Samuel Johnson Is Indignant (3 page)

Remember
that thou art but dust.

I shall try to
bear it in mind
.

“Meet the sourpuss,” says the Grouch to their friends.

“Oh, shut up,” says Old Mother.

 

The Grouch and Old Mother are playing Scrabble. The Grouch makes a play.

“Ten points,” he says. He is disgusted.

He is angry because Old Mother is winning early in the game and because she has drawn all the s's and blanks. He says it is easy to win if you get all the s's and blanks. “I think you marked the backs,” he says. She says a blank tile doesn't have a back.

Now he is angry because she has made the word
qua
. He says
qua
is not English. He says they should both make good, familiar words like the words he has made—
bonnet, realm
, and
weave
—but instead she sits in her nasty corner making
aw, eh, fa, ess
, and
ax
. She says these are words, too. He says even if they are, there is something mean and petty about using them.

Now the Grouch is angry because Old Mother keeps freezing all the food he likes. He brings home a nice smoked ham and wants a couple of slices for lunch but it is too late—she has already frozen it.

“It's hard as a rock,” he says. “And you don't have to freeze it anyway. It's already smoked.”

Then, since everything else he wants to eat is also frozen, he thinks he will at least have some of the chocolate ice cream he bought for her the day before. But it's gone. She has eaten it all.

“Is that what you did last night?” he asks. “You stayed up late eating ice cream?”

He is close to the truth, but not entirely correct.

 

Old Mother cooks dinner for friends of theirs. After the friends have gone home, she tells the Grouch the meal was a failure: the salad dressing had too much salt in it, the chicken was overdone and tasteless, the cherries hard, etc.

She expects him to contradict her, but instead he listens carefully and adds that the noodles, also, were “somehow wrong.”

She says, “I'm not a very good cook.”

She expects him to assure her that she is, but instead he says, “You should be. Anybody can be a good cook.”

 

Old Mother sits dejected on a stool in the kitchen.

“I just want to teach you something about the rice pot,” says the Grouch, by way of introduction, as he stands at the sink with his back to her.

But she does not like this. She does not wish to be his student.

 

One night Old Mother cooks him a dish of polenta. He remarks that it has spread on the plate like a cow patty. He tastes it and says that it tastes better than it looks. On another night she makes him a brown rice casserole. The Grouch says this does not look very good either. He covers it in salt and pepper, then eats some of it and says it also tastes better than it looks. Not much better, though.

 

“Since I met you,” says the Grouch, “I have eaten more beans than I ever ate in my life. Potatoes and beans. Every night there is nothing but beans, potatoes, and rice.”

Old Mother knows this is not strictly true.

“What did you eat before you knew me?” she asks.

“Nothing,” says the Grouch. “I ate nothing.”

 

Old Mother likes all chicken parts, including the liver and heart, and the Grouch likes the breasts only. Old Mother likes the skin on and the Grouch likes it off. Old Mother prefers vegetables and bland food. The Grouch prefers meat and strong spices. Old Mother prefers to eat her food slowly and brings it hot to the table. The Grouch prefers to eat quickly and burns his mouth.

 

“You don't cook the foods I like,” the Grouch tells her sometimes.

“You ought to like the foods I cook,” she answers.

“Spoil me. Give me what I want, not what you think I should have,” he tells her.

That's an idea, thinks Old Mother.

 

Old Mother wants direct answers from the Grouch. But when she asks, “Are you hungry?” he answers, “It's seven o'clock.” And when she asks, “Are you tired?” he answers, “It's ten o'clock.” And when she insists, and asks again, “But are you tired?” he says, “I've had a long day.”

 

Old Mother likes two blankets at night, on a cold night, and the Grouch is more comfortable with three. Old Mother thinks the Grouch should be comfortable with two. The Grouch, on the other hand, says, “I think you like to be cold.”

 

Old Mother does not mind running out of supplies and often forgets to shop. The Grouch likes to have more than they need of everything, especially toilet paper and coffee.

 

On a stormy night the Grouch worries about his cat, shut outdoors by Old Mother.

“Worry about me,” says Old Mother.

 

Old Mother will not have the Grouch's cat in the house at night because it wakes her up scratching at the bedroom door or yowling outside it. If they let it into the bedroom, it rakes up the carpet. If she complains about the cat, he takes offense: he feels she is really complaining about him.

 

Friends say they will come to visit, and then they do not come. Out of disappointment, the Grouch and Old Mother lose their tempers and quarrel.

On another day, friends say they will come to visit, and this time the Grouch tells Old Mother he will not be home when they come: they are not friends of his.

 

A phone call comes from a friend of hers he does not like.

“It's for you,
angel
,” he says, leaving the receiver on the kitchen counter.

 

Old Mother and the Grouch have quarreled over friends, the West Coast, the telephone, dinner, what time to go to bed, what time to get up, travel plans, her parents, his work, her work, and his cat, among other subjects. They have not quarreled, so far, over special sale items, acquisitions for the house, natural landscapes, wild animals, the town governing board, and the local library.

 

A woman dressed all in red is jumping up and down in a tantrum. It is Old Mother, who cannot handle frustration.

 

If Old Mother talks to a friend out of his earshot, the Grouch thinks she must be saying unkind things about him. He is sometimes right, though by the time he appears glowering in the doorway, she has gone on to other topics.

 

One day in June, the Grouch and Old Mother take all their potted plants out onto the deck for the summer. The next week, the Grouch brings them all back in and sets them on the living room floor. Old Mother does not understand what he is doing and is prepared to object, but they have quarreled and are not speaking to each other, so she can only watch him in silence.

 

The Grouch is more interested in money than Old Mother and more careful about how he spends it. He reads sale ads and will not buy anything unless it is marked down. “You're not very good with money,” he says. She would like to deny it but she can't. She buys a book, secondhand, called
How to Live Within Your Income
.

 

They spend a good deal of time one day drawing up a list of what each of them will do in their household. For instance, she will make their dinner but he will make his own lunch. By the time they are finished, it is time for lunch and Old Mother is hungry. The Grouch has taken some care over a tuna fish salad for himself. Old Mother says it looks good and asks him if she can share it. Annoyed, he points out that now, contrary to the agreement, he has made
their
lunch.

 

Old Mother could only have wanted a man of the highest ideals but now she finds she can't live up to them; the Grouch could only have wanted the best sort of woman, but she is not the best sort of woman.

 

Old Mother thinks her temper may improve if she drinks more water. When her temper remains bad, she begins taking a daily walk and eating more fresh fruit.

Old Mother reads an article which says: If one of you is in a bad mood the other should stay out of her way and be as kind as possible until the bad mood passes.

But when she proposes this to the Grouch, he refuses to consider it. He does not trust her: she will claim to be in a bad mood when she is not, and then require him to be kind to her.

 

Old Mother decides she will dress up as a witch on Halloween, since she is often described as a witch by the Grouch. She owns a pointed black hat, and now she buys more items to make up her costume. She thinks the Grouch will be amused, but he asks her please to remove the rubber nose from the living room.

 

The Grouch is exasperated. Old Mother has been criticizing him again. He says to her, “If I changed that, you'd only find something else to criticize. And if I changed that, then something else would be wrong.”

 

The Grouch is exasperated again. Again, Old Mother has been criticizing him. This time he says, “You should have married a man who didn't drink or smoke. And who also had no hands or feet. Or arms or legs.”

 

Old Mother tells the Grouch she feels ill. She thinks she may soon have to go into the bathroom and be sick. They have been quarreling, and so the Grouch says nothing. He goes into the bathroom, however, and washes the toilet bowl, then brings a small red towel and lays it on the foot of the bed where she is resting.

Weeks later, Old Mother tells the Grouch that one of the kindest things he ever did for her was to wash the toilet bowl before she was sick. She thinks he will be touched, but instead, he is insulted.

 

“Can't you agree with me about anything?” asks the Grouch.

Old Mother has to admit it: she almost always disagrees with him. Even if she agrees with most of what he is saying, there will be some small part of it she disagrees with.

When she does agree with him, she suspects her own motives: she may agree with him only so that at some future time she will be able to remind him that she does sometimes agree with him.

 

Old Mother has her favorite armchair, and the Grouch has his. Sometimes, when the Grouch is not at home, Old Mother sits in his chair, and then she also picks up what he has been reading and reads it herself.

 

Old Mother is dissatisfied with the way they spend their evenings together and imagines other activities such as taking walks, writing letters, and seeing friends. She proposes these activities to the Grouch, but the Grouch becomes angry. He does not like her to organize anything in his life. Now the way they spend this particular evening is quarreling over what she has said.

 

Both the Grouch and Old Mother want to make love, but he wants to make love before the movie, whereas she wants to make love either during it or after. She agrees to before, but then if before, wants the radio on. He prefers the television and asks her to take her glasses off. She agrees to the television, but prefers to lie with her back to it. Now he can't see it over her shoulder because she is lying on her side. She can't see it because she is facing him and her glasses are off. He asks her to move her shoulder.

 

Old Mother hears the footsteps of the Grouch in the lower hall as he leaves the living room on his way to bed. She looks around the bedroom to see what will bother him. She removes her feet from his pillow, stands up from his side of the bed, turns off a few lights, takes her slippers out of his way into the room, and shuts a dresser drawer. But she knows she has forgotten something. What he complains about first is the wrinkled sheets, and then the noise of the white mice running in their cage in the next room.

 

“Maybe I could help with that,” says Old Mother sincerely as they are driving in the car, but after what she did the night before she knows he will not want to think of her as a helpful person. The Grouch only snorts.

 

Old Mother shares a small triumph with the Grouch, hoping he will congratulate her. He remarks that some day she will not bother to feel proud of that sort of thing.

 

“I slept like a log,” he says in the morning. “What about you?”

Well, most of the night was fine, she explains, but toward morning she slept lightly trying to keep still in a position that did not hurt her neck. She was trying to keep still so as not to bother him, she adds. Now he is angry.

 

“How did you sleep?” she asks him as he comes downstairs late.

“Not very well,” he answers. “I was awake around 1:30. You were still up.”

“No, I wasn't still up at 1:30,” she says.

“12:30, then.”

 

“You were very restless,” says the Grouch in the morning. “You kept tossing and turning.”

“Don't accuse me,” says Old Mother.

“I'm not accusing you, I'm just stating the facts. You were very restless.”

“All right: the reason I was restless was that you were snoring.”

Now the Grouch is angry. “I don't snore.”

 

Old Mother is lying on the bathroom floor reading, her head on a small stack of towels and a pillow, a bath towel covering her, because she has not been able to sleep and doesn't want to disturb the Grouch. She falls asleep there on the bathroom floor, goes back to bed, wakes again, returns to the bathroom, and continues to read. Finally the Grouch, having woken up because she was gone, comes to the door and offers her some earplugs.