I Still Have It. . . I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It (2 page)

When I looked up, Herb had already gone. I never saw him again, and I know that wherever he is, he’s in a happier place.

My husband tried to help me in any way he could. He would make an effort to be the first one to our mailbox and throw the filthy paper temptresses away before I could see them.

“I’m only doing this for you,” he would say, trying to save me and my credit card from myself.

I’m not proud of this, but I would actually dig in our garbage, fish out the discarded beauties, and dry their coffee-stained pages in the sun. It wasn’t even that I needed to order anything; it was that I had to see what was available to me, just in case.

I feel the reason catalogue shopping has not lessened with the advent of the Internet is the limited but crucial social contact that you get to enjoy with people over the phone. It’s like talking to a relative that you never have to see. I like speaking to people who are doing their best to be polite to me. I like giving my source code and my customer number, which appears in the little blue box on the back of the catalogue. I like that the call is being recorded to ensure impeccable and courteous behavior.

“Hi, this is Betty. How can I help you?”

I picture a friendly white-haired lady in her sixties wearing her glasses on a chain around her neck. She has a picture of her grandchildren on her desk as she writes down my order longhand.

Ordering on the Internet, I picture a badly dressed teenager with greasy hair in a warehouse examining a crumpled piece of paper, climbing up a ladder, matching the number to a box, and then tossing the box into an anonymous receptacle below. It’s just not the same.

I’ve kept my biggest difficulty with catalogues from you until now. It’s not so much the ordering that’s the problem as it is my inability to throw the little suckers away. I didn’t know how many I possessed, but they were hidden everywhere: under the side table next to my bed, behind curtains, and yes, even in my daughter’s bedroom. I’m so ashamed.

They are all gone now. I had a group of women from my meetings come over and we burned them in the backyard. Oh, they still come in the mail. There is no way to stop that. But now I look at them and throw them away, if not immediately, then certainly the next day. If I feel the need to hide one, I call my sponsor and she stays on the line until I agree to smear it with ketchup and throw it in the garbage.

I recognize that I have a problem, but I’m in recovery. I must be, because I recently received my first recovery catalogue.

When you get older, you really appreciate sleep. It’s the best of both worlds: you get to be alive and unconscious.

Do It Again

B
ECAUSE
I
WAS A CHILD SUCH A VERY LONG TIME
ago and my contact with children until I had my own was so limited, I was entirely unaware of a child’s capacity for repetition.

In a typical hide-and-seek session it is not unusual for my child to hide in the same place fifteen times. I’ve tried to explain it to her.

“Molly, the whole idea of hide-and-seek is to vary the places that you hide so I can’t find you. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Mommy. You tell me a new place to hide and I’ll hide there.”

“Excellent. I’m glad I’ve gotten my point across.”

Instead of hiding behind the bookcase, she’ll hide in the new place I picked out. Upon finding her, she squeals in delight and shouts, “Do it again.”

A while ago I made the mistake of carrying my daughter to her bath upside down. She is almost five years old and weighs forty pounds. I know it was in my power to say no and not carry her to the bath upside down ten times, but she is very persuasive.

“Just one more time, Mommy, I promise, this is the very last time. Really, it is. Mommy, just once. Really.”

I hauled her upside down and proceeded to jog to the bathroom holding my forty-pound weight, reversed her, and placed her carefully down on the bathroom rug.

“OK, now it’s time for your bath.”

“Do it again, just one more time. I promise. This is the last time. Really, really, really.”

And I would believe her, just like a first-time home builder being told by a general contractor, “I swear, I will not go over budget.”

In our third hour of playing on the beach one day, my daughter actually got tired of building sand castles and knocking them down and we decided to go for a walk and look for seashells. This is harder than it sounds. I don’t know where you live or if you’ve been to the beach lately, but there is a severe shortage of seashells. There are plenty of bottle caps, plastic forks, and the odd unmentionable decorating the sand, but the actual seashells have been disappearing faster than cashews out of a bowl of mixed nuts. I am such a people pleaser the thought occurred to me to sneak out after Molly was asleep, buy a few bags of shells, and scatter them around the beach during the night so our shell collecting would be more exciting the next day.

Just then, in the distance, I saw it: a complete shell. Not a fragment, but an untouched, sparkling beauty. I raced toward it to snatch it up before anyone else spotted it. It was my shell and I saw it first. I pulled it from the sand and stared at it intently. I ran my fingers over its smooth surface and thought,
Am I able to pass this piece of Frisbee off to my daughter as a shell?
Previously, I’d tried to pass string beans off to her as Martian spaghetti and that was a no-go, but what the heck, it was worth a try.

I turned around and Molly wasn’t there. I turned the other way and scoured the beach. All I could see were adults ignoring the dangers of skin cancer. I’d concentrated so hard on trying to find a seashell for my daughter’s enjoyment, I’d neglected to keep track of her whereabouts.

Horrible thoughts flooded my brain. She could swim but was no match for an angry ocean. What if someone had snatched my baby? The news was full of tales of the demented. I tried to keep calm, but couldn’t. A panicked tone entered my voice.

“Molly, Molly,” I shouted. Nobody answered. Tears began to form. What would I do without her? What would my life be like? How could I exist without my Molly being a part of the world? How could I wake up every morning and not see her sleeping with her three bunnies? I called out one more time.

“Molly. Please, Molly, where are you?”

I heard a giggle.

“Mommy, I’m here. I’m hiding behind you. Every time you turn around, I turn around too so you can’t see me.”

I scooped her up in my arms and hugged her a little too tightly.

“Mommy, why are you crying?”

“Because, for a minute, I didn’t know where you were and I was scared.”

“Really scared?” she asked brightly.

“Yes, really scared,” I replied.

“Really, really scared?”

“Yes, really, really,
really
scared.”

“Mommy, are those real tears?”

“Yes, baby.”

“Let’s do it again…and Mommy?”

“Yes, sweetie?”

“Why are you holding a piece of Frisbee?”

My mother was the worst cook ever. In school, when we traded lunches, I had to throw in an article of clothing.

Oh, Mother!

I
T’S MY CONTENTION THAT THE THINGS YOU REMEMBER
about your childhood govern the way you raise your own children. Even though my mother died when I was thirteen, I find myself constantly remembering the little things she did for me as I spend time with my daughter.

Kindness was my mother’s finest attribute; cooking was her downfall. Luckily, I was not a picky eater. Most of the things she cooked for me I found delicious.

I don’t know why my mother resisted the help of recipes. Professional cooks spend a great deal of time perfecting how much of something goes into something else, but my mother preferred to wing it. Her most successful culinary creation (and my all-time favorite) was spaghetti and ketchup mixed with a semi-melted lump of butter. My second favorite was what I called Campbelled rice. This paired instant rice with Campbell’s Vegetarian Vegetable soup. Not only was it delicious, it was also educational (if not entirely sanitary), as I would spell out different words on the kitchen table with the gummy letters. If there was any Campbelled rice left the next day, the mixture would be poured into tomato soup, thus creating yet another unique variation: Campbelled tomato rice paste. It was midway between soup and Spackle.

My mother’s three most spectacular culinary failures involved a can of corn, a duck, and matzo balls. They were not featured in the same concoction but probably would have tasted better if they had been. I don’t know what prompted her to put a closed can of Niblets into the searing oven; I just remember the explosion. I was only around five, but I recall that I was in charge of picking bits of corn off the floor while she climbed the ladder and tackled the ceiling.

My father loved chicken matzo ball soup and complained that the matzo balls from our local delicatessen were inferior to the ones he remembered from his Catskills childhood. He recalled matzo balls that were light and fluffy and yet somehow had a heavier consistency. I think it was the phrase “heavier consistency” that was my father’s big mistake. One day my mother set out to make the matzo balls from my father’s youth from scratch. I watched her blend eggs, matzo meal, water, a little more matzo meal for heavier consistency, and what appeared to be gunpowder and then attempt to discipline the mixture into the traditional round shape. She then dropped the rolled-up balls of mush into the boiling water and watched them morph. After a few minutes she removed the first specimen from the pot with a slotted spoon and scrutinized it carefully. It was now in the shape of a human liver. She placed it on a paper towel and cut it in half. Although the outside was gummy, the inside was runny, so she stuffed in a little more matzo meal.

“I guess they need more cooking,” she said. “I’ll cut them all in half and put them back in for a while.”

It was like eating dried Silly Putty. We were fearful of breaking the garbage disposal, so the leaden bits of dough were finally tossed in the trash, and all three of us had new respect for the local deli.

My father’s “I’m bored with chicken and steak” statement led to the diabolical duck. For this dish my mother enlisted the help of a recipe. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a recipe for duck.

“A duck is just like a chicken,” she reasoned. “I’ll use a recipe for roast chicken.”

I remember her taking the duck out of the oven and encountering a sea of grease that in my brief life I had never seen emanate from a chicken. It was so slimy that as my mother served it, the poor bird almost slid off the plate.

Not wanting to waste a perfectly good duck, and continuing to make the faulty chicken/duck comparison, the next day she decided to make duck salad. Adding mayonnaise to a mixture does not make a dish less greasy. My mother put the chopped duck, eggs, celery, and mayonnaise in a bowl, mixed it up, and attempted to make me a duck salad sandwich. Even I said no.

Along with my mother’s lack of cooking talent, I also remember her remarkable personality. I remember the light in her eyes whenever she saw me. I remember her kind voice and her forgiving, patient nature. I remember the way she went out of her way to do things to make her little girl happy. I remember the smocking she painstakingly sewed on my pink-striped party dress and her hand-stitching together my first tutu (without a pattern, of course). I remember her surprising me and showing up on parents’ day at my summer camp in North Carolina days after undergoing a major operation. I remember her trying her best to keep a smile on her face as she battled a rampant cancer that refused to be abated. Most of all, I remember that she loved me. I still miss her. After all, she only died forty years ago.

Cooking aside, I only hope I’m half as good a mother to my daughter as my mother was to me.

I love to shop. I rationalize shop. I buy a dress because I need change for gum.

Go Ahead, Open This Bag

M
Y FATHER’S ANNUAL VISIT ALWAYS REMINDED ME
that as we age we do not become less strange.

This particular year, my father looked a little drained as he shuffled off the plane. His usually neatly positioned white hair was disheveled and his shoulders appeared hunched.

“Dad, good to see you,” I exclaimed, administering the two-second father-daughter hug that we had perfected through the years.

“I thought I could do it. Turned out I was mistaken,” he whispered dejectedly.

“What do you mean?”

“The bag of peanuts won,” my father mumbled.

“You’ve come all the way from Miami to Las Vegas to visit me. I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist you make sense,” I demanded. “What game were you playing with a bag of peanuts?”

“I attacked the bag from every possible angle from the minute the flight attendant handed it to me. I just couldn’t open it.”

“You spent five and a half hours trying to open a bag of peanuts?”

“No. I rested periodically.”

“Didn’t the bag have a perforation on one side? Usually, if you look carefully, on one side there’s a perforation.”

“I checked. There was no perforation. Possibly it was a defective bag. I don’t know, I didn’t check other people’s.”

“Why didn’t you ask for help?”

“I’m a seventy-eight-year-old, two-hundred-pound man. What do you want me to say to the thirty-year-old, one-hundred-and-fifteen-pound female flight attendant? ‘Will you open this bag of peanuts for me?’ Why don’t I just put on a dress and be done with it?”

“How about the person sitting next to you?”

“I wish you hadn’t asked. She was an eighty-year-old ninety-pounder.”

“And she opened the bag with no problem?”

“She struggled. She finally stabbed it with a fork over Denver.”

“Why didn’t
you
stab it once you saw there was a way in?”