They write and hand in their scribbled lines and I know I’ve started off on the wrong foot though I know also that if I ever want a lively class discussion there’s always suttee.
On Saturday mornings, my daughter, Maggie, watches television cartoons with her friend Claire Ficarra from down the street. They giggle, scream, clutch each other, jump up and down while I sneer in the kitchen and read the paper. Between their chatter and the television noise I catch snatches of a Saturday morning all-American mythology, names repeated weekly, Roadrunner, Woody Woodpecker, Donald Duck, the Partridge Family, Bugs Bunny, the Brady Bunch, Heckel and Jeckel. The idea of mythology loosens my sneer and I take my coffee to join the girls before the television set.
Oh, Dad, are you going to watch with us?
I am.
Wow, Maggie, says Claire, your dad is cool.
I’m sitting with them because they helped me yoke violently two disparate characters, Bugs Bunny and Odysseus.
Maggie had said, Bugs Bunny, he’s so mean to Elmer Fudd, and Claire had said, Yeah, Bugs is nice and funny and clever but why is he so mean to Elmer?
When I returned to my classes on Monday morning I announced my great discovery, the similarities between Bugs Bunny and Odysseus, that they were devious, romantic, wily, charming, that Odysseus was the first draft dodger while Bugs showed no evidence of ever having served his country or of ever having done anything for anyone except to cause mischief, that the major difference between them was that Bugs simply drifted from one mischief to another while Odysseus had a mission, to get home to Penelope and Telemachus.
What prompted me then to ask the simple question that caused the class to explode, When you were a child what did you watch on Saturday mornings?
An eruption of Mickey Mouse, Flotsam and Jetsam, Tom and Jerry, Mighty Mouse, Crusader Rabbit, dogs, cats, mice, monkeys, birds, ants, giants.
Stop. Stop.
I threw out pieces of chalk. Here, you and you and you, go to the board. Write the names of these cartoons and shows. Put them in categories. This is what scholars will be poring over a thousand years hence. This is your mythology. Bugs Bunny. Donald Duck.
The lists covered all the boards and there still wasn’t enough room. They could have covered floor and ceiling and continued into the hallway, thirty-five students in each class dredging up the detritus of countless Saturday morning shows. I called above the din, Did these shows have theme songs and music?
Another eruption. Songs, hummings, mood music, reminiscences of favorite scenes and episodes. They could have sung and chanted and acted well past the bell and into the night. From the board they copied lists into their notebooks and they didn’t ask why, they didn’t complain. They told each other and me they couldn’t believe they’d watched so much television in their lives. Hours and hours. Wow. I asked them, How many hours? and they said days, months, maybe years. Wow again. If you were sixteen you probably spent three years of your life before a TV set.
53
Before Maggie was born I dreamed of being a Kodak daddy. I’d wield a camera and assemble an album of milestone pictures, Maggie moments after her birth, Maggie on her first day of kindergarten, Maggie graduating from kindergarten, from elementary school, high school and, above all, college.
The college wouldn’t be some sprawling urban affair, NYU, Fordham, Columbia. No, my lovely daughter would spend four years in one of those sweet New England colleges so exquisite they find the Ivy League vulgar. She’d be blonde and tanned, strolling the greensward with an Episcopalian lacrosse star, scion of a Boston Brahmin family. His name would be Doug. He’d have bright blue eyes, powerful shoulders, a frank direct look. He’d call me sir and crush my hand in his manly honest way. He and Maggie would be married in the honest stone Episcopalian church on campus, showered with confetti under an arch of lacrosse sticks, the sport of a better class of people.
And I’d be there, proud Kodak dad, awaiting my first grandchild, half Irish Catholic, half Boston Brahmin Episcopalian. There would be a christening and a garden party, and I’d be snapping away with my Kodak, white tents, women in hats, everyone pasteled, Maggie with child, comfort, class, security.
That’s what I dreamed when I held her bottle, changed her diapers, bathed her in the kitchen sink, taped her infant gurglings. The first three years I secured her in a little basket and rode my bicycle around Brooklyn Heights. When she toddled I took her to the playground and while she discovered sand and other children I eavesdropped on mothers around me. They talked about kids, husbands, how they couldn’t wait to get back to their own careers in the real world. They’d lower their voices and whisper about affairs and I’d wonder if I should make a move. No. They were already suspicious of me. Who was this guy sitting around with mothers on a summer morning when real men were at work?
They didn’t know I was born lower class, using daughter and wife to ease myself into their world. They worried about something that comes before kindergarten, preschool, and I was learning that kids have to be kept busy. A few wild minutes in the sandbox is okay but play should really be structured and supervised. You just can’t have enough structure. If a child is aggressive you have to worry. Quiet? Same worry. It’s all antisocial behavior. Kids must learn to adjust, or else.
I wanted to send Maggie to a public elementary school or even the Catholic school down the street but Alberta insisted on an ivy-covered pile that had once been a school for Episcopalian girls and I didn’t have the stomach for the fight. It would surely be more respectable and we’d meet a better class of people.
Oh, we did. There were stockbrokers, investment bankers, engineers, heirs to old fortunes, professors, obstetricians. There would be parties where they’d say, And what do you do? and when I said I was a teacher they’d turn away. It didn’t matter that we had a mortgage on a Cobble Hill brownstone, that we kept in step with other gentrifying couples, exposing our bricks, our beams, ourselves.
It was too much for me. I didn’t know how to be a husband, a father, a house owner with two tenants, a certified member of the middle class. I didn’t know how to proceed, how to dress, how to chatter of the stockmarket at parties, how to play squash or golf, how to give a testosteronic handshake and look my man in the eye with a, Pleasure to meet you, sir.
Alberta would say she wanted nice things and I never knew what that meant. Or I didn’t care. She’d want to go antiquing along Atlantic Avenue and I’d want to chat with Sam Colton in his Montague Street bookshop or have a beer at the Blarney Rose with Yonk Kling. Alberta would talk about Queen Anne tables, Regency sideboards, Victorian ewers, and I didn’t give a fiddler’s fart. Her friends talked about good taste and rounded on me when I said good taste was what pops up when the imagination dies. The air was thick with good taste and I felt suffocated.
The marriage had become a sustained squabble and there was Maggie, trapped in the middle of it. After school every day she had to follow the routine passed down by a Yankee grandmother in Rhode Island. Change your clothes, drink milk, eat cookies, do your homework because you’re not getting out of the house till you do. That’s what you’re supposed to do. That’s what your mother did. Then you can play with Claire till it’s dinnertime where you have to sit with parents who are civil only because of you.
Mornings redeemed the nights. When Maggie grew from toddler to walker to talker she’d come to the kitchen in her dream state, talking dream talk of a flight over the neighborhood with Claire and a landing in the street outside. In April she’d look at the magnolia tree that bloomed beyond the kitchen window and want to know why we couldn’t have that color forever. Why did the green leaves drive away the lovely pink? I told her all the colors must have their day in the world and that seemed to satisfy her.