But You Seemed So Happy Read online

  My parents threw exactly one Christmas party in that house. I can picture a punch bowl and our house uncharacteristically packed and abuzz with neighbors. It felt like not long after that party the neighborhood divorces began. The dads moved out. The dads always moved out.

  Once I hit puberty and my parents started what felt like an endless process of separating and getting back together then finally divorcing, if there was genuine or positive attention paid to me by them I didn’t feel it. If they ever worried about me, I’m not sure it registered. If there was curiosity about where I was or who I was with, or even just what I was thinking, it rarely landed. I could do just about anything and I did. I never got caught for most of the things I did (at least within a time frame when it would have mattered) and I got falsely accused of things I hadn’t done at all.

  During one of their early separations I visited my dad at his Sad Separated Dad apartment where there were spider plants, boxes of Lucky Charms I could dig the marshmallows out of without getting in trouble, and a roommate who had been through the Vietnam War. Somewhere I have photos of me playing in the snow and sledding there, but I don’t remember much else about it other than I’m pretty sure the entire place was brown. Everything about it felt like failure.

  I saw my father cry exactly once, when my parents sat me down and told me they were getting a divorce. Finally. I was older then, a teenager. And although I can still remember every detail about that living room in that moment and where we each sat, I can’t remember anything about how I reacted. I don’t believe I cried. I don’t think I said much of anything. I think I just shut down. And my father cried and then he left and then honestly, there you go. I don’t remember either of them ever asking me how I felt or if I had any questions or if they could help me through this break in our family. They just did what they did and that was that. I never pined for them to get back together because they never seemed like they were together in the first place.

  We had been just three people—then two, after my father moved out—who resided in the same space but lived independently from one another. I was an easy child but a pissed-off teenager and I felt I had earned the right (don’t we all). I was already becoming a weed that would always find the crack in the sidewalk to sprout from, without ever needing to be tended. Why answer to anybody? What was the point?

  I was smart without knowing it and channeled this into being a wiseass at school and with my friends, and secretive and manipulative with my parents as I hit fifteen. I played to the division between them because they made it so easy. If they were going to continuously put me in the middle, I was going to play the middle for all it was worth. My mother threatened to have my car, a two-tone blue 1979 Mercury Monarch my father had bought for me, taken away. I responded, “Good luck with that. Like Dad is going to listen to you.”

  It was easy to pin my bad attitude and burgeoning character flaws on my parents’ divorce. It was the easiest thing in the world. Every divorce article I would go on to read supported this, as did every grave conversation I overheard between adults as they talked about other people’s divorces. What about the children? Divorce—a legal dissolution by a court—was a convenient repository for any and all struggles: anger, anxiety, cynicism, lack of attachment, lack of commitment, lack of being a good person. A real bad-things catch-all. God forbid I was just born to be some kind of mid-tier asshole. God forbid this legal process might’ve had an emotional silver lining or two for me—a drive to communicate clearly, a desire to find meaning and explanations for why things happen, and a fundamental acceptance early on that most adults don’t know what the hell they’re doing. God forbid we blame (or credit) the people involved versus the process. Divorce was a convenient and generic brush with which I could negatively paint my life. Nothing and no one would allow me to tether it to anything good. The mere suggestion felt offensive.

  To be clear, mine is not a story of trauma and there are no victims here. It is a story of a fairly typical 1970s and 1980s childhood devoid of guardrails and guidance. It is a story of people who made choices when they were young and those choices had consequences for others, specifically for me, that I don’t believe were intended but that doesn’t make them any less real. I am not unique. I am not a survivor. I am just a person who was shaped by other people’s decisions and behavior, as we all are. This is how life works. I was left to figure out things for myself for a long time and I am surprised to realize all these years later I still am.

  Is it ever too late to attempt to blame your childhood for absolutely everything?

  When I was a kid, my best friend in the neighborhood would sometimes ask if I wished I had a brother or a sister. Being an only child was a bit of an anomaly back then, especially with such young parents. What could possibly be the reason for not having more? I’ve suspected having me was a mistake or they realized the hard way (as some parents do) they just weren’t cut out to be parents. Or perhaps their marriage didn’t work right from the start and they knew it.

  My answer to her question was I never wished I had a brother or a sister. I liked being alone then and I have craved it since. I sure wasn’t sad about having all the Christmas presents to myself. I didn’t have anyone snatching food off my plate, “borrowing” my shit, or holding their finger an inch away from my arm in the car while whispering but I’m not even touching you.

  The only downside I have identified over time is that I am the only one who knows these stories and memories from the inside. Just once I would’ve loved to be able to turn to someone around my age, someone who grew up in my house with the same parents in the same town at the same time, and be able to say, “Can you believe this shit?” Just once I would’ve loved to know if someone else who was even a little bit like me would’ve also been waiting for things to come crashing down. I wonder if they, too, would’ve believed they could control everything.

  I never doubted I was loved. I still don’t. I know I am loved. But I’m not sure I ever felt particularly cared for, especially when caring for me felt challenging and when it would’ve mattered most.

  There is a difference.

  Gimme the strength to pursue a social life!!! I’m begging to get yelled at for public displays of affection! Oh yeah, my parents got a divorce. I’ll be going on a whale watch next Saturday.

  —April 14, 1984, 15 years old

  What to Expect When You’re Expecting to Be a Gen X Girl

  Congratulations! You’re going to be born in 1968, a year Smithsonian magazine called “The Year That Shattered America”! That’s good, right? Until 1991, when Douglas Coupland’s book Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture is published, your generation will be known as the Baby Bust generation. Sorry, but we can’t go for that, no (no), no can do.

  I suppose your generation could’ve also been named after Billy Idol’s band, Generation X; or Category X, a group characterized as gravitating to big cities and creative work while also being anti-advertising, anti-authority, and anti-brand in Paul Fussell’s 1983 book, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. Coupland mentioned both as inspirations for the title of his landmark book but, man, which one was it? What if I told you Billy Idol named his band after another book titled Generation X, by Charles Hamblett and Jane Deverson that was published in 1964? This is the kind of circle jerk argument full of deep-cut cultural references you can expect to have for the rest of your miserable life.

  Anyway, when your time finally comes at least your generation will be named after something musical and triply literary and don’t think you won’t shove that down other generations’ throats every chance you get. What are they named after? Just some letter that comes after X in the alphabet? Wow, I’m so sure.

  Year 0–2

  Minimum safety standards for child car seats won’t be established until the 1970s so good luck to you! You will be left to roll about in a tiny death chair accessorized with a dodgy buckle and flaccid strap. Or someone—a parent, a neighbor, a stranger, honestly who kno
ws—will just hold you on their lap, which will seem overprotective compared to what’s going on with your older siblings. They’ll just be bouncing around loose in the back of a pickup truck or sitting in the wayback of the family station wagon giving the finger to passing motorists. This illusion of safety wrapped in almost certain death is your generation’s Beatles.

  Year 3–5

  In 1967, nearly half of all mothers stayed home and that proportion will steadily decline over the next two decades. Which means you, small preschool child, will be parented by the first big wave of “Ha ha, fuck this!” moms who headed off to work thus bestowing upon you immediate independence, Olympian levels of self-soothing, and a cursory knowledge of first aid. You will spend these early years in nursery school not at all being set on a path to higher education. What’s Harvard? You’re four! You’ll just chill, be social, and have books read to you, setting you on a lifelong quest for maximum culture with minimal effort.

  Year 6–11

  You are in elementary school now! You are practically an adult! Yours will be a largely feral existence dotted with occasional check-ins for Little Debbie snack cakes, dinner made from soup mix, and a bath once a fortnight. Your parents will be busy attempting to self-actualize and/or divorce and you’ll be busy learning about the alphabet and Watergate from TV. They will never, not once, wonder whether you’re hydrated.

  You will go to and from school on your own; yes, including walking without any parents whatsoever. You will develop the fine-tuned instincts of a jungle cat. You will probably be beaten up a lot or will beat up others a lot and you know who you’re not going to tell? Adults. You will go missing for hours on end and it won’t even register with your parents that you’re gone. They might’ve had you but that doesn’t mean they want to see you.

  Frankly, it wouldn’t matter if all the adults disappeared from the face of the Earth tomorrow. As long as you’ve got your friends from the neighborhood and a loose dog, you could still survive with just a pocketknife, a can of Tab stolen from your mom, a lighter, a baseball bat, and a box of Bugles salty snacks.

  You will probably see Grease when it comes out and, well, you have to. That’s your one chance. You will be rewarded mightily by Grease, which will feature filthy lyrics like “the chicks’ll cream” that you won’t understand at all. It will also deliver the most powerful lessons of your Gen X girl life—if you want to get a guy, you’ll need to change absolutely everything about yourself, start smoking, and dress like a whore.

  Year 12–14

  You are twelve now! For Generation X, that is child retirement age. Are you smoking yet? What are you waiting for? An engraved invitation, which is still a thing that exists? Also, MTV has launched and the M actually still stands for something. It’s exactly this sort of snotty attitude about “the M still standing for something” that’s both your curse and your comfort.

  Phones are attached to walls and you can only talk to one person at a time so please enjoy both screaming and hearing “GET OFF THE PHONE” every day of your pubescent life. You should also brace yourself for the social and emotional espionage of calling your top-tier best friend, finding her line busy, then calling your lesser lower-tier best friend, and finding her line busy and knowing in your very soul they’re talking to each other. You will be faced with one of your first seemingly insurmountable social, moral, and ethical quandaries—do you attempt an emergency breakthrough? And if you do, what’s your lie? And if you do, what will you shout at the same time the operator says “emergency breakthrough” before you hang up?

  Anyway, make no mistake, everyone is talking on the phone without you, probably about you, paranoia the destroyer, ya spaz.

  Year 15–18

  Here is what you’ll believe:

  The United States is boring

  Wars are in the past

  VCRs, CDs, cable TV, and Atari Asteroids are cutting-edge technology

  Politics is something practically dead people care about

  Blue balls are a medical condition

  John Lennon’s murder and the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster are pointless tragedies so there probably won’t be any more of those

  The year you graduate from high school will be the same year Newsweek runs a cover story titled “Too Late for Prince Charming?” that will state with incredible hyperbole that single women over forty are more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to find a husband. Righteous! You don’t know what hyperbole is exactly, so that will definitely stick!

  Yours is the last generation that couldn’t wait to get the hell away from your parents and do whatever you wanted as if you hadn’t been doing that all along. You’ll graduate from high school, you’ll hear about Black Monday when you’re smoking in the stacks at your college library. You’ll drink your way through college and graduate into a recession. But then that book, that Douglas Coupland book, will finally come out and you’ll have a handle for all of this. Your generation didn’t even have an actual name until you were a legal adult, of voting age, could drive, and be drafted.

  Congratulations. Or whatever.

  Notes from Family Living Class

  January 1986, senior year of high school

  Engagement—not a legal contract

  Marriage contract—agreement of division of assets at the time of divorce

  Engagement period is usually turbulent because “no 2 people agree on everything”

  Length of engagement period should be 6 months to one year—no longer than 2 years. Long enough to find out if the relationship is based on similar interests, backgrounds, and attitudes or if the attraction is mostly physical.

  During the engagement period sexual pressure is much greater, especially before the marriage.

  Recommended to be married for three years before having a child.

  Reasons to sometimes wait until 20s to marry:

  More experiences w/different people

  Decisions have been made as to how you wish to live

  Education is complete

  Career is started

  Why do older people (30ish) sometimes have difficulty adjusting to a first marriage? They are set in their ways, they are used to living independently.

  Why is it often dangerous to get married during the most romantic part of a relationship? Passion is at the highest point it will ever be at in the relationship, once this goes down, disappointment/arguments may set in.

  Teenage Dirtbag

  I worked in a porn shop the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college. It was not a desperate choice. It was not a cool girl choice. It wasn’t even a rebellious choice. Porn was still secretive, grimy, and a lot harder to get. And I, an eighteen-year-old girl, helped peddle it. It was a job I fell into. It was a job I then spent most of my life trying to forget.

  I worked alone in a one-room building on the side of a fairly desolate stretch of nondescript western Massachusetts road, as are most western Massachusetts roads not intended for tourists. Technically it was a two-room building if you counted the tiny bathroom where I would sometimes dye my hair a shade of brown so dark it looked black and blue in direct sunlight.

  Only one employee worked there at a time, shockingly we were not a volume business. Each of us was responsible for opening, closing, reshelving videos, and cashing out the register. I still have sweaty nightmares about this job, rooted in my fear of ever having to work retail again or be responsible for a customer service experience of any kind. These nightmares are usually about not understanding how the new cash register works or not being able to get the key in the door at night. I think of these nightmares as proof of how little I reflected on this job or my safety back then.

  It was primarily a video rental shop but also offered a smattering of other products like vibrators, edible panties, and a single rack of cheap lingerie. It was located catty-corner from a strip club that would sometimes hold male stripper nights, which were gross indeed, but the bartenders would serve us. I was nothing if not pragm
atic.

  If you don’t know how someone can just “fall into” working in a porn shop, then either you’ve never lived in a rural town or you were ambitious. Or you had parents who asked questions like, “Where are you working these days?” Or maybe I just lied? Truly I can’t remember now. I did lie a lot. And I fell in and out of a lot of things back then. I fell out of the quasi-stoner clique and inexplicably into the lower tier of the jock/cheerleader one. I fell into and out of crushes constantly, like playing the slots, believing eventually one of them has gotta hit. I fell into a surprisingly limited sexual relationship with a thirty-one-year-old man when I was still in high school. His buddy was a cop and certainly knew what was going on. So that whole thing about small towns being salt of the earth, our national moral compass, our best American selves? Get the fuck out of here with that.

  I had originally been employed by a general—a “good,” a “normal”—video store. It was located in the center of town, not on the outskirts, like most good and normal things are. This was one of only two jobs I’ve ever been straight-up for-poor-performance fired from. It probably had a little something to do with not understanding nor caring about even the most basic tenets of customer service. I didn’t like people impeding on my precious alone time that I was, in fact, not being paid to indulge in. Simply put, I was a typical teenage jerk who didn’t even have the good sense to hide it.

  One of the managers was a woman in her late twenties, a stunner with a thick mane of prematurely gray hair, and a magnetic, saucy personality. She decided to open her own video store, an adult one, and asked if I’d be interested in working for her. Given I wasn’t working at all I’m pretty sure the intense negotiation process went something like this: I answered the phone. I listened. I shrugged. I said, “okay.” And I hung up.