Delicia, by contrast, was timid and sweet, with short Afroed hair and a soft, almost childlike voice. I thought that because she was shy she’d be a good student, but those two things didn’t always go together. She was polite, certainly, and seemed to try as hard as she could. It just wasn’t good enough for the north side. The two of us were in the same English class, and though I told myself that we were friends, her reticence made it hard to hold any kind of real conversation. Like all the new kids, she used the word “stay” in place of “live,” as in “I stay on South Saunders Street,” or “I stay in Chavis Heights.” Delicia stayed with her aunt, which she pronounced to rhyme with “taunt.”
That was all I knew about her personal life. Everything else was my own invention. I decided for a start that she was virtuous and eager to change, that our association was, in some substantial way, improving her. It’s not how a person would think of an actual friend, much less a potential girlfriend. This was the status I upgraded her to a few weeks into the school year. At fourteen, I figured it was about time I took the plunge. Everyone kept asking if I was going steady, or at least everyone creepy kept asking, particularly the men from the Greek Orthodox church, who’d refer even to newborn babies as “lady-killers” and wonder how many hearts they had broken. Like it wasn’t enough to be dating at the age of three weeks, you also had to be two-timing someone.
To the other boys in my Sunday school class, it was “Who’s the lucky lady?” To me it was just “Find anyone yet?” And though at that age I never could have admitted it, I was as physically attracted to Delicia as I’d have been to any female. Her body was no less appealing to me than that of our head cheerleader, so why not have the two-hundred-fifty-pound girlfriend from the wrong side of town?
The idea coincided with my Greek grandmother’s moving from our house into a new senior citizens’ apartment complex called Capital Towers. She was cruelly out of place there, the only resident who wasn’t born in the United States and who didn’t try, in that resolutely American way, to be gay and youthful. Where Yiayiá was from, old age was not something to be disguised or outrun. Rather, you embraced it, and gratefully, for decrepitude, in Greece, was not without its benefits. There, you lived in a compound with your extended family, and everyone younger than you became your pawn. In America, being old got you nothing but a spare bedroom that was painted purple and had bumper stickers on the door. Then one day your daughter-in-law decides she’s had enough, and out you go, not just to an apartment but to a studio apartment, which basically means a bedroom with a kitchen in it.
Capital Towers was trying to get an activities program going. A social was to be held on a Sunday afternoon in early October, and that, I decided, was just the place to take Delicia on our first date.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” my mother said.
“No,” I told her. “I think it would be interesting for her to meet Yiayiá.”
“Interesting?” My mother allowed her tone of voice to do the heavy lifting, as unless you were making a documentary about gloom, there was nothing interesting about my grandmother. Or at least not to us at the time. If I could go back to 1972, and if I were able to understand Greek, she might have told me all sorts of fascinating things: what it was like to endure a loveless arranged marriage, to be traded away by your family and forced to sail to another country. From Ellis Island, she went to Cortland, New York, a little town in the western part of the state. There, she and her pitiless husband opened a newsstand not much larger than their cash box. What was it like to forfeit your youth? To be illiterate in two languages? To lose every tooth in your head by the age of forty? All I really knew was that Yiayiá loved us. Not in a specific way—she could no sooner name our good qualities than the cat could—yet still we could feel it. I’d occasionally allow her to stroke my hand. All us kids would from time to time, and all of us thought of it as work. Oh, how exhausting it was to let someone adore you.
My Yiayiá was exactly the sort of friend I’d have liked as an adult, someone with an endless supply of hard-luck stories and no desire to ever write a book. At the time, though, she was just an obligation. If I had to go to the social, I figured I might as well get something out of it—hence bringing Delicia. All we’d have to do was walk in holding hands, and the old people would freak out, no one more so than my grandmother. “Who the blackie?” she’d likely ask, for that was the word she continued to use, no matter how often we shouted “Negro” at her.
“I’m not having any part of it,” my mother said.
“So you won’t even give us a ride?”
When she told me no, I accused her of being prejudiced. “You just don’t want your son dating a girl who’s not white.”
She said she didn’t care who I dated but that I was not going to bring this Delicia person to Capital Towers.
“Fine, then, I’ll bring her to church.”
“You’re not bringing her there either,” my mother told me. “It’s not fair to her.”
“You object to anyone who’s not like you!” I yelled. “You’re just afraid your grandchildren will be half black.”
How I’d jumped from dragging some poor girl to a senior citizens’ apartment complex to dating her and then to fathering her children is beyond me now, but my mother, who by then had three teenagers and three more coming right behind them, took it in stride.
“That’s right,” she said. “I want you to marry someone exactly like me, with a big beige purse and lots of veins in her legs. In fact, why don’t I just divorce your father so the two of us can run off together?”
“You’re disgusting,” I told her. “I’ll never marry you. Never!” I left the room in a great, dramatic huff, thinking, Did I just refuse to marry my mother? and then, secretly, I’m free! The part of my plan that made old people uncomfortable, that exposed them for the bigots they were—and on a Sunday!—still appealed to me. But the mechanics of it would have been a pain. Buses wouldn’t be running, so someone would have to drive to the south side, pick up Delicia, and then come back across town. After I’d finished shocking everyone, I’d have to somehow get her home. I didn’t imagine her aunt had a car. My mother wasn’t going to drive us, so that just left my dad, who would certainly be watching football and wouldn’t leave his spot in front of the TV even if my date was white and offered to chip in for the gas. Surely something could be arranged, but it seemed easier to take the out that had just been handed to me and to say that our date was forbidden.
Love seemed all the sweeter when it was misunderstood, condemned by the outside world. The thing about Delicia was that we barely knew each other. Her interest in me was pure conjecture, based not on anything she’d said or done but on my cruel assumption that no one else would be interested in her. Our most intimate conversation took place when I unbuttoned my shirt one afternoon and showed her what I was hiding beneath it: a T-shirt that pictured a male goose mounted, midair, on a female, his tongue drooping from his bill in an expression of satisfied exhaustion. “See”—and I pointed to the words written across my chest—“it says ‘Fly United.’”
Delicia blinked.
“That’s an airline,” I told her.
“You crazy,” she said.
“Yes, well, that’s me!”
On the Monday after the social, I broke it to Delicia that I’d wanted to take her somewhere special but that my parents hadn’t allowed it. “I hate them,” I told her. “They’re so prejudiced you wouldn’t believe it.”
I don’t know what response I expected, but a show of disappointment would have been a good start. If this relationship was going to take off, we needed a common cause, but that, it seemed, was not going to happen. All she said was “That’s okay.”
“Well, no, actually, it’s not okay,” I told her. “Actually it stinks.” I laid my hand over hers on the desktop and then looked down at it, thinking what a great poster this would make. “Togetherness,” it might read. I’d expected electricity to pass mutually between us
, but all I really felt was self-conscious, and disappointed that more people weren’t looking on.
As for Delicia, what goes through a person’s mind the first time they’re patronized? Was she embarrassed? Enraged? Or perhaps this wasn’t her first time. Maybe it happened so often she’d simply resigned herself to it.
It’s a start, I thought as I lifted my hand off hers and turned around in my seat. I figured we had our entire lives ahead of us, but by Thanksgiving I’d been accepted into a crowd of midlevel outcasts and had pretty much forgotten about her. We still said hello to each other, but we never ate lunch together or talked on the phone or did any of the things that real friends did. I don’t recall seeing her in the later grades and am not sure if she attended my high school or if she stayed on her side of town and went to Enloe. It must have been a good seven years before I saw her again. I had dropped out of my second college and was working as a furniture refinisher not far from downtown Raleigh. There was a dime store I’d pass on my bike ride home each day, and I looked up one afternoon to see Delicia walking out the front door. She had a name tag on and a smock, and when I stopped to say hello she seemed to genuinely remember me.
“So, are you the manager of this place?” I asked.
And she said, “You crazy.”
I’d like to think that Delicia managing a dime store was not on the same level as a T-shirt reading “Fly United,” so her response saddened me. My invented version of her was pragmatic and responsible, but all I really knew was that she was nice and shy, and apparently still poor. By this time we were in our twenties, and I understood that friendship could not be manufactured. You didn’t look through your address book thinking, Where are the Koreans? or I need to meet more paralyzed people. Not that it’s outlandish to have such friends, but they have to be made organically.
The people I hung out with in my early twenties were middle-class and, at least to our minds, artistic. We’d all turned our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it. No one wanted to call home asking for money, but we all knew that in a pinch our parents would come through for us. It was this, more than race, that set me apart from Delicia, for how could someone on the bottom rung of the ladder not be outraged by the unfairness of it all?
Passing the dime store on subsequent afternoons, I’d think of my family’s former maid, Lena, who started working for us when my brother was born and stayed until my grandmother moved out. She and my mom spent a lot of time talking, and though my mother, like all the mothers on our street, thought of her housekeeper as a friend, I knew that what she really meant was “a person I pay and am on good terms with.” For how many mothers hung out with other people’s maids? What would the O’Connors have thought if my mom showed up at their door with a canteen around her neck? “Is Marthandra off work yet? I thought the two of us might try camping this weekend.”
Maybe in a tent, away from the cars and color TVs and air-conditioning, a friendship could have taken root. As it was, there was just too much inequality to overcome. If you want a friend whose life is the economic opposite of your own, it seems your best bet is to find a pen pal, the type you normally get in grade school. This is someone who writes from afar to tell you that his dromedary escaped. You respond that your bike has a flat tire, and he answers that in his country August is a time for feasting. It’s all done through the mail, so he never sees your new suburban house, and you never see the hubcap his family uses to boil water in. Plus, you’re a kid, so your first thought isn’t Yuck, a dromedary, but Wow, a dromedary! Or a raccoon, or a mongoose, or a honey badger.
As weeks passed and the cell phone salesman didn’t call back, I started worrying that he’d lost his job. Maybe, though, that’s just me being a cultural elitist, assuming that his life must go from bad to worse. Isn’t it just as likely that he got promoted or, better still, that he left the call center for greener pastures? That’s it, I tell myself. Once he settles into the new job and moves into that house he’s been eyeing, after his maid has left for the day and he’s figured out which remote works the television and which one is for the DVD player, he’s going to need someone to relate to. Then he’ll dig up my number, reach for his cell phone, and, by God, call me.
Loggerheads
The thing about Hawaii, at least the part that is geared toward tourists, is that it’s exactly what it promises to be. Step off the plane, and someone places a lei around your neck, as if it were something you had earned—an Olympic medal for sitting on your ass. Raise a hand above your shoulder and, no matter where you are, a drink will appear: something served in a hollowed-out pineapple, or perhaps in a coconut that’s been sawed in half. Just like in the time before glasses! you think.
Volcanic craters, waterfalls, and those immaculate beaches—shocking things when you’re coming from Europe. At the spot Hugh and I go to in Normandy you’ll find, in place of sand, speckled stones the size of potatoes. The water runs from glacial to heart attack and is tinted the color of iced tea. Then there’s all the stuff floating in it: not man-made garbage but sea garbage—scum and bits of plant life, all of it murky and rotten-smelling.
The beaches in Hawaii look as if they’ve been bleached; that’s how white the sand is. The water is warm—even in winter—and so clear you can see not just your toes but the corns cleaving, barnacle-like, to the sides of them. On Maui, one November, Hugh and I went swimming, and turned to find a gigantic sea turtle coming up between us. As gentle as a cow, she was, and with a cow’s dopey, almost lovesick expression on her face. That, to me, was worth the entire trip, worth my entire life, practically. For to witness majesty, to find yourself literally touched by it—isn’t that what we’ve all been waiting for?
I had a similar experience a few years later, and again with Hugh. We were in Japan, walking through a national forest in a snowstorm, when a monkey the height of a bar stool brushed against us. His fur was a dull silver, the color of dishwater, but he had this beet-red face, set in a serious, almost solemn expression. We saw it full-on when he turned to briefly look at us. Then he shrugged and ambled off over a footbridge.
“Jesus Christ!” I said. Because it was all too much: the forest, the snowstorm, and now this. Monkeys are an attraction in that part of the country. We expected to see them at some point, but I thought they’d be fenced in. As with the sea turtle, part of the thrill was the feeling of being accepted, which is to say, not feared. It allowed you to think that you and this creature had a special relationship, a juvenile thought but one that brings with it a definite comfort. Well, monkeys like me, I’d find myself thinking during the next few months, whenever I felt lonely or unappreciated. Just as, in the months following our trip to Hawaii, I thought of the sea turtle. With her, though, my feelings were a bit more complicated, and instead of believing that we had bonded, I’d wonder that she could ever have forgiven me.
The thing between me and sea turtles started in the late ’60s, and involved my best friend from grade school, a boy I’ll call Shaun, who lived down the street from me in Raleigh. What brought us together was a love of nature, or, more specifically, of catching things and unintentionally killing them. We started when I was in the fourth grade, which would have made me ten, I guess. It’s different for everyone, but at that age, though I couldn’t have said that I was gay, I knew that I was not like the other boys in my class or my Scout troop. While they welcomed male company, I shrank from it, dreaded it, feeling like someone forever trying to pass, someone who would eventually be found out, and expelled from polite society. Is this how a normal boy would swing his arms? I’d ask myself, standing before the full-length mirror in my parents’ bedroom. Is this how he’d laugh? Is this what he would find funny? It was like doing an English accent. The more concentrated the attempt, the more self-conscious and unconvincing I became.
With Shaun, though, I could almost be myself. This didn’t mean that we were alike, only that he wasn’t paying that much attention. Childhood, for him, seemed
something to be endured, passed through like a tiresome stretch of road. Ahead of this was the good stuff, and looking at him from time to time, at the way he had of staring off, of boring a hole into the horizon, you got the sense that he could not only imagine it but actually see it: this great grown-up life, waiting on the other side of sixteen.
Apart from an interest in wildlife, the two of us shared an identity as transplants. My family was from the North, and the Taylors were from the Midwest. Shaun’s father, Hank, was a psychiatrist and sometimes gave his boys and me tests, the type for which there were, he assured us, “no right answers.” He and his wife were younger than my parents, and they seemed it, not just in their dress but in their eclectic tastes—records by Donovan and Moby Grape shelved among the Schubert. Their house had real hardcover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.
In a neighborhood of stay-at-home moms, Shaun’s mother worked. A public-health nurse, she was the one you went to if you woke up with yellow eyes or jammed a piece of caramel corn too far into your ear. “Oh, you’re fine,” Jean would say, for that was what she wanted us to call her, not Mrs. Taylor. With her high cheekbones and ever so slightly turned-down mouth, she brought to mind a young Katharine Hepburn. Other mothers might be pretty, might, in their twenties or early thirties, pause at beauty, but Jean was clearly parked there for a lifetime. You’d see her in her flower bed, gardening gloves hanging from the waistband of her slacks like someone clawing to get out, and you just had to wish she was your mom instead.
The Taylor children had inherited their mother’s good looks, especially Shaun. Even as a kid he seemed at home in his skin—never cute, just handsome, blond hair like a curtain drawn over half his face. The eye that looked out the uncurtained side was cornflower blue, and excelled at spotting wounded or vulnerable animals. While the other boys in our neighborhood played touch football in the street, Shaun and I searched the woods behind our houses. I drew the line at snakes, but anything else was brought home and imprisoned in our ten-gallon aquariums. Lizards, toads, baby birds: they all got the same diet—raw hamburger meat—and, with few exceptions, they all died within a week or two.
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