The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters With the Human Race

by Sara Barron

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” I said. “Also, I was thinking I might sleep on your top bunk. Instead of in my room with Lucille.”

  “Sure,” he said. “No problem.”

  There was a pause during which we both looked to the wall separating us from what had been my bedroom but was now Lucille’s unkempt lair.

  “Her earlobes are awful,” Sam said.

  “I know,” I said. “It’s like someone yanked them off her head and used them as a teething ring …”

  “And then sewed them back on,” he said. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  As we learn to accept that we’ll one day find ourselves attracted to douchebag(uette)s for the simple reason that they’ve got butts like Chinese dumplings, so must we learn to devise strategic methods for the self-serving laying of blame. Don’t hate your brother, hate Carmen Electra. Don’t hate your sister, hate how she spells “womyn.” Aim low, ignore, endure. It sounds bleak, I know. But it’s worth it, I think, if you wind up less alone.

  3

  The Stupids Step Out

  When I was a child, my parents upheld the tradition of taking Sam and me on summer vacations. They were generally tight-fisted with money, but vacations they viewed as a worthwhile luxury. My mother in particular, who felt she was broadening her children’s horizons. Miami Beach, the Grand Canyon, Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Glance upon these diverse sections of the vast nation, cultivate an open mind.

  “It’ll shock you,” she’d told me en route to San Diego, “how changed you’ll feel by the time we get back. Changed how, it’s hard to say. But you’ll be … different. You’ll have seen … the world.”

  But then in the summer of 1990, our excursions came to a halt when my father lost his job. He had spent fifteen years employed by a company at which he wrote dictionary definitions. Until, that is, he showed up one morning and was called into an office and they said the word “downsize.”

  And that was pretty much that.

  My parents responded to the news in different ways. My father, having arrived home in the middle of the day with no clear sense of when or why he’d have to leave again, sat sobbing on the couch, whereas my mother scrambled around searching for any and all returnable items. She found a handful of sweaters and a pack of frozen shrimp. She called her travel agent to cancel our forthcoming trip to Boston.

  I was personally saddened by my father’s job loss. It wasn’t pleasant seeing him wedged in the fetal position, sobbing. More to the point, I had been looking forward to authentic chowder. I now planned to pass the afternoon shut in my bedroom feeling sorry for myself. But I did not manage this successfully. Not once I heard my mother yelling from downstairs.

  “EVERYONE INTO THE DEN!” she yelled. “I CALL A MEETING OF THE FAMILY!”

  This meeting had no precedent, and unfolded rather like how I’d seen family meetings of the mafia portrayed on-screen. Except that we had women. And inhalers.

  “There’s family business to address,” she said. “New arrangements must be made.”

  She told us all to get a pen and paper and write down two cost-free activities that we each found personally enjoyable. Having done so, we’d read them aloud and construct what, in twenty-first-century parlance, is most commonly called a staycation. Everyone did as instructed, and we wound up with the following.

  1. Family walk; family picnic

  2. Reading books; family walk

  3. Wash the car; sit on a float

  4. Doughnut

  Sam was the one who wrote “doughnut.” I was the one who brought up car washes and float-sitting. As I am accountable only for myself, I can explain only my own choices:

  Waving at subservient masses from atop one’s colorful, motorized throne is an empirically pleasant leisure activity.

  As for car washes, they’d been a venerable obsession for years. I’d seen the activity portrayed on-screen numerous times, always as a precursor to some bit of alluring body contact between those doing the washing. The lady character would get doused in sudsy water, desired, and pursued. The overused scenario had left me with the impression that if only I stood with my family in our driveway lathering up the Ford Escort station wagon, one of my male contemporaries might roll by on a skateboard for a look at soapy, eroticized me. I’d be sun-kissed, and possessing of the additional glow one gets embracing life.

  “Join us,” I’d urge the passerby. “It’s, like, so the more the merrier.”

  And then: My family evaporates into thin air! The male contemporary tackles me nonviolently to the ground! I lie beneath him giggling and breathless, and he’s overcome with what he calls my “… natural beauty. Wow. Do you know Cynthia Rhodes?”

  “I don’t,” I say. “Whosoever is Cynthia Rhodes?”

  “She plays Penny in Dirty Dancing,” he says, “and you look exactly like her. Or, I guess, she looks like you.”

  ALL SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES were approved, save for my float-sitting, which my mother claimed involved excessive sun exposure. But the others were honored with their own special day: Barron Family Walking Day. Barron Family Reading Day. Barron Family Make-a-Doughnut Day. The lack of float-sitting was replaced with Barron Family Pool Day. We followed through with Barron Family Car Wash Day, but no male contemporary swung by on a skateboard. This disappointment was compensated for when my mother and brother—the latter in a wet T-shirt, plumped decidedly up by asthma medication—shared an amusing exchange:

  Sam: I am fat.

  Mom: Congratulations.

  Sam: I am fat. Look. (Pointing at his chest.) Boobs.

  Mom: Those aren’t boobs, Sam. They’re nipples.

  Sam: Nipples are boobs, when you’re fat.

  Mom: (Looking at the nipples.) Huh. I guess you’re right.

  My parents, high on resourcefulness, acted atypically relaxed. Their money-saving feathers couldn’t ruffle, not even if Sam or I misbehaved. And Sam and I misbehaved. During Barron Family Pool Day, Sam purposefully shat while sitting on the pool deck. He was seven. This story, euphemistically titled “Sam at the Pool,” is key in my family’s anecdotal canon. For this particular retelling, I called my brother and left a voice mail in which I asked, in effect, what he’d been thinking at the time. The voice mail he left in response has here been directly transcribed:

  I used to have a very hard time moving my bowels. I hated to do it, especially in a strange bathroom. So I’d be really hesitant to go use the bathroom. So it was just like, “Oh. There’s no way I’m getting up to go to the bathroom. I’m having fun in a pool and don’t want to do that …” And so I was all like that, until I had to go. I was sitting poolside, and … I don’t know. Mom and Dad were right there, so I didn’t think I’d get away with it secretly or anything. It wasn’t like, “Ooooh. I’m gonna get in trouble.” I wasn’t even ashamed. It was more like, “Well, whatever … Dad’ll clean it up.”

  Sam intuited correctly. He shat on a pool deck, and my father’s course of disciplinary action was to reach for his towel so he could clean it up himself.

  “Ah, well,” he said to no one in particular. “Parenthood, right? All in a day’s work.”

  I wasn’t much better, shoplifting Purdue packaged ham on Barron Family Make-a-Doughnut Day. We’d gone to the grocery store to buy vanilla extract and I wandered off to the cold-cuts department. That’s where I saw the ham, and stuffed it down my underpants. When inevitably my mother found the ham—I’d tucked it under the fitted sheet that went over my single mattress—I decided to admit the theft rather than lie about having spent her money.

  My mother ruffled my hair in response.

  “Well,” she said. “It is a special week.”

  These Barron Family Activity Days occurred most often in public, and this meant we earned a positive reputation for spending so much quality time together. In the latter half of Barron Family Pool Day, we had gone to shmy at a local art fair.

  “Shmy” is a Yiddish term for “stroll, wander,
or window-shop,” and the subtext of the word, at least in my experience, suggests that one’s superior for having done so—that is, for having looked but not bought. If one says, “I’m shmying,” one’s also said, “I’m not so self-indulgent as to buy, of course. I’ve merely looked.”

  So we’d gone to shmy, and while shmying, we’d run into one of my mother’s friends.

  “You Barrons!” said the friend. “Just yesterday I was driving around and saw you all out together walking! Now here you are again, all out together buying art!”

  “We’re not buying art,” said my mother. “We’re shmying art.”

  “Well, it’s lovely, whatever it is. It’d be great if my kids did a little more walking or shyming. Just a little more willing participation, you know?”

  “Can’t say I do,” said my mom. “My kids are up for anything. I’m very lucky.”

  “Anything” may have meant a walk or a shmy, but it also meant public shitting and shoplifting. However, my mother didn’t want to share the full picture of her experience, and who could blame her? She had admirers now. She had an image to maintain.

  The week was labeled a success. My parents had enjoyed the frugality, and as for me, I loved the faint hints of encouragement. I loved the sense that we were up to something special. Might I have preferred a situation wherein the glory was mine and mine alone? Of course. My ideal would have been to spend the whole of our staycation sitting by myself on the float of my dreams in the center of town. But something is better than nothing. A little attention at an art fair is better than no attention at some chowder hut in Boston. And as for Sam? Well, Sam was so mellow he’d shat on a pool deck. Sam was happy. Sam was fine.

  These joys and satisfactions snowballed into an ambrosial cocktail that convinced my parents to forsake family vacations entirely. Instead, we reserved a week every August for Barron Family Activity Days. We did it from that first year in 1990, when my father lost his job, to 1997, when I left to go to college.

  August 1993 was noteworthy in that we spent the whole of the week at a nearby nature preserve. Which is not to say we camped, as the budget-conscious Barrons would sooner max out credit cards than we would attempt to pitch a tent. We rather drove there and back every day to attend a series of free classes. We flower-pressed, fire-started, and bird-identified. It was during one such bird-identification class that my father won the contest for “Best Ruffed Grouse Drumming” under the tutelage of a woman named Leona. Leona was a burly instructor, and she rewarded my dad with a bandanna that said, YOU BELONG TO THE EARTH.

  “How’s about a round of applause for Mr. Barron!” she yelled, and handed over the bandanna.

  As instructed, the seven of us clapped: my mother, my brother, me. A retired couple. A child with muscular dystrophy. Her father, who’d come to push her in her wheelchair.

  The gang of us clapped for my dad.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You’re welcome!” said Leona. She paused. She said, “Well? Aren’t you gonna put it on?”

  I struggle to adequately explain how bizarre it would be to see my dad in a bandanna. In a feeble try, though, a short list of things that’d be more normal:

  1. If I grew myself a penis.

  2. If I found out my mother and father were brother and sister.

  Nevertheless, my father wanted to be gracious to Leona and not at all dismissive of her gift. So he bit the bullet and tried it on. The resulting visual made my mother laugh so hard, she pissed herself. I know because she told me.

  “I’ve laughed so hard I’ve pissed myself!” she said. “Are we having fun here, or what?!”

  IN THE MIDDLE 1990s, Barron Family Activity Days expanded to include seasonal variations. Each new season brought a fresh bounty of opportunity. In fall, there was Barron Family Raking Day and Barron Family Pumpkin Carving Day. We enjoyed Barron Family Biking Day, exploiting the chill in the air all twenty miles to the Harold Washington Library in downtown Chicago. Once there, we would bounce in unison to a free Klezmer band concert. In winter, there was Barron Family Sledding Day and Barron Family View-a-Manger Day. This last one involved ordering Chinese takeout, and eating in the car. As we ate, my father would drive us around nearby gentile suburbs like Highwood and Lake Forest, so we could point and laugh at the plastic or ceramic mangers. In 1994, there was a not-to-be-repeated Barron Family Caroling Day. The problem here was that we’d gone to a concert known for its audience participation, but then my manner of audience participation embarrassed my parents. I’d been standing directly in front of them bellowing along to “Good King Wenceslas,” when I overheard my mother tell my father, “She is screaming. Just screaming. Are you going to handle this, or should I?”

  I have a long history of giving myself over to the music, of getting brought back to reality when other people’s words and/or facial expressions suggest I’ve embarrassed myself. Perhaps the ’94 caroling attempt was the first time this happened. I can’t quite recall. Regardless, I was not yet ready to be humbled into silence, to accept my singing voice as that of a rangeless Ethel Merman. My parents, lacking the heart to interrupt me, put the kibosh on all future family caroling events. This ensured that if I cared to carol in the future, at least they wouldn’t be around to hear it.

  BACK WHEN BARRON Family Activity Days were in their nascent stages, I enjoyed them by virtue of the flickers of praise they could provide. But as late adolescence approached, the experience redefined itself as one of deep humiliation. Throughout high school, my spring break activities were but a guidebook for extraditing oneself from an already shaky social circle. My peers would go to Cancún, and I would stay with my family in Chicago. My peers would return cornrowed and tanned, and I would return having seen Dead Man Walking or The Birdcage. I knew a mean little thing named Avital Goldfarb. Her locker was next to mine, and I was nice to her out of fear, mostly, but also because in the case of spring break, I wanted to know how the other half lived.

  “Hi, Avital. So how was Cancún?”

  “Oh my God. BEYOND,” she said. “It was, like, totally beyond.”

  “Oh, wow,” I said. “What happened?”

  “Well,” she said, “David Weinberg and me fucked on a swim-up bar and then went to a bubble party after.”

  At the age of sixteen, I was not yet aware that a bubble party was a rave-like experience at which suds were poured on partygoers, who, more often than not, were outfitted in lingerie. I thought a bubble party was what happens when you and a chosen companion stomp around on bubble wrap to pop the bubbles.

  “I love bubble parties!” I said. “My brother Sam and I had one at home!”

  “Just the two of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “In your house?”

  “Yes. Since we couldn’t get down to the ’Cún.”

  “That’s really weird. I mean, like … wait: Did you just say ‘the ’Cún’?”

  Winter break was not much better. At the end of 1995, my mother finagled a deal on one-size-fits-all snow pants. The purchase facilitated the first of the Barron Family Sledding Days, in which my parents, brother, and I all wound up in matching snow pants. Because it was sunny this day, and all of us were nauseatingly pale and steered through life by my mother’s hypochondria, we were also all face-painted with zinc oxide.

  I enjoyed a half hour of good clean fun before a Jeep Cherokee’s worth of my classmates arrived outfitted in Oakley-brand everything. They carried a thermos each, and moved amidst a swell of smoke that smelled of marijuana.

  This brings me to the problem inherent to adequate sledding terrain: There’s never anywhere to hide. Interactions are inevitable. I wound up having mine with Jason Zellman.

  “Oh, hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Nice snow pants,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “What’s in your thermos?”

  “Vodka,” he said. “What’s on your face?”

  “Zinc oxide,” I said. “It makes me less susce
ptible to melanoma.”

  The exchange was unpleasant enough and it was made even worse by the history I shared with Jason Zellman. Three years prior, he’d overheard me in the junior high school cafeteria tell a friend, “You know what’s the worst thing? Butter on ham,” and then—and for reasons unknown—he made a beeline for me so as to slap a slice of butter-logged white bread on my cheek.

  What a boy named Jason Zellman was doing with so much butter on white bread, I’ll never know. But that’s beside the point. What I’m trying to convey is that the experience was remarkably disgusting, and that under even the best circumstance, in Jason Zellman’s presence I now felt vulnerable. As I also felt vulnerable when I was in a pair of snow pants to match my parents’ snow pants, the above conversation was a real one-two punch in the adolescent misery department. Physically painful, almost. Like pouring vodka down my snow pants. Like feeling vodka soak my nonabsorbent jeans.

  AN ODD THING happens in one’s early twenties, and that’s how associations shift regarding nerdish adolescence. Once a liability, the experience morphs suddenly and without warning into a fashionable bit of personal history. I believe this to be a first-world affliction. I can’t say for sure, as I don’t get out much to those third or second worlds—I am too afraid of food poisoning and/or slipping into an unsolvable depression—but here in the first world, we like to dish on what we’ve been through. We hit our twenties and find we crave a little color to our pasts.

  I was on the Internet the other day, stalking the wife of a current enemy. This proved an easy task, as she maintained a comprehensive blog. She’d stocked it with information like what restaurant she went to for dinner and how much she loves her second husband.

  Included in the margin was a 15 Things About Me list, and number 13 read as follows:

  “I have suffered. A lot.”

  I mention the excerpt, as it perfectly illustrates my point: We believe that to Suffer As a Child secures us our status as a Winningly Complex Adult.

  It is a popular trend but it is also misguided. For it prompts even the most stupidly, thoroughly, symmetrically attractive to swear they’ve done just that. They were nerds! Dorks! Tomboys! So thin that someone teased them!