The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted (5 page)

I thought,
Here is how I feel about men: I am angry at
them for the way they sling their advantage about—inter-

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d
rupting, taking over, forcing endings, pretending to not understand what equality between the sexes necessitates, thus
ensuring that they are always and forever the ones who say
when. But I feel sorry for them, too.

I remembered a red-eye flight I was on recently. At about four A.M., I fell into one of those poor-quality sleeps.

I woke up about twenty minutes later and took a stroll down the aisle. The plane was packed with businessmen, and they all lay sleeping, their briefcases at their feet like obedient dogs. They had blankets with the airline’s imprint over them, but the too-small covers had slid to one side or the other, revealing gaps between buttons on the dress shirts, revealing fists slightly clenched. They looked so sweet then, so honest and vulnerable. I felt a great love toward all of them, and smiled warmly into each sleeping face.

over the hill and

into the woods

Seventy-five-year-old Helen Donnelly is kneeling beside a box in the upstairs storage closet, hiding from her children. Not that she would admit that. No, she tells herself she is searching for the Thanksgiving platter that used to belong to her grandmother. It was dropped last year by Helen’s daughter Melissa, and it broke into so many pieces there was no hope of gluing the thing back together, even to hold the lightweight, sentimental bau-bles Helen provides her family as gifts every holiday.

“Now, this is just for fun,” she always says, her hands kneading each other, as they open them. “Nothing serious, just a joke.” As though they needed to be told that wind-up chattering teeth that walked on little plastic feet were anything but that.

One year, when she was cleaning up after Christmas 36

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d dinner, Helen found two of the gifts thrown into the trash.

Whoever was responsible hadn’t even bothered to wait until they got home. The Santa magnets had cost only eighty-nine cents each, and all right, Santa’s red lips
were
painted rather wildly off the mark, as though he had been given a quick kiss in passing, but still. It wasn’t the cost.

Hadn’t she thought about them? Hadn’t she spent the time and the effort? Don’t bother, her husband, Earl, had told her. Nobody wants those gifts, sweetheart, don’t waste your time. They want them, she’d said. You don’t know.
Some
of them want them. And when he’d asked, more curious than confrontational,
who
wanted them, she’d said, Never mind.

Tightened her lips and picked a toast crumb off her lap.

Just forget it, she’d said.

The dish shattered spectacularly, dropped as it was on the new Italian tile kitchen floor. She knew she shouldn’t have gotten that floor.
Italian
tile! When it came from Be-loit! There was not a thing in the world wrong with her old linoleum floor. But there was Marjorie Beauman over for lunch one day, talking about how there was a sale, talking about how tile could make over a whole room, that you could even get heated tiles! “Think of it,” Marjorie said, her voice low and very nearly sexual, “you come out in the middle of the coldest winter night and you think you’re in Daytona Beach!” And Helen fell for it, even though she would rather be in her little Wisconsin town than Daytona Beach any day, summer or winter.

So yes, Helen knows very well that Grandma Ute’s platter is gone, thrown out in the trash last year with the un-wanted food left on the plates (so much
cranberry
sauce, after she’d gone to the trouble to make the garlic-cranberry chutney that that Susan Stamberg had raved about on NPR). For the first time, the giblets and the neck
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of the turkey had been in the trash, too, because the cat, Gertrude, had walked away from them, no longer able to enjoy such pleasures.

When Melissa had dropped that platter, Helen had gotten so angry she’d begun to shake. Appalled by her outsize reaction, she’d run to the bathroom to sit on the edge of the tub, where she’d folded and refolded a hand towel embroidered with a lovely Thanksgiving cornucopia—not that anyone had noticed—and tried to calm her breathing.

And Melissa, outside the bathroom door, “Mom? You’re not crying, are you? Mom? It’s just a platter, I’ll get you another one!” That had just made Helen madder. Get her another one! Another one that Grandmother Ute had washed with care in her old farmer’s sink and then dried with one of her flour sack dish towels? A platter she’d bought from Goldmann’s the first year she was in this country, had paid for on layaway with money she saved every week from her housecleaning job? Yes, Melissa would just run over to
Fifth Avenue
and buy Helen a platter exactly like that, sure she would. Put it on her
platinum
card, and Fed
Ex
it to her.

Melissa has no appreciation for her great-grandmother.

No appreciation for family history. Unless it is a person of color, perhaps. Or a person of persecution, then the history matters. And Melissa had shown no sign of remorse when she broke the platter, either. Even if she did think she could replace it, shouldn’t she have felt bad for having broken it? Was it really so bad to feel bad? Helen thinks more people should feel bad for more things. There should be a kind of revolution to bring guilt back into the main-stream. More guilt, more feelings of worthlessness. All this self-esteem crap was making for a society of selfish people who were careless with everything but themselves.

It was making for a bunch of people who felt entitled to 38

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d speak their minds when no one wanted to hear their opinions, people who paraded their sexuality and politics before the whole wide world when no one cared, couldn’t they see that no one cared? Helen is
not prejudiced,
no she isn’t, but there’s a time and a place, really, there is a time and a place and why do those gay people have to tie up traffic that way with their endless marches? Oh, not just the gays, of course. All of them. The formerly disenfran-chised who now can’t get enough of the spotlight. Just go home, she wants to say to every single one of them. The environmentalists. The vegans and animal rights activists.

The transsexuals and the transvestites and evangelicals.

The AIDS activists and the antiwar people. The pro-choicers and the anti-choicers. The Hare Krishnas snaking along the sidewalks, stinking up the place with their in-cense. Just go home and shut up. As for the homeless, to whom she used to hand dollar bills and smile at all soft-eyed? Now she wants to grab them by the shoulders and shake them, shouting, “Oh, God bless your
self.
Get a
job
!”

She hears Earl calling her from downstairs, and pretends not to hear him. Sometimes if she ignores him he gives up, not having been that much interested in her responding anyway. If he’s calling her to see some golfer on TV. If he needs some help on his crossword, not that Helen is any good at crosswords, anymore. These days, words fly right out of her brain.

“Helen!” Earl calls again, from the foot of the stairs.

“The kids are here!”

“I know,” she says, in a voice he can’t possibly hear. She had seen when the car pulled up, the rental car Melissa and her husband got because they thought their parents were too feeble to drive to Milwaukee and get them at the airport. Just because of that time she and Earl had gotten
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lost and ended up in Fond du Lac. One lousy time. Plus, all right, another time they had an accident, but it was not their fault, people had no manners on the freeway.

“Hon?” Earl calls.

“I
know
!”

She hears him walk up a few of the creaky stairs—are they ever going to get those stairs fixed? Not that anyone would fix them properly. Someone would come and charge a fortune and say that they were fixed but they wouldn’t be. “Aren’t you coming down?” Earl asks.

“Yes! I’m looking for something and then I’ll come down.”
And don’t ask what I’m looking for,
she thinks.

“What are you looking for?” he asks.

She sits back on her heels and sighs.

“Helen?”

“Are Michael and Elaine here, too?” she asks. Her older daughter, the one who deigned to stay in Wisconsin, though in Milwaukee, of course. House on the lake big enough for thirty people. Elaine is fifty-four years old.

How could her daughter be so old? Coloring the gray in her hair and getting those shots in her face!

“Yes, Elaine’s here.” Earl calls up. “Say . . . Helen?”

She comes out of the closet and goes to the top of the stairs to look down at him. There he is, dressed in the shirt she told him not to wear, it is too small and it makes him look ridiculous. A black knit, for God’s sake. Who does he think he is, James Bond? A black knit, and he has also put on the tan pants she has told him a million times to throw away. There is a stain at the crotch plain as day, one little round circle and then two smaller ones, no mystery as to what
that
is. Throw those pants away, she keeps telling him and he keeps telling her, No, I like them.

“What
is
it, Earl?”

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d His smile fades—he’d been smiling at her, his holiday smile. “What are you doing up there?” he asks. He starts up the steps, and she holds up an arm, traffic cop style.

“Don’t!”

He looks up at her. Oh, fine. The hurt face.

“It’s a surprise,” she says.

“
What’s
a surprise?”

“What I’m
looking
for, Earl. It’s a surprise. I’ll be right down. Just start the relish tray. Give them that. All you have to do is take off the plastic wrap. Can you manage that?”

He turns around and heads back downstairs, shaking his head.

“Oh, pooty pooty
poo
!” Helen says and returns to the storage closet.

She sits down and leans against a large cardboard box, crosses her ankles and closes her eyes. She hears Melissa ask, “Where’s Mom?” and the low tones of Earl answering.

And then Melissa says, “What’s she looking for?”

What is it with these people? Don’t they have anything else to talk about? Has the art of conversation disappeared entirely? Well, yes. Yes, it has—Helen knows the answer to that question. It is the fault of television. Television and computers, where all anyone wants to do is keep everything passive and abstract and moronic unless it is about sex where there is nothing abstract at all and everyone is naked. She could teach those people a thing or two about what was really sexy and guess what? It has nothing to do with nakedness.

Something rises up in her. A scary feeling. A thought that she cannot go downstairs. She cannot.

“Mom?”

Melissa.

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“Don’t come up here,” Helen calls.

A pause, and then the stairs creak. “Don’t come up!”

she says again. But there is her younger daughter before her. “Hi, honey,” Helen says. “Happy Thanksgiving.”

Melissa crosses her arms. “What are you
do
ing, Mom?”

Helen stands, feeling one knee buckle briefly, and brushes off her behind. She’s wearing pants, an old gray wool pair, and a white blouse and a red cardigan sweater, an outfit she could just as easily wear to Sears to get a replacement gasket for the washing machine. She has given up on getting dressed up for family dinners: her silk dresses and double-strand pearl necklaces, her theme sweaters.
They
never get dressed up. “I’m looking for something,” Helen says. “I told your father to serve the relishes, is he serving the relishes?”

“Yes, they’re out. We’re eating them.”

“Well, then, that’s fine. That’s all. That’s all for now. Go and eat some more.”

“Ma, do you . . . need some help?” And there it is, Melissa is looking at her strangely.

“How’s Clayton?” Helen asks. “Is he feeling better?”

Melissa’s husband.

“Oh, my God, he’s fine now; his temperature has been normal for two days.”

“What a relief, huh?” Helen does not now nor has she ever liked Clayton. Chews with his mouth open and doesn’t he just know the answer to everything, just ask him. Insisted that his son be named Rolf, his daughter Enya, never giving a second’s thought to Helen’s suggestion that his son would be regarded as a neo-Nazi and his daughter a New Age lightweight. Not that she put it quite so bluntly when informed of the name choices. She offered her opinion in Wisconsinese. She said, “. . . Oh?”

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d

“I brought some flowers,” Melissa says. “Where’s your pumpkin vase? That smiling pumpkin?”

Helen sees that smirk. Don’t think she doesn’t. She tells Melissa, “Well, it’s the flowers, isn’t it? It’s not what holds them. Just put them in anything.”