The Barbeque
Twenty monsters were coming to dinner.
My shoulders ached miserably as I lumbered out of my bird-poop covered Volkswagen and onto the pebbled driveway. It was no wonder, considering how I had driven hunched over and tensed up for two hours, inching down the sardine-packed Garden State Parkway on my way to Beige Heaven. There were no other colors here at our summer home along the New Jersey shore. It was only a sea of beige: beige sand, beige sidewalks, beige houses…beige state of mind. I suppose I should have been grateful. I suppose I should have been kissing the feet of the couple who had so graciously employed me as their nanny (chauffeur, tailor, cable programmer, maid, tutor, cook, and occasional psychologist, nurse, veterinarian and lawns keeper). But I was not grateful. I was unapologetically tired and cranky. I had dreamed of a quiet, peaceful evening, nestled on the sofa with a lengthy novel while the kids watched television after their parents blessed me with their absence and drove back to our full-time home up north. Ever faithful in my position, I of course would remain with the children.
But it was not to be so.
As I trudged up the narrow deck stairs, bumping grumpily into the white plastic chairs that sometimes flew down the steps and into my car, I had a feeling that tonight would be different than all the other Sundays. Patricia (“The Mom”) greeted me frantically from the tiny (beige) kitchen, swarming amid a forest of feasted delights. She informed me that she had invited a “few” people over for dinner - a mere handful she had met at the beach. I sighed wearily, seeing the futility of expressing my disappointment, and retired to the couch. Apparently, all I had to look forward to was a household of people I didn’t care to see and an abundance of children running hither and thither and screaming and stomping and fighting over the television. I wanted to cry.
They arrived not in droves, but marched in single file or two-by-two like the animals on Noah’s ark. And wasn’t it a coincidence that it looked like rain there as well? Cheryl came first. I knew her quite well since her daughter and one of “my” boys were practically twins joined at the hip. Her husband Joe came next with his gold crucifix gleaming in all its Catholicism around his tanned, hairy neck. He must have had a martini or two before he arrived because he actually struck up a lengthy conversation with me, and he never, ever did that before - because I was just the lowly nanny (chauffeur, tailor, maid, tutor, etc.).
Karen came next, a lofty German woman who had once worked as a nanny, so we had quite a lot in common although we never talked about it, not even once. She came with her three lofty daughters and a husband who was not so tall, but his eyes were the most vivid emerald I had ever seen. And for the life of me, I could never remember his name. The rest of the guests were a blur of Tinas and Trudys and Stephens and Kates, all crowding into the tiny kitchen with an onslaught of questions: “Hi! How are you? Where’s the bathroom? Do I have time to change before we eat?” In no time at all they were crammed together on the miniature deck, huddled around the ugly plastic furniture that often scratched my car, scrambling for the few good seats that would place them under the giant umbrella and sheltered from the inevitable rain.
I opted for the inside counter instead and filled up my plate, eating amid the hollering children who were being fed first so they could promptly be banned to the bedroom while the adults conversed outside. I felt no need to join the chat, so I moved to the rocking chair next to the window instead, where I could enjoy the almost insignificant breeze. A barrage of hammering pounded through the screen. Workers next door were cutting and pounding and drilling in sync as they molded the frame of a brand new deck. The neighbors were anxious, no doubt, to begin the shore-ly ritual of regular barbecues with twenty-odd strangers they might meet on the beach. My mind throbbed in time with the sawing, and suddenly I wanted to shout across the alley, “DON’T DO IT! DON’T BUILD THE DECK! You’ll think it quite nice at first, but then, just as you are beginning to enjoy the peace and quiet, someone will unexpectedly invite twenty monsters over for dinner, and before you know it, you’ll be ready to pump thirty rounds into the next person who says ‘Pass the barbecue sauce!’”
But I yawned and said nothing, nothing at all. Instead I turned my hazy concentration to the mumble and jumble of twenty voices mingled with the disco music pouring out of the ancient radio by the stove. Donna Summer was singing about the letter someone found when it fell out of an old brown overcoat, and I suddenly had the urge to awaken my long-dead disco dancing ability. Where was John Travolta when I needed him?
At last I decided to join the conversation outside and forced my weary behind from the chair in which it had suctioned itself. I dragged my feet to the deck where I sank down into the one empty chair and pulled out a smoke. Joe Catholic thrust a neon-pink BIC in my face as the tall German woman went on and on and on about gambling and showboats and how much better it was to go to the Indian Reservation in Connecticut than to venture down south to Atlantic City. And just last week Trudy had won a whopping eighty-five dollars!
I took a long drag from the cigarette and sat there in silence, sipping now and then from my umpteenth cup of coffee, which probably wasn’t a good idea since I was having a problem with heartburn and found myself popping about a gazillion Tums a day. I’m sure it was more due to tension and the fact that I was living the ultimate horror than because of the acid coffee, although the coffee didn’t help much, I will admit that. I took another swallow in spite of myself and caught the middle of a conversation to my left. One of the husbands was recalling the time someone had whistled at his wife while they were riding in their convertible together. He had told her on that day, he the ever-loving husband, “He wouldn’t be whistling if he could see your huge thunder thighs.” His wife, who was sitting right next to him as he retold this pitiful tale, started giggling. I wasn’t sure why, since I (an unrelated observer) had the sudden urge to drive a six-inch stiletto heel into his groin.
Then the tall German woman started boasting about her three daughters, making sure we all knew how wonderfully fit and beautiful they were in all their skinny tallness. Imagine if you will, that Sophie can eat nearly anything! She’s got such great metabolism. I put down my coffee and looked down, sensing my own cottage cheese buns stuffed into the tiny plastic chair that often flew into my car. I felt my own Jell-O legs and thought to myself, is this what life is all about? Sitting in Beige Heaven on a damp deck with the grill still smoking an hour after all the ribs are gone? The putrid odor of stale beer wafting through the humidity as I listened to twenty dinner guests marvel about how wonderful their children were by mere virtue of the fact that they had small waists and ample chests? They didn’t once mention brains or talents or aspirations. What kind of snobby, appearance-fixated world was I caught in, where a woman’s thighs are more importance than what’s inside her head, where metabolism defines worth, and if we dress in the most stylish blouses and have the thickest, most luscious hair, then we can be accepted in society? But if we have a few pimples or big hips or wear thick glasses over our big noses, then we are nothing, we are dirt - even if we discovered the cure for cancer or worked with mentally handicapped kids - it doesn’t matter because we are ugly? What kind of world is that, I wondered.
So I sat there, becoming enraged at all the shallowness I was witnessing, crying inside because I wanted to fix all the injustices in the world and bash these twenty monsters, bash some sense into their thick heads and get them to talk about something more important than strapless black evening gowns or the gorgeous women who supposedly seduced all the husbands when they lunched at the Surf Club down the road. I needed something more meaningful than who has the longest, shapeliest legs. But I couldn’t even speak. I was so miffed. They were all talking around me, the kings and queens ignoring the peasant as if they knew what I was thinking, as if they were well aware of the radical feminist anger raging through my head. They knew that if they dared include me in the discussion, I’d blast their artificial words with a mind-shattering, humbling speech about the ignorance I heard in their voices. The monsters just kept going and going and going like the Energizer Bunny, chatting right around me (and I knew well why!) until someone - the husband with the emerald eyes I think - someone found the courage to challenge me.
“So what do YOU think of our first lady?” he asked, and my mouth began to water as I tasted justice, sweet as honey. AHA! They had awakened the Beast! Finally I’d have my chance to put these superficial snobs in their place with some poignant yet angry words about the crap they were slinging. So I took a deep breath and chose my words carefully. Twenty-odd faces gazed silently with skeptical anticipation, unaware of the wisdom that would soon pour from my lips and smash their warped sense of morality into a pile of guilt.
“Well,” I began with a smug grin on my face. “She’s okay, but her new haircut has GOT to go. And that wardrobe is way beyond hideous, unless, of course, you LIKE the 70’s.”
They laughed in agreement and the murmur returned as though it had never ceased. I lit up another cigarette, took two sips of cold coffee, and leaned back in the ugly plastic chair that marred my car. Everyone else returned to their mundane conversations about Surf Clubs, convertibles, and beautiful children.
Twenty monsters came over for dinner.
I cannot deny, I am one of them.
