Diary of a Misfit, page 34
My mom kissed my cheek, then pointed toward the bar. I knew which cocktail she would order before she even suggested it. Her favorite was a potent mix she called “Walking with Jesus.” It had two kinds of schnapps, both rum and vodka, and a glug of blue Curaçao topped with Sprite. The drink made my head hurt, but just the thought of it inspired my mom to dance toward the bartender in an ass-shaking version of the waltz. I ordered a beer, and when our drinks arrived, my mom sipped her lethal Jesus cocktail through a tiny straw. She closed her eyes in exaggerated ecstasy.
“Mmm, so good. You sure you don’t want one?”
The lights dimmed, so we sat down at the first table we could find. My mom pushed her drink toward me, but I waved her off, swigged my beer, then turned my phone on to record. A trans woman took the stage in a tan sheath dress bedazzled at the shoulders.
“I’m Blossom,” she said, then kicked the air as the opening notes of Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” played.
My mom jumped up and sang along. She kept swishing her hips toward me, bumping my chair with her butt, until I stood and danced, too. Blossom zoomed and hopped across the stage, and the song’s lyrics suddenly seemed progressive to me.
Oh, oh, oh, go totally crazy, forget I’m a lady
Men’s shirts, short skirts, oh, oh, oh
How had I never realized when I was young that this song seemed to defy all the gender rules the South had taught me? I felt so moved by its transgressive lines about men’s shirts that I grabbed my mom’s hand and sang loud with her. Later, I googled “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” and found that Shania Twain had written the lyrics after seeing men transform themselves into women for a night on the town at Toronto’s gay bars. But I didn’t know that yet in Mississippi. Even as I sang along, claiming the lyrics for myself, I wondered if Blossom and I were just hearing what we wanted to hear in lines meant to convey something else.
The song hit its peak, and Blossom snatched the wavy blond wig off her head. She stood in the spotlight, allowing the crowd to look at her for a minute straight. Tears ran tracks through her makeup. I remember my blood felt charged with electricity. I wanted to be as brave as Blossom. My mother roared, and I tried to scream, too, but my voice gave out.
A retired accountant named Charlene performed next. She told the judges she was wearing every bracelet she owned, shining silver she hoped would infuse extra life into her performance of “I Am What I Am” from La Cage aux Folles.
“I was with Dee for twenty-nine years,” she said. “We married the first day it was legal. We made it thirty-nine days before she died.”
My mom looked at me. She was crying, and I felt overwhelmed to be experiencing this night in Mississippi. This was the place where I’d begun to hide myself. This was where I’d told the Quilting Club all the things I couldn’t tell my mother. Would I have stayed in the South if my mother hadn’t rejected me? Would I still have those friends? I scanned the room and didn’t recognize anyone. No, I thought. My friends had fled, too.
Charlene started with a slow vogue, her hands working out the beats. I wondered what Dee looked like. Thirty-nine days. Frankie and I had already been married longer. It didn’t seem fair that Dee had spent most of her life in love with, but not legally bound to, Charlene. I felt grateful or in awe, and I didn’t want to forget the night, so I took notes on a napkin. I described Charlene’s fingerless fur gloves and the purple embroidered smock she wore over a black dress. I wrote down a few lyrics from the song: “My world, and it’s not a place I have to hide in.” “Don’t want pity.” “One life.”
I finished my notes, then whispered to my mom, “I wish I worked for The New York Times. This would be such a good story.”
“Stop working,” she said, reaching for the napkin. “You’re home.”
When Charlene finished, one judge cried. Another, who deemed Charlene the long-lost love child of Liza Minnelli and Stevie Nicks, told her, “Girl, you shop like a drag queen.” I glanced over, and my mother was laughing. I relaxed into my chair.
Six or seven people performed after Charlene. Mom and I catcalled Daniel, a man with perfect abs and no shirt, as he strutted through “Free Your Mind.” We laughed at a lanky restaurateur’s goofy performance of “Only the Good Die Young,” and we snapped along as a baby-faced Iraq War veteran mimed a Backstreet Boys song we used to sing together when I was in high school.
Someone must have won, but I don’t remember the crowning. When the show was over, the bar stayed dark. Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” started playing, and my mom stood.
“Dance with me,” she said.
No one else was dancing, but my mom didn’t care. She jerked me to my feet, and she draped her arms around my waist, and we drifted between the tables. My mom hadn’t held me that way since I was young. I remember I kept thinking of the word “envelop.” I was five or seven in her soft arms, helpless, loved, safe even though the legislature had just decided I never should be as long as I was in Mississippi. My eyes burned and my nose started to run. I sniffed. I didn’t want to cry in front of my mom or the gay people I didn’t know, so I tried to distract myself by cataloging details. My mom smelled like cheap soap and blue Curaçao with a hint of menthol. Her earrings were big double loops. I saw Charlene in the corner, and I wondered if she’d ever told her mother about Dee. Did Charlene and Dee ever dance in public? My mom drew me close. I wanted to hold on, but I felt overwhelmed with emotion and I didn’t want my mother to know that, so I broke away.
“I need a beer,” I said.
My mom watched me walk to the bar, then she continued dancing by herself. I turned away. I pretended to study the options. Red Stripe. Miller High Life. Blue Moon. I took my time paying. I smoothed every dollar bill before handing it to the bartender, and I drank a few sips before counting out a tip. I told myself if I drank I wouldn’t cry. I’d be more fun, and my mother wouldn’t know how many pains I held inside. I held my beer up, then downed half the bottle. When I returned to the table, my mom was hugging Blossom.
“I don’t think it’s a crying song, but I was bawling.”
The music was loud, so I could just barely make out what my mother was saying. I heard her tell Blossom that she’d had her breasts removed, that she’d had to learn what it meant to be a woman without them. They hugged again, then my mom grabbed my hand and pulled me toward a homemade photo booth. A trans woman in a sequined dress and matching headband was shooting photos of the contestants there.
“Can we get a picture?” my mom asked, posing as if she were one of the night’s stars.
The photographer waved us into the frame. My mom turned her head in the way she knew photographed best, and she cheesed the way she always did after a Walking with Jesus. I was too self-conscious to smile, so I struck what I thought was a casual stance—hand on my head, far-off gaze.
“You are so lucky,” the photographer told me. “It’s been twelve years, and my mom still doesn’t accept me.”
The photographer looked down at her dress. The lightboxes were making the sequins shimmer. Her boots were knee-high. She ran her free hand through her brown hair, then she sighed.
“I may be a boy the next time you see me.”
“Honey,” my mom said, reaching for the photographer’s elbow. “I was an asshole for a long time. She’ll come around.”
I finished my beer. My brain was woozy, washing between words and the photographer’s sequins, but I told my mom I needed another drink. Again, I took my time at the bar. Again, I smoothed my bills. When I found my mother again, she was outside joking with a group of ancient lesbians. They formed a circle around her, and I hung back for a few minutes and watched. I’m usually shy in crowds. I’m meant to write the world down, not star in it, but my mother glowed when she was around other people. She didn’t just talk, she performed.
“Of course, I’m going to be honest with you,” my mom told the lesbians. “Because I’m straight, I had to vote for the guy who sang ‘Free Your Mind’ because he has got the nicest ass I’ve ever seen.”
The woman in the three-piece suit high-fived my mother.
“Sweetie, that’s the whole point. You do what you need to do,” she said.
Her name was Debbie. She was a lawyer, and I thought she was sexy in a Holland Taylor sort of way, if only Holland Taylor were butch.
“I’m sorry,” my mom continued. “I’m very open-minded, but I’m not quite into carpet yet. Men’s asses just do it for me.”
I know much of my mother’s bravado was a mask, a ruse she kept up in public but dropped at home, but I loved watching. I wrote my little napkin notes, knowing I wouldn’t want to forget the night, knowing already that notes would not be enough.
My mother and Debbie lit cigarettes. The stars were shining without light pollution or cloud cover, and I made a note of that on my napkin: “Stars brighter in Mississippi.”
I don’t know if my mother told the lesbians we were visiting, or if they just knew because they knew every gay person in town and they didn’t know me, but Debbie asked where I lived.
“Oregon,” I said, almost proud of myself.
“Oooh. You ran.”
My mother interjected.
“She ran from her mother.”
“No,” Charlene said. “She ran from the stigma.”
“No,” my mom said. “She ran from her mother.”
I have no idea what I was thinking, but I taped the conversation, so I know what I said next.
“I work at a newspaper in Oregon.”
It was a strange reply, one neither Debbie nor Charlene commented on. My mom changed the subject. She said she’d heard from some drag queens that there was a good after-party in a bad part of town.
“So are we going or what?” she asked.
The lesbians demurred. It was after eleven. They’d partied enough. My mom was undaunted, though. She pulled a huge puff, then she asked a second time, and the lesbians agreed to go as soon as they finished their cigarettes. They all smoked slow, and eventually, they started talking about the anti-gay bill again. Debbie said she was annoyed.
“I liked knowing my neighbors and all that bullshit. Then we saw the news and realized, ‘Oh god, they are coming for us.’ ”
It pains me to listen to the tape now. My mother is so cool, so at ease with everyone, and I keep piping in with awkward, robotic reporter questions. I sound emotionless, direct, not at all cool. I think I must have felt overwhelmed with longing and fear. I wanted to dance with my mother. I wanted to have friends like the ones I’d had in college. But I didn’t want to stand in front of the mirror every morning wondering if my hair looked too gay.
“Why don’t you leave?” I asked the lesbians. “This kind of thing doesn’t happen in Portland.”
“Fuck that,” Debbie said. “Winter only lasts six weeks here. My house is here. My people are here.”
“Yeah,” Charlene said. “I get to have my state. And they got to take me.”
My mom high-fived the lesbians. I looked up at the stars and back toward the bar, where six gay people were dancing and talking close. I loved Mississippi. I wished I were brave enough to stay. Instead, I stared at Debbie and held up my napkin, too dumb with envy to do anything but take notes.
Chapter Twenty
(2016)
I NEVER SAW MY grandmother again. One night that September, my mother called me while I was out at a bar. It was a hip spot, one that specialized in hamburgers and spicy margaritas, and I think I was there waiting to see a local indie band play. All evening, the bar had been streaming 1990s hip-hop songs. A Tribe Called Quest had flowed into the Notorious B.I.G., and Lauryn Hill was playing when my phone rang.
Usually, I ignored my mother’s calls. I liked to talk to her when I was ready, not when I was out at a bar blasting loud music, but I knew she was in Monroe with my grandma, so I answered. The song changed as I said hello. Lauryn Hill dissolved into Rod Stewart.
“Y’all are not going to believe this,” I said. “The bar I’m in right now just started playing ‘Maggie May.’ Remember how grandma said the mandolin part sounds like Roy’s music?”
My mom was so quiet, I thought she must have butt-dialed me. Finally, I heard a long, low moan, then my mother, whispering.
“Casey, she’s gone.”
* * *
—
MY MOM AND HER siblings held the funeral a few days later. I didn’t go. I only had a week of vacation left that year, and my mom wanted me to spend it with her after the funeral. She told me that she and Aunt Ann planned to clean out my grandma’s house, and they needed help. I felt awful missing my grandma’s funeral. I’d spent seven years flying back to interview her; how could I not be there for her memorial? But I owed my mother, I thought. She’d gone to Mississippi with me. She’d given up pills. If she needed me to clean my grandma’s house, I could do it.
I flew in the last week of September on a morning that was ninety degrees when I landed. It had been below fifty in Portland, so I was wearing a sweatshirt and a jacket, layers I stripped off in the airport parking lot. I turned on one of the dark rap stations that stream in North Louisiana, then I headed toward West Monroe listening to a song about OxyContin and promethazine. No one was in the carport when I drove up. My aunt was asleep in my grandma’s bed, and I found my mother on the couch, wrapped around her childhood Mrs. Beasley doll. I kissed my mother’s forehead. I told her I loved her, and she buried her face in Miss Beasley’s blond hair.
“Baby, I need to sleep for a while.”
I took a few steps back, but I didn’t leave the room. Was my mom grieving or was she on pills? I couldn’t tell. The grandfather clock chimed on the hour, then the house was silent. The only thing I could hear was my aunt’s CPAP machine whirring one room over. I missed my grandma’s voice, the slow way she said “naturally” at the beginnings of sentences, like “Naturally, I’ll make biscuits and gravy for you children.”
The quiet felt too depressing to sit in awake and alone, so I walked to a park half a mile away. My dad used to grill boudin sausages in that park when I was young. We spent whole days sitting there, eating meat and playing cards. I’d always known that trails circled the open acres, but my parents had never wanted to travel more than a few feet into the woods, so I’d never explored them. I looked at my watch. It was 1 p.m. I figured my mom and aunt would sleep for a while, so I had plenty of time to see the woods now. I chose the longest path, a paved two-mile loop. It was flat and flanked by thin trees whose leaves were starting to brown. Someone had gone through with blue chalk and graffitied the asphalt, scratching out mostly misspelled Christian messages. I spotted “babtist” chalked near a pond, and “Jhon 3:16” etched close to a suspension bridge. I posted photos of the phrases on Facebook, and my seventh-grade language arts teacher—the one who’d given me books—messaged me to say it was “ugly” to make fun of my hometown. I felt ashamed, but I left the pictures up for my Portland friends to see.
I kicked a stone into a small pond, angry. I’d wanted to solve Roy’s mysteries before my grandma died, and I’d failed. I had never failed at journalism before. I’d written stories that weren’t as good as they should have been, and I’d gotten a couple of facts wrong here and there, but I’d never started something and not finished it. I should have worked faster. I should have asked Mark again for the journals. I should have hired a private investigator to comb the Arkansas records for some trace I might have missed.
I told myself then that I was angry at myself because my grandmother had died without getting the answers she’d asked me fourteen years earlier to find. But did those answers matter to her as much as they did to me? Usually when my grandma and I talked about this project, she preferred to talk about herself. And I listened. I treated her life story as something worth recording. Maybe I couldn’t have finished this story while my grandma was alive. As long as I was working on it, we had something to talk about, and so I’d stretched my reporting as long as I could. Still, I’d wanted to finish because I’d wanted to show her I could. I’d wanted her to be proud of me.
The afternoon was hot and sticky, and I was covered in mosquito bites by the time I slouched back to the house. My mom and aunt were still sleeping, so I tiptoed into the big bathroom, intent on soaking in my grandma’s Jacuzzi tub. I shut the door. I opened the cabinet below her sink, and the smell of her soap unraveled me. My grandma used Dove or Caress, soft feminine bars that belied the tough-as-nails woman I knew when I was young. She dried the pink soaps after every bath and slipped them back into their boxes to retain their scent. I pulled a half-used bar of Dove out of its box, sniffed it, then sat on the side of the tub, lost with aching. I wouldn’t eat her biscuits again. I wouldn’t listen to her talk about cotton and country music. I probably wouldn’t even come back to this house. The carport would just be the concrete box of my memories. I turned the faucet. I dropped the Dove into the rush of water, then I lowered myself into the stream, crying and fumbling for the bar that smelled like her.
