I began to sob. Not because I didn’t want her to be gay—in truth, it worked perfectly with my embarrassing image of myself as the quirkiest girl on the block, hence my recurring suggestion that my parents foster a child from a third world background. No, I was crying because I was suddenly flooded with an understanding of how little I really knew: about her pains, her secrets, the fantasies that played in her head when she lay in bed at night. Her inner life.
She had always felt opaque to me, a beautiful unibrowed mystery just beyond our family’s grasp. I had been telling my parents, sister, grandma—anyone who would listen, really—about my desires from an early age. I live in a world that is almost compulsively free of secrets.
When Grace was three, she came home from preschool and announced she was in love with a girl. “Her name is Madison Lane,” she said. “And we’re going to get married.”
“You can’t,” I said. “Because she’s a girl.”
Grace shrugged. “Well, we are.”
Later, this became a favorite family story: the year Grace was gay, the Madison Lane incident. She laughed, as if we were telling any silly baby story. We laughed like it was a joke.
But it wasn’t a joke. And Grace’s admission felt not like a revelation but a confirmation of something we all understood but refused to say. Throughout high school Grace remained above the fray. She was president of speech and debate, attending a rhetoric match, then running off to tennis lessons in a crisp white skirt, skeptical of the hormonal hysteria that had overtaken her girlfriends. She’s too mature, we thought, too unusual to get caught up in crushes. We said, “College will be her time. For satisfaction, for relaxation, for boys.”
Grace was polite, firm, and unemotional as she answered my questions, continuing to eat her pad thai steadily and check her phone every few minutes. The basics: When did you know? Are you scared? Do you like someone? Then the ones I couldn’t ask: What have I ever said that let you down, that failed you or made you feel alone? Who did you tell before you told me? Is this my fault because of the dialysis mask?
She said she’d already had a romance, a girl named June who was her roommate on a summer program in Florence. They kissed most nights and, she said, they “never really talked about it.” I tried to imagine June, but all I could picture was a snowy-white mannequin in a wig.
My discomfort with secrets made waiting for Grace to come out to my parents torturous. I begged her to tell them, saying it was for her sake but knowing it was for my own. Sitting with the knowledge, the divide it created in our home, was too much for me. I had never been comfortable with what was not said, and there was nothing I would not say. But Grace wasn’t ready, despite my cajoling and kicking her under the dinner table. I held my tongue, despite my fear that I would have a Tourette’s moment and shout, Grace is gay!
One morning, my mother emerged from her bedroom, eyes sunken, hair askew, bathrobe still on. “I didn’t sleep at all,” she said wearily. “Grace has a secret, I know it.”
I gulped. “What do you think it is?”
“She stays late after school, she ignores me when I ask her questions about her day. She seems distracted. I think”—she took a pained sip of her coffee—“I think she’s having an affair with her Latin teacher.”
“Mom, no,” I said.
“Well, how else do you explain it?”
“Just think,” I hissed. “Think.” I waited, though not long enough, for her to understand. “Grace is gay!”
She cried harder than I had, like a surprised child. Or like a mother who had gotten something wrong.
A few years after she came out, Grace admitted that the June encounters were a fiction. She had invented them as a means of proving to anyone who questioned her that she was really gay. I was relieved to learn she hadn’t fallen in love without telling me.
Grace is graduating from college. The four years since she left home have lessened her mystery and deepened her sense of self. She’s emerged as a surprising, strange adult, still prone to bouts of moody distance but also possessed of a high cackle and a desire to have constant and aggressive fun. Sometimes she hugs and tickles me, and her long, cold fingers annoy me, a reversal of fortune I never imagined possible. When she writes, which isn’t often, I get insanely jealous of the way her mind works, the fact that she seems to create for her own pleasure and not to make herself known.