Salon.com > Lisa Zeidner

Love by the book

Wed, 14 Feb 2001 20:25:00 +0000

My parents were married on Valentine's Day. On that date, my mother believed, my father was unlikely to forget their anniversary. The downside is that their anniversary falls on a day on which it is very hard to surprise your sweetheart with a dozen dewy red roses. It's kind of like having your birthday on Christmas. So they quickly abandoned both their anniversary and Valentine's Day as occasions. Nevertheless, without any of the props of romance, they're rearing up on a 50th wedding anniversary.

Next to 50, my 20 years with my husband are not so impressive, especially since we've actually been married for only 12 of those years. During our unusually long courtship, we basically tried in every way imaginable to break up, including a 2,500-mile commute and some in-your-face Seeing of Other People. I would call our story anti-romantic. Our courtship was like a violent session of product testing, at the end of which we discovered that the relationship we thought was flimsy was, in fact, shockingly sturdy: not a knapsack, but Samsonite.

Bad real estate

Fri, 15 Dec 2000 20:00:00 +0000

The adage insists that there are really only two stories in the world: The hero leaves town, or a stranger comes to town. I would add, as a variation, that the hero gets stuck in a bad, bad place -- maybe even with a stranger. While movies may seem to have the monopoly on bad real estate ("Rosemary's Baby," "Poltergeist"), literature itself sports a long tradition of spaces you love to hate, even before Charles Dickens' "Bleak House." (Indeed, most of Dickens earns honorable mention on this grantedly idiosyncratic list.)

The Collected Tales and Poems Edgar Allan Poe
The father of all bad real estate. The crumbling, moldy, moss-sprouting walls in "The Fall of the House of Usher," the torture chamber in "The Pit and the Pendulum," the lavish but still-infected Prospero Palace in "The Masque of the Red Death" (a no-one-is-safe story I remember whenever I read about gated communities being burglarized): Poe is a catalog of real estate woes. You can't even trust the walls, which tend to close in to bury you alive.

Fresh fruit

Mon, 25 Sep 2000 08:30:00 +0000

We've now all endured the official Memoir Boom and the official Memoir Backlash. During the backlash, we bemoaned the glut of true confessionals on every possible setback and infirmity -- memoirs from the blind, the deaf and the lame, the obese and the anorexic, the celibate and the nymphomaniac. We mocked the self-aggrandizement and exhibitionism that the genre encourages, and wondered whether most of the authors' lives deserved such documentation. We observed that past memoirists had tended to serve as witnesses to cataclysmic events (Harriet Jacob's "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" or Primo Levi's "Survival at Auschwitz"), whereas our age seemed to have nothing more momentous to offer than coming-of-age ditties by suburban youth whose greatest achievement was having watched reruns of "My Favorite Martian" every day after school.

My mother wears army boots

Mon, 08 May 2000 16:00:00 +0000

You can have your lacy, soft, cookie-baking mother, your mom of hugs and lullabies. In some of my happiest memories, my mother's a shit-kicker.

She's only 5-foot-2. But she's never cold -- put her in a bathing suit in a blizzard and she might suggest, "It's a little nippy." At Thanksgiving, she never needs to eat. And man, can she pack. She can pack for a two-week vacation using what looks like a brown paper lunch bag. And everything comes out unwrinkled. In short, there is something of the soldier about her. She's the kind of mother you want watching your back in battle.

A kid in seventh grade liked to torture me. Actually lots of kids liked to torture me, but Bill pushed the envelope: He held a pocket knife to my back while I was bent over a water fountain at my perfectly lovely suburban junior high in Silver Spring, Md.

There had been some questions, theretofore, about the degree of savagery to which I had been exposed. I was prone to writerly exaggeration. But on this occasion, a teacher saw him. And the tip of the knife ripped my dress. So I had evidence.

When I told my mother, she got in the car. She drove right to Bill's house. When she returned, she looked very satisfied. "I don't think he'll be bothering you anymore," she said. And he didn't.

He ain't heavy

Fri, 10 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

"You're going to die," our son announced.

He was 5 years old. Our wills were in order. We wrote them ourselves, with Family Lawyer for Windows. Maybe we should have hired a real lawyer, even if it cost more than the flight for our first jaunt away from our son. We also could have taken separate planes. We know people who actually do this, routinely. When childless, we'd mocked them. Suddenly it seemed like a sensible idea. If we cared about his future, if we didn't want to destroy his life, would it be so very terrible to stagger our departures from New Jersey?

"We're not going to die," we promised him, and we mostly believed this to be true. Odds were that the 747's engines would not explode; no terrorists would board; we would not even get crushed by a double-decker bus when we looked the wrong way crossing the street in London. We simply couldn't die because we have no satisfying choice of recipients for our most precious possession -- the fruit of our loins.

Neither, by the way, do any of the other parents I know.

My prom date, the spy

Fri, 10 Sep 1999 16:00:00 +0000

It must have been 1970, 1971. My copy of Joni Mitchell's
"Blue" was already badly scratched, the navy of the album cover
faded into a pretty patina. If I'm not even sure of the year, I
certainly can't be expected to remember his name, which wasn't
anything obvious: Misha, Boris. Whenever I tried to pronounce
it, I was sternly corrected.

I remember absolutely nothing about his face or body,
although I can safely assume that he was, like all of my
subsequent boyfriends, tall and thin. He wore a strong adult
aftershave, which I found both repellent and sort of interesting.
To make out with him was to be surrounded, almost visibly, by a
mushroom- (or chef's-hat-) shaped cloud of this aftershave.

He was very serious, with good posture and impeccable manners.
He was always careful to tip gas station attendants a neatly folded dollar.
"Thank you so much. I appreciate your service," he would say, bowing slightly and rolling those Transylvanian R's. His father had instructed him in this American gratuity
custom. I told him that, to the best of my knowledge, no one in
the history of Silver Spring, Md., had ever tipped a gas
station attendant, but it was clear that he didn't value my input as a cultural insider.