The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race (6 page)

Confronted with this style of individual, an instinct flares within.

Agree or you’ll be harmed
, it says.
Or, worse yet, prolong the interaction
.

AT THE END
of three weeks, we, the Americans, left Cluses with our French counterparts in tow. Little fanfare surrounded our departure, save for a party at our temporary French school at which there were doughnuts and a game of Danny’s devising called Pin the Tail on the Fag. It involved chasing Sidd around and slapping Sidd’s ass. Then you’d shout, “TAG, FAG! YOU’RE IT!”

Sidd tried to defend himself by standing with his ass against the wall and, when that didn’t work, by hiding in the womyn’s bathroom. I went in there to pee and found him locked in the handicapped stall.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“No!” he answered. “
Why
does he think I’m a fag? Honestly! Like,
why
?!”

I did not answer back, “Because you are, Sidd. You
are
.” And that is because I, Sara Barron of the Student Coalition for Awareness, would never use a word like “fag.” All I did say to Sidd was that Danny was an asshole, and that, clearly, Sidd was not a fag. But then I went back to the party. I felt bad for Sidd, yes, but I did not feel bad
enough
to start showering him with affection. Sidd’s gorgeous French
maman
had come to our going-away party, and after everything I’d been through, the sight of her laughing, engaging, trying to protect him from his various aggressors, it was all a bit much. It made me jealous of Sidd. It felt like, “Yeah, well, I’m sorry about this whole
fag situation. But at least you didn’t eat your weight in skin-cream sandwiches this month.”

Misery is supposed to love company. But I’ve always felt like
my
misery prefers someone who’s doing okay. Someone with enough energy to keep the attention on me.

THE THREE WEEKS
I spent in France were the first three weeks I’d ever spent away from home. My parents came to greet me at the airport. When I saw them for the first time it was inexplicably bizarre to feel an emotion other than annoyance. Something had shifted in the time I’d been away, and for the first time in a long time they looked to me like allies. For they spoke in fluent English. They could operate a vacuum. Their faces were un-pierced.

My parents hugged me hello and introduced themselves to Lucille. But Lucille acted cold. Reserved. My parents wrote this off as a simple case of shyness. They waited until we were all together in our car—my parents in the front seats, Lucille and me in the back—to try to coax her into conversation.

“So Lucille,” said my dad. “Did you have a nice flight? Did you get any sleep?”

Lucille, still, said nothing. I decided I should answer for her.

“Dad,” I said, “we don’t want to talk right now, okay? We’re back from
France
, for God’s sake. Hello? France? Do you even
know
how jet-lagged we feel?”

It was a faux snap. A love nip. That I wasn’t afraid of my father, that he was there to knock about, it made him so much less annoying than he’d ever been before.

My mother piped in.

“If you think France is bad,” she said, “try Israel. It’s
eight
hours ahead. I was there, you know. In 1968.”

My mother paused. She turned around to face us.

“So Lucille,” she said, “are you excited for Chicago? It is home to deep-dish pizza and many good museums.”

Lucille shrugged but did not speak. She put on her headphones and turned on her music.

My mother, father, and I all listened to Lucille’s music
through
Lucille’s headphones.

“Is that … music?” asked my mom.

“Yes,” I answered.

“I see,” she said. A pause. Then: “How good is her English?”

“What?” I asked.

“How. Good,” my mother repeated. “Is. Lucille’s. English?”

“Oh,” I said. “It’s good.”

“I see,” she said. “And can she hear me through the headphones?”

I looked at Lucille, who was looking out the window.

“Lucille?” I called, but she did not turn around.

“No,” I said. “She can’t.”

“Then tell me,” said my mother, “what the
fuck
are in her ears?”

“Lynn!” cried my dad.

“What?” asked my mom.

“They’re called spacers,” I said.

“They’re
disgusting
,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “But you’ll get used to them after a while.”

MY MOTHER WAS
lucky insofar as she didn’t have to spend a lot of time around Lucille’s earlobes. In Chicago, as in Cluses, the schools had worked to coordinate various weekday field trips to keep the students busy. Lucille had a lot of free time too, but rather than spend it at our house, she liked to spend it at the local mall.

My dad had to ferry her there and back whenever she wanted to go, but he said it was worth it if it kept my mother calm.

“She hates those ear things, your mother. And as for the drive, it’s not really that bad. Lucille puts on her headphones, and I put on my Cole Porter CD, and it’s kind of like being alone.”

Ours was a three-bedroom house, and this meant shifting the sleeping arrangements so as to accommodate three kids instead of two. My mother asked if I wanted to sleep in my room, in my bed, near Lucille, or in Sam’s room, on his bunk bed, near Sam and Carmen Electra.

There was no question to this question. I knew what I wanted to do.

I ENTERED SAM’S
room humbly, with metaphoric cap in hand. Literally what I was carrying was a magnet from the Evian factory that I’d intended to keep for myself.

I found my brother Scotch-taping his nose to his forehead. His chin was flecked with spit he looked too bored to wipe away.

“Hi,” I said, and handed him the magnet. “Here’s a magnet.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” I said. I pointed at his face. “I like what you’re doing there with the tape. Your nostrils look … long.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” I said. “Also, I was thinking I might sleep on your top bunk. Instead of in my room with Lucille.”

“Sure,” he said. “No problem.”

There was a pause during which we both looked to the wall separating us from what had been my bedroom but was now Lucille’s unkempt lair.

“Her earlobes
are
awful,” Sam said.

“I know,” I said. “It’s like someone yanked them off her head and used them as a teething ring …”

“And then sewed them back on,” he said. “I know exactly what you mean.”

As we learn to accept that we’ll one day find ourselves attracted to douchebag(uette)s for the simple reason that they’ve got butts like Chinese dumplings, so must we learn to devise strategic methods for the self-serving laying of blame. Don’t hate your brother, hate Carmen Electra. Don’t hate your sister, hate how she spells “womyn.” Aim low, ignore, endure. It sounds bleak, I know. But it’s worth it, I think, if you wind up less alone.

When I was a child, my parents upheld the tradition of taking Sam and me on summer vacations. They were generally tight-fisted with money, but vacations they viewed as a worthwhile luxury. My mother in particular, who felt she was broadening her children’s horizons. Miami Beach, the Grand Canyon, Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Glance upon these diverse sections of the vast nation, cultivate an open mind.

“It’ll shock you,” she’d told me en route to San Diego, “how changed you’ll feel by the time we get back. Changed
how
, it’s hard to say. But you’ll be … different. You’ll have seen … the world.”

But then in the summer of 1990, our excursions came to a halt when my father lost his job. He had spent fifteen years
employed by a company at which he wrote dictionary definitions. Until, that is, he showed up one morning and was called into an office and they said the word “downsize.”

And that was pretty much that.

My parents responded to the news in different ways. My father, having arrived home in the middle of the day with no clear sense of when or why he’d have to leave again, sat sobbing on the couch, whereas my mother scrambled around searching for any and all returnable items. She found a handful of sweaters and a pack of frozen shrimp. She called her travel agent to cancel our forthcoming trip to Boston.

I was personally saddened by my father’s job loss. It wasn’t pleasant seeing him wedged in the fetal position, sobbing. More to the point, I had been looking forward to authentic chowder. I now planned to pass the afternoon shut in my bedroom feeling sorry for myself. But I did not manage this successfully. Not once I heard my mother yelling from downstairs.

“EVERYONE INTO THE DEN!” she yelled. “I CALL A MEETING OF THE FAMILY!”

This meeting had no precedent, and unfolded rather like how I’d seen family meetings of the mafia portrayed on-screen. Except that we had women. And inhalers.

“There’s family business to address,” she said. “New arrangements must be made.”

She told us all to get a pen and paper and write down two cost-free activities that we each found personally enjoyable. Having done so, we’d read them aloud and construct what, in twenty-first-century parlance, is most commonly called a staycation. Everyone did as instructed, and we wound up with the following.

Sam was the one who wrote “doughnut.” I was the one who brought up car washes and float-sitting. As I am accountable only for myself, I can explain only my own choices:

Waving at subservient masses from atop one’s colorful, motorized throne
is
an empirically pleasant leisure activity.

As for car washes, they’d been a venerable obsession for years. I’d seen the activity portrayed on-screen numerous times, always as a precursor to some bit of alluring body contact between those doing the washing. The lady character would get doused in sudsy water, desired, and pursued. The overused scenario had left me with the impression that if only I stood with my family in our driveway lathering up the Ford Escort station wagon, one of my male contemporaries might roll by on a skateboard for a look at soapy, eroticized me. I’d be sun-kissed, and possessing of the additional glow one gets embracing life.

“Join us,” I’d urge the passerby. “It’s, like,
so
the more the merrier.”

And then:
My family evaporates into thin air! The male contemporary tackles me nonviolently to the ground! I lie beneath him giggling and breathless, and he’s overcome with what he calls my “… natural beauty. Wow. Do you know Cynthia Rhodes?”

“I don’t,” I say. “Whosoever is Cynthia Rhodes?”

“She plays Penny in
Dirty Dancing
,” he says, “and you look exactly like her. Or, I guess, she looks like you.”

ALL SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES
were approved, save for my float-sitting, which my mother claimed involved excessive sun exposure. But the others were honored with their own
special day: Barron Family Walking Day. Barron Family Reading Day. Barron Family Make-a-Doughnut Day. The lack of float-sitting was replaced with Barron Family Pool Day. We followed through with Barron Family Car Wash Day, but no male contemporary swung by on a skateboard. This disappointment was compensated for when my mother and brother—the latter in a wet T-shirt, plumped decidedly up by asthma medication—shared an amusing exchange:

My parents, high on resourcefulness, acted atypically relaxed. Their money-saving feathers couldn’t ruffle, not even if Sam or I misbehaved. And Sam and I misbehaved. During Barron Family Pool Day, Sam purposefully shat while sitting on the pool deck. He was seven. This story, euphemistically titled “Sam at the Pool,” is key in my family’s anecdotal canon. For this particular retelling, I called my brother and left a voice mail in which I asked, in effect, what he’d been thinking at the time. The voice mail he left in response has here been directly transcribed:

Sam intuited correctly. He shat on a pool deck, and my father’s course of disciplinary action was to reach for his towel so he could clean it up himself.

“Ah, well,” he said to no one in particular. “Parenthood, right? All in a day’s work.”

I wasn’t much better, shoplifting Purdue packaged ham on Barron Family Make-a-Doughnut Day. We’d gone to the grocery store to buy vanilla extract and I wandered off to the cold-cuts department. That’s where I saw the ham, and stuffed it down my underpants. When inevitably my mother found the ham—I’d tucked it
under
the fitted sheet that went
over
my single mattress—I decided to admit the theft rather than lie about having spent her money.

My mother ruffled my hair in response.

“Well,” she said. “It
is
a special week.”

These Barron Family Activity Days occurred most often in public, and this meant we earned a positive reputation for spending so much quality time together. In the latter half of Barron Family Pool Day, we had gone to
shmy
at a local art fair.