Weak Tea and Toast

Standard fare for anything that caused us to miss school but didn't require a doctor visit was weak tea and dry toast. Along with two aspirin and a day in bed, so my mother believed, would cure anything that ailed us. Doctors still made house calls in those days, arriving in three piece suits and carrying black satchel bags, stethoscopes carelessly hung around their necks like honor badges. There were times when the simple threat of of a visit was enough to initiate a rapid, almost miraculous recovery.

Of course it also meant a day of morning game shows and afternoon soap operas while waiting for my tipsy mother to cross the line into a full blown alcoholic haze - by supper time, when my daddy would take over, the tea was usually cold and the toast blackened - he would worriedly take our temperatures, fuss over the bed linens and then open a can of soup and brown an English muffin, maybe even soft boil and serve a mushed up egg. It was what my mother disapprovingly called "coddling" even when the culprit turned out to be a six week case of mononucleosis and I was briefly hospitalized, even when my youngest brother's belly ache and fever progressed to appendicitis and emergency surgery. Malingering was a favorite diagnosis in our house and caretaking a sick child interfered with her daily routine. Being sick is a past time with them, she complained to her friend Betty next door, You'd think I had nothing better to do than watch over them. Feeling particularly aggrieved at the callousness of this remark, the fact being that both my brothers were confined to bed with the mumps, an illness even the most creative child could scarcely manufacture plus ( and probably more relevant) ) the general feeling that I was next in line, I repeated it to my daddy. The results were predictable - a highly satisfying domestic explosion between my parents later that night - and more than that, I was given into the care of my grandmother the following day and spent my own miserable bout with the virus on a diet of ice cream and ginger ale and any television program I wanted. As outcomes went, I'd had worse.

In the long term, of course, nothing actually changed. By the following year when chicken pox struck all of us at the same time, the weak tea and toast therapy was invoked with a vengeance and television was outlawed for the duration - we were all too unhappy and too sick to complain at this outrage and spent a dismal week being slowly driven mad with itching, restless sleep and boredom - my mother was unaccountably cheerful, climbing the stairs and delivering our meals, fluffing pillows and predicting a return to health any day, all with a detached smile and a veiled satisfaction that made us wince. She likes this! I wailed to my daddy, She's happy we're sick! For a brief moment he looked stricken at this accusation then he recovered. Don't be silly, he said sternly but I had seen it in his eyes and I remember suspecting that just for a second he had almost believed me. Almost.