Authors: True Believers
“You want me to get a meter for you?” Waverly asks, already up off the chaise and headed toward the kitchen door.
“Thanks, Wavy.” I do feel unsettled.
A silver lining of eight-times-a-day blood tests: usually, you discover that a snappish mood or vague fear is some meaningless neurochemical squall, the result of low blood glucose, nothing that chewing a few fruit-flavored sugar tablets won’t cure right away.
And a silver lining of experiencing low blood sugars for twenty-five years before my dad got Alzheimer’s, I think, was that I had an inkling of what he felt. Early on, before he started speaking Danish to dogs on the street, he could give lucid descriptions of his symptoms—of the sudden mood swings, the confusion, the anger, the frightening and infuriating inability to form sentences. It sounded very much like extreme hypoglycemia.
Anyhow, when Waverly brings me the meter, I prick the tip of my index finger and squeeze a smidgen of blood onto the test strip, as I’ve done a hundred thousand times. And five seconds later—88 milligrams of glucose per deciliter of blood; fine—I have the proof that, in fact, my anxiety is real, the result of thinking about 1968 and how my old friends will react when I tell them I’m breaking the oath of silence we took forty-six years ago.
An old Ink Spots tune is suddenly coming out of Waverly’s computer. It seemed ancient when I was a kid and my dad played it every week on our hi-fi. Back then, the only part of the song to which I ever really paid attention was what I considered the dirty bit, when a very deep, very black voice speaks the words “way down inside of me, darling … nobody else ain’t gonna do.” When I was thirty, and driven by ambition for worldly acclaim and in love with nobody but my darling daughter, I rediscovered the song and bought an Ink Spots’ greatest-hits album and started playing it all the time.
I don’t want to set the world on fire,
I just want to start a flame in your heart.
In my heart I have but one desire,
And that one is you, no other will do.
I’ve lost all ambition for worldly acclaim;
I just want to be the one you love.
And with your admission that you feel the same,
I’ll have reached the goal I’m dreaming of, believe me.
I don’t want to set the world on fire,
I just want to start a flame in your heart.
Unlike nearly all the pop lyrics I osmotically learned as a kid, which seemed trivial once I got older, these still strike me as meaningful, especially the line
I don’t want to set the world on fire.
I hadn’t heard it for a decade until one night in 1979, when Jack and I were watching TV. An ad came on for Chanel No. 5. The music was “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.”
“Oh my God,” I said to my husband, “I
love
that!”
“You’re joking, right?” said Jack, the modernist composer.
The man in the ad was called Charles, and the tagline was
Share the Fantasy.
I ask Waverly why she has that song on her iTunes.
“It’s the soundtrack to this game, Fallout 3.”
The sun dips beneath the top of the eucalyptus tree between us and the little mountain that’s between us and the ocean.
“Fallout 3 is what I imagine it is?”
“Life after nuclear war, yeah.” She looks up “I wish I didn’t have to go home, Grams.”
The jolt of intense love—oxytocin gushing from thyroid a few inches heavenward to amygdala, according to my daughter—is instantly tainted by guilt about Waverly preferring my company to her mother’s, the oxytocin expert Greta Wu. And then cut short entirely when I look again at the Apple device.
Alex has answered me. The subject line of his email is “WTF.”
And I think:
If eighteen-year-old Chuck Levy were here, he would urge me to tell the truth and hold back nothing.
6
I do vividly remember things about my childhood that had nothing to do with Alex or Chuck or James Bond or the official Day-Glo red dawn of the 1960s.
I remember my mother in her nightgown sitting on the edge of her unmade bed for several minutes every morning, brushing her long hair as my sister, Sabrina, and I counted to a hundred; then she would pick the strands out of the brush and, no matter the season, stand up and toss the brushings out the open window.
And I remember the fall afternoon in sixth grade, sitting all by myself in the crook of the oak tree in our backyard, staring up at jet contrails, which were a new phenomenon, when a bird flew past within inches of my face. It landed just a few feet above me, then walked along a limb upside down and disappeared into a hole. A minute later, when the bird popped out and flew off, I stood and looked into its hole.
There was a nest. It consisted of grass and twigs and dirt plus a few cigarette butts and bits of cellophane, but the main material was my mother’s red hair, and in the bottom, arranged as neatly as an Easter basket, were seven tiny pink eggs with gray and lavender speckles. I remember staring at those eggs on the thatch of my mother’s hair in the shadows inside the oak tree, worried that my breath might contaminate them but unable to turn away. I knew I was at a perfect privileged age to find and behold this wonder, to have an adventure, still a wide-eyed child but
capable.
I was young Arthur in the Forest Sauvage, Alice down the rabbit hole, Lucy Pevensie peeping through a knot into Narnia. I was agog.
“I see London, I see France!”
By the time I registered what had startled me—my little brother, shouting up from six feet below—I had already slipped and fallen. Before Peter had a chance to say
“I see
Karen’s underpants,”
I was on top of a crumpled, crying four-year-old whose arm had fractured when it came between plummeting me and a large rock at the base of the tree. Later, after I identified the bird, Peter started calling me White-breasted Nuthatch. I got my mother to make him quit the “White-breasted” part, but he called me Nuthatch until we were adults.
I remember our vacations, and my mother always bringing along an aerosol can of Lysol and a box of Dixie cups. Before we were allowed to enter any Minnesota motel room or North Carolina gas station bathroom, she’d go in first and fill it with an antibacterial fog. (My father called the enormous Lysol can her
flammekaster,
or flamethrower.) In order to keep our bottoms from touching unfamiliar public toilet seats, Sabrina and I had to pee into cups my mother held under us.
I remember my family going to the circus for the first time one Friday night when I was twelve. In retrospect, it’s odd that we hadn’t been to a circus before, because one of my father’s own fondest childhood memories was seeing a circus every summer near the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen in the 1920s and ‘30s. Dad and I were alone on our back porch after dinner before we drove down to Chicago, and I told him that a lot of my friends were frightened of clowns. “Americans,” he said, lowering his voice a little, “don’t like clowns very much, I think, because so many Americans are dopes who believe they are very clever. While clowns, of course, are very clever people pretending to be dopes.” I laughed really hard, which pleased him a lot. My mother didn’t like it when he made broad generalizations about “Americans,” because it reminded her that he wasn’t one, even though in reply he always reminded her that he earned a living—in marketing—by making broad generalizations about Americans.
I remember going out to dinner at Walker Bros. Original Pancake House in Wilmette just after it opened. It was a special treat, and I complained that Sabrina got to come, since she’d stayed home sick from school that day with an upset stomach—an illness that I, in my egregious junior-litigator fashion, wasn’t buying. I remember my father ordering the “Danish apple pancake” and then laughing so loudly when it arrived that people turned and looked at us. He’d expected the delicate little sliced-apple popovers of his youth,
æbleskiver,
not this steaming two-pound LP-sized thousand-calorie hillock of apple and cake drenched in melted butter and brown sugar and cinnamon. “God, I love this country,” he said, more sincerely than not, staring at the giant pancake as he cackled and shook his head. Although a ten-year-old, at least in 1960, couldn’t precisely parse his reaction—disgusted
and
delighted?—I thought I more or less understood. My eager little brother wanted to guffaw along with his dad. “It looks,” Peter shouted, “like a pile of
barf.
” Mom said, “
Peter!
It does
not,
it looks scrumptious. And the polite word, young man, is ‘upchuck.’” At which point Sabrina vomited all over the table.
I remember almost every weekend, usually Saturday night around seven-thirty but sometimes Friday, my dad mixing two big Tom Collinses and putting his precious old Ink Spots 78 on the hi-fi. It was the last record he’d bought in Denmark, in 1942, during the Nazi occupation. The opening guitar riff of “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” was the weekly cue that my mother and he were hereby ignoring us for the rest of the night, that we were meant to scram—go to our bedrooms to read, or to the basement to play Monopoly or watch television (our family’s single most un-American oddity: no TV in the living room), or, once we were older, get out of the house and wander off.
I also remember things like watching
American Bandstand
and
Kukla, Fran and Ollie
a thousand times. But so what? In that way, my life was the same as your life or your parents’ lives. Everyone my age has more or less the same checklist of the same moments, the package of entertainment-and-TV-news highlights that the entertainment-and-TV-news industry has cherry-picked and recycled continuously since people my age took over. Whereas each of my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents all the way back filled their mental attics with memories derived from their own idiosyncratic real lives. Almost all of our ancestors’ meaningful memories were
theirs,
custom-made, no more than occasionally supplemented by a dazzling scene from a movie, or a memorable bar of music, or a line from a sermon, or a famous old poem about a barbarian invasion. Nowadays our authentic memories, except for vague recollections of mood and aroma and shimmer, and a few extreme moments—finding a hidden bird’s nest made from your mother’s hair, breaking your brother’s arm, your sister puking in a restaurant—have been squeezed into a second-rate mental ghetto, supplanted by the canon of slick universal media memories.
I’d barely finished living my childhood when show business started replacing my private and odd and fragmentary memories with its special, shiny reconstituted versions. It started suddenly, the moment I became an adult, with the movies
Woodstock
(1970) and
American Graffiti
(1973) and the musical
Grease
(1971). Artists and audiences have always done this, I suppose. But Homer and Shakespeare wrote their stories a century or five centuries after the events, not so quickly that the people who lived through the events were tricked into believing they had
experienced
the fictions and docudramas. A man I dated in 2007 loved
Mad Men,
for instance, so I watched half the first season, and now I can’t help but think of my dad as Don Draper with a foreign accent and a sense of humor, which pisses me off.
It was at the beginning of eighth grade that I became acutely aware of something large and strange under way in the world, a sudden global unraveling way beyond what my dad called “this wonderful picnic-y informality” of America. It wasn’t just from knowing about beatniks or discovering Dylan, but because my English teacher was so pissed off about a new dictionary and my mother was so euphoric about Pope John and his special conclave of bishops at the Vatican. Of course, the fact that puberty and the 1960s were kicking in at precisely the same moment was synergistic: each made the other seem more remarkable and important—to me, to the millions of mes, and to millions of confounded adults. As I morphed into a shocking new version of myself, the whole world was morphing the same way.
Locust Junior High opened that fall, all spick-and-span, its dramatically sloped roof and beige brick and low long wings and grids of big windows so modern, so aggressively, blandly new. The blackboards had no patina of chalk dust. The maps on the walls were unwrinkled and unstained and showed Ghana and Nigeria and both Congos as independent nations. The black paraffin covering the bottom of every dissection tray was virginal, unblemished by pinpricks and frog juice. The tumbling mats in the gym—the “multipurpose room,” because it was also where we ate lunch and watched concerts—smelled of chemicals, factory-fresh. Even the water-fountain water came out stronger and colder than it had in grade school. Almost every book was uncracked, from
A Wrinkle in Time
to
Modern Elementary Algebra
to the unabridged thirteen-pound dictionaries that sat on their own special metal pedestals in the library and each classroom.
Our English teacher made it clear on the first day of school that the
Webster’s Third New International
was a loathsome thing enabling and celebrating the decline of civilization but which he was required by the school district to abide. Mr. Fortini was young, maybe thirty, so his hardcore fogeyism was fascinating.
He didn’t mind the inclusion of smut—”damn” and “shit” and “piss” and “tit” and every bad word we knew except “fuck.” Rather, he disapproved of the new dictionary’s abandonment of disapproval, its replacement of all the old
Webster’s Second
labels—”incorrect,” “improper,” “erroneous,” “ludicrous”—with the weenie word “nonstandard.”
When we were in high school, we heard that Mr. Fortini had left teaching to attend seminary and become a Roman Catholic priest. I wonder now what he thought about the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican, the first sessions of which took place that same fall. My mother was a rabid fan of Vatican II, as it came to be known, and of Pope John XXIII. On the day of the Vatican Council’s opening ceremonies in Rome, she kept us home from school for an hour so we could sit in the basement and watch the live Telstar broadcast on NBC.