Sister Mother Husband Dog: (Etc.) (10 page)

Because of the left thigh business, we took Jocelyn seriously and got Honey five more squeaky toy gorillas. They were hard to find online because it turned out they weren’t gorillas, they were chimps. (We know the difference between a gorilla and a chimp, but when it comes to squeaky toys, it’s hard to tell.) They continue to be the only squeaky toys she likes. She seems to know they are all alike and different from her other toys. Isn’t that remarkable?

Honey’s tricks: She can burrow under the covers and lie there like a lump.

That’s about it.

Except one Sunday last winter, an amazing thing happened. Actually it started the Sunday before. I was making buttermilk pancakes, which I always do on Sunday mornings, and when I put butter on the griddle and turned on the burner, the griddle got so smoky it set off the smoke alarm. Honey went crazy—the piercing sound was painful to her sensitive doggie hearing. She tried to climb my legs. I picked her up and carried her out, and she clung, her little paws digging into my shoulder. The next Sunday, seven whole days later—are you following this?—I took out the griddle, put on some butter, turned on the burner, and Honey tried to climb my legs.

She must have associated the burner with the shriek of the alarm. Or the butter with the shriek, or the pancake griddle with it. The first week the alarm went off at least three minutes after the burner was lit and the butter melted. The second time, the alarm never went off. Still she made the connection.

Isn’t she brilliant?

Now you can tell me all about your grandchildren. Or your cat.

M
y dad can’t tweet because he’s dead. He died in 1992, when telephones were still about the only way to have a conversation with someone who wasn’t in the same place you were.

My dad was an uproar man. Uproar was his specialty. He loved calling one daughter with news of another, often inaccurate, trying to stir up trouble and envy. When he was close to death and could barely recognize his own hands, he still remembered my telephone number and continued to call any hour of the day or night. There was no caller ID then. I didn’t have the option of knowing who it was and not answering.

“Hello,” I would say.

“Your sister won the Pulitzer,” he would say. And hang up.

As I said, he never got it right. Or perhaps he was simply ahead of the story.

When Ashton Kutcher unleashed an avalanche of Twitter hysteria with his tweet, “how do you fire Jo Pa? #insult #noclass as a hawkeye fan I find it in poor taste” (Kutcher was apparently unaware that Joe Paterno, Penn State head coach, was fired for covering up a child sex abuse scandal) . . . and then Alec Baldwin threw a Twitter tantrum because an American Airlines flight attendant told him it was time for takeoff, he had to stop playing Words with Friends . . . I realized how much my dad would have loved to tweet.

He would have instantly grasped its possibilities. How enormously it magnifies the opportunity for attention and family embarrassment. Like Baldwin and Kutcher, my dad was a Hollywood guy, a screenwriter and producer. His calls, much like their tweets, were variations on a theme:
I’m still here, look at me, ignore me at your peril.

He never would have mastered the finer points of tweeting. The retweet, the Follow Friday, the hashtag, the @—all the ways one tweeter can communicate with another. My father would have preferred the basic no-frills
tweet because he wouldn’t have to have a conversation. Which required paying attention to what the other person was saying. Which was a bother. My dad could be sweet, but listening was not his strong suit. On his phone calls (so memorable that I and my sisters Nora and Amy have written about them, and I have no doubt that Hallie will, too), he never said hello or good-bye, those polite fronts and backs that Twitter disposes of anyway. His calls were short blasts. The 140-character restriction was made for him. Like the uproar tweeters of today, he always acted innocent after causing trouble, affecting a kind of how-did-this-happen mode when he’d engineered it.

But mostly he was into bragging. When I think of the calls I’ve missed about his Twittering:

“I’ve got two thousand followers.”

“I’ve got ten thousand followers.”

“Hey, your old man’s got more followers than God.”

“Baby, guess who shut down the system?”

My father was crushed when Hollywood lost interest in him. When he couldn’t get work. When no one knew his name. But men like my father will be able to prolong their fame, thanks to cyberspace, long after they can’t get jobs in television or the movies. If Twitter shuts you down, there’s always Facebook, which Salman Rushdie
used to blow off a girlfriend. A man with a need for uproar always finds an opportunity.

Once when I complained to my dad about his calls, which came one after another exactly as tweets do, in a relentless, endless stream, he said by way of an apology, “I live half my life in the real world and half on the telephone.”

He was truly ahead of his time.

M
y favorite thing is a bakery, and my favorite thing about where I live is how many bakeries are a dog’s walk away. Dogs aren’t allowed in bakeries, but many Manhattan bakeries have little benches in front so you can tie your dog’s leash to a bench leg and keep watch out the window to make sure your dog isn’t dognapped while you are buying a croissant.

If I head to the West Village, I stop at Bien Cuit for a hockey puck–shaped thing with raisins and I think a hint of orange. I don’t have a discerning palate. “It tastes good” is as discerning as I get. This hockey puck is called a granola cookie. Granola cookies are popping up everywhere. I’m pro anything new bakerywise, especially
something that fools you into thinking it’s healthy. I consider a peanut butter cookie a source of protein.

In addition to being pro-bakeries, I am pro-sugar. All my teeth already have fillings, and whatever else is wrong with sugar I don’t care. Everything in moderation, as they say, although my attachment to bakeries does not fall into that category.

There is a famous Danish at Bien Cuit. By famous I mean it’s been in a magazine as one of the best Danish pastries in New York City. (I love it that our culture is so shallow that even a Danish can be famous.) This Danish contains yam, and I’m not wild about it, but I don’t really like pumpkin pie, either. After (or instead of) Bien Cuit, I visit Amy’s Bread on Bleecker Street for a ham, pickle, and butter sandwich on a baguette and a slice of layer cake. American layer cake is a great invention and, if you consider the variations, as remarkable as jazz. From there I’m off to the Blue Ribbon Bakery, where I am very attached to their pizza bread with sea salt, and my husband loves their olive bread. Also they have good hummus, but that’s another story, a healthy one, and they make my favorite open-faced sandwich: roasted tomatoes, arugula, and a special lemony olive oil on their toasted white.

Perhaps rather than go west, I head south through
Washington Square Park, an especially lovely stroll in spring when the pear trees bloom feathery white, stopping at Mille-Feuille on LaGuardia Place for an excellent latte and a
pain au chocolat
or perhaps for their little round chocolate cookies that are not too sweet. Then maybe I turn east to Balthazar, although there is no way to keep an eye on the dog there. Balthazar has great chocolate chip cookies if you like fat ones with walnuts (they freeze well, too—to defrost, stick them in a toaster oven at 450 for five minutes), and they used to have a pistachio doughnut. It was a terrible cruelty to sell something so delicious and then stop. But I don’t want to complain. I am lucky to live in carb paradise and I am lucky to be afflicted with a syndrome (disorder?) that my husband calls Discardia—the tendency to throw things away after a few bites unless I fall in love or am really hungry. Thank God for Discardia, or I would be someone who had to be removed from my house with a crane.

If I walk north, I pass Breads Bakery. I am presently eating my way through the shelves and to date have tasted the almond croissant, the regular croissant, the challah (off the charts, only on Fridays), the babka (too chocolaty for me, but everyone else is bananas for it), the walnut bread (highly recommended), the pain au raisin, and the seven-grain bread (not dense enough). Oh yes,
I’ve tried the chocolate chip cookie (just okay). Then I head up to Spoon for their perfect chocolate brownie, which I take home and eat the tiniest sliver of now and then.

I haven’t mentioned any lemon sweets, and lemon is my favorite flavor. I wish someone in the Village would make a great lemon meringue pie. But I don’t want to complain.

I have been thinking about bakeries a lot recently as well as about complaining, not simply because I am obsessed with bakeries but because I was reading yet another spate of articles about having it all. Women claiming it’s possible to have it all, women claiming they can’t have it all, at least one man chiming in,
Hey, what about me, I don’t have it all, either.
Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, is touring the country, teaching women to “lean in.” I’m glad she is—women need to be as assertive as possible. We still have miles to go in the equality department, but Sandberg, too, smart as she is about it, has thrown her hat into the having-it-all fray. She falls into the hard-but-possible category, and is the current guru in negotiating this imperfect paradise. With her enviable job, helpful husband, two children (not to mention her bestseller), right now she is Queen Have-It-All.

A while ago a woman named Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote a piece in the
Atlantic
about how she realized that she couldn’t have it all. Every so often she surfaces, writing another article or making another round of talk shows on the subject. Slaughter had a dream job in Washington, DC (director of policy planning at the State Department), and a husband and children in Princeton, New Jersey. The setup, she was surprised to discover, nearly derailed her kids. It’s hard to imagine someone as highly educated as Slaughter not knowing that, if you have kids, it’s best to live in the same city they do. If you have a husband, it’s a good thing to hang around him, too. Her problem wasn’t trying to have it all and realizing she couldn’t. It was wanting something so much that she ignored the obvious.

Every choice makes some things in life more possible and some things less—remember upsides and downsides? Actually there is a statistical theory, degrees of freedom, that proves that every single choice you make narrows your choices (the choices you might make in the future), rendering having it all impossible. I dropped out of Advanced Algebra (even though algebra has nothing to do with this, it gives you an idea of my mathematical limits), nevertheless, I will attempt to explain. Take Anthony Weiner, for instance. As I write this, he is all over
the news, trying to make a comeback. Anthony Weiner discovered that he could not be a United States congressman and tweet a picture of his erect penis. Becoming a congressman—convincing us to vote for him—ruled out that possibility. He could not have it all. And he’s a man.

I’m sure when Anthony Weiner found out he couldn’t have it all, he changed the definition. “Having it all” meant having his pregnant wife not leave him. “That’s all I want,” I bet he said to himself when he was exposed and had to resign. “Just don’t let Huma leave me.” He might even have said a prayer to that effect if he’s the praying type, or even if he’s not (circumstances can turn a non-prayer into a prayer). In other words, “all” shrank. However, now that he’s got his wife and his baby son—she didn’t leave him—“all” is not enough. He wants more. He wants to be mayor. Of New York City. He wants to have the public get past his tweeting his erect penis, have a wife, son, and be mayor, too.

Having it all seems to breed wanting more. And since we can’t have it all because it is statistically impossible, and since there is no such thing as more than all, the whole notion seems, I’m sorry to say, depressingly American.

In Ethiopia, 2 percent of women know how to read.
The other day the front page of the newspaper featured a story of an eleven-year-old Afghani girl sold into marriage to pay her father’s debt. In the photo she was sitting on a chair, wearing a pretty flowing red head scarf. She looked so young and innocent that she might at any second bounce up and do an unselfconscious twirl. In many countries, having it all is learning to read. Having it all is getting to choose who you love. Having it all is walking to school without worrying that you might get raped on the way.

One of the most revolting parts of the American female version—and there are many revolting parts—is that having it all defines “all” one way: marriage, children, career. It assumes all women want the same thing. Success rests on achieving three goals (life viewed not as a continuum, but an endpoint), and these goals, as it happens, are exactly the ones that will declare you a success at your high school reunion.

This might not be a coincidence.

Never underestimate the power of high school. It’s the identity everyone wants to live down, the approval everyone aspires to. Being able to check the boxes—marriage, children, career—is more important at a high school reunion than anywhere else, which is why I think
that high school, not feminism, is the reason an idea of happiness got framed this way. It instantly creates the social world of high school: haves, have-nots, wannabes, and freaks. Freaks are those who aspire to other versions of life, who want to march to their own tune. Thanks to this definition of success, they will always be freaks. Freaks forever.

And what if you’re too poor to have it all? Ironically, you have it all—marriage, children, career—but only because it’s a necessity. You have to work to help support your family. Then you are in the impossible state of having it all and having nothing. It’s like you have the jeans, but the wrong brand. What a loser. You never get it right.

My friend Molly graduated from high school in 2003, just before Facebook was founded, and as a result, she says, she has never left high school. She keeps bumping into her classmates on Facebook, even those she hasn’t spoken to since high school. Daily she is bombarded by photos and news of the have-it-alls. She keeps redefining what she wants, she says, by seeing what everyone else has.

Getting away from high school is supposed to free you from the pressure to conform. But now that there’s no getting away, high school is forever. Perhaps Sheryl
Sandberg is not Queen Have-It-All. She is Prom Queen Have-It-All.

To me, having it all—if one wants to define it at all—is the magical time when what you want and what you have match up. Like an eclipse. A perfect eclipse is when the moon is at its perigee, the Earth is farthest from the sun, and when the sun is observed near zenith. I have no idea what that means. I got the description off a science website, but one thing is clear: It’s rare. This eclipse never lasts more than seven minutes.

Personally, I believe having it all can last longer than that. It might be a fleeting moment—drinking a cup of coffee on a Sunday morning when the light is especially bright. It might also be a few undisturbed hours with a novel I’m in love with, a three-hour lunch with my best friend, reading
Goodnight Moon
to a child, watching a Nadal-Federer match. Having it all definitely involves an ability to seize the moment, especially when it comes to sports. It can be eating in bed when you’re living on your own for the first time or the first weeks of a new job when everything is new, uncertain, and a bit scary. It’s when all your senses are engaged. It’s when you feel at peace with someone you love. And that isn’t often. Loving someone and being at peace with him (or her) are two different
things. Having it all are moments in life when you suspend judgment. It’s when I attain that elusive thing called peace of mind.

Not particularly American, unquantifiable, unidentifiable, different for everyone, but you know it when you have it.

Which is why I love bakeries. Peace descends the second I enter, the second I smell the intoxicating aroma of fresh bread, see apricot cookies with scalloped edges, chocolate dreams, cinnamon and raisin concoctions, flights of a baker’s imagination, and I know I am the luckiest person in the world. At that moment, in spite of statistical proof that this is not possible, I have it all. And not only that, I can have more.