Skin Game: A Memoir Read Online Free
Author: Caroline Kettlewell
chatter, the oil that lubricated the machinery of his parish life. He couldn’t keep people’s names straight, did not much care about the vicissitudes and vagaries of Business in the City. He’d suddenly recall that the vestry meeting had started fifteen minutes ago, that he’d said yes to a luncheon for this afternoon. He was wholly guileless in these lapses, his mind already again somewhere else, too restless to alight on any one matter for longer than a moment.
My mother, disappointed in a church that relegated women to bustling around the periphery with covered dishes and silver polish, had left Yale Divinity School, where she was studying theology, to marry my father. (“You’ll be poor all your life!” cried my grandmother in protest when my mother broke the news of her engagement.) But in Illinois, with abstruse theological discourse still echoing in her ears, my mother found herself expected to make her way as the rector’s wife, in attendance upon women whose entire lives—their homes, their children, their accomplishments—were meant to serve as tributes to their husbands’ success.
My mother found these women gracious, generous, and thoroughly intimidating. My father conscientiously attended to his duties as parish priest, but felt quixotically more at home among the lifers he tutored each week at the state penitentiary, following the true calling of his Christianity to minister to the least among us.
My parents’ tenure in Illinois was marked by the uncomfortable feeling, says my mother, that they were masquerading in the guise of their apparent qualifications—that Harvard degree, those Boston bona fides—and expecting at every moment to be unmasked.
* * *
What I’m trying to say is that my family has a history of living lives of fabrication, and after a while it comes to seem natural to edit freely. And if you could pick and choose, wouldn’t it be tempting simply to elide what is least pleasant? In my family, we had so profoundly lost the language for anger or unhappiness or despair, for the awkward and the uncomfortable and the unpleasant, that we didn’t even know something was missing. In the home where I grew up, no one ever argued. No one ever yelled, except every now and then my sister—and then we all would look politely away as if it were something she couldn’t help, like Tourette’s, like epilepsy.
It’s not that we lived in a strained silence of the unspoken. To the contrary, we went for words in a big way—scads of words, volumes of words; we would never have been content to buy just one vowel from Pat Sajak. We lived amid piles of books and cascading heaps of New Yorkers next to every chair and bed.
With our language creating a diversion, however, we looked the other way, like people whistling past a graveyard. There was something out there, something you couldn’t dare to acknowledge: a writhing Pandora’s box of frustrations determinedly quashed, angry words bitten back, sorrows unvoiced. It could bring down the world if opened. Instead, our words kept the lid on, smoothing cleanly, invisibly over the gaps, an unconscious habit of indirection. No one would ever be so presumptuous as to ask about your troubles, and you would never be so presumptuous as to tell.
* * *
On the drive home from school on that February day in 1975, my mother and I would have spoken of other matters. I wouldn’t have known how to tell the plain and simple truth. The truth seemed the most dangerous, the most damning admission, the one I couldn’t allow for.
4
The funny thing about silence is that it always makes the thing not mentioned seem as though it must be so much worse than you imagined.
The day after my school bathroom debacle I went back to school, because what else are you going to do? You go on in life because another day rolls around and expects things of you.
My seventh-grade sociopathic classmates had a field day with the whole affair, smacking as it
My mother, disappointed in a church that relegated women to bustling around the periphery with covered dishes and silver polish, had left Yale Divinity School, where she was studying theology, to marry my father. (“You’ll be poor all your life!” cried my grandmother in protest when my mother broke the news of her engagement.) But in Illinois, with abstruse theological discourse still echoing in her ears, my mother found herself expected to make her way as the rector’s wife, in attendance upon women whose entire lives—their homes, their children, their accomplishments—were meant to serve as tributes to their husbands’ success.
My mother found these women gracious, generous, and thoroughly intimidating. My father conscientiously attended to his duties as parish priest, but felt quixotically more at home among the lifers he tutored each week at the state penitentiary, following the true calling of his Christianity to minister to the least among us.
My parents’ tenure in Illinois was marked by the uncomfortable feeling, says my mother, that they were masquerading in the guise of their apparent qualifications—that Harvard degree, those Boston bona fides—and expecting at every moment to be unmasked.
* * *
What I’m trying to say is that my family has a history of living lives of fabrication, and after a while it comes to seem natural to edit freely. And if you could pick and choose, wouldn’t it be tempting simply to elide what is least pleasant? In my family, we had so profoundly lost the language for anger or unhappiness or despair, for the awkward and the uncomfortable and the unpleasant, that we didn’t even know something was missing. In the home where I grew up, no one ever argued. No one ever yelled, except every now and then my sister—and then we all would look politely away as if it were something she couldn’t help, like Tourette’s, like epilepsy.
It’s not that we lived in a strained silence of the unspoken. To the contrary, we went for words in a big way—scads of words, volumes of words; we would never have been content to buy just one vowel from Pat Sajak. We lived amid piles of books and cascading heaps of New Yorkers next to every chair and bed.
With our language creating a diversion, however, we looked the other way, like people whistling past a graveyard. There was something out there, something you couldn’t dare to acknowledge: a writhing Pandora’s box of frustrations determinedly quashed, angry words bitten back, sorrows unvoiced. It could bring down the world if opened. Instead, our words kept the lid on, smoothing cleanly, invisibly over the gaps, an unconscious habit of indirection. No one would ever be so presumptuous as to ask about your troubles, and you would never be so presumptuous as to tell.
* * *
On the drive home from school on that February day in 1975, my mother and I would have spoken of other matters. I wouldn’t have known how to tell the plain and simple truth. The truth seemed the most dangerous, the most damning admission, the one I couldn’t allow for.
4
The funny thing about silence is that it always makes the thing not mentioned seem as though it must be so much worse than you imagined.
The day after my school bathroom debacle I went back to school, because what else are you going to do? You go on in life because another day rolls around and expects things of you.
My seventh-grade sociopathic classmates had a field day with the whole affair, smacking as it
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