The Cream Puff

When I was very, very young, my father’s sister was the coolest of cool aunts. Straight out of art school, Aunt Jane affected a bohemian lifestyle, choosing to live in a run-down studio apartment in one of Baltimore’s dicier neighborhoods. She’d always wanted to be a painter; she’d lavish layer upon layer of oils upon her outsized canvases to achieve abstract results, usually in different shades of a single hue. One of her gloomier works, a study in browns that resembled a lake in a cavern, or perhaps the cross-cutting of a tree trunk, has covered one full wall of my father’s bedroom for decades now. She exhibited at no-name downtown shows where hungry artists made a dinner from the cheese plate served on opening night; she wore cat’s-eye glasses before they were popular.

I loved going to her apartment, when we would visit Baltimore. She would bring out a bottle of red chianti in a straw-covered bottle to share with my parents, though she’d drink most of it herself. We’d sit around a coffee table on her super-modern and super-uncomfortable butterfly canvas sling chairs, and dip bread cubes into her fondue dish. My parents were very young themselves, and preferred Jane’s unconventional flat to the antiques and rigid deportment required at my Maryland grandmother’s house. Visiting Jane was a breath of fresh air.

Then she met and married a man named Bert, and that was the end of that.

Bert was already divorced when she met him, and a decade older. Jane’s ambition was to paint; Bert thought all art was crapola. Both my father and my sister might have rejected the country club society in which they grew up, but their manners were pure Baltimore Blue Book. Bert installed shelving for a living and was proud of his calluses and perpetually dirty nails. He swore like a sailor, scratched himself at the dinner table, and made it very clear he wasn’t interested in any conversations that weren’t about sports.

I don’t know what Jane saw in him. Perhaps he was an act of rebellion. Perhaps opposites really do attract. Either way, they married quickly. My grandmother moved out of my father’s childhood home into a smaller apartment, and sold the property and its contents to my aunt. She and Bert moved into my grandmother’s house, surrounded by my grandmother’s furniture, her photos, her books. She slept in my grandmother’s bed, cooked in her kitchen. A metamorphosis took place. Very quickly, my aunt Jane transformed into a younger version of my grandmother: easily irritated, narrow-minded, constantly disapproving. She tucked away her paints and canvases behind a wall in the basement, never to touch them again. She became the kind of person who cared about what the neighbors thought. Jane was no longer cool.

A lot of her change of outlook had to do with Bert. He mocked anyone with a degree higher than high school—especially my parents, with their multiple graduate diplomas and professor titles. Effete intellectuals weren’t real men. Real men worked with their hands. A real woman didn’t teach, either; she stayed home, like Jane. My mother’s activism enraged him. The two butted heads with vicious abandon at every family gathering, especially when she would talk about her pet projects—voter registration, equal housing opportunities, birth control. Bert was a lazy conservative who couldn’t muster any better arguments than Archie Bunker with his vague talk about welfare queens and the minorities trying to get handouts instead of working hard, and my mother delighted in shooting down each and every of his protests with actual facts and figures. It didn’t matter; she was a woman, and he could holler louder, so he stomped away from every argument fuming, but convinced he’d shown the Southern broad what’s what.

My father didn’t like his brother-in-law much, either. Not only would Bert insult my mom, but he’d would take every opportunity to remind my dad that his house was bigger, his neighborhood was better, and that he relied on his hands instead of his namby-pamby education to make his way in life. (That the house and neighborhood was my grandmother’s, and not anything he’d achieved himself, didn’t seem to matter.) When we’d arrive as a family for a visit, Bert would mince toward my dad with loose wrists and imitate comedian Alan Sues’ tag line—Laugh-In had been popular just a couple of years before—“It’s Uncle Al, the kiddies’ pal.” Though my dad ignored the barbs, but I could tell they’d make him bristle. I didn’t exactly understand the inference…but I could tell from my father’s reaction it must be unwholesome.

I got the worst of it. Bert constantly needled me, from the second grade up, weighing my every word and action against some imaginary standard of stalwart boyhood that I could never attain. I was a quiet kid. Not a sissy—I wasn’t especially effeminate, nor did I play with dolls. Even in the late nineteen-sixties or early seventies my parents were progressive enough that they wouldn’t have cared if I’d been girly. Other kids, though policed the genders with such fascistic zest that I’d learned never to cross those lines.

My interests didn’t lie with the boisterous pursuits of many boys, though. I preferred to read, to get my schoolwork done. I wrote stories and poetry. “You gotta get his nose out of the books,” Bert would bark at my parents, when I’d visit Maryland and spend the trip in the attic bedroom reading. “Christ, he’s gonna end up a pansy.” There was no piano at my grandmother’s old house, but when at my mom’s command I’d play during their visits to us, Bert would spend the entire performance tapping his foot with impatience, or sighing. When my piece was finally over, he’d skip the applause and bolt, disgusted that my parents would pay good money for lessons. For a boy.

In fourth grade, I started independently making cookies and breads and meals for the family, finding recipes and trying them out (with my mother’s glad approval, since it was less work she had to do). I was once pressed into service to make dessert during one of Jane and Bert’s visits. I spent a couple of hours baking one of my dad’s favorite desserts—puff pastry from scratch, filled with an eggy homemade vanilla custard, drizzled with chocolate sauce (Hershey’s…I was only 10). When I approached the table, thinking everyone would love the delicious pastries I’d labored over, Bert rolled his eyes and tossed down his napkin. “Cream puffs?” he said. “C’mon. Cream puffs from the cream puff? This shit writes itself.”

My aunt, who rarely attempted to leaven any of Bert’s insults, this time put a hand on his arm. “Just eat your dessert.”

“All I know is my kids are never gonna grow up to make cream puffs like some kind of faggot.”

My father froze. My mother pushed back her chair, folded her napkin, and all the while staring at Bert, remove the plate of pasty from my hands and suggested I take my serving to my room. I gladly obeyed, closing my door as tightly as possible and turning on the radio, so that I wouldn’t have to hear the fireworks below.

I knew by then what faggot meant.

All through my childhood and adolescence Bert needled me. Not all his aggressions were so overt: most were subtle. He took my father and I fishing on his boat, but ‘accidentally’ left the bag of books I’d brought on the dock. He’d plan outings to football games, knowing I found them excruciating. He’d parse every word I spoke in the hope of finding something to mock. It got to a point after puberty that it seemed easier to remain silent for days on end, whenever our families visited. Even if I was quiet, though, Bert would interrogate my parents. How could they raise such a sulky boy? Or was I, with that long hair of mine, a sulky girl?

Every time we’d drive up to Baltimore, or Jane’s family would drive down to Richmond, I would have to dig deep and endure, knowing I was in for day after day of non-stop taunts. We all know how adaptable humans are: we learn to diminish unpleasant stimuli we can’t avoid. Bert was the most unpleasant stimulus on that side of the family. Though we couldn’t ignore his bullying, we marked it privately, rolled our eyes at it in public, and pretended as best we could that it wasn’t happening.

Because Bert was wrong about nearly everything. He was wrong about race. He was wrong about social services—or at least hopelessly Neanderthal. He was wrong about music, wrong about art. He was wrong to convince Jane never to paint again, when it had been something she’d wanted to do for a lifetime before him. He was wrong about treating service workers like shit. He was wrong to be a complete and relentless asshole to a little kid. When someone is incontrovertibly, absolutely, astonishingly wrong about everything, he’s easier to dismiss, right?

Of course, no one save myself realized Bert was right about one thing. I was a faggot. A pansy, a cream puff. I had to come to terms with my sexuality during the rough tenure of his withering disdain. My loving parents could dismiss his name-calling, his scorn, the scrutiny he gave to my every word and action, because they assumed like everything else, he was misinformed and incorrect. I, however, knew if that brand of harassment could come from someone related to me (by marriage…but still), what would follow from strangers would be even worse. Perhaps even violent. No little kid should have to grow up with that kind of constant fear around a family member.

So, when I could, I stopped making myself available for his sarcasm and insults. I stopped seeing my aunt and uncle when I started college. I politely declined to take any more trips to Maryland; I’d stay away when they visited my parents. After I moved away, I’d listen to the news from that side of the family from my parents, and then later from just my dad. But after Bert had made my life miserable for such a long period, once I was of age and gave myself permission not to tolerate it any more, it ended.

I’ve only seen Jane and Bert twice in the years since. The first was at my mom’s funeral, which happened at a point long after my sexuality was known to everyone. Neither of them could even bring themselves to address me afterward, either at the church or the interment, much less the gathering at my dad’s house. The second time was several years later at a family wedding—a teetotal affair micromanaged by a bridezilla who threw a public tantrum that people had the nerve to bring gifts not on the registry. I’d been warned by my dad in advance that the clusterfuck would be alcohol-free, but Jane unbent enough to join me and her brother for shots from the trunk of my car. (My dad never drinks. That’s how bad it was.)

I was the oldest of the grandchildren on that side of the family. Jane and Bert ended up having two sons, both more than a decade younger than myself. Neither of them grew up as Bert’s ideal boy: they weren’t athletic, unruly, or manly in all the traditional ways. The older played sports unwillingly until he hit his adolescence, when he refused to participate any longer. He preferred video games, and eventually bourbon from the family’s liquor cabinet: after drunkenly trashing the house and many of my grandmother’s old things, he had to be sent to rehab in his very early teens. He straightened out as an adult; he married, had two kids, got a job as an architect. But even though he’d hit all the tick marks on his dad’s American Dream checklist, none of it lasted. His wife divorced him, and took the house and the kids. For years he was in so over his head with child support and payments on a home in which he didn’t live that he had to board in an elderly couple’s home.

Jane and Bert’s younger son is more of a mystery. ‘Sensitive’ was always the word I heard used to describe him, or ‘artistic’—and I know from experience how well sensitivity thrives in the emotional desert where Bert walked. As soon as my younger cousin was able, he managed to find a scholarship to study in Australia. He stayed there for a decade, working in IT. “It’s like he decided to move to the other side of the globe to get away with us,” Jane would joke with my father, probably hoping that if she spoke the words aloud, it might make them untrue. He moved back to Maryland, but only after Jane and Bert finally gave up the family home at the turn of the millennium and relocated to Tennessee. He never married. He lived with two women, but only as roommates—they both were involved in romantic relationships with other men.

I remember my dad calling me with his suspicions, about fifteen years ago. “I think he’s gay,” he said about my younger cousin.

“Because your gaydar’s so good?” I asked.

“He’s never once had a relationship. Not that he’s told his mother about,” my dad reasoned. “He had to move to Australia to get away from them for a decade. I genuinely think he’s gay and terrified to come out to Bert. Bert would explode.”

“I know.”

“He probably figures it’s easier to wait until after his dad is dead to live openly. Poor kid.”

“I know.” If that’s what was going on with my younger cousin, I’d lived it myself. I’d had more than enough of Bert, growing up.

* * *

I’m writing this essay as a form of self-soothing. When I tell stories on a page, when I collect my memories and arrange them into a pattern I find satisfying, and true, and real, it helps pacify the turmoil in my head. Cobwebs gather on much of what I remember, particularly in passages of my mind on which I’ve long shut and locked the door, intending never to return. Giving them an airing does me good.

I’ve been resurrecting my experiences with Bert because he’s dying. My dad called me last month to say Bert had experienced a few strange symptoms that sent him to his doctor, and then a specialist, who diagnosed him with an advanced form of leukemia. Within a day he was rushed to a special treatment center in Texas; after only a few days there, they sent him home with the news that he only had four or five days to live. It was all very abrupt and unexpected.

My dad said Bert called him to say goodbye, and that the man seemed fairly reconciled to the approaching darkness. At least he was dying at home, with hospice workers helping, and his wife and older son by his bedside the entire time. (My younger cousin has declined to be there.) Since then he’s been on painkilling drugs, so not entirely present any longer. The prognosis of four or five days came three weeks ago. He’s been holding on, improbably, ever since.

My aunt’s reacting as anyone might, coping with the death of someone to whom she’s been married for over four decades. She calls my dad and cries. She’s made plans to sell the house in Tennessee and to return to Maryland. She watches her TV shows, helps with the painkillers, and waits for the inevitable. My father is elderly himself, and has always probably expected to go before his little sister and the man she married, and certainly before any of his own children. He provides what support he can, and keeps me informed. It’s sobering to him, though.

And I react by arranging my memories onto a page. The pain Bert caused is long in the past, though the scars ache when I summon the many psychic souvenirs he left. I turned out okay, despite his warnings: my love of music and of language and poetry, my queerness, my stubbornness in refusing to change to please him—those things he despised made me the man I am.

Writing all these words has made me realize how Bert must have made a straw man of me to scare his own children. The aspersions he cast in my direction, the ways in which he sniggered and mocked the girly boy who liked reading instead of camping, who preferred Beethoven to baseball—how that picture he painted of my softness must have terrified his own kids. He must have made such a bugaboo of me. I was the thing they must never emulate, the unholy creature he feared one of his kids might become.

This straw man, however, feels nothing but pity for Bert. So much time wasted, frightening little kids. And to what end? The pansy has prospered, while Bert’s older son wallows in mediocrity and bankruptcy, and the younger is a wounded little boy in his late forties, refusing to see the man who might hate him because of what he is.

It might not be the outcome anyone would have predicted. I’m certain it’s not the outcome anyone, save maybe the cream puff, deserves.