Brownie Points (9 page)

The school chess club was so poorly attended that the detention center used the club room as an overflow facility. Anytime there were too many thugs condemned to after-school penance, they were sent to Miss Penn’s Chess Room. In a Hollywood movie, the prehistoric spinster with seven inches of white cotton candy hair would inspire the troublemakers to seek redemption through chess. In reality, the teacher was one step away from assisted living, and both chess club members frequently left with pawns firmly shoved up their nostrils.

Our last hope was the drama club, but they didn’t even start auditioning for their musical until second semester.

Jason helped me build a small studio in the garage, which was quickly condemned by Val Monroe’s CC&Rs Enforcement Committee. I swore I saw Ellie and Stacey driving past the house every day, taking notes as Jason and I constructed the frame and hammered plywood walls. But Val’s human accessories waited until we finished before the two slipped a Notice of Code Violation under the front door.

I found moments of refuge from Utopia working on a new sculpture in a spare bedroom. Logan sought comfort in the weekly Girl Scout meetings, where he earned more merit badges than any of the other members. Maya and Jason were acclimated by their first week, but Logan and I were still scavenging for moments when we fit in.

™˜

By the middle of the month, Indian summer was officially over and the air had a cold bite. Yet Maya insisted it was warm enough to go trick-or-treating dressed as a scantily clad pirate. It’s never easy to see your daughter making the transition to womanhood, but Maya made matters worse by squeezing her young breasts into a tiny black pleather bustier and covering her legs with torn fishnet stockings. With a little makeup she would have looked like a page from
Playboy’s
“Girls of the High Seas” issue
.
The night she came downstairs to model her costume, my poor husband almost choked on his drink.

“Get yourself upstairs and put on some clothes,” Jason demanded after he stopped coughing.

“Why? It’s for Halloween,” she protested.

“Maya, you look like a street walker!”

“I’m a pirate,” she said, feigning innocence.

I chimed in. “A plank walker then. Maya, there’s no way you’re wearing something like that at thirteen years old.”

“She’s not wearing that get-up at any age,” Jason barked.

“This is so unfair!” Maya cried. “Bianca, Ashley and I are going trick-or-treating as pirates together. No one else’s parents are being all Amish about it.”

Logan suppressed a laugh and gave Maya a look as if to say he’d told her so. Nonetheless he tried to come to his sister’s defense and explain life in the tween lane to us. “You guys don’t understand how important Halloween is for girls,” he said. “They get to dress super-slutty without anyone talking smack about them the next day.”

Jason lowered his reading glasses and looked at Logan in disbelief. Did he actually think this line of reasoning was going to work with us? Then Jason returned his glare back at our daughter. “You looked beautiful as Snow White last year,” he said.

“Daddy, I was five!”

“Weren’t you the Little Mermaid once?” Jason asked.

“That was Logan,” Maya said. “And he was eight. You guys, don’t make such a big deal out of this.”

Jason straightened himself in his chair and held the arm rests, as if to brace himself from the double whammy of recalling his son’s past Halloween costume and seeing his daughter’s present one. “I’m not making
any
deal of it. You’re not wearing that thing out of this house. Hell, you’re not wearing it in the house. Go upstairs and get yourself dressed!”

“You guys suck,” Maya said stomping off to her room.

“That’s it, you’re going as an astronaut, young lady,” Jason shouted after her. Turning to me, he asked, “Did she say we ‘suck’?”

Jason looked at Logan, who was sitting quietly at the kitchen counter. “So what do you want to be for Halloween, a pimp?”

“Actually, I’ve been wanting to talk to you guys, but maybe this isn’t the right time,” Logan said, pausing for us to invite him to continue.

“Shoot, buddy,” Jason said.

“Well, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about this —” Logan said.

“Go ’head,” I coaxed.

“So, I’ve been thinking what I really want to be is a Girl Scout.”

Jason and I simultaneously repeated our son’s words in disbelief. “A Girl Scout?”

“Doesn’t anyone in this family want to be a ghost or a goblin or anything halfway normal?” Jason cried.

Logan laughed nervously. “I don’t mean for Halloween.”

“Oh, good,” Jason said with a sigh.

Wait a minute. If he doesn’t want to be a Girl Scout for Halloween, then …

“I want to be a Girl Scout for real.”

Chapter Eight

“He wants to be a Girl Scout for real?!” Jason said after I hurried him upstairs to our room. “He wants to be a Girl Scout for real?!” It did our son no good to see Jason repeating these words like the victim of an earthquake, still in shock from watching his house crumble. “He wants to be a Girl Scout for real?”

“Okay, you need to stop saying that,” I commanded.

“He’s a boy,” Jason now changed his statement slightly.

“I know he’s a boy,” I snapped.

“Boys don’t join Girl Scouts,” he added as if it was some great kernel of wisdom no one had yet considered.

“Enough!” I said. “Let’s take a little time to let this settle and we’ll talk about it tomorrow.”

“He wants to be a Girl Scout?”

“Enough,” I said.

Jason opened his mouth, but before he could speak I commanded, “Shut up! You did enough damage downstairs. Be quiet already.”

I’m sure he wished he could turn back the clock just thirty minutes to a time before his daughter told us we sucked for not allowing her to shake her pirate booty, and our son told us he wanted to don a green sash and hustle Thin Mints.

Jason could not let this go. “What the hell’s that boy talking about? He wants to be a Girl Scout?”

“I don’t know,” I returned. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

“If he thought he got his ass kicked before ...” Jason sighed and shook his head. He got up from the bed, grabbed his free weights and began doing bicep curls with such intensity it looked as if he were trying to pump the gay out of our son.

It’s not that I thought Logan’s idea was a good one, but it was unsettling to see my husband’s reaction. It was ten times worse than Maya saying she wanted to go trick-or-treating dressed as Captain Hooker. This alone was disturbing.

“When I was a kid, the worst insult you could call a guy was a girl. Our coach called us girls when we weren’t playing hard enough,” Jason recalled.

“He sounds very enlightened,” I said.

“You know what I mean, baby.” Sadly, I did. “No boy wants to be called a girl, much less a
Girl
Scout
. That’s like the girliest of girls! This is the craziest idea that boy has ever come up with, and he’s had some doozies.”

“It is, but I can see where he’s coming from. Girl Scouts is the only place he really fits here.” Jason’s body deflated as he sat on the edge of the bed. Quickly he began pulling the weights as if he were starting a manual lawn mower. “He’s accepted, the girls love him, Michelle loves him. He’s very popular there.”

Jason stopped pulling the weights and whispered, “They are going to kick his ass. Do you understand me?”

Whispering back at him I explained, “I think it’s an awful idea, Jason. But I want him to know that we’re not going to freak out every time he tells us something, you know,
difficult
.”

“Please tell me we’re not going there tonight, baby,” he said.

“We’re there.”

“Look, a thirteen-year-old has no idea if he’s gay. He’s not having sex with anyone, much less guys.”

“Of course he’s not having sex, but, but — Jason, are we really having this conversation? Come on, we lived in San Francisco for years. How many gay men did we know?”

“Plenty,” he said. “And they were all having sex with other guys. That’s what gay means, baby. If he wants be so gay so bad, let him do it when he’s older.”

“Let him do it when he’s older?” I repeated, slowly, hoping that hearing his own words would help him realize how absurd he sounded. It didn’t. Instead he exhaled and sunk his face into his hands.

“What? Say what’s on your mind,” I urged. “I need to know where you stand on this.”

“If that boy joins Girl Scouts and keeps leaping all over the place, he’s putting himself in the line of fire, and I can’t understand why someone would want to do that. I’m his father. I can’t sit back and watch him do things that are an invitation for an ass kicking.”

“Jason,” I began, crushed.

“I know, I know, there’s no such thing as an invitation. You think I don’t know that?” Jason stopped and remained silent for a few moments as he contemplated whether or not he was going to share the memory he was reliving. “You know that scar over Bea’s eyebrow?” he asked. I shook my head, unable to recall his sister’s mark. “She got that from some white kid who threw a bottle out of his truck window one day when we were walking home from school. They shouted at us and before I could tell her not to turn around, she was facing a Pepsi bottle flying toward her.”

“Oh my God. Why haven’t you ever told me this?” I asked.

“Because I don’t let this kind of shit affect me, Lisa.” I knew better than to state the obvious. “I don’t understand why the boy can’t tone it down a bit and save himself a lot of hassle.”

“I don’t see how you can say that, Jason. You know what it’s like to be targeted like that,” I began, but was quickly interrupted by my husband’s wrath.

“Being black and being gay are not the same thing, and I am damn well sick of every group in the world trying to piggyback on the black experience. There were no 400 years of gay slaves in this country. No one ever tried to keep gay folks from voting, riding in the front of the bus or earning a decent living. My father’s a surgeon and he can’t buy a Slurpee at the 7-Eleven without being followed around by some dumb ass security guard. Lisa, you ever heard of someone being pulled over by a police officer for driving while
gay
?!”

“No, but I have heard of idiots like that boy in the truck beating up gay people,” I retorted.

“Exactly, Lisa!” he shouted before quieting himself so the kids wouldn’t overhear. “That is exactly what I’m saying! Logan can make a choice to tone it down and blend in, and save himself some of the bullshit I went through every day. I wore my difference on my skin every day. He doesn’t have to.” The air left the room. We looked at each other and seemed to have made the same realization: We had each married a fool.

“Do you have any idea how exhausting it is being black, Lisa?” Before I could open my mouth and try to help him make the correlation that was so obvious to me, he held out his hand to stop me. “I could deal with a few assholes every now and then; it’s the everyday shit that wears you down. I tell you, I could’ve used a day off from it growing up.”

“You want a day off from being black?”

“Don’t put words into my mouth, Lisa,” Jason snapped back. “I didn’t say that. I could’ve used a day off from the bullshit Logan is opening himself up to.”

“So you do see the parallel between being black and being gay?”

“You know what I think? I think you want Logan to be gay so everyone can see how hip and liberal you are with your gay kid and black husband.”

If someone shot me from a cannon, I don’t think it could have blown me further across the room. Jason had joked with me a few times about marrying him for his melanin, but I never thought he really felt that way. I lost the struggle to hold back my tears when Jason sat beside me and put his arm around me.

“You know I didn’t mean that, baby,” he said.

“I know you did,” I said, sniffling. “What hurts me is not that you said it, but that you think it.”

“No, baby,” Jason said tenderly, brushing the hair from my face. “I don’t think that. It was the heat of the moment. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it.”

But he did. Jason didn’t shout that my drinking was tearing apart our family. He didn’t complain about my gambling addiction or any other imaginary gripe he had with me. He called me a benign racist because he thought it was at least a little true. And maybe it was to some extent. When I was in grade school, I felt horribly ashamed to be white when we learned about slavery. I went out of my way to flash big, self-conscious smiles at the African-American kids in my class to assure them I wasn’t like those nasty white folks on southern plantations. Jason’s words stung so deeply only because there was a drop of truth in them.

I wiped my eyes and focused on Jason, who now looked like a blurred apparition. He handed me a tissue, and as I blew my nose I realized clearly, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that, like everyone, I had my issues with race, but that I loved Jason with a purity that transcended the physical body.