family & budget
parental control
amy sohn
My boyfriend freshman year of Brown was a six-foot five-inch black guy from Philly who played power forward on the basketball team. He was my first love and our relationship was deep and intense, but one of the main reasons I was drawn to him was because I knew my parents wouldn't approve. They are what you might call liberal conservatives: NPR-listening, cultured, Democratic-voting Jews, but my mom doesn't like women with visible bra straps and my dad doesn't feel comfortable around black men.
So when Kevin came to visit for a weekend the summer after freshman year, things were awkward. He towered over my five-seven bearded dad, who kept resorting to small talk about the championship chances of the 76ers. I insisted that Kevin sleep in my bedroom, even though my thirteen-year-old brother, Mark, was in the next room, and though we didn't have sex the slats on my platform bed kept falling and making loud clacking noises and in the morning my mother looked at us both very strangely.
After he went back to Philly, we would talk most nights, late at night after I got home from canvassing for an environmental group. Our relationship wasn't going well—I was always telling him about the new friends I was making at work and he was worried I was cheating on him, which I wasn't. I hung up in tears and when I walked into the living room my father said, “It doesn't sound like you're very happy.”
“Of course I am!” I said, sniffling. “Happiness sometimes involves emotion.”
“I know this might not be what you want to hear,” he said, which was what he always said before he said something hurtful, “but Mom and I didn't get a good feeling about him when he came to visit. She doesn't think he's polite.”
“Of course he's polite! What are you talking about?”
“Well, he called us by our first names before we said it was OK, and he takes very long showers.”
“Oh, come on!” I said. “That is so hegemonic!”
“What's hegemonic?”
“It's racist and totally unfair! Why don't you just admit that you'd like him better if he were white?” I waited for him to tell me race had nothing to do with it; how could I accuse him of such bigotry when he was only looking out for my feelings?
“Of course I'd like him better if he were white,” he said. “No question about it.”
Kevin and I eventually broke up, for reasons that had less to do with my parents and more to do with all the fighting and crying. I didn't have any other serious boyfriends in college, so after I graduated I set about finding one. I moved into a share in Carroll Gardens, and at night I bar-hopped in the East Village with a girlfriend who had guys falling left and right for her because she smoked and knew how to appear disinterested. I, on the other hand, threw myself at every 120-pound drummer who gave me a second glance. I did magic tricks, the Cockney alphabet (A for 'orses, B for mutton, C for miles), and then I suggested openly that they come back to my place. None of this made for long-term relationships, so by the time I was a few years out of college I was still painfully single.
The only good thing in my life was that I had a job writing a weekly column about my dating life for a downtown alternative newspaper. My parents read it religiously and joked about it, although I knew it made them embarrassed and uncomfortable. One night I went over to their apartment for dinner, as I frequently did since I couldn't cook. My father was sitting on the couch reading New York magazine. “I've just read the most fascinating article,” he said, “about a guy who should be your future husband.”
The article turned out to be about a music-video director, Harvard grad, and former member of the Lemonheads named Jesse Peretz. He'd recently gotten into a terrible car accident, and the brush with death gave him a new lease on life. He had just directed an indie film and had decided to focus on projects he really cared about. “Not only is he bright, talented, and very handsome,” my dad said, flashing me a large photo of him, “but his father is Marty Peretz, editor in chief of the New Republic, and I think his grandfather is I. L. Peretz!” I. L. Peretz was the most famous Yiddish writer in history.
This guy had a pedigree to beat all pedigrees. He had an intellectual father, an Ivy diploma, a stint in a rock band, and a budding new career. Even his name was perfect: The Jesse connoted a freethinking, skateboarding hippie, and the Peretz conjured two generations of leftie Jewish cred.
Although my father had no idea what he was doing by showing me this article, I was in such a vulnerable state that I took it as an admonition. If I wanted his approval I had to find a smart, well-educated Jewish guy with an artistic but impressive occupation. A guy like this would be able to talk with me about art, literature, and love and still get married under a chuppah. We'd have a Jewish wedding officiated by some hip downtown rabbi and invite a crowd of actor and artist friends. We'd buy an old loft in Williamsburg, drink microbrews, and have adorable punk-rock children with trendy names like Dashiell and Ruby.
I never met Jesse Peretz, but I spent the next eight years pursuing the Peretzian Ideal. I dated a string of actors, comedians, screenwriters, journalists, and novelists, all “names” to me if not the world. There was a guy who'd been on a sitcom, a downtown stand-up comedian, a young Broadway director, and a screenwriter who'd been nominated for an Oscar. Some were depressed and Jewish, others just depressed, but they all had one overwhelming thing in common: None of them had any interest in marrying me.
What I didn't realize then was that guys with impressive careers are narcissistic and sought-after, so the last thing they want to do is commit. We'd go on one date, and then, when I called too often or told them I wanted to go out again, they blew me off with lines so repetitive I could have written them myself: “I need to take things very slowly” or “Career is the basement to my house” or “My last girlfriend and I got very serious very fast and I don't want to make that same mistake again.” But I kept chasing them, imagining each guy shaking my father's hand after asking permission to marry me, and my father erupting in a sea of tears like Paul Sorvino at the Oscars when his daughter won for playing a whore.
By the time my twenty-ninth birthday arrived I was starting to lose it. I'd made a career of my singlehood (four columns, two novels, dozens of sex articles for third-rate women's magazines), but I was afraid that when I died my books would be all I left behind. So I decided to throw myself a birthday party to convince myself that friends were all that really mattered. I would invite a small, smart group, show off my new floor-through apartment in Cobble Hill, and show myself that I didn't need a boyfriend.
A few days before the party I decided I needed some art for my walls, and a mutual friend suggested I contact a painter he knew named Jack. So I called and left a message and a few hours later he called back. I was sitting home alone drinking a Corona and watching Double Indemnity on DVD, and when I answered the phone I heard a deep, sexy voice. Our mutual friend had said Jack lived in Brooklyn Heights and was eccentric, so I decided that despite the sexy voice, he was an over-the-hill weirdo with a rent-stabilized apartment and a bunch of cats.
I asked if he could lend me a few paintings, and when he came to my door with his portfolio I saw that he was most definitely not an over-the-hill weirdo. He looked to be in his late thirties (I later found out he was forty-two), and he was six feet tall, with red hair and tattoos of his own artwork up and down his arms. He was wearing a wide-brimmed tan felt hat with a string that attached it from his head to a button on his shirt, and there was something about the old-school nature of the hat that excited me.
It was obvious by Jack's last name, the tattoos up and down his arms, and his aquiline nose that he was not Jewish, but I didn't see him as husband material so much as a hot fling. I had been reading Anaïs Nin stories about perverted painters and their subjects, and I had a fantasy that Jack and I could live out one of the stories together. I led him upstairs, where I was cleaning the apartment in preparation for my party and into the bedroom so I could find a copy of my novel to give h
im as a thank-you. As soon as I walked in I saw my Hitachi magic wand sitting on the bed. “God, this is embarrassing,” I said, yanking it away.
“It's nothing I haven't seen before,” he said.
And that was how it started. He loaned me paintings, but declined my invitation to the party, and when he came to pick them up we went on a long walk. Because I wasn't thinking of him as a potential mate, I was myself when I was around him and not so nervous. Soon it became clear that in addition to being hot, he was also an avid reader, a gentleman, and a rough-edged romantic. He cooked for me, well, in his tiny galley kitchen. He read me Bernard Malamud at night. He bought me used books by Kleist and e-mailed me photos of vintage porn, saying the women's bodies reminded him of mine. We went to see Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love and during the credits I told him I loved him.
I told my parents I was seeing someone new, and then one night a couple months after we met I invited them over for dinner. “I can't believe you're cooking,” said my mother.
“I'm not. Jack is.”
My parents and Mark came and we sat around my tiny table. Jack made a bouillabaisse with good salad and sourdough bread. My dad ate three portions. When my dad found out Jack had gone to Harvard for graduate school he seemed doubly impressed. Jack was not a Jesse Peretz or even a Jew, but he was a mensch, smart, and a good conversationalist, and clearly he loved me. The next day my dad wrote to say how happy I seemed and how beautiful I looked. I got choked up reading it because most of the time when he sent e-mails they were passive-aggressive and weird.
Over the next few months my parents got to know Jack better, and given the fact that he was from a different background and closer in age to them than to me, I thought they did a pretty good job of making him feel welcome. There was only one thing they didn't seem to like about him: They weren't exactly sure how he made a living. When they asked I explained that he sold his paintings, but I rarely gave details about how often or how many. Then I'd change the subject. Soon they stopped asking and we settled into a kind of uncomfortable silence on the issue.
That winter I invited him to spend Christmas and New Year's with my parents, Mark, and me at their country house in the Berkshires. On the night of Mark's birthday we invited our cousins for dinner. My mom usually makes lasagna but Jack offered to make it. “That's very generous of you,” my mother said, but she didn't look happy.
In the morning Jack did his prep work, all except for the salad, and then he, Mark, and I went to see Gangs of New York. We got back at five and even though our guests weren't coming till seven, when we walked in I saw an entire salad in the bowl sitting out on the counter. “You didn't have to do that,” Jack said, blinking.
“I was just trying to be helpful,” my mother said.
Jack looked at the heap of vegetables on top of the lettuce—carrots, tomatoes, celery, and cucumbers. It was a Jewish salad, the kind I'd grown up eating, with everything thrown in. It wasn't an elegant salad like you'd have in a restaurant, with a couple leaves of romaine and a dash of vinaigrette.
Our cousins came over and Jack set out the lasagna, to oohs and aahs. I didn't see the salad, and when I looked up at him he was at the kitchen counter, with the garbage drawer pulled out, gathering the carrots, tomatoes, celery, and cucumbers and tossing them into the trash. I glanced over at my mom. She was squinting at Jack, her mouth in a tight, thin line.
Our last morning in the country, I woke up before Jack. When I walked into the kitchen my dad was sitting at the counter, already on his third cup of coffee. “So Jack's pretty amazing, isn't he?” I said, filling a mug.
“He's wonderful,” my dad said. “Bright, funny, and what a storyteller!”
“I know,” I said.
“I know this might not be what you want to hear,” he started.
“Dad, please,” I said. But he wouldn't stop.
“It's just something Mom noticed. Did you know that when he thought no one was looking he took her salad, removed all the vegetables, and tossed them into the garbage?”
“It was his dinner!” I said. “He didn't even ask her to make the salad but she did anyway!”
“That's not the point,” my dad said. “The point is, Do you think it's a good idea to be involved with someone so narrow-minded? If you two get married, there will be a lot of decisions you'll have to make together, and it will be hard when he shows such a total lack of permeability!”
I stormed downstairs. A few minutes later I heard the Weedwacker. My dad always weeds when he's stressed. It helps him but it doesn't help the garden, since he has no idea what he's doing. A couple years ago he bought a chain saw, and even though the instructions said, “You must use motor oil or the belt will break,” he decided he didn't have to obey. He started to chop down a tree, the belt broke, and the chain saw got lodged in the trunk. It's still there.
On the way home I told Jack what my father had said. I knew it might not be a wise idea to do this, but I was so hurt by my father's behavior that I felt I had to tell Jack, as someone who cared about me. “Can you believe he had the nerve to complain about you behind your back?” I whined.
“You shouldn't tell me these things,” Jack said. “I don't need to know that your parents don't like me.”
“They do like you,” I said. “It's just that my mom has this competitive thing with you because you're a better cook, and my dad feels protective of her feelings. You can't undo thirty-five years of marital loyalty.” He looked out onto the road. I said his name a few times but he was quiet all the way to Torrington.
One night in late June, about nine months after we met, we were lying in bed in Jack's apartment whispering in the dark. He was telling me he loved me, and then he said something about how we should get married. At first I thought he was kidding, but then I realized he was asking, for real. It was a moment I'd been waiting for my whole life, and I never expected it to happen late at night on blue sheets on a mattress on a floor in Brooklyn Heights. I said yes and then I asked him back and he said yes and the rest of the night I couldn't sleep.
A few days later I called my parents. “Jack and I want to stop over one night this week,” I told my dad. “Just to say hi. How about Tuesday?”
“That's not going to work,” he said. “Mom has folk dancing.”
“What about Wednesday?”
“I have the co-op board meeting and on Thursday and Friday we have dinner plans.” I couldn't believe it. My father was trying to cock-block my engagement.
“What about Sunday?” I said. “We're supposed to meet friends for dinner at eight but we can come over before, for a drink.”
“Why do you want to come over if you're not staying for dinner?” my mom said. They do that all the time—both get on the line when I think I'm only talking to one of them.
“I just…wanted to see you guys.”
“If you really want to,” my mother said. Was she in on it too? It seemed they were doing everything in their power to prevent me from telling them I was getting married. It was the “if a tree falls in a forest” of engagements.
“We'll be there at six,” I said, and hung up before they could protest.
Sunday night at five thirty I met Jack at a bar a few blocks from my parents' apartment. He said he was nervous and ordered a Maker's Mark on the rocks. “They're going to be so happy for us,” I said. “You shouldn't worry.”
“I'm not so sure,” he said. “I'm not Jewish and I'm an artist. I think we should decide now if we're asking them or telling them.”
“We're telling them,” I said. “I'm twenty-nine years old. That's too old to ask permission.”
“Good,” he said.
When we got to the apartment my mother opened the door. “Dad's not here,” she said.
“What?” I said.
“He's running errands on the Lower East Side but he should be home soon.”
“Oh,” I said. This was awful. If he didn't make it back in time we'd have to leave for our dinner and I'd have to
postpone the whole conversation. Years would go by, in an endless cycle of New York–style postponements, and by the time we finally told my parents we were engaged we'd already have three kids.
We sat on the living room couch. Jack held my hand. My mother asked what was new. We both said “nothing” at the same time.
The front door opened and my dad came in. Then he disappeared into the bedroom and didn't come out. My mom bellowed his name.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, emerging in a T-shirt and khaki shorts. “It was very hot outside. I had to change.”
He sat down next to my mom. “So anyway,” I said, taking a deep breath and grabbing Jack's hand.
“Did Mom tell you I saw Spellbound last night? It was playing at the Heights Cinema. Excellent documentary. About these kids in a spelling bee. There was this one scene where this girl couldn't spell viand. I swear to you I was on the edge of my seat.”
“We've decided to get engaged,” I said.
“Mazel tov!” my mother said, rising to embrace us. My dad was smiling tightly. My mother turned to him and said, “Come over here and congratulate them.”
He stood up and kissed me and shook Jack's hand and then he said, “Should I open some wine?”
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