I find Amanda at the dining room table. All the doors to the china cabinet are flung open like a poltergeist tore through the house before I woke up. Her elbows rest on the gleaming wood table, her face buried in her phone.
“What’s up, doofus? Nice of you to finally join us. Mom never lets me sleep that late,” she says without looking up from the novella-length text she’s composing.
“She doesn’t seem to care what I do. She kicked me out of the kitchen,” I tell her as I slump into the upholstered chair beside her. They’re new and decidedly more modern than the wooden chairs we had last time I was home.
“Must be nice. She’s up my ass about what I’m going to do after graduation.”
“Do you want help?” There’s a mountain of unpolished silverware in front of her, the real kind with filigree rosettes on the handles that we only use for company. A wedding gift from Grandma Everett.
At least things aren’t strained between me and Amanda. I worried our relationship wouldn’t survive my leaving. She was eleven at the time. It’s not like I could swoop in under the cover of darkness and hang out with her while she lived under my parents’ roof. So I sent her emails: links to the announcement that the Jonas Brothers would be playing the Philips Arena or an article about the new bookstore they were putting in the outdoor shopping center downtown. I would have called, but she didn’t have a cell phone and I was terrified my father might answer if I called the landline. But I wasn’t going to lose my sister.
I was shocked but also elated when she made good on her promise to visit me in New York when she turned eighteen. She came over spring break with money saved from lifeguarding and various babysitting gigs, lying to our parents and telling them it was a senior class enrichment trip to job shadow notable alumni of the high school we both attended.
Hannah, Theo, Priya, and I took her to see Wicked and snuck her into the basement at Home Sweet Home to dance with a crappy fake ID purchased on St. Marks Place. When she left, I wasn’t sure which she was more in love with, the city or Theo, who she followed around like a puppy, hanging on to his every word.
She’s come every spring break since. There’s only one more left before she graduates from Emory. I wonder if she’ll come to LA for this one, but even if she does, I know it won’t be the same without Hannah, Priya, and Theo.
Now that I’m awake, Mom and Aunt Carolyn have turned up the Whitney Houston in the kitchen. I recognize the album as Mom’s favorite. The cassette had a permanent home in the tape deck of her Mercedes station wagon. We’d blast “How Will I Know” and sing along on the short drive to school. But the music was confined to the car, Dad didn’t like it to be loud in the house.
A bark of Aunt Carolyn’s laughter wafts out from the kitchen.
“Oh, you’re bad,” Mom says, also laughing.
“They’ve been like that all morning,” Amanda informs me. “It’s weird, right? I keep waiting for Dad to come out of his office and tell them to quiet down because he’s on a work call. And then I remember.”
“Yeah, it’s super weird.” This is true of the whole trip for me, not just the laughter. I’m not sure what qualifies as weird around here anymore. “She seems good, though?”
“She’s happy to have you here.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“She hasn’t stopped talking about your visit all month. She’s bringing back macaroni and cheese this year because she knows it’s your favorite.” I try to square this with the chilly reception I received in the kitchen, but can’t. “She’s just . . . adjusting,” Amanda continues.
We all are. It’s bizarre for me to be back in this house, too. Back at this table. Where it all went to shit. Where I told my parents I was gay and got expelled from my own family.
My father’s response was an adamant “No.”
Just no. Like the sheer force of his objection could change my sexuality.
And a year earlier, it might have. I would have said, “Yes, sir,” and asked out one of my many female friends who were always leaning a little too close and touching my arm a little too long, like they were giving me a green light to kiss them.
But the summer after my freshman year of college was different because I’d been dating Sean Grady for most of spring semester. Sean was my first real boyfriend.
We met at a wine and cheese party thrown by his a capella group. The event was intended to be classier than the standard campus party with Busch Light and beer pong, but in practice the wine came from a bag. Sean had been out since high school, and he didn’t like that I wasn’t. I was out at school, but no one at home knew, especially my parents.
Out at school wasn’t good enough for Sean. Before we left for summer break he gave me an ultimatum: tell my family while I was home or we’d have to reevaluate our relationship in the fall. In hindsight, this was super fucked up, but at the time I took his demand with the utmost seriousness.
I decided to make my announcement at dinner my first night home. Not because I expected it to go well, but I figured this would give my parents until the end of summer to adjust to my news, the same way Sean’s parents had. “Trust me,” he told me, “my parents are old-school Irish Catholic. If they can accept it, yours will be fine.”
It was not fine.
After lodging his objection, my father stood up from the dinner table, poured a double bourbon from the decanter on the sideboard, which until that moment I thought was only for decoration, and locked himself in his office for the rest of the evening, slamming the door behind him for emphasis.
My mother’s reaction was just an “Oh, Finn” before she got up to start the dishes even though she hadn’t touched her salmon.
Oh, Finn, what, I wondered. Oh Finn, how could you? Oh Finn, give him some time?
That night, I sat in the shadows at the top of the stairs waiting to hear my parents’ conversation when Dad emerged from his office.
“He’ll change his mind real quick once I stop paying for that fruity-tutty liberal school of his. Just you watch, Suze,” I overheard him tell my mother in the kitchen. He poured another bourbon and went back to the office.
I was shocked that she didn’t stand up for me. I really thought she would. But she didn’t say anything.
I’m jolted from the memory by the buzz of my phone against my leg. I pull it out of my pajama pants and see a text from Theo: How’s it going at home?
Awful, I text back.
Last year, I went home with Priya for Thanksgiving. Usually, I’d spend the holiday at Hannah’s sister’s, but Hannah and I weren’t speaking. Priya’s mom cooked a feast of tandoori turkey for the meat eaters and a pumpkin and chickpea curry for the vegetarians, but my favorite thing was the masala mashed potatoes. The house was overflowing with people and Priya was treated like a returning hero back from the big city. Especially by her teenage cousins, who were dazzled by the duffel bag of beauty samples she brought for them, freebies sent to her by PR reps in hopes she would write about them. I was awed by how wonderful it must be to belong to so many people. I should have gone with her this year instead of coming here.