Swish (2 page)

The music was a different matter. The walls of Smoky Mary’s are made of stone instead of concrete, so sound bounces off them and comes back twice as rich and clear—and then hits the opposite walls and reaches the congregation’s ears quadruply refined. Singing in that room is as effortless as breathing; you open your mouth and your voice pours out like water from a jar. Even the worst music becomes beautiful in that space, and the best can fill you with the desire for what is known in Hebrew as
tikkun olam,
the healing of the world. “As truly as God is our Father,” we sang one Sunday in a gorgeous setting of a text by fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich, “so just as truly is He our Mother. In our Father, God Almighty, we have our being; in our merciful Mother we are remade and restored. Our fragmented lives are knit together, and by giving and yielding ourselves, through grace, to the Holy Spirit, we are made whole.” And then the echo died, and the priest started muttering, “Umpho flumpish klizmar,” and I picked up my size-eight needles.

In our merciful Mother we are remade and restored?
I thought as I went back to my first attempt at working in two colors.
Our fragmented lives are knit together? Their god may be a lie, but if he’s a cross-dresser with good hobbies he can’t be all bad.

It was around the time I began my first hat that people started speaking to me on the subway. People had been speaking
about
me on the subway from the moment I first pulled out my yarn on the uptown A train, and I loved it. There is no joy quite like that of hearing people whisper, “What’s he knitting, it’s so complicated, I used to be able to crochet but I would never have the patience to do something like that” in the hushed tones ordinarily reserved for apparitions of the Virgin Mary in food. But being spoken
to
turned out to be an almost invariably unpleasant proposition. No matter how mellifluous the voice that asked, “What are you knitting?” when I looked up I was bound to see someone either wearing a funny beret decorated with plastic flowers or carrying a portfolio brimming with tattered, close-written proofs of the two-shooter theory.

On the crosstown bus one evening a boy of eight or nine leaned forward and spoke to me from across the aisle. “What are you knitting?” he piped.

In addition to dreading that question, I also hate children. One would think that these two facts in combination should have inspired me on this cold December night to a stony silence, but I was feeling generous. “A baby blanket,” I answered condescendingly, glad to be able to broaden the waif’s horizons.

He sat back in his seat. “I just finished a scarf,” he said primly, “in fisherman’s rib. Now I’m working on a Fair Isle sweater, but I have to hurry if I’m going to finish it in time for Christmas.”

Once I recovered my equilibrium, I responded. “That sounds terrific. Good luck.”

What I wanted to say was,
“Does your mother know how gay you are?”

It was in the summer after ninth grade that I came out to myself, and, a week later, to my parents. When my mother said she wanted to talk to me after lunch, I knew she was going to ask me whether I had an eating disorder (I had been eating nothing but grilled cheese sandwiches for the last several weeks, and not very many of them). So when I went up to her room to talk to her, I was relieved when all she said was, “Joel, are you gay?”

“Oh,” I said casually. “Yeah.” The library books I’d left on the kitchen table must have clued her in; it would be difficult to misinterpret a title like
Now That You Know: A Parents’ Guide to Understanding Homosexuality.

Not a muscle in my mother’s face moved. “What do you mean,
yeah
?” she asked in a voice that could have flash-frozen the population of Zambia.

Obviously I had given her the wrong answer, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how. She and my father were civil rights workers, after all; they had committed their lives to
tikkun olam.
He had won his first Supreme Court voting-rights case at the age of thirty, and she, despite never having finished college, was the author of the law that forces corporations and government agencies to pay the lawyers of the people whose civil rights they’ve violated, which law is now the only reason anybody can afford to be a civil rights lawyer. Two weeks after the 1970 massacre at Kent State University of students protesting the American invasion of Cambodia, a similar massacre took place at Jackson State College in Mississippi. Nobody cared about this one, though, because the students killed were black. But my mother, who lived nearby, found an audiotape of the gunfire, which lasted for a horrifying thirty seconds, and convinced a local radio station to play it nonstop for an entire day and night. Then she organized a march on the governor’s mansion in which people carried signs offering friendly criticisms like
GOD WILL GIVE YOU BLOOD TO DRINK
.

Furthermore, my parents stayed true to their principles even when they themselves were the wrongdoers. When I was five, I picketed my house, hoping to be allowed to eat breakfast before getting dressed rather than after. I marched back and forth on our porch, carrying a sign that said
BREKFAST FIRST DRESSED LATER
; since my parents didn’t cross picket lines, and since the front door was the only way into and out of the house, they were trapped inside until they acceded to my demand.

So, if my mother had built her entire life around protecting the rights of the disenfranchised, no matter the price to herself, what problem could she possibly have with a little flouncing here and there? I cast about for other explanations. Perhaps it was my sloppy diction to which she objected. I tried again. “I mean…yes, I’m gay?”

The thrust of the story will be familiar to many who have told their parents they’re not straight. My mother and father said they didn’t mind if I was gay—they just didn’t want me to make up my mind so soon. They tried therefore to eliminate all gay influences from my life; unfortunately, they did this by coming up with prohibitions so stupid they were embarrassing. I wasn’t allowed to wear bow ties. I wasn’t allowed to write in green ink. I wasn’t allowed to compose sonnets to boys (though given the quality of the verse I had been writing, that one was more than fair). They forbade me to see the one gay person I knew, the screamingly homosexual owner of Charleston’s best chocolate store. I regularly told them I was going to the library and went to see him instead, and when they found out they grounded me for a year—not for being gay, they insisted, but for lying to them. I tried desperately to explain that none of this was going to dampen my enthusiasm for opera or my interest in the minor works of E. M. Forster, but the murky cloud of their hope was impenetrable.

It would probably have dissipated on its own in good time if my mother hadn’t also been dying of juvenile diabetes. For a long time she had kept the disease at bay with panache, decorating her portable IV pole as a tree one Hallowe’en when I was six or seven and showing up at a party as Johnny Apple-seed. By the time I was in junior high, however, her struggle had become more difficult; the first time she was carried out of the house to an ambulance in the middle of the night screaming that she was being ripped apart, I sat on the floor of my room paying very close attention to the model dragon I was gluing together until my uncle, her brother, knocked on my door frame and told me she was probably going to live. I thought that if I looked at him I might discover he was just as frightened as I was, so I kept my eyes on the dragon’s right hind claw, which with a great deal of concentration I finally attached successfully.

After tenth grade my de jure grounding was over, but soon enough my father was spending all his time in Alabama arguing a desegregation case for which he was later named Trial Lawyer of the Year by the Trial Lawyers for Public Justice; the case lasted a year, during which period I had to spend all
my
time taking care of my terminally ill mother and my younger brother, who had heard from Jamie Adams that Allison Orson had said I was a lesbian, and wanted to know what that meant. I still resented my mother deeply, because she kept doing things like collecting any mail that came for me, asking me if it was from people she’d want me to be in contact with, and throwing it away if I told her it wasn’t. It didn’t occur to me to lie, and since we had moved to a house with a back door a picket wouldn’t have done any good, so all the mail from kids on the pen-pal list I’d gotten from the gay youth hotline went unread into the trash. The return address on one letter was so illegible that it was impossible for me to tell who had sent it. My mother, in a backward baseball cap because she hadn’t been well enough to go to the stylist in months, opened the envelope and proceeded to read me passages from my own mail, grimacing at the expressions of affection contained therein. I sat frozen in helpless fury before her until I realized the letter was from a straight friend I had met at summer camp. At this point she allowed me to go and read the rest in my room, where I sat on my bed and turned the pages and trembled with hatred.

I spun elaborate fantasies in which I would confront her, implacable in my oratory, and reduce her to a quivering pudding capable only of tearful attempts at reconciliation, which I would ruthlessly spurn. But when your mother gets out of her wheelchair and crawls up the stairs in her nightgown on hands and knees bleeding from diabetic neuropathy, gaily pretending that she has simply found a particularly invigorating new form of exercise, and all you can do, since your father is five hundred miles away saving the world, is make her a rum and Coke with enough Bacardi to knock out a rhinoceros, it becomes difficult to tell her that when she rejected your sexuality she hurt your
feelings.

Almost twenty years later, her reasons for reacting so badly to my coming out remain shrouded in mystery. Perhaps she had some traumatic experience as a child—more traumatic than all the rest of her experiences as a child, which, given my much-married grandmother’s propensity to cruelty, is really saying something—that predisposed her to rabidity. My great-great-uncle was purportedly the queeniest queen ever to queen his way down Queensville Pike; possibly she blamed herself for passing those genetic tendencies along. After she died I was looking through some of her papers and found a letter in which she seemed to come close to confessing an attraction to a woman who had lived around the corner from us when I was five. Maybe she was just jealous that I could say it and she couldn’t.

Eventually, after I’d run out of friends to make scarves and hats for, I decided I needed to move on to something more challenging. I was sort of dating a guy named Mike; he was about to move to Boston for a year, so I resolved to knit him a pair of warm socks. We’d been seeing each other for several months, and I liked him, but I knew that he was not my true love and I was relieved that he was moving away, because it meant I wouldn’t have to suffer through an agonizing conversation about how I didn’t want to be his boyfriend. I could just let distance tear us apart.

Knitting scarves and hats and baby blankets had been all well and good, but socks required an entirely different level of commitment. First, the patterns I’d been using for scarves and hats and baby blankets never called for needles smaller than size six; for the socks I needed size one. Second, where for flat garments I had used two needles, socks required four, which complicated things exponentially. And third, Mike had size-eleven feet—it should be clear why I was dating him—and so knitting his socks took
forever.
I walked around Manhattan carrying a set of four long toothpicks, yarn trailing behind me; the bamboo needles were so thin that every other day I’d break one and have to buy a new set. I used self-patterning yarn, however, which is the closest thing this world has to witchcraft: it’s dyed in such a way that you don’t do a thing but knit it, and the sock you end up with looks like a foot-shaped Rembrandt.