. . .
There is almost no truth better not known. The harder ones are tolerated more comfortably when shared. They couldn’t even talk about me to each other. I was an issue they avoided. Because of the way they had been raised to think about people like me. They did not speak of me, of who I was, even when they were alone, in the privacy of their own house.
Betty turned to me in the car and said, “Well, I guess you’ll go your way and I’ll go mine.” After that, she stopped talking.
The radio murmured, mostly static as the miles passed, and there was nothing but the sound of strong wind. I said nothing. I wasn’t sure what she meant, if we were divided now. There are words you never expect to hear. And then you hear them and it is like the news of death or disaster, they just stop you and you cannot go on for a while.
She said he loved me, my father, he loved me, but not who I turned out to be. That was the essence of it. He loved me, as so many have loved the children who turned out to be so different, “in spite of.” I didn’t want “in spite of.” I had been afraid of “in spite of.” I didn’t want to hear or know that this was how it was with my dad. I just kept reminding myself that he left me his hand.
Maybe I wasn’t afraid of hurting them. Maybe I just knew, always, how it would be, despite their love and best intentions. Maybe I was scared of being hurt myself and knew that finally, through no fault of their own, they could say nothing that could conceal the fact that there was part of me they could never approve of. I wasn’t angry; I was just sad at this separation that would never quite be bridged, this place where, despite what we shared, we parted ways, all of us hurt. It was just a set of circumstances inflicted that we could not avoid, the legacy of our place and time—and all that they had been brought up to believe by the world and the churches that told them I was something wrong. I had grown up with the story of Jesus taking all the little children to his knee. I had thought of churches as places of kindness, but if you are on the outside looking in, if only part of you is accepted, so much is different.
No one can dispute that God or whatever force there is created the world as a changing place. I like to think that it was progress that the father or mother of us had in mind, a greater love, a growing rather than diminishing acceptance of one another, of other kinds of people, as time moves forward, but so much of what I see now does not support my notion of this design.
. . .
After my mother and I had our talk, February just went on. The days were white and empty. Night after night, I dreamed about using drugs. In the mornings, I thought of just leaving, driving to the airport and flying back to New York to hide. Just escape.
Winter is a bleak time in the country, lonely, so I stayed with Betty for several weeks after the funeral to try to help, so she would not feel alone in the house where they had lived together so long. There was low-lying fog, snow melting, lavender streaks in the fields. For days, she stared out from her window at the long blank lawn, the bare suggestions of trees. The house was quiet. Betty said almost nothing; she was papers shuffling, a voice on the phone in another room. When she opened the safe-deposit box, she took the engagement ring that her aunt Mabel, whose middle name she gave me, had left for whomever I would marry. The next time I came home I discovered she had sent it to be reset. She had made it hers. It didn’t matter. It was just something I noticed.
I put dishes into the washer. I shoveled snow. I went through papers and stock certificates, dozens of extra keys to doors and cars. I sat in my father’s chair, but didn’t stay because, though he never had intended it, I was hurt.
My mother did not grieve outwardly, at least when I was looking, but when she sat down on the couch, it was always my dad’s sweater or coat she reached for to throw over herself. When I offered to help dispose of his clothes, she put one finger to her lips to say I should not speak of this. She set the plates down for lunch, returned again and again to her window, watched the snow drop from the branches. She stirred soups, opened cans, kept all the time filled with what had to be done. She never mentioned my father, or our conversation about me, except to say one more time that they never spoke of who I was.
. . .