My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman (9 page)

You know my mom is a bit eccentric, she’ll come right out and tell you—that she shares the couch with five dogs, that she sleeps in her clothes for fun, that she eats the same three meals on rotation.

Did she tell you that one?

But she has some idiosyncrasies of which even she isn’t aware. I think it’s safe to say that I know her better than she knows herself, and none of them gets past me.

For one, my mom doesn’t know how old I am.

I know it sounds impossible. I am her only daughter, and she loves me more than anything. She thinks she knows how old I am; if you ask her, she will deliver her answer with absolute certainty.

She’ll just get it wrong.

I have no idea why this is. She is not some dumb blonde. In fact, she is a super-smart blonde. But just yesterday she sent me something she had just written about what she keeps on her refrigerator door. In it, she poked fun at how she can’t bring herself to take down any of my old report cards, and she had the line, “As you may recall, she’s 26 years old.”

Fact: I am 24 years old.

She must have confused me with her other only child.

Mom’s response? “When you’re fifty-four years old, twenty-four and twenty-six aren’t all that different.”

Fair enough.

Generally, my mom is a tough cookie, but when it comes to recalling my age, she can be very suggestible. However old your kid is, that’s how old I am. We were just recently in the supermarket, and we bumped into a woman she knew who mentioned, “Oh, my son is twenty,” and my mom replied, “Get out! My daughter is the same age! We should set them up.”

Again, 24 years old, here.

This isn’t something that happened as she got older, either. She’s had this quirk as long as I can remember. She kept pretty good track when I was under ten years old, but once you start adding dates and months into the mix, you’re asking for trouble. When I began preschool, we had to bring in our birth certificates. It said my birthday was February 7, 1986.

For years, we had celebrated on February 6.

Oops.

One day off, what’s the big deal?

At least it had the right name on it.

I also noticed my mom has developed a new mental blip. Sometimes, when she wants to say one thing, she’ll say the opposite. But as I said, I know her inside out, backwards and forwards, so I’ve gained the uncanny ability to sense when it’s Opposite Day.

She’ll say, “I took the dogs out, Tony peed but Peach didn’t.”

“You mean Peach peed but Tony didn’t?”

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

She truly doesn’t know she does it. But that’s part of her charm, and I know what she means anyway.

Another of my mom’s charming quirks is she likes to sing around the house. But she doesn’t sing whole songs, she sings the chorus of songs. To be specific, she sings the same few bars of the chorus, over and over and over again.

Now, you can imagine, if my mom can’t remember my birthday, she’s not much for lyrics, but she wouldn’t let that stop her. She makes up her own lyrics about whatever’s in front of her, which is usually one of the dogs. Since the
Mamma Mia!
movie came out two summers ago, her tune of choice has been “Money Money Money.”

The hills are alive with the sound of ABBA.

But at this point, I don’t think she remembers where the song came from, because, like I said, when she sings it, the lyrics might be:

“He’s my, teeny tiny Tony, teeny tiny, he’s my Tony dog!”

I could let this bother me, but then where would I be? She’s so cheerful with her Tony songs, I’d be a jerk to come down on her. So it’s developed into a call-and-response game. She sings the first line, and it’s my job to come up with the next one, sung to the zippy rhythm of the electric guitar part. Put on the spot, I’ll come up with something like, “He wants to eat that sandwich.”

We’re a regular Naomi and Wynonna Judd.

So even though I have to correct my mother on my age, translate her opposites, and listen to a broken record of ABBA’s greatest hits, I don’t really mind. To know someone is to know his or her quirks. To love someone is to
love
those quirks.

Or at least to sing along.

Addictions sneak up on you. They lure you in, teasing you, and before you realize it, you have a craving you can’t deny.

I’m talking, of course, about nuts.

I’m nuts about nuts.

It might be a seasonal thing. Come fall, I gather nuts with the single-mindedness of a backyard squirrel. I buy bags and bags, then settle down with the single-gal trifecta of a Diet Coke, a good book, and the nut du jour.

We’re chasing the dragon, ladies.

My habit started when I was young, and my gateway drug was sunflower seeds. They’re labor-intensive, which is nature’s attempt at portion control.

Futile.

Nature’s no match for me, jonesing for sunflower seeds. Everybody eats sunflower seeds in different ways, and I split mine with my teeth, then amass a tiny pile, like a little gray treasure. When I have about twenty-five seeds, I shove them in my mouth, all at once. This very attractive process used to take me about ten minutes, but after years of practice, I’ve become a sunflower seed professional.

I can do twenty-five seeds in three minutes.

Don’t try this at home. Or if you’re married.

And I never cheat. That is, I never buy sunflower seeds already shelled. If I did, how else would I get that fine layer of filth under my fingernails?

Of course, no nut was as messy as the old-school pistachio, dyed red. I don’t know who thought it made sense to dye pistachio nuts red, but I’m guessing it was the same guy who used to dye Easter chicks pink. You remember what would happen if you ate red pistachios. Your fingers would be red for days. It wasn’t a nut, it was a tattoo.

When I was little, brother Frank and I used to eat tons of red pistachios, but that was before he was gay. I doubt he would do that, today. Gay men have too much style for pistachio fingers.

Plus nowadays we know that the red dye on pistachios causes cancer, or at least, a lifetime of celibacy, so we eat the normal brown kind. They’re meaty and delicious, and many of them come out of the bag partway open, which is helpful. Occasionally you run across a closed pistachio, and if you do, here’s my advice:

Move on.

There’s nothing for you there.

Don’t even try to open a closed pistachio. Tenacity doesn’t begin to describe these hardy few. You could use a clam shucker, a blowtorch, or a nuclear weapon, but in the end, the closed pistachio will defeat you.

Instead, calm down and have an almond. It will take your mind off the closed pistachio, and it’s always easy to crack, though it’s disappointingly healthy. Walnuts fall into the same category. It’s no fun to be addicted to something that’s good for you.

Being addicted to something healthy is like loving exercise.

Go away.

Peanuts are also delicious, and because they properly belong in Snickers, they’re naughty enough to qualify as an addiction. It was my beloved father who taught me to eat peanuts, by which I mean, he always ate the whole peanut, shell and all. It was the only way I knew to eat peanuts until one night, when I popped a whole peanut and everyone started pointing and laughing.

“You don’t eat the shells, silly!” they all said.

So I stopped.

Not eating the shells, just eating the shells in public.

Love you, Dad.

My all-time favorite nut is the pumpkin seed, especially the kind that comes coated with hard salt, white as packed snow but with a higher sodium content. And they’re so salty, they practically demand another Diet Coke, in a vicious, yet familiar, salt/sugar cycle. Once I start eating pumpkin seeds, I can’t stop. They take as long as a sunflower seed to shell, yet are less satisfying, since the seed is merely a sliver. It has just enough meat to keep you wanting more, yet never enough to satisfy completely, even after twenty-five seeds.

Or fifty.

Pumpkin seeds are the crack cocaine of the nut world.

And I need an intervention.

If Freud wanted to know what women want, he could have asked. If he’d asked me, I would have answered:

Another kitchen cabinet.

And I just got one!

Here’s how it happened.

It was about ten years ago that I remodeled my kitchen, adding white cabinets and a trash compactor. To tell the truth, I don’t remember wanting a trash compactor and think it was Thing Two who wanted a trash compactor, but I’ve blamed enough on him, so let’s just say I wanted a trash compactor.

At the time, my kitchen contractor said, “I’ll install this trash compactor for you, but I bet you’ll never use it.”

“I’m sure I’ll use it,” said I. And I probably added, “Plus it will give me something to blame on somebody, down the line.”

In any event, the trash compactor got installed, and it came with two free bags, which I promptly lost.

Ten years and one divorce later, it turns out that the contractor was right.

I should have married the contractor.

Anyway, I never used the trash compactor. Not once. I even forgot it was there until three months ago, when it began to emit a mysterious and foul odor. I searched the thing and could find no reason for it to be smelly, but I washed it inside and out anyway. Still the smell got worse and worse, until it was so bad I could barely eat in the kitchen. Then one day, the electrician came over to fix a light, and he said, “Smells like something died in here.”

Bingo!

The electrician showed me that you could slide out the compactor, which I hadn’t realized, and when we did, we found behind it an aromatic gray mound that used to be a mouse.

Eeek!

The electrician threw the dead mouse away, and I cleaned the trash compactor all over again, but it still stunk worse than my second marriage, which I didn’t even think was possible, so I threw the trash compactor away, too.

Which left an oddly empty space on my kitchen island, a dark square among the white cabinets, like a missing front tooth.

I called the kitchen contractor, whose phone number I still had from ten years ago. As soon as he heard my voice, he said, “Told you,” and came right over.

Last week he installed a new cabinet, including a drawer, then asked, “What are you going to use it for?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I told him, excited by the possibilities. It was almost too much to hope for—a nice empty cabinet and a whole extra drawer. After he had gone, I pulled up a stool and contemplated my course of action.

The decision required me to consider the problem areas of my kitchen cabinets, which are many. My pot-and-pan cabinet is a mess because I hate to stack pots and pans in their proper concentric circles. I just pile them up any way, playing Jenga, only with Farberware. Also I can never figure out how to store pot lids, so I stick them in upside down, setting them wobbling on handles like the worst tops ever. Every time I open the cabinet door, they come sliding out like a stainless-steel avalanche.

I also have a cabinet containing Rubbermaid and Tupperware, but it’s all mixed up, so that Rubbermaid lids are with Tupperware containers and Rubbermaid containers are with Tupperware lids, making the whole thing feel vaguely illicit, like an orgy of plastic products.

Then I have a cabinet of kitchen appliances I have never used once in my life but feel compelled to keep close at hand, namely a juicer, a waffle iron, and a SaladShooter.

You never know when you’ll have to shoot a salad.

My kitchen drawers are equally problematic. I have one drawer for silverware and four others for junk, junk, junk, and junk. All the junk drawers contain the same junk, just more of it, namely, pens that don’t work, pencils that have no points, extra buttons that go to clothes I’ve never seen, rubber bands I got free but can’t part with, menus for restaurants I don’t order from, and pennies.

In other words, it’s all essential.

I think I know what to put in the empty cabinet.

Trash compactor bags.