Alexander and the Wonderful Marvelous Excellent Terrific Ninety Days Read online

  My beautiful flowered dinner dishes must be washed by hand although they are guaranteed to be “dishwasher safe.” “Dishwasher safe” may be good enough for the other adults in this household but it simply isn’t good enough for me, for even the safest dishwasher dishes will sometimes chip and crack, and I hate chips and cracks. To those who would suggest that I’m neurotic about my beautiful flowered dishes, I hereby concede that—yes, okay—I’m neurotic. Now let’s just wash the goddamn dishes by hand.

  There is ice cream, diet and regular, on the top shelf of my freezer. The second and third shelves hold chicken parts and meats. The fourth shelf is for hors d’oeuvres and packs of smoked salmon and frozen soups and frozen vegetables. The fifth shelf holds bread, plus cake and other sweets. This is the way I like it. This is the way I want it. Does anybody have a problem with that?

  Since this subject has often come up, I would like to make myself perfectly clear about how to deal with my lack of certain skills: Last year, when I bought my cell phone, Alexander tried to instruct me in making and answering calls (which I finally mastered) and retrieving my telephone messages (which I could not). He solved the problem, to my satisfaction and his enormous disgust, by recording the following inhospitable words: “Judith Viorst does not receive any messages. Keep on trying until she answers the phone.” I’m mentioning this because, with my children living right here in my house, my absence of electronic and other such skills might (a) become more obvious and irritating to them and (b) tempt them to teach me things I do not wish to know: Like how to take a photograph with my cell phone. Or how to listen to music on my computer. Or what to do with a TiVo or an iPod.

  I need it to be understood that, unless I’m asking how to do it, I don’t want to do it.

  Since this subject has also often come up, I would like to make myself clear about how to deal with what’s viewed as my overprotectiveness. For when it comes to matters having to do with the physical safety of my grandchildren, there is—in my view—no such thing as overprotectiveness.

  For instance, before they all moved in, I carefully checked out the house for sources of possible injury or worse and, after a careful survey of upstairs and downstairs, inside and out, I found that the possibilities were endless: Choking on the cashew nuts sitting in a bowl on our living-room coffee table. Impaling themselves on one of the exceedingly sharp corners of that coffee table. Gouging out an eye with a fireplace poker. Electrocuting themselves by sticking their finger into the toaster to pull out the toast. Crushing a toe or a foot by knocking over the marble sculpture on our hutch table. Poisoning themselves by dragging my blue chair from my bedroom into the bathroom and climbing on that chair to reach the medicine chest and figuring out—because they’re exceptionally brilliant—how to pry the safety cap off of one of our fatal bottles of pills. There is also the possibility of running out the front door and into our street, which looks like a country lane but in fact is not, for maniacal driving-way-too-fast drivers, taking a wrong turn, can threaten the very lives of little children. There is, in addition, falling—falling out of, falling off of, and falling down from, about which I am especially obsessed. Let me explain:

  When my sons were little boys they shared a hamster who lived in a cage on the third floor. One night the hamster escaped from his cage, slipped between the railings of our stairway, and plunged straight down to the hall of our first floor. Miraculously he survived and managed to live for a few more years but I always believed that he suffered from serious brain damage, though people keep pointing out to me that it’s really hard to tell if a hamster has brain damage. In any case, this accident has left me with the fear that a child will fall from the third to the first floor, though people keep pointing out to me that the three-inch space between railings is enough for a hamster but not for a child to squeeze through. I fault these people for lacking an appropriate degree of overprotectiveness.

  And so, while my grandchildren live here, they will live in a childproofed house, in which I intend to be shamelessly overprotective. Issuing frequent warnings. Assuming that if they can, they will do themselves harm. Treating the sounds of silence not as children playing quietly together but as children engaged in something that is likely to lead to a trip to the ER. I don’t care that this hypervigilance will seriously curtail my summer reading. I don’t care that it will also curtail my sleep. All that I am asking from the other adults in this house is for no one to say, “Don’t worry so much. Relax.”

  I honestly don’t think that is too much to ask.

  I’m aware that I am sounding a lot less relaxed and a lot less flexible than I aspire to be by the end of the summer. But let’s see what happens as the weeks progress. Milton and I have vowed to protect our sweet connection with Alexander’s family, in spite of the noise, lack of privacy, and mess. Indeed, I’m expecting us all to transcend the conflicts bound to arise in the course of our intense and intimate living together. I’m also still expecting, if I can calm down about the velvet, to even achieve a little personal growth.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Feeding Frenzy

  On weekdays Marla and Alexander arise at the dawn’s early light, either rousing or being roused by their children, and instantly swing into their dress-them, feed-them, let’s-get-out-of-here-fast morning mode. When I emerge from my bedroom at 7:15 or 7:30 (Milton will follow fifteen or so minutes later), Olivia, fully dressed and sitting crossed-legged on the floor outside my door, announces in reverential tones more suitable to “Elvis is leaving the building” that “JuJu”—that’s my grandmother name—“is up.”

  Down in the kitchen I open my arms to a soft warm bundle of Toby, who guzzles his bottle of formula solemnly, tightly gripping my pinky and gazing deeply into my eyes as if I alone hold the secret of his happiness. Isaac, puffing his cheeks out and then punching them with his fists to make a satisfying pop-pop-pop-pop sound, is greeting me with the trick I recently taught him. And although I wish he would think of me as his storybook-reading rather than cheek-punching JuJu, I am feeling warmly welcomed by my temporarily irresistible grandchildren.

  The operative word, of course, is “temporarily.”

  Marla and Alexander, on their feet and on the move, are swilling down bites of bagel and cups of coffee while also matching small shoes to small feet, ponytailing a tangle of long yellow hair, preparing Olivia’s lunch and Isaac’s snack and a couple of Toby’s backup bottles, stuffing the food and some changes of clothes and various other necessities into backpacks, and persuading two, sometimes three, of the kids simultaneously that they still love the breakfast they loved ten seconds ago. But Isaac is dumping his Cheerios on the floor. And Toby is letting us know, via screams, that happiness can no longer be found in a bottle. And Olivia is defending her right to eat a bowl of berries that consists of three measly berries and eight spoons of sugar.

  “Hey, girlfriend,” Alexander says to Olivia. “The idea is berries with sugar, not sugar with berries.”

  Olivia isn’t accepting these proportions. Nor is Isaac accepting a box of Frosted Flakes as an alternative to his rejected Cheerios. Nor is Toby accepting a pacifier as a replacement for his once-beloved, now apparently hated bottle. There is, at the moment, much crying in the kitchen.

  Marla and Alexander, scolding, cajoling, comforting, chastising, pleading, insisting, and sometimes threatening dire punishment, focus on getting their family ready to leave. Miraculously they are able to make this happen. And they’re on their way to work, driving downtown in two separate cars with the children strapped into three different versions of car seats, Marla and Olivia going off in one direction, Alexander and the two boys in another. Milton, who has made coffee—his special coffee—for himself and me, brings our breakfast and newspapers out on the porch. And unless a grandchild is ill and we have volunteered to be the default nannies, the day—give or take a few toys and games and Cheerios and crayons and some sandals and Junior Suffragist shirts to pick up—is all ours.

  Milton and I
are exhausted just from watching our son and daughter-in-law negotiate these high-octane early mornings, sometimes with colds or stomach flu and always on impossibly little sleep. The spillage, both liquid and solid, is often torrential. The din and the demands go on nonstop. But Marla has said of the parent-career-marriage juggling act they engage in that she feels that they are much luckier than most. “Alex and I share the child care fifty-fifty,” she explains. “And my bosses couldn’t be more understanding. Plus our children are healthy, our day care is great, and you and Milton are living right here in town. I know plenty of working moms who have none of these.”

  In addition, Marla’s parents—both of them younger, thinner, and stronger, not to mention more glamorous, than we are—can be called on from time to time to fly from their Michigan home to Washington, D.C., where they’ll free their daughter and son-in-law to go away for a weekend while they baby-sit.

  And yet, with all this support, Marla adds, “I still would have to say that we’re always living on the brink of chaos. Even with all of the pieces in place, even with everybody being helpful, things can sometimes start falling apart because families and children can be so unpredictable.”

  With a gift for contingency planning that puts FEMA and Homeland Security to shame, Alexander and Marla are unlikely ever to let things fall apart. Their just-in-case scenarios, their months-in-advance advance planning, their lists of people to call when the people they’re counting on to show up fail to show up, appear to cover every possibility. But by the time they’ve finished doing their best by their three children and their careers, there isn’t too much left over for personal pleasures. Having it all, says Marla, is not an option.

  “Someday I’ll play the piano again and work out every day, plant a vegetable garden, do regular volunteer work, spend more time with my husband, and entertain like Martha Stewart instead of serving salsa, chips, and beer. But right now?” she unapologetically tells me. “Right now there’s no Martha Stewart in my life.”

  Nor, right now, is there much Martha Stewart in mine.

  Indeed, when our friends come by for a drink before we go out to a restaurant together, we drink—if it’s not too blazing hot—on our porch. For although the Alexander Five have colonized that porch with a jogger, a buggy, a couple of strollers, some balls, a helmet and bike, and four extremely large and ugly bright green plastic boxes from Peapod’s home-delivered groceries service, it still looks better out there than it does inside. Inside isn’t looking too good not only because of the kids’ stuff scattered all over the floors and not only because the tops of our front-hall radiator covers now display two different sizes of diapers (some unused, some used) and two different strengths of sunscreen (for infants, for children) and pacifiers in two distinctive styles. It also isn’t looking too good because all our household grace notes—the vases of flowers, the painted Russian boxes, the coffee-table art books, the charming knickknacks, the glass bowls filled with candy or potpourri—have been removed, to save them from being damaged or lost forever, from every (at least I hope every) child-reachable surface. And since child-reachable surfaces include what Isaac is able to reach when he enterprisingly pushes a chair to the object of his affections and then climbs up on it, our first floor is a sorry and most un-Martha combination of stark, strewn, and stinky.

  Our dining habits have also taken a dive since the arrival of the Alexander Five.

  For when there were just the two of us, Milton and I habitually sat down to a quiet dinner at 6:45, the perfect compromise between his wish to have dinner at 8 and my preference for dinner at 5:30. Though we constantly watch our weight, and though we often eat our dinner in the kitchen, we still like dining graciously and well, which involved—in the good old days—the use of cloth napkins and our beautiful flowered plates, and a glass or maybe two of a quite decent wine, and a main course that might be a veal piccata, a poppy-seed-crusted tuna, or chicken breasts in a mustard-ginger sauce.

  Often, while we were eating, there would be mellow music playing in the background—the Modern Jazz Quartet or Simon and Garfunkel. We’d discuss everything from the state of the world to the veal. Dinner was, in our postchildren years, a highly civilized meal. And someday it will be that way again.

  Someday, when there are just two instead of seven of us, it will be that way again.

  At the moment, however, we’re still in search of the answers to several questions. Like: When and where will who be eating what? And, can’t the children use napkins instead of sleeves? And, shouldn’t someone sometimes try a vegetable? And, couldn’t Olivia learn, when she sees a grown-up eating something that she believes to be utterly revolting, to stop saying “yuck” and making vomit noises? Actually, I’ve invented a little rhyme to recite to Olivia whenever she begins her “yuck” routine. It goes:

  Don’t be rude

  About other people’s food.

  And since she now recites the poem (after she does the “yuck” and the vomiting noises), I think that we’re beginning to make some progress.

  We hope to make some progress on other fronts. For instance, Milton and I and Alexander and Marla agree that we won’t aspire to togetherness at mealtimes. We agree that Milton and I will plan to eat at more or less our usual time and the rest of the gang will do dinner catch-as-catch-can. Here, on a typical Wednesday, is how this plays out:

  I’ve set the kitchen table for two, with four other help-yourself settings stacked on the counter, and I’m making food enough for us all to eat—Milton and I in ten minutes, the others whenever. Marla has arrived, having picked up Olivia on her way home from her office. Alexander has arrived, having picked up Isaac and Toby on his way home. Marla is heating a baby bottle, and Milton is cooking the older children pasta, and Alexander is trying to comfort a famished and wailing Toby, and Isaac is playing peek-a-boo under the table, and Olivia is drawing on her special Olivia pad on top of the table, and I’ve just spilled gravy on the kitchen floor, and Olivia now has slipped on the gravied floor, and we’re mopping her off and serving her her pasta, and Isaac is saying “no, no, no” to his pasta, and our background music is Isaac’s “no”s and Toby’s diminishing sobs and Olivia merrily singing to the somewhat frazzled adults, “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands.”

  Wine helps. Filling Toby’s belly with formula helps. Using the plain, unflowered dishes helps, because then I’m not compelled to say, “You’ve got to stop banging that flowered dish with your sippy cup.” Accepting less than elegant manners helps. Getting accustomed to kids bobbing up and down from the table between bites of pasta helps. And so does the absence of jazz and “hello, darkness, my old friend,” for we can’t handle any more music while Olivia is singing her never-ending verses of “If you’re happy…”

  Milton and I are no longer clapping our hands.

  Throughout this meal, let me note, Alexander and Marla are responsibly telling their children to remember their pleases and thank yous, and use their napkins and try not to slurp, and that pasta is for eating not for wearing. They also are scolding Olivia for giving Isaac a poke when he tries to steal her zigzag straw from her glass. They also are offering Isaac some alluring replacements for that zigzag straw but his position, unarticulated but totally, screamingly clear is, “Accept no substitutes.” They also are holding, walking, bouncing, feeding, talking to Toby, who, although normally cheerful, is now inconsolable. And they also are, at dessert time, sternly limiting their children’s supply of sweets, though Olivia—whose middle name surely should have been Let’s Make a Deal—is a tough negotiator.

  “One mini Dove Bar for you, little O,” says her mother.

  “Four,” Olivia brazenly replies.

  “Four—are you crazy? One,” her mother tells her.

  “JuJu always lets me have three,” she lies.

  “Never,” I say indignantly, though I sometimes let her have three, but not when her mother or father is anyplace near.

  Olivia silently raises her hand, smiles
her killer smile, and waggles two slender fingers in the air, soon after which she is eating TWO mini Dove Bars.

  And Isaac, outraged, starts yelling, “Mine! Mine! Mine!”

  Soon after which he is eating two mini Dove Bars.

  I’ve always said that, when raising kids, you must establish and stand by certain principles. I never said you should stand by them all the time. And so, as far as I’m concerned, let them each have three mini Dove Bars, so long as they stay in the kitchen, where nothing is velvet.

  I feel a need to explain my concerns about velvet.

  During the years that Milton and I were raising three boisterous boys, we decorated our house appropriately, choosing fabrics and furniture better known for their endurance than for their charm. We wanted our sons and their friends to feel welcome and comfortable in our home, which meant that fragile furnishings would not do, and which especially meant that the sofas and chairs I was longing to upholster in elegant velvets would be covered in sturdier fabrics, like corduroy.

  I really loved velvet. I didn’t much love corduroy.

  But I bided my time and eventually my children grew up and got places of their own, freeing me for a less defensive décor. And over the next several years the stain-resistant corduroys gave way to rooms full of velvet, delicate velvets, glorious velvets, more velvet (some have suggested) than anyone needs. I had bided my time and my sons were grown and now it was safe to have sofas and chairs of velvet. Except I had failed to factor in the grandchildren.

  Who, by the time I had fully finished velveting the house, began to arrive.

  Now I don’t think I have to say that I love my grandchildren more, far more, than I love velvet. But why must I choose?