by Kerr, Jean;
Getting a child to bed is a different proposition altogether. First you locate your child and make a simple announcement to the effect that it is now bedtime. This leads to a spirited debate in which you have to listen to a passionate defense of the many mothers of character and vision who live just up the block and who always allow their seven-year-old boys to stay up and watch Bilko. (Indeed, if my informant is correct, ours are the only children in Larchmont who don’t habitually sit up to catch Night Beat.)
You gently and gracefully present your side of the picture. “Listen,” you say, “I don’t want to hear one more word about Rory Killilea’s mother. You’re going to bed right now, do you hear, now, this minute!” These persuasive remarks, declaimed in clear, ringing tones with perhaps an additional “this Minute!” thrown in for good measure, are usually sufficient to get a boy up into the bedroom. Theoretically, the matter is closed. Actually, you’ve just begun to fight.
Now begins a series of protracted farewell appearances. He comes back on the landing to say that his pajamas are wet and he has a neat idea: he’s going to sleep in his snow pants. You say it’s impossible, how could those pajamas be wet? And he says he doesn’t know unless it’s because he used them to mop up the floor when he tipped over the fish tank.
It shouldn’t take you more than fifteen minutes to find his other pajamas—the ones that haven’t got any buttons, the ones that are supposed to be in the clean-clothes hamper but aren’t. When you’ve finally got him pinned into that dry pair, you can go back and glare at your husband, who has found the whole incident rather amusing (well, dammit, he’s a boy). Your husband’s hilarity, however, will be somewhat quenched in a moment when he hears that one of the fish has perished in the disaster and will require an immediate burial outside by flashlight.
But soft! That boy is back again, and we are into the following dialogue:
“I suppose you want me to brush my teeth.”
“Of course I want you to brush your teeth.”
“Okay, but I won’t be going to school tomorrow.”
“Why not, for heaven’s sake?”
“Because I’ll be poisoned to death.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Chris used my toothbrush to paint his model car.”
This necessitates a brief but painful interview with Chris, who declares, “He never used that toothbrush anyway, he always used mine.”
Normally, along about here, you can count on a seven-minute Luftpause during which you can cut out a recipe for Baked Alaska which you will make as soon as you lose ten pounds, which will be never.
But we’re about ready for that third appearance. “Mommy”—this time the voice is dripping with tragedy—“Mommy, it’s raining.”
You leap out of your chair.
“Do you mean to tell me that you got up just to tell me it’s raining? I know it’s raining. Go back to bed!”
He goes back, but presently the sound of muffled sobs come flooding down the stair well. Naturally, you have to go upstairs and turn on the light and find out what’s the matter with the poor little thing. What’s the matter, it turns out, is that he has left his bicycle over on the Slezaks’ lawn. Not that he is at all concerned about the bicycle, which he has just got for Christmas and which cost thirty-nine dollars and ninety-five cents, but he has tied a keen foxtail to the handle bar and it will be ruined, just absolutely ruined. So you can go over and get the bicycle and if you hurry you’ll be back in time to catch his fourth and final appearance.
This time, noticing the edge of hysteria in your voice (he’s been around for seven years; he knows when you are going to crack), he keeps his message brief.
“Mommy, this is important. I have to have a costume for the play tomorrow. I’m Saint Joseph.”
If children and adults differ in their approach to bedtime, there is even greater discrepancy in the separate ways they greet the morn. To begin with, the average, healthy, well-adjusted adult gets up at seven-thirty in the morning feeling just plain terrible. He stumbles through the physical motions of dressing, staring glassily at the shirt button that has just come off in his hand. His mind, oddly enough, is razor-sharp, probing, questioning: why was he born, why are there never any clean handkerchiefs, where will all this end? He’s moody, morose, and above all else—silent. (This is a desirable situation, since it makes it easier for him to live with that other healthy, normal adult who isn’t feeling so top-of-the-morning either.) He walks with a slight list, holding his hands out in front of him—presumably to catch his head should it fall off. During the entire breakfast period he will break the silence only once, to mutter hoarsely, “I don’t call this half the paper, this is nothing but real estate ads.”
Now we come to the little ones, who rise from their beds like a swarm of helicopters buzzing and sawing the air around them. Although it’s only seven-thirty, they haven’t been idle. One of them has written “I am a pig” on the bathroom mirror with tooth paste—and won’t that be a cool joke on Gilbert when he is old enough to read? Somebody else has found a good secret hiding place for his pirate knife: he just cut a little corner off the pillow and stuffed it inside, and that clears up the mystery of where all those feathers came from. Even so, it’s not the mayhem that eats away at the nerve ends of the adult; it is the riotous good humor and wild, gay chatter that spills like a Kansas twister out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and over the breakfast table.
If the matutinal conversation of children and grownups differs in volume and velocity, it also differs in essence. An adult, if he speaks at all, makes statements (“Well, I see Walter Lippmann is after Dulles again”), a remark that not only doesn’t require an answer, it practically precludes one.
The child, on the other hand, makes questions. Even when he is only trying to impart information, he will phrase it as a query: “Did you know that the Egyptians invented marshmallow?” “Did you know that Billy said if his turtle has a turtle he’s going to give me a turtle?”
Now, most of these questions can be answered by a simple “Yep.” (This is clearly not the time to give your reasons for supposing that the output of a solitary turtle will be necessarily limited.) There is a danger, though, that you will “yep” your way into trouble by missing the ghastly implications of a trick question like, “Do you want to see me drink my milk without touching the glass with my hands?”
There are other important ways in which children differ from their elders. For instance, it is perfectly possible to have a really satisfactory quarrel with an adult. You say to the beloved, “Do you mean to tell me that you met Mrs. Gordon and you didn’t ask her about her operation? Of course I told you, you just don’t listen. Oh, never mind—you’re obtuse, that’s all, just plain thick!” This should lead to a spirited exchange and result in a good, two-day sulk.
Conversely, you can tell a child that he’s the worst boy ever born into the world, follow up this sweeping statement with a smart thump on the behind, and in two and one half minutes he will come back, look you straight in the eye, and say, “Wanna hear a neat riddle?”
Of course we haven’t time here to discuss the more obvious and basic differences, such as the fact that adults believe in Santa Claus and children don’t. But we must get in a word about the Sweater Fetish that is so peculiar to the young. Adults, many of them, don’t have sweaters, and those who do find that the mere possession of a sweater in no way detracts from their enjoyment of a rich, full life. Children, however, regard the Sweater primarily as something to take off. More than that. They see in the Sweater a symbol of all that is plainly idiotic and unreasonable about the adult world. I’m sure that even in Alaska, when the temperature thuds to fifty below zero, little Eskimo children plead, “Do I have to wear it? It’s not cold.” To me, there is something almost touching about the way children fight the daily, doomed battle of the Sweater. It’s as though they were saying to themselves, “Okay, I have to wear this, but someday, somewhere, some kid who is bigger than me
and better than me is going to make it out that back door without one.” There are, to be sure, some lucky children who don’t have sweaters, having left them in school, or in the park, or in a drawer wrapped around a pair of ice skates.
Psychologists tell us that the things we want, the things we ask for most often, provide us with a vital clue to our personalities. Children, having linear minds and no grasp of the great intangibles, spend most of their energy yapping about trifles: “Can I have a Coke?” “Can I have an apple?” “Can I have a Good Humor?” “Can I see Baby Doll? Dickie says it’s a keen picture.”
In contrast, notice the maturity and breadth of vision that is revealed in this sampling of a typical adult’s daily demands: “Where did you put the aspirin?” “Did anybody call the plumber about that faucet?” “Don’t you ever put cigarettes out?” “Tell them we can’t come, tell them I’m sick, tell them I’m dead, tell them anything you want!” “Who the hell took my fountain pen?”
Let’s have no more of this nonsense about children being Little Adults. They are a breed apart, and you can tell it just by looking at them. How many of them have gray hair? How many do you see taking Miltown? How many go to psychiatrists?
Okay, we’ve settled that.
Aunt Jean’s marshmallow fudge diet
Fred Allen used to talk about a man who was so thin he could be dropped through a piccolo without striking a single note. Well, I’m glad I never met him; I’d hate to have to hear about his diet.
I can remember when I was a girl—way back in Truman’s administration—and No-Cal was only a gleam in the eye of the Hirsch Bottling Company. In those days it was fun to go to parties. The conversation used to crackle with wit and intelligence because we talked about ideas—the esthetic continuum in western culture, Gary Cooper in western movies, the superiority of beer over lotion as a wave-set, and the best way to use leftover veal.
Go to a party now and the couple next to you won’t say a word about the rich, chocolate texture of their compost heap or how practical it’s been to buy bunk beds for the twins. They won’t talk about anything whatsoever except their diets—the one they’ve just come off, the one they’re on now, or the one they’re going to have to start on Monday if they keep lapping it up like this.
I really blame science for the whole business. Years ago when a man began to notice that if he stood up on the subway he was immediately replaced by two people, he figured he was getting too fat. So he went to his doctor and the doctor said, “Quit stuffing yourself, Joe.” And Joe either stopped or he didn’t stop, but at least he kept his big mouth shut about the whole matter. What was there to talk about?
Today, with the science of nutrition advancing so rapidly, there is plenty of food for conversation, if for nothing else. We have the Rockefeller diet, the Mayo diet, high-protein diets, low-protein diets, “blitz” diets which feature cottage cheese and something that tastes like very thin sandpaper, and—finally—a liquid diet that duplicates all the rich, nourishing goodness of mother’s milk. I have no way of knowing which of these is the most efficacious for losing weight, but there’s no question in my mind that as a conversation-stopper the “mother’s milk diet” is way out ahead.
Where do people get all these diets, anyway? Obviously from the magazines; it’s impossible to get a diet from a newspaper. For one thing, in a newspaper you can never catch the diet when it starts. It’s always the fourth day of Ada May’s Wonder Diet and, after a brief description of a simple slimming exercise that could be performed by anybody who has had five years’ training with the ballet, Ada May gives you the menu for the day. One glass of skim milk, eight prunes, and three lamb kidneys. This settles the matter for most people, who figure—quite reasonably—that if this is the fourth day, heaven deliver them from the first.
However, any stoics in the group who want to know just how far Ada May’s sense of whimsey will take her can have the complete diet by sending twenty-five cents in stamps to the newspaper. But there you are. Who has twenty-five cents in stamps? You’re not running a branch of the post office. And if you’re going to go out and get the stamps you might as well buy a twenty-five-cent magazine which will give you not only the same diet (now referred to as Our Wonder Diet) but will, in addition, show you a quick and easy way to turn your husband’s old socks into gay pot holders.
In a truly democratic magazine that looks at all sides of the picture you will also find a recipe for George Washington’s favorite spice cake, which will replace any weight you may have haphazardly lost on that wonder diet.
If you have formed the habit of checking on every new diet that comes along, you will find that, mercifully, they all blur together, leaving you with only one definite piece of information: french-fried potatoes are out. But once in a great while a diet will stick in your mind. I’ll never forget one I read about last summer. It urged the dieter to follow up his low-calorie meals by performing a series of calisthenics in the bathtub. No, not in the bathroom. I read it twice, and it said in the bathtub. What a clever plan! Clearly, after you’ve broken both your arms you won’t be able to eat much (if at all) and the pounds will just melt away. In fact, if you don’t have a co-operative husband who is willing to feed you like a two-year-old you may be limited to what you can consume through a straw, in which case let me suggest that mother’s milk formula diet.
The best diet I’ve heard about lately is the simplest. It was perfected by the actor Walter Slezak after years of careful experimentation. Under the Slezak plan, you eat as much as you want of everything you don’t like. And if you should be in a hurry for any reason (let’s say you’re still wearing maternity clothes and the baby is eight months old), then you should confine yourself to food that you just plain hate.
Speaking about hateful food, the experts used to be content with merely making food pallid—by eliminating butter, oil, and salt. Not any more. Nowadays we are taught that, with a little imagination and a judicious use of herbs, anyone can turn out a no-calorie dish that’s downright ghastly. Just yesterday I came across a dandy recipe for sprucing up good old boiled celery. You just simmer the chopped celery (with the tops) in a little skim milk. When it’s tender, you add chopped onion, anise, chervil, marjoram, a dash of cinnamon, and you have a dish fit for the Dispose-All. And you’d better have a Dispose-All, because it’s awfully messy if you have to dump it into a newspaper and carry it out to the garbage can.
And where is all this dieting getting us? No place at all. It’s taken all the fun out of conversation and all the joy out of cooking. Furthermore, it leads to acts of irrational violence. A friend of mine keeps all candy and other luscious tidbits in the freezer, on the theory that by the time they thaw out enough to be eaten she will have recovered her will power. But the other night, having been driven berserk by a four-color advertisement for Instant Brownies, she rushed out to the freezer, started to gnaw on a frozen Milky Way, and broke off her front tooth.
But let’s get to the heart of the matter. All these diets that appear so monotonously in the glossy magazines—who are they for? Are they aimed at men? Certainly not; most men don’t read these magazines. Are they intended for fat teen-agers? Probably not; teen-agers can’t afford them. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for you, Married Woman, Mother of Three, lumpy, dumpy, and the source of concern to practically every publication in the country. And why, why is the married woman being hounded into starvation in order to duplicate an ideal figure which is neither practical nor possible for a person her age? I’ll tell you why.
First, it is presumed that when you’re thinner you live longer. (In any case, when you live on a diet of yogurt and boiled grapefruit, it seems longer.) Second, it is felt that when you are skin and bones you have so much extra energy that you can climb up and shingle the roof. Third—and this is what they’re really getting at—when you’re thin you are so tasty and desirable that strange men will pinch you at the A & P and your husband will not only follow you around the kitchen breathing heav
ily but will stop and smother you with kisses as you try to put the butter back in the icebox. This—and I hope those in the back of the room are listening—is hogwash.
Think of the happy marriages you know about. How many of the ladies are still wearing size twelve? I’ve been giving this a lot of thought in the last twenty minutes, and I have been examining the marriages in my own troubled circle. More than that, I have taken a cross section of the divorcees. (Cross? My dear, they were irate!) What I have discovered—attention, Beauty Editors everywhere!—is that the women who are being ditched are one and all willowy, wand-like, and slim as a blade. In fact, six of them require extensive padding even to look flat-chested.
That the fourteen divorcees, or about-to-be divorcees, whom I happen to know personally are thin may be nothing more than a coincidence. Or it may just prove that men don’t divorce fat wives because they feel sorry for them. Then again—and this is rather sinister—men may not divorce fat wives because they imagine that the poor, plump dears will never locate another husband and they’ll be paying alimony to the end of their days. (I mention this possibility, but my heart’s not in it.)
The real reason, I believe, that men hang onto their well-endowed spouses is because they’re comfy and nice to have around the house. In a marriage there is nothing that stales so fast as physical beauty—as we readers of Modern Screen have observed. What actually holds a husband through thick and thick is a girl who is fun to be with. And any girl who has had nothing to eat since nine o’clock this morning but three hard-boiled eggs will be about as jolly and companionable as an income-tax inspector.
So I say, ladies, find out why women everywhere are switching from old-fashioned diets to the modern way: no exercise, no dangerous drugs, no weight loss. (And what do they mean, “ugly fat”? It’s you, isn’t it?) For that tired, run-down feeling, try eating three full meals a day with a candy bar after dinner and pizza at eleven o’clock. Don’t be intimidated by pictures of Audrey Hepburn. That girl is nothing but skin and bones. Just sit there smiling on that size-twenty backside and say, “Guess what we’re having for dinner, dear? Your favorite—stuffed breast of veal and corn fritters.” All of your friends will say, “Oh, Blanche is a mess, the size of a house, but he’s crazy about her, just crazy about her!”
