by Kari Lizer
I went to the hardware store, bulb in hand, and stood in front of the enormous selection of light bulbs for several minutes until finally a helpful, small, gray-haired woman who I later realized was a man—both of us at the cruel age where men’s features soften and women grow mustaches—asked if I had any questions about light bulbs.
I told her, “I’m looking to replace something over my kitchen island. It’s very high up and hard to get to, but I need good light because it’s where I cut things with sharp knives and bad eyesight.”
She started asking questions: “Do you prefer flood or spot?”
Me: “Flood.”
She: “Natural daylight or soft light?”
Me (excited because I didn’t know that was an option): “Ooh, natural daylight.”
Him (because this is where I realized she was a man): “Incandescent? CFL? LED?”
I was stumped.
He explained, “Incandescent are the old-fashioned bulbs. Regular life-span. Maybe last you a year and a half of regular use. CFLs are next. Energy efficient. Could last five years. But if I were you, I’d go for the LED. They’re pricey. About twenty bucks. But with moderate use, an LED’s going to last you something in the range of thirty years. You’ll pay more now, but you may never have to change that light bulb again.”
He picked up an LED from the rack in front of us, handed it to me, and walked away. I stared at it, and sure enough, right there on the package it promised twenty-five thousand hours of light.
I’ve never been one of those people who are obsessed with age. I’ve never taken to my bed, dreading the run-up to a milestone birthday like some people I’ve known—not at thirty or forty or even fifty. It didn’t mean anything to me. I didn’t fret about wrinkles or sags. I didn’t base my worth on my looks or my youth, so the loss of those things wasn’t devastating. Good looks were never my commodity. I had wit and brains and rage. But in the past few years, I had acquired this new habit of marking time by expiration dates. In the grocery store, I’d check the date on my lactose-free half-and-half. “April 15, 2014. Wow. By the time this half-and-half turns, the kids and I will be back from our spring break camping trip. Oh. That’s so fast. I can’t believe it’s over!” But we hadn’t even left yet. It was just the idea that that was how quickly things were moving—our vacation would be a memory before the half-and-half went bad. It was a way I had of orienting myself, clocking where I would be in life when the milk goes sour. Orange juice, if it was pasteurized, lasted a little longer. So the news was better. It would get me into summer. “June 25, 2016. School will be out. We’ll be in Vermont when the OJ rots.” That was a happy thought!
So when the man in the hardware store presented me with light bulbs that would not burn out for thirty years, I stood paralyzed in the aisle, contemplating what this meant for me. When this light bulb burns out, my father will be dead. My mother will be dead. A few less obvious people will be dead too—people who will die prematurely. People who would go to the doctor for yearly checkups and discover advanced pancreatic cancer that they thought was constipation from their vitamins. Maybe even me. If I do survive, I’ll be eighty-three years old. Maybe, like the hardware guy, I’ll have settled into some kind of gender neutrality and I’ll have to wear a pink bow in my thinning gray wisps to clue people into the proper pronoun. If I still give a shit what people think. And people are still using pronouns. My twins will be forty-nine; my youngest will be forty-seven. They’ll be married or not. Divorced or not. Have children or not. This will all be decided by then. It won’t be a world of possibility like it is for them now at nineteen and seventeen years old. It will be a done deal. They will either feel like life made good on its early promises or let down by it. If I still own the house where this light bulb burns, it will definitely not be advisable for me to get on a ladder on top of the counter and change it myself. If my children are still speaking to me, they might worry about me living alone with lights burning out and think it’s time for me to come live with them. But I won’t go. I don’t think I’ll get along with their spouses. Also, if it’s up to my children to decide what becomes of me, I could be in trouble.
I’m remembering the dinner when I told my three kids that Vermont had just passed a Death with Dignity law, giving people the right to make their own decisions about end-of-life care. I told them, “Once again, our adopted state of Vermont shows how civilized they are. Isn’t that great?”
My children thought for a minute; then Annabel said, “Does that mean we can poison you?”
Elias perked up. “No! Let’s feed her to sharks.”
Then, Dayton, my baby, finished it off with, “You guys, let’s strap antlers to her head and hunt her in the woods!”
Maybe I should have married again. Would it be less lonely with another old person next to me with a blue bow taped to his scalp? But then what if I really loved him and he died first? And now I’m all alone again. Except for my dogs. But wait—my dogs would have died at least twenty years ago. I had to bite the inside of my cheek so I wouldn’t lose it right there in the light bulb aisle. And then the little old man/woman would have to come scoop me up off the floor. Maybe I could marry him. But no. He would definitely die first. He looks like he smokes. I’d probably be a widow by the time I was seventy. I have to stop! I don’t want to think about this. I just want a pleasing light shining down on the island in my kitchen when I cook dinner tonight. That’s as much as I want to think about.
That’s when I suddenly understood why my mother declared it the best Thanksgiving ever. All she wanted to think about in that moment was the fact that the turkey was cooked all the way through and the gravy wasn’t lumpy. She wanted to focus on the food sitting on the table, not the people who were no longer sitting at the table. There is such a thing as too much reality. I put down the thirty-year LED mindfuck light bulb and picked up a regular GE soft white. Life expectancy: one and a half years.
At which point, my youngest child would be graduated from high school. The twins would be of legal drinking age. I would be fifty-five years old, but my beautiful golden retriever would probably still be alive, if I could keep his weight down. My dad’s Alzheimer’s symptoms would no doubt be more pronounced, but he would probably still recognize me. And I for sure would still make it up the ladder to change the bulb all by myself, if I could keep my weight down. That was enough reality for me.
Sometimes it does us no good at all to think about things that are too hard to think about. That’s what poetry is for and music and sex and Mediterranean Mint gelato in my freezer and dogs in my bed. And for my mother and my father and their bigger, harder, more horrible truths—Chablis and scotch and lies.
Winter Break (Down)
It was winter break, and all three kids were going to be sleeping under my roof for the first time in three months. I was counting the minutes until our happy unit would be together again, and I couldn’t wait to wow them with my home-cooked meals, hold spontaneous dance parties in the living room, and surprise them with morning movie dates and popcorn and Diet Coke breakfasts. Ten glorious days of family fun time. The house would be alive with noise and activity and love, just like the good old days, but most of all, I would be so busy cooking and cleaning and nurturing that I wouldn’t have time to do anything else. And that’s exactly what I needed: a giant, exhausting distraction from my state of mind. It had been a grumpy and anxious few weeks. I felt disgruntled and bored but disinterested in all of my options. I think I was in the middle of an existential ennui—though I wasn’t exactly sure what that was because part of my condition was lack of ambition, so I didn’t bother to look it up.
This is usually when I acquired a new pet, but my household was at maximum capacity. I could tell by a first-time visitor’s reaction to my home. I followed their eyes from the three barking dogs to the four cats lounging on every surface to the sign on Annabel’s room that read, “Shut the door, loose bunny,” until they would finally turn their head toward the sound of a hen pas
sing a large egg from somewhere beyond the pool. They would usually say something like, “I didn’t know you had so many animals.”
What they meant was, “I didn’t know you were an animal-hoarding freak.”
So even though I recently heard that hedgehogs make really cute pets, I was going to resist. I just needed a project, I told myself. And my three adult babies home for ten straight days gave me just the distraction I was looking for.
I spent a week preparing for their arrival. Their rooms were perfect, flowers from the garden were placed on their dressers, and their favorite toiletries were stocked to their very specific needs. I knew their allergies, scents, hair challenges, and skin types, and it was all waiting for them—impeccably arranged as if they’d checked into a B&B run by their stalker.
When the day finally arrived, I was skipping through the supermarket aisles, tossing their favorite foods into my shopping cart like a 1950s newlywed expecting her husband home for a romantic dinner. Elias loves Top Ramen and pita chips. For Annabel, those dried seaweed sheets and a bag of Jelly Bellys. A giant box of clementines and organic string cheese for dear Dayton. And finally, individual Nutella packets with pretzel sticks for all three, lovingly placed on their pillows. I spent more than $200 at the market and forgot paper towels, laundry soap, and coffee.
Dayton’s vacation had already started, and Elias flew in from Boston the day before. Elias had positioned himself in front of the TV, watching back-to-back international soccer matches. Dayton was on his computer, playing video games, and the last one to come home was Annabel. I hadn’t seen her since August, and I missed her so much I was mad at her. She had stopped in Texas to visit with a friend’s family on her way home from school in Scotland, so I didn’t get her until two days before Christmas. I told the boys I was leaving to pick her up, and when I got back, they better be ready for winter break fun! I’m pretty sure they heard me.
I drove to LAX from Sherman Oaks at 5:00 p.m. on December 23. It took two hours and fifteen minutes to get there. When I told the checker at the market I was making an airport run, she said I should have Annie take a taxi. But I could never do it because I’m pathologically maternal. How could I be the world’s greatest mother if I sent a stranger in a taxi to pick up my girl?
“God, I love Houston!” she declared first thing when I saw her in baggage claim, which did not make me happy.
“Welcome home,” I prompted.
“Did you even notice my cowboy boots?” she said, ignoring me. Then she tried to kill me: “I think I could totally live in Texas after college.”
“I’m not a fan,” I pouted.
“Have you ever even been there?” she asked, as if I were some rube who had never left Sherman Oaks.
“Yes. I have. With you. We got stuck there for two days on the way back from the Galapagos. Remember?”
Annabel: “Really? I don’t remember that. My childhood’s a little hazy.”
That’s not quite true. Spectacular family vacations might be hazy, but the one time the tooth fairy fell asleep and forgot to leave a dollar under her pillow is crystal clear.
Annabel will insist, “Of course I remember that. It was traumatic.”
“It was not traumatic,” I tell her. “I covered it really well.” Annabel insists I didn’t.
Leaving a note and ten bucks the night after a person’s tooth falls out with the explanation “Tooth Fairy apologizes for the delay. Tooth Fairy, like your mom, is all alone, and no one helps her with anything ever, so maybe you should just give Tooth Fairy a break” is not the kind of thing that keeps a child’s fantasy life flourishing, according to her.
On the three-hour-and-fifteen-minute drive back to Sherman Oaks from the airport, I heard all about her friend’s fantastic family. Apparently, the father is really funny. The mother is an amaaaa-zing cook. And so nice. She’s always in a good mood.
“No one is always in a good mood, Annabel.”
“Rachel is,” she insisted.
“That’s fucking impossible!” I practically shouted, a case in point.
Annabel said, “You seem angry.”
I said I’d been on the freeway for close to four hours. She tells me I should have let her take a taxi. I tell her I wanted to pick her up myself because I’m her mom and I missed her and I thought it would be great of me, even though it was really exhausting and her flight came in at the worst possible time two days before Christmas—but I did it anyway because I’m great. Which, of course, ruined the greatness of it. Which is exactly what my mom does. She talks about anything nice or generous she might do so much that it completely negates anything that might have been nice or generous about it in the first place. I blame Texas for turning me into my mother.
“Are your friend’s parents Republicans?” I ask because I can’t help myself.
Annabel reacts badly. “Are you still doing that? Judging people by one narrow definition as if that tells you all you need to know about them?”
“Yes,” I tell her, wondering when that started being a bad thing.
She tells me it’s childish and judgmental. And that it actually makes me a bigot.
The wonderful thing about sending your children off into the world is that when they come back, after meeting all sorts of cool and interesting people, they are able to serve as sort of a mirror. Not a flattering mirror, like the one at the end of the long hallway in the center of my house. The one that makes me look taller than I am and leaner than I am and prettier than I am. They reflect back in a different kind of way. The way that makes me look bad compared with everyone else in the world. Shit. I’d waited so long to see her; why was I picking fights? I had to find a way to get this homecoming back on track.
Back at the house, Elias was watching yet another Spanish soccer match, and Dayton was still playing video games. “Okay! Time to start our beautiful family together time!” I shouted, trying to sound “up” but instead sounding slightly hysterical, like I was calling someone away from the edge of a cliff. It was so late, and I had a headache that made it impossible to open my eyes all the way, but I was determined to salvage my reputation. I cooked like a fiend—quickly marinating chicken breasts in Italian dressing, tossing them on the grill while I threw together an arugula salad with goat cheese, toasted almonds, and raspberries. I whisked balsamic vinaigrette, broiled some asparagus with sea salt and a squeeze of lemon juice and olive oil. Then I announced, “Vacation rules!” We would eat in front of the TV! Annabel protested the soccer game. Dayton wanted to know why they got to pick shows when he got home first. Elias complained that he was halfway through the game, and why did they get to come in and change the channel? My homecoming dinner turned into a squabbling, sniping brawl, ending with all three storming into their rooms, slamming doors, and me, throwing a tantrum, throwing away dinner, washing the dishes, cursing Texas, Christmas, and Republicans—which is pretty much the same thing I do every night when I’m alone.
The next morning, the day before Christmas, I woke up and decided to chalk up the night before to everyone’s exhaustion and excitement over being together. Determined to make this the best Christmas Eve ever, I burst into each of the kids’ rooms with Fred, our miniature dachshund, under my arm and sang the wake-up song from their childhood: “It’s your wiener wake-up call; we’re going to wake them all, and if they don’t get up, they’ll get licked by this pup.” I informed them we were all going on a hike in the canyon, just like we used to do on the Christmas Eve mornings when they were little. To say I was not met with enthusiasm is a serious understatement, but I forced them to get out of bed, throw on some clothes, and join me in what I guaranteed would be a great way to start the day.
The beginning of the hike was a wordless trudge with me babbling to fill the silence, reminiscing about hikes of Christmas past: once when it was hotter and one time I remembered it being colder. “But not as cold as today. Today is cold. Brr. Nobody thinks it gets cold in Los Angeles, but it does,” I prattled on because I am the only one
making conversation until about halfway up the mountain, when it seems their brains and bodies finally woke up and the three of them decided to run the rest of the way up the steep hill. I started to go with them, but soon, I fell behind, winded and whining, “Wait up!” while they disappeared out of sight. When I finally caught up to them at the top, they were barely breathing heavy. I was red-faced, sweaty, and panting, possibly dying. I told them I was just getting over a cold; otherwise, I would have run up too. It would have been no problem. “I’ve been boxing at the gym,” I say between gasps for air.
This, at last, brought a smile to their wicked faces, and they started taking turns with the old lady jokes… inquiring about my arthritis, offering to carry me, asking if “Mother” needs a rest. There was a small wooden bench under a tree, and the kids asked if I wanted to sit. “I don’t need to sit,” I snapped. Then I sat. I really was just getting over a cold.
I noticed a dedication on the bench, and I read it out loud in an effort to change the subject. “‘In memory of Sandy McCall. She was always there for you.’ Oh. That’s nice,” I say.
“We’ll get you a bench when you go,” Annabel tells me. “It will say, ‘In memory of Kari Lizer: It’s so cold.’”
“Why?”
“Because that’s all you ever say,” says Annabel.
I tried to defend myself. “That’s not true. I said it this morning because it was cold.”
“You said it a few times this morning,” Elias reminds me.
“She also said it yesterday,” Dayton chimes in. “And I’m pretty sure you’ll say it tomorrow.”
“I might. It’s supposed to be cold tomorrow!”
“That’s why we’re getting you a bench!” All three kids laugh.