My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman (7 page)

I’ve decided that refrigerator doors are bulletin boards for moms.

Not like the bulletin boards you remember from school, covered with construction paper cut-outs of hearts on Valentine’s Day. Or the bulletin boards at the supermarket, showing phone numbers for hungry painters. I’m talking about that bulletin board you had in middle school. The one that hung in your bedroom. The one that conveyed no information, but was all about things that mattered to you.

Your very identity, under thumbtacks.

I had one, as you can tell.

I still remember it, and it had school photos of my friends, with identical smiles and fake-sky backgrounds. It had my choir pin and a felt letter from the JV tennis team. It had, embarrassingly, a picture of Prince Charles from the cover of
Time
magazine. I always thought he’d make a good husband.

He could have been Thing Three.

Or King Thing Three.

Well, the other day, I went to the refrigerator to get some milk, and something fell off the door. I bent over and picked it up, which was when I realized that it was Daughter Francesca’s report card.

From seventh grade.

As you may recall, she’s 24 years old.

It made me take a look at my refrigerator door, and I’m betting it’s not all that different from yours. Its double doors are completely covered by layers of stuff, with the oldest on the bottom, like the sentimental strata of the earth.

The top layer is all of Francesca’s report cards, and they date from middle school to her college graduation. I can’t explain why I posted her report cards on the refrigerator when she no longer lived here, but I was so proud of her, even in absentia. Another clue is provided by the other stuff in the top layer, namely, a photo of a mother polar bear and her cub, a photo of a mother horse and her colt, and a photo of a mother elephant and her—

You know where this is going.

The only other stuff in the top layer is birth announcements with baby pictures and Christmas cards with baby pictures. Half of these kids are driving now, but I can’t bring myself to take down their pictures.

How can you throw a baby in the trash?

I found most of the top layer in magazines and newspapers, and when I see something dorky but adorable, I clip it out and hang it on the fridge. I have to tape it up because my refrigerator is stainless steel, so by the second layer, even the tape is old. I think of that layer as the hokey layer, which is closely related to the top layer, in terms of emotionality. It contains photos that inspire, like one of a prima ballerina performing a soaring split in midair, and another of Olympian Shaun White flying upside-down on a snowboard.

Can you tell I’m afraid of heights?

The third layer is evidently the funny layer, plastered with cartoons.

You want it when?

My favorite cartoon is by Robert Mankoff of
The New Yorker,
and it shows a man on the phone at his desk, with a caption that reads, “No, Thursday’s out. How about never—is never good for you?”

God bless Robert Mankoff.

He could be Thing Four.

The other cartoons, all about work deadlines and nasty book critics, make me look more beleaguered than I actually feel. Whoever is doing all this clipping and taping needs to stay away from the refrigerator.

My Sub-Zero suggests that I’m subpar.

The fourth layer is the throwback layer, and part of me is relieved it’s so hard to find, underneath the inspirational kittens. There lie photos of The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, and a young Michael Jackson.

Also Eleanor Roosevelt, but she didn’t have a band.

Finally, the last layer on the refrigerator door contains all manner of diet information, like lists of calories, a chart of South Beach Diet foods, and an index of Weight Watcher points. This layer hasn’t been seen in a decade, and I suspect it came with the refrigerator.

I bet all of this stuff can be dated by its layers, like the rings of a tree. In the end, it’s one woman’s life.

Frozen in time.

Mother Mary is visiting, and Daughter Francesca has come down from New York, so three generations of Scottoline women are under the same roof. Some call this a family staycation, but I call it a slow death.

With excellent meatballs.

The problem is that we spend the first few days staying inside and watching only my mother’s favorite TV shows,
Law & Order, CSI, NCIS,
and
Cold Case.
Bottom line, she loves anything with a corpse, and I begin to feel like one. Then one night at dinner, a miracle happens.

Wait.

Let me back up.

Most people have a list of Things To Do, but Mother Mary has a list of Things Not To Do. Or more accurately, Things Never To Do. At the top of the list is Don’t Go To The Movies. Other entries include Don’t Eat Outside With The Bugs and Don’t Walk All Over This Cockamamie Mall.

To stay on point, the last movie she went to was
Fantastic Voyage,
which came out in 1966. I’m not making this up. She took Brother Frank and me, and I remember nothing about the movie except Raquel Welch, who wore a cleavage-baring jump-suit that caused my mother to pronounce the movie “dirty.”

We up and left.

In any event, since then, I’ve asked my mother to approximately 3,937,476 movies, but she always says no. Nobody knows why Mother Mary doesn’t do the things she doesn’t do, and to inquire is to end up in a tautological trap, like a Mobius strip of conversational hell. For example, I did ask her, and the conversation went exactly like this:

“Ma, why don’t you go to the movies?”

“Because I don’t.”

“But what’s the reason?”

“The reason is, I don’t.”

“That’s not a reason. I want to know the reason.”

“Why?”

“I just do.”

“Why is that a reason for you, but not for me?”

Honestly, I couldn’t reply. I may have a law degree, but my mother is Perry Mason.

In time, I stopped asking about the movies, and it was Daughter Francesca who popped the question, over a meal of over-cooked broccoli, since also on my mother’s list is Don’t Eat Vegetables That Retain A Hint Of Color.

Francesca said, “Hey, why don’t we go see
Julie & Julia
? It’s supposed to be good.”

Mother Mary answered, “Okay.”

I thought I’d heard her wrong. “What?”

My mother looked over. “So?”

We eyed each other warily, but Francesca is no dummy, so she got up, grabbed a wallet and car keys, and hustled my mother out of the house with the speed of a kidnapper.

In no time, we were sitting at the theater with popcorn, soda, and Raisinets. I kept checking, and Mother Mary was laughing away. She’s only four-foot-eleven, so the big seat seemed to swallow her whole and her feet didn’t touch the floor. The flickering lights danced across her bifocals, and her white hair was a tiny cloud in the dark theater.

I leaned over. “So, Ma, it turns out that going to the movies is fun, huh?”

My mother looked over. “You couldn’t leave it alone, could you?”

I said nothing, because she was absolutely right. I couldn’t leave it alone. In fact, I never leave it alone. All of a sudden, at the movie, I realized that I have my own list of Things Not To Do, and well, you know where this is going.

Three generations of trouble.

Mother Mary naps after her trip to the cockamamie mall.

Then, a day later, we were back at the dinner table over the barely green green beans, and my mother remarked that her cell phone got bad reception. I agreed, and Francesca asked, “So why don’t we go to the mall and get a new phone?”

My mother answered, “Okay.”

I looked over at my mother, and she looked back at me, playing mother-daughter eye-chicken. We both knew that she never went to the cockamamie mall, but her eyes dared me to leave it alone.

And for once, I did.

It’s the time of year when nature comes too close for comfort. My spiders are back, which means that when I open the front door, they rush over the threshold, scurry into the living room, and take the good chair.

Now, there’s new news.

A grasshopper throws himself against the front door every morning. Each day when I come down, I see him. He jumps up, bonks his head on the door, then lands and looks up, only to try again. I named him Sisyphus and have gone from admiring his persistence to doubting his sanity. I took a picture of him on the threshold, before he jumps. If I look closely, I can see his deranged gleam.

Lately I was wondering if it’s the same stubborn grasshopper, or a team of less stubborn grasshoppers, rotating the chore. Either way, he’s gone by the afternoon, when I see other grasshoppers in the front yard, who jump and then fly, which is a neat trick. They look like him, so I assume he’s one of them, but if I could jump and fly, I wouldn’t be wasting my time trying to get inside anybody’s house. I’d have a reality TV show.

Anyway, between the spiders and the grasshopper, I stopped using the front door and began using the back door.

Until Little Tony’s frog.

Yes, there’s a small green frog who hangs out near my back door. He’s there every night, and when I open the door, he jumps once, then pretends he’s a rock. Jumping and impersonating a rock isn’t as cool as jumping and flying, but who am I to judge? I can’t do any tricks, except maybe writing a book.

Anyway, when the frog goes into rock mode, he fools my two golden retrievers and Ruby The Corgi. They trot past him, happy to accept that rocks jump only on occasion. But Little Tony, the Cavalier spaniel, knows better.

He sits at the back door all day long, waiting for nightfall. As soon as the frog appears, Little Tony paws at the door, and I let him out, because he wants to be with the frog. He doesn’t try to bite or chase it, he just sits next to it, happily.

Bottom line, Little Tony has a pet frog.

Or maybe a pet rock.

I don’t want to disturb them, so now I use the back door only during the day, and the rest of the time, I am trapped inside my house by spiders, grasshoppers, and one very clever rock.

Nature finds its way inside, however. It all begins with a fox, crossing my backyard. He’s orange and fluffy and appears every day at about five o’clock, then vanishes. Inside the house, his appearance creates havoc. The goldens bark, Ruby The Corgi runs in circles, and Little Tony eats the window. The fox laughs and runs away.

But the fox doesn’t come back for about a month, and when he returns, he looks terrible. He’s skinny, and his fur is mottled. He scratches his ears constantly. He needs help, so I call all the animal control people, who tell me it’s not their problem and suggest I catch him in a Havahart trap. I’m going out to buy one when I find him on the driveway, dead.

The dogs do a victory dance around him, but I feel sad.

Until one night, when I’m trying to sleep and all of them are scratching their ears, their feet thumping against the floor. I turn on the light, wondering. The next day I take the dogs to the vet, and it turns out that they have mange. They get treated, and it will go away in a month.

But not before I notice a rash on my neck, near my ear.

And boy, does it itch.

I call the vet. “What exactly is mange?”

“A type of parasite.”

“Can people get mange?”

“I get it all the time,” says he.

Yuck.
“What do you do for it?”

“Wait it out. They take two weeks to die.”

I consider this.

I’m already single enough.

I’m on my way to the doctor, now.