I lied.
When I was younger, I was the sort of person who, if sitting on a plane next to a stranger, didn’t tell the literal truth about myself. I altered the facts as if my life were a dress whose waist could be taken in and let out as the occasion called for. With one stranger I wore a minidress with puffy Edwardian sleeves, with another a long flowery frock that fell mid-calf. I didn’t feel that I should be held to a single pattern. I had many selves, I told myself, flushed from my latest elaboration; why shouldn’t I trot them out? I wasn’t a proper lady with a prayer book strapped to my wrist; there was more than a little madness in me.
An internal voice egged me on: “You’ll never see that person again, go ahead.” And it seemed true: I wasn’t again going to see the businessman in plastics from Cleveland or the grandmother from Denver, both of whom were entertained by my tale of daring swimming. Who doesn’t want to hear about a young girl struggling to swim to shore when they are trapped in cramped seats? It was so deadly dull to stick to the absolute, bone-grinding truth about myself, adhering to a dress of artful virtue, when what was wanted, what was needed, was a dress to strut down a crimson runway.
I looked out the window, below the plane’s dimension, saw that the land was divided into little regular squares, as if drawn with the help of a ruler, and couldn’t stop myself from injecting some turbulence into the cabin’s stale air. I spoke with power and authority about what it felt like swimming across a lake. About how, reaching the mid-point when the waters were deepest and most frigid, I faltered, having used up all my adrenaline. Then, when it occurred to me that I might fail to reach the other side, I found a second wind and the ability I didn’t know I had to withstand pain. I made it to the other side, staggering out of the water on shaking legs as I tried to gain land, I told them, looking to my right and left to see if my words were having the desired effect upon them. They were. Joy.
I did swim across a lake as I described—it’s just the lake was a wee bit smaller than the one I described and didn’t have nearly so many snapping turtles.
I embellished, I admit it, adding a fancy button here, a tassel there, perhaps a long train to the sackcloth of my life. I didn’t make up stories from whole cloth. I never said I had tamed a lion and he lived in my room, or that I was the granddaughter of Marlene Dietrich and grew up in her house above Sunset Boulevard. The sad truth was that the closest I ever came to a celebrity was when I was on vacation at Niagara Falls with my parents in seventh grade. My mother and I were browsing in the gift shop of the hotel and saw Peggy Cass buying a candy bar at the counter. I think it was a Milky Way. I didn’t know who she was because she was a contestant on TV shows only adults watched—Password and To Tell the Truth, but my mother did, and she gave me a shove toward the cash register where Peggy searched through her enormous bag for change. “Are you Peggy Cass?” I stammered. “My mother would like your autograph,” I said, pointing to a rack of magazines behind which my mother lurked. She didn’t look like a movie star. She had the raspiest voice I’ve ever heard. It would make a dog stand up and bark. She said, “No problem,” drawing out the consonants like she were delivering the line “To be or not to be,” only it was funny. I still have the postcard that says: “To this little girl’s mother, Peggy Cass.”
I made plausible aggrandizements to my record, the sort of thing that a stranger could believe—I said I was a more accomplished swimmer than I was, a better equestrian, that I sang in the Bach Choir when I didn’t. I did swim, ride, and sing, and was pretty good at all of them, but I wanted to be stellar, and I thought that by presenting myself as the person I wanted to be, I would come closer to becoming her. I had a benign—you might say soft—attitude about my lying and saw it as a necessary tool in my self-invention project. I saw myself as a character in an epic that demanded the mythic entrance of its hero. In youth, everything is about creating yourself out of the paltry materials available. It didn’t occur to me that pretending to be better than I was could keep me from the hard work necessary to actually being those things. Or that there might come a time when my attitude would change.
From an early age I looked at my family and thought I had been delivered to the wrong household. You see, my birth family was relentlessly practical and dull—the very things I never wanted to be. My paternal grandfather started the Aldrich Pump Company, a successful company—until it wasn’t. Grandfather Aldrich has a place as a pioneer in the Flowserve Pump lineage and is listed in the Virtual Museum of Pennsylvania Iron Furnaces and Iron Works. In 1902, the Aldrich Pump Company of Allentown, Pennsylvania, began manufacturing the world’s first line of reciprocating positive-displacement pumps for steel mills and mine dewatering applications. Are you still there, reader? Dull, right? Despite his developments of various types of reciprocating pumps, my grandfather went bankrupt and soon thereafter died. My father took up selling life insurance and turned his personal experience of bankruptcy into a lucrative trade he practiced until his retirement. Whenever he caught me mooning about, he said, “Artistry does not run in the Aldrich family. We are a practical lot—pumps and death, pumps and death, that’s our line of business.” I feared that I was destined to join the death trade.
I never made myself less successful, less educated, more ordinary, more dull—I didn’t fabricate in a way that would reduce me or make me conform to my family’s norms. I never said I had a yen for actuarial tables or wanted a tool kit for my birthday. My first impulse was to dramatize the past, to make myself more than I was, to make my mother something other than what she was, to overcompensate for the “pumps and death” business and put it as far away as possible. My mother was born in New Jersey—you heard me—and where’s the fun in that? And then she became a mother and homemaker, not exactly profile material for The New Yorker. So I had to give her a radiant past, full of accomplishment and drama, which would, of course, rub off on me in ho-hum Allentown, Pennsylvania. I said she was born in England, on the cliffs of Cornwall, but it was her father who was born in England and came to the United States as a young man searching for greater opportunity. Enamored with the elegant sound of his accent and the narrative line of his life, I lifted the accent and the immigrant story and gave them to my mother. I also made her valedictorian of her college class.
I did pause before the moment when I added glory to the account, to the reckoning of who I was, who my mother was. But the pause was brief. Just a little catch in my throat. To make something up and carry it off was too thrilling, too exhilarating for me to deny myself. No doubt it would have been better for me to contemplate what I was about to do, to imagine the possible consequences. Just as eating cookies after school did result in a slew of cavities and hours spent in the dentist’s chair. But I preferred the cookies to the peas and didn’t think of the dentist’s chair and the drill. I didn’t really confront what I was about to do. I looked away; I refused to reckon the tally of a lifetime of little lies. Who did they hurt? I asked. The answer seemed to be: no one. I went through my early life as someone who continually bounced down the plane’s steps and disappeared into the crowd, never to see my fellow passengers again.
And then I grew up and everything became complicated. It was no longer a world populated with strangers I would never see again. It was a world of consequence. Job applications, school applications, medical records—lying on such forms had clear consequences even I could see. Records could be checked. I would have liked to have added some inches to my height in order to make a better, newer me, a me closer to who I wanted to be. Couldn’t I say I spoke French even when I didn’t? Who would it hurt? But even I knew that was the sort of lie that could cause consequences, and I refrained. No, I didn’t commit lies on forms and documents that might have a long storage life and come back to bite me. I just lied to myself and the rare stranger. I began to believe some of the stories I told. At some level they seemed true. I came to see my mother as essentially English and distinguished, even if the facts didn’t support that view. I thought of myself as a long-distance swimmer, even if I didn’t swim the English Channel or have any records mounted on my wall. If someone had asked me how I saw myself, I would say without hesitation that I saw myself as a swimmer, a long-distance swimmer. I felt I was always on the verge of going under, in need of rescue.
Adulthood is like living in a police state. I need to rent a storage locker for all my transcripts and forms. I would love to shave a few years off my age (doesn’t every woman dream of that?), change the dates of my graduations. I would love to say I had never been so foolish as to marry when I was nineteen and divorce when I was twenty, but, unfortunately, I can’t, because a paper trail follows me everywhere. I like to consider the awards I could make up, the honors—a whole life of professional success I’ll never achieve is possible to construct if I had the nerve, the recklessness. Think of the fun titles I could invent. But I don’t. I make up silly titles to entertain myself—Queen of Decay, Mistress of Macaroni, Lead Investigator of Dust, Editor of the Edible. In my professional life I stick to the facts and remain limp and miserable and contained in the box of my professional rank.
All my accomplishments, the measly lot of them, are accurately reported on my résumé and my required Web page. Filling out the annual review forms is one of the most depressing days of the year. I keep myself from a single fabrication, a single flight of fancy; I can’t throw one title or conference or award into the mix that I can’t produce documentation for. If, in some crazy moment, I gave myself an award, I would have to create the accompanying documentation, maybe have a plaque made or an official-looking certificate of merit. I couldn’t pull it off; I’d be caught, and the consequences would not be pretty. My so-called record would be ruined. It isn’t much of a record, mostly a record of my failures. However it is my record; I am stuck with it and must, on a daily basis, accommodate myself to it.
Tethered to the facts in my professional life, I have veered a little from the script in my personal interactions. Truth be told, for awhile I was invested in blinding myself to the consequences. When my children were babies and unable to discern what their mother was saying, I perfected my denial and rarely paused before launching a fib. These were tweaks of the real. Here’s one I liked.
I used to tell people that my husband and I got married on a bus in Seattle. (I didn’t say he was my second husband. Was the omission a lie? Should I have disclosed my entire marital history?) It’s a surprising fact that everyone I have told this to has believed me, which, when you think about it, is odd. How many marriages have you seen conducted on a bus? Maybe people don’t ride the bus as much as I do, but let me tell you: I’ve never witnessed a single marriage taking place on one. Do I strike people as bizarre enough that getting married on a bus somehow fits with what they think of me? My husband and I, along with our small wedding party, took the bus to get married in downtown Seattle and afterwards rode the bus home. The lack of hoopla distinguishes it from the vast number of marriage stories. Still, its plainness didn’t please me. It needed a flourish, and so I added that I threw my wedding bouquet to strangers at the back of the bus as I was getting off. A fabrication. I wish I had tossed the bouquet of yellow and white daisies that my niece had sent for the occasion, but I didn’t.
Can’t you see it sailing over the heads of the slumped passengers weary from their day at work? The riders raising their heads in unison to watch it hang above them? And then what—did some girl jump up out of her seat to catch it? Did it fall into some listless lap? Did a fight break out between two women who reached it at the same moment? The possibilities are exhilarating.
Getting married on the bus is a better story than riding the bus to get married. I find buoyancy in the story, and who doesn’t want to associate buoyancy with marriage, which can be a real sinker.
I don’t tell that story anymore, since my children are grown up and in possession of the lowdown. I miss it.
As they aged, my children became uncommonly adept at ferreting out any untruth I might tell, picking up inconsistencies between one rendition of my past and another, and they didn’t hesitate blurting out the gap, reporting their findings like good little detectives. And exaggeration, it was the life blood of my story telling, the pulse of my voice, well, my children would have none of it. They treated exaggeration as if it was the same as an outright lie. They’d roll their eyes if they caught me embellishing an event for the sake of amusement and drama and insist I tone it down, flatten it out, kill it. Good-bye to spontaneity. Good-bye to laughter. Adieu.
Steadily, very steadily, I banished embellishment, exaggeration, tweaks and twists and shouts from my life; personal/professional, the distinction was lost. My family and I were now anchored in a certain neighborhood, in a certain small town, and I was anchored in a certain job. Hardly a stranger could be conjured. When I heard myself making a slight exaggeration, veering in that direction, my chest tightened, and I imagined a big crane lurking nearby, ready to yank me off the scene. Or worse, I saw myself being whisked onto Oprah, without make-up and positioned under hot lights, and exposed before her millions of viewers as a storyteller, an ironist, a stylist. Children and neighbors would be on stage ready to detail the irregularities of stories I had told. Even my sisters and parents would be served up to offer testimony about my early life. What would follow was a lengthy correction of all my misrepresentations, a long, long list of mostly pitiable fabrications, until everyone was exhausted, with their heads thrown back in boredom. Gone was the thrill, the flush of having some fun with the facts. I became a farmer, a literalist of the soil. Good-bye metaphor; hello fact.
I’m not who I once was when it comes to lying.
Now I pause and consider everything I say, everything I write. I ask myself: Is it acceptable to reorder my life to make it more enlightening? Isn’t it incumbent upon me to confront more candidly who I was and who I am? Is my impulse to lie really to give pleasure, or is it to spare myself from the inconvenient and unpleasant truth? Is a slight fabrication the only way to tell the real story or is it a way to obscure the story? It can go either way. It’s a case by case navigation, and it never ends until it ends and you are lying in the ground silently, without a wink left in you.
My husband is less of a complication than my children because, unlike them, he does not watch me closely. He tends to look at me, even when I am standing right next to him, as if I am a long way off. For instance, years passed before he noticed I wasn’t wearing my wedding ring, a ring composed of different gold threads woven into a pattern we had chosen together from a special design shop in Seattle. I had lost it and not told him. I did think he might notice, and in the weeks following the loss I was anxious about it, pulling my hand under the table, getting it out of sight, wondering what I’d tell him if he asked where it had gone. But he never asked. He looked at my hands on a daily basis, and I assumed, because he never mentioned it, that he did not notice the missing ring. Of late it has occurred to me that maybe he noticed it was missing and chose to spare me the unpleasantness of explaining its disappearance. He’s like that—he gives me a wide berth. He doesn’t put people on the spot. Given my predilections, maybe that’s one reason I married him.
But recently, over dinner with friends who were getting married, the conversation turned to wedding rings. They were searching for theirs and having trouble finding the right ones. They asked about ours, noticed I wasn’t wearing one, and then, and only then, my husband was publicly forced to acknowledge that the ring wasn’t on my finger. Still he didn’t ask me the details about how I lost it; he simply accepted its disappearance and tried to move on to another less-freighted subject. But our friends didn’t sense this might not be a good story and insisted on knowing how I could have lost my wedding ring. I mean, isn’t a wedding ring nailed to your finger?
I considered lying. It was my first impulse. I could say I had taken the ring off before going swimming, and it had been stolen from my locker. Details would follow. A plausible story. It was common knowledge I never locked anything—houses, bikes, lockers, lips. I could have gotten away with this fabrication. And maybe that’s what I should have said to spare everyone the unpleasantness to come. But that isn’t how I lost the ring. And I paused. I paused as I never did when I was younger; I paused in a way that had become all too familiar to me now in my so-called maturity.
My husband was sitting at one end of the table, and I looked to his face for some signal. His face was impassive. Our friends were seated on either side of the table, and their faces were both turned to me expectantly. I noticed the wax dripping from several of the candles. The real story would hurt me to tell, and I didn’t want to tell it. I didn’t want to feel the pain of what the true story would present about me. There was more, of course. There’s always more. Things are never simple. I was aware that my story would not be a welcome one to the couple embarking on marriage. Nor would my husband enjoy revisiting that time in our marriage. It would reawaken the bad fight, the time we had worked hard to put behind us and didn’t want to revisit. In the story I was someone who could do stupid things in the moment, someone who let my anger get the best of me. I didn’t want that picture of myself trotted out over dinner with friends. Throwing my ring away was part of a much bigger pattern of my life, a history of not valuing what I had, of not seeing the extraordinary when it was right before me masked in ordinary dress. If I lied about how I lost the ring, I would be protecting myself from admitting that I couldn’t always be trusted to be a good shepherd of the valuable things in my life.
I told how I lost the ring.
After a bitter fight in December years ago, I walked out into the snow and circled the neighborhood for several hours, unhappily contemplating my life. Entertaining thoughts I imagine many couples have after a fight that seems at the time irresolvable. I no longer remember what we were fighting about. And on one of the snow-laden streets, I removed my glove and pulled off my wedding ring and threw it down the street gutter located at the corner of Collingwood and Bailey. I remember because a streetlight illuminated the snow and the gutter. My ring clinked against one of the grids, spun a little, and then disappeared. The snow sparkled. I thought about the irony of the snow, how something could be sparkling when I was so bitterly unhappy.
I couldn’t take back what I did when I calmed down later, and I felt regret. My wedding ring was gone, washed away in a complex set of tunnels running under the city.
My story did not bring pleasure. It brought an end to the dinner. And it brought silence. Our friends left, and surely in the car ride home they discussed the oddity that I had never told my husband I had lost my wedding ring and the oddity that he had never noticed. Surely they shook their heads and wondered what it meant about marriage. Maybe the story awakened doubts about the wisdom of matrimony, or maybe they decided it was folly to spend too much on rings, all things considered. I had confessed something of myself to them and to myself and to my husband, and everyone scurried away. I felt as I’d felt as a young girl when I held my breath under water in the cold diving pool. I’d sit Buddha-style on the ledge cut into the side of the pool, submerged a few feet below the surface, where no one could easily see me, as if frozen within a cube of ice. I stayed under for as long as possible, still as an idol, until my lungs rebelled. Then I’d push off from the ledge and break the surface. This was my ritual, hundreds of incarnations on my path to enlightenment.
Where did that impulse to embellish, to amuse, go? It disappeared but not all at once. Years of erosion were required. Years of having to give a public account of myself, to tally myself up. Now I have finally extinguished the spark, the imp of darkness in me. Is it possible that the pumps and death my father claimed as the Aldrich legacy have indeed become mine? We twist and we shout and we try to wiggle free of what binds us, and sometimes we think we’ve succeeded, only to find that pumps and death await us. Can it be true that my younger self won’t make a reappearance, that my old self with her bold bravado won’t return for an encore, a coda, one last dance in the stygian pastures of the self? Something in me waits for her return, like a dog waits for its master.
Marcia Aldrich is the author of the free memoir Girl Rearing , published by W.W. Norton, and of Companion to an Untold Story , which won the AWP Award in Creative Nonfiction. She is the editor of Waveform: Twenty First-Century Essays by Women, published by the University of Georgia Press. Her chapbook EDGE was published by New Michigan Press. Studio of The Voice is forthcoming from Wandering Aengus Press. Her website: marciaaldrich.com.
Photo by Anete Lusina