Didn't I Feed You Yesterday__ A Mother's Guide to Sanity in Stilettos - Laura Bennett [49]
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