Kramer vs. Kramer

by Avery Corman

  He tried to ward off the feelings, to consciously make a full-time job out of looking for work. He would get up early in the morning, dress as if for work, go downtown, use the 42nd Street Library as his office, make calls from the public phones there, stay busy, read between appointments. He would circle ads, keep lists, visit employment agencies. But he was being worn down. There were days when he began the morning without anything meaningful to do until noon, when he was to call in to an employment agency. He would go through the game of dressing and heading downtown with the working people in order to get to the library, and once there, his only activity was to read the newspaper. And you were not even allowed to read the newspaper in the 42nd Street Library—they checked through your bags. He had to sneak the paper in. He moved his office to a nearby branch where they let in newspapers and had Consumer Reports. He could pass the time informing himself about products he would never need.

  A worker at the unemployment office demanded to know what he had done the day before specifically to look for work, how many phone calls, how many interviews, where was the record, could this be verified? He had spent the day at the library and made two phone calls.

  “Why aren’t you more flexible, Mr. Kramer? Why don’t you try selling storm windows or something?” the man asked.

  “It has limited potential. Winters are getting warmer. All the seasons are flattening out.”

  “Are you being sarcastic, Mr. Kramer?”

  “I’m looking for work. I need the money. Do you have any idea how much Cheerios cost?”

  “That’s not the point—”

  “Fifty-three cents and they’re made out of air.”

  He approved his claim, but with malice, giving Ted a clerical zinger. Ted was now being watched. Each week he would have to go through a long wait for an interview to prove to them that he was entitled to the money.

  He determined it cost nearly $425 a week to live—for rent, utilities, dry cleaning, Etta, Cheerios. He had $95 a week coming from unemployment. Even when he was working, with the cost of a housekeeper, his expenses were high, and by the time his paycheck came, he needed that money. He never managed to save. He had a grand total of $1800 in the bank. In less than two months he would have exhausted all of his cash.

  He told Etta that he was out of work and looking for a job, which she could see easily enough. She offered to let him defer the payment of her salary, but he preferred to continue to pay her for her time. He had not told Billy. The brown eyes did not miss a thing, however.

  “Daddy, were you fired?”

  “Where did you get that?”

  “You’re home sometimes now. And on The Flintstones, Fred was home, too. He got fired.”

  “Do you know what fired means?”

  “You don’t have a job.”

  “Well, I wasn’t precisely fired. The company I worked for moved, and now I’m looking for a new job.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I’ll have one soon.”

  “Then can you play with me tomorrow?”

  “It would be better if I look for work, Billy.”

  He had now been out of work six weeks. He was down to the B level, sending his resume to trade publications whose names he found in a reference book.

  WILLIAM KRAMER WAS FIVE years old. His birthday marked a full year of their lives since Joanna had left. Ted made the party. By request, a Batman cake and six special friends. Ted noted that a miniature Batmobile for a gift and a modest party for a child cost $38.

  He thought about taking temporary work, selling in a department store, telephone solicitation, but these would nullify his unemployment benefits. It did not pay to work at anything but his work. The money was disappearing. Everything was so costly.

  “You lost your job. Ahhh!”

  His intention had been to make a quiet announcement to his parents about his new position as soon as he got one. When his mother asked him directly, “How is it going?” he knew the shortcut to a peaceful conversation was to say, “Fine,” but he could not honestly say it.

  “I’m afraid the company went under, Mother. We all lost our jobs. I’m looking. I’ll get something.”

  “He got fired. Fired!”

  His father came to the phone.

  “Ted, they fired you? Why did they fire you?”

  “Listen, Dad, Fred Flintstone got fired. I was let go.”

  “Who got fired?”

  “The company was sold from under us.”

  “They didn’t take you with them? You must have done something bad for them not to take you with them.”

  “They didn’t want any of us. They relocated.”

  “And now?”

  “I’ll find something.”

  “He got fired. Ahhh!” His mother had taken over the play-by-play. “Ted, you’ve got a baby to feed and that person to pay, and everything is big dollars today. And you’re alone, no wife to help, God forbid anything should happen to you, what would the baby do? And you don’t have a job! What are you doing to yourself?”

  If she had left anything out, he could not think of it. He ended the conversation with assurances that his New York contingent would survive, and with his father shouting over from his end that maybe Ted should come to Florida and drive a cab—so many old folks didn’t drive and couldn’t walk, there was good money in it—which appeared to Ted a rather total misreading of who he was.

  AN EMPLOYMENT AGENCY WOMAN, who had greeted his resume enthusiastically and said she would have him placed within a week, had not returned his calls for three weeks. Summer was approaching. People were not leaving jobs, they were staying to get their vacation time. He was down to $900 in the bank.

  “Billy, goddammit, I told you to get out of here! I played with you! I played with you for a whole goddamn hour after supper! I can’t play with you any more. Go look at a book.”

  “Don’t shout at me.”

  “Don’t whine.”

  “I’m not whining.”

  “Beat it! Go to your room!”

  He grabbed him and marched him out of the bedroom, his thumb and forefinger pressing into the child’s arm so deeply it left marks.

  “You hurt me!” He started to cry.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you. But I don’t want you whining at me. Play by yourself, goddammit. Let me be.”

  Work was at the core of his sense of self. He did not consider himself gifted in any special way. It had taken him years to find this narrow area of commerce for himself. He sold ideas in advertising, a space salesman. His job, his suits and ties, his name printed on notepaper, the secretaries, the modern offices, the money, which permitted him to keep going, try to forget her, hire the housekeeper, buy the wine—this, from work had sustained him. Without work, he felt impotent.

  And with the child, everything was so crucial, with this person so dependent upon him to be the daddy. He had been out of work before, but never with this feeling of anxiety. If Ted Kramer woke in the night, it was hours before he could fall asleep again.

  He had begun to reintroduce himself to employment agency people who had misplaced his resume, filed his card, forgotten him in the cycle of new people, fresh out of work since he had been there—“When did you say that was, Mr. Kramer?”

  BILLY, WANTING TO HELP, offered solace, a sign from the cartoon character universe.

  “Remember when Fred Flintstone got fired?”

  “Yes, you told me about it.”

  “Well, I was just watching, and Fred got a new job. Isn’t that good, Daddy? That means you’ll get a new job, too.”

  He heard from Jim O’Connor. He had taken a trip to Europe with his wife and decided to return to the working world for one more job before retirement. He had joined a new magazine called Men’s Fashion. O’Connor wanted to know if Ted was “inside” or still “out in the cold.” “Out in the cold” seemed wildly inaccurate, since the weather turned an inclement 92 that day, and Ted had trudged through the humidity to an interview at a trade publicatio
n, Packaging World. O’Connor told him his longest stretch was during a recession in the fifties when he was “out in the cold” for a solid year, a dubious bit of encouragement.

  O’Connor could not promise anything—he was just getting established in the job—but he wanted Ted to work for him, if he could convince them to open up a slot, if he could get sufficient money, if Ted could wait a minimum of four weeks for him to try to set it up.

  “It’s kind of iffy. Let’s talk again.”

  “Just promise me you won’t take anything crappy before I can do this.”

  “I’ll try not to take anything crappy.”

  He was down to $600 cash. Packaging World was “very interested” at nineteen, maybe they could go to twenty, a cut from what he had been earning. And they were making him jump through hoops. He had to prepare a mock sales call as if he were working for them—the make-believe client, an oily man in his sixties who was both the advertising manager and owner of the publication, a man who kept his eye on the till.

  “Very nice. We’ll let you know in a week or so.”

  It was as if he had just sung “Put on a Happy Face” at an audition.

  “We haven’t pinned down the pay.”

  “Eighteen-five plus commissions.”

  “You said nineteen, maybe twenty.”

  “Did I? I must have made a mistake. No. Eighteen-five. And that’s up from what we could get somebody for.”

  “It’s a little thin.”

  “Well, we’re not Life magazine.”

  A cute remark, since Life magazine had folded, while Packaging World went on. So he had a possibility for a job, something two floors below crappy, he thought. Apart from Jim O’Connor’s overture, this was all he could count on. If he took the job, he would probably have to move to an older building to reduce his rent. If he moved, the cost of moving would wipe out any savings from moving over the first year. In raw dollars, he nearly would do as well driving a cab. In New York, though, driving a cab was semi-hazardous­ duty. Cabbies often got held up on the job. He amused himself to think of this as one of the pluses for staying in his field. Few space salesmen got held up on the job. Then he began to think—what if something like that really happened to him? What if he got mugged somewhere or killed somehow? Where would that leave Billy? He realized he did not have a will. What if he died suddenly­? Who would get the boy—his parents? Unthinkable. Joanna’s parents­? Impossible. Ted Kramer occupied himself with thoughts of his death. Then he decided to offer his child to the one person he felt he could trust in this way.

  “Thelma, if I die—”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Listen to me. If some extraordinary thing happens and I die, will you take Billy?”

  “That’s the most touching—”

  “Will you?”

  “Do you mean it?”

  “Yes, I do. I know it’s not an easy thing to answer.”

  “Ted—”

  “Would you think about it?”

  “I’m overwhelmed.”

  “Well, if you think you could, I’d like to put it in my will.”

  “Ted, don’t talk like this.”

  “I’d like to put it in my will.”

  “You can, Ted. You can.”

  “Thank you, Thelma. Thank you very, very much. He’d be all right with you. You’re a good mother.”

  Obsessed with the morbid, he called the lawyer and instructed him to draw up a will with Thelma named for Billy, and then he demanded that his doctor, whom he had not seen in two years, give him an emergency physical examination to confirm that he was not going to die by Tuesday. The doctor informed him that he seemed fit—the lab reports would come through in a few days. On the next weekend morning, encouraged by his good health, he climbed in the playground with Billy in a spirited game of monkeys, an activity which still held a high position with Billy, Ted envisioning his son about to walk down the aisle, asking Ted to go to the playground for a quick monkeys before the ceremony, assuming Ted lived that long.

  HE COULD NOT AFFORD to have Etta working for him beyond the next few weeks. Although she had offered to have him defer paying her salary, he was unable to accept having this lady subsidize his unemployment. And if he lingered in this situation, he would sink into the red with her. A year! O’Connor was once out a year. He might have to take care of Billy during the day himself and try to hire baby-sitters for the times he had interviews. He probably could qualify for a day-care center at this point, or food stamps.

  His brother, Ralph, called from Chicago. How was he doing, could he use some cash? He would have considered it a personal defeat to take anything from his older brother. He did not need any money, he told him. Ralph was coming in on business the following week and suggested they get together, go to a ball game. He put his wife, Sandy, on the phone, who pointed out they had not seen each other in over a year. She and Ralph were going to Florida with their children over the summer, perhaps Ted could bring Billy for a family reunion. He said he would consider it. But he did not know how he could possibly afford a trip to Florida.

  The cupboard was nearly bare. The food bills were staggering. With survival instincts nurtured in his Bronx schoolyard—winners stay on, losers get off, you tried any moves to win—Ted Kramer put on what he thought of as The Gourmet Shuffle. He took a handful of credit cards from department stores, left over from Joanna’s days and still in force since he did not owe the stores any money, and went on a wild buying spree. He went to any stores that had a food or a gourmet food department. Ted Kramer, who could not afford to buy chopped meat from a butcher or run up a large order at the supermarket, knew that he could buy food in a department store and the charges would not come through for weeks; he could pay them off on time. He began to buy prime meat on time, frozen vegetables, precious little peas twice the price of any he had ever bought, trout from Colorado, salmon from Washington, high-priced items, pasta from Italy, cookies from Scotland—“Ma’am, this bread was actually flown in from Paris? Amazing. I’ll take it.” Some he shipped home, some he carried, none he paid for with cash. Entire frozen dinners, veal marsala, paella put up by a Mrs. Worthington. Bless you, Mrs. Worthington, for your distribution. Even essentials, eggs fresh from New Jersey, peanut butter. “The frozen pizza? Is it really good or just frozen pizza? Fine. I’ll take four.” He stuffed his freezer and overloaded the cabinets, piled up cartons in the front closet. If all else failed, they would have their chicken cacciatore, and he did not have to pay for any of it now, a little money at a time would do, so long as you paid them something. The stores just wanted to know you were still there. He was still there.

  HE MET HIS BROTHER, Ralph, at a Blarney Stone bar on Third Avenue. They were going to have an old-fashioned evening: beer and pastrami sandwiches at a bar, then out to Shea Stadium for the Mets against the Dodgers. Ralph was tall and muscular, handsome in a tough-guy way. He wore a silk suit, a thin striped tie and loafers. He could have passed for a television actor trying to pass for a mobster.

  “You look skinny, Teddy.”

  “I’ve been working on my weight.”

  “Hey, bring this guy a Tab.”

  “It’s okay. I’ll have a beer.”

  “It sure has been a while.”

  “I know.”

  Ralph watched the legs of a passing girl through the window and then looked down at his food. Intimacy had never been a staple of this family and it did not appear to be on the table this night. Ted had the sinking sensation that one bite into the pastrami, they already had nothing to say to each other.

  “Hey, Teddy, remember the old days—the Giants and the Dodgers for a three-game series? Friday night at the Polo Grounds or out at Ebbets Field?” Ralph offered, apparently feeling the same tension.

  “Great times.”

  Mercifully, they had old-time baseball to carry them along, Ernie Lombardi hitting 400-foot singles, ball games they went to when they were younger. This got them to the ball park, and then the ball gam
e itself carried them along, as they talked about the hitters and the game in progress. During the seventh-inning stretch, Ralph said:

  “Look at this place. All these shmuck-ass banners. What do they know about baseball?”

  “And that organ music.”

  “Come out to Chicago, Teddy. I can set you up in a liquor store.”

  “Thanks, Ralph, but it’s not what I do.”

  “I don’t mean in Chicago. In a suburb.”

  “I appreciate it, Ralph, but no thanks.”

  They returned to watching the game, and afterward, jammed into a crowded subway train, they were spared the burden of further conversation on the way back to Times Square. They switched to old-time basketball on the walk back to the Hilton, where Ralph was staying.

  “How about a drink?”

  “It’s too late. Billy gets up so early.”

  “Is he okay?”

  “He seems to be.”

  “You got prospects?”

  “A couple.”

  “Teddy, you got to need some bread.”

  He had his bread flown in from Paris.

  “I’m fine, really.”

  “How can you be?”

  “I am.”

  “Just say the word.”

  “No, it’s okay, Ralph.”

  Money was time. He needed the time, he needed the money desperately and yet he could not bring himself to ask. In his mind, it would cost him too much to admit the need.

  “It was a nice night, Ralph. Let’s do it again when you come in.”

  They shook hands, and suddenly Ralph squeezed his hand and would not let go.

  “We’re all so fucking distant in our family. Teddy—”