Idyll Banter (2003)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "We'll see," my wife yawned.

  And the next day we did. We saw Mickey's better half everywhere. My wife counted five separate Minnie sightings and five different outfits.

  "She's pulling out every dress in her closet for your father," my wife said to our daughter.

  "She's pulling them out for Mickey," my daughter replied indignantly.

  That night we went to dinner at a Disney World hotel where Minnie would be dining. We confirmed our suspicions: The mouse, who's supposed to have set her big, unblinking, plastic eyes on no one other than Mickey, is a vamp. She may even be a trollop. A harlot. A flirt.

  At the very least, however, for one weekend she had a crush on me.

  The indications? When she came to our restaurant table that night, her bloomers were showing, extending a good two inches below one of her trademark red skirts.

  "Your underwear's showing," my wife said to her. (Our daughter couldn't believe that her mother would say such a thing to the mouse and offered the sort of embarrassed, anti-parent death gaze that she will use well as an adolescent.)

  Did Minnie discreetly shield her bloomers? Nope. She pulled up her dress by the hem and revealed even more. "I think you're paying way too much attention to my husband," my wife told her.

  Minnie tried to play coy, but she never stopped smiling. She wrapped her white-gloved paws around my chest, dipped her dinner-plate-sized ears against my retreating hairline, and gave me a very big kiss.

  All the next day--our last in the Kingdom--we watched Minnie's eyes whenever we saw her, but she had made her point and her eyes never moved.

  Mickey, however, had better start opening his.

  Chapter 3.

  MIDLIFE CRISIS RESULTS IN TAKING PART IN THE WEENIE TRIATHLON

  This column appeared nine months before New Hampshire's "Old Man of the Mountain" collapsed. I've no idea whether the triathlon's sponsors will continue to refer to this event as the "Race to the Face," or whether they will use the more precise "Race to the Place Where There Used to be a Face." I thought my young nephew might be on to something when he suggested christening it simply the "Race to the Neck."

  SOMETIMES YOU SEE middle-aged men who are as sensible and wise as Ward Cleaver or Cliff Huxtable, but the truth is that most of the time you are seeing them on television. "Middle-aged man" is actually the Latin term for "Male of the species who does not vacuum and believes Mick Jagger actually looks pretty good for a guy his age."

  Middle-aged men usually have at least one completely senseless and unwise interest, and the rest of their family can only hope it is something as benign as a sudden passion for Civil War re-enactment or taking a second mortgage on the house to buy a two-seater Nissan 350Z.

  My current senseless and unwise interest is the Top Notch Triathlon, a triathlon held the first Saturday in August in Franconia, New Hampshire. Nicknamed the "Race to the Face" because of the course's proximity to New Hampshire's "Old Man of the Mountain," the competition is actually a pretty weenie triathlon. It consists of a seven-mile bike ride--though every mile is uphill, and some of those miles are uphill and in the woods--a swim across the frozen slush of Echo Lake, and a two-and-a-half-mile run up the ski trails on Cannon Mountain.

  My sense is that it was specifically designed for pathetic middle-aged people whose exercise consists usually of reaching under the couch for the remote, or carrying in from the car those hefty two-liter bottles of Pepsi and family-size bags of Doritos. Its slogan sums up the attitude of most participants pretty well: "The Race to the Face is tough, but it's easier than growing up."

  Last year one of my wife's three sisters participated in the triathlon as one-third of a female team, and convinced my brother-in-law and me to start a team and join the race this year. She thought it would either be great fun to have us around her, or we'd both die of exertion and she'd stop having to share her sisters with us.

  My sister-in-law, I should note, had a great time because she was on a team that came in second to last. She was the swimmer on the group, and by the time she dove into the lake the other participants were already huffing their way up Cannon Mountain, and the only people left cheering from the shore were her extended family. She had the whole lake to herself.

  I'm actually not sure how her team managed to overtake one of the teams ahead of her. Maybe someone was eaten by a bear on the mountain.

  In any case, what might save my brother-in-law's and my team from complete athletic ignominy next month is that my wife agreed to be the swimmer. I will bike, my brother-in-law will claw his way up the ski trails, and my wife will keep us in competition by swimming Echo Lake. She's always been a pretty good swimmer because she swims three mornings a week at the Mount Abraham High School pool, but over the last few months she's started to take her swimming more seriously.

  This means that she has been buying lots of new Speedo bathing suits--which brings me back to why I have become so focused on the Top Notch Triathlon. Sure, I'm biking a little more than usual, and recently I even picked up a second pair of bike shorts for the big day. But my real interest has been in helping my wife choose her training suits. I have been a vocal and articulate proponent of the argument that the less material there is in her Speedo, the better her time will be in the water.

  And because my wife knows that the only prayer our team has of not coming in last is her speed in the lake, by that first Saturday in August I should have her down to the official Speedo race thong.

  Yes, we middle-aged men might have interests that are senseless and unwise . . . but at least we are predictable.

  Chapter 4.

  RICE PUDDING AND FRENCH EDITOR HELP NOVICE CYCLIST SURVIVE

  EIGHT DAYS AGO I survived the "Race to the Face," the first triathlon in which I was a participant.

  As a brief recap for those readers who are not related to me by blood and therefore do not begin and end their Sundays with this column: I have been biking with some earnestness this year, because I was going to be one-third of a team in last week's Top Notch Triathlon in Franconia, New Hampshire. I would bike the seven miles uphill toward Franconia Notch, my wife would swim the alpine slush of Echo Lake, and my brother-in-law from Manhattan would run, walk, and--if necessary--crawl his way up to the top of Cannon Mountain.

  I must confess, I didn't think a seven-mile bike ride would be all that difficult, even though it was uphill and almost half in the woods. After all, I'd been biking two and three times a week to the top of the Lincoln Gap.

  Well, as a friend of mine says, "I was wrong before. I'm smarter now."

  I started in the first wave of 150 cyclists (the second wave a mere two minutes behind us), and there were moments in even the first three miles in which I felt like an ailing jalopy in an interstate breakdown lane while high-performance sports cars zoomed past me. I used up so much energy trying to be competitive in the first half of the race that when I reached the portion in the woods I seriously considered pretending to be a bear and going into an early hibernation.

  By the time I dismounted my bike in the transition area and handed off the wristband to my wife so she could embark upon her swim, I looked like one of the living dead from the George Romero horror movies about corpses that refuse to stay buried. Witnesses tell me that I did not exactly race with elan down to the lake to watch my wife swim, but rather staggered there in slow motion, bobbing and weaving like a drunk. My skin, I gather, was the color of craft paste.

  Nevertheless I survived, and I survived in part because during the thirty-six hours before the race I had a personal trainer: My sister-in-law's French editor, Jose Sanchez, happened to be visiting the country and staying with my mother-in-law in New Hampshire. When he was younger, Sanchez used to ride in professional bike races, and he was a cyclist whose specialty was taking on hills.

  Though he couldn't speak a whole lot of English and I couldn't speak a whole lot of French (Translation? None), through my bilingual sister-in-law he offered to discuss the number of teeth in my gears (
I hadn't a clue), and which gears to use on which parts of the hills (I suggested hitching my bike to a truck and being pulled). We agreed I'd have rice pudding for breakfast, which he said was a part of many cyclists' pre-race fare.

  And then on the day of the race itself, he learned two words of English to share with me as I stretched: "Work hard."

  I did. Our team came in thirtieth out of sixty teams, sneaking (barely) into the top half thanks in large measure to my wife's exertion in the lake and my brother-in-law's grit on the mountain. I shaved eight minutes off my best time on my training runs, though this effort did mean that I walked like a cowboy for days and my bike looked like it had been hit by a car.

  Incidentally, other Vermonters were astonishing, including triathlete Jim McIntosh, also of Lincoln. McIntosh--who actually commutes to work via bicycle over the Lincoln Gap--placed eleventh overall, and had the best time in the forty-plus age group.

  Will I do this triathlon again next year? You bet. I may have been in need of a walker when I was done with my portion, but in some ways I'd never felt better: confident, healthy, and not a little proud.

  And I even discovered that I liked rice pudding for breakfast.

  Chapter 5.

  A GARDENER CAN TAKE PRIDE IN THOSE $17 CARROTS

  LATER THIS MONTH I will be spending the night in Sugar Hill, New Hampshire, and one component of my dinner will be carrots that cost about as much as a DVD player.

  I am exaggerating, but not by as much as you think.

  Moreover, these are not rare and unusual carrots: The packet of seeds cost a dollar and change at the hardware store.

  They are, however, a part of a backyard vegetable garden with a price tag approaching $600. Actually, "backyard vegetable garden" implies the garden is small and manageable, perhaps the length and width of a two-car garage. This garden, by comparison, is about the size of Costco.

  Moreover, this three-digit figure is exclusive of all labor costs with the exception of rototilling ($50), because my sister-in-law and I were the labor, and it would be impossible to put a price tag on the joy in-laws share when they are hacking their way through lupine together underneath the hot sun, or battling armies of bugs so dense that at one point (and here I am not exaggerating) my sister-in-law thought I had put gloves on my hands.

  I hadn't.

  Here is what happened. Though my sister-in-law and her family live in Manhattan, they spend their summers at the ancestral homestead in northern New Hampshire. When she was a child, they used to have a vegetable garden, but they hadn't in the last thirty-five years because no one in the family would ever get to the house until July.

  This year she vowed to change that. In early May she had a plot of yard tilled. I offered to plant the garden for her at the end of May, but she wanted to be a part of this joyful process, and so she and her daughter and my mother-in-law took the train to White River Junction so they could participate. The tickets totaled $372.

  I agreed to meet them over Memorial Day weekend to help get the garden in.

  Immediately I noticed the size of the plot: The Joad family in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath never confronted a field this big.

  "Where's the seeder?" I asked. "And the tractor?"

  "The what?"

  "We're planting this by hand, aren't we?"

  She nodded. We began at 5:00 in the morning, possibly earlier than my sister-in-law has ever gotten up in her life. During the next two days, we planted the vegetables of her choice: tomatoes, potatoes, turnips (including something very scary-looking called kohlrabi), lettuce, zucchini, squash, watermelons (be kind--she hails from New York and is unfamiliar with New England tundra), peppers, Swiss chard, radishes, beets, beans (lima, butter, and bush), carrots, cucumbers, and corn.

  The seeds and seedlings cost $47. We spent $49 for manure and $16 for Miracle-Gro.

  Since my sister-in-law was then returning to Manhattan until school ended in June, we placed bark chips and plastic mulch between the rows to minimize the meadows of weeds that were sure to pop up in her absence. The bark chips and mulch rang in at $55.

  When we were done, we took comfort in the notion that if there wasn't a frost, if it rained (but not too much), if the birds didn't eat the seeds, if rabbits or deer didn't eat the early plants, if the weeds didn't become a jungle, and if the lupine didn't return en masse, there would be a mighty fine garden awaiting her return.

  Exact cost: $589.

  Three weeks later, I went by to see what had survived, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that about half of the garden had made it. Nothing needed thinning, that was for sure, but the potatoes and the beets and nine of the carrots (I counted) were thriving.

  In any event, if my sister-in-law were to divide $589 by the number of vegetables we will eat from that garden, it would make an organic tomato in the Antarctic look like a bargain. But then she grew these vegetables herself, and that is the reason we do this.

  Self-sufficiency. Pride. The joy one can only derive from a $17 carrot.

  Chapter 6.

  NOTHING LIKE MOM'S BIOHAZARD

  FOR DINNER

  SOME YEARS AGO my wife and I were trying to spare my mother's feelings, and so we threw away a casserole dish of something she had made with seashell pasta, frozen shrimp, mock crab (not rock crab), stringy mussels, and canned clams. My mother called it fruits del mar or--roughly translated--seafood so bad the smell alone will scar you for life.

  At least once she served the stuff at a dinner party. There were (Surprise!) buckets of leftovers. This was in the early 1970s, when people were downing bourbon and scotch the way today we knock back bottled water, but there wasn't enough alcohol in all of creation to make my parents' dinner guests join the clean-plate club that evening. Consequently, my brother and I ate more than our share of it the following night because--in a rare and completely uncharacteristic show of affection--we thought we should be gentle with our mother's delicate sensibilities. Our mother actually took to her grave the completely mistaken belief that we thought the casserole was not merely edible, it was scrumptious.

  It wasn't. We had four dogs when I was growing up, two of which would eat their own excrement when they were bored, and none of them were willing to touch my mother's fruits del mar.

  That's why one morning my wife and I found ourselves dumping a whole vat of the entree--faux crab, soggy pasta shells, the dried parsley flakes from a jar--down the garbage chute at the end of the hallway in my parents' apartment building in Florida. We had arrived for a visit the night before, and so (naturally) my mother had welcomed us with her signature dish. The next morning when she saw how much remained, she chirped happily, "Oh, good, we can have leftovers tonight!"

  No, we couldn't. At least I couldn't. Consequently, when my parents went out that morning to run some errands, my wife and I got rid of the remnants, telling my mother when she returned that it was just so delicious we had to eat it for breakfast. In hindsight, the casserole was probably a biohazard and the two of us violated Florida's laws regarding the proper disposal of hazardous waste.

  Memories of my mother's fruits del mar came back to me last month because my family and I were in a restaurant, and there on the menu was the entree. The description was a chilling parody of my mother's version: "The freshest seafood--crab or lobster or scallops--in a delicate clam sauce. Served atop our homemade pasta shells."

  That night when we got home I had to call my father to tell him. "You'll never believe it," I said. "We were just out to dinner, and the restaurant actually had a gourmet version of mom's fruits del mar."

  "It's common here in Florida," my father said, "and it's not half-bad when it's made well." Then he laughed and added, "But your mother and I could never understand how you and your brother could eat it the way she made it. Those canned clams used to make us both gag."

  I was stunned--and not a little confused. "Then why did she keep making it for us?"

  "Because the two of you seemed to love it so much. We j
ust figured it was like Velveeta--one of those foods you seemed to enjoy that struck people with normal palates as completely inedible."

  Then he reminded me that during the Super Bowl this past January, it was I who had made a dish with frozen string beans, a can of toasted onion rings, and a big jar of Cheez Whiz.

  "You've always had very special tastes in food," he said.

  My mother and I showed our love for each other in many ways over the years before she died, but perhaps none as unpredictably O. Henry-esque as her exuberant willingness to make me the dreaded fruits del mar and my feigned eagerness when she served it.

  Chapter 7.

  AT DENVER'S GATE B42 WHEN THE WORLD WAS TRANSFORMED

  I WAS AT Gate B42 at Denver International Airport when the world changed Tuesday morning. And change it did. It was not merely the southern tip of the Manhattan skyline that was tragically obliterated, it was the notion that only skyscrapers and embassies in other countries--foreign lands such as Kenya and Tanzania or cities with faraway names like Dhahran--could collapse with a literally earth-shattering suddenness.

  My wife used to work in the World Trade Center when she was a bond trader and we lived in New York. She worked on the 104th floor.

  Only nine months ago, my wife and I showed the two towers to our seven-year-old daughter for the first time, when we were taking her to the Statue of Liberty. We stood in the cold on the ferry and told her stories of how quickly the elevators seemed to move and what the view was like for her mother when she would gaze out the massive windows to the west and the south.