First Person
My paternal grandfather lived until he was 90. In that time he never once wore a seat belt. In a wreck, he said, he preferred to be “thrown clear” rather than strapped in and potentially decapitated. He thought air-conditioning would kill you. In a hotel, he stayed only as high as the second floor because that was as far as his emergency rope ladder could reach.
I, myself, am selectively high-strung. When it comes to someone else’s life, I say carpe diem all the live long day. If it’s me we’re talking about, though, all bets are off. I’m an accomplished worrier: the headrests on movie theater seats are most likely covered in lice; the woman coughing in line next to me at the grocery probably has early-stage tuberculosis; and the one morning when I wear that ratty underwear out into the world will be the same day I find myself in an ambulance with a paramedic tsk-tsking at the bedraggled stranger before her.
It’s easy enough to see that I come by my anxiety naturally, but it wasn’t until I was in high school that I understood just how naturally.
As a child I’d never paid the opposite sex much mind. Boys were good for basketball games in the backyard, riding bikes around the neighborhood, hide-and-seek on a summer July night. My mother knew this indifference wouldn’t last, but my father hoped to God it would. In his view, even today, “Lacey can get married and have children, but she can’t have sex until I’m dead and gone.”
One night, when I was 14, I announced at dinner that I wanted to go on a date—with someone two years older, in his car, alone. My father didn’t take it well. Not very well at all. From that night on he discussed the issue not only with my mother, but with teachers, parents, therapists—anyone, really, who would listen and consult on his darkest of fears. The entire population of my small high school knew I had a crush on a boy because at PTA meetings my father would stand up during the Q&A to ask just what was an appropriate age for car dating? And is 9 o’clock too early a curfew?
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In his mind, a man-child with a red sports car and a lead foot was coming to take his daughter away. During our final family discussion on the matter, he raged and paced up and down our kitchen for two hours straight while my mother and I sat there, rattled but silent. The object of my affection drove his aunt’s mid-’80s Cutlass Supreme and was a member of his school’s honor society, but that meant nothing to my father. He made me promise to watch the car’s speedometer, vocalize my fears if the car reached speeds over 30 miles an hour, be home by 11, and afterwards give a thorough report on my date’s driving abilities. I should also stay away from R-rated movies. My father went on for so long, and in such a hyped-up manner, that at the end my mother turned to me and said, “So you see, Lacey, you can become pregnant, but you better not get in a wreck this Friday night.”
In the days and weeks to come, however, my father did somehow warm to this new addition in my life. I, on the other hand, became a complete neurotic about the relationship. Christmas was approaching, and the idea of buying a gift for a boyfriend was, in my mind, akin to being asked to design an architectural paean to the wonders of love. The stakes were too high, the pressure for perfection a stress of monumental proportions.
“He’ll like anything you give him,” my mother assured me. “I wouldn’t worry over it so much.”
“But what if he doesn’t like it?” I whined back. “Why couldn’t we have started dating after Christmas? It would have been so much easier.”
My mother shook her head and sighed. I was a teenage girl, a sometimes lost cause in terms of keeping a rational perspective. I truly believed I would have to search out the most perfect gift ever, and so rather than risk failure, I did nothing. I ignored the approaching deadline, hoping that somehow Christmas would disappear. By determination alone, I would will the gift exchange into oblivion. I denied reality so well and for so long, that as Dec. 1 gave way to Christmas Eve, I still hadn’t bought that poor boy a present. My mother, seeing how nervous and wrought up I was, told my father that something had to be done. It just wasn’t right.
An experienced last-minute shopper—my mother’s onetime birthday gift of a drugstore-bought, whistle-shaped perfume bottle a prime example—my father understood the situation well. At 5 that evening he went shopping. At 7 that night the whole family drove to the boy’s house, where, after encouraging words from my mother, I knocked on the front door, waited until he answered and then shoved the gifts his way. “Here’s your electric lantern,” I said. “Here’s a pair of thermal gloves. Here’s a reflective blanket that will save your life if you’re ever lost in the woods.”
I waited for laughter, a grimace, a confused tilt of the head, even. Instead, he smiled, and, after several months of anxious worry, I did too. Christmas was saved; future boyfriends were spared. More important, the father who once feared speeding cars and wayward teenage boys showed his daughter how to live through her own most terrifying, albeit irrational, fears. Miracle of miracles, we didn’t even need Granddaddy’s emergency ladder.