To Be Honest Read online

  After a while inching up the mountain road listening to the family-therapy-camp-themed mix-CD I’d made of songs containing the word “crazy,” Eve unbuckled her seatbelt, knelt on her seat, leaned far out her window, and threw up. I stopped the car. “It’s even worse when I’m the one vomiting,” Eve complained between heaves. “Because it makes me hate myself.” When she finished, Eve settled back into her seat and said, “Never speak of this again.” I never would’ve guessed I’d be so charmed by someone vomiting.

  We just listened to music for a while. When the Boswell Sisters sang “Crazy People,” I asked, “Should this be our song?”

  Eve changed the subject. “So, what are you gonna do therapy about this year?”

  “Oh, I don’t do work,” I said. “I just watch.”

  “You just watch?”

  “It’s all voluntary,” I explained. “If you don’t want to participate, you can just observe.”

  She curled her lips, her most disgusted expression. “You’re telling me you go to family therapy camp every year and don’t do therapy?”

  “What should I do work about?” I was literally requesting her advice, but that’s not how she took it.

  Eve scoffed, “Right, I forgot—you don’t have any problems.”

  “My problems are about dealing with other people and the culture, not my own feelings.” I took my eyes off the road, risking death to check Eve’s expression. She scowled out the windshield and I tried to recover. “Besides, therapy doesn’t work on me because I’ve seen too much of it. I’ve built up an immunity.”

  “I’m still disturbed that you think you don’t have any problems,” Eve told me.

  “You know that’s not what I said.”

  “It’s what you meant.”

  “Therapy doesn’t do anything on its own anyway,” I told her. “People don’t change unless something crazy happens that messes with them enough to reconfigure their brain. Ebenezer Scrooge only changes because he’s visited by ghosts. Dorothy is only convinced that there’s no place like home because a tornado takes her over the rainbow. You can’t just do therapy. You have to be traumatized.”

  I turned to Eve again, and her face plainly expressed her position. The only woman who had ever loved me hoped I’d be traumatized.

  When we reached the campsite, I stopped in the middle of the road and kids mobbed the car, hopping and shrieking, “Family camp! Family camp!”

  “This is awfully cute,” Eve said.

  I peered past the greeters and spotted Dad on the roadside, reading in a lawn chair, still wearing what he’d worn my whole childhood, an old tie-dye band T-shirt and shorts. When he saw us, he closed his book, leapt from his chair, and dashed in our direction.

  Dad nudged past the laughing kids to my window and waved to Eve. “Hi!”

  “I’m so excited to meet you,” Eve said, her voice higher than before, smiling out of nowhere. It unnerved me that she’d hide her awful mood and turn on this fake performance of warmth.

  I think Dad might have noticed it and found it uncomfortable too, because he shifted his attention. “Michael, you grew a beard. It looks good. Did you grow it to look like me?”

  Before I could say no, Eve leaned over me to answer. “I told him to grow it,” she said. “I like him with a beard.”

  Dad raised an eyebrow and smirked. “I have to be vigilant. Michael rips me off a lot.” Eve looked at me as if I should say something. Dad backpedaled. “I rip him off too. We rip each other off.” Eve eyed him expectantly, perhaps waiting for a fun fatherly display, but there would be no shoulder-punch. “Go put up your tent,” Dad said.

  “We’re sleeping in a tent?” Eve asked. “I figured we’d sleep in cabins or something.”

  “No, we rough it out here,” Dad said. “At least some of us do. Michael still wears fucking suits all the time.” He chuckled. “Eve, I hope you know how to put up a tent.”*

  This jab confused me because I’d been putting up my own tent at camp for nine years and it was unlike Dad to make fun of me for something he knew wasn’t true.

  “Are you implying I can’t put up a tent?” I asked.

  Dad scoffed. “Are you implying that you can?”

  Eve broke in. “I’m sure Michael can build a tent.”

  I drove Eve through the camp, thinking aloud about Dad’s remark. “Maybe he’s never been present when I built a tent? So he’s just assuming? Who would he think builds it for me? Mom? Josh?” I asked. Eve didn’t say anything; she was in a bad mood again. We got out of the car and headed into the woods. “So, I’ll build the tent with you watching and you can tell Dad you witnessed it.”

  Eve grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “He knows you can build a tent! He’s just joking!”

  “No,” I said. “Dad only says what he means.”

  Eve looked off into the woods. I wanted to argue more but she changed the subject again. “This forest is so beautiful,” she said.

  I shrugged. “I don’t get very excited about scenery.”

  Eve clenched her teeth comically in an exaggeration of annoyance and said, “The forest is most beautiful when it’s quiet.”

  At camp, Mom was usually with Joe, who none of us wanted to be around, so she wasn’t present for Eve’s first camp dinner. Dad, Miriam, Josh, and me sat around the picnic table, watching her swiftly sketch depressed-looking characters. In our two years together, seeing her draw hadn’t lost any novelty. At each character, we all cracked up or gasped.

  “You are so cool!” Dad said. Then he stage-whispered, “Why would you be going out with Michael?”

  Eve’s ballpoint halted on the page. I recognized the same exasperation she sometimes aimed at me now directed at Dad.

  “I’m kidding,” Dad said. The collective discomfort remained, and Dad’s eyes widened. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I joke around and give Michael a hard time. I guess sometimes I’m just mean.” Dad turned to me and said, “Michael, I’m sorry I was a jerk. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  I couldn’t believe anyone would expect me to be upset by this joke, which was really more of a truth. “I’ve made similar jokes myself,” I said. “I’m just as surprised that she’s my girlfriend.”

  I thought everyone would laugh, but they didn’t. Eve was the only one at the table with any experience avoiding awkwardness. She turned to Miriam. “How are you doing?”

  Miriam shrugged. “I hate camp.”

  Dad said, “Don’t worry about Miriam. She likes complaining. No one makes her come to camp. She chooses to come.”

  Miriam shared a look with Eve and went back to eating, her eyebrows scrunching and unscrunching as she internally grouched.

  Eve suggested, “Maybe Miriam doesn’t like camp itself, but she comes to spend time with her family.”

  “If that’s how she feels, she should say that,” Dad said.

  “I do say that,” Miriam said.

  But Dad just continued. “Every year, she chooses to come and then complains about the choice she made.”

  Eve looked to Miriam and me as if Dad had said something cruel, but then saw that this was, to us, everyday conversation.

  After dinner, Eve and I headed up to the tent to change into warmer clothes and get flashlights. In the twilight, the forest appeared dull and gray.

  “That was upsetting,” Eve told me.

  “Oh? Because of the joke about you being too cool to be my girlfriend?”

  “That was upsetting too,” Eve said. “But I meant how your dad talks to Miriam. She comes all the way here every year even though she’s still upset about your parents and your dad makes fun of her.”

  “He only pointed out that she chooses to go to camp and then complains about it,” I said. “He didn’t say anything inaccurate.”

  “But she’s upset!” Eve said.

  “Everyone has a right to feel and say whatever they want,” I told her. “But everyone else has a right to feel or say whatever they want in response.”

  Eve
was finding my obliviousness exhausting. “But nobody’s trying to make Miriam feel better!”

  “If your family were in our place, Miriam would be pretending to love camp to make my parents comfortable. We’d all fake loving Joe to make Mom happy. Everyone would be lying. Would you like that better?”

  Eve wouldn’t look at me. “It’s not about lying! It’s about showing that you love your family.” She was struck with a way to explain. “If your family is so honest, why don’t they say how happy they are to be around each other or how sad they are that Miriam is going through a hard time or how happy they are that their son is in love?” I had no answer. Having struck me dumb, Eve calmed. “Being honest doesn’t have to mean that you don’t care.”

  “Yes, it does!” I said, revitalized. “The truth hurts people’s feelings. If I cared whether I hurt feelings, I couldn’t tell the truth.” Eve’s mouth fell open, but I went on anyway. “And if I cared what people thought of me, I’d be hurt when they told me how they felt. If you want to be honest, you can’t care.”

  Eve’s pale face had flushed. “Michael,” she said slowly. “You should be upset about the way your family talks to each other.”

  “You think I can just be upset on demand? That I can choose to believe whatever you want?” I started crying and said, “You’re making arguments like a normal person! But I can’t dismiss you like I’d dismiss a normal person because I’m in love with you.”

  Eve started crying too and hugged me. “You’re defending your family. You love them so much that you defend them even when they hurt each other. Maybe that’s how you show you care.”

  “I’m defending them because they’re right, not because I care.” Eve ignored this correction, kept hugging. We were quiet for a while, hugging and crying in the woods like a classic family therapy camp couple.

  That night, Eve and I hung out at the fire pit with Josh and Miriam and a dozen camp teenagers. Dad, the only adult there, sat alone on the opposite side of the circle, out of earshot.

  Eve’s extremities tended to freeze, so I warmed her fingers in my hand. I told her about Bubbe’s response when Dad complained that he was cold: “No, you’re not. This isn’t cold.”

  “That’s awful,” Eve said.

  “I think it’s one of the reasons it bothers us all so much when someone demands that we feel the same thing they’re feeling.” Once I said it, I recognized it as an accidental callback to our earlier fight. Eve turned to the fire, pretended not to notice.

  “So, Josh,” another young adult asked. “How’s college?”

  “It’s okay,” Josh said. “Now I gotta go for even longer to get a degree in molecular biology and chemistry.”

  “Molecular biology and chemistry!?!” I said. Josh had always hated school, and I’d never known him to be interested in science. I couldn’t picture Josh in a chemistry lab.

  “I had an internship with the coroner,” Josh said. “And they told me a criminal justice degree wasn’t enough, that I need molecular biology and chemistry.” Josh and I rarely talked, and when I spoke to my parents, he never came up, so I hadn’t heard until now about his pursuit of a career in forensic crime labs.

  Dad came over to our side of the fire and took a folding chair beside us. “Hey Miriam, how are you doing?”

  “Why don’t you go to sleep?” Miriam asked. “You’re always trying to hang out with the young people.”

  Josh said to Miriam, “Why do you have to be so mean to Dad all the time?”

  “Thanks, Josh,” Dad said. “But she’s just telling me how she feels.” Dad turned back to Miriam. “I’m sorry that you don’t like my being here.”

  Miriam noted to Eve, “That’s how he always apologizes.” Then Miriam brightened as if her mind had moved on to a happier subject. “Want to hear a horrible story?” she asked Eve. “When I was ten, Dad took me to see Chicago on Broadway. After, I said I wanted to be on Broadway when I grew up and Dad said, ‘Come on, Miriam. How could you be on Broadway? You’ve never done any acting and you can’t sing or dance!’ I started crying and he just rolled his eyes and walked me back to the hotel.”

  Dad’s shoulders slumped; he reminded me of a child dunce on a stool. “Miriam, I’m sorry you were upset by that.”

  Miriam gave Eve another nod, drawing more attention to how bad Dad was at apologizing.

  His fire-lit face looked tired and wilted. “Is there something you want me to say?”

  Miriam kept her eyes on the fire. “That’s not how it works,” she said. “There isn’t some secret perfect sentence you’re supposed to say that I’m just refusing to tell you. Why would I write your apology?”

  Dad started weeping quietly next to us, and the fire flickered and cracked chaotically. Then he got up. “Good night, guys,” he said before shuffling off into the dark.

  “Don’t let him walk away like that!” Josh said to Miriam.

  Miriam stayed stoic. “It’s not my job to comfort him.”

  “You’re so mean,” Josh said.

  “It’s not mean to acknowledge meanness,” Miriam said.

  “But it’s in the past. You should just get over it.”

  Miriam threw a stick in the fire. “The only reason my relationship with Dad is remotely tolerable is because I can tell him how intolerable it is.”

  At Eve’s first session, the man doing work called her up to play his young mother. His mother had poked holes in her diaphragm to get pregnant, so her lover would have to marry her. But when she got pregnant, the lover left. Out of desperation, she’d married another man to raise the child. The man doing work had hated this stepfather and his mother’s unwillingness to stand up to him or protect her son from him. The stepfather was German, apparently a Nazi sympathizer, so the man doing work kept shouting at Eve, “You’re the reason my father was a Nazi! You were afraid to be alone, so I had to have a Nazi for a father!”

  Eve stood in front of the audience in her plaid jacket and jeans, her hands clasped anxiously in front of her, her eyes wide, staring down the large man yelling at her.

  When the session ended and everyone was asked to give up the roles they were playing, the facilitator asked Eve how she felt in the role of the mother. “I felt like I’d spent my life with an awful man to make my son’s life better, that I did it for him. And it didn’t help. I felt like I’d wasted my life for nothing.” Eve was crying, not in a role, but as herself. “It’s so easy to do that,” she said. “To only think about making someone else happy. And all along you could have made everyone happier by doing what would make you happy.” All around me, I heard tissues whisked from boxes.

  On our third day, Eve went off to women’s group while I was at men’s group, which continued to be consumed by Dad’s conflict with Joe. After the group, Dad and I were walking back to the dining area and I brought up Josh’s education. “Josh getting two science degrees is blowing my mind. He always hated school. And getting multiple science degrees sounds so impossible!”

  “Yeah,” Dad said hazily. “Josh has great hand–eye coordination.”

  I laughed at this because I assumed he was making fun of his past self, satirizing the dismissive line he’d used for Josh’s whole childhood: “Michael’s a writer, and Josh has great hand–eye coordination.” But I realized he wasn’t joking. I said, “Wait a minute. Are you not joking?”

  Dad still appeared spaced-out, perhaps distracted. “What did I say that would be a joke?”

  “In response to me mentioning how impressed I am that Josh is getting a science degree, you said he has good hand–eye coordination.”

  Dad shrugged and said, “Come on, you know what I mean.”

  “No,” I said. “What does hand–eye coordination have to do with getting a science degree?”

  Dad moved his hands, miming juggling something. “You know, for lab work.”

  “You think Josh is able to get a chemistry degree because he’s good at juggling beakers?”

  “I only said Josh has good hand–e
ye coordination,” he told me. “I didn’t say that hand–eye coordination is important to a science degree. That was your interpretation.”

  “I just asked you what hand–eye coordination had to do with chemistry and you answered that it helped with lab work and you mimed juggling beakers! Why aren’t you admitting this?”

  “Sorry, I don’t know what to say,” Dad told me. “You’re not making any sense. And whatever argument you’re trying to make seems petty anyway. Seems like a waste of time.”

  I looked up into the sparse leaves of the trees above and noticed a single leaf spinning. All the leaves around it were perfectly still. This leaf was being blown by the world’s smallest, most focused gust of wind. I had the urge to point and tell Dad to look, but then the leaf spun its way right off the branch.

  “So, how is Eve enjoying camp?” Dad asked, oblivious to the internal freak-out I’d just experienced.

  “I think she’s still getting used to it,” I told him.

  “You two have gotten pretty serious,” he said.

  “Serious” was such a joyless word, all wrong for me and Eve. But at the same time, it felt like an extreme understatement; I couldn’t imagine a relationship more serious. I stuttered out something like, “Yeah, we’re in love.”

  “Well,” Dad said. “Don’t you think you’re awfully young to settle down?”*

  “I’m twenty-five. What do you think is the appropriate age to have a serious girlfriend?” I asked him.

  “I just think you’re awfully young,” he said.

  I fell into a subconscious impression of how he spoke to me on the walks to and from synagogue. “To hold the opinion that someone’s too young to settle down, you have to be able to define the appropriate age,” I said. We continued like this, Dad refusing to name an age.

  I immediately set off to find Eve. She was sitting at a picnic table in the dining area, drawing.