To Be Honest Page 20

  Within a year, I had a four-hundred-page manuscript.* I hadn’t told my family about it because it seemed cruel and unusual to say, “Hey, I’m writing a book about you. I’ll send it to you in a year or two if I actually finish it. Try not to stress till then!” I’d never kept a secret so talking to my parents felt like lying; for a year, I dodged or cut short phone calls. Luckily, the next family camp fell at the same time as Eve’s sister’s wedding, so we had an excuse not to go. If I’d had to tell them I didn’t want to go anymore and they’d asked why, I surely would’ve blurted, “Because I’ve been secretly writing about you!”

  Miriam had just graduated college and moved to New York. We’d put a bed in Eve’s office so it could function as a guest room. Miriam planned to stay there while she looked for her own apartment. On the night she arrived, I told her about what I’d written. She read the manuscript first. Josh, who was still working on his master’s degree in criminology, read it second. They were both moved by it but expressed concern that Mom and Dad would be upset. Mom read it next. She said she was just glad the book didn’t make her look as bad as Dad.

  I decided to mail Dad a physical manuscript because it seemed wrong to make him print out what would only upset him, like assembling the rifles for his own firing squad. The thick manuscript barely fit into the postal envelope. Cramming it in was rendered more difficult by my sweating, shaking hands.

  I quaked my way through writing a short note, asking him to call me before reading it. It looked as if it had been scribbled in a moving car. I imagined that the bumpy scrawl probably made me appear unhinged. I considered rewriting the note but decided it was more expressive if the handwriting looked as unsteady as I felt.

  When I gave the postal worker the envelope, my pulse hammered as if I’d mailed an envelope full of anthrax. I watched the postal worker shuffle over to a pile of envelopes and drop mine on top. It sat there looking just like the others.*

  The postal worker had told me the date the package would arrive and Eve and I waited that whole day in the apartment for Dad’s phone call, crying together on and off, Eve saying over and over, “I’m so proud of you. You’re the bravest person I’ve ever known.”

  Eventually, Dad called. “I got your package. Definitely unexpected and interesting.” He didn’t sound surprised or interested.

  I cried into the phone. “This book might make you hate me, but I needed to write it.”

  “I can’t imagine it’ll bother me,” Dad said.

  Through the phone receiver, Dad’s disembodied voice possessed a special power. It was a radio voice. It sounded correct no matter what it said.

  When I got off the phone, Eve embraced me.

  “What did he say?” she asked.

  “He doesn’t expect the book to bother him,” I told her.

  Eve backed out of the hug. “He said that? You told him you wrote a book about him and he straight-out told you he doesn’t care?”

  “I was telling him I was afraid he’d be upset.”

  “And he told you that you couldn’t upset him.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “It’s what he meant,” Eve replied.

  “It would be awful if the book didn’t bother him,” I said. “But I can’t even picture what a positive response would look like.”

  Eve wrapped her arm around me and pressed her face into my chest. “What if he read it and understood what you’ve been through?”

  I started crying again. “That won’t happen,” I said.

  Eve smiled warmly and laugh lines crinkled beside her teary eyes. “You’re showing that you care.”

  But this gesture of care seemed indistinguishable from a declaration of war.

  When Dad called back, I took the phone into the bedroom but left the door open to allow Eve to listen to my half of the conversation.

  “So, I read the book,” Dad said, his voice casual, as if referring to a stranger’s book I’d recommended.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think it was any good.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “For instance, on page two, it says there’s a family on the side of the mountain throwing up from carsickness?” I could sense his rolling eyes through the phone. “A whole family throwing up? Maybe one person would be throwing up or maybe just the kids, but a whole family? No one would believe that. It undermines the author’s credibility. Then on page three …”

  I interrupted him, “Hey, Dad. I can get comments from other people. I thought we’d talk about our relationship.”

  “Oh,” Dad said. “You don’t want comments?”

  “I want to know how you feel,” I told him.

  “Oh, okay,” he said. “Let me call you back.”

  I emerged from the bedroom and told Eve about this response. “I shouldn’t blame you for anything,” she said. “Everything bad about you is clearly his fault.”

  I appreciated this sentiment but knew she didn’t mean it; she’d definitely still blame me.

  Dad called me back in about a half an hour and I retreated again to the bedroom with the door open. “Okay,” he said, sounding less certain than he’d sounded on the last call, pausing and hesitating instead of his usual rapid-fire. “So, I guess I have to ask a kind of uncomfortable question.” My brain reeled, trying to imagine what question could possibly be uncomfortable enough for Dad to feel he needed this preface. “Is this fiction?” he asked. “Or do you think these things really happened?”

  That was indeed an uncomfortable question, but it required me asking one even worse. “Do you not remember these things happening?”

  Dad paused again. “Well, I guess they technically happened, but the way you wrote them is … odd.”

  “In what way?” I asked.

  “You wrote what I said and did, but you didn’t explain why I was right.”

  Uneasy laughter rattled out of me. “I left them up to interpretation.”

  “Yeah, but that’s misleading,” he said, now speaking at his usual speed. “Like, you only have one side of the story here. If you’d wanted to portray me accurately, you could have asked me why I said these things and then included that explanation so the reader doesn’t have to read my mind.”

  My cell phone was wet with sweat from my hand, maybe even from my ear. I wished I could be having the conversation on a phone with a real receiver. A cell phone didn’t feel heavy enough.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said. “What did you think of the father in this book?” Dad let out a labored, groany laugh. “Actually, let’s imagine that I told you the story of a friend who wrote a book about his father. Imagine I told you he sent the book to his dad and that dad called and started giving him notes on the book, like an editor.”

  Dad now let out an authentic laugh. “That’s a great example!” he said. “If you told me that, I’d say this father was avoiding his feelings and criticizing his son out of cowardice, because he was too weak to face what was in the book!”

  “Yeah—” I began, suddenly hopeful.

  “But that’s not why I gave you notes! That’s just what it would mean for most people.”

  I paced the bedroom and caught sight of Eve through the doorway. She stood in the living room holding a coffee mug near her face as if weighing whether it was too hot to drink. Our eyes met and she smiled just in time for me to say to Dad, “You’re not the expert on your own feelings. Or on whether you’re right.”

  “Of course I am,” he replied. “You think you know my feelings better than I do?”

  Eve’s smile fell and I wondered if she somehow could hear what Dad was saying. Then I realized she was reacting to my expression, which must have looked awful. She put down her coffee on the sewing machine table and headed toward me to comfort me. After a few steps she stopped herself, deciding that I needed to do this alone.

  I only realized how hard I was crying when I next spoke; my voice barely came out, half rasping, half cracking. “Look,
” I said, “I understand that the choice you have to make here is difficult. If you decide I’m just crazy and you’re right about everything, then you don’t have to accept anything hard about yourself. But, for the record, if I’m crazy, you probably have something to do with why anyway. Your other choice is to think that maybe I’m worth listening to.”

  “This is emotional blackmail,” Dad said, his voice intact, not breaking at all. “Just because you’re my son, I’m obligated to believe your perspective has value? Sorry, but I can’t just choose to believe whatever you want me to.”

  I got off the phone and told Eve, “He’s just saying to me the exact things I’ve said to you. It’s my ironic punishment that I have to hear them now from the other side. I guess I was following a pretty limited script too.”

  Eve smiled lovingly. “Well, you’re not following any script now.”

  The Girl Who Cried Wolf

  Once I’d sent my family the manuscript and it still hadn’t transformed me, our breakups escalated until Eve was dumping me and coming back every few weeks. Sometimes she’d give me a clear reason, but sometimes she’d just disappear and stop returning calls, only to show up in bed that morning, telling me how much she loved me. By this time, she’d broken up with me because:

  — She decided I was secretly in love with the violinist in our band

  — Teaching ukulele wasn’t a job and I kept insisting it was

  — I didn’t take it seriously enough when she felt certain she had a brain tumor

  — She didn’t want to put me through watching her die of cancer

  — I criticized the band arrangement of one of her songs

  — She wanted to go back to family camp and Ididn’t

  — She was too sad to go to a wedding we’d RSVP’d for and I insisted on going without her instead of staying home to comfort her

  — She had crushes, which meant we shouldn’t be together

  — I wasn’t jealous enough about her crushes

  — I was too controlling about her crushes

  — We watched Indecent Proposal and I supported Demi Moore sleeping with Robert Redford for a million dollars

  — I wasn’t upset enough about death

  — She mistreated me and she wouldn’t let me be with such a monster

  I kept all of Eve’s goodbye letters. Once, I brought them out to show her the stack of about a dozen. I tried to hand them to her but she wouldn’t take them. “There are so many,” she said, horrified. “I didn’t realize there were so many.”

  “Also, they’re all almost the same letter,” I said. “They’re pretty much identical.”

  Eve looked down, despondent, and wrung her small hands. “Every time I break up with you, it feels like the first time.”

  One weekend when Eve was in Boston to visit her family, I invited some of our friends over to watch A Nightmare on Elm Street 3. When our friends arrived, the mood was mysteriously tense so I asked if everything was okay.

  “Are you okay?” one friend asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “We ran into Eve yesterday,” he said. “She told me you’d broken up so we figured that’s why you’d invited us over.”

  I sighed. “Okay, hold on a second.”

  I called Eve while our friends were in the room;* I wasn’t sure Eve would pick up because she so often disappeared, but she answered. “Oh, sorry,” Eve said. “On the way to the bus yesterday, I was mad at you so when I ran into those guys, I told them we’d broken up. But then I felt better so I didn’t break up with you and I forgot I told them that.” Eve sighed. “I probably look like such an idiot. Can you tell them I’m sorry for the false alarm?”

  When I got off the phone, I told them, “We’re fine. Apparently Eve was just in a bad mood. She says sorry for the false alarm.” I could sense that my friends didn’t believe me.

  A few months later, Eve returned from a visit to her family and told me she’d rented an apartment in Boston and wasn’t coming back, that we were done. She didn’t give me the usual letter saying she loved me; this time she sat coldly at the table we’d built and demanded that I call my parents to tell them we’d broken up.

  “But you’re just gonna change your mind again,” I said.

  “I’m moving to Boston,” she said. “You have to accept it.”

  “They’re gonna be so upset,” I told her. “You’re gonna put them through this and then I’m gonna have to call them to say we’re back together.”

  It felt disrespectful to continue insisting that she was lying. So, with her still sitting across the table, I called Dad and told him, crying, that Eve and I had broken up. “Oh my god,” he said, starting to cry himself. “You must be devastated.” I told him yes, I was devastated.

  I covered the phone and told Eve, “He’s crying.”

  “I wanted her to be the mother of my grandchildren,” Dad said.

  I reported this to Eve as well. “He says he wanted you to be the mother of his grandchildren.”

  “I hope we can still have her in our lives,” Dad said. “I’ll call her directly to talk about it.”

  I told her, “Dad is gonna call you directly to ask if you’ll still be in our lives.”

  I didn’t talk to him long. Then I called Mom and had a similar conversation.

  “Why?” Mom asked. “Why would you break up? You’re so in love!”

  I said, “You’d have to ask Eve. I don’t really understand.” I told Eve that Mom asked why we were breaking up when we were so in love. I kept that call short too.

  I hung up and Eve wiped away a tear, smiled warmly, and said, “How am I supposed to break up with you after seeing that?”

  It wasn’t long before Eve dumped me again, left her stuff in our apartment in New York, and went back to Boston. She found a friend to sublet her office to cover her half of the rent and was gone. I suspected she’d call me back again soon and tell me she didn’t want to break up after all, but even if I received that call, I didn’t know what to do. Eve no longer cared what I went through. Now she just acted according to whatever she felt. In other words, she was doing exactly what I’d asked of her; she was just being honest.

  Predictably, Eve called me a few days later from Boston to tell me she wanted to move back to New York to be with me after all. I couldn’t go on like this. But I also couldn’t ask her to go back to hiding when she was upset, to feeling ashamed about her shifting feelings and indecision. I couldn’t take her back. I didn’t want to tell her over the phone so I asked her to meet me that weekend. I intended to break up with her then.

  When it was time to meet, she called to tell me she was in a bad mood and didn’t want to see me. I was more insistent than usual, told her I really wanted to sit down together and have a conversation. She asked, “Why? Are you gonna break up with me?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I wanted to do it in person but you’re not letting me.”

  Eve screamed and wailed into the phone, mournfully, like something from family camp. I couldn’t bear to hear it; I told her that I loved her too much to continue listening, that I had to hang up.

  The next morning I awoke to Eve in bed with me, sobbing, trying to convince me to take her back. I told her that I couldn’t, but she could feel how much I still loved her. Over the next months, I never knew when I’d hear a knock and open the door to find Eve standing there in tears. Once she showed up unannounced to give me a comic book she’d drawn, portraying her favorite moments from our relationship. “I thought I could remind you what it was like,” she said. “I hoped I could make you remember.”

  She started sending me daily emails describing her shifting feelings. Some days they were accusatory, about how she felt betrayed by my giving up on her. Other days, she wrote that she understood why I couldn’t be with her anymore and that she wanted to be friends. Other days, she’d send me recordings of heartbreaking songs she’d written about us, about how sorry she was for what she’d put me through. I
told her that we should take a break from contacting each other, but she kept writing and sending me songs anyway.

  One day, I heard a knock at the door and found Eve outside smiling at the sight of me. “Hi,” she said.

  I didn’t invite her in. “Eve,” I told her, choking up already myself. “I asked you to please stop coming by like this.”

  “But this is my home,” she said.

  “It’s not anymore,” I said, really crying now. “I’m gonna move out as soon as I can. It’s not our home anymore.”

  “How can you do this?” she asked me for the hundredth time. “You lied to me.”

  I rubbed my palm over my face. “How did I lie?”

  “You let me think you’d never leave me, no matter what I did,” she said. “If I’d known you’d leave me, I would never have treated you so badly.” She wiped her eyes. “This is like that horrible story about the boy who cried wolf. You’re punishing me just for being myself.”

  I had to hold back from laughing. “That’s your interpretation of the boy who cried wolf?”

  “Sometimes he sends out a false alarm. That’s not his fault. It’s just who he is.” Eve started crying harder but kept talking anyway. “Everyone convinced him they loved him. Then they let him get eaten by wolves. Really, everybody else lied.”

  * It focused mostly on family camp but involved some of the childhood stories that also appear in this book.