I HATE IT WHEN MY KIDS WANT TO HELP. I KNOW HELPING is how they learn, but I just don’t have the time or patience. Any task my kids assist with takes twice as long and yields four times the mess. I remember from my childhood a Duncan Hines commercial where the pretty apron-wearing mother prepares the cake mix with her three smiling children in a sparkling white kitchen, but in my house it never goes down that way. When Pierson insists on stirring the pancake batter, it ends up lumpy and all over the counter. If Truman wants to deliver a morning cup of coffee to his father, there is invariably a trail of joe leading from the kitchen to Peter’s morning perch at the computer. Everything is just so much cleaner if I do it myself.
Driving home from the country the other night, we stopped for gas an hour outside of Manhattan, as is our habit. The best way to enjoy living in New York City is to run screaming from it every Friday. The downside is the effort required to transport five boys three hours in one car without incident. Necessity demands a midway break. We stop to fill the tank and let anyone who is still awake buy junk food from the gas station mini-mart. Pumping gas holds a phallic fascination for my boys, and Peter wasn’t there to say no, so they immediately started begging me to let them wield the nozzle.
“Wait in the car; just let me do it myself,” I said, but it was too late. The doors flew open and three of them escaped. Once a child is out of a five-point-harness car seat, there is little I can do to stem the riptide of testosterone. A scuffle ensued at the pump, because Pierson thought he should be the one in charge, and by the time I swiped my card and chose the octane level, Truman had won the battle with his brothers and was filling the tank. Truman has pumped gas before and he seemed to have it under control so I stepped aside, resisting any arguments from Pierson and Larson about how the scenario was unfair.
When the pump detected that the tank was full, the nozzle clicked and Truman, on cue, pulled it out of the car. Somehow forgetting his previous expertise, he failed to let go of the lever that stops the gas. Flammable liquid shot everywhere at full speed. He pointed the nozzle up, as if to use gravity to stop the deluge, but that only caused a gasoline fountain. Larson, Pierson, and I were screaming at him to let go when gas splashed into his eyes, and he finally dropped the hose— which thankfully released the lever and stopped the river of gas. Pierson, who had been right up in Truman’s grille vying for the pump, was soaked with gas and standing in a puddle of it. He looked down at his saturated clothes.
“I’m gonna blow!” he yelled over and over, taking off running in hysterical circles. The poor kid had recently watched the scene in Zoolander where the male models have a gasoline fight to the tune of “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” by Wham! on their way to buy orange mocha frappuccinos, then one of them lights a cigarette and sends everyone up in flames.
“Mom, I’m gonna blow!” he kept repeating. Peik, previously too lazy to leave the van, leaped out of the car and added to the mayhem by running around the gas station parking lot screaming, “I’ve got a match!” This sent Pierson into even greater hysteria. Meanwhile I did what I could to get us back on the road, picking up the hose and putting it in the machine while trying to avoid the puddles and not get gasoline on my Manolos.
“Screw the cap on,” I directed Truman, trying not to yell at him in front of the gathering crowd. “Can you manage that?”
“But, Mom, really, it should be impossible to pull the pump out of the car while the gas is flowing,” Truman insisted. “It must have malfunctioned.”
“No, you dipwad,” Peik said, taking a break from scaring the hell out of his little brother in order to debase this one. “How would you be able to fill a gas can, genius?”
Pierson had to be stripped of his soaked clothing. Larson, who was dressed as good Spider-Man, offered his bad alter ego Spider-Man costume, which he naturally had with him in case of emergency. It had built-in chest muscles and was so small it gave Pierson a wedgie and came up to his shins, but he was happy to put aside sartorial grievances in order to save himself from immolation. I threw his gas-soaked clothes in a garbage can.
“The show is over, folks,” Peik announced to the parking lot crowd as we boarded the van and drove away. Once we were safely back on the road, we really gave it to Truman, who was embarrassed and angry that we were laughing at him for potentially turning our van into a suicide bomb.
After retaliating with a stream of unprintable curse words, most of which started with “mother,” Truman declared, “When I grow up, I am going to be rich and you’ll all be sorry!”
“What does that have to do with dousing your brother with gasoline?” Peik calmly asked, as I rolled down the window to ease my burning eyes. “This car freaking reeks.”
“I like the smell,” said Larson.
“Oh, great, a future stoner,” Peik predicted.
The next time one of my kids offers to help me, I’m the one who’s gonna blow.
WHEN I MET PETER, HE ALREADY OWNED A COUNTRY HOUSE, THE ULTIMATE luxury for a New Yorker. Being able to get out of the city makes me better able to appreciate living here. Because Peter was unmarried, the raised ranch was, unsurprisingly, a bachelor pad. A one-bedroom house works fine for a single man, or even a couple who get along well, but with our baby habit came a need for more space. The ranch house was also perched on a cliff, and Peter didn’t have the stomach to look out the window and see an infant crawling toward a twenty-foot drop or a toddler scaling a rock wall. The roads were likewise steep, and it wasn’t unusual for Cleo to careen down a hill at thirty miles an hour on her bicycle. We sold the house and drove north until we found something that met our needs and that we could afford. Proximity to New York City determines a property’s value. The farther you drive, the more affordable real estate becomes. A second home in the hour range signifies that you are in the big bucks. This is not a completely linear system, as there are pockets of prestige here and there. You have to be on the lookout for what Peter calls the valley of value, which I suspect is somewhere near Brigadoon.
I have found that city people frequently lie about how long it takes to get to their country house. This is especially true of the Hamptons, an exclusive enclave of towns at the eastern end of Long Island. “It takes us about an hour and a half to get there” is the typical brag. Sure, in a Formula One car with a radar detector.
Our house is in the three-hour range, ideal for avoiding self-inviting houseguests. Three hours in a totally trashed van with five boys and one Butch Ballerina in uncomfortably close quarters. Before we even leave the parking garage, the boys are fighting over which movie they will watch. We have two DVD players so we can show flicks for two age groups, but the warfare over seats is still heated. By the time we reach the West Side Highway, someone has vomited. This is usually a by-product of the fight over the seats, which causes one of them to cry, thereby triggering the postsobbing gag reflex. By the time we pay the toll to cross the bridge out of Manhattan, the snacks and drinks brought from home have been spilled. This causes a seismic shift in the seating, because someone now needs to find a dry spot. Things then settle down until we hit the hour-and-a-half mark, at which point we stop at the Red Rooster. This tiny little hamburger stand in Brewster, New York, has become a habit for us, so much so that, like a speech-impaired Pavlov’s dog, as soon as Larson gets his seat belt on in Manhattan he starts reciting his order.
“Are we stopping at da Woosta? I want a cheeseburga, Coke, and cirka, cirka, cirka.”
This order is repeated endlessly until we get there, and in case you don’t speak Larson, “cirka” means an onion ring, and he literally wants only three of them.
Once we are back on the road, over the remaining hour and a half of the trip milk shakes are picked up by the lids, which pop off every time, soaking chicken strips in ice cream sauce; cardboard boats of French fries drizzled with ketchup end up upside down on the floor; and every single weekend, Blake finishes the exact same order of fried food, with a calorie count equivalent to the recommended daily intake for an entire Broadway cast, and then complains that he’s fat. A few miles on, the burping and farting commence, at first by nature and then increasingly by competition. Usually, with maybe five miles to go, at least one of the creatures in the back needs Peter to pull over so it can pee. By the time we finally arrive at our house, I hate my kids. Only the ones who have fallen asleep and the ones smart enough to pretend they are asleep are spared my arrival wrath.
The house is a converted barn in the Berkshires of Massachusetts; we call it Dairy Air. Next door is a dairy farm, and if the wind is blowing in the right direction, our entire property smells like derrière. The cows are lined up in large open-air sheds, standing in their own filth and producing enough methane to power a third-world country or at least provide the farmer with cable television. We thought it would be good for the children to be near real nature; maybe we could even buy milk from the neighbors. Instead, Peik has developed a Tourettian habit of emerging from the car half asleep on Friday nights muttering “This place smells like ass.”
Living in a converted barn sounds very romantic. Barns can be quite beautiful, with their simply pegged beams and dramatic, soaring, cathedral-like spaces. But our barn is more a glorified shed, not a majestic stone-foundation classic nestled on a wealthy old gentleman farmer’s estate. Even more sadly, our structure was “converted” in the 1960s, when dropped ceilings and wood paneling were all the rage. There are no theatrical spaces with exposed historic woodwork overhead. It’s all very practical, and no doubt easier to heat, but it won’t be appearing in any design magazines. We have a dizzying amount of mod wallpaper and samples of every faux-finish painting technique that has been in fashion since 1970—marbleizing, sponging, decoupage; you name it, you can find it in this house. In a further attempt to obliterate any of the barn’s original qualities, a previous owner attached a covered colonial entry smack in the middle of the barn’s exterior. The minute we signed the closing papers, I attached the faux-authentic structure to a truck and pulled the whole thing off, much to the horror of my visiting parents. The truth is, the beautiful barn structure is there, it’s just buried under Sheetrock walls, linoleum, and shag carpet. A real estate listing would use the phrase “hidden potential.” Even with two architectural degrees between us, like the shoemakers, Peter and I have never attempted to give our children a better place to put their feet. We no longer have the energy or the resources to do anything about this mess. Besides, why put your money into something that five boys are going to destroy?
The basement floods on a regular basis, the roof has a series of suspicious peaks and valleys, the chimney is crumbling, and the paint is peeling. If you touch a window, a pane of glass is likely to fall out; duct tape is the repair tool of choice. When we arrive on the weekends, the mice look at us like “What the hell are you doing here?” and slowly saunter off under the furniture with exasperated expressions. Having had the entire place to themselves all week, they see no need to vacate for our sakes. I think “unbelievable rodent activity” is how the Orkin man described it. The house is in such disrepair it has a white-trash quality. We even boast the requisite broken-down vehicles. The only difference is that instead of old beat-up Chevys and Fords, we have broken-down Land Rovers and Porsches, complete with cinder-block pedestals.
Our yard is filled with more plastic fantastic than a Toys “Я” Us. We have every garage sale item Little Tikes ever made. You know the ones: the turtle sandbox, the log cabin playhouse, the slide, the orange and yellow car; they’re all there, acting as a neon welcome sign to passing children. There are armies of bikes in every size and state of disrepair. All varieties of sporting equipment litter the lawn. As a testament to the overabundance of balls in my life, every possible type litters the yard. I do not recall which one of the boys became a bocce enthusiast, or what prompted us to install a tetherball pole, or the last time anyone played horseshoes, but should you want to engage in any of those games, or countless others, come on down. The entire scene looks like the French Quarter the day after Mardi Gras. Then there are the dangerous boy toys—the motorcycle, the go-cart, and—the ne plus ultra of all bone-breaking yard activities—the trampoline. These items tend to cause mothers with weaker constitutions to reverse out of the driveway as soon as they pull in, their children still safely strapped in their car seats. On some days, I swear I can catch a glimpse of the personal-injury lawyers hiding in the bushes.
My boys have made friends with a family of home-schooled kids down the road. They live on an old working farm and they heat their farmhouse by burning logs in a woodstove and piling hay bales against the outer walls for insulation. Their water comes from a well on their property that often gets contaminated and becomes undrinkable when some random bit of wildlife gets in and drowns. Those kids are not allowed to play on our trampoline or ride the go-cart, because their mother thinks they are too dangerous. Meanwhile, on their property is a dilapidated barn with huge holes in the upper floor. If you were to fall through, you would drop straight down two stories to land on a row of hogs or a couple of dead pigeons and a pile of boards studded with rusty nails. If the barn doesn’t do you in, you are sure to be zapped by one of the electrified wires hidden in the tall grass, or be butted by an angry goat. Despite being fed all the organic grains in the world, kids are still going to be goofy; her youngest once fastened a bungee cord to a tree branch in their yard, then proceeded to jump out of the tree with the other end in his mouth, managing to rip out half his teeth in the process. I guess we all have our own idea of what is dangerous.
The farm kids don’t have television and though they do have a computer, it is for educational purposes only. They aren’t allowed to play any of the popular online games, which their parents think are too violent. They are polite children, perhaps a bit socially awkward, but it’s hilarious to overhear them playing a game of chase with my kids.
“When I catch you, I’m going to slit your throat and hang you up upside down by your feet until all your blood drains out! Then I’m going to skin you and butcher you and put you in the freezer until winter!”
You certainly don’t learn that kind of talk from World of Warcraft.
AS YOU CAN IMAGINE, OUR PLACE IN THE COUNTRY IS A CHILD PARADISE, to the likes of which apartment living cannot compare. City children love it here. So much, apparently, that on one Thursday afternoon I started receiving messages from various parents thanking me for inviting their kids up for the weekend. What? After the third mother (and fourth child) left a thank-you on our answering machine, I decided I had better investigate. I collared Peik and Truman, the only two old enough for unassisted sleepovers.
“Have you two been inviting friends for the weekend without asking me first?”
“Dude,” Peik said, turning on Truman, “it’s my week to have friends, not yours.”
“According to whom?” I wanted to know.
“Mom,” Truman shot back, “Peik always has friends. It’s my turn.”
“Well, I don’t see how it’s going to work. I will ask your father when he gets home.” They both groaned, knowing this is what I usually say when I’m not going to give them what they want.
I have nothing against my boys having friends around. It’s well worth any extra work, because when either Peik or Truman has company they are far less likely to spend the weekend trying to kill each other. Guests keep them out of my hair. They are particularly appealing in the country, where I can simply lock the door and let them in only for meals or the occasional emergency bathroom break, which does not include peeing. “Pee in the grass like you always do,” I say through the screen of the locked door. Blake is usually around to make sure the boys don’t burn down the outbuildings while creating some kind of AID (airborne incendiary device), and the motorcycle and go-cart usually break down before anyone has a chance to get hurt.
The problem with having four extra boys for the weekend is mainly a logistical one. As crazy as it may sound, on the weekend in question I decided I actually wanted all four kids to come along. If I could figure out how to transport and host them, perhaps some grateful mother would be willing to take a boy or three off my hands for an extended period, sort of a parenting karma payoff. But I am obliged to take along my already existing children; there is just no way to legally drive all this extra miniature manhood, too. Back in my day, we would just pile in the back of the station wagon, but Ralph Nader has ruined all that good clean fun, and the law requires me to provide each of these children with an actual seat and safety belt.
“Peter, we’ve got a problem.” I turned to my husband to come up with a solution. It was Thursday night of a long week, so my synapses were not properly firing; there was no way I could solve this one. Peter’s plan was simple. We made sure Blake was up for a crazy weekend, rented a second car, split up the crowd, and headed for the country.
I was awakened on Saturday morning by the sound of a go-cart and a dirt bike outside my bedroom window. Ah, the dulcet tones of boyhood. The very next thing I heard was someone yelling that the refrigerator had been unplugged sometime during the week and all the food had gone bad. Cleaning the fridge was the first of many disgusting tasks that I would need to attend to over the weekend, but with Blake there I could face anything.
Our manny is the best of both worlds. He can be quite the outdoorsman, and is great for organizing things like campfires in the woods, or canoeing on the pond, but his gayness really comes in handy on the domestic side of things.
“We need to buy paper plates. Let’s just feed everyone on paper plates all weekend,” I said to him in an attempt to simplify things. Shopping, cooking, and cleaning up after three meals a day for nine boys and three adults was a daunting prospect.
“I looked at them, but I didn’t buy any,” he responded.
“I understand it will be hard for you,” I said. “But I don’t believe the boys have invited Martha Stewart, so we’ll just have to use the ones from Christmas.” Screw our carbon footprint. This was about survival.
We did, in fact, survive, though getting some of the boys to follow my plan of staying outside proved to be difficult. Some New York City kids have zero tolerance for the outdoors and are more comfortable experiencing it through a video screen. They love to watch baseball for four hours instead of strolling outside and picking up a bat and ball. If you can convince them to take a bike ride, they measure all distances in blocks.
“How many blocks to the covered bridge?”
“It’s half a mile. There are no blocks in the country.”
All in all, the kids were moderately well behaved—and no bones were broken, always a benchmark of success for me. The ultimate upside? For the next year, any time my boys ask to invite a friend I can say, “You just had friends up.” Meanwhile, I am still awaiting that invitation from another mom to take my kids away.
MUCH LIKE A BELOVED DOG, MY TORTOISE, FRANK, TRAVELS WITH US to the country on the weekends, and when the weather is nice he spends his time outdoors in his own picket-fenced pen. He is very quiet, wandering in and out of rooms and traveling back and forth from the city to the country without complaint. He eats what he is given and is about as housebroken as anyone else in the family. He is essentially the perfect child. Is he cuddly? Not really, but after scraping kids off my body all day I welcome an animal that knows how to keep his distance.
One day in the country, Peter decided he wanted to take some movies of Frank with a new high-definition camera. He put Frank in the yard and filmed him walking around in excruciating detail. I’m not sure, but I think Peter was planning to have Frank be the next big star on Animal Planet. After taking a few minutes of footage, Peter left him outside his pen to go scout a different location. Tortoises are faster than you think, especially when you are not looking, and by the time Peter came back, Frank was nowhere to be found. I went ballistic.
“How could you lose Frank?” I yelled.
“He can’t have gotten far,” Peter weakly replied.
I pushed past him and out to the garage, where I grabbed a small chainsaw. I went to the area where Peter was now yelling Frank’s name, as though a tortoise knows to come when called, and began mowing down bushes. I had no intention of stopping until either all eighteen acres were barren or we found Frank. You have to understand how attached I am to this tortoise. He is not one of those stinky water turtles that do nothing but generate lengthy discussions about whose turn it is to clean the algae-infested aquarium. Frank is a valued member of this family. We have had him for many years and watched him grow. He has height notches on the wall, like the other kids. This pet has a real personality, and he recognizes people. He greets me every morning in the kitchen, and he spends his afternoons next to me while I sew or write, soaking up the sunshine flooding in from the windows. A tortoise as perfect as Frank only comes around once in life, and the thought of losing him made me apoplectic.
After several hours of what can only be described as intense pruning, I gave up. Despondent, I went back into the house to have a cup of coffee and mourn my loss. I blamed Peter entirely; this was going to cost him our marriage—and he would have to take custody of the children. As I sat there fuming, Frank ambled out from behind one of Peter’s oversize man speakers in the kitchen.
“Frank, you’re here!” I was truly thrilled to see him. It seems that, like me, Frank is not a real outdoorsman. He’s a city tortoise at heart, and had made his way back into the house.
“Hey, Chainsaw Charlie, you should have seen the look on your face.” Peter laughed. “I’ve never seen you that concerned about any of the children.”
“That’s because Frank’s never invited another tortoise up here without asking me first.”
IT IS GREAT HAVING THE COUNTRY HOUSE TO GET AWAY TO ON weekends, but I wouldn’t want to live there full-time. For one thing, there are no sidewalks, so my heels sink into the mud, which pretty much relegates me to the indoors with the tortoises and scared city children. For another, my connection to civilization—satellite TV—is tenuous. A couple of clouds and I am on my own. But mostly, I don’t fit in with the locals. This is truly the land of antiquing and Birkenstocking, two activities not on my to-do list. There are plenty of New Yorkers who likewise make the trek to the Berkshires every weekend and infuse cash into the local economy, but we are generally regarded with disdain by the sandalistas, and I’m pretty sure we’re subject to a separate price list for local services. It’s a pity, this animosity, as there is quite a collection of interesting characters in the country, and I wouldn’t mind getting to know them. For the most part, though, they prefer Peter; his eccentricity mysteriously makes them read him as one of them rather than one of us. Because of this, Peter learns things about the country that I will never find out firsthand.
Did you know that you need a permit to drive around with a dead body in your car? Or that it takes 120 pounds of dry ice to keep an unembalmed body from decomposing? Peter does. He was invited over when our neighbor Christopher performed a do-it-yourself funeral for his mother. After displaying the body in her bedroom on a bed of dry ice for several days, he drove her to the crematorium in the back of a borrowed station wagon. When his ninety-six-year-old father, Bill, died—Bill had played basketball with my kids right up until the end—Christopher took an even more active role: he helped with the actual cremation. I have heard of growing your own vegetables and even slaughtering your own Sunday roast, but cremating your own father? That’s a bit too homegrown for me. Can you imagine sitting around a neighbor’s house enjoying a cup of coffee and some conversation with a dead man packed in dry ice awaiting the pyre on the dining room table?
Apparently, Peter can. He may not have performed a DIY funeral on either of his parents, but he has come close.
Peter’s mother, Peggy, loved her cat Heloise, or at least loved to make a fuss about her. (Apparently there was once an Abelard, but that was well before my time.) All day long, Peggy would scream from her bed: “Shut the door! The cat will get out!” or “Where’s the cat? Have you let the cat escape?” She routinely whipped her homecare nurses into a panic. Keeping track of Heloise seemed to be her way of staying connected to the world as she was dying of cancer.
Peggy left Heloise to my daughter, Cleo. By that time, Heloise must have been quite old, but she was so petite and spry that we always thought of her as a kitten. We were all surprised when she began to slow down and eventually died.
Channeling the care Christopher gave his parents, Peter pulled out all the stops for the burial of Heloise. As her body lay covered, rotting in the grass, with an occasional dousing of bleach to ward off the maggots, Peter spent two days crafting her a slight mahogany coffin with meticulous dovetail joints and fancy brass hardware. When it was finally stained and polished to perfection, and Heloise was safely screwed inside, the funeral began. It was fit for a Kennedy. The children walked her coffin to our pet cemetery on a wagon covered with an American flag. There was a BB-gun salute—not twenty-one-gun, but at least twelve-gun—as her remains were lowered into the ground. When the soil was filled in, a lion statue was placed as a headstone. As I watched Peter’s face, it occurred to me that taking such care to bury his mother’s cat was actually his way of letting go of his mother.
I MAKE FUN OF DAIRY AIR AND PRETEND TO BE ON THE LOOKOUT for a better piece of property, but the truth is, this scruffy place works perfectly for our family. We sit on some of the most beautiful landscape in the Northeast, and Peter would have me living in a tent as long as the view was good. There is a mix of woods and fields and a lovely pond that freezes over in the winter, hard enough for us to convince ourselves it is safe for ice skating. Any other time of year, the pond reflects the colors of the spectacular sunsets that melt into the Taconic Mountains. In the fall, the country is downright Rockwellesque, with the color of the changing leaves displayed in about a thousand different hues. The place looks especially picturesque in the winter, when a pristine blanket of snow turns the crap on the lawn into a wonderland of sculpture and our leaky heating produces a perfect row of icicles along the eaves. We could never leave, anyway, with Heloise planted firmly in the pet cemetery. So here I stay, and perhaps one day I will uncover for myself all the hidden potential.