The ’50s: An Icetray of Old Threats
By CINTRA WILSON
Photograph by Sibylla Herbrich
"I got it!" said the burly bald guy with the thick wool suit, at the Board of Director's office, back in the G.O. Days. "We build a museum of taxidermized animals! We paint beautiful dioramas around these wild animals, stuffed in lifelike poses, that will give people a truly educational opportunity to see the animal in his native environment!" "Oh, Eustace, you're a genius!" said his secretary, who was wearing three girdles and silk stockings and uncomfortable pumps, and whom no man in the office would date because she wore glasses. "It will be so much more SANITARY than a real zoo." "Don't bother me now, Carol, I've got work to do. Hold all my calls." Peppy violin music filled the office as Carol shook her head fondly at her animated boss, as if to say " Ahh, men are all such little boys." And many years later, there is still a museum that is impossibly weird and creepy, full of moth-eaten lions and musk oxen with sad plastic eyes, standing in painted boxes like nativity sets from another planet. One of that bygone era's few good ideas was to place a full bar in the Sea Life section, strategically located next to the "Mollusks in Our World" exhibit. The Founders rightfully guessed that Weekend Divorce Dads (an important part of the museumgoer demographic) would be entirely weepy with horror by the time they reached the invertebrates, and a stiff shot of Canadian Club would be not an option, but a dire necessity. "Go look at the mollusks, Donny, Daddy's going to have 25 minutes of grown-up time. Mollusks use their stomach as a foot. Don't come back until you've counted them all." Last night I got together with a girl I grew up with. The first time I ever saw Imogene, I was standing on my toes, straining to see her on the diaper table. She was four days old and still had a little black ball of umbilical cord in her navel. Our parents were best friends. My parents were in her father's dorm room when he proposed to her mother. Imogene and I grew up together and suffered through many collective family vacations with each another. We witnessed each other being reduced to tears by the various humilations of childhood, and observed with equal clarity the dynamics of our respective parents' relationships. Lately I have begun to realize that a different code of marital behavior prevailed in the '50s and early '60s. All of our still-married parents are very eccentric, artistic souls. Now, it seems that if a man was considered a genius back in those days, any tyrannical behavior was forgivable, and so both of our genius fathers evolved into strange and demanding creatures whom our mothers contorted into bizarre convex martyrdom shapes to accommodate. Last night Imogene and I talked, for the first time as adults and with raw incredulity, about our parents. Their relationships, we decided, have held together only by virtue of a very strange persevering mettle, the likes of which you never see in a relationship today. Relationships today all have large emergency escape rafts that inflate automatically the instant there is a violation of the relationship's "Health," as defined by our psychiatric and self-help arbiters. Our parents' marriages, on the other hand, endured, held together by bold endurance, abstract fear, mutual suffering and some deeply pathological love based on a belief in the innate superiority of their drastic artistic emotions. Therapy is not an option for these people. Their gifted histrionics of heightened attitude would Not Be Understood by a philistine, some gentle, book-loving Jew-boy on a soft chair who never raises his voice. The Creativity Gods have made our men monsters, and we must pity them for it, our mothers appear to believe. Only we understand this mess, they seem to say, and it's ours, so we'll stay put. Our parents have relationships that nobody would volunteer for today. But they're the product of the values of a different time, a zeitgeist in which it was better to stick around and keep stabbing each other for 30 years over an uninhabitable bog than to scrap everything and move somewhere else. The Kodiak bears in the Museum of Natural History aren't leaving the acrylic tundra. They will not go visit the sawdust-filled Zebu across the hall. Their smells will never mingle, their worlds will never collide. Both of our parents will remain together, in something that is mostly perverse but kind of beautiful, really. Even though the world has thrashed forward and we no longer stuff pygmy rhinos for the joy of the public, dioramas of lost, frozen idealism can still be found here and there, interred in their own severe dignity. Crisco and Rhett are two greaser friends of mine. They were always the kinds of guys for whom tall shiny hair and shark-finned Cadillacs were more important than any other aspect of human life. They lived out a complete 1950s ethos, one manifested in their dames, clothes, music, guitars and furniture. They drove straight out of a LIFE magazine with Eisenhower on the cover, never to trudge forward in appearance, and only seek friends of like tastes. "Rhett, man..." said Crisco, the other day, with concern lacing his Lucky-Strike-addled voice box. "What's up?" asked Rhett, in the process of shining a large glittery paremecium-shaped ashtray. "Man ... I got a real problem with ANGER. I think it's damaging my relationships with women. I gotta WORK on it, man." Rhett started laughing and laughing. "Real '90s adult stuff, man. You're EVOLVING." "Shit," said Crisco. Cintra Wilson can be reached at cintra@well.com. |
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