tiny hell
Everyone else’s family is hell, your friend or partner your shitty Virgil guiding you through. I take it back: some people’s families are normal, quiet, maybe a little boring, they cook in careful synchrony, have made you a bed in a well-organized room where you sleep under the mother’s marathon photos from 3 decades back. They know things about you in advance — what you study and roughly what it means — and ask you some polite questions. You talk about travel, childhood illnesses, praise your friend/partner’s acumen at something, make the parent feel, Yes, I was a good parent. They are feminists, left-wing, they condemn the same wars you do. You watch some TV and the father says, What are you watching? and sort of hovers at the periphery of the living room until you’re 30 minutes into the episode already, at which point he takes up residence in a reclining chair. You are a little sleepy. You feel safe.
Your own family is hell, absolutely, but it’s familiar hell, one you even crave a little bit; returning to those resentments you expect is satisfying, like speaking a language perfectly. You think the language sounds ugly, too guttural and rough, but there’s a comfort in knowing its grammar: that your sister doesn’t want you in the kitchen when she’s making her gochujang rice noodles off an Instagram recipe (because you’ll fuck something up, maybe, or it just feels like too many cooks?), that your mom will show up late to a dinner you meticulously prepared, that she will set down, next to the salad and penne all’arrabbiata, the incongruous black plastic takeaway container (reused, many times) filled with broccoli and tofu coated in whatever assortment of spices she found at the AirBNB, and everyone will exchange knowing looks, that your mother will scrape the tines of her fork against the pink ceramic sides of your sister’s matching bowls and it’s the loudest sound known to mankind. That at the restaurant when the waiter comes over and asks the pro forma How was everything tonight? she will say the food was too salty. That you will bloviate at her about rudeness and it will turn into a longer, louder conversation that emotionally damages both of you. That your sister will have stomach problems so she and her partner won’t come on the tour you booked for five adults at the State Library of Victoria, the one your mom wanted to go on, that your mother will in fact run late to this tour. That your heart rate will go up during all of this and then come back down because she will arrive without missing all that much, that you are relieved by this but also mildly annoyed, that she is a Teflon woman and being late never sticks to her in a real way. That your father will see your sister using an immersion blender inside of a large black pot and say what you were silently thinking, Uhhhh is that a nonstick? because you should never use metal implements on Teflon or you will scratch it and ruin your pan and also release forever chemicals and get cancer, I guess.
Now you are staying the week in a house where the mother uses metal on nonstick pans. Sizzle, steam, scrape. Round and round, the same mistake. There are lots of things that remind you you have little control in someone else’s house but seeing metal touch nonstick every day and not being able to say anything because that would be pedantic and impolite is the one that really sticks in your craw. On New Year’s Eve you watch an episode of Nathan Fielder’s show “The Curse” in which they introduce the concept of the “tiny curse” — kids curse people to trivial miseries, like a pebble in the shoe. Someone else’s home is filled with tiny curses: more salt than you want or less, no trashcan where you want one, unlabeled spices. On New Year’s Eve, cooking with friends in your own parents’ house, left to you while they’re still in Australia, you play a guessing game around the kitchen with condiments of all kinds. There’s sesame oil hiding in an EVOO bottle. Is the white powder salt or sugar? You pour crystals into the palm of your hand and lick.
Truthfully, you don’t understand people who want to spend a lot of time at their parents’ homes. Are they rational economic actors, who know their parents will make them food and give them things (or are they bound by financial reliance)? Are they gentler or more submissive people, more willing to give up autonomy? Are they bound by adherence to duty, tradition, obligation? Or are their parents fundamentally different from most parents who you’ve met?
You like being around your parents sometimes. You can have good conversations with them and find some of their habits endearing. You are lucky: they have a long-lasting marriage, they appear to really love each other. When friends come to visit, they remark about what interesting questions your mother asks and the incredible stories she tells from her early twenties, when she immigrated to the United States. Sometimes they also ask, Are you OK? This happens after they’ve witnessed the rows between you and her — about ideas, about politics, about the parent-child relationship itself — and it occurs to you Other people aren’t like this. It’s strange how that benevolent question, Are you OK? can signal so much opprobrium.
You think that people who are OK with spending a lot of time in their parents’ home are probably good at giving up control. Control over their environment and control over themselves. In this house where you are now, with someone else’s family, dependence goes in all kinds of directions — the mother knows what’s in the refrigerator but not how to use the remote with the smart TV, the father asks for book recommendations from the older son, the scholar. Both sons need to borrow cars constantly. They lean on and disdain each other at the same time. Her I don’t believe you can cook this, his I can, her I’ll have to see you make it, then standing, shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen, doubt palpable. Crazymaking and ordinary.
Maybe some people are OK with spending a lot of time in their parents’ home because their parents are better at giving up control, too.
You are learning more about the sons by seeing them with their parents, in this suburban enclave where a sign reads PRIVATE PROPERTY - NO TRESPASSING at the entrance to a row of gray tract houses. It scares you, the suddenness of their transformation — voices turned combative and insistent. They are constantly irritated by something, imperious and impotent, baby tyrants. Go away, one says when the father comes into the garage to ask if you want to eat, We’ll figure it out ourselves. The son flicks his hand, lord to his retainer. The sons sometimes respond to questions they don’t like by not answering at all, and then the mother’s voice gets louder because no one’s responding. You tell one of the sons this disturbs you, and he says one gets used to her complaining to make conversation, that eventually you just tune her out.
Maybe there is no transformation. The capacity for this light cruelty was there for a long time — in him, in you. You are never as monstrous anywhere as you are with your parents, and when you go to someone else’s house and see their domestic dysfunction, your stomach twists up, you see in stark relief how your family is someone else’s hell. When someone’s parent says it, Make yourself at home is a perverse injunction. Is it simply that becoming a child again when you are an adult is difficult, or is it impossible? Is that what the beautiful Studio Ghibli movie Ponyo is about?
You are trying to be a good guest and good adult-child, trying to stay out of everyone’s way and be polite, smile and say Good morning and Thank you and and ask for nothing, volunteer to wash dishes and set out plates, to roll out roti you didn’t ask for.
She actually rolled them well, the mother calls up to one son, about the roti.
Only you had doubts, he says impatiently in response. It smells like something’s burning down here.
It’s the roti, charring on the edges. Every time you take a breath, you inhale the smoke.
top image credit: image (“Family planning has many benefits”) from this blog on Cosmonaut;
Ponyo image: from a Tumblr called “goddess of blizzard”
Happy New Year!