holds a phallic fascination for my boys, and Peter wasn’t there to say no, so they immediately started begging me to let them wield the nozzle.
“Wait in the car; just let me do it myself,” I said, but it was too late. The doors flew open and three of them escaped. Once a child is out of a five-point-harness car seat, there is little I can do to stem the riptide of testosterone. A scuffle ensued at the pump, because Pierson thought he should be the one in charge, and by the time I swiped my card and chose the octane level, Truman had won the battle with his brothers and was filling the tank. Truman has pumped gas before and he seemed to have it under control so I stepped aside, resisting any arguments from Pierson and Larson about how the scenario was
When the pump detected that the tank was full, the nozzle clicked and Truman, on cue, pulled it out of the car. Somehow forgetting his previous expertise, he failed to let go of the lever that stops the gas. Flammable liquid shot everywhere at full speed. He pointed the nozzle up, as if to use gravity to stop the deluge, but that only caused a gasoline fountain. Larson, Pierson, and I were screaming at him to let go when gas splashed into his eyes, and he finally dropped the hose— which thankfully released the lever and stopped the river of gas. Pierson, who had been right up in Truman’s grille vying for the pump, was soaked with gas and standing in a puddle of it. He looked down at his saturated clothes.
“I’m gonna blow!” he yelled over and over, taking off running in hysterical circles. The poor kid had recently watched the scene in
“Mom, I’m gonna blow!” he kept repeating. Peik, previously too lazy to leave the van, leaped out of the car and added to the mayhem by running around the gas station parking lot screaming, “I’ve got a match!” This sent Pierson into even greater hysteria. Meanwhile I did what I could to get us back on the road, picking up the hose and putting it in the machine while trying to avoid the puddles and not get gasoline on my Manolos.
“Screw the cap on,” I directed Truman, trying not to yell at him in front of the gathering crowd. “Can you manage that?”
“But, Mom, really, it should be impossible to pull the pump out of the car while the gas is flowing,” Truman insisted. “It
“No, you dipwad,” Peik said, taking a break from scaring the hell out of his little brother in order to debase this one. “How would you be able to fill a gas can, genius?”
Pierson had to be stripped of his soaked clothing. Larson, who was dressed as good Spider-Man, offered his bad alter ego Spider-Man costume, which he naturally had with him in case of emergency. It had built-in chest muscles and was so small it gave Pierson a wedgie and came up to his shins, but he was happy to put aside sartorial grievances in order to save himself from immolation. I threw his gas-soaked clothes in a garbage can.
“The show is over, folks,” Peik announced to the parking lot crowd as we boarded the van and drove away. Once we were safely back on the road, we really gave it to Truman, who was embarrassed and angry that we were laughing at him for potentially turning our van into a suicide bomb.
After retaliating with a stream of unprintable curse words, most of which started with “mother,” Truman declared, “When I grow up, I am going to be rich and you’ll all be sorry!”
“What does that have to do with dousing your brother with gasoline?” Peik calmly asked, as I rolled down the window to ease my burning eyes. “This car freaking reeks.”
“I like the smell,” said Larson.
“Oh, great, a future stoner,” Peik predicted.
The next time one of my kids offers to help me, I’m the one who’s gonna blow.
WHEN I MET PETER, HE ALREADY OWNED A COUNTRY HOUSE, THE ULTIMATE luxury for a New Yorker. Being able to get out of the city makes me better able to appreciate living here. Because Peter was unmarried, the raised ranch was, unsurprisingly, a bachelor pad. A one-bedroom house works fine for a single man, or even a couple who get along well, but with our baby habit came a need for more space. The ranch house was also perched on a cliff, and Peter didn’t have the stomach to look out the window and see an infant crawling toward a twenty- foot drop or a toddler scaling a rock wall. The roads were likewise steep, and it wasn’t unusual for Cleo to careen down a hill at thirty miles an hour on her bicycle. We sold the house and drove north until we found something that met our needs and that we could afford. Proximity to New York City determines a property’s value. The farther you drive, the more affordable real estate becomes. A second home in the hour range signifies that you are in the big bucks. This is not a completely linear system, as there are pockets of prestige here and there. You have to be on the lookout for what Peter calls the valley of value, which I suspect is somewhere near Brigadoon.
I have found that city people frequently lie about how long it takes to get to their country house. This is especially true of the Hamptons, an exclusive enclave of towns at the eastern end of Long Island. “It takes us about an hour and a half to get there” is the typical brag. Sure, in a Formula One car with a radar detector.
Our house is in the three-hour range, ideal for avoiding self-inviting houseguests. Three hours in a totally trashed van with five boys and one Butch Ballerina in uncomfortably close quarters. Before we even leave the parking garage, the boys are fighting over which movie they will watch. We have two DVD players so we can show flicks for two age groups, but the warfare over seats is still heated. By the time we reach the West Side Highway, someone has vomited. This is usually a by-product of the fight over the seats, which causes one of them to cry, thereby triggering the postsobbing gag reflex. By the time we pay the toll to cross the bridge out of Manhattan, the snacks and drinks brought from home have been spilled. This causes a seismic shift in the seating, because someone now needs to find a dry spot. Things then settle down until we hit the hour-and-a-half mark, at which point we stop at the Red Rooster. This tiny little hamburger stand in Brewster, New York, has become a habit for us, so much so that, like a speech-impaired Pavlov’s dog, as soon as Larson gets his seat belt on in Manhattan he starts reciting his order.
“Are we stopping at da Woosta? I want a cheeseburga, Coke, and cirka, cirka, cirka.”
This order is repeated endlessly until we get there, and in case you don’t speak Larson, “cirka” means an onion ring, and he literally wants only three of them.
Once we are back on the road, over the remaining hour and a half of the trip milk shakes are picked up by the lids, which pop off every time, soaking chicken strips in ice cream sauce; cardboard boats of French fries drizzled with ketchup end up upside down on the floor; and every single weekend, Blake finishes the exact same order of fried food, with a calorie count equivalent to the recommended daily intake for an entire Broadway cast, and then complains that he’s fat. A few miles on, the burping and farting commence, at first by nature and then increasingly by competition. Usually, with maybe five miles to go, at least one of the creatures in the back needs Peter to pull over so it can pee. By the time we finally arrive at our house, I hate my kids. Only the ones who have fallen asleep and the ones smart enough to pretend they are asleep are spared my arrival wrath.
The house is a converted barn in the Berkshires of Massachusetts; we call it Dairy Air. Next door is a dairy farm, and if the wind is blowing in the right direction, our entire property smells like derriere. The cows are lined up in large open-air sheds, standing in their own filth and producing enough methane to power a third-world country or at least provide the farmer with cable television. We thought it would be good for the children to be near real nature; maybe we could even buy milk from the neighbors. Instead, Peik has developed a Tourettian habit of emerging from the car half asleep on Friday nights muttering “This place smells like ass.”
Living in a converted barn sounds very romantic. Barns can be quite beautiful, with their simply pegged beams and dramatic, soaring, cathedral-like spaces. But our barn is more a glorified shed, not a majestic stone- foundation classic nestled on a wealthy old gentleman farmer’s estate. Even more sadly, our structure was “converted” in the 1960s, when dropped ceilings and wood paneling were all the rage. There are no theatrical spaces with exposed historic woodwork overhead. It’s all very practical, and no doubt easier to heat, but it won’t be appearing in any design magazines. We have a dizzying amount of mod wallpaper and samples of every faux-finish painting technique that has been in fashion since 1970—marbleizing, sponging, decoupage; you name it, you can find it in this house. In a further attempt to obliterate any of the barn’s original qualities, a previous owner attached a covered colonial entry smack in the middle of the barn’s exterior. The minute we signed the closing papers, I attached the faux-authentic structure to a truck and pulled the whole thing off, much to the horror of my visiting parents. The truth is, the beautiful barn structure is there, it’s just buried under Sheetrock walls, linoleum, and shag carpet. A real estate listing would use the phrase “hidden potential.” Even with two architectural degrees between us, like the shoemakers, Peter and I have never attempted to give our children a better place to put their feet. We
