crooked house

Baby Mania

Are you familiar with the video game Babysitting Mania, the goal of which is to frantically tidy up the house and get the kids in bed before the parents come home? The babysitter, fueled by coffee, rushes from mess to mess waving her hands in a bubbly or dust-like cloud over each one. When the fog clears, that particular disaster is gone. She might have to change a diaper or two, then, and maybe stick one of the kids in time-out before continuing her fast-forward mission of making beds and watering dead plants.

I have come home more than once -- exactly twice in fact -- to find the house in shambles, Sylvie fussing in her exersaucer, and David and Luke hunched together over the computer playing this particular game. I can distinctly remember the way my eyes felt as they widened in my head to anime proportions the first time I witnessed this travesty. (And in this case, travesty is exactly the right word.) I think the reason I saw this happen a second time is that, although I was enraged, some part of me was able to retain a certain distance -- possibly because I was so angry that I was having some sort of out-of-body experience due to the rapid flow of blood to my brain -- and, unfortunately, I laughed. Yes, forgive me, fellow mothers: I laughed.

The first time.

(Side note: the expression "fellow mothers" sounds wrong. And yet "sister mothers" sounds, well, polygamist. I just did a bit of googling and discovered that "sistren" was once in use as the feminine counterpart to "brethren." But I digress.)

Anyway, I suppose it shouldn't have come as a surprise to me to learn that Luke has taken to the virtual method of tidying up the little messes in our real world. The other day, when we were already five minutes late for preschool and I was half exhorting, half begging the child to put his snow boots on as I struggled to belt Sylvie into her carseat, I watched as he waved his hands frantically over a pile of toys on the floor while somehow making a strange shushing white noise sound effect with his mouth. He then stood up, rushed over to his boots, which were splayed out over the floor, and repeated the action and the weird sound effect over them. Needless to say, they did not magically appear on his feet.

Still, ever the optimist, I was heartened the other day when Luke asked for a baby doll like Lily's. Lily is our babysitter Holly's two-year-old daughter and she brought her baby doll, whose name is Baby, with her when she came to spend the afternoon. Everything that Holly or I did with or for Sylvie, Lily repeated with Baby. Baby had her bottle, Baby sat in the high chair, Baby played in the exersaucer, Baby slept in the swing.

We went straight to the store almost as soon as Luke asked for a Baby of his own, which he named first Luke, then Luka, then Lucia, then Lou, and then Lee. He finally settled on Dee. Luke spent a couple of days looking after Dee -- he fed her, he changed her, he made sure she had her soother, and he tucked her carefully into bed beside him. He even figured out how to hold her bottle in place with his chin while talking on the invisible telephone. Last night I was on autopilot, in the middle of picking up mounds of crap from the living room floor, when he asked me to help him. I found myself carefully belting Dee into Sylvie's swing before I realized what I was doing. I guess Luke was getting a little tired of being the primary caretaker. I know the feeling. I think the next time Holly comes over, I'll spend my free time playing a nice violent video game.

Happy Valentine's Day. Or Not.

An extremely short break-up letter from Jacqueline Susann to her then (and again later) husband Irving:

Irving, when we were at the Essex House and I had room service and I could buy all my Florence Lustig dresses, I found that I loved you very much, but now that you’re in the army and getting fifty-six dollars a month, I feel that my love has waned.

You've got to wonder why Irving ever agreed to get back together with her. I don't have a copy of the book this letter was collected in, Hell Hath No Fury: Women's Letters from the End of the Affair -- I heard it read aloud on the radio this afternoon -- but I'm tempted. The book was edited by Jezebel's editor-in-chief Anna Holmes. There are a couple more break-up letters from the book, including one written by Rebecca West, quoted here.

Then they played I Don't Want to Get Over You by The Magnetic Fields on the radio and, as I drove past, this huge lanky man in blue jeans and a black leather jacket half-staggered, half-swaggered down the hill in the pale winter sunlight in perfect time to this song. That's one of my favourite things:  I love when random people on the street seem to be walking in time to the song that's playing inside my car and it's even better when the person seems to suit the song. It's so "brown paper packages tied up with string," don't you agree?

Those Are The Rules

The other day Luke was explaining some elaborate new rules for one of his games to his grandfather, who looked a bit confused.

Luke looked sympathetic. "Those are the rules!" he said, holding his hands palms up in front of him in an exaggerated gesture of disbelief. "I don't know why they make 'em like that, but they do."

"Luke," I said. "Didn't you make up those rules?"

Luke turned to me and smiled. "Yup," he said.

The Sincerest Form of Flattery

Last week I read Steven Millhauser's terrific Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American Writer 1943-1954 by Jeffrey Cartwright. How's that for a title? The conceit is that the book is the biography of a boy genius, written by his friend, another little boy who is perhaps also a genius. Or perhaps he is a homicidal maniac. To find out you'll have to read the book. 

Millhauser's prose is beautiful, as usual, but what strikes me most about this book is how apt, how perfectly and precisely detailed, his scenes of childhood are -- they seem not invented but remembered. Maybe they were. If so, I envy Millhauser his memory. This book definitely belongs on my list of classics for adults about childhood. There is passage after passage here that transports you right back into some half-remembered childhood scene of your own.

There is also passage after passage here that highlights what's going on in the lives of my own children, particularly Luke. This scene, for instance, is about Edwin's second-grade infatuation with one of his classmates, a very unsuitable little girl:

He began to have [a] curious sympathy with Rose Dorn... Her fits oppressed him; her restlessness infected him; her habits obsessed him. Unwittingly, as it seemed to me, he began to imitate her. He picked up her habit, for instance, of swinging her arms together in a clap and swinging them apart as far as they would go. He imitated her way of standing against a wall or tree with one foot resting heel-first on the surface behind her. She had a way of pushing her lower lip out and down like a kind of flap, so that she seemed to have no upper lip and a vast underlip; one day when I looked up from my table I saw him sitting with his lip folded down, gazing off in a Dornish trance, quite unaware that he resembled an idiot. When it was her turn during a spelling bee she sometimes frowned, puffed out her cheeks, and placed the tip of her forefinger on her lower lip. The first time I saw Edwin do that I told him he looked like Rose Dorn; he blushed and never repeated it. But he picked up her habit of sitting in her seat with both elbows sticking through the space between the wide wooden slat on top and the narrow slat below. For a while he imitated her unspeakable habit of suddenly banishing a smile or laugh from her face and staring at you without expression; I believe she considered such insolence amusing. She was fond of sticking out her tongue, but thank God Edwin never sank to that. ...

To my horror he began to pick up on her verbal expressions as well. She was fond of saying, "Thank a-you," and Edwin began to say it constantly, angering everyone. "Thank a-you," he would say to Mrs. Mullhouse as she served each item of his lunch. "Thanks, mom. Thank a-you." He assimilated several mispronunciations: "o-weez" (always), "prolly" (probably), "innit" (isn't it), "chocklit" (chocolate), "Mondee" (Monday), "rayroad" (railroad), and "crane" (crayon). Other Dornisms that crept into his speech included: "It's Howdy Doody time" (in answer to the question "What time is it?"), "goody goody gumdrops," "scaredy pants," "fa crine out loud," and "poopy" (a vulgar expression). She was fond of making vulgar sounds in class, and to my great disgust Edwin began to practice them on the way home from school, placing his tongue between his lips and sputtering with positive gusto.

The little girl Luke is taken with isn't unsuitable. She's a sweet kid. She does, however, have a slight speech impediment that must somehow add to her charm. He went back to preschool today after a week off sick and came back talking like her again. He does it on purpose. And he doesn't just imitate her mispronunciations, he imitates the pitch and tone of her voice, too. I try to tease him out of it, looking around with astonishment whenever he does it and asking where his little friend is hiding, but he's too enamoured of her to be embarrassed out of it. He just giggles and carries on.

Die With Your Boots On

A couple of months ago we had to take Sylvie to our local ER. It turned out that she had nothing more worrisome than an ear infection but we spent a few hours there waiting for test results. We shared a room with an elderly man and his wife. They were around 70 or 80 years old and the kind of admirably hardy old people you find around here, people who still manage to live mostly off their land, maintaining extensive vegetable gardens and a few animals in the summer, logging their woods in the winter. While Sylvie slept fitfully in my arms, I couldn't help overhearing the following conversation between them.

Elderly man (in a deep James Earl Jones voice): So can we go home now?

Elderly woman: Go home!?

Elderly man: Yes. We  should go home now.

Elderly woman: You had a heart attack! You're not going home.

Elderly man: I feel all right.

A doctor bustles into the room. He has a sheaf of test results in his hand.

Doctor: Yes, so you definitely had a heart attack. We're waiting for the specialist right now. Hmmm, so from your X-ray it appears  you once broke your collar bone.

Elderly man: Broke my collar bone? No, I never broke my collar bone!

Doctor: How are you feeling now? Any more chest pain?

Elderly man: No, absolutely not. There's no pain.

Doctor: Okay, good. I'll be back as soon as the specialist gets here. And we'll find you a room as soon as we can. (He leaves.)

The elderly man moans a little, in a frighteningly deep voice.

Elderly woman: I hope you were telling him the truth about the pain!

Elderly man: I'm fine. I'm ready to go home now.

Elderly woman: You're NOT GOING HOME! YOU HAD A HEART ATTACK!

Elderly man: I'm sure I'll be fine.

Elderly woman: You don't listen! If you'd only listen, you'd be fine! You should have come in last night when I told you to!

Elderly man moans a little.

Elderly woman: Let me take your boots off.

Elderly man: No! I'm not taking my boots off!

Elderly woman: You might as well get comfortable. You're not going home.

Elderly man: I need my boots.

Elderly woman: YOU'RE NOT GOING HOME!

Elderly man: Don't touch my boots!

Elderly woman: You don't listen. You really should take your boots off.

Elderly man: I need my boots on.

The elderly woman sighs with exasperation. A young nurse bustles into the room. She has overheard none of this conversation.

Nurse (to the elderly woman in a sympathetic tone): You look exhausted! Why don't you go get a cup of tea while I give your husband some medication?

Elderly woman: I'm afraid to leave in case the specialist comes in. My husband doesn't always get things right...

Elderly man groans.

Nurse: It's okay, I'll come and get you as soon as the specialist gets here.

Elderly woman: Well, I am feeling a little faint.  I didn't get much sleep last night. Harold didn't want to come to the hospital. He should have come in when I told him to! He never listens!

The elderly woman leaves. The nurse gives the elderly man a shot and some medication.

Nurse: Now, why don't we make you more comfortable? Let's take off your boots.

Elderly man (in a voice like a lamb's if a lamb could speak): Okay.

I had Maxx Klaxon's version of Die With Your Boots On (that's Maud singing, too) in my head for the rest of the day.

The Order of Odd-Fish Art Show

This is a lot of fun: James Kennedy, author of the terrifically zany young adult novel The Order of Odd-Fish, is having an art show featuring the work of fans of the book. The deadline for submissions is March 15. The art featured above is a cut-paper illustration of an event in chapter 12 of the book by Max Pitchkites, who has done an illustration for every chapter. I love me some cut-paper illustrations. Read more about the show here. And while you're over there, check out James's blog, where he discusses the difference between hard and soft jokes and lots of other interesting things.