Charlie was pretty quick to pick up the tone of the event. Having rejected the seat in my shopping cart designed for children in favor of the deep basket section of the cart, he stood, as if at the prow of the ship, facing out to survey the ocean of merchandise before him. Sometimes he’d reel in a string of Christmas lights or grab a stuffed animal by the tail. In the shoe department he hauled in a whole clump of tangled together fuzzy bedroom slippers. His diaper had come undone and was hanging down one pant leg; he had appropriated a hat, and he was waving to people as if he were running for office. I had never seen the particular crazed look that appeared on his face when, after I let him down from the cart for a moment, he clutched a bag of sponges and began to spin in circles, singing “Beat It.” Even after I picked him up and was walking briskly down the aisle with my son under my arm like a rolled-up newspaper, to regain my cart, he still kept reaching out hopefully for kitchen spatulas and panty hose. And of course I know where he acquired the tendency. As I loaded my bags into the trunk of our car, I couldn’t even remember, anymore, what it was I’d bought.
The morning after our excursion to the going-out-of-business sale I spread my purchases out on the bed to show Steve. The crew socks were terrific, he said, but they were women’s socks. The top of the blender was great, and so was the bottom. They did not, unfortunately, go together. Boxer shorts, when taken out of the package, turned out to be the kind of underwear that certain very corny comedians are discovered to wear when their pants fall down on stage. Steve informed me that he does not wear this type of shorts, but if he ever decides to join the circus he’s all set, with nine pair. By the time I brought out the car seat covers we were both expecting the worst. The covers were intended, of course, for bucket seats. But who knows, someday we may buy a car like that.
Though the store had announced a policy of Positively No Returns or Exchanges (and did not seem at all touched to hear of what a devoted longtime customer I had been), a few days later I was able, after making the thirty-mile trip once more, to replace my two half-blenders with a fancy reel for Steve’s fishing rod. When I got home, he looked at it with interest and said he has been meaning to learn how to fly cast, and maybe in a few years he’d get the hang of it.
This morning Steve stopped at our local clothing store—just for a minute—and bought a complete wardrobe of underwear. He said he would’ve looked for a sale, but he didn’t think we could afford one.
The ice show was in town. Not in our town, of course (we had a circus with a couple of performing dogs one time, and that’s been about it), but in the nearest big city, a hundred miles south of where we live. We thought we’d take the children.
Steve took Audrey to see this particular ice show several years ago, a couple of weeks before the birth of Charlie. Audrey was four then. Tickets cost a lot, but she’d never seen an extravaganza like that—all that glitter, those feathers, the sparkling lights, the twirling skaters in their ruffled skirts—and we knew she’d love it.
Audrey and Steve got home late that evening, after the long drive home, but she wouldn’t go to bed until we’d studied every page of her souvenir program. She explained to me—with only the faintest wistfulness—that some kids got these special flashlights, with Mickey Mouse ears, and when the house lights were turned out for the show to begin, all those kids turned their flashlights on and spun them around. But if you got the light, you didn’t get the program, and the program was better.
We read and reread that souvenir program all year. First, just Audrey and me; then three of us, Audrey with one arm wrapped around her newborn baby brother; and then (when he got older, and wilder) we did our reading during his naps, when we could be sure he wouldn’t lunge for the pages and rip them (as he frequently did when we were reading). By the time the next February rolled around, I knew the names of all the stars of the ice show, and how old they were the first time they put on skates. I could tell you the name of the choreographer, the assistant choreographer, and the lighting designer.
So when commercials started appearing on TV for that year’s all-new ice spectacular, Audrey would shoot me a longing look. Money was tight that winter. I remember bringing a few boxloads of china and antique lace to the secondhand store in town to come up with money for three tickets.
That year we left one-year-old Charlie at home with a babysitter and set out with a backpack full of homemade snacks and a thermos of juice. Once again Audrey came home from the ice show with a souvenir program—and a new ambition: to be a figure skater. Every pond I’d drive past that winter, I’d study the ice conditions, looking for a spot where we could work on our skating.
The next winter we were broke again, and once again I was pregnant. As it turned out, Willy was born the day before Audrey’s sixth birthday party was supposed to take place. Because the party had to be canceled, Steve took Audrey and Charlie into the city instead, to see the ice show—the first time for Charlie. He came home clutching his program and talking about those Mickey Mouse flashlights we couldn’t get. I sat on the bed, nursing newborn Willy and feeling a thousand miles away from ever again dancing on the ice.
This year when they started advertising the ice show on TV, I made no promises to the kids. With Willy walking, every outing is complicated—putting three children into snowsuits, buckling three children in the car. Steve and I tried taking them all skating one afternoon last week (pulling Willy in a sled), and gave up before Audrey had her second skate on, when for the second time in ten minutes, and bundled into layers of snow pants, Charlie announced he needed to go to the bathroom.
Then last Sunday morning, while we all had breakfast, I started thinking about the ice show again. Not wanting to raise the children’s hopes, I passed a note to Steve, suggesting it, and he nodded. I called up Boston Garden: good seats still available. We found a babysitter for Willy and headed for the city.
Our seats were high above the ice (“Is this heaven?” I heard one woman ask in the only row behind us) and Audrey was disgruntled about that. The show had not even begun before the barkers were upon us, offering hot dogs, sno-cones, Cokes, balloons, popcorn, and of course those flashlights. Our children knew the one-treat rule, but still they looked enviously at the children around us, wearing their Donald Duck beanies or hats with blinking lights on the brim, licking ice creams, sipping drinks.
The show began. All our favorite Disney characters were there, and the beautiful blonde star, in a costume even more dazzling than the one I remembered from the pictures in last year’s program. The clown was funny. The villains were mean. The chorus was in perfect step. One of our favorites was a daredevil skater who bounded out, jumped through a flaming hoop, somersaulted backward, and landed standing up.
Now I want to say clearly that our children didn’t behave badly at the ice show. Charlie mostly concentrated on his sno-cone, but he didn’t whine for more, once it was gone, or beg for a glow-in-the-dark sword. Audrey sighed when a woman skated out wearing a gauzy blue fairy dress and wings. After the show was over, both children even thanked us for taking them.
But driving home, with the children asleep in the back, the Happy Meal boxes strewn on the floor of our car, the souvenir program lying between the car seats, I felt an odd sadness come over me.
The day had cost us—with meals, gas, parking, and babysitter—seventy dollars. This year we could manage it better than before. But along with that easing up of my worries has come something else: We have begun taking too much for granted. That naturally, when the ice show comes to town, we’ll go. Naturally, the costumes will be dazzling. The skaters could fly, and—accustomed as we have become to marvels—it might not astonish us.
Crossing the state line back into New Hampshire, we passed a moonlit pond, with no snow on it, and a perfectly glassy surface. I looked at Steve. We were both thinking the same thing. Next year, we’ll just take the children skating on a pond.
The invitation, addressed to Steve and me, said we were part of a select group chosen to vis
it Outdoor World, a new concept in vacationing. And just for listening to the no-obligation introductory tour and lecture, we’d have our choice of three exciting gifts: a gas-fired barbecue, a portable telephone-clock radio, or a grandfather clock.
I had just been thinking it was about time Steve and I took off without the children for a day at a beach that happened to be right down the highway from Outdoor World. I had also been thinking we could use a barbecue. We are the only people I know who grill their hamburgers in a birdbath.
Plus, friends of ours recently took one of these no-obligation tours, and not only did they come home with a movie camera, they had a good time too. “While you’re listening to the lecture, you sort of make believe that you might really buy the time share, or a condo, or whatever it is they’re selling,” my friend Kem said. “It was a nice fantasy.”
So I called for our appointment, assuring the voice at the other end of the line that I was indeed over twenty-three, that Steve and I are employed and earning more than an amount so modest I figured this couldn’t be the most select vacation concept in the world. A person could qualify for Outdoor World and food stamps at the same time.
Saturday morning we headed for the beach. We had a good five hours in the sun before it was time for our appointment but still it was hard to rouse Steve, who was in the middle of a good book. “How long does this tour take anyway?” he asked, and shaving a half hour off what I’d heard over the phone, I told him an hour and a half.
We found Outdoor World easily: a broad expanse of scrub and dirt, right off the highway, with a faintly incongruous lookout tower plunked down in the middle. As we drove in a guard who looked about eighteen, with bad skin and a uniform way too big for him, stopped to check that we were on the visitors list. As we sailed through the checkpoint we smelled smoke and saw that a woman who appeared to be the Outdoor World recreation leader had started a barbecue, using a couple of cinder blocks and some old metal racks that looked like refrigerator shelves salvaged from the dump. That made us feel right at home.
Most of the other couples waiting for their tours were already lined up in the reception area—a pretty motley-looking crew, for the most part. A lot of them were discussing the relative merits of the grandfather clock over the portable telephone. One man put in a request that the tour leader talk fast and get the whole spiel over with in an hour.
It turned out we would each have our own personal tour leader. Ours was Tammy, newly transferred to this particular Outdoor World from another one out west. I had meant to ask no questions and discourage small talk, to keep things moving, but both Steve and I found ourselves liking this woman, asking about her drive cross country and how she liked New England. It was fifteen minutes before we got going on the tour.
The “concept,” as they like to call it at Outdoor World, was this: For a basic membership fee, plus annual dues, we’d be entitled to stay for free at any Outdoor World campground across the country. (At this point, Tammy was flipping through a colored brochure, showing us campgrounds that looked a lot more luxurious than this one, which was, she assured us, new and not yet completed. “Use your imagination,” she said, gesturing with a flourish in the direction of the scrub.)
Free campsites might be all very well, I said, but we don’t own a camper. No problem, it turned out. For just fifteen dollars a night, we could rent a pop-up camper at any Outdoor World. Nineteen dollars could get us a little trailer with kitchenette. For around thirty dollars we could live like kings in a two-bedroom camper. For thirty-nine dollars there was the deluxe model, with TV, microwave, separate master bedroom, and wall-to-wall carpeting.
Now, I have to tell you, it was these campers that got to me. We live in an old house: hardwood floors, exposed beams, three fireplaces, dutch ovens, the works. We have privacy, birds, woods, wildflowers. But sometimes I feel I spend my whole life—every waking hour—taking care of this home of ours.
I suddenly pictured the streamlined life we could lead if we belonged to Outdoor World. Zapping up our dinners in the microwave or outdoors, at the campground, on our new barbecue. Eating off paper plates. No toilet-paper-roll collections stashed under the children’s beds. No year-and-a-half-old plaster cast, from a child’s broken arm, collecting dust in the closet, along with about three hundred similar souvenirs. No lawn mowing and garden weeding and house repairs and septic trouble. And in all that extra time we could be exploring our country, spending time with each other and the kids. Gypsies, with not a care in the world besides which Outdoor World to stop at next.
Of course I didn’t quite imagine dropping everything and moving into a camper. But I have to admit that by the end of our tour (getting the lowdown on campgrounds on the French Riviera, the Alps, Italy, Greece, the British Isles) I was pretty curious as to how much the whole thing cost.
Six thousand four hundred dollars. That was for the basic membership, in one campground, for life. But then there was the Master Membership, with full privileges in all five hundred campgrounds worldwide, lasting not just for one lifetime but for three. The thought of our grandchildren, and their children, hooking up their propane tanks on their camper sometime in the twenty-first century was a little overwhelming.
“What do you think the Master Plan costs?” Tammy asked us. Twenty thousand dollars, said Steve. Twenty-five, I suggested.
“Just a thousand dollars more than the basic membership,” said Tammy, beaming. But only if we signed up this very day. Even as she spoke, the loudspeaker was announcing names of new members and reminding us that there were only a few places left.
It’s hard (now that I’m back in my messy, cluttered, inefficient, unstreamlined house that I love more than any other place on earth) to reconstruct my thinking processes that afternoon at Outdoor World. It’s embarrassing, too, knowing how close I came to becoming one of those faces in the Polaroids on the walls at the Outdoor World reception area: New Members, still working on their first lifetime. Now the whole thing seems, obviously, like a racket. But right then, thinking about those campsites waiting for us, those built-in beds, that no-wax linoleum, that endless coast-to-coast expanse of swimming pools, recreation directors, and hibachis, the idea of having our family vacations all figured out for the next three lifetimes sounded very tempting.
It was Steve who took my arm and steered me out the door (picking up our gas-fired barbecue along the way). Five minutes later, back on the beach, watching the sunset, I had got my senses back, and I heaved a sigh of relief. Easily taken in as I am, I told Steve, I don’t know how I managed to make such a smart choice in a husband.
We were going camping, but first we had to buy a new tent. We had one, but it wasn’t big enough to hold all five of us. So Steve said he’d just run over to the sporting goods store and pick up a two-man model he’d seen on sale there the week before. I announced that the children and I would come along.
“There’s no need for both of us to go,” said Steve. He knew exactly which one he wanted. He’d be back in an hour.
But the children were up for an excursion. (Audrey was already arranging pillows in the back of our van. Charlie and Willy were gathering up their stuffed animals in preparation for the half-hour drive. Even a visit to the supermarket is a major production for us these days.)
“All right,” Steve said, twenty minutes later, after Audrey returned from one last trip to the house for her new Chinese parasol, with Charlie close behind carrying an additional half-dozen books. And we all took off.
In the entry of the store there was a deluxe four-man tent set up, complete with sleeping bags inside and even a circle of rocks and a hibachi in the front, artificial hot dogs resting on the grill. There was a lantern, and four camp stools surrounding the artificial campfire. A bag of marshmallows, even. Steve walked briskly past the display, heading to the ninety-nine-dollar model at the back of the store, which he had picked out the week before. “Here it is,” he said, pointing happily to a small green tent, low to the ground, with no sleeping bags insi
de and no marshmallows.
Charlie climbed right in. He lay down in the tent, put his thumb in his mouth, sucked for a moment, and announced that he liked it. Audrey wriggled in beside him, looking thoughtful.
By the time the saleswoman approached us, Steve was already reaching for his wallet. “This is the one we want,” he said—not one to linger in stores any longer than is absolutely necessary.
“Now we do have another model of this tent for just twenty dollars more, with a double reinforced zipper and a sturdier rain shield and pockets for things like car keys,” said the saleswoman, pointing to a nearly identical model, in blue, across the aisle. Right away, Audrey perked up.
So we inspected the hundred-nineteen-dollar tent—zipping and unzipping, trying out the rain flaps, the window, his thumb. Charlie liked this one too, but Steve looked dubious. “I had the other tent all picked out,” he said. “It’ll do the job just fine.”
“Since we’re getting a second tent, and we’ll be going to all the trouble of carrying it and setting it up, maybe it would make sense to get one of a little better quality,” I suggested. Steve, a more experienced camper, said the ninety-nine-dollar model had everything we needed.
“Blue is Charlie’s favorite color,” said Audrey, helpfully. “And what if a hurricane came, and water got in the green tent? My dolls would get wet.”
“Dolls?” said Steve.
The two of them were still debating that one as I wandered over to a hundred-and-eighty-dollar tent with a screened porch attached. Charlie was wriggling into a model called the marmot, a mummylike construction just big enough for one person. The saleswoman was explaining that bikers use that kind of tent on cross-country trips. She was beginning to look a little edgy.
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