And so we sat.
The feeling of dread had been steadily growing in my pre-teen consciousness as dinner approached. Now, my heart began to pound as the body responded to the threat in the environment. In a matter of minutes, any previously playful, careless attitude morphed into a primal assessment of threats in my surroundings, and they seemed to be everywhere: the professionally-edged, spotless carpet laid upon the darkly stained wood floors, a display of crystal and silver on the breakfront implying a heritage of fine genes, the array of plants along the deep bay windowsill looking onto the garden with its elegant Wissahickon schist providing two elevations of flowering varieties. It was all so clean. Cared for. Nurtured. Unlike me.
The need to escape arose. To anywhere, maybe even just hiding and clutching myself in a closet. Was there an excuse I could create? Maybe I could “feel” sick? But, really, there was no way out. My seat at the table, where they always sat me was already assembled with a Villeroy & Boch placemat and silver cutlery, passed through at least a generation or two, at this thick, mahogany, oval dining table, under the chandelier. I had to sit there. And endure. Just face them and endure.
But this was bucolic Haverford. Haverford, Pennsylvania – one of the most sought-after, civilized towns along Philadelphia’s stored Main Line suburbs. Yet it was also nearly ground-zero for the declining influence of old money WASP hegemony. The dinner was being served in the early 1980s, when few, new fortunes were being made, America was in a rut, and the television and movies seemed to mostly reflect old money – Diff’rent Strokes, Arthur, Heaven Can Wait, Silver Spoons, Being There, Trading Places. Everyone living on the fumes of old money and grasping at the vestiges of status. I tried to play along as if everything was really all going our way.
The shame of it all was that the adults serving the dinner were suffering and they didn’t even know it. And thus made the kids suffer. In a subtle, nuanced, certainly not explicit way. No one really knew the storm they were in, and some would never know. Most people never really become aware of their true suffering, and it manifests itself in many different ways.
In the less appealing segments of the WASP culture, it would demonstrate itself very subtly, but at the same time, sharply…cuttingly. As subtly and sharply as Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People. The suffering emerged from the status they sought and desired, but never ultimately could embody. To live up to their parents’ expectations. To live up to their tribes’. But at the same time, also subconsciously aware society had shifted and they couldn’t quite reconcile the two. And they never knew they were in the cycle, or the storm, because it was too scary to leave it. Their identities and defenses were forged in their suffering. The alcohol just made everything worse. Or better, they might have said. And maybe the same for the cigarettes. It just soothed everything.
I could sense her glaring from the corner of her eye as I tried slicing off a piece of the chicken breast on my plate. It wasn’t even any good, but I knew I had to eat it anyways, and was consciously trying my best to slice gracefully, knowing damn well it would be hard to avoid scrutiny.
“Do you know how to hold your silverware properly, Grier? Because, my God, that way is awful!” She’d burst into a nervous laugh, trying to add some levity and a tinge of kindness to help a young, awkward man. This Luddite heathen, who hadn’t been schooled in the proper ways.
“What’s silverware? Oh! You mean the knife and fork? Oh yea, I forgot. I don’t know, is it this way? Wait, wait, no, maybe this way? I always forget how to hold the fork.” The brute force of adrenaline had risen from the depths of my innards to overwhelm my cranium with the heat of a furnace and blush to my young face.
It was horribly uncomfortable to have the table’s gaze on him now. His father just looked askance from across the table. On one hand with disgust, another with shame that this was his son (“fuck, my kids are a fucking mess. What the fuck do they teach them at that public school? What the fuck does their mother do in that house? God, she really always was so middle-class…”). Or so I thought in the most harsh terms. But what could I believe anymore?
My little brother looked up, but was never able to get a good sense of the social gravity of the situation. I always hoped he could understand the terrible pressure I was under, that I could get some type of lifeline out of my younger sibling, someone in the foxhole with me. But it was never there, seemingly not one iota of recognition of the social dynamics unfolding, or my distress, despite the film of perspiration on me and flushed face. I would try and stare at my brother forcefully enough, bulging my eyes to communicate an SOS, but my little brother, maybe like any younger sibling, just didn’t seem to get it, being in his own juvenile world, just going along with the way things were. It made me feel all the more alone, and inept.
My father would perk up. “Grier, doesn’t your mother show you how to do this at home?” A few questions later it would devolve into “Well, what exactly do those two do of anything in that house?” “Jesus Christ…” “Well, when you have dinner at your home…” (well, wait, isn’t this my home too?)”…do they use napkins?” His prep-school sneer was coming out now. We were barging into a full-blown cultural assault on the middle-class.
“Well, yea, of course…yes, I guess they show us, but we don’t have chicken that much…”
“Well, what do they cook?”
Can’t they back the fuck off, I thought? Didn’t they realize we were coming from a different world? And didn’t they realize they helped create this fucked up scenario of worlds colliding? My brother and I had been hoisted out of middle-class Berwyn, and parachuted into another world on the lower Main Line, just a walk from the Cricket Club, and discussions of private schools and the amount of money this and that family had. And the Jews, of course.
The issue of holding your silverware properly was just among their deeper concerns. The inadequacy of the boys essence was fully apparent across a variety of measures. “Why don’t you guys ever wear collared shirts? It seems all you wear are T-shirts. Do you have any Alligators?” “Do you have a pair of docksides?” When you said no, they’d look at each other, like “Oh my goodness, we really have a problem here….this is so bad, I am not even certain this is fixable…”
The reality was my Mom had little money, and her second husband was a stingy high school teacher, so Alligators were out of the question, unless you got one second-hand. And despite the criticism, the facts showed that my father wouldn’t provide much of any financing – or time – to improve the said inadequacies. Sure he loved the boys, but he was never supposed to actually do any of this stuff. He was supposed to have been important, and in charge, and have people do things like this nurturing bullshit for him, like the deal his father had. So, complaining and sneering was his strategy. I sensed some of the incongruency of the situation, the injustice, partly through my mom’s venting, but didn’t quite know how to reconcile the conflict, much like any pre-teen whose brain hasn’t fully developed to process these emotional nuances. But I knew it left me with a hollow feeling in my stomach. And a sense of despair and helplessness.
And any time my brother or I might innocently question why you needed any of these things or formalities, it frequently resorted to “well, you don’t want to look like a steelworker do you?” “Do you know what those people are like? They don’t do anything. They have no motivation in life, and that’s why they live in rowhomes in Ridley. They get drunk, they don’t think, and they sit around and root for the Eagles.”
There was just something wrong here. They were the adults, they had experience, they were old, they must know right. But it didn’t feel right. Nothing felt right. Aside from the socioeconomic assaults at his father’s, his Mom could barely handle us two rambunctious boys, fighting all the time, getting into trouble, school challenges and all. Our stepfather wouldn’t have anything to do with it. He had had two boys and been through this shit. He sure as hell didn’t need, or want, to play Dad again. What he wanted was a wife to take care of him. So, checkbooks were divided and us boys were almost entirely hers. So, sure, we wouldn’t bath ourselves properly sometimes and could certainly get away with not brushing our teeth. The neighbor’s comment about my younger brother’s “dirty,” unwashed neck hurt though. Shit gets overlooked with one parent. There’s very little way for it to work right, despite the bullshit society seems to espouse.
But, man, when time for Haverford came, we needed to put our best form on, like we went to Episcopal Academy, and summered on the Vineyard. “Do you even brush your teeth?” his father’s girlfriend, schooled at Baldwin and having done little to generate income in her life but the inheritance from the Pennsylvania Railroad, said to him once.
They didn’t entirely mean to be mean. But they knew firsthand this was a cruel world. They had felt it themselves at Smith and Trinity, when faced with smarter students and richer families. What it felt like to be small and not quite adequate. And they languished and lived on faded glory, holding onto their pedigrees and legacy access as their security blankets. They knew it was a cut throat world where people judged and excluded, and laughed at you. People…were cruel. And if you didn’t wear collared shirts, docksides, or have some semblance of the Main Line about you, then you might as well be some simpleton roughneck from Garrett Hill, and you were never, ever going to gain access at Merion Cricket or the Reading Room in Edgartown. And if that didn’t happen, well, then, you’ve lost your tribe and what good were you to anyone. And us boys were apparently venturing far from their sense of the tribe and into a world of slaving in middle-class anonymity. This was their way of saving us. Or maybe they were just repeating their own traumas and saving themselves from further humiliation. At the same time, they had a point: we were faltering, we were unkempt, we needed someone to give us a lifeline.
I only saw my Dad, and his aristocratic girlfriend, every other weekend. And every one of those weekends, my father would show up pathetically late, with little remorse, to pick me and my brother up. It might be an hour, maybe even two, and I would just wait and get angry, sometimes spilling into an adolescent rage, and wonder, why my Dad can’t just show up on time, rather than make us wait while all of my friends were out playing? And when he would finally show up, the smoke from the Kent cigarette would fill the car, the K-car, with smoke. My brother, whose eyes would turn red with irritation would ask gently if my father could open the window a little for fresh air, which he would, but certainly not enough to alleviate the situation. And he’d ask meaningless questions of us, the ones with no soul and no care, the ones you’d just kind of think of on the fly to ask a 7- and 10-year old. He was buzzed. And then he’d stub his cigarette out in the ashtray and all of that smoke would develop out of nowhere from the burning embers and fill the car up again in a fog of carcinogens.
And there’d be the times stopping at Acme, and buying a cart full of 7-Up. All those two-liter green, plastic bottles would be on sale, destined to partner with his bottom shelf vodka that he’d purchased in Maryland where the booze was cheaper. Once “home,” he’d usually stick us in front of the television and get back to whatever he was doing or working on. And we’d feel like little pets just brought along for the ride. Or assets to be negotiated in a resentful, post-divorce environment, where he could take the kids away from their mother every other weekend.
And I wondered when it would all become normal again. One day, perhaps. Yes, I thought, all of this is just temporary, until my parents get back “on track.” But for now, “families” and love were something to envy and escape to on the Brady Bunch. Or Eight is Enough. Maybe that was the real world and this was a television show. Or at least I hoped.
Shyness, anxieties, frustrations, and an absence of self-confidence would grow and persist for years, even decades. I wouldn’t be able to get close to anyone for a long time. Some innocent girl who might take an interest in me would subtly inquire “Wow, that must have been really tough to have your parents get divorced when you were 6?” But I’d avoid the insinuation like the plague, not wanting the reality to taint my pursuit of perfection. I always wanted to say what was worse was the aftermath of the divorce, never the divorce itself. Christ, after all that fighting, those two needed to be separated.
The emotional outbursts grew, but never did anything except get me judged even more ruthlessly by family or others (“I think you need some help”). I’d get laid in high school but mostly because the opportunity fell on my lap (literally?), and I didn’t really feel anything emotional. But by college, I’d get to the point where I couldn’t really handle any inquires, at all. I’d have to walk out of classes on the first day if they went around the room and asked us to introduce ourselves. My heart would start racing and I’d be in panic mode, and need to run. Run for air outside on the campus green, thinking immediately of my excuse for why I had to run out of the classroom if anyone asked. And I’d concoct something shrewd to protect my ego and image like “eh, seemed like a stupid class and I don’t care…” But the despair and self-hatred would grow, and sometimes, drunk, I’d walk into the Hill District, all alone, a young WASP from the Main Line named Grier, looking for a run-in with a group of black, angry teenagers. Just to get the shit kicked out of me. To fight. To feel something.
But life goes on and one adjusts to the conditions and the environment. You grow older and people take you a little more seriously, especially when you start to wear a suit and people aren’t sure how important you might be. You realize how to navigate the system, what drives it, and gain more insight into how things really work. So, in a way, you begin to feel more comfortable, and have some power, because you’re rising in the machine, and you know how to operate in the matrix. But the feelings never go away. And frequently the old feelings get triggered and you fuck up.
But one day you decide to change. You realize no one can help you. No drug can help you. No new therapy can help. No other person can solve your issues. They told you this from the beginning, but you had to see if there was an easier way – there must be, this couldn’t be happening, you’d think. But, alas, it all lies inside of you, as painful as that may sound. And life begins again. And that is what is happening right now.