I'll Love You When You're More Like Me. M.E. Kerr

looks are unreal.

      Mrs. Gilhooley’s idea of dinner is a paper plate swimming in SpaghettiOs, with a Del Monte peach half in heavy syrup thrown in for variety. The Gilhooleys live in a ranch house on half an acre up in Inscape, near the bay, and Mr. Gilhooley has crammed the yard with old cars, front seats of old cars, assorted old tires, a boat which no longer floats, rusted lawn mowers and broken garden tools, and an American flag, on a pole with the paint peeling off it, which has been raised one time only and never lowered. It flies on sunny days, in hurricanes and through the Christmas snows, a tattered red-white-and-blue thing that must resemble the rag Francis Scott Key spotted after the bombardment of Fort McHenry.

      I won’t describe the inside of the Gilhooley house. It’s enough to say that it was one of life’s little miracles that Charlie came out of that pit every day looking more like someone leaving one of the dorms of the Groton School for boys than someone leaving something that long ago should have been condemned by the Sanity and Sanitation Committee.

      I think Charlie regrets having emerged from his closet, even though long before he did he was called all the same names, anyway. Charlie told me once: “You can make straight A’s and A+ ’s for ten years of school, and on one afternoon, in a weak moment, confess you think you’re gay. What do you think you’ll be remembered as thereafter? Not the straight-A student.”

      My father has an assortment of names for Charlie: limp wrist; weak sister; flying saucer; fruitstand; thweetheart; fairy tale; cupcake, on and on. He never calls Charlie those names to his face, naturally; to Charlie’s face, my father is always supercourteous and almost convivial. After all, everybody’s going to die someday, including the Gilhooleys; why make their only son uncomfortable and throw business to Annan Funeral Home?

      Whenever my mother told me we were having corned beef and cabbage for dinner, I usually asked Charlie over that night. It was his very favorite meal. He crooned and swooned over the anticipation of it every time, just as he was doing that night in my bedroom.

      “Oh, and the way your mother does the cabbage,” he was saying, “not overdone, just crisp and with some green still in it, butter melting off it—” et cetera. Charlie can do a whole number on a quarter of a head of cabbage.

      I was sitting there fondling the gold cuff bracelet, trying to figure out what to do with it, since there was no summer phone listing, no listing at all for Sabra St. Amour. She probably had an unlisted number; a lot of the summer people from New York City did.

      I was also watching Charlie and wishing I was his height (6’3½”) and had his deep blue eyes and thick golden hair. The Lord gives and the Lord takes. I wouldn’t like Charlie’s high-pitched, sibilant voice, nor his strange, small-stepped, loping walk. When you first see Charlie walk, you think he’s into an impersonation of someone, or doing a bit of some kind, but he’s not. The walk is for real.

      Charlie says ever since the movies and television have been showing great, big, tough gays, to get away from the stereotype effeminates, he’s been worse off than ever before. “Now I’m supposed to live up to some kind of big butch standard, where I can Indian-wrestle anyone in the bar to the floor, or produce sons, or lift five-hundred pound weights over my head without my legs breaking.”

      “‘The media is trying to make it easier for your kind,” I argued back.

      “They’re trying to make it easier for those of my kind who most resemble them,” Charlie said.

      My sister, A. E., came into my room just as Charlie was finishing his drooling over the cabbage with the butter melting on top. She said, “Forget it. The menu’s changed.”