Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  Before we were off the Mass Pike, The Unfortunate Young Woman was blessedly asleep, and once she stopped talking, I was able to shift my mood from dyspeptic brooding to my usual look-out-thewindow I-84 daze. The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman next to me had her laptop open, and when she typed, her elbow protruded across the armrest. I wasn’t wishing The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman ill. I was merely passing the time by visually measuring the airspace her elbow was poking into between our seats. My eyes were tired from editing a draft of this book, so I’d decided not to read. And looking out the window wasn’t that interesting because I know every inch of I-84 as it winds through Connecticut. Thus, I was just killing time by measuring my seatmate’s elbow intrusion.

  Glancing at my seatmate’s laptop, I saw that she was writing something about education. Did I have a right to read what was on her screen? Sure I did. She wasn’t angling the screen for privacy, and since I was contributing a portion of my airspace to her elbow and thus allowing her to type and read her notes at the same time, I was helping her. Typing with one hand and holding papers with the other didn’t work out very well. There were gaps in the typing action. The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman interrupted her work several times by reaching down to her backpack to extract various snacks in the form of Power Bars. When she bent down to scrabble around in the backpack for the third or fourth time (she’d placed it at her feet), my seatmate’s T-shirt pulled up from her jeans and I glimpsed the base of her flawless ivory-colored lower back and the top couple of inches of her panties.

  They were made of a black and expensive-looking gossamer material. Silk, I guessed. There was exceedingly delicate olive green and pink embroidery featuring a Roman vine motif something like the work one sees framing frescos at Pompeii. If I had to place a bet, I’d say that those panties were handmade in Italy.

  From this brief glimpse I deduced not just that my seatmate had good taste in lingerie, but also that there was probably money in her family. This was no made-in-China-five-pairs-for-$10 piece of underwear. I’d say there was $155 worth of La Perla lingerie tucked under those mundane jeans. The panty glimpse also gave me insight into The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman’s love life. A woman doesn’t wear black gossamer silk panties with handembroidered Roman-derived motifs unless there’s someone in her life to wear them for.

  When she sat up, I volunteered to hold her papers. This had nothing to do with The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman’s lingerie. Miserable cynics may scoff in disbelief; trust me when I say that my consideration of her underwear was fleeting, academic, and passionless! I only offered to hold her papers because from what I’d read on her laptop, her writing seemed to be serious and typing with one hand while holding papers with the other is tough.

  “Put your papers on my knees; then you can look at them and type with both hands,” I said.

  “Oh no, that’s fine,” The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman said while looking somewhat startled.

  “Don’t worry; I don’t mind,” I said.

  “Really?” she asked.

  I nodded and she handed me her sheaf of papers.

  “There’s no fold-down tray, so that’s the best we can do,” I said.

  After that The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman typed faster, but also (it seemed to me) was shooting me worried glances while trying to figure out if I was going to be a nuisance. Also, I think that she felt awkward repeatedly glancing down at my knees and keenly aware that I was perhaps reading her notes. Plus, I had to actually hold the papers since otherwise they would have slipped off my lap. The whole help-my-neighbor gesture was turning out to be far more cumbersome than I’d imagined.

  I could sense her growing discomfort. Was my kindness a prelude to murder? Maybe she’d read about that crazy man in Canada who killed—then beheaded—the man riding next to him on a bus. That was also on a Greyhound. Maybe he’d started out on the trip being nice, too, before things turned mean-spirited.

  “I’m sleepy,” said the exquisitely lingeried, though otherwise plain Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman. “I think I’ll take a nap.”

  Maybe my offer to hold her papers had embarrassed her and she’d only let me hold them to be polite. Maybe she really was tired and wanted a nap. Whatever her motivation, The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman retrieved her papers, then closed her eyes, and a few moments later her jaw relaxed, and unless she was a brilliant actress, she really did fall deeply asleep. The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman’s head sank forward, then jerked back up again several times, and then her mouth fell slightly open.

  About fifteen minutes later when The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman awoke, I asked her what she’d been writing. This was something like telling God your troubles: He knows them all already but apparently likes to be asked and voluntarily kept in the loop. I’d been reading her paper, so I knew the phrases she’d been typing. She confirmed that it was a dissertation on education and women or, rather, “on Asian women and educational opportunities.” Speaking about her subject—with lots of boilerplate phrases like “Gender diversities and technology, achieving economic, political, and social equality”—my seatmate seemed bored. So we moved on to more personal topics.

  Early in the postnap conversation, I mentioned Genie as in “My wife, Genie, loves walking in Central Park.” After that my seatmate seemed to relax—given that men don’t usually speak warmly about their wives if they intend to hit on strangers. Once the what’s-thisguy-really-want factor was taken out of the equation, I learned that The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman was getting her PhD at Columbia, that she didn’t like New York City “because at night I can’t see the stars,” that she was a year from being done with her PhD, that she was Chinese, or rather of Chinese extract: Her grandmother had lived in Taiwan then emigrated, her Chinese father and mother had been born Beijing but lived in America since they were toddlers, and her father was a professor at one of the best of the Boston-area colleges. She told me that her mother was also an academic and, like her father, also an international business consultant. Then she told me that she had a boyfriend in New York City.

  “He’s a black man,” she said, while giving me a glance of defiance.

  No one in her family approved of her boyfriend, The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman said, “even though he went to Yale and started his own electronics business.” Her grandmother was an “out-and-out racist,” she said, and didn’t even pretend otherwise. So was her mother, though she pretended she wasn’t. The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman’s dad hadn’t expressed an opinion about the black boyfriend but was deferring to the women in the family.

  “My grandmother just hates the idea of me marrying a black man,” she said.

  “What about your mother?” I asked.

  “She says she wants me to be happy, then makes snide comments about how mixed-race couples are always a ‘problem,’ and once even said, ‘Studies show that I’d find it so much easier to love grandchildren who look like me.’”

  “She said that?!”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you get on with your family before you met your boyfriend?”

  “Yes. We’re incredibly close; or rather, we used to be. My grandmother cooks for us every Sunday, and we all spend the afternoon at her house eating together. She’s a great cook and cooks all week to prepare. There’s never been a problem in our family, until now. It’s breaking my heart. How could I have known? My parents are so liberal about everything else.”

  Once we got onto the subject of family, marriage, Chinese bigotry against other races, men, children, her sister—who had married a Chinese American and thus served as a “why-can’tyou-be-like-your-sister” example her grandmother harped on—my seatmate talked to me the way you talk only to a complete stranger when there are two or three hours of a bus ride to kill, or the way a granddaughter might talk to a grandfather when she’s feeling desperate. I spoke to her the way a writer—who’s willing to tell his secrets in return for c
onfidences while he’s fishing for good material—talks.

  Whatever the sophistication of the consciousness-raising, postfeminist qualities of my seatmate’s dissertation, our conversation could have taken place at any time in history without even a nod to modernity. We talked about her boyfriend, love, and family troubles. Shakespeare would have understood the dialogue perfectly.

  The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman was thirty and wanted children. Her boyfriend was thirty-two. He wanted to marry and start a family immediately. She didn’t want to “rush,” but she also knew that she was at the age where biology starts to matter and that if she waited a few more years, then added another year or two for career considerations, then had any trouble getting pregnant, she’d be closer to forty than to thirty when she gave birth. And if she wanted more than one child and wanted to space them, then the second child would be conceived on the cusp of her midforties. And, The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman added with a sigh, “midforty is old.”

  “I got my wife—before she was my wife—pregnant when I was seventeen,” I said. “That was forty years ago. We’re still together.”

  “That’s how it should be,” my seatmate replied, somewhat to my surprise. “We have too many options today. My friends and me all say that when we talk. Sometimes I think arranged marriages aren’t such a bad thing.”

  So we’d traveled from a respectable consciousness-raising dissertation on educational opportunity for Asian women, to a Chinese family of academics (in self-consciously progressive Boston, no less) who were unrepentant racists, to issues of childbearing and marriage, passed through the 1950s as it were, and now were headed smack dab back to feudal China and arranged marriages.

  “I know you want to please your family and somehow make all this work, too, but you have to make choices.” I said. “Right now the people that really count aren’t here to defend themselves.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Once you meet your children and grandchildren, it will be impossible to imagine the world without them. Right now they can’t speak for themselves, but if they could, they’d tell you to marry the man you love, whatever your grandmother thinks about black people. Is he kind?

  “Yes.”

  “Does he work at making your relationship work?”

  “Yes. He listens when I talk. He gives me flowers. He even buys me lingerie.”

  “Ha!” I exclaimed, as the panty mystery was solved.

  “Excuse me?” The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman said, looking a bit surprised at my vehement “Ha!”

  “I mean,” I said, “that’s great! He sounds like the right man. Would you like him to be the father of your children?”

  “Yes. He’d be a wonderful father. I met his dad, and he’s a lovely man, too, spent his working life in the army and was a good father. He likes me, and hopes I’ll marry his son.”

  “That’s all you can know. Being married will change who you both are anyway. So all you can know is if he’s kind. The rest is guesswork. When you’re married, the relationship changes you. So there are things you can’t learn until you are married, and waiting around won’t tell you anything more about what it’ll really be like after you make a commitment. That’s one reason that just living with a person doesn’t prepare you to be married. Everything changes after making a real commitment.”

  “I’m afraid my grandmother will never speak to me again.”

  “Your grandmother will come around—or she won’t—but once you meet your children, you’ll never think about a ‘what if’ question when it comes to their existence. If they were here, they’d be telling you to marry their father.”

  I could see from the bemused expression on her face that my seatmate thought she’d either run into a nut or maybe a very forward and slightly demented guardian angel sent to nudge her to woman up and marry her black man. But I had launched. And at the F-you stage, when it comes to spewing wisdom (real or imagined), it’s something like having that second martini; there will be a third.

  “I’ve done some interesting things in life, but nothing comes close—on any scale—to my children and my grandchildren,” I said. “Yes, it’s a cliché. And it’s true. Because I got Genie pregnant so young, I wasn’t even a good father, at first anyway. I don’t even remember who those two kids were who raised my children. We all grew up together, and yet looking back, there’s nothing I’d change but my meanness because you can’t get here from there by any path than the one you’re on. You don’t choose anything important. It just happens. The only choice you have is if you’ll make life’s accidents work.”

  When the bus ride ended, my new acquaintance thanked me for the advice and said she was going to call her boyfriend and tell him that maybe she was ready to defy her family. Somewhere in the midst of our conversation my seatmate said, “We have too many options.” Then we talked about the fact that in most cultures (and in most of history) the big moments in life related to marriage, childbearing, and child-raising. Career was called work, and work was about survival; it was not a form of self-fulfillment, much less expected to be fun, let alone entertaining.

  If you were lucky, you married someone kind. Kind or not, you were stuck with the choices you, or maybe your parents, made about who your partner would be, where you lived, what you did for a job, the social class you were born into, and the shape of your life. Cutting and running wasn’t an option. If you were lucky, you lived. If you were unlucky, you got killed because stupid people were sure that’s what their God wanted them to do to you. The number of children you had, how they were raised, what you taught them about right and wrong, and their expectations were shaped by what would have seemed to be a set of changeless inherited values.

  Since the Depression, the invention of labor-saving machines, the liberation of women, the sexualization of our culture from cradle to grave, the invention of “teenagerhood,” and college as a rite of passage changed what people expected out of life. What had once seemed like inevitable facts—marriage, children, struggle, work, survival, village, town, community, the faith one was born into—became “choices.” So did growing up. In other words, learning to make the most of any situation you’re in became optional, just another choice. The concept of freedom was reduced to the soul-shriveling puny right to choose between consumer products. And relationships became mere choices, too, just like buying a car.

  So here’s the question The Probably Unsaved Asian Young Woman and I hashed out: What hasn’t changed over time? Here’s what we came up with: People still crave Love. So how should we make decisions that take advantage of our new freedoms and yet help us to have a shot at happiness related to what never changes and matters most?

  While riding the subway uptown after the bus ride, I had time to think, and here’s what I came up with in a wish-I’d-thought-ofthat-at-the-time way: It strikes me that our American society, from kindergarten through old age, while talking about how great families are (especially when selling worried young mothers and fathers “parenting” products that they don’t need) might as well have been designed to destroy family happiness. That’s because both the religious fundamentalist and the higher-educationworshipping consumer/choice models of existence and everything that goes with both “dogmas” fly in the face of the reality of what we fundamentally are: tribal, communal, and family-seeking animals craving Unconditional Love and Continuity and Creativity.

  We human animals seek out meaning that transcends the sum of our physical parts. I know only one thing: that any worldview—be it religious or secular—that doesn’t start and end with the recognition of Paradox will become a tyranny. So I have rejected many of my past certainties and embraced the meaning I find in loving, raising, protecting, and praying for my children and grandchildren. I also feel that in some inexplicable way my mother’s prayers for her family have—and are being—answered every time Lucy says, “I love you, Ba.”

  That subway ride took me to Genie. Genie and I love to visit New
York City. We stay in a small hotel on the Upper West Side. We often walk to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. By the time we’re on the jogging path in Central Park, walking briskly around the reservoir, I feel the way I used to feel when I was eight and on my way to Italy riding on the train to our family vacation in Portofino. Our vacations were always as wonderful as I imagined they would be, even back when Mom brought along her Gospel Walnut.

  The Metropolitan Museum of Art is like some perfect childhood memory, except it’s not beyond reach. It is “about” watching wide-eyed children gathered in front of a painting with sketchbooks, making their own drawings. It is about taking my older grandchildren, Amanda and Benjamin, on pilgrimages to give them something lasting to hang on to, even though they sometimes roll their eyes and sigh when I “suggest” we’re going there—again.

  The day after my bus ride I happened to be at the Met alone. Genie was off buying material at her favorite midtown fabric stores. I slipped away from a Matisse show I’d gone to see. Too many people were talking too loudly about the paintings, so I sought refuge in a place I knew would be quiet. There are very public parts of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But there are also some corners where it feels as if you’ve brazenly walked into someone’s home. For instance, there are hardly ever any visitors in the dim recesses of the Chinese galleries. People whisper. Everything seems intimate, almost forbidden. Sometimes visitors stumble in from the bigger, brighter parts of the museum and, as their eyes adjust to the cool dim indirect lighting, look around worriedly as if about to ask, “Are we allowed here?” Perhaps it’s the subdued light. Perhaps it’s the wood floors. But I think that the real reason for the sense that one is intruding is the intimate nature of the objects. Pens, inkpots, writing stands, tablets, finely wrought boxes—they seem as if they belong on a bedside table and are the sorts of things that children are told not to touch, ever.