Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [2]
Meanwhile, she continued to carry herself with a kind of calculated imperiousness … a Hillary Clinton–like bearing of a woman destined for literary greatness. She never stopped obsessing over word choice and sentence structure, never stopped chastising me for using slang. “Why do you have to say everything is ‘neat,’ ” she would nag when I was in grade school, “when there are so many other magnificent words to choose from? Why not say, ‘It’s marvelous.’ Or ‘Bewitching!’ Or ‘Enchanting!’ or ‘Delightful!’ ” Though in my heart I suspected she was right, it was beyond embarrassing to imagine saying, “How delightful! Utterly enchanting!” to a group of my fellow fourth graders during a discussion of TV shows we liked.
From junior high on, she would mark up all my homework papers with official copy editor’s notations in blue pencil, the way she’d learned to at Time. (New paragraph! Stet! Sp!) She also took to carrying a marking pen with her when we went out, so she could circle and correct any misspellings when she found them in their natural habitat: in the grocery store (Avacadoe Sp!), at the gas station (Gasolin Sp!), at the drugstore (Asperine Sp!).
Yet oddly enough, when later in life I wound up getting work as a writer, she never seemed especially pleased. She was in all ways a relentless and scrupulous cataloguer of my many shortcomings.
The minute I walked through the door of her house, I entered an already-in-progress pageant she was judging that had so many recently added unannounced categories it was impossible to be properly prepared. I was always too fat or too thin; my hair was too long, too shapeless, or too short; my clothes were too loose or too tight, too trendy or too adult, their colors too loud or too somber. If I became insulted, she became outraged.
“Do you want me to be less than honest?” she would say, as though tact were not also an option. If I argued a point or defended myself, she took offense at my audacity, because she was absolutely convinced that she was always right, including on occasions when she said things like “If someone acts like they’re gay, that is a tip-off that they are not. Because why would they want you to know?” She would raise one eyebrow and say, “I don’t happen to agree.”
Next thing I knew, we would be in the middle of a fight. By the time I heard her shoes click click clicking down the hall as she stalked out of the room, I had given up trying to stand my ground. She either won or the fight would go on indefinitely.
One day, when I was in my thirties and gainfully employed as a writer on a television show, I decided to conduct an experiment. Knowing that I was going to have lunch with my mother later that day, I thought it would be interesting to see if I could achieve one perfect, criticism-free encounter. So I tried to predict all my own flaws and preemptively correct them. I bought a new outfit and a new pair of shoes, got an expensive haircut, and was careful with my makeup. I plucked my eyebrows to avoid a repeat of one particularly unpleasant family excursion to Mexico when my apparently slovenly and feeble attempts at eyebrow grooming pretty much ruined the whole vacation for everyone. Then, after I arrived at work, I made a stop at every office and cubicle on our floor and asked my co-workers to have a look at me and tell me if they noticed anything wrong.
“You look great,” they all said. Or “That’s a nice jacket.” Or “You look so pretty all dressed up!”
When no one seemed able to highlight any obvious problem areas, I made them all work harder.
“No,” I said. “Look again. There is definitely something wrong, and it won’t take my mother five seconds to find it.”
“You look good,” they repeated.
“Are you sure?” I countered. “I bet there’s something you’re missing.”
And of course, they all failed me. Within a minute of my entrance into my mother’s hotel room, practically before she finished saying