Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia Page B

from his house in the city of Syracuse, who was eleven but just as short as Rabbit, who had olive-colored skin that glowed like a perpetual tan and the tilted-head cool of Ralph Macchio.
    Nothing happened, yet everything had: Rabbit discovered something fundamental about himself without understanding what it meant. And he felt instinctively that it was something he didn’t want to talk about. It was secret and safe inside his mind, and he would keep it there, in a sacred part of himself, until he knew what to do with it.
    As Rabbit grew older, he felt the world become unfriendly. He began to worry, more than he had ever worried before, about what he was and what he wanted, and what it meant his life would be. It didn’t stop him from knowing, but he worried that it would be the only thing anyone would ever see about him—that if he told his father or his mother he was gay, they would never see anything else. “Here is our gay son,” they would say. “Here is our gay son who plays music and is kind, but did we mention that he is gay? Because he is. Gay.”
    And if the only thing the world saw about him was his gayness, how could anyone ever fall in love with
him?
Would he
have
to go to parades and wear rainbow-striped buttons? Would he
have
to love Barbra Streisand? Would
all
his friends have to be gay, not that he had ever met another gay person (that he knew of)? Would he ever be able to
not
have this secret?
    Rabbit worried about all of these things. He also worried about graduation and about college, and whether he would know his own mind if Alice went to a different school (or, maybe worse, he worried that he would love his independence so much, he’d never want her around again). He worried that his sister was setting herself up to be disappointed by real life, and, Pastoral Symphony notwithstanding, he worried that his father was already disappointed, would never open up that coffee house he dreamed of, would never be truly happy. Rabbit worried himself into a hole for the people he loved, for the world at large, and if he hadn’t felt that organized religion had no love for men who loved other men, he probably would have become a priest. He worshiped and found peace, at the age of seventeen, the only way he knew how: in the temple of Beethoven and Debussy, of David Bowie and Led Zeppelin. They filled his secret heart and made it less afraid.
     
    Alice will not shut up. This is not a new phenomenon. Rabbit thinks by now he should have developed a survival mutation, a sub-chamber of his brain like an overflow tank that siphons off and contains his sister’s endless talking. Less than five minutes after Rabbit checked into his room after that first rehearsal, Alice was at his door. About half an hour has passed since then—Rabbit has unpacked all his clothing, set up his toiletries in the bathroom, taken a quick shower, and changed into a crisp new shirt; they have left his room, walked the long creepy hallway, and are waiting for an elevator to take them down to the grand ballroom, to dinner—and he is certain his sister has not stopped speaking for longer than three seconds, which is the amount of time necessary for her to take a breath. He has gleaned that her roommate is famous and crazy, and her roommate’s mother is even crazier and a total bitch.
    Rabbit knows when to nod and when to raise his eyebrows, when to say
Are you kidding?
and when to say
She did
not.
He does it seamlessly, thoughtlessly, as though he were actually engaged in the conversation and not silently overwhelmed by the events of his own afternoon. As it went on, his first rehearsal did not exactly improve. The flautist’s storming out was definitely the most dramatic moment. But then they had to sight-read
Afternoon of a Faun
without the key soloist, stumbling from measure to measure, losing count and coming in at the wrong places. He heard the trumpets and trombones muttering mutinously behind him. Even mild-mannered bassoonist Kimmy