The Letter Q

by Sarah Moon

  In that time machine, I’d bring back a crystal ball and hold it up to you. “See that girl?” I’d say. “The one in the plaid pants who swags with pride like she owns the planet? That’s Sherri. You’re going to hook up with her in five years and spend the rest of your lives together.” The odds of that happening to anyone are so slim, and you were still hurting from him, and I might have had to convince you. But I’d say, “Yep. He’s not The One. She is.”

  Then I would’ve told you to get the hell out of that park in the middle of the night before you got murdered.

  Love,

  Julie Now

  Dear Mandy,

  I call you this because I know at twelve, this is what you longed for people to call you. You listened to the Barry Manilow song daily and deduced that since your middle name is Amanda, he was writing that song for you. You knew all the words and pictured yourself in each scene of it:

  Well, you came and you gave without taking. But I sent you away. . . .

  But you haven’t sent anyone away. It confuses you that this song saddens you and touches you so. You don’t know just yet that this sadness is your growing understanding that this is the world you’re walking into — a world where, for a long time, you will feel an un-belonging, a sense that people are sending you away from them. And I guess, in a way they are. Your best friend is still your best friend. You see each other every single day and it’s hard to be apart. But there is an apartness now. Maria will stay in your life. She’ll move to Florida with Sam, who neither of you know yet but who you will introduce her to. They’ll have three beautiful daughters and the oldest will eventually move back to the city and become a part of your life. But as I write this, you are realizing that you and Maria are very different. Somewhere deep, you know you will never marry. Not the way the rest of the world around you seems to do it. You don’t yet have a name for who you’re becoming because in your small world of Madison Street, you don’t know what this thing is yet. You see Maria’s Auntie Alma. You love her — her huge Afro, her pretty dark eyes. And you love Green Eyes too — the woman Alma shows up with when she comes to visit. Green Eyes is beautiful, soft-spoken, and delicate as dust. You feel clumsy around Green Eyes. And years later, you’ll remember that’s the only name you had for her. But you have some strange connection to these two women that you don’t yet understand. Alma scares you — she is tall and thin and dresses like a man. Your mother calls her a bulldagger and this word alone — when said the way your mother says it — makes you afraid to get too close to Alma. You think, That isn’t me. You are already thinking, That isn’t me. Because somewhere deep, you know that it is. That you are becoming … And your becoming will frighten a lot of people. You don’t understand yet why your mother doesn’t call Green Eyes a bulldagger. Doesn’t say it with the same disdain. You are not concerned with pleasing your mother. You just don’t want to piss her off. You walk lightly through this confusing adolescence. On Friday nights, your mother lets you spend the night at Maria’s. Some Fridays, when you say Let’s play Alma and Green Eyes, Maria says yes. And these are the most wonderful Fridays — a whole night of being who you are becoming. But soon Maria will say No more of that. We need to find boyfriends. Maybe you are thirteen by then. Maybe twelve and a half. You will try to forget this moment. And for a long time, it will remain in some murky place in your memory — half-forgotten but painful still.

  Mandy? I want to tell you, it gets better. There is a whole world of women like you out here. They are amazing! They are mothers and doctors and lawyers and writers and actors and electricians and builders and thinkers and doers. They are funny and thoughtful and caring. Some wear their love proudly, speak out loud about it, declare it as fiercely as they once hid it. Others are shier, quieter, maybe still, a little bit afraid. Maybe still, trying to figure out exactly who they are becoming. And like you, right now, they’re still girls — meaning — one day, you will find each other and you will build communities and you will change the world.

  But right now, I want you to just take one step — away from Madison Street. Off the block, around the corner, onto the L train, into Manhattan — just go somewhere! And look into the faces of other people. The world is big — and there is so much love in it. I promise you — you will find it. It is already, as I write this, moving toward you.

  Love,

  Jacqueline Woodson

  Dear Eileen,

  Isaw you standing there today in the cafeteria looking quite frozen and I wanted to tell you that we in the future understand your insides and are here now to tell you that miraculously you will be okay, um, even by the time you are in your twenties, which I know seems like quite a ways off. I promise you won’t always be standing there stuck in your horrible Catholic school all your life, feeling like if you sit with your friends there will only be more abuse unless you agree to be funny and mock yourself all the time. And all the time knowing the cruelty will come again as soon as Janet has her next horrible idea. Notice that you and Janet bond around one thing — self-mockery — and so at school dances the two of you go out of your way to do the most obscene ludicrous moves to let everyone know that you think THEY are gross and the only way it can be expressed is by becoming gross yourselves. You and Janet take part in your mutual pain in these dances and from where I sit I can’t say for sure that Janet was also a lesbian — but whatever she is or was she just didn’t have the good fortune you ultimately do have to find yourself in a culture that HAS room for you to explore who you might be outside of the Arlington Catholic High School bastion of mean suburban conventionality. Ugh. Know that WE in the future all hate that place. Know that when you are older no one from there will still even care that you are now a writer and a poet and sometimes most important, a lesbian. They are that dumb. In fact in the future your selfhood will only continue to weird them out. But by then you’ll have found a world of people even weirder than you, just better than the past, simply loving, open and confident, angry sometimes but welcoming. You’ll meet people all over the world in person and through your work who will make it abundantly clear that what sails through your mind delights them, and the adventure of that encounter will bring you love and friendship and even some success but mostly it will bring you this crazy smiling part of yourself that will look back at you at thirteen or fifteen and even twelve (Hi!) and say honestly, You will be blown away by who you will grow up into. So I would like to urge you to lighten up on the self-mockery and let Janet find someone else to do the ugly dancing with because you might just want to dance — not so anyone else sees you and gets the twisted message of turned inside-out anger and fear, but so YOU can feel the music and be part of the whole room swaying and bouncing inside and out and not be having to send a message at all to anyone. Just dance, get out there and swim. ’Cause right now you are in the dancing years of your life and if you like dancing at all — and I know you do — you should be doing it for yourself, feverishly and exhaustively. Same with singing. You know those mock-up girl bands you do for the high school talent shows. You love doing that and should not just do mock-ups. Girls can do bands. You know those drums you saw one day gleaming in the basement of one of those boys in Lexington. You wanted to sit down and play even though you don’t know how. You should do it. Don’t be afraid of making a fool of yourself, do what you want. All those things you are good at: drawing and painting, writing funny shit that everyone in school likes you to read out loud in class, those songs you write for the girl band, the plays you write so you won’t flunk history. That is art. It’s the work you will be doing for the rest of your life so be proud of these things that are easy for you. If something is easy for you, it means that big parts of you are being used and you should begin to do that thing with your eyes open and do it until it gets hard. Move something around and it will get easy again. You should look for other kids who are into what you are into and stick with them. The kids who are mean to you are a waste of time. Don’t let them talk you into quitting ballet class because
it’s “queer.” Do you know what queer means? Obviously you are secretly a boy in a way that is turning you inside out, which is part of why you are standing there stuck in the cafeteria today, but you know — so many people are mixes of male and female — and despite the fact of your secret boy, you probably also have secret female parts you don’t even know about yet. Gender is the great mystery of the world (like love) and all the ways you let yourself be terrorized by your friends who think your discomfort, your tomboyishness, your awkward energy is something you should be shamed for is a giant waste of time. They are suffering and they have YOU to pick on. If you just walk away from them and remain the mystery you are, the mystery will draw other kinds of people to you. Some you already know, some you will meet in a few years. By the way, most of the people in your family are queer and that’s part of the silence you feel around the house and part of the creepiness you feel in your family from one person to the next. Everyone’s afraid of what queer means and you will be the first to find out. You can be the first person in your family who lived frankly. So don’t give up. Write in your diary, go where it’s warm, i.e., toward people who act like they like you, and bear in mind that some of them will also seem weird. Pay attention to how the person FEELS when you spend time with them, not how you will look when you show up with them in your world. The world you are in today is really small. Think of the kids you meet on the bus to Harvard Square. Think of how good it feels to be one of them, getting out of town to go hear music. Do not, above all, let your family ever convince you to stay home when it’s time to go. That thing in you that feels like you are ready to leave them — for college or after or even just at a family party — feeling trapped there — always know that you have the right to go. Just as you have the right to be yourself here (and everywhere). The fact that you might not have the means to go AT THIS MOMENT is hard but know that you are ready and that your destiny is to live your life, not theirs, and though it hurts to leave home you will always find a bigger better one that is your own. The world is open to you, unbelievably. You are great, funny, beautiful, and completely wild. And you are already big enough and strong enough and wise enough to make a go in it and become part of its story. So start talking now. Meet yourself. Meet the people. And if they can’t listen to you and can’t hold your attention, then go talk to someone else. And someone else again. You’ll find the right ones. We of the future are waiting for you to make us laugh at the secrets you’ve been holding inside for so long. It’s your joy and we urge you to not be selfish and keep it all to yourself. Your joy, like a dog, wants to go for a walk. And by the way, in the future you will have many dogs, so don’t regret that part of your past. The painful unanimalness of your childhood and teens. Dogs are in your future. Great ones — who are waiting to meet you — so go ahead. Say hello, move toward them. Welcome! WOOF!

  Eileen

  Dear David in Eighth Grade,

  I hate to say it, but I think you owe Mr. Jones an apology.

  Not for being an uninspiring teacher. He is a deeply uninspiring teacher. But, to be fair, it’s hard to imagine anyone inspiring you in eighth-grade Earth Science. “Schist” puns aside, there’s not much in this class for you to latch on to.

  So, yes, you’re bored. Monumentally bored. To the degree that you spend much of the period writing notes or watching the patterns of the dandruff that falls onto the black table-desk. I get it.

  But that’s not really a reason to be mean.

  I’m not talking about the harmless jokes. The time he showed a slide of a girl putting her tongue to a piece of quartz to check its taste, and you yelled out, “It’s Romancing the Stone!” Priceless. But the way you slagged him for being gay? Oh, there’s a price for that one.

  I don’t even remember how it started. He pissed you off in some way. Maybe by being so boring. Maybe by not leaving you alone to be bored. But suddenly you unpacked the insult. He was wearing a pale pink sweater and you started joking that he was gay. And that really got to him.

  Nowadays, we have these things called “teachable moments,” and if Mr. Jones had been a certain kind of educator, he might have defused your insult by telling you how inconsequential it was, and that if he was in fact gay, it wouldn’t matter. But of course, you’re living twenty-five years ago, and Mr. Jones isn’t a certain kind of educator, so instead of telling you it would be okay if he were gay (although he isn’t), he starts to drop references to his girlfriend all over his class. Seriously, every time he can fit in a mention of it, he does. (“My girlfriend and I were looking at cumulus clouds the other day,” etc.) You sense that you’re winning, so you keep calling out his sham, doubting his girlfriend’s existence. You think he doth protest too much. People think this is hysterical. You make them laugh. A lot. And that feels good.

  The weird thing is, you’re not motivated by homophobia. You don’t, to my memory, call anyone else gay as an insult. Ever. But with Mr. Jones, you sense that this is the one thing that will make him the most uncomfortable — it’s the shining arrow in your arsenal, and you use it over and over again. Until eventually it gets boring too, and you go back to your dandruff.

  I have no idea if there’s such a thing as retroactive gaydar, but I’m pretty certain now that Mr. Jones is not, in fact, gay. And you, indeed, are.

  I’m still not entirely sure whether I use the word irony correctly, but I believe there’s something exquisitely ironic about making fun of your non-gay teacher for being gay, and then going home and listening to Barbra Streisand’s Broadway Album over and over again.

  I know many gay people now who honed their caustic wit as a defense mechanism — this particular rapier was the best thing in their own arsenals, so they made sure it was sharp as possible, and sometimes they went in for the kill. Hell, sometimes they still do.

  Don’t fall into this trap. It doesn’t make you safe. It only makes you mean.

  Right now, there’s a lot of talk about bullying. And I think of you every time the issue comes up. Because, I’ll be honest, a lot of the time bullying is presented as an either/or thing: either you’re bullied or you’re a bully. The gay kid is the victim. The bully is the Bad Guy.

  But that isn’t your experience, is it?

  Because you’re both a bully and bullied. You attack — not with your fists, but with your words. And you’re attacked. Never with fists, but there is something about you that inexplicably makes assholes want to spit on you. Such a childish gesture, but man, it sinks in.

  The thing is? What you do to Mr. Jones — or the other cutdowns you make about what classmates are wearing, or how stupid other kids are — is not justified by what you yourself are going through. You’re both innocent and guilty. You are a sweet, intelligent guy that I’m proud of now, and you’re also an occasional asshole that I still can’t believe I was.

  The good news is that I don’t really have to tell you that meanness is wrong; you’ll figure it out yourself, soon. And I don’t really have to tell you that you’re gay; you’ll figure that one out as well. The taunts you get in high school — all those times you’re called gay as an insult, all the stupid spitting that comes with it — won’t really slow you down, because by then you’ll have a sense of context about the world, and you’ll know that you lead a pretty charmed life.

  I’m happy to be able to tell you that at age thirty-eight, you’re not going to want to go back and change many things about your life. You’ll realize the successes and the failures are inextricably linked, and you wouldn’t sacrifice any of the parts because that would alter the whole, which is still pretty charmed.

  That said, the only times you’ll want to change are the times you reached into that arsenal and used the weapons you had at your disposal. The way to deal with bullies isn’t to condemn them, it’s to understand them. In your case, the boys who spit on you will end up being real fuck-ups, miserable and desperate in their own ways. Some will have seen something in you that they didn’t want to recognize in themselves, and will be attac
king that. Others will be so messed up on drugs, loneliness, or the mix of the two that they won’t even appreciate what they’re doing. Others are simply, inexcusably mean, and wear that meanness as an extension of the privileges life has given them.

  And then there will be the bullies like you. Smart kids doing stupid things, in love with the power that their voices can have. Sometimes this is the only power that they possess, and I have sympathy for that. But with you, there are other ways to be clever, other ways to get attention. Eventually you’ll find them. Just not in eighth grade.

  I have a scary feeling that Mr. Jones was younger then than I am now. I know it’s a stretch to ask you to imagine the point of view of an Earth Science teacher, but eventually such things are possible. And you’ll see: Make all the jokes you want. Make people laugh. But don’t do it at someone else’s expense. It gives you a rush, to be the star for a moment, to have your words hit so hard. But that rush only leads you to a place you don’t need to be.

  Sincerely,

  David Now

  Dear Rakesh,

  See — someone can spell your name correctly. Because, well, that someone is you.

  This is you, about twenty years in the future. No, I did not somehow commandeer Marty McFly’s DeLorean, and no, I can’t get you a kiss from Michael J. Fox either. I can get you a signed copy of his eventual memoir, Always Looking Up, but I know that’s not as cool as the fortune-making almanac from Back to the Future Part II. I did, however, buy Always Looking Up off eBay. I won’t go into all the specifics of what that means, but if you ever wondered what will happen down the line to all of those Happy Meal toys that you’ve been collecting, just know that eBay will be heavily involved in their fate.