Forever, Erma Read online

  As I drove by I heard a smart-mouthed carry-out boy say, “You said that last week, lady.”

  A Housewife’s Prayer—October 1974

  Prayer of a housewife who gets out once a year and tonight is the night.

  Please, Lord, don’t let the spots on Laurie’s chest mean what I think they mean, and if they do mean what we both know they mean, grant that our sitter has had chicken pox.

  Give me the humor to smile when I turn on the bathwater and realize that someone has left the knob on SHOWER and it drenches an $8 hairdo.

  Grant me the serenity to put on my fake eyelashes without gluing my left eyelid permanently to my cheekbone.

  Do not let me despair when my husband arrives home thirty minutes late, with a three-day beard that can’t wait, a front seat full of dirty Little League bases that smell like a stable, then tells me he has to stop at a discount house to cash a check.

  Smile upon me this one night so that I may not have to endure a klutz on one side who hums the overture and Typhoid Annie who is sitting behind me and is coughing down my back.

  In your infinite wisdom, help us to ignore our name as it is being paged in the restaurant, as we all well know it is the sitter saying that Michael demands an entire bottle of Pepsi and she will not be responsible for his plumbing if he has a whole one instead of half.

  Walk with us as we get the table by the kitchen door and I get the bent fork and my husband’s soup is cold.

  And when it rains (as we know it will) lead us into the nearest gas station so that we may buy the refills for our windshield wipers that my husband has been putting off for three years...saying the world is due for a drought.

  Comfort us as we go fifteen miles out of our way for a gas station that is open all night and the sitter is angry because we are late and it is a school night and we have to write her a check for the tip and she’s never had chicken pox...before tonight.

  If I ask too much, Lord, give me the strength to say, “Who needs a night out? I’d rather stay at home.”

  Mom Last to Get Cold—October 16, 1975

  There is one negative aspect of being a housewife that no one has ever touched upon: We get all the diseases last.

  Not only that, we have to take what everyone in the family brings us. It’s like being social director in a house of pestilence.

  A couple of weeks ago, my husband dragged home in the middle of the day and said, “I don’t want to panic you, but I may be going to the big car pool in the sky.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “My head aches. My body is burning up. I am nauseated. My chest is tight and I can’t make a fist. Call a specialist and bring me TV Guide.”

  After calling his office and his sister, setting up the card table for his reading material, canceling his dental appointment and lugging trays to his bed, I heard another call for help.

  It was my son who complained. “I’m hot, feel like throwing up and am wobbly. Can I have ice cream for dessert?”

  I put him to bed, called the pediatrician, took his mitt over to the alternate first baseman, went to school for his homework assignment, bought a coloring book, played 30 games of Old Maid and picked up a prescription at the drugstore.

  By the next morning, his brother complained his nose was stuffed up, his head hurt and could I get the electric football game out of the attic.

  The traffic at the front door was like a freeway. My husband received a planter from the secretary pool, Miss Wartz brought over 30 get-well wishes from the class, and Grandma dropped by with a light pudding and molding clay.

  The morning they all went back to their respective jobs, I awoke feeling lousy. “I don’t want to panic you,” I said to my husband, “but if I were on Marcus Welby, M.B., I could only be a one-part episode.”

  “Nonsense,” he said. “You’ve just got what the rest of us had, and we lived.”

  It wasn’t fair. Everyone else had a cold that was the “real thing.” My cold had no status, no respect—and could well have been stamped MADE IN JAPAN.

  My good friend called me up and said, “Didn’t I tell you? Someday they will make one tombstone for housewives everywhere with a standard inscription. It will read, I told you I was sick.”

  “I Was 37 Years Old at the Time”—August 7, 1976

  For years, you’ve watched everyone else do it.

  The children who sat on the curb eating their lunches while waiting for their bus.

  The husband you put through school who drank coffee standing up and slept with his hand on the alarm.

  And you envied them and said, “Maybe next year I’ll go back to school.” And the years went by and this morning you looked into the mirror and said, “You blew it. You’re too old to pick it up and start a new career.”

  This column is for you.

  Margaret Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Gone With the Wind in 1937. She was 37 years old at the time.

  Margaret Chase Smith was elected to the Senate for the first time in 1948 at the age of 49.

  Ruth Gordon picked up her first Oscar in 1968 for Rosemary’s Baby. She was 72 years old.

  Billie Jean King took the battle of women’s worth to a tennis court in Houston’s Astrodome to outplay Bobby Riggs. She was 31 years of age.

  Grandma Moses began a painting career at the age of 76.

  Anne Morrow Lindbergh followed in the shadow of her husband until she began to question the meaning of existence for individual women. She published her thoughts in Gift from the Sea in 1955, at 49.

  Shirley Temple Black was Ambassador to Ghana at the age of 47.

  Golda Meir in 1969 was elected prime minister of Israel. She had just turned 71.

  This summer Barbara Jordan was given official duties as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention. She is 40 years old.

  You can tell yourself these people started out as exceptional. You can tell yourself they had influence before they started. You can tell yourself the conditions under which they achieved were different from yours.

  Or you can be like a woman I knew who sat at her kitchen window year after year and watched everyone else do it and then said to herself, “It’s my turn.”

  I was 37 years old at the time.

  Dumpy Paper Dress—March 31, 1977

  Do you know what depression is?

  It’s sitting in your doctor’s examination room.

  In a paper dress.

  On a cold table.

  And it’s the high spot of your week.

  Your eyes rove around the room and come to rest on the doctor’s diploma. The year he graduated. I’ve got shoes older than that.

  Darn. Forgot to grease my cracked heels. I wonder if anyone else goes in without hose in the wintertime. You have to make a choice in this world. Wear white socks and alienate your children or go sockless and live with cracked heels.

  This dress is not to be believed. I look like a Christmas package that arrived in February. I wonder who their fashion coordinator is, Mr. Hefty? All I need is a twist tie around my neck and someone would put me at the curb.

  The nurse is coming.

  “Are you decent?”

  “No.”

  “I mean are you in your gown?”

  “That’s not the same thing.”

  “Care for a magazine while you’re waiting? Here’s Esquire. There’s a great article in it on Mary Tyler Moore.”

  “I can’t handle Mary Tyler Moore today. I’m depressed, and that could put me over the brink.”

  “Would you rather read The Cysts Digest?”

  “I’ll take Mary.”

  “It says Robert Redford saw her walking along the beach and wanted to introduce himself, but he was awed by her and respected her privacy.”

  “I have that problem,” I said. “Thirty million men out there respect my privacy. And the more they respect it, the more I seem to have. Give me The Cysts Digest.”

  “Now, what seems to be your problem?” she asked, clicking her
ballpoint pen and leaning over my card.

  “I’m depressed. I’m not happy with my life. All my appliances are going. My goldfish died. I need a root canal. I’m talking back to bumper stickers. My hair is greasy. My menus are boring. I fell apart last week when I opened the refrigerator and discovered the date on my yeast had expired. I pray every day for patience...but I can’t wait around for the answer.”

  The doctor came in. “What seems to be the trouble?”

  “I’m depressed,” I said simply.

  “You should be,” he said. “That’s a rotten-looking dress.”

  See what I mean?

  Handbags—October 25, 1977

  The first and only time I was on a ski slope, I had the attention of every person within a two-mile radius.

  It could have been my color-coordinated pants and jacket.

  It could have been my oversized goggles.

  It could have been my knitted cap with the signature of a leading skier on it.

  My husband seemed to think it was because I was the only woman on skis carrying a handbag.

  I can’t help it. Do men actually believe women enjoy lugging around a handbag everywhere they go? By the time everyone in the family unloads their stuff on me, I feel like an anvil salesman.

  I don’t know when it all started, but somewhere in history someone decided women were the keepers of the nose tissue, fingernail clippers, breath spray, Band-Aids, change for rest rooms, pins, hair spray, sticks for chapped lips, road maps, combs and scratch pads. I never see a film clip of Queen Elizabeth with that large handbag slung over her arm that I don’t half expect to see Prince Philip lean forward and say, “Got any gum, Ducky?”

  History used to be kinder to women. Did you see Joan of Arc carrying a Gucci to war? Did Pocahontas lug around a pouch to match her moccasins? And I don’t know where Lady Godiva carried her credit cards, but it wasn’t in a handbag. I would have noticed.

  Believe me, there is nothing that detracts from a woman’s aura of mystery and intrigue like wearing a black suede over-the-shoulder bag with a pale blue bathing suit.

  I think it’s time we women stopped carrying supplies for the entire family. If children don’t have room to carry their own toys, if men don’t have pockets in their pants, tougho.

  Things are clearly out of control. I didn’t mind rummaging through my bag for the ring at the wedding ceremony. I didn’t raise my voice when I went to surgery with a tote bag over my chest. But the other day, I realized things had gone too far. My husband said, “These LifeSavers are stuck together. Where did you have them?”

  “When I went to the sauna—”

  “You didn’t!”

  Bizarre Accidents—November 29, 1981

  I read the other day where a woman was grocery shopping and, in trying to reach the last package of frozen broccoli, lost her balance and fell head first into the freezer.

  A man walking by grabbed her by the ankles, dragged her out and drove her to the hospital, where she was treated and released.

  I have to believe that falling in the freezer was the easy part. The real trauma came when she had to deal with the people who fill out insurance forms. I can see it now:

  “Was this an accident?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was there any other way to get the broccoli out of the case?”

  “Probably.”

  “Have you gotten broccoli out of the case like this before?”

  “Many times.”

  Mothers know exactly what I am talking about. Most of the accidents that happen with children border on the bizarre. They never do anything in a conventional way. I always had the kid with the penny shoved up his nose, the arm wedged in a sweeper bag, a lip caught in a mousetrap. Things that everyone told me 30 years from now I’d laugh at—and I’m still waiting.

  I was only five years into child raising when I stopped asking, “How in the world could something like this happen?” After a while, I fully accepted strange happenings and prepared myself to defend them while riding to the emergency room.

  “How did your son split his head open?”

  “He did a swan dive into two feet of water.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Right.”

  I used to watch nurses at the desk who would try to jam “got pant leg caught in mixer” onto insurance forms or “cut tongue while hiding Fort Apache soldier set from cereal box in his mouth to annoy brother” and wonder what some of the other insurance claims read like.

  I’d surely love to have seen their faces when a woman reported recently her buttocks were lodged in an emergency exit when she was in the rest room of a bus and the bus swerved, forcing her into the window.

  Can’t you hear them asking at the hospital, “Was this your assigned seat?”

  Turning into Mother—June 1, 1989

  I rummaged through a stack of old gift boxes in my closet before I found what I was looking for. It was a knotted, crumpled ribbon. Feverishly, I salvaged what I could and steamed out the wrinkles with an iron. My shoulders slumped as I realized that I had just come full circle. I had turned into my mother!

  How could I have allowed this to happen? I love my mother dearly, but all the little things that have driven me nuts throughout the years have now found a home in my body.

  I carry my lipstick in one of those little holders with a mirror. There is a piece of bright-colored yarn around the handle of my suitcase so I can spot it easily. I keep a litter bag in my car. Can you believe any of this?

  Every time I change the color of my shoes, I change handbags to match. I never used to do that. And the other day I found myself throwing a measuring cup in the dishwasher when I had measured only water in it.

  Maybe I have misjudged my mother. Is it possible there was a time in her life when she never considered rinsing out bread wrappers and hanging them out to dry with little clamp clothespins? Was it Grandma who passed on to her the habits of never calling anyone after 10 o’clock at night and never washing her hair just before she went to bed?

  The first trait I picked up was a shock. When I pulled out of our driveway one day, I immediately got into the left lane on our boulevard.

  “Why are you doing that?” asked my daughter.

  “I have to make a left turn,” I said.

  “Mom! You don’t make a left turn for another thirty blocks.”

  “I want to be there just in case no one will let me in.”

  “You sound just like Grandma,” she said. “She’s always doing that.”

  The comparison bothered me. I have always considered myself to be a free spirit, a monument to rebellion. I worked at it while I was growing up. If my mother said someone was a creep, I saw him as a role model. If she said a philosophy course wouldn’t pay the rent, I minored in it. If her prime concern was getting all the tomatoes canned before they went bad, mine was saving the world. Other than the fact that she gave me life, shared the same home and loved me, we had little in common.

  I was riding with my daughter the other day when she entered the expressway and immediately got into the left lane. “I know,” she said, “the exit ramp is a few miles down, but sometimes no one will let you in.”

  I smiled. It’s only a matter of time before she’ll be saving boxes and ironing old ribbons.

  Love and Marriage

  Get Well for Mom—April 3, 1966

  NOTES PINNED TO THE pillow of a mother who has flu by a well-meaning husband who has inherited the house and kids.

  Monday A.M.

  Dearest:

  Sleep late. Everything under control. Lunches packed. Kids off to school. Menu for dinner planned. Your lunch is on a tray in refrigerator: fruit cup, finger sandwiches. Thermos of hot tea by bedside. See you around six.

  Tuesday A.M.

  Honey:

  Sorry about the egg rack in the refrigerator. Hope you got back to sleep. Did the kids tell you about the Coke I put in the Thermoses? The school might call you on this. Di
nner may be a little late. I’m doing your door-to-door canvass for liver research. Your lunch is in refrigerator. Hope you like leftover chili.

  Wednesday A.M.

  Dear Doris:

  Why in the name of all that is sane would you put soap chips in the flour canister! If you have time, could you please come up with a likely spot for Chris’s missing shoes? We’ve checked the clothes hamper, garage, backseat of the car and wood box. Did you know the school has a ruling on bedroom slippers? There’s some cold pizza for you in a napkin in the oven drawer. Late tonight. Driving eight Girl Scouts to tour meatpacking house.

  Thursday A.M.

  Doris:

  Don’t panic over water in hallway. It crested last night at 9 P.M. Will finish laundry tonight. Please pencil in answers to following:

  1. How do you turn on the garbage disposal?

  2. How do you turn off the milkman?

  3. Why would that rotten kid leave his shoes in his boots?

  4. How do you remove a Confederate flag inked on the palm of a small boy’s hand?

  5. What do you do with leftovers when they begin to snap at you when you open the door?

  I don’t know what you’re having for lunch! Surprise me!

  Friday A.M.

  Hey:

  Don’t drink from pitcher by the sink. Am trying to restore pink dress shirt to original white. Take heart. Tonight, the ironing will be folded, house cleaned and dinner on time. I called your mother.

  Cleaning Out the Attic—December 28, 1966

  Actually, we didn’t have to clean the attic last Thursday.

  The builder checked the sled runner coming through the ceiling in the boys’ room, the sag over the kitchen and the cracks in the hallway and said engineering-wise it would be another full two weeks before the entire structure gave way.

  We picked Thursday because we were still in a festive mood. This is important. On previous occasions when we were not in a festive mood, we had to summon a marriage counselor to hang a picture together. (The time we hung wallpaper in the dining room as a team we were written up in the Ladies’ Home Journal feature, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?”)