Odyssey In A Teacup

by Paula Houseman

  School assembly was on Friday mornings. Every month (starting from week six on the school calendar), a select few from each class were awarded certificates for good work. Parents were invited to attend when their child was being presented with one. I was thrilled to receive a note telling me that at the first presentation, Casper would be a recipient. I even invited Joe and Sylvia (mostly as a fuck-you gesture to her). Reuben couldn’t make it because he was interstate on business, but Ralph wasn’t going to miss it.

  There were about sixty people in the audience on this morning. Three children in Casper’s class were getting certificates. The moment arrived. The headmaster, Mr Boaz, called Casper up on stage (using his given name).

  ‘For excellent, all-round work—Jake Gold.’ Mr Boaz smiled warmly.

  Casper looked so cute as he climbed up the four big steps to the big stage in his big uniform. He accepted the certificate, and then ... he opened his big mouth. He asked Mr Boaz to pull his finger. Oh no!

  It wouldn’t have been quite so bad if it hadn’t been heard over the PA system by all the students, all the teachers, all the parents and grandparents. There was a mixed reaction. Mr Boaz smiled coolly; the students roared with laughter—one child woo-hooed—not surprisingly, it was Hannah; some of the teachers tittered (the straight-laced ones stiffened); some in the audience laughed (mostly the men); Ralph wolf-whistled; Sylvia glared at me (I felt it without even looking at her); and Joe clapped loudly and with such pride.

  It wouldn’t have mattered if there were sixty or only six in the audience. Within twenty-four hours, the word would get out and spread like a forest fire during a heatwave. The extended family reputation was about to reach critical mass, and if Joe Blow’s standing had in any way become watered down through the generations, it was poised for a revival.

  On my way home, as I reflected on this god-awful situation, I wondered what drove my son. I thought of that proverb, ‘It takes a whole village to raise a child’, which roughly translates as every person a kid interacts with will have some influence on them and contribute to their socialisation process—family, friends, teachers, librarians, doctors, dentists, religious figures, etcetera. I wondered if maybe Joe, the village idiot, was too big an influence in Casper’s life. Like Joe, Casper shot from the hip (only Joe did it literally and a little southeast of it. Or south-west, depending on which hip you were looking at). Joe wasn’t bound by social conditioning. And maybe Casper would be like him in that regard, but Casper had manners.

  ‘I felt like Whizpopping, Mummy, but I said please when I asked Mr Boaz to pull my finger.’

  This, and the fact that a farting giant was the central character in a children’s book by a famous author made me feel better. And I desperately clung to anything that would make me feel better because I saw lots of staff lip-pursing throughout my kids’ school life. Mostly, it was because of minor misdemeanours. But when I was called in halfway through Casper’s second year at school to see his teacher, Mrs Antinous, it constituted a big’un.

  ‘Were you aware of the writing exercise I gave the class for homework on Monday?’ she asked me.

  ‘Er, no.’ Casper hadn’t said anything to me.

  She explained the brief: the children had to write a poem about something they considered important in life—desirable qualities such as kindness or compassion or honesty. Mrs Antinous handed me Casper’s paper. He had written the title in brown crayon.

  Toilet Paper

  Shit.

  The urge to laugh kicked in. I furrowed my brow to make it look like I was already concerned. I read the poem.

  We never run out of toilet paper

  No we never ever do

  Because there would be nuthing left

  For us to wipe our poo

  We could use daddys hankachiffs

  But that would be so grose

  And then there would be nuthing left

  For him to blow his nose

  If we used Hannahs beach towel

  Shid have a ferkin fit

  Our mum buys lots of toilet paper

  So we can mop our shit

  That primary urge intensified. I made a show of putting both my hands over my mouth and nose to hide my supposed (and expected) shock and outrage, and tried to think of something sad and depressing. Didn’t work. So I bit the inside of my cheek. Also didn’t work. Then I lost it. I started to laugh. Mrs Antinous was furious. She kept poking the page, specifically the word ‘shit’, with her index finger as she ranted. Thank God she hadn’t picked up on ‘ferkin’.

  Reuben knew I swore a lot in the car and he wanted me to temper my language in front of the kids. I’d read the word ‘firkin’ somewhere, looked up its definition (a small wooden tub for butter or lard), and applied it adjectivally as a substitute for ‘fuckin’: ‘You’re not the only one on the firkin road, dipstick!’ ‘Get in the firkin left lane if you wanna drive so slow!’

  I tuned into the teacher’s tirade again. She got her point across in a shaming way, banging on about our ‘questionable homespun values’. That one worked. This whole business was like a Miss Parker rerun. After I left the meeting, having duly and dutifully told Mrs Antinous I would have a good talk with Casper, I came unglued. I sat in the car and the rear-view mirror attacked. ‘Bad mother, bad wife, bad daughter, bad sister, bad aunt, bad person ... bad egg!’ Oh, woe was me.

  Not for long, though. ‘Hello. Firk you!’ I yelled in response (I still had manners).

  Goddamit, Casper had fulfilled the firkin brief, and then some! My son didn’t pay lip service to kindness, compassion and honesty. He demonstrated these qualities. He knew it would be discourteous to use daddy’s hankies and Hannah’s towel to wipe his bum, and he spelled it out (although that needed a bit of polishing). My kid was considerate! And ... and, his rhyme and metre expressing this were pretty awesome for a six-year-old.

  I did have a talk to him, though, but I had to be careful not to squelch his irrepressibility (I knew what that felt like and how disheartening it is to do this to a spirited child). Still, his filters needed a little bit of fine-tuning. Hmm ... what to do?

  All villages have sanitation workers. Maybe Casper needed more exposure to this lot.

  PART TWO:

  TEA AND SYMPATHY

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN:

  CASUAL CHIC

  As the children grew, the years flew by. Someone once told me that time seems to drag when you’re a kid because even though a year is still a year, one year in the six or ten that you’ve been on earth is a long stretch in the scheme of things. And time seems to speed up as you get older because, relatively speaking, one year in thirty is fleeting. In forty or fifty, it becomes a blip. Ralph wasn’t the one who told me this. His view was uncharacteristically banal.

  ‘Time flies when you’re having fun.’

  Seriously? The best you can offer me is a cliché? You, of all people!

  It was a lie anyway. Time was flying, but I wasn’t having fun. And maybe it seemed to pass quicker after having the children, not just because of the 1:20/30/40 ratio, but also because I tried to fill every waking hour with activities. So time blipped and zipped, and I lived inside a timeline with a chain of events that looked something like this:

  Tuck shop duty

  Bathroom renovation (agonising over the accessories)

  Birthday parties

  Making radish flowers and curly shaved carrots strips (by soaking in cold water); attractively scoring cucumbers lengthwise with tines of fork (for dinner party salads)

  Adding a bedroom (agonising over paint colours and window furnishings)

  Step classes at the gym

  Meetings with teachers because Hannah or Casper were in deep doo-doo

  Kitchen renovation (agonising over fixtures and fittings)

  PA meetings

  Shopping for a new car

  Buying a new puppy (Casper named her Oeuf)

  Club Med family holidays

  Having a pool put in (agonising over waterli
ne tiles and paving surrounds)

  Casper’s Barmitzvah (on a Saturday; low key; intimate)

  Nothing really wrong with any of these things (except for the dog’s name; I experienced a visceral reaction every time someone called her). The orientation of the timeline was the problem. It was kind of supine. Or maybe prostrate, because I was looking down all the time and my life was flatlinish. Only my kids gave it some real dimension.

  I don’t know if time flew or passed slowly for Hannah and Casper, but they were having fun. They remained unstoppable. They were polite, likeable children, though boldly unconventional (watching them was like watching me and Ralph as kids, especially when Casper took to starting his sentences with ‘Hmm ... ’). Their free-spiritedness got them into trouble with their superiors at times, but gained them admiration from their peers. I no longer blamed myself for what I thought was my inadequate parenting and insufficient discipline, and I stopped worrying that they were mixing with inhabitants from the Village of the Damned (or the Village People—same thing). And I finally understood that Hannah and Casper weren’t so much influenced by Joe. Rather, they were like him in that they probably had a strong connection to the primitive part of their psyche. Where Joe had Typhon, I wondered who was calling the shots in Hannah’s and Casper’s subconscious. Then I remembered something.

  During one history lesson, Mr Kosta had mentioned Baubo, a particularly obscure goddess from ancient mythology. Baubo has remained mostly unrecognised in modern times because she was the goddess of obscenity. In a stuffy social milieu, no one was exactly putting out the welcome mat for her. And Mr Kosta, probably anticipating a parent uprising, didn’t go into detail about her. I didn’t give it much thought back then, but now I was curious and decided to research Baubo.

  I felt an instant connection with this little goddess, but shit ... talk about ugly! She actually looks obscene. Baubo is depicted as headless. Even so, she has a face with eyes, a nose and a mouth. It’s just that these features are on her belly, and they’re dual-purpose: her eyes are her nipples; her mouth is her vulva; and the jury is still out on what the nose is (at a guess, I’d say her belly button). And Baubo appears to be in dire need of a chin and upper lip wax, but that’s just her pubes. Pictures of other goddesses indicate they’d had Brazilian waxes, and the Sirens, being sea nymphs, would have also invested in hair removal (wouldn’t want to look like bush pigs in their swimmers). But taking in Baubo’s overall appearance, what the hell difference would a wax job make?

  Anyway, importantly, Baubo’s more than just about obscenity. She’s about having fun; not taking life or ourselves too seriously. She embodies the healing power of laughter. You could do a whole lot worse than have a bawdy character as a guiding light (it sure beat having Cronus, the child-swallowing-bollocks-lopper running the show).

  As I read up on Baubo, it occurred to me that she wasn’t just dominant in Hannah and Casper’s psyche; she’d also played a leading role in mine. Baubo was the one who guided my hand to write ‘fucket’ above the hopscotch squares; the one who put a smile on my face (at inappropriate times) that Sylvia and my teachers often and indignantly told me to wipe off; the one who made me flash my lolly teeth at Miss Parker and directed me to research the etymology of ‘fuck’ in her class. Baubo was also, no doubt, behind every ridiculous interaction and experience. And I discovered that, in French, Baubo’s name is pronounced booboo (the double ‘o’ is said like the short ‘oo’ sound in book). As in, ‘mistake’? Different pronunciation. But Sylvia’s reference to any pain, cut or injury as a boo-boo called attention to the little goddess.

  ‘Where do you have boo-boo?’ she’d ask.

  Everywhere ... you keep telling me I AM one! A ‘pain’ and a ‘mistake’!

  For a brief moment, this didn’t feel so bad. I was the embodiment of Her Holy-Shitness (thank God I didn’t look like her!).

  But whichever way you pronounce Baubo’s name—or call her the Belly Goddess (as she’s also known), or an impulse—she’s tenacious. Having my mouth washed out with soap all those years ago didn’t wash her away. She’d just bubbled up in other ways. And now that I’d made her acquaintance, I was happy to let her continue propelling my locker-room patois, but I wasn’t quite ready to give her carte blanche. So, my hearty belly laughs and spontaneous laughter-for-no-good-reason, which had thinned out over the years, remained thin. And having perfected my social roles, I remained the quintessential nobody.

  In spite of this, even though Hannah’s actions and Casper’s words often made me want to shudder, I secretly cheered them on ... from the sidelines. I loved that my kids’ zany behaviour felt like an ‘up yours’ to Sylvia. I didn’t love it so much that in the rumour mills, they were known as Joe Blow’s grandchildren. It was a bit like those post-fart feelings at Maxi’s granny’s funeral. I was relieved and off the hook because it didn’t reflect on me. But at the same time, strangely, a little disappointed. Unheard, unseen, it felt like I’d finally disappeared. What did I expect? The cojones I discovered on that memorable Seder night at my childhood home, had become like undescended testicles.

  This was causing friction in my marriage, and things came to a head one weeknight as I was washing up after dinner. That afternoon, a Batmitzvah invitation had arrived in the mail. I intended to decline, and with good reason.

  Hayley, the Batmitzvah girl, was the daughter of Lenny and Meg Schmitt. Ralph and I had been casual friends with Lenny as teenagers, but there was always a level of competitiveness between the two boys. Like Ralph, Lenny was from a working class background. They were in the same class at school, both were at the top, both got scholarships in their final year. Lenny went on to study medicine and he became a plastic surgeon, and although Ralph aspired to be a doctor and had the grades to get into med school, Albie insisted he get a full-time job and contribute to the household income.

  With the passage of time, Ralph and I drifted away from Lenny. When I occasionally ran into him, our exchange was pleasant, he always asked after Ralph, and we parted with a promise of getting together. But it never happened. And it had been a few years since I last saw him, so I was surprised that Lenny was requesting the pleasure of the company of ‘Dear Ruth and partner’ at this celebration of a child I’d never met. And Lenny and Reuben had never met.

  ‘You always have a good reason!’ said Reuben when I told him about my decision.

  ‘But he didn’t even bother to find out your name!’

  ‘So?’

  I didn’t have an answer; he stormed off.

  Over the years, I found that big social events had become a nightmare, even more so with the allure of comparisons, judgements and competition. I was no more immune to this than the next person, but the anxiety that arrived with the invitations was hard to handle. And because most of the functions were held on a Sunday, I managed to come up with a whole lot of creative excuses to avoid them. The fear—one I hadn’t shared with Reuben—that every large gathering that fell on a Sunday would be my Armageddon had not abated. But tonight, Reuben was fed up, and I couldn’t I blame him, even though it was probably the best excuse I’d had in a while (I could no longer use the kids as a cop-out because they didn’t need babysitters anymore). He was peeved about my diminishing verve and our diminishing social life.

  After cold-shouldering me for an hour—he did this too often, sometimes for days—but then realising it wasn’t going to change things, he came back and tried a different tack. He grabbed me by the shoulders, looked me square in the eyes, and spoke with the utmost conviction.

  ‘It’s time for you to grab the bull by the balls!’

  Personally, I thought it would be much safer to grab it by the horns (unless it also had undescended testicles). But what Reuben said next hit below the belt.

  ‘You’re becoming like Sylvia.’

  Yeow! This translates to Yeow! in all languages. Except in Hebrew, it would start on the right hand side of the page, be read right to left and be more expressive, like so:
/>   !eb dluoc syob yhctib woh fo noitamrifnoc rehtona teY !woeY

  I got steamed up about this comparison between my mother and me, but what Reuben had implied was right. It was time to face my fears.

  ‘Okay, okay! I’ll accept the invitation.’ How bad could it be? A room full of strangers; who cares what people I don’t know think of me?

  Ralph had also received an invitation and was equally surprised. He declined, not least because he’d heard a rumour that Lenny had recently lost the tip of his little finger, which according to Ralph made him an amputee. Nobody seemed to know how it happened. Ralph made it my job to find out.

  We didn’t attend the actual ceremony in the morning; I drew the line at sitting inside a synagogue. The reception was an open house afternoon tea from two-thirty to five-thirty.

  At two-twenty, Reuben, dressed and ready to go, was standing in the doorway of our bedroom looking at the many clothes strewn all over the bed.

  ‘Why are there so many clothes strewn all over the bed?’

  ‘Uh, because I am a woman.’ Duh!

  He didn’t get it; just stood there shaking his head like one of Joe’s Bobblehead dolls, and moaned about us being late. Even as a social misfit, I knew that you didn’t actually have to be on time for an open house. I told him so, but he still stood there (as if to apply pressure). I ignored him as I checked myself out in the mirror, which was in a generous mood. ‘You look okay. Mid-forties and you still have a good figure.’ What I’d chosen to wear originally was probably a little offbeat, so I settled for a safe look—clothes that I’d bought a couple of years earlier and had hardly worn: a fitted, white, three-quarter-sleeve shirt, Capri pants with a miniature navy and white hounds-tooth pattern, and slick, navy canvas loafers. I applied the finishing touches to my makeup—glossy Ritzy Red lipstick for a bit of va-va-voom—grabbed my navy clutch, and we were off.