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Mrs Pataki, my next-door neighbour, is something of a celebrity on our block, famous as the mother of Snookums (a grumpy tabby cat the size of a canister vacuum cleaner) and as owner of the most impressive collection of Volkswagen Beetle memorabilia this side of the Rhine. Mrs Pataki used to be content with these two areas of glamour and expertise, answering questions about the time Snookums wedged himself in the front gate and whether or not the VW on her ring actually moves with constant grace and good humour. But, as we know from all the actors, rock gods, models and reality TV stars who have gone on to create perfumes, write books, design clothes and end global poverty, celebrity is not always enough. It may be great topping the charts or possessing one of the few miniature VW Beetles that doubles as a bar in the Western World, but the human soul needs more. Mrs Pataki has worked out how to overcome the economic crisis.
“It’s simple, really,” Mrs Pataki confided. “What we need to do is bring back Home Ec.”
An image immediately formed in my mind. An image nightmarish enough to make strong women weep. This image was worse even than the image that forms when I’m reminded of the Summer The Family Went Camping or the Day Mrs McClusky Can-Canned Down the Beach with a Transistor Pressed to One Ear. In this most horrific of images, I saw sewing machines and cutting boards and dress forms. I saw model kitchens, complete with stoves, sinks and Formica tables where six girls who were no longer speaking to each other were forced to eat together. This was the home economics room of my junior high school. I hated Home Ec. I hated Home Ec even more than a hated Gym, and I hated Gym as only someone who was always assigned to a team and never actually picked for one could. [I have to point out here that my hatred of this class had nothing to do with my feelings for either sewing or cookery. I like them both. But I wanted to make intricate patchwork quilts, not A-line skirts; to make tacos and Paht Thai, not pancakes and macaroni and cheese.] I’d just as soon bring back Feudalism as Home Ec.
“Why on earth would you want to do that?” l squeaked.
“Because we live in a throw-away, ready-meals society, that’s why,” replied Mrs Pataki. “Home Ec taught useful skills. Skills we all need. Skills that could save one a lot of money and help the environment.”
“But not everyone’s good at Home Ec,” I argued. “Some people find it as big a challenge as climbing Mt Everest.” Wearing stilettos and a tutu.
“Are we talking about you?” asked Mrs Pataki.
Yes, we were. I actually failed Home Ec.
Mrs Pataki, apparently under the illusion that I was joking, laughed. “Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody fails Home Ec. It’s impossible. It’s like failing lunch.”
Or so they’d like you to think.
In the Home Ec class that I saw so clearly in my mind, I was there, in Group Four, with Kitty Keller, Ginny Lidel, Barbara Shopenhauer, Glenda Cross and Edie Meckler. We were all wearing simple aprons that we’ve made ourselves with a yard-and-a-half of cotton (and bias tape for the neck loop and ties). Kitty, Ginny and Edie’s aprons were in solid colours with contrasting trim, Barbara’s was blue with white stripes and white trim and Glenda’s was a delicate floral print framed in black. They were all so perfectly done that they didn’t look homemade, they looked like they’d bought them in the kitchen department of Macy's. Mine looked like it was made in a home without electricity, at night, probably by a goat. Possibly because, as was frequently pointed out to me (and not only by my parents), I was a peculiar child, the material I chose for my apron was decorated with lizards. That would be my first mistake. My mother had shown a little concern about my choice of fabric (“Do people really want to look at reptiles while they’re cooking?” she’d mused), but I was not to be dissuaded. I loved lizards, but although I’d had a lot of things decorated with dogs, kittens and flowers over the years I’d never had any item of clothing that featured a chameleon, a gecko or an iguana. This was my big chance. Sewing was going to unleash my creativity after all - and free me from the restraints and limits of the Girls’ Department. Personally, I hold the general reaction to my lizard material (a combination of hilarity and hostility that eventually lead me to wearing it inside out) at least partially responsible for the fact that the finished product was both too wide and too long, the simple apron shape mutating into something that bunched at the top and swirled out at the bottom like a crumpled candy bar wrapper. Because of the difficulties threading a bobbin gave me, I’d wound up holding the ties on with safety pins. Mrs Lewis, whose job it was to impart to us the useful skill of sewing (and who never hid the fact that I didn’t meet her standards of what it means to be a girl), claimed that in twenty years of teaching she had never seen anything like my apron. “If we’d depended on you to make the first wheel we’d all still be walking everywhere,” declared Mrs Lewis. Though that, of course, was before she saw my skirt.
“Skirt?” echoed Mrs Pataki? “What was wrong with your skirt?”
Just about everything.
“And that’s why you failed Home Ec?”
It contributed. Because I also couldn’t master zippers or buttonholes it, too, was held together with pins, but the main reason I failed Home Ec was the Candle Salad.
“Candle Salad?” Mrs Pataki was curious despite herself. “What’s that when it’s at home?”
Sadly, I hadn’t done any better in the cooking part of our class than I had in the sewing part. My baked eggs looked like infectious phlegm. My macaroni and cheese set off the smoke alarms. My spaghetti and meat sauce turned a peculiar shade of grey not in keeping with Sunny Italy. Our final exam for the semester was for each group to plan and make a complete meal. Without much consultation, my co-chefs decided that I should make the salad. “You can’t possibly mess up the salad,” said Edie. “That’s right,” agreed Glenda. “What can go wrong with a handful of lettuce?” But the human capacity for error is, of course, limitless. Once again I saw this as my big chance. I could redeem all my mistakes (Ginny Lidel throwing up all over herself, the damage done by the fire extinguisher, the damage done to Italian cooking) simply by producing something truly special. Not just some lettuce and tomato with grated carrot sprinkled over it. Something that Caesar himself would have envied.
Mrs Pataki eyed me warily. “And that was the Candle Salad?”
Indeed, it was.
I got the recipe in one of the cookbooks for kids that my mother, who didn’t like cooking herself, bought to encourage my sister and me to take over the job – and lighted on it because, although unusual by the standards of Long Island, it was largely composed of very usual things that came well within the class budget.
“You mean it was made of candles?” ventured Mrs Pataki.
No, bananas – amongst other things. On a bed of lettuce you placed a mound of cottage cheese and into that you set a ring of tinned pineapple (this formed the candle holder). Into the ring of pineapple you stuck half a banana (the candle). On top of the banana you put a spoonful of mayonnaise or something like mayonnaise (that was the dripping wax). On top of that you put half a maraschino cherry, to represent the flame. And there you had it: the Candle Salad. I made six and lined them up on the counter, stepping back to view them with a certain amount of pride.
Mrs Pataki shook her head. “And for that you failed? Didn’t it taste any good?”
I have no idea what it tasted like (although I assume it largely tasted like cottage cheese, pineapple and banana, which aren’t tricky tastes like natto miso or snails). No one ever got to eat any of it. As soon as my co-chefs turned from their own tasks to see the row of salads (one or two with a cherry flame starting to slip from its moorings) they started laughing. I’d never understood the phrase “die laughing” before, but from the way they were bent double, clasping their sides, and gasping, it seemed possible that they might. Needless to say, this hysteria caught the attention of the other groups. They, too, started shrieking and honking as thought they’d just discovered laughter.
Besides the laughter, I was aware of movement and chatter around me, but the events of the next, say, ninety seconds is a blur. I just stood there, transfixed in much the way I froze when, on the one occasion that I ever wore my Home Ec skirt, the pin opened as I was modelling it for the class and it fell to the ground. And then I heard Mrs Lewis (who had been bent over examining something in an oven) say, “What in heaven’s name is going on?” What was going on was a food fight (brought on, it was later decided, by delirium). As Mrs Lewis’ head rose from the oven, someone got her square in the face with a banana.
“But it wasn’t you who threw the banana.” Mrs Pataki, as well as being a celebrity, is innately fair. “I don’t see why you failed.”
“Mrs Lewis didn’t care who threw the banana. She held me responsible. She was convinced I’d done it on purpose.” Like my mother, Mrs Lewis seemed to think I had a peculiar sense of humour.
“But you didn’t do it on purpose,” said Mrs Pataki. “Did you?”
Not all of my memories of Home Ec are like revisiting Elm Street. There is also the one of Mrs Lewis standing in the middle of Group Two’s Kitchen with a cherry stuck to her nose.
“No, of course I didn’t,” I said.
I believe it was the great novelist Leo Tolstoy who claimed that all happy families are the same, whereas unhappy families are each unhappy in its own way. I can’t help feeling, though, that Count Tolstoy was simplifying things for the sake of a really good line. It seems to me that all families – happy, unhappy or in between – are tiny worlds onto themselves – different and distinct. Worlds with individual cultures and customs. When you’re little, you think that everything that happens in your family is normal. Everybody eats macaroni and cheese on Friday night. Everybody’s grandmother has an altar in her bedroom. Everyone’s father bursts into songs from musicals without warning. That all mothers have pet snakes. That in every family there is an Uncle George who hasn’t spoken a single word for the last twenty years or an Aunt Cotilda who wears a helmet made of aluminum foil to bed. It isn’t until you get older and spend more time out of the house than in it that you begin to realize just how unique and special your family really is. My sister was five.
It happened on Easter. Our family ritual was that as soon as we got home from church on Easter Sunday, my father would hand my sister and me each a basket containing a handful of cellophane “grass” and a piece of paper and a pencil, and set us on the trail of The Big Bunny. The idea was that The Big Bunny, a rabbit with a mischievous sense of humor, had hidden our Easter stuff hither and thither - and we had to find it, filling our baskets piece by piece. Our candy could be anywhere. Upstairs or downstairs. Inside or out. It might even be in the mailbox or the trunk of the car. The pen and paper was so my father could keep track of how many hiding places we’d discovered. If we missed any, we’d be sent back on the hunt. There was no such thing as a Free Lunch in our house.
“None of my friends have to go through this,” grumbled my sister. “Why can’t we just get a basket filled with stuff like everybody else?”
“Because this is more fun. Besides, it’s the way we do it. It’s a tradition.” My father sounded so totally reasonable you’d have thought he was actually making sense.
But my sister, though young, caught the flaw in his logic.
“Whose tradition?” she demanded. “Nobody else has this stupid tradition.”
“Of course they do,” said my father. “All over the world they have Easter egg hunts.”
You’ll notice that I wasn’t taking part in this conversation. I was there, of course. Like my sister, I was all dressed up in my new Easter outfit – the patent leather shoes, the pastel party dress, the seasonal bonnet – but I was a little older. I no longer had the heart for this argument, since we’d had it so many times before. I’d already figured out that other parents were not like ours.
“Egg hunts, Dad.” My sister’s hat was white with tiny rose buds along the crown and a pink bow that tied under her chin, which made her look deceptively sweet. “They just have to find a couple of hard-boiled eggs. All they have to do to get the candy is get out of bed.”
“They don’t know what they’re missing,” said my father. He handed us our baskets, glancing at his watch. “You’d better start hopping, you two. The Big Bunny’s outdone himself this year. It could take you a while.”
We both groaned.
Don’t worry,” said my mother. “Dinner’s not for a few hours yet.”
There were always a few easy finds. The small foil-covered eggs over the doorsills. The plastic egg filled with jellybeans in the soap dish. The hardboiled egg in the magazine rack and behind the drapes. The chocolate rabbits in the laundry hamper. We swooped on these with cries of girlish glee, and after an hour in which we completely forgot what an ordeal he was putting us through, reported back to my father, The Big Bunny’s personal representative on Bluff Road.
He was reclining in His Chair, reading the paper and eating a chocolate chicken. “You haven’t even started yet.” He laughed in the warm, affectionate way people who are sitting in comfortable chairs stuffing their faces with chocolate chickens do. “You’ve got at least another dozen to go.”’
“A dozen!” wailed my sister.
“You can’t be serious,” cried I.
“Chop, chop,” said my father. “See you two later.”
We trekked through the yard, rooting through the mint patch and the barbecue and peering through the lilacs. We combed every inch of the lawn. We left no stone or garden ornament unturned. We uprooted every pot plant, rummaging through the dirt for something wrapped in Saran. My mother waved to us from the kitchen window. I shoved my sister up the oak tree at the back of the yard; my mother came out with the stepstool to get her back down.
I know that somewhere in that afternoon we had baked ham and candied sweet potatoes and a cake cut to look like a rabbit, but I have no actual memory of the meal. My sister and I bolted down our dinners in an unhealthy way, now in the grip of an obsession.
As soon as we were allowed from the table, we resumed our search with the single-mindedness of an adventurer looking for a lost city.
We dug through the linen cupboard and prowled through the living room like spies. I came out of the chimney covered with soot. My sister caused a major avalanche in the hall closet. We tore our own rooms apart. We left not a drawer unmolested or a wastebasket standing. We emptied closets and shelves. We discovered things we never knew we had and things that had been missing for years. Leaving quite a lot of devastation in our wake (“Carpet bombed” was how my mother unsmilingly described it later), we returned to my father with the latest statistics.
“You’re still short.” My father rubbed his hands together. Gleefully. “Don’t forget – whatever you don’t find belongs to me.”
We combed the garage like a CSI team.
My sister took the car. She was thorough and methodical. She checked the glove compartment and the floor. She pulled out the movable seat, rummaged through the trunk, dove into the spare tire – got stuck in the storage space behind the back seat.
I took the garage itself. I looked in every jar of nails, washers and screws on my father’s workbench. I bravely peered in all the dark and dusty corners. I got out the ladder and climbed up to the high shelves. We found the necklace I’d accused my sister of stealing from me, a dollar in change, my mother’s ancient ice skates, a foot stool made out of coffee cans, what was left of the badminton set after the dog got caught in the net the summer before, and two chocolate lambs.
We returned to the living room, convinced that we must have found everything by now.
My father said no. There were still two things missing.
But we’ve looked everywhere in the house and in the yard,” moaned my sister.
“You haven’t looked in the basement yet,” said my father, licking chocolate from his fingers.
My mother went into the basement to do the laundry, and my father went down there to yell at the boiler and fiddle with fuses, but my sister and I never went there if we could help it. Chill and damp, the basement was the kind of dark, uncivilized and treacherous place where ghosts, monsters and criminals on the run were likely to be hiding. At the very least, it was a place mice and spiders would be happy to call home.
My father shrugged. “It’s your call, girls. But I thought you were particularly fond of white chocolate.”
Clutching our baskets and each other, my sister and I tiptoed down the dusty, creaking steps to the concrete chamber of horrors under the house.
“It’s too big,” said my sister as we hovered at the bottom of the stairs, our eyes scanning the landscape of furniture, boxes, cobwebs, crates and luggage. “There’s too much stuff.”
was too much stuff. The shattered remains of past lives – ours, our parents, their parents and people they probably had never known - all coexisted in out-of-sight, out-of-mind exile in the cellar.
“He’s old and lazy. He wouldn’t hide them anywhere really hard to get to,” I reasoned.
“They’ll either be kind of in view or somewhere obvious. He’s not a masochist, he just likes to tease us.”
My sister looked around the room. “I don’t see anything.”
“What about the washing machine?” I gave her a nudge. “Go look in the washing machine.”
She nudged me back. “You come with me.” The washing machine was at the far wall, in the wilderness behind the stairs.
It was a long walk across the concrete floor. Step by tiny step. Even though we barely breathed, we could feel the dust of decades shifting in the air. Every little noise – even ones we knew came from over our heads, like our mother dancing around the living room while she watched the holiday musical - made us dig our nails into each other and jump.
The washing machine, raised from the ground on a wooden platform, was a top-loader. We put down our baskets and I lifted my sister up so that she could reach the lid and tilted her forward. She leaned in. “I think there’s something down there, but it’s too dark to see. Her voice was muffled. “Isn’t there another light?”
There was a light over our heads.
“Try and brace yourself,” I ordered. “I have to let go with one hand.” I reached up to pull the cord that would turn it on.
Something ran across my feet. It was bigger than a spider but smaller than a horse. I thought I saw something glowing. I felt sharp nails. It may have growled.
I screamed and something else – something dank and slimy - threw itself against me, touching my face. I screamed again and ran, knocking over our baskets as I fled. I pounded up the stairs and, gibbering and hyperventilating, hurled myself through the door and into the kitchen where my mother was fixing herself a sandwich. “Ghosts and rats!” I gasped. “Ghosts and rats touched me!”
My mother put down the mustard knife. She only wanted to know one thing “Where’s your sister?”
My sister was still head first in the washing machine. Though by then, of course, she was crying fairly hysterically.
Later, when she was kissing us good night, my mother said, “You know, you really have to hand it to your father. Not many people can combine Easter and Halloween like that.”
As the door shut behind her my sister whispered, “So they’re both crazy, right?
“I’m not sure it’s just them,” I whispered back.
My sister took a break from swimming with dolphins and hugging orangutans on the tropical island where she lives to visit me in the damp and grey of London. On Sunday morning, wrapped in jumpers and thick socks so as not to waste energy by actually turning on the heat, we huddled together on the sofa reading the papers.
“Wow,” said my sister. “Did you see this article on saving money and beating the recession?”
I tore my eyes from the piece I was reading that explained how forty-thousand-pound lunches, three-thousand-pound handbags and eight-hundred-pound shoes were now so yesterday. “Let me guess,” I said. “It reminds you of Dad.”
“He was practically a prophet. He was totally ahead of his times.” My sister shook her head in wonderment and awe. “If I didn’t know it was impossible, I would’ve thought he wrote it.” The article was full of practical advice on using leftovers, making packed lunches, making gloves out of old socks, recycling greeting cards, mending things rather than throwing them out, making do with last year’s coats and your old kettle. “I mean, really. Look here! They even tell you how to darn socks!”
My father darned socks. He knit my sister and me scarves that we jammed into our schoolbags as soon as we were out of his sight. He turned off lights almost as soon as they were turned on, often leaving his nearest and dearest sitting in the dark. He saved string, brown paper, wrapping paper, jars, bottles and boxes, because you never knew when they’d come in handy. He patched sheets. He only bought new shoes when the old ones started leaking. He did hose repairs and his own mechanics. He built a barbecue (legendary) and a “Florida room” (slightly impractical for New York State). He was always asking us if we thought he was made of money.
“Remember the time he decided to turn the back yard into a farm?” I asked.
My sister rolled her eyes. “Who could forget?”
It all started innocently enough.
My mother came in singing a song from the radio, her arms filled with groceries.
She stopped rather sharply when she reached the dining room. “What are you planning to do with that?” asked my mother. She was gazing at the packets scattered across the table as if they were grenades.
“What do you think I’m going to do with them?” My father, who was sitting a few feet away in His Chair (the one he only got to sit in when my mother was either out or otherwise engaged), laid down the book he was reading on root vegetables and looked over at her. “They’re seeds. I’m going to plant them.”
From the look on my mother’s face you’d have thought he’d said he planned to run around our neighborhood in the dark of the suburban night, throwing the grenades into people’s swimming pools.
“Plant them?” My mother’s laugh was as sharp and high as the sound made by a musical saw. “Why on earth would you want to do that?”
My father explained that by planting the seeds we could grow our own vegetables – be self-sufficient and feed ourselves. “Like people used to do,” said my father. “We can get back to nature. Isn’t that one of the advantages of not living in the City?”
My mother, a city girl by both birth and temperament, felt that nature had been adequately represented by Central Park, and would have preferred to get back to Midtown. “I thought we moved out here for the schools and the clean air.”
“And to have a little land to call our own,” said my father.
“That doesn’t mean you have to grow tomatoes on it,” argued my mother. “Why do you think they invented the supermarket? Everybody else around here just grows grass.”
In this discussion you can see one of the basic differences between my parents. My mother enthusiastically embraced progress and technology – whether it was an electric kettle or a box of instant mashed potatoes. She loved the modern way of using something once and throwing it away. My father, on the other hand was wary of too much progress and technology. He hated waste (waste not, want not) and extravagance (a penny saved is a penny earns.) What was wrong with the way his parents had done things? Or his parents’ parents? Or the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia for that matter? How much effort did it take to mash a potato, for heaven’s sake? And as for putting a motor on a can opener? Putting a motor on a can opener simply meant there was something else that could go wrong.
My mother’s eyes narrowed with wifely suspicion, “This isn’t about getting back to nature, is it?” she demanded. “This is about saving money.”
And here we have another basic difference between my parents. My mother (who, perhaps, was also slightly ahead of her times) believed that money was to be spent, often on things you didn’t actually need and/or couldn’t afford, while my father had a tendency (as my mother poetically put it) to hang onto every dollar so tightly that the eagle screamed.
“What’s wrong with being frugal?” asked my father.
“You’re not frugal,” said my mother. “You’re cheap.”
As soon as the ground was soft enough, my father spent his days off digging up the lawn and turning the soil. He bought compost and manure from a local farm (a real farm, not one in someone’s back yard). He borrowed books from the library with titles like GROW IT YOURSELF and SELF-SUFFICIENCY IN THE SUBURBS. All Spring he raked and hoed and planted. He put stakes in the ground to mark the rows of cucumbers and pumpkins, corn and tomatoes, beans and peas, and ran strings from one end to the other, tying rags along them to frighten the birds.
In all of this he had the help of his own clutch of farm laborers – me and my sister. We dutifully opened the packets and gently covered the seeds with earth and ripped the rags into strips and ran back and forth turning the sprinkler on and off. We were given the important job of weeding, and officially deputized to do the watering when my father was at work. My mother, of course, refused to take part. She sat in the sun porch, reading magazines and singing “Old MacDonald had a farm…” under her breath.
My father was unfazed. “You’ll be singing a different tune when harvest time rolls around.”
My mother turned a page. “Don’t count your turnips before they’re grown,” she advised.
Either my mother had prophetic talents the rest of us never suspected, or one of her friends had warned her about what would happen when the vegetables started to grow. My father and his laborers, however, were unaware that, unseen by us, a clever and deadly enemy was patiently waiting for the first green shoots to poke through the ground.
“I can’t believe it!” wailed my father, standing by the stake marked Lettuce. “The slugs have eaten every last one.”
The day before the baby lettuces were grown enough that even my sister and I could tell what they were. Today they were ravaged stumps.
“Didn’t I say I heard something in the garden last night?” asked my mother. “It was probably them chomping away in the dark.”
My father tried pellets. My father dug trenches. My father scattered sand and broken eggshells and ashes over the soil to make it hard for the slugs to move. He put plastic bottles around the seedlings like fortress walls. He made traps filled with beer and milk. But still they came.
“You’re becoming obsessive,” said my mother.
My father looked up from his latest acquisition from the library: KNOW YOUR SLUGS. “I’m not obsessed. I’m just not going to be beaten by a creature that doesn’t even have feet.”
And then, one moonless, rainy night we were roused from our beds by a heavy knocking on the front door. My sister and I shot out of our rooms the way you do when you’re a kid and you know that something unusual, exciting, and possibly horrific is about to take place.
My mother had also shot out of her room, pulling her robe around her and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. “Go back to bed!” she ordered.
We followed her down the stairs.
“Maybe some mad killer’s escaped from prison and the police have come to warn us,” whispered my sister.
“You are so melodramatic,” I hissed back. “It’s probably just Mrs Houlahan again.” Mrs Houlahan lived next door. The year before, when raccoons got into her attic, she’d arrived on our doorstep at three in the morning, convinced she was being burgled.
My mother, whose hearing improved in direct proportion to how much you didn’t want to be overheard said, “Don’t be ridiculous. Your father’s locked himself out of the house. Now go back to bed!” She opened the door.
It was the police – Officer Kellogg and Officer Schultz. Needless to say, with Officers Kellogg and Schultz was my father.
“Sorry to disturb you, Mam,” said Officer Schultz, “but we found this gentleman prowling around your backyard. He claims he lives here.”
My mother stared at my father in. My father was wearing his rain jacket, his fishing hat and his old galoshes. He was carrying a flashlight in one hand and a bucket of slugs in the other, You could see her thinking What’ll happen if I say “no”? Every light in the house blazing. Bags of new socks. Lunches at the diner.
“For Pete’s sake,” pleaded my father, “tell them who I am.”
“I’ve never seen this man before in my life,” said my mother.
My sister burst into tears.
As an example of one of those rare, natural phenomena – like a blue moon or a shower of miniature orange frogs – I found myself in conversation with Sonya Upjohn at the school bus stop one snowy winter morn. When I say that I was in conversation with Sonya Upjohn what I mean is that Sonya was talking and, because of the weather, I happened to be huddled more or less under the shelter with her and her friends - which made me (at least technically) part of the group. Although Sonya and her pals normally paid as much attention to me as the rest of the world pays to small, random particles of dust, and I have no memory of ever being spoken to by Sonya (unless you counted laughter), I nodded along with the others, smiling like a cheap doll.
Sonya Upjohn only lived around the corner from me, but she might as well have lived on another planet. Sonya was one of the most popular girls in my high school. I was not. I was one of those girls for whom February is all about groundhogs. Sonya was one of those girls for whom February is all about hearts and valentines.
Which is what the talk was all about as the snowflakes fell romantically around Sonya’s pretty head, making her look like an angel on a Christmas card (and my nose turned red and I lost all feeling in my toes). Not only had Sonya been asked by three different boys to go to the Valentine’s dance, but with days still to go till the Big Fourteen, the Upjohn mantel was already sagging under the weight of all the heart-shaped cards she’d received.
“I mean, my God, can you imagine being one of those poor losers who never gets a Valentine’s Day card or gets asked to the dance?” Sonya’s voice was high with horror, her lips drawn together as if she was about to blow bubbles.
From the sounds made by Sonya’s friends it seemed likely that there was only one poor girl on the bus stop that morning who could easily imagine going through life always restless and unhappy because, no matter how much else she achieved in her life (not even if she discovered a cure for cancer or brought about Permanent World Peace and ended poverty), no one ever sent her a Valentine or asked her to the Valentine’s dance.
“I mean,” Sonya shrieked on, “it must make you want to move to Bulgaria and grow potatoes.”
I was still smiling like a painted piece of plastic, pretending I was part of the group – the invisible part. But then they all suddenly looked over at me and it was obvious from the embarrassed, pitying expressions on their faces that they’d forgotten I was there. If they’d ever known.
Sonya started talking about what she was going to wear to the Valentine’s dance and, as if she and her friends were worked by remote control, they all turned their backs on me at the same time.
On that frosty morning, Bulgaria didn’t seem nearly far enough away.
The Valentine’s conversation haunted me all day long like a particularly irritating ghost. It sat with me in homeroom, moaning softly. It nearly got me concussed playing volleyball in gym. It distracted me so much in history that when Mr Streb asked what Manifest Destiny was I blurted out, “Being an Old Maid!”
As soon as I got home that afternoon I threw myself down on the sofa and burst into tears.
My mother (happy in the knowledge that she would get a card, a box of chocolates and a present for Valentine’s Day because she had already frog-marched my father into town to buy them) cha-chaed into the living room carrying a basket of laundry. She stopped short when she saw my limp form sprawled over the couch.
“Now what’s wrong?” asked my mother.
I didn’t usually confide in my mother, but I was in a weakened state from hours spent picturing my empty life with nothing to comfort me but a couple of cats and the Nobel Prize so I told her.
My mother said I was being ridiculous (which is what I knew she’d say, and was one of the reasons why I never liked to tell her anything).
“Good Lord!” said my mother. “You’re fourteen. You have your whole life ahead of you! You haven’t even started to bloom yet.”
“Maybe I’m never going to bloom!” I wailed. My grandmother had a wisteria that she planted twenty years before and it hadn’t seen a flower yet.
“Never’s a long time,” said my mother. “You’ll see. There’s someone for everyone. Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
Although this was another occurrence as rare as chickens with teeth, it turned out that on this occasion my mother was right. Two days later I got home from school to find an envelope addressed to me on my desk. There was no return address and I didn’t recognize the handwriting. It bore a cancelled stamp. I opened it warily. My mail was usually restricted to reminders from the library about overdue books.
It was a Valentine. It was simple but tasteful. Nothing gushy or over the top. Just a plain red heart with an arrow through it on the front, and inside the message Be My Valentine – signed, Your Secret Admirer.
“What was that letter you got today?” asked my mother over supper.
“Nothing,” I said, my eyes on my plate. “Just a reminder from the library.
The smart thing to do would have been to stick the card in my dresser and forget about it. But I didn’t do that. The image of Sonya and her friends suddenly realizing that I – a poor loser who’d be better off farming in Eastern Europe than going to high school on Long Island – was standing with them kept flashing in my mind. I wanted them to know that (unlike my mother) they’d been wrong about me. I had a Valentine. I had a secret admirer. I wasn’t going to have to dedicate my life to root vegetables after all.
But of course making them aware of all that wasn’t as easy as it might sound. I couldn’t just arrive at the bus stop, waving my card, “Yoohoo, Sonya, look what I got!” They’d think I’d sent it to myself.
As I saw it, the only way I could wipe those pitying looks off their faces was to go to the Valentine’s dance. With a boy. A boy who liked me but was too shy to show it. A boy who wouldn’t collapse into hysterical laughter if I asked him out.
It didn’t take long to narrow down the list of Possible Secret Admirers to one. Halliday Flock. Halliday was my lab partner in biology. He was smart, odd, about as cool as surgical stockings and so shy that whenever he had to speak in class he turned the same shade of red as canned tomato soup. He was also the only boy who spoke to me on a regular basis (mainly stuff like “Not like that”, “What are you doing?” and “Here, give it to me”, but we did once have a pretty interesting conversation about the Iroquois Confederacy). He not only spoke to me, he had been known to laugh at my jokes, which was more than most people did.
I’ve always felt a lot of sympathy for boys because, Leap Year, Sadie Hawkins Day and feminism notwithstanding, the burden of asking someone out is usually theirs. I’d rather carry a backpack full of bricks around for a month. I figured there was only way to do this humiliating task that made you as vulnerable as a baby bunny at a convention of hawks, and that was to do it. So, as we left class together the next day, I dropped my books on his feet and when he bent down to help me pick them up I said, “Halliday, do you want to go to the Valentine’s Day dance with me? Just answer yes or no.”
Halliday turned the color of several cans of tomato soup and said, “Yes.”
I suppose it would be nice if I could say that Halliday and I went to the dance, had a fantastic time, made Sonya and her friends eat their perfect little hearts out and fell madly in love. But, sadly, none of that would be true.
For openers, neither of us knew how to dance. If either (or, better still, both of us) had known how to dance, we would then have had to face the fact that I had a good four inches in height on Halliday, making slow dances difficult if not impossible. We stood together at the Wallflower side of the room, having to shout at each other to have any kind of conversation over the music and laughter of the others. I’m pretty sure that Sonya never saw us (and that, if she did, she had no idea who we were since I was wearing a dress for the first and last time in my high school career and Halliday was wearing a suit jacket that seemed to belong to someone else and had done something faintly horrifying to his hair).
And then we had a fight because we were both so bored and uncomfortable and would much rather have anywhere else shelling peas.
Halliday wanted to know why I’d had the stupid idea to come to the dance in the first place.
I screamed back that I wouldn’t have had it if he hadn’t sent me that card.
Halliday said, “What card?”
The moral of this story is: never trust my mother.
The good news is that once we realized there was no reason for us to be there, Halliday and I went to the diner on Main Street, had hamburgers and fries, and talked about the Mohawks for the rest of the night.
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 apositive 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 no 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.
When I was a kid, Christmas was my very favourite time of year. Magic. I loved the feeling of anticipation. I loved the decorations. I loved baking the cookies. I even loved shopping (this was in a gentler time, of course, long before anyone was killed by stampeding bargain hunters). I couldn't wait to get the box of old glass Christmas balls out of the attic. I spent hours setting up my train set and my cardboard village under the tree.
The first order of business was putting the lights up along the front of the house. Most of our neighbours put up enough lights to be seen from outer space, but ours was a simple, single string of red and green bulbs. My dad was the light putter-upper. My job was to hold the ladder. My mother's was to poke her head out the door every few minutes to shout, 'Be careful up there! Remember what happened to Jerry Kunzer. It was a miracle he wasn't killed.' Ten years before, Jerry Kunzer, who lived behind us, decided to take the decorated tree from its traditional place in one corner of the living room and put it on the roof in a moment of madness caused by drinking way too much of the Christmas sherry. Who knows why his addled mnd thought that was the thing to do. He was alone at the time (you have to assume that had Evelyn Kunzer been home she would have pointed out what a stupid idea it was and locked him in a closet till he sobered up) so there's no record of the thought process that lead a forty-year-old insurance salesman and a six-foot pine from inside the Kunzer's ranch house to its roof. Not that they were up there for long. In fact, and this is a detail my mother always ignored when she shouted her warnings to my father, they never got up there at all. When Evelyn Kunzer returned home she found Jerry, more or less in the tree, passed out at the foot of the ladder and a trail of tinsel and broken balls leading back to the house. The miracle wasn't that he hadn't killed himself (since he was on the ground when he fell), but that he had enough sense to put his jacket on so he didn't freeze to death.
After the lights were up, my dad would paint a snowman on the living room window with, strange though this may sound, some kind of opaque window cleaner. My job in this project was to paint in his carrot nose and coal lump eyes, his scarf and hat and the candy cane he carried in his snowman hand. The scene would be completed with bits of holly and falling snow. My mother's contribution was to provide the music. "I'm dreaming of a white Christmas," she'd declare as my father mixed the colours. "Frosty the Snowman..." she'd sing as the picture began to take shape. "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer..." she'd croon as she hung the wreath on the front door for the first time (it never stayed in place for more than an hour and by Christmas Eve was usually leaning against the milk box).
I don't ever remember having a family conversation that started with me saying: 'Mom? What does a snowman have to do with Christmas?' or 'Dad? Why don't you paint the Wise Men in the window? Do you think a snowman is more representative of the spirit of the season than kings bringing gifts to the Saviour of Mankind?' - and ended with my mother saying, 'You know, you're not funny' and my father admitting that he was a lot better at drawing blank, round shapes with cartoon features than chaps with beards.
But it never occurred to me to ask those questions. Not until years later, when I found myself on Oxford Street one Yuletide. I looked up at the lights strung across the road to mark the festive season. Oh, I thought, it's the Dove of Peace. But then I looked again. It wasn't the Dove of Peace at all. It was the Birds Eye logo. No, really. Birds Eye, I suppose, was sponsoring the lights that year and they'd put up their logo. The Dove of Peas. What, I wondered, does the Birds Eye logo have to do with the Baby Jesus? About as much as Frosty the Snowman, I answered myself.
After the house was all decked out for the holidays, we'd get started on the cookies. My father was the baker in the family (my mother being the woman for whom slice and bake cookie dough was invented). Every year we (and, across Long Island, all my aunts) made a giant batch of my grandmother's recipe for Christmas butter cookies. My dad did the mixing, rolling and most of the cutting, and I put on the sprinkles. If it had been left to my dad, all of our cookies would have been circles or stars. He liked them not only because they were straightforward and fuss-free, but also because they were compact and allowed you to get more cookies on each tray than the larger, more intricate shapes of the Santa, the angel, the teddy bear and the gingerbread man. My mother and I thought the circles and stars were boring. We'd had the same argument about what shapes to cut out every year for as long as I could remember.
"The others taste better," my mother would say.
"That's ridiculous," my father would snap back. "How can they taste better? They taste exactly the same. It's the same dough."
"Well, I don't care about that," my mother would counter. "They still taste different to me."
Which was when I would say, "No, Mom's right. Especially the Santa. The Santa tastes better than all the others."
My father was a patient man, but one year even his patience expired and he decided to settle the argument once and for all.
"Really?" he said. "We'll see about that."
My father marched off to his bedroom and came back with one of the dozens of unused handkerchiefs he'd gotten as Christmas presents over the years.
"We're going to do the blindfolded taste test," he announced.
The deal was that if my mother and I could tell the difference between a round cookie and Santa with his pack on his back when we couldn't see them, then forevermore my father would make equal trays of every shape. HOWEVER, if we couldn't tell the difference, Santa and the others would be put at the back of the kitchen drawer and never see another Christmas this side of Armageddon.
Because my father knew my mother and I could be devious, even though he was breaking off small pieces from each cookie we weren't allowed to touch them with our hands. I went first.
"You're sure you can't see?"
I could tell from his voice that he was checking under the bottom of the blindfold for gaps. I said I couldn't see a thing, which, amazingly enough, was true.
"Okay, here's piece one... and here's piece two."
I said piece one was a circle or a star.
"That's just luck," said my father. "You'll have to get at leastfour out of five."
I got five out of five. So did my mom.
My poor father couldn't believe it. "But it's impossible," he kept saying. "It doesn't make any sense."
He spent most of the night standing in the kitchen, nibbling on first a star or circle cookie and then a Santa or a snowman, trying to taste the subtle difference, while my mother and I watched Miracle on 34th Street on TV.
"Do you think we should tell him the truth?" I whispered.
I did say we were devious.
"Not yet." My mother took another Santa from the plate on the coffee table. "It's Christmas. Let him have his fun."
Merry Christmas! Seasons' Greetings! Happy Solstice!
When the sun shines and the days are long and hot, people bounce down the street wearing bright colours and happy smiles. They hum along to their iPods. They laugh gaily as they talk on their mobes. They swing their arms and bob their heads. They stop to pet a dog or call a cat or smell a rose. It's as if the whole world is in a really upbeat commercial - for soda or possibly crisps.
But the English summer has a very short life span. Soon the skies turn grey and the days are short and damp. People hunker down in their dark coats or huddle under their black umbrellas, scurrying along with their shoulders hunched and their eyes on the ground.
'It's the most depressing time of year,' said my friend, Q. 'All I want to do is crawl under the duvet and listen to sad songs. I almost feel as bad as I felt when Simon Mudbuilder broke my heart.'
I said I didn't think it was that bad. 'You don't burst into tears every time you see some bloke in a green hoody. And you can talk about more than the way Simon Mudbuilder mashed his bake potato and covered it in ketchup.'
'Okay, so, realistically, I probably don't feel that bad,' Q conceded. "That was a definite 30 on a misery scale of 1-10, and this is only an11. But it's still as much fun as walking through a bog in high heels and a bandage dress in a monsoon.'
I said I didn't think the autumn was either physically challenging or necessarily going to cripple you for life.
'Perhaps not,' said Q, 'but it is pretty gloomy and doomy. You can't deny that.'
I thought I could. I love this time of year. The trees all red and gold and glowing. The leaf storms. The bonfires. The squirrels scampering hither and thither, burying nuts. The crisp tang in the air. The pumpkin pies.
'But the fun's all over!' wailed Q. 'No more lying on the beach for hours. The only tan you can get in November comes from a tube. And no more wearing shorts and skimpy dresses. No more barbecues and late nights in the garden. Now the garden looks like a graveyard, it's dark at four o'clock and soon I'll be wearing big coats and all-weather boots - things with as much sex appeal as a washing machine.'
'You're being negative,' I chided. 'You have to look at all the positive things the autumn has to offer.'
'Oh, right,' grumbled Q. 'Swimming costumes at half price and squash.'
I said that though this was not the season for lying by the pool or charring hamburgers under an umbrella, the autumn is the time to learn a rewarding craft. Weaving. Crocheting. Quilting. Knitting. Knitwear is very popular as the nights close in and the frost falls over the Ford Fiestas.
'Um duh,' grumped Q. 'I'm not my grandmother. If I want a scarf or a pair of mittens, I'll buy it.'
'All right,' I said, 'so knitting's out as a substitute for lying on hot sand and self-basting. But you could curl up by the fire with a cup of cocoa and a good book.'
Q said she'd rather curl up in front of the telly with a bottle of soda and a bag of crisps.
'That's what happens at this time of year,' complained Q. 'Besides dressing like a major appliance, I actually start to look like one since I put on weight because there's nothing to do but eat. I might as well just lock myself in the kitchen until Spring.'
I suggested that we take the dog for a walk in the park. I reckoned the fresh air and exercise would cheer her up.
Q's dog is named Caribou. He's part Jack Russell and part some other sort of small, lunatic, frenetic terrier. He looks more like a stuffed toy than a very large deer.
Caribou does not share Q's dislike of autumn. He loves thundering through the piles of leaves. He loves leaping several feet into the air to catch leaves as they fall. He can't think of anything more enjoyable than chasing squirrels.
He chased a squirrel straight up a very tall tree. The squirrel leapt gracefully to the next tree, of course, but Caribou stayed where he was.
In case this is a question you've ever puzzled over, although the occasional insane terrier may make it up a tree through sheer frenzy, dogs are not really equipped for getting back down.
Q and I stood underneath, gazing through the leafy curtains of red and gold. We knew Caribou was up there because we could hear him barking, but all we could see of him was the end of his tail.
'So now what do we do?' Q wanted to know. 'Knit him a slide?'
When eventually Caribou had been rescued by a philosophical park keeper ('This happens all the time,' he informed us. 'It's tricky if it's a Labrador.'), Q and I resumed our walk.
'Look at that!' I gestured to the line of trees, curling beside the pathway like a Christmas ribbon. 'You have to admit it's beautiful. I feel as if we're strolling through an Impressionist painting.'
Q kicked at the ground, causing a golden cloud to scatter in front of us. 'I don't,' said Q. 'I feel like I'm walking through dead leaves.'
I love Halloween. Of all the festivals of the year, Halloween is my favourite. This isn't because I'm into horror, or in league with the devil or anything like that. I've never liked scary movies. In fact, I've only watched one horror film in my life. When I was twelve my Aunt L took my cousin and me to a matinee one summer afternoon. Since my Aunt L didn't believe popcorn or candy were suitable snacks for children we brought with us a bag of fruit. My Aunt was a very conventional, conservative and religious woman who made footstools out of old coffee cans in her spare time, so it may seem strange that the movie she took us to was a blood-curdling, spine-tingling, skin-crawling film so horrifying that when the lights came up I was sitting there, pale and breathing heavily, rigid with terror, with a peach squashed to pulp in my hand. I can still feel the juice dripping through my fingers. The memory of that afternoon never left me. Not only did I not eat peaches for the next twenty years, I swore I would never again watch anything that scared me so much I had nightmares for months and screamed whenever I passed a fruit stall. And I don't believe in the devil so it would be difficult to align myself with him.
Since I don't believe in the devil, I don't believe in 'witches" in black hats making spells to turn the milk sour. I know that Mrs Palin, who may very well be the next Vice President of the United States, does, apparently, believe in witches (and that they are out to get her), but I'm afraid this is another thing we'll have to agree to differ on. The concept of the witch trial has always struck me as a little illogical. The witch trial is one of those diabolically clever, damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't sort of set ups in which, if I'm correctly understanding how many of them worked, put a person in the position of proving a negative that, according to the tests that were concocted to do this, could only be proved by dying (for example, they dunked you in the ocean and you drowned, so you weren't a witch). You would think, as well, that if someone were working with Satan she would not only do something a little more spectacular than making a couple of young girls hysterical (for another example), but that she'd be able to defend herself a little better as well. Surely, if you have supernatural powers and the backing of the Devil, you're not actually going to sit in your kitchen waiting for the lynch mob to come banging on the door - you're going to turn yourself into a moth and scarper (or turn the mob into ants and step on them). When I think of something like the Salem Witch Trials (for yet another example), it strikes me as pretty ironic that at a time when the Europeans were unashamedly conducting their horrific genocidal assault on the native peoples of the Americas they thought that they themselves were under siege by malefic, supernatural forces. That when they looked for "evil" they looked elsewhere. So, so much for witches.
On the other hand, I have a lot of time for ghosts. What I like about Halloween (besides the costumes and the jack-o-lanterns scenting the house with the aroma of roasting pumpkin, the trick-or-treating and decorating the front window with bats and cobwebs and black cats) is the possibility that our world has more levels than most of us ever see. I find the idea that the memories of the past are as much a part of the present as the computer oddly comforting.
I know a lot of people who have had encounters with ghosts. A strange man who appears on the path to the house or at the end of the drive and then disappears. A girl in a blue dress at the top of the stairs. Footsteps on the garden path but no one there. Objects disappearing from where you know you put them, only to return weeks or even months later in exactly that spot. A friend of mine once woke up to find an old man (obviously, not someone she knew) standing at the foot of her bed. The old man was in his pyjamas (and I seem to think he was wearing a nightcap, but I have the feeling that I may be embellishing here). From the expression on his face it was clear that he was just as surprised to see her (presumably in his bedroom) as she was to see him. My friend might have thought that she was still asleep or seeing things, but for two things. The first was that, judging by where the old man stood against the bed, he was obviously standing on a floor that no longer existed. The second was that her cat was sitting beside her, all fluffed up and her eyes wide, staring at the old man and making that sound cats make when things aren't quite right.
Sadly, I myself have yet to see a ghost. Unless that woman who suddenly appeared on that dark, country road in Cornwall that time - who turned and stared at us as we drove past; and who was gone when I looked back half a second later - was a ghost. Though, of course, she could have been a witch.
PS. Just in case you're thinking that my dear and much loved Aunt L was in reality an evil-hearted sadist who got a kick out of torturing small children, not long ago I happened to be flicking through the channels as one does and there was the movie I'd seen with my cousin and my aunt so many years ago! I recognised it immediately. And you know what? It wasn't a horror film. It was, as far as I could tell in the one and a half seconds I stood there watching it, a low-budget remake of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
HAPPY HALLOWEEN !!!
The cats are spending their summer holiday with us. Although they do spend a lot of time lolling about, sleeping and eating (as you do when you're on holiday), Kevin and Rocky don't really recognise weekends as being on a different schedule from the rest of the week. Because of that, I was woken with a head butt, feet positioning themselves on my rib cage and a gentle paw on the mouth at the usual hour (not long enough after dawn to make you feel you've missed much of the morning). I kept my eyes half-closed as we went downstairs, holding on to the banister so that when I did trip over one of them I wouldn't actually break my neck. (The theory is that if you don't fully open your eyes you can go back to bed.) Kevin has to have his tablet before he eats. First you have to catch him, which is tricky since he has that same sixth sense about his medication that he has about going to the vet and can disappear while you're still thinking about how to proceed. Then you have to wrestle his mouth open. Then you have to jam the teeny tiny pill down his throat, all the while telling him what a good boy he is while he claws your thighs. By the time I'd done all that and scooped the kibble into their bowls while they wailed pitifully and circled round me, getting under my feet and causing me to knock over the bin, I was pretty wide awake.
Resigned to staying up, I decided to go round the corner for the paper. I opened the front door. The day before had been unusually sunny and warm, but today the air was dense and grey and a thick but oddly soundless rain was falling. I went back in for the umbrella.
Obviously, the blokes who run the shop don't own a cat because they weren't open yet.
Several people were huddled under the overhang with the patience for which the British used to be known throughout the world.
'Welcome back to Old Blighty,' said the plump woman with the natural tan. She'd just come back from the beaches of Cyprus.
The weather-bronzed chap in the bright shirt shuffled his feet. 'You can't beat the English summer,' he muttered. He'd just come back from the melting-sun plains of Africa.
'I wish we was still in LA,' said one of the two teenage girls (both of them also naturally tanned, their hair bleached out by sun and sea and wearing, rather optimistically I felt, shorts and sleeveless vests).
The other girl said she did, too.
In the fearsomely polite way for which the British also used to be known throughout the world (I being the only one with no tan either natural or unnatural and armed for the weather), they asked if I'd gone anywhere nice on my holiday.
I said yes.
'And where was that?' asked the woman who was probably still shaking the sand out of her shoes.
I said, 'Norfolk.'
'You mean like in Virginia?' asked the girl in the I Love L.A. t-shirt.
I smiled gamely. 'No,' I said. 'I mean like in England.'
The all exchanged one of those amused, that's-not-the-way-we-do-it smiles.
'What's there to do in Norfolk?' asked ILL's friend.
'I'll wager it wasn't a very long holiday,' said the chap who had watched the sun set on the Kalahari.
Everyone laughed.
'Longer than you'd think,' I said.
To begin with, when you have a car like mine, going round the block can take an hour. Going to Norfolk takes considerably more.
There were three of us going. That meant three sleeping bags, three mattresses, three rucksacks, three pairs of Wellies, two tents, the stove, the barbecue, a week's supply of food. All in a car that was meant to carry two very slender people (the British used to be famous for that, too) with the dog and a picnic hamper on the back seat. (The good news was that the wind-up torch has never worked and the other torch, the hum-dinger one I bought in case we broke down at night on the motorway, always goes off like a smoke alarm no matter which button you push, so they were both left at home.)
We put things in and took things out and rejigged everything for an hour or two but it began to look as though the only way we could get everything in was to leave one of us home. In the end we decided to put C in the back seat first, and then build up our cargo around her.
'You all right back there?' I called as the engine started.
'Except that I can't move and my knee's touching my chin, I'm fine,' said C.
'Don't worry,' said E. 'Even though, it's not going to take us more than three or four hours. And we'll have a pub lunch when we get there.'
C said she couldn't wait.
The car broke down the first time right after we stopped for tea. After the tea we decided that since it was getting late we'd all be dead from starvation if we didn't find a fine old country pub for lunch right then, so we headed off down a fine old country lane.
Almost magically, we broke down right at the entrance to a petrol station.
'See if they'll let you use their phone to ring the AA,' said E.
I said but I thought you brought your mobile (as we all know, I do not do mobile phones). He said he had, but he didn't have much credit on it and we should save it for an emergency.
The kid in the station wouldn't let me use their phone. The kid in the Little Chef next door would, but his boss wouldn't. The kid in the motel behind the Little Chef dialled the number for me.
It took an hour or so, but eventually the AA man got us going.
Everyone felt not just cheerful but relieved. The disaster that we'd all been dreading (funnily enough, this had happened before on long journeys) had come and gone. We were on our way. We'd be there in no time.
Within twenty minutes (having failed to fine anywhere still serving lunch) the emergency prophesised by E happened.
We broke down on the A11. Unlike the entrance to the petrol station, the A11 has no safe place to park your car while you wait for the AA. Assuming, of course, that the AA is coming.
The C and E sat way up on the bank, away from the frantic rush of lorries the length of a city block hurtling by, while I sat in the car (so I could hear more than traffic) and listened to the automated voice say 'Your call is important to us... You are in the high priority queue... Thank you for waiting....' Every time a bus or truck went by my little car shook and rattled. This is it, I thought, they're going to knock us over. 'Your call is important to us... You are in the high priority queue... Thank you for waiting....' The voice kept repeating, and all the while I stared out at the darkening sky. I was just wondering if the storm would actually be as bad as it looked it would be when a living person suddenly spoke. 'How can I help you today?' I squealed with joy. I told him how he could help me. We'd already broken down once... this was my number... this was our details... I was just at the part where I told him where we were, my mouth open to say mile marker number______, when the phone gave a delicate little beep and went dead.
'I told you it didn't have much credit,' said E.
Heads down as the rain started to fall, C and I began the long march back to the petrol station. At least my head was down. C said, 'A Triumph Spitfire just want by waving at us.'
We stopped and looked back. The Spitfire had pulled up behind our car. A couple were climbing out. Maybe they had a phone we could borrow. By the time we reached the Spitfire its driver was standing with E, the two of them looking down at the engine the way men do.
'Don't worry,' said his wife. 'If anyone can fix your car by the side of the road, it's D. That's what he does. Fixes Triumphs.'
Of course he does, I thought, I should have guessed that.
'So how long did it take you to get to Norfolk?' asked the woman who had spent her holiday sipping cool drinks and reading novels she didn't feel bad about spilling sunblock on.
'Eight hours.' I didn't mention that this was us going flat out, since we were afraid to stop again if we had a choice. By the time we reached the campgrounds the engine was overheating.
'Camping's nice, though,' said the bloke who'd camped not on a site with RVs and families playing badminton but where the lions and antelope roam. 'Relaxing.'
Did they think we were mad? We could've camped in the backyard for all that. I said that we weren't there just for the camping.
'Course not,' said I Love L.A. 'You were there for all the other stuff to do. Like..." She frowned, trying to think of what else there might be to do north of London.
'Beaches!' filled in her friend. 'Don't they have beaches up there? You know, if it wasn't raining you could go to the beach, right?'
'And museums,' said the woman. 'They must have museums.'
I said I reckoned they do.
'And a boardwalk,' chimed in the first girl. 'They must have rides and an arcade. That sort of thing.'
'Historic sites,' said the man in the shirt. 'Weren't the Romans up there?'
As far as I can tell, the Romans were everywhere.
'Actually,' I said. 'We went to learn how to build a cob house.'
I Love L.A. was eyeing some boys across the road, her friend was buffing her extraordinarily long silver nails on her shorts, the woman was looking at her watch and even the man in the shirt was glancing up the road, but this statement caught their attention.
'A what?'
'You mean like out of sweet corn?'
'Can you do that?'
'Why would you want to?'
I explained that the cob house is another old British tradition. Low-impact, made of natural materials and as friendly to the earth as a tree or a bumblebee. 'They use passive solar energy so they need little extra heat in the winter and they're naturally cool in the summer,' I further explained.
Everyone nodded, though it could have been because they were dozing off.
But the age-old sense of politeness ruled. 'I'm sorry,' said the woman, 'but I'm not quite getting this. Are you saying they're made out of corn cobs?'
'No.' I laughed, just in case this was an example of the legendary British sense of humour. 'They're made out of cob. It's a mixture of clay, sand and straw.' Even to me I sounded like a manual.
The girl whose nails looked like spikes frowned. 'Isn't thatmud?'
'More or less...'
'And how long's that meant to last in this weather?' wondered the chap who had slept in the bush. 'I should think you'd be better off living in a tent.'
'There are cob houses in this country at least six hundred years old,' said I.
"And that's what you did on your holiday?' A smile lit up the first girl's face like the California sun as she saw the bloke from the shop hurrying towards us. 'You built a mud house?'
'Part of one.''
It doesn't sound very exciting,' judged her friend. 'You know, it's not fun like going to Disneyland.'
Oddly enough (and not including the half-naked man who had to be hosed off in the garden because he fell in the bog) it was very exciting and a lot more fun than having your picture taken with Mickey Mouse.
I said you'd be surprised.
This is a cob house. This one looks like somewhere a hobbit would live, but many of them just look like your regular old country cottage made for people generally shorter than we are. This cob house is a one-room studio. It was designed and made by our teacher Kate Edwards of Edwards Eco Buildings. It's even more amazing on the inside.
The first time I saw Harley, she was stretched along the top of a sofa, looking disapproving. Her brothers and sisters (of which, in my memory, there seem to be about a hundred) were launching themselves off the furniture, scrabbling up the curtains and swinging themselves around chair legs the way kittens do, but Harley sat among them like a meditating Zen master in the middle of a riot. She was a cat of enormous dignity, even when a less serious sister was trying to grab her tail. Paws crossed, eyes half-closed, ears pricked, Harley lay there with an air not of tolerance but of graceful endurance. I am above this... she seemed to be saying. And this, too, shall pass... She opened her golden eyes and looked at me. I looked at her. Harley never implored, but Sally, her owner, did. "Please take one of the kittens," Sally begged as the other hundred kittens hurled themselves around us. "Please... please... please..."
I said that I didn't want a kitten. Absolutely I did not want a kitten. I needed a kitten like I needed a pink tutu - possibly less.
I pointed to Harley. "But if I was going to take a kitten," I said, "then that's the one I'd take."
Harley flicked her tail and threw her sister to the floor.
The next time I saw Harley I was on a train going into the city from Long Island. Seconds before the train pulled out of the station, Sally had come racing along the platform, a wicker basket only large enough to hold a picnic for one clutched against her. I was hanging out of a window. She thrust the basket into my hands as the whistle blew, waving good-bye. I sat down, the basket on my lap. There was no sound coming from inside. She must be asleep, I thought, and opened my book. Every five or ten minutes I'd lean my head to the box, but there was still no sound inside. No purring, no snoring, and no complaining. I had once tried to take a cat on a train journey in a box and that cat had not only made an unholy din that did nothing to make us friends among the other passengers, she'd eventually clawed her way out of the box and spent most of the trip on my lap. I began to fear that Harley was dead. I've killed her, I thought. What was I thinking of? She's suffocated in that tiny basket. When I got home, instead of shouting, "Look what I have! I have a surprise!" and pulling out a beautiful kitten with the coloring of a Halloween candy, I was going to pull out a limp length of fur like an old draught excluder. Look what I brought you - a dead cat! Very cautiously, I opened the basket and lifted the lid. Harley opened her eyes. "So you're all right, then?" I said. She twitched one ear. And went straight back to sleep.
I watched Harley walk through the door of our apartment as if it was the door she'd been waiting to walk through all her short life. It occurred to me then that I hadn't chosen her at all - she'd chosen me.
Harley settled right in, but the rest of us took longer. She was often grumpy, largely disapproving and had no tolerance for fools. In Harley's world there were two ways of doing things: her way and the way she didn't want them done. She sat where she wanted, even if someone else was already there. She peed down the plughole in the bathtub. She let you sleep with her. She didn't like loud noise or childish behaviour. When we played ball, she did the counting (one... two... three... THROW!) When we watched TV she demanded her share of salsa and chips. If Harley wanted something, she told you. If your sneezing annoyed her, she complained. If your hand was in the way so she couldn't stretch out on the keyboard of the computer the way she liked, she moved your hand. If you left a tomato or a blueberry muffin unguarded, she ate it. If you ventured out of your room at night when, as far as she was concerned, you weren't supposed to be up at all, she lay in wait to grab a passing foot or stalked you down the hall. And, after that first idyllic train ride, although it was possible to get her in her cat carrier, she howled the whole time like several very unhappy banshees, so that people would be peering into the case, trying to see what unearthly beast you had in there.
Harley pretty much came and went as she pleased - out the back door and over the fence into the gardens and up the fire escapes of Brooklyn to see her friends and have adventures. In one building we lived in, she would go to the top floor apartment every day, to eat tuna fish sandwiches and watch soap operas with the woman who lived there. In another she scaled the heights to pick fights with other cats. And often she couldn't get back down and someone would have to go knocking on doors and climbing through windows to retrieve her.
Harley died this July. Someone, trying to cheer us up, said that eighteen years was a long time for a cat. But, sadly, it's not a long time for a friend.
Harley Street Davidson
1990-2008
One Swell Cat
I have resisted getting a mobile phone for so long that it has almost become the most interesting thing about me.
'What's your mobe number?' someone will ask, pen poised.
And I will smile the smile of the person who has never had a cavity or lost a set of keys and say, 'Oh, I don't have one.'
Incredulous, my questioner will laugh nervously. 'Really? You don't have a mobe? What happened to it?'
Meaning, I assume, did I lose it? Is it on a train somewhere, travelling without me, occasionally playing the theme tune from The Rockford Files to no one? Did I misplace it? Will it be fifty years before someone discovers it under the basement stairs, listening to the last message it received (Hi, it's me... I'm on the bus...) and wondering what it really means? Or maybe it was stolen. (One of my friends had her phone stolen so many times that she always carried two with her, so she could have one nicked and then continue her conversation after the thief had galloped down the road.) Or maybe it fell out of a pocket while I was leaning over the canal to see if that flash of silver was an old can or a fish.
'Nothing happened to it,' I'll assure them. 'I've never had one."
Incredulity turns to astonishment bordering on outright disbelief. 'But that's impossible! How do you manage without a mobile phone?" They're so useful. They're so important. They're so necessary. "For heaven's sake! Even shepherds in the mountains of Spain have mobile phones!"
I can see that mobile phones are useful. And I can see that, especially if you're on a mountain in Spain with only sheep for company, they could be pretty important in an emergency. But I'm not so sure about necessary.
Most people can barely walk two feet without pulling out his or her phone. A bus ride even of only a few minutes is impossible without a conversation (that, yes, really does include the information that the caller is on a bus). No one seems able to nip into a shop for a container of milk without ringing someone to alert her to that fact. I'm in Tesco's... No, the other one... I should be home in ten minutes... A person will be riding her bicycle down a busy road, carrier bags hanging from the handlebars, and instead of giving a great deal of thought to getting through the traffic without ending up under a van, she is chatting away to her best friend about what J said when she told him she didn't want to see him any more. A person will be in the bank, engaged in a transaction that in Olden Times would have involved an exchange of hellos and information (I'd like to withdraw some money... You have to sign this slip... that sort of thing), but now instead of talking to the teller the customer is talking to someone named Sharon and telling her off for borrowing the boots with the rhinestones without asking.
'All right,' you say. 'But the other day I was meeting someone at the train station and if we hadn't had our phones we would never have found each other because even though I told her to meet me outside track 23 she got hungry and was waiting in McDonald's.'
But if she hadn't had a phone with her, she would have stayed where she was meant to be, not wandered off for a packet of chips. Indeed, people not only managed to have fairly full and interesting lives before the advent of the mobile phone, they also managed to meet in front of the cinema at five o'clock as they agreed without having to ring each other as soon as they got out of the tube to say, 'Where are you?' (to which the answer is usually a wave and the words, 'Over here!)
But then I started to rethink my position on mobile phones because of The Incident.
F and I couldn't decide where to have dinner, so we said we'd meet outside the train station at seven. That way we could go down the road to the Mexican place, or across the park to the Ethiopian restaurant. F, who lived near the station, said, 'Don't worry if you're late. I know what the trains are like.'
I sailed out of the station at five to seven. It was winter. It was dark. It was raining with a great deal of enthusiasm. I planted myself just inside the entrance, so only my feet and the front of me would get wet. I spent half an hour listening with no real curiosity to the phone conversations of those around me (I'm at the station... I had pasta for lunch... But I only need to borrow ten quid...). And then (because I also don't own a watch) I went inside to check the time. I went over in my mind my conversation with F that morning. Seven... train station... entrance... Don't worry if you're late... I slouched through the rain for a bit, the way you do, in case when she said 'in front of the entrance' she'd actually meant 'over by the newsagent's' or 'halfway down the road by the auto shop'. At eight, since I was already pretty wet, I did another tour of the area, looking up and down the road as though I expected to see F running over the roofs of cars under an umbrella. At eight thirty, about to go back into the station and get the first train home, I decided instead to walk down to the Mexican restaurant. I peered through the window, like an orphan in a storm. There was F. She was eating chips and salsa.
Even I could see that if I'd had a mobile phone (and if F had had one, which she didn't) I would have been able to ring her at seven-ten and find out that she'd gone straight to the restaurant we hadn't said we'd go to.
That was when I started to give some serious though to getting a mobile phone.
Another friend, C, had recently bought a super-duper model that was a radio, mp3 player, camera and phone all in one. It could play music, take pictures and film clips, and send pictures and messages fast as you could hit the buttons. State of the Art. Guaranteed to be nicked within a day and a half (or to fall in the canal).
'C,' I said as part of my research into buying a mobe. "How's your new phone?'
She said it was brilliant. It could do everything - take pictures, play music, show film clips... The only thing it couldn't do was make phone calls and send text messages.
As I already can't make phone calls or send text messages, I decided against the phone.
Because I've become a bit weary of reading about Amy Winehouse, I haven't been paying much attention to the news lately, but there was an item this week that did catch my attention. Apparently, a plane spotted a group of indigenous people in the Brazilian jungle who had never been made any contact with the modern world before. I first saw this item online, with a tiny picture of men shooting spears into the sky. To be honest, I don't know if this story was true or not. Rumour has it that there was a big piece in The Sun about it, but The Sun isn't a paper I would read if I was in a train crossing Siberia in a snowstorm, totally by myself, and there was nothing else to read, so I didn't see it. The paper I will read didn't have anything about it.
Nonetheless, this story made me think. If it's true, and these people had never seen a plane before - if they had no idea that there was more to the world than the life they'd been living in the jungle for thousands of years - what must they have thought? When the first European ships hove into view off the coasts of the Americas, quite a few people thought their ships must be floating islands. Which makes sense. Not many islands do float, of course, but it's not impossible. And they knew what an island is. So would these surprised hunters in the Brazilian jungle think the plane was some sort of very large bird? With people in it? Or would they have heard stories? Maybe they'd even seen a plane or two before, just never been seen by the plane. At least they had the good sense to shoot at it - and then to scarper - obviously knowing instinctively that whatever it was it wasn't good news (something that didn't occur to most of the indigenous of the Americas until it was way too late).
So here we have a people who have lived a 'primitive' but sustainable lifestyle probably for tens of thousands of years. They can take care of themselves. They feed and clothe themselves, they shelter themselves, they have their own medicines and ways of dealing with accident and illness. If they need something they make it. They've been doing extremely well, really, and require absolutely nothing from anybody else. And these people have now been 'spotted' by the 'civilised world' - a world in which most of us can't put up a shelf. We are almost totally dependent. Everything we have - our food, our clothes, our entertainment, our homes, our transport - we get from someone else.
I am the first to admit that though I'm really good at turning on lights (and turning them off - I do my bit), I have no idea how they work or why. If the planet had depended on me to give it lights and televisions and Iphones, we'd all still be sitting in a cave somewhere singing about the day's hunt while I tried to work out how to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. But I am not alone. The majority of us don't have a clue how anything works. If the power goes, we flap around looking for batteries for the torch and waiting for someone else to put the power back on. If water starts streaming down the light cord in the kitchen, we run screaming from the house and call a plumber. A challenge for most of us is what to do for an evening if the TV breaks.
I was once woken up very early on a Saturday morning by my sister-in-law, who must have been twenty at the time, because her mother had gone to work and although she'd figured out how to put two slices of bread in the toaster she didn't know how to boil an egg. How many people are there in our world who can't boil an egg? Or cook a chicken? If you can cook the chicken, would you know how to catch a chicken, kill, pluck and gut it if it was the only thing you had to eat? Or would you just sit there watching in run around all fluffed up and clucking, hoping it'll die of old age before you starve to death? Let's say that the chicken did have a timely heart attack. How would you start the fire if you didn't have any matches?
Those chaps in the jungle - though probably impressed that we can fly and talk to people who aren't there - would be astounded to discover how useless we are personally. So here's my thought question for the month. If these people aren't left alone by us (as one certainly hopes they will be), what will they make of fellow humans whose greatest contribution to their own survival is shopping? What on earth will they make of Amy Winehouse?
I just got back from a trip to New York. Where I stayed there is a very large colony of wild parrots. I know, you don't think of parrots when you think of New York. (Not out of a cage.) You think of pigeons. Or possibly sparrows. But these parrots are all over! Legend has it that a doctor and his wife let a pair loose (or possibly several pairs) and now there are hundreds of them. They're good sized parrots and of a greenish hue. If you close your eyes when they fly overhead you'd swear you were in the jungle (even though you're standing on a city street by the bagel shop). It's pretty cool, really. No one seems to know how they survive the New York winter (which does usually include snow and freezing temperatures, not conditions one associates with parrots) but they do. I think I can honestly say that you haven't really lived till you've seen twenty or so parrots hanging off the bird feeders of a house in Brooklyn. The world is really very interesting.
Usually when I go to look forward to going to my favourite Chinese restaurant. But my favourite Chinese restaurant has mysteriously closed. Disappointed, I spent a lot of time walking around the Lower East Side of Manhattan (mostly in the rain). I found a very excellent bookstore. Besides a great selection of books, it featured two dogs who were either playing a game of tug-of-war between the shelves or sitting on either side of anyone trying to eat something from the café (looking both expectant and hungry). I don't know if it's something about that section of Manhattan, but the nearby vegan shoe store features a lot of cats, not all of them what you'd call friendly.
Since I got back from New York, Rocky (otherwise known as Demon Kitty because although he looks very sweet he is really very evil) and Kevin (otherwise known as He Who Worries All the Time because that's what he does) have been staying with me - cats like to take a holiday, too.
Because they are only visiting, they're not allowed out. Kevin, who looks like he's always been disappointed and expects nothing more, doesn't mind that much, but Rocky does. Rocky is a trained killer. He doesn't want to be indoors, knocking a soft ball down the hallway. He wants to be outside, tasting blood.
Back at home, Rocky is the scourge of the frogs, birds, mice and even mutant rats of his neighbourhood. Rocky's mother often wakes up to the sound of panicking frogs trying to escape from her flat. She has more than once trod on dead rodents. There have been mornings when her living room looked like an abattoir. Sometimes she's afraid to leave her room. Where people like you and I hear the noises of the city - traffic, police sirens, people shouting because Arsenal just lost again - Rocky hears The Call of the Wild.
Rocky spends a lot of time sitting by the kitchen window, watching the birds and the mice. He calls it Cat TV. After the time I woke up to the sound of running water, I always tie up the tap so he can't accidentally turn it on in a moment of excitement when he thinks that if he scratches at the glass enough he'll be able to escape.
Sometimes Rocky likes to sit on top of the fridge for a better view of the garden. But sometimes he falls off. (So the other things I've learned is to take all magnets off the side of the fridge before he arrives and never to leave anything that might break in the sink.) Rocky is one of those cats who is lucky to have nine lives, because he's always falling off things like table tops and chairs (and refrigerators). And sometimes you'll see a bag moving frantically across the kitchen floor and have to help him out.
Kevin likes to sleep under the bathtub or on the keyboard of my computer in the day, and Rocky likes to sleep on the bed, but at night they both like to be awake. They chase each other through the house. When they get tired of that they try to wake me up. Rocky does this by digging his claws in my head. Or sitting on it. The other night I woke up pretty sharply when Kevin bit my finger.
Rocky also likes to do yoga. He's very good at lying flat on your back in deep relaxation. I have recently reinstated his yoga room privileges (taken away after the time he bit my toe and drew blood) because it's impossible to get into the oneness that is yoga when someone's wailing loudly and waving a foot through the crack in the door.
While Rocky watches Cat TV, Kevin watches Meerkat Manor. He loves it. No matter what he's doing, or where in the house he's doing it, he comes running as soon as the theme song comes on, and sits in front of the set, mesmerised, until it's over. I can't decide whether he has a thing for reality TV or if he thinks the telly is another window.
(Note to You: Those trying to find HERE'S WHAT I THINK
The Teenage Girl's Guide to Life, Love and Walking in Six-inch Platforms by Aunt-Know-It-All (aka Janet Bandry) it is here.
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THE DARK SIDE OF HOME EC
THE BIG BUNNY BLUES 