Where's My Wand?: One Boy's Magical Triumph Over Alienation and Shag Carpeting (10 page)

As a mystical wizard, the prospect left me with a sinking feeling, since Mother’s social shortcomings were not necessarily limited to those who lived on our block. It was obvious what needed to be done.

The next afternoon, alone in the basement, bedspread caftan in place, I executed a grandiose wave. Up into the sky I flew and, as if suspended by parachute, swiftly began to float down into our neighborhood, which now resembled a candy-colored nirvana. I seamlessly drifted through the roof of our house and into the living room. This room, a symphony of expensive flocked wallpaper, blue shag carpeting and white crushed velvet furniture, was a roped-off VIP area open only to those with extraordinary access, like the president or maybe Jesus. I hovered near the ceiling so as not to set foot on the forbidden shag.

As I carefully conjured, several neighbors who had never gotten past the driveway of our home suddenly found themselves seated on the crushed velvet furniture, holding cups. Mother entered, an apron around her waist. She smiled and offered the pot she was holding. “More coffee?”

They beamed at her.

“I’m so glad we could get together,” Mother said as she poured, squeezing the hand of the woman in front of her. “We just don’t do this kind of thing often enough.”

My spell was cast.

 

 

THE BATTLE PREPARATIONS for Warren’s visit began.

The house was scoured to the point that the Centers for Disease Control could have used it to store vaccines. New decorative objets d’art were purchased to give the home a stylish, almost lived-in look. And Mother cooked: pot roast, scalloped potatoes and green bean casserole.

Val and I were dumbstruck, completely unaware that she was able to prepare any of these dishes or, for that matter, that she even knew what a pot roast was. She didn’t wear an apron, but I nonetheless took this unexpected homemaking effort as a good omen.

The big night finally arrived. The carpeting had been vacuumed for the final time just moments before Warren’s arrival, the scent of burning rubber from the latest exhausted fan belt still lingering in the air. Val was wearing her grooviest Laurie Partridge vest and had spent extra time under the iron, her hair a highly damaged but bone-straight walnut mane. Not to be outdone, I had spent hours in front of the bathroom mirror, Dippity-do-ing my hair into a glossy, side-parted extravaganza, my many cowlicks pasted into shiny submission.

Mother had just come from her weekly beauty shop appointment, and she fairly glowed in a striking red dress, her black hair a perfectly coiffed helmet of waves. Even Dad had dressed for the occasion, his usual T-shirt, Dacron pants and moccasins replaced by a freshly pressed short-sleeved dress shirt and brown polyester dress slacks.

The doorbell rang. Suddenly, Dad stepped forward to open the door while Mother stood demurely behind him. My jaw dropped. Val audibly gasped. The “little woman” role was an image familiar to us only from television reruns. In the Poole militia, there was only one commander, and it was not our father.

As Warren stepped into the foyer, Mother practically curtsied. Val turned to me and whispered, “Where’s the camera?”

I silently marveled at my magical abilities. I was on fire. Tonight, all would go according to plan.

Warren Littleton was a barrel-chested, fortysomething man with shoe-polished jet-black hair and not one but two gold teeth. He wore a large diamond ring on one pinkie that would have been ostentatious on Al Capone.

Warren took one look at Mother and whistled. “Holy moly, Ray, you got yourself a looker.”

Mother smiled uneasily as she stepped out of reach of his thick, sausagelike fingers.

“Boy, if I had one like this at home,” he declared loudly to Dad, “I wouldn’t need all those hookers in Vegas!”

There was a long silence. In the Baptist religion, sex is viewed as a procreational duty with no inherent entertainment value, and as such it was never discussed in our house. Mother maintained her smile, refusing to acknowledge that our guest had just dropped a turd on the shag.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Warren, I thought Ray told me you were married.”

“I am,” he replied merrily as he slapped Dad on the back. He breezed past Val and me without acknowledging us and sauntered into the family room. “Where’s the mother’s milk?”

As the evening progressed, we came to understand that “mother’s milk” was Warren’s term for beer, a beverage he consumed with ferocious intensity. Our parents drank only occasionally, and mostly just wine, but on a recent trip to Kansas, Dad had purchased two six-packs of Warren’s favorite beer, Coors, which was, at that time, available only in certain states and thus highly prized in the others.

The more Coors Warren consumed, the more he became what would kindly be described as a raconteur, and unkindly, a blowhard. He had a penchant for four-letter words, which, in our household, had seldom if ever been used and thus, when tossed off by him like cheery punctuations, hung like a fart in an elevator. Val and I had long been taught that these words were not only wrong, but could quite possibly result in our everlasting banishment to Hell, so we nervously reassessed the odds on our admission to Heaven each time he let one fly.

Over his first four beers, Warren regaled us with seemingly endless tales of his high jinks at company conventions. He would punctuate each story with a raucous laugh as if to inform us that he had reached the punch line, which invariably included a phrase like, “With a body like that, who knew she was a nun?”

Our mother continued to play the dutiful wife, her subservience a matter of both curiosity and confusion to Val. I, knowing full well that I had had a hand in Mother’s newfound disposition, simply smiled serenely. Val wisely whispered that maybe we should seize this abnormally maternal moment and ask for something—but what? A box of Ding Dongs? The new Three Dog Night album? A getaway car?

Mother gently tried to coax Warren onto a new subject, steering the conversation to his kids. “How old are your boys?” she asked, sipping her extra-black coffee.

“Oh, who the hell remembers?” he growled. “They live with my ex-wife.”

“Well,” Mother continued, determined to keep the conversational ball from bouncing back to sex, “they must be quite athletic if they’re anything like you.”

Even at my age, I saw this for the blatant suck-up that it was, given that Warren could balance his beer can on his belly and would not require a seat-back tray aboard any commercial airliner, but he was oblivious. “Yeah, they’re all-stars. They both lettered in football.”

He turned to Dad. “What does this one play?” he asked, motioning toward me as if I was a stuffed deer head on the wall.

Dad paused, and with an uneasy smile, replied, “Warren, he’s only ten. Not exactly ready for junior varsity.”

Warren pressed ahead. “Well, he’s gotta have
some
talent. You think he’s a runner? Maybe he’ll break the five-minute mile.”

Mother gently interjected. “Eric’s more the creative type. He likes music and television.”

“Ohhhhh, I get it,” Warren boomed, sitting back and looking me up and down. “One of
those
.”

Mother and Dad both elected to ignore this statement. I looked at Val questioningly, but she refused to meet my gaze.

Warren, who seemed to feel that his joke had been lost on the adults in the room, decided to press his point. “Oh,
you know
,” he whispered to Mother in a bizarrely effeminate voice as he fluttered his hands about.

Mother stood, masking what seemed to be annoyance behind a gracious smile. “Dinner?”

 

 

EVENTS WERE NOT unfolding quite as I had anticipated. Thankfully, Mother’s carefully prepared meal was glorious, which gave us something else to focus on. Val and I reveled in this rare and unexpected bounty, wolfing it down like Ethiopians at a casino buffet, as Warren, getting progressively drunker, stared at us.

“Don’t you ever feed these rug rats, Elaine?” he barked. “You’d think you kept ’em locked up in the basement. Although”—he leaned over and whispered to her as he nodded toward me—“this one, you might want to.”

Dad and Mother exchanged glances, unsure what to do. I stared down at my plate, not exactly sure what Warren meant but quite sure it wasn’t a compliment. Val carefully arranged her peas into the shape of the state of Missouri.

“What?” Warren slurred defensively.

Dad passed him the scalloped potatoes, probably hoping some starch would soak up the booze. “Come on, Warren. Easy does it.”

“Oh, hell, I’m just joking around.”

“We’re proud of our kids,” Mother said firmly, a bit of the charm absent from her tone.

“Well, you
should
be proud of the girl,” Warren replied, as he gazed blurrily in Val’s direction, knocking over his beer, which to my horror spilled onto the powder blue shag. “She’s not too hard on the eyes—all things considered.”

As Val contemplated this qualification, I grabbed my napkin and leaned over, dabbing the spill.

“Easy there, guy,” Warren sniggered, “your head’s practically in my lap!”

Mother jumped up and snatched Warren’s beer away. “Here, let me help you with that,” she offered, her lips pursed into a grim version of a smile as she exited to the kitchen.

“Wow, curb service,” Warren commented, winking at Dad. “That’s my kinda wife. Bet you don’t lift a finger around here.”

Dad just smiled wanly. We heard a cabinet door slam.

Mother returned moments later holding a relic of my toddler days, a battered plastic sippy cup. Warren looked up, confused, as she poured his beer into it, snapped the lid on, and handed it to him.

“Thought you might like this, since you call it ‘mother’s milk.’ ”

She excused herself and returned to the kitchen, leaving the four of us to fend for ourselves.

Warren smiled hesitantly, unsure what to make of this. Everyone was quiet, all of us well past the point of being full but forcing down a few last bites in order to keep busy. Dad decided to make one last-ditch attempt to sober Warren up and keep this badly listing social ship from sinking.

“Why don’t we get away from these dirty dishes? Let’s have coffee in the other room.”

Warren, understandably, took this to mean the
living
room, which opened onto the dining room. He rose unsteadily from his chair and aimed himself in that general direction.

Although Mother was now in the kitchen, furiously polishing the remaining silver off the sterling cake knife, her sixth sense for potential trespassing was triggered like a Brinks burglar alarm. As Warren—who was neither the president nor Jesus—ambled drunkenly toward our most sacred of rooms, Mother flew into the dining room, knife held high.

“What are you doing, you
oaf
?!” she hollered, grabbing his arm to yank him back from the precipice of the room where no man dared go. “He meant the
family
room!”

Warren stopped in his tracks, far too inebriated to bother wiping the look of shock off his face. “What the hell . . . ?”

Mother, suddenly emboldened, added insult to injury. “If you weren’t so drunk, you’d know the difference!”

She stood there, her arms crossed, daring him to take another step. Warren turned to Dad as if expecting an apology, an explanation or another Coors.

“Uh, we don’t use the living room,” Dad explained hesitantly. “Elaine thinks the family room is more, you know, relaxing.”

“Relaxing, my ass,” Warren bellowed. “This bitch is crazy!”

Val and I remained at the table, transfixed, like witnesses to a particularly gruesome car crash. Warren turned and wove his way through the dining room, the kitchen and the family room to the foyer, followed by Mother and Dad. He silently opened the front door.

“You know,” Mother barked, as Warren weaved down the driveway to his car, “my son may not be athletic, but he’s smart, and he’s creative. The only two words people are probably ever gonna use to describe your sons are ‘brainless’ and ‘incarcerated’!”

Mother slammed the front door, leaving Dad outside with Warren. She stood frozen behind it for a moment before taking a deep breath and returning to the kitchen. After a long moment, the door opened and Dad walked back into the house as Warren gunned his motor, screeching down the street. We all paused, listening for the sound of mailboxes being taken out.

“I probably should have driven him home,” Dad mumbled.

Mother paused in her polishing. “He won’t kill himself. Evil never dies.”

With that, she disappeared to the basement to wash the table linens. She never reappeared that night, probably worried that her outburst had cost Dad his new job.

But it hadn’t.

Dad was promoted shortly thereafter. He and Warren never spoke of that evening again. We never knew whether Warren simply wanted to forget that the night had ever happened—or if he didn’t remember that it had.

And I was beginning to realize that my magic could bring results I hadn’t asked for, but valued just the same. For Mother hadn’t been kind to Warren, as I’d intended; but as she protected her son, something more profound had occurred—she had been kind to me.

G
randma’s here!”

Those words, bellowed in a voice that had long since passed Lauren Bacall-sexy and was well on its way to the Addams Family’s Lurch, were unnecessary. Grandma’s scent preceded her. Top notes of Winstons intermingled with traces of mothballs and kitty litter to lend her annual arrival a unique sense of foreboding; in those moments, rather than
feeling
the tension coming in our household, we actually smelled it.

Grandma Dorothy was our mother’s mother, a no-nonsense woman whose every breath was laced with tar, nicotine and opinions. She traveled with three Zippo lighters, a pinochle deck and her cat, Tweeter, a blue point Siamese with all the charm and warmth of Attila the Hun.