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Stray City

Page 5

by Chelsey Johnson


  “You could say that,” I said.

  We all have our coming-out story, or why-we-haven’t-come-out story. More precisely, we have two. There’s the official version, paragraph-sized for conversation, for when it comes up, usually on level-two get-to-know-you with friends and dates and curious coworkers. That one covers the basics: when, where, how, the end. You will tell it again and again over the course of your life, polishing it to a fine sheen, until it’s as close to frictionless as you can get it. Then there’s the real story, the full version, which you tell only a handful of people ever—even if you’re one of the lucky ones with a good family, with loving parents who eventually accept you. Because, as Lawrence once said, when the only other time you’ve seen your dad cry is at a funeral, what does that mean about you?

  Ryan got the short version: nineteen, home for Christmas, Mom overheard me on the phone, they blamed college, the end. “I couldn’t afford it on my own, so.” I cut my pancake triangle into smaller triangles. “I quit. How about you?”

  “Me too. The quitting part. But I wanted to.” He took a semester off at UW to tour and never went back. Later he went to barber school. Tired of grunge and Microsoft creep, he’d split Seattle for Portland. Three years later, he’d been here as long as he’d lived anywhere.

  For much of the game I’d been plagued with a vowel-heavy rack that spelled nothing but sounds of distress, and right then Ryan laid down two of his last tiles to make OF and IF, the F doing double duty on a double-word. He was now ahead by a solid thirty points and I still had five letters left.

  He pulled out his wallet and set it on the table.

  “Oh really.”

  “Whenever you’re ready.”

  I laid down all my letters to spell STAKE, pluraling his IF, K on a triple-letter. I took him right out. “Ready,” I said.

  Ryan fell back in the booth, slumped to the side, and then slid out of view.

  I peered under the table. He was stretched out on his back on the bench. I asked if he was okay.

  “Reeling from my defeat.”

  “At least you got a free breakfast out of the deal.”

  “Aha. What if that was my strategy all along?”

  “It was not!” I said.

  “No, it really wasn’t. I hate to lose.”

  “Me too.” I lay down on my bench as well. Under the table it was dark and shadowy. I could see pale patches of gum stuck to the particleboard. Ryan’s face was half shadowed from the table and half lit from behind.

  “There’s a problem,” he said.

  “That I beat you?”

  “That too is a problem, and I plan to solve it. The other one I’m not so sure I can.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The problem is that I like you.”

  “I suppose that is a problem.”

  His eyes fixed upon mine. “But here’s the thing. I think you like me too.”

  “You know what’s a problem? Why do men always think that they can convert us? That we’re not really what we say we are?” I said it with a smile, but my mouth felt hot.

  “No, no, I’m not trying to convert you. I just have a hunch you’ll like me more than you think.”

  “Oh really.”

  “Yeah.”

  I shook my head. “We’ll see about that.”

  “We will? See, already it’s looking good.”

  I laughed. “You’re hopeless.”

  My arm was hanging over the edge of the booth, and I felt Ryan’s hand bump against my fingers. I batted back at it. Then he slid his hand underneath mine. I let my hand rest there on his for a moment, on that warm plank of hand, a hand like a raft. There is no texture in the world quite like a human palm. The fingers sense it right away; a hand knows another hand the way a dog knows another dog, it responds to its kind.

  I turned my head to look at him. He was looking back at me. The table loomed above our heads like a low flat roof, protective, dim.

  “You said you had no expectations,” I said.

  “I don’t,” he said. “Just a feeling. A little feeling.”

  “I’ll be right back,” I said, rising from the table.

  In the restroom I washed my hands carefully, then leaned against the sink and lingered. The restroom’s walls and ceiling were tiled in gold-veined mirror squares. There I was, repeated into infinity but fractured and increasingly hard to see. I returned to the table.

  “Now I’m going,” he said, and got up.

  I slid into the booth and waited. I looked out the window and stared at the handle of my car door. Maybe when Ryan came back, I would get up and go again; I imagined we could trade off like that all night, infinitely patient. Go, wait, go, wait. I did not want to stay or leave.

  The waiter brought the check. Ryan tried to pay after all and I battled him off: “Don’t diminish my victory.”

  On the way to his van, Ryan’s hand caught mine again. I pulled away deftly, as if we were just doing a high-five trick, and almost said, Not here. This wasn’t our part of Portland.

  But to the old people walking by, the families, the truckers, it didn’t matter at all. Ryan and I could head to third base right there in the parking lot and the worst we’d hear would be, Get a room. I slid my hands into my pockets. Holding hands with this guy was not what I had signed up for. I just wanted the game. And pancakes.

  Born Family

  OKAY, HERE’S THE REAL STORY.

  My mother loved limits. They were a ten-foot fence guarding her and her family. Nothing could get in, nothing could get out. She was the most ardent kind of Catholic: a convert. As if to make up for her first twenty years of lax Lutheranism, she attended mass every day. She had converted to marry my father, who had been only casually faithful, a Mexican-American Catholicism relaxed by a couple generations of assimilation and intermarriage, but she took it all the way, one-upping him as if to prove something—perhaps to her own parents, who had disapproved of the relationship and worried her children would be “confused.” Maybe it was living in rural Nebraska, a place where the weather is harsh and the landscape open, and she needed to buttress herself with the element-proof structures of the mind. Her convictions became her fortress.

  My plan was not to crash the fortress but to build a small annex onto it. One brick at a time, a gradual reveal. I would go on with my underground life, my real life, but acquire the trappings of college degree, respectable work, even membership in the Catholic church downtown (whose progressive tendencies could be incrementally introduced into productive conversations)—a life that sounded good over the phone and at family gatherings. I would come home for every Christmas. And one day, I would ask to bring A Person, and they would be helpless in the face of her charm and kindness, and our love would radiate and encircle the whole family, and the annex would be complete. All of us within it.

  Christmas was my first trip back home from college. I packed clothes I hadn’t worn since the third week of school, washed my hair, and put on mascara, three things I did seldom to never. I shrugged on my old Andrea drag. It was part of my long game.

  When I landed in Nebraska, the emerald fields I’d left in August were now wiped blank by winter. The white went on forever. Snowdrifts sculpted their way up the sides of the houses and outbuildings.

  The man relatives: How are classes?

  The lady relatives: Got a boyfriend out there?

  My brother: “Yeah, right. She looks like a boy.” He smirked at my short hair and my horn-rimmed glasses.

  “It’s a pixie cut, like she had when she was little,” said an aunt helpfully. “I think she looks . . . French.”

  “A pixie cut,” my father agreed.

  “It’s cool,” declared Annabel, the youngest, and my mom gazed at her with fond relief, as if Annabel could see beauty the rest of us couldn’t. She was the only one of us four who had blue eyes and my mother treated that recessive gene as if it had bravely fought its way to the top just for her.

  For mass I changed into a s
kirt from high school and one of my mom’s sweaters, and the symbolism killed me a little, all dressed up in a past that was long gone and a future that never would be. “Why don’t you keep it,” my mom said. The sweater was pale yellow with scalloped edges, like a decorative soap. “It’s just darling on you.”

  “No thanks, Mom,” I said. This became a ritual when I returned to Nebraska. She would call me to her room, make me try on her sweaters and blouses, and urge me to take them back with me. “I think it’s more you.”

  “I think it’s very you,” she retorted.

  I opened my mouth to ask just who she thought I was, then imagined that cellar door opening and swiftly closed it. I made myself smile. “Are you sure?” Of course she was. I accepted the sweater and thanked her, and she was pleased.

  It was when I returned home my sophomore year, in 1993, that my plan broke down. I was in love with Vivian and Portland and my head was full of ideas from Reed, and my new confidence made me careless where my fear had always kept me in line. I wore a new Mom sweater and lipstick but couldn’t hold my tongue when Alex said the Clinton health care plan would turn the country Communist.

  The phone rang on Christmas Eve. Vivian. My mother answered upstairs and I took it in the laundry room.

  “Hi. Save me,” I said. I sat down in a basket of clean clothes. Vivian was at her parents’ home in a Seattle suburb, still in reach of everything. We talked for half an hour and then she had to go; they were going out for Thai food. Her dad was a secular Jew and her mom just secular, and I envied this incomprehensibly simple Christmas of presents and a restaurant meal, as if everyone had a birthday on the same day. “I love you too,” I said. “Can’t wait to see you.” Vivian said, “Hang in there. Be brave.” I hung up the phone and opened the door and there was my mother.

  She said, “Who were you talking to?”

  “Vivian.” My face grew hot. “My friend. From school.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Of course. Do you need any help? I’ll do this load of whites.”

  For the next two days I could feel her watching me. I tried to snap back into high school Andrea, but my mother already knew too much, and for once she seemed to be contemplating action instead of denial. To be surveyed like this made my skin hot and my stomach heavy. Every sentence out of my mouth seemed constructed by a scribe in my brain who was always a second late in the transcription.

  At school, the LGBT union wasn’t the only student group I had tried to attend. I had also once ventured shyly into a Latino/a student group, where the leaders of the meeting peppered their rousing talk with Spanish phrases and cultural in-jokes that everyone else laughed at and bantered along with as I tried to follow, mentally taking notes on what to look up later. I had grandmas but no abuelas; I had grown up with John Denver and Amy Grant records, eating casseroles made with Campbell’s soup. I enrolled in Spanish I, where the professor taught us Spain Spanish with the lisp and European assumptions, and though I learned how to converse about pleasantries, order lunch, and take the bus to El Prado, I didn’t return. Meena said, “It’s just a group, don’t worry about it. The South Asian student union does good things and I’m glad they’re there, but it’s a particular kind of person who loves an affinity group. I mean, how many of your actual queer friends are in the LGBT union?” None, I admitted.

  Still, when I went back home I searched my father’s face for what I thought was Mexican-ness, something still visible in him but diluted in me. I had his mouth, his brown eyes, but my skin was lighter. My hair was fine and dark brown, while his was thick and silvering at the temples. What was I looking for, though? Who knew how much of his ancestry, and thus mine, was indigenous and how much European? I realized I was seeking a trace of purity, as if such a thing existed—as if one’s roots could be a single clean bright plunge like a carrot, instead of the complicated dirty tangle that most of us actually had. Essentialist was an accusation my friends and classmates had flung around liberally in arguments, yet secretly maybe we all wanted it for ourselves in some way or another—to have an essence. To be an identity.

  “I wish we’d spoken Spanish at home,” I blurted in the kitchen. It was now two days after Christmas. My father stood at the kitchen counter, flipping through the newspaper, while my mother prepared dinner and I made my own vegetarian spaghetti sauce. “I mean growing up.”

  “Where did that come from?” my mother said.

  “It would have been nice to be fluent. To have that ability.”

  “Aren’t you taking it now in college?”

  “But it’s not the same,” I said. “It’ll always be a second language. An add-on. You could have taught us, Dad.”

  “I couldn’t have taught you much,” my dad said. “No one really spoke Spanish in Westerly, Nebraska.”

  “Then,” my mother added.

  He folded up the front section and opened Sports. “My dad got held back in school three times for his English, so he made sure that’s all we spoke. We had to fit in. It was hard to be different.”

  “People thought he was a Sioux Indian.” This was a fact my mother disclosed often and with a certain delight.

  “Lakota,” I mumbled.

  She rolled her eyes and asked why I hadn’t gotten all fired up about Germany or Sweden, since I was at least as much those as I was Mexican. Why did I only want the Mexican part? She meant why didn’t I want what she was.

  “Germany’s creepy,” I said. “And there’s no point in learning Swedish since there aren’t many of them and they all speak perfect English.” I turned back to my dad. “Do we still have family in Mexico?” My siblings and I had never met our grandfather; he died of a heart attack when my dad was twelve. “Have you ever wanted to visit them?”

  “My dad’s dad left home in Nayarit young and never went back. He didn’t get along with his family. He had other ideas about how to live. Our family is here now.”

  “Your father is American and so are you,” my mother said as she shut the oven door. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

  The day before I was to leave, they sat me down in the living room. I tucked my feet underneath me on the scratchy plaid couch. Behind me, the record player’s lid was pinned shut by stacks of Christmas CDs. “We don’t care how good an education it is,” my father started.

  My mother broke in, “I don’t like what this place is doing to you. Honey, look at yourself.”

  “It’s just a haircut,” I said. “It’ll grow back.”

  “It’s not the haircut,” said my father.

  “It’s your whole attitude,” said my mother. “You didn’t want to go to church, you won’t eat the food your grandmother made, you have a hole in your nose—” She teared up at this. I didn’t know she’d noticed—I had removed the ring, slipping it in only to sleep. “We don’t know what kind of friends you have there, your grades are slipping. You were never like this. We sent away a beautiful, well-adjusted daughter and you’ve come back—it’s like we don’t even know who you are.”

  “This is me,” I said. “I’m more me than I have ever been.”

  “Come back home. Stop acting like someone you’re not.”

  “What do you think I was doing here all those years?”

  “I don’t know what that means,” my mother snapped. “And who is this Vivian you’re always talking about and talking to on the phone?”

  “My friend?” I hated the lie. I was so proud of the word girlfriend. It was awful to neuter it.

  “Promise me it is not what I think it is.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “I can’t even say it.” Her eyes were bright, her cheeks red. How disconcerting to see a kind face grow cold—it is such a subtle shift, the way the muscles switch into place, harden. “Promise me. Promise.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Promise your mother,” said my dad.

  I looked away from them, out the window. Wind lifted a haze of snow off the surfac
e of the fields. My parents had stopped farming and now leased them to a distant cousin. They were ours in name only. Like me, I thought.

  I could have rented out that life for much longer, according to my plan. Later, I wondered if I could have told them the truth another way. I promise you have nothing to worry about. Or I could have said what they wanted to hear. But I thought of relating my lie to Vivian later. I thought of her hand stroking my arm and her sympathetic, disappointed eyes. I imagined how she would light up if I told her I’d come out. How, in doing so, I would become a real queer. I too would have a coming-out story. My long game looked to be shot anyway. Be brave.

  “Do you want me to lie?” I said. “Isn’t lying a sin?”

  “God forgives us our sins,” said my mother. “But not all sins.”

  I took a breath and said I was in love.

  My father gripped the arms of his chair and closed his eyes, a pilot going down. My mom said my whole name, spoke it like a curse. The tacit, they could have lived with; it could have been my invisible cross to bear, its weight mine alone. After all, it was not a sin to be homosexual; it was a sin to act on it. And I—

  Even in the long version, I keep the worst of it to myself.

  All that is necessary to know is that my mother wept and my father’s voice shook, but their certainty was ironclad. They had raised me Catholic and moral and with strong role models, and all my siblings were turning out right, so the culprit was obvious. I could come home and go to one of the state schools or they would find a way to pay for Creighton, but as a matter of conscience, they would not pay that institution another cent.

  I shifted back into survival mode. I said okay, I would pack my things. I went limp and contrite just long enough to board my plane back to Oregon.

  When my feet touched the carpet of the Portland airport, my knees trembled with relief. I didn’t yet know that a few days earlier, on New Year’s Eve, in another corner of Nebraska, Brandon Teena had been murdered. When the story emerged I felt sick for weeks. We all mourned this brave, sweet person we had never known but imagined we could. And I mourned the Nebraska that I once knew, also dead.

 

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