The Last Slice of Hawaii
Did I mention? Every Friday night we all sit down together and eat pizza and watch a movie. That’s the family tradition and was the family tradition way before I moved in four months ago.
We make the pizza ourselves and then bring some furniture to the living room to complement the small sofa that the two kids garrison with blankets and pillows and a baby doll named Nora, who eats and pees and poops and vomits, authenticity overriding affability in the current fashion of playthings.
I sit on a wicker chair by the bookshelf, Clement leans back on a rolly desk chair on the other side of the sofa, and Julie sometimes sits on the floor by the coffee table, sometimes sits straight-backed against the child-sized barstool, whose short seat and questionable construction forces its user to contort herself into an awfully healthy – which is to say uncomfortable – posture.
Everyone gets their own uniquely deficient view of the small television set. The one working speaker mumbles the dubbed German dialogue and sighs some pale, orchestral refrain that begs us to laugh, laugh, laugh! at the lighthearted shopping montage.
The first Friday night I was living with the family, the parents had to work. They made two big pizzas and set them on the table along with three glasses, a bottle of sparking water, and a big roll of paper towels.
“Last one in the room closes the door,” Lea said. She looked over at me.
I got up and closed it, and I sat back down.
“And turns off the light,” she said.
I did that, too.
“And we also need plates.”
Stand up, lights on, door open, grab some plates, come back, close the door, turn off the light, hand out the plates, sit down.
So then it was just me, Lea, Leonard, and Willi und die Wunder dieser Welt, a playful travel documentary for kids. Willi’s main goal is to take some of his friend’s ashes to her favorite dune in the Sahara Desert, but he doesn’t let that required story arc get in the way of swimming with crocodiles in the rainforest or sumo wrestling in Japan.
But I was having a really hard time hearing the television, so I whispered to Lea: “Can you turn up the volume?” Leonard then hit me in the head and told me to be quiet.
A few minutes later, Leonard asked me to cut him a slice of pizza. I wondered if lightly hitting him on the head and telling him to be quiet would teach him a valuable lesson. I figured it would just mean I had to leave my new room four days after I moved in to it, so I let the total unfairness of the apparent pediarchy go.
So, Leonard asked for the slice.
“Give me a slice of Hawaii,” he said.
“Hawaii?” I asked. After all, Hawaii is a noun, an island. And its slices were already claimed by the United States in 1959.
“Just give it,” he demanded. I gave him the slice of Hawaiian pizza and as we watched the film the kids quoted the funny lines immediately after they occurred and I said nothing at all.
The first few weeks I felt like an intruder, and the kids helped support that feeling.
Leonard, whose hunger is insatiable, was always concerned that I was eating his food.
“Did you eat an apple yesterday?” Leonard asked.
“Yes, and I told Clement so he’d know to buy more,” I said.
“Dad, I found the thief!”
And Lea, the ten-year-old domestic wunderkind, fretted about cleaning supplies.
“Are you allowed to use our laundry soap?” she would ask.
It was not possible to declare that I was now a part of we simply because I’d handed over some cash – you can’t buy acceptance (except in cults, hotel casinos, and fraternities).
So the kids would turn on the stereo and climb up on my bed and throw pillows at me and yell, “You only rented the room, not all the furniture. This is ours!”
But I sat around on that furniture that wasn’t mine for a long time and it started to smell like me and little by little we just get used to the things that are around us – though it’s always hard to believe that things were once different and may change again (Was I ever not alive? I can’t remember.) – and last week Lea snuck up on me while I was writing (she always does that) and she was crying and she grabbed my ankle and whimpered: “Please don’t go back to California.”
I love the kids. I love the fleeting seriousness of their problems: missing hair accessories, stupid jackets, dumb lunchboxes, mealy-tasting yogurt, wiggly teeth, too many toys, pajamas, bedtime, he-poked-me-but-she-hit-me-first-but-he-tried-to-show-me-his-willy.
I love that Leonard sings all of his thoughts at dinner each night: “I don’t know what I should eat!/I’m going to spread some butter on this roll!/Maybe salami, maybe fish, maybe poo-poo!/I don’t know what to eat!” Or how he wants to become mayor and occasionally dresses up in a suit and practices speeches in front of the big mirror by the front door.
I love that Lea corrects me about everything, like when I use u (yoo) instead of ü (ew), or when I accidentally roll my r’s when I say an English word because I practice so much to improve my German accent, or when I tap my foot at the dinner table (“Our neighbor’s baby is trying to sleep!”) – and then she explodes because Leonard ate the last tomato and suddenly she’s on the floor screaming and crying and hurling her enormous hair in every direction like some horrifying prototype for an anthropomorphic Swiffer Wet Jet.
And kids really do say the darndest things.
A few weeks ago, we were cleaning the house to get ready for the holidays. Lea started to iron a tablecloth while Leonard and I were sweeping the stairs outside the front door. We come back inside and Leonard is furious.
“I wanted to iron!” he yells and rolls on the floor in the position that supposedly helps if you’re on fire.
“Don’t worry,” Julie says, “I’ll give you a very special job.”
“Make sure it’s more special than Lea’s job!” Leonard insists.
“I don’t even want a special job,” Lea says, “I just want to iron.”
A few days later, on Christmas, Leonard answers the phone and it’s a distant family member. Julie mumbles to me that she doesn’t really feel like chatting.
So Leonard says: “Sorry, mommy doesn’t feel like talking to you today.” And he hangs up.
After Christmas, Leonard wants to play the board game that I got him, Forbidden Island. I explain the rules to him and I notice he seems a little anxious.
“Is it too complicated?” I ask him.
“No,” he says, “it’s just… why are we going to the island if it’s forbidden?”
Yesterday Lea came into my room and sat down next to me on the sofa. She watched me read for a few minutes before she put her hand over the book, looked at me gravely, and asked: “Are you happy you’re a grown-up?”
“Yeah,” I say, “yeah.”
She nods.
“Do you want to grow up?” I ask her.
“I haven’t decided yet,” she says.
Last Friday I missed pizza night. I was on my way back from a short trip to Hamburg, where I saw things as diverse as the Reeperbahn and Miniatur Wunderland.
When I came in the whole apartment was dark, so I set my bag down in my room and went to check if anyone else was home. I found the kids in the living room, near the end of watching the final Harry Potter film for the sixth or seventh time.
Leonard ran to the kitchen and came back with a glass, which Lea then filled with water. Lea made some place for me on the sofa and I sit down, but Leonard stayed standing up and said, “Sorry, we don’t have much left, but do you want the last slice of Hawaii?”