Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo?

by Jancee Dunn

  We parked the car a few streets over from our target. It was just starting to grow dark, and packs of costumed kids—princesses and superheroes and more princesses and more superheroes—were already roaming the neighborhood.

  “Every single boy is a superhero,” I said. “We should have dressed him as Spider-Man. Then he could have gone back to the houses multiple times and gotten more candy.”

  Heather looked across the street at a hulking black SUV idling at the curb. “Tell me they’re not going to drive the kids to the next house,” she said as three costumed children ran back to the SUV and climbed in. It moved forward three yards and then the kids got out again.

  We started a couple of houses down the street to warm Travis up. “Okay, Travis,” I chirped. “Now the fun begins! Go on up to the house, and don’t forget that your Aunt Jancee likes peanut butter cups, so if you see them, grab two.” I gave him a gentle shove.

  He looked around, puzzled. “Where am I?”

  “You’re in Candy Land!” I said brightly. He didn’t buy it.

  “This is where I used to trick-or-treat when I was a kid,” said Heather. “We thought you would like it.”

  Travis walked slowly up the stairs of a newly built McMansion that loomed over a tiny strip of decimated yard. We trailed protectively behind him, curious to see the interiors of some of these behemoths. Who lived there?

  The door flew open and a well-coiffed yoga mom stood with a silver tray that held a variety of full-sized candy bars, which elicited an involuntary pang of greed in me.

  “Aren’t you adorable,” she said as Travis’s “Trick or treat” echoed in the cavernous hall behind her. We could glimpse a few pieces of furniture pushed against the wall as if they were in a police lineup. They looked puny against the hallway’s cathedral ceiling.

  On we went. As Travis walked to the next house, he passed a large stuffed scarecrow that lounged on a bench in the front yard. Suddenly with a yowl it sprang gruesomely to life, and Travis gave a dog-whistle scream and tearfully ran for Heather. As he clung to her legs and sobbed, I reacted with the empathy of the childless. Faker, I thought.

  The scarecrow sheepishly approached us. “Sorry, buddy,” he said to Travis. “Didn’t mean to scare you that bad.” He took off his tattered hat. “See? I’m just a regular guy.”

  “Come on, Travis,” I said. “Do you know any scarecrows with goatees? No, you do not.”

  “I want to go back to the car,” Travis whimpered. Even at the age of three, the poor child already had a history of being exploited by his aunt. When he was a baby, I loved to make surrealist films of him. I’d lodge his nice, round head in a bowl of fruit, for instance. He was such a sweet-natured little fellow that it never seemed to bother him when I dressed him in a tiny tank top and gold chain and had him act out a Sopranos episode for the camera.

  Gamely he dried his tears, and Heather and I led him to our old house. I rang the doorbell with my heart thumping. A smiling teenage girl answered. “Hi, Peter Pan,” she said to Travis as Heather and I craned our necks past her to see the flowered wallpaper they had put up in the hallway.

  After Travis took some candy out of her basket, Heather nudged him to mime the choking scene they had carefully rehearsed, but he’d fallen into a hypnotic trance at the sight of a full-sized Snickers. I looked at Heather and telegraphed, Ask to use the bathroom.

  You do it, she telegraphed back.

  No, you, I signaled.

  You!

  Do it! I’m older and I command you!

  But you can talk your way into anything! Remember when you convinced that IRS agent not to audit you?

  Hm. You might be right. I sent him a card afterward that said “I love the IRS.” Remember? He hung it in his office. Mr. Shelborne, I think his name was. He was a great guy.

  Good. So you know what to do. Just tell her you have—

  The door clicked shut.

  Travis looked pleadingly at Heather. “Can we go home now?”

  Defeated, we trudged back to the car. “We have to stop,” said Heather. “We just have to stop this.”

  We didn’t bring it up again. I thought that perhaps we were finally cured, until two months later, when I received a dizzying email, written by a woman who had read my memoir and realized that she was living in our former house. Would I like to come and see it?

  I couldn’t breathe.

  Her family would be moving to Italy soon, she continued, but before they left, they’d be happy to show me around.

  I excitedly phoned Heather, who phoned Dinah, who phoned my parents.

  The woman and I arranged for a tour for the following Tuesday. I asked if I might bring a family member or two, skimming over the fact that every one of us had enthusiastically signed up to attend.

  On the big day, we all met in a nearby park. My parents had brought two enormous boxes of doughnuts and cups of coffee for our hosts. We were all twitching with excitement, even my toddler niece and nephew.

  As the whole crew trooped up the walkway, I grabbed Heather’s arm and squeezed it. “I feel sick,” she whispered.

  We assembled on the porch and rang the doorbell. The door opened to reveal a pretty, smiling brunette and a teenage boy and girl. “Come on in!” the mother said grandly.

  We were in. We were in! I did a quick scan. The living room was intact, and looked brighter. I was used to my folks’ gloomy but easy-care brown wall-to-wall and stain-hiding dark-patterned couches. The light was disorienting without the familiar sun-blotting beige drapes my parents favored, hung over sheer curtains that caught any escaping rays so that our living room remained lodged in a perpetual Norwegian winter, no matter what the season.

  Heather saw my confused face. “Look at the fireplace,” she prompted quietly. It had the same mantel, at least. We smiled at each other.

  “Isn’t this pretty,” said my mother. All of us stared at the living room. Even the teens looked at it with mild interest, as if they were seeing it for the first time.

  Mercifully, my father broke the silence. “Is there a place to put these doughnuts down?” he asked. “You don’t need to tell me where the kitchen is.”

  Clutching one another as if we were entering a mine, we all made our way through the hall. Were we really going to have doughnuts and coffee in our old kitchen? They probably had stripped the walls of the drab oak cabinets and tan plaid wallpaper, but surely the kitchen table was in the same spot. There was nowhere else to put it, really. And of course the pantry had to be in the right-hand corner.

  We stepped into an enormous white room and looked around, disoriented. The kitchen had been gutted and expanded to twice the size, the ceiling raised to a dizzying height. A huge island took the place of our table. We took in the designer refrigerator and stove, the wall of untouched cookbooks.

  “Look at all those new windows,” said Dinah after a minute. She smiled at the teens. “I bet you guys have to clean these, don’t you?” They laughed and said no.

  I followed my father’s gaze and saw that he was looking beyond the wall of windows to the yard. The deck that he had built had been torn down, replaced by the kitchen addition. “Wow, I never realized we were so close to the neighbors,” he said.

  Dinah joined him and looked out the windows. “No, you see, Dad? The neighbors put on an addition, too.”

  He nodded. “Oh. Right,” he said absently.

  We gathered around the kitchen island and made small talk, asking the teens about their teachers. They lost their shyness and regaled us with funny stories as we microwaved the coffee, which had grown lukewarm, and ate the doughnuts. Then the kids, now outgoing, volunteered to show us their rooms. I heard Heather’s sharp intake of breath when she saw the way that her old bedroom, once bright yellow and frilly, had been transformed by the boy into a dank lair, strewn with the usual teen-boy detritus. My bedroom, meanwhile, was unrecognizable with its gleaming new floors and spiffy wall paneling. I quickly took it all in, trying to appear discreet even a
s my head joggled around like a cat following a fly. I hoped so much to discover an artifact, even a small one, from the years spent dreaming on my bed and writing in my diary Nothing. Even the baseboards had been replaced.

  Our tour ended with a peek into the master bedroom, but we felt hesitant to barge in, especially after the owner had been so accommodating.

  “Well, thanks so much for doing this,” I ventured as we walked down the stairs to the hallway. I didn’t meet Heather’s eyes, but I knew her thoughts mirrored mine. What had we been craving, exactly, with this little excursion?

  I suppose I had wanted to spot something wonderfully mundane—homely, even—that would instantly transport me through an emotional time machine. If we were standing inside of a kitchen that we recognized, surrounded by all of our family members—still alive, still miraculously healthy—then we could achieve the impossible and actually go home again. But there was not a familiar relic to be found, not a doorknob, not a light switch. And really, who could blame the woman for tossing out the funereal linoleum, the gruesome light-blue toilet in my father’s “special” bathroom that the rest of us only used in direst emergency? Our house had been a symphony of browns—not tasteful chocolate brown, either, but dingy grime-brown, built to capably hide the filth generated by a thousand kids trooping in and out. Hell, I would have swept through the place like Hannibal’s army.

  Still. My chest hitched a little and I dared not meet Heather’s eyes.

  “Oh, girls,” said the woman suddenly. “I almost forgot. Stay there.” She ran upstairs to the attic, and we heard her scavenging around. Then she bounded down the stairs, clutching a furry object.

  “This is a little piece of your old bedroom rug,” she said to me. “I saved it. I can remember visiting my old house after I grew up, and I thought I’d keep it just in case the old owners came by.”

  She handed the little square to me. It was my old-fashioned hooked rug, with a black background and a cream-and-pink floral design that I used to trace with my fingers as I lay on the floor and listened to records. Heather reached out and gingerly petted it.

  “Thank you,” I said feelingly.

  The woman laughed. “I have one more thing to show you.” She led us into her bedroom and opened her bathroom door. “I didn’t renovate this one,” she said. “I figured that no one would see it but me, so why bother, right? Feel free to stay in here and look around. I should probably go down and join your parents.”

  The bathroom was exactly the same: the blue tiles, the laundry chute, the ancient fixtures. Hysterical laughter bubbled up in both of us as at the same time we spotted the mirrored toothbrush holder that swung discreetly back into the wall, a relic from our childhood that was dated even back then.

  “It’s as crusty and tacky as ever!” Heather said with a gasp. “Look, there’s some toothpaste stains. They could even be ours! I’ve never been so glad to see something in my life.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “And look at the shower door! The handle is still wobbly.” We stayed in that bathroom for a full ten minutes, trying to get ourselves together, and then a wave of cackling would overtake us again.

  “I wonder where the girls are?” I heard my mother say downstairs.

  Heather drew herself up and smoothed her hair. “We’ve been up here too long,” she said. “Let’s go. Come on.” She grabbed my shoulders. “Wait a minute,” she said suddenly. “It’s over, right?”

  I nodded. Of course, we couldn’t really go home again. Our folks had aged. Hell, Heather and I had aged. One week earlier, we had been comparing spider-vein patterns on our legs.

  “It’s over,” I said. Clutching my ratty square of carpet, I followed her down the stairs.

  Salty, Sweet, Gritty Blobs of Joy

  My friend Lou was once my producer when I was a veejay on MTV2, MTV’s sister channel. During the inexplicable five years that I was on the air (I was the most ramblingly unprofessional television personality in the history of Viacom), Lou and I found that we shared a number of interests, including schlocky movies and sugary foods. Lou soon got into the habit of leaving meandering messages on my answering machine rhapsodizing about his latest food discovery. He often gets so swept up that he must leave his message in two parts. For instance:

  Hi, it’s Lou. Okay, so my current obsession is Baskin-Robbins chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream—first of all, because there are lots of chunks. There’s not random pieces like, “Look, there’s one up ahead”—they’re all over the place. And the vanilla ice cream, while probably extremely artificial, is so appealingly, blindingly, Clorox-bleach white, it’s like a dream, and then you have these salty, sweet, gritty blobs of joy And the more you eat—obviously out of the container because it tastes best out of the container—the more the snow melts, and it becomes this delicious thick, cold soup with chunky surprises, and you keep digging into the mountain like a treasure hunt to find more. There’s so much joy in that half-gallon!

  So it says on the container that there are only eleven grams of fat per serving, and I don’t know what’s happening to me that I suddenly think eleven grams a serving is okay. And I don’t know how many servings there are in a half-gallon. My belief is that there would be four, but it’s probably in the double digits. And the only reason I got the ice cream is because I worked out really hard today at the gym so I wanted to ruin whatever progress I made by going to get a Reese’s Whipps. Have you ever had a Whipp? It’s like a 3 Musketeers, except the nougat is peanut butter.

  Anyway, I was walking home with my Whipp in my pocket, and in the distance, I see the welcoming fluorescent white-and-pink colors of the Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins combo store that’s open 24-7. So I go in, just to check inventory. I thought, They probably don’t even have the cookie dough. [beep]

  Lou again. What the hell is with your machine? Anyway, they had it, so I felt it was a sign I should buy it. And the lid of the container was even ripped.

  Me, aloud to the machine: “What, with the dirt that could get in, or mold? Microbes? Insect legs? I would never have bought it.”

  You would never have bought it, but I did anyway. I had to. Why I needed that half-gallon in my house, I don’t know. I thought, Lou, when you get home, don’t do what you did last time, which is eat almost all of it. When you get home, have the Whipp, put the ice cream in the freezer, and enjoy it another night. Eat the Whipp, then have an apple, and then thirty-two ounces of water or something.

  So I came in, took my shoes off, and immediately opened the ice cream and began eating it. I didn’t even hesitate. It was like I never even had that thought. Later I thought, Water, apple—what? So I ate probably three quarters of the container. I think my eyes were dilated at this point. And so that I wouldn’t eat the rest, I sprayed Caldrea Green Tea Patchouli Countertop Cleanser on it, which happened to be nearby.

  And then, a half hour later, I ate the Whipp. [beep]

  If I’m not receiving phone messages, I’m being sent emails with semi-pornographic subject lines like Mmmm or Oh My God or I’d Eat This for Sure and underneath, a link to some obscure food purveyor Lou has unearthed: a Maine-based vendor of whoopie pies (“I’d get the one with peanut butter filling, or maybe raspberry”) or a bakery in north Jersey that sells tiramisu-flavored cakes.

  So when either of us is feeling down, we cheer ourselves up with a long-standing ritual: We meet at a grocery store, load up the cart, and then proceed to Lou’s apartment, where we camp out on the couch and have ourselves a Lifetime-movie film festival. Lou lives in Gramercy Park, and his building is one of the few that actually overlooks the park itself, a beautifully manicured refuge and one of only two private parks in New York City (the other is in Queens). Lou has a coveted key to the park, but does he ever go in there? No. He prefers to stay indoors. “It’s hardly a park, anyway,” he sniffs. “It’s like a little patch of land with a fence around it. It’s not like there are rides or anything.”

  I phoned him one recent Saturday morning. “No
one calls me anymore,” I said. This was true. Most of my friends communicated via email, so that depending on my mood, my apartment could seem peaceful or mausoleum quiet. On this particular day, I felt like Omega Man as I pictured bustling homes in the city where the phone jingled merrily all day. Although if mine rang all the time, I’d be irritable. God, I’m tedious, I thought, and picked up the phone.

  “I think I need to get out of my apartment,” I told him.

  “Meet me at Whole Foods,” said Lou. “I’ll need about two hours to get going.” Lou always required long lead times before meeting me, although it was unclear what he actually did during them. He usually mumbled something about getting wrapped up in some Internet search (his latest being Whatever happened to Joyce Hyser from Just One of the Guys and Deborah Foreman from Valley Girl?)

  We used to start our ritual at a regular grocery store near Lou’s apartment before we discovered the giant, gleaming Whole Foods on the Bowery downtown, the high temple of twelve-dollar salad dressing often referred to as “Whole Paycheck.” The place filled me with equal parts giddiness and shame, with its temperature-controlled walk-in cheese cave, the Beer Room with two hundred different brews, the thin-crust pizza bar, the Pommes Frites counter with twelve varieties of dipping sauces, the gelato bar with irritatingly seductive flavors like black mission fig and crème fraîche. The Bowery had changed profoundly from its skid row past of the sixties and seventies, when down-and-outers would weave in and out of the fetid flophouses that lined the streets (many with incongruously upbeat names like the Dandy and the Palace). Now the area was studded with sleek multimillion-dollar lofts and peopled with trust-fund kids and starlets who weaved in and out of pricey bars.

  Lou met me at the door of Whole Foods, announcing briskly that we had plenty of ground to cover. He liked to inspect virtually every product in the store. We started in the cheese section, where he snatched up a container. “You can’t go wrong with pimento cheese spread.”