Revenge of the Paste Eaters Page 9

  At the Web site www.dremel.com there is an ongoing contest for new and creative uses for one’s Dremel. I have frankly not explored this particular page of the Web site: myself, I have been scrolling around, trying to locate that beige plastic case with the internal plastic moldings designed to nest my Dremel. It appears that one can buy a Dremel in a case, or one can buy an uncased Dremel, but one cannot buy an unDremeled case. This flies in the face of intelligent marketing. Since I estimate that a full 50 percent of all Dremels sold never leave their cases, it seems foolish that the case is the one accessory a Dremel owner cannot buy. It’s a question of need.

  tin-foiled again

  upon reflection it has occurred to Babycakes that he could have chosen a better person to feed, shelter, be-litter, and amuse him. He will stay with Mommy, he has decided (if with a slight sigh)—for in truth, he has seconds of genuine fondness for her (particularly those seconds around 3 a.m.)—but it is only because he is a fine young cat that he has learned to forgive her for her faults.

  For instance, she deliberately deprives him of his favorite food group, chocolate. Mommy puts warm chocolate in a cup and drinks it, and she will not share with her beloved Babycakes. Mommy eats soft chocolate out of tiny plastic dishes that are just deeper than his tongue is long and she will only give him these dishes when the chocolate is more than tongue-deep. She is a bad Mommy, but Babycakes is a cat of uncommon inner personal strength, and he has learned to forage on his own.

  Mommy has a round thing where she hides everything that might be of interest to Babycakes. It was in the round thing that Babycakes found the shiny metal pockets of chocolate powder that Mommy—silly Mommy—told him he could not have.

  Babycakes ate the chocolate powder. Just to show Mommy, he ate his powder, shiny pockets and all.

  Soon a dreadful thing happened. He had been going about his life as usual, grooming his beautiful gold self, when his entire body was overwhelmed by painful, agonizing spasms and Babycakes coughed and gagged until his fur came through his nose! He very nearly turned inside out! Nothing like this had ever happened to Babycakes before, and he was so shocked and astounded he had to go take a nap.

  But someone had put fire in Babycakes’ belly, and it burned and burned. Someone had stuck several Ping-Pong balls in Babycakes’ belly and they bounced and bounced. Babycakes was a very unhappy cat.

  Mommy rose from her platform to go to her litter room and stepped on a small, wet wad of Babycakes’ used fur, and she became very unhappy, too.

  She put Babycakes in a box and took him to Jennifer Needles.

  Babycakes has never understood why Mommy likes Jennifer Needles. She seems like a nice Big One. She is covered with exotic and fascinating smells that suggest to Babycakes that she has some very interesting friends. Jennifer speaks to him very kindly when they meet, and she strokes his fine fur, and she talks pleasantly enough to Mommy, and just when Babycakes is beginning to like her, she pokes him in the most personal of places and then sticks him with pins. This almost always when Babycakes isn’t feeling well anyway, and it seems acutely unfair to him.

  Twice a day for several days after they visited Jennifer Needles Mommy put Babycakes on the counter and gave him sticky, bluck-tasting white stuff out of a little glass tube. Babycakes had mixed feelings about this. He rather liked the white stuff, but it’s against Feline Law to appear eager, and being aloof can be SUCH a bother.

  And then one day Mommy said, in a cheerful voice that lacked sincerity, “Would you like to go see Jennifer again?”

  Babycakes said, “No.” He said, “No” every way he knew how to say no, and when Mommy showed him that hated box Babycakes dug Mommy as his gentle way of saying, “Mommy, LISTEN to me.” Mommy said several very bad words and stuffed him into the box anyway and took him to the Place Where All Sorts of Things Are.

  Mommy showed Babycakes a fur-thing that had ears way too long and a nose that twitched and just a little bitty tuft of tail Babycakes would have been ashamed to own. It smelled like dinner to him, but Mommy said, “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  Mommy showed Babycakes a huge, bad-smelling thing that wobbled all over the place and had terrible breath and that looked into Babycakes’ very own box at him and said, “Woof.”

  Babycakes said, “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  And then Jennifer Needles came to Babycakes’ box and she pulled him out of his box, and Babycakes said, “No” to Jennifer Needles.

  “Did he just hiss at you?” Mommy asked.

  “Oh, it was just a little hiss,” said Jennifer Needles, and she began to feel Babycakes all over his body. She felt his tummy. She felt his teeth. She looked in his ears, she played with his coat, she deliberately and intentionally made all of his hairs go the wrong way.

  This was the very last straw. Babycakes said, “No” to Jennifer Needles.

  “Amazing,” Mommy said to Jennifer Needles. “He’s NEVER hissed at me—he usually just swats me and rips off some hide.”

  “I think he’s okay,” Jennifer Needles said, and put Babycakes back in his box.

  Babycakes lay very flat in his box. If anyone had looked in there they might have seen a fine gold rug. All the way home Babycakes was very quiet and very flat. Had his life been just a little different, he might have been a Persian rug. He might have learned to fly, and he might have flown far, far away from Mommy and her evil friend, Jennifer Needles.

  “So,” Mommy said as they rode home, just Mommy and a beautiful non-Persian gold rug, “I guess we won’t be eating any more tin foil, eh, Babycakes?”

  Mommy seemed inordinately pleased with herself.

  training day

  This morning the parking lot

  was full of unusually stupid birds

  —loud, arrogant birds who stood

  at my wheels and demanded food

  as if someone had waited on them

  their entire lives. Welfare birds

  (it is the welfare parking lot).

  A darker, fuller bird fluttered

  around them as if to say, “FLY,

  you fools—fly away!”

  And I sat there in my twelve-year-old

  land yacht dripping antifreeze

  on the pavement while baby birds

  shrieked and made demands and fought

  among themselves and finally scurried

  off after their mothersource, never once

  seeing me as anything but a missed meal.

  the epidemic

  just after the close of World War II an epidemic struck this country. In the next ten years, American parents, amazed that they had won the war, produced the biggest single generation of children ever born in the same decade. But they did not do so without threat. By the time I came along in 1949 parents had steeled themselves against the single most overwhelming disease ever to face an affluent society. Kids my age could also die of polio, viral pneumonia, or the flu, but the infirmity that struck the deepest terror into a parental heart was the Big Head.

  Just about anything could cause the Big Head. Winning. Not coming in last. Coming in last, but coming in at all when no one expected you to finish. Doing something well, receiving a compliment, feeling good about something you did—all of this was the devil’s own workshop for the Big Head. It could strike at any time, anywhere a small child had a moment of rampant ego gratification, and my parents—and the parents of all of my friends—were determined that it would never happen to a child of theirs.

  If I did something well, my mother assured me it was “about time,” or she told me how much better she had done with less effort at an earlier age. When other people complimented me for something she would roll her eyes and say under her breath, “Don’t let it go to your head.” I presumed from a very early age that nothing I would ever do would much impress my mother: I was doomed to failure, I knew, and the very BEST I could hope for would be to blend in invisibly with the rest of the losers. My mother, by comparison, had taught herself to read while gazing at
billboards through her mother’s womb.

  I was her first child. Lovingly she shared my baby stories with me. I was born a month premature with no fingernails, no eyebrows, no baby fat, and I was bright red. My ancestors, gathered around me to welcome me into the fold, choked on phrases like “she’s beautiful.” I was the ugliest newborn ever presented to either branch of my family tree. This reception apparently worked on my delicate nerves and I retaliated by getting colic and screaming for the first six months of my life. In retrospect, given the opportunity to make amends I might have handled that situation differently, but I have often sensed that the tone of my relationship with my mother was set before I had much opportunity to tinker with the effects of my input.

  Being her first attempt, I was particularly vulnerable to wind shifts, predators, and things that go bump in the night. My mother believed I strolled obliviously through life with my heart on my sleeve and my brains tucked firmly in my back pocket. And while it is true that I rode my bike around our P-shaped drive while wearing a hat that fell down over my eyes, allowing me to ride headfirst into her parked Buick, I think her assessment was unfair and unkind. The world, in my mother’s eyes—and therefore, in mine—was one endless parking lot filled with Buicks.

  My childhood would have made a lot more sense if I had watched my little sister the Wee One produce her first child BEFORE I had to deal with my own mother. One day the Wee One was a pregnant woman expecting a normal baby: she gave birth, flapped her cape, and out jumped HyperMom. She had given birth to the Perfect Child and she was not worthy. Twinkies and their ilk—the mainstay of the Peck family diet—were banned on the spot: he was to dine solely on vegan fare. He would be touched only by those who had spent seventy-two days in a hermetically sealed antibiotic chamber. He could never wear yellow because it would adversely affect his emotional development, and he would never be spanked, paddled, scowled at, or otherwise physically abused. I once accidentally spoke loudly in a room where he was sleeping and she glared at me as if I had offered him a vial of heroin.

  My mother was much like that when I was a child, but it never occurred to me that she might be temporarily insane, and of course it never occurs to a child that mothering is a learned art. She referred to me from time to time as her “practice piece,” causing me to retreat to the gravel pit and mutter about mothers who needed more practice—but I didn’t get it. I assumed, since I was the one getting yelled at, that it was somehow my fault the world was a dark and dangerous place. She presented such a confident and self-assured front, I just assumed there had always been rules.

  I had all kinds of nonsensical rules to follow. I was told repeatedly not to get into cars with strangers—even when the strangers insisted I get in the car right now and be taken home. Even when I had miles to walk up and down snow-covered mountains in the dead of a Wyoming winter . . . I lived in Michigan and we had no mountains and I barely left the house in the dead of winter, but I tested all of the variables just the same. (“What if we’re in a plane crash in the Andes mountains and all of our legs and arms are broken and this man stops to offer us a ride . . . ?”) I was forbidden to take candy from strangers, as if hordes of candy-pushing strangers attacked me every day. (I never saw one. I was particularly fond of candy, so I was eager to have my mettle tested. I had a hard enough time getting my friends to offer me candy.) I had to watch out all of the time for people sneaking around behind me, jumping out of the bushes to give me compliments and trick me into getting the Big Head.

  I remember once I asked her, “Mom—am I beautiful?” And she laughed and said, “God, no—whatever gave you that idea?” She died when I was twenty-seven, but I cleverly memorized all of those Mothertapes and I can play them back whenever they might be the most harmful to my emotional serenity. I have, over the course of my lifetime, completely revised my concept of the word “beautiful,” but if you told me today that I am a beautiful person I would say, “Yeah, right.” You can’t trick me.

  My mother raised me to believe that I should go quietly through life, striving to do the best I could do while keeping a low profile. If I excelled at something, other people would notice. Other people would draw attention to my skills and abilities. Other people would reward me. I should incessantly strive to please every passing stranger on the street is the lesson I learned, but my mind has always run to the extremes. Other people would let me know when I had done well—there was no reason to wander around begging for compliments.

  She also raised me to believe that I was, indeed, special. There were five of us, and we were all raised to believe we were special. We were Eloise’s children. We had the ability to be anything we wanted to be. We were destined for something wonderful.

  We had no idea what that “something wonderful” might be and we couldn’t take compliments worth beans, but . . .

  I don’t know how she did that. On my more bitter days, I profess not to know why a parent would raise their child to believe that drawing attention to her skills and abilities is a social crime. But I do. In my heart I am a Midwesterner, and my people live by three simple rules: work hard; wait for your turn; if you feel the need to talk about something, go plow a field until the need passes. And I don’t know how you stomp on a child’s ego on a regular basis and still teach that child to believe he/she has a special entitlement. Particularly when that child, as an adult, has no idea what that entitlement is, or what their “special” quality might have been.

  My siblings and I have discussed this at great length during our lives. It is not something I imagined, because all three of us girls have found the same beast breathing hotly down our necks. We were supposed to have been Special. We should have accomplished Something. We should have done something Astonishing and Wonderful and something that had never been done before. I write to feed that beast. I have also failed spectacularly, challenging the outer limits of failure, just to get her off my back. All three of us have come to see Mother’s legacy as an amazing feat—and something of a family curse.

  Proudly I can admit before you all that I have never suffered from the Big Head. In my fifties I have more or less conquered paralyzing attacks of worthlessness and self-doubt, but it is unlikely I will ever succumb to excessive ego. There have been times in my life when I knew, in my heart, that I was the one person in the room with the skills and talents to solve a particular problem. And I have waited patiently for the other people to recognize those skills and talents—knowing that they won’t. And I have allowed that opportunity to pass because My Mother Told Me not to praise myself. And I have kicked myself in the ass for doing it. And, knowing better—I have done it again.

  Nor have I taken upon myself the burden of instructing the next generations. There is nothing like a small child, wallowing in the amazing global egocentrism they enjoy, to bring my mother running to the fore, her heel raised and poised for the delicate meat of the ego. “It’s for her own good,” she whispers insistently in my ear. “Are you going to allow that child to wander free in this world that naked and unable to defend herself? Better you should crush her soul than let some total stranger do it later . . .”

  I paint terrible images of my mother. We had a complex relationship, my mother and I, but I never doubted that she loved me, and I never doubted that whatever she did, she did with my best interests at heart. She was afraid. She had dared to dream for herself and that dream lay half-formed and stillborn in her heart, and she wanted that not to happen to her children. She may have read the manual on child-raising in something of a hurry, and she left—me, at least—with the lifelong message I carry in my own heart. You’ll never amount to a hill of beans—but you’ll be a wonderful, special hill of beans.

  I’ll be a hill of beans with a Big Head.

  sperm

  i’ve been thinkingabout sperm lately.

  My Beloved was telling me about friends of hers—both women—who decided to have a baby and as a result, they “spent a small fortune on sperm.”

  I always ass
umed it was free. Pretty much a by-product.

  They obviously had never talked to my mother, who assured me with undaunted certainty that any man I would ever meet would willingly, happily, even eagerly give me all of the sperm I could ever hope for absolutely free of charge: that in fact most, if not all, men would insist on bestowing this gift. Further, my mother told me it was my duty to resist this generosity with every fiber of my being, which, being the good daughter that I am, I have done. I have led a nearly sperm-free life. My mother, on the other hand, presented me with four younger brothers and sisters, which suggest to me that she was made of much weaker fiber than I am.

  I am assuming that all five withdrawals my mother made came from the same sperm bank. We share a number of characteristics, my siblings and I. None of us can breathe through our noses, although they appear perfectly normal on the outside (a lucky gene-stroke there: on the far side of our pool are beaks best suited for wading birds). We all have tiny little mouths full of crowded, semi-crooked teeth. We lean toward tall, and as we age, we spread out sideways. Often amply. We are not a small generation. If you were to talk to the friends of any of the five of us, it would not take long for the conversation to turn to our quirky sense of humor. So my people are tall, husky, tiny-mouthed, crooked-teethed mumblers with chronic sinus infections and a very droll way of looking at life.