Family - The Ties That Bind...And Gag! (2 page)

“What does it look like?” I asked.

“It looks like a group of illegal aliens hauled in for questioning. What are you doing in a tennis dress?” he asked our daughter.

“Playing tennis,” she said dryly. "I didn't know it was

formal."

“This is a Christmas card, for crying out loud. Go get into something appropriate. Come on, boys! Stand up straight!”

“I am,” said our son. “I just don't have shoes on.”

“Then stand behind your mother. No, that won't work. The nuclear mushroom on your T-shirt is hovering just above your mother's head. My,God! What is he doing in an antinuclear T-shirt anyway?”

"It was the only thing left in my closet that was

clean."

“So go get one of my shirts. Now where's your sister?”

“She's washing her hair.”

“Is this going to take long?”

“His feet smell."

“Where's the dog? We can't have a picture without Harry in it.”

“Quit shoving.”

“Creep!”

The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together.

Sitting there I thought about how the years have challenged families in a way no one would have thought it possible to survive. They've weathered combinations of step, foster, single, adoptive, surrogate, frozen embryo, and sperm bank. They've multiplied, divided, extended, and banded into communes. They've been assaulted by technology, battered by sexual revolutions, and confused by role reversals. But they're still here—playing to a full house.

One by one the family wandered into frame with wet hair, borrowed shirt, and shoes that didn't fit.

As I struggled to give dignity to the moment, my daughter said, “Mom, why do you have a snake in your utility room?”

The camera clicked. The annual Christmas card portrait was captured for another year. One son sat there in the same sport coat and tie he had worn last year and the same bare feet. The other one's mouth was crooked as he whispered out of the side of it how he felt like throwing up since the plane was late and he hadn't eaten. The dog was licking the same disgusting part he had licked the year before. Our daughter's eyes were following the blurred figure of her father trying to find his place before the shutter clicked. My lips were forming what looked like the SH word ... when in fact it was the SN word. They photograph the same.

Immediately following the picture-taking, the shoving began and didn't stop until a body hit the floor. Another one felt compelled to tell me her brother had gotten into the dip because she smelled the cream cheese on his breath. Echoes of “I'm telling” resounded. The stories began to flow ... about the time they locked the baby sitter out in the snow, the day the aquarium caught fire in their bedroom, the school play where one was a dangling participle, and who spit on plates when it was his turn to do the dishes.

They had all returned from their private lives, but the moment we were together, the floodgates of the past opened and once again we slipped into the comfortable role of a family.

One by one, stories were resurrected of the fun times we had shared. We must have sat there for five or ten minutes.

“TRUST ME ...

I'M YOUR

MOTHER'

Friday: 6:30 p.m.

Mother backed into the kitchen from the garage balancing her handbag, a shopping bag, and a large hatbox. “Something smells good,” she said, kicking the door shut with her foot.

“Onion tops in the disposer,” I said. “You didn't have to bring dessert.”

“I know. Put it on a plate and I'll take my box back, thank you.”

She lifted off the lid, “Doesn't that smell good?”

“It smells like fruitcake and I hate fruitcake.”

“I don't understand you,” she said. “Your grandfather loved fruitcake.”

“What has that got to do with me?”

“He loved you so. You were his favorite. The pineapple alone cost $6.”

“I hate pineapple, Mother.”

“It's Julia Child's recipe and you like Julia Child.”

The conversation was inane and predictable. Why didn't I just admit that people who love fruitcake are ... “different.” In evangelism, they are to the right of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if fruitcake lovers founded the next major religion of the twentieth century.

I have never met a fruitcake baker in my life who didn't want to convert me to all that baked fruit. I could be standing in Mother's kitchen and announce without a trace of humor, “I do not like fruitcake. I have never liked fruitcake. I have sampled more than 10,000 species of fruitcake, and it is my dream that I never have to sample it again,” only to have her put a slice before me and say, “Try it. This one is different.”

Fruitcakes are not different. They all tend to be the same, each having an assortment of incompatible fruits and the distinction of weighing more than the stove they were cooked in. They defy all of the culinary rules in the book. No one ever says, “This fruitcake is so light, you don't know you're eating it.” That is because the heavier the fruitcake ... the better.

Another thing I hate about fruitcake lovers is they smile when their cake is rejected. I don't like people who do that. It's unnatural. I'd be more comfortable if they would just say, “Who asked you to eat this cake? It cost me $45 to make, and if it were up to me, I'd drop it on your ungrateful foot!” You can have respect for a person like that. But no, fruitcake lovers will stand by and watch you spit out the sample in your hand and say, “But isn't it moist?”

“You are so stubborn,” said Mother, transferring the industrial-strength cake to a plate. “My son-in-law will like it.”

Now that had been one of the greatest surprises of my married life. The man at the wedding who was “not good enough” to marry me has now turned out to be worth two of me. I never thought she'd turn on me. Mothers are supposed to be loyal to their own kids ... right or wrong. It just didn't work out that way. My husband would bring her a bouquet of fresh flowers for some occasion and she'd say, “Erma never got me flowers that you don't have to dust.” Or when we'd climb into a car she'd say, “I never got to ride in the front seat before. Erma always said if I rolled down the windows, I wouldn't get sick back there.”

After the children came, she really put her longevity in the family to the test. I was pitching out uneaten food from the kids' plates one night when my husband said, “Aren't you going to save any of that?”

I looked to Mother for support. She looked at me like I was something that had just missed the trap set under the sink for me and said, “Waste not, want not. Lord knows that's not how she was raised. We never could get her to see the value of money. Maybe if she were out there like you, earning it, she'd be more frugal.”

Throughout the years, my husband has been treated to the history of my stubbornness, my dedication to spending more money than I have, my bad temper, lack of patience, inability to finish anything, short interest span, and refusal to set goals.

I often thought of going home to Mother, but what for? My husband would be there ... eating fruitcake!

“So, are you all set for Thanksgiving at your place?” I asked. “I told the kids and they're looking forward to it.”

“Sure ... unless you'd like to have dinner here?”

“Mom,” I said, “you know you enjoy all that fussing around surrounded by family ... trotting out your best dishes and all that last-minute excitement. Besides, no one can turn out a picture-book turkey like you do. I don't know how you do it year after year.” Mom smiled and was caught up in her own thoughts.

Erma pulls that “Grandma enjoys it” line on me every year! What enjoyment! What makes all of them think a sixty-five-year-old woman likes to get up at 4 a.m., arm-wrestle a naked turkey, stand over a toaster trying to make stale bread into fresh dressing, and spend ten hours making a meal that will take twelve minutes to inhale? Easy for her. All she brings is a bag of nacho chips and four folding chairs.

As for the picture-book turkey, the only thing I share

with that animal is a thigh problem! Everyone thinks turkeys are fun-loving gobble-gobbles. If they cooked one, they'd see them as the vindictive, grudge-wielding, give-it-to-them-with-your-last-breath, revenge-seeking, tough old birds they are.

No one understands that a turkey gets done ... any time it feels like it. I've had 30-pound birds cook in two hours: before the pies have cooled, before the potatoes and yams have cooked, before the cranberries are frozen ... before the guests have left home.

And I've seen 10-pound turkeys cook for eight hours and still look like you're carving a ham.

Makes you wonder if the first Thanksgiving in Massachusetts was the religious experience the history books say it was.

Wouldn't be surprised if Mrs. Brewster really sent the kids out in the morning for an egg corn McMeal breakfast and told them if they set foot in her kitchen before the turkey was done she'd kill 'em.

The pictures of the first Thanksgiving always look so idyllic with Indians embracing white men in a show of peace and harmony. I can't believe there wasn't a disgruntled hostess somewhere who said, “If Running Deer wants to smoke that stinking pipe, he's going to have to go outside and do it.”

She used to pull the same scam at Christmas with the

toys until I pulled her cork. “Why don't you leave the drum set at Grandma's,” she'd say, “so you'll have something to play with when you visit.” Those drums sounded like a thousand camels on your eyelids.

“I've invited your cousin Marie and her husband for Thanksgiving,” said Mom. “These dish towels could use a shot of bleach.”

“I thought you weren't speaking to her because her daughter never thanked you for the pen and pencil set you sent her for graduation.”

“She finally sent a note,” she said. ”Besides, I don't like to hold grudges."

Right. And if you believed that, you'd believe that every Friday night Nancy Reagan watches Falcon Crest. My mother has elevated revenge to an art form.

Every year at the family reunion, we all check in with her to see whom we are speaking to and who is out in the cold. The length of their sentence varies with their crimes.

“You didn't answer your phone when I called because you knew it was me.” (four years)

“You never paid me back the $3 I put in for you when we went in on flowers for Margaret's funeral.” (eighteen years)

“I was the last to hear you were expecting.” (two years)

“When you looked through my photo albums, my picture of Dad was there. When you left, it was gone.” (twenty-five years)

“YOU know!” (This was the dreaded grudge that lasted for life.)

I remember going to one reunion where you needed a program to know which side of the picnic table to sit on. I approached my cousin Doris and said, “Are we speaking to one another this year?”

“I don't think so,” she said.

“Why?”

“I never sent your mother an invitation to Robbie's birthday party.”

“How old is Robbie now?”

“Thirty-six.”

I picked up my plate to move. “What about Estelle? Am 1 speaking to her?”

“Not unless she returned the bread pan that your mother sent home with her twenty years ago.”

“It will be good to see Marie again,” I said to Mother. “I haven't seen her since the reunion when she grabbed the last picnic table in the shade.”

Mother's head shot up. “Was that Marie?”

“Forget it. I was probably mistaken,” I said quickly. “So, how are you two lovebirds enjoying Dad's retirement?”

“Wonderful,” she said. “Yesterday your father cleaned out the exhaust fan and tomorrow he's going to take the lime out of the teakettle.”

“What did he do today?”

“Showed me how to walk with my legs spread apart so I wouldn't wear a path down the middle of the hallway carpet.”

"And to think we were worried about you two getting

on one another's nerves."

If my daughter had sense, she'd worry. I could write the book on nerves. Maybe a primer and coloring book for wives of retired husbands everywhere.

See Jim.

Jim used to run and jump and chase clients. Jim stays home now. He has a new watch. He will tell you what time it is even if you don't want to know.

It is time to get up.

It is time to remove the oil stain from the driveway before it spreads to the rest of the house.

It is time to alphabetize your spices.

It is time to eat (lunch/dinner/breakfast/break/snack/party).

Sometimes Jim will act like a houseguest.

“'Where do you hide the iced tea glasses?”

“The hall bath needs toilet tissue, Mother."

'“There is someone at the door selling something.”

“I'd put the dishes away, but I don't know where they belong.”

Sometimes Jim will act like he has hired you for the summer.

“Who was that on the phone and what did they want?”

“Where are you going and what time are you coming back?”

“I don't think that grass can wait another day.”

Retired men like Jim bring efficiency to the home. It is cheaper to make your own tea bags than to buy them ready-made.

Don't heat up the oven for one baked potato. Do a dozen at a time and freeze them.

See Jim drive a nail by the door to hold your car keys

See him drive a nail by the phone to hold a pencil.

See Jim drive a nail in the desk to hold your unpaid bills.

See Jim drive you crazy.

It was all a surprise. I didn't know I married a man who knew so much about dishwashers, wax build-up, hand-washables, stain removers, children, and how to keep bananas from turning brown.

Jim is surprised. He does not know how I have managed to stumble through forty-five years of running a house without him.

Everyone is surprised he is busier than ever.

I'm not.

As I filled a glass of water at the sink and popped an aspirin in my mouth, Mom said, “Don't you feel good?” “Just a little headache,” I said. “Nonsense,” she said. “You probably need a laxative.”