The Paisley Sheep

“Hey, Frank, you coming home for Christmas this year?” My father’s gruff Bronx accent made him sound like a truck driver who smoked three packs a day. In reality, he was the CFO of a shipping company and hadn’t touched tobacco since he gave it up for Lent in 1975.

“Oh, yeah, you got to come home.” My mother’s Bronx accent was more self-consciously hoity-toity. Kind of like Joy Behar. “Your father already made his first batch of Pignolata.”

Pignolata (pronounced PEEN-yo-LOT-tah) is a traditional Sicilian dessert served at Christmastime—little tumors of deep-fried dough that are so tough they could snap a molar. These suspicious little lumps are then laminated in honey. I’ve been told that as a kid, I loved the stuff and would eat it by the sticky fistful. I have no memories of this and suspect it is a family myth. As an adult, I think Pignolata tastes like overly sweetened kibble.

My parents were trying to coax me home for the holidays and their lead selling point was something that tasted like honey-covered dog food. This was not entirely ineffective. The gesture was pleading and out-of-step in a way that made it kind of adorable.

“And I’m gonna make Cannoli,” my dad said. “And Anisette Biscotti. And Reginelle Cookies.” My paternal grandfather owned a bakery on 222nd Street in the Bronx and my dad grew up working there. He loved to bake and it delighted my father to make treats for the family. “I got a recipe from Uncle Mario for those Amaretti Cookies you like so much.”

He was really pulling out the stops.

“You gotta come home this year,” my mother said.

Here’s the thing: My parents weren’t really inviting me. Not the whole of me. They were only inviting the parts they approved of.

I was not the son my parents expected. That was my older brother, a diehard Giants fan who made the dean’s list at John Carroll University, a good Jesuit school in Ohio. He married a cheerleader, had four kids (all of whom were so freaking cute I couldn’t stand it) and became a successful businessman. I’m pretty sure my parents half-expected a black sheep would come after such a goodie-goodie. Instead, they got me. I was not a black sheep because black was far too basic. I was the paisley sheep of the family. John and Jeanette DiPalermo, two devout Italian Catholics from the Bronx, didn’t know where to begin with that.

~

My father was fond of saying that homosexuals just weren’t natural, a tidbit of misinformation he quoted loudly and often. In fact, homosexuality has been observed in over 1,500 species including mammals, birds, reptiles, insects, and invertebrates. But my father had never been one to let facts influence his opinions. “Things just do not fit, if you understand what I’m trying to impart,” he would say. Another fiction. After having lived more years than I care to admit as an unapologetic homosexual, I can tell you for a fact that things do indeed fit.

My mom always wanted to know how the gays decided who was going to be the woman and who was going to be the man. “Only God is supposed to decide those things,” she often said.

At this point I’d feel compelled to point out the obvious. “Mom, Dad, you realize you’re talking about me, right?”

“Has it ever occurred to you that you might be possessed by the demon of homosexuality?” my mom would want to know. “If you ever wanted to try an exorcism, I know some people.”

This seemed like a good idea to my father. “You should consider it, son. If you got a demon, you want to expunge it.”

So, my parents wanted me to exorcise my homosexuality, which is a lot like saying, Frank, we love you but your right arm is disgusting. Would you mind sawing it off? You can keep it in a cooler in the garage and sew it back on when we’re not around, but we don’t want to see it.

It’s not that I had to pretend I was straight when I was around them. I just had to pretend I wasn’t queer. Which meant I had to tiptoe around ten-thousand subjects: who my friends were, how I spent my time, politics, God, every meaningful thing, including the most meaningful of all, my husband. The only way my parents would accept him into their home was if he and I pretended to be roommates. This was something I wasn’t willing to do. Not shockingly, a certain distance developed between me and my folks.

But I still loved them. And they loved me. Well—they loved all of me aside from the part that wanted to sleep with men. What’s hilarious, ironic, and tragic all at once is that the queerest aspects of myself (apart from who I wanted to boink) were what they most admired. They were amazed that I was a writer, that I could spend hours and hours trying to coax words, sentences, and paragraphs to line up in a way that made strange music. But they failed to notice that the melody I produced had a decidedly lavender hue. They were amused that I was an inveterate nature-boy who could spend entire days hiking the rolling hills surrounding their house. But they never understood that the outdoors was my only solace when I was a queer kid trapped in a violently intolerant suburb. They found me easy to talk to and told me secrets they wouldn’t trust anyone else with (including each other). But they never realized that my capacity for empathy was a fortuitous side effect of growing up in such a hostile environment.

That last paragraph makes it sound like the heartache of being a gay youth in a homophobic town is the reason for the qualities my parents embraced. This isn’t wrong but it’s only partly right. Even if I was born into a family and a world that accepted my queer self with open arms, I’d still have a different perch on a different branch. My queer mind and queer heart have queered my creativity, queered my love of nature, and (most importantly for what you’re about to read) queered my listening.

That same queered listening picked up on a note of desperation from my parents. They wanted me home for the holidays. Bad.

So, I went.

~

They’d long ago moved from the Bronx to the East Bay in Northern California. I flew into Oakland Airport and they were waiting for me in baggage claim—Dad in his striped cardigan and newsboy cap, Mom in her maroon winter coat and floral scarf.

Mom looked different. Skinnier. Drawn. But she mentioned she was on a diet. I chalked it up to that.

“We thought we’d take you to that Italian restaurant you like on the way home,” my father said as he seized control of my carryon. “The one with the Calamari Dalmatino.”

“Sounds great,” I said. “But I’m not ordering the calamari. I think I’m getting allergic. The last couple of times I ate it, it made me sick.”

“Last week I got sick after eating calamari,” my mother said. “The week before that it was risotto with shrimp. Before that it was your father’s Chicken Cacciatore, but he always puts in too much prosciutto and pine nuts. Makes it so rich.”

It struck me as odd that Mom could rattle off so many instances of being sick. But she’d always been prone to indigestion. And she was over seventy. Weren’t stomachs supposed to get touchy as people aged? Wasn’t that an expected thing along with liver spots and droopy jowls?

I’ll tell you what, no stomach ailments bothered her the day I arrived. She and Dad shared the Calamari Dalmatino that I didn’t order. After that she had shrimp scampi. Then Tiramisu for dessert. During the entire time I visited, Mom ate like a true Italian, which is to say passionately—Crab Cioppino on Christmas Eve, a ham on Christmas day, all those desserts my father made.

I came back to San Diego the day after Christmas.

On January 2nd Dad called. Mom was in the hospital. She couldn’t keep anything down. Stomach cancer. I went back to the East Bay as soon as I could.

~

The doctors infused my mother with a type of chemo that was so nasty they immediately put her on massive doses of morphine so she’d sleep through the worst of its side effects. During the two days she was knocked out, they discovered her cancer was worse than they’d realized. Much worse. Further chemo would be pointless, so they decided to do the compassionate thing which was, well, nothing. Since she couldn’t eat, her death would come pretty quick. This course of action made sense to the docs. It made sense to my father. It made sense to my brother. It made sense to me. There was just one problem. No one told my mother.

When I got to Alta Bates hospital in Oakland, I found her propped up in a hospital bed. She’d only just surfaced from the morphine depths and was still bleary-eyed. She was also confused. She didn’t understand why she wasn’t going home.

Her doctor came in, listened to her stomach with a stethoscope, made a few notes, and left. My father doted on her, dabbed her parched lips with a moist Q-tip, put warm compresses on her forehead, but he said nothing about her condition. My brother sat at her bedside, held her hand, kissed her cheek. But he didn’t talk about her cancer. At one point, there was a whole crowd of people in her hospital room—family, friends from the neighborhood, people from church, everyone talking about this person’s new grandchild, that person’s new job, another person’s gallbladder surgery, everything except the fact that my mother was going to die.

Eventually, my brother went back to work, my dad went home for a shower and a nap, and Mom’s friends went back to their lives. That left me and Aunt Bernice to hang out with my mom.

Aunt Bernice was my father’s sister and her accent was even thicker than his. She was famous for her delicious meatballs and heart-stopping bluntness. She sat on one side of my mother’s bed, I sat on the other, and my mother dozed between us.

“Your mom needs to know she’s dying,” Aunt Bernice said in a whisper that I’m pretty sure could have been heard on the Alkali Flats of New Mexico. Somehow, Mom didn’t wake. “The poor woman is bewildered.” 

  “I keep thinking Dad, or my brother John, or the doctor, or the priest, one of those people will do it,” I said.

“Well, they’re not, Frank.” Aunt Bernice sounded accusatory as hell. She always sounded accusatory as hell. “So, it’s up to us.” 

My mom stirred, opened her eyes. Then she started to vomit. She did that a lot. My aunt held one of those kidney-shaped bowls under her chin. I gently wiped her mouth when she was done. It wasn’t so bad. And it was the worst thing in the world.

Mom’s glassy green eyes turned toward us. “Am I dying?”

Aunt Bernice lunged at her. “Oh, no! Jeanette, you’ll be fit as a fiddle in no time. You watch!”

I wanted to lie too. You’re going to be fine, I wanted to say. You’ll be going home soon. The house is full of flowers. I even wanted to say, I’ll pretend to be your straight son if you want. 

Instead, I put my hands on Aunt Bernice’s shoulders and gently moved her out of the way. “Yeah, Ma. You’re dying. The cancer is worse than the doctors thought. There’s nothing they can do. Nobody mentioned how much time you have left, but you’re not eating. It can’t be long.”

My mother nodded. No tears. No words. Just nodding.

“Sorry, Ma,” I said.

She sighed and waved a hand. What can you do? she seemed to be saying. Then she looked out the window onto a prim little neighborhood in Oakland. “Is that Westchester?” my mother asked. “Is that Aunt Yola’s house?”

Westchester is a county in northern New York. Aunt Yola died more than thirty years earlier.

“Yeah, Ma. That’s Westchester. That’s Aunt Yola’s house.”

~

Six weeks after my mother’s funeral, something strange happened while I was sleeping. I’m tempted to call it a dream. But that’s not what I truly think it was. I believe that somehow I stepped into an alternate reality that was dreamlike while at the same time being realer than real.

I sat at my desk in my home office, writing. Everything was in its place, the monitor, the keyboard, the small basket filled with pens and pencils. But everything had a luster, like it was made of blown glass. Everything seemed to vibrate with molecular beauty. My office had been moved to a universe where the atoms were just a bit more glorious than the ones in this world.

I was writing a poem. I typed:

This night wants us,

This night with blue eyes.

But when I looked at the monitor, the words were not what I’d written. Instead, I saw “Hello,  Frank. How are you?”

I had a feeling deep in the bowl of my pelvis that somehow, some way my mother had written those words.

I wrote back, “Mom? Is that you?”

No response.

I typed JJJJJ. On the monitor, I saw JJJJJ.

I typed Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.

On the monitor, I saw Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep.

I typed Chock Full O’ Nuts is That Heavenly Coffee.

On the monitor, I saw “Yes, Frank. It’s me. I miss you.”

Goosebumps everywhere. My scalp prickled. My heart galloped.

I typed “I miss you too. How are you?”

“I’m fine,” my mother wrote back. “I’m just so confused.”

“Why?’

“Where am I, Frank? What’s going on? What’s happening to me?” 

They were just words on a monitor and yet they made my heart ache. Once again, my mother was confused. Once again, she didn’t understand what was happening to her. Once again, the task of explaining fell to me.

“Don’t you remember?” I typed. “You died. Mom, you’ve been dead over a month.”

A pause. I imagined her mulling this over.

“I suspected as much,” appeared on my screen. “But Frank, everything is so different. Nothing’s like I expected. I don’t know what to do with myself.”

“That sucks,” I wrote. Then I got an idea. “Do you see anyone you know?”

“Oh sure. Tons of people. And I know all of them. My mother’s right over there.”

“Sorry,” I wrote. Her mother was a perpetually constipated and eternally unpleasant woman.

“It’s okay,” my mother wrote. “She’s different now.”

“Thank god for small miracles,” I wrote. “Is your father nearby?” She was always partial to her father.

“Yeah. He’s talking to Uncle Vincenzo.”

“Why don’t you pull Grandpa aside and ask him to give you the rundown. I bet he’d be happy to explain everything, like a little orientation.”

“Good idea, Frank,” my mother wrote. “I’ll do that.”

Then I wrote, “Hey, Ma. Can I ask you something?”

“Sure. What, we’re gonna have secrets now?”

I had to laugh at that.

“Why me?” I wrote. “Why aren’t you talking to Dad right now? Why aren’t you talking to my brother?”

She didn’t respond.

Maybe she thought the answer was obvious. Since I was the one with the courage to tell her she was dying, of course I’d have the courage to tell her she was dead.

I’d be willing to bet that last paragraph isn’t wrong, but it’s only partially right. I have a queer mind and a queer heart. That gives me a different perch on a different branch. Maybe that made it easier for my mother to find me. Maybe that made it easier for me to hear her. Maybe my mother, in whatever form she currently inhabits, can finally appreciate me because of what I am rather than in spite of what I am.

And what I am is the paisley sheep.

~