Unless there’s something you want to know, in which case you came to the right place.
By Susan Anspach • Illustration by Matt Mignanelli
I’m writing this a little shy of two months pregnant. By the time it gets published, I’ll be past three months, the mark after which it’s generally considered safe to share the news. In the meantime, my husband and I have been mulling it over, tasting the words, listing first names and speculating due dates—essentially by ourselves, which is not in my nature. It’s not eating me up, exactly, but it’s made for a few stiff Skype calls with my parents, who ask what’s happening in my life and to whom I have to give flat answers about what I’m cooking for dinner or what television series is queued on our Apple TV.
I’m not keen on secrets. I’m not, customarily, a secretive person. It comes, I think, with being a poor liar. If I sense the oncoming accusation of a lie, my face splits into a lunatic grin, even when I have nothing to hide. I look back at secrets I one time thought I had—crushes, thin fibs to cover oversleeping or not having read for class—with absolute certainty I never fooled anyone. It’s humiliating. I’m always better off with the truth.
Almost always. There are some things you’re expected to keep secret or lie about if it’s only a little while or a little lie. Like the baby. Like how much wine you drink, if your doctor asks. Preparing to leave my first job and quietly interviewing around for a second made me feel awful and fishy and vaguely knowledgeable on chronic blood disorders that could account for four doctor’s appointments in three weeks. I swore to myself I would never do it again, and I didn’t: I left my second job for a master’s degree, not before giving my supervisor a year and a half’s notice.
An incident years and years before sticks out in my mind. I must have been about 12, on the walk home from school with a friend and her mother. I don’t know how the subject came up, but I remember telling my friend’s mom I didn’t have any secrets and her shooting me a dark look, saying that if that were the case, I had a lot to learn. More than likely she was referring to indiscretions, not secrets, but that wasn’t the language we were using at the time. My brain immediately went to work on possible victims of blackmail and unsolved murders having suffered at the hands of Mrs. Waller, who was wiry and no-nonsense and not at all hard to picture in the role of a jewel thief. She threw a mean Halloween party, that Mrs. Waller. There’d always been a dark side.
What blew me away was her broader implication: That not only she, but most people are carrying around loads of secrets.
It still blows me away. I worked for a while as a college academic advisor, a job where if there was one thing you could bet on, it was a sky-high spike in dead grandparents the days before finals week. Students lie so much. They are steeped in secrets and deceit. It’s a pleasure for them because they think they’re so good at it. My own college is infamous for its many secret societies, none of which served any purpose beyond smearing its logo across major historical works of architecture. It was supposed to symbolize egoism, I think. Or graffiti.
I don’t have a symbol. I am an open person. I am an untrustworthy one.
When a friend of ours was making plans to propose to his girlfriend, he and my husband plied me with red herrings about when and how he would do it, thinking I’d leak something and mislead her. That is, my handling of secrets is so clumsy that when someone tells me one, there’s a chance they’re doing it with the hope I’ll spill the beans. When I didn’t, they weren’t happy with me.
I have rotten luck. This year, I bought my husband ski lessons for his birthday—then the school called him about them, ruining the surprise. Last year, I spent two months organizing a party he didn’t know about until an oblivious unwanted guest invited herself—so very unwanted that I was forced to come clean so we could brainstorm a way to give her the slip. At the party, he pretended to be surprised anyway, and the genius of our joint duplicity must have blown the whole system because we’re pretty sure we fooled everybody.
I can’t even keep secrets from myself. There was no way I was going to wait to learn the sex of our firstborn, and there’s no way I’m going to the second time, either. Sometimes I think it would be fun to be cute and break open a blue- or pink-stuffed piñata in the backyard when we get home, but my husband would peek at the envelope and I’d strangle him for it in the car. And I need him on my team. Our “big” secret with the first baby was his withheld first name. It was exhausting to keep from my mother, who sent weekly emails that didn’t ask how I was feeling or sleeping but alternated, always in a soaring single column, between lists of suggestions and guesses.
Families are the cyclonic storm systems of secrets. For a long time, I didn’t know mine had any because when one of them’s so big and so close, it of course takes longer to see it. I still don’t have a good grip on our secrets, other than knowing we have them, jumbled up in a mess of far-flung speculation and conspiracy. On my dad’s side, we’re Dutch. On my mom’s side, we’re a question mark. As in, possibly Welsh? Maybe Transylvanian? I’m not naming regions at random. Those are the options repeatedly bandied about—two places that, so far as I can tell, are linked only by a proclivity for vague mysticism and individual tourism industries short of booming. You don’t end up in Transylvania by accident. And if someone, such as my maternal great-grandfather, wanted to obscure his family history on purpose, there’d be no place better for it than the northern Romanian backwoods or a country that still believes in lake monsters.
I don’t hold it against him. People are complicated. So are their motives, their secrets. My great-grandfather could be sparing us something we don’t want to know. I may owe him my peace of mind, or I may owe it to a different person entirely, though I’ll never know so long as they keep their lips sealed. The secret, I’m coming to find, to my own happiness? A lot of times I’m better off in the dark.
Over the phone last week, my mother mentioned that she spotted Mrs. Waller, working, she thought, at a public library in Manassas. It struck my mom, who’s retired, because she’s been considering various part-time jobs for herself. She said she didn’t think she could ever work at the library, though, because she would get bored checking out and re-shelving books.
I don’t know, I told her. I could work at a library. I’ve always liked reading, and organization, and quiet. I could think of worse ways to spend eight hours a day. You’d have time to yourself. To order your thoughts. Little lies, truths, or big ones. Send them out in the world. Shelve them away. Keep your secrets. Keep mine. I have one month to go and nothing to hide.
@CitySprawlNVMag confesses everything on Twitter.
(April 2015)