My Life as a Goddess Page 7

  Well, not really. We later discover it was actually Tom Doniphon in the shadows who shot Liberty Valance, but what matters is that everyone in town thinks it was Ranse. He’s elected governor and then senator from the juice of said murder, and when he tries to tell the newspapermen of Shinbone who really killed Valance, he is rebuked by the editor: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

  My father was very different from me. He once said that he did not understand the purpose of reading a book if it did not contain technical information you needed to consult. My father had no patience for frivolity or pleasure. He seemed to believe that life lived best was unending hard work periodically punctuated by relenting to the frivolous weaknesses of a wife who wanted to see a movie or relax for an afternoon. My father very much wanted to be a hard, dry icon of strength like Tom Doniphon.

  Like the cactus rose Pompey brings Hallie early in the film, my father was raised in hard soil. I don’t mean poverty or adversity: My father grew up financially more secure than my mom, and was a white heterosexual cisgendered straight man at one of the nicest times in history to be such. Pax Whitemania, if you will. His problems were more immediate: His parents were not nice. My father was an unexpected late pregnancy born into a home of stern, judgmental Southern Baptists who never particularly liked him. My grandparents moved every few years. My grandfather had dreams of farming in his native Arkansas but made real money only by working in the shipyards of San Francisco. The moves meant that no friends were permanent, and the only dependable people in his life were the family who did not like him.

  Then my father got himself a new family. My parents got married three months into the unexpected gestation of my sister. He was eighteen and she was nineteen, and such was the course of nature. It was now within my father’s power to love people who might love him back. My mom and my sister are women, the gender traditionally assigned responsibility for affection. My father was, in various ways, able to treasure them, like Tom treasured Hallie. An ungentle person trying at gentleness.

  Then I was born.

  My father’s hostility is in my first memories. It looms. One of my first memories is standing before my father, who was sitting in the yellow chair, which was at an angle that clearly means this memory is from the 1970s. Also, he’s sitting down and I’m looking up at him, which means I couldn’t have been more than three. (I was always enormous.) My mother said, “Tell him. Tell him that he scares you.” And I remember thinking, “Maybe if I lie, he will like me.” So I refused my mother’s suggestion and insisted my father didn’t scare me. For years I relived this moment, knowing so concretely that if I’d just been brave enough to tell my father that he scared me, things might have changed. I blamed myself, and it would be decades before it crossed my mind that my father, an adult man (though barely so), might have chosen to be less actively angry at his toddler son all the time.

  My father was not, in fact, like Tom Doniphon. Men instinctively fear and respect Doniphon, but not my dad. He was not a person who was instinctively popular. He was instinctively unpopular. His years of moving from school to school left him desperate to prove his value to other men, but he wasn’t athletic enough, or tall enough, or funny enough, or rich enough, or interesting enough to captivate others. All he had was his capacious, unending willingness to work.

  So he became the boss. He worked his way from construction laborer to cement mason to foreman to contractor to construction manager to construction inspector. Through responsibility and reliability, he took a working-class skill set and turned it into a marginally middle-class life. He also had employees, all men, who were duty-bound to seek his approval and understand that his way was the right way. Through work, he finally found something that proved he mattered.

  And at home, he was a boss. He wielded authority, not love. His greatest expressions of affection were declining to use the authority he would remind all of us he had. When my sister and I would misbehave during the summer, a common punishment was to be whipped with the green branches of an almond tree. We would each go and select a switch, my father would ritualistically remove the lower leaves so it would move faster, and then he would switch us. Periodically, my sister would cry, and my father would make her get the switch; he would remove the leaves, then he would symbolically cast it aside to let her know she was receiving clemency because she was a girl. I would still be switched.

  My mother never hit me. She never needed to. She had a relationship with me.

  My father controlled the money coming into the house. He owned the cars, he owned the house. He was bigger than any of us. My father did not want to rule through respect or law but through unquestioning obedience and a decent dose of fear.

  This is a power structure that Tom Doniphon would have understood. Indeed, it is a power structure that Tom tries to explain to Ranse Stoddard. It’s the system of authority that Liberty Valance uses to keep the town in check, and it’s the system of power that Tom uses to stop Valance.

  In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, Tom Doniphon clearly loves Hallie. He is building an extension to his house to try to create the kind of feminine comforts Hallie would require. He finishes the extension just before he shoots Valance, and afterward, drunk, comes to some kind of realization that the man he is could never provide stability or happiness to Hallie. Doniphon drives home and hurls an oil lamp at the extension and sets it on fire. Tom stops himself from trying to be the kind of man he can’t be, and tries to make way for Ranse to give Hallie the happiness he cannot.

  My father tried. He got a girlfriend, he got her pregnant, he married her. He had a child, then another child. He built a home for us with his own hands. He tried to give us love, but the results had all too much in common with the prickly cactus rose Pompey brings Hallie on Tom’s behalf.

  My father and I would spend very long days doing work in our orchard or in his shop. We would talk, but if my talk ever got too whimsical, fantastical, or happy, my dad would shut it down. Happiness, in the long run, was embarrassing or expensive.

  My mom told me lots of stories ranging from the Arkansas of her ancestors—stories handed down—to her own life, to celebrities, to history, to politics. Lots of settings, lots of tones, lots of lessons. Be generous; cake stands are useful; a good dog loves you and hates everyone else; if people fuck with you, make sure you fuck with them harder; most people are secretly anti-Semitic; too much baking powder will ruin dumplings. She shared her life through stories. She was basically the Andy Cohen of my childhood.

  My dad told me few stories, but one he told a lot. When he was a boy and living in Missouri, the youth Sunday school leader was going to take some boys on a fishing trip. My dad wanted to go, but he was not invited. He told his mother that this was making him sad, so she called the Sunday school leader and asked him to take my dad. My dad was embarrassed but went. “It was fun, but it would have been more fun if they’d wanted me to begin with.”

  My dad told me this story so many times. It was a resonant truth he wanted to impart to me. It’s better to just be wanted. After Ranse Stoddard finishes his story, he heads back to Washington with Hallie, and they talk of returning to Shinbone for their golden years. Simmering under the surface of the conversation is the unsettling sense that Hallie has never been truly happy because the rugged, self-assured man she always loved pushed her away so she could be a senator’s wife.

  I was never what my dad wanted. Part of me thinks that a son who solidified his hopes for his own masculinity would have made him happy. A football star who got the girls and was magnetic in the way he was not. My dad always seemed fascinated with those uncomplicated guys in my class. He would point out their behavior and wonder why I couldn’t be more like them.

  But the real part of me, the best part of me, the Ranse Stoddard who carries books, knows that no son would have been able to make him happy. He hated me before I was sentient. He loved me, too, absolutely, but from the beginning, there was a little more ha
te than normally exists between a father and son. Or maybe not.

  Before I was aware, I was aware that I was doing it wrong. I wasn’t sure what, but I was doing it wrong. He resented me for this inchoate failure and pulled away. I was always supposed to be chasing to prove something to him I didn’t really want to prove. I was supposed to have some inner desire to repair trucks, play catch, and work on construction sites. I didn’t. He was mad.

  My mother tells a story of my dad washing his car when I was eighteen months old or so. I saw him washing and wanted to help, so I picked up a wet rag that was on the ground and rubbed it against the car. My dad freaked out because the rag had gravel stuck to it; he was worried I’d scratched his paint. He picked me up and started hitting me. More sophisticated iterations of this interaction replayed over the following twenty-five years.

  One evening during my second-grade year, I was taken to the auditorium of a school not my own. I did not know what was going on. I assumed my parents were voting. When we didn’t find any polling booths in the auditorium of April Lane Elementary School, I asked. My mother informed me that I was going to play T-league and my dad was going to be coach, and that it would be very good for our relationship. I was seven, my father was thirty, and already our entire family was treating my relationship with my dad like a marriage on the rocks.

  Let me be honest: I did not care for T-ball. There were no wizards involved. There was grass, but frolicking was frowned upon. There were other boys, some of whom I liked, but most of whom confused me. And there was my dad, angry at me for doing it wrong, not playing me because he couldn’t be showing favoritism to me. Finally, at the end of my second season playing, he got asked to coach the all-star team. He did not put me on the team because, again, he could not be seen as showing favoritism to me, so for three weeks, I had to go to the park and watch my dad coach other people’s sons. I got to play with my female cousins, and honestly, I preferred it.

  In a world that seemed generally angry at me—many people other than my dad were mad at me for boying wrong—I sought the stability of books. In a book, no one calls you Gay Guy or gets mad at you that you throw wrong. Books are full of other people’s problems that you can learn from. Like a young Ranse Stoddard, everywhere I went, I brought a sack with a bunch of books, prepared to remove myself from dangerous situations. My dad hated it. He didn’t understand it. Over time, his anger grew, first at the size of the book bag, then baldly at the books themselves.

  We spent many long car rides together, mostly during the summers when I had to work construction with him. We engaged in more of that strange conversation that could never be fun, personal, or frivolous. Once, when I was in college, he picked me up from a bus that goes from Berkeley to Davis. After light talk, I retreated to a book. When we finally got home and got out of the car, he pulled King Lear out of my hands, tore it in two, and threw it on the ground. His rage was a thing without words.3

  Words are what I have. I tried, starting in high school, to solve the problem of my father. People with different skill sets would have tried better means, but I believed that all he was missing was a bit of rational, logical explanation of the problem. I was just the young lawyer to convince him that hating me was the wrong choice.

  Filled with all the E. L. Konigsburg and J. S. Mill I’d consumed over the years, I structured arguments. He began by dismissing my observations, so I learned to marshal facts to respond. I made my mind keen and organized, and I kept fastidious detail of his actions. I picked the most clearly structured examples of his distaste and disrespect to position my arguments most favorably. Sound reason had ended tyranny in the United States; it had ended segregation and systemic misogyny (I believed); clearly, if I could just reason well enough, my dad would realize that he didn’t need to be angry with me all the time.

  But the structures and authorities of Sutter County, California, were no more capable than those of Shinbone. There were no arguments clear enough, no grades good enough, no football victories resounding enough for him to recognize validity in my cause.

  My dad was officially five feet nine inches tall, which means he was actually five-eight. I am six-three. My freshman year in high school, I weighed just under three hundred pounds. Though I lacked interest, speed, or much natural skill, I was valuable on a football field. He informed me before my freshman year that I was going to play, and I played. He came to an astounding number of my practices just to watch. He had played football. He had been not great. I started games nearly every week that I played. I was eventually a team captain, and at the end of my senior year, the head coach gave me the award for toughest player. My dad loved that I played football. And on the way home from the ceremony where I got that award, my dad said to me, “You could have tried harder. You never really tried as much as you could at football.”

  Maybe I could have, but in my life, I had too many things I was good at to try super-hard at a thing I wasn’t good at. Which is why, decades later, I would still be trying to form arguments, phrases, constructions, to make my father see our relationship differently. To stop him from identifying every action and gesture I made as an insult and a slight. I wanted to live in a world where my gods, reason and logic, had the power to heal this injury.

  One thing to understand is that, in all of these conversations with my father, these oral arguments before a Republican construction worker, I had to remain completely calm. If at any point in time my father began to register that I was raising my voice, or if I simply vexed too many of his poorly formed rebuttals, he would raise his voice. If I countered, he would approach as though to hit me. He pulled a hammer on many occasions. He was in charge, and that force was part of what kept him in charge. Subtly, underneath all of my father’s social interactions with us was the gentle awareness that he might beat us like he’d beat a disobedient dog. We were, of course, all animals he owned.

  Now let us remember: At the age of thirteen, I was seven inches taller than he was and outweighed him by a hundred pounds, but for the following nine years, when he glowered at me and threatened violence, I relented in fear.

  I hated him. Not because he threatened violence, but because he forced me to live in a world that was governed by fear and not reason. I was offering him solidity, stability. A nice, patient teenager who will never disobey but will always offer clear, well-reasoned arguments for the things he wanted to do. I wanted rule of law, but my dad understood the world better than I did. The minute he relented to rule of law, I would be in charge. He needed Shinbone to stay a territory. He needed to be Liberty Valance.

  But my relationship with my dad is not a tragedy. It is a comedy. Because in this situation, Liberty Valance was five-eight.

  When I was a senior in college, my mom went to the doctor. Her stomach was doing something weird, and the doctor politely informed her that the weird thing her stomach was doing was playing host to a thirty-five-pound ovarian tumor. She went into the hospital, and my family had to start wondering how things would work when the person who makes things work wasn’t there. Things at home were bad. We were all on edge, and neither my sister nor my father was inclined to de-escalate situations. I’d also spent the previous three years gently unwrapping my anxiety and resentment, mostly in the form of essays about Shakespeare plays. All the work breaking down, categorizing, analyzing, and defending arguments about relationships that had been so useless against my dad delighted my instructors at Berkeley. I had people in my life who valued the person I was, and it left me feeling what may have been my first little shreds of pride.

  My father and I argued. The house was deprived of the woman who loved us both more than anyone had ever loved us, the woman who de-escalated, whose upset was to be avoided. We were in my parents’ bedroom. I do not know what we argued about. That has been lost to history. He raised his voice and I did not back down. He walked toward me, arms extended from his sides like a rooster trying to seem larger before a fight. I grabbed him by the throat and shoved him against the wall.
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  I was Ransom Stoddard. Finally, at my wits’ end, and with our Hallie gone, I relented from my belief that reason, argument, and law could solve this problem. I descended to barbarism. I took a pistol to the main street of Shinbone, and I didn’t need a Tom Doniphon in the shadows to shoot for me. The simple truth was that if I’d been any other boy in Sutter County, California, I’d have kicked his ass when I was fifteen. Maybe he would have shot me, but he wouldn’t have. He would have respected me. But I didn’t want that respect.

  It was a chilling moment that I am still living today. His neck crumpled down on my hand, the shock and fear resonating from him. Worst, even in that moment, I wasn’t consumed by rage; I wasn’t seeing red in the fashion of every barely literate alcoholic man I’m related to. When he walked toward me, mostly I was just thinking, “This is ridiculous,” and with my arm made the clearest argument that his reliance on physical violence for authority was unsound. He didn’t get that.

  After that, he was better. My mom used that word years later: “Ever since you did that, he’s been better.” A little less tyrannical, a little less cruel.

  He never respected me, in the way that I understand respect. He never deferred to my reason, he never treated my suggestion as a viable option. He respected me in his way. Mostly, that involved not driving my car unless I gave him permission.