I’m not the only one puzzled by how boys become men and then men become the masters of the universe. I have yet to meet a single mother on a park bench, a female teacher, or a pediatrician who doesn’t have the same thoughts. It’s only the men who disagree with me and feel the need to support their counterthesis by listing every accomplishment of every male in history. The only possible explanation I can come up with is that in prehistoric times women needed some space to get the real work done without having to worry about the crotch-grabbing spectacle over on the pile of furs. So the women gave men bows and arrows and taught them how to hunt, and eventually when they got tired of shooting their little weapons at animals they shot at other men, and war began, and then men had something to do with their time. The trend stuck. Whatever the case, I love my boys. I find their antics and inabilities amusing and constantly surprising. I just don’t get how they ever lapped girls when the fairer sex had such a clear lead.
WANDERLUST
“I’m not the outdoorsy type, unless a waiter is following me with a tray of champagne.”
“HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT KENYA?” PETER asked me on the phone, asking me out on our second official date.
“I love Kenya!” I said. Of course, I thought he was joking—who gets immunizations to go on a date? But no, he was completely serious. This is why I love New York; where else can you meet a man with the means and the sense of adventure to plan such a killer date?
Peter called the New York offices of Ker & Downey, an old-school safari company, and told them we wanted to take a week-long safari and would like to leave the coming weekend.
“But it’s Tuesday. You want to leave Saturday?” the agent asked in disbelief.
“Or Friday,” Peter replied casually.
“People plan a trip like this a full year in advance. Kenya is in Africa. There are a lot of arrangements to make.”
Peter messengered a check over to prove he was serious, reservations were made, and I found myself in the office of a tropical infectious disease specialist getting vaccinations and malaria pills. The next stop was a whirlwind shopping spree for fabulous khaki cocktail wear. Peter already wears khaki, so his wardrobe was perfect. I mailed my daughter to Texas to stay with my mom, and we headed for the airport.
It was a dream date from start to finish. We stayed at the Governors’ Camp in the Masai Mara, where we could hear lions roar as we lay in our luxury tent. One afternoon I was changing and heard someone enter. I turned around to see a wild elephant standing about ten feet from me. I grabbed my camera and got a priceless close-up of his face. Only after the camera flashed did I notice the panicked guard with the spear who shooed the powerful creature out.
“You will live a long life because you were not killed by that elephant,” the guard informed me. It hadn’t occurred to me that I wasn’t on an amusement park ride.
We then went to a camp called Borana, where the animators of The Lion King stayed for inspiration. One day our guide called us over to the edge of a precipice.
“Come see this.” He motioned. On a small cliff below were two sleeping leopards.
“This is very rare. Leopards are difficult to see because they hunt only at night and are well camouflaged. They are solitary animals; seeing two together is very rare. It only happens when they are mating.” When we turned around, there was a waiter holding a tray of champagne. Thank God my backpacking days through Europe with a Eurail Pass eurocard are over, I thought; this is travel.
That night, back at the camp, we dined with an Italian expat wearing a shoulder-holstered pistol who showed us his elephant gun with lion tooth marks in the butt. It occurred to me that he wasn’t on a photo safari like the rest of us.
“Let’s all have a drink to congratulate Peter and Laura,” our host said. “They are the first guests here at Borana ever to see all of the big five in one trip. We have guests who return year after year in the hopes of such an accomplishment.” The “big five” are the elephant, lion, water buffalo, rhino, and leopard. Unbeknownst to us, it is the goal of a safari to view these animals, or bag them if that’s your thing.
“Why not the giraffe, or the hippo?” I asked our host.
“The animals in the big five were determined by big-game hunters. These are the animals most difficult to shoot, because of their ferocity when cornered,” he said.
I still enjoyed seeing the giraffe the most, but it was our friends the mating leopards that gave us the edge. I love it when I win competitions I didn’t even know I was entered in.
After Borana, we stayed at Giraffe Manor in Nairobi, a 140-acre estate used as a refuge for giraffes. The giraffes roam free on the property and, like park squirrels, they stick their heads in through the dining room windows to beg for food.
Peter must have known this trip would be a hard act to follow, especially after we took our cue from the leopards. He had me at “safari,” and I never looked back. Oh, sure, we went to Europe a couple of times to visit my brother’s family, and I have been known to tag along on the occasional business trip, but once we had two three four five six kids, “vacation” became a four-letter word.
Once. We have gone on vacation all together, as a family of eight exactly once. I’m not really sure why we did it—perhaps because Peter had traveled a good deal as a child and wanted his children to do the same, or maybe because I was suffering from some form of wanderlust postpartum depression. We decided on Puerto Rico as it was a short, direct flight, and we could give the kids a taste of olde architecture without me needing to schlep them around for passport pictures while still sorting out Baby White Male’s paperwork. In a fit of “what to pack,” I went onto the L. L. Bean website and ordered a bunch of polo shirts and shorts in assorted sizes, some swim trunks, and flip-flops. When they arrived I opened the box and dumped the contents into a wheelie. Six hours later, the eight of us were in Old San Juan.
Remember when the Brady Bunch go to Hawaii and Bobby and Peter find some ugly idol at Dad Brady’s construction site and it turns out the trinket has an “evil taboo” and the next thing you know Bobby’s head almost gets bashed in by a hotel wall decoration, then Greg has a massive wipeout on his surfboard and Peter is attacked by a vicious tarantula while he is sleeping? And then they have to return the cursed thing to the “Tiki Cave,” where crazy Vincent Price is lurking and tries to scare them, then ties them up, while back at the hotel the girls confess to knowing where the boys are and oh why didn’t they tell their parents sooner? And finally it’s all happily ever after with a big luau and everybody—Vince included—takes a turn “sounding the horn of brotherhood” while blowing into a big conch shell and great hilarity ensues? Well, Puerto Rico was nothing like any of that. It rained. We stood in line for a boat to the recreation island. I suspect the food was shipped in from Wendy’s. The kids swam in the pool during the one hour it didn’t rain. We could have gone to the Holidome in Paramus and been a thousand times happier and about $15,000 up on tuition.
Peter worries that we don’t travel enough. But having children in such a wide range of ages makes vacation planning tricky. It’s hard to find a destination that appeals to all of them. My older children should be receiving their requisite doses of culture by touring the great cities of Europe. I am loath to imagine the horror of shepherding my three younger ones through the British Museum or the Louvre. We have all grown to love the Winged Victory of Samothrace without a head, but I can’t promise that after my crew blew through she wouldn’t be missing a wing. Maybe we should wait until the boys will eat something other than chicken nuggets. Or till I can be sure I won’t be arrested for creating an international incident when one of them hocks a loogie off the Eiffel Tower, killing a Frenchman in the process.
Last summer Peter’s friend John took his family to a dude ranch in Wyoming. Knowing I am not the outdoor type, unless a waiter is following me with a tray of champagne, Peter decided to take Peik and Truman for a session of male bonding. Or male bondage, depending on your deftness with the
reins. I’m not sure why he agreed to go to a ranch; his only memory from the single such childhood trip was of his father’s butt bleeding from too much riding. Nevertheless, he picked up the phone and booked a week in August.
My inner calendar shrieked—August is the darkest month in New York, when both nannies and therapists leave the city. It is a dangerous time, with hollow-eyed mommies pushing strollers and sobbing into cell phones, begging their therapist’s receptionist to please, please, have him return the call. If I was not mistaken, I had just been sentenced to five days alone with a two-, a five-, and a six-year-old. Outnumbered by the wee digits. Sure, I could take them up to Dairy Air, but then I’d be even more alone with them. At least in the city I don’t have to worry about one of them drowning in the pool while I’m pulling another out of a mangled dune buggy. Not one to be outdone by a spouse, I turned to the mouse and made a snap decision of my own: we would go on a Disney cruise! Who doesn’t love Disney? Cleo would join us and I would plop the boys into day care mousetivities and have some real mother-daughter bonding time, placidly reading our books next to the grown-ups-only pool.
Here’s one thing you should know about the Disney Cruise: the culture of Disney is insidious. Mousack is piped into every nook and cranny of the damn ship: the elevators, the restaurants, the hallways. If you submerge yourself in the mouse-shaped pool, you will hear the haunting theme from The Little Mermaid, as though she were down there, somewhere, singing. You can’t escape it by going to the Lido deck, or even, God forbid, your own room. Every single time you leave your cabin, some sort of switch is triggered so that upon reentry the radio is back on, blaring “Small World.” I thought the Geneva Convention had banned that song. If they want to find Bin Laden so badly, the government should just turn Afghanistan over to Disney and the company can pipe some of its greatest hits into the terrorists’ caves. Before you know it, every last one of them will crawl out and confess to something, anything, to make it stop.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Before we could even set foot on the good ship Disney, I had to find a way to get the three Mouseketeers to the launching pad down in Florida. I had assumed this would be one flight, but no, it was two, and the last thing you want to do when traveling with the smallest of children is have to switch planes in Atlanta. I was tempted to fly Cleo up from Texas just to help me ease the pain, but I decided I could do this, and I could even love doing it.
Things began to unravel at La Guardia Airport, where I was informed that you could no longer check bags at the curb because the airlines had decided to charge a new fee for any checked baggage. Which meant we had to get into a long snaking line in order to turn over our unwieldy luggage. Have you done this with a toddler? Well, have you done it with a toddler, a special-needs kid, and a pushy six-year-old? Pierson tried to help by manning the stroller, meaning he decided to ram it into the backs of my legs every time the fellow in front of us moved so much as an inch. I prefer to let a little space open up before I have to shoulder all the bags and precariously tip the oversize wheelie forward. Pierson, on the other hand, is incrementally driven.
“Mom, move up,” he’d say. Ram.
“Chill out.” I’d try not to curse at him. “I’m trying to figure out where Larson is.”
“He’s up there, pretending to be with those people.”
And he was. Clearly embarrassed by our steerage situation, Larson had found a young couple in the first-class express line who looked vaguely like him. He was loitering just out of their peripheral vision, lightly stroking their YSL luggage. I think he might have ended up in a much grander locale, if I’d let him.
We made it through security okay, even with the task of having to remove all our shoes and get them back on again, and waiting at the gate to board was fine, especially as it was the first time the boys had access to my carefully packed activity bag. They were enthralled by the new dot-to-dots and fresh crayons. Even Finn seemed as though he might be ready for his mid-morning nap by the time we got on the plane. No such luck. The minute we boarded, all hell broke loose. Along with “Never admit fatigue,” “Fight over the window seat” is one of the two cardinal rules of childhood, and Pierson and Larson immediately obeyed it. Sleepy little pre-boarding Finn turned into a cute version of that animated creature Gollum from Lord of the Rings: standing on armrests, dancing on tray tables, and just generally trying to scramble over other people and suitcases and into the aisle, a demented gleam in his eye. I opened a bag of Cheetos, hoping it would work its usual magic. He grabbed it and flung them everywhere at once. Larson and Pierson stopped squabbling long enough to laugh at me picking orange bits out of my hair and then went after the rest of the contents of the activity bag, spilling the Model Magic wrappers and fuzzy colored pipe cleaners from a “Make Your Own Bug” Kit. The big, brightly painted wooden beads provided for the bodies went rolling off to a faraway row. Gollum stood up on my lap and played peek-a-boo with the elderly couple behind us. I felt sorry for them. A smiling two-year-old is adorable for exactly three “I see yous;” after that, you tend to want your space back. I would have gotten him his own seat, but how could I when I needed to have a hand on the other two?
Across the aisle a couple in their late thirties sat down, clutching the same Disney Cruise Line travel packet as I had. It was just the two of them, no children. I had to ask.
“Why? Why are you going on a Disney Cruise without children? Young at heart? What the hell?”
“Not by choice,” the man answered, good-naturedly. “My sister is getting remarried and wants her children to have fun at the wedding.”
“Oh, thank God,” I said, pitying them but comforted to hear a valid excuse. Just then the “Fasten Seat Belts” sign binged on and we started to taxi, eliciting from Pierson the now-predictable wail “I have to pee!” I had asked him seven billion times, but no, this was when he decided he would definitely die if his bladder wasn’t emptied immediately. I tried to soothe him for the excruciating five minutes it took to reach get-up-and-walk-around altitude, but by then he had decided he didn’t have to pee after all and would instead wait until the drink carts were blocking the aisles in either direction and the passengers in the row in front of us had unanimously decided that ten A.M. was the best time to snooze, and so had reclined right into my personal space.
“I really have to pee!” Pierson shouted from the window seat, grasping his crotch and doing a little dance in the three inches of space allotted him. I assessed the drink cart traffic jam.
“You’re going to have to wait,” I said, shushing him. Finn had finally exhausted himself and was asleep across my lap. Any sudden movements by others or me would surely result in another round of Hobbit-chasing.
“Let me just pee in a cup, then,” he whispered, which sent Larson into fits of laughter. Mercifully, the drink cart cleared at that moment. Pierson walked from armrest to armrest over us all and into the aisle, racing to the back of the plane and disappearing into the john. Larson gave me an impish look and scooted over to the window, pushing his brother’s crap into the middle seat.
THANK GOD CLEO WAS THERE IN ORLANDO TO HELP US GET ONTO the shuttle, because by then I was ready to turn around and fly home, solo. The guides packed us onto the Disney-fied bus and immersed us in the culture: a soaking that wouldn’t stop for the next three days. I sensed danger and gave my boys one last bit of advice: if anyone offers you something called Kool-Aid, don’t drink it. Disney is a worthy opponent, with many ways of indoctrinating malleable minds into the cult. They use such techniques as tanned crew members in crispy uniforms, with overwrought, laminated smiles and enthusiastic voices, two-finger pointing you along the way to fun.
On board, it was all Disney, all the time. Cleo was strangely but cautiously enchanted at first, sucked in by the cleverly executed sculptures of the Little Mermaid, Belle, Cinderella, and the other Disney princesses scattered around the hallways. Getting to our room was no small feat: every couple of steps some creature in a towering costume
would pop out of the woodwork, frightening my young boys. Finn was clinging to me like a monkey, face tucked firmly into my dress. Larson stayed behind me, while Pierson would occasionally check in with me, dubious.
“Mom, did you see that duck?” he’d ask.
“You mean Donald?” I’d say.
“He has a name? Donald? That’s stupid.”
“Well, he was named back around the Depression, when Donald wasn’t such a stupid name as it is today. You know what’s worse? His middle name is Fauntleroy.”
“What about that tall guy with the long ears? What’s his name?”
“Goofy.”
“Seriously, Mom. Goofy? Is that supposed to be funny?”
“You know, Mom,” Cleo interjected, “you could let them watch age-appropriate cartoons now and then.”
“Trust me,” I said, “If we were on the Family Guy cruise, they’d know everyone here.”
“Is Petah heah?” Larson yelled from his shelter, having caught only the salient points of the conversation and jumping up and down with the most joy he had shown thus far. “Wheah, wheah? And Stewie?”
“See,” I said, opening the door to our cabin. It was clean, tidy, and creepy. Done up in faux-deco black and white, it used the Mousetif everywhere: curtains with brass Mickey tieback pegs, Minnie-shaped soaps in the loo, a kid’s table in the familiar trisphered shape; even tiny little mouse heads worked into the very woof and weave of the carpet under our feet! The place was infested with mice. Shimmery little satiny mouse heads were brocaded onto the duvets—and, most insidious of all, a collection of framed “family” photos adorned the tiny desk. At first glance I thought maybe the cruise people had pulled images of us off the Web—that would have been freaky enough. But no, these were pictures of Walt and family: on his wedding day, at the opening of Disneyland in California, on the deck of a similar-looking ship. It brought to mind the closing shot of The Shining, when the camera focuses in on the black-and-white photo of Jack Nicholson, who has joined the many dead of the old resort hotel, and you see that he’s grinning because he’s so happy to have been sucked into their world. At least I could comfort myself with the thought that the mom and kid got out of that hellhole alive.
Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday? Page 14