Authors: Lynne Tillman
Whatever,
Lynne Tillman
NEW YORK, NEW YORK
But There’s a Family Resemblance
There’s a story in my family about Great Uncle Charley, who didn’t know, until he was eighteen and married Margaret, that women went to the bathroom. It’s always told with that euphemism. My father, whose uncle Charley was, told it to me when I was thirteen, in a father-son rite of passage, his three brothers told their sons and, later, even their daughters, when they loosened up about girls.
When Charley and his brothers were kids, they made up their own basketball team in the Not-So-Tall League, they were all under 5’ 8”. They even had shirts made up; there are six photos of that. I’m named after Great Uncle Charley, they say he guarded like a wild dog. My dad’s generation is taller, mine even taller, except for my twin sisters. They’re short, in every snapshot they look like dwarfs. I pored over the family albums starting when I was a kid; I think it was because I was the youngest and needed to get up to speed fast. I knocked into furniture all the time, too, because I raced around, not looking where I was going, running from everything as if a monster would get me. I’m still covered in bruises.
When I think about Great Uncle Charley’s shock at seeing his blushing bride, Margaret, on the can for the first time, I can visualize it, like a snapshot, but I never knew him, he died before I was born. They say you can’t know the other, you can’t know yourself, and sometimes you don’t want to know the other or yourself. I’m sick of trying and failing. But when I imagine my namesake, I can see a smile and a robust body, because of the family pictures, and I always ask myself: could Uncle Charlie have had any kind of a sex life after that?
I don’t know why they named me after him, I’m not like him, according to my mother, but I feel implicated in his sexual ignorance. Families do that, implicate you in them. There are the twins, and one boy ahead of me, he’s the oldest, and we’re separated, oldest to youngest, by six years, so my mother was kept busy, but my father was the boss at home and in the world. He owned a paper factory, and I developed a love for paper, because he’d bring home samples; I liked to touch them, especially the glossy kind, photographic paper, which I licked until one day my mother shouted, “Stop that. You’ll get cancer.” So I stopped.
After Charley died, a terrible secret exploded on Aunt Margaret, who had a near-fatal heart attack and became an invalid, and then she died when I was ten. My parents still won’t tell me what happened. Neither will Stella, Charley and Margaret’s only daughter, tall and willowy, and strangely silent about everything. Maybe she doesn’t know.
I have a doctorate in cultural anthropology and am a tenured associate professor—the big baby can’t be fired, my brother likes to joke—and teach my students that a family’s implicit contract is to keep its secrets. They’re essential to the kinship bond, which offers protection at a price—loyalty to blood and brood. What happens in the family stays there: no obedience, no protection. I use various media to explain certain phenomena and enduring characteristics, as well as new adaptations, of the American family. For example, Mafia movies succeeded, after the family was hammered during the 1960s, by promoting oaths that, like marriage, were ’til death do you part, while guilt and criminality occurred only by disregarding the Family, not the law. The movies glorified the thugs’ loyalty to the clan, but HBO’s
The Sopranos
portrayed mob boss Tony Soprano’s sadism so graphically that, Sunday by Sunday, the viewer’s sympathy was shredded. But other genres will fill the bill, there’ll be no end to war stories for an age of permanent war, and, with the cry for blind patriotism, an American’s fidelity to family can be converted into an uncritical devotion to country.
My whole life, I’ve been absorbed in the family photo albums, home movies, and videos, classifying and preserving them, yet each time I look at my mother when she was nine, I stare, rapt: what’s that expression, I wonder. Time passes in looking, I don’t know how long, and the same fantasy occurs: I might see her static face move, speak, explain herself to me; in the videos, when my father sits at the head of the table at holidays, I see his contempt and malevolence and despise him even more. The few photographs I myself shot of him he hated, he said I made him look bad, that he didn’t look like that, and tore them up in front of me. It’s more evidence of his aggression to me.
At home, I study the familiar images, but in the end nothing changes, the movies run along the way they always do, and without close-ups, it’s hard to see their faces, too many people are walking away from the camera, and the photographs don’t open up, either, their surfaces are like closed doors, as mysterious as they were when I first saw them. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, that’s the most honest response to explain my mania. I look and wait. The unguarded moments are the best, they’re most available to interpretation and also to no interpretation, but always they remain unguarded moments that I can make more of, just the way I want to make more of my life. Instead, I’m facing their ambiguity, which may be truer. I also collect snapshots and albums of unknown people. My pleasure is that I don’t know them, their anonymity identifies them to me, and, in a sense, through them, I can recognize my anonymity to others. It’s like making yourself a stranger.
The American family sustains itself and mutates along with its movies, TV sitcoms, photographs, video. Since the 1960s, in tandem with political agitation, media have remade it, blood ties are no longer necessary, but family cohesion still requires loyalty and secrecy. Any gay/straight sitcom pledges allegiance to the same flag. And though the worst things happen in families, the most disgusting and painful, with long legacies, the family is still idealized; there’s no replacement yet. It remains necessary for survival, and if you’re not in one, your fate is usually worse. Children in London, taken away from their parents in the Blitz, sent to the countryside for safety, were more traumatized than those who stayed home during the bombings. No matter what kind of terrorism happens in a family, relatives hardly ever betray their families’ secrets. The exceptions become sensations—Roseanne, La Toya Jackson. A member’s self-interest can break any contract, implicit or explicit, in the name of honesty, to cure the family or to get just desserts.
Uncle Jack tried to sell life insurance after Uncle Jerry’s funeral, and then my father stopped speaking to him. It’s nothing to the big world, but the break reverberated in ours, loud, disturbing, and still does. What about weddings? How does the tribe meet, on whose territory? When my oldest first cousin, Betsy, married a black man, only the adults knew. We kids were told Betsy had done something wrong and went away. I figured she’d had an illegitimate baby, as it was called then, but after three beautiful legitimate kids with him, a nice guy, nicer than Betsy, her bigoted father relented, so she was back in the fold, times had changed—look who came to dinner in the movies and lived in big houses on TV. Her kids have refused to have anything to do with us. I don’t blame them.
In the 1970s, the Loud family fascinated Americans with its psychological honesty, so compared with it, today’s reality TV is a joke; it trivializes whatever reality you’re invested in. The Louds fell apart afterward. TV’s exhibitionists challenge credulity, sanity, yet people humiliate and shame themselves daily. Americans can’t shake their Puritan past, so everyone’s hoping to confess their sins and find God’s grace. Still, it’s hard to understand Judge Judy’s appeal to the characters who want to be judged on TV, and those who watch manifest people’s perverse, insatiable curiosity and schadenfreude. Also, some people miss being yelled at as they were in their families. I’m one of them.
Shame is different from thirty years ago, it doesn’t last as long—Pee-Wee Herman, Martha Stewart, Richard Nixon—they bounced back, and, like history, Americans forget their pasts and sins quickly. Americans have several acts, with shame’s mutation, and if they’re televisual, it helps; if they’re not, some can escape the stigma of being “ugly as sin” with plastic surgery—see Paula Jones and Linda Tripp. “Ugly” is bad, it’s evil—remember what the bad guys in movies look like.
Great Uncle Charley lived with a secret, and there are more in my family: my brother discovered he’d been born an androgyne, changed to a boy surgically, a fact hidden from him by my parents, until he began to date and felt weird emotions; the twins had abortions when they were fourteen, and apart from that “sin,” they had sex with the same man, maybe at the same time; and my father hit my mother. Mom was frightened of him when he drank, she cowered, I remember her crouched, it’s an image gelled in memory. We kids didn’t need to be told, Keep your damn mouth shut, we knew. If I ratted, a term I learned from cop shows, I knew I was betraying Us, and I’d go to hell. So you’re implicated in your family, always.
Mostly, my mother took the pictures. My father thought it was beneath him, he felt superior to us. My brother and I stood next to each other in many photos; he loomed over me until I turned fourteen and shot up ten inches. I became taller. He hated that, you can see it, I can, because I know his expressions. You can see, I can, the power balance shift: in later photos, then no photos, except at weddings, when we stood far apart, especially at his wedding. To my father’s disgust, he married Claudia, born Claude, a male-to-female trannie; only close friends and family knew. My sisters loved being photographed together, they still do. The twins are identical, both pretty, one has fuller lips, the other a wider nose; you can tell them apart easily if you know them. Their entire lives they’ve looked at each other, images of each other, maybe wondering who’s prettier, and whether she loves herself and image more or less than the other twin does.
The concept of family resemblance is reasonable, given genetics, but it’s peculiar, because what makes a resemblance isn’t clear, there’s no feature-by-feature similarity. Most of us in families share a resemblance. Fascination with the “family other”—a neologism I used in my first book,
You’re a Picture, You’re Not a Picture
—is dulled by the other’s being related by blood; yet what’s near can be farther (what’s in the mirror is farther than you think), because up close, we’re less able to see each other. I don’t look like my brother, but everyone says I do. I hate my brother, often we hate our siblings, so a family resemblance colludes against your difference against your will. Blood tells the story, it seems to say, of which you are a part, and like tragedy can’t be escaped.
But what does comedy tell? Like about Great Uncle Charley, the buffoon, comic, teaser, the man who didn’t know that women piss and shit. Or was his life a tragedy? Was there an inevitability to it? In comedy, the only inevitability is surprise, an unforeseen punch line; guess it, and it’s not funny. Uncle Charley—his life’s a toss up, he was always funny, everyone said, then he died and his terrible secret came out that wasn’t funny, and it was a surprise. Tragedy can’t be a complete shock; it must build and build to a foreseeable end, which can’t ever be avoided. I can’t see any of it in the family photographs. But a family resemblance shares that attribute—it can’t be avoided. You can’t escape what it says about you.
After people die, my mother put it, all that remains are photographs, that’s why we take them. Then she said to me, more sharply, Your interest in the family photos is morbid, the photos, videos, you’re holding on to your childhood, it’s sick. I ignored her and still do, even though she’s dead. Often when people die, you reconsider their statements. I just look at their pictures.
Time goes on, your sacred films and tapes of weddings and communions are hidden away, everyone wants to have them, few look at them again, most are just kept images. I hardly knew so-and-so, there she is forever, but I don’t have to look at her, either. The matte or glossy snapshots, in a drawer or album, represent a past, stand as an implacable memory, stored away against time, and even if in time you recognize no one and nothing by them, even if you have the memory only because the photo exists, it’s a kind of elegy to a reality, a fact or document from the distant past, a memento mori. Or, as Claire’s ghost-brother Nate whispered to her in the finale of HBO’s
Six Feet Under
, when she was shooting their family before leaving home, “That’s already gone.”
When they die, even clowns sometimes morph into tragic heroes. Take Great Uncle Charley. I stare at his photos, ranging from when he was three, posing for a professional in town, sticking his finger up his nose in a high school graduation photograph, his eyes bugging out at a party after his college graduation, looking boisterous with the Not-So-Tall basketball team, or beaming as he cuts the cake with his bride, Margaret, and on and on. Three years before he died, there’s an arresting one of him with his head drooping to the side, a melancholy expression on his face. I want to peel away the emulsion, get under that sad-sack image, and find out his secret. It’s a primitive urge maybe, or a silly or naive feeling, but no matter what I might seem to know about the fiction and illusion of images, I’m also still that little boy rushing around, curious, trying to find out what’s what, and who, like Great Uncle Charley, is shocked at what I see that no one told me would be there. I want other pictures to efface what I do know, to show me another world, I want to kill images, burn them, like some of my brother. Photographs aren’t real that way.
In my next book, I’m broaching treacherous ground and taking up some cultural questions around images, specifically, a photographer’s disposition—the subject behind the camera—and the effects of family resemblance. When an artist pictures a family member, what’s the psychological impact of a family resemblance on the artist? Is the image also a self-portrait, when the shooter “resembles” the one who poses and so also sees himself or herself? How does the sociology of the American family—for instance, sibling order—affect images? Whose “I”/“eye” can be trusted, if trust is an issue in art, and why? From what I learned in my family, I don’t trust anyone in front of or behind a camera, but with a nod to its futility, I’ll try to keep my bias out of it.