But the nurse was shaking his head. “Looks like you need a skin graft. Tomorrow, you’ll have to see a hand surgeon.”
“Thanks,” I said, but this is what I thought:
Now that calls for an underwire.
Getting Religion
I understand that there’s a religion that allows polygamy, so that a man can have as many wives as he pleases. To be fair, I’m not sure this is exactly the religion, but it’s the religion on the TV show, so it may only be an HBO-sanctioned religion.
But that’s not my point.
My point is, where is the religion that allows a woman to have as many husbands as she pleases?
I could get very religious about a religion like that, but there isn’t one. It’s like The Stepford Wives, where the wives are robots who do everything to please their husbands. What I want to know is, where are the Stepford Husbands?
You know why it’s set up this way. The book that started the religion was written by a man, and the book that started the Stepford Wives was written by a man.
Well, I write books, too. Can I start a religion?
In my religion, wives could have as many husbands as they wanted. So far, I’ve had as many ex-husbands as I wanted, but that’s not the same thing.
You can see how my new religion would open up a world of possibilities. For example, in my life, neither Thing One nor Thing Two was very handy around the house. So my first new husband would have to be handy. I’ll call him Fix-it Hubby. I really like a guy who can fix the doorbell. Or that rubber thing inside the toilet tank that’s supposed to flop up and down. Things have gotten so bad around my house that, last week, a friend of mine sent her husband over to fix that rubber thing.
That was when I turned to religion to solve my problems.
My second new husband would have to be sexy, and if you need me to tell you what he’s for, you’re new around here. I’ll call him Sexy Hubby. Every woman has her own idea about what constitutes sexy, but mine involves chest hair.
My third new husband would do chores, like take out the trash and unload the groceries. Chores are all I’d ever ask of this very lucky man. I hate to do chores, and who doesn’t? I’ll call him Chore Hubby. And my fourth new husband would have to be a great cook. It would be fun to have a husband who cooks, especially if he looks like Chef Tom Colicchio on Top Chef.
I’ll call him Tom Colicchio.
How great is this religion, so far?
I think women would love this religion, and so would men. The advantages for women are obvious, but there are plenty of advantages for men, too. After all, it means that your husbands could avoid the more tiresome of your marital duties. For example, you could be Sexy Hubby and leave fixing the toilet to Toilet Hubby.
Or vice versa, if it’s playoff season. You only have to fix a toilet once and it stays fixed, if you follow.
My new religion is also good for men, because, frankly, I know a lot of women who are a Handful. Actually, I’ve figured out that I’m a Handful. So of course, any woman worth having is a Handful. But in my religion, all the hubbies could band together to keep the Handful happy, and that creates certain efficiencies and economies of scale, which is the kind of thing men love.
Because it leaves more time for the playoffs.
The other great thing about my new religion is that there would never be divorce. If you got sick of Toilet Hubby, you wouldn’t have to divorce him, you could just marry Car Inspection Hubby. It’s really annoying to have to get the car inspected all the time, and you can never find your registration card. In fact, you could marry Registration Hubby, too. And Proof-of-Insurance Hubby.
Why not?
Then you wouldn’t ever have to leave the bedroom.
If you follow.
Finally, the best thing about my religion would be who got worshipped. In the religion where you have tons of wives, they all worship the husband. And if you have lots of robot wives, they worship the husbands, too.
So you see where this is going.
Wanna join?
Have It My Way
I used to think of myself as low-maintenance. I used to believe I was easy to please. But now I know better.
Starbucks taught me the truth.
My order at Starbucks is a vente iced green-tea latte, breve, no melon syrup, light ice. I love my drink. It’s a treat I give myself a few times a week. I give myself all manner of food rewards, because I’m an emotional eater. Can you think of a better reason to eat?
But back to Starbucks. I was standing in line behind a tall sugar-free cinnamon dolce latte with nonfat milk no-whip, who was standing behind a grande iced non-fat no-whip mocha. When it came to my turn, I gave my order and watched my hard-working barista like a disapproving mother, to make sure he didn’t add the melon syrup.
One time, my barista made a mistake and added the melon syrup. I took a sip and then threw the entire drink away. I won’t drink it with the melon syrup. And I couldn’t bring myself to ask the barista to redo it, because I couldn’t admit to him or myself that I’d become a woman who refuses to drink something that isn’t exactly the way she wants it.
But I have.
I always order salads with the dressing on the side and no croutons. I always use Splenda and not Equal. I like Half-and-Half or light cream in my coffee, but not milk. I like strawberry preserves, but don’t come near with me with strawberry jelly.
How did I get like this?
I was standing in Whole Foods the other day, mesmerized by the yogurt. I used to be fine with normal vanilla yogurt, then I switched to strawberry. But here I was, dazzled in the dairy aisle, astounded by white yogurt containers gleaming like pearls on a strand. There was normal yogurt from cows, but there was also goat’s milk yogurt, buffalo milk yogurt, nonfat yogurt, low-fat yogurt, and yogurt in a bottle, so you could drink it. There was yogurt with normal bacteria and yogurt with special bacteria.
Uh-oh. I had no idea how to choose bacteria. Generally, bacteria is the kind of thing I like to avoid.
In short, I could have it the way I wanted, but I wasn’t sure how I wanted it. Then I started to wonder about when all these choices began, and when we started to customize germs.
Maybe it goes back to Burger King’s “Have it Your Way” campaign. Before then, back when we didn’t know better, we ate hamburgers with whatever they put on them. The Burger King campaign was a response to McDonald’s “Have it Our Way” approach, which meant that every burger came with a pickle, ketchup, and chopped onion bits.
In those days, if you didn’t like the pickle, you were forced to take matters into your own hands. You had to handle the situation all by yourself. You had to take the pickle off.
Likewise, if you didn’t like ketchup, you had to cope. You either had to eat your hamburger with the ketchup and try to live another day, or you had to find yourself a plastic knife and scrape that ketchup right off.
We were like MacGyver then, full of ingenuity.
But those days are over. We started having it our way and we never stopped. And somewhere along the line, there sprung up 300 million choices for every product, and I became the pickiest person on the planet.
That’s it. It must be Burger King’s fault. Because it can’t be mine.
But here’s the hard question: Have all these choices made us happier? Am I really, truly, happier for all of those choices?
Absolutely.
I love it. I love having everything exactly the way I want it. I work hard to earn the money to buy myself my food rewards. I’m like a puppy giving myself Milk Bones—which come in cheese, liver, and regular flavor.
And I even love the dairy aisle, dazzling me with choice. When I clap eyes on all those yogurts, my heart swells with pride. I’m lucky to live in a country armed with powerful marketing weapons, all of which are aimed at little old me. They’ve succeeded in convincing me that there really is a difference between these products, and that the difference is critical.
And so I choose.
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In fact, I’m going to start sampling soon, and in a week or so, I’ll have selected my absolute favorite bacteria.
I hope it comes in hazelnut.
Movie Time
Recently, I went to the movies and saw one of the worst movies ever. But I had a great time, for one reason:
Movie candy.
I used to think that I loved the movies, but I realized what I love is movie candy.
What’s so great about movie candy is that I allow myself to have it at all. I’m in carb rehab, so I’d never eat popcorn at home. Nor would I ever eat candy, normally. But at a movie, I’m allowed to get popcorn and candy, both. In fact, I’m entitled. A movie theater is Switzerland of the diet world.
The same goes for portion control. I’m careful about my portions, but not at the movies. All movie candy has one portion size. Two hours.
Movie popcorn isn’t food, it’s gambling. You never know if you’ll win or lose. Most often, you lose, because movie popcorn can taste like blown-in fiberglass insulation or paper, salted. Sometimes you win, and get a bag like I had the other night—a lovely canary gold, freshly popped, tasting of real Jersey corn. That’s one win in forty-odd years of movie popcorn. Yet, gambler that I am, I know that I’ll hit the jackpot again someday. That’s why I keep playing movie popcorn.
In contrast, the appeal of movie candy is its very predictability. If movie popcorn is a date, movie candy is a marriage. It always tastes the same, so much so that you can have a certain go-to movie candy for years. Raisinets has been my favorite movie candy for the past decade. It never disappoints. It always tastes chewy, soft, chocolaty, and vaguely healthy. My relationship to Raisinets has lasted longer than both my marriages, and cost me far less.
Before Raisinets, for me there was only Goobers, again for almost ten years. It wasn’t cheating to switch from Goobers to Raisinets, because both are in the same movie candy food group, namely Chocolate Contaminated by Natural Foods.
The decade before that, I always went with Whoppers, which were from a related food group, Chocolate Contaminated by Unnatural Foods.
I used to love Whoppers, chocolate-covered malted milk balls that come in a faux milk carton, a reminder of their fauxdairy origins. I stopped eating Whoppers only when I kept encountering what daughter Francesca calls the Dead Whopper.
The Dead Whopper looks alive on the outside—smooth, round, shiny, and almost brown. But as soon as you bite down, you know. The Dead Whopper collapses instead of crunching, and flattens to a gummy rock. It doesn’t taste like chocolate, it just tastes brown. And there you are, stuck with a cheekful of Dead Whopper and no napkin. It takes trust to eat candy in pitch darkness, and the Dead Whopper breaks its vows.
So I divorced Whoppers. I aim for quality control in my candy marriages.
Back in my youth, my movie candy came only from the High Maintenance Group, composed of Jujyfruits, Dots, and the immortal Jujubes. This group contains fruit plastic pressed into unrecognizable shapes and tinted the color of unpopular crayons. I used to love candy from this group because I was younger and had more time to deal with their candy drama.
The High Maintenance Group required a do-it-yourself dental scaling, right there in the movie seat, with your fingernail. It was labor intensive, not to mention disgusting. Picking your teeth and eating what you retrieve is acceptable only for eight-year-olds and under.
The High Maintenance Group also required you to hold the candy up to the movie screen to determine its color/flavor. I can’t tell you how many movies I saw through a Lysol-yellow Jujyfruits filter. I liked only the red and black Jujyfruits, so I had to perform the ritual of finding them by the light of the screen, then dumping the orange, green, and yellows back into the box. In no time, only the colors I hated were left, so I had to rank them, then eat them in descending order of hate.
It required a lot of decision-making, for a candy.
No candy was more high maintenance than Jujubes, the founding candy of the group. I think they may be defunct now, because I never see Jujubes at the movies anymore. I admired Jujubes for their moxie, not to mention their enigmatic name. They weren’t people-pleasers, like Raisinets. Jujubes dared you to like them. They made too much noise, as if they wanted out of their narrow box. They could crack a molar. Their colors were profoundly ugly. They tasted like drill bits.
And you know what?
I miss them.
I Miss My Father
You know that Mother Mary is extraordinary. Father Frank is, too, though he has passed away. The fact that he is gone seems simply beside the point. I’m still a daddy’s girl.
Let me tell you why.
Oddly, I’ll start by telling you what Father Frank was not. He couldn’t fix everything; he didn’t have all the answers. He wasn’t one of these all-knowing, omnipotent fathers who solve all problems, handle all situations, and generally stand in for God or, at least, Santa Claus.
He wasn’t a tough guy, either. He couldn’t even bargain for a Christmas tree on Christmas Eve. Once we ended up paying $50 for the Charlie Browniest tree on the lot. The asking price was $35 but he gave the tree guy a tip for lashing it to the car.
Nor was he a sugar-daddy kind of father, granting all the requests of his adored, and only, daughter. In fact, though I was always adored, I found out at midlife that I wasn’t even his only daughter.
I learned I had a half-sister, whom he had fathered while in college at Berkeley. She had been put up for adoption in California and eventually came to find him. He opened his arms to her, even though my meeting her was like a bad episode of The Patty Duke Show, which may be redundant.
So he made mistakes, some with blue eyes. By the way, before you feel sorry for my half-sister, she got a wonderful adoptive family. I got The Flying Scottolines. At least I wrote a novel about it—in fact, several.
My family is a miniseries.
Above all, my father loved life. He liked everybody and he ate anything. I cannot remember him not smiling. When he found out my brother was gay, he went down to South Beach to help him open a gay bar. I’m not sure who got the first dance.
He was agreeable and easy. I remember once he told me he’d seen a certain movie, and I asked him why, because it had been badly reviewed. He said, “That’s where the line was going.”
He was a reliable man, too. An architect, he never missed a day of work for sickness or any other reason. He loved his job, always. Any trip in the car would take us somehow past a construction site, and he’d get out and explain how the building was being constructed. He was always home at 6:15 for dinner and he always fell asleep on the living room floor, afterwards.
Sleeping on the floor is a big thing in my family.
Of course, he was most reliable about me. We talked all the time, about everything. He always asked what I learned in school that day and listened carefully to my answer. He helped me with my trig homework; he taught me to read a map. He drove me and my friends everywhere, both ways—no trading off with other parents for him.
He clapped at every high school play, whether I had a big or little part. When I was older, he beamed through every book signing. At one of my signings, someone said to him, “You must be very proud that your daughter is an author.”
He replied, “I was proud of her the day she came out of the egg.”
And he was.
I felt his love and pride all the time, no matter how I screwed up. When my first marriage foundered, about the time daughter Francesca was born, I quit my job and went completely broke. He didn’t have much money, but what he had, he offered to me. When I found a job part-time, he babysat for Francesca every morning, made her breakfast, and took her to school. From him, she learned that it was possible to toast a bagel with the cream cheese already on top.
She will never forget that.
Nor will I.
Sometimes I feel sorry for fathers. And I wonder if they feel sorry for themselves. It’s as if they’re the supporting actor of parents, or sec
ond-best. It’s like we have a Father’s Day only because we don’t want them to feel left out after Mother’s Day. In a Dick-and-Jane world, it’s moms who get top billing, and fathers who are simply, at best, there.
But may I suggest something?
There’s a lot to be said for simply being there.
My father was always there. And whenever he was with me, I knew it was exactly where he wanted to be. There.
And I feel absolutely certain that, even in this day of cell phones and BlackBerrys, he wouldn’t be checking either of them when he was there. In all my adult life, I have never met anyone who was so completely there.
There is underrated. There is a sleeper. There doesn’t get much hype, but there is about love and devotion. About constancy and sacrifice.
Here is my wish for you:
On Father’s Day, may you be lucky enough to have your father there.
Baby Bird
I am a woman who likes routines, but now that daughter Francesca is home from college for the summer, the times they are a-changing.
By way of background, she is my only child and I’m a single parent, so it’s just the two of us. Even so, I had gotten used to the empty-nest thing. I liked everything being in order, or at least in my favorite form of disarray. I had my own hours and habits. I walked in the morning with the dogs. Worked all day. Cooked something simple and light during the evening news. Worked at night or read, guilt-free. Showered as necessary.
But my baby bird is back, and she’s wrenched my life out of shape. For example, I had to move all of my winter clothes, boxes, and books out of her room, as she insisted on having a bed.