Lake Wobegon Days (44 page)

33.
Oh, I think you can do without that.
Your words come back to me when I look at a new sportcoat. Good Scottish tweed, it costs $130, and when I try it on, it makes me feel smart and lucky and substantial, but you’re right, I can do without it, and so I will.
You can get a perfectly good one at Sears for half the price.
If I bought the $130 one, pride would leak in and rot my heart. Who do I think I am?

34. For fear of what it might do to me, you never paid a compliment, and when other people did, you beat it away from me with a stick. “He certainly is looking nice and grown up.”
He’d look a lot nicer if he did something about his skin.
“That’s wonderful that he got that job.”
Yeah, well, we’ll see how long it lasts.
You trained me so well, I now perform this service for myself. I deflect every kind word directed to me, and my denials are much more extravagant than the praise. “Good speech.”
Oh, it was way too long, I didn’t know what I was talking about, I was just blathering on and on, I was glad when it was over.
I do this under the impression that it is humility, a becoming quality in a person. Actually, I am starved for a good word, but after the long drought of my youth, no word is quite good enough. “Good” isn’t enough. Under this thin veneer of modesty lies a monster of greed. I drive away faint praise, beating my little chest, waiting to be named Sun-God, King of America, Idol of Millions, Bringer of Fire, The Great Haji, Thun-Dar The Boy Giant. I don’t want to say, “Thanks, glad you liked it.” I want to say, “Rise, my people. Remove your faces from the carpet, stand, look me in the face.”

35. The fear of poverty haunts me. You weren’t poor but you anticipated the possibility by believing you were.

36. The fear of illness. You were seldom ill but you were always prepared to be.

37. Your illnesses were the result of exhaustion by good works, mine the result of having disobeyed you and not worn a scarf, not taking vitamins. I crawl into bed like a dog and feel not only unwell but unworthy. If someone came in to shoot me, I’d turn on the light so he could take better aim.

38. The fear of poverty and illness, brought on by a sudden craving for cheap wine. A flaw in my character, a weak seam, and one day I bend down to tie my shoes and hear a rip in my head, and on the way to work I pick up a gallon of muscatel, and spend my lunch hour in the alley. A month later, I have no job, no house, no car, and my nose is dark purple and swollen to the size of an eggplant. My voice is like sandpaper, I cough up gobs of phlegm, my liver feels like a sandbag. My teeth are rotten stumps. I crap in my pants and lurch toward strangers, mumbling about spare change. The flaw was created by disobeying you. “Someday you’ll find out,” you said, and I probably will.

39. Damn.

40. Damn.

41. Damn.

42. Damn.

[Three pages missing.]

56. In our house, work was a weapon, used as punishment, also to inspire guilt. You waited until I sat in a chair and read the funnies, then you charged in: “How can you
sit
with this mess all around you?” I looked down. One lonely sock on the floor, a Juicy Fruit wrapper on the table. You snatched them up, sighed as if your heart was broken, and stalked out. A great sigh, so loud it could be heard in the back of the balcony. You worked your fingers to the bone, and did anyone lift a finger to help? No, they didn’t. When I lifted a finger, you told me it was the wrong finger and I was lifting it the wrong way. When I vacuumed, suddenly vacuuming became an exact science, a branch of physics, and I was doing it all wrong—you snatched the hose away and said, “Here, I might as well do it myself,” which was what you intended all along.

57. You taught me that, no matter what I thought, it was probably wrong. The world is fundamentally deceptive. The better something looks, the more rotten it probably is down deep. Some people were fooled but not you. You could always see the underlying truth, and the truth was ugly. Roosevelt was a drunk and that was that. New Deal? What New Deal? A sham, from beginning to end. There was no Depression, a person could get work if they really tried. There was more to everything than anyone knew. This teaching has led me, against my better judgment, to suspect people of trying to put one over. At the checkout counter, I lean forward to catch the girl if she tries to finesse an extra ten cents on the peaches. That’s how Higgledy-Piggledy makes a profit. That’s why cashiers ring up the goods so fast, to confuse us.

58. Believing there is always more than meets the eye defeats the sense of sight. Always looking for hidden meanings, a person misses the lovely surface of the world, even in spring. Surely those green leaves are hiding bare branches. If you look hard enough, you will glimpse them: dark, malevolent, and a big trunk that if you ran into it hard enough, it would kill you.

59. Nonetheless you set store by a certain orderly look to things. Dinner was at noon, supper at five-thirty. This is so ingrained in me that I eat whether I’m hungry or not. I eat everything put before me. It is a sign that I am good.

60. Clean clothes made us respectable.

61. A clean house distinguished us from colored people.

62. Bigotry is never a pleasant subject so you didn’t bring it up but you stuck by your guns anyway. Indians were drunks, Jews were thieves, and the colored were shiftless. Where you got this, I don’t know, because there were none of them around, but you believed it more absolutely for the utter lack of evidence.
Everyone
knew about those people. It was common sense.

63.-67. [Obliterated by beverage stain.]

68. Everything was set in place in your universe, and you knew what everything and everybody was, whether you had ever seen them or not. You could glance at strangers and size them up instantly. An article of clothing, a phrase from their lips, a look in their eye—you knew who they were, and you were seldom generous in your assessments. “She certainly thinks a lot of
her
self.” “I’ll bet that’s not
his
wife.” “If that man’s not a crook, then today’s not Sunday,” you said one Sunday. It was something about the shape of his head. You could tell. They couldn’t fool you. And now I do this myself. I adopted the mirror-reverse of your prejudices and I apply them viciously. I detest neat-looking people like myself and people who look industrious and respectable. I sneer at them as middle-class. In elections, I vote automatically against Scandinavian names.

69. In fact, you imbued me with the sensitivity of a goat. I say vicious things about old friends to people I barely know. I say vicious things to people’s faces and then explain that I was kidding.

I am truly cavalier toward the suffering of innocent people, including that which I myself cause. The other day, I almost ran down an old man in a crosswalk. I hadn’t seen him. My friend grabbed my arm and yelled and I slammed on the brakes. Rather than apologize to the man, I turned and explained to my friend that I hadn’t seen him. And I hadn’t. I didn’t even see him after I stopped and he stood there, dazed and terrified. I don’t really see anybody.

70. When I hear about deprivation and injustice in the world, I get up and change the channel.

71. What can I do? It’s not my fault. I didn’t make them. God did. It’s His world, let Him take care of it.

72. Anyway, I was brought up to believe that whatever happens to people is their own fault. There were few if any disasters that you couldn’t explain by citing the mistakes made by the victims. “She never should have married him.” “He never should have been there in the first place.” Even if you had to go back thirty years, you could find where they took the wrong fork in the road that led directly to their house burning down, their car being hit by a truck, their hands being eaten by corn pickers.

73. If they had been more like you, they would have been all right. But they weren’t paying attention. They lacked your strong sense of the cruelty and hopelessness of the world.

74. You misdirected me as surely as if you had said the world is flat and north is west and two plus two is four; i.e., not utterly wrong, just wrong enough so that when I took the opposite position—the world is mountainous, north is east—I was wrong, too, and your being wrong about the world and north made me spend years trying to come up with the correct sum of two and two, other than four.
You gave me the wrong things to rebel against.
My little boat sailed bravely against the wind, straight into the rocks. Your mindless monogamy made me vacillate in love, your compulsive industry made me a prisoner of sloth, your tidiness made me sloppy, your materialism made me wasteful.

75. I wasted years in diametrical opposition, thinking you were completely mistaken, and wound up living a life
based more on yours
than if I’d stayed home.

76. Because you always went to bed at ten, I stayed up half the night, chainsmoking (you were opposed to cigarettes), drinking straight gin (you didn’t drink), and, given time, might have cut off my arm, it being yet another thing you would never have done.

77. I wasted some good years thinking proudly that I wasn’t anything like you. Having grown up with ugly wallpaper, I painted all my walls off-white and thought I’d finally arrived. Bought a white couch, yours having been purple. My place looks like February.

78. I resist washing my dishes because it makes me feel obedient: the sink is disgusting.

79. I revolted by becoming a sensitive person, which I am not. I hate folk music. I don’t care for most of the sensitive people I feel obligated to hang out with. Many of them play guitars and write songs about their feelings. I have to pack up my Percy Faith records when they come and put the box in the bedroom closet and pile winter coats on it, and despite the mothballs I’m afraid they’ll take one sniff and say, “You like light classical, don’t you.” I pour a round of Lowenbrau, being careful not to pour along the side but straight down so the beer can express itself, and they say, “Did you ever try Dockendorf?” It’s made by the Dockendorf family from hand-pumped water in their ancient original family brewery in an unspoiled Pennsylvania village where the barley is hauled in by Amish families who use wagons with oak beds. Those oak beds give Dockendorf its famous flavor. These beer bores, plus the renovators of Victorian houses, the singer-songwriters, the runners, the connoisseurs of northern Bengali cuisine, the collectors of everything Louis Armstrong recorded between August 1925 and June 1928, his seminal period—they are driving me inexorably toward life as a fat man in a bungalow swooning over sweet-and-sour pork. You drove me toward
them.

80. This is one I can’t say. It’s true and it’s important, having to do with sexual identity, but if I said it, I’d hear you saying, “How can you
say
that?” and I know I’d feel guilty. So I won’t.
You
know what I mean.

81. Another thing of the same sort.

82. Another.

83. Guilt. Guilt as a child, then anger at you for filling me with guilt, then guilt at the anger. Then I tried to relieve
that
guilt by presenting you with a wonderful trip to Los Angeles to see your aunt. You protested that I didn’t need to, then you went, and you conspired to make it awful. You cashed in the first-class plane tickets and flew tourist, you cancelled the reservation at the Beverly Wilshire and stayed at a cheap motel in Torrance by the freeway, then you came home miserable (but happy) and gave me a refund.

84. I took you to a famous steakhouse on your anniversary. You agonized over the menu and ordered the cheapest thing. I pleaded, I argued. I ordered the prime rib. I felt guilty as I ate it, just as you intended.

85. With the refund from the trip, I bought you a pearl necklace and a pair of gold earrings. You never wore them. “I’m afraid of losing them,” you said. “Here? In the house?” I said. “You never can tell,” you said.

86. All those birthdays and Christmases, when you turned to me and said, “You shouldn’t have,” you really meant it. You were the author of the story, not me, and it was supposed to be about generous parents and an ingrate son. Once or twice, dark marital suffering was hinted at, with the clear intimation that you had stuck together for my sake. I felt wretched for months.

87. A scene, repeated thousands of times:

88. A scene from early childhood: our Sunday School class learned “Joy to the World” for the Christmas program. You asked me to sing it for the aunts and uncles when they came to dinner. I said no. You said yes. I said no. You said, “Someday when I’m dead and in my coffin, maybe you’ll look down and remember the times I asked you to do things and you wouldn’t.” So I sang, terrified of them and terrified about your death. You stopped me halfway through. You said, “Now, come on. You can sing it better than that.”

89. A few years later, when I sang the part of Curly in
Oklahoma!
and everybody else said it was wonderful, you said, “I told him for years he could sing and he wouldn’t listen to me.”

90. I did listen to you, that’s most of my problem. Everything you said went in one ear and right down my spine. Such as, “You’re never going to make anything of yourself.” When I was laid off from a job, you couldn’t believe it wasn’t for something I had done, something so awful that I wouldn’t tell you.

91. Everything I said had hidden meaning for you, even, “I’m going to bed.” “You can’t even spend a
few minutes
talking to your parents?” you said.

92. Every tiny disagreement was an ultimate blow to you. “Is this the thanks we get after all we’ve done?”

93. My every act was a subject of study: “What are you doing?” you asked a million times. “Why didn’t you do it before?” (Or “Can’t it wait until later?”) “Why do it
here?
” “Why are you so quiet?”
I’m thinking.
“About what?”