Of course somewhere not so deep down none of what happened with the fryer was a surprise to me. From the moment I met her on the main floor at Gimbel's in the city, where she was offering sample sprays of men's cologne (I think it was Pierre Cardin, a huge phallic bottle of which I bought that day and may still have in the bottom of the bathroom vanity), I knew Daisy was volatile, like the crazy girl who haunts every neighborhood, the one always climbing fences and trees and eating flower petals and terrorizing the boys with sudden kisses and crotch-grabs. At Gimbel's Daisy sprayed me before I consented and then sprayed me again, and I would have been really pissed except she was amazingly bright-eyed and pretty and she had these perfect little hands with which she smoothed down my coat collar. She had a heavy accent to her English but she wasn't a tentative talker like some who come to this country and seem just to linger in the scenery and either peep-peep or else have to bark to get your attention. Daisy just let it all spill out in her messy exuberant froth of semi-language, clueless and charming and quite sexy, at least in that me Tarzan you Jane mode I welcome, with its promise of most basic romance.
For I had no idea what real craziness meant. I thought people like my father and my mother and my brother Bobby were off-kilter and in need of professional help. I didn't know what it was to be DSM-certified, described in the literature, perhaps totally nuts. And it was a month or so after the deep fryer incident that the first genuine trouble reared itself, when Daisy went off to Bloomingdale's and charged $7000 for a leather living room set and a full-length chinchilla coat. We had a terrific fight, me rabid with disbelief and Daisy defiant and bitter, talking about how she "knew class people" and mocking me for "working in dirt" like some peasant or field hand. Her eyes were wild and she was practically spitting with hatred and I swear had she been wielding a knife I would be long in the grave.
I didn't know that the previous days in which she bought herself and the kids several new outfits and served us filet mignon and lobsters and repainted our bedroom a deep Persian crimson trimmed in gold leaf were indicative of a grandiose run-up to a truly alarming finale; in fact, I was pretty pleased, for Daisy seemed happy and even ecstatic for the first time in a long time. She was lively with the kids and once again we were making love nightly, and though she worried me a little with her insomnia and solo drinking and 2 A.M. neighborhood walks in her nightgown I figured I was still way ahead of a lot of other guys with young families I knew, who were already playing the field and spending most of their free time away from the house. I tell you if Daisy hadn't blitzkrieged our net worth at Bloomingdale's nothing much would have changed; probably I wouldn't have cared if she was only steadily depleting our bank account, a time-honored way in our civilized world. But this was 1975, when the economy was basically shitting the bed, and Jack and Theresa were seven and six and I was making $20,000 a year at Battle Brothers, which was a hell of a lot of money, actually, and much more than I deserved. But $7000 for anything was of course ruinous, so I had to beg the store manager to take everything back (with a 10 percent restocking fee, plus delivery), and then cut up her charge cards and take away her bank passbook and start giving her the minimum cash allowance for the week's groceries and sundries and gas.
As you can imagine, Daisy wasn't exactly pleased with the arrangement. It was a suggestion/directive from Pop, whom I hadn't consulted directly but who had overheard my mother telling Aunt Vicky what her daughter-in-law had done. The next day Pop barreled into the messy double office we shared at the shop and plunked his backside onto my desk blotter and asked me what the hell I was doing. I had no clue what he was talking about, and as usual in those days I just stared up at him with my mouth half-crooked, indolently probing my upper mo-lars with my tongue.
"I'm talking about Daisy," he growled, as if he were the one who had married her, as if he were the one having the troubles.
I should mention that Pop always adored Daisy. From the second he met her it was clear, he could never stop talking about how gorgeous she was and how sexy and whenever they met he'd corral her with a big hug and kiss and then twirl her in a little cha-cha move, all of which Daisy welcomed and totally played into like she was Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday, just the kind of humoring and ass-kissing that my father has always lived for and measured everyone by.
"I hear she went on a spree at the department store and damn near bankrupted you."
"Not near," I said. "It was seven grand."
"Holy Jesus."
"But it's fixed now I'm making it go away."
"Damn it, Jerome, it's just going to happen again! Don't you know how to handle your wife yet?"
"I think I've learned something in these last eight years, yes."
"Bullshit. Listen to me. Are you listening, Jerome? This is what I'm telling you. You have to squash her every once in while, I mean completely flatten her. Otherwise a beautiful woman like Daisy gets big ideas, and those ideas get bigger every year. If she were a plain sedan like your mother you wouldn't have to worry, you'd only have to deal with a certain displacement, you know what I mean? But with a sleek machine, you've got to tool a governer onto the sucker, do something to cut her fuel."
"I have no idea what you're talking about, Pop."
"What I'm saying is you've got to be a little brutal. Not always, just every once in a while. Now is a good time. All this women's-libbing and bra burning is confusing everybody. Treat her badly, don't give her any money or attention or even a chance to bitch or argue. Don't let her leave the house for a week. Then when she's really down in the dumps bring her some diamond earrings or a string of pearls and take her out to a lobster dinner. After, screw her brains out, or whatever you can manage. Then everything will go back to normal, you'll see."
"And how do you know any of this works, if Ma isn't that kind of woman?"
"Trust your Pop, Jerome. I have wide experience. And if that doesn't do it, call Dr. Derricone."
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I must have said, to get him off my desk and case. But that very night when I got home Daisy was un-dertaking a complete overhaul of our house décor; she was going through a couple of hundred fabric swatches piled on the kitchen table, she had four or five different dining room chairs, some Persian rugs, several china and silver patterns, she had odd squares of linoleum and porcelain floor tile; she had even begun painting the dining and living room with sample swaths of paint, quart cans of which lay out still opened, used brushes left on the rims, dripping. For dinner she was heating up some leftover pasta on the stovetop. In the den the kids were watching TV, rolling popcorn in baloney slices for their predinner snack, and then spitting streams of Dr Pepper at each other through the gaps in their front teeth. When I asked her what the heck was going on Daisy simply looked up from her work and answered that she couldn't decide between a shiny or not-so-shiny silk for the living room curtains and what did I think?