How are you going to introduce me?” I asked Chris.
We were sitting in the car outside a funeral home in Worcester, Massachusetts. Chris’s grandmother’s wake was going on inside. There were so many cars turning into the parking lot that a police officer was directing traffic. Chris had waved to the officer when she pulled in. “That’s Robbie Donahue,” she said, and then added, “My father directed funeral traffic to pay for Catholic school.” Chris’s father was a vice cop. Before graduating from the police academy at twenty-five, he was a helicopter mechanic and door gunner in Vietnam. Chris was born while he was at basic training; she learned to walk and talk while he was in Vietnam. According to family legend, Chris’s younger sister was conceived in the taxi their parents took home from the airport the night he returned for good. Her father was near sixty now, and nowhere close to retiring. For years he had refused one promotion after another. Why, he asked, would he want to spend his life behind a desk? “I like the chase,” he said.
“How should I introduce you?” Chris asked. She wasn’t looking at me. I knew she didn’t really want to deal with this. Not today.
“Just use my name,” I said. “And leave it at that.” I was putting on lipstick in the car mirror. Yesterday I had gone to Eileen Fisher, the only clothing store in the Massachusetts college town where we now lived, and tried to find something appropriate for a wake. I had been to only one wake before this, my own grandfather’s, but that had been in Pittsburgh in March, at a time when I still had a real job and lived in a real city, and so I wore a brown suit and brown pumps and kept an extra pair of stockings in my purse in case I got a run. Now it was late June in Worcester, and I was a graduate student. I was wearing a black pencil skirt with a lime-green, sleeveless sweater, which was, I realized as I watched all the women walking into the funeral home in pale suits, a terrible choice. My hair was expanding in the humidity and I was starting to sweat.
“Why don’t you go in first,” I said. I didn’t want to pressure Chris, not now. She missed her grandmother terribly. For the past three months she had spent every Saturday in Worcester with her grandmother, watching Red Sox games, doing crossword puzzles, eating the Ritz crackers and sliced cucumbers of her childhood. On those Saturday mornings Chris would get dressed early, fill her coffee cup for the car, and pack her bag for the day I had hoped we would spend together, now that we had made a home for ourselves in an old parsonage on the Main Street of a tiny Massachusetts town. On those Saturdays Chris would come home late, her eyes red from crying in the car. That spring I learned Chris was not as estranged from her family as she had once suggested.
Eventually I got out of the car and went into the funeral home. The reception room was filled with people and the thrum of conversation. I saw the casket, saw the long line of people waiting to kneel, make a rapid-fire sign of the cross, and then lay their hand for an instant on the glossy wood. I did not make an approach.
Instead I gave my condolences to Chris’s parents, whom I had met once before, and they accepted them kindly but were quickly distracted. The line of people needing to speak to them was long. I was only relieved. I didn’t have much to say to them. After a few minutes, Chris’s sister Lynne found me in the lobby. “Tennis, anyone?” she asked with a laugh, nodding to the sweater I had tied over my shoulders in an attempt to dim the lime green without adding to the sweating problem. I had known Lynne for a few years by now. She was a wise-cracking and lively person, and I liked her. And while I was certain she had no problem with the idea of me, I couldn’t tell if she liked the actual me.
Lynne opened her arms and gave me a hug. She always smelled the way I had, as a child, assumed I would smell someday, a floriated mix of perfume and makeup and hair product that did not overwhelm but still left no room for other, more animal smells.
“I’m so sorry about your nana,” I said.
“Thank you,” Lynne said. “I can’t believe she’s gone!” This is what everyone in the family had said when I offered my condolences. Their nana was eighty-five and had been in a state of decline for years. Still, it seemed no one could imagine life without her.
“Oh, and congratulations too,” I said, looking down at her stomach.
“I heard the heartbeat today,” Lynne said, giving her belly a pat, as though to praise what swam in there. “So I’m telling everyone.” She laughed, swung her hand toward the crowd, and flipped her long, blonde hair over her shoulder. Lynne was a second-grade teacher at a local parish school, and she lived a block from the house where she was born. These were her people, and it was clear—and enviable, to me—that she would spend the wake offering the seed of hope that was her growing baby; she would walk among everyone as an antidote to death. It’s not often these things line up this way, that you are the one bearing a new soul as an old one rushes out. I could see that she felt a lesser loss because of it, that she felt a bit invincible.
Lynne left me to continue on her rounds, and I sat down in the row of plush chairs against the wall to watch the action around me. Everyone was talking loudly; everyone, it seemed, had a pressing story to tell. The women had well-styled hair and wore lots of gold jewelry and bracelets that chimed when they moved their arms. They spoke with their heads close, their hands over their mouths. The men were clean-shaven and handsome in their suits, and they charmed me with their firm handshakes, their smiles, the way they crossed their arms over their chests and leaned in as they laughed. My own parents’ friends were scientists and academics, social workers and textile artists. The men were wiry and mostly bearded, the women wore linen skirts and expensive scarves and let their hair go gray and wore it cut close to their heads. They tended toward thoughtful introversion. They were marvelous people, they were my people, but now, sitting here in O’Connor Brother’s funeral home, I wanted to be one of these people too, to claim their exuberance, their shine, and, more than anything, their belief.
I also watched Chris, watched how she was laughing, listening intently to people’s long answers to her questions, gasping with excitement at the sight of old friends and their babies. I had never seen her so enthusiastic, and I couldn’t tell if it was an act. Later, after many years together, I would come to understand that it was not an act, that she adored these people, cherished her past with them. But I would also come to understand that when the retirement or first communion or graduation party was over and the time came for us to go home, she would need to sleep for hours, sit in silence at the table with the newspaper, or go for a run with her iPod blasting so that she could return to the world where she lived without them, the only world in which she could truly be herself.
That evening after the wake we went to Chris’s parents’ house. “Where are we sleeping?” I asked Chris. The last time Chris and I had spent the night at her parents’ house (which had also been the first time), her mother put us in separate bedrooms. It seemed odd to me that she would still enforce their house rule of no shared beds until marriage despite our being already in significant violation of their more essential rules, but I didn’t protest. And neither did Chris. She had shared a bed with high school girlfriends, but only because her parents had no idea what they were doing or who they were to each other. And after high school she didn’t bring many girlfriends home with her.
“My mom said to share a room,” she said. “There’s not enough space to split us up.”
“Lucky us,” I said in a not particularly nice tone. Chris didn’t say anything. After this visit her mother wouldn’t try to separate us again, and I would begin to understand that this is how I would become part of the family, crossing one unmarked and unspoken boundary at a time.
In the morning, Chris and her cousins went to the church to prepare for the funeral, and I stayed behind. Her cousin Terri was going to read from Corinthians during the service; Lynne and Jen, Chris’s youngest sister, who was twenty-five years old and still referred to as “the baby,” would carry the wine and wafers to the altar for communion. Chris and her older cousins were pallbearers, she the only woman among them. No one, not even Chris’s parents, mentioned anything about this distinction. No one seemed to notice. When Chris was eight years old, she was the first girl in all of Worcester to play Ty Cobb little league. This was five years before Title IX, and the story ran in national newspapers. Her strength and physical ambition were a source of confusion and discomfort to her parents; her father was an extraordinary athlete, and in all fairness so was her mother, although she never played team sports. But her father had been a baseball star, a natural. And he had no son. But he had Chris, who was also a natural, and he struggled to make his peace with his unconventional daughter. Her mother discouraged her from playing sports. She punished Chris when she spit through her teeth; she implored her to do the things the other girls liked to do. Chris told me this made her more determined to play, and to excel. I suspected that it also made her sad, and lonely.
Many years later, when our own daughters were old enough to play team sports, Chris’s mother gave us a scrapbook into which she had pasted every clipping, every team photo, every sports section listing of Chris’s remarkable stats. She had underlined Chris’s name whenever it appeared, put a star next to her quotes. In one team photo, a blurry shot taken from some distance, she had drawn a heart around Chris’s face.
When I arrived at Our Lady of the Angels, I went in through the side door then took a wrong turn, so instead of entering the sanctuary I went into the priests’ quarters. Nine priests were serving at this funeral mass, in homage to Chris’s grandmother, who had devoted herself to the Church. All nine of them were dressing, throwing white robes over their dark suits so that the robes caught the air for a moment, and the priests appeared as birds whose wings were puffed against a cold rain. I turned away before they saw me, or at least I hoped it was before. What I had seen seemed a secret, the way they had gone from being men to something else entirely.
I didn’t sit with Chris at the funeral. I found a seat near the back with her cousin’s wife, who was trying valiantly to keep her toddler quiet. A few minutes after the processional, the little girl started making too much noise and they left the sanctuary for the crying room, and left me alone in the pew. When the Mass ended, Chris and the other pallbearers walked out of the church with the coffin. I could see that Chris was weeping, and because she was carrying the coffin she could not wipe the tears from her face so they were falling onto the lapels of her suit jacket. I began to cry, because it was so sad to see her that way, and because she was not mine just then. She was her Nana’s. And Chris could not belong to both of us, not in this life. She had told her Nana nothing of her gayness. And I knew that, consciously or not, Chris was allowing me to enter her family only as her grandmother was leaving because she didn’t know if she could have us both, and she was scared to try.
After the funeral, Chris’s parents’ house swelled with people, and I tried to keep busy (and out of the way) in the kitchen. I sat for a little while with Chris’s grandfather, who seemed to have aged a decade since yesterday’s wake, and I chatted with him about baseball and the weather, two things I knew little about. He talked slowly, his eyes downcast. He didn’t ask me who I was.
By four o’clock most of the guests had gone home. The mothers and aunts were in the kitchen drinking wine; the fathers and uncles were in the garage inspecting Chris’s father’s drag racing car. The grandchildren were in the basement, playing restaurant at the wet bar and goofing around on exercise equipment. We—Chris and I, her sisters and her cousins—were in the living room. Chris’s sisters and cousins were adamant about their love and acceptance of Chris and had known many of her old girlfriends. But still I had the sense that they were a little uncertain about me. Chris had not brought many girlfriends home, and now here I was, not only in their house but at their grandmother’s funeral, lazing around on the couch with them after all the other guests were long gone and only family remained.
After we had finished a few bottles of wine, Lynne started rummaging in her parents’ entertainment center for old home movies. “Oh, let’s watch this one!” she said, pushing a VHS tape into the player, shushing everyone by waving the remote control at us. In an instant the snowy screen became a vision of their nana in a pink sweatshirt, standing over the stove and talking to the camera about whatever it was she was making. Everyone in the room got quiet. “She’s making blinis,” Lynne said to me, then turned back to the screen.
“Like for caviar?” I asked. No one answered me; they were too busy watching, and crying, and laughing. They were, with the exception of Lynne, a little drunk.
“Oh, let’s do it now,” Chris’s cousin Terri cried, tears running down her cheeks. “Let’s make blinis!”
And then they were all saying, yes, yes, let’s make blinis! Terri called into the kitchen, “Auntie Judi! We’re making blinis!”
Chris’s mother called back, “Not in my kitchen you’re not!”
It was then decided, with murmurs and laughter, that in the morning, after Chris’s mother left for her seven-to-three shift at the hospital where she worked as a cardiology LPN, we would make blinis.
“Wait until you taste them, hon,” Chris said, putting her arm around me for the first time all day. “Just wait.”
From what I could discern from the video, blinis were potato pancakes with a little extra flour. I was slightly awed by the fact that these people seemed to believe there was something distinctly Lithuanian about shredded potatoes fried in oil.
“Aren’t blinis just latkes?” I said.
“No,” Chris said, shaking her head. “They’re different.”
The next morning blini-making began right after breakfast. Lynne arrived with her little boy and her husband, Jim, a large and genial red-haired Scot. Jim was the son of a butcher, and a fantastic cook. The next year he would talk me through a standing rib roast over the phone, rescuing my near-botched Christmas dinner for the in-laws we would soon share. On this morning he had an electric skillet under one arm and a bag of potatoes under the other.
They all got to work washing and peeling, admonishing each other for deviating from Nana’s technique, crying and laughing over their growing piles of potato peels. I offered to grate. “Okay,” Lynne said, “but be careful. No fingernails in the blinis.” I looked at Chris, wanting to share a horrified glance, but she had her back to me at the sink, scrubbing potatoes. “I think I can manage,” I said.
Soon the skillets were warm, and Jim dropped alarmingly generous spoonfuls of Crisco into them. The snowy mounds began to melt into clear and smoking lakes of oil. Lynne squeezed the starchy liquid from the potatoes with her hands, then mixed them with egg and flour and dropped the mixture into the oil. Soon the house smelled like a McDonald’s.
The smell brought in the uncles and aunts—who had been keeping their distance on the patio—for a plate of their childhoods, fed to them by their grown children. And the kids came in from the yard, calling, I smell blinis! I was the plate filler then, putting two and three blinis on each paper plate, spooning applesauce for the children, sour cream for the adults, fielding requests for more. Chris and her cousins ate them without plates, standing up, with their fingers. For the first time since we arrived, everyone was quiet.
When it seemed that everyone was sated, I filled the sink with water and soap. Chris’s mother would be home from work in a few hours, and the kitchen was a mess of dishes and potato peels. Jim came over and, wordlessly, took over the rinsing.
“Well,” Lynne asked me. “How were your first blinis?”
“Oh, I loved them!” I said, hoping I was enthusiastic enough.
Jim turned and looked at me. He winked. “Give it time,” he whispered. “Give it time.”
Chris was twenty-five years old when she came out to her parents. It didn’t go well. They were a working-class Catholic family, first-generation Americans, who still lived in the house they had moved into on their wedding day in the town where they were born. In our house we have a picture of Chris’s mother, six years old, on Santa’s lap. Chris’s sister has a picture of their father, also six years old, with the same Santa. Their world was small, and while this fact alone doesn’t explain their struggle to accept Chris’s gayness, it did make them—would make any of us—more susceptible to the gaze of others, to the watchful eye of authority and its insistence that we do not get to do what we want just because it feels good. And it made it difficult to know when exactly—how exactly—you became an adult, became the one who gets to make the rules. To change them. Made it difficult for them to see the possibility of reinvention, of a life off script.
So when Chris came out, her parents were angry, and they were frightened, and they said hurtful things. She forgave them, bit by bit. By the time Chris and I met she had reached a fragile peace with them, a peace that was in large part dependent on Chris’s discretion, and her undivided attention when they asked for it. She kept her romantic life private and her loyalty to them clear. She kept the peace. What I don’t think any of them realized was that Chris had done it for her grandparents’ sake. It was their approval she could not bear to lose, their affection she could not live without.
Chris’s grandfather died three months after her grandmother. He wasn’t sick, or even taking any medications when he died. He was tired, and he missed his wife too much. Chris and I sat together at his funeral, and after the service she introduced me to people as her girlfriend. At the luncheon following the service, I sat next to a priest wearing a large onyx ring and a cashmere blazer who told me stories of his years at the Vatican. Chris’s grandmother’s favorite priest was absent from the lunch. When Chris asked her father about him, he told her that last month there had been accusations of sexual abuse, a harrowing number of boys over a harrowing number of years. Now he was gone. To jail? Chris asked. Her father wasn’t sure where he was. Well, thank God Nana didn’t know, Chris said. It would have destroyed her. Chris’s father nodded in agreement. Yes, thank God she died when she did. That she was spared the heartache. As I listened I couldn’t help but think of the heartache Nana’s death had spared me, and how secretly grateful I was to both Chris’s grandparents for going when they did, and for giving me the chance to stay.