Why My Third Husband Will Be A Dog (20 page)

My daughter and I exchanged glances.

Mind you, Mother Mary is 4′11″ tall and about a hundred pounds. Her hair is white and cut close to her head, and with her brown eyes behind round glasses and her nose curved like a beak, she looks like a baby snow owl. But in the lab coat, she could have been Dr. Bunsen Honeydew from
The Muppet Show.

Why she was wearing a lab coat, I had no idea. I didn’t even know she had gone to medical school.

“Ma, is the doctor in?” I asked, setting a mug of coffee in front of her.

“What do you mean?”

“Why are you wearing a lab coat?”

“I’m eighty-three. Can’t I wear what I want?”

“But where’d you get a lab coat?”

“What’s the difference?”

“I’m just curious. Don’t you think it’s a little strange?”

“Why?”

I gave up. Answering a question with a question is my mother’s favorite thing, and if she wanted to play Dr. Mom, it was fine with me. Plus I had noticed that some older people get tired of dressing normal and start wearing strange outfits. Not all older people, but some. I’m not naming names. They’ve been getting dressed nice for a long time, and at some point, some of them they just stop bothering. For example, under her lab coat, my mother had on cotton pants and a Miami Vice T-shirt she’s worn since Don Johnson was hot.

Who can blame her?

Not me, not really.

At her age, I’ll probably be the same way. In fact, I’m the same way already. When I’m in first-draft hibernation, I wear the same fisherman’s sweater every day, which I bought for twenty dollars from a street vendor in New York. It smells like the subway and guarantees I’ll be single forever. It’s the comfort food of clothes, and since it harms no one, who cares?

I started frying eggs when daughter Francesca said, “I like the lab coat. Wouldn’t it be funny if we all wore uniforms instead of clothes?”

“It might.” I decided to play along. “What uniform would you wear?”

“A trashman jumpsuit.”

“Why?”

“It would be so easy, and if you got trash on it, it wouldn’t matter.”

My mother nodded. “See, that’s why I like my white coat. It’s so easy.”

Wrong. Chico’s is easy. Lab coats are crazy.

It got me thinking about uniforms. I remembered with fondness my sash from the Columbus Day parade, but that’s not the same thing. A mail lady uniform would be cool, because you can carry dog biscuits in the big pockets. The UPS guy gets to wear knee socks, which are way easier than pantyhose, but who wears pantyhose anyway? I wouldn’t mind a chef’s uniform, because I could gain three hundred pounds and still fit into those checkered pants.

Then I knew. “I’d go with a motorcycle cop uniform. I like the boots.”

“And the gun,” my mother added.

Francesca looked over.

Half the time, we get in a wardrobe rut that might as well be a uniform, right? For example, when I’m in second draft, which lasts three months, I switch to the sweater-jeans-Danskos trifecta common to suburban moms and English majors. At book signings, I pair a pretentious jacket with pretentious jeans, because they match. And the little black dress is my uniform for the night shift.

Maybe it’s not the worst thing. Uniforms make our life easy. What we wear reflects the way we see ourselves and sends a clear message about us.

My mother was saying, “My sister had quite an outfit. After she lost all that weight, she used to go down the Navy Yard in shorts and high heels, with whoopee socks.”

“What are whoopee socks?” my daughter asked, and my mother lifted a thin, white eyebrow.

“You know.”

But maybe not all messages need to be so clear.

Daughter Francesca came home from visiting a friend the other day and said, “Mom, you know what you need?”

Uh oh.

Leave it to your kids to let you know what you need. You thought you had what you needed, if not everything you wanted, and you were happy with that, because you adhere to the teachings of a certain philosopher-king who says that you can’t always get what you want, but you can get what you need.

“What do we need?” I asked.

“A home theater.”

“Do tell.”

So Francesca sat down at the kitchen island and told me all about her friend’s home theater. A plush room with a hugescreen TV. Picture quality to rival any multiplex. Three stepped rows of cushy recliners that moved forward and back at the touch of a button. Stereo speakers for crystal-clear digital sound. No windows or noise to cause glare or distraction. In short, a total movie experience, without the long lines, sticky floors, or suspect upholstery.

By the end of the conversation, you know what I was thinking. Mick Jagger is a false idol, and I need a home theater.

All I have is a home, and while I used to think that was enough, I was wrong.

My new home theater was already taking shape in my mind, fully-loaded. It included all of the above, plus some custom touches that Francesca and I came up with. Cupholders in the recliners. A popcorn machine. We stopped short of the mannequin inside the fake ticket window, because that would be creepy.

We even thought of signs we could hang on the walls: There’s no place like home theater. Bless this home theater. Home, sweet, home theater.

Then we started walking around our house, figuring out which room we could destroy, I mean, convert.

We considered the family room, but it had too many pesky windows, and even if we put up shades, we could never get the room dark enough. There was just too much sunlight streaming in, ruining everything. Plus views of evergreen trees and holly bushes we’d have to obliterate.

We considered the basement, but I nixed that idea. My basement is dark enough, but it’s cold and damp. Spiders live there, and the occasional mouse.

All my mice are occasional.

If they weren’t, that would be a problem I’d have to do something about and the kind of thing you’d never admit to in print. I know they’re occasional because I put occasional traps down and find dead mice, but only on occasion. Also I think of them as field mice, which are a normal and natural part of country life, and not mere rodents, which are disgusting. And I do live in a rural area, if you don’t count the Corporate Center. So all I have, really, are occasional field mice.

Either way, the basement home theater isn’t happening.

Unless the movie is
Willard.

We went to the dining room and looked it over. I have a symbolic dining room and consider myself lucky. In my broke days, I always dreamed of having a house with a dining room I didn’t use. It’s not as if my dining room is too fancy to use, because nothing in my house is too fancy. It’s that I’ve run out of bookshelves, so books cover all the surfaces in the dining room, including the table and chairs. While some people have a pile of books to be read, the so-called TBR pile, I have a dining roomful of books to be read, or a TBR dining room. The books present an obstacle to a home theater, but I can’t bring myself to replace Thoreau with
Transformers III.

So the dining room is out.

We ran out of rooms and looked around for a place to build an addition for the home theater, but by then we both knew we were pipe dreaming. There was no place for an addition, and it would cost a fortune. We resigned ourselves to the fact that our home would forever lack a home theater.

But we hold out hope that those friends of hers will ask us over.

Charity begins at home theater.

So I have two kittens, Mimi and Vivi. They’re eight months old and although they look a lot alike, their personalities couldn’t be more different.