“You know how I know you’re gay?” Barry says.
I shrug, knowing there is no way to avoid the punch line.
“You go to an all-girls school,” he says and barks out a short, choppy laugh, sending a round of Doritos splinters all over the front of his shirt.
“You know how I know you’re gay?” I counter.
Barry looks uncomfortable. He’s not used to me turning his favorite jokes back on him.
“Your name is Barry,” I say and go back to what I’m writing.
Barry looks puzzled. “That doesn’t even make any sense,” he says. Without giving it too much more thought he launches into the next assault. “Hey, you know how I know you’re gay?” He doesn’t wait for a response. “You write in a diary!” He grins at me triumphantly. The orange Dorito dust encrusts the corners of his mouth. I should know better than to respond, but I do anyway.
“It’s not a diary; it’s a journal. And if you must know, it’s an assignment for school.” My face burns a little, even if it’s only Barry.
Barry doesn’t miss a beat. “You know why you’re gay?” he continues. “Cuz you’re doing homework, and it’s not even Sunday.”
Now I’m just annoyed. It’s not like I was even writing anything profound. I was mostly just doodling in the margin of a blank page just to avoid conversations like this one. “Wouldn’t that just make me studious, diligent, fastidious, or even conscientious?”
Barry stares at me, his mouth hanging ever so slightly ajar. “Whatever, dude.” He selects a particularly large Dorito chip from the bag and stuffs it in his mouth whole. The crunching noise seems to be his punctuation mark. He goes back to watching some rerun of That ’70s Show on TV and leaves me alone for a little while.
Barry’s dad is my mom’s brother, Kris. My annoyance about their visit is twofold. For one thing, Barry is pretty much the bane of my existence. He’s annoying, and he smells, and he seems to be pretty much incapable of having a conversation that strays beyond the following topics: classic rock bands, reality TV shows, boobs, and anything at all related to the playing or watching of ice hockey. There’s only one of those subjects that I find remotely interesting, but hell if I’m going to talk about tits with my Neanderthal cousin. Besides, he probably wouldn’t believe it and would use whatever I said as an excuse to ask me if I’m gay.
The real reason that Barry and Uncle Kris’s visit is so annoying is that it supplanted one of my the few family rituals I actually like. Every Thanksgiving my mom and I visit my dad’s mother at her assisted-living home in Indiana. My grandmother Mima is pretty much the coolest member of my family. She refers to my dad, who happens to be her son, as “the schmuck,” even when Mom asks her not to.
“Why?” she’ll say. “He is a schmuck.” And then Mom will get all quiet and leave the apartment for a little while. When Mom gets pissed at Mima, I usually find her down by the pool. It’s pretty much the best part of that place besides the food. The pool at Shady Acres is enclosed in this giant glass dome. It’s all steamy and warm in there, almost like a greenhouse. It’s like our own little tropical vacation.
I don’t know if Mima gets too intense for Mom sometimes or if it’s just that she knows she doesn’t have a leg to stand on in that argument. I appreciate what she’s trying to do. You know, protect some sainted image of my father in case he decides to show up again someday and attempt to have some kind of relationship with me. But it’s a little hypocritical, considering that Mom does her fair share of Dad-bashing when we’re at home. She’s just a little more passive-aggressive about it. But really I just prefer the honesty; I mean, it’s not like I haven’t noticed that he’s been pretty much AWOL for the past seven years. It’s not like he’s been off climbing Mount Everest or saving the children in Africa or in prison, for god’s sake. He’s the development director at a history museum. Which, when he’s in a pissy mood, he describes as schmoozing people for money. When he’s feeling good he gets all starry-eyed about “going back into the field someday.” I’m really not sure what he’s talking about. I mean, what field? I think this is just something he tells himself so he doesn’t have to admit he hates his job.
It actually might be kind of cool if he were in prison. I wouldn’t mind visiting him. It would be kind of interesting to visit someone in prison. I bet you could get a lot of those meals that come in partitioned trays. I used to love eating Lunchables, before Mom figured out they had the nutritional value of the cardboard they were packed in. That’s the way the food comes at Mima’s house. Every night we fill out this little card saying what we want for our meals for the next day, and then they deliver them, just like that. All you have to do is heat stuff up sometimes. I guess I kind of like things when they’re neat and organized. Somehow I don’t think that’s the kind of mind-blowing revelation that Ms. Tuttle is looking for.
It would really annoy me if anyone read this and thought that I was a bad student because I’m lacking a male role model in my life. Because I really don’t think that’s the case.
Having two parents is kind of an outdated model family at this point in the twenty-first century. In fact, most of the kids I know live with one parent or the other, or are part of some kind of blended family. They used that term in our eighth-grade health class back in public school. It’s kind of a nice way of labeling a whole bunch of people who don’t necessarily want to be family but are forced to think of themselves that way. The term always made me think about putting a family in a food processor and chopping it up until the parts were even and indistinguishable from one another. Which, frankly, doesn’t sound all that great to me.
Mom and Dad and I aren’t really part of any blended family. We’re just like three extra ingredients that ended up in the world. We don’t belong to anyone else, and we barely belong to each other anymore. Back when my parents first split up, Mom and I lived with her parents while she figured things out. That wasn’t so bad. Norma (my mom’s parents wanted to be called by their first names) used to take me on outings to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which I nicknamed the Boring Museum for Adults, or to see a youth concert at Symphony Hall. The latter were a little better since she usually brought candy in her purse. Plus there were naked statues. It wasn’t ideal, as far as entertainment goes, but it felt good to be part of something a little bigger than just me and Mom, or me and Dad at his condo in New York City.
I used to spend half the time with Dad at his condo. But then we moved to Boston and getting back and forth became more and more of an issue, so I just stopped seeing him as much. I kept waiting for him to make it an issue with Mom—you know, that he was being denied his parental rights or whatever—but he never did.
I overheard them on the phone once. Well, I overheard Mom’s end, anyway. I could tell she was complaining about his lack of involvement with me because she was saying “he” and “his” with extra emphasis combined with phrases like school-work and Boy Scouts Then I could tell he was arguing with her because she said, “Well, I’d like to have some time to find myself too, David, but some of us are busy raising a child.”
I never thought about myself that way before—like somebody’s burden. I just figured that parents felt about kids the way they do on TV: like they were the best thing that ever happened to them. Wasn’t it your responsibility to sort all that “who am I” crap out before you had kids? I don’t know how they can expect me to have the kind of answers that they don’t even have when they’ve got like twenty-five years on me.
I was never a very loud or needy person, I’m pretty sure of that. But after I heard that conversation, I made an even bigger effort to lie low and stay out of Mom’s way. It was weird. I expected her to notice and react one of two ways. I thought she would compliment me on what an easy kid I was to raise, or I thought she would say something about how she missed spending time together. But she never said anything. So I just kind of kept on disappearing little by little. And it was never really a big deal until I started messing up in school. And even then, Mom’s never really put two and two together.