Liz Scheier - Never Simple

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For Judith Scheier, who tried.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.

OSCAR WILDE

He who tells a lie is not sensible of how great a task he undertakes; for he must be forced to invent twenty more to maintain that one.

ALEXANDER POPE

When we discover that someone we trusted can be trusted no longer, it forces us to reexamine the universe, to question the whole instinct and concept of trust. For a while, we are thrust back onto some bleak, jutting ledge, in a dark pierced by sheets of fire, swept by sheets of rain, in a world before kinship, or naming, or tenderness exist; we are brought close to formlessness.

ADRIENNE RICH

I need to tell you something.

I looked up over the edge of my book. My mother was standing in the living room doorway in one of her endless array of flowered, crepey muumuusthe Shut-In Chic Collection, I called them privatelywith one hand on the knob, her face grave. I was on fall break, my freshman year at college; the last year, after this conversation, that I would consider my mothers apartment home. I let the book fall facedown on my chest.

What?

Well. She fiddled with the knob, coughed. You said you were going to take driving lessons and get a learners permit when you go back to school.

Thats right.

Thats going to be hard. I dont think theyll give you one.

I laughed, a little offended. Im sure it cant be that hard. Millions of idiots do it every day.

Thats not what I mean. Look. More fiddling. Theyre going to ask you for identification, a birth certificate. You dont have one.

So Ill send away for a copy.

No. No. Will you listen to what Im saying? Theres nothing to get a copy of. I never filed a record of your birth at all.

I scrabbled my elbows under me and sat up, my breath sharp in my throat. Finally, I thought. This is it. A bureaucratic boulder she couldnt lie her way over. An official document even she wouldnt dare forge. At last: answers. I dont understand. Why not?

Well. Deep breath. I was married when you were born. But not to your father.

No one lies like family.

We lie to each other all the time. We lie to keep each other at a distance, to give ourselves some elbow room in the claustrophobic nuclear unit. To spare each others feelings. To cut short a conversation, or to begin one. To ensure that the artichoke-heart softness of our insides is sealed safely off forever. As I write this, my two toddlers are in the next room, cheerfully belting out some interminable preschool song and throwing stuffed animals at each other. Theyre too young to ask me about my missing father, or my never-spoken-of mother, or why I am the way I am. Theyre too young to understand how much they dont know.

Then again, I havent started lying to them. Yet.

This is the story of digging out the biggest lie I was ever told.

My father was long since dead, but never mind: we had each other. My stylish, petite, sardonic mother and me. There werent a lot of single mothers around, and the few we knewheads together in the playground, Marlboro Reds gesturing furiously, given a wide berth by the married women sheep-dogging their husbands awaywere divorced. Mom was a widow, without any of the usual indicators that archaic, weepy word impliesno black dresses, no red-rimmed eyes. He was too long gone for that. He was forgotten. We were a team: one big, one small. Two sparrow-boned, sharp-eyed blondes, hand in hand.

There was no trace of my dead father except an ancient white leather backgammon set, which I kept reverently boxed up under my bed. Shed married him not long after divorcing her first husband, and in the early weeks of her pregnancy, he was killed in a car accident when he stopped at a red light and the driver behind him didnt. In a storm of grief she burned all his photos, including those from their wedding, at which she wore a borrowed ivory pantsuit that she dutifully returned. It was such a whirlwind romance that even the few friends she didnt alienateand the very few members of our family who were alive and speaking to each otherhad never met him. Family, dead. Friends, moved away.

This story is, of course, total bullshit.

But I believed it. Why wouldnt I? Parents in childrens books died all the time. I was a city kid, and as far as I was concerned, carsin which I almost never rodewere gas-snorting, two-ton death machines.

I asked about him, anxious for the details.

What did he look like?

Like you, Miss Mouse. Blond, gorgeous. (I blushed.)

Was he excited to have me?

It was too early, honey. He didnt know.

Oh. That stumped me, the specifics of pregnancy fuzzy at best. Then: What was he like?

She pushed up her glasses into her hair and sighed. Elizabeth, this was all a long time ago. He was a good man. Im sorry hes gone, but hes gone. Now, what should we read tonight?

I worshipped her. I loved her smoky cackle and her jokes, even though most of them went over my head, and I loved her whole-body storytelling, and her habit of pulling me out of school whenever something more interesting was happening. I loved that she adored me above everything else on earth and told me so on a roughly hourly basis. I felt like the small, slightly ratty sun around which the galaxy revolved.

So how was it possible that she was lying to me?

The paucity of belongings wasnt the problem. I could believe that a person could be swept away wholesale with nothing to show he was ever there. But the stories were such clear fabrications, haltingly told, a note of panic in her voice. She wasnt a good liar, despite all the practice.

The other kids I knew who were missing a father hadnt misplaced theirs quite so badly. Theirs came to pick them up for brunch on Sunday mornings, or dinner every other Thursday. They may have been shitty, and plenty of them were, but they were known quantities. Mine was a blank with a fuzzy blond halo and, apparently, a love for backgammon. Was he out there somewherein a Kips Bay divorced-guy apartment, or a row house in Queenswondering if shed ever let him meet me? Or unaware I existed at all? I surreptitiously scanned the faces of blond men on the street who looked to be about the right age. Is it you? Years later, when I donated eggs, I did the same with tiny blond toddlers with a mixture of curiosity and detachment. My anonymous genetic children were hypotheticals, but my fatherhe had to have been real. (Evidence: me.) But where was he?

Telling exorbitant lies was easier in the 80s. There was no internet, no way to track down the clues, especially for a six-year-old who rarely left the house. (If any of your friends fathers touch you, you tell me, she warned, even though she usually insisted playdates take place in our own living room, under her watchful eye.) She could reasonably believe that if she didnt give up the truth, I would never find out. But I knew something was wrong with her story. She was reluctant to talk about him, and I suspected that her reticence wasnt due to the patina of grief, but the fear of slipping up. What was she hiding?