Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim Read online

  I didn’t know any Pam Dobbins or J. J. Jackson, but the reverential tone of Janet’s voice sent me into a state of mild shock. Call me naive, but it had simply never occurred to me that other schools might have their own celebrity circles. At the age of twelve, I thought the group at E. C. Brooks was if not nationally known, then at least its own private phenomenon. Why else would our lives revolve around it so completely? I myself was not a member of my school’s popular crowd, but I recall thinking that, whoever they were, Janet’s popular crowd couldn’t begin to compete with ours. But what if I was wrong? What if I’d wasted my entire life comparing myself with people who didn’t really matter? Try as I might, I still can’t wrap my mind around it.

  They banded together in the third grade. Ann Carlsworth, Christie Kaymore, Deb Bevins, Mike Holliwell, Doug Middleton, Thad Pope: they were the core of the popular crowd, and for the next six years my classmates and I studied their lives the way we were supposed to study math and English. What confused us most was the absence of any specific formula. Were they funny? No. Interesting? Yawn. None owned pools or horses. They had no special talents, and their grades were unremarkable. It was their dearth of excellence that gave the rest of us hope and kept us on our toes. Every now and then they’d select a new member, and the general attitude among the student body was “Oh, pick me!” It didn’t matter what you were like on your own. The group would make you special. That was its magic.

  So complete was their power that I actually felt honored when one of them hit me in the mouth with a rock. He’d gotten me after school, and upon returning home, I ran into my sister’s bedroom, hugging my bloody Kleenex and crying, “It was Thad!!!”

  Lisa was one grade higher than me, but still she understood the significance. “Did he say anything?” she asked. “Did you save the rock?”

  My father demanded I retaliate, saying I ought to knock the guy on his ass.

  “Oh, Dad.”

  “Aww, baloney. Clock him on the snot locker and he’ll go down like a ton of bricks.”

  “Are you talking to me?” I asked. The archaic slang aside, who did my father think I was? Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat.

  “I mean, come on, Dad,” Lisa said. “Wake up.”

  The following afternoon I was taken to Dr. Povlitch for X-rays. The rock had damaged one of my bottom teeth, and there was some question over who would pay for the subsequent root canal. I figured that since my parents had conceived me, delivered me into the world, and raised me as a permanent guest in their home, they should foot the bill, but my father thought differently. He decided the Popes should pay, and I screamed as he picked up the phone book.

  “But you can’t just . . . call Thad’s house.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said. “Watch me.”

  There were two Thad Popes in the Raleigh phone book, a Junior and a Senior. The one in my class was what came after a Junior. He was a Third. My father called both the Junior and the Senior, beginning each conversation with the line “Lou Sedaris here. Listen, pal, we’ve got a problem with your son.”

  He said our last name as if it meant something, as if we were known and respected. This made it all the more painful when he was asked to repeat it. Then to spell it.

  A meeting was arranged for the following evening, and before we left the house, I begged my father to change his clothes. He’d been building an addition to the carport and was wearing a pair of khaki shorts smeared with paint and spotted here and there with bits of dried concrete. Through a hole in his tattered T-shirt, without squinting, it was possible to see his nipple.

  “What the hell is wrong with this?” he asked. “We’re not staying for dinner, so who cares what I’m wearing?”

  I yelled for my mother, and in the end he compromised by changing his shirt.

  From the outside, Thad’s house didn’t look much different from anyone else’s—just a standard split-level with what my father described as a totally inadequate carport. Mr. Pope answered the door in a pair of sherbet-colored golf pants and led us downstairs into what he called “the rumpus room.”

  “Oh,” I said, “this is nice!”

  The room was damp and windowless and lit with hanging Tiffany lampshades, the shards of colorful glass arranged to spell the words Busch and Budweiser. The walls were paneled in imitation walnut, and the furniture looked as though it had been hand-hewn by settlers who’d reconfigured parts of their beloved Conestoga wagon to fashion such things as easy chairs and coffee tables. Noticing the fraternity paddle hanging on the wall above the television, my father launched into his broken Greek, saying “Kalispera sas adhelfos!”

  When Mr. Pope looked at him blankly, my father laughed and offered a translation. “I said, ‘Good evening, brother.’”

  “Oh . . . right,” Mr. Pope said. “Fraternities are Greek.”

  He directed us toward a sofa and asked if we wanted something to drink. Coke? A beer? I didn’t want to deplete Thad’s precious cola supply, but before I could refuse, my father said sure, we’d have one of each. The orders were called up the staircase, and a few minutes later Mrs. Pope came down, carrying cans and plastic tumblers.

  “Well, hello there,” my father said. This was his standard greeting to a beautiful woman, but I could tell he was just saying it as a joke. Mrs. Pope wasn’t unattractive, just ordinary, and as she set the drinks before us, I noticed that her son had inherited her blunt, slightly upturned nose, which looked good on him but caused her to appear overly suspicious and judgmental.

  “So,” she said. “I hear you’ve been to the dentist.” She was just trying to make small talk, but because of her nose, it came off sounding like an insult, as if I’d just had a cavity filled and was now looking for someone to foot the bill.

  “I’ll say he’s been to the dentist,” my father said. “Someone hits you in the mouth with a rock and I’d say the dentist’s office is pretty much the first place a reasonable person would go.”

  Mr. Pope held up his hands. “Whoa now,” he said. “Let’s just calm things down a little.” He yelled upstairs for his son, and when there was no answer he picked up the phone, telling Thad to stop running his mouth and get his butt down to the rumpus room ASAP.

  A rush of footsteps on the carpeted staircase and then Thad sprinted in, all smiles and apologies. The minister had called. The game had been rescheduled. “Hello, sir, and you are . . . ?”

  He looked my father in the eye and firmly shook his hand, holding it in his own for just the right amount of time. While most handshakes mumbled, his spoke clearly, saying both We’ll get through this as quickly as possible and I’m looking forward to your vote this coming November.

  I’d thought that seeing him without his group might be unsettling, like finding a single arm on the sidewalk, but Thad was fully capable of operating independently. Watching him in action, I understood that his popularity was not an accident. Unlike a normal human being, he possessed an uncanny ability to please people. There was no sucking up or awkward maneuvering to fit the will of others. Rather, much like a Whitman’s sampler, he seemed to offer a little bit of everything. Pass on his athletic ability and you might partake of his excellent manners, his confidence, his coltish enthusiasm. Even his parents seemed invigorated by his presence, uncrossing their legs and sitting up just a little bit straighter as he took a seat beside them. Had the circumstances been different, my father would have been all over him, probably going so far as to call him son—but money was involved, so he steeled himself.

  “All right, then,” Mr. Pope said. “Now that everyone’s accounted for, I’m hoping we can clear this up. Sticks and stones aside, I suspect this all comes down to a little misunderstanding between friends.”

  I lowered my eyes, waiting for Thad to set his father straight. “Friends? With him?” I expected laughter or the famous Thad snort, but instead he said nothing. And with his silence, he won me completely. A little misunderst
anding—that’s exactly what it was. How had I not seen it earlier?

  The immediate goal was to save my friend, and so I claimed to have essentially thrown myself in the path of Thad’s fast-moving rock.

  “What the hell was he throwing rocks for?” my father asked. “What the hell was he throwing them at?”

  Mrs. Pope frowned, implying that such language was not welcome in the rumpus room.

  “I mean, Jesus Christ, the guy’s got to be a complete idiot.”

  Thad swore he hadn’t been aiming at anything, and I backed him up, saying it was just one of those things we all did. “Like in Vietnam or whatever. It was just friendly fire.”

  My father asked what the hell I knew about Vietnam, and again Thad’s mother winced, saying that boys picked up a lot of this talk by watching the news.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” my father said.

  “What my wife meant . . . ,” Mr. Pope said.

  “Aww, baloney.”

  The trio of Popes exchanged meaningful glances, holding what amounted to a brief, telepathic powwow. “This man crazy,” the smoke signals read. “Make heap big trouble for others.”

  I looked at my father, a man in dirty shorts who drank his beer from the can rather than pouring it into his tumbler, and I thought, You don’t belong here. More precisely, I decided that he was the reason I didn’t belong. The hokey Greek phrases, the how-to lectures on mixing your own concrete, the squabble over who would pay the stupid dentist bill—little by little, it had all seeped into my bloodstream, robbing me of my natural ability to please others. For as long as I could remember, he’d been telling us that it didn’t matter what other people thought: their judgment was crap, a waste of time, baloney. But it did matter, especially when those people were these people.

  “Well,” Mr. Pope said, “I can see that this is going nowhere.”

  My father laughed. “Yeah, you got that right.” It sounded like a parting sentence, but rather than standing to leave, he leaned back in the sofa and rested his beer can upon his stomach. “We’re all going nowhere.”

  At this point I’m fairly sure that Thad and I were envisioning the same grim scenario. While the rest of the world moved on, my increasingly filthy and bearded father would continue to occupy the rumpus-room sofa. Christmas would come, friends would visit, and the Popes would bitterly direct them toward the easy chairs. “Just ignore him,” they’d say. “He’ll go home sooner or later.”

  In the end, they agreed to pay for half of the root canal, not because they thought it was fair but because they wanted us out of their house.

  Some friendships are formed by a commonality of interests and ideas: you both love judo or camping or making your own sausage. Other friendships are forged in alliance against a common enemy. On leaving Thad’s house, I decided that ours would probably be the latter. We’d start off grousing about my father, and then, little by little, we’d move on to the hundreds of other things and people that got on our nerves. “You hate olives,” I imagined him saying. “I hate them, too!”

  As it turned out, the one thing we both hated was me. Rather, I hated me. Thad couldn’t even summon up the enthusiasm. The day after the meeting, I approached him in the lunchroom, where he sat at his regular table, surrounded by his regular friends. “Listen,” I said, “I’m really sorry about that stuff with my dad.” I’d worked up a whole long speech, complete with imitations, but by the time I finished my mission statement, he’d turned to resume his conversation with Doug Middleton. Our perjured testimony, my father’s behavior, even the rock throwing: I was so far beneath him that it hadn’t even registered.

  Poof.

  The socialites of E. C. Brooks shone even brighter in junior high, but come tenth grade, things began to change. Desegregation drove a lot of the popular people into private schools, and those who remained seemed silly and archaic, deposed royalty from a country the average citizen had ceased to care about.

  Early in our junior year, Thad was jumped by a group of the new black kids, who yanked off his shoes and threw them in the toilet. I knew I was supposed to be happy, but part of me felt personally assaulted. True, he’d been a negligent prince, yet still I believed in the monarchy. When his name was called at graduation, it was I who clapped the longest, outlasting even his parents, who politely stopped once he’d left the stage.

  I thought about Thad a lot over the coming years, wondering where he went to college and if he joined a fraternity. The era of the Big Man on Campus had ended, but the rowdy houses with their pool tables and fake moms continued to serve as reunion points for the once popular, who were now viewed as date rapists and budding alcoholics. I tell myself that while his brothers drifted toward a confused and bitter adulthood, Thad stumbled into the class that changed his life. He’s the poet laureate of Liechtenstein, the surgeon who cures cancer with love, the ninth-grade teacher who insists that the world is big enough for everyone. When moving to another city, I’m always hoping to find him living in the apartment next door. We’ll meet in the hallway and he’ll stick out his hand, saying, “Excuse me, but don’t I—shouldn’t I know you?” It doesn’t have to happen today, but it does have to happen. I’ve kept a space waiting for him, and if he doesn’t show up, I’m going to have to forgive my father.

  The root canal that was supposed to last for ten years has now lasted for over thirty, though it’s nothing to be proud of. Having progressively dulled and weakened, the tooth is now a brownish gray color the Conran’s catalog refers to as “Kabuki.” It’s hanging in there, but just barely. While Dr. Povlitch worked out of a converted brick house beside the Colony Shopping Center, my current dentist, Docteur Guig, has an office near the Madeleine, in Paris. On a recent visit, he gripped my dead tooth between his fingertips and gently jiggled it back and forth. I hate to unnecessarily exhaust his patience, so when he asked me what had happened, it took me a moment to think of the clearest possible answer. The past was far too complicated to put into French, so instead I envisioned a perfect future, and attributed the root canal to a little misunderstanding between friends.

  Monie Changes Everything

  MY mother had a great-aunt who lived outside of Cleveland and visited us once in Binghamton, New York. I was six years old but can clearly remember her car moving up the newly paved driveway. It was a silver Cadillac driven by a man in a flattopped cap, the kind worn by policemen. He opened the back door with great ceremony, as if this were a coach, and we caught sight of the great-aunt’s shoes, which were orthopedic yet fancy, elaborately tooled leather with little heels the size of spools. The shoes were followed by the hem of a mink coat, the tip of a cane, and then, finally, the great-aunt herself, who was great because she was rich and childless.

  “Oh, Aunt Mildred,” my mother said, and we looked at her strangely. In private she referred to her as “Aunt Monie,” a cross between moaning and money, and the proper name was new to us.

  “Sharon!” Aunt Monie said. She looked at our father, and then at us.

  “This is my husband, Lou,” my mother said. “And these are our children.”

  “How nice. Your children.”

  The driver handed my father several shopping bags and then returned to the car as the rest of us stepped inside.

  “Would he like to use the bathroom or something?” my mother whispered. “I mean, he’s more than welcome to. . . .”

  Aunt Monie laughed, as if my mother had asked if the car itself would like to come indoors. “Oh, no, dear. He’ll stay outside.”

  I don’t believe my father gave her a tour, the way he did with most visitors. He had designed parts of the house himself, and enjoyed describing what they might have looked like had he not intervened. “What I’ve done,” he’d say, “is put the barbecue pit right here in the kitchen, where it’ll be closer to the refrigerator.” The guests would congratulate him on his ingenuity, and then he would lead them into the breakfast nook. I hadn’t been in too many houses but understood that our
s was very nice. The living-room window overlooked the backyard and, beyond that, a deep forest. In the winter deer came and tiptoed around the bird feeder, ignoring the meat scraps my sisters and I had neatly arranged for their dining pleasure. Even without the snow, the view was impressive, but Aunt Monie seemed not to notice it. The only thing she commented on was the living-room sofa, which was gold and seemed to amuse her. “My goodness,” she said to my four-year-old sister, Gretchen. “Did you choose this yourself?” Her smile was brief and amateurish, like something she was studying but had not yet mastered. The mouth turned up at the corners, but her eyes failed to follow. Rather than sparkling, they remained flat and impassive, like old dimes.

  “All right then,” she said. “Let’s see what we’ve got.” She received my sisters and me, each in turn, and handed us an unwrapped present from an exotic shopping bag at her feet. The bag was from a Cleveland department store, a store that for many years had been hers, or at least partially. Her first husband had owned it, and when he died she had married a tool-and-die manufacturer who eventually sold his business to Black and Decker. He, too, had passed away, and she had inherited everything.

  My gift was a marionette. Not the cheap kind with a blurred plastic face, but a wooden one, each fine joint attached by hook to a black string. “This is Pinocchio,” Aunt Monie said. “His nose is long from telling lies. Is that something you like to do from time to time, tell little lies?” I started to answer, and she turned to my sister Lisa. “And who have we here?” It was like visiting Santa, or rather, like having him visit you. She gave us each an expensive gift, and then she went to the bathroom to powder her nose. With most people this was just an expression, but when she returned, her face was matted, as if with flour, and she smelled strongly of roses. My mother asked her to stay for lunch, and Aunt Monie explained that it was impossible. “What with Hank,” she said, “the long drive, I just couldn’t.” Hank, we figured, was the chauffeur, who raced to open the car door the moment we stepped out of the house. Our great-aunt settled into the backseat and covered her lap with a fur blanket. “You can close the door now,” she said, and we stood in the driveway, my marionette waving a tangled good-bye.