I'll Love You When You're More Like Me (5 page)

“I'm not in awe of her,” Mama said. “I'm terrified of her. She's a manipulator.”

“How can she possibly manipulate us, Mama?”

“She can connive,” Mama said. “We have to be firm.”

“She's just an old lady, Mama.”

“Some old lady!” Mama said. Mama fanned herself with a copy of
Daytime TV
. The air conditioning was on; it was actually on the frigid side on the sun porch, but Mama liked to fan herself in mock irritation the way grand ladies do in old Oscar Wilde plays.

“Okay, Miss Know-It-All,” Mama said, “don't let anything faze you. But would you mind washing the sand out of your hair and getting into something elegant? We've got a seven-thirty date, and
I'm
impressed enough to want to be on time.”

“I'll put on knee pads,” I said.

“Meaning what?” Mama said.

“Meaning shouldn't we make our entrance on our knees with our eyes down?”

“What did I do to displease you, God?” Mama said, looking up at the ceiling. “Was it so bad I had to be saddled with this wiseacre kid?”

As I was going upstairs, Mama called after me, “Wear your nice new bracelet, honey. I want Fedora to see it.”

5. Wallace Witherspoon, Jr.

I never liked bringing home kids from school because of the way they got quiet once they were in the house. I always had the feeling they couldn't wait to talk about it once they got out of there. (“They've got three rooms in front for the corpses!” et cetera.) But Charlie Gilhooley was the exception. He was another bookworm, another receiver of A pluses from Mr. Sponzini, and almost as big an authority on Seaville and its history as old Mr. Sigh, who lived with his sister and wore knicker suits year round.

“Ramps instead of stairs!” Charlie exclaimed the first time I ever dragged him home from the library with me. “Of course! To wheel the bodies around! Makes perfect sense!” Charlie was slightly on the enthusiastic side about nearly everything—that was his way—but it was better than just clamming up and pretending my house wasn't any different from anybody else's.

Charlie wanted to know everything there was to know. He wanted to know more than I wanted to know about the Witherspoon Funeral Home, and I'd have to tell him I didn't know the answers to half his questions because I had this deal with my father: I didn't have to take an active interest in the business until I was out of high school. Charlie'd ask, “How can you not want to know?” “I'll never
want to know,” I'd tell him, “even after I know.”

Charlie was sixteen when he started telling a select group of friends and family that he believed he preferred boys to girls. The news shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone who knew Charlie even slightly. But honesty has its own rewards: ostracism and disgrace. Even Easy Ethel Lingerman, whom Charlie dated because he loved to dance with her—Easy Ethel always knew all the latest dances—even Easy Ethel was ordered by her grandmother to stop having anything to do with Charlie.

My own deal with Charlie was don't you unload your emotional problems on me, and I won't unload mine on you. We shook hands on the pact and never paid any attention to it. I went through a lot of Charlie's crushes with him, on everyone from Bulldog Shorr, captain of our school football team, to Legs Youngerhouse, a tennis coach over at the Hadefield Club. Charlie, in turn, had to hear and hear and hear about Lauralei Rabinowitz. (“How can you be so turned on to someone with a
name
like that!” Charlie would complain.)

The same week Charlie made his brave or compulsive confession, depending on how you look at running around a small town a declared freak, Mrs. Gilhooley visited Father Leogrande at Holy Family Church and tried to arrange for an exorcist to go to work on Charlie. Charlie's father, a round-the-clock, large-bellied beer drinker, who drove an oil truck for a living and in his spare time killed every animal he could get a license to shoot, trap or hook in the throat, practiced his own form of spirit routing on Charlie by breaking his nose. It was a a blessing in disguise, Charlie needed at least one feature that was just slighty off, to look
believable. The nose gave him that credibility, but people still always looked twice at Charlie, even before he spoke or walked. To use my sister's favorite, and maybe only, conversational adjective, Charlie's good looks are unreal.

Mrs. Gilhooley's idea of dinner is a paper plate swimming in SpaghettiOs, with a Del Monte peach half in heavy syrup thrown in for variety. The Gilhooleys live in a ranch house on half an acre up in Inscape, near the bay, and Mr. Gilhooley has crammed the yard with old cars, front seats of old cars, assorted old tires, a boat which no longer floats, rusted lawn mowers and broken garden tools, and an American flag, on a pole with the paint peeling off it, which has been raised one time only and never lowered. It flies on sunny days, in hurricanes and through the Christmas snows, a tattered red-white-and-blue thing that must resemble the rag Francis Scott Key spotted after the bombardment of Fort McHenry.

I won't describe the inside of the Gilhooley house. It's enough to say that it was one of life's little miracles that Charlie came out of that pit every day looking more like someone leaving one of the dorms of the Groton School for boys than someone leaving something that long ago should have been condemned by the Sanity and Sanitation Committee.

I think Charlie regrets having emerged from his closet, even though long before he did he was called all the same names, anyway. Charlie told me once: “You can make straight A's and A+ 's for ten years of school, and on one afternoon, in a weak moment, confess you think you're gay. What do you think you'll be remembered as thereafter? Not the straight-A student.”

My father has an assortment of names for Charlie: limp wrist; weak sister; flying saucer; fruitstand; thweetheart; fairy tale; cupcake, on and on. He never calls Charlie those names to his face, naturally; to Charlie's face, my father is always supercourteous and almost convivial. After all, everybody's going to die someday, including the Gilhooleys; why make their only son uncomfortable and throw business to Annan Funeral Home?

Whenever my mother told me we were having corned beef and cabbage for dinner, I usually asked Charlie over that night. It was his very favorite meal. He crooned and swooned over the anticipation of it every time, just as he was doing that night in my bedroom.

“Oh, and the way your mother does the cabbage,” he was saying, “not overdone, just crisp and with some green still in it, butter melting off it—” et cetera. Charlie can do a whole number on a quarter of a head of cabbage.

I was sitting there fondling the gold cuff bracelet, trying to figure out what to do with it, since there was no summer phone listing, no listing at all for Sabra St. Amour. She probably had an unlisted number; a lot of the summer people from New York City did.

I was also watching Charlie and wishing I was his height (6'3½”) and had his deep blue eyes and thick golden hair. The Lord gives and the Lord takes. I wouldn't like Charlie's high-pitched, sibilant voice, nor his strange, small-stepped, loping walk. When you first see Charlie walk, you think he's into an impersonation of someone, or doing a bit of some kind, but he's not. The walk is for real.

Charlie says ever since the movies and television have been showing great, big, tough gays, to get away from the
stereotype effeminates, he's been worse off than ever before. “Now I'm supposed to live up to some kind of big butch standard, where I can Indian-wrestle anyone in the bar to the floor, or produce sons, or lift five-hundred pound weights over my head without my legs breaking.”

“‘The media is trying to make it easier for your kind,” I argued back.

“They're trying to make it easier for those of my kind who most resemble them,” Charlie said.

My sister, A. E., came into my room just as Charlie was finishing his drooling over the cabbage with the butter melting on top. She said, “Forget it. The menu's changed.”

Like my mother, A.E. (for Ann Elizabeth) has lots of freckles. My mother uses makeup against hers, but A.E.'s not allowed makeup because she's only ten. She tries lemon juice unsuccessfully, but mostly runs around covered with spots like a Dalmatian with very long orange hair and glasses because she's nearsighted. In the summer she looks like a little ghost someone painted red, which was how she looked that night, with her sunburn, in her long white, cotton caftan. She wears white frame glasses, too, insisting on them for some reason the rest of the family has never figured out. Since A.E. was a baby, screaming out one day that she did
not
want manilla! as we were about to give her a first taste of vanilla ice cream, she has been emphatic about her likes and dislikes, always strong and slightly mysterious.

She did not like corned beef and cabbage, either, so there was a victorious smile curling the corners of her small, pink mouth. “Due to the not unlikely, but nevertheless unexpected, arrival of a guest, we have had to change the menu.” A.E. loved to talk like a book instead of like a
ten-year-old, and she managed it for as long as she could sustain it at one time.

By “guest” she did not mean Charlie. . . . In our house, a “guest” meant only one thing. Someone had died, would soon be reposing in one of our Slumber Rooms, then off to the cemetery in our “coach.” . . . When guests were with us, we did not fix anything for ourselves to eat which carried a heady aroma. We did not want to chance offending the bereaved. Replacing corned beef and cabbage that evening, A.E. informed us, was meat loaf, new potatoes and a salad.

“Who's our guest?” I asked.

“Old Mrs. Lingerman.”

“Ethel's grandmother?” Charlie said.

A.E. nodded.

“Well hallelujah!” Charlie said. “Back to the dance floor.”

“Why don't you just turn that gold bracelet in to the police?” A.E. asked me.

“ ‘Charles Gilhooley,' she used to say to me, ‘your hair's too light to seem natural.' I'd tell her the truth, it was natural, and she'd say back, ‘Well it's so light it don't seem natural, and if it wasn't natural then Ethel could not go out the front door with you even to cross the street, you realize that, don't you?' ‘Oh yes, ma'am, Mrs. Lingerman,' I'd say, ‘but my hair is my own color, ma'am.' ”

“Sabra St. Amour might remember my name and call me,” I said.

“Sure, sure,” said A.E. “Sabra St. Amour might remember your name and call you and I might grow up to be Queen of England.”

“I might, too,” Charlie said.

“I'd just as soon she didn't call here, anyway,” I said.

“Why?” Charlie said.

“Because then she might come here,” A.E. said, “and there'll be Easy Ethel's grandmother, open coffin, too.”

I groaned and sighed appropriately.

A.E. was delighted with my misery. “It's not a P.O., either,” she added.

In mortician jargon, a P.O. is a Please Omit—meaning no flowers.

“This place will stink of lilies and roses and stock; it'll stink around here good!”

Even Charlie said, “Why don't you leave the bracelet someplace where she can pick it up? How about Current Events?”

“Wait until she finds out what you're helpless to prevent yourself from becoming when you grow up!” A.E. said, always making my father's profession sound even worse than it was, sound like vampirism which has to be passed on to each succeeding generation.

“There are female morticians, you know,” I threatened A.E. for the umpteenth time.

“I've already made up my mind that I'm going to be an internationally renowned poet,” A.E. said, “and besides it isn't woman's work.”

“Where is women's liberation when I need it?” I said.

“You ought to be glad you've got something to look forward to being,” said Charlie. “I'll end up like Mr. Sigh if I stay in this town.”

“I'd rather be Mr. Sigh any day,” I said. “
Any day!
”

“Mr. Sigh lives with his sister,” A.E. said, “and I'll probably live in Paris, France.” She swung through my door,
letting in Gorilla, our enormous Persian cat. Gorilla walked across to my small round rag rug and swooned across it, stretching out full length with her tail whipping slightly at the tip.

I picked her up. “We have a guest coming, sweetheart,” I said, in my best imitation of the old-movie actor Humphrey Bogart. “Try to stay out of the coffin; it repels certain people.”

“Are you and Harriet going to The Surf Club Saturday night?” Charlie asked me.

“When don't we go to The Surf Club Saturday night?” I said.

“Maybe I could call Ethel and we could go double.”

“Charlie,” I said, “you said you were through dating girls.”

“I can't take Legs Youngerhouse to The Surf Club,” he said, “even if he'd go with me.”

“What am I going to do with this bracelet?” I said.

“Go back to the beach tomorrow and look for her?” Charlie said.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“So it's okay if I invite Ethel along for Saturday?”