Thinking Straight

by Robin Reardon

  The meeting rooms, where Charles said our evening Prayer Meetings would take place, all had names from the Old Testament. He stood proudly in front of the one named Isaiah.

  “This one is ours. We meet here after Fellowship.”

  Then he led the way past Ezekiel, Obadiah, Esther, Daniel, Ruth, and Malachi (I kind of liked that one) to the boys’ wing, pointing down the hall toward the girls’ rooms as we passed it. “We’re not to go into the girls’ wing under any circumstances.”

  No worries.

  Before going to the chapel, Charles took me to the bathroom. There were no urinals, just stalls with doors only halfway up so you could see the back of anyone standing in there, and probably the face of anyone sitting down.

  “I don’t need to piss,” I told Charles, which was true, but mostly I didn’t want him standing there watching the back of my head while I took a leak.

  “Maybe not now,” he said, a warning in his tone, “but you won’t get another chance for a while.”

  I shrugged and went into a stall, unzipped, and let go of the little there was. What I was really feeling was like I needed to take a shit. My intestines were churning, and when that happens I usually get diarrhea. But I was damned if I would do that with him standing there.

  I left the booth and headed toward the door, but Charles stopped me. “We always wash our hands here, Taylor.”

  I looked at him like he had three heads, but he just gestured toward the sinks. I thought of flipping him the finger but decided it wasn’t worth it. There would be more important things to lock horns over.

  The chapel was pretty spartan. White paint everywhere, and not much in the way of amenities. No cushions in sight. And there was this humongous cross that had to have been designed for a bigger space hanging in the middle of the room, suspended from the ceiling. Reverend Bartle was kneeling in front of the altar, head bowed over folded hands, and he didn’t look up when we came in. I expected Charles to say something, but he just stood at the back, hands folded in front of him (hiding an erection, Charles?), waiting. Finally Reverend Bartle stood up slowly and turned toward us.

  “Ah, boys. Come forward, please.”

  I’d met Reverend Bartle once before, when my folks had driven me up to see the place. It had been a grueling forty-minute trip, with me sulking in the backseat, terrified and frantically searching my brain for ways to convince my parents that this was a bad idea. When I met him, Reverend Bartle had seemed—well, fatherly, I guess, in a religious kind of way. Maybe patronizing is closer. Tall, with white hair and sharp eyes. They were probably blue, but they seemed almost metallic.

  Things had happened pretty quickly once my dad decided it was going to be Straight to God for me. And here I’d been looking forward to the best summer of my life, spending as much time as possible with Will. We’d been a kind of secret item all through the school year. Sometimes it was super hard not to sit with him when we were in the same class, not to hold hands every chance we got, not to go out on real dates. Hell, I even wished we could have gone to junior prom together. Wouldn’t that have turned some heads? But we didn’t need dates. We just needed to be together.

  So summer was going to be a special time for us as a couple. Until I was practically forced to confess my “sin.” To tell my folks I’m gay.

  It was their own fault, actually. Pestering me about girls. I’d taken stupid Rhonda to the prom when they made it obvious they weren’t going to stop poking at me until I did, but that wasn’t enough for them. It was kind of like, now that I’d taken her out, all of a sudden they noticed I didn’t take any other girls out. So when they failed with Rhonda, they tried with Angela. The night she and her folks came over to dinner, my mom arranged things so we sat next to each other. That was bad enough, but then—true to their threat—they practically shoved us out the front door for our walk, while the four parents sat around drinking coffee and no doubt talking about how sweet it would be if these two kids “got together.” The Russells, Angela’s whole family, went to our church, too. So it would be that much more wonderful. YR. Sorry: Yeah Right.

  So I went with Angela—who was actually a pretty nice girl—out for our forced march. It would have been awkward even if I’d been interested in her, because both of us knew our folks had set this up, and there were expectations. To her credit, and although it took about two minutes, she was the one who broke the ice.

  “Feels pretty weird, getting shoved out the door like that, doesn’t it.” Not a question.

  “Weird? How about retarded?”

  She laughed. It was a pretty laugh, and I got a little worried. Was she interested in me and just trying to put me at ease so I’d feel like I could make a move? I risked looking at her.

  She stopped walking. “You hate this, don’t you.” Also not a question. “I’m not happy about it, either. I mean, I like you, Taylor. You seem like a nice guy. And maybe that’s why I’m going to trust you with something. Is that okay?”

  “Trust me?”

  “With a secret. Because I think you deserve to know. Especially if you ever thought that we, you know, might come to something. So…is it okay?”

  I shrugged. “I guess so.” I could floor her with a secret of my own, but I wasn’t sure she deserved to know mine. She turned and started walking again, and I fell into step.

  “I have a boyfriend. Well, I can’t really call him that. Not in front of anyone. My parents don’t want me to see him. That’s why they want us—you and me—to get together. They think I’ll forget about him.”

  Wow. We have something in common, Angela and I, besides meddling parents. “Why not?”

  “He’s not saved. And he doesn’t want to be. His parents are freethinkers.”

  It was my turn to stop dead in my tracks. “Atheists?” The idea that there were people who didn’t believe in God had always been a startling one to me. Sure, I knew they were out there, but I didn’t talk to them. I’d heard only terrible things about them.

  “No, they’re not atheists, exactly. They would say they’re god-centered, but they wouldn’t capitalize god in writing. They believe in rational approach. To everything.” She kind of giggled. “Danny says—that’s my boyfriend—he says that when you don’t have to make sense, you can say anything at all!”

  “What does that mean, not making sense?”

  “Think about it, Taylor. How many times have you been told something that made no sense at all, but the church insists you take it on faith?”

  I got the concept, all right—like, why would God make me gay and then tell me it’s a sin to be gay? But the freethinkers were confusing me. “I don’t get it. They have no religion, but they sort of believe in God, but they don’t believe in faith?”

  “No, no, they have faith. It’s just much more—I don’t know, more free-form. So they don’t have a scripture they follow. And they don’t go to any church.”

  “Wait. How can you have faith and not have a religion?”

  “Well, Taylor, they aren’t the same thing. A religion is just a specific way of applying faith.”

  This didn’t synch up with anything I’d ever heard before. I started shaking my head, sure she was just repeating pat phrases she’d heard from this Danny character.

  Angela must have decided we’d gotten too far off the track she wanted to be on. “Anyway, what I’m saying is, I can’t be interested in you. And since you’re a nice boy, it seemed unfair to lead you on, in case…you know.”

  “Okay. Thanks.” And I moved forward again.

  For the next minute or so of our walk, I was going round and round in my head about whether I could tell her about me. In the end, I approached it a little sideways.

  “So, Danny’s parents. What would they say about homosexuality?”

  “Oh that. Such a fuss. There are so many things in the Bible that we ignore, and everybody seems to make their own decisions about what things those ought to be. Danny’s folks would just say, Who cares? As long as people aren’t hur
ting each other—and it doesn’t hurt you if someone else is gay, does it?—then leave the gays alone.” I guess I was quiet too long, and she said, “That upsets you, doesn’t it? I’m sorry. That must sound like sacrilege to you. I just get so into these discussions with Danny. His parents have always encouraged him to question everything—”

  “No, that’s not it.” But that’s as far as I got before I froze.

  “What is it, then?” She stopped walking. Again. I stopped and turned toward her. “Oh my God, you’re gay! Taylor, are you gay?”

  Well, that got me moving again. “Will you be quiet? Is there anyone on the street who didn’t just hear you say that?”

  “Taylor, I was practically whispering. You barely heard me. I’m right, aren’t I? This is so cool! I don’t think I know anybody who’s gay. Except you, of course.”

  “Oh yes you do.”

  “Who? Tell me!”

  “No way. I’d never tell that about anyone else. Especially given how everyone in church feels about it.” Which reminded me I hadn’t extracted any promises. “So, you wouldn’t, like, tell anyone, would you?”

  “Oh, Taylor, of course not. You’d be crucified. And besides, you have my secret, too.”

  She took my hand. It was a weird moment. But she held it most of the way back to the house, and it felt a lot less weird by then and a lot more like friendship.

  So it’s kind of ironic that it was Angela who outed me to my folks. Not directly; she didn’t do anything wrong. But after the Russells left that night, there was all this pressure from my folks to tell them how much I liked her.

  “She’s great. A real sweet girl. We had a nice walk.”

  Mom asked, “So do you think you’ll see her again? Will you ask her out on a date?”

  I felt like there was a bat in the room. You know how they fly? Sort of all over the place, and it’s impossible to know how to duck to avoid them. All I could say was, “Maybe sometime.”

  “Sometime?” Dad bellowed. “Sometime? Taylor, there’s nothing wrong with the girl, is there? She’s pretty, she’s smart, she’s Christian,” by which he meant our kind of Christian, “she’s polite, her parents are fine people—what more could you want in a girl?”

  “Nothing, I guess.” I headed for the stairs, hoping to make it up to my room and bring this inquisition to an end. But no. Dad was right behind me, with Mom behind him; he had more to say, and he wasn’t letting me avoid it.

  “Do you have any idea how rude that is? How inconsiderate? To make a girl think you like her and then leave her hanging like that?”

  I wheeled, nearly ducking to avoid that bat in the air. “Look, I’m not the one who suggested this little get-together, so she doesn’t have any reason to think I’m interested in her that way. If anyone has led her on, it’s you.” I stood there, my back to the stairs and relative safety, my folks in front of me and looking about as sad and confused as I’d ever seen them. Into the silence, I said, “So I want both of you to stop pestering me about asking girls out. I have to do what’s right for me.”

  Almost whining, my mom asked, “Taylor, isn’t there anyone you’re interested in?”

  I took a breath. Then another. I clenched my hands into fists, balling up the fabric of my pants. I released the fabric. Gathered it again. I ground my teeth.

  “Yeah. There is.”

  Mom stepped forward, and maybe the look on my face was what made her afraid, but she was afraid. I contemplated telling her I was in love with a girl whose parents were freethinkers. That might actually be better than the truth, as far as they were concerned.

  Mom said, “Who is she?”

  I opened my mouth and closed it a few times, thinking it was really too bad Angela and I hadn’t been smart enough to set up a conspiracy. I would pretend to my folks that we were going out, and she could pretend to hers. But there’s that thing about lying. I bet even freethinkers believe that’s wrong. Time for the truth. So I said, “It’s not a she, Mom. I’m gay.”

  They both stepped back, and then Dad lunged for me. He grabbed my arm before I could duck and dragged me into the living room, practically throwing me onto the sofa. I stood back up as he turned to start pacing around the room. Out of the corner of my eye—I didn’t dare not watch Dad—I saw Mom kind of sink into a wing chair.

  Dad wheeled on me, and I nearly fell back onto the sofa. “I don’t ever want to hear you say that again! Do you hear me? You’re talking Satan. You’re talking Hell. You’re talking about your immortal soul. And I won’t have you disgracing this family!”

  Maybe if he hadn’t said that last bit, about the family, I would have just let him rant and rave. But it was too much for me. “Oh, we can’t have that, can we? Family disgrace. You know, God made me who I am. It’s between me and God.”

  Dad’s voice got quiet. Hard. “I’ll tell you what’s between you and God. Satan is between you and God right now. So don’t pretend you know what you’re talking about, because right now you’re just Satan’s mouthpiece.”

  “I do so know what I’m talking about!” My voice was nowhere near as calm as his. But I had more to lose. “I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about this, praying about this, and reading the Bible about this. I know where Satan is. And he’s not standing between me and God.”

  Dad marched around the living room, kicking aside a small table that got in his way. He’s got a bit of a temper, so despite the comical look of the wispy hair strings on top of his head when he moves around, it’s a bad idea to get him riled.

  Too late to avoid that, though.

  “You’ve done it already, haven’t you? You’ve been active. You’ve committed sodomy.”

  My mind went two different places when he said that. One was to Will. Not that I pictured the act, but that I didn’t want my parents to do that. If I said yes now, they’d want to know who was with me. I didn’t want to give Will to them. Plus I didn’t want them to say I couldn’t see him again.

  The other place was the word itself. Sodomy. If you read the Bible carefully, the people of Sodom committed all kinds of sin. It wasn’t just a matter of men having sex with men. They were greedy, and they proved frequently that they were without mercy. And Abram’s nephew, Lot, lived there; why? And when two angels—who were always men, of course—came as guests to Lot’s house and some local guys wanted to have sex with them, do you know what Lot did? He offered instead his two virgin daughters! Talk about abomination. But my point is, sodomy means just one thing today, but the original meaning was more than that. So had I committed sodomy? Not biblically. Not in all its aspects.

  So for at least two very different reasons, I said, “No. You’re wrong.”

  He stopped and stared at me, looking triumphant. “Then you really don’t know anything about it.” He walked over to where Mom was still sitting in the chair and put his hand on her shoulder, I guess to set up something like a wall of intervention. Solidarity against me. “Then I know what to do. We’ll all go, the three of us, and talk with Reverend Douglas. He’ll know what steps to take. In the meantime, young man, you should consider yourself grounded. We can’t take any chances.”

  And as if that settled it, he nodded in my general direction and said to Mom, “I’m going to read the last section of the paper.” And he plunked himself down into his recliner.

  I stood there feeling like the spaceship I’d arrived on had taken off toward home without me. Mom got up kind of suddenly and disappeared, and I skulked off to my bedroom, fighting the urge to call Will, terrified that if either of them found out I was talking to him they’d figure out who he was to me.

  So Dad made the decision of what was gonna happen next, like he was the only one who needed to be consulted, and Mom disappeared. Which left me—where? Sometimes the weirdest part of a confrontation is what happens right afterward. It’s like no one’s on the same terms they were on with anyone before it happened, and there’s all this psychological dancing that goes on as everyone tries to find out w
hat the new boundaries are. I was feeling a powerful need to set some new boundaries, starting with my mom.

  Practically tiptoeing so my dad wouldn’t know I was anywhere near, I moved through the house toward the laundry room. I figured that’s where Mom would be; it’s where she goes when she’s upset.

  And sure enough, the door was shut, and I could hear her quietly crying in there. I knocked once and opened it, and she was standing in front of the ironing board ripping an old pair of my pajamas into rags. Therapeutic, I suppose. She dropped all of it when she saw me and wrapped herself around me, crying harder, calling my name between sobs.

  “It’s okay, Mom. Really. I’m fine.”

  “Oh, Taylor!” was all she said for a while, until she let me go so she could blow her nose. Then, “Your father is so upset. I don’t know what he’ll do. Why does it have to be like this? Why do you…” She kind of fizzled out and blew her nose again.

  “Mom, I don’t know what else I can tell you. This is who I am. It’s not something I chose, just like being who you are isn’t something you chose.”

  “But Taylor, it’s a sin!”

  “We’re all sinners, Mom.”

  “But you’re choosing to sin!”

  “No. You aren’t listening. I didn’t choose this, any more than I chose brown hair or what day I was born on. I can’t change my birthday, and I can’t change the color of my hair—not really, and I can’t change this.”

  “But…you’re our only child.” She raised her arms into the air and let them flop down again, helpless.

  “And that means what, exactly? That you don’t get another chance to do it right?”

  I must have shouted. I probably sounded like Dad. She sort of squeaked, “It means we won’t have grandchildren.”

  I let out a tired breath. “Mom, I don’t know why I’m gay. I don’t know if God made me like this to test me, or to test you and Dad, or if there’s some other reason, but it’s who God made me. Do you think I haven’t prayed about this? Do you think I haven’t asked God why?”