To My Ex-Husband (22 page)

None of this takes into account, however, the inevitable balsam/Douglas fir controversy that is certain to arise, the lovely aroma of the former versus the needle staying power of the latter. Edward himself would go for something roughly two feet high and unscented, in acrylic.

Still to be settled is whether we do gifts on Christmas Eve, as they have always done, or on Christmas morning, as we have always done. If the Christmas Eve tradition prevails, Annie will have to open hers later, by herself. She'll be with you on Christmas Eve.

June told me that you've bought a house. She says it's completely charming, and has an extra bedroom. I don't suppose you'll be moving in time for Christmas …

1989

JANUARY 8

Another new year—and early menopause! I'm not a Brady Bunch kind of woman, I can see that. I wonder if there was an episode in which the mother didn't get her period for months on end, a situation much exacerbated by the holidays.

Being at home does not bring out the best in children. In terms of behavior, I would set the average age at about five. They play in their rooms with their respective friends until Edward and I announce that dinner is ready, at which time they come skipping and squealing into the kitchen, look at their food, pick it over, and say “What's in it?” Then, as the meal progresses and Edward and I ask that they try to refrain from sprawling across the table, they whine. “It's not like it's a formal dinner party, Dad.”

If they were five, you could say, “Go to your room.” Only since most of them are in college, you'd have to say, “Go to your guest room.”

Tony's girlfriend was perfectly delightful, though, and very solicitous of Annie, who felt left out. Edward and I kept asking each other, “Now why couldn't our children be like
that
?” Nina, in her usual sane voice, has reminded me that our children
are
like that—when they're at someone else's house.

Now we're whittled back down to just Melissa. Edward describes life with Melissa as like in a “demilitarized zone.” But Edward himself is no day at the beach when she's at home. They're like a cat and dog circling each other around the food bowl. It occurs to me occasionally that Melissa is fine—that Edward is the problem.

In any event, we've made progress. Recently, Melissa asked me a direct question—her first. (This is someone, bear in mind, who calls her father at work to let him know that there's nothing in the refrigerator that she likes to eat. There's none of
her
food. Not that identifying her food is that simple. She no longer eats anything that's been tied up or has a face. She was eating yogurt, but now milk products are suspect. So we're pretty much down to pasta and free-range lettuce.) Anyway, Melissa wanted to know, was I going to let my hair get gray?

“To match my clothes?” I asked. She had used the washing machine to dye some shirts black, and the dye was still in the machine the next time I used it. With my gray clothes and my gray hair, I'd be an adolescent's dream. Put me against a gray January sky and I'd be invisible.

Melissa's question touched me in a funny way. It meant she had a view of what she wanted her father's girlfriend to be like, or at least to look like. That meant that she had an opinion. She wasn't indifferent, as I had thought. She didn't say it, but I assumed that she didn't want me to let my hair get gray, which presented something of a dilemma.
I
wanted to let my hair get gray. At the same time, I wanted to please Melissa. I wasn't indifferent, either. The girl is growing on me.

Melissa is in the habit of wearing big clothes, things that don't actually come in contact with her body. The clothes in combination with this full, wavy head of honey-colored hair give her a rag doll quality that perhaps I'd begun to find irresistible. That, and the gnawing awareness of how hard it must be to be uprooted at that age, to give up your room, your house, your street, the path to your friend's house, your bus stop; to find yourself with a whole new set of territorial imperatives, to suffer the scrutiny of people who feel like aliens to you, people who want you to do things for-your-own-good, people who think they are interested in who you are, but who will not rest until you are more like them. I'd developed a need to pick Melissa up, sit her in my lap, and read her a story. But no story would be enough; it's never enough to say, I know how you feel.

FEBRUARY 6

There was a time (during our marriage, for instance) when a man was out of place in the kitchen. He was a vestigial organ that hung about with his hands in his pockets, asking if there was anything he could do. Cooking was a gene thing. To ask your husband to prepare dinner was as outrageous as asking him to change the color of his eyes. So I secretly longed for a man who would step into the kitchen, step up to the stove, and say, “Well, tonight we're having noisettes of lamb with a raspberry vinegar sauce.”

Of course, it needn't have been anything so grand as all that. I would have been grateful with some cozy, competent middle ground between the Frugal Gourmet and you, the fellow who used to get me out of the shower because the rice had come to a boil.

I remember, some years ago, forming a prophetic opinion about all this. Harvey was making an omelet that was a work of art. From the first flick of the wrist as he cracked the eggs to the final product as it flipped up into the air and came down in the pan, I felt as if he had donned a cape and flown out of a phone booth. It was then I decided that if I ever married again it would not be for money, nor even, necessarily, for love. It would be for that omelet, that sparkle of perfection that had danced in my dreams. I would commit myself forever to the first man who could make it.

This was, as we say today, in another life. Now, in my new life, I am putting the cover on a pot of peas. The sound of the lid clicking into place stirs a proprietary interest on the other side of the room. It is he who has passed the omelet test. “Just a minute,” he says, rushing to the rescue. “Wait for the water to boil first. Then put the cover on.”

“Does it really matter?” I ask, knowing it doesn't. I know, you see, because I have been cooking peas for a quarter-century. He can tell me about the
soufflé de saumon
if he wants to. He can tell me about the
champignons farcis
. But he cannot tell me about peas.

“Yes, it matters,” he says. “Part of the cooking process is the gradual increase in heat …”

Okay, so he can tell me about peas. All the better to move on to the salad dressing, my area of expertise. I use my usual, time-honored recipe of lemon, olive oil, a touch of tarragon, and a bit of mustard. I like it, the children like it, my ex-husband—where are you when I need you?—always liked it.

Edward, however, does not like it. One dip of the finger determines that it “lacks zip.” But not to worry. What I have here, he explains gently, as if speaking to a small child, is not a salad dressing, but the basis for a salad dressing. He will add pepper and Parmesan, more mustard, maybe, and some garlic. What do I think?

What do I
think?
I think, Why don't I just go get a glass of wine and lie down?

What is this? Has my mother forgotten to tell me something? Why would a woman sit her daughter down and discuss the ways of the world and, more specifically, the ways of men, and neglect to mention the apparently incontrovertible importance of a gradual increase in heat? With respect to peas, I mean.

And that's not all. Recently, while I was performing that most familial of culinary tasks, baking a cake, Edward made a seemingly simple inquiry. Had I tested the baking powder to see if it was still good?

This may be naive on my part, but I take the shelf life of my baking powder for granted, not unlike that Fire 'n' Ice lipstick rolling around in my medicine cabinet that dates back to the fifties. Slices of roast beef, or pints of cream, they're something else. They scream to be released at a certain point. My mother must have felt that way, too. Otherwise, she surely would have clued me in about the all-important baking-powder test.

Frankly, it's more than I want to know. And, at the risk of being ungrateful, I feel similarly about the top on the pot of peas.

And so, in having surrendered sovereignty of the stove to a higher and, in this instance, masculine authority, I reflect: Maybe I never made mouths water; maybe I stunted the cultural growth of a trusting and innocent family by stooping to use the blender method for the béarnaise. Now, thanks to an answered prayer, the culinary equivalent of the Second Coming, I know better. But I'm reminded of an old expression that the enlightened often impart to the unenlightened: “You don't know what you're missing.” It seems a glib and rather reckless statement. For it may not be the best thing to find out. To know can mean to fall from grace. You can be a second-class citizen in your own kitchen. Far wiser, then, to heed those who warn, “Be careful what it is you ask for. You might get it.”

FEBRUARY 23

Nina's father died last week. He was buried, which surprised me. I didn't know him so well that I could really speculate on his wishes with any accuracy, but I didn't think he was a religious man. He never made a point of his religion, at least not publicly. Now, it turns out, he had converted to Catholicism in his later years. No one seemed aware of that, even Nina and her mother, except in the vaguest way, and it was their job to put together the suit, tie, and shoes that he was to wear for burial.

None of this, of course, is unusual in itself. But it made me think of how we sign our name, so to speak, when we take our leave of this world. It's our final stamp, the mark of who we are. What I don't understand is why that mark is so often a secret, a posthumous message left in a sealed envelope under a blotter on the deceased's desk. My father went so far as to buy a burial plot—and then scribbled frantically at the eleventh hour that he wanted to be cremated.

Maybe it seemed like too much trouble, suddenly, that someone would have to go around shopping for a casket. Or maybe he was disturbed by the notion of being hermetically sealed, preserved in the earth, rather than being permitted to return to it. But it begins to make sense to me now about him, not what he wanted, but that he changed his mind about what he wanted. He was a man who switched signals. This was his final, signature switch.

I've always wanted to tell you what it was like at the crematory that morning, but there never seemed an appropriate time. You discouraged me from going; everybody did. The reason it wasn't discussed may have been out of deference to Annie and Peter, who would have been completely freaked out by the idea, or perhaps it had more to do with us. Our marriage was distinguished in those days more by what wasn't said than by what was.

I might have done it out of rebellion, but I'm glad I did. Someone comes and zips your father into a body bag and takes him away. It's the last you see of him. There's no viewing, no grave where you'll sit with a bunch of daisies and commune with the man who made you happy and miserable in equal measure for as long as you knew him.

So I had to see where they took him and what they did to him. I told the driver I'd follow; he didn't seem to mind. Though I knew better, I had a child's image of the place where we were headed: figures of hooded death standing on guard at the gates; thick, black smoke curling about the roof; bodies waiting for the iron jaws of the oven to clang shut on their last light of day. We pulled up in front of a one-story cinder-block building. For a second, I thought that the driver was making an unscheduled stop at a beer distributor's. A door opened, and a man stepped out and began guiding the driver as he backed up to the door. Presently, the man came over and shook my hand. I explained that I was the deceased man's daughter, and that I wanted to stay with him until he was really gone.

I expected a reaction at this, an, “Oh, no, dear, you don't want to do that!” What I got was a high school chemistry teacher with an enthusiasm for his subject. My father was about to become an object lesson.

Standing upright in the corner of this immaculately clean room, reminiscent of a garage except for two large wall ovens, was a big cardboard box. The two men put the box on a gurney and slid my father into it. Then they wheeled the gurney over to oven B and put him in, box and all. If there's been a viewing, the coffin is used. It would take about two and a half hours, at between seventeen hundred and two thousand degrees.

I noticed that there were two doors on the ovens. The outer one was solid and made of stainless steel. The other was a thick fire-brick door and had a small window; you could check the progress of the flames. There was a hole in the near end of the ceiling, over the chest cavity, where most of a person's organs are situated. The flame shot down out of that hole and began licking at the box my father was in.

I was a good student, curious, attentive, listening to the explanations about the air vent, how it's part of a system that works like a catalytic converter on a car; how the air circulates around the outside of the oven, and is cleansed of pollutants before it is released through the chimney. But then he started to lose me.

He—Crispini, I think his name was—was telling me stories about some of his experiences in the business. I heard them, but I didn't take them in. My mind wandered across the lawns of my childhood, my father pushing me on swings, carrying me around on his shoulders, laughing. I was often nervous when he laughed; I worried it wouldn't last. He had that infamous short fuse, my father. And he died the way he lived, suddenly, and in a burst of irritation. His heart gave out. It was as if a cloud passed over, and with it had come just one more change in mood.

I was looking at the little giftlike containers they put the ashes in when Mr. Crispini called out. “Come here,” he said. “You might like to see what's going on.”