Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (10 page)

“Yellyfish,” he said. He dropped it in the sand.

“Hey, Baby Sean,” said Zach. “Watch!” He leaned over and squeezed my nose. “Honk,” I said sadly.

Baby Sean thought this was the most wondrous thing he had ever seen. He looked at me, and then his brother, and then at me again.

“Can Baby Sean honk your nose, Daddy?” said Zach.

I nodded. I really didn’t see what difference it could possibly make now.

Sean reached out tentatively and clasped my nose. I felt his tiny fingers encircling my nostrils.

“Honk,” I said. “Honk. Honk. Honk.”

O
N THE WAY
back to the condo, Zach read the end of the book to his brother. The sun was shining all around us now, burning off the mist. I was still thinking of that woman I’d seen. If I’d been her, instead of
myself, what would my life have been like? How was it possible, at this point, to imagine a life for me that did not include Zach, and Sean, and Deedie?

“What happens,” Zach explained, “is that in the end of the story, the very hungry caterpillar turns into a butterfly. He builds a little house, and climbs inside it, and then he changes.”

“Then?” said Baby Sean. “Then?”

“Then nothing, Baby Sean,” said Zach. “He changes, and becomes a butterfly. And has to fly away.”

RICHARD RUSSO

©
Elena Seibert

I didn’t care about you at all
.

There was a poker game to go to
.

The track was there
.

Richard Russo
—known to his friends as Rick—is the author of seven novels, including
Empire Falls
, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He and I shared an office at Colby College in the early 1990s, when we were both professors of creative writing there. The friendship quickly grew to include Rick’s wife, Barb, and their two daughters, Emily and Kate; in our will, the Russos are appointed the legal guardians of Zach and Sean, should anything happen to Deedie and me. Our friendship has weathered many transitions—not only mine from male to female, but Rick and Barb’s, from parents to grandparents. In June of 2011, Rick and I sat on the sun porch of the Russos’ house in Camden, Maine, to talk about parenthood and fiction.

J
ENNIFER
F
INNEY
B
OYLAN
: Rick, a lot of your readers probably think they know your father because your novels frequently have a kind of brilliant but feckless middle-aged man at its center. And whether it’s
The Risk Pool
or
Nobody’s Fool
or
Empire Falls
, I think there is a certain “Russo Man.”

R
ICHARD
R
USSO
: Right. The rogue male.

JFB:
How close is that to your father?

RR:
My father was a man of just enormous charm. He had the ability to walk into a room and make everybody happy, just by his presence.
Women in particular, he had a way of making … especially women who maybe once had been beautiful but weren’t anymore … he just had a way of making older women, sometimes elderly women … he would compliment them and charm them and just make them feel … you could just see their faces light up, you know, when Jimmy was around. He had that ability to just charm everybody. He was an incredibly generous man, too. Whenever he was around. But the problem with him was always not being around.

JFB:
Why was he not around? I mean, he married your mother. How long had they been married when you came into the picture?

RR:
Well, he married just before he shipped overseas. And he came home a different man. You don’t land on the beaches in Normandy and make it all the way through France and on all the way to Berlin and come back the person you were when you left. I think that my mother and father, before he left, were kind of on the same page about what they might have wanted the shape of their marriage [to] be. But by the time he came back, he had changed and she hadn’t. My mother, to another extent, would never change. She was, even deep into her eighties, a woman who looked at the world in essentially the same way. Whereas my father came home with very little tolerance for any manner of bullshit. He was celebrating the fact that he was alive.

So the last thing in the world he wanted was any kind of responsibility. When other soldiers came back and took advantage of the GI Bill, or put a down payment on a house, or started having kids and settling down, he just wanted no part of any of that, and my mother’s point with him always was that it’s time. She said, “Can’t you see? Look around you. Everybody else is growing up. Everybody else is coming into parenthood, everybody else has at least some ambitions as to what the rest of their lives are going to be like. Time for us to just do what everybody else is doing.” And my father just wasn’t in it, and he never would be.

He said, “I didn’t care about you at all. There was a poker game to go to. The track was there.”

JFB:
How old were you when he said that?

RR:
Well, I was probably in my late twenties, early thirties. I was
going back [to Gloversville, New York] summers to work construction and save money for the next year of college.

JFB:
It doesn’t sound like he was saying it particularly apologetically.

RR:
No! No. I mean, there was an element of apology in it, in the sense that he said, you know, if I had to do things all over again I wouldn’t have done it exactly that way, but he’d come to the conclusion that my mother was just batshit. “I wasn’t going to live with your mother!”

He said, “I knew you were around and I knew I had responsibilities, but it was just easy on a day-to-day basis to forget, just easy to forget. There was always something going on.”

JFB:
What did you learn from your father when he was around? Your novels lead me to suspect that now and again he would show up and take you off on an adventure of some kind, whether you’re fishing, or …

RR:
Well, I mean, part of it was negative, and some of it was very, very positive indeed. On the negative side, [what] I came to realize—and it’s only become crystal clear in the last few years when I’ve thought about it more—was that my father was also really afraid of me. When he did turn up, it was almost always with someone else. He’d have a friend of his, or if he picked me up, we would go to New York City maybe and catch a Giants football game or a Yankees game, but it was always with my uncle Chuck, and they’d always meet a couple of other guys there. Later on, when I got to be a little older, we’d go someplace where he could always count on knowing people when he arrived. So even then the burden of what slender parenting he was doing he could share with a half a dozen other drunks.

I always thought when I was younger that it was just disinterest, and I didn’t recognize it as fear until much later. Or inadequacy.

JFB:
What was he afraid of? Was it that you were the ghost of responsibility? That he shirked?

RR:
Yeah! Or feelings of inadequacy from just not doing your job. If you don’t do your job ninety-nine percent of the time, you’re not going to have a really strong feeling of competence that other one
percent of the time. And I was not an easy kid, in the sense that I think he thought of me as someone who as soon as he got home would be reporting back.

JFB:
You were your mother’s spy.

RR:
Her instructions to him whenever I left the house with him was always just a series of don’ts. I always had a sense of him as a very dangerous man, which, of course, at times he was. There were times when you did not want to be standing next to my father. Because something would come flying at him and it wouldn’t hit him, it’d hit you.

So it made me an alert child, but it also made me a vigilant child. When I was with him, I was always trying to figure out his absence. Always trying to figure out if he was the man that my mother portrayed for me. So he must have seen me as a kid that was always taking notes. Always disapproving. And I always had the sense that by the time he dropped me off again at my grandfather’s house that he had just about as much of me as he could stand.

The powerful and positive things I learned from my father had an awful lot to do with work. Because he did such hard physical work and he played so hard. I would watch him when we were working road construction together in the summers. I would watch him, absolutely slack-jawed at how hard that man could work. And he was then in his fifties and he could outwork and outdrink everybody. I mean, he would limp in the first couple of hours in the morning, but once he burned off the alcohol he was simply amazing. The amount of what I could only consider punishment that man could endure. And when he began to get older and have some physical illness and injuries that just come from a life of hard work, his ability to manage pain left me just amazed. And also, as he became ill—the first barb of lung cancer, then he went into remission for a while, and then he went into a second bout of lung cancer—he had an ability to absorb not only physical pain but psychological pain, of just knowing what was happening to him, and going through those radiation treatments without ever complaining, without ever showing any … he had to be afraid, but he never showed the slightest weakness. At all.

JFB:
So do you think you got that as a son, a certain fearlessness, a certain dedication to work? As your friend, I’ve rarely seen you afraid, and when I have, you’ve been afraid for other people. I’ve seen you afraid for me, I’ve seen you afraid for Deedie when I was midtransition. I saw you afraid for our son Sean when he was born. But I’ve never seen you afraid for yourself.

RR:
Well, I am a person who puts one foot in front of the other. I’m never afraid of something not working. I’m not afraid of failure in the traditional sense, because it’s just not part of the way I go about things. In the sense that I have seen other writers, I’ve seen students, I’ve seen people absolutely paralyzed, afraid of making a mistake and the mistake leading to failure. It’s something about my makeup that comes from watching my father work and seeing my grandfather also, through various deprivations in his life, put one foot in front of the other. That’s kind of what I do. And if I’m not afraid, it’s because I always have a kind of attitude about these things that, if this doesn’t work, we’ll throw it out and try something that does, and if that doesn’t work … That’s just how you do it, you put one foot in front of the other.

JFB:
Rick, I think if I had been your father’s son—or daughter—I would have resented his absence. I would have been mad. I would have been hurt. And yet in your fiction, at least, these Russo Fathers, these Russo Males, you’re always very forgiving of them. Do you think that’s surprising? I think you have every reason to be damaged and angry. Instead, there’s a tremendous amount of love for him, for this man who said to you, “I never thought about you.” Why is that?