The Silent Treatment

Once upon a time, there was a therapist, a teenage boy, and a very long hour.

This particular boy slumps in the maroon armchair, nearly supine, staring at the window. Outside, three boys whizz by on skateboards, hooting. Hard plastic wheels rumble over sidewalk cracks.

“So, tell me about your day at school,” the therapist asks. “What’s your favorite class?”

Every so often, the boy can raise his eyes to the ceiling, see cracks in the yellow paint, and pretend not to hear. That’s one minute. Then he imagines he’s somewhere else. Maybe playing frisbee with a friend, if he had a friend, or one of his brothers. Two minutes down, 48 to go.

“I’d like to know what happened today,” the therapist says. It sounds like pleading. “What’s going on at home? What are you feeling? Are you sad?”

In seventh grade, my life entered a terrible new era. Boys and girls were separated in physical education class. Mr. Gardner, mustachioed, broad-shouldered, gray hair closely shorn, terrifying, walked up and down the line of boys, clipboard in hand, eyeing us in our oversized white t-shirts and black shorts, our pathetic middle-school inadequacy.

At 13, I was smaller than the others. My voice was so high-pitched, I tried not to say anything. When Mr. Gardner called my last name, I raised my hand. Not seeing me, he yelled again, “Scott?!?” When I answered, “Here!” the other boys snickered at my attempt to lower my voice.

It was wrestling season. For a grade, Mr. Gardner required each boy to face off against another. When he called my name, the crowd of boys hooted. Stomach reeling, I moved into the circle. Then he hollered: “Eugene!” One overweight boy stepped forward, his face flushed, the epicenter of all dread in the universe. The rest of the class encircled us, laughing at the contrast. Eugene was huge. I was short and slight. How could the coach think we were well-matched?

“You can do this,” he said. “Have some fun!”

My mind swirled with notions of arm bars and single-leg take downs and half-nelson pins. Eugene was too big for me to put my arms around, so I got on all fours. He wrapped one arm around my chest; the other gripped my skinny bicep. His heart thumped against my back. His face was damp, and he dripped sweat on me.

Mr. Gardner blew a whistle. “Go!” The boys thumped the mat with their hands, an earthquake of humiliation. I don’t know what happened next, since Eugene was behind me, but it seemed he collapsed on top of me, pinning me under a mountain of flesh.

“Get out from under him!”

I could barely breathe, let alone move. Within seconds, Eugene won. The coach pulled his hand into the air. Eugene’s face turned pink, relieved.

I wanted this nightmare of being a boy to be over. Back in the locker room, there was nowhere to hide in the echoey shower room full of naked boys. Everyone seemed to have new hair in places I didn’t. I caught a glimpse of Eugene: huge fleshy stomach, shy smile. Even he had hair between his legs. I fumbled getting dressed.

“If you don’t take a shower, I’ll mark you down,” Mr. Gardner said behind me. I pretended I didn’t hear him and bolted. “I’m marking you down,” he called.

Though it wasn’t lunch yet, I walked out of school and ran to the apartment I shared with my mother and two brothers. She’d separated from my father, who’d disappeared a few months earlier without explanation. No one else was home. In my bedroom, I huddled under the bedsheets with a flashlight and a book. Over and over, I read the same books: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women and Little Men, E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. My criteria for a good book were simple: there had to be a family with two parents, a soft-spoken father with opinions about meeting adversity, and mostly girl characters. There could be nothing about the rules of being a boy.

Maybe the real torpedo came, weeks before the wrestling match, on that first day when students were assigned lockers. It was my first year at Cockeysville Middle School, in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland. I fumbled with the dial of my locker and jerked the handle. “Darn it.” I only had a few minutes before the bell. Day one of middle school and I already hated it.

Mitchell McGuire’s locker was two doors down. “They’re tricky,” he said, his face covered with blond scruff. “I can help. Tell me your number.” A foot taller than me, he looked like a man, yet we were the same age. He turned the dial as I told him, and it popped open, and I dumped half my textbooks in it. Then he stood there, waiting.

“We need to get to class,” I said. “The bell’s gonna ring.”

“Do you want to go get high?” he asked. “We can go behind the bleachers.”

“What?”

“I have grass,” he whispered.

It had never occurred to me that I was old enough or bold enough to skip class or smoke grass. I trembled and shook my head. “You shouldn’t smoke grass,” I said. “It’s illegal. You shouldn’t skip class either. You’ll get in trouble.”

Mitchell’s eyes narrowed. “Forget I asked,” he said. “I’ll go by myself.”

A middle-school reputation is a fragile thing, easy to tank.

A few days later, when I opened my locker, it was filled with shaving cream. My books were covered with white foam. I didn’t know what to do. It was impossible to get them clean, though I scrubbed furiously with toilet paper from the boys’ bathroom. The word hate wasn’t strong enough to describe how I felt about middle school.

Though I was 20 minutes late, the art teacher, Mrs. Dennis, smiled and told me to get my project from the shelf. We were painting faces on old shoes covered with papier-mâché. Mine had a frowning clown face with far-apart eyes, crazily dilated, as if he’d just murdered someone. I dreaded sitting in her class almost as much as physical education. Some of the same boys were there, lobbing spit balls when Mrs. Dennis wasn’t looking. The word they used to taunt me, bigger and louder and more powerful when said for the class to hear, was always the same:

Faggot.

I dipped my brush in black paint and tried to concentrate on my clown’s murderous eyes. No one had ever explained this word to me. I suspected it meant homosexual, a vague idea shivering in a haze of otherness. But who would I ask?

Mitchell called out, “Why are your hands so sticky, faggot?”

A girl yelled, “Ew gross, Mitchell!”

“You’re pathetic,” he said to me. “You better watch yourself after school, little boy.”

I wanted to run home.

Faggot, faggot, faggot. Each time someone said the word, it felt like a violent bee sting. There’s-something-despicable-about-you. You-do-not-belong-here. Disappear.

I wanted the day to end.

Later that afternoon, as I began to walk home, Mitchell jumped from a nearby bush and punched me in the jaw. I was so shocked that I barely felt the blow, but later that evening my jaw began to ache. The jagged shards of the day reassembled, and I recalled Mitchell’s 13-year-old face, which looked so much older, when he leaned in to punch me: his angry squinting eyes, the set of his rectangular jaw, the wisps of whiskers on the chin, and the burning cigarette clenched in his lips, so close to my own face that I worried the hot ash would fall on my polo shirt. Then he’d said the word: Faggot.

For the next few weeks, my mother let me stay home, accommodating my complaints of stomach pains and headaches. I researched and discovered that I could miss 45 school days a year and still pass to the next grade.

Then, after 10 days absent from school, the school secretary called my mother and asked us to meet with the vice principal. His office was a foreign territory, reserved for kids in trouble. In my whole life, I’d never gotten into trouble. The vice principal was a grandfatherly figure, in a white shirt and a navy-blue tie. He had wrinkles obscuring his eyes and gray tufts coming out of his ears. “Wayne’s missing a lot of school,” he informed my mother.

In a quiet voice I explained, “I can stay home for 45 school days and still pass to the next grade.”

He frowned and shook his head vigorously. I couldn’t hear everything he said because it was now shockingly clear that I was the kid in trouble. He commanded my mother: “You need to get him to go to school. No matter what.”

My mother pursed her lips. She wore a mint green pant suit with a scarf patterned with purple flowers. She was a realtor in 1978, a brutal economy that no amount of hustle could match.

“I can keep up with my homework,” I whispered to her as we left his office. “Why does it matter if I’m in the building, if I get good grades?”

After our talk with the vice principal, we stopped by the office of the school counselor, as directed, to see if he could help with school avoidance. His navy-blue tie pinched his neck, as if it was choking him. He had more to say than the vice principal, but he talked to me. “If you get picked on, you need to fight back. If you fight back, they will leave you alone.”

I stared at him. This seemed impossible.

“They smell fear,” he said, “so you must get rid of your fear.” He had a gentle fatherly tone when he gave these awful directives. “If you think you’re going to cry,” he continued, “come to my office. You must not let them see you cry.”

I said nothing. Neither did my mother. She was worried about taking time away from showing houses. I knew she was worried about rent. Neither of us knew what to say to these men in their crisp, ironed shirts with perfectly knotted ties. When we got to the car, she sighed. “Assholes,” she muttered.

As a working parent with three boys—13, 12, and 10—she didn’t know what else to do with my complaints of physical ailments, except to keep me home. She couldn’t argue with the vice principal and the counselor, she said, but she didn’t have to listen to them either. She brought me to our pediatrician. Wearing a white coat over a pale blue shirt, he listened with what looked like either patience or suspicion, then cut a deal: he’d write a medical excuse for me to get out of physical education class, the nexus of my anguish, on the condition that I attend school every day, no excuses, and go to therapy. He wanted me to see a male therapist. “He needs a man’s influence,” the doctor told my mother. “You can’t coddle him.”

Neither the vice principal, nor the school counselor, nor the physical education teacher agreed with this medical excuse—this endorsement of sissyness—but he was a doctor. Other than my mother, who secretly thought my staying home was the only safe solution in a dangerous school, all the men watching us seemed to believe that the problem was me: my habit of crying when teased; my fear of being chased and shoved and punched in the locker room; my anxiety about jeering and name-calling in home room and art class and the gymnasium. And it was impossible not to notice all of them seemed to be throwing adult men at me as an antidote. Everyone seemed to want to cure me of my fatherless state. But all the substitute fathers who came onto my path made me feel like I had a gruesome disease.

Once a week, my mother dropped me off at the therapist’s office. My body resisting the give of the armchair, I sat across from Howard and stared. He had a brown beard, glasses that didn’t obscure the warmth in his eyes, a round face, and a paunch that seemed to suggest he was comfortable with himself. Sometimes he wore a plaid flannel shirt, reds and blues with threads of gold. He asked questions in a gentle voice. He wanted to understand what was making me unhappy, but still he had that voice and that big man’s beard. Though he had done nothing to me, I couldn’t forgive him.

Howard asked question after question, nudging to see if I’d say more. I responded with single words—the fewer syllables, the better—and grunts. He cajoled me to play games of checkers and Uno and Monopoly, games that sat in tattered boxes on a shelf. He tried to engage me over a game of pool in the group room of the Community Mental Health Center. I refused to talk. He praised me when I broke apart the triangle of colored balls. “Excellent shot!” If he ever felt irritation, he never showed it. When nothing worked, we sat across from each other in silence.

It’s not easy to be silent for an hour, sitting across from someone who’s waiting for you to speak, but with determination it can be done.

Week after week, as I endured middle school, Howard looked at me and I looked away. Except when I glanced back to confirm he was still looking at me.

While Howard did have the beard, and the paunch, and the flannel shirt, he didn’t direct me to do anything. He offered no advice or guidance or reminders of the rules of being a boy. He asked questions or he waited for me to speak. When I glared, he smiled at me with his brown eyes.

Sitting across from him, I was steadfast in my resolve. My throat tightened. My brain shut down. There was a rolling in my stomach, a constant pressure behind my eyes. The words to name the problem were far beyond my ken: contempt, aggression, hatred, homophobia. I only knew I needed to hide from the forces they represented. Words I did know—chase, punch, faggot, cocksucker—were wrapped in humiliations which only became bigger in the retelling. Silence can be powerful that way, a kind of refusal and strength.

“I have a question for you,” Howard said one afternoon.

I stared, unwilling to give him any encouragement.

“Do you know what a ‘faggot’ is?” he asked as if it was any ordinary word.

My face burned. I looked away but couldn’t escape his gaze. How did he know? I wondered. Was I somehow marked?

“You’ve heard that word at school,” Howard offered, his hands folded in his lap. “Many teenage boys use it as a curse word.”

Before I could stop myself, a word escaped from my body: “Yes.” Howard was seeing parts of me, my humiliations, that I didn’t want to reveal.

“Do you know what it means?”

I shook my head. I wanted our time to be over. I wanted to be in the car with my mother driving home as she sang along to Carly Simon and Aretha Franklin on the radio.

“It’s a cruel word for a male homosexual,” he said in a weary, matter-of-fact voice. “A man who is attracted to other men. It’s used to make them feel badly about themselves. But there’s nothing wrong with being gay, Wayne. It’s just another form of love.”

A few days later, as I hurried home from school, three boys emerged from behind the same hedges carved into sharp angles. They were smoking cigarettes. Two of them were from physical education class. The other was Mitchell. When I tried to charge past them, they blocked me.

“Where’re you going?” Mitchell asked. The cigarette smoke made my eyes sting.

There were three of them. It seemed so unfair. “Leave me alone,” I said, voice softer than a whisper.

Mitchell shoved me. Another boy punched me in the stomach: the air left my body, and my butt hit the ground. For a moment I sat stunned, trapped. After a day of loneliness and invisibility at school, it was too much. They towered over me. They talked over each other: “You’re a faggot, you know that?” “We’re going to beat the shit out of you.” “Just like Eugene did.” They laughed, hard.

“Boys, what are you doing?” shouted a teacher. She started walking over to us.

When the bullies turned to look, I took my cue and bolted.

“Wait a minute,” she called. “Tell me what happened!”

But I’d gotten away again.

Later that afternoon, I sat across from Howard, trying to hold back. But my resolve broke. I couldn’t control the hot tears running down my cheeks. I cried and cried and cried like there was no end to the sadness, like I was all of sadness, like there was no boundary between my body and the expansive misery of the universe. Howard nodded and he passed me tissues. His eyes grew moist.

I didn’t say any words but I cried for the whole hour. Howard looked at me with a sad helplessness, as if we were stuck together in the same awful situation. He only said one thing, as the session came to a close: “It must be very hard, Wayne.”

My mother was waiting in the car outside. Without a word I left.

Remembering that silent time in his office, it strikes me that he taught me something about fathering, but it didn’t look anything like the makeshift fathering being pushed on me from all sides, so it was unrecognizable, strange. Fathering can come from a quiet, humble place.

For the three years I was a mandated therapy client, I never had a real conversation with Howard. I was stubborn and unforgiving, of him and all the father substitutes—of everyone who couldn’t see that I was mad there even had to be a substitute. To the men scrutinizing my situation, even to Howard, there was never any sign that I improved. For most of high school, I never returned to physical education class. Every year, my mother insisted that the pediatrician write a medical excuse. “He’s still seeing a male therapist?” the pediatrician would ask without looking up. I remained a sensitive boy, quick to cry, fearful of brutality, maybe a touch more compassionate than average. Not such an awful fate in the long run.

Eventually, I became a father of two sons, also late bloomers with smaller-than-average bodies; then a psychotherapist, like Howard, who would have his own experiences of sitting across an office from teenagers with hard expressions, begrudgingly accepting the one hour they get when no one tries to change them.

I’d become a man who longs to send out a message into the universe, that mostly brutal place with its occasional pockets of human kindness. I want to say to Howard: “A long time ago, it was you, your quiet humility, who saved a misfit boy. But I didn’t know it at the time, and you would never see it.” I wish that I could tell him: “You waited, never knowing if there would be a return on that investment of patience.” But I don’t know where he is, or if he is still alive.

Instead, I sit in my office, the bookshelves stacked with board games and decks of cards, with a boy who doesn’t want to play and doesn’t want to speak. I take another breath. I ask another question. I watch him and I wait.