5November2007
The 37-Year-Old Version
Posted under places beginning with: C; Cedar Grove; New Jersey.
This story about a ‘homecoming’ in New Jersey comes to us from award winning essayist Joel Schwartzberg. The article was previously published in the New York Times Magazine (August 12 2007) and is republished here with the author’s consent. Joel writes a blog for NJVoices and is also currently a nominee for the 2007Weblog Awards.
To my naïve 37-year-old eyes, my parents’ condominium in Cedar Grove, New Jersey was just a place to sleep while my wife and I, separated after 10 years of marriage, “figured things out.” I had my own room, which was cluttered with a museum’s worth of cheaply framed photos. Wherever I turned, I saw myself — at my bar mitzvah, my senior prom, my high-school graduation. It was hard to resist the feeling that on some level I belonged there.
But to my parents, my presence endowed their home with an exciting purpose: to foster a child who hadn’t needed fostering since 1986, the last year I lived in their house. I’d been a traditionally nerdy Jewish kid, programmed to please and vastly unschooled in the language of emotion. Bypassing any made-for-TV teenage rebellions, I sailed through my adolescence like a Stepford Son.
Twenty years later, as I dressed for work each weekday morning, my mother interrogated me. She asked when I needed to leave, what I wanted for breakfast, if I wanted one of my dad’s multivitamins, when I would return and what effect all this would have on the chicken dinner she was planning to prepare in her new pressure cooker. And then she would ask, “What’s going on with … you know?” She couldn’t come right out and say the word “separation,” because talking about feelings in my family is like talking about extraterrestrial life — entirely hypothetical.
“Are you two getting back together?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. This was not an answer she understood.
To their credit, my parents valiantly found solutions to their interpretation of my problems. When I talked about the high price of lunch, they eagerly bought me a pound of turkey. When they saw my clothes strewn about, they got me a wicker hamper. They washed my whites and colors — together — and dropped my work shirts off at the cleaners. They cleared space on shelves and collected my spare change in a cup. They gave me the guest bathroom and half the medicine cabinet. Within a few weeks, the meat went bad, my toothbrush disappeared and my dad was wearing my white socks, now somewhat pink.
On the evenings I couldn’t invent a reason to stay out late, my mother would ask hopefully if I wanted to watch something “on tape.” In my family, we share an addiction to other people’s drama, perhaps to compensate for burying our own, and my mom has no fewer than three VCRs working day and night to support her habit. She and I would sit and stare at cop-and-lawyer shows until I couldn’t tell one perp from another. One evening, halfway through “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit,” she hinted about my dad’s coming birthday.
“Your point being?” I teased her.
“Be nice,” she said. But her awkward way of laughing it off made me regret my remark. I could see that I was returning their assertive caretaking with outright resentment, but somehow I couldn’t help myself.
A week later, I stayed out late for an after-work party and took the last train home, sneaking back into their condo like a burglar. I had already rationalized going to work late and turned off the alarm. Around 7 the next morning, my dad knocked.
“Do you need to get up?” he mumbled through the door.
“No, it’s O.K.,” I said, my voice muffled by the pillow.
Less than 15 minutes later, my mother threw open the door.
“Oh my Gah-ahd!” she exclaimed. “You’re going to be late!”
“I told Dad it’s O.K.! Didn’t he tell you? It’s O.K. — what’s wrong with you?!”
She paused while I dug my face farther into the pillow, clutching for every last moment of sleep in the most dramatic manner.
“So … ,” she asked. “What time do you have to be there?”
A few long seconds passed before I heard the door finally shut.
We were all stuck in the same bad sitcom together, re-enacting old roles that we’d never explored to full potential. I was the defiant teenager I’d never been. They became the intrusive parents they’d never been. To make matters worse, the bedroom was feeling smaller by the hour, and the photos would not shut up.
Two months after I moved into their condo, I packed while they slept and left with as much as I could jam into my Sentra. But I realize now that it wasn’t their fault; they did the best they could. It was just time for me to grow up, take some responsibility and leave home for good.
