Supermarket Syndrome

Now no one but the baby, who still thinks mothers are made in heaven, would consider me a perfect housekeeper. But there are certain things on which I pride myself. I can untangle kites from telephone wires, and I’m the only mother on the block who can skip Double Dutch. What I can’t seem to do, is keep enough food in the house to feed my family.

I buy food the way Ibn Saud takes wives—extravagantly, and in great bulk. But within twenty-four hours my pantry shelves are completely empty. Actually, the shelves aren’t exactly empty. What they are, is filled with empty jars, boxes and cartons; so that after I check the cupboards, I come home from the grocer’s with a single tin of sardines, when what I really need is the kind of food order I’d buy if I were setting up house-keeping with a dozen healthy truck drivers.

I don’t know where the food goes. My family certainly doesn’t eat it. My husband decided long ago that if we were to remain married at least until the children were grown and able to fend for themselves, he’d better never eat breakfast or lunch at home.

And the children never eat anything. They make castles out of their mashed potatoes and drop their peas down the baby’s neck. Everything else goes out on the back porch for the squirrels, which makes hanging out the wash pretty hazardous. It’s also pointless, because even the squirrels are smart enough to prefer my dahlia bulbs.

I know this sounds as though I’m disorganized and never try to make out grocery lists, but that’s not true. The trouble is that, assuming I can find a pencil, I can never locate any paper to write on, unless you count the backs of traffic summonses or the cuffs of my husband’s dirty shirts. The real test comes when I have to write a note to my child’s teacher, and all I can find in the way of writing materials are an overdue meat bill and a half-used tube of Pink Passion lipstick.

The really harrowing part of it is that even if I make lists, I can’t read them. One night, in a mad burst of organizational frenzy, I wrote down everything I needed to get the next day and stuck it with smug satisfaction to the refrigerator door. The next morning I leaped out of bed, anxiously anticipating a day of fruitful accomplishment.

It took me only an hour to figure out that ‘lrg mln nt 2 rp’ meant ‘large melon not too ripe’, but I defy anyone but the discoverer of the Rosetta stone to decipher ‘rtn lggs fr lgr pr n grn’.

And the cost of grocery shopping today! I’d noticed the rising supermarket prices, but I put it down to all the pantyhose and CDs I was buying. I never dreamed that food prices were going up too. Experts keep telling me to comparison shop, which leaves me with two choices: I can pay a sitter a king's ransom and drive to the other end of town to save a penny on a can of string beans; or drag four protesting children along, in which case the money I save won’t begin to pay for the tranquilizers I’ll need when I get home.

I guess I’m just not prepared, either mentally or physically, to make a career of food shopping. There are so many other matters that require my urgent attention—like who put all that sand in the kitchen cupboard? And more important, why? (I hope they’re collecting it for the sandbox and not, dear Lord, not another ant farm).

I once watched a woman in the butcher shop, pencil and notebook in hand, checking off the huge order of meat being packaged for her. Now, I begrudge no woman her attractive appearance. We’re all fashion models at heart. What I resent is watching a woman in a Chanel suit, every hair in place, sitting contemplating her meat order as though she were consulting the wine list at Maxim’s.

She told me that by making one big order this way, her family’s meals were completely planned for the next six months. This is an unnerving thought for someone like me, who considers a meal well planned if she remembers to run in for a pound of ground round while she’s doing the afternoon car pool.

Anyway, there’s something depressing about knowing exactly what you’re going to eat for dinner for the next 180 nights. I think I’ll just keep on doing what I’ve always done. Every day at five p.m., I’m going to look into the refrigerator and wonder hysterically what kind of meal I can possibly prepare with a jar of apricot yogurt, two uncapped bottles of soda water and a half-eaten toffee apple.

R U P C ?

I read in the paper the other day that the government has recently formed a Race Relations Board. Apparently, its first official act was to refuse to allow an advertisement for a Scottish cook to make porridge and a Finn to teach the Finnish language. According to the Board, no one may designate anyone or anything by race or nationality, because that would be discriminating against others.

A member of the Board was telling me how much prejudice they had uncovered. “But we’ll put a stop to it!” he vowed. “We’re going to close down all the restaurants in the country!”

“Restaurants?” I asked “Whatever for?”

“They’re the worst offenders! Why, the racial overtones of the menus are frightening! There’s Irish coffee and stew, English muffins, Welsh Rarebit, Scotch whiskey, Danish and French pastry, Belgian chocolate, Swedish meatballs--the list is endless!”

“I didn’t realize that discrimination was so rampant,” I admitted.

“You have no idea! We had to arrest all the architects for designing houses with French doors. And the Turkish baths had to go.”

“You’re very thorough.”

He smiled proudly. “No one escapes the law because of power or position. I myself spoke to the mayor rather sharply for allowing the trees downtown to get Dutch elm disease. And the use of all those telephone Poles is certainly in questionable taste.”

“Do you find racism more prevalent in one group than another?”

“Well, we had to close down all the stationery stores for selling Scotch tape. And all the orchestras had to go. Pity. But they had French and English horns, if you please! Shocking! And then there are the bigots who insist on playing Russian roulette. But for sheer group racism, you can’t beat the kids.”

I was shocked. “You mean the children are prejudiced against other nationalities?”

“You bet they are. They go Dutch on dates and get in Dutch with their parents, which forces everyone to talk to them like Dutch uncles. And we had to close down the playgrounds and swimming pools to stop them from playing Chinese checkers and doing the Australian crawl.”

“You seem to have covered everything thoroughly.”

“Absolutely! We’ll soon be completely free of prejudice. But my family has me a bit worried.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, I caught my wife eyeing a Persian lamb coat in a store window the other day. And wouldn’t it be dreadful if I had to arrest my five-year-old son for catching German measles?”

Redecorating

The poets say that in the spring, a young man’s fancy turns to love. The only trouble with this arrangement is that it comes into direct conflict with a young woman’s fancy, which turns to redecorating her entire house the minute winter starts to wane.

Unfortunately, redecorating a home is a harrowing experience, requiring the nerve of a kamikaze pilot, the patience of a head nurse and the resourcefulness of a hostess with a five-pound roast and twelve unexpected dinner guests.

For example, you decide to wallpaper the front hall. This means that you have to have the painters in to paint the woodwork first.

But before you do that, you have to call in the carpenters to make a few minor repairs, like replacing the doorknob your husband removed in a fit of pique the last time the baby locked himself in the bathroom.

The main trouble with redecorating is that it begets redecorating. Newly painted walls make the drapes look tacky; new drapes make the carpets look worn; new carpets make the furniture look shabby, and so on, far into the debt-ridden future.

And the decisions! Every woman know the agony of choosing just the right shade of blue for that back bedroom wall. But how many are aware of the trauma-strewn path to choosing the right wallpaper?

I’ve seen women who chose their husbands on the first date and named their babies before they left the delivery room, hanging blank-eyed with panic over books of wall-paper samples, begging opinions from perfect strangers who wandered in off the street.

Naturally, for all this time and effort, not to mention the emotional scars that will be with you until old age, you get no sympathy from your husband. Complain that you’re exhausted, you simply can’t go on, and the sweet considerate thing will leap to his feet and offer to put the whole redecorating job off for another ten years.

Of course, eventually the job gets done. Suddenly you find yourself eating alone at the table, sans carpenters, painters, paper hangers and your neighbors, who heard you were redecorating and kept coming over to try to hire all the workmen away from you.

At last it’s finished, and you love it! Or maybe you don’t. It doesn’t much matter. In no time at all, it’ll acquire that soiled, crayoned, scruffy look that made you do it all over in the first place.

Household Help!

I’ve been interviewing housekeepers again, which my husband swears is my favorite indoor sport next to raising and lowering the hems on all my clothes. I tried Myrtle, who demanded $1.75 for bus fare and drove home in her Buick convertible; Sonia, who smelled of garlic and Pauline, who smoked. This last might not sound reprehensible to you, but I stopped smoking twelve years, eleven months, nine days and fourteen minutes ago, and there’s no one as unforgiving as a reformed sinner. There were also sixteen other women who promised to appear bright and early Monday morning and never did.

Actually, I don’t really enjoy looking for household help. I just do it to while away all the spare time I have left after cleaning the house, doing the laundry, making the meals, car pooling the kids and meeting my editor’s deadlines.

I don’t know why it is, but women applying for domestic work always travel in pairs, like book ends. One of the women ringing your doorbell is smartly dressed, has a smile on her face, remembers your name and strikes up an instant rapport with your baby. She’s the friend.

Her companion, who’s come to work for you, is fat, frowsy and completely devoid of either personality or teeth. It reminds me of the blind dates I had in college, where the handsome six-footer with the leather elbow patches arrived with the short bald guy with glasses and a postnasal drip, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out which one was meant for me.

The thing is, decent household help is impossible to find. Everyone who applies for the job makes it perfectly clear at the outset that if it weren’t for her asthma and sciatica, she’d far rather be digging ditches somewhere in Labrador.

Driven to desperate measures, I put an ad in the paper. The first call came from a harridan who examined my stand on the Middle East before we got down to the crux of the matter, which was how big my house and family were. When I apologetically admitted that they were ten rooms and four children respectively, I could see it was hopeless.

The trouble is, the more children you have, the larger the house you need, and therefore the more household help you require and the less you can afford to pay for it.

One sweet young thing told me she could get sixty dollars a day downtown with no laundry, no children, no windows or walls. It took all my husband’s powers of persuasion to keep me from beating her to the job.

One woman sounded so human, I timidly asked her if she’d do some ironing.

“Of course,” she replied. My joy was unconfined until she added, “I don’t do sheets, shirts, blouses or dresses.” For two weeks we had the best-ironed handkerchiefs and socks in the neighborhood.

The last call came from a woman who told me where I lived, what I served for lunch and how much I paid. Then she said, “I don’t wash windows, walls or floors.” I remember whimpering that our ceilings didn’t get too dirty this time of year before I hung up and had hysterics in the corner.

I’m sitting at the kitchen table writing this. The dining room table, where I usually work, lies buried beneath last month’s newspapers, which I’m going to read the minute I have time, and a set of architect’s plans for a house in Florida, which my husband just brought home from the office. Apparently he figures that if I can’t keep this house clean, he’ll give me another chance to make a fresh start down south.

Anybody wanna buy a dirty house?