Disquiet, Please!

by David Remnick

  Now I set for myself only those goals that I know to be completely achievable. I forgo all fantasy. In the coming quarter, I plan to increase the number of molds on the wall of my sleeping space; to increase the number of apéritifs I have before dinner; and of course I plan to increase my dependence on imported oil, which, since it is a broad national goal, I don’t really count. The results, I know, will be very gratifying. Sometimes, however, my candor and consistency are so overwhelming that I have to sit down and have a drink and smoke a cigarette. I have such a large amount of public trust now that in some ways it is almost too much. I don’t want to cut myself off from simple human experience, after all. I don’t want to surrender my warm human qualities. The public doesn’t want that, surely. So I have decided to relent in the case of my friend Bob Mern. I think the public will understand. I’d like Bob to come over and watch Starsky & Hutch with me. I will raise Bob’s rating back to a “B” (“Some Risk”). I will suppress this quarter’s report and send him a notice that his rating is “B.” I wonder if he will call me back. If he doesn’t, it will be a triumph, in a way, since it is a goal of mine to receive thirty-two percent fewer phone calls this quarter than last.

  1977

  POLLY FROST

  CARBOHYDRATES

  8:15. A balmy evening in February, the kind we’ve been having since global warming began. As usual, I’m standing around, wondering when Jonathan is going to show up. He’s already fifteen minutes late.

  8:17. At least I’ve stopped wondering why I always get involved with the wrong man, why I constantly find myself in destructive relationships. I used to think it was my fault. Then I read this book. Suddenly, I understood: He can try to deny it, but my father is an alcoholic. And I am an adult child of an alcoholic.

  My father has never thought that he was an alcoholic. Yet, when I was growing up, he had to have a drink every night when he came home from work. Guess who fixed it for him. He called it a “Jeanie.” After me. I’ve tried to help Dad face up to what he is, and I feel good about my efforts.

  Jeanie! One drink! One little drink! One drink a night does not an alcoholic make!

  Dad, you had to have it.

  Of course I had to! If you knew the pressures of Unit-Sales Management—

  I’m in Retail Dispersal, and you won’t find me drinking.

  Then I’d come home to “When are we going to get a new washing machine? How are we going to pay for Jean’s education and take that trip to Europe? What do you think of this hairdo?” Your mother had a million questions. But you. You were so mature for your age. You were there to listen. I never needed to go out and find a bartender to talk to. Not when I had my Jeanie.

  Stop trying to implicate me in your behavior! I will not be your co-denier!!

  The olive has always been my favorite part!

  8:21. Jonathan shouldn’t keep me waiting for dinner. He knows I’m hypoglycemic, even though he refuses to believe it. He thinks hypoglycemia was invented to annoy him. All those people who weren’t really hypoglycemic gave it a bad name. You’d be at an art gallery with them, or you’d be trying on a pair of slacks, or you’d be talking about something that interested you. Out of the blue, they’d announce that they were having a hypoglycemic attack. They absolutely had to eat that minute or else they were going to faint. And it would all be your fault. Of course, they weren’t hypoglycemic at all. They were just manipulative. I take responsibility for my own hypoglycemia. I always bring food with me.

  8:25. These really are pretty good cookies. Macadamia nuts have a particularly stabilizing effect on my blood sugar. So does guacamole, come to think of it. Too bad it’s so hard to pack in a shoulder bag. The important thing is, I’m calmer.

  I’m convinced that stress is the No. 1 factor in causing hypoglycemia. The stress from your job, the stress of being in a relationship, the stress of parents. Simply having parents is stressful.

  8:30. The worst part of being an adult child of an alcoholic is that I always find myself in relationships with passive-aggressives. How hard it is to tell if a man is a passive-aggressive! At first, they seem perfect. They listen to you, they let you take charge. You want to discuss feminist issues? They don’t get threatened; they smile.

  Then. Then the other behavior begins. The endless waiting—you waiting for them. I was involved with this P.-A., Tim. I had to be the one to decide that it was time for us to take a vacation, where we’d go, how we’d get there. He waited until we were at the airport to assert himself, just as they were giving the final boarding call. He said he needed to buy a copy of GQ, and he wandered off. He never showed up on that flight. I got on the plane anyway, and had the worst hypoglycemic attack of my life. As soon as I landed in Oaxaca, I had to eat five orders of guacamole to get myself to the point where I could breathe regularly. I couldn’t look at an avocado today if it weren’t for how they stabilize me.

  Tim showed up at the hotel room fifteen hours later with a big smile on his face. I threw all of the chocolate flan I was eating right at him—and flan is a major source of simple carbohydrates. He wiped the chocolate off and proposed to me on the spot. It doesn’t take much to figure this one out. He’d driven me crazy and turned me into an exact replica of his mother, punishing him with my tears and my rage. Do I have to say anything more about men who want to marry their mothers?

  Jonathan is also a P.-A. We’ve been engaged for three years. He hasn’t actually asked me to marry him—he’s trying to enrage me first, by making me wait for his offer. But I’m smarter than I was in Mexico. I know how to hold my own in these relationships. I simply tell everyone he’s my fiancé.

  8:42. Jonathan thinks this is going to make me upset. I’m not upset. He can get here whenever he wants. He knows I’ll just stare at him over dinner.

  8:46. I’m down to half a cookie and three seaweed chips. This is precisely the kind of predicament Jonathan likes to put me in. If I leave to find a deli, he’ll show up and I’ll be gone, and when I return he’ll say, “What do you mean I’m late? You weren’t even here!”

  The other night I saw a double bill of Sally Field and Julia Roberts trying to get away from their husbands. Sally’s trapped in Iran, and Julia’s stuck somewhere out on the Cape. Meanwhile, I’m sitting in the theater, waiting for Jonathan.

  8:48.23. People come and go, and my purse is devoid of nutrition. A man is standing two and a half feet from me, three inches into my personal-interaction area. Why do men do these things? This is not Jonathan, but this is a P.-A. That’s why he’s thumbing through the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, introducing a monokinied Elle Macpherson into my field of vision. This is a very angry man. If he were an aggressive-aggressive, he’d be doing something about his anger. He’d be out raping women. But oh, no, you’re just a passive-aggressive, so you’re standing here, shoving that magazine in my face, trying to make me feel bad about my body! I don’t know why! I never saw you before! Well, you’re not going to make me feel bad about my eating needs!

  I can’t believe it. Jonathan has me setting a new record. This is the worst hypoglycemic attack of my life. Either that, or it’s the earthquake they are always predicting for New York City. Or maybe the ice caps have finally melted.

  I will survive this. I deserve to survive this. I recycle! I buy only environmentally sound products for my cleaning lady to use! I eat only animals that have had the chance to move around a bit in their lives! Yes, I use sunblock that’s been tested on cocker spaniels, but I think that’s excusable! I deserve to have my co-op stay above water level!

  Dad, this is all your fault!

  Jeanie! One drink!

  I think it would be better for our relationship if I forgot your next birthday.

  One little drink!

  What about my needs?

  8:53. These Korean grocery stores are always so busy, but I am entitled to stand here and eat. God, I love Ben & Jerry’s. It’s true, though, what the books say about other men. They just don’t have it in them to give m
e what I need. I must empower myself. With every spoonful of Heath Bar Crunch, I am becoming stronger.

  Jeanie!

  You had your chance, Dad.

  Jonathan can wait for me forever on that street corner, as far as I’m concerned. Because Ben and Jerry care. They care about the future of this planet. Every time you eat their ice cream you are also helping to save the rain forest. Ben and Jerry care about sustainable agriculture. They care about their employees. They care about educating visitors to their factory in Vermont. And they want me to become my own person.

  1991

  WENDY WASSERSTEIN

  SHIKSA GODDESS

  I CANNOT tell a lie. Now that Madeleine Albright, Tom Stoppard, and even Hillary Rodham Clinton have embraced their Jewish roots, I feel compelled to bite the bullet and publicly reveal that I’ve just discovered my own denominational truth. I am Episcopalian.

  I should have guessed a long time ago, because my parents never mentioned it. In fact, they hid it. They sent me to primary school at the Yeshiva Flatbush. It never crossed my mind that I was deliberately being isolated. On our classroom walls were portraits of Chaim Weitzman and Golda Meir in place of Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower. Our horror stories were not of being buried by Communists but of being suffocated by nomad ham sandwiches.

  We lived in a Jewish neighborhood in Flatbush. Our shopping strip included kosher butchers and Hymie’s Highway Appetizers. For Sunday brunch, my mother produced bagels, belly lox, and cream cheese with scallions. Nobody told me that lox lived a double life as smoked salmon, or that herring could ever be kippered.

  Even the Christmas holidays were a setup. Every year on Christmas Eve, we were on a jet to Miami Beach. There was not even a chance for us to watch the WPIX Channel 11 Yule log burning as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sang “Silent Night.” We celebrated the holidays front-row center at the Versailles Room, with Myron Cohen warming up our crowd for Sammy Davis, Jr. Even our African Americans were Jewish!

  Until now, I’ve had a happy life thinking of myself as a Jewish writer. I came to accept that when my work was described as being “too New York” it was really a euphemism for something else. I belonged to a temple, and, on my opening nights, my mother invariably told friends that she’d be much happier if it was my wedding. In other words, I had a solid sense of self. I knew exactly who I was.

  Then the bottom fell out. I was speaking at the Lion of Judah Luncheon in Palm Beach recently when I noticed a woman in a Lilly Pulitzer dress, one strand of pearls, and forty-year-old pink Pappagallo shoes leaning against the door. She stood out from the crowd because, instead of the omnipresent Barry Kisselstein Cord purse with lizard clasp, she was carrying a battered lacrosse stick.

  At the conclusion of my talk, she approached the podium. “I hope you don’t mind my speaking to you, but I believe we are related,” she said.

  I looked at her dead-straight blond hair and smiled politely. “I doubt it.”

  “Your name translates to Waterston,” she continued. “Harry Waterston, your great-uncle twice removed, was my mother’s fourth husband. They were married for one month.” She looked at me as if only a simpleton wouldn’t make the immediate connection.

  I did have a distant relative, Dr. Harry Wasserstein, but I never heard of him marrying anyone but Aunt Rivkah. According to my mother, even though Harry was an educated man, he never worked a day in his life, and Rivkah’s life was miserable.

  “I think you must be mistaken,” I said, and tried to excuse myself.

  “After he left my mother, Harry Waterston changed his name to Wasserstein because he wanted his son to go to an Ivy League college, and to Mount Sinai Medical School. Harry, Jr., became an educated man, but he never worked a day in his life.”

  I was shvitzing. I mean sweating. “Our name actually translates to Waterstone,” I said.

  “That’s irrelevant!” She was almost haughty. “Look at that actor on Law & Order—what’s his name, Sam? He’s a Hasid if I ever saw one.”

  She handed me the lacrosse stick while I made a mental note to find out what Sam Waterston was doing for the High Holy Days. “This was Harry’s lacrosse stick, which he used the year he was expelled from Hotchkiss,” she said. “He made me promise to give it to the first Wasserstein relative I met in Palm Beach. He said it was inevitable that one of you people would show up here!” She winked and left the room.

  Good or bad news had always made me hungry. But for the first time in my life I needed a drink. Maybe she was on to something.

  That week, I began eating chicken sandwiches with mayo on white bread, no crust, and getting full after two bites. For the first time in my life, I wrote in to The Mount Holyoke Quarterly: “Am looking to buy thirty-year-old Saab car and to apologize to all the Holyoke girls named Timothy and Kikky, whom I never spoke to. I now know you were very interesting people.”

  I began wearing faded cardigan sweaters and canceled all appointments for massages, pedicures, and exploratory liposuction. I gave up on my complicated relationship with a married Jewish Malaysian vibes player and learned to enjoy the company of a divorced asexual friend from Amherst who studies pharmaceutical stocks for J. P. Morgan. I began running ten miles every morning and sculling down the Hudson nightly. My approval ratings with my friends have gone up fifteen points.

  But I was still, as I used to say in Yiddish, “nit ahin, nit aher,” or, as I now say in the Queen’s English, “neither here nor there.”

  That was when I decided to go on a listening tour of Fishers Island. I wanted to really hear the stories of my new Wasp ancestors, learn to make their cocktails, and wear their headbands. I want to live up to my true destiny and announce to the world how great it is to be goyisheh like me.

  1999

  JACK HANDEY

  LOWERING MY STANDARDS

  AS you may have heard, I have very high standards. When people see me do something, they often shake their heads in disbelief. That’s how high my standards are.

  But lately I’ve been wondering if maybe they’re not too high. Am I pushing myself too hard? Do I always have to be the one that everybody looks up to? Are my high standards hurting my happiness and things like that?

  Why, for instance, do I always have to be the first one to show up at a party and the last one to leave? And, while I’m at the party, is it really so important that I tell the dirtiest joke? A lot of times, I’m the only one telling a dirty joke, so it’s not even that big an accomplishment. And, if someone else does tell a dirty joke, why do I feel compelled to tell one that is even dirtier and more graphic? Just so I can be No. 1?

  Why do I sometimes feel like I should get “a job,” or do some kind of “work”? Does thinking about maybe getting a job make me better than other people? Am I worried that if I quit borrowing money from my friends they’ll think I’m stuck-up?

  Why do I have to be the honest one? Do people really want you to be that honest about how old they look or how big their breasts are?

  When I catch my foot and stumble on the sidewalk, why do I have to pretend to keep stumbling, all the way down the street? To avoid embarrassment?

  At every get-together, why do I have to do my funny cowboy dance? Why not do a dance that isn’t so demanding, like my funny robot dance, or just funny prancing?

  Is it really my responsibility that half-empty glasses of beer not be wasted?

  Whenever there’s a scary sound at night, why do I have to do all the screaming? Maybe somebody else can scream and cry and beg for mercy, for a change.

  Would the world really fall apart if I didn’t point out to people which are the regular goldfish and which are the bug-eyed ones? Let them figure it out on their own.

  Why does it have to be me who ends up asking how much someone paid for something? Everyone is curious.

  Could a sock really be a parachute for a mouse? Maybe not, but does that mean I have to stand up in the middle of the movie theater and start booing?

  Why do I always have to be the one who
sums up what was just said, or explains to the children what Hell is, or calls the meeting to order?

  These are all questions I would never even have asked myself until that incident with Don. Every day, my friend Don and I would see who could trip each other the most times. But then one day I tripped him and he fell and broke his jaw. He looked up and, with slurred speech, said, “I guess you win.” But what did I win? I didn’t win anything, and you know why? Because I forgot to make a bet with him. But something else was wrong, and I knew it. Why did I want to trip Don in the first place? To show how clever I was, or how brave, or how successful? Yes, all those things. So I guess that answers that.

  Still, something about it bothered me. I decided to drive up to a cabin in the mountains. For a week, all I did was sit and think and watch a lot of television. How, I agonized during the commercial breaks, did I get such high standards? Was it something from my childhood, or my fraternity-hood? Was it from another lifetime, when I was in another fraternity? I wondered if my high standards were leading me to a heart attack. Then I thought, Yes, but it’ll be the biggest heart attack anyone’s ever had. I wondered if it was even possible for a person like me to lower his standards. Then I wondered if they still make Bosco. I became so confused and frustrated I began smashing things in the cabin. I wound up running headlong into the woods in a panic when the people who owned the cabin suddenly showed up.

  As I drove back to civilization (as you squares call it), I had already made a momentous decision: I would keep thinking about the possibility of lowering my standards. Maybe, just maybe, I don’t always have to be the best. Maybe I don’t need to always be the first one to point and laugh. Maybe when I ask someone a question I don’t always have to begin it with the words “Pray tell.” Perhaps I don’t have to wear the fanciest fanny pack that money can buy. And when I’m at a dinner party maybe I don’t need to sniff every piece of food before I eat it. In short, perhaps I should worry less about doing the right thing and more about doing the right thang, whatever that means.