bite your nails. You want to win the contest, don’t you? Tom might be gaining on you. How are yours growing, son?”
“But Dad, is it a sin?”
Mom is exasperated. “These manners are atrocious. We can’t even have a conversation. We have to do something.”
Inspired, Dad sets down his martini glass.
“From now on, whoever makes a mistake in manners has to get milk for everyone else.”
“Forever?”
“Until someone else makes a mistake.”
Everyone agrees.
•••
But there are so many mistakes, the job keeps changing hands and it’s hard to keep track. A few nights later, Pogo snatches the red paper cap from the milk bottle and offers a suggestion.
“If we crown the Milkman, we’ll remember who it is every time! I wrote a song for us.”
He sings (to the tune of “Sailing, Sailing, Over the Bounding Main”):
“Long live the Milkman,
Long may he reign!
For he’s a schmo and we all know
He’s the gamest in the game!”
From then on, the paper cap is placed atop the offender’s head, the song sung lustily by all, milk refilled as needed by the offender. Seven rambunctious buckaroos learned table manners by means of ceremony, whimsy, song, and sharp-eyed siblings longing to relinquish the crown.
Within These Walls
The dining room door swings into the fierce emotional arena of the kitchen. If ever a room embodied conflict, this is it. What pleasures it holds. The bulging promise of Saturday’s grocery bags, the body-swaddling aroma of a rich Sunday roast, the toothpick frills and sparkle of a black-olive party night—Ritz crackers, pimento cheese, Swedish meatballs bubbling in sauce; the humble rapture of just-baked cookies.
Yet what glaring, cold, hard surfaces. What unappetizing colors: metal-edged red Formica countertops, gray plastic wall tiles, an oval black enamel table, scrape-y chrome chairs, strange blue-gray-might-have-once-been-white striated linoleum, lit by an irritating flickering bare fluorescent halo. And, like the rest of the house, none too clean.
I see buttery, flowery, cozy kitchens at neighbors’ or in magazines.
“Mom, why does our kitchen look this way?” I ask over and over.
“It looked chic once,” she answers. Throughout our childhood, she insists that she longs to redo it, but she never gets around to it. Truth is, it accurately reflects her loathing of domestic chores. Unless she’s getting ready for a party, she dislikes spending time here. She states with pride that her favorite cookbook is Peg Bracken’s I Hate To Cook.
While these dingy cupboards, counters, and fridge hold food, my principal source of comfort and happiness, these hard edges sharpen the stinky-sponged meanness of dishwashing arguments, tribal struggle, pilfering, and the delayed detonation of guilt.
•••
But come on, let’s visit my living room.
We don’t use this fireplace. Too much trouble since that time the flue wasn’t open. The third and final time we lit a fire in it was to burn the mortgage.
These Meerschaums belong to Dad’s whopping pipe collection. He loves a fragrant bowl of Brush Creek ever since he gave up cigarettes after his heart attack. What did break his heart?
Right there is our grandmother clock. It used to bong so beautifully, but hasn’t worked in years. Just stuck there at 2:50.
This portrait hanging over the mantel is a jumbo of those Dad signs at the State Fair or down at the station. People line up to see Don O’Brien. He went from broadcasting minor league baseball games in his rich and resonant voice to radio programs, and now he’s on TV.
•••
My father’s voice is who my father is. Images, vivid and faded, advance and retreat on a screen in the mind, but voices enter the body like scent. I still feel your gentle resonance humming my shoulder against your chest.
The sound of you, the many pipe sounds: cleaning the stem with prickly pipe cleaners (Dill’s, lettered red on yellow), knocking the bowl with the heel of your hand, the puff and toot, the skritching match, the suck of breath, your smoke-covered voice answering my questions, clink of the gone-out pipe against the grape glass ashtray.
He’s sitting in this living room portrait, pipe in hand, as if paused in thoughtful conversation, more Walter Cronkite now than Gable.
Whether he’s forecasting a good fishing day or buckets of snow on his evening weather segment, describing the comfort and durability of a King Koil Mattress, or hosting the Gold Award Theatre, people trust my Dad. For good reason.
He can say, “Go First Class…Go Phillips 66!” with real assurance, because he makes a point of always using the products he pitches. We go out of our way to get to Montgomery Ward.
Not only that, he screens the Hollywood Family Playhouse films before they air to see if they’re worth watching. If not, he’ll say, “It’s a dog. Go to bed.” The station goes along with what he calls his “frankness.”
“If people are going to believe in the commercials I give,” he tells them, “then I’d better be honest about the movies.” It makes people want to shake his hand.
Integrity is his hallmark. He takes pride in that.
And see? His eyes really do follow you all over the room. Can’t get away with anything in here.
Here’s his gold reading chair, where once to amuse us he stood on his head. Here’s where you’d find his lap if you needed it. Here’s where I face the consequence of my first sin, at age five.
•••
It begins, as so much does, in the kitchen and centers, as so much does, on food.
“Can I have an apple, Mom?”
She’s checking meatloaf in the oven.
“You mean, ‘May I please have an apple?’ ”
“May I please have an apple?”
“You may not. It’s too close to dinner.”
I watch. When she turns to unscrew the jar of pimento-stuffed martini olives, I shove a Red Delicious under my striped polo shirt.
“Irene Marie! Did you just take an apple?”
“No,” I reply bald-facedly, sure as an ostrich that I am concealed.
She folds her arms and scowls.
“Go speak to your father about this.”
