It's All Relative (17 page)

And then, forgetting what goes up must come down, the baseball just as suddenly
—thwack
!—smacked me squarely in the face.

I went down hard, like a lumberjack's tree, but magically, ironically, comically, the ball did not roll away. Rather, my girth held it in place, and the ball spun for a second between my pink breasts like a pinball before finally settling on the top of my belly, where it sat in my ample navel like a golf ball on a tee.

“Grab the ball! Grab the ball!”

My teammates all began running toward me, yelling. I could see Willie's face in the distance, screaming in slow motion, the words distorted, “The ball hasn't hit the ground. Just grab it with your glove and we win!”

I felt all warm inside; Willie was talking to me.

I had yet to realize that the warmth was due to a vicious nosebleed.

I saw Willie coming toward me, yelling, “Don't move! I'll get it!” And just as he leaned down to straddle my body, to take me in his arms, I reached up in a dreamlike state to hug him.

“Don't!” he yelled, too late.

The ball rolled off my tummy and onto the ground.

We lost.

Willie removed his glove and angrily threw it at me.

“You stupid idiot!” he yelled.

I wanted to tell my soulmate his phrase was redundant, and that calling me either “stupid” or an “idiot” would suffice, but I knew that wouldn't do any good.

“There are other sports,” my dad told me at the Dairy Dip after the game, “individual sports, like shot put and discus.”

I knew these were dumb, fat-guy sports, ones where you could finish fortieth at a track meet and still get a medal. I didn't want that.

“Tough way to go down, huh?” Willie's mom said to my parents,
licking a twist cone. “Maybe you need to work with Wade a little more … hit him a few hundred pop-ups every night.”

I looked over at my mom expectantly.

I could see “fact or fiction” ready to roll.

Yes, like any good mother worth her salt, mine also refused to have her family belittled.

“We are a family of artists, not athletes, Daphne, didn't you know that about the Rouses?” my mother asked. “Our family's history is filled with famous painters and artists and inventors, isn't that correct, Ted? Those are the genes my son has.”

Now, my father was an engineer who didn't have an artistic gene in his bones, unless you counted as art the fact that he outlined his tools on the wall of his work shed in blue chalk.

“I didn't realize that,” Daphne said, rather sarcastically.

“We don't talk about it much,” my mother whispered to her.

But others, it seemed, would.

Within a week, our family's fact-or-fiction faux-arts background had spread around town and garnered the attention of our middle-school band director.

Which is why, later that summer, I was specially invited to attend his band open house and instrument-selection night. I walked in to find that the windowless, egg-carton padded room was filled with our town's smartest and most sensitive kids—“the losers,” as my brother called them. And yet I instantly felt more comfortable here, in a band room, than I ever had on a baseball diamond.

I scanned the room.

And winced.

There were Loralynn Jenkins and Vesta Rutini, big girls with even bigger moles, wearing winter coats even though it was ninety-seven degrees outside and 150 degrees in the room. Their greasy hair was slicked back and separated into two stiff braids that made it look as if they had just undergone electroshock therapy. They were fingering
xylophones, and, from a distance, it looked as if they might be holding shiny pretzel sticks, the instruments dwarfed by their size.

There was Tabitha Buchanan, who was lovingly called “Tubby Buchanan” at school, and she was standing, fittingly, beside a tuba while smiling gleefully. From a distance it looked as though two very happy, very fat, very pale sisters were posing for a picture.

Ray Davenport, whom a couple of the mean boys called Gay Davenport as though that was his given name, was playing the piccolo. Really playing.

Ray had practiced, and it showed, notes floating forth that sounded like real notes you'd hear on the radio. Ray, unfortunately, drooled from both sides of his mouth when he played, like my dog did when I held a piece of steak in front of his face, and, considering the way he blew and went to town on his instrument, I had to admit his nickname seemed to fit.

“This is a house of freaks,” said my brother, who had been forced by our parents to join us after he'd been caught chewing Skoal behind the high school bus barn. “Can't I wait outside? I don't want anyone to think I'm actually with these people.”

But my brother was right. After he left, I focused on my primary purpose: to select an instrument less on its musical intricacies—the way its sound touched my soul—and more on how it would minimize my big-boy size while maximizing my reputation at school, not realizing at the time that neither goal was attainable.

I walked around the room and surveyed the instruments that were on display:

A xylophone? I glanced over at Loralynn and Vesta. Definitely not.

A piccolo? I looked at Gay, still sucking away. No way.

Tuba? I checked out Tubby and her sister. Next.

Drums. They would accentuate my stomach.

Trumpet. Not big enough, and too many people were already clamoring for it.

And then I saw it, the one instrument that stood alone. I walked over to it and ran my hands over its golden body, quickly becoming enamored by its uniqueness. I picked it up and blew through the large silver mouthpiece. A deep, bold blare shot forth.

Manly, I thought.

“This is it!” I yelled at my parents. “This is it!”

“A trombone?” my dad said. “Now why in the hell would you pick a trombone?”

I couldn't say the real reasons: that I thought its size and its big bell would make me look thin in comparison, that people would focus on the slide moving back and forth instead of on my girth, and that it sounded deep and commanding, unlike my real voice.

“It's the foundation for every piece of music,” I said.

Our band director, a bouncy, thin man, rushed over and said, “He's right! The trombone is
the
key instrument to all musical pieces. It's rarely the lead, but it's always the key. However, we already have three trombonists coming back next year, and we really don't need another.”

I looked at my mother, ready to cry, and she sensed I would be crushed if I couldn't play my instrument of destiny.

“How about the clarinet?” the band director asked.

“My great-great-uncle on my mother's side played trombone for the Count Basie Orchestra,” my mother said. “That is correct!”

The band director looked at her, genuinely confused, wondering if she was really telling the truth, which, of course, she wasn't.

“Fact or fiction?” I mouthed to my mother, whose eyes widened with excitement.

“I guess a band could always use another talented trombonist,” he said.

For the next six years, my mother and father would cheer me on from snow-covered streets as I marched by in epaulets, spats, and a two-foot-tall white fuzzy hat playing “Jingle Bell Rock.” They would
snap pictures from the bleachers as I played “Apache Dance” with the band, releasing the spit from my trombone between songs. They would even watch as I played Inspector Trotter from Agatha Christie's
Mousetrap
, poorly meshing an Ozarks accent with an English one. In fact, I would go on to do things my parents never anticipated, never expected. Their dreams of watching their son hit a home run, or make a game-saving tackle, or hit the game-winning free throw would be replaced by a son who would rather recite his own poetry.

And yet—always, always—my parents would be there to cheer me on, sitting in empty auditoriums or standing on deserted streets when other parents had long ago grown tired of the out-of-tune music and out-of-step marching of their dorky kids. I would look over and see my parents, clapping wildly, looks of absolute bewilderment frozen on their faces.

Years later over a Mother's Day dinner, just after my first feature story had been published in a fairly prominent newspaper, my mother proudly turkey-walked away to retrieve a photo album, carefully lifting the plastic to add my clip to our family history to proclaim, “I always knew we came from a family of artists, isn't that correct, Wade?”

Out of habit I wanted to yell, “Fact or fiction?” but instead I looked into her eyes, smiled, pulled her close, and hugged her, knowing that for once in her life she just might be telling the truth.

M
y grandma Shipman used to install twenty-foot inflatable reindeer on her roof, wrap our gifts in velvet bows, and bake and hand decorate hundreds of Santa Claus cookies, whipping and dyeing the icing so that Santa's coat looked red and velveteen, his beard white as snow, his eyes glistening from just that little extra coating of sugar.

Birthdays meant homemade cakes with mile-high frosting and colorful balloons filling the kitchen. Halloween meant carving pumpkins and laughing at witches that had flown directly into my grandma's light pole outside her home.

But when my grandmother became ill and her health slowly and methodically began to decline, our holidays became more minimalist.

It was too difficult for me to see my grandmother as some sort of ghost of Christmas past, so I began to stay away more and more during the holidays while she lived in a nursing home. What I missed during this absence, I would later discover, was the fact that my mom had taken on my grandma's role. In fact, my mother spent vast amounts of time in my grandma's nursing-home room re-creating those cherished holidays for her: She lavishly decorated her tree, she helped my grandma carve a pumpkin, and she walked into her
room—ignoring all codes and regulations—with sparklers ablaze on the Fourth of July.

One spring evening, after I had not visited home in a particularly long time, my mother called and said, simply but directly, “I think it's time you visited your grandmother in the nursing home. I expect to see you here on Mother's Day.”

“But …” I started.

“No buts,” my mom said.

“But she's not my mother-mother.”

And then my mom hung up on me.

I cussed my entire five-hour drive home, lamenting a lost weekend.

As a young man, I had so many better things to do than visit my grandmother in a nursing home. I had more important things to think about, other things to occupy my time and mind than the very real fact that my grandmother was dying and that youth was fleeting and that, sooner or later, this would eventually be my fate.

When I returned home that Mother's Day, I walked in to find my mother a changed woman.

She seemed harder, tougher, but more resilient. She didn't gush over my return like usual. She said, very directly, “It's about time.”

That Sunday, my mother and I went to visit my grandmother on Mother's Day, bringing her a vase of hand-picked peonies from her garden, a heart-shaped box of chocolates, and a stack of elaborately wrapped gifts, ones that looked as if they might be photographed for a style magazine—hauling them into the very nice nursing home and past a few patients, some of whom sat motionless, wheelchair-bound, in the throes of dementia.

As we made our way past, a couple of the patients began to wail and flail, just like babies, unable to convey their emotions that visitors had come to call.

When I passed an ancient woman with a shock of white hair who
was eating her lunch off the tray of her wheelchair, she suddenly stuck an arthritic hand into her compartment of corn and tossed a handful of kernels at me and said, in a disturbingly matter-of-fact way, “Well, look who the dog dragged in. If it ain't Sonny, home from the war.”

And, just as quickly, she began screaming.

And crying.

Yelling, “Sonny, my baby!”

She was coughing up corn and ghosts from deep within her body.

I crumpled against my mother and we made our way to my grandma's room, which was marked simply and sweetly—like a kindergarten teacher might designate her room on the opening day of school—with only her first name, Viola, drawn in purple crayon, just like her floral namesake.

“I'll go in first,” my mom said, taking all the presents. “I want to prepare her. It'll be easier this way, okay?”

There was something about the word
prepare
—prepare my grandma for what, I thought—that made me highly uncomfortable, made my teeth begin to chatter, which I tried to blame on the chill in the nursing home.

I waited outside the door a minute or two until my curiosity got the best of me, and then I peeked my head around the frame and saw not my grandma but a nearly unrecognizable version of her: bloated, pale, a mass of white, brushed-out permed hair, no makeup, no dentures.

My mother was hugging a ghost.

I retreated, standing flat against the blandly cheery wallpaper in the hallway. I tried to grip something to keep myself from falling and finally managed to grab the safety bar that served as the home's functional chair rail before I slid all the way to the linoleum floor.

I shut my eyes to stop the spinning and tried to remember my grandmother as she had been.

My grandma's sole dream in life had been to be a mother and a
grandmother. Happiness pulsed from her body, joy radiated from her soul, when she engaged in the simplest of daily pleasures, the ones that made her family smile: frosting a towering, three-layer cherry-chip cake; making homemade pie crusts; pulling sugar cookies out of her oven; giving hugs; decorating for the holidays; simply listening to her family tell the tales of their lives.

My grandma was a simple woman, and—as I grew older and more bitter about my course in life, the fact I was gay, the belief I might never find happiness—I equated her simpleness with naïveté.