Tupperware Days

by Lisa Plantico Carlsson

She had spent her life waiting, and now, at 53, she wondered what for. A book she'd recently read suggested that waiting was a position of power; it determined the course of the object for which one waited. Margaret wasn't convinced.

Her days were all largely the same. The voices of Lisa and Sonny on 106.5 FM woke her up every morning, and as she dressed for work she sometimes chuckled at the silly jokes they made. Isn't that like Sonny, she'd shake her head as she poked silver balls through her earlobes, then would smile abashedly at her reflection for pretending to know him. She always felt shame when she developed growing familiarity with strangers, and it was only with embarrassment that she would admit to knowing such mundane details as the names and ages of the children of Sheila, the Safeway clerk who so often checked her items at 6:30 on Wednesdays when she went shopping.

Such traits were the signposts of old age, like switching to canned green beans and frozen entrees for convenience, or falling asleep in front of the TV. Margaret was determined to never follow the course of her mother, who stored all leftovers in dilapidated Cool Whip containers with peeling strips of masking tape identifying the contents. Bright stacks of sturdy Tupperware spoke to the greater order in Margaret's refrigerator, and it was with pride that she neatly printed food names on the clean white square labels that came with the set. "Pot roast and baby carrots," "corn on the cob": even the remnants of her meals spoke to their homestyle quality.

Making order filled in the days of waiting with carefully attended-to pocket calendars and closet space dividers. Margaret kept written records of her own weekly schedule, as well as the daily plans of her husband, Dan, and each of their three grown daughters--even Peggy, all the way in Nebraska. She didn't see her need to tabulate such details as being intrusive; it was simply a matter of common sense, and she saw to this duty with the same thoroughness with which she periodically rearranged the old bedrooms of her "girls," supplying the rooms with convenient storage bins or new shelving so they'd be comfortable should the need arise for any of her children to return home.

Margaret's own parents had reconverted her room to a den, and thirty years later she still found it distasteful to sit with her parents before the TV screen and watch its fluctuating light shine now blue, now white, upon the wild rose wallpaper she'd selected when she was thirteen. When her girl Kirsten was eight, she'd spilled grape juice on the soft pink carpet, further scarring the room. Margaret pursed her lips when she looked at the brown spot still visible, a mark that seemed indecent to her--in the room where she'd first dreamed, first whispered words of love over the telephone--like a menstrual stain upon silk sheets.

Margaret kept her daughters' rooms open, washing the sheets once a week to keep dust and mites from destroying their freshness.

In the mornings, Margaret listened to Sonny and Lisa, and bustled around the kitchen heating oatmeal for breakfast and tidying up the crumbs and dishes Dan left an hour earlier as he ran off to C & B Auto Body, where he gave estimates for car repair work. At 8:30, she opened her daily planner to the Notes section and waited for Sonny to recite local traffic conditions. With his smooth voice leading the way, she then mapped out the most effective route into the city and was out the door by twenty to the hour.

Margaret worked as the receptionist at Laggerty Mutual. They liked her mature looks and dependable nature. For sixteen years she'd been employed by them with nothing but nickels and dimes for raises and one vacation week a year, and not once had she issued a word of complaint. She arrived promptly at nine, her permed brown hair neat and close to her head, and a silk shirt tucked into a well-ironed navy blue or taupe skirt. Never any flashy jewelry or over-powering perfume, she gave an aura of trustworthiness and reliability to nervous clients worrying before the prospect of selecting life insurance.

Every noon, Margaret knocked on an associate's door to notify her she was going to lunch, then she marched her navy pumps across the street to order a club sandwich and iced tea at Denny's, chatting--always reluctantly at first--with the waitress (with whom she was, naturally, on a first-name basis). For about six weeks two years ago, Candace, a temp who had briefly filled a position at Laggerty, joined her on her outing. Margaret often thought of Candace as she sat in her booth blotting the bacon strips in her sandwich with a napkin (it had been Candace who warned her of the abundance of such grease). Margaret missed their talks, and couldn't help feeling a bit bored sometimes as she meticulously chewed her food for the requisite 30 bites (another tip from Candace), and wondered what adventures her old companion was up to. Candace had had a boyfriend named Larry who was cheating on her with some floozy from Topeka, Kansas--one of those on-line encounters, which made Margaret glad she still stood firm against using the Internet herself. Candace had complained often of Larry's infidelity, and was always on the brink of leaving him. She planned to do it in a dramatic way, writing her farewell in red lipstick on the kitchen floor.

Margaret had gone out and bought a tube of lipstick--fresh strawberry--after hearing Candace's story, and she often entertained herself with pictures of Dan's reaction should he come home to find bright berry streaks marring the pearl linoleum in their kitchen. "Gone fishing--for a better sea," she might write, mocking the scrawled notes her husband left as he took off for the coast with his cronies. Or how about the daring, rather risqué: "Thanks for a good time." That one left her slightly breathless, coming as it would after thirty-four years of marriage! She wondered if Candace had finally left Larry, and what the kitchen floor had said if she did.

In the evenings, after the supper dishes had been carefully washed and put away, Margaret would sit and pretend to read as her husband flipped through channels on the TV. Thirty-four years; it had been a long time. She hated feeling that way. It was as though all the waiting, all the dreams that had filled her mind in her younger years, had come to nothing but the anticlimactic reality of her life. Thoughts of the past nurtured Margaret in such moments. She recalled the years of her children's youth, and sometimes she missed the greasy fingerprints on the car windows, or the squished Cheerios and crumb-covered pennies that found their way behind the couch cushions. She used to scold them for their poor respect for property; now, as she sat in the living room among the tidy arrangement of knickknacks and furniture, Margaret found something lacking in the neatness of it all. She had once longed for a home straight from the pages of Better Homes and Gardens. There was nothing to interfere with such ideals now, and somehow that knowledge was disturbing.

"Is that coffee I smell brewing?" Dan's eyes remained glued to the TV screen as he directed the question to his wife.

Margaret started from her reverie; her body had already risen automatically before his question even registered. There was no coffee brewing, but she saw no reason to disclose that evident fact to him, only began to shovel miniature heaps into the pot on the kitchen counter. I have measured out my life with coffee spoons. T.S. Eliot's line from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" came to Margaret as the coffee began to percolate. His words seemed to speak to her now far more than they had in college. Only instead of the minute order of the brown plastic scoops she used for coffee, she saw herself tossing years aside like generous scoops of laundry detergent. With bleach action, she thought, thinking of her need to always present a happy face to the world. What an awful lot had changed since she left college in her freshman year to marry Dan! They'd done all right for themselves--had managed to achieve the "happiness" of the middle-class lifestyle for which they'd hoped. Yet Margaret still caught herself thinking that life--real life--surely waited around the corner.

Margaret clung to the culture she'd enjoyed as a child as if it were a beacon showing her the way to life. On weekends when Dan left to go fishing, Margaret sometimes drove to the city and wandered through art exhibits at the museum. She'd meet her daughters there for lunch as frequently as possible, but she was always worried that she was being a nuisance to them, and the conversations remained stilted. Margaret thought it was a shame Peggy, to whom she felt closest, lived all the way in Nebraska. She'd said the same when Kirsten, her youngest, had gone 400 miles away for college, and when Susan, the eldest, had worked with a cousin in Washington for a summer; her daughters remembered this, though she didn't.

Margaret could wander museums forever, long after her daughters had pleaded other engagements and departed. Her favorite art form was paintings, and she found especially compelling those portraits of people whose concentration was turned away from the artist. In a recent Reader's Digest, Margaret had read an article on Andrew Wyeth, and in particular, on his painting, "Christina's World." The painting showed the image of a polio-stricken woman pulling herself through a field of dry grass toward a house off in the distance. Her resilience was apparent in the taut musculature of the woman's arms and back, clear even through the faded pink fabric of her dress. In "Christina's World" the focus was on the attainment of a goal--arriving with good time to the house. In "Margaret's World" the focus too often was on the ordered little nest she and her husband had created, a well-drawn portrait lacking in life. She longed for something to shake them both up.

Getting ready for work at the same time each morning, Margaret accompanied her routine with the laughter and buzz of Sonny and Lisa's A.M. Talk Radio Show. Every so often, she imagined what the consequences might be of writing the pair an eloquent letter of admiration, chock-full of witticisms matching their own. Suppose they were to invite her down to the station? Such things did happen, in other people's lives... Margaret could sit in the recording studio with them, and somehow things would be different as the three of them engaged in repartee. Possibilities might emerge to save her from the death sentence of waiting she'd cast upon her 53-year-old frame. And why shouldn't something happen in her life?

Margaret walked slowly over to her dressing table, where she kept an elegant box of monogrammed notecards wrapped in tissue paper. Suitable for special occasions she'd thought when she purchased them. The cards hadn't been touched since Susan's wedding five years earlier. Lifting the box from the drawer, her eyes caught for a moment on a bit of gold gleaming through her collection of handkerchiefs. A small smile crossed her face as she fished out the tube of lipstick. So silly that she had kept it; the color was such a ridiculous shade of red.

Playfully she dabbed a bit on her lips, and arched her eyebrows questioningly at her reflection in the mirror. Perhaps it wasn't so bad, applied with moderation. It seemed to bring a color to her face that she hadn't seen in years. Maybe she's never use it on the kitchen floor, but there was no reason for it to sit in her dresser, growing stale. Margaret placed the tube on top of the table's glass surface, with the collection of perfumes she'd received over countless birthdays, Christmases and Mother's Days.

Getting down to business, she then picked up a pen and opened the box of notecards. The tissue paper crinkled between her fingers as she pulled out one of the ivory cards and placed it before her. There were many different ways one could begin, but Margaret decided to go for the personal. Dear Sonny and Lisa, she began, resisting a glance at the clock. Margaret was going to be late to work, and somehow she didn't mind in the least.

The Author

Lisa Plantico Carlsson lives in southern Sweden with her husband, one-year-old son and a house full of turtles. In the winters, they try to escape the cold and ice by heading to Lisa's native Oregon to bask in the raindrops. Their dreams of retiring young in Hawaii have yet to be realized.