Why I'm Like This

by Cynthia Kaplan

  That summer, I taught canoeing at a YMCA camp on the Aspetuck River. For weeks before camp began my mother repeated over and over that the son of an old college friend would be working there, too, and that I should look out for him. I could vaguely recall the son of another of her college friends as being short and spindly and beady eyed, and I was so tired of hearing his name, Jamie Karlin, Jamie Karlin, that I vowed to have nothing to do with him on principle, the principle being to reject anything my mother ever suggested. Little did I know that soon I, too, would be repeating, no, chanting his name over and over and over and over again, until the vowels and consonants had bored themselves into my skull as into a tree trunk, the deep grooves of which I might trace for the rest of my natural life.

  Jamie Karlin was heartbreakingly beautiful. Looking at him was like looking into the sun. I could only do it for a moment or two at a time before my eyeballs burned and my head ached. He was a golden shining thing, a supernova, a young lion. To break him down into his parts, his wavy blond hair, the golden, fleecy cilia that covered his arms and legs, his mouth, would be counterintuitive; you wouldn’t parse a rose or a bald eagle or the last day of school.

  He taught woodworking. One day he almost cut off his finger on the lathe and when he came home from the hospital that night, tired and sweet on painkillers, the other boating counselor, Chris, and I watched TV with him at his house. At one point for no reason he reached over and stroked the back of my calf. Other people have memories of making out in rec rooms. What can I do?

  Then, on a balmy night in late July, Jamie Karlin took me to a party, and afterward, while sitting in my driveway in his car, I nervously popped the door handle, engaging the car’s interior light. “Isn’t that kind of bright?” he whispered. “Sorry,” I whispered back, and then I said, “Good night” and “See you tomorrow,” and I got out of the car. No one ever told me that when a guy says it is too bright he means I want to kiss you, not Get out of the car and shut the door behind you.

  And yet, the summer was not a complete disaster. On one of the last true blue days in August, when the oppressive midsummer haze had been blown away by some zippy cumulus clouds, opportunity knocked once more. At the counselors’ pool party, Jamie Karlin asked me to rub sunblock onto his back. He had the most unbelievable, fair, freckly skin. Had I this moment to live again, I would have offered to apply the sunblock later, in private, with my tongue. At the time, though, I was too overcome to even speak. It was all I could do not to pass out. Mute, I sat down next to him in the cool grass that sloped above the pool and caressed his lanky, soccer-boy body with Coppertone.

  I was obsessed with Jamie Karlin for years after. Years. I loved him like a dog loves a bone. Why do they do that? There is no meat left on it. Is it wishful thinking? Is it the idea that meat was there once and maybe it will be there again one day? Or is it just nostalgia? Oh, that meat was good, remember that meat? Nummy nummy nummy. There I was, chewing my love down to a nub and then burying it and then digging it up and then burying it again somewhere else. And then digging it up. Didn’t want any other dogs to find it! If nothing else, I was loyal.

  And there was nothing else.

  I did not have a romantic relationship with any of the great loves of my youth. In college, when boys I liked started liking me back, that is, when the moon was in the seventh house and Jupiter aligned with Mars, I often didn’t know what to do with them. Still, I made out with a reasonable number of athletic, slightly grungy, flannel-shirted guys, because they were the kind I’d grown up with, the kind I couldn’t have back then, but since my university was eight trillion times larger than my high school, the numbers were in my favor. Unfortunately, none of these boys turned out to be boyfriend material. Somehow, along with lanky and sexy, it seems I was often attracted to dumb. Well, not dumb, but unwitty, which is not a prerequisite for firsts but makes it mighty hard to go back for seconds. Therefore, I fell hopelessly in love with a series of smart, witty fellows who either weren’t interested in my virginal self or scared me because I was my virginal self. Perfect. Nummy.

  To top it all off, I was always friends with the girl all the men wanted. I’d like to say it was by accident, although that sounds naive, but I was naive. It certainly didn’t do me any good. Perhaps these girls sought me out. I was classic sidekick material, cute enough to be seen with but not cuter than you. My best friend at Andover summer school was a tall Texas girl with blond hair and stick-straight legs. She looked amazing in tennis shorts and was adored by all. I was her first Jewish friend. She’d never even eaten a bagel. We were like Candy Bergen and, I don’t know, some short Jewish girl.

  My first college roommate, randomly assigned to me, turned out to be a siren, beckoning men to their destruction with her arching eyebrows and C-cups. When her boyfriend from home visited her they had noisy almost-sex half the night while I had to pretend to sleep. She made out in the stairwell of our dorm with a guy I liked. She had walked out with him with the intention of telling him how great I was and then, she said, he jumped her! Imagine that!? Drunk, she went home from a party with another guy I liked, and after they dry-humped he threw up on her. Sure, I had to laugh, it was funny. Ha ha ha. We were inseparable.

  I finally had sex and it didn’t change anything. Or rather, it changed everything. As good as sex was, it had a way of bursting the bubble. My early loves were based on a stomach-roiling mixture of visual cues and wishful thinking. I wanted something that was substantial only in my imagining of it. Domesticity, even the barest minimum that is a result of waking up together and requiring showers and food, felt awkward and contrived. This is because after you start having sex, you go through a period where it is easier to have sex than it is to have a conversation, which could and ultimately did lead to the unpleasant discovery that the object of your attraction is an idiot. Wait, we’ve come full circle; sex didn’t change anything again.

  There was a guy I slept with for five months. We had almost nothing to talk about but he could come to orgasm twice without ever pulling out, like that Doors lyric, “Love me two times…I’m goin’ away.” I was both sad and relieved when he ended it. At the time, the acid test for me was whether or not a guy had read Ethan Frome, and he failed. One night he fell asleep on the bench in his entryway with a piece of toast in his hand.

  I had a boyfriend who yelled at me for mopping his bathroom floor because I couldn’t stand to walk barefoot in there. He wrote a terrible play about boarding-school jocks sodomizing the sensitive freshman and didn’t give me a part in it. He thought art for money was crass so he lived in an apartment his parents rented for him and eventually ended up in TV. He went to sleep listening to sports radio, like my grandfather listened to the stock quotes. He broke up with me by disappearing for two months without a word.

  Then I had a boyfriend who routinely abandoned me at his friends’ parties, parties where I knew no one. Unless someone interesting was paying attention to me and then he would slither over me, like a creeping vine, to share the light. He would seduce me and as soon as I was seduced he would complain that he felt boxed in. He forgot to bring his credit card to the restaurant on Valentine’s Day and then never paid me back. He took an eternity to come. The day I figured out that sticking my finger in his anus did the trick I bought myself a new hat. I tortured myself with him for a year, on and off. The off was when I intuited that he was sleeping with a colleague at his glamorous, high-powered job. Not a remarkable feat, the intuition, that is, since I heard him talking to a friend about her on the phone, sorry, my phone, while he thought I was still in the shower, sly dog. The woman was wafer thin and had long red curlicue hair. Every man I know was in love with her at some point or another. So, of course, we became friends. I gave the guy a second chance but it ended anyway when I came to the realization that his grammatical errors would eventually drive me out of my gourd.

  And there were other guys all during the black hole that was my twenties. Like the one who stood me up at my birthday dinner. And
the one who wanted to caress my breasts until I thought my head would explode. (Note: Head explode is not a euphemism for something good.) And there was the handsome lawyer from Baltimore. He had a big truck. No, really, a truck.

  Why would I have sex with such people? Beats me. I had to have sex with somebody. I needed practice/I got a late start/it felt good. I couldn’t spend my whole life waiting for some soul-crushingly beautiful boy to give me just enough rope to hang myself with. At some point I had to let there be more. Sex is what grown-ups do with their pent-up longings. They don’t just pine away; they can’t be nostalgic for something they’ve never had. Well, I can, because I have a very good imagination, but most people can’t.

  I was so used to the agony and anxiety of unrequited love that I thought that agony and anxiety were love. It wasn’t enough for someone to make my pulse race, he had to make me sick. One boyfriend, Mr. My Filthy Home Is My Castle, actually gave me migraines; he was my hero. The pain of it all was also an antidote to the tedium, masking the most banal of connections with time-sucking, brain-freezing uncertainty. Why talk about politics or books or anything when you can talk about whether or not this is a relationship? Or why not just have sex. Ah, again you see we’ve come full circle.

  My stomach finally stopped hurting the morning after my first date with the man who would become my husband. I woke up at seven kicking my feet under the covers, a little scissor-kick dance, a dance of lightness and ease. I did not know then that I would marry him, but I knew that I would be all right. There was a whole new breed of man out there, a gold standard, and I had finally tapped the vein. It was actually possible to go out to dinner, go home and have sex, wake up, shower and have breakfast, conversing throughout, all without being either bored to tears or in tears. Of course, there are still times, yes, when I wish I had to worry whether or not he is going ask me to dance or sit next to me on the bus on the way home from the class trip to Mystic Seaport. There are times when I wish I could worship him from afar and listen to Paul McCartney’s Ram twelve times a day because it is his favorite album. I miss the idea of the agony.

  But that’s okay. Because sometimes, at night, we pretend that he is a border guard and I am a graduate student in archeology, and I am able to make do with that.

  this is for you

  DO you love this? If you don’t love it, don’t take it. I’ll give it to your cousin, because she will love it. How about this? I bought this in Singapore/Madrid/Palm Beach/Mexico City, in the gift shop of the Queen Mary/the Bel Air/the Georges Cinque/the Hong Kong Hilton. It is made of the best jade/ivory/gold and has little diamonds/garnets/rubies/seed pearls spelling out Lillian/LSS/Dearest. Take this little fish/heart/chai/elephant with the tusk up. It represents luck/life/love/wealth/health. I want you to have this. And this. One day.

  When I’m dead.

  Every time I visited my Florida grandmother, my mother’s mother, Lillian Siegel, we made a full account of her jewelry. We would sit together on her bed and she would display her wares. Each necklace and ring, each bangle, each pin had a back-story, a provenance. She wore the baroque pearls on the ship the France and the captain had a mad crush on her. She haggled with a blind man in a shop in India for the ivory charm and surely there was not another of its kind in the world. She bought the ring with the serpent that climbed up your finger in a hotel in Beverly Hills just before she rode the elevator with Cary Grant.

  “Oh, Mr. Grant, how do you do? Do you know that I’ve seen all your pictures twice?”

  My grandmother was an extremely charming woman and I have no doubt that Cary Grant chatted with her all the way from the lobby to the penthouse. Men often attached themselves to Lil, even though she was married. Suave young men of Latin origin wrote her letters, addressing them To my dearest friend and signing them With undying gratitude. A priest she met in Singapore relied on her for spiritual advice. Dance instructors on cruise ships invariably forsook all other students so that they might dance the merenge each night with her. She was not a flirt, rather she was open-minded, lighthearted, intelligent, amusing. She made friends and had admirers wherever she went.

  Lil often traveled without my grandfather, Ben, whom she had met as a teenager in Brooklyn. They required time apart; they argued every day of their married lives, and they were married three times. Once at seventeen, before it was legal; once at eighteen, in front of their families; and once again in the seventies, after they had been divorced for a year or two. While they were divorced my grandfather had a brief, intermezzo marriage to a woman named Ruth who clearly wasn’t up to the task. Too docile. My grandparents’ divorce was, by my mother’s account, an acrimonious affair, and during the proceedings Lil was offered the services of a retired gangster who was living on the other side of South Ocean Boulevard at the Diplomat Towers. She graciously declined his proposal to fit my grandfather with a pair of cement shoes and heave him into the Inter-Coastal Waterway, but she did accept a gold-plated pocket watch from him, which, during one of our sessions, she gave to me.

  Lil liked everything around her to be special. She thought each and every one of her belongings was exquisite, and she would ask you, when you visited, if this or that wasn’t the most exquisite you’d ever seen. As I got older it became clear that it was more a matter of it being the only I’d ever seen. Certainly no one else’s grandmother had glued little ornate pillboxes to the tops of a pair of Chinese urns to give them “interest.” Or crocheted a border onto her bathroom rug. Or twined a garland of silk ivy around the naked body of a lamp nymph. Or sawed a couple of inches off some valuable dining-room chairs that seemed too high. Lil had only a cursory respect for a thing’s intrinsic value. It’s an antique? So what? An ugly drawer pull is an ugly drawer pull. What it needs is gold leaf. My mother had a little inlaid-wood side table that I coveted. It had one tiny drawer which while I was growing up housed a single old-fashioned skate key, conjuring up fantasies involving a boy from my high-school hockey club. The table was one of a pair belonging to Lil, my mother told me, but she didn’t know what had happened to its mate. On one visit to Florida, I noticed that a small side table with a top like a large porcelain platter had the same dark, three-legged base as the inlaid table. I asked my grandmother about it. Oh, she said, she had taken off the wood top and glued in its place a porcelain platter. Wasn’t it exquisite?

  In my grandparents’ kitchen there was a charming glass-topped table and two chairs made of wrought iron and painted pink. On each chair there was a thick fuchsia-colored vinyl cushion and every time you sat down it released a sustained hiss, maybe fifteen seconds long, as it deflated beneath your weight. When you stood up it stuck to the back of your thighs, then slowly peeled away, making a sound like tape being ripped off a package. The price of beauty.

  My grandmother became known in her various apartment complexes in Hallandale for her handmade three-quarter-sleeve sweaters, or “bracelet sleeve,” which meant the arms were short enough to show off an elegant wrist and whatever exquisite thing dangled from it. Lil and I cataloged these, too, and my mother and I always wore them when we visited, to please her, although on us the sleeves did not look elegant, just too short. There were probably more than forty sweaters, and they fell into several groups. There was the solid-pullover-with-the-little-V-neck-and-gathered-shoulders group, the all-over-tweedy-color-mix-with-contrasting-cuffcardigan-and-sometimes-a-sparkly-metallic-yarn incorporated group, and there was the variegated-stripe group, which consisted of sweaters with a contrasting stripe on one arm but not the other, or on one panel but not the other. Or stripes in front but not in back, or in back but not in front. Sometimes a whole sweater was red except for one white sleeve with a red cuff. And there was often some extra crocheted detailing. Like a little pocket, or a collar or loopy hem. Actually, my grandmother gave her store-bought jackets and hats and sometimes even her tablecloths the same treatment—a little crocheted border. She even held knitting classes poolside. All over South Florida there are scores of little old ladies in
color-block sweaters with the sleeves too short, and just as many relatives up north too guilt ridden to give them away and too embarrassed to wear them.

  My grandfather’s main interests were his grandchildren, his stocks, and the beach, which he walked every morning. He had a deep tan and a head full of white hair, which I loved to comb, until my father, as a joke, told me it was a toupee. In his day, Ben had been what was called a natty dresser, but his fashion sense in retirement could only have been interpreted as a conscious choice to antagonize his wife. Although they had plenty of money, he took to wearing slightly grungy, often loud sport shirts and mismatched shorts or bathing suits, and white loafery types of shoes, dirty canvas boaters, or worn-down flip-flops. I think he even owned a clip-on tie. No, I’m sure he owned a clip-on tie. I can suddenly see him standing in the apartment, handsome even in light blue leisure-suit-type pants and a short-sleeved oxford, clipping the damned thing on. My grandfather had the most wonderful look, as if he had boxed in his youth—sort of like a shorter, leaner, more Jewish Norman Mailer. When my brother and I were young, Ben’s favorite thing to do was to stick his head out of a doorway or around the corner of a wall, and then grab it back with his own hand, screaming for help as he did it. He also coined the phrase “No coughing allowed,” which became a standard of the Siegel-Kaplan lexicon. Why it never caught on with the population at large is still a mystery.

  Ben had a way with language and had been a comedy writer for the radio stars of the thirties—Jack Perl, who was known as Baron Munchausen; Joe Penny; the Marx Brothers, and Burns and Allen. He also had a job writing lyrics and poems for the Quality Art Novelty Company. He sat around with a bunch of WPA writers, one of whom was Robert Benchley, and wrote unprintable poems that started “Roses are red, violets are blue…”