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As the old year hobbled to a close, my mother, my sister and I would all sit thoughtfully in the glow of the Christmas tree, wearing as many of our presents as could fit on one body at the same time and finishing off the cookies, while we chose our New Year’s resolutions from the hundreds, nay thousands, on offer. Would I stop teasing my sister? Stop arguing with my mother? Cut my hair? Would my sister finally trade in the twenty hard plastic and brightly coloured dinosaurs she slept with for something more orthodox like a teddy bear? Would she overcome her hysterical fear of shampoo? Would this be the year she tried spinach? And what about Mom? Would she learn to play the piano? Plug in the sewing machine? Figure out how to parallel park? My father never took part in this ritual. He sat in His Chair, smoking a small cigar and reading a book or the paper, acting as if he was unaware of what the rest of his family was doing, If pressed (or goaded) by my mother, my father always said that he’d already made one New Year’s resolution, (never to make another New Year’s resolution), and that, so far, he’d kept it. Which was definitely more than anybody else he knew or was related to had ever done.
The years came and the years went. My hair grew longer. Even if you said it in Polish or Mandarin just the mention of the word ‘shampoo’ still set my sister off like a car alarm. My mother continued to drive around town looking for a space that didn’t involve parallel parking, sometimes coming home after two or three hours without ever getting out of the car. Indeed, few of our resolutions ever made it past noon on New Year’s Day. Until the year my mother announced that her resolution was to go on a diet, that was.
My mother had always been one of those skinny, flat-chested girls who wouldn’t put on weight if you locked her in a candy factory for a month. While her friends were all worrying about whether or not they could dare wear stripes and politely refusing second helpings of lettuce, my mother decked herself out like a zebra and ate like an Olympic swimmer. Which meant that she was one of the three or four women in the entire country who had made it into her forties without ever going on a diet. Not once. Not even for thirty-eight minutes. And she probably never would have gone on one if it wasn’t for Millie Firnberger.
At the Christmas lunch of my mother’s church group, Millie Firnberger asked her how far along she was. For a second or two my mother wondered what Millie was talking about. How far along what? A friend of mine once said that he never knew he had a big nose until his first day of teaching. He’d turned his back on the class to write his name on the board, and when he turned back they all had their arms held out in front of their faces like elephant trunks. And so it was that my mother never knew she had developed a ‘stomach’ until Millie Firnberger smiled over the chicken a la king and asked her when the baby was due.
My father’s reaction to the diet resolution was to nod vaguely from behind his paper, puff on his cigar, and say, ‘That’s nice dear.’ Which was what he always said.
My mother put her hands on her hips, her elbows jutting out like arrowheads. ‘You don’t think I’ll stick to it,’ she snapped. ‘You think it’ll be like when I said I was going to bake my own bread.’
‘I didn’t say that,’ said my father.
The bread-making resolution had produced one loaf, so hard it broke the knife she tried to slice it with.
My mother’s elbows continued to jut. ‘But you were thinking it. I know you. You don’t think I have any willpower.’
My father sighed. Like my sister and I, he had a healthy respect for the power of my mother’s will. Like hurricanes and tornados, it was nothing less than a force of nature.
‘I think you can do anything you set your mind to,’ said my father. Which was what my mother always said, whether she meant it or not.
‘What is this?’ my father was gazing at his plate as once the natives of the East Coast must have gazed out at the enormous wooden ships looming towards them and thought: Are those floating islands? Is this okay in a general, that’s how things go kind of way, or are we really in trouble?
‘Supper,’ said my mother. ‘What does it look like?’
My sister and I were also gazing at our plates with bewilderment – and a growing sense of horror.
It looked like three ounces of boiled chicken, one cup of steamed spinach, half a cup of plain rice, and a tomato, cucumber and lettuce salad (sans dressing) to me.
‘It looks like your diet,’ said my sister.
My mother, who was as known for her mood swings and reality-defying logic as she was for the number of parking meters she’d banged into while trying to parallel park, smiled sweetly over a forkful of lettuce. ‘Well you didn’t expect me to sit here eating cottage cheese while the rest of you stuff your faces with meatloaf and mashed potatoes, did you?’
Apparently, we did.
There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of diets in the world. I knew that. Excerpts were always appearing in my mother’s magazines. The grapefruit and the Atkins… The GI and the Hollywood… The Scarsdale, the nut, the all the grape leaves you can eat in one sitting… And now there was this.
Good grief, I thought. My mother’s invented the family diet.
Later, conferring in whispers in the basement where my father disappeared for hours at a time to ‘do things’ (which meant get a little peace) we all agreed that we’d been naïve.
My mother did all the cooking. My mother did all the shopping. My mother planned all the meals. It should have been obvious right from the start: if my mother was going on a diet, then we were all going on a diet.
‘Maybe we’re getting ourselves all worked up over nothing,’ suggested my father, who’d never wanted more than a quiet life. ‘Remember the piano? She never got past Chopsticks. She won’t last more than a day without potatoes.’
I wasn’t so sure. I was a fan of Sherlock Holmes and, although weak with hunger, I’d been doing some snooping around. ‘She’s bought a calorie counter,’ I said.
‘So?’ shrugged my sister. ‘Lots of people have calorie counters.’
‘And a book.’
‘And lots of people have books.’ My sister was born with a positive and optimistic nature.
I gloomily shook my head. ‘This is a diet book.’
‘Maybe we can bury it,’ said my sister. Positive and optimistic, but practical as well.
Dad patted our shoulders fondly. ‘I’m telling you, you’re overreacting. She bought the sewing machine, too, but she’s never used that. We’ll be eating goulash by the end of the week.’
My father was wrong. Probably because she felt he’d challenged her. My mother had set her mind to going on a diet the way governments traditionally set their minds on world domination. She was taking n prisoners. Showing no mercy. Throwing out the rules about not gunning down women and children. There was no more sugar in the house. No chocolate milk powder. No cookies. No bread that wasn’t whole wheat and sliced so thinly you could read through it. We all watched in horror the night my mother poured the last bottle of soda down the sink. ‘None of you need this junk,’ she proclaimed. ‘You’re much better off with water and lemon.’ By the end of the week we were eating Ryvita with one teaspoon of sugarless jam and calling it dessert.
‘I never thought I’d say this,’ said my sister, ‘but I actually look forward to going to school.’
At school there was lunch. There was the deli to stop at on the way home to buy a bologna sandwich, a quarter pound of potato salad, a giant dill pickle and a bag of chips. We’d huddle under the awning at the front of the store, oblivious to the gales and snows of January, stuffing it into our faces before it froze and we’d lost all feeling in our toes. We’d sneak boxes of cookies home in our school bags and eat them under the blankets at night.
‘It’s not enough,’ I said. ‘We’re growing girls. We need meatballs and spaghetti. We need hamburgers and French fries. We need banana cake.’
‘Why don’t you two come to the lumberyard with me?’ By the end of the week my father was taking a new interest in doing the odd jobs in the house that had been undone for years, walking around with a pencil tucked behind his ear and a notebook tucked into his shirt pocket . ‘You can give me a hand.’
On the way home from the lumberyard we stopped at McDonald’s.
‘I don’t get it.’ My father squeezed ketchup over his fries with a philosophical if puzzled shake of his head. ‘It’s been a whole week. How come she hasn’t caved in yet?’
Far from caving in, my mother seemed to be blooming. She tucked into her morning slice of dry toast and half a grapefruit without sugar with the enthusiasm of a child given a hot fudge sundae. Every night she set the day’s boiled, steamed or poached offering on the table as though it was a Thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings. She said she thought the diet was doing us all a world of good.
‘And she’s not even in a bad mood,’ offered my sister. ‘That’s not normal.’ It didn’t take much to put my mother in a bad mood; starvation should have been a no-brainer.
I chewed thoughtfully on my cheeseburger. ‘You don’t think she’s scamming us, do you?’
My sister wiped ketchup from her mouth. ‘You mean like the way we’re scamming her?’
My father bit into a fry. ‘That’s where the two of you get your deviousness from,’ said my father.
The four of us were exhausted and tetchy from fighting our way down Oxford Street with armloads of shopping. There’s something about people constantly walking into you, suddenly stopping in front of you to check their phones, or whacking you with giant rolls of wrapping paper that drains the joy out of your heart like pulling the plug drains the water from the bath.
“I told you we should go to a mall,” grumbled Marigold, hugging her shopping close for warmth as well as protection. “At least they have benches. And heat.”
Saskia jumped nimbly out of the way of a triple baby buggy being wheeled by a woman on a mobile phone who apparently had the deed to the pavement between Marble Arch and Regent’s Street in her handbag. “Yeah, but there’s less room to manoeuvre in the mall,” she muttered. “What about the time I ended up in that pond?”
I said, “You know, I think we should take a tea break.”
Daisy, buffeted by a pack of women with blood in their eyes, ricocheted off a post box and retrieved her hat from the road. “Tea’s not going to be strong enough,” said Daisy.
We wound up in one of those coffee bars that sprung up in (and cover) London like a rash. There were coloured lights, a small tree decorated with silver snowflakes and jolly wishes for a happy holiday in the windows. Shining red and green tinsel garlands hung from the ceiling. Bing Crosby crooned gently in the background. The staff all wore either antlers or Santa Claus hats.
“This is my last year doing this.” Marigold leaned back in her chair, holding on to her cup as a woman adrift in the stormy Atlantic would cling to a life preserver. “It gets more and more like a kamikaze mission every year.” She fished a piece of tinsel from her cocoa. “I’m really worried that one year I’ll never make it back home. They’ll find me trampled in the lingerie department, the last pair of striped leggings clutched in my cold, dead hand.”
“I’m with you.” Saskia shook her head and a cloud of artificial snow floated into our drinks. (In case you’re wondering why there was artificial snow in Saskia’s hair, searching for a present for her godchild she’d tripped over a small boy in the toy store and fell into the Winter Wonderland display.) “Not only is it more and more like Mission Impossible, it’s also Mission Futile and Pointless. I don’t know anybody who actually needs anything, and if there’s something they really want they already have it. Except for the babies. The babies grow out of things before they wear them even once. But that’s it. All I’ve bought are Gifts of Desperation.” She put a plastic carrier bag decorated with angels on the table and reached inside. “Just look at this stuff.” The stuff in question was a scarf in this winter’s colours for her aunt; a pair of camouflage socks for her uncle, and a Homer Simpson can opener for her brother. “Like the forty scarves she already owns aren’t enough for one woman. Like my sixty-year-old uncle’s going to be sent to Afghanistan next week. Like my brother ever buys anything without a ring pull.”
Daisy, whose nature is in keeping with the seasonal spirit of peace and joy, said, “I think those are good presents, Sas. They’re practical. And they’ll probably get used. You know, not like the egg slicer Huey gave me last year. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings so I told him was just what I always wanted, but I’ve been I never had any trouble slicing eggs with a knife. And I did with the slicer. It kind of mauled the eggs.”
We all laughed.
“That’s not nearly as bad as the crocheted toilet roll cover my grandmother made me that time,” said Marigold. “Remember that? It looked like a candle. It even had a flame.”
I remembered. “We must’ve spent an hour trying to figure out what it was for.”
“And we could never really be sure,” added Marigold. “It could’ve been to cover a roll of kitchen towel. Or if you had a bunch of tinned peas you didn’t have room for in the cupboard.”
“Don’t let’s leave out the clothes pegs,” begged Saskia. The clothes pegs were wooden ones, painted gold and decorated with artificial flowers. Roses I believe. Though they could have been pansies. My godmother gave them to me. But, unlike Marigold’s toilet roll cover, which had at least been made for her by her grandmother with her own hands and a heart full of hope, my godmother had bought the clothes pegs somewhere. Not with hope, but because it was Christmas Eve and she was running out of time. “Did you ever do anything with them?”
“I didn’t have to. The dog ate them.” I pointed to Saskia. “But what about you? What was the worst Christmas present you ever got?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” said Saskia. “The elf slippers. They even had bells on the toes. I looked like Little Sandy Sleighfoot.”
“At least you didn’t have to wear them in public.” Pain filled Marigold’s eyes as she relived the year her parents bought her a pink duffel coat when everyone else was wearing puffy parkas or baseball jackets. “I’d’ve run away from home if I’d had a decent coat to wear.”
The afternoon snuggled up around us as we recounted our treasured memories of Christmases Past. Not just the gifts you can never forget. The magic moments: when the cat landed on the turkey; when the tree fell over; when your brother unexpectedly turned up with six friends who had nowhere else to go. By the time we’d finished our drinks and stopped laughing, we were all in such a good mood that we were singing “Silver Bells” as we left the coffee bar, heading for the next block of shops, the joy settled back in our hearts.
Night was falling. A pale disc hung over the park.
“Look,” said Daisy. “The moon’s smiling. Like it’s wishing us a Merry Christmas.”
And maybe it was.
Happy Solstice! Merry Christmas! Season’s Greetings!
Winter's coming - if not already here. Time to store the harvest, can the last of the fruit and vegetables, and batten down the hatches. In America, of course, November is the month when Thanksgiving is celebrated. When folk travel hundreds, even thousands, of miles, and eat enormous quantities of food to thank the Earth for her bounty ? and the next day start shopping for Christmas.
Which is one of the things that made me think about 'Living the Dream'. It's what most people want; a phrase you hear all the time. Living the Dream - 'I'll win the biggest lottery in the world, and I'll be living the dream.' 'I'll become a celebrity because I can hop on one foot and whistle the title song from the musical Oklahoma! at the same time, and I'll be living the dream.' 'I'll inherit billions from a great aunt in Geneva who ran away with a mysterious stranger forty years ago and whom I've never heard of, and I'll be living the dream.' 'My guardian angel will appear at the foot of my bed one night and grant me whatever I want, and I'll be living the dream.'
I don't know about you, but I've never really been completely sure what this 'dream' is meant to be. Clearly, it involves a lot of money. Probably a lot of bathrooms, cars and electronic gadgets as well. Really big televisions. Holidays in five-star hotels with infinity pools and mind-boggling room service. Limitless amounts of clothes, jewellery, shoes and watches. For people who already have more money than most sovereign nations, living the dream will probably include six houses (with tons of bathrooms), a yacht the size of a large town and at least one private jet. (For people living on sidewalks, in cardboard boxes, or in their cars, living the dream is likely to be a little more modest.)
But if you think about it, none of that is really living any kind of dream. It's all just about being lucky in one way or another and having a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff that will stay behind when it's your turn to leave the planet. It seems to me that the real dream is Life itself. That's what we should be living. Every day, and every minute of every day. Laughing and singing and loving. Watching the sun rise and set. Counting the stars. Walking through the falling leaves or falling snow or falling rain. Telling stories. Hugging baby orang-utans. Filling our lives with colour and joy. Knowing that Life itself is a gift for which we should be endlessly grateful.
Which is why I'd like to dedicate this month to the memory of Mei Yee (aka Pamela) Leung, who knew this and was...
Mahjong by Mei Yee Leung
...a fantastic artist... a fantastic spirit... a fantastic friend...
All hallows night,
When witches roam,
And restless ghosts
Search for a home.
Tis wise to stay safe in your bed,
The covers drawn above your head.
For you never know just what they’ll do –
And how it may come out for you...
My mother got the ouija board in a yard sale. Twenty-five cents, never used and still in the box. If there was one trait that my mother, my sister and I all shared it was the never-pass-up-a-bargain trait. We’d buy anything so long as it was on sale – biplanes, baby elephants, pre-Colombian fertility gods, doughnut-hole cutters. Even ouija boards. “Those things are just a lot of hokum, just as useful for connecting you to the spirit world as a piece of old rope,” said my father when he saw the board. “That’s twenty-five cents thrown away.” It was not a trait he shared.
Grandma Madge (my mother’s mother) read tealeaves and had a crystal ball and, in general, was a woman of many legends, myths and superstitions. She agreed with Hamlet that there was more in Heaven and Earth than met the eye. My father’s family didn’t go in for that kind of thing. If you couldn’t see it, then that was probably because it wasn’t there.
“That’s not the future,” my father would say, staring into the cup in which Grandma Madge had just seen a tall, dark stranger and a long journey amid palm trees and happy singing. “That’s just used tea.”
But although my sister and I were, of course, fascinated by fortune telling and communication between realities and longed to have a paranormal experience, my father’s cynicism had its effect on us. Rather than risk his ridicule and have him walking around for days saying, “Didn’t I tell you?” and “What did I say?” because all his negative energy sent every spirit on Long Island flying off to Connecticut to see what was happening there, my sister and I decided to wait for Halloween to try out the board. Halloween, the night of shape shifters and unquiet souls; the night when witches ride the wind and ghosts pass among the living like dreams. On this night you can talk through time and speak with the dead as easily as you pick up a phone and call your best friend. All you need is a deck of tarot cards, a bag of runes or – if the spirits have finally provided one for you – a ouija board. We were ready.
We decided to have a sleepover, and we chose our guests carefully. I invited my friend Kammy, who had once seen a ghost sitting on her front porch when she got home from school. (Kammy thought it was someone interested in renting the upstairs apartment. She did wonder why the woman was dressed for a funeral in the 19th century, but there was a lot of amateur theater in our town so she put it down to that. She asked the woman what she was waiting for. The woman said, “Ebenezer,” and promptly disappeared.) My sister invited Luane Clearwater, who claimed to be related to Pocahontas, on the grounds that the natives of the Americas traditionally had a good working relationship with the spirit world.
The only place we could have our “séance” was in the kitchen, because that was the only place with a table we could all sit around. Major white appliances and cabinets filled with canned vegetables and boxes of cereal aren’t really what you think of when you think of calling other realms, but my sister and I did our best. We lighted the room with candles and covered the window with her signs of the Zodiac bedspread so we couldn’t see the swing set out the back.
My father poked his head in as we were setting up. “If you happen to run into him,” said my father. “You wanna ask Oswald if there really was another gunman?”
None of us had ever tried a ouija board before. But we figured we knew what to do. Put your fingertips on the planchette; ask a question; shut up and concentrate; wait for an answer.
Kammy thought we should start with a simple test question.
We closed our eyes. “Is it Halloween?” we asked.
Nothing happened for a minute or two, and then the planchette started very slowly to move.
We all opened our eyes.
‘Luane, stop pushing!” ordered my sister.
“I’m not,” said Luane.
“Yes you are,” said my sister.
She was.
We started over.
We spent at least forty-five minutes on the simple test question, but always one of us, perhaps subconsciously impatient to get on to something more interesting, would start shoving the planchette towards YES.
“Why don’t we just skip the easy question and try one that has to be spelled out,” I suggested.
“And one none of us knows the answer to,” amended Kammy.
We asked the ouija to name the ghosts in our neighborhood.
But, again, the only time the planchette moved was when one of us made it move. L. A. Z. C.
“It looks like the name of a drug company,” said Luane.
Q. B. S. X.
“Maybe it doesn’t speak English,” said Kammy.
My mother came in and made some tea. “No luck yet?” said my mother.
My father came in and made himself a sandwich. “Maybe all the spirits are busy tonight,” said my father. “Getting candy.” Then he laughed like that was the best joke he’d ever made.
My sister decided that the problem was the doorbell. It kept ringing because of the trick-or-treaters. My sister said, “How can we call up an ancient spirit with all these little kids constantly interrupting?”
We took a break for snacks and replaced several of the candles that had burned out. We waited till the trick or treating was over and my parents went to bed. And then we tried again.
When Luane fell asleep sitting up, we agreed that it was probably time to give up and go to bed.
“Dad was right,” grumbled my sister. “It’s all a load of hokum.”
“Maybe we should lie,” I said. “So he doesn’t gloat.”
When I woke up it was still dark and the others were sound asleep. But I was wide awake. I don’t know if I really thought the ouija would answer us, but I was disappointed that it hadn’t. And I really didn’t want my father to be right. I decided to try by myself.
I opened the kitchen door. There was a woman sitting at the table, staring down at the planchette. She was dressed all in black. Even her bonnet was black. The planchette was skittering over the board like a mouse being chased by a cat.
I spoke without thinking. I said, “What are you doing?”
She looked up. “I’m waiting for Ebenezer,” she said.
And then she disappeared.
HAPPY HALLOWE’EN!!!
‘I have the best news! You’re not going to believe it!’ Tobia leaned forward, earnestly, her eyes bright with excitement.
‘Don’t tell me! You’ve found a way to end global poverty? You’ve succeeded where Bono and Sir Bob failed?’
‘No, not that.’ She shook her head, disappointed in my lack of vision. She picked up her cup. ‘What I’ve done is, I’ve finally decided what I’m going to do with my life.’
This was good news not only to Tobia, but to all her friends and family who had been wondering for some time whether or not she was ever going to do anything.
‘That’s great,’ I enthused. ‘What’s it going to be? Doctor, lawyer, marine biologist, physicist, head of the IMF?’
She shook her head again and took a sip of tea. ‘No, none of those. Those things aren’t me.’
I resisted the urge to groan out loud. ‘You haven’t gone back to the idea of being a celebrity, have you?’ Although, almost magically, ‘celebrity’ has become a job description in recent years, most of Tobia’s family and friends had spent a lot of time making her aware of the downside of celebrity. The massive amounts of plastic surgery. The twelve hours in the gym every day to stay in shape. The photographers living in the trees and dustbins outside your house. The global criticism and condemnation if you wear the wrong shoes, put on a pound, or forget to shave your legs.
‘Oh, no, no, no,’ Tobia assured me. ‘I know what a competitive field it is. I understand that even though you don’t need any qualifications or skills like you would to be a plumber or something it isn’t really easy to become a celebrity.
No, this is much much better than that.’
No plastic surgery. No paparazzi. And, presumably, no skills or qualifications. It sounded ideal
‘Keep me in suspense no longer,’ I begged. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m going to become one of those - one of those -’ Tobia frowned, searching for the word that was skittling round her brain like a panicking bird. ‘You know. That thing the French don’t have a word for.’
I said I was under the impression that the French had a word for most things.
‘Not this.’ Tobia was still frowning. ‘President Bush said, the French don’t have a word for it.’
‘You mean entrepreneur?’ I suggested.
‘That’s it!’ She snapped her fingers. ‘Entrepreneur! I’m going to be an entrepreneur.’
Because I am sometimes accused of being fussy and petty I didn’t point out that entrepreneur is, in fact, a French word. It wouldn’t be the first time either President Bush or Tobia was wrong. I said, ‘Wow. Well that’s really something.’ I poured more tea. ‘So what’s it going to be? Boutique? CafÄ? Bookshop?’
Tobia’s expression became thoughtful, almost musing. ‘Actually, I was thinking of launching my own perfume.’
‘You what?’ I’d picked up the milk but put it back down ‘Perfume? Your own perfume? Is this before or after you launch your own satellite?’
‘You’re being sarcastic, right?’ Her expression was less thoughtful than suspicious. ‘Are you saying you don’t think it’s a good idea?’
I said that, yes, that was what I was saying. Because, unless she’d been holding back some information on her general education, I wasn’t aware that she knew how to make perfume. Assuming, that was, that you could make it in the kitchen or the bathroom.
Tobia’s laughter spluttered like a damp match. ‘I’m not going to make the perfume. I mean, do you think Mariah Carey makes her own perfume? Or Hilary Duff? Or Justin Bieber. Get real, they probably don’t even make their own beds. I’m just putting my name to it. Like they do.’
I took a slug of black tea. ‘What are you going to call it? Tobia Blackthorn’s Impossible Dream?’
Undaunted, she said, ‘Well maybe not perfume, then. I could do a clothes line like Gwen Stefani and Beyonce. Or cosmetics like Katie Price. Or even jewelry or shoes.’
‘Tobia,’ I said. Calmly. Patiently. ‘Tobia, you don’t have a name. That is, you have a name, but it isn’t a name anyone but your friends, your family and your doctor recognizes. Those people can only get away with launching their own labels because they’re celebrities.’
Tobia leaned back, her smile serene or, possibly, slightly demented. ‘But don’t you see, that’s the beauty of it. Only celebrities can put their names on something. So I put my name on something and, bingo!, I’m a celebrity! And I don’t even have to go on some reality TV show to do it.’
‘You know what?’ I finished off my tea. ‘I think you’re right. I don’t think the French do have a word for it.’
My parents both came from immigrant, working-class families, and couldn’t have been more down-to-earth if they’d lived underground. Upward mobility was a phrase they associated with elevators. My mother always said that she had no fancy airs and graces, that she was working-class and proud of it, and that pretty much summed up both of my parents. In a country where Keeping up with the Jonses was almost a national past-time, my mother couldn’t give an old sock what the Jonses were doing.
Suzette Renzulli’s mother wasn’t like my mother. Mrs Renzulli had airs and graces that stretched from her house on Chestnut Grove to the moon. She named her children Suzette and Gerald, not Susan and Gerry as any other mother in our community would have. She drove a late-model foreign car, not a used domestic like the other mothers. She didn’t subscribe to Good Housekeeping, she subscribed to Vogue. Mrs Renzulli, my mother said, was in competition with the world. Or certainly with our slightly drab and unexciting just-outside-the-suburbs part of it. Mrs Renzulli had to have the newest, most expensive, most modern, latest and trendiest everything. Car. Furniture. Appliances. Clothes. She was determined to be both different and better than everybody else. If a neighbour put a birdbath on her lawn, Mrs Renzulli put a fountain on hers. If a neighbour threw a barbecue Mrs Renzulli threw a wine and cheese party. In out neighbourhood, it was the Jonses who had to keep up with Mrs Renzulli.
And then, that fateful summer, the Melroses, who lived across from the Renzullis, went to Mexico. Or, to be slightly more precise, the Melroses went to visit Mr Melrose’s sister in San Diego and took a day trip to Tiajuana. Mrs Renzulli immediately announced that her family was going to Paris that year. (‘Not even Canadal!’ cried my mother. ‘France!) Mrs Renzulli’s conversation became full of French words – oui and non, s’il vous plait and excusez moi. If she saw you walking down the road she called, ‘Bonjour!’ If she backed into your car in the supermarket parking lot, she cried, ‘Mon Dieu!’
It was a hot summer, and so my parents and my sister were driving around the cool and leafy Adirondacks. (When it came to her vacation my mother thought that since she had to cook approximately 362 days of the year, at least seven of those days should be on a sterno stove by the side of the road, and so our holidays were always spent driving along the coast waiting to break down.) I’d chosen to stay home that year, reading every Sherlock Holmes story and looking after the dog, the parakeet and the fluctuating population of guppies. Mrs Renzulli hired me to water their gardens while they were away.
Every afternoon Booey and I would walk the several unpaved blocks to the Renzullis’. Booey would rest in the shade of the oak tree in the back yard while I hooked up the hose and watered Mrs Renzulli’s flowers (lilies, of course – there were no marigolds or pansies in Mrs Renzulli’s borders) and Mr Renzulli’s vegetable patch, even larger than my dad’s. While I was there I’d also walk round the house, just to check that everything was secure. I should say here that this wasn’t because we lived in a high-crime area, but in a high-raccoon one. My mother believed they could pick locks.
The first few days were uneventful. But the day after my obsession with A Study In Scarlet had almost made me forget to water at all, I noticed that there were vegetables missing from Mr Renzulli’s patch. I dropped the hose. Quite a few vegetables missing. Tomatoes. Corn. Cucumbers. Zuccini. Beans. Lettuce. Carrots. A couple of onions. Some of these missing vegetables could, of course, be explained away by rabbits (or even raccoons). But even I, whose idea of helping her father with his vegetable garden was to eat whatever he grew, knew that rabbits rarely pull up whole heads of lettuce. Or carefully pluck carrots, squash or ears of corn. They don’t know the right way to pick tomatoes. I was deep into the intense and foggy world of Sherlock Holmes by then. Wooden wheels echoed over cobbled streets. The sad strains of a violin drifted through the more ordinary sounds of TVs, radios and dishes being laid. I looked around for clues. Tiny clues. Small signs. Things that would be missed or thought of as insignificant by a less analytical mind like Watson’s or Booey’s. I scanned the neat rows of vegetables, my eyes narrowed, by brain whirring. And there it was! Holmes would have been proud; I found a clue. Footprints in the soil that yesterday’s unusually late watering had softened. I reasoned that the most resourceful, lock-picking raccoon doesn’t wear shoes.
Having clocked the footprints in the vegetable patch, I then stood back to assess the situation. The way Mr Holmes would. Who were my most likely suspects? On the right of the Renzullis’ was Mrs Karlsen. Mrs Karlsen was in her eighties and was never seen out after dusk, which made her unlikely for midnight garden raids – even if anyone had ever noticed her wearing men’s shoes. On the other side were the Ramses. Mr Ramse was the Methodist minister. Mrs Ramse was a guidance counsellor at the high school. The image of Mr Ramse in his dog collar and Mrs Ramse in her suit and pearls sneaking into the Renzullis’ backyard in moonlight to steal cucumbers was a hard one even for someone with my imagination to conjure up. Behind the Renzulis were the Morgans, who had a six-foot fence, a swimming pool and one of the most expensive houses in the area. I couldn’t see them coming all the way around the block in the dead of night to steal corn.
I dragged my faithful sidekick Booey from under the oak, and together we carefully examined the crime scene for further clues. A tissue carelessly dropped from a pocket. A butterfly of ash drifted from a nervous cigarette. The hole of a high heel in the lawn that would tell me Mrs Ramse wasn’t what she seemed. We didn’t find any of those things. But there was dirt on the back stoop that possibly hadn’t been there the day before. And one of the basement windows was opened a crack. I might have missed dirt on the stoop, but there was no way I’d missed an open window. Quiet as air, I kneeled down. Our basement was a cellar, concrete and damp where my father had his workbench and my mother’s washing machine gently rusted. But if our basement hadn’t begun, the Renzullis’, of course, was finished. It had floors and ceilings and panelled walls. It had rooms with doors. It had a pool table and a bar. There was nothing to be seen through the crack: the room was dark, the door closed. But I thought I could hear distant voices; I would’ve sworn that I smelled, very faintly, something that made me think of pizza.
Things might have turned out differently if my parents had been home. My father, irritated by all the ouis and nons, the s’il vous plaits and excusez mois of the last few weeks, said Mrs Renzulli was like a gold ring you could bite in half. My mother said that if Mrs Renzulli insisted on naming one of her children Suzette she should have called the other one Crepe; at least than it would’ve been funny. My parents, therefore, would have been suspicious. They would have wondered just what was going on and called through the window. I called the police.
In neighbourhoods like ours, good news travel fast but bad news really travels fast. As soon as the police pulled up people started appearing like stars on a winter night. One on that porch. One on this lawn. A cluster at the side of the road. A gaggle of boys surrounding the patrol car. A group of girls at the bottom of the driveway. The Renzullis were just sitting down to supper when Officers Murphy and Spazoto entered the basement. They were dressed not for Paris but for the beach. They were having spaghetti.
You can’t arrest people for not having enough money to go to France and eat olives and snails on their vacation; for not even having enough money to go to the Jersey shore and eat hot dogs and saltwater taffy. Especially not when they’re hiding in their own basement. But things were never the same for the Renzullis. They weren't shunned, but they were definitely smirked at. Kids starting calling Suzette ‘Sue” and Gerard ‘Gerry’. Which was probably a relief to them. The foreign car was sold and the wine and cheese parties replaced with barbecues. Which was probably a relief to Mr Renzulli. But well into the autumn, whenever Mrs Renzulli appeared someone would mutter ‘Mon Dieu’. And my mother had the satisfaction of comparing notes with Mrs Renzulli on cooking on a sterno stove.
For those of you who never heard of him, Brian Haw, who died last month, was a British peace campaigner and activist. He set up a one-man peace camp in London’s Parliament Square, across from the Houses of Parliament and that other great tourist attraction, Big Ben, in June of 2001. To start with his protest concerned the economic sanctions against and bombing of Iraq by the UK and the US, but after September 11 and President Bush’s declaration of the War on Terror (and then Afghanistan and Iraq) he widened its focus. He may not have been a formal part of the anti-war movement in the UK, but he was certainly an inspiration to it. He lived in his camp for nearly ten years, a visible thorn in the side of the government, annoying it to the point where Parliament changed the law to try and get him out. It didn’t work. He was constantly harassed, complained about, criticized and arrested. That didn’t work either. In 2003 millions of people around the world marched to protest the beginning of the Iraq War, but after those marches they all went home and had dinner and watched TV. Brian Haw stayed at Parliament Square. In the winter and in the summer, in the sunshine and the rain, he was there with his pictures of dead children and his placards and his buttons and his tent. And with his enormous courage, dignity and anger. It doesn’t matter whether or not you think Brian Haw was right to believe that war is wrong and that mass murder is not a flawless foreign policy. What matters is that he had, as my mother would have said, the courage of his convictions. Or, as my father would have said, he put his money where his mouth was. Unlike many of the people he irritated the most, he didn’t say one thing and do something else, or back down at the first sign of trouble.
I doubt that Brian Haw will rest in peace. I think his ghost will be haunting Parliament Square for many years to come. I certainly hope so.
Mallory answered the phone on the tenth ring. That alone should have told me that something was wrong. Mallory is someone who would answer her phone immediately if it rang while she was being introduced to the Queen. She said, “Hello?” Quietly. Almost warily. As if her thoughts had been somewhere else.
“Mallory?” I said. “Mallory, it’s me. Are you ready? I’m all set to leave the house.”
Mallory and I had been planning a walk along the river since the grey, bleak days of winter when we huddled together by the fire, our fingers wrapped around a hot cup of tea and the wind whistling through the chimney. It’ll be Spring, soon, we told each other. And then we can take a nice walk along the river. Spring robed in all of Nature’s glory, fresh and bright. The timeless banks of the Thames green and leafy and dappled with sunshine as we strolled along as countless people before us had strolled. Past quaint villages. Past woods and fields filled with wildflowers and butterflies. Past islands and gliding swans. Past ancient cottages, grand estates and historic pubs. A timeless walk where instead of the bleat of sirens we heard the call of birds; where instead of stalled traffic we saw rabbits leaping through the tall grass and baby birds learning to fly; where instead of the indifference of the city we were greeted with friendly waves from fellow walkers, boat and barge. I thought of it as The Glad to Be Alive Walk – basking in the joys of Spring.
Mallory choked back a sob. “I can’t come.”
“Can’t come? But why not?”
“I just can’t. I—I—I’m too upset.”
Too upset for the Glad to Be Alive Walk?
“But what happened?” Had the boiler broken again? The cat gone missing? The computer crashed? She wasn’t ill, was she? “Are you all right, Mal?”
“Oh it’s not me. I mean not specifically. I’m ok. It’s-” Another sobbed cracked her voice.
“Who?” I pressed. “Your mum? Your dad? One of your nieces? Oh, no - not Uncle Joe.”
“No, it’s nobody like that.” She snuffled back a few dozen tears. “It’s—It’s-”
“Who?” I screamed. Begged. “It’s who?”
Mallory blew her nose. She took a deep breath. “It’s just that it’s such a dreadful world, isn’t it? There’s so much misery. I mean the Bible’s right. It’s a vale of tears. It’s wall-to-wall suffering. And it’s hideously unfair. It’s a miracle anybody has a moment of happiness with all the horrible things that happen to people who so don’t deserve it.”
What were we talking about here? The millions of starving, abused, disease-ridden children in the world, thousands of them dying every day? All the people killed by drone bombers? The indigenous people fighting the giant oil companies to save their forests and keep their homes and ways of life? The people blasted, shot, humiliated and made homeless in wars and peace-keeping missions they didn’t cause? The constantly growing number of victims of flood, drought, tornado, earthquake, famine and nuclear meltdown? All the hardworking people who lost their homes and jobs and dreams in the duplicitous dealings of the banks and brokers? It’s a pretty long list.
“No, none of them.” This time Mallory’s voice didn’t so much crack as splinter. ”We’re talking about Cheryl Cole.”
Did I still have water in my ears from my shower?
“Who?”
“Cheryl Cole, Dyan. You must know who Cheryl Cole is. She was on the UK X Factor.”
“Is she the one who wears way too much make-up?”
“That’s a matter of opinion.”
“Is she the one who once won the ‘Best Looking Girl of Newcastle’ contest?”
Mallory blew her nose again, honking in a way that would have impressed even the gliding swans we were clearly destined not to see. “It wouldn’t surprise me. She’s not just a talent judge. She’s a fashion icon, you know. She was only on the cover of Vogue. And she’s the new face of L’Oreal.”
I had no idea who the old face was.
“Singer?” I was getting an image. Hair. Lips the color of ketchup. Eyelashes like awnings. “She was in some girl band, right? But she’s not Victoria Beckham.”
“Of course she’s not Victoria Beckham!” Mallory adroitly managed to combine deep sorrow and grief with indignation and outrage. She should be on the X Factor herself. “She’s Cheryl Cole. Victoria Beckham’s never suffered the way Cheryl’s suffered.”
Like the jingles for products you would never buy that you find yourself humming as you sit on the bus, bits of information I never asked for started jogging around my brain.
“You mean because she had malaria? Mallory, do you know how many people die of malaria in-”
“It’s not just that.”
“The divorce?” I was pretty sure there’d been a divorce. From a football player. “Did I miss something? You’re not trying to tell me she’s the first football wife to ever get a divorce?”
“You’re being deliberately ridiculous,” accused Mallory. “You must know what happened. It’s been all over the news.”
It had been all over the news.
“She puffed her hair up and went off to conquer America.”
“No!” Mallory’s was an anguished cry. “She got fired!”
Which didn’t strike me as being a first, either.
“From the US X Factor,” explained Mallory.
As if that made all the difference between Cheryl Cole losing her job and the thousands of people who aren’t the new face of L’Oreal losing their jobs because of the economy.
“But they’re just ordinary people, not role models for young girls,” argued Mallory. “Cheryl Cole is. She’s an inspiration. She shows them that they can do something with their lives. That they can be somebody.”
“You mean divorced?”
“Dyan…” Mallory’s voice sounded like a tapping heel.
“Okay, I know what you mean. You mean Simon Cowell’s protogee. But what about that incident? Was that part of being a role model?”
Mallory sighed. “What incident?”
“The to-do Cheryl had with the bathroom attendant in that nightclub that time.”
There was another calling-the-flock honk. “You’re the only one who remembers that,” said Mallory.
“What do you mean you don’t want to go?” Margo gave me the same look my mother used to give me when I refused to eat something she believed was really good for me. “It’s an historic occasion. It’s a communal ritual with mythic overtones. It’s the best show in town. And, besides, it’ll be fun.”
“It wont’ be fun.” I said this with some conviction. “It’ll be worse than Christmas shopping on Oxford Street. Worse than rush-hour traffic in L.A. Worse than New Year’s Eve at Time’s Square.”
But, like my mother, Margo wasn’t to be discouraged by reason. “No, it won’t.
You’re wrong,” she insisted. “I’m telling you, it’ll be fun.”
I set my jaw in a way my mother would instantly have recognized as the there-is-no-way-okra-is-going-past-my-lips signal. “Define fun.”
“The cheering crowds,” said Margo. “The feeling of camaraderie. The pageantry and pomp. Everybody excited and cheering. The entire planet joined in a glorious celebration of love.”
“You won’t see anything,” I argued. “Unless you consider seeing a bunch of people in Will and Kate masks who have come all the way from Düsseldorf and Manchester for the weekend waving flags seeing something. You’ll be packed in with a bunch of strangers and all you’ll see are the backs of other strangers heads.”
“But you’ll be there. It’ll be something to tell your granddaughters. You were there when a commoner married a prince! It’s like a fairytale come true.”
“I’d rather tell them about Thomas Rainsborough and the Levellers.”
“Oh...” Margo’s sigh contained several universes dark with disappointment. “You can’t be serious. Every girl wants to be a princess.”
“Oh please.” My sigh contained several universes stormy with contempt. “Where’d you get that from? Some Disney movie?”
But Margo was adamant. That’s why you see so many girls in pink. And fairy wings. And sparkly tiaras. Small girls are tucked up in their Little Mermaid sheets and matching duvet covers at night (or Cinderella, or Sleeping Beauty), to dream about some day marrying a handsome prince. Older girls, having moved on to pop-star sheets and duvet covers, read The Princess Diaries and continue to dream.
I asked if no one’s noticed that there aren’t that many princes to go around.
“The operative word here is ‘dream’,” said Margo. “It’s important to have dreams.”
“It would be more useful for everyone if they dreamed about discovering a way to reverse climate change or bring about world peace. This monarchy lark is all just an extravaganza to distract people from reality.”
Although she’s actually a biochemist, Margo can produce the scowl of a thwarted dictator when she wants. And the scathing tone of voice. “In case you haven’t noticed, the royals are real. They have castles and horses and all those hats.”
“But 99.99999% of us have a lot less chance of joining them than of winning a jackpot lottery.”
“But people do win jackpot lotteries,” Margo countered. “You see them in the papers all the time, pouring champagne over their heads and buying expensive cars. And anyway, I’m not asking you to wish on a star here, I’m just asking you to go see the procession. To be part of history.”
I pointed out that I’m already part of history. We all are.
“I don’t know why you always have to be so negative,” grumbled Margo. “Why can’t you see the joy and happiness a wedding like this brings all of us?”
“You’re right,” I finally conceded. “This wedding has brought me some happiness and joy.”
“Because they’re so obviously in love?” guessed Margo.
“No, it’s not that.”
“Because it’s such a magnificent spectacle and people all over the world will be watching it?”
“No, it’s not that, either.”
“Okay, I give up.” Margo made an empty-handed gesture. “What is it?”
“Tony Blair wasn’t invited. It must be driving him nuts.”
Leona and I were having tea in my kitchen. On the table was the pile of papers that mostly live there, two cups, two saucers, two spoons, the teapot, a pitcher of milk, a sugar bowl, a plate of chocolate-chocolate-chip biscuit, Leona’s Burberry and one elegant but largish black and white cat. The cat was on the Burberry.
Leona looked in her cup, and gracefully removed a black hair with one long, bright purple nail. Though in a pointed way.
“Excuse me, Miss B,” I said to the cat, “you’re not supposed to be on the table.”
Miss B gently waved her tail over my tea.
“You know, I’ve never understood the point of cats,” said Leona to me.
“The point?”
Leona nodded. “Yes, the point. What do they do exactly?” She reached for a biscuit, blowing off a few white hairs. “What do they contribute to the world?”
Miss B had been purring (a sound rather like that made by the motor of a small and ancient refrigerator), but now she stopped. She narrowed her eyes.
I gave up looking in my food and drink for cats hairs years ago so I was staring at Leona as I took a sip of tea. “Well,” I said, “they’re very curious, of course. They’re always investigating things.”
Which is why Miss B frequently has cobwebs hanging from an ear.
“They’re not exactly furry Sherlock Holmeses.” Leona brushed at the sleeve of her linen shirt. “What do they do? That’s my question. You know, to justify their existence. To pay their way. You know, like dogs offer companionship.”
“Cats are companionable.”
“No they aren’t,” said Leona. “Unless there’s food involved they’re either asleep or sitting with their back to you.”
“That’s not true.” I pointed to Miss B. “See? They like to be in the centre of things.” Put down a box or an empty paper bag and the cat’s in it. Open a newspaper or set your jacket (or your Burberry) on the table and the cat’s on it.
“Dog’s guard the house.” Leona was being pretty dogged herself.
“Miss B guards the house. You should see her come running when she hears the gate open.”
“Because she thinks she’s going to be fed.” Leona looked at Miss B, who seemed to be nodding off. “And what if it was a burglar? A dog would attack. Would she attack?”
Possibly not. The time someone threw a rock through the window it took four hours to find Miss B, made magically purse-size, at the back of the cutlery drawer. On the other hand, the time Leona heard a strange sound in the house she rang me from the cupboard under the stairs, begging me to come over and see what it was since she couldn’t ring the police because of last time.
“Would you?”
Leona ignored my question. “What about loyalty? Dogs are fantastically loyal. They’re man’s best friends. They’ll always stick by you through thick and thin. Cats only think of themselves.”
I bit into a biscuit. “I’m not saying that’s true, but if it is true, cats aren’t the only ones.” People steal, lie cheat and betray each other all the time. And they let each other down. “Remember when you dumped Arnie Folkstone because he got hay fever?”
”Oh, you’re not harking back to that, are you?” Leona sighed. “You should’ve heard him. He never stopped sneezing. I could barely hear myself think round him. It made me nuts.”
I poured more tea. “A dog would’ve stayed with him.”
As would a tree, a ferret, or a sunflower.
“And they hunt,” said Leona. “Dogs. They can get you food.” She eyes Miss B, whose head was now resting on the plate of biscuits. “Cats don’t do that.”
“Cats hunt. They’re very good hunters.”
“Having a mangled mouse dumped on your face at five in the morning is not the same as a dog swimming into the lake to retrieve a pheasant for your dinner.” She moved the plate and Miss B’s head dropped to the table. “And if you accidentally shoot yourself whilst hunting, a dog will go for help.”
“Like Alastair did when you fell down the stairs on the bridge that time?”
She fished another hair from her tea. “He doesn’t like hospitals.”
He left her and took a cab home.
“The thing is, Leona, that if you’re talking about the point of things, there isn’t much point to anything, is there?”
“Consider the lilies of the field… they toil not, neither do they spin…” murmured Leona. Which seemed a surprising quote for someone who has more labels than Heinz. “At least lilies engage in photosynthesis and produce oxygen. All cats so is eat and sleep.”
“Actually, I wasn’t thinking of lilies.” I rubbed Miss B’s ear and she immediately started purring even though she did give the appearance of being asleep. “I was thinking more of people.”
“People?” repeated Leona.
“I mean we are doing our best to destroy the planet and everything on it one way or another, but aside from our notable contributions to global destruction what is it we do to justify our existence? ” Miss B crossed her paws, pretty much defining the word “adorable”. “You’re not all that loyal and you don’t hunt.”
“I shop. Shopping counts as hunting.”
“But what else?”
“What else do I do?” Leona spluttered with amused disbelief. “You know what I do. I’m a banker.”
“Okay so you eat and sleep and bank.”
“I make money.”
“And spend it on thousand-pound bags.”
“Well that’s more than cats do,” said Leona.
‘Man, did you hear about Charlie Sheen?” asked Dan.
I said, ‘Who?’
‘You know, the highest paid actor on American TV, Charlie Sheen.’
I frowned, thinking. ‘Is he in Mad Men?’
‘No not Mad Men. He’s in Two and a Half Men.’
I said I guessed that if he was the highest paid actor on American TV, he didn’t play the half.
Dan said that opinions on that differed.
Margot said, ‘She’s pulling your leg, Dan. She’s not unconscious or orbiting the Earth. Of course she knows who Charlie Sheen is.’
I nodded. ‘Martin’s son.’
‘Hahaha,’ said Dan.
The simple truth, of course, is that unless you’re unconscious, in a space ship or live in a cave in the Himalayas where you meditate for ten hours a day and never see another soul, after his most recent meltdown, you know who Charlie Sheen is. My cat knows who he is. ‘Burping birds, not him again,’ says my cat.
‘I’m just sick of hearing about him,’ I explained. ‘Have all the wars, famines, injustices and disasters on the planet been miraculously sorted so this guy is all was have to talk about? You can’t open a paper or turn on the radio or even go online without seeing or hearing something about Charlie Sheen.’
‘So besides the fact that the world does have other problems, is the reason you’re sick of hearing about him because he makes more money for one episode of his sitcom than most of us make in a lifetime?’ asked Margot. ‘Is that what it is?’
That, too. But mainly because, as far as spectator sports go, I’ve found the whole media frenzy over Mr Sheen’s very serious problems a lot like bear baiting, and just as pleasant and enjoyable to watch. (Discounting the fact that the bears didn’t get paid fortunes they then squandered rather spectacularly.)
‘I wasn’t gloating,’ defended Dan. ‘I feel sorry for the bloke. He’s obviously in big trouble. I hope he can sort himself out. You know, like Lindsay Lohan.’
Lindsay Lohan sorted herself out? When did that happen?
‘After she got out of custody last year,’ explained Margot.
So what’d she do? Give up all her worldly goods and go to work in an orphanage in Africa for the rest of her life?
Dan shook his head. ‘No. She visited some teenagers in a homeless shelter in L.A.’
‘She signed autographs and gave out some purses,’ added Margot.
‘Wait a minute, wait a minute.’ For the first time in days I was actually able to forget entirely about Charlie Sheen. ‘How is her visiting this shelter supposed to help these kids?’
Margot laughed. ‘Um duh. It’s not to help them, is it? It’s to help her. She said it made her feel blessed.’
And so she should.
‘Are you saying that’s her sorting herself out? Spending half an hour at a homeless shelter, realizing that there are people who can’t afford to go to expensive rehab or get a good lawyer when they’re in trouble?’
Dan shrugged. ‘Well, it’s a start.’
‘Gee,” I said. ‘Maybe if she works really hard in five or six years she’ll be asked to interview Putin.’
Dan looked at Margot. ‘Now what’s she talking about?”
Margot rolled her eyes. ‘Naomi Campbell.’
So far, this year has already shown itself to be filled with all sorts of challenges and surprises, and I was with some friends the other day, talking about what had been happening in the world. Biblical floods. People’s revolutions. Economic collapse. The offside rule.
‘Admit it,’ said Barry. ‘You have no idea what the offside rule is.’
‘It doesn’t matter whether I know what the offside rule is or not. I don’t play football,’ I explained. ‘What matters, Barry, is that the sports commentators were saying that the female linesman didn’t know what the offside rule is. Because, even though she is a linesman, she’s a woman. And, obviously, only a man could understand anything as complex and cosmically significant as a rule some men made up for some game they also made up.’
‘They were just joshing,’ said Leo. ‘You know what blokes are like.’
‘Um…” Annie gazed at him over her mug. Meditatively. ‘That’s how we know that they weren't joshing.’
In case you are not a European football fan, let me explain very briefly what happened. Two British commentators, covering a live match, passed some comments to each other about the woman linesman’s ability to understand the offside rule - or inability – when they thought they weren't On Air (which, unfortunately for them, they were). It’s true that the offside rule isn’t as simple and straightforward as, say, the Thou Shall Not Kill rule, but apparently this inability to understand it is genetic and affects every woman ever born, even if she’s trained for years to become a linesman and knows as much about football as David Beckham. That’s of no importance. She might as well be an orang-utan for all she’ll ever understand the offside rule. Needless to say, there was a pretty swift and vocal response to this exchange, and not just from women. Men who see nothing wrong with women doctors, lawyers, artists, fighter pilots, or even linesmen, rose up in outrage. [I’m not going to bother explaining the offside rule here. If you’re a football aficionado/a you’ll already know it. And if you’re not a football aficionado/a, you don’t need to know it. It’s not like it’s going to save you if you get lost in the jungle, or help you work out the distance between Bent Tree, Oregon and the nearest star. You can lead a completely full and exciting life without it.]
Teddy smiled. ‘You women always overreact,’ said Teddy. ‘You can’t take a joke.’
None of the women returned his smile.
Tululah bit unto a biscuit without spilling a crumb. Snap. ‘That’s because the sense of humour gene is on the same chromosome as the driving, map reading and corporate executive gene,’ said Tululah.
The men exchanged nervous looks.
‘You’re kidding, yeah?’ asked Barry.
‘I’m being sarcastic, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Why don’t we all lighten up a little here?’ asked Leo. ‘After all, I think we can all agree that there are differences between men and women.’
‘You mean like facial hair and giving birth?’ I asked. ‘Or like never being able to find your keys, multi-task or ask for directions?’
Later, while I was putting up a shelf for him and he was ironing a pair of jeans, Teddy asked if I did know what the offside rule is.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘It’s a lot easier to understand than the pluperfect subjunctive.’
‘Do you think you could explain it to me?’ asked Teddy.
Oh by gosh by golly, take down the tinsel and the holly – a new year has begun.
I’m writing this on the very first day of 2011, after a 2010 that a lot of people would agree could have been better and a New Year’s Eve whose quiet was only disturbed by the fireworks that seemed to go off right in front of the house, which had the cat running for cover (she really, really doesn’t like sudden loud noises close to her home).
This is the official day for contemplation and reflection (and, for some of us, watching old films or TV series with a bag of crisps and the cat, finally out from under the sofa, curled up beside us). The day when most of us will resolve to do better in the new year than we did in the old one. This year we’re not going to waste our lives impersonating a couch cushion; this year we’re going to be vibrant, energetic and inquisitive. There shall be no more idle hours spent watching people we’ve never heard of (or have heard of vaguely) making fools of themselves on national television; it’s the great novels of world literature and educational documentaries this twelve months. Classical music instead of pop. Serious news programmes instead of chat shows. That bag of wool and knitting needles that’s been at the back of the closet for the last three years is brought out once more into the weary light of day. The calligraphy sets/brass rubbing kit/weaving loom we got last Christmas is dragged from the cupboard and set firmly on our desks. We pump up the tyres on our bikes and oil our skateboards. With heroic effort and determination, we finally manage to thread the sewing machine and find a recipe for making bread that seems fairly easy. And it doesn’t stop there. Thousands – millions – of people will give up smoking again, drowning that last pack in the toilet even as they open the first pack of chewing gum that will replace those cigarettes (at least for a while). Thousands – millions – of people will go on a diet, scuttling through the dark to dump a bag of snack foods in somebody else’s garbage (good bye double-fudge brownies and mesquite potato crisps and hello carrot sticks and bean sprouts). Classes in T’ai Chi. Karate, yoga, Pilates, Japanese, glass blowing, jewellery making, welding, and ceroc will be booked on the second day of January. On that very same day, armies of earnest looking joggers in new trainers and immaculate running gear will hook themselves up to their Ipod and hurl themselves into the grey, cold morning, grim with virtue.
Why do we do these things? Because we know that things arenot as good as they might be. Because we want our lives to be better. But even if Uncle George learns to jive dance, and Aunt Wilhelmina loses thirty pounds, and I finally read WAR AND PEACE, our beleaguered old world isn’t going to be much improved by our efforts. The rivers will still be polluted. The land will still be polluted. The air will still be polluted. More species will go extinct each day, more old-growth forests disappear, more mountains be blown up, more children die of poverty and war. And the time bomb that is the destruction and degradation we have wreaked on this beautiful planet will continue to tick. Tickticktickticktick.
So this year, rather than taking up climbing for a couple of months or eating steamed vegetables for a week or two, I think we should make a collective resolution. That each one of us will do one small thing this year to help the earth fight back – plant some trees, stop eating so much meat, stop buying so many things that we don’t actually need, sometimes walk instead of taking the car. Small things, every now and then. Treading a little more lightly on the Earth. Thinking a little bit more about how the things we do affect the rest of the world. Tickticktickticktick.
And then you can take that flamenco class.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
There was a piece in the paper the other day about (of all things) Christmas! Apparently a lot of people are complaining that they can’t even use the ‘C’ word any more. It’s all festive this and season’s that. Happy holidays and Winter celebration… No Christmas cards. No Christmas lights. No Merry Christmas. It’s hard to imagine how schools manage to put on their nativity plays without mentioning the Christ child, but perhaps they just call him The Baby and skip over the details.
It got me thinking about this time of year. Diwali happens a little earlier, of course, but basically this is the season of festivals of light at the darkest time of year. Pagan winter solstice celebrations. Hanukkah. Christmas. But something odd has happened to Christmas. It’s as if there are actually two Christmases on the December calendar.
The first is, of course, the celebration of the birth of the man who symbolizes hope and who taught love, forgiveness and brotherhood. The man who threw the moneychangers out of the temple. The man who said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. The man who is the Light. That’s Christmas number one.
Then there’s Christmas number two. That’s the one that seems to gear up the day after Thanksgiving (though it starts warming its engines sometime in September) when crazed shoppers trample each other to be the first into a cheap department store to buy yet another big screen TV. The spendspendspend, buybuybuy, IwantIwant Christmas. The how big is your tree and how many cards did you get this year? Christmas. The one that seems to have very little to do with babies in mangers or messages of hope.
Personally, I’m not in favour of using the ‘C’ word in the context of Christmas number two. But I’ve come up with the solution. All we have to do is change the name of Christmas number two to a more appropriate label. Then people who are celebrating the birth of Jesus can wish each other a merry Christmas. And people who just want to shop can wish each other something else. I’m open to suggestions.
In the meantime:
Happy Solstice! Merry Christmas! Season’s Greetings!
My Aunt Lillian was the family radical. My other aunts and uncles all voted Republican and went to mass every Sunday and considered garlic in food A Step Too Far; the women were all fulltime housewives and the men all worked in suits. Aunt Lillian not only always worked and cooked with garlic with gay abandon, but in her youth she’d been briefly married to an artist (that nobody liked on principle) and lived in Greenwich Village (which they also didn’t like on principle). She was the first person in the history of the family to get a divorce. And then, instead of having learned the error of her ways and marrying someone proper and moving to the suburbs, she went traveling (or “gallivanting” in the words of her sisters). When she came back, she was married to Aaron the Anarchist poet and declared herself a Buddhist. They lived on the Lower East Side, and they didn’t drive a car like everyone else in the family, they rode a motorcycle (“And it doesn’t even have a sidecar,” complained her sisters.) They listened to jazz. They marched on Washington. They had friends who (according to her sisters) looked like “Communists, atheists, or beatniks”. But even worse than all that, Aunt Lillian was outspoken in her views and opinions, of which there were many. As my father put it, “Lillian always had ideas.” As her sisters put it, “Lillian never knows when to keep her big mouth shut.”
Because she always had ideas and never knew when to keep them to herself, Aunt Lillian hadn’t been included in a family gathering since the Big Fight in Baldwin. By then Lillian and Aaron had two children and lived in Queens, but even if they’d had thirty children and lived in the Vatican it wouldn’t have been enough to make them fit in with the rest of the family. Family legend doesn’t recall exactly what the Big Fight in Baldwin was about, but it was more likely to be about politics or religion (Aunt Lillian’s two favorite topics; guaranteed to get a rise from her siblings) than the onion dip. There was a lot of shouting and name-calling; a deck of cards was thrown on the floor a chair fell to the floor; and a glass of gingerale was flung across the table at Uncle Seb. Aunt Helga ran upstairs, crying. When Helga was safely locked in the bathroom, the cousins all went back to the head of the stairs and peered over the banister again, Lillian and Aaron were putting on their hats and coats even as Aunt Loretta was opening the front door. Their faces all looked frozen; not cold, just solid as stone. “Thank you for such a delightful evening with such enlightened people,” snarled Aunt Lillian. And Aunt Loretta said, “You’re very welcome. Let’s not do it again.”
But this wasn’t the first argument my aunts and uncles had had in all the years they’d known each other (or the first time Lillian threw something at her brother, Seb). Eventually, tempers cooled and Christmas and birthday cards were exchanged, and the sisters continued to talk on the phone to one another every week. But, although it was never said in so many words, it was understood that the only thing Aunt Lillian and her brothers and sisters agreed on was that they didn’t want to be in a confined space together for the foreseeable future (“confined space” being defined as anything smaller than Texas).
And then one of the older cousins got married and everyone was invited. The wedding went off with no major scenes, and the next Thanksgiving Lillian and Aaron invited us all to their house for the feast. “It’s been so long,” said Aunt Lillian. “We’d like to hold it here. Do something special.”
Presumably everyone else assumed that by “special” she meant adding orange rind to the cranberries.
All was well for the first fifteen or so minutes. Drinks were served; bowls of nuts were passed around. We cousins were all in the TV alcove off the living room, watching the parade on TV. And then Aunt Loretta suddenly raised her head and sniffed. “I don’t smell the turkey,” said Aunt Loretta.
Aunt Lillian set a dish of popcorn on the coffee table. “That’s because there isn’t any turkey.”
The adults broke off their conversations and looked over. Heads with a vested interest in drumsticks and stuffing turned away from the sight of Mighty Mouse being buffeted by the New York wind. The uncles all laughed as if this was the funniest joke they’d heard in a long time, hohoho, but Aunt Helga said, “What do you mean there isn’t any turkey?”
Aunt Lillian smiled. “I mean that there isn’t any turkey.”
“But there has to be a turkey,” said Aunt Dorrie.
Aunt Lillian was still smiling, but it was the smile of a woman who’s about to ask you a trick question. “And why is that?”
“Because it’s Thanksgiving,” said Aunt Sophie.
My cousin Lila turned off the TV and we all shuffled closer to the living room.
“So? Who says we have to have turkey just because it’s Thanksgiving?”
“It’s a tradition,” said Aunt Loretta. “An American tradition.”
“Because a handful of Englishmen ate turkey a few hundred years ago?”
“I’m going out to the porch for a cigar,” said Uncle Aaron. He looked at his brother-in-laws. “Anyone coming?”
“Yes, because a handful of Englishmen ate turkey a few hundred years ago,” said Aunt Florence.
“And what about all the other millions of people who came here?” demanded Aunt Lillian as the men all shambled out the door. “What about the immigrants from Europe and Russia and Asia. What about the slaves? What about their traditions? Why don’t we have borscht and paella and chow mein and peanut stew to celebrate our nation? Why don’t we remember all those people and all they did for this country?”
Not in a frozen way, but coldly, Aunt Sophie said, “Lillian, maybe you’re forgetting, but the Pilgrims were here first.”
You could see Aunt Lillian get taller. “Oh no they weren't.” She sounded pretty firm on this question. “I believe if you check your history books, Sophia, you’ll find that there were people here a long time before the Pilgrims showed up to boss everybody around and take their land.”
“I should have known!” croaked Aunt Loretta. Her glass hit the coffee table like the crack of a rifle. “You can’t miss an opportunity to make one of your points, can you? You have to turn everything into one of your crusades.”
Aunt Lillian ignored her. “For instance, the Wampanoags. Why don’t we remember them? If it hadn’t been for the Wampanoags your precious Pilgrims would have perished in the first snows.”
“But they didn’t perish, did they?” piped up Aunt Florence. “They survived and built this great country.”
“On the blood and tears of everybody else!” roared Aunt Lillian.
My own mother, who had been unnaturally quiet through all of this, suddenly spoke up. “So,” said my mother almost sweetly. “If we’re not having turkey, what are we having?”
“Venison. I believe that’s what the Wampanoags brought to the feast.”
“Venison?” Aunt Dorrie was frowning; this wasn’t a word that got a lot of usage in our circle. “You mean deer?”
My sister burst into tears. “Oh, no,” she sobbed. “We’re eating Bambi!”
Personally, I’m convinced that if my sister hadn’t got all upset about tucking into Bambi, the meal would have been a success. Or less of a failure. After all, we ate Tom Turkey and Porky Pig and Karen Chicken and Bessy the Cow all the time, and nobody ever made a fuss. But none of the children would touch the venison, and Aunt Loretta obviously saw this as a cause to champion, so she wouldn’t touch it either. The other aunts went along with her. The men ate small portions, sheepishly.
“Well,” said my mother as we drove home later that night. “That’s certainly a meal I’ll remember for a long time.”
“What I don’t get,” said my father, “is why she just didn’t make fish. Surely the Wampanoags fished.”
“Maybe you can suggest that for next year,” said my mother.
HAPPY THANKSGIVING
All hallows night,
When witches roam,
And restless ghosts
Search for a home.
Tis wise to stay safe in your bed,
The covers drawn above your head.
For you never know just what they’ll do –
And how it may come out for you...
It was Halloween. A night for shape shifters and unquiet spirits; a night when witches ride the wind and bats weave through the trees like fleeing dreams. On this night you can talk through time – consult the cards or the runes or the ouija - can speak with the dead as easily as you pick up a phone and call your best friend.
Though not in my neighborhood. We were all about split-levels and ranch houses and rustic fences. We might decorate with cardboard skeletons and carved pumpkins, but we didn’t really do parallel worlds or chatting with the dead. Halloween for us was little kids in dime-store costumes, teenage boys having a license to harass everyone and bags of cheap candy.
“Let’s go over the rules, one more time,” said my mother.
Outside leaves blew across the yard like sparks and at our front door, pawing the ground and shouting words of encouragement like “Let’s go!” and “What’s taking so long?” were a vampire, two pirates, a pumpkin, a horse, a princess, a fire engine and a giant squid.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Mom.” I flapped my silky black cape (once my mother’s dancing skirt) restlessly. This year I was Morgana la Fay. “We’ve gone trick-or-treating before. We know what to do.”
My sister made a sound like a small pig grunting under a stack of hay – umpfumpfumpfimpf – which I translated as “Give us a. break”. This year my sister was a robot. My father had made her costume – an even more elaborate cardboard and papier mâche construction than the dragon of the year before – but his design had some shortcomings (as his designs often did). In this case, the difficulty of hearing what my sister said was one of them.
But my mother had lived with us and our father long enough to know that nobody ever listened to her; and that if they did listen to her they forgot what she said the minute she walked away. She held her arms akimbo, an orange bag emblazoned with a black skull and crossbones dangling from each wrist. “You don’t leave this house until I’m satisfied.”
Since we would have been there till Christmas if my sister went through the drill, I obediently listed my mother’s rules:
1. Stay with your group.
2. Only go to houses that look trick-or-treat friendly (nothing that looks dark or inhospitable; nothing with eggs smashed against the windows or broken pumpkins strewn across the porch; nothing with No Trespassing or Beware of Dog signs).
3. Don’t accept anything that isn’t in a sealed wrapper, including fruit (even in the days before the internet stories of razorblades in apples and rat poison in cupcakes made the rounds of suburban mothers with efficiency and startling speed).
4. Don’t eat anything until you’ve brought it home and your mother has had a chance to inspect it.
5. Even if you think you may die, NEVER use a stranger’s bathroom.
6. If you lose your sister there’s no point in coming home.
“All right.” My mother handed me both bags (another shortcoming of my father’s robot was that my sister couldn’t actually bend her arms). “Have fun you two. Be back by seven or I’m calling the cops.”
It was dark by the time we’d done all our street and the next one and started on Lakeside Crescent. Also by then a few more shortcomings of my sister’s costume had made themselves known. It was hard for her to walk. This was partly because she was wearing the cardboard and papier mâche equivalent of a trashcan and had to take small steps, and partly because she was wearing the cardboard and papier mâche equivalent of a trashcan and couldn’t see where she was going. She lagged behind. She was constantly stopping to adjust something. She had to be carried up anything over two or three steps. The enchantress doing the carrying got really tired of it really fast. The others – unfettered by my mother’s rules - stopped waiting for us.
The leaves continued to scuttle past us; the night grew cold. Jack-o-lanterns grinned and grimaced from windows and porches. And all around us costumed figures trotted up and down the road, shouting and laughing – and moving unencumbered. Two houses away a vampire, two pirates, a pumpkin, a horse, a princess, a fire engine and a giant squid shrieked with glee as they hurried down a driveway, checking their loot.
“Hurry up,” I urged the robot waddling towards me. “They’re leaving us.”
“Umphumphumphumphumphumphumphumphumph,” said my sister. I’m going as fast as I can.
By the time we reached the halfway point, I could just see a pumpkin turning the corner to Polo Drive. Several yards behind me, the silver robot was leaning against a tree.
“Now what?” I shouted.
My sister was leaning against a tree. “Umphumphumph.” Her legs hurt. “Umphumphumphumoh.” She needed a bathroom.
“Not now,” wailed Morgana. “You have to hold it. We don’t know anybody around here.” She consulted her watch. “And we’re never going to get to half the places if we don’t hurry. There isn’t much time left.” I pointed to the end of the crescent. “You just get to the corner. I’ll collect your treats and meet you there.”
Up and down the front paths and driveways and from one side of the street to the other I went, my skirts swishing, my bangles clanking, my cape flying out behind me. “Trick-or-treat,” I’d say. “Morgana la Fay,” I’d say, and then explain who she was. I’d hold out both bags. “One’s for my sister. That’s her down there.” I’d point to the road. The woman holding the bowl of candy would lean into the night, but she didn’t always see the silvery trashcan shuffling through the shadows. And nor did I. “She’s there,” I’d say. “I promise. She’s having trouble walking.”
I made better progress by myself, but not that much better. When I finally met my sister at the corner there wasn’t a pirate, a horse or a giant squid in sight. In fact, there was no one in sight.
I grabbed my sister’s arm. “You’re just going to have to get those little legs moving,” I said. “Or we’re going to have to start for home now.”
“Umphumphumph,” said my sister.
All of a sudden she wasn’t just walking, she was gliding along as if she were on wheels. Whizzwhizzwhizz. We hit house after house, as if we were knocking down dominos. I didn’t seem to be moving myself, I was just holding on. Polo Drive fell behind us. Our group was conferring at the start of Meister, deciding which houses to miss – who always gave candy corn versus who gave Snickers. We flashed past them, missing nothing. At every door my sister did the talking. “Umphumphumph.” But where before our benefactors would just smile in that vague way people do what they don’t understand what’s being said, now they beamed with delight. “Why of course I have a treat for you.” They’d give her double. “What an amazing costume,” they’d say. “Did you make it yourself?” “Umphumphumph-umphumph.” “Well what a nice daddy you have. Isn’t he talented?”
It was the Halloween I’d always dreamt of. We got to every house in the neighborhood; every last one. I’d never seen our bags so full. And we weren't late. Not even by a couple of minutes. It was five to seven as we flew up our drive. I was so happy that I didn’t notice that a few candies had fallen out of one of the bags or that my sister had stopped to pick them up.
I ran up to the front door and yanked it open! “We’re back!” I shouted.
My mother and my sister were sitting on the couch, drinking cider and watching TV.
I just stood there, looking at them for a minute, trying to figure out what was wrong.
“What happened to rule number six?” asked my mother. “How could you let your sister come home by herself?”
“But I didn’t,” I protested. “She’s been with me the whole time.”
My mother made one of her oh-really? faces. “No she hasn’t. She needed the john. She dumped the costume and came home. She’s been sitting her for the last half hour.”
“But-” I looked behind me.
There was no one there.
It was a Saturday afternoon in early Spring. We had made it through a difficult winter – severe snow storms, power cuts, my mother becoming obsessed with making her own pasta (imagine boiled bread), the paterfamilias taking a life-unenhancing dislike to consumerism and my sister being especially unreasonable – and here we were, waiting for the first buds to open and the sweaters, scarves and parkas to be packed away.
The telephone rang in the living room.
My father was in Milwaukee, doing whatever it was he did. My mother was on a ladder in the kitchen, repainting the ceiling after the Great Pressure Cooker Explosion. The GPCE had taken place on Thursday, not long after my father left on his business trip. The idea was to remove all traces of Hungarian goulash before he got back. My sister was in the living room, recuperating from a cold and watching a movie. I was also in the living room, half watching the movie while I dried my hair, enhanced my complexion under a cleansing mask and did my nails. I had a Big Date.
“Somebody want to get that?” called my mother.
Bringbringbringbringbringbring…
Just then the egg timer beside me went off.
“Would somebody get the phone?” she repeated, slightly louder this time.
“I can’t!” I shouted back. My twenty minutes were up. “I have to get this stuff off my face...”
Bringbringbringbringbringbring…
“Somebody better answer that!” roared my mother, that edge in her voice that reminded you that women can also be warriors. “If I have to climb down from this ladder to answer that phone you’re both going to wish you’d been born to someone else!”
“Oh I guess that means me!” bellowed my sister, her voice slightly shrill with martyrdom and indignation. My sister, a slender, sprite-like creature, got up and marched the few feet from the sofa to the phone as if she had cement boots on her feet, making the floor tremble and the pictures rattle on the walls. “I have to do everything around here!”
“If it’s for me, say I’m busy and I’ll call them back,” my mother ordered.
“Yeahyeahyeah…”
Bringbringbringbr—
“Hello?” The shrillness and the bellowing had vanished, replaced by a sweet, delicate lilt, so that whoever was on the other end could be forgiven for thinking he or she had misdialed and been connected to heaven. “Oh, hi…
No, I’m sorry, but she’s really busy right now…”
I headed for the bathroom.
My big date was with Richard Schaeffer. He sat in front of me in English. We were reading Hamlet that semester. Richard Schaeffer was more a Raymond Chandler than a Shakespeare kind of guy. It was my job to kick the back of his chair if he started to doze. So it was possible that he’d asked me out not because he liked me but because he was grateful. But I didn’t care. If you didn’t count Lisa Mackle’s cousin from New Hampshire – which I didn’t – this was my first real date. We were going to a movie. After the movie we were going to the diner for burgers and fries (“So, you know, don’t eat a big supper or you won’t want anything later”), and then his father would pick us up and drive me home (since the night she mistook the Ingrahams driveway for a road my mother avoided driving in the dark as much as possible). I had no problem talking to Richard in school, but I was worried that I might not know what to say to him when we were by ourselves. I didn’t want to talk too much, but I didn’t want to talk too little either. When I’d gone out with Lisa Mackle’s cousin (for pizza with Lisa and her boyfriend Luke), the conversation between us had pretty much stopped after “Hi, nice to meet you.” My main memory of the evening was of smiles as rigid as stone and chewing. He told me seven times that the pizza was really good, and I agreed nine.
It took me a while to get all the goop off my face, take a shower, do my hair, do my make-up and get dressed. When I finally emerged from the bathroom, instead of telling me how great I looked, my mother said, “Thank God for that. I’d thought you’d drowned.” My sister didn’t say anything.
It had been over a month since I pushed my sister into the artificial pond at the mall, but she still wasn’t speaking to me. Stubbornness is a trait on both sides of my family. I’d pretty much gotten used to it. If I did need to say something to her I’d go through one of my parents or whoever else was around (“Could you ask my sister if she’s seen my bead loom?” “Would you please tell my sister that I wasn’t the one who finished the banana cake?”), but most of the time we both acted as if the other one didn’t exist. It was like being an only child in the sense that I didn’t have anyone to argue with all the time.
I was meeting Richard in front of the theater, and because of this I’d told my mother I was meeting him at six, which was actually fifteen minutes earlier than we’d arranged. I didn’t want him to see her in her overalls with Mediterranean Gold paint in her hair.
So at six o’clock sharp my mother left me off in front of the old movie house in town. I watched her do one of her legendary U-turns in the middle of Main Street, and waved her goodbye. It started to rain. I moved into the foyer. Couples started arriving for the six-thirty show. The six-thirty show started. The ticket booth closed. The rain got heavier. I continued to wait.
You have to remember that this story takes place a long long time ago, in the primitive days when a phone was either in your home or in a booth. They didn’t go with you wherever you went, ready to be used whether you were on a bus or at the dentist’s. Which meant that you couldn’t just text your date and say WHR R U? That if a truck full of sheep had turned over on Clay Drive and blocked traffic for the next two hours he wasn’t going to be able to call you to tell you to go in without him, he’d meet you at the diner. So I continued to wait.
At seven-fifteen, though it hadn’t occurred to me yet that he had rung while I was drying my hair to say that he’d sprained his ankle jumping out of a tree and couldn’t make our date, I finally figured out that Richard wasn’t coming. It was three miles from our house to town. They were long, dark miles even when it wasn’t raining in a vengeful kind of way. There was a phone booth down by the bank so I turned up the collar on my non-waterproof jacket and made a dash for it. I had just enough change to call home to beg my mother to come and get me.
My sister answered the phone.
“Hi,” I said. “Can you get Mom?”
My sister hung up.
My sister stopped speaking to me after the incident at the James Fennimore Cooper Mall. (That would be the incident where, berserk with rage, I pushed her into the artificial pond.) Even though I was the one who got dragged off by the security guard and banned from the mall for the next hundred years, I’d been made to apologize to my sister as if I were the one in the wrong. “I’m sorry I shoved you into the water,” I’d said, sounding about as sincere as I felt. “I was in a blind rage. You know, because you stole my new skirt and were wearing it like it was yours and getting it all dirty and sweaty.” My sister refused to accept my apology. “You weren't blind,” said my sister. “You knew it was me your were pushing into the pond.”
Obviously, it wasn’t the first time my sister had stopped speaking to me in all the years of our close but complicated relationship. The silent treatment was something that, like dusk and dawn, happened with a certain amount of regularity and inevitability. But my sister liked to talk. Even as a small child, she fell asleep in the middle of one sentence and woke in the middle of another. My father, himself a man of few words, used six of them to sum of my sister: “She always has something to say.” This meant that the periods of silence between us never lasted that long. Half a day. A day. Two days the time I kidnapped her cat. But this time my sister was Really Serious.
The first I knew that she wasn’t speaking to me was that same night at supper when I asked her to pass me the salt. She kept talking to my mother about how she might as will move to Siberia if she couldn’t have her own phone. [NB: this was years before everybody not only had their own phone, but carried it around with them twenty-four hours a day.]
“Excuse me,” I said. “Could you pass me the salt?”
“Everybody I know has their own phone,” said my sister. “It’s like having your own toothbrush.”
Since I could tell that she wasn’t talking to me, I repeated my request. And again. And again. And once more.
My father finally heard me. “For Pete’s sake,” he muttered. “I’m trying to eat my meal in peace. Will you let your sister have the salt? She sounds like a broken record.”
My sister looked over at him with the same sweet smile she’d given him the time he fell off my uncle’s boat. “Oh, I’m sorry, Dad. Did you want the salt?” She handed it to him, and then went back to her conversation with my mother.
My father passed me the salt.
Disbelief moved in next to indignation as I stared at the side of my sister’s head as she continued to entertain my mother with the gruesome details of the destruction and devastation not having her own phone would bring into her life.
“Wait a minute!” I snapped. “Does this mean that you’re not speaking to me? Is that what this means?”
“Even Amie Schneider has her own phone, and she doesn’t have any friends,” said my sister.
“Hey!” I leaned over and gave her a shove. “Are you not speaking to me? Is that what’s going on?”
“Mom,” said my sister, “could you tell your other daughter not to touch me? Because I really don’t want her germs on me.”
“Tell her yourself,” said my mother.
“I don’t believe this!” I stood up, taller than usual. “You’re not speaking to me!”
“Dad,” said my sister. “Could you tell your other daughter that I’m not speaking to her, and that I’m never speaking to her again as long as I live. That even if we were alone in the house and it was on fire I wouldn’t tell her?”
My father cut a porcupine meatball in half. “No,” said my father. “I won’t do that. You tell her.”
“You’re not speaking to me?” The parakeet started screeching and pacing back and forth on his swing, making the bell ring. “You can’t be serious! After what you did? You're not speaking to me?”
My sister stood up, too, facing but not looking at me. “Tell her that’s right! I’m not speaking to her.” These instructions were either meant for the parakeet, who seemed to be having a nervous breakdown, or for the dog, who could be seen curled up on my father’s chair in the living room, snoring gently. They certainly weren't meant for our parents, who had picked up their plates and moved into the kitchen. “Tell her that this time she’s gone way too far!”
“I’ve gone too far!’ My voice crackled with indignation. “What are you talking about ‘I’ve gone too far’? I’m the innocent victim here!”
“Remind her that she tried to drown me. If there hadn’t been people around to help me out I would be another tragic statistic. A headline on a supermarket tabloid: Girl goes to watery grave while shoppers look on in horror. Hand of Death belonged to her only sibling.”
“You were never in any danger! You were in the mall! There were like hundreds of people there. And it was an artificial pond. Not the Atlantic Ocean.”
“Remind her that people have drowned in puddles!” screamed my sister.
“But you’re the one who thieved my skirt!” I roared. “Remember that? Remember the part where you thieved my skirt?” “I didn’t steal her stupid skirt,” bellowed my sister. “I borrowed it.”
“Don’t worry about not speaking to me,” I informed her. “Because I wouldn’t speak to you if you were the last person on earth. I’d rather wear a girdle! I’d rather spent the rest of my life walking on my hands!”
That was the kind of taunt that should have provoked a response like, “I wish you’d go to Australia and spend the rest of your life walking on your head” from my sister. But not this time. She clamped her mouth shut and said nothing, picking up her plate and following my parents into the kitchen. The Really Cold War had officially begun.
“Don’t you think you’re being a little melodramatic?” asked my mother. Her arms were folded across her chest and her expression suggested that she was being diplomatic, but only with a lot of effort.
I raised the drill, ready to finish putting the screws in place. “No, I don’t think I’m being melodramatic. I think I’m being practical.”
She raised her voice to be heard over the drill. “Putting a padlock on your door.” It wasn’t a question but it sounded like it was.
“That’s right. If I can’t leave my room for ten seconds without having it burgled, then I’m being practical.” I stepped back to survey my handiwork. There were a few more holes than there needed to be, but it wasn’t too bad. It would do the job. I smiled. “It’s either this or hire a security guard.”
My mother gave me one of her you-don’t-have-to-be-crazy-to-live-here-but-it-helps sighs. “I don’t know what people are going to think when they come to the house and see you’ve got a your room locked up like it’s Fort Knox.”
“They’ll think I live with a thief, that’s what they’ll think,” I snapped back.
Right on cue, my sister’s door opened and her head appeared. “Just make sure you tell them how you tried to kill me!” yelled my sister.
It was an ordinary Saturday afternoon. The James Fennimore Cooper Mall was filled with people of all ages, sizes, shapes, colors and religious beliefs happily buying things they didn’t need and in many cases would never use. There was laughter and smiling. There was music. The artificial waterfall splashed into the artificial pond. The colorful plastic bags bobbed along like party balloons. Bored looking men stood outside of stores, bags of shopping clumped around them like presents around a Christmas tree, glancing at their watches every few seconds. Small children dripped ice cream and soda. Huddles of boys sat together on benches or strolled the walkways with their hands in their pockets, telling each other bad jokes. Small herds of girls, the special endorphins only generated by shopping making them shine, moved from store to store like grazing cattle moving across a field. Except for a few bickering couples and crying children, all was peaceful and content in the James Fennimore Cooper Mall.
But suddenly this scene of tranquility and domestic bliss was shattered by a heart-piercing scream. People looked up, frozen in the moment like startled gazelles. Only the three teenage girls over by the pond, engrossed in deciding where to go for lunch, didn’t hear the scream.
Which, as it turned out, was unfortunate.
Another scream, closer and even more piercing than the first, echoed through the west side of the first floor. Even the girls debating the merits of pizza over pastrami heard that. The very pretty one with the pin-straight hair and eyes the same shade of cornflower blue as the skirt she was wearing looked up just in time to see someone in a perfectly aged but tragically stained denim jacket charging towards her, hair flying and face contorted in rage. “Stop!” shrieked the girl. “Wha-”
But her words were lost in a mighty splash as she toppled backwards into the pond.
I hadn’t planned to go to the mall that weekend.
Kammy’s parents were away and I was staying with her to keep her company and to stay up half the night watching old movies and eating junk food. Mrs Cole had taped notes to what she considered Danger Points around the house. [DO NOT USE DISHWASHER on the dishwasher. REFILL ICE CUBE TRAYS on the ice cube trays. DO NOT FLUSH GALLONS OF POP CORN DOWN The TOILET on the toilet. Etcetera…] Besides the notes, she left pages of typewritten general instructions on what we should do, what we shouldn’t do, and whom we should call when, despite all her advice, we messed up.
“Is she unbelievable or what?” thundered Kammy. “You’d think they were going away for a month and she was expecting war to break out. We aren’t children, for God’s sake. I think we can make it through the weekend without any of this stuff happening.”
And Kammy, of course, was right. We didn’t lock ourselves in the attic, we didn’t set fire to the dryer and we didn’t blow all the fuses. In fact, none of the possible disasters envisioned by Mrs Cole occurred.
We turned the kettle into charcoal.
We put it on to make coffee and forgot about it. It had a whistle, but we didn’t hear the whistle because we were playing The Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the right volume (loud enough to wake the dead). The Coles had a smoke alarm, but it had been inactivated weeks before when Mr Cole made blackened fish.
Kammy and I stared at the charred remains of the kettle, the handle flopped over to one side like a fence that’s been hit by a heavy wind.
“Oh, Gawd…” groaned Kammy. “She’s going to murder me.” She used the fire tongs to lift the kettle into the sink. Just in case it suddenly exploded and pieces of hot metal flew around the kitchen like leaves in a storm. “You’d think she’d’ve had the sense to put a note on the freakin’ kettle, wouldn’t you? She’s put notes on everything else.”
“I guess she figured we knew this one.” This had happened before. Which is how we knew about putting the kettle in the sink and how much like leaves in a wind exploding metal can be.
“Well, she was wrong, wasn’t she?” said Kammy.
I tried to look on the bright side. “At least we didn’t spill Dragon’s Blood nail polish all over her denim jacket.”
My sister was always borrowing my things. That is, she called it borrowing. I called it taking without permission, which, according to Webster, is stealing. Shoes, socks, dresses, jeans, skirts and blouses, music, books, jewelry - everything that belonged to me was fair game. It was as if my room was the jungle and she was the illegal logger or the poacher after bush meat.
And as if it wasn’t enough just to help herself to MY PERSONAL POSSESSIONS, she would shorten my skirts and stretch out my tops. She’d lose my earrings and loan my albums to people who also never gave them back. She put holes in my socks.
She dumped half a bottle of Dragon’s Blood nail polish all over my denim jacket. My beautiful, washed-out jacket with the fraying cuffs. It had taken me ages to get that jacket to that state of perfection. And it had taken her approximately thirty seconds to destroy it.
My sister, of course, was sorry. She just wanted to wear it bowling because it was so cool. She was going to put it back in my closet before I even noticed it was gone. The nail polish was an accident. It wasn’t like she did it on purpose.
“Stay away from my things!” I’d screamed. “I mean it. If you so much as lay one finger on anything of mine unless it’s to get it out of the way of a herd of stampeding wildebeest I’m going to make you wish you were born to slaves in ancient Rome!”
My sister promised. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve learned my lesson.”
But not for long, it seemed.
Because as Kammy and I rode down the escalator with the new kettle from Happy Home Housewares, what did I see but my sister standing there with her friends, wearing MY NEW SKIRT. What a fool I’d been! Naïve! Trusting! I’d actually believed that I could go away for an entire weekend and my sister wouldn’t jump at the chance of plundering my room.
I, like you, had heard the expression “I was beside myself with rage”, but it wasn’t until that moment on the escalator that I realized what it meant. I really was beside myself. There I was, a regular teenager in a ruined jacket only a few steps away from the main plaza – and beside me, huge and demented, was the Terminator, programmed to destroy the girl with the pin-straight hair in the blue skirt without question or thought.
It was the Terminator who screamed.
It was the Terminator who leapt the last few steps and sprinted towards the pond.
It was the Terminator who shoved my sister into the water.
But I was the one who had to be picked up by my father from the security office of the James Fennimore Cooper Mall.
“What on earth got into you?” asked my father as we got in the car.
I shrugged. “It’s a long story.”
You may remember that my mother, my sister and I had declared war on the oppressive, irrational and authoritarian regime of my father because he had decreed that, following what he’d taken to calling The Consumer Bloodbath that Is Christmas, we weren't to buy a single new item of clothing (or accessories) until Easter. [Negotiators had established that should every pair of socks we owned go up in flames, or thieves break in and steal our shoes, we were permitted replacements, but this was comfort as warm as the freezer.]
Our house was like Colonial America during the Revolution. We were alight with the spirit of justice and rebellion. Even when my father was home, we would meet in dark corners, whispering our grievances and plots. My father would look up from his book on Tibetan mysticism. “What are you three up to?” he’d ask. And we’d all smile that enigmatic Barbie smile that could mean something or nothing and say, “Nothing.” My father would come into the living room, looking for his razor, and blink in the sudden silence. “What are you three cooking up?” he’d want to know. And my mother, used to thinking on her feet, would murmur something about “somebody’s birthday’s coming”, and we’d all disappear into our rooms like Algonquin warriors vanishing into the forest before he’d realize that if someone’s birthday was coming it wasn’t his.
Give me Liberty, or give me death…! No taxation without representation…! Better to die on your feet than live on your knees…! These were the words that inspired us during the dark days of that winter.
After my father outflanked us by having had the foresight to hide a copy of his terrible inventory (listing every item of clothing, belt, bracelet, necklace, pin, hat, scarf and what he referred to as “hair doodads” we possessed) my mother called an emergency meeting one night while my father was at band practice. [Note: We called it a band because we liked to humor him, but it was really just him and Ernie Rossman, their guitars and Ernie’s dog, Seagull, who spent most of his time sleeping in Ernie’s guitar case but would occasionally come in on a chorus that required howling.]
“Okay, girls,” said my mother. “I think you both agree with me that this intolerable situation has gone on long enough.”
We agreed. It was a week and a half. One precious Saturday at the mall had already been lost to the depthless ocean of time. Another was coming up. Not only that, but my mother’s quilting circle was having its yearly Down Home Dinner on Saturday, my sister had been invited to Danielle Sargassi’s birthday party that same night (the middle school equivalent of being invited to Martin Scorsese’s Oscar party), and the following Monday I was appearing in a special assembly sponsored by the history department: The Bread and Cheese Hollow First Annual Constitution Bee. These events required new clothes. My mother could not be expected to eat pot roast with her fellow quilters in a dress they’d seen before. My sister could not be expected to attend the birthday party of the year in something she’d already worn. And I couldn’t possibly stand up in front of the whole school to answer questions about the Constitution of our great nation in just anything I happened to find in my closet. (My father, of course, begged to differ, and refused to give us a special dispensation on the grounds that his mother, Grandma Becky, had in her entire life only had One Good Dress that she wore to every wedding, funeral and church service she ever attended. “If Grandma Becky could do it,” said my father, “so can you.”)
“But we’ll never be able to go shopping on Saturday,” argued my sister. “We’re practically under house arrest.”
If we said that we needed to go somewhere on the weekend – the library, for example, or that great hardware store across from the new shopping center – my father would not only drive us there, but accompany us inside. It was like having a bodyguard, but one who only let you go where he wanted.
My mother was ahead of her. “I’ll pick you up on Friday right after school. Better yet I’ll give you each a note that you have to leave early for a dental appointment.”
“But what about the inventory?” asked I. “If we buy anything he’ll see that it’s not on his little list.” It was like the Mikado, but without the songs.
“Only if he finds what we bought,” countered my mother.
“But you saw him,” protested my sister. “He knows all our hiding pla-”
“Correction.” My mother was shaking her hear and drumming a cheerful tune on the table top with her fingers. “He knows our old hiding places.” My mother had been thinking, and all I can say is that the world lost a major military strategist when she decided to turn her talents to making porcupine meatballs and hassocks out of coffee cans. “You’ve heard of the Underground Railroad, haven’t you?”
I had, but I couldn’t see how it helped us. I gazed back at her appraisingly, wondering if the strain was beginning to get to her. “You mean the London subway system?”
“Not that Underground Railroad,” said my mother.
My sister tilted her head to one side. “You mean when runaway slaves were smuggled into the free states and Canada through a network of safe houses?”
“Bingo!” cried my mother.
We would hide our new things at other people’s houses. I would store mine with my best friend Kammy. My sister would keep hers with the twins, with whom she spent so much time we called them the triplets. My mother, who prided herself on getting more Christmas cards than the Pope, would leave things all over town.
“You know,” I said, “sometimes I really think you’re touched with genius.”
“So do I,” said my mother.
For some reason, even though it can’t really be considered a political issue, politicians make a really big deal about ‘the family” – especially around election time. It’s all ‘the family this’ and ‘the family that’. They want to pay people to get married. They want to pay people to stay married. They want to punish people who aren’t married. They often blame single mothers for everything that is wrong with society (though I have yet to meet the single mother who led the nation to war, wrecked the economy or invented the nuclear bomb).
But still, you can see their point. Families are, on the whole, a really good idea. Strength in numbers. Everyone pulling together. Someone to cook the supper, someone to do the dishes and someone to pay the bills. Someone to laugh at your jokes. Someone to make jokes you can laugh at. Someone to give you a ride to the mall. Shared values. Shared goals. Shared problems. And let’s not forget that wise old saying: A midlife crisis shared is a midlife crisis quadrupled.
Within weeks, if not days, my father’s midlife crisis had grown from a minor scuffle about dancing snowmen into a full-scale war. My father controlled the money (which, as every head of state on the planet will tell you confers an incredible amount of power), but my sister had her seasonal lawn work money (shoveling snow in the winter, mowing lawns in the summer), my mother had her seasonal baking business (pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving, fruitcake at Christmas, hot-cross buns during Lent, bunny cakes at Easter) and I had my non-seasonal babysitting money so we could exist for a while without funds from the Family Bank. Besides which, my mother, my sister and I were a formidable guerrilla army. When my father developed an allergy to leather, we waged and won the No Shoes in the House War. When my father turned against the gentle cow and anything truly delicious that she produced, we waged and won The Toffee Swirl War. Ditto the You Call that Music?, That Skirt Isn’t Short, It’s Invisible and The Hair Cut wars. We were trained, we were fit, and we were fighting on our own turf. George Washington would have commissioned us all.
My mother, being the more devious of the three of us and the one with greater access to the enemy, was in charge of sabotage.
‘I don’t see how you can do it,’ said my sister. ‘He’s locked the inventory in his toolbox.’
This would be the inventory of every item of clothing (plus accessories) owned by my father’s beloved wife and daughters.
‘And the toolbox is where?’ inquired my mother.
Recognizing the Socratic method of teaching, my sister’s brow puckered thoughtfully. ‘In the basement, of course.’
‘And what happens in the basement?’ persisted my mother.
My sister’s brow was still puckering. ‘Dad hides out from us down here.’
‘The laundry,’ said I.
My mother’s smile was gentle but firm. ‘And what else?’
My sister and I looked around. There wasn’t that much going on in the cellar. My father’s workshop. The chair where he sat when he was pretending to be building something but was really reading a book. The shelves where he stored his canned vegetables that year. The washing machine, the dryer, the double sink where the dog reluctantly took his baths. The boiler. The large damp patch on the floor.
“Floods!’ shrieked my sister. ‘Floods happen!’
I pointed out that hurricane season had passed.
‘Oh, tuttuttut.’ My mother’s head slowly shook back and forth. ‘Storms aren’t the only thing that have made the basement flood.’
My sister and I gazed back at her with a certain amount of awe. We knew she was devious. We knew her talents were wasted on domestic chores, she should have been running the FBI. But his – this was staggering.
‘You’re going to break the washing machine?’ we gasped.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said my mother. ‘And have to do the laundry in town till he fixes it?’ It had taken a month the last time the washing machine collapsed under the strain. She picked up the toolbox and put it in the sink. ‘We’ll just tell him it flooded.’
On Saturday morning my father went down to get his inventory to make sure that we hadn’t added anything to our wardrobes while he was out earning out living. He came back faster than a boomerang.
‘What happened?’ He was waving the sodden inventory, its pages blurred and more or less welded together. ‘My toolbox looks like it was on the Titanic!’
If the caption was ‘Shocked sympathy’, my mother’s face was the illustration.
‘Oh dear,’ said my mother. ‘Did I forget to mention that the washing machine flooded again?’
But, as my father himself often said, you don’t live in Seattle without owning an umbrella – and he’d lived with the Seattle that was my mother for quite a few years.
He smiled. ‘Thank God I have a copy of this in the trunk of the car.’
You may recall that my father had a Moment of Truth in the mall one Christmas (later described by my mother as “That time your father saw the Virgin Mary picketing the five and ten”), which lead him to think deeply about the meaning of that holy day. The result of all this thinking was that things like singing chipmunks, dancing snowmen and serial spending were banished from our celebrations. But those of us who hoped that a few homemade presents and a modest Christmas dinner would mark the end of my father’s Crusade against Constant Consumption were sadly mistaken. Not satisfied with taking Santa Claus and a supporting cast of cartoon characters out of Christmas (and putting Christ back in), in the New Year he declared a Ban on Clothes Shopping until Easter. Nowadays a lot of people are reforming their shopping habits - buying things secondhand; joining groups that exchanged unwanted goods; scrounging through garbage cans for food; going for months without spending any money except on the barest necessities - but back then the idea of not ceaselessly buying new things whether you needed them or not was virtually unheard of, and when it was heard of it was considered insane if not incontestable proof of a Communist Conspiracy.
Needless to say, my mother, my sister and I didn’t see my father for what he was - the Advance Scout for the Anti-consumerism Army that would come decades later - but as a reactionary killjoy; a man who only got new clothes when we gave him socks for his birthday or someone accidentally burned one of his three dress shirts and who, therefore had no understanding of how the real world worked.
Not that we were overly worried. Not at first. My father might be the Head of the Household, but in many ways this was an honorary title that had very little to do with how the house and family was really run. He had his rules – If you take one of my tools, put it back where you found it; Don’t ever use my razor to shave your legs; Don’t borrow anything of mine without asking; No eating in bed unless you’re paralyzed from the waist down; Don’t buy anything from catalogues, newspapers, or magazines - and we would listen patiently as he set them down, nodding seriously as though we had every intention of obeying. But we didn’t. We knew how to work around them. Don’t tell your father… Dad’ll never notice… and He doesn’t need to know… were our watchwords. We sent away for everything the catalogues, newspapers and magazines had to offer, we mislaid his tools, we used his razor, we borrowed the few things he had that a wife or teenage daughter might feel an overwhelming need for (and on one unfortunate occasion put the image of a hot iron on the back of his favorite shirt) and covered our sheets with ketchup stains and crumbs - safe in the knowledge that he was too tired by the time he got home from work to count his screwdrivers, spot the new cat and dog egg cups, or wonder at how quickly his razor blades went dull. “There’s nothing to worry about,” we assured each other after the Mall Moratorium announcement. “He can’t tell a tank top from a T-shirt. How’s he going to know if we buy something new?”
But on the day after my father’s chilling declaration he answered that question himself.
“What in heaven’s name are you doing?” My mother stood in the doorway with her arms folded in front of her protectively, eyeing my father with the same suspicion she had shown the summer before when she went out to get the mail and found Mr Capriniano next door (wearing a shower cap decorated with ducks and a plastic raincoat) painting his house Pepto Bismol pink.
Confronted by my mother, Mr Capriniano had explained that he was camouflaging his split level so the aliens wouldn’t find it when they landed at the full moon.
Confronted by my mother, my father, a pencil stuck behind one ear and a clipboard in his hand, stopped in the act of opening their closet door and said simply, “I’m making an inventory.”
“An inventory,” repeated my mother. “An inventory of what?”
“An inventory of every item of feminine apparel in this house,” replied my father. He waved the clipboard at her, revealing that many of the pages it held were covered with the details of the contents of my and my sister’s dressers and closets. He’d been saving the best for last. “And that includes shoes, slippers, socks, tights, scarves, hats and belts.”
“I knew it!” cried my mother. “You’re just like Mr Capriniano! You’ve completely lost your mind.”
“I’m nothing like Mr Capriniano.” My father wrote the word “dresses” on a clean sheet of paper and underlined it. “I’m not doing this because I invested my life savings in a company that manufactures electric rocking chairs and I’m having a nervous breakdown. I’m doing it because I know how you three operate.”
My mother, my sister and I all exchanged a look. It was a look the late President Richard Nixon would have recognized instantly. Shifty. Wary. Ready to lie. Exactly how much did he know?
“And you’re going to what?” My mother smiled in a way President Nixon would also have recognized: the bluff. “Count every article of clothing we own every night before you go to bed?” She laughed her I-don’t-think-so laugh.
“Once a week should suffice,” said my father.
“You can’t be serious!” If my sister was accomplished at something besides optimism, it was indignation. “We’re not criminals.”
“That’s right!” I chimed in. “The way you’re treating us, we might as well live in a totalitarian regime where all the phones are bugged and the secret police is always breaking down the door to search the house!”
“And that’s another thing,” said my father. “Don’t think you’re going to buy things without me finding out. I know all about your hiding places.”
Now the look the female members of the family exchanged said: attic… toy chest… bottom of the hamper…
“Well, girls…” My mother was smiling again, but now more like Crazy Horse getting ready to meet Custer and his men at Little Big Horn. “I guess you’re father’s got us over an empty barrel. It looks like we now live in a no-shopping zone till Easter.”
“I told you I was serious about this,” said my father.
My mother, my sister and I all nodded. “We know… We know…”
The war had now officially begun.
This month I’m not going to talk about my life. Instead, I would like to take this opportunity to offer my own small tribute to the teacher, humanist, writer, activist and pioneering historian Howard Zinn, who died suddenly on the 27th of January. He was a man of enormous intelligence, courage, integrity and passion. A truly good man who stood up relentlessly for what he believed; who always spoke the truth as he saw it; who had an unshakeable belief that people can make the world the way they want it to be. In a long life of extraordinary productivity, he never slowed down; never stopped lecturing and writing; never gave up.
People who knew Howard Zinn also speak of his humour and compassion, his generosity of spirit and his patience. I only knew him through his work, but his death has saddened me greatly – I feel as though I’ve lost a close friend. I know the world has lost a man it can ill afford to lose.
[As a bit of an aside, Howard Zinn is best known for the groundbreaking A PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. More recently, however, he published the two-volume A YOUNG PEOPLE’S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES – a book that might just make you change your mind about how you feel about history.]
My father said, “No.”
My sister and I gazed back at him with hopeful, this-has-to-be-a-joke smiles.
“No?” My sister’s laugh was also hopeful. “What do you mean ‘no’?”
“I mean no way, Jose. I mean not in this lifetime. I mean nein, nyet, N-O, NO.”
Even at the tender age of fifteen I’d mastered stating the blindingly obvious. “Are you saying you won’t give us any money to go shopping?”
My father nodded. Slowly. Thoughtfully. As if seriously considering every nuance of my question. “Yes, I think that just about sums it up. There will be no finance for fripperies. No cash for cologne or cosmetics.”
My sister, inheritor of every Optimistic gene our ancestors had to pass on, said, “Do you mean just today, or do you mean like tomorrow, too?” She was still smiling.
The head of the house puffed on his cigar. “I mean your chances of getting money out of me for shopping until the Easter Bunny comes hopping down the Bunny Trail are considerably less than the chances of survival of a butterscotch sundae in hell.”
Through my sister’s veins coursed the DNA of women and men who thought that the ice would melt by Spring; that everyone in their village had no more than a bad cold; that what turned out to be the 100 Years’ War would be over in a week. She didn’t give up easily.
“But it’s January,” said my sister. “The sales are on. You always give us money for the sales.”
Rings of smoke floated between my father and us. But today those rings didn’t look like doughnuts or halos; today they were obviously zeros. “Not this year, I don’t.”
My sister and I exchanged baffled looks. What had we done? Nothing. Nothing that he’d caught as at. He hadn’t lost his job, so we weren't suddenly really poor. The roof hadn’t been blown off the house in the night requiring masses of money to repair it. My mother hadn’t emptied his bank account and run off to Mexico. What could possibly have caused him to make such a cruel and unfair decision?
My mother, passing through the living room with a bucket of papier mâche for her winter crafts project (a bust of Eleanor Roosevelt), came to a stop. “He’s having a midlife crisis,” she informed us.
“If I was having a midlife crisis, I’d buy a sports car and a toupee,” said my father.
My sister and I weren't the only ones who would have preferred the sports car. “So what is it then?” inquired my mother, her voice edged with sarcasm. “Is this because you saw The Virgin Mary in the mall last month?”
“I didn’t see the Virgin Mary,” corrected my father. “I simply had a realization that Christmas is about celebrating the birth of Jesus, not about seeing how much money you can spend before the 25th of December.”
“But now it’s after the 25th of December,” argued my sister. “Why won’t you let us go shopping now?”
He tapped his cigar against the ashtray, dislodging a gray slug of ash. “Because you don’t need anything.”
This was a statement so totally ridiculous and absurd that for at least thirty seconds both my sister and I were stunned into a highly unusual state of speechlessness. Don’t need anything? We? We went shopping every weekend. We always needed something.
My father disagreed.
He flung wide the doors of our closets. “Look at that!” He pointed to the crowd of blouses, skirts and dresses. “What do you call that?”
“Clothes,” muttered my sister.
“A lot of clothes,” said my father. “What you have in there could last you the rest of your life, never mind a couple of months.”
I groaned and rolled my eyes. “You mean so long as we don’t grow or wash it too much.”
My father ignored me.
“You have enough things in there to clothe an entire village in the Third World.”
“Not unless everybody in the village is the same size as me,” snarked my sister.
This time he ignored her.
“And this?” he demanded, pulling open dresser drawers. “What do you call this?”
“Jeans?” I ventured. “Sweaters?”
“You can wear how many pairs of jeans at a time?” asked my father. “How many sweaters?” He pointed to the row of shoes on their racks. “And you have how many feet, ladies? Six? Ten? Are you really centipedes and not human girls?”
With almost divine patience, my sister and I explained that a person couldn’t be expected to wear the same thing every day, or even once a week.
“It’s okay for you,” said my sister. “You just go to work. But we go to school. People notice what we wear.”
My sister and I didn’t always agree - full-scale wars had been waged over the right way to tie a shoelace or butter a potato - but this time we were as one.
“She’s right. And we can’t just wear anything.” I pulled a handful of hangers from my closet. I yanked a wad of tops from my dresser. “Everybody’s seen me in this stuff like a zillion times, Dad. I have to have new things to break up the monotony.”
“No you don’t,” said my father. “I’m declaring a moratorium on buying.”
My sister and I exchanged worried looks. Moratorium sounded suspiciously like mortuary. Was my father killing shopping?
“You’re taking a break from this endless consumption.” Whether we wanted to or not, apparently. “There will be no new articles of clothing in this house until Easter.”
My sister wasn’t just the girl who looked at the glass and, unconcerned with what was in it, declared it Half Full! She was the girl who was usually shrewd enough to figure out how to get someone to fill it up all the way. “You mean unless we pay for them out of our own money.”
My father’s head shook slowly back and forth, in the way of someone about to give you really bad news. “No, that’s not what I mean. I don’t care if some guy comes to the door and gives you a cashiers’ check for a million bucks. You’re not buying any new clothes until the Spring. And that’s final.”
“But what about this?” My sister shook several pairs of socks in the air. “I have to have new ones. They all have holes.”
“Then darn them.”
“Darn them?” It was I who laughed, my sister was too surprised. My father, like many parents, was frequently unreasonable – but now he seemed to have taken leave of his senses. “People don’t darn socks any more, Dad. That’s like so Nineteenth Century.”
“No,” said my father. “Washing your clothes by hand is so Nineteenth Century. And if you don’t want to be transported back there you will not only start darning your socks, you’ll start patching your jeans and mending your sweaters and learning how to take down a hem or two.”
My mother, who often couldn’t hear you when you asked for pizza or a lift into town but who actually had the hearing of a bat, materialized in the doorway of her workroom.
“And who’s going to be darning your socks?” she asked my father.
This time it was my mother that my father ignored.
In case you don’t live in London, you might like to know that (surpassing even the year the Bird’s-Eye logo hung over our major shopping street to represent this joyous religious season) the lights of Oxford Street this year are an advertisement for Disney’s A CHRISTMAS CAROL.This had been kept something of a secret from me, so I came to an abrupt halt as I turned out of a side street and was confronted by the illuminated image of Jim Carey as Scrooge. And not for the first time, I wished my father was with me.
Of my parents, my father was the least dedicated Christian. My mother was a Protestant and went to church every Sunday, to Bible Class on Thursday evenings and to the Women’s Circle on Mondays. She participated in all church events and outings, kept her well-thumbed weekly religious magazine on her bedside table in case she needed help or comfort in the night, knew exactly how tall Jesus was (six feet), was forever reminding us what the Bible had to say about our behavior (more than you’d think), and called her minister Reverend Bob. In contrast, my father, a Catholic, went to church every Sunday, but did so largely because it was a sin not to and, having experienced war, he didn’t particularly want to go to hell. And although often commented on the irony of people who had been praying five minutes ago trying to beat each other out of the parking lot with a noticeable lack of goodwill, he had very little to say about Jesus or the Bible. The priests in our church didn’t have first names, and the only time my father was known to actually talk to one was at his yearly confession (because if you didn’t receive Communion on Easter, that was a sin). So it was a surprise to all of us when it was not my mother but my father who turned his back on the commercial bloodbath that is Christmas and, like Jesus casting the money-changers from the temple, decided to cast the money-grubbers out of our yuletide celebration.
We were in the mall. Carols played over the sounds of screeching children and bickering couples. Santa’s elves (tall Santa’s elves in mini skirts and leotards) passed through the throng handing out Have Your Picture Taken with Santa forms.
My mother had the list of presents we had to buy for aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, neighbors, Santa’s pals, and anyone who might conceivably either buy one of us a gift or expect one. It was a long list, and getting through it redefined the meaning of tedious. Could we buy all six girl cousins the same thing, or was that too impersonal? If we couldn’t (which was my mother’s eventual decision), then what on earth were we going to get each of them for exactly the same price? Didn’t we give Aunt Lottie bubble bath last year? Didn’t we give Aunt Cerise eau de toilette? Who was it didn’t have pierced ears? Was it okay to get the uncles socks again? Did the fact that Mrs Hollander, next door, had given us a jar of homemade jam last year mean that we should give her something this year? Would a dozen home-baked cookies be enough? And could we just wrap them in Santa paper or should we buy a festive tin to put them in, to balance out the mason jar she’d given us? Since Aunt Macy’s presents to me and my sister the year before were clothes pins with artificial flowers glued on them (the exact purpose of which was never discovered) did we have to buy her something from a real store or could we get away with a crocheted toilet roll cover from my mother’s church’s fair? You can see why it took so long.
My father had plunked himself down on a bench by a mini-waterfall, shopping bags at his feet like wretched masses huddled round the skirt of the Statue of Liberty, while my mother, my sister and I went into Sweet Dreams to pick out a pair of pajamas for cousin Lulu (who didn’t read, didn’t listen to music, had no hobbies and wasn’t interested in anything, thus limiting the gift-giver’s options).
When we re-emerged thirty or forty minutes later my father was gazing about him like someone who’s sight had suddenly been miraculously restored.
“Look at this!” He swept his arms open to include the stores, the burdened shoppers, the tinseled palm trees, the dancing snowmen lights and even the plastic reindeer suspended over the waterfall. “Just look!”
My mother’s eyes were on the Italian deli. “What am I looking at? The olives? Because I don’t really think anyone we know likes olives that much. I mean, a few of those black ones from the can in the relish tray are all right, but-”
“No, no! Not the olives. I mean everything. Just look at it. Santa Claus… Rudolph… snowmen… polar bears. For the love of God – could someone tell me what polar bears have to do with Christmas?”
“Because they live at the North Pole?” guessed my sister.
“Did the Baby Jesus live at the North Pole?” bellowed my father. Heads turned. “Did he put chilli pepper lights around his crib? Did he keep reindeer in that manger?”
My mother perused her list. “Are you staying here?” she asked him, ticking off Lulu. “Because I have to go to Sternman’s to see if they have that footbath for your sister Millie.”
“Oh no you don’t.” My father had had it with all the cheap decorations and useless presents. He was done with the gluttony and greed. We were going to take back every present we’d already bought, estimate how much more we would have spent, and give all that money to Christian Aid. We would give presents, but we had to make them ourselves. We would have a Christmas dinner, but it would be a much simpler, pared down affair (the money we would have spent on the rib roast, the olives, the pickled watermelon rind, the salted nuts, the eggnog, the chocolates and the three desserts also went to Christian Aid). My father rose to his feet. “We, as a family, are putting Christ back in Christmas!” he declared.
In front of the five and ten, one of Santa’s elves applauded.
“Thank God we have an artificial tree,” said my mother, “or I suppose we wouldn’t be allowed that either.”
My sixth grade teacher was Mr Sutcliffe. We were the first class he’d ever taught, which meant that, unlike the other male teachers at Bread and Cheese Hollow Elementary school, he was young enough to remember his own childhood and had a full head of hair. It also meant that he hadn’t had his idealism, passion and enthusiasm sucked from his soul by hundreds of eleven-year-olds whose favorite period of the day was lunch. In fact, I believe it’s fair to say that Mr Sutcliffe pretty much glowed with enthusiasm, idealism and passion. Mr Sutcliffe had a mission. He didn’t care if we became doctors and lawyers or secretaries and plumbers; he cared that we thought and didn’t just let life happen to us. He encouraged us to be questioning and creative. He wanted us to love learning as much as he did. “Education isn’t about memorizing dates and facts,” he’d say. “A computer can store dates and facts. Educations about opening your mind and heart. It’s about thinking. Think! Think! Think!” At which point Ted Grosky or George Hubbard would shout out, “I think I want to go home!” Undaunted, Mr Sutcliffe would join in the laughter. “And I think you should think again,” he’d say. “Or I’ll think about keeping you after school.”
Despite his idealism, passion, enthusiasm and demands for conscious and creative thought, we all liked Mr Sutcliffe. He wasn’t fusty or dull, or drone on worthily for what seemed like whole lifetimes the way some teachers did. Oh contraire! Mr Sutcliffe was funny, interesting and kept us awake even through the most tedious hours of the syllabus. His enthusiasm was contagious. The boys thought Mr Sutcliffe was especially cool because he was a war hero and rode a vintage Harley, which sat in the parking lot among the compact cars of the rest of the staff like a lion in the middle of a purr of tabby cats. The girls thought he was especially cool because he was extremely cute, played the guitar and Emily Gonzales had seen him in the supermarket wearing a necklace (“Not a St Christopher’s medal,” she assured us, “a real necklace with beads.”), which was a historic first for our town, and possibly a historic last as well.
Every year, besides collecting canned goods to distribute to the deserving poor, our school put on a special Thanksgiving pageant to celebrate the founding of the New World. The band played, the chorus sang, the dancers danced, the children with special skills (being able to twist yourself into the shape of a pretzel or play Roll out the Barrel on the accordion) performed and, to tie it all together thematically, there was always a skit commemorating The First Thanksgiving. As it happened, that autumn our class was doing a project on Colonial America. Perhaps unaware that Mr Sutcliffe believed that history was “always told by the winners” and had decided to change that, Mr Lupino, the Principal, gave us the task of putting on the Thanksgiving skit.
Few people in America may know about the massacre of the Pequot in 1637 (though Class 6A did), but there probably isn’t anyone over two who doesn’t know the story of The First Thanksgiving in 1621. It’s pretty straightforward. The Pilgrims came to America to escape religious bigotry and repression. The Wampanoags, who’d been living in the area for quite some time and were unaware that it was really New England and the property of the English Crown, helped them settle in and showed them what to plant and hunt and stuff like that so they didn’t starve to death. To thank God (and, possibly, the Indians), the colonists made a feast to celebrate their first harvest. This event not only showed their gratitude but created an enduring symbol of the cooperation between the English and the Native Americans. What could be easier to depict in the few minutes allotted to us? It was a no-brainer. Unless, of course, you were being taught by the enemy of no brains. “Don’t parrot history,” Mr Sutcliffe instructed. “Interpret it.”
The auditorium was decorated with cardboard turkeys and cardboard pilgrim hats taped to the walls. Out front the audience gathered. Since this was a daytime production, there weren't any fathers in the crowd, but there were plenty of mothers. My own mother, resplendent in her royal blue coat with the fur collar, sat dead center, her program on her lap and an expectant smile on her lips. Back stage, the cast of The First Thanksgiving gathered. Our study of Colonial America had approached the subject not from the perspective of the Colonists (the winners) but the Native Americans (the undeniable losers). We were ready to interpret.
Our first break with the traditional version of the Pilgrim’s story happened when the colonists finally landed after their arduous journey.
“Hark!” cried Pilgrim One, spying the Wampanoags watching not quite cautiously enough from the trees. “Have we made a mistake? Did we take a wrong turn? This land is already occupied.”
“Not by white people!” said Pilgrim Two. “So it doesn’t count. This is our land now.”
As one of the Wampanoags I didn’t have any lines, so I was free to see the smiles fade from the face of just about every mother in the room.
“But maybe they can give us some seeds for the crops that grow here and show us where the best hunting and fishing is,” said Pilgrim Three. “We could really use the help.”
“And maybe they could lend us some food if we run out of supplies before our first harvest,” said Pilgrim Four. “We probably won’t make it without them.”
Cut to the following autumn.
The Pilgrims were gathered around a table, in the center of which was a basket of corn and squash. The Pilgrims had empty plates in front of them and were holding their knives and forks at the ready.
Pilgrim One looked stage left. “I wonder where our guests for The First Thanksgiving are. It’s getting late. ”
“I’m getting really hungry,” said Pilgrim two. “They should have been here hours ago.”
“You don’t think the few who survived the measles, smallpox and mumps epidemics we gave them have died, too, do you?” wondered Pilgrim Three.
“Well that would be something else to be thankful for, wouldn’t it?” said Pilgrim Four. “At least we won’t have to shoot them later when we want more of their land.”
From the wings where the Wampanoags waited, I saw Mr Lupino marching towards the door to one side of the stage.
Cut to the surviving Wampanoags in their lodge.
“I feel a little bad about not going to dinner with the Pilgrims,” said Wampanoag One. “I mean, we did promise.”
“Are you kidding?” Wampanoag Two laughed hollowly. “They take our land, give us diseases, make us worship their God, murder, kidnap and enslave us - and you want to have dinner with them?”
“It’s not really that,” protested Wampanoag One. “I just think that they owe us something. Some recognition of all we’ve done for them.”
I turned to the audience. That was my cue.
But as I opened my mouth, the curtain suddenly started to close in front of us. Mr Lupino, looking a lot redder in the face than any of the Wampanoags, was in the wings, tugging on the cords.
Unprepared to miss out on delivering what I considered the best line in the skit, which I’d written myself, I bolted through the narrowing opening in the curtains to stand alone at the front of the stage.
“Don’t worry!” I said, my voice loud and clear. “They’ll give us something. A few hundreds years from now they’ll start naming cars and RVs after us.”
There was a silence that could have drowned out the sound of a million bison stampeding over the plains.
I looked out into the audience, searching for the face of my mother, beaming back at me with maternal joy and pride.
She was hiding behind her program.
It took my sister a day to notice that her laces were missing.
“Are you sure you didn’t take them out yourself?” My mother often managed to sound as if there was little on the planet that could ever truly surprise her. “Maybe one of them got some dirt or a drop of juice on it and you couldn’t use it any more?” Or maybe it was just the oddities of her own children that couldn’t surprise her. She knew us well.
“I think I’d remember if they were ruined,” sneered my sister. “I think I would have got some new ones right away.” She turned to me. “There’s only one person in this house who would stoop low enough to steal my shoe laces.”
I widened my eyes in innocent surprise. “Are you talking to me?”
“Well, I’m not talking to the dog,” snapped my sister
I, of course, (as she had) denied all knowledge.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I sounded bored. “Why would I take your shoe laces?” I sniggered. “I mean, that is like sooo pathetic.”
My sister twisted her face into what any half-decent painter would recognize as the picture of contempt. “That’s exactly how come I know you did it,”
Later that night, while my sister was sprawled on the sofa, doing her homework and watching TV, I de-arranged her socks. One cat sock paired with a dog sock; the other paired with a giraffe sock. One polka dot sock paired with a striped sock; the other polka dot sock paired with a heart sock. One green with a blue; one blue with a black. And so forth.
She marched into kitchen the next morning with a shopping bag in her arms.
“Why aren’t you dressed?” asked my mother.
“Because I can’t go to school!” My sister dumped the contents of the bag (every sock she owned) onto the table. “Look what she did! She’s mixed them all up! Now I don’t have any socks to wear today. It’ll take me hours to sort them out.”
“What in heaven’s name is wrong with you?” asked my mother.
Head bent over the history homework I was conscientiously double-checking, I chortled into my cereal bowl. And then I realized that she wasn’t speaking to my sister.
“Me?” I was shocked. Insulted. Hurt. “Why are you blaming me? I didn’t do it. Why would I do a dumb thing like that?”
“I don’t know,” said my mother. “I wish I did, but I don’t. Instead of doing a doctorate in abnormal psychology I married your father.”
“Well I’m sorry, to disappoint you” I said with as much haughtiness as someone eating branflakes can be expected to muster, “but I have a lot better things to do with my time than mix up her socks.” I gave my sister a smile as sweet as a gallon of corn syrup. “Maybe the ghost did it,” I purred.
“Ghost?” My mother looked at the pile of socks with new interest. “You think Nellie did that?”
“Well, it stands to reason, doesn’t it?” I said. “She’s been in that graveyard a long time. It would give her something to do. She must be humongously bored.”
My sister, throwing a pair of socks (one yellow, one orange if I remember correctly) in the air as if it was a ball, started whistling Dixie.
The next day I hid one of my sister’s shoes in my father’s toolbox, where she would never think to look for it and he wouldn’t find it till next autumn when he traditionally spent a couple of days “getting the house ready for winter”.
But instead of yelling and screaming and throwing things at me, my sister calmly invited my mother into her room to examine the gap in her shoe rack. “Look what Nellie did this time,” she announced.
“But why would she only take one shoe?” mused my mother. “It looked to me like she had both her feet.”
I shook up my sister’s jewelry box so that everything was tangled together. But instead of ranting and raving, she presented the box to my mother as if was some kind of trophy.
I de-alphabetized my sister’s tapes. “I guess she was trying to figure out what they were,” she said to my mother. “She’s just curious, that’s all.”
My mother came back from the library with two books: The DICTIONARY OF GHOSTS and GHOSTS OF LONG ISLAND: CASE STUDIES.
The next morning when I went to get dressed I found that every skirt, dress and blouse I had, had been taken from its hanger and dumped on the floor of the closet.
My mother reached for her book of case studies. “That’s very interesting,” she murmured. “There’s a similar incident in here.”
“It’s not the ghost,” I protested. How could it be? There was no ghost.
“Of course it’s the ghost.” My mother flicked through pages. “She’s obviously transferred her focus from your sister to you. You’re probably closer to her in age.”
“It’s not the ghost, it’s her!” I howled, pointing an accusing finger at my sister, who at that moment was immersed in feeding toast to the dog. “It’s her cheap form of revenge.”
My sister glanced over, smiling like an angel who’s just done a good deed. “Revenge for what?”
The next day I found wet sand in the pocket of my jacket.
“That could mean that Nellie drowned…” murmured my mother. “We are near the beach.”
My math book disappeared.
“Are you going to do something?“ I demanded. “I can’t do my homework without my book. I’ll get a detention. Is that what you want?”
“I’ll write you a note and explain about Nellie,” offered my mother.
That was all I needed, a note from my mother to Mr Hirsch explaining that I couldn’t do my homework because the ghost hid my textbook. I might as well give up any dreams of happiness right then.
“Don’t bother,” I said. “I’ll go over to Kathy’s and do my homework there.”
I discovered stones in the bottom of my book bag. I opened the sandwich I’d made for my lunch the night before to find that the peanut butter had turned into liverwurst. My hairbrush had been smeared with Vaseline. Every button on my blouse fell off while I was changing for gym. I thought I might lose my mind.
Those were the buttons that broke the camel’s back. That night I went to my sister and admitted defeat.
“You win,” I said. “I can’t go on like this. What will it take to make you stop?”
“A written apology and ten bucks,” said my sister.
“Only if you give me my striped shirt back.”
“Deal,” said my sister.
On Saturday morning all the toilet paper disappeared.
“You know, almost the same thing happened to that family in Wampaugh,” said my mother.
My father, who, because he’d only just returned from his business trip the night before, hadn’t yet been told about the haunting of our humble home, said, “What family in Wampaugh?”
“The one that had the ghost of an 19th-century sea captain living in their attic,” said my mother.
My father put down his coffee cup. “What does that have to do with out running out of toilet paper?”
My mother explained that we hadn’t run out of toilet paper, Nellie had hidden it all.
“Whose Nellie?” asked my father.
My mother made her you-never-listen-to-a-word-I-say face. “Our ghost,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten about Nellie.”
Rather than admit that he had, my father said, “So where does the sea captain come into it?”
“He flooded the house,” my mother explained. “You know, because they weren't paying enough attention to him.”
My father’s eyes were narrowed in concentration. He’d been away from us for nearly two weeks. It was clear he could have used a debriefing. “So you think whatever her name is took our toilet paper because she’s not getting enough attention?”
“She could get violent,” said my mother. “The sea captain did. We may have to call the priest to have her exorcised.”
My mother left right after breakfast to have her hair done. As soon as her car pulled out of the driveway my father turned on my sister and me. “I can’t turn my back on you two for a minute, can I?”
This was, of course, a rhetorical question but we both answered it anyway.
I clamped my hand to my heart. “I swear I didn’t do it!”
“Me neither,” said my sister. “Reallyreallyreallyreally.”
“Then who did?” my father, not unreasonably, wanted to know.
“The ghost!” we answered as one.
My father sighed. “The only consolation I have in my life is that neither of you was twins,” said my father.
My best striped top (red and blue with a devilish thread of yellow round the collar and cuffs) was missing. I’d taken it out of the clean laundry, folded it meticulously and put it away in the middle drawer of my dresser, right at the top. I knew that this was what I’d done because: A. It was obviously what I should have done; B. I remembered doing it; and C. I’d planned to wear it to the movies on Saturday afternoon. But when I went to the middle drawer of my dresser on Saturday morning the top wasn’t there. I rummaged through the drawer but it hadn’t wiggled its way down to the bottom. I pulled every single thing out, but it hadn’t hidden itself in a sleeve or a turtleneck or a pocket. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I hadn’t put it in the middle drawer but the first or the third. It was possible. I was a teenager; I had a lot on my mind. I rummaged, I pulled out, I sifted through. I searched with the thoroughness of Sherlock Holmes examining a drop of cigar ash, but my very best striped shirt wasn’t in the dresser. It hadn’t fallen down the back, either.
“Mom!” I hollered. “Mom! What happened to my red and blue top?”
My mother sighed as if she was three thousand years old and for all of those three thousand years (on the average of approximately sixteen times a day) someone had been asking her where her red and blue top was. “I thought you put it away.”
“I did.” Like a fly on the salad, an injured note settled into my voice. “But it isn’t there, is it? It’s disappeared.” I was righteous and indignant. This kind of thing wouldn’t happen if I were an only child.
My mother was at the kitchen table, making a bouquet of roses out of pink and yellow Styrofoam egg boxes. Normally my mother’s arts and crafts projects (which were wide-ranging and often frightening) were done in the basement where my father had built her a customized workroom to reduce the possibility of our finding foreign objects like sequins or broken glass in our food. But my father was away, and his absence had the same effect on our household that the sheriff taking a vacation would have had on Dodge. A certain lawlessness prevailed.
She didn’t look up as she said, “Are you sure you looked thoroughly?”
“Yes, I looked thoroughly. I took every single thing out of my dresser. It isn’t there.”
This statement finally made her glance my way, one penciled eyebrow rising accusingly. Her lips were pursed.
“I am going to put it all back,” I snapped.
My mother picked up another petal. “Make sure you do.”
“You’re missing the point!” I wailed. I would have defied anyone to spend two minutes in my family and not realize how unfair the world really is. “It didn’t just walk out of my room by itself! It’s not a shape-shifter! Your daughter took it!”
She calmly glued the petal into place. “You’re my daughter.”
It always amazed me that though she had no sense of humor my mother still tried to make jokes.
“The other one.”
My sister had history. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d “borrowed” something of mine without going through the formality of asking me first. My brown corduroy skirt. My snowflake socks. My Eric von Schmidt album. To name but three things she’d felt entitled to help herself to simply because we shared a gene pool and had rooms next to each other.
“I thought she promised not to do that any more,” said my mother.
And the President promised not to raise taxes.
“Oh, Mommmm….” I groaned. How naïve could one woman be?
“Well, did you ask her if she took it?” My mother picked up a tiny, sparkly yellow bead with a pair of tweezers. “Why don’t you ask her if she took it before you start jumping to conclusions.”
“Fine!” I huffed. “I’ll do that, shall I?”
My sister said she hadn’t touched my stupid top. “I’d rather have lice that wear that,” said my sister. “It’s like so uncool.”
Of course, she was lying. Only my mother would have expected her to tell the truth.
“Well if you didn’t take it, who did?” My mother couldn’t fit into my clothes and as far as any of us knew my father didn’t cross dress. “You may not have noticed this, but we don’t have any other sisters.”
My sister smiled the smile that punched every button I had at exactly the same moment with the force of the explosion needed to launch a missile. Boomboomboom.
“Maybe the ghost took it,” said my sister.
“Don’t think you’re getting away with this!” I hissed.
The door slammed behind me. But not so loudly that I didn’t hear my sister laugh.
Only my mother had ever seen the ghost.
According to my mother, she was a young woman wearing a long, summery print dress with an apron over it and a bonnet. She may have been wearing gloves. Her skin was as pale as moonlight on water and she smiled like the Virgin Mary. My mother called her “Nellie” for no reason other than she’d always liked that name. My mother had seen Nellie twice. Once on a hot and humid August day my mother had woken up in the hammock in the backyard and seen Nellie walking through the kitchen wall. And the second time, the following winter, walking through the snow on the road in front of our house (and through several telephone poles and stranded automobiles as well). Nellie didn’t belong to our house – before we’d had it built there was nothing on our property but trees – but, according to my mother, came from the Colonial cemetery in the nearby woods. My mother (whose own mother had told fortunes and read tea leaves and raised her with a deep belief in The Other World) said it stood to reason.
“She’s either lost or just taking a walk,” said my mother.
My sister, being younger and more impressionable, had been scared of the ghost, and had gone through a phase of thinking that every clanking pipe or branch scraping against the house was Nellie, trying to find her way back to the cemetary. I, on the other hand (who, with my father, represented the logical, rational side of the family) had always been skeptical about the ghost (if not actually scathing, cynical, sarcastic and doubled over with infantile laughter). Indeed, until my sister leered at me like that and said Maybe the ghost took it, I’d forgotten about Nellie completely. My sister, obviously, hadn’t. Now that she was old enough to wear make-up and steal my clothes she was also acting as if she was too old to believe in ghosts. But I knew better. She still always slept with a night-light on and jumped at unexpected noises. I figured that even if Nellie couldn’t help me get back my very favorite top in the entire universe, she could help me settle the score.
As soon as my sister left the house, I tiptoed into her room like a cartoon fox heading for the chicken coop. Although I knew beyond even the slightest shadow of a doubt that my sister had taken my striped shirt I searched her room before I set my plan in action. My sister believed in neatness and order and a certain amount of perfection. Her closet and drawers were all color coordinated (blues together, whites together, etc), which made my job easier than it would have been if I’d been searching my room. But – if further proof was necessary (which it wasn’t) - there was no sign of the top. Secure in the knowledge that I’d more than bent over backwards to be fair, I removed the laces from my sister’s turquoise high-tops, and buried them in the garbage.
The haunting had begun.
There was a flying water bug in the showers. More specifically, the flying water bug was in the shower occupied by my sister. Her screams, which could not only curdle blood but had undoubtedly curdled every container of milk within a ten-mile radius of the campsite, brought two rangers, a vacationing policeman, and a very large man with a knife thundering into the ladies’ washroom, thinking (not unreasonably) that someone was being murdered. Because of the delay the ensuing chaos, hysteria and pandemonium caused, we were late setting off for our evening meal.
By the time it was becoming obvious that we were not going to arrive at our destination within the next twenty minutes, dark had fallen over what was left of the ancient woodland. Night birds called, crickets chirped, and bats swooped over the fields like phantoms. Like nicks in the forest, the lights of distant cabins shone – assuring us that, contrary to how things seemed, we weren't the last people left alive on the planet. Inside the car, where polite conversation had long since ceased, my mother peered through the windshield like a cavalry scout looking for Sioux war parties, the dog snored, my sister rhythmically kicked the seat in front of her, my father rhythmically told her to cut it out, and I wondered, as I sometimes did, if there was any chance that my Aunt Georgia, who taught Art and lived in Greenwich Village, would be willing to adopt me.
Suddenly my mother straightened up. “What’s that? What’s that?” shrieked my mother, jabbing the air in front of my father and narrowly missing his nose. “Look! Up there! It’s a gas station!”
My father didn’t glance over at her, or slow down. “We don’t need gas.”
“Pull in there,” ordered my mother. “Pull in there and ask for directions.”
“We don’t need directions,” said my father. “We aren’t lost.”
Among the many things my father was known for (the honeymoon salad joke, his gag of pretending someone was choking him from behind the door, the horse shadow puppet he could make with his hands) was a pathological refusal to ever ask for directions. Even if we’d been driving for several hours, had been over the Brooklyn Bridge five times, a hurricane had started up and one of his children was crying and the other was throwing up out the window, my father would not ask the way. It was his version of the Code of the Samurai.
On this occasion, after the unprecedented success of our canoe ride (no major arguments, no tears and less than twenty mentions of Disney World) and my mother’s miraculous cure (she couldn’t have gotten back to the rental dock faster if she’d had an outboard), we were on our way to the slap-up “real” meal (nothing from a can) at the “real” restaurant (no burgers, no pizza) recommended by the owner of Charley’s Bait and Tackle. We’d been on our way there for over an hour, but, despite the fact that it was only “a few miles straight up the road after the boulder that looks a lot like a raccoon”, we hadn’t found it yet.
“Do you know where we are?” demanded my mother. “Because if you don’t know where we are, then we’re lost.
Recognizing from her tone of voice that if my mother had been the commander of combat troops she wouldn’t be taking any prisoners, my father eased his foot off the gas. But not happily. “This is ridiculous,” he grumbled. “I bet you it’s just around that bend up there.”
“Five bucks,” said my mother.
Because of the time in Philadelphia when my father went into the news store and pretended to ask for directions when all he did was buy two packs of gum and a Hershey bar, my mother insisted on going with him. Seeing this as an opportunity to at least get a soda, I insisted on going in, too. The dog needed the rest room, so he came along. And my sister, still traumatized by her water bug experience, wasn’t going to sit alone in the car even for a few minutes, so we all trooped into the station with my father.
While my mother stood beside him with her arms folded in front of her and a scowl on her face, my father put four cans of soda on the counter and said, conversationally to the man at the till, “You wouldn’t know where the restaurant is around here?”
The man behind the counter rang up the sodas. “Which one?”
“Well, that’s the thing…” My father chuckled. “I can’t remember the name. But I think it looks like a log cabin.”
The man chuckled. “Everything up here looks like a log cabin.”
My mother sighed.
“Guy at the lake said it’s on the same road as the boulder that looks like a raccoon.”
“Racoon?” The man frowned. “You sure he didn’t say coyote?”
“Racoon,” repeated my father. “I’m sure he said raccoon.”
The man was shaking his head. “Racoon, huh?”
Aware that, beside him, my mother was starting to paw the ground, my father searched his mind for some other relevant information. “Oh, I know!” He snapped his fingers. “He said there’s a stuffed bear outside the entrance.”
“Oh, stuffed bear! Why didn’t you say?” The man handed my father his change. “That’ll be Links. Best darn steak house in the state. Big as a platter. Melts in your mouth like butter on a griddle. Then there’s the onion rings and the scalloped potatoes… I’m telling you, you haven’t tasted onion rings or scalloped potatoes till you’ve had the ones at Links. And if you don’t like steak, there’s the chops - chops to die for – or the chicken….” He shook his head. “Well, the chicken’s just out of this world.”
“Considering how long it’s taking us to find this place, it probably is,” muttered my mother.
The man beamed on my sister and me. “And wait’ll you see the desserts… People come from miles just for the homemade ice cream and blueberry pie.”
“Well, I can believe that,” said my mother.
“It isn’t far, is it?” My father’s voice was bright with hope. He pointed out the window. “I bet my wife it’s just around that bend.”
“Well kind of…”
You went around the bend, then turned right on Luke Skyler Road. About three miles later, when you came to all the mailboxes, you did another right onto Sagwa. When Sagwa forked you stayed on the left. About half a mile past the second white house on the right you made a right. You’d cross a stream and pass a church. The third left after the church was Shortcut. The restaurant was four miles down on the right.
My father’s head bobbed up and down, either with understanding or with the effort of trying to shake the directions into it.
“Thanks!” said my father. He turned to go, and we turned with him. “Right… right… left… right… left… right…” he mumbled as we all shuffled towards the door.
“I’m getting blue berry pie,” said my sister.
“You owe me five bucks,” said my mother.
“The chicken sounds good,” said I. “And those potatoes…”
“Steak. I’m having the biggest steak they have.” The car keys jingled in my father’s hand as he held the door open for us to file through.
“Course, it’s closed on Mondays,” called the man at the counter.
Desperate as a man who knows the crowd around is looking for a rope and about to get ugly, my father turned around. “Well what about one of the other restaurants?” He was close to begging. “One of them must be open.”
“Nah…” The man shook his head. Sadly. “There aren’t any other restaurants round here.”
My mother (claiming that she couldn’t take a turn with the paddle because she once strained her back rowing at summer camp when she was twelve) sat at the back of the canoe, the dog on her lap, her delicate skin protected by a large straw bonnet tied with a strip of bright pink organza.
“By the shores of Gitche Gumee….” she intoned. “By the shining Big-Sea-Water…”
Normally, on family trips, my mother sang. She usually tried to match the song to the locale. “Onward, Christian Soldiers” or the song about the church in the wild wood should we pass a party of knights or a religious building. “Old MacDonald” if we passed a farm. “We’ll Meet Again” when a cemetery hove into view. Today, however, as our canoes huffed and puffed their ways over the serene and woods-encircled lake, she was reciting Longfellow’s poem “Hiawatha” (the two verses that she remembered from school). Fortunately, my mother didn’t know any songs about Native Americans, and even if I could have paddled and sung at the same time there was no way I was going to fill in that gap in her knowledge by sharing the song about Running Bear and Lovely Little White Dove with her.
“Hiawatha” was bad enough.
“What’d I tell you?” shouted my father. “Didn’t I say this was going to be a vacation we you never forgot?” He and my sister were in the lead canoe. He was doing the paddling and she (having already dropped an oar into the water once) was sitting behind him, slapping the surface of the lake with her hand in a way that suggested she might be wondering how much force it would take to capsize the boat. “Look at that view. Isn’t it spectacular?” Water splashed over my father and his passenger as his blade pointed at the view. The jade-green, glasslike lake below us. The enormous, silent sky above us. The huddle of old-growth forest that encircled us. “This is what this country used to look like before we invented strip malls,” my father informed us. “Wild. Raw. Throbbing with life. Just as Nature made it.” He pulled up his oars, letting the bright red canoe (number 18) drift while he took in the untamed beauty all around us in our rented canoes with our life jackets on. “It’s like going back in time.”
“I’d rather go to Disney World,” grumbled my sister. My sister hadn’t been in favor of this vacation to begin with (well, no one was except my father), but since discovering that campsites didn’t have private bathrooms or TV, I’d rather go to Disney World had become my sister’s theme tune. “They have Frontier Land, you know.”
“Be that as it may,” my father placidly replied. “But it’s all pretend, honey. This is much better. This is the real thing.”
“I bet the real tribe that used to live here would be a little surprised to find all those white people swimming in their lake.” I was in one of my rebellious phases, which three twenty-four-hour days with my family was doing nothing to diminish. “Not to mention the speedboats and the café and the bar on the other end.”
My father looked back at me. “Cynicism is not attractive in one so young.”
“Stop giving your dad a hard time,” ordered my mother.
Which, if you asked me, was pretty rich since she’d done nothing but give my father a hard time since we left home – starting from when she threw the map out the car window. She not only refused to paddle, she also refused to help set up the tent, to blow up her air mattress or to cook on the ground, and usually stayed at camp, reading a book, while my father took my sister and me on walks to disprove her predictions that we would break out in poison ivy or contract lyme disease. But being ferried over what amounted to one gigantic scenic overlook obviously agreed with her.
This was a part of getting out in Nature she could go with. “This place is inspiring. Truly inspiring.” She peered over the tops of her sunglasses to be even more truly inspired.
“God’s country. That’s what they called it. God’s country.”
“No it wasn’t. They called it Algonquin country.” I told you I was in one of my rebellious stages.
My mother, however, wasn’t about to be baited. One of the reasons she was in a good mood was because tonight my father had agreed that we could eat in a restaurant instead of having yet another meal of canned beans and canned spaghetti (which, with canned soup, canned ravioli and boiled water, were just about all you could expect to make on our stove). Even Wilderness Dad had his limits of just how far back in time he was willing to go. “It’s so quiet and peaceful,” she went on. “It really makes you think.”
“All it makes me think is that I’d rather be at Disney World,” said my sister.
“It’d be cool if we could see an eagle or an elk or something like that.” I sighed. “But I suppose we exterminated all of them, too.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said my father. “The Ranger told me there’s plenty of wildlife left in these woods. Deer… raccoon… coyote… even bear.”
“Not down here with all these tourists around.” Rebels aren’t easily persuaded. “Somebody’d shoot them.”
“Let’s pull in over there and have our lunch,” said my father.
We pulled in “over there” and dragged the canoes up on the shore (my sister grumbling about not having to do this at Disney World and my mother and the dog, both exempt from this labor - she because of her old camp injury and he because of his paws – looking on.)
Interestingly, although a woman who considered crossing the supermarket parking lot a hike, it was my mother who suggested we go further inland to find a “sylvan glade” where we could have our picnic. “A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou…” Still obviously inspired, my mother was on a poetic roll that day, even if she’d changed continents. She beamed at my father. “Wouldn’t that be romantic?”
My father (though more a piece of cake and can of beer kind of guy) said, “We’re not going too far in. We have to keep an eye on the boats.”
Without going too far, we actually found the perfect spot, secluded but unspoiled by the litter that dotted the shores of the lake. It was a small clearing in a natural circle of trees. There were logs to sit on and a leafy roof over us through which the sun streamed down in halo-like light. Around us branches creaked and birds sang and tiny forest creatures rustled in the undergrowth – just as they had for thousands of years. As we ate our bologna sandwiches and sipped our iced tea, I think I can say that each of us was touched and moved by the timeless grandeur of our surroundings.
“It’s so serene,” murmured my mother. “Like heaven on Earth.”
Even my sister went through the whole meal without any mention of Disney World.
And then, folding up his sandwich bag and gazing over my mother’s head, my father said, “I don’t want anyone to panic. The best thing is to stay calm. But if I’m not mistaken, there’s a black bear watching us from right behind your mom.”
My sister and I both screamed, “Where? Where?” and launched ourselves at my father. My mother scooped up the dog and ran.
My sister opened her eyes first. “I don’t see any bear,” said my sister.
I opened my eyes. Still holding tightly to my father’s arm I peered through the trees behind the spot where my mother so recently had been. “I don’t either.”
“Don’t you?” My father shook his head, gathering up the fallen picnic fare. “I guess maybe I was mistaken after all.”
By the time we got back to the boats, my mother was yards out on the water in the blue canoe, paddling with a speed and grace that would have made Hiawatha proud.
“You see?” My father winked. “I knew that shoulder must have healed by now.”
In the last several decades, the Family Vacation has become a fixture in our culture – as if, not satisfied with arguing for fifty weeks in the relative privacy of our own homes we want to give the rest of the world a chance to see us at our worst. It strikes me as somewhat ironic that a group of people who can’t go Christmas shopping together without shouting, tears and festive violence (i.e., my father throwing the Singing Santa onto Route 110) would want to go away together to someplace where they can’t lock themselves in their bedrooms and refuse to come out, but Life, as they say, is strange.
“But a family vacation’s supposed to be vacation the whole family enjoys,” wailed my sister. “Like going to Disneyworld or someplace like that.”
My father, who was wiping several years’ worth of dust and small insects off the portable gas stove he’d bought for power cuts in hurricane season, didn’t look up. “Exactly. The whole family. Which, I believe includes me.”
My father had put his foot down, and crushed firmly under its heel was Cinderella’s tiara. He was tired of spending his precious vacation driving from one child-friendly venue to another. Up and down the East Coast we went, my parents in the front seat (bickering) and my sister and I in the back (bickering), every night the four of us crammed into one cheap motel room with our electric coffee pot, a hot plate and an ice chest (so that the only meal we had to eat out was lunch) and arguing about what to watch on the TV that was bolted to the wall. We’d been to Storybook Land and The Mountain Game Farm. We’d been to Pioneer Land and Cowboy World. We’d been to Water World, King Arthur’s Realm and Fairy Town. He was drawing the line at Disneyworld. This year, said my father, he wanted to really relax and enjoy himself. He didn’t think that was too much to ask.
My sister, as you will have guessed already, disagreed.
“But everybody goes to Disneyworld,” she moaned. “All my friends have pictures of themselves with Goofy and T-shirts and really cool key chains and stuff. And they all say how great it is… They think we’re weird because we haven’t gone. They think there’s something wrong with you.”
My father, however, was impervious to the ridicule of eight-year-olds.
“A real vacation isn’t about T-shirts and key chains,” said my father. “It’s about experiencing all life has to offer. It’s about challenging yourself and pushing your limits.” This was why we were going camping. According to my father, life’s offerings included tents, sleeping bags and getting pretty intimate with nature. It would make us more rounded people, like Boy Scouts. “Wouldn’t you rather have your picture taken walking an old Indian trail than standing next to some college student dressed as a cartoon character?” he asked.
My sister said, “No.”
“My friends all stay in hotels,” said my mother. Wistfully. So long as we went somewhere, she didn’t care where we went but she would have liked to stay in a real hotel. The idea of room service appealed to her.
“Where’s your pioneer spirit?” demanded my father. “It wasn’t staying in hotels that made this country great.”
“It wasn’t sleeping on the ground either,” snapped my mother.
You may have noticed that my whining voice hasn’t yet been heard in this discussion. That’s because I was at the age when I would rather have gone to prison than go on another family vacation, and that went for one that included Mickey Mouse. If my sister’s ideal holiday consisted of spinning around in a giant teacup, and my mother’s of calling for a turkey sandwich and a bottle of beer to be brought to her room, then my ideal holiday would have been if they’d all gone to Timbuktu or even the Jersey Shore and left me home by myself.
Which is why I now said, “I don’t see why I have to go at all. I could stay home and look after the dog.”My mother made her mouth into a flat line. “Over my dead body.” In her opinion, I was of an age when the only way she would leave me at home by myself was with a police escort.
“The dog’s coming, and you’re coming, too,” said my father. Finished with the stove, he reached for the Coleman lantern (also bought for hurricane season). “You’ll see, we’re going to have a lot of fun.” He beamed on his own flesh and blood and their mother. “This is going to be a vacation you’ll never forget.”
It was already dark by the time we pulled into the Red Tree Falls Campgrounds. Or, to be slightly more accurate, it was already dark by the time we found the Red Tree Falls Campgrounds. Day one and counting.
Things hadn’t begun very well. Loading the car had taken roughly three hours more than my father had allowed for. Every time he’d tied what he thought was the last bundle on the roof or managed to close the trunk despite the laws of logic and physics, one of us would hurl herself from the house with something else that had to come no matter what. When we finally did manage to get out of the driveway, we were back in twenty minutes when my mother realized we’d left the dog behind. (My sister and I, hoping to break our father’s will, had agreed to wait at least two hours before sounding the alarm.) Then we got a flat. By the time that was fixed my mother needed a restroom and my sister and I needed food. Then my mother, who was navigating, sent us thirty miles in the wrong direction. Then she and my father had a fight about whose fault it was that we’d gone the wrong way and my mother (firmly establishing the new family tradition started by my father the Christmas before) threw the map out the window and told him to do his own navigating if he thought he was so smart. Then the dog threw up. And then (perhaps as we should have known) the Red Tree Falls National Campgrounds turned out to be a closely kept government secret, hidden away over wooden bridges and down nameless dirt tracks that were all as similar as crocodiles from any main roads or obvious landmarks - and even from the knowledge of locals (“Can’t say that I do…”), as though it’s whereabouts had to be kept from enemy agents. God forbid the Red Tree Falls Campgrounds should fall into the hands of the Soviets.
We arrived at campsite 48 (“You’re in luck!” the ranger congratulated us. “We have one tent spot left”) about five minutes before the rain.
“You can’t be serious,” said my mother as we staggered out of the cramped car and the first drops fell on us from a tar-black sky. “We can’t put the tents up in the dark and the rain.”
“Of course we can,” said my father. “The ground’s not mud yet, is it? I’ll leave the car lights on and we’ll be home and dry in no time.”
It may surprise you to learn that none of us had ever erected a tent before. Even more interesting, though, is the fact that it hadn’t occurred to my father that he might want to do a dry run (literally) in the warmth and comfort of his own house – rather than wait till nine o’clock at night in a storm to discover that he had no idea which pole went where. I have since seen tents that pretty much put themselves up, but ours weren’t like that. Ours needed human intervention. My mother (and the dog) refused to get out of the car, which left my father to grapple manfully with their tent on his own, which used quite a few words we’d never heard him use before. My sister and I would have happily stayed in the car, too, but we’d been packed in the back with the dog and the supplies for nearly ten hours by then, making stumbling around in a downpour blindly banging pegs into the ground seem almost pleasant.
Just to prove that miracles do happen, by ten thirty both tents, though listing noticeably, were up. Outside the rain poured down in what can only be described as a Biblical way, but we were snug and dry, happily eating peanut butter and crackers together in my parents tent by the light of the Colemans.
And then a new sound joined the thudding of the rain, and the dog jumped on my lap, getting peanut butter all over his ears.
“What was that?” whispered my sister. “Was that a wolf?”
“Of course not,’ said my father, with all assurance of a man whose experience of wild animals pretty much started and stopped with the rabbits who annually ate his vegetable patch. “There aren’t any wolves around here. It’s just the wind.”
Another new sound ripped through the night.
This time my sister nearly jumped in my lap. “Then what was that?”
My mother spread peanut butter on a cracker in a philosophical way. “I think you’ll find that was your tent being blown across the campgrounds.” The lantern light made the smile she gave my father slightly sinister. “This certainly is going to be a vacation we never forget.
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THE FAMILY DIET
JOLLY HOLLY
ANOTHER HALLOWEEN TALE
THE FRENCH DON'T HAVE A WORD FOR IT
A HALLOWEEN TALE 