by David Leite
“Yeah.” I stomped through the house to the garage. I opened the basement door. “I’m taking off on my bike.”
“Okay, well, be careful.”
“Mom banse.”
“God bless you.”
Flee, defect, escape, cut and run.
I jumped on my old canary-yellow Schwinn and rode to the far end of Sharps Lot Road to visit Silvia Farm, where I had worked summers. Cora, Mr. Silvia’s wife, and Billy, his son, were nowhere to be seen, so I skidded my bike into the wall and walked into the old barn, which was no longer in use. The tomato-packing assembly line was gone, the floor empty. I had ended up at the farm all those years ago because my parents thought hard work and sunshine would be an antidote for their morose teenager. Bobby Ledoux and I had ridden our bikes to the farm in the spring, me on the very same yellow Schwinn, to ask for jobs. We made a dollar and twenty-five cents an hour, working forty- to fifty-hour weeks.
For three ball-busting summers, I’d spent my days bent over picking peppers, green beans, and summer squash; stringing up and popping suckers off tomato plants; and slicing cabbages from their roots with a knife so dull I couldn’t have done myself in if I’d tried—all the while getting a redneck sunburn and scratching my ass. (I’d had a run-in with more poison ivy while squatting in the woods.) I’d also had to endure the taunts of the other hired farm boys, who would point to their crotches as they called my name, because they somehow knew I was the rarest of things on a vegetable farm: a fruit. To be fair, no one had escaped the ribbing. It just stung extra-bad, because although I was too young and naïve even to be in denial yet, I somehow knew that what they were so crudely intimating was true.
During lunch I’d sit in the cool shade of the maple tree, fantasizing that one day I’d become as rich as Jay Gatsby, and that I, too, would wear swell Brooks Brothers clothes and drive a yellow Rolls-Royce while the other boys pumped my gas.
Mr. Silvia was an ornery, tough bastard, and if he thought you were slacking, he’d toss the kid next to you off his row and begin hoeing or picking or weeding right across from you—looking at you the whole time. You had sure as hell better keep up, or you might not be picked up the next morning for work when Billy made his rounds with the truck.
When I glanced up at the rafters, which looked as if they’d been washed with tobacco spit, it all came flooding back. I rocketed out of the barn, jumped on my bike, and hooked a hard right onto Marvel Street. My feet were pumping faster than my heart. One afternoon, when I was at RIT, my mother had called to tell me Mr. Silvia had passed. I was deeply sad, I’d told her, because I’d loved the old man, in my way. To get his approval had meant I was one of the guys, and I’d needed that more than anything back then.
“David,” she said softly, “he hung himself in the barn.” She kept talking, and I could tell from her tone she was saying something soothing, but I felt my brain slip loose, like gears on my bike, trying to catch on. How could this irascible, indomitable man have killed himself? She explained that he had been suffering from depression for a long time. Years and years ago, Cora had taken him to Boston for shock therapy, and it had worked for a long time, but it came back. This time there was nothing anyone could do.
Bludgeoned. That’s how I felt, coasting down the hill to the old part of town. It seemed that whenever I stood, I got a baseball bat to my shins. I used to wonder, How many times can a person be pummeled before he can’t get up anymore? Do we have a limited reserve of energy that, once it’s spent, we can never recover? I remembered some of the Vietnam vets I’d see at the Bluffs, Paneen’s slot-car racing emporium down in Ocean Grove. They had come back vacant, somehow erased. Had they been beaten too many times? I worried about myself, wondering if I was flirting with that limit, that line in the sand past which insanity, Taunton State Hospital, and hopelessness lived.
I’d manipulated my parents into getting me to a psychiatrist by threatening suicide when I was fourteen. I’d known that I wasn’t going to take my life, because I’d had an unassailable certainty—which had nothing to do with naïveté, youth, or faith—that whatever was haunting me would be rooted out, with a rusting garden trowel if need be, but it would be gone. I’d be cured. In time, when I realized a cure might have been over-optimistic, I’d learned to cope with the low-frequency rumble of anxiety and moments of floating disconnectedness. I’d just never bargained with the notion that they could return, full frontal and unapologetic. And I’d never imagined that killing myself could be a relief. But now, I finally understood Mr. Silvia’s choice.
The next morning, my mother pulled me into the kitchen. It was her domain, and she commanded it with a no-bullshit, do-it-my-way-or-take-a-hike mentality. But today she was gentle, solicitous even.
“Do you want to help make the marinade for the carne assada?” she asked. I didn’t. I wanted to burrow into bed, head under my pillow, and awaken when the anxiety was gone, bleached clean like so much black mold.
Vo, sensing something was off, toddled in from the breezeway and sighed herself into a chair to watch, quietly.
“Sure.”
I could always gauge how nervous my mother was about meeting someone new by how much she cooked. For Bridget, who was arriving the next afternoon to spend a few days with us, she had packed the upstairs and basement refrigerators with food. “I have no idea what the woman likes” was her reasoning. “She’s Russian, for cripes’ sake. What do they eat? And don’t ask me to make ‘paloogies,’ or whatever they call those dumplings.”
She pulled out the ingredients from the cupboards: paprika, my father’s red wine and his onions, tomato paste, bay leaves, crushed red-pepper flakes, and plenty of garlic powder, salt, and pepper. She rooted around under the cabinets for the black enamelware roasting pan with the white flecks, and placed it on the counter. She grabbed the edge of her housecoat and wiped the inside, although it was perfectly clean. Everything in my mother’s house is meticulously clean.
“Okay, first pour the wine into the pan.” I did. “Next, the tomato paste.” I opened both ends of the can and pushed it out with my thumb. It made a little farting noise as the cork of red plopped into the pan.
“Excuse yourself, Ma,” I said to her.
“Very funny, Mister Man. Make sure it’s dissolved.” I used the back of a spoon to smash the paste against the side of the pan and then swirled it, brick red bleeding into the purple. “Now, add the garlic, bay leaves, and red pepper.” The familiar smell, our smell, started to waft from the pan. It was comforting, and reoriented me whenever I walked into my parents’ house after being away for a long time. I could pick out the notes of our heritage: the acidic tingle from the basement, where my father made his wine from the grapes in the back half acre; the heady sharpness of garlic and sting of onions from the kitchen. That was the Holy Trinity in my mother’s and grandmother’s cooking.
She placed a hunk of beef that she had cut into quarters in the pan. “Why four pieces?” I asked.
She looked at me incredulously. “Ask her,” she said, pointing to my grandmother. “That’s how she always did it.” My grandmother craned her neck up to inspect the beef. She nodded with approval. “Bem.”
“Now onions,” my mother said, pointing to the six huge globes my father had dug from the garden the previous autumn. “Peel them, then cut them into half-moons.” With my fingernail I picked at the onion’s papery skin, the color and finish of bamboo flooring, and she hip-checked me out of the way. “We’ll be here all day if you keep at it like that.” I looked over at Vo, who rolled her eyes and fluttered her fingers over her lips, her way of trying to hide a laugh.
“Open the drawer,” my mother said, which she pronounced droh-wer, “and hand me the knife.” It was the only knife she owned. Its blade had been half worn away by my father, who over the years would trundle to the basement, flick on the rotary grinder, and file off another sixteenth of an inch in the name of sharpness. She held the onion in her left hand and pulled the knife toward her thumb, and in a
few deft flicks, it was peeled. She plonked it down in front of me, as if to say, Get a move on. “Pronto.” Ready.
The onions stung, and it felt good. I forced my eyes open, letting them water. My shoulders started hitching, and my mother wrapped her arms around me. I rested my chin on her shellacked beehive.
“Son, I wish I knew what to do for you,” she said, which made me only cry more.
“Me, too, Ma. Me, too.”
I looked over at my grandmother, and she was wiping her eyes. She didn’t understand. She reached out her hand, knobby and tiny, to me. “Querido,” she whispered, her head tilted to one side. Sweetheart. Her tone was placating, as if to say, Stop, please stop doing this to yourself. And I wished I could.
Desperate, my mother hauled out the Funeral Story.
“Do you remember that time Dina, Joanne, and I went to that wake?”
I nodded, already smiling in anticipation, and she began.
“Well, for some reason, the funeral home had all the mourners sitting on risers, one higher than the next, like in a stadium,” she said, washing her only knife and putting it away. “I guess so everyone could have unobstructed views of death.
“Anyway, we were sitting on folding chairs about halfway up—me”—she took a step to her left—“Dina”—another step to her left—“and on the end of the row was crazy Jo.” To the left of Joanne, she explained, had been one of those accordion walls that locked into place and divided the large parlor into two smaller rooms.
“Always a devil, that Jo, she starts joking with your godmother—you know how she is.” She began acting out the sequence I’d known since I was a kid. “So they start laughing. Naturally, I poke your tarouca godmother to shut her up,” she said, giving the air a swift jab with her elbow, “which just makes them laugh harder. So Dina elbows Jo, and, don’t you know—Jo’s chair slips off the edge of the riser, and she falls against the wall, ripping it out from the ceiling. Now she and the wall are on top of all these screaming mourners from the other wake. She’s lying there, legs kicking in the air, trying to pull down her dress, screaming, ‘Betty! Ellie! Help!’” Here, some of my old mother, Ellie, Before Conversion, came through, and I could see the delicious glint of evil in her eyes. “We just left her there hollering, we were laughing so hard.”
The story had its intended effect. Vo was squeaking in her chair, her hand in front of her mouth so we couldn’t see she wasn’t wearing her dentures. Spurred on by my mother’s cackling, I scrubbed the tears from my face. It felt good to bust a gut, to lose myself for a moment.
One morning while Bridget was with my mother, my father and I took off walking up Sharps Lot Road toward the green water tower, which was now painted a battleship gray. I guess to better blend itself into New England’s ubiquitous overcast days, although that day it stuck out like a sore thumb. The sky was a startling cerulean blue—the kind people always mention when discussing a disaster. “The morning started out so beautiful,” they say. “Who would have ever guessed?”
We turned down the lane to Mr. Silvia’s old cabbage fields. The ruts from the trucks carrying all of us boys and piles of produce boxes with flexible wire closures had long ago filled in. It was almost impossible to tell this had ever been a working dirt road; it was so overgrown with grasses.
“I like Bridget, Son.”
“Thanks.”
I brushed my hands along the top of the grass; a few heavy bumblebees looped away. I grabbed one of the long stalks that looked like they had furry caterpillars crawling on the end. If you pulled up just so, the stalk would release from the lower leaves with a high-pitched squeak and shudder, and when you slipped it in your mouth, it had a vegetal sweetness that, to me, was the essence of summer.
A cargo hold of feelings weighed down on my chest, and I needed to empty it.
“Daddy, I have something to tell you.” The grass bobbed in my mouth as I spoke.
“Okay.”
We walked farther down the path, with me quiet, him waiting. I don’t remember if there was a buildup, or caveats, or tears. The words were just there somehow, out in the sunlight for the first time. “I’m gay.” We had reached the end of the lane, where it opened up into the old fields. They seemed smaller than I remembered, less distinct and clear-cut. I looked straight ahead, trying to remain invisible.
“But . . .” He pointed in the direction of our house. “Bridget?”
“Daddy, you know timing has never been my strong suit.” After a long pause, I added, “It’s confusing.”
He rubbed his fingers back and forth across his lips and then under his chin; it was a gesture he so often uses when he’s trying to gather himself. Before he spoke, I interjected: “Are you surprised? Honest, tell me. Are you?”
He shook his head.
There were so many questions I wanted to ask: When did he suspect? Did he remember my horror when he had explained sex to me? Was he disappointed? Before I could tell him that I wanted to change, that while I knew I loved Bridget, I was working very hard to become sexually attracted to her, he interrupted.
“Don’t say anything to your mother.”
I wanted to swallow my words whole. But there they were, glinting in front of us, taking up space and volume, refusing to be ignored. No sooner had I finally unburdened myself, no sooner had I thought I’d put an end to the secret that had festered since even before I was transfixed by the hair swirling out of the top of Paneen’s jeans—than he wanted it hidden again. Don’t say anything to your mother.
Bad timing. That’s what this was. You stupid, impulsive idiot. If I had told him at a different time, maybe in a different way, he wouldn’t have tried to stash it, just like Boys & Sex, pushed down into a box deep inside. I have no idea why I waited until Bridget was there, back home with my mother getting lunch ready, to tell him. All I knew was that I was compelled to vomit it all up, relieve myself so I could heal.
But from what? In my foolishness, I believed that telling him would magically lance my pain in some great, cathartic Movie of the Week moment, that I would emerge onto Sharps Lot Road changed. As if by simply opening my mouth, all the anxiety and dread and blackness would tumble out onto the lane and shrivel, dead, like slugs in the sun. Instead, I felt no different. Except now I had to live with the weight of this miscalculation.
After lunch, while my mother was washing dishes, my father called Bridget and me into the living room and pointed to the orange couch. We sat down. He wrung his hands together hard, and I could hear the hissing of his calluses.
“Bridget,” he said softly, a kind expression on his face, “this morning, David told me about—” He paused, letting his silence say what he couldn’t.
She looked at me, and I nodded. “Oh!” she said, surprised. “Okay.” I could see she was as nervous and as confused as I was.
A longer pause.
“Young lady, are you good with this?” he asked, moving his hand back and forth between us. “Is this what you want?”
At any other time, about any other topic, I would have turned on my father, roaring that he had no right to speak to either of us that way. But I didn’t feel judged or indicted. It would have been hard to, considering how gently and carefully he had spoken. That’s my father, and there was no way he could have lived with himself had he not asked.
Oddly, I don’t remember Bridget’s response; I wonder if I chose not to.
The night before fall semester started at CMU, Bridget and I scanned the announcement board across from the drama office for classroom assignments. Freshmen, looking spooked, milled around on the periphery, as returning students called to one another, hugged, laughed.
Everyone noticed my weight loss and new clothes, but I took no pleasure in them. I had again lost my appetite and dropped to—what? I had no idea, and I didn’t care. I hadn’t stepped on a scale since I’d arrived at my parents’ six weeks earlier.
As I listened to them speak—some holding me at arm’s length, shaking their heads in wonder—I wat
ched their mouths moving, eyes opening wide, fingers pointing. But I heard nothing. It was as if I had gone deaf; their voices were lowered to a muffled murmur. I wonder if I look normal to them. Can they tell something is wrong? Do I seem different from the David of last year? Darlene, Bridget’s old roommate, laughed. Now they’re all cracking up. Better laugh so you’re not found out. So I did.
As Marcus King was in the middle of talking to me, I turned and walked away.
“All right, then,” I heard him say, “be that way!”
Walking down the center hall of the Beaux-Arts building, with its vaulting beauty, I remembered one of the scripts I’d read during the summer, and the Robert Burns poem that had inspired its title, and of a line in that poem: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.”
Outside dusk was falling; the familiar coppery tang hung in the air. I looked down the mall of academic buildings and knew I had lost.
19
MISE EN PLACE
My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in the hollow of my throat. I faced the wall. A few pieces of tape curled like eyelashes. Behind me, two dozen or so people were about to judge me. I took a deep breath and turned around.
“It’s cold,” I said, rubbing my arms to warm them. I wasn’t acting when I said my next line: “I’m trembling all over, just as if I’d got an examination before me.” A few scattered laughs. Not enough. I backed up against the wall and clutched my chest like I was having a heart attack. “I suffer from palpitations, I’m excitable and always getting awfully upset!” More laughs. Better. Buoyed, I stole a glance at Angela. She couldn’t hide her disdain; she shook her head and rolled her eyes. When I saw her put down her pen and close her notebook, I gave up. I said the rest of my lines mechanically, leaving my scene partner bewildered, her eyes pleading.
It was the start of sophomore spring semester, and I was doing a scene from The Marriage Proposal by Chekhov. Ever since I’d arrived back in Pittsburgh, the anxiety that had gutted me during the summer had been slowly replaced by a frightening darkness—“the Gloaming,” I called it—that closed in, fading me to black. I cared about nothing. The clothes I bought went unused; the rituals that had given me so much comfort, forgotten. My bed remained unmade and unchanged for weeks. I looked just as rumpled. I had stopped running, and weight piled on; I ate constantly. Days would go by, and I wouldn’t touch my journal; then, seized by a sudden, thundering imperative I couldn’t ignore, I’d write long, rambling entries about the Quiet Me versus the Loud Me, introverted-self versus extroverted-self, and I didn’t understand any of it.
