Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo?

by Jancee Dunn

  “Dude,” he brayed. “S’going on? Not much. Chillin,’ chillin.’ You? What’s up? Yeah, me neither. So what’s happening?”

  This fruitless search for something that was “up” went on for twenty minutes. A glare in his direction was all I could muster. I’m always afraid that if I confront someone, he’s going to flip out and cause a scene, or stab me. And so I fume silently, and then for the next hour I try out various snappy retorts. Hey there, sorry to interrupt your chillin,’ but do you mind turning off your phone, like the sign plainly says?

  As I left the gym for the grocery store, I dialed my friend Lou. “I really have to try not to let rude people get to me,” I said.

  “Tell me about it,” said Lou, who could handily access his latent rage at any time. He ticked off his pet peeves. “I hate when girls go to stretch out on the mats and then lie down and proceed to text. They’ll do one halfhearted sit-up, and then check if they got a response. They aren’t stretching anything except their thumbs. Then they have to have the frequent sips of water because just the thought of working out has dehydrated them! Nothing’s happened yet, but they’re drinking! Take a sip, adjust hair, take a sip, adjust hair.”

  Lou was now fully cranked. “How about people who warm up for the treadmill by putting the sole of their foot to the back of their head? Why? Oh, and don’t forget the other stretch that involves craning the neck constantly to see who else is in the gym!”

  “I know, but I—”

  “What about clappers who watch sporting events and feel the need to vocalize every goal or score? Imagine if everyone who watched Family Feud did that! What are they so excited about? Are they part owners? Do they have a bet riding on it?”

  Unfortunately Lou was not helping my mood. I hung up and journeyed onward to the bank. I passed a guy standing on the sidewalk with no discernible purpose. “Hey, there,” he said. “Smile!” I glowered at him. Why do men like to tell women to smile? Am I in a pageant? Who walks down the street smiling?

  My phone rang. It was my mother. “I just watched the best show, e-vah,” she enthused. “You’ve got to tape it. It’s called Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel. Now, I generally hate watching sports, especially golf, which I can’t even bear to hear your father discuss. But you know, this show goes deep into the lives of some of these sports figures, and …”

  I was surprised that my mother was proselytizing about one of her “programs.” Usually this was my father’s domain. Once a week I would receive a call from him about the joys of CBS’s Sunday Morning (“You learn so much, and a lot of the segments are very uplifting”), Battlestar Galactica (“pure escapism”), and The Shield (“real quality writing, just so many great characters, the show ended but it’s available on DVD”).

  “… reporters profile their personalities,” my mother was saying, “and a lot of these football players give their time and money to these incredible causes, it’s just very inspiring.” Then she stopped. “What’s wrong?” she said suddenly. “You sound upset.”

  “No, I’m not. I just feel defeated sometimes when I leave the house. People can be so irritating.”

  “You’re just focusing on the bad ones. Most people mean well. It’s silly to fixate on the rude ones, and a waste of energy, because it’s really the other person’s problem. There’s no way you’re going to change people, so why not let it go? Honest to Pete, that’s what I love about getting older. I don’t focus so much on other people.”

  “You have gotten mellower,” I allowed. “So how would you have handled this one? I was just at the seafood market and the couple behind me was making out furiously and it was just the three of us in the store. I don’t quite know why the smell of dead fish got them going. Should I have said something?”

  “Nah. A confrontation isn’t worth it most of the time. It upsets you more than them, and then you’d chew on it for days. Anyway they were getting off doing that in public, so they probably would have loved a reaction. Let it go.”

  “I just feel like people were more polite with each other back in the day.”

  She snorted. “That’s because they were. I was there. I think a lot of it changed when parents began thinking that their children were entitled, like in school when kids started being allowed to talk back to teachers. But listen: This is now. Stop fixating. After you hang up, just start counting the good encounters you have with people. I think you’ll probably be surprised. And talk to people. The world is smaller and friendlier when you engage. It just is. What does Tom always tell you?”

  I sighed. “‘Don’t be weird.’”

  “Right.” She told me about her recent encounter with a woman in a coffee shop who stood next to her at the milk-and-sugar station. My mother was intimidated because she was tall, chicly dressed, and elegantly coiffed. “I thought, This is not going to be a nice person, but I said, ‘I’m sorry I’m in your way, but my coffee has to be the exact color I like, or I can’t drink it.’ Well, she was so nice, and said she couldn’t let her husband fix her coffee because it had to have the exact amount of sugar and cream in it or she’d pour it out. I shouldn’t have made assumptions about her, and I see you do that a lot—judging people. You write their story for them before they’ve had a chance to open their mouths.”

  I told her I would try to stop, even as I doubted that the strangers in my neighborhood were quite as friendly as the ones in her small suburban town. I was proved right on my final errand when a scantily clad girl with a blond pixie cut shoved ahead of me on the sidewalk so that I stumbled onto the street. I scowled at her back. Could your shorts be any shorter? I ranted in my head. Why give everyone a free show? Nice tiny tube top so your stupid back tattoo is visible. You’re hip! We get it!

  I got closer to her and realized she had headphones on, so she hadn’t been aware of me on the sidewalk. Then I got even closer and got a gander of her tattoo. It was festooned with tiny hearts and flowers. NANA, it said.

  His ’n’ Hers Tiger-Print Underwear

  in Soft, Shape-Retaining Fabric

  I spent many, many hours as a youth lying on my bed, sequestered from all that fresh air and sunshine, paging through my favorite catalogs. For those of us who grew up in the seventies and eighties, poring over them was a rite of passage. Those portals to a more glamorous, merchandise-filled life were our version of cable television. They fueled my burning desire to be blithely rich, if only to be able to call up Swiss Colony and casually order a Do-bosh Torte, a fifteen-layer chocolate cake that seemed the height of sophistication at the time.

  I was hypnotized by Swiss Colony’s offerings, especially the gargantuan gift boxes overflowing with an explosion of gaily wrapped cheese wedges, petits fours, and vaguely named but enticing “beef logs.” Someday, I would think. Someday when I’m a grown-up and I have my own money, I will call this catalog and order whatever I want. Also, I will drive an orange Corvette Sting Ray.

  My friend Julie never gravitated toward foodstuffs, instead spending her youth indoors studying the wares of Lillian Vernon. “The stuff was brightly colored, and more important, it was cheap, so you could actually order things,” she says. “Like the roly-poly pens, which were five pens in different rainbow colors with sand in them so they stood up like Weebles. It was all about getting things personalized, too, which is so fun when you’re a kid.” (Offering monograms for the masses was a canny move on Lillian’s part.)

  My sister Dinah used to regularly lose herself in the pastel world of Avon. “Avon rarely had a light touch when they made up their models,” she says. “Usually they would be wearing three or four different colors of eye shadow. Their lids looked like peacock feathers. They were obviously going somewhere glamorous, somewhere middle school kids were not invited. That’s where I wanted to be.”

  One of my favorite things about Avon was its tradition of bestowing on its perfumes nuttily exotic names, from the now-discontinued Far Away Fantasy, To a Wild Rose, and Lemon Velvet to one of its more current men’s fragrances, the not-so-
evocatively-titled Perceive. Perceive? But I, too, daydreamed over the Avon catalog. What I really wanted to order was the carefree self-confidence of the fresh-faced models. High school is about never being quite right, and in the catalog world, nobody looked awkward. Those pink-cheeked models appeared to take all of that shiny merchandise for granted, in a way that I never would.

  I grew up, as George Orwell once put it, “lower upper-middle class.” My father was a JC Penney manager in a town of doctors and lawyers. While I was well aware that I had it leagues better than most people in the rest of the world, my folks were constantly battling debt in their (ultimately futile) quest to remain in that comfortable town. If they bought us something, it was not replaced unless it physically fell apart. For twenty-two years, I had the same foam pillow on my bed, which gradually compressed into a hard rectangle with the texture of a dentist’s lead blanket for X-rays. That pillow, along with my rigid secondhand mattress, which was as flat as a Japanese tatami mat, ensured that I didn’t get a decent sleep for decades. But it would never have occurred to me to ask for another.

  I yearned, with rampant teen shallowness, to live like our glamorous neighbors, the Roses. I babysat their children and frequently brought along my sister Heather to help (and, continuing the family tradition of parsimony, gave her one sixteenth of my fee for the privilege). When we had bundled the kids off to bed, Heather and I would nose around their spotless home and marvel at their offhand affluence.

  “Look at this,” Heather would say, opening the fridge to reveal a silver bowl of whipped cream and another of strawberries. “Real whipped cream! No can! They must put it on the strawberries for dessert. On a Tuesday night!” She held up a box. “And look. Go-diva mints. Not for company. Just for eating” She darted to the kitchen sink. “Did you see this?” She held up a container of dishwashing liquid. “They don’t water down their dish soap like Dad does. Look at how thick it is!”

  In my fevered mind, those people in the catalogs lived like the Roses, airbrushed to perfection and surrounded by all of their accessories for the Good Life. I just knew that if I possessed the right stuff, all of my insecurities would melt away. Which is why catalogs were the ideal fantasy fodder. If I were to go to the mall and glimpse some of that merchandise up close, the strange colors and hanging threads would be disappointingly apparent (and seeing the clothes on my lumpy teen body was inevitably worse). But not with catalogs, whose transformative possibilities waited enticingly, and conveniently, in the future.

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, my most-thumbed catalog was JC Penney, because with my father’s employee discount and falcon eye for sales, there was a small chance that we might actually be able to buy something. The Christmas catalog sent me into paroxysms of greed. I burned for that kid-sized cardboard pop-up house and the doll that came with a trunkful of a dozen outfits. Quantity, not quality, was crucial. What fun was the Baby Alive doll, which “ate” real fruit-colored food that ended up in a viscous yellow or orange splotch in her diapers, unless it came with three thousand refill packages of baby food?

  Heather would stare, year in, year out, at a grainy photo in the Penney’s catalog of the Easy-Bake oven and its accompanying mixes. “To this day, I would just die to receive that in the mail,” she says in hushed tones. “There was the regular assortment, the deluxe, and the mega-deluxe. You know which one I wanted. And I never forgot the child-sized electric cars, which back in the day were so foreign and magical. You’d fantasize about being the only one driving it around in your neighborhood.”

  That our parents would bark with laughter if we asked for these items only made the longing worse. When I was nine, I ventured into the living room where my mother was reading the newspaper after work. I hesitantly asked if she would buy me the Easy-Bake oven from the catalog, making what I thought was an exceedingly generous offer to share it equally with my sisters.

  “Sure, sweetheart,” she said absently, her eyes still on the arts section.

  Hope and suspicion wrestled within me. Was this a trick? Had I caught her in a magnanimous mood? Then she looked up and I knew.

  “I’ll just tell your father to work seven days a week instead of six,” she said with freezing calm. “No problem! And I’ll put in for more overtime, because I only worked three nights this week.” I slowly backed out of the room.

  Happily, deprivation powered my creative mind. I may well have become a writer because of the fantasies I conjured of a new, improved me living in a stately pleasure dome. Guests would marvel at the artistic verve of my foot-shaped shag rug, the sheer, wasteful luxury of my giant baseball-glove-shaped chair and my tabletop air-hockey game.

  It’s been a few decades since I read every page of a Penney’s catalog, but I was afforded the opportunity not long ago when I gave a book reading at a church in Fairfield, Connecticut. My folks, as they often do, loyally showed up, and afterward, the organizers thoughtfully presented us with some vintage Penney’s catalogs they had procured on eBay.

  The next day I leafed through a dusty 1975 edition, chuckling at the his ’n’ her overall sets, the tiny polyester light-blue leisure suits for incredibly bummed-out boys, the Evel Knievel Daredevil Action stunt cycle.

  When I got to page 163, I stopped laughing. What was this? For $19.95, you could buy your very own JC Penney ceramic water pipe. “For a cooler, smoother smoking experience,” read the caption. “Can be smoked by 1, 2, or 3 persons at a time.” They didn’t even bother with a perfunctory “for tobacco use only” warning at the bottom. They knew. They knew.

  I dialed up my father. “Dad? Did you know your company’s catalog used to sell water pipes?”

  “Well, no, that’s not true,” he said. “We didn’t do plumbing parts. Automotive, yes, but, I don’t recall any—”

  I interrupted him. “You smoke pot with a water pipe. It makes the smoke more mellow. Apparently.”

  “I find that hard to believe. Are you sure?”

  I informed him that I most certainly was, hung up the phone, and examined the catalog more closely. Oh my. On page 304 was a Glenfield 60 semiautomatic rifle (“Save $8.00!”). Well, at least it wasn’t offered in the Christmas catalog. And here we have some skimpy, 100 percent nylon tricot His ’n’ Hers Tiger-Print Underwear, in—gaack—“soft, shape-retaining fabric.” Why would you want your nylon tricot to stay molded in the shape of your private parts? Had my parents bounded down the stairs for breakfast in those getups, I would have headed straight to the therapist’s couch before preschool. Over in the housewares section, a black fake-fur bedspread that would have shamed Hugh Hefner was on offer, with matching black fake-fur draperies. Missing was the warning not to light up a postcoital cigarette around all of that spun acrylic, unless you wanted your new bedroom to be a burn unit.

  My head swam as I kept flipping the pages in alarm. The entire catalog was a louche countercultural carnaval of sleaze: black-light posters, a child’s T-shirt with the sweet, endearing slogan DO IT IN THE DIRT, a doll called Growing Up Skipper (“Turn her arm and she grows a full ½ inch,” meaning that a large pair of jugs erupts through her chest cavity). Even the straight-laced automotive section peddled floor mats for the car embossed with a dazed, grinning bear and the saying IF IT FEELS GOOD, DO IT! (Tell me: What activity pops into your head? Right. Me, too.)

  And my father willingly brought this filth into our home? Even the cardboard walk-in playhouses I once coveted evinced a bleakness my younger eyes had missed. I had always yearned for the Burger King Playhouse, a cardboard drive-through window that seemed festive at the time, with its plastic burgers and crisp paper hats for the workers. When I studied the catalog photo with older, wearier eyes, I saw a chubby kid, already a victim of supersizing, sitting inside the window, hunched over a Burger King bag that he’s about to hand off to a “customer.” It’s the single most depressing toy I’ve ever seen. Hang on for a few years, kid, and your “dreams” can come true!

  But by far the most disheartening toy that JC Penney offered in 19
75 was the Sunshine Valley House, a pop-up vinyl abode that housed the free-livin,’ free-lovin’ Sunshine family There was groovy long-haired patriarch Steve, granny-dress-and-sandals-wearing Stephie (his girlfriend, presumably, because they certainly didn’t need a piece of paper to tell the world how they felt), and tiny, illegitimate Baby Sweets. An extra $3.87 bought you a Family Activity Craft Pack, including the unsettling River Trip Pack, complete with miniature frying pans for “live-off-the-land” suppers. The whole sordid drama unfolded in my adult mind. Too bad for Baby Sweets that the river trip was a one-way journey, after Steve couldn’t pay the bills with free love and had to sell the pop-up house. It won’t be so bad, living by the river, Stephie thinks. At least we all have each other. Maybe another baby will bring us closer. I won’t tell Steve I’m throwing away my diaphragm. It’ll be a surprise!

  After I made my upsetting discovery I brought the musty catalog to my folks’ house and made my father look through it. “You see?” I demanded. “Sodom and Gomorrah.”

  But my father was absorbed in the men’s pajamas. “Boy, I remember that robe,” he said dreamily. “Had it for years. Never frayed.”

  “Dad,” I said. “Look here.” I pointed to a page that peddled a red fake-fur toilet-seat cover, which offered both comfort and the convenient ability to absorb pesky stray drips. “When did you start catering to pimps?”

  “Well, we were reflecting the demands of the customers at the time,” he faltered, but then he cracked and burst out laughing. (Later he forwarded jpegs of some of the choicer items to his Penney’s cronies, who also had a good chortle.)

  I loved to rib my father, but I knew everything is different seen through kids’ eyes. What princess canopy bed could possibly match the hype of my overheated dreams? Who among us has not been crushed when those long-awaited Sea-Monkeys arrived, and they weren’t wearing crowns and smiling but were tiny brine shrimp that resembled waterlogged silverfish? I thought back to the time when I finally procured a credit card during the summer of my first year of college and, coached by Dinah and Heather in the background, ordered a small gift box from Swiss Colony.