Childhood Sweethearts by Miriam Levine

Childhood Sweethearts by Miriam Levine

My parents were childhood sweethearts. They met in elementary school and have been inseparable since. When my mom tells the story, she’ll say that it was a “blessing and a curse” meeting so young. But when my dad tells the story, he leaves out the curse part. This reminds me that my dad is the nicer person.

Also the time when I told my mom privately that she was my favorite parent, and I loved her more than my dad, she said, “Really?” and then gave me a tight hug. But when I told my dad that he was my favorite parent, and I loved him more than my mom, he scolded me and listed all of the reasons that I should love him and my mom equally. That was the other time I realized that my dad was the nicer one.

I admit that my mom is hilarious and it’s hard not to laugh when she makes fun of people. If we invite someone over to our house who smells, she may wrinkle her nose behind their back and make a gagging face. Most of the time, the person doesn’t notice. I enjoy her humor even when it’s mean. Okay fine, especially when it’s mean, because then it feels like we’re in cahoots doing something naughty together.

My mom’s favorite activity is opining about other people’s supposed fantasies, deep-seeded fears and detrimental limitations. Mere acquaintances become rich fodder for us to dissect, chew up and spit out.

My mom has always saved these moments for me, and when my dad isn’t around. But there are times when he witnesses her vicious side and he shakes his head gently and then leaves the room. He never participates, but he also doesn’t tell her to stop.

I admit that I’m an active participant. When I throw my head back and cackle with laughter, that’s the encouragement she needs to keep going. She loves an audience.

When my mom and I go out together, we’re bandits. Our mortal enemy? Lines. My mom doesn’t believe in waiting. Whenever we are faced with a line, we strategize a way to cut. If a doctor is running late and three other patients are sitting in the waiting room, I suddenly have a toenail fungus that is spreading and I’m in excruciating pain. If we arrive at a movie theater and a long line has already formed in front of the ticket office, my bladder is about to explode so we must purchase tickets immediately in order to run inside to the bathroom. If a restaurant is completely booked and we don’t have a reservation, our imaginary friend has already arrived and is expecting us.

Once when we were boarding a bus, a young woman snuck ahead of us and as she entered the front door, my mom spanked her. I think it was an involuntary reaction. As if on autopilot, her hand jutted out and slapped her butt. Hard. My mom remained stone faced. She was righting a wrong. The woman didn’t even turn around. She simply accepted her punishment and moved on.

Whatever it is, we don’t wait. Ever.

My dad takes me out for bagels every Sunday morning. We wait on line. Always.

My mom savors vagueness – the ultimate punishment – leaving people guessing. When she insinuates that your husband is secretly gay and using you as a beard, is she teasing in her irreverent way, secretly admitting you to an intimate club of co-conspirators? Or is she actually mocking your delusion that you are married to a straight man? If you act offended, you didn’t get the joke. If you laugh alongside her, you’re senile and living a lie. She reigns supreme in Shades of Grey. Clarifying is beneath her. You are meant to decipher the meaning of her words like an ancient Talmudic text.

My mom eats with her mouth wide open. She’s usually mid-monologue and bits of half-mauled food spray through the air. Sometimes it lands on me and I won’t even notice because I’m so enraptured in her story. She keeps her eyes wide open for emphasis when discussing something X-rated. A neighbor’s sexual proclivities, for example.

My dad likes doing things quietly. When he eats, he chews silently. He looks down at his plate and is enmeshed in whatever it is he’s eating, contemplating the various ingredients and steps that make up his meal. When I eat with my dad, my mind wanders. I’m not trying to keep up with the twists and turns of a pathological tryst between three adults we barely know. Instead, we sit together in tranquility taking one bite at a time.

When I turned fifteen years old, I begged my parents for a pet. I wanted a cuddly dog. My dad said, “Ask your mother.” My mom said, “No.” I persisted. I needed a friend. I knew that I could handle the responsibility. I promised to walk it. I promised to pick up the poop. Finally my mom said yes to a pet, but under the condition that she would have final jurisdiction over what kind.

She came home with a Persian cat. My mom named her Elizabeth, as in the British monarch. The cat was the feline equivalent of a total bitch. Elizabeth became my mom’s confidant. I was demoted. Suddenly, I couldn’t have a moment alone with my mom without her furry appendage. The queen hissed whenever I approached. She snuggled close to my mom while glaring at me like a sociopath. My mom’s flaming red nails curled around Elizabeth’s golden fur like an aristocratic accessory.

Once my mom and Elizabeth donned matching red talons, I turned my attention to my dad. We waited on lines. We said what we meant. We ate quietly. It felt wholesome, albeit a little naïve, not to question a neighbor’s sexual proclivities. My mom is a silk pillowcase that is smooth to the touch, but you wake up drenched in sweat, hair matted, not knowing what hit you. My dad is a down blanket.

I started to notice that my dad was funny. Not in the ambiguously ridiculing vein of funny, but in his keen observations of the world. Like when he pointed out a pigeon that resembled Woody Allen. Or when he quoted a funny line from a movie (also Woody Allen), but used it in a completely different, but apt, context. When we went to the farmer’s market, his voice shifted to a subtle – almost undetectable – twang. Once when I got up early and walked to his side of the bed to wake him, I found a life-sized doll under the covers that resembled him, but he was already in the kitchen making my breakfast. My omelet was in the shape of a cat’s head, complete with triangular ears and a scowl that he squiggled on with ketchup.

My dad wasn’t just safe. He was good company. Who knew? All this time that my mom was stealing the spotlight, and he had been concealed in the shadows, he deserved his own spotlight just the same. He wasn’t showy or loud or controversial. But he did ignore Elizabeth’s condescending presence and he didn’t hurl droplets of food in my face.

Once my mom added golden streaks to her dark bouffant, and she started to resemble Elizabeth, my new alliance was solidified. The cat didn’t affect the relationship between my parents. My dad regarded Elizabeth with mild irritation, but my parents sustained their established choreography. What I used to view as an imbalance of power, I now understood as a romantic duet. My mom continued to be the larger than life provocateur and my dad her humble and supportive partner.

When I was twelve years old, my mom became obsessed with the circus. She was enamored by the theatrics of it – the costumes, the acrobatics, the animals. She took me to the circus once a week for an entire year. She studied all of the players and performances as if analyzing a foreign film. One night after we came home, she announced that she had enrolled in a “Circus Training Boot Camp.” She found an intensive course where she could be coached by professional circus gurus. It was a month-long program in another state. I thought she was joking. My dad had smiled and took out a large suitcase from storage. When I realized she was in fact serious, I flung my body over the suitcase and wailed.

“How can you leave me for the circus?” I asked.

“You’ll be fine. You have your father,” she said.

My dad looked calm, as if he had either been expecting this announcement or had been injected with a tranquilizer, and not at all as if it were the shock of a lifetime. He gave her a hug and said, “Proud of you.” She packed her bag and told us she’d be back in a month.

“How could you let her abandon us?” I asked my dad.

He shrugged and mumbled something about it making her happy.

I didn’t trust that she would return. I was scared she would run off with the traveling circus. I cried every day during that month she was gone. It was too quiet. I missed my mom. I couldn’t trust someone who would desert me without hesitation. While she was away, I ransacked her bathroom cabinets and threw out all of her tampons. Either she wouldn’t notice because she would never come back. Or, she would see the error in her ways once she was forced to soak through her underwear.

Sure enough, she did come back and when she did, she looked defeated. My dad kissed his downcast clown and picked up the suitcase to help her unpack.

“How was the boot camp?” I asked her.

“Not for me,” she said.

We never spoke about the circus again, and we never went back to see it in action. I assumed that my mom was embarrassed she couldn’t cut it. Or maybe she was bullied by a flexible acrobat, or had some other traumatic experience that tarnished her appreciation of the whole thing. Or maybe it’s like once you work at a restaurant and see all of the horrors behind the scenes you never want to eat at another restaurant again. I don’t know what happened. But watching my dad send her off to the circus with a smile made an indelible imprint in my childhood memory.

At the time I thought my dad’s permission of this strange whim was pathetic and weak. I wanted my dad to stand up to her and say, “No” and for once put her in her place. My mom had chosen a band of talented misfits over her family. What the hell. But my dad let her get the circus infatuation out of her system and was certain she would then carry on exactly where she had left off. Was he a fool? Or had he chosen to play the long game?

My mom saw herself as a talented misfit and had wanted to escape to a place where her virtuosity would be appreciated. She wanted to stand on stage and hear deafening applause. She wanted to be among beasts and contortionists. Maybe my dad empathized with her unrequited desire for greatness. He said, “Go.”

 Eventually, she traded in the beasts for Elizabeth. They now sit in solidarity, recognizing their uniqueness and stature. There is a clear hierarchy in our home – those with golden streaks and red nails at the top. My dad wasn’t displaced because he was already operating in an alternate dimension. He had never occupied my mom’s sphere.

So what was his sphere, you might ask? Random acts of kindness to the most deranged humans on the planet. It sounds sweet but it actually makes me question his sanity.

My dad has a close relationship with a homeless man who calls him by a different name every day. Yes, they speak daily. The man is barefoot and his toenails extend five inches past the tips of his toes. My dad walks over to the homeless man’s street corner and hands him something different at each encounter. One day it was a sandwich. “Steven, I told you I don’t like mustard,” the homeless man said as he chomped on it, licking his lips. Another day, it was a watch. “Now tell me, Robert, why do I need to tell time? I’ve got nowhere to be,” the man said. Then he strapped it to his left wrist and never took it off. On a particularly sunny day, my dad brought him a hat and sunglasses. “Not my style, John,” he said, examining the goods, but then wore both.

“What’s the homeless man’s name?” I asked. After all, this may be the deepest friendship for both my dad and this man.

“I’m embarrassed to say I forgot. It’s either Fred or Frank, but I can’t remember,” my dad said.

“He can call you by a different name each day but you’re embarrassed that you can’t remember which of the two most similar sounding F names is his?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter what our names are,” my dad chuckled.

My dad continues bringing this ungrateful homeless man gifts every single day. And each day Fred/Frank belittles the offering.

Then there’s the frenetic pet storeowner. We never had any pets besides the cat, which my mom acquired recently. But years prior, my dad had befriended this manic business owner by taking me to the local pet store to visit the animals. We looked at limp iguanas, horny guinea pigs, and emaciated rabbits. The pet storeowner tried to engage us in conversation and we ended up staying an hour while she shared her life story with my dad. The snippets I overheard were that she grew up on a farm. She trusted many men who shouldn’t have been trusted. In retrospect, she may have had bad judgment. She has always loved animals. Only animals understand her. A lot of ups and downs until she bought a store going bankrupt and decided to devote her life to selling smaller creatures to bigger creatures.

During this soliloquy, she reached for my dad’s coarse hands and they stared into each other’s eyeballs. I was half listening but took this opportunity to open the turtle tank and organize a race in the store’s main aisle. All of the turtles were very slow and distracted, except for one that sprinted to the finish line while taunting me with red beady slits. That freakishly fast turtle still haunts me in my nightmares.

From that day forward, my dad can’t pass the pet store without stopping by to say a quick hello. Which becomes an extended saga about a scorned lover, her tumultuous upbringing, or the fortitude she has to persevere in the commercial animal industry.

When my mom came home with Elizabeth, which she had bought from an elitist Persian cat breeder upstate, my dad pulled me aside.

“Let’s not mention our cat to the pet store lady. I don’t want her to feel betrayed that we didn’t buy it from her,” my dad said.

I nodded.

He was worried about her feelings.

Don’t forget about the woman who inhabits the last booth in our neighborhood bagel shop. She smells like pickle juice and sweat mixed together. She squeals when my dad and I enter the café every Sunday morning. She wears mini skirts that bunch up at her waist. Her arms jiggle so violently when she gestures in the air that I’m nervous the extra skin might whack me in the eye. She paints fuchsia lipstick all around her mouth, circling her lips in an overdrawn oval. My dad walks over to her and asks about her week. She is overwhelmed by his interest in her. Her eyes fill with tears as she stares him up and down like he’s a piece of fresh lox.

She flirts with my dad, and has even said, “Whenever you decide to leave your old hag of a wife, you know where to find me.” She then pointed to the vinyl bench where her thighs were permanently stuck. She’s never met my mom, but assumed that he’s way out of her league. She cries when we say goodbye.

I told my mom to step it up because she has competition.

“Seriously, there are all of these women you don’t know about, all waiting to sink their teeth into dad. What’re you going to do about it?” I asked her.

I tried to incite jealousy. Or at least a sense of urgency.

She laughed.

My mom is the rollercoaster and my dad is the steady road. What you might think of as two opposite forces repelling, are instead, like a yin and yang attracting with subtle appreciation of each other’s differences. These two unlikely bedfellows peacefully coexist as long as they have their trusted sidekicks. For my mom, it’s Elizabeth, the snobbish cat. For my dad, it’s the marginalized members of society who feast on his flesh like starved carnivores.

My mom found the only man in the world who let her inner clown free. My dad found the one woman who wanted to leave her idyllic life to join the circus. She’ll make you pee from sidesplitting laughter. He’ll make you cry from the surprising ways in which he extends himself. In their presence, you’ll find many bodily fluids exiting your body.

They met in elementary school. Sitting next to each other in fourth grade math, they bonded over their mutual distaste for Mr. Gross. He was boring and his tests were hard. They spent class making each other giggle by drawing cartoonish caricatures in their black and white marble notebooks. Once my dad started to sketch a grotesque Mr. Gross in the nude, and my mom finished it by leaning over his desk and drawing a huge penis, they knew they had found true love.

And ever since, those two learned to sit at their separate desks, side by side.

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Copyright Miriam Levine 2025

Image Source: Daiga Ellaby from Unsplash.com