A Night Out

Under normal circumstances, my household operates with the orderly precision of a tribe of wild Indians in full battle retreat. However, it isn’t until I start preparing for an evening out that things actually descend into utter chaos.

Centuries ago, in my maiden youth, I remember spending an entire Saturday afternoon getting ready for a date. Today, if I get five clear minutes between the time I finish drying the last supper dish and the first blast my husband toots on the car horn outside, I consider myself truly blessed.

The reason I’m always late is that my children bitterly resent my having any social life. Their firm conviction is that at my advanced age I should spend my few remaining evenings rocking and knitting and watching TV. Therefore, as soon as I start preparing to go out, they develop headaches, unquenchable thirsts and difficulties in long division—a monumental conspiracy to keep me chained to the medicine cabinet, the refrigerator and the grade four arithmetic text.

Hard as this is, I infinitely prefer it to their destructive attempts to help. One child fills my evening bag with lego bricks; another takes garbled messages on the phone; a third spills face powder into my shoes, while the baby runs around grabbing everything that isn’t nailed down and throwing it into the toilet.

But, demanding as the children are, their performance pales in comparison with that of their father. Now, I know my husband dressed himself before we were married, and at no time did I ever promise to love, honor and provide valet service. Nevertheless, if I want to avoid having invidious aspersions cast on my wifely abilities, I have to draw his bath, manicure his nails, polish his shoes, lay out his clothes, put in his cuff links and tie his tie.

He never seems to realize that I have to accompany him in an equally suitable state of dress. In what seems to me to be a deplorably unbalanced division of labor, he bathes and dresses with the aplomb of a Persian potentate, while I hysterically feed, bathe, put to bed and supervise the homework of four uncooperative children.

But what makes me such an ardent convert to the Women’s Liberation Movement is that when I finally dash madly out to the car, he actually has the nerve to wonder out loud why women can never be ready for anything on time!

Nursery School, Ho!

Now that school registration has come and gone, and a blissful silence has descended on the house, I’ve begun contemplating my hard-won freedom and wondering if the effort involved in enrolling my youngest in nursery school was worth it.

Just finding a suitable school took months, hampered as I was by friends and neighbors who tried to shame me into sending my child to a progressive nursery where they give zither lessons and a course in conversational Russian.

Unfortunately, even the least pretentious nursery school has certain requirements which the child must fulfill before he is permitted to register. These are listed in a lengthy questionnaire which, if taken seriously, would take a psychologist a month to fill out. It was right about then that I started to contemplate hiring a governess and tutoring the kid at home.

The first thing they asked was whether my child was toilet trained. Now, I understand that in some households, nine-month-old babies march themselves off to the bathroom whenever necessary, but I’m sorry to say that mine was never one of them. However, I never despaired. I simply sent the child off with trust in his heart and an extra pair of underpants in his school bag. I’m happy to announce that my confidence was not misplaced: two of my favorite children were toilet trained by their nursery school teachers.

The next question on the list was whether my child was familiar with the working of a pair of scissors. Familiar? He’s been cutting up my bed sheets with unerring accuracy for the past six months! However, I felt no obligation to supply the school with an over-abundance of information. I simply answered ‘yes’.

The next question asked whether my child could draw and color. One visit to my home would supply the answer, since my walls resemble those covered with primitive drawings in the caves at Lascaux. Again, I answered ‘yes’.

For a list of his previous medical illnesses and immunizations, I simply referred the school to the nearest public health office.

The questionnaire next asked me to list any personal idiosyncrasies or peculiarities I’d noticed in my child, or any information about him I thought the school ought to know. Now, I operate under the theory that a child shouldn’t be marked for life with a written record of peccadilloes that could later by used against him. Therefore, I never so much as hinted at what he did with the enema bag last summer, or why his best friends never invite him to sleep over at their homes. Some skeletons should never be let out of anyone’s closet.

I tell myself that the teacher has ten months in which to discover the many facets of his imaginative mind all by herself, without any help from me. If I told her what to expect, the entire school year would be an anticlimax.

The last question was the hardest of all to answer. It asked what I hoped my child would get out of nursery school. Darned if I know. The whole question seems to be academic, because if he’s anything like my other children, he’ll be home sick four days out of five anyway.

Post-Op Prevarication

I’ve come to the conclusion that no one ever tells a patient the whole truth about what her surgery is going to involve.

“In two weeks you’ll be doing everything you did before,” my surgeon told me, and he was partially right. I found, only fourteen days after the big event, that I was perfectly capable of lying in bed all day, reading a few short get-well cards. Occasionally, I even had enough surplus energy to moan every time I tried to turn over or take a deep breath.

What he never mentioned were the things I couldn’t do--cough, sneeze or stand upright for more than twenty seconds without my ears starting to ring like the carillon in the cathedral at Notre Dame.

My doctor wasn’t the only one who didn’t seem to realize how weak I was after my operation. Friends who take to their beds for days with a sore throat or a trick knee were amazed when I told them I wasn’t up to dinner and the theatre the day I got home from the hospital.

They, and everyone else I met, kept telling me they’d undergone the same operation, suffered worse complications and recovered weeks sooner than I had.

“My dear, I was playing tennis ten days afterward,” someone told me smugly when I celebrated my three-week post-operative anniversary by having my husband drive me, very slowly, once around the block in the car.

Eventually, of course, all my malaise came to an end, and the day dawned when I could actually comb the back of my hair without feeling so faint I had to lie down for a week.

Gradually I found that I could stand upright quite comfortably without worrying that I would split open and spill something vital onto the floor.

Now that I’ve recovered, I think it’s time I shared my new-found well-being with those less fortunate than myself. I’m going to join the ranks of that vast legion of liars--people who have undergone surgery.

“You’re going to have an operation?” I’ll ask blithely. “Don’t give it another thought. I had something far more serious done not too long ago, and I was up and around and feeling absolutely marvellous in no time at all!”

The Grandmother Clock

We have just bought a grandmother clock, which is a smaller version of a grandfather clock and a bigger version of a granddaughter clock. If this sounds complicated, I could become even more technical by describing their various styles and sizes, including the different types of weights, pendulums, chimes and clock faces of each. In fact, after spending several weeks making the rounds of even more stores, I have learned more about grandmother clocks than I actually wanted to know.

In fact, I examined clocks in twenty-eight stores, which is quite a feat considering that I can get out only when I have a sitter, the car isn’t on the fritz and my grocery list doesn’t exceed thirty-two pages; in which case I spend the day at the supermarket basking in the delighted smiles of the proprietor, who has been known to greet me by name and offer me part of his lunch.

Anyway, I examined, pushed, pulled, listened and measured, and submitted my findings together with a scale drawing to my husband, who promptly did absolutely nothing about it. Six weeks later, he called and told me that he’d just happened to be in a department store, had seen a clock he liked, and I could expect delivery that afternoon. He also made a few other remarks about women taking too long to make up their minds, but it was hard to hear him above the noise of my head banging against the wall.

During my investigation, I had been most interested in the musical quality of the chime. After all, the main charm of the clock was its melodious tone and I wanted this quality to be exactly right, and especially not too loud.

In the noisy department store, the chimes could hardly be heard. When the clock was delivered and installed, the sound of the chimes melted melodiously into the cacophony created by the normal day’s routine. We all gathered every quarter hour like dogs in a Pavlov experiment and listened rapturously.

However, in the stillness of the night, in the silence cause by little mouths closed in sleep, doorbells and telephones stilled, dishwashers and pianos at rest, the dulcet tones of the chime assumed the volume and cadence of Big Ben installed a foot from my left ear.

I closed doors. I piled pillows and blankets on my head. I stuffed cotton into my ears. I paced floors, silently cursing my sleeping oblivious family. Hours passed, each mockingly marked by that hideous chime, in which, however musical it had seemed before, I now distinctly detected two flat notes.

It wasn’t just the chime that disturbed me. It was the inexorability of it that forced me to lie awake in anxious apprehension. I finally stopped it entirely and stumbled bleary-eyed to bed for the rest of the night.

My husband used to reminisce fondly about the chimes of his childhood clock, and his desire to create similar musical memories for our children. Now, it’s all very well for children to be reminded of the passing of time. To them, time is a luxurious infinity, a never-never land which has no direct application to them. But at my advanced stage of life, I don’t want to be reminded every fifteen minutes of how little I have accomplished in the past quarter hour and how few and fragile my plans are for the next.

I’m convinced that a chiming clock would make an excellent substitute for one of Dante’s more infernal tortures. The words written on the face of my clock are oh, so sadly true! Tempus indeed fugits, and I must admit that I resent it, bitterly.