Swish by Joel Derfner

Author:Joel Derfner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780767930024
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2008-05-12T21:00:00+00:00

For the next few weeks, Sarah was the only person to show up for my class. “I have to stay out of trouble,” she said one day during hamstring curls. “Stay away from boys, you know?”

“Boys are definitely a lot of trouble,” I said.

“I want to get married, so I have to stay out of trouble.”

“Who do you want to get married to?”

“I don’t know yet. First I have to get well. You know I’m mentally ill, right?”

“Yes. That’s terrific, move your legs exactly like that. You’re doing a great job!”

“I want to stay away from boys, stay out of trouble, so I can get married. I was going out with a boy but it was too much so I stopped. Are you going out with anybody?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you want to marry her?”

I turned to stone.

During the ensuing silence I continued the knee lifts. “Nah,” I said finally.

“Why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’m just not the marrying kind. Move your arms like you’re throwing a basketball. Yes!”

But the thing is, I am the marrying kind. I want desperately to get married (by which I mean married married, not civilly united or domestically partnered or any other modified participial adjective the government might condescend to toss me). Mike and I have spent hours arguing about our theoretical wedding. I want us to get married grandly, wearing morning clothes. I’d book the Basilica di San Marco for the event if I could, but I do not hold out much hope that the Patriarch of Venice His Eminence Angelo Cardinal Scola will be easily won over. Mike, on the other hand, wants to get married in shorts in the middle of the woods. When he revealed this and I asked him, appalled, where our guests would sit, he actually said, “On the beautiful green earth.” The fact that I did not break up with him at once should be taken as an indication of how deeply I care for him.

So how could I paint Sarah a picture in which he was nowhere to be found?

Even as I told myself I was protecting her, I knew it wasn’t true; I was protecting myself. But from what? Did I think she was going to bash me? The medicated mentally ill are statistically no more violent than the general population. Furthermore, even if she had tried to harm me, she was not physically strong enough to do so, and it would have been the work of three seconds to overpower her. We were in a neighborhood known less for its enlightened acceptance of gay people than for its history of race riots, but that had been years before, and besides Sarah was from somewhere else.

Not long after I had started teaching aerobics, a friend interviewing me for a project in her sociology class asked, “Has discomfort with being open about your sexuality ever led you to modify your behavior?”

“Nope, never,” I had answered breezily.

But I realized now that my answer had been a total lie and that in fact I modified my behavior all the time.

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