Family - The Ties That Bind...And Gag! (9 page)

He smiled, “Have you seen your personal fitness room since the kids came home?”

I kicked open the door to the personal fitness room and gasped. The mirror was fogged with steam, towels were strewn wall to wall, the shower curtain dripped water on the floor, soap turned from a solid state to a liquid before my eyes, tubes without caps dotted the sink. The toilet tissue spindle was empty. Wet washcloths and dirty clothes hung from the exercise bicycle. Newspapers littered the floor. The toilet was filled with Band-Aid wrappers. Opened bottles of shampoo and rinses lined the bathtub, and a hair dryer was left in the bowl.

It should have been called the “children's playroom.” Ever since I could remember, it was their social watering hole. They came in here at the age of two, and barring major holidays and occasional stabs at education, we didn't see them again until it was time for them to get their own apartments.

What did they do in there? They projected home movies of Mommy and Daddy into the toilet bowl and then flushed so our faces would swirl and appear distorted.

They floated light bulbs in the bathtub and shot at them with water pistols. They wrapped a dead horned toad in a flag once and buried him at “sea.” They decorated the toilet seat like a cake, using Dad's shaving cream for the lettering.

And when I pounded on the door and shouted, "What

are you doing in there?" the response was always the same.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing” translates into something quite different for a parent and a child.

“Nothing” to a parent means you are staring into space with your hands in your lap, your eyes glazed, and your breathing shallow.

When a child is doing “nothing,” that is a signal for parents to dial 911. He is usually doing “nothing” behind a closed bathroom door, a dog is barking, water is running under the door, a sibling is begging for mercy, and there is a strange odor of burning fur and the sound of a thousand camels running in place.

I always wanted to know how long they had been doing “nothing,” whom they were doing “nothing” with, and how come it took them fifteen minutes to answer the question.

Kids are drawn to a bathroom like a magnet. There's a mystique about it from birth. Immediately after they enter the world, an inner voice says, “As soon as you learn how to walk or crawl, Bippie, you can toddle into the bathroom and throw your shoes into the toilet.”

“What are shoes?” asks the infant.

“Something you take off your feet every chance you get.”

“What's a toilet?”

“The place you throw your shoes in to make it bubble.”

I looked around. I had spent the best years of my life in this dreary steam bath trying to train one of them to a toilet seat. I wish I had a dime for every day I put a kid on the throne and sat on the edge of the bathtub and described the water scenes from Deliverance. Sometimes I threatened them with a hole in their bicycle seat and a plastic liner in their tux at the prom.

They spent so much time in the bathroom, they thought the sky had a light and an exhaust fan in it. Small wonder they grew up with an affinity for this room. It became their retreat... their mountaintop ... their last bastion of privacy. It assured them diplomatic immunity from every chore you can think of.

“Where's your brother? I want him to help carry in the groceries from the car.”

“He's in the bathroom.”

“Hurry up or you're going to miss your school bus and I'll have to drive you to school.”

“I'm in the bathroom.”

“Are you in bed?”

“I'm in the bathroom.”

“Could you let the dog out?”

“I'm in the bathroom.”

“Come to dinner!”

“I'm in the bathroom.”

In my nightmares, I could hear a minister at the altar saying to the bride, “Where is the bridegroom?” and a voice from the distance shouting, “I'm in the bathroom.”

Looking back, I realized most of my communication with the kids was exchanged outside of this very door, usually at 2 in the morning.

“Are you home?”

“Who did you think it was?”

“What time is it?”

“What time do you think it is?”

“Have you eaten?”

“Don't I always?”

“Did Greg get in touch with you?”

“Did he call?”

“Did you get gas for the car?”

“Didn't I say I would?”

“Are there any towels in there?”

“Aren't there always?”

“Do you want me to call you late in the morning?”

“Are you serious?”

“I'm going to bed. It's wonderful that we can talk together like this. A lot of kids when they reach your age become uncommunicative and you don't know what they're doing or thinking. Am I lucky or what? Don't answer that!”

As I wiped the last of the water off the floor, I stood up and surveyed the room with pride.

“The personal fitness room once more meets health standards,” I announced proudly.

“It will always be the library to me,” said my husband, as he entered with a stack of newspapers.

“Before you get settled,” I said, "I want the bathroom

scale."

“Where are you going with it?” he asked. "To the 'reptile room.' Another twenty pounds on top

of the snake cage can't hurt."

“BUT DAD ... IT'S A CLASSIC!”

Saturday: 8 a.m.

Watching them from the window, they looked like a scene from Father Knows Best. Dad in his coat sweater circled his son's car, stopping occasionally to kick the tires and huddle over the motor. His son, slightly taller than his father, in raggy jeans and tousled hair, waved a wrench in his hand.

Was it only a few years ago the father had black hair and the son wore bathing trunks the size of a coaster and they were standing together in that same spot to dedicate the swimming pool?

Kids we had never seen before were lined up with snorkels, rubber ducks, rafts, and old inner tubes from semi trucks.

“For God's sake,” said his father, “I don't even have the thing inflated yet. Didn't you tell them it's plastic, it's only 48 inches in diameter and 14 inches deep? I've ordered bigger drinks!”

As he put his lips to the valve, a hush fell over the crowd. After ten minutes of gasping and blowing, he was ready to pass out, but the pool was inflated. As he stood over the plastic pool with a garden hose, the group's eyes were riveted to the trickle of water. He held the crowd back while he added bleach and swished it around. When he finished he said, “Now, we're going to lay a few ground rules. No jumping in with grass on your feet and ...” He and his words were drowned ... literally. Two seconds later a neighbor child appeared at the door and announced our son had gone to the bathroom in the pool and they were all going home.

They may have had their differences in the past, but today they were ... communicating.

The door slammed shut with a fury that jarred the dishes. “Didn't I tell you buying that pile of junk was a mistake!” “But Dad, it's a classic.”

“You can't tell him anything,” said my husband, addressing his remarks to me.

“What's the matter?” I asked.

“The matter is,” said my husband, “that that car was a lemon from the word go. Did you ever wonder who buys all those cars driven on television on The Rockford Files or The Dukes of Hazzard? Our kids buy 'em.”

“Dad, the car was a '79 and only had 500 miles on it.”

“That's because it was a getaway car.”

“Hatchbacks are classics.”

“It wasn't a hatchback until a garage door fell on it, haven't you figured that out? The tailpipe is held on with electrician's tape, the windows are stationary, the springs are shot, and the motor won't turn over.”

“In ten years,” said my son pointing his finger, “that little baby will be worth its weight in gold.”

“It's going to take you ten years to get a transmission for it that's available only in a small town in Czechoslovakia! You better get your act together, Mister, that car is going to take money ... lots of it.”

“I take care of the car,” he said defensively.

“Pouring Orange Crush in the radiator when it boils over is not taking care of it.”

“If it's such a bummer, how come someone tried to steal it last month?”

“If it's such a gem, how come they caught them trying to hot-wire it to get it started when the key was in the ignition?”

“I didn't ask for a lecture. All I'm asking for is a lousy $200 to get it running again.”

“Look, Son,” said his father, “ever since you graduated from college you've been trying to find yourself. You wanta know where you are? You're somewhere between Clearasil and bankruptcy. I have a dream for you, Son. I want to see you join hands with a steady job at the altar of employment and promise to love and to cherish from this day forward, for retirement benefits or for mergers ... for pay raises or layoffs ... in slumps and stock splits ... till death do you part. You need an incentive? For better or for worse, you're married to a 'classic' sitting in the side yard with bucket seats and a name you can't pronounce. You're committed to it in sickness and in health for as long as you can afford gas, insurance, license fees, and tune-ups. You have responsibilities now. You have a car to support! Get a job!”

Our son listened carefully and headed for the guest room.

For a first-generation speech, I had to admit it was pretty good. Usually, our lectures were Golden Oldies handed down from our parents, which their parents had laid on them. But this was a new speech for a new generation living in new times. No one had to tell our generation how to find the American Dream. The molds were in place when we got there. We married early, had babies, wore practical polyester, paid cash, fertilized grass, washed our own cars, and waited for the Christmas savings check. We accepted twenty-year house payments, forty-year marriages, and thirty years on the same job without question.

It wasn't until we had children that we discovered no one wanted to emulate us or our life-style. No one wanted to inherit the fruits of our labor. No one wanted to profit from our experiences.

They had their own timetable.

Our generation brought with us the curse of memory. We remembered when jobs were nonexistent and there was only one way out of a world of sleeping in your underwear and buying coal fifty cents at a time ... an education!

I don't think we could ever forget the feeling of pride of watching our first college graduate weave down the aisle.

He looked like a Supreme Court judge who had just shot a few baskets and had forgotten to change his shoes.

I snapped a picture, even though he had threatened to self-destruct if I did it. I looked. He was still there looking at me like he had eaten something that didn't agree with him.

His father and I had disagreed on his choice of university. I thought the campus had a nice “feeling” to it—much like The Paper Chase on PBS. I never lost my naivete. When my son didn't write home, I knew it was because he dropped a bible on his foot and couldn't hobble to the post office to mail his letter.

When he intercepted his grades before we could open them, I knew in my heart he wanted to have them framed and given to me for Mother's Day.

As I told his father, I know he postdated a check for $100 so he could buy a jacket to go with his tie for the one evening a week they dressed for dinner at the dorm.

Even when we phoned him at the dorm and a voice shouted, “Suds! It's your Mom!” there was no doubt in my mind I had dialed the wrong number.

My husband took one look at the curtains flapping outside the dormitory windows, a three-story monument to beer cans near the chapel, and a goat tethered in the student lounge, and said, “You are wrong. It'sAni'maf House.”

Had it only been four years since he sat at our dining room table and worked out his curriculum? At first I thought the subjects were frivolous, until our son explained there was a movement underfoot to make college students more literate.

“What will they think of next?” I smiled.

“The general consensus,” he added, “is that advanced education has swung too far toward specialized studies and needs to get back to courses that prepare students for life.”

I couldn't agree more.

He had done well in “Remedial Bicycle Watching” (three hours) designed for the novice who has had three bicycles ripped off in five years. “Bring chains, locks, small explosives, and detonator. Bicycles will be furnished.”

“Is There Life After Lunch?” was enlightening (three hours). “A seminar with guest lecturers who outline advantages of staying awake to participate in cleaning room, soaking laundry, doing required reading, and, in the final quarter, adding a class or two.”

He barely squeaked through “Your Car and Faith Healers” (two hours). This was “a frank look at automobile mechanics who promise to fix your transmission by adding water.” As a bonus, Dr. Weingard Schuyler, Heart Institute, conducted a lecture on how to survive an insurance premium notice after a claim has been filed.

No one will know how he crammed for “Parent Weekend: Religious Experience or End of the World as You Know It.” This covered all aspects of getting it together before your parents appeared on campus, including how to make a roommate of the opposite sex disappear and how to decorate your room with academic accessories like books and pencils. Guaranteed to give new meaning to “have a good day.”

The course he felt did him the most good was “Jogging For Bodies,” a five-hour fun approach to physical fitness in which warm-ups were eliminated and the emphasis was on meeting members of the opposite sex.

I thought he chose his courses of study rather wisely, but my husband said he feared that a general education would promote intellectual conformity and a sterile acquiescence for the sake of social cohesion. I told him, “The boy wanted to take 'Social Cohesion' the last semester, but he needed the 'History of Perrier' to graduate.”

To appease his father, he actually took a job-related course called “Cinema.” He always loved going to the movies. At first we thought it would be fun to have a child who could splice together some of our home movie shots of South America. That was until we discovered he edited the shortest home movie ever recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records. As he explained to us, “There was only ten feet of film that had any quality to it whatsoever. I cannot believe you left home without a dolly for the camera.”