Page 2 of Exquisite Things

Sometimes, most times honestly, my own ability to pretend I’m something I’m not sickens me. I don’t think of myself as a liar,

and yet, I’m so skilled at it. Faking comes so naturally when I’m with Mother, Liam, my classmates, coaches and teachers.

Perhaps I’m just weak. Or maybe, as my cousin Brendan says, I’m simply too concerned with pleasing others, Mother in particular.

But what’s wrong with wanting others to be happy?

I suppose it’s the lying that’s wrong. When Mother asks me to pick up some cuts at the butcher and he asks, “Oliver, you have

a lass yet?” I find it too easy to offer him a conspiratorial wink and say, “Still searching for her, Mr. Barrett.” It’s horrible,

isn’t it? All I want is to live a life of honesty, to be as pure as a Chopin melody. Instead I’m like one of my signature

wrestling moves, the one where I pull my opponent deep into a hold, almost like an embrace, before I turn him into my victim.

That’s who they think I am. A destroyer. If I’m a good wrestler, it’s because the mat is where I take out my aggression at

this cruel world that turns the purest of boys into the most deceitful of men.

But I must lie, mustn’t I? To be honest and pure would be to destroy my beautiful mother’s dreams. And she’s worked so hard for us, hasn’t she? Raising two boys all by herself and taking extra shifts at work after we lost my dad in the pandemic.

“No woman should raise two men without a man,” she likes to say. In fact, she’s downstairs saying it to the mailman now.

“But if any woman can do it, it’s you, Mrs. Doherty,” the mailman says in his jovial voice. That man has been delivering the mail to us for as

far back as my memories go, and there hasn’t been a day where he hasn’t done it with a smile. Doesn’t he have dark days like

I do? Days when he doesn’t want to leave the bed, when he longs to sink into his own gloom? Nights when he wants to ignore

duty and indulge all his forbidden fantasies?

“You’re too kind,” Mother says sincerely.

“This one’s postmarked from New Haven,” the mailman says brightly. He knows, like I do, that nothing fills my mother’s heart

with pride like a letter from New Haven, an update from my brother Liam at Yale. “He’s doing well, is he?”

“More than well,” my mother says with a glow in her voice. “Full scholarship to Yale. He’s made all the hard work worth it,

and Oliver will too. He has his sights set on Harvard like his cousin Brendan. They have a wrestling team now, so perhaps

there’s a scholarship in his future. How could they say no when they see the way he overpowers the other boys on that mat?”

“Oh, I was at the last meet. Oliver absolutely pulverized the other boy,” the mailman says gleefully, like destruction is

sport, which of course it is.

“Yes, well... if it gets him a scholarship, it will all be worth it.” Somewhere inside her, my mother knows wrestling means nothing to me but the chance to get into Harvard.

She’s the one who taught me piano, isn’t she?

Who guided my fingers from key to key, who would play the ends of my seventh chords when my hands weren’t big enough, patiently waited for me to master a trill.

Coached me to stop parking my foot on the pedal when it could finally reach it.

“It muddies the sound,” she used to say, as my father blurted out his own muddy sounds in the background.

“You want your notes to be crystal clear.” She knows me.

Perhaps even the piece of me I hide. Or maybe not.

If she did, she would have deduced why I’m using wrestling to get a scholarship to Harvard.

But she has no idea what Harvard means to me, what my cousin Brendan has shown me. A whole world of men like me, men who would

shatter my mother’s illusions of who her baby boy is.

“Oh my, our Liam is seeing a young woman,” Mother says. “Her name is Mary. She’s studying to be a secretary. He says she likes

to bake.”

“Just like you,” the mailman says. “Every good boy falls in love with a woman just like his mother.” I cringe when I hear

that. If I do fall in love, and I’m not sure I ever will, then it certainly won’t be with a man like my father, who drank

too much, raged too loud, and lived impulsively. If anything, I want the opposite of him. A boy with clarity of vision. A

boy without even a hint of cruelty in him.

Mother tells the mailman she’s going to pack him some of her famous oatmeal cookies. “The secret’s in the nuts,” Mother says.

“Thanks, Mrs. Doherty. I’ll see you tomorrow.

” Mother closes the door when the mailman leaves.

I hear her deflate with a sigh. I know she pretends, too.

Her happiness is a costume she wears for others.

Underneath it is her quiet grief. It’s been two years since we lost Father.

My brother left us for Connecticut in September.

Maybe I’m a born faker like she is. There could be some gene we don’t know about.

The imitation gene. If there is, my father didn’t have it.

He couldn’t fake a thing. Not his hatred for me, certainly.

Sometimes, he would catch me singing a Bessie Smith song as I played its melodies on the piano, and he would slap me across the face with the back of his heavy hand for simply warbling a feminine tune.

Imagine what he might have done if he knew that last week, I let Brendan and his friends put rouge on my cheeks.

“Oliver, are you awake?” my mother bellows from downstairs. “Would you like some eggs?”

It was thrilling, looking at myself in the mirror and seeing this rouged stranger. This soft boy who looks the way I feel.

Not a pulverizer of men but a lover of them. I do imagine it sometimes, what he would do. Father, I mean. In my worst moments,

I’m happy he’s gone. If not happy, relieved. I feel sick admitting this, but I want a life of honesty, at the very least with

myself. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

“I’m not hungry,” I yell. “I’m studying.”

I hear her down in the living room. She lifts the fallboard of the piano and plays a few scales. Mother always likes to warm

up her fingers with the scales that transport her. That sound like they come from some other place. Diminished scales. I can’t

help but push myself out of bed when I hear the eastern sounds. It’s like she’s calling to me to take a seat next to her,

on that bench where we’re always at our most connected.

“You remember how to play this scale?” she asks.

“Of course,” I say. “The Phrygian. It sounds major, but it’s minor. A deceptive scale.” Like me.

I place my hands on the ivory. I like to play with my eyes closed. To know that I can create music from pure instinct. I play

her a Phrygian scale. It’s just a C major, of course, but you start on an E, which changes everything. Where you start the

story, and where you end it, changes its whole meaning.

“It takes you somewhere, doesn’t it? To some deserted Greek island perhaps, where everybody plays music and takes in the sun all day.”

I can’t help but smile, even as I correct her. “If memory serves, Phrygia was inland, and was in what would now be the Ottoman

Empire.”

“Those are the facts,” Mother says. “This, my son, is a fantasy. Play me something. I want to be transported.”

I open my eyes and begin to play one of her favorites, Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca,” the “Turkish March.” I offer her a smile

as my fingers travel across the keys. She seems to relax into the music as she unties the straps of the apron she’s wearing

around her widening body. Ever since Father died, she eats what she craves, wears what feels comfortable, and seems much happier

for it too. Father would chastise her if she ate too much or begged for a night off cooking. Never mind that they both worked

all day. She had to cook all night as he kicked up his feet and drank. Those were his rules. Sometimes I wonder who she might

have been had she never been a wife who had to sew other people’s clothes to make ends meet and cook three men’s meals every

night. I finish the piece with a flourish, then play some improvised notes as I tell her, “I’m going out tonight, so you don’t

need to make me dinner.”

“Where are you going?” she asks, unworried. She trusts me. She shouldn’t.

“Brendan invited me to Harvard to study with him.” A half-lie. I am going to Brendan’s, but not to study. It’s his friend

Cyril’s birthday, and they’ve planned a gathering in Brendan and Jack’s room. “Studying with Brendan will really prepare me

for Harvard. I’ll understand exactly what they’re assigning.” I’m laying it on too thick now, so I stop.

“How kind of him. Please thank him on my behalf.” She knows Brendan, but not as well as I’ve come to know him.

Father tended to keep his own family at a distance, and Brendan is my cousin on his side.

Mother runs a hand through my waves of brown hair.

“You need a haircut. I could do it before you go.”

“I like it long.”

“It gets in your eyes.”

“Well then, all I need to do is blow.” I blow and my hair flies up. I can tell how silly I look. She laughs, and I laugh too,

but mostly because I’m imagining Brendan’s roommate, Jack Whitman, turning what I just said into some sharply delivered adage— all I need to do is blow —in his inimitably capricious way.

A wave of pain seems to stab me in the gut. I close my eyes. She must sense my change of mood because she asks, “What is it?

Do you miss your father?”

“No, it’s not that.” I wish I could conceal the ache in my voice. Perhaps I’m not as good a liar as I think myself to be.

“Grief takes time, and it lingers under the surface,” she says. “Reveals itself in unexpected moments. Is it because he used

to cut your hair? Amateur barber, your father.”

“Very amateur,” I crack. I’m grateful for our laughter. It allows us to move on from her questioning. If there’s one person

I hate lying to, it’s her. My beloved mother, who deserves an honest son.