Gym teachers were forever trying to bring out something that wasn’t there. It wasn’t just that my muscles seemed improperly strung and my stamina lacking, my problem lay in the fact that I simply didn’t care. Oh, I cared a great deal about looking clumsy as I struggled up the climbing rope and ran, knees knocking, to first base on the pinch-hit home run made by a friend. I cared, when teams were chosen, that I was picked last or dealt out like a handicap to whichever seemed the better team. But I had no feeling for nets and baskets and spinning, bouncing leather-covered spheres. I never felt, when watching a game, the way suspenseful books and movies make me feel—tense and excited, muttering under my breath (a cinematic cheerleader) “Come on, you can do it. Hurry up!”
One thing that saved me was that the class “nummers,” “retards,” “spastics” like me always came in pairs. All through the years I spent at war with balls and gym teachers, I had an ally. Sometimes she would be the class fat girl or someone born with a leg that never grew right, or a poor girl from the country with wishbone legs and bangs that fell down in her eyes and no real gym suit, which was (I suspected) the real reason why she didn’t play. Most often my companion on the outfield would be a borderline outsider like me, someone who wrote poetry or got talked about for her funny hand-me-downs, or a hysterical giggler who chewed her nails and wrote dirty jokes with me in study hall.
The way athletic competence had been distributed among us always fascinated me. It happened too often to be a coincidence, that the same people who were cool and cute-looking and bright (in an unthreatening way)—and popular—were the ones who got picked first, were, in fact, the captains of the teams. Their grace—no, it was ease, really, and confidence—seemed to be transferable from one part of life to another. The line between Winners and Losers cut through all phases of school life almost from kindergarten on, and to cross it was as hard as kicking the ball past the goal posts. At age thirteen I felt my life was fated from then on—I saw the pattern that had followed me so far as never-changing right up to my death. That was what frightened and discouraged me most about phys. ed.—the feeling (reinforced at every step) that I was a loser. It seemed as though the sole object of those classes was to chip away the ego, bit by bit. I felt it on the baseball field and at the spider ball net, stumbling through the obstacle course (alone, the whole class watching) and back in the locker room, where even my sweatlessness pointed to my inadequacy, where the jaunty, casual talk in the great open shower stall (it comes to me in nightmares still—a gas chamber) made me blush, where the weekly inspection to make sure we’d really showered sent me fleeing to the bathroom stalls (I’d bared myself enough in class without adding the shame of a flat chest to my list of failures), where even opening the combination lock of a locker was impossible for me.
The very way you walked was important, not to the ones who did it right—they never had to think about it or to practice, their shoes were never worn more on one side than on the other—but to the ones who didn’t, the ones who bounced or swayed or slumped. I was aware of almost every step I took, imagined mirrors and heavy clumping sounds. I envied ballerinas, and studied the girls at school whose walking I admired to see just how they swung their arms and where they put their chins and shoulders. That was something I did a lot—checking to see how the others, the very popular ones, did things—how they chewed their lunch-box carrot sticks, whether they wore loafers with pennies in them or not (not—penny loafers were corny), and whether, on rainy days, they put on rubbers or got their feet soaked. But like that storybook character who brings his mother milk when she asks for eggs, eggs when she asks for flour, flour when she wants milk, no matter what I learned from my study of The Popular, I seemed to be forever one step out of time.
Never positively unpopular, I hung around the fringes, moving in just occasionally to become a student council secretary or dance decorations chairman. The logical train of thought that put me in office was the same kind by which people assume that if a man paints still lifes and landscapes well, surely he can do walls and fences; if I could write poetry—awful stuff, too—surely I’d be perfect for writing minutes.
I used to blame it on my name, the hissing at the end of my one syllable, the impossibility of abbreviating what was, itself, a kind of abbreviation, and the awkwardness of adding y or ie or, as some girls did, when they hit junior high, the letter i. If I had been Debbie or Cyndi or Kathy or Sally—Deb or Cind or Kath or Sal … well, things would have been different. Sometimes, usually in September, when a new teacher and a new bunch of kids gave me—briefly—the illusion of a fresh start, I’d try a nickname, instructing my parents and my best friend, Becky, to call me (oh God!) Cricket or Pumpkin or DJ. On the first day of school, as the roll call was read, it seemed to me that there was plenty in a name, all right. The LuAnns and Franceses of the fourth grade would sink, one always knew, and from the moment when red-haired Margie Taylor’s name was read (it happened every year: “Mary Margaret” the teacher would say … mock horror from the class, then giggles, “Margie, she means you,” and a long, funny cute-dumb explanation, “Well my parents named me Mary, but …”), from that moment, we knew that Margie had it made.
By fifth or sixth grade I had learned that new haircuts and bobby-pin curls and red underpants would make no difference, and I became—in the name department, anyway—almost humble, flattered when a boy or a big kid (seventh grade) called me by name, because it meant that he acknowledged my existence, he recognized and accepted a decision made by my parents twelve years before. Even boys’ not bumping into me as we passed in the halls came to seem a compliment. They saw me, they had not ignored me, and they—those celebrities whose discarded lunch bags, even, seemed special to me—they had altered their course down the hallway to allow for me.
It was reverse logic, really, my plan to change my name, my walk, my parents—to copy the kids who seemed always right, the popular ones. I longed for the kind of parents who played bridge and went to PTA and took me camping and bowling. Or, more precisely, I longed not to have a different set of parents who did those things but—contradiction in terms—I wished my own parents would do them. They went along with me—they tried bowling, even (and it is one of my favorite images of them: my father in his tie and jacket, reluctant to let go of the ball, rolling it slowly so as not to chip the pins; my mother lobbing it energetically into one gutter or the other and making an occasional strike), but of course they put the label of our strangeness on their bowling so that, far from making us more normal—like those families on TV—it only pointed up how different we were. I came to see, finally, that the parents of the Kathys and Cindys and Debbies of the world were what I called right (by that I meant they fitted in, everything they did seemed properly American) not because they did things like bowling, but that they did things like bowling because they were, from the core, right. Whatever they had done, because they did it, would have seemed fitting. When I affected their actions I was imitating effects instead of causes, so of course I failed.
1965
ASK US WHOSE FACE is on the five-dollar bill and we may not know the answer. But nearly everyone my age remembers a cover of Life magazine that came out in the fall of 1965, part of a series of photographs that enter my dreams and my nightmares still. They were the first shots ever taken of an unborn fetus, curled up tightly in a sack of veins and membranes, with blue fingernails and almost transparent skin that made the pictures look like double exposures. More than the moon photographs a few years later, that grotesque figure fascinated me as the map of a new territory. It was often that way with photographs in Life—the issue that reported on the In Cold Blood murders; a single picture of a boy falling from an airplane and another of a woman who had lost two hundred pounds. (I remember the faces of victims and killers from eight years ago, while the endless issues on Rome and nature studies are entirely lost.)
Photographs are the illustrations for a decade of experiences. Just as, when we think of Alice in Wonderland we all
see Tenniel’s drawings, and when we think of the Cowardly Lion we all see Bert Lahr, so, when we think of Lyndon Johnson’s air-borne swearing-in as president in 1963, we have a common image furnished by magazines. And when we think of fetuses, now, those cabbages and smiling, golden-haired cherubs have been replaced forever by the cover of Life. Having had so many pictures to grow up with, we share a common visual idiom and have far less room for personal vision. The movie versions of books decide for us what our heroes and villains will look like, and we are powerless to change the camera’s decree. So, while I was stunned and fascinated by that eerie fetus (where is he now, I wonder, and are those pictures in his family album?) I’m saddened, too, knowing what it did to me. If I were asked to pinpoint major moments in my growing up, experiences that changed me, the sight of that photograph would be one.
I AM A MAGAZINE and paperback reader, but most of all a television watcher. What I think of as a uniquely American brand of banality fascinates me. In bookstores I pick up paperbacks and check before I buy to see if the characters have foreign names, whether the action takes place in London or New York. Intellectual friends (who watch no TV) can’t understand what I see in reruns of old Andy Griffith shows. “Nothing happens,” they say. “The characters are dull, plastic, faceless. Every show is the same.” I guess that’s why I watch them—boring repetition is, itself, a rhythm—a steady pulse of flashing Coca-Cola signs, Holiday Inn signs, and the Golden Arches of McDonald’s.
I don’t watch TV as an anthropologist, rising loftily above my subject to analyze. Neither do I watch, as some kids now tune in to reruns of “The Lone Ranger” and “Superman” (in the same spirit they enjoy comic books and pop art) for their camp. I watch in earnest. How can I do anything else? Five thousand hours of my life have gone into this box.
I was an undiscriminating television viewer who would sometimes sit down before the set at three o’clock, when I got home from school, and not get up again till dinner, not even to change the channels. I let it all pour over me—the quiz shows and the soap operas, old movies and Westerns, but what I liked best were the situation comedies. I followed them all—“The Beverly Hillbillies,” “My Favorite Martian,” “The Flying Nun,” “My Mother the Car”—with a certain assurance at the start of each show that exaggeration, broad or narrow, dry or wet, was to follow, that bathtubs would not just overflow, they would fill the house with soap bubbles; that ghosts would levitate objects for the benefit of someone’s boss, who had so little confidence in his own sanity that this would be enough to drive him near the brink—his nervous breakdowns were supposed to make us smile; that a nun could fly, a witch would marry a mortal, a horse would talk and some outlandish figure would move into someone’s otherwise-normal suburban home—a martian, a genie, a woman reincarnated as a 1933 Ford. The very farfetched shows—the ones whose plots hinged on some outside improbability—I watched, but never completely enjoyed, just as I never liked the way comic books and cartoons made me feel, and never cared for the broad, punch-me humor of “The Three Stooges.” Their exaggeration seemed like mockery, too stylized, too far removed from any recognizable human motive.
What I liked best of all were the quiet, often dull family situations whose fascination for me lay in their comfortable unremarkableness. A few contained genuine comic spark, of course (“I Love Lucy,” the old “Dick Van Dyke Show,” “The Andy Griffith Show”), and those I watched for the performances, conscious of being entertained, and of Lucille Ball’s silly-putty mouth and Dick Van Dyke’s graceful awkwardness, as he tripped, weekly, over the steps in his split-level and into the arms of Mary Tyler Moore. The other shows, though—the forgotten half-hours that died in midseason, and the ones, like “The Real McCoys,” “Father Knows Best,” “Ozzie and Harriet,” “Make Room for Daddy,” that went on, like breathing, forever, so that the children grew up before our eyes, while the fathers balded and the mothers went gray—those gave me another sort of satisfaction. They made the eventlessness of my own life, the eventlessness that had brought me to the set in the first place, seem comfortingly acceptable.
Anyone can see comedy—or Komedy—in the levitations of a martian or the exaggerated dress and accent of a millionaire hillbilly. What a show like “Leave It to Beaver” did was harder—it made everydayness entertaining, even beguiling, it seemed to put a comic frame around my kind of life, tended to magnify the everyday situation (or to present it, unmagnified, in all its dilution, as if the camera had simply recorded any random half-hour at the Cleaver house). I loved “Leave It to Beaver”; I saw every episode two or three times, witnessed Beaver’s aging, his legs getting longer and his voice lower, only to start all over again with young Beaver every fall. (Someone told me recently that the boy who played Beaver Cleaver died in Vietnam. The news was a shock, the first thing that had made the war seem real to me. I kept coming back to it for days, until another distressed Beaver fan told me that it wasn’t true after all.)
We watched Westerns and police dramas for vicarious excitement, to see, from our armchairs, as observers, scenes we would never in life be part of, and so there was a necessary sadness to the act of watching, coming from the knowledge that people like the ones the show portrayed would never need to watch TV. But there was nothing vicarious about watching Bud Anderson or Ricky Nelson or Patty Duke—even the names are forgettable, beside “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.’s” Napoleon Solo, or Zorro. The Bud Andersons of the world watched TV too, it was clear, so seeing them on TV was rather like seeing ourselves. Not that the situation comedies were realistic—our kitchen at home never looked like Donna Reed’s—but they were at least fascinatingly ordinary. Too much realism would have jarred; things in real life never have that reassuring television symmetry, soothing as the ticking of a clock.
I remember the one time, in all my years of viewing, when a TV family seemed to break the code of what’s supposed to happen on TV and what isn’t. The actress playing Danny Thomas’s wife on “Make Room for Daddy” must actually have died, or just got tired of playing Mom to Sherry and Rusty. At any rate, whatever really happened, on one truly shaking episode, her absence was explained to the children by a wet-eyed Daddy, who said that Mom had gone to Heaven. I knew it was just a TV show, of course, but that kind of thing wasn’t supposed to happen on this kind of TV. A rule had been broken, or alarmingly bent, and it seemed as if, after that, I could have faith in little else I saw.
When I was eight or nine, I first heard the phrase “Stop the World, I Want to Get Off.” I remember perfectly the moment when I read the words for the first time, in an advertisement, and stopped dead in my skimming of the Sunday Times. It was, I think, one of my first real encounters with what I called then “deep thinking” (the other times came when I first considered Death—my own, negative numbers and “What came first, the chicken or the egg?”). That Stop-the-World phrase, anyway, seemed so familiar, and so telling, struck so deep, it was as if I’d thought it up myself. I knew the feeling, all right—the frightening, exhausting realization that no matter what, from now till my death, I could not really take a rest. It isn’t the exclusive possession of kids in my generation, I’m sure—this treadmill feeling—but we grew up, certainly, during a time when the feeling was especially strong, a time that was, in an awesome variety of ways, hectic. We were worn out a bit by all the fireworks around us—space shots and wars and new music and new dances and new drugs. They were too exciting not to watch, and yet we hoped for an unexciting intermission that never seemed to come. TV programs, like the bland half-hour shows I loved, gave us that rest—more so, even, than books or sleep; in books you’re left to visualize characters, while the all-inclusive camera leaves no room for the imagination or the editing of detail. (Not even our dreams are free from activity and pressure. Even as we dream them, we evaluate and censor.)
It may sound lofty and rationalizing to say this, but I think I watched and watch still, rapt, those situation comedies for the same reason that some of the more mystically minded o
f my generation have turned to meditation. (The meditator’s goal always seemed an odd one to me: the ultimate experience reportedly being to stare at a glass of water and think nothing, nothing whatever; not “glass” or “water” or “What will I have for dinner tonight?”—to empty the mind, or at the very least to make a blank of it.) That seems to me just what I did watching TV, I realize now; in Zen terms (the Zen masters would be horrified, I guess) I ceased meditation. There was nothing that needed to be thought about during the blandest shows. (Bland, but not charmless. When charm left, the show made its presence felt again, like yeastless dough, heavy in the stomach. “How did that girl get her part?” I’d wonder. “Who wrote that terrible script?” And the lovely, mindless coasting feeling would be gone.) When the Douglasses or the Nelsons or the Petries or the Ricardos or the Stones were in true form, though, I didn’t ever wonder how the show would turn out, or why anyone was doing what he did. Like pleasant grade-B detective stories I read with no desire to turn first to the last page and find out what happens, I never felt suspense as to how “The Donna Reed Show” would turn out. If I’d seen a show before, it didn’t matter, because every show was a replay of the classic pattern anyway, and I could see them over and over just as I can hear the refrain to a song time and again.
Looking Back Page 7
