Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo? Read online

  JULIE: With us, it’s the joys of a breakfast buffet. In our family we spend an incredible amount of time talking about what makes something in the buffet good or crappy. Like if they have fresh fruit or real granola, we’re all excited. But if it’s the little boxes of Kellogg’s cereal, well, that’s no good. If we’re at a hotel and a breakfast buffet is included, it’s a good thing. I could tell you my entire life of traveling based on the breakfasts of the hotel.

  JANCEE: We had breakfast brought up to us on a tray in Savannah. My mother liked that, I can tell you.

  JULIE: What did you eat? (This is a very common question that we ask each other.)

  JANCEE: Biscuits and strawberry jam, fruit, muffins, and coffee.

  JULIE: No protein?

  JANCEE: You know what? There was protein. I forgot. We had poached eggs on a bed of grits.

  JULIE: Nice. (She is interrupted by the sound of two voices, one male and one female. When she answers them, her voice is high and warmly enthusiastic.) Sure! Central Park? Take a left, there are three loooong blocks, and then you’ll see it. There will be a lot of trees and grass. (Aside, to me) And maybe a used condom on the ground. Okay! Have fun! Black socks and sandals—must be German tourists. Did you ever see a famous person on the street and then you realize the person’s dead?

  JANCEE: Yes. I had a moment the other day when I thought I saw Norman Mailer. Why? Who did you think you saw?

  JULIE: I thought I just saw Raul Julia. But then I remembered that he’s not around anymore. So, what did you and your mom do together?

  JANCEE: I have to say it was a little strange to spend so much concentrated time with my mother. Usually other family members are around to break it up. For the first hour it was odd, and then I got used to it.

  JULIE: You know, I would like for that to happen. I really should plan something with my mother before it’s too late.

  JANCEE: Well, let’s think here. What do the two of you like to do? What’s the ultimate activity?

  JULIE: (immediately) Outlet shopping.

  JANCEE: Hold on, my cleaning lady is knocking at the door. (Luba, my Russian cleaning lady, holds a tampon wrapper that she has retrieved from the bathroom trash can.)

  LUBA: (sadly) No baby?

  JANCEE: No baby. Not this month, I guess.

  LUBA: I pray for you to have a child.

  JANCEE: Thank you. (Luba shuts the door.) Luba is keeping an eye on my fertility cycle, as usual. So I noticed something about my mother this weekend. She has a habit of commenting on people’s appearances right in front of them. She’ll say (overly Southern, Foghorn Leghorn voice), “Lord have mercy, look at the size of that family comin’ toward us! Every one of ’em is as big as a rhino, even th’ damn dawg!” In the meantime they’re all standing on the same street corner as we are. You know how when you’re in a foreign country you tend to speak English freely, thinking no one will understand you anyway? That’s what she does, right here in America.

  JULIE: My mother, if you say to her in a quiet voice, “Don’t look now” or “Don’t turn around,” she’ll say, “What? Where?” In the last few years she has totally lost her ability to self-edit. It’s just a cringefest. She’s always saying to my aunt about her daughter that when she was born she looked just like a wolf, all covered in fur. And then you’ll hear my aunt say in kind of a quiet voice, “I don’t remember that.” But my mother isn’t listening. She was just telling me about a wedding she went to, and she began with, “The bride had a good head,” and then she sort of left it at that. And I knew that what was going to come next was “But the body, no good.” It’s never going to be “But a great body.” Not with my mother.

  And the other thing she told me was that a woman in her town had a bunch of kids but no teeth. Her exact words were “Many kids but no teeth.”

  JANCEE: I guess it’s inevitable that we turn into our mothers, but I would hope we might be more tactful. But who knows? Maybe you lose that ability Here, I’ll make you feel better. How are you different from your mom?

  JULIE: I think I’m a much more conscious person.

  JANCEE: I don’t understand.

  JULIE: My mother was sort of out to lunch. I mean, she was a mother at twenty-two and I’m forty-something, and she had three kids and I have one. I live in the city and she’s in the country. (Her parents’ house upstate is teeming with wildlife, so when Julie visits, she will send me emails with titles like “Hello from Snakeland.”)

  But our main difference, I think, is that my mother was like a drone who went from living in her parents’ house to college, and then the summer after college she met my dad and got married. She never got a chance to grow as a person. So we’re very, very different in where we are in our lives when we had kids.

  And she also was sort of unaware of psychology at that point. When Violet didn’t want to go to pre-K, she was crying and grabbing on to my leg, and even though it was painful, I knew it was best for her to go. And my mother would have said, “Oh, she doesn’t have to go.” That kind of thing.

  But we’re the same, too, in that we march to the beat of our own drummer. I don’t care what people think. When it comes to being a parent, for instance. My friend told me, “When I was at your house and I saw that Violet watched TV all the time, I thought, My God, I would never do that. And now I do it all the time.”

  JANCEE: That’s heartwarming.

  JULIE: Once I was doing a reading for my book, and in the audience was one of my friends, and kind of as a joke, he stood up and asked me, “What’s your process?” And I said, “Turning on Noggin.”

  And now I’m in a mourning period because Violet doesn’t watch television anymore. Let me tell you, it’s hell. In the old days, she used to zone out in front of the TV. She’d lie on the couch with her blanket. I told my friend Susan, “It’s like Violet always has the flu, right?”

  But it’s not that way anymore. Now she always wants to play She likes going out, and being read to, and activity books and stuff. She’s not very independent in her play.

  JANCEE: I hear from so many parents that they aren’t going to let their kids watch television, and one by one, they all cave. (Walking into the kitchen) You can’t believe what my kitchen counter looks like. Tom obviously made breakfast before he left today. There’s an open box of cereal, a bag of coffee, and a container of milk on the counter, which is now warm. You don’t need to be Quincy to retrace his steps. That’s how I know he’ll never cheat on me, because he’d leave a trail of evidence.

  JULIE: Paul is the same way. (Paul is Julie’s husband, a television producer.) They could never commit crimes. It’s that sort of inability to know the difference between mildly cleaning up and totally cleaning up. Leaving the mustard knife on the counter but putting the turkey back in the fridge.

  Paul, it’s not as surprising, because he doesn’t seem like the most meticulous guy. Tom looks like a Felix Unger type. But he ain’t! You know what? He misrepresented himself to you.

  I can’t decide whether to go to the grocery store or not after the gym.

  JANCEE: Go home, I say. It’s so humid today. Be good to yourself.

  JULIE: I’m going home. It’s disgusting out.

  JANCEE: I’m around if you want to talk later.

  JULIE: I’m sure we will.

  Sure Are a Lot of Memories

  in This Garage

  I had an absurdly happy childhood growing up in the small town of Chatham, a leafy enclave in the Garden State that was more New England than New Jersey The stores that line Main Street are out of a Capra movie: Sunnywoods Flower Shop, the Bean Curd Chinese restaurant, Helen’s Dressmaking Shop, Liberty Drug (which has a working soda fountain), the Stitching Bee (“for all your needlepoint needs”). My idyllic life was to end in the early nineties when my parents announced, after much throat clearing, that they were selling our family home and moving to a lake community in northern Jersey.

  My sisters and I were dumbfounded. This was our home. Granted, none
of us were living there at that point, but still. My parents explained that they had remained in the house for us, but with retirement imminent, they craved a fresh start. They wanted to watch the sun set over the lake as they drank gin and tonics with their feet up.

  “And to be honest, girls, we’re getting a little tired of keeping up with the Joneses,” said my mother, who had opted out of Chatham’s country club circuit.

  “So you’re just going to give up and admit defeat?” said Heather. “Why not put a couch on the front porch?”

  “Maybe you can use an old toilet as a planter in the front yard,” I put in angrily. My father sighed wearily. “You know, the sun sets in Chatham, too. And what about seeing our friends?” Of course we were unable to see things from their point of view. We were all in floods of tears.

  Despite our protestations, the house was put on the market and snapped up within a week. Before we knew it, the folks had quietly moved on an unspecified day (we informed them that we didn’t want to know which one). At the time, Dinah and I lived in Hoboken, the chosen land for suburban New Jersey kids who couldn’t quite commit to New York City, while Heather was finishing out her fifth (or was it sixth?) year of college in San Francisco.

  At our next family get-together at the lake house, my parents presented to each of us one cardboard box with a name scribbled on the side, filled with dusty mementos. The rest of our things had been tossed.

  My father, seeing our bewilderment, held up a VHS tape. “I’ve got a special surprise for you girls,” he said. “I walked through the old house and taped a little presentation for you.”

  We assembled on the couch and he popped the tape into the player. It opened with a swooping shot of the garage, which was empty save for two Wiffle balls hanging by strings that my dad had stapled to the ceiling to mark where to perfectly stop the car (although he never did figure out a mechanism to discourage his teen daughters from cheerfully shearing the side-view mirrors off the Buick LeSabre, sometimes on a monthly basis).

  “Here we are in the garage,” my father had intoned in a somber “newscaster” voice, sounding like Walter Cronkite on the day Kennedy died. “Sure are a lot of memories in this garage.”

  My mother looked at my father. “I can’t think of one.” His stentorian narration continued. “Our first car here was a Volkswagen Bug. Got it the year we moved in. Nineteen seventy-seven. I think we also had the LeSabre, which took us from Pittsburgh to Cleveland to Chatham. That was a big, solid car. Yep, I could barely fit it in the garage! Happy times. Then your mother started working, and of course, she had to get her own LeSabre. A real beaut, two-toned. Three-toned, if you count the detail. Oh, your mother loved that car. She put two hundred thousand miles on it.”

  My mom interrupted him. “Jay? Are you going to reminisce about every car we’ve ever owned?” She grabbed the remote and hit fast-forward. Now my father was lovingly filming his workroom in the basement.

  “… girls never came down here, so it was pretty much my own place,” he was saying. “I fixed a lot of hair dryers down here. Built a dollhouse or two. Why, I even built these workbenches. I hope the new people know what they’re getting. A lot of—”

  My mother coolly pressed fast-forward again. He was clearly going to spend a lot of time on his favorite rooms. I wondered if “his” bathroom, adjacent to the workroom, would receive a doting tribute. When the tape stopped, he was standing in Heather’s bedroom. It was completely vacant. Not even the thumbtacks that held up her Howard Jones poster remained on the wall.

  Heather sat up sharply. “Dad? Don’t tell me that you filmed the empty house. Surely you have another tape of the furnished house. Right?”

  He looked perplexed, his eyes darting in alarm from Heather to Dinah to me. “Well, you already know what it looks like furnished. I thought you’d like to see it when it was empty.”

  Heather goggled at him. “Empty of memories? Empty of meaning?”

  He sighed. “Do you want to see the rest of it or not?” And so we toured each bare room accompanied by Dad’s commentary which ran along of the lines of Lotta memories here and Lotta hard work and I never did get around to replacing those baseboards. At the end of it, he had taken the camera outside and ambushed our elderly neighbor as he was methodically collecting his mail.

  “Hey, there, Paul!” my father called to him as the camera ran. “I guess we won’t be meeting like this anymore.” Paul eyed him suspiciously as he wrestled a catalog out of his mailbox.

  “I never did get that ratchet screwdriver back that I lent you, but you know what? You go ahead and keep it,” said my father heartily. “It’s our last day here, and I’m making a tape for posterity. Got any words of wisdom?”

  Paul hesitated, glancing around warily. “It certainly will be quieter around here without your kids,” he said, not unhappily. “Best of luck to you.” My father waited for more wisdom, but Paul was already making his determined plod up the driveway.

  Even though we eventually grew to like the lakeside place, we still felt the inexorable pull of the old one. After a few years, Dinah was able to move on, but Heather and I simply could not. We detoured longingly past it on our way to the Short Hills mall, commenting on new developments, rejoicing in details that remained the same: the mailbox, the pachysandra bunched around the birch trees in the front yard, the tomato plants that grew on the side of the house.

  We would park like stalkers across the street and, in a fog of sentimentality, reminisce about the things that none of our friends who grew up dysfunctional could believe we actually did: eating hamburgers together outside at the picnic table on summer nights spangled with fireflies, tossing a ball back and forth with our father in the yard, roller-skating in the driveway as our mother planted geraniums nearby Of course, nostalgia had neatly obliterated the screeching and hair pulling of our hate-filled teenage years.

  During that era, our parents worked constantly My father put in six days a week at JC Penney while my mother was a sales rep who supplied office furniture to buildings around New Jersey Because they were so often absent, the house truly felt like it belonged to us children. We had the run of the place without the bother of payments or upkeep. The scars and marks that the house bore—the burns on the kitchen linoleum from a careless smoker at a party, the flapping screen door, loose from beer-addled teens heedlessly banging it shut—were inflicted by us girls, not by our more careful folks.

  Years passed. Heather and I still drove slowly by the house. The new owners built an addition onto the dining room. Our longing grew more acute, our childhood rosier, as adult problems piled onto our shoulders. Once, when both of us were between jobs, we boldly pulled into the driveway of our old home when we saw that no one was there. “Let’s pretend we still live here and we’re coming home from the grocery store,” I said insanely as we swung in. Then we sat for a while. Then we put the car in reverse and drove back out.

  Even after we both got married and I had moved to New York City, even after Heather had decamped for small-town life in New York State, we still made biannual trips, hungrily scanning the old place. Was the makeshift tombstone for our dead Siamese cat still under the spreading oak tree near the deck? In the city, I found myself migrating from one cramped, roach-spray-scented apartment to the next—ten in total—so I romanticized the house’s rolling green lawn, its luxuriously spacious laundry facilities and spare rooms decadently free of any discernible purpose (a living room and a den!). It was hard to get sentimental about a fifth-floor walk-up with a refrigerator that smelled like it once housed dead bodies and a super who jauntily wore his pet boa constrictor like a scarf Heather, meanwhile, had become the mother of two rambunctious young boys she couldn’t leave alone for a millisecond (the last time she did, Travis had absconded with her nail polish and neatly lacquered his baby brother’s eyebrows so that he resembled a shiny ventriloquist’s dummy).

  One September afternoon as we staked out the old house, I could stand it no longer. “I’ve got to see
the inside,” I said. “This is unsatisfying. How can we get in?”

  Heather thought for a moment. “I’ve got it,” she said finally. Travis had recently turned three, and Halloween was a month away. “We could take him trick-or-treating in this neighborhood and say that he has to use the bathroom,” she said excitedly. “Actually, he always does have to use the bathroom. Or I could have him pretend to choke on a piece of candy and we could ask for a glass of water. Then we’re in.”

  I grabbed her shoulders, moved that she would train her young son to fake a hazardous accident. “Perfect,” I whispered.

  And so the following month, we plucked a confused Travis from his own neighborhood in New York State, where he fully expected to go trick-or-treating with his pals, dressed him in a Peter Pan costume, and drove him an hour and a half to the Jersey neighborhood where we grew up and he did not. It was a little unnerving to carry a child across state lines for my own purposes, but I reasoned that the end result for Travis would be a big pile of candy either way, so what was the difference, really?

  “I’m hungry, Mommy,” he said as we headed into the neighborhood.

  Heather winced. “Oh, God. In all the excitement, I think I forgot to feed him dinner. Maybe one of these houses will offer nuts, or an apple or something.”

  I turned around. “We’ll get you some nuts, okay?”

  He frowned. “Nuggets?”

  I looked at Heather helplessly, and she said, “No, honey, not chicken nuggets. Nuts! Some nice, fun nuts!”