Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (26 page)

If my recent experience is any guide, the world is no longer organized that way. I can’t help wondering how this will affect families. I can’t help wondering how it will affect men’s rooms. Traditionally, the atmosphere in men’s rooms is a little—well, edgy. Will the presence of a cooing baby being powdered loosen things up? Will strangers now stop by the Koala Bear Kare table, say something like “Cute little booger,” and fall into a conversation about diaper-rash remedies?

I also can’t help wondering why I hadn’t heard about this before. I try to keep up. Is it possible that men—presumably the only people who use the men’s room—have consciously kept mum about the availability of changing tables? If so, I hope they are not laboring
under the misapprehension that there is a realistic possibility of keeping this secret. What they ought to be doing is polishing a new gesture—a cheerful smile that goes along with saying, “Let me get this one, honey. You finish your chicken fajita while it’s still hot.” It’s here, guys. It’s here.

1995

I know I’m going to get in trouble for this. I’m supposed to believe that the reason men tend to have more interest in, say, carburetors than women do is because little boys are given trucks at Christmas instead of dolls. I do believe that. Really. I’ve believed it for years. I continued to believe it even after my friend Bernie Mohler, the feminist, gave his five-year-old daughter a catcher’s mitt for Christmas only to have her plant a marigold in it.

I believe all that stuff. I’ve even cooperated to the extent of maintaining total ignorance when it comes to carburetors. I’m not absolutely sure what a carburetor looks like, but, given the choice, I’m certain I’d rather have a doll. I’m just fine on this issue. Except for this: I believe that in the spring, female human beings get a deep biological urge to replace the living room slipcovers.

I’m not talking about something imposed by society—something that has to do with getting dollhouses for Christmas. I’m talking about something buried way down there in the chromosomes somewhere. And I’m talking about all women. I believe that in the spring Margaret Thatcher, on her way out of 10 Downing Street to deliver a stiff lecture to a group of poor people, will stop as she strides through the living room, turn to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and say, “Doesn’t it seem to you that the chintz on that armchair by the window is getting a bit tatty?” I believe that Sandra Day O’Connor’s thoughts turn
to slipcovers in the spring. So do the thoughts of female automobile mechanics and female physicists and female mud-wrestlers. So, as it happens, do the thoughts of my wife.

Come springtime, I find her in the living room, staring hard at the couch. “How long have we had that couch?” she asks. That’s an indication that her plans for the couch go beyond new slipcovers. When it comes to furniture, I try not to get into a discussion with my wife about length of service, because on that subject our figures tend to differ. She’ll fix her glance on some innocent armchair that I think of as brand-new, and say, “Well, we’ve had almost forty years of good wear out of that armchair now …”

She thinks the resistance I have every spring to replacing the couch is caused by stinginess. She’s wrong. Only part of it is caused by stinginess. I’ve never denied that I’m troubled by how much redecoration costs these days. I hear stories. A friend of ours I’ll call Mark Singer had a bathroom wallpapered not long ago, and when I asked him how it worked out, he said, “Fine, although I think that, all in all, we’d rather have had a car.” That’s the sort of story that can give a stingy person pause.

But there’s also a factor that has nothing to do with stinginess. Take the conversation we had just last week:

“What do you think of that couch?” my wife asked.

“Couch?” I said. “What about the couch?” This is an answer that is preselected by a biological code.

“What do you see when you look at that couch?” my wife asked.

“See?” I said. “Couch? Which couch are we talking about?”

“There’s only one couch,” she said.

“Oh, that one,” I said. “Well, I see a piece of furniture with a back and cushions and four stubby little legs. I see a sitting instrument. I see a device designed to hold human beings, once they’ve folded themselves in two places.”

“You don’t see how threadbare it’s getting on the arms?”

“Arms?” I said. “Threadbare?” (You can tell that these answers are biologically mandated: Nobody would sound that dumb if he had a choice in the matter.)

“I don’t think you do see it,” she said. “I honestly don’t think you can see it.”

“Making fun of someone’s physical handicaps is the last thing I would have expected from you,” I said. I wasn’t talking about my eyesight. I was talking about my biologically imposed inability to see the need for a new piece of furniture as soon as my wife saw it.

“Maybe we can just make do with new slipcovers instead of getting a whole new couch,” she said.

“Well, I agree that this is probably not the best time to buy a new couch,” I said, jumping at the opportunity to encourage the less damaging of two serious hits. “Particularly considering the money we’re probably going to have to spend on the car.”

“The car?” she asked. “What’s wrong with the car?”

“Well, I haven’t had it looked at yet,” I said. “But I don’t like the way the carburetor’s sounding.”

1987

My wife keeps telling me that I don’t really hate the neighbor of ours who talks a lot about the importance of trim and gutter maintenance. I’ve had this problem with my wife before.

She is the person who insisted that I was only joking when I said several years ago that people who sell macramé ought to be dyed a natural color and hung out to dry. She is the person who tried to shush me when I told a man who pushed ahead of me in an airport line that only certified dorks wear designer blue jeans.

It is my wife who argued that I had no legal standing for making a citizen’s arrest of someone for performing mime in public. It’s clearer than ever that she is to blame for the children’s excessive tolerance.

I haven’t done any trim and gutter maintenance in so long that I’m no longer quite certain what there is about them that needs to be maintained. I also feel that way about the points and plugs on the car. I know they’re important, but I can’t quite remember just why. The
same neighbor—he can be called Elwood here, although around the house I always refer to him as Old Glittering Gutters—cannot see my car without patting it on the hood as if it were an exceedingly large Airedale and saying, “When was the last time you had a good look at the points and plugs?”

“I’d rather not say,” I always reply.

It’s none of his business. His points and plugs are, I’m sure, sharply pointed and firmly plugged in, or whatever they’re supposed to be. His trim and gutters are, it goes without saying, carefully maintained. You could probably eat out of Elwood’s gutters if that’s the kind of person you were. I hate him.

“You don’t really hate him,” my wife said. “You may think he’s a little too well organized for your tastes, and you may not want him over for dinner all the time. But you don’t hate him.”

Wrong. Elwood has a list of what’s in his basement. He says that the list is invaluable. He wonders why I don’t have a list of what’s in my basement. He doesn’t seem to understand that if I made such a list, it would have to be a list of what might be in my basement, and it would have to include the possibility of crocodiles. Elwood’s list is cross-indexed. A man who has a cross-indexed list of what’s in his basement is not a little too well organized, he’s hateful.

The other day, Elwood asked me what sort of system I used to label my circuit breakers. I tried to remain calm. I made every effort to analyze his question in a manner detached enough to prevent physical violence. I tried to think of reasons why Elwood would assume that someone who had already confessed ignorance as to the whereabouts of his 1984 gasoline credit card receipts (“There might be some stuffed in the glove compartment there with the spare points and plugs, Elwood, but I hate to open that thing unless it’s a real emergency”) would have his circuit breakers labeled at all, let alone have them labeled according to some system.

I calculated, as precisely as I could, what chance there was that a jury, learning of the question that preceded the crime, would bring in a verdict of not guilty on the grounds that the strangling of Elwood had clearly been a crime of passion.

“The system I’m using now,” I finally said, “is to label them Sleepy, Grumpy, Sneezy, Happy, Dopey, Doc, and Bashful. However,
I’ve given a lot of thought to switching to a system under which I would label them Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, and Bruce. I’m holding up my final decision until a friend of mine who has access to a large computer runs some probability studies.”

“Probability of what?” Elwood said. I noticed that as he asked the question he retreated a step or two toward his own house.

“Just probability,” I said.

When I got back inside my house, I told my wife about the conversation and about the possibility that Elwood now believed me to be not simply slovenly in the extreme but completely bonkers.

“Poor man,” she said. “He probably thinks you’re dangerous.”

“He may be right,” I said.

“You have to try to think of Elwood as a human being,” my wife said, “someone with feelings, and a wife and children who love him.”

“I suspect his children perform mime or sell macramé in public,” I said.

“Also,” she said, “it really wouldn’t be such a bad idea to label the circuit breakers.”

I looked at her for a while. “You’re right, of course,” I finally said. I got a felt-tipped pen, went to the circuit-breaker box, and started right in: “Sleepy, Grumpy, Sneezy …”

1986

I figured the big question about our twentieth wedding anniversary might be whether the local newspaper would send a reporter out to interview us, the way reporters always used to interview those old codgers who managed to hit one hundred. (“Mr. Scroggins offers no formula for longevity, although he acknowledged that he has polished off a quart of Jim Beam whiskey every day of his adult life.”) I
figured that might be the big question even though the local newspaper is
The Village Voice
. Or maybe I figured that might be the big question
because
the local newspaper is
The Village Voice
. In Greenwich Village, after all, we are known rather widely for being married. We enjoy a mild collateral renown for having children. Several years ago, in fact, I expressed concern that we might be put on the Gray Line tour of Greenwich Village as a nuclear family.

We got married in 1965. In those days, a lot of people seemed to be getting married. In recent years, though, it has become common to hear people all over the country speak of long-term marriage in a tone of voice that assumes it to be inextricably intertwined with the music of Lawrence Welk. In the presence of someone who has been married a long time to the same person, a lot of people seem to feel the way they might feel in the presence of a Methodist clergyman or an IRS examiner. When I asked a friend of mine recently how his twenty-fifth college reunion had gone—he had attended with the very same attractive and pleasant woman he married shortly after graduation—he said, “Well, after the first day, I decided to start introducing Marge as my second wife, and that seemed to make everyone a lot more comfortable.”

This awkwardness in the presence of marriage has, of course, been particularly in the Village, a neighborhood so hip that it is no longer unusual to see people wearing their entire supply of earrings on one ear. (“I don’t hold with jewelry or none of them geegaws,” Mr. Scroggins said, “although over the long haul I’ve found that a single gold stud in one ear can set off a spring ensemble to good advantage.”) In the Village, a lot of people don’t get married, and a lot of those who do seem to get unmarried pretty much on the way back from the ceremony. When our older daughter was in first grade at PS 3, one of the romantically named grade schools in the Village, I happened to be among the parents escorting the class on a lizard-buying expedition to a local purveyor called Exotic Aquatics; as we crossed Seventh Avenue, the little boy I had by the hand looked up at me and said, “Are you divorced yet?” When I said that I wasn’t, he didn’t make fun of me or anything like that—they teach tolerance at PS 3, along with a smattering of spelling—but I could sense his discomfort in having to
cross a major artery in the company of someone who was a little bit behind.

Reaching a twentieth anniversary might just intensify such discomfort among our neighbors. I could imagine what would be said if that little boy’s parents happened to meet by chance now and our names came up. (As I envision the sort of lives they lead, she has just quit living with her psychotherapist in New Jersey to join a radical feminist woodcutting collective; her former husband is in the process of breaking up with a waitress who has decided that what she really wants to do is direct.) “Oh, them!” the woodcutter would say. “Why, they’ve been married for
decades
!” The more I considered it, the more I thought that if a reporter in our neighborhood came out to interview people on the twentieth anniversary of their marriage, the questions might be less like the ones he’d ask a citizen who had reached the age of one hundred than the ones he’d ask someone who has chosen to construct a replica of the 1939 World’s Fair out of multicolored toothpicks in his recreation room. (“Tell me, Mr. McVeeter, is this some sort of nutso fixation, or what?”)

Then I happened to run into the old college classmate I call Martin G. Cashflow. In both investments and social trends, Cashflow prides himself on just having got out of what other people are about to get into and just having got in on the ground floor of what other people haven’t yet heard about. After Cashflow had filled me in on his recent activities—he had just got out of whelk-farming tax shelters and into chewing of hallucinogenic kudzu—he asked what I’d been up to.