Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo?

by Jancee Dunn

  I fumbled for my purse, overcome with an impulse familiar to many who travel, of wanting to help and a fear of being besieged. The driver turned around. “Don’t give them money,” he warned, “or the car will be surrounded and we won’t be able to move.” The people kept coming. After an eternity the light changed. I made a vow to donate to a local organization when I returned home, but I felt ashamed that I hadn’t obeyed a human impulse to help.

  The next morning we made our way through the pushing, jostling crowds on Delhi’s teeming sidewalks. I thought the press of bodies was hard until we hit Shastri Park and saw the gangs of screaming, scuttling monkeys darting through the greenery. Hindus consider them to be sacred and feed them peanuts and bananas. Hadn’t anyone seen Outbreak? Delhi was overrun with hungry rhesus monkeys, an estimated ten to twenty thousand of them. When we were there, reports of “marauding monkey gangs” dominated the papers.

  I steered clear. When did interacting with playful monkeys become a required tourist activity? How many vacation photos do I have to see of friends’ trips to Brazil or Costa Rica or Cambodia with the requisite shot of rogue monkeys crawling on their shoulders and searching for nits in their hair? What is so charming about a pack of monkeys stealing your sunglasses or snatching the ice cream cone that you just paid for and scampering up a tree? Monkeys aren’t cuddly. They screech. They bite. They spread mysterious viruses (see “travel fears,” above).

  It seemed safer on the street, which was thronged with vendors selling vegetables and bread and batteries and underwear.

  Everything imaginable took place on that sidewalk. People were bathing, arguing, relieving themselves, sleeping on mats, eating breakfast. A man in an old La-Z-Boy chair was having his impressively long ear hair carefully trimmed by a barber. Another guy was getting a tooth pulled. A third was casually trimming his toenails.

  For the first few days, I did a lot of muttering Get me out of here under my breath. I truly did not understand what the hoo-ha was all about. But on the fourth night, the magic did kick in for me—inspired by, of all people, one of our ex-presidents. We had gone to dinner (Delhi’s food, by the way, was sublime), and at the entrance of the restaurant we saw, for the fourth time, yet another photo of Bill Clinton. Apparently he’d spent a few weeks in India and had hit every restaurant he possibly could. In the photo, Clinton had his arm around the proprietor. Both were grinning broadly, as were the hundred employees surrounding them. Next to it was a snap of Clinton dancing at an Indian wedding that he seemed to have crashed. He was out of breath and laughing. Lord knows the man had his faults, but was there a living person who enjoyed being around others more than he? At the time, he had to contend with leading the Western world. So why was I squandering my time being tense? When you travel, a sense of control is the first thing to go. What was the point of coming all this way if I didn’t eagerly leap into everything like our ex-president did?

  And so I stopped fixating on the relentless crush of humanity that heaved and undulated around me at all times. Once you realize you cannot do a thing about the crowds, you have no choice but to put reports of stampedes at Hindu temples out of your mind, relax, and enjoy what really is an extraordinary place.

  Traveling to other cities usually makes me appreciate the pristine splendor of my obsessively dirt-free home, but this did not happen on our journey to Tokyo. The whole city was so immaculate that it only made me realize how much cleaner I could become.

  Everyone who returns from Tokyo raves about the mind-bending high-tech kookiness of the city. One prime example is Namjatown, a huge, hallucinatory amusement park housed inside a sprawling indoor mall called Sunshine City in Ikebukuro. The fever dream of Namco, creator of Pac-Man and other arcade games, it’s a dizzying funhouse of weirdness, the best part being the food, particularly the dumpling-centered theme park called Ikebukuro Gyoza Stadium, which mimics a bygone Japanese town with a winding street lined by umpteen gyoza shops, each created by a different, vaunted gyoza chef Afterward, we visited Ice Cream City, an explosion of candy-colored ice cream shops offering hundreds of flavors, including squid, beef tongue, pumpkin, and Indian curry I had the soy ice cream, while Tom helped himself to a scoop of the cheese.

  But even better than Ice Cream City was my room at the new Peninsula Hotel in the Marunouchi district. It is the most thrilling place I have ever been in. You will need to take out a third mortgage to afford it—we saved for a year—but I will never see those sorts of high-tech perks again. It took a good hour to inspect all of the wonders of that room. I raced around like a kid hyped on too much sugar. (Jaded, I’m not. A music publicist for Queen once told me that when Freddie Mercury arrived at a new hotel room, he would jump on the beds. Freddie is my inspiration.)

  The room was more thoughtfully intuitive than the most solicitous butler. When the phone (which displays the time and weather in your hometown) rang, the television and radio automatically muted. The bathroom phone, meanwhile, featured a digital filter to blot out any betraying echo indicating that you were conducting business on the bowl. The thermostat, which was next to the wall-panel Internet radio, had a control button to adjust the room’s humidity level. I jacked it so high you could have grown orchids in there. Built into the capacious walk-in closet was a nail dryer, just in case your nails were still wet after your spa manicure. Next to the tub was a “spa” button, which automatically dimmed the lights and switched the radio station to calming music as you sank into the bubbles. Heaven! And—why didn’t someone think of this sooner?—a fleet of “privacy” buttons, accessible from the bed and, crucially, the john, just in case a staff member knocked at the door while you were indisposed.

  But the very best part of that room was the toilet, demurely hidden by discreet frosted-glass panels. When I clapped my eyes on it, a choir of angels sang sweetly in the background. In fact, there is probably some model that actually provides the music of angels for added comfort and relaxation. I approached this marvel of sanitation with humility and awe. It had an automatic open-and-close lid (usually I handle all lids outside my own home with a crumpled tissue, Howard Hughes–style), auto flush, and an air purifier that instantly neutralized odor.

  “I never knew it could be like this,” I whispered. It was the ultimate fetish object for a clean freak like myself. Situated by the seat—which was heated, of course—was a thrillingly complicated panel of buttons. Front/rear cleanse. Soft cleanse. Oscillating. Pulsating. There was even an adjustable cleansing wand for added control. And after all that specialized washing, a warm-air dryer with five temperature settings gently stirred your nether regions like a sweet spring zephyr.

  “I’m going to try a soft cleanse,” I whispered. “No, an oscillating soft cleanse, followed by a medium-heat dry.”

  “Come on,” called Tom. “I found a great noodle place in Roppongi.”

  “Five more minutes!” I called desperately. I did everything but lick that toilet. Which I probably could have.

  I wanted to live in that bathroom. For the week of our stay, I practically did. Every night I would guzzle pints of water. Time to go to the bathroom again! Sometimes I would rush toward the toilet to try and beat the automatic lid. It always won. By the end of the week, the toilet and I seemed to have reached an affectionate understanding. If I woke in the night, that toilet knew. Before my feet reached the floor next to my bed, I could swear I heard the discreet zzzzt of the lid opening. “You rascal,” I said one night with a chuckle.

  Tom stirred in the bed. “Who are you talking to?” he asked blearily.

  “What? Oh, no one.”

  At the end of that enchanted week, I had to be physically pried away from my beloved new friend. It was no surprise that when I returned to the States, my cleanliness mania grew alarmingly worse. Toilet paper seemed so barbaric. So maybe not every trip built up my character. In fact I think our jaunt to Japan diminished my character, because I’ve spent a little too much time since then scheming to buy a top-of-the-line Toto Washlet.

/>   “Don’t tell me you’re on that toilet website again,” Tom said to me this morning as I hunched over my computer.

  “Of course not,” I said, smoothly changing screens to BBC News. But I can’t stop. One day I will possess that toilet, if only to erase the image that haunts me of our final parting, when, for the last time, the lid gently closed, as if it was sadly waving good-bye.

  This Is a Prank, Right?

  Not long ago I was on a flight from New York to Los Angeles and fell into a conversation with my seatmate, a woman in her thirties with spectacular caramel highlights and one of those artfully draped cashmere throws that well-groomed women wear to ward off chilly plane air. Usually I don headphones and whip out a book the minute I sit down, especially after being burned by an incident on my last flight. I had been seated next to a man who, before I had fastened my seat belt securely and adjusted my seat to its upright position, had shaken my hand and boomed, “Good to meet you! How are you today?”

  I’ve logged thousands of hours in the air and have learned that this greeting indicates the dreaded Chatty Person in Sales. The giveaway is the word today, followed by repeated usage of your name (“Well, Jancee, I grew up in Chicago but decided to go to school on the East Coast, and you know, Jancee, it’s funny …”).

  But this woman—a lawyer for environmental causes, I learned—was low-key and graciously refrained from hogging our joint armrest. And so we traded biographies. I explained that I was joining my husband, who was already in Los Angeles, for a flight to China. Imagine, I went on, that one day your husband tells you he’s writing a book and must travel to Tokyo, Delhi, Rome, Mexico City, and Berlin, among other cities, for research and would I like to come along? It had been a dream.

  She frowned. “But what did you do with your kids?”

  I replied that I didn’t have any.

  “Why not?” She had already told me that she had two young sons.

  This question has been put to me probably a hundred times. It always struck me as an odd thing to ask, because it was so personal, and also the very phrase “Why not?” implied that I was somehow shirking my duty as a woman. In any case, I never seemed to deliver an answer that satisfied my inquisitor. “Well,” I began, “my husband and I have always been on the fence about it, and in the meantime, we’ve been having so much fun that the years have just sort of slipped by.” I shrugged.

  “Hmm,” she said, and I knew what was coming next. “Don’t you think it’s selfish not to have children?”

  This dishearteningly familiar argument never failed to amaze me. Why on earth was refraining from adding a child to a world with an exploding population and diminishing ozone layer selfish?

  In the same breath, she switched to fearmongering: Who, she asked me, was going to care for me when I was old?

  That one never stirred any alarm, for it always seemed to me that when you reached your dotage, being in possession of a giant pile of money was infinitely more useful than having offspring. A grudging weekly visit or phone call from Junior might be nice, but surely it would be much nicer to be able to afford to rebuff the nursing home in favor of a private nurse and personal chef to care for me in my own cozy surroundings. Cynical? Perhaps. But I always called up the same rosy picture of my doddering years: I am in a down-filled armchair in my expansive library. A fire crackles invitingly in the fireplace as I settle in with a sigh and open a book with my gnarled hand. My private nurse bustles in with a blanket, cooing that she doesn’t want me to catch a cold. She tucks it around me as my chef brings me a steaming cup of tea and easy-to-chew, well-buttered toast on a gleaming silver tray. Who needed kids? I’d rather pay staffers to listen to me prattle about the old days than torture some grandchild into listening to creaky tales from my rock-and-roll past. At that point, who would care except my well-paid companions about the time a wobbly Pete Townshend slurred “I love your frock” backstage, lurched to hug me, and knocked me over?

  “I don’t see being child-free as selfish,” I told the woman.

  “Well, I can tell you that before I had kids, I was all about me, me, me,” she said, fluttering her hand. “Kids really set your priorities straight. Honestly, I never realized how shallow I was before.”

  Then I got angry. Why was this any of her business? And what was so altruistic about shifting her focus from herself to her kids? “Right,” I said, struggling to keep my voice level. “So your decision to reproduce was a selfless act, was it?” (I wasn’t quite that articulate, because I was flustered.) “So your motive for having kids was to further the greater good of humanity?”

  The rest of the flight was glacially silent.

  I probably overreacted. But at that point I was so bone-weary of yet another well-meaning but tactless person joining in the discussion of my sadly empty, tumbleweed-strewn uterus—from the cabdriver who once warned that I’d never be a “real woman” to a grandmotherly type who asked me, with genuine concern, why I “hated children.”

  Part of my impatience stemmed from my fruitlessly debating the subject with Tom at home. Was there anything worse than two analytical writers on a tediously elliptical loop? We veered endlessly between pro and con. On the one hand, being around children for any length of time made me a bit tense. I’m the person who enters a restaurant, sees shouting kids running in the aisles, and storms out. I deliberately take vacations when school is in session. I gag when I smell chicken nuggets. I flee from noise. Tom’s worse. He’s like those stern old men in British gentlemen’s clubs who glance up sharply when someone rustles a copy of the London Times with too much vigor.

  On the other hand, what if having a kid was actually fun? At my advanced age, I could only manage to extrude one shrunken, dried-out baby anyway, so it’s not as if I would be overwhelmed. So many friends whom I trust have tearfully told me that having children was the best decision they had ever made. Think of life, one of them had said, as if it’s a bridge made of rope. The more ropes you have that tether you to the earth, the better. Sometimes I did get the feeling that I was ever so slightly adrift—but maybe everyone felt that way.

  And while my weekends with Tom were peaceful idylls filled with books and late breakfasts and old movies, there were times when I felt like our apartment was too ordered, too still. Sometimes—only sometimes—I envied the cheery chaos in the background when I phoned a friend who had kids.

  Years passed with no resolution, until we were so tired of the subject that we figured we would simply leave it to fate. I know, I know—sometimes when friends have informed me that a pregnancy “just happened,” I have been puzzled. How could a person be so randomly offhand about such an enormous decision? Either you wanted a kid, or you didn’t, and if you tossed the birth control pills, surely you were craving a child, if even on an unconscious level.

  Yet that is exactly what we decided to do in order to break our crippling deadlock. And as time went by, we both presumed that fate was delivering us a firm no and accepted the fact with equanimity. And at least my advancing age finally managed to halt the flow of family propaganda—the pro-kid presentations, the flow charts and PowerPoint presentations, along with assurances that every family member would babysit for up to a week at a time. Happily, this campaign had dried up along with my womb.

  Still, at any familial gathering, someone would make a halfhearted pitch, mostly out of habit. On the previous Labor Day weekend, Tom and I had gone to my folks’ place to take advantage of their pool. It was a crumbling old concrete structure that my father was too cheap to heat despite my having bought him a pool heater in desperation, but we were grateful for a place to splash around in nonetheless. On Labor Day, Heather stopped by for a lunch of barbecued pork sandwiches and chocolate pecan bars that my mother had decided to make from her recipe bible, Southern Living.

  While Tom and Heather’s husband, Rob, headed out for a quick game of basketball, we set the table. Then I saw my mother and Heather exchange a brief but significant look.

  “So,” Heather be
gan, elaborately casual. “I guess you’ve completely given up on the idea of children, huh?” Heather was always the spokesperson on this topic, and then my mother would unobtrusively chime in. This was a deliberate move. I could just picture my mother telling Heather, You bring it up. Shell feel pressured if I do it. I saw how irritated she got when I happened to mention that the psychic I consulted last year said I was goin’ to have six grandkids, and I’m only up to four.

  I stopped pouring the iced tea and faced her. “You know what? I just don’t think it’s in the cards, and you shouldn’t feel bad about it. I have a life that is more exciting and fun than I ever would have imagined. Honestly, I don’t feel any sort of void.”

  Heather nodded. “I believe you. I do.” My mother hovered behind her, wondering whether she should jump in or not.

  “Fate is telling us that it’s not happening,” I added. “I swear on my life that I’m all right with it.” I grabbed her by the shoulders. “I’m all right.”

  My mother, who was pretending to be preoccupied with emptying a bag of potato chips into their “company” cut-glass potato chip bowl, couldn’t resist opening her yap. “But you’re not on any sort of birth control, right, honey?” I hadn’t been for five years, but my mother regularly felt the need to confirm this, apparently fearful that I was going to tiptoe off to Planned Parenthood behind her back.

  “Correct. But at my age, it’s highly unlikely that I can produce even a sickly, three-pound preemie for you at this point. So you should bug Dinah and Heather for those extra two grandchildren.”

  Then my mother pointed out, for perhaps the two hundredth time, that her own mother had been forty-two when she came into the world. “Mama thought I was—”