CNF: The Art of Lying

by Nancy Connors

 

[Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the “Topical” series, with each piece solely submitted to and chosen by the Final Reader Pietra Dunmore.]

 

My father was a world-class liar. He was a master of the fun lie, the breezy lie, the casual lie that blew right into you because you wanted so much to believe it. Most of his lies were about his childhood: he was a rich little boy; his grandfather owned a collar factory in Troy, NY; he owned a pony; he had an IQ of 186; he was invited to be on a kids’ quiz show that broadcast nationwide on the radio, but his parents wouldn’t let him…and on and on. Nothing provable, all insubstantial as air. My two sisters and I were both charmed and envious. We believed everything, even when our mother would interrupt with a weary, “Oh, John, stop.”

Much later, I understood that my father lied to create a better childhood for himself. The real one had been dismal, filled with loss and casual cruelty. So his grandfather, a train engineer, became a captain of industry. His mother, who worked as a secretary, was transformed into a newspaper illustrator. In truth, he was – as they used to say in the tight Irish community of Albany – a bastard, born to his mother out of wedlock, a boy who didn’t know until he was 11 that the old man they used to visit on Sundays was his father.

When I was about ten, my father began lying about all sorts of other things: where he disappeared to on the nights he didn’t come home; where the money went; why he suddenly got fired. When I got to be 11 or so, I saw that almost none of what our father told us was true. I felt unsettled, listening to him, like I was being played for a fool. Later, I became cynical, disbelieving everything, so that when he did tell the truth, I shrugged it off.

Still, it was seductive, all that lying. When I was in high school, I tried it out for myself. And I loved it. I loved the rush of getting away with it and the pleasure of creating a new, more exciting past for myself. A lot of my lies revolved around Florida, where we had lived until we moved to staid, grey Chicago. My lies centered on that other, better life: I knew how to surf and had had a near miss with a shark; we had owned two horses; I’d won ribbons for my riding, but they got lost in the move. My lies gathered people around me, and I became addicted to building these air castles and to being – if only for a few moments – the center of attention.

Later I found out that lying could also let me do what I wanted to do, even when I knew it was wrong. In high school, this meant lying about going to the public library night after night when I was really sunk deep in a red booth at the local diner with my boyfriend or lying on the floor in my friend Amanda’s bedroom, smoking pot and listening to the White Album.

I finally gave up my lying ways when I got to college. Suddenly I was focused on the future, not the past, and on who I was going to become, not who I was. I did try lying a couple of times at parties until one night an older student, having listened to some airy nonsense from me, simply raised one eyebrow and said, “Oh, really?” and I was shamed enough to leave the party.

We’ve just lived through an era of the big lie, the gale-force lie that many people wanted so badly to believe: that only one man (hugely successful in business, all-seeing, a master strategist) could save us from American Carnage: the suppurating evil that lurks among us (immigrants, the radical left, or – and I still marvel at this one – an international ring of baby eaters). It was a lie that convinced nearly half of U.S. voters, up until January 6. The storming of the Capitol blew in a wind cold enough and strong enough to knock down the creaking remnants of his administration. People saw the pictures. They saw the videos. And they stopped believing. Enough people, anyhow. Within 48 hours, the platforms for his lies were yanked from under him, and his lies (and he himself) simply blew out of our lives. Or nearly. Because that’s the problem with lies: even when they appear to be gone, they’re still there, in the air, whispered around, luring us yet again into doubting the truth, and driving us to live in a weird, dissociative state of perpetual uncertainty.

My father never stopped lying, even – especially — to himself. After decades of drinking, smoking and putting on weight, he convinced himself he was still in Marine Corps shape, as fit as he’d been at 21. One day, after months of inactivity, he played an intense tennis match and suffered a massive heart attack on the court. He was 47. In the end, his lying killed him.

 

Nancy Connors is a poet and fiction and non-fiction writer whose work has appeared in Stonecoast Review, failbetter, Midwest Poetry Review and Passager, among others. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.

 

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