To Be Honest Read online

  I knew Joe, but I’d never even noticed him and Mom conversing. He spoke with a high-pitched voice and slow, jumbled speech. His thick glasses magnified his eyes. It unnerved me to imagine this random acquaintance in a relationship with my mother.

  Mom took a deep breath and said, “Dad and I had an open relationship.”

  “I can understand that,” I said, too quickly again.

  “You can?” Mom said.

  I’d never had a girlfriend, but I thought I understood open relationships because the girls I liked were always sleeping with other people.

  Also, though Mom thought she was telling me about the open relationship for the first time, I’d sensed it already because my parents were so bad at keeping secrets. She and Dad both brought up monogamy and open relationships often, and with a casualness that implied they’d had one. Mom had mentioned that several of their friends at camp had open relationships. Dad had offhand given me advice as a teenager about how to talk to women that didn’t sound like how he’d approached Mom at fourteen. I’d never questioned them because their casualness made asking about it feel square.

  “It’s so awful to tell you this without Dad here,” she said. “We wanted to wait till camp, when we’d all be in the same place and we’d all have support. But now everything’s messed up.” Mom let out a long sigh. I’d never seen her so lost and devastated. Mom kept wiping her nose with a handkerchief. “Annika at camp suspected Joe and I were together and gossiped to Jane, who called Miriam a few minutes ago to tell her about it.”

  “Wow, that’s not supposed to happen,” I said. It hadn’t occurred to me that family therapy camp could intervene in actual life.

  “So Miriam asked me if the rumor was true,” Mom said. “And I couldn’t lie.”

  I wasn’t usually physically affectionate, but this seemed a time to hug Mom. “It’ll be okay,” I blurted emptily, parroting the culture’s most popular line of comfort.

  We hugged for a moment, her clutching me the hardest she’d clutched me since my childhood. Then Miriam burst from her bedroom in pajamas, stomped down the stairs, and stopped in the middle of the staircase to scream at her. Mom jumped out of our hug and dashed to meet her, but Miriam swatted her away, flew back to her bedroom, and slammed the door again, her muffled yells still audible. Mom chased after her a few steps and stopped halfway up the staircase. She remained awhile on that middle stair, neither of us saying anything. This was what it took to leave us speechless.

  At the time, Dad was visiting a friend in Northern California. When Mom called to tell him that Miriam and I knew about the divorce, he drove the six hours back to L.A. Then Josh, who had been away on a trip with his friends, returned and we had a family meeting in the living room. The chairs and couch surrounded a glass coffee table that Josh used to climb under as a child; he would lie on his back on the carpet, spacing out, staring up through the glass. Now, Josh was a teenager in a muscle shirt with spiky bleach-tipped hair. Mom and Dad told Josh about the divorce and he immediately asked, “So, where do I live then? With you or with Mom?” They explained that Mom would find her own living situation and Josh and Miriam would move back and forth. Josh said, “That’s fine as long as I have video games and cable TV at both houses.”

  Mom said, in a therapist’s tone, “Josh, how do you feel about us splitting up?”

  Josh shrugged. “It’s none of my business. I don’t know why Miriam’s so mad.”

  Miriam glowered and said, “It’s completely normal to be upset when your parents get divorced!”

  Dad sighed and said, “Well, at least this is happening right before camp. It’ll be a great chance to process our feelings.”

  Miriam bolted upright from her slump. “You still want to go to camp?”

  “Why wouldn’t we?” Dad asked.

  “Because everyone knows that Mom’s leaving you for someone else from camp!” Miriam slapped her forehead. I’d never seen that cartoonish gesture in real life.

  Dad shrugged coldly. “I see no reason to hide what’s happened. It’ll be helpful for us all to be able to talk about what we’re going through, to tell our sides of the story. Joe’s coming too, so his side will also be represented.”

  Miriam couldn’t believe this. “Joe’s going too!?!”

  Mom started crying again. “I need him. This is a really hard time for me.”

  “This is crazy,” Miriam said. “It’s just crazy.”

  Miriam wasn’t crying—she was just sick of the lunacy. She turned to me, hoping I’d serve as an older, more authoritative voice of sanity.

  I shrugged. “It makes sense to me.”*

  Mom and Joe drove separately while Dad drove Josh, Miriam, and me up the treacherous mountain. Miriam cried in the car while I did my best to comfort her. “People break up,” I said. “It happens all the time. It should be an easy thing to accept. It’s usually good when a couple breaks up; the tragedy is when they stay together while they’re unhappy. Technically, almost everyone married should get divorced.”

  One by one, campers I knew greeted me with long hugs, condolences, and assurances that they’d be there for me if I wanted to talk. I kept telling them I was fine—though insisting I was “fine” in an annoyed voice made me sound like I wasn’t fine. And beyond that, being fine with your parents’ divorce wasn’t acceptable either. I resented the suggestion that I was supposed to be upset, that even therapy culture believed everyone should be the same.†

  I kept noticing Miriam in the distance at a picnic table or on a tree stump crying or yelling at Mom or Dad or both or hugging one of the facilitators. I figured it was best to leave her alone. I’d really bought into a family camp line: “Other people’s feelings are none of your business.”†

  Walking back to the dining area from the bathroom, Joe ambushed me. “Hey, Michael!” he said in his overly enthusiastic nasal whine. “How are you doing?” His thick glasses were smudged and crooked. He checked his watch as if he’d written crib notes there about what to say, and asked, “Can I talk to you for a minute?” I knew this conversation would be a nightmare, but I was sometimes willing to watch a train wreck even if it required that I be a passenger. Joe and I walked to the creek bridge; we had a background soundtrack of wind through leaves and river-trickling. “I just wanted to say,” Joe said, “that I’m excited to be a part of your family.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I like your dad a lot,” he continued. “I think he’s a great guy. But we all know he can be difficult too and, in those times, you can talk to me. I can be like your father.”

  My first instinct was to laugh. But it only took a second more for this comment to feel more creepy than funny, this random man wanting to take over as my father.

  “Joe,” I told him. “When someone leaves her husband for another man, generally the kids don’t like that man, you know?”

  “Yeah,” he said vacantly.

  “So, that would be good to accept, that no one’s gonna welcome you into the family.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “So, I’m gonna go now,” I told him.

  As much as Mom’s love for Joe bothered me, I understood that he likely served as a long-needed relief from Dad’s scrutiny and criticism. Still, it disappointed me to see Mom with someone unquestioning, easygoing, and inarticulate, someone defined by qualities that appealed to most people.

  At temperature reading, Mom stepped down to the amphitheater floor and said, “My bug is that some people gossiped about me and the rumor got back to my daughter and made things a lot worse for all of us. So, my solution is that everyone should think twice about gossiping.”

  The woman who had spread the news got up and said, “She’s talking about me. I stand by what I did. This community isn’t here to help you keep secrets.”

  This led to a whole back-and-forth about confidentiality which went on for an hour with no resolution.

  That afternoon at the check-in, Dad said, “This camp is obviously happening at a weir
d time. My only request is that if you want to know what’s going on with me, ask. I’ll tell you. And if I tell you, believe me, I’m not gonna lie. No one knows how I feel except me. That’s it.”

  Mom’s check-in was more tearful. “I’m afraid that now everyone hates me!” she said. “And I feel like everyone’s talking about me and I can’t even find out unless someone breaks confidentiality.”

  I showed up to the first men’s group with the knowledge that it would likely involve talking about Dad and Joe. There was no chance that they’d stay quiet to avoid a scene.

  I waited in the clearing with a dozen other men, some shifting in their lawn chairs, some perched woodenly, some whittling, some swatting mosquitoes, some glaring into the dirt. The men’s and women’s groups met simultaneously so the women luxuriated in the picturesque session area while we congregated in the fly-infested clearing by the compost heap. I could hear the groundskeeper’s farm animals snorting and squawking as if in the throes of their own group session. I sat in my lawn chair, swarmed by flies.

  I heard rustling in the bushes behind me and turned to find not a struggling forest animal, but Joe, his shoulders high, hiding his neck, his hands clasped at his belly. Men around the circle rolled their eyes.

  Dad arrived carrying extra folding chairs tucked in his armpits. He dropped the chairs onto the pile and sat across the circle from me without acknowledging Joe or showing any nervousness.

  The men went around the circle doing check-ins, but everyone finished quickly. Nothing led into work. No one cried or even paused out of emotion, unlike most years, when everybody spilled their tears as soon as they could. I wondered if they were rushing and remaining detached to make room for Dad and Joe.

  When it was Dad’s turn, he said, “Men’s group has always been my favorite part of camp. I have to censor myself in the main group … a lot. But I’ve always felt that this was the place where I could really show my heart.”

  It bothered me that Dad said he’d been censoring himself. I thought he would tell anyone anything. I zoned out, considering this remark, my attention swinging in and out of Dad’s long check-in. “Last year, Joe told my wife that I’d been talking about her. I don’t get why it upset her so much, but it did. And now she’s leaving me for Joe. Obviously, Joe broke confidentiality to cause problems in my marriage so he could move in.”

  Joe interrupted. “That’s not what happened.”

  “Did you tell her about our conversation in group last year?” Dad asked.

  “She had a right to know,” Joe said. The group fell into a chaos of hostile grumbling, so Joe panicked. “I didn’t break confidentiality!” he said. “I didn’t tell anybody anything.”

  The circle was enraged, but I laughed; I found nothing funnier than someone too flustered to stick with a story.

  Somebody said, “For god’s sake, Joe, stop talking.”

  Joe bent as if stabbed in the belly and said, “I’m not the one who should stop talking! You should stop talking.”

  Dad’s eyes bulged, bloodshot and wet, and he leaned forward in his lawn chair, aggressively, even violently. “This is the only place in the whole fucking world where we’re supposedly able to say what we feel, and you tell me to shut up!?! You’re an untrustworthy lowlife, so I have to shut up? Because you’re gonna go out and tattletale on me?”

  Another crying man then broke in. “How am I supposed to speak from the heart in this group when I know somebody might walk out of here and steal my wife?”

  This conversation continued uneventfully until men’s group was over.

  The next day, Mom did work in the main session accusing Dad of using the men’s group to turn me and other camp men against her and Joe. Joe had clearly reported to Mom again what had been said in men’s group. Her work eventually led her to describe what had gone wrong in their marriage. “He always acted like my feelings weren’t justified, like I didn’t have to be considered. It’s always been this way. Growing up, my feelings didn’t matter. And still, my feelings don’t matter. I’ve asked my kids to welcome Joe into the family and they don’t. I’ve asked men’s group to stop talking about us and they won’t. What other conclusion am I supposed to draw except that I don’t matter?”

  The next men’s group discussed Mom’s session. Dad didn’t address what she’d said about their marriage; instead, he focused on accusing Joe of breaking confidentiality again.

  I figured that everyone would move on by next year’s camp, but I figured wrong. My parents and Joe weren’t going to stop fighting, which meant that everyone else had to hear about it. Men started doing check-ins specifically about how tired they were of talking about Dad and Joe. But, when Dad and Joe weren’t being discussed, no one else volunteered to replace them because the group’s trust had evaporated.

  The following year, camp still wasn’t over it. Miriam, who was now fifteen, did work in the main session about the divorce. The camp women jokingly referred to the men’s group as “impotent.” I started to wonder if the Levitons had broken family therapy camp.

  A Deal with the Devil

  After camp in 2001, the summer before my senior year of college, a friend of my friend’s girlfriend confronted me about how I dressed. Shira had giant brown eyes, wide and kind with others but always narrowed at me. I envied the grace in her movement, how she’d own every object she lifted, how she always stood in photographable poses but still read as authentic. Perhaps most impressive to me, she spoke with her own style of brutal honesty; no one I knew was as comfortable mocking and insulting me. She had no issue complaining openly about my presence. She refused to ride in my car because she didn’t trust my driving. When we went bowling, she made a show of covering her eyes for my turns, saying she couldn’t handle my awkwardness.

  At this particular house party, in a living room full of friends and acquaintances sitting on couches and on the carpet, I made a casual comment about girls not liking me and Shira erupted, “Look at how you dress! How do you expect someone to go out with you?”

  I engaged her, legitimately curious. “You think my clothes are the reason girls don’t like me?” I asked. “I have a pretty low opinion of people, but even I wouldn’t imagine everyone’s that superficial.”

  “It’s not superficial,” Shira said. “You’re twenty years old now. You’re supposed to have some style. You dress like a child.”

  I was still wearing khakis, corduroys, and baggy T-shirts. I’d added an overcoat that I thought looked film- noir.* I told her, “If someone cares that much about clothes, she’s not my type.”

  Shira laughed at me. “Dude, you’re not in any position to pick and choose. Doesn’t it bother you that everyone else has girlfriends? Everyone else has sex?”

  “A little,” I said. “But I’m good at entertaining myself alone. I can fantasize and play music and write stories.” Shira turned to my other friends as if she wanted them to back her up, but they felt too sorry for me. “Okay,” I told her. “Let’s say I’m convinced: I want to wear clothes that will make girls like me, a disturbing concept. But let’s say I’ll wear whatever other people will like. How should I dress?”

  “Look at other people and wear whatever they wear,” she said. “Watch a movie and dress like the actors. Or dress like a band. Anything’s better than what you’re doing.”

  “Why don’t you take me shopping?” I asked her. “I’ll try stuff on and see what you think I should look like.”

  I thought this would be funny, to see what embarrassing trends she’d tell me to follow. My friends, who had been listening, appeared excited; they’d apparently been unhappy about how I dressed too but were unwilling to say anything. They all pushed Shira to go shopping with me, so she agreed.

  I met Shira at her house so she could drive us to the vintage clothing store; she still refused to ride in my car. On the way, she explained why clothes weren’t superficial. “Everybody cares about how they dress and how other people dress,” she said. “If everybody cares about it, h
ow can it be superficial?”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “Everybody’s wrong about almost everything.”

  “You have the worst attitude,” she said. “You talk like you’re so superior but you’re just insecure. If you listen to me and dress better, people might actually like you.”

  “But I’d know they only appreciated me because I dressed like them!”

  Shira whacked her palms against the steering wheel. “Just be happy if people like you. Stop thinking about why.”

  At the vintage store, Shira rummaged through shirts, handing me possibilities. “The first thing is to wear clothes that fit. Your shirts are huge. Do you buy large or something?”

  “Medium,” I said.

  “You’re thin. Buy small. Maybe extra small.” She handed me patterned button-up shirts from the ’60s and ’70s, jeans, a jean jacket, a denim shirt.

  “What’s with all the jeans?” I asked. “I’m gonna look like a cowboy.”

  Shira laughed. “Have you ever looked at anyone? Everyone wears jeans.”

  In the changing room, I found all these clothes far too tight. I put on a pair of jeans and a plaid button-up and a jean jacket and laughed at my own reflection. I couldn’t imagine how everybody else could stand dressing alike. I walked out of the changing room in this preposterous getup, expecting Shira to laugh, but she smiled beautifully. “Wow,” she said. “Honestly, you look way better than I expected. You look like a different person.”

  I tried on a few other outfits, and each time I walked out of the dressing room, Shira gasped. “I can’t believe this,” she said. “I’m saving your life.”

  “I can’t possibly wear any of this in public,” I said. “It’d be like Halloween.”