Family - The Ties That Bind...And Gag! (14 page)

She awakened a talent... if not for making music, then for appreciating it.

She taught them what instruments can do and how you can play softly for effect or louder when you place your foot on the pedal.

She taught them if you practiced for three lousy hours on the same song and hit the same stupid note every time, you could turn your mother into a sniveling bowl of cookie batter.

I wasn't the only one. Mothers of musicians everywhere live out their lonely lives in desperation. God love 'em. They never know when a phone is ringing. They never hear a jet zooming overhead. They don't hear anything after awhile. They just sit there with a smile on their faces, watch lips, and pick up an occasional word here and there.

They want to believe that Mozart had a mother. They want to believe Mrs. Osmond lived in a hotel while her children were growing up and practicing on their instruments.

They are the loneliest women in the world, apologizing to neighbors, to other members of the family, to the world. They are torn between having the patience to hear “The Spider Song” on the piano for five hours at a crack or strangling a tuba player with their bare hands and feeling guilty for the rest of their lives.

It is usually the fathers who encourage a talent that is so dormant in their children, it takes x-rays to find it. It was my husband who suggested we give all three of our children piano lessons. I did that. One day he said, “When are we going to gel a piano for them to practice on?”

“That wasn't part of the deal,” I said. “I only said yes to the lessons. After all, if they played baseball, would we turn our living room into a sandlot?”

He bought the piano anyway and was sorry when the sound turned his lawn brown.

Miss Marpling did not look well and I thought, life is so short, why not let bygones be bygones? As I left, I dropped by her table to tell her so when she grabbed my hand and said, “I forgive you for your three little no-talent children.”

By the time your children are dating, your contribution to their lives is minimal. There comes the parade of the Twinkles and the Neanderthals ... all potential in-laws. I'll always remember the first one to be brought “home.” Her beauty was flawless. She was built like an inflatable. She brought me a live poinsettia. She was bright and funny and smart and had read all of my books. She opened her mouth, and I knew she was wrong! wrong! wrong! for my son. She had an overbite.

I took her aside and said, “Darling, you may think you are attracted to my son, but underneath that even row of teeth and those healthy gums is a very ordinary person. Believe me.”

It sounded harsh, but you have to know those straight white teeth in my son's mouth represent my cruise to Norway, my matching set ofVuitton luggage, and my operation for a deviated septum. (What is there to breathe for when your child eats like a beaver?) They represent five years and $6,300 worth of payments.

With every Eddie Haskell ... every sleep-over ... every friend you approve or disapprove of, we lose a little more of the child to them. They are ultimately shaped and molded by everyone who touches their lives.

When we moved away from the old neighborhood, I observed the most agonizing, heart-wrenching scene in my entire life. My son was saying good-bye to his best friend. The two had been inseparable. They ate together, slept together, played together, and were together on family vacations. I once took the kid shopping for school clothes before I remembered he wasn't mine. There were embarrassing tears that day and clumsy good-byes with promises to write and always keep in touch. He was family!

Several years passed when my son returned to the old neighborhood for a visit. He could hardly wait to see his old friend. He caught up with him on a Saturday afternoon shooting baskets in the gym.

“Well?” we asked.

“He didn't remember me,” said my son.

He learned something that day. Friends are “annuals” that need seasonal nurturing to bear blossoms.

Family is a “perennial” that comes up year after year, enduring the droughts of absence and neglect.

There's a place in the garden for both of them.

IT'S 11 O'CLOCK. DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOUR PARENTS ARE?

Saturday: 4:40 p.m.

"Hello, Jeff, guess who? Yeah, I'm home for the weekend. Dad took another one of his infamous pictures for the Christmas card, and Mom is doing her Donna Reed number. Believe me, it isn't easy raising parents these days. You never hear about that. All people talk about is how hard it is to raise kids. Well, I'm here to tell you parents are no day at the beach. They just got better P.R. You hear a lot about the teenage driver, but what have you heard about the menopausal mother on the passenger side? You climb in the car and she says, 'Mother trusts you to be a responsible adult when it comes to operating this vehicle. I know you will not do anything rash and will do exactly as I say. Just relax, and remember that one careless mistake on your part and you could maim your mother for the rest of her life.' She's got another cute trick. You'll be riding along and all of a sudden, you hear her sucking in her breath, grasping the dashboard with both hands, and making a guttural, inhuman sound. When you ask what's the matter, she grabs her chest and whispers, 'Nothing.' Something happens to parents when their kids become teenagers. They are struck down with some kind of premature senility. They don't know anything. There was a time they could make a traffic light turn green by blowing on it, and they were never at a loss for an answer to a question like, 'How come God never married?' but all of a sudden they become repetitious.

I even had to correct my mother's grammar in front of company. Boy, the night when she couldn't remember that my sister got to lick the pan of chocolate batter when she was three and I had to wait until I was five, I lost all respect for her. She said to me one night, 'Why don't you get off my case and stop prosecuting me?' I hated to spell p-e-r-s-e-c-u-t-i-n-g in front of her, but someone had to tell her. Around that age, they seem to resist change. I cannot believe Mom drove to a self-service gas station and tried to force the leaded nozzle into an unleaded gas tank. She doesn't think. After she corrected the mistake, she went to pay her bill and the clerk said, “You owe seven cents on pump no. 23.' She said, 'I didn't put that gas in my car' 'What did you do with it?' asked the clerk. 'I poured it on my foot. I meant to pour the unleaded.' 'On your foot?' 'In the car.' The whole thing was embarrassing. I'm worried about parents. I really am. They don't seem to have any focus for their lives. The other night, all of us kids were sprawled out all over the living room with a stack of video-cassettes, eating and having a good time, and we caught them splitting. We asked, 'Where are you going?' They said, 'Out.' 'Out where?' 'Just out.' We said, 'Do you know what time it is? It's time when most people are going to bed. The only thing you can get into at this hour is trouble.' They said they were just going to bum around. My sister said, 'I don't know why you can't just spend one night at home once in awhile and watch television with us. Would it kill you?' They said, 'It's boring. Besides, you never watch our shows.' We said, 'We'd watch them if you didn't watch those trashy things on PBS with the English accents.' We told them to be home early, but we were up half the night waiting to hear the motor turn off and know they were home safe. I don't enjoy nagging at them all the time, but they're so darned frustrating. You can talk to them and you think they're listening, and the next morning, they're doing something stupid. When my mother was younger, she used to be neat as a pin. You should see her office now. The plants are dead. There are coffee cups with the coffee dried up in them sitting around all over the place and a waste-basket that is ready to walk. I said to her the other day, 'When was the last time this ironing board was down?' She said, ‘In 1971. The year we moved.' I informed her I was embarrassed to death to have people come in the room and she said, 'Then shut the door. It's my room and they have no business in here.' I'll tell you the truth. I'll be glad when Mom and Dad get their own apartment. Nice talking to you, Jeff.”

“YOU LOOK WONDERFUL”

I wouldn't admit it to anyone, but having the family around always makes me feel ... old. Maybe it's the way everyone has started to say “You look wonderful” instead of hello.

I liked it better when they asked, “How's it goin'?” or “What have you been up to?” But “You look wonderful” sounds like they're reassuring me. It seems so insincere ... maybe because people say it whether you've just rolled out of bed or the recovery room. Come to think of it, at a funeral I attended last week, the same people who hugged me and said, “You look wonderful,” peered into the coffin and remarked, “She looks wonderful!” No wonder it makes me suspicious.

To make matters worse, I pull on a sweater and my mother's arm comes through the sleeve. The physical transformation is the least of it. I'm doing all the things she used to do that used to drive me crazy. I save twist ties from bread wrappers by the pound. When I get into the car, I don't even turn on the motor until I check all the mirrors and the position of the seat and arrange my dress.

I can hear water dripping a half-mile from the house, and I can't stand to be near a sweater without picking it up and folding it like they do in department stores.

It's only a matter of time, I guess, before I put a fake flower on the antenna of my car at the shopping center. I used to be so fun-loving, so impetuous, so impractical. I'd wash my hair at midnight and go outside in the' winter without socks. Now I tell my kids that an unmade bed gives you had skin!

Who was the idiot five years ago who said, “I'm proud of my age. I earned every wrinkle?” That idiot was me. No one has wrinkles anymore. They have plastic surgeons. Even that funeral I went to last week. You couldn't tell if the deceased was going or coming. It probably wouldn't take that much to make some changes ... especially for someone with a little creativity.

Silicone injections to reduce forehead furrows ($275) and forehead lifts to correct drooping eyebrows, bags, and sags ($3,000). Home solution: move out before son moves back home.

Cryosurgery, the freezing to remove raised and flat brown age spots from hands ($100 an office visit). Home solution: connect the liver spots and palm them off as mesh gloves.

Chin lift to eliminate double chin and to lift and tighten chicken-neck throat ($2,500). Home solution: wear turtle-neck sweaters.

Chemical peeling to erase laugh lines around eyes and mouth ($500). Home solution: buy an untrained puppy. You will never laugh again.

It's not just a matter of looking older ... I feel older. Is it because I see my past in my children? Have I given up center stage and become a bit player with fewer lines every year? Are they a reminder of what I was?

I know this. I will never go to another high school or college reunion as long as I live. It's too depressing. Everyone wants to look like he or she is twelve again. Everyone wants to be the one who fulfilled the class prophecy.

Who needs it? What did they ever do for me? Taught me how to diagram a sentence and conjugate three Spanish verbs. Big deal. Some people are staples at every reunion and wouldn't miss it for the world. Every year they suck it in and play the game of beat the clock.

You always see insurance salesmen. To them, one class reunion is worth 500 callbacks. Show them a picture of your family and from somewhere they pull out an artist's brush and take Daddy out of the picture, leaving you with no income and a $130,000 mortgage. They really know how to liven up a party.

Old cheerleaders always show up ... the ones whose bust measurement exceeds their I.Q. by 35. You can't miss a cheerleader. She has the only chest that takes two name tags. If Sandra Day O'Connor appeared in her black robe, the cheerleader would say, “How many children do you have now and where are you living? Honey, you ought to be color-draped. You're definitely an autumn—not black!”

You can count on seeing rich people who used to be poor. They drive new cars, give you their “card,” and hide out in the rest room from the university development fundraisers. Same thing with shy people who have their own syndicated talk shows. Their motive in returning is revenge upon all the teachers who never called on them when they knew the answer and were too shy to raise their hands.

Maybe if I hit it big in Amway, I'd go back but ...

Something is changing within me. I can feel it. Every time I buy something of value, I have visions of my kids marking it down to $2 at a garage sale. Sometimes I wake up at night in a cold sweat just thinking that my cup and saucer collection will fall into the hands of someone furnishing a summer cabin who doesn't mind dishes that don't match.

I don't mean to frighten or depress anyone. Lord knows I'm not “going anywhere” tomorrow, but I felt a sense of order about doling out some treasures to my kids last summer. I can still see the look of surprise on my daughter's face as I held out my seventeen-year-old mink stole and said, “Do you know what this is?”

She put on her glasses and came in for a closer look. “Help me,” she said.

“Christmas. Severely depressed. Family. Daddy. Surprise.”

She nodded. “I got it. Daddy killed this and we ate it for Christmas dinner.”

“It was my first mink coat,” I said, “and now it's yours.”

She was so overcome, she was speechless.

“There are so many priceless bits of memorabilia in my possession, I hardly know where to begin,” I said. “I want to be fair to you and your brothers. There's a glass lid that belonged to a cast-iron skillet given to me by my grandmother. The skillet's lost, but the lid doesn't have a crack in it. No sense having some attorney rip it off.”

During the ensuing weeks, I dispersed a hand-blown glass sea urchin I bought at Disneyland, a coconut shell necklace from Hawaii, and an old piece of sheet music from their piano-playing days.

I parted with my high school class ring and a clothespin painted like a pig that holds a recipe. When my son dropped by, I handed him a box and smiled. “We have only our todays.”