Living Out Loud (32 page)

“I’m going to be in heaven for my birthday,” my grandmother told her eldest daughter, who had tended her tirelessly as she weakened. “Sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to me.” She had buried her husband and two of her children. She left two daughters, four sons, thirty-two grandchildren, twenty-nine great-grandchildren, and so many anecdotes that we were still telling them three hours after we left the cemetery. She always gave me the cherry from her Manhattan. In my mind, she’ll live forever.

T
he way he told it, it really was a funny story. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his second beer in hand, talking about having minor surgery. He said the inside of the office looked like a gathering of ghosts, with the doctor and his assistants draped, masked, gowned, gloved. The trays, the floors, the chair, the countertops: everything was swathed in white. And there he was in the middle of it, feeling as though he should have a bell in his hand, so that when he could talk again he could clang the thing and cry “Unclean!”

You’ve got to trust me on this; he made us laugh at the whole thing. The time to cry was long past, the time when we all found out that he tested positive for the AIDS antibody, the beginning of the time when he knew that to have a mole removed or a tooth out would be a major undertaking, fraught with feelings of fear and anger and shame.

And then it got less funny. I noticed a deep
cut, and asked how he had gotten it. He had had an accident at home, but didn’t go for stitches. He couldn’t stand the idea of the fuss that would be made if he told them he was exposed. He couldn’t stand how he would feel about himself if he didn’t tell them.

And it stopped being funny at all when I came downstairs after he was gone and picked up my beer to finish it. And stared from the bottle in my hand to the bottle on the table and realized that I didn’t know which was mine and which was his. And, feeling horrible, hypocritical, paranoid, pitched them both in the trash.

Things are bad all over on the AIDS front, even in our house, where we have routinely done what some of the folks of Arcadia, Florida, and Kokomo, Indiana, and a host of other towns went to extraordinary lengths to avoid. Our friend plays with our children, eats at our table, is never permitted to leave without a hug and a kiss on the cheek. It would never occur to me to do otherwise. I know I will not be exposed through him.

I know.

I think.

I hope.

I wanted to jump right on the people who have been bigoted about this, the people in Arcadia who wanted to keep those three little boys out of school and who refer to gay people as “queers,” the ones in Kokomo who made Ryan White’s life so unbearable that his family left town, the parents in Texas whose pediatrician closed up shop last week because his little patients were taken home when it turned out he was antibody positive. The people who won’t eat at restaurants where gay waiters work or won’t give blood. Except there is a little bit of them in all but the very best of us. We call them ignorant, and they are. But I suspect we all feel at least a little ignorant where AIDS is concerned.

The problem is that we would love absolute certainty on all aspects of this issue. We are a nation raised on True or False tests. We want doctors to give us the answers, which shows how short our memories are. After all, it was the doctors who told us that smoking wouldn’t kill you and amphetamines during pregnancy didn’t do a bit of harm. We want to know precisely how this disease spreads and why some people who are exposed get it and some don’t and whether being exposed means inevitably getting sick. First we hear that the biggest argument against transmission through casual contact is that health-care workers don’t get it. Then we hear that health-care workers have gotten it. And we don’t know what to believe. All we know for sure is that getting sick means dying, at least so far. And that you can’t get it from a beer bottle that’s been sitting around for an hour. I know that.

I think.

I hope.

There is a very small cadre of smart and deeply committed people who have an unwavering commitment to never letting one small bit of the misinformation about this filter into their psyche. And there is a larger cadre of those who are using their poor children as an excuse to spout venom and lies about groups of people they despise and feel threatened by. And then there are a lot of people in the middle, people trying to be smart and rational about this, people who read the latest stories and statistics and try to be sensible and yet who watch a mosquito coming toward them and wonder where it’s been and whose blood is inside it. When our friend first found out he had been exposed, he offered to stop visiting our house. I was indignant. What did he take me for? In medical parlance, it would be necessary for there to be “an exchange of bodily fluids” for him to infect my children. There was no risk to having him to dinner, more of a risk to cutting him out of our lives and depriving ourselves of his friendship and of our own
self-esteem. So I smiled as he roughhoused with the older boy, and all the time somewhere in my mind I was thinking, “Please, God, don’t let the kid accidentally bite him.”

Columnists are usually in the business of opposites, of us and them. And that’s what this started out being, a column about us and them. I continue to think about myself as different from people who torment first graders whose only crime was a bad blood transfusion, who are probably more likely to become mortally ill from well kids than the other way around. I continue to think of myself as different from those people who would leave a dying man on the sidewalk if he were bleeding in certain areas of New York and San Francisco. But I’ve watched the mosquitos on occasion, I must admit. And one night not too long ago I threw away the butt end of two perfectly good beers because one was mine and the other wasn’t. Sometimes, when I’m feeling self-congratulatory, I think about that and I am ashamed, and I realize that maybe there is someplace between us and them, and that this is it.

GROWING
UP

W
e met when we were both fifteen. She went to the beach with my family that summer, and when she stepped out of the bedroom we shared, wearing a two-piece bathing suit, I watched my father and one of his friends turn pale beneath their ruddy tans. As I lay on the beach in my own suit, its top boned into the facsimile of a bust, I could lift my head and through the gap between my sternum and the fabric see a sliver of gray-green water. For the first time in my life I was aware of sex, not the act, nor the mechanics, but the essence of it. And a gulf began to open between my friend and me.

But she was my best friend, and hard as it may have been to figure by the looks of us, she was the good girl, I the bad. I suppose everyone has at least one friendship like this in their lives. We were dialectical, she the thesis, I the antithesis. She was direct, trustworthy, kind, and naïve; I was manipulative, selfish, and clever. She laughed
at all my jokes, took part in all my schemes, told everyone that I was the smartest and the funniest and the best. Like a B movie of boarding school life, we stole peanut butter from the refectory, short-sheeted beds, called drugstores and asked them if they had Prince Albert in a can. Whenever I hear a mother say, “If so-and-so told you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it?” I think of her. On my order, she would have jumped.

She hatched only one plot in all our time together, and it had such staggering simplicity that I leapt at it, sneaking down the fire escape in the middle of the night to meet our boyfriends at an all-night diner. It wasn’t her fault that we got caught, that I got expelled, that she stayed on to become May Queen. It was the mid-sixties, so all we had done was to eat cheeseburgers and feel naughty. But as the bad girl I got the blame, and as the good girl she was assumed to have followed my lead. It was a time when good girls still got the breaks. It seemed terribly unfair then but seems exactly right now. And the gulf widened.

I went to a college that had a reputation, and she went to one with a football team. She was in the Midwest and I was in the Northeast. She cried when I told her I was on the pill, and she goggled at the suggestion that I was opposed to the war in Vietnam and wore overalls to class. I was a middle-of-the-road milquetoast at a school with its fair share of campus radicals, but she made me feel like Jane Fonda. I drove eight hours to her parents’ home the summer after our freshman year to be the maid of honor at her wedding. Where she came from, a girl didn’t wait for her B.A. to get her Mrs., particularly if the person who proposed was eager, older, and very rich. I wore purple organza and looked like an eggplant. There was a fountain full of whiskey sours. Within a year she had her first baby.