I Can't Complain (4 page)

First, a disclaimer: I say yes a lot. And despite making the category of requests sound burdensome, I recognize every day how fortunate I am to be an author whom people publish and issue invitations to. Still, my first novel came out in 1990, so I’ve had a long time to sniff out what may be the less desirable venues, which is to say the readings where nobody comes and/or the attendees aren’t—as my late mother would say—from the book buyers.

Take book groups: almost always a gratifying bunch. But I have learned to ask, “Would it be all right if I arrive after the, um, business items?” The same goes for the annual meeting of the Friends of any given Library. Again, experience has taught me that I am not always interested in last year’s minutes, or this year’s awards and thank-you gifts to the hardest-working cochairs, without whom . . . etc.; or the raffle of forty items donated by local merchants, followed by the presentation of flowers to the individuals who designed the invitations and made the cookies. I say this as no curmudgeon; in fact, as a fiction writer I am interested in life’s ceremonies and awkward moments. But these occasions seat me not in the back row, where I could check my e-mail, but onstage, facing the audience, as I try to look fascinated or at least appreciative. Accordingly I inquire in advance, “Your event
begins
at seven? And what time, might I ask, would I actually be needed?”

The book group analog is this: I have found myself too often in a hostess’s kitchen, amid fifteen strangers who all know one another, not just from discussing books once a month but from their children’s school or the workplace or temple or church or the block. I consider myself outgoing, not uneasy with new people, but there’s always a moment in these kitchens where hospitality circumvents me, and the prevailing conversational ethic appears to be, “Let’s chat among ourselves and fine-tune our end-of-year potluck next month, lest the visiting author feel besieged.”

I refill my coffee and murmur from time to time, “Shall we begin?” gesturing with my plate of bundt cake toward the circle of empty chairs. “Anyone?”

In the related realm of bookshop readings, declining an invitation has its penalties and its rewards. I don’t want to be seen as a diva, and certainly want to be a trouper on behalf of my publisher and our mutual wares. More social algebra: Will I flop, or will I draw a crowd? What if I say no and I’m wrong? What if one hundred hardcover-buying readers attend, including reporters and movie producers? On the same book tour, May 2004, I was up against the final episode of
Friends
and the final episode of
Frasier,
the latter in Florida. Attendance: one fan, one cousin, and her date.

Can I ever really be sure what to accept and what to decline? Yes, if I’ve done the event in the past and know it’s a dog. Take the pre-Christmas sale-a-thon where at least ten authors sit at tables with their old and new books, thereby encouraging customers to confuse the day with a crafts fair. They browse; they turn your book over, read the flap, compare the photo to the live person in front of them, smile weakly, then move on to the best-selling author two chairs down. The first time I attended, I consoled myself that there was a payoff, that the deli downstairs had corned beef and chopped liver and really good pickles. Second year, I brought my knitting, the same year I noticed that the paperbacks piled at my station had been signed by me at the previous year’s author-a-thon. Third year, I declined, and I told the truth: too many authors, snow predicted, not enough customers.

I have a companion quirk to the saying of no: I must explain why I’m turning down an invitation, lest the potential host guess the truth, that I simply don’t want to go. I always RSVP with an excellent reason and ask the same in return, a little emoting and a lot of regret.

It’s just that I expect a little effort, a convincing so-sorry-but-no along with the offer of future social intercourse. Such is a footnote in my self-styled book of etiquette—that one can infer from the turndown that it is a regrettable and unavoidable scheduling conflict and not a divorce. (This, I believe, is a vestige of my long-ago dating life, when there were
no
’s that meant never, and
no
’s that said, “It truly
is
father-daughter weekend, otherwise I’d love to, and after that I’m free for the rest of my life.”)

What I’ve learned since 1990, the year of my first novel and coincidentally the year I turned forty, is that almost everyone accepts
no
with grace as if it’s what he or she expected all along. The committee that recruits the talent for the conference moves down the list to the next author’s name. The parents of the bride cheer when my turndown arrives, reducing their bottom line by one expensive rack of lamb and my share of champagne, wine, and fashion-forward canapés.

Further reinforcing my ducking of invitations is a response I often hear: “We didn’t really think you could make it (across the country/on such short notice/on the day after Thanksgiving/since you don’t know the bride or groom), but we thought we’d try just the same.”

Off the hook, I send my present, regrets reiterated convincingly on the card. Later I hear about the deeply disappointed dentist couple slated for my table, whose teenage daughter is a writer, too!

I am tempted to say, “Whew. That was close. Nothing worse than a stage mother with a writing sample in her purse.”

But I don’t. A fiction writer’s job, after all, is to spin tales and sound convincing.

“Greatly looking forward to next time,” I reply.

W
HEN MY SON WAS
nine years old, a family friend gave him
Why Do Our Bodies Stop Growing? Questions About Human Anatomy Answered by the Natural History Museum.
The illustrated book was a big hit, filled with the occasional half-goofy question like “Is it true that you can eat an apple standing on your head?” or “Is the skull one big bone?” On page 88, Ben found Question 132, the loaded one, which asked, “When do I stop being a child?” Beneath that were three paragraphs on puberty, including a sentence that got his attention: “Body changes in adolescence turn girls into young women who can have babies and boys into young men who can make women pregnant.” That there was a connection between boys and babies had apparently never occurred to Ben. “How,” he asked, incredulous, “do men make women pregnant?”

I, the evolved parent at child rearing’s sacred crossroads, said, “Um. Let’s go ask Daddy.” And then, to prove it was science rather than cowardice, added, “He’s a doctor.”

Daddy was watching TV. I repeated Ben’s question. My husband said in a voice I didn’t hear very often—therapeutic, pedagogical, Fred Rogers—“Well . . . sure. I can answer that. Do you want to sit down?”

And truly, Planned Parenthood could have videotaped his presentation and distributed it: the penis, the vagina, the sperm, the egg—logically, calmly, no smirking. Ben listened and didn’t interrupt. When Bob finished, Ben asked—not coyly but suspiciously—“How does the seed get in there? Remote control?”

Bob said no. The man puts his penis
into
the woman’s vagina.

After a few moments of contemplation, Ben asked, “Do you have to get naked to do this?”

Bob said yes, you did.

“Did you and Mom get naked?”

Bob said, “I believe we did.”

Our son stood up, exited the room, and yelled from the kitchen, “I’m never doing that.”

We waited for his return and his follow-up questions. I said, “That was excellent. You couldn’t have done better.”

“We’ll see,” said Bob.

A few days later, at the kitchen table, Ben asked me as casually as he could, without looking up from his breakfast, “How do girls get pregnant?”

I said, “Ben! You remember! Daddy told you the whole story two nights ago.”

His tone changed to one of weary tolerance, as if I were the one who needed the refresher. “Yeah, yeah, I know: the man takes a seed out of his tush, and the woman eats it.”

Well, why not? It had its own charm, and I was learning something valuable: one shouldn’t push the facts of life too early. I’d like to think I corrected his misapprehension on the spot, but I don’t remember doing so. Nor do I remember his coming to us for more sex education.

School took the next step, a unit named Human Growth and Development, formerly known as Human Growth and Change, amended after someone (this was a lab school at Smith College) worried that the word “change” could traumatize. The boys and girls were separated for the classes; the boys got (I swear) Mr. Weiner, an experienced and married sixth-grade teacher. Fifth grade proved to be good timing, developmentally, because Ben would study his vocabulary list without snickering. Again, Bob did the quizzing. “Vulva?” I heard him ask evenly from the next room, to which Ben would answer, equally clinically, “The external genital organs of the female.”

“Vas deferens?”

“The main duct that carries semen.”

When Bob said, “Clitoris?” I took a step closer.

“Female organ of pleasure,” our ten-year-old answered as matter-of-factly as if the topic were cotton gin and Eli Whitney. The vocabulary was in place, though not always the idiom: a few months later he reported to his father that he had seen two Smith students outside Davis Hall “doing foreplay.”

I asked a friend with a daughter-classmate, “How was Human Growth and Development for the girls?”

“I had to straighten her out on something,” she told me. The girls were shown a video about boys and erections. Someone or something sexy appeared in front of the actors, a row of teenage boys, camera aimed at their backs rather than their faces or their pants. As a result, the fifth-grade girls deduced that sexual stimuli caused boys to stand at attention: an erection was all in the shoulder blades.

Section two of Human Growth and Development was coed, a year later in the spring of sixth grade. I asked Ben how that was going, boys and girls together. It was fine, he said, his tone implying,
Why wouldn’t it be?
I asked how his friend Nathaniel was coping with this mature subject matter, because I knew from Nathaniel’s mother that he still believed in the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. Ben answered as if venting a classwide scorn over Nathaniel’s reproductive IQ. “Nathaniel! He didn’t even know what PMS was!”

Seventh grade brought a new school and, midyear, a new unit called simply Health. Ben announced it at breakfast, sighing and saying, “We start Health today.” A pause and a wry smile—I was his best audience and he knew it. “Third year in a row I learn about fallopian tubes.”

He was an old hand. The teacher later told me that when Ben presented his special project on conjoined twins, featuring Chang and Eng, Barnum’s famous act, he informed the class that both men had married. Pause . . . shake of the head, then: “Don’t even
ask
about the honeymoon.”

He’s a grown-up now with his own place, a fruitful social life, excellent hygiene, and good sense. I’d like to thank Bob and Mr. Weiner, the playground, his bunkmates at camp, the locker room, the Internet, and especially the Talking Transparent Woman at Boston’s Museum of Science. It’s an important job, and I couldn’t have done it alone.

R
ECENTLY MY PUBLISHER
asked me to update my “about the author” paragraph for some promotional purpose. Instead of ending with the usual, “She and her husband live in Massachusetts and have one child,” I added, “a son, Benjamin, who turned out great.” I sat back and smiled. It seemed the right tribute at the right time, as Ben grinned at me from a newly framed college graduation photo.

That’s where I sit now, on this side of my child’s first twenty-two years, all of which replay in the most delightfully nostalgic fashion. Things that once seemed huge, worrisome, tiresome, burdensome, are now only footnotes in The Legend of the Reasonable Child.

The biggest travail that we’ve reduced to a fond memory is the fact that he didn’t sleep through the night until he was six years old. It could have been worse; he might have carried on and cried inconsolably, when all he needed was the sight of me, a pat, a blanket retrieved—but how did we know he’d ever reform? Add to our interrupted sleep the public relations factor: the question on everyone’s lips, beginning soon after his birth, was, “Does your baby sleep through the night yet?”

“Not quite,” I answered—for the next seventy-two months.

As he approached one year, every passerby, every bum on the street, was a child development expert. “Walking yet?” they’d ask, as if my toddler had
HAPPY FIRST BIRTHDAY, BEN!
embroidered on his bib.

“Our pediatrician says they either walk or talk,” I’d murmur, turning to my big, happy stroller passenger to prompt a sentence containing both a subject and a verb.

A partial list of early parental concerns and their outcomes includes:
Then:
Bad sleeper.
Now:
Age twenty-two years and ten months, sleeps through anything, naps anytime, any place, on any surface.
Then:
Crawled late, stood late, cruised late, walked at seventeen and a half months.
Now:
Walks, runs, skis black diamonds, drives.
Then:
Watched too much TV, played too much Nintendo.
2004:
Graduates from an Ivy League university.
Then:
Suffered acute anxiety when left with anyone but mother, father, grandparents.
2004:
Moves three thousand miles across the country, whistling all the way.
Then:
Shy.
Now:
Exceeds his five-hundred-minutes-per-month cell phone plan.
Then:
Addicted to breast milk, followed by cow’s milk, chocolate milk, and juice not from concentrate, which is to say:
teeth at risk;
blamed myself for not promoting water as most delicious beverage.
To this day:
No cavities.
Then:
Not interested in toilet training. (“I not fwee yet,” he would protest when we broached the subject.)
Today:
Bathroom issues limited to wet towels on the floor and use of a fresh one for every shower. Toddler tolerance for dirty diapers is now seen as a prognostic of the easygoing, unflappable adult.