Eleven #2
The question surprises me, but I answer. “Eighth grade. I didn’t make it a big deal or anything. Just told my friends and family. By now, most people know.”
“You ever get any shit for it?”
“I mean, you saw Evan Hegge and Dana Hendricks at the party. But it’s hard to tell if they hate me because I’m gay or because I’m awkward.”
“But your dad. How did he take it?”
“Great, actually. He’s not the most emotional guy on the planet—you’ve met him—but he’s always been supportive.
” A laugh escapes my throat. “This one time at Mass, Father Peter said something homophobic in his homily, and my dad legit stood up and ushered Emma and me out of there. Now we only go at Christmas.”
“That’s surprising. For a small-town guy from his generation.”
“I guess it’s because Emma and I are his life.”
He looks at me sideways. “What happened to your mom?”
“She’s in Chicago. She left when I was eight.
” I don’t tell people this story—Katrina is the only person I’ve talked to about it—but for some reason I find myself continuing.
“She and my dad met at the School of Mines. He grew up in Irontown and went there because it’s close.
She was from Chicago. I think maybe she always expected him to move back with her, but he’d never leave this town. ”
“And?”
“It was The Lion King’s fault,” I say, joking, but he’s watching me, confused, and I realize I need to either tell him the whole story or let half the truth sit between us.
On this ledge with Garrett, I don’t want half of anything.
“We watched Lion King as a family one night when I was eight, and I remember being obsessed with the music. Not the songs, the soundtrack. Hans Zimmer went hard on that thing, and I remember the ending, when Simba climbs Pride Rock, how the strings begin a sweeping melody and then they’re joined by winds and then driving percussion and then it segues right into a reprise of ‘Circle of Life.’ I heard it, and I was so pumped that I couldn’t stay in my seat.
“I asked my parents where the music came from. They were confused at first until they realized I was talking about the film score. ‘A composer,’ my dad told me, and I said, ‘That’s what I want to be when I grow up.’ I didn’t think much about it, you know?
When you’re a little kid, you decide on a new future career like every week. ”
I swallow. I suddenly don’t want to continue the story.
“Enz?” Garrett says, and it’s the first time he’s used the shortened version of my name.
“My mom,” I say. “She got kind of angry. She was like that, I remember. She used to get so angry, so quickly. ‘People from Irontown don’t grow up to be composers,’ she told me.
‘They grow up to be miners or run shitty antique stores.’ Dad sent Emma and me to bed, but I stayed awake, listening to them fight.
Mostly my mom yelled at Dad for trapping her here, and she unloaded about how she hated our house and our town and the U.P. In the morning, she was gone.”
Garrett’s head jerks back. “But what about you and Emma?”
I don’t want to answer this question. It’s followed me most of my life, and every time I ask it of myself, the answer is the same: We weren’t enough.
“Dad sent her airfare for years. She came and visited a few times, and I remember she was so happy, almost manic. She’d gotten a well-paying job, and she brought us all these presents, and she kept telling us how she’d have even more things for us when we moved to Chicago with her.
She kept offering to have us come visit, but she would always cancel at the last minute.
Then she stopped coming up here and Dad eventually stopped sending money.
And then…” I trail off, unsure how to end the story.
“God, Enzo,” Garrett mutters, “that’s so shitty. I’m sorry.”
I feel like I’ve shared too much, but I’m glad I have. Then I say, “I don’t need you to feel sorry for me for being from Irontown. It’s not like I’m stuck here or anything.”
He picks up a leaf from the ground and begins absently tearing it apart. “But that’s why you don’t want to leave, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t want to be like your mom.”
I’m so surprised by this observation that I don’t say anything. I open my mouth to argue, then close it. I’ve never compared going away to college to my mom leaving our family.
Or have I? I think of the crushing guilt I feel each time I imagine Dad and Emma sitting around the dinner table without me, the house quieter without my oboe playing.
How Dad will have to hire someone else to work at the shop.
How going to college feels more like abandoning my family than moving on to something bigger.
I think of how, when Dad caught me scrolling through the University of Washington’s website last year, he’d gotten unreasonably angry, like a switch had flipped inside him.
“So you’re too good for the U.P. now?” Dad had asked.
I hadn’t known what to say, hadn’t known where the question came from or why there was so much resentment in his voice. But maybe he was making the connection Garrett just did: His wife left him, and soon his son would do the same.
I’m reminded of all the times my college plans have come up over the last few years, how Dad and I get so tense that we forget how to talk to each other. He becomes forceful and authoritarian, and I become compliant and resentful.
I don’t say these things to Garrett, and I can tell he doesn’t expect me to.
“Why did you want to know how I came out?”