My parents moved from an apartment complex to a house when I was eleven years old. I moved with them, of course, and would only discover in the next few years what it means to leave a place behind, in an irrevocable way where the closest you will likely get to seeing it is standing in front of it. Many of my childhood memories are connected to that place, the way the light hit the wooden floor, the texture of the wallpaper in the living room. Once I did manage to go back, just walking through the park where I’d played as a kid, and made friends that by that point, I’d already lost: it was creepy. It was perhaps more haunting than it should have been because I never felt I’d really finished there, being eleven, I didn’t have a concept of what it means to move, or the rituals one should maybe consider performing in order to exorcise possible future ghosts. It was the first time I left something so definitely. Transparent seems to understand this feeling very well. Maura has spent years in the house that she is now packing up. She has raised three children here, gone through a divorce, survived pretending to be someone else every single day. It must be fraught, but also profoundly difficult to let go of all her memories. We will also discover in the following episodes that each of the Pfefferman’s associates different things with the photographs and collectibles of a lived life, that they have a shared history but also very divergent paths through their respective childhoods.
Maura: Honey, are you okay with me?All of the children will react differently to Maura coming out to them. Sarah appropriates it to an extent, uses it as inspiration to make sense of her feelings for Tammy: from the way she speaks about her, it becomes clear very quickly that she is falling, or already has fallen, in love with her again. Maura’s choice to live openly and freely seems to give her permission to claim the same for herself – to end her unhappy marriage, to chase that happiness she feels with Tammy, to be herself (“I just wonder what it would feel like who is actually moved by loving you.”) Maura watches her cautiously, both marvelling at how love looks like from a distance, but also aware of the difficulties of making these choices. It’s almost like Maura is fueling Sarah, and her need to lead an authentic life becomes so pressing that she can’t help but tell Len almost immediately, after wandering the very impersonal, clean and empty house they share. He suggests therapy, because he thinks it’s a fixable problem.
Sarah: Oh god, yes, I’m happy.
Maura: Happy?
Sarah: Yeah. It’s inspiring, I’m so glad you get to be who you are. That’s who we should all be.
Sarah: Len, it’s me.It’s a debatable point, if this is a question about morals or human decency, if Sarah has obligations, if being authentic and loving completely beats all other considerations. Sarah leaves, and makes an excited phone call, overwhelmed by her own courage almost, expecting that Tammy would feel exactly the same thing she is feeling (because that’s what happens when you’re in love), and would immediately draw the same conclusions about her own unhappy marriage. Except of course, Tammy is much more hesitant than Sarah. Sarah is traveling back to her past, although very little is revealed about how her relationship with Tammy unravelled that first time; meanwhile Josh has been stuck there all this time. Back in the day, the babysitter that the Pfefferman’s hired to take care of him started a relationship with him. Nobody would hesitate to call it abuse if the genders were reversed, so it feels hypocritical not to do the same here – Josh has been abused by his babysitter since his adolescence, and it has profoundly influenced how he connects to other people and views relationships, and it still continues to this day, he constantly goes back to her, even when he believes himself to be in love with someone else. Even more terrible, all of the Pfefferman’s knew about it, and nobody intervened to protect him, instead Sarah, when she calls him to tell him she has found their love letters stored away in old cereal boxes, frames it as some kind of transgression on his part. He was fifteen years old. She wrote to him about wanting to marry, and have children. And now he has no clue what he needs or wants out of a relationship, or to even be in one: Kaya is no longer picking up his calls and is avoiding him. Maura has every intention to come out to him in that way that the first time doing it (if it’s easy, if it’s good) spurs you on and carries you – but she can’t do it in the end once she sees him in the driveway, and instead dresses up again, deflecting his guess that she is dating a much younger woman, judging be the perfume Josh can smell on her. It’s different with everyone, and it’s different with sons.
Len: You’re not allowed to do this, you know.
Sarah: I don’t know how not to.
Ali is on the sidelines in this episodes. She picks ups drugs from Syd, who listens to her stories and plans but is visibly disappointed when she realizes that Syd has no intention to take the drugs with her, but is taking them back to her newly found sex buddy and fitness instructor (to try and seduce his roommate into a threesome, as graphically described). In retrospect, it’s easy to imagine Syd going through this for the past fifteen or so years of her life, listening to these things, trying to find the right face and the right words while suffering profusely. It takes all her energy to pretend not to care, or at least not too much, or at least not in the wrong way. Another thing this show is about: how people incidentally hurt each other, not necessarily intentionally but by not caring enough and not paying enough attention.
The episode also starts to hint what it meant for the children that Maura was leading a secret life, all the small ways that it influenced their childhood. The sneaking around. The secrets. Maura leaving her children in the car, waiting, walking into the magazine store, considering buying one, and then making that exhilarating discovery that she is not the only person in the world (and later, the desperate one that there are still a million ways that people can be different, even if they share some things). Mark (Bradley Whitford) is discreet, and helpful, and he is in the same position that Maura is in – needing to keep the two parts of his life separated. Still, there is a massive difference between something being a profound part of someone’s identity, at the core of it, and something being a play on identity, more a performance for the sake of exploring than anything else.
They are all trapped, and sometimes it only becomes obvious in retrospect, in realizing how certain events have affected them and the course of their lives, the decisions they later allowed themselves to make. Josh can’t untangle the babysitter from every other relationship in his life, because it was his first experience with love, and it shaped him. Sarah is only now allowing herself to make choices that she didn’t when she was younger, but in a way, that can only work if another person is in the same spot, as ready as she is, and that timing between two people is so very rare. She walks through the empty house – the beauty and at the same time sadness of seeing all the traces of the past, the lines that the furniture made on the carpet, the way the house grew old with them and is still recognizably theirs, except at the same time no longer, since it lacks everything that would make it a home. It’s a haunted place now.
Random notes:
Josh ends up getting fired when he can’t take a hint that Kaya doesn’t want him around anymore – his boss is surprisingly accommodating up to that point, hinting at the things that white straight guys sometimes get away with, but he crosses a line when he becomes physically violent and threatening (shouting “she doesn’t feel safe with me?!” at some point).
Heartbreaking moment, Sarah watching Tammy and her dinner routine with her family, but ultimately being on the outside of it (last episode, Maura was part of the routine, but at the same time, because of who we know her to be, on the outside of it).
Josh: I’m trying to do the right thing.
Ali gets thrown out while high takes a taxi to her dad’s.