I'm Sorry You Feel That Way Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Tongue Twister, Tongue Tied

  The Boy

  Love in the Age of Ick

  What’s (Not) Simple

  My Abel Brother

  Humping the Dinosaur

  Mary, Queen of Arkansas

  The Boy, Again

  Officer Frenchie

  Sufficiently Suffonsified

  It’s Me. It’s Him. It’s Them.

  The Devil I Know Is the Man Upstairs

  The Girl Who Only Sometimes Said No

  Lighten Up

  Ten Million, at Least

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  AMY EINHORN BOOKS

  Published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons

  Publishers Since 1838

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014,

  USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2009 by Diana Joseph

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed

  in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or

  encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

  Purchase only authorized editions. Published simultaneously in Canada

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following, where portions of this book first appeared: Willow

  Springs: “The Devil I Know Is the Man Upstairs”; River Teeth:

  “It’s Me. It’s Him. It’s Them.”; Weber: “What’s (Not) Simple”; Marginalia: “The Boy.”

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Joseph, Diana, date.

  I’m sorry you feel that way : the astonishing but true story of a daughter,

  sister, slut, wife, mother, and friend to man and dog / Diana Joseph.

  p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-68633-7

  1. Joseph, Diana, date. 2. Joseph, Diana, date—Philosophy. 3. Joseph,

  Diana, date—Family. 4. Authors, American—21st century—Biography.

  5. Women—United States—Biography. 6. Feminists—United States—

  Biography. 7. Joseph, Diana, date—Marriage. 8. Man-woman relationships—

  United States. 9. Motherhood—United States. I. Title.

  PS3610.O668Z

  814’.6—dc22

  Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed.

  Some sequences and details of events have been changed.

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For The Boy

  and For Allen

  A man is a god in ruins.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  Tongue Twister, Tongue Tied

  One day my father sat me down and said, “See, what happens is sometimes a girl will go with this one, and then she’ll go with that one, and then she thinks what the hell, that one over there doesn’t look so bad, why not go with that one, too.”

  My father paused to take a long draw on his cigarette. It was 1982, the “Just Say No” campaign hadn’t yet come on full-force, and fathers like mine smoked without guilt or shame or brain-washed children nagging at them to quit. They smoked in front of their children and their children’s friends, they smoked in the station wagon with children bouncing around in the backseat, the baby sitting on somebody’s lap and all the windows rolled up. A sixth-grader could walk to the corner convenience store to play the Daily Number and buy a pack of smokes; no one questioned it. My father played 0-2-6, a dollar straight and a dollar boxed. He smoked Lucky Strikes, unfiltered. I walked the eight blocks from my house to the Fast and Friendly to play his number and buy his Luckies just about every day.

  My father was talking, he was explaining something. There was something important that I needed to know, and he was telling me about it. I needed to listen. He wanted me to pay attention.

  “Now, look,” my father said, “when a girl goes with this one, and then with that one, and then with that one over there, and with who knows how many others, what happens is people start to talk. People will always hear all about what she did, see, and when they do, they’ll talk about it. They’ll say that girl is a pig.”

  The Lucky dangled from my father’s lips and his eyes were squinty from the smoke. He raised his eyebrows. He was jabbing his finger at me. Moving only half his mouth, my father said, “Don’t be a pig.”

  That was the first time my father ever talked to me about sex. It would be his final word on the matter. Neither he nor I would speak of it again.

  My father has spoken to me about other things. He is a man of firm belief and definite opinion.

  For a long time, one of his favorite issues to put on the table was the ratio of how little money I make to how much education I have. He liked to ask how much was I making, so he could say, “That’s it?” and then taunt me. “I’m the dummy,” he’d say, “and I made more than that. You’re supposed to have all this education. What was all that schooling for if that’s all the money you’re going to make?”

  My father, who dropped out of school in eighth grade, owned and operated a tow truck and auto body shop. When I was a kid, he loomed large, big and tall, powerful and strong, his energy endless, but these days, his health isn’t good. He’s given his retirement over to puttering around the house, he’s cooking fabulous meals, baking fabulous pies—even rolling out his own crust—and he dabbles with day trading online.

  Usually, when I call home, my mother answers the phone. She’s the one I chat with, the one I ask how’s Dad doing? or what’s Dad been up to? If it’s Father’s Day or his birthday, I call specifically to speak to him, and usually I can get him on the phone to wish him Merry Christmas.

  But there have been times, though rare, when I’ve called home, and my mother isn’t there. My father answers the phone. That’s when he and I talk.

  This happens once, maybe twice, a year. During these conversations, my father has spoken with great authority and discussed at great length matters I can’t begin to comprehend: investments and annuities, bonds and interest rates, the Fed, the Dow Jones, and the stock market, which I always hear as the stalk market. I imagine a small creepy one-room office across the river and in the questionable part of town. It’s where I’d go if I wanted to hire someone to keep menacingly close tabs on someone else. I’m runnin
g through the many possibilities of who I’d like to have stalked when I hear my father say how much money do you have in your savings?

  The honest answer would be none, I don’t have any money in my savings. I don’t have a savings account, and if you really want to know, the way I balance my checkbook is by changing banks.

  But I’m a coward. My answers to the questions my father asks are rarely honest. Because I’m all about keeping the old man off my back, I’m all about telling him what I think he wants to hear. I also want him to think well of me, which means the truth will not do.

  “Eighteen hundred,” I say every time he asks, because it sounds like a figure that’s plausible and realistic, like it could be true, but it also sounds, to me at least, like an impressive amount of money to have just lying around. “Almost two thousand dollars saved!” I tell my father, who, in turn, always says the same thing. He always says, “Not enough.”

  During these telephone conversations, my father and I also talk about my brothers. My father confides in me his feelings concerning my brothers’ lives, specifically what they’re doing wrong.

  “He’s an asshole,” my father says.

  I don’t have to ask which brother he’s talking about. I know that if I’m patient, at some point, my father will reveal to me that both of my brothers are assholes, but each boy is an asshole in his own special way. I never disagree with my father on this matter. I never take up for my brothers, I don’t defend them or argue their cases. I always defer to my father’s opinion, murmuring my agreement that my brother is an asshole indeed, no bones about it. I mean my brothers no harm, but I’m happier when my father is displeased with someone other than me.

  While I have wandered from Pennsylvania to New York to Colorado to Minnesota, both of my brothers still live near my parents. This makes it easy for my father to keep up with their lives. This is what enables him to point out with such certainty that my one brother is an asshole because his bitch of a girlfriend is leading him around by the balls, while my other brother is an asshole because of the truck he bought, or because of how fast he rides his motorcycle, or because he says it’s fun to go four-wheeling. One of my brothers is an asshole because of the way he went about digging a hole, or hanging drywall, or building a deer stand, and my other brother is an asshole because he got pulled over for speeding, or because he thinks he’s in love with a single mother seven years his senior.

  “I tried to tell him,” my father says, “but he’s a hardhead. He thinks he knows everything. He doesn’t know jack shit. But he won’t listen to me. If he’d listen to me, he’d know.”

  “I know,” I say. “It’s true.”

  “He’s an asshole.”

  “It’s true.”

  My father says he doesn’t need me to tell him what’s true.

  I agree.

  If it’s a rare thing for me to call home and talk to my father, it’s even rarer when my father calls me. Each time it happens, it catches me off guard, and every time, I’m a little flattered, thinking wow, he must really want to talk to me. He must’ve been thinking about me. I’m charmed by it. I think it’s cute that my father has taken the time to search for my phone number, then dial it. I think it’s sweet. It makes me feel singled out, special, privileged, honored, and loved.

  One time my father called to reveal that my mother didn’t like being a stay-at-home mom, she didn’t like being stuck at home with children. “Your mother doesn’t like kids,” he shared. “She never has.”

  Another time he called to say he hadn’t been feeling well. “I feel funny lately,” he told me. “I can’t think, I can’t sleep, I can’t concentrate.” His health problems require him to take a variety of prescription drugs. There are the pills he takes in the morning, the pills he takes at night; there are the pills he takes for pain, the pills he takes on an empty stomach or with food. Green pills, red pills, blue pills. “I just want you to know,” my father continued, “I think it’s her. She’s doing something to my medicine. If I turn up dead,” my father told me, “it’s your mother.”

  I said thanks, Dad, I appreciate you letting me know, and thanks for calling, and after we hung up, I called my brother Mitchell. “I just got off the phone with Dad,” I said. There was something smug in my tone. Something gleeful and gloating and proud. “Dad called me. He told me if he turns up dead, it’s Mom.”

  But Mitchell already knew. Of course he’d already heard. “Dad called me this morning,” he said, and I was immediately jealous and resentful. If I’m second to that asshole on the old man’s list of allies, how special can I be?

  There are things about my father that I just don’t know.

  For example, I don’t know how tall he is. I don’t know how old he is. I don’t know what my father wanted to be when he grew up, or who was his best friend when he was twelve.

  I don’t know who taught him to ride a bike. I don’t know his favorite color. I don’t know if he ever saw a rock concert or who his favorite Beatle was, or what he would have majored in if he’d gone to college. Business would be my guess, but is that right? Do I have it right?

  I don’t know how long he and my mother have been married, or when is their anniversary, or how they met, or the story of their courtship. I don’t know his first wife’s name or how it works that one of the four daughters from his first marriage is younger than me. I don’t know how old he was when his father died or how he felt about the man.

  I don’t know how he’ll feel about the words on this page.

  I don’t know how to find these things out unless I ask, and I don’t know how to ask. I don’t know what words I would say. I don’t know where I would begin, and what if it turns out there are things I don’t really want to know?

  It’s possible there are things I don’t really want to know.

  When I’m on the phone with my father, I listen. I say yes, yes. Right, right. Of course. It’s true. How about that. Wow, I never thought of it like that. I agree with everything he says. These conversations last until my mother returns from wherever she’s been—the store, usually—and my father says your mother’s here, let me put your mother on the phone.

  My father is maybe six feet tall and he might be fifty-nine years old. He smokes. He has a two-pack-a-day habit, though he’s tried to quit, more than once. During those times, his temper, while never mild, never gentle, was even shorter, more volatile. Just the words Dad’s quit made us speak softly and step lightly. But the time he tried to light that artificial cigarette, the fake one made of plastic and meant to appeal to the smoker’s oral fixation, he seemed embarrassed and maybe even a little amused.

  My father likes food: pistachios and peanuts, sausage sandwiches and meatball sandwiches, ham sandwiches and Easter ham dotted with cloves and pineapple rings. He makes his spaghetti sauce from scratch; his chicken noodle soup stops the sniffles, cures cancer, and clears up acne. There are bottles and bottles of booze in our china cupboard, but my father doesn’t drink. One time, I saw him have a beer with his dinner in a restaurant, but I have never seen him drunk. Instead, he drinks iced tea, all day long, all year round, sweet tea, made on the stove top: a saucepan of boiling water, a cup of sugar, ten Lipton tea bags.

  My father’s eyes are blue. His legs are skinny. His hair is curly and black, though he’s balding, and has been for as long as I can remember, a bald spot on the back of his head that we measured first with a quarter, then a silver dollar, then the rim of a cup, and now it’s just a big bald spot.

  When I was little, I used to give him a pack of Lucky Strikes for Christmas, or a lottery ticket, a wallet, socks, or a package of T-shirts. The T-shirts had to have a pocket for his cigarettes. I rarely saw him wear any other kind of shirt. I have never seen him in a suit.

  Around the house, he doesn’t wear a shirt. Every night, as soon as my father came home from work, he took off his shirt. His stomach was large and round and hairy, fat but hard. He had the kind of gut that allowed him to say Punch me. Go ahead. As hard
as you want, as hard as you can. I was so used to seeing him like this that I didn’t think anything of it, not until years later when I was an adult, and a friend, flipping through my family album, pointed out there isn’t hardly a picture of my old man where he’s wearing a shirt. Not in Christmas pictures or the pictures from his birthday party, and not in the picture I have of us on my graduation day, me in my cap and gown, and my father, shirtless.

  He didn’t bother to put on a shirt when a boy came to pick me up for a date. The rule was a boy couldn’t just sit out in the driveway and wait for me, he had to come in the house and say hello to my father, shirtless and big-bellied, my father who didn’t necessarily acknowledge my date, didn’t always put the newspaper down, sometimes didn’t turn down the volume on the television or even turn his head in the boy’s direction. Once, after seeing the bologna-skin tires on one boy’s car, my father refused to allow me to go anywhere until that kid got a new set. Another boy asked me if my father was mean. Sometimes, I said. Still another asked if my father hated him. I said I didn’t know. It seemed possible, especially since I wasn’t always sure how my father felt about me.

  My father worked long, hard hours. My brothers and I grew up to be people who don’t quite know what to do with ourselves when we’re not working. When my father came home from work, he wanted his children to greet him at the door. He wanted a sheet spread across the couch so the couch stayed clean while he took a nap before supper. He wanted a supper that included meat, starch, vegetable, and a stack of sliced white bread on a saucer, a stick of soft oleo in the butter dish. He wanted to watch television in peace.

  My father watched Paul Kangas host Nightly Business Report on PBS. He watched movies about vigilantes and renegade cops, and he especially liked Chuck Norris movies or movies starring Charles Bronson or anything with Clint Eastwood as a cop or a cowboy. On Sunday afternoons, my father watched football games and he liked Kung Fu, the series where a monk named Kwai Chang Caine wandered through the American West, occasionally experiencing flashbacks in which he remembers some valuable lesson taught to him by blind Master Po. My father brought home a VHS tape called Faces of Death that showed a scene of people eating a monkey’s brains fresh out of its skull. My brothers and I weren’t allowed to watch it, but the old man told us about the people who, forks in hand, dug right in.