ABOUT THREE WEEKS AFTER my daughter, Julia, was born, I was standing in line at Russ & Daughters, a lovely little shoebox of a shop that’s been serving the most exquisite Jewish delicacies ever since Mr. Russ loaded up his pushcart and headed for the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1908. I was ordering smoked butterfish and nova, sliced thinner than angel wings, as the guys behind the counter plied me with samples of apricot strudel and raspberry rugelach. It was spring, my baby was healthy, Russ & Daughters had just put out their marble nut halvah, and all was right with the world.
I was experiencing what the late, great Spalding Gray used to call “a perfect moment.” Please note, Mr. Gray didn’t talk about perfect days, he didn’t even refer to a perfect half-hour stretch. Nope, he only suggested that there are moments when life is inexorably sweet, but those moments are few and far between—and generally over before you can capture them on the teeny camera in your ridiculously tricked-out cell phone.
The little old lady to my left decided to strike up a conversation. “So, how long have you been coming here, dear?” She smelled like Pond’s cold cream and cinnamon, and I liked her immediately. “Well, ma’am, my aunt Bernice first brought me here when I was just a kid,” I answered between bites. She smiled warmly and told me she grew up right around the corner, on Orchard Street, and had shopped here since the 1920s. “I raised five children on this food,” she said, pointing to the baked blueberry farmer’s cheese. We were soul mates in sable, partners in pickled herring; we spoke the language of lox. And that’s when it happened.
My new buddy suddenly reached out her bony little liver-spotted hand, patted my baby-free middle, and asked the one question nobody should ever ask: “When are you due?”
I toyed with the possibility that she had some sort of death wish. Perhaps the question was actually a thinly veiled plea. I mean, isn’t it plausible that what she was really saying was “I want to go out on a high note, so I’ll just have a taste of chopped liver, and then do something so heinous that it drives this perfectly reasonable woman to club me to death with a side of salmon”?
You see, there are certain questions that must never be asked:
And, above all:
I don’t care if the woman you’re asking is wearing a T-shirt with a giant rhinestone-encrusted arrow that points to her belly and reads BABY ON BOARD. I don’t care if she’s writhing on a gurney in the birthing room of Mount Sinai Hospital, screaming for an epidural as an obstetrician announces, “One more push and the baby will be out!” You never, let me repeat, never, ever, under any circumstances, ask a woman when she’s due.
“June,” I replied.
Some people collect coins, some prowl the Internet for vintage guitars; I know a woman with a closet full of antique Kewpie-doll heads. I’m not totally clear what turned her against everything from the neck down—she may have been frightened by a Barbie breast as a child. But I’m nobody to judge, because I, too, am a collector. What I collect are slights, digs, withering remarks, and the occasional mean-girl glare. I examine a good when-are-you-due story from every angle, I trade them with friends, I commit them to memory, I savor them for eternity.
Here are a few of my favorite insults:
Forget about kids; grown-ups say the darnedest things. Sometimes they mean well, sometimes they mean to lacerate, sometimes they’re just clueless. The challenge (at least for me) is not to take any of it personally…even when it’s meant to be taken personally. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me, unless of course I decide to let them.
I’ve decided to stop letting them. I don’t want to lock and load when a nasty comment comes my way, but I also refuse to duck and cover. Instead, I am going to answer clumsiness with equanimity, bitchiness with compassion, and verbal violence with disengagement.
I think it’s a damn good plan—wise, tolerant, even kind of Zen. If I play my cards right, I could be crowned Miss Mental Health 2011. There’s just one teeny, tiny problem: I honestly believe Metallica’s next-door neighbor stands a better chance of getting a good night’s sleep without ear plugs and an Ambien than I stand of actually getting this plan to work. But that certainly doesn’t mean it’s not at least worth a try.
So I will seek, to paraphrase Saint Francis of Assisi, not to be understood but to understand. I will send my collection of slights to Sotheby’s and have them auction it off to the highest bidder, one dig at a time. “But Lisa,” you ask, “can you really function in a kvetch-free zone?” Trust me on this: there will always be things to kvetch about.
“I love you,” says the voice on the phone. We were just about to hang up. “Love you, too,” I chirp back without missing a beat. Now, had this declaration come from a sweetheart, a parent, my little girl, I’d be suffused with the milk of human kindness for a couple of seconds before returning to the stack of work on my desk. But this “I love you” came from a publicist in Los Angeles who wanted me to check out her client’s new sitcom.
I’d be hard-pressed to tell you the capital of North Dakota, the chief export of Ottawa, the square root of anything. I can’t explain football, Congress, or the career of Bill O’Reilly. But there is one thing I know with crystal clarity: This L.A. publicist doesn’t love me any more than I love her.
It’s a Barnum & Bailey world, just as phony as it can be, and there was a time when I embraced every artificially sweetened, fake-fur-covered inch of it. I’ve engaged in that “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine” exchange of faux-familiarity that passes for communication. I’ve played fast and loose with my inner thoughts. I’ve gone looking for intimacy in all the wrong places. Enough is enough.
I don’t mean to suggest that we should line the borders of our personal space with barbed wire, I just want my podiatrist to quit hugging me hello. Granted, if my podiatrist were Denzel Washington, this observation would be about the importance of pedicures, but he’s not and I don’t think it’s too much to ask that touching be confined to below the ankles. Had my boundaries been crossed by a single podiatrist, I could chalk it up to the price of fallen arches. When I finally work up the nerve to return to Russ & Daughters and a stranger waiting in line for cinnamon raisin bagels and designer cream cheese casually divulges that her husband thinks foreplay is a brand of yogurt, it’s time to establish a few additional golden rules for an exceedingly tarnished age: