OKAY, HERE’S THE REAL STORY.
My mother loved limits. They were a ten-foot fence guarding her and her family. Nothing could get in, nothing could get out. She was the most ardent kind of Catholic: a convert. As if to make up for her first twenty years of lax Lutheranism, she attended mass every day. She had converted to marry my father, who had been only casually faithful, a Mexican-American Catholicism relaxed by a couple generations of assimilation and intermarriage, but she took it all the way, one-upping him as if to prove something—perhaps to her own parents, who had disapproved of the relationship and worried her children would be “confused.” Maybe it was living in rural Nebraska, a place where the weather is harsh and the landscape open, and she needed to buttress herself with the element-proof structures of the mind. Her convictions became her fortress.
My plan was not to crash the fortress but to build a small annex onto it. One brick at a time, a gradual reveal. I would go on with my underground life, my real life, but acquire the trappings of college degree, respectable work, even membership in the Catholic church downtown (whose progressive tendencies could be incrementally introduced into productive conversations)—a life that sounded good over the phone and at family gatherings. I would come home for every Christmas. And one day, I would ask to bring A Person, and they would be helpless in the face of her charm and kindness, and our love would radiate and encircle the whole family, and the annex would be complete. All of us within it.
Christmas was my first trip back home from college. I packed clothes I hadn’t worn since the third week of school, washed my hair, and put on mascara, three things I did seldom to never. I shrugged on my old Andrea drag. It was part of my long game.
When I landed in Nebraska, the emerald fields I’d left in August were now wiped blank by winter. The white went on forever. Snowdrifts sculpted their way up the sides of the houses and outbuildings.
The man relatives: How are classes?
The lady relatives: Got a boyfriend out there?
My brother: “Yeah, right. She looks like a boy.” He smirked at my short hair and my horn-rimmed glasses.
“It’s a pixie cut, like she had when she was little,” said an aunt helpfully. “I think she looks . . . French.”
“A pixie cut,” my father agreed.
“It’s cool,” declared Annabel, the youngest, and my mom gazed at her with fond relief, as if Annabel could see beauty the rest of us couldn’t. She was the only one of us four who had blue eyes and my mother treated that recessive gene as if it had bravely fought its way to the top just for her.
For mass I changed into a skirt from high school and one of my mom’s sweaters, and the symbolism killed me a little, all dressed up in a past that was long gone and a future that never would be. “Why don’t you keep it,” my mom said. The sweater was pale yellow with scalloped edges, like a decorative soap. “It’s just darling on you.”
“No thanks, Mom,” I said. This became a ritual when I returned to Nebraska. She would call me to her room, make me try on her sweaters and blouses, and urge me to take them back with me. “I think it’s more you.”
“I think it’s very you,” she retorted.
I opened my mouth to ask just who she thought I was, then imagined that cellar door opening and swiftly closed it. I made myself smile. “Are you sure?” Of course she was. I accepted the sweater and thanked her, and she was pleased.
It was when I returned home my sophomore year, in 1993, that my plan broke down. I was in love with Vivian and Portland and my head was full of ideas from Reed, and my new confidence made me careless where my fear had always kept me in line. I wore a new Mom sweater and lipstick but couldn’t hold my tongue when Alex said the Clinton health care plan would turn the country Communist.
The phone rang on Christmas Eve. Vivian. My mother answered upstairs and I took it in the laundry room.
“Hi. Save me,” I said. I sat down in a basket of clean clothes. Vivian was at her parents’ home in a Seattle suburb, still in reach of everything. We talked for half an hour and then she had to go; they were going out for Thai food. Her dad was a secular Jew and her mom just secular, and I envied this incomprehensibly simple Christmas of presents and a restaurant meal, as if everyone had a birthday on the same day. “I love you too,” I said. “Can’t wait to see you.” Vivian said, “Hang in there. Be brave.” I hung up the phone and opened the door and there was my mother.
She said, “Who were you talking to?”
“Vivian.” My face grew hot. “My friend. From school.”
“Everything okay?”
“Of course. Do you need any help? I’ll do this load of whites.”
For the next two days I could feel her watching me. I tried to snap back into high school Andrea, but my mother already knew too much, and for once she seemed to be contemplating action instead of denial. To be surveyed like this made my skin hot and my stomach heavy. Every sentence out of my mouth seemed constructed by a scribe in my brain who was always a second late in the transcription.
At school, the LGBT union wasn’t the only student group I had tried to attend. I had also once ventured shyly into a Latino/a student group, where the leaders of the meeting peppered their rousing talk with Spanish phrases and cultural in-jokes that everyone else laughed at and bantered along with as I tried to follow, mentally taking notes on what to look up later. I had grandmas but no abuelas; I had grown up with John Denver and Amy Grant records, eating casseroles made with Campbell’s soup. I enrolled in Spanish I, where the professor taught us Spain Spanish with the lisp and European assumptions, and though I learned how to converse about pleasantries, order lunch, and take the bus to El Prado, I didn’t return. Meena said, “It’s just a group, don’t worry about it. The South Asian student union does good things and I’m glad they’re there, but it’s a particular kind of person who loves an affinity group. I mean, how many of your actual queer friends are in the LGBT union?” None, I admitted.
Still, when I went back home I searched my father’s face for what I thought was Mexican-ness, something still visible in him but diluted in me. I had his mouth, his brown eyes, but my skin was lighter. My hair was fine and dark brown, while his was thick and silvering at the temples. What was I looking for, though? Who knew how much of his ancestry, and thus mine, was indigenous and how much European? I realized I was seeking a trace of purity, as if such a thing existed—as if one’s roots could be a single clean bright plunge like a carrot, instead of the complicated dirty tangle that most of us actually had. Essentialist was an accusation my friends and classmates had flung around liberally in arguments, yet secretly maybe we all wanted it for ourselves in some way or another—to have an essence. To be an identity.
“I wish we’d spoken Spanish at home,” I blurted in the kitchen. It was now two days after Christmas. My father stood at the kitchen counter, flipping through the newspaper, while my mother prepared dinner and I made my own vegetarian spaghetti sauce. “I mean growing up.”
“Where did that come from?” my mother said.
“It would have been nice to be fluent. To have that ability.”
“Aren’t you taking it now in college?”
“But it’s not the same,” I said. “It’ll always be a second language. An add-on. You could have taught us, Dad.”
“I couldn’t have taught you much,” my dad said. “No one really spoke Spanish in Westerly, Nebraska.”
“Then,” my mother added.
He folded up the front section and opened Sports. “My dad got held back in school three times for his English, so he made sure that’s all we spoke. We had to fit in. It was hard to be different.”
“People thought he was a Sioux Indian.” This was a fact my mother disclosed often and with a certain delight.
“Lakota,” I mumbled.
She rolled her eyes and asked why I hadn’t gotten all fired up about Germany or Sweden, since I was at least as much those as I was Mexican. Why did I only want the Mexican part? She meant why didn’t I want what she was.
“Germany’s creepy,” I said. “And there’s no point in learning Swedish since there aren’t many of them and they all speak perfect English.” I turned back to my dad. “Do we still have family in Mexico?” My siblings and I had never met our grandfather; he died of a heart attack when my dad was twelve. “Have you ever wanted to visit them?”
“My dad’s dad left home in Nayarit young and never went back. He didn’t get along with his family. He had other ideas about how to live. Our family is here now.”
“Your father is American and so are you,” my mother said as she shut the oven door. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
The day before I was to leave, they sat me down in the living room. I tucked my feet underneath me on the scratchy plaid couch. Behind me, the record player’s lid was pinned shut by stacks of Christmas CDs. “We don’t care how good an education it is,” my father started.
My mother broke in, “I don’t like what this place is doing to you. Honey, look at yourself.”
“It’s just a haircut,” I said. “It’ll grow back.”
“It’s not the haircut,” said my father.
“It’s your whole attitude,” said my mother. “You didn’t want to go to church, you won’t eat the food your grandmother made, you have a hole in your nose—” She teared up at this. I didn’t know she’d noticed—I had removed the ring, slipping it in only to sleep. “We don’t know what kind of friends you have there, your grades are slipping. You were never like this. We sent away a beautiful, well-adjusted daughter and you’ve come back—it’s like we don’t even know who you are.”
“This is me,” I said. “I’m more me than I have ever been.”
“Come back home. Stop acting like someone you’re not.”
“What do you think I was doing here all those years?”
“I don’t know what that means,” my mother snapped. “And who is this Vivian you’re always talking about and talking to on the phone?”
“My friend?” I hated the lie. I was so proud of the word girlfriend. It was awful to neuter it.
“Promise me it is not what I think it is.”
“What do you think it is?”
“I can’t even say it.” Her eyes were bright, her cheeks red. How disconcerting to see a kind face grow cold—it is such a subtle shift, the way the muscles switch into place, harden. “Promise me. Promise.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Promise your mother,” said my dad.
I looked away from them, out the window. Wind lifted a haze of snow off the surface of the fields. My parents had stopped farming and now leased them to a distant cousin. They were ours in name only. Like me, I thought.
I could have rented out that life for much longer, according to my plan. Later, I wondered if I could have told them the truth another way. I promise you have nothing to worry about. Or I could have said what they wanted to hear. But I thought of relating my lie to Vivian later. I thought of her hand stroking my arm and her sympathetic, disappointed eyes. I imagined how she would light up if I told her I’d come out. How, in doing so, I would become a real queer. I too would have a coming-out story. My long game looked to be shot anyway. Be brave.
“Do you want me to lie?” I said. “Isn’t lying a sin?”
“God forgives us our sins,” said my mother. “But not all sins.”
I took a breath and said I was in love.
My father gripped the arms of his chair and closed his eyes, a pilot going down. My mom said my whole name, spoke it like a curse. The tacit, they could have lived with; it could have been my invisible cross to bear, its weight mine alone. After all, it was not a sin to be homosexual; it was a sin to act on it. And I—
Even in the long version, I keep the worst of it to myself.
All that is necessary to know is that my mother wept and my father’s voice shook, but their certainty was ironclad. They had raised me Catholic and moral and with strong role models, and all my siblings were turning out right, so the culprit was obvious. I could come home and go to one of the state schools or they would find a way to pay for Creighton, but as a matter of conscience, they would not pay that institution another cent.
I shifted back into survival mode. I said okay, I would pack my things. I went limp and contrite just long enough to board my plane back to Oregon.
When my feet touched the carpet of the Portland airport, my knees trembled with relief. I didn’t yet know that a few days earlier, on New Year’s Eve, in another corner of Nebraska, Brandon Teena had been murdered. When the story emerged I felt sick for weeks. We all mourned this brave, sweet person we had never known but imagined we could. And I mourned the Nebraska that I once knew, also dead.
At Reed, I went straight to the financial aid office. Surely parental severance would qualify me for a generous package. But I learned that no matter how on my own I said I was, in the universe of financial aid I still belonged to my parents and their tax bracket until age twenty-four. That was five years away. The Reed staffer offered me loans and said she’d try to get me a better deal for the next year, but there was no way I could carry the debt of even one semester there on my own, much less five.
As my parents had expected, I packed my clothes and books and turned in my dorm key, leaving my roommate with a super-single for the rest of the year. But I mailed them back the one-way plane ticket they had booked for me.
Vivian and my friends took care of me, many with a knowing embrace. People shared their own stories, helped me find a place, hooked me up with extra jobs. I moved into a $150-a-month attic bedroom in a cozily dilapidated, haunted punk house.
“Come home,” my parents pleaded, and then commanded. But I already was. I thought they would come around, but their pain was deep and real, and they transformed it into an instrument of force. Their immovability shook me. My sin was mortal. They needed to be certain of something and they stuck with the thing they’d known longer than they’d known me, the church. All my stockpiling of good behavior had been for nothing; my currency was no good with them, counterfeit from the start. They still wanted the other Andrea, the one I had made up for and with them.
For the first time I understood why queer people changed their names. It was about more than trying to be different or weird, though maybe it was a little bit that, to go by Tiger or Ace or Ponyboy or Dirtbag or whatever, my future girlfriend Flynn adding the F to her name. The name they gave you belongs to someone else, their invention of you; if you turn out not to be that person, you have to name yourself. But I stayed Andrea—I couldn’t let go entirely of the person I’d always been. The tyranny of family love is that you can’t help but love people who think God can’t stand the sight of you.
The next Christmas I braved one last visit home, hoping a year would have taken the edge off. I missed the clear winter light and crisp air that made my eyes water and the smell of snow on wool mittens. I wanted my mom’s Swedish pancakes and cheesy grated potatoes and the salsa my dad made in an old Sunbeam blender with canned stewed tomatoes and extra jalapeños. I wanted to go back to where I came from. In my vision, my parents would have missed me so much and be so relieved to see me that they would relent. How could they sacrifice their daughter? They would love me no matter what. They would reinstate me at Reed. My siblings would rally behind me.
Alissa was president of her sorority and spent half the time on the phone with her new, better sisters; Alex was all basketball and JROTC; Annabel gave me helplessly sympathetic looks. We all put on a play called Just Like It Never Happened, and I didn’t know how to go off-script.
The day after I arrived, my mother invited me into town with her to do errands. Snow was piled along the curbs like a low mountain range and the pale sky promised more. After the grocery store, she pulled into the parking lot of the church.
“I’ll wait here in the car,” I said.
“Come in with me,” she said. “Father Lane would be so happy to see you. Just say hi.”
Nothing pleased my mother more than hauling her brood to church, and I needed points, so I swallowed and followed her inside. Father Lane’s door was open, and he instantly rose to his feet when he saw us. He welcomed me with exceptional warmth and invited me to take a seat. I glanced at my mother but she wouldn’t look at me, merely smiled brightly toward Father Lane and said, “You know what I’m going to do, I’m going to just run over to the butcher and pick up the roast while you two catch up. You wouldn’t want to do that anyway, honey, the meat, right? I’ll be back in two shakes.” And she was out the door.
My mother, despite my vegetarianism, had attempted to put meat on my plate at every meal for the past two years. I looked at the door as it clicked shut behind her. I looked at the priest, whose wide, closed smile hid his teeth. From his frame on the wall, Pope John Paul II looked just past us with a benevolent smirk.
“Is this about what I think it’s about?” I said.
“What?” Father Lane said like a bad actor. “Just wanted to talk about things that are goin’ on in your life and ways that we can help. Any confusion you’re goin’ through.” When he dropped his G’s like that, super casual, you knew it was serious.
I said I was feeling clear about things. I crossed my legs and folded my hands over my knee. “But how are you doing?”
Father Lane sighed and his gaze came to rest upon the bookshelf across the room. “I’ve been thinking. Sometimes,” he said carefully, as if reading the titles aloud from a distance, “sometimes you have to make a sacrifice to be your best self. You have a choice, you know, which road you want to go down.”
“I know,” I said, perhaps too certainly, because he started and sat back.
“How long have we known each other?” he said.
“Since I was five or something.” He’d grown gray since then, and his neck had begun to sag, I now noticed.
“I know who you are, Andrea. You are a child of God. And you deserve to live in the light, not the darkness.” In a conspiratorial tone, as if revealing a treasure map to a child, he told me that there was a place in Colorado that could help me, that could restore me to my best self and help me conquer same-sex attraction—a place that could end my suffering. I pictured euthanasia.
He slid a brochure across the desk toward me: COURAGE MINISTRIES. A plump, soft-faced man and what looked like a bulldagger in a wig and dress held the hands of two small children. A sentence below proclaimed a proven program for how to “come out” of homosexuality.
“That doesn’t really work,” I said.
“Oh, it can. It’s hard,” he said, “to transcend the body.” He looked tired. “But the soul prevails.”
I set my hands on the armrests, ready to push off. “May I ask you something?”
“Please do.”
“Was it worth it? Giving up everything to become a priest?”
Father Lane paused for a moment. “Yes.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thank you.”
I walked out and headed down Main Street. I found our unlocked car and got in.
My mother looked surprised to see me shivering in the passenger seat when she approached, a roast as big as a toddler in her arms. I reached over and popped the trunk for her. She shook her head and deposited it in the backseat.
“How was your talk?” she said warily. “That was quick.”
“Helpful,” I said. “Father Lane looks well.” I turned up the radio, which was playing “The Little Drummer Boy.” “Remember when Alex had to act this out for the Christmas pageant?” I said.
“Do I ever,” she said, and sighed. “You kids were so sweet.” Pa-rum-pum-pum-pum did its resigned descent.
We each kept an eye on the other the rest of the day. I knew she wasn’t done.
I was twenty—they couldn’t involuntarily commit me to something, right? Or could they? I was still listed as a dependent on their tax forms.
The next morning, December 23, my dad got ready for work early and my mom said, with a tight-lipped breeziness, that she’d ride into town with him to “tie up some loose ends.” I knew in my gut that they were headed to the church—and this time, she was taking Dad. They were hatching something. That Bikini Kill line Resist psychic death ran through my mind. I had a narrow window.
My little sister, Annabel, who was fifteen and had gotten her farm license, drove me to the Greyhound station in Lincoln, tearful and worried. “I’m not supposed to go more than thirty miles from the house,” she said. “And I don’t know if the minivan counts as farm equipment.”
“Please, if Mom gives you a hard time, you can blame it on me,” I said. “Tell them I tricked you. Like, I said we were just going out shopping for presents. You don’t deserve to get in trouble, and I can’t possibly get any deeper.”
“I wish we were just going shopping,” Annabel said. “Do you have to go? Can’t you just wait it out?”
I began to cry too. “I wish I could. I can’t. I’ve been waiting it out all my life.”
She nodded. “I won’t blame you,” she said.
I hugged her hard until I could form words again. Don’t be silly, I told her, I was already a lost cause to them. “I love you so much. Take care of yourself. Blame me.”
My parents had framed my transgression as a crime against God, but really I had committed a crime against them. I had blasphemed the family. I had wrecked the family’s story, the story my parents had spent their entire adult lives writing. That was the unforgivable part. My mother had seized the chance for a redemption narrative when she sent me to the priest—my chance to play the prodigal!—and I’d blown it for all of them. They held strong. It was simpler—maybe not easier, but simpler—to write me out than to rewrite the whole thing. My sister Alissa got engaged; the Morales stock would soon be replenished. I would be dutifully invited to the wedding, but not to meet the baby born ten months later.
I did not go to that wedding, nor to Nebraska again—I stayed home, which now meant Portland. The next Christmas Eve, a group of us exiled by choice or by force pulled together a party. We called it, for the first time, family dinner. I shouldn’t have been surprised by how many of us there were, but I was. Mountains of food, lights strung around the old piano in the living room, a stack of scratchy old soul records taking their turn on the stereo. I had a new girlfriend of six weeks, Flynn, with long hands and ripped jeans that hung low on her hips like a boy’s, and we couldn’t stop sneaking kisses. Our lust was so potent it would half wake us in the night. We would coo and slip our hands around and re-entwine our limbs and fall back asleep all blissed out. By week three we had said I love you.
Bolstered by this new love, the holiday camaraderie, and the spiked cider, I let the forces of habit and propriety override my better judgment, and during dinner I sneaked to the corner of the kitchen with the cordless and my calling card. I dialed home.
My mother wouldn’t speak to me. “She and Alissa are busy working on the roast for tomorrow,” my dad said. “We sure wish you were here.”
A lump in my throat. His voice was gentler than I’d expected. “Me too,” I said. “Tell everyone I say merry Christmas. Can I talk to Annabel?”
“We’re praying for you, honey. We know you’ll come through this.”
“Come through what?”
“God can change anything,” he said.
“Can I just talk to Annabel?”
He was quiet for a moment. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“Good-bye, Dad,” I said, and hung up.
Topher, whom I’d just met, came into the kitchen to grab a new bottle of whiskey and saw my face.
“Uh-oh,” he said. He poured me a double while I wiped my eyes and tried to breathe without shuddering. “To the orphans,” Topher said. We clinked and I tossed back the bitter comfort. I loved him then.
Flynn appeared in the doorway and hurried to my side. “What did you do?” I leaned into her, fists curled against my chest. “Baby,” she said sternly. “You didn’t call your family, did you?”
“I couldn’t help it,” I said.
She shook her head, wrapped me in her long arms, and nuzzled her nose into my hair. My hand slipped inside her scratchy thrift cardigan and found the warm, soft T-shirt below. “Oh, Andy,” she said. “You’re my family, you know.”
My heart sang. “I am?”
“Yes,” she said.
“You’re mine,” I said, and relief rolled through me like a sob.
“Always,” she said.
Always. The extravagance of that word! I sank into it. Always, always, always. And though it later turned false, for the first time I thought I could be okay, and that was enough.
Flynn walked me back into the living room, where Robin was now at the old piano banging out songs from a book of 1980s soft rock sheet music while others belted along. We traded the gifts we’d all brought, white-elephant style, and I ended up with a riding crop that made everyone whistle and hoot, and Flynn shot me a wicked look. It would never leave our closet, but we wouldn’t have believed that if you’d told us then. The always I believed in could not fail.
In the end we all descended to the basement for a raucous, drunken, dozen-member jam session, and I played the same two barre chords on the guitar over and over, with little skill but with such force and speed my fingers became embers and my ears rang like bells.