Crazy Salad (25 page)

As far as I can tell, several of the early warnings Mrs. Turpin refers to appeared in the
Ontario Bulletin
, but I can hardly blame the “victims” for not noticing them. Until recently, the
Ontario Bulletin
was written by Mildred A. Pappas, who appears to be as blithe and good-humored as Mrs. Turpin is the opposite. Here and there Mrs. Pappas tucks in a late-breaking crime story: “As we were going to press Security Chairman Sue Lindgren called to say that the cigarette machine in the basement had been vandalized and that both cigarettes and some change were missing. There were no known suspects at the time of the call.” But Mrs. Pappas has a firm editorial philosophy which she expressed in the January, 1975,
Bulletin:
“Both the trivial and the important are vital in portraying a clear
picture of life in the Ontario—or anywhere else.” And she has such a charming way with the trivial that her readers really ought to be forgiven their apparent tendency to skip over the important. In the February, 1975,
Bulletin
, for example, Mrs. Pappas does mention the business of not putting keys into pocketbooks, but that item pales next to the report on the revival of a limp African violet at the Houseplant Clinic, and it fades into insignificance next to the tantalizing mention of the removal of a hornet’s nest from Elsie Carpenter’s dining room window.

The information on the hornets’ nest appeared in a regular feature of the
Bulletin
called “News and Notes,” which includes birthdays, operations, recent houseguests and distinguished achievements of residents, as well as small bits of miscellaneous information like the announcement of the founding of the Ad Hoc Friends of the Pool Table Committee. Other regular sections of the publication are “The Travelers Return,” a list of recent trips by residents; and “Committee Reports,” summaries of the doings of the various building committees, of which there are nine. (This figure does not include the committee for the pool table, which has since disbanded, having successfully restored the table to use in the basement Green Room, which was recently and unaccountably painted yellow during the 1976 Painting Project.) The Ontario is surrounded by trees and gardens, so the
Bulletin
often mentions the planting of a new azalea or juniper tree, and it recently devoted an entire page to the final chapter of the eight-year controversy of the Great Red Oak, cut down on August 27, 1976, after the board of directors overruled what was known as the “wait and see” policy of the High Tree Subcommittee. Articles like these are often illustrated with simple drawings of birds and leaves. Occasionally, a photograph is used, but only on a major story like the flap over the water bill.

Ontario residents first learned of the water-bill flap in a July, 1975,
Bulletin
article headlined
A SHOCKING BILL FOR A SHOCKING WASTE:
“Chairman Chris Turpin has just announced that a staggering (and unbudgeted) $1,660.94 water bill for the last quarter has just been received, adding that the amount is more than
three
times the amount for the preceding quarter. A wrong billing? No. Uncommon usage for bad water, etc? No.… The water company has advanced the opinion that only one malfunctioning toilet allowed to run continuously can be the cause.… The chairman stated that the board will decide on a method of payment of the unprecedented bill at its July meeting, the alternatives being (1) to find the resident or residents responsible and to bill accordingly, or (2) to specially assess
all
residents (owners and tenants alike) approximately $10 each to settle the bill.”

For a month, we anxiously awaited word of what was up. Would ten dollars be added to the maintenance? Or would Chairman Turpin lead the Ad Hoc Committee on the Unprecedented Water Bill through each apartment in search of the hypothetical malfunctioning toilet? Finally, the July
Bulletin
appeared, with a terse report suggesting that the investigation was closing in: the prime suspect turned out to be not some irresponsible resident but the building’s thirty-five-year-old water meter, which had just been removed for inspection by the water company. Meanwhile, Clarence K. Streit, a resident who was apparently unaware that human error was about to be ruled out, made a guest appearance in the
Bulletin
as the author of the Flask Water Dollar Saver. “It is quite practical,” he wrote, “to save three pints of water every time one flushes a toilet. We have been doing it for a couple of years.” According to Streit, if everyone in the building placed three pint flasks in his toilet tank, then Ontario could save 150,000 gallons of water a year—or, as he put it, 150,000 gallons of water a year. Mrs. Pappas
urged residents who took up Streit’s suggestion to submit their names for publication in order to encourage others. No one did; at least I assume no one did from the fact that Mrs. Pappas never again referred to the Flask Water Dollar Saver Plan. In the August
Bulletin
, however, the water meter was definitely fingered; it turned out to be not just out of order but thoroughly obsolete. A photograph of the new water meter appeared as an illustration.

If I have any complaint at all about the
Ontario Bulletin
, it is simply that its even-handed approach occasionally leaves something to be desired. Accurate reporting was simply not enough to convey the passions engendered by the paint selections of the 1976 Painting Project, nor was it adequate to describe the diabolical maneuverings of President Turpin and the Ontario board in the face of these passions. Residents who read the loving tribute in the August
Bulletin
to the Great Red Oak and the account of its mysterious incurable disease could hardly have been prepared for the stunning moment at the annual meeting in September when it was moved that no tree be cut down without a membership vote. Mrs. Pappas’s low-key description of the restored iron grille entrance doors—“Unfortunately, the ‘Ontario’ inscription now faces the interior of the building since it could not be relocated from its solid iron casting to the outside”—does not quite do justice to the situation.

And I cannot imagine that
Bulletin
readers were in any position to judge the item in March, 1976, which announced Dr. Allan Angerio’s resignation as House Maintenance Committee Chairman. “In protest of the Board’s sanction of extensive remodeling in a neighboring apartment, Dr. Allan Angerio has resigned five months after his appointment. In a recently circulated letter to all residents Dr. Angerio states that during the extended period of renovation he was ‘unable to use my apartment for either business or pleasure.’ He also states that his letter has engendered a considerable
response from the membership, many of whom have indicated interest in a proposed revision of the Bylaws and House Rules of the Corporation to preclude further extensive structural ‘modernization’ efforts in the Ontario.” This is certainly a fair summary of what happened—but it is not enough. I know. I am married to the man who hired the contractor who accidentally drilled the hole into Dr. Angerio’s bedroom wall.

In any case, mine are small complaints. The main function of a newspaper is to let its readers know what’s going on; I doubt that there are many communities that are served as well by their local newspapers as this tiny community is by the
Ontario Bulletin
. And I would feel even more warmly toward the publication than I do but for the fear I have, each month, that I will pick it up to read: “The residents of 605 had a fight last Thursday night over the fact that one person in the apartment never closes her closet doors.” I like neighborhoods, you see, but I worry about neighbors. Fortunately, my husband and I also have an apartment in New York. And I was extremely pleased several weeks ago when we moved to new quarters there in an extremely unfriendly-looking brownstone on an extremely haughty block. In the course of the week’s move, we carried some garbage out of the apartment and left it on the street for the garbage collectors. Ten minutes later
—ten minutes later
—a memo arrived from the 74th Street Block Association concerning the block rules on refuse. I’m not going to quote from it. All I want to say is that its author, Emma Preziosi, while not in the same league with Christine Turpin, definitely shows promise.

March, 1977

I think it was about 1954 when my mother got her mink. A Beverly Hills furrier had run into some difficulty with the Internal Revenue Service and he was selling off his coats. My mother would never have bought anything wholesale—she disapproved of it on grounds that I never understood but later came to suspect had something to do with being the daughter of a garment salesman—but there was a distinction between buying wholesale and getting a good price. She got a good price. It was an enormous mink. A tent. It came to her ankles, and at least two people could have fitted under it. The skins were worked vertically. I did not know this at the time. I did not know much of anything at the time, much less anything about the way mink skins were worked. A few years later, when I knew, all the furriers in America decided to work the skins horizontally; when I heard about it, I instantly understood that it would not make her happy to be wearing an Old Mink. But she always pretended that things like that meant nothing to her. She was a career woman who was defiant about not being like the other mothers, the other mothers who played canasta all day and went to
P.T.A. meetings and wore perfume and talked of hemlines; she hated to shop, hated buying clothes. Once a year, after my father had nagged her into it, she would go off to a fashionable ladies’ clothing store on Wilshire Boulevard and submit to having a year’s supply of clothing brought to her in a dressing room larger than my current apartment. She grumbled throughout. I thought she was mad. Now I understand.

My guess is that my father paid for the mink, wrote the check for it—but he did not
buy
it for her. My parents worked together, wrote together, and there was no separation between his money and hers. That was important. Beverly Hills was a place where the other mothers wore minks their husbands had bought them. They would come to dinner. The maid would bring the coats upstairs and lay them on my mother’s bed. Dozens of them, silver, brown, black, all of them lined with what seemed like satin and monogrammed by hand with initials, three initials. I would creep into the bedroom and lie on the bed and roll over them and smell the odd and indescribable smell of the fur. Other children grow up loving the smell of fresh-cut grass and raked leaves; I grew up in Beverly Hills loving the smell of mink, the smell of the pavement after it rained, and the smell of dollar bills. A few years ago, I went back to Beverly Hills and all I could smell was jasmine, and I realized that that smell had always been there and I had never known it.

My mother wore the mink for years. She wore it through the horizontal period and into another vertical period, but it never became fashionable again; by the time vertical skins were back, furriers were cutting minks close and fitted. Eventually, she stopped wearing it and went back to cloth coats. She and my father had moved back to New York and she had less patience than ever for shopping. And then she was sick and went to bed. One Thanksgiving
she was too sick to come to the table. My mother loved Thanksgiving almost as much as she loved making a show of normal family life. I knew she was dying.

The months went by, and she hung on. In the hospital, then out, then back in. She was drugged, and wretchedly thin, and her throat was so dry, or so clogged with mucus, that I could not understand anything she tried to say to me. If I nodded at her as if I understood, she would become furious because she knew I hadn’t; if I said, “What?” or, “I don’t understand,” she would become furious at the effort it would take to say it again. And I was furious, too, because I was there for some kind of answer—what kind of answer? what was the question? I don’t know, but I wanted one, a big one, and there was no chance of getting it. The Thorazine kept her quiet and groggy and hallucinating. When the nurse would bring in lunch, soft food, no salt allowed, she would look around almost brightly and say, “I think I’ll take it in the living room.” I would become so angry at her at moments like that, so impatient. I wanted to say, damn you, there is no living room, you’re in a hospital, you’re dying, you’re going off without having explained any of it. And she would look up and open her mouth just slightly, and I would put another spoonful into it.

Then it was September. Fall. The room had a nice view of Gracie Mansion and the leaves were turning. It was a corner room on the sixth floor, which is, for those who care, a little like being seated at the right table. She did care. She managed, almost until the end, to keep up appearances. If the nurse was new, she would raise herself a bit, lift her arm in a dear and pathetic waft, and introduce us formally. “Miss Browning,” she would say, “my daughter, Mrs. Greenburg.” (My mother and the fish market were the only people who ever thought of me as Mrs. Greenburg.) Then she would collapse back onto the pillow and manage a bare flicker of a smile. I
found it unbearable to be there and unbearable not to be there. I was conscious that I was going through an experience that writers write about, that I should be acutely aware of what was happening, but I hated that consciousness. And I could not look at her. She would moan with pain, and the nurse would reach under her, move her slightly, and the sheet would fall away and I would catch a glimpse of her legs, her beautiful legs now drained of muscle tone, gone to bones. The hallucinations went on. Then, one day, suddenly, she came into focus, knew exactly who I was, and like a witch, what I was thinking. “You’re a reporter,” she said to me. “Take notes.”

Two days after she died, my sisters and I spent an afternoon—how to put this?—disposing of her possessions. It was an extremely odd day. People kept dropping in, somber people, to pay their respects to my father; in the bedroom were the four of us, not at all somber, relieved, really, that it was finally over, and finding a small and genuine pleasure in the trivial problem of what to do with her things.