The Neallys

Suze: End-of-Term

Suze: End-of-TermI did not know what I wanted to say but I knew that I wanted to say it and that I could not say it. So, Kerry closed the Camry’s door and walked up the path to her house. I drove back to my Aunt’s and took the train into the City the next morning after I went for a run in the hills around Sarah Lawrence and on a nearby path. When I entered the Apartment, it struck me that I was quite different from what I was when I left it only a few days before.

I never had a Thanksgiving like this. It was usually an almost formal event with my father in a suit and my mother in a dress and me and my brother, Eric, uncomfortable in the long silences. My mother, unlike my father (or so I thought), had siblings but after we had gone to my Aunt Debbie and Uncle William’s house when I was in high school, with a house full of kids of varying ages and sizes, our Thanksgiving contacts with others were via the phone, although I spent each of the breaks from Stanford going out for runs with former teammates and hanging out with neighborhood friends, like Annie.

Now there were the hours and hours I spent just with Kerry and especially our “date,” which I felt our dinner on Saturday amounted to. I realized that any attraction I felt towards Eileen was attraction I felt for Kerry.

I knew I was gay. I knew when I was in high school. Not that I ever acted on it. I just enjoyed the way girls, and especially not the tall, sleek distances runners with whom I spent so much time, looked. I saw nothing of interest in the boys in my classes. And my regular porn habits—severely restricted while home—always tended to the lesbian. If I ever viewed straight porn it was once or twice to see what it was about and it was never repeated.

I told no one. Not even Annie who, I knew when I was in high school, was definitely not gay, a view that did not waiver for a moment since. Indeed, a disproportionate amount of time I spent with Annie included the ups and downs, and sideways, of her long- and short-term relationships with boys and, eventually, men. I figured that she didn’t try to draw me out about my exploits because, first, she knew I did not have any and, second, she figured I was shy and otherwise engaged. Indeed, it’s not like I did anything with females of the species. And I was never attracted to her, much as she was the classic California blonde. In retrospect, though, I think that while I never told Annie, she might have figured it out and was waiting for me to tell her. I loved that about her. And in fact, I never did anything about it. I kept my desires under wraps. I had plenty of friends and that is all I wanted or needed at the time.

Suddenly I had a friend in Kerry and suddenly I knew that I wanted and needed more with her. But I was disciplined enough to realize that I could do nothing about it just yet (if ever) and I was able to compartmentalize enough to put that aside while I prepared for my exams. Plus everything I knew told me she was straight.

And so Kerry and I and the others in the study group met on campus each day between when classes ended and exams began. It was the most intense mental period I’d ever experienced and one course and one outline bled into another in an eruption of thought. When we took the last exam, the five of us went to a pizzeria on Broadway where we wolfed down a few pies and a few pitchers of beer and caught our breaths for the first time since we had started in August.

We then scattered.