Chasing Water. Anthony Ervin
half-Italian (she was called half-breed as a child), Sherry exudes a matriarchal charisma and maintains a maternal dictatorship, aligning in this sense more with her Mediterranean ancestry than her American upbringing. It’s from her that Anthony inherited his long limbs and cutting quips, which both mother and son can deliver with an infuriating and amusing nonchalance.
Though nearing seventy, she looks a decade younger and has the energy of someone half her age. The blood pressure and sleeping pills she takes are probably more due to hyperactivity and stress than ailing health, which she maintains with daily treadmill runs and neighborhood walks. One might be tempted to say that her intrinsic vigor and bullish tenacity played a role in helping her defeat cancer in 2000 despite the doctors giving her a 60 percent chance of dying within five years. Sherry considers it her duty to protect her children against the perils and treacheries of a poor, nasty, and brutish world. Whatever unspoken demons lie buried in her past, they inform her outlook: “I don’t let anyone walk on me. There was a time when I was more submissive, but not anymore. Shit on me once, shame on you. Shit on me twice, shame on me. I taught my kids that. Protect yourself.”
Though the family celebrates Christmas, not Hanukkah, and though there’s bacon in her fridge, Sherry feels connected to her Jewish heritage, especially to what she refers to as the Jewishness of valuing education. “I demanded good grades,” she tells me. Although the good marks came, they were often qualified by remarks about behavior misconduct, which never sat well with Sherry. As disciplinarian and keeper of order in the home (her husband was the good cop), Sherry had the most trouble with her middle son: “Anthony always had me frustrated. I never found my footing with what to do. I spanked, I yelled, I confined him to his room. Took away this, took away that. It was his personality. When I say, I want it now, I mean now. You say now to Anthony, and he says, I’m going to make you wait twenty minutes because you said ‘now.’ He stymied me all the time.”
The eldest sibling, Jackie, didn’t give his mother as much as grief as Anthony, but mostly because he was better at not getting caught. “There was crazy stuff that Mom had no idea about,” Jackie recounts. “Like riding bicycles over makeshift bridges across the roofs of houses, playing with nail guns on construction sites . . . I look back now and say, Thank God I lived.”
Anthony, on the other hand, didn’t try to hide anything: he’d openly flaunt his waywardness. Even so, the criteria for good behavior were stricter for the oldest brother. Whereas his younger siblings might be punished with a “time-out” that required them to stand in the corner, Jackie would be grounded for a month or longer for minor infractions like not doing homework, getting a bad grade, or lying. And though the others were also spanked, Jackie recalls receiving the lion’s share, usually delivered on his backside by spatula, spoon, shoe, or belt. Sometimes he was compliant, but other times he’d sprint away, running circuits around the house while “being chased and swung at.” Jackie admits he often exacerbated matters: “Part of me was just rebelling because I grew up in such a strict environment. You try to take the win from the loss. Lose on your own terms.”
It was a tug-of-war mother-son dynamic of bizarre, fiendish proportions: one evening Jackie took off sprinting on his usual circuit of the house with his mother chasing him, spoon in hand, only to encounter a wall where a door had been just that morning. “She sealed it up,” he says with a wry laugh. “And then I was trapped.” The purpose of the renovation was less diabolical: to raise the home value by forming an extra bedroom. But Jackie is convinced his mother instigated a skirmish that same day to lure him—or have him lure himself—into her dead-end snare.
In retrospect, Sherry has misgivings about the corporal punishment she doled out: “It was wrong, and now they’re always throwing up to me that I spanked with the wooden spoon.” But especially for Anthony, Sherry has always felt a guiding hand was essential, not only in elementary school but also throughout junior high, high 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