Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

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What Naked Crabs Can Teach Us

Posted August 27, 2006
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On a beach in Cape Cod, in a hole dug into the sand, the hermit crabs are shimmying out of their shells. The kids scream with delight, and it really is delightful. "I can't believe we're getting to see this," I keep saying, like a taped message of my own amazement, and Ben says, "I know!" every time.

We've been collecting hermit crabs in a bucket, which itself makes for an inexplicably good time. But then I've always been a collector at the beach: sea glass, shells, driftwood; In every summer photograph, I'm hunched over, scanning for some or other briny treasure (although my everyday posture is so terrible that these photographs do not actually look that different from the ones of me, say, sitting at the dinner table). Of course, there are the photographs from when the children were babies, in which I'm squinting grimly into the sun to make sure they're not drowning or starving or getting strangled by an octopus or choking on the sand or catching spontaneously on fire. Maybe that's why I'm having so much fun in the bay this year: I trust more that Ben and Birdy will not suddenly be -- How do I put this? -- dead. It helps that this is the first year you can zip Birdy into a life vest without her shrieking what sounds like a demented version of the Hallelujah chorus with "Hallelujah" swapped out for the words "Boo hoo hoo."

Anyways, when the tide is out, the water here is knee deep for miles, and the hermit crabs scuttle along the sandy bottom, darting from seaweed clump to seaweed clump like spies in an action movie. Part of the thrill of picking them up is the very real possibility that they will pinch you with their tiny claws; this makes the children scream a lot, although Birdy is fond of reassuring Ben: "Hermit crabs really like to be so, so gentle." She's always been fearless about them, while Ben starts out every new summer a little crab shy. Usually I'm patient about this, although sometimes I've been inexplicably exasperated by his skittishness: "Just pick it up," I have been known to sigh. "It can't exactly lop your finger off with a claw the size of dollhouse tweezers." In a lifetime of stupidly picked battles, this may be one of the stupider -- the holding of hermit crabs is hardly a significant arbiter of human courage -- but Ben is always glad when he overcomes his fear.

Now we've dug a deep, shallow hole in the sand, and it's filling with water. We dump in the dozens of crabs -- Ben always names this particular configuration of sand, sea, and crustacean "The Hermit Crab Hotel" -- and watch them, rapt, while they rest and mingle, wrestle and escape. But Ben notices that one of them is dragging around a real monstrosity of a shell. We look closely: at some point, the crab's regular, spiraly snail-type shell must have attached itself to a giant white clam half, which now pokes up into the air like a graceless sail. The crab staggers around so awkwardly -- "Did some jokester stick something to my back?" Michael says, in its voice, and then a little later, "The bells!" like Quasimodo -- that Ben is filled with pity. He splashes off into the bay, returns with an empty spiral, and places it near our afflicted friend. "Go ahead," he coaxes. "Try it on." "Oh honey," I say. "That's so sweet, but I don't think it works like that."

But I'm wrong. The little crab reaches a tentative claw into the shell's empty hole, pats the shell all over, then pops out of his beleaguering house -- He's just a tiny thing as naked as a boiled shrimp! -- and, with his two claws braced against the opening, lowers his bare heinie gingerly into the new shell. He reaches back now to pat himself all over, then cranes his tiny head around to look. "Does this shell make my butt look big?" Michael says, and I laugh, but it's such a dear thing we're watching -- this vulnerable little animal and the children so peachy and fascinated -- that there are tears in my eyes.

But not a minute later, another crab is checking out the abandoned shell, and even as we're shouting "Don't do it! That shell stinks!" he's plopping himself inside, feeling around. And suddenly it's the fitting room at a sample sale; there's an epidemic of shell swapping. "Um, no -- I'm not sure I'm done with that one," we imagine them saying. "Wait a sec, I may still be getting that one." The crabs pat and pat themselves, crane their heads around, try on one shell and another, return to their original shells, pop out again.

And what it kind of reminds me of is the week before, when I was trying on a tankini, newly arrived in the mail. In a life without children, these would be private moments, or so I dimly recall. But with children, it might as well be a parade. The kids milled around me; the kids touched me and rubbed the silky fabric of the swimsuit. "Ooh!" they said. "Aah!" I felt like I'd stepped off the bus in a different country. "Wow!" they said, and Ben said, vaguely, "It's so big in the back!" "What are these lumps?" Birdy wanted to know, and I said, "These? These tiny beads?" And she said sweetly, "No, these! These big lumps!" and patted my hips. I thought of the tabloid I'd just seen in the supermarket: a red circle drawn around Paula Abdul's cleavage, the incriminating headline: "Plastic Surgery Boob Disaster!" If the kids published a newspaper devoted to us, it would be filled with lovingly circled pictures, sincere headlines. "Mama's big gigantic lumps!" it would gush. "Daddy's breath smells like beans!" "Mama's neck mole as tiny and weird as a tiny little brain!" The crabs are still checking out their shells, and Ben and Birdy cheer them on, their enthusiasm as pure and bright as a shooting star.

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About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of the memoir, Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family, available online and in bookstores nationwide.

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