Crime

This story starts years ago.

The boys were young. We all still lived at home in our house. And one day -- God knows why -- Wife started telling the boys about my academic achievements when I was young (grade school, high school, college).

Now I had made a point of never discussing any of this. It's all ancient history and I figured they didn't need to know. Besides, there is something really pathetic about anyone whose greatest achievements in life happened when he was sixteen. If I've got nothing better to say for myself than that I was valedictorian of my high school and that I had great SAT scores, ... that's pretty small and sad, isn't it? Better I should just skip all of that. How could they possibly care? And if I make a big deal about it when they don't care, won't I just come across as self-absorbed and clueless?

But suddenly there was Wife, telling them all about it. She probably exaggerated it; in the first place she wasn't there back then, and in the second place she really really cares about this stuff. She craves the kind of recognition that makes me run and hide. So it sounded to me like she was laying it on kind of thick.

I got mad. I yelled for her to stop. I demanded how could she do such a thing when she knew I didn't want her to talk about all that.

She didn't understand. Never mind that I had asked her not to discuss it ... she disregarded that request completely because to her mind she wasn't saying anything bad. In her mind, she was praising me; therefore she was saying good things; therefore the fact that I had expressly asked her not to somehow disappeared ... or didn't matter ... or never happened. Because it was OK by her lights, that made it OK simply. It's as if I couldn't really have meant what I said when I asked her to keep it a secret.

I tried and tried to get her to understand that tastes differ. Values differ. Just because it was OK with her didn't make it OK with me. She couldn't understand. She couldn't even understand that she didn't understand. It was as if I were a mime ... as if I were mouthing and gesturing but no sound came out. Her inability to get it was that total.

I felt that way a lot around Wife, and I kept looking for ways to break through so she could hear me. I kept looking for something I could say, something so bizarre that she would realize that she really didn't understand me ... something so bizarre that she would drop all her certainties, open her ears, and just listen.

In all my years with Wife, I never found it. But that particular day, while I was groping for something to say, I hit upon asking her, "Do you just hate your children? Why else would you tell them this stuff?" I wanted her to understand that I meant (in small part) "Don't lay a trip on them that they have to live up to such-and-such an image. Let them be who they are." I also wanted her to feel slapped in the face -- shocked enough that she would trouble to listen.

That part didn't work, but she did call D to complain about how bizarrely I was talking. (This was back when D was still Wife's best friend.) And D wrote me a letter demanding to know how I could possibly think Wife hated the boys just because she was praising me to them.

I said it was because I was startled. I was taken by surprise by her telling the boys about my victories in school a hundred years ago, so I overreacted. D wrote back to say that was crazy: there's no way that just being surprised or startled could make me say something so extreme, and in any event why should I be startled instead of pleased? (In her own way, D was just as chronically unable and unwilling to understand me as Wife ever was.)

So I tried to explain by telling a story. Think of it, I told her, like this ....

Suppose that you were a young woman in Germany in the 1930's, and you married a man with political ambitions who rose to be the Gauleiter of some important city.  In the last stages of the War, your husband is shot by partisans, and somehow you escape undetected to North Carolina.  You adopt a Southern accent, change your name, and take a job teaching ... and nobody knows about the life you used to lead.  By working very hard, by never letting up your guard for even a moment, you manage to erase your former life completely.  This means there are no embarrassing questions about war crimes; no difficult moments where you are asked how you personally feel about the Jews; no angry strangers lecturing you about how their Daddies were shot down in cold blood by your goddamned sonsabitching Kraut soldiers and what the hell do you have to say about it now ... none of that.  You have achieved one important part of the American Dream, by completely reinventing yourself.  Nobody has any idea that you didn't spring directly out of the red mud in the small rural town where you teach.  And then one day, as you are shopping for groceries, a stranger sidles his cart up next to your in the frozen food aisle, touches you on the sleeve, and whispers softly (in a voice that could not possibly have come out of the Carolinas), "Guten Abend, Frau Gauleiter.  Wie geht es Ihnen?  Was neues?  Erinnern Sie sich mir?"  Wouldn't your heart jump into your throat?  Wouldn't you feel like screaming?  Can you really judge me for overreacting?

That's the story I sent her, to explain how I felt at Wife explaining to the boys what an outrageous academic overachiever I was back when I was an immature little snot.

But what does the story mean? If that's how I felt, ... then how exactly is it that I did feel? Like my achievements were something shameful? that they were hateful? that they were crimes against humanity? What does this story really say?

I don't know -- consciously -- exactly what the story means. I told it because it felt right. But now that I look back on it years later, I have to say that it looks like I was trying to say I felt that my academic achievements were a crime. That they burdened me with a terrible guilt. That they had to be expiated. That I had to be punished for being so goddamned smart and so insufferably good at the games schools make you play. That there was something deeply wicked and immoral about being the best student in my selective private prep school every year but my first, and again the best student in my intensely academic liberal arts college every year but my first. 

The. Best. In. Two. Excellent. Schools.

When I spell it out like that I can still feel a little twinge of pride in the accomplishment. But at the same time I feel ashamed of the pride, as if it soils me ... the way a really degrading sexual fetish might. As if the very fact that I can feel these twinges of pride just proves how depraved I am, how low and petty. As if pride in that achievement is the same thing as wallowing in the gutter, or masturbating in public.

I still feel like it is a crime. I don't resent being punished for it. In fact, maybe this is where I get my flirtation with Sister Failure ... as a door to redemption. Because if I fail badly enough, maybe I can escape the curse of so much early success.

I just don't understand why I think these things.