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Contents
1994
Chapter 1: We’re Not Going to Get Thrown in a Van
Chapter 2: Thank You for Saying That
Chapter 3: They Just Try to Make Things Prettier
Chapter 4: The Harp Player
Chapter 5: Pig Question
Chapter 6: Almost More Like Poems
Chapter 7: You’ve Got to Stay Inside the Napkin
1995–2006
Chapter 1: I Trust Myself to Do It Because I’m Strong
Chapter 2: Smile, Lads
Chapter 3: Again, Acceptable
2007
Chapter 1: Tom, Myra, Julie 2
Chapter 2: I Try Not to Think of Anyone in Terms of Categories Like That
Chapter 3: I Have to Remind Myself of That
Chapter 4: I Feel Like I’m Looking at Two of You
Chapter 5: Their Whole Actual House
Chapter 6: What Kind of Honesty Do You Think Is Going to Come out of Me?
Chapter 7: The Opera
Chapter 8: It’s the Spontaneity That Will Make the Energy Feel Real
Chapter 9: The Cats
Chapter 10: It’s a Good Thing, Just Moving Through the World
Chapter 11: The Mansion
Chapter 12: The Spanish Show
Acknowledgments
About Benjamin Nugent
For Bobie, Zeidi, and Polly
1994
1.
We’re Not Going to Get Thrown in a Van
The Dads were a man and a woman. They were my father, Linus, and Khadijah’s mother, Nancy. Khadijah called them the Dads because, in her family, Nancy played the traditional paternal role. She spent more time at work than Khadijah’s father, she made more money, she was harder to talk to. She was a Dad. And my father was a Dad.
To explain why we needed a name for the pair of them, I’ll start with the Friday that Khadijah and I, with our respective Dads, ran into each other at Gaia Foods. The Day of the Dads.
It was early March, Language Day at Wattsbury Regional. As sophomores active in language clubs—I, Russian; Khadijah, French—we both manned tables, selling borscht and mousse outside the cafeteria after school. We never spoke during Language Day, although our tables stood five feet apart. All I knew about Khadijah was that she was third-tier popular, all academics, no sports, no theater, no newspaper, an organized girl who recorded homework assignments in apple green pen in high-quality notebooks, and that her deceptively black-sounding name, pronounced Kah-DEE-jah, was a product of Nancy’s Sufi years.
My father picked me up after we collapsed the tables at five, and we stopped at Gaia on the way home, for dinner essentials, wine, and ice cream. After Nancy picked up Khadijah, they stopped at Gaia too. While I was trying to show my father how smart I was by making an argument about how many pears he should buy versus how many grapes for a fruit salad, I saw Nancy and Khadijah hovering by bananas.
An astute observer probably would have seen there was something weird between Nancy and my father right away. But I was only fifteen. I was stupid when it came to interpreting the behavior of the Dads. It’s strange: When you’re trying to impress a person, you can’t see that person well. And Khadijah and I, we longed to impress the Dads.
I noticed nothing unusual in the Dads’ body language or in their faces. My father reached out and laid his hand on the pears peeking from Nancy’s wicker basket, looked her in the eye, and said, “They’re fresh today.”
The gesture did not strike me as remarkable. I found it mysterious, but my father was a sophisticated person. Everything he did was mysterious.
“Sometimes,” he hastened to explain, looking at Khadijah and me, stroking his beard, “the fruit at Gaia is slightly rotten. That’s the dark side of organic. Everything isn’t spritzed with poisons to make it look neat.”
I was, myself, as odorous as aging fruit. My parents were hippies. They had not spritzed me with poisons to make me look neat. My blond, shoulder-length hair was triangular, because while I knew there was a hair product called conditioner, I didn’t know that conditioner was what people used to make hair lie down. I hadn’t acquired the habit of shaving my ghost mustache or wiping the fingerprints off the lenses of my glasses. I wanted to be like my father, who taught political science, who knew how to talk about capitalism in such a way that people either agreed heartily with him or looked personally affronted and concerned for their safety. I wanted his air of rebellion and authority, his shaggy, dark hair and revolutionary beard. But I didn’t know how to turn myself into him. I was wearing one of his blousy, long-sleeved shirts from the early seventies that I’d discovered in our attic, green with wooden buttons, and the consequence was that I smelled as if I were kept in an attic.
Khadijah, by contrast, had the grooming and bearing of a girl with a hands-on mother. She stood straight and still. The burgundy scrunchie that held her brown ponytail matched the trim of her Esprit socks. But for all the inorganic, detail-oriented parenting lavished on her, she was almost as awkward as I was, no surer of how to start a conversation. When the Dads asked for some time to chat by themselves, she tensed at the prospect of being left alone with me. We both doubted, I think, that we could find something to talk about.
“You hooligans won’t cudgel each other, if we wander a little?” My father thumped a box of Finnish crackers against his palm. “You can keep yourselves entertained?”
“Five minutes?” Nancy asked us, edging toward my father. “Maybe ten? You see, my chickens, a mutual friend of ours is in the hospital.” Nancy had managed to tame her hair, I noticed, the way I longed to tame mine—it formed a neat, soft bell behind her face, like Tom Petty’s. She batted aside one strand with impatient, bony fingers.
“Go, Mom, it’s Gaia,” said Khadijah, picking at her cuticles. “We’re not going to get thrown in a van and sold into sex slavery.”
The Dads shot around a corner and vanished. At first there was only silence. But eventually, Khadijah turned to face me with a solution to our not knowing what to do with each other, using semipopular girl instincts I lacked: “Should we spy on them?”
I said yes. “I’m so bored,” we both said. But I think the reason we spied on them, aside from the need to kill awkwardness with action, was that we suspected something. We were in tenth grade; it was strange they’d felt the need to ask us if we’d be okay while they spoke in private. We just didn’t suspect that we suspected something.
Trolling the aisles, we sighted the grown-ups in Candy. Nancy was slouching in order to better inspect an item on a chest-high shelf. My father was scratching his beard as if he was looking at art.
“What we need is a hiding place,” said Khadijah. She snapped her fingers. “The African-American History Month thing.”
The African-American History Month display sat at the aisle’s mouth, fifteen feet from where my father stood speaking with Nancy. It consisted of two tables pushed together and covered with kente cloths. February was over; like the produce, the display had been kept out too long. The tables were poorly aligned, and the cloths sagged in the gap between them. A traditional African-American cookbook and an Ethiopian cookbook remained upright, but a third volume had toppled over. There was something foreboding about this structure. Something told me that, if Khadijah and I hid inside it, like children in a fairy tale, we would have a hard time getting back out, would require a trail of crumbs. Before we could discuss the pros and cons, K
hadijah crept. She slipped between the kente cloths and vanished beneath the tables, and I had no honorable choice but to follow.
We were on our hands and knees in the dark, cheek to cheek, almost touching. I smelled Khadijah’s vanilla shampoo, and my own stale shirt. I made a promise to myself: I will never emit this scent again. We peered through the gap between the maroon kente cloth and the green kente cloth, drawing them aside like stage curtains. My father and Nancy faced each other in the candy aisle, oblivious. We watched the show.
My father did something astonishing. He took a candy bar and slipped it in the pocket of his quilted corduroy barn jacket. He was going to steal it. Nancy whacked him on the shoulder with the back of her hand, and he put the candy bar back on the shelf. Next he took a large, glistening gift bag of chocolate and shoved it halfway into the same pocket. Nancy whacked him harder; he put it back.
Then he took a paper bag of cookies down from the shelf as Nancy dealt little blows to his shoulder. He made a show of trying to stuff the bag into the pocket, until it ripped open at the corner, and bled cookies on the floor. Nancy crossed her arms. My father tried to gather the cookies and hold the broken bag at the same time.
“Linus,” said Nancy, “you clumsy outlaw.”
My father arranged the fallen cookies in a little pile on the shelf and slid the mutilated bag back into place. After he’d brushed the crumbs from his fingers, he reached down and tipped up Nancy’s chin. I could only assume that he would restore the chin to its original position, as he had everything else he had taken in his hands. He would put Nancy back, just as he had put back the chocolate and the cookies. Nancy stared up at him and dropped her hands to her sides like a child. That was when he kissed her, full on the lips. She kissed back, hungry. It was probably because of the sweets all around them, but one of my first thoughts was that they were eating each other.
Khadijah and I said nothing. Our faces were almost touching in the dark. We jerked away from the gap in the kente cloths, and my head struck the underside of the metal table.
“Why would your dad do that?” she demanded, finally. She was breathing hard. “My mom is married to my dad.”
“My dad is married too, to my mom,” I pointed out. “Your mom kissed him back.”
“I’m going to go out there and ask them what’s going on.”
“I predict that question will prove unacceptable to them.” Even in this moment of father-related crisis, I tried to speak with my father’s gravitas.
“My poor dad,” Khadijah said. There were tears in her round brown eyes.
“Just because your mom kissed my dad doesn’t mean, necessarily, that they’re screwing.” This was my idea, at the time, of being comforting. I sent a thought out to my father: If you are screwing, I will cut off your dick and give it to Mom on a sword. Then, immediately afterward: I’m sure there is a good reason for this. It’s only a kiss, I thought. Nothing else.
“I hate your dad,” Khadijah said.
“This isn’t necessarily anything.” In truth I felt it was beyond doubt that my father, who had held me on his shoulders on marches he’d organized for divestment from South Africa, had a more nuanced moral understanding of the situation than we did, and was doing the right thing, even if it looked wrong. “I repeat, all they’re doing is kissing. Why should we make an assumption?”
The kente cloths lifted slightly when a brisk walker passed by. I knew from the acknowledgment of Kwanzaa at school that the cloths were used for sacred rites, by the Akan people.
“I wouldn’t want to kiss that beard,” Khadijah said, her face pressed against her legs.
“Your mom dresses Republican,” I responded. “That’s one of those lady blazers.”
“Your dad dresses like a homeless person.” She was actually sobbing now. “He’s in public but he’s wearing sweatpants.”
“Don’t cry,” I said. “It’s going to be okay.” It was something I had learned to say from movies, but I meant it.
Khadijah was always pretty, but crying, she was so beautiful my face was going to burn off. I found the discovery that tears enhanced beauty nearly as disorienting as everything else that was going on. At any rate, I realized it might be acceptable to reach out and touch Khadijah, now that I had told her not to cry. I laid my hand on her head. When she didn’t object I stroked her hair slowly. I liked the feeling of doing this too much to stop.
She jerked her head back. “I think that maybe I should tell my dad and you should tell your mom.”
“That’s out of line. It’s kissing.”
“True.” She thought for a moment, calmer now. “Whatever they’re doing, if we told on them, it would make it bigger.”
With nothing to do, my hand, the one that had been stroking her hair, was shaking. I sat on it.
“We can’t leap to conclusions,” I said. “I don’t want my father’s reputation to suffer. My parents have an excellent marriage.” A kiss, I thought, hearing a new voice in my head that I hoped was the voice of adulthood, means nothing at all.
We sat and watched through the gap in the cloth as the Dads walked away and turned a corner. We found them where they’d left us, in Produce.
“Did you survive our absence, darlings?” Nancy asked. She and my father were peering at us, I realized, to make sure we hadn’t seen them. “Did anything bad happen?”
There was a soldierly expression on Khadijah’s face, an expression you already saw on Hillary Clinton sometimes, in 1994. Her eyes were pink, but her face was dry. She shrugged. Smiles dawned on the faces of the grown-ups. They were concluding they hadn’t been caught.
“Mom, please don’t be paranoid,” said Khadijah. “We’re fine.”
2.
Thank You for Saying That
When my father and I came home from Gaia Foods, he kissed my mother on the mouth and sliced the pears. I watched him to see if he looked guilty, but I couldn’t see his face as he stood at the kitchen counter chopping. My mother slid a pizza from the oven, spun the greens, and asked about his day in her low, steady therapist’s voice, the way she always did. If she knew anything, it didn’t show on her face.
“Did the anthro guy try to get his new courses in the major?” She dialed down the volume on All Things Considered to give her full attention to his answer.
“He tried, and then he asked us to articulate our needs. He’s a whore.” My father plucked the grapes from their stems and dropped them on the pears. A grape fell to the linoleum, and he stepped on it without noticing.
“Does he make you angry?”
“Do I seem angry? Not particularly. He’s a nice whore.”
“So nothing’s wrong?”
“I’d like to banish him to a comfortable island before he kidnaps more of my students and conscripts them, that’s all.”
My mother nodded as she fanned the steaming pizza with a mitt. She’d sensed something was off about him—did she know? Was there more to know than what I’d seen? She called my little sister, Rachel, who shuffled in with her library book about an Arab girl forced into marriage, her hair wild with static from reading in the corduroy beanbag. I didn’t want it to be dinnertime. I was usually ravenous all hours of the day, but now I was too jumpy to eat. I drummed my fingers against the fridge, the radiator, the bowl of greens.
As we sat at the table, my mother, my father, Rachel, and I, I stood my mother next to Nancy.
Nancy, like my father, taught at Wattsbury College, a small liberal arts school whose campus sprawled a square half-mile between the Wattsbury town common and the lumberyard. From the common you could see its glassy library, from the yard its columned gymnasium. It had redbrick dormitories jacketed in ivy, but it was smaller than any school in the Ivy League, and sported a color scheme I’d never seen elsewhere: The stucco business school and the observatory were lemon, the administrative buildings sherbet orange. It was as if a more whimsical civilization had ruled Massachusetts in days beyond remembering, and fallen, stranding a colony in our midst. W
hereas my mother taught psych at a college twenty minutes west, in the shadow of the Berkshire Hills. It was my high school duplicated five times over, beige blocks, concrete.
“You look glum, Joshua,” my mother said. “What’s wrong?” She flashed me clown faces: a cartoon frown, a madman smile, the gape-mouthed stare of a person struck with a pie.
Was it that my father thought Nancy was hotter? “Your outfit’s strange, Mom,” I said.
My mother’s clown face disappeared. She looked at me probingly, twisted a lock of her long brown hair. She wore a denim button-down over a pleated denim dress. “It’s not really an outfit,” she noted.
“In this family,” my father said, “we permit women freedom of dress.” He reached into my mother’s hair and rubbed her earlobe between his fingers. “Your mom looks nice.”
“Notice he didn’t actually defend what I was wearing,” said my mother. But she was smiling. There was something about this, her smiling at my father, after he’d kissed Nancy, that was intolerable to me.
“We ran into Nancy Dunn and Khadijah at Gaia today,” I said. My father glanced at me and resumed chewing.
“Khadijah Silverglate-Dunn,” said Rachel. She had memorized the names of all the girls and most of the boys in my class, knew our social hierarchies better than those of her own grade. “She’s pretty, unconventionally.”
My father waggled his eyebrows. “I bet Josh liked her outfit.”
Rachel made the sound like the crescendo of a police siren that to seventh graders signifies the detection of lust. I blushed and dropped the subject.
When we were done eating, my father cleared the table while my mother headed for the stairs. Every evening, immediately after dinner, she performed her rituals: a hundred prostrations, a seated meditation, the pouring of water into twin orange cups.
“Why do you do that stuff?” I called to her. It was the first time I’d raised the subject in years; she never spoke of it. I looked to see if my question had provoked a telling reaction from my father, but he had his head in the cabinet over the sink, where we kept the wine. “Does it ever bother you that the rest of us don’t believe in it?”
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