Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - By David Sedaris Page 0,14

From Ellis Island, she went to Cortland, New York, a little town in the western part of the state. There, she and her pitiless husband opened a newsstand not much larger than their cash box. What was it like to forfeit your youth? To be illiterate in two languages? To lose every tooth in your head by the age of forty? All I really knew was that Yiayiá loved us. Not in a specific way—she could no sooner name our good qualities than the cat could—yet still we could feel it. I’d occasionally allow her to stroke my hand. All us kids would from time to time, and all of us thought of it as work. Oh, how exhausting it was to let someone adore you.

My Yiayiá was exactly the sort of friend I’d have liked as an adult, someone with an endless supply of hard-luck stories and no desire to ever write a book. At the time, though, she was just an obligation. If I had to go to the social, I figured I might as well get something out of it—hence bringing Delicia. All we’d have to do was walk in holding hands, and the old people would freak out, no one more so than my grandmother. “Who the blackie?” she’d likely ask, for that was the word she continued to use, no matter how often we shouted “Negro” at her.

“I’m not having any part of it,” my mother said.

“So you won’t even give us a ride?”

When she told me no, I accused her of being prejudiced. “You just don’t want your son dating a girl who’s not white.”

She said she didn’t care who I dated but that I was not going to bring this Delicia person to Capital Towers.

“Fine, then, I’ll bring her to church.”

“You’re not bringing her there either,” my mother told me. “It’s not fair to her.”

“You object to anyone who’s not like you!” I yelled. “You’re just afraid your grandchildren will be half black.”

How I’d jumped from dragging some poor girl to a senior citizens’ apartment complex to dating her and then to fathering her children is beyond me now, but my mother, who by then had three teenagers and three more coming right behind them, took it in stride.

“That’s right,” she said. “I want you to marry someone exactly like me, with a big beige purse and lots of veins in her legs. In fact, why don’t I just divorce your father so the two of us can run off together?”

“You’re disgusting,” I told her. “I’ll never marry you. Never!” I left the room in a great, dramatic huff, thinking, Did I just refuse to marry my mother? and then, secretly, I’m free! The part of my plan that made old people uncomfortable, that exposed them for the bigots they were—and on a Sunday!—still appealed to me. But the mechanics of it would have been a pain. Buses wouldn’t be running, so someone would have to drive to the south side, pick up Delicia, and then come back across town. After I’d finished shocking everyone, I’d have to somehow get her home. I didn’t imagine her aunt had a car. My mother wasn’t going to drive us, so that just left my dad, who would certainly be watching football and wouldn’t leave his spot in front of the TV even if my date was white and offered to chip in for the gas. Surely something could be arranged, but it seemed easier to take the out that had just been handed to me and to say that our date was forbidden.

Love seemed all the sweeter when it was misunderstood, condemned by the outside world. The thing about Delicia was that we barely knew each other. Her interest in me was pure conjecture, based not on anything she’d said or done but on my cruel assumption that no one else would be interested in her. Our most intimate conversation took place when I unbuttoned my shirt one afternoon and showed her what I was hiding beneath it: a T-shirt that pictured a male goose mounted, midair, on a female, his tongue drooping from his bill in an expression of satisfied exhaustion. “See”—and I pointed to the words written across my chest—“it says ‘Fly United.’”

Delicia blinked.

“That’s an airline,” I told her.

“You crazy,” she said.

“Yes, well, that’s me!”

On the Monday after the social, I broke it to Delicia that I’d wanted to take her somewhere special but that my parents hadn’t allowed it. “I hate them,”