Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [26]
I walked along the river. I found the spot where I had looked into Brian’s eyes and lay down on the bank. My limbs outstretched, I myself was star-shaped, staring at stars. I thought of the coming-out stories I had heard. The best story was of a mother who hugged her son and said, “You’ve been so alone.” That was better than “I love you.” It was instant comprehension of a life. The worst story was of parents who disowned their eighteen-year-old son and drove him out into the snow in his pajamas and bare feet. As the boy’s feet turned indigo, the front door opened, and he thought, of course, they didn’t mean it. Then a suitcase full of his clothes launched out, and the door shut again, for good. I thought about what my own story would be. I knew it would be neither of these.
I trudged home to learn it. My parents were waiting for me—I had asked to talk to them before we went to bed. I felt a pang when I saw they were dressed up, as if for a parent-teacher conference. I sat on the immaculate ivory couch next to my mother, and tried to remember how I had meant to begin.
When I was nine, my mother told me about the invisible red thread. We were waiting for the train in Tokyo’s sweltering Shibuya station. She bought me a Calpis soda from the vending machine—the sweet fermented milk that is, according to slogan, “the taste of first love.” Noting the words amidst the blue polka dots on the can, my mother smiled and told me of love. She said some Japanese say we are tied to the one we love with invisible red thread—that it was already decided who my mate would be, and that if I could only grasp the thread, I could reel her in and claim her. I knew she was trying to keep me amused, so I went along, feeling the air around me for that elusive filament. Then something struck me. I asked her how they knew the thread was red if it was invisible. Her eyes widening, she put her hand on my neck and kept it there, despite the heat, and told me I might be missing the point.
In the midst of winter, Camus says, he discovered in himself an invincible summer. For the past months at Oxford, I had felt I could never get warm. I tried to make it back to that memory of how my mother had looked at me in the train station. The hotness of her hand.
“I know I have worried you,” I said, eyes down. “I’m sorry, and I want to explain. It has to do with Brian.” The words came more haltingly after that name. “When I was with him, I felt some things for the first time. I realized the person I will love—the person to whom I am tied—will not be a woman.”
The silence arced and fell, and arced and fell, like a soundless telephone.
My father said slowly, quietly, “Are you saying that you are a gay?”
His grammar had at last been stressed beyond its usual perfection. But I was not about to quibble with the construction of words I did not have the courage to utter.
“Yes,” I said.
I looked up. My mother’s face as she looked at my father is one I will never be able truly to describe or forget. I can only say her eyes looked for translation, solace, meaning that he could not, for once in his life, provide. I thought: I, so confident of words, have now met the limits of language. I will find no words that will catch that gaze in their net.
“But if this is so,” my mother said in Japanese, “we will never be able to go back to Japan.” I realized then what I had feared about coming out to my parents. That someone—myself, my mother, my father—would die. Would curl up, turn face to the wall, and expire. When my mother spoke those words, I knew she was telling me of a death—a metaphorical death, a social death, but a death. That was the albatross I killed—her cross-shaped innocence, her idea of home.
She saw me flinch. She switched to English. “What you are doing,” she said, “is very courageous.” It was as if one language could not contain her two voices.
We broke away awkwardly. I lay