True Stories from an Unreliable Eyewitness

by Christine Lahti

  This boyfriend and I had been dating for a couple of years when he moved into my newly purchased, architecturally challenged one-bedroom condo on West Seventy-First Street. We’d decided to take this terror-inducing “next step” because, up until this towel assault, it had been pretty smooth sailing. My therapist had encouraged me. “Why not?” she said. “Think of it as a laboratory experiment!”

  Well, he might as well have just lifted his leg and peed on my bed, marking it like a dog. No matter how much discussion we’d had about equality, somewhere, deep down, my new roommate expected me to be his “wife.” Talk is cheap, I thought, staring at the gray puddle spreading on my beloved quilt; the proof is in the . . . towel.

  Tommy knew how gun-shy I was about commitment. I’d shared with him the cautionary tales of past boyfriends who seemed to require that I make myself smaller so they wouldn’t feel threatened. Like that underemployed actor who would fly into a purple rage anytime I had any career success. Or that withholding, domineering blond musician with the wire-rimmed glasses, a doppelgänger of my dad.

  Tommy had heard plenty about my pervasively sexist upbringing. How my mom had to surrender her entire identity when she agreed to marry my father. He’d even witnessed it firsthand.

  On a visit home, Tommy watched how she’d wait on Dad, hand and foot, as he sat for hours in front of the television watching sports. Through the din of cheering and the drone of Howard Cosell, Tommy could hear Mom cheerfully ask, “Excuse me, Ted, can I get cha anything, honey? Would ja like some more . . .”

  “Sshhh!” interrupted Dad, urgently holding up his index finger. “go blue! yes . . . touchdown!!”

  She’d wait patiently for the play to be over, feigning interest in the pileup of beefy athletes on the screen as she smoothed her helmetlike hair.

  “Now, what is it you wanted?” he’d finally respond, in a voice mildly tinged with annoyance.

  “Oh, sorry! Um . . . I just wondered if I could bring you another beer or something else . . . maybe a Reuben?”

  “You’re an angel in disguise!” he’d whisper distractedly, his eyes fixed on the endless series of instant replays.

  Her made-up face fixed in a smile, she’d empty his ashtray, restock his peanuts-and-red-hots mix, bring him a fresh Budweiser and an expertly grilled sauerkraut and corned beef sandwich. She was careful not to get in his sight line as she quietly set up his TV table and placed his napkin on his madras plaid trousers.

  “Holy shit. What was that?” Tommy said to me later that night in Dad’s wood-paneled den on the pull-out leather couch. Even though we were living together, both thirty-two years old, we had to sleep in separate beds at my parents’ house because we weren’t married.

  “I felt like I was on Mars,” he went on.

  “Yeah, well, welcome to my world,” I agreed, embarrassed.

  He laughed. “No wonder you’re so fucked-up!”

  I looked at him sadly.

  “No, no, no,” he replied, dancing as fast as he could. “I meant . . . no wonder you’re so paranoid. Look, sweetheart, I promise you, that guy in there with the madras pants and red hots? I will never, ever, be anything remotely like him.”

  Although clearly supportive of women’s rights, Tommy didn’t exactly call himself a feminist yet. But back then, any man who identified as such just seemed like he was trying to get laid. At the time, I accepted his preferred word: “humanist.” He swore that he loved me because I had big dreams, and that he shared my need for independence.

  But then . . . he played the fucking wet-towel card, knowing full well that my hair-trigger trust was at stake. Was this blatant disrespect a sign of something even deeper? Was he actually saying, in the most passive-aggressive way possible, that he wanted out? Fuck, I should have known. I’d had misgivings from the start.

  “So . . . I met this guy . . . Tommy,” I’d told my shrink a few years prior, when I was thirty-two.

  She lifted her eyebrows. “And?”

  “I don’t know. He’s just so . . . nice.”

  “Jesus, Christine,” she said, looking at me sadly. Her voice became husky. “What makes you think you don’t deserve to be with someone who’s nice?”

  Okay. Shit. She had a point. She knew that the only men I felt comfortable with at that point were gay. And here was this funny, sexy, seemingly nonsexist heterosexual man who could do magic tricks, named Tommy Schlamme. Eventually, with her help, taking baby steps, I began to understand the attractive and essential nature of kindness.

  Tommy and I became friends first, and then gradually lovers. Although I kept denying others’ insistence that I was falling in love, something strange and wonderful was happening; a kind of tender trust. After he’d moved in and I confronted him about the towel debacle, he apologized, reassuring me it wasn’t a sign of anything except carelessness. I also found out that we shared many of the same issues; neither of us had any interest in the limitations of traditional gender roles. Yikes. Could this guy actually be a potential life partner?

  Note that I said “life partner.” Marriage wasn’t even on my radar back then. I knew, as Gloria Steinem said, that marriage would seem like the last choice I would ever have. Why would any sane female voluntarily choose to enter that kind of prison? A woman’s wedding day was touted as being the greatest day of her life, when really it was the last day of her life. Everyone stands and applauds her as she walks down the aisle with her father, who then transfers his property to her soon-to-be husband. The marriage license was nothing more than a deed of ownership.

  Yet against all odds, despite my trepidation, our “experiment” worked. And several years later, we decided to wed. We were planning to start a family soon, and we thought it might be better for our future kids if we got married. Plus, we liked the idea of a big dance party. This miracle occurred on September 4, 1983, at the Dairy in the middle of Central Park, officiated by a dour woman from the New York Society for Ethical Culture. We had handwritten our humorless ceremony, battling over every word. I felt especially adamant that there be no hint of any patriarchal religious bullshit. Our one expression of spirituality was a reading from The Color Purple in which the character Shug describes God, who could be seen in the color purple, as “not a He or a She but an ‘It.’” Speaking our no-nonsense vows to each other, Tommy and I both knew we were heading into uncharted territory. We figured we’d just have to make up our own rules as we went along.

  We went on to raise three children. Not terribly unconventionally, except we tried our best to do it together, as partners, with as much levity as humanly possible. It’s still been important to me to maintain separate bank accounts, though we share all our expenses as equally as we can. Certainly not without many extreme ups and downs, and maybe partly because we’ve spent a lot of time apart, we are now going on thirty-four years. Though a friend recently said that if an actress and a director in Hollywood have been married for thirty-four years, it should really be calculated in dog years.

  What I discovered is that this particular guy never felt the need to control me. If anything, I’ve been the more controlling person. I have even at times, hypocritically, expected him to do the more “manly” chores, such as:

  Taking out the garbage. (Sorry, I can’t help it, I still think that’s a guy’s thing.)

  Recording shows on our VCR. (Yeah, see, that’s why I need his help.)

  Basically any job that requires a tool. (Except for my vibrator. I’m fine with that one.)

  Unplugging the toilets. (Just . . . please.)

  He also tends to clean up after me more than I do after him. Still, I am always the one who goes downstairs at three in the morning brandishing the baseball bat to see why our three dogs are barking—but only because Tommy is sound asleep upstairs, confident in the knowledge that I am certifiably insane.

  My husband, at times, still leaves his wet towel on our bed. And yeah, occasionally it makes me want to strangle him with it. But mostly, all I feel is a slight tug of irritati
on. After so long, it’s dawned on me that he really, truly doesn’t expect me to pick it up.

  These days, I might throw it in the hamper. Or perhaps even leave it there. I guess I finally trust that sometimes a wet towel is . . . just a wet towel.

  Not too bad. Only took me 238 years.

  8

  The Street Where “They” Lived

  Christmas Eve, 1958. My family took our annual driving tour of all the extravagantly decorated houses in our suburban Michigan town. Twelve-foot-tall plastic Santas on rooftops, Nativity scenes with stuffed baby Jesuses gracing front lawns, trees and shrubs exploding with multicolored string lights; the neighborhood was lit up like a Christian shopping mall on steroids.

  Then we suddenly found ourselves on a dark street that looked like a ghost town. While traditional colonial and redbrick houses lined the rest of our town, these homes were all made of concrete and glass. We drove through this foreign world as if we were on safari, peering out from the safety of our locked, faux-wood-trimmed Mercury station wagon.

  “This is where the Jews live,” whispered my father, as though he was the guide and didn’t want to disturb the wildlife. “As you can see, these houses here are all very modern and ostentatious.” It was the first time I remember hearing that word.

  “Well, this is different,” said my mom, noticing the houses’ lack of holiday accessorizing.

  “Holy mackeroly! Why don’t they have any decorations?” I asked.

  “They don’t believe in Christmas.” Dad spoke with a sense of wonder and pity, as if he were saying “They don’t believe in food.”

  I instantly imagined these Jewish people wandering around their cheerless rooms like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, dressed in drab clothes, murmuring “Bah, humbug” under their breath to each other. Even at eight years old, I was still enchanted by Christmas. I’d heard vicious rumors that Santa Claus was made up, but I wouldn’t have any of it. I thought about how Santa must simply fly over these homes—“Skip this godforsaken street, Rudolph; Jews live here!” I pictured all the toy-deprived Jewish children and just didn’t understand it. Why would anybody choose not to celebrate Christmas? And why were all of these nonbelievers living on only these few bleak blocks?

  While growing up, as far as I could tell, I never met a Jew. There may have been some Jewish kids in the public schools I attended, but I wasn’t aware of it. I was pretty sure Jewish people were not allowed at Red Run, the country club we belonged to, either. One day, after visiting an exclusively Jewish club for the first time with a friend who’d been invited, Dad came home and reported, “Oh, it was fine, except while I was taking a Jacuzzi, I looked down and there were human stools floating around. I jumped out of there fast!”

  He said it as if he wasn’t surprised, given that it was a Jewish club. Well, geez, I thought, if they shit in hot tubs, maybe I’m glad I don’t know any Jews. He also absurdly implied that once the shit was spotted, nobody else bothered to get out. What was wrong with these people? I thought. Raccoons wouldn’t have stayed in that hot tub!

  My family spent summers on a lake in northern Michigan. I don’t think there were many Jews there, either. The summer residents seemed more like the decorating, Christmas-celebrating type, our type. Everyone acted like they were always celebrating something. They looked ostentatiously cheery, wearing bright colors that matched their fruity cocktails. The yacht club we belonged to was exclusive, but it resembled a large rustic log cabin. Most of its members seemed to belong in an L.L.Bean catalog; men with nautical hats and madras Bermuda shorts, women in their capris and sun visors, sailboats with names like Seas the Day, Aqua Holic, and Passing Wind.

  The bubble in which I grew up didn’t just have a problem with Jews, by the way. My exposure to people of color was equally nonexistent—pretty much limited to Lorraine, our once-a-week cleaning lady, who had no last name that I ever heard, and the waiters at Red Run, one who I only heard my dad refer to as “Jimmy.” Once in a while I’d see some Mexican gardeners tending our neighbors’ lawns. The single most exotic place I’d ever visited before high school was Colorado.

  Then I went to the University of Michigan and discovered diversity. It was like never leaving the flats of the Midwest your whole life and then suddenly driving up the coast of Big Sur. A Buddhist professor from India taught one of my favorite courses, Comparative Religion, where I learned about the Bible and the Koran. I had classmates and teachers from all over the globe. For the first time I was surrounded by Jews, Blacks, Muslims, and Hispanics from various economic backgrounds.

  Attending a lot of Thank God It’s Friday frat parties my freshman year, I gravitated to the one Jewish fraternity in particular. To my surprise, these guys looked exactly like everyone else and were not at all Scrooge-like. They even wore bright colors. A couple seemed especially fascinating—they had long, dark hair and were whip-smart, funny, and from the most sophisticated place on earth, New York City!

  Although I entered that college as Republican as my parents, the conservative scales fell from my eyes faster than you could say “LSD.” Then, after graduating, my new progressive values and I moved to New York; a city of millions, the most cosmopolitan, diverse place in the world. Yet for many years there I managed to have relationships only with WASPy men who looked and acted a lot like my father—cool, calm, and repressed.

  Finally, at thirty-two, I ended up meeting and falling in love with a passionate Jew named Tommy Schlamme. One Christmas, I brought him home.

  All eight of us sat around the red-cloth-covered table on Christmas Eve, wearing our red outfits. So many lit candles adorned our dining room, it resembled high mass in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Tommy sat next to me, wearing a long-sleeved black T-shirt.

  “So, Tommy, tell us, how do your people celebrate Christmas?” my dad asked, his cheeks flushed from his extra-dry martini. I wanted to dive headfirst into my bowl.

  Tommy swallowed a few thick spoonfuls of Mom’s pea soup before answering. “Well, Dr. Lahti, exactly the same way your people celebrate Hanukkah,” replied my future husband. We all laughed awkwardly. Then silence, interrupted only by the clanking of heavy silver spoons against china.

  One of my brothers changed the subject. “How about those Wolverines?” he asked, referring to the U of M football team that my dad worshiped.

  I looked over at Tommy and whispered, horrified, “How about these Lahtis?” It felt like I was watching my Christmas-sweater-clad family in a bad holiday episode of Leave It to Beaver.

  Tommy must have thought he’d landed in an alternate universe. I’m pretty sure it was the first time he’d seen an entire family, all adults by this point, with outfits that matched their tablecloth. He also watched as Dad played the organ and we sang rapturous songs about the birth of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior and Mommy kissing Santa Claus, often in well-rehearsed two- and three-part harmonies.

  Born and raised in Texas, Tommy also didn’t have a lot of experience with snow. I doubt it ever occurred to him that the thing to do with snow was to get naked and roll in it. Which is exactly what we all did after taking a sauna that night. With only towels wrapped around us, we ran out into the backyard in bare feet and lay down in the middle of enormous snow drifts. (The copious amounts of wine consumed at dinner helped, as did the cocktails before and the cognac after.)

  At first Tommy, still in his black T-shirt, just observed the rest of us. With bare bodies steaming like freshly boiled shrimp, we pranced out into the frigid snow, yelling, “Woohoo! Come on, Tommy! It doesn’t feel cold, it just tingles!” Then he watched as I lay down in six inches of the stuff and scissored my arms and legs up and down, creating a snow angel. “Come on,” I encouraged him. “It’s really good for you! Then we’ll go back in the sauna and beat ourselves silly with birch branches!” Tommy finally joined in. But he appeared confused and skeptical, as if he’d just joined a family of inebriated polar bears.

  The next day, some of my parents’ friends stopped by. Penny Taylor, our
next-door neighbor, met Tommy. She was also from Texas.

  “So nAHce to meet you, Sammy.”

  “It’s Tommy, Penny,” I corrected her.

  “Oh, sorry, AH knew that! So, are you EYE-talian?” she asked.

  “No, I’m Jewish,” Tommy chimed in.

  “Oh, AH apologAHze! AH’ve just never seen black curly hair like yours, Sammy, and assumed you had to be—”

  “How about those Wolverines, Penny?” I interrupted.

  The second time I brought Tommy home, it was summer. We went to our family’s cottage. The first thing he witnessed was my father’s 6:00 a.m. assassination of a woodpecker with his 22-gauge shotgun. I doubt Tommy had ever seen a loaded firearm up close. The pest had pecked one too many holes on the side of our cottage, so Dad, in his red-plaid bathrobe, pulled his gun out of his drawer, aimed it up into the trees, fired once, and down floated a bird, as dead as an autumn leaf.

  That afternoon my father took Tommy to the local golf course, which had probably never encountered a Jew, either.

  As he placed his tee in the grass, Tommy remarked “Wow, this is great! We’ve practically got the course to ourselves!”

  “Shhhhh, lower your voice! It disturbs the other players,” Dad said, practicing his swing in his salmon polyester trousers.

  Then that night, while we swam in the lake after another sauna, Dad came out on the dock and whispered, “Shhhh, Tommy, the neighbors! Your voice carries across the lake!” Yes, Tommy had a tendency to speak loudly, but I’d never heard my father shush any of his six booming-voiced children. Was it because he thought Jews not only defecated in hot tubs but were too boisterous on golf courses and large bodies of water?

  Tommy wasn’t a stranger to discrimination. His family had fled Nazi Germany while many of his relatives were exterminated in the concentration camps. Once, when he was growing up in Houston, a heavyset neighborhood woman sat him on her lap and hugged his six-year-old head into her ample bosom. “Poor child. You poor, poor child. I’m so sorry that you’re going to go to Hell because you don’t believe in Jesus,” she cried, as she combed through his curly hair, looking for his horns. Tommy went home and asked his mom if that really was the case. “Couldn’t we please, please, please just believe in Jesus? I mean, why not?” he begged.