Ch 08: Holy Outing
Only beginning to grasp the societal disdain for the love I'm feeling, a nun decides to tell my mom.
I knew something was wrong the moment I heard my mother's voice, a blend of despair and disappointment that sent a chill down my spine. A few short weeks after I found love, I graduated from high school, and then returned home to Rogers, got a job waiting tables at the local Holiday Inn, and, while anticipating my return to college in the North, spent my time pining for Michelle.
One afternoon after my shift, Mom summoned me into the family room. The air conditioner was no match for the relentless Arkansas sun as it beat down through the picture window at that time of day. The family room was the last place I wanted to be, but this was a rare request, and it didn’t feel like challenging it would be in my best interest.
I had no context for, or experience with, serious conversations with Mom—we just didn’t have them. When she was upset, she didn’t talk about it, or, except for that one time when she chased me into my room, even show it. She had taught me—expected me—to do the same.
I sat down on the hassock in front of the chair she was in. In retrospect, this wasn’t the smartest move. It’s hard to come across as self-assured or defiant, depending on what would be required, sitting on a hassock.
“Sister Barbara called me,” she began.
“She did?” I was as much intrigued as surprised. “When? What for?”
“Last month. That’s not important.” She waved her hand in the air dismissively. “What’s important is that she is concerned about you.” A look passed over Mom’s face that I had never seen before. Distant, defeated, like she had just lost a precious pearl, one she knew she would never get back.
Uh, oh. This was not good. “Last month?” I asked to give myself time to think. That meant she called before graduation—and I’m just hearing about it now?
My mind flashed back to Lumen Chapel. Graduation had just concluded. Michelle and I were standing outside with other graduates in our caps and gowns. Parents milled about with looks of pride and probably some relief on their faces. Dad handed me a greeting card.
I could tell the envelope held something more than a card. I slipped open the seal and two photos fell out. As I reached down to pick them up, a blazing orange car sitting in our driveway back home came into view. My eyes grew wide. I choked. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
“This is for me?” I stammered as I scooped up the photos, certain the images might disappear, and the car along with them, if I didn’t ask fast enough.
“Yes,” Dad said. “We thought you’d like it.”
Like it? I loved it, and I hadn’t even seen it yet. My own car! In my favorite color. I couldn’t wait to get home now.
“It’s a 1973 Pontiac Ventura Hatchback,” he went on. “Pretty spiffy.”
Pretty spiffy indeed!
Now that I was home and had claimed the beautiful car as my own, I wished I was driving it instead of sitting here on a hassock in the family room with mom.
“Sister Barbara said you were involved in, in,” the words caught in her throat. “in an unsavory relationship with another girl—with that Michelle girl.” The way she said, “that Michelle girl,” I could see the words spill out of her mouth, down her blouse, and onto the carpet.
I didn’t react—at least not externally. Inside, I felt like I had just been run over by my new car.
“Are you a homosexual?” She spit the words out and then turned her head and locked her eyes on the floor, bracing for my answer to slap her in the face.
I had no context for her question—no idea what the word even meant.
My mind flashed back to a conversation I’d had with Sister Barbara a few weeks earlier. She called me into her choir room and, while seated at the grand piano, her fingers poised over the keys as if she were about to start playing, she charged, “You and Michelle are spending too much time together.” Her fingers resting now. She didn’t look up at me. “You need to do a better job of guarding your reputation. People are talking.”
Each word hit me like a staccato note in the refrain of the new piece she introduced us to earlier that day in my third period choir class.
My heart ached at the thought of someone talking about me, telling Sister Barbara bad things about me—and Sister Barbara thinking bad things about me.
I backed up and tried to hide behind the piano’s lid so she couldn’t see my face.
I asked what people were saying, but she wouldn’t tell me. “Just be careful,” she warned, as she finally began to play—silky notes belying the stiffness in her voice. I backed out of the room and let notes of some classical piece I didn’t recognize guide me through the door.
I reached the hall, gentled the door softly behind me, and leaned against it. I closed my eyes and took in, and then let out, a deep breath. I didn’t know whether to be filled with shame or anger. I didn’t get into trouble like that. What right did she have to tell me who I could be friends with? What did she mean by “guarding my reputation?” I knew one thing—her warning wasn’t going to change how I felt about Michelle.
I left that conversation resolute, but wary. I told Michelle we needed to lay low for a while, but it didn’t change how I felt. I was in love for the first time in my life, and I couldn’t imagine how anyone could think it was wrong.
Sister Barbara hadn’t used the word homosexual when she talked to me, but that must have been the word she used when she called Mom. I don’t think Mom would have come up with it on her own.
I can’t remember how I answered Mom’s question. I do remember how devastated I was when our conversation was over. What had been natural and beautiful to me was something Sister Barbara had told me was ruining my reputation and now Mom said it was something I should be ashamed of. Something dirty. Sinful. Sick.
“What have I done wrong?” she cried. “You need to go see the priest,” she pleaded. “Promise me you’ll go see the priest.”
I wouldn’t. I couldn’t. What would I say to him?
“I should never have let you go to that school,” she said shaking her head as if admitting defeat.
When it was clear we had nothing more to say to each other, I stood up and said, “I’m going out.” She nodded without looking up. I’m sure she expected I would.
But instead of hopping on my bike like I always had as a kid when things got tense at home, I jumped into my spirited, brand new orange car. When I turned the key in the ignition and backed out of the driveway, I was in control, on my own, free to go where and do what I wanted. Today, however, I felt more like I had been caught in the pistons and battered around before being spit out onto the driveway.
Luckily, I didn’t have to think about where I wanted to go because I wasn’t thinking at all. My brain felt dull and dense, like a rubber eraser. I pulled into a parking spot on W. Poplar Street, slipped the car into park, put a quarter in the meter, and ran up the stairs, two at a time, as I always did.
When I flung open the heavy, white wood and glass doors, I knew I was safe. The Rogers Hough Memorial Library, my library, was like an old friend. I had spent countless hours here extracting, no, divining, the secrets of the universe in this magical place. The library held the answers to every question, the solution to every problem. Sometimes, I’d methodically search the card catalog and then follow its cryptic code, like a treasure map, to the exact spot where a book was shelved. Other times, I’d roam the stacks until I stumbled upon something that captured my imagination. Either way, when I found a book that interested me, I’d plop down on the floor and read. Somewhere in here, I could find out about this sinful, shameful, sickness that everyone seemed so upset about. I was sure of it.
I proceeded directly to the card catalog. I quickly browsed the labels until my eyes zeroed in on the drawer that held the H’s, GA-HZ. That’s it. I slid it open, lifted the long, over-stuffed drawer out of the wooden cabinet, and placed it on the table. I scanned the room to make sure no one I knew was around, that no one would sneak up behind me to see what I was doing. This was a small town, after all, and chances were someone I knew, or who knew me, was in here, too.
When I determined it was safe, I rummaged through the cards, some with book titles on them, some with authors, some with subjects. I focused on the subjects. Ha, Hi, Ho. Homeostasis, Homosapien, Honeybees. Wait a minute. I must have missed it. I went through the cards backwards, one card at a time. Nothing. Neither “homosexual” nor “homosexuality” was listed. I was sure it would be in here.
I fought back a growing sense of despair. I certainly wasn’t going to ask the librarian, Mrs. Osgood. She had moved from Plymouth to Rogers with Daisy, just like we did. She’d been our librarian in Michigan, and now she was our librarian here. She was a kind, old lady, but I knew enough not to ask her about this. I slid the card catalog drawer back into place, fingers lingering on the metal drawer pull as if I could will the card I needed to be there. I tried to think of some other word I could look for, but I didn’t know any others. The word hummed in my head begging for meaning.
I moved over to the dictionary, which sat on a pedestal in the center of the first-floor study area. It might not have the answer, but at least it might have a clue, and I knew that with enough clues you could solve any mystery—at least my old friends, The Three Investigators, could. To get to the H’s, I lifted what must have been several hundred pages from the left side of the gargantuan tome to the right.
I ran my finger down the page. There it was: Homosexual. “a man with sexual desire for another man.” I stood there and stared. It didn’t say anything about me—about love, tenderness, or the sweet caress of Michelle’s lips. Nor did it say anything about mental illness, sin, or the shame I was supposed to feel for the love I experienced with Michelle. Nothing in the dictionary definition applied to me at all.
I flipped the pages to the M’s so no one would see where I’d been looking and collapsed into a chair at a nearby table. What now? I couldn’t remember feeling so alone. Even my library had betrayed me.
I wished I could call Michelle. She was with her sister, an Adrian Dominican nun, at her sister’s convent in Chicago, so there would be no way I would get through to her. I had no one I could talk to. No one who would understand.
The summer progressed as slowly as a walking stick climbing up my favorite oak tree at the end of our driveway. I worked as much as I could to avoid being at home. I scouted out pay phones in obscure locations around town so Michelle and I could sneak in an occasional call. When I was home, I stalked the mail truck so I could scarf up any letters she sent me. I even arranged for Michelle to send mail by General Delivery to the next town over only to have the postmistress question my mom about why I was getting mail in Bentonville. I felt invaded, persecuted—and infatuated. I couldn’t get enough—of Michelle or of the intrigue! My parents’ secret-keeping paled in relation to my own deviousness. Or so I thought.
I had to wait, though, until I returned to Michigan for college to finally read something about the real meaning of homosexuality. I was in a friend’s dorm room when I spotted a book on her shelf. I swallowed hard and screwed up my courage to ask, “Can I, um, borrow that book, um, about Sappho?” I wasn’t sure who Sappho was, but I had heard enough to make me curious.
My friend laughed, “It’s not about Sappho. It’s about us. Of course, you can borrow it.”
Sappho Was a Right-On Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism by Sidney Abbott and Barbara Love was one of the first books written by a lesbian, about lesbians, and thankfully, the first book I ever read about homosexuality.
I hadn’t realized how sheltered I had been all those years growing up in Rogers. I knew nothing about lesbians, or the “gay” lifestyle, or even why the Church considered it a sin. The topic, like so many others, had been erased in my household. From this book, I learned about women who had found happiness and were living fulfilling lives in love with other women. This book described exactly how I felt and didn’t make it sound sick or sinful at all.
I had found my people. Now I just had to figure out how not to feel like I had to hide it.
Read Chapter 9: “Unlikely Sources”
If you just subscribed, you can read previously published chapters of If You Only Knew by following links in this table of contents. If you ever fall behind, this is easiest way to catch up.
Wow. So the irony of escaping the ordeal of heteronormativity by going to a Catholic school is delicious, but I was struck in this chapter in particular about how society functioned on its own a sort of secret police, always watching and suspecting, and how queer folks (and this was still true at least up through the 80s for me, and even now in many places) feel like traitors, subversives, saboteurs to the "natural" order. It's heartbreaking, but also, I'm glad you read Sappho first.
Ah, Sappho was a …that was one of my first affirming books too. I had forgotten about it! Thank you for the memory and the story. A poignant telling.