Diary of a Misfit, page 22
I saw the tattoo on the driver’s upper left arm first. It looked like a seal for the local fire department, with an American flag and flames surrounding a portrait of a regal-seeming dalmatian. It was the kind of tattoo I assumed a tough guy would choose, but when the driver leaned out, I saw that she was a woman. Her brown hair was graying and buzzed short, and she was wearing a T-shirt with a howling wolf printed in the center. She never said the word “lesbian,” but she caught my eye, and I knew.
“I mean, I am,” she said. “Are you?”
She winked and nodded toward my video camera. “Hell,” she said. “I knew Roy. What you want to know?”
Chapter Twelve
(December 2011–December 2012)
HER NAME WAS PAM, a name I thought must be some kind of omen, considering I’d just seen the Pamela I’d lived with earlier that day. The lesbian Pam—Pam Sykes—told me she’d been twelve and working the cash register at her stepfather’s grocery when she first met Roy. It was 1972. Roy came in with a pack of dogs, looking to buy eggs and milk on credit, and when he got to the cash register, Pam went mute with wonder. Roy’s hair was short and slicked back like a man’s, but his skin was as smooth as a woman’s. His hands, too, looked feminine. Pam told me she hadn’t been able to name the feeling back then, but she looked at Roy and knew they had something in common.
“I asked one of the old ladies who worked in the store, ‘Is that a man or a woman?’ Miss May was really vague and said, ‘Well, she dresses like a man and works like a man, and that’s about all I can tell you.’ That intrigued me even more.”
Pam didn’t make much eye contact with me as she talked. She was still hanging out of her truck window, and she mostly looked at the road. But after she said that, she let out a deep whoosh of an exhale, then she settled back into the cab. I asked her how old she was now, and she said fifty-one, just a few years older than Roy must have been the first time she saw him.
For reasons I don’t remember anymore, we decided not to do an interview in the middle of the street that afternoon. Pam gave me her number, and I told her I’d call her the next time I visited Delhi. I figured I’d return in a few months. She said all right, then she spun off into the distance, her wheels spitting gravel as she darted across the railroad tracks. I wondered if she was Archie’s neighbor, the one who’d been kicked out of the military for being gay.
We left Delhi the next morning, and I didn’t see Pam or Louisiana for another year. I went back to Portland, to the newspaper, and the professor who continued to break up with me every other week the rest of that winter. I didn’t think about Pam or the documentary much because I was busier than I’d ever been at work. I could tell I was becoming a better reporter. None of my stories made it into the real paper that winter, but once or twice, the superstar narrative journalists who worked downtown emailed to say they liked something I’d written. I stayed at the bureau until seven most nights, editing videos or tinkering with words until I found the right verb. I drove back to the city after dark, buzzing off the thrill of having puzzled out a single sentence.
Everything started to slip into place for me that year. A few days after I returned from Louisiana, I met Frankie, the girl from Facebook, and I knew almost immediately that she was the friend I’d spent a year seeking. We went for a beer and ended up talking for three hours about our grandparents. Her mom’s parents were from the Basque Country, an autonomous region in northern Spain, and Frankie told me that Euskara, the language her grandparents spoke, was an isolate, unrelated to any other language. She called her grandparents amuma and aitxitxa, and as she talked about eating shrimp salad and watching soap operas with her amuma, I ordered another beer just to buy another hour with her.
By the end of January, Frankie and I were hanging out three or four times a week. We watched The Voice on Monday nights and went for cheap oysters every Tuesday at a Louisiana-themed restaurant Frankie found. We rode bikes together. We went dancing. Once a month, Frankie watched my cat while I hung out with the professor in rural Washington, and on the weekends I stayed home, Frankie cooked bibimbap or pasta alle vongole, elaborate dinners just for the two of us. Once, she even invited me over for breakfast, and we smiled across the kitchen table, nervously eating the perfect salmon eggs Benedict she’d made from scratch.
Two of my other best friends, Claudia and Jessica, sat me down that spring and told me I couldn’t keep dating the professor and spending all my time with Frankie. I told them Frankie and I were just friends, but they remained unconvinced. Friends do not eat dinner together every other night, they said. They don’t share homemade breakfasts, and they don’t talk wistfully about meeting each other’s siblings someday. It was wrong to monopolize Frankie’s time. Plenty of other girls would have loved to date her. She was goofy, and she could cook or draw anything. At queer dance nights, girls walked up to tell her how cute she was. Jessica said I had two options. I could break up with the professor for real and start dating Frankie, or I had to cut back our hangouts to once a week.
I loved spending time with Frankie, and I hadn’t forgotten that jolt I’d felt when I first saw her picture. Those strangers at queer dance nights were right: Frankie was cute. She had hazel eyes, a mess of brown hair, and a perfect nose dotted with just the right number of freckles. Her smile reminded me of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a dorky heartthrob whose poster I tacked to my wall in middle school. I baked her a chocolate cake for her thirtieth birthday, and she made a pineapple upside-down one for my twenty-ninth, and once, I fell asleep against her shoulder while we watched The L Word, but our relationship didn’t feel like romance to me.
Back then, I thought only dramatic, dangerous love could be romantic. Maybe I learned that from my mother. Every story she told me about Cam was a tortured one, and she only seemed to want my father when he was cheating. Life was boring when life was good. Real love—big love—was doomed, my mom taught me. It was impossible. It was painful. Throughout my twenties, I slept with married women, mean women, women too drunk or broken to be available. Being around Frankie felt too easy. She never stood me up. She was fun, sweet, predictable, nothing like the professor I crossed state lines to chase. All my friends said that was a good thing—“The professor is not good for you,” one friend texted me every single week of March—but easy wasn’t thrilling. It wasn’t agonizing the way my mom made me believe love should be, so instead of asking Frankie out, I asked her to watch my cat while I whiled away the weekends in the professor’s art-filled house.
I might have continued making that mistake forever, but a few weeks after my birthday, the professor broke up with me for good. I moped around for a few days, but then, in June, The Oregonian’s managing editor called to tell me my big shot had arrived. Starting mid-month, I’d cover North and Northeast Portland, the city’s most diverse neighborhoods. After five and a half years in the bureau, I was finally moving to a job downtown.
I started my new beat on a Tuesday, the day Frankie and I always went for dollar oysters. She texted me the night before to suggest we celebrate by biking to the Louisiana restaurant together. At 6 p.m., I ran downstairs and found Frankie outside The Oregonian, leaning against the pearl white Bianchi she’d assembled herself. I grabbed my blue Kona, and we pedaled east, uphill and over the river.
The sun was shining when we left my office, but just before we hit the Broadway Bridge’s highest point, it started to rain. Normally, Portland rain wouldn’t be worth mentioning. “Rain” is the city’s perpetual state. The sky skews dark, and the streets stay wet eight months a year, but most of the time, the rain there is only a drizzle. That afternoon, it stormed the way it does in Louisiana. The rain banged down in pelting sheets, and the wind shoved my bike back and forth.
By the time we reached the restaurant, Frankie and I were so soaked, I had to go to the bathroom and wring my shirt out in the sink. I looked at myself in the mirror, all messy-haired with rain, and I told myself it was time to be happy. I’d finally earned the job I wanted, and now this nice girl was in my life. I didn’t need to choose bad romance anymore. I didn’t need professors or broken women. All I had to do was walk into the restaurant and decide to be happy, normal. I shook my hair out, then I went.
* * *
—
OUR CLOTHES WERE STILL wet when we left the oyster bar two hours later, but Frankie insisted on biking me all the way home. She followed me up the stairs, and we watched another episode of The L Word still wearing our itchy, damp work clothes. We sat so close to each other that the sides of our hands touched. Frankie says I put my arm around her “woodenly,” but I don’t remember that. I don’t remember either of us moving until 8 p.m., until the light streaming in from my picture window dimmed as the sun arced close to the river, and Frankie remembered she hadn’t brought any bike lights. She stood. She went to the bathroom, and when she returned, she was wearing her helmet. I didn’t know it then, but she told me much later, she’d decided in the bathroom to kiss me. I thought we were going to hug, but when we tipped toward each other, our lips caught. It was a clumsy first kiss, probably the most awkward one I’ve ever had, but a few days later, we kissed again, then we kept kissing until finally, a month later, after she’d returned from a trip with her mother to the Basque Country, we agreed to call each other “girlfriend.”
* * *
—
THAT SUMMER, MY PARENTS came to visit me in Portland for the first time. I spent the week before their trip worrying, looking at my beloved apartment the way I suspected my mother would. The hardwood floors were scuffed. The tile around my sink had turned black with the kind of mold every century-old Portland apartment has. And the crown moldings I thought of as jazzy looked ancient in a bad way when I imagined my mom staring up at them.
When I pull out pictures of that apartment now, I can see that it was the kind of place you can only have when you’re single and in your twenties. I kept Christmas lights strung along a curtain rod all year long, and I never once hung drapes. I had a Polaroid camera, and I used it to take photos of every person who visited, then I hung those pictures above the crown molding. I had several dozen, just enough to wind around two-thirds of the room. I left the remaining space empty, open spots for future visitors. I did have a sectional couch I’d spent a whole paycheck purchasing. It was locally made and cornflower blue, and its silhouette was a mid-century modern style I associated with classy people, but behind that beautiful couch, I hung a huge, unframed David Hockney poster that showed California’s littered Pearblossom Highway. The only framed art I owned was a mixed-media piece titled Catalog Portraying the Lesbian Lifestyle. The work included images of twenty or so “required objects” for lesbianism, everything from a box of Dyke cigars to a set of dildos in three sizes. All my plants looked a little funky. The cactuses had gone crooked creeping toward the sun, and the dracaenas were burnt and barely alive. But I was happy in that apartment. I had a heavy wooden desk where I wrote stories, a double IKEA bookshelf full of my favorite novels, and an old card catalog I’d bought from a man who picked all the local thrift stores clean of their best items.
The night before my parents flew in, I ran my hand along the card catalog drawers, and I hoped my parents wouldn’t notice the other piece of odd furniture in my living room—an end table a friend had made me out of three different cabinet doors. It was useful, a place where I set my books and glasses down, but it didn’t look like something my mother would ever allow in one of her immaculately decorated rental homes.
My parents flew in mid-July. My mom complained about the three flights of stairs she had to climb to reach my apartment, and when I suggested sushi or Thai food for dinner, she pretended to gag. “Can’t we eat something American?” she asked. I took them to a pub. Frankie biked over to meet us, and as she walked toward our table, I held my breath. My mom had only ever met one girlfriend, a very sweet army brat I went out with in college. My mom hadn’t met the professor or anyone else I’d liked in Portland, not even the newspaper designer I dated for three years. I clenched my fist anxiously, but when Frankie ordered a beer and a corn dog, my mom flashed a thumbs-up.
“Thank God you eat normal food.”
My parents stayed a week. We were good when we were drinking, happy when we were out, but the mornings were tougher to navigate. My mom swore she was allergic to cats and walked around holding her nose when Lafayette was in the room. She complained about having to go downstairs to smoke. And she did notice my silly cabinet-door-table. Every time she walked past it, she started singing the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies.
I only took my parents to a restaurant I liked once. It was a vegetarian place, which I knew was a risk, but I persuaded my mom to try it by telling her they served baked Brie, her favorite food. She spent most of the dinner grumbling about the fact that Portland restaurants don’t serve drinks in Styrofoam or with nearly enough ice. After the baked Brie arrived with a few too many fancy additions—hazelnuts, thin slices of an apple variety she’d never tried—she pushed her plate aside and started playing Candy Crush on her phone.
After a few days in Portland, I took my parents on an overnight trip to see the Pacific Ocean. I thought it would be an easy win—my mom had always loved the beach when we lived in Georgia—but when we got there, she refused to walk to the shore. She said the beach was too cold and the water too far away from the parking lot, and she was right. The Pacific Ocean is nothing like the Atlantic. That far north, the water is too chilly for swimming, and you have to wear a jacket most weeks of the year. But it’s beautiful, and we’d driven three hours to see it, so I didn’t want to just sit in the car.
“I’m walking down there,” I said.
My dad went with me to see the sea lions sunning themselves against the surf, but my mom stayed behind. He and I spent maybe twenty minutes on the beach, taking pictures of the sea lions and each other. We laughed a lot. We posed goofy, and we talked in high-pitched silly voices, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother waiting in the parking lot. I wanted my family to be proud of me. I wanted them to love what I loved, or I wanted them to at least experience what I loved. Instead, my mom was sitting in the car, probably bored and mad at me. I told myself I’d been insensitive. I shouldn’t have picked an activity my mom didn’t feel comfortable doing. My dad and I headed back to the parking lot, and I made up my mind to apologize, but when we reached my car, the interior smelled like cigarettes, so I plopped into the driver’s seat, sulking without saying a word.
Later that night, after we’d eaten dinner at the only restaurant my mom would consider, we somehow locked ourselves out of our hotel room. The front desk worker had already gone home, so we had to wait an hour until a locksmith showed up. A breeze blew off the ocean, and my mom’s teeth chattered. Even in the summertime, the nights are cold on the Oregon coast. The temperature dropped to fifty-seven degrees while we huddled outside, and my mom looked at me as if even the weather were my fault.
“I can’t believe you live here,” she said. “I’m never coming back.”
* * *
—
I DON’T REMEMBER the rest of the trip. I took my parents to the airport, then I avoided talking to my mom for several months. My dad called every few weeks or so to tell me my mom was in the hospital again, but usually, I made excuses to get off the phone. Years later, my dad told me that he’d felt like he was on an island back then. No one wanted to talk about my mother’s hospital stays, and so he had endured them alone. I could reject his calls and live my life pretending, but he had to spend his life walking up and down the fluorescent halls of her anguish. All his money went to hospital bills, and all his clothes smelled slightly antiseptic. He didn’t tell me any of this then, but I’m sure I wouldn’t have listened even if he had. After that beach trip, I turned distant and cold.
Frankie told me recently that I seemed tough in my twenties that I came back from the beach and griped about my parents only eating American food, but I didn’t act hurt. Later that week, I told a friend over instant message that I was glad my parents were gone.
“We have nothing in common,” I typed.
“You have nothing in common with your parents? How is that possible?”
I wanted to believe I was angry, but I understand now that I wasn’t mad. I was embarrassed. I felt rejected, and I hadn’t thought it was possible to feel that way in Portland. I expected to be hurt in Louisiana, but Portland was my place, a city where I felt safe and empowered to be myself. I used to think that the only thing distancing me from my parents was my sexuality, but I realized during that trip that being gay was only a part of it. It didn’t matter if my parents met my girlfriend, or if they stopped believing I was going to Hell. There were things we’d never have in common, ways I’d always feel like I didn’t belong. I couldn’t show them my life if I didn’t take them out to eat sushi or Indian food. I didn’t play the Frank Ocean or Kendrick Lamar albums that were my favorite records that year because I knew my mom would plug her ears and call it noise. And even though my mom read constantly, I didn’t talk about books I loved because I didn’t want my parents to remember that I was more educated than they were. Those gaps made me feel horribly alone. I’d thought when I was younger that if I found my city, my place in this world, all my wounds would magically heal. I wouldn’t feel rejected. I wouldn’t be a misfit. But after my parents left, I realized I was wrong. My hurts had traveled with me.
For weeks after, I moped around my apartment, somehow believing I was the only person in the world who’d ever drifted apart from her family. I think I felt that way, in part, because Frankie’s family was tight-knit. Her parents hadn’t just tried sushi, they loved it. She and her mom liked the same old movies, and her whole family texted all day long on a group they’d labeled “Saturday Fun Bunch.” I thought something was uniquely wrong with me. But in the years since, I’ve realized that Portland was a place full of people who’d fled somewhere else. All my friends had their own Louisianas haunting them. They came from Tucson or Gainesville, the northeastern suburbs or some tiny midwestern town no one’s ever heard of, and they told themselves they didn’t miss those places. Usually, their parents didn’t visit Portland. Instead, once a year, my friends dragged themselves home, where they pretended to be less queer, less educated, and less citified versions of themselves. They posted iPhone photos on Facebook, beaming shots that showed them drinking outside their favorite childhood hangouts, then they flew back to Portland, the Xanadu where we told ourselves we could be free.
“I mean, I am,” she said. “Are you?”
She winked and nodded toward my video camera. “Hell,” she said. “I knew Roy. What you want to know?”
Chapter Twelve
(December 2011–December 2012)
HER NAME WAS PAM, a name I thought must be some kind of omen, considering I’d just seen the Pamela I’d lived with earlier that day. The lesbian Pam—Pam Sykes—told me she’d been twelve and working the cash register at her stepfather’s grocery when she first met Roy. It was 1972. Roy came in with a pack of dogs, looking to buy eggs and milk on credit, and when he got to the cash register, Pam went mute with wonder. Roy’s hair was short and slicked back like a man’s, but his skin was as smooth as a woman’s. His hands, too, looked feminine. Pam told me she hadn’t been able to name the feeling back then, but she looked at Roy and knew they had something in common.
“I asked one of the old ladies who worked in the store, ‘Is that a man or a woman?’ Miss May was really vague and said, ‘Well, she dresses like a man and works like a man, and that’s about all I can tell you.’ That intrigued me even more.”
Pam didn’t make much eye contact with me as she talked. She was still hanging out of her truck window, and she mostly looked at the road. But after she said that, she let out a deep whoosh of an exhale, then she settled back into the cab. I asked her how old she was now, and she said fifty-one, just a few years older than Roy must have been the first time she saw him.
For reasons I don’t remember anymore, we decided not to do an interview in the middle of the street that afternoon. Pam gave me her number, and I told her I’d call her the next time I visited Delhi. I figured I’d return in a few months. She said all right, then she spun off into the distance, her wheels spitting gravel as she darted across the railroad tracks. I wondered if she was Archie’s neighbor, the one who’d been kicked out of the military for being gay.
We left Delhi the next morning, and I didn’t see Pam or Louisiana for another year. I went back to Portland, to the newspaper, and the professor who continued to break up with me every other week the rest of that winter. I didn’t think about Pam or the documentary much because I was busier than I’d ever been at work. I could tell I was becoming a better reporter. None of my stories made it into the real paper that winter, but once or twice, the superstar narrative journalists who worked downtown emailed to say they liked something I’d written. I stayed at the bureau until seven most nights, editing videos or tinkering with words until I found the right verb. I drove back to the city after dark, buzzing off the thrill of having puzzled out a single sentence.
Everything started to slip into place for me that year. A few days after I returned from Louisiana, I met Frankie, the girl from Facebook, and I knew almost immediately that she was the friend I’d spent a year seeking. We went for a beer and ended up talking for three hours about our grandparents. Her mom’s parents were from the Basque Country, an autonomous region in northern Spain, and Frankie told me that Euskara, the language her grandparents spoke, was an isolate, unrelated to any other language. She called her grandparents amuma and aitxitxa, and as she talked about eating shrimp salad and watching soap operas with her amuma, I ordered another beer just to buy another hour with her.
By the end of January, Frankie and I were hanging out three or four times a week. We watched The Voice on Monday nights and went for cheap oysters every Tuesday at a Louisiana-themed restaurant Frankie found. We rode bikes together. We went dancing. Once a month, Frankie watched my cat while I hung out with the professor in rural Washington, and on the weekends I stayed home, Frankie cooked bibimbap or pasta alle vongole, elaborate dinners just for the two of us. Once, she even invited me over for breakfast, and we smiled across the kitchen table, nervously eating the perfect salmon eggs Benedict she’d made from scratch.
Two of my other best friends, Claudia and Jessica, sat me down that spring and told me I couldn’t keep dating the professor and spending all my time with Frankie. I told them Frankie and I were just friends, but they remained unconvinced. Friends do not eat dinner together every other night, they said. They don’t share homemade breakfasts, and they don’t talk wistfully about meeting each other’s siblings someday. It was wrong to monopolize Frankie’s time. Plenty of other girls would have loved to date her. She was goofy, and she could cook or draw anything. At queer dance nights, girls walked up to tell her how cute she was. Jessica said I had two options. I could break up with the professor for real and start dating Frankie, or I had to cut back our hangouts to once a week.
I loved spending time with Frankie, and I hadn’t forgotten that jolt I’d felt when I first saw her picture. Those strangers at queer dance nights were right: Frankie was cute. She had hazel eyes, a mess of brown hair, and a perfect nose dotted with just the right number of freckles. Her smile reminded me of Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a dorky heartthrob whose poster I tacked to my wall in middle school. I baked her a chocolate cake for her thirtieth birthday, and she made a pineapple upside-down one for my twenty-ninth, and once, I fell asleep against her shoulder while we watched The L Word, but our relationship didn’t feel like romance to me.
Back then, I thought only dramatic, dangerous love could be romantic. Maybe I learned that from my mother. Every story she told me about Cam was a tortured one, and she only seemed to want my father when he was cheating. Life was boring when life was good. Real love—big love—was doomed, my mom taught me. It was impossible. It was painful. Throughout my twenties, I slept with married women, mean women, women too drunk or broken to be available. Being around Frankie felt too easy. She never stood me up. She was fun, sweet, predictable, nothing like the professor I crossed state lines to chase. All my friends said that was a good thing—“The professor is not good for you,” one friend texted me every single week of March—but easy wasn’t thrilling. It wasn’t agonizing the way my mom made me believe love should be, so instead of asking Frankie out, I asked her to watch my cat while I whiled away the weekends in the professor’s art-filled house.
I might have continued making that mistake forever, but a few weeks after my birthday, the professor broke up with me for good. I moped around for a few days, but then, in June, The Oregonian’s managing editor called to tell me my big shot had arrived. Starting mid-month, I’d cover North and Northeast Portland, the city’s most diverse neighborhoods. After five and a half years in the bureau, I was finally moving to a job downtown.
I started my new beat on a Tuesday, the day Frankie and I always went for dollar oysters. She texted me the night before to suggest we celebrate by biking to the Louisiana restaurant together. At 6 p.m., I ran downstairs and found Frankie outside The Oregonian, leaning against the pearl white Bianchi she’d assembled herself. I grabbed my blue Kona, and we pedaled east, uphill and over the river.
The sun was shining when we left my office, but just before we hit the Broadway Bridge’s highest point, it started to rain. Normally, Portland rain wouldn’t be worth mentioning. “Rain” is the city’s perpetual state. The sky skews dark, and the streets stay wet eight months a year, but most of the time, the rain there is only a drizzle. That afternoon, it stormed the way it does in Louisiana. The rain banged down in pelting sheets, and the wind shoved my bike back and forth.
By the time we reached the restaurant, Frankie and I were so soaked, I had to go to the bathroom and wring my shirt out in the sink. I looked at myself in the mirror, all messy-haired with rain, and I told myself it was time to be happy. I’d finally earned the job I wanted, and now this nice girl was in my life. I didn’t need to choose bad romance anymore. I didn’t need professors or broken women. All I had to do was walk into the restaurant and decide to be happy, normal. I shook my hair out, then I went.
* * *
—
OUR CLOTHES WERE STILL wet when we left the oyster bar two hours later, but Frankie insisted on biking me all the way home. She followed me up the stairs, and we watched another episode of The L Word still wearing our itchy, damp work clothes. We sat so close to each other that the sides of our hands touched. Frankie says I put my arm around her “woodenly,” but I don’t remember that. I don’t remember either of us moving until 8 p.m., until the light streaming in from my picture window dimmed as the sun arced close to the river, and Frankie remembered she hadn’t brought any bike lights. She stood. She went to the bathroom, and when she returned, she was wearing her helmet. I didn’t know it then, but she told me much later, she’d decided in the bathroom to kiss me. I thought we were going to hug, but when we tipped toward each other, our lips caught. It was a clumsy first kiss, probably the most awkward one I’ve ever had, but a few days later, we kissed again, then we kept kissing until finally, a month later, after she’d returned from a trip with her mother to the Basque Country, we agreed to call each other “girlfriend.”
* * *
—
THAT SUMMER, MY PARENTS came to visit me in Portland for the first time. I spent the week before their trip worrying, looking at my beloved apartment the way I suspected my mother would. The hardwood floors were scuffed. The tile around my sink had turned black with the kind of mold every century-old Portland apartment has. And the crown moldings I thought of as jazzy looked ancient in a bad way when I imagined my mom staring up at them.
When I pull out pictures of that apartment now, I can see that it was the kind of place you can only have when you’re single and in your twenties. I kept Christmas lights strung along a curtain rod all year long, and I never once hung drapes. I had a Polaroid camera, and I used it to take photos of every person who visited, then I hung those pictures above the crown molding. I had several dozen, just enough to wind around two-thirds of the room. I left the remaining space empty, open spots for future visitors. I did have a sectional couch I’d spent a whole paycheck purchasing. It was locally made and cornflower blue, and its silhouette was a mid-century modern style I associated with classy people, but behind that beautiful couch, I hung a huge, unframed David Hockney poster that showed California’s littered Pearblossom Highway. The only framed art I owned was a mixed-media piece titled Catalog Portraying the Lesbian Lifestyle. The work included images of twenty or so “required objects” for lesbianism, everything from a box of Dyke cigars to a set of dildos in three sizes. All my plants looked a little funky. The cactuses had gone crooked creeping toward the sun, and the dracaenas were burnt and barely alive. But I was happy in that apartment. I had a heavy wooden desk where I wrote stories, a double IKEA bookshelf full of my favorite novels, and an old card catalog I’d bought from a man who picked all the local thrift stores clean of their best items.
The night before my parents flew in, I ran my hand along the card catalog drawers, and I hoped my parents wouldn’t notice the other piece of odd furniture in my living room—an end table a friend had made me out of three different cabinet doors. It was useful, a place where I set my books and glasses down, but it didn’t look like something my mother would ever allow in one of her immaculately decorated rental homes.
My parents flew in mid-July. My mom complained about the three flights of stairs she had to climb to reach my apartment, and when I suggested sushi or Thai food for dinner, she pretended to gag. “Can’t we eat something American?” she asked. I took them to a pub. Frankie biked over to meet us, and as she walked toward our table, I held my breath. My mom had only ever met one girlfriend, a very sweet army brat I went out with in college. My mom hadn’t met the professor or anyone else I’d liked in Portland, not even the newspaper designer I dated for three years. I clenched my fist anxiously, but when Frankie ordered a beer and a corn dog, my mom flashed a thumbs-up.
“Thank God you eat normal food.”
My parents stayed a week. We were good when we were drinking, happy when we were out, but the mornings were tougher to navigate. My mom swore she was allergic to cats and walked around holding her nose when Lafayette was in the room. She complained about having to go downstairs to smoke. And she did notice my silly cabinet-door-table. Every time she walked past it, she started singing the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies.
I only took my parents to a restaurant I liked once. It was a vegetarian place, which I knew was a risk, but I persuaded my mom to try it by telling her they served baked Brie, her favorite food. She spent most of the dinner grumbling about the fact that Portland restaurants don’t serve drinks in Styrofoam or with nearly enough ice. After the baked Brie arrived with a few too many fancy additions—hazelnuts, thin slices of an apple variety she’d never tried—she pushed her plate aside and started playing Candy Crush on her phone.
After a few days in Portland, I took my parents on an overnight trip to see the Pacific Ocean. I thought it would be an easy win—my mom had always loved the beach when we lived in Georgia—but when we got there, she refused to walk to the shore. She said the beach was too cold and the water too far away from the parking lot, and she was right. The Pacific Ocean is nothing like the Atlantic. That far north, the water is too chilly for swimming, and you have to wear a jacket most weeks of the year. But it’s beautiful, and we’d driven three hours to see it, so I didn’t want to just sit in the car.
“I’m walking down there,” I said.
My dad went with me to see the sea lions sunning themselves against the surf, but my mom stayed behind. He and I spent maybe twenty minutes on the beach, taking pictures of the sea lions and each other. We laughed a lot. We posed goofy, and we talked in high-pitched silly voices, but I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother waiting in the parking lot. I wanted my family to be proud of me. I wanted them to love what I loved, or I wanted them to at least experience what I loved. Instead, my mom was sitting in the car, probably bored and mad at me. I told myself I’d been insensitive. I shouldn’t have picked an activity my mom didn’t feel comfortable doing. My dad and I headed back to the parking lot, and I made up my mind to apologize, but when we reached my car, the interior smelled like cigarettes, so I plopped into the driver’s seat, sulking without saying a word.
Later that night, after we’d eaten dinner at the only restaurant my mom would consider, we somehow locked ourselves out of our hotel room. The front desk worker had already gone home, so we had to wait an hour until a locksmith showed up. A breeze blew off the ocean, and my mom’s teeth chattered. Even in the summertime, the nights are cold on the Oregon coast. The temperature dropped to fifty-seven degrees while we huddled outside, and my mom looked at me as if even the weather were my fault.
“I can’t believe you live here,” she said. “I’m never coming back.”
* * *
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I DON’T REMEMBER the rest of the trip. I took my parents to the airport, then I avoided talking to my mom for several months. My dad called every few weeks or so to tell me my mom was in the hospital again, but usually, I made excuses to get off the phone. Years later, my dad told me that he’d felt like he was on an island back then. No one wanted to talk about my mother’s hospital stays, and so he had endured them alone. I could reject his calls and live my life pretending, but he had to spend his life walking up and down the fluorescent halls of her anguish. All his money went to hospital bills, and all his clothes smelled slightly antiseptic. He didn’t tell me any of this then, but I’m sure I wouldn’t have listened even if he had. After that beach trip, I turned distant and cold.
Frankie told me recently that I seemed tough in my twenties that I came back from the beach and griped about my parents only eating American food, but I didn’t act hurt. Later that week, I told a friend over instant message that I was glad my parents were gone.
“We have nothing in common,” I typed.
“You have nothing in common with your parents? How is that possible?”
I wanted to believe I was angry, but I understand now that I wasn’t mad. I was embarrassed. I felt rejected, and I hadn’t thought it was possible to feel that way in Portland. I expected to be hurt in Louisiana, but Portland was my place, a city where I felt safe and empowered to be myself. I used to think that the only thing distancing me from my parents was my sexuality, but I realized during that trip that being gay was only a part of it. It didn’t matter if my parents met my girlfriend, or if they stopped believing I was going to Hell. There were things we’d never have in common, ways I’d always feel like I didn’t belong. I couldn’t show them my life if I didn’t take them out to eat sushi or Indian food. I didn’t play the Frank Ocean or Kendrick Lamar albums that were my favorite records that year because I knew my mom would plug her ears and call it noise. And even though my mom read constantly, I didn’t talk about books I loved because I didn’t want my parents to remember that I was more educated than they were. Those gaps made me feel horribly alone. I’d thought when I was younger that if I found my city, my place in this world, all my wounds would magically heal. I wouldn’t feel rejected. I wouldn’t be a misfit. But after my parents left, I realized I was wrong. My hurts had traveled with me.
For weeks after, I moped around my apartment, somehow believing I was the only person in the world who’d ever drifted apart from her family. I think I felt that way, in part, because Frankie’s family was tight-knit. Her parents hadn’t just tried sushi, they loved it. She and her mom liked the same old movies, and her whole family texted all day long on a group they’d labeled “Saturday Fun Bunch.” I thought something was uniquely wrong with me. But in the years since, I’ve realized that Portland was a place full of people who’d fled somewhere else. All my friends had their own Louisianas haunting them. They came from Tucson or Gainesville, the northeastern suburbs or some tiny midwestern town no one’s ever heard of, and they told themselves they didn’t miss those places. Usually, their parents didn’t visit Portland. Instead, once a year, my friends dragged themselves home, where they pretended to be less queer, less educated, and less citified versions of themselves. They posted iPhone photos on Facebook, beaming shots that showed them drinking outside their favorite childhood hangouts, then they flew back to Portland, the Xanadu where we told ourselves we could be free.
