It's All Relative

by J. M. Snyder

  I’m just about to turn around—Dan should be finished his shower by now, I don’t have to talk to Mom—when I hear my sister’s voice rise in anger from a room at the end of the hall. “What’s wrong with this?” she cries, and without thinking, I pick up my pace, hurrying down to her. “You’re always saying I’m too damn depressing and the first time I wear something normal, you have a shit fit.”

  My mom answers her, just as upset. “Caitlin! I don’t have the time to go into this with you right now. You’re not wearing that.”

  “It’s my body,” Caitlin replies. As I near the room, she steps out into the hall, and at first I don’t realize what the problem is here. She wears a bright teal dress with tiny sleeves, a scalloped neckline, and princess seams that cause the skirt to twirl out around her knees when she turns. Her skin is deathly pale against the splash of color, her hair pulled into a severe ponytail, so dark it looks as if someone inked it in. But when she looks up at me, her makeup is still harsh and unforgiving, thick black lines like bruises rimming her eyes. “I’ll wear whatever the hell I want to,” she yells back into the room. “What do you care? It’s not your funeral.”

  Mom sounds weary when she starts, “Caitlin—”

  “I’m not changing!” My sister storms off down the hall, muttering, “Out of my way, Mike,” as she pushes past me. “I’ll wear whatever the fuck I want, see if you can tell me different. What do you care what I look like anyway?”

  She directs the question at me, but I just shake my head and shrug, I don’t know. “You look pretty,” I tell her. It’s the truth.

  “Fuck off,” she says. I move aside and let her go.

  I watch her until she turns the corner, skirt billowing around her like the sea, and her black Mary Janes clip clip clip down the wooden steps, a sound that reminds me of an electric typewriter. Well, I think, straightening my sweater, I found Mom’s room. Trouble is, I’m not sure I’m ready to go inside.

  I don’t have much choice—I’m already here. Might as well get it over with. Cautiously I lean into the open doorway, one foot angled after Caitlin in case I have to run for it, too. She’ll be in a mood now, I remind myself. She lost the woman who practically raised her as her own, she lost the son she thought she knew, she probably thinks she has a very tenuous grip on what’s left of her world, too. Gently, I think. Gently…“Mom?”

  “What?” She sits on the double bed, already neatly made, and stares at her reflection in a small mirror on the bedside table. One hand is raised to her face, an eyeliner pencil held between fingers that tremble slightly—she tries to steady them with the pinky against her cheek but it doesn’t work, the sharpened tip of the pencil wavers as it nears her eye. With a dramatic sigh, she sets the pencil down and frowns into the mirror at me. In a peevish voice, she asks, “Michael, what is it? Can’t you see I’m busy here?”

  I take a step into the room. “Mom, I’m sorry—”

  That’s as far as I get before she buries her face in her hands and begins to weep.

  Chapter 48: My Mom

  The tears frighten me—I’m not used to seeing my mother cry. For all her histrionic tendencies, she’s not one to simply break down and sob. It’s a sign of weakness to her, giving in, giving up, childish behavior that she will not accept. “What are you crying for?” she used to ask when we were younger—or rather, used to ask Ray, because I learned early on that crying wouldn’t get me anywhere with her. “Tears ain’t money, honey, they won’t buy you squat.”

  Tears ain’t money, honey, I think now, watching her shoulders shake as she huddles into herself on the edge of the bed. I’m almost afraid to speak, sure that the words will slip out and she’ll descend on me like a bird of prey, tearing and biting and clawing me apart in her sorrow. But before I realize it, I’m kneeling in front of her, taking her into my arms as if she’s the child. “Oh Michael,” she sighs. Her anger surfaces through her tears and she punches at me with useless fists that flutter around my shoulders like crippled birds. I hold her closer, catch her hands between us and they clench in my sweater as she murmurs, “Damn you.”

  “It’s not my fault,” I remind her. I mean Aunt Evie’s death, she knows that, she nods in agreement, not my fault. But that’s not the only thing she’s blaming on me, and I whisper into her hair, tacky with styling spray and smelling faintly of aerosol. “I know you think this is intentional, Momma, but it’s not. Please believe me. Do you think I chose to be this way? To hurt you like this?” Her tears sting my neck, burn through my sweater to my skin below. “If there was anything I could have done to make it easier—”

  “You didn’t have to tell me,” she cries.

  Her words are muffled where her face is buried against my shoulder, but they sting as if she’s shouted them for the whole house to hear. I rub her back and swear that I feel each tear brand my flesh. “Would you rather I lied to you about it?” I ask gently. “Sure Mom, I remember Mary Margaret what’s-her-face. Pretty girl. Did she happen to leave her number?”

  “Stop it.” I hide my face in the dried ends of her over-processed hair and hate my mouth for the things it says sometimes. “That’s not what I mean.” Hugging me tighter, as if trying to imprint the memory of this moment into her bones, she whispers. “I had such high hopes for you, Michael.”

  “I’m gay,” I tell her, “not dead. It’s not the end of the world. I’m still here—”

  But she doesn’t hear me. If she does, she isn’t listening. Instead, she talks over me in a teary voice that I have to fall silent to hear. “Such high hopes,” she murmurs. “Such dreams. You could’ve had a family of your own—you’d make a wonderful father, I just know it. And now…and now this.”

  “Those are your dreams, Mom, not mine.” Though I keep my voice down, she shudders against me as if I’ve screamed at her, and her hands grip my sweater until I’m sure the knitting will unravel in her hard palms. “You never asked me what I wanted. It’s my life, but you don’t seem to care much about whatever dreams I might have.”

  She pulls away from me then, with a sigh that I feel deep in my own chest, it’s that painful, that sad. Her eyes are puffy and red—even if she could steady her hands, there’s no way she could outline her lids with the thin pencil on the table beside her mirror. Suddenly she looks too old to be my mother, she looks ancient, and I’m struck with an image years and years from now, this whole weekend played out all over again only at her house after she’s gone. It’s a never-ending cycle, isn’t it? A constant struggle to survive that you can never, ever win. In the end, it always comes down to those we leave behind. “Mom,” I sigh, brushing matted hair from her face.

  She shoos my hand away and rubs at her eyes. “Tell me what your dreams are, then,” she says as she blinks up at the ceiling to stop her tears. “Tell me where you see yourself going from here on out, Michael, because I surely don’t know anymore.”

  “Same place I was always going,” I assure her. She shakes her head like she can’t believe it, and I rest my chin on her knees, hugging her legs through her black rayon pants the way I used to when I was a little boy. I would look up at her with what I hoped were large, sad eyes and plead with her, please Momma, please let me get this comic, or please let Stephen come over today, or please don’t make me sit next to Ray in church. When she looks down at me now, I can see all those memories play out in her mind, though I’m the adult here, aren’t I? I’m the one with the calm, reasoning voice, I’m the one trying to dry the tears, me. I’m not a child any longer. “I’m not headed to hell just because I love a boy,” I say with a smile she won’t or can’t return. “I’m not going to suddenly become a stripper, or a porn star, or contract AIDS and die in a back alley somewhere.”

  Wiping her cheek, she mumbles, “Those things happen, you know.”

  I frown and imagine my eyes like a puppy’s, pleading, begging. “I’m not saying they don’t,” I admit. “I’m just saying they won’t happen to me.” She shakes her head, she’s not buying it, and m
y chest hurts to see fresh tears stand out like crystal beads in her eyes. “I have a lover, Mom, just one. I love Dan. The same way you felt for Dad when you promised to love and honor him for the rest of your life, no matter what. What I have with Dan is just like that.”

  “You’re talking about marriage.” My mother shakes her head again, clearing away thoughts I’m not privy to, and her face crumples in her hands like a used tissue. “Is that where this is going, Michael? You can’t be serious.”

  “I’m in love,” I tell her again. I don’t know how many different ways I can say it, I don’t know what to do to get it through to her. “I’ve never been more serious about anything in my whole life.”

  Her hands drop to her lap. Her fingers twist in the hem of her white blouse, which she’ll tuck into her pants when she finishes getting ready to go. There’s a black vest hanging on the door to her closet like a mantle of mourning—she’ll shrug into that, button it up, and the only white showing then will be her starched collar, her billowy sleeves. How much longer before we have to tuck our grief into these dark clothes? Before we must stand in Morrison’s and shake hands with the people of Sugar Creek, accepting their condolences with sad smiles and lowered heads? I can almost hear them now, the murmurs, the apologies, the reminiscences shuffling together like the whisper from a deck of cards worked between a dealer’s hands. “You’re still young,” Mom says. “Who’s to say this isn’t just a phase—”

  I cut her short. “It’s not. This is me, Mom. It’s who I am.” The look she gives me says she’s not convinced—I can see a hope deep inside her that refuses to die. Forcing a laugh, which comes out more bitter than I intended, I tell her, “I didn’t choose to be this way. I didn’t wake up one day and think you know, maybe I’m going to like guys for awhile. It didn’t happen like that. I’ve just known it forever—other boys my age were looking at girls and me…” I laugh again. “I was looking at them. You remember Stephen?”

  Her hands stop their nervous twitching in her lap, and the corner of one reddened eye jumps with an unconscious tic. “Robichaud?” she whispers. When I nod, she closes her eyes and sighs. “Don’t tell me he’s…”

  “Gay.” The word makes her cringe, and I say it again, not out of spite but because she’s going to have to get used to it. “I guess you could say he was my first boyfriend, in a way. It wasn’t actual intercourse, we were too young, and I wouldn’t call it love. Experimentation, maybe, though he—”

  “Michael.” With a faint shake of her head, she presses her hand to her mouth, as if the thought of me and Stephen doing whatever it was we did together is too much for her to stomach.

  Gently I say, “I’m twenty-five, Mom. I’m an adult now. I’m having sex.”

  “You don’t have to tell me about it,” she sighs. With one hand she touches the side of my face, her thumb tracing the curve of my jaw as she stares at me, through me, trying to see someone I no longer am. “You don’t have to be so damn proud.”

  Surprised, I laugh and cover her hand with mine, pressing her palm to my face. “What, would you rather I keep it to myself? Or deny who I am? Live in misery just because you don’t want to deal with it? Happens to everyone else’s sons, is that it? Not yours. Never yours.” Before she can reply, I point out, “You raised me better than that.”

  Now she smiles, her fingers feathering through the ends of my hair as she studies me. I feel the beginnings of tears prick my own eyes and I blink them away, I don’t need to cry again. It won’t help me anyway, not with her. She’s down to sniffling, once or twice dabbing at the corners of her eyes to smear away the tears that haven’t fallen yet, but she isn’t sobbing any longer. Whatever squall of emotions that rained in her heart when I first came in here has passed—she’s gathering herself together again, and in another half hour or so, you would never know a storm came through. But I don’t fool myself, I know this respite has nothing to do with our coming to a common ground. I can see it in the set of her jaw, feel it in the tremor of her hand on my face, as if she wants to curl those fingers into a fist and pound me back into the person she thinks I should be. I’m not that boy anymore, Mom, I think, leaning into her touch with an alert wariness that whispers this moment is slipping away and we’ll be back at odds again soon enough. I don’t know if I ever really was. For eighteen years I lived in your house and managed to hide it from you, like a secret pet that I cared for and nurtured in the privacy of my own mind, taking it out only when I found someone—like Stephen—who I could trust not to come running back to you. I did lie to you, can’t you see that? As long as I possibly could. And see where it’s gotten us now? You wanted me to keep this up? If not for Dan, I might have, too—why bother telling her until she absolutely needed to know?

  But now it seems sudden to her, I’ve pulled back the curtain and shown her a glimpse of my real life, the secret I’ve harbored all these years, and she thinks this is just a passing phase. It’s not. “I’m not going to grow out of this,” I whisper, closing my eyes so I won’t have to see the pain in hers anymore. Her gaze bores right through me like radiation, burning and searing and tearing everything in its path as she aims for my soul. I have to protect that at all costs. “I’m not gay to be spiteful, or to get attention, or to break your heart. I put up with too much to want to be this way, Mom, you just don’t know. You’ve seen the news, heard the stories, I’m sure. You know it’s hard—”

  “Oh, honey,” she sobs, and she pulls me to her, holds my face against her breasts the way she used to when I came to her as a child, bruised or bleeding or upset, hurt, and she couldn’t take away the pain. I can smell her perfume, a heavy gardenia scent I’ve always associated with older women because it’s a favorite of Aunt Bobby, too. Aunt Billie wears a warm musk, and Aunt Sarah likes those light florals that tickle your nose. Evie always wore a spicy blend of both, which smelled as wonderful as the ocean on summer nights. I wonder if there’s still a bottle of that somewhere around here. I should take it home as my inheritance, keep it in the bathroom, spritz it on my shirt when I’m feeling sad or alone and need to know she’s only a prayer away.

  Stroking my smooth cheek, my mom kisses the top of my head and sighs. “As if I don’t worry enough about you,” she says. One tear slips down my face to the corner of my mouth, where it stings salty and hot. I stick out my tongue and lick it away. “Living so far from home, all by yourself, going to school, working full-time, on your own…”

  “I have Dan,” I remind her. Taking her wrist in both hands, I look up and hope she doesn’t see that I’m close to crying now, too. “He’s such a good man, Mom. You couldn’t ask for someone better, honest. Attentive and loving and strong. So strong. He’s just what I’ve always wanted in a partner, what I need to survive. I can’t imagine life without him. He’ll keep me safe.” At her wry attempt at a smile, I plead, “Give him a chance, please. Give us both a chance, that’s all I’m asking for here. I’m still your son.” Sitting back, I brush away an errant tear that trickles forgotten down the side of her nose and wait. When she looks at me, her smile softens into something almost familiar, almost forgiving. “I still love you.”

  Her chin trembles and I expect more sobs, maybe a teary apology, something sappy and sweet, straight off a Hallmark greeting card, blank verse in flowing script that tugs at the old heartstrings. But no—she’s had time to compose herself, and the woman who sits before me drying her eyes is the same self-possessed mother I’ve always known, her emotions reined in as she struggles to get this situation—and me—under her control. “I’m not okay with it,” she says. The look in her eyes demands a response so I nod, I know. Nothing has really changed between us, I know this. “Not by a long shot. Don’t think for a moment that I condone this…this relationship of yours, because I don’t, not at all.”

  I nod again. “I know—”

  “I don’t like it,” she interrupts, cutting me off. “I don’t think it’s right.”

  Exasperated, I sigh, “Mom. Right or not, he�
��s a part of my life now. You have to realize this—you have to respect it, respect me, if I mean anything to you at all.”

  “You do,” she says, touching my hair, my face, with a loving hand. “You know you mean the world to me, Michael, you and Caitlin and Ray…”

  She trails off as her fingers straighten my collar, an automatic gesture that is at once so absent and so poignant, so real, that my throat swells shut with unbidden emotion. I could press my point, but what’s the use? We’re at an impasse now, I know her feelings on the subject of my homosexuality, she knows exactly where I stand when it comes to Dan, and as the poet said, “Never the ‘twain shall meet.” We stand on two separate banks of a river of emotion that cuts between us, too deep to ford, too wide to cross—I can see where she’s coming from as clearly as if she stood on an opposing shore, but I can’t stretch over this divide that separates us, I can’t just abandon my own feelings. One day we might manage to span this gap between us—this is just a foundation, a place to build upon, not necessarily an end but a means to one, and years from now maybe we will finally meet halfway across a bridge we started today. I can live with that hope. If she stays civil to Dan in the interim…“Don’t make me choose,” I say softly. “Between him and you, Mom, don’t, because I won’t do it. He means the world to me and I don’t want to have to stay away if it’s going to be a problem with bringing him to the house.”

  My mother looks at her hands, in her lap again, and then at the clock beside the bed. It’s getting late, the morning almost gone, and I can practically hear her counting down the time she has left to get ready. “Mom?” I prompt. This is one of her tricks, I know it too well—ignore the question instead of answering, see if it goes away. “If you’re going to treat him like shit, I’d just as soon stay away. I’m not coming down to visit you guys without him, and I sure as hell ain’t sleeping alone.”