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“So what’s the latest wedding news, David?” Marcy asks, the twinkle in her eyes visible even through the phone screen as she smiles at him.
He takes a deep breath and lets it out quickly. He’s getting used to these chats with his soon-to-be mother-in-law. Not that he isn’t still anxious that he’ll say something that will convince her that he is terribly wrong for her son, but that anxiety is ignorable most of the time.
He tries to give her a smile in return, the smile of a normal person and not a big bag of nerves and self-recriminations. He isn’t sure he succeeds. “Well, Dad and Stevie and I are going to a tasting tomorrow so that we can select the final menu. I’m very excited.”
“That sounds fun!” Marcy enthuses.
“Mmm,” he agrees. “I’m a big fan of… food,” he mumbles, wincing. I’m a big fan of food? Ugh.
“Well, we are really looking forward to all of it,” she says. “It sounds like it might be the most elegant wedding I’ve ever attended!” she continues, and then her face falls. “I don’t mean because it’s a gay wedding, I just mean because you have such amazing taste, David.”
He tries not to visibly wince at her nervousness, at the stricken look that indicates Marcy’s worry that she’s said something wrong. And she has said something wrong, but not exactly in the way she thinks.
Gay wedding, Marcy said. It’s close enough, a voice in his head murmurs. Don’t say anything. It hasn’t been all that long since her own son came out of the closet, and then there was the engagement news on the heels of that, and in all that chaos David hasn’t prioritized explaining his sexuality to the Brewers. A gay son is one thing, but maybe a pansexual son-in-law is a bridge too far. And he gets tired of it, sometimes. Tired of explaining. Tired of coming up with analogies. Tired of correcting people.
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“David, darling, I hope you know that you don’t have to hide who you are with us,” his mother said as she sat at her vanity, her eyes on the wig she was carefully brushing out.
He frowned, confused. That wasn’t the reaction he’d expected when he tumbled out of the backseat of their driver’s car a few minutes ago and barreled through the front door of the house, excited to tell anyone who would listen that he had a date for the homecoming dance. He was sixteen, and his skin was finally clearing up, and Jessica had said yes when he asked her. For once, David felt on top of the world.
“What are you talking about?” he asked, frowning at the back of his mother’s hair.
Moira gave him a glance in the mirror then looked back at her wig. “Not that you can’t have a nice time with this Justine person—”
“Jessica.” He’d had a crush on Jessica for months, and he still couldn’t believe she agreed to go with him to the dance. It was exactly the thing he’d been hoping for, and in his experience the thing he’d been hoping for, at least in a romantic capacity, didn’t happen for David.
“Jessica,” his mother repeated. “Not that you can’t have a nice time with Jessica, but you don’t have to pretend that you feel more for her than you do. We will accept whomever you decide to bestow your affection on.”
“Okay,” he said doubtfully. “Well, I’ve decided to bestow my… ugh.” He hated when his mother’s arcane vocabulary crept into his own speech patterns. “I really like Jessica.”
Moira turned and looked skeptically at him. “Of course you do, dear.”
“What?” he shouted, annoyed. Leave it to his mother to let all of the air out of his joy like this.
“Well, it’s just that when we were in the Hamptons you seemed quite taken with that Rafael boy.”
He rolled his eyes. If ‘taken with’ described a few clumsy handjobs and then getting dumped on the beach at night, then sure. “I’m over Rafael,” he responded.
“All right, but I’m just saying, that doesn’t mean you need to revert to some kind of heteronormativity, David,” she chided gently.
“I’m not…” Years later, he’d be able to explain how dating girls didn’t make him any less queer, but at sixteen he didn’t have the words to express it. “I like boys and girls,” he said.
Moira raised an eyebrow. “I’ve known plenty of bisexual women over the years.”
“What are you implying, that because I’m male I can’t like all genders?” He also didn’t have the words at that age to explain why men on the multisexual spectrum were less visible than women.
His mother just shrugged. “I’m saying that being gay is something you should love about yourself. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Oh my god,” he muttered, stomping out of his mother’s room, his excitement about his homecoming date effectively quashed.
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David watched the cabbie heft their luggage out of the trunk and onto his parents’ driveway. The Christmas lights from the trees that lined the drive reflected off of the metal brackets on his suitcase in a twinkling cacophony. While he settled the bill with the cab driver, Letitia and Andrew whispered to each other, laughing over some joke that David didn’t hear. As the cab pulled away, David yanked on the telescoping handle on his bag and began dragging his suitcase over the stone walkway, wheels clattering. He called back to his companions. “I just need to make an appearance with my family and then we can go out. Find something fun to do.”
“Cool,” Andrew said noncommittally.
He’d told his parents that he was bringing two friends home for Christmas, but not the nature of their relationship. Not that he even understood the nature of their relationship. Mostly they paired off in different combinations. He and Letitia hooked up sometimes, and he and Andrew hooked up sometimes, and a couple of times, all three of them went to bed together. But Letitia called Andrew her boyfriend and Andrew called Letitia his girlfriend, and David didn’t get any such honorific from either of them.
It didn’t lower his anxiety at all when the housekeeper showed his companions to two separate guest rooms. David had been envisioning them all piled together in the king-sized bed in his room, but then he hadn’t explained their relationship to anyone, so why wouldn’t they be given separate guest rooms? He told them they could put their stuff in his room if they wanted, pointing it out, but then left to seek out his parents before he could see how they responded. He felt wrong-footed with the whole situation. Maybe all of this was a terrible mistake.
He found his parents in the library.
“Um, hi,” he said, annoyed that they weren’t the kind of parents who were excited to greet their first-born son returning from college. “I’m home.”
“David!” his father said with a jovial boom from his position over by the drinks cart. “Welcome home!”
“Yes, it’s wonderful to have you home, my darling,” his mother added, but her focus didn’t stray from the issue of Vanity Fair she was paging through with one hand as she balanced a martini in the other.
“So, um…” He scratched the back of his head. “I guess I didn’t explain what the… situation is with Andrew and Letitia. So I thought I’d better do… that.”
His mother looked at him blankly. “Who?”
“My… the guests I told you I was bringing home? Andrew and Letitia.”
She nodded, a vacant look in her eye. She definitely didn’t remember.
“Anyway,” David continued. “I should have said that we’re all… I’m in a relationship with them. Both of them.”
His father narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean, relationship?”
David crossed his arms. “I mean, we’re together. Like, romantically.”
“Which one?” his mother asked.
“All of us,” David said. “I mean, I don’t know if I actually see myself as polyamorous, but—”
“So that’s still a thing?” his father asked. “You dating men and women?”
David exhaled a heavy sigh. “Yes. And people who don’t fall on the gender spectrum as one or the other.” This was it, he realized. His coming out moment with his parents. “I’m pansexual.”
“Pansexual,” Johnny repeated with bemusement. “But… I don’t know, David. I just thought…”
“What?” David’s voice came out high-pitched and strained.
“John, don’t,” Moira warned.
“I thought you might, you know, settle on one gender. And if that’s men, well, we accept—”
“That’s not who I am, and you’re both going to have to deal with it,” David interrupted. He stalked over to the bar cart and swiped an almost-full bottle of vodka, then turned on his heel to leave his parents behind. “We’re going out. Bye.”
“David—”
“Byeeeee.” He shook off the conversation as he took the spiral stairs two at a time. Maybe someday they’d come around.
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“David, I just want you to know that I endorse all your sexual encounters,” his father slurred one night on the walkway outside their motel rooms. And no, he wasn’t sober, but he seemed to mean it. So maybe one good thing had come out of their move to Schitt’s Creek. His father finally accepted his sexuality.
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“It’s a same-sex wedding,” David blurts.
Marcy stops talking, her brow knit in confusion. “What was that?”
“It’s not technically a gay wedding, it’s a same-sex wedding.” He clears his throat. Here he is in another coming out moment, another in a lifetime of coming out moments. “I mean, it’s mostly fine to call it a gay wedding, and I know it’s easier to call it that, but I’m not gay, I’m pansexual. So calling it a same-sex wedding is more… accurate.”
“Oh, David, I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize.”
“It’s really not a big deal,” he says, but it kind of is a big deal to him because he’s been mistaken for gay for a lot of his life. And most of the time he doesn’t even care. In fact, he kind of likes the fact that both he and Patrick buck stereotypes when it comes to their sexual orientations versus how they present themselves, and that nine people out of ten would probably guess wrong if asked which one of them is gay. But he wants the Brewers to know him. He wants the Brewers to accept him for all that he is, and isn’t that something?
“No, I want to get it right,” Marcy says. “Patrick’s identity is important to him, and I’m sure yours is too. I hope… I hope you’ll tell us when we get things wrong. And know that we’re learning, and it doesn’t mean we don’t accept you.”
“Of course,” David says, his heart surging with affection for her. “Of course I know that. It’s… it’s been a lot for you to get used to this year.”
Marcy chuckles. “I do envy your parents, David. They’ve had so much more time to get all of this right.”
He waves his hand at the screen in dismissal of that. “Believe me, they needed all that time to get it right. But, they did eventually, so… yeah.” He releases some tension he didn’t realize he was carrying in his shoulders. Being seen feels good. Who knew?
“Thank you for telling me, David,” Marcy says, smiling at him through the phone screen.
The smile he returns is easy this time. “You’re welcome.”