Grace always intrigued adults. For starters, she was smart. Her interests ranged from architecture to ornithology, and she approached things much more like an adult than with the irksome whimsy of a precocious child. As a little girl I had been obnoxiously self-aware, irritatingly smug, prone to reading the dictionary “for fun” and making pronouncements like “Papa, nobody my age enjoys real literature.” Things I’d heard “special” people say in movies. Grace simply existed, full of wisdom and wonder, which is why we often found her in the bathroom at a restaurant, talking a forty-year-old woman through a breakup or asking what a cigarette tasted like. One day we found her in our pantry swigging from a small bottle of airplane vodka, disgusted but intrigued.
On only one occasion did her maturity go too far. It was the dawn of social media, and Grace, then in fifth grade, asked me to make her a Friendster account. Together we listed her interests (science, Mongolia, rock ’n’ roll) and what she was looking for (friends) and uploaded a blurry picture of her blowing a kiss at the camera, clad in a neon one-piece.
One night I picked up my computer, and it was open to Grace’s Friendster messages. There were a dozen or so, all from a guy named Kent: “If you love Rem Koolhaas, we should definitely meet up.”
Always the alarmist, I woke up my mother, who confronted Grace about it over whole-wheat pancakes the next morning. Livid, Grace refused to speak to me for several days. She didn’t care whether I was trying to protect her, or what “Kent” the “ad sales rep” had in mind. All that mattered was that I had told her secret.
In college, my dormmate Jessica started dating a girl. To me, it seemed sudden and rash, a response to trendy political correctness rather than basic human desire. “She’s trying to prove she’s not just another JAP,” I told people. “She broke up with her boyfriend like two weeks ago! All she cares about are shoes and dresses.”
Her girlfriend, a pretty-faced soft butch with round glasses and hunk-at-the-sock-hop hair, had graduated already and would drive to Ohio every other weekend, at which point I would have to clear out, sleeping on the floor of someone else’s room, so they could go down on each other for infinity.
Sometimes I would ask her to tell me about the sex and whether someone else’s vagina was insanely gross.
“No,” she said. “I actually like doing it.” “It” meant “oral sex.”
Grace came to visit me at school one weekend, and I brought her to a party. By this time she was fifteen, all legs and eyes and fawn-colored freckles, with shiny brown hair that fell down her back and two-hundred-dollar jeans she had somehow convinced my father she needed. She stood in the corner, laughing and nursing the single beer I had promised her.
Oberlin being a liberal haven where opposition was king, the coolest clique at school was a group of rugby-playing, neon-wearing lesbians. They dominated every party with their Kate Bush–heavy mix tapes, abstract facepaint, and pansexual energy. “Kissing is a dance move,” their leader, Daphne, once explained to me.
And that night Daphne noticed Grace, her little puppy nose and the big ridged teeth she still hadn’t grown into, and dragged her onto the dance floor.
“We’re alive!” she shouted, and Grace was embarrassed, but she danced. Awkwardly at first, then with conviction, engaged but not overly eager. I watched her from the sofa with pride. That’s my girl. She can roll with anything.
“Your sister’s gay,” my Jessica announced the next day, folding the fresh laundry spread across her twin bed.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“I’m just saying, she’s into girls,” she said casually, like she was offering me a helpful tip on how to save money on car insurance.
And I completely lost it: “No, she’s not! Just because you’re gay for a second doesn’t mean everyone else is too, okay!? And not that I’d care if she was, but if she was, I would know. I’m her sister, okay? I’d know. I know everything.”
Grace came out to me when she was seventeen. We were sitting at the dining room table eating pad thai, our parents out of town, as they often were now that we were old enough to fend for ourselves. Twenty-three and sponging mightily, I forked some noodles into my mouth as Grace described a terrible date with a “dorky” boy from an uptown school.
“He’s too tall,” she moaned. “And nice. And he was trying too hard to be witty. He put a napkin on his hand and said, ‘Look, I have a hand cape.’ ” She paused. “And he draws cartoons. And he has diabetes.”
“He sounds awesome!” I said. And then, before I considered it: “What are you, gay?”
“Actually, yes,” she said, with a laugh, maintaining the composure that has been her trademark since birth.