I introduced my boyfriend, Ferdy, to my parents 25 years ago when he and I stayed at their home in Millbrook, N.Y. He was visiting from Bali, Indonesia, where we had met and fallen in love three years earlier. I was on break from teaching in Hong Kong, the city to which I had escaped from midlife crises of divorce and despair.
When my Hong Kong contract ended, I moved back to New York, but Ferdy and I faced substantial hurdles in getting him a tourist visa. Finally, 18 months later, I was able to pick him up him at Newark Liberty International Airport and we drove to my apartment in Staten Island, near the college where I was teaching.
We kept each other warm in my apartment but braved winter during my time off so I could show him my city: Central Park, the Cloisters, MoMA, the Village. And we planned a weekend visit to my parents’ house in Millbrook.
“What will your friend eat?” my mother asked on the phone.
“Whatever you make,” I said. “But maybe rice instead of potatoes.”
On the extension in his workshop, my father said: “I bought hot sauce. Indonesians like their food spicy.”
When we arrived, my mother greeted Ferdy with a huge hug. Unused to physical affection among his own relatives, he stiffened, and I laughed at his scrunched-up face.
My parents were terrific hosts, and in the bed of my old upstairs room, Ferdy and I counted the number of times my father had said, “Ferdy, I want to show you something,” before pointing out deer in a field, wild turkeys by the roadside or hot sauce in the pantry.
“It doesn’t seem so, does it?”
“So they know that you — we — are gay?”
“They certainly do now,” I said.
My parents and I didn’t discuss the subject openly, which was a relief to me. Neither did we talk about it the next year, when they came to Staten Island to celebrate my being hired at an international school in Jakarta where I would live with Ferdy. Nor when Ferdy and I returned every summer for a visit.
Written By JAMES PENHA
Source: New York Times
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