But what did that even mean, if I had been a boy? I would stand in front of a buckling full-length mirror in the small room downstairs where my mother stored Christmas ornaments and sewing supplies, looking at my reflection, trying to work out how I felt about this information. Sometimes, when studying my image in the mirror, I would feel a little pang of mourning for the other version of myself I had somehow . . . what? Killed? Because if I hadn’t been me, would “Matt” be alive? Or was “Matt” my brother? My almost brother, I mean.
And still, decades later, if I meet some guy named Matt, I continue to think, Hey, that’s my name, too. It’s a strange thought to have and I never share it, of course. You can’t just go around saying things that might alarm people. You have to be sensitive with others. There was always this dissonance about identity.
TEACHERS WOULD REMARK TO MY PARENTS OF MY QUIET INTELLIGENCE and generally obliging nature, but also of my dreaminess and of a punishing perfectionist streak then manifested in a near psychosis about checking my schoolwork over and over and over before the teacher would eventually pry it away from me. I’m sure I seemed docile enough, but it’s possible there was something just a little bit sly about me, too. And, for better or worse, I lived nearly entirely in my head. But I guess I’d always had this idea that the mind must be allowed to investigate for itself, without interference. The mind must be free and agile—and incoercible.
Fog delays of an hour or two were routine at my school. In the mornings, fog would rise from the ground like an otherworldly presence, and everything—farmland, silos, roads, houses—was shrouded and reconfigured, the way that blizzards rearrange the world, or dreams, until the fog was burned away by the sun.
Do you want to know one of the problems with having read lots of books in your life? You’re unsatisfied with descriptions that aren’t metaphor.
My parents were always busy. Both were from Pennsylvania and had already moved a lot for my father’s job as an engineer at Goodyear: first to company HQ in Akron, Ohio, then to Lincoln, Nebraska, now to Marysville, and eventually back to Akron again. There was no extended family anywhere close to us, and we were a harmonious, and dangerously self-sufficient, unit. My father, who looks—then, now, forever—unnervingly like George Washington (or Chevy Chase), was in grad school, too, working on an M.B.A., forever making the long, flat drive on Route 33 back and forth to Columbus. My mother taught at my Unitarian Universalist preschool—a place just crawling with fellow Silverstein fans, as you might well imagine—and later worked in our town as a case manager at a workshop that employed developmentally disabled adults with tasks such as sorting and packing small automotive parts.
Throughout my childhood and adolescence, my mother specialized in telling these long, slightly surreal stories about the clients at her workshops, tales that stalk me still. I would hang out with her at work sometimes, and occasionally she would take me along to client home visits—to group homes or to apartment buildings with dark, airless hallways. These were the first glimpses I ever had of truly marginalized people—people who then seemed to me, to steal a line from James Baldwin, in “the long, hard winter of life.” Mostly I dreaded these trips; on them, I recall having all these nebulous semi-thoughts I knew I wasn’t scheduled to have yet, sort-of thoughts about the idea of luck, about how merciless fate was and how so much of who you were was a mere accident of birth. But I think somewhat differently, and a bit more practically, about things now. I now understand that these were people who fought to lead productive lives, and I also see that they didn’t need anyone’s sympathy.
Even when I was young I was old, and I always had more of an interest in adults than I did in other children. I still have an exceptionally vivid image of the rather curious woman who drove my elementary school bus, yet I can’t entirely recall the faces of any of the kids on the bus with me. This bus driver, who, in memory, was always chewing on a toothpick and who, even in deepest winter, would keep the fan over the dashboard blowing, was clearly someone who had been through some rough stuff (she was missing a pinkie). I’ve always enjoyed learning about the processes of how things are done, and I was interested to observe that, when driving over railroad tracks, she would stop the bus right in the middle of the tracks and then crank open the door to listen for a train. It had seemed to me then that the actual railroad track was perhaps not the ideal location from which to determine if a train was barreling toward you, but what did I know?
She kept a small transistor radio up in front with her and had it tuned to a Top 40 station. Confirmation that my story is a period piece, whether I like it or not (I do not): two of the era’s big hits I’d hear most often on the bus were the Marvin Hamlisch reboot of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” and “Feels So Good” by flugelhornist and composer Chuck Mangione. But there was another song on that radio, one that got to me even more: “Games People Play,” by a band with the superlatively noncatchy name of the Alan Parsons Project. It was an up-tempo tune in the somewhat cold prog-rock manner, but the lyrics ground me to pieces:
Where do we go from here
Now that all of the children are growing up?
The song was, in my interpretation, a howl from middle age: the dispossessed man, fearing irrelevance, fearing purposelessness, asking, What do I do with myself in the world now? I was just a little kid, but I can tell you that I really keenly felt this song.
Writers—or anyone who does anything “creative” (used loosely)—are always getting asked where they get their ideas, but that’s never the right question. You always know everything, all the time. There are no new emotions; there are only new events. If I may quote Ingmar Bergman, and the following observation he gives to a character in his brilliant film Fanny and Alexander: “One can be old and a child at the same time.” I knew that this “Games People Play” song was saying something I didn’t particularly want to hear, but something I already understood about what it feels like to be a person in the world.
There is wisdom beyond knowledge.
Also: What if adult life was a game you couldn’t win?
MY FATHER WAS PROMOTED TO A NEW JOB AT GOODYEAR HQ IN AKRON, and two days after my ninth birthday, we moved from the cornfields in the center of the state to the Rust Belt up north. The move happened in late winter, and it was colder in the new place, a little bit harder, and everything—people included—seemed slightly more beaten up. The sunsets, at first, before I finally started paying attention, didn’t seem as striated or as luminous as they had back in the flatness of Marysville, and new categories of precipitation fell from the sullen, but possibly more interesting, northeast Ohio sky. Although I hadn’t complained about it too much, I hadn’t wanted to leave Marysville. I remember how unutterably sad it seemed to me, seeing, in March, Christmas decorations still up in the window of a local insurance office in my new town, Tallmadge—then a dry town, by the way, with the discouraging motto “City of Churches.” Tallmadge was adjacent to Kent, home to Kent State, and I soon learned the names of the four young people murdered there by their government on May 4, 1970: Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder, Sandra Scheuer. I always kept these names close.
Soon after we moved, there was a fire at a house in our new neighborhood. The house, one street over, was, in my view, the best one around—a late seventies translation of a center hall colonial, and one night it burned to the ground. But why hadn’t we heard any sirens? Had there been sirens? We awoke one morning to see, from our dining room window, the big white house we barely knew now lying in ghostly ruin.
My father, a cause-and-effect man, a realist, and, frankly, a cynic, was of the opinion that the fire was probably arson and an insurance scam—everyone in the house was absent that night (so we’d heard; we were the new people in the neighborhood, and we’d never met or seen the family), including the pets. This actually seemed to me a reassuring hypothesis, since it had to do with money.
But my mother, for reasons unknown, was certain that a curse had been placed
on the house.
“A hex,” she would say. “Gene, that house was hexed.”
She kept this up for years. I never disbelieved the theory. Not to get too mystical about it, but I guess a part of me has always half thought that everything we see in front of us is a prop and that the true nature of the world is hidden from view. Sometimes there was a hint of some greater reality, but that hint was all you got.
After the fire, I would ride my bike over to the charred skeleton of the house. The house was still recognizably houselike, but the roof and windows were gone, and its walls were the purest black. The air around it was malignant; it rippled, it buzzed. Soon, the place was razed and a new house was built on the lot, but still, in imagination all these decades later, when I think of that street, I always see the ruins of the old house, not the new house built where it had stood. The old image displaces the new, and I can never see the current one straight.
My new elementary school was one of those flat brutalist-style institutional buildings with painted cinder block walls. When I started there, my mother and I met the principal, a prim older lady in a tweed suit, in her office.
“Do you have a lot of fog delays?” my mother asked.
The principal looked at my mother in bewilderment. “Fog delays?” she asked. “I’ve never heard of a fog delay.”
I did not care for this lady, who, incidentally, the following year, would make an announcement over the PA system that she’d unilaterally decided to ban the Olivia Newton-John song “Physical” from being played at school. Too racy. No, I did not like the principal already, but while seated there I reminded myself of the correct spelling of the word “principal”: “the principal is my pal.” I’d read that somewhere.
“Adri told me that she wants a young and beautiful teacher,” my mother said.
This had been just some dumb thing I’d said to my mother, and I was slightly mortified that she would repeat it there. (I mean, I didn’t want the principal to think I was that shallow, though I was.) Also, I no longer wanted to be known by that babyish truncation “Adri.” No, I hadn’t been happy about leaving my home—moving in the middle of a school year was a disjuncture I’ve still never gotten over—but at least this new place seemed to offer the possibility of presenting myself anew.
“I have just the teacher for you,” the principal said.
My new homeroom teacher, who had short black hair, styled in the layered bob made fashionable by Lady Di, was indeed young and glamorous. On my first day of school, I was given an assignment to prepare a short presentation in which I would introduce myself to the class. She explained that there would be a bulletin board, and on it I was to thumbtack photographs of my family and also index cards with whatever biographical information I wanted. I would have a few days to gather my pictures.
I found some Polaroids of my parents and my dog, ones my mother didn’t mind if I punctured with a thumbtack, and I made my father take a picture of our new “contemporary”-style house. The house, by the way, was boxy, gray, and unadorned, and our new development had scrappy young silver maple trees all over the place. I prepared my index cards, writing in neat block letters:
MY FAVORITE COLOR IS LIGHT GREEN (PASTEL)
MY BEST FRIEND IS MY DOG SUSIE
WHEN I GROW UP I WANT TO BE A LAYWER
I think about her a lot, that earlier self with her gender-neutral plaid shirt, her adult handwriting, and her big “laywer” dreams. But I already knew that being a lawyer was not going to suit me. I already had this sense that I didn’t really want to deal with worst-case situations or, frankly, with reality; what I wanted, really, was an alternative to reality.
During the presentation, I gestured to the photo of my new house and boasted that my new bedroom had not one but two closets.
A girl’s hand went up. “Your house looks like a barn,” she said.
I went back to my desk. The teacher said she had something important to tell us. She was going to start a new job in a few weeks.
“I’m leaving,” she said, “to be a . . . flight attendant.”
Cries of distress issued from around the room. A girl with lots of freckles across her cheeks doubled over her desk, weeping torrents, rending her garments asunder, etc. She wasn’t the only one. All the students in class looked as if they’d been hit in the face by a collective dodgeball. I attempted my own pantomime of distress—I sat at my desk and tried, and failed, to make myself cry—although I knew I did not deserve it, the feeling or the performance.
“But why would you want to get a new job?” asked a boy, also very bent out of shape. (This boy would, two years later, become my first “boyfriend,” provisionally speaking.)
“Oh, I won’t be far away. Just remember—look up,” she said distantly, pointing a dazzlingly long nail, painted red, at the ceiling and the sky beyond, “and that’s where I’ll be.”
This woman and I intersected for probably a total of three weeks of our lives, but I will admit that for years afterward, when I would look up to the unreal airplanes in the sky overhead, I would often half wonder if she, this once adored former teacher, was on one of them.
Teachers, it turned out, seemed to drop like flies in my new school. Not long after that, we lost another one. He was a music teacher, with the longish white hair of a mad scientist or a syphilitic nineteenth-century composer, and he would, in nearly every class, remind us, this group of unexceptional nine-year-olds at a public elementary school in northeast Ohio, that he had a Ph.D.; as evidence of his exquisite educational credentials, he would go up to the blackboard and write something, any old thing, demonstrating how terrible his handwriting was. And it really was. His claim, and one that has always stuck with me, was that the more formal education a person had, the worse the handwriting became. In his class, we sang beautiful and enigmatic songs about the Erie Canal and the Underground Railroad, and I was interested to learn that the lyrics to “Follow the Drinking Gourd” were a coded map for slaves escaping north. (It is also a fact that this teacher began many of his classes by playing a recording of the original Paul Lynde version of “Kids” from Bye Bye Birdie.)
For the length of time I had him as a teacher, he would refer to me as “the new person.” As in: “New person, what do you think ‘Low Bridge’ is about?”; “New person, what is a ‘whole note’ worth?” Don’t ask me why this man decided to zero in on me, but he sure did. After I sang a terrified surprise solo version of “Yellow Submarine” in front of the class—“terrified,” “surprise,” and “solo” because my performance partner, Mindy, was a no-show at school that day (but you’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do)—the music teacher said, “New person, you never cease to amaze me.”
One afternoon, he made his big announcement: he would be leaving, too.
The music teacher was perhaps not as adored by students as was the brunette Lady Di, yet a student in class was still curious enough to ask him why he was going away.
I still remember the teacher’s response.
“Because this,” he said, “is not the place to be, my friends.”
3
Our destinies come at us in unlikely ways. We tend to overdramatize our own agency; we like to attribute whatever success we’ve had to our own ingenuity, industry, brilliance, good looks, overall irresistibility, etc., but the truth is that luck is at least 80 percent of life and maybe even more than that. In Renaissance drama, Fortune is the principal force—the primary character—that shapes human lives. It is not impossible that free will is an invention of the novelist, who is in the interiority business.
When I was twenty-two, a week before my college graduation, I flew from Ohio to New York to interview for a job as an editorial assistant at the men’s magazine GQ. Up until a few weeks before, I had been intending to go to grad school, like everyone else. In my view, literature class was the only place to be: there was no “right answer,” there was no group consensus, you got to choose your own truth, and you got to grapple with one exemplary mind�
��the mind of the writer. And when you learned how to read novels, the actions in your own puny little life intensified and took on a very different sort of consequence.
I liked to read, and I liked to write, and grad school was a place in which both of those things could be blamelessly done. What harm could come of that?
A lot, evidently. A professor tried to discourage me from the plan.
“Whatever you do, don’t become an academic,” she said. It was a month before my graduation, and she and I were standing in a hallway in the English department. “You’re too independent.”
The “independent” bit did not seem meant as a compliment. The truth is that I was independent only insofar as I had approached my studies in a somewhat delusory fashion—until, that is, I started taking this professor’s classes. She taught literature and women’s studies, and I knew she was mine forever after two things happened: When she announced to the class, “Just so you know, you are all being trained to be middle managers.” And when, during the following class, she walked up to the blackboard and wrote these words: “I CAN’T GO ON, I’LL GO ON.”
She also added, there in the hallway, “Academia is a horror for women.”
My professor, it turned out, had this friend, and this friend had a friend. The friend’s friend was an editor at GQ. She suggested I call the GQ guy for what she somewhat extravagantly called career advice. Of course, I had no career. This was not a call I wanted to make.
In the Land of Men Page 2