Unlike the girls at Charlie Brown’s school, who wear dresses, Peppermint Patty wears shirts and pants or shorts. She and her friend Marcie attend a different school than Charlie Brown, on the other side of town. If Pigpen was an emblem of self-acceptance, an even better example was Peppermint Patty. I imagined her response: Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Surely she’d want to give me a good scrubbing. I pictured myself knocking on her door en femme, her startled expression as she realized that the strange woman before her was someone she already knew. In the mornings, I lay listening to her tender breaths, taken in sleep. It was not so unlike Pigpen showing Patty only his clean side. I had not yet cheated on Rachel when we watched Tom Stoppard’s play-at least, not if you measure cheating by the fairly high standard of having an actual affair. The side facing away from Patty is still covered with grime. As she departs (“I guess there’s some hope for him, after all”) you see that only half of Pigpen is clean. “I didn’t think I looked this good.” In a strip from September, 1954, Patty marches along with a bucket, determined to “personally give Pigpen a good scrubbing.” But when she finds him-sitting, as usual, in a sandbox-he looks clean and shiny. “Aren’t you ashamed?” Violet says to him, after making him look in the mirror. Sure, he’s immersed in filth-he can “raise a cloud of dust in a snowstorm,” as Charlie Brown puts it-and Patty and Violet seek constantly to humiliate him. Of all the characters in “Peanuts,” Pigpen seems most at peace with the life he has been given. I could imagine Charlie asking, with his usual anguish, “Isn’t there anyone who can tell me what love is all about?”Īs it turns out, there was one person who could: Pigpen. It was Charlie Brown and his friends-children who lived in a world defined by unrequited love-who resided in the real one. It was in reading “Peanuts,” lying on the floor beneath the piano in our suburban home, that I first grasped the terrible truth: my parents resided in a cartoon universe. My primary form of self-care was the constant generation of blarney. I buried treasure in the yard and drew maps for my sister to find it. I invented satirical songs, which I performed on the piano or sang a capella in my unexpected soprano. I did imitations, some of them so good that I could pass for other people on the telephone. Marcie is in love with Charlie Brown, and with Peppermint Patty, but Peppermint Patty loves only Charlie Brown. Lucy is in love with Schroeder, but Schroeder is in love with Beethoven. Charlie Brown’s little sister Sally is in love with Linus (“Isn’t he just the cutest thing?”), whose affections, in turn, are reserved for his blanket. Charlie Brown loves the Little Red Haired Girl, whom we never see. “Peanuts” was just one broken heart after another.
My favorite strip was “Peanuts,” which, if I’d been paying attention, contained some lessons for me about the world that lay ahead. One was to wake up in the morning as the girl I knew myself to be the other was that an all-encompassing love would erase this desire completely. As a closeted transgender child, I had hoped that a similar love might fall upon me, and, in so doing, cure me of the unfathomable desire that had dominated my heart since I was five or six. They were like the Quaker version of Morticia and Gomez Addams. My parents’ marriage had been like that: selfless, giving, ideal. I had grown up believing in the transformative power of love. I knew Rachel would realize something was up the first time that she sneezed. Jean had two cats, and my girlfriend-who I’ll call Rachel, and who remembers none of this, not even the play-was allergic. In the weeks to come, I would take care to wash my sheets. I looked over at Jean, and she looked at me, and at that moment we came to an unspoken agreement about all the trouble we were about to cause. During a movement called “The Catacombs,” the music grew dark. “Not a word about the utter tedium of the unrequiting.”Ī year later, I was sitting on a couch with a half-Irish writer named Jean, listening to “Pictures at an Exhibition,” a piano piece by Modest Mussorgsky. “Gallons of ink and miles of typewriter ribbon expended on the misery of the unrequited lover!” Close replied. “He wants to punish me with his pain, but I can’t come up with the proper guilt. We had descended the sixty-odd blocks to see Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing,” at the Plymouth Theatre. It was 1984, and my girlfriend and I had been living together for a couple of years. We were watching a play about infidelity.
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