Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (25 page)

I still find myself thinking back on the old-fashioned scenes I had
envisioned for our marriage: We are sitting peacefully in the parlor—after having kissed the little ones good night—and I glance up from the desk, where I have been polishing off a letter to the
Times
on our policy in the Far East, and say, “Alice, how do you spell ‘referred’?” Alice tells me. Or, on another evening, Alice looks over from her side of the desk (in this version of our marriage, the custodian of an abandoned courthouse in Pennsylvania had sold us an eighteenth-century double desk for eighty-five dollars including delivery to New York in his brother’s pickup), where she has been composing a letter to her parents saying how sublimely happy she is. She asks me how to spell “embarrass.” I tell her.

1978

It’s been more than two months since I read in
The Washington Post
that in Germany the government has to approve the name of your child. I think my response to the
Post
item has paralleled the stages people sometimes move through in response to a family catastrophe, beginning with denial and going on to anger. I now remember specifically that the first words I uttered upon reading the item were “Get serious!”

But the story I’d just read was obviously real. In Germany, if the clerk in charge of such matters at your city hall doesn’t approve of the name you propose to give your newborn baby, you have to name the baby something else. That’s right: the clerk. The government says it’s a question of the clerk protecting the child. If they tried that in this country, the question would be who’s going to protect the clerk.

In Germany, on the other hand, there are all sorts of regulations like this that the citizenry docilely accepts—although the
Post
piece did report that a doctor in Dusseldorf recently went to court to challenge a law that makes it a crime to take a shower after ten in the
evening. (I know what you’re saying now. You’re saying, “Get serious!” That means you’re in the denial stage. I suggest that you go to your public library, look up
The Washington Post
for March 25, 1991, and turn to page A14. Then you can move on to anger.) Next time you’re assured that we have a strong cultural unity with the countries of Western Europe, keep in mind that Germany has laws against taking a shower after 10
P.M
.

In Germany, name-clerks routinely turn down names that don’t make it clear whether the child is a girl or a boy, for instance, or names that might sound unfamiliar to the other children at school or names that mean something odd in the language of a foreign country that the child in question will almost certainly never visit.

Let’s say that you want to name your new son Leslie because you have reason to believe that your rich and essentially vicious Uncle Leslie would be so touched by such a gesture that he would leave you a bundle to see little Leslie through college. (I’m using American names because I don’t want to irritate you with unfamiliar German names at a time when this thing has already put you in a bad mood.)

The clerk says absolutely not: Little Leslie could be mistaken for a female. You say that if enough of Uncle Leslie’s boodle is involved, you don’t care if little Leslie could be mistaken for a parking meter. The clerk says no. You appeal to a court. The judge upholds the clerk. You get so mad that you take a shower at ten-fifteen. You get arrested. Now this kid of yours has real problems: He doesn’t have a name and one of his parents is in the slammer.

I don’t mean that I approve of parents giving their children silly names. My views on this matter are on the record. I have stated publicly that naming a child after a store—Tiffany, for instance, or K Mart—is probably unwise. Twenty years ago, I counseled that Sunshine was not a good name for a child, although perhaps perfect for a detergent. I disapproved of the slogan-names favored by Chinese Communists in the fifties because, let’s face it, Assist Korea is no name to have on the playground.

But if Sunshine feels more like a Norbert when he grows up—maybe he thinks Norbert is more appropriate for someone keen on regular promotions in the actuarial department—he can simply change his name. His mother, who changed her name from Maxine to
Starglow when she dropped out of college in 1971 to become an apprentice goatherd, can still picture that sweetly dirty little toddler as Sunshine. Should any of this have anything to do with government clerks? Get serious.

1991

1991

By now, my wife’s policy on attending school plays (a policy that also covers pageants, talent shows, revues, recitals, and spring assemblies) is pretty well known: She believes that if your child is in a school play and you don’t go to every performance, including the special Thursday matinée for the fourth grade, the county will come and take the child. Anyone who has lived for some years in a house where that policy is strictly observed may have fleeting moments of envy toward people who have seen only one or two productions of
Our Town
.

One evening this spring, though, as we walked into an auditorium
and were handed a program filled with the usual jokey résumés of the participants and cheerful ads from well-wishers, it occurred to me that this would be the last opportunity to see one of our children perform in a school theatrical event. That view was based partly on the fact that the child in question is twenty-six years old. She was about to graduate from law school. I was assuming that the JDs slogging through the bar-exam cram course would not decide to break the tedium with, say, a production of
Anything Goes
.

As I waited for the curtain to go up on the 1995 New York University Law Revue, entitled
The Law Rank Redemption
, I found myself thinking back on our life as parental playgoers. I realized that I couldn’t recall seeing either of our daughters in one of those classic nursery-school-pageant roles—as an angel or a rabbit or an eggplant. I thought I might be experiencing a failure of memory—another occasion for one of my daughters to say, as gently as possible, “Pop, you’re losing it”—but they have confirmed that their nursery school was undramatic, except on those occasions when a particularly flamboyant hair puller was on one of his rampages.

I do recall seeing one or the other of them as an Indian in
Peter Pan
and as the judge in
Trial by Jury
and as Nancy in
Oliver!
and as the narrator (unpersuasively costumed as a motorcycle tough) in
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
and as a gondolier in
The Gondoliers
. We heard their voices in a lot of songs, even if a number of other kids were sometimes singing at the same time. We heard “Dites-moi, pourquoi” sung sweetly and “Don’t Tell Mama” belted out. All in all, we had a pretty good run.

I don’t want to appear to be one of those parents who dozed through the show unless his own kid was in the spotlight. To this day, when I hear “One Singular Sensation,” from
A Chorus Line
, I can see Julia Greenberg’s little brother, Daniel, doing a slow, almost stately tap-dance interpretation in high-topped, quite tapless sneakers. I’m not even certain what my own girls did in the grade-school talent show at PS 3 that I remember mainly for the performance of the three Korn brothers. One of them worked furiously on a Rubik’s Cube while his older brother accompanied him on the piano. The youngest brother, who must have been six or seven, occasionally held up signs
that said something like
TWO SIDES TO GO
or
ONE SIDE TO GO
. I have always had a weakness for family acts.

I won’t pretend that all school performances were unalloyed joy. We used to go every year to watch our girls tap-dance in a recital that also included gymnastics, and the gymnastics instructor was an earnest man who seemed intent on guarding against the possibility of anyone’s getting through the evening without a thorough understanding of what goes into a simple somersault. He described each demonstration in such excruciating detail that I used to pass the time trying to imagine him helplessly tangled in his own limbs as the result of a simple somersault that had gone wrong:

“Untie me,” he is saying.

“Not until you take an oath of silence,” I reply.

Even so, I came to believe over the years that my wife’s policy on school plays, which sounds extreme, actually makes sense. It used to be that whenever young couples asked me if I had any advice about rearing children—that happens regularly to anyone whose children grow up without doing any serious jail time—I’d say, “Try to get one that doesn’t spit up. Otherwise you’re on your own.” I finally decided, though, that it was okay to remind them that a school play was more important than anything else they might have had scheduled for that evening. School plays were invented partly to give parents an easy opportunity to demonstrate their priorities. If they can get off work for the Thursday matinée, I tell them, all the better.

1995

1994

I’m afraid the fact that I was in a men’s room at the time is germane. This was just off Interstate 84, east of Hartford. Driving through New England, my wife and I had stopped at a franchise restaurant. As I was about to leave the men’s room, I glanced at an unfamiliar object on the wall and suddenly realized that it was a pull-down diaper-changing table. In the men’s room.

My first thought was that the presence of a diaper-changing table in the men’s room might have been a fluke. It might have reflected a gesture by a single corporation, made because the vice president of customer services happens to be a modern woman or happens to be what my daughters used to call a
SNAG
—a college acronym for a “sensitive new-age guy.” (He goes to a lot of pro-choice demonstrations and tends to cry a lot in movies.) Evidence against the fluke theory presented itself that very day in a men’s room a few hours down the road and, not long after that, in a men’s room on a car ferry. At that point, I heard myself mumbling, “It’s here, guys. It’s here.”

The next time I spotted a changing table, it had a logo on it that showed a picture of a koala below the words Koala Bear Kare. My friend Pierre had been visiting us, and I’d driven him to the airport to get a plane home. We walked into the men’s room at the airport together. He saw Koala Bear Kare at the same time I did. He didn’t seem alarmed. Pierre’s children, like my children, are grown. For both of us, grandchildren remain hypothetical.

I nodded toward Koala Bear Kare. “I assume you’re checked out,” I said. That was the phrase we always used in our house for anyone who had some experience in diapering. It made being a practiced nappie-swapper sound sort of like having a security clearance.

“Oh, sure,” he said. “And I know you’re checked out.”

“Yes, of course,” I said. Even when Pierre and I were young fathers, a forward-looking male knew that if he didn’t participate in that elementary aspect of baby raising, he might be robbing himself of the opportunity to say, during a stressful family conversation fifteen or twenty years down the road, “I changed your
diapers
!”

“I’m checked out on changing diapers,” Pierre said. “But I might have a little trouble figuring out how to get that gizmo down out of the wall.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “it seems to me that there was a time when you were concerned about your ability to master a dishwashing machine. And now you’re noted for glassware that twinkles with that sparkling shine.”

I would think that most modern fathers are checked out. But I would also think that a lot of modern fathers—some
SNAGS
among them—have considered themselves more or less off duty when the family’s eating out. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if some of them had polished the gesture they use in public when the baby is in obvious need of changing—a sort of apologetic shrug, communicating both regret at not being able to shoulder the burden this time and helplessness in the face of a world organized to assign changing tables only to women’s rooms.