Ordinariness has always eluded me. Not that I ever searched for it very hard – it was too much fun to wow my classmates with tales of my rather colorful childhood and my mother’s stint as a chorus girl, and to drop a few names of the famous whose hands I had shaken along the way.
As I grew up and times changed, notable life events were still plentiful but less fun. I’d learned that the really cherished parents in this society organized school picnics and made brownies… and though I provided amusement I had totally failed to provide a Norman Rockwell world for my own children. After two or three decades there was a collection of disasters in my closet that sometimes made it difficult to shut the door.
From the ‘70’s to the ‘90’s I was a single mother living in New York City with four teen to twenty-somethings in various prep schools and colleges scattered around the country. Daughter #1 was at USC studying film. Daughter #2 was at college in Vermont studying photography. The two younger boys, their half-brothers, were home, struggling through high school and trying to grow weed in the bathroom without my noticing. The apartment rang with Kiss, Pink Floyd and the WHO which I was told daily I had to learn to appreciate. They wore gypsy headbands and had wispy nascent beards.
But changes were taking place in Son #1, which were watched suspiciously by his brother. The beard went and a small new neatness instinct was at work. His marks began to go up and he graduated from high school with a prize for “Most improvement.” He went on to become an ER nurse at Lenox Hill Hospital and a respectable citizen in suit and tie. And he met a girl far different from other girls he’d known, most of whom were notably short on both style and conversation, and brought her home for dinner.
I liked her as soon as I opened the door. She was blond, pretty and she wore a dress – no jeans or Kiss t-shirt. She smiled, she knew how to talk to adults – even in this trying situation.
She came from Texas. She was a pediatrician just finishing her training. The romance went with lightning speed and within a month they were engaged. They were going to live in Dallas. I saw photos of handsome houses on suburban streets, dogwoods and fields of bluebonnets, the family at the Country Club, in front of the Episcopal Church, waving from cars. Son #1 couldn’t wait – he was going to have the Norman Rockwell life I hadn’t given him. What did he have in New York, after all? A couple of divorced, depressed parents, two absent sisters and a betrayed younger brother. (I did have a boyfriend, but he was depressed too.)
Dates were set, parties discussed, clothes bought, plane reservations made. Son #1 gently told his father and me – in case we were absolutely clueless, which we were – that we needed to plan a cocktail party in New York and a rehearsal dinner in Dallas. By the time all this was launched, a pinpoint of anxiety was spreading like a stain throughout my entire interior. My tightly-locked closet of skeletons was going to be forced open.
Certain things were obvious. I was divorced, and my ex now belonged to S., a dishy blond in a miniskirt, who kept phoning me to discuss her outfit for the Dallas wedding and to further outline her plans for snaring the wedding bouquet. Son #2 was visibly angry at his brother for deserting the counterculture, and my two daughters, whom I’d tried to raise to be free and open-minded people, thought the Civil War was still going on.
“Texas!” they cried. “Their politics are horrible … they go to church…they eat weird things… they keep guns in their glove compartments.”
“Think what you want, but don’t you DARE say anything rude or I’ll kill you,” I shouted. All this and we hadn’t even started packing!
Son #1 said people had asked if my boyfriend and I had any plans to marry.
“NO,” I said, “and don’t hold your breath. They’ll just have to suck it up” – an expression I’d learned from my future daughter-in-law. My boyfriend was a respectable physician, for God’s sake. As the wedding approached I developed several nervous symptoms.
I asked Son #1 if he’d told his future in-laws about certain events at our house during times of extreme stress which had led to visits from the police. He said no and I said that was a good choice.
I asked him if he’d ever mentioned the tax errors of a certain family member which had led to arraignment and months of house arrest. My smart son again shook his head. Back into the closet.
What about me? My parents’ divorce, my father’s three wives, my two divorces. And what about Uncle Charlie – did he count? He’d served time for molesting little boys – he’d taken my little boys for rides, seemingly harmless, in his car, seating them on his lap – but he was an uncle by marriage, his genes went elsewhere – which must make a difference. Or Cousin Paul the Black Sheep (whose genes I shared), whose crimes were so extensive that my mother wouldn’t tell me what they were – leaving me to infer incest, cannibalism etc. And there had been a flaming love affair between two first cousins that was regarded in the family as sinfully incestuous. Once, years before, when I’d asked my mother if there was any insanity in our family, she’d looked thoughtful. “No – except for Cousin Bridget who swam straight out in Dublin Bay and never came back.”
At the Rehearsal Dinner, my daughters’ few words to their brother through a microphone were more like dirges than messages of hope and joy.
“Don’t leave us,” one sobbed.
“Don’t ever forget you’re a Yankee and a New Yorker,” the other choked.
(Never mind that they had both married and moved thousands of miles away.)
At the lovely Dallas Country Club wedding, with everything from Tex-Mex to caviar to champagne, my sons and two sons-in-law managed to get hold of enough drums and electric guitars to perform the Stones’ “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.” The wedding guests looked stunned but were very polite. And the blond in the miniskirt, Son #1’s virtual stepmother, managed to shove enough bridesmaids aside to catch the bouquet… sure confirmation, she said, that she and Ex-Husband would be married very soon.
Son #1 laughed and said, “Dad’s practically hiding under the table.”
When the minister finally pronounced the significant words I breathed a huge sigh of relief that the dread door hadn’t opened and flooded us all right out of Dallas.
In spite of a rather colorful background – or perhaps because of it – I’d been a shy and self-conscious child, sure that I was somehow different and inferior to the other kids in my class. There was something about Dallas – its seeming propriety, its bumptious, good-humored confidence, its unselfconscious religiosity, which – for no good reason – plummeted me straight back to the sixth grade. Again everybody else had the desired ordinariness, I was the oddball. I was an atheist and a Democrat: I dressed differently, ate differently, talked differently, thought differently. I didn’t, and would never love guns or football… though I did have a certain fondness for rodeos.
Son #1 stepped into all this with ease and grace. Church was fine, he’d discovered religion years before in spite of his godless mother. He’d outgrown scuzziness and rebelliousness, he had a sunny disposition. He ate anything anybody fed him, he was learning to cook. Over the years, he even developed a certain weird pride in being a Texan… which he now was.
But as time passed and I got to know the Dallas family better, certain things leaked out: a bad streak of alcoholism had killed one uncle and was threatening a cousin. Yet another cousin had an entire closet full of guns, though nobody but me seemed to regard this as pathological. Best of all – if you want to look at it that way – a certain close member of the family was serving time for some kind of financial shenanigans which sounded to me like embezzlement – and would later serve another sentence for the same thing all over again. This cancelled out similar doings in our family and made everything fair and square
And in case all this wasn’t enough: as time passed the young couple had three daughters… and the middle one insisted, starting at age 4, that she was a boy… and today at 16 she is, mostly, a he. To me – but only me – that wipes out everything else for sheer street theater. Now the daughter is a tall son with a deep voice, in a suit and tie, and nobody turns a hair – and this is Texas. It’s fine with them all, and nobody will let me stuff him into a closet. (They’re all full, anyway.)
The world has totally changed again.
