Alyssa Lopez

          I saw the burnt orange paint on my great-uncle Milton’s 1972 Chevy Camaro, him sitting in the driver’s seat waving with a huge grin on his face.  I can recognize a few faces -- my grandma sitting in a beautiful garden of tulips around the age of 21, her holding my Uncle Steve underneath a crucifix a few years later, the dark lines under her eyes already becoming visible, and finally a shot of her caught lounging on the beach up at her summer home as an unidentified foot is cut off by the picture’s edge.

 

          I always dreamed that somewhere, way back in the past, I had a great-great-something-or-other who was a King of Scotland, or a relative of Marie Antoinette, or I’d even take a soldier in the Revolutionary War.  I imagined my pride at discovering this long-forgotten family secret, who I would tell (everyone) and how I would tell them (smugly, with a huge smile on my face).  But nothing ever came up.  And in my mind, that was a huge disappointment.

          

          It’s funny how you expect to feel when you finally get what you want, but that’s rarely ever the case.  Family secrets have a way of creeping up on you from angles you’d never expect or see coming.  They remain hovering above you like invisible clouds, ones you’d never know even existed if you didn’t look up.  But sooner or later, you sense a shadow over yourself  and have to explore, have to reach up to see what it is and why it’s there.  Then you can finally see a whole different perspective than your own.  

 

*****

          

          The pictures I cherished the most weren’t actually in an album.  Instead, a collection of pictures was shoved into the back pocket of the last book.  Usually, my grandma would be reminiscing over photos with me and as soon as I was about to turn to this pocket -- SNAP -- the book slapped closed and another was placed onto my lap in its place.  But the few times I got to see the pictures, I couldn’t understand what the problem was.  It was just a few simple photographs of my Grandma and Grandpa’s 1968 wedding.  In one, my grandma’s oversized white silk gown -- intended to hide the evidence of her four-month pregnancy -- did quite the opposite, drawing attention to the absurdness of its size.  Another showed a photo of my grandpa with what I can only assume was his best man, grabbing each other by the shoulders as if for an embrace.  Then there were my newly wedded grandparents, sitting side by side in a dark church basement, my grandma looking nauseated and my grandpa looking away from the camera, a frown on his face and a glass of something in his right hand.  As a kid I took this as a typical, exhausted reaction to a wedding, the newlyweds caught in a candid moment after their joyful day.  But instead of a moment of eternal bliss, their faces show the warnings of a lifetime of disgust and sadness -- something I wouldn’t be able to tell until many years later, when I found out the truth.

 

*****

 

          Once again skimming through my parent’s old baby albums of me while sitting at the kitchen table, I asked the same question that I had brought up for the last 18 years:  “Are you sure there’s no one famous in our family?”

 

          My mom sighed, shaking her head at me from the stove where she was hard-boiling some eggs -- she’d heard my question so many times before.

 

          “I just want one family secret -- something juicy.  We have to have something!” I implored, though not really expecting anything.

 

          I’m not sure what changed at this very moment, but my mom turned around and looked me over for a moment before pursing her lips.  I could tell that she was debating telling me something, and I felt my heart begin to beat a little faster in anticipation.

 

          “You really want to know a secret?” she finally asked, turning back to the stove to check on the eggs.  She began to fumble with a spatula and stir the pot, trying to keep her hands busy.  Dang, I thought to myself, if she’s this nervous to tell me then it has to be good.  I pictured her breaking the news she had discovered a long-lost connection to George Washington or Napoleon Bonaparte, and my relief that there was at least one person in our family who had achieved fame.

 

          Her sudden change in demeanor and her nervous inability to look at me made me a bit hesitant to ask what the secret was.

 

          Without turning around to me, she looked up at the timer on the stove and said flatly “Your grandpa was gay.”

 

          Wait, what?

 

          I was confused.

 

          When did you know about this?  How long did this go on?  Who else knows about this?  Why did he marry grandma then?  My mind raced with questions that I didn’t feel were appropriate to ask.  It was something I had never thought about, never even considered, and I struggled to find any words in order to break the awkward silence that was occurring.

 

          “That’s it?”  I blurted out, trying to play it off as if the revelation wasn’t a big deal.  

 

          My mom shot back around, a skeptical look in her eye as she watched me.  

 

          “What do you mean, that’s it?” she asked.  “What do you think?”

 

          I honestly didn’t know what I was thinking. I questioned how I grew up without ever considering this, and how I had never once heard whispers about it when I was a kid and snuck into the kitchen pantry to listen to my mom and grandma gossip after dinner.  They talked about everything -- fights that my parents had gotten into, the rumors that great-uncle Milton was losing his mind, my grandma’s extremely short-lived dating life.  But in no conversation was this biggest secret ever brought up.  From an early age I learned never to bring up my grandpa when out in the garden planting begonias with my grandma, and to expect awkward birthday parties when they were both forced to be in the same place at the same time.  It wasn’t that they were hostile, they just didn’t interact -- they ignored each others’ presence, pretending that neither one existed.

 

          “Being gay is not a big deal,” I said to my mom, looking down at the photo album as a distraction.  She was still looking at me intently, but at the same time I could tell that her thoughts were in a million other places.  

 

          “Well, let me know if you have any questions,” she said a little more quietly, before turning back around to stir the eggs.

 

          I had finally gotten the secret I wanted, but it had shocked me into silence.  I was finished asking questions for a while.

 

*****

 

          A few days after she told me, I tried to bring it up as casually as possible on a car ride to the store.

 

          “So, did grandma know about grandpa?” I asked, looking down at my phone.

 

          My mom paused.  “She probably did.  I don’t really know.  She doesn’t talk about it, but she once told me she had always wanted a divorce… so I don’t know,” my mom began to ramble, her words beginning to wander off as she thought.

 

          “How did you find out?” I asked, testing to see if she was still willing to talk about it.

 

          “I found out when you were a baby.  He had… friends,” she mentioned vaguely.  I waited for more, but she just kept driving, eyes staring intensely at the road in front of her but roaming other places in the far reaches of her mind.  I wished I knew what she was thinking, but her vagueness coupled with my confusion at the entire situation ended the conversation there.  

 

          What shocked me most was the way this one gigantic secret shaped the way I began to see the world.  When my grandma pulled out the photo albums the next time, it was Christmas Eve and my family had gathered at her house to order Chinese food and begin prepping for dinner the next day.  The house was stiflingly warm as the brick fireplace glowed in the living room, and you could smell the molasses cookies wafting out of her new oven in the kitchen.  Cheerful as always, she brought each album out one by one from the closet and carefully laid them on the glass coffee table in front of me, like nothing had changed.

 

          I was hesitant to open them -- it had been about a month since our awkward conversation in the car, but I hadn’t had much closure. As time had gone on though, the gravity of my grandpa’s identity began to hit me, and I saw my perspective shifting.  But oddly it wasn’t my perspective of my grandpa that changed, it was how I began to see my grandma in that moment which shifted.  My grandma, a strict Conservative who I’d never seen eye-to-eye with, opposed many of the beliefs I held.  She abhorred the term “feminist,” and believed that women should be the caretakers who serve their husbands and children.  While I wrote papers about minimum wage reform, she held more traditional views on welfare, calling recipients “ungrateful.”  But more than anything, I had noticed from a young age that my grandma held especially strong prejudices against the LGBT community.  Growing up it was a comment here or there, about how she disapproved of how her brother Mike was “living his life.”  It wasn’t until I introduced her to two of my good friends in high school who were dating that her words began to upset me.  “You don’t have to be friends with them you know,” she said to me after I got back from the movies.  “Watch out for them, they do such bad things.”

It was times like these, when her overt homophobia became apparent, that I judged her harshly for being ignorant.  I felt that I couldn’t say something back to my grandma without it being seen as disrespectful, and at the same time my resentment began to build up.  How can you say such awful things?  We are all human!  I’d want to scream.  So I compromised and attributed her old age and conservative upbringing to her views on these topics.

 

          The dots began to merge together, creating a picture that captured more to her story than I had ever imagined.  It made sense why my grandma snatched those photos away from me every time I was near them.  Instead of judging my grandma for being protective of her past, or judging my mom for not telling me this secret until then, I saw the bigger picture -- the fact that many different pieces, events, and stories play into our family’s history.  

 

          As I picked up my favorite album, I looked up at my grandma sitting in her rickety brown recliner across the room from me smiling, and immediately felt at ease.  She sipped her lemon tea and flipped open an album of her own baby pictures, pushing her tiny glasses to the end of her nose in order to catch all of the details.  If a camera captures only one brief moment in time, I wish that it had been this one.  It was my moment of true clarity.

 

          As I began to understand more about my grandma, I saw her flaws transformed into beautiful extensions of her complex yet satisfying life.  It had been easy for me to make up a story about my grandparent’s magical wedding day, the happiness they shared, and the vanilla-iced wedding cake they ate at their reception.  But in reality, there is so much more to the story, to our souls and our delicate essences, and that something is more than a camera could ever capture.