drinking on our new IDs, and on our second Scorpion Bowl at the Hong Kong, she confessed that she had squealed about the crop circle to Doug Constantine, back when we were ten. She had kept her mistake from everyone for eight years, and I cycled between awe at her discretion, shame at her indiscretion, and anger that she had let Dad think for all those years that I was to blame.
In the play, Arthur’s father kills a noble and replaces him with Constantine’s father. Then Arthur kisses and ends up marrying Constantine’s sister, rejecting a better offer from the French. In real life, Constantine French-kissed Arthur’s sister before she rejected him,and then Constantine’s father reported Arthur’s father to the sheriff of Nobles County. (If my father did not distort our family life to forge this play, I am left with the uncomfortable possibility that we have lived a distorted version of Shakespeare’s imagination, which, ridiculously enough, is what one Shakespearologist claims: we are all the Bard’s inventions.)
Dana and Doug kissed when they were ten, I learned with the long straw running from my mouth down into the plastic tub of alcohol. “My first try,” she slurred. “And I told him—well, I made him guess. I talked about the news on TV about the UFO, and I let on that I knew how it happened, and then we kissed again, and then I think I told him all of it.” So was she giving him a secret in order to win a kiss, making her the john and Doug the gigolo? “No, he wanted to kiss me.” So did she let the secret slip and then hope to seal his secrecy with a kiss, making her the incompetent sexual manipulator? “No, it wasn’t an accident exactly.” So Doug snatched a secret by kissing her into indiscretion, making him his father’s agent and her the poor trusting sap? “No”: Dana was a women’s studies major, and so she described the event as her futile attempt at some sort of “idealized, media-transmitted, societally endorsed, heterosexual intimacy, secrets and flesh co-opted simultaneously.” This seems the saddest of all interpretations.
“How could you let Dad think it was me?”
“He never thought it was you.”
He’d openly blamed me for years, and continued to associate me with any betrayal he suffered for years to come. That association spread so that every time he was arrested, some part of him wondered if I’d blown the whistle on him “again.” Dana’s blithe wishful thinking—
he never thought it was you
—was impenetrable. She refused to see how I could take this badly, refused to admit she should have told him the truth.
Her resistance to reality on this point, her insistence that Dad somehow just “knew” truth and always acted in our interest, was a blister waiting to burst.
12
A BSENTEE PARENTS DESERVE their kids’ anger. Kids have to get mad to get over it, and if they hurt their parent in the process, that is the healing astringent necessary to everyone. As with many things, Dana was better and faster at this than I was.
Back in 1979, a month after my father began serving that ten-year sentence, fifteen-year-old Dana finally staged her only adolescent rebellion, expressing her pain at Dad’s incompetent wonder-working and abandonment of her. Her attack may not impress anyone who’s given their parents a truly rough ride, but you have to judge her act in context. Considering that her own personality (gay) was already an unwilling blow against parental expectations, she had never felt the need to “act out,” all rebellious energies spent on navigating a world that contained a fair amount of hostility to her. But now she aggressively struck at our father, harder than I could have, because she was braver and more honest, because he loved her more, and because what she did was so piercingly fired at him and him alone.
She became an anti-Stratfordian.
She consciously chose to believe, or tried to believe, or at least pretended to believe—and then
In the play, Arthur’s father kills a noble and replaces him with Constantine’s father. Then Arthur kisses and ends up marrying Constantine’s sister, rejecting a better offer from the French. In real life, Constantine French-kissed Arthur’s sister before she rejected him,and then Constantine’s father reported Arthur’s father to the sheriff of Nobles County. (If my father did not distort our family life to forge this play, I am left with the uncomfortable possibility that we have lived a distorted version of Shakespeare’s imagination, which, ridiculously enough, is what one Shakespearologist claims: we are all the Bard’s inventions.)
Dana and Doug kissed when they were ten, I learned with the long straw running from my mouth down into the plastic tub of alcohol. “My first try,” she slurred. “And I told him—well, I made him guess. I talked about the news on TV about the UFO, and I let on that I knew how it happened, and then we kissed again, and then I think I told him all of it.” So was she giving him a secret in order to win a kiss, making her the john and Doug the gigolo? “No, he wanted to kiss me.” So did she let the secret slip and then hope to seal his secrecy with a kiss, making her the incompetent sexual manipulator? “No, it wasn’t an accident exactly.” So Doug snatched a secret by kissing her into indiscretion, making him his father’s agent and her the poor trusting sap? “No”: Dana was a women’s studies major, and so she described the event as her futile attempt at some sort of “idealized, media-transmitted, societally endorsed, heterosexual intimacy, secrets and flesh co-opted simultaneously.” This seems the saddest of all interpretations.
“How could you let Dad think it was me?”
“He never thought it was you.”
He’d openly blamed me for years, and continued to associate me with any betrayal he suffered for years to come. That association spread so that every time he was arrested, some part of him wondered if I’d blown the whistle on him “again.” Dana’s blithe wishful thinking—
he never thought it was you
—was impenetrable. She refused to see how I could take this badly, refused to admit she should have told him the truth.
Her resistance to reality on this point, her insistence that Dad somehow just “knew” truth and always acted in our interest, was a blister waiting to burst.
12
A BSENTEE PARENTS DESERVE their kids’ anger. Kids have to get mad to get over it, and if they hurt their parent in the process, that is the healing astringent necessary to everyone. As with many things, Dana was better and faster at this than I was.
Back in 1979, a month after my father began serving that ten-year sentence, fifteen-year-old Dana finally staged her only adolescent rebellion, expressing her pain at Dad’s incompetent wonder-working and abandonment of her. Her attack may not impress anyone who’s given their parents a truly rough ride, but you have to judge her act in context. Considering that her own personality (gay) was already an unwilling blow against parental expectations, she had never felt the need to “act out,” all rebellious energies spent on navigating a world that contained a fair amount of hostility to her. But now she aggressively struck at our father, harder than I could have, because she was braver and more honest, because he loved her more, and because what she did was so piercingly fired at him and him alone.
She became an anti-Stratfordian.
She consciously chose to believe, or tried to believe, or at least pretended to believe—and then
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