My sisters and I have convinced ourselves that at least half of our parents are gifted with a mild brain-stem disorder. This, we feel, accounts for their inability to recognize many social norms, let alone conform to them. ‘Disorder,’ we believe, is a term strong enough to associate with most of our memories involving our parents and public. The word reeks of clinical oddness; while other children may refer to their parents’ behavior as ‘weird,’ our parents are in a spectrum beyond weird. They are disordered.
My mother liked to use clichés or repetitive phrases to describe her life, as though using common language would provide her with normalcy. Occasionally, she put a great deal of effort into blending in, but in doing so she reminded me of a cat swatting at a yarn dangled overhead. No matter how much she tried, she was never going to be able to grab on to the wool swinging just beyond her control. No matter how she mastered the delivery of a cliché, its usage would always seem slightly forced and inappropriate to the situation.
My father, on the other hand, only used clichés if they were in Latin or German or attributable to an incredibly obscure source. He often created his own phrases which, although cryptic, were often very funny. “Only lions like martyrs” was a saying targeted at our throes of girlhood drama. “Get ‘em Broderick” was aimed at any police officer either buying coffee and doughnuts, or speeding by in a squad car. “And Richie Rich died in bed” was thrown out as a curse on any dishonest public figure, which to him included nearly all members of the Reagan administration.
I learned a lot from my father’s phrases, and retain a small cache of his arcane knowledge. On a trip to New York, I insisted on finding a monument to an Alaskan Husky, and was surprised that my local friend had never heard of Balto. “A statue of Balto stands in Central Park” was one of my dad’s favorite sayings, which loosely translated meant “congratulations” or “I’m proud of you.” I’d thought that, much like a general awareness of the moon landing, most grown-ups had heard of Balto’s statue. But the exploits of a heroic sled-dog aren’t nearly as well known as Armstrong’s one small step for man.
My parents’ approaches to language were reflections of their personalities. My mother had an almost pathological fear of encountering people, including all people aside from her husband and offspring. Her clichés were intended to mask her into the crowd, allowing her to minimally contribute to the conversation without distinguishing herself in any way. My father assumed his listeners enjoyed his obscure references, chuckling to themselves as if to say ‘so true, so true.’ If a listener could not identify the reference then they were not worth talking to in the first place. As a product of this union, I viewed most of the world with a fearful sneer. Too terrified to attempt many friendships, I still looked down on most acquaintances. To have not heard of Balto! To have parents who voted Republican! Really, who were these people? How did they survive with their primitive minds? And why were there so many like them?
As children, the influencing combination of timidity and disdain lead some of us daughters to view the outside world as a great anthropological experiment. My sister Elizabeth and I respectively decided to live amongst the savages and try to be accepted as one of their own, or to study them from afar. My research led me to develop an acute ability to categorize people. “You are just like my friend Andrea!” I once told a girl with whom I was auditioning. “I think of everyone as a unique individual,” she replied, somewhat offended by my keen power to stereotype. “That’s exactly the same thing she would say!” I agreed.
Elizabeth, on the other hand, went on to not only be accepted by the savages but also became one of their leaders, although she had to sever a bit of her soul in the process. Over time our mother came to associate her fear and dislike of strangers/neighbors/extended family members/parents of her children’s’ friends/etc. with my sister. Since Elizabeth was usually hanging out with some random, bizarre person she’d known since she was five (and therefore spending several of her non-school hours outside of the house) she was regarded with the suspicion previously reserved for our local grocery store cashiers. “I don’t know what Elizabeth is thinking” our mother would sigh, “but she apparently wants to see a movie with Jillian this weekend.” This bit of news would be delivered with an eye roll and head shake, indicating that her daughter was clearly out of her mind to crave so much questionable social contact. While Elizabeth always had the largest circle of friends she also fared the worst at home, often being treated as an untrustworthy outsider. Of the four of us, only my sister Mary had the good sense to simply not care what other people, including our parents, thought. This, naturally, irked those of us who were dedicating most of our energy towards reading others’ thoughts and adjusting our lives accordingly. “Who the hell does she think she is?” we’d say. “Can’t she tell what people think?” Whether she could or not, it didn’t bother her, and resulted in her persistently and intentionally Just Being Herself. Although, like all of us, she probably also experienced shock upon discovering that much of the city of Manhattan was unaware of the inspiring story of Balto, the laudable sled-dog.
My biggest journey into the land of the savages started the first night of my freshman year of college. Removed from my home of the previous eighteen years, I no longer had a safe haven to return to where I could record and analyze my observations. Knowing that little stood between me and total hermit-dom, I’d signed up for a double room and therefore shared my living space with a non-blood relative. While this provided me with some consistent social contact, this also meant that I was now constantly analyzing another person. My attempts to pattern out the thoughts of my roommate were only broken by sleep, until I realized towards the end of the first trimester that she was neither as intelligent nor as interesting as I’d assumed. I then turned my attentions to a male neighbor down the hall, who claimed to be a cross-dresser and regularly tried to hang himself with a much-too-long rope. For awhile we were each other’s favorite company, until I grew sick of his self-absorption and he of my codependency.
But on the first evening of the start of my life away from home, I had yet to analyze any of my dorm-mates. On orientation night, freshmen congregated in the open field behind the library, where a pep rally was held in order to welcome us to our new school. My roommate had abandoned me, so I found my way by following small groups of people who looked roughly as new to the terrain as I was. Crossing campus this way raised in me the mild panic of one who knows that they were born with no sense of direction, but the fear of being lost was soon crushed by the astounding mass of People I Did Not Know. It had been three years since the last time I’d been confronted by a large number of new souls, and for the first time ever I no longer had a safe haven built on fear and loathing of the public to return home to. Something huge was blanking me; dead-stopping my normal inner monologue of observations and judgments on my environment. A fog was hollowing my heart and stomach and roaring through my head. My father had never taught me an expression for this feeling, and my mother would not use a cliché to ever describe herself as lonely or single herself out. So I paced around the field, trying to keep my movements controlled and purposeful in order not to run, and wondered – what in the hell, what in the holy living hell, am I supposed to do now?
What I did was to pick my way across the field, and start navigating across campus as best I could back the way I came. All the while I wished a nice vampire would happen by and rip out my jugular, thus saving me from the world of people. As luck would have it, I found my dorm before any vampires found me.
The next morning, I would begin my several-week-long analysis of my roommate. Later that day I would make my first tie-dyed ti-shirt, and meet a disproportionately large number of sorority girls in my orientation group. Towards the end of the week I would discover the male interest down the hall and began my appreciation of his self-destructive quirkiness and intellectual snobbery. And the following week I’d attend my first undergraduate theatre classes, meeting a disproportionately large number of very attractive gay men. But my first night as a freshman I acted more like an overwhelmed novice than experienced anthropologist. Jacked up on fear, I stuck my head under the covers and went to sleep, leaving the disorderly world behind.
*****
My intention was to imitate David Sedaris. I believe I've come as close as I can come. I tend towards the melodramatic or pathetically self-absorbed, as opposed to holding on to the humor thread like he can. It was an interesting exercise. Mr. Sedaris, of course, rocks and should be read by all.