I could be a point of contact, I thought. I could volunteer for something.
* * *
I started small. Before I ventured into school volunteering, I tried neighborhood volunteering.
Green Ladies Garden Club members, mostly women in their late twenties and thirties, were inducted by fellow neighbors. Did I care about gardening? Not really, but this group was right there in my own backyard, and it had monthly meetings. Structure! Organization! Unlike some hoity-toity clubs that demanded proof of pedigree, the only requirement for this one was that you live on one of eleven streets that formed our neighborhood. By joining, I agreed to cohost one informational session about flowers per year. Cohosting duties included booking a speaker, making a casserole and a salad, and opening your home to the fifty or so people who attended. A few times a year, the club held fundraisers to pay for horticultural improvements to the neighborhood. Bake sales, wreath sales, that kind of thing.
I don’t remember if someone asked me to chair the Pumpkin Patch Extravaganza or if I raised my hand and offered. I do remember thinking we could revolutionize the whole thing by selling not just pumpkins on the first Saturday of October, but advertisements on the promotional flyers that went into mailboxes in September. If we got local businesses to pay to have their names on the flyers as sponsors, we could raise even more cash for seasonal flower plantings! I presented the idea by showing off a sample flyer at a meeting in someone’s kitchen one night. If I do say so myself, it was adorable, bedecked with little pumpkin drawings.
The assembled neighbors oohed and aaahed as they passed it back and forth over bowls of chips and salsa. Then one woman held it up with a derisive chuckle. “Cartoon pumpkins?” she said, rolling her eyes. “So this is what you do all day?”
What I DO ALL DAY?
Has there ever been a more loaded phrase? I don’t know what the right answer is to the “What do you do all day?” question. Maybe the right way to spend all day is hand-mashing organic fruit into baby food with a mortar and pestle. Maybe it’s training for a marathon. But apparently it’s not drawing cartoon vegetables.
I knew better than to care. I should have blown it off.
But I was tired.
And I was proud of my pumpkins.
Under my breath, behind a tortilla chip, I growled, “No, I screw your husband all day.”
The woman who asked the question didn’t hear me—thank God—but the friend sitting next to me did, and the tale has entered our book of friendship legends. Once every few years, someone brings it up. I remain extremely horrified (and slightly proud) of myself in that moment.
* * *
I graduated from neighborhood fundraisers to larger community events when I joined the committee for a party to benefit the local hospital.
The way big party committees work is this: You are asked to join at a certain level of financial and time commitment. If the event is to have a “bejeweled” theme (oh, picture the color scheme!), these levels will be named for gemstones: the topaz committee (you pay a certain amount for two tickets to the party, you agree to help lick envelopes, and that’s it); the opal committee (you pay for two tickets and you make a small additional donation, plus you get invited to a pre-party); the ruby committee (write a medium check, help compile the guest list and lick envelopes, and you get the tickets, the pre-party, and your name printed on the back of the invitation); the sapphire committee (big check, more perks, name in a bigger font on the invitation); and the diamond committee (enormous check, a special gift upon arrival, and your name super-big at the top of the invitation ahead of everyone else’s).
It’s the second or third committee from the bottom you want. The opal or the ruby.
Why? Well, ask yourself this question: Do you want to throw a fun bash that raises enough money for a new ambulance, or do you want to throw a fun bash that raises enough for an ambulance and positions you as a good person in the eyes of friends and strangers? You definitely don’t want to sign on at the lowest level (topaz, what a cheapskate) or the highest level (who has that kind of cash?). So it really comes down to how much it matters that your name be printed on the invitation.
I know. You’re not supposed to want anything in return for giving something away.
But I picked the ruby committee.
If all I’d wanted was to give the city a new ambulance, I could have taken the money I spent on a dress and the amount I paid to be a ruby and made a donation. But that wasn’t all I wanted. I admit it, I wanted my name on that invitation. Honestly, I wanted my name anywhere.
My name—all three words of it—no longer appeared on report cards or regular pay stubs. I did most of my freelancing as a ghostwriter, which means that after weeks or months of writing something, I’d see it come out in print under someone else’s byline. My name wasn’t even spoken aloud much anymore. (Think about it: Does a spouse or baby call you by name? No. That only happens in the outside world, the world of professional and social interactions.) I just wanted to see it in print—proof that I was still alive.
* * *
I still volunteer, but in less visible ways, for causes and people and organizations that need help I’m able to give. It feels better to me these days to give time and resources anonymously or near-anonymously. Still, I’d be kidding myself if I didn’t acknowledge that even that kind of volunteering makes me feel like I’m doing something to make the world the tiniest bit better, which makes me a little proud . . . which just brings us back to wrong-ish reasons. Dammit. Here we are again.
I have, at least, grown out of needing to see my name on an invitation. It helps that I’m at a different stage in my life and in my career. My name is visible in lots of places now; I no longer need evidence of it in that way. But it’s also true that my final major volunteer role just about did me in. So I guess I quit for some right reasons, and I quit for some wrong reasons, too. Both are correct, as is the fact that I’ll never forget that last big volunteer gig: chairing the elementary school fundraiser.
* * *
It began with a phone call. Beware this call, the one from the acquaintance at your child’s school who “just wants to bounce an idea off you.”
Letting an idea be bounced off myself is how I ended up in charge of the whole thing. Not part of it, not one committee, but the entire one-hundred-person team of volunteers. And this was no pumpkin patch; it was an art sale that was expected to move thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of paintings, statues, and knick-knacks in order to finance teacher bonus funds, field trips, and classroom improvements. Heading up this organization was the kind of semi-full-time job that required apprenticing for a year beforehand in order to learn how it all works.
I got the call from the school’s fundraising director while I was at home recuperating from dental surgery. I could barely form words, my mouth was so packed with gauze. She said, “I know you can’t talk right now, so I’ll talk, and then after we hang up, you can email me to let me know you’ll do it.” Blood and saliva oozed from the corners of my numb lips as I listened.
“You’re so good at motivating people,” she said. “You’re the most organized room mom at school—everyone says so.”
Did everyone say so? Really? My ears perked up. I looked around my den, where broken crayons, puzzle pieces, and plastic doll limbs littered the floor, nestled among airy wads of shed dog hair.
It’s a bit of a ruse, this seduction. It’s like that trick men play on women sometimes where they say, “It’s just that you’re so good at laundry. I couldn’t possibly do it as well as you can.” That’s bullshit. Anybody can learn to fold a shirt. Paying someone a compliment is just a way to psych them into doing something. And it definitely takes a bit of psychological trickery to make someone believe they want to take on a role like this.
Because it is a hard job—it really is. In this kind of gig, there aren’t just committee meetings; there are subcommittee meetings and kickoff meetings and budgeting meetings. And preparing for ea
ch one requires forty-five trillion emails and phone calls and texts. I learned all this after I said yes—which, of course, I did. I fell for it, big-time.
There are also “staffing” meetings, where you have to decide which volunteers will be slotted into which positions. Who will be communications chair? Who can handle the finances? Who will oversee all the sales shifts at the event?
And here’s the thing: Unlike professional staff, volunteer “staff” can’t be fired, because they were never actually hired in the first place. In some ways, this is a positive thing. Most of the parents who gave their time and talents during the years I spent on this effort did so with the most generous of spirits, tirelessly showing up in suits and sweatpants and surgical scrubs and jeans to make phone calls and set up booths and smile at visitors. To this day, I love many of the wonderful friends I made during that time in the volunteer trenches. When something went wrong—say a batch of paintings arrived for sale without wires or hooks to hang them—these blessed souls showed up with drills and wire. When spirits flagged, they brought brownies and tea. They cheered each other on and thanked each other for help and made fundraising magic out of thin air. For the most part.
But you know how it is. There’s always one or two. Or five. Or twelve.
There’s always that volunteer who doesn’t listen to instructions and therefore doesn’t know you can’t stack wet paintings one upon the other. There’s always one who feeds off drama, calling separate “debriefing” sessions after larger gatherings so she can report on which fellow volunteers aren’t pulling their weight and who’s wearing inappropriately short skirts to meetings and, by the way, you-know-who’s kid got kicked off the fencing team and don’t you want to know why?
There’s always one who breaks the heel of her shoe while working a single two-hour shift that you had to beg her to take so you wouldn’t be short-staffed. She’s the one who gets on Facebook and tells her five thousand friends that she’ll never volunteer again because the event you just spent two years of your life planning is nothing but a nasty, dangerous yard sale. It’s a colossal waste of time, she says, this event that you’ve poured your time into, that has filled your inbox to the point that you’ve long since abandoned your zero-unread-messages policy, that has required so many evenings of spreadsheets and slides and note cards that you haven’t made dinner for your family more than once a week in over four months. This thing you’ve stuck with because you said you’d finish it and because sometimes it’s kind of fun and because, mostly, it will be good for the teachers, and you’re so, so grateful for teachers. What a shit show, the lady with the broken heel says, what an amateur hour. Everyone should just skip it, she tells them.
“I’m so sorry you broke your shoe,” you have to say when you call her, which you have to do. “I know it’s a . . . special shoe . . . to you.” You swallow, willing yourself to keep your composure. “Would you mind, though, just as a personal favor, maybe taking that Facebook post down? You’re absolutely right, of course, it’s a travesty that your footwear was unsafe while on school grounds. But we don’t want to upset any of our sponsors, you understand.”
* * *
I’m not saying it isn’t worth it. What I am saying is that you can’t expect to give away your time and get pure, golden, ray-of-sunshine fulfillment out of it, no matter how glorious it may feel for a while to help a cause, to stand at the front of the room and feel seen and heard and able to make good things happen for people who deserve good things. Doing something for humanity doesn’t mean you won’t still find yourself sometimes hating humanity. You just have to know that going in. It’s part of the deal.
The good news is that when it’s all over and the last of the confetti has been swept from the floor after the party where you handed over the giant check and smiled for a photo, you get to pick up the phone one last time and call a bright-eyed mother of a kindergartner. “You’ve always thrown such good class parties,” you’ll say. “You’re a natural leader. Everybody says so.”
It’s a little wrong of you to convince her it’ll all go great; but it’s a little right, too.
Sports Radio
My friend Pauline and her husband had us over for dinner, along with two other couples—all of us longtime friends. After dinner, when the other guests retired to the den to catch the end of a football game, I went into the kitchen. After I finished sneaking the family dog a few bites of steak and loading plates into the dishwasher, I realized we’d stayed past eleven o’clock, so I walked into the den and said, “Hey, should we let these guys have their house back now?”
That’s when everyone whipped around and shot outrage-lasers from their eyes: “Are you kidding?” they yelled. “Good God!”
You’d have thought I was standing in the doorway spinning a baby on the barrel of a gun. It was as if I’d shouted, “I LIKE TO BITE THE TAILS OFF PUPPIES AND USE THEM TO CLEAN MY EARS!” or, “I JUST SWALLOWED A LIVE HERMIT CRAB!” All these people I knew and loved glared at me with disgust and horror. I blinked in confusion as everyone turned back to the television.
“What?” I said to the room.
Only John responded. He patted the ottoman next to him. “There are two minutes left,” he said. “And it’s tied.”
To say athletics are not my forte would be like saying a fried Oreo is not exactly a health food. As resolutely as I apply my mind to it, I have never been able to hitch on to the popular obsession with sports. If I think hard enough, I can almost understand why Judas betrayed Jesus at the Last Supper and how selfies became a phenomenon and why some men wear short-sleeved button-down shirts; but I cannot grasp why adult humans watch other adult humans run around grabbing at a ball, much less why our society agrees that the individuals engaging in this tussle should be paid millions of dollars. It’s the gaping hole in my understanding of humanity.
The urgency of sports confounds me, too. The importance of whatever’s happening on the field always trumps what’s going on in real life. That’s why I got yelled at for trying to leave a dinner party before the game was over. It’s why you can’t walk in front of the TV when everyone’s watching the instant replays. It’s why, if the score is tied in double overtime, you could skip naked down Main Street shooting hundred-dollar bills out of your ass, and no one would notice.
Supposedly, watching a sports game together is a social activity, but there’s so much about it that seems antisocial. If I sit through a game for too long, I get not just bored and confused, but resentful, as if I’ve been lured into punishment under the false promise of a party. It starts to feel like everyone is yelling about offsides to test me, or worse, to spite me. It’s like the universe is taunting me with nonsense just to see how much I can tolerate.
* * *
In my late thirties, I noticed that many social interactions had started to feel like football games. Tedious. Pointless. Like a vaguely cruel act of aggression by a world that was rejecting me. At obligatory events such as parent socials and holiday parties I found myself lingering in parking lots and bathrooms, taking much longer than necessary to apply lipstick or check my phone. My fingers would curl into fists while I tried to listen to people I’d met once or twice deliver monologues on their house renovations, the weather, or—always the worst topic—traffic. Had conversation always been like this? Or were people suddenly choosing the most inane subjects to wax on about at length? Was I hiding my irritation, or could people tell I was bored to the point of hostility when they started in about how it was a bit chillier this week than last, or that February sure is a short month, or how did it get to be Friday already?
* * *
I went to another dinner party around that time, this one just for women, a girls’ night out among friends of friends. Someone had been kind enough to invite me, and I was excited for the outing. Leaving the house at six o’clock meant handing over the kids’ dinner and bath-time duties to John, and an evening without that repetitious responsibility felt like a mini-vacation. I looked forward to
a night among adults and anticipated the conversation we’d get to enjoy about books, movies, news, the secret to conquering migraines, war, secret grudges, and well, whatever. No talk about nap schedules, peanut allergies, or stroller comparisons—those were the things we talked about when children were around, when we passed each other on the sidewalk by the park or in a pediatrician’s lobby. That was kid stuff. Tonight was for grown-up stuff. World stuff. Real stuff.
It began:
“Marge, you make the best chicken salad,” one friend of a friend said, as we sat down around the dining table and shook our napkins onto our laps. Mine had a pastoral picnic scene on toile fabric, a Frenchman with a big hat and lace cuffs and a lady with her bosom tucked into a giant dress, both of them peering delightedly into a basket.
“You do,” I said. “This is good.”
Marge: “Well, you know I put grapes in it, that’s the secret.”
Person to Marge’s left: “But do you boil the chicken? Or bake it?”
“Always boil it. Baking comes out too dry.”
“And salt it?”
“Salt the water, not the chicken.”
Okay, I thought. That’s enough about chicken salad.
“How much salt?”
“More than you think. You want to be able to see it in the water.”
I Miss You When I Blink Page 11