“When you’re like him, everything is about how people treat you,” Mom says. “He’s either rejected or accepted. That’s his whole social dynamic.” To an outsider unfamiliar with these jarring non sequiturs, Sheldon likely sounds racist. He used to to me. “I spoke with a very nice black man,” Sheldon said. “Some of the black men can be a little, shall we say, arrogant. But he was so kind, helping me find some things.” Only when I started trying to understand my uncle’s lonely life, did I start to hear his sweeping pronouncements not as a measure of human worth, but as a measure of human receptivity to him. His fixation was less a racial than a behavioral taxonomy. Like Braille or a blind person’s cane, labeling people based on their demeanor helps him navigate the world. Are Mexicans welcoming or hostile? Are Jews more receptive to him than Koreans? If he can identify patterns, then he can avoid trouble and more efficiently find help. For Sheldon, saying Jews are this, Puerto Ricans are that, is the equivalent of saying, “The #9 bus always runs late, so take the #6. It’s quicker.”
“This one Mexican came to cut my palm tree last month,” Sheldon said. “From Chiapas. He really appreciated being here. Some of them take advantage.” Sheldon would know. After Howard passed, the family dynamic changed. Prevention became top priority. My grandparents lived in fear of losing another child, so they become overly protective. They didn’t put bars on the windows or forbid their children from eating outside the home; instead, they became hyperaware of their children’s frailty. They micro-managed, worried, and nagged their concern as if to fit the Jewish stereotypes I grew up believing. The brunt fell on Sheldon, the sole surviving son. He was already fragile enough to require coddling, but as the degree of coddling increased, he softened further. Instead of forcing him to toughen up and securing his independence, he became dependent.
Sheldon took advantage of this paradigm shift. He not only capitalized off the attention previously directed at Howard, he milked my grandparents’ sympathies in order to feed his own laziness. When he didn’t get what he wanted, he threw fits. A few times when he needed money they wouldn’t give him, he threatened to kill himself. In a huff, he pushed over the cash register at the Haber Dasher once. No one commented when he blew a thousand dollars on a 35mm camera and equipment he never learned to use, or lectured him about the hundreds of dollars he spent on a seashell collection that now sits housed in a box in his garage.
Mom thinks his understanding of human behavior is lopsided because it’s over-simplistic. She told him that peoples’ response to us don’t always reflect their feelings about us. Sometimes people are rude because they’re just in bad moods: they lost their job that week; they’re going through divorce; they quit smoking and are irritable. It could be anything.
Yet Mom also coddles him. To protect him, she types his résumés and proofreads each round of his job applications. His last job grading standardized tests was the longest he’s held in years, and he quit. No one knows why. Mom suspects social sensitivity: he felt people were laughing at him, or he had a run-in with a single unfriendly employee and felt slighted. “My heart just bleeds for him,” Mom says. My dad won’t extend any sort of empathy.
“I’m done with him,” Dad says. “I give him respect because he’s your mother’s brother, but that’s all I will give him any more.” Dad has given Sheldon countless second chances. Dad’s tolerance for honest mistakes is huge—I crashed my first car, got cited for alcohol possession at age sixteen, done many stupid things—but Sheldon has exhausted it. He once banned Sheldon from our house after he caught him in their bedroom, rifling through their mail after Grandpa died. He was looking for financial info—assets, wills, checking and credit card records—for ways to get money, or news about what the rest of the family was hiding from him. Dad said, “It was the last straw.”
Sheldon’s savvier than Mom and I think. “My father was the type of salesman who would tell someone trying on a suit, ‘Yah, it looks great,’ even if it was a size or two too big,” Sheldon once said. “I on the other hand would tell them it’s large. Get another size. Why lie?” He shrugged, puckered his lips. “My father didn’t think this was good for business, but people want that kind of assistance. They come back for it.” We all do.
In When Harry Met Sally, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan get food at a diner, and Crystal tells her, “No, you did not have great sex with Sheldon . . . A Sheldon can do your income taxes. If you need a root canal, Sheldon’s your man. But humpin’ and pumpin’ is not Sheldon’s strong suit. It’s the name.” Then he shows her with an impression: “Do it to me Sheldon. You’re an animal Sheldon. Ride me big Shelll-don. It doesn’t work.” No one I know ever did it to my Sheldon. He lived that part of his life in secret, however much he lived it at all. My heart still breaks for him that he hasn’t enjoyed lasting or intense romantic relationships the way the rest of his family members have.
Sheldon asked me if my girlfriend still lived in North Carolina. When I told him that she and I had broken up, he released a mournful sigh. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “She was very beautiful. And you said you liked her very much.” Unlike many people, he actually remembers what things you tell him.
“Mom tells me you’re writing a lot,” Sheldon said last month. “That’s very good, Aaron.”
If I had a girlfriend now, I’d bring her over to Grandma’s house, let her meet him, talk about Mexicans and politics and his 1970s vacations. When I tell him I love him, I mean it. I don’t want to feel burdened by our relationship anymore. It’s not fair to either of us, especially if he’s ill. So at dinner he and I discuss movies, books, the charms and difficulties of living in New York. I liked living there, I told him, cold or not. He asked, “Are the people there friendlier now?”
Last week I opened the copy of Watts’ The Wisdom of Insecurity he gave me. Marginalia covered most of the 152 pages: black ink marks, frenzied dashes, enormous sloppy asterisks. Sheldon underlined sentences, bracketed whole paragraphs. On one page he underlined “the real world,” on another “promises, hopes, and assurances.” I flipped through the book front-to-back, reading the short phrases that he underlined with what, from the thickness and intermingling curves of the markings, seemed a visible excitement. I made a list:
“chronic insomnia;”
“man is basically selfish;”
“the quest for security;”
“we are not divided;”
“sorrow, and boredom;”
“unfair distribution of pleasure and pain;”
“intensity of joy;”
“you can get away;”
“the dead;”
“resisting the inevitable;”
“understanding;”
“There is no experience but present experience;”
“By letting it go he finds it.”
Watts was a British thinker. He translated numerous volumes of Zen Buddhism and Chinese and Indian philosophy, and much of his own work tackles the subjects associated with those traditions: higher consciousness, the nature of God and reality, the non-material pursuit of happiness, personal identity. Watts’ ambiguous language is plagued by what I consider the smoke-and-mirrors trickery of cheap, woo-woo, New Age metaphysics. But I kept reading, searching for clues to what my uncle was responding to in these passages: was it the insecurity parts? The lessons on living “in the present?” Forgiveness? “ . . . but it is just the feeling of being an isolated ‘I,’” one passage said, “which makes me feel lonely and afraid.”
Thirteen of the twenty-nine lines on page seventy-nine were underlined. Seven asterisks coated the margins. Beside one paragraph sat a clot of scribbling so thick it resembled human hair. “The principle thing is to understand that there is no safety or security,” it said, and, “the more you struggle to escape, the more you inflame your agony.” But the sentence that struck me hardest was on page 104. Scored with black ink, it read: “Here life is alive, vibrant, and present, containing depths which we have hardly begun to explore.” I slid the book in
the middle of my bookshelf, beside some of my most cherished story collections and autographed volumes. As an heirloom, a family photo.
Mom keeps a large framed photo of her father on her dresser. Black and white, cropped from the shoulders up, it shows Grandpa wearing his white Navy uniform, a huge grin creasing his smooth, shaven cheeks. His eyes always pinched closed when he smiled, as if his mouth needed all the skin to express the joy contained within him. When I look at his face, I see my own. Everybody seems to. My friend Sarah saw the photo and stood straight up, turned around to my mom and me and said, “You two look just alike. Is that weird?” That might explain why Mom tucked a photo of me at age sixteen into the picture frame. I too am smiling wide, eyes squinted half shut, teeth showing just like Grandpa’s.
Recently Sheldon blurted, “Oh my Aaron, you’ve lost so much hair.”
No longer sensitive to such observations, I playfully said, “I know. It’s matrilineal. I blame your Dad.” I laughed extra hard to show that I was kidding, and when he noticed, he laughed back.
Sheldon was limping the other day at dinner, so I asked what happened. He said his new medication made him faint, and when he fell in the bathroom, he bruised his foot. Faint, I wondered, what’s he on: mood stabilizers? Tranquilizers? Is he mixing alcohol and sedatives? No one asked the name of the medication, because when we had inquired before, he felt we were being nosy and changed the subject. That day we only offered advice on using frozen corn to reduce swelling.
I used to wonder if he exaggerated the severity of his deafness, using it as a way to distance himself from his nagging mother and the hostile world. As Dad says, “Wouldn’t you lose your hearing too if someone was always correcting you?”
At my mom’s fifty-eighth birthday dinner at Red Lobster, Sheldon started describing a Hawaiian vacation he took in 1973. Slumped low in the booth, Grandma gripped his bicep, leaned close to his ear and whispered, “Everyone can hear what you’re saying.”
“My mother,” Sheldon later told me, “she unnerves me sometimes.” Mom fears I have the wrong impression of Grandma. She says that growing up, when she got stressed from having too many things to do—high school homework, college term papers—and didn’t know where to start, Grandma told her not to get overwhelmed. Then they would sit down together, make a list of everything that needed doing and check each item off as they completed it. “Grandma would stay up late with you,” Mom said, “talking, if you had a problem. With anyone. Sleep—she didn’t care. She’d stay up with me all the time, working through my lists.”
And Sheldon? Last week, I finally asked Mom what I have been wondering for years: What’s wrong with him? She folded her hands behind her back, leaned against the kitchen counter. “I don’t really know,” she said, tilting her head. “I’m sure if he was born today he would have a clear diagnosis. We just didn’t have that back then.” Unlike what I previously believed, his traits weren’t the product of overprotective parental smothering following Howard’s death. When Howard died, Sheldon was twenty-two. “He was always different,” Mom said. That’s the most detailed diagnosis any of us have come up with.
She described Sheldon as a good brother back in New York. Admittedly, when they were kids, she had to write “Loraine” on masking tape and affix it to her favorite yogurt or soda in the fridge so Sheldon wouldn’t eat them. And he’d eat them anyway. She laughed when she said this, because he always took an interest in how she was doing. He would join her and her friends in the living room when they came over, ask her about school, what she was reading, if she had a boyfriend. My Aunt Debbie was embarrassed by him as a kid. “She still is,” Mom said. Debbie joined us at Red Lobster that day.
While Grandma paid the bill, Sheldon dumped the remaining cheese biscuits into his doggy bag along with packets of Sweet ’N Low. Dad snickered. I shrugged. Debbie stood up and scurried into the lobby.
One recent Christmas Day, my family was sitting around my second cousin Marty’s living room after lunch. Marty grew up in Queens and retired in Phoenix. Grandma and Marty sat beside each other on the couch. My mom, Sheldon, and I sat in chairs facing each other on opposite sides of the room. As he’d done before, Marty was complaining about his parents’ unwillingness to rent a bigger apartment in Queens growing up. His parents made him share a bed with his older brother Harvey until he was sixteen, Harvey twenty-two. “They couldn’t get a two-bedroom?” Marty said. “In the same fricking building?” He was facing Grandma but addressing the entire room. “They paid $52 a month,” he said. “I still remember that numba.”
“For your mother,” Grandma explained, “it was about change. She didn’t like change. For your father it was money.”
Marty waved his hand. “The money is bullshit,” he said.
From across the room, Sheldon looked at Mom and me. “Why harp on something that happened fifty years ago?” he said. “You’re sixty-two years old. Get over it already.” Mom and I looked at each other, shocked by his self-awareness. Sheldon laughed and waved his own dismissive hand. “I forgave my father for many things,” he said in his booming voice. He nodded at me and grinned. His eyes squinted in narrow, gleeful slits, slits like mine, in an expression that to an outsider probably looked exactly like my grandfather’s. Marty kept talking. Grandma didn’t look at him. Only Mom and I seemed to hear Sheldon when he muttered, “That’s ancient history.”
THE BURDEN OF HOME
If you haven’t seen the 1987 movie North Shore, take that as evidence of your refined palate. The movie came out when I was in sixth grade, and it was so corny that I refused to acknowledge how profoundly I connected with it. It’s the story of Rick Kane, an eighteen-year-old surfer from Tempe, Arizona, who wants to earn the big, pro-circuit money that his idol, and the movie’s antihero, Lance Burkhart, earns. When Rick wins a surf contest at a local artificial wave pool, he skips college and uses the five-hundred-dollar prize to move to Hawaii and tackle the epic waves of the legendary North Shore.
Once in Hawaii, Rick rides the waves alongside the locals. He falls for a native beauty named Kiani and clashes with a tough surf crew called the Hui. Nearly everyone discourages him: “This is our wave.” “Leave local girls alone.” But the line that always stayed with me came during a scene in which Rick is eating lunch with Kiani and her family. Kiani’s three brothers corner him at the table. They mock his surfing and call him JOJ—short for “just off the jet.” Then the oldest brother stares into Rick’s eyes and says, “Go back to Arizona, haole,” meaning outsider, white boy, non-Hawaiian native. It was as if he were speaking directly to me, a teenage kid desperate to leave Arizona.
Like Rick, I lived in Phoenix, was obsessed with the beach, and wanted out of the desert. I envied the lifestyle that coastal California afforded: the temperate weather, the scant clothing, the year-round range of outdoor activities. While southern Californians spent their summers riding bikes and hanging out on the boardwalk, we Phoenicians endured an average of a hundred or more days of one-hundred-degree heat. Touch a car door in July, and you’d burn your fingers. But that wasn’t all. Arizona was completely uncool. It’s associated with lame Hollywood westerns, golf and retirees. To coastal denizens, we were hicks.
Sometime in fifth grade, just before North Shore came out, I bought a bodyboard and learned to ride waves pretty well. At home, I covered my bedroom walls with images clipped from surf magazines: black sand and palm groves; bronze women in bikinis splashing through azure water. I stuck surf stickers on my door, corny ones that said “Body Glove” and “Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax” in blinding pink and yellow fonts. When I lay in bed at night, I pictured myself sleeping in a thatched hut and drinking from coconuts. I taped a quote from an ad on my door: “Summer is an attitude, not a season.” And I wore only shorts, even in winters that reached the low forties. When my parents dropped me off at middle school, I gathered with my friends on the playground before class. Condensation frosted the tetherball pole. Crystallized dew coated the brown winter grass. And I’d stan
d there shivering with my arms crossed, wearing shorts and a flannel and a hooded Vans sweater, watching my breath. At one point, I asked my parents if we could replace my bedroom’s brown carpet with beach sand. They asked where the bed would go. “We’ll build wooden boardwalks around the edges,” I explained, “with one plank diagonally across the middle for the bed.” And how would I avoid dragging sand into the rest of the house? “I’ll wipe my feet every time I leave my room.” The brown carpet stayed.
When I first saw North Shore I was shocked. The posters, the neon gear—my room was decorated just like Rick’s. Rick was a dorky aspirant, and clearly, so was I. Worse, as wannabes playing dress up, we had no credibility next to real surfers. What was more embarrassing for a would-be surfer than never to have trained in the ocean? No matter how we dressed, how politely we acted, or how hard we tried to fit in, Rick and I would always be what we were: the guys from the desert wave pool.
Still, as much as I related to him, I knew I wasn’t entirely like Rick. Not because I didn’t surf. And not because I wasn’t old enough to leave home like he was. It was because after all his struggles—being ostracized by locals, punched in the face, slammed into reefs—he successfully assimilated, went from outsider to insider, while I did not and never would. By the movie’s end, the Hui let him ride their waves, Kiani falls in love with him, and Turtle, his one true friend, quits calling him barney. Although Rick doesn’t win the professional surfing paycheck he initially hoped for, he does earn acceptance and respect, which, in the emotional formulations of ham-fisted screenplays, and in the hearts of angsty teenagers, is the real prize. I didn’t fare as well.
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