Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Page 27

  Two months after I’d left home, post-college, to live on my own, our parents announced they were separating. Although their twenty-six-year marriage had oscillated between grinding frustration and festering resentment, their decision somehow still managed to come as a total shock to John and me.

  “How can you guys be separating?” my brother cried when my parents called him at college with the news. “You just redecorated the apartment.”

  “What do you want us to do?” our mother sighed. “Stay together so your father can look at the wallpaper?”

  Their marriage had stagnated, she said. They needed some time apart to “gain some perspective” and “work a few things out.”

  “It’s only temporary,” said our dad.

  Yet no sooner had he transplanted his toothbrush and business suits to a furnished one-bedroom across town than it became obvious he was not moving back.

  “I can’t believe our parents are splitting up,” I sobbed to John. “I mean, they already stuck it out twenty-six years. Would another twenty-six really kill them?”

  “Did you see this coming?” John asked incredulously. “I didn’t.”

  “I didn’t either,” I said. “Okay, except for whenever Mom yelled at Dad that she wished she lived alone—”

  “Or those times when he said he might leave her.”

  “Or when she told him he was boring.”

  “Or when he refused to comfort her when she was upset.”

  “But except for those minor details—” I said.

  “They seemed happy enough together,” John concluded.

  “Besides,” I said. “Isn’t marriage, by definition, supposed to be deadening and lethal anyway?”

  By the mid-1990s, almost nothing from our childhood remained. The Upper West Side had become so aggressively gentrified, sections of it now resembled a cruise ship. Luxury condominiums with polarized windows sprang up, sporting awnings with pretentious names like “The Key West” and “The Montana,” suggesting that they were not really part of New York City at all. On street corners where residents had once shelled out $25 for a Baggie of marijuana, they could now spend the same amount for a plate of blackened catfish. In a move that was particularly ironic, a number of bodegas run by Central American immigrants were replaced by Banana Republics.

  While John and I supposed we shouldn’t complain, we did anyway. Given the choice between counting our blessings and whining, we usually opted for the latter, and it annoyed us to no end that the Upper West Side had become so chic and expensive, none of us who’d actually grown up there could now afford to live in it.

  Worse still were the new arrivals—snotty, suburban-bred professionals who harbored the delusion that they deserved to live in our neighborhood simply because they could pay the rent. Their sense of entitlement was galling. Twice, young stockbrokers with attachÉ cases body-slammed me in attempts to grab the taxis I’d hailed; at my gym, a balding Master of the Universe climbed onto my step machine and tried to shove me off because, even though he’d missed his turn, he was in a hurry, goddamn it! During my childhood, I’d dodged countless threats from black and Hispanic kids in the neighborhood, but these turned out to be nothing compared to the viciousness of white yuppies, who would physically assault you without warning over a Nordic Trac or a latte.

  To console each other, John and I indulged in the archaeology of memory, regaling one another with our “insider knowledge” of what the neighborhood had really been like.

  “Oh look,” I’d say nostalgically, pointing to the new Blockbuster Video on Broadway, “remember when that used to be an empty lot and all the junkies used to nod off there?”

  “And across the street was that adult movie theater that only showed Spanish porn?” John added wistfully.

  “And remember that paranoid schizophrenic named Quack-Quack who used to wander around Amsterdam Avenue wearing duct tape and terrorizing all the women?”

  “Oh!” we’d wail in unison, “where did everything go?”

  After our parents separated, John and I had the awful, nagging suspicion that not only had the infrastructure of our past vanished, but that our entire home life had been like Thanksgiving at Howard Johnson’s. Had we spent our childhood dancing around with ice buckets on our heads, thinking everything was just dandy, when really our parents were sitting there spellbound with misery? Apparently so.

  We spent hours on the phone performing autopsies of our parents’ marriage. “Was that why Dad took so many business trips? Was that why Mom was so moody?” It was now impossible to leaf through a family album, to look at pictures of birthday parties, of summers at Silver Lake, of the four of us grinning before our Christmas tree, without feeling queasy. Suddenly, every memory was suspect, counterfeit, a likely illusion.

  “Was anything the way we thought it was?” we asked each other. “Why didn’t we have a clue?”

  A dead giveaway, apparently, should’ve been the interior decorator.

  “Your parents completely redid their apartment, then announced they were splitting? Augh, that’s classic,” said Joshua, my boyfriend at that time. Joshua’s own parents had divorced when he was thirteen, then remarried twice each by the time he’d turned twenty. Unsurprisingly, he now considered himself an expert in marital pathology. As he explained it, there was no surer sign that a marriage was in trouble than when a couple paid professionals to reupholster their sofa and knock down their drywall. To hear him tell it, an interior decorator might as well arrive on a couple’s doorstep wearing a black-hooded robe and holding a scythe. As soon as a designer started sashaying around the living room enthusing, “I’m thinking terra-cotta. I’m thinking Moroccan/urban. I’m thinking throw pillows,” you could be sure the marriage was kaput.

  “It’s like a joint midlife crisis,” Joshua explained, running his fingers around the rim of a margarita, then sucking off the salt. “Instead of a sports car and a blonde, couples install track lighting and buy a new dishwasher. Hell, my mother and her second husband built a whole new country house just before they called it quits.”

  Of course, neither my brother nor I had known any of this. The year our parents had decided to redecorate, all we’d thought was: It’s about fucking time.

  As an artist, our mother had always been loath to throw out anything that might, with a dab of Elmer’s glue and a sequin, be converted into a decorative handicraft. And so, over the years, our apartment had taken on the distinctive look of a roadside garage sale. Virtually every room had become crammed with discarded picture frames, pipe cleaners, bolts of colored felt, acrylics, yarn, saw horses, plastic milk crates, and those Styrofoam heads used to display wigs in department stores. It was a “decorating scheme” not unlike the process that formed the Grand Canyon. One layer of debris settled prettily on top of another, preserving it for all eternity.

  Our father drifted among these canyons seemingly indifferently, content just to sack out on the sofa with the sports page amid piles of our mother’s Mondrianesque collages, decoupage coffee tins, and 3-D mobiles painted to look like psychedelic fish. His own idea of home improvement pretty much began and ended with picking his socks up off the floor.

  Yet the year my brother left for college, our father made a sudden, stunning decision. “We’re redoing the apartment,” he announced. From the way he said this, there was no way of mistaking that “redoing the apartment” was really a euphemism for “getting rid of this tsunami of crap.”

  His adamancy was surprising.

  As they’d gotten older, John and I had noticed, our parents’ personalities had begun to ossify into caricatures of themselves. More and more, our mother’s sensitivity and “artistic temperament” were giving way to a simple, constant state of agitation. She was like a storm system, filling our household with weather and drama, her views of the world swinging wildly between hope and indictment. One moment, she was weeping with gratitude over all the poignant beauty of our lives; the next, she was raging over their mediocrity. We lived
on constant alert for the shifts in her moods, trying desperately to forecast her.

  Our easygoing father, on the other hand, had mellowed to the point of inertia. Lolling around placidly in sweatpants, he spent his time at home hypnotized before the television. He’d read the paper for hours, or absentmindedly stare out the window, seemingly immune to the histrionics that the rest of us felt compelled to engage in on a nearly daily basis. Occasionally, he’d rouse himself just long enough to realize that he should be taking more demonstrable interest in our lives.

  “So, Susie,” he’d say awkwardly, casting about for some clear point of entry. “How’s that, um, party planning of yours going?”

  “What party?” I’d say.

  “Weren’t you planning a party? Something with champagne and ice cream that boys could only come to in drag?”

  “You mean my Sweet Sixteen?” I said. “Dad, that was seven years ago.”

  By middle age, our parents were interacting like two components of an EKG reading, our mother the erratic heartbeat, our father the perennial flatline. It wasn’t our idea of fun, but it seemed to work well enough for them.

  Yet once our father decided to redecorate, he was transformed overnight into Napoleon. Our apartment, to him, was suddenly a continent waiting to be attacked, pillaged, and colonized through the strategic use of paint swatches. He didn’t hire a decorator so much as appoint one. “Everyone,” he announced imperiously, “this is Gene.”

  Gene was an elegant, bearded man who insisted that his specialty was decorating apartments in such a way as to make them look as if they’d never been decorated. Before my mother could even wonder aloud why we needed a decorator if all he was going to do was make it look as if he hadn’t done anything, a legion of “removal specialists” arrived. On my father’s orders, they spent two days carting away our prized collections of saw horses and broken floor lamps. “Out,” my father commanded, as they trooped back and forth with their burlap-covered dollies. “All of it. Vamoose.”

  “Who is this person?” my mother said with alarm. “Yesterday, he couldn’t find the clothes hamper. Now, he’s a fanatic who sits in the bathroom, obsessing about linoleum.”

  It was strange to see my father so invigorated. No sooner were the rooms cleared than carpenters, painters, and contractors arrived, clomping through the apartment in coveralls and ponytails, filling it with industriousness and the distinctly oniony smell of male perspiration. Under my father’s direction, the renovations then proceeded as frantically as time-elapse photography set to the William Tell Overture.

  Soon, every evening began to feel like Christmas morning; my parents and I hurried home from work eager to discover the latest surprise: six sleek leather chairs tucked around a new dining table. A hand-embroidered carpet unfurled on the living room floor. The beauty went beyond anything we had ever imagined for ourselves. It was hard to believe, frankly, that so much material good fortune could be visited upon us—and that my father, of all people, had instigated it. Why, when it was all done, my mother and I dared to whisper, our apartment might look like something out of Architectural Digest.

  Yet the less our home looked like a storage facility, the more alien we felt in it. We moved around the new rooms stiffly, gingerly, like guests in a furniture museum.

  “Don’t sit on the sofa!” we shrieked when one of us entered the living room with a glass of Diet Pepsi. “You’ll spill!”

  “We’ll get more comfortable with this in time,” my father said with newfound authority. “It’ll be better once the wall unit arrives.”

  For the piÈce de rÉsistance, he’d ordered a custom-made wall unit for the living room. To hear him go on about it, however, it was not merely a wall unit that was going to arrive, but a wall unit messiah.

  “Wait till you see it,” he said excitedly. “It’s a brand-new design by the same company that builds wall units for the royal family of Denmark.”

  For as long as I had known him, my father had had almost zero interest in material goods. Any gadget harder to operate than a bottle opener was a source of anxiety for him. Designer suits, athletic shoes—my father could barely pronounce the names, let alone appreciate their status. Whenever we asked him what he wanted for his birthday, he shrugged. “Jeez. I don’t know. Maybe a new pair of sweat socks?”

  This custom-made wall unit was the first item I’d ever seen him get visibly emotional about.

  While I struggled to present myself as someone who cared, he described in painstaking detail how it was made of a rich mahogany veneer, making it easy to clean! Bolted directly into the wall, there’d be no warping or wobbling! “It’s indestructible. You can store anvils in it,” he said excitedly, as if this were something we were actually contemplating doing.

  For weeks, our apartment lay in wait, the renovations complete except for one naked, gaping space in the living room and a mountain of boxes, ready to be emptied. Once the wall unit arrived, our father insisted rÉpeatedly, our apartment would be clear for the first time in decades.

  The day of the delivery, he was so excited, he stayed home from work. “When you get back this evening, it’ll be like you’re in a brand-new apartment,” he said gleefully.

  “For starters, it’ll be quiet,” said my mother, rolling her eyes. “No more listening to your father obsessing about the goddamn wall unit.”

  That night, the apartment was, in fact, quiet. As my father had promised, when I arrived home from work, there were no more cartons barricading the hallways, no more stepladders and paint cans lying about. All traces of renovation had vanished.

  “Hello?” I said plaintively.

  I hung up my coat and headed into the living room. My father sat on our newly upholstered couch. My mother was over by the window, staring blankly out at the city.

  “So. Did the wall unit come?” I asked. But before they could answer, I saw it for myself. It was impossible not to. Extending from the floor to ceiling, it took up the entire eastern wall of the apartment.

  Gargantuan and liver-colored, it looked not so much like a piece of furniture as a gigantic control panel, an enormous monolith riddled with brass industrial hinges and knobs. The retractable “cabinets” were more like hatches and vaults, and the dark shutters looked impenetrable, giving it a foreboding, sinister quality. The unit was so massive, it overpowered everything else in the living room. It gave you the distinct feeling it would slam down on top of you at any minute and crush you. It was hideous: the Death Star of furniture.

  My father leapt up. “Well,” he said, forcing a smile. “What do you think?”

  I studied it for a moment.

  “Is it really bolted to the wall?” I said.

  My mother gave a little cry of despair.

  “I could kill Gene,” she said, nearly in tears. “And I could kill you, David. It didn’t look like this in the catalogue at all.”

  “Look, Ellen. I told you,” my father said desperately. “It has lights.” Turning to me, he fairly pleaded, “I told her, it looks better with the lights.”

  Hurrying over to the wall unit, he pushed a button on the side and small halogen bulbs embedded in the top shelves came on weakly, illuminating the uppermost cubbies like a row of shadow boxes. “See?” he said. In a court of law, he would have been accused of leading the witness. He twisted the dimmer on “high.”

  It was a little better, but not much.

  I walked over and examined the wall unit. It was made of a sort of plastic laminate, a glossy fake wood oddly reminiscent of the halcyon furnishing at Hojo’s. There was no painting it, no bleaching it, and, I saw quickly, no removing it. It was bolted to the wall, all right—an exterior wall—which meant my parents would probably have to knock down the entire building if they ever wanted to get rid of it. It was a monstrosity, a titanic eyesore, and they were stuck with it.

  For a moment, we all stood there, marinating in misery. “Maybe you just need to remove some of the cabinet doors,” I suggested. “You know, lighten it up.
Make it more homey.”

  “Yes. Of course,” my father said, seized with relief. “Remove some of the doors.”

  Immediately, the three of us got very busy with screwdrivers, removing the cabinet doors, then stocking the exposed shelves with my mother’s prettiest art books and handicrafts. She positioned a couple of philodendrons in each corner so they cascaded down greenly.

  “Well,” she said uncertainly. “That’s a little better. I guess.”

  “Oh, it’s a lot better,” my father insisted. “See, how much nicer that is? I think this will work out well, actually. I think this looks pretty good.”

  I didn’t know who he thought he was kidding. Our efforts were the aesthetic equivalent of pinning a corsage on a robot. Yet as I watched him struggle to make the best of it, I found myself rooting for him, hoping that he would succeed in taming the oppressive wall unit—or at least in convincing my mother that he had not, in fact, made some colossal mistake.

  By dinnertime, we were utterly fatigued from the physical labor and forced optimism of it all. Too tired to cook, we went to our local Chinese restaurant and pushed shreds of shrimp lo mein around on our plates while studiously avoiding any mention of the wall unit. When we came home, I noticed, none of us made a beeline for the living room.

  “Look, I think we just need to sleep on it,” my father said finally. “When we wake up in the morning, it may look like a whole new piece of furniture.”

  “Well,” my mother said dubiously. “I suppose.”

  “You know, sometimes these things just take getting used to,” I prompted, eager to help. “We’ve been living amid drop cloths and boxes for so long, naturally it’s going to take us a while to adjust to real furniture.”

  “Oh, that’s such an excellent point.” My father looked at my mother encouragingly. “Isn’t that an excellent point? It’ll just take us a while to adjust. In a few days, you’ll see. We’ll probably love it. In a few days, we probably won’t even notice it’s there.” Then he smiled. “I mean, people, it’s just a goddamn piece of furniture. It’s not death and it’s not cancer, right?” He laughed. “I mean, let’s keep some perspective here. It’s only a wall unit.”