That Boy When You Were Sixteen

Jacqueline Doyle

 

Let’s say there was a beautiful boy when you were sixteen. Tall and skinny in the way of adolescent boys, he had long eyelashes and smelled like Old Spice deodorant. His bare skin felt very warm when you buried your face in his chest. The two of you spent every afternoon after school making out in his bedroom while his mom was at work. He had an unzipped sleeping bag he used as a bedspread. The plaid flannel lining smelled faintly of unwashed boy and sweat and cum and Old Spice, smells you liked because you associated them with the way his hands and tongue made you feel, and the excitement of taking off some of your clothes and leaving on others and saying no and saying yes, oh yes.

 

Let’s say none of that is true. Let’s say there was no boy, and what you remember from the year you were sixteen is being mouthy in classes and yelling at your mother and listening to the Doors holed up in your room and standing on the sidelines at mixers. And this: riding your bicycle in a sudden thunderstorm as evening is about to fall, coasting down a long steep hill, drenched, ice cold, exuberant. You thought you would never get away from the suburb you’d lived in your entire life, where everyone cared more about money and conformity than spirit or intellect or art and where there wasn’t a single boy who liked you. Soon enough there’d be college and lots of boys, and you’d take off your clothes and say yes, yes, oh yes. Beautiful boys whose names you no longer remember. But that year, you were alone.

 

You never imagined you’d look back at that sixteen-year-old girl and exult in her fierce integrity. Anyone at sixteen can imagine a boy with long eyelashes, after all. And you can imagine him now, balding, gone soft with a paunch, or maybe even gone to an early grave. A heart attack, cancer. You like the girl, though, still very much alive. She nods when you look for her in the mirror, unabashed and defiant, grateful for the life you managed to give her, grateful that she got away from everything she despised. Surprised, really, at what she couldn’t have foreseen: the power of her imagination and where it would take her and how it’s all turned out.

 

Let’s say there’s no such thing as a happy ending. It’s a shock to see her, the unhappy sixteen-year-old girl, and realize she never imagined that you’d get so old or that you couldn’t go back to being that young. You can say now that the beautiful boy you wanted so badly when you were sixteen didn’t matter at all, but you were so anguished then. Maybe it would have helped, if there’d been a beautiful boy. And now you’re happily married to a beautiful man, you have a beautiful son, but you worry about them. Are they healthy? Are they content? What if this or that disaster occurred? Life pushes you forward when you’d rather linger, but you really have no control over the accelerating pace or the final destination, coming so much faster and sooner than you ever expected. You’re getting closer every day, whether you like it or not.

 

Let’s say you accept that. Let’s say you don’t. Let’s say there’s a point where imagination fails you. But you haven’t reached it yet. Let’s just say.

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Lost Uncle

Naomi Gordon-Loebl

 

1: Loma Prieta

In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake split apart northern California. Sixty-three people died. Thousands more were injured. In Oakland, a stretch of the multi-level Cypress Freeway collapsed, killing some forty-two drivers and passengers who were unfortunate enough to be traveling at the wrong time, their bodies crushed between layers of concrete.

 

Soon after the earthquake, my uncle David called my mom. He told her that he felt a strange satisfaction in those days, walking around the city, among the wreckage, among the terror and the daze that had settled like an uncomfortable blanket over the Bay Area. Everyone else, he said, was finally experiencing what he felt every day.

 

2: Postcard

In June 1987, my mother was visiting her brother David in San Francisco, seven months pregnant with my sister and me. A postcard still survives from that trip, sent to my grandparents at their summer cottage in Maine. “We had a nice day—brunching & then walking in the Berkeley Botanical Gardens,” my mom writes. “Now we’re relaxing & making quiche for tomorrow’s pool party. What a social calendar!”

 

I imagine my mother, never exactly a partier, accompanying her brother to his many engagements. I love David’s handwriting, which I’ve come to recognize from years of examining his diaries and letters. It’s a gorgeous, confident script with a dashed-off feel. His addition to the postcard is briefer. “Am having a good time with J-J,” he writes. “Love + kisses.”

 

What the postcard doesn’t say is that during my mother’s visit, David’s doctor called with the results of his recent bloodwork. He was HIV-positive. My mother tells the story with the narrative distance afforded by thirty years. She cried on the plane in both directions, she always tells me: on the way there because she almost missed her flight and had to sprint, seven months pregnant with twins, through the airport to the gate. On the way back, well—she’s never had to explain that part.

 

3: Paper airplanes

My uncle David was my mother’s only brother. He was blond and handsome, and like me, the kind of gay person who could never pass for straight. When I was a child and he was in his thirties, he lived in San Francisco, in a series of apartments that I visited but can’t remember, except for the last one: a one-bedroom on 17th Street in the Mission, with a bay window into which he had tucked his kitchen table. We sat at that table, my twin sister and me, as five-year-olds, making hundreds of neon green and pink paper airplanes. David had died that spring. The paper airplanes were to pass out at his memorial; he had taught us how to make them on an earlier visit to New York. It is the only memory I have of him, except that I’m not sure whether I actually remember it at all, or whether the image—him in our little bedroom on the top floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn, standing next to my sister’s bed and tossing a paper airplane in front of the window with delight—is an after-market addition to my brain, an imagined scene that syncs conveniently with the story I’ve been told about that day. There is no way I will ever know. I sometimes think I can hear his laugh: a rich, high-pitched sound that dances just beyond the edges of my memory. Ironically, I feel more sure of that one; I am positive, somehow, that it’s accurate. My grandmother says she thinks she has his answering machine tape buried somewhere in storage. I’m desperate to hear it.

 

4: Mary

David and my mother grew up in Washington Heights. Their parents were refugees who had survived Nazi Germany and Austria against all odds. They were immigrants, grateful for their adopted country and eager to build stable lives after years of trauma and upheaval. They gave their children good American names: David and Judy.

 

Like me, David was gender non-conforming from the time he was a toddler. I tried to stand to pee, wanted to be called Jason. David wrapped scarves around his head as a stand-in for long hair and took the name Mary. My grandparents worried he might turn out to be gay. They feared they had done something wrong as parents; they believed, as my grandmother tells me now, that they owed it to their son to care for him in the best way they knew how. They sent David to a psychiatrist, who he saw until he was eighteen years old. When David was accepted to college at Brandeis, the psychiatrist warned against the move. David was at a critical point in his treatment, the psychiatrist said. If he went away from home for college, his progress toward life as a straight man could be lost.

My grandmother fired the psychiatrist. Enough was enough. She sent David to Boston.

 

5: Butch, femme

One of David’s best friends was a lesbian named Andrea. She lived in San Francisco, and she was a frequent visitor during his stay in the hospital in the spring of 1993. On one such visit, David showed Andrea a recent photo of my twin sister Ana and me. We were dressed, as we were in every photo from those days, like a pair of life-sized Ken and Barbie dolls: me in baggy jeans and a baseball cap, Ana in all-pink everything.

 

“Look,” David said to Andrea, pointing to the picture. “Butch and femme.”

 

I did not hear this story until many years after I came out. When I did, my world shifted. It occurred to me that David was almost certainly the first person to name my queerness. But more than that, the story ruptured a narrative that I had carried for a long time: that David and I had never overlapped as queer people in the world; that perhaps the only person in my family with whom I shared this tiny, precious detail of my existence had died unaware. This narrative caused me no small amount of regret, and to some extent, it is still true: David and I were ships in the night. But his ship had seen my floodlight scanning the waters. And his light had flashed welcomingly back.

 

6: PCP

David was on vacation in Argentina in February of 1993 when he came down with a bad cough. He flew back early from his trip, and soon entered the hospital with a diagnosis: pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, or PCP.

 

PCP is a rare lung infection that affects only those with weakened immune systems. Before the development of antiretrovirals, it was the most common opportunistic infection contracted by people with AIDS. David’s case was dire. His doctors had prescribed him a prophylactic regimen of antibiotics—an attempt to prevent what eventually came to pass—and he had maintained it despite a severe allergic reaction to the medication. Thus, the strain of PCP that he eventually contracted was drug-resistant. There were few options.

 

I was raised with the understanding that David was, in a way, lucky. He lived for years after he became HIV-positive. He danced, traveled, worked, and acted in plays—though he did not have another serious partner after his diagnosis. He never suffered from the myriad plagues that famously befell so many people with AIDS in the worst years of the epidemic: the blindness, the dementia, the public markings of Kaposi’s Sarcoma. He was healthy when he left for his vacation in Argentina that winter. Then, six weeks later, he was gone.

 

My mother has told me the story only once. She was visiting him in his hospital room when he began to cough uncontrollably. He coded. Nurses and doctors rushed in and threw my mom out. He survived the episode—an event technically known as acute respiratory failure—but he would never breathe on his own again. He spent the remaining weeks of his life in a medically induced coma, hooked up to a ventilator. On May 24, 1993, weeks after he entered the hospital, my family made the decision to remove life support. He was thirty-seven years old.

 

7: What is an uncle for?

An earlier version of me believed that David would have known everything. The kids who called me “lezzie” in middle school, the girl who broke my heart when I was fourteen, the woman who did it again when I was in my early twenties—I used to fantasize that my fairy-godmother-uncle, having suffered so many of the same wounds, survived so many of the same storms, would have solved it all.

 

It’s a nice fantasy—and David would be far from the first person who, having died, is made to carry in absentia all of the projections of the people he left behind—but a fantasy it is. I no longer entertain the idea that he would have had the perfect words to shepherd me through every difficult passage. He was a human, fallible as me, and I am reminded of that as every year I draw closer to the age that he was when he died. I am thirty-six now and still messy, still figuring out how to return emails in a timely manner, how to tell a friend I am mad at them before my anger bubbles out in the wrong way. What kind of magical thinking would I have to employ to believe that someone like me could save anyone?

 

What is an uncle for? A younger me might have said that an uncle’s purpose is to impart sage advice—to light the way, to offer what he’s learned from his experience traveling the same uncertain terrain you find yourself stumbling along. I’m less illusioned now. An uncle might be there to offer wisdom, the very rare kind that transforms the way you look at the world. Or he might be there to wax on with what he thinks is brilliant guidance, but which is barely relevant to your life. He might be there to draw comparisons that feel inaccurate, to tell you exactly the wrong thing, or even just to shrug and say, in a way that leaves you feeling dissatisfied and alone, that he doesn’t know. David might have been any of these uncles—or, most likely, some combination of them.

 

These days, rather than speculating about the lessons he might have shared with me, I find myself thinking about my uncle’s pain. Perhaps this shift toward empathy is natural. Soon I will be older than David ever was. I broke up with a girlfriend last year. It’s been a slow-moving rupture, the kind that aches for longer than you think it should. I don’t know how David coped when his last relationship ended; how much he cried, how many letters he wrote and didn’t send, how long before he felt better. Most of it I’ll probably never find out.

 

8: Lost uncles

For a long time, I worried that if David had survived, we might not have gotten along. What if he had driven me crazy? What if we had argued about gay assimilation every time I visited him in San Francisco? He might have left comments on my Instagram posts that made me cringe. Maybe I would’ve come home from every visit full of frustration.

 

“My uncle David,” I might have sighed to a friend over beers, back in Brooklyn. “We are just so different.”

 

Even so: I can’t shake the feeling that we would have learned something from each other too. Narratives of the early years of the AIDS epidemic often mourn the tremendous loss of talent: the dancers, composers, painters, actors, curators, and writers whose contributions were far from finished, their oeuvres forever incomplete. I wonder about all of the lost uncles, every queer friend of mine who, when they have heard about David, has leaned across the table and told me their story. What if every queer person my age had grown up with their Uncle David? What would we have learned from them? What would they have learned from us?

 

And with that continuity, so seismically disrupted—what would we have built?

 

9: Memorial

Last year, as a Christmas present, my younger brother Sean digitized our family’s home videos. Among the contents of the old cardboard box he sent off, reinforced with extra layers of packing tape, was a VHS tape which was familiar to me from the nearly three decades it spent sitting on a shelf in my parents’ living room, but which I had never watched. The label on its spine, written with Sharpie in my father’s capital letters, read: DAVID’S MEMORIAL.

 

Sean sent me a link in January. Even in its new digital form, the video has all the hallmarks of old home movies: fuzzy, unfocused images; distorted sound; dated outfits. It also has, as is often the case with pre-smartphone home movies, some attempt at narrative structure. The unknown person behind the camera takes pains to document the scenery of the memorial: a large room filled with arched windows, metal folding chairs, and bunches of rainbow balloons. Side tables are piled with food: mountains of bagels, platters of lox and sliced red onions, a carrot cake decorated with dozens of little carrots repeating across its rectangular surface, each of them finished with a tiny, iced green top. The videographer pans slowly across these tables, and the photo albums laid across them too, zooming in on some pictures that are so familiar to me that I could describe from memory the flowers that appear in the background, and others that I do not think I have ever seen before.

 

The program is not overly long, and in a way, it is unremarkable. A memorial service for a thirty-seven-year-old man is by definition unnatural: in the late twentieth century, thirty-something-year-olds with full heads of hair and lungs that could power them up Italian mountains on long-distance bike tours were not supposed to die. But as I watched the camera scan the room at David’s memorial, revealing dozens of good-looking young men in ties and jackets, I couldn’t help but think about how absolutely normalized this event was in San Francisco in 1993—how many parties with carrot cake and rainbow balloons these men would have attended by this point, how many guest books they would have signed, how many times they would have shrugged on those well-fitting suit jackets. Perhaps that’s why they smile as they greet each other; why they know how to dance when the music begins, an activity that strikes me as totally surreal for a memorial, even though I understand its rationale: this is a celebration of David’s life, and David loved to dance. As Robert, David’s best friend, says in his opening remarks: “This, I’d say, is certainly David’s largest party ever, and you know how he loved a party…although I think he’d probably be at the beach on a day like this.”

 

I appear in the video almost from the very beginning: a short-haired five-year-old wearing colorful shorts and a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt. My immediate family is seated in the front row, and for some reason, I have chosen a seat by myself, across the aisle. I sit on the metal folding chair; my legs, too short to reach the ground, dangle in the air. The videographer, as though anticipating my specific interest in this video almost thirty years later, zooms in until only my face is framed in the shot. I do not look sad—which makes sense. What does a child who sees her uncle twice annually understand about death, about his forever-disappearance from a world she has only known for five years? I do, however, look alert. And in my hand, I hold the handle of a large white paper shopping bag. It spans the entire length of my bare shins. In a half hour, after the eulogies end, my mother will take the microphone to explain that my sister and I will be giving out paper airplanes in memory of our Uncle David. We walk past and through the hordes of tall adults, who at this point stand and stretch, preparing themselves for food, for dancing, or to say hello to the person they have not seen in a year. Our high voices punctuate the sounds of the crowd. “Did you get one?” we say. People seem to be humoring us, calling our names in request, and the camera follows me as I turn in every direction, reaching into the bag, handing out the airplanes two at a time, a sense of purpose and pleasure on my face. A red AIDS ribbon—one of the first symbols I can ever remember recognizing as a child—is pinned to my chest. In the next shot, David’s friend Frank stands and buttons his jacket, smiling. In the background, our airplanes fly through the air, their flights brief and sharp. People are throwing them.

 

In her eulogy, read aloud by a friend—another mother who lost her son to AIDS—my grandmother says David believed that people had “an essence from birth to death.” Of course my uncle knew who I was, I think, watching this younger but not-so-different version of myself stride around the room, the white paper bag hanging from my little fist. In the video’s last frames, the mourners dance to an upbeat, unidentifiable nineties tune while in the background, a home movie of David as a toddler, dressed in white and dancing with my mother, plays on a television screen.

 

10: Bedtime stories

My uncle David kept diaries. Slim, flexible notebooks with faded clothbound covers: one striped blue and white and dotted with tiny red roses, another covered in an abstract floral pattern in tan and green. My grandmother kept these notebooks after he died, and they lived on the towering mid-century bookcases in the foyer of my grandparents’ apartment, next to the photo albums filled with black-and-white pictures of David as a boy. It didn’t occur to me until I asked my mother about it that this might have been an invasion of David’s privacy, that maybe David would have been horrified to know that his mother had held onto his diaries like they were souvenirs from his bar mitzvah. My mom had made her peace with this fact—David was gone, she said, not here to feel violated or embarrassed, and how could she begrudge my grandmother any physical trace of her son that remained in the world—but she had never read them, and she would not.

 

Though I believed my mother’s ethical assessment to be the correct one, my desperation to know David outweighed my ability to self-regulate. From the time I was a teenager, I spent hours poring over the diaries in my grandparents’ apartment. I was enthralled by the person whose unfiltered voice spun across the pages in faded ink. Who was this man? The one who loved to eat and to travel, who detailed every dish he ate on vacation with impressive diligence, noting those that were “just okay” and those that were “delish,” whose ability to find dance floors and meet strangers wherever he went I found myself admiring, decades later. David spread out before me, opinionated, annoyed, delighted, alive. At the same time, as I suspect anyone who has tried to meet a person through their private writings can attest, in some ways he remained as opaque as ever. The notebooks were in my hands, but they might as well have been behind museum glass, flat objects that would never reveal more than the text on their surfaces, no matter how much I squinted. They were like pre-recorded bedtime stories, played long after the narrator has left the building. What if I had a question? And I had so many questions.

 

The temptation here becomes great, irresistible, even—how can I write about these notebooks, full of travel spats with friends and the occasional hand job, without showing their contents? My mission all these years has been to know this person whom I cannot ever know, and here, finally, an opening: David, in his own words. It seems almost unfair to talk about the notebooks without sharing them, and for this reason, I have tried out every possible justification for quoting from them here. There is the nihilistic: he’s dead, he has no consciousness, he no longer exists to experience the humiliation and indignation of having his most private thoughts published and read by strangers. Then, on the exact opposite end of the spectrum, there is the mental gymnastics: he loved attention, craved the spotlight, and would’ve enjoyed having his words made celebrity, the mundane details of his life a source of interest for so many strangers.

 

I want to find these arguments convincing, and for brief moments, in conversation with friends or late at night at my desk, I can talk myself into accepting them. But before I get to the point where I transfer my uncle’s intimate thoughts from his pages to my own, an inconvenient feeling crowbars its way in. Sometimes it is thinking about facing my mother and telling her that I published her brother’s diaries—the ones she refused to read. Sometimes it is a physical feeling, the one you get when you receive a clear directive from your internal compass, then resolutely face the opposite direction and march ahead. And sometimes it is a simple realization: to publish my uncle’s diaries would be to sacrifice the privacy of a person who died young, who was robbed of longevity, and who is not here to defend himself. Perhaps David would have happily signed off on it; perhaps he would have made the same choice, if he were here to make it. But he is not here, and I cannot stomach taking advantage of his inability to object.

 

What I can do, though, is tell this story.

 

One day, visiting my grandparents’ apartment, I pulled David’s diaries from their home on the shelf, flipping absentmindedly through the notebooks as my grandmother finished a phone call in her study. A small, folded piece of paper fluttered from the pages, landing on the rug at my feet. I picked it up. It was a music request sheet from a party—a three-by-five-inch form that a partygoer might fill out and return to the DJ, requesting that they play a particular song. Instructions at the top identified the “mixtress” as Page Hodel, a legendary lesbian Bay Area DJ the Chronicle once called “San Francisco’s unofficial Pied Piper of Party.” The form was blank, unused—but on the back, someone had written something: a man’s name, address, and phone number, followed by a note: “When you don’t have to get up at 7 AM or whenever.”

 

In all my years of studying these notebooks, how had I never encountered this object? I punched the address into my phone and was disappointed but unsurprised to see that the map and an accompanying image of the street revealed only a nondescript apartment building about four stories high. Still, I squinted, looking back and forth between the fuzzy picture and the note in my hand. Someone had given David this exact slip of paper, the one I now held, and he had tucked it between the pages of this diary all those years ago. What had transpired with this person? Did they go home together to this tan brick building on Market Street? Did the man pass him the note on the dance floor—or at seven in the morning as David left for his job as a salesman at AT&T? I briefly considered calling the phone number, but of course I wouldn’t—that would be insane—and it almost certainly didn’t belong to the man anymore, the man who might very well be someone else’s long-gone uncle.

 

11: Fear of motion

I never knew this person. Why am I chasing him?

 

My mother reminds me that there is a natural human desire to know where we come from; to see our forebears; to search for our own thick eyebrows in theirs, the distinctive shapes of our noses, an unmistakable gait or familiar settling of the jowls. The recognition of ourselves in an ancestor offers both proof of our own existence and a logic for understanding it. You came from somewhere—you are not a lab experiment dropped out of space onto planet Earth, unmoored and without a history, but rather a link in a sequence, with a past that confirms your present. Someone came before you. And perhaps this someone with their crooked teeth, their widow’s peak—perhaps their existence explains yours in some way, provides a key with which to read your own map. “Then I think about my fear of motion,” the Indigo Girls sing, “which I never could explain / some other fool across the ocean years ago must have crashed his little airplane.”

 

Queer people my age were born into a unique kind of fortune. Our predecessors belonged to the first generation in which LGBTQ young adults came out en masse. Our aunts, uncles, and godparents grew up in the era of that famous and succinct Gay Liberation slogan, “Come out!” Many of them did; many of us grew up in families where someone was already out, already queer, had already named the thing before we were old enough to know it had a name. We were born, in other words, with the chance to see ourselves in our own families. Or tantalizingly close, anyway.

 

Is it any wonder I’m still seeking the airplane-crasher?

 

12: Debt

There is something else, too. My mother told me that David never had another boyfriend after his diagnosis—no one serious, anyway. She was quick to clarify that it wasn’t because of HIV, or at least, not because of the stigma. “I just don’t think he was in the right place emotionally to be in a relationship,” she explained.

I am younger than David when he died—barely. He did things I’ve never done: he moved across the country, traveled through Europe, went to business school. Some of them were not so happy: looking statistics in the face, he took out an expensive life insurance policy, a practical bounty on his head with my siblings and me listed as benefactors. The resulting inheritance paid for my college tuition.

 

I’m well aware, though, of the things I’ve done or might do that David won’t. I have the privilege of a relatively healthy body, for today. If I’m lucky, I’ll have children; if I’m lucky, I’ll turn 50; if I’m lucky, someday I’ll be the old person at the club, dancing even though I don’t know the song. Of course, none of us knows what will happen; all of this could change tomorrow. But for now, I live with the monumental fortune of being able to see my future. I don’t walk around like yesterday was an earthquake, and tomorrow could come another, and with it, the end of my existence. I do not live in fear.

 

I don’t know how to explain that I feel I have inherited an enormous debt, and maybe, also, a gift. When I dance for hours next to strangers and their pungent sweat; when I kiss a woman underneath a hundred gaudy rainbow ceiling ornaments in a West Village gay bar; when I lie on the beach for a deliciously long time and know I should put on sunscreen but can’t bring myself to reach for my bag. I know, logically, that these moments are not a gift from David, that he did not die so I could have them. But I feel, nonetheless, the achy weight of experiencing them in his stead. He no longer can, so I must. I owe it to him.

 

13: Cherries

My mother always tells me about how when he was little, David saved the cherries in his ice cream. He would collect them in his bowl, she says, waiting to eat them as the last part of his dessert. Sometimes, right as he got to the end, right as he was about to savor the cherries he had stockpiled, my grandfather would steal his bowl, teasing him. David never failed to get upset. It was cruel of my grandfather to play with him that way, my mom says. But sometimes she’ll also tell me that he was teaching David a lesson, and maybe not a bad one. Don’t be miserly with joy, I imagine that lesson to be. Don’t wait for a more perfect time to take pleasure in what you have.

 

I think about David and his cherries sometimes when I open my drawer, see that my favorite T-shirt is clean, and am tempted to save it for a different day. When I feel, for some reason, that I should wait and wear some other, lesser T-shirt. For what? I wear the shirt. It’ll fall to pieces whether or not I do.

 

14: Provincetown, one

One summer in my late twenties, my then-girlfriend and I decided to go on vacation to Provincetown.

 

Like many queer neighborhoods and towns, Provincetown was an artists’ community before it became known as a haven for gay people—my straight grandparents on my father’s side actually honeymooned there in 1949—but for decades now, it has been the closest thing in the United States to an official gay vacation town, replete with all the trappings of both gayborhoods and American beach destinations. In the summer, every coffee shop, art gallery, restaurant, and beach towel is filled with gay people (alongside a growing minority of straight tourists including, disturbingly, bachelorette parties).

 

My vacation with my girlfriend was far from my first time in Provincetown. As a child, I spent summers visiting Wellfleet, ten miles down the Cape. We took frequent day trips to Provincetown, eating pizza at Spiritus and free fudge samples at the penny candy store, reveling in the playfulness that, even as kids, we could feel in the air from the moment we biked onto the main drag. It was a beloved, magical place for me, and as an adult, I’ve wondered why. Are all children predisposed to love towns with weekly drag parades? (Maybe; after all, restrictive gender roles harm everyone, and children are perhaps more attuned to the pleasure of rejecting them than adults with many more years of repression under their belts.) I suspect, though, that I felt an instinctive safety there. I was always a gender-nonconforming child, always the source of visible confusion and the subject of barely whispered questions, always acutely aware that others saw me as strange from the time I was very, very small. My parents had many lesbian friends, women with strong muscles and handsome buzzcuts and impressive baseball skills, and I always felt drawn to them, even if I could not say why. Provincetown had the same inexplicable hearth-like quality. Something in me vibrated when I was there.

 

But visiting as an out queer adult was different—and as we drove into town on Route 6, the familiar bay-facing cottages coming into view, I thought for neither the first nor the last time about the fact that this was something David had done too. There is only one road onto the Cape. This row of little houses, the sun just beginning to threaten its descent behind them, would have greeted him on arrival, just as it greeted me.

 

David went to college in Boston and stayed in the city for several years after graduation. It was from there that he began to make the three-hour trek to Provincetown, on weekends and eventually for entire summers, which he funded by working in exchange for lodging. My mother still has his satin varsity jacket from the Boatslip, the raucous hotel and bar where he worked as a pool boy. The jacket is burgundy with white trim, an almost confusingly fancy staff uniform. My mom wears it occasionally on spring nights out on the town.

 

The Boatslip is still in operation, and every afternoon during the summer, it hosts Provincetown’s biggest party—the tea dance. If you happen to be outside at 4 PM, you witness its pull: on seemingly every block of town, a steady tide of people wanders toward 161 Commercial Street, settling in for three hours of boozy rum punches and dancing on the Boatslip’s deck overlooking the bay. The festivities end promptly at 7 PM, and the same ritual repeats in reverse, if more slowly: tipsy partiers in slim chino shorts and glittery drag costumes lollygag down the middle of Commercial Street, making the already-barely-car-friendly road just about impassable. They eat pizza at Spiritus, they go home to nap, they sit down for pasta at Ciro and Sal’s. Some of them will surface hours later at the A-House—a 200-year-old bar that’s sometimes described as the oldest gay bar in the United States.

 

This is a different Provincetown from the one I visited as a child. The proliferation of straight tourists and bachelorette parties aside, I never went to bars, drank cocktails, danced sweaty against any bare-torsoed men I didn’t know. On the first afternoon of our vacation, we went to the tea dance. It was an overcast day, and we were too early; we were new to this and didn’t realize that our 4:15 PM arrival was akin to a 9 PM appearance at a club. We ordered rum punches, and the bartender finished them off with extra glugs of Bacardi 151 down the straw. The line not yet clogged behind me, I told him my uncle once worked at this bar many years ago.

 

“Oh, have you looked for him in the staff pictures?” he asked me. “There’s one for every year inside.”

 

We ducked into the empty indoor bar to look. Some part of me had convinced myself that David’s employment at this exact establishment was a dream, that any proof that he had stood here would be purely in the form of stories I’d heard, not physical artifacts to be touched, held, or clung to. But there, hung along the stairwell leading to the bar’s hotel rooms, were framed group photos of the Boatslip staff, each neatly labeled with a year. I climbed the steps slowly, studying the pictures. In each, a crowd of some dozen men smile at the camera. They are handsome, young, fit. They wear staff T-shirts, some years burgundy, others pink. They ham it up for the camera, make goofy faces, lean on each other’s shoulders and sit at each other’s feet. As the photos get older—1993, 1992, 1991—the haircuts look more and more vintage, the clothing styles—tall white gym socks, tucked-in T-shirts with rolled sleeves—more and more resembling the photos I’ve seen of David. Many of these men are probably dead.

 

1983, 1982, 1981, 1980, then…nothing. I found myself at the top of the stairs, facing the hotel’s little reception window and a door labeled OFFICE. I looked at the hallway’s bare walls, a little frantic—did the photos continue in some unseen location? Was the rest of the display hung elsewhere? No, said the man in the reception window, wearing a blue Boatslip T-shirt. There might be older photos somewhere, he said, but he really couldn’t say. If they existed, they were probably in storage.

 

He didn’t offer to investigate further, and I didn’t ask. How could I justify such a request? I knew David worked here. My mother had the jacket to prove it, even if it was nowhere to be seen in these pictures. What more could I be seeking from a single group photo, one in which the total real estate taken up by my uncle’s face would have been smaller than the pad of my index finger? And perhaps it didn’t even exist; perhaps they hadn’t taken a photo that year, a negligent manager or grumpy staff. Perhaps it existed, and David wasn’t in it—he had been sick, maybe, or away on an overnight to Boston. I could not ask for an archival hunt for such a photo.

 

Why, though, did the absence feel so devastating?

 

I realized, back on the bar’s deck and feeling the rum punch’s depressive undertow, that I had allowed myself to anticipate something new—an addition to the static archive that I had assembled of David’s life. There had been no new stories about him for a long time; no new photos; no new facts to sit with, to run through my head during long train rides or jogs in the park. There were only the stories I asked my mother to tell me again and again, hoping that some heretofore untold detail might surface; the photos that I reexamined, searching the background for clues I hadn’t noticed before. When a person exits our physical world, so does the possibility of a new encounter with them. What we have is what we have; there is a bottom, and you can see it.

 

The staff picture was a trapdoor—a tiny, new piece of David to be discovered in a world he is long gone from. I longed to come face-to-face with him here; if a photo was my best chance, I would have taken it.

 

15: Yom Kippur eve

I call my grandmother and ask her if I can stop by to borrow David’s old journals; I need to check some facts, I say, make sure I’ve gotten the chronology right. She’s thrilled that I’ve asked. Of course, she says, she’ll have them ready for me when I come. A few days later, she tells me she’s putting together a collection of materials for me, stuff I’ve never seen. She thinks it’ll be useful for my work.

 

If I’m honest, I’m skeptical. Haven’t I spent decades of my life picking through every artifact of David that lives in their apartment? The photos, the old T-shirts, the childhood drawings, the elementary school report cards. The programs from the plays he acted in; the programs from his memorial; the photocopies of his obituary, Xeroxes of Xeroxes on which his face has been reduced to a collection of shadows, my grandmother’s familiar handwriting crawling in blue ink—“Bay Area Reporter”—across the top of the page.

 

But my grandmother has the best memory in our family, and she is always surprising us. I go with an open mind, and at the end of our visit, as I am leaving their apartment, she proudly instructs my grandfather to hand me the tote bag that she has hung by the door. The bag is stuffed with loose papers of different sizes and thicknesses, envelopes, folders, cards. I check to make sure the journals are there, then drop the bag into my backpack and buckle it closed.

 

Back home, I sit on my couch and pull papers from the bag, spreading them across the coffee table. My grandmother is right; I haven’t seen any of this before. The bulk of the contents turn out to be condolence cards that my grandparents received after David’s death. Some are long, and the words, despite the authors’ insistence that none could be adequate, strike me in their empathy. “I grope to say something, anything that could relieve some of your pain and suffering,” one person writes. “We press very close to you with all our sympathy and with love.” Others are far briefer; some writers, in a move that scandalizes me, have only signed their names beneath the greeting card’s preprinted message of sympathy. All of the condolences have been marked with a short notation in my grandfather’s neat European script, a detail that escapes my notice until I realize that it appears uniformly on each of them. “Answered,” he has written at the top of every card, followed by a date.

 

I finish the stack of cards and am about to turn my attention to the journals when I notice a five-by-eight spiral-bound notebook with a plain cardboard cover, a notebook I’m sure I haven’t seen before. I open it. The first page bears a centered inscription, written in the elegant letters that have become familiar to me: “Purchased Greenwich Village, NY. 10/12/86. Yom Kippur eve.”

 

Ah, I think. Maybe this was a notebook, like so many of my own, bought with lofty intentions of diligent daily journaling and never used. Maybe that’s why I’ve never seen it.

 

But I flip the page, and the first lines shock:

 

     6/12 started Septra

 

     6/13 headache in AM took aspirin

 

     6/14 headache took aspirin 2 doses

 

     6/  started AZT

 

Among the many records of David’s life in his journals—his birthday lists, his travel stories, his New Year’s resolutions, his records of every dollar spent, every cocktail enjoyed—there is no mention of AIDS. The conspicuity of this omission becomes more and more apparent as I repeat the revelation to myself, which is somehow only occurring to me now, scanning this meticulous documentation of headaches and pills. No mention among the accounts of arguments with friends and lists of concerts. No mention among the recounting of flights and ferries, among the favorite movies and musicals enumerated. How could I have been so naive as not to notice—not to see the glaring absence, the obvious missing shadow of that phone call from his doctor’s office in June 1987, and all that followed it? Here, finally, they had surfaced: the missing pages.

 

16: Was he brave?

“Nana,” I ask my grandmother. “Will you tell me the story about David getting bullied on the train platform?”

 

She laughs.

 

“Well,” she says, never one to turn down the chance to tell a story. “You mean when those little boys held him up?”

 

She tells me again, every detail. How she and David had been riding the subway home together in the evening, and how he said he wanted to get off early to buy a book. How she didn’t think twice about it—he was just twelve, but he already rode the subway to school by himself every day. How she gave him ten dollars, and how an hour later, a police officer called to tell her that he had her son. The officer said that he was going uptown and could drop David off, but my grandmother said she would collect him herself. She did, and on the way home, he told her how two little boys had tried to take his money.

 

(Little boys, my grandmother calls them, and here I remember that this is always part of the telling: how young all three boys were, how ridiculous the idea of little boys mugging each other.)

 

He’d refused to give them the ten dollars, and they’d argued with him all the way into the train station, where they passed the better part of an hour threatening him with a tiny penknife until he cried, and then pretending to comfort him whenever strangers walked by. All the while, he remained steadfast in his unwillingness to give up his money. Finally, a police officer happened upon them and intervened. He brought all three boys back to the station and summoned their mothers to retrieve them.

 

“I admire him for it,” my grandmother says at one point, using the present tense to describe his refusal to give in. I press her.

 

“Do you think he was brave?” I ask. “I mean, wasn’t that brave of him?” I am testing a thesis now. It is about David, but it is also about me—about the boys who stole my school pictures in middle school and scrawled epithets on them before taping them up in the hallways; about the girls who surrounded me in the schoolyard and told me I looked like a monkey to a chorus of laughter. I would have been exactly the age David was as he stood on the subway platform, fingers closed around the bills in his pocket as the trains came and left, came and left. Haven’t they made us tougher, all the little boys who held us up with tiny penknives? Aren’t we braver for our trials on the subway platforms, even if we cried, even if we grew desperate as the hour wore on and it seemed no one was coming to help?

 

“I don’t know if he was brave,” my grandmother says. She never gives me easy answers, for which I am grateful. “I think what’s shocking is that no one stopped—in that whole hour, all those adults, walking back and forth, and nobody noticed what was happening with those little boys.” She shakes her head, and we are quiet.

“I miss him so much,” she says, shaking her head. “Still. Such a schnookiepuss.”

 

Schnookiepuss. A word I grew up with; a word we loved to hear from our grandparents. If we were flowers, we would’ve bent toward the sound every time it fell from their lips. If I had to define it, it’d be this: a schnookiepuss is someone who is lovable. Except it’s not an abstract kind of lovability. A schnookiepuss is a particular someone who you just love so much.

 

I think then about what I know of David’s last trip to Argentina, right before he died. How at a McDonald’s, he followed a man who had cruised him into a bathroom and dropped his pants for a blowjob. The man flashed a knife and took all of the cash he had. His friends, telling me the story twenty-five years later at a dinner party in San Francisco, laugh. It’s a story of a hookup gone wrong, and from the way they describe him when he came out of the bathroom, it doesn’t sound like he was brave. I think they use the word hysterical. I would’ve been hysterical too.

 

So, maybe not brave. Stubborn? And determined; if he was hysterical, he didn’t let it get in his way. The bathroom holdup was not the event that sent him on an early plane back to New York, and I feel reasonably certain that if he had lived, he would have kept on cruising. I think about the child on the train platform, surrounded, and the thirty-seven-year-old flying home to die. My grandmother: nobody noticed what was happening with those little boys. A bathroom, a penknife, an earthquake, a virus. So many passersby. Sometimes I feel so angry.

 

17: Provincetown, two

Toward the end of my week in Provincetown, the Boatslip hosted Solid Gold—their twice-weekly party paying homage to the eighties television show of the same name. Madonna, Whitney Houston, Cyndi Lauper, and Prince floated across the open-air dance floor. An overcast day, the sky striated and gray behind the bare masts of sailboats sitting low in the bay, but who would complain? Even though it was Thursday, the bar was full, and all around us, men in tank tops and one middle-aged lesbian bachelorette party—having, I noted, perhaps the best time of anyone in a sea of good times—jumped euphorically with, or more or less near, the beat. When the familiar opening notes of “It’s Raining Men” rolled from the speakers, a collective cheer spread through the crowd, and at the chorus, every person sang along, their feet stomping on the bar’s old wooden floorboards with synchronized thuds that almost drowned out the song’s percussion track. “It’s raining men,” we all shouted, “amen,” and the air itself seemed to vibrate with pleasure.

 

Then the next song began: a quintessential eighties beat, a synth melody, and an unmistakable voice. “Ooh yeah,” Whitney Houston riffed, as “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” played.

 

“I Wanna Dance with Somebody” came out in 1987, the year I was born and the year David was diagnosed with HIV. It’s a song that has always buzzed somewhere underneath my ribcage; a resonance I attribute to the fact that, like so many ostensibly straight songs adopted by queer people as anthems, the song manages to express something profound about queer longing.

 

The pain of the gap between what we have and what we want is at the heart of “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” Yet, it’s not a sad song. Whitney makes the choice to believe in desire, even when the deck feels stacked against her—even when desire might bring her pain. It’s a choice she has to make if she’s going to survive. The song is melancholy, but it’s not cynical. It’s not a mourner’s lament. It’s a manifesto, a celebration.

 

Most of the time, for me, the gulf between the living and the dead feels vast and uncrossable. Very rarely, though, things line up. The physical landscape, the one that keeps the records as we humans change shifts, offers up the memories it’s been holding safe in its files. A bar plays the same song they played thirty years ago. They serve the same potent rum punches they’ve been serving for thirty years. Dancers’ feet stamp out rhythms on old floorboards that have seen the same rhythms before. The sun sets pink and orange over the boats in the bay, just as it’s always done. The only thing that’s changed is the year on the calendar, and for an instant, I feel like all that separates me from someone who died decades ago is a sliver of time and space, a gap no larger than the one between the sun’s last flash on the horizon and the moment it dips out of sight.

 

18: David

How has it taken me until now to realize? In Hebrew, the name means beloved.

 

19: To make sense

Contrary to my speculation that perhaps David’s Yom Kippur notebook would turn out to be an empty one, every page is filled. It reads, today, a bit like the notes of a person who has spent a weekend falling down an Internet rabbit hole of everything that was known in 1987 about AIDS. It includes documentation of symptoms, questions for doctor’s visits, notes from doctor’s visits, book recommendations. Lists of drugs, mini-lessons in virology, references to studies and legislation. Names, phone numbers, addresses, organizations. Dates. It is detailed, comprehensive, at turns both erratic and thorough. It has an unmistakably frantic tone. It is almost unbearably painful to read.

 

These pages, I realize, date from the same time as all of those vacation diaries. He would have sat on that plane to Brussels, the one whose ticket is still tucked into his journal, with two notebooks on his tray table: the one in which he carefully documented the flight, how much he slept, the museums he was looking forward to visiting, and this one: the one in which he kept track of questions he wanted to ask his doctor, raised spots on his skin, phone numbers for support groups. I am tempted to tell a story about this divide. Was he compartmentalizing? Was this how he maintained his sanity—walling off the fear from the joy? The separation is so complete that it is hard to imagine it is an accident. But, what do I know about how David lived? What do I know about the air aboard that plane? I’m an amateur detective, like a child with a polyester Sherlock Holmes hat and a giant magnifying glass, its plastic lens cloudy and scratched. I’m fishing, and if I stumble upon the truth in the process, I won’t even know it. There’s no one to tell me I’ve gotten this right.

 

I turn the pages and pause at each one, turning each phrase in David’s handwriting over in my head—pentamidine, acyclovir—as though, if I concentrate, any one of these words could be a portal to the past. Simonton Getting Well Again (visualization). As though, if I find out what books he was reading, maybe I’ll be transported back to that apartment on 17th Street. AIDS + ARC, amantadine, rimantadine, HPA23. As though, if I squint hard enough at his words, maybe I’ll finally see him at his kitchen table, on the bus, in the doctor’s waiting room. Trying to make sense of something no one has made sense of yet; trying to figure out how to live.

 

I make my way through the entire notebook, writing down terms and bullet points as I go. Retrovirus RNA->DNA->RNA sends me back to the unit on HIV in middle school biology, a class I took six years after David’s death and, to this day, the only time I have ever gotten a good grade in science. Ribavirin, azidothymidine AZT, and I think about my grandmother telling me how David, weakened by antivirals, struggled to lift their suitcases into the overhead compartments when they took a plane together to Hawaii. Dideoxycytidine TOXIC. Naltrexone immunostimulating NY study. Peptide T? Candace Pert, Salk vaccine encouraging. FDA testing Van de Kamp, Agnos not passed, Doolittle killed, Theresa Crenshaw, Randy Shilts’ book this month The Band Played On. 20% infected in ’82-83 are stable. Pentamidine inhalation prophylaxis/Septra, why not try it. On, and on, and on.

 

A photo is tucked about three-quarters of the way through the notebook, on a page that begins with a list in green marker: medical, chg pent appt, Conant appt, East Bay recom. It is me as a toddler, stepping confidently forward on the cracked sidewalk in front of my Brooklyn home while my mother, laughing as she looks into the camera, stoops to reach for my hand. The trees are bare, but it is a sunny day. The photo gleams with happiness.

 

I try to remind myself that the chances are good that my grandmother absentmindedly stowed this photo in these pages years after David died. But the type on the back of the picture announces that it was printed by a photo lab in February 1989. It is possible, I decide, that he placed it here.

 


 

“Lost Uncle” originally appeared in The Florida Review vol. 48.1, Fall 2024, available for purchase here.

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101 Steps to Becoming an American

I.

1. Wake up at four in the morning. Your bags are waiting for you, and your grandma and uncle are getting the car ready. The ride to the Caracas International Airport will take several hours, and the flight from Caracas to Atlanta will take eight.

 

2. Six months prior, your mother left for the U.S. You knew she moved there permanently, but this didn’t bother you. Your house was big; your family was big; you had lots of friends, lots of toys, lots of everything. You’d visit her in America, but only visit. Then you’d return home, where you belonged.

 

3. Every year prior, as the midnight clock crossed from December 31st to January 1st, your mother scurried across the street with you in one hand and a small suitcase in the other.

 

4. Things were not so bad yet. There were rumors of a rigged election. Rumors of plans for a rewriting of the Constitution for extended presidential terms. Rumors. Protest. Peaceful protests. Marches with everyone wearing flag shirts, flag hats, flag face paint. For the Republic. For democracy. But things were not so bad.

 

5. Citizenship offers many benefits and equally important responsibilities. When you naturalize, you agree to accept all of the responsibilities of becoming a U.S. citizen. You agree to support the United States, its Constitution, and its laws. In return, you gain all the rights and privileges of citizenship such as the right to vote and travel with a U.S. passport.

 

6. During your naturalization interview, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration officer will ask you questions about your application and background. You will also take an English and civics test.

 

7. American Government: What is the supreme law of the land? The Constitution. What does the Constitution do? The Constitution sets up the government, defines the government, and protects the basic rights of Americans.

 

8. Board your first airplane.

 

9. Get excited. Look out the window and see the airport shrinking, the city coming into full view, clouds passing, and your home fading into a map—like the ones in geography class.

 

10. You will have a layover in Atlanta, but you will arrive in Salt Lake City at approximately 3 p.m. the next afternoon.

 

11. Use the only English you know to tell your name to the flight attendants. Try first-class food. Watch the newest movie. Try third-class food. Puke. Learn how to say “Where ees de bathroom?” Try Rice Krispies Treats for the first time.

 

12. Be excited. This is your first flight, your first time traveling outside the country, and your first time visiting Mom.

 

13. American History: What is one reason colonists came to America? Freedom. Political liberty. Religious freedom. Economic opportunity. To practice their religion. To escape persecution.

 

14. Geography: What ocean is on the East Coast of the United States? The Atlantic Ocean.

 

II.

15. Circle back to English class. All you can remember is “Cat,” “Dog,” “My nem ees…” You’re going to need all of it.

 

16. Things are not so different here. There are buildings and houses. Gas stations. People. But it is different, though you can’t put your finger on it. The air is unfamiliar. You feel like a little fish in a big ocean, far from the lake in which you grew up.

 

17. Unpack your bags, go explore, eat your first BLT. Your first burrito. Your first American cheeseburger. It won’t have ham, or fries, or three different cheeses, or garlic sauce, but it’s still good.

 

18. Experience snow.

 

19. Discover ChapStick: have your life changed forever.

 

20. Change is what everyone craves when they say they want to travel. Change. The only unchangeable force in the universe. Too little change and life gets stale like bread; too much change too often, and change can get unnerving like a roller coaster. Just the right amount can make one distracted.

 

21. Sign up for school. It’s okay, you’ll only be here for a year or two with Mom. Then you’ll go home. Then you’ll have plenty of stories to tell everyone.

 

22. Repeat 5th grade. It’s because of your birthday. You will now be a year behind all of your friends when you go home. Two years, in fact, since school goes until 11th grade there. But you’ll do great. In fact, you’ll learn English faster than the other English Language Learners at your school because you’re so addicted to trading card games, and all of the cards here are printed in English.

 

23. The food will be weird. But what it lacks in seasoning it will make up for in cheese. You will be fine.

 

24. “Poh-taah-toe-eh.”

 

25. No, no, it’s, ‘Poe-tay-toe.’

 

26. “That’s what I said.”

 

27. “Thegypshingocars.” “Thegypshangotcars.” “Thegyptiangodcards.” “The Egyptian God Cards.”

 

28. “Yes, teacher. I will come to your house Sunday.” Wait, what? “I will come to your house Sunday, right?” Oh! You will come to my house someday. I get it. But, no, don’t do that.

 

29. Naturalize: To establish a plant or animal so that it lives wild in a region where it is not indigenous. To alter an adopted foreign word so that it conforms more closely to the phonology or orthography of the adopting language. To regard as or to cause to appear natural. To admit a foreigner to the citizenship of a country.

 

30. Scratch your head over and over and over again. Here, almost no one knows anything about where you’re from. Most cannot place it on a map. Most will mistake you for being from Mexico. The Middle East. Samoa.

 

31. “You’re not in Kansas anymore.”

 

32. Some naturalized species can become invasive by either direct competition with native species or genetic pollution through hybridization that can add to negative environmental effects to the native species.

 

33. In any situation you come to, there will be the fear of the unknown. They do not know you and where you are from. Therefore, they will fear you. Fear may at times disguise itself as hatred. Hatred is nonlinear: It attaches itself to things in the future and/or the past, despite the irrelevance of either in the current context. You will likely not realize this is happening at first. Thus, you will continue to smile and socialize and eventually feel the volume of a massive, unseen roadblock in your attempts to do these.

 

34. Some naturalized species, such as palms, can become ecosystem engineers, changing their habitat and creating new niches that affect their ecosystem positively. The potential and/or perceived positive impact of naturalized species are, however, less studied than the potential and/or perceived negative impacts.

 

35. Who lived in America before the Europeans arrived? Native Americans. What group of people was taken to America and sold as slaves? The African people. What territory did the United States buy from France in 1803? The Louisiana Territory. Name one war fought by the United States in the 1800s: The Mexican-American War.

 

36. Learn quickly. Pay attention. This is a test. This is all a test. Everything you do from now on. Everything.

 

37. Everything is new, and therefore exciting.

 

38. After three or four years, tell your mother that you’ve decided to stay. Be happy. This will be a great new experience for you.

 

III.

39. Ask yourself, “What am I doing here?” Your mother worked for the Governor’s Office. Your aunt traveled the world. Your uncle was a police officer. Your grandma is a retired professor. Your house was one of the biggest on the block. Ask yourself, “What am I doing here? In this one bedroom apartment, with no one around who knows us, without a penny in our pockets, in this borrowed room with all of our belongings crammed on top of each other, unable to pay rent, living off the charity of others, more and more in debt. With no one around. From one place to another, nowhere to settle.”

 

40. Sell your soul to Satan. Just kidding. But join a gang, or something that’ll make you feel good. Everyone’s doing it. At least all your friends: the ones from Mexico, Bosnia, Thailand. You’re fourteen, what else are you going to do? Prep for college? Yeah, right.

 

41. Geography: Name one U.S. territory: Puerto Rico. U.S. Virgin Islands. American Samoa. Northern Mariana Islands. Guam.

 

42. Rights and Responsibilities: What are two ways that Americans can participate in their democracy? Join a civic group. Give an elected official your opinion on an issue.

 

43. Tell your mother not to worry. It’s just one D-. You’ve always been a good kid; it’s just a slump. It’s not like the time you got caught shoplifting clothes from the mall. That was out of necessity; you didn’t have any money to buy clothes. This is because it’s cool; everyone is doing it. After all, you left all your toys and clothes back home.

 

44. Get in a fight. Or two. Everyone is doing it. You have to protect your territory. Your girl. Your status. But go to the hospital afterward because they’ll have caught you off guard and jumped you and left you so bruised your mom will almost faint when you get home. She’ll want to yell at you, but she won’t because she’ll be too scared. She’ll break the piggy bank to take you to the nearest hospital and watch over you all night to make sure you take your painkillers. Maybe you’ll have lost the fight. Maybe it will never have been in your favor. But you’ll feel, from that long night of bandages and tears, that the person who got hurt the most was not you.

 

45. The next day, realize that your friends are not who they say they are. That your life is not going the way you want. That you have a right, no, a responsibility to your mother, to yourself, to everyone else, to get it together. Then, as 9th grade ends, ask your mom to move you far away where you can start over.

 

46. Holidays: Name two national U.S. holidays. New Year’s Day. Thanksgiving.

 

47. Eat your first Thanksgiving meal. Your mom’s friend from work invited you two. Take whatever friendships come your way. As long- or short-lived as they may be.

 

48. Try cranberry sauce. Smile. Be pleasantly surprised with the mushy pile of vegetables and bread they call stuffing. Fall in love with yams. Have seconds, thirds, and fourths. Sit. Smile. Say what you’re thankful for. It’s not like home, but it’s nice. This you can get behind.

 

IV.

49. Work. Work hard through high school. Maybe you’ll go to college. Maybe you’ll find a scholarship for undocumented immigrants, though you wouldn’t know where to find such a thing, and neither will your mom. Maybe you’ll get lucky. Somehow.

 

50. Celebrate. Your mother’s boss is willing to pay for your college tuition. It’s just one year of culinary school, but it’s a lot. He’s willing, though. And it means much, much more to you. So you’ll work hard, harder than anyone else in your class. Then you’ll work hard after. After you’ve finished and thrown food up and down hot pans all around the city. People will take advantage. They will invite you to work a test weekend, training, a trial, to see if you’re qualified for the job, then determine you are not eligible because you are undocumented. Then they’ll hand you a twenty-dollar bill for your three days of labor, and they’ll smile because you are not eligible. They will pay you minimum wage for the same labor your coworkers are doing because you are not eligible. You will have to leave many, many jobs prematurely. And you’ll keep working. You’ll work until you find somewhere that will take you, risk and all, and give them your all in return. Weekends. Holidays. Late notices. Duties that don’t belong to you.

 

51. Learn quickly, pay attention, this is a test. You’ve decided to stay.

 

52. American Government: What are two rights in the Declaration of Independence? Life. Liberty. And the pursuit of happiness.

 

53. Experiment.

 

54. Get lost in yourself. This is the land of opportunity, and you feel like you have none. You’re in your prime. Realize there’s nothing here for you and you need to spread your wings and move somewhere else. Start fresh. Try Texas. It won’t work. You’ll miss home, your mom, your sister, your friends. Return. Try new hobbies. Buy new clothes. Lots of new clothes. Look like an American. Eat like an American. Spend like an American. Get stuck. Your wings will be too heavy. Find yourself somewhere else.

 

55. Dream. The winter nights here are long. Winters are long.

 

56. Find a spouse. Get married. Be careful who it is. Everyone will doubt that it’s love. Everyone will wonder if you’re doing it for the papers. The papers. The papers. You will wonder if you’re doing it for the papers. Don’t. Just live. Love. Dream.

 

57. Have children. They will make you more American. You didn’t expect this to happen. Could this really be you? The immigrant with children who don’t speak their home language? Don’t eat their home food? But they do. This is their home. This is all they know. And you will love them anyway. And you will share your home with them, through memories and food and maps and dreams. Because you’re a dreamer. And some dreams never die.

 

V.

58. Cultural bereavement is the experience of an uprooted person or group that results from the loss of social structures, cultural values, and self-identity. The person, or group, continues to live in the past and is visited by supernatural forces from the past while asleep or awake. They suffer feelings of guilt over the abandonment of a culture and homeland. They feel pain if memories of the past begin to fade but find constant images of the past (including traumatic images) intruding into daily life. They yearn to complete obligations to the dead and feel stricken by anxieties, morbid thoughts, and anger that mar the ability to get on with daily living.

 

59. It has been decades since you decided to stay. Decades since you’ve seen the rest of your family, and things have gotten worse. Much worse. But what can you do? You are seas and seasons away. And here, you are nothing. A speck. You have no power to do anything. And it’s getting much, much worse.

 

60. Rights and Responsibilities: What are two rights of everyone living in the United States? Freedom of expression. Freedom of speech. Freedom of assembly. Freedom of petition. Freedom of religion. Name one right only for United States citizens: The right to vote in a federal election.

 

61. Back home things have changed. A forest after a wildfire. But flames still burn.

 

62. Your family sends you pictures. Videos. You see the news. You can’t recognize any of it. There is hope, always hope. Hope that things will return to the way they were, but everyone knows, deep down, that things will never be the way they were. What is left is a dream. A dream of a forest, years after a fire, flourishing again.

 

63. Somewhere along the line, you got distracted. You’ve changed.

 

64. Toss and turn in your bed, night after night.

 

65. Somehow, your mother has stayed the same all this time. This is surprising and comforting. She is, like you, nothing here but still manages to do something. Of this you will take note. You will take note of the years of extra work she and many other freshwater fish put in: the thrift store shopping for new clothes, the food bank visits, the loans, the title loans, the payday loans, the altitude of the chin, the friendships lost and gained, the reset button after an accident, the autopilot, the way a fast food restaurant can suddenly become a palace for a celebration, the piggy banks, the miracles, the indestructible smile, all to give a portion to everyone struggling who stayed home.

 

66. To have freedom to do anything is to have power.

 

67. See yourself succeed. Find a new career. Find a home. Find a purpose. See your mother succeed. After years of work. And work. And work. See her find money and time and purpose in helping family, and peace of mind as you join her. When did you find it all, you don’t know. It all just “happened” as you forged ahead, like a slow-moving river, eventually ending up in the ocean.

 

VI.

68. The civics test covers important U.S. history and government topics. There are one hundred civics questions on the naturalization test.

 

69. It’s July 6th, and you tell your mother that your test is tomorrow. “Maybe I should give you the pamphlet so you can study for when you apply for citizenship, Mom.” No, no. It’s too early for that. “You should begin to study now.” Your mother shakes her head, and grandma jumps in: Okay, who was the first president of the United States? Your mother’s eyes widen, and she looks for a lifeline: The one who’s sitting on the chair? “Nope, that’s not it. Boy, Mom, that’s the easiest question. If you can’t get that one, how are you going to pass the test?” All I know is that Independence Day is July 4th, she says with a smile.

 

70. Take your two-year-old daughter to the July 4th celebration at the park. Flag shirts, flag hats, flag face paint. You’ve had dozens of these, and it’s time for you to give her some of what you’ve had. Take her to the playground, get her an inflatable ball, feed her cheeseburgers with no ham or garlic sauce, take her to watch the parade, and dance with her to country music.

 

71. You have never liked country music. Your spouse told you that it’s the appeal of the simple life that is attractive about it. Family, friends, simple comforts. You’re skeptical. Most country music stars wear as much bling as 50 Cent in his prime. No. It’s something else, and you can’t put your finger on it.

 

72. Somewhere down the line, country music became a symbol of fear. Was it the kids with cowboy hats on the playground who made fun of your accent or the guy at work with a country accent that never lent a hand? Was it college or the news or one isolated incident hidden from your sight for years? You don’t know. But somewhere down the line, you decided country music was not for you.

 

73. Face your fears. Dance to country music with your daughter and your mother and her friends. You will dance surrounded by white folks trying to enjoy their 4th of July. Look at them and listen to the rhythm of the music and remind yourself why the Pilgrims came to America.

 

74. After a few line dances, the speaker will say that in the audience “we have a lot of folks that speak Spanish,” and he wants to apologize now because he doesn’t know a single word of what he is about to say. Then the band plays “La Bamba” by Ritchie Valens.

 

75. Enjoy the music.

 

76. Go home. Get a good night’s sleep.

 

77. There are one hundred civics questions on the naturalization test, and you know most of them. You study harder and harder as the day of your test approaches. You’ve never had test anxiety before, but this is different. Your spouse tests you to prepare.

 

78. How many U.S. Senators are there? We elect a Senator for how many years? Who is one of your state’s Senators now? The House of Representatives has how many voting members? We elect a Representative for how many years? Name your Representative. How many justices are on the Supreme Court? Who is the Chief Justice of the United States now? What is the name of the Speaker of the House? There are four amendments to the Constitution about who can vote; describe one of them. Name three of the original states. What did Susan B. Anthony do? Who was the president during WWI? Who was the president during WWII?

 

79. What is one promise you make when you become a United States Citizen? To be loyal to the United States. To defend the Constitution. To obey the laws. To do important work for the nation if needed. To serve in the military if needed. To give up loyalty to other countries.

 

80. Tell your spouse, “Let’s see how well you do: What is one important thing Abraham Lincoln did?” He was inducted in the Wrestling Hall of Fame.

 

81. Let’s ask your mom. “Mom, name one U.S. territory.” Texas.

 

82. Arrive on time to the interview. Be polite. Look clean. Smile. The interviewer is young and serious. It’s a small, beige office with a large desk and a pile of your previous applications for deferred action, work permits, a green card, green card limitations removal, and citizenship lying on the edge—a history of your formal communications with the United States. A lexical map of the geographic locations where you’ve lived since you arrived. A picture of a long journey. A dream. And the interview begins.

 

83. You don’t have time to settle in. It’s fast. The interviewer asks about your life, not just here and now, but everywhere and at all times, even outside the United States. They ask about your criminal record, your spouse, your children, your parents. You doubt every answer you give. They review your citizenship application. They ask ten questions from the civics test so quickly your hands drip with sweat by the end. And just like that, it’s over. Sign here, review this. This is for your records.

 

84. Just then, you notice something on the naturalization sheet. Somewhere in the middle of a series of formal identifying information lies a phrase, “Former country of nationality: Venezuela.” You pause… This moment is what you’ve been waiting for for the past twenty years. You sign here: you agree to become a United States Citizen. Naturalized. Accepted. No more twenty-dollar bills for hours and hours of labor. No more jumping from job to job because of your “status.” No more selling yourself to anything or anyone you don’t have to. No more anxiety when you see a police officer. No more long winters. No more empty dreams. It’s here and now. But you hang on to that word as it echoes in your mind: former.

 

85. You look at the interviewer and say, “Everything looks good, but I have one question… does the U.S. allow dual citizenship?”

 

86. The interviewer is surprised: You mean… Venezuela?

 

87. “I mean, do they require that you give up citizenship to your previous country?”

 

88. They pause.

 

89. Well, you’ll have to look at the U.S. policy; essentially, no, some countries require that you denounce all ties to former countries; the U.S. is kinda in the middle of the line for all of this; you’ll have to look at the policy on this, it can be kinda tricky; did that answer your question?

 

VII.

90. Once a person feels accepted—at home, somewhere—they begin to protect that somewhere. A large wall surrounding the city. A large army. A law or two. Once sufficient physical/external protection has been implemented—and at times as it is being implemented—a socio-personal/internal defense mechanism is simultaneously employed. An immunity system consisting of social norms, traditions, pack mentalities, and identity narratives. This antibody-type response even works at an individual level, after most external and internal social threats have been subdued or eliminated, past the time of immediate danger, even when distanced from the place of belonging.

 

91. “Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition” (James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room).

 

92. Crave your native tongue. Yearn for it. Long for it. For decades, you swam in foreign waters, and it was exciting. Now, as you move closer and closer to the shores of this dream, your soul thirsts for the fresh waters of that little lake where it all began. Music, literature, art, movies, television, friendships, food, history. More than ever, you want to resurrect the past, research it, dance with it, and walk hand in hand into the night.

 

93. “Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it’s not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you’ve been to” (Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood).

 

94. Although the Oath of Allegiance to the United States speaks of renouncing “allegiance and fidelity” to other nations, U.S. immigration law does not explicitly address the topic of dual citizenship. The best summarization of the U.S. government’s position on dual citizenship lies in a U.S. Supreme Court opinion explaining that “a person may have and exercise rights of nationality in two countries and be subject to the responsibilities of both.”

 

95. Just because the United States allows dual citizenship, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that your country of origin does too.

 

96. Claims of other countries upon U.S. dual-nationals may result in conflicting obligations under the laws of each country.

 

97. Receive your approval notice and Oath Ceremony notice. The naturalization ceremony is a solemn and meaningful event. The United States Citizenship and Immigration office asks that you dress in proper attire to respect the dignity of this event.

 

98. Appear at the ceremony with your spouse. The rest of your family will wait for you outside to celebrate. You’ve said so much up to this moment; the only appropriate thing is silence.

 

99. “Language is the only homeland” (Czesław Miłosz).

 

100. You are reminded of a quote a friend introduced you to: “The love of one’s country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?” (Pablo Casals). You translated to see how this sounds in Spanish. You like the quote, but you hate when online quotes appear without citations because you are never certain if they are true. In this case, it’s not the quote that resonates with you but the idea behind it that lingers. It doesn’t matter if Casals actually said it; someone said it, and that makes the words real. Like sand on a warm beach.

 

101. Decide that change is not bad, that fish can swim in fresh and saltwater, and that a person can—and often does—have more than one home.

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Instar

Anton DiSclafani 

 

In early August, my husband finds a Luna moth with an injured wing while walking our dogs. The wing is luminescent and green, torn nearly in half. We put the moth, which will never fly again, into a netted terrarium, a former home for caterpillars that arrived in pupae form. Our children—two boys, six and three—had ignored the caterpillars. I didn’t blame them. The whole experience felt perfunctory, riskless. Go to insect.com and order caterpillars that are almost butterflies, caterpillars surely raised in some sort of caterpillar factory, ready to enter the next stage of life as soon as they are unpackaged. 

 

My husband jokes that the Luna moth is in hospice care. Otherwise, of course, it would be cruel to keep. Its delicate legs cling to the netting, hour after hour. I wonder what the moth makes of the chaotic sounds that surround it, the little boys who peer into its face. If it hears, or sees. 

 

My older son speaks to it, seems unfazed when it doesn’t respond to his voice. This boy is most at home in the natural world. My husband says he was born into the wrong family. I have never camped. My husband used to, when he was young, but it has been years. Luna moths, we learn, do not eat or drink in their short time—a week, ten days—on earth. They exist only to reproduce.  

 

It becomes a she one morning when we wake to dozens of nearly microscopic eggs, scattered thickly upon the netted walls of her final home. I’ve never seen her move, but she must have moved, injured though she is, in the night. I am glad for her, that she served her purpose, that she will not die in vain, though I know that to feel anything on behalf of a moth is ridiculous.  

 

Like the caterpillars, our Luna moth offers a guarantee: she will die, and we will watch her do it. 

 

 

When the moth enters our house, my older son is about to begin kindergarten for the second time. It is common in our football-obsessed town to redshirt your children, especially boys, so that they are bigger for sports, but that is not why we do it. We do it because he is struggling to read. Whether or not this is because he wasn’t explicitly taught at his free-range Montessori school, or because he is dyslexic, remains to be seen.  

 

When the moth enters our house, I am happy. We’ve entered a contented phase. It took me a long time to feel like myself after our younger son was born, three years ago.  

 

But now I do.  

 

 

 

The moth lives alongside her eggs for a few days, then she begins to die. When I think of moths, I imagine the small brown kind that eat holes in sweaters and flock to light. But this moth is beautiful, lovelier than any butterfly I’ve ever seen. She is as large as my hand, iridescent green with yellow spots that resemble eyes, to fool predators. She disintegrates, bit by bit. I find a piece of her wing at the green bottom of her cage; by the next morning, she lies crumpled, surrounded by the rocks and assorted talismans my older son installed there. He loves objects: marbles and coins and bits of things he finds in the world. He comes home with rocks and moss and desiccated insects. I throw away his treasures in secret, when he is sleeping or at school. He doesn’t miss them unless I am careless and he sees something he once loved at the top of our trash. 

 

A friend is over when my son sees the dead moth at the bottom of its terrarium, and at first, he is stricken, but he catches himself, acts as if it’s no big deal. Because he has a friend over. The bravado of a watched boy. 

 

The eggs hatch in stages. There are dozens of tiny caterpillars, and some of them make their way through the netting and disappear. My son and I look up their food sources, find a sweet gum tree and cut a branch.  

 

Almost all of the first wave of caterpillars die, because I didn’t think to change the branch and they cannot survive without fresh food. I consider taking the cage outside, unzipping it, letting the caterpillars into the world, where they will almost certainly die.  

 

I decide to try one more time.  

 

 

My younger son starts preschool at the same Montessori program my older son just left. Ships, passing in the night, we joke. He leaves his home daycare, run by an Iranian-American woman I have come to love. I joke that she saved my sanity, but it is not really a joke. My husband and I traded off childcare for the first two years of his life, but I was more tethered to the baby, especially early on, when he nursed.  

 

This woman loves my child. And I love her, because she loves my child, part of a trend I’ve noticed: I love the people who care for my children. And when we have to leave them, as we always do, children flying through one stage after another, I am unbearably sad.  

 

For a year, she greeted me at the door in the morning, asked me about my son’s night, his morning. I will never stand in her foyer again.  

 

I text her on my younger son’s final day and tell her I can’t do pick up, or I will cry.  

 

 

 

I keep the second wave of caterpillars alive. The first time I count there are twenty. They are so tiny it is difficult to think of something to compare them to—the white part of my fingernail. Twenty eyelashes, bundled together. My friend directs the Museum of Natural History in our town, and I text her questions. She tells me Luna moths are her favorite Saturniid, and I feel a strange sort of pride, as if I have anything to do with it.  

 

My favorite parts of my days are when I am alone, when my children are gone, and when my children come home and I play with them. Cook for them, bathe them, change their clothes, wipe their bottoms. The list is endless; sometimes I feel more servant than parent. There’s not a lot of difference, my husband says.

 

I worry over the caterpillars. Every night I remove the branches to which they cling, and I count them. We sit at our kitchen table, which is the kitchen table from my childhood home. The table is old, pine, and my mother took better care of it than I do—she rubbed oil into its surface when it was dry, swept the crumbs from it every night with a damp sponge. I never complete the former chore, only sometimes the latter.  

 

My sons like when the caterpillars crawl on their arms. I like this, too, because it delights my children. I worry that the caterpillars will not know there is a new, fresh branch, so I take a needle and gently separate them from the old leaf, transport them to the new.  

 

My friend the scientist tells me I might rip their insides out this way, and I am horrified that my carefulness was so wrong. I take the small scissors I used to trim my children’s fingernails when they were babies and cut around the tiny, neon green caterpillars and transfer bits of caterpillar-occupied leaf to the new leaves. It is time-consuming but satisfying, a task that is finite and clear, unlike writing.  

 

You will do anything to make your life complicated, a different friend says. He is a man. I can’t imagine a woman saying this. All the women I know complicate their lives like I do. With children and pets and gardens. 

 

Things to care for.  

 

 

My husband asks how my babies are. But I don’t feel maternal toward the caterpillars. I feel enchanted by them. Something otherworldly is unfolding, so close to me. When one caterpillar touches another, the touched caterpillar rears up and swings its body around, aggressively, and though I assume this is nothing more than instinct, I can’t tell what purpose it serves. To scare? To try to identify the touch as friend or foe? Perhaps it is simply a reflex, meaningless without context. 

 

I watch them eat around the edges of leaves. They are active unless they are molting, in which case they look like they are praying, their front legs lifted from the leaf, clasped together. They stay like this for a few days, then they shed their skin, which we find later, dotting leaves like mummies. 

 

One time we see a caterpillar in the process of tugging its new body from its old. I’ve never seen anything like it. I tell my son it is rare to witness such a thing. A creature in its most vulnerable state, its skin soft and new. Untouched. 

 

None of them have individual personalities. Maybe I would ascribe traits to them if I spent more time with them, but I doubt it. They are too tiny, too driven by the most basic of needs: Food. They move slowly. They never seem afraid, or even aware of my presence.  

 

My older son and I see one poop, the flaps on its rear unfolding with elegant simplicity. My son is delighted, almost hysterical. His humor veers toward the scatological. My husband tears the tiniest piece of toilet paper for the caterpillar, and my son roars with laughter.  

 

Every night my husband goes to our sweetgum tree and cuts a branch. With my phone’s flashlight we check it for the parasites I have read could kill them. After a while he has to use a ladder, because we have stripped the tree of its lower branches.  

 

 

After spending a summer learning the basics of phonics with a tutor, then a month of kindergarten for the second time, my son reads a word. Haltingly, slowly, he reads. I yell in excitement, startling him. But he is happy. To have pleased me.  

 

When my younger son was six months old, I fed him scrambled eggs, and his face turned bright red. He was diagnosed first with an egg allergy, then with a peanut and almond allergy. I learned everything I could about oral immunotherapy, the process by which the allergic is fed increasing doses of their allergen. I found it on the Internet. No doctor ever mentioned it to me. OIT makes perfect sense: You teach the body to tolerate the poison.  

 

Nobody near us performs OIT on children as young as my son, even though the research is astoundingly clear: The younger the child, the more flexible the immune system. The younger the child, the better OIT works.  

 

I considered taking my baby, seven months old at that point, to Houston once every other week for treatment, which would have required an hour and a half drive to the airport, then a flight, then an overnight stay. Then I found an allergist in Birmingham, two hours away, and my husband and I, with the flexible schedules of academics, took him every Monday.  

 

His allergy disappeared before he had all of his teeth.  

 

My older son goes to a tutor every week, but I decide this is not enough. I’ve read articles and studies about the dyslexic brain that suggest that the dyslexia is a chicken and egg problem. Since the dyslexic child does not enjoy reading, he does not read, never changing the neural pathways of his brain that would make reading easy.  

 

I lean hard on a study that scanned the brains of young children before and after intensive phonics tutoring. There was almost no difference between the post-tutored brains and the brains of children who were not dyslexic.  

 

We hired another tutor to come to our house on the weekends. We read book after book after book.  

 

It is the only way I know how to approach a problem. To, as I explain to my mother, nip it in the bud. The allergies, the dyslexia. I am well aware there are situations that I will not be able to nip in the bud, that we have been lucky, so far. My older son might struggle in school. At first, this idea undoes me. Then I adjust. I think of the people I know who don’t read as much as I do. My sister’s wife, who is one of my favorite people in the world, has never read my books. It is a family joke.  

 

I want my son not to be unhappy. But that is impossible. I want to choose his unhappinesses. I don’t know what I would choose, if given the choice.  

 

 

 

My children like letting the lime green caterpillars crawl on their arms. But the caterpillars grow quickly, and their bigness alarms them. My younger son cries one evening, at dusk, the time of day we usually tend to them. After dinner and baths, before stories and bedtime.  

 

Off, he says. I want it off. 

 

I understand. Their heads have turned large and brown, their legs more articulated. I don’t feel the same affection for them, and I wonder if this is what having teenagers is like. 

 

Each new version of the caterpillar displaces the older ones. I marvel at how tiny they were when I look at pictures on my phone. It is the same way with my children. Watching videos of them from six months ago, a year—it is like watching strangers whom I love.  

 

I feel no tenderness toward the caterpillars, but I do want them to survive. It pleases me, to watch them grow. To see them eat.  

 

If I listen closely, I can hear them chewing.  

 

 

My older son has some of the warning signs for dyslexia, which is not a learning disability but a learning difference. He was a late talker. He confuses his bs and ds, but most children his age do. The biggest warning sign is that he is having trouble learning to read. I learn that the brains of children undergo a transformation when they learn to read; dyslexic brains do not undergo the same transformation. I learn that there are different kinds of dyslexia, that as many as twenty-percent of the population is at least somewhat dyslexic. I learn that dyslexics tend to have great spatial abilities, that they are, for example, good at Minecraft. I learn so many interesting things about dyslexia, about the brain, about reading and language. I hope none of it applies to my son.  

 

My older son is sensitive. Often he cannot tell us why he is upset, but as he’s grown older my husband and I have started to understand him better: He is most disturbed when a plan of his does not go as he thought it would. He thought he was going to come home and eat popcorn while watching cartoons, and we tell him he is in fact going to soccer practice, and he disintegrates.  

 

The problem is that often we don’t know what his plans are until they’re disrupted.  

 

 

The twenty caterpillars survive for a few weeks. Then they start to die. For no apparent reason. One by one. I find them at the bottom of the terrarium. I scour the Internet and read that disease and fungus are common among caterpillars, can kill off dozens in one fell swoop.  

 

I have no way of knowing what kills them, but I know what doesn’t kill them: A living predator. A bird, a human.  

 

I hate to see them dead, and in this one area of my life, I am uniquely powerless. Before the illogic of the idea reveals itself, I consider taking them to the vet.  

 

I hide the dead caterpillars before my children can see them. My older son becomes suspicious. Weren’t there more? he asks.  

 

No, I tell him. I don’t think so. If I admitted there were, I would have to admit I’d disposed of them in secret. That I have, from a certain perspective, lied.  

 

I think nothing of lying to him. It occurs to me that I should. 

 

 

My older son begins to read in earnest. Simple words—consonant vowel consonant—but still he is reading. I feel both a profound relief and a sense of dread: That we have solved this problem, that there will surely be another problem in his childhood that I cannot solve. It’s not a question of if, but when. Because he is a person. Because a life without problems is impossible.  

 

 

 

Look, I say to my husband, to my children—look. The caterpillars have gone from microscopic to the size of my pinkie finger in a month, and now they are preparing to enter pupae form. There are six of them left. When I finally tell my son that some of the caterpillars have died, he is unbothered. The remaining six find the dead leaves at the bottom of the terrarium, leaves I have left there for precisely this purpose, and begin to wrap themselves inside them. It is an ingenious disguise, if you don’t account for lawnmowers: A bird sees a dead leaf, not a meal.  

 

Look, I say, to my husband and children. Look. We all look. We are all amazed. None of us has seen anything like it, up close.  

 

I am so proud that I saved them.  

 

 

 

On Easter morning, half a year later, we are in the garage, putting on shoes in preparation for meeting meet my parents for brunch. I have forgotten about the pupae, who sit in their terrarium in our garage, still clothed in leaves. I assume they have all died, but I don’t have the heart to throw them away, and I know from my friend that there is a small chance they have overwintered, remained in pupae form until the spring.  

 

But my older son has not forgotten. He checks the moths every day.  

 

Look, he says. At first I think he is pointing to an old can of paint. But no, it’s a Luna moth that has emerged during the night.  

 

My life will change in unimaginable ways over the next year. Illness, birth—I am pregnant with my third child. The normal vagaries of time that bring pleasure and pain.  

 

Too on the nose, my husband says, referencing the moth’s surfacing on a day celebrating resurrection, a joke our children are years away from comprehending. But there is awe in his voice.  

 

We let our older son unzip the terrarium, watch in our driveway as the moth flies away. It grows smaller and smaller, a glimmer in the bright sky.  

 

A flash of green, a spark of something from another world. 

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My Mother’s Museum

Mark Brazaitis

 

When my mother died in May of 2022, at age seventy-nine, she left me and my sister her house in Washington, D.C. I visit the house frequently, ostensibly to clean it in preparation to put it on the market. Less a dutiful housekeeper and more a curious visitor to a museum, however, I never fill more than a few of the 13-gallon trash bags I carry with me. I am reluctant to disturb anything when every room is a wing of a compelling exhibition, and each object in it—photo, T-shirt, letter, knickknack, receipt—is a revealing relic of my mother’s life.

 

The manner in which I tour her house determines the way I read her story. It’s like inhabiting a work of experimental prose: the beginning and end are arbitrary; characters appear unexpectedly; there are frequent and abrupt jumps in time; and the narrative is nonlinear, digressive, and sometimes redundant. Occasionally my mother recedes from the tale, and I move to the forefront: a ten-year-old, a high-schooler, a college graduate, and—in a bathroom mirror—a middle-aged man still coming to terms with his past.

 

The following is one of my visits to my mother’s museum, her story—and mine—conjured by four objects:

 

A mini cassette tape labeled “Step People.” (Exhibit location: top drawer of my mother’s dresser.)

 

I made the tape as a humorous gift for my mother in the summer of 1989, when I was twenty-four, combining audio from my father’s second wedding and my droll (or such was my intention) commentary on the ceremony. For good measure, I mixed in snippets of pop songs, including the Kinks’ “Destroyer,” over which I shouted lyrics I invented. I named the tape “Step People” after my four new relatives—my stepmother and three stepbrothers—whom I equated with figures from a horror film, even if my oldest stepbrother was my good friend.

 

For my mother, my father’s remarriage was a double injury. It represented a final betrayal by her former best friend, my father’s soon-to-be wife, who’d encouraged her to divorce my father, then, a few months later, started dating him. And it was the culmination of my father’s cruelty toward her, which had begun years earlier, when we lived in East Cleveland, Ohio, and he had an affair with another of her close friends.

 

Periodically after the divorce, in the spring of 1982, my mother sobbed in her bed late at night. Invariably, I pulled myself from sleep and sat by her as she revisited my father’s transgressions. To comfort her, I mocked my father and his lovers past and present. My goal was to make my mother laugh. If she was laughing, she wasn’t crying.

 

My mother’s tears ceased before morning. Perhaps she didn’t think she could afford to let her sadness slow her down. She was the tireless, inventive, and accomplished editor and publisher of Hammer and Dolly, the monthly magazine of the Washington Metropolitan Auto Body Association. She’d turned Hammer and Dolly from a 16-page provincial digest into an 80-page glossy with an international readership. The magazine featured news from around the world on everything from computerized estimating systems to new paint technologies to controversies over aftermarket parts, as well as profiles of people in the industry and lighthearted features, including a cover story on the best “whoopee” cars.

 

Nor did my mother cry when one of her boyfriends was on the scene. Did she not feel the urge to cry, or did she refrain because she was worried that the man she was with would feel diminished by the feelings—negative but powerful—she still had for my father? I never asked her.

 

My mother would marry my stepfather a few months after my father’s wedding, but this didn’t mean he wouldn’t suddenly exit her life, as he’d done before, when they’d been dating. Meanwhile, I’d graduated from college, would soon leave for Guatemala with the Peace Corps, and wouldn’t be around to soothe and amuse her. I decided she needed something to comfort her in my absence. Whenever she felt blue, she could listen to “Step People.”

 

Before my father’s wedding, I placed my microcassette recorder in my suitcoat pocket. Immediately before the ceremony, I pushed “record.” I was my father’s best man. Standing with him at the altar, I might as well have been wearing a wiretap. I alternately felt like a righteous informer and a stool pigeon.

 

Clearly eager to appear learned and worldly in front of what he must have judged a sophisticated crowd—both my father and his bride were reporters; their wedding guests included well-known politicians and journalists—the pastor interspersed Bible verses with wisdom from other religious traditions. And he couldn’t resist sprinkling his service with lines from Kahlil Gibran, the author of The Prophet, whose overquoted words had something in common with greeting card rhymes.

 

At one point in the service, my stepmother’s middle son read a poem he’d written, its final couplet rhyming “Tom,” my father’s name, and “Mom.” My sister and I, trained by our maternal grandmother to be literary snobs, had to think sad thoughts so we didn’t howl with laughter.

 

At the reception afterward, the husband of a local news anchor protested that his wife—who was clearly used to getting whatever she wanted immediately—had yet to receive a piece of wedding cake. The cake had been cut only a couple of minutes before, but never mind—her sweet tooth needed instant gratification. He chanted his demand: “My wife needs cake! My wife needs cake! My wife needs cake!”

 

I captured all of it on tape and spliced highlights, or lowlights, together with music and my oh-so-funny (or snarky or sophomoric) observations.

 

I wonder how often my mother listened to “Step People.” Because I found the tape in an open box in her dresser’s top drawer, I suspect that she must at least have looked at it long after my father’s wedding and probably long after his death, of kidney cancer, in 2005.

 

From time to time, I’ve felt guilty about mocking my father’s wedding. I would have been ashamed had he ever listened to “Step People.” But staring at the cassette, titled with my long-ago handwriting, I imagine a sorrowful night in which my mother, alone in her dark bedroom, clicked “play” on her mini tape recorder. If her tears gave way to laughter, I don’t have any regrets.

 

A photograph of my sister and her then-boyfriend, when they were in college, sitting on an armchair in my mother’s living room. (Exhibit location: a drawer in the vanity of my sister’s old bedroom.)

 

My sister’s boyfriend broke up with her on Christmas Day, 1992, but only after he’d celebrated the holiday at our house and loaded the trunk of his car with the gifts my family had given him. An hour after her boyfriend drove off to his home in New Jersey, my sister shared her sad news with our father, who was living down the block with his second wife. My father grieved—not for my sister’s loss but for the money he’d spent on the guitar tuner he’d given her now ex. “My God,” he said, “he might as well have robbed me at gunpoint. It would have been more decent.”

 

What strikes me about the photo, however, aren’t its two subjects but what is visible at its edges. Under the lamp on the table beside the armchair is a collage picture frame with photographs of my silver-haired, tanned stepfather. Above the lamp is another collage of photos, this one featuring a baby, my stepfather’s first grandchild. On the mantel above the fireplace is a 10-by-13 high-school photo of my stepfather’s younger son. Behind my sister’s head, in an open cabinet, is the television my stepfather watched endlessly as he smoked one cigarette after another, the fumes sucked into an electric air filter my mother insisted he use.

 

I’d forgotten how much of the house, which became my mother’s after she and my father divorced, my stepfather had claimed. Now I remember returning to it at various times after I’d left home for college, for the Peace Corps, and for graduate school, and finding it each time a degree stranger than the house I’d felt most comfortable in, which wasn’t when my father lived in it but in the months immediately after he (and his temper and his obsession with tidiness) left.

 

My stepfather, who was then my mother’s boyfriend, moved into my mother’s house at the beginning of my junior year in high school. In the aftermath of a divorce, it isn’t uncommon for children to live with the stranger who is their parent’s new partner. By extension, we children of divorce live with the stranger’s family and friends, their habits and hobbies, the foods they like, the entertainment they entertain themselves with. Do most of us grow comfortable with the arrangement? I never did. The longer my stepfather lived in my mother’s house, the more it felt to me like a bed-and-breakfast whose walls, weirdly, held a few photos of me, my sister, and my mother.

 

After twenty years, my mother divorced my stepfather. But even now, more than a decade after he last stepped foot in the house, I find traces of him: golf tees engraved with the name of the insurance company he worked for; videotapes of his favorite comedians; a pennant from a professional football team he liked. Although I call my stepfather every Christmas and faithfully send birthday cards, I’ve never stopped thinking of him as an interloper. After my father’s exile, I was, briefly, the king of my mother’s house. I’d thought this was the way it was supposed to be; I was next in the line of succession, after all.

 

If I have more perspective on my Oedipal ambitions now, I am no less interested in reclaiming my territory. Anything of my stepfather’s I come across goes straight into one of the trash bags I’m carrying. Discarded item by discarded item, I begin to restore my mother’s house to the place I felt most comfortable, the place I believed was most mine, the place I would most call home.

 

A box full of empty boxes. (Exhibit location: the attic.)

 

It’s a metaphor, I decide. But of what?

 

Do the dozen small boxes, each large enough to hold a necklace or a tie, represent the gifts we never gave each other?

What gift would I have wanted from my parents?

 

When I was growing up, they gave me model airplane kits, books about dinosaurs, a baseball glove. Later: a Bruce Springsteen album, a black sweater, War and Peace in the original Russian. (A lazy Russophile, I read no more than a page.) But if I could go back in time, to when I was ten or twelve or fifteen, and ask my parents for a gift, I’d wish for something immaterial.

 

It wouldn’t be that they remain married, which would be to wish for both the impossible and the undesirable. They’d had two wedding ceremonies, one Catholic, one Protestant, in order to appease their Montague-and-Capulet parents, who’d deigned to attend only the ceremony they preferred. A more mature and compatible couple might have overcome this inauspicious start, but my parents’ marriage soon became strained, contentious, and, most damaging, adulterous. It needed to end.

 

If I wished that my parents had never married, I wouldn’t be wishing myself out of existence. I’d been conceived two months before they exchanged vows. But as resilient and tough as my mother could be, she would have found single-parenting challenging, especially because my father would have been, at best, a reluctant contributor to my welfare, stingy with his time and his money. And they wouldn’t have had my sister.

 

No, the gifts I wish they’d given me are the gifts I wish they’d given each other.

 

I wish my mother had given my father the gift of her forgiveness. From the start, he was an unsuitable partner, expected to live up to Father Knows Best standards that his own father, an alcoholic who abandoned his family when my father was eight, never came close to meeting. Tormented by his Catholicism, which sanctified sex only if procreation was its aim, my father found sin tempting not only for its pleasures but for the middle finger it waved in the faces of oppressive authorities. Early in his marriage, my father and one of his lovers received a citation for public indecency. My father considered it a kind of medal—proof that he’d defied God, the Catholic Church, and the law. When he told me the story years later, he seemed unconcerned about the only person his behavior had actually hurt—my mother—who’d found the citation in his desk drawer.

 

If my mother had forgiven my father, she would have freed herself from the debilitating anger and resentment she felt toward him. But even in the months before her death, she belittled his character and blasted his failures as a husband and father. She’d forgiven him nothing.

 

From my father, I would have wanted the gift of clarity and compassion—clarity about how he’d made my mother miserable and compassion for her pain. Had he acknowledged my mother’s sorrow and told her he was sorry to see her suffer, he might have lessened the bitterness in their relationship, thereby liberating me from my role as my mother’s confidante and consigliere—and his secret critic and lampoonist.

 

What gifts would my parents have wanted from me?

 

My mother, at her angriest and most wounded, might have wanted even more of my loyalty—perhaps my outright refusal to have anything to do with my father.

 

My father, I suspect, would have liked me to be less sensitive. If I’d been less attentive to my mother’s needs (or neediness, as he might have put it), I would have been more accepting of his relationships, particularly with his second wife. For a long time, I saw her only as my mother did, as someone deserving scorn.

 

What gift would I have given myself if I could reach across the years and place it in my teenage hands? The equanimity to accept my parents’ flaws, including their failure to temper the rancor in their relationship, and the wisdom to realize I had no power to make either of them happy—and no obligation to.

 

Of course, to gain such equanimity and wisdom, I needed to have lived the years I’ve lived. I imagine myself, as in a science fiction novel, returning to the time of my parents’ divorce. Do my parents notice I’m a fifty-six-year-old man with gray hair and spider-web-thin lines at the corners of my eyes? Am I able to retain my transcendent tranquility, or do I become, again, the boy I’d been, caught in the tempest of the never-ending end of my parents’ marriage?

 

Even now, I would have nothing more to offer than a plea—Be kind to each other, please—which is what I wanted to say a thousand times but never did.

 

A Rolex watch. (Exhibit location: a bottom drawer in the vanity in my mother’s dressing room.)

 

I’ve always thought of Rolexes in the same category as Ferraris: showpieces beyond the means of most mortals. Evidently, the watch wasn’t beyond my mother’s means, although it was difficult to determine what her means were. She was open about much of her life but deeply secretive about money. My sister and I watched her spend it sometimes in what we considered frivolous ways—she bought more Beanie Babies than should have been legally permitted, for example—and we braced ourselves for the day she would confess to bankruptcy.

 

I don’t remember my mother buying a Rolex. I think I would have. Although she was circumspect about her money, she was ostentatious about her purchases. Her Beanie Babies occupied half of the shelves in her house. Her Diane Freis dresses filled an entire closet. She bought enough books on tape to listen to John Grisham, Stephen King, and Anne Rivers Siddons over the course of three lifetimes.

 

Did my mother inherit the Rolex from her mother? When my grandfather wasn’t arguing with my grandmother, he worshipped her. Perhaps the watch had been one of the few extravagant gifts he’d bought her. Having survived the Great Depression and worked his way into the middle class, he was a devout believer in the American Dream. A Rolex would have been proof that he’d achieved it.

 

I’ve never imagined owning a Rolex. I’ve lost enough Timexes to wonder if I should own a watch at all. But even if it’s a woman’s watch, too small for my wrist, it’s mine now. Therefore, I’ll need to revise my idea of who I am: poet, former Peace Corps volunteer, teacher, environmentalist, and…Rolex owner! The latter puts me in the company of such luminaries as tennis star Roger Federer and jazz singer Diana Krall.

 

The Rolex has stopped ticking, but HNP Jewelry and Watch Repair is less than a mile from my mother’s house, conveniently tucked in the basement of Rodman’s, which sells everything from Greek wine to organic dog treats to Tylenol. HNP is owned and operated by an older Asian couple, and when I hand the watch to Corey, a soft-spoken man with a subtle wit, he smiles and says he’ll have the battery replaced in ten minutes.

 

As I’m wandering the aisles, I have a sweet fantasy of Corey returning my watch and, after an appreciative whistle, telling me it’s worth $20,000.

 

When I return to his counter, he says, “You’re the man with the Rolex?”

 

I nod as modestly as I can.

 

He retrieves it from his worktable and gives me a sly smile. “You know it’s a fake, right?”

 

“It is?” Surprisingly, my voice doesn’t rise in plaintive disappointment. I’ve prepared for this possibility. What’s too good to be true usually is. I ask, “How do you know?”

 

“From what’s inside it.”

 

Instead of platinum springs and wheels—or whatever the inner components of a Rolex are—I imagine aluminum and plastic.

The new battery is $25. I wonder if the watch is worth half as much.

 

“More fake Rolexes than real,” Corey says. His shrug suggests this is true of so much in our imitation world.

 

Driving back to my mother’s house, I wonder if Bob, one of my mother’s former boyfriends, gave her the “Rolex.” It was Bob, after all, who, as he asked her to marry him, presented her with a ring made of cubic zirconia. He claimed the ring was diamond, but, suspicious, my mother brought it to Tony Bonanno, a famously discerning jeweler with a workshop in the Maryland suburbs. In his gravely, Godfather voice, Bonanno told my mother, “It may be worth $3, but I wouldn’t give you a dollar for it.”

 

When my mother confronted Bob about the ring’s inauthenticity, he tried to reframe its value by telling her it was “made in space.”

 

When my mother shared this information with Tony Bonanno, the jeweler said, “Lady, I think your boyfriend was made in space.”

 

In my mother’s last conversation with Bob, she told him, “Either you’re lying or you’re stupid. Either way, you’re out of here.”

 

I helped Bob load his belongings into the back of his truck before he drove off. His last words to me were: “Go out with your hair on fire.” To this day, I have no idea what he meant.

 

In later year, stories of “Diamond Bob” never failed to draw a laugh from people, even from my mother, who, despite her general good nature, was sensitive about certain portions of her biography. My grandfather found special delight in “Diamond Bob” stories, perhaps because he was susceptible to conmen.

 

My grandfather believed not only in the American Dream but in its accelerated version. He made several investments with acquaintances who promised fast and fantastic returns. One involved a self-healing asphalt. With the technology, my grandfather told me enthusiastically, potholes would become extinct. Potholes defied predictions of their demise, and my grandfather lost $5,000.

 

To the end of his life, he hoped to cash in. Even as he slid into dementia, he mailed off checks to sponsors of sweepstakes, one of which, American Family Publishers, had a prominent (and seemingly trustworthy) spokesman, Ed McMahon, Johnny Carson’s chuckling sidekick on The Tonight Show. My grandfather was convinced that McMahon would soon be knocking on his door, million-dollar check in hand. “But don’t tell your grandmother,” he said to me. “I want it to be a surprise.”

 

I wonder if my grandfather received the “Rolex” as part of “winning” a sweepstakes. My grandmother would have known it was fake. But, respecting his dignity, she would have kept this insight to herself.

 

On my drive back to my house in Morgantown, West Virginia, I think about giving the “Rolex” to my younger daughter, who is twenty and about to leave for a junior-year-abroad semester in Italy. I picture the delight on her face as I hand her what I’ll allow her to believe is the genuine article. I imagine my pleasure at being the author of her joy. How long would I allow her to keep her illusion? Tony Bonanno is dead. He can’t tell her that her father was made in space.

 

I don’t lie to my daughter, but she wants the watch anyway. She’ll have fun pretending it’s authentic, she says.

 

I hand it to her. She places it on her wrist. I’m disappointed: It doesn’t fit perfectly. But: “Good enough,” she says, and, laughing, goes to look at herself in the mirror.

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Excuses for My Disability

Miriam McEwen

This is the part where I make a call to determine my eligibility for a new power wheelchair. Excuse me. My phone is breaking up. Yes. This is the part where I drive. Yes. In my blue bus. This is the name we have for my wheelchair-accessible vehicle. Yes, really. I drive for an hour to reach this appointment with an apologetic-looking doctor. I am late. I am sorry. Excuse me, the doctor’s gray-gold eyes seem to say, but you are late. I nod. This is the part where the doctor sighs and takes me into his office despite my lateness. This is the part where he settles into his creaky office chair and says, “Yes. What seems to be the trouble?” And I say, “My wheelchair. It’s breaking. It’s seven years old. I need a new one. I’m eligible.” I show the doctor how the metal parts which hold my foot pedals on have been inexplicably crushed. This part right here is why my foot pedals dangle like that. The doctor nods. I show him how the wheelchair’s driving console keeps flashing green and red and yellow. I don’t know why. But this is the part where I confess I’ve had the wheelchair out in the rain quite a lot. The doctor’s gray-gold eyes are surprised, seeming to say, Excuse me, but you are in a power wheelchair, so small wonder the wheelchair is breaking. No. I mean—yes. But I like the rain too much not to be out in it. “The wheelchair is seven years old,” I say again. This is the part where the doctor asks if I believe I will always be disabled. “What?” I say. “Yes, yeah.” No, somehow, too. But I’m eligible.

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On Love and Duty

Joyce Dehli

 

“Will you help me?” Michael whispered in my ear as plates of his mother’s rhubarb pie were passed around the table.

 

Michael had asked my partner Grace and me to join his family’s brunch one late-summer Sunday in 1995. Before others took seats, he’d motioned for us to sit on either side of him. I understood: we were his sentinels. As it turned out, he didn’t need our protection. Michael’s family had gathered for him, but they mostly left him alone. His three brothers ribbed each other incessantly, occasionally enfolding their mother into their banter. They hadn’t seen Michael since his AIDS diagnosis, though they lived only thirty minutes away, near the farm where they’d been boys together. Michael’s two sisters and a few friends cared for him.

 

Michael was really Grace’s friend. A decade earlier, they’d gotten sober together as part of a tight group of gay and lesbian AA friends. They were all in their early twenties then, except for Michael who was about ten years older. By the time I met Grace a few years later, her circles were widening. Still, her core group stayed tight, and I saw Michael at potlucks and picnics. We talked a little. In their boisterous group, he was the shy one. His hair was summer wheat, his eyes sky blue. I liked his field-worthy jeans and checkered, short-sleeve shirts buttoned over white tees. He reminded me of the farmers on organic cereal boxes, happy amid their grains. He tolerated discos but adored country line dancing. If he could, he would have traded his graphic-design job for tending gardens, hands in soil, and fresh blooms always in the offing. That’s all I knew. Grace was our only link; I had my own friends.

 

Things changed when Jonathan, the youngest of their sobriety group, died from AIDS. He was the one they’d tried to protect, the dashing and needy one who, in his late teens, had fled his small hometown in northeastern Wisconsin for Madison. Before long, his dreams of a writerly life with worldly men took him to Chicago, but he kept his ties to Grace and Michael. After Jonathan’s death, his parents whisked his body back to the town he’d despised and to a church that prayed he would be forgiven for the life he had lived. His friends drove two hours to his funeral. They did it for Jonathan, though they knew the ceremony would be brutal. I went along. On the ride home, our car overflowed with stories, hilarious and tender, of the man they loved. Michael didn’t talk much. We didn’t know then, but he was already sick. HIV had become AIDS.

 

One Sunday, not a year later, Michael called our house in a panic. He said his brain wasn’t right; it switched off and on, off and on, froze up and split in pain. Grace and I took him to the emergency room. After hours of tests and waiting, a doctor said he’d had a series of ministrokes called TIAs, or transient ischemic attacks. Blood flow to his brain had sputtered for a spell. AIDS was to blame, the doctor confirmed. He sent Michael home, warning him to expect more attacks.

 

Michael called us regularly to take him to the ER, usually on weekends. Looking back, I think he was being considerate of our time, knowing we worked long hours during the week. He contained his terrors until they burst on weekends. Most of his other friends—gay men and an ex-boyfriend with whom he still lived—were exhausted by the needs of those dying around them. They were devastated by relentless loss. Some turned away from Michael. Grace loved Michael like an older brother, but she sometimes grew annoyed when he called. Still, she remained steadfast. Unlike Grace, I could keep my distance. I wasn’t bound to Michael in the same way. I sometimes wondered: what is my duty here?

 

In the decades that followed, I asked myself that question often—when dying friends lingered in illness and when cancer took my dad, slowly and painfully, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. What was my duty, and could I bear it? Could I watch what dying inflicts on a human body? Could I bear the grief that precedes death, gathering into itself like darkness before a storm? Could I bear knowing that whatever care I gave, it couldn’t be enough? And when I wanted to flee, would I stay or turn away?

 

As Michael’s circle shrank, his anxiety swelled. The sicker he looked, the clearer it became to everyone: this man had AIDS. Nobody took open seats near us in the ER waiting room. If he’d wanted, Michael could have lived most of his life passing as straight. But as he grew gaunt and weak, he was seen as a man with AIDS. And, given that this was the mid-1990s, people assumed he was gay.

 

He wouldn’t have hidden if he could. When Michael got sober, he committed to being himself in the world. Grace lived that way too, but not me. Although I was generally out, I excelled at managing what people knew about me: more truth for some, less truth for others. I calculated the risks of being out against the pain of hiding. Standing beside Michael, I felt vulnerable to derision. I didn’t always speak up for him.

 

Once, two white-coated ER residents ridiculed Michael for being scared. As he trembled in a gown on the edge of a hospital bed, they—a woman and a man—stood several feet away, practically shouting their questions: “What year is this?” “Who is the president?” When Michael answered incorrectly, the woman laughed at him. The man accused Michael of seeking attention. Clearly, they wanted Michael to go away. Grace and I were outraged, but we said nothing. Perhaps Grace thought it was better for Michael if we didn’t complain. We didn’t want him to get kicked out. But maybe I also feared their disdain for Michael would extend to me. I’d speak up today, but I knew less of life then.

 

Michael’s regular doctor said he could stay home as long as he had people caring for him. A few friends set a schedule and divided tasks, until Michael’s ex-boyfriend-turned-landlord kicked him out. He said he couldn’t watch another death. That’s when Michael’s younger sister took him in. She lived alone in a small house nearby and delivered mail in the mornings. His older sister flew in from L.A. and stayed for weeks. Before long, the sisters proposed the family brunch. The family hadn’t gathered in a long time.

 

By then, Michael looked twice his age of forty-three—all bones, covered by bruised and mottled skin, with wispy patches of hair on his head. If his mother and brothers were shocked to see him, they didn’t show it. The brothers came in with fists jammed in their jean pockets. They didn’t hug Michael or even touch him. All morning, the sisters were up and down from their dining-room chairs, bringing out an egg-bake and plates of cinnamon rolls to the table, filling coffee cups, and clearing leftovers for pie. The brothers talked of the growing season and how farming had changed in the years since their father’s death. Mostly they joked, drawing out their mother’s laughter to the point that she had coughing fits. One of her lungs had been removed for cancer, and now the other had it. The family had known loss and soon would know more.

 

Michael spoke little and ate less. Now and then, he smiled, though seemingly not about anything in particular. His eyes held one person, then another. Grace jumped into family stories, asked questions, and laughed appreciatively. I could not. I was stunned, then furious that nobody asked Michael about himself. Nobody mentioned his illness. They knew he had AIDS, just as they knew he was gay—another secret that wasn’t a secret. Yet, his brothers barely glanced his way.

 

I was quick to judge Michael’s brothers as cowards. Quick to assume that what Michael needed from them were words. I was certain Michael needed to hear that his family knew him, loved him, and could bear his illness with him. Now, in the second half of my life, I wonder if I was wrong. Maybe Michael didn’t need words as much as he needed his family’s presence. His brothers came as close as they dared at the Sunday brunch. And he welcomed them, though with Grace and me and his sisters at his side. Michael didn’t speak the words: gay, AIDS, dying. He put aside radical honesty in order to receive his brothers’ love as offered. This was more than Jonathan got, and maybe it was enough for Michael. I don’t know. It wouldn’t be enough for me.

 

Much is expected of those who love the dying, and those expectations are often enough to scare a person away. But my role with Michael seemed limited and clear. At the brunch, I knew my place: the loyal sentinel, bound not by love but by duty. I fumed, but I kept quiet and refused my slice of pie.

 

When Michael whispered—“Will you help me?”—I was glad for a reason to leave the table. He clutched his cane and gave me his arm. As we shuffled down the hallway, the table talk faded. I expected he wanted to nap.

 

“I need to go to the bathroom,” he said.

 

All of my anger at his brothers turned into fear for me. I didn’t want to be afraid, but I was.

 

AIDS deaths peaked in the United States that year. Within several months, the FDA would approve antiretroviral drugs that would turn AIDS into a manageable, if chronic, disease for many people. But for Michael, like those before him, the diagnosis was a death sentence. We had brochures from the local AIDS Support Network to guide our caregiving since we didn’t have the Internet then. Touching was okay. We knew AIDS was transmitted through blood and semen, as well as vaginal fluids, but not saliva, sweat, or urine. But what if Michael had a cut, an open wound? He had thin skin and bouts of incontinence. When his sisters cleaned him, they wore gloves. Nobody was completely sure how careful to be. I tended toward caution and focused on doing chores and running errands for Michael, not bodily care. Mostly, he and I talked, often about gardening. Grace did more. I held back not only because I was afraid of AIDS. I was afraid to watch a person die. It was my first time.

 

I opened the bathroom door, and we squeezed inside. Toothpaste and brushes, soap, rubbing alcohol, and creams crowded a shelf above the sink. I guided Michael to a narrow space between the toilet and the tub.

 

“I need you to help me,” he said.

 

“Okay, with what?”

 

“Everything,” he said. He leaned heavily toward me, exhausted.

 

Why me? That was my first thought. I heard his brothers’ laughter, those men who had grown up with him and had bodies like his. Why not them? Why not the mother who gave birth to him? His sisters? Even Grace? Why did Michael ask me? How did I get here? 

 

“Okay, so you just need to pee, right?” I asked.

 

He nodded. I undid his belt, unzipped his fly, let his pants drop to his ankles, and pulled down his underwear.

 

“Okay,” I said again. But I knew there was more to do. Michael wasn’t steady, and I didn’t want to get wet. What if there was blood in his urine? I wondered if doctors were absolutely sure urine didn’t transmit HIV. If I got AIDS, Grace would be there for me, but not my family—I felt sure of that then, but I didn’t really know. It would be just Grace and me and, as it was with Michael, a few friends. The thought of dying, as Michael was dying, terrified me.

 

It’s strange how many thoughts can blaze through a mind in a second or two, leaving—one hopes—no outward sign. I did what I needed to do. I held Michael’s penis, aimed at the bowl, shook off the last few drops, and wiped him.

 

“Thank you,” he said.

 

The brunch ended soon afterward, and I don’t think his mother or brothers saw him again until his funeral several weeks later. In the weeks between, AIDS-related dementia took over Michael’s mind, slowly at first, then swiftly. When Grace and I came for our shifts during the week, or just to say hello, Michael was always in bed. He’d lost language and could no longer speak with words. But I felt sure we communicated even toward the end.

 

One rainy day, Grace and I found Michael agitated, rustling on his bed with gym shorts over his diapers. He was as small as a skinny boy, his body was withered and worn.

 

It was Grace’s idea to put something on the turntable. She thumbed through the dozen or so albums on a shelf, pulled one out, and dropped the needle. She nodded at me and smiled at Michael.

 

“If I should stay …”  

 

Michael stopped moving. Grace turned up the volume until Whitney Houston’s voice swelled through the room, through the whole damn house. Grace and I sang along to Michael: “And I will always love you / I will always love you…”

 

Ardent and loud, we kept singing. I fumbled the lyrics until we returned to the chorus, then I belted it, and Grace did too. “I will always love you.” We twirled at the foot of Michael’s bed. We drew our hands to our hearts, then threw our arms out to him. He flung his arms toward us with glee. His eyes shone. His smile was radiant. His sounds merged with our song. We hugged him, enfolding him, all the while singing. We were happy. I believe we were all happy in that moment.

 

Grace had to return to work, but I stayed a little longer. I sat on the bed beside Michael, who was half-raised against pillows. I reached for his hand, surprised to feel content. Michael curled onto his side and nudged his head onto my thigh, where he fell asleep.

 

I wondered then, as I still do, why Michael let me near in his dying days. It’s true that he needed help and I was there. Still, he kept plenty of people out. Maybe his trust in Grace extended to me. Maybe he’d decided I was basically kind. And with me, the stakes weren’t so high. Not like they were with the people he loved, the people he wasn’t sure would come, would stay. It’s the closest ones who have the power to hurt you most. He knew that, and maybe that was reason enough.

 

I gave Michael so little, and sometimes not enough. At times, he asked more of me than I thought I could bear. That was a gift, but one I didn’t appreciate until years later when friends and my father were dying. Every time, I felt afraid. Every time, a voice told me to run. Still, I showed up. I stayed. I made mistakes. Too often, I said the wrong thing. By the time my father died, I knew that while words matter, you can’t say everything at the end. You don’t have to.

 

I went to my friends and my father out of love. But love wasn’t what drew me to Michael, and love wasn’t why I stayed through his illness. He might have been at the edge of my circle, but he was there. I went to him as I go to my garden: duty-bound to tend what is in my backyard. That’s how I imagine Michael tended his garden, from shoots through blooms through winter beds at rest. Maybe that is what he and I were doing from the start—tending each other—from those early talks at parties, through the days of his illness, to the end when silence replaced words. I think that’s right. I wonder if Michael knew how much I grew, tended by him.

 

Sometimes love follows duty. And, as every gardener knows, tending offers its own rewards: the rhythmic turning of soil, pressing seeds, pulling weeds. You pray for sun one day and rain the next, as if you had a say in what lives and what dies.

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Announcing the Winner of the Editor’s Prize for Creative Nonfiction

Congratulations to Faith Shearin, our 2023 winner for the Editor’s Prize in Creative Nonfiction! Her essay, “Going Home,” will be available to read in our Spring 2024 issue.

Faith Shearin’s seven books of poetry include: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), Telling the Bees (SFA University Press), Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize), Darwin’s Daughter (SFA University Press), and Lost Language (Press 53). Her poems have been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry. She has received awards from Yaddo, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her essays and short stories have won awards from New Ohio Review, The Missouri Review, and Literal Latte, among others. Two YA novels — Lost River, 1918 and My Sister Lives in the Sea — won The Global Fiction Prize, judged by Anthony McGowan, and have been published by Leapfrog Press.

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The Purported Magic of Broccolini

When, on several occasions, my Twitter crush tweets that he’s eating broccolini, I feel intrigued. I’ve eaten broccolini a couple of times, in restaurants, but never prepared it at home. I begin looking for broccolini each time I visit the grocery store, with no luck. After two months, broccolini becomes available from my online imperfect produce delivery. Jackpot!

            I become very excited about the broccolini, which I must wait three days to receive. Although I’m no longer in full pandemic isolation mode, I work from home, am single, and see friends only occasionally. Most of my waking life is spent indoors, staring at a screen, or on long, slow walks that I hope counterbalance those other hours.

            To combat loneliness and keep my spirits up, I try to give myself a continual stream of small thrills — walking a new route, photographing a neighbor’s rose mallow hibiscus bush, listening to a musician I’ve never heard before, and, now, exploring the purported magic of broccolini.

            I search for information about broccolini online to fuel my excitement as I wait for the order to arrive, like a child would research a gift they are expecting for Christmas. I know what I’m doing is a little silly, a contrived effort laid forth as part of a larger attempt to maintain mental and emotional health. But don’t we all need a little silliness sometimes? For me, at least, researching broccolini has healing properties.

            Since I’d heard broccolini referred to as “baby broccoli,” I’d mistakenly thought it was the broccoli plant harvested at a young age. But I learn broccolini is not young broccoli. It’s actually a hybrid of broccoli and gai lan, another Brassica vegetable also called Chinese kale or Chinese broccoli.

            Further, the word broccolini is trademarked. This hybrid vegetable, only legally allowed to be referred to as “broccolini” by the company Mann Packing, is nutritionally similar to broccoli, providing protein, fiber, iron, and potassium. But because broccolini is denser, you’d need to eat nearly twice as much broccoli to receive the same amount of nutrients.

            Mann Packing isn’t the only brand that trademarked a term for my virtual crush’s favorite veggie, though they seem to be the most successful. Other companies have trademarked “bimi” and the aptly named “tenderstem.”  Those who prefer not to use branded terms for this piece of produce may call it broccoletti, Italian sprouting broccoli, aspiration, and — my personal favorite, albeit slightly inaccurate — sweet baby broccoli.

            When my broccolini arrives, it looks slim and long. The stems end in playfully floppy, round florets. After examining it closely, I put my broccolini in the fridge. When I take it out the next day at dinnertime, I see that tiny yellow flowers have bloomed around the edges overnight. An internet search shows the yellow flowers indicate the broccolini has aged, but is still safe to eat.

            I sautee the broccolini in oil for only a few minutes as the internet had instructed, strain it, and spoon it into a bowl. Although I rarely use butter, I drop a pat on top of the slightly charred aspiration, watching the pale yellow square melt onto the green stems and bright yellow flowers. I squeeze a few drops of juice from a halved lemon over the dish, then grind sea salt on top.

            I decide to eat my long-awaited broccolini at the dining room table, like it’s special, like I’m special, and not someone who eats most meals either at her desk while looking at the computer or on the couch while watching television.

            The first bite is soft and warm on my tongue. I eat slowly, with my eyes closed. The richness of butter, the tang of lemon, make the vegetable taste luxurious, sultry even.

            All of my excited preparation no longer feels the least bit silly. My effort was well worth it. The broccolini tastes like I picked it on a walk through a field rather than ordered it online. As if I prepared it over an open flame outdoors rather than in a suburban kitchen. I feel like I’m in a fairy tale — “The Woman Who Eats Yellow Flowers” — and I don’t want to leave.

            I consider standing back up to get my phone for the purpose of taking a photo of the dish and tweeting it at him with the text, “You’re an influencer!”

            I refrain. This moment is mine.

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