The Medicine Burns Read Free

responsibility. I’ll tell you how I luridly imagined what happened as a result of this precept: frustrated by my silence, she must have lain awake long after my father had fallen asleep, and some inkling of intuition or suspicion led her to believe that I possessed something that would answer her questions.
    She waited until I left the house before she began a thorough cleaning of my room. She found what she was looking for in my dresser, but she must have turned over several pungent jockstraps, none of which were mine. (At the time I had weekend employment at a Jewish country club where I was as able a locker-room attendant as my mother was a housecleaner.) I’m still disturbed today by her oversight. Had she recognized the use I made of those jocks, she might have been embarrassed from further inquiry. But rummaging further, she found the letter, and it was the letter that enabled her to launch her inquisition without having to imagine a thing.
    She was setting the table for a game of mahjong. Her friends would be arriving in a couple of hours. She was filling ceramic bowls with candy and nuts. When I arrived home, she looked up as though she was startled. Perhaps she was; I’m sure she could not help but to have seen me differently.
    But I saw something had changed in her, too. It was a look of shame that had irrepressibly risen to her surface. It was the shame she had denied by her storytelling.
    â€œDo you want to tell me something?” she asked finally.
    She came around the table and squeezed my arm. “You don’t need to tell me. I’m already well aware,” she said, and pulled the letter from an apron pocket.
    I could easily re-create the argument that ensued, with both of us playing defensively, because arguments around the issue of privacy have never ceased for me, nor have the strategies changed. What I found most compelling was my mother’s insistence that one must “fit in,” that if I chose the life of a homosexual, I would be ostracized, singled out, kept apart.
    And I imagined myself sitting alone on a beach somewhere, sharing my mother’s unvoiced humiliation while a muscle-bound cartoon kicked sand in my face. I said to her, “Perhaps I will have to learn about devils disguised as angels.”
    Curfews were instituted in the belief that homosexuality existed only when practiced. These were desperate measures that I couldn’t be bound by, and I remember pulling up in a car full of friends as the sun rose. My mother would be preparing my breakfast and about to wake me when I would come in the front door, just ready to fall asleep. There were the tedious arguments that never broadened our understanding of each other. And then grudging silences.
    You may wonder what my father’s reaction was to all this. His was an imposing presence wearing massive suits from Big and Tall shops, but beneath the mafia looks and dark glasses, he was really terrified by conflict. He wept when my mother showed him the letter, but refused her suggestion that he have a little talk with me. He was a traveling salesman and I never saw much of him but one day the phone rang. “How are you, Dad?” I asked. His voice was shaky and finally broke on the other end. He asked to speak to my mother. I remember sitting in the kitchen while she spoke to him on the phone.
    â€œYou did what?” I heard her asking. “What are we going to do now?” And finally I heard her say, “Then make an appointment with a psychiatrist and explain to your boss that you can still work while you see him.”
    â€œYour father’s had a nervous breakdown,” she said. “He walked out of a store with the equipment he’d just sold them. They found him placing the cameras in his trunk.”
    His boss had already suspended him from further work until he was fully evaluated by a psychiatrist. I think we all sensed that there was no specific amount of time implied by