Thursday, May 19, 2005
Some People
A distance no greater than five feet separated the couch from where I sat on the love seat, yet my parents perched on the edge of the coffee table, facing me, our knees inches apart. Like strangers trapped together in an elevator, we adjusted our feet around each other clumsily as the minutes passed. My mother, elbows resting on her thighs, her hands clasped together above her knees, tried to catch my eye.
“Do you know what that means?” she asked.
I was ten. My heels knocked against the base of the love seat. It was 1981; our living room was a palette of earth tones. Our paintings were polite, forgettable, the artwork of motel rooms. I fingered a tiny bruise on my thigh and considered my options.
“Mike?”
Which was the right answer? Risk deceit, or confess ignorance?
In the end I nodded. My eyes raced up to measure their reaction. A smile passed between them, the smile adults use to congratulate themselves on their intelligence.
“Are you sure?” my father said.
I’d miscalculated; it was a rhetorical question. Should they press for evidence I could offer none.
“Well,” my mother began. “Sometimes…” she paused. I watched her eyes scanning the wall behind me. “Most of the time men and women, they’re attracted to each other. They fall in love with each other. They… well, they have sex with each other.” I focused again on their knees. Avoiding their eyes was safer.
My father cleared his throat. “Do you remember when we talked about sex?”
His leg jittered. Each question seemed more complicated than its surface.
“When a man puts his penis into the woman’s vagina?” His voice was too loud. My mother and I blushed. The brass clock on the mantle ticked. To end the moment and our suffering, I nodded. This seemed to please them and they relaxed.
“Well,” she continued, “sometimes women are attracted to other women…”
“And sometimes men are attracted to other men,” he said.
“That’s right,” she said, nodding. “That’s what it means.”
“That’s what it means,” he said. I glanced up. The corners of his mouth curled in a smile, but his eyes stayed the same. “And that’s what we are.”
They watched me closely. Somewhere along the way I had lost my place.
“I’m attracted to other men,” my father offered.
My mother smiled at me. “And I’m attracted to other women.”
I looked past them, out the picture window. The mailman, still clad in his summer shorts, turned up our front walk, shuffling through envelopes. Last week someone tucked a firecracker in our mailbox and blew it off the front of the house. These things happened during the State Fair. A dent remained in the aluminum siding, and the sturdy mailbox sat on the front porch, leaning up against the house. After my father moved out, little projects had collected all summer. I heard the mailbox rattle open and shut. The mailman retreated, his back wedged dark with sweat. I focused again on my parents’ knees, no wiser than before.
“But that doesn’t mean that your mother and I didn’t love each other,” he said. “We were attracted to each other for many years.”
“But sometimes people change,” my mother said. Her lips set in a hard line.
“Yes, we changed,” he said. “Now, this might be difficult to hear, but we think you’re old enough to understand.” He paused. “This probably means that your mother and I won’t be getting back together.”
“But that doesn’t mean that we don’t love you. That hasn’t changed,” my mother said. My eyes had settled on her hands, clasped so tight that her knuckles were white. “Mike?”
I glanced up.
“We still love you.”
My vision blurred.
“It’s okay,” she said, reaching forward. Her hand, awkward, rubbed my shoulder, then fell back in her lap.
Neither of them understood. My tears were not mine; they did not come from within me, but were conjured by their words, their close scrutiny of my face. They watched me, expecting me to cry, the pressure unbearable. So I cried.
My mother said they weren’t going anywhere.
You’ll still live with us, my father said.
We’ll take turns, she said. Okay?
I endured, praying for the end to this, when they’d release me. I’d fall back, marshal my energy, navigate new paths over our shifting terrain. A passage from some book came to me: a young Indian boy stalking prey through woods. He walked quietly, stepping toe-to-heel over the trail.
“Now, there’s something else,” my mother said. “You might…well, this is something that a lot of people might not understand.”
“You probably shouldn’t tell anybody about this,” my father said. “Your friends.”
I heard a door open at the end of the hallway. A moment later Mark appeared. My parents, who had been leaning in towards me, pulled back.
“Mark…” she said.
“Mark, we’re talking to Mike right now. A private conversation.”
He didn’t move. The day before, with a pair of scissors, he had cut off his bangs. A week later his kindergarten picture would capture his mistake for eternity. He looked pale and pathetic in the doorway. His brown eyes met mine; something in my expression stilled him further. My father stood up and went to him, gently taking his shoulder, turning him, Mark’s eyes remaining locked on mine until, with a small push, my father guided him back down the hallway.
My mother and I glanced at each other nervously, like two people on a blind date. “We haven’t decided yet what to tell Mark. So please don’t say anything to him, either, okay? You can talk to me. To us, I mean. You can talk to us whenever you want.”
My father returned, alone. He sat again on the coffee table and asked what he’d missed.
Nothing, I said.
We were quiet for a minute. My mother asked if I had any questions, and I shook my head.
“Are you sure?”
We stood together. “Can we have a hug?” he asked. I fought the urge to squirm out of each embrace.
An hour till sunset. I pushed through the back door. Mrs. Carlson, the retiree from next door, waved from her backyard, a pair of pruning sheers in her grip, her gloved hand smudged with dark soil. I ducked my head, raising my hand in return, wiping my eyes against my sleeve with one quick movement. I hurried to the garage, smacking the button on the inside wall, light spilling in as the door rolled open. My bike leaned against the far wall. I grabbed the handlebar and spun the bike to face the street. I smacked the button again, swung my leg over the crossbar and pushed off on the pedals. I bent low over the handlebars, coasting under the closing door.
I learned to ride in Wisconsin, before our last move. That winter, two years before, my parents bought me a bike: bright yellow, with training wheels. I spent a few months circling the cement floor of the unfinished basement, weaving around the furnace and the wooden support beams, the wheels spinning and clicking beneath my weight.
I had a friend, J.B., a freckled boy from first grade, who lived in a large, rambling house down the block, next to a path that cut through a small patch of woods behind our school. Every afternoon we played together in his room upstairs, breaking into his sister’s room across the hall, reducing her to tears with our persistence. That spring my father removed the training wheels and I spent the first afternoon with him coaching me. I fell, again and again, on the grass that lined our sidewalk. An hour later–my elbow scraped, my knees grass-stained–my frustration spilled into anger. He couldn’t say it, the right word that might bring me into balance. I threw the bike down on the sidewalk and collapsed on the grass. My father looked down at me. Neither of us spoke.
J.B. came by–he’d long been rid of his training wheels–and by silent negotiation he took my father’s place, running alongside me, urging me on after each fall, his voice never wavering. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go again.” He did not comment on my tears, which seemed then the most generous thing anyone had ever offered me. My father watched for a minute or two, then went inside.
When my parents told me that we were moving again, the fourth time in eight years, they said his name, said they were sorry. The depth of concern in their voices touched me, it told me things were hopeless; this was not something that could be argued away. That is how I understood it. Being angry with them was misguided. These decisions were out of their control. They were no more responsible for our migrations than they were for the weather.
I turned left on Pascal. Lights came on in the windows of our neighbors’ homes. Televisions washed the walls of their rooms a living, flickering blue. A woman bent over a kitchen sink in yellow light, steam rising around her face. Following my lengthening shadow, obeying some instinct, I twisted through the quiet streets, raising myself off the seat, pumping my legs till the wind filled my ears with meaningless sound.
