by Tod Davies.
My mother was a difficult person. So am I, her daughter, though in different ways. But that she loved me, and that I loved her, I have no doubt. Her care for me often showed itself as anger, or as ridicule, but this was her defense, learned early. How can I blame her for any way she chose to defend? There had been so much to defend from.
But she did worry about me. She did care. That I thought she didn’t, when I was younger, was a misunderstanding.
When I was a young woman, I really hated being an object of desire. What I really wanted was to be a subject. So I made men suffer, especially men who didn’t understand what they were doing when they treated me like an object of desire rather than like myself. They thought they were being complimentary, I’m sure. But it used to prick at me, even when I didn’t know the source of the prick. I would kick back at them. And that made my mother angry.
“You have all these boys trailing around after you,” she would complain in a bitter voice. “And you just ignore them. Or worse, you’re mean.”
“Serves them right,” I said. “I just want them all to go away and leave me alone.” I meant it, too.
Years later, another friend thought she had the key to my mother’s anger. “It must have been the way she survived,” my friend said. “Making men love her. She must have worried you were cutting off an escape route for yourself.” I think my friend was right. That had been my mother’s way of staying safe. She wanted me to stay safe, too.
There was one time, though, that my mother warned me against a boy. At the time, it seemed to me to be a contradiction to her usual advice, which was to keep as many boys on a string as possible. But there was no contradiction. She wanted me to be safe. But she also wanted me to not make the mistakes that she had made. This wish was not always consistent. But it definitely applied to that day she drove in the car and warned me not to do as she had done.
Her mistake was that she had misunderstood the trap she was walking into. She thought it was safety, I see that now. And why wouldn’t she think that? In her hurry to be safe, to become an American, she had misunderstood what was in front of her and walked into it. She thought I was walking into the same trap. So she warned me.
Which brings me to my preppie boyfriend, the one I moved in with when I was in my early twenties. As far as misunderstandings go, I have to say the two of us were a big one. It was hilarious, how many miscommunications there were between us, as if we spoke two different languages, the way it always seemed to me my parents did. I still feel as if I spent my entire childhood trying to mend the gap in their mutual misunderstanding. “Dad,” I would say, “I think what Mother means is . . . ” And “Mom, what Dad is trying to say . . . ”
So my mother married my father, someone who never understood her, and who she never understood in return. Worried, anxious, she watched me, thinking I was about to make the same mistake with the preppy boyfriend.
I might have, too. He was handsome. He dressed beautifully. His manners were perfect. His family was elegantly well to do. He was easygoing. Like my father, probably a little too easygoing. Like my mother with my father, we misunderstood each other. Sometimes in hilarious ways.
For example. He and his very upper middle class family had a dog, a black Labrador, named Bogey. Bogey was an affectionate, easygoing, go-along-to-get-along dog, always willing to sidle up to you for pets in whatever way you wanted.
I thought Bogey was named “Bogie,” for Humphrey Bogart. Or “Bogey” for a ghost. Really, the ghost definition would have worked for our relationship too, mine and the preppy boyfriend, considering how unreal it was. But best, most defining of our relationship, was the actual meaning of Bogey’s name.
Bogey the dog was, in fact, named for a term in golf, where if you make one more stroke over the par on a hole, that’s a “bogey.” In other words, you’re just getting by, looking good, but not too good. You’re inexperienced. You haven’t yet learned how to play the game.
Like my mother at twenty-three, when she married my father.
I didn’t understand any of that until much later. I certainly didn’t understand that I was misunderstanding the preppy boyfriend in a very similar way to how my mother had first misunderstood my father.
The misunderstanding about the dog’s name really should have warned me. The day the preppie boyfriend shamefacedly admitted the dog was not named for Humphrey Bogart or for a ghost, I heard a little bell go off in my head warning me that there was something more. But I didn’t listen. Then I discovered that the preppy boyfriend was a member of an “exclusive” golf club that didn’t allow Jews in as members. I was more than a little shocked. Actually, I was incredulous. I said, “Are you telling me you belong to a club that wouldn’t let my ex-boyfriend in as a member because he’s half-Jewish?” He, shamefaced again, explained that it was because his dad wanted him to belong. That bothered me, though not, apparently, enough. I put it under the heading of the preppy boyfriend’s general good nature, and desire to be liked by everyone he met. Like his dog, Bogey. Like his dog’s name.
Like my kind, weak father. His mother was a strong woman pretending to be weak, and she found passive aggressive ways to make her will known. “Well, Bill,” she said to my father after she was unable to persuade him not to marry my mother, “you always did love things Asian.” An insult my mother never forgot. Although I think she did forgive. Later, when she got much better at the game.
But that was my parents’ relationship when they were young. Not quite on a par with what it should have been. Just a little over. A game clearly played by two inexperienced players. My father, when wisdom overtook him in his old age, said to me once, “I was very immature for my age when you were born. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
Like me and the preppy boyfriend. Both of us. We were lucky, though. Conventions didn’t mean we had to get married to have a little fun together. It could just be a game.
Lovemaking was a game that I liked. Sports, not so much. It always astonished me when I discovered someone I knew loved some sport. The boyfriend didn’t have a passion for golf. He was just a nice young man who wanted people to like him. His father loved golf, so he loved it, too.
That was how my father was too. He liked to get along. You might say they were both used to hitting a comfortable one stroke over par. Their safe space.
My mother and I were playing the game to win, and trying to learn how to do it as quickly as we could. Too quickly to be good at it. Too overconfident in our own judgment. Too competitive.
There was another misunderstanding between us. I completely misunderstood what my mother wanted for me. I think she misunderstood it too. Until push, as they say, came to shove.
The preppy boyfriend and I were one big misunderstanding. We were suited for entirely different kinds of lives. What each of us really wanted, at bottom, was as different as could be between someone who loved playing golf and someone who thought playing golf was stupid.
Life is confusing. Love is confusing. That’s the way they’re supposed to be. I must admit, confused or not, the preppy boyfriend and I had a lot of fun. Even with all of the misunderstandings between us. Maybe even because of them. Those misunderstandings didn’t stop at the name of his dog.
There were also his parents. Not that there was anything wrong with his parents. Not if you were playing a conventional game with hopes for conventional prizes. Which was my misunderstanding. I thought that was what my mother wanted for me. Conventional prizes. Marrying up, as they say.
His parents. Well. The life they had built for themselves and their family was part of the preppy boyfriend’s allure. I thought it was the life I’d been raised to live. I thought it was the one I wanted. All those prizes. When I was young, I hadn’t yet figured out what prizes I really wanted to win.
My mother, raised on American movies, when she was young thought all Americans wore dinner jackets in the evening. She married my father before finding out that some Americans—my father’s family, for example—actually prefer tractor-trailer caps. Poor mother. I still remember her trying to speak French at the dinner table. She must have driven her in-laws crazy. Just the same way I would have driven the preppy boyfriend’s parents crazy.
The preppy boyfriend’s parents were part of the upper middle class Catholic apparat in San Francisco. They had a charming Victorian house in a ‘good’ neighborhood. They had a charming country house for the weekends in the wine country. They had Bogey, that very amiable Labrador dog, just the right breed, no shelter dog he. And they gave lovely, charming, utterly conventional parties.
I brought my best friend to one of those parties. That was the venue for one of the most hilarious misunderstandings of all. Afterwards, the preppy boyfriend’s mother asked me about “your poor friend, whose father is dead.” But my best friend’s father wasn’t dead. When I asked him about what could possibly have misled her, he burst out laughing. “Oh my god,” he said, aghast. “She asked me what my father did for a living, and I said, ‘well, he was a brewer’.”
His father had been laid off after the shut down of the last brewery open in San Francisco. That was sad. But he certainly wasn’t dead. He was just unemployed.
I don’t think I ever told the preppy boyfriend about that. I did laugh about it behind his back, though. I was kind of mean then, if I’m going to be honest. I wasn’t as nice to him as I should have been. Mocking him was a way of not admitting to myself that I was attracted to that which was not likely to make me happy.
Now I reflect that my mother’s occasional meanness to my father came from the same root. It had been her fault they’d married. She’d insisted on it. It was her own fault. But she blamed him. Why not? I did the same to the preppy boyfriend. I blamed him for what was a simple mismatch.
His family, and the way they lived, secretly enchanted me, though of course I wouldn’t admit it, even to myself. He had been the best friend of the older brother of a classmate of mine. This classmate had been, off and on for years, my best friend at school. One of her appeals to me was her mother. I adored her mother. She was the only mother of my classmates who never dressed up, wearing the same old capri pants and sleeveless blouse at all times. She never wore makeup. She pulled her undyed hair back in a messy bun with an unfashionable fringe on her forehead. She could do these things, unlike the carefully curated mothers of the other girls in my class, since she was the descendant of an old California family, very established, very rich, given to playing down their riches in the way only the truly rich can do. I remember her own mother, my friend’s grandmother, on being asked by her grandchildren, “Granny, are you a millionaire?” saying, “A million dollars isn’t what it used to be, children.”
I thought my friend’s mother was the absolute height of everything cool, of everything I aspired to be. At the time, my idea of the ne plus ultra of fashion was a poplin raincoat lined with sable. That was the way I thought she was, too. I loved that. I leaned toward wanting to be rich and successful just so I could ignore looking like I was rich and successful. A pose, that was all it was. So there was this strong temptation to use the preppy boyfriend as a prop for that pose. Kind of as if we were characters in a movie and not living, breathing, complicated human beings at all.
You should not use another person as a prop. It never ends well. He used me as a prop, too, of course. I was supposed to be the free spirited hippie chick that proved he wasn’t absolutely conventional. I resented that. But I was having too much fun to let the resentment surface in a way I could actually confront. I didn’t understand it about myself. The misunderstandings weren’t just between the two of us. They were between ‘me’ and who ‘I’ really was.
Anyway, it was this woman I so admired who told her daughter, my classmate, that the preppy boyfriend was just the kind of boy she hoped my friend would grow up to marry. Mothers all loved him. Except mine, of course. Which was probably another part of his allure. And since all my classmates had a crush on him too, when he showed an interest in me, later, in my early twenties, I just couldn’t resist. I went for it.
We met again after childhood, at some party of which I have only the faintest recollection. But I certainly do remember what happened in the car afterwards.
We had a lot of fun. I do have to say that. No matter how mad he might get at me in memory—and I didn’t treat him well, poor preppy boyfriend—he would have to admit that.
It was mildly surprising to me that my mother was not happy about this. I found this out quickly. As usual with her, she was not backward about showing her unhappiness. When the preppy boyfriend first visited my parents’ house, perfect in his 501 blue jeans, his pink button down shirt, his Sperry topsiders, and his little tortoise shell rimmed glasses, she met him at the door, stared at him incredulously and said, “Excuse me,” disappearing into her rarely used living room.
A few seconds later, we, a bit stunned, heard the sounds of roaring laughter coming out of the archway to that room. “Mother!” I said. “What are you doing?” There she was, rolling around on the Aztec gold high pile carpet, laughing till the tears were coming out of her eyes.
She wiped her face. “You told me he was bad!” she said accusingly. “But you didn’t tell me he was this bad!”
I could only apologize and lead the preppy boyfriend away.
I was annoyed with her. But then there was that car ride later. She tried to apologize. She tried to explain. “I don’t want you to make the same mistake I did,” she said. She meant, and she was right though I didn’t get it then, the preppy boyfriend looked like my father had looked at his age. Someone who could make a good living and give his wife a good position in life. Someone who looked good.
If that was what I wanted in life. Was that what I wanted?
I knew it wasn’t in some obscure part of my heart. What surprised me was that my mother knew, too.
“Don’t worry, Mother,” I tried to reassure her. “I’m not going to marry him.” But I wasn’t sure. It was such a temptation, marrying the preppy boyfriend.
She could hear that little note of doubt. “All I can think,” she said anxiously, “is that you’d be bringing his parents into the family. And I’d be stuck with them forever.”
So I pointed out to her that the preppy boyfriend was exactly what she had raised me to marry. Lawyer parents. Elite prospects. Victorian house in the best part of San Francisco. Country home. Etc. She just looked at me.
I knew what her look meant. We both knew. That was the mistake she’d made with marrying my father. That marrying an idea instead of a person. It’s always a mistake.
It’s the mistake of someone who hasn’t learned the best way to play the game.
He did ask me to marry him, at least twice if I recall. But he wasn’t really serious. It was more like if I would say yes, I could be the one who was at fault for his not following the line that had been set for him. It would be my fault if his Godzilla wife forced him to leave that country club. It could be my decisions that would make people angry rather than his. He hated making people angry. He wanted to be liked.
I suppose that was why I didn’t get angry, only exasperated, when the preppy boyfriend cheated on me. I knew it wasn’t like the other unsatisfactory ex-boyfriend, the one whose pleasure came partially, if not completely, from making me miserable. My preppy boyfriend just wanted to make anyone he was with like him more. If he had to sleep with them to do that, well, as long as he didn’t get caught, it didn’t count. Anyway, I wasn’t a paragon of faithfulness myself. Although to give myself—and him—credit, neither of us slept with people to make others miserable. We just wanted to have fun, and in his case, avoid unpleasantness.
That we didn’t know it, either of us, was the root of more misunderstanding. If only we both could have seen what was going on, have admitted it then. We would have had even more fun that we allowed ourselves.
I remember once calling him and realizing there must be another girl in the room. As we were hanging up, he said, in a spritely voice, “Alrightey!” I waited a few minutes, and then I called back and said, “Don’t you ever ‘alrightey!’ me again. And don’t think I don’t know why you did it that time.”
I imagine I ruined their evening. Really, I don’t know why he put up with me. I was a monster. He was not a monster. He was just a nice guy who played golf at a racist country club because his father wanted him to.
So the inevitable breakup happened, far more painful than it needed to be, if only we’d been aware enough to understand what game we were actually playing. What score was possible to two such amateurs. And how it was time to head back into the clubhouse off the green.
I was lucky. I didn’t need to marry him. I could count him as a lesson in the game and move on. Then what should happen, would. You start to be better at the game. You start to be able to shoot under par. Fewer bogeys. At least that’s the way it seems to me.
You stop blaming your own anger on anyone else.
I don’t think the boyfriend who owned Bogey the dog ever felt his anger. And I think that was his attraction to me, as much of my father’s attraction had been to my mother. That I could be angry for him. I could be the one to be blamed.
The last time I saw him, years after we’d parted, he invited me home to meet his wife and young children. He had a perfect life. Beautiful wife. Healthy, handsome children. A thriving and prosperous career. Gorgeous house in a great neighborhood. I’m sure he was a member of whatever country club was going nearby. I’m sure he was still playing golf.
We went out to dinner, and when his wife was in the bathroom, he made a pass at me. I just stared at him and changed the subject. I thought, “Oh my god, Mom was right. That would have been me in that bathroom.” I got out of there as soon as I could. I felt for his wife. I don’t suppose it occurred to him for a moment that he was angry with her for his not being able to fulfill all his desires in the life he’d chosen. But whose fault was that? If I’d married him, it would have been me he blamed. Although probably for different things altogether. Because you can’t have everything. You have to choose. And I guess once you’ve chosen what game you’re going to play, you have to learn how to play it. And stick within the rules.
Now, as I write this, I realize something else. In his head, I was to blame for his attraction to me. If we had an affair, and he got caught, it would have been me, the fatal seductress, who was the bad one. Because he liked to be liked. He couldn’t be the bad one.
I was pretty annoyed about that pass. But he was still a nice guy, and he still liked to be liked, and I’m sure he was perplexed by his own anger, which must have seemed foreign to him, not himself at all. I’m positive he was still angry that the perfect life hadn’t given him everything he wanted.
I wish now the two of us, when we were young, could have just relaxed and been grateful for the time we had together that was so much fun. A game, really. Much more fun than golf. At least I think so. But what do I know?
Why should I have been snobby about golf, anyway? It’s only a game. I assume it can be fun for those who play it, the way lovemaking was fun for me. The scoring system alone had a lot to teach me. I really should have been paying proper attention to Bogey’s name.