Sometimes Never, Sometimes Always (8 page)

Yeah, because I told you five seconds ago that I was going to get changed. How utterly incomprehensible that I would have my clothes off. “My dress is on the floor,” I blurt. Okay, so clearly I’m brain damaged. “I mean, I … I’ll hang it back up.” Lame.

Her eyes slide around the room. “I brought you your cocoa,” she says, and she holds the cup out as though I’m going to take it, like I’m going to stand there in my bra and underwear holding a steaming mug of cocoa.

“Um, you can set it on my dresser, I guess,” I say. “Thank you.”

This ridiculous mental malfunction I’ve got going on almost makes me forget my manners, which would be a grave error. I feel acutely vulnerable right now. I grope for my dress on the floor of the closet, hoping I can keep the unzipped luggage hidden, and successfully manage to hang up the dress and pull on some sweats and a long-sleeved T-shirt. “That feels much better,” I say, smiling brightly as inane words continue to trip off my tongue.

“Cassandra, is … is Eric …
carnally involved
?”

“Whaaaat?” Carnally involved? Unwanted images of that time I walked in on him and Gavin flash in front of my eyes, and my face burns. “Mom!”

Carnally involved? I mean, really. Who says that? Who even
thinks
that? I shudder, trying to impress upon my mother how incredibly mortified this whole discussion is making me, but she doesn’t look at me. Instead, she sinks down right there on my pale pink carpeting and buries her face in her hands. I imagine she’s crying, though she doesn’t make any noise. Oh god. I take a step closer to her. “Mom?”

“I found … a
condom
… in his trash can,” she says. She keeps her hands over her face, hiding her eyes, but she’s not wallowing in it; I can see her pulling herself together, piece by piece, like a jigsaw puzzle of poise. She lowers her hands and waves them in front of her face in little motions, as though the air in front of her is the source of her discomfort. Onion fumes, maybe. “I’m so sorry, Cass. I didn’t mean to lose it like that. Really, I’m all right.” Her thin mouth pulls into that smile again, a stick-figure line-smile that couldn’t fool anyone.

“Mom, I don’t know anything about this, really.” And I don’t, either. I have no details to report about Eric’s sex life, or lack of one. That’s between him and Gavin and doesn’t need to involve anyone else’s opinion, no matter what my family’s church might say. I’m not sure if Eric is cool with God on this score, but personally I can’t put faith in an unconditionally loving God condemning people for loving. Allegedly.

“I can’t wrap my mind around why he would be disgracing himself like this.” She dabs at the corners of her eyes with an index finger wrapped in the edge of her sleeve. I see the black mascara stain spread across the fabric in a little pool of saltwater. “Not to mention the poor girl.” She looks up at me, wounded. “He hasn’t even introduced us to her,” she says.

“Well, you know Eric. He plays his cards close to his chest,” I say. It’s true, but she doesn’t know how true, and I don’t really want to tell her.

“But this is too close. What do you think, Cass? Should I have Dad talk to him? Or maybe if I say something to Gavin, do you think? Eric respects him, and even though Gavin isn’t saved, I know he’s an honorable young man. I’m sure he would talk some sense into Eric, if I could figure out a way to speak to him about it.”

I shake my head. “No, Mom. Don’t embarrass him by talking to his best friend about something like this. What if Eric was …
you know.
Experimenting, like. With … ” Oh, god. This is too much. She stares at me without any glimmer of understanding in her eyes. My face heats up again.

“Experimenting?” She presses her lips together, and her eyes grow so liquid and fragile I can barely continue.

“You know. Like with himself.” Okay, so this might be the most embarrassing moment of my entire life. I’m explaining masturbation to my mother. She may as well not even be human, and I may as well be dead.

Her voice is small and uncertain. “Oh.” A frown, her eyes on her hands in her lap, twisting and twisting the band on her left ring finger. “Ohhh.” She looks up, and her face is pink, too, but hopeful. “Do you think that could be it, really? Will you pray with me, Cassandra? Pray for strength for Eric and for guidance for me, as his parent?”

I squirm. She only knows that I’m uncomfortable praying in front of other people; I wonder if she suspects that I don’t pray at all, if she speculates about what is or isn’t in my heart. I’ve never really tried to tell either of my parents what I think—it seems like words better off left unsaid. Someday, when I’m an adult with my own place, won’t they realize that I’ve got different ideas about what to do with my Sunday mornings? It doesn’t have to be a big thing, a big conflict. We can go our separate ways, that’s all. Later, once I’m out of this town.

“
You
can pray, if you want,” I say. I think it’s easier to keep the peace, mostly.

“Jesus, in your glorious name, we thank you for the many blessings you bring into our lives. Our children, each one of them a gift so precious. Help them, Lord, as they face the many temptations of this carnal world, and please be with me as I try so hard to interpret your will for them and guide them along the path to righteousness.”

She ends the prayer and squeezes my hand, and I can’t help it. For a moment, I’m awash in this awful sort of rueful sadness. It prickles up out of my chest and binds my throat, my mouth and nose, until I have to labor to breathe. It’s not God, and it’s not the Spirit, smothering me with vengeance. It’s pity—pity and compassion for my mother. She and I may have our moments, but right now all I can think of is how she’s feeling as she watches her children careening off into the world, out of her reach. How it feels for her to be so powerless, and how comforting it must be to be able to hand it all to God in a prayer and trust that it will work out in the end.

Oh, Mom. It’s not going to work out the way you hope. And if I were a praying person, I’d ask God to give you the flexibility to bend under the new shape of things. Jesus, help my black-and-white, literal-minded mother to understand that righteousness is a rainbow of different shades of gray.

13. Describe your family …

Annika and Britney gossip the entire lunch period today about people I barely know, while I do exciting things like adjusting kerning and placing ads for community businesses in the margins of the sports section. I knew this newspaper was read by a lot of people, but I had no idea that there are companies all over town paying good money to get their little business-card-sized advertisements stuck in the side columns of
The Gordon High Gazette
. And somehow each and every one of those ads was created in a different program on a different platform, and for some inexplicable reason, they all look completely different on my computer screen from the way they look on the proof sheets the businesses send. This, apparently, is my (impossible) job—making the two match up.

So while Britney and Annika talk smack about the entire basketball team and more than half of the hockey team and discuss the sexual history of all the cheerleaders, I spend my lunch swearing and restarting and loading and reloading fonts. They hardly know I’m there.

Three things I did not know (or really need to know) about the jocks at my school:

1. 1.
   Jack (“Off”) Fuller, the captain of the hockey team, allegedly got his nickname from an act performed in the presence of the entire hockey cheer squad. (And according to my sources, performed while the squad gave their own rousing performance of the cheer “Strike! Strike! Strike!” altered to “Stroke! Stroke! Stroke!”) Um, go Gordon Golden Gophers? So gross.
   
2. 2.
   Felicity Forrest sat between twin senior forwards Cade and Connor Jacobsen on the basketball bus and is apparently equally talented with her right and left hands. So double gross.
   
3. 3.
   That shadowy upper lip of Melissa Vigliotti, star athlete and top contender for valedictorian?
   Steroids
   , whispers Annika,
   not just Italian
   . So mean.
   

Okay, so this information seriously does not need to live in my brain. I feel dirty just knowing these details, like the knowledge of the used condom in my brother’s wastebasket. Ew. Take a trip from my conscious memory, please.

Hours later, and I’m still trying to banish these thoughts from my head. Down the hall, I can hear my mom nagging Dicey to finish her math homework and the sounds of Dad’s evening news filtering out from the den. I finish the dishes from tonight’s dinner, my fingers sweeping across the bottom of the sink, checking for stray silverware. Everyone’s home and getting ready for bed except for Eric, who’s still at the library with Gavin. The library, yeah right.

Eric, seriously. What was he thinking? And he wants to tell them—to tell everyone about Gavin and whatever. I don’t mind that Eric’s gay, but I wish we could skip the part where everyone finds out and gets shaken up and upset and … complicated. I hate that part. I wish sexual orientation could be something quiet and personal, not the kind of detail that compels perfect strangers to think about it or talk about it or have strong opinions about what my brother and his boyfriend might do when they’re alone.

There’s no question about the stance of the Joyful News Bible Church when it comes to homosexuality. Pastor Fordham has even uttered that awful cliché about “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” and this in an audio recording he distributed in one of the monthly mailings to the entire congregation. I mean, really? That’s the best you can do?

Dad is harder to read—he’s a reserved man who gives monosyllabic answers to most inquiries. A lot of the time I get the feeling from him that he’s patiently waiting for his children to become useful in some way, and in the meantime he prefers to stay out of the way. He usually says all the right things; it’s just that he seems sometimes like he’s moving through life out of a sense of duty rather than following his dreams and passions.

I’m not sure how a man so rational and aware of his obligations will react to his son’s revelation of
love
for another boy. I imagine him sort of frowning, like he does, drawing his eyebrows together and saying, “But Eric, what about having a family? What about a wife and children?” Deviation from expectations is simply not on his radar.

I pull the plug and watch the dishwater swirl down the drain. I still think Eric should wait to tell them until he’s out of college, or at least out of high school. At the very least, he should wait until the end of next month when he turns eighteen. I can’t really see my mom and dad sending him to one of those reprogramming therapy places, but at least if he’s a legal adult, he could refuse to go. That kind of thing is terrifying to me, really. Even if Mom and Dad are okay with Eric being gay, the church people will be … more complicated. And what about the rest of the world, all those stupid people full of hatred—I know it’s hard for him to hide, but I’m scared for him, too.

I slip into the quiet of my own room, the soft sounds of the pigs in the darkness. I kneel by their cage and watch, for a moment, their small comfortable lives.

“I wish we could skip the drama and go to the part where we’re all fine.” I say the words softly into the downy top of Nutmeg’s head as she snuggles against my neck, and she makes her little purring happy sound. I sit with her a bit and then set her back down in her pen, where she crawls into her little tunnel to chill.

The tarot cards call to me from their hiding place. I can almost feel their snappy shininess in my hands, and I long to spread them out on the floor and mix them up, to search those intriguing pictures and those lists of inscrutable words for some way to help my brother.

I listen again, my ear pressed against my bedroom door, trying to figure out if my parents have gone to bed yet. Maybe if I sit with my back against the door, I’ll hear the footsteps approaching and have time to hide the cards before someone enters. It’s past ten o’clock, and Mom has already stopped in once to say good night, so it’s probably safe. Okay, so Mom’s a bit of an insomniac, and there’s still my nosy sister to contend with, but still. This was about risk-taking, right?

I get the cards from the back of my closet and grab my little garbage can from under my desk. If I keep the can right beside me, I can hide the deck inside it if someone comes in. It will have to be enough.

I slide the cards out, starry-side up, and read the directions in the guidebook. The querent—that’s the person asking the question—is supposed to think about the question while shuffling the cards. Still, maybe I can sort of channel Eric as I shuffle, thinking about what kind of question he would ask if he were willing to try.

I close my eyes for the slightest of moments, holding the deck in both hands.
Eric.
The cards feel heavy in my hands, a weight of consequence. I smile to think of how I half expected a demon to emerge from the plastic when I opened them.
Eric.
I struggle to keep my mind on him, on the question I think he would ask at this time.
Should he come out to Mom and Dad?
I shuffle the deck, trying to concentrate, but my mind wanders as the cards slide past my fingers.