Oddballs (3 page)

“Uh, sure, come in,” I said, wishing I had been warned about this, thinking fast, trying to avert disaster.

His mother's high heels clicked across the wooden floors—her house, of course, had wall-to-wall carpeting. I walked ahead of her; Frank trailed behind. I stopped in the living room and turned back. Frank's mother was looking around at the forest of houseplants, the old Oriental rugs, the dragon-legged library table piled with magazines. “Listen, why don't you just sit down in here,” I said. “And I'll go get my mother. She's, uh, busy in the kitchen.”

“Oh, let's not be formal about this,” Frank's mother said, though she was the one who was all dressed up. “And I don't want to interrupt her cooking. I'll just pop in and say hi.”

“But …” I tried to protest.

“The kitchen must be this way,” Frank's mother said, heading right for it. There was nothing I could do.

Mom was sitting at the kitchen table feeding the baby, who was two months old. She wore an ancient, faded housedress and was barefoot, her legs unshaven.

“Mom, this is Frank's mother,” I mumbled.

“Very nice to meet you,” Frank's mother said, her eyes moving between the dirty dishes in the sink and the piles of soil on the kitchen table from the plants Mom had been repotting. Mom was a good housekeeper, and we also had a cleaning woman during the week. But on Saturdays Mom relaxed.

“Oh, hello,” Mom said, a little surprised, glancing at me, then at Frank's mother. “Pull up a chair for her, Billy.”

Frank's mother sat down gingerly on the edge of the chair, as though protecting her dress from its surface. “Hello there, honey,” she said to the baby in an artificial voice. “And what's
your
name?”

Mom gazed fondly at the baby. “He doesn't have a name. I suppose we'll have to come up with one eventually.”

Frank's mother looked blank, as though the concept of a baby without a name was beyond her comprehension. She glanced around uncomfortably. “What a big old house you have. It must be very time-consuming, keeping it …” Then she stopped, not wanting to say the wrong thing.

“It works for us,” Mom said, not too warmly, since she had caught the implication that her house wasn't clean.

Frank's mother tried again. “I hear your husband is a scientist.”

“A physiologist. He does experiments on live human heart muscle,” Mom told her.

“
Live
human heart muscle?” Frank's mother said. “But where does he get live—”

Vicky and her friend Avis dashed into the kitchen, giggling. They had dyed their hair purple with grape juice; their teeth were colored red, white, and blue with lipstick and eye makeup; and their clothes were smeared with various unidentifiable substances. “Are there any cookies left, Mom?” Vicky demanded.

“No. Anyway, it's too close to supper to eat stuff like that. Have an apple if you're hungry.”

Finally, Mom was saying something vaguely normal. But when Vicky took the apple from the bowl on the counter, it slipped out of her hand and rolled across the floor—which, due to potting soil, was not what anyone would call clean. Vicky picked the apple up from the floor and immediately bit into it, and she and Avis raced out of the room.

“But she didn't
wash
it!” Frank's mother could not keep herself from expostulating.

Mom shrugged. She was not pleased by Frank's mother's remark. “It's good for them to eat food off the floor. Dirt builds up immunities. I never wash food, never sterilized a bottle in my life. And my kids are never sick.”

I couldn't really blame Mom. If she'd known Frank's mother was actually coming inside, she would have kept her out of the messy kitchen; she might have made an effort to fix up her appearance a little. But this woman had arrived early, invaded her house without warning, and pushed her way into the kitchen. It was too late now for Mom to put on a false front.

I already knew there was no hope of Frank spending the night or even eating over here again. His mother would certainly not want him to be exposed to any food that was not sterile. And it was clear that Mom was not paying any attention to what Vicky and Avis were doing, which meant she would also not be supervising us tonight. It was only a matter of time until Frank's mother dragged him home—and I was hoping it would be soon, before anything else happened.

A vain hope. Danny, who was almost two and a half, tottered into the kitchen, sucking his thumb.

Frank's mother was still trying to maintain a pleasant facade. She smiled at Danny. “Aren't you adorable,” she said, in the same artificial voice she had used with the baby. “But you know, it's not good to suck your thumb, dear.”

Danny looked puzzled and slowly took his thumb out of his mouth.

Mom was really fed up. “Danny,” she said, “put your thumb
back
in your mouth.”

Danny comfortably obeyed.

At last Frank's mother had had enough. She stood up. “Well, thank you for inviting us in,” she said. “Now it's time for us to go. It's been a very, uh,
interesting
visit.”

“Isn't Frank spending the night?” Mom asked her, as though she didn't already know the answer. “Oops,” she casually added, as a fountain of baby vomit splashed onto the table.

“Not, uh, this time, I'm afraid,” Frank's mother said. I could see the struggle she was having not to rush from the room. “Good afternoon.”

I followed them to the door. “Bye, Frank,” I said sadly.

He just looked at me. I didn't envy him. He was going to have a lot of questions to answer now.

The next year, Frank was sent to a fancy private school, and I attended public junior high. It was only natural that we soon stopped seeing each other. It turned out, years later, that we both went to Harvard. But we did not renew our friendship. By then, Frank had become a preppie and was part of a super-conformist clique—the kind of people I would have nothing to do with and who, of course, wouldn't be seen dead with someone like me.

But I sometimes wondered: Would he have turned out differently if his mother had
not
come into the house that afternoon?

The Freedom Fighters of Parkview

The Greenbergs often came to our house for Thanksgiving dinner and other holidays. The parents, were both highly respected literary scholars. They were also urbane and bawdy and were the only other parents we knew who seemed just as easygoing and relaxed with their kids as our parents were.

Vicky and I always loved it when the Greenbergs came over because we had so much fun with their kids. Vera was three years older than me, Nick a year younger than Vera; both were brainy and good-looking. They were popular at school, though not the least bit pituh.

Pituh
was a term that Vicky and her friends Avis and Eleanor had coined to describe the members of the popular cliques at junior high and high school. That Vera and Nick were popular
without
being pituh was a unique combination of attributes, and Vicky and I both looked up to them. It would have been natural for us to resent them, since Mom was always telling us what brilliant students they were, so athletic, attractive, articulate, and so on. But we couldn't help liking them anyway (though Vicky would often scream at Mom to shut up about them). Vera and Nick also clearly enjoyed spending time with us on these family occasions, though we couldn't really be friends with them at school, since they were older and hung out with a different crowd.

It was the Greenberg kids who taught us to play the card game I Doubt It. The basic object of the game was to cheat. We loved it. There were many moments during I Doubt It when you'd try to scream furiously at somebody but couldn't manage it because you were laughing too hard.

On Thanksgiving, when I was in seventh grade, we couldn't play I Doubt It because many of the cards had disappeared. Danny, who was four, denied any knowledge of them. We discovered what remained of the missing cards when Mom made Vicky change Tycho. Confronted with this palpable evidence, Danny admitted that he had fed them to him. Both sets of parents thought this was very funny.

But Vicky and I felt it was unfair that Danny had not even been chastised for ruining our game. The Greenberg kids were disappointed, too. And so, instead of playing I Doubt It, we sat around in my third-floor room, complaining about adults in general and our parents in particular. It was our first conversation of this kind with the Greenberg kids.

Of course, both sets of parents, merely by existing, had certain defects in common. All parents, by definition, were arbitrary, unfair, demanding, and constitutionally incapable of understanding their children or of seeing any point of view but their own. This was nothing new. But kids from each family were fascinated to discover how many previously unimagined tortures the
other
set of parents routinely inflicted on their children. Vicky and I were particularly surprised and gratified to find out that the Greenberg parents did not think their kids were as perfect as our mother did—far from it.

“Your parents really force you to
eat
?” I gasped in wonder.

“You mean yours
don't
?” Nick replied.

Vicky and I shook our heads.

Vera nodded grimly. “We don't leave the table until we finish as much as they decide to dish out. And if they catch us with anything like chocolate, then it's pimple-inspection time.” She rolled her eyes.

Vicky and I were shocked. “But you guys don't have pimples,” I said. “Our mother goes on and on about what flawless complexions you have.”

“She does?”

“She's always talking about how wonderful and perfect you are, how much better than us,” Vicky said. “Not that we hold it against you or anything,” she added quickly. “She does it with other people's kids, too. Her favorite topic is how much worse we are than all her friends' kids.”

Vera and Nick clucked sympathetically. “Well, at least she doesn't do it in public,” Vera said consolingly. “Our mother's always telling people the most personal, embarrassing things about us while we're sitting right there. It makes me want to sink through the floor.”

Now Vicky and I made sympathetic noises. Vera, who was efficient and well organized, began to make a list of our parents' various sins against us. She was the oldest and the most practiced at taking notes in school—no one else could have written fast enough to get it all down legibly.

Mom found the list of parental outrages the next day when she went up to my room to make my bed. She was not in the best mood, since she and Vicky had just had a screaming fight, and Vicky was sulking in her room. Mom caught sight of Vera's notes on my bedside table, two wailing toddlers pulling and clawing relentlessly at her as she struggled to plump my pillows and straighten my sheets.

I was lying on the couch downstairs, reading a wonderful book of horror stories Mom had recently given me, enjoying the rich aroma of the turkey soup, which had already been simmering on the stove when I got up that morning. I was so engrossed in Love-craft's “The Dunwich Horror” that I didn't even notice Mom's approach, despite the pervasive stench of Tycho's loaded diaper, which inevitably accompanied her. Only when Mom said, “Is this Vera's handwriting?” did I look up.

She was standing above me, holding Tycho against her hip with one arm and Vera's notes in her other hand. My first response, when I realized an already irate Mom had read the list, was chillier than anything evoked by the Lovecraft story.

“Vera's handwriting?” I said stupidly. “Oh, um … I guess … I mean …”

But Mom chuckled. “This has got to be one of the funniest things I've ever seen in my life. Listen to this.” And she read, “‘In the privacy of their home, the parents drop their fake public behavior and reveal their true natures: disgusting slobs who laze around the house, reprimanding their kids the instant they are not industrious, engaged in constructive behavior, or impeccably groomed.'”

“Nick said that, not me or Vicky,” I quickly pointed out.

“Of course
you
dumbbells didn't,” Mom said. “The Greenberg kids are clever enough to come up with something that has a real comic punch to it.”

I had finally realized she wasn't angry; now
I
was insulted. “But we
were
the ones who said parents are always telling their own kids how inferior they are to other people's children.”

“I know you have a talent for inventing things, Billy. But that remark just isn't as witty as Nick's. Sorry.”

I didn't know what to say.

“Take Tycho and clean him up,” she told me. “I want to look this over again.”

“You've already read the whole thing?”

“Uh-huh.” She thrust Tycho at me. He started screaming the instant I lifted him, very carefully, from Mom's hip. She sank down on the couch with Vera's notes as I bore him away.

I didn't really worry that the Greenberg kids might get in trouble as a result of Mom's finding the list. Mom was not the kind of unscrupulous person who would cause problems by reporting anything from the notes directly to the Greenberg parents. Her discovery of the list had quite different repercussions.

I don't remember whose idea it was to turn the notes into a play about the horrors inflicted by adults—especially parents—onto children. What I do know is that Mom was the driving force behind the entire production. She worked harder on it than anybody else, even though she had a full-time job and Danny and Tycho to deal with.

The first meeting took place the Saturday after Thanksgiving. The industrious, well-groomed, and witty Greenberg kids were there, of course. We also invited Albert, who was Vera's age, and Vicky's friends Avis and Eleanor, and my friends Nicole and Bart and Matilda.

The initial brainstorming session did not begin well. Some of the kids were understandably constrained by Mom's presence—she
was
a member of the enemy camp, after all—and did not dare to express themselves freely. Mom attacked this problem by reading the list aloud herself, praising much of it, and contributing her own creative and constructive suggestions for improvement. It became apparent to everyone that Mom was being completely objective and not taking any of the material personally.