Read Online You're Married to Her? by Ira Wood - Free Book Online

his lover, who is a well-known writer closer in age to mother than son. Upon being introduced the mother asks, “I don’t know if you want me to be honest or not.” The episode goes on to report that the word ‘honest’ in my family is synonymous with ‘vicious’ and to innocently invite the candid disclosure of anyone’s true feelings is to prepare oneself for the discharge of every sordid, unkind and spontaneous impression. “To be honest,” the (my) mother extends her hand in greeting, “I’ve asked my friends and nobody’s ever heard of you.”

    In the week it took me to decide what to do I came up with the scheme of using a razor blade to neatly excise the chapter. (“Damn publisher!” I heard myself telling my mother. “You got a defective copy?”) Meanwhile the book was gaining momentum. I was interviewed on Fresh Air, planning a book tour. Mass paperback reprint offers were coming in. Movie producers were calling and so were the relatives (“You’re such a celebrity you haven’t got a copy for your uncle?”). Before I got around to sending the book my mother called to inform me that she had bought it. That she liked it.
    â€œReally! How far did you get?” I asked.
    â€œChapter Sixteen.”
    I did not hear from her for some weeks after that and finally forced myself to make a Sunday morning call. “So Mom, what did you think of the book?”
    â€œOh, I got busy. I stopped reading it.”
    â€œHow far did you get?”
    â€œChapter Seventeen.”
    â€œIs that him?” I heard my father’s voice behind her. He took the phone.
    â€œHi, Pop.”
    â€œHey, I read your book.”
    â€œWhat did you think?”
    â€œWell, you didn’t treat me too bad.”
    â€œI didn’t?”
    â€œBut you really socked it to your mother!”
    The conversation ended there. The momentum of the book continued. I was offered representation by the
William Morris Agency. A movie option was negotiated. But I now only sporadically spoke to my mother and most pointedly never about the book. Although I knew I could be considered a very fortunate young writer, I was ambivalent, and confused. Didn’t the story of my own life belong to me? How was I to write about it?
    My mother and I continued to have guarded, shallow conversations until in one of them, many months later, her feelings simply burst. “Were we so bad to you?”
    The devil is in the adverb. How do you measure “so bad?” Did they beat me, starve me, abandon me; sell my body to strangers? “Of course not.”
    â€œThen why do you hate us?”
    â€œI don’t hate you.”
    â€œDo you think we wanted you to suffer?”
    â€œYou know what I think, Ma?” My mother was married at eighteen. My dad had just turned twenty. Her own mother was the most domineering woman I have ever met, a self-styled grande dame from the North Bronx, delightfully indulgent to her first-born grandson but imperious with her own daughter and impossible to please. My father’s father was a semi-literate plumber, a callous and uncommunicative boor who took pleasure in playing him off against his older brother. When my parents were young, marriage was one of the few options open to children who longed to escape. Even sadder was the fact that they had not been in the least prepared to raise their own. “I honestly think you did the very best you could.”

    â€œWe did,” she began to sob. “Every day we did the best we could.”
    I’d like to report that mother and son reconciled then and there. I’d like to report a happy end. In truth mistrust still lingers and if all was eventually forgiven, much remains unsaid.
    My father, it would turn out, read my book more than once. It made him feel important (or endorsed perhaps, in the way people feel about something or someone first encountered in the