Did You Ever Have A Family

by Bill Clegg

  I wanted to leave Seattle because of my friend Penny. She was my closest friend and I’d known her since I was a little kid. We grew up a few doors down from each other in Worcester, Massachusetts, in big Catholic families, and went to the University of Massachusetts together after high school. We never had a fling because neither of us could back then admit to ourselves or each other that we were gay. Not in high school, not in college, and not for a while after. You have to remember, this was the seventies and early eighties, and though it’s not that long ago, for gays it’s like another millennium. Especially in Worcester, Massachusetts, and especially in our neighborhood, which was 100 percent Catholic and 100 percent straight, at least on the surface. After Penny and I graduated from college, we went to New York. She wanted to work in advertising, and neither of us could face returning to Worcester. I had always planned on Boston, but Penny could be pushy when she wanted to be, and so New York it was. We lived on the Upper East Side at first, and in many ways, not good ones, it felt like places we’d been. Mostly families, straight couples, and hard-partying college graduates living five to an apartment. It took us a while but we found our way to other parts of the city, and eventually to other women like us. But, boy, we were slow! Or at least I was. Once she found it, Penny took to that scene quick and within a few months had a girlfriend, a job as a bartender at Henrietta Hudson, and was on a softball team. I didn’t like the bars so much, the hard drinking and the drugs. Those girls were wild. Most of them, like us, were from somewhere else and had whole lifetimes of loneliness and anger stored up. Once they hit the city, and each other, they let it all out, and often it was messy. Penny started to get messy, and after she moved in with her girlfriend, a young girl named Chloe, we drifted apart. I was working at the Lowell Hotel on East Sixty-third at the time as a check-in clerk. It’s a beautiful art deco gem, and many of the rooms are actually apartments where people live either year-round or when they are in town for shopping or shows or business. I loved the order of the place, the fresh flowers, the crisp staff uniforms, the history. It felt like nothing bad could ever happen there. I got promoted twice in that first year, and by the time I was twenty-six I was an assistant manager. Nothing had ever really worked so well for me—not childhood, school, family, or the gay scene in New York. In all these places I had always been the odd duck. But at the Lowell, I fit. I knew where I was useful and where I wasn’t, and so I spent most of my time there, on and off the clock. Meanwhile, Penny was bartending and boozing and giving up on her dream of working in advertising. She’d gone on some interviews and sent her résumé around when we first got to New York, but once she moved in with Chloe, all that stopped. Chloe had been raised in Brooklyn by two hippie parents and was out and proud since high school. She was nineteen and had already dropped out of Barnard College by the time she met Penny.

  It wasn’t until Penny’s first overdose on heroin that I began to understand what was going on. Even though it had been over a month since we’d seen each other, I was still her emergency contact at the bar, so two days after she hadn’t showed up I got a call. I tracked down Chloe, who tried at first to cover it up. She floundered with a story that Penny was home with the flu, but only after I showed up at their apartment on the Lower East Side and pounded on the door did she finally tell me the truth. Penny was on the psych ward at Bellevue, where she had been transferred after detoxing in the emergency room. The hospital wouldn’t release her for at least a few more days. Chloe told me later that night that she wanted Penny to move out, that she was a disaster, and that the whole scene was too much for her to handle. Never mind that it was Chloe who’d introduced Penny to heroin, we packed Penny’s things and moved them into my studio in Murray Hill. Chloe gave me a letter to give to Penny, breaking things off, I assume, since I never read it. Whatever she wrote convinced Penny not to try to change Chloe’s mind.

  Penny lived with me the rest of that year. There’d be two more overdoses, hundreds of dollars stolen from my wallet, and a suicide attempt before Penny finally agreed to go to a rehab I found outside Seattle. I flew with her there and stayed the first few days, but then returned to New York to my job. She stayed in that rehab for eight months and then moved for a year and a half into a nearby sober house with other women in recovery. By then I’d been out to Seattle to visit her a dozen times. Penny’s family, like mine with me, wanted nothing to do with her when she came out to them, which was the Christmas after our first year in New York. It’s not an original story except that we decided to tell our parents the same night. We timed it to dinner, which was six o’clock in both of our houses. In my case, my father left the table and my mother wept into her napkin. In her case, they asked her to leave the house and come back only when she had, her father said, cleaned up her act. She knocked on my door that night, slept in a sleeping bag on my bedroom floor, and we went back to New York together first thing in the morning. My mother eventually came around, but only after my father had died, and even then she asked that I not rub it in her face by telling her about girlfriends. Meeting them, and of course there only ever was one, was out of the question. So she died doing the best she could, but in the end we barely knew each other.

  After that Christmas, Penny and I were, for each other, clearly the only people we could count on. Besides my job at the Lowell and the people I worked with there, Penny was my entire world. Every free weekend or vacation I had I was on a plane to Seattle to see her. On one of those trips I met Kelly. She was the manager at the Holiday Inn not far from Penny’s sober house, and one night after I’d flown all day from New York, she checked me in. She was agitated, I could tell, but professional. I found out later she was working the check-in desk because one of her employees had called in sick at the last minute, and as a result she had to miss her nephew’s basketball game. There she was, in her gray cords and green Holiday Inn blazer, wrinkling her nose like she always does when she’s pissy. I remember watching her for a long time, her head down, red hair jammed into a ponytail with loose strands floating from her head like spun gold, processing my credit card and mumbling under her breath all the while. Finally, she looked up, and for the first time I saw her eyes—green and gold and flashing like Christmas trees from her freckle-splattered face. I don’t know how someone like me, who had never before even had a girlfriend, could recognize love when it arrived, but I did. I’d dated a little in New York, but women scared me. They were either too brash and manly or drank too much. People weren’t as open then either, so if I was attracted to someone, most of the time I didn’t know if she was gay. And I’ve never been the aggressive one, never the one to make a move or give someone my number. So I worked all hours and in my free time talked to Penny on the phone and listened to her tell me about the meetings she went to and the sober women she lived with. And I went to see her. This went on for a couple years before that night at the Holiday Inn. I saw those Christmas-tree eyes and my life changed.

  Three nights? she asked as she looked at my reservation. I don’t think I managed more than a nod in response. You happen to be free for a drink or a bite any one of those nights? Just like that. After two words and a nod she asked me out. Kelly has never been shy, and thank God. I nodded again, and the next night she took me to a steak house near the harbor, and the night after that she made me cream of asparagus soup and a big salad with pears and walnuts and chunks of avocado. It was the best salad I’d ever had. I know it sounds insane, but the next night I was on a plane to New York drafting my resignation. I was twenty-eight and had been alone for a long time. I watched people my age at the Lowell pair off and make plans, throw dinner parties and go on vacations together, get engaged. I knew I didn’t want to be alone anymore. I moved in with Kelly two months later and took a job at the Westin Hotel as the night manager. It was a far fall down the scale from the Lowell, but I didn’t care. I was with Kelly and near Penny, who was clean, living in a sober house, and working in ad sales at a local newspaper. For a long while I was what most people would d
escribe as happy. I didn’t feel that low, lonely ache I’d felt in my gut my whole life—growing up in Worcester, at school in Amherst, and in New York, especially on the weekends after Penny left. For the first time in my life, I was happy. We didn’t have a ton of friends—Kelly had her brothers and nephews, and I had Penny. Outside that circle we liked plenty of people well enough, colleagues and neighbors and acquaintances, but we mainly kept our own company. We never got wrapped up in the gay scene, which was for young people, and we weren’t young anymore. We had our small tribe and that was enough.

  Kelly and Penny bickered sometimes, like sisters, and every so often a dinner would end abruptly, Penny getting worked up over something Kelly had said, usually political, and storming out. But Kelly adored Penny and was always the first to show up to her house if a pipe burst or if she needed help painting a room. She was always at our house with this girlfriend or that—none of them stuck—watching movies, cooking meals, bragging about her softball-team victories, complaining about work. She didn’t have far to go since she lived two doors down to the right from the end of our street. Kelly always used to say that if the wind was just right, she could throw a Frisbee from our stoop and hit Penny’s house.

  And then, out of the blue, a couple of kids climbed through Penny’s window and raped and strangled her to death. She was alone, the girl she was seeing—she always liked them young—was still in college and asleep at her dorm that night. It was late, three or four o’clock in the morning, and no one heard her screaming. I still have nightmares about what she must have gone through, how terrified she had to have been. For a long time I didn’t speak beyond muttering. Neither did Kelly. We just sort of coexisted in near silence for months. We went to our jobs, came home, went to bed after eating something. The world had changed and we with it. Penny’s family did not come to her funeral. A friend from New York came, and a girl we knew in college, too, the staff at the paper where Penny had become associate publisher, her softball team, her sober friends. And us. I was a mess, so Kelly spoke and Penny’s boss did, too. And then it was over. There are no words precise enough to describe how wide and empty the world is when you lose someone that matters to you as much as Penny did to me. Every effort suddenly seems useless. I made it through the funeral and a few months after. But the mornings got tougher as time went by, and it became more and more difficult to get out of bed. I started calling in sick to work and eventually just said I was taking a vacation. One week turned into three, and the manager of the hotel called and said we needed to have a talk. Over the phone, without even so much as meeting with him, I told him I quit. Said those two short words, hung up the phone, and rolled back into my pillow. He called Kelly at work and told her what had happened before I could. He told her that he understood I was going through a tough time and that the hotel was happy to give me a leave and help out in any way they could, but he wasn’t accepting my resignation. Kelly came straight home, threw a handful of sweaters and socks and toiletries into a bag, picked me up out of the bed—in my sweatpants and T-shirt—and carried me out the front door and into the passenger seat of her CRX. Change of scene is all she said as she started driving—as much to herself, I think, as to me. She pulled onto 101 and headed south, along the coast. By the time we got to Astoria, just over the Oregon border, the sun was setting over the Pacific. We stayed the night at a little bed-and-breakfast, but the town was spooky—steep hills stacked impossibly with ramshackle houses, all of it tilting above a ghosty wharf. We left that morning and drove back up 101 to the edge of Grays Harbor. North of Aberdeen along 109, it’s all beach. Little houses, a few motels and beach. And above it all the widest sky I’d ever seen. It was May and still chilly, but we pulled over to the side of the road and walked past the dunes to the water. Kelly told me to take my shoes off even though the sand was freezing cold. The wind was wild, and as we walked, we leaned into it to keep moving forward. It was the first real effort I’d made in months, leaning in, not allowing myself to be blown back or down. The hard, cold sand beneath my feet felt good, and I remembered I had a body and that it could feel. We walked along the surf’s edge for twenty minutes or so and eventually we saw the Moonstone. From the beach it looked abandoned, but as we got closer, we saw a few lights on in the office and a housekeeper dragging a vacuum between rooms. The place was flaking with old paint and for the most part empty, but I was struck by the way it squatted at the edge of the beach, under that enormous blue sky and before the vast Pacific. It sat there, ugly and unbudging, the sandy wind whipping along its rusted gutters. I thought of Penny.

  We stayed that night in Room 6, where Jane is now, but long before the good mattress. And then, after a few weeks of convincing Kelly, we sold our house, quit our jobs, and cashed in our 401(k)’s early. During that time we came back to Moclips twice and haggled with the Hillworths, who’d been trying to unload the place for years but had a hard time letting go. Eventually, we bought the Moonstone and the Hillworths’ house next door and all the scratched and broken-down furniture in both. Kelly and I had worked in hotels our entire adult lives, and now we owned one that needed us as much as we needed it. Kelly’s brothers thought we were crazy, but they knew once we’d made up our minds there was no turning back.

  That was over four years ago and I still think about Penny every day. I talk to her when I walk the beach and I ask her what she would do about this or that. I’ve asked her about Jane and if I should worry, and in the roar of the ocean I hear her say keep watch but let her be. Each time I head back up the beach and come upon the Moonstone, I remember the first time I saw it and Kelly’s face smiling at me in the crazy wind. And later that night, the two of us crawling into bed in that room that sits so close to the sea. After we turned out the lights, I tucked under the blankets and thanked God. For Kelly, for this life. And for Penny, who helped me survive growing up in Worcester, getting through college, and convincing me to move to New York. And into the dark I thanked Penny directly, for being my best friend, for agreeing to go to rehab in Seattle, for getting sober, and for staying out there long enough for me to check in that night at the Holiday Inn. I shivered as I imagined all the possible outcomes if any one thing had happened differently along the way. If my parents had moved us to some other neighborhood in Worcester when I was a kid. If Penny had never met Chloe and never tried heroin. If I’d picked the Econo Lodge or the Days Inn that night in Seattle. If I’d left New York one day before, or after. If Kelly’s employee hadn’t called in sick. If Penny’s girlfriend had slept at her house instead of the dorms the night those kids turned up. If Penny had locked her windows. I curled into Kelly and burrowed as deeply as I could into her back. I remember the tissue-thin, pale yellow T-shirt she wore, pressing my face to it and feeling her warm skin on the other side. And I remember thinking this is what it feels like to be home. Here. In the space around and between us. This fabric, this skin, this smell, this woman.

  For most of that night I was awake, wondering at it all, the pattern that seemed to emerge when I laid out every fluke and chance encounter, puzzling through all the possible signs and meanings; but any trace of a design disintegrated when I remembered the chaos and brutality of the world, the genocide and the natural disasters, all the agony. I never felt so small, so humbled, by the vastness of the universe and the fragility of life. I studied the water-stained ceiling in the room and imagined the things it had seen, the people. Who else had huddled here, pressed into someone they loved as if they were the last thing on earth that mattered? Who else prayed that morning would never come? Prayed they’d never have to leave this bed and let go.

  That night, the moon glowed through the curtains of the locked window, its storybook light dancing a path to the horizon, to the other side of the world. Two car doors slammed in the parking lot—one, then a moment later, the other. I listened for footfalls or keys turning in locks but heard nothing but the crashing surf outside. From the bed, I could see stars. At first, only the big ones: bright and fat and alone, jum
ping with urgency; and then the rest: tiny and fierce, a billion grains of sand spilling across the night sky, shining like the coast of heaven. Kelly’s sleeping body rose and fell with each breath. I curled closer, held tighter. I pressed my nose to her back and through the thin cotton smelled the motel soap on her skin. Waves collapsed and exploded on the beach, one after the other, again and again. I was home.

  George

  My son Robert got married this year. He and his wife, Joy, called me from their honeymoon in Big Sur, California, to let me know they’d gone to city hall in Oakland to say their vows. Do I wish I’d been there? Of course I do. But it’s how they wanted to go about things and it’s their business. I was glad for the phone call. Joy is a strong woman and I think the two of them make sense together. They’re not exactly what you’d call an affectionate couple or terribly expressive, or at least not from what I’ve seen in the few times I’ve seen them together. But given what Robert’s been through, just making sense is more than adequate. They’re both journalists, both busy, both black, both sober, and neither wants children. Robert writes about human rights abuses in government prisons, and Joy is obsessed with the impact of oil pipelines on indigenous lands. She spends a lot of time in Canada. When they talk about what they’re working on, they both tend to shout, so when we speak on the phone or see each other, neither of which is often, I try to steer the conversation to safe subjects like the weather and pets. I love Robert and I know he loves me, but since his mother died over a decade ago, he’s stayed away from Atlanta, his sisters, and me. For instance, his sisters haven’t met Joy yet and they’ve been together for over four years. They don’t make a fuss about it. Robert for them has always been less a brother and more like a cousin or young uncle who visits occasionally. Boarding school in Connecticut, five months in hospitals, two years of rehab and aftercare in Minnesota, and eventually college in Portland kept him away, sometimes even during Christmas. They knew a lot about him—he was so much and so often the subject of dinner-table talk in our house—but I don’t think they ever had a chance to know him.