Oh reader, assimilated or unknowing—no one dresses like Haman for Purim, for the simple reason that Haman is a genocidal murderer. Every Purim we celebrate that at the end of the Purim story, Haman’s body has turned black and is hanging from the highest tree. We have put him there.
I certainly knew he was a genocidal monster when my mother dressed me up as him. My yeshiva was so Zionist that even the rabid Arab-hater Meir Kahane sent his daughter there, and my teachers were quite thorough on all points concerning violence against the Jews, even when addressing six year olds.
My mother worked so enthusiastically on my costume for Haman—sewing me a three-cornered (vinyl) dark purple hat, which functioned rather as Haman’s SS helmet in the Purim story, putting one of her black wigs on my head to be Haman’s hair, and another wig carefully cut to fit my face to be his beard. Outlining my brows and eyes in black pencil—that it was the best costume I have ever worn, and I hated every minute wearing it because it was all my mother’s.
Nothing of the art of the Haman I was playing was me. Wearing the costume she had put together so artistically, I was simply being my mother’s notion of Haman, my mother’s transgression of gender and the niceties of Purim in my very conservative yeshiva, my mother’s antic creature.
I have always hated being as porous as I am. Able to be filled with others' content. Mimsy—the portmanteau word Lewis Carroll coined for "flimsy" and "miserable" at once—unlocalizable, able to take any shape. Especially when directed by my mother ... Fey, impish, effeminate, will o’ the wisp; mercurial, multifarious—counterfeit in my very being, like a photocopy of a human. Like those beautiful beings Puck and Ariel, who were really nothing more than great-looking, impressive slaves when you get right down to it. With them, as with me, there is no there there. All the creatures of Faerie are tricksy, thievish, prestidigitational performers. Fairies have the duplicity of all subject peoples.
I have always felt my own two-ness, always known that I was only half a person—if indeed that much. I realized very young that I was the true referent all those men unthinkingly have in mind when they refer to some gay man as a "lightweight” or a "Twinkletoes,” someone who cannot fill his own, deep human shoes. I am the one they really meant. I have never been a real person; and I have always dissembled, or as my fairy kin like to say, beguiled. And I cannot help it, reader. Camus may have said "liberty is the right not to lie,” but as for me, I have never been free.
And I hate it. I hate lying, which is the same as having no history, no will, and no capacity for connection with anyone. Liars do not speak the same language as friends, and therefore they cannot be friends.
Oh reader, hate me, put this down, throw me away, recycle me or even do it the old-fashioned way—burn me up in fire—but of course I love lying, too.
All my life I’ve been able to vanish quickly as a mouse, to borrow and not repay, to lie as lightly as a leprechaun. My mother taught me how to do all three. They form, in fact, almost the sum of the moral philosophy that she taught me. My progenitor was, not to put too fine a point on it, a professor of philosophy, and one of her most influential papers was a lesson plan for children about the goodness of lying, and the utter foolishness of every moral system that condemned it out of hand. For years, this curriculum was actually taught to public school children in New Jersey as a result of my mother's efforts. The proof of the lying lesson went like this. "You see your friend Stacey running away fast in one direction. When she is out of sight, a group of tough guys runs up to you, looking angry. Some of them are holding sticks and pipes. Their leader says, ‘Where’s that Stacey? We’re so mad at her! We’re gonna get her!' You point in the opposite direction from the way she ran. Did you do the right thing?”
My mother extended this to all other possible cases of lying. I had to lie to my aunt, to my grandparents—about things we had spent too much money on, or too little; where we had gone on vacation; the fact that I ate the free lunches offered by the city in my public school; the fact that my mother had told me, at age nine, what my aunt’s first ten experiences of intercourse with her husband had been like (excruciatingly painful, but she persevered, and the eleventh was pleasurable). I had been at the wedding of Aunt Natalie and her husband Bernie, and it was both fun and discomfiting to know what their first intercourse experiences had been like.
And I had to lie to my sisters: “Don’t tell Josie I said this,” Mommy said, "but I happen to know that she is very, very jealous of you.” I never told Josie my mother had warned me about this, but it influenced how I acted with Josie to the end of my days. To my other sister, Aphra, I could not reveal that my mother had said Aphra was a schizophrenic and "pathologically unable to separate from her.”
My mother brought me with her to the New York Human Resources Administration (the city’s welfare office), so that she would erroneously seem to be a poor single mother ("You always get more sympathy when you have a child with you,” Mommy giggled). I was eight. We were lying and saying that Daddy didn’t live with us and didn’t share his income as a salesman or deliveryman with us. "No one can live on welfare and no other income,” she told me, "it’s too low. You have to lie.”
In a sense she was certainly right. It is true that you couldn’t live even the slightest bit well on welfare, including every family member buying books if they desired them, having the children go to camp—even at scholarship rates—in the summers, having meat—considered an important food for children in the ‘60s and ‘70s—available several times a week.
(After a certain point in grad school my mother stopped cooking, but for years we ate costly TV dinners every night, with the so-called Hungry Man Dinner giving me a quivering butchy thrill as I ate the enormous roast-beef entree with its man-friendly apple cobbler, as often as I could get it.)
We shopped only at the really cheap clothing stores—Alexander’s, Klein’s, that pennyworth-apparel wonderland May’s. But strangely, we sometimes went to Cape Cod for a two-week vacation. My mom said we were poor. (She made sure we had piano, singing, ballet and art lessons, either according to age—all six-year-olds in the family had to begin studying piano, for example—talent or inclination. )
My father worked alternately some lower-middle-class, working-class, and a few lumpen jobs (salesman for gates on stores, and by phone, for cemetery plots; deliveryman for Wise potato chips and later, crullers at 5:00 a.m. to greasy spoons; once, hander-out of fliers for a midtown sex parlor—"beautiful Asian masseuses” they said. My father, a silent man, didn’t tell about the fliers; it was my mother who blabbed about them, gleefully).
The difference between her job as a philosophy-professor and his as a donut-deliverer (and pimp’s helper) was the essence of my mother’s mercurialness, her extreme mobility, and, she thought, her brilliance, her ability to turn dross into something shiny. She told my sisters and me that we were brilliant, too—everyone but my father, who she said was stupid and ugly and smelly—so that our splendid educations, including my mother’s, came to seem the gold she had produced from the lead and dirty coal of my father’s work by means of her own personal and unprecedented powers of alchemy.
My mother’s work didn’t produce very much income (as a professor, like many in our big-name city where instructors were supposed to live on prestige alone, she never made it above the adjunct stage), but it produced so much glory that, for my sisters and me, it was like looking at the Sun. The problem for us was that my father really did smell bad, not like a man who has gone to work and not yet showered but like a homeless person or a half-breed monster created by an evil magician and kept locked in the basement, its smell of rotting garbage occasionally rising above the extraordinary, magic sprays of air freshener and drowning them out.
I felt sorry for my little father-monster. I still do, for that smell he bore for his and my mother’s experiments (was he her familiar? her assistant? her subject?) and that he still exudes from his plot in New Jersey, thirty years in the ground.
We
had to put special chemicals in. My father had needed potentially toxic doses of preservatives and industrial wastes to keep him from simply decaying even in life, after the worst experiment had ended, the one where his tissues were interchanged with those of a female bear and he was baited for four years in a time-travel medieval English zoo, so that the already poisoned soil of New Jersey was deemed to be the only sustainable site for him when his time came.
My mother said none of me came from him, but I wonder.
Certainly I was more plastic than him. But did that make me more or less free? How can we say? I believe I had to lie more. My mother made me lie to my teacher—which hurt my positronic brain, or felt like it did, with the unbearable contradiction of Teachers as Not to Be Lied to and Teachers as Another Category to Be Bamboozled.
I was more nervous and ashamed of lying to my fifth grade teacher—about our address, as my mom demanded of me—than I have been nervous and ashamed about much else in my life. It felt like my body was burning on the inside and the outside to call out my fake address to my teacher, Mrs. Kay, when she was asking everybody’s address for her file. I felt much worse on another day when she asked who needed a bus pass and I eagerly shot my hand up and Mrs. Kay asked for my address again and I had to give the fake one, only to have her chuckle sweetly and say, "Oh, that’s only three blocks from school, you don’t need to ride the bus, honey, do you?”
I had to smile painfully at her and affirm the lie.
But even more painful—surprisingly so—was the way my mother made me lie to Her Herself. My brain circuits bit into each other when I did that, and I would imagine the sharp edges of my internal motherboard rasping together. I was more intimate with my mother than I was with anybody else and, I thought, more intimate than I could be with anybody else. My mother made me, and she was my gazelle, my dove, my breathing supply, my Source. Reader, she was my only source of anything good—I had no other. I have perhaps neglected to say that she was beautiful. I have perhaps forgotten to tell you how she would kiss my face and say "You are my baby, my own one, my own!” She loved telling me stories that reflected her brilliance and, we both thought, my own, like "Poseidon Is Mad at Odysseus,” or "Theseus Finds a Way Out of the Labyrinth Even Though Nobody Else Can!” She loved reading to me. She was my Sun, and yet I was supposed to lie to her.
This made me feel, at times, like I did not exist. This was a contradiction because she also told me that I did exist, through her—as her "brilliant baby." But mostly, what existed was the Sun, and everything else was a figment, like the shadows on Plato’s (for of course we talked about Plato) cave wall.
She needed to think that I was constantly in a state of joy, perhaps because she was not. My mother worried about growing old, and she also worriedabout beingugly and disgusting with that pink and yellow and red and brownhole in her neck. It was odd and fragile, like a bit of cell wall that, under a microscope, resembles a little trove of flowers. But she kept it covered except at home, and no one mentioned it except, two or three times that I remember, my mother calling it "hideous” and "grisly."
But she would ask, "Is my nose bigger than that other witch’s over there? And whose wrinkles are bigger, mine or hers?” And, as Isaid, my mother was convinced she was dying ever since the 1971 operation, and would call Doctors on Call—doctors you had never met before that you could pay to come to the house on an hour’s notice. The clean-scrubbed young doctors would arrive with beefy bodyguards with guns (this was the ‘70s), and the doctors brought immense black doctors’ bags of Valium and Demerol with them, which they would give my mother. She called them every month or so.
When she had her original surgery, I dreamed that my mother was a car, and my father, sisters and I were all driving in her. I was afraid that my father was driving her too fast, and then he was driving her too fast—and she needed an operation. And so my father performed a tracheotomy with his pocketknife, through the roof of the car. In real life, this is what my mother had—a permanent tracheotomy, which was now the only organ through which my mother was able to breathe. In my dream she had a permanent slit through her own roof.
She was afraid, as I have said, of dying. But she was even more scared of being beaten in some even more dreadful and systematic way, being taken advantage of, being humiliated like someone who had never even been a philosopher. Of being smashed up like someone who was not even the weakest wizard. Being made mock of and kicked, like someone who didn't even have a brain.
Many years later, when I had begun to study karate at twenty-one and was showing my moves around the house, she kicked me in the shins because she assumed (incorrectly) that I was going to hit her.
As a child, of course, I did not take karate, becauseecstaticpointy-headedgoblin-toys do not require it. Though she did partly want me to be happy for my own sake, my mother mainly believed that toys are here to sing and entertain, to throw themselves in the air and then catch themselves, in ridiculous clothes like jesters. Sad jesters are hardly effective, and no one wants sad or angry toys, either. I have quite a lot of toys here on my desk as I write this, and not a one of them has ever told me that we need to talk, or that they had an accident and wet their pants, or that they sometimes got scared at night.
I loved my Sun-like mother, but I hated showing her only this half of myself. It often made me feel like I didn’t possess even the barest strip of reality that I thought I did, that I was the most basic schematic drawing of myself and not even the actual fully-produced android.
And whenever my sister Josie was unhappy, my mother would prepare a little suitcase. She would pack it and bring it downstairs to our dimly-lit apartment house lobby, and Josie would have to wait with it, crying, for a car my mother had presumably called that would take her away.
In the end my mother would always forgive her and allow her to stay. But I didn’t know she would, and Josie didn’t, either. I never had my suitcase packed; I was too good a schematic drawing for that. I have always been good at what I do; I would never let my mother see me as unhappy as Josie let herself be seen. I was very proud of this. For years my mom and I played a game called “Smart Baby” where, in the game, I began life as smart as an adult, already knowing how to read and write and do sums and every other task that grown-up people did. I knew history, and geography, and science. As my mother put it, I already knew everything and could do everything. I needed nothing.
A few times, when my sisters and I had let down our guard and actually allowed my mother to become unhappy, she packed a big suitcase—her own—and said she was going to leave. She did in fact leave two or three times during our childhood for a night or two (because “I just have to get away”), although more often my sisters and I won her over when we begged her to stay.
She liked me to amuse her with word games and displays of my many mental talents.For her friends, at dinner parties, she would have me read my poems and book reports and personal declarations (like “This Is Why I Am Now Sure That God Cannot Be Both Omnipotent and Good”).
She had me declaim aloud to her friends the poems of other people that I liked, like Edna St. Vincent Millay telling a bird who represented Thought to “Depart, be lost. /But climb.”
You might have anticipated, reader, that so big a ham as I would have loved this exhibition, but I feared and hated it. It made me sad because it wasn’t me; even though it entailed reciting things I had written or poems that I liked, it wasn’t me back then to show off and entertain with them. None of it was my desire, not even the desire to entertain, at the beginning. Reader, if you can imagine a Puck who is secretly depressed, who worries in the bathroom and sneaks off to smoke and smash his toes into the hard, white tile wall, that Puck was me.
Reader, I had difficulties from my mother creating me out of whole cloth, but I had even more from my father’s surreal sports, employing me as the birdie in his games of badminton.
Using me as the pins and ball (and sometimes the alley and the next lane) in his games of bowling.
Using me as the puck (yes, my reader, the Puck, the two have always been connected) in his games of field hockey.
Using me as the ball and clubs and beret in his games of golf.
Using me as the ball in his games of jai alai.
How his perceptions could become so altered that he could think I was a piece of state-of-the-art athletic equipment, bought at a nearby mall, I do not know. I do know his perceptions were very altered. (Mine would be, if I’d been bear-baited, for sure.)
Reader, my father hit me, and the rhyme or reason to it was as frankly odd as if he had instead played Ultimate Frisbee with my cheeks, or used my gallbladder as a mallet in a gentlemen’s game of croquet. He was not—as I hope I have made crystal clear—a dominant force in my family, and yet he was allowed a certain liberty to use my brows as bocce-balls and my temples as a wiffle ball, however many times he wanted.
My mother didn’t mind. Sometimes he hit me when she wasn’t there, sometimes when she was, but it did not matter as long as he did not strike me many blows at a time, in which case she would tell him huffily, “That’s enough.” But, reader, even his single blows were enormous, like a giant’s, and his short recreations hurt me.
Perhaps I’ve lied. It wasn’t only recreational for him to strike me—I clearly made him angry, although it was often surprising what made him angry at me on any particular occasion.
He was sensitive. And my mother added to his pool of sensitivity daily, by saying things like, “You’re just too stupid to understand!” in everybody’s earshot. He never talked back to her when she said things like that. She also told jokes to which my father was the punchline—“What’s immovable and fat and hairy and idiotic?” and encouraged my sisters and me to make fun of him. I only once saw him reading a book—My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok—and clearly the only possible thing for me to do was to say, “Holy Christ, Daddy’s reading a book! What if his brain pushes out of his head?”
Growing Up Golem Page 2