Oh, she’s a roll of toilet paper. No, she’s a marshmallow
Oh, he’s an ice cube. No, he’s global warming.
Ooo-la-la, she’s a French maid. No, she’s Alice in Wonderland.
If only their mothers had made them signs to wear around their necks. If only all of us wore signs around our necks that announced to everybody who we were. Wouldn’t we be a lot less confused?
Ben is wearing the prison costume. I’ve made him another sign. This one says department of corrections prisoner #328459. I’m so proud of him. I think his costume is just right given his age. It doesn’t look like he worked too hard on it (a plus in my book), and he looks cool.
When I was a kid I was a clown for Halloween. What I mean is that I was a clown every year for Halloween. It was the only option available to me, as Dawn was always a cowgirl and Rebecca, my older sister, was always a witch. At least this is how I remember it. Sara, my youngest sister, was not born yet so she was not a part of this triumvirate. That there was something else to be besides clown, cowgirl and witch never occurred to me.
I was not a person who took risks. I’d start thinking about my costume in the summer. Wonder what I’ll be this year? How about a clown? Maybe a clown? Think I’ll be a clown. Truthfully all the other costumes scared me. When I was nine I believed that the costume you wore sank into you. This was serious stuff. You were choosing who you were going to be. Your costume was your destiny. I watch my son race around the gym, and I see his destiny: his ninja heart, which is no longer safe to show the world; his iPod bones, which he’s chosen for aesthetics and entertainment purposes and which I’ve rejected; and his jailbird skin, which I’m in the process of tattooing permanently onto his body.
I wish I could tell you that when we leave school we drive straight to Target and I buy my son the perfect costume, but this is not a fairy tale. Instead, I go home and climb into bed. I feel like a bride on the morning of her wedding day: pumped full of adrenaline yet fatigued to the point of exhaustion, and the big moment, the big I DO, is yet to come.
A few minutes later Ben climbs into bed with me. I know one day he will be too old to snuggle, but thank God that day hasn’t arrived yet. He doesn’t let me touch him in public anymore, but here in the bowels of our house, in the sanctuary of our bed, it’s safe to throw his legs over mine and let me stroke the hair back from his temple. This is what I’m best at—being his safe place.
Lying in bed, my limbs entangled with his, his feet nearly as big as mine on the eve of what will certainly be the last Halloween I will have any say over what he wants to be, I am light-headed. The day feels stuffed with too many molecules—it’s as if summer, spring, winter and fall have been crammed into one afternoon. I nuzzle Ben’s head.
“Stop smelling me,” he says.
Usually this kind of smelling leads to me telling him to take a shower, which is a very bad outcome for a kid.
“It’s Halloween,” he reminds me. “Are you going to make me take a shower?”
“No, not today,” I say.
“Tomorrow?”
“Not tomorrow either.”
“When?”
“How about the day after that?”
Ben presses his hand against mine, measuring our fingers. He’s always calculating, waiting for the day when he will be bigger than me. I am waiting for the day when he takes a shower without my prompting him to. I’ll be waiting a lot longer than he will.
“You’re a good woman,” he says.
It sounds like something he’s lifted from The Waltons, a show he watches from time to time. Imagine living on your own mountain, having a passel of brothers and sisters who wish you no harm, walking down a lovely dirt road to school, your books tied together in a neat little bundle with a shoelace. You’re a good woman, Livie, Pa Walton would say to Ma Walton when she made a pound of beef feed twelve people. This is Ben’s way of saying it’s okay I didn’t make him into an iPod because I have other qualities, like letting him go three days without bathing.
Here’s how Halloween works in Northern California. One enthusiastic mother agrees to host. The other mothers bring the kids over at 5:00 p.m. and by 5:05 the drinking is well under way. The spouses arrive around six and soon after take the kids out for trick-or-treating, Dixie cups of scotch sloshing around in their hands. The mothers eat cookies shaped like witches’ fingers and say things like: Jesus, I’ve already gained ten pounds, and once I found out I had elevated blood sugar levels everything made sense: my constantly being angry, my backing the Volvo into that stone wall, the endless thirst!
Halloween’s almost over, is what I’m thinking, while watching the clock. Soon I can go back to a normal life.
When the kids return they race upstairs to examine their loot. We continue to pound down the Sauvignon Blanc, but after about half an hour it occurs to me that they’re oddly quiet. A few minutes later Ben comes downstairs and sits next to me on the couch.
“I’m ready to go home,” he says.
He isn’t dressed like a prisoner anymore. He’s stripped down to his jeans and T-shirt. In a fit of creativity, before we left the house I gave him a black eye with some face paint. Prisoners are always getting in fights, aren’t they? The entire left side of his face is now the color of a prune.
“Me, too,” I say to him. “Get your candy and let’s go.”
“I don’t have any candy,” he says.
“What do you mean you don’t have any candy?”
“I gave it away.”
“Why would you give your candy away?”
“Because I didn’t want it,” he says softly.
“We’ll see about that,” I say, grabbing him by the hand and marching him upstairs.
He’s been swindled out of his candy! This is exactly why I insisted he be a criminal for Halloween. So he could stand up to bullies!
“Please, don’t,” he says.
“No way, buster,” I say. “This is unacceptable.”
Up in the bedroom I find what I think is a pirate, a ghost, P. Diddy and what I can only surmise is Alan Greenspan (but don’t quote me on that) sitting in front of four heaping piles of candy. Looking at that candy I am furious.
“What’s happened here?” I demand of the boys. “Where is Ben’s candy?”
“He gave it to us,” says the pirate, shrugging.
“Now why would he do that?” I say.
A mother steps forward. “It’s true,” she says. “I saw him. He gave it away.”
A father says, “This is great! Aren’t you happy about this? Why, it’s every parent’s dream. I wish my kid would give away all his candy. Besides, it’s better for you. Less temptation. Tomorrow, I mean. We all know who ends up eating the candy.”
“You don’t understand,” I say. “I’m afraid he’ll regret this.”
Ben looks up at me with his big green eyes pleading silently for me to let it go. But I can’t. Something is horribly, horribly wrong.
“Sweetheart,” I say, “how are you going to feel in the morning when you have no candy? Do you understand what’s happening here? You’re going to wake up in the morning and have NO CANDY.”
“Well,” he says, “I do like Almond Joys.”
The pirate, the ghost, P. Diddy and Alan Greenspan hurl their Almond Joys gleefully at us. What the hell kind of kid likes Almond Joys? Well, a kid with a mother on the warpath who likes Almond Joys.
“There—all settled,” says P. Diddy’s mother.
We go downstairs and say our good-byes and I feel shaky, as if we have just narrowly escaped being in a car accident.
“Don’t be mad at me,” says Ben.
“I’m not mad,” I say “I just don’t understand.”
But I am mad. I’m disappointed. Why doesn’t Ben stick up for himself? How is he going to make it in the world?
“You don’t know what it was like,” he says. “Ask Dad.”
“Dad’s already gone home.”
“Well, he saw it,” says Ben.
“Saw what?”
“They had no Halloween spirit!” Ben cries. “They just raced from house to house getting candy. They didn’t even say thank you. They didn’t even stop to look at the decorations. I couldn’t keep the candy. It just felt bad. Bad, bad, bad!” he says.
There comes a time in every mother’s life when it becomes very clear that your child is a much better person than you are, but you’re not allowed to say this because then where would you go from there—admitting such a thing to a nine-year-old?
ACTIVITY: ROLE PLAYING
DIRECTIONS: Two people play at a time. The two actors decide on a real-life drama that includes two characters and a situation. For example:
Two people on vacation when their car runs out of gas.
A door-to-door salesperson trying to sell you a kangaroo.
Two people who haven’t seen each other in a long time walk up and greet one another.
Do you know sometimes when you look at your kid and it’s like his face has run away? Suddenly he no longer belongs to you? And for a moment you can imagine him free in the world, living, loving and dying without you ever knowing him? Without you ever having spoken one true thing to him?
“Your goodness dazzles me,” I tell him.
The roads are dark. The air smells of jasmine and moon. Parents become children and children become parents. The membrane between life and death stretches thinner every day, but still we are rich. We have eight Almond Joys. We tear them open and gobble them down.
November
FORTY-FOUR. WHAT KIND OF NOTHING AGE IS FORTY-FOUR? I CALL DAWN TO commiserate.
“How did this happen?” I say when she picks up the phone.
“Hmm,” she says, which is twin-speak for what kind of nothing age is forty-four?
“It adds up to eight,” I say “That’s got to be a good thing. Isn’t eight some kind of important number?”
“Oh, sure,” she says. “It’s one year past the seven-year itch.”
“Speaking of sevens, it’s seventy degrees here,” I tell her.
It’s impossible to be a New Englander and live in California and not feel smug during the winter months.
“Is it cold there in Cohasset? It must be really cold,” I say.
I hear her breathing.
“Dawn?”
“What?”
“I miss the cold.”
“Screw you,” she says. “We’re doing Chinese food and a movie.”
That’s what I usually want for my birthday. At least that’s what I say I want. Of course, that’s code for I want so much more but I’m not going to tell you what I want because you should just know and if you don’t get it for me I’ll be really mad.
“You’re the only one who called on my birthday,” Dawn says.
“You, too!” I cry.
We have the same conversation every year—the poor-forgotten-overlooked-twins conversation. It’s our mythology and we cling to it like a blankie. Here’s how it works: in our family of four girls, the oldest and the youngest are not only the most beloved but also the smartest, the most popular and the ones with the best hair. Those unlucky enough to have been born in the middle—just two minutes apart—have only each other.
Take for instance when we were ten. Dawn had a cold, so my mother kept her home from school. I missed her so much I told my friends she had fallen off an eight-foot-high stone wall and broken her leg and now she was in the hospital.
I may have elaborated further. She was lying on the ground groaning in pain for hours, clutching her leg, the bone sticking straight out of her calf before I found her—my unfortunate, left-for-dead twin sister. When the teacher got wind of this she stopped our math lesson and had everybody spend the rest of the period making cards for Dawn. I made one for her, too, with an illustration of her falling off the wall and a little speech bubble that said, “Help, Melanie, help!”
When I got home from school Dawn was eating a 3 Musketeers Bar and watching The Love Boat in the living room. My parents were very strict. We were only allowed candy on Sundays. Sundays were candy day, not Tuesdays. I took the cards out of my knapsack and threw them at her.
“Here,” I said.
“What’s this?” asked my mother.
“The kids made Dawn cards.”
“Why?” said my mother.
“Because she’s sick.”
“With the sniffles?”
“Well—yes,” I said. “They were worried.”
My mother rifled through the cards, a look of growing horror on her face.
—I hope you get out of the hospital real soon.
—One day you’ll walk again!!!
—Good thing Melody found you.
“Help, Dawn, help!” I shouted as my mother grabbed me by the elbow and hustled me from the room to begin a six-month sentence of punishments.
“Happy Birthday to us,” I sing to Dawn.
I can hear her boys screaming in the background. She sighs and then the phone goes dead.
My husband, a surfer, is in the garage soaking his wet suits in a pail.
“I changed my mind. I don’t want to go out for Chinese food.”
“Okay,” he says. “What do you want?”
“I want something good. Something homemade. Something that you would eat on a cold November day.”
“Like scalloped potatoes?” asks my husband.
“Yes, but with cheese.”
“Au gratin potatoes?”
I nod.
“What else?”
“Lamb. Leg of lamb,” I say.
“And éclairs from La Farine,” he finishes.
“That would be nice, but I don’t need éclairs and a cake,” I say.
He swishes the wet suits around with a pole. He swishes the wet suits around with a pole some more.
“You didn’t get me a cake?” I say.
“You said you didn’t want a cake.”
“And you believed me?”
“Let’s go shopping,” he says cheerily.
“You go shopping,” I say. “I’ll stay home.”
I have an aversion to grocery stores. I hate them. Just pulling into the parking lot causes my blood pressure to spike.
“No, you’re coming with us,” he says. “It’s your birthday and you just talked to your sister and you’re homesick and you’re not staying here alone.”
“Fine. As long as we don’t have to take the van.”
The only thing worse than going to the grocery store is going to the grocery store in the van.
Because I need to replenish my almond supply I suggest we go to Trader Joe’s.
Almonds are the thing I eat when what I really want to eat is Kozy Shack rice pudding. I keep bags of almonds everywhere: in my car, in my purse and in various locations in the house. They are a very effective appetite suppressant. The key, I’ve found, is to eat enough of them. A handful is not enough. One cup will not only take the edge off but will make you feel just the teensiest bit sick, so the thought of scarfing down a quart-size container of rice pudding is no longer desirable.
In addition to the almonds we get our leg of lamb and some nice Yukon Gold potatoes and a bottle of birthday wine. My husband was right. I needed to get out of the house. It’s so festive in the store. The aisles are sun-splashed and the staff gives away free samples of oatmeal raisin cookies and pomegranate lemonade.
“Not everybody has Trader Joe’s,” I say to my husband.
For instance, there is no Trader Joe’s in Cohasset.
“It’s your birthday,” he whispers in my ear. “And I’m going to make you a nice birthday dinner.”
We have been traveling down the aisles with a woman and her two young children. This woman has long, gray, ponytailed hair and has a kind of a hippie cool-Berkeley-mom vibe going (she’s wearing a sleeveless tunic over jeans), and she smiles at me the kind of smile that says Aren’t we lucky we live in this great part of the country where it’s seventy degrees at the end of Novem
ber and look at my vibrant, unscheduled, wildly creative Waldorf children who have never watched TV, never picked up a Nintendo DS, and look at your boy (what amazing green eyes—he looks nothing like you) and look at all of us with our bags of pumpkin seeds and legs of lambs and gingersnap cookies.
I am a sucker for smiles like this, and so, besotted, I follow this woman straight into the checkout line. This, of course, is a big mistake. Because it turns out she is not just grocery-shopping, she is having a lifestyle experience. Here’s what a lifestyle experience at Trader Joe’s looks like:
You move very, very slowly.
You discuss your food choices and your children’s allergies at length with the cashier.
You open a tin of chocolate-covered Altoids and distribute them to everybody in your line and the line next to yours.
You insist on helping the bagger, and then you bag very, very slowly.
When you are carded (they card EVERYBODY at Trader Joe’s), you say, “You’re kidding, right?” but what you mean is “You’re not the only one who thinks I look twenty-two when really I’m thirty-five,” and then you tell the cashier the story of how you went prematurely gray when you were twenty-two.
When the cashier rings you up and chirps good-bye, you look under your cart and see that you’ve forgotten to pay for your laundry detergent and toilet paper. “Oh, no,” you cry. “Just take it,” says the weary cashier.
I am also having a lifestyle experience. Here’s what my lifestyle experience at Trader Joe’s on my forty-fourth birthday looks like.
I huff loudly.
I huff even more loudly.
I look at the person behind me in line and roll my eyes.
The person behind me looks the other way because he’s having a lifestyle experience similar to the gray-haired ponytail woman and he’s not going to let some bitter woman who would be better off shopping at Lucky’s pull him down.
My husband suggests I breathe. He tries to distract me by asking me how is it possible that I forgot Julia Child came to our house for dinner.
The Slippery Year Page 3