Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things

by Amy Dickinson

  Chapter Fourteen

  Real Housewives

  I had only ever raised one child, and I had done so by myself. I had raised Emily to understand me. We shared a culture underscored by my own family’s values and propped up and influenced by music, books, movies, and television. Bruno was raising his children in an approximation to the way he had been raised: cloistered and vaguely Amish but without the woodworking and pony carts. The family’s cultural isolation was such that when I arrived in the household, they had no radio, one channel of broadcast TV, and no cable. Until wireless came into the house (enabling us to at least look up answers to deep questions such as, “Who is Renée Zellweger?”), the family’s main cultural touchstones were a collection of movies on tape and DVD, including a few seasons of Law & Order and the entire Gilmore Girls series. One of their favorite movies was a slapstick Dominican film called Sanky Panky, which featured lots of characters hilariously pratfalling, mostly in Spanish. They would watch it as a family, crowded onto the couch, and howl with laughter.

  Bruno bought a radio so I could listen to the news and prepare for my monthly appearances on Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me! He also offered to get a satellite dish installed so I could watch television (we didn’t get cable that far out in the sticks). Aside from the unpleasant prospect of living in one of those beautiful Victorian homes in the countryside with a satellite receiver attached to the roof, I suggested a waiting period. The reason for my skepticism was because the previous Christmas (when Bruno and I had just started dating), I had given the family a DVD of A Christmas Story, Jean Shepherd’s caustic, nostalgic tale of his midwestern family’s fouled-up Christmas. Bruno and the girls watched the movie together and found it incomprehensible, mean-spirited, and unfunny. Before pouring 200 channels of television into this innocent family’s heads, I wanted to conduct a basic media survey. Evenings spent playing chess in front of the fireplace instead of watching sitcoms together might be the only nightly entertainment this family was prepared for.

  Bruno and the girls knew who Seinfeld was, but they couldn’t identify Frasier Crane in any iteration. They had never seen the Dick Van Dyke Show, The Andy Griffith Show, The Honeymooners, or, it seemed, any sitcom—classic or otherwise—aside from Friends in syndication, which ran on the one channel coming into the house. The family had never watched a national or a local newscast at home or watched election returns together. I worried that they had never been group-disappointed by the anticlimax of the ball dropping in Times Square during a New Year’s Rockin’ Eve.

  The family also had no knowledge of the long-running and classic television ads that littered our local landscape, with their earworm jingles—like the one for Sam Dell Dodge, or the ambulance-chasing law firm in Syracuse that you were supposed to call when you were in a car accident. They had never seen anyone get slimed on Nickelodeon. They didn’t seem to know that some people swallow live bugs or zip-line across alligator-infested ponds for TV fame. They thought Real Housewives were women who stayed home and took care of the house. Although they knew what the real world was, they had no familiarity with The Real World.

  After about a month, I tabulated my results and announced to Bruno that according to my data, unfortunately it was too late for these girls of ours. Throwing them into the vast and unfiltered television cesspool at this stage in their development would only ruin them and pickle their intellect forever. Not on my watch, mister.

  Instead, I brought in a DVD of Sense and Sensibility with Emma Thompson and three different versions of Pride and Prejudice. Bruno recognized Colin Firth only as the dad named “Lord Henry Dashwood” (get the sly Sense and Sensibility reference there?) in the Amanda Bynes movie What a Girl Wants. In fact, Bruno had a disturbing familiarity with the entire Amanda Bynes oeuvre, left over from his tenure as a single father taking his daughters to movies at the mall. He quoted from a scene in What a Girl Wants more than once, until I asked him to please never do that again.

  Soon enough, the girls cast me in the role they were most familiar with—that of Lorelai Gilmore, the quirky, fast-talking, noncooking single mother from the Gilmore Girls. True, they were onto something there, especially when it came to cooking. Each member of the family could whip up a delicious dinner for six in a half hour; when it was my turn, I spent the day food shopping and planning as if for a dinner party. I made massive, gooey, cheesy casseroles, fit for a Methodist potluck. Clare, a skilled and instinctive cook who relished pulling together holiday meals for forty, seemed especially flummoxed by my inability to get an entrée and two sides to appear at the same time. In the kitchen I suffer from a sort of mealtime Tourette’s, where the presence of a spatula brings on the swears. Eventually I was relegated to chopping and salad assembling. Occasionally I was permitted to produce a stew or soup, dishes I could prepare in advance and leave simmering on the stove.

  We ate dinner together every night, and the meal was preceded by the Catholic grace. I eventually learned the words to this prayer and joined in but declined to use the sign of the cross. For some reason, doing so felt like an affront to my Huguenot ancestors. Bruno liked to conduct current events seminars during dinner, as his own father had done, but these conversations were more like sermons. When he was finally spent and we had all stopped fake-yawning with the sheer torture of it all, the girls and I would talk about school, college applications, friends, and clothes. When we ran out of topics and things got quiet, I would pull out a vexing question I had received for my advice column and ask them how I should answer it.

  Parents don’t spend enough time asking their children questions—other than “How was school today?”—and listening to their answers. My work as an advice giver gave me a way in and fostered my growing relationship with these teens. Sharing tough questions sent in from readers provided great talking points for this thoughtful and diverse family group.

  Over the years, I had heard from scores of parents, middle-school teachers, school counselors, and teachers of English as a second language that my column was used as a teaching tool and as a way for people to discuss real-world issues. Couples frequently reported reading my column aloud to one another, and after reading the question, guessing about what my advice would be before reading the answer.

  At the dinner table I would open up my laptop and read a letter from a sixth grader wondering how to handle a tricky triangle with two frenemies. “So, Avila, what do you think I should say to her?” I’d ask, and she would dig deep and perhaps confess to a similar situation in her own life, before offering her advice. My hope was that this would help her to self-guide through her own tricky personal situations.

  But real life doesn’t always reveal itself as neatly as a question sent in to an advice columnist. I was about to be tested and challenged by this new family of mine. My own foolishness, hubris, and frailty would be exposed, and I would need to be forgiven.

  Chapter Fifteen

  All the Single Ladies

  After dinner, while we cleaned the kitchen and put the dishes away, my stepdaughters would sometimes pop in one of the few CDs we had kicking around. My taste in music zigzags between Haydn, the soundtrack for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Frank Sinatra, Patsy Cline, Nancy Wilson, and Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys. I winced through Celine Dion and Mariah Carey until—bam!—Beyoncé kicked in the door to our kitchen. We crowded around the kitchen table and watched the “Single Ladies” video on YouTube, stumbling through frequent buffering sessions that had all of us frozen in place. Naturally, all of the girls instantly absorbed the dance through their pores, while I watched in wonder and then occasionally attempted to join in. My dancing to Beyoncé was, I assume, like watching Laura Petrie try to skateboard. Were these girls laughing with me, or at me? I wasn’t sure.

  I don’t consider myself a particularly picky person. I have a fairly relaxed attitude toward housekeeping and other people’s habits, but the girls adjusted to my nonnegotiable pet peeves, namely the sounds generated by chewing and the clipping of nails. Als
o, I refuse to touch anyone else’s feet. Otherwise, they also quickly learned that I don’t share well. Don’t eat off my plate, don’t wear my sweater, don’t use my laptop, and if you want to slip on my boots to go out to get the mail, please ask first.

  In this family, possessions flowed between sisters. This was a vestige of Bruno’s upbringing in a family with thirteen children, where the brothers pulled their shared clothing out of a “community chest” at the top of the stairs. In the mornings when Bruno drove them to school in his pickup truck, the girls plugged hair dryers and curling irons into the truck’s cigarette lighter attachment and did their before-school primping as they shared the tiny mirror visor. They also shared (and sometimes bickered over) nail polish, soccer cleats, T-shirts, and—I assume—opinions about their new stepmother’s peccadillos.

  Watching the girls interact was a reminder of my own experience growing up in a tribe of sisters. The dynamic between adolescent sisters is one of the universe’s most beautiful and volatile chemical compounds. I felt loved and fiercely protected by my own sisters growing up, and yet I still remember being chased screaming through the house by one sister wielding a hairbrush like a machete while the other calmly threatened to call our mother at work to rat us both out. Jane always insisted that we all must get along. However, when she left the house, sometimes all hell broke loose. In my new household, I had to occasionally watch all hell break loose, knowing that I shouldn’t (and probably couldn’t) leap in to make peace. I asked my mother, “Remind me, how did you do it?”

  “Damned if I know,” she said.

  Integrating into my new family was challenging and exhausting. I had led a quiet life raising Emily. It was far from a perfect life, but because I had created it, I almost always knew where I stood. In contrast, my life in Bruno’s household during the early days felt like a continuous blind date at a Slovenian cocktail party. I was always exerting and on my best behavior, but I didn’t yet understand the family language. Getting to know one person intimately is challenging. Knowing a household of individuals thoroughly seemed impossible.

  At the end of my workday, I would drive the short distance from my house/office, stop by Jane’s, and spend time with her as the dusk descended over her quiet house. My aunts Millie and Jean were usually with her when I arrived. I would visit with them and try to cook a little something that she might eat, and then I would gingerly say good night when her neighbor Deborah arrived to help get her to bed. I was entering a period of deep sadness over my mother’s declining health, which I didn’t know how to handle. After leaving her, I would drive to Pemberley, sit in the car in the driveway, and steel myself to have a second dinner with my new family.

  My stepdaughters all kindly embraced my close relationship with my mother and asked about her during those periods when they realized that I was almost continuously worried about her. Michaela seemed especially interested in my mother, and her thoughtful curiosity about Jane was a kindness and a relief to me. Michaela was applying to colleges, and within a year she would leave the household; she seemed to be working extra hard to get to know me before her exit.

  Jane thought they were all lovely; she engaged them by occasionally asking great questions and by watching and listening, but otherwise never expressed any opinion about them. I tried to push my stepdaughters toward my own family of sisters, aunts, and cousins, but my clan’s politeness toward them did not feel like much of an embrace but more like they were waiting to see how things turned out before committing to new family members. (In fairness, they were dealing with their own busy families and were involved in Jane’s care, just as I was.) It was as if my two families were running on parallel tracks, with me at the median. My new daughters were already part of a huge clan with almost a hundred first cousins. My far smaller family added another grandmother, two great-aunts, two aunts and uncles, and a dozen new cousins (most living locally) to the mix.

  On our first Thanksgiving Day together, we attended three turkey dinners: first at the Freeville United Methodist Church feast, then at my cousin Nancy’s house on Main Street, and then at Bruno’s mother’s house at Maryhill Farm. The night before, I had lain awake, trying to map out our movements to make sure that everyone would be seen and satisfied, timing out the baking of the casseroles and pies, and worrying about whether my stepchildren would like my own family enough to want to keep me in theirs.

  I entered a period of frequent travel; my first book came out two months after our wedding, and I left town frequently for readings and other public appearances. Occasionally leaving the household for short periods of time was a blessing for this stepparent at the beginning of blending a family together—everybody let out their breath, relaxed, and regrouped. When I would return from these trips of three or four days, I sometimes wondered if the girls even realized I was gone; in my absence they would simply slip back into the pattern of many years that they had already established, dipping back into their own story of a single dad and his beautiful daughters, drying their hair on the way in to school.

  Three months after moving into the household, I traveled to Chicago to visit my office at the Trib and to attend my monthly taping of the radio show. I was sitting on the couch in my apartment in Chicago, congratulating myself after the show (“I so funny! I so smart!”), when Bruno called. He told me he had some news. “Sure, lay it on me. I’m already sitting down,” I told him.

  “It’s about Angela,” he said. “She’s pregnant.”

  I think of myself as someone who is resilient and flexible. I see myself as someone who rises to personal challenges. In truth, I am frequently none of these things. I was shocked by my reaction to this news, which I can only describe as free-floating, crippling, dark anxiety. I can’t do this, I thought. And then I said it out loud a few times, to Bruno and to others.

  Bruno and I tried to crowbar details out of Angela, but she was silent and frustratingly resistant to our efforts. Mainly, she acted like the eighteen-year-old person she was. I also acted like an eighteen-year-old, like a petulant teenager who’d had something snatched from her. I could not think of one thing more challenging than trying to fast-track into this family’s life, until I was faced with the prospect of adding a baby to it.

  This feeling went on for months. I went with Angela to a couple of prenatal visits, flipping the pages of What to Expect When You’re Expecting in the doctor’s waiting room. After her appointments, she would ride quietly in the car on the way home. Eventually, Angela engaged a couple of her girlfriends to go with her instead, and I kept some distance. There were no “what can we expect, now that you’re expecting” discussions at the dinner table, and no plans emerged. When asked how she was feeling, Angela would only say that she was tired. Her other thoughts and feelings seemed quietly submerged. I told family members about the news. “How is she doing?” my mother asked. I told her she seemed well. “How are you doing?” she asked. “Me? I don’t think I’m doing very well.”

  Bruno adjusted to this event the way he seems to adjust to everything: very quickly and with little worry or angst. This is someone who grew up with twelve siblings. He is authentically a “the more the merrier” kind of guy. Bruno often cheerfully repeated a phrase left over from his own crowded childhood: “That’s life in a herd!” But I wasn’t equipped to live in a herd. Tearfully I recalled our courting days, driving around the countryside in the snow, unaware of how challenging the journey might be, and innocent of the complications lying in wait around the next bend.

  But also, Bruno had never given birth and raised a baby on his own. I had done this, and I was filled with dread and worry. I worried about the impact of this new child on our very young marriage. I fretted about the prospect of trying to raise a baby as we were also trying to raise its young mother and her sisters. I worried about trying to mentor a young mom, when I didn’t know her very well, and barely had a handle on my own parenting. I fretted about cribs, onesies, diapers, and baby seats. My thoughts seemed to automatically settle on
ly on the endless challenges of having a baby on board as I anxiously ruminated about every possible delicate complication of adding another child to our crowded household. At one point, when I stated point-blank that I wasn’t ready for this, Bruno reminded me that I didn’t have to be ready. I wasn’t having a baby; Angela was, and ready or not, this was happening.

  Chapter Sixteen

  What the Dog Did

  The undeniable reality of having a baby on the way is that—regardless of your own level of preparedness—that baby comes. I was hoping the gestation of my anxiety and negativity would be that of a chipmunk (one month), versus a giraffe (fifteen months), but it turned out to be very human-scaled.

  In fact, my worries seemed to grow instead of fade as the months passed and we in the household waited for our May birthday.

  Bruno’s “the more the merrier” ethic weighed me down. I wanted for the “more” to genuinely be merrier, but often it was not. Mainly, “more” just felt like more—more people, more complications, more questions without any resolution, more failed attempts at connection, and more challenges I was unable to meet.

  The turning point came courtesy of our dog. Calvin, being young, dumb, and an energetic runaway, tangled with a car down the road, and his leg was badly broken. Michaela, who was at that time dreaming of becoming a doctor, took charge of his care. The dog returned home after surgery hopped up on painkillers, with a massive stitched wound across his hind leg and his head encased in a plastic cone, which he removed whenever he felt like it. The instructions were to take him out several times a day, holding up his midsection in a sling so he wouldn’t put any of his eighty-five-pound weight on his injured back leg. I took Calvin out when the kids were at school, and otherwise we all bickered over whose turn it was.