Maybe (Maybe Not) (2 page)

We refer to ourselves in first person singular—“I”—but inside, it’s more like first person plural. Most of the time, my inner life seems like a ventriloquist act. A ceaseless dialogue between Me and my dummy. Oddly enough, the dummy is smarter than I am.

It seems as if my dummy and I have lots of company. There’s quite a crowd in here with us. A child and its parents. A wise old person. A mechanic, demons, a fool, a scientist, comedian, musician, dancer, athlete, magician, professor; a Romeo, censor, police officer, fire fighter, and multitudes more. The population of a small town inhabits the landscape of these
disunited states of myself. And the town meeting is always in session.

I can fully relate to the occasional stories in the tabloids about multiple personalities. This is not news to me. In the best sense of the word, I run an asylum—a safe refuge—in my mind. And it’s not a problem. As long as I keep the shades drawn and the doors closed, and don’t let anybody loose, all is well. As long as I’m firmly in charge of my secret life, the world sees me as sane and functional. Am I? Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

Those who have closely considered the secret life—people like Freud and Jung—use metaphors to speak about the way we keep the secret life from causing chaos in personal and public life. They speak of “the gatekeeper,” “superego,” “monitor,” and “inner parent.”

My own metaphor is
the Committee.

And my ventriloquist’s dummy seems to be the chairman.

I think of my committee as odds makers who say things like, “If you rob a bank, it’s ten to one that the FBI will get you, and you will end up in jail for a long time.” Or, “If you tell people you talk to God, they’ll think you’re religious, but if you say God talks to you, it’s ten to one they’ll think you’re crazy.”

Most of the time, most of us go around with our heads running full tilt doing the most amazing things,
while we safely negotiate the obligations of public and private life. Much of what goes on in the secret life is not aberrational. Sometimes entertaining, it is often mundane and unexceptional—neither dramatic nor demonic. Just the necessary backstage maintenance operation of life where we sort out the contradictory material into piles of what works and what doesn’t, what’s useful and what’s not.

The French have a charming term for one aspect of the secret life.

La perruque.
It means “the wig,” and is slang for a particular kind of disguise. It refers to what you do for yourself while apparently going about the job you are paid to do. If you are a typist working at your desk and you are in fact writing a letter to your lover on company time, this is
la perruque.
When you make personal calls from your office phone, do a little grocery shopping while out on company business, daydream, or even use your employer’s time to make a list of things to do over the weekend, it’s all
la perruque
—conducting your personal life under the guise of working at your job. It’s not stealing. It’s an acknowledgment that your
public
life,
personal
life, and
secret
life run concurrently and parallel.
La perruque
on the job is balanced by the time you think about work while you are on vacation.

The workings of a family include the secret life.

My oldest son is a man now. Thirty-two, grown-up.
He knows about money, sex, love, work—success and failure. We have become peers in many ways.

We went out for a beer together recently, and he confessed to me things he thought and did behind my back when he was a kid. Then I confessed to him things I knew he was thinking and doing but didn’t do anything about because I couldn’t deal with them, having done the same or worse when I was his age. While playing the public role of parent, I was still secretly both a rebellious adolescent and a fearful child.
La perruque
—always the disguises.

Or consider this family secret.

The father of a friend died suddenly at eighty-two. My friend was an only child, himself divorced, and his own children lived too far away to come to the funeral. A lonely time.

The father was a solemn, humorless, literal-minded man who had been a mechanical engineer all his life. Not much imagination or affection. My friend respected his father, but the relationship was a formal and somewhat distant one. But now his father was dead, and the son was the sole heir to the estate.

The government thinks of an estate as money, stocks, bonds, life insurance, jewelry, and any other tangible item of value that can be assessed and taxed. But there is always all the other stuff—all the small things—the knickknacks—the odds and ends of a life. These are kept, sometimes hidden, in places where you would not ever trespass when your parents were
alive. But now you must look. And make decisions about what to keep and what to dispose of. You are licensed by death to enter the antechamber of your parents’ secret life.

There is usually a drawer. Top drawer. In a bureau in the bedroom.

In this case, the father was an orderly man. At one end of his top drawer were all his socks, folded and sorted by color—black and brown. In the other end, several small boxes and a tobacco tin.

In one little box, his U.S. Air Force insignia pins from his uniform and cap. In another, miscellaneous jewelry—tie tacks, collar stays, studs, some foreign coins, and three keys. The old man kept his deceased wife’s wedding ring in the original box from the jewelers, along with a lock of her red hair.

And in a flat cigar tin, wrapped in tissue paper, there were tiny teeth neatly glued to a card, with a date under each one in the father’s handwriting. Human teeth.

This find was a bit of a shock.

His
father
was the
tooth fairy.

All these years he’d thought it was his mom.

Not all the family secrets are bad news.

W
hen my grown children confess what they did behind my back when they were kids, it doesn’t occur to them that I was also doing a few things behind their backs. In the spirit of fairness to my wife and children, I confess:

A
t the end of January, at the end of my desk, sits a potted poinsetta.

Yes, I know that the correct spelling and pronunciation are “poinsettia.”

I don’t care.

And I am trying hard not to care about this particular plant.

For my role in its life is that of executioner.

Every year in December for as long as I can remember, at least one potted poinsetta has appeared in my life. I never buy one. Someone always gives me one. Unlike other seasonal gift flowers—lilies, daffodils, carnations, and such—poinsettas do not just bring their message and then die and leave your life in a graceful way. They have a life span comparable to a sea turtle, and are as tenacious as cacti. Even if neglected,
they will hang on and on and on. Encouraged, they can become bushes sixteen feet high.

Do you know how these things got into the holiday package in the first place? Joel Roberts Poinsett is to blame. He lived from 1779 to 1851 and spent his life as a South Carolina politician—elected first to the U.S. Congress and serving most of the rest of his life as a diplomatic envoy to various countries south of the border, most notably Mexico. Poinsett was a manipulative sort, and he managed to meddle in Mexican politics so often that he was officially declared persona non grata. The Mexicans coined the word
poinsettismo
to characterize his kind of intrusive behavior.

When Poinsett returned to the United States, he brought a flowering plant with him, formally labeled
Euphorbia pulcherrima
, but popularly called “poinsettia” in his honor. Its winter foliage of red and green leaves quickly gave it a place of honor in our Christmas traditions. And a place of nuisance in January. As I contemplate the potted plant on my desk, I comprehend the personal meaning of
poinsettismo
—this problematic plant intrudes upon my life.

If my wife had her way, we would have kept every poinsetta that ever entered our domicile. Our house would become a poinsetta refuge. Lynn the Good would not knowingly end the life of any living thing. It does no good to explain to her that poinsettas are not puppies. And she can’t stand leaving them neglected
around the house while they slowly wither and expire. She covertly waters them when I am out of the house. In times past, we had poinsettas struggling on into July. We have finally agreed that “something” had to happen to poinsettas, but she doesn’t want to know exactly what.

As usual, my lot is being the family criminal. I do the dirty deeds. Exterminate bugs and mice, throw out wilting flowers, and empty the refrigerator of mummified leftovers. And make the poinsettas disappear.

At her insistence, I did try a few humane tactics. But I learned that giving away a poinsetta in January is like trying to unload zucchini in August. Neither the neighbors nor the Salvation Army had any interest. Leaving one on a bench at a bus stop in hopes it would be adopted didn’t work. The poinsetta was still there three days later. My wife rescued it and brought it home again. Tossing it in a nearby Dumpster brought the same result.

I tried to interest her in a ceremony called “the Setting Free of the Poinsetta.” This involved taking the plant out of the pot, lowering it reverently off our dock into the water, and letting it float away on the lake. Maybe the wildlife would eat some of it, and the rest would blend into the great cycle of decay and return of which all living things are part. An organic solution with cosmic overtones. But a bird-watching friend told us the plant was toxic to waterfowl. Those pretty red leaves are poisonous.

One year I left a poinsetta outside in the falling snow. It looked so nice out there—and an easy way to go. If it couldn’t handle the cold, so be it. We still had it in March.

We’ve finally settled on an unspoken plan where one unannounced day in January I will surreptitiously pick up the poinsetta as I’m going out the door. I carry the poinsetta off to my office, where it will live for a while until it dies. The janitor tosses it out. And that’s that. Easy.

Well, not quite.

In truth, in my secret life, I am of two minds on this subject.

As in many cases, something that may be trivial may also be important.

Part of me thinks I should be on the side of anything so beautiful that hangs on to life without much help from me. It brings vibrancy to winter’s gloom. And will outlive me with only an occasional watering. I should hold poinsettas in esteem and have them planted on my grave.

And another side of me says to hold back on the heavy thinking. These things are dispensable holiday decorations. No metaphorical anthropomorphic thinking need apply. A poinsetta is a potted plant, not a paradigm of existence…When its usefulness is served, it goes to the dump. Come on.