Living Out Loud (22 page)

T
he Royal Wedding Pig-Out began promptly at 5:30
A
.
M
. with the traditional opening of the bag of peanut M & M’s. These were the same peanut M & M’s that were served on this very same sofa bed at the wedding of Lady Diana Spencer and the Prince of Wales some years ago (well, not the same bag, but the same size and variety of candy), and were in no way meant to reflect on the eating habits of the bride, the former Miss Sarah Ferguson. It’s bad enough having showers and fittings and rehearsals before your wedding without having everyone talking about how much you weigh.

Several weeks ago, the paper printed the extraordinary measurements of Miss Ferguson, who is built like a real person who actually consumes food; reporters even slipped a tape around the hips of her wax facsimile at Madame Tussaud’s in London. If she had not become a public figure the moment Prince Andrew popped the question, I think Miss Ferguson would have had
an excellent lawsuit on the Tussaud incident alone, something along the lines of first-degree humiliation or conspiracy to commit embarrassment.

The Royal Wedding Pig-Out is an object of ridicule in my home. I will agree to rise before the sun for three special occasions: the ritual feeding of a baby (intermittently), the ritual fishing with the father (very intermittently) and the Royal Wedding Pig-Out (every five years or so). Despite the sporadic nature of the Pig-Out, the rules are clear. There will be tears during the reciting of the vows. The bride will be admired. And the Nestlé Crunch bar will not be eaten until the ceremony is over.

My husband thinks that the Pig-Out is a function of two things: the fact that I am an Anglophile, thanks in part to a profound and very early attachment to the writings of Charles Dickens and good toffee, and the fact that I am a glutton and seek excuses to eat junior high school food. This is accurate but incomplete. I am also a brideophile. On Sundays I read the society announcements. “Bad veil,” I mutter while my husband rolls his eyes. I have old scrapbooks filled with photographs of wedding gowns, which I apparently thought, at age thirteen, were the ultimate dress-for-success outfits.

I have outgrown some of my illusions; I no longer think that the Empire waist is attractive, for example. But I still love the idea of women caught in the act of getting married. I could care less about men. When the groom is riding through the streets during the Royal Wedding Pig-Out, I go to the kitchen, make a pot of coffee, and call friends who are Pigging-Out in their own homes and scream, “Is this great or what?”

I have traced this to a time in my life when the sole important occasion with a woman at its center was a wedding. I would gladly stay up all night to see the investiture of Pope Mary I, but the chances of this happening in my lifetime seem slim. I would even go to Washington, which is saying something
for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public being sworn in as the first female President of the United States, while her husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pillbox hat and matching coat. But for most of my life the only ceremonies I’ve been to at which women were the stars were weddings. So I like weddings.

This does not necessarily reflect my views on marriage. There are good marriages and bad marriages, but there are no bad weddings, except for those in scuba gear or on horseback. Most weddings have a kind of certainty to them. When I turned on the news last weekend to check out Caroline Kennedy’s wedding dress, it was soothing to see that she was as skinny as she was ever going to be in her life, which seems to be the norm for all brides except the current Princess of Wales. It was also reassuring to see that Caroline Kennedy’s mother, the most poised woman in America, was in possession of a quivering lower lip.

Sarah Ferguson looked beautiful, too, and she and the bridegroom actually looked like they were in love. (Of course, there are surprises at every wedding. At this one, for example, the Queen wore a creditable hat.) I always feel myself empathizing with the bride: Did she get any sleep? Has anyone mentioned that her necklace is crooked? Doesn’t that train weigh a ton? All this once made me think that I would love being the bride myself. That I didn’t was one of the two great disappointments of my own wedding. (The other was that my hair did not curl, but that’s an ugly story and better forgotten.) Doing it yourself is simply not the same as sitting back with a good candy bar and watching someone else do it, which I suppose is why some people are voyeurs.

I hope Sarah enjoyed herself as much as I did, but I doubt it. She was probably too busy worrying about her veil and her train and whether anyone was going to slip behind her and throw a tape measure around her waist. Now she can relax, eat
all she wants, and settle down to the business of being married, which is often more fun than getting married and can be done in much more comfortable clothes.

As for me, I will wait five years for Prince Edward to get married. I’ve got the Pig-Out down to a science, as precise as the parade route from Westminister Abbey to Buckingham Palace. When they come out on the balcony, I break out the Pepperidge Farm cookies. If, however, there is ever a royal wedding in the late afternoon, Greenwich Mean Time, I have already decided to introduce a Blimpie and a beer.

I
t was during the thirteenth inning, with it all tied up at 3-3, that I found myself hanging over the partition inside a Checker cab, my back end in the back seat, my front end in the front, twisting the dials of the radio to find the playoff game between the Mets and the Astros. My driver, who had been tuned to so-called easy-listening music, was a Thai immigrant who seemed to think that what he was witnessing was exactly what you could expect of indigenous Americans. His English was spotty, but moments before I finally picked up the game amid a ribbon of relentless static, he did manage to say feelingly, “You big fan.”

Well, no. Actually, I am what is known in the vernacular as a baseball wimp. I ignore the whole season until, each year at this time, during the playoffs and the World Series, I become terribly interested in baseball. You’ve heard Reggie Jackson called Mr. October? I am Ms. October.
Someone very nicely described it the other night as eating the whipped cream off the sundae. At home, not nicely at all, I am described as a disgrace to a noble sport, a fair-weather fan, a Joanie-come-lately.

I’ve always liked baseball, even as a child, when tradition dictated that I should be prohibited from playing, and my three brothers should be egged on. I like the sense of both the camaraderie and the aloneness of it, the idea of nine men working together in a kind of grand pavane—pitcher to catcher, shortstop to second baseman to first baseman—and the idea of one man looking down the loaded barrel of a pitcher’s arm and feeling the nice clean solid thunk as he hits a ball that will fly into the bleachers. (I like basketball, too. I do not like football, which I think of as a game in which two tractors approach each other from opposite directions and collide. Besides, I have contempt for a game in which players have to wear so much equipment. Men play basketball in their underwear, which seems just right to me.)

But I like other things, too. I like a sense of drama, and I have to admit that I just don’t find the question of whether someone is out at the plate in the third inning of the forty-eighth game of the season that inherently dramatic. I like a sense of continuity, and in today’s baseball you don’t get much. As soon as I take a shine to a player, he’s gone—to another team or to run a car dealership somewhere in the Middle West. I have never fully recovered from the disappearance of a player from the Yankees called Chicken Stanley, for whom I developed an unwarranted affection some years back, not because of his playing or even his funny name, but because he looked somehow vulnerable and pathetic in pinstripes.

I like a sense of community, and in the early months of the baseball season it always seems to me that the community consists mainly of solitary men staring glassy-eyed at television sets and occasionally saying to befuddled three-year-olds,
“Shortstop! That’s a good position for you. Shortstop!” On the occasions when I try to join this community, I always blow it by doing something stupid, like screaming when Reggie Jackson hits a triple because I still think he plays for New York, or saying, when a player comes up to bat, “Boy, he’s cute,” which can throw a pall on the whole afternoon. Playoff games produce real community. I monitored the final National League playoff game in stages: first with an entire office full of people clustered around a television in midtown Manhattan; then in the cab with the radio; next in a commuter bus in which two people were listening to Walkman radios and reporting to all assembled, saying things like “They’ve tied it up” (groans) and “The Astros just struck out” (cheers), and then to a street being patrolled by a man in a white Pinto who kept leaning out and yelling, “Top of the sixteenth, still tied.” I made it home to watch the last inning with my husband.

Baseball at this stage of the game offers just about everything I want. With only a handful of teams in contention, I can keep track of who’s who and what they do best, of who can’t run and who can’t hit and who can’t field. Each play is fraught with meaning, each loss a joy or a disaster. And each game is played before great communities of people, in bars, in rec rooms, even in offices, the ranks of the faithful swelled by those who have a passing interest and those who have no interest at all in baseball, but know a good cliffhanger when they see one—the same kind of people who watched the first episode this season of
Dallas
to see what happened to Bobby and then forgot about it. In fact, at this time of year baseball becomes a different kind of spectacle for me, something more along the lines of
As the Bat Swings
. Will Keith lose his temper? Will Lenny be a hero? Will Davey show emotion? Now we get down to the soap operas, and Chicken Stanley or no Chicken Stanley, I love soap operas.

T
his is the story of a turkey, and the things she cooked for Thanksgiving dinner. It is not an easy story to tell. It includes a bulb baster, those useless little metal rods Julia Child uses for trussing, and quantities of cheesecloth heretofore undreamed of. And butter—my God, the butter. Even now, a full year later, I can see my hands stretched before me, gleaming horribly like that cranberry jelly you get in a can.