by Kerr, Jean;
Please Don’t Eat the Daisies
Jean Kerr
For my severest critic
Contents
Introduction
Please don’t eat the daisies
How to be a collector’s item
Greenwich, anyone?
How to decorate in one easy breakdown
Dogs that have known me
The Kerr-Hilton
The care and feeding of producers
One half of two on the aisle
Don Brown’s body
Toujours tristesse
Snowflaketime
How to get the best of your children
Where did you put the aspirin?
Aunt Jean’s marshmallow fudge diet
Operation operation
About the Author
Introduction
I had the feeling all along that this book should have an Introduction, because it doesn’t have an Index and it ought to have something. But I was getting nowhere until I received this dandy questionnaire from the publicity department at Doubleday.
Now, I’m an old hand at questionnaires, having successfully opened a charge account at The Tailored Woman. But this was a questionnaire with a difference. It had heart. Take the item: Why do you write? In less artful hands this might have been a touchy question, indicating—perhaps—a last-minute case of nerves at the head office. Instead, one felt that they cared. They just wanted to know, that’s all.
Of course, there were a certain number of routine questions. List your pen name. (I just call it Ball-Point.) What do you do when you’re not writing? (Buy geraniums.) Husband’s name? (Honey.) List your previous addresses. (Funny, that’s what The Tailored Woman was so curious about.)
But then we began to probe deeper. What is your life’s ambition? What do you hope to accomplish ere dusk sets in? As far as this book is concerned, who should be notified in case of accident?
It was this next to last question that really yanked me to attention. It made me realize—and for the very first time—that in my scant twoscore minus seven years (all right, I’m the same age as Margaret Truman; let somebody check on her) I have already achieved my life ambition. That’s something, you know. I feel it sets me apart, rather, like that nice convict who raises canaries in San Quentin.
To go back to the beginning, I was only eight years old, and clearly retarded for my age, when my goal in life dawned on me. I won’t say there was a blinding flash, just a poignance, a suspension of time, a sweet recognition of the moment of truth not unlike that memorable instant in which Johnny Weissmuller first noticed that he was Tarzan and not Jane.
It was seven-thirty in the morning and my sister, who was six, was pulling my feet out from under the bedclothes and crying, “Oh, get up, get up, you mean thing, Mother says I can’t go downstairs until you’re on the floor!” I withered her with one of my characteristically salty sayings—“Oh, you think you’re so smart, Lady Jane Grey!”—but as I stumbled out of bed I realized then and there that all I wanted out of life was to be able to sleep until noon. In fact, I composed a poem right on the spot to celebrate the discovery. I remember the poem (unfortunately reprinted here in its entirety) because it is the only one I ever wrote, unless you want to include a two-line Valentine which said “Thee—whee.” The poem:
Dearer to me than the evening star
A Packard car
A Hershey bar
Or a bride in her rich adorning
Dearer than any of these by far
Is to lie in bed in the morning.
Of course I realized even then that you can’t sleep until noon with the proper élan unless you have some legitimate reason for staying up until three (parties don’t count). But I was in high school before I grasped the fact that I was never going to do anything that would keep me up until three. I had been writing short stories which, in the first flush of failure, I sent to Liberty Magazine on the innocent but quite mistaken theory that Liberty would buy them because everything in the magazine was so terrible. (The only story I can remember now was called “The Pursuit of Happiness” and I wince to report that Happiness was the heroine’s name.)
The solution, for me, was obvious: I had to locate a husband who stayed up until three. With this in mind, I ruled out basketball players, who were the natural objects of my affection at the time (I was five feet nine). It had been my observation that all basketball players eventually joined their fathers in the construction business, an activity notorious for its chaste and early uprisings. Besides, I didn’t want to marry a basketball player anyway. I really wanted to marry George S. Kaufman and was deterred only by the fact that (a) he had a wife, and (b) I never met him.
It may not seem very romantic, and I don’t think Victor Herbert could have done a thing with it, but by the time I was eighteen Walter (my husband) was the only truly eligible man I had ever met. He was an assistant professor who began teaching his classes at three in the afternoon and who directed plays all night. Actually, he got up at ten o’clock in the morning, but that was close enough. It was something to build on. And, to be entirely fair, he had certain other endearing qualities. He could play “Ja-Da” on the piano, recite whole sections of The Waste Land and make passable penuche. So we were married and I began each day bright and late at the stroke of the noon whistle, a splendid state of affairs which continued for two years or right up to the moment our first son was born.
Now the thing about having a baby—and I can’t be the first person to have noticed this—is that thereafter you have it, and it’s years before you can distract it from any elemental need by saying, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, go look at television.” At this point I was willing to renounce my master plan—so doth parenthood make cowards of us all—and go to bed at a decent hour like everybody else. Unfortunately, Walter was still staying up until three, busily engaged in making student actors look older by the ingenious device of keeping the stage lights very dim, and I was seeing him during the late hours, the children during the early hours, and double all the rest of the time.
It took me quite a while to come to grips with the situation, basically because I was thinking so slowly (from the lack of sleep) and because I had to spend so much time trying to remember to turn off the sterilized nipples before they melted. Eventually, after several years and several children, it came to me that the solution was to hire somebody else to get up in the morning.
At the university, we lived basically on a teacher’s salary, which is the way you live on a teacher’s salary; and this meant that if we were going to have a helpmate, I, Mommy, would have to make some money to pay her. But how? A job was out of the question: getting up in the morning was what I was trying to avoid. It had to be something I could do at home among the cans of Dextri-Maltose. But what? Could I sell little batches of my own special chicken creole soup, which I make by mixing together one can of Campbell’s chicken soup with one can of Campbell’s creole soup? No.
So I decided to write plays, spurred on by a chance compliment my father had paid me years earlier. “Look,” he exploded one evening over the dinner table, “the only damn thing in this world you’re good for is talk.” By talk I assumed he meant dialogue—and I was off.
I won’t say that my early efforts were crowned with glory. Oh, I’d say it, all right, but could I make it stick? When my first play was produced in New York, Louis Kronenberger wrote in Time, with a felicity it took me only ten years to appreciate, that “Leo G. Carroll brightens up Mrs. Kerr’s play in much the same way that flowers brighten a sickroom.” (I guess this is what they mean by the nick of Time.) I don’t know why this and similar compliments for Leo G. Carroll didn’t stay my hand forever. As someone pointed out recent
ly, if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, it’s just possible you haven’t grasped the situation. But what with one thing and another (the advance paid by the doomed producer, and the amateur rights) I was now paying the salary of a very nice girl who had insomnia anyway and who pretended to enjoy distributing pablum and crayons until I emerged, rosy and wrinkled, at eleven.
Thus, as the golden years rolled on, I typed my way through several maids. There was a brief, ghastly period, immediately after we left the university, when it looked as though Walter was going to take a civilian-type job and we might have to live, oh think of it, normally. But my fears were groundless and Walter became a drama critic. In many ways, a drama critic leads an ideal existence, or would if he didn’t have to see so many plays.
Obviously, it’s fun to share the opening-night excitement of a great big hit. And there are, every year, a certain number of plays that must be labeled failures (because they close, for one thing) which are nevertheless fascinating to watch. But then, alas, there are the dogs (the worst of these usually turn up in March or April, which is the origin of the phrase “the hounds of spring”). These are the plays that are so bad you sit there in stunned disbelief, fearing for your sanity while on all sides people are beating their way to the exits. It was after just such an evening that my husband commented, “This is the kind of play that gives failures a bad name.”
I don’t know what set of standards the critics themselves bring to these occasions. But I can sense the presence of a real disaster, where no one will be allowed to enter the area for twenty-four hours, by gauging the amount of incidental information I’ve picked up about the bit players. We sit so far front that it is possible to read by the light-spill from the stage. And through the years I have discovered that on a really grueling evening it helps to keep me alert—that is to say, conscious—if I study the program notes while the performance is going on. “Biff Nuthall,” I read, “here making his debut in New York in the part of the elevator boy, hails from Princeton, New Jersey. He attended the University of Wisconsin, where he achieved notable success as Mosca in a student production of Volpone. Mr. Nuthall also plays the oboe.”
As you can see, I now have something to chew over; my subconscious is now gainfully occupied. Biff Nuthall as Mosca. I’m sure that boy is loaded with talent, but he’d never be my idea of Mosca. Benvolio maybe, or Friar Laurence; but Mosca—with those freckles and that red hair? And if he hails from Princeton, New Jersey, what was he doing going to the University of Wisconsin? What’s the matter with Princeton, for heaven’s sake? But that’s the way some boys are: just because a college is located in their home town, it’s not good enough for them. I’m sure you had your reasons, Biff, but it doesn’t seem loyal, somehow. And another thing: what do they mean by that curt statement: “Mr. Nuthall also plays the oboe”? Do I imagine it, or is there a rebuke implied there somewhere? Doesn’t he play it very well? Or does the press agent, who composed this little biography, not have a very high opinion of the oboe? For his information, the oboe is a noble instrument too much neglected by young people nowadays. What does he want, an entire orchestra composed of violins?
If the cast is long enough, one can while away a whole evening in this manner.
I do have a compulsion to read in out-of-the-way places, and it is often a blessing; on the other hand, it sometimes comes between me and what I tell the children is “my work.” As a matter of fact, I will read anything rather than work. And I don’t mean interesting things like the yellow section of the telephone book or the enclosures that come with the Bloomingdale bill about McKettrick classics in sizes 12 to 20, blue, brown, or navy @ 12.95 (by the way, did you know that colored facial tissue is now on sale at the unbelievably low price of 7.85 a carton?). The truth is that, rather than put a word on paper, I will spend a whole half hour reading the label on a milk-of-magnesia bottle. “Philips’ Milk of Magnesia,” I read with the absolute absorption of someone just stumbling on Congreve, “is prepared only by the Charles H. Philips Co., division of Sterling Drug, Inc. Not to be used when abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, or other symptoms of appendicitis are present, etc.”
For this reason, and because I have four boys, I do about half of my “work” in the family car, parked alongside a sign that says “Littering Is Punishable by a $50 Fine.” So far as the boys are concerned, it’s not the direct interruptions at home that are hard to adjust to. I don’t mind when one of them rushes in to tell me something really important, like the Good Humor man said that banana-rum was going to be the flavor of the week next week. What really drives me frantic and leads to the use of such quantities of Tint-Hair is the business of overhearing a chance remark from another part of the house (“Listen, stupid, the water is supposed to go in the top”). Rather than investigate, and interrupt myself, I spend twenty minutes wondering: What water? The top of what? I hope it’s just a water gun and not, oh no, not the enema bag again.
Out in the car, where I freeze to death or roast to death depending on the season, all is serene. The few things there are to read in the front-seat area (Chevrolet, E-gaso-line-F, 100-temp-200) I have long since committed to memory. So there is nothing to do but write, after I have the glove compartment tidied up.
Once in a while—perhaps every fifteen minutes or so—I ask myself: Why do I struggle, when I could be home painting the kitchen cupboards, why? And then I remember. Because I like to sleep in the morning, that’s why.
Please don’t eat the daisies
We are being very careful with our children. They’ll never have to pay a psychiatrist twenty-five dollars an hour to find out why we rejected them. We’ll tell them why we rejected them. Because they’re impossible, that’s why.
It seems to me, looking back on it, that everything was all right when there were two of them and two of us. We felt loved, protected, secure. But now that there are four of them and two of us, things have changed. We’re in the minority, we’re not as vigorous as we used to be, and it’s clear that we cannot compete with these younger men.
You take Christopher—and you may; he’s a slightly used eight-year-old. The source of our difficulty with him lies in the fact that he is interested in the precise value of words whereas we are only interested in having him pick his clothes up off the floor. I say, “Christopher, you take a bath and put all your things in the wash,” and he says, “Okay, but it will break the Bendix.” Now at this point the shrewd rejoinder would be, “That’s all right, let it break the Bendix.” But years of experience have washed over me in vain and I, perennial patsy, inquire, “Why will it break the Bendix?” So he explains, “Well, if I put all my things in the wash, I’ll have to put my shoes in and they will certainly break the machinery.”
“Very well,” I say, all sweetness and control, “put everything but the shoes in the wash.” He picks up my agreeable tone at once, announcing cheerily, “Then you do want me to put my belt in the wash.” I don’t know what I say at this point, but my husband says, “Honey, you mustn’t scream at him that way.”
Another version of this battle of semantics would be:
“Don’t kick the table leg with your foot.”
“I’m not kicking, I’m tapping.”
“Well, don’t tap with your foot.”
“It’s not my foot, it’s a fork.”
“Well don’t tap with the fork.”
“It’s not a good fork” … et cetera, et cetera.
Christopher is an unusual child in other respects. I watch him from the kitchen window. With a garden rake in one hand he scampers up a tree, out across a long branch, and down over the stone wall—as graceful and as deft as a squirrel. On the other hand, he is unable to get from the living room into the front hall without bumping into at least two pieces of furniture. (I’ve seen him hit as many as five, but that’s championship stuff and he can’t do it every time.)
He has another trick which defies analysis, and also the laws of gravity. He can walk out into the mid
dle of a perfectly empty kitchen and trip on the linoleum. I guess it’s the linoleum. There isn’t anything else there.
My friends who have children are always reporting the quaint and agreeable utterances of their little ones. For example, the mother of one five-year-old philosopher told me that when she appeared at breakfast in a new six-dollar pink wrap-around, her little boy chirped, in a tone giddy with wonder, “Oh, look, our Miss Mommy must be going to a wedding!” Now I don’t think any one of my children would say a thing like that. (What do I mean I don’t think; there are some things about which you can be positive.) Of course, in a six-dollar wrap-around I wouldn’t look as if I were going to a wedding. I’d look as if I were going to paint the garage. But that’s not the point. The point is: where is that babbling, idiotic loyalty that other mothers get?
A while back I spoke of a time when there were two of them and two of us. In my affinity for round numbers I’m falsifying the whole picture. Actually, there never were two of them. There was one of them, and all of a sudden there were three of them.
The twins are four now, and for several years we have had galvanized iron fencing lashed onto the outside of their bedroom windows. This gives the front of the house a rather institutional look and contributes to unnecessary rumors about my mental health, but it does keep them off the roof, which is what we had in mind.
For twins they are very dissimilar. Colin is tall and active and Johnny is short and middle-aged. Johnny doesn’t kick off his shoes, he doesn’t swallow beer caps or tear pages out of the telephone book. I don’t think he ever draws pictures with my best lipstick. In fact, he has none of the charming, lighthearted “boy” qualities that precipitate so many scenes of violence in the home. On the other hand, he has a feeling for order and a passion for system that would be trying in a head nurse. If his pajamas are hung on the third hook in the closet instead of on the second hook, it causes him real pain. If one slat in a Venetian blind is tipped in the wrong direction he can’t have a moment’s peace until somebody fixes it. Indeed, if one of the beans on his plate is slightly longer than the others he can scarcely bear to eat it. It’s hard for him to live with the rest of us. And vice versa.
