If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits? (6 page)

“You bet,” I nodded. “Not to mention what happens when you mistakenly spray tub and tile cleaner on your teeth. I mean, who wants teeth that foam and deodorize?”

“I can't believe it, Mother.” She smiled. “Do you realize this is the first meaningful conversation we've been able to carry on in years?”

I passed the bathroom and gave my underarms a spritz with air freshener. These may just be the only two ozones I'll ever get, and I plan to take care of them.

Have a good day....

The more technology the phone company developed, the more complicated using the phone became. I never knew what complicated was until the phone company launched a campaign to save me money.

Every time I picked up the receiver, I kept seeing the face of an operator on television with half a phone growing out of her ear admonishing, “Dial direct. Save 60 percent on nights and weekends. Lower rates on shorter distances. Talk one minute to Nashville for twenty-two minutes.”

One Sunday I found myself setting an alarm for 3 a.m. and direct-dialing Nashville to a person I never liked much and talked for four minutes because I saved $1.25. It was a bargain I couldn't afford to pass up. In fact, in four weeks, I saved enough to call my sister in Ohio at a civilized hour during the week with an operator to announce me.

I put up with all of it because I knew communications were moving forward. However, I was totally unprepared one day when an operator from the phone company called to ask if I had made a long distance call to North Carolina, and if so could I supply her with the number I had called as it had not been recorded.

“How did you get my number?” I asked. “It's unlisted.”

“From directory assistance,” she said.

“Shame on you,” I said. “That's an extra. Do you know if you had dialed me on the weekend instead of prime time during the business hours you could have saved thirty-two cents on the first minute?”

“But I...”

“Besides, if you call me for assistance three more times this month, you will be charged twenty cents a call. That all adds up. I assume you are calling from a business phone, which is charged full rates, which means each additional minute we talk is costing you forty cents. Frankly, dear, I'm going to do you a big favor and hang up. I don't think you can afford me.”

Have a good day....

The Meat Mutiny came without warning. One day, we were eating more and paying less and the next there were two hundred and seventy-eight products on the market to help our hamburger.

Housewives did not take the news sitting down. They stood outside of grocery stores eating dog food in protest. Signs went up suggesting, fight meat prices. suck your thumb. And clever cookbooks came out to combat the crisis. (Cook Cheap cost $12.95.)

Overnight, butchers became the darlings of the cocktail party, replacing doctors. I hated myself for it, but I found myself playing the game like the rest of the homemakers.

“How's your rump today, Fred,” I asked my butcher one day after he called my number.

He looked around cautiously. “You've been a good customer of mine for two years, Erma. Nursed our baby back to health after the flu epidemic and loaned me the money to get my store started. A man doesn't forget things like that. [I smiled.] I can arrange financing on a sirloin tip at 6 percent on the unpaid balance for thirty-six months.”

“See you at our house Saturday night?” I smiled.

“You bet,” he waved.

I had no shame whatsoever. “Well, if it isn't Fred Sawsil. I hate to bring this up at a social gathering, Fred, but I was wondering if you would prescribe something for a tough round steak. The meat thermometer registers normal and I've already given it two tablespoons of meat tenderizer.”

He looked up tiredly. “Take two aspirins and call me in the morning,” he said. “Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to Mrs. Beeman. She has a sty in the eye of her round.”

I stood there in a daze. Somehow, it did me a world of good just to touch the hand of the man who had touched a standing rib....

Standing at the meat counter day after day was depressing. I found myself looking over cuts of meat that I used to think belonged in bottles at Harvard.

“What is that?” I asked Fred one day. “In the corner of the meat case?”

“Tongue. “

“Whose?”

“It was an anonymous donor,” he said dryly. “This is tripe,” he said, holding up a carton.

“I'll say,” I said weakly.

“Have you never tried pig's feet?”

“No, you never know where they've been.”

“Chicken?”

“I'll pretend I didn't hear that.”

I motioned to Fred to come closer, “Listen, Fred, do you remember that rump roast you financed last week? Well, when you trimmed a little of the fat off it went into deep shock and...”

“I don't make house calls,” he said stiffly.

“So, why don't you drop over to the house tomorrow,” I said, “and I'll have a few people in and....”

On Wednesdays I play golf," he said.

Have a good day....

I wanted to boycott coffee when it went to four dollars a pound. I really did, but basically I'm weak and cannot endure pain.

I knew I was paying more for three pounds of coffee than I paid for a winter coat when I was first married, but I couldn't help myself.

You cannot imagine the pressure I got from the women in the neighborhood. One morning, I practically ran to the coffee klatsch at Lois's house.

Just inside the door, Lois said, “Want a cup?”

She put an empty cup in my hand.

“Where's the coffee?” I asked.

“I never promised you coffee.”

“That's not funny, Lois. Do you have any idea what I would give for a cup of coffee? I'd sell my children.”

“Wouldn't we all.”

“I'd sell my body.”

“Braggart.”

“Lois, I'd sell my bowling trophy.”

“Will you get hold of yourself? We've got to stand firm together or there's no telling how high the price of coffee will go.”

“Look,” I said regaining my composure, “I never thought I'd admit this to anyone, but I am older than the rest of you and I lived through the Great Caffeine Drought of 1942 during the war.”

“I never heard of it,” said Lois.

“And I hope you never do,” I said. “I saw my mother in the morning without a cup of coffee once and it's the closest to death I ever want to come. She toasted and buttered her hand and put it on my sister's plate. She bumped into a footstool with her head. She felt a draft and it was her eyelashes blinking. When she thought no one was looking, she put her head in the coffee canister and inhaled. My father caught her trying to shave her tongue. It was awful.”

“It must have been a terrible thing for a child to see,” comforted Carol, “but courage; it'll all be over soon.”

“I know,” I whimpered, “but a day without Joe DiMaggio is like a day without sunshine.”

You can only be “lousy with courage” for so long. On the way back from the school after lunch, I swung the car into a drive-in and yelled, “One cup of coffee please... and will you take a personal check?”

Have a good day....

7

"Warning: Families May Be Dangerous to Your Health"

There's a lot of theories on why the American family is losing ground as an institution.

Some say it's economics... others say ecology... others blame lack of fulfillment... a few opt for priorities, or as one neighbor observed, “Would you want to bring a child into a world that wouldn't elect Ronald Reagan?”

I personally like the American family. It has a lot of potential. Besides, the world is not geared for two people. Twinkles come twelve to a box, kitchen chairs, four to a set, gum, five sticks to the package.

To my way of thinking, the American family started to decline when parents began to communicate with their children. When we began to “lap,” “feed into one another,” “Let things hang out” that mother didn't know about and would rather not.

Foremost of the villains that ripped the American family to shreds was Education. It was a case of Hide-and-Seek meeting Show and Tell... the McGuffey reader crowd locking horns with the Henry Miller group.

The ignorance gap that the new math created between parent and child has not even begun to mend.

Before the new math, I had a mysterious aura about me. I never said anything, but my children were convinced I had invented fire.

When we began to have “input” with one another, my daughter said to me one day, “Mama, what's a variable?”

“It's a weirdo who hangs around the playground. Where did you read that word? On a rest-room wall?”

“It's in my new math book,” she said. “I was hoping you could help me. They want me to locate the mantissa in the body of the table and determine the associated antilog ten, and write the characteristics as an exponent on the base of ten.”

I thought a minute. “How long has the mantissa been missing?”

She went to her room, locked her door and I never saw her again until after she graduated.

The metric system was no better. Once a child knows that a square millimeter is .00155 square inches, will he ever have respect for a mother who once measured the bathroom for carpeting and found out she had enough left over to slipcover New Jersey?

And what modern-day mother has never been intimidated when she has to communicate with a child's teacher?

I don't think there's anything that makes my morning like a kid looking up from his cereal and saying casually, “I gotta have a note saying I was sick or my teacher won't let me back into school.”

“I suppose it has to be written on paper,” I ask, slumping miserably over the bologna.

“The one you wrote on wax paper she couldn't read. But if you can't find paper, I could stay home for another day,” he said.

I tore a piece of wallpaper off the wall and said, “Get me a pencil.”

The pencil took a bit of doing. After a fifteen-minute search we finally found a stub in the lint trap of the dryer.

“You sure are whipped up about this note,” I sighed.

“You don't understand,” he said. “If we don't have one we don't go back to school.”

I started to write. “Is your teacher a Miss, a Ms. or a Mrs.?”

“I don't know,” he pondered. “She owns her own car and carries her own books.”

“Dear Ms. Weems,” I wrote.

“On the other hand, she stayed up to watch the Miss America Pageant.”

“Dear Miss Weems,” I wrote.

“It doesn't matter,” he shrugged. “When she has her baby we'll have a new teacher.”

“Dear MRS. Weems,” I wrote. "Please excuse Brucie from school yesterday. When he awoke in the morning he complained of stomach cramps and..."

“Cross out stomach cramps,” he ordered, “tell her I was too sick to watch TV.”

“Dear Mrs. Weems, Brucie had the urgencies and...”

“What does urgencies mean?”

“Stomach cramps.”

“Don't tell her that! The last time you wrote that she put me next to the door and didn't take her eyes off me all day long.”

“It was your imagination,” I said. “Do you need a note or not?”

“I told you I can't go to school without it.”

“Okay then, get me the dictionary and turn to the 'D's.”

He looked over my shoulder. "What does D-I-A-R-R-H-E-A mean?"

“It means you sit by the door again,” I said, licking the envelope.

Composing the note took twenty-five minutes, which was eight minutes longer than the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I wouldn't bring it up, but only yesterday I was cleaning out a jacket pocket and there was the note: unread and unnecessary.

To me, modern education is a contradiction. It's like a three-year-old kid with a computer in his hand who can multiply 10.6 percent interest of $11,653, but doesn't know if a dime is larger or smaller than a nickel.

It is like your daughter going to college and taking all your small appliances, linens, beddings, furniture, luggage, TV set and car and then saying, “I've got to get away from your shallow materialism.”

My kids always talk a great game of ecology. Yet, they harbor the No. 1 cause of pollution in this country: gym clothes.

A pair of shorts, a shirt and a pair of gym shoes walked into the utility room under their own steam last Wednesday and leaned helplessly against the wall. I stood there while I watched a pot of ivy shrivel and die before my eyes.

Blinking back the tears, I yelled to my son, “How long has it been since these clothes have been washed?”

“Since the beginning of the school year,” he shouted back.

“What school year?”

“1972-1973.”

“I thought so. You know, I don't know how your P.E. teacher stands it.”

“He said we weren't too bad until yesterday.”

“What happened yesterday?”

“It rained and we came inside.”

“Don't you have rules about laundering these things?”

“Yeah. We have to have them washed every four months whether they need it or not.”

Carefully, I unfolded the muddy shorts, the brittle T-shirt and the socks that were already in the final stages of rigor mortis.

As I tried to scrape off a French fry entangled in a gym shoestring, I couldn't help but reflect that this was a child who had been reared in an antiseptic world. When he was a baby, I used to boil his toys and sterilize his navel bands. I made the dog wear a mask when he was in the same room. I washed my hands BEFORE I changed his diapers.

Where had I failed?

Under his bed were dirty clothes that were harboring wildlife. In his drawers were pairs of soiled underwear so old that some had plastic liners in them. His closet had overalls and jeans that hung suspended without the need of hangers.

Opening the lid of the washer, I felt around trying to find the gym clothes that I had just washed. I retrieved a shoestring, two labels and a clean French fry.

 “What happened to my gym clothes?” asked my son.

“After the sweat and dirt went, this was all that was left.”