Good in Bed

My friends all knew the drill. My brother and sister and I did it a few times in the early days of my parents’ split, before my father a

And on Sunday morning, in time for church or Hebrew school, the parade would begin again, only in reverse: the cars pulling up and disgorging the kids, who’d hustle up the driveway trying not to run or look too relieved, and the fathers trying not to drive away too fast, trying to remember that this was supposed to be a pleasure, not a duty. For two years, three years, four years they’d come. Then they’d vanish – remarried, mostly, or moved away.

It wasn’t that bad, really – not third-world bad, not Appalachia bad. There was no physical pain, no real hunger. Even with the drop in the standard of living, the suburbs of Philadelphia were still a damn sight better than the way most people in the world – or the country – lived. Even if our cars were older and our vacations less lavish and our in-ground swimming pools less than pristine, we still had cars, and vacations, pools in the backyards, and roofs over our heads.

And the mothers and children learned how to lean on each other. Divorce taught us how to deal with stuff, whether it was reduced circumstances, or what to say when the Girl Scout leader asked what you’d like to bring to the Father/Daughter banquet. (“A father,” was the preferred answer.) My girlfriends and I learned to be flippant and tough, a posse of junior cynics, all before we hit sixteen.

I always wondered, though, what the fathers felt as they drove up the street they used to drive down every night, and whether they really saw their former houses, whether they noticed how things got frayed and flaky around the edges now that they were gone. I wondered it again as I pulled up to the house I’d grown up in. It was, I noticed, looking even more Joad-like than usual. Neither my mother nor the dread life partner, Tanya, was much into yard work, and so the lawn was littered with drifts of dead brown leaves. The gravel on the driveway was as thin as an old man’s hair combed across an age-spotted scalp, and as I parked I could make out the faint glitter of old metal from behind the little toolshed. We used to park our bikes in there. Tanya had “cleaned” it by dragging all the old bikes, from tricycles to discarded ten-speeds, out behind the shed, and leaving them there to rust. “Think of it as found art,” my mother had urged us when Josh complained that the bike pile made us look like trailer trash. I wonder if my father ever drove by, if he knew about my mother and her new situation, if he thought about us at all, or whether he was content to have his three children out there in the world, all grown up, and strangers.

My mother was waiting in the driveway. Like me, she’s tall, and heavy (a Larger Woman, I heard Bruce’s voice taunt in my head). But whereas I am an hourglass (an extremely full hourglass), my mother is shaped like an apple – a round midsection on toned and muscular legs. A former high-school standout in te

She wears her hair short and lets it stay gray and dresses in comfortable clothes in shades of gray and beige and pale pink. Her eyes are the same green as mine, but wider and less anxious, and she smiles a lot. She’s the kind of person who’s constantly being approached by strangers – for directions, for advice, for honest assessments of whether bathing suits made the would-be wearer’s butt look big in the communal dressing room at Loehma

Today, she was dressed for our outing in wide-legged pale pink sweatpants, a blue turtleneck sweater, one of her fourteen pairs of activity-specific sneakers, and a windbreaker accented with a small triangular, rainbow-colored pin. She wore no makeup – she never wore it – and her hair was in its usual air-dried spikes. She looked happy as she climbed into the car. For her, the free cooking demonstrations at Philadelphia ’s premiere downtown food market cum meeting place were better than standup comedy. They weren’t intended to be participatory, but nobody bothered to tell her that.

“Subtle,” I said, pointing at her pin.

“You like?” she asked, oblivious. “Tanya and I picked them up in New Hope last weekend.”

“Did you get me one?” I asked.

“No,” she said, refusing to take the bait. “We got you this.” She handed me a small rectangle wrapped in purple tissue paper. I unwrapped it at a red light, to find a magnet depicting a cartoon girl with squiggly curled hair and glasses. “I’m not gay, but my mother is,” it read. Perfect.

I fiddled with the radio and kept quiet during the half hour drive back to town. My mother sat quietly beside me, obviously waiting for me to bring up Bruce’s latest opus. On the way into the Terminal, in between the vegetable vendor and the fresh fish counter, I finally did.

“Good in bed,” I snorted. “Hah!”

My mother gave me a sideways glance. “So I take it he wasn’t?”

“I don’t want to be having this conversation with you,” I grumbled, as we worked our way past the bakeries and the Thai and Mexican food stalls and found seats in front of the demonstration kitchen. The chef – a semiregular I remembered from the Southern Favorites lesson three weeks before – blanched as my mother sat down.

She shrugged at me, and stared at the blackboard. This week it was American Classics with Five Easy Ingredients. The chef launched into his spiel. One of his assistants – a gangly, pimply kid from The Restaurant School – started hacking away at a head of cabbage. “He’s going to cut his finger off,” my mother predicted.

“Shh!” I said, as the front-row regulars – mostly senior citizens who took these sessions way too seriously – scowled at us.

“Well, he is,” said my mother. “He’s holding the knife all wrong. Now, getting back to Bruce…”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. The chef melted a gigantic glob of butter in a pan. Then he added bacon. My mother gasped as if she’d witnessed a beheading, and raised her hand.

“Is there a heart-healthy modification for this recipe?” she inquired. The chef sighed and started talking about olive oil. My mother returned her attention to me. “Forget Bruce,” she said. “You can do better.”

“Mother!”

“Shh!” hissed the front-row foodies. My mother shook her head. “I can’t believe this.”

“What?”

“Would you look at the size of that pan? That pan’s not big enough.” Sure enough, the chef-in-training was cramming way too much imperfectly chopped cabbage into a shallow frying pan. My mother raised her hand. I yanked it down.

“Just let it go.”

“How’s he going to learn anything if nobody tells him when he’s making a mistake?” she complained, squinting at the stage. “That’s right,” agreed the woman sitting next to her.