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Angetevka: Festooned Felicities

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Despite not having seen Bill for over twenty years, I am perfectly comfortable standing with him in his bedroom where a pair of glitzy, bejeweled, bling-bling silver handcuffs hang from the bedpost. We were friends in high school over thirty years ago, and he, too, moved to New York City out of college. Twenty years ago, I attended an Easter party downtown where he lived with his then-wife, also a friend and former classmate. Yet even with the passage of time, Bill feels familiar, a piece of my former apple-strudel home in this bagel-with-a-shmear big city.

“Does your dad still have that old, big, black limousine?” is one of the first questions Bill asks me.

“Yes, of course. Who would give up his old, big, black limousine?”

“I loved that car. “ His tone is not ironic; it is reverential.

There’s no accounting for taste.

Another couple comes into the bedroom and Bill introduces me and they ask how long I’ve known him.

“Over 30 years,” I answer.

Bill interjects, “I went out with her sister.”

“You’re kidding!”

The reason they are so shocked is because Bill is gay. They never knew him to be with a woman.

Growing up one of eight kids in our staunchly Catholic and rigidly German, southern-Indiana town, Bill tells me about the time he brought home his ex-boyfriend. He was shopping in a store and he thinks that the proprietor, whom he knew, didn’t realize that he was with a man. “She saw that I was with someone who was black and had two earrings, and that was bad enough – I could tell that she didn’t even consider the possibility that this person was a man. They have blinders on there. They see what they want to see.” Bill turns to my husband and says, “You know, I can imagine how the German people refused to see what was happening during the Holocaust. I don’t mean to minimize it, and obviously it’s not the same thing, but it’s the mentality…the blinders,” he finishes. My husband nods. He’s been to Jasper, Indiana. He understands a community for whom denial is not a dirty word. Personally, I still think there’s a lot to be said for sweeping things under the carpet. Some things are too harsh to be examined in the daylight.

The morning after Bill’s holiday party, I call my sister, Liz. I tell her, “I forgot that you had dated.”

“I think he just liked me because of that old black limousine.”

“Oh, my God, that’s the first thing he asked me!”

“You see.”

“Did you ever think, Liz, that you went out with a guy who turned out to be gay…”

“Two,” she interrupts, correcting me.

“Oh, I forgot about Woody,” I say. “And do you realize that I went to the prom with a guy who later came out as gay? Was it us?”

“I don’t think so,” she laughs.

She’s probably in denial.

That evening, I stop off at my friend Lili’s house on the Upper West Side. She’d called earlier to say that I have to see her house. “It’s decorated like the White House for Christmas!”

“Like the White House?” I’d asked.

She explained that her housekeeper, Rose, had volunteered at the White House to decorate it for Christmas, a very prestigious gig, and one that she’d trained for. Rose had spent five days working ten hours a day to gussy up the White House. She was driven there every day by former advisor to Bill Clinton, Vernon Jordan, who is the employer of Rose’s friend, who was another of the volunteers. One day, one of the security people asked the African-American Mr. Jordan if he was the driver and he graciously concurred, yes, I’m the driver. Gotta watch out for gate crashers.

That night, I arrive at Lili’s house and ring the bell, admiring the impressively beautiful, lavishly-wrought wreath on the door. “You have to see this!” Lili greets me. Her personality is such that she finds joy and wonder in even the most mundane things – parallel parking with Lili at the wheel is an adventure. “Look, see how festooned it is!” Indeed, greenery in which are nestled pine cones and fake red berries and gold bows creep up the banisters and surround the insides of the doorways and drape across the mantles atop the fireplace. Big, sparkly gold ribbons are tied at the edges, and frosted silver bulbs hang from the door frames. The Christmas tree is fat and tall and scrapes the ceiling. It, too, is decorated to within an inch of its life.

“It’s like how you grew up,” Lili says. “Like in Santa Claus, Indiana.” Santa Claus is a small town a few miles from Jasper that I’ve mentioned to Lili in the past. My sister, Mary, lives there, and the town is festooned like nobody’s business over Christmas, with lights dangling and hanging and covering and decorating, with a 52 foot Christmas tree in the middle of the village that comes to life at the top of the hour and twinkles and spirals. The village is sectioned off in themes, with the story of Grinch, and the story of Rudolph and the Polar Express on display in lights and figures… It’s quite something, a bright and hopeful wonderland. The town of Santa Claus answers, with the help of volunteer elves, over 30,000 letters from children over the holidays. My sister, Mary, told me that she thinks she was one of Santa’s elves in 7th grade. The history teacher brought the class a box of letters, and the students had to stuff and address them. “I didn’t know I was an elf!” she said.

“I didn’t grow up with Christmas,” I point out to Lili now.

“You didn’t? Why not?”

“Pagan.”

“You mean Christmas wasn’t Jesus birthday?”

“Nope.”

“So when was his birthday?”

“Scholars think it was probably in September, around the time of the autumn equinox,” I reply.

“Like, maybe September 18th?” Lili squints her eyes thoughtfully, and I laugh because I know that’s her birthday.

“But you were Christian, right?” Lili, perplexed, asks me later when we’ve sat down and I’ve finished ooh-ing and ahh-ing over Rose’s Presidential handiwork.

“Yeah, of course,” I say. My background is confusing, even to my close friends, because who wouldn’t assume that being Christian equals celebrating Christmas and Easter and going to church on Sunday, none of which my family did. Nor would they understand growing up in a community in which every family, except yours, is Catholic or Lutheran, and everyone was a Rose, exhibiting crèches of the baby Jesus, with life-sized displays of Santa and his reindeer scampering across their front yards. Yet, not only did I believe that Christmas was pagan, I also thought it was probably demonic – pagan and demonic were synonymous as far as I was concerned. And so I avoided saying Merry Christmas and lived in fear of anyone saying it to me, lest I had to respond and perhaps incur God’s wrath. God’s wrath was easily incurred. It was not something you took lightly.

But I don’t go into any of that with Lili because it’s the holidays, and I am okay with people seeing what they want to see, because you know, it’s really hard to see or understand what’s outside of our experience.

Finally, at the end of the evening, Lili and I sit at the kitchen table with her teenage daughter and stepdaughter, and the conversation turns to the subject of hurtful words and the importance of being aware that innocuous remarks might be offensive to others. Her stepdaughter says that when people toss off something like, “You must be adopted!,” meant as an insult, it hurts her feelings because she is, in fact, adopted. We all chime in with the common things that people say and which, unwittingly, might strike a sad or uncomfortable chord in others.

Calling someone a retard – what if their brother or sister or someone in their family is mentally handicapped? Saying “You’re so gay!” in a pejorative manner – hey, guess what, maybe they are. I confess that I once asked someone when her baby was due, but it turned out she wasn’t pregnant. I was in an elevator and it was a really long ride to the sixth floor. I’ve also become sensitized to not asking anyone if they have children – first of all, it’s not my business, and second, if they don’t, it’s possible that they have tried and it hasn’t happened, and so my question is simply rubbing salt in the wound. Basically, we all agree that it’s best to talk about the weather, and otherwise keep your mouth shut, which is not in my personality whatsoever, but is something I aspire to.

It’s ever so human to believe that our observations are correct, and that the other person shares our world view, our likes and dislikes. That presumption makes us feel perfectly comfortable leading with our mouths, not editing ourselves. Teachers assume that their students won’t mind being an elf, even if it is in opposition to their religious beliefs; storekeepers assume that a man must have brought home a woman, albeit one with very short hair and two earrings; teenage girls believe their prom dates are straight. Security guards see a black man driving a car and assume he is a chauffeur.

Here’s the thing about blinders: You have to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, you have them on before you can take them off.