Page 2 of Summer Lessons
“Oh dear God.”
“But Mom, God doesn’t like it when we touch our penises. That gross girl in school said that in front of the entire class! Why would you bring him into it?”
“Mason, would you like some Kool-Aid?”
Mason smiled at his mother, distracted and happy about it. “Yeah. Do we have cherry?”
“I hope so. Watch Dane. Mom’s going to go get some Kool-Aid for both of us.” Mason would figure out later that Mom’s Kool-Aid had a healthy dollop of vodka, but then, who could blame her at that point?
After Mom got up and toddled unsteadily into the kitchen, Dane tilted back his head and laughed uproariously. “Pee-pee!” he shrilled. “Going pee-pee!”
“Yeah,” Mason said glumly, resting his chin on his hands. “You enjoy that now while you can, little brother. According to Mom, they have to get locked away in the dark when you get older, and the only time they can see the light is when they visit vaginas.”
“Ginas!” Dane crowed. “Ginas ginas ginas….”
“Gross.”
“Ginas gross,” Dane repeated happily.
Later, when Dane came out too (in a slightly less harrowing and more coherent confession when he was thirteen), Janette would turn to an ecstatic Mason and say, “I blame you.”
His father denied that there was alcohol involved, of course, but she’d had vodka and Kool-Aid that day too. Mason would start to wonder if the drink held some special significance. His mother certainly did drink a lot of it in the years to come.
Twenty-three years ago
“SORRY, MOM.”
“Mason….”
“She was being stupid!”
“Your teacher?”
Mason looked around the bright, busy walls of the time-out room. “Yeah. We were supposed to write a story about what our family would look like in twenty years.”
“That’s nice,” his mother said encouragingly.
“It was,” he grumbled. It had been. “I drew pictures,” he said, because this had felt like going above and beyond the call of duty for eighth grade.
“Can I see them?” His mother smiled prettily, and he pulled the offending pictures out of his binder, hoping for another few moments alone with his mother before the principal came in.
“Here.”
“Oh, nice,” his mom said, encouragement in her voice. “You in a tie, a nice young man with yellow hair and a suit, and two kids, and a dog! The dog is a nice touch, Mason. Your brother would approve. So what’s wrong with this?”
“The teacher said I couldn’t write my family that way,” Mason said, getting indignant.
“Because there’s two boys?” his mother asked, her voice hardening.
“Yeah.” Mason felt the injustice keenly. “And I said you were okay with it, and the teacher said it wasn’t possible for two boys to have a family, and I said, ‘Just because the penis isn’t going in a vagina, that doesn’t mean that two boys can’t have a family together.’”
Next to him he could feel the air in his mom’s lungs whoosh out in a rush. “There’s that word again,” she said, sounding tired.
“But I used it right this time!” he complained. Because there had been other times, right after the puberty video, in which he’d been informed that the word “penis” was absolutely not appropriate to use. Like when a little girl tried to kiss him and he said, “I don’t want girls touching my penis!” Or when a little boy asked him what he was going to be when he grew up and he said, “I’m going to be a businessman and have a husband, and another man is going to touch my penis!” These times were bad.
But this time… Mason wassurethis time was right.
“Yeah, yeah,” his mother said, tilting her head back and massaging her temples. “This time you’re right and the teacher was wrong, and the next hour is going to be atreat!”
