I Can Barely Take Care of Myself (21 page)

Throughout most of my life there seemed
to be only two types of women represented on TV shows. There were housewives slaving away over a hot stove and then there was
Sex and the City
’s Carrie Bradshaw, who once said she used her stove to store handbags. I’m neither of these types of woman. Before and after we were married, my husband’s dinner would continue to be something that he bought for himself at the Whole Foods sandwich counter.
I’d be coming home from work at nine o’clock and eating my cottage-cheese-and-cucumber saltine sandwiches. I wasn’t a totally useless wife. I was always able to open a bottle of wine for dessert.

I have memories of my grandfather Kirkman making mashed potatoes that were so good because they tasted like a bowl of butter. I love my mom’s brownies. My favorite thing about both of those recipes is
that someone else made them for me. Occasionally I feel an urge to whip up some mashed potatoes and brownies, but I don’t ever feel an urge to scrape the crust from the baking pan, or to squeeze out some progeny so he or she can remember that while Mommy was out of town often doing stand-up comedy, she baked a mean banana bread to try to make up for her flagrant neglect.

I am a generally honest,
good person who likes eating your brownies/playing with your kid for ten minutes, but that doesn’t
mean I should drop everything and enroll in culinary school or start begetting future generations so that one day I can traumatize them, for example by telling them their grandpa was a no-good adulterer.

I never met my mom’s dad, Grandpa Freddy, who died many years before I was born. I’d always
known my (now deceased) Nana Jean as a widow. Nana lived about an hour away from our house and had never learned to drive. Once a year, on Thanksgiving, my dad dutifully picked up his mother-in-law and drove her back to Needham, Massachusetts, to stay with us. Nana and I used to walk to the corner doughnut shop the morning of her arrival and when we were out of earshot of my mom, she’d tell me stories
about her dead husband. That’s how I thought of Grandpa Freddy—as my nana’s dead husband and not a real grandfatherly type. She didn’t paint the most familial picture of that man.

Apparently, Freddy was a bit of a womanizer and cheated on my nana. When I was about nine, on one of our doughnut-eating walks, I asked her, “Is Grandpa in hell?” I knew the Catholic Church wasn’t so hot on married
men having girlfriends, and even though he was my grandfather, I was pretty sure that God didn’t bend the rules for my family. Nana matter-of-factly answered, “Freddy’s in purgatory.”

She explained that it was like a waiting-room area for people who are dead but aren’t quite ready to meet God. That didn’t sound so bad. I liked most waiting rooms as long as they had fish tanks and
Highlights
magazine.
But Nana Jean said that purgatory was brutal. She said it felt like you just couldn’t wait anymore and then the nurse would come out and you would see a glimpse of God behind her and she’d look you over and decide not to take you in to see him just yet. All the while the devil is nipping at your heels, saying, “I’ll take you right now if you want.” My nana grinned. “I know Freddy’s in purgatory
because his spirit knocks on the wall above my bed all night long while I’m sleeping. And I say, ‘Freddy, since when do you pay so much attention to me in the bedroom?’ Freddy wants me to pray for him. That’s how he’ll get out of purgatory. But I’m not praying for him. He can wait.”

I never had to go to Catholic school like my mom did. My parents weren’t as religious as their parents. My parents
were like middle managers to God the CEO. They passed on his orders with a shrug: “Look, I don’t want to strictly obey the Ten Commandments either but the big guy says we have to.”

But straying from Catholicism makes my mom nervous because her superstition kicks in. I’ll never forget when I told her that I’d started going to Buddhist lectures in Los Angeles. “Jennifah, you can’t do that. You
were baptized in the Catholic Church. There’s an invisible mark on you that says, ‘Catholic.’ You can’t go get stamped with other religions. God doesn’t know what to make of it and you don’t end up in heaven.”

For such an all-powerful dude, God, as my mom sees him, is easily confused. I did have to go to church every Sunday, although we didn’t pray or read the Bible at home during the week or
anything like that. My mom’s philosophy was: “God is busy. He doesn’t need to hear that you’re thankful for every shit and fart.” I always thought that expression should be embroidered on a pillow.

Ultimately I decided Buddhism wasn’t for me either. You still have to get up on Sunday mornings and you have to sit twice as still for twice as long. My mom also has given up going to church. She thinks
the pastors are too old and out of touch. She and my dad have found the church of Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, where they are devoted to the worship of the slot machines. Another of my mom’s philosophies is: “Well, at least the church I’m
not
going to is the
right
one.”

But like all good Catholic families, ours just keeps getting bigger. I’ve come to realize that my relatives apparently like
to have lots of unprotected sex. The annual Kirkman Christmas party is getting so enormous and overwhelming that I’ve had to start my own tradition for that day—have a phone-therapy session with my shrink in the morning while trying to mask the fact that I’m sipping a 10:00 a.m. glass of Riesling.

Every party is the same. I say about two sentences to a cousin
and then their daughter, whatsherface,
is off and running across the room to put her finger in a light socket to see whether she’ll light up like the Christmas tree. The fact that I don’t want to have kids of my own doesn’t mean I want to watch someone else’s die a painful death by electrocution, so I gracefully bow out of the conversation. “No, it’s fine. You go chase her. We’ll catch up later.”

My extended family are a bunch of
hospitable, sweet souls. Anyone who walks through the door is considered family. But sometimes I’m still self-conscious at the family Christmas party because I am childless. My sister Violet is childless too but she has three cats and three horses. She gets up at the crack of dawn to feed them, so people feel less bad for her. It seems like as long as you’re cleaning up some living thing’s poop after
age thirty, family members really respect that lifestyle choice. My uncle Will, a stout Italian man with a white beard, plays Santa Claus every year at the party. Kirkman Christmas takes place a week before Actual Christmas, but the kids are naturally able to suspend their disbelief and accept that Santa Claus comes to Auntie Violet’s a week early to honor the fact that it’s easier to get all
of the Kirkmans together on that day. Also, when you’re a kid, I guess it’s just called “believing in Santa” and not “suspension of disbelief.”

At dusk, Uncle Will heads out to my sister’s barn and changes into his red Santa suit, complete with fake white beard, even though he has a real one underneath. He brings in a sackful of presents and doles them out to more than thirty screaming, shrieking
children who are freaking out harder than preteen girls and creepy older men at a Justin Bieber concert.

I stand back with the adults while the kids trample one another for a front-row seat at the Santa concert, and once they’re down, I watch them go into a trance. At no point do they seem to realize that Santa, unlike any other man, has whiskers made of cotton. Or maybe they do notice but don’t
seem to care? I never thought that any of the Santas I met as a kid was
the
Santa.

My mom always told me that the Santa Claus at the mall was a
Santa look-alike who was also from the North Pole and definitely sanctioned by Santa. So I never went in with expectations and I always felt a little superior to the other kids because I knew that this wasn’t Santa and I was in on it with him. I’d sit
on his lap and play the game and tell him what I wanted, knowing that he would pass it on to the real Santa but that the chump whose lap I was sitting on was not the guy who was going to be coming down our chimney.

Actually, nobody was coming down our chimney. We didn’t have a fireplace. My mom told me that Santa came in through a vent on the roof and climbed down our attic stairs (which doubled
as a cleaning supplies closet). I was always very impressed with how, every Christmas morning, the cleaning supplies looked untouched. Santa got extra points in my book for being so diligent about putting things back where they belonged.

But every kid at Kirkman Christmas was told that this was
the
Santa Claus. And they were buying the taped-on eyebrows that Uncle Will was selling.

By the time
Will/Santa comes on the scene, the shrieking gets out of control. I don’t remember my mother and father ever letting me shriek at high decibels in other people’s homes—even family members’ homes. I’ve never grabbed someone’s Christmas gift out of his or her hands. (Then again, I never wanted the same kind of presents that other kids got. As a kid, every Christmas I asked Santa Claus for one of
those “furry clips that high school girls hang off their purses.” Santa never delivered. I learned later in life that those are known as “roach clips” and they are not just purse decorations, like some pinecone ornament on a Christmas tree. They hold your roach—aka the tiny little pile of ash and rolling papers that a joint has been reduced to after a round of puffing and passing.)

At last year’s
Kirkman Christmas party, with my divorce still a secret and it being no secret that I was beyond my peak egg health, I thought it would be a good strategy to seem “normal” and “into children.” When Santa had given out his last gift and the kids’ voices were hoarse from wailing, I decided to flex my maternal side.
Everybody was always telling me I’d be such a great mom and the third glass of Riesling
had given me the courage to try. Santa Will walked quickly toward the front door with his empty bag. Once he was out of their eye line, the kids had already forgotten about Santa. They were playing with their toys and almost knocking over the Christmas tree. The front door shut and I ran to the group of kids and said, “You guys! Santa is leaving! Let’s all run to the window and watch his sleigh
with his reindeers fly away!” The kids looked at me in stunned silence.
They had never considered that the sleigh and eight tiny reindeer were outside.
I was a genius. Here I had been for thirty-seven years, thinking that I wasn’t good with kids just because I didn’t want a child of my own, and it turns out I possessed, at minimum, the creativity of a cool kindergarten teacher.

The kids screamed
in unison, “
Rudolph!
” and ran to the window. They pushed one another from side to side, trying to get the best view, just as I realized that the view they were getting was a behind-the-curtain glimpse of Uncle Will going to his truck to drop off his empty bag and walking into the barn to change back into his plain red fleece
KISS THE COOK
sweatshirt—an outfit not becoming of Rachael Ray, let alone
a magic man like Santa.

Some kids saw Santa Will walk into the barn and the kids who didn’t were crying because they’d missed the sleigh flying away. The rest of them couldn’t figure out what the hell was going on, so they just started to cry in utter confusion. It was like watching a bunch of women having dinner together and one of them starts to get choked up. But before she has a chance to
explain why she’s about to start sobbing the others join in—partly due to an instinct to sympathize and partly due to the competitive instinct to steal the sympathy spotlight.
I am the most upset! Look at me!

My aunt Gina turned to me and said, “Here’s a tip. When dealing with children, you don’t have to act like a child. You just have to tell them to believe in Santa Claus but don’t exhaust
yourself running around acting like you believe in him too.”

Maybe that’s a good reason to tell people why I’m not having
kids. Part of being a good mom is suspension of disbelief, trusting your kids will grow up to be awesome instead of jobless burnouts, trusting that they won’t get bullied or that at least you’ll know what to do if they do, trusting you won’t lose all of your friends and you’ll
get your boobs back. I’m not really equipped to tell someone to believe in something that I can’t believe in too. And I don’t want to raise someone so blindly trusting of me that he or she actually thinks a fat guy who probably can’t catch his own breath has the energy to oversee an entire workforce of elves three hundred and sixty-five days a year, and that somehow with no workouts or training
he can keep his arms flapping on those reins all night long on a sleigh that holds enough toys for all of the children in the world—except for the Jewish and Muslim kids.

If I had a kid, I already know that I would totally break her trust later in life when I go into her room and read her diary. That’s why I’m folding now.

10. I’m Gonna Die Alone (and I Feel Fine)

Mrs. Sanders, the ninety-two-year-old lady who lived across the street from me when I was a little kid, died alone trying to change a bulb in the Tiffany light fixture on her kitchen ceiling. In what should be documented as the biggest “are you fucking kidding me” in the history of bad timing, she had a heart attack while standing on the chair and fell
backward, and only the kitchen floor was there to break her fall and her brittle bones. She was found on her back, clutching a sixty-watt bulb, next to a tipped-over chair, while her apparently necrophiliac poodle, Mimi, licked her face. She had a “kid”—a seventy-two-year-old son named Donny who didn’t live with her. He wasn’t there to take charge and say, “Mom, I’ll change the lightbulb for you.
Please, don’t climb that chair. You could fall to your death on the floor, where I will find you in a day with your housedress over your head and your knee-high panty hose exposed.”

I think of Mrs. Sanders whenever somebody says to me, “If you don’t have kids, you won’t have anyone to take care of you when you’re old.” Mrs. Sanders sacrificed her best years in metabolism—her twenties and thirties—to
raise Donny, and she still ended up changing her own lightbulb, which led to her taking her last breath alone in the dark on some cold linoleum. Donny came by every week to help his mom grocery shop and to weed her flower garden, but he
wasn’t there on the night that he could have been most helpful. According to the logic of bearing children in order to have built-in caretaker insurance, if Mrs.
Sanders birthed Donny only so she could get some help around the house in her twilight years, she wasted her life.