SIX
“Allison?”
“Yes, Mom?” I called toward the car’s speakers as I steered, one-handed, into the parking lot of BouncyTime, where the birthday party for a classmate of Ellie’s named (I was almost positive) Jayden was starting in ten minutes. It was a miserable April day, gray-skied and windy, with a dispirited rain slopping down.
“Are you almost here?” she asked in a quivering voice.
Dave sat next to me, stiff and silent as one of those inflatable man-shaped balloons that drivers in California buy so they can use the high-occupancy-vehicle lanes. It had been several weeks since his birthday dinner, but we hadn’t talked about anything more substantive than whether we were running out of milk or if I’d remembered to make the car insurance payment. I took my pills, he, presumably, found comfort in conversation with L. McIntyre, and we tried to be polite to each other, especially in front of our daughter. Said daughter was in the backseat, chatting with her friend Hank.
“If you are going to put something in your nose,” I heard Ellie announce, “it should not be a Barbie shoe.”
“Okay,” Hank snuffled. Hank was a pale and narrow-faced little boy with a ring of whitish crust around his eyes and mouth. He was going on six, the same as my daughter, but thanks to his allergies to eggs, wheat, dairy, shellfish, and pet dander, he was the size of a three-year-old and he sniffled nonstop.
How did Ellie even know what a Barbie doll was? I wondered as I maneuvered into a parking spot between a Jaguar and a minivan. I wasn’t sure, but I bet that I had Dave’s mother, the Indomitable Doreen, to thank. Doreen scoffed at my “notions,” as she called them, about organic food, gender-neutral toys, and limiting Eloise’s TV time. Doreen was tall, broad-shouldered, and slim, with the same fair complexion that her sons had inherited and the same cropped dark hair, although I suspected she dyed it. Doreen had raised three boys and had been waiting for years to have a girl child to dote upon. Whenever Doreen got my daughter alone, she’d let her gorge on ice cream and candy. They would stay up all night in Doreen’s silk-sheeted king-sized bed, playing Casino and watching Gilligan’s Island and God only knew what else. “Lighten up,” Doreen would tell me, sometimes with a good-natured (but still painful) sock on the shoulder, when I politely reminded her that Ellie did better when she kept to her bedtime schedule, or mentioned that Dave and I gave her an allowance for doing her chores, and that when she slipped our daughter twenty bucks it tended to undermine our authority. “Calm down, or you’re going to make yourself crazy!”
I knew that my mother-in-law meant well. She’d never talked about whether she’d missed the job she gave up once her sons were born, but I wondered if she had, and if she saw how I had struggled, first as a full-time stay-at-home mother and now as a stay-at-home mom with a part-time (inching ever closer to full-time) job. I could have asked, but the truth was, things hadn’t been great between us since I learned that she’d read my birth plan out loud to her book club. In retrospect, the plan might have been a little excessive—it was eight pages long and spelled out everything from the music I wanted to how I didn’t want any external interventions, including an epidural, and had gone on, at length, about the necessity for a “peaceful birthing environment”—but that did not mean I wanted the six members of Words and Wine laughing at me over copies of Sue Monk Kidd’s latest.
In the backseat, Ellie was regaling Hank with the story of the dead squirrel she’d seen at the corner of South Street during one of our visits to the city. “Its middle was all crumpled, and there was BLOOD on its BOTTOM,” she said, as Hank mouth-breathed in horror.
“Hey, El, I’m not sure that’s appropriate,” I said.
Ellie paused, gnawing at her lower lip. Then she turned to Hank and said, in such a perfect lady-at-a-cocktail-party tone that both Dave and I smiled, “And what are your plans for the weekend?”
I put the car in park and waited until Hank said, “I don’t know.”
“?‘Plans for the weekend’ just means what you are going to do,” Ellie explained. “Like, you could say, ‘Watch Sam & Cat,’ or maybe ‘Put all your nail polishes into teams.’?”
“I don’t have nail polishes,” Hank said wistfully.
The phone rang again. I ignored it, thinking that at least, unlike my mother, Doreen didn’t need instructions for the most basic tasks—calling the oil company to have the tank refilled, remembering to change the car’s windshield wipers instead of just, as she’d once done, buying a new car. If my father had still been himself, I would have asked how he dealt with her, even though I suspected the answer probably involved sex.