CHAPTER SEVEN

They’ve Left!

 

Early in September, Milton and I took off for a seventeen-day vacation, leaving the Alexander Five still in residence. Though their renovation would not yet be done by the time of our return, it would, they assured us, be done enough. This meant that they would be moving out just before we arrived. And this meant—was this good news or bad news?—that we would be coming home to an empty house.

It was good news and bad news.

The good news, of course, was the termination of our three-story nursery school and the repossession of our grown-up life: The restoring of breakables to their former locations. The filling up of vases with water and flowers. The removal from every surface of left-behind diapers. The banishing of chaos from every shelf. And the revival of dignified dining, with background music, place mats, and adult conversation.

These mornings Milton and I can be found in the kitchen sipping our coffee and reading the papers, with only the headlines disturbing our digestion. These evenings Milton and I can be found in the kitchen sipping Shiraz and quietly chatting, with only one two three four telephone solicitations disturbing our peace. (I’m holding a little contest for the best response to these pesty solicitations, with outright rudeness prohibited and extra credit given for brevity. The current front-runner: “Thanks for calling. Bye-bye.”) Here in our kitchen no one is whining or screaming or chewing on something, then spitting it out. No one is yelling, “Yuck!” or “Gross!” or “Ewwww!” Nor is anyone singing a newly learned Indian Rain Dance song—“Yo yo yo yo yo. Ya ya. Yeh yeh”—repeatedly and at the top of her lungs.

The good news is that our life is back to civilized.

The bad news is that sometimes it feels too damn civilized.

The bad news is that sometimes—no, often—we miss the mess and the noisiness of living together, entangled, side by side and cheek by jowl and tush by tush, with our boisterous, beloved Alexander Five.

Now that they’ve gone is everything here the way it used to be? Well, not exactly. Our house, which always looked lived in, is looking significantly more lived in, and while even the velvet has managed to survive, certain stains suggest that my wine-velvet chair has had some illicit encounters with chocolate. Our marriage has also survived, has indeed been enriched by our shared delight in our resident family, despite the fact that their presence has interfered with the marital option of running naked from room to room flinging champagne and caviar at each other before falling into a passionate heap on the floor. As for my personal growth, I ought to be modest and leave this to others to describe. On the other hand, I’m going to do it myself on the grounds that I don’t want to take any chances.

I think I’m a better person for having had this familial experience but I wouldn’t say that I’m a different person. I’m better because, while they lived here with us, I laughed more and grumbled less. I tried not to offer too much uninvited advice. I never once suggested that the food that Isaac and O were dribbling everywhere could doubtless explain our recent influx of mice. And when I called attention to what, in my view, were endangered-grandchildren situations, I did my very best to speak in tones of calm concern, not panicked shrieks.

I’m better for knowing I could, if I had to, display more self-restraint than I ever dreamed I was capable of displaying, even though—when Isaac ran into the street outside his house after moving back home—I definitely reverted to panicked shrieks.

I’m also better for knowing that, in matters of timing and schedules, I could hang—if I had no choice—a whole lot looser, accepting the fact, for instance, that I couldn’t keep writing the article I was writing because Isaac or O needed extra attention right now, accepting the fact that I’d never know before we actually sat down at the table how many people I would be feeding that night, accepting the fact that, even though I desperately wanted and needed to leave this minute, I couldn’t until I had found one of Toby’s pacifiers, accepting the fact that as long as these kids were embedded in my life, my life would be a lot more unpredictable.

Yes, while they were here I learned that I could live, if I had to live, with the unpredictable. But now that they’ve left I’m back to my old routines. For the fact is that I’m happier—and I always will be happier—when I’m able, unimpeded, to plan ahead. This means not only making lists of what I am going to do on a daily and weekly and monthly and—yes!—yearly basis but also always allowing myself substantial amounts of time in which to do it. I set the table for dinner parties three full days in advance. I show up at dinner parties well before my hostesses have finished dressing. I get to movies early enough to have my pick of any seat in the theater. And I also arrive at airports so far in advance of what the current guidelines require that I could forget my picture ID, go back to my house to retrieve it, and still be in the security line two hours before my plane is due to depart. This is the woman I used to be, and the woman I am today, though I actually did—for one brief shining moment—manage to tolerate the unpredictable.

I also managed to tolerate, because there was no alternative, levels of disorder that I thought I couldn’t possibly abide. I mean, while I may not be the cleanest person in the world, the serenity of my soul requires neatness, and if I was someone given to displaying framed needlepoint epigrams on the wall, mine would unabashedly read, “A place for everything and everything in its place.” But while my grandchildren lived in this house—even with their parents, ever vigilant, ever diligent, picking up after them—disorder was the order of the day, and the answer to what’s a three-letter word describing the state of our household would be “sty.”

To fully grasp what a great psychic leap it was for a person like me to live, day after day, in a messy house, you will have to be told about my second-floor linen closet, a confession I regard as both embarrassing and revelatory, a confession I’m hoping won’t be held against me.

For I am a woman whose five big shelves in my linen closet display, along with the linens, assorted pharmaceutical supplies—Band-Aids and cough drops and toilet paper, Pepto-Bismol and nail polish and shampoo, disposable razors and Tylenol and tooth-paste—all of which have been organized, have been lovingly, carefully organized, into groups. Each of these groups has then been lined up in front of a handsome blue-bordered stick-on label on which, in my best printing, I have inscribed: “cuts and bruises,” “colds and vitamins,” “shaving,” “hair,” and “teeth,” and—in a burst of inspired alliteration—“bowels,” “belly,” and “beauty.” Not everyone—I’m not naming names—during the stay of the Alexander Five had been as committed as I to keeping all items in their clearly labeled locations. But during that time I never once complained, though I did, when no one was looking, move some misplaced tubes of Crest from “belly” to “teeth,” and some razors from “colds and vitamins” to “shaving.” I mostly, however, managed to ignore the frequent assaults on my linen closet. My ability to silently endure the rape of my shelves was not an inconsiderable achievement.

“Why does it always have to be neat?” Olivia once inquired during her stay with us, as she played with the jewelry in my jewelry box, mixing up the pearl with the silver earrings, mixing up the necklaces with the bracelets, mixing up the rings and the pins with the earrings and the necklaces and the bracelets, until the separate sections—with a place for everything, everything in its place—were indistinguishable.

“Because I like it like that,” I said, removing a glittery choker from her grasp and returning it to where the chokers belonged, prepared to insist on my absolute right to retain a few remaining enclaves of orderliness. But then she reached out and stroked it, saying, “It’s so beauty-full, JuJu. Can’t I just hold it?” tilting her head in her irresistible way and making me feel like one of those terrible people who cares about objects more than human beings.

“Okay, you can hold it,” I said, and soon her fingers roamed through my jewelry box once again, lifting up this and that and murmuring, “Beauty-full.” I told myself there’d be plenty of time, after they all moved out, to care about objects more than human beings.

Though I learned to put up with messiness, which is, after all, a temporary condition, I didn’t have to deal with much permanent damage because, outside of a stain here and there and an unremovable mark on an antique desk, our house came through the onslaught of the Alexander Five with most of its walls, floors, and furnishings intact. I can’t say how I’d have handled chips on my beautiful flowered dishes or water marks on my handsome dining-room table, but I like to think I’d have risen to the challenge. Indeed, I am proud to report that during the time that our extended family was living here I never once was tempted (well, I never was significantly tempted) to turn into one of those people whom I recently read about in The New York Times.

These are the kind of people who—whenever they entertain—impose strict party rules to protect their stuff, brazenly choosing undamaged over hospitable. Many of them, with their pale-colored rugs and expensive, fragile fabrics, do not allow red wine to be served in their homes, and one of them prohibits any food that’s red or brown, including not only red wine but beets and chocolate. Others, protective of their recently refinished floors, stop guests at the door and ask them to take off their shoes, sometimes reshodding their feet in white paper booties or embroidered Chinese slippers. And perhaps the most drastic example of what the Times nicely characterized as Extreme Hosting is the couple who, afraid of winding up with water marks on their wood furniture, a fear that I can definitely relate to, cover every wood surface in their place—before a party—with plastic wrap!

The Times describes a host who replied to a guest’s request for red wine by asking for a blank check to cover all damages, noting that “this maneuver is not for beginners.” It is somehow comforting to know that, no matter how dire the threats to my floors or my velvets, I never attempted to master this maneuver.

When I say I’m a better person, even though I’m basically not a different person, I mean I now know I can override my nature and my needs in the higher interests of familial harmony. I mean I now know that I actually can, in the interests of getting along with my children and theirs, live for a while—indeed, for quite a long while—with unpredictability and messiness, and do so without a psychotic break or even much subterranean resentment. The fact that since they’ve left I have reverted to all of my pre-Alexander Five habits suggests that I am still the person I was. But this doesn’t detract from the fact that lurking deep deep down inside me is the capacity to be—should it happen to be demanded of me—flexible.

Another aspect of this newly uncovered flexibility is my ability—was my ability while they were living here—to live with a considerable lack of privacy. For though Marla and Alexander were always careful not to invade my personal space, little O showed no such inhibitions. Weekends and evenings, vacation days and sick days, whenever I was at home and she was around, there was no place I went that she didn’t feel free to follow, singing songs and asking questions and offering various tidbits of information and talking talking talking talking talking.

“Are Louie Armstrong and Lance Armstrong brothers?”

“Isaac and ice cream and iPod all start with ‘I.’”

“Dragons are make-believe, but giants aren’t.”

“I don’t want Charlotte [of Charlotte’s Web] to die, I’m allergic to plums, and Ethan’s my boyfriend but I’m not going to marry him.”

She also, out of the blue, unleashed a stream of naughty words, explaining to me when I expressed some surprise, “My mommy got mad and said those words, but then she said she was giving herself a Time Out.”

When I was at my computer, having told O that I needed to finish some serious work, she would stand by my desk asking, “When will you stop being serious?” When I was in the bathroom—there are four of them in our house—she would sit down on the floor inquiring, “When is it my turn—I want to use your potty.” Whenever I answered the telephone, she would hover at my side, wondering who I was talking to and what I was talking about and how long it was going to be before I hung up. And when I was in my bedroom, stretched out on my bed and reading, or trying to read, a novel, she would stretch herself out beside me and ask, as she had asked a hundred times before, “How old are you, JuJu? Tell me—I won’t tell anyone.”

I announce my age every decade or so in the titles of my books, the last title being I’m Too Young to Be Seventy, and I feel no obligation to go public with further details, though I certainly don’t conceal my age from my friends. I conceal it from O, however, because she’d probably save up her money and announce it in a full-page ad in the Post, responding instead to her wheedling, demanding, relentless pursuit of the truth in three different ways: I’m not telling you. I’m a hundred and nine years old. And—this answer, I’m pleased to say, drives her crazy—I’m five feet, five and three quarter inches tall.

“JuJu,” she’ll growl, “I’m asking how old you are, not how tall you are.”

To which I reply, driving her even crazier, “I’m five feet, five and three quarter inches tall.”

Showering, bathing, exercising, sleeping, tweezing my eyebrows, shaving my legs, putting on makeup, polishing my nails, I rarely—if Olivia was anywhere on the premises—was alone. And although I perhaps need more time for myself than many people do, although I could be quite happy spending a day, maybe even two, without human company or a phone conversation, and although hanging out with O required every ounce of my energy and attention, I wouldn’t, looking back, relinquish one moment of it.

Because she’s so interesting. Because she’s so much fun. Because she’s both bossy and sensitive, silly and smart. And because the way she looks at the world—so thoroughly, so thoughtfully, so questioningly, so full of amazement and joy—keeps prompting me to open my eyes and notice (as Lance’s brother Louie would have it) that it is—it is indeed—a wonderful world.

I know that I also took pleasure in my own three children when they were growing up. They delighted me and they certainly opened my eyes. But I often felt squeezed in a vise by all the constant, concurrent demands of motherhood and marriage and a career. On any given day, as I sped from car-pool duties to marketing, wrote for three or four hours before I picked up the boys to buy jeans or get them their shots, I would have throttled anyone who suggested that I stop and smell the roses. And while I still believe that being a mother is a lot harder for women today, I wouldn’t want anyone thinking that being a mother back in my day was all that easy.

But if motherhood is difficult, being a grandmother is a whole other deal, filling our hearts with uncomplicated happiness and our wallets with shameless numbers of photographs. In our relationship with our grandchildren there are fewer obligations and more enjoyment, fewer expectations and more acceptance, fewer lessons and a lot more laughter, fewer vegetables and more dessert. It’s delicious being a grandparent. I am loving being a grandparent. And with Milton beside me, wholeheartedly loving it, too, our grandparent identities, our Papa and JuJu identities, are shaping the way we are currently living our lives.

We’re becoming less ambitious—we’re not reaching so high or pushing so damn hard. We’re still in the game, but we don’t have to run every race. And if we’re now moving at a slower pace, we are (usually) sturdy enough to keep up with our grandchildren. We still—let me pause to knock on wood—have the energy. And we now have the time.

We have time to fly to Denver to hang out with Bryce and Miranda. We have time to fly to New York to go to the playground with Nathaniel and Benjamin. We have time to watch Elmo with Isaac and to tickle Toby’s toes and to color in the coloring book with Olivia. We have time to slow down, and stop, and smell the roses.

Being a grandparent, once described as “parenthood one step removed,” turns out to be, to be more precise about it, parenthood one blissful step removed.

Even when our youngest son, his wife, their baby, their toddler, and their five-year-old were living here with us for ninety days.

Especially when our youngest son, his wife, their baby, their toddler, and their five-year-old were living here with us for ninety wonderful, marvelous, unforgettable days.