Domestic Affairs (16 page)

Because this is such a small town, the newspaper comes out only once a week here, and when it does the news is likely to be who won a milking contest and whose aunt has been visiting from Maine. For controversy we consider questions like whether or not to rename Dump Road after a beloved and recently deceased town fireman. Photographs on the front page feature unusually large trout, high-school athletes, and good-looking woodpiles. Then a month or so back, on the top of page one, came the headline “Two in Family Have Cancer,” accompanied by a large photograph of Mr. and Mrs. Norton and their three children, all of them stiffly facing the camera and looking understandably grim.

The story below the picture went on to tell the Nortons’ story, based on the reporter’s visit to their home and the afternoon he spent there. Eighteen months ago, the family’s middle son, Billy, was diagnosed as suffering from leukemia and put on a program of chemotherapy. Then, a couple of months back, on the very day Billy was found to be in remission, his father was discovered to be suffering from another form of cancer. The paper didn’t say it outright, but for the father, especially, things don’t sound too hopeful.

He can’t work now, of course, the paper informed us, and neither can his wife, because she’s so busy driving back and forth to the city, bringing her husband and son for treatments. The family has no medical insurance, no relatives in the area, no savings. Already they have had to give away their beloved family dogs. They don’t know what they’ll have to do next.

Reading news like this, of course, leaves a person reeling. (Also, filled with the knowledge of his own relative good fortune: Thank God it’s not me.) I kept looking back at the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Norton (just a few years older than Steve and I, I figured). Mr. Norton very gaunt now, of course, but bearing the look of a man who used to be well built and muscular. Mrs. Norton, a good-looking woman, with dark circles under her eyes, her mouth forming a perfectly straight line. The little boy with cancer, his hair just beginning to grow back in tufts, like a baby’s. Almost saddest of all were the older brother and younger sister, who don’t have cancer. I wonder if they ever feel guilty about their good health.

At the end of the story about the Nortons there was a plea for contributions. “We’re proud people,” said Mrs. Norton. “We hate asking for help. We just don’t know where else to turn.”

Well, this is, as I said, a small town, and people here believe in taking care of their own. Even though the Nortons hadn’t lived here all that long—didn’t work in town, or belong to a church, or appear to have a lot of friends here—people began organizing the minute that story came out. Audrey came home from school a day or so later to report that every classroom was decorating a coffee can for local businesses to put out for contributions to the Norton Fund. Then the third grade announced a car wash. The school nurse approached me about donating the proceeds from a school play I was directing. There were posters for a dance on behalf of the fund, and then a concert.

It’s come to the point where now you can’t buy a cup of coffee or pick up a newspaper in this town without seeing one of those Norton Fund coffee cans and that photograph of the family taped to the cash register. A couple of days ago Audrey came home from school with a letter from the principal, informing us that the elementary school would be putting together a bunch of food baskets for the Nortons, to be delivered on the last day of school, and asking that every child in the school (about five hundred) bring a canned food item for the Norton family. When I forgot to send in a can, that first day, Audrey delivered an impassioned retelling of the Nortons’ plight for me, and then marched off to survey our pantry shelves for good items. “I think one is enough,” I said, as she reached for a whole stack of tuna cans.
“Mom,”
she said sternly, “they’re desperate. Everybody has to give as much as they possibly can.”

Well, I have become increasingly uneasy about all of this and about why I haven’t opened my heart to the Nortons. All the more so because the family’s situation is so unequivocally terrible. (Cancer. It’s the nightmare that haunts us all. Multiplied by two.) Why don’t I feel better about the way our community has rallied for these people—by doing precisely what my husband and I try to teach our kids? Namely, to always lend a hand.

It’s just that I’m picking up these troubling undercurrents—hidden strings attached to all of our community’s love and charity. It is almost as if, with the contents of our coffee cans, we have purchased the right to scrutinize every aspect of the Nortons’ lives, and not surprisingly, they come up short in a few departments. There’s the story told me by a friend about a mutual acquaintance of ours who lives near the Nortons. One of the gentlest, most sweet-natured women I know, she showed up on my friend’s doorstep in tears, a couple of years back. Mrs. Norton had just chased after her, screaming, because—backing her car out of her own driveway—she had almost hit one of the Nortons’ fifteen tied-up dogs.

Then there is another woman in our town, who tells my friend she drove past the Nortons’ house the other day (drove out there specifically to check things out, actually), and what she saw were half a dozen dogs, still tied to trees, three ten-speed bikes, a new addition, and a moped.

“Why doesn’t Mrs. Norton get a job?” I have begun hearing some people ask. Someone else will point out, then, that she has to drive her husband and son to treatments. “What about nights?” they ask then. “And what about the sixteen-year-old son? He could get work after school. He could help out.”

We have all of us become experts on the Norton case. Our quarters and our canned tuna entitle us to speculate, debate, and finally, to judge. It’s possible that Mrs. Norton isn’t a very nice woman, I think to myself. But is her trouble any less real, for the way she screams at her neighbor? Do we only help people who don’t tie up their dogs? Is what we want to see—driving past the houses of people we help out—signs of unabated misery? Does a person holding his hand out forfeit the right to a ten-speed bicycle? How about a five-speed, then? How about a one-speed?

Last night as we were clearing the table after dinner, I made a few remarks to Steve about some things I’d been hearing around town concerning the Nortons, and Audrey overheard. “How would
you
feel if you were them?” she pointed out. “You wouldn’t act so nice either.” And of course she’s right.

So I sent a can of tuna in to school today, along with a can of baked beans, and some cream of mushroom soup that nobody in our family ever seems to want. I pictured what dinners at the Nortons’ will be like this summer, as they make their way through five hundred cans of baked beans, sardines, and maybe the odd Spam. I thought again of the haunted face of that father—who is suffering (all of us here now know) from cancer of the left testicle. And the boy, reading in the paper that his chances for survival are “pretty good.” And the healthy brother and sister—maybe stopping in Weber’s News now and then for a pack of gum. Standing at the cash register, studying that construction-paper-covered coffee can with their family’s name on it and knowing it’s headed their way.

In September of the year Audrey turned six, a meeting of concerned parents who might like to raise money for an elementary-school field trip was called at her school. That seemed like a good idea. I had been a parent of a child in this school system exactly two weeks at this point, and hadn’t burnt out yet. Audrey’s new purple sneakers were still purple and not, as they would be come November, gray. She still had the top to her thermos. Life seemed filled with possibilities. So I went to this meeting, along with seven other mothers, six of them, like me, the parents of first graders.

We started talking about ways to earn money, and all the usual suggestions came up. A bake sale, a yard sale, a raffle. Then I said, “Why don’t we put on a play?”

Even then I knew there were easier ways to earn money. (I think Steve, for one, would have written out a check to the school, on the spot, exceeding by a dollar whatever profits this play might conceivably bring in, if he’d known what this play would do to our life.)

But money isn’t everything. I acted in plays all through my own school years (though never in elementary school. Nobody ever wanted to put elementary-school children in a play, and I had always wondered why. Stay tuned.)

Anyway, those old plays represent my happiest school memories. I wanted that for my daughter, and for the many children in this town who have never seen a play, never been applauded for anything they’ve ever done. I knew a few like that, back when I was growing up—kids who could barely read, kids who wore the same clothes every day and devoured their hot lunch as if they hadn’t seen food for twenty-four hours, which they probably hadn’t. Goofy kids with hardly any friends, oddballs who got on stage and suddenly were stars. Children so shy they could hardly open their mouths—but oh, could they ever dance. For them, especially, being in plays was a lifeline.

Everybody at the meeting agreed that a play sounded great. Before I knew it, I was given the job of director, and it was decided that we’d put the show on near the end of May.

End of May, I said. That’s blackfly season around here. So we made it a play about a little town like this one that’s overtaken by blackflies. Of course the blackflies would be first graders (typecasting). I would write the play. And every child who wanted to could have a part.

Ninety-seven children wanted a part. “Don’t worry,” said the teachers. “A lot of them will drop out.” And before I knew it the cast was down to ninety-four.

Every one of those children got a line. Every character got a name. “Mrs. Apple, Mrs. Yogurt, Mr. Telephone, Mr. Paperclip, …” I would call out, at the beginning of Townspeople Scene Number 16. For the last dozen or so parts, I started naming characters after whatever I saw on my desk.

They did get to know their lines, most of them—which is not to say they knew when to recite them. There were times, during rehearsals, when I thought I might have to stand onstage throughout the performance, holding a yardstick and tapping heads, like the player of an enormous human xylophone. At every rehearsal, about thirty children lost their script pages. About forty children would ask if they could go to the bathroom. Ten needed change for the soda machine. Five wanted to know when they’d be getting their costume.

We found a choreographer, but because she gave birth by Caesarean section just six weeks before rehearsals began, there were a few problems. First, we needed a babysitter. Then, because she was nursing, we needed a breast pump. Then, when the breast pump didn’t work, we needed formula. “Whatever you do, don’t give Patrick formula with iron,” were my last words to my choreographer, the day Patrick started taking formula. (Iron constipates.)

Wednesday the choreographer called me up to tell me Patrick was constipated. I told her how to carve miniature infant suppositories out of Ivory soap chips.

Thursday we were still waiting for the soap chips to take effect, and meanwhile, I was tap dancing.

I haven’t told you yet about my friend Erica—another first-grade mother—whose job it was at rehearsals to keep certain fifth-grade boys from beating up or kissing certain first-grade blackflies. She called one morning to tell me she thinks she’s getting ulcers. “I’m tired of being the heavy,” she said—understandably. So that day her job was passing out Oreos.

I have not told you about Scott, who decided, after six rehearsals, that he didn’t want his leading role anymore and dropped out. Or my closet, which by the last week of rehearsals was piled waist high with every item of clothing I had worn, but had not had time to hang up, in the last four weeks. Or the fact that I was spending about three hours on the phone every day, rounding up breast pumps and top hats.

But in the other column was a boy named Ben who’s stayed back twice and still can’t read much, who knew every one of his four lines perfectly. A boy named Jimmy who practically lives in the principal’s office, who turned out to be one of the best actors in the school. A girl named Susan who was always the first one to arrive at every rehearsal, so she’d be sure not to miss anything. A couple of townspeople who danced their hearts out, and some who knew not only their own line but everybody else’s too, which they would recite softly, under their breath.

When I told Jimmy’s mother how good her son was in the play, she looked at me incredulously. “Jimmy?” she said.
“Jimmy?”

The thing about a play is that when he’s onstage Jimmy doesn’t have to be Jimmy. He gets a fresh start. He’s Mr. Paperclip. And people will clap for him.

We grow five kinds of tomato plants in our garden, and lots of basil. In August, when everything comes ripe, I cook batch after batch of tomato sauce from scratch. I can my sauce in quart jars—rows and rows of them, enough so our family can have spaghetti once a week for a year. I make an extremely thick, rich-smelling sauce, and I’m very proud of it. Every few months I go down the steps to the cellar, where I store my jars of sauce, and count how many containers are left, to make sure the supply will last us through to next year’s tomato harvest. And while it’s true that I love the taste of this sauce of mine, served up on a plateful of pasta, what I love even more is the sight of those jars, still unopened on my shelves.

Last year a happy miscalculation left us with more sauce than we needed. So one night, just days before I was due to can my new batch, we decided to give a spaghetti party and serve up what was left from the season before. I made a big salad, baked a couple of pies, rented a couple of Charlie Chaplin movies, and called up some friends. This being a small town, with not a whole lot else happening on a Tuesday night, most of them said they’d come, and one friend asked if she and her husband could bring along a pair of travelers they’d just met. We had plenty of food, so of course I said yes.

Here in New Hampshire, where new diversions are few and our social circle small enough that most of us run into each other at least half a dozen times in any given week, the kitchen is as good a place as any to create a little drama. Some of my methods could seem a little corny to sophisticates. (Piña colada, served in a coconut shell. Homemade potato chips. Tempura, served by a cook—me—in a kimono and accompanied by a scratchy record of koto music.) I stick sparklers in my cakes and fortunes in my cookies. I guess my theory has been, if you can’t go to Peking, you might at least try Peking duck. And so our palates know a good deal of variety. Even if the rest of our lives does seem a little mundane.