“Porshe.” When he turned around, I could see that he was crying. I was shocked. He bent over now, his hands on his bent knees, his elbows locked. He was looking at the ground. I was shocked and I couldn’t speak. I just had to wait.
He started talking and standing upright at the same time, deliberately but with difficulty.
“I’m just really worried about you. I just can’t believe how thin you are.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I knew I was thin but not nearly thin enough for this reaction. If I’d worked out in a sweater so he didn’t see my arms he wouldn’t be reacting like this, but I felt that now wasn’t the time to explain that to him. Besides, I’d never been so upset, seeing him cry. I’d never been so upset.
He got himself together a little, enough to look at my face. I was speechless, still, but I could see he wasn’t asking me to speak.
I watched as his face started breaking again. His face crumbled into creases. It went red. Tears were falling down his cheeks. He looked at me imploringly although he still wasn’t asking anything of me. It confused me.
“Porshe . . .” He cried harder. As he inhaled to say what he was leading up to say, his breath caught, making short staccato sounds. “You’re gonna die.”
My brother had left shortly after I’d pleaded my case. I told him that I knew what I was doing. When that didn’t work, I told him that I would eat, that I would gain weight and stop obsessively working out. He seemed pleased to hear all that so he left me to hang out with Sacha, who, after pointing out a very thin girl in the gym, dropped me home. She didn’t say anything about my weight, she just pointed to that girl on the treadmill, exclaiming that she was anorexic and how sad it was, and then she dropped me home.
I had cried a lot with my brother. The tears weren’t for me. They came because of him, because I hated seeing him cry like that. The only other time I’d seen him cry was when our dad died and to be honest, I didn’t know why my weight made him so sad. And I didn’t know why Sacha pointed out the so-called anorexic girl. I knew that I was thinner than usual. I knew that I was underweight, but anorexia was never something that I thought I could have. The girl at the gym didn’t have it. Not just anyone could have anorexia. It was a disorder of the highly accomplished, cultured, beautiful. It belonged to models, singers, and Princess Diana.
I had always been secretly in awe of anorexics with their superhuman self-restraint. There is a neatness to it, a perfection. Apart from the fact that I could never be thin enough to be anorexic, I didn’t want to be anorexic anyway. I just wanted to excel at dieting.
• • •
When I arrived home, my mother intercepted me on my way to take a shower and asked me to come to her room. At a glance it was clear to me that my brother had been talking to her about the episode at the gym and it was clear that her nonchalant attitude had been replaced by a very serious one.
“Come in here for a minute, okay? I would really like to talk to you.”
I followed her through the living room and into her bedroom. I passed by Gran, who for twenty years had sat in the chair in the corner of the living room, alternating her attention between the TV and her family’s lives, all played out in front of her as a source of entertainment. But my grandmother didn’t appear disconnected or uncaring, she just seemed like she already knew the end to all the stories. She’d seen all the reruns on TV and in life. She’d seen it all before. We were an episode of The Golden Girls in a rerun. Blanche, whose self-worth is based on her looks, has something on her mind but can’t communicate it in any way other than by acting out and has been called in to talk to problem-solving Dorothy, who had been given a tip by Rose as she stumbled across the truth, but it was something that Sophia had known all along. Gran gave me a look as I passed her that said, “Oh, yeah! I remember this one. This is the one where you confront your mother about her lack of acceptance of you for being gay and she finally accepts you for who you are. Oh yeah! This is a good one . . .” She couldn’t really have known that, of course. My mother and I had decided not to tell her about my sexuality. We had decided that she was too old and knowing that truth about me would be a terrible shock. Something like that could kill her. That the words “I’m gay” might just stop her heart, and she’d topple onto the floor, dead from shock.
My mother stood backlit against the window of her dark bedroom. I could just make out her pink scalp underneath her wisps of gray-blond hair and I wondered for how long gray hair could be dyed. Maybe it became so porous that color would just not take to it anymore. Maybe that’s why really old people have gray hair. Until this point I had thought it was because people in their eighties and nineties couldn’t be bothered because superficial things like looks didn’t matter anymore, but what if the desire to hold on to blond or brown hair was still there but the ability to do it was gone? I wondered if that’s what aging felt like. That desire and reality were dueling until the day you die, that nobody ever got to a place of peace. I had always wanted to get old so I didn’t have to care anymore, but I began to think that it would be best just to skip the getting older part and just die.
“You’re so thin, darling. It’s awful.”
Yes. I’m thin. I’m exactly what you wanted me to be.
“Well, I guess I can get my Swatch watch now.”
The Swatch watch was a carrot my mother used to dangle when I was a teenager if I reached 119 pounds, the magical eight and a half stone. As I had always fluctuated between nine and nine and a half, that number was always just a fantasy, a magical land where perfection lived and all the people who were special enough to get there were covered in Swatch watches. As I struggled to get to that number on the scale, the Swatch watches I wanted were going out of style one by one. First it was the clear one I wanted but was too fat to have, then a yellow one with blue hands, then the black one that passed me by without my earning the right to own it. I really did want my plastic Swatch watch. Even though they didn’t make them anymore.
“If you don’t eat something, you’re going to die!”
My mother squatted down with her hand on the corner of the bed. Her other hand was covering her face as she quietly sobbed. I stood over her, looking down. To my surprise I stood there waiting for something to happen. Where was the rush of emotion that had overtaken me when I saw my brother similarly bent over, sobbing and in pain? Where was that panic I felt that made me search for something soothing to say? Where was the deep regret for making my mother so upset? To my horror, a smirk involuntarily stretched over my face. My mother was crying and I was smiling. I loved my mother very much. Why was I being so cold?
The answer came to me with certainty and clarity.
I can be gay now. I can be who I am without pretending anymore. I’m forcing her to accept me just the way I am.
I bent down and picked my mother up off the floor. I put my arm around her shoulders and we sat like that on the edge of her bed until she stopped crying. I was waiting for her to stop so I could start in on her. As my mother quietly cried, I planned my attack. I would tell her that I was angry that she didn’t accept me for being gay, I was angry that she seemed to care more about how I looked than how I felt or who I was. I was going to tell her to change or she would risk losing me. My comments would hurt her, but it was better for her in the long run. I was going to show her the same tough love she’d shown me.
But I didn’t do that. Instead, I burst into tears.
“I’m so sorry that I’m gay, Mama. I’m sorry I’m not what you wanted.”