school, and even beyond.
In contrast to Anthony’s mother, his father Jack took a more live-and-let-live, hands-off approach. Jack’s own father, a West Virginia coal miner, had been a tough man whose exchanges with his children included belts, stakes, and whatever else he could get his hands on. Jack didn’t want to raise his sons that way: “I’d had enough of that with my father. I’m not a yeller. I’m the level-headed guy, the peacekeeper.” Or as Sherry puts it, “Jack was always the diplomat, whereas I don’t give a shit.6” Having experienced plenty of hooliganism and police run-ins in his youth (he enlisted in the military as a way to keep out of trouble), Jack never felt Anthony was a problem child or troublemaker; he saw him rather as a “mischievous instigator” who merely required a calm talking-to now and then. Perhaps because the dominating presence of their mother eclipsed Jack’s more laid-back approach, the boys at times felt their father could be a detached, even absent figure. But they would also later come to realize that the trauma from his thirteen months in Vietnam had led to depression, anger, and anxiety that unraveled his first marriage and caused him difficulties within the family structure for years to come.
Whatever tunnels Jack had to work through, he seems to have emerged to a place of peace and acceptance. His Southern roots come through in his easygoing manner and lilting speech, whose musical cadence, deep timbre, and lullabyish geniality would, one assumes, be equally effective in coaxing both infants and women to bed. He’s a man of few but well-chosen words, delivering them in a way that makes even a mundane remark sound wise and meaningful. When I first visited the Ervin household, Jack motioned me into the kitchen, where he set before me a tumbler and a bottle of twelve-year-old Scotch that he saved for rare occasions. Then he motioned to the bottle. “Pour your own trouble, son.”
* * *
Before tribal societies went the way of the dodo, initiatory rites of passage under male guidance existed for young men as a ritualized way of severing their dependence on their mothers: the combination of, say, peyote and desert, was a method of forcing the teens to cope with physical and psychological hardship so that they might return to the tribe no longer as children but men. Such ventures into the wilderness would probably not jibe with Sherry’s pedagogical philosophy. She once told one of Anthony’s college girlfriends that she needed to be more involved in managing him because he required controls and parameters.
At one point during my visit, Sherry asked Anthony if he’d taken a nap. When he said it was none of her business, she retorted: “Always my business, because I’m your mother.” He was thirty-two at the time. Their exchanges often resemble those of a curmudgeonly couple, where each one anticipates the other’s responses and then mulishly digs in and refuses to budge, all the while maintaining the resigned calm that comes from the recognition that life cannot be otherwise. For example:
—Nap, Anthony. Listen to your mother.
—Don’t tell me what to do.
—I’ll always tell you what to do
—Don’t tell me what to do.
—I’ll always tell you what to do.
—Don’t tell me what to do.
For Sherry, the duties of motherhood are eternal, beyond the ken of time’s passage. When I asked if she felt that her Big Mother–style monitoring and the draconian reins she maintained over Anthony through his childhood and teen years were necessary, she scoffed: “For Anthony? Absolutely! Good grief, are you kidding? If he had parents that didn’t give a shit and fed him McDonald’s and KFC and left him on his own devices, he would have been the kid in jail. Absolutely.”
Sherry equates discipline with care: her involvement in her son’s life is not control but a fundamental and necessary expression of love, as essential as feeding him real food (she repeatedly points out that she never fed her sons fast food or pseudo-food like bologna). Cracking down on misbehavior is as much an expression of proper child-rearing as is preparing nutritious food. And a ferocious protectiveness accompanied that discipline. Woe befall those who criticize her sons. She refers to Anthony’s elementary school principal as a “hardnose” who presided under the delusion that Anthony was a juvenile delinquent. When his club coach at Canyons Aquatic Club prefaced Anthony’s “Swimmer of the Year” award at the banquet by saying that at best it should have been shared with another swimmer, Sherry bristled: “Jack had to hold me back in the chair. I thought I was going to run up on the stage and pop him one.” To this day, she hasn’t forgotten the two words at best: “I hold a grudge. I don’t forgive and I don’t forget.”
Yet Sherry’s brusque and guarded exterior belies a generous, doting, and self-sacrificing spirit. She’s always worked unceasingly in service of her children, at times holding multiple part-time jobs, while also cooking, cleaning, and ferrying her sons to and from swim practices. When turtles stray up to her house from the nearby pond, she picks them up and returns them to their watering hole. When her neighbors moved and abandoned their cat like undesirable furniture left curbside, she took the feline in. The pain of the disadvantaged and vulnerable distress and activate her at a primal level.
“I’m not very trusting from being burned too many times,” she once told me, and something in her tone made me realize that whatever her childhood details may be, my youth was a swaddled pampering in comparison. Her Cerberean posturings and iron grip over her sons, like that iron fence she once built around the pool, seem to stem more from her fear of being a neglectful parent than from the actual dangers of the world.
On my last visit, shortly before I left, Sherry leaned in toward me: “Not to threaten you, but if you harm my son through this book, either consciously or indirectly, I will hurt you.”(It wasn’t the first warning. On my previous visit, as I left, she said, “Be nice, or I’ll come after you. Even if I’m dead, I will hunt you down.”)
“Can I quote you on that?”
“Absolutely.”
She then invited me to join them for Thanksgiving and sent me off with a hug and a sandwich for the plane. When I later declined her invite, explaining by e-mail that my mother would have my head if I didn’t spend the holiday with my parents, she simply replied, “I approve.”
The others are so much bigger than me. This is Junior Olympics. Like Olympics for kids. Maybe one day I’ll go to the real Olympics.
I’m so nervous. If my time is in the top eight of all the backstrokers then I make finals. And then, no matter what, I get a medal. I’ve never won a medal before. But maybe not this year because I’m swimming now with the big kids, the nine- and ten-year-olds. I’m the only eight-year-old racing them.
It’s bright and loud with cheering. I’m nervous. I hear Mom yelling, “Go, Anthony!”
Phweeee: the whistle.
I jump into the water. I’m so nervous. I turn and face the wall and grab the handles.
Phweeee. “Take your marks.”
Don’t let the feet slip.
Beep! My feet stick to the wall and I shoot backward.
I kick hard and swing my arms as fast as I can. They made a new rule that you don’t have to touch the wall with
