Someone wrote a sweet coming of age story and I'm just thinking about eating tacos: Jacob Guajardo's "What Got into Us"

It's no accident, I think, that this story came where it did in order of publication in the 2018 Best American Short Stories anthology. It's just after "Come on, Silver" by Ann Glaviano, which has to do with the confusing messages young women get concerning sexuality. Guajardo's story is about two homosexual boys dealing with equally confusing messages about their sexuality coming from society and from their own bodies.

It's a pretty simple story. Delmar and Rio, both named for the water, are growing up in a Michigan tourist town along the lake. It's a small town most of the year, then overrun during the summer. Delmar and Rio live like brothers, with their mothers, both named Maria, living together in one bedroom while Delmar and Rio share a bed in the other. The Marias aren't a lesbian couple; they are just close friends who have joined forces to raise kids and own a house they couldn't otherwise afford. The mothers run a taqueria together. Meanwhile, the boys roam freely along the beach during the summer.

Their freedom while their mothers are working gives the boys a chance to explore their feelings for each other. The opening scene has them trying on their mothers' dresses. Rio, the tougher of the two, whom the narrator Delmar thought of as "the bravest person he knew when he was fourteen," feels it's important to try to become like a woman, because if he and Rio are sexually attracted to one another as men, then that means they are gay. The most difficult part for the boys about growing up is that on the one hand, evidence of who they are is all around them, but at the same time, they are trying not to see who they are: "I have not said out loud what I am but I think about it all the time."

Being gay would put the boys in a category they call "monsters," which for them is "anything we cannot explain that June." They make occasional attempts to resist what they feel, but their attraction overwhelms them. The strongest part of the story is its believable treatment of the powerful onrush of a first love.

After that we are fucking everywhere. We are naked when our mothers are at work in the taco stand. We fumble around in the darkness for each other, like moths to the only light in a room. Our sex life will never again be as exciting as when we are fourteen and sharing a bed. 

But it doesn't last. The boys are reckless as they sneak off everywhere to have sex. Eventually, they get caught sneaking into an unoccupied summer home. The owner who comes back unexpectedly finds them en flagrante delicto, a fact that gets back to their mothers. The mothers separate the boys from then on, each sleeping in a bed with his own mother.

The boys grow up. Rio plays baseball, flunks out of college and comes back to work at the taqueria. Delmar goes off to college and does well. When he comes home, he finds that Rio has "become the kind of brave that says yes to everything," and he ends up in rehab for a heroin addiction. Delmar, however, eventually manages to find a saner love and marries a man with whom he can raise a family.

The tragedy of the story is that although Delmar thought Rio was the bravest boy he knew, that only extended to the exploration of their sexuality when they were teens. Rio is brave about trying things, but not brave about facing up to who he really is. When it comes to facing up to who he is, Delmar is the braver one. He's the one who at least tries to bring home a husband to meet the Marias. He at least tries to explain to them who he is and what he needs his life to be. Rio may have been brave enough to face the monster on the shore of Lake Michigan when they find a dead moose, but Delmar was the one able to look back at "what got into us" and answer the question. This is the truer form of bravery, and the one that enables Delmar to find happiness that eludes Rio.

Personal notes on the writing

There are some really nice evocative, sensual lines in the story. The spell only broke for me on three occasions, all of which are a little picayune.

First, when the boys are caught in one of the vacation homes and the police officer ends up taking them home, we read that "the cop had been able to speak Spanish and had told our mothers what we'd been doing." But the story had already told us that the Marias speak English: "They are childhood friends--immigrant daughters who grew up translating for their mothers and fathers." When the boys ask about their fathers, the mothers answer in English. It's English with a mistaken turn of phrase in it, but it's serviceable English. They could have understood what they boys had been doing even if the cop didn't speak Spanish.

Secondly, one of the Marias goes away to Mexico for the entire month of July. While she is gone, Delmar's mother "spends July harvesting the garden in our backyard." I don't understand how two mothers on an apparently rather fixed income, an income that seems to mostly depend on selling tacos to tourists during a short tourist season, can afford to do this. Surely, running the taco stand during the busiest part of the season would have required both mothers? And if not, if only one was running it, surely she wouldn't have had time to focus on gardening throughout that month after she got done at the taco stand?

Finally, and this really is a small nitpick here, there is a sentence near the end of the story where Delmar has to tell his fiancee about his past with Rio: "I will have to explain that night on the drive home about Rio and I." The correct grammar there, of course, would call for "Rio and me," since they are the thing he is talking about, the grammatical object. You could try to explain this by saying Delmar is himself a kid who grew up in a mixed-language house, so he has his own little mistakes that bleed into his English. But that's really the only mistake like that I saw him make in the story. It felt to me like that was just something the editors missed. It's small of course. I probably make a more egregious mistake than that in every blog post I put out. But in something that I assume was edited as heavily as this story was, I'm surprised nobody caught it. Which would mean that maybe it's there intentionally, but if so, I can't understand why.

LATE ADDITION: Karen Carlson did her usual excellent summary of this story here.