TheBanyanTree: Life Stories 142

[Tobie Shapiro]

February 5, 20000000000000000000000000000000000000000000007

Dear Menschen,

	Every day, my mother rises about a couple 
of hours after I do.  She comes in to the room 
where I am working and starts talking.  I'm in 
mid sentence in some editing task, and I have to 
shut her out so I can finish the sentence.  What 
is the first question of the day?  Go on.  Guess. 
How are you?  Did you sleep well?  What are you 
doing?   No.  The first question of the day is, 
"What shall we plan for dinner?"

	I just can't rustle up the enthusiasm for 
talk about dinner when I haven't even had a cup 
of coffee yet.  Yeah, even though it's decaf. 
But the question for me is: why does this bother 
me so much?  I mean, who cares if that's what she 
wants to talk about?  What difference does it 
make when you talk about planning dinner?  It has 
to be talked about.  We have to coordinate our 
efforts, after all.  I feel like an ingrate 
begrudging her her first question of the day.  So 
I stuff it.  It's my fault.  Besides, there are 
more weighty issues to deal with, more emergent 
questions, such as: what are we doing for lunch?




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Marriage can be fun

	Dweller and I were lying in bed one 
morning.  It was before either of us had moved or 
spoken.  No good morning yet.  The day hadn't 
officially started.  As far as each of us was 
concerned, the other one was still asleep.  So, I 
messed with Dweller's head.  I murmured softly, 
but clearly:

	"Engine trouble"

	"What?" he reacted

	"What WHAT?" I responded.

	"You said something."

	"No I didn't."

	"You said, 'Engine trouble'"

	"Why would I say, 'Engine trouble'?"

	"You sure you didn't say anything?"

	"I didn't say anything.  I'm just lying here."

	We both sank back into our private 
worlds.  A couple of minutes later, I opened my 
mouth and muttered:

	"Marine life."

	"MARINE LIFE?!"

	"What marine life?  What're you talking about?"

	These were the little gifts I gave 
Dweller, moments of delightful confusion, an off 
balance pirouette to decorate the day.

	I had conversations with him that were scripted by me.

	"You don't love me."

	"Yes I do.  You know I do."

	"No you don't."

	"Yes, I do!"

	"No you don't.  You know what you'd do if you really loved me?"

	"No.  What would I do?"

	"See.  You don't really love me.  Because 
if you did, you'd know what you'd do."

	Even then, I had no idea what these odd 
occasions did for or to him.  He never actually 
told me.  He never said, "Stop that!", but he 
never said, "Thank you," either.  So I forged 
ahead.

	I'd make him a milk shake and put a dozen 
straws in it, all sticking up out of the top of 
the concoction.  I called him at work, pretending 
to be all sorts of strange people: someone with a 
thick eastern European accent asking for 
directions to Etcheverry Hall, a fund raiser for, 
"SAVE THE GNAT", a Mrs. Twinge from Consolidated 
Demographics taking a survey about what his 
preferences were in states of the union.  "And 
how would you rate Iowa?  The best, very good, 
good, fair, or unfair?  Does red, blue yellow, 
black or white come to your mind when I say, 
'Missouri'?"  He'd usually play along.  He knew 
who it was.  Still, he never said, "Thank you," 
or, "Cut that out."  So I continued.  Until the 
last stages of our marriage when we weren't 
really talking to each other.  Then all the joy 
dropped out of everything I did, and I retreated 
into a shell of silence.



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On strike

	Allowance was something that caused 
fights between my parents.  My mother wanted to 
give us cash every week and have us keep track of 
it.  My father wanted to keep a record of it in a 
book, just add the buck fifty to the ledger and 
if we wanted to peek at our money, he could show 
us the books.  "See?" he said, "Just like a bank 
account."

	The problem with that system was that the 
written money was kept entirely separate from 
actual money, so that when during the week, we 
wanted to buy something one or the other parent 
would just fork over the money and not make any 
subtraction on the books.  The requests for money 
out of pocket had their own life, and we forgot 
about the ledger that was keeping track of our 
theoretical money.  It piled up over a period of 
years until when we asked to see it on the books, 
it took our father an hour and a half to get up 
to date.  We watched him do it, too, suspecting 
that he'd penny and dime us out of our lousy buck 
fifty a week.  Dana had the keener eye for these 
things, and she rode him hard while he made his 
tally.  I stood by, twelve years old and ready to 
fight for my rights if I had to.

	It turned out that we had several hundred 
dollars saved up.  We were elated.  We put our 
heads together to decide what to do with this 
money for which we'd sacrificed so hard.  Our 
answer was Disneyland.  We went to our parents 
and said that this money would get us all into 
Disneyland and buy us first class ticket books 
for rides.  We would even treat our parents to 
their admissions.  But the devil was in the 
details and we didn't know to ask to see the 
small print.  Besides, everything was oral. 
There was no small print.  The only print there 
was was of our formidable savings of three 
hundred fifty or so dollars.

	We drove down to Disneyland in the family 
station wagon.  We stayed at a motel in Sherman 
Oaks, close to Pearl, my mother's best friend. 
We went to Disneyland, bought our admissions, 
bought the top line packages of tickets, the E 
tickets, and had a fine time running our parents 
ragged while we explored every corner of the 
park.  Then we spent the next day with Pearl, her 
husband, Meyer and their kids, Kerry and Stuart. 
We drove back on the third day.

	A while later, Dana and I realized that 
the admission and tickets had cost only fifty 
bucks, tops, and we had a lot of money left over 
to do something with.  We put our heads together 
to figure out how to blow it.  We decided we'd 
better take a look at the ledger to see just how 
much we had left.  We approached the father.

	"There's nothing left," he said, plainly, 
smiling.  "You spent it all at Disneyland."

	"No.  We couldn't possibly have.  It only 
cost $5.35 for an E ticket book, and the 
admission was only a few dollars.  We had three 
hundred fifty dollars!"

	"What have you done with our money?" was what we meant.

	Our father explained that our money had 
paid for the gasoline, the motel, the meals, 
everything, and from his estimates, we'd used it 
all up and then some.

	"But you never said we had to pay for the 
gasoline and the motel and the food!  And 
besides, we spent a whole day there without going 
to Disneyland.  We never said we'd pay for a 
whole vacation.  You cheated!"

	He told us this was a lesson he'd 
intended to teach us.  "Always pay attention to 
the small print.  If you don't you can get 
cheated.  That's what the real world is like." 
Then he went back to what he was doing with a 
satisfied look on his face.

	But Dana and I had a plan.  We asked our 
mother for some money and took it down to the 
stationery store where we bought poster board, 
and the hardware store where we bought two rough 
cut, flat sticks made of softwood.  We wrote in 
big indelible ink on the posters, "ON STRIKE! 
FATHER UNFAIR!"  "ON STRIKE!  FATHER STOLE OUR 
MONEY!"  We tacked the boards to the sticks and 
went gushing down to the street where we took our 
positions in front of the house.  We held up our 
signs and marched back and forth from the 
opposite ends of the lot, toward each other, 
crossing in the middle, away from each other, and 
back again, and back again, and back again, 
shouting slogans, "Unfair to children!"  "Father 
stole our money!"  "Unfair!"  "On strike!"  It 
caused a ruckus.  The neighbors got out of their 
cars and brought in their groceries pretending 
nothing was amiss, but they parted their front 
curtains to take a look.

	Finally, our parents came down to the 
sidewalk and begged us to stop.  They were old 
FDR liberals, Union supporters.  This must have 
stung.  We said we'd only stop if our money was 
returned to us.  We negotiated.  They bargained 
us down to two hundred dollars.  We had asked for 
two hundred fifty.

	"But no one kept receipts.  There's no proof," our father said.

	"You were the ones with the receipts.  We 
would have paid for it ourselves if you'd handed 
us the money.  Why didn't you save the receipts? 
So there's no proof we spent anything," we 
retorted.  "Maybe we should ask for the whole 
three hundred fifty."

	We started marching again.  Cars stopped 
and people stared.  One man put his head out of 
the window and shouted, "Bad Dad!" probably in 
jest, but nevertheless, shaming enough to count 
for something.  They agreed to two hundred fifty. 
Dana and I put our signs down, shook hands 
decisively and went back in for dinner.  Their 
treat.



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-- 




Tobie Helene Shapiro
Berkeley, California   USA

tobie at shpilchas.net