Inclination (6 page)

Sitting in the
church basement at five minutes before seven o’clock on the Thursday night of
February vacation week, everything feels so freaking wrong. It isn’t as much
the fact that it’s a Thursday, or that it’s seven at night, or that it’s winter
vacation week, but what feels so strange is the sheer emptiness of this place
that’s usually teeming with life. (Teeming is a vocabulary word I’ve never
before had occasion to use, but now that I’ve used it, I pretty much own it.) I
sit there in the silent void, waiting for Mrs. Martine to come down the stairs
that lead from the crying room.

After yet another
night of disturbed sleep, marked by nightmares about forced poison Kool-Aid
drinking, I decided it was time to bite the bullet on Tuesday afternoon, and I
called the rectory to make an appointment with Mrs. Martine. It’s probably
going to kill me to do it, but I’m planning to confide “The Problem”. Before I
placed the call, I reminded myself that the woman is a youth group leader and
she’s probably quite experienced in dealing with youth “in crisis”. Like me. I’m holding out hope that she’ll
able to guide me in terms of understanding what God wants me to do and helping
me do it.

Mrs. Martine is
not exactly what I’d call “a warm and fuzzy people person”, but then neither am
I. She’s what I’d describe as efficient and capable and qualified. As a retired
high school math teacher, she knows her way around teenagers, and she has high
expectations of what we can accomplish, even as young people. I’ll put it this
way, where I
never
have to suppress
an urge to hug her, I
often
have
occasion to compliment her on her matter-of-fact effectiveness.

“Anthony, it is
nice to see you. Thank you for being punctual.” She descends the narrow
stairway, her low heels clicking in time to carefully measured steps, looking
every bit the schoolteacher. Tonight her hair is fastened in a neat gray bun
perched on the top of her head, but her round face, as always, appears more
stern than seems fitting for a youth group leader, and she’s wearing a plain
beige pantsuit, and as predicted, sensible shoes. Like always, she carries her
tote bag with knitting needles sticking out of the corner. I suddenly wish I’d
thought to bring her a shiny red apple, which seems fitting. Mrs. Martine
approaches the table where I sit, and she eases into the seat opposite mine.
“Elbows, please.”

I immediately
remove my elbows from the table where they’ve been holding up my head.
“Um…sorry. Nice to see you, too, Mrs. Martine.” This isn’t going to be easy.
“Thank you for coming here to talk to me.”

She allows a
what-choice-did-I-really-have sort of sigh and then says, “Well, since this is
not a social visit, I don’t see any point in dancing around each other here.
Let’s get straight to the point. You wanted to speak to me. Well, here I am,
son. So speak.”

Mrs. Martine has
a knack of putting aside the pleasantries and focusing on business at hand.
Why would tonight be any different?
“Um…that sounds like a good idea.” I push my black hair off my face even though
I wish I could let it stay as it was, hanging over my eyes.

Mrs. Martine
folds her arms across her chest and I hear the sound of a foot tapping on the
tile floor. “Whenever you are ready, Anthony.”

I experience a
sudden urge to run from the room screaming, “I changed my mind!” but I manage
to subdue it. I’m here for a purpose, possibly a soul-saving one. Staring at
the table, I start to talk. “I-I have a problem, and I thought…that m-maybe…you
could help me with it.”

When I look up at
her, she’s still staring at me, expectant. Impatient.

“Um…here it is,
Mrs. uh… Mrs. Martine.” I swallow down my nausea, throw caution to the wind,
which is supremely hard for me to do, and spill my most closely guarded secret
to this adult I’ve been told I can trust. “I…uh…Mrs. Martine, I think that… I
think I might be g-gay.”

I close my eyes
and wait for a scream or a gasp or a thud that indicates she’s fallen to the
floor in a dead faint at my shocking, rainbow confession. All I get is silence.
When I look back up Mrs. Martine is still studying me, but now she’s also
shaking her head very slowly.

But since she
isn’t offering me any solutions to my monumental problem, I keep on talking.
“I’ve tried to stop feeling this way, but it doesn’t work.”

“And you would
like to know what it is you should do?” Her voice is as cold and dry as a
desert at night, which is nothing new.

I, on the other
hand, am sweating an ocean. I nod my dripping head.

“Let me ask you a
few questions, Anthony.” Mrs. Martine unfolds her arms and places them on her
lap. “Tell me about your relationship with your mother.”

“My
mother
?”

She smirks.

“She’s a good
mom. Always there when we need her…and comes to most of my tennis matches…and
is an awesome cook and….” I have no idea what the woman wants me to tell her.

“Does she love
you?”

“You
know
her, Mrs. Martine—of course she
does!”

“Is she
overpowering
when she expresses her
feelings of love?”

My chin drops as
it begins to dawn on me where she is going with this line of questioning.

“Does she pay too
much attention to you and spoil you and declare her love for you at
inappropriate times and places?”

I tilt my head.
“Uh…excuse me, ma’am?”

“Anthony, dear, often
mothers who smother their sons turn their boys gay.”

To be honest, I’m
taken aback by the fact that Mrs. Martine seems to actually believe this is
even possible. “No, Mom doesn’t smother me at all. Even if she wanted to, she’s
too busy trying to keep up with all of the girls to do that.”

“Then it must be
your relationship with your father who has made you…this way.”

I’m too stunned
to respond.

“He is distant,
isn’t he? A workaholic?”

I shake my head.

“Admit it,
Anthony. He is largely absent and has been since your adoption.”

I think of our
recent trip to Gucci’s candy and how Dad insisted we have lunch together on the
way home, and when we were at
The Leaning
Tower of Pizza
he confided in me his plans to get tickets to all of the
Yankees/Red Sox home games for the two of us. Dad is
not
an absentee father. I shake my head again, with more feeling
this time.

Now Mrs. Martine
appears genuinely perplexed. “Then it must be the effect of all those sisters.
Maybe subconsciously you’ve made a choice that you want to be
like
them, one of your parents’ natural
children.”

“
Natural
children?” Mom has always told
me that the girls are her biological children and I am her adoptive child, but
I’m every bit as
natural
as they are.
Then the other thing Mrs. Martine said hits me. “A choice? You think I
chose
to be this way?”

To her credit,
she doesn’t nod vigorously, but she does say, “What else could it be, Anthony?
If your parents and family didn’t do this to you, then….”

I have no answer,
other than the inner knowledge that no one would choose this. Who in their
right mind would choose to be a way that would get them nothing but ostracized
and ridiculed and condemned?

“If your parents
didn’t make you this way, then you
chose
to be homosexual.”

“
Why on earth
would I
choose
to be gay?” My voice contains
more bitterness than it ever has before in the presence of an adult. “If I act
on it, I’ll be condemned to hell!”

At that point,
she nods in vigorous agreement. “Well, Anthony, it is good that you came to me
with this problem. I will work with you to help you correct it.”

And just like
that, I’m again ready to listen. If she knows how to solve my problem, then I
need that information. “Thank you, ma’am.”

“This is what you
need to do….” She hesitates, engrossed in her own thoughts.

“I’ll do whatever
God wants me to do.” I don’t mean to say anything at all, but the words slip
out.

“You need to
start dating a girl.”

Again I gawk at
her because I didn’t expect to hear this recommendation.

“A nice girl,
like Elizabeth O’Donnell, for example, could cure you, I’m sure of it.” She
stands up, as if to signify that our conversation is over as she has found the
proper solution to my minor dilemma. “You need to invite her to go to a movie
with you this weekend.”

“A movie?” I am
strangely distracted by the sight of my arm, still-bruised from the pinching
tactic.

“Yes. You will take
her out and show her a wonderful time, and I am certain that you will feel
things for Elizabeth that you have never felt for a …a young man.”

I try to ignore
the way my face gets hot. “But I don’t know if Elizabeth even
wants
to go to a movie with me.”

“Oh, she does,
dear. Anyone with eyes in their head can see that she’s crazy about you.”

Well, I don’t
know if the lady is right that dating a girl will turn me straight, but she
is
right about Elizabeth’s interest in
me. Even my parents have noticed Elizabeth’s frequent longing gazes in my
direction at church. “Okay, Mrs. Martine. I’ll do it.”

“Don’t look so
miserable, Anthony. Elizabeth is a smart and attractive, not to mention, devout
young lady. Dating her will change everything.” She heads for the stairs, and
states, without glancing back, “You’ll see.”

I sit there,
basically dumbfounded.

“Be sure to pull
the door closed at the top of the stairs when you leave.”

Sitting alone in
the church basement, I will admit, I don’t know precisely how to feel. After
about ten minutes, during which I firm up my resolve to carry out the plan, I
head up the stairs. And I’m sure to carefully pull the door at the top of the
stairs closed.

Mom did
everything she could think of to help me fit in as I grew up—into our very
Italian family, as well as into our mostly Caucasian town—and to inspire me to
feel like I was special rather than different, as there aren’t many Asians
living in Wedgewood. To be exact, there are the folks who own and run
Taipei New England
, the local Chinese
food restaurant, and me.

When I was four,
she’d come to the Holy Trinity Tikes Preschool and laid out on the floor in the
middle of our meeting circle the outfit I’d been wearing when they’d picked me
up at Logan Airport on the day I’d “come home to America.” All of my little
friends had studied the tiny clothes I’d worn, the bottle I’d held, and the
blanket that had covered me. Then she read aloud to the class
Mommy Far, Mommy
Near
by
Carol Peacock, an adoption
storybook she’d read to me many times on the living room couch at home. By the
end of her visit, all of the preschool teachers had been crying, but the
fifteen kids in the circle had simply seemed bewildered. I still remember at
the conclusion of her overly long explanation and the story, my fellow student
Kerry Curry raising her hand and asking Mom, “What is
a-
dop
-shun
?”

In kindergarten,
Mom had visited Wedgewood Elementary School on Gotcha Day, which was when we
annually celebrated the anniversary of when my parents had taken me home from
the airport. Each year we had a party, complete with gifts, balloons, and cake.
That year it had been little Lazarus Sinclair—olive skin and dark hair, wide
innocent-looking brown eyes—who’d raised his hand and declared, “No fair.
Anthony
gots
two birthday parties and I only
gots
one.”

In grade school,
I’d managed to express to my mother that when she came into school and made a
big deal out of my adoption, it made me feel
more
different from everybody else, and
not
super special, as she’d hoped. So, Mom had changed tactics, and
at home we’d started nearly a decade of intermittent “South Korean Home
Projects” to explore “Anthony’s culture”. We made
kimchi
about ten times—I actually liked it but we couldn’t even force-feed it to my
sisters—we colored, sewed, and glued South Korean flags, and we made and played
traditional Korean board games like
Yut-Nori
. We
learned the Korean alphabet and how to count to ten in Korean. I even went to a
Korean Culture Camp one summer in elementary school and took Tae Kwon
Doe
lessons for three years of middle school.

None of these
activities had done too much in the direction of making me feel connected with
my Korean heritage, but they
had
let
me know how far my mother would go to make things right for me.

And now, in my
current effort to assimilate (I wrote this SAT-quality word on the palm of my
hand with a red Sharpie on my way over to E’s house, so I could check its
usage), I’m sitting in a movie theater beside Elizabeth O’Donnell, on my very
first date. Just over an hour ago, I picked her up and said a very polite hello
to her parents, who I already know well from church, and then we sat in silence
in my car for nearly half of the distance to the movie theater. It’s strange
that although we can discuss a wide array of topics at Our Way meetings, being
together on a date felt totally different. During the duration of seemingly
unending silence in my car, I continually cast glances at my date, and made an
honest effort to appreciate her freshly brushed strawberry hair and the way
she’d painted her nails pink, and I even made sure to sniff in the sweet scent
of her perfume. But David’s hair had smelled much better, if I was going to be
honest.

Sitting properly
in the passenger street of my car, Elizabeth O’Donnell was the definition of
loveliness. And I was completely unmoved by her charms. But that had been early
in the date. I’d assured myself it was too soon to worry.

When we got to
the movie theater, I bought our tickets and popcorn, and then she led me to
seats in the very back row, which very honestly had made me sweat bullets. My
first thought had been, “Oh, my gosh, she’s going to want to make out”, but
then I corrected my paranoid thinking with, “This is all-holy Elizabeth, and
she’s not the type of girl to kiss on the first date, so I’m in the clear.”

I am dead wrong
on that count. After we eat the popcorn, E gets
more
comfortable
and soon
her head is leaning on my shoulder, and this, I can deal with. Then she shivers
rather noticeably, and just as I’m about to retrieve her coat from the seat
beside me to drape over her, she suggests that my arm on her shoulder would
definitely go a long distance in warming her up.

Okayyyy
….
And once she’s snuggled beneath my right arm, she turns her head,
and breathes feverishly,
into
my
right ear until I turn awkwardly toward her. This is when her lips seem to
develop their very own faster-than-a-speeding-bullet superpower—they lunge
forward and attach to mine. The suction is pretty
dang strong.

And so Anthony
Duck-Young Del
Vecchio
experiences his first kiss—a
clumsy, buttery, salty affair.

In my mind, the
kiss is a test—or maybe more of a science experiment. And gosh, do I ever want
to like it. I pay close attention to every last one of my body’s specific
physical reactions to “kissing a girl.” And despite the fact I want to create a
long and detailed list of what body parts swelled and which moved of their own
accord, there’s absolutely nothing to write down. In plainer words, no involuntary
movement whatsoever has occurred in the crotch of my pants. To say I am
disappointed would be yet another major understatement, so maybe I won’t say it.

Within a few
minutes of the start of our foray into “making out”, I am figuratively, and
quite literally, suffocating. I push her back, probably with a bit too much
force, and gasp for air. Even in the dark I can read her facial expression.

Confusion…yes, this
is very much present.

Hurt…uh-huh, I
see a fair amount of this too.

And anger,
there’s no doubt.

The two of us sit
through the remainder of the movie, shoulder-to-shoulder, in stone silence. The
drive home is darn quiet, as well. At her doorstep, the last thing I say to
her, after gulping deeply, not to mention quite audibly, is, “See you at church
on Sunday, Elizabeth.”

Her only response
is the slamming of her front door.

Church on Sunday
is going to be awkward with a capital A.

Huge sigh.

And yet another
audible gulp.

It would be a
major understatement to say that fitting in has never been an easy task for me.
But I have had it up to my eyebrows with understatements.