Don’t Tell Your Mother
I’m drawn to my dad’s bookshelves like moths are to our porchlight, and I’m probably just as stupid. He’s an avid reader of fantasy and horror, and the worn spines sport intriguing titles like The Silmarillion, IT, and Lightning, and a lot more of them say GOR. He has an art book by someone named Frank Frazetta, and I’ve flipped through it once or twice, but it didn’t interest me much.
I actually know some of the stories without realizing it yet. On weekend nights, when I’m allowed to stay up late, Dad and I sit out on the deck. Sometimes he sets up his telescope for us to look through. A lot of times, we just sit and talk. I’m only seven or eight years old, but he talks to me like he would anyone; I don’t think my dad ever knew how to talk to kids, so he just never treated me like one. He tells me stories from his childhood—like about the time he and his friends witnessed a UFO—and he also tells me stories from his favorite books and movies. Like an ongoing one about a magic ring. There’s a beautiful woman in it named Galadriel who lives in a forest, and I’m completely infatuated with the idea of her, not least because Dad says he wanted to name me Galadriel but Mom said no. I think it’s a glamorous name, and I probably have some idea that I’d be prettier if I’d been named after this beautiful person, so I’m angry at Mom for not agreeing to it.
Dad tells me a story about time-traveling Nazis (Dean Koontz’s Lightning). He tells me another one about a weird spaceship named Rama (Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama). He tells me about a woman and her son trapped in a car by a rabid Saint Bernard (Stephen King’s Cujo). I know, in a vague way, that these are books he’s read, but I somehow do not make the connection between the stories he’s told me and the tattered paperbacks on his bookshelves.
The GOR books have no covers, and Dad says that’s because he worked at a five-and-dime as a teen and got paid in books that were supposed to be destroyed. The shop’s owner could mail back just the covers for reimbursement, then he was supposed to get rid of the books, but he’d let Dad take whichever ones he wanted first.
I’m as interested in the GOR books as I am in the Frank Frazetta art book, which is to say, not at all. But the others captivate me. Still, I know they are meant for grownups. I’m precocious, and my reading comprehension is well above my age, but I am aware that, even though I can understand things for adults, those things are still not always okay for me to engage with. I’m a cautious kid at heart, hypervigilant, a rule follower.
And yet.
When I am in fifth grade, my father relents and gives me Lightning to read. He seems to think it’s the least harmful of the books on his shelf that I’ve been caught staring at. He knows I love Indiana Jones and that the idea of fighting Nazis—time-traveling ones at that—excites me. “Don’t tell your mother,” Dad says as he hands over the prize.
From there, I’m allowed to read more Koontz (Watchers, The Bad Place), but King is still off the table. We read The Hobbit in school, and Dad offers me The Fellowship of the Ring, but I’m no longer interested. At some point I learned that Galadriel is not in the books very much, and I don’t care about any of the others or their quest. (Well, I’m kind of curious about Gandalf—Dad’s description of his pseudo-ascension captures my imagination a bit, and Shadowfax sounds awesome—but it’s still not enough to motivate me to tackle the dense prose. I felt the same the first time my mother suggested I try Jane Austen.)
But in 1990, a miniseries based on Stephen King’s IT airs, and because Dad wants to watch it, I’m allowed to join him. (My parents were surprisingly permissive when it came to TV, so long as they were there to give me context.) Even with the somewhat anticlimactic ending, my mind is blown, and I’m fixated on the story of these childhood friends who seem almost like superheroes as they fight evil in their small town.
And Dad has the book on his shelf. I know this.
I also know asking to borrow it is futile.
So I steal it instead. But am at least clever enough to plug the gap with another random book (I don’t remember which, probably something from my own shelves). The problem I fail to foresee, because somehow I’ve never noticed, is that Dad keeps his books first grouped by author, then in alphabetical order by title, just like a library. So he immediately notices when IT goes missing, replaced by something that absolutely does not belong.
And since I’m an only child and Mom won’t even touch those books, I have no handy scapegoat or even a likely excuse for why the forbidden fruit has gone missing. Clever, 14-year-old me has “hidden” it in my backpack. I planned to leave it in my school locker but gave in to the temptation to bring it home again to read more before bedtime. My parents are used to me spending hours in my room reading and listening to music, and they don’t think much about what I’m reading. After all, I’m a good kid; I don’t do things I’m not supposed to do, which includes reading books I’m not supposed to read.
Dad knows better than to bring Mom into the loop, so he comes to me first to ask about his book. In this way, my dad is sometimes like an older brother—willing to ally himself with me, if only to keep Mom from having a reason to throw a fit. It doesn’t take much to set her off, and yet the weirdest things do and don’t bother her, so we generally err on the side of assuming anything might be a trigger. What Mom doesn’t know won’t hurt us.
I don’t even try to lie when Dad confronts me. He’s not angry, only concerned. As with TV and movies, he simply wants to make sure I have context for what I’m reading. I assure him I do; I watched the miniseries, after all. But Dad knows things can be scarier and have more impact when you’re reading them. Imagination is wonderful but can also be a real bitch. And mine is renowned (by teachers, parents, friends) for being vivid.
After a discussion, he tells me again what he said when he handed over Lightning: “Don’t let your mother know.”
From there, I work my way through a number of King’s books: The Dead Zone, The Shining, Misery, ‘Salem’s Lot… Dad has most of them, and the others I smuggle home from the library. I start in on Anne Rice as well. And the Dune series. I drop Koontz right around the time Hideaway comes out; that’s the last book of his I can recall reading. I still read the occasional book by King, but I’m pretty selective. And, alas, Anne Rice has passed away. I did try to read Prince Lestat but couldn’t get through it, sadly.
Some of my taste in books I inherited from my best friend’s mother Lynn. She introduced me to Shakespeare, and to the Plantagenets and Tudors in general. Also to Agatha Christie and Victoria Holt. I had been allowed to read Regency romances of the kind put out by Harlequin and Zebra—the sorts of books that were vaguely Austenesque and chaste; Marion Chesney was a favorite—but Gothic romance was something else. Rebecca entered the picture after Lynn told me about the movie Laura and how it helped inspire Twin Peaks. I went on to enjoy The Turn of the Screw and the movie The Innocents. And Lynn did give me my first Victoria Holt novel: Seven for a Secret. Which prompted me to go back and read as many others of hers as I could find. And then Philippa Carr and Sara Hylton. Anything British and atmospheric, really. If it was also “historical,” all the better.
And, not to count my own mother totally out, she did introduce me to the Travis McGee books by John D. MacDonald. Though that came about, in part, because Jimmy Buffett mentions them in the song “Incommunicado,” and I was raised as a Parrot Head. In fact, music had a huge impact on my childhood, but that’s another chapter.