Which Road Did You Come From?, Part Two

In the conclusion of The Artificial Grandma, Dr. Robert Philipson continues his journey through post-college drift, emotional illness, and the disillusionment of returning home. Set against the backdrop of a failed commune dream, an acid-laced revelation, and the oppressive weight of family history, Philipson navigates his internal crisis from the smoggy mountaintops of Southern California back to the bedroom of his childhood home in Pasadena. 

Host Info
Hosted by Dr. Robert Philipson
Robert is a former professor of African-American studies with a passion for jazz and art. A published author and Harlem Renaissance historian, he has produced multiple films about the intersectionality of race, music, and sexuality.

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Transcript

As with Fern, we began the discussion as a theoretical enterprise. Where could we buy land? (Carol immediately suggested the environs of Fiddletown.) How much would it cost? How many people would we want in the community? How much would each participant have to invest in order to make it go? What skills would we need? Where might we find financial aid and how long before we became self-sufficient? As we hashed this out, the discussion felt less speculative and more like a prelude to action. Carol got particularly animated and began bouncing in her chair. “I need to move!” she finally exclaimed. Her declaration startled both Alan and me; it was rare for her to assert herself like that.

“Go!” I urged, and she took off running. Alan and I exchanged looks, then followed toward the shoulder of mountain overlooking the valley. What started as a jog-trot turned into a full-on spontaneous race until Alan started pulling ahead. I lunged after him and dragged him to the ground. We both laughed.

“That’s what you get for being a faster runner.”

“I see there’s no room for the superior man in your democratic utopia.”

“Of course there’s room,” I protested. “I am the fastest among equals.”

“Even if you cheat?”

“It’s not cheating; it’s confirming the natural order.”

Alan just smiled and shook his head as we both got to our feet. 

“Should we go after her?” I asked?

“I know where she went. There’s a viewpoint just over the rise. You can look down on Lake Elsinore.”

As we resumed our progress, I noticed how sharp our shadows seemed against the ground.

“You majored in psychology,” I said. “What did you learn about Jung’s shadow?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Random association. “ ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.’ ”

“What?”

“Keats. Sorry, literature. It distracts people from my non sequiturs. I don’t know why I’m asking. Just answer the question.”

“Hmm, we only had a week’s module on that in our intro course.”

“Well, tell me what you learned.”

“The shadow side—let me see if I can say this right—is everything we don’t know about ourselves or choose not to know about ourselves.”

“So it’s like Freud’s id?”

“No, it’s more . . . I guess you could say devious than that. The id wants what it wants. The shadow side refuses the truth of its reality.”

“What do you mean?”

 “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. We read it as part of the Jung module. They’re not two different people, but as long as Dr. Jekyll refuses to recognize his shadow side, it gains dominance, especially during periods of shock or trauma or paralyzing indecision.”

I laughed humorlessly. “Paralyzing indecision. That rings a bell.” 

“Ding! Ding! Ding!” Alan rejoined just as we crested the rise and saw Carol standing at an outcropping before the mountain’s fall.

“How’s it going with Carol?” I asked. I immediately regretted the question; it sounded too abrupt.

Alan slowed his pace. “Not good,” he replied. “We’ve stopped sleeping together.”

The revelation embarrassed me. It must have been a while since Alan had confided in a friend. “Isn’t there anyone you could consult with?” I asked.

Alan shrugged. “We’re not hiding anything from each other.”

When we joined Carol at the overlook, the layer of smog had turned slightly bronze in the late afternoon light. A speedboat moved across the lake dragging an antlike water skier behind. From somewhere in town a jackhammer’s staccato rose to our level.

“Noise pollution and air pollution!” I remarked. “Goes together like bacon and eggs.” I could feel myself winding up. “No escape! No escape!” I swept my arm across the vista in a proprietary fashion. “Someday, my children, none of this will be yours. It doesn’t look like much now but think of it in ten years: the shopping malls and trailer parks and fast-food restaurants. Did you know that McDonald’s had its humble beginnings in San Bernardino—a mere forty miles away? That is truly the genius of our homeland! England may have Shakespeare and Italy, Michaelangelo, but we have . . . Walt Disney!” And then I began to sing:

“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot

With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot.”

“C’mon, kids, you know the chorus. Follow the bouncing greenback!’

And we did. We sang it together. 

“Don’t it always seem to go

That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

We returned to the building site and worked until the deepening twilight forced us to stop. I helped lay bricks. Alan and Carol urged me to shower first. As Alan took his turn, Carol reheated stew she’d made earlier in the week. We ate by the light of a Coleman lantern, then Carol went to take her shower. Alan brought out his stash for an afterdinner smoke. 

“Carol still doesn’t indulge much?” I asked.

“She doesn’t change easily. It’s not so much fun for me to get high by myself, so I’m glad you’re here.”

“Always happy to help a brother out.” I almost decided to tell Alan about my acid trip but decided against it. I didn’t want to prejudice the case I was making for our potential collective future.

Carol emerged with her head wrapped in a towel. Alan and I continued passing the joint back and forth. After my outbursts of earlier, I felt slack. I didn’t need to perform anymore; they liked me. We sat for long periods of silence in the enclosing darknesss of night, occasionally offering gentle musings on the future. The stars glittered sharply with no city lights to dim their brilliance, and I felt once again an old longing to know the nighttime sky.

“I haven’t seen the sky like this since I moved off campus years ago! It was easy to get away from the lights there. Growing up in the city, I never knew how dark the night could be. Remember how the small-paned windows of the living room would glow as we approached our house on Graham Hill Road?”

“I always loved that about the house,” Carol rejoined. “That made it feel more like home.”

“We made it feel more like home,” I responded with unexpected warmth. “I had many living situations during my five years at Santa Cruz, but ours was easily the best.”

“It was good,” Alan said. “No problem personalities. The house had great character—”

“Cold as a witch’s tit in the winter!” I interrupted.

“That was the drawback with all those windows.”

I noticed that I had begun shivering. “Speaking of cold, I’m freezing! And really sleepy. I didn’t sleep well last night, and I need to crash.”

“We have a camping cot for visitors.”

“Great! I much prefer that to a ground pad. I brought that and a sleeping bag.”

And so I prepared for bed. The minute my head hit the pillow, I was out. My body hadn’t enjoyed a good rest since the previous morning, and so much had happened since then. 

I woke in the supernatural glow of predawn with my stomach in turmoil and sweat beaded on my forehead. Crawling carefully out of my sleeping bag, I padded over to a bush at a discreet distance and threw up. I felt slightly better as I lay down again, but I knew I was going to be good and sick. I tried to return to sleep but determined it was hopeless, and the day only got brighter. I rose and made quiet preparations to leave. I hadn’t decided whether to tell my friends I was going or just leave a note, but Alan heard me and came out of the trailer as I was rolling up my sleeping bag. He was wearing only pajama bottoms, and I was reminded of how Aryan he looked with his blond hair and square chest. He had been a jock in high school, and his body kept the shape that he had trained it to. 

“What’s up?” he asked in a low voice, which told me Carol was still sleeping.

“I’m sorry, man. I just threw up, and I can tell it’s only gonna get worse. I want to go home and be sick there.”

“Are you okay to drive back? I’ll be worried about you.” The concern in his eyes moved me.

“I’d just like to borrow a handkerchief ’cause I know I’m gonna sweat.”

“Seriously, Bob, if you won’t stay you should let me drive you back.”

“Alan!” I was kind of dumbfounded by the offer. “That doesn’t make any sense. How would you get back here?”

“Carol could follow us in our car, and I’d drive yours.”

I considered the offer briefly. We’d already discussed their coming to Pasadena, but I didn’t want to host while I was sick.

“Stop,” I said. “I can make it home.”

“Well, if you’re sure.”

I stood up with one strap of my knapsack slung over my shoulder. Alan came up to hug me, and I had to keep myself from pulling away. Everybody hugged in Santa Cruz, but the shirtless thing . . . I couldn’t process it.

“Drive carefully,” he admonished stepping back. 

“I will. I’ll write you a postcard telling you when it’s good to visit me in Pasadena. You’ll like my parents. They’re really cool. And I’ll introduce you to Fern and Kay as well.”

“We’ll call the next time we get into Lake Elsinore.”

The sun crested the mountain to the east, and I had to put my hand up to shade my eyes.

“Say goodbye to Carol for me.”

“Will do. I love you, Bob.”

“I love you too, Alan.”

The drive back would normally have been refreshing in the clean bright air of the desert morning, but I had to concentrate on keeping my sickness under control. A headache was coming on strong—I should’ve asked Alan for some aspirin!—and it hurt to move my head or even dart my eyes. Thank god I was heading west and didn’t have to contend with the blinding sun. I turned on the radio, and a rough-voiced man talked urgently about the benefits of owning a Challenger motorcycle. “For the man who likes to handle the road as if it were his woman . . . Challenger!” After the call letters (“KHJ – Boss Radio”) the Beach Boys.

And she’ll have fun fun fun

Til her daddy takes her T-bird away-y-y-y.

Click! Silence was better.

I sped carefully—an oxymoron to those who hadn’t braved the terrors of the Pasadena Freeway since age sixteen—and made it home in record time. Just in time, in fact, to vomit again in the toilet of the little bathroom. That didn’t make any sense. The house was mine, and I could have lay panting on a rug of the big bathroom waiting for the nausea to abate rather than the cramped space of the cold tile floor. I felt dizzy standing up and so made my way to my room on hands and knees hoisting myself into bed.

For the next two days I gave myself over to the confines of my sickness. When was Mommy coming in with aspirin crushed into Hershey’s chocolate sauce? Where was the special sick box of games and puzzles available on no other occasion? I was on my own. I would throw off the bedcovers in my yellow room until the heat penetrating our un-air-conditioned house forced me out of bed and to the weak solace of the hallway Woo. Then I would wander around, sitting listlessly in vacant chairs. I tried reading but my concentration was shot. A dip in the pool would help during the hottest part of the afternoon, but my stomach felt too tentative to attempt anything approaching a swim. I felt somewhat better in the evening, but only enough to watch reruns of I Spy, The Wild Wild West, and The Dick Van Dyke Show. My father loved the last of these (“a goyische family surrounded by Jews” as he characterized it), and when it was aired, that was the only time the entire family regularly gathered in front of the TV.

Ach! The house was littered with memories! No wonder I couldn’t find myself as an adult! And anyway I was sick. It was a relief to have a physical ailment to blame for my depressed spirits. It was enough to be alone at home and sick. It was appropriate; it was right; and I only wanted to do it and not think about it.

But I did think about it sometimes during the hazy wanderings of the afternoon, especially when I looked at the gleaming row of the Encyclopedia Britannica that filled the first shelf of the living room bookcase. Something about all that definitive knowledge encased in those smooth black bindings pushed my unwilling brain into activity. There had always been books in my childhood, always stimulation and always things to do. How many trips to the museum, the park, the observatory, the zoo—downtown L.A.!—had my parents taken me, taken all the children, on? We had been taught to see and seize everything. This home had always been filled with teasing, love, food, and books—and temper tantrums, explosions from my mother, the name of “Emily” she foisted on me when she thought I wasn’t spending enough time playing outside. (My brother took that one up with a vengeance.) I had forgotten about the dark side since I had gone away to college and had only come home, even during the summer vacations, as a visitor whose life was elsewhere. I had the luxury of cherry-picking the good times. Away from home, I thought of home as place of joy, some pain, but above all life!

I was vouchsafed a vision of this—thanks to drugs—during what I thought would be my last summer at home, the summer before I was to return for a final fall quarter at Santa Cruz. (I had forfeited some credits working on the Cambodia strike of 1970 and needed a make-up class.) My family teased me for being sentimental. I had cried when our first television set was consigned to the trash heap and never heard the end of it, so I learned to protect my more lachrymose tendencies from family derision. I still bled for inanimate objects, however. And slept with my stuffed bed companions so long that my mother, during one of her fits of pique, snatched them away and hid them. “You’re too old to be sleeping with dolls!” she said. I had no reply. I felt ashamed. (Once I left for college, however, she returned them to their environs as a reminder of “Bobby,” now safely gone.)

At twenty-three I was now the only child who, because of the summer job as a replacement custodian at Cal Tech, was spending significant time at home. David had launched, attending law school at UC Hastings; Alice, having moved to Berkeley years ago, was extricating herself from a failing marriage to her high school sweetheart; Zeeb had fled to Clark University in Massachusetts—almost as far as she could get from Pasadena and still be in America. None of us yet had children or full-time careers, and so we would come to Old House Road to visit our parents and, if there were others around, to be a brother or a sister or a stomach scratcher to the dogs. One extraordinary week during that summer, all the siblings were home. It wasn’t for a holiday or an occasion. It was just life. The children relaxed and lazed about, enjoying one another’s company now that it had become a rarer thing. During the week, I had to work, but I’d been saving some mescaline to drop at the proper time, and that Saturday seemed the proper time. I knew I couldn’t tell the others; this would be a solo trip. 

As I began to come on, I wandered around the house taking in the activities of my family. Everyone quietly pursued their tasks and pleasures. My father worked at the table in the living room; David was polishing his Karmann Ghia on the backyard lawn; Alice and Jean sat by the pool; Mother alternated between the pool and the kitchen, where she was preparing the evening meal. I felt tremendously moved by the little unconscious acts that went to make up the life of this family, the casual lazy togetherness of a summer day. I overflowed with love and wanted to express it, to make my family aware of the magic of that afternoon, but it was its unforced quality that made it so idyllic. I was the sole spectator of a magic lantern show that would dissolve at the touch of self-consciousness.

As the afternoon progressed, along with the force of the mescaline, the need to share my perceptions pushed me up Old House Road to the house of our neighbors just beyond the empty lot. When the Josephs had moved in, we were no longer the only Jews in the neighborhood, much to the satisfaction of my mother. 

Dr. Joseph, a medical man, seemed nice enough but was remote in the way most men of my father’s generation were. Their son Daniel and I were the same age, and we hung out together through propinquity, but there was never much of a bond between us. I established more of a connection with Mrs. Joseph and continued to visit her whether Danny was home from college or not. She was an intelligent woman whose aura of unexpressed sadness suited the dark house in which the family lived. We were hardly confidants, but we bonded over the melancholy that we secretly shared—beautiful souls unappreciated by our loved ones. I wince now as I write this—what grown woman would have nursed such adolescent sentiment?—but that was what I believed at the time. And on the basis of that belief, I went to fetch Mrs. Joseph as a secret sharer.

She was alone that afternoon. When she answered the door, I didn’t want to step into that shadowed house. “It’s beautiful outside,” I said. “Won’t you come and join us for a drink by the pool?” As we walked down the quiet asphalt road baking in the sunlight, I stopped us by the empty lot. “Close your eyes and listen,” I said. She smiled and obeyed. I did the same. Occasional bird trills. The low hum of the electrical wires. The chok-chok-chok of someone’s Rain Bird sprinkler. In the distance, the playful cry of a neighbor child. The approaching slow crunch of tires coming up the street would soon drown out everything else. “You can open your eyes now,” I said, and we both looked at Mr. White driving home in his blue Dodge Polara. We exchanged waves. Mrs. Joseph smiled at me quizzically.

“Nobody walks on this street,” I said. “It’s a dead end so there’s no through traffic. We have no sidewalks, no front porches. There’s no park on this mesa; there’s not even a convenience store. House after house after house after house. Our lives are cut up into private spaces.”

“There are worse fates,” Mrs. Joseph said.

Did she know I was tripping? I didn’t care at that point. “I don’t want worse!” I cried. “I want better! Look at this day. Even the smog is giving us a break. But a man’s home is his castle, and every castle is surrounded by a moat. It’s a beautiful day, and we can’t even share that joy.”

I turned to Mrs. Joseph almost pleadingly. “Why can’t we share instead of being pushed into separation and loneliness? Why are forced to go on and miss the value of these afternoons?” 

“Honey! Are you unhappy about something?”

“No, no . . . it’s just . . . life could be so beautiful!” This sounded lame, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say, much less how to say it. We started walking again.

“Your mother always said that the reason your heart was so tender was because you wouldn’t expose it. I think I know what she means now.”

“What? She said that?”

“Of course. You think parents don’t know their children?”

“What did she mean by that?”

“I think you’ll have to ask her.”

“You said you thought you knew.”

“Danny’s the same way. Most boys are. You won’t admit how much you love because loving makes you vulnerable.”

We were entering the asphalted arc of our front driveway. “I wasn’t talking about romantic love,” I said.

“Neither was I. If you don’t say ‘I love you’ to the world, then the world won’t know.”

My mother must have heard us talking from inside the house. She opened the front door and her smiled widened. “Come in, Leah,” she said. “Join us by the pool. It’s a beautiful afternoon.”

“Lovely,” Mrs. Joseph agreed.

My eyes filled with tears. I don’t remember whether I excused myself or not, but I had to get away. I felt as though I would burst into sobs. I went into the little bathroom and splashed my face with water. Looking in the mirror, I could see that my pupils were dilated, my cheeks and forehead unnaturally red. Had I peaked on the road outside and not even realized it?

I went to my room and stayed shut up for a while. Lying supine on my bed, I let the tears trickle from my eyes and down to my ears. Why was I crying? I wanted to share this beauty and I couldn’t, not even to Mrs. Joseph. And it was tragic because it was so ephemeral! There would never be another afternoon like this.

And that was true. Even though there were only six of us, we were already coming apart. I did not know how rare and unstable was the Eisenhower ideal of the nuclear family. On the surface, we conformed: Mom and Dad, college sweethearts and together since then; one set of parents for all the children; one house that sheltered us from the misty dawn of consciousness to now. No divorces, no deaths, no moves to other places (Paris had been an aberration), hardly any relatives from outside our nuclear pod. So strong were we, so seemingly eternal, that we could open ourselves to others in gracious dispensation of our family identity. The parts that didn’t fit—the crazy brother, the perpetually dissatisfied mom, the younger sister driven to the opposite coast and near repudiation of that same wonderful family—I put aside and didn’t think about. The family that I had envisioned growing up on Old House Road was an artificial construct for sure, but I clung to it as my rock of identity. Thus it was and thus it would always be.

The shock of intuiting that this was not eternal . . . I couldn’t take it in. And it was easy to live in denial from a distance, when my life was elsewhere.

But now, the very next summer, I was home again. Home and sick. And what did it mean to be home and sick? To be sick of home? Homesick? Sick from home? An Odysseus not yet left for Troy? The circumstances hardly merited the comparison. I could never long for Pasadena, as du Bellay had longed for Anjou. (I grimaced at the thought. That would provide red meat to the future editors of my memoirs.) And yet Pasadena had been home, in the past, before I had left, before I had learned to repudiate. I flipped through my mental slide carousel: pushing Hamlet up the dry waterfalls while hiking the narrow canyons of the San Gabriels; the hot Halloween and graduation gatherings on the burning asphalt of my school playground; year after year of Rose Parades, simultaneously corny and awe-inspiring; the bittersweet juice of the sourgrass that had grown in the neighborhood fields before they were turned into home and more homes. And it was home and had been home and always home even through my groping adolescence and the holiday dinners that had sustained my years in college. And now, was it home no longer? 

Turning on the TV offered no respite. Daytime programming was a wasteland. My record albums were still packed in boxes, and the old LPs my parents owned had never inspired much appreciation. Musicals I loved, and there were a number of original cast recordings, but my mood couldn’t countenance The Pajama Game or Bye Bye Birdie. I wandered around the house trying dully through the sickness to feel moved by the furniture and bric-a-brac I had known since childhood. It was too hot, too smoggy, too real, and I was too sick. The afternoon oozed monotonously into evening.

My parents returned as I lay in bed. I hadn’t realized that the week had passed. I heard them unloading the car but determined to stay where I was. It wasn’t late, but I could have made it an early night. I heard my parents talking through the closed door of my bedroom and felt comforted. After a time, my door opened, throwing in a narrow shaft of light. My mother peeked in.

Although I had determined to keep silence, I suddenly called out. “Mom?”

“You’re awake,” she said stepping into the room.

“How was the trip?”

“Wonderful,” she replied. “We had scrumptious weather all the way.”

“That’s good,” I replied without conviction.

My mother caught the tone. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Are you all right?” She walked over to the bed.

“Yes.”

“Are you sick?

“Yes.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. It’s not serious.”

“How long have you been sick?”

“A couple of days, I guess.”

Mom put her hand on my forehead, the immemorial gesture of concerned love. “You do feel warm,” she said. “If you’re not feeling better soon, I’ll call the doctor.”

I shook her hand off. “I don’t want a doctor. It’s not something a doctor can fix. Look, you’ve just come back. You’ve been driving for hours. We can talk about it in the morning. I feel fine. Don’t worry.”

My mother hesitated. “Did you take something?”

“Yeah, the usual stuff, aspirin, antihistamine.”

She bent down and kissed me. Her lips felt cool on my cheek. “We’ll talk in the morning then.” She moved toward the door. “You’ll tell me tomorrow, won’t you?”

“I promise, Mom. Tomorrow.”

“Good night, Bobby.” 

I didn’t bother to correct her, though I had long ago forbidden my family to call me by the diminutive of my childhood name. “Good night.”

She shut the door behind her, and I stayed on my back for a few more minutes. She’d caught it, and I’d have to tell her something tomorrow. I could plead illness. My condition spoke for itself. But I couldn’t face the thought of more lying or equivocation. (“I’m fine, Mom! Everything’s fine!”) Ugh! I grunted and flipped over on my stomach.

I did not have a good night’s sleep. I awoke several times and finally tiptoed into the big bathroom to get the sleeping pills. As usual the door to my parents’ bedroom was ajar, and I could hear my father snoring. How did Mom put up with it? I guess that was part of the reason she insisted on adjoining twin beds. 

The sleeping pills did their work, but my dreams became increasingly vivid. I was descending into our swimming pool filled with mud. My mother and I were hiking but she was in a wedding dress. “Love is hard, Yossel,” she said. I wanted to tell her that I was Bob, not Joe, but my dreams were on to something else. Alan and I were sitting upright in a twin bed. Both of us were dressed only in pajama bottoms. “It’s narrow,” he said, turning toward me with the same look of concern he had left me with the day before.

I awoke with a pounding heart and lay still until I brought my body back under control. I didn’t feel rested but further sleep was unlikely. Morning filled my yellow room with merciless sunshine. Hearing my mother move about the kitchen, I felt both comforted and disquieted by the sounds of my childhood.

After a while, there was a soft knock and the door swung open slightly. 

“Are you awake, sweetheart?”

“Yes.”

My mother entered bearing a glass of orange juice and some aspirin. She looked healthy and tan from her hiking trip. I noticed again the deep lovely lines on either side of her mouth, smile lines.

“Good morning,” she said, placing the glass on the bedside table. “Let me feel your forehead.”

I sat up with my back to the wall. At the touch of her hand, my emotions welled up. She lightly began to brush up my hair. “You were always so unwilling to be touched when you were a little boy.”

“Oh, Mom!” I cried, putting my hands over hers and pressing them against my hairline. “I’ve got to leave here!”

My mother was silent for a moment. “What is it, honey?”

The words rushed out in febrile clarity. “I can’t let myself be weak here and I am weak here and I hate myself for it.” The tears began to track down my cheeks, tickling my skin. “I’m just prolonging my adolescence here, and I can’t do it!”

“Do what, Bob? We’re not asking you to do anything.”

“Yes, you are, Mom. You have to be or you wouldn’t be my parents.”

That made her laugh. “We’re your parents, all right. We’re stuck with you; you’re stuck with us.”

“You want me to be happy, right?”

“Of course!”

“Can’t you see I’m not happy?”

“Baby!” she said with a mixture of compassion and impatience. “Mommy can’t fix that.”

“I know! I know!”

“You’ve got the whole world in front of you. What do you want?”

“Ah, that’s the problem. Wild impossible things. Things like justice and intimacy, peace on earth, goodwill toward men—I don’t know! Compassion and wisdom and maybe a little pity and—Christ!—idiotic things like a just social order and a whole mishmash of crippled idealism! I don’t know! I thought things would be different when I came home, that my apprenticeship was over and I could start living my life as an adult. But that’s shot to hell! Everything’s come with me: all the failures and falling-shorts and the hundred little lies I pretend not to see through because I’m home now and I should be different but not only am I not different but I’m a fool as well!”

At this Mom sat on the edge of the bed. “You’re so hard on yourself!” she said. “So impatient! Everybody feels the way you feel at some point!”

“And you?”

She almost snorted. “Especially me. What have I done with my life? I thought things were going to change too when all you were grown and out of the house. Yes, there’s been some change, but it’s only come slowly. People don’t change overnight!”

“Oh, Mom! I’m so tired of being an adolescent!” Saying this released the tears and gave myself up to them freely. 

To my mother’s credit, she didn’t give me the sharp rebuke I deserved. Her little boy was hurting, and she leaned me against her while I sobbed. 

After a while she spoke. “Honey, believe me, the adult problems come of their own accord and soon enough. Freedom without responsibility is an empty thing, and there’s no responsibility without constraint. I’ve always regretted getting married so young, but your father and I have raised a wonderful family, and I just live with it. And you take your character with you wherever you go. When we were in Paris, I had to fight with myself even harder to keep my weight down. It’s a constant struggle. If it’s your character you’re trying to change, you don’t escape anything by leaving home.”

“I know,” I replied, shaking my head miserably. “I know, but I’ve got to go anyway. I can’t stay here any longer. I never cry like this. This whole conversation is a testament to my weakness. You’re right but it doesn’t make any difference. I can’t sort things out here. I can’t stay home.”

And in time I left. I left my parents; I left Fern and Kay; I left Alan and Carol; I left everyone in a confused flight toward some kind of structure that would relieve me of a freedom I didn’t want to relinquish nor knew what to do with. My inability to stay home was not supplanted by the means or desire to create a new one. That would not be possible until my illusions about Old House Road were irrevocably extinguished by homosexuality and death. 

I never thought about my broken promises. I doubt they’d meant much to the people I’d made them to. How could they take me seriously? I was twenty-three and sublimely unaware of my narcissism. My mother’s unspoken words, the rebuke she repressed out of exasperated love, were the ones I most needed to hear:

“Grow up!”