Can I Get An Amen? (3 page)

Luke came with me to the group home where Gary’s brother, Daniel, lived. I had wanted to say good-bye and drop off a few gifts, including a new Celtics T-shirt, the Celtics being the only entity that Daniel adored almost as much as he did Gary. While I sat chatting with Daniel, Luke stood on the sidelines, feeling the discomfort and pity felt by all first-time visitors. I could tell what Luke was thinking as he watched the palsied movements and heard the slurred voices. We grew up being told that God created each of us, handpicked our pieces and parts, both physical and otherwise.
What, then,
Luke thought,
had happened here?

I told Daniel that I probably wouldn’t be by for a while.
Ask your brother why,
I thought.
Ask him
. But from Daniel’s behavior, I could tell that he had already been given the gist of it. As I got back in the car, I obsessed over what Daniel would tell Gary about our visit. When would Gary realize that he was making a mistake? His next wife wouldn’t care this much about Daniel. She wouldn’t bring him home every Sunday; she wouldn’t take him to basketball games and movies. With a brood of children to look after, she would soon become too busy. He would become a nuisance, then a burden, before he was forgotten entirely. And what would happen to Daniel then?
Are you willing to sacrifice him, too, Gary?

Though neither of us was a smoker, Luke and I bought a pack of Marlboro Lights and kept one burning for almost the entire car ride. We stopped only once, at a dismal little rest stop where a tiny Hispanic woman stood in front of a bucket of filthy water, absentmindedly pushing a mop across the brown-tiled floor. Once we hit the New Jersey Turnpike, the highway rose above the sort of postapocalyptic industrial wasteland that often defines the state, with heat rising in waves off the acres devoted to stacks of empty cargo containers and oil tanks. But soon the blinding late-August sun was tamed by the lush green of the suburbs, where the men who sat in window-filled corner offices in Manhattan skyscrapers kept their homes.

Luke asked me if Mom had told me the latest about our father’s newest project, Channing Crossing, and the financial issues it was going through. “Yeah,” I said, “she mentioned it.” Due to my mother’s almost biological need to prophesy doom, she had been
mentioning it
for months. My father, a real estate developer, had rolled the dice big-time on an enormous new mixed-use development in Pennsylvania that offered both housing and commercial space. Then the real estate bubble burst and what had seemed like a potential gold mine turned into a major financial liability.

“I think it might be worse than she wants to admit,” said Luke as he turned into the long paved driveway of my parents’ very beautiful home.

I felt my shoulders tense. Things were supposed to be
better
than my mother indicated, never
worse
. “Like, how much worse?”

“I don’t know, Elle. I just think it’s weird that they didn’t rejoin Rook National this year.”

I thought back to the conversation in which my mother had
said that they didn’t plan to renew their membership at the club. “But Mom said that Dad’s shoulder has been bothering him too much for golf.”

“I know,” said Luke hesitantly. “But I think they are just temporarily in a tight spot. I’m sure it’ll pass, though.” And we both settled into that ambiguous but comfortable thought.

. . .

“Oh, praise you, Jesus!” came my mother’s elated voice as she saw Luke and me walk safely into the kitchen. She abandoned the bowl of pasta that she was tossing and, wiping her hands on a dish towel, bustled toward us. “I was so worried about y’all driving on that terrible I-95. Just last week someone from our church nearly had an accident with a tractor-trailer just outside Stamford.” I was first on the list for a hug and she reached her thin little arms up around my neck. At five feet six inches, she was the shortest member of my family by three inches. “My little Ellen. My poor little baby girl! I am so sorry, Ellen.” I hadn’t seen her in person since before Gary left. “I know that you can’t see it yet, but this is all part of God’s plan for you.”

“Mom…,” I started by way of a warning, but she had already moved on.

“Luke, thank you so much for going up there to help your sister.” She held him long and tight and I knew what she was doing. She was doing what she had done each and every time she’d seen him since he came out of the closet: she was trying to pray the gay out of him. She was trying to save his soul. While my mother adored Luke, she didn’t adore, as she put it, “his lifestyle.” His being gay was incredibly hard for my parents to accept, so she adopted a bifurcated view of her son: there was the
gay part and then there was the rest of him, the part that God had made. When my mother came up for air she eyed us suspiciously. “Have y’all been smoking?”

“Just crack, Mom,” answered Luke. “Some blacks were selling it by the side of the highway.”

She swatted him with a dish towel and dropped that line of questioning. “Daddy’s going to be home later,” she said as she pulled pasta bowls out of the cabinet. “He had some meeting at the bank.” Luke shot me a meaningful look. “So, tell me,” she went on. “How was the drive? Y’all have any close calls?” My mother viewed the perils of the American interstate system as a constant and relentless menace. She was always astounded when we managed to travel them unscathed and viewed our safe journey as nothing short of a miracle. Luke and I just shook our heads. “No?” she asked, sounding a touch disappointed. “Well, that was God’s mercy.”

She began ferrying pasta over to the table. “Lukie, grab some forks,” she said, plucking a mushroom from the top of one of the bowls and popping it in her mouth. “I made that tagliatelle with the white wine–mushroom sauce that Aunt Kathy told me about. Wait till y’all taste it.”

As she scampered back to the fridge to grab some Parmesan cheese, I noticed how her narrow hips seemed to swim in her white linen pants. “You look like you’ve lost weight, Mom.” She was always on the slender side, but she was beginning to look fashion-editor thin.

“Everything gets harder when you get old, honey,” she said as she flitted back to the table like a hummingbird. “Even eating.” She plopped into her chair and I heard the clang of her heavy gold watch hit the table. It rested above the same hand that held her small, humble engagement ring, a relic from an earlier time.
Taking off her headband, she readjusted it on her head, pulling her silvery gray hair away from her face. “But I’ll make up for it tonight. I’m starving.” I stared at her for a moment. My mom was still beautiful, even without makeup. Her well-moisturized skin bagged beneath her eyes a bit but still clung nicely to her enviable bone structure.

Luke complimented the dinner, and my mother launched into detailed but characteristically frenetic instructions on its preparation. Her recitation of the recipe faded into background noise as I took in the room. My parents had built the house eight years ago, after I was already out of the house and living on my own, so I had never really spent much time there. The odd weekend here or there, maybe a week between Christmas and New Year’s; that was it. The kitchen looked like it was lifted from one of my father’s model homes. It was nice, very nice, in a ubiquitous granite-countertops-and-stainless-steel-appliances kind of way. It flowed into a living area that had cathedral ceilings with enormous windows flanking the massive stone fireplace. All the furniture was big. Big leather couches, big armoires, big oriental carpets. We sat at an enormous farm table that seated twelve, above which hung two big drum-shade chandeliers. Luke took a sip of water from a big goblet. I instantly missed my little cape.

Snapping me back to the present was my mother’s voice. “So you saw Gary before you left?” Her thumb rubbed at her index finger, a nervous tick.

“Yeah,” I said, twisting the stem of my water glass. “We met for a cup of coffee last night.”

“And how’d that go? Do you think he’s going to come to his senses?”

I slumped back in my chair. “I don’t know, Mom. I kind of doubt it.”

Her gaze darted up to a framed family photo that hung on the wall. Luke was fifteen, I was thirteen, and Kat was twelve. Her eyes lingered on Kat. “I don’t know why God chooses to give children to some women and not others.” Her expression was distant, as if she was trying to make sense of events from the past in the context of the present, as if it was all part of some complex equation that had to add up. Then she quickly shifted gears, telling us about Aunt Kathy’s recent trip to Ireland. Aunt Kathy, for whom Kat was named, was my mother’s only sister, and they were bonded in a way that none of us entirely understood. As siblings, we were all close, but Aunt Kathy and Mom were like veterans of the same war; they knew each other on a level that no one else could.

After dinner Luke offered to help bring my things upstairs. “Which room?” he called from the foyer, a bag in each hand.

“The blue room!” replied my mother. Gary and I had slept in that room before, with its calming mist-colored walls and big white bed. I liked the blue room.

By the time my father came home, Luke and I had brought up all my things and I was beginning to unpack. Somehow the physical act of unzipping suitcases with the intent of putting things in drawers—drawers that were not my own—summoned an unexpected and unwelcome sense of panic.

When I heard the echo of my father’s heavy footsteps on the stairs, I quickly fought to regain my composure. “Where’s my girl?” he called as he headed down the hallway.

Though I knew that he knew exactly where I was, I played along. “In here!” I said cheerfully as I blotted the wet streaks on my face with the backs of my hands.

The door cracked open and he stuck his head in. “Hey, Dad,” I said, forcing a smile as I sat on the bed in front of an open
suitcase, the bedside lamp giving off a soft, yellow glow. Somehow it was harder to see my father than it had been to see my mom. Gary was exactly the type of man my father had wanted me to end up with, his hardscrabble roots appealing to my father’s up-at-dawn, midwestern sensibilities. “He’s a self-made man,” my father would declare proudly when describing Gary to his friends. These were churchgoing men, pillars of the community who admired ambition, perseverance, and a strong work ethic. “Put himself through college
and
law school. And you should see how wonderful he is with his brother.”

“Oh, Ellie,” he said sadly as he stepped inside and saw my red-rimmed eyes. He looked tanned and vigorous, his thinning white hair appealingly wind whipped. He sat down next to me and tousled my head gently. “Everything is going to be fine, kiddo. Just fine.” He flashed the soft, comforting smile of a primetime network television father. “All this with Gary is going to work itself out.” I sniffed and nodded. I hated to disappoint my dad. We all did. But one by one, each of us in our own way had let him down. Luke was gay, I was getting a divorce, and Kat… Well, Kat was Kat.

He gave me a kiss on the forehead and told me again that everything was going to be okay; then he went downstairs to begin an evening routine that involved a glass of Scotch, a leather chair, and Fox News. As soon as he closed the door, I lay down on the bed and wept, gripping a pillow against my face to muffle the sobs. It was an angry, indignant cry. But when I was fully purged, I clenched my jaw and balled my fists and vowed that that was it. I wasn’t going to become some sad, barren spinster, puttering around my parents’ house like an invalid. I was going to put one foot in front of the other and move on from this shit. I would get over Gary; I would accept our divorce.
God, she’s so
healthy,
people would think.
She’s really pulled herself through all this.
And if I couldn’t do it, then I would pretend to. I was good at pretending.

I ran a dry hand towel over my face and then marched downstairs to join my parents. I expected to find them in their typical posts, my father sitting back in his chair with his feet resting on an ottoman and my mother reclining on the couch, with her reading glasses on and a magazine splayed open and lying on her chest. But tonight they sat next to each other, their heads inclined in intense discussion. Over the relentlessly raised voices of their news show, I couldn’t make out a single word of their conversation, but as soon as they saw me, they both adopted bright, easy smiles. Instantly, the concern and anxiety vanished from their faces so convincingly that I smiled, too. Turns out we were all good at pretending.

I
t was eight thirty a.m. and I was having a cup of coffee when the phone rang. My mother answered. “Oh, hey, Jill honey,” she said with a smile. “She’s right here.” Jill and I had been friends for so long that she still knew my parents’ home phone number by heart. There was something nostalgic about my mother handing me the phone to speak with Jill.

“Jillie, hi,” I said, warmed by the very existence of my old friend.

“Elle, I know it’s under terrible circumstances, but I am so glad you are back home.”

“Thanks, Jill.” Jill and I didn’t need to go through the rote so-sorry exchange, as she was the one friend I had kept in touch with over these past few weeks.

“Listen, I’m going to pick you up in an hour. We’re going to the mall. Kat’s meeting us.”

Jill was married to a successful businessman, Greg Wadinowski, whose family owned a chain of convenience stores. She
had long ago given up the charade of her thirty-five-thousand-dollars-a-year PR gig, despite the fact that they hadn’t yet started a family, and was now content to lunch and shop and worship the gods of retail. But Jill was so forthcoming and ironically without pretension that you couldn’t hate her for it. Kat was a hairdresser with an irregular schedule who often had chunks of midweek time available for Jill’s adventures, and the two had become very close over the years.

Jill picked me up in her late-model Range Rover and handed me a whole-milk latte from one of the few remaining locally owned coffee shops in our area. “I still can’t believe you waste the fat grams on these milk shakes,” she said, adjusting her large designer sunglasses. Her own skinny cappuccino, which was certain to contain at least a quarter inch of Splenda sediment, sat in the console cup holder.