Accidentally on Purpose

by Mary F. Pols

  I treated mine with reverence. It skimmed across the floor, following me obediently like a very useful dog, reaching every nook and cranny, sucking up all the cat hair that had been resisting every previous vacuum I’d owned. As the gas man left, I put the Miele down in the living room, next to the bookcase. I loved it so much I could almost think of its shiny red body as decorative.

  A week later, Matt and Dolan were watching a movie while I made dinner. “Can I turn on the heat?” he called out to me. “Sure,” I said, slicing potatoes. I walked into the living room about half an hour later. The room was warm. “What’s that terrible smell?” I said.

  Matt looked up sleepily. He had his head on a pillow. Dolan’s hand was affectionately slipped into his father’s hair. “I don’t smell anything.” He had the least sensitive nose on the planet, but this was overwhelming. How could he not have noticed? But more important, what was burning? I went around the corner, to the hallway where the grate was. There was my Miele, splayed out on its back, its red plastic cover oozing all over the grate. The smoke alarm went off just as I was attempting to wrench the corpse free of its assailant. Its innards were exposed, and it looked as vulnerable and awkward as Kafka’s cockroach.

  “My beautiful vacuum cleaner,” I wailed.

  I had to go walk around the block, practically hyperventilating. It seemed he cost me money every time I turned around.

  “Mummy, I sorry,” Dolan said when I came back in the house, no calmer than before. He had his hands splayed out in his cute mime routine, the one that gets me every time. But usually he’s using it because he actually did something naughty. “I sorry for the vacuum cleaner.”

  “You didn’t do anything, honey,” I said, rubbing his back.

  In the other room I told Matt, stabbing at him with my finger, “You will go out this weekend and you will buy me another Miele. Just as nice as this one.”

  Then I had to leave. I got in the car and called Wib and told her how awful my life was, having this person around who ruins cars and melts vacuum cleaners.

  “I’m just having trouble understanding,” she said. “You have something on your floor that gets hot enough to destroy a vacuum cleaner?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s a gas furnace. With a pilot light.”

  “Now, could Dolan burn himself on this?” she asked. “Because it seems to me if—”

  “If Dolan sat on it for a half hour when it was turned up to seventy-five degrees and he was made of plastic, yes, he could hurt himself; in fact, he would melt,” I said impatiently.

  Why wasn’t I getting the kind of sympathetic response from Wib that I wanted? Matt had launched an assault on two valuable possessions. (Both of German origin as it happened. Matt’s heritage was Polish; was this a subconscious thing, a deep-seated resentment over World War II? What was next? Was he going to set fire to Dolan’s Steiff teddy bear, the one I’d won at an auction?) Just as I had with Matilda, the romantically inclined couples’ counselor, I was seeking allies. Wib disappointed me first by not indicting Matt and then suggesting that perhaps by constantly anticipating failures on his part, I’d made it hard for him to succeed.

  I’d had enough lessons in the impermanence of things. I’ll confess, on the day of the melted Miele, I wanted Matt gone. I wanted to be free of him. I didn’t want to worry about his career. Or his living situation. Or his health. I didn’t want to watch him eat ice cream and be itching to tell him not to because dairy could aggravate his colitis, all the while knowing that if I did say something, he’d be irritated and ignore me anyway. Mostly what I didn’t want to feel was the sense that I was putting so much energy into caring for someone who didn’t particularly seem to want me to care for him.

  In truth, none of this actually had anything to do with the vacuum cleaner, but that’s what I was fixated on. A few days later, I called Alison, hoping to chew over the Miele incident again.

  “I’m thinking I’ll have him split the cost of a new vacuum with me,” I said. “Do you think that’s okay?”

  “No,” she said.

  “I should just pay for the whole thing?” I asked.

  “Probably,” she said, evenly. “Look, it’s just an object. Don’t get me wrong, when Katy used to break things, I’d get angry. But really, it is just an object, and in the long run, what does it matter? So he made a mistake. He didn’t do it intentionally.”

  “I just feel as though he doesn’t listen to me,” I said. “I feel like he’s turning me into this shrew.”

  “Maybe you’re ordering him around too much,” she said. “Maybe he’s tuning you out because he can’t handle all the orders.”

  I don’t delegate many tasks, and I try to delegate only the ones I know should be easy for him. But when I do, my requests do sound like orders. This tendency stemmed from his passivity, and the fact that it often takes asking him three times to actually get something done, but now it’s a pattern. When he does that prayer pose, the plea for protection from this nagging woman, it’s usually accompanied by his saying, “Okay, okay, okay, okaaay.” Lately, Dolan has begun saying it too. “It’s dinnertime,” I tell my child, and when he finally comes to the table, he’s saying, “Okay, okay, okay, okaaay” in just the same tones of exasperation as his father.

  “Look,” Alison said. “We are controlling people and we tend to move very quickly. We process quickly. We get annoyed with people who don’t move at our pace. Why do you think I get so irritable when everyone is milling around in my kitchen and I want to clean up? And I don’t want anyone else to clean up, because they won’t do the same kind of good job I would. This is not normal. This is hard for other people to be around.”

  “Matt definitely does not move at my pace,” I said. “He’s not stupid, by any means, but he’s just kind of dreamy. I don’t know, I just wish he were sharper by nature. Quicker to take the initiative.”

  Alison was kind enough to ignore the fact that I was essentially saying I wanted Matt to be more like me.

  “You can’t make him sharp,” she continued. “Certainly not by snapping at him. The most important thing is Dolan. You’ve decided you want to have his daddy around, for his sake, so you just have to put up with melted Mieles.” She laughed. “Sorry. I promise you it will seem funny someday. But did you really need a $600 vacuum?”

  WITH MY PARENTS GONE, it made sense that I’d turn to my siblings in any crisis. But even had my father still been alive, I don’t know that I would have shared the vacuum cleaner story with him. No matter whose fault it was, the fact that I’d possessed such an extravagant item wasn’t the best illustration of fiscal responsibility. It was, I had to admit, similar to buying a $48 candle to remove the rat odor from the trailer you were living in because you didn’t have the savings to move into a new apartment.

  During one of our many bedside conversations during the last year of his life, my father offered to give me some money.

  “A check for you and a check for Dolan,” he’d said. “The maximum that the IRS allows as a gift. But I am thinking that I should perhaps put it in a trust, and put Benet in charge of it.”

  This sounded like a mild insult, but to complain seemed ungracious. I was the youngest and the only one of his offspring who didn’t own her own home. I was certainly the least frugal and financially savvy of all my siblings (unless you count Wib, whose old habit of tossing unopened bills in a drawer had long ago convinced Sean that he should handle their money). I still wasn’t saving, beyond what went into my 401(k), and I hadn’t gotten rid of my debt. A part of me wouldn’t mind if Benet did handle my money for me.

  But I didn’t want my father to depart this world thinking so little of me.

  “I think Benet has his hands full without having to deal with my money,” I told him.

  “Perhaps Sean then,” he said.

  “I suppose,” I said. I was grateful when Dolan woke up and immediately began banging his calves against the stroller, a prisoner wanting to escape, giving me an excuse to es
cape myself.

  Later that day, Benet and I were in the kitchen cleaning up the dinner mess.

  “Does he really think I’m that much of a loser that he has to create a trust for me?” I said, scrubbing a pot. “I’m forty years old.”

  “Scallops,” he answered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I think he thinks you’ll spend it all on scallops and such,” he explained, stacking dishes meticulously, the saucers here, not there. I stopped my scrubbing and scrutinized Benet’s face, looking for the joke.

  “What do you mean, scallops?” I said.

  “Well, this summer, when you made scallops and pasta for everybody, you must have bought three pounds of scallops,” he said. “He noticed.”

  “There were seven of us eating!” I protested.

  “They’re rich,” he said. “And expensive. When Beth and I eat scallops, I buy four for each of us.”

  I turned the water back on and scrubbed the pot harder. I knew I tended to over-serve my dinner guests in general, a culinary retort to all those times when my mother, unable to shake her Depression-era upbringing, cooked only enough pasta for one portion each. But it never occurred to me that this tendency would lead to a greater judgment about me and money. Nor was this an unfair judgment. In the wake of the Miele disaster, I couldn’t get that scallop conversation out of my head. The way it was nagging at me meant something, but I wasn’t sure what.

  MEANWHILE, my professional responsibilities were weighing heavily on me, and so was the feeling that I needed to step it up on the mothering front. Potty training was the next major hurdle. I longed to be done with diapers, which cost me more each month than electricity. At two and a half, Dolan was generally willing to pee in the miniature, throne-shaped potty I’d placed next to the toilet. But when it came to pooping, he preferred to go off in a corner when I wasn’t looking, do it in privacy, and then find me and demand a fresh diaper. If I was attentive to the warning signs, I might be able to catch him before he started.

  One morning that fall I noticed an ominous silence from the living room and scurried out of the kitchen to find him standing behind a chair, wearing a telltale expression of pained concern. “Let’s poop on the potty,” I said with false cheerfulness as I scooped him up under the arms and went running for the bathroom.

  By the time I got him seated on his potty, he’d hit his internal pause button. He asked me to read him a book. And then another. And then a third. I used up another diaper in the process of giving up and then going back to deciding I had to be firm about this poop being done in the potty.

  “It’s hard,” he told me. “Poop’s not coming out today.”

  He asked for another book. Then he peed. “I did it,” he said triumphantly. “That’s just pee,” I said, pressing him gently back onto the seat. My mind was busy thinking of the writing I had to do today. And the milk I had to buy. The life insurance I should get. And the fact that I’d once again be late to day care, trailing in well after everyone else was settled in for the morning, Dolan still sporting his breakfast egg on his face, me in yoga pants and woolen clogs, attempting to masquerade as a person not in pajamas. Small picture, big picture, back and forth. I was anxious to get to the computer, where I think best.

  Maybe Dolan didn’t have to poop. Maybe I was just wasting both of our time. “Let’s go,” I said.

  “No, I pooping,” he said. “Read another book.” He looked like a little bird. I had put him to bed the night before without a bath, after we had been out having a windblown walk on the Bay, and now his hair was sticking out in every direction. Suddenly I was hugely annoyed with him. I had spent five straight days with him by myself. We went on two playdates that involved mostly negotiating for sharing, mopping up of tears, and threats that we would leave immediately if he didn’t shape up. On the third day, I discovered he had broken the CD player. On the fourth day, I took him into a public bathroom with me and cautioned him not to touch anything. He promptly licked the wall.

  “Time for school,” I said, picking him up under the armpits. He shouted, “No,” and kicked madly at my arms, my belly, my hips. He connected with my nose, hard. How much longer will I be able to control this strong little body, I wondered, picturing him as a teenager, slapping me aside as I try to flush his heroin down the toilet. He thrashed while I dressed him, and I stayed calm. Then I carried him, crying, out to the couch and attempted to put shoes on his wildly kicking feet. “I don’t want to go to school” was muffled by his tears, but I heard it.

  Then I screamed. All the frustrations of the last few months emerged in that one scream: the damn impermanence of things, the permanence of Matt and me, stuck with each other, the sense that I was doing too many things and none of them well. Dolan stopped crying. I carried him to the car without saying a word and stuffed him, like a sack of potatoes, into his car seat, while he sniffled. I was already ashamed, but I didn’t apologize to him yet, because I was still angry. I said nothing to him in the car. I didn’t slide open the mirror on my visor, which I usually use to watch him watching the world. A few blocks from his school, he pointed out the fire station to me. He sounded cheerful. He sounded as though he had just decided to let my insanity pass. I was amazed when he leaned against my legs in his classroom, reluctant to let me go. How could he not fear the crazy woman? I did.

  As I drove home, I remembered myself at ten, lying on my bed, screaming into my pillow. In my memory, I’d cried so much that for a minute or two, there was a cascade of snot and salt water on my face so monumental, I was almost proud of the force of my own drama. Recovering, I heard steps on the staircase. He wasn’t moving fast, but I knew his footfall, light and springy even when he wasn’t in a hurry. He was always an energetic man. When we made pit stops on long drives, he mortified us all by standing in front of the car, kicking his legs into right angles and swinging his arms. I craned up from my pillow to look at the door, checking to make sure that the key was turned.

  He knocked, softly. “Buglet?”

  I ignored him.

  “Mare-fare?”

  “Go away,” I told him.

  “I’d like to have a word with you, dearie,” he said, his voice conciliatory.

  He was sorry. I had won. I went to the door and unlocked it. He was wearing a blue oxford shirt and chinos, his daily uniform in warm weather. In winter, he added a crewneck sweater, although never one with raglan sleeves. He was vehemently opposed to raglan sleeves, as if wearing them could diminish a man. His eyes had been full of rage just fifteen minutes ago. We had fought over the proper method of crabgrass eradication. For almost twenty-five years, this crabgrass has returned to haunt him. He suspected seeds carried on neighborhood cats or perhaps the same heavy spring winds that took down a branch of the best apple tree. The seeds could have been blown over from Mrs. Hessel’s. She was not as diligent at lawn work as he was. He also suspected blue jays, those menaces of the avian world.

  The crabgrass was tough. The grass around it gave way before it did, which is why my father wanted it removed very carefully. I had grown frustrated with trying to dig up each patch and had tried yanking it. He’d inspected my pile of sundered grass and cried out in vexation when he’d found rootless pieces. I’d told him that it was hard, and it hurt my hands, and the tool he’d given me, a sort of long fork without a middle tine, didn’t work very well anyway. Then he’d seen remnants of feathery seedpods clinging to the reddened pad of my index finger, further evidence I was doing it wrong. Hadn’t I listened? he’d stormed. And then I’d stormed back, about how he’d had six children purely to have a full workforce at all times. In short order, his eyes blazing, he’d threatened to crack me across my bottom. This was not unusual, but increasingly it was an affront to my all-important dignity.

  But once he came to me, apologetic, I became the victor. The tool was not adequate, the work was too hard, the crabgrass should be disposed of by some other means. I was right. He was wrong.

  More than thirty years later,
I realize I never triumphed. He must have been regretting his loss of self-control, his own irrational rage. He felt guilty. He felt the way I felt, driving home from day care with an empty car and the mournful feeling that I could have just damaged my sunny child, whom I knew to be angelic in comparison with many two-year-olds.

  If I wanted to, I could talk myself out of feeling too bad; I feared my father’s wrath when I was growing up, but I never feared him, never doubted his love. Maybe Dolan and I will be like that, I could tell myself. There was nothing wrong with my relationship with my father. Except of course that I never felt I could possibly do everything right enough to really impress him. And that as an adult, I cared far too much about being right.

  I WAS AWARE OF AND contemplating my urges to be right, but that didn’t necessarily mean I was about to abdicate all claims to certainty. There were things I was, in fact, very right about. Matt’s medical situation for one. I wanted him to find a new doctor to treat his colitis. I wanted him to see someone who would suggest a more holistic approach, who would encourage him to try acupuncture—he met such suggestions from me with disdain—and make real dietary changes. That person would change everything, I believed, get him on the track back to good health and teach him how to manage his illness. When he told me he’d made an appointment to see someone new, someone whom he’d researched and who had a good reputation, I felt like falling to my knees to cry hallelujah.

  Because I am his family, his “she,” at least for the time being, I went to pick him up at the hospital after his latest colonoscopy.

  “Are you here for Matthew?” his new doctor asked. I nodded. She looked competent and alert, neat and tidy under her white jacket. She was probably first in her class at medical school. She was young enough to appreciate the usefulness of acupuncture and yoga in treating a stress-related illness. She would make him better. “Will you be driving him home?”