Goodbye Disguise

I had a recurring dream as a child that has stayed with me even though, or maybe because, it makes no sense. The dream has no plot. It’s a single image of my mother pushing a stroller down a hill in Central Park in a line of other women. It’s called The Rubber Gorilla Dream, suggesting that instead of toddlers in pigtails and sailor suits, the women are pushing inflated gorillas in strollers. The gorillas are like balloons escaped from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. The mothers are pushing the strollers down a steep, asphalt-paved decline, each gorilla/child belted in for safety. But here’s the catch…the animals in the strollers aren’t gorillas. They’re hippos. The creatures being mothered are misidentified and will remain misidentified for all time. In memory, I will continue to refer to this nocturnal vision as The Rubber Gorilla Dream and, even more curiously doctor, I will develop an attitude about hippopotami. When a child is stubborn or recalcitrant, I will refer to her as a hippopotamus. I have no idea why I thought gorillas were more docile, but it’s clear in the dream that my mother believed she had given birth to one that would always do what she was told. She could not be disabused of her version of reality no matter how much the hippo in me objected.

Photo by David Clode on Unsplash

We are much more aware now that adults can and do misrepresent children. Back in the fifties, girls were expected to be girlish like my great-granddaughter Madelyn who plays with her baby dolls while her brother plays with his remote control cars. I was a hippo in a gorilla suit. I was the girl who did not want to be the princess in the school play.  No one knew what to make of me. We are beginning to understand some of those backstories now when it comes to gender, but what about, as in my case, the continuum of introversion and extroversion? There are still so many other misrepresentations out there, so many other ways we are expected to wear the costumes that have been laid out for us, as if everyone is playacting and we’re all just hoping and praying we don’t walk into the wrong dressing room by mistake. I thought of this, oddly, when reading about the trial of Trump who clearly knows, if he knows nothing else, what kind of animal he was born to be. When we encounter such a person, our expectations are defied. We’ve been thinking of him as a measly worm, possibly the one inside Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brain, when in fact he’s a full-blown rattle snake. One journalist wrote, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them.” Most people are either unclear about who they are or unwilling to reveal it. The power of knowing where you live in the zoo and calling a hippo a hippo cannot be overestimated. 

In the absence of this clarity and courage, people feel trapped, bewildered. Much has been written about the epidemic of loneliness in our culture. People say we need to belong, we need to get up and join something, a club, a community group, to counteract the isolation. But I remember the alienation I felt in the apartment building on 83rd street surrounded by people above, below, and on all sides of me and even in college when I thought I had a great many friends. I remember how I talked to myself all the time, but didn’t have much luck finding out who I was or what I was feeling. How I didn’t realize until much later in life that the person I was missing, the person I was lonely for was me. This struggle with belonging to myself did not dissipate in large, noisy crowds. The racket was there from the beginning. The everyday honking, brakes screeching, motors revving, police sirens and fire engines screaming New York of my childhood. The soldiers were coming home soon and I was making my not so grand entrance into the commotion, into a strangely hopeful new world that was rising out of the war, filled like all wars with agony and loss. No one knew much about what it would be like after it was all over, but the energy of the moment was jazzy, upbeat.  People were optimistic when I was young. There seemed to be a lot to sing about if you hadn’t lost someone you loved in Normandy or Bergen-Belsen, if you weren’t paying close attention.

But some people pay attention by nature. We are not part of the parade, not throwing confetti and kissing the handsome men in uniform. Some of us live lives that are meant to unfold on the margins, in quiet interiority. These days, the atmosphere around me is thinner and increasingly sobering. It’s more difficult to pretend. I am far away now from the clamor of the cars hurtling over the potholes. It’s been a long time since I’ve inhaled the intermingled smells of the great world, cuchifritos frying in hot oil, pot roast simmering upstairs, the perfumes and aftershaves of the well-dressed women and hat-wearing men in the elevator. I am far from the fantasy of wellbeing and belonging I grew up with on 83rd street. My days have largely quieted down, emptied out. I hear the five year-old upstairs, the planes coming in low over Wolfe Park and the sacred chorus of the birds, but mostly I hear the tinnitus, the ringing in my ears, which isn’t bad. It sounds like crickets chattering. I have grown old far from home but closer to myself.

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Many Voices will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. All subscribers are now welcome to read Many Voices posts. In May, Many Voices will feature Peggy Reeves, a glorious artist in the Berkshires working in the area of alternative photography.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.