Diary of a Misfit, page 32
We didn’t have Wi-Fi above the clouds, but when our plane landed, Frankie’s phone buzzed with the news. Soon we were all crowding around her tiny screen, reading Justice Anthony Kennedy’s words out loud in the lobby of the Oakland airport:
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family.
Frankie’s parents cried, and they kissed our cheeks and held us in hugs that seemed to last forever. We somehow made it out of the airport and emerged into what looked like a sea of rainbows. It was Pride weekend in San Francisco, and everywhere we went, people were celebrating. Our cab driver, a man with wrinkled skin and an eastern European accent, greeted us by asking if we’d heard the good news. He drove us to a grocery store, and when I paid, the cashier handed me a small rainbow flag along with my change. Even the churches were calling the decision a victory. The large, ornate chapel down the hill from our Airbnb lit its windows with rainbow-colored gels, and the four of us trekked down to take pictures of our illuminated history.
It was a perfect weekend. We toasted the decision with champagne and four or five rounds of raw oysters, then we went to a Giants game and walked along the Embarcadero, and the sun was shining hot enough to burn us. Frankie’s mom and I were obsessed with beet juice, so we kept going out to buy more. That Saturday, as I swigged a ruby-red gulp, I watched sailboats bob over the bay, and I knew that I wouldn’t have done any of the things I loved if my mother had come. She would have complained about San Francisco’s hills. She wouldn’t have tried oysters or beet juice, and she definitely would not have sat through nine innings in a stadium where the drinks cost north of ten dollars.
What my mother would have liked was the parade, a celebration The Guardian called “the most jubilant Pride festival in living memory.” Nancy Pelosi and Laverne Cox were in the line-up, and so was Jim Obergefell, the man whose name was on the Supreme Court decision. I kept wondering what my mom would have thought about everything. Would she have whistled at the Dykes on Bikes? Would she have catcalled the men who strolled around wearing nothing but cock rings? I know she would have danced to the brass band that blew loud and happy for hours on end. And I suspected she would have cried when the PFLAG marchers drifted by, wearing tie-dyed shirts and carrying signs that said they loved their gay sons and lesbian daughters. My mom had never lived anywhere that had a PFLAG chapter, and I wondered, as the marchers drew close, if things might have been easier if she’d known other parents with gay children. Maybe she could have told them, instead of me, that some days she wanted to throw up, thinking about me kissing a girl. Maybe they could have pushed her to accept me sooner.
San Francisco’s PFLAG group was so big, it took them two whole minutes to march past us. I reached for Frankie’s hand, and I looked back at her mom and dad. They were crying. Frankie’s parents are Catholic, and I suspected that they, too, had had a hard time when she came out, but they were here now, flanked by naked men and topless lesbians, waving their own tiny rainbow flags. Frankie’s dad kissed her cheek, then he kissed mine, too.
“We should be out there,” he said.
I didn’t wind up looking for an outfit in San Francisco. We spent a day at a custom suit shop, picking out fabrics and buttons for Frankie’s outfit, but I was too embarrassed to try on clothes in front of her parents. I adored them. I just felt like I’d be betraying some lifelong dream I’d promised to my mother. Instead, I ordered a white jumpsuit online. It had one strap, pockets, and an overlay of lace that made it fancy enough for a wedding. I tried it on at home, one evening after work, in a cramped hallway where we kept all our board games and the only full-length mirror we had. Frankie zipped me into it, then we stood in front of the mirror together. The jumpsuit was baggy in the chest and long in the legs.
I stared at myself, and I knew the experience would have felt different in a real shop with my mother. We would have had champagne, and my mom would have cried and told all the sales clerks stories I didn’t want them to hear. She would have found a jumpsuit that fit me. At home, Frankie and I stood, sober and silent, frowning at my baggy form. Eventually, one of our three cats sauntered by on his way to the litter box and broke whatever spell we were under. Frankie disappeared and returned half a minute later with safety pins. She would fix this, she said. She pinned the jumpsuit in a few key places, then she waved her hand as if to say voilà.
“We can get it tailored,” she said. “We can make it fit.”
* * *
—
THAT YEAR WAS A particularly bad one for my parents. My dad got fired from his exterminating job for a reason he never quite explained, and he spent what little savings he had trying, but failing, to open his own bug-spraying business. My mom didn’t work. She hadn’t worked in years, not since I was in high school, and even as their bank account slipped toward zero, she didn’t offer to look for a job. She was too sick, she said. By July, they were out of money. They couldn’t cover rent, so they moved out of their house in Shreveport, stashed their stuff in storage, and went to live with my brother in the one-bedroom apartment he was renting in Washington, DC. Frankie and I had a two-bedroom house with a yard, but my parents never asked if they could live with me, and I didn’t offer. I told myself I didn’t ask because my parents were allergic to cats, but that was just a way of rationalizing the truth. I didn’t want them to live with me. I didn’t want to see my mom if she went back on pills, and even if she stayed clean, I didn’t want her nosing around, judging my eating habits. I felt guilty, imagining my brother sleeping in his living room while my parents took his bedroom, but I waved that guilt away by telling myself that my brother was the good child, the one who started working when he was twelve to help pay rent, the one who would move home and take care of my parents when they grew too old to fend for themselves. I wasn’t good like him. I would never be good like him.
My parents didn’t have enough money to fly to Portland for our August wedding, so I bought their tickets, and my brother paid for their week-long stay in a hotel near the airport. They flew in early that week, and my stomach ping-ponged as Frankie drove me to the airport. What if my mom hadn’t kept her promise? What if her voice slurred, and her eye drooped, and she looked as old as she had when we’d seen her in February? We got to the airport early, so I dragged myself through the parking lot, then walked circles around the lobby, waiting. My stomach hurt. My hands sweated, and when my mom finally rushed past the glass doors, I felt like I was letting go of a breath I’d held in my entire life. She looked fifty again. Young. Her eyes were clear, and she ran toward me, and I cried the way she usually did at airports. We held hands all the way to baggage claim, and I knew, before we’d ever picked up her suitcase from the carousel, that everything would be okay that weekend.
Frankie and I took our parents to some of our favorite restaurants that week. We ate roast chicken and Italian chopped salads and Belgian waffles topped with Brie. We didn’t have a regular, catered rehearsal dinner, but we did buy everyone sandwiches at Bunk Bar, a hip-but-casual restaurant a few blocks from our house. Afterward, we went to a karaoke bar, and my mom and I stayed up late, taking shots of Patrón and singing “Stayin’ Alive” in high-pitched squeals. I was drunk before 9 p.m., but my mother kept ordering tequila, pushing the shots toward me, then pouting if I refused to drink them. I can’t remember how I made it home. A crack of thunder scared me awake at 4 a.m., and I groaned, then curled toward Frankie.
“I’m going to be hungover on our wedding day.”
Frankie’s parents had rented an Airbnb in a neighborhood a few miles west of ours, so she left early that morning to get ready with them. My dad dropped my mom off at our place around 9 a.m. She labored through the doorway, smiled meekly, then sat on the edge of my couch.
“Are you hungover, too?” I asked.
She shook her head no, but I poured us both tall glasses of water anyway. She didn’t touch hers. For a while, we sat in the living room, close to each other but not talking. It was raining, and we were supposed to have our wedding ceremony outside, so every few minutes, I stood and looked out of our picture-frame window to see if the clouds were starting to break. They weren’t.
“Soooo,” I said, collapsing onto the other side of the couch. I wasn’t sure what to say next. I tried to remember the last time my mother and I had been alone together, but I couldn’t think of anything recent. Maybe it was that first trip to Delhi, before I started bringing Aubree along, before my mother stopped going with me.
“Should we play music?” I asked.
My mom shrugged, and I wasn’t sure what else to suggest. I hadn’t expected us to feel so awkward around each other. When I was young, we had so much fun getting ready for my school dances. Back then, my mom applied my makeup. She fixed my hair. She jigged around my teenage bedroom, forecasting all that the evening would hold. I’d thought that the morning of my wedding would be like those high school nights. I’d pictured her singing into a hairbrush, dancing to the Bee Gees, maybe even pulling me close to match her disco sway. But she didn’t dance the morning of my wedding. She sat on the edge of my couch and made herself small in a way I’d never seen her do before. When she spoke, her voice was timid.
“What do you want to do with your hair?”
I pulled my bangs straight up. My hair was much shorter than it had been in high school. Back then, my mom had used hairspray and curling irons and bobby pins to give me fancy updos. But now the sides were close to shaved, and the top was only three inches long. The best I could do was maybe form it into the kind of fancy mohawk the singer P!nk wore at awards shows. My mom was the queen of wielding hairspray, but when I suggested P!nk’s style, she shrugged and said she didn’t know how to do that.
My best friend, Hayes, came over later that morning, and my mom suggested that the three of us go out to have our nails done. It was the only festive thing she’d suggested, so I consented, even though my nails were short and I hated polish. We drove to a salon, briefly excited, but we both seemed to deflate as soon as we walked into the shop. I felt uneasy, and I think my mother was embarrassed because I was wearing a brown flannel shirt and a Wyoming baseball cap. She kept asking if I was “comfortable” in those clothes.
“More comfortable than I am in this shop,” I said.
Neither of us spoke as we browsed through the shelves of polish. Hayes picked something pink and daring, and I chose a clear overcoat. My mom frowned.
“You don’t even want a French tip?”
Later, at my house, Hayes flat-ironed and sprayed my hair into the mohawk. Hayes zipped me into my jumpsuit. My mother stood six feet away from us the entire time. Maybe she was nervous, but I kept hoping she’d pull closer to me. She didn’t tell me I looked beautiful. She didn’t pose for any pictures with me the way we used to before high school dances. She just stood six feet away, silent and bunching her hands together.
My dad picked us up mid-afternoon in an economy car my brother rented for the day.
Frankie and I had only fifteen thousand dollars in savings, so we’d planned the cheapest wedding we could. Frankie designed all the invitations and place settings. I spent months mixing a seamless playlist to avoid hiring a deejay. We didn’t pay for a wedding photographer, either, but I could see, as my dad pulled up to the park we’d rented for the ceremony, that my friend Beth, a photojournalist at The Oregonian, was waiting in the street with her Canon. Beth shot rapid-fire as my mom leaned in to kiss me. Only later, after my mom had gone back to DC and Beth had invited me over to look at the pictures, did I see that I’d bent away as my mother reached for me.
I walked up and down the block. Eventually, I spotted Frankie. I know straight people think it’s bad luck to see each before the ceremony, but Frankie always calmed me, and I wanted to hug her before our parents walked us down the straw-covered path we’d deemed an aisle. I waved her over. I wasn’t wearing my glasses, so the trees and the crowd were both fuzzy, but Frankie was clear when she stood close enough to hold. She held on to me, and I felt rooted, assured.
“Are you ready?” she asked.
I walked toward my parents, and my mother looped her arm through mine. She and I were close to the same height, so our arms linked naturally together, but my dad was six foot one, half a foot taller than I was, and I kept losing his arm as my mother tugged me toward her. She cried as we slow-stepped toward the front. Of course she cried. She cried when she was happy or sad or tired or amused or praising God or asking God to perform some workaday miracle like opening up a parking spot right by the entrance to the mall. She almost always cried dry. I knew she was really feeling something when she let tears streak her makeup. But that afternoon, she cried the same scrunched-face, tearless cry I’d seen in mall parking lots. She must have been happy, but that cry told me she was not rocked.
People say weddings are the happiest day of a woman’s life, but I mostly felt nervous. I was disoriented without my glasses, and the people who came up to congratulate me appeared in a blur. I only ate a bite or two of the paella we served and none of the oysters we’d spent all year dreaming we’d have. Our first dance was clumsy, and a few hours in, I got mad or hurt because people started leaving before the good rap songs played. I’ve forgotten almost everything else. Did Frankie and I dance together after our first bumbled attempt? Did we whisper anything to each other? Did we kiss in a dark corner? I only remember one or two details vividly, and the one I remember most is my mother’s speech.
She started to speak into the microphone, and people clinked their spoons against their wineglasses a little too long for her liking.
“Shut upppp,” she said, feigning annoyance. Everyone laughed. When she started again, she sounded formal and rehearsed. She’d written the speech on her phone, and she held it close enough to read.
“I’m standing before you tonight with overwhelming pride and joy. Casey, I love you so…”
The speakers hummed with feedback. My mom shot the microphone an appalled look that was exaggerated and hilarious. Everyone laughed at their tables, and my mom bent in half, laughing, too. When she stood back up, she put her phone down. She looked at me and Frankie.
“Casey, you have truly been the sunshine of my life from the moment you were born. As a little girl in pigtails, as a little girl in fifth grade getting kicked out of class for correcting the teachers on their grammar, to the beautiful woman who sits before me. I adore the fact that you’ve always dreamt big and you have chased your dreams into reality. Frankie, Casey and I have spent a lot of hours talking about heartbreak and finding true love, and we spent a lot of hours at the Outback Steakhouse over Sydney’s Sinful Sundaes.”
At this, she turned away from me and Frankie. She put her hand on her hip all sassy-like, and she riffed for the crowd.
“Whenever she broke up with a dud, that’s where we wound up,” she said. She pointed to her butt, then winked. “And now you know why I’m so big.”
Outback had been the fanciest place my mom and I could imagine in the 1990s. We saved up to go there or the Olive Garden for holidays, and we pieced together the cheapest menu items into what we considered an epicurean feast. At Olive Garden, we ate way too many breadsticks, then ordered the pasta e fagioli because it came with unlimited refills. At Outback, my mother always asked for a plate of lemons so she could mix her own lemonade using the sugar packets on the table. We’d fill up on the brown bread Outback gave out for free, and we’d split the six-ounce sirloin—the smallest steak the restaurant sold. All of that was just a preamble for the dessert we went there seeking. The Sydney Sinful Sundae was vanilla ice cream rolled in toasted coconut and topped with hot fudge, whipped cream, and a single strawberry sliced into thin pieces. My mom and I shared one after the first boy I kissed dumped me a week after the homecoming dance. We split another later that year when a boy from church told me he only saw me as a friend. My mom took me to Outback for every heartbreak in high school, and as an adult, I never drove by one without thinking of her, but we’d never gone out for sundaes when a woman broke my heart. I didn’t tell her that Ellen, the first girl I kissed, chose a boy over me, and we didn’t slide into an Outback booth when the professor dumped me over and over again the year I met Frankie. Now, I supposed, my mother and I would never have a reason to go for a breakup sundae. I was getting married. I’d never feel heartbroken again.
My mom finished her speech. She stepped toward her table and grabbed a glass of champagne. She line-danced her way back into the spotlight.
“I would say congratulations, but I am truly a hick, so I am going to say ayyyeeeeeeee.”
She held her champagne high in the air. The crowd ayyyyeeeed back. She swigged, curtseyed, then sat down again.
* * *
—
FOR MONTHS AFTER, PEOPLE came up to me to tell me how much they’d loved my mother. Everyone seemed to have shared a cigarette with her. Everyone said they’d watched her nasty-dance to “Da’ Dip” or “Wobble” or “Back That Azz Up.” I didn’t smoke or dance with her, but after the wedding, my mom and I started talking on the phone every few weeks. That December, for the first time in a decade, I spent Christmas with my parents. Frankie and I went to DC for a week, and we did the kind of family activities I’d loved doing with her parents. We played games and painted ceramic mugs at a shop below my brother’s apartment. We hung stockings and watched old movies. My mother loved going to tea shops, so I took her out for scones and cucumber sandwiches on Christmas Eve. A few days later, she went out to eat mussels with me. I’d never seen her eat anything as adventurous as mussels. I was smiling so big and stupid in the restaurant, I could hardly stand to eat. My mom didn’t complain about the texture or the taste, and she dipped bread into the broth until every drop was gone. Later that week, after I’d told my mom that Frankie and I wanted to try the Asian-fusion restaurant Momofuku, my mom even went with us. She mostly stuck to the Southern fried chicken the restaurant served, but she tried a few pieces of kimchi, and even though she winced as if she’d eaten something disgusting, I was happy. She was trying to understand me—not the me she’d spent her younger years believing I’d become, but the real me, the me who liked fermented foods.
