Lie To Me

People frequently mistake me for someone they know. Apparently I look exactly like the video store guy’s friend from grade school, or the mechanic’s neighbor.  I’m a dead ringer for the singer’s manager’s niece-in-law or a co-worker from that restaurant job years ago. I’m honored by the errors, since it’s clear that I remind them of a person they liked or at least thought was reasonably attractive. No one ever asks, “Say, weren’t we in cell block 9 together?” or “Weren’t you down the hall from me in rehab?”   

I don’t mind being Everywoman. The trouble with looking familiar and approachable is that I am subjected to an unusual number of earnest confessions and spontaneous confidences. New acquaintances trust me far too quickly, thrusting lurid secrets across the table to me like canapés. (“Here, try this one—it’s delicious. There are lots more!”)

A mental health professional once confided in me that he’d had his license stripped for getting involved with a patient; a minister told me he was an alcoholic long before he told his congregation. This might be a tad too much information from someone I don’t know well. Married women tell me of affairs they are having, or wish they were having, or the ones they discovered their husbands were having by surreptitiously combing through all the emails between the offending parties. I receive these confidences attentively, but the conversation is usually a one-way street, since they’re just confessing, not conferring. The prevailing logic appears to be that if you’ve got a few moldy items in the refrigerator, no need to actually get rid of them, just set them on a tray for company and they’ll disappear all by themselves.

Mark Twain once said, “I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie. I can, but I won’t.”  

He often shocked people with his honesty. But probably not because he corralled them in a café all afternoon describing the details of his recent surgery or his cousin’s arrest. Truth and bean-spilling sometimes seem to be worlds apart.

In the house where I grew up, there were two upstairs bathrooms. Once my brother neared puberty, the tiny hall bathroom, originally shared by my brother and me, became the “men’s room,” a humid cave redolent with the aromas of my father’s Old Spice aftershave and my brother’s gym socks molting beneath the lid of the wicker hamper. My mother and I shared a more spacious bath adjoining my parents’ bedroom, adorned with crimson flowered wallpaper, a built-in bench along one wall, and a large clean tub, its edges laden with sweet-smelling bubble bath packets and loofahs. My mother wasn’t an especially private person. I experimented with her green eye shadow while she bathed, or held the oval hand mirror to the back of her head so she could see that her French bun, held in place by tortoiseshell combs, was perfect.

Frequently she perched on the narrow bench to keep me company, doing her toenails or waiting for her goopy clay face mask to dry while I took my turn in the tub. My mother tended to launch into interesting monologues when she had a captive audience, and I listened dutifully, steam from the bathwater rising up between us, while she expounded on her hopes for me, politics, the faults of her older siblings. I waited for her to hand me a shampoo bottle or a washcloth at the breaks between topics, all the while soaking up her words like a sponge.

One chilly weekend morning a few days before Thanksgiving, Mom moved a space heater into the bathroom, and we stayed in there a long time, reluctant to exit the cocoon of cozy warmth.  My mother squinted into the mirror, making deft movements with an eyelash curler, while I ran more hot water into the tub around me and poked holes in a sea of bubbles. I plied her with questions I already knew the answers to, about her engagement to her first fiancé, killed in the war, or how she met my father. Boy-crazy and shy, I relished the story of their hurried civil ceremony and honeymoon, just before my father was shipped overseas. The notion of my parents’ very own wartime romance, carried out by mail after only knowing each other a short while, seemed thrillingly poignant to me. I scrubbed my knees and neck again, dawdling to draw out the conversation.

My mother paused in her ablutions, and said idly, waving the eyelash curler into the air like a pointer, “You know, I never should have had children.”

I remember the awkward, naked feeling of that moment.  It was as if all the warm bathwater had suddenly drained from the tub, leaving me beached and shivering. One ought to reply, but I had no idea what was called for in response, or where I stood. Was I her confidante? Her friend?  A ten-year-old bystander, listening in on a casual conversation?  Should I politely agree that child-rearing hadn’t been worth her while?

Bewildered, I said only, “Yes, I know what you mean.” In some fierce, devoted way, I made myself see the sense of it, wanting to protect her. She was beautiful and slender, a talented artist. She should never have had to be a mother. She could have built a bigger business as an interior designer or a sparkling social life with my father. Instead of fixing school lunches or making macaroni for art projects or combing the phone list to get a babysitter so she could attend a PTA meeting, she could be dancing and dining downtown on a regular basis. Or sailing to Bermuda on vacation.

She applied lipstick from a silver-colored tube, smacked her lips a few times to blot them, and surveyed her face evenly in the mirror. Then she plucked my terrycloth robe from its hook on the door and put it on the stepstool next to me.

 “I’m going to go get dressed. Now don’t you dare forget to rinse the tub,” she said, before shutting the door firmly behind her, as if she’d just won an argument. My mother’s confession that day was no more substantial than the fibs she told the next-door neighbors; a half-truth, it separated and wounded both of us. I didn’t know then how sturdy truth is. Honesty isn’t anecdotal, nor is it something to fling about as the urge strikes. We must be the truth, and nourish it, holding it dear to our hearts. The telling of it, by comparison, is a very small thing indeed.

Stacy Appel is a writer in California whose work has been featured in the Chicago Tribune and other publications. She has also written for National Public Radio.

~Stacy Appel