Living Out Loud

by Anna Quindlen

  Now, of course, hot pants have returned to their former status as a condition rather than a garment, and I have developed a bit more sense. But still I feel that I have not got the self-image down, what one of my friends calls “The Look.” Now that I have passed from college to first job to marriage to other jobs to kids, I should have some sense of what to take off the rack: Silk dresses? Black separates? Stone-washed denim? It’s not that I should know how to dress; I should know who I’m dressing. But when I group my clothing according to the traits conveyed, my closet looks like a convention of multiple-personality cases.

  So I contemplate short skirts. They were once me, although that was a time in my life when my character was so ambiguous it could have qualified as protoplasm. But are they me now? And which me are they? And is that the me I want other people to see? Boy, I wish buying clothes was about clothes. I hate character analysis in front of a three-way mirror, especially when I am looking at the back reflection. I hold up a skirt on a hanger and imagine it ten years from now, a sociological find, a conversation piece: Remember when they tried to bring short skirts back, and you were dumb enough to buy one? Was that really YOU who did that?

  SHOP LIKE A MOM

  I was doing the family grocery shopping accompanied by two children, an event I hope to see included in the Olympics in the near future. Not until we were putting the food on the little treadmill at the checkout counter did I realize I had not personally picked out many of the items in the cart.

  There was shoestring licorice, a small jar of macadamia nuts that was more expensive than the earrings I was wearing, and a box of Mallomars. There were also two more boxes of breakfast cereal than I had bargained for: one kind of cereal shaped like tiny ice cream cones filled with chocolate-chip ice cream, and another called Cocoa Puffs, which I remember fondly from my childhood chiefly because they turned the milk brown.

  I took all this stuff back amid wild wailing and picked up the mouthful of yogurt raisins my younger child had spit all over the checkout line in his anger and distress. “I shall not be moved,” I said in the car, looking at them both in the rearview mirror. “I wanted the ice cream cereal,” screamed the elder.

  I’m under a lot of pressure to shop like a mom. My mom shopped like a mom, too, but in her day it was easier. Those were the days when people believed that fats were what God put in food to make it taste good. When my mom went shopping, she bought cookies with ingredients that sounded like a science fair experiment, fruit drinks with no fruit, and huge loaves of bread that could be compressed to the size of a handball with one squeeze. It was never enough. There were still the fights with the kids, the incredible outrage we could summon at the suggestion that a four-pound Almond Joy bar was an unreasonable purchase.

  Now that I am on the other side, I can understand why a civilized woman who knows the difference between emulsifiers and real food would nonetheless shop like a mom. You want to minimize the fights and you want some appropriate food on hand if by chance you sink to the lowest levels of human degradation and start watching The Colbys.

  I swore it would never come to this. On the subject of feeding my first child, I was what you might call a real pain. For the first six months of his life he got nothing but breast milk, accompanied by the occasional rhapsody about nourishing him from my own body. When I put him on solids, I carried a little food mill everywhere; it became traditional at family gatherings to see me hunched over a plate of steamed carrots, grinding them and mixing them with yogurt.

  I knew those days were gone forever when I found myself recently splitting a bag of Cheez Doodles with my sons. (You know everything about Cheez Doodles by the way Cheez is spelled. I mean, would you buy a sauce for your asparagus called Holl-N-Daze?) It was not companionable; none of us were talking, just scarfing down those little curlicues like attack dogs at feeding time. Finally my first child, he of the breast milk and puréed carrots, looked up and grinned, a salty orange grin. “Mommy, I like this stuff,” he said.

  The father of the children is disturbed by these lapses. He does not like to come home and, reading the hieroglyphics on their dinner plates, discover that the children ate takeout Chinese food instead of roast chicken and steamed string beans. But the father of the children is not home to hear the pleading: “Please can we have dumplings? Please can we have choo choo pork? Please can we have fortune cookies?” The younger one—who takes after Sylvester Stallone and tends to confine himself to one-word sentences that sound like depth charges detonating—stomps about and shouts, “Spareribs!”

  The father of the children remembers a time when I was a careful shopper and a devoted cook. He forgets that at the time my Tupperware was not being used as bathtub toys, my vegetable steamer basket had not become a pond for the plastic dinosaurs, and nobody was using the garlic press as a gun. (It was also a time when I sublimated my true nature and pretended that I thought Ring Dings were revolting, which is a lie.)

  The eldest child came home the other day begging, pleading, whining for some fabulous, delicious, absolutely transcendent food he’d had at a friend’s house. It was red, he said. It had bananas; you could hold it in your hand and see through to your finger, you could make it dance. We had to have it. With horror I realized what he was saying. He wanted Jell-O.

  Do you know that I once had a theory that if you fed children nothing but nutritious foods, with no additives, preservatives, or sugar, they would learn to prefer those foods? I should have recognized the reality at the first birthday party, when tradition triumphed over nutrition and I made chocolate cake for the guest of honor. He put one fistful in his mouth and gave me a look I would not see again until I brought a baby home from the hospital and told him the baby was going to stay. The cake look, roughly translated, said, “You’ve been holding out on me.” He set about catching up. The barber gave him lollipops, the dry cleaner a Tootsie Roll. At the circus he had cotton candy, which is the part of the balance of nature designed to offset wheat germ.

  The other night for dinner he was having vegetable lasagna and garlic bread, picking out the zucchini, the spinach, even the parsley—“all the green stuff”—and eating only the parts of the bread that had butter. “Know what my favorite food is, Mom?” he said. “Sugar.”

  THE ROYAL WEDDING PIG - OUT

  The Royal Wedding Pig-Out began promptly at 5:30 A.M. with the traditional opening of the bag of peanut M & M’s. These were the same peanut M & M’s that were served on this very same sofa bed at the wedding of Lady Diana Spencer and the Prince of Wales some years ago (well, not the same bag, but the same size and variety of candy), and were in no way meant to reflect on the eating habits of the bride, the former Miss Sarah Ferguson. It’s bad enough having showers and fittings and rehearsals before your wedding without having everyone talking about how much you weigh.

  Several weeks ago, the paper printed the extraordinary measurements of Miss Ferguson, who is built like a real person who actually consumes food; reporters even slipped a tape around the hips of her wax facsimile at Madame Tussaud’s in London. If she had not become a public figure the moment Prince Andrew popped the question, I think Miss Ferguson would have had an excellent lawsuit on the Tussaud incident alone, something along the lines of first-degree humiliation or conspiracy to commit embarrassment.

  The Royal Wedding Pig-Out is an object of ridicule in my home. I will agree to rise before the sun for three special occasions: the ritual feeding of a baby (intermittently), the ritual fishing with the father (very intermittently) and the Royal Wedding Pig-Out (every five years or so). Despite the sporadic nature of the Pig-Out, the rules are clear. There will be tears during the reciting of the vows. The bride will be admired. And the Nestlé Crunch bar will not be eaten until the ceremony is over.

  My husband thinks that the Pig-Out is a function of two things: the fact that I am an Anglophile, thanks in part to a profound and very early attachment to the writings of Charles Dickens and good toffee, and the fact that I am a glutton and seek
excuses to eat junior high school food. This is accurate but incomplete. I am also a brideophile. On Sundays I read the society announcements. “Bad veil,” I mutter while my husband rolls his eyes. I have old scrapbooks filled with photographs of wedding gowns, which I apparently thought, at age thirteen, were the ultimate dress-for-success outfits.

  I have outgrown some of my illusions; I no longer think that the Empire waist is attractive, for example. But I still love the idea of women caught in the act of getting married. I could care less about men. When the groom is riding through the streets during the Royal Wedding Pig-Out, I go to the kitchen, make a pot of coffee, and call friends who are Pigging-Out in their own homes and scream, “Is this great or what?”

  I have traced this to a time in my life when the sole important occasion with a woman at its center was a wedding. I would gladly stay up all night to see the investiture of Pope Mary I, but the chances of this happening in my lifetime seem slim. I would even go to Washington, which is saying something for me, just to glimpse Jane Q. Public being sworn in as the first female President of the United States, while her husband holds the Bible and wears a silly pillbox hat and matching coat. But for most of my life the only ceremonies I’ve been to at which women were the stars were weddings. So I like weddings.

  This does not necessarily reflect my views on marriage. There are good marriages and bad marriages, but there are no bad weddings, except for those in scuba gear or on horseback. Most weddings have a kind of certainty to them. When I turned on the news last weekend to check out Caroline Kennedy’s wedding dress, it was soothing to see that she was as skinny as she was ever going to be in her life, which seems to be the norm for all brides except the current Princess of Wales. It was also reassuring to see that Caroline Kennedy’s mother, the most poised woman in America, was in possession of a quivering lower lip.

  Sarah Ferguson looked beautiful, too, and she and the bridegroom actually looked like they were in love. (Of course, there are surprises at every wedding. At this one, for example, the Queen wore a creditable hat.) I always feel myself empathizing with the bride: Did she get any sleep? Has anyone mentioned that her necklace is crooked? Doesn’t that train weigh a ton? All this once made me think that I would love being the bride myself. That I didn’t was one of the two great disappointments of my own wedding. (The other was that my hair did not curl, but that’s an ugly story and better forgotten.) Doing it yourself is simply not the same as sitting back with a good candy bar and watching someone else do it, which I suppose is why some people are voyeurs.

  I hope Sarah enjoyed herself as much as I did, but I doubt it. She was probably too busy worrying about her veil and her train and whether anyone was going to slip behind her and throw a tape measure around her waist. Now she can relax, eat all she wants, and settle down to the business of being married, which is often more fun than getting married and can be done in much more comfortable clothes.

  As for me, I will wait five years for Prince Edward to get married. I’ve got the Pig-Out down to a science, as precise as the parade route from Westminister Abbey to Buckingham Palace. When they come out on the balcony, I break out the Pepperidge Farm cookies. If, however, there is ever a royal wedding in the late afternoon, Greenwich Mean Time, I have already decided to introduce a Blimpie and a beer.

  A BASEBALL WIMP

  It was during the thirteenth inning, with it all tied up at 3-3, that I found myself hanging over the partition inside a Checker cab, my back end in the back seat, my front end in the front, twisting the dials of the radio to find the playoff game between the Mets and the Astros. My driver, who had been tuned to so-called easy-listening music, was a Thai immigrant who seemed to think that what he was witnessing was exactly what you could expect of indigenous Americans. His English was spotty, but moments before I finally picked up the game amid a ribbon of relentless static, he did manage to say feelingly, “You big fan.”

  Well, no. Actually, I am what is known in the vernacular as a baseball wimp. I ignore the whole season until, each year at this time, during the playoffs and the World Series, I become terribly interested in baseball. You’ve heard Reggie Jackson called Mr. October? I am Ms. October. Someone very nicely described it the other night as eating the whipped cream off the sundae. At home, not nicely at all, I am described as a disgrace to a noble sport, a fair-weather fan, a Joanie-come-lately.

  I’ve always liked baseball, even as a child, when tradition dictated that I should be prohibited from playing, and my three brothers should be egged on. I like the sense of both the camaraderie and the aloneness of it, the idea of nine men working together in a kind of grand pavane—pitcher to catcher, shortstop to second baseman to first baseman—and the idea of one man looking down the loaded barrel of a pitcher’s arm and feeling the nice clean solid thunk as he hits a ball that will fly into the bleachers. (I like basketball, too. I do not like football, which I think of as a game in which two tractors approach each other from opposite directions and collide. Besides, I have contempt for a game in which players have to wear so much equipment. Men play basketball in their underwear, which seems just right to me.)

  But I like other things, too. I like a sense of drama, and I have to admit that I just don’t find the question of whether someone is out at the plate in the third inning of the forty-eighth game of the season that inherently dramatic. I like a sense of continuity, and in today’s baseball you don’t get much. As soon as I take a shine to a player, he’s gone—to another team or to run a car dealership somewhere in the Middle West. I have never fully recovered from the disappearance of a player from the Yankees called Chicken Stanley, for whom I developed an unwarranted affection some years back, not because of his playing or even his funny name, but because he looked somehow vulnerable and pathetic in pinstripes.

  I like a sense of community, and in the early months of the baseball season it always seems to me that the community consists mainly of solitary men staring glassy-eyed at television sets and occasionally saying to befuddled three-year-olds, “Shortstop! That’s a good position for you. Shortstop!” On the occasions when I try to join this community, I always blow it by doing something stupid, like screaming when Reggie Jackson hits a triple because I still think he plays for New York, or saying, when a player comes up to bat, “Boy, he’s cute,” which can throw a pall on the whole afternoon. Playoff games produce real community. I monitored the final National League playoff game in stages: first with an entire office full of people clustered around a television in midtown Manhattan; then in the cab with the radio; next in a commuter bus in which two people were listening to Walkman radios and reporting to all assembled, saying things like “They’ve tied it up” (groans) and “The Astros just struck out” (cheers), and then to a street being patrolled by a man in a white Pinto who kept leaning out and yelling, “Top of the sixteenth, still tied.” I made it home to watch the last inning with my husband.

  Baseball at this stage of the game offers just about everything I want. With only a handful of teams in contention, I can keep track of who’s who and what they do best, of who can’t run and who can’t hit and who can’t field. Each play is fraught with meaning, each loss a joy or a disaster. And each game is played before great communities of people, in bars, in rec rooms, even in offices, the ranks of the faithful swelled by those who have a passing interest and those who have no interest at all in baseball, but know a good cliffhanger when they see one—the same kind of people who watched the first episode this season of Dallas to see what happened to Bobby and then forgot about it. In fact, at this time of year baseball becomes a different kind of spectacle for me, something more along the lines of As the Bat Swings. Will Keith lose his temper? Will Lenny be a hero? Will Davey show emotion? Now we get down to the soap operas, and Chicken Stanley or no Chicken Stanley, I love soap operas.

  STUFFING

  This is the story of a turkey, and the things she cooked for Thanksgiving dinner. It is not an easy story to tell. It includes a bulb baster, tho
se useless little metal rods Julia Child uses for trussing, and quantities of cheesecloth heretofore undreamed of. And butter—my God, the butter. Even now, a full year later, I can see my hands stretched before me, gleaming horribly like that cranberry jelly you get in a can.

  It’s hard to know where to begin. My husband says that I was conscious and not on drugs, alcohol, or cold medication when I decided to invite both my family and his family to our home for Thanksgiving dinner last year. Only eighteen people could make it. Some had other commitments. Perhaps they had heard that it would be my first turkey.

  I bought the bird from the butcher. “I need the biggest fresh turkey you can manage to trot out,” I said, struggling into my competent person’s air like a pair of 501 Levi’s two sizes too small. The butcher wrote on a piece of brown paper. I went home and read cookbooks. One said that in cooking turkey, allow fifteen minutes a pound. Another said allow twenty-five minutes a pound. One said to cook the turkey five hours. Another said to cook the turkey eight hours. “It depends,” said my mother-in-law. “On what?” “On how accurate your oven temperature is,” she said.