Inflating a Dog

(a sample)

WHEN PEOPLE ASK what my mother was like, I tell them the story of her lunch launch, because in that story so many of her best attributes show to good advantage—particularly her enthusiasm—and also because the lunch launch—Ella’s Lunch Launch—was a success, her only successful entrepreneurial venture, coming after a long string of failures that struck bottom with Ella’s Lacy Licks, an enterprise that was for a while known as Ella’s Ribbons of Dee-Lite.
    Throughout my childhood and adolescence my mother dreamed of going into business for herself.  This desire first began to manifest itself when I was very young, too young to understand that there was a motive for her yearning beyond wanting to make some money, but by the time I was thirteen or so I did understand.  I understood that she wanted recognition more than she wanted money.  She wanted to make people—in particular, my father—see that she could accomplish something, build a business from nothing and become a woman who was defined by a business rather than a woman who was defined by a husband who ran a garage, a son who salivated at the sight of a girl in a tight skirt, and a suburban tract house with a partially finished attic.  She wanted to make the world—or at least my father—think of her as Ella Piper Leroy, hairdresser, for example, rather than Ella Piper Leroy, housewife.
    My mother had many schemes for businesses and many dreams about their success, and many of her schemes and dreams got as far as the dinner table.  While my father and I ate, she would smoke and talk, nervously, laying out a plan for her audience of two, full of enthusiasm, until, in most cases, a moment came when her face fell, and she finished her proposal with her eyes down, as if the scheme were there on the tablecloth in front of her, falling apart before her eyes, shattering like the fragile ribbon candy that, at Christmastime, she liked to put out in dishes decorated with images of evergreen trees.
    Sometimes, though, a scheme survived the dinner-table test. Some survived because they were the sturdy, boring sort of undertaking that my mother never would have enjoyed pursuing, like a window-washing service, and others because she put them back together out of the broken bits and held them together with the force of her determination, as she did with her plan to make ribbon candy, package it, and ship it far and wide as Ella’s Ribbons of Dee-lite. 
    I think it was obvious to all of us, even to her, that ribbon candy must be made in a factory by machines especially designed to extrude sugar syrup in a continuous ribbon, fold it back upon itself uniformly, and snip it off in lengths that fit into boxes.  I know it was obvious to me, because I was a watcher of industrial documentary films, which were in those days purveyed to youngsters via television on Saturday mornings, as entertainment.  I knew, to name the first examples that come to mind, how Coffee-Toffee soda bottles were molded, filled, and packaged; how the glass for the bottles was made; how the caps for the bottles were cut from sheets of metal and printed and fluted and lined with a thin disk of cork; and how Coffee-Toffee soda itself was made, though the films stopped short of initiating me and the other early risers into the mysteries of the secret process that gave the soda its inimitable flavor; and I knew that all of these processes required intricate machines with precision parts that were polished to gleaming brightness and operated with uncannily accurate timing in a handsome industrial dance.
    Looking at her, smiling, tossing out ideas for a name for her ribbon candy, I felt the weight of her inevitable disappointment.  I was certain that she was going to find out that she couldn’t make ribbon candy, but she certainly wasn’t going to find it out from me.  Because I understood very well from personal experience the heavy emptiness that filled one’s heart when the words “you can’t” were spoken, I rejected after only the briefest consideration the thought that I might tell my mother that she was up against something that she probably could not accomplish without the aid of intricate machines.  I would not play the dark angel of defeat.  She wasn’t going to hear a discouraging word from my father, either.  He had given up trying to dissuade her from her schemes because he couldn’t stand the aftermath.  He had learned to let her fail rather than telling her that she would fail because the gloom that settled over the house when she merely failed on her own was a lighter and briefer gloom than the gloom that followed his telling her that she couldn’t do what she yearned to do, and so instead of saying “You can’t make ribbon candy,” he just shrugged and said, “Why not give it a try?”

TRY SHE DID.  I came home from school one afternoon to find the kitchen glazed with sugar.  Threads of crystallized sugar crackled when I pushed the back door open, and they webbed the room, running along the walls, across the countertops and the stove and the sink, across the faces of the white metal cabinets.  My mother had spun a sugar cocoon like one of the sugar eggs that were sold at Easter. 
    (These eggs were molded in two halves, a top and a bottom, the joint cemented and concealed by a decorative squiggle of colored sugar paste, but before the halves were joined a tiny scene was constructed inside, made of images printed on stiff paper, cut and mounted with candy syrup that held them in place to make a diorama, sacred or profane, the buyer’s choice.  I don’t know how all that was done; if there was an early-morning documentary on the process, I missed it.)
    My mother seemed not to be aware that I was in the kitchen.  She was drizzling hot syrup from a can in which she had punched tiny holes, waving the can over a strip of aluminum foil that she had rolled out onto the floor, making intricately layered swirls and squiggles along the foil.  When the sugar crystallized, she would have an edible action painting.
    While I watched, something came over her, something that I might, at the time, have called sudden inspiration—or a fit.
    (Now, I think I would call it the untrammeled expression of her true self and her aspirations for that self, a girl who lived within my mother and still expected that someday she would actually become the woman she hoped she would become.)
    She began swinging the can beyond the limits of the foil so that the swirls of syrup looped onto the floor. This seemed like an inspired idea to me.  The completed candy, when trimmed around the edge of the foil, would seem to have no edge but the edge that had been imposed on it by the knife, would seem to have been cut from a candy composition without limits.  I liked the artifice of it, and I admired her style.  Her swings grew wider and wider, though, and began to go far beyond the foil.  As she swung the can in wider arcs, she began to swing herself, to dance with the can, swinging and swaying with it.
    I was smiling.  I realized that my mother was doing something a little mad, and, judging from the spun sugar around the room, had been doing something mad for a while, but I thought it was, as my friends and I, my group, my little local tribe, said at that time, “inflated.”  In fact, if I had had to define what we meant by “inflated,” I could have done worse than to describe a suburban housewife flinging sugar syrup around her kitchen, turning it into a sugar egg with a little window in the door through which an interested observer could have witnessed the curious diorama of a suburban housewife flinging strands of sugar around her kitchen while her teenage son, bemused but proud, looked on and thought her inflated, blown up like a madman’s dog.  It was, for us, a term of praise.
    She whirled herself around, and the can swung in my direction.  I said, a little tentatively, in awe of her advanced degree of inflation, “Hi, Mom.”
    She stopped swinging the can, and the syrup ran in a dozen streams straight down onto the floor.  She noticed me for the first time since I’d cracked my way into the kitchen. I was amazed—and a little hurt—to think that she could have been unaware of me for so long, that she had been too wrapped up in what she was doing to pay attention to me.
    The expression “wrapped up in something” was common at the time, a time when I and many of the people I knew, perhaps most of the people I knew, still expected that we would be able to shape the future to our liking, long before we had begun to think of ourselves as sailing sinking ships, a time when we were often lost in dreams of our individual futures (mine, for example, were full of complaisant girls who competed for my company, and my father’s were, I think, awash in beer).  Recalling my mother now, involved in her sugar work to the exclusion of everything else, I really understand what we meant by being “wrapped up in something.”  I had seen it in her expression.  It was the expression of a person who has slipped out of context and into something more comfortable: full attention to a single idea.  The eyes of such a person seem unfocused, because it is the mind’s eye that’s doing the seeing.  My mother’s occupation had become her insulation, like a coat that she might have wrapped around her on a winter’s day and pulled tight at the neck to warm the self that was wrapped within, to protect it from the inhospitable conditions that lay without, to protect her ambitious inner self from the icy reception that she received outside her wrap.
    “Oh!  Peter!” she said.  “I didn’t notice you there.  I guess I got all wrapped up in what I was doing.  I just—”  She looked around the room, beaming.  “I’ve been so busy here,” she said, “making candy.  Not ribbon candy—that didn’t turn out too well.  Lace candy—Lacy Licks, that’s what I’m going to call it.  Ella’s Lacy Licks.  See it all?” 
    She swung the can to indicate everything that she had accomplished, and the syrup followed, but when she turned toward me again, her expression had changed.  The smile was gone.  She stopped turning and stood there looking at me for a moment, as if she thought that I might want to say something to her, and when it became clear that I had nothing to say, she said, “I’ve made a mess,” and let the can slip from her hand.

MY FATHER WOULD BE HOME in two or three hours.  I think that I felt the pressure of that deadline more than my mother did, because she knew that his attitude toward her would be little changed by the fact that his kitchen was inside a sugar egg.  Both my mother and I had made messes before, but mine still made my father angry, while he had stopped being angry about my mother’s messes long ago.  He had a much more effective way of showing his annoyance with her now: disdain.  I could predict what he would do when he came home.   He would give the kitchen the once-over, deliver his opinion with a dismissive snort, refrain from saying “I told you so,” crack the sugar lace around the refrigerator door, open it, get a can of beer, and retire to the living room to watch television.  My mother would drop another notch in her own estimation.
    Disdain, contempt, dismissal—they all hurt much more than a display of anger.  I’m excluding violence from this calculation.  I never saw my father strike my mother, and I honestly think he never did, but he battered her by belittling her, and I had reached an age when I knew how she felt because I felt battered when he belittled me.  I was also at an age when I wanted to fight back.  I was growing, and all my juices were flowing, and I had developed a competitive tongue.  I’d begun to give back as good as I got, and I had begun to turn back on him the same abusive trio he turned on my mother and me: disdain, contempt, dismissal.
    “We’ve got to get this cleaned up,” I said to her, almost in a whisper, as if he might be somewhere nearby, listening.
    “I’ll do it,” she said, dispirited.  She looked around the room, and I could see what she felt from the way her shoulders drooped, and I winced at the thought of the load of contempt my father would be bringing home in a couple of hours.
    “We’ll both do it,” I said, and then, as if we were in a movie, one of the Western movies I watched at the Babbington Theater, in a one-room cabin on the plains, where a pioneer woman was going into labor, I added, “We’re going to need lots of hot water!”
    We fell into a frenzy of cleaning.  We worked without pausing, and we worked without talking.  Now and then we exchanged a glance.  I think each of us was checking to see whether the other was tiring.  Each time our glances met, we grinned and winked.  We had become conspirators, and we were enjoying ourselves.
    The closer six o’clock drew, the likelier it became that my father would pull into the driveway, and the thought that he would surprise us still at our work was beginning to send us into a panic.  My mother stopped working for a moment, stood up, and said to me, tentatively, “I’ve got an idea.”
    “Great,” I said.  “We need an idea.  What is it?”
    She told me, and it struck me as such a good idea that we put it into effect immediately.  We carried my father’s favorite chair out onto the front lawn.  We carried the table that stood beside it out there, too, and placed it beside the chair.  We carried the television set out and put it in place in front of the chair.  I ran the long extension cord that he used for his electric drill through a cellar window and plugged the set into it.  We carried a few more pieces of furniture out, and two small rugs, and by the time he came driving up, the effect was quite convincing.  I know that it was, because when my father got out of the car and walked across the lawn, he said, “Spring cleaning?”
    “Right!” said my mother.  “Peter’s helping me, but we didn’t get started until he got home from school, so we’re not quite finished.  You don’t mind sitting out here, do you?  It’s a nice night.”
    I came out the front door with six cans of beer in a bucket full of ice and set the bucket on the lawn beside my father’s chair.  I handed him an opener.  He sat in the chair and opened a can.  I turned the television on.
    “We won’t be much longer,” said my mother, and she and I went back inside to finish our work.
    At the door, I paused for a moment and stole a look at him.  He was sitting there in his chair in precisely the attitude he assumed every night when the chair was in its accustomed place in our living room, watching television as he always did, but his chair was not in its accustomed place, and neither was he, and that alteration of the ordinary arrangement of things had a wonderful consequence: he looked ridiculous.
    Just then, Mr. Morton came by, walking his chickens as he did every evening.  Raising chickens in the back yard was at that time and in that part of Babbington a popular hobby among adult males, and Mr. Morton had a flock of champion birds.  When he reached the end of our front walk, he stood there and worked his jaw without speaking.  My father squirmed in his chair.  I like to think that he was experiencing the unsettling feeling that he looked ridiculous in the eyes of the chicken champion of Babbington Heights.
    Finally, Mr. Morton spoke.  “Sitting out on the lawn, Bert?” he asked.
    My father snapped his head in Mr. Morton’s direction and said, “Spring cleaning.”
    “Uh-huh,” said Mr. Morton.  He looked up at me for a moment.  I shrugged and rotated my forefinger beside my head.  Mr. Morton nodded, gave a shake to the leashes on his chickens, and he and his little flock went on their way.