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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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Heat Wave

Posted June 24, 2008
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You are always forgetting to tell the children things they need to know. Like when you introduce Ben to an old friend who says, "Ben, it's so nice to meet you!" And Ben says, "Oh." Later, when you tell him that "It's nice to meet you too" is a conventional polite response, Ben says, "Oh!" He had no idea. So you're wondering if it's possible that you've neglected to tell Birdy that, during a heat wave, when your entire home is like a public sauna housed in the armpit of a sweltering giant - well, lying on top of you is not the quickest route to coolsville. But if she can't scorch you completely, then, at the very least, she would like to throw one sticky leg and one sticky arm over your unhappy back. "Birdy," you finally groan, "when we're pressed up against each other, it makes both of us even hotter." And she says, "Oh!" and retracts her muggy limbs. She had no idea. Then, on second thought, she drapes them back over. She's the kind of person who prefers humid stifling to the unbearable loneliness of a square iota of personal space. You secretly are too.

But the heat. Please. One thing you might not be able to predict, if you move in December, is that, come June, your kitchen floor is going to sweat like a tile pig. Does ceramic have sweat glands? Apparently yes. Or maybe just cracked ceramic does. We ask our friends about it - they've built and remodeled various houses and know a great deal about such things - and they say cheerfully, "Oh, our house in Ireland had sweating tile floors!" "Which house?" we ask, and they say cheerfully, "The one we ended up tearing down." Oh.

Another thing you might not know is that, come shorts season, you are going to scare the bejesus out of everybody by emerging, palely, as the ghost of cellulite past. "Oooooooooooh!" you can moan, while your eerie white thighs jiggle hauntingly. "I've come for your Häagen Dazs!" People might laugh - or they might look away, uncomfortably.

Everything is wilting. Every piece of paper you pick up flops over limply in your hands like a damp dishtowel. You catch Birdy out in the yard, nibbling the stale crackers you put out for the birds that are now sitting in the grass as soggy as miniature sponges; she's so sneaky and, apparently, starving - it's like she's auditioning privately for a remake of Oliver. Your own hair looks like it was brushed in the night by vandals wielding a piece of Velcro - every strand puffing out into a humid, wiry nest. The children don't understand why sitting, naked, on the wool rug makes them feel hot and itchy. You don't understand why it's so boiling at Ben's chorus concert. Somehow you had pictured the inside of the church like a hushed, cool sanctuary from the heat, but instead it's a kind of lack-of-air-conditionerliness-is next-to-godliness scenario. Birdy forgets again that sitting in your lap isn't really going to cool anybody off, and her scalp exhales a hot-hair smell that is both animal and divine; you press your nose to it in spite of yourself.

Meanwhile, the poor singers have gone all droopy and humid. Some children still manage to lift their voices to the heavens, although your Ben is among those who seem able to lift their voices only about as high as the ceiling of the shtetl. Michael is whispering in your ear because at every concert he awards his own secret Frankenstein Prize for a certain wooden listlessness, a certain way that the arms hang down like rubber hoses, a certain grim line bisecting the face right where you might expect to see, instead, a singing mouth. You never know which newly teenaged, slumpingly expressionless boy will be the prize's unknowing recipient, but you can be sure that it is awarded with utter fondness, and with a "there but for the grace of a couple of years" certainty that, one day, that will be your own special Frankenstein up there. You yourself are never so filled with tenderness as at the sight of gawky adolescence. Although eight years old turns out to be a close second. The singing children fill your chest with the kind of love that mimics something like a heart attack. "You guys were so awesome!" you cry after the concert, kissing your son's flushed, salty forehead, and he says, "I know!" and then, because it's not like you've forgotten to teach him anything, "Thank you."

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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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