No Faking

"It's a waste of time if I can't smile easily, like in the beginning..."
- Ira Kaplan, Yo La Tengo, "Autumn Sweater"

I might go for a girl who would walk down the aisle to "Autumn Sweater," if only for the knowing looks at "Is it too late to call this off? / We could slip away / Wouldn't that be better?" But this isn't about that. What this is about is fake smiles, and faking it, in general. First, take this test.

I do not like to pose for pictures. I do not like standing there, waiting for someone to take a photo. Most people have no idea how to take a photo. They stand there, squinting and grimacing behind the camera, covering the only part of their face that can tell you when to be ready and count off "1-2-3" and then sort of fidget a little, and then the camera mechanism itself whirrs and clicks, and finally, the pre-flash, and then the flash. I never know what to do with my hands.

Other people know how to pose for pictures. My cousins know how. My sister knows how. My sister is awesome at pictures. Me, I've got problems. Reviewing the multiple prints from the multiple cameras at the multiple events, with me in multiple costumes from this winter's wedding made me painfully aware of this. But worse than posing, and worse than the results, I've come to realize that I have forgotten how to smile.

Or more precisely, fake a smile. Every photo, I think I've done it, smiled. But it always comes out wrong. At best, the half-grin that to me, from the inside, feels like a smile, the slight rise in the cheeks, the forced upturn of the corner of the mouth, turns out to be sort of a flat, close-mouthed stare. And worse, forced into the full toothy smile, the lips awkwardly parted and drawn up above my teeth, the enforced squint, the saliva-y squeege noise from my gums and the corners of my mouth, the slight quiver of the lower lip, the slow tug of gravity as I wait and wait, I look like I'm taking a before picture for a dentist or maybe a plastic surgeon. It's terrible.

Of course, it's not as bad as all that. I can smile, easily, when I mean it. But the faking, I don't know hot to fix. I've thought about spending an hour in front of the mirror every night, plying at my face, train it into working. Or maybe I need to go back to my Stanislavsky.

I scored 12 out of 20. I'm not sure what my being optimistic or pessimistic has to do with anything, or my level of confidence. I took the test again, and still only scored a 14 out of 20. The body part that tells you the most about the smile are the eyes, of course. But I told them "the aftersmile."

I'll readily admit, the older I get, the less I trust the science that men do. Part of this is knowing more about the scientists, and part of this is knowing less about the science. PK told me about a study the other day where they sit you down and ask you to tap with your left finger or right finger if a name shown is more associated with a white person or a person person. Then they ask you to tap if a word is positive or negative. Then they ask you to tap with one finger if what they show you is either a positive word or a white person's name, and with another finger if it is a negative word or a black person's name. People are good at this, they tap quickly, assuredly. Then they ask you to tap with one finger if it is a white person's name or a negative word, and with another finger if it is a black person's name or a positive word. People are bad at this, the fuck up a lot. They tap slowly, and wrong.

This tells us something about our brains, perhaps, and what society does to our brains, perhaps. PK also told me that it shows how dumb some science is. I think that's what he said, I could be wrong. PK cuts open men's brains, and takes things out with an ice cream scooper. I listen and stay credulous.

This experiment, I don't know if it has a name, but I would call it the "Beautiful Sheneeqa."
In the past six months, a word has crept up in conversations that unsettles me. Talking to colleagues, and ex-colleagues, people who've spent lots of time with me at work, and in that respect, know me fairly well, they have had an uncanny habit of telling me that I have "integrity." This specific adjective has come up in multiple, distinct conversations. Unsolicited and a propos of nothing, really. It's a complement, and well intended, but it feels heavy and damning. Like I've cast my lot in with the grand, anonymous middle.

Integrity is not transcendent. It doesn't move you from shore to shore. Integrity is the mooring, not the boat.
My interest in writing this is not to dwell or debate my integrity, or lack thereof, but to cast off on a slightly different tangent. Let me begin by excerpting a lengthy passage from Bright Lights, Big City:

"When you were growing up you suspected that everyone else had been let in on some fundamental secret which was being kept from you. Others seemed to know what they were doing. This conviction grew with each new school you attended. Your father's annual job transfers made you the perennial new kid. Every year there was a new body of lore to be mastered. The color of your bike, your socks, was always wrong. If you ever go into psychoanalysis, you will insist that the primal scene is not the encounter of parents in coitus: it takes the shape of a ring of schoolchildren, like Indians surrounding a wagon train, laughing with malice, pointing their vicious little fingers to insist upon your otherness. The scene repeated itself in schoolyards across the country. Not until you reached college, where everyone started fresh, did you begin to pick up the tricks of winning friends and influencing people. Although you became adept, you also felt that you were exercising an acquired skill, something that came naturally to others. You succeeded in faking everyone out, and never quite lost the fear that you would eventually be discovered a fraud an impostor in the social circle."

For the longest time, my parents kept a framed photograph of me, in the room that I would stay in when I visited. I must have been twelve or thirteen in the photograph, at the height of teenage awkwardness, and it was ever so evident: my too large head, with eyes, nose and ears outgrowing the rest of my face, sat on top of my rail thin body. I wore a pair of cut-off read sweatpants, fraying above the knee and bunchy in the wrong places, a white t-shirt with "Singapore" and a picture of a dragon on it, and a black University of Kentucky baseball cap. In the photograph, taken at a charity fair at the Montessori school, I had a rangy, toothy smile. Happily, I was the height of uncool. It's one of those photographs that your parents keep and display that you can't, for the life of you, understand why.

At an increasing pace, but currently about once every three or four meals, dinner with my parents, devolves, in the end, into cheerful bouts of nostalgia. Generally, I am a passive observer. Normally, it goes like this:

"Do you remember the time when Mr. Carr gave you the assignment to trace your family history back to the Mayflower? And you didn't know what to do, so you went to him and asked him to change your assignment?"

"Do you remember when when you came home from school one day, and you asked me 'Mommy, are we poor? Because why do I have to wear shoes from Payless?"

"Do you remember the time the McElroy kids locked you out of the apartment building in Evanston, so you just sat in the snow for three hours?"

"Do you remember the time that you got so angry with your uncle, who was staying with us, that you ran away from home, and we had to drive around the neighborhood in the car to find you? And you were hiding under the deck the whole time?"

Each memory ends in peals of laughter. Of course, half the time I don't remember the story, and the other half, I remember being less plaintive, and more ironic, oh-so-ironic, precocious me. Certainly, this doesn't represent a collection of enduring pain. I was a steady kid. These things didn't rattle me.

Where these memories and passed-on recollections matter now, is in how they resemble the recollections in Bright Lights, Big City, the ring of children, Indians surrounding a wagon. The experience I'm describing is widely shared, of course, by almost any child of immigrant parents forced to turn up at a grade school or middle school. Exaggerating the mis-steps of youth, the clash of cultures, of the inherited culture of an old world, and the enforced culture, of a new, and ruthless, world at school, demanded the questions of, at best, How do I fit in? and at worst Do I fit in?

And almost always, these questions meet a natural resolution, as part of growing up. People find their feet. Immigrant children lose their accent, or never pick up their parents accents. People fit in.
The literary chronicle of America's fraudulence is a lengthy one. I don't know where it begins, but I'm betting early on. It finds a great height, of course, with Gatsby. We reach, we strive. We change, we grow. For money, for status, for women.

Or our motor is wound around some much deeper coil. We are living out a life that we do not own. Our father's life, our mother's life, the life that we see on TV.

Then one day, some artifact surfaces, some tiny missionary from our past, shining a light of truth into our world. Things crumble. We break down. It's a sad, terrible, beautiful story.

Faking it, of course, is also at the core of the American Dream. It is what allows us Gatz' to become us Gatsbys. Or, maybe we come from families that have been here forever. We live in the wide swaths of America that isn't New York, or Hollywood, or Washington, D.C. So we turn up in New York or Hollywood or D.C., like Jay McInerney or Johnny Depp in the "Into Great Wide Open" video. We stare for a moment, we marvel, we take it in. And then we start to hustle. We write home, we tell small lies. We keep up appearances, things are moving forward. But eventually, we have to retreat. Water finds its level. Like Jim Croce sings, "New York's not my home."

We are not the people who turn up on your TV, and we do not want to be.
The problem I had with the passage I lifted from Bright Lights, Big City is that I've never felt like I'm faking it, I've never felt a fraud. I feel like I've had ample opportunity, but the feeling never comes. It is from this that I think the slur arises, integrity.

I think I'm lucky in that many of my friends are the same way. Our chests are not puffed up, our voices are not too loud. We smile when we feel like it. We are privileged in this way.

Right?

It took me two weeks to break three of the rules that guide this blog. It was my hope to write on a tight line, to keep my language, thinking, and ideas taut, precise. It was my hope to stray from the maudlin, confessional indulgences of the medium. It was my hope to stay light, funny, and true. At best, today, I have bent those rules, at worst, laid them to waste. Chalk it up as an experiment, and if it falls flat, or worse yet, pretentious and naive, sorry for it. If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading.