. . .
Before the trip, my father took their passports to Kinko’s and had the pages with the photos Xeroxed and enlarged. He taped them—not with Scotch tape, but with something used to hold heavier things together—to the inside of the suitcase top. There they were, George and Betty in black and white, ready to meet the world, ready to splurge a little after working, like everyone they knew, hard all their lives and doing their best to be good and do good. They were older now, but they still had innocent faces, faces that somehow suggested their times and America, their home.
. . .
“I remember a river,” Betty says, “but there wasn’t enough water. It was very dry. It looked a little bit like here.”
“Do you remember the name of the river?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Was it the Rhine?”
“It might have been. What I remember is that it rained and I thought the water was finally going to fill up the riverbeds and when the next people got here it would probably be prettier.” She goes quiet, then asks, “Can I help you anymore, George?” as if we were studying for a test and she was drilling me, like she used to with long division.
“Can I help you, George?”
“No,” I want to say. “It is not you. It is everything that has happened. It is this sense that I have missed my chance and here I am.” Maybe everyone feels like that.
“To tell you the truth,” my mother confides, “I liked those Christmas shows in New York better than anything on that barge. I think your father did too. We always wanted you to come along.”
“I’m just not a Rockette person, Mama.”
. . .
I carried that suitcase with my parents’ pictures for twenty years or more everywhere I went: to college, home, and back so many times, to Barbados, London, Paris, Miami, San Francisco, Los Angeles, to Morocco, where I stayed at a house in the Old City where every night we were awakened by the call to prayer and I searched for a gift for Betty in the souk.
People said I should buy something new, something bigger with wheels, something in leather. But I kept carrying that suitcase until the strap broke and one of the pictures inside got torn off. I carried them with me everywhere. I still have it. I keep special things there, stuff I want to save as long as I live. One day I imagine these postcards that are preoccupying my mother will find their way there, the postcards from their trip to Europe.
“What are you doing, George? What are you doing to your arm?”
“I’m scratching it, Mother.”
“Why are you doing that?”
“I guess because I itch.”
“I don’t like it when you do that,” she says. “It looks like it hurts to do that.” And to her, it does. It would be enough to almost make her cry if she did that, ever.
“Is there anything I can do for you, George?” she asks again.
“You could try to remember the name of that river.”
“I’ve tried,” she says. “I can’t remember, and why does it matter? I told you it rained and I couldn’t sleep and I had to lay awake and listen to your father snore and I thought, here I came all the way to Europe to float down a river and listen to an old man snore.
“What can I do for you?” she asks again.
“What can I do for you?”
Neither one of us knows.
. . .
In the end my parents were just George and Betty, who always tried their best. That was enough. They weren’t New York. They didn’t have to be all the world or on television. I was different: Just me was never enough. Just me was something less than okay. So I tried to make up something a little better, too clever by half, I guess. I think I tried too hard. There were voices in my head, saying: “You have to do better.” Then I fell down.
“Is there anything I can do for you, George?” Betty asks one more time, because perhaps she knows that the time when she can do anything for anyone is growing short.
“See me,” I start to say. I don’t know where the words have come from, and I stop before I utter them because I know it is too late anyway, too late for her to know all of me. I didn’t discuss my sexuality with her until I was forty. She didn’t ask. My father hadn’t asked. We were all afraid. None of us knew how not to hurt one another. I made us all feel imperfect. I felt I was wrong. They felt they had caused it. No one said anything. They went to Radio City, said they missed me being with them. “Next year,” I always said before heading off to the magazine.
. . .
I didn’t feel comfortable when I was a kid. I didn’t feel comfortable in my body. I didn’t feel comfortable anywhere. I hated to have to walk across a room if people were watching; this was just a fear I had, something I did not quite know what to do about. In New York, all this made things hard.
“I never would have guessed you felt that way,” a rare confidante told me once. “But I see it now.”