by M. E. Kerr
I hang out with him the whole time.
We don’t get to say much to each other until lunch.
The school doesn’t dare serve him what we get in the cafeteria, so they send out for heros, and set up a little party for him in the lounge.
The principal shows up, and some librarians from the Leighton Town Library.
When we do get a few minutes to talk he asks me what I am writing.
I say, “We had this cat, Petunia, who was always looking out the window …”
He is looking right into my eyes as though he is fascinated, and I finish the story.
“Wow!” he says. “Wow!”
“It’s sort of sad,” I say.
“It has heart and it has humor, Pete,” he says. “The best stories always do.”
His last session is in the school library, and members of the town are invited.
About fifty people show up.
He talks about his books for a while, and then he starts talking about me.
He tells the story about Petunia. He called it wistful and amusing, and he says anyone who can think up a story like that knows a lot about the world already.
I get a lot of pats on the back afterward, and Ms. Terripelli says, “Well, you’ve had quite a day for yourself, Pete.”
By this time I am having trouble looking her in the eye.
Things are a little out of hand, but what the heck—he is on his way to the airport and back to Maine, where he lives. What did it hurt that I told a few fibs?
Next day, the Leighton Lamplighter has the whole story. I hadn’t even known there was a reporter present. There is the same photograph Peter Sand has given to me, and there is my name in the article about the author visit.
My name. Dad’s story of Petunia, with no mention of Dad.
“Neat story!” says Tom Terrific.
My stepfather says if I show him a short story all finished and ready to send out somewhere, he’ll think about getting me a word processor.
“I don’t write for gain,” I say.
Mom giggles. “You’re a wiseguy, Pete.”
“Among other things,” I say.
Like a liar, I am thinking. Like a liar and a cheat.
When Dad calls, I am waiting for the tirade.
He has a bad temper. He is the type who leaves nothing unsaid when he blows. I expect him to blow blue: he does when he loses his temper. He comes up with slang that would knock the socks off the Marine Corps.
“Hey, Pete,” he says, “you really liked my story, didn’t you?”
“Too much, I guess. That’s why you didn’t get any credit.”
“What’s mine is yours, kid. I’ve always told you that.”
“I went off the deep end, I guess, telling him I want to be a writer.”
“An apple never falls far from the tree, Pete. That was my ambition when I was your age.”
“Yeah, you told me. … But me. What do I know?”
“You have a good imagination, son. And you convinced Peter Sand what you were saying was true.”
“I’m a good liar, I guess.”
“Or a good storyteller. … Which one?”
Why does he have to say which one?
Why does he have to act so pleased to have given me something?
The story of Petunia isn’t really a gift. I realize that now. It was more like a loan.
I can tell the story, just as my dad told it to me, but when I try to turn myself from a liar into a storyteller, it doesn’t work on paper.
I fool around with it for a while. I try.
The thing is: fantasy is not for me.
I finally find out what is when I come up with a first sentence which begins:
Before the author comes to school, we all have to write him, saying we are glad he is coming and we like his books.
You see, I am an author who writes close to home.
WE MIGHT AS WELL ALL BE STRANGERS
“It was Christmas,” said my grandmother, “and I went from the boarding school in Switzerland with my roommate, to her home in Germany.
“She was afraid it would not be grand enough for me there … that because my family lived in New York, it would seem too modest, and she kept saying, ‘We live very simply,’ and she kept saying, ‘Except for my uncle Karl, who pays my tuition, we are not that rich.’
“I told her no, no, this is thrilling to me, and I meant it. Everywhere there was Christmas: wreaths of Tannenbaum hung, the Christmas markets were still open in the little towns we passed through. Every house had its Christbaum—a tall evergreen with a star on top.
“I was not then a religious Jew. I was a child from a family that did not believe in religion … and what I felt was envy, and joy at the activity: the Christmas-card landscape, snow falling, smoke rising from chimneys, and villagers rushing through the streets with gift-wrapped packages, and the music of Christmas.
“Then we saw the signs outside her village.
“Juden unerwünscht. (Jews not welcome.)
“And other, smaller signs, saying things in German like kinky hair and hooked noses not wanted here, and worse, some so vile I can’t say them to you.
“‘These have nothing to do with us,’ Inge said. ‘These are just political, to do with this new chancellor, Hitler. Pay no attention, Ruth.’
“I did not really even think of myself as a Jew, and while I was shocked, I did not take it personally since I was from America. We even had our own Christmas tree when I was a tiny child. … Now I was your age, Alison. Sixteen.
“Her parents rushed out to greet us, and welcome us. Inside there was candlelight and mistletoe and wonderful smells of food cooking, and we were hungry after the long trip. The house was filled with the family, the little children dressed up, everyone dressed up and joyous.
“We sat around a huge table, and wine was served to the adults, and Inge’s mother said we girls could have half a glass ourselves. We felt grown-up. We sipped the wine and Christmas carols played over the radio, but there was so much talk, it was like a thin sound of the season with in front of us the tablecloth, best china, crystal glasses! I thought, What does she mean she lives modestly? There were servants … and it looked like a little house from the outside only. Inside it was big and lively, with presents under the tree we would open later. I was so impressed and delighted to be included.
“Then a maid appeared and in a sharp voice said, ‘Frau Kantor? There is something I must say.’
“Inge’s mother looked annoyed. ‘What is it?’
“Then this thin woman in her crisp white uniform with the black apron said, ‘I cannot serve the food. I do not hand food to a man, woman, or child’—her eyes on me suddenly—‘of Jewish blood ever again.’”
My grandmother paused and shook her head.
I said, “What happened then?”
“Then,” my grandmother said, “we carried our plates into the kitchen and served ourselves. … All except for Inge’s uncle Karl, who left because he had not known until that moment that I was Inge’s Jewish friend from her school.”
“I never heard that you were there when all of that was going on, Grandma.”
“It was my one and only time in Germany,” she said. “So you don’t have to tell me about what it feels like to be an outsider. You don’t have to tell me about prejudice. But Alison, I thank you for telling me about yourself. I’m proud that you told me first.”
A week later, my mother said, “Why do you have to announce it, Alison?”
“Is that all you’re going to say?”
“No, that’s first. First I’m going to say there was no need to announce it. You think I don’t know what’s going on with you and Laura? I don’t need eyes in the back of my head to figure that out.”
“But it makes you uncomfortable to
hear it from me, is that it?”
“I can’t do anything about it, can I? I see it every time you bring her here. I would like to believe it’s a stage you’re going through, but from what I’ve read and heard, it isn’t.”
“No. It isn’t.”
“I can kiss grandchildren good-bye, I guess, if you persist with this choice.”
“Mom, it’s not a choice. Was it a choice when you fell in love with Dad?”
“Most definitely. I chose him!”
“What I mean is—you didn’t choose him over a woman.”
“I would never choose a woman, Alison! Never! Life is family. Or I used to think it was. Before this!”
“What I mean is—there were only males you were attracted to.”
“Absolutely! Where you got this—it wasn’t from me.”
“So what if the world was different, and men loved men and women loved women, but you were still you? What would you do?”
My mother shrugged. “Find another world, I guess.”
“So that’s what I did. I found another world.”
“Good! Fine! You have your world and I have mine. Mine happens to be the real world, but never mind. You always went your own way.”
Then she sighed and said, “I’m only glad your father’s not alive to hear his favorite daughter tell him she’s gay.”
“I was his only daughter, Mother.”
“All the more reason. … We dreamed of the day you’d bring our grandchildren to us.”
“That’s still an option. I may bring a grandchild to you one day.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t?”
“Not if it’s one of those test-tube/artificial-insemination children. I’m talking about a real child, a child of our blood, with a mother and a father. I don’t care to have one of those kids I see on Donahue who was made with a turkey baster or some other damn thing! Alison, what you’ve gotten yourself involved in is not just a matter of me saying Oh, so you’re gay, fine, and then life goes on. What you’ve gotten yourself involved in is serious!”
“That’s why I’m telling you about it.”
“That’s not why you’re telling me about it!”
“Why am I telling you about it?”
“You want me to say it’s okay with me. You gays want the whole world to say it’s okay to be gay!”
“And it isn’t.”
“No, it is not! Okay? I’ve said how I feel! You are what you are, okay, but it is not okay with me what you are!”
“So where do we go from here?”
“I’ll tell you where not to go! Don’t go to the neighbors, and don’t go to my friends, and don’t go to your grandmother!”
“What do you think Grandmother would say?”
“When she stopped weeping?”
“You think she’d weep?”
“Alison,” my mother said, “it would kill your grandmother!”
“You think Grandma wouldn’t understand?”
“I know Grandmother wouldn’t understand! What is to understand? She has this grandchild who’ll never bring her great-grandchildren.”
“I might bring her some straight from the Donahue show.”
“Very funny. Very funny,” my mother said. Then she said, “Alison, this coming-out thing isn’t working. You came out to me, all right, I’m your mother and maybe you had to come out to me. But where your grandmother’s concerned: Keep quiet.”
“You think she’d want that?”
“I think she doesn’t even dream such a thing could come up! She’s had enough tsuris in life. Back in the old country there were relatives lost in the Holocaust! Isn’t that enough for one woman to suffer in a lifetime?”
“Maybe that would make her more sympathetic.”
“Don’t compare gays with Jews—there’s no comparison.”
“I’m both. There’s prejudice against both. And I didn’t choose to be either.”
“If you want to kill an old woman before her time, tell her.”
“I think you have Grandmother all wrong.”
“If I have Grandmother all wrong,” said my mother, “then I don’t know her and you don’t know me, and we might as well all be strangers.”
“To be continued,” I wrote in my diary that night.
My grandmother knew … my mother knew … one day my mother would know that my grandmother knew.
All coming-out stories are a continuing process.
Strangers take a long time to become acquainted, particularly when they are from the same family.
LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON
“Maybe you’d like us to call you something else,” my father said to Harley.
“Why?” Harley said. “Because it was a Harley my folks were riding when they were killed?”
“I know your real name’s Ken Jr. I just thought—”
Harley waved away the suggestion. “I’m used to my nickname,” he told my dad. “Anyway, it wasn’t the Harley that killed them. They’d been celebrating their anniversary at Jungle Pete’s, and Pop probably couldn’t even see the road.”
“OK. Harley it is!”
And Harley it was. In my room, while I slept on the sunporch hide-a-bed. Riding my 10-speed bike. Wearing my socks, my jackets. Playing my CDs, and hogging my PC. Harley made himself right at home.
“That’s what we want him to do,” my father said. “It won’t be for long, Connor. His uncle’s going to take him as soon as he finishes his work in Alaska. If it wasn’t for Harley’s dad, I wouldn’t be alive.”
Dad wasn’t that surprised when he saw the swastika Harley had pinned to his cap the day we met his bus.
All Dad said was, “Better take that off, Harley. That won’t go over too well here in Cortland.”
“It’s just a decoration—doesn’t mean anything,” said Harley, but he unfastened it and stuck it in his pocket.
The reason Dad wasn’t surprised was that he’d been through the Gulf War with Harley’s father, and he said Ken Sr. was a little “insensitive” too.
That was putting it mildly. After the war, he’d call Dad long distance and he’d always start off the conversation with the kind of jokes Dad hated: Polish jokes, jokes about Jews, blacks, Italians—no race or color was excluded.
If I ever told a joke like that, I’d be grounded, and Dad didn’t have any buddies who spoke that way either. But Ken McFarland always got away with it.
“That’s just Ken,” Dad said. “He doesn’t know any better. But he knew how to pull me out of the back of that Bradley when we got hit. He risked his life doing it, too!”
Both Dad and McFarland were reservists who suddenly found themselves in Iraq back when Saddam marched into Kuwait … I was still in middle school then, wearing a yellow ribbon and an American flag, running to the mailbox every day, and never missing a Sunday in church.
I didn’t dislike Harley. He was friendly and so polite my mother kept commenting on his good manners. We all felt real bad about his folks’ death too, and we couldn’t do enough for him.
But there were times, a lot of times, when my mother’d tell him at the dinner table, “We don’t call people that, Harley.” Or, “Harley? We don’t think so much about a person’s race or color.”
He’d say, “Sorry, M’am. I don’t have anything against anyone. I’m just kidding around.”
“But I have a problem with it, Harley,” Mom would try, “and it sounds like you are prejudiced when you talk that way.”
“Not me,” Harley’d tell her, always with this big smile he has, his blue eyes twinkling.
“Cork it around here!” Dad would say.
“Yes, sir. Right. I’ll watch it,” would come the answer. But there seemed to be no way he could stop himself. It was built-in … Sometimes after my folks called him on it, they would
roll their eyes to the ceiling, ready to give up on trying to change him … I made up my mind I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. He’d be gone soon.
He was a fish out of water in Cortland. He’d come in summer. I had a job waiting tables at Tumble Inn. Mom and Dad worked too, so Harley was home by himself a lot watching TV, playing computer games, riding my bike around. He was 15, as I was, and he didn’t have a lot of money, but Dad said let him have the summer off: Poor guy. Let him do what he wanted. He was going through enough.
He never showed that he was going through anything. He put a photograph of his parents out on my bureau, and he ran up our phone bills calling his buddies. He’d tell them eventually he was going to live with his uncle in Wisconsin. (“Yeah, I know it sucks!”) And he’d ask a lot of questions about what was going on. Then he’d tell jokes like his father’d told—we’d hear him in my room hooting and howling, spewing the same kind of language my folks had called him on.
His uncle’s job in Alaska took longer than we’d thought, and I dreaded it when I heard he was going to school with me come September.
Dad said he’d find his own crowd—let him be, so I let him be. I told kids I hung out with how his father had saved my dad’s life, and what happened to his folks, and then I let him fend for himself.
Harley was really smart, and that surprised me. But he wasn’t good at making friends. It was hard to be a new guy, too. We all knew each other since grade school.
Teachers warned Harley about his racist language. He always seemed surprised, and always protested that he was just kidding around. He was funny when he told his kind of jokes. The kids laughed at the accents he’d come up with, but he made them feel uncomfortable, too … I’d just walk away, embarrassed for him, I guess … and embarrassed he was staying with us.
I’d see him sitting by himself in the cafeteria, looking around at everyone in groups. Once I felt sorry for him, and went over to sit with him. But he said, “You better get back to your crowd.” I didn’t ask him to join us. I knew he’d say something that would either trigger a fight or hurt someone’s feelings. My father called him a “loose cannon,” and I think that was why we didn’t invite the neighbors over for our usual backyard barbecues.
