Back the Same Day!

Back the same day!

Every time we’d pull into the driveway, my father would cheerfully exclaim “Back the same day!”  I think it was a reference to an advertising slogan back in the early days of the automobile; one of his uncles in upstate New York had become a millionaire selling the newfangled horseless carriages.  My mother was always at the wheel because my father didn’t drive.  Why my father didn’t have a driver’s license  was a mystery to me, but as a kid I chalked it up to being just one more thing that was weird about our family.  Everybody else’s dad drove cars; Suzanne Bryzynski’s dad drove a fire truck.  Other dads could fix things, like flat bicycle tires and loose boards in a tree house; I can’t imagine my dad knowing which end of the hammer to use.  He was able to tear himself away from his books and Beethoven recordings long enough to do manly chores like mow the lawn in summer, hang storm windows in the early fall, swap out the old furnace filters for clean news ones in winter.  But other than that, he was fairly useless around the house.

Although he was the family breadwinner, my mother handled the family finances.   She doled out an allowance from his own paycheck, which he continually complained was too small.  On Saturdays we’d walk downtown together to do errands -- first a trip to the library where we’d return the stack of books checked out the previous Saturday, then onward to spend his allowance on sundries at Osco’s Drug Store, and once a month or so get a haircut.  Last but not least  we’d stop for a treat before walking home.  In summer we’d get ice cream cones.  In winter we’d stomp snow off our boots in the lobby of  the little train station downtown and feed change into the hot drink machine, cocoa for me, coffee for him. 


As an adult looking back on this situation, the strangest aspect of my mother’s control over the family purse strings was her insistence on filling out the annual tax forms, an occasion of high tension, even in the sanest of families. In mine it felt like Armageddon.   Every April all the receipts with numbers to be entered and  pages of forms to be filled out were scattered across the dining room table like an explosion. I could hear may parents bickering and I knew to tiptoe softly into the kitchen.  This annual ritual situation was insanely weird considering 1) my mother had no particular accounting skills and could have easily demurred from the task, thus saving herself and her entire family from grief; and 2) my father was a professor of tax law at a major university and thus uniquely qualified to fill out the  forms for our family‘s uncomplicated one-income tax situation.  In fact, my father had been an attorney for the IRS in Washington, D.C., where my three older brothers were born.  His claim to fame was having authored the original  federal short form, “My bestseller,“ he liked to call it. 

It’s safe to say my father was not a confrontational man, otherwise he would have marched down to the bank and cashed his own damn paycheck, and while he was at it go about the business of getting a driver’s license.  But for reasons never explained, nor discussed, this didn’t  happen.  Instead, my father had his revenge by saying things like “Back the same day!” which he knew pissed my mother off.  He’d say it in such a cheerful tone of voice she knew she’d come off as the bad guy if she told him stuff it. 

His other favorite catch phrase came at the end of every meal eaten at home.  “I guess that’s all we’re going to get!“ he’d exclaim cheerfully before escaping to his pipe and the stack of reading that awaited in the living room.  My mother’s retaliation was to serve him terrible meals.  Knowing he loved vegetables with sauces, she’d serve gooey masses of matter cooked to transparency in a pressure cooker adorned with a little salt.  Most entrees came out of a can or the freezer; desserts came ready made in package.  “Salad” meant green Jello atop a leaf of iceberg lettuce.    After he declared his nightly “I guess that’s all we’re going to get,” my mom and I would set about the task of clearing the table, tossing the pot pie tins in the trash and loading silverware into the dishwasher.  “Never get married,” she’d hiss at me.

As my parents danced their passive-aggressive tango, never confronting whatever hurts, resentments or disappointments that simmered just below the surface of their interactions with each other I felt guilty.  If I could be a better daughter, maybe they’d get along better!  I worked hard to get A’s at school, obediently keep my room tidy, and not play my Beatles records when dad was at home in hopes that the air we breathed would cease to crackle with unresolved tension.  When these strategies inevitably failed I made myself as small and unobtrusive as possible, letting my mind wander into Wonderland and Narnia and places where little girls had adventures free from parental strife. 

When I was still too young to be left at home in the evening when my mom drove to the campus to pick my dad up after work, I’d take a book along with me in the back seat, steeling myself for the moment we’d pull into the driveway and my dad would say -- sing it with me now -- “Back the same day!“



Because my father -- his name was Roger -- was a professor, he had the same vacation times as the kids.  Of course he loved to travel by car.   Which meant that every summer and again at Christmas time we'd pile into the car and head somewhere.  My mother did all the driving.  By the time my brothers were old enough to drive they were old enough to refuse to go on these trips.  So one by one I lost my traveling companions until it me, my parents and their resentment toward each other driving around inside a Pontia cCatalina with my mother at the wheel.  We traveled through the rural south where I saw little girls my own age living by the road in shotgun shacks;  when we stopped at a park for a picnic lunch I  wanted to drink from the “Colored Only” fountain because I thought the water would look like a rainbow.  We crossed the border into to Canada, where my eldest brother, Roger, Jr., had gone into hiding to escape the draft during Viet Nam war, my mother giving me strict instructions not to contradict her in front of the border guard when she lied about our destination.   The best was New York City where my father took me to Macy’s in Herald Square and bought me a hot pink paisley paper dress.


One summer we broke tradition and  took the train to California to visit my mother’s sister.  I was about 6, which would have made my brother Ed 12 or 13.  He insisted on wearing his Boy Scout uniform the whole time.  To keep us out of her hair, our mother handed us a box of Fizzies, a product probably so toxic it no longer exists; the tablets were  like Alka-Seltzer crossed with Kool-Aid.  Ed and I ran gleefully to the drinking fountain  in the corridors outside the rest rooms, conveniently located outside the realm of  parental purview.  Instead of following the instructions to dissolve the Fizzy tablet in a glass of water, we’d each pop one in our mouths.  Our tongues burned, our teeth turned psychedelic  hues of red or purple or whatever  fruit flavor the particular tablet purported to emulate, then, for the underpants-wetting coup de grace, an endless stream of foam erupted out of our mouths.


When we’d return home from these family trips, my dad refrained from his usual chorus, perhaps largely  because the statement would be logically false since we were often away for weeks at a time.  But thankfully these trips also diffused whatever emotional time bombs were ticking beneath the surface of my parent’s marriage, and for a brief time we’d be a united, peaceful, if tired, nuclear family unit.