I Lost Everything in the Post-Natal Depression (17 page)

I asked the milkman if they looked familiar. (He has never gotten out of his truck since. He just sets the milk at the end of the drive.)

As a result of the handling, the briefs became soiled, so yesterday I put them back into the washer. After the spin cycle, I felt around for them and they were gone. In their place, I found a faded beach towel with little black footprints on it that I have never owned in my life.

I’m going to pretend I didn’t see it. The headaches are coming back.

My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.

An ad in a midwest newspaper read, a while back,
“WANTED
: Women to do ironing for housewife ten years behind in everything. Must have strong courage and sense of humor. Phone——.”

I figured there was a woman I could live next door to in perfect harmony. I iron “By appointment only.” I learned long ago that if I ironed and hung three dresses in my daughter’s closet, she would change three times during dinner.

The other day my son wanted me to iron his jeans for a class play. “Which leg faces the audience?” I asked, with my iron poised in mid-air.

“Boy,” he said, “you’re sure not Mrs. Breck.”

I hadn’t thought about Mrs. Breck in years. She was an antiseptic old broad who used to live two houses down from me. She had an annoying habit of putting her ironing board up on Tuesdays and putting it away again at the end of the day. (What can you expect from a woman who ironed belt buckles?)

One afternoon I dropped in on her as she was pressing the tongues in her son’s tennis shoes.

“You know what you are, Mrs. Breck?” I asked. “A drudge.”

“Oh, I enjoy ironing,” she grinned.

“You keep talking like that and someone is going to put you in a home.”

“What’s so bad about ironing?” she smiled.

“No one does it,” I snapped. “Did you ever see the women on soap operas iron? They’re just normal, American housewives. But do you ever see them in front of an ironing board? No! They’re out having abortions, committing murder, blackmailing their boss, undergoing surgery, having fun! If you weren’t chained to this ironing board, you could too be out doing all sorts of exciting things.”

“Like what?” she chuckled, pressing the wrinkle out of a pair of sweat socks and folding them neatly.

“You could give Tupperware parties, learn to Scuba dive, learn hotel management while sitting under a hair dryer, sing along with Jack La Lanne, collect antique barbed wire, start chain letters. I don’t know, woman, use your imagination!”

I read the newspaper ad again. It intrigued me, so I dialed the number and waited.

“Hello, Mrs. Breck speaking …”

Son of a gun. It sure makes you feel good when you had a part in someone’s success, doesn’t it?

That fact that housewives are a misunderstood group was evident recently at a cocktail party. A living room psychologist was analyzing women who move furniture every time they cleaned house.

“Basically,” he announced, “they are women who hate men. They cannot bear the thought of a man entering his home and walking across the floor without cracking his femur bone in three places. Rearranging furniture is a little more subtle than putting a cobra in a basket by the bed.”

I took exception to his remarks. “Women who rearrange furniture have imagination. They have creativity. They have style.…”

“Don’t forget hernias,” he prompted. “Why is it a woman cannot pinch the clasp on her bracelet, yet can move a fifteen-hundred-pound freezer from the basement to the garage?”

Everyone laughed, but it occurred to me that men don’t really know boredom as women do. If we had offices with secretaries with appointment books you could do our week with one original and six carbons. Same old egg on the plate, same old dustballs, same old rumpled beds, same old one-of-a-color socks in the wash.

An attack of monotony does strange things to a woman. Once, for no reason at all, after I finished cleaning the bathroom, I filled an apothecary jar full of popcorn and put it on the back of the commode.

Another time, I put an early American eagle on the doghouse. Usually when I clean, I will fill a brandy snifter with water and food coloring and float a zinnia in it which goes stagnant in ten minutes and hatches mosquito larvae by nightfall.

I will try anything to break the monotony … change a light bulb, paint a wall with an artist’s brush, put the dining room furniture in the living room and the living room furniture in storage.

“When I clean tomorrow,” I told my husband, “I am going to take out the tub in the bathroom and put the washer and dryer in its place. Then I’m going to cut out the front of the tub and make it into a campy sofa for the living room.”

“If you want to change something, why don’t you wash the draperies?” he mumbled.

“If you’re going to use language like that, the least you could do is send the children out of the room,” I said.

Two things have always bothered me about my domesticity. One was when the children sent Colonel Sanders a Mother’s Day card, and the other was a remark made
by my husband one evening who said, “Get out of the kitchen before you kill someone.”

I have always felt cookbooks were fiction and the most beautiful words in the English language were “room service.”

My insecurity at entertaining was compounded when I read an item in a social column recently about a bash for several hundred people where the host was quoted as saying, “We had a pig in our freezer and our neighbors had turkeys in theirs, so we just decided to have a turkey and swine party.”

I opened my freezer. I had three snowballs left over from last winter, fourteen packages of chicken innards that were being saved until “garbage day,” two radio batteries that someone said would recharge themselves if put in the freezer, a half-eaten piece of taffy with a retainer brace in it, and thirty pounds of hamburger.

I could just imagine myself picking up the phone and saying, “Hey gang, wanta come over Sunday? I’m roasting chicken necks in a pit and for dessert we are having fresh batteries over snowballs.”

When I entertain, I do it with all the grace of a water buffalo with a migraine. To begin with, a spontaneous, impromptu, instant party takes me anywhere from three to four weeks to pull off.

First, I must amass enough glasses. This involves numerous trips to the gas station.

Then I must make the house look as though it has never been lived in by children. We must paint, plaster, buy pictures, remove the baby gate from the top of the basement stairway (we haven’t had a baby in thirteen years), and replace all the dead house plants with fresh green ones.

Finally, I must pull together a menu.

“What should I serve?” I ask my husband, leafing through a stack of cookbooks.

“How about that wonderful pork Mary Lou made on her rotisserie?”

“How about Sloppy Joes?” I ask.

“Hey, I know. The Spanish dish we had at the Dodsons with the whole clams in it.”

“How about Sloppy Joes with a lot of pepper?”

“Maybe we could have a luau and serve something from the pit?”

“How about Sloppy Joes buried in the sandbox?”

Our parties go well enough, I guess, but it’s a little disconcerting to open up the paper the next day and read where your husband is quoted as saying, “We had 30 pounds of hamburger in our freezer that wasn’t moving and our neighbors had 30 bottles of catsup without labels to unload, so we had a Sloppy Joe Party.”

Of course, we’ve never given a party in our lives that something (or someone) didn’t crawl inside our wall and die.

It’s the price you pay for rustic, rural living.

In my mind, I visualize a group of mice meeting on a cornfield and one of them says to the other, “Bufford, you don’t look too good.”

“Oh, I’ll be all right,” says Bufford, “it’s just a head cold.”

“Nevertheless,” says the leader, “why don’t you check in at Bombeck’s wall?”

The night of our last party, Bufford didn’t make it to the wall. He staggered into our old pump organ and died.

My husband came into the house, sank to his knees and gasped, “Not again! Where this time?”

“In the pump organ,” I said.

“Can’t we get rid of the odor?”

“Only if you want to paint the living room.”

“We mustn’t panic,” he said, patting his wrists with a deodorizer wick. “We’re just going to have to make
sure that no one plays the organ tonight.” We both nodded.

The party was in high gear when Max Marx sat down to play the organ. I grabbed a can of deodorizer and followed him.

“What are you doing?” he asked, annoyed.

I turned the deodorizer on myself. “It’s Skinny Dip,” I said feebly, “to make me irresistible.”

I watched in horror as he pulled out the stops on the organ and started to pump. As the bellows wheezed in and out, spreading misery throughout the house, three women fainted and one man put out his pipe.

“I say,” he said, pausing, “do you have a dog?”

“We have three of them, but they’re outside.”

He began to play again, then stopped and sniffed. “Is someone in the house cooking sauerkraut? Or making sulfer with a junior chemistry set?”

“No.”

“Is someone wearing old gym shoes?” he persisted.

His wife came over at that moment and leaned over his shoulder.

“Max, your music stinks!”

“Is that it?” he said, and moved on to the kitchen for a stronger drink.

The other day Brucie complained, “My head hurts and my nose is stuffy.”

“Ridiculous,” I said. “It’s too early. Christmas is a whole week away.”

Normal people can always predict when the holidays are near at hand. There is an air of excitement, the smell of holly, the ringing of bells, the singing of carols. At our house, if we have measles, it must be Christmas.

Down at the laundromat, I am known as Typhoid Mary.

“What are you having this year for Christmas?” they ask as I sort my clothes.

“Well, I’ve got one exposure to chicken pox, one who has only had mumps on his left side, and one who just threw up to keep things interesting.”

It’s never serious enough to be an emotional drag, but I’ve forgotten what real Christmases are like. I cornered
my friend Donna Robust and begged, “Tell me again about Christmas at your house.”

“Well,” said Donna, “on Christmas morning I get up first and.…”

“Start going through the yellow pages to find a drugstore open,” I said, my eyes glistening.

“No, no,” she laughed. “I turn on all the lights around the Christmas tree. Then I ring the sleigh bells and.…”

“I know, I know,” I said excitedly, “it’s pill time. You give one a spoon of Coke Syrup, another an aspirin, and the baby a suppository for nausea.”

She shook her head. “I summon them all around the tree to open up their presents. Then, after breakfast, we all get dressed.…”

“Can you imagine that?” I sighed. “Everybody dressed.”

“Then we go to church and that afternoon we have fifteen or twenty people in for Christmas dinner.”

“Once I saw my dad on Christmas. He slid two batteries under the door for a robot monster that didn’t include them. We were contagious at the time.”

“I bet that was nice,” she said.

“Oh, and another time the doctor dropped by to check on us and brought in a bit of snow on his boots. The kids went wild.”

“Maybe this year things will be different,” said Donna, patting my hand.

“Maybe so,” I sighed. “But tell me again about how you all get dressed and go out.…”

On the first day of Christmas my husband gave to me a car with a dead battery.

On the second day of Christmas my husband gave to
me two suits for pressing, one dog for worming, and a car with a dead battery.

On the third day of Christmas my husband gave to me three names for drawing, fifty cards for sending, one gift for mailing, and a car that would take till Saturday.

On the fourth day of Christmas my husband gave to me one house for trimming, one tree for buying, one broken ladder, and a short trip to surgery.

On the fifth day of Christmas my husband gave to me three kids for shopping, walnuts for chopping, fruitcake for baking (with Mom’s recipe), one house for cleaning, eight doorbells, one Avon call, and a paper route for delivery.

On the sixth day of Christmas my husband gave to me one garage attendant, one hostile doorman, two window washers, one errand boy, and three single secretaries.

On the seventh day of Christmas my husband gave to me one instant party, one broken punch bowl, one littered carpet, three pounds of chip dip, and three unemployed secretaries.

On the eighth day of Christmas my husband gave to me a driveway for snowing, red nose for blowing, long list for going, and a stinking home cold remedy.

On the ninth day of Christmas, my husband said to me, “I have a chipped tooth.” “Did you get my rented suit?” “Hope you brought enough loot” for the annual Christmas charity.

On the tenth day of Christmas my husband gave to me a pageant by the wee tots, a gift of a flu shot, and a bird that looked better off than me.

On the eleventh day of Christmas my husband gave to me a bike for construction … where are the instructions? … these are for a wagon … my spirit is draggin’, and besides it’s a quarter past three.

On the twelfth day of Christmas my husband gave to
me gifts of a steam iron, half a water heater, plunger for the bathroom, a blouse size 43, two scented soaps, one paperback, three hair nets, and a toothbrush with a dead battery.