Free What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day by Pearl Cleage Page A

confines of a Christian church.’ So they declined to put the notice in the bulletin and canceled the meeting until they can ‘clarify things’ with me ‘concerning areas of great importance to us all.’ She signed it
‘Yours in Christ,’
and was kind enough to return my pamphlets.”
    I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was. I spent a lot of years being ignorant about AIDS because it was new and the information was usually bad or nonexistent. In 1981 they were still calling it a gay cancer and I was still cutting a wide sexual path through a group of ne’er-do-wells whose specific sexual histories I hesitate to speculate about even now. But this plague is more than a decade old now. Claiming it’s too nasty to talk about in front of God is hardly the most effective defense.
    People like Gerry Anderson don’t even understand that there’s a plague going on. They’re watching these dumb kids fucking around like it’s 1965 and the worst that can happen is some kind of minor venereal infection that penicillin can knock out in a couple of days. By the time they figure it’s okay to hand out a public health pamphlet, it’ll be way too late. It’s probably
already
too late.
    I remember that guy’s wife who came up to the shop after he got my note about being HIV-positive. All she wanted me to do was take it back. Like calling its name conjures it up and makes it real. Like if I just wouldn’t talk about it, things could get back to normal. I wish I’d had time to tell her to forget all that what-you-don’t-know-won’t-hurt-you fantasy shit. Those wild people from ACT UP got it right:
Silence
=
Death.
    “I thought truth was the light,” Joyce said, stuffing the brochures back in the envelope.
    “Bad girl,” I said.
    Joyce tossed the letter down on the table. “I refuse to think about this anymore tonight. Let’s go swimming.”
    “Now?” I hadn’t been in the lake at night since I was a kid, but the mysterious freedom of floating around in the dark was one of my favorite memories. All three of us used to go; me, Joyce, and Mama. Daddy didn’t like to swim at night, so he’d sit on the dock and name the constellations as the stars came out. “You want to go swimming
now?”
    “This very minute,” she said, pulling me along behind her, tossing me a suit and struggling into one of her others that she hadn’t had on since she gained all that weight. When she finally got it on, a sizeable portion of her butt was still hanging out. She frowned at her reflection in the full-length mirror.
    “I’ve got to get back in shape,” she said.
    “Don’t let me say
amen,”
I said, smug and still size seven. I hadn’t been off the circuit so long I’d let things get out of hand yet.
    Joyce turned toward me and raised an eyebrow. “I thought you said you were going to stop drinking so much.”
    “What’s that got to do with it?” I sounded like a whiny child.
    “Nothing,” Joyce said, “except that neither one of us is taking such good care of herself, you know?”
    I tried to get my feelings hurt then, but I knew she was right. If I wanted to be as healthy as I could be, even now,
especially
now, I had to cut back on all the vodka I was drinking and figure out some kind of exercise I could do that wouldn’t drive me crazy. Speaking of which, a little mental health effort probably wouldn’t hurt either.
    “Well, you’re the oldest,” I said. “Tell me what to do.”
    “Will you do it?”
    “Will
you?”
    “God, yes! I look terrible. We’ll start a program.”
    “Okay.”
    “We’ll eat more nutritious food.”
    “Who’s cooking?”
    “I am.”
    “Okay.”
    “We’ll exercise regularly.”
    “What kind of exercise?”
    “I don’t know,” Joyce said. “Anything but swimming until I get a new suit.”
    “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s already almost dark outside.”
    We picked our way down the gentle grassy slope that ran from Joyce’s back steps down a couple of