Mary Catherine
by Allie King
I still don’t know if Mary Catherine hated me or loved me. At the start I was her groupie. I carried extras of her favorite guitar pics, I played harmony to her melody, learned all her songs. Mary Catherine agreed to marry me either to subvert the dominant paradigm, or because I was good in bed – at least better than her old boyfriend. She liked the attention, she liked the unconditional positive regard, also my persistent worship, my boundless admiration for her talent. She married me in a meadow – the wedding performed by a defrocked Methodist Minister, joined by a handful of supportive but skeptical friends. One friend played the flute. My mother baked a cake. We went to a fancy Inn for our honeymoon night. After I went down on her, while Mary Catherine fell asleep in my arms in the four-poster canopied bed she said, “You know this is just for show, just to stick it to the man – right?”
“Right,” I said, because she was always right. She was so beautiful with long brown hair, deep brown eyes and a backside that invited perusing.
We performed in coffee houses around Boston, she in the spotlight me hogging the shadows.
When I moved away to New York she said, “Why do you hate men?”
“The only man I hate is my father and he earned that,” I said.
“I can’t talk to you when you deny the truth,” she said and stopped answering my phone calls and letters.
Mary Catherine called me to tell me she was getting married for real to a man she’d met in her Accepting God’s Will program. She was in three classes in the program, she explained, and he was in two of them, plus they’d formed a band.
“Are you going to admit it now, that you hate men?” She said that was why she didn’t invite me to the wedding.
Not because you already married me? I wondered. But I didn’t say it.
“I don’t hate men,” I said, but repeating it didn’t make her believe me.
I flew to LA where she was recording a demo – without her husband. Her voice, pure and clear sang through me. I joined in on the harmony – all the parts were engraved on my soul – I never missed a beat. Mary Catherine’s smile lit up my heart.
“You came in just right,” she said. The highest compliment she’d ever paid me.
She hustled me out before her husband came home. I tripped on the path leading away from her house, but I didn’t fall. She sent me a copy of the demo. I never played it.
Allie is at work on a collection of short stories about queer and lesbian lives during different decades and is finishing a second novel exploring the what-ifs of relationships. Allie can be reached at AllieKing@protonmail.com.