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MAINE — There are many tokens of unmistakable adulthood. One is when you catch sight of your reflection in a store window, and it is your mother looking back at you. Another is when you first see your name on a water-and-sewer bill. Yet another is when you arrive at a friend's empty cottage on another Maine lake — your first cottage being previously booked by another family for a week in the middle of your five-week holiday — with a carload of luggage and groceries and four young children, and discover that the previous guests turned off the power leaving a refrigerator full of food in 90-degree weather for more than a week — well, there is no mistaking who is the grownup now. It is you. You are the one who opens the ghastly, furred doors and receives the hideous gust of penicillin, or whatever it is that grows on ancient pasta salad and suppurating hamburger meat.
The children tumble worriedly into the kitchen behind me. "What is it, Mummy?" "Uh, id's disgusding!" I cry, waving them back. "Oh, dat is so revolding!" Then they get a whiff. "Pee-YEW!" "What's that horrible smell, Mummy?" "I'm not eating anything from THAT fridge!" "Can't we go home?" "Pink!" Phoebe pipes up, holding out a sparkly bead for me to admire. Colors are her chief line in conversation now, along with "Fill-in-the-blank hurt me," whenever her dignity is breached. "Oh, dear, oh, blah, oh children," I blather, "Go see if there are any toys. Just stay out of this stinking, yucky, disgusting...darlings, just go play." Years ago, when my husband and I were foreign correspondents, we visited a town in the Philippines that had been hit by a terrible flash flood. Thousands of people had been washed into the sea; many hadn't made it that far, and lay rotting in the heaps of sandy detritus left by the storm waters. I mean no disrespect to the dead when I say that this fridge was a spectacle only marginally less stomach turning. I find a pair of rubber gloves and a box of garbage bags and set to work, groaning and cursing and setting a dreadful example to Youth. Out goes some Tupperware apparently lined with chinchilla. "Oh, yuck!" Out goes a bowl of green pancake batter, a chunk of rancid cheddar, slime that had once been lettuce, and bagels that don't bear thinking about. If anything, the smell is worse. "Blue!" Phoebe is back with another bead. "Dot dow, darling, go dext door." Then I realize that not only are the foodstuffs rotting, but the soft plastic edges that are supposed to form the seal on the refrigerator are coated with black mildew, inside and out. In fact, there's a kind of inky grassland spreading up from the...freezer. Which I must open, just as the pretty girl in slasher films must always go down into the basement. "&*@#$%!!!" From the living room comes a shocked voice, "Mummy just said &*@#$%!" In the freezer is the stuff of nightmares, a pantry for the apocalypse. Melted Fudgicle mingles with rotting pork, bread lies soaking in a lake of viscous, green-topped liquid nearly an inch deep. Eerily, the hot-dog rolls — those white ones with the sharp machine-cut along the top — still look fresh and untroubled. But, then, no one has ever pretended they are actually food. So I chuck everything
out, bit by putrid bit, until I am left with the lake, which is so nauseating
that I have to stand up for a bit and take a break. And that is when I
see a bottle of my hostess's vodka. Eureka! When my husband and I had
driven away from the flood-stricken Philippine town, we couldn't rid ourselves
of the deathly stench until we had in desperation, each of us, run a little
whiskey around the inside of our nostrils. It sounds beastly, I know,
and rather callous, but it works. On the principle that more disinfectant
must be better than less, I soak most of the lake up with paper towels,
wipe on some Lysol, and then swill vodka freely around the freezer, up
the sides, along the wire shelves, and into the ducts from which the cold
air comes. But I don't have to do the nostril thing again, because almost
immediately, the freezer begins smelling downright clean. "Are you okay, Mummy?" "Red! Lellow!" "Can we go swimming?" "Can we have something to eat?" "Can we have
marshmallows?" Unfortunately, yesterday I discovered that on our dock lives a vast spider, absolutely huge, like something you'd find up the Amazon, only bigger, and petrifyingly nimble. I discovered him because he was standing an inch from my bare foot. Obviously, I can never set foot on that dock again. — Meghan Cox Gurdon, who lives in Washington D.C., writes as much as her young family will permit. Watch for her new NRO column, "The Fever Swamp" starting this autumn. This is fourth in a series about vacationing with her children in Maine (see here for more). |
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