The St. Sebastian Review, which published “Perfect” in their Spring, 2015 issue, has sadly closed. I’ve reprinted “Perfect” here. The story was also a semi-finalist for Ruminate Magazine’s 2015 VanderMey Nonfiction Prize.

“The St. Sebastian Review is an LGBTQ Christian literary magazine, founded to give voice to a community often disenfranchised and unheard. We exist as a forum within and from which LGBTQ Christians of any denomination can engage both critically and compassionately the culture in which they find themselves. We are purveyors of fine poetry, fiction, nonfiction essays, and visual art from among the LGBTQ Christian community and its allies.”

 “Perfect”

by Tania Moore

 (Approximate reading time 10 minutes)

I.

“Mom,” Henry asked, striding beside me in his corduroys and miniature Timberland boots, “why can’t boys wear nail polish?” I reached out for his hand, his pinkie fingernail painted blue.

“It doesn’t make sense, does it? Girls can wear anything they want, but boys can’t do a lot of things girls can, like wear skirts.” I pushed forward over a pathway of poured cement that led from his second-grade classroom to our car. The falling leaves hinted of arctic winds yet to arrive, and I wondered how it must have felt when Henry’s sister burst into our lives three years ago in a blaze of pink – pink tutus, pink, sparkly shoes, pink nail polish.

Henry’s expression was inscrutable, as if he were puzzling over a chess board, considering his next move.

“It’s not right, but I worry that you might get teased,” I continued. “Maybe you’d have to decide what you want to be known for, being a great friend and a super chess player, running fast and having good ideas, or for wearing nail polish…” I trailed off, my words traitorous to my own ears.

II.

A short time later Henry informed me that his favorite color was orange. He helped me pick out his orange Marimekko comforter, and when he lay nestled beneath his covers, his head rested on a bed of orange clover. He had also invented a new game which he asked me to play in the evenings when I tucked him in. It always began the same way.

“If I had a boy with beautiful, chestnut-brown hair, and someone said to me, ‘I can change your boy so he will have red hair. He’ll be the same in every other way, but his hair will be the color of tiger lilies,’ I would say, ‘No. Absolutely not. I love my boy’s dark curls. They remind me of ferns uncoiling from the earth in spring, and I wouldn’t change them for the world. I love him exactly the way he is. Or,” I continued, “what if someone came up to me and told me that they could make my boy’s eyes turn the most luminous, corn silk blue…” We played this game until Henry’s eyes drooped, and he drifted off to sleep.

III.

When Henry was eight, he came with me when I brought his sister, Lucy, to her ballet class. After the barre, where a dozen five-year-olds practiced teetering on one foot, the teacher asked Henry if he would like to join in, and Henry eagerly nudged off his sneakers and peeled off his socks. As the recorded strains of Swan Lake wafted from the speakers, twelve little girls in leotards and ballet slippers, one with a huge tulle tutu, traipsed around the room like tipsy fireflies, and in the midst of them, Henry. He glided and leapt, swooped and twirled, emanating joy and an innate, mesmerizing grace.

When the music stopped, and I helped Lucy with her coat, my heart sank. If Henry were living in St. Petersburg, Russia fifty years ago, he might have been chosen to join the ranks of the Vaganova Ballet Academy, but Henry did not live in Russia; he lived in suburban America, where boys played football, baseball, hockey, tennis – any sport imaginable – but they did not take ballet.

“You were fantastic,” I said as we pushed through the front door. “If you’d like, we could find a class with kids your age.”

“Maybe.” Henry stepped out onto the crunchy snow, his coat open to the wind.

That evening, Henry and Lucy were in bed when Thomas came home from work. I carried my tea to the kitchen table and sat down with him as he finished his dinner. Henry, I told him, had tried out his sister’s ballet class.

“He was radiant. A natural. I think he’s really talented.”

Thomas rested his knife against the side of his plate. “You know that Henry’s already not like other boys. It’s hard enough that he’s a chess player. Why would you introduce him to something that you know can only make his life more difficult?”

“It wasn’t like that –”

“I feel as though you set him up.”

“Set him up? I didn’t suggest it, Thomas. The teacher asked him. And he was so happy. Maybe if you had seen him –” 

“But what did you think you were doing? Were you trying to make him gay?”

In the silence that pooled, I couldn’t locate whether the fear was coming from him, or me. I carried my cup to the counter.

“What if Henry is gay?” I asked, pivoting to face him.

“Why do you say that?”

“No reason,” I shrugged. “The nail polish.”

 “He was seven years old for Christ’s sake!”

I turned away so I didn’t have to look at him. The dishes had been cleaned and dried, but still I held on to the edge of the sink, filled with a deep and unquenchable sadness.

Dully, I left the room, carrying with me this basin of grief. Only when I passed within the halo shed by the lamp in the hallway did I grant myself one wish, the wish of mothers everywhere, that I might raise my webbed arms, and like a Bedouin tent, protect my children from the wind and scorching heat, from the abrasion of the sand and every hideous unkindness the world held in store.  

IV.

When Henry was twelve, he told me that he hated taking the school bus, and he wanted me to drive him to school. The boys in his grade were idiots, and the way they talked about girls disgusting.

I threw out a tentacled web, a mother’s sixth sense, but gleaned no answers.

No, he scoffed, he wasn’t being teased.

I circled around, tried a different tack. Still nothing. Eventually I told him to listen to his music and ignore them.

V.

At seventeen Henry had one or two friends and was ahead a grade in math. He was on his school’s tennis team, and he convinced Thomas and me to let him build us custom computers. When the parts arrived, he lay them out on the hardwood floor in the living room, attaching the anti-static wrist strap with particular care.

Henry blushed easily, and seemed to have no interest in girls. Thomas insisted that there was no way for me to know this, as I would be the last person Henry would tell. I didn’t disagree, even though I knew that I might, in fact, be closer to the first person Henry would tell. Let Thomas believe what he wanted, until it really mattered.  

In August I was surprised when Henry took Alison Bernhard to the U.S. Open and told me that he planned on kissing her. I found myself imagining Alison, or anyone, as a daughter-in-law, and I wondered if this thought was as unfamiliar to other parents as it was to me.

Henry didn’t tell me how it went with Alison when he came home, and I didn’t ask.

One evening a short time later, I was chopping garlic with a thin, fine blade, sending the slivers shooting off the cutting board and onto the floor.

“How did it go with Alison?” I asked. Henry sat at the counter absorbed in his physics homework.

“It was okay,” he said without looking up. “Now I know.”

My knife hung suspended in the air.

“Not everyone likes kissing their first time,” I said, then scraped the garlic into the pan.

VI.

During his freshman year at college, Henry started going to mass at seven o’clock every morning. He had not grown up going to church, although I had recently started attending Episcopal services at the small stone church in town. He came home on spring break and showed Thomas and me a video of a Carthusian monastery deep in the French Alps where the monks took a vow of silence, spending their waking hours in solitude, praying in their eleven by eight-foot cells. They even took their meals alone.

When the clip ended, we stood clustered around the computer that Henry had built, and no one said a word. I had trouble scooping up the proper response from the alphabet soup that was my stomach.

“Why,” I managed, “would you want to live so isolated from the world?”

“What world, Mom? A world of corruption and deception? Or one that’s authentic and pure.” Henry left the room while Thomas remained staring at the screen, his posture, usually so upright, now slumped.

Two days later I drove Henry back to school. As we rolled down the driveway, he took out his Kindle and started reading aloud a passage from the over eight hundred pages of Saint Augustine’s Confessions that he had downloaded. Sin, he told me, was not in having immoral feelings, but in performing immoral acts.

My hands gripped the wheel. “What you’re quoting is not what Jesus taught.” I selected each word as if it were a precisely cut fragment to be laid in the evolving mosaic of our lives. “He preached tolerance. That’s why there’s that story about him accepting the leper and the eunuch. You must know it from your reading. You can’t pick a phrase here and there and cling to it as literal truth, Henry. Even Jesus said that his work on earth was not done.”

“No no.” A faint smile played over Henry’s features, as if he inhabited a realm separate from my own, one open only to him, to God and to the righteous few. “God loves us and wants to help us overcome our weakness and sin.”

Rain had started to fall, droplets, then rivulets down the glass. I jabbed on the wipers.

“I can’t hear this crap,” I blurted. “I adore you, Henry, but I can’t have this bullshit in my car or in my home.” I heard the harshness of my own words, but as I merged onto the highway, it was almost with relief that I realized I’d rather lose him than let him think that I would not fight for a love more powerful than the brokenness of our world.

When I left him off at school we hugged awkwardly.

“I love you, Henry. You know that, don’t you? What I said –”

“It’s okay, Mom. I know.”

VII.

Henry and I no longer discussed religion, and when he came home for the summer, he did not bring his prayer book with him. His Kindle lay uncharged on his desk.

“What happened to Saint Augustine?” I asked as I deposited a pile of laundry on his bed.

“I haven’t read Saint Augustine in months.” Henry placed a marker in his book, Ion Tracks and Spectrometry. In a week he would be leaving for a summer research grant in Boston.

“Oh, okay.” I turned to leave the room.

“Mom.” Something in Henry’s voice, a tiny inflection, made me pause. He had grown a scruffy beard flecked with copper, and it was handsome on his lean face. “I wanted to tell you. I’m gay.”

I opened my mouth, but no words came, so I stepped towards him and folded him in my arms, holding him tight so not a stray sock or curl could fall away.

VIII.

Two months later Henry returned from Boston, and when I picked him up from the train station, the sun slanting and low, his fingernails caught the light as he lifted his suitcase into the car. Each perfect oval was painted a luminescent olive green as leaves fell down around us, talismans of amber and gold.