The Bickersons Play Cariboo

Posted September 07, 2007

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I love early summer. It's like the big, green TGIF of the entire year. The children, newly sprung from school, sleep late, lounge around in their pajamas, are entertained simply with Play-Doh, Chinese checkers, watering the mint in our barrel. Later they will bicker and wilt in summer's scorching expanse; it will become the desert they're dragging themselves through to get back to school, even as school casts its giant, ruinous shadow over their freedom. I remember that feeling. But this moment is golden. I turn in the car to tell them something, and their faces are so glossy, Ben's dotted with freckles as if an angel has scattered glitter across the bridge of his nose. "What?" Ben asks, looking at me, and when I smile and shrug, he says, in a perfect imitation of me, "I could eat you up." It's true. They're like human sugar cookies.

Bickering human sugar cookies. Because I was wrong about the timing. Now is when they'll bicker and wilt, it turns out. Today. It starts simply. "I wish you were famous," Ben says. "Because then we'd be rich!" This is the kind of thing that totally deflates me. We are forever yammering on and on about the planet, the people living on it, and then Ben's like a compass of bad values, returning magnetically to the True North of wealth and fame. Not that I haven't put a hand up to my eyes and squinted in that direction myself, mind you -- but still. "What would you want that we don't already have?" I ask him, and he's smart enough to understand that this question is a minefield: judgment of his character might await, ticking quietly in the car with us. "I want to say candy," he says, cautious, "But that's kind of silly, since we already have some. And it's not like you'd really let me eat a lot more of it. I guess I don't know."

But Birdy interrupts by bursting suddenly into tears. "I don't want her to be famous," she says. "Benny, no!" "Birdy, what?" Ben says, and she cries, "Being famous means you have to stay still forever!"

"Forever!" she cries again.

Hm.

I'm racking my brain here, because usually it's possible to recreate the trajectory of these misunderstandings. "Oh -- it sounded like famous but really I said coma!" No. Have we been to any wax museums lately? No. Spotted any dead movie stars? Nope again. Perhaps she's trying to get at a more philosophical point about fame and stagnation.

"Birdy, that's totally not what it means," Ben is saying, and Birdy, who is balanced uncertainly between real crying and fake crying, cries, "It is!" Ben sighs. "Birdy, it's not. It just means that everybody knows you." And Birdy cries, not unreasonably, "I don't want everyone to know Mama! And besides it does mean you have to stay still forever."

This continues inside the house. Birdy wants to sit and read Ben The Sleep Book, and he doesn't want her to. I hear him say, not unkindly, "Fine, Birdy, you can read it out loud, but I'm not going to sit and listen." I'm in the kitchen, and he must say something quietly after this, but I hear only Birdy's offended response: "Benny, I am really reading! It's a kind of reading." I'm making a brown rice salad, chopping an entire, gorgeous bunch of farm-fresh scallions, which I'm sautéing in a pan, and their conversation filters in to me in unpleasant snippets. Not unlike a car alarm from a distance. Or the audio version of water torture. I try to think of the right metaphor and come up with "grating," before I remember that this is the actual word.

Over the course of 10 minutes, I hear: "Birdy, stop! I told you I didn't want you to pretend I was a baby!" "Ben, that hurt my feelings!" "I don't like to play Cariboo as a winning game!" "Well the thing is, you were pushing me!" And then Birdy, in a stammering crescendo of indignation: "Well, the thing is ... Well, the thing is ... No! The thing is ..." And then there's the kind of wailing that means you have to turn off the burner, wipe your weary Mama hands on a dishtowel, and investigate.

I once had a bad boyfriend who announced, after I'd been trying to express my profound rage and disappointment to him, "The vein on the side of your face looks like a fern." And I'm just like that too, it turns out, because here are these weeping willows of conflict and misery, and all I can do is force them to sit together on my lap while I wrap my big arms around their little shorts and T-shirts. I don't have it in me to negotiate or mediate or problem-solve. And it doesn't help them at all, but when I say, "How do I ever make it through the winter without getting to see all these delicious arms and legs?" I mean it.

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The Bickersons Play Cariboo

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

The Bickersons Play Cariboo

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