Erma in Bomburbia

By John Skow

COVER STORY

For a survivor of housework and motherhood, laughter is still the best revenge

Notice: Car-pool moms entered in the U-Haul Mother-of-the-Year brake-off should complete the following literary quiz. Answers must be written in eyebrow pencil, and nuttiness counts,

1) For ten points, and a year's supply of mental floss, what American philosopher, whose latest book has been ensconced on the New York Times best seller list for 40 weeks, described the stance of a pregnant woman as "like a kangaroo wearing Earth Shoes"?

2) Who first defined the contribution of American mothers to the psychological well-being of their children as "guilt: the gift that keeps on giving"?

3) From whom did Tocqueville, while touring American suburbs, steal his famous one-liner that "the grass is always greener over the septic tank"? Hint: Henry David Thoreau is a good guess, but wrong.

4) What noted existentialist and television celebrity, when asked in supermarket parking lots whether she is the legendary Erma Bombeck, blushes prettily, lowers her gaze and says, "No, I'm Ann-Margret, but thank you anyway "?

"I'll be honest," says Bombeck (for it is indeed she, the syndicated star humorist of 900 papers in the U.S. and Canada, and the baggy-toreador-pants clown of ABC'S Good Morning America), "when I started, I thought I was squirrelly. I thought it was just me. After the first columns, everyone on the block confessed it was them too." Those early columns, written in Centerville, Ohio, back in the early '60s, were not quite Corinthian, but they sure were Ermaic. Their message was that housework, if it is done right, can kill you. It was that the women who kept house in the happy hunting ground called suburbia were so lonely that they held meaningful conversations with their tropical fish. It was that "you become about as exciting as your food blender. The kids come in, look you in the eye, and ask you if anybody's home."

The message has not changed in substance, although many of the women she wrote about 20 years ago have gone on to divorces, master's degrees and careers, and Bombeck and her husband are now the wealthy proprietors not of an $18,000 tract house near Dayton but of a lavish hacienda on a hilltop near Phoenix. "Women around the world are coming to the point where they are looking at their domestic situations and saying, 'My God, I'm going crazy, it's climbing-the-wall time,' " says Bombeck. She is 57 now ("somewhere between estrogen and death," she mutters); her three children are grown and flown, and the elegant white walls of her fine house do not have crayon marks or grape jelly on them. But motherhood is a sentence without parole--have some guilt with your chicken soup; eat, eat!--and Bombeck and her fans have no trouble understanding each other. "I could move up to Alaska," she says, "where the nearest neighbor is 300 miles away, get there by dog sled, walk into the cabin, pour a cup of coffee and then hear her say, 'These kids are driving me crazy.' "

Dropping in is what Bombeck does. Three times a week in the newspapers, and twice more on television, she plays the nation's dingbatty neighbor, who comes in the back door without knocking and cheers everyone up by saying, "Never mind the mess here, honey, let me tell you about world-class squalidness." And then yarns away, maybe, about babies so wet that their diapers give off rainbows (a Phyllis Diller line she loves to steal). Or about her husband, the football watcher, who sits in front of the tube "like a dead sponge surrounded by bottle caps" until "the sound of his deep, labored breathing puts the cork on another confetti-filled evening." About her schoolboy son who flunked lunch. About her washing machine, which eats one sock in every pair; her kids ask where the lost ones go, and she tells them that they go to live with Jesus. About how, when one kid ate an unknown quantity of fruit on a supermarket expedition, she offered to weigh him and pay for everything over 53 Ibs. About why it is all right to store useless leftovers in the refrigerator: "Garbage, if it's made right, takes a full week." About how young mothers want desperately to talk to someone who isn't teething, and the woeful results when they try to generate conversation with those lumps, their husbands, by asking, " 'What kind of a day did you have dear?' One husband reportedly answered by kicking the dog, another went pale and couldn't find words, another bit his necktie in half . . ."

This is classic Bombeck, the wild exaggeration compressed into the stinging one-liner that only slightly overstates the awfulness of the truth. You don't think husbands and kids are that bad? Listen, let me tell you about bad. "After 30 years of marriage, I felt like a truss in a drugstore window." You think that's-overstated? Let me tell you what it's like to be a working mother, "racing around the kitchen in a pair of bedroom slippers, trying to quick-thaw a chop under each armpit . . ." Shared responsibilities? "Transporting children is my husband's 26th favorite thing; it comes somewhere between eating lunch in a tearoom and dropping a bowling ball on his foot." Listen, let me tell you. . .

Trench warfare of this kind is waged not against men and kids, but against loneliness and self-pity. The quick, hit-'em-again-with-another-joke style fits the desperate nature of the combat. The young mother who reads it may have a degree in psychology from Michigan State, but as she cleans up after the puppy while trying to separate two children who are fighting over a linty piece of bubble gum, she may not be in the mood for compound-complex sentences. She may smile over a column by Art Buchwald, the master of the discovered absurdity, or one of Russell Baker's elegantly sane demonstrations that the world is crazy. But if she enlists in an army, it is likely to be Bombeck's. Am I really down on the kitchen floor with an old pair of Jockey shorts doing this? Yes, and there's Bombeck with pork chops under her arms. Such realizations (epiphanies, a James Joyce scholar would call them) explain Bombeck's syndication in those 900 papers, the wild success of her seven books, and reader loyalty that does not stop short of fanaticism. No doubt they also explain her eight-year run on Good Morning America, where her appearances are consistently cheerful but not so sharp or funny as her columns. Bombeck's fans want Bombeck, and they are prepared to excuse home movies.

Her self-caricature, the rhinoceroid slob in housecoat and curlers who hasn't seen her feet since grade school, is not even a fun-house mirror image of reality. She is a good-looking, brown-haired woman (though the hair color varies according to whim) who is, if not gaunt, at any rate acceptably trim at 5 ft. 2 in. and 127 Ibs. Is it a surprise that her daughter Betsy, 30, and her sons Andrew, 28, and Matthew, 25, have lost their baby teeth? And that her husband is not a football-stupefied turnip but rather an articulate, quick-minded fellow? Bill Bombeck retired in 1978 after a successful career as a school administrator, and now manages their income of $500,000 to $1 million a year. He is more likely to be found jogging than watching the tube, and four years ago he ran the Boston Marathon in the creditable time of 3 hr. 29 min. Not all of the one-line zappers come from her side of the table; Bill will breeze into the house and announce with a big smile that he has just been to the library and that all of her books were in. She replies that he looked like a dead fish after his last road race and that he had better slow down. "You don't understand," she says. "I'm too old to shop around. You're it." The strong affection between the two is evident.

There is a hint of where the columns come from when Bombeck is persuaded to talk about herself. "My life story?" she says. "Fifteen minutes top. You're looking at shallow. I'm just not that deep. You're looking at a bundle of insecurity. I always think that everything good is going to evaporate and disappear overnight. I am the quietest person at the party. I position myself at the chip dip and don't leave all night. I still have a very ordinary, simple person trapped in this rich, gorgeous, successful body." The joke is practiced and sure, but she does not want her listener to miss her point, so she spells it out. "The whole thrust of my existence is that I'm ordinary." It seems important to her to believe this. Another joking statement of the theme: "Everyone thinks of ordinary as some kind of skin disease." Then she quotes the sort of thing she says when she gives a commencement speech: "Most of you are going to be ordinary. You are not going to the moon. You'll be lucky to find the keys to your car in the back parking lot. But some of you are going to be great things to yourselves. You are going to be the best friend someone ever had . . ."

The journey that did not lead Bombeck to the moon began in Dayton, and the date could be set accurately enough as June 4, 1936. She was nine, and that was the day her father, a crane operator named Cassius Fiste, died of a heart attack at 42. "One day you were a family," she recalls, "living in a little house at the bottom of a hill. The next day it was all gone." The furniture, including Erma's bed and dresser, was immediately repossessed, and her half sister went off to live with her natural mother. Erma and her mother, 25-year-old Erma Fiste, shared a bedroom in her grandmother's house, and each day Mother Erma would get up at 5 a.m., fix breakfast for her daughter, see that she was dressed for school, and then leave in time to work the 7 a.m. shift at the Leland Electric factory. An adult observer would have seen a spunky young widow doing her best in bad times, but not until years later did Erma think of her mother's tough-minded energy as wise or heroic. What she felt at the time was a daily desertion. When her mother married a moving-van operator, Albert ("Tom") Harris, two years later, Erma gave him the classic drop-dead greeting: "If you think you're going to take my father's place, you're crazy." His attitude, she says, was "This kid needs sitting on." Eventually Erma and Tom made their adjustment. The incredible self-centeredness of children, normal and natural but often savagely cruel, has been a consistent theme in her humor.

When her daughter showed signs of shyness and loneliness, Mother Erma signed her up for tap-dancing lessons as therapy, then took her to an audition for a Kiddie Revue at a local radio station. Erma stayed on the program for nearly eight years, tap dancing and singing. "She was quite a little hoofer," says her mother, who still has Erma's signed song sheets for On the Good Ship Lollipop and I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter. Bombeck says it is obvious that the wrong Erma broke into show biz. When her mother, now a lively 73, began to appear with her on talk shows, Bombeck would tell the producers, "Don't worry about Mamma not talking. Worry about her taking over the show."

Which is exactly what she does. Mother Erma, who lives with her husband in nearby Sun City, admits that she "never had a sense of humor growing up. But as I get older, I get crazier. Me and Erma are both sort of silly together. The humor helped us to get closer. We began to see life as it is and not take it so seriously."

At Emerson Junior High in Dayton, Bombeck started writing a humor column for a school newspaper called The Owl. Says Bill Bombeck: "The format hasn't changed a lot. You're talking about someone who has been writing a personal column since she was twelve or 13 years old." Bombeck had been fairly offhanded about singing and dancing, but wising off in print was the best thing since soaping windows at Halloween. A couple of years later she was at it again, clowning about shoplifting, clearance sales and the lunch menu for the newsletter of Rike's department store, where she worked to pay college expenses. "You can't imagine how it fractured those people," she says now. "I knew exactly what I wanted to do. God, I wanted to write. That's all I wanted to do. I really loved the exaggeration. I still write about passing my varicose veins off as textured stockings."

Her pursuit of a college education took her through uncertain territory. Middle-class teenagers of the time went on to college from high school the way they went to the drive-in for frozen custard and French fries. Everyone enrolled somewhere, and no one thought much about it. But Bombeck was working class, the first person in her family's history even to graduate from high school. College was not seen as a necessity for many young women, or even as especially desirable. "Your goals were supposed to be modest," she recalls. "If you were a girl, you either got a job and paid board, or you got married." She took typing and shorthand at a vocational school and worked as a copygirl at the Dayton Herald to meet expenses. (Bill Bombeck worked at the morning Journal as a copy boy.) Erma saved enough money to begin courses at Ohio University, in Athens, but after a semester she was broke again. She returned to Dayton, got the department-store job and enrolled at the University of Dayton, the Roman Catholic school where Bill was a student.

Living at home and paying her own way, Bombeck made it through college in four years, including three sessions of summer school. The experience was not rich in what is usually thought of as college life, but she got the degree, and she did it on her own. In a second profound act of independence, she converted at 22 from the United Brethren Church to Roman Catholicism. "I saw something in it I wanted to have," she says. "There is something very soothing about the whole thing. A love of God is easier for me to accept than the fear." She remains a believer, who says, quirkily, "I never laugh when I pray. That's God's turn." Like many Catholics, however, she is troubled by doctrinal issues affecting birth and reproduction. She agrees with the church prohibition of abortion but cannot accept strictures against birth control. "The group I ran with would have six, seven, eight kids and be drowning underneath. Let's face it, the earth cannot afford this Catholicism."

The Dayton Herald took on a gifted but erratic recruit after Bombeck graduated from the university. As a reporter, she recalls, "I was terrible at straight items. When I wrote obituaries, my mother said the only thing I ever got them to do was die in alphabetical order." Even with her shorthand, she says, "I could never get the knack of listening and taking notes at the same time." She would get excited and forget to write things down, and "everyone I interviewed ended up sounding like me. I did that with Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Eisenhower." The idea of Eleanor Roosevelt sounding like Erma Bombeck clearly had its bizarre appeal, but before anything truly lunatic could come of it, Erma quit the paper for good in 1953. She and Bill, by then a struggling high school social studies and American history teacher, had been married four years, and, she says, "I was sick of working. Putting on pantyhose every morning is not just whoopee time. My dream was to putter around the house, learn how to snap beans, put up curtains and bake bread." The young couple adopted Betsy, and Erma, who had learned domesticity as a child, returned to the home, an event that was to prove only slightly less momentous than Douglas MacArthur's return to the Philippines.

As everyone who has made the mad leap into parenthood knows, it is not the first child but the second whose arrival skews life into a grotesque caricature of its former civility. When Bombeck was several months pregnant with Andrew, the family moved to a tract development a few miles from Dayton that she was to satirize as "Suburbian Gems." Its real name is Centerville. The Bombecks lived on Cushwa Drive ("probably named for some dentist") in a house like all the others except for one prized interior feature, a $1,500 "two-way" fireplace, and on the outside, a front door they painted red so that Mother Erma and Tom Harris could find them when they visited.

None of the residents of Centerville, least of all the Bombecks, thought they were doing anything hilarious as they mowed their lawns and carted their kids to Cub Scout meetings. Bill tinkered around the house, and pieced out his teacher's salary by painting houses and working at the post office on school vacations. Erma, he says, was always repainting or redecorating, moving the furniture around. There was, of course, a septic tank, and in the summer, says Erma, "you could see that little sucker sink into the ground and you'd think, 'There goes another $400.' " But there weren't many one-liners: "Who was there to listen?"

By an odd chance, the family in the house across the street was that of a young radio broadcaster, Phil Donahue, with five growing children. Donahue, an old friend now, whose morning TV appearances bring housework to a halt across the country, confirms that Bombeck was by no means the neighborhood clown. She and Bill, he says, were among the most hardworking of the development's house-proud do-it-yourselfers. All the houses had Early American furniture, including the inevitable rocker with a cushion tied to the back. The idea of Bombeck as a hopelessly disorganized housewife "is, at the very least, highly exaggerated. When you went to Erma's place, you never had to step over dirty underwear. At least in the evenings."

The pressure that was to fizz through the crazy columns was building, however. Listen to Bombeck, who wanted to give her kids the secure childhood she had missed: "I was overwhelmed. You get from your mother what things should be. I'm killing myself. We all did. Are you ready for this? I'm sitting there at midnight bending a coat hanger, putting nose tissue on it to make a Christmas wreath for the door. You know what it looks like? It looks like a coat hanger with tissue that is going to melt when it rains. It's a desperation you cannot imagine. I had a husband who worked at his job until 7 and 8 p.m. taking care of other people's children. That's when I remember reading Jean Kerr, who would sit out in her car and hide, reading the car-manual section on tire pressure. It's ridiculous. The whole thing is ridiculous." Then a deep breath: "It's the core of laughter. If you can't make it better, you can laugh at it."

Laughter: "If Mary had lived on our block, we would have said, 'Of course she has time to go to the dentist. She only has Jesus.' "

Making it better, sort of: "It is not as good as anyone, including your mother, promised it would be. It is also as good as it is ever going to get. And no matter what you do, no one is ever going to thank you."

Why, in the early '60s, she began writing columns: "I was too old for a paper route, too young for Social Security and too tired for an affair." This archetypal wisecrack is, after her heartfelt growl about the overmeticulous neighbor who waxes her driveway, probably the best known of Bombeck's nifties. It has a dead-on, chisel-it-on-my-tombstone truthfulness. But for the moment, no one paid much attention to her capering. She did a column a week, at $3 each, for the Kettering-Oakwood Times, a suburban weekly. Her desk was a piece of plywood supported by cinder blocks in the Bombeck bedroom. Her participation in the stately procession of English literature stopped before the family came home, and the shoe-leather minute steaks and ketchup always hit the table on time. "Mom never missed a dinner because of a deadline," Son Andrew says now. Given Bombeck's feelings about the enterprise--"Why take pride in cooking it, when they don't take pride in eating it?"--this is high tribute.

Bombeck turned out zingers in the wilderness, earned her $3 a week and tried not to spend it all in one place. Then in 1965 things began to move fast. The merged Dayton Journal Herald offered her a twice-a-week column, and only three weeks later, the Newsday syndicate took her up. The phrase is exact; in journalistic terms, syndication is equivalent to ascending to heaven on a pillar of cloud. By the end of her first year, she had 36 papers, including Newsday, the Denver Post, the Minneapolis Star and the Atlanta Constitution. She began to be recognized in supermarkets. One day in 1967, Bombeck remembers, she was kneeling on the floor of the bathroom in Centerville, laying a piece of shag carpet around the toilet, when she heard Arthur Godfrey talking about her first book, At Wit's End, on his radio program. This lady probably lives in an apartment in New York City, Godfrey said. Bombeck wrote to him, confessing the grisly truth, and soon became a regular guest on his program.

By this time the women of Bomburbia were changing. The housewives of Cushwa Drive had divorced or taken jobs, and Bombeck, somewhat ironically, was almost the last stay-at-home mom left on the block. The winds of feminism had swept through town, ruffling feathers. One evening, Bombeck recalls, she drove into town with some other women to hear a lecture by Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique. "She started talking about yellow wax buildup and all that, and all of us started laughing." Friedan shook her finger and scolded them; these were supposed to be demeaning concerns, not funny ones. Bombeck remembers thinking, "God, lady, you can't make it better tonight. What more do you want from us?" Bombeck's feeling was that "first we had to laugh; the crying had to come later." She still has not entirely forgiven Friedan and other militant feminists. "These women threw a war for themselves and didn't invite any of us. That was very wrong of them."

Vexation at poor tactics and abrasive personalities was one thing; conviction was another. Bombeck knew which side she was on. Her success had allowed the Bombecks to move to Phoenix. But in 1978 she gave up her $15,000-a-shot lecturing sideline and began a two-year stump tour in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment. She hit senior citizens' centers, parking lots and Laundromats. Some of her fans wanted to hear her jokes but not her political views. The Lieutenant Governor of one Southern state patted her on the head and said she should be home having babies. "My babies were old enough to vote against him," she says, still burning. One store in Salt Lake City took her books out of the window, "and just before Mother's Day too."

Bombeck took the ERA defeat hard, and still does. She has little respect for younger women who opposed the amendment. "The young ones are coming up with an attitude that says we got it all," she reflects. "The older women know we don't. My mother's generation still remembers when women didn't think it was respectable to drive alone at night, and went to bed because their husbands were tired."

A second defeat seems not to trouble her. In 1980 she sold a television series called Maggie, based on one of Bombeck's typical housewives, to ABC. Living in a Los Angeles apartment during the week, Bombeck got up at 5 each morning to write her column and by 9 was at a desk at Universal City Studios writing TV scripts. Bombeck never quite learned to love speaking show biz--"That line doesn't work for me, sweetie" and "Trust me"--and Maggie sank without a trace after eight episodes. The lines were funny but somehow the show wasn't. One critic suggested that what was needed was Bombeck herself in front of the camera.

Humorists do not cry, much, and Bombeck returned to life in Arizona without a backward look. Her children are on their own now (Bombeck gives a heartfelt "whew!" and wipes her hand across her forehead). Betsy is a computer retailer in Los Angeles; Andrew, who served in the Peace Corps in Liberia, teaches gifted students in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Matthew works at an advertising agency in Los Angeles while he writes television scripts. They all agree that family life was warm and normal, not the succession of disasters that Bombeck still thinks she brought on their heads. "It was a real close family," says Andrew, "kind of square, with a real good atmosphere. I just assumed all families were like that." Matthew adds that as a kid, "you're pretty selfabsorbed. You never look at your parents and think they're a little overworked. If anything, you think the opposite. The underlying thing is that she has pretty much been our mother. You think of her as Mother, not Erma Bombeck."

The handsome new house in Paradise Valley, overlooking Phoenix, is calm now when calm is needed. There is a secretary to intercept phone calls and a maid to chase dust balls. Bombeck does not even know if there is a septic tank. Bill and Erma have separate offices, and she is in hers by 8 each morning, after walking a "killer mile" or puffing along with a videotaped exercise routine. At her desk she is all business. When she has time, she weaves twigs and bits of string into a play and says that the first act is in workable order. But the three columns and two TV slots a week come first. Writer's block? No such luxury is permitted. If there is an idea whirling around in her head, it's a great day. If not, she checks notes she has written to herself "on breath-mint wrappers, blank checks and hotel stationery." She relies now more on narrative than on the famous one-liners she fired off as a beginning columnist "because I was afraid people wouldn't wait for the story."

A column is only about 450 words, and the problem is simply to find the right ones. This takes three or four drafts usually, the first stiff and awkward, "like some English-class essay," and the last chatty and, in a carefully chiseled way, spontaneous. Advice to imitators: to avoid marooning yourself without provisions in a trackless last paragraph, think ahead of time of your cheery ending, the gag that leaves the reader newly hopeful that joining the French Foreign Legion may not be the only answer. Bombeck is proud of never missing a deadline, and she makes a point of quoting the praise of an elderly Detroit Free Press desk editor who said, with deep admiration, "I never read you, but by God you're on time!"

She is now writing not so much about the housewife sorting socks, she says, but about the same woman ten years later whose kids phone her at the office every five minutes. Going back to school and getting a master's degree really changed things, didn't it? Perhaps it is this sort of realism that is missing too often from her TV spots on Good Morning America. Television's appetite for visual gags forces her to be a comic entertainer, not the wise-guy satirist of the newspaper column. She has a natural talent for mugging, but when she tries, typically, to cope with an eccentric dentist who wears a Superman suit, or to record a hit country tune in Nashville, or to interview an underwater hockey team, the jokes sometimes seem forced. Even on TV, though, the zingers can zing: having decided, unaccountably, to interview a pig, she starts off, "Hi, I think I used to date your brother . . ."

Her conversation makes it clear that she is indeed, as she says, "a flaming liberal Democrat." But no, she will not use the column to let the air out of Ronald Reagan. Politics "isn't my beat," she explains; her readers would resent it. She does take risks with her writing, though she says, "You have to stand out there in your bloomers for a lot of years" before you have earned your readers' trust enough to try something radically new. Bombeck's readers have accepted a sharp departure in her latest book, Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession. Most of it is funny, the mixture of short pieces, one-liners and wry humor as usual, but there are several short, sad stories that have the quality of O. Henry's sentimental tales. One tells of a mother who died of cancer, leaving each of three sons a letter that began, "I always loved you best . . ." Among the most effective is the story of an old Jewish widow who chats happily every night with her dead husband Seymour. Her grown children think she is batty and put her in a home. She does not care; she gets through to her husband there too, and in fact meets another old woman, who says cheerfully that, sure, her own dead husband talks about Seymour.

The author is not entirely certain about the sad pieces. They work, yeah, but "anybody--anybody--can bring out your tears. That is a piece of cake. It is 20 times as easy--make that 50--to make people cry rather than laugh." People have problems, she says. Their kids are on drugs, they aren't getting along with each other. "Now you . . ."--she says to her listener--"say something funny."

Usually she manages. On talk shows these days, she is always asked, with reference to the title of the new book, to name the oldest profession. She skips a beat, looks solemn and says, "Agriculture." It is very hard to catch her off balance. Her editor at McGraw-Hill, Gladys Justin Carr, recalls a lunch meeting in Chicago when Bombeck was publicizing her fifth book, If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?, hoping to match the previous sales of The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank. As Bombeck was about to begin her speech, a procession of waiters entered, each bearing a bowl of cherries over his head. There was laughter, then an expectant hush. Carr swears that Bombeck had known nothing about the cherries stunt. Unfazed, however, she stepped to the microphone and said, "Well, I hate to think what would be going on in here if we were promoting my last book."

The rewards of all the wit and work are now plentiful: for one thing, she is the only female in a seditious cabal called the American Academy of Humor Columnists, whose other members are Art Buchwald, Russell Baker, Art Hoppe, Gerald Nachman and Don Ross, and whose sole function is to give members an excuse to write insulting letters to one another. (She was admitted, says Buchwald, because she won a banana-bread bake-off with another woman and also promised to make coffee and clean up.) Her friends are admiring and loyal. "There is an awful lot under the hair curlers," says one of them, Columnist Ann Landers. "She is savvy and sophisticated enough not to come across as too savvy and sophisticated."

She has a closetful of honorary degrees, her very own 1983 Mercedes 380 SL convertible and three nicely grown children who claim that they are going to add up all the jokes she has made about them and charge her 25-c- apiece. Newspapers around the country (see box) are filled with would-be Bombecks bursting in air. Though when women say they want to be just like her, she says wryly, "What they mean is they want to stay at home, make a lot of money and appear on the Johnny Carson show."

More valuable than any of this is her rich, sure, rock-solid sense of inadequacy. No writer should be without it. Bombeck's brings her back to the typewriter, twitchy with remorse for the unspeakable sin of not measuring up, after only a few days of vacation. She writhes, and writes, and makes a rare sort of contact. "I swear to you, I don't write fiction," she says. Bill Bombeck and their endlessly libeled children swear she does. No matter; when the jokes splat on the page like strained spinach flung by somebody's centrifugal suburban baby, they are true to life. Bombeck's mail shows that. Women, mostly, write to her about husbands who haven't blinked since the football season started or convict sons or babies put out for adoption. Usually they try to make jokes; Bombeck has taught them how.

"Annie is fine except for a slight learning disability," one mother wrote. "Charlie was stuffing Cracker Jacks up his nose today with Carey Allen's assistance. They tried shaving a couple of months ago. Between the school's Halloween carnival (chairmanship, of course), a pumpkin pie in the oven and the twins, here is a very big thank you. I am selfish, I certainly swear, and we sure laugh a lot!" --By John Skow. Reported by William McWhirter/Phoenix

With reporting by William McWhirter/Phoenix