Host: Reflections on Disease, Domesticity, and Decorum
A short story about long silences.
I was tall for my age, and I was wearing heels, so I had to lean over to peer through the window of the front door to see the curb where I normally waited for the school bus with Harley. But it was 93 degrees with 93% humidity, and I had just spent an hour meticulously straightening my hair with a hot iron. I couldn’t risk exposing myself to the elements. And I wasn’t in the mood to meet Harley’s latest snuff porn review with polite indifference. So, I watched for the bus from the civility of our air-conditioned foyer, which my mom and I jokingly pronounced FAW-YAY with a combination of snooty affectation and exaggerated Southern drawl.
I couldn’t make sense of it at first — my dad pulling into the driveway after he’d left for work hours ago. I strained to see the mass of something draped over his arms. What was he carrying? Why was he even here? He never missed a day of work or left early. But when the passenger door opened and Simon emerged, logic fell by the wayside. When my uncle was involved, anything could happen. It was Simon’s life’s work to cause a scene wherever he went, and as an avid traveler, he’d done so in many places.
It‘d been a while since he visited us from his adopted home of Mexico City. As he tells it, he hitchhiked from Alabama to Mexico at fourteen, surviving on his wits and learning Spanish along the way. My mother says that’s a crock of shit. My own memory of Simon always conjures an image of him standing in the dairy aisle, squirting a yet unpurchased can of whipped cream into his mouth. First, throwing his head back to receive the creamy, white projectile mass with the loud aerosol hiss goading him on. Then, throwing his head back again to laugh with maniacal delight knowing everyone within earshot was looking on with disgust, irritation, and disdain. He would relish them all. He was promiscuous with his provocations of abject disapproval from strangers and family alike. He gave zero fucks, and I adored him for it.
Something was shifting its weight in the folds of what I now realized was my dad’s military-issue blanket kept from his Army days. I guess the blanket was still in the trunk from watching fireworks on the cobblestones by the river. Yet my germaphobe dad was clinging it tightly to his chest. Cradling it even. A brown hand glided slowly through the dark green folds. It was Alejandro.
As I opened the door for them, my dad looked slightly startled. The bus was late, and I don’t think he expected me to be home. I don’t think he planned for me to be home. He was never the type of person you would call “relaxed”, and you could attribute his general skittishness to his intense nicotine addiction. But this was something else. It didn’t fit into any of the categories of agitation my uncle could have provoked during a twenty-minute trip from the airport. As our eyes met, I could see it clearly. It was fear. Not nicotine withdrawal, not anger, but fear.
Alejandro’s other hand and then his face emerged from the folds. It had to be him because he was the only friend Simon ever brought on his visits to Memphis. He didn’t speak English but had endeared himself to the family on previous visits with his warm smile or maybe just his patient tolerance of our uncle, who was so intent on being intolerable. But his face was now just an outline of my memory of it circumscribed by its underlying bone structure.
They passed over the worn doormat that now read WE___ME. My dad, still carrying Alejandro in his arms, walked through the foyer and den and towards the smell of vanilla and clove that filled the guest room. My uncle sauntered behind with his years of ballet training perceptible in his graceful gait. As Alejandro was carefully laid on the crocheted bedspread, he turned to me with his familiar and warm smile that radiated gold against the lavender walls splashed with morning sun. But the rest of his face was familiar in a new way that I struggled to reconcile. I traced the hollow cheekbones beneath his sunken eye sockets situated in a form more evocative of a memento mori than my memory of him. I realized now that it was the face of men I’d seen staring out from the screen of the television under recent headlines about “gay cancer.” I took special note of these and any other news clips that covered topics discussed in our home in only hushed voices: gay, cancer, sex, Jewish, Black, poor, divorced, feminist, fat.
The blanket fell to the white carpeted floor. In a house full of wall-to-wall white carpet, there was no margin for error. My dad hastily retrieved the blanket and headed for the walk-in closet. He folded it in half, then in half again and again, making it smaller each time, hoping it would disappear, knowing my mother would later declare it was wrong while folding it correctly. He placed it on a shelf in the back anyway, past the dolls my sister and I no longer played with, past our first communion dresses, past the quilts our grandmother had sewn with the skilled care of an Army nurse, past the Hustler magazines my dad thought were well hidden, past the gaping silence that seeped in from the guest room.
When my dad emerged from the solace of the closet, my uncle was sitting on the bed next to Alejandro, who was now sleeping. No words were exchanged. But we all read between the lines on each other’s faces. We all knew that the purplish lesions on Alejandro’s skin signaled a death sentence. The damage had been done, and his own body was betraying him through magnitudes of multiplication, through unknown mechanisms.
Simon stared at the crystal bowl of potpourri resting on a lace doily on the night table. A few dried rose petals had been sprinkled next to the bowl for whimsical flair, one of my mother’s special touches that she took delight in imagining our guests noticing. Hand towels generously trimmed with satin and pearlescent soaps shaped like seashells didn’t go unnoticed as much as unused for fear that they were strictly for decoration. I wasn’t sure if Simon was noticing the potpourri or just staring at it.
The doorbell rang, breaking the silence with its ostentatious Westminster Chimes. It was supposed to lend an air of elegance to our suburban home, but the lengthy sequence allowed ample time to scrutinize each technologically generated note for authenticity. It wasn’t fooling anyone, least of all itself.
DING
DONG
DING
DONG
D1NG
D0NG
D1NG
D0NG
Peering through the front door, I could see the school bus idling behind Harley’s sweaty face as he yelled through the glass, “Bus is here.” He disappeared behind the thick fog of breath his words left on the window.
Heading to the curb, my heel snagged a bit on the worn doormat that now read ∃w___∃M. As we climbed the stairs of the bus, Harley asked, “What do you call a homo on a skateboard?” I pretended I didn’t hear him. Catching a sulfurous whiff of my burnt hair, I opened the window next to my seat and wondered what existed beyond the primordial ooze of the unforgiving school bus, beyond a palpable shame enveloped in whispers and silence. I wondered if my mother’s Southern hospitality had limits and if Simon and Alejandro would still be there when I got home.
