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Of course, Jackson and I didn’t go. Going with anyone besides each other was impossible; going together was a bridge too far even for us.
We watched our classmates, paired up boy-girl, boy-girl, marching solemnly with subdued excitement up to the gymnasium. The last to arrive were Rio and his girlfriend, Victoria. She was wrapped in yards of ruffles and tulle—her aunt was a set designer at the community theatre two towns over. Rio, boldly, was wearing his grandfather’s zoot suit from the 1940s. Shockingly yellow, it featured high-waisted, wide-legged, tight-cuffed, pegged trousers and a long coat with wide padded shoulders and still wider lapels. On his head, crowning his now-slicked-down hair, was a broad-brimmed yellow hat.
Once everyone was inside, we retreated to the fields that ringed the high school and watched the lights, listened to laughter and music: Andy Gibb’s “I Just Want to Be Your Everything,” K.C. and The Sunshine Band’s “I’m Your Boogie Man,” and Natalie Cole’s “I’ve Got Love on My Mind,” which really drew the rulers into action, we imagined.
Saturday, June 25, 1977, Locust Hollow—Graduation was yesterday. My grandfather didn’t attend. Neither did my brothers.Today,Mr. Fabricant, as is his tradition, had the senior class at his house—an immaculate two-story cottage placed in the middle of an acre of pristine green lawn and bordered in the back by a neat row of apple trees—for a picnic to celebrate our graduation. Mr. Fabricant asked me to help him bring out the homemade sausage and hamburgers for the grill. On the way to the kitchen, I spied his living room, full of plump, white velvet sofas like clouds sealed in clear plastic with gold-colored plastic trim. The tall, iridescent white lamps dripping crystals were capped with tall, white shades wrapped in cellophane. Plastic runners crisscrossed the white shag carpeting like highways through fields of white corn. The wall behind the sofa was mirrored; the other three walls were upholstered in crushed red velvet. It was the most beautiful and pristine room I’d ever seen. I vowed one day I would live in a house like it while I avoided my classmates’ curious stares and waited anxiously for Jackson to arrive.
Unable to stop him from attending altogether, Reverend Jack had settled for delaying Jackson’s arrival as long as possible to decrease his exposure to Mr. Fabricant’s radical ideas and encouragement of free thinking. Reverend Jack didn’t approve of Mr. Fabricant encouraging his students to leave Locust Hollow and find their places in the larger world any more than he appreciated Mr. Fabricant’s exhortation to examine the beliefs they’d been taught and to discard those beliefs as necessary.
Thursday, August 18, 1977, Locust Hollow—The hallway outside our only bathroom stank of Hai Karate cologne, my clue that my grandfather was going out with one of the severalchurch widows he was making time with. Usually, these dates occurred on Friday and Saturday evening, but the stench was unmistakable and positive proof he had a date.
My grandfather is neither good-looking nor particularly clean and certainly without any discernable charm; still, he’s made his way through the widows in the church choir and is now at work on the deaconesses. I guess a man shared is better than no man at all.
Anyway, I knew he was going out and my brothers were already in bed, so it was an opportunity to spend time with Jackson. I called him. We had a signal system set up: when one of us wanted to talk or see the other, one of us would call the other and let the phone ring once then hang up. The other would then call back if it was safe.
We were forced to make love in the dark; we felt like we were dancing in the moonlight.He goes with boys, they whispered about each of us, and we hadn’t cared. My brothers—that pigeon-shooting, puppy-drowning, football-throwing legion of assholes—discovered Jackson and me in the barn,in medias res, at our most vulnerable and defenseless.
My brothers stared at us agog, twittering and giggling, the looks on their faces as difficult to decipher as the sounds they made. My brothers don’t speak; instead, they utter a series of shrieks and squawks that vary in pitch and volume, but which are uniformly rhythmic and repetitive, from morning to night. At times, their emissions are quite prolonged and dramatic, making me think they are singing an opera, but instead of French or German, they are singing in a language of their own making.
As Jackson struggled to get dressed under their wide-eyed stares like spotlights, he shouted, “I thought you said they were in bed.”
“Theywere,” I said, struggling to dress myself. “Get out of here,” I shouted at my brothers. “Go back to bed.” When they stood still staring, I chased them away with a certain violent gesture and a shout as guttural as the sounds they make.
By the time my grandfather returned, Jackson was safely away, and my brothers and I were in bed. I hoped for sleep, which eluded me until the early hours.
Friday, August 19, 1977, Locust Hollow—Jackson and I hadn’t spoken since he rushed away yesterday, after my brothers caught us in the barn, so I was anxious to see him at work today.
Jackson works at Lewisohn’s like I do, but while I work the sales floor and the registers, he works as the “receiver”—unloading deliveries and sweeping and mopping and cleaning the bathrooms. So, we don’t work together, but Mr. Lewisohn lets us take our breaks together. We don’t know if he’s oblivious to the rumors about us or if, as the lone Jews in Locust Hollow, he and his bookkeeper wife are inclined to cut us some slack since we share the same pain of exclusion.
Jackson was pacing in the breakroom when I arrived. “Sunday is gonna be a shitshow,” he said.
I shrugged. “It always is. They’ll pray over us, put their hands on us. They’ve done it before.”
“They’re gonna send us to camp,” he blurted, pausing in his perambulations.
“Camp?”
“In the mountains! They’ll make us sleep outside and pump our own water.”
“Huh?”
“They’re going to send us to a camp to make us straight.” He began pacing again.
“What? That’s just stupid,” I said.
“They’re gonna do it!”
“How do you know this?” I asked. He stopped in front of me.
“My mother told me. I don’t think she meant to. It just sort of slipped out.”
His mother, Esther, is a thin wan woman who always walks behind her husband; she is little more than his wife, an obligation or maybe an expectation. She follows behind Reverend Jack like an early morning shadow and is as insubstantial; she offers little comfort to Jackson and none to anyone else.
“Your brothers ratted us out.”
“How? They don’t speak.”
“Apparently, they do. Maybe that gibberish they speak is some sort of secret language only they and your grandfather understand—I don’t know—but they told your grandfather, and he went to my father, who now wants to send us both to that camp.”
