Mama Laura turned to see. “What about him? Come here, Geddy. I’ll fix you a burger soon as they’re ready.”
“He’s almost thirteen years old. Pardon my French, but it looks like he’s growing himself a fine pair of boobs. Is that normal?”
Geddy had an amazing ability to go stone-faced and silent when confronted with criticism, but he was self-conscious about his weight and this one took him by surprise. His face turned red, then white. I saw the tendons stand up in his neck as his jaw clenched. Impressively, he managed not to cry.
Mama Laura winced. “He’s a little portly but it’s just baby fat.”
“You should get his hormones checked. See if he’s normal.”
I said, “Of course he’s normal.”
My father shot me a hostile glare. Aaron, across the patio table from me, rolled his eyes: Oh fuck, here it comes.
“Is that your diagnosis?” my father asked. “What happened, did you get a medical degree without me knowing about it?”
For most of my life I had revered or feared my father, depending on his moods or mine. Even after I grew out of the fear, I never argued with him. It had never seemed worth the trouble. And Grammy Fisk had always been there to rein him back when he stepped out of bounds. He would never have said what he just said had Grammy been at the table with us.
“Get on inside,” Mama Laura told Geddy in a tight voice. “Put on a shirt for supper. Something short-sleeved out of your closet. Go on now. Go.”
Geddy hurried into the house, shoulders hunched.
My father dug a spatula under a beef patty and turned it. “Thank you for your opinion,” he said to me. “Not that I asked for it.”
“You humiliated him.”
“You think I hurt his feelings?”
“You think you didn’t?”
“And do you imagine that boy can go through life without getting his feelings hurt once in a while? He needs toughening up if he’s ever going to make it through school. I guess you think you’re protecting him—”
“I guess I’m thinking I shouldn’t have to.”
“What you have to do is show some respect. We need to get that straight, if you’re coming back to Schuyler.”
And I said, “Am I coming back to Schuyler?”
“Aaron told me you talked to him about this. You know the situation, Adam. Your grandmother had some money, and that worked out to your benefit—and that’s fine, but whatever Grammy had tucked in the bank needs to help with her expenses now. I know we’ve disagreed on certain things, you and I, but I also know you’re not selfish enough to want that money for yourself. So I’m afraid you’re homeward bound, unless you can make some other arrangement on your own hook. And you’re welcome here and always will be. But that doesn’t entitle you to pass judgment on me. Not when I’m setting the table you’re eating from. Which is what we need to do right now. Laura, pass out the paper plates. Everybody line up! Aaron, get the corn out of the boiler.”
Mama Laura, who had sat through all this with an inscrutable expression and her small fists clenched, said, “Shouldn’t we wait for Geddy?”
“Once he’s in his room it can be hard to pry him out,” my father said.
So I offered to go get him.
I found Geddy on his bed with his face buried in a pillow. He sat up and wiped his eyes when I came in. I helped him change into jeans and a fresh shirt. Then I took him out to the KFC on Main Street. I figured that way we could eat without choking on the food.
At the restaurant I told Geddy a secret: my father had asked the same question (Is that normal?) about me. More than once.
I had never carried the kind of extra weight Geddy did, and boob-droop had not been among my otherwise comprehensive suite of adolescent concerns. But there had been plenty of is-this-normal moments when I was growing up. My incessant reading of books, my disinterest in high school sports. My father had never quite accused me of being (to use his word of preference) “queer,” but that inference had never been far away. I was not, as it happened, queer (at least, not in the sense he intended), but neither was I what he believed or expected any son of his should be. And for him, that was a distinction without a difference.
“Did he hate you?” Geddy asked.
“He doesn’t hate either of us. He just doesn’t understand us. People like us make him uncomfortable.”
“Is that a thing?”
“What?”
“People like us. Are there people like us?”
“Well, yeah. Of course there are,” I said.
And Geddy beamed at me. It was a little heartbreaking, how badly he wanted it to be true.
I left Schuyler the same night. Only Jenny Symanski (and Geddy, of course) seemed genuinely sorry to see me go. Jenny wrapped her arms around me and we exchanged a kiss, sincere enough that Mama Laura blushed and looked away.
And I had to admit, it was nice to be reminded how Jenny felt and tasted. There were years of familiarity folded into that hug. Jenny and I had made love (for the first time, for both of us) when we were fifteen, fooling around in Jenny’s bedroom on a hot August Saturday morning when her parents were out at an estate sale. Our lovemaking that day and afterward had been driven more by curiosity than passion, but it was a curiosity we could never quite satisfy. There were times—especially during the interminable Fisk-Symanski dinners our families used to hold—when Jenny would catch my eye across the table and communicate a lust so intense that my resulting boner required serious stealth measures to conceal.
We couldn’t keep that kind of relationship secret forever, and my father complicated the whole thing by approving of it, at least up to a point. I think he felt it established my heterosexual bona fides. And he liked the idea of marrying his spare son to a Symanski, as if the families were royal lineages. It was Grammy Fisk who took me aside and quietly made sure I grasped the basics of safe sex: “If you marry that girl, it ought to be because you want to, not because you have to.”
“I’m so sorry about your tuition,” Jenny whispered as we hugged. “But if you do have to come back to Schuyler, it won’t all be bad. I’ll make sure of that.”
“Thanks,” I said. And that was all I said.
Because I had no intention of coming back. Not if I could help it.
Chapter 3
I saw the tranche house for the first time on a clear, hot evening at the end of August. Because it would come to mean so much to me—because I learned and forgot and gained and lost so much in that building—I’m tempted to say it seemed special from the moment I first glimpsed it.
But it didn’t. It was one house on a street of many houses, not very different from the rest. It was large, but all these houses were large. It was sixty or seventy years old, as most of these houses were. Its garden was lush with marigolds, coleus, and a chorus line of hostas. A maple tree littered the front lawn with winged seeds the color of aged paper. I walked past the house three times before I worked up the courage to knock at the door. Which opened almost before my knuckles grazed it.
“You’re Adam!”
“Yeah, I—”
“I’m so glad you could make it. Come in! Everyone else is here already. Whole tribe. Buffet in the dining room. I’ll take you there. Don’t be shy! I’m Lisa Wei.”