Playing Favorites
A re-reading of an old memory
I’m about eight years old and my sisters and I are swarming my father. He sits in one of the bentwood chairs in our kitchen on Riverside Drive in New York City. We seem over-excited, bouncing around and talking over each other.
“Who do you like best? Who? Who’s your favorite?!”
“I love you all equally.”
“Yeah, but who, who, who!?!”
That’s how I remember it. The three of us pulling on his arms, circling the chair as he sat there. I knew it was me. I was the favorite and I wanted him to admit it. My younger sisters were so irritating. And I knew he wouldn’t say. I was old enough to know that parents never admitted they had a favorite.
“Who, who, who?!”
“Well, right now I guess it’s Vicky.”
The feeling was unsettling enough for me to embalm the memory. I was the favorite. I knew it. I won. And I felt awful. Instantly, I felt terrible for my sisters. I don’t remember how they responded. Maybe they don’t even remember this. Maybe I even made it up. It has the quality of a recurring dream. But for me there was something else in the mix: I kind of knew, even then, that my father was behaving badly. It’s one of my first awarenesses of that—among many to come. He shouldn’t have said that. He was self-centered and thoughtless, and said and did things that hurt others. His wonderful ability to live in the moment (and damn the consequences) had consequences. It was the beginning of an ending.
Now, when I reread that scene from the memoir about my father’s art career, I read it differently. My father said “right now,” Vicky is my favorite. Instead of guilt that I eclipsed my sisters with my father, I feel the anxiety of those words “right now.” I thought that whole memory might be invented, but when I belatedly read through the artifacts of my own childhood I found a reference to it in 1976, when it was already a memory: “I remember once when we asked Dad who he liked best*, and after some hesitation he said, ‘Vicky.’” The asterisk was inserted later, in fat blue marker, and at the bottom of the page it says “*at the moment” (I was already a scholar, inserting marginalia!). Clearly, I knew his preference could pass; my victory (I’m Victoria, the winner) was temporary and conditional.
I knew all too well from my parents’ divorce that people could be pitched out of the family boat. That was the expression my mother once used, quoting a friend of hers who had a severely disabled son. The friend cared for him at home, though that was sometimes difficult for the whole family, because “no one gets thrown out of the boat.” The wording made a big impression on me, with its evocation of the wildness outside the small, secure lifeboat.
While I was working on this memoir my husband, our elder child, and I all stumbled on the 1955 film of Guys and Dolls on television and I realized I had somehow never seen the whole thing. We watched it through, and that child, an adult living at home with us, loved it. She’s a big fan of Michael Kidd’s choreography from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (a film she knows by heart) and loved the singing and dancing. For me, the film was an intensive immersion in mid-1950s values. We were all delighted by the rousing number “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat,” when gambler Nicely Nicely Johnson imagines he’s traveling over water to heaven and his sins keep getting in his way. The rest of the people on the boat (the gamblers in the play’s setting but also a general public) tell him to “sit down, sit down, sit down!” because he’s rocking their boat. It’s delightful, even though its message of conformity and docility is perfect for its time.
Frank Loesser wrote the music and lyrics for the 1950 Broadway premiere and Stubby Kaye performed it in that production and on film, as the House Committee on Un-American Activities Committee was policing the art and theater worlds for communists and homosexuals. Stubby stands, narrating his dream, and the chorus shouts him down. My father too was told by his culture to sit down and not rock the boat. So he sat. The Guys and Dolls song is what’s called an 11 o’clock number, a show-stopping tune that comes near the end of the musical, and reveals a turn in the plot that prepares the audience for an ending. Guys and Dolls resolves by reintegrating the gamblers back into the boat. It ends with a conventional display: the double wedding that merges the bad guys with their good dolls.
What connects these stories? The fear and consequences of being seen, which can be dramatic. My father left the family boat in 1970. As a child I wasn’t sure why, so I worried it might happen to me too.
I haven’t shared a writing exercise in a long time. I’m not sure if they are useful, but here you go— in case.
Writing Exercise: Set aside chronological time, for a moment, and make an outline of your memoir or personal essay in emotional order. Notice what emotions appear first and what organically follows from them. Then look at your outline and see how it might reveal a narrative structure for your writing.
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Victoria, what a piercingly vivid moment between your father and your sisters. Parents never want to admit they have a favorite child, and kids are certain that they do. Kids also have a knack for hearing what they want or expect to hear, and tuning out the rest, the “at this moment.” Our feelings toward others shift from moment to moment, a tough idea for kids to understand.
I am fascinated by sibling relationships and have seen some interesting research on the impact of parental favoritism. It hurts the perceived favorite too, and it casts a long shadow on sibling bonds between grownups.
This is a moving and poignant essay, Victoria. I guess the young Victoria was experimenting with rocking the boat by insisting on an answer to her question?