Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo?

by Jancee Dunn

  Granted, those noodles, floating in rich, scallion-flecked broth, were … well, they were magnificent. But I wonder sometimes if I enable Tom’s fussy behavior. I will admit to many quirks but no steadfast rules. None of my female friends have them, either, particularly if children are part of the picture. Kids’ demands, they will tell you, have a way of preempting any oddball rules for living. “Women have to be more flexible and more forgiving,” says my friend Tracy, whose boyfriend, a financial mogul, has a zero-tolerance policy toward flip-flops and phone calls “to check in.”

  It does seem hard to imagine a female version of Mr. Pink, Steve Buscemi’s jittery character in Reservoir Dogs. In a famous scene set in a diner, he announces that he doesn’t tip (again with the tipping, which comes up as much as brunch). “I don’t believe in it,” he barks. “I don’t tip because society says I have to. If they really put forth an effort, I’ll give them something extra, but this tipping automatically, it’s for the birds. As far as I’m concerned she was just doing her job.”

  Maybe Mr. Pink clung to his no-tipping rule to avoid being engulfed by options paralysis. More than once, Tom has tried to explain his behavior by citing this famous phrase from Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice. Schwartz wrote of going to an electronics store and falling into a fugue state after being confronted with 110 different televisions and 85 different phones (and that was just for landlines). Tom likes to repeat Schwartz’s argument that a tidal wave of choice leads to anxiety as we’re haunted by second-guessing. To stave off that crippling ennui, why not keep it simple? When Tom goes into a Starbucks, he orders a large coffee with milk, period. No whipped cream. No espresso-truffle latte. No chocolate curls.

  Of course, to a younger man, choice is enticing. But an older man is acquainted with disappointment. The years roll on, the regrets pile up, and suddenly your dogged adherence to “no alcoholic beverage that contains more than three ingredients” starts to make more sense.

  “When I was younger, I was less discerning,” says a male friend of mine. “But at this point in my life, I’m confident enough to trust my own taste.” He adds that many of his seemingly random rules have actually improved his relationship with his wife. Oh? How is “only pre-1970-era jazz on long car trips” self-protective? “All arguments between couples on car trips begin with music preferences,” he says. And what of “no talk of finances after five P.M?” “I’ll stay awake and brood, which interrupts her sleep. You see? I care about her getting enough rest.”

  Others claim that these rules protect their own health. My friend Lou can’t abide laptops in coffee shops (home or library only), mirrors in restaurants, and being within ten yards of a Bluetooth earphone user (that last one in particular sends him into a molten rage). “For me, it’s a way of decreasing stress in my life,” he says. “If I compromise, I start a slow boil, and frankly, it’s not good for me. At this point in my life, I’m well aware of my triggers, and unfortunately, I’m discovering new ones every day.”

  Tom, for his part, points to his semi-rootless existence. He’s a writer who is always on the road, who lived in five New York apartments before we met, so he welcomes his self-imposed structure, even if it’s theoretical. But surely it must go deeper than that. Could it have something to do with the nation’s declining birthrate and the rise of only children such as Tom who simply like things their own way? Or Tom’s long participation in Dungeons and Dragons as a youth (forgive me, Tom), which made him perhaps a little too adept at creating his own private, kooky world? In the end, there is probably a little truth in all of these theories.

  And when Tom’s rules wear me down, I console myself with his oft-repeated argument: At least with him, I know exactly what I’m getting.

  I thought about a conversation I had with the Dungeon Master—er, Tom—in our Tokyo hotel after my street meltdown. When I accused him of taking a secret pleasure in winding me up, he looked at me with astonishment. “I’m not looking to torture you,” he said. “Never. I just don’t want to have bad experiences. And more important, I don’t want you to have them either.” It was as simple as that. After four decades on earth, time was no longer infinite for him. Those mediocre dinners and pointless films become less forgivable. And so, for Tom—and for me—out the window go reunion-concert tours, morning television, and invitations to events with vague dress codes like “smart casual” and “business festive.”

  In a grudging way, I suppose I admire this kind of moral absolutism, this willingness to stand one’s ground despite raised eyebrows. It’s better to be with a man who knows exactly what he likes than with some of the anything-goes guys of my past. The only thing more exhausting than being around someone with iron regulations is being around someone with none. It takes guts to stand by your principles, as uncool or outrageous as they may seem.

  And for all of my husband’s quirks, which sprout daily like Amazonian undergrowth in the rainy season, he’s not so rigid in the ways that matter. He makes me laugh. He gamely accompanies me to the mall to buy place mats. On the aforementioned Scandinavian trip with my parents, he carted those people around in a tiny rental car for ten days as the air inside filled up with the sickly mint scent of their sugarless gum and the sound of my father’s Julio Iglesias CD.

  And maybe it’s Tom’s streamlining mechanisms that allow the intellectual part of his mind to flourish. He is the most curious person I know. He travels all over the world, reads four books a week. The important part of his mind is elastic, so I suppose I can deal with a quirk or two. Or fifty.

  And so I accept without argument that there will be no viewing of “Inspirational Coach” movies, ever. Unless it’s on an airplane. International flights only, six hours minimum.

  Hug Them and

  Squeeze Them for Me

  My paternal grandma was the sort of well-groomed lady that I have always loved, the type who would never dream of leaving the house without every auburn hair firmly in place and a carefully blended circle of lipstick applied to both cheeks (if you lived through the Depression, rouge seemed an unnecessary extravagance). I used to see her once a year, because she lived across the country in Sun City, Arizona, a sprawling retirement community of forty thousand seniors who whiz around on golf carts, packing their Active Lifestyle with All That Jazz dance classes and cribbage games and pool aerobics.

  So to keep in touch, I used to call her from my cubicle at Rolling Stone magazine, where I worked in the nineties. If I did an interview that went badly, it was particularly comforting to talk to her afterward. Fortunately she wasn’t hard of hearing, so I was able to keep my voice down among my co-workers, who wouldn’t necessarily think that calling Grandma was very “rock.”

  I once phoned her up after a dreadful encounter with the granite-faced members of Aerosmith. “Hi, Ma,” I began. (“Ma,” she felt, was a zippier moniker than “Grandma.”)

  “Well, hello, honey,” she said in her gentle, creaky voice. “Are you at work?” She had answered on the first ring, as usual. My grandfather had died a few years prior, and while Ma liked to “keep busy,” sometimes, she admitted, her afternoons were a little too still.

  “Yes. I just tried for half an hour to get the guys in Aerosmith to talk at a red-carpet event. The more one-word answers I got, the more rambling my questions were. It was painful. The only nice one was the drummer.”

  “Well, that’s often the case, isn’t that what you told me?” I was always touched that Ma, whose musical tastes ran to the hymns she played on the church organ on Sundays, made an attempt to understand my world. It didn’t matter that she had no idea who or what an Aerosmith was. I just liked it when she huffily declared that they were “ill-bred” and that it was not very professional of them to be rude to me.

  I asked her how she was doing and slowly unclenched my teeth as she recited her recent activities: a morning at the beauty parlor to get her hair “fixed,” a series of “nice lunches” with friends, a game of duplicate bridge. “You should smell the wo
nderful orange blossoms blooming here,” she said. “They smell so good, although I have to go grab a handkerchief sometimes, as it seems I’ve developed an allergy.” Later in the week, she and her sister, my great-aunt Lucile, were planning a banner day: a trip to their favorite thrift store (“we don’t need a thing, but do you know, we can’t stop ourselves”), a lunch buffet at their favorite gloppy-cheese-and-blobs-of-sour-cream Mexican place, and a spin through a model-home development, “just for fun.” For Ma and her white-haired pals, model-home developments were amusement parks for seniors.

  I had accompanied her on a few of these model-home larks in the past and always felt deep sympathy for the beleaguered sales reps forced to run through their spiel, room by room, for a horde of seniors who had not the slightest intention of buying. Instead they would remark in a loud voice, Heavens, I surely don’t know what I would do with all this space. Why on earth would you need a microwave that size? Honest to Pete, imagine the heating bill in here, Marianne, with these high ceilings. There goes your Social Security check.

  The exchanges I had with my grandma at that time had a civilizing effect on me, as if she had shown up in my grimy Rolling Stone cubicle and lightly placed a doily on my battered office chair.

  I told my father about this rejuvenating effect one weekend at my parents’ house, as we all sat around the kitchen shoveling handfuls of Costco snack mix into our mouths before dinner.

  “I call her every Sunday, and I’m sure we hear the same details,” he said. “Let me guess. She got her hair fixed and played duplicate bridge.”

  “Pretty much.”

  My father opened the pantry, wrestled out the four-pound container of snack mix, and unsteadily slopped more of it into the bowl. He told me that he used to phone his father at work. As both of them were proud employees of JC Penney at the time, naturally they liked to open with a round of shop talk. “We had these great conversations, and he became more of a friend than a father,” he said. “You share different feelings you never could admit to when you were younger.”

  My grandfather died suddenly of a heart attack on his sixty-fifth birthday. A practical man, he had asked to be cremated immediately and interred in a wooden box to spare the family the cost of burial. The only problem with his plan was that the whole process happened so quickly that my dad never got to properly tell his father good-bye. He paused. “Do you know, I don’t have anything recorded of his voice, ever? When I could have. It was possible. I’m sorry that I wasn’t farsighted enough to record or even videotape him. I’ve got some old converted movies, but they don’t have audio.” He looked bleakly out the kitchen window. “It’s one of those things that you put off until tomorrow, you’re immersed in day-to-day living, and then all of a sudden tomorrow is there and you’ve missed the window. So that is a real regret of mine.”

  The three of us sat quietly for a bit. To break the silence, I asked my mother if she had any regrets about her own parents, Lillian and Hershal Corners, who had both died in the late seventies in the tiny Southern town of Citronelle, Alabama, where my mother was raised. To my surprise, she answered immediately that she had. While my father was the goopily sentimental type, fond of reminiscing and of poring for hours over old photos, my mother focused only on the present and the future. “I have no regrets about myself as a person,” she said. “It’s what I may have been able to do for my parents. I wish I could have done more for them financially, and I know that’s irrational, because we didn’t have any money. I regret that I didn’t take my children down to Alabama more, because they worshipped you kids.”

  Even a few decades after their deaths, she could rarely talk about them without her voice catching. “You don’t feel like an orphan when one dies, but you do for sure when both of them do,” she said. “My emotional backup was gone. And also the person that rocked you, the only person that knew how you were as a baby, is gone. What kind of food did I eat? What dresses did I wear? They could be the only person in the world that knows that the reason why you’re afraid of dogs is that you were attacked when you were six. And it’s just … gone.”

  My mother was the youngest of six, the result of an accidental pregnancy, which my grandmother had originally assumed was some sort of tumor. She had my mother at the age of forty-two, an anomaly in those pre-IVF days, and as a result, my mother was the recipient of the sort of cosseting normally reserved for grandchildren. This lavishing of affection only intensified when we girls came along. My grandparents had little money, but that didn’t stop my grandma from slipping us twenties—cash it pains me to realize now that they could have really used. “Bless those girls’ little hearts,” she would say on the phone to my mother. “Hug them and squeeze them for me. You might even pinch them, sort of easy like.”

  When I was born, my parents lived in a tiny apartment in Rochester, New York, and my grandmother, wearing white gloves and a hat, took one of her few plane trips to “come and get hold” of me. “Mama had to stay in a hotel because we had only one bedroom, and when she got there, she was very upset that she left her gloves in the taxi,” my mother recalled. “And wouldn’t you know, the next morning the cabdriver knocked on our door and brought the gloves, telling me, ‘I wanted that nice Southern lady to know that there are good Yankees, too.’” She dabbed away a little tear.

  “So where is the regret? I don’t understand.”

  She composed herself. “Well, we had saved up to serve her a steak. And she didn’t tell me until years later that it took everything she had to eat that steak, because it was rare.” She laughed. “So I regret that we didn’t cook that steak to death.”

  I wiped a tear that dribbled down my own cheek. “Mom. Mom! You know that’s irrational.”

  She nodded. “Of course.” We reminisced for a while about her mother, whose only vices were smoking (she thought ladies didn’t smoke, so only the immediate family witnessed her puffing away) and watching Saturday-night wrestling matches, especially the ones starring her absolute favorite, Gorgeous George. Then my mother sat upright.

  “Come to think of it, you know what I might regret the most?” she said. “That I never asked her a question. Mama was eight when her mother died of pneumonia. She was one of ten children, and her father couldn’t keep her in Virginia, where they lived at the time, so he sent her to live with his married sister in Alabama. And I have always wished that I asked her how she felt about that. Was she scared? How did she feel about losing her mother so young? I didn’t want to make her feel bad because she would always tear up about it. But now I think that maybe I should have pressed her just a little.” She picked at an imaginary piece of lint on her sleeve. “Because now I’ll never know. She got married when she was sixteen. What was that like? I don’t even know how she met my father. They had kids during the Depression, and so Dad had to move all over, pursuing jobs. I always wanted to know what she thought of that, too.”

  “Why didn’t you ask?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Hers just wasn’t a touchy-feely generation that shared all of that stuff.”

  That night, in my parents’ guest room, I lay awake, preoccupied by what they had told me. It was difficult for me to grasp, in an age when no event is too small to be videotaped, the blunt finality of never hearing your father’s voice again. It was harder still, as a member of the most analyzed generation in American history, to imagine shying away from questions that didn’t seem remotely personal to me. The next day I continued to brood about it as I rode back to the city on an early New Jersey Transit train, so that I could go directly to the midtown offices of Rolling Stone.

  As I slid into my chair, it occurred to me that because I often conducted one or more interviews a day, my tape recorder was permanently hooked up to my phone. Why couldn’t I simply call my grandma in Sun City that afternoon and record our chat? And—at the risk of sounding creepily Nixonian here—I decided I would not tell her I was doing so. I have found that if you do, you will spend the first ten minutes
listening to self-conscious fretting. I don’t know what to talk about. What should we talk about? What do you mean, “Just be yourself”? Are you recording this, right now? Seems kind of boring, doesn’t it? Wait, can you go back and erase that last bit? I sounded stupid. Maybe you should turn it off until we really get going. Even if the person eventually relaxes, the conversation never really loses that stiltedness.

  I felt it was crucial that the exchange be natural, because when it comes to loss, what one often craves is not the significant events but the absolutely mundane. I can remember seeing an old Christmas videotape of our family grouped around the tree, waving and reciting Merry Christmas, everybody! Then my father turned the camera on each of us and asked about our plans for the coming year, which we dutifully answered. It was mildly interesting, but more for the clothes we were wearing than for the staged family assemblage and awkward answers. (Mom only granted us a glimpse of her real self at the end, when she told my father to turn the damn thing off, enough already.)

  For me, the only compelling part of the entire tape occurred during the last five minutes. My father hadn’t filled it up completely, so we kids grabbed the camera and filmed ourselves goofing off in the kitchen as we all made dinner. We had changed from our formal clothes into eighties leisure wear—Girbaud jeans and baggy, striped Esprit sweaters—and the kitchen counter was piled with the detritus of hectic family life. I studied that tape with the most intense longing, because there were the dishes we used at the time, and the puerile jokes we thought were fall-down funny, the hamburger-and-noodle casserole that we assumed was the pinnacle of haute cuisine. We were loose, and fully ourselves. It was the only genuinely authentic moment that existed on video from our youth.