Close to Home

by Cynthia Baxter

  Nevertheless, choosing an appropriate present for Noona was Jessica’s mission here at Toys R Us, a warehouse-sized toy store that was every child’s dream and every parent’s nightmare. In fact, shopping here was like being a contestant on a television game show.

  First the players aimed themselves with a supermarket cart, a key element in allowing them to carry to the check-out counter as many impulse purchases as possible. Then, as they made their way through each one of the six-block-long aisles, each parent and child team was required to find a way to compromise on an endless number of conflicting goals with the minimum of tears—for the child as well as for the parent. The child invariably wanted to look at, touch, sing the television commercial for, name the manufacturer of, and, in the end, demand the purchase of as many toys as possible. The parent, meanwhile, strove to minimize the number of items that actually made it into the cart. Finally, it was time to tally up the day’s acquisitions. The winner not only got a trunkful of plastic, she also got an application form from a local bank to refinance her house.

  This time, however, as Jessica passed through the electric doors, she was armed with more than her supermarket cart and her charge card. Today, she had come equipped with a strategy.

  “Okay, Sammy,” she informed him as they swung into the section right inside the door, that one that was shrewdly stocked with irresistibles like candy, seasonal toys, and more guns and grenades than Fort Dix, “We’re mainly here to buy a birthday present for Noona. But you can pick out one toy. One, Sammy, got it? Just one, but it can be anything you want. Almost anything,” she was quick to correct herself.

  “Okay,” Sammy agreed happily. “But we won’t buy any shooting toys, because you don’t like them, right?”

  “That’s right,” Jessica said with a firm nod.

  Talking to himself, in a voice that was barely audible, Sammy said, “I like shooting toys.”

  Ordinarily, Jessica gritted her teeth and headed for the “boy’’ aisles, the ones characterized by dark, masculine colors like black and navy blue and the olive greens and beiges of camouflage. Shopping for a boy’s toy was like perusing the latest issue of Soldier of Fortune magazine. Violence was the byword here, be it in the no-holds-barred form of G.I. Joe and Rambo toys or the more subtle, more stylized versions, like Ninja Turtles and Transformers, a line of plastic cars, trucks, and airplanes that converted, absurdly enough, into killer robots.

  Not that every toy relied on the formula “playtime equals killing time.” There were more peaceful toys, as well, although what they lacked in maiming ability they more than made up for in macho stereotyping. There were the construction toys, the cranes and bulldozers and tractors, many of which came complete with batteries, little plastic men in construction helmets, and teensy-weensy union cards. There were infinite varieties of motorcycles and race cars, emphasizing that ever-popular male belief that faster is better. As for the creation of phallic symbols, there was every manner of building toy, an example of “variation on a theme” being carried to a bizarre extreme.

  But she was not in the market for a boy’s toy on this particular occasion. Today Jessica headed toward the girl aisles, easy enough to locate for anyone who wasn’t color-blind. If it wasn’t either pink or lavender, after all, it simply was not deemed suitable for the female half of the population.

  On the way she passed through the art supplies, and she paused to consider something along those lines. But chances were that Noona Applebaum and her Stepford mom resided in a house that was decorated at least as meticulously as they were, and so fingerpaints and Play-Doh would probably be as welcome there as a baby seal coat at a Greenpeace fund-raiser. With that thought in mind, she continued on to the pink section, hoping that venturing into this previously unexplored section of the toy store wouldn’t prove so demoralizing that she would require a chocolate milk shake from McDonald’s to recover.

  Her hopes were short-lived.

  This is where it begins, she thought the moment she entered the first pink aisle and found herself enshrouded by the world of Barbie. The dream condo, the disco, the summer house in the Hamptons; the flimsy bikinis that showed her Mattel trademark; the hair products, the clothes, the makeup, and more froufrou than there was in Zsa-Zsa Gabor’s closet—it was all here.

  This is where we females learn our values, Jessica was thinking morosely. What’s important here in the pink world of little girls is dressing well, like Barbie. Having sensational hair. Spending all our energy—and lots of money, preferably somebody else’s—on looking pretty and frail and ornamental. After all, if you have a great tan, perfectly smooth legs, hair that can change color on a whim, and skirts shorter than Mike Tyson’s temper, you’re guaranteed to live happily ever after.

  Where did it all lead? Why, to marriage, of course. And here in the very next aisle were all the accoutrements of that most desirable state. Toy kitchens, complete with little dishes, small sponges, and microwaveable prepackaged foods. And oh, look! There’s even a little toy iron to play with! A tiny vacuum cleaner, a washer-dryer, a miniature box of Easy-Off oven cleaner. What fun! Now every little girl in America can enjoy playing Illegal Alien Working as a Maid!

  There were some attempts at improving the lot of little girls, at least in terms of their fantasies about the future. Tucked in the corner, for example, behind seven different varieties of nursing kits, there was one dusty doctor’s bag.

  But let’s face it, thought Jessica with a grimace. How much of a chance does a doctor’s kit stand against five thousand feet of shelf space dedicated to Barbie, the beautiful, silent doll who always looks great and never disagrees with anything anybody says?

  Sammy interrupted his contented crooning of “We’re into Barbie,” straight from Channel Five into his impressionable little head, with “Hey, Mom, put your eyes over here.”

  Jessica blinked, then followed the pointing finger to see what had captured his interest. She saw that what he was so excited about was a makeup and nail polish set.

  “Buy me that,” he demanded, his eyes lighting up with the euphoria that only the promise of spending money can cause.

  “Honey,” she said gently, “do you know what that is?” She sounded calm enough, but panic was rising deep inside her. Maybe he thought it was a paint set, or perhaps a model-building kit. And if not, maybe, just maybe, she would be able to sidestep what she was already seeing as a possible disaster.

  “Sure I do,” Sammy said confidently. “It’s makeup and nail polish. It makes you look so beautiful. I saw it on TV. I want it. Buy me that.”

  The moment of truth. Just how did the enlightened mother of the late twentieth century respond to her three-year-old son’s request for a makeup and nail polish set? Did she explain that those were only for girls? That was, after all, a phrase that, up until this point, she was proud to have managed to eliminate from her vocabulary. So far, in Sammy’s entire experience, there was no such thing as “only for girls” and “only for boys.’’ She even made a point of saying fire fighters and mail carriers.

  On the home front. Daddy cooked dinner and washed dishes and vacuumed the rugs—not as frequently as Mommy, certainly, but his bouts of doing household chores did tend to have high visibility, thanks to the enthusiastic monologue he kept up all the while, keeping everybody in the room updated on what he was accomplishing. Mommy, meanwhile, shoveled snow and fought with the insurance company over the phone and did all those things that, back in the old days, people believed required high testosterone levels in order to be accomplished.

  Mommies and daddies were equal. That was the message she was trying to get across to her son. Yet to forbid him to have a coveted toy simply because it was not appropriate for boys . . . well, what kind of message was that?

  Jessica did some fast thinking.

  “Okay, Sammy,’’ she finally said. “If that’s the toy you want, that’s the one you’ll have.”

  He was so gleeful as she took it off the shelf and handed it to him
that she felt bad for having hesitated. For a fraction of a second, she mourned the fact that she and her son lived in a society that forced decisions like this one to be made. Still, as she continued her safari up and down the bubble-gum-colored aisles, she kept one eye out for the other mothers’ reactions to her little boy’s blissful fingering of the pink blister pack of blush and lip gloss, hating herself for being relieved that they all seemed too frazzled even to notice.

  “Now, what shall we get for Noona’s birthday present?” Jessica said. Suddenly she had had enough of shopping, and she wanted to get out of this toy hell.

  That was meant as a rhetorical question, but Sammy took her request for advice to heart.

  “I know,” he said after thinking hard for a few seconds. “How about a Transformer?’’

  Jessica wasn’t sure whether to hug this sex-blind child or to attempt to explain as diplomatically as possibly that race-cars-cum-killer-robots just weren’t an appropriate present for a little girl who had in her possession more lace than a small Belgian village. So she decided not to do either, but rather to treat his suggestion matter-of-factly.

  “That’s a good idea, but you know, I have an even better one. How about a puppet?”

  That was the perfect solution. A hand puppet encouraged creativity, it consisted of only one piece and had no moving parts at all, and it was entirely nonsexist, nonviolent, nontoxic, noncommercial, and noncontroversial. Who could fail to love a floppy puppy, one of those soft brown Gund numbers that was even softer than the real thing and required neither paper training, feeding, nor worming?

  Sure enough, even this bastion of plastic commercialism had them in stock. True, the price was a bit higher than what she had hoped to spend, but she reasoned that she could more or less make up the difference by enlisting Sammy’s aid in making a homemade birthday card, a flashy one made with Elmer’s glue and glitter. She could also use some of the all-occasion wrapping paper she periodically picked up at Odd Job Lots and kept on hand, instead of investing the price of three shares of AT&T to buy something more stylish at Hallmark.

  “There. That was fun, wasn’t it?’’ Jessica said brightly as she wheeled Sammy, the Gund puppy, and the equivalent of half the Clinique counter back to her car. She was relieved that, all in all, the whole expedition had gone quite smoothly. “And I think Noona will like her puppet, don’t you?”

  But Sammy wasn’t listening. He was too busy trying to decide whether to do his nails in pink polish or red.

  * * * *

  The Applebaums’ house in Old Brookville had been designed and decorated with one simple theme in mind: If it looks showy and expensive, use it. Taste, it appeared, was a concept as foreign here as living on a budget. If Jessica had ever had any doubts as to whether or not there was justice in the world, they were banished completely with one look at the monstrosity that the Applebaum family called home.

  There should be a law, thought Jessica. She stood before an oversized house that was part Tudor and part Frank Lloyd Wright, meeting at the halfway point with three-story columns and an ornate Victorian doorway.

  Even so, she had a perverse interest in seeing more. It was, no doubt, that same sick part of the mind that attracted people to movies like Nightmare on Elm Street that was responsible. She let go of Sammy’s hand and rang the doorbell, actually eager to see what lay beyond the white door.

  Not surprisingly, it was not Mrs. Applebaum who answered, but a plump woman who was Central Casting’s perfect housekeeper, complete with black dress, white apron, and gray expression.

  “We’re here for Noona’s party,” Jessica said gaily. “This is Sammy McAllister.”

  “Are you his nanny?” asked the housekeeper.

  “Uh, no.” That was a first. “I’m only his mother.”

  The inside of the house was consistent with the outside. Huge mirrors, laced with gold, made the cavernous interior seem even more cavernous. The white leather furniture looked as if no one had ever dared sit on it; the glass tables displayed only carefully chosen useless items, like a small statue of a grotesque designer dog and a fancy ceramic ashtray that no smoker would ever use. Everywhere there was thick white carpeting. Jessica tried to remember the last time she had washed the soles of her shoes.

  As if she didn’t already feel like the new maid, reporting in on her first day of work, she also had to go to the bathroom.

  “Uh, excuse me, can you tell me where the . . . ?”

  But the housekeeper was already otherwise engaged, at the moment telling the mother, or perhaps the nanny, of Noona’s next guest where to hang her sable coat.

  Calling upon her own initiative, she opened a few doors until she found the bathroom.

  “Is this where the party is?” Sammy asked in confusion.

  “No,” Jessica replied. Glancing around the bathroom, she added, “But it could be.”

  The large room was black. Black and shiny. There were shiny black tiles on the floor, shiny black tiles on the walls, shiny black tiles on the ceiling. Everywhere there were surfaces so shiny that it was possible to watch oneself accomplish any number of hygienic acts from angles that heretofore one could have only fantasized about.

  As she and Sammy reemerged, the sound of music and high-pitched voices told them that the party goers were gathering in the playroom. She led Sammy inside. This room was obviously meant for letting down one’s hair; the leather furniture, after all, was black, and the rugs were dove gray. On one wall was one of those televisions with a screen as big as the one at the drive-in movies.

  Mrs. Applebaum was there, dressed all in white. It occurred to Jessica that she looked as if she were in the wrong room.

  “Oh, look, Sammy is here!” cried Noona. Instantly he was absorbed into the party.

  Jessica sat back, prepared to relax with the other moms. Instead, she realized that most of them were simply dropping off their kids and disappearing. The few who did remain were friends with Mrs. Applebaum, and they immediately launched into an animated discussion of the breakup of the marriage of someone Jessica had never heard of.

  She was tempted to leave herself, to explain to Sammy that this was a social occasion geared only to the younger generation, when an interesting individual appeared in the doorway, either the hired entertainment or a misguided woman who thought that wearing a cat costume was a sure way of guaranteeing social success.

  Mrs. Applebaum soon set Jessica straight.

  “Oh, look, everybody! It’s Prissy the Pussy!” she cried, waving her arm like Mrs. Swifty Lazar announcing a newly arrived guest at her annual Oscar Awards party.

  “Hell-LO, boys and girls.”

  “Hullo,” a few of the children muttered politely.

  “I can’t tear you,” Prissy the Pussy reprimanded. “Hell-LO.”

  “Hello!” This time, the children echoed her greeting with considerably more enthusiasm. They were catching on fast. Just like the army.

  Prissy not only possessed all the charm of a drill sergeant, Jessica observed, but she also had one of the strongest New York accents she had ever heard. Joan Rivers, move over.

  “I’m Prissy the Pussy, and I wanna find out all yaw names. Oh, you girls ah all so beauty-ful! I’m so jealous! And you boys ah so handsome, I’m in love wit’ every single one a yas!”

  “Mom?” Sammy mumbled uncertainly, dashing over to Jessica for reassurance.

  “It’s okay, Sammy,” she said confidently, giving his shoulder a little squeeze. “She’s just pretend.”

  The little boy who was usually such a ball of fire eyed Prissy the Pussy for another few seconds, carefully considering his mother’s assertion.

  “Lookit, boys an’ girls,” Prissy was ordering the crowd of baffled children. “Look who I brought wit’ me today. Are you ready to meet my special friend? Aw, ya gonna love ‘im. Heah he is.”

  She reached into the tan tote bag she had brought along, made out of fuzzy fake fur that looked like it had been made from an old shag rug. She pulled
out a stuffed raccoon whose grooming habits were only slightly better than those of the tote bag with the shag-rug roots.

  “Say hullo, ev’ybody, to Rocco Raccoon!”

  With Rocco’s appearance on the scene, Sammy let out a whimper and scrambled into his mother’s lap. The last time he had resorted to such a desperate act of dependence, from what Jessica could recall, was the summer before at her parents’ house, during a violent thunderstorm.

  “Mom, I can’t like her,” Sammy said, his words merely echoing what his body language had more than sufficiently expressed. “I wanna go home.”

  “Aw, honey, we can’t go home. Not yet. There’s going to be cake and ice cream and balloons—”

  “I wanna go home!”

  Jessica could picture Sammy thirty years down the road, lying on some analyst’s couch, describing a mysterious image that plagued him even though he couldn’t identify the source, that of a woman dressed in black tights and cardboard triangle-shaped ears with eyebrow-pencil whiskers drawn on her face, commanding him in a nasal, Brooklyn-accented voice to shake hands with a matted raccoon.

  “I’ll tell you what. Let’s go somewhere else and wait there until Prissy the Pussy is finished, okay? Maybe we can go play with some of Noona’s toys.”

  Sammy just wanted out. He clung to her in terror as she carried him out of the Leave It to Beaver Goes Italian family room, back into the white living room. Through a window Sammy spotted Noona’s swing set out back.

  “Look, Mom! Swings! I wanna go on those climbing things.”

  Sure enough, Noona’s climbing things were comparable to those owned by the Sea Cliff elementary school, a creative concoction of different levels made from logs that included all manner of tunnels, tires, slides, and metal bars, enough to convince anyone who still doubted that human beings evolved from the apes. There was no one around; Mrs. Applebaum and her pals had vanished completely, and the housekeeper was busy arranging pink candles on a Minnie Mouse birthday cake.

  “Sure,” Jessica said with a shrug. “Why not?”