Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin (24 page)

“I’ve noticed you out here for a few Sundays now,” the counterman said. “I figured maybe you’re having trouble getting around, and I could get you something.”

“Thanks anyway,” Tepper said. “I don’t think anything today.”

The counterman started to straighten up. Then he said, “Are you waiting for somebody?”

“No,” Tepper said.

“Oh. Well …,” the counterman said. “Guess I should get back.” But he made no move to leave. He smiled, in a friendly way. Finally, he said, “Just here, parking?”

“Exactly,” Tepper said. “I’m just here, parking.”

The counterman didn’t say anything for a while. He was still leaning on the car door, looking in the window. Then he said, “You’re just here parking because you feel like it, and if someone wants the spot, it’s too bad, because it’s your spot, and it’s a legal spot—right? Listen,
a lot of times, I feel like doing something like this myself. You know, it can get pretty irritating with some of those customers.”

“I’ll bet,” Tepper said.

“They’ll say, ‘Gimme a nice whitefish.’ So I’ll say, ‘One whitefish, coming right up.’ Cheerful. Pleasant. And they’ll say, ‘A
nice
whitefish.’ Can you imagine? This happens every Sunday at least once. I could prevent it, of course. I could head it off. You know how I could prevent it …”

“Well,” Tepper said. “I suppose—”

“Of course!” the counterman said, “I could just repeat after them exactly: ‘A nice whitefish.’ But I won’t. I won’t give them the satisfaction. What I really feel like saying when they correct me—when I say, ‘One whitefish, coming up,’ and they say, ‘A
nice
whitefish’—is, ‘Oh? Well, I’m glad you said that, because I wasn’t going to get you a
nice
whitefish. If you hadn’t said that, I would have looked for a whitefish that’s been sitting there since last Tisha B’Av—an old, greasy,
farshtunken
whitefish. Because that’s what we serve here mostly. That’s our specialty. That’s how we’ve managed to stay in business all these years. That’s why the Russ family is synonymous with quality and integrity in this city for maybe seventy-five years—because they sell their steady customers rotten, stinking whitefish. That’s why the boss gets up at four in the morning to go to the suppliers, so he can get the
farshtunken
whitefish before his competitors. Otherwise, if he slept until a civilized hour, as maybe he deserves by now, he might get stuck with
nice
whitefish.’ ”

“There’s always something,” Tepper said.

The counterman, looking exhausted from his speech, could only nod and sigh. He glanced into the store and then looked back at Tepper. “Listen,” he said. “Do you mind if I sit with you for a minute? It looks like it’s quiet in there. I could take a little break.”

“Why not?” Tepper said. He opened the passenger door and slid over to make room for the counterman.

2001

FAMILY MATTERS

“We got married in that awkward period in the history of domestic relations between dowries and prenuptial agreements.”

The English resent the fact that we’ve never been willing to use the boys’ names they favor; they’ve always suspected us of thinking that their names are for sissies. I once came up with a plan to deal with that. It was a rather utopian plan—a sort of name exchange. For a certain number of years, a lot of Americans would name their boys Cedric and Cyril and Trevor and Evelyn. Well, maybe not Evelyn. I’m not sure an American kid would make it as far as third grade with a
name like Evelyn. At the same time, we invite the English to name their boys American names. Then, sooner or later, the United States would have a lot of grown-up men with English-sounding names and there will be a lot of people in England named LeRoy and Sonny.

Think of how proud the English would be on the first year that every single linebacker on the National Football League all-star team is named Nigel. If the plan works perfectly, the Queen’s Honors List that same year will have on it a noted musicologist named Sir Bubba Thistlethwaite.

I gave up that scheme. I didn’t want to drain any energy away from my campaign to have people name their sons Calvin. It’s easy to laugh—you people named Charles and Robert and John. You don’t know what it’s like walking around with an obsolescent name. Those of us named Calvin sometimes feel like someone named Hepzibah. So we’ve banded together to get more people to name their kids Calvin. Just for company. I spent a lot of time talking to some good friends in Nova Scotia, where we live in the summer, trying to persuade them to name the baby they were expecting Calvin—so much time, in fact, that they finally said maybe I could think of something else to talk about. After that, I found myself lobbying their five-year-old daughter, Ruthie. I figured she’d be influential when the time came.

I said, “What name were you thinking of as a name for this lovely little addition to your family, Ruthie?”

And Ruthie said, “Static Cling.”

“What if it’s not a boy?” I asked her.

She said, “Freezer Burn.”

When the baby came, it was a boy and they named him Calvin. They
preferred
Calvin to Static Cling. The same week, I got a birth announcement from Rhode Island—another Calvin. Now I think we might be on a roll.

Being named Calvin has not been all negative. During the first term of the Reagan Administration—what I believe historians now refer to as Voodoo I—I was asked by the government to make a cultural-exchange visit to South America. I was surprised to be asked. I had, in my role as jackal of the press, said some unkind things about the Administration. I had speculated, for instance, that for a long time President Reagan had been under the impression that Polaris
was a denture cleanser. When the question came up of how close the Reagans were as a family, I had reported the rumor that a trailing photographer on Fifth Avenue had witnessed Ronald Reagan, Jr., wave and yell “Hiya, Dad!” to a man who turned out to be Joel McCrea. “What good sports they are!” I thought. “Sending me to South America anyway on a cultural-exchange visit.” Then I got to thinking what the Administration’s idea of culture might be, and realized that I had been confused with Calvin Klein.

1990

Yes, of course I’ve been thinking about the marriage of Valerie Jane Silverman and Michael Thomas Flaherty—two fine-looking and richly accomplished graduates of Harvard, class of 1987—who tied the knot some weeks ago and adopted as a common family name Flaherman.

I did not need all of those telephone calls asking if I had, by chance, missed the Flahermans’ wedding announcement in the Sunday
New York Times
. I stated years ago that the wedding announcements have always been the first news I turn to on Sunday in the
Times
. It has been my custom to do some careful analysis of the family background of each bride and groom, and then to try to envision the tension at the wedding reception.

The names going into the marriage are, of course, helpful to that sort of vision—as is the assumption that every human being has at least one truly dreadful cousin. In an overtly bi-ethnic merger such as the marriage of Valerie Silverman to Michael Flaherty, I would ordinarily have wondered whether Mike Flaherty’s dingbat fourth cousin, who has been assuring all of the Silvermans that some of his best friends are Jewish, will actually fall into conversation toward the end of the evening with an equally brash cousin of Valerie Silverman’s who has
been poking every Flaherty he meets in the ribs and saying, “I guess you’ve heard the one about Murphy, O’Leary, and the two priests.”

In recent years, though, the name taken after the wedding has added to my concerns. Whether or not the bride is going to retain her last name has become an important element in the announcement. You have to wonder whether the Nancy Jones who announces that she will be keeping her surname after marrying a young man named Chomoldsley Rhoenheushch is a committed feminist or a weak speller. And I’ve been wondering lately whether a wedding someday between, say, the son of Madonna and the daughter of Sting would produce a nice young couple who had to start married life with no last name at all.

The Flaherman nuptials were particularly interesting to me because of the possibility that their approach to merging names as well as lives was the outgrowth of a warning I issued fifteen years ago about the danger of liberated young couples combining surnames by connecting them with hyphens.

At the time, I pointed out that if Penelope Shaughnessy married Nathaniel Underthaler while her best friend, Jennifer Morganwasser, married Jeremiah Christianson, and then the children of those two unions, Jedidiah Shaughnessy-Underthaler and Abigail Morganwasser-Christianson, themselves got married, these offsprings would end up as a couple named Jedidiah and Abigail Shaughnessy-Underthaler-Morganwasser-Christianson. Which means that they could never expect to get their name into a newspaper headline unless it was a headline announcing, say, World War III.

I think what the Flahermans—and, presumably, others by now—have done is a resourceful solution to the problem of how modern women can retain their names without creating monikers that make the signature run off the line every single time. One of the people I talked to about this situation—those of us who are devoted to the wedding section of the
Times
are likely to be sharing impressions of this or that announcement late on a Sunday morning, when people in other households are discussing the trouble in the Balkans or thinking about turning to the breakfast dishes—said that Flaherman struck him as a less euphonious name than, for instance, Silverty, but I consider that a quibble.

So congratulations to the Flahermans. And what if they have a son who wins the hand of Daphne Shaughnessy-Underthaler-Morganwasser-Christianson? We’ll deal with that problem when we get to it.

1992

I married Alice under the assumption that she could spell “occurred.” She now insists that nothing specific was mentioned about “occurred.” It seems to me, though, that implicit in someone’s making a living as a college English teacher is the representation that she is a speller with a repertoire adequate to any occasion. She certainly knew that the only person in her line of work I had any experience being related to, my cousin Keith from Salina, reached the finals of the Kansas state spelling bee. She now says Cousin Keith’s spelling triumph was never spoken of between us. I distinctly remember, though, that I listed for Alice the highlights of our family’s history, as any prospective bridegroom might for his future wife, and Cousin Keith has always been part of my standard Family History recitation—along with my cousin Neil, who was once the head drum major of the University of Nebraska marching band, and my Uncle Benny Daynofsky, who in his early eighties was knocked down by a car while planting tomatoes in his own backyard in St. Joseph, Missouri. It is significant that she does not deny knowing about Uncle Benny.

Is spelling the sort of thing that modern young couples get straightened out beforehand in marriage contracts? I wouldn’t bring this up after all of these years, except that, as it happens, I can’t spell “occurred” either. I was forced to look it up twice in order to write the first paragraph, and once more to get this far in the second. Somehow, I had expected to marry someone whose spelling would be, if not perfect, at least complementary to mine. We would face the future
with heads held high, and maybe a short song on our lips—confident that together we could spell anything they dished out. Before we had been married a month, the real world started to eat away at that fantasy: It turned out that Alice was not very good on “commitment.” I don’t mean she didn’t have any; she couldn’t spell it. I have never been able to spell “commitment” myself.

I know how to spell “embarrass”—usually considered by double-letter specialists to be a much more difficult word. I have been able to spell it for years. I planted “embarrass” in my mind at an early age through a rather brilliant mnemonic device having to do with bar stools. In fact, not to make a lot out of it, I had always thought of my ability to spell “embarrass” as a nice little facility to bring to a marriage—the sort of minor bonus that is sometimes found in a husband’s ability to rewire lamps. (I can’t rewire a lamp, but I can change the bulb, usually. That qualifies as what I believe is called an “allied skill.”) We have now been married thirteen years, and Alice still has not asked me how to spell “embarrass.” Apparently, she has a mnemonic device of her own. I have never inquired. That sort of thing doesn’t interest me.

For a while, our reformist friends used to urge us to make a list of the words that troubled both of us—their theory being that some wretched consistency in the American educational system would be further documented by the fact that a husband and wife who went to public schools thirteen hundred miles apart were left without the ability to spell precisely the same words. Converts to the new politics of lowered expectations have told me that I should simply accept Alice’s spelling limitations and comfort myself with thoughts of the many splendid qualities she does have—the way Americans are now supposed to settle for only two gigantic automobiles, reminding themselves that some people in Chad have none at all. I have tried that. I have reminded myself that Alice can explain foreign movies and decipher road maps. I suspect that in a pinch she might be able to rewire a lamp. But, having come of drinking age in the 1950s, I may be culturally immune to the politics of lowered expectations. I can’t get over the suspicion that a politician who preaches that doctrine is really arguing that we ought to settle for him.