let the wild rumpus (of rewriting) start
“Now, Samuel,” Uncle Lenny said soberly, taking another bite of coffee cake, “when are you and Alice going to get married?”
Sam just sighed. He’d been having this conversation—in some form or another—his entire adult life, and it was starting to become exhausting. “Well,” he began, before being cut off by a shout from his mother in the kitchen.
“Alice is a lesbian, Leonard! I already told you!”
Sam had to repress a laugh at his mother’s newly-discovered frankness on the subject. For a long time, it had been something they talked in circles around, when they talked about it at all. It wasn’t that his mother didn’t love Alice; he knew she did. There were still pictures of him and Alice all over his mother’s house: the two of them with knowing smiles, dressed in their best for their senior prom, or slouching coolly on stage together at one of their gigs. And he’d seen how his mother had taken Alice into her arms on that summer night just after graduation, when Alice had turned up on their porch, shattered from what had happened with her parents. It had been the end of Mrs. Cohen’s dreams, too, that night. But she’d held in her disappointment in favor of comforting Alice, who was still the daughter she’d never had, even if she’d never be her daughter-in-law.
But whether or not his mother still loved Alice wasn’t really the issue; it was the fact that he still did, all these years later, and everyone knew it. There’d been some hope for him, or so his mother had thought, in those few weeks last year when the two of them had lived apart. But then he’d ended up following her anyway, right from their cramped studio over the bar into the shotgun in Mid-City Alice had leased with the intention of…
Anyway, it hadn’t worked out, Alice’s plan. And she’d needed him; so he’d gone, even though his mother had strongly cautioned him against it. Because the truth was that he needed her, too. Ultimately, his mother had come to accept it, if only as a temporary living arrangement. But ever since then, she’d taken a marked interest in reminding him—reminding all of them, really—of the cold, hard facts of the situation. It had become his mother’s new favorite word: lesbian. And she uttered it with such an affected emphasis, letting that first syllable linger as it dragged it’s way across his consciousness.
Alice is a lesbian.
As if he needed reminding.
