Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo?

by Jancee Dunn

  Not that I have a bad setup at the moment. I live in a converted church, a venerable old structure nearly a block long. It was built as South Congregational Church in the 1850s—Henry Ward Beecher was said to have preached there—but by the 1980s, its flock had sadly dwindled and the church was sold to a developer. Now there are thirty condos inside, but from the outside it still looks like a house of worship and frequently confuses deliverymen. The building is wonderfully quiet because of its massive stone walls, and its earlier incarnation gives the place a tranquil feel. And so I tend to stay put.

  Julie shares the same strain of agoraphobia. “Why leave?” she’ll say sensibly. “For what?” Home is a guaranteed good time. You can read. You can watch a movie. You can make brownies. You can take a nice bubble bath. As Pascal said, “Man’s unhappiness springs from one thing alone, his incapacity to stay quietly in one room.” Why leave? For what?

  Forget parties, which I view as work. The irony is that even as a card-carrying hermit, I am still pleased to be invited places, and appreciative of anyone who makes the effort to host any sort of shindig, a nightmare I would never bring on myself. I know already I’d be the type of host who would obsess about the one guest who isn’t screaming with laughter, making out with strangers, and spraying everyone with jets of champagne. So I show up to any place I’m invited and then make everyone uncomfortable as, filmed with sweat, I strain to be the witty and sparkling bon vivant, the spirited initiator of a thousand lively conversations. I solicit opinions. I ask questions.

  Sometimes this approach works too well. I once sat next to a man at a dinner party and threw out some of my regular starters: Where did you last go on vacation? Do you have any horrible neighbors? (All New Yorkers like to talk about their horrible neighbors.) He answered eagerly enough but never asked anything in return. To amuse myself, I started counting up my inquiries. When I reached question number thirty (at which point I wanted to holler Pop quiz! What’s my name? Where am I from? I don’t need a state, just give me a general region!) I turned with a sigh to the person on my other side.

  I usually spend the cab ride home from any gathering recovering from social anxiety disorder. “What the hell is with people?” I carped recently to Tom after a cocktail party where I spent ten minutes in a group that talked around and above me. When I was finally able to break in and introduce myself, I was quickly assessed and dismissed. Then they all resumed speaking as if I weren’t there. “Why can’t people engage in a simple conversation? Is this a New York City problem? Is it an East Coast thing? Is it modern society?”

  Tom didn’t answer and wearily closed his eyes. “You know what’s worse?” I went on. “Either people ice you because they can’t figure out a way you can be useful to them, or they overshare. How about the woman who told us she just had unprotected make-up sex with her heroin-addicted ex-boyfriend? We met her five minutes before she yielded that one up! Yet I found myself asking her follow-up questions to be polite. I asked her if they went on any more dates after that. Then she laughed at me because I called them ‘dates’! What was I supposed to call them? Encounters? Appointments?” I slumped in my seat. “God, I hate myself.”

  Tom gazed out the window. He had heard this jabber many times. “You really don’t have to try so hard,” he said. Tom, unlike many of my friends, never wastes time on postgame analysis. The most I have typically been able to coax out of him is confirmation that an event was fun, or not fun. Then the subject is closed, whereas I tend to fret about my shoddy performance for at least an hour.

  I looked broodingly out my window of the taxi. “I shouldn’t have asked that blond woman so many questions about her dead dog. But she seemed to want to talk about it. Was it me? She worked that dead Chihuahua into every conversation. I just felt like she needed an ear. But then did you see how upset she got? She broke away and ran to the bathroom.”

  Tom shook his head. “I don’t know what gets into you.” Tom is very different from my friends and family. If I relay my latest gaffe to one of them, they will helpfully construct an elaborate backstory or justification to calm me down. Last year, at a dinner party, I publicly shuddered at the idea of multiple births after the subject of quadruplets was broached. Silence descended as people fiddled with their silverware. I learned later to my intense mortification that a couple at the far end of the table recently had had triplets.

  “They’ve probably heard that reaction before,” said Dinah soothingly when I told her what I had blurted. “Triplets are unimaginable for a lot of people, particularly for you, because you don’t have kids. And that couple should have spoken up and said, ‘We have triplets, I know it sounds like a lot of work, but it’s rewarded us a hundred times over,’ or, you know, something trite like that. Instead of making everyone squirm because they knew something you didn’t.”

  Tom’s response was more succinct. It usually was. I could relay the most complex, baroque problem to him, and his response will be seven words or less. Stock answers include So stop doing it, then; Well, that’s his problem; Just tell her no; and Why do you care? It’s freeing, in a way.

  Addressing my multiple-births blunder, he said, “Sometimes you should think before you speak.” As much as I resented his remark, he was right. So many people are undergoing IVF these days that a lone baby is passé. Who doesn’t have a litter of infants?

  “How about that woman who talked about her nephew for forty-five minutes?” I fumed. “I never met her nephew, so is it too much to ask that he should at least be interesting? An investment banker who snowboards is not compelling to me. Then she took out photos of his kids.”

  “You should have moved on to someone else,” Tom observed mildly.

  It was more satisfying to vent to Julie, whose horror of social gatherings, particularly those that take place past 3 P.M., matches my own. “When I go to parties, all I ever do is calculate how soon I can leave,” she once told me. If she and her husband, Paul, find themselves attending a party at a friend’s apartment, “we walk to the door and as we’re buzzing to be let in, we want to say into the speaker, ‘We have to leave soon.’”

  Maybe if I had chosen a different vocation—if I was a police officer, say, or a teacher—I would at least have been forced to deal more effectively with the outside world. Instead, I’ll go on a writing jag and the days will slip past so that when I eventually emerge from my apartment, blinking, I’ll wince at my reflection in the plate-glass window of a store. Most of the time I have Car Face, the gray, puffy-eyed, slack-mouthed look you get when you’ve been on a long road trip and finally lurch stiff-legged out of your vehicle at a gas station.

  And the longer I stay walled up, the more emotionally fragile I am when I creep out of my abode. And so as I attempt to go to the drugstore or the dry cleaner like a normal person, I must ensure that my mood stays serenely level, or I deteriorate rapidly.

  Recently Tom was walking with me to our neighborhood pizza place after I had holed up inside for the entire weekend, and I saw him scan my face anxiously when we both spotted the crumpled body of a sparrow on the sidewalk.

  “Don’t be weird,” he pleaded. This is perhaps the number one thing he says to me.

  “Did you see that poor little crushed bird,” I whispered in a ghostly monotone, eyes downcast. All is death, death and decay.

  “Let’s just get some pizza,” he said desperately “Pepperoni? Hmm? How about onions?”

  “I hope it wasn’t tortured to death by kids in the neighborhood.”

  “Have you ever seen the kids in our neighborhood torture anything? It probably got hit by a car and died before it knew what was happening.”

  “I suppose so,” I murmured.

  Recently I decided to make a break out of Cuckoo Town and go out for the entire day, like a functional human, rather than a skinless chicken breast wrapped in cellophane. And so I began in the morning, full of optimism. I actually like walking around my neighborhood, which was settled in the early part of the last century by Itali
an immigrants. Their descendants still display statues of the Virgin Mary in the modest front yards of their apartments.

  I eased into the day with a visit to one of my favorite stores, an old-time purveyor of underwear, housecoats, and “dungarees” run by two elderly brothers who are an institution in the neighborhood. Merchandise is arranged inside wooden shelves that line the walls, as it has been for a half-century (you describe what you want and they root through the drawers), and purchases are rung up on an ancient cash register. All day long a steady trickle of loyal customers stop inside the narrow shop (if the patrons number three or more, one brother throws his hands up and cries “It’s nuts in here!”).

  I’ve often bought things that weren’t strictly necessary because I loved talking to the brothers, who started working in the store right after World War II. This time I purchased yet another package of white sport socks for Tom to add to the teetering pile I had already gotten him. “How’s business?” I asked.

  “Good, good,” the more garrulous brother said. The other was standing at the counter, hunched over the sports section of the New York Post. “Lotta housecoats. People come in, they buy eight, ten at a time before they go to It-ly to take them to all their relatives.”

  I looked behind me at the row of brightly colored housecoats. “Eight dollars apiece seems like a bargain to me,” I said. “You could probably jack that up a little, don’t you think?”

  He waved his gnarly hands. “No! No. We like to keep the price low.” He darted over to the housecoats and fluffed some of them out for display. “Almost time to switch over to flannel housecoats,” he muttered. “Cold weather coming.” He examined a label inside a blue checked number. “Made in China,” he said. “Nothing made in the USA no more.” Then he moved on to a pile of Lee jeans, which he neatly refolded. “I started working here right after World War II,” he said. He says this every time. “People tell me I should retire. What am I gonna do all day? I like to work, talk to people.”

  Prompted by my questions, he started reminiscing about the old neighborhood, once the province of dockworkers and sailors who worked in the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard before it closed down in the sixties. “Lotta those sailors were Norwegian,” he told me. “They went to all the bars around here. Used to be a lot more bars. And a few blocks away there was a rest-a-rant, like a Scandinavian lunch place, where they used to eat.” He looked at his brother, who was still bent over the paper. “You remember that?” The brother nodded.

  Then he moved on to another favorite subject, the future of the shop. His son, a fireman, and daughter, a teacher, have told him that they will not take over the business. “I’m probably the last one,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Sixty years I been in business. I guess the place’ll close up.” Uh-oh. Here comes the rain again. I moved quickly to hand him my money and escape before my mood slid downward.

  I stepped out into the sunshine. See? This is fun, I told myself. I especially loved my neighborhood in the morning, when the shopkeepers swept the streets in front of their stores and gossiped with one another. And how could I properly call myself a writer unless I got out there and eavesdropped on the world, which is what writers do best?

  I passed a coffee shop where I had overheard many an intriguing conversation. Just last week, Tom and I had stopped in for coffee and a sticky bun. Sitting at the booth behind us was the resident coffee-shop hang-about, a wiry guy in his fifties named Eddie with scraggly reddish hair and a bandanna around his neck. From what Tom and I had gathered over the years, Eddie appeared to run some sort of Internet company out of his home but was forever nursing a coffee inside the shop and talking to the employees, who treated him with tolerant good humor. “Hey,” he yelled to a waitress who rushed by with a pot of coffee, “this song that’s playing. It’s the Vapors, right? I remember this song. Shit, I might have seen them in concert.” But his patter had a nervous edge to it, and he seemed even more fidgety than usual. Every time the shop door opened, he looked up warily.

  After a few minutes, a young couple came in and silently took a seat next to him. The younger man ordered a coffee, regarded his scraggly booth-mate, and cleared his throat. “You know why I had to fire you, right?” he said. Tom nudged me. Something was about to go down.

  “No,” said Eddie. “No, I don’t. And you didn’t even call me to tell me why. You didn’t have the decency.”

  “Yes, but I texted you. Listen, there are a number of reasons why this isn’t working out. First of all, the cat likes to eat in the morning, and we know you’re not a morning guy”

  “Shit. I’ve been there at eleven-thirty eleven forty-five. That’s still morning.”

  Tom and I had grown adept at pretending to talk to each other when we were spying on people, using nods and gestures like extras in a play Today we had the distinct privilege of watching a cat-sitter firing in progress. They should have known better than to hire that guy.

  The woman broke in. “And we feel”—she glanced at her husband for encouragement—“we feel that you didn’t come every day, either.”

  “What? Of course I did.” He widened his eyes.

  Lying, I mouthed to Tom.

  “We measured the cat food. There was no way.”

  Eddie distractedly rubbed a calloused hand over his face. “You measured the cat food? Jesus.”

  The younger guy nodded. “It wasn’t just that. Why were our pillows from the bed on the couch? I mean, look, it’s fine if you hang out, but—”

  Eddie was indignant. “I was playing with the cat! I was lying down on the couch with the cat, giving it quality time, like you told me to do!”

  The younger guy shook his head. “We just had to get someone else.” Eddie said nothing and looked bleakly out the window. “Listen,” the guy went on. “Do you want to be considered a reserve cat sitter?”

  After a moment, Eddie pulled himself together. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah. That would be cool.”

  Today I bypassed the coffee shop—too much to do. Then I walked by a church with a hand-lettered sign taped on the front door. BAKE SALE INSIDE FOR CHILDREN’S CHARITIES, it read. What heartless monster could continue walking? I went in. Four card tables were piled with goods. I scrutinized the selections carefully, passing over the sexier items—the chocolate chip cookies, Rice Krispie treats, and neatly frosted chocolate cupcakes—to find what I wanted. On the third table sat a crooked, grayish Bundt cake of indeterminate flavor with a swampy surface, as if it hadn’t been baked enough. A too-thick layer of red-sugar sprinkles had been dumped over the wetness like sawdust over a stain. The crimson dye had oozed out of the sprinkles so that it looked like the cake had been stabbed and was bleeding.

  “I’ll take it,” I said to the lady who was watching me expectantly. I picked up a bag of dark, lumpy shot puts that might have been burned oatmeal cookies. “These, too.”

  The woman beamed. “Wonderful!” I beamed back. My small good deed buoyed me. So far, all was well.

  Every time I find a community group or an elementary school holding a bake sale, I stop in, carefully choose the most unappetizing items, and buy them. I can’t tolerate the thought of some well-meaning person spending an afternoon making a hideous Bundt cake that no one will touch. At least a few of the frosted brownies are going to go, but those fruitcake cookies? If I don’t buy them, I will be haunted by the scene of a grim-faced parishioner or parent of a first grader sadly throwing out her stale, forlorn creation at the end of the sale.

  Which of course is what I do, too. I take them home (to avoid another scene that torments me, of a dismayed baker who spies his uneaten fruitcake cookies in a nearby trash can), and then I stuff them into my own garbage bin. Tom correctly thinks that I’m insane, and further, that I encourage inept baking, but I can’t help it.

  In the same vein, I can never resist going into a women’s exchange store, one of those humble nonprofits that help women who have fallen on rough times sell their handcrafted doodads. Origina
lly these stores were part of a national movement after the Civil War, which left many women without husbands or a way to earn a living. The storefront displays of these places will tear your freakin’ heart out: hand-knit sweaters and crocheted napkins and pastel baby clothes. What cretin, what inhuman ogre could walk past that sock monkey sitting hopefully in the window, waiting to be taken home? I once spent two hundred dollars at the Baltimore Woman’s Industrial Exchange, and did I need that mint-green knit afghan, the set of woven potholders? I also stop at all lemonade stands offering room-temperature beverages that are probably half saliva, or urine. I stop at any farm stand with a trusting coffee can on a table to stuff your money in and buy ten squashes that end up rotting on my kitchen counter.

  And so, clutching my lumpy, wet, cellophane-wrapped Bundt cake, I continued on. Yes, all is well, I told myself. I thought of a popular British wartime poster that crisply instructed the citizenry, KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON. That would be my new motto.

  But then I was rattled by a series of annoying encounters. As I went to the gym, I opened the door for a woman who didn’t thank me—or even look at me. I noticed that the guy who loudly and repeatedly blew his nose into the neckline of his shirt as he clomped on the running machine was there, so I moved as far from him as I could. Then, as I climbed onto an elliptical machine, I realized I had forgotten my iPod to block out the loud dance music my gym plays. I am part of the tiny minority who prefer what a friend of mine calls Contractor Rock, which is the J. Geils and Billy Squier that your contractor plays to keep his energy up as he rips open your walls.

  And so I was forced to listen as a guy behind me with a backward baseball cap ignored the NO CELL PHONES sign and dialed up his bud.