My Nest Isn't Empty, It Just Has More Closet Space Read online

  I bet all of this stuff can be dated by its layers, like the rings of a tree. In the end, it’s one woman’s life.

  Frozen in time.

  How I Spent My Summer Staycation

  Mother Mary is visiting, and Daughter Francesca has come down from New York, so three generations of Scottoline women are under the same roof. Some call this a family staycation, but I call it a slow death.

  With excellent meatballs.

  The problem is that we spend the first few days staying inside and watching only my mother’s favorite TV shows, Law & Order, CSI, NCIS, and Cold Case. Bottom line, she loves anything with a corpse, and I begin to feel like one. Then one night at dinner, a miracle happens.

  Wait.

  Let me back up.

  Most people have a list of Things To Do, but Mother Mary has a list of Things Not To Do. Or more accurately, Things Never To Do. At the top of the list is Don’t Go To The Movies. Other entries include Don’t Eat Outside With The Bugs and Don’t Walk All Over This Cockamamie Mall.

  To stay on point, the last movie she went to was Fantastic Voyage, which came out in 1966. I’m not making this up. She took Brother Frank and me, and I remember nothing about the movie except Raquel Welch, who wore a cleavage-baring jump-suit that caused my mother to pronounce the movie “dirty.”

  We up and left.

  In any event, since then, I’ve asked my mother to approximately 3,937,476 movies, but she always says no. Nobody knows why Mother Mary doesn’t do the things she doesn’t do, and to inquire is to end up in a tautological trap, like a Mobius strip of conversational hell. For example, I did ask her, and the conversation went exactly like this:

  “Ma, why don’t you go to the movies?”

  “Because I don’t.”

  “But what’s the reason?”

  “The reason is, I don’t.”

  “That’s not a reason. I want to know the reason.”

  “Why?”

  “I just do.”

  “Why is that a reason for you, but not for me?”

  Honestly, I couldn’t reply. I may have a law degree, but my mother is Perry Mason.

  In time, I stopped asking about the movies, and it was Daughter Francesca who popped the question, over a meal of over-cooked broccoli, since also on my mother’s list is Don’t Eat Vegetables That Retain A Hint Of Color.

  Francesca said, “Hey, why don’t we go see Julie & Julia? It’s supposed to be good.”

  Mother Mary answered, “Okay.”

  I thought I’d heard her wrong. “What?”

  My mother looked over. “So?”

  We eyed each other warily, but Francesca is no dummy, so she got up, grabbed a wallet and car keys, and hustled my mother out of the house with the speed of a kidnapper.

  In no time, we were sitting at the theater with popcorn, soda, and Raisinets. I kept checking, and Mother Mary was laughing away. She’s only four-foot-eleven, so the big seat seemed to swallow her whole and her feet didn’t touch the floor. The flickering lights danced across her bifocals, and her white hair was a tiny cloud in the dark theater.

  I leaned over. “So, Ma, it turns out that going to the movies is fun, huh?”

  My mother looked over. “You couldn’t leave it alone, could you?”

  I said nothing, because she was absolutely right. I couldn’t leave it alone. In fact, I never leave it alone. All of a sudden, at the movie, I realized that I have my own list of Things Not To Do, and well, you know where this is going.

  Three generations of trouble.

  Mother Mary naps after her trip to the cockamamie mall.

  Then, a day later, we were back at the dinner table over the barely green green beans, and my mother remarked that her cell phone got bad reception. I agreed, and Francesca asked, “So why don’t we go to the mall and get a new phone?”

  My mother answered, “Okay.”

  I looked over at my mother, and she looked back at me, playing mother-daughter eye-chicken. We both knew that she never went to the cockamamie mall, but her eyes dared me to leave it alone.

  And for once, I did.

  Foxy

  It’s the time of year when nature comes too close for comfort. My spiders are back, which means that when I open the front door, they rush over the threshold, scurry into the living room, and take the good chair.

  Now, there’s new news.

  A grasshopper throws himself against the front door every morning. Each day when I come down, I see him. He jumps up, bonks his head on the door, then lands and looks up, only to try again. I named him Sisyphus and have gone from admiring his persistence to doubting his sanity. I took a picture of him on the threshold, before he jumps. If I look closely, I can see his deranged gleam.

  Lately I was wondering if it’s the same stubborn grasshopper, or a team of less stubborn grasshoppers, rotating the chore. Either way, he’s gone by the afternoon, when I see other grasshoppers in the front yard, who jump and then fly, which is a neat trick. They look like him, so I assume he’s one of them, but if I could jump and fly, I wouldn’t be wasting my time trying to get inside anybody’s house. I’d have a reality TV show.

  Anyway, between the spiders and the grasshopper, I stopped using the front door and began using the back door.

  Until Little Tony’s frog.

  Yes, there’s a small green frog who hangs out near my back door. He’s there every night, and when I open the door, he jumps once, then pretends he’s a rock. Jumping and impersonating a rock isn’t as cool as jumping and flying, but who am I to judge? I can’t do any tricks, except maybe writing a book.

  Anyway, when the frog goes into rock mode, he fools my two golden retrievers and Ruby The Corgi. They trot past him, happy to accept that rocks jump only on occasion. But Little Tony, the Cavalier spaniel, knows better.

  He sits at the back door all day long, waiting for nightfall. As soon as the frog appears, Little Tony paws at the door, and I let him out, because he wants to be with the frog. He doesn’t try to bite or chase it, he just sits next to it, happily.

  Bottom line, Little Tony has a pet frog.

  Or maybe a pet rock.

  I don’t want to disturb them, so now I use the back door only during the day, and the rest of the time, I am trapped inside my house by spiders, grasshoppers, and one very clever rock.

  Nature finds its way inside, however. It all begins with a fox, crossing my backyard. He’s orange and fluffy and appears every day at about five o’clock, then vanishes. Inside the house, his appearance creates havoc. The goldens bark, Ruby The Corgi runs in circles, and Little Tony eats the window. The fox laughs and runs away.

  But the fox doesn’t come back for about a month, and when he returns, he looks terrible. He’s skinny, and his fur is mottled. He scratches his ears constantly. He needs help, so I call all the animal control people, who tell me it’s not their problem and suggest I catch him in a Havahart trap. I’m going out to buy one when I find him on the driveway, dead.

  The dogs do a victory dance around him, but I feel sad.

  Until one night, when I’m trying to sleep and all of them are scratching their ears, their feet thumping against the floor. I turn on the light, wondering. The next day I take the dogs to the vet, and it turns out that they have mange. They get treated, and it will go away in a month.

  But not before I notice a rash on my neck, near my ear.

  And boy, does it itch.

  I call the vet. “What exactly is mange?”

  “A type of parasite.”

  “Can people get mange?”

  “I get it all the time,” says he.

  Yuck. “What do you do for it?”

  “Wait it out. They take two weeks to die.”

  I consider this.

  I’m already single enough.

  I’m on my way to the doctor, now.

  Deadline Fever

  The good news is that I didn’t have mange. The bad news is that I had poison sumac and a deadline.

  Or as I th
ink of it, a dreadline.

  To explain, it takes me a year to write a novel, and my deadline just passed, on a Monday. Below is a rewind of the week leading up to the deadline, with play-by-play medical updates. Please tell me you’ve had weeks like this, because poison sumac loves company.

  Our story begins on Monday morning, when my satellite radio stops working. It flashes Acquiring Signal, even though it isn’t. No biggie. On Monday afternoon, my cell phone breaks. It’s been dropping calls for a few weeks, but now it won’t stay connected to anyone. I don’t have time to get another, so I just won’t talk on the phone for a week. I have to work anyway.

  Poison sumac spreads to look like a map of Italy, which suits.

  On Tuesday, I’m low on groceries and down to take-out food, so I try to reheat pizza for dinner, but the oven won’t go on. All right, no sweat, I can wait a week to get the oven fixed. I eat the pizza cold, which is delicious.

  Poison sumac adds islands of Sicily and Sardinia, now geographically correct.

  On Wednesday, I’m brewing my 55th cup of coffee and I go to get Half & Half from the refrigerator, but when I open the door, the light stays off. The refrigerator is on the fritz, and I notice water pooling on the floor. I can ignore the puddle, but the Half & Half will go bad and I need coffee.

  Caffeine and deadline is my longest marriage.

  So I call the appliance guys, and luckily the refrigerator guy is in the neighborhood, so he comes and replaces the gasket, whatever that is. I work all night on coffee adrenaline, and by Thursday morning I need breakfast, so I go to the freezer for ice cream.

  Yes, you read that right. Ice cream for breakfast. On deadline, I crave sugar. Caffeine, sugar, and me are a threesome.

  But when I open the freezer door, a solid block of ice coats the top shelf and my Häagen-Dazs is vanilla soup. I call the appliance guy again, and they tell me the gasket repair caused an air lock, whatever that is. They’re not in the neighborhood and will get there when they can. So I drink the ice cream, and it’s delicious. In fact, if I had cold pizza to go with my warm ice cream, I’d be in pig heaven.

  Also, poison sumac has spread to the Italian island of Ischia, which sounds like “itchier” for a good reason.

  On Friday, I’m working and adjusting to the new normal. My house is quiet because the radio stayed mute and the cell phone can’t ring. I don’t cook in the oven because it doesn’t work, and there’s no food left in the refrigerator, even though it does. I eat things that used to be frozen, like Boca Burgers, which I microwave for lunch and dinner. For breakfast I make toast. For dessert I have microwave popcorn, and it’s all delicious. I’m backsliding with carbohydrates, like ex sex.

  Carbs join sugar, caffeine, and me for the weekend. We have a deadline orgy.

  Poison sumac invades Poland, intending world domination.

  Saturday afternoon, my laptop is acting wacky. The monitor seems fainter and I can’t read it, so I call my computer guy, who comes over. We use one of my old monitors with the laptop, but that doesn’t work, so we replace the laptop with an old computer. This process takes four hours, during which I eat nothing but fingernails, for three more grams of carbohydrates.

  Poison sumac marches westward to France. Paris is burning, and so is my chest.

  Sunday morning, my throat aches and my tongue is swollen, but I’m fine. It hurts to eat anything, but that doesn’t matter because there’s nothing to eat. I can’t drink either, but I’m out of coffee and running on bile. I power through to Monday morning, when I finally finish my book.

  It’s called Think Twice.

  But it should have been called Poison Sumac Acquires Nuclear Weapons.

  Booked

  As you may know, my first book of adventures was entitled Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog.

  Which pretty much guaranteed that I’ll never have a third husband, but you can’t have everything. Mostly, I have fun.

  I remember when I told Mother Mary that the book was going to be published. She was sitting at my kitchen island, her neat head bent over the crossword puzzle, her close-cropped hair showing a grayish whorl. A hearing aid nestled behind each ear like a plastic parenthesis. Next to her sat a mug of coffee, with a napkin covering the top. She always covers her drinks, perhaps to keep out airborne bacteria or incoming helicopters.

  So I broke the news, and she looked up, lifting a sparse silver eyebrow.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Why, what?”

  “Why are they making a book about the stories? Who’s gonna buy that?”

  “I hope some people will. It’s funny, right?”

  “Yeah, but they already read them in the paper.”

  “Well, they might have missed some, or they might want them all in one place, or they might give it as a present for the holidays.”

  She looked at me blankly, a slow blink of milky brown eyes, behind bifocals.

  “Ma, not everybody lives in Philly and gets the Inquirer. You, for example, live in Miami.”

  “I don’t need the paper, or the book. Cousin Nana tells me what it’s about.”

  This is true. Never mind that the columns are online, so that Brother Frank can get one and print a copy for her, every Sunday. Instead, she prefers to rely on Cousin Nana from South Philly, and I have stopped pointing out that, in hearing “what it’s about,” she misses these superbly crafted sentences. I tried another tack:

  “Ma, the cool thing is that you’re going to be in a book. People will read about your lab coat and your traveling back scratcher. They’ll know you hate Raquel Welch and love Omar Sharif. Aren’t you excited?”

  “No.” She sniff s. “Who cares? Nobody cares.”

  “They do. At least, some of them do.”

  This is also true, if my email is any indication, and thank you for writing to me. Mother Mary always gets rave reviews. She’s like the American Idol of mothers. Rather, the Survivor of mothers. Or maybe I’m the survivor.

  Then I got another idea. “Ma, I’m going to have a few book signings, and you should come. I’m sure people would have questions for you, and you could answer them. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  “No.” She went back to her puzzle. “I’m not going.”

  “You could even sign the books.”

  “Why would I?”

  I left it alone, knowing that it was too soon to start campaigning in earnest. Of course, in time, I guilted her into coming. After all, she’s the reason I started writing, though she’ll never know it from me, because Cousin Nana might forget to tell her this part. To explain, I’ve always loved this quote of Eleanor Roosevelt’s: “A woman is like a tea bag. You never know how strong she is until she’s in hot water.”

  I knew that was true, if only from living with Mother Mary, who had been in more hot water than any fifty tea bags and had come out stronger. Later, I saw that strength in my girlfriends, and I wanted to see in print the kind of women I saw in real life. I think of them as extraordinary, ordinary women. Tea bags, all.

  Sisters to Nancy Drew.

  That’s why this book has the subtitle, The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman. I think it sums up the point, doesn’t it?

  So keep reading, and save your questions for Mother Mary.

  She has all the answers.

  WordPerfect

  I think a lot about words, and I like to choose the most important words for the decades of my life.

  For example, when I was in my twenties, everything was about dating, romance, and love. During school, I had crushes on anything that moved, and being Italian, I fell in love many times.

  On the same day.

  Just kidding.

  But I did have a low flashpoint in those days, and the most important words of my twenties were, “I love you.”

  The words “I love you” lead to marriage, or at least they did then, and I had two of those in the next decade or so. And my most important words morphed from “I love you” to “I’m sorry.”

 
I’m sure it’s a coincidence.

  In my thirties, I apologized for everything. I was like an apology machine. The apologies started with things like “I’m sorry I’m late,” then increased to “I’m sorry I said what I said,” and ended up with “I’m sorry I think what I think,” “I’m sorry I am who I am,” and ultimately, “I’m sorry I married you.”

  Really, really sorry.

  Luckily, there were backsies.

  This led to the most important words of my forties, which were, “Thank you.” As in, “Thank you, God, for divorce.”

  Among so many other things.

  I was thankful that I had gotten back on my feet and acquired a grace I should have had earlier. I was thankful for everything in my life. Thankful that Daughter Francesca was growing up so beautifully, despite the many curveballs I’d thrown her. Thankful for my parents, then both still alive. Thankful that I had my health, when so many did not. Thankful for my house, even with its mortgage. Thankful for my dogs, though they never listened. Thankful I had a second career, which I loved.

  So what words are the most important for my fifties?

  It’s taken me years to figure it out, but I know it now. What’s the word it’s taken me this long to figure out, and once I figured it out, even longer to say out loud?

  What is as important as “I love you,” “I’m sorry,” and “Thank you,” now and forever?

  Ask.

  I never used to ask for anything. Help. An answer. A favor. A new job. A concession. A request.

  Whatever it is, if I wanted it, I would never ask for it. I would just hope it came to me, magically. Or I might just suffer in silence, in the manner of the early Christian martyrs.

  Heaven, help us.

  Now I ask, and I get plenty of no’s. But I’ve also gotten a yes or two, which feels like I won the lottery. There are a lot of little examples, but here’s one: last weekend, I was at the National Book Festival, and I was scheduled to speak at breakfast. As book gigs go, this is a big one, but it was early in the morning. I had to be dressed and ready by seven o’clock, and I was worried.