Family - The Ties That Bind...And Gag! (15 page)

He said, “Is this another ”living bequest'?"

“I hand-hooked this little rug for your nursery,”! said, unrolling it on the floor. “Do you remember the little sailboat and the seagulls?”

“I remember,” he said solemnly.

“Do you remember that it took your mother twelve years to finish at an expense of $140 ... $90 in yarn alone?”

“Why don't you hang on to it, Mom,” he said. “You've got a few good years left.”

Two weeks later I saw the rug in his apartment. It was lining the dog bed.

Maybe Elizabeth Taylor is right. Age is inevitable and we should welcome it like an old friend. It's a fact that the world spins on the energy of its young. That's why I have a priest who smells like Clearasil arid a doctor who wears Calvin Klein jeans on his daily rounds.

There was a time when the stewards on planes looked like they had just landed their first job. Now the men piloting the planes are looking forward to shaving for the first time.

And Lord, what I would give to see a mature woman delivering the 6 o'clock news! Sometimes I think if I see another silken-haired beauty queen with capped teeth and wet lips wrapped around the failing economy, I'll scream.

I passed a mirror and mechanically pulled up my jowls and chins. It could be worse. Maybe Mother had passed her cellulite down to me, but my grandmother had left me a greater legacy: her! For years I watched my Grandma baste her roots, pound her body, and pat her chin in an effort to bring the aging process to its knees.

She succeeded. She was like a Timex watch that you could bury in sand, spin around, sink, beat on, misplace or drop, and she still kept right on ticking until the day she died.

I remember when she was in her seventies she went to the nursery one day and bought a five-gallon blue spruce tree. The nurseryman said, “Are you aware these only grow less than an inch a year?”

Grandma said, “So, when they get higher than the house, I'll have 'em trimmed.”

It's funny. When my mom and dad were my age, I thought about hiring someone to feed them. And now ... I positioned myself in front of the mirror again ... now, My God! My husband and I are beginning to look alike! I had never noticed it before, but we have the same firm jaw when the red light goes on in the car in downtown traffic. We both chew the inside of our mouths when an accountant calls. We both roll our eyes to the ceiling when a speaker says, “There are fourteen major points I'd like to share with you.”

Without even realizing it, we have blended. His hair got longer; mine got shorter. His hands softened; mine hardened, He grew a stomach; I grew upper arms. His chest grew with exercise; mine dropped to my knees. My chins came from chocolate, his came from sleeping in a chair, but they're the same chins.

And we not only finish sentences for each other, we don't even have to start them. Just yesterday morning, we were both reading the paper when I asked, “Are you going again this year?”

He answered, “What's the point?”

I said, “You'd think Reagan would issue a statement on...”

He said, “He did. Finish the story. You need anything while I'm out?”

I said, “Why do you go to the same store all the time? You know they never have ...”

He said, “They did last week and you didn't want any.”

I said, “Do you think we're beginning to ...”

He said, “Not a chance.”

“Then how come you ...”

“Coincidence.”

Maybe age is kinder to us than we think. With my bad eyes, I can't see how bad I look, and with my rotten memory, I have a good excuse for getting out of a lot of stuff. I can't remember where the fuse box is located, what weight of oil goes into the car, and how I'm supposed to record checks in the checkbook. Besides, it's the one thing that holds us together. He relates to a woman who stands in front of an open refrigerator and wonders why, and I relate to a man who walks to the other end of the house and stands in the room muttering, “What did I come back here for?”

And he always supplies missing words to my sentences, like Ed Asner, croissant, James Michener, and artichoke.

I guess there are a couple of ways you can handle time. You can be like my grandmother, who regarded it as a formidable foe in a game of wits where one wins and the other one loses. Or you can have respect for one another and live in reasonable harmony in a give-and-take situation.

I caught another glance in the mirror. My knees had grown together, my laugh lines were deep enough to plant barley, oats, or rye, and wicker chairs were painful. I was part of a natural evolution of things where children begat the future, earning me a place in the past.

As I took a deep breath, I saw my father's face reflected in the mirror next to mine. He said, “You look wonderful! Honest!”

“Don't say that.”

“You don't want me to tell you you look wonderful?”

“Tell me something I can believe,” I said. “I feel like I'm in the souffle of my life and someone just slammed the door.”

“You should complain,” he said. “I just said to a clerk in the supermarket, 'I'm ready to check out,' and she said, 'We all have to go sometime, Gramps.' ”

IF A HOME IS A MAN'S CASTLE ... LET HIM CLEAN IT

Saturday: 5:15 p.m.

In the media room, my dad held his cup as I poured coffee into it. “What are you doing out shopping? I thought you were retired.”

He lowered his voice to a whisper. “Someone's got to keep the house running,” he said. “Your mother would let everything go to pot. Do you have any idea what I found in the refrigerator last week? A cake of yeast that had expired June 17. If I had run my business like she runs that house, I'd have been bankrupt.”

My father. I cannot remember the day I dropped the prefix “step” from his title. I referred to him as my dad and it seemed right somehow.

How long had it been since he came into the game of parenting as a relief pitcher? Usually everyone loves a man who comes in when the team is in trouble, the bases are loaded, and someone is needed to win the game.

But a stepfather does the same thing and is accused of “interfering.”

Take a substitute teacher. He's kinda naive and new and goofs up a lot and has a whole class rooting for him, but a stepfather is a substitute and he's “stupid.”

And don't we cheer on the understudy who hops in at the last minute and gives a performance with no experience? Everyone sitting there in the darkness is hoping to witness the birth of a new star, but a stepfather is “trying to take the real star's place.”

Families aren't easy to join. They're like an exclusive country club where membership makes impossible demands and the dues for an outsider are exorbitant.

Thank God, he hung in there.

“You see,” he continued, “I'm trying to ease your mother out of going to the supermarket. She's totally inefficient. Can you imagine spending $16 a minute and not having a list? The woman never reads a label to find out what's in the can. Just grabs it off the shelf. Why, they could be using pig lips in it for all she knows.”

As Dad continued his tirade, I thought to myself, there are two things a woman should do by herself ... give birth and shop. I have been with my own husband to the store a few times. He always stands around on one leg like a napping whooping crane. Men never really understand that shopping is meant to be a spontaneous, impulsive, madcap adventure.

I'd be halfway down the second aisle before I realized he was on the first aisle trying to fix the wheel of the shopping cart.

“You can't use this cart,” he'd say. “The wheels all go in a different direction.” Women shoppers would just look at him and shake their heads.

He drove me crazy with a pocket calculator, figuring out I could save one cent per ounce by buying a liquid bleach. In between his comparison shopping, he would arrange the cart, putting all the taxables in one corner, the dairy products in another, and surrounding the eggs by a wall of toilet tissue.

Someone did a study of men in supermarkets and discovered they're just too weird. They rarely shop in tennis clothes, stand around and gossip, or spend more money than they have. They never squeeze anything in produce, or buy trees, underwear, or cassette recordings. They never figured out that if spending $16 a minute isn't fun ... then what is?

I honestly never thought my father would become domesticated.

He was a man who couldn't push down the tab on the toaster and thought aspic was a ski lodge in Colorado. The day after he retired, he was speaking yellow wax buildup like a native and running the entire house.

Looking back, I think it all began when he joined the liberated men of the eighties ... those patron saints of sacrifice who “make the coffee in the morning.”

It's all he talked about. To him, “making coffee in the morning” was on the same plateau as carrying the baby during the last three months of pregnancy.

Mom and I didn't want to sound ungrateful, but making coffee is one of the simpler things we do. To us, it's on the same domestic entry level as putting a grocery bag in the trash can or taking a frozen chicken out of the freezer to thaw.

Up until that moment, my dad had never done anything domestic before. “Making coffee in the morning” was something he could do without compromising his masculinity. He could still watch the Rams on Sunday and make coffee on Monday morning.

“Speaking of hanging it up,” I said to my dad, “your grandson is thinking of retiring.”

“From what? He's too young to retire.”

“There is a precedent,” I said. “Bjorn Borg stopped playing tennis when he was twenty-six, and I read the other day where Maiy Lou Rctton retired at eighteen.”

“Eighteen!” he gasped.

“Hey, when you've appeared on the cover of Time magazine, written your autobiography, and skied with Dr. Ruth ... what's left?”

“I don't understand kids today,” he grumbled, “They just don't have the ambition we had to get ahead.”

It was true. They never aspired to be a doctor because you had to wash above the elbows. Didn't want to be a priest because you had to work Sundays. And didn't want to be President of the United States because there was no chance for advancement. For awhile, one of them talked about being a game show contestant, but face it, he was too cheap to buy a vowel.

“Didn't he want to be a baseball player at one time?” asked Dad.

“Yeah, but that was only because you could grab up a handful of dirt, wipe it off on your pants, and spit in public. Don't worry, Dad, he'll find himself. Let me get you another cup of coffee from the kitchen.” My dad gave a half smile.

The trouble with kids is they give 'em too much nowadays. They pay those kids for their old teeth, to go to bed, and to breathe!

Why doesn't anyone ever tell young people the truth about work? We have an entire generation of kids growing up who have been told that work must be “fun, relevant, and meaningful.” The hell it is. It's discipline, competition, and repetition. So the paper route wasn't the religious experience they thought it would be. And the dirt and sweat from the construction job didn't fulfill them? And they didn't feel excitement selling velvet paintings of Elvis door to door? That's because they're confusing work with success. Success is fun, relevant, and meaningful. Work is just plain dogging it. So why do we do it?

Because those are the ethics that count for something, and if we don't maintain these things, we lose something we desperately need to survive .., called dignity.

“Dad, come quick!”

“What's the matter?” he shouted.

“I just came into the kitchen for more coffee and I'm not alone,” I said. “I saw a darting shadow out of the comer of my eye.”

My husband joined us. “What's the matter?”

“There's an animal in this kitchen ... somewhere.”

“What kind of an animal was it?” he snickered. “Rocky Raccoon? The Flying Squirrel? Smokey the Bear? How about Dumbo? Pogo? Charlie Tuna? Name names.”

“It was a disgusting mouse and stop talking like he was wearing a letter sweater.”

“What did it look like?” he asked.

“It was tall.”

“It was probably just a baby that came in from the garage.”

This bit of wisdom from a man who told me last year that a plague of crickets in my house was good luck and they ate two carpets.

Oh, I used to be naive about animals. I wanted to believe they were male, unmarried, and traveling alone.

“Bill,” I said, “I want you to go to the hardware store and get me fifteen traps, thirty-five boxes of painless death powder, eighteen aerosol insecticide sprays, five bottles of fast-acting mists, five plastic swatters, and a mallet.”

"You have enough short-range missiles?'' he asked, nudging my dad in the ribs and laughing.

My son joined us and said, “What's so funny?”

“Your mother is funny,” said his granddad. “She's hysterical over a little mouse.”

My son rushed over and grabbed the box by the toaster. “That was no mouse. That was my snake's dinner!”

Calmly, I walked from the kitchen to my bedroom where I shut the door, turned, and screamed.

I WANT YOUR JOB,

VANNA"

I love you, Jane Goodall. I really do.

I was filled with envy when you went to Africa in the sixties to observe the baboons and chimpanzees. I said, “Why not me, God? I could take the silence, the boredom, the isolation. Why was I chosen to stay behind to battle smog, bickering children, and aggressive leftovers?”

From time to time I would see you on a special on PBS, and for days afterward I would fantasize about climbing into a pair of shorts and a faded shirt, fastening my hair in a ponytail (where do you get all those rubber bands in a country without doorknobs?), and ascending to a solitary hill to write down what I saw.

No panty hose riding around your hips, no gas gauge on empty, no need to shave your legs, no video games, no newspaper in the downspouts, no securing the house every night like Fort Knox ... just blessed peace and only the need to worry about having a clean pair of shorts for the next day.

Sometimes, Jane, I'll go for months and not think too much about you, and then it's the weeks just before the holidays when I think about you a lot. I think about you when the kids are home and two of them are pounding out the first eight bars of “Heart and Soul” on the piano for three solid hours. I think about you when we run out of milk every six hours. I think of you when they invade my space with their smells and noises and possessions.