Tales from the Dad Side (15 page)

The Parent Trapped

M
ary and Sally,” I addressed my high school girls as I served up a couple short stacks of flapjacks, “if we could do anything today, what would it be?”

“Let's get manicures!”

That was not the answer I was expecting. It was like discovering that Lou Dobbs was an illegal alien.

“Mommy takes us all the time. Puh-lease?”

Welcome to New Jersey, the nail salon state, with the highest per capita consumption of acetone in the civilized world. Allow me to explain how seriously women in the Garden State take their nails. A lovely mother of two had just gotten her nails done. She didn't want to smear her still-tacky fingers on the seat belt, so she decided not to buckle it for her five-block trip home. While she was waiting at a stoplight, a teenager blew the light, sending her through the windshield.

“She didn't feel a thing,” her best friend told me at her funeral. “This is how she'd want to go. Look at her nails—they're
perfect.
”

That's how powerful the pull to polish is where I live, so if my girls wanted to go out for manicures while Mom was busy, I could certainly drive them over; they surely had a three-year-old
Popular Mechanics
magazine in the spot wherever the menfolk waited for their beautified women.

As I was pulling into a spot at the strip mall, Mary got me a second time. “What are you getting, Dad?”

Whoa, hold it right there, Shorty
. That was not part of the deal. I had no intention of getting a treatment of any sort at that clip joint. I was just their chauffeur, who'd pay at the end.

“Come on, Dad!” They were giving me the same look our golden retriever gives me to open the sliding door so he can come inside and drag his dog butt across our living room rug.

Doing an instant damage assessment, I didn't spot any cars I recognized in the lot. The salon was five doors down from Starbucks, so chances were none of my regular coffee swillers would see me. So I took a gamble. Keep in mind I had never had anything like this done before and thought the whole lotion and potion thing on guys was weird, although I did once laugh at something on
Will and Grace.

“Okay, what would you suggest for a gentleman, ladies?”

Their answer was unanimous, a mani-pedi, which is salon slang for getting a manicure and pedicure; I explain that for any Montana or Wyoming cowboys reading this by campfire light.

“Do you have the punch card?” Mary asked Sally as we entered the reception area; my wife had a card that was just one punch away from a free visit, because every tenth visit you could have any single body part trimmed or tweezed for free. Leonid Brezhnev, the authoritarian leader of Russia with the big Brooke Shields bushy mono-brow, would have loved this place.

My girls were regulars, and as soon as the door opened, the woman in charge greeted them by name and asked what they'd like done. I immediately took charge as the alpha dad.

“A manicure for Sally, with a palm tree.”

“Very nice.” She nodded her approval. “Last time she had a beach ball.”

“And Mary will have the manicure
and
pedicure,” I said in the loud voice so that nearby customers would hear that Mr. Big Spender was splurging for both, the nail equivalent of surf and turf.

Then I dropped the bomb. “And I'd like a manicure and spa pedicure as well.”

Four or five matrons swiveled their heads around, Linda Blair–style, to see the man who wanted his toes painted.

“You do serve guys, don't you?”

“Of course,” she said as I imagined she nervously depressed a hidden button with her foot that would warn the luxuriating ladies there was a man in the house.

“Penny!”
The receptionist summoned a sturdy young woman who looked Korean but insisted she was from South America, who was apparently on staff to handle the more complicated cuticle cases, like split toenails or men.

As I walked back, every single woman paused for a moment to look up from her
Vogue
or
Better Homes and Gardens
. They stared at me mouths agape as if I had last year's haircut.

I was directed to a burgundy leather massage chair much like the one Sharper Image has in its window, except instead of a footstool this one had a five-gallon foot tub. Once I was barefoot, Penny gritted her teeth and took a good look at the science project I'd been growing for the better part of forty-five years. Surely the last time she'd seen feet like mine was in
Shrek
.

Without a word she gave my feet an extra squirt of some sort of something that burned on contact. I tried to sneak a glance to see if it was an insecticide from the Black Flag family.

“They must be for a man—they're called man-icures!” I cracked, trying to break the spa ice.

(Crickets.)

Sally was having second thoughts about my being on the premises. While I didn't know anybody there, she did: cheerleaders from her high school, the dip-cone girl from Dairy Queen, and half a dozen vaguely familiar women from church who'd apparently heard a man was coming in and wanted a good seat. Meanwhile my older daughter, Mary, sat smiling her approval of my doing something so evolved. “Dad, you're so Clay Aiken.”

A word about a pedicure—it does not feel good. After the burning squirt bottle, Penny got out what I would gauge from my wood shop days was a 60-grit sandpaper stick, and sanded off things. Once satisfied, she picked up a razor-sharp stainless-steel contraption that looked like one of those vegetable slicers advertised on late-night television and whacked off more years of dangling skin parts. It was absolute torture. Why were these nail salon girls working in New Jersey and not Gitmo, where they would have those terrorists singing like canaries?

Not wanting to appear a wussy, I said nothing about the pain and instead observed the half a cup of dry dead skin debris she'd just harvested from my feet. “Penny, good job making the grated Parmesan.”

“Thank you, Mr. Steve. Now I never eat pizza again.”

“Way to go, Dad,” whispered Sally.

“Your father is very liberated,” the woman next to Mary told her as Mary sent a text message to her mother that read exactly: “its fun 2 c dad interact w/the staff.”

Ten minutes later my wife got another text that read: “Dad's eyes are closed. He doesn't know it, but they're putting polish on his toenails! Don't worry, it's clear, but very shiny!”

They didn't ask me about polish. Penny just pulled out the little bottle and slathered it over all ten of my little piggies. Please don't quote me on this, but they looked great. But my self-admiration was short-lived, as Penny directed her attention to my calves and kneecaps with a vigorous rubdown. I felt a little self-conscious with a total stranger massaging me in front of my children, but the kids nonchalantly watched the woman giving me the calf job. Why weren't they a teensy bit freaked out? It was like seeing your dad take a spin class with Elton John.

“Let's go,” Penny announced as she pulled me up and escorted me toward the front of the store for my paraffin manicure.

“Hi, girls,” I said to a trio of high school cheerleaders who giggled as they watched me waddle their way wearing a pair of paper flip-flops.

“My dad will get a manicure,” the cheerleader from the middle of the pyramid said, “the instant a pig flies out of his butt.”

The brunette tagged on a “My pops is clueless about what happens here. He doesn't even know what a Brazilian is,” and they all burst into laughter.

“What's a Brazilian?” I discreetly whispered to Penny, who handed me a brochure explaining that a Brazilian was not only a person from Brazil, but also a painful waxing process performed by technicians who had made such poor career choices that they were paid to apply hot wax to total strangers' most private nooks and crannies and then briskly rip it out, making the recipients rue the day they started growing hair in those southern spots.

For my manicure Penny used nail clippers, which was much different from how I did my own nails, which was with a pair of scissors from Staples. By this time my daughters were hovering, watching Penny's precision much like medical students gathered around a famous cardiologist during a triple bypass. I just sat there and smiled; this was why we came: a father spending quality time with his girls. Then I realized they just wanted tip money.

“Back pocket,” and they pulled out my wad of ones and looked for their manicurists and pedicurists. A few minutes later the work was completed on my hands and feet, and on my thirty-eight-dollar bill I tipped Penny ten bucks because of all the extra time involved, and because it was gross. This wasn't just a gratuity, it was hush money.

“Penny, ten dollars says I was never here.” She happily slipped it into her apron as she returned to vacuuming up my piles of DNA with a Shop-Vac.

On the way out the door I spotted one of our annoying neighbors, whom we don't speak to because she dropped a dime on me to report the building of a tree house without a permit. As we passed her I turned to my daughters, and asked, “Did you enjoy your treatments, girls?”

“Yes, Daddy,” Sally said.

“Me too! I think I'll get
another
Brazilian next week!” And just to
add to the effect, I exited a bit bowlegged, much like my many Montana cowboy readers.

The father-daughter thing had worked out; I had shown them I wanted to be with them and was willing to leave my comfort zone and try something from their girly world. In turn they asked if I would take them into my 'hood.

“Can I go with you to the gym, Daddy?”

I loved showing Mary how all of the weight-lifting machines worked. She did the heavy lifting as I stood next to her and counted, from one to ten, over and over. She then ran on the treadmill much faster and farther than I could run as I marveled at how she was able to sweat like one was supposed to. Over the years I had developed what I called a “placebo workout,” where my routine consisted of changing into my workout costume, stretching, chatting with friends, traversing from machine to machine doing a few non-life-threatening lifts, and finally taking off my workout costume, which, thanks to my sweat-free workout, was never soiled.

After our workouts Mary and I were headed to our separate changing rooms, and I had the satisfying feeling that I'd shown her the ropes of my old-man gym.

“You're lucky she wants to spend time with you. My girl's already married,” a guy who always seemed to be at the gym when I worked out said from the other end of the locker room bench I was seated upon.

“We're lucky men to have girls who love us,” I said.

I was expecting some sort of a response, but he said nothing. Perhaps he was struck by the shockingly profound conversation for two men in towels, or it could have been the telltale sign that I was not the man he'd thought I was.

“Hey, Steve,” he said with his eyes cast downward, “what the hell happened to your toes? They're shiny….”

I Can't Cut the Cord

M
y lone son and I arrived at Newark airport around eight on the evening of July 4. Most of America at that moment had already applied mosquito repellent and was seated in uncomfortable folding chairs that seem to be used but once a year as our nation collectively commemorated our national anniversary the way our forefathers intended, by blowing things up and frightening wild-life.

Explosions were in fact all I could think of. It was two summers after September 11, and despite the fun our high school sophomore would soon be having with his cousin that summer at Oxford, the fear was palpable in letting him fly alone thousands of miles across an ocean filled with water and sharks and scary plankton that can consume human flesh, all in the dead of the night. His mother was too upset to go. We both put on brave faces, but I could tell he was just as nervous as I.

“Anything you want to tell me before I go?” my seventeen-year-old globe-trotter asked at the departure gate.

I paused for a moment. “Yes, there is. If you see a nice girl you'd like to chat with, don't start with ‘Are you allergic to duct tape?'”

A laugh, a hug, and he was gone.

The night he flew across the Atlantic was the first time he had ever been away from home. Long after everyone had gone to bed, I
walked to his bedroom door and caught a whiff of the very essence of him, dirty tube socks and Axe body spray.

If he had been there, what would he have been looking at right then, other than
SportsCenter
? I lay on his bed. Directly overhead were the glow-in-the-dark stars we'd glued to his ceiling as a second-grade science project. They'd watched over him for most of his life. On that night, he was under the real stars, on his own.

The next night I returned to his room before going to bed to think about him, and the next night and the next, but I stopped before a full week had passed, because I was getting used to the idea that he was gone. At summer's end, we flew to London and took the train north to watch our boy clad in prep school blazer and khakis take part in a very spirited debate on something that made no sense to us.

Still our little boy, he seemed more worldly as he gave us his tour of Oxford University. His sisters were particularly impressed with the long dark dining hall where they filmed the Harry Potter movies. I made Sally put back the souvenir fork she tried to pinch from the table that sat under the levitating candles.

“Dad, don't walk there,” he barked out as I strolled across the gorgeous lawn at Pembroke College.

“Peter, you're not the boss of me,” I said proudly, co-opting a line from the
Malcolm in the Middle
theme song.

“It's against the rules,” he insisted.

What happened to my calm son? He goes away to England and turns into Dick Cheney?

“Peter,” I shot back, “you're telling me they have rules against walking on the grass?”

“Dad, it's not just grass, it's a graveyard.”

Oh.

“A lot of the teachers who lived in these buildings,” he said, pointing to the surrounding halls, “are buried in this courtyard.”

My initial repulsion turned to a weird admiration of the lush
green carpet, which was on a par with a fine golf course. At home I could fertilize only with Turf Builder; here they used English professors.

Walking with him as he gave us a guided tour, I was struck by how independent he seemed. I was very proud of my boy.

Four years later and it was my daughter Mary's turn to go to Oxford, and while I certainly trusted her as much as I did her brother, she was a girl, and I worried that with her wandering around England for the summer it would simply be a matter of time before she'd catch Prince William's eye, and by the end of her summer Mary's name would be on a terminal at Heathrow and I would get a cushy job as a viscount.

But before a prince offered her a glass slipper she would have to get to England, and there was a problem with that—the day she was to leave, a series of car bombs were found in London, and just as we were loading our SUV for the airport, my wife called me back into the house to watch a report from Sky News that a terrorist had rammed his bomb-laden Jeep Cherokee into the front door of the Glasgow airport and then lit the both of them on fire.

“The red zone is for loading and unloading car bombs….”

Coincidentally, the last trip we'd planned had been for Mary's sweet sixteenth birthday, and rather than an extravagant party with scads of marginal friends and excessive decorating, she'd asked her mother to take her and her sister on a trip to Paris. Airline tickets were purchased, hotels were booked, and on the day they were to leave, hundreds of young Parisians decided to welcome Mary by lighting the suburbs on fire. Looting, violence, general chaos. Panicked that they'd be caught in the bedlam, my worried wife called Continental Airlines and spoke to a sympathetic reservation agent/mother who agreed with my wife that the only thing that should be torched on a sweet sixteen was birthday candles and not a warehouse district. Au revoir, City of Frights.

Instead they flew west to southern California. They stayed at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, where they worked out next
to Jude Law in the fitness center and saw Pamela Anderson changing in the locker room.

“Dad,” my youngest daughter, Sally, confessed later, “when I realized who that lady was who was undressing, I just thought one thing.”

“Yes?” I said, knowing that the one thing she would think would be different from the one thing that came to my mind.

“Where's my camera phone? Do you know what the tabs would pay for that?”

Sally was one candid away from a full ride to college thanks to the
National Enquirer
. But there would be many more famous seminude celebrities for her to befriend. At that moment we were about to ship off her sister, Mary, to Oxford to study British history. But unlike her last aborted trip to Europe, this time it wasn't Molotov cocktails thrown by French teenagers who wanted jobs; the UK airport terminal attack was international terrorism.

“If she doesn't go, it means we've surrendered and the terrorists win,” I told my wife, honestly believing that, kind of.

Terrorism is always easier to talk about when it affects other people, not a blood relative. At that point Mary had been in her room and not near a television, so she had still not seen or heard about the UK attack or the worldwide increase in the terror threat. Why should we tell her? It would only scare her. As she packed, my wife and I decided that because of the heightened state of alert, Heathrow was at that moment probably the safest airport in the world. The decision was made—she would go.

But we didn't know whether to tell her about the incident on the way to the airport or to just let her discover it on her own once she got there. She must have known something was up preflight because her brother and sister uncharacteristically burst into tears when they said good-bye, and all of our friends made urgent phone calls—“Are you going to let her go?”—which led to private conversations behind closed doors so that somebody who might be flying that day would not get as freaked out as her parents.

As we drove to the airport we did not listen to news radio because we didn't want her to hear one of the news bulletins. Instead we listened to Dr. Laura tell some woman who was stuck in a dead-end marriage to leave the womanizing bum to whom she was hitched.

“This is the hill you want to die on?” Dr. Laura lectured some call-in loser on XM.

I didn't want to think about hills or dying so I changed the channel and we listened to some guy in a monotone tell us that we should liquidate our 401(k) and invest in pork bellies.

At the gate Mary, who by that time knew about the terrorist attack, was a picture of maturity. When it was time to say good-bye, she put on her brave face and then walked through security backward so she could see us every step of the way until a partition got in our way, and she was gone. I was trusting the guys with the Uzis would keep her safe between our house and the land of Quidditch.

Wondering whether we'd made the right decision to send her, my wife and I spoke not a word on the way home, instead listening to the news on the radio of the attack, and how they'd gotten some leads and were about to launch a series of raids to head off another attack. I had an uneasy feeling about letting her go. It was the right thing for her…wasn't it? When my wife and I got home, I went to the airline website and punched in her flight number. As I waited for that screen to load on that day of international airport terror, I was instantly scared to death.

Call the airline
.

That was the same online notation for the planes that crashed on 9/11. I dialed her cell phone, and got nothing, not even her voice mail message. I found another flight tracker, identical message.

Call the airline.

Why couldn't she have gone to summer camp in the Berkshires, where the only worry was about flies the size of canned hams? I picked up the cordless and dialed the 800 number for the airline.

“Due to an unusually high call volume, your call will be answered by the next operator in approximately twenty-three minutes.”

Twenty-three minutes? Why was the airline switchboard suddenly jammed at nine o'clock on a Sunday?
BECAUSE SOMETHING BAD WAS HAPPENING, AND I WASN'T THERE TO PROTECT MY DAUGHTER!

Tempted to hang up and call another number, I knew I'd just lose my place in line, so with speakerphone on, I went fishing on the Web, where panicked parents can become hyperspeed typists. Five other flight trackers all issued the same disturbing notation, but after I was eighteen minutes on hold, I was back at her airline site and got a suddenly different notation:
Taxiing for takeoff
.

What changed from
Call the Airline
to
Taxiing for takeoff
? It didn't matter. I sat at the computer clicking—
REFRESH
—every fifteen seconds, as it gave me a virtual real-time status report;
Taxiing for takeoff. Altitude, 0 feet. Altitude, 0 feet. Altitude, 0 feet. Altitude, 50 feet.
I held my breath, watching to make sure the numbers went up and not down.
Altitude, 120 feet.
I continued until her flight was cruising 35,000 feet away from anything the plane could run into, like buildings, mountains, or icebergs.

At bedtime I replayed the ritual of going to her room and sitting on her bed, but this time I didn't feel sad; I felt very alone. This was what it would be like when she and her brother and her little sister all moved away. It would be painfully quiet. I sat there and wondered if she was frightened, or if she even knew what was happening on the ground in the United Kingdom. I stared at a third-grade Halloween costume photograph of Mary dressed as Mary Queen of Hearts. Things used to be so simple.

As dads we try not to show when we're scared or worried, but truth be told, the most frightening times are when we have no control over what's happening. When the kids are somewhere we can't see them, or talk to them, or squeeze them, we have to hope and pray that they are safe, and that if something comes up, they'll be wise enough to improvise. Twelve hours after
Call the airline,
our phone rang.

“Hi, Dad!”

“Hi, Mary. You took off late….”

“We did? Didn't notice. Daddy, it's real pretty here today,” and she launched into an excited recitation of who she'd met and where she'd been and how she'd momentarily lost her bag. “I just met the nicest boy. His name is Eduardo, and he taught me how to salsa dance!” I could hear kids laughing in the background; I felt a wave of relief wash over me until the cell phone abruptly cut off.

“Hello…Mary…Hello?”

I waited a minute for her to call back, but nothing, so I dialed her cell phone. It rang and rang and rang some more. Where was she? Was she with Eduardo? Wait a minute, who was Eduardo the salsa dancer? What was the legal age for marriage without parental consent in that country? As I Googled an answer I reminded myself of one of my wife's sayings,
Paranoia will destroy ya,
which was true, but as her father it was natural for me to imagine the worst possible scenario was unfolding at some undisclosed location, in another country. I hit redial again, and a man answered. It was not Eduardo.

“Hi, this is Chuck Norris….”

For her sixteenth birthday I had asked
the real
Chuck Norris—the same guy about whom somebody on the Internet has invented hundreds of Chuck Norris-isms, like “Chuck Norris has two speeds, walk and kill,” the Mr. Norris who was one of Mary's cultural icons—to record her phone message. He had graciously complied, and his message was what I was hearing.

“Mary Doocy can't come to the phone right now, because we're out fighting crime,” Chuck Norris announced in his famous monotone. “Leave your message at the sound of the snapping neck.”
Beeeeeeeep
.

“Mary, it's Dad. Call us when you can.”

It was hard for me to let my son travel alone to England, but it was exponentially tougher for a father to let his little princess fly away from our little cocoon to the land of the kidney pie. For every parent saying good-bye to any children, regardless of the time apart, it is tough. We raise them as best we can, we teach them stuff like how to start a pilot light or change the spare tire, even though we
know they're not paying attention, because they know we'll always be there to help them. And just when our children get to be young adults and truly a joy to be around, they leave us to start their own lives.

Mary would return in five weeks, and we would all survive what was her first big step toward a lifetime of independence. She knows that wherever she goes and whatever she does, between her mother, her siblings, Chuck Norris, and me, she'll never be alone.