Amaze ((Gay and Angry)(a short story))

She troubled me.

She troubled me, and my wife, and from what I remember her of her foster parents she troubled them, but most people seemed to like her, especially those who went on that school trip I once took with her to South Dakota, to: the Bad Lands, and Black Hills and Mount Rushmore. Her foster mother and father presided over some of the children on that trip of this Minnesota rural district, where my granddaughter, Maria-Lee lived (I had remarried, and so Maria was no relation to my new wife).
She treated her foster parents like servants of some old southern town, before the advent of the Civil War, in the 1860s. I didn’t take a liking to that and confronted her with the issue, but she didn’t feel certain guilt whatsoever over that confrontation: “Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t like the way I acted before?” Was all she could say.
I was one of those grandparents, living quite a ways from her, in the City of St. Paul. However, as it happened, I did not stick around to be told off by a thirteen year old kid, and I told her so, “If you can’t respect your foster parents, and you look like you want to confront me negatively about this, how then do you expect this to turn out between us?” I added to that, in so many words: I’m not the kind of person that will take all your crap. And to be frank, I think she was very happy I did not get involved with her controlling issue of her foster parents.
She really did not have anything more to say on the matter, but she had a secret, something that was bothering her, and perhaps to a light extent, me. Something that was really worrying her very much, something she was afraid to tell anybody, even me—I couldn’t imagine what it was, and she couldn’t imagine what my reaction would be, it was such an odd thing that she had no one to tell her not to worry. Had she asked me, that is what I would have said?
I had never really heard of anyone having such a problem like the one that was troubling Maria at her age. On the one hand it appeared maybe silly, when I found out: on the other hand…
I wanted to tell her, that her secret was nothing to get angry at me over, or about. Because I had no magical powers to make her different than what she chose to be, or how she chose to live, not after she was an adult anyway. I might have been to her, a serious minded adult, one that could force a proposal from her, and make her restore lost femininity if indeed I wanted to, but I wouldn’t and couldn’t. In short, she was angry from the age I met her, at thirteen years old, and when she called me, when she was sixteen years old she was still angry, and when she phoned my wife at a full adult’s age, and said, what her secret was, she was still angry. Maybe she had a wish, I had a wish, and who could make wishes come true? Would I accept her as she was? She was too angry to deal with.
Not even card tricks could make her less angry, and again there was no magic I knew other than, time to allow this anger to sink into some deep sinkhole and die, but it was hard to tell when it would, and if it would.

Now, about this wish and secret…

of hers, which I’m sure the worry was with her from morning to night: it wasn’t anything she could straighten out and ask me—evidently, but she did tell my wife when she phoned her. It required the right time, and a careful prepared moment. She seldom called me and I didn’t want anymore disrespect. But when she did, I listen to my wife, what she had to say about what Maria had to say, and how she had said what she said. And it was not a delicate moment; again her thick ugly anger came out, attempting to catch my ear.
We never talked after that last conversation when she was sixteen years old, not verbally at least. She was too stupid, and I was too nervous. Yes, nervous. It was just something I sensed in me, powerful, as was the stupidly she carried about concerning this issue.
She saw something though in me, a desire. And so she tried to get ahold of me in South America, and turned her anger down and rolled her sleeves up, eyes and heart elsewhere though, and said “I want to start a new relationship with you (inferring she was sorry, and that should mend all hurts and injuries and so for and on).” She didn’t call me grandfather, rather by my first name, which was the first disrespectful thing I noticed. I was to her, what I always was to her, a brief visit, curiosity, home blood substance.
When I think of her, the humid winds of the old Mississippi River drift deep and seep deep into my bone, they no longer are for an innocent girl.
I love her, and she wanted to love me, but she loved beyond me, and so I kept my distance, as she behaved indifferently. She felt it, but she never reasoned what caused my coldness; it wasn’t as she thought, and I told her so, the last time we talked on the computer: I never cared one way or the other if she were gay, I did care if you were angry and disrespectful, she wanted respect, she just couldn’t give it, I didn’t care to walk on eggshells with anybody, her included, life is too short for that. Why be around people that make you unhappy. No sense in it, they use you, drain you then walk away proud as a bear who just sucked up all the honey in the beehive.
‘Really,’ she thought. Perhaps thinking, this is all a little humorous. It struck me as a very dry subject—her lesbianism.
I said, “If you are happy where you are in life (knowing it must had been difficult for her) I can’t help in that area, I don’t know how, the only thing I would be able to do is accept. I’m fine, and I’m fine with you. Everything’s hunky-dory.” But of course I would not have cared for her to bring her lover around, that perhaps might have been another issue, but one that could have been solved later on.
I said, “I’m sorry things did not work out better for us, but why do you want to have a relationship with an old man now?” She really didn’t have an answer.
What was there to say? How could I explain that all through the years I waited for her to accept me for me, I had already accepted her—and her secret, the one she never told me until she was of age, other than disrespect for me and her foster parents. And so we remained silent, and perhaps that is the best, no one gets hurt that way, especially if it is a one-way street.

Dedicated to Maria… (Granddaughter) 5-22-2009