We Need to Talk (or, Mrs. Marsh)
"Goddamn," she sighed raggedly, making another in a series of false grabs for the back door. She turned around and stepped back toward where I sat, but I didn't look at her. I was focusing on the omelette on my plate (a late-night snack). "Two years ago if you'd have gone I would have been a-okay." She made a gesture, which I caught in the corner of my eye, signifying a-okay, the same one she used when she said "lickity-split." "But now, it's just painfully hard. Painfully hard." She sobbed once, then stepped out into the night to light a cigarette.
I looked at my plate. Not a thought crossed my mind. At some point I picked up my fork and sliced the omelette with it. But I wasn't thinking about eating.
Then she came back in. She seemed to have calmed down some. "Well, I'll tell you this, Craig," she said, and sat down at the table. "From this point on, your life is in your hands. You're an adult now."
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," I said.
"No, you're an adult. I mean, you're an adult."
"Hm," I said. I stood up and took the plate with the uneaten omelette back into the kitchen. I went to the pantry to get some plastic wrap. She was standing at the counter.
"All these years, I've been saying to Sharon Marsh and all the other moms, 'He's so brilliant, he's so amazing,' but you hardly made it through high school."
I wrapped up the plate and put it in the fridge for later. Really I didn't want the omelette, but I figured it would hurt her feelings if I didn't save what I couldn't eat. A friend and I had eaten dinner not long before, but when Mom sets her mind on something, say making me an omelette, she can't be diverted from her path.
"And I know it's true," she was saying. "You are brilliant, and you are amazing."
"I don't know," I said.
"No, you are. You are brilliant, and you are amazing. But... What are you gonna do with yourself? What are you going to do with your life?"
"What do you mean? In college or after?" I went back to the table, where my fork still lay on the paper napkin.
"Well, anywhere. How are you gonna take care of yourself? Are you gonna go to class? Are you gonna do well, or drop out?"
I thought about it for a second. The table wasn't really where I wanted to be. Conversations like these never led anywhere good. I decided to give a truthful response, but one that I hoped would end the discussion. "As much as I can, I'd just like to do what I feel like."
She took my fork to the dishwasher, and the napkin to the trash. "What does that mean? 'Whatever you feel like doing?' What's gonna happen to you?"
"Well, ideally, the things that happen to me would be things that I feel should happen to me," I said uncertainly.
"I don't like the idea of anything happening to you."
"Look," I said. "I don't mean something happening to me, like... you know, something happening. I just mean, I'll do my homework because I don't want to drop out. Maybe I'll go to a few parties because I want to meet new people. If I really don't feel like doing my homework, then I guess I won't. But because I won't want to drop out, I'll keep my head above water. That's all."
"I don't want anything to happen to you," she said, getting a little choked up again.
About a month ago things changed with Stan, my boyfriend. Well, he was my boyfriend a month ago—now I'm not entirely sure what to call him. And though I know it's not right, for the past month I've blamed his mother, Mrs. Marsh.
Stan's family has always been extremely important to him. You could call his family the most important thing in his life—more important even than Catholicism, which is huge. I know your family is supposed to be the most important thing in your life, but come on, for how many teenagers is that actually true? Maybe I'm wrong. At the very least, it's not true for me. Anyway, back to Stan. His sister, Shelley, is his best friend, although I hear they fought a lot when they were younger. They have conversations together that they'd never have with anyone else. Shelley was the first person Stan came out to. After that he came out to his parents, who have always been more than a couple of enforcers.
Now, I think Shelley is pretty cool. When Stan came out to her, she was okay with it, even though she's always been a devout Catholic, just like the rest of their family. As I understand it, many Catholics aren't big into homosexuality. So the fact that his sister was so accepting of him was encouraging to Stan. He came out to his parents, who were not as immediately supportive. Get this: he cried when he did it. He cried in front of his parents!
Stan tells me his father was okay with his confession. His mother, on the other hand... not so. It wasn't that she condemned his sexuality, or that she even had anything major against gay people. But she's always sort of had her head in the news, and in the wrong stations; back when it was a big thing, she got an earful of AIDS reports, and apparently it created lasting scars. This isn't fair for me to say, but a viewpoint like that, one completely informed by Fox News, you probably lump gay people together with heroin addicts and tattoo freaks. Anyway, she worried that something bad might happen to her son because of his sexuality. And not something imprecise. There was a world of horrible possibilities: he could get beaten up, he could get sick, he could be denied positions in the workplace, etc. Oh, and I'm sure she also wondered how it would affect her son's personality and behavior if he started adopting whatever persona gays are supposed to adopt.
The first time I met Stan's parents was before he and I were together. We were chilling at his house, watching "Pitch Black," that sci-fi pterodactyl-kinda movie with Vin Diesel. It was around midnight, and his parents got home from a party. This was mid-sophomore year, around February. Sorry, but I can't be more specific than that. Stan and I had been going to school together for a long time, but I had never really talked to him until recently, and so I'd never been over to the Marsh house. Stan introduced me to his parents. "Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Marsh"; "Hello, there, Craig." No strong impression was made. They seemed okay—they were very well-dressed—and I probably seemed okay to them. I mean, I didn't do or say anything out of the ordinary. They went to bed, and Stan and I finished the movie. Then Stan engaged me in this philosophical discussion related to "Pitch Black."This is a side note, but he always thought too much about the macro and never enough about the micro. It's like when he meant to do soul-searching, he just fooled himself into thinking he was searching the universe for some sort of Answer. Anyway, after that I went home.
The next time I talked to Stan's parents was in senior year, after Stan and I had gotten together, and they had already come to dislike me. First of all, they knew I was with their son, and they didn't like that one bit. Stan had come out to them two years earlier, but as far as they knew he'd never had a boyfriend until now. Also, even if I weren't his boyfriend, they probably wouldn't have liked me. They knew that I had once encouraged him to lie to them.
Here's what happened: it was early on in my relationship with Stan, before his parents knew about us. It was getting late on a Wednesday night, say around 10:00. It was raining like crazy. Stan and I had met at school and gotten into to the music room through a window with a broken lock, played the piano for a while, and then made out by the door. Now we were in the back seat of my car, naked, listening to music and the rain coming down. We weren't fooling around, because he wasn't into that. But we had managed to strip each other nonetheless, and now were just talking, getting used to the sight of each other's bodies. He got a text message from his mother. "Where are you?" she wanted to know. I said, "Tell her we went to Richard's, that café on Main. We're there now, and you'll be home shortly." "Yeah, okay," he said. He sent the message, and we got back to talking. Actually, we may have started making out. Suddenly two headlights appeared in the parking lot directly above us. There was a good deal of foliage between the two lots, not to mention a difference in elevation, but still we could see the headlights gleaming in the darkness like two booby-trapped gems in an Indiana Jones flick. "Shit, shit," Stan said, and started putting on his clothes. He was always skittish. "Get dressed," he said. The car above us started to back out of its space. For a moment I thought it might come down to our lot. Maybe it had some business there. Nothing I could do about it, in any case, other than put my pants on. So I pretty much just chilled while Stan freaked out. The car drove right past our lot, toward the road. How long was that car there, I wondered. It seemed to me that it had been there when we parked. But surely its occupants hadn't just sat there the whole time? No, they must've been out in the rain. Suddenly it occurred to me to worry that we'd been seen. But the next moment I thought, Well, how could they have seen us? Like I said, there was a clump of trees between our two lots, and their lot was much higher than ours. Sitting inside their car, the people probably wouldn't have been able to look down and see us. Plus it was raining really hard, and that obscured everything more than fifteen feet away. My headlights were off; they probably hadn't even noticed my car parked below them.
Stan got a text from his mother. "Come home" was all it said.
When he got home, Stan's parents grilled him. Apparently that was them above us. They'd been snooping around school, because Stan hangs out there a lot after it gets out, and they didn't believe that he was with me at Richard's. Why, I don't know. Anyway, they'd seen his car in the lot above ours and jumped to conclusions. At this point, Stan could've said, "Well, we took his car." But he probably already had the deer-in-the-headlights look on his face, and besides, he could never lie to his parents. So he said, "Craig encouraged me to lie to you guys." He said that.
Anyway, a lot was riding on that second meeting with his parents. I had hoped to have dinner with them at some point, so I could try to convince them I wasn't such a bad guy, but Stan was afraid that would reflect some kind of commitment, which he was totally uncomfortable with.
And so my second meeting with Mr. and Mrs. Marsh came in late May, when Stan threw a party at Stark's Pond celebrating our high school graduation. At this point Stan's parents knew this much about me: I was gay and probably corrupting their son, I was comfortable lying to adults, and I hadn't graduated with honors. That's all. Stan and I didn't interact much during the party. Most of his friends didn't know about us, and he wanted to keep it that way. Though I was out to everyone at that point, he wasn't. I didn't talk to his parents, either, except to say hello and Thank-you-for-having-me.
Anyway, at one point I was in line to get some barbecue from the buffet. Stan's father was serving the meat at the end of the buffet table, and he was talking to the guy in front of me about some sports team. Now, I'm not one of those girly guys you see around—in fact most people were shocked when I came out—but I am sort of a wimp, and sports have never been my thing. I don't play 'em, and I don't watch 'em on TV, either. But from what I could tell, this guy knew his stuff, and Stan's father seemed to be enjoying their conversation. Once the guy had his food, he went back to the dock.
"Turkey," I said to Mr. Marsh. Then, "Hi."
"Hi, Craig," he said, and smiled. It was an average smile. The kind you give to your son's friend. He gave me a good piece of turkey breast. Then he showed me his smile again, and this time it did look a little halfhearted.
"Thanks," I said, and went back to the dock. I wasn't embarrassed by my conversational inadequacy for long, because really I'm not conversationally inadequate, and I had a good time down on the shore with all my classmates. But still, I wonder what effect that exchange had on Stan's father's impression of me. Did he know I was a wimp now, and did that lead him to make other assumptions?
Anyway, the party lasted late into the evening. At around eleven, Stan and most of the remaining partygoers went back to his house to watch"Once Upon a Time in Mexico." Clyde Donovan and I, old friends, said we'd join them in a minute, and stayed out on the dock to smoke a few cigarettes.
The water was as still as a mirror. Nearby there was a house wrapped in blue and green Christmas lights, where a quiet party was dying down. You could just make out the ghost of a sad country song floating across the water. The moon seemed particularly big, and it hung right above us. Clyde got some liquor from his car that he'd been saving, and we took a few burning swigs. Then we got to talking about "The Big Lebowski" or something like that; maybe I'm just thinking Coen Brothers because Stan and I were really into "Raising Arizona" then. In any case, we didn't hear Stan's mother walking around behind us. What she was doing cleaning up the place near midnight, I'll never know. But she happened to look over and see us smoking, illuminated by the light over the dock. When Clyde and I looked back and noticed her, it was too late to hide our cigarettes and booze. She was standing there looking at us. Not scornfully, but you know. Catholic and all, and us being seventeen. And me being in a relationship with her son on top of that, well. She didn't say anything, and neither did we. She just went back to doing what she was doing. But it was bad news, all the same.
Lately Stan's mother has had a vice grip on his schedule. At her request he got a job in Fairplay, where he works six hours a day, five days a week. It takes about an hour and a half for him to get there and back, depending on how bad traffic is. She's also forbidden him to go out on week nights. They spend an hour a night praying, as a family.
Of course, Stan's responsible for never calling me. (It's been about a month since I've so much as talked to him, and I haven't seen him around town.) But after I ran out of contempt for Stan, I got angry at his mother. Who was this bitch, I thought, forcing me and Stan apart? She had the EQ of an iceberg, and had somehow sterilized Stan so that he was just like her. With her disapproval and overbearingness she had ruined our relationship. Stan's first worthwhile relationship as well as mine.
But like I said, I don't know. I don't really have the right to be mad at her, and I'm not anymore.
When I was at the table with my mom tonight, I knew what she wanted. She wanted me to reach out and put my hand on her shoulder, and to say something reassuring. But I don't know what I would've said to console her, even if I'd bothered to try. I've never allowed emotion to enter my discussions with my mom. Sometimes she can get a little emotional, but never me. To be honest, the thought of being open with her kind of makes me recoil, as though I'd just touched some bug with too many legs.
Anyway, that's not what I want to talk about.
Stan's mother isn't too different from mine. She wants what's best for her son, and she's afraid of what might happen when he grows up. Those are normal fears, but for the parent of a gay kid they're especially worrisome. Moreover, she wants a little tenderness while Stan's still around. Though I think the measures she takes to protect him and keep him in the house are over the top, I guess I see where she's coming from. She's not vindictive or controlling, really. Just concerned.
I should have comforted my mom when I was at the table with her. I know that. When did I become so distant from her? Sometimes she says to me, "You must have been so sad in middle school," and when I ask her to explain what she means, she says, "Well, I don't know." All these years, I should've been talking to her about what I was feeling. Whereas Stan came out to his parents more or less right off the bat, I saved my mom for last. Everyone at school knew before her, even other parents. What did she do to deserve that kind of neglect?
My mom's sporadic attempts to keep me in the house read a little differently than Mrs. Marsh's complete dominance over her children. My mom is desperate. She feels like there will be nothing left for her once I'm gone, even after I denied her open communication for years. Mrs. Marsh, unlike my mom, will have her husband and her church and probably other things after her son leaves. But nevertheless, she's completely attached to her boy, and look how she's letting it affect everyone's life. What's keeping my mom from doing that, too? Doesn't Mrs. Marsh know her son loves her? Maybe I'm wrong, and I still don't understand.
For a while I wondered if desperation wasn't a quality common to mothers everywhere. But then I thought about Stan, how I grew so attached to to him, how I would give anything to be back with him, to have kept that relationship alive. After a month with no communication, I still wonder what he's doing, how he's living, when or if he'll contact me. And I wish I had tried to be more alluring last time we were together. Maybe that would have changed things. If only I'd put his CD on in the car, instead of that stupid one I made. If only I'd put on a button-down instead of a t-shirt, or some khakis instead of those worn out jeans. Most of all, I wish that I had responded just that much differently when he nonchalantly and unemotionally said, "I love you.