It's All Relative

by J. M. Snyder

  My lower lip trembled as I kissed him tenderly. “Well,” I breathed, “I think I love you now, Dan. I’m not saying we have to do anything tonight, but I want to hold you. I want to wake up and watch you sleeping beside me. I want—” He laughed and my heart stopped in my chest. “What?”

  “I’m in the Army,” he reminded me. “I get up at the crack of dawn, babe.” I didn’t get it—my mind was a fuzzy haze from the drinks, the noise, the night. “I’ll watch you sleep,” he told me. Then he kissed me, and as the neon sign above Rainbow Joan’s winked out, he whispered, “I think I love you, too.”

  The restaurant has held a special place for us since that night. Dan takes the beltway around Baltimore, eases into sudden traffic, gets off at the Edmondson Avenue exit. Joan’s is on Orleans Street—when I see the sign, I turn around to wake up Caitlin. “Cat,” I call, but she’s sound asleep. Plucking off her headphones, I shake her gently. “Caitlin? Get up.”

  “Wha—?” She stretches into a sitting position, blinks around like she’s not sure where she is. “We there already? Damn, that was fast.”

  I wish. “We’re in Baltimore,” I tell her. With a stifled yawn, she lies back down. “We’re stopping for a bite to eat. Unless you’re not hungry?”

  “I’m hungry,” she mumbles, and I have to shake her awake again when Dan pulls into Joan’s parking lot. “What?” she whines. “I’m up. Jesus.”

  “Don’t call me Jesus,” I joke, climbing out of the car. I hold the door open and she stumbles out like she’s drunk, staggering into me. “You want to sleep?” I ask, but she shakes her head. “We can bring you something.”

  She pushes away from me. “I’m fine. Awake, see?” To emphasize her point, she holds her eyes open wide and grins ghoulishly at me. “See?”

  I give her a playful shove towards the restaurant. “I see,” I tell her. Dan takes my hand as we step around the car, the two of us gravitating together like opposing magnets. Loudly, so Caitlin will hear, I say, “We can leave her here, you know. If she starts to act up…”

  “I hear you,” she growls. She pushes through the front door of the restaurant and lets it swing back at me, but Dan grabs the handle before it hits my arm. Nodding over her shoulder at us, Caitlin tells the waitress, “I’m not with them.”

  Ignoring her, I say, “Three, please.” As the waitress leads us to a booth, I ask my sister, “What, you paying for yourself?”

  “Are you treating?” she wants to know. She slides in one side of the booth and takes the menu from the waitress.

  Dan waits for me to get in across from her before he sits beside me. “I’ll cover it,” I say. “Long as you don’t order every damn thing they have.”

  Caitlin gives me a sardonic look over the top of her menu. “I’m not Ray,” she reminds me. “A Reuben’s good enough for me.” Then she folds the menu and looks around, taking in the brightly painted walls, the magazine-covered tables. Most of the booths are already filled despite the early hour, but the jukebox is off, the TV tuned to some midday movie from the late ‘80’s whose title escapes me at the moment. One of those Jon Cusak comedies that leaves no doubt in my mind as to why the guy isn’t acting anymore. “You guys come here often?” Caitlin asks. If she notices that the majority of couples around us are same-sex, she doesn’t mention it.

  “We like it,” I tell her. Beneath the table, Dan rests a hand on my thigh, and his hip presses against mine in the seat. “The food’s good, you’ll see.”

  The waitress comes for our orders—a Reuben for my sister, two turkey and ham hoagies for myself and Dan. I want a cheesesteak but I change my mind at the last minute, because this isn’t Pennsylvania yet and I swear no one south of the Mason-Dixon line can do a cheesesteak justice. I’ll wait until we get to Sugar Creek for that. I’m sure one night we’ll call in an order to Big Al’s, the self-proclaimed Steak King. My mouth waters at the thought of one of his sandwiches. Chopped steak and melted cheese smothered in olive oil…all others pale in comparison.

  While we wait for our food, I lean back in the booth and study my sister. Her eyeliner has smeared until her eyes look like bruises in her face, and her lipstick has mostly disappeared. Just the dark outline of her lips is left, making her mouth look larger than it is. Her eyelashes are clumped together into thick spikes of mascara—bedroom eyes, if I’ve ever seen them. She looks like she just woke up after a long night of partying. “You look frightful,” I tell her.

  She smiles sweetly and sips at her soda. “Thank you,” she replies.

  I can’t tell if she’s being facetious or not. Suddenly I realize I don’t know much about my teenaged sister—she wasn’t this Goth-girl the last time I saw her at Christmas. When did this start? Why? The whole look seems too high-maintenance for me. But she plays it off like it’s nothing to her. She ignores the stares from the people around her, unaffected by the faint whispers that her appearance and black clothing seem to invite. Since the moment I came home, she’s played at being impervious to anything that’s said or done. My announcement at dinner didn’t seem to surprise her in the least.

  When Dan excuses himself and heads for the bathroom, I sit up a little and say, “Tell me something, Cat.”

  I use her nickname because I want to get on her good side. Unfortunately, it just makes her suspicious. She looks at me distrustfully and asks, “What?” Before I answer, she adds, “We said no talking about our sex lives, remember? I really wasn’t going to tell Mom you guys did it last night.”

  I have to laugh. “I’m not—Caitlin, this isn’t…look, I don’t want to know, okay? You use condoms, right?” She nods, and I give her my most disarming smile. “Then okay. No more talk about sex, I promise.” Cautiously I ask her, “I just want to know—are you cool with Dan and me?”

  She shrugs. “He’s alright,” she says. “You could do worse. Nice ass, you know?” Then she laughs again. “Or wait, are we not mentioning that, either?”

  Secretly, I agree with her—Dan has a fine ass, but she’s only sixteen and I’m going to pretend she’s not checking my guy out. “It’s not like I’m surprised here, Mike,” she tells me. The look she throws my way suggests that she’s known for awhile that I like boys. Counting off on her fingers, she says, “You’ve never had a girlfriend, ever. Didn’t go to prom. Didn’t date in high school.”

  Well, I did, but no one I was serious with, no one I ever brought home. “You just figured it out on your own?” I ask, impressed. “So why can’t Mom see—”

  “Oh,” Caitlin interrupts, flipping her hair out of her face. “And a few months ago I found some magazines in your closet that confirmed it.”

  I laugh. “The Advocate,” I say. When she shakes her head, I frown and try to think what else I might have in my old room. “Gay and Lesbian Review?” Another shake. “Out? Caitlin, what?”

  Dan approaches the table and she gives him a mischievous grin. “Try Freshmen.” I feel a heated blush color my cheeks, and Dan gives me a quizzical look as my little sister reels off names of gay porn mags I totally forgot about, hidden away in my closet at my parents’ house. “Men, something about twinks…”

  “Okay,” I concede as Dan slides in beside me again, his hand drawn to my leg. “I get the point.”

  Chapter 9: Memory Lane

  After we eat it’s back on the road. Dan takes interstate 83 out of Baltimore, heading north into Pennsylvania, my hand covering his where it rests on my knee. In the back seat, Caitlin’s fiddling with her Walkman again, muttering under her breath. “I think my batteries are going,” she says, ripping the headphones off and throwing them to the floorboards. “Can’t we stop somewhere?”

  With a laugh, I ask, “Where?” The highway stretches out to the horizon and trees line both sides of the road. The signs list approaching cities that sound familiar because I’ve seen their names on these same green boards for as long as I can remember, but I’ve never stopped at any of them. I don’t want to stop now, not just for batteries. One wrong turn and we co
uld be lost for days. In the rearview mirror, I see Caitlin’s ignoble pout and tell her, “We can stop in Harrisburg if you want. Isn’t there a 7-11 right off the interstate?”

  “I don’t know,” she mutters. Then she sighs dramatically and throws herself back in the seat, her arms folded across her chest, her chin tucked down so all I can see is the top of her head and the light brown roots that look almost red against the black dye in her hair. “Can’t you turn up the radio a bit?” she wants to know. “It’s so damn silent back here.”

  “Dan doesn’t like it loud when he drives,” I say.

  But my lover starts to play with the radio controls. “It’s okay,” he tells me, turning the speakers up in the back. Glancing into the mirror, he asks, “How’s that?”

  One corner of Caitlin’s mouth pulls up into a half-smile. “Fine, thanks.” She doesn’t mention the dance music, doesn’t ask if we can find something heavier to listen to, and without the headphones shielding our world from hers, she feels like now it’s time to talk a bit. So she leans against the back of my seat, her head right next to mine. When she speaks, she’s unnaturally loud in my ear. “How much farther?” she asks.

  “Couple hours,” I say, looking past her to Dan. He sees the look and nods. “What, four? Five?”

  “About that,” he concedes. His hand squeezes my knee, and he asks, “Is any of this starting to look familiar to you, babe? Or am I off-track?”

  No, he’s right on track. Everything about this road brings back memories—images rise in my mind like bubbles to the surface of a pond. The years, stacked one upon the next like layers of a cake, melt and run together, until I’m not sure what happened when…

  One year we stopped for fresh peaches at a stand right by that sign for the KOA campground—the cart’s not there now, but I remember the heat of that day beating down on the top of my head, warming my hair until I thought it’d burst into flame. I stood there so long debating over the large, overly ripened fruit, until my mom just grabbed my hand and told the vendor to bag up five peaches. One for each of us, with one set aside for Aunt Evie. We were going to wait until after dinner to eat them, but in the backseat of the car, Ray dug into the bag when our parents weren’t looking and ate his. “Go on,” he said, handing me one of the softball-sized peaches. It took both hands to hold it, and when I bit into it, juice ran down my chin and throat and arms. By the time we got to Evie’s, we were both so sticky and my mom so angry that she made us stand in the backyard while she hosed us down. Ray laughed the whole time, making her angrier still. We never stopped for fruit again after that.

  Then one time, when I was a teenager and almost as surly as Caitlin is now, we decided to come up to Sugar Creek for the fourth of July, and to beat the holiday traffic, Dad thought it would be a good idea to leave shortly after midnight. Our headlights reflected off the silver backs of the tractor trailers that sped along the interstates at breakneck speed, until it seemed like we were surrounded by Martians in shiny metal spaceships hovering two feet in front of our car and hemming us in on either side. It was a good plan, though—the roads were clear of travelers, the only traffic being the huge semis that ran after dark. But just outside of York, we saw a car pulled over to the side of the road. A man struggled with a tire as he held an emergency light in one hand, the kind ensconced in a plastic cage that mechanics use to hang beneath the hood of a car. Inside the car, the overhead light was on, illuminating a woman and a young girl my age. Both had wide, frightened eyes.

  Dad pulled over to see what the trouble was—back then, people did stuff like that. You didn’t think of getting killed or calling the state police on your cell phone. Hell, we didn’t have a cell phone. “Donald, I don’t think you should—” was as far as my mom got before Dad was out of the car, the door slammed shut on her words.

  Ray and I watched as he spoke with the other man, and then he was back. “Come on, boys,” he said, and despite my mom’s misgivings, we clambered out into the night. Just a flat tire, that was all it was, but Dad leaned on the jack and Ray rolled the old tire away when the stranger handed it to him. My job was to hold the new one in place. I was doing fine, too, until I heard a light tapping and looked up to see the girl inside the car staring at me through the window, a big smile on her face. She had just the faintest blue shadow dusted across her eyelids and pink, sparkly lip gloss. Although I was old enough to know I liked guys, this girl was pretty. It was the make-up, I think. Made her look otherworldly.

  Dad’s voice rang out in the night. “Michael! Watch what you’re doing, kid!” Surprised, I let go of the tire and it fell heavily on my foot. “See?” my dad asked in righteous indignation as I yelped in pain. “You’re not paying attention. Ray, get over here and help him hold that up.”

  My foot was swollen by the time we reached Evie’s—I took my sneaker off to massage the bruised flesh and couldn’t even squeeze it back on. I hobbled for almost a week after that. “One of the last times I ever looked at a girl, too,” I say, telling the story to Dan and Caitlin.

  My lover laughs and kisses the back of my hand. “Good thing for me,” he replies.

  “Was that when Ray pitched your shoe out the window?” Caitlin asks. When Dan looks at her, confused, she explains, “It’s sort of a running joke at Aunt Evie’s. You’ll see. Everyone likes to throw their shoes at Ray because—”

  “I’ll tell him,” I say, pushing Caitlin into the back seat to quiet her. “I was there. You weren’t even born yet.”

  “I know the story,” she assures me. “It was somewhere along here, right? Before Harrisburg.”

  Now Dan’s interest is piqued and it’s not even all that great of a tale. “I was just five years old,” I tell him, and he grins to picture it, me a toddler. “We were goofing off in the back seat and Ray tied my shoelaces together. Double knots, I couldn’t get them undone. So I kicked them off and threw them at him. Like an idiot, he pitched them out the window.”

  “Why?” Dan wants to know.

  I shrug. Who knows why Ray does anything? “So I wouldn’t throw them at him again, I guess. I don’t know.” I still remember the expression on my dad’s face, though, when we stopped at McDonald’s for a quick bite to eat and he told me to put on my shoes. “They’re gone,” I said, with all the aplomb of a little child. When he asked where they were, I pointed at the road. “Back there.”

  Ray admitted to throwing them away—he can’t lie to my dad. One look into those glowering eyes and he starts to blubber like a baby. My mother was livid, refused to even speak to my brother until we got to Evie’s. Most of the family was already there, cousins and aunts and uncles lounging on the porch in the mid-summer heat, but as my dad carried me up to the house, Mom laid into Ray. “Threw the shoes out the window, can you believe it? Eight years old—where’s your brain?”

  Even at five, I knew the answer to that question, though at the time I kept quiet. Everyone thought it was the funniest thing, only because Ray was old enough to know better and he so obviously didn’t. One by one our cousins slipped out of their shoes, if they wore any, and as he passed, they pelted him with sneakers and sandals and flip-flops, until he was crying, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

  Yeah, it was mean, but children are mean creatures. From the back seat, Caitlin cackles at the image of Ray running the gauntlet of shoes. “They still do it,” she laughs, hitting the back of Dan’s seat to get his attention. “Hell, I do it and I wasn’t even there at the time. It’s the funniest thing. He’s all like what? Like he doesn’t remember.”

  With an enigmatic smirk, Dan replies, “He probably doesn’t.”

  Caitlin leans forward again, this time to get a good look at Dan. He glances at her, over her head at me, then his eyes are on the road again. “What do you think of Ray?” my sister asks.

  Dan shrugs, and when he looks at me a second time, I see the discomfort in his gaze. Though we haven’t discussed it, I already know that he doesn’t like my brother. Ray’s ignorant comments last night w
ere enough to put him on Dan’s shit list. But my lover isn’t one to mention it—even if I ask him outright, he’ll try to play it off. He doesn’t talk bad about anyone, not his hard-nosed CO, not his Army buddies, not even the sergeant at basic who ran him and dozens of other cadets into the ground. No, he’ll just shrug and say nothing, like he does now, but he’ll give Ray a cold shoulder whenever they have to be together. He won’t initiate conversation, he won’t look my brother in the eye, he won’t even respond to anything Ray says if he can help it. To Dan, he won’t exist. That’s the way he deals with someone he can’t stand but can’t do anything about.

  “Come on,” Caitlin tries. “I won’t tell him what you say.”

  “There’s nothing to say,” Dan tells her.

  That’s all she’s going to manage to get out of him. When he looks at me for help, I elbow her out from between the seats and say, “It’s none of your business, Caitlin. Cat. Just sit back, will you?”

  “Jeez,” she mutters, crossing her arms and pouting in displeasure. “It’s not that hard a question.” Dan doesn’t answer, and her reflection glares at us in the rearview mirror. “You either like him or you don’t, and if you do, then you’re the first. I didn’t ask for details.”

  She doesn’t know when to stop. “Caitlin,” I warn.. There’s a dull ache starting behind my right eye and I don’t feel like dealing with her anymore. “Just don’t, okay?” Leaning against the window, the glass cool on my forehead, I close my eyes and murmur, “Please.”

  An uneasy silence fills the car, cloying and heavy like thick perfume. It makes my head hurt worse, and Dan starts to rub my thigh in long, comforting strokes. I love him. I don’t care if we have to drag sleeping bags up into the dusty attic, or even pitch a tent in the backyard in the middle of October—I’m not sharing sleeping quarters with anyone else but him. I’m going to need his arms around me to get me through the next few days. I’m going to need his quiet strength, his love. I can’t do this alone. Hell, I can’t even deal with Caitlin for very long…how am I possibly going to survive the rest of the family?