The Suburban You Read online

  Having already addressed this issue in her own mind, your wife responds to your inquiry instantly. In a nanosecond she says, “Let's go to Ho Sing.” She says this loud enough for the kids to hear so that they get excited about the prospect of eating with chopsticks and eating food that they like. She deploys this strategy because she knows that the last place that you would ever suggest would be a Chinese restaurant. Over the past nineteen years that you have known each other, you have never once introduced the idea of going to a Chinese restaurant, nor, over that same period of time, have you ever responded favorably to anyone's recommendation to go to a Chinese restaurant. There is nothing that you really find appealing about this type of food, and you have never really understood all the to-do around it. You think that it is gooey and greasy and you have never really stumbled upon a favorite dish. The only aspect of Chinese food that you find at all redeeming is that you can order the food simply by calling out a number.

  At this point, it is three to one and you and your wife know that if you reject this idea of going Chinese, as they say, you will be the most unpopular dad in your suburb. You look at your wife and she knows that she has you. “That sounds great,” you reply untruthfully. “I really feel like Chinese tonight. What a terrific idea.”

  It is 5 P.M., an hour before your usual dinnertime, but for some reason your wife believes that the kids are famished. “Let's go immediately,” she says. “Everyone get your shoes on. We are going now.” The restaurant is a five-minute drive away, yet on the way out of the house your wife believes your kids to be so hungry—she always believes they are hungry—that she gives them a snack of licorice. “Honey,” you say, “why would you give them a snack now? We'll be at the restaurant in five minutes. They could wait.” “They are hungry,” she says.

  Just as your kids are finishing their snack, you arrive at the restaurant and park the SUV. En route, you drive by two cars, one after another, and you notice, out of the corner of your eye, that both drivers scowl at you. By not making eye contact with them, you do not give them the satisfaction of knowing that they think you are being an asshole.

  You walk into the restaurant and are seated. Unlike in the restaurants that you prefer most, there will be no bread and olive oil served before dinner tonight. You sit down in a booth, but, according to your wife, you have selected the wrong seat. “You better sit on the inside,” she says to you, “so Blake can get out and go to the bathroom if he needs to.” You know that your wife knows that your son is fully capable of asking you to move in the event that he has to go to the bathroom and that you can quite capably get out of his way if such an event arises, but you do not bother to initiate this discussion with your wife. You simply switch seats with your son, because that is the alternative that will put you on the path of least resistance. (He, too, knows that the alternative to relocating his seat is not worth the effort.) Your wife nervously looks around for the waiter, who arrives and asks if you would like something to drink. She responds, “I am famished and our kids are, too. We need food now.” The waiter, understanding that the flow for this meal will be different than the flow for any other meals that he will serve that night, and most other nights, for that matter, responds as he should. “Would you like to order?” Well, you have just sat down, and with this cue you pick up your menu. It has items numbered from 1 to 128, and then some others that are not numbered. It is somewhat overwhelming to you, until you remember that to you most of this food tastes the same and most of it has that same gooey texture. You do not become that invested in the menu.

  Your wife looks to you and asks if you are ready to order. Not really, you think, but you know better. That is your cue to give your wife more time to make her selections. You raise up your index finger to the waiter, indicating “One minute, please,” hoping that you did not just flip him off in Chinese. You look more closely at the menu and still have difficulty distinguishing one dish from another and then order No. 14, because the combined age of your kids is fourteen. You ask for a Chinese beer to drink as well.

  While you were going through this with the waiter, your wife has been conferring with your kids and seems to have narrowed down her choices. Surprisingly, each of your kids has a strong preference. You ask if they will order, and they do. First, your son says to the waiter, “Could I please have egg rolls and fried rice?” and your daughter asks for fried rice, please. They make you proud that they do this so politely.

  Your wife is up, and, if tradition holds, there will be a rather lengthy and involved discussion with the waiter about the various options. She asks for the waiter's dinner recommendations and advice because, though she doesn't consider you to be an expert in office furniture, she sees the waiter as the source and authority of the highest-quality, most unbiased information, rather than how you see him, as a man trying to up the bill and increase his tip potential as best he can.

  There is discussion about fish and cashew chicken, various types of spring rolls, and sauces with which you are unfamiliar. Finally, your wife asks the waiter what fish dish he would recommend. “Number thirty-eight,” he says automatically. Your wife refers to her menu and it looks good to her. You glance at the menu that your waiter has not yet taken from you and notice that, of all 128 items on this menu, No. 38 wins in the most expensive category, by a good 30 percent. “Perfect,” your wife says. “That looks really delicious.”

  The waiter takes the menus from all of you, and your wife adds, “The kids are starving. Could you please bring anything out that is ready for them as soon as possible?” In time, less than you anticipated, three people emerge from a double swinging door, which you assume is the dividing line between the kitchen and dining room. They have plates of food in hand, which you think may belong to your family. The food is yours, and 75 percent of your four-person family is very excited. There are special chopsticks, bound at the top with rubber bands and paper so that the kids can control them. They love the experience of eating with this infrequently used utensil. Your wife believes that she has ordered the best item on the menu, because it has been endorsed by your waiter. By its price, you agree. You, however, have struck out again. Your plate, containing menu item No. 14, is saturated with a brown, viscous, translucent, Valvoline-like substance that is covering what you guess to be vegetables, chicken, and sticky white rice.

  To be part of the family experience, you eat a little, but mostly you enjoy everyone else enjoying themselves. The question that you have always had about this food, wondering what people see in it, remains. You pick through your food but mostly leave it alone. Your Chinese beer, you come to accept, will be the highlight of this meal for you.

  Your family finishes their food and everyone is ready to go. Your wife, eager to leave, flags down the waiter and asks for the check. You take it and begin reaching for your money. Your wife asks you to leave a tip, which is a good thing, because this is the first time in your life that you have ever eaten at a restaurant and paid, so you are not familiar with the custom of leaving a tip.

  You return home, and just as you pull into the garage the Golobs' garage door opens. You rush your family into the house. As a family unit, you are 75 percent satisfied with that dinner. You enter the kitchen, get out a pot, put some water in it, bring it to a boil, and cook some spaghetti noodles. You cook them just right, pour some sauce on them, and sit down to eat a real meal.

  Select a Video with Your Wife

  Your kids are asleep and it is 8:30 P.M. It is a perfect evening to stay at home and rent a video or DVD. One day about nine months ago, you noticed when you went into Blockbuster that 90 percent of the selections were DVDs, not videos, which you had been accustomed to renting. The time before that when you went into this store, it seemed like their selection was better suited to your hardware capabilities, in that videos accounted for 90 percent of the selections. You get the hint. You are a man with flow and you go out and buy two DVD players for the TVs in your house where you do your movie watching.

  That ni
ght, you and your wife think that it would be fun to rent one or the other. It doesn't matter now, because your family is current with its equipment. You are a home-movie switch-hitter. You look at the pile of dirty dishes on the kitchen table and say to your wife, “Honey, I don't want to trouble you with going to the video store on this cold evening. I will go out.”

  She goes to one of her pads of paper and jots down the title of a video that her friend Robin told her about that morning. As she hands you a small folded slip of paper with her movie selection, she says, “Why don't you get this; Robin recommended it, and she always recommends something that you enjoy.” What your wife just told you is that this will be some sentimental love story in which someone is dying of cancer. Your wife will cry and be sad throughout the movie and you will be wishing that you were upstairs doing something more enjoyable with your time, like trying to figure out why your stock portfolio dropped by 30 percent over the past year. She hands you the folded scrap of paper, which you slip into your pocket while looking for your shoes, which your wife has relocated since you took them off a half hour ago.

  “Great, honey,” you say, trying to get out of there as soon as possible, before your wife changes her mind and wants to go, leaving you with the dishes. “Could you pick up a gallon of two percent milk?” your wife requests as you leave the house.

  You are thinking that you would like to see Day of the Jackal, but you know that this is not a movie that Robin would recommend, therefore it will not be a movie that makes your wife's list of must-sees.

  You arrive at Blockbuster. One thing that you enjoy is walking around the store and looking at every title and reading the description of every movie. After doing this, you like to select what you think is the best one. Usually, after spending forty-five minutes selecting the perfect movie, you get home and one of three things occurs. One is that the movie that you took too much time selecting is one that your wife does not want to see. Alternatively, you have selected a movie that, when you start viewing it, you both realize that you have seen before. The third possibility is that you have taken so long to select a movie that when you get home your wife has initiated another activity and she no longer wants to watch a movie, so you end up watching some chick flick like Terms of Endearment, which you have selected with your wife's interests in mind, on your own.

  Tonight, you vow to yourself on the drive over—while squeezing between an oncoming SUV, whose driver's eyes you avoid, and a parked German luxury car—that you will get whatever is on that little piece of paper that your wife has handed to you and will be back home in five minutes, so that, unlike other movie evenings, this one will be a success, for your wife, anyway.

  You park the car, enter the store, and pull the little piece of paper out of your pocket. Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, it says. Oh great, you think. You wait for the Blockbuster clerk to complete ringing up the customer standing in front of you, whom the clerk refers to as François—a high-school-aged, athletic-looking kid wearing a golf shirt, whose extended right hand is disappearing and reappearing as it gracefully slides back and forth in the lower center region of the buttocks of the woman standing really close to him, who, although she bears no resemblance, is old enough to be his mother. When the transaction is completed, François turns to the woman, without losing his hand placement or interrupting its rhythmic movement, and says, “Come on, Christine, let's go.” They do.

  You ask the clerk, as quietly as possible, where Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood is while looking at the paper your wife handed you, so that he, and anyone else listening, knows that this is not your selection but your wife's.

  He smiles, because he is familiar with this scene, as he points to the Drama section. It's over in the Drama section, under S, about three-quarters of the way down that aisle. You head over that way. You arrive at the section and there are eight boxes of this movie, but, to your surprise, they all seem to be checked out. You now have to go through the embarrassment of going back to the clerk, waiting for him to finish with the customers who are waiting in line ahead of you, and asking him if there are any available copies of this movie elsewhere in the store. You wait in line impatiently.

  Finally it is your turn. He looks up and recognizes you. “Find it?” he asks, smiling, to which you respond that all the copies were checked out. He bangs on his keyboard, hits return a few times, looks up at you, and says, louder than you wished, “Sorry, all copies of Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood are checked out.” This is the best news that you have received all day long and you want to tip this Blockbuster clerk, but you don't.

  You rushed out of the house and forgot your phone, so, oh well, you cannot call your wife to ask her for another one of her selections. The ball is in your court now. You fall back into your old habits and begin with As in the New Release section. You look at every film that looks remotely appealing and read each description. You make mental notes of the ones that sound good to return to after you have done your tour of duty. As you make your rounds, you know that your fallback is Day of the Jackal; you recently read the book and loved it.

  A half hour slips by, and you are suddenly cognizant of the time. You ask the clerk, with more confidence and volume in your voice than before, where you would find Day of the Jackal, and he looks at you approvingly, as if he notices that you had just found the penis that you lost when you first arrived at the store. He tells you to look over in Suspense, under D. This is a movie that you convince yourself your wife will love and think is a great substitute for Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. You know that it will also make her happy knowing that you are watching something that you find enjoyable.

  You find the movie and it hasn't been checked out. You wait in line for the three people in front of you to check out, a process that takes five minutes per person, then you check out and go home.

  You arrive excitedly opening the back door and your wife is at the kitchen table with a bunch of papers strewn about her. “Hi, honey,” you say. “Where were you? Why did you take so long?” she asks accusingly. “Well, Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood was completely checked out and I had to select another movie. I got Day of the Jackal. You will love this movie,” you add.

  You know instantly by your wife's reaction that Day of the Jackal is not on her must-see list and that she is disappointed. “Why didn't you call me for another movie suggestion?” she asks. You tell her that you forgot your phone and she looks at you suspiciously. “Did you remember to get the milk?” she asks. You did not. She tells you to go down and put the movie on and that she will be down in a minute.

  You go downstairs, to the basement, where you have put the TV in your house so that it is inconvenient for your kids to watch it, and you insert the DVD into your new piece of hardware. The movie comes on and you realize, ten minutes into it, that it is looking familiar. You realize that this is not because you have just read the book. You assume that you saw it on a plane on one of your business trips, because if your wife had seen it she would have been so kind as to tell you the minute that you excitedly told her of your selection, the one that you chose with her in mind.

  You are a half hour into the movie and your wife still has not arrived. You pause the film and go up to the kitchen. She is gone. You realize that she went up to bed.

  You finish watching the movie, all alone, knowing everything that has happened. You go to bed and your wife is sleeping. You do not have sex that night, like you may have if you had brought home a movie that was on Robin's list.

  Draft a Little League Baseball Team

  More than anything, you love doing things with your kids, especially playing sports. You played sports growing up and you have always been OK. Not great, but not so bad, either. But now it is a whole different story. There is nothing like playing a sport with a group of eight-year-olds to make you feel more athletic than you have ever felt in your life. You are in your athletic prime.

  Your suburb takes its baseball seriously. You assembled a team of first-graders last
year in a coaches-pitch baseball league. The team consisted of your kid and his friends, and because you knew where and how to pitch to each kid on your team, they were all hitters. You attempt to import your last year's team into the second-grade league, and after trying everything you can think of you cannot do it. You look upon yourself as someone who can convince anyone to do anything, a skill that you have perfected as a corporate executive, but is useless in this Little League.

  There are tryouts in this league, which are called “evaluations,” coupled with a draft. The reason for this is to assure that the teams are evenly balanced, although you know that some of the other coaches have figured out the loopholes so that they could stack their teams. You have not made the effort to investigate any loopholes in the system because your only motivation is to try to keep friends together. You show up for the draft. The setting is this: there is one manager and three coaches for each of the twenty-four teams in the league—ninety-six dads who sit in prearranged seating in a gym set back along the first- and third-base lines of a painted baseball diamond. Each coach is given a clipboard and evaluation forms to assess the performance of each of the 336 second-grade kids who signed up for baseball that year. You are given a pencil to record your comments and your scores, which are to be tallied after the evaluations so that you can rank each of these 336 second-graders, in order of best to worst (from 1 to 336). Each kid gets to come into this lair of coaches, alone, with an identifying number pinned to the back of his shirt, and shows the ninety-six coaches and managers how he hits, throws, catches, and runs.

  One by one, each kid enters the coaches' lair and tries his best, for the most part. Except for the six kids who wish they were anywhere but here. Those six kids are on each of the ninety-six coaches' and managers' special list of kids not to choose for their team, no matter what.