by Dan Chaon
My father blushed, and we were all silent. “Well,” my father said, and cleared his throat. “I hope you’re being careful.” He picked at his eggs.
“Careful?” Corky said. He gave a short laugh. “I can’t even tell you. The other night I was out with this guy . . .” He stopped. All of us were sitting stiffly, and my father had a pinched look on his face. He touched his eyelids, as if to clear away the image of Corky and this man, this lover.
“Well, anyway,” Corky said. “He didn’t even want to kiss. He goes, ‘I don’t know you well enough yet.’ ” He took a bite of toast, nervously, then looked over at me, and winked. I kept my face expressionless. He winked again.
“So, Todd!” he said. He spoke my name as if it were some ridiculously cheerful exclamation, like “gee whiz” or “wowza,” the kind of thing he used to say with mocking relish when he was in high school. “Tomorrow’s the big day!” he said. “Graduation! Commencement! The beginning of a new life!”
“Right,” I said. I didn’t like to think about it that way. I couldn’t imagine myself working a regular job forty hours a week, or leaving home for college or the service; it seemed amazing that anyone could live alone, pay their own bills, get up in the morning without their mother waking them.
“Yes, Toddy,” my mother said quickly. “We haven’t seen you in your cap and gown.”
“Yeah, and you’re not going to, either,” I said.
“What’s the matter?” My father frowned. I could see how it was going to go: They’d do anything to escape more information about Corky’s sex life. “Are you ashamed of your cap and gown?” my father said.
“I just don’t feel like putting it on, that’s all,” I said. “What’s the big deal?”
“Oh, come on, Todd,” my brother said. He grinned, enjoying himself, and I shook my head at all of them. It figured—even with all of them looking at me, the focus was still on Corky underneath.
“I feel like a dancing dog,” I said. I pushed away from the table.
When I went into my bedroom, I just stood there for a moment, staring at Corky’s suitcase, then out the window. The morning was warm and clear. Outside, the grass was sickly yellow green in the patches that appeared where the snow had drawn back. It made me think of a horror movie I’d seen where the smooth, pale skin of a dead woman peeled away to reveal a monster’s face. At last, I went to the closet and took the box out. The cap and gown were still wrapped in plastic, and I tore it away roughly. I slid the gown over my head, the silky cloth slick against my bare arms, my neck. I fit the cap over my hair, and it fit snugly. It made me think of a wig.
When I came into the kitchen, Corky began to hum a jazzy “Pomp and Circumstance,” snapping his fingers. The gown billowed around me, the cap tilted against my line of vision, and I shambled forward, trying to imagine how Clint Eastwood would walk in a cap and gown.
“You look real nice.” My father nodded.
“Stand up straight,” said my mother.
It would have been nice to say that I was going out that night with a group of friends to some party on somebody’s farm where everyone was singing and carrying on around a keg an older brother had bought. Some of my classmates were doing that, but not my friends. Jeanine’s grandparents were coming in from California that night, Craig’s family was taking him out to dinner, Brad and Janice, both of them too good for their own good, were going to a special Mass or wake or whatever it was for graduating seniors. I remember Corky and the other seniors who were in plays had a formal dinner for themselves. They’d sent out calligraphied invitations and dressed up in coats and ties. At the party, they’d put parts of Corky’s valedictorian speech to the music of My Fair Lady. He’d come home late, singing in a Cockney accent at the top of his lungs.
And what did I do? I sat around. Corky was busy providing the entertainment. As I sat after breakfast and read a horror book, my brother helped with the dishes and told my mother about Jacek, a Yugoslavian man he’d dated, a man who made independent films and had done a music video for a rock group. Actually, Corky didn’t say they’d dated. That was only implied by the careful, wistful description he gave. My mother drew various dishes out of the soapy water, nodding as if she didn’t quite understand what it all meant.
After lunch, we went for a drive. Corky seemed excited. He wanted to drive by Rattlesnake Knob, he said, and take pictures to show his friends in New York. I pictured him laughing about it at a cocktail party, showing his photos to a group of lithe, smirking gay men as they stood on the terrace of some penthouse, surrounding Corky, looking at the bleak landscape in the photos and then, thankfully, gazing at the city lights that blurred to dazzles, at the Statue of Liberty with the moon hanging over her head. “How quaint,” they’d murmur.
The four of us squeezed into the cab of the pickup, with Corky and me in the middle. We drove out toward the hills, and when we passed the rock house, Corky made us stop.
The house stood in the middle of a field. It had been built by pioneers, and the sod roof had long since collapsed. The walls had been built of pumice rock that the pioneers had gathered from the hills, and from the smattering of trees they’d found by the creek and cut down. It was still recognizable as a house, there was still the frame of the doors and windows, though the wood was mostly rotten, and even the stone walls were crumbling. My father used to take us out here when we were little and tell us about pioneers. Corky wanted to take a picture.
He got out of the truck and strode through the ditch to the fence. We followed. Corky stretched the lines of barbed wire apart so he could squeeze through, then paused on the other side, and looked closely at the wire. “Hey, Dad,” he said as we came to the edge of the fence. “Look at the strands of this wire. It’s really intricate. Is that rare?”
My father bent over to look with Corky, so that their foreheads nearly touched, so they looked like mirror images of one another, leaning over, hands on their knees. “No,” my father said. “No, not rare. Just old.” He sighed, straightening up. It used to be that, wherever we went, my father would be pointing things out, explaining things. As we’d drive up into the hills, my father would tell us how the trickle of creek we’d passed a mile back had made them; over millions of years a valley was created with hills on either side. I remember imagining the gray hills with their jagged lace of pumice cliffs, rising up on either side, pushing slowly out of the flat prairie like mushrooms. My father taught us trivia that seemed amazing back then—how to tell a rattlesnake from a bullsnake, types of barbed wire. Maybe he was remembering the same thing, because he just stood there, touching his fingers to his eyelids as Corky clicked his camera at the barbed wire.
“So,” my brother said to me as we walked across the pasture to the rock house. “Am I going to get to meet one of these girlfriends of yours? Is one of them going to stop by the house tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” I said. My parents looked at me. They didn’t say anything, but it still made me feel like a failure. They knew I didn’t have a girlfriend. Even in the one thing I had over Corky, I was a flop. Corky stood out in front of the rock house, which was surrounded by tall dry weeds, and put his hands on his hips. He looked over his shoulder at me, and I sighed. My parents looked at me curiously, and I stared down at the ground. “They’re not really girlfriends,” I said. “They’re just friend friends.”
When I looked up, my eyes met Corky’s. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “Hey,” he said. “Why don’t you all stand in front of the place? That’ll make a nice shot.”
We arranged ourselves—my father stood behind my mother and me and pulled us close to him so he could hide his potbelly. He and Corky were the tall ones in the family, and I’d inherited my mother’s shortness. We pressed together. “Smile,” Corky called, and I set my lips into one of those smiles that I knew was crooked and dopey, but I couldn’t stop it. “That’s great,” Corky said. He aimed the camera at us. “It’s one of those pictures you’ll keep forever, you know?” We
separated from our cluster. Corky took another picture.
As we walked back to the car, Corky put his arm around my shoulder. I stiffened, but I didn’t shrug him off. “I think just plain friends are the best kind,” he said.
“Yeah, right,” I said. He tilted his head as if a cool breeze were blowing.
“I sing this song in my show called ‘We’re Only Friends.’ It’s really great. I’ve got this sort of Dietrich look, and the tune is a thirties German thing, you know.” He began to sing softly, his voice raspy, deep, but strikingly like a woman’s. His voice carried, wafting into the open air.
I didn’t know what he was trying to prove. Maybe he was trying to get us used to the idea. Maybe he was just needling my parents. Maybe he was showing off. But whatever he thought, the Subject kept coming into our conversations. He had given my mother’s recipe for fried chicken to a man. He used a song my father liked, “Someday Soon, Going with Him,” in his show, and the closing number was a song my mother had loved when she was younger: “Where the Boys Are.” He sang a bit for us. He kept at it, throughout dinner, and afterwards, while we were trying to watch TV, tossing little comments out for our consideration. My father got a glazed look, as if he could hear someone far away calling his name. My mother looked more and more bewildered.
As for me, I found myself thinking about the clothes I’d seen in his suitcase. I wondered if he was planning to put them on.
When he came into the bedroom late that night, I was lying on the bottom bunk, reading my book. “Corky,” I said. He was bent down, searching through his suitcase. “Do you—?” I cleared my throat. I watched him collect a toothbrush and dental floss from his bag. “I mean you normally wear normal clothes, don’t you?”
He looked up at me, not smiling. “Are you asking if I’m a transvestite?” he said. He stared me down, but I didn’t say anything. “I only dress for my act, if that’s what you mean,” he said. “For my job.”
I nodded. I took a deep breath. “So . . . how come you packed women’s clothes?”
His eyes narrowed. I remembered how he used to have his secret box of stuff, a scrapbook full of old clippings and things, the way he’d come in and found me looking through it. “Keep out of my stuff, Toad!” he’d shouted, and started punching me.
“What do you mean?” he said softly. He was looking me up and down, appraising me, and I watched him set the items in his hand back in the bag. He unzipped the compartment and pulled out the makeup kit, the photos. “This stuff ?” he said fiercely. For a minute I shrank back, as if he were my older brother again and he could beat me up. He stared at me until I looked away, and then he suddenly chuckled. “Todd,” he said, almost affectionately, as if he were remembering some other brother that wasn’t me. “I thought maybe someone might have wanted to see my show.” He sighed. “People pay money to see me perform, you know.” He put the blouse to his face. “Here,” he said, and threw it at me, hitting the book I was still holding in my hand. “Smell it.”
It must have been the look on my face that made him laugh. I held it and sniffed. I had dark thoughts about what I was supposed to smell.
“Old Spice,” he said. “For the manly man.” It was my father’s brand of cologne. “It’s a joke,” he said. He picked out the bunch of pictures and clippings and walked over to the bunks with them. He put them on top of the blouse. “If you want to look at this stuff, you can,” he said. “I’m going to brush my teeth.”
Before he got to the door, he turned. “Jesus, Todd, what did you think?” he said. “Did you really think I was going to run around your graduation party in drag or something? Did you think I came home for the sole purpose of embarrassing you?”
I looked down at the pictures of him. “Why did you come home?” I said.
He put his back to me. “Because I was stupid.”
At my graduation party, my relatives drank and gave me money. Commencement was as long and dull as the past four years of high school had been. In her speech, the valedictorian kept referring to the future as a train, and I imagined myself standing on the railroad tracks, watching it bear down on me.
The party made it even worse. There I was, in the middle of the living room, holding a paper plate—melting ice cream, a slice of chocolate cake—dabbing the frosting from the base of the little wax graduate that had been in the center of the cake, which my mother had insisted I take as a memento. When my uncle Evan came up and handed me an envelope, and asked what my plans were, I tried to tell him that I had a lot of options I was considering. But after that, I gave up. The next time, when my aunt Susan handed me a card and asked me the same question, I just shrugged.
Which of them had futures that were so wonderful? I watched Great-aunt Birdie, already drunk before noon. She’d been married twice, and now was living with some man in Denver. Or my cousin Russell, who’d just gone bankrupt. Or Grandpa Mitch, who a few months before had a heart attack and had to crawl from his bedroom down the hall to the phone. “Oh, he looks so thin, so pale,” they whispered behind his back. “He shouldn’t be in that old house alone.” Soon, he’d be in a nursing home. My parents sat on the couch near my grandfather, looking nervously at Corky. It was sickening. They’d spent the better part of their lives raising us, and look where that got them.
Corky was across the room, sitting on a folding chair with his legs crossed at the knee. He was right at the edge of the kitchen. People had to walk past him to get to the food or the beer. I watched my relatives file slowly by, their eyes fixed on him. They asked how life was treating him in the Big Apple and tightened their smiles.
I stirred my ice cream and cake together. Even I couldn’t help noticing him. Aunt Birdie came weaving up to me, fiddling with the tab on her beer. A napkin was stuck to her shoe, dragging behind her as she sidled toward me. “Congratulations, precious,” she said, and pushed her lips to my forehead, leaning against me for support. “What’s in your future?” she asked, and pushed a crumpled bill into my jacket pocket. I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said. Corky had lit another cigarette and was saying, “You know, that sounds an awful lot like a film I auditioned for.” Aunt Birdie kissed me on the eyelid, and I slid away from her grasp. I decided I needed to go outside for a while.
The wind was blowing hard, and it was cool for late May. I bunched my jacket together at the neck, staring out past the yard to the driveway, which was crowded with my relatives’ vehicles. I breathed slowly. For a minute I’d imagined I was going to spin out of control. I might have broken free of Aunt Birdie, while lisping and sashaying, cooing, “Ooo, a film I auditioned for. Ooo, how wonderful I am.” I might have denounced my parents in front of everyone, what hypocrites they were: “We’re so proud of our Corky! How nice it is to have a son who’s a successful drag queen!”
Corky came out a few minutes later. He exhaled smoke as he poked his head out the door. “Todd,” he said. “You’re missing your party.”
He kept his body inside the house, so it looked like his head was a puppet, moving along the door frame. He bent so he could look at me upside down. It was an old game from childhood. We used to practice miming around the edges of doors, so that from the other side it looked like we were floating, or being lifted by an invisible force. “Todd,” he said, in a mock-solemn, British-actor voice, like they have when they recite Shakespeare. “Why are you so glum, Todd?” His head vanished then, as if it had been yanked from the stage. He came out of the house and stood beside me.
In the house, someone had turned on music, my father’s Patsy Cline tape. It drifted mournfully in the stillness, wisping through the walls.
I sighed. “Did you ever,” I said, “wonder what was going to happen to you?”
There was a flicker in his eyes—I had caught him off guard, and he thought of something, remembered something. His smile wavered. “No,” he said.
I considered this. Maybe he’d always known. “Well,” I said. “What do you think will happen to me, then? Because I wonder. I wonder a lo
t.”
He stared at me for a long time; then he put another cigarette to his lips.
“You’ll probably be miserable,” he said. “Like everybody else.”
Our eyes met, and we both looked down. His words hung there—as if he’d dropped a cup or a bowl at my feet and we were both considering it, looking at the shards of broken glass. In the house, I could hear my father laughing.
“Thanks a lot,” I said stiffly. “Sorry I asked.”
He shrugged and pulled a folded bill out of his pocket. He pushed it into my hand. “Maybe I will go squeeze into that dress,” he whispered.
“Don’t,” I said through my teeth. I looked at the piece of paper in my hand. A hundred-dollar bill. “I can’t take this,” I said. “That’s too much.”
He lifted his eyebrows, and I watched him put it back in his pocket. His hand slid out of his pocket holding a nickel, which he flipped toward me. I fumbled, caught it. “There,” he said.
“Very funny,” I said. He dragged deeply on his cigarette.
We stared at each other. “Go ahead,” my brother whispered. Smoke curled around his face as he breathed, and he pushed his hands through his dyed hair, loosening his ponytail. “I know you’re dying to. Say faggot. Say cocksucker.” He smirked at me. But then as I watched, it seemed that some awful transformation was coming over his face. It was trembling and contorting like there was something beneath it trying to escape. For a second I imagined that he must be seeing something terrifying, a dark shape lunging at us, and I turned quickly. But there was only the empty yard.
“Say it,” he whispered. “Say it.”
SURE I WILL
Here in the heart of the country, the trees are all in lines and patterns. There were no trees here before the pioneers came, I’m told, and when the cottonwoods and elms and spruce were finally brought in, they were planted so they conformed to the edge of a road or a field; they were organized into regiments to protect houses from the sun, or land from erosion. It seems to me that people must have forgotten how trees grew in forests, or even that trees were a natural phenomenon, not something they could erect like sod houses or barbed-wire fences. They were hypnotized by the flatness of the landscape, by the unyielding conformity of everything in their lives.
