The Harm in Asking: My Clumsy Encounters with the Human Race (7 page)

“Shmy”
is a Yiddish term for “stroll, wander, or window-shop,” and the subtext of the word, at least in my experience, suggests that one’s superior for having done so—that is, for having looked but not bought. If one says, “I’m
shmying
,” one’s also said, “I’m not so self-indulgent as to
buy
, of course. I’ve merely looked.”

So we’d gone to
shmy
, and while
shmying
, we’d run into one of my mother’s friends.

“You Barrons!” said the friend. “Just yesterday I was driving around and saw you all out together walking! Now here you are again, all out together buying art!”

“We’re not buying art,” said my mother. “We’re
shmying
art.”

“Well, it’s lovely, whatever it is. It’d be great if
my
kids did a little more walking or
shyming
. Just a little more willing participation, you know?”

“Can’t say I do,” said my mom. “My kids are up for anything. I’m very lucky.”

“Anything” may have meant a walk or a
shmy
, but it also meant public shitting and shoplifting. However, my mother didn’t want to share the full picture of her experience, and who could blame her? She had admirers now. She had an image to maintain.

The week was labeled a success. My parents had enjoyed the frugality, and as for me, I loved the faint hints of encouragement. I loved the sense that we were up to something special. Might I have
preferred
a situation wherein the glory was mine and mine alone? Of course. My ideal would have been to spend the whole of our staycation sitting by myself on the float of my dreams in the center of town. But something is better than nothing. A
little
attention at an art fair is better than
no
attention at some chowder hut in Boston. And as for Sam? Well, Sam was so mellow he’d shat on a pool deck. Sam was happy. Sam was fine.

These joys and satisfactions snowballed into an ambrosial cocktail that convinced my parents to forsake family vacations entirely. Instead, we reserved a week every August for Barron Family Activity Days. We did it from that first year in 1990, when my father lost his job, to 1997, when I left to go to college.

August 1993 was noteworthy in that we spent the whole of the week at a nearby nature preserve. Which is not to say we camped, as the budget-conscious Barrons would sooner max out credit cards than we would attempt to pitch a tent. We rather drove there and back every
day to attend a series of free classes. We flower-pressed, fire-started, and bird-identified. It was during one such bird-identification class that my father won the contest for “Best Ruffed Grouse Drumming” under the tutelage of a woman named Leona. Leona was a burly instructor, and she rewarded my dad with a bandanna that said,
YOU BELONG TO THE EARTH
.

“How’s about a round of applause for Mr. Barron!” she yelled, and handed over the bandanna.

As instructed, the seven of us clapped: my mother, my brother, me. A retired couple. A child with muscular dystrophy. Her father, who’d come to push her in her wheelchair.

The gang of us clapped for my dad.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You’re welcome!” said Leona. She paused. She said, “Well? Aren’t you gonna put it on?”

I struggle to adequately explain how bizarre it would be to see my dad in a bandanna. In a feeble try, though, a short list of things that’d be more normal:

Nevertheless, my father wanted to be gracious to Leona and not at all dismissive of her gift. So he bit the bullet and tried it on. The resulting visual made my mother laugh so hard, she pissed herself. I know because she told me.

“I’ve laughed so hard I’ve pissed myself!” she said. “Are we having fun here,
or what
?!”

IN THE MIDDLE
1990s, Barron Family Activity Days expanded to include seasonal variations. Each new season brought a fresh bounty of opportunity. In fall, there was
Barron Family Raking Day and Barron Family Pumpkin Carving Day. We enjoyed Barron Family Biking Day, exploiting the chill in the air all twenty miles to the Harold Washington Library in downtown Chicago. Once there, we would bounce in unison to a free Klezmer band concert. In winter, there was Barron Family Sledding Day and Barron Family View-a-Manger Day. This last one involved ordering Chinese takeout, and eating in the car. As we ate, my father would drive us around nearby gentile suburbs like Highwood and Lake Forest, so we could point and laugh at the plastic or ceramic mangers. In 1994, there was a not-to-be-repeated Barron Family Caroling Day. The problem here was that we’d gone to a concert known for its audience participation, but then my manner of audience participation embarrassed my parents. I’d been standing directly in front of them bellowing along to “Good King Wenceslas,” when I overheard my mother tell my father, “She is
screaming
. Just
screaming
. Are you going to handle this, or should I?”

I have a long history of giving myself over to the music, of getting brought back to reality when other people’s words and/or facial expressions suggest I’ve embarrassed myself. Perhaps the ’94 caroling attempt was the first time this happened. I can’t quite recall. Regardless, I was not yet ready to be humbled into silence, to accept my singing voice as that of a rangeless Ethel Merman. My parents, lacking the heart to interrupt me, put the kibosh on all future family caroling events. This ensured that if I cared to carol in the future, at least they wouldn’t be around to hear it.

BACK WHEN BARRON
Family Activity Days were in their nascent stages, I enjoyed them by virtue of the flickers of praise they could provide. But as late adolescence
approached, the experience redefined itself as one of deep humiliation. Throughout high school, my spring break activities were but a guidebook for extraditing oneself from an already shaky social circle. My peers would go to Cancún, and I would stay with my family in Chicago. My peers would return cornrowed and tanned, and I would return having seen
Dead Man Walking
or
The Birdcage
. I knew a mean little thing named Avital Goldfarb. Her locker was next to mine, and I was nice to her out of fear, mostly, but also because in the case of spring break, I wanted to know how the other half lived.

“Hi, Avital. So how was Cancún?”

“Oh my God. BEYOND,” she said. “It was, like, totally beyond.”

“Oh, wow,” I said. “What happened?”

“Well,” she said, “David Weinberg and me fucked on a swim-up bar and then went to a bubble party after.”

At the age of sixteen, I was not yet aware that a bubble party was a rave-like experience at which suds were poured on partygoers, who, more often than not, were outfitted in lingerie. I thought a bubble party was what happens when you and a chosen companion stomp around on bubble wrap to pop the bubbles.

“I love bubble parties!” I said. “My brother Sam and I had one at home!”

“Just the two of you?”

“Yes.”

“In your house?”

“Yes. Since we couldn’t get down to the ’Cún.”

“That’s really weird. I mean, like … wait: Did you just say ‘the ’Cún’?”

Winter break was not much better. At the end of 1995, my mother finagled a deal on one-size-fits-all snow pants. The purchase facilitated the first of the Barron Family
Sledding Days, in which my parents, brother, and I all wound up in matching snow pants. Because it was sunny this day, and all of us were nauseatingly pale
and
steered through life by my mother’s hypochondria, we were also all face-painted with zinc oxide.

I enjoyed a half hour of good clean fun before a Jeep Cherokee’s worth of my classmates arrived outfitted in Oakley-brand everything. They carried a thermos each, and moved amidst a swell of smoke that smelled of marijuana.

This brings me to the problem inherent to adequate sledding terrain: There’s never anywhere to hide. Interactions are inevitable. I wound up having mine with Jason Zellman.

“Oh, hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said.

“Nice snow pants,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. “What’s in your thermos?”

“Vodka,” he said. “What’s on your face?”

“Zinc oxide,” I said. “It makes me less susceptible to melanoma.”

The exchange was unpleasant enough and it was made even worse by the history I shared with Jason Zellman. Three years prior, he’d overheard me in the junior high school cafeteria tell a friend, “You know what’s the worst thing? Butter on ham,” and then—and for reasons unknown—he made a beeline for me so as to slap a slice of butter-logged white bread on my cheek.

What a boy named Jason Zellman was doing with so much butter on white bread, I’ll never know. But that’s beside the point. What I’m trying to convey is that the experience was remarkably disgusting, and that under even the best circumstance, in Jason Zellman’s presence I now felt vulnerable. As I also felt vulnerable when I was in a pair
of snow pants to match my parents’ snow pants, the above conversation was a real one-two punch in the adolescent misery department. Physically painful, almost. Like pouring vodka down my snow pants. Like
feeling
vodka soak my nonabsorbent jeans.

AN ODD THING
happens in one’s early twenties, and that’s how associations shift regarding nerdish adolescence. Once a liability, the experience morphs suddenly and without warning into a fashionable bit of personal history. I believe this to be a first-world affliction. I can’t say for sure, as I don’t get out much to those third or second worlds—I am too afraid of food poisoning and/or slipping into an unsolvable depression—but here in the first world, we like to dish on what we’ve been through. We hit our twenties and find we crave a little color to our pasts.

I was on the Internet the other day, stalking the wife of a current enemy. This proved an easy task, as she maintained a comprehensive blog. She’d stocked it with information like what restaurant she went to for dinner and how much she loves her second husband.

Included in the margin was a
15 Things About Me
list, and number 13 read as follows:

“I have suffered. A lot.”

I mention the excerpt, as it perfectly illustrates my point: We believe that to Suffer As a Child secures us our status as a Winningly Complex Adult.

It is a popular trend but it is also misguided. For it prompts even the most stupidly, thoroughly, symmetrically attractive to swear they’ve done just that. They were nerds! Dorks! Tomboys! So thin that someone teased them!

I was
such
a dork growing up, but it was worth it! It’s what made me who I am today
.

Of course, there’s an unstated presumption at work,
and that’s that who they are today is something other than mind-numbingly mundane. The whole thing’s a reach at seeming humble and complex, a bit of self-delightedness sold as self-effacement.

The behavior is annoying, to be sure, but it is not without its upshots. Namely, that when I entered my early twenties, Barron Family Activity Days morphed yet again. This time into something I was proud of. Suddenly Barron Family Pedal-Boating Day wasn’t embarrassing so much as it was adorable. Adorable and hilarious! A contributing factor to the unique piece of sass I’d become! Tell a person post-collegiately, “Sorry I can’t make it to your party. It conflicts with family pedal-boating,” and prepare to bask in public praise.

“Did you say ‘family pedal-boating’? OMG. How cute are you?”

“Whatever. We’re, like, total nerds.”

“Whatever! You’re awesome!”

Praise is what’s awesome, and seeing as how my twenties were otherwise a revolving door of waiter shifts and unbiblical sex, any meager boost to my self-esteem was welcome. In 2004 I had a boyfriend I both scored and maintained owing almost entirely, I think, to Barron Family Activity Days. On our third date, he invited me to a party, and I declined the invitation citing a conflicting visit home. I said, “I really would love to, but the thing is, my parents schedule these, like, Family Activity Days.” I leaned coquettishly in on my elbow. “And they’re simply not to be missed. It’s
so
super-nerdy. Oh my God. I’m such a dork!”

It’s really effective, seeming all at once unavailable
and
family oriented, and this guy slipped into the palm of my hand like it was greased and hanging on a better-looking woman. Someone more authentically aloof. Things between
us fell apart eventually, of course, once my neediness and lack of generosity shined through. But just because victory isn’t yours forever, well, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t yours for once.

THIS BRINGS US
to today: Sam and I are both in our thirties. My mom is sixty-five. My dad is sixty-nine. The four of us do still indulge in Barron Family Activity Days, but my feelings surrounding these activities have shifted for what I think might be the final time.

They
had
been enjoyable, and then embarrassing, and then exciting to exploit.

They
have
, however, gotten sad.

The time we now spend together sledding, say, or communally wading in lakes, looks less “cute” than it does deranged, and the problem (from what I can gather) boils down to lack of grandkids.

Let me here state that if you care to feel the active withering of your own,
personal
womb, you ought to try burying your arthritic mother in the sand in lieu of the toddler you’ve failed to produce.

The subtext of most of what my parents say these days smacks of “We don’t need grandkids!
We’re
thrilled to be here, just us four!”

It’s pretty depressing, and it’s made even more depressing by the fact that they know they’re not getting one anytime soon. Sam makes just above minimum wage as a line cook, and I lack any vague interest in putting someone else’s needs before my own. So my parents get depressed. They try to act like they’re not, but they are. If you ask them their opinion on the matter, my father, teary-eyed, will tell you, “Oh, you know. It’s fine.” But my mother, more defensively, will say, “
My
kids are creative,
okay
? They’re artists. You have grandkids, I have artists. Sam
and Sara are creative artists, and artists take longer when it comes to having kids.”