On Being Late and Lying

and the effects of marriage

At the corner of West End Lane and Blackburn Road, there’s the surprise of sunlight, the hangover of puddles, people in raincoats hunched like slow moving hedges, and I’m crafting my fourth excuse for what has made me late.

From my mother, among other things, I get a tendency for tardiness and a tendency for lying. 

As a kid, I was the debris in a teacher’s final sweep of the pick up zone. Sitting there each afternoon, I fantasized that my mom was baking cookies for my arrival, or she’d been in a horrible car accident on her way to get me. These were the only acceptable excuses. When she showed up intact, without blood or flour on her hands, I’d stop listening to the excuse. 

Unfortunately, I’ve inherited my lateness from both sides which genetically means I’m almost unrectifiable. There’s a recklessness to my family’s lateness, too. My dad and I were headed to JFK on the Hutchinson River Turnpike in traffic, beginning our father-daughter trip to Memphis, when I looked up at a plane and wondered if it was our flight. The timing was right: ours had taken off four minutes ago. My father still misses more flights than he makes.

Shortly after my husband and I started dating, we planned a trip to Nova Scotia with my parents. I was running late and when we got to the airport, we sprinted to make our flight but as we got to the gate, they’d just closed the doors. Ben was sweating, mortified. But my parents, by some miracle on time, were seated in the empty waiting area smiling. “Well, let’s go make dinner together, and we’ll come back for the morning flight!”

My maternal grandmother gave birth to her third child in an elevator, still wearing galoshes, a full length fur coat, and a hat with the feather bobbing in her face. 

We are a long line of late people.

But her refusal to understand clocks also meant if I had a problem, my mom dropped everything, poured us cups of tea, and sat until I’d talked it out and out and out. Her future plans be damned, she’d wait until I was laughing about that failed Latin test, that party I wasn’t invited to, that stupid comment in front of that kid I liked. 

My excuses for tardiness are most often lies. It comes from a belief that the people and circumstances I’m with right now deserve my time, and it is a refusal to abide by time. It’s a dismissal of what’s to come and a hypervigilant attention to this person, this idea, this experience happening now. Like my mom, I love to linger.

If I am meeting you, I will not be on time. But when I am with you, I will be late for anything. 

My husband, who comes from a family who shows up far too early for all flights, doesn’t understand my lateness or my lies. He watches me on the phone, spinning mistruths about why I’ll be late or absent, rolls his eyes. He is chronically honest in the way that I am chronically not. At our wedding, one of his childhood friends told the story of walking home from a convenience shop and revealing to Ben that he’d shoplifted a piece of candy. Ben said nothing, but crossed the road to walk on the other side. There’s Puritan in his bloodline. There’s Irish and French in mine.

My lying used to incense him, a moral defect in the star he’d hitched his life to. But as in most things marriage, after 14 years, it’s a creaky annoyance he comes to expect. I like to think my husband has come a long way, sharing not just a side of the street but now a bed with an immedicable liar. 

The world’s first essayist, Montaigne, wrote two essays about lies: “Of liars” and “On Giving the Lie”. He’s not a fan of lying and he’s scoldy at times about my lot: lies “grow with the child. And once the tongue has been put on the wrong track, it cannot be called back without amazing difficulty.” 

He speaks with relish about liars caught, those “fashioning their words only to suit the affairs they are negotiating and to please the great to whom they are speaking,” and for this, “they are willing to enslave their honor and their conscience.”

Montaigne notes that the truth has one face, a lie has thousands. And I remember some of my own, like hydra sprouting heads, the lie seeming to take a life of its own, out of my hands. 

I’ve been caught in a lie, many times. Those of us who lie enough will always get caught. And it’s got its own series of sensations, this caughtness. Like swallowing a piece of hair, like smelling of the dead mouse under floorboards, like the midnight list of what you haven’t done. And yet, despite the shame, the stench, the gagging, there’s a desire to double-down on my lie. To make it somehow true. 

In conversation this week, someone reminded me of the etymology of essay in French: it means “an attempt”, “a try”¹. And I am trying here, to ask forgiveness and to explain my reasons for my lies, for my lateness. Two objectives that should never go together, like “I’m sorry I cheated but here are my reasons” or “I’m sorry I was racist but let me tell you why…”  But sometimes defensive reasoning needs to be the precursor to confession and atonement. Sometimes we must load a paragraph full of contrasting coordinating conjunctions to get to “I’m sorry.”

Last summer, Ben’s dad’s health declined rapidly. When the call came that his dad had maybe a day left, we were far from home and far from his parents. A triangular mess. There were no direct flights back to his father, and the time to get there was only two hours less than to help me get our sons back to London before flying to Boston. Ben chose to risk it and help us home first.

He called his mom to tell her the plan, why he would take a little longer, why he might be late.

At the airport, our flight was delayed. In the grief and race, we packed no diapers in our carry-on luggage, and I emerged from the bathroom following our toddler with four sanitary pads stuck in his pants. He walked like a bear toward his father, who was folded into himself over the airport’s red-yellow-blue play structure. Our two-year-old grabbed Ben’s pant leg to ask a question, and I watched the sandwiching effect of taking care of someone whose syntax is stripped of articles and full of strange pronouns and reaching for someone whose voice sounds like mist.

They likely won’t make it, I feared, my husband to see his father and his father to feel his son one last time. And I felt it, the extraordinary injustice of him, a man honest and on time, being late to say his final goodbye. 

Two weeks ago, my mother-in-law gave me my father-in-law’s annotated copy of our wedding ceremony program. Ben’s father married us. When we were sharing with him the vows we wrote, he cautioned us: “don’t make promises you can’t keep. Make it about the commitments you can keep.” He was never a bullshitter. But mainly, he didn’t want our marriage to start with hope, he wanted it to start with honesty. 

Montaigne wrote “Lying is an ugly vice, which an ancient depicts in most shameful colors when he says that it equals giving evidence of contempt for God, and at the same time of fear of men.” I underlined “fear of men” the first time I read this essay. But now I know, it isn’t a fear of people, or even a fear of upsetting people that has led to my lies. It’s a fear of the endings of things. Lies have kept things open, possibility alive. A twisted form of hope.

This year I’ve watched my husband closely again. After eleven years of caring for babies, my focus has shifted back to him. To support him, yes, but also because he is my lesson in how to say an honest goodbye.

We’re likely at the midpoint, he and I: 44 this year. Time enough, I think, for me to learn to say goodbye, and perhaps then, how not to give the lie.

1. Sincere thanks to the insightful conversationalist Rik van den Berge for this.