My kids are loud. Very loud. Yes, I know that your kids are loud, too. But trust me, my kids are louder. How do I know? I just know.
When my little daughter snuggles up to me on the sofa at night to tell me she loves me, the sound of her voice almost ruptures my eardrum. Her twin brother has a yelp that makes my skin crawl. And as for their older brother, he’s so loud that, at 10 years old, he sounds like Rocky Balboa right after the big fight.
The ear, nose and throat specialist we finally took him to said he had one of the most advanced cases of vocal nodules he’d ever seen in a kid, and recommended speech therapy on the double. He went on to say that if my son didn’t get a grip on his own voice and learn to use it more gently, he’d have to undergo a surgical procedure that would basically sand the nodules off his vocal cords.
So now I go around threatening my kid with an operation if he doesn’t pipe down. As threats go, it’s not terribly effective. Threatening to take away his TV time works much better.
My brother-in-law calls us “the foghorn family.”
“SAM FINISHED OFF ALL THE TOASTED OATMEAL? NO FAIR.”
“TOO BAD, YOU IDIOT.”
“YOU’RE THE IDIOT.”
“I AM NOT AN IDIOT, YOU IDIOT.”
“MOM, SAM HIT JONNIE WITH THE CEREAL BOX!” (Sounds of screaming.)
I don’t know for sure why my children are so loud, but I think it has something to do with the fact that at any given time, one of them is shrieking to be heard above the other two. My husband and I, however, are not particularly loud; in fact, at least in the case of my husband, the opposite is true. He practically embodies the notion of the soft-spoken, laid-back, contemplative type — except, of course, when he’s really, really pissed. Then he, too, is capable of shaking the rafters.
Unlike my husband, my kids don’t seem capable of controlling their voices. Instead, they go from zero to 60 decibels faster than you can say, “Who broke the vase?” They’re deafening from the minute they open their sweet little eyes in the morning to the minute they at last, mercifully, close them at night. And it started almost immediately, as in, from the moment that Sam, my firstborn, emerged from the womb, all sticky and tiny and blinking his alien-like eyes. I mean, this was a baby who could scream. Satisfied? He was never satisfied. Content? Why be content when colic is so much more dramatic? By the age of 3, the kid sounded like Humphrey Bogart.
Oh, and did I mention that all my kids, but Sam in particular, tend to be slightly on the anxious side?
Here’s an illustration of how annoying it is to live with high-anxiety, high-decibel-level kids: Let’s say that I’m in the bathroom, with the door locked behind me, and Sam’s on the other side of the door, screaming at me, even though he knows that he is not allowed, under any circumstances, to trail me to the bathroom.
MOM, DID YOU REMEMBER TO SIGN THE PERMISSION FORM? YOU HAVE TO SIGN THE PERMISSION FORM, MOM. IF YOU DON’T SIGN IT, I WON’T BE ABLE TO GO AND I’LL GET AN F MINUS. AND HERE’S A PEN, MOM, HERE. WILL YOU SIGN THE PERMISSION FORM, MOM? I MEAN IT. I REALLY NEED YOU TO SIGN THIS PERMISSION FORM. OK, MOM?
Car trips are nightmares; Thanksgiving dinners painful; “quiet time” an exercise in theater of the absurd. About the only time my kids are, in fact, reasonably quiet (other than when they’re sleeping) is when we go to synagogue. Alas, Yom Kippur comes but once a year. Anyway, it’s no laughing matter, not really, which was why, after our little visit to the ENT, I finally got my act together and started looking around for a speech therapist for Sam, whose vocal nodules were thickening and coarsening by the minute.
Actually, it wasn’t hard to find a good speech therapist because my younger son, Jonathan, was already in speech therapy. He’d started speech therapy the year before because the only person who could understand him was his twin sister, and lately she, too, had been having trouble. The problem was that Jonathan’s speech therapist, Miss Lutavia, couldn’t fit Sam into her already jam-packed schedule.
Besides, she pointed out, the problems Sam had were global, having to do not only with his own strained vocal apparatus, but with the entire family dynamic. So she called a colleague of hers at the Louisiana State University speech and hearing clinic at the department of communication sciences and disorders and, to make a long story short, Sam was evaluated.
Shortly thereafter, my children embarked on group speech therapy. I am not making this up.
Before they could even begin, I had to fill out a four-page questionnaire about Sam’s physical and emotional development including his APGAR score (9.9), his length and weight at birth (20.5 inches and 6 pounds, 4 ounces) and his nursing habits (nonstop). Moreover, I had to answer questions like “Did your child experience ear infections, and, if so, approximately how many? (state year).” As if I could possibly remember. Does he now or did he ever play with matches? (No.) Torture small animals? (Just his brother and sister.) How does he get along with his peers? (Loudly.)
Honestly, sometimes I think there’s a vast conspiracy of health-care-related sub-specialists out there whose sole aim is to discover what my husband and I have done to fuck up our children. Group speech therapy is not the first time we’ve gone down the childhood-imperfection disorders road, no ma’am.
There was the little dance we did with a couple of developmental psychologists the year that Sam was in first grade and his teacher, among other people, noticed that his bottom never actually touched the chair. Sam’s now-ex-pediatrician told me that Sam had a hot-zinger case of attention deficit disorder and would be on Ritalin “for the rest of his life.” (To date, the kid’s never taken anything stronger than children’s Tylenol.)
Then there was the educational testing to which we subjected our daughter, when another bright bulb in the education racket informed us that she apparently processed information in a disjointed way typical of children with learning disorders. So off we shlepped to the neuropsychologist for a battery of tests, only to be told, among other things, that Rose “has difficulty attending to a task unless it is something she is interested in,” and showed no “evidence of hallucinations, delusions or disordered thinking.” Duh.
But group speech therapy at least addresses something real. And OK, so maybe the head honcho at the clinic did sit me down on the first day of group speech therapy and ask me, in a very gentle, non-threatening voice, if I thought that just maybe there might be something in Sam’s history or perhaps in our family’s past that just might account for what she called his “verbal intensity.” You mean in addition to the regular beatings his father gives him? Just kidding. “The cords on his neck stand out whenever he speaks,” she said, “indicating extreme tension and anxiety.” Gee, now you tell me.
The kid’s loud, OK? That’s why we’re in group speech therapy to begin with. Or, in the words of the report: “Therapy should focus on the reduction of high-intensity talking, yelling and screaming. Also, Sam should begin to develop self-monitoring skills with respect to vocal intensity, particularly while interacting with his siblings. Inclusion of his brother and sister in the therapy sessions will facilitate transfer of these self-monitoring skills to the home environment.”
This is how it works: The kids go into a room together with their speech therapist and ascribe numerical values — “1″ for whisper all the way through “5″ for screaming — to each other’s tone of voice. When they come out, they’re covered with stickers.
The real fun begins the rest of the time — the approximately way-too-many hours a week when they’re neither in group speech therapy nor at school, but at home, torturing each other. It is during these hours that I am supposed to track their vocal behaviors daily, rating them by frequency and logging them onto a little graph. Among the behaviors that I am supposed to track:
- Vocalizing under muscular tension
- Talking for an extended period of time
- Using the across-the-room voice
- Laughing hard
- Arguing with siblings
- Calling others from a distance
- Vocalizing toy, animal or other non-linguistic sounds
Oh yeah, and I’m also supposed to graph the underlying quality of each of my children’s three voices.
The problem with this little task, as I told the therapist, is that it might be kind of hard for me to track these and other behaviors when I am simultaneously helping my three kids get their three different homework assignments done, doing the laundry, trying to get dinner on the table, having a little telephone tiff with my husband and battling my own daily ontological meltdown. Not to mention that the whole thing is stupid. What kid doesn’t make farting or pig noises, at least on occasion?
“You really must try,” she said. So I came up with an alternate solution, involving the age-old method of threats combined with bribes. When my kids really turn up the volume, I threaten them with any number of punishments, including missing dessert for up to a week; but when they speak in reasonably quiet voices, they get a star on the star chart that I create weekly and tack on the fridge. If they get a total of five and a half stars a week, I take them to McDonald’s to pick up the high-fat, high-cholesterol, high-hormone kids meal of their choice, and on the way back home, I eat their french fries.
When I told the speech therapist about the alternative graph I had constructed, she didn’t seem impressed. But to date the kids and I have earned enough stars to collect enough little plastic figurines based on characters in movies we haven’t seen to open our own toy store.
Now, that’s what I call a happy ending.
I‘m trying to explain to the pretty, slightly tipsy, blue-eyed and blond-haired woman who has been telling me about her school days that, in fact, I myself am not a graduate of the St. Mary’s School. I’m telling her, somewhat awkwardly, that I have merely come to the reunion as my friend Sarah’s “date,” but the minute the word “date” is out of my mouth, I realize that I may have made a semantic boo-boo. Indeed, the woman (Class of ’52) blinks rapidly behind her glasses, and then says — in the broad, flattened vowels and up-and-down cadences of the Old South — “Well, aren’t you girls lucky to have each other then?”
“Yes we are,” I say.
We’re in the dining room of a lovely old house that typifies New Orleans’ Uptown neighborhood with its high ceilings, crown molding and gleaming, wide floorboards and canopy beds. Around me, the St. Mary’s girls coo and laugh, their musical voices hanging in the humid air. But this whole deal, frankly, is weird. Why, indeed, had I agreed to schlep all the way from the comfort of my husband and kids in Baton Rouge to New Orleans for this gathering of assorted former debs and sorority girls, none of whom, as far as I can tell, has ever met a Jew (which is what I am)? Not that you can tell a person’s religious or ethnic bona fides just by looking, but as I stand there grinning stupidly in an effort to blend in, I find myself hurling back to the fourth grade, when my best friend invited me to join her and her family for an afternoon of upper-crust fun at the then-restricted Chevy Chase Club just outside Washington. Her mother had to get some kind of special permission for me to tag along, so that by the time we were actually there, I felt so self-conscious that I got a stomach ache and had to go lie down, and when at last I felt better, I thought that everyone was looking at me, with my dark brown curly hair and dark brown eyes and “Mediterranean” skin, and thinking: “What’s the little kike doing here?”
This time around, to top things off, I’m ravenously hungry, but — as the sole Jew in South Louisiana who keeps kosher — I see there isn’t much here that I can eat. Fortunately, one of the husbands of one of the St. Mary’s girls has already seen to it that I’m well supplied with vodka, so I don’t notice it so much when I get that old, queasy, reject feeling in the pit of my stomach, which is making all kinds of loud noises. Plus I’m no longer a kid. I’m about three seconds shy of the age my mother was when she had her midlife crisis, so what do I care if the people gathered here think I’m Sarah’s Yankee Jewish lesbian lover? A girl, after all, could do far worse.
“Hello,” someone says from behind me. I turn to see another blue-eyed, once-blond former deb. She introduces herself, then says, “Class of ’49.”
The truth is, when Sarah asked me to accompany her to this gathering of New Orleans-based graduates of the St. Mary’s School (an Episcopalian girls school in Raleigh, N.C.), my first thought was: You have got to be kidding me. But what I said was, “Huh?” Sarah went on to explain that St. Mary’s is not only where she was educated for the two years after high school because in the ’60s the University of North Carolina didn’t admit women as freshman, but it was also where her own mother, in whose veins flow generations of blue Virginia blood, had gone. The school was founded in 1842 and for years educated the aristocratic daughters of the really truly Old South, like Jefferson Davis’ daughter. I still wasn’t convinced, however, that I wanted to go to a reunion of St. Mary’s blue-hairs.
But then Sarah pointed out — speaking in the Southern tones so deep that every time I hear her I can’t help but picture white-columned plantation houses serviced by an army of slaves — that the event would provide me with “deep background” for the novel I’m trying to write, the one that’s been ruining my life for the past several decades, but will all be worth it the minute it wins a National Book Award and I get to be interviewed on NPR. I’d told Sarah about my novel, which, like me, is set in Baton Rouge, but, unlike me, revolves around a family of white aristocratic Catholics who live in a big house filled with chintz and French furniture, and a poor black family whose housing accommodations are not nearly so luxe.
“The South is not like the North,” Sarah had said on the drive over.
No kidding, I think now, as I explain, for the third or fourth time in 15 minutes, that I myself am not a St. Mary’s girl — as if you can’t tell by looking at my frizzy brown hair and definitely non-Episcopalian nose — but that I’d come as my friend’s date.
“Well then,” this new lady — a very close approximation, in my
estimation, of
the last lady — says after I finish my explanation, “Aren’t you two girls lucky
to have each other?”
“Yes we are,” I say.
“Of course,” she continues, “in my day, St. Mary’s was a finishing
school. Mamma just insisted I go — after all, Grandmother was a St. Mary’s
girl — and in those days we did what we were told to do.” She winks, then says
to a bald man hovering near the bar, “Will you be a dear and get me another
one of these?”
“What’s finishing school?” I ask Sarah as we give ourselves an
unauthorized
tour of the high-ceilinged, Oriental-carpet-strewn rooms.
She rolls her eyes. “It’s where a girl goes to get finished, of
course.”
Back in the dining room, I’m once again engaged in conversation,
this time by
one of the husbands, a man who apparently has never heard of the term
“personal space,” and keeps leaning in on me in a way that makes me hyper-aware of my person. My legs — which in an effort to look respectable I’d
squeezed into my one pair of pantyhose — itch. Normally I don’t wear
pantyhose, which were invented by men. They leave red welts on your stomach
and make your crotch feel untidy, and if you, like me, don’t shave your legs
every day, or even every week, they rub against your leg-hairs in just such a
way as to cause a little tingle of unpleasant electric shock. And now, as I
inch slowly away from this joker who keeps leaning in on me, I can’t help but notice that, in
fact, I’m the only woman in the whole room who is wearing the damn things.
“Excuse me,” I say. “I’m going to go get a breath of air.”
Meanwhile, our hostess, wearing enormous, brightly colored plastic
Halloween earrings, is bustling back and forth between the kitchen and the
dining room, bringing out platter after platter of all the foods that I don’t
eat: sliced Virginia ham on biscuits; shrimp étoufée; crab dip; something else
with little shellfish in it; more crab dip; pigs-in-blankets. Fortunately,
by now I’m on my second drink so I don’t really notice how loudly my stomach
is rumbling.
Our hostess, however, does notice. “Won’t you have anything to
eat?” she says. And though I truly hadn’t meant to make an issue of it or draw attention
to myself in any way, I say, “I’m Jewish and I don’t eat that stuff.”
Whereupon I immediately experience one of my not-infrequent Woody Allen in
“Annie Hall” moments, and my armpits sprout sweat.
But of course nothing frightening or embarrassing happens because
I’m not in
a movie but at a party in New Orleans, which is, as everyone knows, the
loosiest-goosiest, most accepting, welcoming, rollicking and frolicking place
on the planet, and I know I’m only being paranoid and neurotic, which is, if I
do say so myself, my right as a Yankee Jewish struggling writer with three
small children and air-conditioning that frequently breaks down.
“Well Lord
have mercy, dear,” the hostess says. “Why didn’t you say so?” And the next
thing I know she’s taken me by the hand to the kitchen, where she grabs a
plate of fried chicken and says, “Is this OK?”
Finally, my stomach filled with chicken and my ethnic and religious
ID
established, even I, a poster child for Prozac, begin to relax a little. From
across the room I can hear Sarah telling someone about her two wonderful
college-age daughters, and then I, too, am talking about my kids: my 9-year-old, Sam, who runs like a gazelle; my 5-year-old twins, Rosie and
Scooter, who periodically switch personalities just to confuse me.
The subject of how the various St. Mary’s graduates had migrated to
Catholic
Louisiana from Protestant North Carolina is front-and-center for a while.
This subject then gives way to the “Are you related to?” game, which resembles
Jewish geography except that everyone’s last names are Coates and Worthington
and Higginson. Finally, there’s this general, well-oiled, room-wide
affirmation about how absolutely wonderfully darling it is that I had agreed
to be Sarah’s date for the night, because isn’t it just wonderful to have such
a sweet precious friend and aren’t we girls lucky to have each other in this
day and age? And the thing is, the St. Mary’s girls mean it.
And once again, I’m faced with the realization that people in the
South are
just so damn nice. Here’s what I mean: In the North (where I lived until my 36th year), people say, “How ya doin’?” but what they mean is: Where
did you go to college? What do you do for a living? How much money do you
make? Is your house bigger than mine, and if so, how much did you pay for it?
Do you have children? How old are they? Are they smart? Do they attend the
“right” private school?
Because there is this wretched competitive soul-deadening attitude that I could never escape when I lived in Washington
and points north, that is utterly and entirely absent from social discourse in
Louisiana. In Louisiana, people say, “How y’all doin’?” and they mean: I
hope you are having a really, really great life, and would you like a glass of
iced tea or if you’re down in the dumps, perhaps something a little stronger?
The South is different from the North.
The blue-eyed former debs and sorority girls are chatting all
around me,
their voices floating through the airy rooms of this lovely old house, and it
occurs to me, well, duh, that the social strictures that I felt as a child and
that my ancestors faced have simply melted away, and my stomach aches and
paranoia have become boring relics. The St. Mary’s alums are sweet and warm
and welcoming, and I feel like a sneak and a spy, appearing among them, as I
am, in order to soak up some “deep background” to help me flesh out my novel’s
family of rich Louisiana self-styled aristocrats. But as it turns out, it’s a
wash, because my rich Louisiana self-styled aristocrats are too fucked-up to
draw life from these sprightly gals with their jangling earrings and milky
blue eyes and life stories that I will never, never in a million years know.
I‘m an extremely anxious person, and always have been. It’s not that I suffer from the kind of paralyzing anxiety attacks that, I’m told, feel like a combination of a heart attack and the onset of schizophrenia. But I do live with constant low-level and sometimes not-so-low-level dread — a kind of second skin, worn on the inside. I’m anxious when I have too much work to do, and when I have too little. I’m anxious when my house is filled with the noisy chaos of family life, and when — save for the thud-thud-thud of my hyper-beating heart — it’s silent. I’m anxious when I’m upset, and anxious when I’m happy — especially when I’m happy because who the hell gave me the right to go along all sunny and chipper? My anxiety is non-situational. It just is.
It’s also situational. For example — and I know this isn’t original — I’m afraid of flying. After all, airplanes are held together by Elmer’s glue and piloted by guys with blow-dried hair. The combination has always disturbed me. Fortunately, I’ve been able to develop a technique for helping the pilot keep the airplane where it should be. It’s very simple, really: The night before my trip, I get a really bad stomach ache, and when I get on the plane the next day, I begin to sweat so profusely that people stare at me. Then I pray. My husband insists that it is not my pre- and during-flight ritual that keeps the plane aloft, but if I say so myself, the proof is in the pudding.
Other activities, such as having to call people I don’t know, push my anxiety meter into the red zone. I also dread bill paying. Worse than paying bills, there’s balancing the checkbook, a feat that I haven’t actually ever been able to accomplish. Even so, just knowing that it’s time to wrestle with my checkbook makes the backs of my knees tingle and my head feel slightly feverish. But the worst is dealing with large, impersonal government agencies, such as the Department of Motor Vehicles. I recently had to go to the DMV to get a new driver’s license. For weeks beforehand, I had nightmares about it. By the time I actually got to the head of the New Driver’s License line, I was a wreck. I was a wreck because I hate lines, and I was worried that I’d have all the wrong documents and end up getting sent home. Plus I’m afraid of government functionaries, who always seem to be angry at me. The clerk took my old driver’s license and looked at me suspiciously. She then asked me to take an eye test. “Please read the top line,” she said. I did so, perfectly too, I might add, only I kind of read it backwards, which is to say from right to left. Then I started jabbering on about how my oldest kid had just started Hebrew school and Hebrew is read from right to left and the clerk let me go on for a moment or two and then said: “Calm down, ma’am, and read the top line.”
My mother tells me that my anxiety is hampering my mothering ability, making my kids and husband nuts, and that it’s time, already, to let the anxiety go. “Don’t they have therapists where you live, Jennifer?” she says. After all, as she points out, the first three rounds of therapy got me pretty damn far. As long as I’d managed to rid myself of self-disgust, insomnia and destructive relationships, why not go the distance and chuck the anxiety, too? Mr. Will, the ageless Cajun Buddhist who, until he took off for Nepal a few weeks ago, was my next-door neighbor, had also been urging me to live life anxiety-free. He wanted me to meditate, and even offered to teach me how to do so. But as I told Mr. Will, I’m far too anxious to meditate, and — this is where I lost him — why the hell would I want to spend several hours of each day meditating when I could be working myself into some kind of frenzy instead?
But as tiresome as it is, my anxiety serves a purpose other than warding off plane crashes. For one thing, it motivates me to get out of bed. It also motivates me to get things done ahead of time, which was why, when I was in college, I never once had to cram for a final exam. (The irony, of course, is that 20 years after graduation I’m still having those really awful exam dreams, where you suddenly realize you haven’t studied all semester.) I also make lists. I make lists of lists — big lists and sub-lists and long-term lists and daily lists. I don’t like it when things are out of whack, so my household runs fairly smoothly, and my kids adhere to a fairly regular routine. I also vacuum a lot.
I guess it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise when my three children graduated from the diaper stage and emerged as full-fledged anxiety factories of their own. My eldest child is so anxious that at times he tenses up and turns red and paces back and forth like a cartoon character just before steam comes out of his ears. My twins are not laid back by nature either. They literally have started climbing the walls, or, more specifically, the door frame. There they are, clinging to the top of the frame like bats. They want to know why they should come down. It’s safer up in the door frame, they explain, where the raging waters of the Mississippi won’t get them when the inevitable flood finally comes. And by the way, who will take care of us if you and Daddy are both killed at the same time?
Come to think of it, all kids are anxious. Their worlds are governed by mysterious, unknowable and sometimes chaotic forces, and they lack the adult language to imaginatively organize it. Which is why they’re into ritual: magic words, magic signs, the closet door left exactly a half inch open (so the lions inside it will stay inside but not get so pissed off about being locked inside that they come storming out, as my older sister, a corporate lawyer, will explain). Because I am such an anxious person, I think I understand my kids’ anxieties and can at times anticipate their irrational fears better than, say, a more rational, less anxious person, such as my husband. When, for example, the younger of my two sons was troubled by a witch that appeared night after night in his dreams, my husband calmly explained to him that witches aren’t real and that his dreams
couldn’t hurt him anyway. Naturally, this approach didn’t help even a little tiny bit. I took a different approach and taught my son how to chant the Anti-Witch chant. Here’s how it goes: “Go away bad witch/Get AWAY from here/’cause you’re yucky and ucky/you’ll land in the mucky/and we don’t want you ANYMORE!”
It’s not that I enjoy being jazzed up and agitated all the time, but my anxiety is as much a part of me as my memory. It is, in fact, the glue that keeps all the parts of my personality together. Once I was a crazed, miserable, sullen and sulky girl. Every night, I begged God to protect me and my family, and then went on to implore Him not to inflict all kinds of punishments on me. I listed each possible calamity, asking Him, again, to please spare me from them. Please, God, don’t let the house burn down. Please, God, don’t let my father get shot by a madman on the elevator. And on and on I went every night, until I was about 13 — at which point I developed an obsession with Nazis. I saw them everywhere: hiding in the woods that surrounded our house, lurking in the back rows of the movie theater in the new shopping mall, standing in front of me during Algebra class. My high school years were not much better, except that I moved on from Nazis and became afraid of everything.
I’m no longer obsessed with Nazis and I no longer have to ritualistically beg God to spare me from suffering. I actually get on with the business of living quite well. I long ago grew tired of my own cramped misery. And through a series of small miracles, helped along by the kindest Freudian in New York, for whom I later named my first child, I managed to free myself of the worst of my demons. Now at times I can barely recognize myself. Who is this person? And what does she have in common with that miserable mess of a woman who once went by her name? The answer — even more than memory, more than my brown eyes and hair — is that constant, persistent, gnawing sense that something, somewhere, is not quite right. My stomach hurts, my palms sweat — therefore I am. And I look around and see — ah! — that everything’s OK after all.
Three weekends ago, as we braced for Hurricane Georges, my husband and I didn’t know what to expect. Since our move from Washington, D.C., to Baton Rouge, La., three years ago, the only hurricane we’d experienced was in a melodramatic play — a combination of bad Faulkner and bad Tennessee Williams, with a little Oprah thrown in. The actors stomped around onstage in wet clothing, uttering things like, “When the Lord in His Terrible Glory speaks you don’t got no choice but to listen, baby.” But now it was real life, and the storm was heading straight for the Big Easy, and after that, to us, here in the state capital. It looked like it was going to be a whopper.
My husband had been an Eagle scout, and he doesn’t like to be caught unprepared. During the one year that we lived in Los Angeles, we kept a row of jugs filled with water along the wall of our kitchen, in case we had an earthquake. By the time we moved out of our apartment, all our earthquake water had turned a sickly shade of green and smelled. But now it was 10 years later, and my husband, in something approaching a full-scale panic, called me from work on Thursday and asked me if we were stocked up on batteries, canned goods, water, paper supplies, Band-Aids, sterile gauze and flashlights.
“No,” I said.
“Oh my God,” he said.
“Band-Aids?” I said.
“What if a tree branch fell on one of the kids?” he said. “Or worse?”
That night, he went to the store. When he got back home — his grocery bags laden with Chicken of the Sea — he said, “I forgot bread.” In the morning, he went back to the store — this time for candles, fruit juice, canned soup and bread, only he couldn’t get bread because there was none left. Friday night, my aunt called from Maine to ask me to call her children in New Orleans and urge them to take refuge at our house, some 80 miles inland and on relatively high ground. I didn’t have to. They called me. We went to sleep wondering how long we’d have electricity.
At 6 o’clock on Saturday morning — a time that I prefer to be extremely unconscious — the phone rang. It was our friends Collette and Steve, calling from New Orleans. Collette and Steve have three children under the age of 3. “We’re kind of thinking about getting out of here before the storm hits,” they said. “Do you have room?”
“We’ll make room,” we said.
“We’ll call you back,” they said.
By now our own three children were up, and — it being our only day to sleep late — in bed with us. Our eldest son, age 9, had begun to worry about what we’d do if our water supply was cut off and we could no longer use our toilets. “I mean, do we go in the bushes or what?” he said. “And how can we go outside if there’s like a hurricane blowing around?” I was worried about the same thing. But the truth of the matter is — not that I wanted to give the Lord in His Terrible Glory the wrong idea — I was kind of looking forward to the hurricane. For one thing, we’d been in a drought all summer: Our local lakes had receded to reveal a skin of muck, pond scum and litter, my flowers had barely bloomed and our trees were so thirsty that they’d started drinking beer. Plus I’d never seen a hurricane before, and I wanted to see what it looked like.
At midmorning, Collette and Steve called again. Here’s what
they said: “We’ve decided to ride it out.”
“Are you sure?” we said.
“We have a raised house,” they said. “We’ll be all right. Just so long as
the roof doesn’t blow off.”
They gave me courage. I figured that if they weren’t scared of the storm in
New Orleans, there was nothing much to fear in Baton Rouge, except for a week-long loss of electricity and massive, widespread property damage, as had
happened in 1991 when Hurricane Andrew hit. Even so, we filled up all the
jugs we had around the house with water and cleared out our backyard: Our
patio furniture came into the dining room; the kids’ toys — their plastic
“climbing machine,” their trucks, their seesaw, their tools and bicycles and
scooters and Frisbees — went into the shed; the potted plants came into the
kitchen. “We don’t want to leave any potential missiles lying around,” my
husband said.
By Saturday night, as we waited for my cousins to arrive from New Orleans,
even I was beginning to get a tad anxious. Where, after all, were they?
They’d called around 4 to say that they were leaving, and already it was
9. It’s not supposed to take five hours to get from New Orleans to Baton
Rouge. It’s supposed to take one and a half if you’re me, or, if you’re a
college student who has not yet grasped the basics of mortality.
Outside the wind was picking up and the sky, through the trees, was taking on
a weird, pearly shimmer. At last, around 11, my cousins — their baby in
tow — showed up.
“The traffic was pretty bad,” they said.
On Sunday morning, we turned on the TV to learn that all of Baton
Rouge — from the schools to the government — would be shut down for two days.
After breakfast, we went out to fill up our tanks with gas — just in case we,
too, had to flee. But the four gas stations we went to were out of gas.
We drove back home on a quarter of a tank and went out for a walk. The air
was warm, wet, somehow unusually dense. The skies were streaked with a
greenish-yellowish light. All over the neighborhood, people were beginning to
tape up their windows. At one house, the windows were already covered with
plywood. When we got home, my husband asked me where we kept the masking
tape. We didn’t have any. He went back to the store, but the store didn’t
have any masking tape, either. It had already sold out. We watched the news.
We watched the sky. The storm was scheduled to hit before daybreak.
That night, we ordered in Indian and watched a video. By the time the movie
was over, it was well past our bedtimes. But it didn’t really matter: The
entire state was shut down. Up and down our street, our neighbors’ houses,
like ours, were filled with refugees from New Orleans. Their cars, like ours,
had been pulled up off the street, for the “higher ground” of our
driveways. It was almost midnight. I got in the shower and washed my hair.
After all, I figured, I hate having dirty hair, and the Lord in His Glory
alone knew when I’d next have the chance to shampoo and condition.
Finally — just before we turned in — my husband and I filled up our bathtubs.
We were, in other words, as prepared as we were going to be for this amazing,
enormous, 200-mile-wide melee that even now was beginning to pound the
wetlands east of us, sending surges of salty wetness into people’s homes, rearranging the arrangement of earth and sky, and proving, once again, that a
below-sea-level swamp is not an ideal place to build a city. But I didn’t
feel prepared. I felt — in this house full of people — alone. My husband and I
should have known better than to move to a place where they eat alligator. We
should have studied the map more closely, or at least consulted an expert in
the field of water dynamics, or a geologist, or a psychic, before we’d packed
up all our stuff and our three little children and moved to Baton Rouge.
Someone, in other words, should have told us that they have hurricanes down
here. I fell asleep thinking about which of our treasures I’d try to save, in
the advent of flooding: the portraits of my great-great-grandparents that I’d
inherited from my grandmother? The beautiful tribal rug that I’d bought on a
whim three years ago even though we couldn’t afford it? Our wedding album?
The children’s baby pictures?
On Monday morning, we woke to clear blue skies and learned that, though all
of Baton Rouge was still closed down, the storm had taken a right turn and
had slammed into the Mississippi and Alabama coasts, sparing all but the
eastern edges of Louisiana entirely. My husband gratefully went off to work.
My cousins went home. My kids began to whine about how bored they were.
Then, in mid-morning, our electricity snapped off. I don’t know why. There
wasn’t any hurricane; there wasn’t even any wind. Outside, the skies were a
brilliant deep blue spotted with a few high clouds. I figured maybe somebody
in our neighborhood had sneezed hard. Our house, without air conditioning, began
to heat up, because even though it was almost October, it was still, by any
civilized measure of weather, disgustingly hot and humid. I was stuck in an
un-air-conditioned house in a city where nothing was open with three bored kids
and more canned tuna than we could eat in a lifetime. I would have preferred
the hurricane.
“Fuck,” I said.
But I was rescued just before noon, when friends called and invited us to
join them on a picnic. We headed out to a rural park just below the
Mississippi levee, where a stiff breeze was blowing. We ate our sandwiches
and potato chips and then the children flew kites. They ran back and forth
across the field, their kites trailing behind them, under a dome of Southern
sky, on the banks of the Big Muddy. “Look Mommy! Look, look!” they cried.
The wind took the kites high into the clear blue skies.
BATON ROUGE, La. – On Monday night, we in Baton Rouge, along with the rest of the nation, were glued to our TV sets. But by Tuesday afternoon — splshtttt — it was as if the whole televised spectacle hadn’t even happened. I heard one lady in the supermarket compare the president’s speech with premature ejaculation: all sweaty buildup, then over in a moment, and in the most embarrassing way. But in general, it hasn’t been a big topic of conversation, at least in the circles I travel in, which, admittedly, are somewhat limited: the parents of my three kids’ friends, my neighbors, my professor husband’s colleagues at LSU, the other moms at my 9-year-old’s bus stop.
Today when I got to the bus stop, the usual gang of (mostly) moms were gathered around their Chevy Suburbans, BMWs and mini-vans, chatting about this and that, but not about the president and Monica Lewinsky. Which in some ways is weird, because folks in this part of the world generally love talking politics. The bus stop is on the periphery of the Garden District, a well-heeled, tree-lined, blue-blooded neighborhood that’s considered “old Baton Rouge” — and the kids are from well-to-do, well-educated and well-informed families. But no one was interested in talking about the president. I had to press.
Finally they started talking to me. One of the moms — who months earlier had told me the one about how the difference between the president and the Titanic is that only 325 women had gone down on the Titanic — had this to say about the president’s confession:
“What a scumbag. We all know he did it. My kids knew he did it. My dog knew he did it. Let’s move on. Impeach him? Are you kidding. Let’s look at the choices.”
Donna, who is a friend of mine, the daughter of a Baptist preacher and the anchor of the local news, was simply angry: “I’m appalled,” she said, “because he uses the media to manipulate me, and I don’t like to be manipulated, but let’s face it, he’s a politician, and skirt-chasing is what they do.”
Her husband, Mark, pointed out that the president might have done better had he taken his cue from former four-time Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards, who, when asked whether he cheated on his wife, simply admitted to it and got on with things. “A known hound dog,” Mark said, “and no one cares.”
But a couple of the other moms were not so forgiving: “An elephant is an elephant and you can’t disguise an elephant,” said one. “He’s simply no longer credible as president.” Another waffled and at last admitted that, given the choice, she wouldn’t vote for him again (a few minutes after I spoke with her, this same woman rushed up to me to make sure she wouldn’t be identified in any way whatsoever).
Nancy, who often stays in her car at the bus stop and who I therefore rarely hang with, shrugged, sighed, then said, “I knew he was lying from the first time he opened his mouth. I didn’t vote for him and I think he should be kicked out. It’s a terrible scandal and it makes our whole country look stupid.”
Baton Rouge is situated smack in the heart of the Bible Belt, and as far as most folks are concerned there’s only one religion, and it’s Christianity. Even the state law school, at LSU, hangs a wreath over its doors at Christmastime. The point being that if you take your Christianity seriously, you probably won’t be inclined to forgive the president his sins. I’m not from here, originally, and I often feel like I’m surrounded by a sea of right-wing nuts bent on destroying everything I hold dear: separation of church and state, the right of every child to get a decent, safe education and simple, gun-free safety. Speaking of guns, many of my neighbors hunt, a practice I personally find repulsive.
Speaking of neighbors who hunt, one of my neighbors — who also happens to be the father of my daughter Rose’s best friend, Emma — has had it up to here with the president’s shenanigans. He tells stories of Clinton’s butt-and-boob-grabbing practices from way back when he was still just the governor, and a young one at that, of Arkansas, which is just up the road and across the state line. He also believes, in a nutshell, that the president’s persistent lying simply disqualifies him from continuing in the Oval Office. “It’s not the sex per se, although the sexual practices are disgusting,” he said, “but the lying, the perjury, the hiding behind legalese falls under the category of high crimes and misdemeanors. The founding fathers put high crimes and misdemeanors in the constitution for a reason, and that reason, I believe, was to protect the moral character of the office. If a CEO or a professor at a university or a military officer did what Clinton did and then lied about it, he’d be gone. Why should the president have special privileges? It’s not a question of can he govern. It’s a question of should he govern.”
Deanne Clementson, who along with her husband, George, owns and operates Able Air Conditioning (George spends a lot of time at my house), is disgusted by the whole big mess: the months of gossip and innuendo, followed by what she called a “totally fake, excuse-filled speech, that admitted he was guilty then provided an explanation, like a child.” Deanne, a Baptist for whom the Word of God is a living, holy presence — and who readily admits that she’s not a Democrat — went on to say that “as a Christian, I’m begging God to save Clinton. He shouldn’t have done it in the first place, and his actions speak loudly. He’s hurt his wife and child badly. He doesn’t give an example of a loving, faithful husband. We have a bad enough problem in this country with our children, with parents who don’t teach them morals, don’t teach them right and wrong, and Clinton is our leader. It’s an embarrassment to the country.”
I guess most people could guess that Baton Rouge does not have the political or social makeup of, say, Manhattan’s Upper West Side. But it can surprise you, too. After all, we’re just down the road from the original Sin City — home to Mardi Gras and the Saints, Bourbon Street and JazzFest — and we’re teetering, too, on the edge of Cajun Country, which is filled with Cajuns — the people who coined the phrase Laissez les bon temps rouler. So it didn’t completely shock me when Wilbert Hall, a Jehovah’s Witness who occasionally helps me out in the garden and who has, on more than one occasion, lectured me about the teachings of Jesus, told me that, as a Christian, he’s disgusted with Clinton — both for the adultery and the lying — but as a citizen, he’s not all that disturbed. “He broke God’s law,” he said, “but as a leader, let him get on with things. After all, he ain’t the only one up there in Washington running around. What’s the difference between Clinton and Newt Gingrich? Newt Gingrich just hasn’t been caught yet.”
People in Baton Rouge know that people screw up, and they don’t have any illusions about the moral purity of our political leaders. After all, our oft-indicted former governor, Edwin Edwards, is still making news for his alleged pond-scum-sucking financial and personal shenanigans. Earl Long is best known for his liaison with a stripper. Huey Long died long before the age of TV, but at least in my neighborhood, people are still talking about all the rotten things he did. The current governor, Mike Foster, is Mr. Clean in comparison — so clean, in fact, that he wants to clean up the state’s drug problem by forcing all welfare recipients to submit to mandatory drug testing, and the hell with the right to privacy.
But I’m straying from the subject. The subject is Clinton’s philandering and confessing, but it’s a subject that most folks around these parts just can’t get too worked up about. Sex and lying? So what else is new?
