The next morning, Emmy knocked on our door. “Why don’t you ask your uncle when your birthday is the next time you see him?” she suggested. My mother soon understood and offered a gentle smile. “Don’t you do anything to celebrate your birthday?” pressed my mother.Įmmy scratched her head, bit her lip and said nothing. At home with my three brilliant brothers, I rarely had the chance to correct anyone. Emmy loved setting the table - another difference between us that I neither understood nor bothered to question.Įmmy thought for a moment. “When’s your birthday?” my mother asked Emmy one evening before dinner. Over the years, Emmy started calling her “Mom.” I made the mistake of relaying this information to my mother, who subsequently banned next-door visits.Įven so, in the spirit of Catholic inclusion, my family embraced Emmy as a second daughter - my mother especially. One day, Emmy told me her uncle kept a gun under her bed. Everything - including the house’s 5-year-old tenant - appeared neglected. Outside, the yard was wild tangled grass grazed my thighs, saplings sprouted from a makeshift deck. The walls were unadorned no photographs, no paintings. A mound of trash clustered in the kitchen. A strong odor of dogs and cigarettes clung to the furniture. Inside Emmy’s house, stuffing splayed from couch seams.
I WANT MY DAUGHTER TO BE GAY NIFTY ARCHIVE TV
“After my favorite TV show is done,” she answered. “How do you know when to go to bed?” my alarmed mother once asked her. Her uncle worked odd hours and her older brother made himself scarce, which left 5-year-old Emmy alone most of the time, wandering the neighborhood and microwaving her meals. A factor I wouldn’t begin to articulate until I understood the true distance between our homes: a very significant eight feet.Įven though we saw each other almost every day that summer, I only visited Emmy’s house three times. A nebulous factor that slipped into my subconscious and surfaced in my autocratic attitude. I was two years older, yes, and we played on my territory with my toys, yes - but there was something else. Looking back, I wasn’t exactly mean to Emmy, but I sensed that I had something she did not. My Barbie dated the Ken with real hair while Emmy’s Barbie was stuck with the cheaper, creepier Ken. When we played Barbies, I took the newer Barbie with the better clothes and gave her the one with the missing foot. When Emmy and I played School, I always got to be the teacher. But children are like prisoners and sorority sisters: They’re quick to establish hierarchies. I knew none of this when I invited Emmy into our house for a Popsicle that humid day.
These things, I would later learn, mattered. Later I would learn terms like “race,” “socioeconomic status,” “welfare,” “white privilege” and “structural violence.” Later I would learn that Emmy’s white mother died of a heart attack a few years after Emmy was born and her black father was in jail for drug-related crimes. A sociologist could have predicted our outcomes from a handful of statistics, but as a child, I assumed there was little difference between her life and mine. So when my 5-year-old neighbor showed up at our door, I thought that maybe she - dark hair springing, T-shirt stained - could be the sister I’d always wished for.Įmmy told me she lived next door with her uncle Mike and brother Kyle. Although my three older brothers let me join in on their games, I could only endure so many defeats in pingpong, basketball and Super Smash Bros. It was the summer of 1999 I was 7 years old and in need of a friend. I observed the girl at my door cautiously. Editor’s Note: They were neighbors and childhood friends, but the writer of this 2015 essay, our latest Magazine Classic, would come to realize that the distance that separated them was “a very significant eight feet” encompassing a vast gap in opportunity.