But there was no fuckoffery to be had that Thanksgiving Day in Florida. Eric and I forced ourselves to endure her affections, the way Elijah now suffers my good-night forehead kisses. Mom wanted to know if we are happy. Yes, we assured her, we’re happy. She wanted us to know that we’re good people. Yes, we assured her, we know we’re good people. But most importantly, she wanted us to know that I had always been her favorite.
Although Mom believed herself to be in her final days, I could see no indication that this was the case. It was a deathbed conversation without the deathbed. Yes, her health was bad and her long-term prognosis worse, but I saw no signs of the Reaper hovering about. No scythe marks on the floor. No rattling chains. She seemed, if not well, then at least okay. Or maybe I was just in denial, which in addition to being a sound medical strategy, is also the best way to cope with emotions.
My instinct is to pull away from difficult situations, to detach, make jokes. I tried being present for Mom during our talk, but it was hard. I felt like she was trying to create something momentous for us from dubious materials, the way Richard Dreyfuss builds Devils Tower out of mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The whole time I was thinking, “Okay, wrap it up.” But even though our conversation felt awkward as hell, and even though she didn’t say anything we hadn’t heard a thousand times before, I love her for trying.
I left Florida a couple days later, inexplicably guilt-ridden. Why did I feel so bad? I’d done my part. I’d suffered through the dry turkey and wet conversation. I’d made the appropriate amount of small talk with Sandy’s kids and their husbands. I’d been a good guest and son. But I left feeling as if I had let Mom down, maybe because I felt like Mom was asking me for something I couldn’t give, some words I didn’t know how to speak about love and acceptance and forgiveness.
A parent never has the right words to describe their love for a child. There’s only a dull ache where words should be. If it were a sound, a parent’s love would sound like this: “Mmmmphhhf.” So when a parent tries to express that love in its fullest form to their kids, it comes out wrong. The best any parent can do is just to be there, time after time after time, when they need you and when they don’t, and when they do but don’t know it. You show up and, in showing up, you hope they get the message.
When I lie dying, sometime in the distant future, I am going to do the opposite of what Mom did to Eric and me. Instead of saddling them with heavy expressions of love, I will summon my children to my deathbed, make them lean in close, then whisper, “You’re both a couple of assholes.” And if they laugh, I’ll know I did my job.
Chapter Seven
We are those assholes now
Home for me, as I said, is the wilds of Connecticut. Martha and I have been here twelve years and plan on staying. Like most of our neighbors, we are transplants, crowded out of nearby New York City by congestion and high rents and the sound of Japanese superbikes bombing past our window at three in the morning. We moved here to slow down, to trade New York City’s roaches and rats for moths and mice, to have space to breathe, elbow room in which to flex our elbows, safe outdoor spaces for the children to complain about being forced to play upon. And of course we moved here for the schools. Everybody wants to know about the schools.
“AREN’T THE SCHOOLS GREAT?!” our friends and neighbors yell at each other over bottomless, frothy cups of no-fat decaf soy lattes, which is another way of asking, “Aren’t WE great?!” We ask because we need somebody—anybody—to affirm our life choices. We did the right thing, didn’t we? We’re doing what’s best for our children, aren’t we? We are smart and worthwhile and our work lives are fulfilling and our spiritual lives are rich and our communities are litter-free and we are going to live forever. Right?
These are the sorts of questions we ask ourselves while lying awake at night listening to our hearts chattering in our chests. As we breathe the country air, tart and sweet as a slice of cheddar on fresh-baked apple pie. As we enjoy the restful night music of coyotes ripping apart baby deer. As we feel the Lyme disease clawing its way into our nervous systems. We take Ambien to turn off our heads, but it doesn’t work. Maybe that chattering in our chests isn’t anxiety but the first spastic stutter step of atrial fibrillation. Maybe we won’t wake up in the morning. We are slowly going crazy. I don’t know if it’s all the unnerving silence or what, but put enough soft city folks into the deep and shadowy woods together and they are bound to freak the fuck out. It’s like Lord of the Flies up here, wardrobe by J.Crew.
Our occupations and circumstances vary, but we share certain commonalities. We are well educated and well-off and mostly white. We made good life choices. We drive good, safe cars. On Sunday nights in the warm weather, we gather on the public lawn with picnic dinners of roasted veggies and baked chicken and listen to free concerts while the kids play tag out by the gazebo. We share a peculiar state of mind whereby we have everything but cannot stop complaining about it. It’s not that we are dissatisfied, exactly; more that we know something better is just around the bend. We want to do better, be better, feel better, be better.
We control what we can but so little feels within our control. Our kids are all growing up too fast. Soon they’ll be gone. Soon we’ll be alone in these houses that used to suffer their handprints on every stainless-steel surface, crumbs lodged in every crevice, unidentifiable stains smearing every wall. They will be gone but our houses will be clean and we will be despondent. We can’t keep our kids from growing up and we can’t keep ourselves from growing old. But we try. We attend daily services at SoulCycle and spend our Sundays worshipping at the church of Whole Foods. No, we cannot beat back time, but we can smooth our skin and tone our abs and visit hair-restoration specialists in the city. We can armor ourselves against the future with pearlescent teeth and manicured nails and buns of steel.
But the woods are dark and they are closing in.
Just because I recognize our insanity does not immunize me from it. Far from it. If anything, I am among the worst of my kind, vain and fearful, scrambling to figure out how to keep myself alive. Today and tomorrow and always. And if I cannot do that due to my bad, bad genes, then I will settle for keeping myself attractive. Starting with my waist.
Only a few years ago, my pant measurement was a snappy 30/32. That’s a waist-and-inseam combo any man would be proud to call his own. 30/32. You can almost hum it. But now, suddenly—alarmingly—the numbers are equal: 32/32. No longer quite so zippy. Said aloud, it’s an alarming jangle of syllables, as untrustworthy as people whose first and last names are the same: Steve Stevens. I wouldn’t buy even buy a paper clip from a guy named Steve Stevens.
If I allow this trend to continue, very soon my waist measurement will exceed my inseam measurement. What then? What happens when I am wider around than I am tall as measured from crotch to ankle? Surely that is the beginning of the end, as prophesized in the book of Atkins. As a younger man, I swore I would never let such a thing occur; you can easily make such promises to yourself when you are twenty-five and the weight does not accrue no matter how many Taco Bell #3 Value Meals you consume.
For the first forty years of my life, any weight gained was good weight, weight that would fill me out, broaden my shoulders, add girth to my loins. But now it appears I am past my metabolic prime and have entered the long, slow glide path into general flabbiness, soon to be followed by bloat, diabetes, leaky, corrugated arteries, and, eventually, a final descent into a morbid obesity so profound a crane will be required to extract me from my bedroom window, where I will one day be discovered in my bed, wrapped in a sheet, lying facedown in a viscous pool of coagulated KFC chicken gravy.
These are the kinds of thoughts that keep me staring at the ceiling during the wee morning hours. But I take comfort in the woolly optimism of my woodsy brethren and sisters. We hearty pioneers of the Connecticut wilderness are nothing if not resilient. Where anxiety might paralyze those in lesser zip codes, here we let it motivate us, activate us, i
nspire us. For we are the strivers and doers. We bear college degrees from good, private, second-tier schools. Our Internet connections are hearty, our search queries strong, and we do something about it.
The women inject themselves into constrictive Lycra suits and do Pilates. The men squeeze their testicles into compression shorts and go for long, winding rides on artisanal bicycles hand-carved from asteroids. Both sexes take to witchcraft, reciting impenetrable incantations: antioxidant, beta-carotene, Botox, ohm. . . . We offer burnt sage to Gwyneth, goddess of Dewy Skin.
Where once Martha and I talked about rock bands and theater and other urban pleasures, we now have regular conversations about fiber. We stock up on olives because it is understood that olives are healthful and delicious. Turmeric, that wonderful Indian spice, is healthful and delicious. Red meat is healthful and delicious every ten days but eaten more than that renders it heart-killing and carcinogenic. Kale is magic. Beets: holy. Once a week or so, we dutifully consume some bland species of (sustainable) (wild, not farm-raised) fish. We even go so far as to add flaxseed to recipes that do not call for flaxseed because we are those assholes now.
Assholes yes, but not saints. We still let our kids eat crap. Not exclusively, but enough that they do not feel as though they are growing up on an Israeli kibbutz or, worse, in Park Slope, Brooklyn. And when we buy that crap for them to eat, of course, it means Martha and I eat it, too. The kale wilts in the produce drawer. The beets bleed out onto paper towels, unloved and untouched. And when I say we eat fish once a week, I am lying. It is more like once a month. It just feels like more often because having fish for dinner, even the sustainable kind, sucks.
Occasionally we try sneaking healthfulness into places where none ought to exist. One night I made mashed potatoes. Except there were no actual potatoes in my mashed potatoes. Instead, I used cannellini beans and parsnips pureed with chicken stock and roasted garlic, a recipe I found in one of those cookbooks that teach you how to eat so you will live to be a million.
“Why do the mashed potatoes look like that?” asked Elijah. It is true the dish had a peculiar tint that betrayed itself as something other than spud-like.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied. “Those are regular mashed potatoes.”
“Okay,” he said, accepting me at my word because he does not yet know his father is a liar and a fink.
Ruthie, although two and a half years younger, has a more finely attuned bullshit detector. She refused to even try the dish until threatened with expulsion from the dinner table. When she finally inserted a quavering forkful into her mouth, she moved the “mashed potatoes” around her tongue for a moment, choked back a vomit bubble, and pronounced them disgusting.
“They are not!” I replied. “They’re delicious.” She was right. They were disgusting.
Martha insisted she loved the dish, even eating Ruthie’s unwanted portion. Then she complained that I “let her” eat too much. I let her? What would she have me do? Put a hand on her wrist as she lifted another forkful into her gob and say, “Sweetheart, I think you’ve had enough”? How would that have gone over? I suspect not very well.
Martha hates her body, or at least claims to, despite the fact that she looks great. I’m not just saying that as a husband whose wife will one day read this book. I speak as a fan and connoisseur of the female form, as evidenced by my regular habit of studying examples of it online after she goes to bed each night. But like everybody else’s, Martha’s relationship with her own body is fraught. “I look terrible,” she says occasionally (every day).
Other regular complaints:
“I look old.”
“I look fat.”
“My hair is a disaster.”
“Look at this!” she often yells at me. “This” usually means her stomach, which sometimes protrudes after a big meal, the inevitable result of once providing temporary housing for two freeloading fetuses. “This” might also mean a new spider vein on her leg or a twitchy eye muscle. I am forever being instructed to look at some misbehaving part of her anatomy.
I dislike when she does this, because I have no interest in finding fault with her. Not because I find her flawless, but because I am too susceptible to suggestion. If she keeps enumerating her failings, perhaps I will start believing her to be as monstrous as she believes herself to be, and I have no wish to think ill of her body. I love it too much. Plus, it would require too much negative mental energy, energy that could better be spent hating myself.
Personally, I am not a fan of bodies at all. They are too time-intensive, require too much maintenance. They must be tended to on an almost constant basis; if they don’t need food, they need water. Or air. Brushing and flossing? Please. Bodies are nuisances. They are fragile. They suffer pain. They runneth over with fluids. Bodies demand recharging, not once in a while, but every single night. Moreover, they are prone to disruption and disrepair. Every body inevitably fails, as my mother’s is slowly doing fifteen hundred miles to the south. They are the very definition of planned obsolescence. Bodies are simply not designed for today’s go-go lifestyle. But what to do about it? How do we wring more usefulness out of these tetchy flesh bags?
There is a doctor in Italy who claims he can transplant human heads. His method for doing so is a disarmingly simple three-step process:
1. Sever the spinal cords of both head and body donors.
2. Fit them together like store mannequins.
3. Stick the two together with “inorganic polymer glue.”
It sounds like the sort of plan a six-year-old might devise. Yet, as improbable as the idea sounds, it might actually be possible. Similar experiments have already been conducted on both dogs and monkeys with varying levels of success. In the first half of the twentieth century, Soviet scientists attempted to keep disembodied dogs alive by hooking their heads up to a device called an “autojector,” which was a big fluid recycling system, sort of like a swimming pool pump. How successful these experiments were is a matter of some debate, although footage exists on YouTube of a rather sad-looking Siberian husky head being coaxed to eat a piece of cheese. The “dog” eats the cheese, which then falls out the bottom of its neck. The footage is possibly a hoax, but whether it is or isn’t, please don’t watch, because seeing a bodiless dog head trying to eat cheese is a genuine bummer.
In 1970, an American scientist named Robert White transplanted the head of one rhesus monkey onto the body of another. Although the monkey (monkeys?) survived the procedure, the poor creature could not do much more than look around, because the operation destroyed its spinal column.
Forty-five years later, both glue and head-severing technology have apparently advanced so much that the aforementioned Dr. Frankenstini argues that it is now possible for humans to regain at least some motor control after undergoing a head transplant. Think about that. Same head, different body. Or, from the point of view of the cadaver, same body, different head.
In fact, as of this writing, it has been announced that the first head transplant will be attempted sometime within the next few years. A Russian man, suffering from a terminal muscle-wasting disease, has volunteered to be the first patient. The operation, at an anticipated cost of fifteen million dollars, will be performed in China, a country that has fewer restrictions on doing insane shit.
Imagine: the ability to cast off our old, wrinkled carcasses with their unsightly waist/inseam sizes in exchange for new, toned, tight bodies with clear, unsullied toenails. From there it’s conceivable that, in the next few decades, we’ll have the ability to grow headless bodies on big industrial body farms, swapping them out as easily as we snap on and off vacuum attachments.
At that point, everybody could have a “perfect body,” or a custom-made imperfect one. Or a body with nine legs. Or maybe we could transplant our torsos onto horse bodies and become centaurs. And, of course, once we are centaurs, we are only one step away from becoming flying centaurs, and then it’s basically game over because there�
�s nothing more awesome than that.
But until that day arrives, we are stuck with the bodies we have. You with yours, me with mine. Everybody deals with their bodies in different ways. Some people do everything they can to maximize their body’s powers and abilities. Many more people, people such as myself, think about maximizing their body’s powers and abilities, but mostly eat Tostitos and stale almond cookies with dog hairs pressed into them. Working out is hard and upsetting. Eating well is hard and upsetting. Sitting around doing nothing is easy and anesthetizing, which is why I prefer it.
But “easy and anesthetizing” is not a good long-term survival strategy. If I am going to live long enough to become a flying centaur, I need to do something beyond adding flaxseed to my oatmeal. Which brings me back to the cult of well-being here in the woods of Connecticut. Yes, one could find fault with our healthful obsessions, the way we careen from fad diet to fad exercise regimen to fad supplement like a crew of lost sailors trying to navigate their way through the fog. But you cannot fault our enthusiasm for trying. Here, people do not wait for things to go from bad to worse. They don’t even wait for them to get bad. They wear Fitbits to track their physical exertions and construct elaborate Excel spreadsheets documenting each calorie that enters their mouths. They have action plans. I wanted an action plan, too.
I resolved to change my ways. Preserving a respectable pant measurement provided some motivation. Seeing Mom ailing and bedbound provided more. She would give anything to have my mobility, so what was I doing sitting around letting my own good health escape like air from a leaky bicycle tire? I couldn’t rely on science to save me, or faith, or even denial. I needed to activate some dormant part of my brain, the part that notices a beautiful day and thinks, “Hey, I should be outside!” and not, “Hey, I think we still have a bag of pretzels in the cupboard!” But I didn’t know how to make the change. It wasn’t like I hadn’t tried before. I had. And failed. Why does doing difficult things have to be so damned difficult?
Navel Gazing Page 6
