Cake or Death (14 page)

Look how hard I try to make myself useful to you. I’m old in mind but I’m sweet and handy as a chunk of apple in a bricklike bag of brown sugar. (That tip actually
works; don’t say I never taught you anything.) There, I’ve softened you up.

In truth, aside from politics and the coming destruction of the planet, I have no problem with the way the world is headed. It’s better and offers infinitely more opportunities for pleasure and adventure than when I was a child twitching the rabbit ears on the TV.

But I still want to write these letters. Then I read the letters that are written to me and the humourless editors of whatever I’m writing for, and I realize that there’s a phalanx of crazed, spittle-spraying, damaged and dangerously un-straitjacketed people out there with nothing better to do than complain about their own wildly incorrect interpretations of what I wrote, having convinced themselves that I will be deeply moved by their complaints.

And sometimes I
am
deeply moved. To write back. And there the trouble begins.

I once wrote a brief shopping column. One week I did four hundred words on children’s toys. They should be wood, I said, and not just because wood is chic in toyland. I could give a toss about fashion, allegedly. (I am under the impression that I am not shallow. I could be wrong about this.) Wood is not intrinsically more educational than any other material unless you’re teaching your toddler about different kinds of wood, i.e., This is oak, my child, good English oak bought in Hamleys. It was Dutch elm disease that destroyed the superficial good looks of the American small town, well, that and big-box stores and the curse of the automobile but that is by the by. What matters is that when you throw that wooden toy at Auntie
Heather’s head, it dents (her head
and
the toy) but you can’t say that of plastic.

No, cheap plastic toys made by desperate underage factory slaves (very much like you, my little Alexandra) in China will not dent. But these toys will dry out and split. Worse, they will stain with the plethora of substances you insist on introducing into the living room. A living room is not a place for paint or jam, my child; it is a place for reading and contemplating, or perhaps watching an improving David Attenborough documentary on bird life.

Then the child hits me, hard this time.

I bought a toy kitchen for my niece. It was like a little phone box, but with counters, ovens, microwaves, pots and cutlery, all made of plastic. She loved it and I was, by design and by far, the most popular relative that Christmas. But when I visited next Christmas, I wrote, the play kitchen was broken in six places and irretrievably stained. It looked, I wrote, like the kitchen of an alcoholic.

I then received a letter from an aggrieved man who told me that he was an alcoholic and that his Jenn-Air kitchen was immaculate, positively gleaming. I owed alcoholics, who have struggled to overcome their disability, an apology for impugning their household maintenance.

I wrote back instantly, of course, saying, Dear Sir, Are you certain you weren’t drunk when you wrote this?

The guy then sent his letter and my reply to the editor, who insisted that I apologize. I think I did too, for the sheer fun of repeating the line about him being drunk, and said alcoholics are the cleanest, tidiest people I know. It’s so funny watching them at Christmas as their
faces go numb and they pour an entire drink on their shoes under the impression it is flowing down their little red lane. These people are nature’s hygienists. Okay, I didn’t put that last bit in the letter.

I am invariably harangued by readers when I write about mental illness, pets and “supporting our troops” in WhereverTheFuck. What I resent and can’t say is that I have seen more mental illness than they’ve had hot dinners, and that is because I venture out of my home where the madmen roam and they clearly do not. It is my job to get outside. It isn’t pleasant, but it is always sick-making in an interesting way, especially if you can get a halfway entertaining/useful column out of it.

I remember spending a week trying to track down a cell-phone company that was selling ring tones that were the sound of a woman crying out as she was kicked in the face with a leather boot. After a week of being avoided by a huge company that operated by phone (its public relations people invariably answered the phone with a nervous “How did you get this number?”), I finally screamed at a voice-mail that they’d be sorry, dickless wonders.

Then, and this was both funny and horribly mortifying, I had to write to two men at this awful company and assure them that they had generative organs. Big ones. The editor took that bit out. Which is good, because everyone at this cell-phone company was a misogynist and utterly devoid of dick, so why pretend?

At the time, I did feel guilty because I think it’s wrong to disparage men by referring to their genitals.
But this was my problem. Nothing was ever funny to a Canadian, ever. I started to think that Canadians had no sense of humour, and then I realized that it was only Canadian letter-writers who had no sense of humour. Everyone else in Canada was fine, which is why they hadn’t written to me. They either saw the humour or hadn’t read the column or they were busy with their lives and didn’t have the time to witter away to a complete stranger about personal assemblages of resentments built up over the decades.

The thing they didn’t know was that I was by nature a polite person. I always apologized after losing my temper. Losing your temper is a failure by definition, I think. It’s my dream to be a calm person. I have long known I will never achieve this dream, but now I can see that I won’t even be able to build a facade.

Even humourless Canadians started to look good to me after I appeared on
The O’Reilly Factor
, that spewing-on Murdoch-owned Fox News, by that awful loofah-penis yelly-man Bill O’Reilly. He’s such a disgrace that Stephen Colbert based an entire show,
The Colbert Report
, on Comedy Central parodying the idiocy, arrogance and dopey cruelty of O’Reilly.

But I was being interviewed by O’Reilly on my welcoming American draft dodgers to Canada. Non-violent, thoughtful young people come here in great numbers, I said. O’Reilly hated this, wanting them all in prison being sodomized by white supremacists, but what he hated more was that I had clean hair, pearl earrings and perfect teeth and I was calling myself a socialist.

I was aiming to show O’Reilly viewers that a socialist could be civilized and reasonable. I imagined his audience as cave-dwellers who dealt with excretion by getting down on all fours and letting loose like an animal. I was right about that last bit, of course. You would not believe the e-mail I got. These men mentioned their yearning to bend women over logs and make them squeal like pigs. Worse, they wanted to do this to these draft dodgers and their wives, some of whom were
not white
, which was beyond the pale in their eyes, one might say.

E-mail itself is odd by its very nature. What happens when your job consists of sitting at home writing is that at some point you become pathetic enough to make e-mail friends. I have met almost none of these people, although they’ll show up on book tours and after a speech and they seem normal and nice. But the problem is that they have become my social circle. It is not normal to have a social circle you haven’t met.

Inevitably some of them are pedophiles, disappointed to discover that you are a crone of forty and have no intention of bringing your stepdaughters to meet them in a coffee shop at 7 a.m. To them, I’m Lolita’s mother.

My, we have drifted far from our original topic. Because people who write to newspapers to complain about something pointless and daft (if it has a point and makes sense, they rarely write, why would they. Their world is rational and filled with productive activities) are a tiny subset of our original target: People I Cannot Stand.

It starts with parents and teachers, of course. The thing about the U.S. TV show
Malcolm in the Middle
is that eleven-year-old Malcolm, who turns to the camera with a horrified, bewildered, appalled expression every time an adult says anything adult, has it right when he says the only good thing about childhood is that it ends.

After I finished childhood, I went through years of eating a joy sandwich, mashing and slurping away, not even wasting time on whoever was staring at the juice running down my chin and the lumps of avocado on my lips. (Avocados are made out of fruit fat. Coconuts are crunchy fruit fat. Macadamia nuts are kernel fat. Eat them and see if I’m right.) What was staring at me was my own face in the mirror, inevitably growing older and disapproving of my own pleasure. Other people’s pleasure, fine. But my own? For several years, I became my own mother. Oh, I was hard hard hard on myself.

I still am, but I can brush it off more easily now. That’s thanks to my new thing. I now notice other people’s tight, pursed little mouths and take enormous joy in that. When you hit forty, you increasingly cease to care what other people think. And when someone tells you about their upcoming colonoscopy and the process one has to go through to make it possible for the clinic staff not to simultaneously vomit and faint, and on which they are now embarking and not sparing you any details, you encourage them.

They’re such good copy, see?

Someone will be babbling about internal sluices and dousings, and how the worst thing is seeds because the clinic literature emphasizes that it can ruin, just ruin, expensive snaky machinery, apparently. Instead of saying, “You are sucking all the joy out of my life,” you take notes. You can make leading remarks like, “I take it you shouldn’t eat corn. Them kernels is big. Would you have to buy them a new $178,000 machine or do they just accidentally perforate you in revenge?”

What I’m saying is, turn the tables. In the course of a day, you will meet one or seventeen or 220 joy vampires. And when you were in your twenties, mashing your face into your joy sandwich (yes, since you ask, in university I once got high, hopped in the bath and ate a huge plate of spaghetti; it was massively enjoyable), you didn’t notice them. In your thirties, these people brought you down. Hit forty and you’ll be using a mental tape recorder.

Thank God I’m not like them, you’ll be saying. (This is intended to comfort younger readers. Hope it helps.)

My mother, who loves me and whom I love, each in our own profound and unsaid way, used to crush me with a remark. She does it to this day, and with great skill, I must salute her for that. It is always intended to be helpful. It always hurts. My husband says this “nurturing” skill is in fact natural and comes strung in the blood with motherhood. I then make taut remarks about a different version of disconnection between fathers and daughters. Fathers don’t attend their daughters sufficiently to note exactly which spot between the ribs is best for the slipping of the knife and if you want to take
pride in that, go right ahead. This debate continues into the evening.

My husband is a carnivore, as am I, but we both like our meat rare. Sometimes we’ll be in the midst of one of these discussions—he had a sunlit childhood; I did not—and I’ll look at the platter on which rests the roast and the thing will be leaking blood. I like my meat bleu. It’s a bowl of blood. (Often there’s a crazy salad too.) And the discussion of daughters and mothers and men and what is done to girls and women goes on, and then my husband cuts me another piece of bleeding protein.

To this day, family dinner and the depiction of family dinners leaves me in a state of delight and horror. When the camera drew back and gave us the still life of the family eating together in the great 2006 comedy
Little Miss Sunshine
, I noticed people in the theatre wincing and moving back in their seats along with the lens. See, there was a time when this would have appalled me. All family dinners are appalling to all who were once children.

But now I suck it up. My dinner mirrors the subject under discussion, as well as my feelings. When I was a child, my father, who loved hunting, would come home with a chopped-up moose or deer which he would then cut into smaller pieces which my mother would bag and label for the freezer. I saw none of this. But I remember the house reeking of blood for a week. I imagine the Dick Cheney household being very much like this.

Blood memories. A glass of Jackson-Triggs Merlot—am I the only one who thinks red wine is blood by the glass?—and we have a merry time of it. I knew from a
young age, or whatever age it is when you figure out that women have children, that I was not going to do the womanly thing. Other women complain that there is intense social pressure on them to have children, and since I have never felt this pressure, I wonder—is it me? Perhaps people have been pressuring me for years by asking me if I have children and if not yet, then when, and I am so nest-rested in my childhood decision that it has all sailed right past me. When people ask me a personal question, I just assume it’s related to some neurosis of their own.

The first reason I never had children is that they hurt coming out. I remember my father, an obstetrician/gynecologist, having been out delivering a baby all night and complaining the next day that he had injured his hand pulling the baby out.
He
complained. Imagine what the mother felt. And no, I don’t expect it helps one bit to have your vagina switch identities and suddenly become a “birth canal.”

My father’s complaint made me think of that British TV show about a vet in Yorkshire, Trooble at ’Cow it was called—no,
All Creatures Great and Small
, and Robert Hardy always had his hand up to the elbow in a cow’s back passage. I remember being puzzled when I heard for the first time about gay men fisting in New York and then remembering when the calving went wrong.

Second, I’d be a dreadful mother. Overprotective, yet not admiring myself enough to allow the child to resemble me, I can imagine my poor kid crawling away from me, refusing to wear the clothes I selected, learning to conceal her feelings, growing up to be, like me, an
appalling combination of socialist and snob and in other words, never winning. I would love to be that relaxed, casual, oblivious type of mother but think of what you’ve read of me so far. I can’t be that.