I Need To Learn To Lie Better

Apr 5

My grandmother was the Barnum & Bailey of liars. I could hear her shaking her head after I told Frederick

what I really thought about his grandmother who had waited thirteen lucky years for her guerrilla fiancé

his grandfather, while he was hiding out in the jungle, coming dangerously close to the catastrophe of her own spinsterhood

She must have had some idea what he would have done to her if she hadn’t. I still say he ought to have known better

since I had already shown my hand when he told us about his uncle driving backwards through the Amazon

for seven hours. At night. He had just learned, Frederick told us, that my aunt, his fiancée, was ill, and his car

was stuck in reverse. But when he got there it turned out she had nothing more than a head cold. That reminds me

of the one about the car trying to back out of the multistory garage: There’s an exit, the attendant shouted

pointing to the signs. I know, the car cried back, but that’s not the same thing! If you are facing the ocean

my grand equivocator of a grandmother once said to me—we were on our way to San Francisco together

in the early years of her widowhood and she was contemplating the frozen sea of silent clouds out her window like an aerialist

gauging her leap into the arms of the approaching trapezist—the waves can’t knock you down you while you’re not looking

But if you don’t want to be knocked down by the big waves, I reasoned, you can just step back up onto dry land

Ah, she said, you were always too smart for me, and she squeezed my hand in the way that meant I was her favorite

Liane Strauss

The You You Were