Tales From A Broad

by Fran Lebowitz

  The kids complain, but they’ll cheer up when they see their gang of friends and go off to the playground or the beach or the parking lot or the highway while the adults totally lose track of them. They have a club, a brotherhood, with these kids. Such memories of Halloween and Christmas and New Year’s and umpteen barbecues and Sunday happy hours at our place, not to mention the many times we’ve all found ourselves together at Safra.

  After Sadie and I have a lovely shower in the clubhouse, I organise the seating so we’re under the cabana on the beach with two big tables – adults here, kids over yonder. I get a pitcher of guava-lime juice and three jugs of beer. Sadie and Huxley are already in the playground. Frank and I sit side by side, admiring the view. We are so close to the airport here that you can see a passenger’s tie; you can’t hear your husband point out, ‘This is the last 747 they made using tsongtung in the fustlegrade.’

  ‘Isn’t this fantastic?’ I say.

  ‘What?’ Frank says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  I feel wonderful, from the bike rides, the kayaking, the walk on the beach, the shower, the sun, and here’s some nice, chilled, lovely Tiger Beer and a yummy bowl of ikan bilis (fried anchovies and Spanish nuts – yum, yum, not). I push aside the snacks and pour another mug; tomorrow is my day off, say Maj and Mag. Yeah!

  ‘Happy Father’s Day, Frank.’ I raise my glass. The plane has passed and all is calm and easy.

  ‘Happy Father’s Day,’ comes a chorus of voices. Kiss kiss. ‘Sorry we’re late.’ – ‘Just got back from a soccer match.’ – ‘Is that new?’ – ‘How’s your day been so far?’ – ‘Did anyone order another jug?’ – ‘Where are the kids?’ – ‘Oh, you’re so tanned.’ – ‘I just got up.’ It’s Tilda and Hugh, Dana and Regular Collin, Jenny and Steven, Lisa and Roy, Simon and Melanie all at once. Frank and I don’t clink.

  My favourite waitperson arrives with more ikan bilis and I bring out my cheesy crackers to share, remembering Dr S’s words: ‘crackers and wine’. But this is crackers and beer. We always ask for this waitperson who loves the kids, knows our peculiar way of doing things (like wanting all the dinners brought out together so we’re all eating at the same time) and makes sure we never gaze upon an empty jug. But we also ask for this waitperson because we’re dying to know if it’s a she or a he. The name is Trace (long e).

  After two hours, we order food. Burgers and chips for the kids, some fried rice and curries. Sadie wants plain white rice. Frank looks at me for approval on devil’s beef. (‘Go ahead, it’s Father’s Day!’) I get egg foo young, fried calamari and dry vegetarian kway teow. Two seconds later, it all arrives except for the burgers and the plain white rice. Ten, 15, 20 minutes later, after many reminders, there is still no sign of burgers and white rice. This is appalling. The kids have nothing to eat and our dinners are cold. I get up. ‘No, Fran, don’t,’ they all implore. I walk. ‘Please, Fran. Let Frank handle it.’ No one can stop me. I’m running on steam. Someone has to save the day. I’m damn glad I didn’t take Dr Soon-feel-fucking-better powder; I want to be mean and I want to be scary and someone is going to pay for this.

  I plough over to Trace and shout, ‘What is so, incredibly, fucking hard about giving a kid a bowl of white rice?! And the hamburgers? We all came together, capiche? We want to eat together. Get your pitiful act together!’

  ‘Sorry, sorry. So sorry, Ma’am. Busy kitchen. New staff. Food’s on the house, okay? Very sorry. Okay?’

  They always do this over here: douse me with patience and kindness. No one ever gets mad. It makes me mad. It makes me ashamed.

  ‘Oh, yeah, that’s good, thanks. Hey, I’m sorry too.’ We hug and I feel bosoms. I can’t wait to tell everyone.

  Eventually, we have our feast and continue our lively chatter. The kids disappear again off into the dark and we swoop down on their leftover French fries, pour out more beer, wave cigarettes around and circulate. By nine, we’ve had enough. Frank locates the kids and straps them in and I ride like the wicked witch, pedalling furiously, berating anyone walking on the cycle track or riding stupidly.

  Frank and I are brushing our teeth.

  ‘Have fun?’ I ask.

  ‘Yeah, it was nice.’

  ‘So much fun.’ I sigh, getting under the covers. ‘Frank?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You had a great time, didn’t you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Good. Me too.’

  ‘Yup,’ Frank says and turns the lights out.

  I turn them back on. ‘Are you being sarcastic?’

  ‘Let’s not fight. It was great.’ He closes his eyes.

  I sit up. ‘Did you or did you not have fun tonight?’

  ‘I did. It was great. I just said it.’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But nothing.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ He bolts out of bed. ‘Shut up already.’ He takes his pillow.

  ‘Frank, don’t go. I’m sorry. It’s Father’s Day. Please stay.’ I crawl across the bed.

  He pauses by the door. ‘Yeah.’ He grabs a pen and writes on the wall, ‘FATHERS DAY’. ‘See, lots of fathers. No apostrophe there, no singular possessive, not in your little world. Your complicated, scheming, ever-expanding …’

  ‘Screw you. Go to hell!’

  ‘I was just about to!’ He slams the bedroom door and I hear him taking a blanket from the closet; he stomps downstairs.

  My alarm goes off. How could I have forgotten today was my day off? But when my hand reaches the clock, I’m aware that it’s the phone ringing. I know it’s just some client calling to tell me how much he hates me, not realising of course that he’s waking me up but delighted when he finds out that he ruined my day after I ruined his life.

  ‘Hello?’ I say warily.

  ‘Fran.’ It’s Frank’s brother, Walt. My face gets hot and my stomach drops. ‘Bad news,’ he says, ‘Dad died.’

  ‘I’ll get Frank.’

  I find Frank working on his computer out on the balcony. I hand him the phone and sit on the sofa he made up for himself when he’s ready to sleep. I will be here when he’s ready to come to me.

  Dear Samantha,

  Thanks for your note. Can’t believe we’ve been in New York this long. Good news is we leave in a week! Here’s the lowdown:

  Not many people attended the service. In fact, it was four Rittmans – me, Frank, Walter and Pat – and one Bybell, Anne Bybell, mother-in-law of the deceased. The last funeral I attended with these people was for her husband, Frank’s grandfather, Pat’s father. I was pregnant with Sadie, and Anne thought I shouldn’t view the body, bad for the baby or something. The way I remember it, I didn’t need to make a special trip to view the body. He was perched way up on a pedestal, the walls were mirrored and the casket was spinning round and round like the prize car on the showroom floor. I could clearly see the entire head reflected to infinity around me. After that initial excitement, I mostly thought about getting a slice of pizza across the road. Anne seemed in a rush, burdened in a very busy-person way, someone who simply didn’t plan for this glitch in the day. Frank’s grandfather was a lovely man. He was the sort to don a hat and tie every day of his life. He took Frank and Walt to see fire engines and feed ducks. He loved Pro Wrestling, knew every character on the circuit and was either a very good actor or one of the few clean souls in the world who, with all his heart, believed it was a real sport. We’d egg him on and try to get him to admit the stuff was staged but he’d become glossy-eyed and recount wonderful rounds he’d seen on the television between Buster Butt and Wild Man Marvin. I bought him linen handkerchiefs every Christmas. When he was very old and very feeble, one day I saw him patiently, with true self-acceptance but not without great effort, get out of an easy chair. Uuuuuup he heaved with shaky limbs, slowly, thump, thump, dragging his old and feeble body down the hall. At last, he almost reached the bathroom door. He paused, took a
breath, and suddenly a blur confronted him, a whirling dervish, who swung open the bathroom door, slipped in and slammed it shut, locking it for good measure. It was his wife on her battery wheelchair. I don’t know why Anne couldn’t have used one of the other four bathrooms on the ground floor. She’s like that. Every time I ask Pat to babysit, Anne shouts, ‘Pat, you promised to take me to the hairdressers.’ Hey, it’s important to look your best when you’re a 94-year-old widow who never goes anywhere. But I do admire her. The day I saw her thwart her husband, a prostate cancer victim, on his way to the loo, I also saw her reading the stock pages while watching the Bloomberg report while phoning her broker.

  As for Frank’s father’s service, it was fine, and while I could smell the bubbling cheese and sauce from the pizzeria across the road, I was able to meditate on the man who was my father-in-law. He took the place of my own father for a few years. He listened to my tales of woe and offered considered advice. He wanted to know his boys as they grew to men and was saddled with regret that he travelled so much while they were young. He could take a joke, make a joke, get a joke. He was intolerant of democrats but he didn’t know his family was infiltrated with ’em. He thought we should move to Australia because ‘America is turning into a third-world country’. He didn’t like to show affection but became tearful easily. Whereas my parents planted us in a nice safe pot on the windowsill and pruned us and watered us and cooed to us, he and Pat tossed their seeds out in the yard and let them grow, viewing them from the window and delighting in their wildness, their freedom and their thorns. He liked scotch, he liked my cooking, he liked the nice, long birthday cards I wrote, and he liked our kids but was scared to hold them. He liked Super Market Sweep and Rush Limbaugh. He collected exotic foods that would sit on the kitchen shelves until we were around and then he’d pull some jar out and say, ‘Fran! Frank! Come in here. Get a spoon, Fran. Here. Have you ever had stuffed gerbil brain? You don’t know what you’re missing.’ He had rules: you don’t touch your sons past the age of three; you don’t meet people from three destinations at a restaurant; you don’t ask for a raise. He vented about his mother-in-law, who stole his wife and his chair every chance she got, coming along for the ride some 50 years ago when Anne clearly said, ‘We do.’ But he never complained to her.

  The minister closed the service with the prayer for the living, ‘In life, in death, oh Lord, abide with me.’

  ‘Amen,’ we said.

  ‘I win,’ Anne said.

  We hung close, surrounded by a brown, warm, tucked-in calm, straightforward emotions, the lack of ambiguity in bereavement, the slight sweetness of missing someone who was loved. Frank and Walt and Pat sat in the kitchen until two in the morning reminiscing.

  Bill would have been embarrassed if he heard Walt remembering that last hug, 37 years ago, as if it were yesterday.

  A day or so later, Frank checked in at his New York office. I checked in at my New York office and the kids went to daycare. Frank stayed late for a conference on new top-secret business (I’ll tell you more when he tells me), I picked up the kids. Next day, I stayed late to meet with people and Frank picked up the kids. The only thing that isn’t back to the way it was – besides Frank not having a father – is that we’re just visiting. It’s a vacation from my vacation. ‘Enjoy an exacerbating two-week holiday! Renew your tension! Reactivate your ulcer!’ I’m getting lots of stares, too. I don’t know if it’s because I look like a negative with all this fake blonde hair and charred skin or maybe it’s the jogging shorts and platform shoes, but I catch people looking. I think they’re trying to figure me out, work out where I fit. New Yorker? Tourist? Tannist? I seem busy and heading somewhere without being dulled by routine or strung out on anxiety or wowed by the fact that I am in New York City, hot damn!

  The other day, we went to visit our house. I guess we should have called but we just took a chance. I mean, if we had said, ‘Hey, we’re in town, not more than 500 yards away, thought we’d stop by’, they would have had a chance to screw in some bulbs, take out the trash, weed the garden, sweep the deck, fix the wallpaper, rinse out the toilet, make a bed or two … But we just pulled on up the drive.

  ‘Hi, sorry to intrude. The kids wanted to see the old place. If it’s not a good time?’ I gave her a chance. She could have said, ‘No, but in 48 hours I’ll be happy to let you come in.’ Instead, she smiled warmly and hugged us and offered us drinks and told us how much they love the house and asked us how we were doing. I couldn’t answer because I was busy being bewildered at the state of the place. As I took Sadie upstairs to her old room, I passed a hole in the wall. ‘What happened here?’ I called down the stairs.

  She came bounding up.

  ‘Ya, the paint chipped.’

  ‘Paint is not eight inches thick. We are missing pieces of the house here. I can see its innards, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Oooh, maybe you’re right,’ she said, moving her hair from her face and tilting forward to get a better glimpse of the panoply of exposed pipes and wires that you could not fail to notice even if you just had both your eyes poked out. ‘Does look like a little of the wall came off.’

  Tell Maj and Mag that I am receiving the workouts and doing them under much cooler conditions than you are. The weather’s good, actually. I will miss Diet Snapple – I wish they could come back with me. And I wish Frank’s mom would, too, for a visit but if I dare suggest it, who knows what Anne might do to me. There she was taking a shower when … Seriously, Pat is sad, so deep-down sad.

  I’ve been thinking, life just isn’t long enough to be sure you got all of it sucked down. When you lose someone, it seems you wonder why you didn’t just sit in a room and stare at each other because one day you won’t be able to ever, ever again. Frank was lucky to have had a great last conversation with his father but he wasn’t lucky enough to have had it sooner. It was six months ago.

  I’ll save the rest of the sermon for our next long run.

  See you soon.

  Love, Fran.

  ‘Jet lag means one day off! Drink Biospliven and meet us tomorrow at 0500 at the track. Time trials! Condolences! Yeah!’ reads the message on my email.

  I have three weeks to acclimatise before the marathon. I train hard and only see Frank as he lumbers up to bed and I heft myself down to coffee.

  ‘Hiya Frank.’

  ‘Hiya Fran.’

  ‘Everything okay?’ Big yawn.

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Have a nice run, Fran.’

  ‘You too, Frank.’

  But at last, the marathon.

  Frank and I go to an early dinner the night before at a nice, boring place offering ‘red’ and ‘white’ wine. I have something simple and forgettable, just like Maj and Mag told me to. I wake up the next morning at three, drink two cups of coffee, smoke two cigarettes, feel nervous and sick and want to be dead, but somehow I rally when Maj and Mag get on the boom horn and call up to my balcony: ‘We are waiting in the cab. I repeat, we are waiting in the cab.’ Columns of lights go up around Fortune Gardens but it’s ever so brief a disturbance.

  I have sewn my number on wrong so I have to wear my shirt backwards. I wait at a portaloo, in the middle of the line, for ten minutes but someone obviously moved in there, and, looking at my watch, I have to abandon the ablution.

  The runners are called to the line-up and I humbly take my mark way in the back of the line to make it clear to all that I am casual. As I look around at the eager faces, the ready loins, as I feel the ruckus of pent-up energy, I take a moment to berate myself lavishly. Why in the world didn’t I just do the right thing for once in my life? Why didn’t I work out smarter, stop smoking, stop drinking? The gun goes off. Got me?

  It is still dark but the humidity, though a mere fraction of what we can expect by the time the sun comes out, is thick. I am dabbing and dabbing with my wristbands. I need a bathroom. I spot a Mobil station and veer in. My luck, the bathroom is being cleaned. Do
uble happiness: the attendant is a deaf, toothless guy from China who hadn’t noticed the 1500 people running by and doesn’t understand why I am doing some monkey dance. I yank him out of the bathroom, forcefully pee on his scrubbing bubbles and thank him as I join the ranks again.

  I feel much better, much springier, and sprint a few clicks, trying to make up for lost time. I almost lose my footing leaping over a pig’s head in the middle of the road. Yes, that is correct: a pig’s head. Middle of the road. Just the head. I might like to read the entrails for wisdom but they’re not about. No doubt I’ll trip on the large intestine later.

  The course takes us past thousands of eating houses, coffee shops, hawker centres and food carts. The smells can make you hungry or sick, depending on a number of variables, like: do you want to eat fish-head soup at 7 am? Do you like the odour of last night’s chilli crab? I am assaulted every block with noxious fumes until I hit Serangoon Road, Singapore’s Little India. There is the scent of curry, cinnamon, tandoori – now that’s aromatherapy. But it’s a short road and I am now on Balestier and shop house after shop house is festooned with shellacked dead ducks, row upon row of them, waving to and fro like gamey wind chimes.

  I slip on a mound of rice and am totally blinded by the gold outside a Buddhist arts and crafts shop. People are passing me left and right.