When Did I Get Like This?, page 14
“Oh,” Connor said, dumping out the hamper full of Penny’s new friends. “That’s Penny’s scrapbook. We have to show the class everything she gets to do with us this weekend. Can we have a party?”
Here, laid out before me on the kitchen counter, was the chronicle of Penny’s adventures with all the other families in Connor’s class: an autumn camping trip; Christmas in Vermont; a beach vacation in St. Bart’s; a figure-skating competition; a piano lesson; casual sushi making; and an elaborately choreographed jewelry heist, complete with sets and costumes, in which Penny was the sleuth who saved the day. Each family’s entry was scrapbooked beyond anything I had ever imagined. One mother had used colorful adhesive photo corners to attach her family’s photos and spelled out “MEMORIES” in mock-quilted sticker letters. Another mother had mimicked, in type style and story, the award-winning children’s book If You Give a Pig a Pancake. I never made pancakes, ever.
Each entry topped all those that had come before. Now it was our turn. “So, who gets to see the scrapbook?” I asked Connor, trying to sound casual. (He was still party planning in the toy room.)
“Ms. Truman reads them to our class,” he answered enthusiastically. “And ours is going to be the awesomest! Right, Mom?”
“Uh-huh,” I answered back, suddenly understanding that my weekend was to be spent in frantic preparation for a project destined to be seen on Monday morning by an audience of exactly sixteen. Had Connor been the first Person of the Week, instead of the last, I might have assumed I could do something half-assed, a one-pager with two or three photos, and have Connor write the captions himself. I was relieved that we were going last so I could at least see clearly what was expected of me. I had to make up some lost ground with Ms. Truman, who I was sure already perceived me as a slacker mom. When the Letter of the Week had been J, and Connor decided to be five minutes late for the bus before he started looking for his household object, I grabbed a jar of Jif and shooed him out the door. At pickup that afternoon, Connor waited for me at the entrance to the classroom, holding the Jif carefully away from his body in a sealed Ziploc bag. “Mom. You can’t bring peanut butter to school,” he hissed, cheeks aflame, and of course I brought peanut butter to school every day when I was in kindergarten, but today, you might as well bring in high-level radioactive waste.
On the other hand, there are times when I nearly kill myself with parenting effort only to find that I should not have bothered. When the boys’ camp declared last summer that a particular Wednesday would be “Evil Superhero Day,” I was up early laying out various costume options. Connor decided to be “Shark Man,” and Seamus came up with “Bad Robin,” the malevolent doppelgänger of Batman’s ward. Off we went, me so proud of our family’s creative accomplishments.
When we got to the parking lot, I noticed that none of the other campers walking in were in costume. A handful of counselors had made totally lame, five-minutes-previous attempts. “I’m Tinfoil Pinned to My Shirt Guy!” the head counselor said, waving to us from afar. “Hey, you guys look great!” But Connor was already pulling off his shark hat and rubbing furiously at the handlebar mustache I had drawn on him with brown eyeliner. Seamus’s eyes were downcast in shame. I had gotten it wrong, again. Apparently Evil Superhero Day was only for losers. And their mothers.
How am I the only mother who always misreads these situations? Is there some clearing of the throat I’m not picking up on, some signal by which the other mothers can tell which assignments are to be ignored and which ones will count for 40 percent of our final grade? I can never tell if these things matter or not. Left to my own devices, I might have assumed that Penny’s scrapbook was the least important component of Connor’s rule as Person of the Week. I mean, it was unclear to me why the two were even related. But if the other mothers had put so much work into it, it had to matter. If I was about to overthink this, well, that was clearly my assignment.
Penny had been allocated to our family for what was forecast to be a very rainy spring weekend, one for which we had no particular plans. I was a little annoyed that Ms. Truman had handpicked for her own turn with Penny a long weekend on the slopes in Park City, so that her scrapbook pages might have adorable shots of Penny on the chair lift and sipping fire-side cocoa après-ski. After their busy weeks at school and soccer and karate, a weekend sitting around the house was just what my kids needed. But that was hardly scrapbook-worthy. Nor could I just make stuff up, since documentation was required. I couldn’t say we went to MoMA without a ticket stub and a picture of Penny with a Matisse portrait to show for it. We had to come up with something good. And “we,” of course, was me. Connor was already plopped on the couch, completely absorbed in an all-new episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, and David was not going to be any help either. None of Penny’s scrapbook entries were in a father’s handwriting. All of them had a clearly female touch, because the fathers had an ounce of sense in their heads. “Screw that,” David would say when he got home, and I, while knowing his sentiments were correct, would still be the one a tearstained six-year-old would be pointing at on Monday morning if I didn’t bother.
So there I was Friday night, doing a photo layout of our hastily arranged “Welcome Penny Pizza Party,” in which Connor and Penny sipped an apple juice with two straws and fed each other pizza, like newlyweds sharing their first forkfuls of buttercream frosting. Next was bath time, requiring advanced trick photography to make it look like Penny was under the bubbles with Maggie without her actually getting wet. Then Seamus pretended to read Penny a bedtime story, me still snapping away. Getting my three kids ready for bed is usually activity enough; trying to make it all Penny-worthy was exhausting.
I tossed and turned in bed that night, dreaming of Penny, fretting about how to make her weekend with us one she would always remember. So far, we had not done anything that could be considered memorable. I did not want her going back to Kindergarten M and oinking about how lame we all were.
Saturday morning arrived with sheets of rain. My three children stared at Handy Manny, munching handfuls of peanut butter Puffins. “Hey, guys! I have an idea!” I yelled. “Guys! Let’s create an indoor carnival for Penny!” The kids did not even look up. With forty-eight hours left to go, the novelty of Penny’s visit had already worn off, and I was the only one whose oars were still in the water.
Nor was Penny an easy guest. It was exceedingly hard to tell whether she enjoyed making Shrinky Dinks or not. I started to think that Penny was a little bit full of herself: if Connor was Person of the Week, she considered herself Pig of the Decade. I was killing myself digging up arts ’n’ crafts activities from the back of the closet and getting nothing but silence and an upturned snout in return. Meanwhile, it continued teeming outside.
“Who wants to go to the Children’s Museum?” I hollered, trying to rally the troops.
“Not me,” my children chorused, watching an old James Bond movie with Daddy on the couch. I couldn’t get them out of the house. Truthfully, it was the kind of rain I would not normally have considered leaving the house in either. But we were not showing our guest a good time. The Flynns had taken Penny to Playland! We couldn’t even make it to the mailbox.
By Sunday afternoon, I was out of ideas. It was still raining. Maggie was dragging Penny around by her curlicued tail and I did nothing to stop her. I wheedled Connor into joining me at the dining room table so we could at least start on Penny’s scrapbook. We scrolled through all the pictures I had taken on the digital camera.
MOMMY: I thought we could show Penny asleep in your bed and say, “Connor’s bed was so comfortable!”
CONNOR: Penny wouldn’t say that.
MOMMY: Why not?
CONNOR: Because Penny is a pig. She likes to sleep in mud.
I hadn’t thought of that. Maybe that was why she had such a puss on.
After several more such protestations that Penny would never say that, or do the very thing I had created a photographic essay of her doing, I had Connor start on his “Things That Start with Z” list so I could just finish Penny’s scrapbook myself:
Early Sunday morning, Maggie fed me some Raisin Bran. Yum!
Then we got dressed.
Then it was still raining so Connor’s mommy said we could play the Wii.
Oh my God. That was supposed to be the exciting part! Our scrapbook entry would go down in history as the worst weekend Penny had ever spent. Despite all my effort, here was documentary proof that all my kids did all weekend was lie around.
I had to jazz things up somehow, and so after the kids went to bed I downloaded scrapbooking software from the Internet. “You are nuts,” David said, off to bed with a good book. Well, yes, but I was almost finished. All I had to do was teach myself how to use the software, then click and drag eight pages’ worth of Penny’s photos and caption them with zany fonts. Then, since there was no visible excitement in any of the pictures, I punched up my presentation with phrases like “Good Times!” and some clip art of a cartoon guy with a lampshade on his head. I was able to print out this magnum opus around 2:30 A.M., just in time to collate the family photos that I had suddenly remembered the Person of the Week also required, fill the Estimation Jar with Tootsie Rolls, and find a household object starting with Z. A tiny plastic zebra. Which I admit was kind of a cop-out but it was getting light outside.
Connor woke me up an hour later, anxious to begin the week at school in which he would be the star. I showed him the finished Penny scrapbook, our pages appended to the back of the volume. “What do you think?” I said eagerly.
“It’s nice,” Connor said, shrugging. A few minutes later, he used a tone that I perceived as slightly critical to inform me that I had not poured enough milk on his breakfast cereal, and that is when I lost it. “Can you give me a break? I was up all night working on that freaking scrapbook!” I screamed at my own son, the Person of the Week, no less. He looked at me, confused. Who had asked me to?
Back into Connor’s backpack Penny and her scrapbook went for the trip to school. When we reached Kindergarten M, I laid out the Estimation Jar and all of Connor’s family photos. Connor pulled Penny out of his backpack, tossed her on the LEGO table, and headed for his cubby. Forgetting something.
MOMMY: Connor! Aren’t you going to show Ms. Truman Penny’s scrapbook?
CONNOR: Oh. Yeah.
He pulled the scrapbook out and handed it to Ms. Truman.
MS. TRUMAN: Oh. Yeah.
She placed it on her desk and walked away.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to throttle the carefree, childless Ms. Truman and say, “Do you understand what it is like to spend the weekend with a teething toddler crying on one hip while you give all your attention to a stuffed animal?” But I kept it together, still hoping that when I returned for pickup, Ms. Truman would lead all of Kindergarten M in a hearty round of applause: “Let’s hear it for Connor’s mommy, who has really outdone herself this time!”
She did not. Connor told me that evening that, since Morning Meeting on the rug had gone a few minutes over, Penny’s scrapbook had to be scratched from the agenda. “Ms. Truman said maybe we’ll look at it tomorrow,” Connor added; I could tell he did not want to disappoint me. I did not ask about it again the next evening. I did not really want to know. It is possible that our adventures with Penny never saw the light of day at all, and that her scrapbook was trashed in early June, thrown out with all the ripply bulletin-board borders too covered in staple marks to be reused.
Once again, I had been had. Not only were my exertions unappreciated, they were not even noticed. However, had I handed in a picture of Connor’s unopened backpack with a caption saying “This is where Penny spent the weekend at our house. Then she suffocated. The End,” that would have been certain to come back and bite me on the ass. The things a mother does well are always invisible compared to the things she does badly.
The school year was over a few weeks later, but I did see Penny the Pig once more, sitting atop a plastic bin of stuff to go into storage. She returned my gaze impassively with her beady plastic eyes, offering neither gratitude nor farewell. Right up to the end, it was all about her. What a bitch.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Pretty
The Christmas that I was eight years old, Santa brought me what I wished for above all else: a My Friend Mandy. I was nearly too old for dolls, but Mandy was aimed at the more sophisticated consumer. Her pliant white Mary Janes went only on the correct feet, just like real shoes would. What baby doll could say that? Mandy’s corn-silk hair stayed soft and shiny through all my ministrations, at least until I gave her feathered layers with my Ziggy scissors. Her eyes were blue, beneath impertinently long painted-on lashes; her smile was demure and complex; her body was a modest cotton unigarment, covered in rosebuds. I made a bed for Mandy out of a heavy-duty hatbox I decoupaged with strips of leftover wrapping paper. She lived in this bed, hidden beneath my own so my little brothers would not find her, amidst her alternate outfits: a pink party dress and white straw hat with coordinating pink ribbons; a gay red and green tartan frock for holiday wear. My Friend Mandy was not a rough-and-tumble backyard Barbie, one to share with the tomboy gymnast down the street. Playing with Mandy meant, for the most part, sitting alone in my room, changing her outfits, and admiring her breathtaking beauty. The good people at Fisher-Price would have expected me to prefer the “My Friend Jenny” doll, since they had created her for girls who looked like me: brunette, freckled, green-eyed. But I wanted no part of Jenny. My Friend Mandy, with her blonde hair and rosy cheeks, was not only much prettier than I was; she was the prettiest girl I had ever seen.
Thirty years later, I am awakened each morning by a tiny voice calling me from down the hall, and each morning, when I go in my daughter’s room to get her out of her crib, I am struck by how pretty she is. Maggie’s little hands have five dimples each, where the fingers meet the back of the hand. Her cheeks are extra rosy in the morning. She also has lips that look painted on, pale blue almond-shaped eyes, and strawberry-blonde hair that lies straighter and shinier than My Friend Mandy’s ever did. On most mornings, I bring Maggie back to our bed so she can give Daddy a wake-up kiss and get him in the shower. When David opens his eyes and looks at our daughter, he says, a little awed, “Sweetheart. Where did you come from?” Maggie doesn’t look much like David or me. She is much better looking than either one of us. Perhaps, I sometimes think, she is a changeling.
I then take Maggie back to her room to change her sodden all-night diaper and choose what she will wear that day. The bowed, double-hung rods of Maggie’s closet groan with the weight of her adorable outfits, both for the current season and the next three or four years hence. Imelda Marcos had fewer options. Maggie has so many enchanting things to wear that it is a little stressful trying to keep them all in rotation. I never thought that I would be this mom, risking debtor’s prison to feed my Petit Bateau habit. I never thought that I would put more consideration than was healthy into what my little girl should be wearing to her “Free to Be Under Three” class on a Thursday morning, biting my lip as I considered whether her teacher there had seen Maggie in a particular frock before. But there I stand. “What about this one?” I say, pulling out a ruffly dress utterly unsuitable for a day Maggie will spend mostly hanging around the house. Maggie clasps her fat little hands together and inhales sharply. “Uh dess, uh peh-ee,” she breathes. She stays patient and still while I attire her in the dress, matching leggings, and her button-top ankle boots, giving her a sort of Parisian ragamuffin flair. “Yes, Maggie,” I say, stepping back and taking in that day’s masterpiece. “It is pretty.” Then she makes her second grand appearance of the day before her father, who by then will be standing at the mirror shaving. David never fails to give the desired reaction: he hits the sides of his face with his open palms, in mock disbelief, and coos in falsetto, “So pretty! Who’s so pretty?”
There is no question who has become, in David’s heart, the fairest of them all. My heart always leaps a little at my husband’s delight in our daughter; it has been a long time since he has reacted so enthusiastically to one of my ensembles. Of course, that may be because the attention that I pay to Maggie’s beauty and wardrobe has come at the expense of my own. When I woke up this past Easter morning, I had no idea what I was going to wear to church, and from the depths of my closet, twenty minutes before Mass was due to begin, dredged up a blouse that (post-breastfeeding) gaped two sizes too large and a skirt that puckered about the hips in a manner most unbecoming. Oh, and I hadn’t washed my hair. But Maggie’s outfit—dress, crinoline, tights, and white patent leather shoes—had been laid out on her dresser for a week, chosen after great deliberation from several excellent finalists as I drifted off to sleep each night.
I am aware that I am on a slippery slope to Pageant Mom here. Not that I have ever dreamed of Maggie becoming Little Miss International Darling Grand Supreme. But now that I have a daughter, I get those women. Having others tell you your little girl has loveliness worthy of a four-foot trophy (and savings bond) is just as good as being lovely yourself, and maybe even better. When I walk down the street pushing Maggie’s stroller, and Maggie walks beside me pushing her doll baby in her stroller, the construction workers no longer catcall at me like they did ten years ago. But every passerby gives Maggie a “She’s so cute!” or at least the “awww” pushed-out lower lip, and I scoop these up as eagerly as Connor collects the blinking hearts he encounters playing Star Wars on the Wii. If I receive a compliment myself, I want to brush it off: “Really? I look like I lost weight? Uh, hardly.” But hearing that my daughter is pretty is lovely and uncomplicated. I don’t have to roll my eyes when someone says Maggie is beautiful. I just say, “Thank you,” and I mean it.
