And so, whenever they visit, I attend lovingly to their needs while standing between drooling babies and golden velvet, between runny-nosed toddlers and deep rich burgundy velvet, between pre-scholars clutching melting M&M’s in both their hands and a subtly striped (mostly fawn and celery) velvet, between kids oozing catsup and mustard and peanut butter and cherry pie and a lushly patterned brown-bronze-mocha velvet.
I have waged, until the moving in of the Alexander Five, tough but successful battles against the forces that would violate my velvets. But now that I’m facing attacks that are both daily and sustained from my three enchanting but often smeary grandchildren, I am, for the first time, fearful for their survival…. The survival, that is, of my velvets—not of my grandchildren.
In addition to breakfasts and dinners each day, and lunches on the weekends, there’s a great deal of in-between eating known as the “snack,” which is why my glass-windowed kitchen cabinets (once so neatly arranged that sometimes I would actually stand there admiring them) are now a jammed-in-all-together helter-skelter mess of animal crackers, fishy crackers, mini-muffins, tiny cartons of applesauce, miniature boxes of Gatorade, miniature boxes of cereal, and (take your choice) either Scooby-Doo or Dora the Explorer fruit-flavored snacks.
Isaac, who has the plump rounded beauty of a Renaissance cherub, can also be found admiring my cabinets, his beseeching brown eyes and his piteous cries as he gazes at the goodies behind the glass conveying a state of criminal starvation. Trying to carry his oh-too-solid flesh past the cabinets and onto a kitchen chair poses a challenge to the lower back. And trying to sell him on carrots when he’s yearning for Scooby-Doos poses a challenge similar to selling George W. Bush on tax increases.
Snacks are much preferred to meals and are eaten far more frequently and copiously—before and after breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And, unlike meals, which in theory are eaten only in the kitchen, snacks are carried to every room of the house. My supermarket sojourns, which, despite those boxes of home-delivered groceries, take place about four out of seven days a week, can barely keep pace with this voracious consumption. Nor can my DustBuster suck up the smushed and spilled and stomped and crumbled food debris as fast as Isaac and his big sister create it. The tidiest of the three children is Toby, whose repertoire is limited to the bottle, though Milton and I tend to call it the “fucking bottle,” because it is merely a shell into which—each time and for us with great difficulty—you insert a disposable condom-like plastic sheath. And should you forget to insert the sheath (as both Milton and I will sometimes forget to do) and pour the warmed formula into this shell of a bottle, you’ll soon be mopping formula off the floor.
Our ineptitude with the bottle extends to our failure to master the locks of Toby’s bouncy seat, safety locks designed, we’ve been assured, to protect a baby from falling out of his seat and not for the specific purpose of torturing his hopelessly klutzy grandparents. So Toby is locked in his bouncy seat, screaming for his bottle. And Milton and I have finally prepared his bottle. And now we need to unlock the locks and lift Toby into our arms and feed him his bottle. The unlocking part of this plan isn’t going too well.
“Press down here, and pull there,” I say to Milton.
“I’m pressing. I’m pulling. It isn’t working,” he says.
“I think we need to release that center part first,” I say to Milton.
“I already tried. It won’t release,” he says.
“Or maybe we could just slide his little arms out from under the harness,” I say to Milton.
“Get out of my light and stop talking,” Milton says.
Eventually, thanks to a not-very-gracious team effort, Milton and I spring Toby from his bouncy seat. He no longer has any interest in his bottle.
Cleaning up the kitchen at the end of a three-meal, five-or-six-snack day, Milton, munching his grandchildren’s leftovers as he does the dishes, seems to have discovered his inner child. “This mac ’n’ cheese is pretty good,” he tells me. Or, popping some soggy frozen pizza into the toaster oven and then devouring it, he pronounces it to be “not bad at all.” He turns rather haughty, however, when I offer him some fruit-flavored Scooby-Doos. “Certainly not,” he says. “I have my standards.”
But our standards, as I have made clear, are not what they used to be. With the velvet imperiled, the flowered dishes unused, the state of our house not something you’d want friends to see, the kitchen shelves in tumult, the shelves of our freezer and fridge beyond description, the sound of silence replaced by the sound of crying, and gracious dining no more than a distant memory, the phrase I keep holding on to is, “This too shall pass.”
Then Isaac flings himself at me and gives my knees a fiercely passionate hug. And Toby sleeps in my arms with sighs of contentment. And Olivia puts her small hand in mine and says, “Let’s take a shower and dress up stylish.” And Alexander and Marla share a quiet drink with us at the end of an evening. And maybe I really don’t want this to pass too soon.
CHAPTER THREE
The Resident Grandchildren
Olivia never walks down the stairs of our house. Actually, she rarely even runs down them. Her preferred travel mode is the jump: Three steps from the bottom. Four steps from the bottom. Five steps from the…
“Stop that, Olivia. Stop that right now,” shouts her father. “One of these days you’re really going to hurt yourself.”
Alexander pretends that he can’t possibly imagine where his daughter acquired such risk-embracing behavior. All of us know, however, that the gene was passed directly to her from him. As a person who, at Olivia’s age, climbed onto the wing of the plane ride at the amusement park because riding on the inside was just too boring, Alexander is reaping what he has sowed. Once upon a time he used to call me—fondly, I tell myself—his paranoid and overprotective mother. Now, and I must admit I take some pleasure in recording this, he is me.
(Well, almost me. I still could give him a few instructions in worrying.)
The past is also repeating itself in other, less potentially perilous ways. For instance:
O and I are sitting on the wall-to-wall carpeted floor of my home office, where I’m teaching her the art of building card houses. “Find the balance,” I urge her as her tented structures wobble and collapse. She grows increasingly frustrated and I try to help by offering her a mantra: “Cats meow, dogs bark, pigs oink, and card houses fall down,” I briskly say to her. The mantra seems to work. We keep on building.
My husband, watching us building, sneezes loudly, sneezes again, then sneezes once more. Our house is going up. Uh-oh, it’s down. “Cats meow,” says Olivia. “Dogs bark. Pigs oink. Card houses fall down. And papas sneeze—very very loudly.”
We start all over. Persistence finally pays off. We construct a house using every card in the deck. Alexander, standing at the doorway of my office, is grinning broadly.
“I sat on this floor and I did the same thing when I was a little boy,” he tells Olivia. “I sat right here and my mom taught me to build card houses.”
With Olivia in my life on a daily basis, there are many other things I am able to teach her. Like checkers and a variety of board games. Like word games: What’s the opposite of “happy”? Can you give me three words that rhyme with “bite”? And like a bouncing-ball alphabet game from my childhood that begins—pick your own nouns: “‘A’ my name is Anna and my husband’s name is Albert and we come from Alabama and we bring back apples. ‘B’ my name is Betsy and…” straight through to “Zelda, Zero, Zimbabwe, and zebras.” Try it; you’ll like it.
We also draw pictures, sitting side by side at the kitchen table, and do jigsaw puzzles, at which she’s much better than I. “JuJu,” she often says, quite patronizingly, to me, “if you’d practiced puzzles instead of reading so much when you were little, you wouldn’t be so terrible at them now.” But after completing her sixty-piece puzzle in truly record time, she always condescends to help me with mine.
“I’m good at doing
puzzles,” she says. “I’m good at writing books,” I reply defensively. “Different people have different things they’re good at.” And later, when I’m moaning about how incredibly long it’s taking me to fit just four of these stupid pieces together, Olivia gives me a pat on my hand and reminds me, “Different people have different things they’re good at.”
As the mother of three sons who rarely if ever patted my hand and who dressed and smelled like street people till the day that they discovered the opposite sex, I’ve found it a revelation to have two granddaughters, especially since both of them (despite O’s risky habits) are deliciously, unequivocally girly-girls. My firstborn—hazel-eyed, movie-star-gorgeous Miranda—lives far away, in Denver, Colorado, which means that even with visits back and forth on agonizing United Airlines we see each other just five or six times a year. (Though now that she has acquired her own e-mail address, we may begin to be in more frequent contact.)
Because they’re less regularly in our lives, we don’t know our Denver grandchildren or our New York ones as day-to-day intimately as the ones from D.C. We’re aware that Brandeis, aka Bryce, is at seven an adept and passionate athlete, and almost impossible to beat at checkers. We’re aware that Nathaniel, age four, is a gutsy kid who, even when scared, will physically challenge himself, and who loves riding scooters and making up games with his friends, and whose powers of persuasion can get his parents to do what he wants, even if they’ve already said no three times. We’re aware that Benjamin, just turned two, can count to fifty and speak in perfect sentences and may, in our humble opinion, be a genius. And we’re also aware that Miranda (along with being a fine artist, an avid reader, and wonderfully sweet with all of the younger kids) is a major Fashion Person, with—at the age of only eleven—the best, most inventive taste in the whole family.
In a talk with Miranda on the subject of our shared pleasure in clothes, I once said that I thought it was quite okay to be a Fashion Person as long as that wasn’t the only thing we were, as long as we cared about clothes within the context of larger matters that we cared about. I told her that we were allowed to be concerned about purses and peace, and I plan to discuss this with O when she’s a bit older. But right now we simply revel in dressing up after taking a leisurely shower together—since she moved in I rarely shower alone—while checking out each other’s choices in dresses and skirts, in pants, sweaters, shoes, and jewelry. We also do makeup together, playing with powder and lipstick and blush—“Don’t want to look like a clown,” she repeats after me. And if she or I, in her judgment, has managed to put ourselves together especially well, she’ll confer upon us her ultimate accolade: “Stylish!”
Olivia—who has never displayed any problems with low self-esteem—has made it clear that she views herself as not only a lot more stylish but also much better-looking than her grandma. She decides to solicit her grandfather’s concurrence.
Olivia: “So Papa, who is prettier—JuJu or me?”
Milton: “I wouldn’t answer that for a million dollars.”
Olivia: “Please Papa, say it—which of us is prettier?”
Milton: “I already told you—I won’t answer that question.”
Olivia: “Please Papa, please Papa, please, please, please. I need you to answer the question just this once. Which of us is prettier—JuJu or me?”
This dialogue goes on for a while. Milton is hanging tough. But Olivia is utterly relentless. And after a ferocious barrage of “I need you”s and “just this once”s and “please, Papa, please”s, Milton, fool that he is, finally capitulates. “Well, I guess I’d have to say JuJu, because she’s my wife.”
Olivia’s face is a study in shocked disbelief. “JuJu?” she squeals. “JuJu you picked? How could you do that?”
Milton explains once again. “Because JuJu’s my wife.”
“Okay, okay, okay,” says an outraged O, “JuJu’s your wife. But I”—and here she speaks in the stentorian tones of God addressing Moses—“I am your granddaughter.”
On and off for the next twelve hours Olivia complains about Milton’s response, commanding and begging him to reconsider and calling upon her mother and father and even upon me to declare him some version of mentally incompetent. I see a family resemblance here: When my mother entered a beauty contest in high school, she came in second and promptly demanded a recount. As a result, the caption under her high-school yearbook read, “Ruth Ehrenkranz, most conceited girl in the class.” This is another discussion that I’ll be having with Olivia when she is older.
One weekend in early July the New York contingent—Marya, Nick, Nathaniel, and Benjamin—bravely drove down to D.C. for their summer visit, increasing to eleven the number of relatives stuffed into our bulging house. There are rituals to be followed whenever our sons and their families return to the old homestead: Making room in our driveway for their automobiles. Selecting suitable grown-up and kid DVDs. Meeting their eating requirements—Atkins for this one, vegetarian for that one, whole milk, two percent, one percent, fat-free. And checking out the family photos hanging on the walls of our second-floor hall to make sure that there is equal representation. Aren’t our sons too old to be counting up photographs and complaining, “There’s two more pictures of Tony than of me?” It seems they are not.
While Isaac and Benjamin warily eyed each other, O and Nathaniel bonded instantly, shouting and laughing and racing each other up and down the stairs, shining flashlights into each other’s faces, swimming together, bathing together, showering together, and—with some assistance from Isaac and Benjamin—together transforming my still somewhat orderly office into a wall-to-wall full-service playroom. “What’s all that stuff?” they asked about the hectic collection of drawings, photos, and messages I’ve tacked to the bulletin board behind my desk. I skipped past “For peace of mind, resign as general manager of the universe,” and read them another favorite, a picture postcard from a far-off friend: “The last time I saw you, besides that memorable fall day when we all marched on the Justice Department and shouted, ‘Stop the war!’ to whoever was listening, was in the Giant on Wisconsin Avenue. You were pulling two loaded grocery carts and three boys.”
The children of two of these now-grown-up boys, having finally finished working over my office, moved on to Milton’s, where they swarmed all over the room and persuaded their papa to quit the computer and come play. Not that it was so hard to persuade him to play. For Milton, having grown up as an only child, had always longed for brothers and sisters. His sons, in a sense, had helped to meet that need, providing him later in life with built-in buddies to horse around with, go canoeing with, camp with, ski with, play Sunday-morning softball with, and discuss in minute-by-minute detail every triumph and every tragedy of the Redskins with. As the grandchildren started arriving, Milton looked forward to grooming them for similar roles, delighted he had so many of them to groom. Indeed, on the grounds of the more grandchildren the merrier, he offered—after our sons and their wives declared themselves holding the line at two kids apiece—a bonus payment for a seventh grandchild. We learned of the impending addition of Toby to our clan when Marla and Alexander came over to see us one day, announcing that they were there for the bonus payment. Milton, proud as could be of the success of his plan to increase the Viorst population, was thrilled to pay up.
And now he was thrilled to be hanging out with four of his seven grandchildren—Isaac and Benjamin, Nathaniel and O. Lying down on his rug with his knees drawn up and his hands holding on to a giggling Nathaniel, whose belly was shakily balanced on Milton’s knees, and assuring the other kids that yes, if they’d please wait a minute—please!—they’d each get a turn, my husband gave me a look that said as plainly as any words: “This is exactly what it’s all about.”
I agreed. Which didn’t mean that either of us was anything less than eager for their bedtime.
Because the bodies exceeded the beds, we spread sleeping bags on the third floor, embedding each body in its proper location. But during th
e course of the night many ups and downs, ins and outs, and rearrangements occurred. Alexander, for instance, discovered that sometime after midnight Isaac and O had both joined Marla in bed while he, Alexander, was now dispossessed and lying on the floor, zipped cozily into a red-checked, fuzzy-pawed, absolutely adorable puppy-dog sleeping bag.
A good time, though little sleep, was had by all.
Well, except for poor Nathaniel, who, the next day, skipped breakfast and wound up in the ER, where he and his dependably calm and patient mother, Marya, and I spent a good three hours making sure that his stomach pains were nothing serious. Sitting in the waiting room, I remembered earlier times, too many to count, when Nathaniel’s dad and his uncles were rushed to the hospital, rushed there for broken wrists, smashed noses, knocked-out teeth, heavy bleeding, falls on the head, and—at one devilish brother’s suggestion to his younger brother—the drinking of turpentine.
I have many tender memories of my long-ago days as the mother of small boys. Our visits to the emergency rooms of Washington, D.C., are not among them.
To celebrate Nathaniel’s escape from appendicitis and other major ills, and also to reward him for courageously enduring pokes, prods, and needles, we drove straight from the hospital to the toy store. There we bought him a special gift and some lesser gifts for all of the other children, returning him home with a smile on his face and ready for the wild rumpus to resume.
Later that day Nathaniel, who has been working on his manners, was asked by his parents to demonstrate his new mannerliness.
Nick: “What do you say when you get a present you like?”
Nathaniel: “Thank you.”
Marya: “And what do you say when you get a present you don’t like?”
Nathaniel: “Thank you.”
Nick: “And what do you say when you get a present you really, really hate?”