Sorry, Bro, page 27
The silence is all wrong. There’s this urgency in me, a feeling that I’m on the precipice of something big if I can just muster up the courage to jump.
Mom’s own words, that she wants me to be happy above all, are sparking hope in me. Plus, I already semi-confirmed that Erebuni and I were seeing each other with my comment about the coffee. Mom likes to be mentally prepared to accept new info. She hates surprises (hmm, kind of like me; I’ve never put that together). It’s possible that enough time has passed.
“Have you been looking for a new job?” she says, more of an accusation than a question.
“Kind of.” I get into a flow and rapidly pop off the ends of a couple of beans. It feels like I’m pulling myself apart instead of the legumes. I’m never going to say a word, am I?
She adds another couple of clean beans into the “done” bowl. “It is not going to be easy . . .” she begins, launching into her usual lecture about how my being fired means it’s going to be ten times harder to find a new job. I can’t listen to this again.
“Mom,” I interrupt.
My stomach tightens. The words are in there. Say it. Tell her. She already knows. You’re just confirming. It feels like the whole universe is whispering in my ear to tell her already, to get it out, stop holding it in.
I turn toward her. “I was lying to you before. I was with Erebuni. We were seeing each other.”
She steps back, and I swear her hand rises to her chest in shock. If I don’t barrel forward it’s never coming out. I find myself actually looking at her in the face. “It’s true. We were, uh, starting to date. We liked each other so much. I can’t help but think that she’s actually the best person I’ve ever dated.”
“Wha—You are telling me this now?” She’s shaking her head. Not the best response, but it’s not the worst. She’s not screaming, she’s not backing away or leaving the room. Her ears are wide open; she’s listening to me.
“It’s not a fluke. I’ve liked women, girls, for as long as I can remember. The same time I liked boys, I liked girls, too.” My mind jumps to summer camp when I was seven years old, crushing on a beautiful blond girl several years older than me, the whip of her hair as she ran by during tag. “It’s always been this way. And I know that might be hard to hear, but I couldn’t keep it in anymore. It’s just me.”
I say the last sentence softly, and it seems to relax the panic in my mom’s eyes. She lets out a choked laugh, and now I’m the surprised one.
“Ever since the banquet, I suspected,” she says. “But you’re so girly,” she insists. “Are you sure?”
“Oh yeah,” I say, and hope it didn’t come out too lasciviously.
She covers her face in her hands and breathes out, then releases them. “Is there still a chance you will be with a man? You still like men? Or is that gone now?”
I try so hard not to be frustrated. I take a shallow breath. “I do like men, too, that hasn’t changed. There’s a possibility I might end up with a guy. But I’m telling you this because I might end up with a woman. And you have to know this about me.”
She says, pleadingly, “It would be easier if you were with a man. For you and—I don’t like to say this to put pressure on you—for me, too.”
The whispers. I hate that this is part of the equation. I get the sense she would have almost no qualms if not for the outside intrusion, for the chorus of people yelling, “Oh the horror!” I feel for her. It’s hard to say screw everyone else. I mean, it’s what I’ve been having trouble with this whole time. I can’t expect perfection from her when I can barely bring myself to buck convention.
“I know. And I’m sorry for all the pain this might cause you. I don’t mean it to happen to us. But there’s no helping it. This is who I am.”
She shakes her head. “The community is so backward.”
My face gets hot, my eyes fill. She gets it. I knew she’d get it. “It is.”
Then her eyes well up with tears, and they don’t seem happy. I want to groan because when my mom cries I capitulate to whatever she wants and turn my back on myself. I can handle her anger and hauteur, but never her genuine sadness. She takes a small step toward me. “Does this mean you will never have babies?”
I almost laugh. Of course that’s what she’s worried about. I shake my head emphatically. “No, it doesn’t. I want kids, one day. There are ways to have kids without being married to a man.” I switch to Armenian, “One day, you will become a grandmother.”
She lets out a huge breath and crosses herself. “Then I can live with anyone you want to be with. Tantig Sona and her big mouth be damned.”
I hope she’ll do a whole lot more than just live with it, but this is huge. It feels like Tantig Sona is a stand-in for the rest of the bigotry of the community. Mom’s on my side, and I can hardly believe it.
“Mom, it will be okay. I will make you proud,” I say.
“Nareh, I am already proud,” she replies. “Diana sent me your article. It was—I couldn’t believe my daughter wrote such a thing. I felt I was there with you. And I wanted to strangle that man who did that to you.”
She . . . she read it? “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“I was about to tell you, then you interrupt me to tell me you are gay. Or not gay, I don’t know the words for it.” She huffs, then continues, “It was very good, that’s what I’m saying. With that talent, I know you will find some new job.”
My bottom lip shuts against the top one, trying to prevent a cry from bursting out. I can’t get out the thank you, so I step over and hug my mom, and she hugs me back, and we’re in it for a while, and I forgot how good it feels to just hold and be held by your mom. I’m a little kid again; she smells and feels the same as when I was five.
When we finally pull away my mom looks at me funny. “You know, there was an essay you had to write freshman year about a classmate. You wrote about your soccer teammate, what was her name, Jasmine? It was very descriptive of her body. I thought maybe you looked up to her a lot, but now maybe I think different?”
I know the exact assignment she’s talking about. As a naive little freshman we had the weird prompt to write a descriptive essay about a classmate, and I took it as an opportunity to let my heart run free about my feelings for Jasmine on the page (not understanding it was actually lust, though I had visions of us making out in the janitor’s closet, not included in the essay). I can’t believe Mom remembers it.
“Yep,” I say, “That wasn’t just friendly admiration. Full-on crush.”
She shakes her head. “I would never see anything like that. Back home, everyone was either married or unmarried, there was no gay. You sometimes suspected, but a woman couldn’t be walking down the street with a man you weren’t married to, much less two men holding hands. They’d be murdered on the spot.”
“That’s horrible,” I say.
She makes a sound of deep agreement. Then, her voice gets small, serious. “That stays in the mind forever. When I saw you kissing her—Erebuni—I thought, They are going to kill my daughter.”
Whoa. I never knew that. I could tell her don’t worry, that’s not going to happen. Her fear is unfounded. But she’s sharing this part of herself with me, and I can tell she doesn’t want to be reassured by facts. She wants me to know how scared she was. This is as close to an apology as I might get for the way she acted at the banquet.
“I’m sorry you felt that way.”
Mom sighs. “I know it’s stupid.”
“No, it’s not. That’s how you grew up, that’s what you saw and heard. I get it. I’m glad you can see past it now, though. Seriously, thank you for this. For everything.”
She studies the yellow dish towel her hand is resting against, then waves me off. “Don’t make it seem like I’m so prejudiced that was a hard thing for me.”
I smirk. She always needs to be in the right. That’s fine with me. “Okay, Mom.”
Then Nene steps in, and she has this look on her face like she’s about to share something big. Mom and I turn toward her. Nene lifts a finger. “Back in Anjar, there was a woman I knew, older than me.”
I shift my weight. I love when Nene shares from her past, but I was kind of hoping to get more time with Mom to talk about my coming out, and Erebuni specifically. I’m afraid that if we get interrupted that’s going to be it, no more returning to the awkward subject.
Nene continues, “She was a fierce fighter, from Musa Dagh originally. Photographs of her with bullets up and down from her neck to her waist. They say she killed fifty enemy soldiers while defending her home. She and her family finally left in 1939, I believe, when France annexed it to Turkey for good. I was nine years old then, and we met them soon after. Anjar was very small.
“She never married. She told me one time, after what she had seen and what she had done, she would never let a man be the boss of her. She was the most impressive woman I ever met, and when I married Hrant, I was sad that I couldn’t be more like her.”
Holy . . . so Nene was listening this whole time? She’s definitely gleaned the same-sex thing. How much of the conversation did she understand? Also, between this conversation and the one at the banquet, it seems like Nene has some regrets about some of the actions she took, or rather didn’t take. Her poet lover, the one she left behind to marry my grandfather. She’s held them in for decades and is only now sharing them.
“So, I am telling you this because I think she is a little bit like your friend, Nar my dear. The tall one who spoke at the banquet, who you were joking around with every time she got off the stage. Those two women, they hold themselves the same way.”
My mouth falls open. She was listening, not only now, but she saw Erebuni and me together at the banquet, miming and typing messages on her phone. My heart hurts thinking of how happy Erebuni and I were at that moment, not knowing what was coming our way only an hour or so later.
And that Erebuni reminds her of this fierce warrior lady from Musa Dagh.
“Bring her over for dinner. Let us get to know her better,” Nene says.
My mom sucks in a breath, stealing all the oxygen from the room. One step at a time for her, and that’s probably a bit much to jump into.
“She’s, uh, a little mad at me now. Because I lied to her,” I say.
Nene puts on that face like she has all the assurance in the world. She waves her hand. “You can make up. You’re a very resourceful girl.” She pats me on the arm and walks out of the kitchen like she didn’t drop the biggest bomb on us.
I look at my mom. “Did you know about that?” I ask.
Mom seems both surprised and unfazed, like Nene doing these big reveals has been a regular part of her life. “Nene is a mystery to you and me,” she replies.
She turns to the pile of beans and says, “Let’s continue if we want to have any hope of eating fassoulia today.” Then she adds in Armenian, “My daughter.”
My window might have closed to expand on the details of all my feelings, but I’m already lighter. It’s as if I’ve sloughed off an entire layer of skin, and I’m all shiny and soft underneath. I’m plucking beans, crushing garlic, and opening tomato cans like I’m not here. I keep replaying the scene from minutes ago over in my head.
There’s something else. Now that I’ve told Mom and Nene, I want to keep going, shout it to the world. I couldn’t believe how freeing it felt to put the words down about what happened at KTVA with Richard, how badly I needed it. It helped me make sense of the whole thing. Now I need to do that again, and it’s not like I don’t have the perfect place to yell my sexuality to the world. The need to do it is tugging at me, urging me to look at it straight in the face.
It’s almost ten a.m., and there is some light filtering in through the fog. I know where I need to go. I give the countertop one last sweep and tell my mom I need to head out for a bit. The way I say it, I don’t ask for permission, I’m not apologetic. It surprises even me.
28
A wall is not built with one stone.
Մէկ քարով պատ չի կայնիր:
—Armenian Proverb
Back home, after putting the final dinner dish into the dishwasher, I’m back in my room, cozy with the heater on, reviewing the winning photo. I’m cupping the phone in my hands as if it were a precious gem and I’m in awe of its power. I scroll through the words I spent all day writing.
This isn’t going to be my usual type of Instagram post. It’s the same smiling selfie, still Nareh who loves matcha lattes and spotting sidewalk blooms, but there’s another layer about myself I’ve hidden too long, and I want to share it with you all.
I’m bisexual. That’s it, such a small thing, two words, but I’ve been terrified to openly say it. Afraid that people will think I’m oversharing, seeking attention, or getting explicit about my sex life. While I’m writing this I imagine some readers waving their hands like ugh, we don’t need to know. If you fall into that camp, the “Unfollow” button is easy to tap.
I’d occasionally see other people’s coming out stories and be happy for them, proud of them, but I always thought, “that’s for other people, not for you.” I thought, as long as I was with my (now ex) boyfriend, I never needed to come out. And honestly, if I hadn’t met the most incredible woman, there’s part of me that thinks I would have never come out. The thought scares me, that I could have lived my entire life in the closet.
But now coming out is for me, too. Because I don’t want to hide as if this is something shameful. Because I don’t want to have to pretend someone is just a friend. Because I don’t want to hurt people with lies just to bend to the norm. Because it’s just life, and you can’t help who you love.
Being open about who I am may make some aspects of my life harder (namely, community acceptance, because news flash, not everyone who lives in San Francisco is a bleeding-heart liberal), but even typing this, I already feel lighter. I’m hoping for the particular type of freedom that comes only when you shout about who you truly are. I’m hoping it will inspire others, too.
Thank you for being here with me and letting me share my story with you.
I’ve read and reread it a hundred times; it’s ready. And the photo is perfect. I went back to Ocean Beach, my hair lashing around freely and a small surprised smile on my face, like the first blush at being tickled. And on my shirt, a new addition. I went to a tchotchke shop in West Portal and found a rainbow pin. I felt a little fake doing it, like, Oh yeah, now you get a rainbow pin, Nar. But then again, yes, exactly; this is the right time for me. The rainbow pin is peeking out from the corner of my shirt, where it still sits since I haven’t taken it off. But I still haven’t hit “Post.”
Because even if I did come out to Mom, and no matter how confident I might sound in the post, it’s still terrifying.
I’m megaphoning this to tens of thousands of people, some of whom I know. My cousins follow me, some of my mom’s friends, too. It’s their presence that makes me more nervous, not the strangers. Shoot, do I need to text my cousins one by one and come out to them first? No, that’s not necessary. One post and done, spoken to the world.
I know what Dad would think. He would hate it. All those fears about attention seeking, oversharing, those are seeds planted by Dad. He wouldn’t want the world to know that his daughter was into women, that she was not a perfect specimen of straight, white America. Well, screw that. A part of me is guilty for thinking badly about him, and also how I got off “easy,” with him not being here to rage back at me.
A thought strikes me, and it’s kooky, but I go for it anyway. “Dad,” I say aloud. “This is who I am. I hope that you will be able to accept me.”
I feel better then, like the last person I needed to tell has been told. Never thought my great sexuality reveal would include coming out to a ghost, but here we are.
On my wall, there’s the abstract coffee art Erebuni gave me. I wonder if she remembers I have this, this piece of her in my home. The coffee spill looks like dirt at first glance. Then I see there’s a shovel, a hoe. And possibly flowers trembling along the edges, dahlias and windflowers. I’m not sure if that’s what Erebuni intended or if I’m the only person who can see these objects, but I feel they’re a positive sign.
I really am turning into my mom with the superstition.
Well, here goes. I hover my finger over the button and tap it, quick, so that I can’t undo it. “Post.” It’s done and out. I’m out. My heart jumps up to my throat. Oh God, what did I do? There could still be time to undo this. It feels big and terrifying to share, and it can’t be undone once people see it.
Then the notifications begin. Heart. Heart. Heart. Heart. They flutter on-screen one after another like a pulse. Then some general comments come in, emojis of hearts with the flag. “Love you girl” from one of my cousins. Okay, maybe this . . . maybe it won’t be so bad.
And let’s be real, I did this in part so Erebuni could see my public coming out. It’s for me, but in it, there’s a strong message directly to her. It’s a tad past nine, and while all I want to do is text Erebuni, I decide that one, it’s too late to text someone who is still upset with you, and two, I should play it slightly cool instead of shouting, “Look what I did!” at her.
Instead, I lie in bed and soak up the comments of shocking kindness from strangers. I’m getting more specific ones now. Women saying they’re bi, too, but haven’t told anyone; women who are out and proud and proud of me, too; others who don’t mention their sexuality who still thank me for the post, or say my hair looks cute like that. One guy who says, “Hot.” Not the type of support I was looking for, but if he had to say something dumb, at least it wasn’t hateful.
For a couple of years now I’ve generally tried not to let any comments get to me, the good and the bad, otherwise I’ll fall into the trap of living my life by them, allowing a crowd to define me. I always imagine they’re talking to a character, not to Nar, the real me. But today I slip off the veil and press my face directly into the comments, feeling their every texture. I am known to the world. I’m more me than I ever have been. That’s the thought I fall asleep to.
