I nodded, turned my pillow over so I could brace it under my arm to hold me up more comfortably.
“Are you scared?”
“About what?” I said. “Is there something I should be scared of?”
“You know. The future. The rest of your life. You won’t be a little girl anymore.”
“I haven’t been a little girl for a while, Tommy.”
“You know what I mean,” he said, standing up, tucking his hands into his pockets like he does whenever he’s being Big Brother. “You’re going to have to begin making big choices,” he said. “What you want out of life. You know it’s not a diploma you receive when you cross the graduation stage. It’s really a ceremony where your training wheels are taken off. The cap everyone wants to throw in the air is a symbol of what you’ve been so far in life: a student. That’s right, everyone wants to cast it off so quickly, eager to get out into the world. Then they realize they’ve got only a couple of choices for what to do next. The armed service, college, or working at a gas station. It’s too bad we don’t have a better way to recognize what the meaning of graduation really is. Right now, I think it leaves you kids a little clueless.”
“Tommy,” I said. “Yes, you’re eleven years older than me. You know more than I do. But really, you need to learn when to shut the hell up and stop sounding pompous.”
We laughed again. I’m lucky that, no matter what makes me mad about my brother, we can laugh at ourselves together.
“So what are you upset about then?” he asked after we settled down.
“Them,” I said, trying to get serious again. “Mom and Dad. Tommy, have you thought about what this is going to do to them?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what the town’s going to say? Tommy, do you know in their church newsletter they have a prayer list and our family is on it?”
“What for?” he asked, beginning to sound alarmed.
“Because you’re gay!” I said. It didn’t come out how I wanted, though. By the way his face, always alert and showing some kind of emotion, receded and locked its door behind it, I could tell I’d hurt his feelings. “It’s not like that,” I said. “They didn’t ask to be put on the prayer list. Fern Baker put them on it.”
“Fern Baker?” Tommy said. “What business has that woman got still being alive?”
“I’m serious, Tommy. I just want to know if you understand the position you’ve put them in.”
He nodded. “I do,” he said. “I talked with them about Tristan and me coming out here to live three months ago. They said what they’ll always say to me or you when we want or need to come home.”
“What’s that?”
“Come home, darling. You and your Tristan have a home here too.” When I looked down at my comforter and studied its threads for a while, Tommy added, “They’ll say the come home part to you, of course. Not anything about bringing your Tristan with you. Oh, and if it’s Dad, he might call you sweetie the way Mom calls me darling.”
“Tommy,” I said, “if there was a market for men who can make their sisters laugh, I’d say you’re in the wrong field.”
“Maybe we can make that a market.”
“You need lots of people for that,” I said.
“Mass culture. Hmm. Been there, done that. It’s why I’m back. You should give it a try, though. It’s an interesting experience. It might actually suit you, Meg. Have you thought about where you want to go to college?”
“It’s already decided. Kent State in the fall.”
“Kent, huh? That’s a decent school. You wouldn’t rather go to New York or Boston?”
“Tommy, even if you hadn’t broken the bank around here already, I don’t have patience for legions of people running up and down the streets of Manhattan or Cambridge like ants in a hive.”
“And a major?”
“Psychology.”
“Ah, I see, you must think there’s something wrong with you and want to figure out how to fix it.”
“No,” I said. “I just want to be able to break people’s brains open to understand why they act like such fools.”
“That’s pretty harsh,” said Tommy.
“Well,” I said, “I’m a pretty harsh girl.”
After Tommy left, I fell asleep without even changing out of my clothes. In the morning when I woke, I was tangled up in a light blanket someone — Mom, probably — threw over me before going to bed the night before. I sat up and looked out the window. It was already late morning. I could tell by the way the light winked off the pond in the woods, which you can see a tiny sliver of, like a crescent moon, when the sun hits at just the right angle toward noon. Tommy and I used to spend our summers on the dock our father built out there. Reading books, swatting away flies, the soles of our dusty feet in the air behind us. He was so much older than me but never treated me like a little kid. The day he left for New York City, I hugged him on the front porch before Dad drove him to the airport, but burst out crying and ran around back of the house, beyond the fields, into the woods, until I reached the dock. I thought Tommy would follow, but he was the last person I wanted to see right then, so I thought out with my mind in the direction of the house, pushing him away. I turned him around in his tracks and made him tell our parents he couldn’t find me. When he didn’t come, I knew that I had used something inside me to stop him. Tommy wouldn’t have ever let me run away crying like that without chasing after me if I’d let him make that choice on his own. I lay on the dock for an hour, looking at my reflection in the water, saying, “What are you? God damn it, you know the answer. Tell me. What are you?”
If Mom had come back and seen me like that, heard me speak in such a way, I think she probably would have had a breakdown. Mom can handle a gay son mostly. What I’m sure she couldn’t handle would be if one of her kids talked to themselves like that at age seven. Worse would be if she knew why I asked myself that question. It was the first time my will had made something happen. And it had made Tommy go away without another word between us.
Sometimes I think the rest of my life is going to be a little more difficult every day.
When I was dressed and had a bowl of granola and bananas in me, I grabbed the novel I was reading off the kitchen counter and opened the back door to head back to the pond. Thinking of the summer days Tommy and I spent back there together made me think I should probably honor my childhood one last summer by keeping up the tradition before I had to go away. I was halfway out the door, twisting around to close it, when Tristan came into the kitchen and said, “Good morning, Meg. Where are you off to?”
“The pond,” I said.
“Oh, the pond!” Tristan said, as if it were a tourist site he’d been wanting to visit. “Would you mind if I tagged along?”
“It’s a free country,” I said, thinking I should probably have been nicer, but I turned to carry on my way anyway.
“Well, sort of,” Tristan said, which stopped me in my tracks.
I turned around and looked at him. He did that same little shrug he did the night before when Tommy asked Mom and Dad if he could hang the American Gothicportrait in the living room, then smiled, as if something couldn’t be helped. “Are you just going to stand there, or are you coming?” I said.
Quickly Tristan followed me out, and then we were off through the back field and into the woods until we came to the clearing where the pond reflected the sky, like an open blue eye staring up at God.
I made myself comfortable on the deck, spread out my towel and opened my book. I was halfway done. Someone’s heart had already been broken and no amount of mix CDs left in her mailbox and school locker was ever going to set things right. Why did I read these things? I should take the bike to the library and check out something classic instead, I thought. Probably there was something I should be reading right now that everyone else in college would have read. I worried about things like that. Neither of our parents went to college. I remember Tommy used to worry the summer before he went to New York that he’d get there and never be able to fit in. “Growing up out here is going to be a black mark,” he’d said. “I’m not going to know how to act around anyone there because of this place.”