growing up weird

Raw Material #2

My friend Caroline Argrave recently posted a beautiful essay on the way she idolized the Gabor sisters after having been raised by four octogenarians. I left this little cat turd in the comments (don’t you love that phrase? I stole it from Appleton King). I said it seemed the Gabors were both insiders and outsiders—my favorite kind of people—as Caroline, I suspected, had been. As I was. Caroline graciously agreed.

As a kid, I’d have done anything for a weirdness as charmed as watching Turner Classics. We didn’t have a television at all, except when my grandmother came to visit, the trunk of her gold Buick loaded with Seagrams 7 and a little pink T.V. Not having a T.V. was my fault.

When I was four, I snuck into my parents’ bedroom and turned on Sally Jessy Raphael. I watched, rapt, as a woman with crispy, permed hair complained about her overbearing husband “he won’t even let me buy tampons!” A troupe of male strippers marched out in maroon G-strings and lifted this housewife in the air and bounced her in front of her smoldering husband. (Had Sally Jessy considered the domestic scene this would provoke when that couple returned home?? Um, YIKES.)

Obviously, Pappy walked in for the dancing. My father was neither dextrous nor strong, but he lifted the television, opened the antique window AND the storm window behind it, and hurled the machine out onto the lawn where it exploded and lay rusting for weeks.

Whenever my mother was in Los Angeles (working on a television show!) Pappy would pick me and Lily up from school on his motorcycle wearing one of the named hats from his collection—‘Al Gazazarat’ was his favorite: a wooly, white fez that looked like headgear from the Ottoman Empire. (Sadly, I cannot find a photo so settled for the above.) “Don’t you need helmets for the girls?” my teachers would ask. Wherever my father went smelled like the green leaves he rolled into paper and smoked at the edge of the woods. Other peoples’ parents did not have this perfume, I noticed. I became socially vigilant, trying to detect the baseline of ‘ordinariness’ so I could find it and stop the kids I thought were laughing.

Like Caroline’s Gabors my life looks about as “American as Jay Gatsby and Coca-Cola” now. The boys watch cartoons and walk themselves to school; they play sports and do summer camps in a town so quaint it might’ve borne Norman Rockwell. But I’m in costume.

I like my safe town and my close family and I appreciate that I was never so othered I couldn’t find my way into the mainstream. But there’s nothing like shifting your own identity to help you see that IT’S ALL FAKERY. (Is that a real word, or one Pappy made up?) We invent customs, we read rooms, we play pretend until it’s real enough. In every new situation I notice myself pause and shift—what’s called for here? What’s praised, what’s taboo? All the years I spent being weird gave me an anthropological gaze. I wouldn’t trade that for the banality of constant enfranchisement.

…and now I wonder if I ought to do a better job embarrassing my kids.

I’m curious about your secret outsider identities. Unusual smells in the house that mortified you when friends came over? A grandmother who chain-smoked or publicly removed her dentures? (👋) Or maybe something more serious, like a family illness that shaped your view of the world? (👋) Today’s funny stories are often yesterday’s pain.

To that end, do you agree that being a conscious outsider is a pretty certain way to grow up an empath? Show your reasoning in the comments section below.

But above all—keep trying,

Isabel

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