You know those goofy quizzes where you get a point for each infraction you’ve committed? Things like playing hooky or joyriding, recreational indulgence in various substances, or killing a man in Reno just to watch him die? My score is probably equivalent to, or lower than, that of your average nun. I’ve never been drunk, never smoked or gotten high — at least not for kicks. The cheap weed my classmates inhaled in their parents’ basements seemed unlikely to compare to the dayslong morphine hazes of my youth.
Of particular social interest circa middle and high school, as dances and dates came into view, were one’s plans for their alleged virtue. I didn’t relate to Catholic and fundamentalist Christian classmates who publicly pledged chastity and privately fretted about late periods; I was as abstemious sexually as I was with everything else. It wasn’t that I was “saving myself” for marriage, an institution from which I was barred. Nor did I think sex was dirty or shameful — I suspected it was spectacular and best shared with someone I loved, which was still a long way off.*
While most of my friends hurled themselves toward social development milestones, my head was usually in a book. Every weekend I scoured the newspaper’s TV guide supplement for Hitchcock films and screwball comedies, circling what I wanted to watch or record off PBS and AMC. (It took what felt like an eternity for my parents to upgrade to a cable package that included TCM.) Papa called to alert me to other required viewing, often musicals, but was also partial to Jewish leading men. From George Segal in No Way to Treat a Lady to Harvey Fierstein in Torch Song Trilogy, he found representation everywhere.
When my parents complained I wasn’t sociable enough with my peers, I signed up for extracurricular activities to appease them. In fifth grade, that meant staying late with a handful of other weirdos to make birdhouses and puppets in a glorified supply closet. (Lacking any interest in ornithology or puppetry, I took these crafts home for my sister to play with until she lost interest and they were tossed in the trash.) Broader opportunities mercifully arose in the years to come. I learned a new instrument, volunteered as a conflict mediator and pursued journalism with enough success that I won a prestigious award or two and had an article reproduced in a textbook.
None of it impressed my parents, who were busy with other things. “You never participated in anything,” my workaholic father once grumbled when I was in my early twenties. At first I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. I reminded him of the flute, my appearance in a local newspaper, and the dozens of academic awards I’d earned, including medals, plaques and ribbons for journalism, short fiction and poetry. Some were displayed in my bedroom for years. He remembered little of it, or the French classes I took, only the summer enrichment camps I declined to attend.**
My mom’s memory wasn’t much sharper, which was understandable. She was surrounded by screaming children during some of those years, including an infant she cared for to bring in extra money, and Felix’s behavioral problems frequently demanded her attention. Though I mostly appreciated my invisibility at home, it eventually reached an inflection point and I decided to keep my family in the dark about my writing. As a private kid whose interests and achievements rarely intersected with theirs, I saw little value in sharing my passions or personal triumphs if it was all so disposable to them.^ Not much has changed in the last 25 years.
It’s funny, when I sat down to write this the intention was to reminisce about being a strange kid and learning embrace it. Those plans receded as I reflected on the latter half of my childhood and how much of it was spent getting lost in the shuffle. What I’ve arrived at instead is the uncomfortable realization that many of those dynamics have been recreated in my relationship with Crankenstein. It’s nothing I could write about humorously or authoritatively at the moment; it’ll require more reflection than that. But already I’m questioning the implications of almost everything I wanted to say about “Follow Your Arrow,” a Kacey Musgraves song that’s meant a lot to me over the last 10 years.
The central issue is this — what if your arrow points away from your marriage? That’s not meant as a cliffhanger or threat; as you can probably tell, neither of us are the type to run out on someone we love. We’ve discussed staying together and we’ve also discussed the possibility of maintaining a platonic partnership while ending the romantic part of our relationship. If you’re a lyrical literalist, neither of us is interested in kissing lots of girls; it’s the “you just get so many trips ’round the sun” part that’s relevant.
* “Saving yourself” made it sound like a Tupperware ad. It was an expression that reduced one’s virginity to something that must be carefully preserved for someone else’s delectation. That person was understood to be male, if not your future husband then Jesus. I saw no connection between that and my own abstinence, which was intended solely for me (and which I can definitively say I don’t regret). But the main thing that age has taught me about religious-based ‘purity’ culture is something I understood intellectually but not emotionally as a kid: it’s indescribably cruel to those who were sexually abused prior to engaging in anything consensual. It encompasses nearly everything that’s vile about religious fundamentalism.
** I didn’t want to share communal bathrooms with strangers post-surgery. Every school that identified me as potential talent required dorm-living. These days you could probably just ask for a private bathroom, but that never occurred to me or my parents back then. (Of course, some of those programs now cease to exist because it was our standardized test scores that intrigued them and those have temporarily fallen out of vogue.) As for French, I’m better at reading it than speaking it and the main thing I remember from class was being the only kid who paid attention to the 1939 film version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. You can probably guess why: I was mesmerized by Maureen O’Hara’s Esmerelda.
^ By the age of 16 I was on studio mailing lists, receiving press packets and FedEx envelopes stuffed with DVD and videocassette screeners to review. I’m not sure my parents noticed or had any clue that was unusual.