Shadow Play

Their house was filled with books that no one read, a piano that nobody played, and paintings that nobody looked at. There was a dog that no one loved and a white picket fence that kept nobody out and held no one in. It was shadow play—all the right shapes but no substance. This poster picture of the American Dream was like a set, and they were only actors.

Dad had never seen a bootstrap, and if he had, he wouldn’t have known what to do with it, let alone complete the unfinished metaphor. Mom had come from middle-aged money, and they’d married young. Vanity, property, stability.

Their days were filled with conspicuous leisure and consumption, and everything was completely comfortable. Though they’d lived there for years, the house and its contents looked brand new. Their lives were kept clean and routine, and everything was in order. And everyone was in order. The system worked. There was to be no more revolution because they had arrived. Liberty, equality, fixity.

Each novel statement was made with a nervous “ha-ha” that sputtered out at the end, diluting its personality. This laugh-like sound that was more of a whimper was indicative of their nature—never quite confident in what they said or whether such an individual utterance would disrupt the well-oiled social mechanism. Better to laugh it off than to stand out. Certainty, conformity, ubiquity.

They did what they were supposed to do. Socialization materialized in the form of the block party or backyard barbeque in accordance with convention, a prescribed communal gesture and a display of civilization. The warmth and smells of springtime passed by them unacknowledged. They compared notes on living with the neighbors like kids circulating copied answers in class. And in a unison fostered by falsified affinity, they cringed into smiles that fooled all and none. So they floundered in spontaneous human interaction until they could draw down the blinds and retreat to their controlled atmospheres of televisioned bedrooms and radioed silences.

When news of distant trouble came on, they turned off the tube. A mindless “just awful” smoothed out the ripples, and a return to reading “Sports” and “Style” restored order quickly. The company misery required would not be found in them. They had no room for sadness. Beauty and felicity were messy and inutile, and love a waste of time. So, they rejected these forms of selfish greed. The very notion of the soul had become quaint.

Their secure society was to live on forever, and the inertia of safety allowed them to carry on in this way, unconcerned.

The characters were flat, and there was no climax. Of course, there was some ceremony in  traditional acknowledgment of life as generations eased in and faded out quietly like so many dusks and dawns. When they were born, they were enveloped in the fold without song and dance.

And at their funerals nobody cried because they didn’t know how.

—Columnist Megan E. McKenzie can be reached at mckenzie@fas.harvard.edu.