by Cara Mentzel
Instead of holding back tears, I was suddenly holding back laughter. I was a lunatic, ready to sob and still cackle at the top of my lungs. I sat back down and put my hand over my mouth until I was certain I’d swallowed my laughter. Arrested? It was laughable. Hyperbole. It couldn’t really be happening. Not to me.
Eventually the officer “processed me” and reality couldn’t have been clearer. I didn’t know what “processing” meant exactly, but I quickly learned. I was checked for bruises—I didn’t have any—fingerprinted, and photographed. “Don’t smile,” Officer Yoga said before taking the picture. Really? He must be the life of every party.
When I was allowed to make a phone call, I called Dee, who—this time—literally bailed me out. I remember nothing of the conversation. By that point I couldn’t see straight. Even my thoughts moved in crooked lines. My head was splitting. And all I wanted was to be home with my boys, who, to no one’s surprise but Jon’s, ended up sick for the whole of winter break.
In addition to my bail, Dee paid for a high-powered attorney, the same one the Broncos hired to handle their domestic disputes. Hiring him was like hitting a fly with a frying pan, but I couldn’t afford to accept even a deferred sentence. There’s a tiny box on the application to school districts that asks if you’ve ever accepted a deferred sentence. If I checked the box, I’d never be a teacher. My record needed to be expunged, completely. And so, the frying pan. Dee saved my ass, again.
Having to enroll in anger-management class pissed me off. It was a small price to pay for a clean record and a career as a schoolteacher, but it was a waste of time, time I didn’t have. I drove to some seedy building off the interstate surrounded by fast-food restaurants and gas stations. The designated room was filled with about twelve people. A few high school girls who had been in one too many catfights. A couple of drunks who got out of hand at the bar. A guy with meth teeth. A couple of “too cool for school” college-aged jocks. The teacher, a heavyset man with a full, dark beard and an irritating boisterous demeanor. And me. Me.
I tried to make the most of the class and think of something other than the circumstances that had put me there. I figured if I was going to be there, I might as well try to learn something. We could all use a little help managing our anger, I acknowledged. But the class was no place for my optimism. The highlight of the experience was the thirty-minute break midway through, just after we’d learned how to breathe deeply and count to ten. I decided to embrace the part of court-ordered anger-management pupil, so I picked up some Burger King, bummed a cigarette off one of the catfight girls, sat on the hood of my Subaru, and watched the busy highway.
The debris from those awful months lasted years; it still shows up sometimes. Occasionally, I wish I’d asked to keep a copy of my mug shot before they closed my file. I could have made coasters or calendars with the image—better yet, thank-you cards. It seemed there would always be something I could thank Dee for.
I couldn’t stay in family housing once I’d finished my full-time studies. I’d been searching for a job and rental I could afford. I was pretty discouraged by my options. Then Dee called.
“I just got off the phone with Burt,” she said, referring to her business manager. “I want to buy you a house.” Dee fascinated me sometimes. She’d only recently insulted me for not having cable TV.
“You’ve never seen Six Feet Under?” she asked one day.
“I can’t afford HBO, Dee,” I answered, a little embarrassed.
“It’s only like fifty dollars a month or something.”
“Yeah, I know. I can’t afford that. Besides, I don’t have a lot of time for TV right now.”
And yet, there we were on the phone again, not three months later, and it was clear to me that she definitely understood the extent of my financial struggles. I didn’t know what to say to her.
“Dee, I can’t let you buy me a house. I told you, I can’t be a charity case. And I already am. You’ve done too much.”
“I get that, Cara. I do. But you’re not a charity case. I’m getting paid a lot to sing for a couple of hours at a bat mitzvah. I want to put the money in a Cara Fund,” she said.
“A Cara Fund sounds a whole lot like charity.”
“I guess, but that’s not how I mean it. I mean that it’ll only take me a couple of hours to make sure you and the boys are comfortable for the foreseeable future. It’s not like I’m buying you a mansion or something, just a comfy little house.”
I thought about the lowly thirty thousand dollars I’d probably make that year, before taxes and only if I found a teaching job.
“I guess they’re paying you more than you used to make to sing at bat mitzvahs,” I joked.
“Yeah, you have no idea. It’s crazy. But look: I want the boys to have stability and a yard. I want them to have a home.”
I started to cry.
“I want that too, more than anything,” I told her. I covered my eyes and held my face in my hand.
“Then let’s do this: I’ll buy a house there as an investment, you’ll calculate how much you can afford each month—I don’t care how much it is—and then you can pay me rent. Does that feel better?”
“Yeah, it kinda does. But I know myself, I’ll constantly be wondering if it’s okay to buy this or that. I’ll feel like I have to justify every purchase.”
“You don’t have to do that. I trust you.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But I’ll worry about it anyway. And no matter what you say, taking your money gives you a voice in my decision-making and that makes me uncomfortable. You don’t always like my decisions.”
“Well, whatever. We’ll figure that out later. I can’t bear seeing you in a shithole.” I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I detected some impatience in her voice, and I felt bad. She was excited about her plan, and I’d put a negative spin on it. And that must have been hard on Dee. I imagined that if you’re going to buy someone a house, you’d like it to make them happy. So I changed my tone to match her excitement.
“It would be nice to have a bedroom door that locks,” I offered.
“I bet it would!”
“That’s not what I mean,” I answered, offended that she’d think I’d hide a lover in my room while the boys were home. “I don’t do that when the boys are with me! The lock is for time-outs,” I continued, “my time-outs. You know, like when one of the boys takes scissors to my ponytail when I’m squatted down in front of the dryer—and yeah, that’s happened. Sometimes I need a place to escape so I don’t scream or throw something.”
“Well, that’s that, then. You need a home,” she said, “a home with locks.”
“I know. And you couldn’t be more generous. I’ll start looking.”
“Make sure it has a yard,” she added. “A good school. And stop crying. I want to do this.”
“I love you. I love that you want to do this.”
“Love you too. Keep me posted,” she finished.
I found a home in a town called Louisville, just east of Boulder and one of the top ten places to raise a family in the country. It was a good investment for Dee. It was a four-bedroom tri-level with a fenced-in backyard, on a corner lot. The neighborhood elementary school and local park were only a couple of blocks away. The only downside was the fake front lawn. When the pine needles fell from the evergreens it was easier to suck them up with a Shop-Vac than rake them. This made for a couple of embarrassing fall mornings with my neighbors.
Two weeks before the 2005–06 school year began, I found a job teaching third grade in Boulder. I’d have thirty students in my class that year. I was as overwhelmed as I was ecstatic. As inexperienced as I was determined. On the first day I locked us all out of the building by accident. A few days later at recess an untimely wind blew my skirt up to my waist. “Maybe you should get some skorts,” one of my students suggested. “They’re on sale at Target.” And a few weeks later, I made yet another mistake.
I had an “open classroom.” It looked like an unfinis
hed rectangle with an eight-foot-wide opening in one of the walls. Through the opening, observers, parents, other teachers, other children, and administrators could watch everything my students and I did. They were afforded a good look at my blackboard and me, but only the backs—the bedhead, braids, and ponytails—of my third-grade boys and girls.
I was in the middle of a math lesson. We had deviated slightly from our unit on money to learn about the origin of the word “cent.” I had just posed the question, “How many pennies in a dollar?” when three adults approached the entrance to the classroom. I recognized the first gentleman as the superintendent of our district, the woman next to him as my principal, and the last woman, whom I didn’t recognize, I later learned was a board member in our district. I’m pretty sure my stomach was trying to climb out of my throat. Without warning, I was being watched by my boss, my boss’s boss, and my boss’s boss’s boss. I was a bug under a child’s magnifying glass. I didn’t know if I was being examined or if I was about to get burned.
Lots of students had their hands raised to tell me that there are one hundred pennies in a dollar, but I called on the one student who liked to raise her hand even when she didn’t know the answer.
“Alana, how many pennies in a dollar?”
“Uh … uh…” she started.
I grabbed a plastic penny, set it on her desk, and reframed the question.
“How many of these make up a dollar?”
She was a sweet girl who took her sweet time and by the absent look in her black eyes, I suspected we were a long way from an epiphany. Nonetheless, I knew that good teachers resist the urge to cut off students’ thinking. Ample “wait time” is key to good instruction. So I waited as long as I could bear and then tried to move things along without making Alana feel bad.
“How ’bout asking one of your friends for help? Your neighbor Zach, maybe. It looks like he would love to help.”
Zach sat there with his hand stretched high in the air and his butt like a bouncy kickball unable to stay seated. Still, Alana didn’t want give in.
In the time she took to ponder the answer, my sons cleaned their rooms, my mother finished leaving me a voice mail, and teacher pay doubled in the United States.
“Zach, help a girl out,” I said, finally caving.
“One hundred. There are one hundred pennies in a dollar,” he answered correctly.
“That’s right, Zach. There are one hundred pennies in a dollar, or one hundred cents. One hundred. That’s what cent means,” I concluded.
I would have loved to discuss a century or a centimeter, but I didn’t get the chance. By the time I had another opportunity to subtly check on my visitors, they had disappeared. I let out a big sigh and turned back to face the board. I froze. Smack-dab in the middle of my blackboard, in large letters that could only have been formed by the most careful of elementary school teachers, was the word “penis.”
Gulp.
A little later in the day I was hustling down the hall to the front office on an errand, and still shaking my head about my phallic faux pas, when I spotted the superintendent in front of the cafeteria. I had just determined there was no escape route when he approached me and said, “I saw your interview in The Denver Post this morning. You must have been very happy when your sister won the Tony.”
I’d forgotten all about the interview and it took me a few awkward seconds to remember as he stared at me, waiting for my reply. The national tour of Wicked had arrived in Denver that week. Dee wasn’t a part of the production, but days before my fateful math lesson, a reporter had called me to get a quote for an article he was working on about the show. I obliged.
“I was. I am,” I stammered a little. I couldn’t hear my own voice. All I could hear was “penis, penis, penis, penis” inside my head. “It was one of the best days of my life,” I added and hoped he couldn’t see through the huge superficial smile that disguised my relief.
The superintendent and I parted ways and I felt lucky. Dee could rescue me without even knowing it, without even being there. And thank God. As I walked into the front office I heard a little Bing Crosby playing in my head and I thought, I guess sometimes clouds really do rain penis from heaven.
Lesson 11
HOW TO MAKE HELLO DOLLIES
A few months into the school year, my grandma died. I loved my grandma.
Sylvia Mentzel didn’t fit the grandma stereotype. She wasn’t the gentle, petite woman with a falsetto voice full of princesses, parties, and lollipops. She wasn’t fond of spoiling or doting. She was tough, tall, and big boned, and her voice was loud and nasal, with more attitude and New York accent than affection. Her feet were a size eleven, but that never stopped her from putting one of them in her mouth. She could be abrupt and insulting and had bad habits of eavesdropping and judging people harshly. She was more Bea Arthur than Betty White. She had almost superhuman hearing, but could say, “What?” louder and more frequently than most. And sometimes she shared things I wished she hadn’t, while at other times she didn’t share things I wished she had.
Grandma had been a consistent part of our childhood. Dee and I spent school holidays at her eighth-floor apartment in the Banyon building in Pembroke Pines, Florida, back when Grandpa was still alive. It was in their den that Dee and I watched As the World Turns by day and Pat Sajak on Wheel of Fortune by night. It was there that we channel-surfed, punching the single row of buttons on a brown cable remote the size of a thin-mint box. It was there that we read our books and played Spit. There that Grandma brought us sandwiches for lunch and made us egg creams with U-Bet chocolate syrup. There that Dee and I slept together on the sleeper sofa, where she repeatedly insisted I had the softer skin. There that, left to our own devices on New Year’s Eve, we snuck Manischewitz out of the fridge and shared a glass—rebels. And it was there, on the wall over the den couch, that she hung framed photos of family generations. The old-fashioned scalloped edges and blurred black-and-white photos of her parents, stunning photos of her and my grandpa in their youth, a series of annual picture-day photos for each of her four grandchildren, Andrew, Evan, Idina, and Cara—every lost tooth, new tooth, pimple, and hellish haircut memorialized on her wall for visitors to admire.
I had a few favorites. There was a pair of pictures, junior high–age Dee with teal eyeliner and third-grade Cara with an oversized pair of front teeth, both sporting matching checkered blouses with ruffled collars. And there was an eleven-by-fourteen-inch photo of my sister in an elaborate gold-leaf frame. She was probably five years old and posed preschooler-style with her hands folded over an open picture book, her silky pigtails accentuating the corners of her smile. When I thought of that den and those pictures, I knew there was more to Grandma than her prickly exterior.
Grandma would sit on a lounge chair out at the pool in her retirement complex and watch Dee and I play in the chlorine. We did handstands and counted to see how long we could keep our legs up in the air. Sometimes we stood in the water and stretched our legs apart as far as we could, while the other dived underwater and tried to swim through the triangular tunnel without touching. We also played lifeguard. “Help! Help!” I’d holler and Dee would jump in, pull one arm across my chest and wedge it under my armpits, then dig the other arm into the water to help her swim back to the pool’s edge. Grandma watched and talked to her neighbors; “Those are my granddaughters. They’re in town from New York,” she’d say.
Dee and I used to give Grandma manicures. One time when Dee was around seventeen years old and I was fourteen, she painted Grandma’s nails while I styled Grandma’s hair—a daring proposition for Grandma in the late 1980s. I gave her a side part and used a curling brush and a hair dryer to feather her bangs across her forehead. I teased the hair by her temples out and back a bit for added volume, then I placed my hand over her eyes and sprayed one too many squirts of Stiff Stuff hair spray around her head to keep each strand in place.
An hour or so later, Grandma, Dee, and I were in the elevator with ou
r towels heading down to the pool when in walked two silver-haired ladies, friends of Grandma’s. After a brief greeting, Grandma motioned to her hair and proudly said, “Look what a great blow job my granddaughter gave me!” To which I spat a laugh at their distressed faces and slightly peed in my bathing suit. At least sixty years spanned their age and ours, but in silent milliseconds we came to a collective understanding about the meaning of “blow job.” Dee and I locked eyes for the remainder of the elevator ride, as if that were the key to containing more laughter. When the elevator door slid open, we smiled stiffly and ran out to the pool. For the first time, I jumped in without first feeling the temperature with my toes.
When I started attending the University of Colorado at Boulder and the regular trips to Florida ended, I reached out to Grandma by phone. Sometimes we connected through her recipes. Her cooking represented heart and heritage to me. The family favorite was Hello Dollies, and the recipe was like a highly sought-after family heirloom. This is one of the few baked desserts that is better out of the freezer than the oven, and Grandma always kept plenty of batches in the kitchen for when her grandkids were around. She sent me the recipe, along with a handful of others, handwritten in her perfect script on yellow legal paper. Grandma was fluent in graham cracker, sweetened condensed milk, chocolate, coconut, and walnuts, all substitutes for the affection that eluded her.
We also connected through my writing. I had started writing in the quiet, nesting time of pregnancy with Avery and had since enjoyed journaling about my experiences as a mother. The first piece I wrote, “The Masterpiece,” was anything but. The title referred to my unborn child and not my prose. To my surprise, a New Agey magazine, The Tide, wanted to publish the piece. The Tide was a local publication riddled with advertisements for massage therapists, hypnotists, herbalists, and, my favorite, an over-the-top horoscope section that I perused weekly even though I gave it as little credence as a tabloid. But I wasn’t picky. I was happy—shocked, really—that they liked what I wrote.