Playing Catch with My Mother: Coming to Manhood when All the Rules Have Changed

New Year's Eve If this is obsession--obsession, one could say, right down to the words, boy, man, girl, woman--then I've had it since I could speak. I've breathed it, no more conscious of it than of the bite of pollution in the New York City air. I went about my business like any other boy until someone brought it to my attention, as when my tall father bent down the branch of a young maple on our street in Greenwich Village, to show me the brown-edged holes in the green leaves. Invisible acid in the air had burned holes just big enough to peer through. When I looked, I saw my long-haired father, my cobblestone street, my upthrust city darkly framed as by a pinhole camera. On the first New Year's Eve I remember, when my parents brought my toddler sister and me to celebrate with family friends, I was not thinking that the air between men and women burned with angry confusion. I knew that my struggling parents had been fighting more, and more publicly, than before, but their fights were beyond me, facts of nature, forest fires. On the way to Princeton, I remember thinking of my good luck--we'd gotten to ride not just the subway but two real trains, the impressively long Trenton local and now, from the junction, the little "dinky," with its deep-voiced conductor and its door excitingly open to the air. When I tired of the train, I thought about the toy airplane in our overnight bag. I'd made it in my kindergarten's first-ever turn in wood shop, with a scrap of two-by-two for a body, and for wings a flat narrow board the shop teacher held while I painstakingly hammered. The wheels were wooden buttons that really spun, and across the wings and to each side of the nose, where model planes showed military insignia, I'd inked the numbers of the coming year with indelible purple Magic Marker: 1972! We got to our friends' house as the evening sky deepened. The trees beyond their living room windows had turned black. Peter's mother lit candles by the stereo, on the side tables, and in the dining room. Firelight flickered off glass tabletops and chrome tubing and bright black leather. The whole downstairs filled with a fireplace glow, cozy and unreal. Soon the dads, long-haired and bearded, were sitting on the couch, talking in important-sounding dad sentences, and the moms were standing in the kitchen, chopping salad vegetables on wooden boards. The kitchen had doorways but no doors, so what the moms said could be heard in the living room even over the music: sharp laughter, criticisms long pent up. My friend Peter and I went upstairs to his room, to push toy cars and trucks and to play-fly my New Year's plane. The comforter on his bed was good to sit on, but bumpy for Matchbox vehicles and wooden wheels. In time, Peter's sister came to the door, and a familiar dispute began. Peter argued from strict principle--older brothers with older brothers, younger sisters with younger sisters--and his sister countered with a plea for reason and flexibility: Amanda downstairs, just two, was too young for games. Peter relented. The three of us were playing together when I felt the tremor of my parents' argument on the stairs. My father's step was heavy, his voice distorted; it was hard to recognize him. My mother's voice made a flat, distancing drone, a sound that said not you, not what you say, never, nothing, no. This was a bad one. I felt I should step into the hallway and show myself, to remind them where we were, that this was supposed to be a holiday. Peter was driving a dump truck up the side of his bed, and his sister was asking how it kept from crashing when the mountain was so steep; to them, adult voices on the stairs were nothing to notice. I wished then that I didn't have this ear always listening for out-of-tune conversations. My father's voice rose and my mother's followed. She yelled his name, and something thumped dully down the stairs. Peter and Amy looked up.Lichtenberg, Greg is the author of 'Playing Catch with My Mother: Coming to Manhood when All the Rules Have Changed' with ISBN 9780553378023 and ISBN 0553378023.