Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (36 page)

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 rebellious 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.”

She paused, and only then did it dawn on me where all this was headed.

“I’ll be well taken care of as a nun,” she sniffed. “No matter how little alimony your father winds up paying me.”

Suddenly, I understood why women jurists are tougher on rape victims than men are. Watching her enlist the services of a feng shui expert, a psychic, and a twelve-step program for support … listening to her brag that she’d hadn’t missed a day of work, even as she fell asleep each night with the help of a few drinks and QVC blaring on the television … seeing her struggle to remain upbeat as her so-called friends called to report to her that they’d seen my father on a date—my heart repeatedly broke for my mother, then retreated in self-preservation. For years, my mother had been a force of nature, formidable and fierce. Yet seeing her diminished was far worse. It was too terrible, too sad. If I permitted myself to feel for her too much, I would drown in the sorrow and injustice of it. I would hate my father. I would lose all faith in love, marriage, and trust—in which I had very little faith left, anyway.

Feeling gutted, bereft, hamstrung between my parents, I refused to accept the long-term parsing of loyalties, the schizophrenic love, the careful negotiations and balancing acts that divorce extorts from its children—and that become necessary, frankly, for the rest of our lives.

Instead, genius that I was, I decided to alleviate my pain by treating both parents abominably, battering them with guilt, exhausting them with resentment. Calling them at odd hours, I’d sob, “Why are you doing this?
You’re
the ones making a mess.
You
clean it up!”

“Don’t tell me you’re saving your own life!” I’d scream at my father.

“Don’t tell me how much pain you’re in!” I’d yell at my mother.

“Who cares about your goddamn happiness?” I hollered at both of them: “What about me and John? What are we supposed to do now that we don’t have a family? Where are we supposed to go for the holidays?”

The first Christmas without my father was such agony that I bowed out early, selfishly, leaving my mother and brother stranded by her sad little Christmas tree, thick with the ghosts of Christmases past. Every silvery ornament, every strand of tinsel reflected our raw, gaping loss, our sense of abandonment, our amputated limb. Our mother had tried her best. It was just the three of us.