Let's Never Talk About This Again

The most important room in my childhood home was covered in ducks; a first-floor den that we called the Duck Room.

I worked in branding for a while, coming up with names for products and start-ups and buildings, and there was one guy at my company who would get so frustrated during brainstorming sessions that he would finally yell, "Call it what it is! Why are we fucking around with this, guys? We should just call it what it is!" Of course, if we always called things what they were, the world would be full of Overhyped Pink Wines, and I Can Believe It's Not Butters, and Sneakers for Elves at Raves.

But in this case, the "Duck Room" captures it perfectly. The room had wallpaper with a mallard pattern that was as tasteful a mallard pattern as a mallard pattern could be. I remember the paper as red, but my mom insists it was brown. Armchairs were upholstered with another tasteful duck pattern that Mom and I both agree was yellow. Our duck-shaped phone had a curly black cord extruding uncomfortably from her fine-feathered bottom. It was all pretty classy for the mid-1980s.

The Duck Room was important because it was the nerve center of our house: part media library, part family archives, where we kept all of our games, records, VHS tapes, photo albums, and books. Our TV was in there, and our VCR, and a convertible "flip chair" that was just wide enough for me and Daniel to cuddle up on together when our family settled in to watch a show or movie. Mom usually took the couch, and Dad liked the armchair closest to the TV, just in case a racy scene came on and he had to spring into action, changing the channel or jabbing at the fast-forward button on the VCR. The Duck Room was my favorite place in the house.

It was also where my image of my dad changed forever. Alterman, forever altered, man.

I'll show myself out.

The room had two floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases that flanked a sliding glass door leading out to our deck, where our three cats that I always forget about liked to sleep in the sun. I always forget about them because they were outdoor cats, and belonged to the woods, and knew that they were better than us. Their names were China, Tasha, and Sunday, and sometimes my dad would catch a glimpse of one of them and start singing "Memory," the only song he could stand from the Broadway musical Cats.

The built-ins had storage cabinets at the base, and those jutted out far enough that there was room for me or Daniel to stand on top of them when we wanted something from a shelf. I could reach every shelf except the top one. It was an easy climb, and from there we could explore a hodgepodge of cookbooks, novels, storybooks, and random artifacts from our parents' lives before they were our parents: like newspaper clippings, their high school yearbooks, an invitation from First Lady Rosalynn Carter that requested the pleasure of my father's company at some dinner for employees of senior citizen–related publications, which, at one point in his life, he was.

I loved the yearbooks, loved seeing the kinds of kids my parents had been. My teenage mom looked like a young Penelope Cruz with a Jackie Kennedy hairdo. There are photos of her throughout, some where she'd posed with her choirs and clubs, and one candid from a fancy-looking dance, where she looks stunning but uncomfortable. Mom sang soprano with the madrigal singers, and even went to All-State one year. Above her class portrait it reads Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure.

Dad's yearbook was called The Pennridge High School Pennant. He's wearing thick Buddy Holly glasses in his class portrait, and above it reads Gift of self-expression…quotable…way out humor…strong convictions…irrepressible.

Even on my tiptoes on top of the cabinet, I couldn't reach higher than the second-highest shelf, but that was fine. I kept most of my own books in my bedroom, and never really needed anything from the Duck Room, except my own cookbooks, and a rainbow-colored set of kids' encyclopedias called The Childcraft How and Why Library. It was a collection of a dozen or so volumes like Mathemagic, which combined arithmetic lessons with puzzles, games, and stories, including the tale of a little boy named Milo, who travels to a magical world and meets a friendly human-like shape with twelve faces: the Dodecahedron. Each face showed a different expression, and when his mood changed, they would shuffle around. I loved this little creature, and the idea that you could have ever-changing moods all over your body, like a blush in your armpit, or a frown on your knee. I read and reread the Dodecahedron's story for years before I found out that it was an excerpt from the fantasy novel The Phantom Tollbooth.

Instead of being excited that there was so much more to Milo's story, I was gutted! What do you mean, my favorite story was just one small part of another story? This whole time I could have been reading about bigger adventures, with more wonderful creatures? I felt cheated, like I'd missed out on years of opportunities to develop a deeper and more complete connection with something I loved. It made me wonder what else I was missing out on.

I'd already suspected that there was a wide, wild world beyond the Duck Room. Even though my own shelves were stocked with G-rated material, I had a few friends who were allowed to see PG-rated movies, without their parents present for guidance. That blew my mind. And made me jealous.

Out of curiosity, or maybe defiance, or maybe even in an act of quiet mutiny, I began to snoop through my parents' shelves and drawers when they weren't paying attention, just to see if, like Mathemagic, they were holding anything back from me, too.

I didn't find anything interesting, not on purpose. One humdrum Saturday, while my parents were at the grocery store, I scaled the Duck Room bookcase to grab my copy of The Sesame Street Cookbook, so Mom and I could make Snuffle Loaf in a Spaghetti Nest together for dinner.

While I was up there, I noticed that I was finally tall enough to reach the top shelf. A whole new trove of goodies to explore.

First I found a fancy wooden book that wasn't a book at all, but a blue-velvet-lined case containing a few intricately carved tobacco pipes. Next, a small red book with pages that crackled with age. My mom's teenage diary. I did a quick flip through; she mostly wrote about some guy who she wanted to take her skiing. Then, they went skiing.

Way in the corner of the shelf, I found a stash of tall, thin paperbacks packed tightly together—and, behind them, there were a few more, hidden from plain sight. I crammed my fingers between two spines so I could wiggle one of the books out of the sardined pack.

There was an orange cartoon cat—sort of a poor man's Garfield—on the cover. She was scraggly and orange, with heavy pink eyelids and softly floppy whiskers that reminded me of overcooked spaghetti. The cat sat, human-style, leaning on her elbows in front of a checkerboard, looking about as interested in it as our snooty cats were in us. It was called Games You Can Play with Your Pussy.

A book about games! I loved games! Why hadn't I seen it before? Why was it shoved out of reach?

I cracked Games You Can Play with Your Pussy open and found that it was a chapter book, divided into sections like "How to Clean Your Pussy," "How to Feed Your Pussy," and "Nursing a Sick Pussy." That one begins: Nothing looks quite so sad as a sick pussy. The spunk, the vitality, the old get-up-and-go have all got up and gone.

But…there weren't any games in this game book. And the how-to chapters didn't contain any actual grooming or feeding information. I knew that my cats disdainfully licked themselves clean and ate bowls of colorful, crunchy bits shaped like tiny drumsticks and three-leaf clovers with no stems.

I stuck my fingers back into the pack and wiggled a few more books out. There was So You've Got a Fat Pussy!, with a cartoon cover cat that looked like it had eaten the first one. How to Pick Up Men featured a blond woman in a slinky dress. A man in a green suit sat in her lap—a man sitting in a lady's lap?! Hilarious! And two other men in the background, looking askance.

It took a little effort to wiggle out the hidden books, but I finally managed to get a few loose. They had names like The Official Italian Sex Manual, Sex Manual for People over 30, and The Jewish Sex Manual. And there was one with a very eye-catching cover, called Bridget's Sexual Fantasies.

I'd never heard the word "sexual" before, but I did love the Disney movie Fantasia.

On the cover of Bridget's Sexual Fantasies was a photograph of a large, topless woman with ripe apple cheeks and juicy watermelon breasts, holding a braided rope and some kind of lacy belt. She looked up at something, or someone, beyond the camera. She looked happy.

Something below my stomach gave a little ping! Cautiously, I opened the book. It was full of photos of the same large woman, the "Bridget" of the title, spilling out of different skimpy costumes, posing with different smiling men. As I flipped through the pages, I found many more words I didn't recognize. "Bondage." "Voyeurism." "Orgy." One unfamiliar term, "Oral Sex," was at the top of a story about lollipops. I started to read it, but then I heard the garage door rumble, announcing my parents' return, so I hurried to shove the books back into their place on the top shelf. My father got mad whenever we messed with his stuff, and based on how the books were shelved, I got the feeling that I wasn't supposed to be looking at them.

As I hurried to put everything back into what I hoped was the same order I'd found it in, some familiar words caught my eye. More precisely, a familiar name.

The first page of Games You Can Play with Your Pussy said, "by Ira Alterman."

That couldn't be right.

Ira Alterman. That's my father's name.

I knew I was seconds away from being caught red-handed, but I couldn't resist checking the title pages of the other books: So You've Got a Fat Pussy!, by Ira Alterman. How to Pick Up Men, by Ira Alterman. Bridget's Sexual Fantasies, as told to Ira Alterman.

The ping! below my stomach turned into a brick. What. The. H-e-double hockey sticks?

There was barely time to process this fresh and confusing information before I heard a noise in the hallway and realized that—oh no!—someone was coming. I jammed those books back into place as fast as I could, jumped down from the cabinet, and landed with an ungraceful THUD just as Dad appeared in the doorway.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

For a second I thought about asking Dad about these confusing books, but I didn't want to get in trouble for touching his things. For now, I'd pretend I hadn't seen them.

"Just getting my cookbook," I said, and quickly grabbed The Sesame Street Cookbook from its familiar place on the shelf. "And, um, looking at your yearbook."

"Ha! That old thing," Dad said. "Have I ever told you about the time I had to play the piano in a jazz band at a talent show? It was last-minute. I didn't even play the piano, but I had to figure it out as I went. They call that 'out-on-a-limb-provisation.'"

And then we took The Sesame Street Cookbook into the kitchen, and Mom helped me shape a lump of ground meat into the suggestion of a Snuffleupagus. The whole time, questions about the books tumbled around in my head, and I wasn't sure how to ask them, or even if I should.

So, I didn't. I kept everything I knew and wondered about these strange books to myself. For the next twenty-five years.