by Sarah Gorham
God was a responsible creator, or so went the theory. He permitted only those evils that encouraged goodness, which made us humane and just. Retarded children are a tragedy, but they are also the triggers for compassion, philanthropy, scientific research. Indeed, Beckie gave birth to my mother’s avocation. Finding few services for the handicapped and no central source of information, my mother created Washington’s first Directory of Services for the Handicapped. Later, she became director of the Montgomery County Association for Retarded Citizens, a job she assumed while Beckie was in “school.”
Eager to please, my sisters and I joined her—educating, enlisting, converting. Dad raised up a tent on the sidewalk, and we sold lemonade for the retarded. Nancy volunteered at state institutions, reading and providing companionship to the retarded. We all sold fruitcakes for the retarded—Claxton fruitcakes in red-and-white striped boxes, three dense, ingotlike bars to a box. Every fall we sent out an appeal to friends and family, with Beckie’s photograph at the top. “Dear Friends,” one letter began, typed on my mother’s Royal typewriter and dated November 15, 1967:
This fall Beckie was seven years old, and like all solid citizens of seven, went off to school. However, unlike most, she was found eligible for admission by only one school in the entire area. It was the Co-op School for Handicapped Children in Vienna, VA, which does not require that its students talk, or know what a potty is for. In short, Beckie passed its non-requirements with flying colors. She loves her new school, and has seemed happier, more alert, and more responsive since attending its “classes” with her school-mates.
But our joy was somewhat dampened by a notice from the school informing us that in this Co-op, cooperating means selling unappetizing quantities of fruitcakes. And so … … you have been chosen to share our burden. Will you buy a pound or two of fruitcake? It costs $1.10 per pound. Delivery is guaranteed. It happens, by the way, to be very good fruit-cake, which makes it easier for us—and you. Call us any time at FE8-1765. Our staff of assistants will be happy to take your order.
Fondly, All the Gorhams.
Dear reader, we were that staff of assistants. Our house was a processing center, with each of Beckie’s sisters stamping, packaging, taping, writing out addresses, licking labels and envelopes. I can’t even tell you if we liked the stuff, which crowded our freezer and grew fur by June. I will confess that I dug out the green and red cherries, leaving the rutted cake on the counter-top to dry. What a team we were!
Beckie was our wabi, the distinctive flaw that made our family an exquisite paragon. This Japanese concept, with its sister sabi, guides us with three important principles: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect. Asymmetry, asperity, oddity, and incompletion have a place in art and life! Indeed, wabi-sabi can lead us to enlightenment. Here was something to crow about. So I crowed, reviewing books for a journal of exceptional children, writing reports on the retarded, combing through library catalogs, hungry for literature that portrayed them as human, with sisters and brothers and aunts, like us. The Sound and the Fury, Of Mice and Men, and especially, To Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus was my hero, mother and father blended into one. I loved that next-door tree with its mysterious, miraculous knothole. In the movie, their neighborhood was bathed in lustrous black and white, with wailing screen doors and wicked-witch branches. We called my sister “Boo,” for the sensitive Mr. Radley who emerged from the Halloween shadows.
Then she pitched into adolescence and we had to admit her presence was not so benign. It was consuming just to maintain the all clear in our house—dishes, silverware, homework, potting soil, nail scissors, dirty socks, crayons, Coke bottles—everything went in her mouth, or crashed to the floor. Her nose was crusty, her teeth crooked and difficult to clean. Saliva soaked her T-shirts, and the collars were often ripped from ceaseless chewing. She had moments of over-the-top excitement. If an ambulance passed at full scream, Boo threw herself down on the sidewalk and flapped like a beached seal, her pleasure bodywide. At first, this was funny. Then not so funny. In the Bethesda garden center, or Kmart, or the Giant, we let her drive the cart, dragging that leg as if it were made of steel. Inevitably, something would set her off. The Muzak shifted, the intercom chimed, and down she went, fanning herself deliriously, oblivious to startled housewives and sales clerks on alert. The sight of my sister stirred something deep and disorienting in others—a baby in a teenager’s body, the damaged child as monster, from the Latin monere, “to warn.”
My parents agreed to experiment and place Boo in a “boarding school” with an excellent reputation. The results were disastrous. Staff-to-patient ratio was poor and Beckie deteriorated quickly. I accompanied my mother on her last visit through the Pennsylvania suburbs to Woods School. We were directed to a pool, where Beckie was taking swimming lessons. She sat on a bench, dwarfed in her lifejacket—a wispy, bony little bird. She’d lost nearly fifteen pounds on an already slight frame. Mother scooped her gangly baby into her arms and fled home, lips drawn tight the entire two-hour drive.
They would try again, twice, at last settling for a large yellow clapboard Victorian in the Delaware countryside, staffed by a couple with their own disabled child. They called it a group home, and home it was, with dogs and a real kitchen, living room, and bedrooms for the kids though they were some odd-looking kids, moaning and scraping around the basketball court.
Years went by. I left for college, graduate school, and soon after began a family with a good man and two healthy daughters of my own. No one faulted me for keeping my distance. My sisters and I have always been war-veteran close. To blow off steam, we allowed ourselves politically incorrect jokes about the retarded. We ran the other direction when spotting a group of them on field trips. We stewed, we mourned, or none of the above. There was unspoken forgiveness for whatever tack we chose in dealing with Boo. Outsiders were the ones who misunderstood, who saw my inattention as uncaring. Most likely their experience was confined to the mildly retarded, those with greater awareness and independence. There was the question of whether Boo even knew us.
When I was nearly forty, my eldest asked to meet her aunt, the only aunt she’d never seen. She was curious, so we drove out to Beckie’s school, where we were escorted down a long hallway to a shoebox in the back, with windows all around. We found her strapped into a chair, coated in chocolate and saliva, bellowing with clear satisfaction. I could feel Laura back away, full of concerns I would need to address. But for a few minutes, I spoke to my sister, clucked and murmured in that lilting soprano you would use to address an infant. I touched her corkscrew hair. She leaned her head against my shoulder, scanning my face with those wayward eyes. Seeing her raised a river of tenderness and murk. Were the nurses treating her well? Did they know she drank from a plastic cup, never glass, and adored highly processed smoked turkey?
Because she chewed imperfectly and frequently inhaled her food, Beckie was prone to pneumonia. She bounced back from one terrible case after another, beating the odds in spite of scarring, weakness, and dire prognosis. Once in the ICU, we made the tormented decision to remove her from the respirator, and we gathered at her bedside to say good-bye. As if on cue, she immediately resumed breathing on her own. But we knew these farewells were practice, and indeed, when she turned forty-one, a particularly ferocious infection finally took her life.
I’ve heard that while we are in utero, we may be accompanied by the undeveloped cells of a ghost twin. Grieving for Beckie has felt like this. She is a shadow-life tucked under my bodyeaves. There she sways with her lopsided limbs, rickrack teeth, and gentle infant demeanor. She ties me to the earth, my little instructor, reminding me never to feel completely safe or too full of pride. She is my discomfiting, my never-never-land little sister.
On Lying
I’ll come clean, right now. I excused my daughter’s absence from school with a lie. We wanted to get a jump on our vacation, so I told Sister Paulette that Bonnie would be attending her great-uncle Max’s funeral on Frid
ay. Indeed, he had passed away last winter, the touch of truth that made the lie easier. It takes some chutzpah to lie to a nun, though people of all ages have been doing it for years.
What did I feel? About twelve years old, like one of the girls roaming around me in their hiked-up blue skirts.
But I was determined, with a specific purpose in mind: we would leave early for the long drive to Door County, avoiding late-afternoon traffic. Bonnie’s commitment to her classes and Sister Paulette were the only obstacles. My lie, like most lies, was a method of achieving my goal. Our goal, my family’s goal, that of expediency or safety or however I justified it at the time.
I was also careful, perhaps more so than the uniformed teenagers around me. After all, I was replacing the truth with a falsehood and it had to be believable, with characters, details, motivation. Believable, but simple; I couldn’t imagine myself reciting an elaborate story, sustaining that kind of false energy.
Liars should have good memories.
—PROVERB
Later, after I was well rested and back in my routine of dropping Bonnie off at school, seeing her safely inside, then leaving for work, Sister Paulette pulled me aside. We sat together under the bronze crucifix and sentimental portrait of Our Savior, the office a whirlwind of bells, buzzers, and flicked ponytails. I wondered if the school was bankrupt and she was breaking the news to each parent individually. Or maybe Bonnie was in trouble of some kind. I was alert and confused. Sister Paulette held my hands in hers and peered directly into my pupils, as if to check for shrinkage. She whispered, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Loss. My chin dropped. I glanced to the left, hoping to recover my bearings, felt a pilot light catch under my skin and heat climb. I had forgotten all about the long-suffering uncle. My response came after a long pause, during which time I was frantically searching my back-up files. “Sorry for your loss,” I repeated. “Oh, that loss. Well, he was a distant uncle. We were not very close to him.”
Sister Paulette saw it all. If she hadn’t been 100 percent confident before, she must have noticed my relief when the subject changed, and we began to discuss the “air-conditioned county” in Wisconsin where we relaxed and recreated. If I had been telling the truth, I might have been a bit more eager to return to the theme. A woman who has lost someone wears her grief like a plus-size coat: her skin droops, her shoulders slide. I was refreshed after my two-weeks-and-a-day vacation and rather perky.
The body never lies. In its collusion with the truth, it avoids eye contact, limits movement of arms and hands. The liar is not likely to touch her chest, but fidgets a lot, grazing face, throat, hair. She backs up in her chair, sits stiffly, compresses her physical space. Timing and duration of emotional gestures are also slightly off—too short or late. When a liar is faking emotion—delight or grief—her facial expressions can’t really get into it. Eyebrows furrow as if a fly were in the air, a smile’s confined to the lips instead of the whole face.
Aphasics, who have lost the ability to speak or understand language, quickly develop an acute sensitivity to physical gesture. They are among the best lie detectors, reports Nancy L. Etcoff, and others, in Nature magazine. They pick up all their clues from watching a liar move rather than listening to her speech.
My mother too was gifted with an unusually keen social intelligence, or “shit detector,” as she called it. She distrusted Phil Donahue, and G. Gordon Liddy before the Watergate scandal broke. Though Lutheran by baptism, she had a Jewish impatience with niceties, euphemisms, whitewashing, and could see from a mile away whether someone was faking it.
This made my adolescence difficult. To honor my curfew, I went to my room at eleven, locked my door, climbed onto a chair under the window, cranked the handle, squeezed through, and dropped to the begonias below. Then I’d walk briskly to the bridge by Mohegan and Goldsboro, where my boyfriend stood smoking under haloed streetlights. Night after night after night, our relationship secretly flourished.
Weeding the side yard one hot afternoon, my mother spotted the crushed flowers. I blurted out an explanation: “It must have been those dogs. A whole pack of them. Look what they’ve done!” We both knew the real story. To my mother, it wasn’t worth the fight, so nothing surfaced, little changed, except perhaps my avoidance of her begonias when I leapt into the steamy dark.
In common use from the fourteenth all the way up to the seventeenth century was the adjective gull, of Germanic origin, which meant, “yellow or pale.” The noun gull referred to “an unfledged bird, especially a gosling.” A young, inexperienced bird, pale and yellow, might be easily deceived. From this comes the word gullible.
Though pale, Sister Paulette was no fledgling bird, sparrow nor goose. Neither was my mother.
Kindness should override truth.
—SAMUEL BUTLER
I don’t think my parents ever lied to me. The worst I remember is a kind of imprecision. When asked about the results of my IQ test, my mom responded, “Oh, somewhere between your father’s and mine.” I could tell, in the name of tenderness, she allowed herself a white lie, a clean cloth over a knotty table. I was satisfied with her answer and sat like a sparrow, safe between my parents on the swaying intelligence wire.
The truth is often too hurtful, terrifying, unpleasant, mundane, or confusing to deal with. It begs embellishment. As a consequence, in varying degrees, for multiple reasons lying is an essential element of social interaction. Here are four points on a possibly infinite list of examples:
• Joni Mitchell doesn’t wear makeup: “Not really. A little blush, concealer, a dash of mascara, a little color on the lips. And that’s it.” Joni wants us to think her beauty is effortless. The Times calls this “makeup denial.”
• Please do not call them McMansions. They are “luxury estates,” a phrase that conjures up Versailles, Fontainebleau, Kensington Gardens in the dappled, rolling hills of France or England. For a mere $5 or 6 million, you too can be a count, lord or lady, prince or princess from a long line of blue bloods.
• The director promises to get you started in the very next play, scheduled for spring. When you don’t sleep with him, the part never materializes; you can’t even get him on the phone.
• “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” said President Clinton. Note his avoidance of the contraction “didn’t,” as well as his reference to “that woman,” formalizing, and distancing himself from Monica Lewinsky. Thousands of teenagers are now “abstaining from sex” by practicing fellatio. This benefits boys in particular, a happy new population of Little Bills.
A lie is a social tool. We lie to avoid consequences—hurting the feelings of a loved one, embarrassment, failure, impeachment, jail, or sometimes just because it’s easier than relaying the complicated truth. (I borrowed the sweater from my sister who borrowed it from her roommate who bought it at a thrift shop. Or: Thank you. I don’t remember where I got it.) We also lie to get something we want, whether it is a fluffier version of our lackluster selves, a longer vacation, membership in some elite intellectual group, or a house in the Pacific Palisades.
Even animals will lie. Our hound dog Emma sleeps on the living room couch; it’s her spot, her kingdom. When her sibling Monty hops up there before her, she rushes to the front door to let roll her mellifluous, hound-dog bellow. There is, of course, no intruder. We all know she’s faking, except Monty, who jumps off the couch to join in the fray. Who can blame him? It’s the wolf’s cry, the irresistible bugle call of the hunt. He’s bewitched and falls for it every time. As soon as he lands on all fours, Emma stops barking abruptly and leaps onto the couch before Monty knows what hit him.
There are some cases where lying is a virtue in the animal kingdom. Consider the nesting plover who spots a predator and immediately begins an elaborate charade of limping, squealing, dragging and dipping of one supposedly broken wing toward an adjacent sand dune and away from her brood. Animals dissemble for many of the same reasons we do. Monty’s hair rises along his spine a
nd he grows two inches taller. A magnificent frigate bird puffs up its scarlet feathers until its throat is bigger than a bear’s heart. Plants too: The mountain laurel’s pollen-coated, spring-loaded stamens are painted a bright, alluring pink. From scent and color, the lady-slipper creates a tantalizing canoe-shaped trap for bees and spiders.
Rocks and cement do not lie. The very idea is absurd. It appears the lie is a characteristic of living things, an extension of Darwinian notions of natural selection. The liar, whether plant or animal, casts a spell for a handful of reasons: to jump-start the reproductive process, protect its young, defend its territory, escape predation, scare or intimidate rivals, or otherwise appear more fit in the world’s eye.
The most enchanting things in nature
and art are based on deception.
—VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Here is a poem that describes a deception gone wild, from Jeffrey Harrison’s collection Feeding the Fire:
OUR OTHER SISTER
The cruelest thing I did to my younger sister
wasn’t shooting a homemade blowdart into her knee,
where it dangled for a breathless second
before dropping off, but telling her we had
another, older sister who’d gone away.
What my motives were I can’t recall: a whim,
or was it some need of mine to toy with loss,
to probe the ache of imaginary wounds?
But that first sentence was like a string of DNA
that replicated itself in coiling lies