Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress Page 28

  “That’s right,” my mother said mirthlessly. “It is only a wall unit, David.”

  Later that night, however, I found I couldn’t sleep. Beyond my window, the city glittered, then grew steadily darker as lights in other buildings snapped off, like eyes shutting, like faces turning away. When the numbers on my clock radio flipped over into the single digits, I finally surrendered, got up, and headed into the kitchen for a snack. The tiny halogen bulbs on the wall unit were still on, glinting bleakly in the darkness. I almost didn’t notice my father, sitting alone on the couch, staring up at the wall unit. He seemed unaware of my presence, or, indeed, of anything around him. All the florid optimism had been drained from his face; alone in the shadows, he looked worried, utterly bereft, more defeated than ever.

  “Dad,” I whispered, “it’s only a wall unit.”

  Startled, his head jerked in my direction. “I know, sweetie,” he whispered sadly after a moment. “It’s just furniture.”

  But any stranger with an IQ higher than room temperature would’ve known that it was not “just furniture” at all. One look at my father, and they would’ve known instantly that as he stared at the wall unit, he was seeing a void that he believed would become the rest of his life. His frenzied redecorating hadn’t been a quest for more closet space, but a desperate, naive attempt to resuscitate his own life, to renovate his marriage, to stave off some gangrenous rot. No doubt, with that damn wall unit, he’d hoped to contain my mother, to confine her volubility, to shut away years of tension behind a sleek mahogany veneer. He had tried his best, but his efforts had only resulted in this: a more permanent hideousness, bolted to his wall. Now, he was exhausted. He was out of ideas.

  Anyone else would’ve known instinctively that, as my father gazed despairingly into the shelving, he was seeing not a piece of furniture at all, but his own, awaiting coffin.

  Anyone but me would’ve known that, at that very moment, he was planning to leave.

  Divorce, we’d once thought smugly, was for other, less intelligent families. The fact that we had remained “intact”—while all around us, our neighbors were divorcing—had always been an enormous source of pride to my family. Occasionally, my mother would come home from the grocery store and announce, “I just heard that Ben and Rosalynn Schneiderman are splitting.” Hearing this, our faces would break into the same triumphant look that children got whenever they snagged a seat during musical chairs. Just like these children, my family and I secretly believed that we remained in the game not because of timing or luck, but because of our own inherent cleverness.

  Sure, our mother was often seething. Sure, our father wandered around like a zombie. But at the end of each day, we ate dinner together. We had our Sunday brunch rituals, our driving to the beach rituals, our Christmas morning rituals—and none of them ever involved the words “custody,” “visitation,” or “stepparent.”

  When our parents began divorcing, John and I found ourselves jettisoned from one demographic pile into another. Suddenly, in our twenties, we became the children of divorce, part of the other 50 percent. In a matter of weeks, our father had moved out, then moved again, then hired Gene the Decorator once more—this time to help him furnish his new bachelor pad on East 12th Street.

  “Most men leave their wives for another woman. Our dad left Mom for another wall unit. Do you suppose we should feel lucky?” my brother said.

  By waiting until we were grown, our parents had spared us a serial nightmare: the custody battles, the court appearances, the anxiety over whether child support and alimony would ever arrive, the possible parental vanishing acts. By waiting, our parents spared us the torture of thinking that we ourselves were to blame for the divorce. They’d spared us all traumas but one: the fact that our family had been smashed apart like a pumpkin.

  Within weeks of my father’s exodus, our family circle had expanded. In addition to the four of us, there were soon our shadows, four alter egos in the form of four therapists, earnest men and women with leather-upholstered furniture and white noise machines whirring away in their fern-filled foyers. In our readiness to seek professional help, we became possibly the first family to double in size in the wake of a separation; it was as if our parents had initiated an act of mitosis.

  It was every bit as ludicrous as it sounds. Soon I was having phone conversations like this:

  Me: Hi, Dad. Listen. I’m calling because I’m upset about something, and when I talked it over with my therapist, she said I should talk to you about it directly.

  Dad: Oh. She did? Well, listen, sweetie. Right now’s not a good time. I’m actually late for my therapy appointment.

  Me: So let me get this straight. You’d rather go to your therapist to talk about our problems than talk to me about them directly?

  Dad: Hm. I guess I would. But that’s an interesting observation. I’ll be sure to bring it up in therapy.

  Overnight, we’d become clichÉs, a stupid caricature of New York neurotics flailing around, and I hated us for it. Once, I had worried that my family’s eccentricities made us a bunch of freaks. Now, I saw that we were no different from anybody else, and this was at least as depressing. All the standard pettiness, wretchedness, and temporary psychosis that plagued every other divorcing family in America plagued us, too.

  My father, for his part, behaved like a man who had just emerged from a coma. Having spent decades catatonic on the sofa, he suddenly erupted with personality, becoming a great fount of needs, opinions, appetites, and the highly irritating desire to express himself almost constantly.

  “You know what I realized today when I was at Gristede’s?” he said as I wandered dumbstruck through his trendy new downtown apartment, examining his love seat with its Aztec designs, his modular glass coffee table, his wicker basket filled with dried seed pods from Pier One Imports: Was this stuff really my father’s? His black, lacquered bureau was neatly stacked with ticket stubs from Lincoln Center. There was a coaster from Caramba’s! where I often went with Joshua for obliterating margaritas. Since when did my father like Yo-Yo Ma? Since when did he drink tequila?

  A few weeks earlier, he’d taken my brother on a two-week white-water rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. Until that moment, he’d never gone camping for more than a weekend—and never farther than a twenty-minute drive from a waffle house. But now, standing in the middle of his stainless-steel kitchen, he announced, “If I had my life to live over again, I wouldn’t have done what I did. I’d lead a much more outdoors life. I’d live in Colorado or Utah. I’d maybe be a wilderness guide or a park ranger.” Then he looked at me beamingly, as if awaiting applause.

  He’d separated from my mother, he said, to save his own life. Now, he was center stage of it for the first time, basking in his own attention. Each day, he became more alive, more engaging, more thoroughly unrecognizable to me.

  Early one Sunday morning, he telephoned. “I didn’t wake you, did I?” he said, his voice full of pancakes and sunshine.

  “Nuh-uh. I was just getting up to answer the phone,” I said groggily.

  “Good. Because I just had such a great idea, I had to call you immediately,” he said. “What do you think of me getting my ear pierced?”

  I waited for the punch line, but apparently there wasn’t one.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m hoping this is a crank call.”

  “I’m serious,” my father laughed. “A diamond stud in my left ear? Or maybe a little gold hoop? How cool would that be?”

  “Dad,” I said. “You’re fifty-two years old.”

  “So?” he said. “I’m a very hip fifty-two-year-old. And an earring would make me look even hipper, don’t you think? I’d be, as you kids say nowadays, ‘fly.’ I’d be ‘phat.’ I’d be ‘keeping it real.’”

  “For starters, if you ever want to be any of those things,” I said, “don’t ever, ever use any of those words again. Look,” I sighed. “In this world, only two groups of straight men get their ears pierced. The first are rebellio
us seventeen-to-twenty-three-year-olds. The second are pathetic middle-aged men trying desperately to look like them. Guess which category you’ll fall into?”

  “Gee. Really? You think so?” My father sounded deflated.

  “You might as well just walk around with a sign tattooed to your forehead saying ‘Hi, my name’s David, and I just can’t do enough to advertise my midlife crisis.’”

  “No,” said my father.

  “Yes,” I said. “Think ‘comb-over,’ Dad. Think ‘toupee.’ An earring is just the 90s equivalent. You might as well get a Corvette and an artificial tan.”

  “I’m calling your brother,” my father said. “He’ll think it’s brilliant.”

  “No he won’t. He’ll think it’s the stupidest fucking thing he’s ever heard.”

  “Five dollars,” said my father.

  “You’re on,” I said. “And pay up’s in cash.”

  Three minutes after we’d hung up, my father called back.

  “Well?” I said.

  “It was hard to hear his opinion,” my father conceded. “He was laughing so hard he had to put down the phone.”

  Being a fifty-two-year-old man was far different than it had been only a generation ago. At fifty-two, men of my grandfather’s generation had looked and acted like, well, grandfathers. They didn’t plan white-water rafting trips down the Colorado River. They didn’t wear blue jeans and leather bomber jackets. They didn’t unabashedly discuss their group therapy over a double-skim latte.

  Similarly, being a twenty-six-year-old woman was far different. In the not too distant past, an unmarried woman my age was on the fast track to spinsterhood. Now, my father and I were living at perhaps the first moment in history when a twenty-something daughter could lead a life almost identical to that of her middle-aged father. As single, urban professionals, both of us stayed up past midnight in our own little apartments watching Tootsie and Diner on video, eating Kung Pow Chicken straight out of the carton, wearing T-shirts and unisex boxer shorts we’d each purchased at the GAP. Both of us were dating, but skittish about marriage. We compared recipes and housekeeping tips. We read the same books and even listened to the same CDs: the soundtrack to The Commitments. Ingrid Lucia and the Flying Neutrinos. The Joshua Tree. My father would leave messages on my answering machine:

  Hi, honey. Question for you. What’s the name of that band I like so much with the three initials?M.R.I.?

  “That’s R.E.M., Dad,” I’d respond. “The album you like is called Out of Time.”

  After twenty-six years, we were suddenly contemporaries, each struggling anxiously to live without my mother.

  I should have been grateful. Too many fathers divorced their entire family when they left. Mine, by contrast, could call me three times in one night to report on the progress he’d made reheating spaghetti sauce. Living alone in his studio, reading travel brochures, and contemplating cooking classes, he was happier than I’d ever seen him—more generous with me, more involved in my life than ever. He was like a whole new parent. More Fun! More Attentive! Easier to Talk To! 150 Percent More Entertaining!

  Unfortunately, I resented the hell out of it.

  Parents, I believed, were supposed to remain older than you. While you could change—you could grow up, up, and away— parents, by virtue of being parents, were required to remain static. Ideally, they should eat the same bowl of Oat Bran every day for forty years, dress in the exact same cardigans and bathrobes they’d worn since you were three, sit in the same armchairs, bickering over the crossword puzzle every Sunday, and never once alter their recipe for meat loaf. Ideally, they should live in a time capsule, so that whenever you came home to visit, you could breathe in the familiar mustiness of your childhood, survey the anachronistic furnishings, and chuckle, “Boy, nothing ever changes around here, does it?” Their sole purpose in life was to maintain your own happy illusion of security.

  When my therapist told me that such expectations were deluded, narcissistic, and childish, I stuck out my tongue, then spit at her.

  The other problem, of course, was that my father’s newfound well-being seemed to come at the expense of my mother’s. My mother had claimed she’d wanted to salvage the marriage. Why hadn’t my father? Over the phone sometimes, her voice sounded like that of a bewildered little girl. “Why didn’t he want to work it out with me, Suze?” she pleaded softly. “I just don’t understand.”

  A steady, relentless worry had entered her life like the dripping of a faucet: worry over finances, worry over bills, worry over what would happen to her as a woman in her fifties alone.

  Despite her tofu and New Age sensibilities, my mother had not existed entirely in the counterculture. Like so many “good girls” of her generation, she’d trusted my father would take care of her “until death do us part.” Amazingly, she’d never had her own bank account. She’d never balanced her own checkbook. Without my father standing sentry by her side, she found herself fully exposed to the contempt our culture levels at middle-aged women. Every day was riddled with petty cruelties and small indignities: the smarmy condescension of doctors: So how are we feeling today, Mom? The salesman who ignored her for ten minutes, then rushed to greet another customer obsequiously: “How can I help you, sir?” The young, shiny-haired bank teller who rolled her eyes and said huffily, “Tell me you’ve never owned an ATM card before.”

  Restaurants were particularly brutal, Whenever my mother took herself out to dinner, the hostesses invariably eyed her with disdain and did nothing to disguise the fact that they considered her a waste of a table. “Just one?” they said, frowning, then led her, grudgingly, to the last table in the back, the table just before the bathroom, adjacent to the pay phone corridor, directly in the path of the swinging doors.

  One night, as my mother sat in a restaurant, listening to the shouting and clatter coming in great gusts from the kitchen, a man at the table beside her turned in her general direction.

  He was dining with a woman, and he’d been holding forth bombastically, gesturing with a wineglass full of Bordeaux.

  “I’m sorry,” he said to my mother, without actually looking at her. “But do you mind? The service here tonight is awfully slow.”

  With that, he leaned over and put his dirty pasta bowl, along with that of his companion, on my mother’s table, leaving it there for the busboy.

  Dumbstruck, my mother sat looking at the congealed remains of this stranger’s linguini, his plate graveled with clumps of Parmesan cheese and bread crumbs. Then she looked at the wreckage of shrimp casings clinging to his companion’s plate, streaked bloodily with cocktail sauce. The man had gone back to talking, oblivious: it was no longer his problem. My mother’s heart thumped wildly with outrage, helplessness. Finally, she set down her fork, too sickened to eat.

  Only after she paid her bill did it occur to her what to do. “Excuse me,” she said to the man as she got up to leave. He and his companion were lingering over a shared plate of tiramisu, twining and untwining their fingers seductively across the table. “But do you mind?” said my mother. With that she picked up her plate, slick with garlic, olive oil, and half-eaten fish, and set it right down in front of him.

  To his credit, the man was sufficiently shamed. Blushing, he fumbled to his feet, dropped his napkin, sputtered an apology. But as my mother stalked off, his dining companion said loudly, “Wow. What a bitch.”

  Hearing my mother relate this story, I felt her own helplessness and rage—not only at the couple dining next to her, but at my father, too, for leaving her to a lifetime of dining alone. Unless something changed, I realized, John and I would now be left to function as our mother’s surrogate spouse. We would change her lightbulbs and program her VCR for her. A few years down the road, we might very well end up shouldering even bigger responsibilities that were supposed to have been, by law, our father’s: co-signing loans, perhaps, supporting her through the death of her parents, admitting her to hospitals, advising her on retirement. Until further notice,
I was, at least, her date for nights out.

  As I hung up her coat at a restaurant one evening, I noticed her dress was undone in the back.

  “Mom, your bra is showing,” I whispered.

  “Whoops. What?” she said woozily. It was clear she’d had a drink beforehand—a habit which was new for her. Hurriedly, I yanked the zipper over the pale, exposed triangle of skin.

  “I’m sorry. I’m used to your father doing that for me,” she said quietly. “Now that I’m living alone, I can’t always dress myself, you know.”

  Ironically, the only quality of my mother’s that seemed to remain predictable was her unpredictability. Early one morning, she telephoned with an announcement. “I don’t want to upset you,” she said, “but I’m thinking of becoming a nun.”

  “A nun?” I said. “But we’re not even Catholic.”

  “So?” she said. “I can convert. I’ve always been a very spiritual person. And from what I understand, nuns have a lot of fun.”

  The last time I’d heard the words “nun” and “fun” used in the same sentence was in third grade, when my classmate Jennifer and I had written a poem together for extra credit. We’d composed a stanza about “a nun in a habit” who’d had “fun with her rabbit,” and we’d been extremely pleased with ourselves.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But just where did you get this idea?”

  “A new colleague of mine, Faye, is a former nun,” my mother said brightly. “She told me nuns have a really good time together. They take field trips, visit art museums. A lot of them play musical instruments. The way Faye made it sound, convents are sort of like sorority houses.”

  “I see,” I said. “And this is reason enough to pledge allegiance to the Vatican and oppose things like birth control?”

  “Look, I could become more conservative in my old age,” my mother offered. “Besides, in a convent, I’ll always have a roof over my head, medical care, and three square meals a day.”