Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (34 page)

Our parents stood by the doorway looking stunned, their glazed-over faces suggesting that they could not quite believe they’d created us—two offspring who were capable of going bazookies over a Styrofoam ice bucket and a piece of Howard Johnson’s guest soap. The ice machine by the elevator amazed us. That our bathroom had not one, but
two
sinks was incredible. Best yet, however, was the Thanksgiving dinner itself. The chef at Howard Johnson’s was clearly a culinary genius. Why, he’d managed to cook a Thanksgiving dinner identical to that of our favorite TV dinner. The tissuey slices of turkey came smothered in sweet, brown, gelatinous gravy—just the way we liked it—accompanied by a troika of starches. Tater Tots. Mounds of processed mashed potatoes. Dinner rolls. Not a green bean or a cranberry in sight. And afterward, Oh! None of those awful Thanksgiving pies in which vegetables tried to pass themselves off as desserts. There were simply, gloriously, twenty-eight flavors of Howard Johnson’s ice cream.

“Oh, Mom! Oh, Dad!” we proclaimed rapturously as we dug into parfait glasses dripping with chocolate syrup. “This is the best Thanksgiving
ever!
”

And so we inscribed it in our annals of the family:
The best Thanksgiving ever.
Occasionally, as teenagers, John and I prompted, “Hey, remember that Thanksgiving we spent at Howard Johnson’s?” Then we’d lovingly recall each detail, reliving our pleasure, our naive delight at the voluptuousness of it all. Oh, it had seemed like such an adventure, didn’t it? Remember when we made a fort using the luggage rack and extra pillows? Remember playing “The Flying Wallendas” by jumping off the dresser? Remember those hot fudge sundaes for dessert?

Only years later, when we were waxing nostalgic about it again one morning, did our father audibly groan: “Augh. That Thanksgiving we spent at Howard Johnson’s. Was that ever a fucking nightmare.”

“Oh, it was horrible,” our mother agreed. “The absolute worst.”

My brother looked stunned. “What are you talking about? That was, like, our best Thanksgiving
ever.
”

Our father chuckled. “For you kids, maybe,” he said. “For you kids, it was the Thanksgiving when we let you run up and down the halls of Howard Johnson’s playing with the ice machine.”

“But for your father and me,” our mother interjected, “it was the Thanksgiving when we nearly drove off a cliff.”

“Boy, I will never forget hitting that guardrail,” our father said soberly, staring down into his coffee cup. “I was sure that was
it.
We were going over.” He shook his head. “Driving up to Vermont in that old VW What were we thinking?”

“We were young. Young and stupid,” our mother said gently.

“And remember? I had to plead with the receptionist at Howard Johnson’s to take a personal check because we didn’t have enough cash for the rooms?”

“And we couldn’t find a garage—”

“And I got a nosebleed from the stress—”

“Oh, that blood in your beard. All over your shirt—”

“I sat in the motel lobby with an ice pack so it wouldn’t scare the kids—”

“And then we had that disgusting Thanksgiving dinner—”

“That turkey was like Alpo—”

“Nobody else in the whole place except for those two drunken farts feeding dinner rolls to their beagle. And one of them yelled at you, David, when you asked her to put out her cigarette because John was just getting over the mumps, and he was congested—”

“I had the mumps?” said John.

“Oh, was that ever depressing,” said our mother.

“I can’t believe you guys,” I cried. “It wasn’t that way at all. That meal was delicious. That motel was a palace. We jumped on the beds. We watched color TV. We loved every minute of it.”

Our parents laughed. “Well,
you two
did, sweetie,” said my father. “And that was the only redeeming thing about the whole holiday. Otherwise …” His voice trailed off.

“That day was horrendous,” our mother declared. “That day was criminal.”

Two months after I’d left home, post-college, to live on my own, our parents announced they were separating. Although their twenty-six-year marriage had oscillated between grinding frustration and festering resentment, their decision somehow still managed to come as a total shock to John and me.

“How can you guys be separating?” my brother cried when my parents called him at college with the news. “You just redecorated the apartment.”

“What do you want us to do?” our mother sighed. “Stay together so your father can look at the wallpaper?”

Their marriage had stagnated, she said. They needed some time apart to “gain some perspective” and “work a few things out.”

“It’s only temporary,” said our dad.

Yet no sooner had he transplanted his toothbrush and business suits to a furnished one-bedroom across town than it became obvious he was not moving back.

“I can’t believe our parents are splitting up,” I sobbed to John. “I mean, they already stuck it out twenty-six years. Would another twenty-six really kill them?”

“Did you see this coming?” John asked incredulously. “I didn’t.”

“I didn’t either,” I said. “Okay, except for whenever Mom yelled at Dad that she wished she lived alone—”

“Or those times when he said he might leave her.”

“Or when she told him he was boring.”

“Or when he refused to comfort her when she was upset.”

“But except for those minor details—” I said.

“They seemed happy enough together,” John concluded.

“Besides,” I said. “Isn’t marriage, by definition, supposed to be deadening and lethal anyway?”

By the mid-1990s, almost nothing from our childhood remained. The Upper West Side had become so aggressively gentrified, sections of it now resembled a cruise ship. Luxury condominiums with polarized windows sprang up, sporting awnings with pretentious names like “The Key West” and “The Montana,” suggesting that they were not really part of New York City at all. On street corners where residents had once shelled out $25 for a Baggie of marijuana, they could now spend the same amount for a plate of blackened catfish. In a move that was particularly ironic, a number of bodegas run by Central American immigrants were replaced by Banana Republics.

While John and I supposed we shouldn’t complain, we did anyway. Given the choice between counting our blessings and whining, we usually opted for the latter, and it annoyed us to no end that the Upper West Side had become so chic and expensive, none of us who’d actually grown up there could now afford to live in it.

Worse still were the new arrivals—snotty, suburban-bred professionals who harbored the delusion that they deserved to live in our neighborhood simply because they could pay the rent. Their sense of entitlement was galling. Twice, young stockbrokers with attachÉ cases body-slammed me in attempts to grab the taxis I’d hailed; at my gym, a balding Master of the Universe climbed onto my step machine and tried to shove me off because, even though he’d missed his turn, he was in a hurry, goddamn it! During my childhood, I’d dodged countless threats from black and Hispanic kids in the neighborhood, but these turned out to be nothing compared to the viciousness of white yuppies, who would physically assault you without warning over a Nordic Trac or a latte.

To console each other, John and I indulged in the archaeology of memory, regaling one another with our “insider knowledge” of what the neighborhood had
really
been like.

“Oh look,” I’d say nostalgically, pointing to the new Blockbuster Video on Broadway, “remember when that used to be an empty lot and all the junkies used to nod off there?”

“And across the street was that adult movie theater that only showed Spanish porn?” John added wistfully.

“And remember that paranoid schizophrenic named Quack-Quack who used to wander around Amsterdam Avenue wearing duct tape and terrorizing all the women?”

“Oh!” we’d wail in unison, “where did everything go?”

After our parents separated, John and I had the awful, nagging suspicion that not only had the infrastructure of our past vanished, but that our entire home life had been like Thanksgiving at Howard Johnson’s. Had we spent our childhood dancing around with ice buckets on our heads, thinking everything was just dandy, when really our parents were sitting there spellbound with misery? Apparently so.

We spent hours on the phone performing autopsies of our parents’ marriage. “Was that why Dad took so many business trips? Was that why Mom was so moody?” It was now impossible to leaf through a family album, to look at pictures of birthday parties, of summers at Silver Lake, of the four of us grinning before our Christmas tree, without feeling queasy. Suddenly, every memory was suspect, counterfeit, a likely illusion.

“Was anything the way we thought it was?” we asked each other. “Why didn’t we have a clue?”

A dead giveaway, apparently, should’ve been the interior decorator.

“Your parents completely redid their apartment, then announced they were splitting? Augh, that’s classic,” said Joshua, my boyfriend at that time. Joshua’s own parents had divorced when he was thirteen, then remarried twice each by the time he’d turned twenty. Unsurprisingly, he now considered himself an expert in marital pathology. As he explained it, there was no surer sign that a marriage was in trouble than when a couple paid professionals to reupholster their sofa and knock down their drywall. To hear him tell it, an interior decorator might as well arrive on a couple’s doorstep wearing a black-hooded robe and holding a scythe. As soon as a designer started sashaying around the living room enthusing, “I’m thinking terra-cotta. I’m thinking Moroccan/urban. I’m thinking throw pillows,” you could be sure the marriage was kaput.

“It’s like a joint midlife crisis,” Joshua explained, running his fingers around the rim of a margarita, then sucking off the salt. “Instead of a sports car and a blonde, couples install track lighting and buy a new dishwasher. Hell, my mother and her second husband built a whole new country house just before they called it quits.”

Of course, neither my brother nor I had known any of this. The year our parents had decided to redecorate, all we’d thought was:
It’s about fucking time.

As an artist, our mother had always been loath to throw out anything that might, with a dab of Elmer’s glue and a sequin, be converted into a decorative handicraft. And so, over the years, our apartment had taken on the distinctive look of a roadside garage sale. Virtually every room had become crammed with discarded picture frames, pipe cleaners, bolts of colored felt, acrylics, yarn, saw horses, plastic milk crates, and those Styrofoam heads used to display wigs in department stores. It was a “decorating scheme” not unlike the process that formed the Grand Canyon. One layer of debris settled prettily on top of another, preserving it for all eternity.

Our father drifted among these canyons seemingly indifferently, content just to sack out on the sofa with the sports page amid piles of our mother’s Mondrianesque collages, decoupage coffee tins, and 3-D mobiles painted to look like psychedelic fish. His own idea of home improvement pretty much began and ended with picking his socks up off the floor.

Yet the year my brother left for college, our father made a sudden, stunning decision. “We’re redoing the apartment,” he announced. From the way he said this, there was no way of mistaking that “redoing the apartment” was really a euphemism for “getting rid of this tsunami of crap.”

His adamancy was surprising.

As they’d gotten older, John and I had noticed, our parents’ personalities had begun to ossify into caricatures of themselves. More and more, our mother’s sensitivity and “artistic temperament” were giving way to a simple, constant state of agitation. She was like a storm system, filling our household with weather and drama, her views of the world swinging wildly between hope and indictment. One moment, she was weeping with gratitude over all the poignant beauty of our lives; the next, she was raging over their mediocrity. We lived on constant alert for the shifts in her moods, trying desperately to forecast her.

Our easygoing father, on the other hand, had mellowed to the point of inertia. Lolling around placidly in sweatpants, he spent his time at home hypnotized before the television. He’d read the paper for hours, or absentmindedly stare out the window, seemingly immune to the histrionics that the rest of us felt compelled to engage in on a nearly daily basis. Occasionally, he’d rouse himself just long enough to realize that he should be taking more demonstrable interest in our lives.

“So, Susie,” he’d say awkwardly, casting about for some clear point of entry. “How’s that, um, party planning of yours going?”

“What party?” I’d say.

“Weren’t you planning a party? Something with champagne and ice cream that boys could only come to in drag?”

“You mean my Sweet Sixteen?” I said. “Dad, that was seven years ago.”

By middle age, our parents were interacting like two components of an EKG reading, our mother the erratic heartbeat, our father the perennial flatline. It wasn’t our idea of fun, but it seemed to work well enough for them.

Yet once our father decided to redecorate, he was transformed overnight into Napoleon. Our apartment, to him, was suddenly a continent waiting to be attacked, pillaged, and colonized through the strategic use of paint swatches. He didn’t hire a decorator so much as
appoint
one. “Everyone,” he announced imperiously, “this is Gene.”

Gene was an elegant, bearded man who insisted that his specialty was decorating apartments in such a way as to make them look as if they’d never been decorated. Before my mother could even wonder aloud why we needed a decorator if all he was going to do was make it look as if he hadn’t done anything, a legion of “removal specialists” arrived. On my father’s orders, they spent two days carting away our prized collections of saw horses and broken floor lamps. “Out,” my father commanded, as they trooped back and forth with their burlap-covered dollies. “All of it.
Vamoose.
”

“Who is this person?” my mother said with alarm. “Yesterday, he couldn’t find the clothes hamper. Now, he’s a fanatic who sits in the bathroom, obsessing about linoleum.”