To Be Honest Page 2

  Dad cared so much about talking that he couldn’t engage below a certain standard of conversational clarity. So, Dad didn’t know how to hang out with toddlers. At four, the best I could do was listen to music with him in his “record room.” He’d spread out on his hard little gray couch surrounded by ceiling-high shelves of records like fortress walls and I’d sit on the gray-carpeted floor or on the little stepladder Dad used to reach his highest records. Sometimes I’d wobble or dance around. Dad would play me music he thought I’d like. My favorite song was “Boris the Spider” by the Who. I understood that when I got older I’d be able to talk more like Dad and conversation would become a suitable game.

  Mom and I sat Dad down to play him the first Michael Talking Tape; Dad took the spot next to Mom on the couch that only barely fit in the room. He propped his right foot on his hairy left knee and faced the TV and speakers, running his hand over his bulbous, bearded chin, his pose identical to when he listened to records. My voice emanated from the speakers. I loved hearing myself so loud. My eyes darted back and forth between Mom and Dad’s expressions. Mom laughed and glowed and smiled, but Dad only listened, his forehead lined, his wide, dark-brown eyes unwavering. When the Michael Talking Tape ended with a mid-sentence click, Dad shifted on the couch, planted both his bare feet on the carpet, and clasped his hands with his elbows on his knees. “First of all,” Dad said, “Gum disease isn’t about chewing gum. It’s a disease that affects this pink part below your teeth.” He illustrated by lifting his lip to show me his gums. “Beyond that, I didn’t understand most of it.”

  “Well, I like the Michael Talking Tape,” Mom must have said.

  Dad likely noticed Mom’s disapproval and got indignant, which provoked “the chocolate defense.”

  “This is like getting upset because I don’t like chocolate!”* Dad would say. “Whether I like chocolate has no effect on whether you like it. So, who cares what I think?” In these moments, Dad’s movements would become frustrated; he’d shake his head and drop his hand onto his leg with an unintentionally loud swat. “I’m happy if you like the Michael Talking Tape! I can’t help it if I don’t. We don’t choose what we like. It’s not my fault I don’t like chocolate either!”

  As Dad went on about the ridiculousness of anyone else caring whether he liked chocolate, I listened carefully, clenching my jaw and forehead as if to wring more thoughts from my brain. I could feel an idea soaking in and it wasn’t painful at all, but freeing: I could like the tape even if Dad didn’t. We didn’t have to agree. I could have opinions without anyone’s permission, not even my parents’.

  After that, when I listened to the Michael Talking Tape in bed, I’d hold Dad’s opinion and mine in my mind simultaneously. I could feel the temptation to agree with him, but I didn’t fall for it because Dad had told me specifically that I shouldn’t care. I loved deciding for myself. To me, that freedom was better than a million compliments.

  The only trouble was that I wanted to be happy when someone liked me without having to be sad if they didn’t. I couldn’t articulate any of this at four, of course, but my feelings naturally settled into a kind of balance, that I could still be pleasantly surprised if someone liked me, but I didn’t need to be liked.

  I wanted to play with Dad but he had no interest in drawing, and I wasn’t old enough to converse in a way that he could enjoy. One weekend, I wandered into his record room, where I found him in his usual spot on the couch, staring at a record cover. “Dad,” I said. “Can we play a game?”

  Dad leaned the record cover against the back of the couch to brainstorm potential games. “Well, you can’t read yet, so we can’t play Scrabble.* Maybe you’re old enough for chess?” he said. I’d never heard of chess, but I hoped I was old enough.

  Dad fetched a little wooden chessboard from the garage and placed it on the gray carpet. I watched him set up the pieces in an impossibly complicated arrangement. “This is the king,” Dad said, lifting the second-tallest piece and tapping the little cross on its head. “The king can move one square in any direction.” He moved the king around the board to show me. I concentrated, desperate to remember the rules. My whole childhood, I listened like this, training myself to observe closely and remember everything that was said.†

  I don’t know how long Dad spent teaching me the rules and testing me on the movements of each piece, but soon we were able to play through a game. Dad showed me how he’d trapped my king so anywhere it moved it still landed in check. Then he flicked my king so it toppled onto its side and rolled slightly back and forth.

  “Checkmate,” he said.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It means I win.”

  I watched my king wobble slower and slower and started crying. Dad just asked, “Want to play again?”

  Once I’d learned to play chess, it was all I wanted to do when Dad was home. Sometimes Mom would sit in the room silently reading or knitting or doing work while we played. After inevitably losing each game, Dad would ask, “Want to play again?” I always said yes.

  Chess was my first competitive game; the drawing and storytelling games Mom played didn’t involve winning or losing, so I wasn’t used to the concept. One day, we visited my cousins’ house for a family event. My cousin Seth liked to run around and make everything a contest. When he’d suggest that we race across the backyard, I’d ask, “Does it have to be a race? Why don’t you just run if you want to?”

  Alone with me at a table in his backyard, Seth made a fist, placed his elbow on the tabletop, and proposed we arm wrestle.

  “I’ll get hurt,” I told him.

  “You’re a chicken,” he said.

  I thought about that, whether I was a chicken. I decided that being afraid of arm wrestling counted as being chicken. Luckily, I didn’t care if I was a chicken or what my cousin thought as long as it meant I didn’t have to arm wrestle. “Yes,” I told him, with an informational, almost scientific tone. “I’m a chicken.”

  Seth hopped up from the table, considering running away to find someone else to play with, but swiveled in silence on one foot instead. Then he turned back to me. “I’ll play easy,” he offered.

  “What’s playing easy?” I asked.

  “I won’t wrestle my hardest. I’ll let you win.”

  I leapt to my feet. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he said, amused that I’d never heard of this. “When I arm wrestle with my dad, he plays easy.”

  At the realization that Dad could’ve been playing chess easy on me all this time, I crumbled. I started crying, which confused Seth even more.

  The next Saturday, on Dad’s record room floor with the chessboard between us, I asked him, “Why don’t you play easy?”

  Dad waved his hand in the air as if shooing a fly I couldn’t see. “If I played easy, how would you know if you improved? How would you know if you ever won for real? How would you ever trust me?” Dad laughed to himself and mumbled, “It’s so weird, playing easy. I don’t see what there is to gain from it.”

  “It’s nice?” I suggested.

  Dad frowned. “Sometimes nice isn’t respectful,”* he said. “Being respectful means trusting someone to be able to handle the truth, or at least giving them the chance to try!”

  I couldn’t follow Dad’s next rant.† “If everyone plays easy, you never learn to lose. And then when you finally encounter something honest, you’re blindsided. You’re too fragile. You haven’t been prepared to be brave or to manage your feelings. You’ve never needed to because you’ve been encouraged to run off and hide with your sycophants and nice people who play easy. So we end up with millions of cowards who freak out at the slightest hint of reality, who think it’s the world’s moral responsibility to perpetually swaddle them in pillows.” Dad tilted his head down, disappointed in the world. “With you, I don’t play easy,” he said. “I respect you too much.”

  I took in this last line. Dad respected me. I could see why respect was better than niceness a
nd why I couldn’t have both. As we continued playing, Dad kept silently shaking his head. I imagined he was thinking about my less fortunate cousin and his father, who were too fragile to be respectful like us.

  Drinking Sour Milk

  My family had always been like windup toys, moving mechanically regardless of obstruction, marching infinitely into walls. We couldn’t stop our internal gears. At best, we could only strain against them.

  My parents loved to tell me stories from their own upbringings so, even as a child, I had a sense of why my parents had ended up so honest. Mom and Dad met in high school when they were fourteen, in 1966. Mom knew Dad from around school as a class clown who cracked witty remarks and satirized the teachers. On their first date, Dad took Mom to see the movie adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, perhaps the least appropriate first-date movie of all time. They both cried at the end when the sad murderer was executed. It impressed Mom how different Dad was from other boys, that he wasn’t ashamed to cry, even in front of a girl he barely knew.

  By the time I was born, fourteen years later, they’d evolved a general like-mindedness. But their distinctive upbringings left them with a few philosophical incompatibilities.

  Mom’s family split time between Los Angeles and Las Vegas because her parents, Grammy and Pa, sold cake decorations and ornaments, moving back and forth between the two cities that hosted the most weddings. Pa’s persona reminded me of traveling salesmen in old movies, men who met on trains and asked, “Hey pal, what racket are ya’ in?” Pa spoke mostly of his successes with sports, war, and women and the foolishness of his wife or kids, most of it exaggerated or fabricated. He was gregarious, good-looking, and occasionally even charming, but offered nothing of himself. I doubt he ever shared his true feelings with anyone.

  Grammy’s pill-addict mother and abusive father had left her with a chaotic mind and a bottomless, indiscriminate demand for approval from anyone she encountered, especially strangers. Grammy experienced every interaction as insulting, occupying a state of perpetual offense, her feelings hurt by microscopic slights far beyond anything dreamed of in etiquette. For Grammy, a person was either “sweet” or “nasty” depending on their ability to anticipate and deliver what she wanted. Grammy groused most about the nastiness of waiters who didn’t compliment her enough, show her the appropriate gratitude for her presence.

  She also harbored a unique resentment for doctors who committed the crimes of asking her age, inquiring about what she ate, or suggesting she might not be in perfect health. She considered a negative diagnosis rude.

  Grammy understood that no one would like her if she accused them of nastiness twenty times an hour: being liked required constant self-censorship. “No one knows what I really think of them,” Grammy bragged to Mom, as if it were an enviable ideal.

  All of Grammy’s motherly wisdom revolved around how best to embody what others wanted. According to Grammy, men wanted Mom to play dumb, feign happiness, and be as pretty and feminine as she could manage. For women, Mom was supposed to hide her flaws and portray herself as perfect while still remaining complimentary enough to make even those she despised feel special.

  Though many people, especially women, are raised to sacrifice themselves to please others, the oppressiveness of Mom’s family pushed her to extremes.

  My vision of Mom’s mentality at age fourteen when she met Dad comes from a story she told me when I was four or five. One of Mom’s high school friends invited her over for lunch. They asked what Mom wanted to drink and she asked for milk. At the table with her friend’s family, Mom drank their milk and immediately recognized it was sour. No one else at the table was drinking milk. Mom had internalized Grammy’s sense of manners, believed that commenting on the sour milk would be impolite. She also knew it was rude to ask for milk and not drink it. Mom understood that etiquette was all about secretly taking on discomfort to spare others embarrassment. So fourteen-year-old Mom kept drinking the sour milk until she threw up.

  When Mom told me this story, she said to me, “You wouldn’t drink sour milk. Right, Michael?” I told her I wouldn’t and she squeezed me. “I don’t want you to ever feel like you have to drink sour milk.”

  Explaining Dad’s parents requires starting with his grandmother, the outcast of Worcester, Massachusetts. In the one photo of my great-grandmother (shot in the 1930s, the period when she wreaked the most havoc) she wears loose pants and a wide-lapel jacket like the flamboyant costume of a Shakespearean prince, with fox fur draped over her shoulder as if carrying home her own kill. Her hair is short, her face hard. Her sister stands next to her, nondescript, smiling, perfectly normal except for my great-grandmother’s arms eeling around her, long, ringed fingers laced against her back. My great-grandmother stares down the camera, showing preemptive contempt for anyone who might eventually behold this photograph.

  She’d emigrated from eastern Europe with her family before World War I and settled in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she married another immigrant and had eight children. Dad’s mother, who we knew as Bubbe, was born in 1927, the fifth child. Because my grandmother was Bubbe, we called her mother Big Bubbe. When Bubbe was nine, Big Bubbe got fed up with her husband, exiled him from the house, and instructed her children to cross the street whenever they ran into their father. Even in the Lithuanian section of Worcester, where everyone knew one another and crossed paths daily, Big Bubbe saw estrangement as a legitimate method of problem-solving. Those present at this time (and for her numerous future marriages and divorces) say she’d leave a man the first time he told her no. So, Bubbe grew up crossing the street whenever her father passed.

  Big Bubbe had already been greatly disliked, but a woman banishing and publicly humiliating her husband was scandalous beyond comprehension. Raised without a father by a brutal woman hated in their community, Bubbe was desperate to get out of Worcester. Big Bubbe had always dreamed of moving to California—no one knows why—so Bubbe inherited the idea. When she was twenty-two, she married my grandfather, who was twenty-seven, and told him, “I’m moving to Los Angeles. Are you coming with me?”

  Neither Bubbe or my grandfather, Zayde, had ever left Worcester. Zayde was a short, simple man who enjoyed telling jokes and napping, not the sort of person to seek adventure or leave the only family he knew. But Bubbe asked him to move to Los Angeles anyway. She’d found a husband who wouldn’t say no.

  When Bubbe moved to Los Angeles in 1950, her mother and siblings followed her. Zayde’s family remained in Worcester. Zayde visited Worcester often, but Bubbe refused to ever go back.

  Dad described Bubbe’s parenting style as normal for Jews raised during the Great Depression, but my family tends to have skewed perceptions of normal.

  Dad told me, “She thought you needed to be tough or you’d die. When I was a kid, if I said I was cold, she’d say, ‘No, you’re not. This isn’t cold.’”

  Bubbe would take Dad to a toy store and tell him he could have whatever he wanted. He’d pick a toy and she’d veto his choice.

  Dad felt a lot of anxiety around holiday gift-giving because, as a child, he’d seen his mother open gifts from his father and announce that she didn’t want them. Dad had tried to calm himself by asking his mother to tell him in advance what present she’d like. She replied, “No one does that.”

  In Mom’s stories, she depicted Bubbe as tyrannical and cruel. Dad told the same stories without complaint or negativity. If any of us suggested anything bad about Bubbe, Dad would defend her, insisting that she’d been a loving mother.

  Still, a direct line can be drawn from these childhood experiences to Dad’s oft-repeated sentiments. “No one should expect you to read their minds,” he often told me. “It’s their responsibility to let you know what they want. And you should always be allowed to ask. Guessing feelings is presumptuous. Our emotions don’t all work the same. I don’t want anyone assuming how I feel. They should ask and I’ll tell them.” Bubbe’s line “no one does that” tied to Dad’s insistence o
n human variety. “Anthropologists and psychologists know that the weirdest thing you can imagine has been considered perfectly normal in at least one culture sometime in world history.”

  When Dad was eight, he had the idea to keep a journal. He saved his allowance to buy a blank notebook. He wrote his name on the inside cover and the date on the first page and began his first sentence. A few words in, he stopped the pen. It occurred to him that Bubbe would search his room and read this journal and that she wouldn’t like the first line he’d intended to write. So he crossed out those first few words to start over with an opening his mother would approve of. Then he realized the pointlessness of writing this to please his mother. Dad’s journal began and ended with that one crossed-out half sentence.

  When Dad told me this story, I asked what he’d wanted to say. He didn’t remember, and said that the journal had been thrown away, that Bubbe threw away a lot of his stuff without asking. I wondered if she’d opened it before she threw it out. Maybe Bubbe saw the crossed-out half sentence without putting together what it meant. Now I know that many parents may not want to know everything that goes on in the minds of their kids. But at the time, I only knew what it was like to have parents who wanted to know what I thought and who wanted to tell me what they thought. Dad’s story read as the most tragic I’d ever heard, a story of a child whose mother didn’t want to know him.