The Letter Q

by Sarah Moon

  You will find out who did it, Tim and Jim Hopkins*, the twins two doors down who deliver the paper. That same evening, your doorbell will ring, and it’ll be a white man collaring two sobbing bookend-brothers about your age. They will insist they did it on a dare. Their father will shake them down. Through tears, they’ll say they’re sorry. Their father will make them deliver the paper free for two months out of their allowance as penance.

  Your family will have to live two doors down from theirs for years and years, until your parents sell the house. You’ll go to all the same schools as Tim and Jim, who are a year ahead. You will blot them out of your mind, thinking only, “stupid, rhyme-y names” when you see them at school. You will later find Tim on Facebook (Lord, this is too complicated to explain; just wait and see what it is.). You feel a mean thrill when you see that he looks gray, overweight, and unhappy.

  On the night of The Terrible Day, Mom will assure you that everything is fine. But something has changed for you. You understand that the world isn’t kind. People you don’t know will hate you for who you are.

  As your mother explains to you and your sister, “No, don’t worry. It was a mistake. The neighbors do want us here,” you glance at your father’s face, still tight with rage. You suspect what she’s saying isn’t true.

  Tonight, you will sleep in your own room, but it won’t feel as good as you thought it would. As your mom and dad kiss you good night and you snuggle into your new bed, you will understand that, no matter what, you will always have these three people who love you. It will always be the four of you. You are bound together by blood and love and pain and by the memory of The Terrible Day.

  April 30, 1979

  Dear Linda,

  You don’t know it yet, but today is the day you’re going to come out to your parents. It’s not going to go well.

  News flash: You’re a lesbian! I’m giving you the information this way because you will also end up being a journalist. In this day and age, thirty-some years from right now, being a journalist is MUCH harder than being a lesbian! Trust me.

  Anyway, it’s really not news at all that you’re a lesbian. You already know and everyone else suspects. That’s why your mother and father are waiting to ambush you when you open the door to their bedroom and finally break the silence.

  As unbelievable as it sounds, this whole coming out thing is going to work out fine. You’re going to find the love of your life, a tall beautiful woman, who is kind and warm and Southern. She will whisper secrets to you in a voice that sounds like dessert.

  You’ll have two children. I know what you’re thinking. But, yes, lesbians can have children. It’s basic biology. You did well in high school science; you’ll figure out how to make the kid thing happen.

  Your children will call you “Mommy” even after they’re too old for that corny sort of thing. The girl will be all arms, legs, and smiles. She’ll be determined, a tough spirit, her brow furrowed on the day she is born. She’s serious on the outside, with a soft, gooey center. When you look at your daughter, you’ll see yourself.

  Your son will be just soft and gooey. He’ll take your hand when the two of you walk down the street, even though he’s as tall as you. He’ll be a good-time guy, who’ll make you laugh until you can’t catch your breath. Every time you look into his face, you’ll see Dad.

  But it doesn’t feel that way today. Your home, in suburban Denver, will feel small and airless. Mom will ask, “Are you a lesbian?” She wants so badly for you to say no. But don’t bother. She’s as sure as first thing in the morning that it’s true. You know her; she’ll try and talk you out of it:

  “Honey, you’re not a lesbian.”

  “You might feel that way now, but it will go away and you’ll be normal.”

  “No daughter of mine is a lesbian.”

  “We’ll get you a good therapist.”

  “Why are you doing this to ME!?”

  “You ARE not a lesbian!”

  Dad won’t say anything until the end. Then he’ll tear up and whisper, “Do you hate men?”

  I know you’re afraid. You’re scared that you will first lose your family and then, little by little, everybody else in your life. Especially every other black person. If the “community” — which means every black person you know, have ever met, or will meet — finds out you’re a lesbian, THEY will take away your black card. And this is the “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” late ’70s, a bad time to be black but not black — or black enough.

  In your mind, you can’t be black and gay. In the world you live in, all the gays are white, and all the blacks are straight. And in the big picture, you believe that being a lesbian is bad for the race. It might be good for you — but for twenty-nine million other people, it’s bad bad bad. You’re supposed to be a model, and do the right thing for the community, a race of people who have suffered so much.

  But face it: Mostly you are terrified of a black community of only three. You are mostly afraid that your family will stop loving you when you admit that you’re a lesbian. But they won’t. The four of you are the lone survivors of The Terrible Day, and your shared history is a tie that binds you together.

  You will reassure Dad that you don’t hate men, especially not him. He will love you fiercely until his last breath, a shallow inhale that comes just hours before your son is born. Mom had no intention of pushing you away. After today, she will tighten her grip, pulling you closer … to torture you. She will continue to power away at you, doing everything she can to convince you that you are not a lesbian.

  But you inherited her strength, her will, and that streak of stubbornness that runs right down your backbones. It will take her five years, but Mom will finally realize that she can’t change you back. You will never be a proper black lady with good shoes and matching bag, who marries a professional African-American gentleman and has two kids. She will cut her losses and love her two grandbabies — and you.

  One day many years later you will ask her if she wishes you were straight. She will hesitate, then say, “I love you just the way you are.” You will never forget that.

  Love,

  Linda

  * not their real rhyme-y names

  Dear One,

  It’s not that you’re unrecognizable from here, but that it seems so long ago. History, lives, laws, attitudes have speeded up, but down that long corridor of change, there you are, nervously waiting to go onstage. It’s 1963, senior year of high school, and you’re starring in the school play, Everyman. That it was a medieval morality play, its hero torn by temptations and forced to choose between his good angel and his bad — well, it was the choice of the drama coach, the Jesuit who happened also to be my Greek teacher and for whose favor I longed. That you were Everyman is the irony, because in fact you were a peculiar, solitary, smart but unhappy individual, not at all like your classmates or contemporaries — or, for that matter, the character in the play. Eager to be an adult, you had loathed a childhood that enforced games and sports, rigid routines and conventions. You wanted to be “included,” but kept yourself snobbishly apart. Rather than roughhouse with the boys, you preferred playing house with neighborhood girls. More than anything, you were bored.

  But you had one advantage. You were gay from the start, and knew it. Your desires — no matter how troubling or temporarily confused — had a single, as yet unfocused, aim. You occasionally thought how, in the future, marriage or the priesthood might usefully hide those desires, but that was only because, as a teenager, everyone listens to what others say as a source of possibilities. One wants to fit in, wants to fulfill the expectations of the family, wants to succeed in society.

  This was what they now call the Eisenhower Era — a term that might as well be the Dark Ages — a time of “soulless conformity.” (Actually, the 1950s and early ’60s were, as far as the arts were concerned, a period of innovation that can rival the 1920s.) It’s often singled out as an especially horrid time to have been gay, enforcing a repres
sed or furtive life. A gay teenager seemed destined for marriage or suicide, and was raised amidst crushing social norms and religious bigotry.

  And yet, you survived. The goals the age instilled in you, however twisted, were happiness and success — notions that are easy to scorn and hard to resist. And that, incredibly, was your fate as an adult. How come? There were dozens of reasons — luck, the right genes, good teachers, parents who blissfully ignored you. You didn’t have any gay friends, or none that you knew of then, but you had what turned out to be a perfect guide: the Closet. In the age of enlightened responsibilities and openness, “the Closet” has almost as bad a reputation as the Eisenhower Era. But you found a way to make a virtue out of its necessity.

  By trying to pass as straight, by laughing at the wrong jokes, by muffling your advances, and by walking around with your head down, you learned a way of life that became invaluable to you as a writer. One of the first and most lasting lessons you eventually learned as a young writer — and it is impossible to separate this lesson from the fact you were gay — was lying, pretending. You learned to hide inside a pen. Or rather, the pen allowed you to learn the difference between hiding something and disguising something — that is to say, making it difficult but not impossible to see. A poem — and a person too? — needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants a person to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants him to understand things only years later.

  Of course, you didn’t realize all that while you were standing in the wings, waiting for your cue to enter. (My first line was to be “Why asketh thou?”) That was half a century ago. We all act. Some, alas, act out. If we’re lucky, we learn to keep our private selves at a little remove, to savor them. And you were one of the lucky ones. In time, you learned not to fear but to appreciate the distance between the busy world and your secret, all the ramifications and delights you had in being you.

  Love,

  Sandy

  Dear Anne,

  I know, I know, you are driven by anger and revenge — anger against the circumstances of being brought up in a male-dominated Navy culture and revenge against what feels like an unending series of obstacles and rejections erected to annoy you and you alone. And I know that the energy produced by the anger and revenge is rich, useful, and seemingly limitless. Wonderful! Every adventure you have enjoyed, fueled by revenge and anger, led to voracious forages out into the wide world. And I know that the accumulating ambition and adventure led to insight, to travel, and to creative endeavor. All of this is true and wonderful. You used what was available to you — you made lemons into lemonade.

  But how can I encourage you to listen far more closely to the subtle indications of your own body? How can I help you to trust the genius of your body and to move with more moment-to-moment responsiveness to the world and to follow the signals that your body is offering? If you listen closely, the body will let you know who and what to trust and who and what to avoid. The mind, though, which is the wiliest part of your body, will trick you. The prefrontal cortex of your brain makes you prejudiced and frightened and you second-guess your instincts. Subsequently you power through things too much. But please know that it is possible to savor the moments and drink in the sensations that wash over you as a direct result of your efforts in the world, whatever your efforts are, including the creation of plays, which is what you always seem to gravitate toward. Taste and revel in these moments because they will mitigate your fear and give you the feedback that you need to move forward gracefully. The moment-to-moment sensations of the body do not lie. Use your body as a barometer. Trust the goose bump factor. When someone, or something, gives you goose bumps — or as the French call it far more poetically, frisson de corps — pay attention. Locate the source of this physical excitement and then follow the ensuing cues, whether they indicate initiating a new relationship or diving into a new play. Your body is telling you something. Trust these indications and your sense of adventure. I am suffering now as a direct result of your lack of sensitivity to the indications of your body. You pushed too hard. You did not trust your instincts and you did not trust the other bodies around you. You need to understand that, like cattle, we are a species that herds. We move through life in relation to others — in relation to other people’s bodies. Try to make choices in the moment by trusting the body — your body and the bodies around you. Today the ache in my hips is a constant reminder of your willful excesses and abuses. Did you mean to hurt me? Did you think about me at all?

  I am thinking of you now with sympathy for your churning stomach and your constant sense of inadequacy and doubt that plagues you each step of the way. Oh, I know now that you do not in fact have to prove yourself with every step that you take. Can’t you see that like-minded friends and colleagues around you will help, will come to your rescue, will join with you and together you will make it to the next clearing? How can I encourage you to trust your body and the bodies of those around you in the moment-to-moment unfolding of your life and the lives of those around you? As Aristotle said, we find meaning in relation to those around us. I am aware now that what you do with your body and how you move through the world matters. You carry it all with you, through time, in the body. You are speaking to me now and every day. I carry you with me.

  Yours always,

  Anne

  Dear Little Lucy,

  Good news! You were right. About everything. Every last thing.

  Okay, maybe not every word that came out of your mouth needed to be said. Maybe you exaggerated a bit — often and a lot? — because you were afraid of not being heard. Maybe you sometimes told lies because you needed to hear the words out loud to know that they weren’t true.

  But those slips, those tiny tests, those moments where you cut yourself in half, or maybe into many pieces, to experiment with truth, aren’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about what you knew, in your core, to be true.

  You were right.

  Think about it.

  There you are at age twelve, an oversized girl in tights and a leotard, clumping across the wooden ballet studio. Skinny Mrs. Shoemacher, with her hair pulled into a tight bun, slapping out the rhythm with her hands. You wanted the tutu. You wanted to feel how your body could move. You wanted your older sister to like you. You wanted grace. Nothing wrong with tutus, movement, your sister, and grace. But ballet? You hated it. Hated it.

  Now compare that with sitting at the long dinner table at summer camp with Miss Jo at the head. You loved her unfashionably short hair. You loved how loudly she sang. You loved the goofy faces she made. You loved the way she bumped hips with other counselors. You even loved the attention when she asked, “What are you looking at?” if you stared at her for too long. You knew that Miss Jo was one of the most genuine people you’d ever met. You knew, back then when you were just twelve years old, that you belonged at her dinner table and not in Mrs. Shoemacher’s ballet studio.

  Getting to right, knowing what is true for you, was the hard part. It still is. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to go online, pull up a search engine, and type in: true, Lucy, now.

  What you did took a bit more time. It involved running away and digging giant holes in the earth. Even theft and arson. It seemed like you were committing random acts of destruction. But even then you were working your way toward the life you needed. You were building forts that kept you safe and nurtured your imagination.

  Fort #1: You are five years old. You have two older brothers and an older sister. They’re playing baseball and running track, fine-tuning their fashion statements and making friends with other kids. Who are you? You’re not sure. You find an opening in the bushes at the side of the house. You crawl in and find a hefty branch that holds your weight. When you sit there, you are all alone. No one knows where you are. No one knows who you are. It is the perfect fort, with the walls of green leaves and chairs of bounc
y branches. You realize that when you go into your fort, maybe with some cookies or a book, you are just you. You realize that it feels very, very good to be you, alone, your five-year-old self emerging into a girl who loves green.

  Fort #2: You are ten years old. You and your best friend, Michelle, like to play girl and boy. You like to make out. You especially like to do this when you construct an elaborate story to hold the play. You are a basketball star and she is a cheerleader. She is a park ranger and you are a tourist. You are a photographer and she is your model. You both are explorers, working your way up the wilds of a previously unknown river.

  Her father catches you in the tent in the backyard. You both have your shirts off. She’s lying on top of you and you’re making out. He tells you to never do that again.

  That’s when you built the next fort. There is a vacant lot up the street, and you decide you’ll build a dugout house, like the ones in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books. You spend an entire September digging the hole, arguing about how far down you have to go before angling horizontal to the surface to make the “room.” You want to put an armchair down there, and also a shelf to hold your box of cookies and books.

  Unfortunately, a construction crew arrives and begins digging their own hole for a new house. You have to abandon that fort.

  Fort #3: The following summer, however, the house hasn’t been finished. The construction site is fun to explore in the evenings, after the crew goes home. Sometimes you pee in the room that will eventually become the bathroom. You put loose nails in your pockets. This gives you an idea.

  Not far away is a patch of woods. Everyone calls it Pete’s Woods because mean Mr. Peterson has the only house in the dark forest. You and Michelle begin stealing scrap lumber from the construction site and dragging it to your own construction site in the woods. You select a nice muddy spot right by the creek. That way you’ll have water for drinking and washing. You use the nails you’ve collected in your pockets and a hammer you take from your family’s garage. You manage to get the floor and two walls up before the fire.