Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

by Amy Krouse Rosenthal

  As a kid, the minute I sensed my parents had sat me down for a you’ve disappointed us discussion, the cry feeling would materialize, reducing me to nothing more than a pulsating throat and two blurry eyes. This kind of admonish-induced cry happens less frequently now that I am an adult, but a few instances do stand out. One was on a trip we took with another family. On the very last night we made a let’s-use-up-all-our-groceries dinner together, and prepared everything in the other family’s quarters. In the middle of the night I woke up with a start: The dishes! We left all those dishes, pans, in their sink. I felt sick thinking about it. First thing the next morning I brought it up—I’m so sorry, I don’t know how that happened, all the wine, I’m so sorry—thinking my friend would just brush it off—don’t be silly, not a big deal. But in the nicest possible way she said, well, I wasn’t going to say anything, but yeah, we were pretty ticked; the kids and I stayed up for a while doing them all. She was totally over it, she said. But that I had done something so thoughtless and sloppy and ungracious—fine, so it wasn’t intentional—filled me with such shame and remorse that I broke out in tears. I tried not to; God knows I tried to hold the cry back. But there was no containing it. My crying made her feel worse for having said anything. We hugged, and then soon departed in our separate rental cars. I cried off and on for another thirty minutes as we drove along the dirt country road.

  Lately, which is to say in my late thirties, I find that I am often moved to tears in my car, alone, listening to music. The combination of the quiet plus music plus cocoonlike detachment plus open-road reflection seems for me to be a potent mix. I really love my sisters, I’ll think. We used to be so little together, with our matching floral parkas and crooked bangs, and now we are grown-ups with families of our own. Or I’ll be excited to share some news with my parents—work-related, or a milestone with one of the kids, or one of those you’re-not-going-to-believe-what-happened stories. News of any kind doesn’t feel real, or thoroughly incorporated somehow, until it’s been relayed to them. I’ll picture the scenario:

  Hi, Mom.

  Ames!

  Hi. Hey, I want to tell you guys something.

  Okay, wait, let me get Dad, he’ll want to hear. Paul, pick up the other phone; Amy is on; she wants to tell us something.

  Yep, I’m here.

  You see? They’re just so sweet.

  While I’m driving, I often think about Ellen. Ellen lived with us for years, helped looked after me and my younger brother and sisters. When I was twenty-four, she was murdered in her apartment. I got the call when I was at work. Within minutes we were all at my parents’ house. What else could we do but cling, and splash water on our red, puffy faces. Ellen wasn’t formally educated, but oh, she was smart. She always said she had mother wit. She could keep our teenage secrets when it was all right to, but she would also know exactly when to call us on our shit. She would warn us of shady friends. My teenage boyfriend was a good egg and she appreciated this fact in a way that I was only fully able to later in retrospect.

  We went to the funeral at her church. There was a lot of singing. My legs felt weak. I was just so sad, stuffed, and sick from a buffet of sadness: heartsick sad, mad sad, numb sad, exhausted sad. It was a long time before anyone could mention her name without me having to excuse myself. A few weeks before she died, I had finally—and how glad was I now—followed through on an idea the two of us had tossed around since I’d moved into my own place. Come sleep over, Ellen! I’ll make you dinner … you can see my place … I can take you to the train the next morning. I made her pasta, I remember that. But she didn’t like the kind I chose; I should have known better—it was the wrong shape, too unusual, too city-girlish. I should have made rice. We watched Johnny Carson together and she rubbed my back like she used to. I felt guilty about it in a way because I wanted this to be my chance to dote on her, but it felt so nice. I tried to insist on her sleeping in my bed—no, Ellen, you take the bed, really, please, you are not sleeping on my couch—but she would have none of it. So there we were—small me in my big bed, big Ellen on my small couch. But she was happy that night, I know she was; me too.

  Another person who often comes to mind when I’m driving is Oscar, the man who ran the overnight camp I went to for eight summers. His wife, Natalie, had MS. I never saw her out of her wheelchair. She was withered and shaky, broken and trapped. On a good day she would raise her arm and wave. H-h-hi, g-g-girls. This was not all: Their daughter, Renee, who always seemed to be about eighteen to me, had some horrible disease since birth. We didn’t know what it was, but she looked a bit off; I mostly remember her fingers looked funny. She was supposed to have died years before, but she kept going and going; everyone knew hers was borrowed time. I spent two months at this camp every summer from the age of nine to the age of sixteen, yet I don’t recall ever giving serious thought to these tragic figures. They were just two more camp fixtures: There’s the lodge; there’s the tetherball pole; there’s the lake; there are Natalie and Renee. They are all dead now; I believe Renee went first, then Natalie, then Oscar.

  Hi, Oscar.

  Amy. What a surprise. How are your sisters?

  They’re good, thanks. I’m sorry that you died, Oscar, and Natalie and Renee, too.

  Yes, we did, didn’t we. It was time.

  Listen. I want to tell you. I want to tell you that I think about you a lot. It had to have been so hard for you all those years, running a camp, and looking after your sick wife and daughter. I didn’t know the word stoic back then, but that’s what you were. I mean, Jesus Christ, Oscar. I’m really sorry. For what you had to go through. And for not realizing more back then, paying closer attention, offering to help or something. You never made us girls feel burdened with your hardship. You carried it all. You gave us everything. I loved camp so much. I still know every camp song. “In the Northwoods of Wisconsin, beneath the skies so blue …” You were a good man. I teach things to my kids that you taught me. It must have been painful watching a hundred and fifty healthy girls frolic about, a hundred and fifty pairs of strong legs, a hundred and fifty strong hearts, a hundred and fifty promising futures. We were just oblivious, we were so busy having the goddamn time of our lives.

  Amy, it’s okay. You were twelve.

  It’s not okay.

  It’s okay.

  I wanted to tell you this.

  THANKFUL

  I’m thankful for my health, my childhood, and spell-check. I’m thankful for our new hot water tank and how we no longer have to coordinate our dishwashing with our bathing. I’m thankful for the wide range of flavors potato chips come in—mesquite barbecue in particular. I’m thankful my job doesn’t require wearing panty hose, or a honking red nose. I’m thankful that I have not had to fight in a war. For platform shoes. For coincidences. I’m thankful there are people who know exactly how to build a house—it seems like such an impossible task to me. I’m thankful for all the people who ever left, in those dishes by the cashier, a penny I later used. I’m thankful that I’m done with the phase of my life where I had to spend hours filling in little circles with a number-two pencil. That I don’t know everything that people say behind my back. That my husband has zero interest in golf. That I am not a Kennedy. That Hitler wasn’t a twin. I’m thankful when plans I made for reasons other than just wanting to fall through. I’m thankful I was born after the advent of indoor plumbing, and after the popularity of corsets. I’m thankful for insect repellent, nonstick pans, and Velcro. I’m thankful for the sun—it just keeps rising, and never asks for anything in return. I’m thankful that people in real life don’t spontaneously break into song like they do in musicals, and that some weeds look like flowers, and that at the end of a really bad day there is sleep. I’m thankful for smart, alert air-traffic controllers. For right turn on red. I’m thankful every time I pull up to a parking meter with free time remaining. I’m thankful that a movie, which costs $200 million to make, still costs only nine dollars to see. I’m thankful for maybe.


  THANKING A STRANGER FOR TAKING YOUR PICTURE

  You’re with a group of friends and one of you asks a stranger, Would you mind taking a picture of us? The stranger obliges. After-ward, everyone shouts thanks! As the thank-yous die down and the stranger starts to walk away, you turn to him, look him in the eye, and say, in a real enunciated and sincere way, thank you, like you and the stranger have an understanding, and that everyone else’s thank-yous were cute and flipp, but yours was the one that counts.

  3841 BORDEAUX

  3841 Bordeaux was my address for a very long time. Technically, I lived there eleven years—from the age of three to the age of fourteen—but it felt like a hundred and eleven years. For those were the years when a year was an eternity of days. Time was somewhere between stretched-out and nonexistent. Life wasn’t forward-moving then; life just was. It was as big and beautiful and motionless as my mahogany bedroom dresser. 3841 felt as forever to me then as the finiteness of life feels to me now. One could count on things. Always: curled-up worms on the sidewalk after it rained. Always: the comforting weekend sound of the Cubs game or the Bears game on TV; the rise and fall of the announcer’s voice; the muffled roar of the crowd; not understanding any of it; steady, likable background noise. Always: my dad’s bottom drawer of neatly folded white undershirts; being able to take them to sleep in, so soft. Always: holidays with the uncles at the card table playing Hearts. Always: reading the cereal box while we ate breakfast, Beth and I. Always: being in my room, hearing the mechanical chinking of the garage door opening and knowing my parents were home. Always: my dad whistling and dressed nicely, even on Sundays, a sweater and pressed slacks. Always: my mom shaving in the tub, one leg hovering in the air, razor gracefully raking from ankle up to knee. Always: getting into bed and feeling the cold underside of the pillow against my forearm. Always: the late-night lullaby of ice knocking against my parents’ water glasses as they came upstairs. There were a lot of always’s. Even today the number 3841 sounds more like infinity to me than the word infinity itself.

  TIP OF TONGUE

  And then in the middle of the night, thank God, the name comes to you. (Blythe Danner.)

  TOAST

  I cannot stress this enough: One second your toast is fine, golden brown; the next second it is black.

  TOAST, DRAWING GOOD

  You can be really bad at something, but because kids cannot do that thing at all, and perhaps have never even seen anybody else do that thing, they think you’re really good at it. For example, I drew this at breakfast and Miles said, Wow, Mom, you draw really good toast.

  TRAINER

  I would like, just once in my life, to have an opportunity that would require me to work out with a trainer for an entire year, à la Linda Hamilton for Terminator 2, or Denzel for Hurricane. Though as a writer, I’m not sure how this would ever come about.

  TRANSLATING A POEM

  That they are able to translate a poem that rhymes—from Portuguese to English, let’s say—to be able to find just the right word with the right nuance, and have it rhyme with solicitous to boot, is just tremendous.

  TRAVEL

  In the end, no one really wants to hear about your trip.

  See also: Other People; Returning from Journey

  TUBE OF OINTMENT

  I could never figure out a good way to open an ointment tube. I would poke the aluminum seal with a kitchen fork prong or with tweezers. I was in my early thirties when I learned that the outside of the cap was designed specifically to puncture it.

  TUESDAY NIGHT

  There are proponents of New Year’s Eve, and there are proponents of regular Tuesday nights. I am one of the latter, much happier residing in the wake of the mundane. One evening after a good dinner, the kids and I were taking a walk, and we got stopped by a complete stranger. She had seen us from her window, she said, and ran down because the back of her dress was jammed in the zipper, and she couldn’t undo it herself. The kids stood and watched as I helped her unzip her dress. She thanked us and went back inside. That was a really great night.

  Such was the case even when I was a schoolgirl: I tended to dread field-trip days, all the excitement while getting our coats and lining up, the singing and bouncing on the bus, the museum exhibits that we were supposed to look at and learn something from, that curious feeling of detachment, and the guilt that I wasn’t enjoying it. How wonderfully uneventful the next day was, everything subdued and back to normal, pencil sharpener over there, teacher by the chalkboard, us quietly working away at our desks.

  See also: Happiness

  U

  UNEASY CONVERSATION

  In a conversation where I’m slightly nervous, I’ll find myself using some random word over and over, a word that I am otherwise not particularly attached to, like with Greg at lunch it was the word version. In the other, better-scripted version of this day, I don’t spill vinaigrette on your folder.

  UPDATE

  I have started reading, and liking, fiction. This was not the case a year and a half or—not that this book is chronological—99 pages ago. Aside from a handful of short story collections (Carver, Canin, Moore) and an isolated novel here and there, my post-college reading-for-pleasure era has been marked by a shocking absence of fiction. I have been trying to understand how this change came about, how or why the gateway suddenly opened for a nonfiction junkie such as myself.

  False starts and stops, that’s all it ever was for me with fiction, like when you’re in the midst of an intense story on the phone but the other person keeps going sorry, can you hang on a sec, that’s my call waiting, just a sec. Not very conducive to beginning, middle, climax, and end storytelling. That’s how it was with trying to read a novel. My brain would, mid-paragraph, click over to retrieve some other unrelated thought. I couldn’t keep it flowing long enough for the all-out-of-the-gate-at-once characters to break from the pack and reveal themselves as individuals whose names conjured up specific traits. Nor could I hang on long enough for the text to begin to read as a story and not just line upon line of random, comma-infested sentences.

  My attachment to facts and truth more or less began when I learned to read. From the get-go I was crazy for biographies; there was a series for young readers about legendary women (presidents’ wives, Amelia Earhart, etc.) that I couldn’t get enough of. I recall, a bit later, being thrown by the idea that something in print might actually not be fact. If the words were printed, they carried so much power. The authority had spoken, and it took me awhile to get hip to the don’t-believe-everything-you-read adage. My favorite bedtime story for my entire third year of life wasn’t a made-up story at all, but rather a series of bullet points outlining the characteristics of our new suburban house and how, unlike in the city, we would have a backyard, and what specifically we were going to be eating there (steak, corn, and soda pop). I would ask my dad to tell me again and again.

  After completing an early working draft of this book, I wanted to put it all to the test, to verify, to erase any possibility of troubling cloudy grayness. Who could do this? Matching memories with family or friends wasn’t absolute enough: think Rashomon. And God had never spoken to me in any clear way, not to mention the difficulty of getting Him a manuscript. There was only one solution I could think of: a polygraph examination. So one afternoon, with wires sticking out of my head and chest, I responded to an administrator’s questions. Is what you’ve written in this book the truth as you know it? And (because I was curious): Did you write this book to the best of your ability? I was happy when her analysis arrived a couple weeks later saying I’d passed, but by then, strangely, and out of nowhere, I had read a novel from start to finish, loved it, and (I see now in retrospect) had officially been admitted into the kingdom of fiction. This was in December of 2002.

  From there, things started unraveling. I became okay with urban myths. I am now able to appreciate them for the stupid little stories that they are, and not agonize over whether or not the girl who had spiders crawl out of
her cheek is an actual real girl or a totally made-up not-real girl. Also: I can improvise in the kitchen. Prior to my fiction arousal, I’d have to follow a recipe to the T. The recipe was the truth. You didn’t start throwing in cayenne pepper just because you felt like it, or use one tablespoon of sesame oil instead of two. That was fiction. Now if I feel like following the recipe exactly, fine. But I can also deviate and concoct without feeling like I’m doing something wrong.

  But still, what then should I attribute this shit to? Was it that I had to fill myself up with a certain amount of facts—nearly forty years’ worth—before I was technically ready to appreciate what one could do with facts, how they might be folded in, altered, stretched, and pureed? Was it that, unbeknownst to me at the time, while replacing a roll of paper towels, I was struck with a lightning bolt of literary maturation on, say, the morning of December 21?