Stray City

by Chelsey Johnson

  The restroom was empty. I walked into the bedroom and found the closet door open. My mother stood inside it, leafing through Ryan’s shirts that hung there. She lifted a flannel sleeve to her face and sniffed it deeply, eyes closed.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She jumped. “Is this all the clothing he has? He needs some new shirts.”

  “Please, let’s go eat,” I said.

  I got into the back seat, a kid in the car again. I buckled my seat belt. My dad asked, “Which way?” I met his eyes in the hazy rearview mirror and was swept by a huge sorrow over how much I’d missed. I closed my eyes and piled my brother and sisters into the minivan beside me, all four of us jockeying for the two captain seats. How well we’d thought we knew each other then. How we took for granted that we all knew Alex got carsick but would try to read anyway, Alissa sang the best and gave the hardest slugbugs whenever you spotted a VW Beetle, and Annabel wouldn’t eat anything cheese flavored and could burst into tears on the spot if you looked at her wrong. How when we stopped for gas we knew exactly what everyone would get: square sugary Chuckles for Mom, a packet of sunflower seeds for Dad, peanut butter cups for Alissa, crackers sandwiched with foamy orange cheese for Alex, a tube of bright pellet-like Sixlets for Annabel, waxy sweet Nibs for me. We wore each other’s old clothes. We knew exactly how to make each other cry, and where each was most ticklish, and how to piss off whoever was having a friend sleep over. A pile of Morales kids, heading grumpily, sleepily into mass, slotted into the pew with my mother’s head held high as she sang the major-key hymns she’d grown up with now in somber Catholic keys. And we waited afterward, milled around the church basement while our parents talked forever and poured coffee from an aluminum tank into small Styrofoam cups. We lined up on the bleachers for Alex’s basketball games. A rare vacation to the Black Hills, to the Flintstone campground, in a borrowed pop-up trailer. Four stockings on the fireplace, made of felt and sequins from kits. For almost two decades, we were this. And then what? Now my parents lived alone in that big house and waited for us to come home once or twice a year, or never.

  Parenthood seemed like it could turn into the saddest thing in the world. I had to try to be good with them now.

  “You’re not still a vegetarian, are you?” my mother asked when I ordered a veggie burger. “You have to eat meat, honey. It’s not fair to the baby.”

  I was going to push back, and then remembered those nights last summer when the dog and I would secretly eat chicken together, back when I thought I could get away with everything. None of my friends were watching now. I gave in and changed my order to a grilled chicken sandwich. Sorry, chicken, I silently apologized. My mom crossed her arms, satisfied.

  “I’m surprised your doctor hasn’t talked to you about that.” She shook her head as if the doctors in Portland were clearly out to lunch, inferior to the good sensible Nebraska doctors. “It’s not just about you anymore.”

  “I don’t really have a doctor,” I said.

  Her jaw dropped.

  “I don’t have health insurance,” I explained.

  “Get some!” she said.

  “Have you ever tried to get insurance when you’re already pregnant? Does not happen.” I told her I was eating lots and sleeping well. I told her I never felt sick.

  She and my father exchanged a look when I mentioned the free clinic.

  “This guy should marry you,” my father said.

  “He doesn’t have insurance either,” I said drily.

  “You must give this child a chance to be born into grace. It’s a gift from God,” my mother said. Her eyes teared up. “Oh, Andrea. You have a chance now to have a normal life. To turn your life around. Don’t let it go.”

  “What’s a normal life?” The words felt heavy and sludgy in my mouth.

  “You have to ask that?” my father said with terrible sympathy.

  “I can’t marry him,” I said.

  “Why on earth not?”

  I don’t love him enough. I couldn’t say that to them. Or to him. But I knew it was true. I swallowed hard. I thought of the Sharon Bottoms case. I said, “We can’t afford it right now. We’d need to save up a lot more.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake, we’ll help,” said my mother. “I love weddings.”

  My father put a hand on her arm. “Just make sure you do it before the baby is born.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Purgatory.” I took a deep gulp from my water glass and filled my mouth with ice.

  Mercifully, the server brought our food. I took a jaw-unhinging bite of my sandwich, hoping to temporarily disqualify myself from conversation. My mother stabbed a french fry with a fork and gave it a thoughtful nibble. “Will you be able to quit your job?” she asked. “What is your job?”

  They called the next morning from the Days Inn downtown. They wanted to take me to Target and Babies“R”Us and buy me things. I said I couldn’t, I had to work. Then I called Ted at home and asked if I could come to the shop early.

  They visited me at Artifacts—“I can’t believe this old stuff is so expensive now! This is what my mother had”—and showed up at my house that evening with plastic bags full of objects I had never imagined would be part of my life: plastic bottles (“with bonus nipple”), pacifiers, a towel with a hood, a pillow shaped like a broken doughnut. My mom asked if my friends were throwing me a shower. “I can’t imagine,” I said, then worried she would return to do so, and added, “that they wouldn’t.”

  She said I had better register, then, so they wouldn’t accidentally double up on the things she’d just gotten me.

  It was the night of the television show. We all sat in the living room. I had called in Lawrence and Meena for reinforcements, and they showed up with a six-pack I hastily hid on the back step and two pints of ice cream. I made a huge bowl of stovetop popcorn and soaked it with unsalted butter, the way my grandmother used to make it. Even though my mother would be confused by their haircuts, Meena, when called upon, broke out impeccable manners—she had actually gone to finishing school as a teen—and Lawrence was so elfin and wounded-eyed that no one could find her a threat.

  On the show, an actor made unfunny jokes about his childhood and talked about what an honor it was to work with this director. A hundred ads ensued, full of straight people wanting each other or doing right by their children and pets or recovering from disgusting ailments. Then the host announced the musical guests.

  I ran to hit Record on the blank tape in the VCR.

  The band stood arranged in their spots, faces brightly lit, the lead singer’s megalomania all agleam in his discernibly made-up face, and launched into a song.

  “There he is,” I said. “In the back.” The camera only caught glimpses of him: a couple of shots of his hands rolling out fills, a shot of him tossing back the hair that always swung into his eyes while he drummed. Mostly he kept his head down and played like a pro. Lawrence remarked that she’d always appreciated that he didn’t do drummer face. My parents leaned forward and stared.

  It’s strange to watch on television someone you know intimately in life. They become a figuration of themselves, a reduction, a play character on a set. I had only ever seen Ryan moving through the space in front of me. Now a blue backdrop and bright spotlights saturated all the colors, and the music sounded tinny, the instruments more separate, without the amplification of a club and the crowd’s absorption. The song fell just short of catchy, with a distantly familiar guitar riff and a hook that repeated but never quite stuck, all while the singer struck aerobic poses and soared his grit-in-honey tenor as if he were playing Madison Square Garden.

  My mom kept leaning to the side as if she could somehow see around the singer and bassist, who blocked her view of Ryan. “That’s him,” she kept saying. My dad ate his popcorn one kernel at a time. “What kind of music would you call this?” he said.

  Meena snorted. “It wants to be glam rock.”

  “Huh.”

  “What do you think of
it?” Lawrence asked.

  “Different.”

  “That singer is goofy,” my mother said.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. “That’s exactly what he is,” I said. “He doesn’t know it, though.” She was so pleased by my laugh she flushed and laughed too. Our eyes met and for a moment she was my mom again: my first harbor and home, one of the first faces I had ever seen. She had built me with her body the way I was building this one. She had been twenty-three then, even younger than I was now, a kid herself with baby Alissa on her hip. She had known what she was getting into. Or she had thought she did.

  I get it now, I wanted to say to her, I get it.

  But then I didn’t: how could she have let me go? To heal now, over this, would send the message that their freeze-out had worked. The Christmas letter: In the end, Andrea met a man. We are blessed.

  That night I sprawled across the whole bed. I called Bullet up and she settled in on Ryan’s pillow. I finally had no secrets, so why did I feel like I was lying?

  My parents checked out of the Days Inn the next morning—they had to get back to the store and the dog. Before they left, they came by the house. I brewed a full pot of coffee and baked oatmeal muffins from one of the handful of recipes I had kept from home. It broke my heart a little. All these years we could have had a normal relationship, the kind of life where parents come to visit and you make them breakfast, the hospitality in your hands now, your own adult kitchen.

  “Have you met Ryan’s family yet?” my mom asked, neatly slicing off the top of a muffin.

  “Not yet.” She raised her eyebrows. I said, “He doesn’t have much. Just a mom. Soon.”

  “Well, family is the most important thing. You’ll see,” she said. My father agreed.

  My throat tightened bitterly. Was I not family? Had I not been the most important thing? I swallowed and said stiffly, “I know. It’s a good thing family can take many forms.” My heart raced as I said it, as if it were so radical, so defiant. But it didn’t even register with them.

  “Once you have that baby, all your selfishness just goes out the window. You are not the same person you were.” My mother smiled and her eyes filled with tears. She grabbed my hand across the table. “Oh, honey. Do you know how many years we have prayed for you?”

  “All in God’s time,” my dad said, patting her back.

  I withdrew my hand and stood up from the table. I pleaded morning sickness. When I returned from some hands-on-the-sink deep breathing, my father slid an envelope across the table.

  Inside was a cashier’s check for $10,142.

  “What the fuck?”

  “Andrea Jean,” my mother said.

  “When your grandmother died, she deeded the farmland to you four kids.” For several years my parents had leased the land; when Annabel turned eighteen, they’d decided to sell it and divide the proceeds “for when each of you got married and started families of your own.”

  “So Alissa and Alex already got theirs?”

  “Yep.”

  “And Annabel?”

  “We put hers and yours into CDs. And now . . . here you go.”

  All these years I’d been on my own, the stress and the hunger, my only safety net what I could stitch together myself with my friends, and here was one that had been waiting for me the whole time—or had it? If not for the baby, would I ever have received it? Would I not have known until my parents died and someone went through their affairs in a safety deposit box at Citizens’ National Bank?

  I wanted to ask. But I didn’t want to know.

  “We’ll be back for the baptism,” my dad said as we hugged good-bye on the front porch.

  “Or bring the baby back to St. Peter’s for the baptism,” said my mother. “And your husband.”

  “He’s not my husband.”

  “He will be.” She patted my arm. “Oh, why don’t you come have the wedding in Westerly?”

  “There’s not going to be a wedding, Mom.”

  “Fine, go to the courthouse, whatever.” She assumed a look of exhausted benevolence to transmit that she was being Open-Minded. “But bring that Ryan home.”

  They waved into the rearview mirror as they pulled away.

  I closed the front door behind me. “That’s not home,” I said—to no one, to everyone, to myself, to the baby. “This is home.”

  I lay flat on the floor and wept. Here was my chance to regain citizenship in my family of origin by having this baby in their nation: the land of man plus woman equals baby as God intended it. All I had to do was continue doing what I was doing now: live with Ryan, let him love me, find some way to try to love him, let the baby arrive, and convert our remaining ambivalence into love for it with the alchemic force of its need. There it was. There was the way back in. Sheer inertia—mere inertia—would carry me there. Assimilate and convert, like my parents had. The child could have grandparents, cousins, biological aunts and uncles, like I had. The child could meet Nebraska; I pictured it playing on the parked combine in the pole barn, running across the huge lawn with a cousin in August, my dad settling the kid onto the tractor seat in front of him to ride down the long driveway to the mailbox. I could show the kid my secret places in the barns and the attic. For that matter, I could show it where I had hidden my real journals. But could I explain how I split into two selves then? Why I disappeared for years? What happened in those six, seven years in Portland when I came to queer life, when every light came on inside me? And why I let it go? I would mourn it for the rest of my life.

  I felt like I was losing my parents all over again. They had left me, and I had left them. I couldn’t follow them, didn’t want to. As my ears, hair, neck, turned damp, I hoped my grief wouldn’t wash into the baby. I laid my hands atop my belly. You will never have to know this kind of sorrow. Not if I can help it.

  Feel This

  THEY HAD BEEN GONE ONLY HOURS WHEN THE BAND MANAGER dropped off Ryan. Bullet huffed at the sound of the van and ran to the front door to meet him. She full-body-wagged at his entry, her hips and shoulders samba-ing back and forth. He walked right past her and asked, “Are your parents still here?”

  “You just missed them. Say hi to Bullet, she’s excited to see you.”

  “At least someone is,” he said. “Hi, Bullet. Hi, Andy.”

  “I’m glad you’re back,” I reassured him. I closed my eyes and kissed him. “Welcome home.” As if on script.

  The evening was warm and mild and we opened the bedroom windows to let in the clean new air. I sat on the bed while Ryan unpacked his three items of clothing and shaving kit from his backpack. I still couldn’t understand how he lived with so little. He said he was disappointed to miss my parents. I said, “No, you dodged a real bullet.”

  He asked me what happened, how it went, how I was feeling.

  “It would take me multiple notebooks to process what happened on that visit,” I said. “I don’t even know where to start. I’ll tell you when I figure it out.” I braced myself with my arms behind me. My soft belly was starting to firm up, especially when I slouched. “Look at this,” I said. “Pretty soon it won’t just look like a beer gut.”

  Ryan glanced at it incuriously. I realized that he never touched my belly anymore. “Do you want to feel it?” I said.

  “Is it doing something?”

  “Just growing.”

  He kicked his empty backpack under the bed. “I have to go shower off the travel,” he said. Most of us then reveled in grubbiness, letting our natural funk accumulate and radiate a kind of pheromone aura, punk perfume; our jeans and jackets developed a patina so thick it felt like suede; but not Ryan. He preferred to be clean.

  “Tell me one thing about the visit,” he said when he returned, damp and relieved. He dropped his towel and I averted my eyes. The naked man body still embarrassed me. You get used to seeing naked women all your life, but a man’s floppy cluster looks so exposed and hapless. I concentrated on smoothing the sheets.

  “We watched you on TV,” I
said. “My dad thought it was ‘different.’ My mom called the singer goofy.”

  Ryan laughed and pulled on his boxers and I looked up at him again. I did like his chest, firm and flat, and the trail of fine gold fur down his belly that brushed against my hand, like an animal, when I reached down to try to get myself off during sex. I couldn’t coax myself to do even that anymore. I wondered when I would ever have sex again—as in real sex, to me, not this mammal act that no matter where it started always seemed to turn down the same street and end at the same place. I was only twenty-four, how could I already be done? Meena had a theory that whatever you do to someone in a past relationship will happen to you in the next one, and vice versa. So maybe I’d become Flynn. Poor Ryan. I’d inflicted lesbian bed death on him.

  “Your parents nailed it,” he said. “But now I’m worried what they said about me.”

  “You? You’re fine. You’re the best news they’ve ever heard.”

  “Hell yeah,” he said, zipping up his jeans. “They want me to marry you?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Don’t look so shocked. Catholic parents. Pregnant daughter. Safe guess.”

  “Right.” I pressed my hand to my chest and exhaled. He studied my face.

  “Maybe I should.”

  “Should what?”

  “Marry you,” he said.

  “Very funny.”

  “Is it? Why’s it funny?”

  My stomach flipped. Did he know me at all? “You don’t even mean that.” I forced a conspiratorial laugh.

  But his face was unreadable. Eyes intent, an elusive smile. “How do you know?”