I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50 (14 page)

Why can’t I make chicken marsala? I should have a signature dish before I die. Even my mother, who rarely cooked, made a well-regarded beef wellington. If I could make a gluten-free beef wellington, I could open a food truck and corner the market on comfort food that has fallen out of fashion. We will need to serve
chicken kiev, shrimp scampi and a tuna casserole topped with fried onions from a can. Must perfect recipe before son goes to college, because it’s not a signature dish unless you’ve made it for your kids.

Why did I only have one kid? Who will he be able to laugh about me with when I am gone? Need to do more embarrassing things in front of his friends to create shared memories for him. Try leaving door open when getting out of shower next time one of his friends comes over. No. That is wrong. Very wrong. Very icky. Don’t do that. Don’t think that. What time is it? Lord, how can twenty minutes pass so slowly?

Muffins are not cake. They’re round, and that’s totally different.

Very few things stand the test of time. Nothing I do will be remembered when I am dead. My son asked me who Marilyn Monroe was the other day. How many more minutes until I can Google pictures of her before her nose job? People always forget she had work done.

Only scientific inventions, Twinkies and Shakespeare have stood the test of time. I bet that actor whose name I can’t remember who plays drug kingpins trained in Shakespeare.

If I had thirty thousand dollars, I could build an extra bathroom.

How tiny are those tiny houses?

If my husband and I each had our own tiny house, we could have our own tiny bathrooms.

I don’t know what Susan Sarandon had done, but her neck looks fantastic.

I hope I don’t get a dowager’s hump.

If Suze Orman really does retire and goes sailing around the world, how many bathrooms will her boat have, and how tiny will they be?

Zucchini bread isn’t cake. It’s a loaf and that’s totally different.

Whose pink sock is that balled up in the corner and what am I supposed to do with it? My son loses so many socks and kids are always leaving single socks at our house, what am I supposed to do with them? Why can’t there be just one sock that everyone wears, like the Mao jacket for feet! The Universal Sock. Yes!

The Universal Sock will come in two colors, white and black. Surely we can all agree that socks don’t need to come in any other colors? If we need socks to express our individual flair, then we’ve got bigger problems, right? Isn’t that what beanies are for? And earrings? The sock will come in three fabrics: cashmere, wool and cotton. Sizes: small, medium and large. They will all look exactly the same so if you lose your job and need to downgrade, your old socks will still match any lesser socks you will purchase in the future. Totally egalitarian footwear. This will be a money saver, since you will need to purchase fewer socks as you will no doubt gain socks that are shed by kids and other houseguests. You’ll make better use of the socks you have as you fold together stray singletons. As the industry constricts, jobs will disappear, so we’ll create work for the unemployed collecting leftover colored socks to make into sweaters for the residents of Portland, clothing for dolls and leggings for cats. In the same way that people who don’t use the Internet will eventually die off, leaving a planet populated by humans who never have to wonder
what people they went to high school with are having for dinner, most will forget there were any other socks and won’t miss them at all. Sure, in the distant future, bands of nonconformists determined to exercise their freedom to wear colorful socks will form a liberation movement: Free Our Colored Socks, FOCS, will become a rallying cry for the small population oppressed by the tyranny of dichromatic hosiery, but until then, we will be united and status equalized by our feet.

Miguel Sandoval! He was amazing in that movie about Pablo Escobar,
Blow
. Is it considered memory loss if you can eventually come up with the name you were trying to remember? What time is it?

Okay, it’s only been nineteen minutes but who’s counting? I’m just going to round up to twenty. Only 13,400-ish minutes of meditation to go this year.

I deserve some cake.

I’m making a trip to Florida and it’s all because of the sandwich. Sandwich Generation, that is. That’s the label being given to those of us who are somewhere between boomer and Gen X who are hitting middle age and coping with declining parents while we’ve still got kids under our roofs. Every decision I make is an attempt to balance this equation. Do I squeeze out a contribution to my retirement account this year, help pay down some of my parents’ debts or keep my son from going full-on Steve Buscemi? Ultimately, I pony up for my son’s braces, because no matter what career path he takes, an exploding mouthful of teeth isn’t going
to help him as he’s already made the fatal mistake of not having been born into the top 1 percent.
*

At any given moment, one of my friends might be having a sandwich. We’ll be planning to get together for cocktails—after all, our kids are finally reaching the age when they should be able to spend an hour or two alone—when I’ll get a call.
Ryan was trying to turn paper into parchment and almost burned the house down. We’re having a family meeting, wish us luck!
Or,
Mom fell and broke her hip
. Or,
Dad had a [fill in the blank with any number of ailments] and needs a [fill in the blank with any number of procedures] and I’m flying to [fill in the blank with any number of destinations], so let’s try again. How does four years from now work for you guys?
If the NSA is wiretapping our phones, sadly the only pattern of note is how often the Mayo Clinic comes up in conversations.

We’re the meat. You want to get to the meat, but before you do, you have to chew through the bread. An indication of how much things have changed in the last few years is that I used to look forward to going to Miami for a very different kind of sandwich—a Cuban sandwich. Ham and slow-roasted pork smothered in melted cheese on grilled bread. At my age, I shouldn’t be indulging in this cholesterol festival, but I’ll need at least one of these to sustain me on this mission.

The timing is terrible. I don’t believe in any kind of universal
law other than Randomness Happens, but it does seem like family emergencies, whopping credit card bills and bad skin always arrive at the worst possible moments. This is the second trip I will make to Florida this year. I was just there a few months ago.

The first emergency occurred before I’d had a chance to catch my breath after my son’s bar mitzvah. Planning and executing a bar mitzvah is never a walk in the park, but when you’re an atheist on a budget, you end up doing a lot of juggling.
*
There were several compelling reasons to have our son bar mitzvahed. Not only is it a time-honored tradition in our cultural, if not religious, heritage, but even more important our parents were getting so old that this could be one of the last big celebrations for their grandson they might be around to enjoy.

Complicating this plan was that we don’t belong to a temple.
*
Luckily, I was able to arrange for my son to study with someone I’d met on a writing assignment. I’d just covered what was believed to be the first bat mitzvah in an American women’s prison. It was the only time I’d been in temple where the person sitting next to me had the words
SUICIDAL FREAK
tattooed on her neck. There’s a saying, “There are no atheists in foxholes,” but it should
be amended to add “. . . or in penitentiaries.”
*
If I am ever incarcerated you can bet I’ll be signing up for every form of religious education offered. They have the best snacks; they observe holidays and often meet in air-conditioned halls. I figured if that rabbi could handle lifers, he could do just fine with my teenager.

But where to hold the event? Our home, with its temperamental seventy-year-old plumbing, is not ideal. As the rabbi’s congregation meets in a double-wide trailer on the grounds of the California Institution for Women in Chino, his place wasn’t an option. Ultimately, we were offered a meeting room at my son’s Episcopal elementary school. It was their first and I believe only bar mitzvah to date.

Being an atheist had never stopped me from enjoying the ritual, community singing, gay friendly and general do-unto-others-as-you-would-have-them-do-unto-you sentiment of the school’s chapel services, plus, the school had amazing camping trips. A camping trip that includes margaritas? What’s not to like? My son and I had also spent numerous Friday nights volunteering in the church’s soup kitchen, so to have the ceremony in that space seemed ideal.

The administration apparently wasn’t holding it against us that Ezra held the distinction of being the only kid to ever refuse participation in the annual kindergarten Christmas pageant. It wasn’t the message of the play he objected to, it was his role that he took issue with. He was assigned to be an angel while he
envisioned himself a shepherd. If you saw my round-faced, golden-locked cherub at that age,
you
would have cast him as an angel. People used to stop us on the street and say, “Your kid would have gotten a lot of work in Michelangelo’s time.” He looked like he’d floated down from the roof of the Sistine Chapel. Normally, I wouldn’t have indulged this kind of behavior, but before I had a chance to intervene, his teacher had brokered a deal with him. As long as he agreed not to recruit other recalcitrant angels into his boycott and faithfully (as it were) attend rehearsals, he could recuse himself from the performance. That he kept his end of the bargain exhibited a certain maturity that I had to admire. Even during the play, when I whispered, “Don’t you miss singing with your friends?” he remained firm and stated, “I’m singing along in my head.” I had to give it to him.

The bar mitzvah went off with just a few minor glitches. The only accommodation the rabbi had requested was that any crucifixes be removed or covered during the ceremony, something the church officials were kind enough to agree to. It wasn’t until the service was under way that my husband and I noticed our goof. We’d inadvertently placed him and our son in front of glass windows perfectly framing them between the two life-sized statues of Jesus in the courtyard garden. Thankfully, no one pointed it out to him, and I thought it made an unusually ecumenical triptych.

Nevertheless, our parents were all in attendance. Jewish celebrations entail a rigorous coordination of meals that typically follows this progression: just a nibble of something light, breakfast, brunch, afternoon snack, something to hold you over until
later, early dinner, low-blood-sugar pick-me-up, dinner, supper, something to tide you over until breakfast, and a midnight snack. Repeat until completely satiated, exhausted or bloated. We’d barely seen everyone off to their respective time zones when I got the news that my parents urgently needed to sell their home and needed assistance.

As I travel over the causeway spanning Biscayne Bay connecting Miami to my parent’s home on Sunset Island II, I look out over the water at this view that was captured in the final frames of
Midnight Cowboy
. When Dustin Hoffman takes his last breath, you can see the island where my parents have resided for forty years in the background. No one is dying, but my parents are taking this move hard. My sister and I have urged them for at least the last fifteen years to sell this house. The roof tiles are cracked and leaky, the kitchen woefully outdated, property taxes exorbitant and the landscaping expensive to keep up, especially when hurricanes regularly fell trees. But for my parents, the island itself had become part of their identity. It was an address that conferred status. Our neighbors once included William Paley, Howard Hughes and deposed dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle of Nicaragua. Current residents count Anna Kournikova, Enrique Iglesias and Lenny Kravitz among their illustrious ranks. I am convinced a move will be good for our parents. The equity from the sale of the house should provide money to live on, plus they’ve grown isolated on the island. Many of the newer islanders come for only brief visits and the absence of other year-rounders is palpable. Entire blocks of houses are dark for months at a time. My parents have also taken to keeping their cumbersome storm
shutters up all year round. It’s making their home seem like a mausoleum. A change of scenery might do them good, but this move will mark their entry into the next and probably last chapter of their lives. My parents have been supportive grandparents, showing up for baseball games and music recitals, making valiant attempts to keep current with newfangled distractions. “What’s this about Ezra and his Vines? He’s into horticulture now?” It’s heartbreaking to witness this passage.
*

I arrive to find my mother in a state of high anxiety. The house sold within weeks of listing it on the market and they are completely unprepared. My mother is intent on getting rid of everything she owns; if I’d shown up any later, my parents might be sleeping on tatami mats. She’s always had an eye for bargains and has already had an auction house cart away the items she acquired at thrift shops and estate sales that are now worth much more than she paid. Lamps, silk oriental rugs, a silver-plated tea service, a piano, and even the majority of their tables and chairs. The house has been eerily emptied out. Luckily, the time has passed when her possessions held an appeal for me, as it’s come to my attention that my own furniture is aging me. Having a house full of antiques can seem winningly eccentric when you’re young, but just the other day I caught sight of myself in a mirror sitting in a rocker from the 1930s and wondered what Grandma Moses was doing hanging out in my living room. Wearing vintage clothes
when you
are
vintage is a double negative. The last thing I need is more old-timey ephemera, but I feel something I might even call grief in the pit of my stomach.

My mother ushers me into the garage, where card tables are piled with items she wants to pass on to me. It’s the kind of clutter the
Grey Gardens
set designer might have culled to re-create the dilapidated home of Big and Little Edie.

Of the objects I can identify, there are chipped dishes and bowls, moldy books and a miniature scales of justice, something everyone’s dad had on his desk in the seventies.

Then there is the memorabilia from my father’s many businesses. As a serial entrepreneur, his career spanned a wide range of industries. There’s a six-foot-long historical drawing of St. Louis Union Station in Saint Louis, from his noble but unrealized attempt to restore the historic landmark. I’m tempted to rescue it, but it’s been neglected for so long the print is yellowed, frayed and covered in watermarks. There’s a poster for a film called
The Silent Partner,
which I’m surprised to see because it dates from the foray into soft-core porn distribution that ended disastrously. His company released such classics as
Poor White Trash
,
also known as
Scum of the Earth
and
The Naked Rider
. One of my fondest childhood memories is reciting
Naked Rider
’s radio ads:
In the house she was a lady, but in the stable, she was
—horse neighing sound—
an animal.
The one film that had some artistic value,
The Silent Partner
, starring Christopher Plummer, tanked, sending the company into the Chapter Eleven that marked the end of my college education. There are a few lithographs, also
very degraded, that might be from his gallery. Yes, there was an art gallery as well. There was a travel agency, a silver mine and a door factory. A high point was the period during which he and a partner owned The Embers, a much-beloved classic steak house that had fallen into disrepair. The restaurant was a Miami Beach institution, famous for its fire pit, thick-cut steaks, potatoes au gratin and baked apples. Ever the ham, I was thrilled to perform a few songs for his reopening of the restaurant. When your business partner goes by the single nickname “Blackie,” you might suspect mob connections. During those years, I was my father’s confidante. I was a senior in high school when he was offered a brown paper bag containing $50K in return for laundering money. “Do it,” I advised, calculating the cost of the double perm I was longing to ruin my already frizzy hair with. He declined, but it was not uncommon to hear that business associates or close friends were heading off to serve time in white-collar prisons. The restaurant closed its doors within eighteen months. Not long after, I was cast as a hooker who was being harassed by her pimp, Choo Choo, in
Miami Vice
. Wouldn’t you know it, my character operated her business out of The Embers, which was now a Euro-trash hotspot. Dad has no emotional attachment to any of this stuff, as he bequeathed his “legacy gift” to us years ago. During a visit to Florida, I found my father and five-year-old son sitting together on the floor. “Grandpa is teaching me how to play craps,” my son told me excitedly, holding up my father’s set of ivory dice, though his “never say die” resiliency is without a doubt the most valuable gift he’s passed on to us.

That feeling in my stomach is growing into something I might
call despair, but what can I do with this stuff? The tradition of preserving family heirlooms, such as they are, is something likely to disappear in the coming years. I can’t imagine my son, a citizen of the digital age, will either have room for or want to keep the photographs of relatives whose names have been forgotten, not to mention the other crap I’ve acquired over the years.
Must do a major purge when I get home
, I tell myself as my mother and I pack up boxes for either Goodwill or the large dumpster we’ve rented.
*

The object I feel the most affection for turns out to be a brass ashtray from the seventies. It still has ashes in it. Either they’ve never cleaned it or someone is still smoking. I don’t ask. I shove the ashtray, ashes and all, into a brown paper bag to take home with me.

I spend several heated hours convincing my mother not to get rid of her dining room furniture. Even though we’ve yet to determine where they’ll be heading, I tell her it’s safe to assume that they won’t be living in a yurt and will still need a surface to eat off of and something to sit on.