Family - The Ties That Bind...And Gag! (8 page)

Or when you can't chew the taffy apples because your partial plate might give way. When someone gives you a kitten and you turn it over and say, “Are you crazy? It isn't even spayed,” it's time.

When a sensuous housewife answers the door and asks, “Do I know you?” and you answer, “No, Dollface, but we can fix that,” you're too old.

When someone drops a shiny new penny in your bag and you rush right out and drag a Porta Potty to their front porch, you know you've lost the spirit.

When you start “begging” at 11 at night and have to quit at midnight to pick up your date, give it up.

You've graduated to a new plateau ... when you're a pregnant nun running around in a Volkswagen in search of a party.

“FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE—BUT NOT FOR LUNCH”

Friday: 9:30 p.m.

“I've got a treat for all of you,” said my husband. “It just occurred to me, you never saw the slides of your mother and me in the Smokies. Get me a couple more books for the projector. The picture is off the screen. I've got a shot of a dog with one ear standing straight up that will knock your socks off. Last one in, hit the lights.”

Reluctantly, the family filed into the darkened room as the slide show began.

“This is one of your mother eating a ham sandwich when she didn't know I was shooting.”

From the darkness we heard, “That's disgusting. Put a mirror in front of her.”

“You're gonna love this,” said their father. “I used my tripod and if you really look close, you can see just the tip of a wing. See it? What kind of bird did we decide that was?”

A flash of light hit the room as a door opened and seconds later, we heard a motor start.

“Here is your mother standing by the state line sign. I like to do that for purposes of identification. Oh, and here's one of your mother and me when we were first married. How did that get in there? Wait a minute.”

There was another flash of light and we heard someone dial a number on the kitchen phone.

“Oh Lord, remember this guy?” said the narrator. “You kids don't know him. We met him at one of the lakes. Was it Lake Ochichaba? Couldn't get away from the guy. What was his name, Erma? He had a sister in Cleveland. She was a dental assistant. Sounds like Crabtree or ...”

The door opened and I saw a silhouette of my mother pushing my father out the door.

An hour later my husband said, “Get the lights and I'll change carousels.”

The audience had thinned out to the two of us.

“That bad,” he said dejectedly.

“You could throw a war,” I said, “and if they knew you were showing home movies, no one would show up.”

“I guess they think we're pretty dull,” he said.

“Why do you say that?”

“One of them said to me, 'When you're married for thirty-eight years, what do you talk about?' ”

“Show the slide of us as newlyweds again,” I said. “I think I'm still wearing the same shoes.”

The couple flashed on the screen looking awkward and uncomfortable with the attention.

Had we ever been that young?

I remembered the day so well. As I knelt beside him at the altar, I outlined my plan. First, I was going to talk him into letting his hair grow out. God, I hated that burr. It made him look like a shag rug that had just come out of the dryer. In a couple of months, he wouldn't look like the same man.

At the reception, I watched him with his poker-playing buddies across the room. That would have to change. From here on in, it would be just the two of us watching sunsets and holding hands at the movies.

I'd have to change his eating habits from all those vegetables (designer garbage) to the things that really counted: rolls, pasta, dumplings, and gravy as a beverage.

He was slow and precise. I'd have to come up with a way to speed him up. His personal habits needed work. He never put a cap on a ballpoint pen. He hung up the phone backward because he was left-handed, and his sense of fashion was nonexistent. He wore winter clothes in the summer and summer clothes in the winter.

It is thirty-eight years later and absolutely nothing has changed.

My husband stared at the slide, consumed with his own thoughts. The bride should have marched down the aisle with a Buyer Beware sticker on her forehead. Married a week and she fell apart. Her tonsils became infected, her teeth began to rot, her kidneys became infected, she got three childhood diseases, and she needed glasses. She would have made a great little fixer-upper for some premed student . ..if he had been able to afford her on his salary.

She had an annoying way of dispensing responsibility. She took the appliances as her domain until they broke down and the warranty expired. Then it was always, “You'd better fix YOUR toaster!” The lawn was hers when it came to planting flowers, but when it needed cutting, it was always, “Your lawn is getting ahead of you.” There was never any doubt who got custody of the septic tank.

“I wonder if our kids really appreciate the hard work it takes to make a marriage survive,” he said, putting on another carousel of slides. “It's a lot of give and take.”

I sat in the darkness nodding my head slowly. You don't know give until you're married to a man who controls the television remote tuner, and you don't know take until you sit there through an evening of subliminal experiences of denture creams, breakfast cereals, and wine coolers that all run together.

It was always understood that my husband, Darth Vader, would be the custodian of the television tuner. He regarded the electronic device as his personal “force” of good over evil TV shows. I'm sitting there watching Dallas, and just .liter Sue Ellen says, “Miss Ellie, I've got to sort things out. I thought for a few days I'd go to ...,” a 90-pound walrus flashes on the screen and Bill Conrad's voice says, “... the Bering Sea with thousands of other bulls to mate.”

Instinctively, I know he has changed the channel without asking again. I know in my heart that as long as he holds that box in his hand, I will never get back to Southfork.

One night I am comfortably engrossed in a deep, meaningful film when Liv Ullmann suddenly turns into Bea Arthur who turns into Frank Gifford who turns into the Boston Pops who turn into two wrestlers. When I try to explain that Liv is at a crisis in her life and is about to make a major decision about her baby, he says, “I'll turn it back. I just want to see what's on the other channels.” By the time he turns Liv back on, the kid has grown up, married, and is talking about his mother in the past tense.

Power. That's what it's all about. Somehow, women just can't capture that same feeling of control by standing on the rubber mat at the supermarket and watching the doors slide back and forth.

“Sometimes,” I smiled, “I think our kids think we were born old. It's a shame they didn't know us when we were silly and unpredictable and did dumb things ... before we became so ... organized.”

My husband was staring at the screen again, lost in his own thoughts.

I married a woman who would bury no garbage before its time! I never saw anything like it. There could be two tablespoons of peas and a pot roast the size of a Kennedy half dollar, and she would say, “Let's save it.”

I counted up once. It took an entire week for a leftover to make it to the garbage can.

Day 1: It went from table to refrigerator in an elaborate ritual of joy. “This will make wonderful vegetable soup.” Everyone believed her.

Day 2: Every time someone opened the refrigerator door and picked up the leftover, she chanted, “Don't touch it. I'm saving it for vegetable soup.”

Day 3: The leftover was moved to a less prominent shelf and occasionally was patted and reassured it had a future in vegetable soup.

Day 4: A traumatic time in the life of future garbage. It was either tossed or was shoved to the rear of the refrigerator on the shelf next to a bowl containing three table-spoons of peach juice and a pit.

Day 5: Traditionally on the fifth day, the leftover was opened, exposed to air, and passed around to see if anyone could identify it. If it was recognizable, it was shoved in a dark corner and allowed to “ripen” for another day. If not, it was history.

Day 6: This was a crucial day in which the peas and beef curdled, turned green, hardened, or grew fuzz.

Day 7: Excited cries resounded through the kitchen as the children danced around the refrigerator chanting, “Is it garbage yet?”

Then Erma would remove the leftovers, fold back the foil, and pronounce the peas and beef dead! Then she would prepare it for burial. First, she wrapped it in newspaper, then put it in a brown bag, then a plastic one, and finally put it to rest in the garbage can in the garage.

I always wanted to put a sign on it, leftover: born may 7. died may 14.

“For what it's worth, Dear, I like your slides,” I said, “even though I do feel like a dinosaur.”

“Ummm,” he said, turning on the light and stacking the carousels. “I read the other day that if a divorce is to occur, it will happen at six and a half years. I wonder what's so mystical about six and a half years.”

“It's the marital warranty,” I said. “It expires at seventy-eight months.”

“What are you talking about?”

"Everything has a level of tolerance. The level of a marriage is six and a half years. At the end of that time, the wife will have cooked 5,408 meals. It's as good or as bad as it's going to get.

“After seventy-eight months, you will have met all the relatives—away from the church. The father-in-law who eats like a Cro-Magnon, the brother who sponges, and the mother-in-law who will call your husband 'the baby' when his gut hangs over his belt buckle and his hairline looks like the state of Florida.”

“You don't know that,” he said.

"Trust me. That's the time company manners are put aside, and courtesy is no longer a consideration. Your husband's feet start to smell. His wife leaves toothpaste in the bowl. He cleans his fingernails at the table. She doesn't just blow her nose ... she flushes it.

“The trousseau is gone. She's down to wearing flannel pajamas and wool socks to bed. There are children to water, feed, educate, clothe, maintain, and discipline. A good-bye kiss in the morning has all the fervor of giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a dead parakeet.”

“My God,” he said, “you make it sound like we're serving time.”

“But wait. Occasionally, you see a couple who beats the odds. Did you ever read the section in the newspaper devoted to couples celebrating their fiftieth anniversary? There was one yesterday. Where did you put the paper?”

“Stuffed under the sofa.”

I leafed through until I found it. “Here we go. 'Maudie and Walter Slanker, married fifty years, will be guests of honor at a reception' ... blah blah ... listen to this. 'We've hauled water by horse and wagon, coped with the cold and the deep snow, raised and educated a family of ten, and lost a daughter, Virginia.' ”

“She married excitement all right,” said my husband.

“Twenty-seven words for a lifetime,” I said. "You have to wonder. Were there other moments? Did they hang wallpaper together? Argue about who slept next to the wall? Toast no-baby month? Become jealous of an encyclopedia salesman?

"Did she get sick of his same jokes year after year? Did he tire of hearing about her arthritis? Did they wonder about their future together the year he taught her how to drive? The year his mother baby-sat and cleaned her oven? Was he cheap? Was she boring?

"Did he have an annoying habit of picking his teeth with his tongue and making a clicking noise that drove her up the wall? Did she say every night for thirty years when he walked through the front door, 'Is that you?'

"Did they really love one another through fevers, flu, fatness, nausea, irritability, and sarcasm—or did they just hang on?

"Were they there for one another when Virginia died, when he lost his job, or when she felt neglected?

"Did he ever know she hated peppers in the meat loaf but for fifty years put them in because he liked them? Did he ever suspect she hated house slippers without heels but wore the ones he bought every Christmas?

“Ten children ... that's a lot of shoes, a lifetime of overbites, an eternity of 'Can I's' ... endless evenings of PTA, years of slammed doors, and an uninterrupted span of ”We've got the children to think about.' "

I put my head on my husband's shoulder. “Fifty years. How did they do it?”

My husband sighed, “He probably had hopes of getting in the last word.”

A CHILD'S BATHROOM IS HIS

CASTLE

Friday: 11 p.m.

As my husband packed away the projector, I noted the calm that had once again come over the house, with all three of the kids out pursuing whatever it was they pursued at 11 o'clock at night.

“I think I'll go up and check the ”guest rooms.' "

“Since when did the kids' bedrooms get to be guest rooms?” asked my husband.

“Don't start. I told you before, I like the idea of a room making a statement. The bedrooms say, 'Don't settle in. Your visit is only temporary.' ”

“The minute they moved out, everything around here changed,” he said. “You put a tablecloth on our kitchen table, and the next thing you know, it was a 'breakfast room.' And a lamp and a chair turned our bedroom into a 'suite.' I'll never understand why you took the pool table out of the family room.”

“Because we no longer had a family,” I said patiently. “Besides, the pool table looks better in the sun room.”

“It got the same amount of sun when it was just the back porch,” he grumbled. “Besides, I miss the desk in the —what is it you call it now?”

“The 'media room.' ”

“I don't see why you had to put it in with your sewing machine.”

“Maybe you'd like it better in your workshop?”

“Where is my workshop?” he asked.

“You know very well it's in the old basement with your tools.”

“What tools?” he said. “I got a hammer, a screwdriver, a dozen baby food jars with screws stored in them, and two broken-down lawn chairs. All I want is a nice room where I can sit down and read a paper in some kind of privacy. I can't even go to the bathroom to be alone anymore.”

“That's because we don't have a bathroom. Since we put the exercise bicycle and the bathroom scale in there, it's a 'personal fitness' room.”