Oak Bend Review

 

I C What U Did There 

by Nadine Darling

 

 

 

On Labor Day, the Channel of biographies will do a marathon usually, usually of Biography, because that is satisfying in a circular sort of way, I guess. I am not above this. I like to see how people were damaged as children and beaten as teenagers and then magically became Aaron Spelling, in a way that was not magic at all but hard work and Big Breaks. At times, before the commercial, the announcer will announce that the subject’s life was about to change…forever, and whatever the outcome those three dots are just inextricable. Without those three dots, see, there is no conflict and the thing- a sexy green dress worn to the Grammy’s, a pregnancy, a role in a coming of age movie in which the subject plays a girl in a red car who doesn’t say one line- might not have even happened at all.

I am not above this, did I mention?

I am waiting for you. There are so many hours in the day, which is one of the things that would not have occurred to me were you not in the bedroom with the door closed writing a book while the baby and I are hanging around in the living room, not making noise. For the baby that is hard. She is the staunch type and not much for trivia. She likes to P-L-A-Y. Growling belly games and biting calf games and everything else is a real bring-down. I am not her first choice of parents to be left with, and I can accept that. I am not even my own first choice of people to be left with.

The biographies are all about popular sitcoms from the seventies or popular actors of popular sitcoms of the seventies. Also producers. Aaron Spelling started smoking a pipe before he ever produced one show because he thought that it would make him seem more trustworthy. He married a go-go dancer and never gave up. Later, he died.

How long will this book be? Because the baby and I have things to do. She has eyebrows like yours, the baby. They are straight and take the course of the eye perfectly, with no arch, like a race that’s neck and neck. Sometimes one of the two of you will look at me and I’ll have a moment of hysteria in my brain, like I need to bite down on something, and I think that’s why my jaw hurts so bad in the morning. I have no defense against my love when I'm asleep. It comes at me like a guy with a tire iron and I lie there, eyes closed, synapses like whoa, acting like I ever had a chance.

After Maude, Bea Arthur tried to do an American version of Fawlty Towers and it was doomed from conception, ask anyone. She had to play the nagging wife, not the bumbling hotel owner. Also, it bothered her that Lucille Ball played Mame in the movie of Mame. She was nice though, Lucille Ball. Honestly, she could not have been nicer.

When I said I wanted the baby to look like you, I assumed she would look like me somewhat. I do think she will have my issues with carbohydrates. The other day, a Fed-Ex guy came to the door to ask if we knew the family at #4, but he stopped when he saw the baby, who was strapped to me in her carrier like something explosive. He had to rearrange his mouth to fit the new thing he wanted to say, which was, “wow, that’s a big one.” Also, the new pants, the purple ones, the ones you say fit like a tourniquet? Those are 12M. Think about that.

After the one about Betty White- or maybe it is during- you come out from the bedroom. The baby is asleep on the maze of different blankets I have draped around to make the floor easier to crawl on. I am wondering, is the book done? You motion at me and at the guestroom, and your pants are unbuttoned, and I am not above this. Betty White was a champion for civil rights. During her first series in the fifties, some affiliates in the south wanted to take her show off the air because some scenes featured a black musician, but Betty White stood up to them and they caved. I’ll bet a lot of people don’t know that. And her second husband died of cancer. That’s a subject I kind of want to never hear about, husbands and death. I get all superstitious and start crossing myself a million times really fast like I’m fit to take off. The baby doesn’t wake up until you’re back in the bedroom.

During the first season of Charlie’s Angels, Farrah Fawcett took a trip to France and noticed that none of the women were wearing bras, and this made her decide to stop wearing hers. Jacquelyn Smith concurred. The most popular episode of that show by far is Angels in Chains, in which the girls are undercover in a women’s prison and go around in towels a lot getting hosed down. Then Farrah wanted more money and left and they got a bunch of others girls that weren’t Farrah. One was a girl from commercials of the perfume Charlie and no one liked her much. Her acting wasn’t very good, they said. They said that they’d expected more.

And don’t get me started on Alan Alda. Please.

When you come out of the bedroom four hours later with two pages under your belt, let’s take a ride around with our five dollars worth of gas, the same Salem Bridge, Salem Courthouse, Salem Hospital of always with that mulchy smell of cigarettes playing in the back like a song and the baby tired from her  jumpy thing, her blanket world, her flying saucer with the beads in a turning cartridge like a bingo barrel. And maybe you will act as though I’ve accomplished something, a woman and her child during four hours of wartime, draped in her loneliness and bravery like a shroud, and tell me that I’m good still, that I’m still a good thing.

Oh, and Gopher, the guy who played Gopher on The Love Boat, he was terribly burned in a cab in Turkey in an incident involving a cigarette and balloons filled with hydrogen. When the guy who played Issac saw him right after he had to pretend it was not so bad, because he was a good friend and actor, but it was bad, really bad. And Gopher decided to be in politics then, after the pain of show business, because why shouldn’t a guy like him have something real?