The Story of Ella’s Lunch Launch
 

HEN PEOPLE ASK what my mother was like, I tell them the story of her lunch launch, because in that story so many of her best attributes show to good advantage—particularly her enthusiasm—and also because the lunch launch—Ella’s Lunch Launch—was a success, her only successful entrepreneurial venture, coming after a long string of failures that struck bottom with Ella’s Lacy Licks, an enterprise that was for a while known as Ella’s Ribbons of Dee-Lite.
    Throughout my childhood and adolescence my mother dreamed of going into business for herself.  This desire first began to manifest itself when I was very young, too young to understand that there was a motive for her yearning beyond wanting to make some money, but by the time I was thirteen or so I did understand.  I understood that she wanted recognition more than she wanted money.  She wanted to make people—in particular, my father—see that she could accomplish something, build a business from nothing and become a woman who was defined by a business rather than a woman who was defined by a husband who ran a garage, a son who salivated at the sight of a girl in a tight skirt, and a suburban tract house with a partially finished attic.  She wanted to make the world—or at least my father—think of her as Ella Piper Leroy, hairdresser, for example, rather than Ella Piper Leroy, housewife.
    My mother had many schemes for businesses and many dreams about their success, and many of her schemes and dreams got as far as the dinner table.  While my father and I ate, she would smoke and talk, nervously, laying out a plan for her audience of two, full of enthusiasm, until, in most cases, a moment came when her face fell, and she finished her proposal with her eyes down, as if the scheme were there on the tablecloth in front of her, falling apart before her eyes, shattering like the fragile ribbon candy that, at Christmastime, she liked to put out in dishes decorated with images of evergreen trees.
    Sometimes, though, a scheme survived the dinner-table test. Some survived because they were the sturdy, boring sort of undertaking that my mother never would have enjoyed pursuing, like a window-washing service, and others because she put them back together out of the broken bits and held them together with the force of her determination, as she did with her plan to make ribbon candy, package it, and ship it far and wide as Ella’s Ribbons of Dee-lite. 
    I think it was obvious to all of us, even to her, that ribbon candy must be made in a factory by machines especially designed to extrude sugar syrup in a continuous ribbon, fold it back upon itself uniformly, and snip it off in lengths that fit into boxes.  I know it was obvious to me, because I was a watcher of industrial documentary films, which were in those days purveyed to youngsters via television on Saturday mornings, as entertainment.  I knew, to name the first examples that come to mind, how Coffee-Toffee soda bottles were molded, filled, and packaged; how the glass for the bottles was made; how the caps for the bottles were cut from sheets of metal and printed and fluted and lined with a thin disk of cork; and how Coffee-Toffee soda itself was made, though the films stopped short of initiating me and the other early risers into the mysteries of the secret process that gave the soda its inimitable flavor; and I knew that all of these processes required intricate machines with precision parts that were polished to gleaming brightness and operated with uncannily accurate timing in a handsome industrial dance.
    Looking at her, smiling, tossing out ideas for a name for her ribbon candy, I felt the weight of her inevitable disappointment.  I was certain that she was going to find out that she couldn’t make ribbon candy, but she certainly wasn’t going to find it out from me.  Because I understood very well from personal experience the heavy emptiness that filled one’s heart when the words “you can’t” were spoken, I rejected after only the briefest consideration the thought that I might tell my mother that she was up against something that she probably could not accomplish without the aid of intricate machines.  I would not play the dark angel of defeat.  She wasn’t going to hear a discouraging word from my father, either.  He had given up trying to dissuade her from her schemes because he couldn’t stand the aftermath.  He had learned to let her fail rather than telling her that she would fail because the gloom that settled over the house when she merely failed on her own was a lighter and briefer gloom than the gloom that followed his telling her that she couldn’t do what she yearned to do, and so instead of saying “You can’t make ribbon candy,” he just shrugged and said, “Why not give it a try?”

Y FATHER WOULD BE HOME in two or three hours.  I think that I felt the pressure of that deadline more than my mother did, because she knew that his attitude toward her would be little changed by the fact that his kitchen was inside a sugar egg.  Both my mother and I had made messes before, but mine still made my father angry, while he had stopped being angry about my mother’s messes long ago.  He had a much more effective way of showing his annoyance with her now: disdain.  I could predict what he would do when he came home.   He would give the kitchen the once-over, deliver his opinion with a dismissive snort, refrain from saying “I told you so,” crack the sugar lace around the refrigerator door, open it, get a can of beer, and retire to the living room to watch television.  My mother would drop another notch in her own estimation.
    Disdain, contempt, dismissal—they all hurt much more than a display of anger.  I’m excluding violence from this calculation.  I never saw my father strike my mother, and I honestly think he never did, but he battered her by belittling her, and I had reached an age when I knew how she felt because I felt battered when he belittled me.  I was also at an age when I wanted to fight back.  I was growing, and all my juices were flowing, and I had developed a competitive tongue.  I’d begun to give back as good as I got, and I had begun to turn back on him the same abusive trio he turned on my mother and me: disdain, contempt, dismissal.
    “We’ve got to get this cleaned up,” I said to her, almost in a whisper, as if he might be somewhere nearby, listening.
    “I’ll do it,” she said, dispirited.  She looked around the room, and I could see what she felt from the way her shoulders drooped, and I winced at the thought of the load of contempt my father would be bringing home in a couple of hours.
    “We’ll both do it,” I said, and then, as if we were in a movie, one of the Western movies I watched at the Babbington Theater, in a one-room cabin on the plains, where a pioneer woman was going into labor, I added, “We’re going to need lots of hot water!”
    We fell into a frenzy of cleaning.  We worked without pausing, and we worked without talking.  Now and then we exchanged a glance.  I think each of us was checking to see whether the other was tiring.  Each time our glances met, we grinned and winked.  We had become conspirators, and we were enjoying ourselves.
    The closer six o’clock drew, the likelier it became that my father would pull into the driveway, and the thought that he would surprise us still at our work was beginning to send us into a panic.  My mother stopped working for a moment, stood up, and said to me, tentatively, “I’ve got an idea.”
    “Great,” I said.  “We need an idea.  What is it?”
    She told me, and it struck me as such a good idea that we put it into effect immediately.  We carried my father’s favorite chair out onto the front lawn.  We carried the table that stood beside it out there, too, and placed it beside the chair.  We carried the television set out and put it in place in front of the chair.  I ran the long extension cord that he used for his electric drill through a cellar window and plugged the set into it.  We carried a few more pieces of furniture out, and two small rugs, and by the time he came driving up, the effect was quite convincing.  I know that it was, because when my father got out of the car and walked across the lawn, he said, “Spring cleaning?”
    “Right!” said my mother.  “Peter’s helping me, but we didn’t get started until he got home from school, so we’re not quite finished.  You don’t mind sitting out here, do you?  It’s a nice night.”
    I came out the front door with six cans of beer in a bucket full of ice and set the bucket on the lawn beside my father’s chair.  I handed him an opener.  He sat in the chair and opened a can.  I turned the television on.
    “We won’t be much longer,” said my mother, and she and I went back inside to finish our work.
    At the door, I paused for a moment and stole a look at him.  He was sitting there in his chair in precisely the attitude he assumed every night when the chair was in its accustomed place in our living room, watching television as he always did, but his chair was not in its accustomed place, and neither was he, and that alteration of the ordinary arrangement of things had a wonderful consequence: he looked ridiculous.
    Just then, Mr. Morton came by, walking his chickens as he did every evening.  Raising chickens in the back yard was at that time and in that part of Babbington a popular hobby among adult males, and Mr. Morton had a flock of champion birds.  When he reached the end of our front walk, he stood there and worked his jaw without speaking.  My father squirmed in his chair.  I like to think that he was experiencing the unsettling feeling that he looked ridiculous in the eyes of the chicken champion of Babbington Heights.
    Finally, Mr. Morton spoke.  “Sitting out on the lawn, Bert?” he asked.
    My father snapped his head in Mr. Morton’s direction and said, “Spring cleaning.”
    “Uh-huh,” said Mr. Morton.  He looked up at me for a moment.  I shrugged and rotated my forefinger beside my head.  Mr. Morton nodded, gave a shake to the leashes on his chickens, and he and his little flock went on their way. 

FTER THE CANDY-MAKING FAILURE, my mother tried nothing else; she didn’t even talk about trying anything else.  She had been defeated.  She was finished.  One day when I came home from school, she was sitting at the dining-room table, looking straight ahead, weeping.  There was something so bleak and hopeless about the way she was just sitting there, with no obvious provocation for her weeping, no sad letter in front of her, no bandage on her finger, that I stopped inside the door, dumbstruck, immobilized, unable to go to her and ask her what was wrong, certainly unable to offer her any comfort, unable even to tiptoe through the kitchen and into the living room and leave her in private.
    Grieving, I have decided since then, was what she was doing, grieving for the loss of someone who had never existed: that Ella Piper Leroy whom she had hoped to become, a woman whose potential existence had depended on the possibility of success, on hope.
    If hope is like a breeze that lifts and lofts and carries us on when we hardly have the will to carry on otherwise (and it is), then the candy-making failure had taken the wind out of my mother’s sails.  She had lost hope, and having lost hope she had lost someone she had hoped to know someday, someone she had hoped would make her proud, as a mother hopes that a child will make her proud: she had lost Ella Piper Leroy, tycoon, child of her own ambition.
    When I saw her crying at the dining-room table, she was, I think, grieving over the death of that hoped-for self.  In her own mind’s eye, she could no longer imagine a future for herself that was different from and better than the present in which she found herself, so she had no future at all, and that was the end of her.
    I didn’t recognize that at the time.  I was too full of myself.  I was embarrassed by the sight of her, weeping there.  I suppose that she was embarrassed too, because she made a stab at pulling herself together, forced a smile in my direction, and shrugged.  I returned her false smile with one of my own and went upstairs and into my own cares and my own hopes and my own ambitions for my own little self.

ANY YEARS LATER, I had attained some small success.  I was about thirty-four.  I had taken over the authorship of a series of books for boys—the Larry Peters adventure series—and I was being paid fairly well for the tales I was churning out.  With some of the spoils I bought a classic car, a powerful Kramler V-12, gleaming white, redolent inside of rich leather and leaking brake fluid.  My parents had retired to a small house near but not on a small lake in a small town nowhere in New Hampshire.  When Albertine and I and the boys arrived in the Kramler, my mother was delighted by the sight of it.
    A few days after we had returned home, a gift from my mother arrived in the mail: a pair of driving gloves.  The gift card read, “To my son with a very special car.”  She had read the Kramler correctly; she understood what it had been designed and built to say, and she understood why I had bought it: to say that I was a success, and she thought of me as a successful person—which, I think, for her meant someone who had succeeded in defining himself.  At the time I thought it ridiculous that she assumed that I had defined myself as the driver of a powerful Kramler, that she thought I was someone who might want to define himself in that way, but, more than that, I felt sorry for her because I saw from her gift to me that she would have liked to have been someone who had earned herself a powerful Kramler.  Mark my words: I didn’t say that she would have liked to own a Kramler; I said that she would have liked to have been someone who had earned herself a Kramler.  She would have liked to have made herself into such a person.  She would have liked to have made herself into someone, someone she thought of as someone.

EFORE SHE DIED, I visited my mother in an intensive-care ward.  She was fettered by wires and tubes, bloated with accumulated fluids, barely able to speak.  She was dying of lung cancer brought on by regret, by the tens of thousands of cigarettes she had smoked while she sat in the dark, sipping mediocre wine and mourning the loss of her hope, mourning the spunky self who had chased so many harmless follies, the young and ambitious Ella Piper Leroy who had died years before. 
    If things had gone as they ought to have gone, we should have been able to talk about her success.  There should have been one business that finally succeeded, and we should have been able to reminisce about the crazy things that had happened while she was running it.  We should have had some laughs.  She should have been able to sigh and smile and shake her head in wonder at all that she had done, and she should have been able to say, “It was quite a ride.”
    Instead, she had almost nothing to say, and I had almost nothing to say to her—unless I talked about myself.  I retreated into that, but when I realized what I was doing I caught myself and we fell again into silence.
    I held her hand, and when the silence between us became embarrassing, I squeezed it and said that I would see her again the next day.  I didn’t.  She died in the night, as Ella Piper Leroy, housewife.

UST IT BE?  Must it be as it was when the way it was was wrong?  No.  Not while I’m around.  Time has made me see that I might have helped her.  Maybe all she needed was a sidekick.  All the cowboys I lionized as a little boy had sidekicks, descendants of Sancho Panza who carried the luggage of comic relief.  I should have learned from them the lesson that even the boldest of us needs a little help from a friend, needs somebody on his side, even if it’s a bumbling simpleton who lards the earth when he walks.  I could have been that comical sidekick, and if I had been, who’s to say that with me taking pratfalls by her side she might not have made a success of something? 
    That’s why, when people ask me about my mother, I don’t tell them about Ella’s Lacy Licks or any of her other failures; I tell them about Ella’s Lunch Launch.  I tell them how she bought a clam boat that was slowly sinking from the day she stepped aboard it; how, together, we repainted it in tropical colors, fitted it out with a rudimentary kitchen, rigged a canopy over the deck and flew pennants from a dozen poles; how we plied the bay selling chowder and sandwiches to vacationers and baymen; and how I kept the boat afloat all summer without ever letting her know that it was sinking.  I tell them about the mishaps and merriment; I tell them how my mother became known (not far and wide, but near and narrow, which was enough) as “Ella, who runs Ella’s Lunch Launch”; and I tell them how the lunch launch, in the fall, when I was back in school and unable to keep it pumped dry, sank.
    At the end of the story, my mother and I stand on a bulkhead at the edge of Bolotomy Bay looking down at the sunken boat, reminiscing about the crazy things that happened while she ran it, with me at her side as first mate, sous chef, bus boy, and sidekick.  When we have run out of stories, my mother puts her arm across my shoulders and gives me a squeeze.  She sighs and smiles, shakes her head and says, “It was quite a ride,” and I agree.

   Peter Leroy
   New York City
   December 24, 2000

I should like to see the custom introduced of readers who are pleased with a book sending the author some small cash token: anything between half-a-crown and a hundred pounds.  Authors would then receive what their publishers give them as a flat rate and their “tips” from grateful readers in addition, in the same way that waiters receive a wage from their employers and also get what the customer leaves on the plate.  Not more than a few hundred pounds—that would be bad for my character—not less than half-a-crown—that would do no good to yours.

Cyril Connolly, Enemies of Promise

Inflating a Dog is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author. 

Picador USA will publish Inflating a Dog in the summer of 2002.

For information about publication rights outside the U. S. A., audio rights, serial rights, screen rights, and so on, e-mail the author.