Surly Wench Journal

Lemon Beagle

2013-01-09T09:19:00.000-08:00

My husband and I have recently downsized from a four bedroom home in the suburbs to a two bedroom condo downtown. We have done this to “simplify” our lives, but also to prove to ourselves and our families that we are still young and hip enough to enjoy an urban lifestyle. A lifestyle that puts us within walking distance of numerous restaurants, galleries, and bars, not to mention a neighbor who sings Italian arias while strolling with his dog, and Carl, the local homeless man, who pushes his shopping cart down the middle of the street every morning at eight o’clock.

When my three grown children announced they would be spending Christmas with us in our new place, we enthusiastically looked forward to showing them our hip new crib. When they announced they would also be bringing their dogs, I was less enthusiastic. “Oh, we’ll be fine,” my husband said, indicating I was being overly dramatic.

My son had recently adopted what he called a Lemon Beagle, which I had never heard of, that was going to be flying in with him from San Francisco.

“So you’ll be carrying him on the plane?” I said, imagining a cute spotted puppy that would fit neatly between his feet.

“Oh no,” he said. “I’ll have to crate him.” And then he quickly changed the subject.

Imagine my surprise when, three weeks later, I saw him unloading what appeared to be an elephant crate from the back of my car. My husband had driven down to Atlanta to pick up my son and his Lemon Beagle, which is apparently code for a cross between a pit bull and a Great Dane.

His name was Finn and he was adorable but clumsy, knocking over furniture with his tail which he swung behind him with the velocity of a bull whip. My dog, Yoshi, gave him a wide berth.

I rose early the next morning determined to take Finn and Yoshi for a walk.

“Are you sure you want to do that?” my husband said, sipping his coffee at the breakfast bar.

Undaunted, I set out. What I soon learned is that, although it’s relatively easy to walk one dog on a leash, it is less easy to walk two. Especially two that have a combined weight of well over one hundred pounds. Dogs in a pack constantly jostle for dominance, trying to be the lead dog. Added to the fact that I was walking both on retractable leashes that were quickly entangled, I soon found myself being dragged along the sidewalk like a musher racing across the frozen tundra of the Alaskan Iditarod.

This would have been enough to discourage any sane person, but I was determined to go on. I had a point to prove. I wasn’t the same old Shrinking Violet I had once been; I now ate oatmeal and miso soup for breakfast, stayed away from saturated fats and dairy, and meditated twice a day. I could handle walking two dogs along a city street.

It was in the second block that the real trouble began.

By now my pulse had begun to pound ominously in my ears. My breathing was ragged and strained. We scooted past a row of neat bungalows set back slightly from the sidewalk. The middle house had a neatly manicured lawn, with baskets of flowers and ferns set out strategically around the base of a large oak tree. Various whirligigs spun in the breeze, and a ring of colorful garden gnomes peeked roguishly from between the baskets of ferns and flowers. It was the kind of yard that announces, “No Dogs Allowed” by its very neatness.

Finn, who had apparently never seen a garden gnome, decided he didn’t like the looks of these strange creatures, and lunged suddenly to the right, bellowing and knocking over baskets and whirligigs with his tail. Yoshi sprang to the left. I found myself being dragged, spread-eagled, toward the massive oak and began to shout, “No, no.” Finn, panicked at the tone of my voice, began now to run in circles, catching two of the larger ferns in his leash which he dragged behind him like a conveyer belt.

“It’s okay, puppy, it’s okay,” I shrilled, trying to calm him down. He continued to run in circles, wrapping the retractable leash around his legs until, finally, tied up like a rodeo calf, he lurched to a stop, and fell over. Taking advantage of his immobility, I glanced over my shoulder to check on Yoshi.

He was taking a huge, steaming shit in front of a basket of fake petunias.

It was at this moment that I realized my left arm was numb and one eye was fluttering like a bad circuit. It occurred to me that I might be in the throes of a medical emergency. I imagined the couple who owned the house returning in the evening to the wreckage of their carefully-tended yard. I imagined garden gnomes and ferns and whirligigs scattered in disarray, two dogs hog-tied and squealing, and a middle-aged woman, dead of an apparent heart attack, face down on the lawn.

I fell on my knees, hard, at the base of the tree, and began hurriedly to set up the fallen gnomes and fern baskets. Then I gathered Yoshi’s warm excrement in a plastic baggie, untied Finn, and turned and limped quickly for home.

I imagined the couple returning home to find that their garden gnomes had been vandalized, checking their surveillance tape, and uploading it to YouTube, where it would become an instant Internet sensation. I imagined my children’s friends calling.

“Dude, isn’t that your mother?”

My husband was still sitting at the breakfast bar when I limped in.

“That was quick,” he said. “Did you have a nice walk?”

I said nothing, handing him the leashes, and turning, hobbled toward the bedroom to take a nice long nap.

Charred Turkey and Jamaican Qualade Shooters

2012-11-20T14:08:00.000-08:00

We’re driving to New Orleans tomorrow to spend Thanksgiving with our two daughters. The younger one is still in college and the older one has graduated and stayed in New Orleans. Her boyfriend is a chef at one of the top restaurants in town and he’ll be preparing the meal for us and approximately twenty-five of their closest friends. The menu includes Roast Suckling Pig, Turkey with Oyster Stuffing, Sweet Potato Casserole with Apple Puree, and Cheddar Biscuits with Olives, among other things.

“Shall I bring a Green Bean Casserole?” I asked my daughter tentatively.

“No, mom, thanks. We’ve got it covered,” she responded in a tone indicating she saw trouble coming and was attempting to head it off.

As with most of the country, we’re approaching this most-American of all holidays with a great deal of anticipation and reservation. Where else but at Thanksgiving do you celebrate so much togetherness, love, and unresolved conflict around a big, heavily-laden table? Add a well-stocked bar to the mix and the potential for family drama goes through the roof.

I’ve promised my husband to be on my best behavior.

My daughter, when I talked to her last week, sounded confident and unconcerned. After all, she and Mason hosted a similar crowd last Thanksgiving and everything went off without a hitch, except for the deep-fried turkey which somehow got left in the fryer after someone broke out the Jamaican Qualude Shooters. We were not at this celebration but have heard the legendary stories of the charred turkey which was greeted (perhaps owing to the Jamaican Qualudes) with cheers and gales of laughter. Mason served it up on a silver tray.

I am determined that this year’s Thanksgiving will go off without a hitch, by God. I will help my daughter whether she wants it or not.

“Shall I bring the sterling?” I asked her.

“No, mom, please don’t.”

“Oh? Do you have enough silverware for twenty-five people?”

“Actually, this year I’m making it easy on myself and everyone else. I’m using throw-away plates, utensils, and glasses.”

“You’re using plastic? For Thanksgiving?”

There was a pause while I imagined my daughter rolling her eyes and making obscene gestures at the phone. Still, she majored in psychology. Her education comes in handy when profiling serial killers or dealing with passive-aggressive mothers. Her voice, when she finally spoke, was calm and detached.

“Actually, they make really cute plastic ware these days. It looks a lot like the real stuff. You won’t be able to tell until you pick it up.”

“Oh?” I said doubtfully. “Well, if you’re okay with that.”

“I am, mom. I’m okay with it.”

My husband, seated across the room, was slowing drawing his finger across his throat and shaking his head.

“Oh, all right,” I said to him later. “I won’t say a word about anything. I’ll just keep my mouth shut and drink Jamaican Qualades with everyone else and let Lauren and Mason handle everything.”

“I think that would be best,” he said agreeably.

We leave tomorrow for Thanksgiving in New Orleans. I have been meditating to ready myself for the occasion.

No doubt, my daughter is doing the same.

Career Day

2012-10-27T10:35:00.000-07:00

Somewhere around the third grade, on Career Day, when all the other kids were standing up and saying they wanted to be either a policeman, or a fireman, or a ballerina, I decided I wanted to be all three. I didn’t want to limit myself to just one occupation. I wanted to be everything from an astronaut to a monkey trainer. That left me with only one career choice. I would be a writer.

My classmates looked at me as if I’d just announced I wanted to make a living euthanizing puppies at the pound. By now, I was used to being a little outside the pack. I’m not saying I was friendless, but I played alone a lot. Still, the other kids had learned I was good to have around when it came to imaginary role playing games. They knew who to come to when they needed a storyline for Roy Rogers or Tonto and the Lone Ranger.

My desire to make a living using only my imagination and my highly developed skill at hyperbole persisted throughout elementary school and into high school. My father was an itinerant college professor and we moved around a lot - throughout the Deep South, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma. I was always the new kid trying to fit in, the outsider looking in, the breeding ground of all neuroses, angst, and future artistic endeavor.

I attended public schools in the days before Ritalin was routinely prescribed for bright, imaginative students who had trouble paying attention. This was in the 1960’s and 1970’s when a public school education still meant something, back before Self-Esteem became the cornerstone of learning. When my high school English teacher, Charlie Chesmore, called me an ignoramus and a sloth for coming to his class without first reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he wasn’t too concerned about my delicate self-esteem. The result of this public humiliation was that I showed up the next day having read the play in its entirety. Go figure.

I went to college to learn, not necessarily to get a degree. I took creative writing and literature courses from enthusiastic professors who taught me to be a good reader, and, consequently, a better writer. Somewhere around my junior year I realized that if I spent any more time studying the great writers I’d be too paralyzed with insecurity to write anything myself.

I left school, married, had children, worked a series of meaningless day jobs, and wrote. I wrote essays and short stories, which were never published, and novels which, eventually, were. It hasn’t been easy. Still, when I think back to that third grade girl who stood up on Career Day and told the class she wanted to be a writer, I’m not sorry for the choices I’ve made. It seemed so simple then – just a matter of putting a few good stories down on paper and making them all fit together. Years of hard work, rejection, and perseverance later, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Booze and Bad Decisions

2012-10-17T08:10:00.000-07:00

My youngest daughter was recently home from school for fall break. She goes to college in New Orleans (as did my older two) and she’s acquired that slightly jaded, sophisticated air that the city seems to impart. Been there, done that, dude. This is a city, after all, that boasts drive-through daiquiris, karaoke laundry mats, and over 150 festivals a year, all of them involving copious amounts of alcohol. Temptations are plentiful. Local law enforcement tends to sport a relaxed attitude toward alcohol consumption (you can drink in college bars with only a school ID regardless of the legal drinking age of 21) and it’s not illegal to walk the streets carrying a cocktail “to go” cup. For students who’ve grown up in the Bible Belt or the Midwest or even New York, it’s an eye-opening experience. You either learn to hold your liquor, or you become a raging alcoholic.

I generalize, of course. The truth is, even as a frumpy, middle-aged woman, I love New Orleans. I love the history and the culture, the French joie de vivre, the emphasis on good food, good booze, and good company. Where else in the country does Happy Hour begin at noon on Friday and extend into the wee hours of the night? New Orleans gave us jazz but it also gave us the Sazerac, the Hurricane, and the Ramos Gin Fizz.

Despite their urban sophistication, I’m always apprehensive when one of my college-aged children comes home from New Orleans. Chattanooga, for all its revitalization, is still primarily a small town. With small-town police officers who take their roles as defenders of public sobriety seriously. Cabs are hard to come by after a night of heavy drinking. The downtown bars close at 2:00 p.m. but the free electric shuttle stops running at 11:00 p.m.

We thought when we moved off Signal Mountain into a two bedroom condo downtown that it would make it easier for everyone. Easier for our adult children to party with their friends and take a cab home and easier for us to sleep knowing they were only a few short blocks away and could get home safely. Unfortunately, it hasn’t worked out that way.

Jordan’s first night home, she walked into a bar where there were literally “only six people I didn’t know.” A good time was had by all and at 2:00 a.m., the time she had told me she’d be coming home, I woke up. I won’t go into the angst of being a parent waiting for an adult child to return home after midnight. Suffice it to say, my father used to wait up for me. And now I wait up for my children. It’s crazy, given the fact that in New Orleans they probably don’t get home before 4:00 a.m., but you see, I don’t know about it, so I sleep like a baby.

At 2:00 a.m. the first of many texts arrived. Don’t worry, I’ll catch a cab. Followed by, The cab isn’t coming. I’ve called twice, and then, I’ve walked to my friend Kelly’s house, and finally, There’s some guy here who says he’ll give me a ride. The last one caused a frenzy of return texting. Don’t catch a ride with a stranger! Where are you? I’ll come get you!

Twenty minutes later, she was home. This was at 3:30 a.m. and I’m the first to admit, I don’t do well without my eight hour beauty sleep. The screeching was long and sustained. No doubt the neighbors enjoyed every minute of it. She, for the most part, was fairly sober and handled my display with a blasé smirking that further enraged me.

“Mom, I’m an adult. You can’t wait up for me anymore.”

Eventually, I ran out of steam and we both went to bed. The next morning she awoke, sweet and contrite, and apologized for texting me eight times over a two hour period. She had thought that by texting me repeatedly, she’d be putting my mind at ease so I could drop back into a peaceful slumber. Apparently, she had been “overserved” at the bar (said with a giggle), and the decision to text had been a bad one. She had not caught a ride home with a stranger (I’m not stupid, Mom) and her ride had not been drinking (Seriously, Mom, I’m not stupid), and I really shouldn’t wait up for her anymore because she wasn’t a child. She was an adult.

I could only look at her and remember my own father sitting in his wing back chair in his robe, his eyes bleary, his hair standing up in outraged peaks around his face while I argued with boozy breath that he shouldn’t wait up for me. I wasn’t a kid. I was an adult.

“You won’t know what it’s like until you have a child of your own,” he’d said.

Forty years later, I get it.

Old Maids of the Mist

2012-10-09T07:55:00.000-07:00

I recently went to Canada and Niagara Falls with a group of women I’ve been friends with since grade school. We’ve known each other for forty-five years and managed to keep in touch, which is pretty remarkable when you consider how disparate and scattered our lives have become. We grew up in the same small college town, went to grade school, junior high, high school, and the first few years of college together. Three of us left home and went out into the wide world, while two stayed behind and raised families in the same small community where we’d grown up.

A few years ago, after twenty-five years spent raising families and struggling with careers, we reconnected on Facebook. Since then, we try to get together every year for a girls’ trip. The amazing thing to me is how, despite our many differences, we’ve managed to remain friends. As an adult, I have a tendency to gravitate toward women who dress like me, read the same books, watch the same TV shows, have the same social and political beliefs. The old “birds of a feather, flock together” syndrome.

But other than our shared childhoods and experiences raising families, there’s not a lot my four hometown friends and I have in common. A former athlete, a cheerleader, a writer, a sorority girl, and a flighty giggler, I’m not certain if we met today we would even be friends. So what is it about childhood that makes us so much more willing to embrace others different from ourselves? Do we simply become lazy, or less willing to compromise as we grow older?

It was in sixth grade that I first met Zona. She and I were both “new girls,” having moved into town from somewhere else. I was a tomboy and played mostly with the boys on the playground. She was prissy and was the first girl in sixth grade to shave her legs. I didn’t dislike Zona; if anything, I felt sorry for her because she was bad at sports. All the same, I realized that we probably wouldn’t be spending a lot of time together.

One morning I walked into the girls’ bathroom to find Zona standing at the mirror teasing her hair. I watched, fascinated, as she deftly moved a long-handled comb through her curls. We were still standing there when Ruby Mays walked in. Ruby was six feet tall and had a deep voice and shoulders like a linebacker. When Ruby asked you for your lunch money, you gave it up. I was terrified of her and did my best to avoid eye contact, slinking into one of the opened stalls. Ruby stood in the doorway, watching Zona with an unreadable expression. Without warning, she stuck out a large, hairy-knuckled hand.

“Hey,” she said. “Let me borrow your comb.”

Zona stopped teasing her hair. She tilted her head and stared at Ruby in the mirror as if giving her request careful consideration. Time seemed to stop. My bladder sagged. Give her the comb, I telepathed frantically. Just give her the goddamned comb.

Zona turned around, her expression thoughtful and pleasant. “Ruby, I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “But I don’t let anyone use my comb.”

Ruby’s big fist shot out and caught Zona on the chin, and she went down. She lay on her back, staring up at the fluorescent lights, blinking. Ruby helped herself to the comb and then tossed it back to Zona as she went out.

I went over and helped her up. She seemed genuinely surprised at Ruby’s reaction. “Why did she do that?” she kept asking. I stared at her, grinning in appreciation. I had never seen anyone stand up to Ruby Mays and it occurred to me that despite her shaved legs and prissy ways, Zona had more courage than anyone I knew. Certainly more courage than me.

Years later in Canada, while arguing with Zona about politics, that scene with Ruby resurfaced. And it occurred to me that the spark of courage, the knot of stubbornness that I had admired all those years ago in Zona was still there. Despite our profound, and sometimes violent, differences I could still appreciate that aspect of her personality.

Forty-five years later, we still have a connection. And I’m a better person for it.

I'm More Brilliant Than I Look

2012-09-18T10:08:00.001-07:00

My fifth novel, The Sisters Montclair, has recently launched and I’ve been visiting a lot of book clubs. I’m always slightly apprehensive at these face-to-face meetings, because I have the impression that Cathy Holton in Person, is somehow less impressive than Cathy Holton the Writer. Looking around at the polite faces as I drone on about some event that colored my last novel, I often wonder if I’m on the verge of putting my listeners to sleep.

Flannery O’Connor once complained, when discussing an upcoming television interview, that she was afraid she’d stare blankly at the camera and utter such memorable lines as “Huh?” and “Ah dunno,” to the interviewer’s questions. I know exactly what she meant. On the page, writers can make themselves sound witty and erudite. We have the advantage of that most essential tool of good prose; the rewrite. We can sit in a darkened room for days constructing and reconstructing one line until we get it perfect. To a reader it may seem that our perfection is innate, a lucky coincidence of fate and natural-born talent, but I can tell you it’s actually the result of a great deal of hard work and determination. It takes a lot of effort to be funny, or philosophical, or blindingly lyrical. Any writer who tells you otherwise is bluffing. There are few geniuses among us. Most of us are just competent liars with a good work ethic.

At a recent book club meeting, an admiring reader read out several lines she had bookmarked in one of my novels.

“Did I write that?” I deadpanned. Much laugher. (Occasionally, I can be entertaining.)

The truth is, I remember that passage very well. I must have worked on it for weeks, rewriting, deleting, rewriting, circling back with a frenzied determination that only a true obsessive compulsive could appreciate. But in the end, I wrote something that was good, something that I can be proud of for years to come. A passage that makes me appear, to the casual reader at least, like something of a literary genius.

Now if only I could rewrite my personal appearances.

Birthday Club

2012-06-13T08:03:00.000-07:00

I’m in a birthday club that meets monthly for lunch. We’ve been doing this for over ten years, long enough to get to know each other pretty well, to be completely free and comfortable around one another. Which is a beautiful thing. And much cheaper than therapy. When we first started getting together our children were younger and we were always harried, barely able to spend an hour without having to jump up to go collect a child or hurry back to work. Now our lunches can drag on for close to three hours, long enough for our waitress to go off shift and the restaurant to empty and the busboy to stand yawning in a corner.

We are beautiful, self-assured, completely natural women, meaning there’s not a size two among us. We’ve lived long enough to be comfortable in our own skins, to accept the sags and wrinkles and wobbly thighs that come with being mature, natural women. So far, we’ve resisted the siren call of plastic surgery.

I tell you all of this because my husband always asks with astonishment, “What do you find to talk about for three hours?”

Here’s a sample:

“I ran into Lucy Dillard.” Eye roll. “She and Jack are getting ready to go to the Bahamas and she was bragging about having her bikini area waxed so she can wear her new thong.” (We hate Lucy.)

“I tried some of that Nair stuff once. It was so painful, y’all.”

“Is that the stuff that smells like rotten eggs?”

“See, if you wear a swim skirt you don’t have to worry about hair.”

“Not unless it hangs down below the edge of your skirt.”

Laughter.

“When Scott and I were going to Mexico on that business trip last year, I went to Target and bought one of those cute little elastic waist skirts that go over your suit. It was in a zebra print, which for some reason I thought was stylish. Apparently I was wrong. Anyway, by the third day the elastic had stretched out so bad one side hung down lower than the other, which made me look kind of like a wounded zebra dragging a leg. Trust me, it was not a good look. So I just pulled on a pair of shorts and told Scott he better not say a word.”

“Did y’all hear they’re coming out with a line of Spanx swimsuits?”

Much excitement here.

“I tried one on but the problem is it squishes the fat from your waist down over your hips which is not really a good look either.”

“Kind of like a reverse muffin top?”

“Exactly.”

If laughter truly is the best medicine, we should all live to be ninety.

Duck Lips and Book Launches

2011-06-12T11:06:00.000-07:00

My new novel, Summer in the South, has just launched and like modern authors everywhere, I’m busy trying to learn the intricacies of social media and internet marketing. Because therein lies the secret to riches and success and break-out novelist superstardom. Or so I’ve been told, by the thousands of bloggers who write about such things on a daily basis and whose advice I vainly and blindly try to follow.

So I’ve built a new website. I’ve set up a Summer in the South Facebook page. I’ve made my first few timid Tweets. (Although really, the whole thing feels so asinine; what do people find to Tweet about? My life is not that exciting. @cathyholton Just found another line in my neck!)

I’ve embarked on the obligatory blog tours, written the obligatory blog posts, learned how to build a landing page and navigate the Amazon author’s page. I’ve comparison-shopped online advertising and marketing pitches, hosted the requisite book launch and book giveaways, sent out the requisite press releases and galleys. In fact, so far the only thing I haven’t done is work on my new novel. Internet marketing is hell on writing.

I need a break.

And what, you might ask, does a brain-dead author do to relax from the technological onslaught of online book marketing? (No, it does not involve vodka.) I grab a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and plop down in front of the TV for another mindless episode of The Housewives of New Jersey….Orange County….New York. Somehow these bitches put it all in perspective. They make me feel better about myself.

Then I head over to Stoopid Housewives for a truly entertaining romp through the viewer comments section. These women are hilarious. They’ve taken the art of “drankin’” and “dishin’” to a whole new level of excellence. They’ve given the housewives names like “Duck Lips”, “Jesus Barbie”, and “Wretched.” I hover shyly, sipping my Pinot Grigio Spritzer and giggling like an eighth-grade school girl.

Which is exactly what I need sometimes.

Parental Guilt

2011-01-26T07:25:00.000-08:00

When my youngest child was in kindergarten she used to squint when watching TV. For some reason this annoyed me.

“Stop squinting,” I would tell her and she would oblige, stationing herself about ten inches from the screen.

Now if she’d been my first child, I would have immediately, obsessively worried myself sick. But as she was my third, I went on folding clothes, or making dinner, or doing any of the thousand other chores that having three children under the age of twelve entails.

When she was in second grade I received a rather stern note from the school nurse telling me she had failed her eye exam. I was offended. What was she implying, that I was an unfit mother? Determined to prove her wrong I took my daughter to an expensive ophthalmologist.

“Legally blind,” was his expert opinion. “With astigmatism in the left eye.”

I was shocked. No one in my family wore glasses and only one sister in my husband’s so the thought that my children would have anything less than perfect eyesight had never occurred to me.

When we walked out of the doctor’s office, she in her new coke-bottle glasses, my daughter looked up into the trees and exclaimed, “Look, mommy, I can see the leaves!”

(Insert knife here and begin slowly to remove my heart.) To this day, if I’m ever asked to cry on command, I have only to relive this anguished and guilt-ridden moment to comply.

I was telling this story to some friends over cocktails (only when I’ve been drinking do I tell this one), when my friend, Donna, said, “Oh, I can beat that.”

I was dubious. Donna is beautiful, tall and slender, always stylishly dressed and made up. She’s married to a stockbroker and has raised three handsome sons, feeding them organic meals long before it became the norm. I have always considered Donna to be, well, perfect, and I would hate her except that she is nice and very funny. So I can’t.

Anyway, she was out to dinner a few months ago with one of her strapping six foot four inch sons when she noticed him holding a glass with one of his pinkies stuck out like an English lord sipping tea.

“Why are you doing that?” Donna said. “That looks silly.”

“Oh well,” he said. “Funny you should mention it. Do you remember that time in grade school when I closed my finger in my desk and I came home and told you, and you said, Oh, just put a band aid on it. It’ll be fine. Well,” he held the stiff pinky up for her appraisal. “Now, I can’t bend it.”

“Are you telling me it doesn’t bend at all?” Donna said, horrified.

She rushed him immediately to the only doctor who could see them on short notice which happened to be, ironically, her son’s ex-pediatrician. He examined the frozen pinky and then remarked, sadly, that if she’d brought the boy to him when he first injured it he might have been able to minimize the tendon damage, but now it was too late.

Now whenever Donna sees her son drinking beer with her husband or sitting down to family dinners and holding a glass, she notices that little erect pinky and feels as if he is giving her a middle-finger salute.

I guess the lesson here is that despite our best intentions, we sometimes fall short in the parenting department. And with enough love, time, and psychotherapy our children will overcome their physical and emotional handicaps and forgive us.

Eventually.

Last Bus to Crazytown

2010-06-21T15:28:00.000-07:00

My husband and I are empty nesters. Our youngest child went off to college in the fall and last winter, anticipating this event, I did what any hormonally imbalanced woman would do.

I went down to the local animal shelter and adopted a rescue puppy.

And this is not just any rescue puppy, mind you. This is a rescue puppy with plenty of emotional baggage. (Think Billy Bibbit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.) It seems our shy puppy, only three weeks old, had been found huddling with his three siblings under a bush on Christmas Eve after witnessing their stray mother get hit by a car. One of the puppies had already died of exposure. The others were taken in by a loving foster mother who rose every few hours for three weeks to hand-feed these poor orphans.

We named him Yoshi, which means “good” in Japanese.

We were as anxious as any new parents might be to raise this one right. We bought every dog-rearing book we could find. We’d had dogs before when the children were small, Jack Russell “Terrorists”, my husband called them, but we’d been too harried and over-burdened as parents to pay much attention to the dogs.

Yoshi has a group of plush animals, his “babies”, that he sucks every night as he’s falling asleep, as diligently as my children used to suck their thumbs. He rides with us in the car, goes for long walks in the park, sits between us on the sofa at night watching television.

Worrying about his socialization skills, we took him to the dog park. He didn’t do well. He seemed horrified by these strange four-legged creatures that bounded over, intent on ramming their noses up his ass. He sat down abruptly and leaned against my leg, humiliated and confused.

Thinking he might find a better class of playmate, we took him to a local doggy daycare. The woman in charge, who my husband fondly calls “The Commandant,” stuck him alone in a room with a large, overly friendly Doberman. (She raises Dobermans, of course). When Yoshi squealed in fright at the slobbery advances of the Doberman, the Commandant claimed that he was a “fearful dog” totally unsuitable for daycare. “You have no way of telling with these mixed breeds,” she told me. “Why he’s the way he is.”

Did I detect a bias against mixed-breeds? Oh no she did – ant.

I insisted Yoshi be given a week’s trial. As far as I was concerned, he showed more intelligence than any of these over bred, muscle-bound, pedigreed dogs she seemed so proud of. Every morning Yoshi rose and when told he was “going to school”, pranced, tail-wagging with excitement, toward the door. Every day at naptime I picked him up from daycare, hopeful that he’d managed to make a few friends. On Friday, the Commandant crooked her finger and indicated I should follow her into the office. Yoshi was being expelled. He had only made two friends but they were in the little dog class and he was too big to play with them. The big dogs didn’t like him. He wasn’t a team player.

I came home with a lump in my throat, imagining Yoshi friendless on the playground. Sitting by himself at the lunchroom table. Not being invited for slumber parties at the more popular dogs’ houses.

“Never mind,” my husband sniffed. “We both know Yoshi is gifted. He’s too intelligent and sensitive for those other dogs.”

I blew my nose, pouring us both a stiff drink. “Do you think we should adopt again?” I asked . “So he won’t have to be an only dog?”

Helicopter Parents

2009-11-05T09:45:00.000-08:00

I’ll admit it. I am one. I raised three children and I tried to make their lives as happy and trouble-free as I could. Because I’m a good mother and I only wanted the best for them. I didn’t want them to suffer from bullies, mean authority figures, social events they weren't invited to, bad grades they occasionally made, sporting teams they didn’t make, all those traumatic events that characterized so much of my trouble-laden early life.

I just wanted my children to be happy.

And guess what? They’re not. As young adults, they worry about everything. They fret over every little bump in the road of life they encounter. A boss who treats one of them unfairly is a “psychopath.” A boyfriend or girlfriend who doesn’t return their affection can cause a month-long depression. A job that one performs diligently is suddenly eliminated in a down economy – how fair is that?

The answer, of course, is it’s not fair. Because life isn’t fair. My generation knew that. So why did we raise our children to believe that it is?

My husband recently read an article about administrators who are seeing waves of ill-prepared children entering college, children who’ve never made a bad grade in school, or been cut from a sports team, or had to arrange their own social calendar, much less done their own laundry or kept a check book. Children who’ve been protected from failure all their lives and so have come to expect that life is fair.

When I was a girl, I didn’t get a new bicycle just because everyone else on the street got one. If I made a bad grade in school, my parents didn’t call the teacher and request I be allowed to retake the test because I might not get into the right college. On the few occasions when they attended one of my basketball games, they didn’t call the coach afterwards to see what I could do to get more court time.

I learned that sometimes things work out and sometimes life sucks. I learned that failure means picking yourself up, trying a little harder next time, and going on.

And, hopefully, my children will learn that, too. Eventually. Once I stop hovering.

Marie Antoinette is Alive and Living on the Upper East Side

2009-04-21T12:44:00.000-07:00

Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m a “Housewives” junkie. It’s my dirty little secret.

Having made it through “The Real Housewives of Orange County” (trailer trash on silicone) and “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” (entertaining but fake), I’m hooked, absolutely hooked, on “The Real Housewives of New York City.”

Is it me, or do the Housewives of NYC remind you of being back in high school? First, there’s Alex and her creepy, secretly-gay boyfriend (husband) trying desperately to break into the popular clique. I wanted to like Alex, I really did. She’s from the Midwest and she’s a graphic designer. But then there was the naked-on-the-beach St. Bart’s episode and all the talk about “au pair girls” and knowing the “right people,” not to mention the conversations with her children involving pretentious smatterings of French. And don’t get me started on poor Francois and Johan, those long-haired, French-speaking little darlings destined for a life of school yard bullying. How do you say please don’t kick my ass in French? Really, what are their parents thinking?

And then there’s Ramona, who likes to describe herself as “ladylike” and “classy”, while wearing a tiny bikini and engaging in martini-fueled horseplay around the pool in front of her humiliated thirteen-year-old daughter. Go mom. Ramona’s one of those people who says whatever she wants without any regard for anyone else’s feelings, and then seems genuinely surprised when it all backfires. She’s the girl in high school who tried to make you feel guilty for getting on the pill, who boasted she’d be a virgin when she married, who swore she wasn’t having sex with her boyfriend and later got pregnant her junior year.

Jill reminds me of the girl who grew up in a trailer on the wrong side of town but despite her humble origins, still manages to snag one of the rich boys. She wears her insecurities on her sleeve, only in Jill’s case it’s a Herve Leger sleeve. It gets a little old hearing her brag about spending $8,000 on a Birkin bag or complaining about losing her housekeeper as if it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to her; but then she cries when her daughter leaves for Paris or she mentions that her mother used to hound her about her weight when she was a girl, and I can’t help but feel sorry for her. (Is it just me or is Jill’s mother seriously scary?)

Kelly’s the cheerleader who’s always gotten by on her charm and good looks. But don’t cross her. Behind that pretty facade lies a borderline psychopathic personality. (Think Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction). And really, the fake tan has got to go. (Not that I would ever tell her this, of course, not unless she was safely trussed up, Hannibal Lector style.)

And Bethenny? Well she’s my peeps. If she and I had gone to high school together, we’d have been good, good friends (as we say in the South). Bethenny wields sarcasm like a scalpel (“Cher called. She wants her outfit back.”) Despite her new fake boobs, there’s something real about her. I can imagine us smoking cigarettes in the girls’ bathroom, sharing a bottle of tequila out at the lake, or sneaking out of my window on a Friday night. (Not that I ever did those things, Mom. Really.)

And then there’s the Countess. LuAnn. Who I used to admire for her openness, before I realized that the openness was really just another side of self-conceit. If I had to place LuAnn in high school, I’d describe her as the self-absorbed Homecoming Queen. The night she corrected Bethenny for having introduced her to the limo driver as “LuAnn” instead of “Countess de Lesseps” I knew I was going to have a problem with LuAnn. The whole thing was so very Let-Them-Eat-Cake. This is America, and we don’t give a damn about things like titles, LuAnn, so get over yourself. Seriously.

Which brings me back to the whole addictive quality of the show; the fact that I feel I know each of these women intimately and can like or dislike them accordingly. I’m a guilty voyeur. As Bethenny says, while watching from the sidelines of a tension-filled tennis match, “It’s like watching someone skin an animal alive.”

My husband always groans and leaves the room when he sees the show is on. But later, as I’m climbing into bed, he wants to know what happened on tonight’s episode. The hypocrite.

He’s as bad as Ramona.

Indian Princess

2009-04-16T09:02:00.000-07:00

As children, my father always told us we had Cherokee ancestry. This wasn’t too hard to believe as my brothers and I had round Charlie Brown heads and, what the neighborhood kids liked to call, “Chinese” eyes. My brother’s nickname was Kato and mine was Suzie Wong.

We weren’t just Indian; we were Indian nobility. We were descended from a Cherokee princess, according to my father. He was a large somber man with a Gaelic temperament, meaning that one moment he would be weeping over a particularly beautiful verse of Yeats, and the next roaring in rage over a bicycle left in the driveway. He was a college professor struggling to earn his Ph. D with a wife and three children in tow, and often seemed to be walking a tightrope between hope and utter despair.

My mother, a sweet Southern girl, ruled him with an iron fist although he was unaware of this, of course, as the fist was clothed in a soft downy glove. Direct confrontation was never my mother’s style. She could soothe and cajole my father out of his moods with a skill I’ve only seen matched by The Horse Whisperer.

In those days my father was on a ten-month teaching assignment, meaning he spent a month teaching at a summer camp for forestry students and the remaining two months of the summer traveling with his family. Our travels, regardless of the mileage involved, were always done in an automobile where my brothers and I, endlessly bored, would devise a series of rough games to keep us occupied. The backseat was divided like Gaul into three parts; as the eldest, I took the section directly behind my father where I could mock him with impunity (and where the belt, should he loosen it and begin to flail over the seat back, could not reach); my middle brother took the middle section with two borders to defend; and my youngest brother, who was prone to car sickness, hugged the far door.

The summer of my twelfth year we took a trip to the Black Hills of South Dakota. My father had brought along Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee for his light summer reading, a horrific account of the massacre of three hundred Sioux men, women, and children by the U.S. 7th Cavalry, and as the vacation wore on he sank deeper and deeper into one of his black moods. We watched anxiously as my mother tried, and failed, to bring him out of it.

“Oh look,” she said, clapping her hands gaily. “A trading post. And they have real arrowheads! Let’s stop, shall we?”

“Three hundred men, women and children,” my father said, eyeing us gloomily in the rearview mirror. “Promised a reservation and then hunted down like dogs. They were our people.”

“I thought we were Cherokee,” I said.

“Three hundred people murdered in cold blood.”

“They have ice cream!” my mother said brightly. “Who wants ice cream?”

Later that night, in the adjoining room, we heard my parents arguing, one of the few times I’ve ever heard my mother raise her voice. As we were leaving the next morning, my father said, “Where’s my book?” He had left it on the nightstand, where sometime during the night, it had mysteriously disappeared.

“Where’s my book?” he repeated, eyeing my mother suspiciously.

She returned his gaze evenly. “Today I thought we’d have a picnic,” she said, smiling. “Won’t that be nice?”

I have no idea if my father ever finished the book. He never spoke of it again and not long after this vacation he stopped telling stories of our Cherokee grandmother, the Indian princess. Even now when I’m at my parents’ house I search for Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee on the bookshelves, but I never find it. It seems to have disappeared into my family’s past as mysteriously as our Cherokee grandmother.

Everything I Need to Know About Life I Learned from Scarlett O’Hara

2009-02-20T16:27:00.000-08:00

Seriously, y’all.

My daughters, raised on semi-militant feminism, have no idea what it was like growing up in the sixties and seventies. Female role models, at least for Southern girls who came from “good people”, tended to run along the lines of Homecoming Queen, Cheerleader, President of the Home Ec Club, Miss Snellville Beach, or for the truly big dreamers among us, Miss America. My own gentle Southern mother, a former Miss Crisp County, watching once as I, in a fit of sullen adolescent rage beat a long line of boys for the church table tennis championship, remarked in despair, “Can’t you ever let the boys win?”

No, mother, I cannot.

Part of my adolescent angst was due to the fact that I couldn’t find any female role models out there who I thought were remotely like me. I was an outcast, an anomaly. Raised on Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Marcia Brady I was taught that girls should be (a) pretty, (b) sweet, (c) self-sacrificing, and (d) smart, but not too smart. Certainly my own mother was a shining example of these virtues (except for the last one, she was smart as a whip but kept it to herself.) I, on the other hand, could not manage any of them. I had a bad temper and a tendency to curse like a mafia don when crossed. I was competitive at sports. I spent very little time in front of my Miss Clairol Lighted Make-up Mirror (a gift from my hopeful mother), preferring a pair of faded jeans and one of my father’s old shirts to the tailored pantsuits that were popular in those days. A voracious reader, I had a tendency to be overbearing and opinionated in a classroom setting. I couldn’t have been more miserable or insecure.

And then a wondrous thing happened. I picked up a copy of Gone with the Wind, and my life changed forever.

A true feminist would perhaps find little in Katie Scarlett to admire but to a girl like me she was a godsend. Yes, she was vain and deceitful and selfish, but those traits made her real. She wasn’t some lace and sugar confection meant to be put up on a pedestal and admired from afar; she was down and dirty and cunning as any male.

When I announced my new-found literary ideal that night at dinner my father, an old-school Southern gentleman who never cursed around my mother and I, looked up from his plate and said, “Scarlett O’Hara! Scarlett O’Hara was a ...bitch!”

My mother looked at my father in shocked dismay and said, “Lamar!”
My two brothers snorted and elbowed each other like a couple of frat boys.
“Melanie Hamilton is the true heroine of that novel,” my father said.
“Melanie Hamilton is an insipid milk-toast,” I replied.
“Leave the table!” my father roared.

I knew then that I was on the right track.

Here are the things I learned from Scarlett O’Hara that I have tried to pass on to my own daughters.

1. If you truly want something, go out and get it.
2. Don’t expect a man to make you happy.
3. Be self-sufficient.
4. Don’t waste your time worrying about what small-minded people think.
5. Don’t fear challenges in life; they build character.
6. Don’t be afraid to show people who you really are.
7. Embrace your true nature; your faults as well as your virtues.
8. Never give up on love.
9. Always be hopeful for the future.

So go ahead, label me. Call me a smartass, tell me I’m foul-mouthed, bad-tempered, poorly-dressed. Call me a bitch.

Frankly, sir, I don’t give a damn.

The Literary Life

2009-02-19T12:18:00.000-08:00

As a teenager, I used to imagine my future life as a writer. I imagined myself twenty years into the future living in a cottage overlooking the Irish Sea, dressed in a pair of silk pajamas, a cigarette in one hand and a martini in the other, churning out novels that brought me international acclaim. I imagined a life of quiet seclusion, my only interruptions the daily mail drop, bags and bags of letters from adoring fans who would be content to worship my literary genius from afar.

Fast-forward thirty years to the hard, cold reality of my life as a writer. (a) I’ve never been to Ireland, (b) my fan mail arrives in the form of occasional emails that I’m always thrilled to get, (c) I spend most days dressed in a pair of baggy sweatpants and a stained t-shirt, and (d) I never write clutching a cigarette and a martini (well, not a cigarette anyway).

Writing is no longer about living a life of quiet seclusion. With the advent of podcasts, web sales rankings, and televised book reviews, it’s all about marketing, baby. Image has become just as important as substance. The cult of Youth and Beauty has finally infiltrated the publishing world.

Take a look at the cover photos of some of the writers on the best-selling lists and you’d swear they just walked off the pages of Vogue. Even the literary writers (although done up in tasteful black and white, of course), manage to look youthfully arrogant and, well, fabulous. My son, a Photoshop Wizard, assures me that, with a little work, he can make me look fabulous too.

And I thought all you had to do to be a best-selling writer was write a good book. Silly me.

Byron had a club foot. I’m pretty sure if he wanted to make it in today’s media-saturated publishing market he’d have to do something about that. My new novel, Beach Trip, is set to launch in May and I’m already feeling the pressure for a makeover. I’m thinking fifty pounds, a jowl lift, and a professional teeth-bleaching at the very least.

Forget ghost-writing; the trend of the future will be for ghost-doppelgangers, younger, more attractive actors to fill in on the media circuit for aging, fabulous-challenged writers.

One of my daughters, who looks exactly like I did twenty (okay, thirty) years ago, would be the perfect fill-in for me. I told her with my talent and her looks we’d hit the best-seller lists in no time, we’d be a shoe-in for Oprah and Good Morning America. She thought the idea demeaning to women (she’s currently taking a feminist literature class and has lost her sense of humor.)

Besides, she’s twenty-one. She looks like a goddess. What does she know?

Yes, We Can

2008-11-22T09:51:00.000-08:00

I’m watching the news this morning about all the hoop-la over Obama’s upcoming inauguration. Should he tone it down, given the economy, or should he throw down in a big way, given the historical significance of his election? Should Michelle wear designer duds or shop at Target? As if the guy doesn’t have bigger things to worry about!

I have to say, though, despite all the bad news coming from the television anchors (have you ever noticed how these people seem almost gleeful as they deliver their forecasts of doom and destruction?), I have this inner feeling of optimism. I have this gut feeling that everything is going to be all right.

Call me crazy, but I miss the days of Bill. Bill Clinton could sell a double bed to the Pope. He could sell you chicken shit and make you believe it was chicken salad (to paraphrase another of our fine Southern presidents, LBJ). And maybe that’s what this country has been missing for the past eight years. A president who could make us believe, really believe, in chicken shit.

Not that I’m lumping Barack Obama in with Bill Clinton. He has something of Bill’s calm, unflappable demeanor but in Obama it’s more an air of studied resolve, of steady determination to see a job through.

I was never quite sure if Bill, despite his obvious intelligence, was seeing the big picture. Obama’s grave countenance the evening he celebrated his historic win in Grant Park, tells me he does see the big picture, and is approaching what history may call some of our country’s darkest days, with the requisite combination of courage, boldness, and tenacity. And somehow, despite all the bad news, this comforts me.

Maybe it’s because I read history. Maybe it’s because I know that, during those moments of extreme crisis in our nation’s history, we’ve always managed to produce a leader who helps us rise above failure, division, and despair. George Washington. Abraham Lincoln. Franklin D. Roosevelt. Barack Obama?

Miracles happen every day. If we believe.

Damn, That Girl Can Write

2008-11-21T12:42:00.000-08:00

Anyone who reads my novels knows I love dark humor. The darker, the better. And no one does dark humor better than the British. I discovered Hilary Mantel years ago while browsing through an out-of-the way bookstore. I read Everyday is Mothers Day, followed by the sequel, Vacant Possession. The novels revolve around Muriel Axom, the hulking, psychopathic, idiot savant daughter of a medium trying to eke out a living in a crumbling English middle-class suburb. Muriel is a truly evil character and yet also strangely compelling and childlike. It’s a testament to Mantel’s ability as a writer that she can create a character who evokes such strong conflicting emotions. Slowly, patiently, and diabolically Muriel plots her revenge on people who have been cruel to her, including her own mother. Her transformation in Vacant Possession, set against the staid, bourgeoisie background of the Sidney family, is by turns grotesque, horrific and comic.

Mantel is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including The Orange Prize for Fiction (Beyond Black). She is a fine writer but she’s not for the squeamish. Her novel, The Giant, O’Brien is the story of an Irish giant who exhibits himself on the London curiosity circuit in the 1780’s. Charlie O’Brien is also an Irish storyteller who entertains the human oddities he travels with, the dwarfs, bearded ladies, prostitutes, and pinheads. At eight feet tall, he’s a celebrity of the circuit, but he’s also begun to grow again, which means he’s dying. It’s at this time that he comes to the attention of John Hunter, the brilliant Scottish anatomist who determines that he must have the Giant O’Brien’s skeleton for his collection. The novel is slim, but Mantel manages to capture in her spare language the essence of the eighteenth century, with its cruelty, hypocrisy, and dawning preoccupation with scientific research. It’s the story of two remarkable men, set against the dying of the old world, and the birth of the modern age.

My favorite book of Mantel’s, however, is her autobiography Giving Up the Ghost, which can be enjoyed by everyone. It’s one of those books that, as a writer, I can so clearly relate to, pages where she describes what it’s like to be an imaginative child, a storyteller, an introvert in an extroverted world. She also describes what it’s like to be an intelligent woman, an academic, in a man’s world of the nineteen sixties and seventies. Her lifelong struggle with endometriosis, her misdiagnosis and subsequent battle with the medical establishment over her own body, are conflicts women everywhere can relate to.

Kudos, Hilary. You go girl.

Happy Families Are All Alike

2008-11-20T11:53:00.000-08:00

I’m fascinated by those television reality shows about big families. You know the ones, with anywhere from twelve to sixteen, nope make that seventeen, kids. I note that the mothers in those shows are always abnormally calm. Prozac-calm.

Me, I come from good Beserker stock. I come from people with names like Olaf the Terrible and Sven the Morose. Just ask my three children. They’ll tell you life in our household was loud, but never boring. They’ll tell you my mothering style was something along the lines of Becky Sharp Meets Tony Soprano (they mean that in a good way, of course.)

Not that I ever lost my temper in public. I’m a Southern girl, and we’re taught that to display anger in public is the height of white-trashery. We’re taught that you should never strike or rebuke your children in public, but should instead wait to do so in the privacy of your own home.

So I wasn’t Donna Reed. So sue me. I’m a survivor. I’ve raised three teenagers and I have the baggy skin and frown lines to prove it. And I did so without the help of pharmaceuticals, I might add. (Martinis, yes – pharmaceuticals, no.) My husband and I are whittled down some, but we’re still standing.

Still, watching those TV shows about large happy families, it’s easy to get a little misty-eyed. Last night while getting ready for bed, I mentioned to my husband that maybe we should have had ten children, bought a farm in the country, home-schooled our offspring, and baked our own bread.

He looked at me with an incredulous expression and then began to laugh. His laughter was long and sustained, bordering on hysteria.

He was still laughing this morning.