I Can't Complain (2 page)

The gift of her prejudices is that almost everything I eat or contemplate eating, or scrape off a roll, reminds me of her. She is there when I eat leftovers cold and every time I dress a tomato. Whenever a buffet lunch serves only tuna, egg, chicken, and potato salads, I think,
All she could eat here would be a roll and a pat of butter.
I don’t like to drink water from a mug unless I have to, and I’ve never tasted Thousand Island dressing.

Before she died in 1998, I visited her in the nursing home every day. As I was registering her upon admission, I said to the woman behind the desk, “Above all else, she cannot have condiments. Ever. Could you write this down, please: No mustard, no mayonnaise; no salads
made
with mayonnaise; no ketchup, pickles, relish, or piccalilli. No tartar sauce. No Miracle Whip, either. No salad dressing of any kind. Not even on the side.”

Perhaps, in her diminished state, they could have tricked her. But, really, in light of what other grown children might be demanding for their parents, wasn’t mine a small, benign request? The staff always said she was the sweetest person in the whole place. She’d lost her speech, so it was up to me to explain her religion. I had to make sure that this lucky institution observed the rules of Julia, and that no careless aide would let those poisons touch her lips.

JULIA LIPMAN’S SALAD DRESSING

Juice of a fresh lemon; salt, pepper, paprika to taste.

M
Y FATHER, AN AVID READER
, loved books but didn’t buy them, at least not retail. Our shelves held an odd collection of classics, cookbooks, humor, essays, and ancient history, all hardcovers (my father insisted that paperbacks were abridged), few written after World War II, none costing more than a quarter, and all from a dusty secondhand bookstore in Lowell, Massachusetts.

The store was not 84 Charing Cross Road; not a shop where one made discoveries of the rare book, eureka variety. But one day my father came home with something he’d picked especially for me.

“I think you’ll like this writer, Max Shulman,” he said.

“
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
?” I read from its turquoise spine. The word “novelization” hadn’t been coined yet, but I sensed that these stories, having inspired the sitcom, would be . . . well, inane.

But then again, my father—the parent who didn’t allow television on school nights—endorsed it. He liked only good books, and “good” usually meant funny. He worshipped Ring Lardner and, above all others, S. J. Perelman. “Give it a try,” he said.

The introduction was written by Shulman himself: “The stories in this volume have appeared in
Good Housekeeping,
Cosmopolitan,
the
Saturday Evening Post,
Today’s Woman,
and
American Magazine.
They are, therefore, clean and wholesome narratives, quite suitable for the parsonage library. (The publisher wishes me to announce that substantial discounts will be given to parsonage libraries . . . My publisher also wishes me to announce that he has left over from 1936 a large number of copies of
Meet Alf Landon
. . .”)

Who is this wise guy?
I wondered.

I read on: “Mean, small, captious, and niggling readers will notice certain discrepancies in the following stories,” Shulman continued. “In some . . . Dobie Gillis is a freshman; in others he is a sophomore. In some he is majoring in law; in others he is majoring in journalism or chemistry or English or mechanical engineering or nothing at all . . . These tiny variations . . . to the intelligent, greathearted, truly American reader . . . will be matters of no consequence.”

I loved that. Where was the pious introduction that prefaced all other books? I wanted to adopt this voice, to be clever and brash instead of meek and well-mannered; I wanted to make observations that were droll and offhand like Shulman’s; impolite and effortless. I turned to the first story and was rewarded immediately: “I cut in on them, laughing lightly at the resultant abrasions,” Dobie says, after spotting Clothilde Ellingboe doing the “Airborne Samba” at the freshman prom.

That first story, “The Unlucky Winner,” has, at its heart, a brilliant piece of faux-mannered bombast. Led astray by the party girl Clothilde, unable to meet a deadline, Dobie hands in “Thoughts of My Tranquil Hours,” plagiarized from an ancient tome by Elmo Goodhue Pipgrass:

Who has not sat in the arbor of his country seat, his limbs composed, a basin of cheery russet apples at his side, his meerschaum filled with good shag; and listened to the wholesome bucolic sounds around him: the twitter of chimney swifts, the sweet piping of children at their games . . . the comfortable cackling of chickens, the braying of honest asses . . .

And on it goes, Mr. Shulman’s ode to verbosity, for several hundred more words (“. . . the beneficent gruels, the succulent tarts . . .”). “That was the first sentence, and the shortest one,” Dobie adds dryly.

Wry, cynical, intelligent, irreverent—nothing is sacred on Shulman’s campus. Professors are windbags and frustrated novelists. Fathers are tyrannical and stupid. Public servants are crooks. To be sure, Dobie is girl-crazy, and Mr. Shulman built each story around this predisposition. Pansy Hammer, Lola Pfefferkorn, Clothilde Ellingboe, Thalia Menninger, and Poppy Herring—all meet Dobie’s rather single-minded criterion for girlfriendhood: beauty of the shapely, creamy-skinned, retro variety. But why not?

What saves Dobie are his character flaws and his limitations—physical in some stories, intellectual in others. If he wins these beauty queens, it is by his wits; when he doesn’t get the girl, it is because he plotted, annoyed, and failed. Romantic comedy needs obstacles to succeed, and Dobie has plenty: no money, no discipline, no muscles. (In “Everybody Loves My Baby,” Dobie is competing with four Big Men on Campus for the hand of Helen Frith: “‘I ran ninety-eight yards for a touchdown this afternoon,’ said Davy. ‘I shot twenty-four baskets last night,’ said Ellis. ‘I tied the Olympic record for the hammer throw yesterday,’ said Bob. ‘I pitched a no-hit game last summer,’ said Georgie. I cleared my throat. ‘I can float on my back,’ I said.”)

How wonderful that
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,
originally published in 1951, has come back into print. Its appearance belongs to the Eisenhower era, but its jokes are Seinfeldian. (“Her manners were exquisite. I had seen her at the Kozy Kampus Korner eating the specialty of the house—a sandwich that contained scraps of pot roast, gravy, chopped nuts and a dipper of sauerkraut—without even getting her fingers moist.”)

It is absolutely essential—the laugh test—that I quote from “Boy Bites Man,” from the tortured obituary written by journalism student Lola Pfefferkorn, “a figure that brought forth frequent cries of admiration from my slightly foam-flecked lips.”

No more will the flowers raise their multicolored heads and smile for Emmett T. Zoldin, upholsterer, of 476 Coolidge Ave. No more will the song of birds cheer his days. The winds will still blow and the rain will still fall upon the green earth, but Emmett T. Zoldin will not know. For yesterday as Emmett T. Zoldin was bent over a Swedish Modern chaise longue . . . the Angel of Death with merciful swiftness extinguished the flickering candle of his life. And no amount of tears from Yetta Zoldin, his widow, or from their son, Sam O. Zoldin, or from their daughter, Mrs. Arbutus Gottschalk, or from Emmett’s brother Pyotor, still living in their native Finmark, will bring Emmett T. Zoldin back. And tomorrow when the Abide With Me Mortuary lays his mortal remains to rest in Sunnyvale Cemetery, it will be the end of Emmett T. Zoldin on this earth.

Farewell, honest upholsterer!

As a reader, I appreciated this as the fully realized, polished gem that it is. But now, as a writer, I imagine Max Shulman (he described himself as “squat and moonfaced”) choosing, then crossing out adjectives, searching in the first place for these names, these middle initials, this occupation. I hope when he typed, “Farewell, honest upholsterer!” he laughed aloud.

As my father did when he picked out his favorite passages and read them to me. He liked to entertain his daughters when we were home sick, even when we were past the age of being read to. I can see him taking off his glasses to wipe away the tears of laughter over Lardner’s “Alibi Ike” and his persevering through his own guffaws.

My first editor, Stacy Schiff, once asked me which books influenced my own writing, especially those of connected short stories. “Oh,” I said. “Well, I love John Updike’s Maples stories. And, of course, Grace Paley . . .” I hesitated then said, “But my all-time favorite is
The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
by Max Shulman.” There was the long pause of an English major and aggrieved image builder. “You might not want to say that in public,” she advised. (Two books later I would name a character after Max Shulman: Martha Schiff-Shulman, best friend of the narrator in
The Way Men Act,
a tribute to the creator of Dobie Gillis, hyphenated for all time to the surname of the above editor.)

I felt exonerated when I read in Eric Lax’s biography of Woody Allen that Max Shulman is Allen’s favorite writer, and again when I read that Bob Newhart named Shulman, Robert Benchley, and James Thurber as his greatest influences.

Once best-selling and celebrated, Max Shulman died in 1988 at sixty-nine. In a
New York Times
obituary, James Barron quoted Shulman as saying he was good at humor because “life was bitter and I was not.”

My father died three years later, a copy of S. J. Perelman’s
Vinegar Puss
on his nightstand. Laughter in the sickbed was his prescription and is part of his legacy.

I was his baby, the second of two girls. As good and faultless a dad as he was, he was an even better audience. We four ate supper in the kitchen, my mother serving, my father presiding, Mr. Gusto in all matters. His own days were unfulfilling—he was a salesman with a Harvard degree, having graduated in the doomed year of 1929—but career frustration was not something he talked about. Thus my sister and I had the mike at mealtime, and we could’ve been comedians on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
the degree to which our prattle seemed to entertain.

Decades later, at an event sponsored by the Women’s National Book Association, I described my father’s delight in his daughters’ anecdotes. A fellow panelist turned to me and said for all to hear, “A study of successful women showed they all had one thing in common: fathers who listened to them.”

My sister and I do solemnly believe—no, we insist—that each of us was, unquestionably, her father’s favorite child, the shiniest apple of his eye. The argument goes like this: I was Daddy’s favorite child. No, sorry, you’re wrong.
I
was. We smile as we present the evidence of his devotion made visible. Finally, we agree to disagree, recognizing what a sweet and lucky argument ours is.

I
N DECEMBER
1980, my friend Bobbie told me she was pregnant. She was thirty years old and single, then an underpaid lawyer for a state agency. She said her mind was made up. Her social life had not borne much fruit; she might never get married or conceive a convenient baby; she wanted this one. The father, Rick, was a nice enough man, newly divorced, seemingly embarrassed by Bobbie’s pride of pregnancy (they were colleagues), and nervous about unwed fatherhood.

They dated, they argued, they attended Lamaze classes—at which Rick asked more questions than all the other partners combined. The commitment standoff, though mutual, was annoyingly modern, especially for those of us in Bobbie’s camp. He was there for her, sort of; her friends and coworkers wanted something more, not that we could name it, but something like a declaration. When her baby turned out to be a healthy girl, we were thrilled; Bobbie’s fond hopes for a daughter, for a true and reliable lifetime partner, had been realized.

Even with his long-stemmed red roses and his sterile gown, Rick looked lost and apologetic in Bobbie’s hospital room as the maternal grandparents fussed and Bobbie the pioneer, lying gingerly on one side (“a hemorrhoid the size of a golf ball,” she explained), regaled her childless visitors with birth stories. Bobbie and baby Julia were discharged and went home to Bobbie’s apartment. Rick, as far as I could see, was peripheral. He held Julia and regarded her fondly in his own fashion, which is to say in the manner of a man who didn’t have a way with babies.

But if Julia the infant didn’t showcase Rick’s talents, then Julia the child certainly did. For thirteen years he was, in the very best sense, a crazy father, a constant visitor and adorer, Julia’s famously, embarrassingly devoted dad, the guy who drove the Newton-to-Sudbury round trip for every PTA meeting, sneaked into both visiting days at camp—meant for awkwardly divorced parents—and cut work to chaperone school trips.