She worked at the Starbucks inside the Target and at the animal shelter, and between those two jobs she was still barely able to pay our ever-increasing rent. For her, the mansions that encroached daily were a constant reminder that her life was untenable, and that, as she rapidly approached fifty, she had nothing to show for her labors and would soon be forced to move to a less nice (read: less white) part of the city. She was holding on as long as possible, determined to get her son through high school in the good, rich town before collapsing.
I shared a bedroom with her son, Jason, an effortlessly masculine and unreflective sort, who was neither bad nor particularly good, and who often farted in answer to questions addressed to him. How he always had a fart ready to go was a mystery to me, but I knew that if I became annoying enough to him, he would complain to his mother so persistently that it would leave her little choice but to evict me.
When my mother had been released from prison for good behavior after serving only two years of her sentence, my sister moved back in with her while I had remained with Aunt Deedee under the pretext that my mother could not “handle” both of us, though whether on a financial or an emotional level was always vague. It was easy for her and my sister to share a queen-size futon in her tiny studio apartment, but where would they put me, with my adolescent male body? It was as if they were afraid that when they opened a cupboard my secret erections would all come tumbling out.
There was a further bizarre line of reasoning that because I was the same age as Jason, but slightly smaller of build, I could wear his hand-me-downs, thus making my upkeep “practically free.” It “just made sense.” It was “easier for everyone.” While I did nurse this rejection by my mother and sister as a core psychic wound upon which my entire personality was founded, I also breathed a sigh of relief. As much as I wanted my mother to want me to live with her, I didn’t want to actually live in that tiny, airless studio apartment, and I think I even told Aunt Deedee as much.
Really, I suspected there was another reason I remained with my aunt, and it was because almost immediately upon her release my mother had taken up with a new boyfriend who was so exactly like our father it was comical, and Aunt Deedee and I both knew without having to ask or look for clues (the first time I met him he was wearing a shirt that said CONQUER YOUR INNER BITCH; who needed to know more?) that he was probably homophobic. While I had never come out to my aunt, one day in ninth grade, when I had been struggling in the bathroom, she came in and said, “If you are going to wear eyeliner, let me at least teach you how to put it on so you don’t look like a sad clown.” And she had taken the cheap black pencil I had purchased at Rite Aid, explained to me that it was useless, and opened her own makeup bag to me, showing me all of its wonders: tiny arched brushes and tubes and palettes of colors and primers and luminizing sticks and other products I had never heard of. “Go to a MAC store,” she told me. “They’ll love you in there, sweetie.”
Her sympathy did not extend to my septum piercing, which she said made me look like a cow. “A bull,” I pointed out. “At least it’s a boy cow!” But she tolerated it and me, though I did not want to test this tolerance, which I intuitively felt was jerry-rigged from moment to moment, a rope tossed casually to me as she rushed from one shift to another, yelling over her shoulder, “I think there might be tater tots, make something.”
But whenever I went over to see my mother and Gabby, Aunt Deedee would examine me, inspect me. She would make me turn in a circle. Sometimes she would suggest I change my shirt. If I had dared to wear eyeliner, she would tell me to take it off. She requested that I put my hair back in a gross ponytail that made me look like I bred iguanas. But it made me look less gay.