Susan Finch

NELLE 8 | 2025

Maybe you are not a clawfoot tub person, my sister tells me on my first trip to visit her in Boston. Melissa is twenty-two and bisects everything into binary preferences: dog people/cat people, cilantro fans/cilantro haters, oyster lovers/idiots. I am seventeen and my sister is supposed to be touring me around her college, but instead, we’ve spent most of our time in her apartment drinking Long Island Iced Teas and coming up with a list of evidence to decide once and for all if our mother is gay.

Facts that might suggest our mother is a lesbian:

1. Our mother’s friend, Sharon, a physical therapist, spends a high percentage of weekends with my mother. They go to see singer-songwriters perform and come home late smelling like appletinis and ashtrays. We find Sharon in her pajamas at the breakfast nook on Saturday mornings drinking a giant cup of coffee. Do grown women have sleepovers, we ask each other? We do not yet consider ourselves grown women, so we are unsure.
2. My mother’s recent divorce from our father despite his eligibility as a husband. This assessment requires a sub-list about marriage material: He has his hair, is employed, is not abusive, does the dishes at least half the time, and is generally a nice dad. After the top five, we stop making this list because the bar feels extraordinarily low, and it makes us too sad to continue.
3. Sharon drives a Subaru hatchback.
4. The infamous card. It’s a birthday card from Sharon that we found in our mother’s bathroom drawer. Maybe it was hidden? The message says, “Happy Birthday to my favorite Adventure Partner.” Does this mean partnerpartner? It’s the nineties and we are young and not great at subtext. What kind of adventure are they on?

The first night I’m at my sister’s apartment in Boston, I try to take a shower in the clawfoot tub, but I do not secure the shower curtains correctly. They must be overlapped and tucked in just the right way, and I fail to do either to Melissa’s liking. I soak the bathmats and the tile floor. Just take a bath tomorrow, she tells me, you’ll enjoy it. But when I do, I can’t help but think about all the other feet and butts that have been in the tub basin before me. You are not adventure partner material, Melissa says.

Additional facts:

5. Annie Lenox and the Indigo Girls are on heavy rotation on my mother’s stereo, but Melissa Ethridge has not made her top five.
6. My mother joined a drum circle. Enough said.
7. When we asked her if she was gay, she did not say no. She did not say yes either though.
8. My mother was not happy in her marriage. This did not make our initial list, but it needs to be accounted for. Sometimes our mother would sit in the station wagon with her fists clenched, her knuckles white and heavy as the wrought iron claws at the bottom of the tub.

Before I leave Boston, Melissa deems my mother a mystery. You, she points at me before she puts me in a cab, are an open book. I don’t know exactly what my sister means, but it doesn’t feel good to be so transparent, so obvious. When my mother picks me up from the airport, Sharon is driving and my mother rides in the passenger seat. Did you have a fun trip? Did you like the college? How was Melissa? My mother peppers me with questions. But I’m resentful about my mother’s secrets, so I mostly grunt and say, it was fine.

My mother eventually married a woman, but not Sharon. It would take my mother five years after the divorce to explain: she loved who she loved. While my sister and I waited to be included in her circle, we didn’t always treat her with kindness. Years from now, I’ll sit in another clawfoot tub, this time at a fancy resort, where I’m supposed to relax, recharge from my own failing relationships. My toes peek out of the water, and my feet are crooked in ways that remind me of my mother’s. My body echoes hers in unmistakable and unfathomable ways. We are all failures, and yet, in the end, we are all a success.