Domestic Affairs Page 9

  I wanted three children, and maybe more. Of course I can’t imagine doing without any one of them. It’s just that right now, life around here is so grueling I have to make advance arrangements just to step into the bathroom.

  I lie awake, projecting into our future. In two years, Willy will be the age that Charlie is now—almost three (an age that seems thrillingly mature and independent by comparison). Someday, I murmur to Steve, we will have a three-year-old, a five-year-old, and a nine-year-old. Someday they will be five, seven, and eleven. Six, eight, and twelve … I spin the different combinations in my head like a gambler, dreaming of the perfect hand.

  I call up a friend who has a child a few months older than Willy (I dial twice, because the first time my son pulls my glasses off. As we talk, he sings into the receiver, which is wet where he licked it. He grabs for my coffee. Points at the record player, demanding music. Gets himself tangled up in my extra-long telephone cord). “How long does this stage last?” I ask her. “When does it get easier?”

  “Search me,” she says. “I’m still waiting.”

  Our older two children are taking the new Willy surprisingly well, considering. They’re devoted to him, even though (in the last two days) he has destroyed three pop-up books, the right paw of a Gremlin puzzle, and one of Mr. T’s ears. Where once my children used to beg me to play cards or blocks, now all they can hope for, often, is that I’ll get their brother out of their hair. “Mo-om!” they call out, at least thirty times a day. “Come get Will.”

  But he doesn’t want me, of course. He’s a wriggler, not a cuddler, and what he really wants are the other kids. He’s a third child: the one I had no time to nurse after the fourth month. The one who got his milk unheated, straight from the refrigerator.

  Willy’s the one we were always calling by his brother’s name (it had been so recently that we’d had that other blonde-haired baby boy under our roof). He’s the one we never got around to sending out announcements about, never took pictures of. He grew, like one of those weeds that somehow manage to push up through the cracks in a sidewalk, without a whole lot of close tending. Of course he walked at ten months: He could see this was no house to be a baby in. Not this year, anyway. Better to get moving, to grow up fast. So he did, and he has.

  Our third child is a wonderful, cheerful baby, who smiles when his brother bops him on the head with a stuffed animal. Once when he was a few months old I heard a loud noise upstairs, where he was napping, followed by a small peep. I couldn’t go check it out right away because Charlie had just got stuck in the sofa, while Audrey was trying to fold up the hideaway bed with him inside, and somebody had turned on the hot-air popcorn popper without putting a bowl underneath to catch the popcorn. When I finally managed to investigate upstairs, I discovered the bottom had fallen out of Willy’s crib (which is, like everything else he uses, pretty beat up, from the two previous occupants). He was lying on the floor with his mattress on his head, cooing. This is a baby who does not expect life to be a bed of roses.

  I tell these stories to friends, smiling ruefully, but they’re sad stories too. I love babies, love sitting in a chair, just rocking them, smelling the tops of their heads, studying their toes, and I haven’t gotten to do those things much this time around. Not that Willy’s suffering: he has a brother who (in spite of the occasional bop) almost never races through a room without stopping to pat his head, and a sister who likes to hold him by the armpits and waltz him around the room to our Cyndi Lauper record.

  Mostly I’m sad for Steve and me, that we’re seldom able to relish this time and take it slow, that all we can do right now is grit our teeth and count the months until it’s over and we don’t have a baby around here anymore. And then—oh, will we ever miss it.

  The hardest thing for me about having three children is finding a way to be with them one at a time. Used to be, with two, Steve could take one and I’d take the other. Now even when both of us are on duty, we come up short. The books I read to Willy don’t interest Audrey (“If I hear ‘Scat, scat, go away, little cat’ one more time, I think I’ll lose my mind,” she says). Charlie wants to do puzzles. Willy wants to eat them. Audrey draws with markers. Willy scribbles on her picture. Willy wants to go out. Charlie wants to stay in. Charlie and Willy want to watch Sesame Street. Audrey is trying to play the piano. Audrey and Charlie want to see a movie. Willy insists on staying in the lobby, swinging karate chops at a life-sized cardboard image of Rambo. That’s how it goes around here these days.

  Being with one of our children—any one, alone—is a dream for me now. I’ll sometimes corral one of them to come along with me on a trip to the dump, just for the few minutes we’ll have in the car together. Every now and then the naps work out right, and I can fit in a game of Cootie with Charlie while Willy’s asleep, or Charlie and Willy will go to bed early and Audrey and I can race off to her room and read a couple of chapters of a book with no illustrations that she loves and Charlie hates. I have caught myself, during those times, with an edge of tension in my voice that comes from knowing how rare this time is, and how much I want to do in it. “Let’s not waste time setting up the Cootie legs in the holder,” I say to Charlie. “Willy’s going to wake soon.” “Hush!” I snap at Audrey. “You’ll wake your brothers.”

  Then I try to remember what the point of all this is—namely, just being together and giving whichever child I’m with the gift of my undivided attention. And then I think about the night I spent last winter with my son Charlie, snowed in at the Ramada Inn.

  I was supposed to fly to New York City and interview a famous child-development expert who had a new book out. It was going to be a brief trip, but even so, my trips are always hard on my husband and children. So I invited Charlie, the one who had seemed in greatest danger of getting lost in the shuffle, to come along. I extracted the promise from him that he’d be good during my interview, which would take no more than a couple of hours, and packed a satchel full of all his favorite books, plus crayons, paper, and fruit roll-ups, to keep him occupied while I worked. After that, we would see the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History, have dinner with friends, sleep over, and fly home the next morning.

  That was the plan. The day of our trip dawned cold and cloudy, with light snow flurries, but still we set out around lunchtime for the small, mostly commuter airport thirty miles from where we live to catch our flight to the big city. By the time we reached the airport, though, the snow had turned to ice and the runway was coated. No planes flying out all day, and no way I could make the thirty-mile drive back home. So I crawled at ten miles an hour, stopping three times to de-ice the windshield, to a Ramada Inn a few miles down the highway from the airport and checked in with my son. “Is this New York City?” he asked, looking dubious. (Maybe he’d slept through the plane ride? Maybe the interview was over, before he’d even got to eat his fruit roll-up?) No, I explained. This is Keene, New Hampshire. There’s the supermarket where we sometimes shop, and there’s the car wash Dad takes you to. We’re sleeping here tonight.

  Of course the first thing I did was make a call to the city, postponing the interview until the following week. Then I called Steve, back at the house, and told him not to worry. I was so cold from being out in the storm that I unpacked my flannel nightgown and Charlie’s sleeper suit and, even though it wasn’t yet four o’clock in the afternoon, put them on. Then we made a pile of books next to our bed, climbed under the covers, and read every one.

  We played tic-tac-toe. We did dot-to-dots. We colored. We took a bath. We sang “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” The motel had an indoor pool, and I, miraculously, had packed a body suit that could pass for a bathing suit, so I went for a swim while Charlie jogged around the pool, calling and waving to me and hiding behind the artificial potted palms. Back in the room, I got into my warm clothes again and ordered a chicken dinner from room service. We set up our food cart in front of the big color TV and watched a couple of shows before drifting off to sleep as the snow pi
led higher and higher outside our window. Out on the highway, hardly a car passed by. It felt as if the world had stopped.

  The next morning I woke early to Charlie bouncing on the king-sized bed. Pulling back the curtains. I could see our car out in the parking lot, completely buried in snow and ice. But the sun was shining. Plows were moving. We’d be out in an hour or two.

  We turned on the Today show and saw the child-development expert I was supposed to interview the day before, talking about the problems of working parents. We got dressed and headed for the motel restaurant, where we ate French toast and picked up our paper placemats as souvenirs of our trip. We packed our bags, stuffing in a couple of those individually wrapped soaps for Audrey and a postcard of Keene. We paid our bill and headed out to shovel the snow off the car. We were home in time for lunch.

  UPWARD MOBILITY

  My Children and Money

  The Going-Out-of-Business Sale

  The Ice Show Comes to Town

  Chance or a Lifetime

  Buying the Tent

  IN MY YEARS OF parenthood I’ve given a good deal of thought to the issue of children and money. I’m not speaking, here, of those depressing figures one encounters, periodically, that tell what it costs to raise a child these days—figures that (if I’m to take them seriously) leave Steve and me, with our three kids, about a million dollars short. And that’s not even counting where we’ll stand if even one of them turns out to have an overbite.

  What I’m speaking of is how a parent goes about teaching her children (as our Depression-educated parents used to put it) the value of a dollar. About money in general—what it is and where it comes from, where it goes, and most of all, the appropriate attitude with which to regard it. That you shouldn’t love it, can’t hate it. Have to respect it, mustn’t worship it. Not to squander or hoard it. And really, this money-explaining business makes communicating the facts about sex or religion or the electoral college system seem pretty elementary.

  A child’s earliest relationship with money is oral. Around the age of twelve months (but of course mine were precocious) they start putting coins in their mouths. Now Willy likes to put pennies in his big sister’s bank, counting as he goes (one, four, seven, two, nine …). He has been known to tap me on the head at three in the morning with the sweetly voiced request, “Penny please, Mom.” And in his rowdier moments, to tear through the house yelling at top volume, “Five dollars. Five dollars. Five dollars.” It doesn’t take long, clearly, for a child to grasp the idea that these are powerful words.

  But where Charlie and Willy remain happy with any coin, Audrey has learned about the deceptive value (given their relative size) of a dime over a nickel. Her greatest reverence she reserves for paper currency. And when, once, she observed me bent over a stack of bills, in tears, she hustled off to her room and came back a few minutes later to shower me with a pile of hand-colored tens, twenties, and fifties, all bearing presidential-looking profiles. If money can’t buy happiness, she’s learned, it can at least cheer a person up.

  I won’t attempt, here, to fully dissect the bizarre anatomy of this particular family’s finances. Steve and I—who haven’t had a single employer or a weekly paycheck in our seven years of marriage—collect our dollars pretty haphazardly. Every now and then they rain down on us, and (never sure how long they’ll have to last us) we may buy three lobsters or a car, or fly off to the Bahamas. And then there comes a drought, and the next thing you know I’m setting up a tableful of our possessions at the town flea market. Whatever the current state of our affairs, however, they are not typical or stable. Watching a local news segment, we can only laugh nervously as the money expert offers advice on a family’s life and health coverage (and pronounces them, with only a hundred thousand dollars’ worth, underinsured). We work very hard at providing our children with a happy and stable home, at being parents they can rely on. But as for owning a piece of the rock—well, the best we can offer is shifting sands.

  Of course our own hard times have no real similarity to the poverty of, for instance, a babysitter we had once, who—at age twenty-two—got all her teeth pulled because she couldn’t afford fillings. For us there has always been an end in sight, the promise of a check in the mail, no fear of being cold or hungry. We don’t let our children entertain the notion that doing without new shoes or this months Sesame Street Magazine has anything to do with hardship. Still, it certainly hasn’t hurt them to get the sense, during our leaner times, that my wallet isn’t bottomless, that the bank is not some magical place whose windows one can drive up to anytime (in a car whose gas tank is perpetually full), with a cash drawer forever open and a fat envelope of bills always inside.

  Partly because of the intermittent instability of our situation (and also, I think, because this is a universal fascination), Audrey is close to being obsessed with the theme of rich people and poor ones. When Audrey plays with her Barbies, the rich girl, in the evening gown and fur stole, is usually mean and speaks in a vain, cruel voice, while the poor one is sweet and humble. To Audrey, rich means having a house with several bathrooms. And having grasped the meaning of wealth, she’s wasting no time in passing on the news to Charlie. A recent lesson at the school she periodically runs, which he has little choice but to attend, was titled “How to Draw a Rich Girl.” (With lots of frills on her skirt, and smiling broadly, that’s how.)

  Like parents everywhere, we hold forth regularly (when Audrey’s making faces over her asparagus and requesting that the crusts be cut off her toast, when she pours the leftover milk from her cereal down the drain) on the hungry children who would give anything for that milk and those crusts. Audrey’s comprehension seems to come and go: I have found her feeding steak to our dog Ron, but also, as she stands at the edge of the giant sand pit that serves as our town dump, throwing away school worksheets and musing on how lucky it is that she did them in pencil, because some poor little girl who can’t afford to go to school could pick them out and erase the answers and do the work all over again.

  What else are my children learning about money? The concept of inflation seemed to come naturally: At a recent art show held in her bedroom, Audrey’s pictures started out with price tags of one and two cents, but when (with her father, brothers, and me as customers) they started going like hotcakes, she began crossing out prices, upping them to ten cents, even thirty, as fast as we could hand over our coins.

  Audrey is, at least, getting the idea that spending involves making choices and sacrifices, that if I buy her a new blouse, she won’t be getting a turtleneck. We’ve tried to teach her about doing jobs to earn money and about saving it, too. (Like me, Audrey has frequently sold one possession to get the money for a different one, and like me, she maintains a strong appreciation for thrift shops and Salvation Army stores. Her most beloved outfit is a very fancy white organdy communion dress, only a couple of sizes too large, that we found at a yard sale—although she wears it seldom, for fear of appearing rich.)

  I try, all the time, but pretty lamely, to make sense of the world for our children: Explaining the nightly news to Audrey as best I can during the commercials. Reducing to a six-year-old’s terms the idea of money for defense versus a nuclear freeze. Playing a car game: Which costs more, a house or a hundred Barbies? a visit to the dentist or a trip to McDonald’s? But I know that, as much information as my husband and I give our kids, the world of finance and economy makes little sense—must seem more than a little surreal, even. We have a two-year-old son who, at the mention of Jesse Jackson, starts dancing wildly around the room and singing “Beat It” or “Thriller.” We have a daughter who believed, after my wallet was stolen in New York last fall, that now we’d be poor. And here am I, trying to untangle things for them, while our checking account stands mysteriously overdrawn again, with our projected monthly budget looking good until the realization hits that we’ve forgotten to allocate money for food.

  One of the biggest discount stores in our area was going out of business—e
very item marked down 50 percent. Now I bet I’ve made about five hundred trips to this particular store over the last ten years—handed over a couple of thousand dollars, for probably a ton of bobby pins, curtain rods, beach balls, and jumper cables. So it seemed necessary to pay (literally) my last respects.

  The place had been pretty well stripped by the time I got there, with half of what was left broken or dirty, and heaped on the floor. The snack bar, where I had hoped to purchase Charlie’s tranquility with a bag of popcorn, was closed down, looking like Pompeii at the moment the volcano erupted, with grape soda still percolating in a cooler and coffee cups on the counter. No time for coffee anyway. Shoppers were racing ahead of us, cleaning out all the most popular bra sizes, stripping the shelves of shampoo and vacuum-cleaner bags and batteries. The speakers that used to pipe gentle organ music in my ears were transmitting urgent messages, meanwhile—like an emergency broadcast system during a wartime air raid, notifying shoppers of additional markdowns (“hurry, hurry!”) and reminding us that soon the doors would close forever. I picked up my pace and flung a pair of crew socks into my cart for my husband, hitting Charlie on the head by mistake. We were off and running.

  There is a danger, at an event like this one, of confusing the end of this particular store with the end of civilization in general. You begin to feel as if this were your last chance ever to buy anything. So you get four lipsticks, and enough photograph albums to see your infant son through high school graduation. I bought sneakers for my three children’s next three sizes, and, for Steve, five packages of underwear and (an impulse from somewhere out in left field) a set of car seat covers.