One of my earliest childhood memories is my father taking me in the evening to Samena Swim & Recreation Club in Bellevue. It was just him and me. I’d taken swim lessons and could hang out by myself with the help of water wings, goggles, and a kickboard while my father swam laps in a nearby lane. I loved the echo in the cavernous room, the way the sounds and voices melded into each other, gurgling, muted, watercolors for the ears. I spun around, did the dead man’s float, watched pale, distorted legs dangle down into the blue. I kept one eye on my dad and another on the pool’s edge, my two sources of safety.
Too young to get changed in the women’s locker room alone, I’d accompany my father to the men’s area. Once my clothes were tugged back over my arms and legs, sticky from inadequate toweling off, dampness seeping through in the creases but warm nonetheless, I’d wait for my father to shower and dress. As I sat there I wasn’t looking anywhere in particular: at the rubber mats on the floor, the slats in the bench, at pale toes like gnarled gingerroots, calves with hair worn off in patches from dress socks, and knees everywhere, those scrunched-up, featureless faces. “Stop staring,” my dad would insist over and over again, sounding admonishing and embarrassed. I kept my head down. Later I realized that this reminder, this reprimand, was likely something my father was saying to himself more than to me. The shame of looking, of wanting to look.
And then there was that time we were pulling the car into the garage and from the backseat I yelled the word “penis” for no reason other than that I was eight years old and at that age it’s fun to call out the words for genitalia in a loud voice. One day I’d come home from kindergarten and repeated a term I’d heard on the playground: “motherfucker two-ball bitch.” Whether it was at my ignorant daring or at the perplexity of the phrase itself, I’m not sure, but my parents laughed. Here I was now going for the encore. But saying “penis” in front of my father, while he was trapped in a car with me, and thus trapped with that word, and whatever he pictured in his mind when he heard that word, whatever feelings he felt about that word, that thing, resulted in me being dragged upstairs and getting my mouth washed out with soap.
Oh, we also received the International Male catalog, a men’s underwear catalog that is essentially a showcase for big European cocks.
Only in retrospect can I find clues to my father’s gayness. Sometimes the dull detritus of our pasts become glaring strands once you realize they form a pattern, a lighted path to the present. I have to turn over and reimagine certain moments from my childhood and make them conform to a different narrative, a different outcome.
When my sister and I were both away at college, my father, still living in the house we grew up in, informed us that he was going to start taking in “boarders.” I imagined something out of a W. Somerset Maugham novel: doilies, stale biscuits, afternoon tea, a collision of international seekers. Except our house was in the suburbs, carpeted, with an open layout, replete with landings and those bulked-up banisters that were good for jumping off when adults weren’t around, or for hide-and-seek stealthiness. The playroom, with its sloped ceiling, old striped couch, and first-generation CD player, would be the “room for rent.” The idea of a boarder seemed odd, even seedy. I was indignant. This was a childhood home, not a hostel!
It wasn’t for financial reasons. My father’s rationale was that the house was unnecessarily big for one person—true. And empty—also true. I suppose he was staving off loneliness. They were always men or college-aged boys. They were unlike my father: One was a snowboarder with beachy, blond hair whose family owned a water sports business. Another was a part-time musician who sold me an Ampeg amplifier head and cabinet that he was storing in the garage. My garage! One man I know nothing about save for the fact that his car was repossessed right there in the driveway. If they had one thing in common it was that all of them were slightly wayward, rough-hewn, jocose. I would occasionally come home on the weekends and no longer feel like the house was a retreat, or even mine—I was simply crashing there like anyone else. There was a new sense of transience to the house, of transition. It was a husk, emptied of sentimentality, populated by strangers, and by that I don’t just mean these men, I also mean my father. I am certain nothing happened between the renters and my dad. The men, the boys, were unaware, in between and on their way. But for my father this was a rehearsal, a way of circling around a new kind of male intimacy.
My father was a corporate lawyer. He went to work in a suit and tie. He had a secretary. He left the house before seven a.m. His professional life felt generic, like a backdrop, a signifier more than a life: office job. I knew very little about what he did. He traveled to China, Russia, Australia, sending home postcards and returning with stuffed koala bears or wooden nesting dolls. He collected toy trucks and paraphernalia with company insignia that he displayed atop credenzas or that my sister and I would grudgingly mix in with our other toys, as if we didn’t want to sully our Cabbage Patch dolls or My Little Ponies with crass corporate sponsorship. My dad had work friends whom we saw infrequently. It was all trousers and ties. Grays and browns. There was a sterility to it that I found both exotic and comforting. The office was in a nineteen-seventies high-rise next to a mall. A swift-moving elevator, a destination we’d reach undeterred, a telephone number I had memorized, a secretary who knew my name.
My father wasn’t just taciturn—it was like he didn’t want to be heard.
I don’t know if he had nothing to say or if he didn’t know what to say. Perhaps his reticence came from not being able to name what or who he was, or what he felt. So he stayed quiet, and he waited for the words to find him.
This is what I knew about my father: He grew up in Evanston, Illinois, outside of Chicago. He attended Duke University and then the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for law school. He has one brother. He was the assistant coach of my soccer team, and the head coach of my sister’s. He ran marathons. He mowed the lawn. He was always working on something called a sump pump in the crawl space. He was slight and handsome, dark-eyed, wide-eyed, wide-nostrilled, looking curious and confounded, boyish. He was stern yet timid, a disciplinarian with no follow-through, self-conscious, not prone to affection, undemonstrative. He liked liver pâté. He had a mustache and then he didn’t; I cried when he shaved it off because I didn’t know he had a space between the bottom of his nose and his upper lip, like a pale secret.
My father was hard to know, and gave little indication that there was much to know. He claimed he remembered almost nothing about his childhood. He only ever recalled one incident. It was about the first time he came home from college on holiday break. He was sitting in his parents’ home, waiting for my grandfather to return from work. When my grandfather came through the door, he greeted the family dog first, even though he and the hound had only been apart for the day and my father had been gone for months. That’s the story.
My father came out to me in the summer of 1998. I was headed to Seattle from Olympia to pick up a friend at the airport. She wasn’t arriving until almost midnight, so the plan was to stop in on my father and then visit some friends after their soundcheck at the Crocodile Café.
My father was at his first apartment in Seattle. He had sold the Redmond house, a nontraumatic event, probably for the best considering it had become a house for wayward youth. I was relieved he was out of the suburbs, especially Redmond, changed so fiercely by Microsoft, transformed into a corporate headquarters, indistinguishable from the brand. It was as though you could see an architect’s model as you walked around; it had an exemplary quality, both a place and a placeholder.
Seattle felt like a good spot for my father. Though he’d been living there for a while now, his apartment had that strange first-apartment feel, always odd for someone you associate with the accumulation of things. Parents are supposed to be our storage facilities: insert a memory, let them hold on to it for you. Leave behind stuffed animals and school projects, report cards and clothes, they keep them so you don’t have to. I knew that wasn’t part of the bargain with my family. I’ve thrown out piles of things, taken them to the dump and never looked back. But still, to see my dad in a blank space, it only seemed to make him more blurry, like he had just appeared on a canvas, before the background was filled in. His sphere was borderless, and the sense of nowhere made me feel alone, unbound. I’d often felt that around my relatives, but now I felt it anew and acutely. Like the first time my dad bought Christmas ornaments and I realized that after wanting to celebrate Christmas for so long, it wasn’t about having a tree, it was about having a box in the basement or attic or garage, something that we could return to over and over again, something that said, this is us and this is where we were last year, and this is where we’ll stay, and this is where we’ll pile on memories, over and over again, until there are so many memories that it’s blinding, the brightness of family, the way love and nurturing is like a color you can’t name because it’s so new. And then my father went out and bought cheap ornaments and we took them out of boxes and plastic and I realized it wasn’t Christmas that I wanted. What I wanted was a family.
So here was my father, in this white apartment with textured walls and thick carpeting, and the scant amount of furniture and paintings he’d brought from Redmond, looking like interlopers, like imposters, neither here nor there. And we’re sitting in this living room and I have no idea who he is and he says, “So I guess I’m coming out to you.” He said it like that, in a sort of meta way, as if he were along for a ride that his new self was taking him on. Which was typical, like he was just a sidekick in his own life, a shadow, though I’m assuming it was more of a linguistic fumbling, not knowing exactly how to come out or what words to use.
I was used to this sort of presentational mode at this point. What I heard was “Your mother is going into the hospital,” or “Your mother is moving out,” or “I have cancer,” and then again a few years later, “I have cancer.” I was used to being sat down and presented with life-altering information and taking it with expected nonchalance. This was me asking my friends’ parents about MS all over again. My role was to be factual and professional, like a reporter. Emotions were not part of the equation. So, tell me, Dad, how did you know?
What my father explained next was basically the history of the Internet, at least in terms of how we use it for social media and networking. In fact, if it weren’t for the Internet, I don’t know if my father would have realized, or been able to acknowledge, that he was gay. I thought of Microsoft taking over Redmond, and now gayness taking over my father.
He began in chat rooms. International ones. Asking questions. Talking with other men, many of them married, he made sure to point out. Eventually, it was U.S. chat rooms, exchanging stories, feelings, desires, telling of trysts and transgressions, confusion, shame, lust. Eventually he was chatting with other men in Seattle. The truth was a satellite, the picture getting clearer, circling and homing in, and then he was close enough to touch it. He met a male nurse named Russ, a friend, someone he could confide in. And there was a Northwest men’s running group. He was allowing the truth to get closer: it was the galaxy at first, then global, then the continent, then local, and finally the shape of him, settling in. I don’t know what that must have felt like, to realize you have a body at the age of fifty-five.
The year before, my father had been diagnosed with cancer for the second time. Kidney. I remembered that right before his surgery he had taken a business trip to Texas. It seemed strange that his company wouldn’t send someone else, that he would insist on traveling so close to the surgery. I passed it off as stoicism, not wanting cancer to interrupt his life or schedule, or just denial. But that night in Seattle he told me that on an earlier trip he had met a couple in Houston, both lawyers, gay. The trip he took right before his surgery was to come out to them. In case he didn’t make it. To strangers. In Texas. He put down a small “x” on a map, a little scrawl of visibility. Then he came home, the doctors removed the cancer, and he had to live. More important, he wanted to.
I took the news better than my sister. She felt abandoned a second time: first my mother, and now this. But I, too, felt confused. If he wasn’t himself during my childhood, then what was my childhood? What was I? When someone says, “That wasn’t me, this is me,” then I wonder how was I myself around a you who wasn’t? My father had been the constant, the territory, and now I felt like he was rescinding. There was no longer a placeholder. I would have to discover him anew.
We want our parents to be the norm from which we deviate. So when my dad came out, my instinct was that I needed to husband-up and get married. As if my family wasn’t freaky enough. Me: adrift. My sister: unmarried. My mom: ? And now my dad. Who would fly the flag of normality? My sister bore this burden more heavily than I did. But I immediately felt like I should be popping out kids within a few years of my dad realizing he was gay. Let our parents be anorexic and gay! That shit is for teenagers. My sister and I would be the adults. We would be conventional, conservative even. Guns, God, country, and my contrarian, reactionary self. (This phase lasted about ten minutes.)
When my father came out to his mom, my grandmother said, “You waited for your father to die, why couldn’t you have waited for me to die?” I knew then that I never want to contribute to the corrosiveness of wanting someone to stay hidden. Despite all my initial conflicts about trying to reconcile the father I had as a child to the one I have now, I am thankful that he is happy, that he did not waste another second. Now there is someone to know.
This essay was excerpted from "Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl: A Memoir," which will be published by Riverhead later this month.
