by Lee Siegel
* * *
One evening my mother stopped me as I passed her on the short steps between the upstairs and the downstairs hallways. She had been sitting on one of the steps. It was jarring to see her sitting there like that, in such a girlish position: knees up, arms folded across her knees, her chin resting on her arms. It was one of many jarring impromptu, young or girlish things she did at the time.
How is Tina? she asked. Proud to have a girlfriend, to be in an actual relationship with a girl, I had told her a lot about Tina. But I could see from that old malicious gleam in her eye that she wasn’t interested in my new girlfriend.
She’s fine, I said as I continued past her to the top of the three steps.
Are you seeing her tonight? she asked.
Maybe, I said. Maybe I will. Yeah, I guess so.
I bet the two of you have a lot of fun together, she said.
Tina is great, I said. I began to wonder fearfully if she had smelled the sex Tina and I had had in her bed a few days before. I wonder now if I had made love with Tina in her bed because I wanted her to smell it. I turned around and headed to my room at the end of the hallway.
I bet, my mother said as I walked away, that you are the biggest screw in town.
That night her physical closeness to me on the stairs and her words mingled with all the other bewilderments in my heated twilight thoughts. Though she never touched me, I started to lock my bedroom door at night.
* * *
At home, my mother, Nathan, and I were eating TV dinners in place of the elaborate meals my mother once made, even during the week. I didn’t know whether this was because my mother lacked the money to buy food or because she was too depressed to shop and to cook. I did know that even with my father, by now living on his own, contributing to the household expenses, things were tight. Occasionally I would hear my mother on the phone with her one close friend, Judy Baum, say, amid fragments of hushed conversation, the words “food stamps.” But I never knew whether she ever applied for them.
I had been working part-time since I was fifteen. Now my mother began asking me for, as she put it, “rent.” Work was easy to find. The fact that New Jersey had no sales tax, along with Paramus’s location at the intersection of two major highways—Route 17 and Route 4, which ran west and east and thus also into New York—had made the town a major commercial hub. In 1957, the year I was born, two of the largest shopping malls in the country opened up in Paramus: the Garden State Plaza and the Bergen Mall.
Even before she needed me to contribute to the household budget, my mother had believed that working while going to school would strengthen my character. Develop marketable skills, she told me, so that you will have something to support yourself with. My going off to work as a stock boy in a department store seemed to give her more pleasure than my modest accomplishments at school, where despite my lackluster academic performance I was winning praise from my English teachers for my “reading comprehension” levels.
Partly my mother was repeating Menka’s mantra of having something to fall back on. As Menka’s emphysema had worsened, his effect on her had weakened, despite his opposition to her desire to divorce my father. As he had become a more enfeebled figure, my mother seemed to take pleasure in defying her earlier fear of him by boldly adopting his worldview. You have to make a life for yourself, she also told me, parroting another of his favorite directives. But she was not just repeating Menka’s sentiments. She was also stifling my ambitions as Menka had once stifled hers.
Yet the most disturbing element of her new relationship with me was the way I seemed to threaten her. One day, after we had a bitter fight and I told her that I was feeling dizzy, she snapped back at me, You’ll end up outliving us all.
That night I called my friends to a summit meeting. Packed into Alex Tarmanian’s tiny green Toyota Corolla, the marijuana smoke seeping out of the windows, all seven of us agreed that it was unusual for a mother to reproach her son for the natural fact that he would most likely outlive her, though as Alex intelligently observed a few nights later, after briefly speeding up a highway exit ramp in the mistaken belief that it was the entrance ramp, no one’s longevity was guaranteed.
* * *
Maybe because my mother had the temperament of an actress, she assimilated the dynamic between her and Menka, her first and most commanding director, more seamlessly than most other children absorb their parents’ influence. This was reflected in her seductiveness toward me, which would reach its peak of intensity a short time later, when I brought home my college girlfriend during my first summer back from college.
At the height of one of our pitched battles, when we had screamed ourselves out over some small thing—me glancing at a book at the dinner table, me wanting to go camping overnight with my friends—and we were standing there, red-faced, trembling, our voices hoarse with rage and emotion, my mother would pretend that she was having a heart attack. She would fall to the ground. There she lay, inert. This happened either late at night when Nathan had long been asleep or during the day when, for whatever reason, he was not at home.
The first few times my mother clutched her chest and dropped to the floor, of course I panicked. I shook her and shook her, but she would not respond.
Still naive about the most basic things, I had no idea where to locate her pulse. I could not bring myself to put my hand on her breast to try to find her heartbeat, so I placed my hand on her stomach until I could feel her breathe. Once I determined that she was still alive, though, I was at a loss. I thought of slapping her gently in the face as I had seen people do in the movies, but I could not get myself to do that, either.
I just sat by her motionless body, saying “Mom” over and over. I was no longer the boyfriend of Tina Durrell, or the budding intellectual who had won the praise of his English teacher, or the testosterone-driven teenager drinking and roaming the town with his friends, looking for girls. I was a virile young man suddenly robbed of his virility.
My mother repeated this scene three or four times until I caught on to the theatricality of it and pretended to call 911, which immediately resuscitated her before I could give the imaginary dispatcher our address. She seemed addicted to her simulations of dying. She would lie on the floor, often in her nightgown, with her legs spread out and her underwear showing. After a time, she would open her eyes and moan. Gradually sitting up, she would pretend to slowly return to consciousness. Where am I? she would ask, blinking, asking me to help her stand. Grasping her hand, I would support her as she got to her feet while wrapping my other arm around her waist.
Finally she would tell me she was okay and I would lead her to her bed. Lying on top of her blanket, she would speak of her love for me. Once again, she would tell me the story of the December morning I was born, about how, the contractions beginning, she and my father raced for a taxi in Bergenfield and she fell into a snowdrift. You were almost born in the snow, she would say. Then she would close her eyes, and I would leave.
2
SCREAMING FROM CARS
You can stand up for circumstances that hurt, outrage, or embarrass you because they are your circumstances. Even if you don’t like yourself very much, or like where you come from, you will resent anyone who tells you that you and the place you come from are unacceptable. I was ashamed of my parents, I was enraged by them, but I was also protective of them. After Terry Calloway, a girl in my high school who was one of my father’s piano students, suggested that my father was too shy to be a good teacher, I never spoke to her again. When from time to time kids mocked my mother’s habit, both ingratiating and self-dramatizing, of calling people “sweetie” and “honey,” I told them, in a rage of shame, to go fuck themselves.
The academically elite crowd at Paramus High School, who were mostly Jewish, brought out all my insecurities. They were composed. They were restrained. They rarely revealed what they were really thinking. In defiance of their composure, I turned my lack of inhibition into a type of pedigree.
&n
bsp; In the cafeteria I would run around with the tray, begging the cafeteria workers for, say, beef Stroganoff in a Russian accent, or spaghetti with meatballs in an Italian accent. Or I would fall to my knees before a beautiful girl and recite a parody of “How Do I Love Thee?”
ME
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Let me see. Number one: Your ears. Number two: Your fingers. Number three: Your fingernails. Number four: Your elbows. Number five: Your new Mustang. Number six—
GIRL
(rolling her eyes)
Let me know when you reach a million. (She turns back to her friends.)
Or I would go up to Barry Goldberg and Barry Cohen, the two leaders of the academically driven crowd, the first the class president, the second the vice president, and really let them have it:
ME
Hey! Uh-study your-uh salad hard, and turna inna youra meatballs tomorrow onna time.
BARRY C
(laughing good-naturedly but turning red)
Okay, Lee.
ME
More Struuuuuuuganoff. More beeeeef Struuuuuuuganoff. I haff to eat to pleess my parents. To pleeeessss my parents. Ya zig moy, vrog moy!
BARRY G
(also blushing)
Dasveedanya.
ME
I Italiano, not Russki. I-uh cook-uh you some braaaacheeeoli also. You-uh wanta some braaaacheeoli? Make-uh you strong. Make-uh you smart. Make-uh you get into Harvard.
BARRY G
(the red in his face going from embarrassment to anger; but he still continues to laugh with a show of good nature)
Yes, let’s have some of that. That sounds good.
BARRY C
I love Italian food.
ME
I-uh love to eatta some pizza. Then to eatta some spaghetti. Then to eatta some cannoli. Then to-uh sit down, read some Aristotle—anda masturbate! Do you-uh like to masturbate?
(Barry G and Barry C look at each other with shared annoyance, then at the small crowd of other students who are laughing. They start to laugh.)
ME
Your father, he-uh masturbates. You-uh canna be sure of thatta. Plato loved to masturbate, too. That’s how he came up with his ideal forms. While he was jerking off.
(Barry G and Barry C finish off their milk and pile their empty plates and cups neatly on their trays. They stand up.)
BARRY C
Pardon me if I don’t shake your hand, Mr. Plato.
BARRY G
We’re off to class. Buon giorno, Signor Aristotle.
ME
Aristotle said that money fucks and makes interest the way parents make children. Don’t forget!
BARRY G AND BARRY C
(together)
Ciao!
Self-suppression was not for me. I scorned people who didn’t live for the gratifications of the moment. I saw them as conformists, people cowed by convention who spent their young lives in debt to some unknown future. I owed it to myself to enjoy the present. Any obligations to the future I would satisfy when the future arrived.
I found myself in a different group from the Jewish crowd, most of whose fathers were lawyers, doctors, architects, reasonably successful businessmen. My friends’ fathers were electricians, cops, garbagemen, commercial artists, mailmen, pharmacists, insurance agents, cabdrivers. Matthew Cassidy was an exception. He awed us with tales of his father, Donald, who was an architect in New York. Sometimes I would stand with Matthew on the overpass above Route 17 and he would identify the buildings in the New York City skyline that he said his father had designed. The buildings were so far away that I could never make them out. Matthew explained that he had been to the city himself to see them so he knew exactly where they were.
Some boys I felt drawn to but never became friends with, like Joey Navas, whose father was a maintenance supervisor for the Port Authority. Joey was part of a group of tough kids who were of either Irish or Italian descent. Only one or two of them were real bullies, but once they started pushing people around, that became the group’s hallmark and its criterion for cool.
Slowly, maybe without them even being aware of their transformation, the boys in the group went from being loud, funny, and daring to brutish and aggressive. I think that very few of them thought of themselves as bullies. Because an ego-gratifying sense of well-being flowed through them when they were pushing other people around, they felt that bullying was some special kind of virtue.
Joey was part of their crowd, but he never laid a hand on anyone. The other boys in his group treated him with respect, all the more because, not being outwardly clever, he was too inhibited to talk much. His silence, combined with his self-possession and sweet nature, gave him a certain authority. For me he seemed to have a particular solicitude. I don’t know why. The one time his group came for me in a distant corner of the school’s playing fields, Joey stepped between us and said, Leave him alone. He’s a friend. Then he looked at me, his confidence with his group suddenly becoming shyness with me. He nodded to me and I nodded back as he sidled away to his crowd. We weren’t really friends, and we never had anything to talk about.
After high school Joey became a plumber. Then he joined the New York and New Jersey Port Authority police. He had three children, and I found out later that he would bring their lunches to them in school on his days off in order to be closer to them and to delight them. One day in September, nearly thirty years after he had protected me in high school, he led a group of PA cops into a burning tower to try to save some strangers and never came out.
Is that what a very wealthy and very cultivated writer friend of mine meant when she once described someone as being “almost pathologically kindhearted”? Her phrase, set beside Joey’s unfathomable, militant kindness, has always agitated and perplexed me. If a person’s kindness causes his destruction, then wouldn’t the pathology be on the other side?
* * *
Sons of the lower middle class that we were, even in our extremest behavior my friends and I found ourselves, without meaning to, adhering to the law of moderation. We obstructed ourselves in distracted ways, but we were not not grimly self-thwarting; we were reckless, but not determined to die; indolent when it came to following the rules, but not delinquent.
We were earnest, too. When not too shy to speak at all—my aggressive antics were covers for my essential shyness—we often blurted out what we were really thinking. To compensate for our lack of well-heeled sophistication, we dressed with excessive formality whenever we went on a date.
On those occasions we discarded our usual torn sweaters or fraying knit shirts and dirty jeans in favor of permanent-press dress shirts. But these could not hide our awkwardness. In London once, a British book editor from the working class told me how in England, people quickly sum up your class origins and award or subtract “points” for your various mannerisms.
How about talking with your hands? I asked him.
Oh, he said, with a rich laugh, you lose a lot of points for that.
We could not resist using our hands when we talked. From a distance we must have looked like sailors shipwrecked on a deserted island, signaling to passing aircraft.
* * *
A famous magazine cover portrays the average New Yorker’s mental map of the world as consisting of a vast foreground that is Manhattan, after which appears a small rectangle representing the country beyond, followed by the barely visible rest of the world.
If you had excavated the minds of my parents and my friends’ parents, you would have found a map of the world in the form of a giant kitchen table. In the middle of its Formica surface sat an enormous pile of bills and small savings-account books with vinyl covers. The pile represented their lives in northern New Jersey. Pushed to the edge of the table, the salt and pepper shakers and napkin holder stood for the rest of the country, and the rest of the world. Budgetary conclaves around the kitchen table were weekly, sometimes nightly rituals for our parents.
The reality of need behind everyday appea
rance became imprinted on us. Teddy Di Buono’s mailman father got him a summer job driving a mail truck and Teddy was caught by another mail carrier cutting pictures out of a Playboy magazine he was supposed to have been delivering. (He did this, he explained, as a protest against the pornography industry.) Teddy told us how the postal service supervisor threatened to fire his father as a result of his breach. He had heard his father on the phone begging a friend in the post office to intercede for him. Teddy related this story to us with wide-eyed horror.
We revolted against virtuous appearances that never acknowledged the struggle for survival behind them. This meant that we set ourselves against anyone who did not seem to be suffering or struggling.
* * *
We worked up our own type of social distinctiveness, out of which we tried to draw enough confidence to keep going. In this epic project, cars were indispensable.
We used to drink ourselves into near stupors while driving around town and listening to Led Zeppelin or Jethro Tull (if Paul Dolcetto or Peter Camino was driving), or Larry Coryell or Al Di Meola (if Tarmanian or Di Buono was driving), or Erroll Garner or Oscar Peterson (if I was behind the wheel). Camino liked to accelerate to eighty or ninety in an empty parking lot, slam on his brakes, and put the car into wild spins, during which we would hoot and cheer, too numb from alcohol to be frightened when the car was about to tip over. Paul simply drove as fast as he could, even when sober, all the while glancing distractedly out the window. On a highway once, with me in the passenger seat, he drove into the back of a school bus while looking at a snowy egret standing on the island between the highway’s two directions. His head bounced off the steering wheel and into the windshield, leaving a cobweb of shattered glass. I hit the dashboard and escaped with a contusion on my forehead. His brain swelled and he was in the hospital for several days.
“Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust!” I would shout as with one friend or another we slowed the car down and passed the Beautiful Girl and Her Friends. It was a line that I memorized from a poem I had come across in my wanderings through the school library. I could not make heads or tails of the poem, but the words fit my antisocial impulses nicely. They also referred to despicable qualities that I believed respectable people hid within themselves.