In the last month of his life, as he was dying from prostate cancer, Dad spoke to his family, assembled around the kitchen table. He wanted to apologize, he began, for what happened that day long ago when he insisted that Jeff and I “fight it out.” We both immediately assured him that the event was long lost in the mists of childhood and had left no psychic wounds, which on my part, at least, was more wishful than true. There in the kitchen, I remembered The Fight clearly enough, but was unable then to acknowledge even to myself the seriousness of the injury that was inflicted on me by my father and his son.
Here’s what happened. Early one Saturday, Jeff and I were hanging out on the loveseat in Dad’s study, which was downstairs and across the hall from the master bedroom (we were maybe eleven and ten years old?). Mother and Dad weren’t up yet. I’ll bet one of us said “Stop it! You’re bugging me, so keep off!” We were pushing, shoving, and quarreling, when suddenly Dad stormed out of the bedroom—naked, as he slept naked—and dragged us both out into the living room. “If you’re going to fight, fight it out,” he shouted. “Fight it out, fight it out, fight till you’re done.” I can imagine few things more painful for Mother, who, wrapped in a bathrobe, was sobbing and kept pleading, “Ken, please stop, please stop.” But there was no stopping the fight, which by now was serious as Jeff and I punched and grappled for advantage, really angry. I don’t know how long the scrapping and hitting went on, nor do I remember any details about the fight except this. I was in retreat and tripped over the piano bench, then suddenly I was lying on my back and Jeff was on top of me, grabbing my shoulders and ready to bang my head against the floor (or had he already done so? maybe a couple times?). “Get off me! Get off!” I was crying, and finally, “I give up.” The fight was over. As soon as I surrendered and Jeff let me up, I ran upstairs and locked the door to my bedroom. “Tina, Tina please come out. Tina, please talk to me. Come downstairs. Please,” Mother repeatedly urged. But I refused to talk to her, and wouldn’t even go near the door. Mother returned repeatedly, needing so deeply for all of us to forgive one another and be at peace. Not me. I wasn’t unlocking that door, humiliated as I was, and I certainly wasn’t ready for peace. I don’t know how it was that I finally left the privacy of my room to rejoin the family.
Was it as I remember it? Was Dad really naked in this scene? That seems so—how shall I say it—Freudian. Did he really demand in so many words that we “fight it out,” fight until his son was victorious? Until his daughter cried, “I give up”? Against his wife’s tearful pleas? Who knows? Indeed, there’s no knowing, and what matters, of course, is that this is the scene that I remember, and the scene that to the assembled family I declared long over and lost in the past. I now think differently. In that scene, Dad embodied the Law of the Father, in the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s phrase, that “transcendent quality” powerful enough to discriminate between twins, and separated us once and for all by asserting Jeff’s difference from me, and his superiority as a boy. Certainly I felt that superiority as he straddled me, pinning me down and knocking me around. He was literally above me. When Dad finally couldn’t stand the agonistic relationship between his children, and the ways in which I must’ve sometimes dominated Jeff, he established the (supposed) universal difference of a simple hierarchical binary, masculine over feminine, as it expresses the (supposed) foundational difference of sex, and mandated The Fight to sort out what was owing to his firstborn, his son.
Gender was in my father’s hands—at that moment—a blunt instrument. Yet gender is, of course, not simply a matter of disciplining and punishing so as to create masculine boys and feminine girls. In fact, my parents supported me when I wanted clothing and toys not intended for girls. It was okay with them if I wanted “clodhopper” work boots, or high-top Converse All Stars, or cowboy boots and a jeans jacket, and they never tried to talk me out of playing sandlot football or baseball with the boys. They even gave me for my birthday present one year the toy rifle that I so longed for and knew, just knew that I wasn’t going to get. They had little interest in conforming to the narrowly conservative social/political/ethical norms of our small town, and communicated that clearly enough to their children. Nonetheless, my tomboy resistance to girlhood was a complicated effort, and my parents, who let me dress and play as I wished, also mandated a femininity intended to distinguish me as a girl. I had long hair halfway down my back (though I always pulled it back into a tight ponytail), and I had, without exception, to wear dresses to church on Sunday.
The Fight, toward the end of elementary school, foreshadowed my trials in the gauntlet of puberty, where becoming normatively feminine meant carrying my books in front of me, instead of on my hip—one among many unspoken rules I encountered in seventh grade. No one rode a bicycle to school after sixth grade. With books stacked awkwardly before me, I would walk to school feeling my handbag slipping off my shoulder to my elbow, where it would bang against my leg and make a run in my nylons. Mother continued to wear her hair in the bob she had gotten in college, and was of little help to me in communicating the inside story of stylish femininity. My closest friends in junior high were two new girls who had gone to the other elementary school in Huntingdon, the one downtown. They were happy to shovel the snow off the school playground with me so that we could play basketball in winter, and they enjoyed playing pitch and catch as much as I did. Yet even they seemed to have the knack of femininity better than I, and by ninth grade each had the dubious success of a boyfriend. Gender was for me a kind of out-of-body experience, relieved only by playing varsity sports once I got to high school. Even there, femininity intruded—the field hockey uniform was a kilt, worn over black bloomers, and the basketball uniform a tunic belted in the middle, same bloomers. It didn’t matter, however, because I was playing hard with my teammates, competing to win, and the uniforms had numbers, and everything! It’s true that the girls’ teams were called the “Huntingdon Bearkittens,” while the boys were the “Huntingdon Bearcats,” but I didn’t care what we were called as long as we had girls’ varsity sports. I do, however, regret chanting “Queer Grier Is Here” in the locker room before playing the team from the private Grier school for girls near Tyrone, long before “queer” was repurposed as a proud blazon.
There’s a snapshot of Jeff and me that I’ve always liked. There we are, together on one side of the table, in front of a birthday cake covered with lit candles. Jeff turned twenty-one on August 13, 1973, the summer we were both working at the Brethren church camp near Huntington. My twentieth birthday was only three weeks later, so the cake may have been for both of us—that seems likely to me, since we were both going our separate ways at the end of August, and Mother sometimes combined our birthday celebrations when we were kids. That summer he was a counselor at Camp Blue Diamond, and I was the “waterfront director,” a.k.a. the lifeguard, at the little lake, where I oversaw the beach and the swimming area, the canoes and the floating docks where they were moored. The color photo shows me deeply tan, and my hair, bleached blonde by the sun, is hanging in waves and curls down to my shoulders. I’m wearing big silver loop earrings. Jeff is also tan from his summer’s work, and wears his brown, shoulder-length hair pulled back from his face in a ponytail. We are sitting side by side at the foldout teak table in the living room that Mother would set for festive events, and we’re both smiling and looking at the camera. For decades I looked at this photo and thought we looked strikingly alike—the same blue eyes, strong nose, well-defined lips, clear jawline. Our smiles are much alike.
I found the photo in an album, got it out and put it in a wooden frame, and I see it now on top of a chest of drawers. I got it out because Jeff was gone and I wanted to be in his presence again. I mourned his death, and I mourned the life that he never got to lead, the one in which he didn’t have MS, didn’t endure the slow devastation of his body, and didn’t end up paralyzed. The photo shows us in our youth, each strong in body after a summer at the camp. I had been swimming half a mile early every morning i
n the lake before climbing into the white lifeguard’s chair, a slow crawl back and forth along the outer buoys. Jeff had hiked repeatedly to a fire tower on a nearby mountain, every week with a different group of campers, where they climbed the metal staircase all the way to the top to look out over the forested and farmland beauty of central Pennsylvania. There we are, both of us in great health, shining with potential, on the verge of full adulthood. Looking at this youthful birthday photo, it seems impossible that my vibrant, handsome brother would be stricken with a neurological disease that would bring him to quadriplegia in his forties, let alone that I would break my neck and at age fifty find myself quadriplegic, too
One hot summer day, I was visiting Jeff, and we went out in his van to run errands. When we got back, I was lounging on a leather sofa that was cool to my cheek as I turned to look at Jeff sitting across from me in his wheelchair. How can he stand it, I wondered, always being in his wheelchair and never sprawled on the sofa? How can he stand never stretching his legs after a long drive? How can he stand going through the world so slowly, always having to wait for the lift to get into the van, never taking steps two at a time? How can he bear to live in a world so physically monotonous, with tactile sensation so dulled? How awful—to lose your grip and the use of your hands, literally lose your signature! A few years later, lying in my hospital bed, the thought came to me that I now had to answer those questions for myself. At the stroke of fifty, my fantasy of being Jeff’s twin had been finally, malevolently realized. Paralysis trumped gender.
I remembered an essay by Freud that I had read long ago, “Das Unheimliche,” or “The Uncanny.” I was looking for anything to help me understand the particular fold in time I felt myself to be living in, a doubling back, terribly changed, to days long ago. Freud’s essay treats the effects created by the horror stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann, a master of the genre, who often renders familiar domestic scenes creepy and threatening, as though through the looking glass. Something once familiar and safe becomes unfamiliar and unsettling—unheimlich, literally “un-homelike.” Hoffman creates a kind of doubtful suspense about what’s really happening by introducing some form or another of a shadow figure, a doppelgänger, or by describing a setting that you immediately recognize as every day . . . but now it’s off-kilter, and populated with frightening characters. The walking dead, ghosts, and zombies are creatures of horror both alive and dead, but even more frightening are the familiars who intrude into what should be ordinary everyday life, bringing with them a whiff of the underworld. A soldier missing and presumed dead returns, but his loved ones are incapable of recognizing him, or a familiar domestic world is not right, somehow, an oddness all the more threatening because barely perceptible, yet unmistakably there. Episodes of The Twilight Zone are often of this sort, and Edgar Allen Poe’s horror stories sometimes work by the same logic.
Freud introduces his study of the unheimlich with an analysis of its opposite, heimlich, or homelike, homey. We discover with surprise a fact that Freud finds quite significant—the word contains within itself its own antonym. Heimlich means both familiar, homey, and comfortable, and also that which is concealed, out of sight or hidden in the home, thereby transforming the family home into a place of threatening secrets. Heimlich and unheimlich tell the same story. “[E]verything is uncanny that ought to have remained secret and hidden, and yet comes to light.” The unheimlich “leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar,” but only through an analysis that, as it were, raises the dead.2 For Freud, the unheimlich is illustrative of mental life. You consciously admire yourself as a rational, civilized creature, yet all the while repressed thoughts literally too repulsive and ugly to be acknowledged profoundly affect how you live your life. Unbeknownst to you, you’re a double agent. The unconscious gathers to it all that must be forgotten and remain beyond conscious reflection if orderly adult life is to be achieved and preserved.
I don’t want to pursue here an orthodox Freudian analysis, but I am convinced that child rearing inevitably creates thoughts that are unthinkable, and that later reappear in a different guise in dreams and fantasies. My father apparently needed his son to fight and win, and my loving mother loved me perhaps not wisely, but too well. As a friend of mine observed when we were talking about her soon-to-be adolescent son, she’d come to understand that all she could do was her best, and that it would be his job to sort it all out for himself later on. I want to be very clear, my parents and my brother did their very best by me, and I by them. I loved my family when I was a child, and I love them now. Nonetheless. Of these matters Philip Larkin writes,
THIS BE THE VERSE
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
. . .
The crude Anglo-Saxon energy of “fuck” extends through the poem’s three stanzas, which sustain unmodulated the tension of the first line—your parents “fuck you up” both literally and metaphorically, bringing you into this world only to leave you damaged. The harsh language posits this damage as existential, the unavoidable pain of human being declared in two simple, short declarative sentences. Tetrameter reinforces the crude language with the four-beat line of traditional ballad, nursery rhyme, and popular music, and the rhythm is relentlessly enforced by the insistently monosyllabic words of the first two stanzas. “Ex´ tra” is the sole exception—an extra syllable, as it were, to assert that “you” inherit your parents’ faults, and then some.
The inevitability of damage extends generationally as the poem moves into the compound-complex sentence that makes up its second stanza. It begins, “But they were fucked up in their turn,” and continues not by excusing the parents for their fucked-up parenting, but by committing the poem to an increasingly bleak, multigenerational view. The meter continues to be unrelentingly blunt. When I first read the poem, I was in analysis, and I knew it was addressed to me. “This Be the Verse” told me that all families are fucked up, and suggested to me that the representation of happy families everywhere you turn may be compensation for unavoidable pain. “This Be the Verse” in its existential bleakness spoke so immediately to me because I was trying to figure out how I could have suffered in the intimacy of my loving family—an intimacy that depended on suppressing hostility, which made it impossible to declare and work through anger, envy, greed, lust, sloth—the whole catalog of mortal and venial sins. Larkin’s arresting, generative obscenities are harsh, and seem to have no application to my loving family. Yet I’ve committed the poem to memory and could recite it to you now.
The third and final stanza summarizes the existential drama of being fucked up with a significant change in diction.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.3
The poem arrives at the grand abstraction “Man,” and the three Anglo-Norman syllables of “mi´ ser y.” The tone of the poem becomes formal. Misery deepens through simile, which brings us to the final two lines, an enjambed imperative. Unlike my friend, who has both a daughter and a son, the speaker of the poem has no wish to “fuck up” a child, in either meaning of that verb. In his world, there’s no having a child without in some way royally fucking things up. I’m of a generally optimistic temperament, but in this case I’m with the speaker—I have no kids myself.
I’ve come to think that the happiness my mother and father enjoyed in their marriage may have led them to believe that their way of life was not simply the best for them, but the best for everyone and the only way to live a fulfilling life. We didn’t keep good track of photographs as I was growing up, but there is a white album with a series of pictures taken the day of their wedding. One is a candid snapshot taken in between the formal posed photographs. They are standing facing e
ach other, with their heads thrown back in laughter, as Jane is reaching out for Ken’s hand. At some point Mother annotated the picture—“Joy, Joy, Joy! Here we are!” So they were, and I’m happy for them every time I look at it. I believe they delighted in each other, but pumped the air out of the room for me.
I can imagine how much parents must hope for the well-being of their children, so I was not surprised when my father told me on the eve of his son’s wedding that he hoped that I, too, would marry and “in due course” have children. I was dead certain neither acts were in my future. Jeff and I had both just graduated from college, and I had been with my family for two days in Rochester, New York, doing the things that you do before a wedding. Earlier that day I had suddenly bolted out of Beth’s parents’ house after Mother had me try on the bridesmaid’s dress she was sewing to check where it should be hemmed. It was a gown of blue sprigged muslin with short puff sleeves that, given the way I carry myself, made me look like a linebacker. I wandered, crying hard and surprised by my emotion, around the suburban sameness of a neighborhood that defied my best efforts to distinguish among its streets. I am quite sure that I didn’t think that much about the gown, and I don’t remember coming to any conclusions about my misery. In retrospect, the weekend of the wedding is all affect—a profound, mute feeling of unbelonging that I couldn’t admit even to myself. I certainly didn’t want to marry, and still don’t—it’s a contract filed with and enforced by the state, which proceeds to dole out social goods with reference to that bond. It’s a tie that binds women to domestic labor, the infamous, unpaid “second shift” that so many women begin when they get home from the factory, or the office, or the restaurant where they’ve been waiting on people all day. Why the hell would I want to marry?
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