Page 58 of Playworld
“You like to read so much,” Oren pressed, “why don’t you go into publishing?”
“Shut your trap,” Mom said to him. “And you too,” she said to Dad. “And you,” she said to me, “don’t look at me like that!” When I said nothing, she flung her wadded napkin onto her plate, knocked over her chair when she stood.
Oren waited until he heard her lock our bathroom door and the faucets squeak, the running water canceling our noise. “My friend Betsy’s mom works at Random House,” he whispered. “She has an office with a secretary and gets any book they publish forfree.”
“Mrs. Potts,” I said to Dad, “works at Smith Barney.”
Dad glumly shook his head, imitating the British actor John Houseman: “They make money the old-fashioned way,” he said. “Theyearnit.”
He glanced at Oren and then at me, and he couldn’t help himself: he started to laugh. Which gave us permission to laugh too. After we fell silent, Oren, with some hesitance, said to Dad, “Whydon’tyou do jingles?”
Now it was Dad who pushed away from the table.
“Because,” he yelled, “you have to saynotosomething!” Then he marched to the front closet, thrust his arms through his coat sleeves, and, upon leaving, slammed the door.
Perhaps, I have often reflected, singing was for Dad somehow even more sacrosanct than acting and was not to be soiled by commercialism. In point of fact, Dad did perform one jingle for a local toy store. In it, a couple of kids were featured playing with a racecar set, their smiles followed by its bargain-basement price, and then comes the song. The bouncing ball, which in the commercial was a globe with a striped hatand smiley face, compressed as it hopped atop each word’s syllable. To this day, I occasionally catch myself happily humming the melody and then have to suppress the urge to burst out singing it the same way the chorus of kids perform it—jubilantly:
Playworld!
A world of toys.
Great for girls.
And great for boys.
Playworld!
Where prices go…
And then Dad sings the descending notes down to the deepest C:
So low,
low,
low,
low,
llllllllloooooooooow…
Oren and I identified his voice the first time we saw the commercial. It ran during afternoon cartoons, and when we told Dad we’d heard him, he’d said offhandedly, “They give me a fifty percent discount on all their merch,” a fact which, true or not, immediately slivered into Oren’s mind.
“Can you take us shopping there?” he asked.
“It’s all the way in Paramus.”
“What about the one in Hackensack?”
“That’s far too.”
“There’s also a store in Syosset.”
“That’s past Queens.”
“So’s Hackensack,” Oren said, “depending on which direction you’re going.”
“What’s the rush already?”