I'm Sorry You Feel That Way Read online

  I also have the impression my father liked the film Purple Rain, starring Prince, which he must have caught one of the zillion times it ran on HBO.

  Am I remembering right? Can that possibly be true?

  As far as I know, my father doesn’t read books for pleasure, but he’s always read the newspaper. He likes to look at real estate listings from other parts of the country and compare prices to where he lives. When I travel I always pick one up for him, though I almost never get it mailed, and when I eventually toss it in the recycling bin, I feel guilty. I feel like I should try harder. I should do more.

  When I was growing up, my father seemed unapproachable and unpredictable. Sometimes he got really, really furious about something—dust on top of the grandfather clock, for example, or that the pork chops my mother made for supper had been frozen, or the C that I got in algebra—and he’d yell. Or he would throw something. He might ridicule someone until that person cried. He might hit something. He might hit someone.

  It’s easy to remember the mean things my father did. The violent things, the hard, angry things. Growing up the daughter of such a man, it’s easy to fixate on those things, to hold a grudge. Letting go of the grudge is much more difficult. One of my brothers tells me Dad’s not like that anymore, the old man has really mellowed out. My other brother says he just wants everybody to be happy and get along.

  Such assholes!

  So when I think about my father, I try to keep in mind the other things I know about him, the things I know for sure.

  There’s this:

  My father could be a clown. He liked tongue twisters, and hearing him mangle them always made me laugh. He could say A big black bug bled black blood. He was good at She sells sea shells down by the seashore. But Seashell city tripped him up. Seashell city. Seashell city. Seashell city.

  She smells shitty!

  There’s this:

  My father and I were watching a video called, I think, Cops: Too Hot for TV. There was a sting operation involving undercover police disguised as Arab sheiks busting a prostitution ring. When I said surely members of law enforcement have better things to do than hassle those poor women, my father said he disagreed. Those poor women are criminals, he said. So I said prostitution should be legal.

  I don’t know why I said that. I don’t even know if I believe it. I was twenty-five years old, old enough to have and assert a controversial opinion, but I suspect there was nothing grand or lofty about what I was saying. I think I was just trying to shock my father, get a reaction out of the old man, who said he was disappointed in me, he thought he had raised me better than that. He looked sad. He said do you have no morals? What happened to your morals? I wanted to raise you better than that.

  And there’s this:

  One year my father made me watch the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association. I was fascinated by every detail. I remember how in the final hours, his hair black as shoe polish, slick with pomade, dapper tuxedoed Jerry loosened his bow tie, tugged open his collar, and made a case for the kids, his kids, those poor sad tragic hopeless crippled kids. Jerry sang “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” You’ll never walk, period flashed through my mind, and as if to punish my wicked thoughts, my father pledged my allowance to the handicapped children on my behalf. He asked if I understood how lucky I was that I could talk and walk and sit up straight. I imagined how awful it would be to be handicapped in a wheelchair or on crutches, and I felt happy that I wasn’t. Then I felt guilty about my happiness, guilty about my good fortune, my healthy body, my strong mind. Then I felt resentful about how it wasn’t my fault that I possessed good fortune, healthy body, strong mind, and who were Jerry’s Kids to get my allowance? Then I felt ashamed of my selfishness. I broke open my piggy bank and threw some Susan B. Anthony silver dollars at the problem. I became a Democrat because of my father, who keeps how he votes to himself.

  And finally, there’s this:

  My father is the smartest man I know. He remembers things he learned in fifth, sixth, seventh grade, things like how many feet are in a mile and how many cups are in a gallon and what’s the state capital of North Dakota. He wanted me to know things, too: how to work out math problems in my head and why I should pay attention to interest rates, what my constitutional rights include and why I need to pay off my credit cards in full every month. He told me to trust no one, that the United States government wants me to be ignorant and stay ignorant, and that the media are trying to keep me that way, and so is corporate America, and so is the pope. He told me if I ever wanted to make some real money, I should major in business, not English. He believed college wasn’t really even necessary, and he said if I went into business, then I needed to learn to play golf because the big business deals are made on the golf course. Shortly before I moved to Syracuse, New York, my father told me that someday the entire state of New York will be underwater. He told me gas prices will drop in the weeks before an election. He told me to always carry enough money to make a phone call or pay a cab for a ride home. He told me to always carry some form of ID in my pocket so they can identify my body if I’m ever in a disfiguring accident. He told me no one is more important than my family.

  What happens is sometimes a girl will go with this one, and he isn’t right for her, so she’ll go with that one, and she doesn’t like him, either. The girl isn’t a pig, she just doesn’t know what she wants. Or maybe she is a pig, but she’s young and reckless and doesn’t care. She likes romance, she wants adventure. She sees that one over there, and he doesn’t look so bad. In fact, he looks to her like he’s pretty good, and she thinks what the hell, why not.

  So I went with that one. But my father didn’t like him, didn’t approve of him, and for a long time, my father didn’t speak to me. Not even on Father’s Day when I showed up with a wrapped gift box containing a leather wallet. Not even when I said Happy Father’s Day, Dad. It took me getting knocked up before my father grudgingly spoke to me again.

  I named my son for him. My son’s middle name is my father’s first name. I think my father appreciated the gesture, but then I don’t know for sure. He’s never said.

  A friend of mine once told me to give it up, he was sick of hearing me go on about it. “Your old man is never going to love you the way you think he should,” my friend said. “He’s never going to ask the questions you want him to ask. The best thing you can do is learn to father yourself.”

  The father I’ve invented for myself is sitting at the kitchen table, shirtless and drinking iced tea. He’s eating pistachios, his fingers are stained red. It’s the summer of 1982. I’m twelve years old, and I’m hot and sweaty and just coming home from pretending my bike is really a palomino named Goldie. There’s a pile of stubbed-out Luckies littering the ashtray, there’s a Lucky hanging from his mouth. It’s been a long day towing cars out of ditches and painting cars in a sunless, claustrophobic garage. His hands have been scrubbed with a brush and some Goop, his shoulders are stiff, the tendons in his neck are tight, he’s got a headache, his back hurts, he looks tired.

  Hi, Daddy, I say.

  My father smiles. Hi, sweetheart, he says. He pats the seat beside him. He says what’s new with you?

  The Boy

  Recently, the boy showed me his feet. They were disgusting. They oozed, but they also looked dry. He said his feet were itchy and that they hurt. It hurt to stand, he said. It hurt to walk. He said he needed crutches or, even better, a motorized wheelchair. His feet smelled horrible, bringing to mind that Pablo Neruda poem about the blood of the children and how it’s like the blood of the children. No metaphor can begin to describe the atrocity, no comparison can come close. The same idea was applicable here: the boy’s terribly smelly feet smelled like terribly smelly feet.

  What happened to your feet? I said. How did they get to be like this?

  The boy said he didn’t know.

  We showed his feet to our next-door neighbor, a Vietnam veteran, who in one glance made a d
iagnosis: “My God! That’s trench foot! I haven’t seen that since Vietnam!”

  The boy was interrogated. He blinked under the harsh light, but he didn’t flinch. He only said his feet hurt, and he didn’t know how or why.

  I know why. Though this boy has a dresser full of clean socks, fresh socks, neatly folded socks, he one day decided he’d wear again the pair he’d already been wearing. He got out of the shower and put those dirty socks back on. That night, he wore them to bed. The next day, he wore them to school.

  If you ask the boy why, why would you do such a thing, he’ll shrug. He’ll smile. He’ll say he doesn’t know.

  The boy with trench foot is my son. He was born on April 20, 1992, a few days before the L.A. riots. His birthday is also Hitler’s birthday and the day of the shootings at Columbine High School. Other upsetting events around April 20 include the end of the siege of the Branch Davidian complex outside Waco, Texas, and the bombing of the federal court building in Oklahoma City. This bothers the boy. He believes that so many bad things having history on or around his birthday doesn’t bode well for him or his future. He thinks it reveals a flaw in character: his own, of course, but also mine.

  You know this boy. He was the one at the first T-ball practice who cried because he didn’t know how to run the bases. At T-ball games, he sat tucked away far in the outfield, pulling up the grass, watching dreamily as the ball rolled by. You made assumptions about him. Thin and nervous. Asthmatic child of a chain-smoking mother. The kind of kid who’d stay pale all summer long.

  But he might have surprised you. Though the boy didn’t much care for T-ball, he refused to quit, no matter how many times I recommended it, no matter how much I encouraged it, not even when I offered him five dollars and a Happy Meal. I didn’t want to believe his commitment to the sport was because of determination or spunk. We’re not that kind of people. The boy sucked at T-ball. He knew this. Everyone knew this. I figured he played because of the postgame snacks: the Popsicles, the Rice Krispy Treats, the Dixie cups of purple Kool-Aid.

  You also saw me at the T-ball games. I sat alone in the bleachers, the mother separate from other mothers—the sick, weak, puny antelope cut off by the rest of the herd. Those other mothers? They didn’t invite me to their after-game picnics. When the sign-up sheet for bringing in the postgame snacks went around, it passed by me. None of them asked if we were signing up for soccer, and would I like to join the carpool.

  At the time, it occurred to me I was being snubbed, though I wasn’t good at figuring out why. Every once in a while, I glanced up from the novel I was reading or the crossword I was puzzling or the menthol cigarette I was smoking to hear female voices shrieking at my child: “C’mon! You can do it! Run, run, run! Hustle, hustle, hustle!”

  I watched my son stroll to first. He plopped his bottom on the base, possibly exhausted, but more likely bored. “Get up!” those other mothers shrieked. “Where’s your fighting spirit? Where’s your hustle?”

  I watched them pound their fists in the air like they were banging on a door or joining Communists in solidarity. I marveled at their enthusiasm. It was nice they cared, but it was a T-ball game, for Christ’s sake, played by five-year-olds. I’d light up another smoke and get up from the bleachers to go sit someplace quieter, like my car. I waited for the T-ball game to end so I could go home and wait for T-ball season to end.

  What you don’t know is when T-ball season ended, the boy was bellyaching again. What surprised me was why. He was sad it was over. He liked T-ball. He liked his name in white letters across the back of his shirt. He liked how the players lined up to slap hands with the other team. He liked how everyone was nice, saying way to go, good job, good game.

  T here are other moments from which you know him, this boy, my son. He was the boy in kindergarten who freaked out a little girl by insisting he was her husband, she was his wife, they were married, and they would never get a divorce. This same year Monica Lewinsky was news, and when the boy asked me how to spell “sex,” I told him, never figuring he’d go to school the next day and write it all over his alphabet journal, sometimes in large letters, sometimes in small, and sometimes upside down. This same year the boy’s father and I got a divorce, and the boy reverted to thumb-sucking and took up grinding his teeth.

  You might remember him from first grade: he’s the one who ate glue. He and I were so broke that year that when he found a ten-dollar bill in the street, I took it from him, thrilled I could put gas in the tank. This boy believed in Santa and the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny long after all the other boys and most of the girls wised up. The summer between second and third grade, he was the boy you saw on the United flight, Denver to Pittsburgh, the Minor Traveling Alone to spend summer with his father, and when the boy boarded that flight, he didn’t look back, breaking his mother’s heart.

  Think back to fourth grade. There was the boy on the play-ground the bigger boys knocked down. The game is called Push, and the object is to push this kid down, and every time he tries to stand back up, you push him down again.

  Tell those guys you don’t like that, I suggested. Or go tell the teacher. Or stay down. They’ll get tired and go away eventually.

  The boy wanted to know if he should hit anyone. He said that’s what the Vietnam vet next door told him to do.

  Absolutely not, I said. We are not people who use violence to resolve conflict.

  The boy said I didn’t understand.

  Why are those guys even pushing you down? I asked, and the boy said they just were. But why, I asked, there must be a reason, it can’t be arbitrary, and the boy said it was. Well, hang in there, I told him.

  But the boy preferred a war vet’s advice. The boy came to like the way his own hand can curl into a fist. How that fist can bloody a nose.

  This boy, my son, is eleven years old. Standing four-foot-eight and weighing seventy-three pounds, he shows no natural athletic ability, no physical coordination, though he has other amazing talents: wiggling his ears, curling his tongue, raising just one eyebrow. Supersonic hearing enables him to eavesdrop on conversations taking place behind closed doors.

  He’s also a cruel mimic. “I’ll be Mom,” he says, and he puts his hands on his hips and bops his head. “I am absolutely bone weary!” he cries. He’s made his voice squeaky and shrill and, for some reason, southern. It’s not how I sound, though I recognize the furrowed brow and bunched-up lips. “I mean, what I wouldn’t do for a hot bath, a soft bed, and a stiff . . . cocktail!”

  The boy has no interest in, or sense of, fashion, though he dislikes when I refer to what he’s wearing as an “outfit.” He’s aware of Eminem, but prefers to push Matchboxes in the sandbox or sit in his room building fantastical flying machines out of Legos. His morning breath will gag you, but he doesn’t have B.O. His skin is unblemished. He has dimples and his father’s high forehead. He wears glasses and longs for contacts, though I don’t approve of giving contacts to a person who can’t remember to flush the toilet. He’s a good-looking boy who is going to be a good-looking man. He’s aware of it. He’s not above using it, especially on the nuns at Holy Trinity Catholic School who let him turn in his homework late and the female bakers at City Market who give him extra cookies. His eyelashes are so long they bend against the lenses in his glasses. His lips are pouty and red. He can look mournful, desolate, despairing, and in need of comfort, though it’s unclear to me whether this is what he intends or just what I think. The boy has never thrown a tantrum. He’s never slammed a door or said I-hate-you-you’re-a-horrible-mother-I-wish-any-woman-was-my-mother-but-you! Without self-consciousness, he holds my hand as we walk through the parking lot. His hands are sticky no matter how many times I tell him to wash them.

  Last night at dinner, I tried to comfort the boy. He had to write a paper about an event that took place on the date of his birth. He didn’t like the assignment.

  I’d done some research, and though the results weren’t stand-up-and-cheer, I thought he might feel a littl
e better. We were eating spaghetti when I told him Ron Howard’s brother, Clint, was born on April 20. The siege on Londonderry, an exciting moment in British history, happened on April 20, and April 20 is also the date President Jimmy Carter was attacked by a swamp rabbit while on a canoe trip in Plains, Georgia. I encouraged the boy to think of his birthday as 4-20, which, as legend has it, is California cop code for public cannabis use. All the clocks in Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction are stopped at 4:20, and 4:20, I’m told, is teatime in Amsterdam. In fact, I said, as I passed him the Parmesan, since your favorite subject is social studies, you’ll enjoy this: there’s a subculture, an entire group of interesting people in places like, say, Ann Arbor, Michigan, or Boulder, Colorado, or Berkeley, California, who’d be thrilled to have April 20 as a birthday since it is also the day they celebrate an international event called the Hash Bash.

  The boy thought about this. Then he stuck his pinky finger in the Parmesan. He sniffed it, sighing like a cynical and weary cop in a rumpled suit and fedora hat who’s seen it all one too many times. He touched the tip of his pinky to his tongue. “It’s marijuana, all right,” he said. He was shaking his head like he regretted what he was about to say, but it was something that had to be said. “What we have here is a 4-20, and it’s my own mother.”