May 1987
Ennis didn't own a car. He made deliveries with the East West Magazine van and that was all the driving he cared to do in Boston. As on most mornings, he was cycling along the bike path on the Cambridge side of the Charles River. After a couple of miles he would cross the BU bridge and meander into Brookline. He had the green light as he approached JFK Street, but he glanced to the left to make sure the car cruising alongside him wasn't signaling right. As he entered the crosswalk he heard brakes screech and a horn blare. "Asshole!" the driver yelled after him, and turned right.
That Boston driver couldn't diminish the pleasure that suffused him that morning. The weather was perfect and for 45 minutes, until he reached Brookline Village, he could pretend he was still a student – a time in his life when his future could remain safely vague. He knew the source of his contentment: Joe was back in town, even though the news he'd broken about his boss had unsettled Ennis for some reason.
They had shared an apartment in Brighton after freshman year, and Joe had continued to pay his half of the rent after he moved to DC following graduation. He came back up to Boston for work several times a year; since he lived with his sister in her condo in Washington, he could afford it. When Ennis had given up the apartment to live with Jay in Cambridge, they'd made sure there was space for Joe to crash.
But seeing Joe these past two days had reminded Ennis that he hadn't really gotten anywhere since graduation. Joe liked to joke that it was thanks to Ennis' way with words that he was where he was now, that he owed his job to his best friend. It was Joe's way with people, though, that had helped him navigate the path to Washington.
He coasted into Brookline Village, down Station Street and straight into the loading bay of the old warehouse that now contained offices. He walked his bike onto the freight elevator and rose to the third floor, where he locked it to the radiator down the hall from the East West door. Then he fished a clean black t-shirt from his knapsack and changed into it. MISSION OF BURMA was stenciled in red letters across the front, a memento of his early college days. It was the birthday of Tina, an assistant editor who wore only black day in and day out; the rest of the staff secretly agreed to come to work dressed in that color to mark the occasion.
When he walked in the door, Susan the new receptionist was wearing a black turtleneck and a long black skirt. Don the circulation manager, with whom Ennis shared the first office immediately off the reception area, had the Globe open on his desk and was sipping coffee from a black mug as he turned the pages. As befitted a geezer like Don, (as Ennis jokingly called him) he was clad in a black polo shirt and black suit pants instead of a rock band t-shirt and black jeans.
"Has she noticed?" Ennis asked. He tried to see which section of the paper Don was reading.
"She's not in yet." Don set down his mug and made a face. "Susan brought in soy milk for the coffee. Everybody's bitching about it."
"Gee, I wonder why she thought we'd go for that."
Lureen swanned into their office, all black tights, black mini skirt, black silk blouse, black suede vest, long black hair and red lips. Don folded the newspaper and sat up straight while Ennis reconsidered the verb. All the swans he'd ever seen were white so that didn't fit. He tried to think of an elegant or long legged bird that had black plumage.
"You look great in that outfit, Lureen."
Ennis thought Don might have more luck with that line if he didn't use it on her every day. He always moaned to Ennis that he was out of her league. Ennis never said so, but he objected to using baseball metaphors to talk about women.
Before she could respond, they heard the front door open. Through the doorway, Ennis saw Susan look up and her eyes widen. Lureen shifted her stance ever so slightly as she glanced toward the front desk and Ennis noticed her lips twitch into a half-smile. It must be the color separation house rep, he thought. The guy looked like a model, or a movie star.
"Can... can I help you?" Susan stammered.
"It's alright, he's going back to the art department," Lureen drawled. She smiled sweetly at the man, who flashed his perfect teeth and winked at her as he walked past and down to the end of the hall. Susan looked toward the three of them and fanned herself, her eyes wide.
Lureen rolled her eyes. "Looks aren't everything," she sighed as she turned and headed back to the advertising department.
"Easy for her to say," Don muttered. The thing was, Lureen really was out of Don's league, and Ennis' too. She was the same age as Ennis, so fifteen years younger than Don, but she made a lot more money. Ennis suspected she might even be married, based on a remark he once overheard outside the bookkeeper's office. Lureen was a bit mysterious.
"Why don't you offer to give her a foot rub," Ennis suggested to Don, who had a reflexology practice on weekends and evenings.
"I did. I asked her once if she wanted to come in for a session but she turned me down."
Ennis could think of better lines to use to get Lureen's foot in his lap, not that he wanted that for himself. He opened his mouth to offer one up to Don, but then had a thought: maybe he should charge for them.
He'd noticed that all the staff who had no direct role in producing the magazine had sidelines, either because they couldn't live on their East West salary or because their work wasn't interesting, or both. Mary in the mailroom catered parties and Sue drove around authors who came to Boston on book tours.
When Ennis had imagined working for a magazine, his fantasy job had been to be a staff writer or editor, not Distribution Manager. Since graduating, he'd worked at Kinko's Copies, then as a sign painter and of course had written ad copy for those two brothers on the Cape who catered clam bakes – when he wasn't digging the pits. He seemed to be circling around his dream. Working for a magazine reminded him of farming, with the planting and harvesting cycle compressed into one month. But instead of operating the tractor or the combine harvester, he was the guy who trucked the crop to the grain elevators.
Just then he heard the front door open again and the sound of heavy boots clomping across the wooden floor. Tina strode by without glancing into their office and went straight to the one she shared with two other assistant editors. She'd been a student at BU the same time as Ennis but he hadn't known her, though he remembered fondly the girls who were like her, with their black spiky hair and studs and ear cuffs, black rags and Doc Martens. But towards Tina he felt a twinge of unjustified resentment that she had managed to snag an editorial job.
"That's weird, she's wearing a white t-shirt today," Ennis remarked. When Don didn't respond, he glanced over at him.
"Holy shit!" Don had opened the Globe again and was staring down at an article. "Barney Frank is gay?"
"Sure, didn't you know?" Of course, Ennis hadn't known until last night. Joe had told them over pizza about the Globe interview. Ennis had to admit he'd been shocked. How could a dumpy nerdy guy like that be gay?
"Wow, look at this picture. He looks gr— a lot better now." There was wonder in Don's voice as he handed the paper to Ennis.
It was true. Barney Frank had lost weight, cut short his salt and pepper hair (and permed it?) and ditched his horn-rimmed glasses. Even so, he looked nothing like those guys you saw around, the ones with tight jeans, lumberjack shirts, work boots, short cropped hair and mustaches. It just didn't compute.
Jay had asked Joe why Barney had decided to come out now. Because of AIDS, he'd explained. When other congressmen talked of quarantining gay men, he knew he couldn't stay silent. Joe had glanced at Ennis then, for just a fraction of a second.
Ennis focused on his work for a while, then went to use the photocopier which was located just outside the art department. Tina came out of the editorial office. She glanced at his chest.
"Oh, Mission of Burma! God that takes me back. I've never seen you wear that before."
He grinned down at her, waiting for the other shoe to drop, but she stepped past him into the art department.
"Oh my god!" Tina began laughing, her hands on her head.
He moved behind her and saw the art director standing by the light table next to the color separator guy, whose yellow tie and blue shirt screamed out in the room. Her frizzy red hair was shockingly vibrant against her black dress, while the two designers looked like vultures bent over their drawing boards. The typesetter emerged from her room, swathed in black leggings and tight tunic.
"OH! MY! GOD!"
Other staff people began popping out of their offices, grinning, and soon Tina was bent double with laughter.
"Oh, this was planned?" the color separator guy asked bemusedly. "I noticed all the black but I was afraid to say anything, in case someone had died."
At lunchtime they all went across the street to Bertucci's, where they'd reserved a long table. As they were ordering pizzas, the waitress said to Lureen, "Excuse me... are you all, like... witches or something?" and everybody cackled.
Riding home that evening, Ennis calculated the number of months he'd had his job. By the time his birthday came around in the fall, would the rest of the staff have noticed that he wore black to work every day, too?
Chapter 2BThe summer I was 12, when KE and Kathy finished high school, my parents missed a curve racing home from Garden City. It was the only bend in Route 83 and they drove that way often, but they'd heard a tornado had touched down out our way, and when we didn't answer the phone they feared the worst. The three of us saw the twister a mile away – the first one we'd ever seen from the house – and hid in the storm cellar. It passed to the north of us, but when we finally came out, the sheriff was just coming up the drive.
The accident changed everything. My parents spent three months in rehab; suddenly, KE and Kathy were needed. They turned 18 in August but hardly noticed. My sister canceled her engagement and my brother threw away the army recruitment forms. We brought in the harvest ourselves, my father giving orders over the phone to my brother each morning and evening from his hospital bed. He needed KE to be a man then, and my brother came through for him.
Kathy took over everything my mother had done, as well as cared for both of them when they finally came home in October. She was good at nursing, and when my parents were back on their feet she left home to make a career of it.
Not much changed for me at first. I had more chores, but not more responsibility, and in September I returned to school. But now it was my sister who packed my lunch and drove me to the bus stop. In the evening my brother asked me about my day. It seemed as though my siblings had suddenly turned into nicer versions of my mother and father.
But when my parents finally came home, they were different people. Once Dad saw that his offspring actually could run the farm, he relaxed. Mellowed, you could say. For that first year he could hardly walk, so he sat on the front porch or in the kitchen in the winter, and learned to play guitar and sang Hank Williams songs while my brother spent the day in the fields.
Before, her church and its causes had been the center of my mother's life. But to our surprise, she continued to stay home on Sundays even once she could walk and didn't return the calls of her old groups of anti-this that and the other. What a relief not to hear about Jesus every day! We asked her why.
"You remember that poster I had on the wall about the two sets footprints in the sand and whatnot?"
Sure, we remembered, glancing at each other. Whatnot? The one where Jesus is supposed to have carried you when you see only line of footprints; we'd noticed it was gone.
"Well, when I was in the hospital I realized that it was you kids who needed the carrying just then. I had enough help from the nurses and doctors. So I told Jesus to leave me be but would He please make sure you had good weather to get the corn in. And see? It all went well. So now I know that when you're in pain, it's better to ask Jesus to go help the people you're depending on.
"Now Ennis honey, go through that bag of yarn and pick out the colors you want for the sweater I'm going to knit for you after I finish Kathy's."
I must have been happy then, right? I was at first. What kid wouldn't be thrilled to have his ornery dad and distant, distracted mom change practically overnight into attentive, affectionate, guitar-playing, sweater-knitting parents? During the months that they were invalids, I basked in their attention. Before and after school I spelled Kathy, fixing Mom cups of tea and massaging Dad's feet, which seemed to relieve his headaches. They let me read to them, and we played cards. But I was grateful they couldn't climb stairs, because when I'd had enough of their cheerful company I could escape to my room and they couldn't follow. KE and I had always shared a bedroom but he'd taken over my parents' room while they slept in hospital beds downstairs.
By the following summer they were fully recovered and I was going quietly crazy. As if to make up for the snipefest that had characterized our home life of the previous years, my parents launched a campaign of family togetherness. Every evening featured a different activity: board games, cards, singalongs (Hank Williams), TV ( Happy Days or Little House on the Prairie but never M*A*S*H).
Kathy and KE made the switch effortlessly to this new, benign regime. But they had other things to focus on that my parents respected. Kathy studied biology so she could get into nursing school and of course KE was in charge now, in practice if not officially. All four of them realized we'd been given a second chance as a family and wanted to make the most of it.
But I didn't like how crowded and busy my island had become. "Ennis honey, where are you?" followed me everywhere, my mother's voice ringing out no matter where I was hiding. I had no friends to escape to because... well, ever since I'd understood that I was living in the wrong place I'd lost the knack of making friends. I was quiet, and when I did speak I said the wrong things, whatever came to my head. Like the time in 9th grade I told a girl (admiringly!) that her beautiful, smooth, glossy reddish brown hair looked like raw liver. No wonder she slapped me.
But thanks to all my reading and my odd imagination I could write well, which impressed my teachers. Of course, that did not help me in the friends department. By the time I got to high school, I was desperate for an excuse to stay away from home, and for someone to assuage my loneliness. I found my salvation in baseball and Jack Tornado.