Best Friends, Occasional Enemies: The Lighter Side of Life as a Mother and Daughter (Reading Group Gold) (18 page)

Mother Mary never met a microphone she didn’t like.

Please, visualize amongst yourselves.

By the way, I forgot to tell you that Mother Mary took to wearing a lab coat around about age seventy-five. I’m not sure why or how, as she has no medical training, but she bought one at the dollar store and decided it was a good look for her. So now she’s Dr. Mom.

Literally.

But back to the story. She tells the crowd that I didn’t talk at all for the first few years of my life and they took me to several doctors, who thought I was learning disabled. But when I finally spoke, at age three, I said, “I want a cookie.”

At this point, I wrest the microphone from her arthritic little hand. I offer no explanation for my belated speech, except that I really wanted a cookie.

And I still do.

What does it mean if your first word is
carbohydrates
?

(Maybe that you’ll be cursing on the scale.)

Well, it gets worse.

There’s nothing about me she doesn’t know, and there’s nothing about me she won’t say, so after I’ve delighted the crowd with my speech, quips, and anecdotes to illustrate how great I am, my mother takes the floor and disillusions them by telling them everything about the real me. This defeats the purpose of the entire tax-deductible party, and by the time the book club members leave, several are looking at me funny and one advises that I should let my mother take all the time she needs on the toilet.

“How’d I do?” Mother Mary asks, after everyone has gone.

“Terrific!” Francesca tells her.

And oddly, I agree.

Not Under My Roof

By Francesca

I was raised right, and I have my mother to thank. I used to gripe about some of her rules and chores, but in the end, she was usually right, and I carried those lessons with me. Now I have a relatively clean, tidy, well-run household.

Until my mom comes to visit.

Something strange happens when my mother stays with me—we swap roles. It’s like my apartment is a wormhole to bizarro world, where I am my mother, and my mother is teenage me.

Because my mom is within driving distance, she has no imperative to pack neatly, so she always comes in like a bag lady and basically explodes with stuff.

In her defense, my apartment is small enough that any added things constitute a natural disaster.

Yet somehow, she also never has a suitable outfit for whatever our main activity is and must borrow one from me.

But I can’t complain. I’ve raided her closet since I was fifteen, so I owe her on this one.

I think my mom’s favorite thing about staying with me, beyond the money saved or the quality time with boring ol’ me, is that she can bring Little Tony and Peach. I love to see them, and so does my dog, Pip, but three toy-sized dogs in a toy-sized apartment create a surprising amount of dirt.

Think Dust Bowl with dog hair.

There was a time when my mom and I had five dogs and a cat, so we are old pros at pet-hair management. At home, we have L.L. Bean furniture liners that must cover the sofa and armchair anytime we are not sitting on them, or company isn’t over. When I was still living at home, if I so much as got up to go to the bathroom, my mom would nag me about forgetting to cover the couch.

In my apartment, I have a ratty blanket for the same purpose. I thought my mom would be proud. But instead, she ignored it.

“Mom,” I said, replacing the blanket for the second time that day. “You have to make sure the blanket is covering the couch cushions, especially after the dogs come in from a walk.”

“They’re not that dirty.”

“Yes, they are.”

My mom rolled her eyes at me and complied.

Now was that so hard?

Another night, we were about to head out to see a movie. I was waiting by the door while my mom gathered her things.

“Okay, ready,” she said.

“You left the kitchen light on.”

“I know. I left it on for the dogs.”

What, do they have a lot of reading to do?

“It’s wasteful,” I said.

With an exaggerated sigh, my mom trudged back to the kitchen and turned off the light.

“What’s with the attitude?” I asked. But I could hear her voice saying it, even as the words left my mouth.

Scary.

When I was younger, another of my daily chores was setting the table. There was a right way to do it, and that was to clear the table, wipe the table down with a damp sponge, and set it with a full set of silverware—fork, knife, and spoon, no matter what my mom was serving for dinner.

On my mom’s last visit, I convinced her to take a night off of restaurants or takeout and let me make dinner. I wanted to show her that I can take care of myself, because like any good Italian mother, she never thinks I’m eating well or enough. Since I cooked, she set the table.

I brought over the salad bowl and saw big paper towels by each plate.

“I have napkins,” I said.

“Eh, I didn’t know where they were. This was easier,” she replied.

Paper towels were always a forbidden shortcut in our house, but I bit my tongue. My bewilderment increased when I lifted the towel and saw only a fork and a knife beneath it.

“I’m gonna have a Diet Coke,” my mom said. “Do you want one?”

“Sure, and while you’re up, can you grab us two spoons?”

“We don’t need them.”

“It’s good to have them, just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“In case my mom comes over!”

And we both laughed.

Uncle Sam

By Lisa

Thank God for our government, which just sued a yogurt company.

Whew.

Don’t worry, America, they’re on it.

You may think that we have bigger problems for government to fix, but you’d be wrong.

Silly wabbit. Government can’t fix anything.

A yogurt company may sound harmless, as compared with thieving banks and Charlie Sheen, but appearances can be deceiving.

Luckily, we don’t have to watch out for ourselves, thanks to Uncle Sam. He’s a good uncle, even though he never gives us a dollar at Christmas, like my Uncle Ed used to. I loved Uncle Ed, but Uncle Sam is from the Other Side of the Family.

Every family has an Other Side.

It’s either Your Mother’s Side or Your Father’s Side, but we all know what we mean when we say the Other Side.

Them.

Not us.

Uncle Sam sued the yogurt company for claiming that Activia yogurt would make people more regular, if they ate it once a day. The government said that the company was exaggerating with its ads, because people would probably have to eat Activia three times a day to be more regular.

Thanks, government. Because who would ever guess that ads exaggerate anything?

Hmm.

For example, I believed an ad for a lipstick that said it would get me a man.

But it didn’t.

And I believed an ad for sneakers that would make me thinner, but they didn’t. And my face soap didn’t make me younger, and my car didn’t change my life. Obviously, I was cheated, and Uncle Sam needs to step in. I want ads for things we can trust.

Like politicians.

As for Activia, let’s get real.

Have you ever tasted Activia? I have, and I love it. It’s delicious. A creamy vanilla flavor, light and perfect. It’s so good, it’s criminal. In fact, maybe that yogurt company got off easy, only being sued.

They should go to jail.

I never endorse products, and this still isn’t a product endorsement, because honestly, you shouldn’t buy Activia. You know why? Because if you do, you’ll never stop eating it. You’ll be so regular, you won’t ever leave the house.

If you follow.

Come to think of it, now that our government has established that you need three Activia a day to be regular, it should move quickly to find out what happens if you eat fifty-seven a day.

Because I could.

But it’s not my fault. It’s the yogurt company’s fault. Because it puts Activia in little containers, which makes me eat more than one.

Hell, they practically stick that spoon in my hand.

And if that weren’t bad enough, the company sells Activia in packs of six, all stuck together. It simply resists being pulled apart. In one sitting, I could eat six, no problem. Activia is a six-pack for girls.

If this keeps up, I’ll have an Activia belly.

Finally, I appreciate that Uncle Sam is so concerned about my health and welfare, especially my bowel movements.

Thanks, Unc!

Some people dislike governmental intrusion, but not me. Privacy is overrated. I don’t value it at all, as you know if you read this column.

I’m happy my government’s up my butt.

And the best part is that the yogurt company had to settle the lawsuit, paying the government some $21 million, which I’m sure will be put to excellent use. Uncle Sam may not give us money at Christmas, but with luck we’ll get a really nice screwdriver.

So we’re screwed.

I think that $21 million will go far toward paying off the federal deficit, which is now at $13 trillion. After all, you have to start somewhere.

There are a lot of drops in a bucket.

Mathlete

By Lisa

I was never good at math, but I figured it didn’t matter. Unfortunately, it does, at least when you make cranberry sauce.

And it’s more than just math, it’s science, too. I figured I’d never need to know anything about volume, but I do. Again, I was wrong, when it comes to cranberry sauce.

Cranberry sauce is high-maintenance, for a condiment.

We begin with what happens to me every holiday meal, when cranberry sauce demands to be made. For some reason, I never end up with the 12-ounce bag of Ocean Spray cranberries that dummyproofs the entire process. It has the recipe right on it, and all you have to do is follow it, dump the cranberries and sugar into the boiling water, and you’re good to go.

Plus I get extra credit for making my own cranberry sauce from scratch, and not just opening the can and making it look homemade by chopping it up with a fork.

That’s beneath me.

Sort of.

Obviously, I’m not a high-rent kind of cook. I own fancy cookbooks, but the recipe on the Ocean Spray bag is as reliably awesome as the one for chocolate chip cookies on the Hershey’s bag. If these companies ever change their wrapping, I can’t cook.

But anyway, the store is always out of the Ocean Spray bag by the time I get there, so I have to buy whatever overpriced organic cranberries are on hand, and unfortunately, they’re always too pretentious to have a recipe on the package.

And this time, I ended up with a plastic container of artisanal cranberries whose label said that it contained one dry quart of cranberries.

Huh?

I don’t know what a quart of cranberries is. A quart of milk, I’m familiar. But cranberries?

I have a vague understanding that there’s some kind of difference between dry measures and liquid measures, but I never understood what the difference was. For this reason, I own a bewildering array of Pyrex measuring cups, but I have no idea if they measure dry stuff or wet stuff, or if that matters.

That would be the science part.

So I thumb through my fancy cookbooks on Thanksgiving Day to find a cranberry-sauce recipe, but they’re too full of themselves to help me out with such a basic recipe, and even
The Joy of Cooking
doesn’t have one.

Now I know I’m in trouble.

If it’s not in
The Joy of Cooking,
my cooking is joyless.

I’m fresh out of joy.

So I go online to try and find a cranberry sauce recipe, and every single recipe tells you to use 12 ounces of cranberries. Because everybody but me has that Ocean Spray bag.

Ocean Spray intends world domination.

In fact, Ocean Spray is the Microsoft of cranberry companies.

Of course, the Ocean Spray recipe is on its website, and it specifies 12 ounces of cranberries. But I have no idea how many ounces are in one dry quart, or the other way around. I know it sounds dumb, but I don’t even know which is bigger. Or heavier. Or wetter. Or dryer.

You see the problem.

So I type the following question into Google: “How many ounces are in one dry quart?” And a bunch of links pops up, so I click on the first, from wiki answers, and it reads:

32.

Blink. Blink blink.

I don’t even know what that means, as far as the recipe goes. Hoping to get a clue, I click on the next link, which purports to answer the same exact question. And its answer, also from wiki answers, is:

5.

Uh oh.

Now I officially don’t understand. There are either 5 or 32 ounces in one dry quart.

And the only person dumber than me is this wiki dude.

So now I’m starting to panic, and I go from one link to the next, eventually falling into a wormhole of conversion tables, where I encounter words like drams and deciliters, and I learn that one firkin is equal to 34.069 liters.

I had no idea. I should have listened in firkin class.

And do you know how many liters are in a hogshead?

If you said 238.48, you win a can of cranberry sauce.

Which is what I’m buying, as soon as I get my coat on.

Oprah and Einstein

By Lisa

Oprah is the genius who coined the term “aha moment,” wherein you realize something about yourself, usually something that makes you feel smarter.

Me, I remember an aha moment that made me feel dumber.

It happened a while ago, at the time of the awful oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and I was on an airplane in front of two men who spent the entire three hours trying to figure out a way to stop the spill.

And then, that’s when I thought, aha!

I’m not smart enough to fix an oil spill.

But before we go further, let me be clear:

I was sad about the oil spill, and I knew it wasn’t a laughing matter. I used to read everything I could on the subject, because I cared.

All I’m saying is that I had no idea how to stop it. I don’t know how to plug a hole in the Earth. I can barely work my BlackBerry.

I admired these men, who had so many ideas. That’s the kind of can-do attitude that makes America great.