Burn
When my brother and sister and I were children, men and women had two things we don’t have now: cocktails and hairdos. They had Gimlets and Manhattans and Gibsons and Singapore Slings and Vodka Stingers and Blue Mondays and Grasshoppers and Old Fashioneds and Highballs and Sidecars. They had Mint Juleps for Derby Day. They also had muddlers and swizzle sticks. Men were known and even famous for their ability to make one or the other of these cocktails. Women never made them, except maybe during the war, they did, when they were alone. But not as well.
It was a whole male ritual of equipment and liquor and deft hand gestures and quips. My father and his friends would say things like “Let me freshen that up for you.” They would say things like “grease cutter” and “Just have a nightcap and then you can go.”
People had bars that stood out in the open, on fancy pieces of furniture. They had silver ice buckets. They had silver julep cups. They had Highball glasses with their monograms on them. They got these things for wedding presents.
Nowadays, except for the trendy run at a Cosmopolitan or a Mojito or something, people drink wine. Or hard liquor on Wall Street. When I was little nobody drank wine; they hardly even drank it at dinner, except for very fancy dinner parties. And it was bad wine. At least it was bad wine in the country. It came in jugs. They had cocktails instead. Nobody even says cocktails nowadays.
After dinner parties, at which the women wore taffeta or silk dinner dresses, at which they wore earrings and necklaces and clever dinner rings, my mother used to have a tray of cordials with tiny glasses she would bring out, crème de menthe and Triple Sec and Drambuie and cognac and Cherry Heering. Sometimes she would make pousse-café, an amazingly complicated thing she learned about in Gourmet that involved layering cordials according to their various densities, so you ended up with a vertical rainbow of six or seven liqueurs. It was like being the Marie Curie of after-dinner drinks. I still have all the fancy little cordial glasses.
The women had hairdos, then. Not haircuts—hairdos. They would wear their hair up or down, in braids, in French twists, in bouffant concoctions, according to the various occasions. They put their hair in rollers in the afternoons, before a party, but they never went to the grocery store with their hair in rollers, just bobby pins sometimes, and their hair sparkled from the hair spray used to hold it all in place.
It was very different then. People in the country lived the kind of life they imagined being lived in the pages of the New Yorker magazine. And they were good at it, and it gave them pleasure to be good at it.
People had real parties. My mother and father would grab at any excuse for a cocktail party or a dinner party. Anywhere people were gay and bright and didn’t have a care in the world.
They once gave a going-away party for a couple who were going to Europe for two months in the summer. Napoleon came to be the bartender, making cocktails, macerating mint and sugar in the bottom of silver julep cups, serving up Old Fashioneds and Highballs, and the women wore raw silk summer dresses or sleeveless linen dresses with shoes that matched, and some even wore gloves and even hats, and everybody looked like they had a lot of money, even if they didn’t have a dime and had just charged it all at J. Ed Deaver or Grossman’s, the two local clothing stores for grownups.
There were rules, then. My mother, for instance, never drank or served rum. That was a rule. Nobody had even heard of tequila, then.
My mother was lovely in her bones, as the poem says. She could sew, and so she could make beautiful dresses out of Liberty lawn or linen or, once, gray wool with a jeweled collar. She wore them well. She didn’t have any money, but she was always turned out beautifully. She had a friend whose sister or somebody lived in Ohio and bought her clothes at the Dayton Oval Room, and, every now and then, a box would arrive with this woman’s castoffs, which wouldn’t fit my mother’s friend, so my mother had some clothes with fancy designer labels like Pauline Trigere.
At the going-away party, all the guests looked like they didn’t have a care in the world. Men stood on the back terrace and told jokes in the waning sunlight and talked about the war and the Virginia Military Institute. Women talked about books or poetry or the garden club. They talked, but they didn’t talk dirty. My mother once told me that she’d never heard a woman say fuck until after the men came back from World War II, and even then they never said it in public.
A lot of them had grown up together. They had had adventures. My mother and her friend Sunshine and my godmother Emily and my other godmother, Fran Pancake, true, would sometimes talk about the week they had spent at Virginia Beach when they were young, sunning themselves and drinking what they called Scotch-type whiskey. They never tired of talking about that trip, and it was always funny. I saw photographs. They were on the beach, wearing very dark glasses, like blind people in bathing suits.
We heard the stories because we would work the parties. My brother and sister and I would dress up and we would pass things, little cheese straws and cucumber sandwiches with the edges cut off. My mother made this dip for which she was famous. It was made of crabmeat and sherry and Cheez Whiz, and people thought it was delicious, so a lot of them would hover around the dining room table where the chafing dish was. Imagine having a chafing dish.
Their names are the stuff of legend to me. They were the grownups, and I more than anything wanted to be a grownup. Jack Leary, the first man I ever saw naked, who would always get drunk. His wife, Sunshine. Mack and Mary Monroe. Jack and Kyle. The Tutwilers, Ann and Tut. Tommy and George. Movie stars. Might as well have been movie stars.
Sunshine was a sardonic woman. She was stuck in a bad marriage to Jack, a terrible drunk, so she took a very ironic view of life, bitter, of course. I used to spend the night at their house a lot—her children were my best friends—and I saw it all. Once they set the chimney on fire. The fire department came and sprayed water down the chimney. It was over way too soon. Jack was the only man who ever spanked me, except for my father. He spanked his son and me for riding our bicycles in the street in front of the Kappa Sig house. My father didn’t really have the heart for it. Jack did. Their house is sold now. So’s the Kappa Sig house, actually.
Once my mother passed Sunshine at a stoplight, it was just before Christmas, and my mother leaned out and called, “What do you want for Christmas?” And Sunshine answered, without a trace of a smile, “Out.” My mother drove on.
I came home from a birthday party once, having drunk too much punch, and then I threw up on the floor and Sunshine was out for drinks and all she said was, “Listen to me. If it’s purple, don’t drink it.”
See. Cocktails. They knew their stuff.
At parties, at cocktail parties, nothing bad happened. Except sometimes this one woman got embarrassingly drunk and once even had to spend the night, because she fell down on the coffee table and knocked it all to hell and her husband wouldn’t even take her home. But usually, nobody said a mean thing and went home before they got too drunk to drive.
Everybody smiled, and kissed each other, and the men got drunk but not too drunk and spilled whiskey on their neckties and wrapped their beefy arms around one another’s shoulders and people took black-and-white photographs of all the people in their dense perfection. It was proof that matter can, in fact, be created out of nothing.
The going-away party at which Napoleon came to mix the cocktails was a huge success. It was for some rich people my parents knew, a man who taught with my father and his wife. They were going to Europe on a boat, on the Queen Elizabeth, while everybody else would be sweltering in the heat and driving twelve miles for a swim at Goshen Pass, but there was not a trace of envy. People were glad for them; they had a lot of money and close family connections in Richmond. The wife wasn’t the shiniest nickel in the bag, but she had a sable coat. At Christmas, she spread it out on the coat bed for all the other women to see when they put down their wool coats.
In those days, it was good manners for the guests of honor to leave first. Tha
t was the signal that the party was going to be over soon. As they were leaving, my brother and I were supposed to help them with their coats and whatever things they had brought. The Queen Elizabeth couple had a twenty-year-old daughter, and she had worn a small mink stole to the party, a summer fur, I guess they were called, probably borrowed from her mother or her grandmother. Her grandmother had real money. The small mink stole was so soft. It felt so expensive.
My mother had a mink coat. It was short and light brown. She won it in a contest in which she was asked to describe the goodness of a certain brand of split pea soup. Every day, when my father came home from graduate school, she would serve him split pea soup. She wouldn’t eat it herself, because she loathed it, but he would describe it to her, and then she would sit all afternoon—she was pregnant with my brother at the time—and she would compose twenty-five words or less in praise of this whatever split pea soup. She won. They were so poor, they had to ask his mother for money to pay the taxes on the coat. My mother loved that coat.
So I was helping the daughter on with the stole, putting it around her shoulders, and she turned and said, “Why, thank you, honey. You’ll make somebody a nice little wife someday.” Why would anybody say that to an eight-year-old boy?
She lives in Vermont now. She’s old, I guess, and a widow, but her words are still a complete curiosity in my memory. Maybe she just wasn’t very adept, like her mother.
My mother and father were not only good at giving parties, generous and clever, they were good at going to parties. People adored them for their wit and charm, for their lean good looks, for the way my mother dressed, and my father, too. My mother never wore anything that didn’t show off her slender waist. She had a lot of belts.
She smoked, and she did it eloquently, and she was not only funny, she was witty, intelligently witty. We had a minister in our church named Barrett, and once, when my mother knelt at the altar rail as he approached with the chalice, she looked up at him with an innocent, pious expression and said so anybody nearby could hear, she said, “Pass the claret, Barrett.” That kind of thing. She wrote witty occasional poems for people’s birthdays, and people treasured her company.
This was before it all went bad. This was before she started dressing in wash-and-wear pants and blouses from Leggett’s, before she stopped caring, before she stopped sewing, before her conversation turned vague and unfocused.
They were a handsome couple, my parents, and they lived in a charming house that belonged to my mother’s mother. My mother always sat in the same chair, a blue slipper chair by the fireplace, and she claimed she was always cold, even in the hot, muggy summers, possibly because she so rarely ate anything.
She had cigarettes and coffee for breakfast, she had cottage cheese and canned pears and cigarettes for lunch, she never ate bread or dessert. She never ate between meals. She was thin but not painfully so and that’s why she looked so good in clothes. She said she’d been fat as a child and she never wanted to be fat again.
Once, when she was a child, she got run over by a car. It was one of those light, early cars—she was born in 1919—and she wasn’t hurt at all, but my panicked grandfather told her she could have anything she wanted. He felt responsible. His eye had strayed for a minute.
She said she wanted to have her hair cut like a boy’s.
Almost every day, people came for drinks, or my parents went somewhere else for drinks. When you went somewhere else for drinks, not cocktail parties, just everyday drinks, you always took your own liquor.
When people went out for drinks, they’d take their children with them, and we’d play together, unless they were girls, in which case they’d play with my sister. One little girl had a doll baby named Horrible. Horrible had lost all of her hair—some of it burned off with matches—and many of her body parts and one of her eyes and was in every way hideous, but this little girl loved Horrible, or Harble, as she would say, and wouldn’t give her up. At our house we’d play games because we didn’t have a TV. That’s why we liked it when we went out for drinks with my parents. Other kids had TVs. We could watch whatever we wanted.
My father had an ice tapper, a kind of bendable rod with a heavy metal disk at the end, and this was his way of breaking up ice cubes. You could set your watch by it. Five o’clock, the tapping of the ice cracker signaled the beginning of the cocktail hour.
Somebody once said to me that all families were either about the parents or about the children, and ours was about the parents. More exactly, it was about the cocktail and dinner hour, my mother always smartly dressed, my father smoking, but only after five o’clock. He could smoke a pack of cigarettes between five o’clock and bedtime, but he only smoked the first inch of a cigarette, which was great when we were older and started learning to smoke, the ashtrays filled with these cigarettes that were almost whole. My mother never dumped the ashtrays at night; she was afraid of fires.
In Virginia, we generally started smoking secretly about age fifteen; we started smoking in front of our parents at sixteen, and the idea was, you just kept on smoking until you died. Cigarettes cost a quarter a pack.
My parents believed you learned to drink at home. When I was seventeen and started sitting with the grownups for the cocktail hour, my parents didn’t like it that I didn’t drink, so they’d buy these sissy aperitifs like Lillet, like Cherry Heering, like Dubonnet, hoping I’d like them. When I was seventeen, my mother and I decided to cut down on smoking, so we started smoking pipes, and I would sit with the grownups, smoking a pipe and gagging my way through a glass of Lillet on the crushed rocks.
My mother wore gloves. Her fingernails were scarlet, her mouth was scarlet. She wore a perfume, Wind Song, by Prince Matchabelli. She loved Joy, and sometimes my father would give her a small bottle for Christmas. Later, when I moved to New York, I started buying her Norell, and she liked that a lot. She didn’t wear Wind Song in its little crown-shaped bottle anymore. She had no idea what Norell cost. She thought it was probably about the same.
When she died, there was a bottle of Norell on her dressing table. She hadn’t worn it in so long it had turned amber and viscous and you could barely get the top off.
She wore powder, and her dressing table was always covered with a thin, dusty layer of pale pink. She was publicly elegant, but privately slovenly, even then.
She bathed in the late afternoon, changing for cocktails, and once, in the bathtub, she pulled a rusted carpet tack out of her rib cage. She showed it to us; she showed it to the people who came for drinks. She lifted up her blouse to show the little hole it came out of. Once, during the cocktail hour, she sat down in a chair right on a pair of scissors, which plunged through her girdle and deep into her behind.
My mother was the last woman in the world to need a girdle, she was so thin and gamine, but she always wore one.
She ran from the room, blood streaming, and went upstairs to my grandmother’s room, the scissors still imbedded in her bleeding flesh. My grandmother told her to turn around, and she put one foot up on my mother’s ass—it feels odd saying my mother’s ass, but I don’t know what else to call it. She pulled the scissors out as though she were pulling off a riding boot. My grandmother put on some iodine and a bandage, she had been a nurse, and my mother changed her dress and went back downstairs to cocktails. She had to sit sideways, but it made for a really funny story, anyway, right away. Just one of those funny things that happened at cocktails when the whoevers were out last week.
Later, when I started working, she started to ask me to buy clothes for her in New York. I bought them at Bonwit Teller or Bergdorf Goodman. My mother would send me a hundred dollars and ask me to get her a dress for a wedding or a dance or some big party. Even in those days, you couldn’t buy a dress for a hundred dollars, so I’d buy whatever I thought would look nice on her, whatever it cost. For my sister’s wedding, I bought her a long green Oscar de la Renta dress, a perfect garden party kind of dress, and I told her it cost a hundred dollars. It cost eight h
undred dollars. I told her I’d bought it at a discount outlet. When she took up the hem, there was a tape I hadn’t noticed that said BERGDORF GOODMAN over and over around the whole full long skirt. She didn’t bat an eyelash.
I liked to see my mother in beautiful clothes. I wanted to believe we were richer than we were, and my parents were so unhappy that I would do almost anything to please them, although, as many people have told me, they never showed the slightest pride or gratitude for anything I’d done.
Once, when I was in college, a roommate said to me on the ride back to school after a weekend at home, “I have a question. You have a 4.0 average, you’ve just won a big fellowship, you’re giving a speech at graduation, you have the most beautiful girlfriend of anybody. Where’s the pride? Where’s the nachus? If I’d done what you did, my mother would take out a full-page ad in the New York Times.”
We just did what we did because that’s what we were expected to do, and we wanted to please them, to do anything to break this chain of bitterness and depression that hung over the house when all the guests were gone. My mother took tranquilizers, like all housewives did then, and she longed to have a job. She had a job before we were born, working in the lab at the hospital, but my father didn’t like it, so she stopped, and went on just wearing beautiful dresses and scarlet lipstick and making exquisite dinners when company came.
She made a dessert called tortoni, which was a sort of coffee semifreddo. I hated it, but it wasn’t for children anyway, like avocados. Avocados were too expensive, alligator pears, so we were told children wouldn’t like them.
She made a cake that was called Paris-Brest because it was invented on a train in France. She made the best biscuits in town, better even than my grandmother’s, although she never ate a single one. At the end of the month, when the money was all gone, she made Welsh rarebit. She kept her household money in a book called The Pleasures of Poverty, and when that was almost gone, she made creamed chipped beef on toast. She had three hundred dollars a month to feed a family of five. But at the beginning of the month, she rubbed flour on roasts of beef so the skin would be crispy.
The End of the World as We Know It Page 6
