My mom lets the moment go on, but she looks my dad’s way. Warning? Noticing?
“Okay,” I say.
My dad limps up. He says his ankle is better, but it still seems to pain him, especially during cooler mornings. “Tara na.” Let’s go now. He leans over and kisses my mom on both cheeks. He goes out to his truck.
I pause for my mom to give me her blessing, a quick tracing of her thumb on my forehead. “You talk to your father,” she says. “He’s only stressed right now.”
I don’t know what to say, though, as I get into the front seat of the Tacoma. I don’t know what to apologize for. I do feel different from my parents. I get hints of the country they came from, and my mom did teach me Tagalog.
It’s weird. My dad was the one who worried I might speak bad English if I learned Tagalog. My mom told him it’s good for kids to be bilingual. But now he’s being gung-ho about me being Filipino.
I sit silent, feeling useless and confused.
I might be brown, and I can understand what they say, but I don’t sound like my parents. So much of me is different. So much of me feels like it deserves a name different from the ones they use for themselves. There’s so much of me they don’t know.
I clench the handle of my backpack as my dad drives. We watch the damp, deep green lawns, the little kids at crosswalks, the oak trees towering. He rolls down his window. I know we both smell sea salt, but we don’t say so to each other.
He pauses a couple of blocks from Saint Agatha’s. He always says it’s to avoid the traffic. But I think he doesn’t want to embarrass me with his truck—its clattering lawn mower and paint cans and random lumber in the back.
The truck rumbles. I know this is my chance to say something that will dissolve the sudden tension at breakfast.
“Bless,” he says. He makes a small cross on my head with his thumb. He does it every morning, but it feels quicker today, like he’s tracing quick evidence of his disappointment on the skin of my head.
“Ladies,” Mrs. Scott says, tapping a small pile of worksheets on her lectern.
She’s starting the class in a good mood. I feel my jaw tense.
“Today we’ll talk about something that you daydream about a lot, I’m sure, this Saturday being Valentine’s Day. Hope that always stays a happy holiday for you.”
The class giggles. Mrs. Scott smiles. She has huge, curly, televangelist ’80s hair, blond dyed blonder, and stabby blue eyes. Every day she wears the inch-long wooden cross that also hangs from the necks of the convent sisters who own the school.
I look down at the cover of our Morality textbook, Your Life in God’s Love! The words from the assignment last night splash across my mind like ugly paint. I was too scared to highlight them, but I read them over and over, memorizing them. A distinction must be made between a tendency that can be innate and acts of homosexuality that are intrinsically disordered and contrary to Natural Law.
I’ve seen Mrs. Scott’s car in the parking lot. It’s been a year since the election, but she still has the YES ON PROP 8 (PROTECT MARRIAGE!) sticker on her town car bumper. I see the two same-gender stick figures, crossed out, in the faculty parking lot every time I walk to school in the morning.
“How many of you have started going on dates?” Mrs. Scott asks the class.
The class laughs openly now. A few rows away from me, Rika lifts Melissa’s hand. They share a secret grin with each other, probably thinking about the water polo players from Saint Dominic’s.
“Okay, focus,” Mrs. Scott says. “Another question. How many of you want to get married one day?”
Everyone raises a hand. I scan the classroom for anyone who wants to stay single forever. Or be a nun. Or be free! To date whoever, forever!
Everyone wants marriage. No one wants to be a crossed-out stick figure.
I raise both my hands, panicked, and then I put them both down. Melissa looks at me, looks at Rika, and they smirk.
“All right, of course!” Mrs. Scott says. “Ladies, marriage is one of the most joyful, stressful life transitions a person can endure. It’s also one of the holiest. It’s the foundation of a healthy society.”
With that, Mrs. Scott tells us the story of her two marriages.
Her personal stories are a hallmark of her teaching style. So are the stories of other Saint Agatha’s students too. Unnamed students who had premarital sex; students who came to class smelling like “Mary Jane dope”; “stupid” students who stayed with boyfriends who called them stupid. Students tease each other not to become a Scott story.
Mrs. Scott’s story now is about her first marriage to a man who’d started his own company manufacturing smartphone accessories in some province in China. He’d gotten wealthy really fast, and he was everything Mrs. Scott had imagined in a husband. Taller than she was, also blond, athletic but not too muscle-head huge, and loved to cook. They had fireworks and two live bands at their wedding, which cost about eighteen thousand plastic smartphone cases.
But after just six months, Mrs. Scott used her husband’s laptop and peeked at his browser history.
“I don’t recommend snooping, ladies,” she says, “but sometimes we sin against each other in relationships. My small sin discovered his greater sin.”
He was addicted, she saw, “to a certain kind of obscene movie. Ladies, he just had hundreds of links to these movies. The obscenity. I can’t even—” She shakes her head.
We all look at each other, united for a moment in imagining just what kind of “obscenity” this was. I see a deer and a blond boy on a random page of my Morality textbook. I close the book.
Mrs. Scott got a Church annulment, citing her husband’s “lack of mental capacity.”
Mrs. Scott’s new husband is a plumber and an air conditioner repairman. He came into class on her birthday, bringing a whole cake and an armful of roses. He had dark hair and a mustache and seemed older than she was. He seemed solid, like the kind of white guy my dad would hang out with, or lend his tools to.
“All this is to say, ladies,” she finishes, handing out worksheets, “I had a lot of assumptions about what marriage was supposed to mean, and who my future husband was going to be. I’m giving you this exercise so you can examine assumptions of your own.”
MY PLAN FOR DATING AND FUTURE MATRIMONY
Some of the reasons I date are:
In the future, I want to do the following with my husband:
I think matrimonial love is supposed to:
I’m most worried about my future husband finding out:
I’m most hopeful that marriage will:
I imagine my role as a wife to be:
After completing your answers, review them with a classmate. Discuss:
What does this list tell others about you?
How would your parents read it?
How would a future husband read it?
How would your priest read it?
I turn my black pen cap around and around in my fingers.
Why do my classmates like dating? I see them sometimes at the mall, holding hands with boys from Saint Dominic’s and Oaks Magnus and Thousand Oaks High, sharing cinnamon buns and frozen yogurt and smoothies. So much sweetness. Maybe right now the girls are writing about mall snacks and holding hands. Maybe they’re thinking about the ways they’ve already sinned with boys, becoming Scott stories. Maybe they want a marriage that was better than their divorced parents’. Or maybe the lucky ones are writing that they want a marriage as good as their parents’—like my parents’.