SHAME

My mind was in too many places. I’d be applying for college in a year, and everything I did, whether it was my intention or not, became an item for my college calling card: student leadership; French club; dance company. I wrote for the school paper, trying to come up with gritty features that had to do with the world outside our campus bubble. I conducted two or three interviews for a long piece about a new homeless shelter in town and felt a flush of professional gratification when our faculty adviser allowed me to keep the word damn in one of the quotes. With a teacher who had chaperoned a trip to Washington, DC, the year before, I started a relatively inactive branch of the Junior State of America club. I stuck a “Dukakis for President” bumper sticker to my locker and rode some nights with a friend’s parents to meetings of the local Democrats Club, or whatever it was called. Behind all of this activity was the notion that if I could just get out of Fairfield—get to a real somewhere—I’d be able to do something genuine with all my theoretical interest in the world. I’d converge with the people I’d been waiting all my life for, and together we’d find our true place. It was a different time from the one kids live in now, an era when someone in my position could have the luxury of not knowing and not worrying, when the specifics were still far enough in the future that I could trust them to work themselves out. All the details had to do, in the meantime, was wait for me and exert whatever magnetism they could in my direction.

My teachers recognized something in my ambition. One afternoon, Mr. Catania, who’d agreed to let me take economics as an independent study, told me, “You’re going to get lots of opportunities because of who you are.”

I liked the sound of that. Didn’t it mean I was special, deserving of opportunities?

We were standing near his desk in the classroom, with the door open to after-school comings and goings. I was on my way home, just dropping by to deliver a paper on the topic of opportunity cost.

“You’re an African American woman,” he continued. “You should take advantage of the opportunities that will bring you.” My heart sank. Where he’d said “opportunities,” my mind revised the statement to hear “handouts”—a word that instantly conjured the look and taste of those ancient bricks of government cheese Nella had once brought around, the ones we’d eventually ended up throwing away. I’d been brought up to do the kind of work that would put me above such offerings, to shine so brightly I’d have to be rewarded for my merits and nothing less.

Mr. Catania could surely read the distrust in my face, which he tried to quell by suggesting it was a new time in the world. It was the Oprah era, and suddenly people were not only willing but eager, falling over one another to listen to someone who looked and even sounded a lot like me. Exceptional Oprah, who’d changed the world—hadn’t she?—with her cocktail of intelligence, empathy, and affability. Of course I wanted a life and a voice—a public voice—just like hers. But the advice stung nevertheless, because it also told me that it might be hard to be seen for who I was beyond or beneath the category to which I most visibly belonged. I told myself that Mr. Catania was wrong, though I didn’t erase his advice from my mind. At home every afternoon, the mail brought brochures from colleges across the country. Mr. Catania’s voice whispered in the back of my mind whenever the word diversity was printed among the catalog copy.

I was one of a group of prospective students flown out to Connecticut for a weekend visit to Trinity College. It was my first solo flight, but I’d been seated in the row beside an Asian girl named Audrey, who would be one of my roommates for the weekend. We hit it off in the air and bonded on the very first night in Hartford over the fact that neither of us was interested in the Jell-O wrestling event our hosts planned for us to attend. Looking out at the audience (a fairly homogenous sea of white faces, who on the whole seemed rather engaged by the sticky affair), I realized we must have been asked to campus in an effort to recruit students of color.

Audrey wanted to go to Yale just like her father had, and so did our other roommate, a black girl named Carol, who was a junior at a fancy Connecticut boarding school. Later that night, shivering in the dorm where we were camped in our sleeping bags, I decided that my dream was to go to Harvard. Conrad was living in Boston; he’d graduated from medical school and earned a prestigious fellowship in internal medicine at Massachusetts General, and so I’d told Audrey and Carol, “My brother lives in Boston,” as a way of cementing my own blood link to such an ambition.

When I got home and asked my mom if she thought I could get into Harvard, she’d looked at me with those large eyes of hers and smiled, saying, “You can go to Harvard or anyplace else you put your mind to.”

—

Settling back in to things in our household, I noticed tension. There was something upsetting our mother, and she whispered about it with Jean. Well, they weren’t whispering really, but they spoke about it in fragments and quiet tones, as if it were something they no longer needed to reference by name. This vague it seemed to bother my mother more, but her disappointment—or was it anger?—rubbed off on Jean. They’d gossip about it, then pray about it. Their tension seemed to hover in the room, lingering but never rising very high, like the smoke off dry ice.

I guess I trusted that whatever it was, it didn’t apply to me. If it did, I’d surely at least have had some guilty inkling about what I’d done, a feeling of shame just waiting to be summoned. I was so in the dark about the it in question, I knew I had to be in the clear.

But the murmurs continued. When Easter rolled around, I observed how Mom seemed to be preparing for the family gathering (Conrad wouldn’t make it home from Boston; he’d be on call, but the rest of us would be there) with an unusual preoccupation. She still baked the cakes and the rolls, still stuffed the bird and glazed the ham, but the girlish eagerness that usually characterized her preparations for such occasions wasn’t present. There was something dogging her mind. I helped in the kitchen, trying to amuse her with stories from school like I’d always done. She laughed when she was supposed to, but at night the prayers resumed, and so did the whispers.

On Easter, the revelation came. Michael arrived with his girlfriend, a slight, pretty, timid-seeming girl who didn’t say much and followed him everywhere he went, as if she were afraid of being left alone with the rest of us. She was white, but that couldn’t have been what upset my mother. My siblings had already brought the occasional white boyfriends and girlfriends home for visits without alarm. No, something else was at stake.

I could read the tension—and judgment?—in Jean’s movements and my mom’s. They were perfectly cordial, but the warmth, the ease, the play with which we always welcomed guests, especially special guests, were absent. Then, while we were all waiting for dinner, Michael and his girlfriend (her name was Kathleen, like my middle name and like Mom’s name used to be before she’d changed it to Kathryn) lay down together on the couch for a nap, their arms around each other and limbs entwined. The way their bodies fit together so easily and relaxed like that into such a familiar, unselfconscious sleep made perfectly clear what had been causing our mother such unrest.

“Did you see that ‘nap’?” Jean had asked me that night after Michael and Kathleen had left. Of course I had; it had taken place right in the middle of the family room. We’d all seen it. I’d practically sat and watched it, for a moment at least, before busying myself someplace else out of a feeling of intrusion or impropriety.

They were living together. Was this Michael’s way of showing that he was an adult, of embracing or even validating his decision to live as he wished? I was too young then to think about how natural it was for a man his age (he was twenty-five, after all) to fall in love and have sex and make a life with someone, even without waiting for the certainty or the ceremony of marriage. I was too young and living too much in my own head to have feelings like that of my own. Or else I still believed that I should be ignoring those feelings, apologizing for them, talking myself into putting them off for a later time.

Michael’s freedom, and the way he’d chosen to announce it, unsettled me. It meant that life was not the obedient animal I’d been taught to believe it would be. If it wasn’t, then what else that I’d been plotting, planning, waiting to receive, might turn out to be disconcertingly different from what I’d expected? And it meant that we as a family weren’t quite what I’d thought we were, weren’t the five perfect, dutiful children for whom every good thing had been reserved. Mostly, I suspect it unsettled me because deep down I understood that I, too, would soon deviate from our mother’s wishes, and that when I did, it would tear her up inside and threaten to build a wall of disappointment between us.

I thought about Michael and Kathleen living together, wondered what it looked like, what they did. Did they feel proudly defiant or diminished by the rift their choice was causing? And did it mean that Conrad was out there sleeping with girls, too? Conrad, who had never done a wrong thing in my eyes and who never could, I was sure. Conrad, whom even our mother seemed to look up to (he looked a little like her father—I think that was part of it—but it was also just him, the way he seemed to carry something brilliant inside himself), what if he was defying our mother’s wishes, too? Wouldn’t it mean that, no matter how I tried or what I told myself, I would fail her, too?

I couldn’t manage to unravel that logic-knot, and so I backed up to the thread I could decipher, the one I had more clearly before me: Michael and Kathleen on the couch, sleeping the deep sleep of lovers, something my parents—that all adults—had the propriety to do behind closed doors. Michael, causing all the whispers and the sighs and the accelerated prayers. How could he? And, perhaps more quietly, silently in the very back of my mind, was this: why should it be him and not one day me? Why should he be able to do it and flaunt it and get away with what I knew I’d feel forced to hide or deny no matter how old I was?

For weeks, I stewed, upset by the upheaval in my view of the world—our world—that the revelation had caused. The next time Michael came home, I barely spoke to him, was deliberately cold. It hurt me to treat him that way. I was acting upon borrowed feelings and hurting myself in the process. And worst of all, perhaps I was hurting my brother, my sweet, humble brother, the one who deferred so often to Conrad’s authority as the older son or his status as the doctor. Being cold to Michael left me cold inside, but I kept it up until I couldn’t bear it any longer.

“Talk to him,” Mom had urged me. I don’t know if she wanted me to let go of my resentment or if she wanted my words, whatever they might be, to have some kind of a chastening effect on my brother. Once, when I was very young, she’d dictated a letter for me to write to one of Conrad’s college roommates who hadn’t been paying his part of the phone bill. She’d thought that anyone would feel guilty about being reminded to do the right thing by a child. I’d sent the letter, not thinking of how it would make Conrad look, and the roommate had paid up, but the conversation I was being urged to have with Michael was altogether different, one for which I had no script and little wherewithal.

It was just before dinner. I remember sitting on the couch in the upstairs sitting room. Michael came up because he knew I wanted to speak with him. It was a heavy moment—we both knew it—and I still didn’t know what to say. I’m sure he was anxious about what it would be. Did he feel guilty for shocking our mother? For being the one to show me that the world, the real world, could be messy and painful and that such choices—the choices that would hurt or upset the people we love—were absolutely necessary?

“I’m sorry I’ve been mean to you,” I said. I can’t remember what he said, or if he said anything, but it was clear that there was more that I must say in order to come clean and break the spell of tension and distance my behavior had cast. It wasn’t a word like sex or sin or, for that matter, God, that needed to be spoken. Those words were implicit, part and parcel of our mother’s worry. I’m sure she’d used them at one point herself—that is, if she had indeed sat down and had her own heart-to-heart talk with Michael.

All five of us were good kids. I don’t think any of us wanted to do wrong. But we censored ourselves growing up in order to prevent the need for conversations like the one Michael and I were having. I wonder how much our being good in the eyes of God and our parents came out of the fear of being confronted as having failed in one way or another.

Once, in the eighth grade, I’d put off doing the final bit of work on a social studies report until the Sunday before it was due. It just happened that on that same day, instead of going home after the church service, we went to the house of some of my parents’ friends. It was an impromptu invitation, the carryover of a conversation that had started on the steps outside the sanctuary. We stayed for one of those long Sunday lunches that fall under the rubric of “supper,” and as the sun began to set, I felt a rising agitation. Finally, I interrupted my father to tell him that I needed to get home and finish my assignment. We made an accelerated goodbye, but when we got into the car, my dad turned to face me and said, “I’m disappointed in you.” It was the first time he’d ever told me such a thing, and it split me open. I cried all the way home and felt miserable as I sat poring over my index cards to piece together the finished paper.

Michael probably felt like that—like he’d done nothing wrong but had failed nonetheless because someone he loved, someone with extraordinarily high expectations, had been let down by his actions—when I blurted out, “I’m just—I’m just so disappointed.”

The words drew tears. Mine were tears of shame and regret at having, in just that very moment and with that particular phrase, broken Michael’s heart. Perhaps the part of me that had been angry for weeks had chosen those very words for precisely such a purpose, but immediately, I felt small. Why hadn’t I just focused my attention in the direction of things that genuinely concerned me? And, more to the point, what was preventing me from apologizing for the error of my disappointment and the haste of my judgment? What has kept me, even after all these years, from offering my brother the kind of apology he deserves, one that would yank me out from behind the safety of having been young and impressionable; one that would expose me for what I was, someone lying carefully in wait, biding her time, determined—I knew it even then—to do the very same thing as the person she blamed: to grow up and leave home and live her own life honestly, unapologetically, doing exactly as she pleased?