Family Dancing (3 page)

“Why such a hurry?” Luis said.

“The parade. The Gay Pride Parade. I’m meeting some friends to march.”

“I’ll come with you,” Luis said. “I think I’m too old for these things, but why not?”

Neil did not want Luis to come with him, but he found it impossible to say so. Luis looked older by day, more likely to carry diseases. He dressed again in a torn T-shirt, leather jacket, bluejeans. “It’s my everyday apparel,” he said, and laughed. Neil buttoned his pants, aware that they had been washed by his mother the day before. Luis possessed the peculiar combination of hypermasculinity and effeminacy which exemplifies faggotry. Neil wanted to be rid of him, but Luis’s mark was on him, he could see that much. They would become lovers whether Neil liked it or not.

They joined the parade midway. Neil hoped he wouldn’t meet anyone he knew; he did not want to have to explain Luis, who clung to him. The parade was full of shirtless men with oiled, muscular shoulders. Neil’s back ached. There were floats carrying garishly dressed prom queens and cheerleaders, some with beards, some actually looking like women. Luis said, “It makes me proud, makes me glad to be what I am.” Neil supposed that by darting into the crowd ahead of him he might be able to lose Luis forever, but he found it difficult to let him go; the prospect of being alone seemed unbearable.

Neil was startled to see his mother watching the parade, holding up a sign. She was with the Coalition of Parents of Lesbians and Gays; they had posted a huge banner on the wall behind them proclaiming:
our sons and daughters, we are proud of you
. She spotted him; she waved, and jumped up and down.

“Who’s that woman?” Luis asked.

“My mother. I should go say hello to her.”

“O.K.,” Luis said. He followed Neil to the side of the parade. Neil kissed his mother. Luis took off his shirt, wiped his face with it, smiled.

“I’m glad you came,” Neil said.

“I wouldn’t have missed it, Neil. I wanted to show you I cared.”

He smiled, and kissed her again. He showed no intention of introducing Luis, so Luis introduced himself.

“Hello, Luis,” Mrs. Campbell said. Neil looked away. Luis shook her hand, and Neil wanted to warn his mother to wash it, warned himself to check with a V.D. clinic first thing Monday.

“Neil, this is Carmen Bologna, another one of the mothers,” Mrs. Campbell said. She introduced him to a fat Italian woman with flushed cheeks, and hair arranged in the shape of a clamshell.

“Good to meet you, Neil, good to meet you,” said Carmen Bologna. “You know my son, Michael? I’m so proud of Michael! He’s doing so well now. I’m proud of him, proud to be his mother I am, and your mother’s proud, too!”

The woman smiled at him, and Neil could think of nothing to say but “Thank you.” He looked uncomfortably toward his mother, who stood listening to Luis. It occurred to him that the worst period of his life was probably about to begin and he had no way to stop it.

A group of drag queens ambled over to where the mothers were standing. “Michael! Michael!” shouted Carmen Bologna, and embraced a sticklike man wrapped in green satin. Michael’s eyes were heavily dosed with green eyeshadow, and his lips were painted pink.

Neil turned and saw his mother staring, her mouth open. He marched over to where Luis was standing, and they moved back into the parade. He turned and waved to her. She waved back; he saw pain in her face, and then, briefly, regret. That day, he felt she would have traded him for any other son. Later, she said to him, “Carmen Bologna really was proud, and, speaking as a mother, let me tell you, you have to be brave to feel such pride.”

Neil was never proud. It took him a year to dump Luis, another year to leave California. The sick taste of ashes was still in his mouth. On the plane, he envisioned his mother sitting alone in the dark, smoking. She did not leave his mind until he was circling New York, staring down at the dawn rising over Queens. The song playing in his earphones would remain hovering on the edges of his memory, always associated with her absence. After collecting his baggage, he took a bus into the city. Boys were selling newspapers in the middle of highways, through the windows of stopped cars. It was seven in the morning when he reached Manhattan. He stood for ten minutes on East Thirty-fourth Street, breathed the cold air, and felt bubbles rising in his blood.

Neil got a job as a paralegal—a temporary job, he told himself. When he met Wayne a year later, the sensations of that first morning returned to him. They’d been up all night, and at six they walked across the park to Wayne’s apartment with the nervous, deliberate gait of people aching to make love for the first time. Joggers ran by with their dogs. None of them knew what Wayne and he were about to do, and the secrecy excited him. His mother came to mind, and the song, and the whirling vision of Queens coming alive below him. His breath solidified into clouds, and he felt happier than he had ever felt before in his life.

The second day of Wayne’s visit, he and Neil go with Mrs. Campbell to pick up the dogs at the dog parlor. The grooming establishment is decorated with pink ribbons and photographs of the owner’s champion pit bulls. A fat, middle-aged woman appears from the back, leading the newly trimmed and fluffed Abigail, Lucille, and Fern by three leashes. The dogs struggle frantically when they see Neil’s mother, tangling the woman up in their leashes. “Ladies, behave!” Mrs. Campbell commands, and collects the dogs. She gives Fern to Neil and Abigail to Wayne. In the car on the way back, Abigail begins pawing to get on Wayne’s lap.

“Just push her off,” Mrs. Campbell says. “She knows she’s not supposed to do that.”

“You never groomed Rasputin,” Neil complains.

“Rasputin was a mutt.”

“Rasputin was a beautiful dog, even if he did smell.”

“Do you remember when you were a little kid, Neil, you used to make Rasputin dance with you? Once you tried to dress him up in one of my blouses.”

“I don’t remember that,” Neil says.

“Yes. I remember,” says Mrs. Campbell. “Then you tried to organize a dog beauty contest in the neighborhood. You wanted to have runners-up—everything.”

“A dog beauty contest?” Wayne says.

“Mother, do we have to—”

“I think it’s a mother’s privilege to embarrass her son,” Mrs. Campbell says, and smiles.

When they are about to pull into the driveway, Wayne starts screaming, and pushes Abigail off his lap. “Oh, my God!” he says. “The dog just pissed all over me.”

Neil turns around and sees a puddle seeping into Wayne’s slacks. He suppresses his laughter, and Mrs. Campbell hands him a rag.

“I’m sorry, Wayne,” she says. “It goes with the territory.”

“This is really disgusting,” Wayne says, swatting at himself with the rag.

Neil keeps his eyes on his own reflection in the rearview mirror and smiles.

At home, while Wayne cleans himself in the bathroom, Neil watches his mother cook lunch—Japanese noodles in soup. “When you went off to college,” she says, “I went to the grocery store. I was going to buy you ramen noodles, and I suddenly realized you weren’t going to be around to eat them. I started crying right then, blubbering like an idiot.”

Neil clenches his fists inside his pockets. She has a way of telling him little sad stories when he doesn’t want to hear them—stories of dolls broken by her brothers, lunches stolen by neighborhood boys on the way to school. Now he has joined the ranks of male children who have made her cry.

“Mama, I’m sorry,” he says.

She is bent over the noodles, which steam in her face. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Wayne, but I wish you had answered me last night. I was very frightened—and worried.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, but it’s not convincing. His fingers prickle. He senses a great sorrow about to be born.

“I lead a quiet life,” she says. “I don’t want to be a disciplinarian. I just don’t have the energy for these—shenanigans. Please don’t frighten me that way again.”

“If you were so upset, why didn’t you say something?”

“I’d rather not discuss it. I lead a quiet life. I’m not used to getting woken up late at night. I’m not used—”

“To my having a lover?”

“No, I’m not used to having other people around, that’s all. Wayne is charming. A wonderful young man.”

“He likes you, too.”

“I’m sure we’ll get along fine.”

She scoops the steaming noodles into ceramic bowls. Wayne returns, wearing shorts. His white, hairy legs are a shocking contrast to hers, which are brown and sleek.

“I’ll wash those pants, Wayne,” Mrs. Campbell says. “I have a special detergent that’ll take out the stain.”

She gives Neil a look to indicate that the subject should be dropped. He looks at Wayne, looks at his mother; his initial embarrassment gives way to a fierce pride—the arrogance of mastery. He is glad his mother knows that he is desired, glad it makes her flinch.

Later, he steps into the back yard; the gardener is back, whacking at the bushes with his shears. Neil walks by him in his bathing suit, imagining he is on parade.

That afternoon, he finds his mother’s daily list on the kitchen table:

tuesday

7:00—breakfast

Take dogs to groomer

Groceries (?)

Campaign against Draft—4–7

Buy underwear

Trios—2:00

Spaghetti

Fruit

Asparagus if sale

Peanuts

Milk

Doctor’s Appointment (make)

Write Cranston/Hayakawa

re disarmament

Handi-Wraps

Mozart

Abigail

Top Ramen

Pedro

Her desk and trash can are full of such lists; he remembers them from the earliest days of his childhood. He had learned to read from them. In his own life, too, there have been endless lists—covered with check marks and arrows, at least one item always spilling over onto the next day’s agenda. From September to November, “Buy plane ticket for Christmas” floated from list to list to list.

The last item puzzles him: Pedro. Pedro must be the gardener. He observes the accretion of names, the arbitrary specifics that give a sense of his mother’s life. He could make a list of his own selves: the child, the adolescent, the promiscuous faggot son, and finally the good son, settled, relatively successful. But the divisions wouldn’t work; he is today and will always be the child being licked by the dog, the boy on the floor with Luis; he will still be everything he is ashamed of. The other lists—the lists of things done and undone—tell their own truth: that his life is measured more properly in objects than in stages. He knows himself as “jump rope,” “book,” “sunglasses,” “underwear.”

“Tell me about your family, Wayne,” Mrs. Campbell says that night, as they drive toward town. They are going to see an Esther Williams movie at the local revival house: an underwater musical, populated by mermaids, underwater Rockettes.

“My father was a lawyer,” Wayne says. “He had an office in Queens, with a neon sign. I think he’s probably the only lawyer in the world who had a neon sign. Anyway, he died when I was ten. My mother never remarried. She lives in Queens. Her great claim to fame is that when she was twenty-two she went on ‘The $64,000 Question.’ Her category was mystery novels. She made it to sixteen thousand before she got tripped up.”

“When I was about ten, I wanted you to go on ‘Jeopardy,’
” Neil says to his mother. “You really should have, you know. You would have won.”

“You certainly loved ‘Jeopardy,’
” Mrs. Campbell says. “You used to watch it during dinner. Wayne, does your mother work?”

“No,” he says. “She lives off investments.”

“You’re both only children,” Mrs. Campbell says. Neil wonders if she is ruminating on the possible connection between that coincidence and their “alternative life style.”

The movie theater is nearly empty. Neil sits between Wayne and his mother. There are pillows on the floor at the front of the theater, and a cat is prowling over them. It casts a monstrous shadow every now and then on the screen, disturbing the sedative effect of water ballet. Like a teenager, Neil cautiously reaches his arm around Wayne’s shoulder. Wayne takes his hand immediately. Next to them, Neil’s mother breathes in, out, in, out. Neil timorously moves his other arm and lifts it behind his mother’s neck. He does not look at her, but he can tell from her breathing that she senses what he is doing. Slowly, carefully, he lets his hand drop on her shoulder; it twitches spasmodically, and he jumps, as if he had received an electric shock. His mother’s quiet breathing is broken by a gasp; even Wayne notices. A sudden brightness on the screen illuminates the panic in her eyes, Neil’s arm frozen above her, about to fall again. Slowly, he lowers his arm until his fingertips touch her skin, the fabric of her dress. He has gone too far to go back now; they are all too far.

Wayne and Mrs. Campbell sink into their seats, but Neil remains stiff, holding up his arms, which rest on nothing. The movie ends, and they go on sitting just like that.