Why I'm Like This

by Cynthia Kaplan

  This is the way with my father. He is of one mind about things, his mind. It is impossible to convince him otherwise, even with charts and graphs and surveys and polls. No device or idea works until he sees it works (or until he reads the directions), and then nothing else works. And this applies to every aspect of his life. If he likes a particular food, for example, it is not possible to make him understand that you don’t: “Rye bread is delicious, you’re crazy.” Each time my mother served the horrible Liver Meal—that was the meal consisting of sautéed chicken livers, cooked spinach, and mashed potatoes—my father would lean over my plate and stir the spinach and mashed potatoes together, thus contaminating the mashed potatoes and essentially doubling the amount of spinach. “How can you not like this?” he would say. “It’s delicious. You don’t know what you’re missing.”

  When I was about twenty-four years old, I had an operation of sorts to remove a congenital something or other that had taken up residence in my right lung. Before the procedure began, my father instructed me to drink eight full glasses of water. He was absolutely sure that he had heard somewhere, or read perhaps, that prior to procedures “such as yours,” a patient must deluge him-or herself with fluids. I told him that no one had suggested this to me but he was adamant, the result being that I later found it necessary to pee mid-procedure in the presence of ten or so medical personnel, onto a folded towel, which was all I was offered, while I lay stark naked on a gurney. A nurse said to me “Eight glasses of water? What in God’s name for?”

  Ahh, but the trouble is, I can imagine myself saying to someone: “You have to drink eight glasses of water this morning before your procedure.” And when they ask why, I would posit: “Because this is that kind of procedure.” Maybe I read it somewhere, maybe someone I know has had a similar procedure, maybe I made it up. (I am often most convinced of the rightness of things I make up.) I am, in fact, the Gadgeteer’s daughter, and I have inherited a variation of the Gadgeteer Gene. While I couldn’t care less about all those clever little devices, per se, I have an almost unshakable confidence in my ability to think logically. And I am pretty much always right. And I don’t stop giving my opinion until I am sure it has been absorbed if not actually ratified by all listeners, or else they leave the room, which sometimes happens. My father is more dismissive of opposing opinions. Or rather, he is sympathetic. He will shake his head at the sorry state of your antediluvian gadgets and might even buy you some new ones, but he will not lose sleep over it. I, however, am less sympathetic than rather dangerously empathetic. I feel what you feel. And if I feel that you are wrong, I will stay up the entire night until I have brought you around. Nobody can beat a dead horse like me, nobody. Except maybe my mother, but look at what she’s up against.

  If I sound impossible to live with, I’m not, but there’s time.

  If my father sounds impossible to live with, he is, but now, thankfully, that is exclusively my mother’s problem. It helps that my father is also the most loving, most generous man I know, and if you keep at him long enough, hard enough, if you are sure of your facts and armed with some evidence, you might occasionally break through to him. When you do he will laugh, wonderfully, at his own wrongness and say, “Really? I can’t believe it. No kidding. I was absolutely positive. Oh, well.” Once in a while he even proves himself wrong.

  “It fit into this holder in the car door and would have been great except every time I took a sip, the goddamn thing leaked down the side. Christ. I got this other one, though, and it really keeps the water ice cold.”

  is that what you’re wearing?

  I CRY intermittently in the car on the way to Greenwich Hospital to see my father, who has had a heart attack. I feel as though my head will explode from the surely combustible combination of a) relief that cigarette-smoking, bacon-munching Jack Kaplan has finally arrived at the moment he’d been gunning for all these years and was probably going to live to tell the tale and b) fear that the fact that I’m wearing blue jeans and clunky shoes to the hospital will aggravate my mother.

  A typical telephone conversation with my father goes like this:

  “Hi,” I say. “How are you feeling? Do you feel better? Have you been to the doctor? Are you taking your medication? Did you read the thing in the Times about the reflux thing?”

  “Where?” he asks. “I don’t know. Did I? What day was it?”

  “Yesterday in Health. Are you getting your esophagus checked regularly?”

  “Yes, of course. How are you?”

  “By whom? Doctor Yes-You’re-Fine or a real doctor?”

  “Aw, come on. By the Mount Sinai guy. I go every year. What’s new?”

  “You have to be careful when you have a sore throat.”

  “Any time I have a sore throat I take antibiotics.”

  “Antibiotics don’t cure cancer.”

  “I guess you’re right. How’s David?”

  “You’ve really got to lose some weight.”

  “I’m trying.”

  “Clearly you don’t care if you live to see my children.”

  “Jesus Christ, how can you say that?”

  “You’d stop smoking if you did. Anyway, when are you guys coming to see my play?”

  My father is a notorious self-medicator and self-un-medicator. He pops untold numbers of antacids for his hiatus hernia and occasionally likes to go cold turkey on his steroid medication. Dangerous? You betcha. Once he decided to stop taking his iron pills (Why? Just because!) which caused him to lose a lot of weight very quickly, which made him happy even though he looked like death warmed over and, in fact, might have died. He is also fond of self-diagnosis. He likes to get his blood work sent directly to him by e-mail from the lab. Oh, look, his good cholesterol is up and his bad cholesterol is down. Oh, wait. Which is the…? No, that’s right. He is going to be fine! Between us we have raised Nagging and Deflecting to a high art.

  The same character traits that make my father a wonderful father—his generosity and spontaneity, his utter confidence—make him a medical nightmare. He is at once self-indulgent and hypercritical. He is a dreamer with no patience. He cannot turn except on a dime.

  I do a bunch of crying in the hospital parking lot to try to get it out of my system. My father is a bigger crybaby than I am (he teared up when he heard I had lost my virginity, possibly out of relief that I finally had) and if I set him off I’ll start again, too. I am sure that he is already going berserk blaming himself for being in this mess. My father handles serious troubles by taking complete, furious responsibility for them. He handles the lesser ones by throwing responsibility onto my mother. Sometimes his recriminations will be so baseless that all he can spit out is a “Sandy!” in a disgusted tone of voice. Or the ever popular “Sandy, how could you let me do that?”

  As predicted, my father’s expression when my boyfriend David and I arrive is self-reproaching and slightly sheepish. He thought that since his father died at ninety-six he could lard up all he wanted. He could smoke and sleep badly and fret silently over work issues because he had good genes. Well, my grandfather did exercises every morning before breakfast and my grandmother never met a bland food she didn’t like. So, my dad is both mad and embarrassed. This works well for him because he has a great face. His mouth and his brow will do one thing but his eyes another. He can also be both serious and amused at the same time, like Ed Asner. The first words out of his mouth are something like “Jesus, I’m such an idiot.” Followed by “Whatever you do, don’t tell my mother. She’ll make us all crazy.” He also feels terrible for bringing my mother home from Florida, where for the last two weeks she has sat vigil with her mother, who lies dying of cancer in a hospice. Yet he can’t wait for her to come. When she does David and I leave so they can be alone. It is going to be a ten-Kleenex reunion and in the back of my little, little mind, I do not want her to ask me why I can’t carry a real hanky. My mother isn’t a shallow person by any means, but still, seeing my dad alive before she sees me may afford me a sho
rt grace period.

  It’s not really her fault; she hails from a long line of criticizers. Her mother was so disparaging of her hair that she became known in her family circle as Sandra Your Hair! Siegel. In my mother’s adulthood, my grandmother likened her to Edith Piaf—which was not a compliment, since Edith wore all black and usually looked like hell. Despite the fact that I have memories of my mother, who is, in fact, gorgeous, in vivid Pucci ensembles, her long brown hair flipped fashionably up at the shoulders, overall, her fashion sense could best be described as Quiet Chic. Simple dark suits and elegant white blouses and little black dresses. My grandmother had short hair dyed various shades of sometimes startling red and she dressed very stylishly. Even in her old age she wore straw hats set at a rakish angle and high-heeled mules and colorful little ponchos she had crocheted herself. She never made her peace with the fact that my mother wouldn’t take her advice. Once, my grandmother told her: “If you buy that rug I’ll never be able to come to your house.” My mother bought it. The salesman clapped.

  In a bootless effort to rewrite her genetic code, my mother has managed only to reorganize it. Her technique could best be described as rhetorical-aggressive. She’ll ask me: “Is that what you’re wearing?” Technically, I am already dressed in the offending outfit. So is it possible she really wants an answer, as if it might be anything but “Yes”? As if I travel to various events with a Saks Fifth Avenue hanging bag of alternative outfits? As if I’m just wearing what I’m wearing to test her patience and embarrass her in public? At least my grandmother was direct. My mother just can’t bring herself to say “You look like Patty Hearst.” And my father has begun to parrot her, though he lacks her subtlety of tone. “What is that? Is that a skirt? Is that how that’s supposed to look? Hah, hah, hah.”

  At the same time neither of my parents could be considered either a trendsetter or a clotheshorse. They advocate quality over quantity, so, for example, if a little black Valentino cocktail dress or a pair of Gucci loafers or that maroon cashmere V-neck can be respectably worn anytime in the current quarter century then they—that is, my parents, the dress, the loafers, and the V-neck—have all done their job. My mother buys the same three pairs of beige-y sling backs every few years, as heel styles change, at Lady Continental. One pair has a black calf toe, one has a black patent leather toe, and one has a black silk toe. Silk toes are the dressiest.

  When I was young, we dressed up to travel. I wore loafers and kilts (Dress Campbell or Black Watch—I had both) and button-down shirts and sometimes a navy blazer every time we flew to Florida to see my grandparents or went on a vacation. My brother wore the same get-up minus the kilt but plus gray flannels and a tie. You’d think my mother ran a restricted private school. When we arrived in Ft. Lauderdale, we would invariably be greeted outside the air-conditioned Delta terminal by a blast of tropical air, and during the half-hour ride to my grandparents’ apartment we would itch and sweat as heat billowed in through the car windows. Or worse, it would gust across the dusty tarmac as we sat out the hours-long layover in an airless departure gate in San Juan waiting to board a puddle jumper for some island or other. And, of course, we would leave the same way, waiting at the airport in a near-faint among families comfortably decked out in unstylish shorts and T-shirts and souvenir straw porkpie hats.

  Once during high school I went shopping with my friend Sue, who was a dancer, and we each bought slinky Danskin-type leotards and wrap skirts at the only groovy boutique in town. The leotard I bought was a glossy brown and the skirt a glimmering peach with a ruffle at the bottom. I brought them home and showed them to my mother and they never again saw the light of day. I remember she sent me off to my ninth-grade formal in her full-length kilt. I’m sure it was very smart in the seventies for a grown woman to wear a little sweater and a full length kilt to a holiday party, but you can bet that no teenage guy was going to put his hands on my scratchy wool ass during “Free Bird,” providing he could even find it under there.

  In all other ways my mother is a model mother—loving, smart, supportive, fun but not so much fun that my friends prefer her to me. Doesn’t she deserve every consideration at this moment? Now more than ever, with her dying mother and her seriously ill husband? Unfortunately, it is too late to go back and put on a kilt and loafers.

  David and I take seats in the ICU waiting area. We talk about how nice Greenwich Hospital is. It is very calm; nobody is running around with the paddle cart yelling “Clear!,” which confirms my theory that people in Greenwich die slowly and quietly of alcohol-related illnesses. My brother shows up with his wife and daughter and we hug each other in that awkward but comforting way known only to siblings. Then we all talk about how lucky Dad is to have had the good kind of heart attack, the warning kind, as opposed to the bad kind where suddenly your arm hurts and then you drop dead.

  When my brother and I were growing up, if the phone rang after ten o’clock it could only mean one thing: the Grim Reaper had stopped in for a milk shake with the Kaplan family. Sometime after college (where your phone only rings after ten o’clock) this practice resumed. So, for example, the night my mother left an ultra-casual message on my answering machine in my Upper West Side studio apartment, time stamped 11:53 P.M., I knew my grandfather had died. Every family has its own encoded language. This was ours. “Hi, honey. It’s Mom. Give us a call when you get home. We’ll be up.” Sure, they’ll be up. They’ll be up planning the funeral. Last night there was a similar message from Florida: “Mom…call…anytime.” Tappity tap tap. I assumed my grandmother had died and started to cry. Boy, I loved her. Then the phone rang. This was unexpected. It was one-thirty in the morning. Grandma was already dead, or so I thought; what’s the deal? It was my brother: Dad…heart attack…hospital.

  After a while my mother opens the door and we go back into the hospital room. If she notices my Doc Martens she doesn’t mention it. Actually, Sandy, herself, doesn’t look half bad. She looks like she only had a nightmare as opposed to is living one. She is wearing her uniform: a straight skirt and a cashmere sweater with a silk scarf at the neck, pumps and stockings, simple gold earrings, and her travel talisman, her grandfather’s gold pocket watch on a long chain around her neck. Still, something is not quite right. Shouldn’t she be more of a wreck? Then I realize with a shock: These are the only kinds of clothes she has. But also, my mother doesn’t like her children to see that she is worried. She got this from her father, who was never sick a day in his life, until he was and then he died, but you never saw him sweat. If you ask my mother how she is, she will invariably tell you that she is Fine. If she ever, God forbid, lay injured and starving on a mountaintop, and you happened to get her on the phone, she would still be Fine. I compliment her on her composure and she tells me that after hearing her story, the man sitting next to her on the plane told her, not unsympathetically, that she looked like hell and should go put on some makeup.

  A woman with very, very long hair, the kind you can sit on, the kind your sister gets you on Oprah for so they can cut it off on national TV, arrives to discuss my father’s diet. Now, anyone who knows my father knows that a discussion of his diet can only lead to misery. His favorite foods are Hellmann’s mayonnaise and butter.

  “No orange juice, no coffee,” says the nutritionist. No smoking. (No shit.) No nuts, no ice cream, nothing fried. No butter or mayo or full-fat anything. Low-or no-fat everything. Chicken or fish cooked in olive oil. Or Pam. My mother, a purist who would as soon be caught using a cooking spray as she would wearing a wool/poly blend, nods appreciatively and mouths Yes. Yes. My father has his “I’m listening” look on. His brow is furrowed and his head is turned slightly, presenting his ear to the speaker. It is the same as his “I’m not listening” look. We all know his brain shut down the minute he heard “No.” My father is never going to become a good heart-attack patient. He simply will not change. No matter how we will nag him and lecture him, bully him, flog him. Year after year, my mother, my brother, and I will continue the
torturous dialogue.

  “Dad/Jack, no!”

  “What, I’m just having a bite.”

  “You’re not!”

  “Come on. I never eat this. I swear to God.”

  “Dad/Jack stop! Give me that.”

  “Jesus, you’re a pain in the neck.”

  That night I lie in bed with my mother in the apartment in Greenwich. I wear one of her old flannel nightgowns, she wears another. It is strange. We can’t believe we are in this predicament. We can’t believe we are in Greenwich. My parents sold our house in Weston and moved here a couple of years ago, its greater proximity to Manhattan a concession to my mother, who hadn’t been all that excited to move to Connecticut in the first place and who has probably dreamt every night for the past thirty years of owning an apartment on Madison Avenue. I am more like her than I am willing to admit. I’d like an apartment on Madison Avenue, too. I tell her I’m sorry about my ratty clothes but that I’d dressed that morning in a daze. She says: “That’s okay. Who gives a shit?”

  Come again?

  One of the hardest things about growing up is how one day it suddenly dawns on you that your parents are human. It hadn’t occurred to you before. Why should it have? But then something happens, some thing happens, and the veil drops. It may have been totally insignificant, like the way your mother ran her finger around the lip of her wineglass at dinner parties as if she were one of those water-glass musicians, or how your father mixed Bosco straight into the milk carton and didn’t tell anyone else. Or it could have been something huge, like the night not long ago when your mother told you she felt like her dad was the only person who ever loved her exactly as she was. Or the moment you realized your father was truly incapable of changing, even to save his own life. These are just moments, really, blips on the parental screen, during which they reveal their humanity, and that they are in the world, flailing about as helplessly as everyone else, everyone who is not your parents. Blowing it. Surviving. Hanging on by their nails. That they are at once more spectacularly resourceful and more deeply flawed than you might have ever imagined inspires both scorn and admiration, two emotions you’d always reserved for nonrelatives. But, happily, between the blips, they are just the same as they have always been, annoying, yet impeccably dressed, and you breathe a sigh of relief. It is too painful for them to be human.