Elm Creek Quilts [09] Circle of Quilters (7 page)

“No pool,” said Lucas. “No pool, please?”

“Honey, we have to go to the pool.” Karen dropped to her hands and knees and strained to reach the sunblock. “Your brother has a swim lesson.”

“No pool. No swim!”

“You don’t have to swim,” said Ethan reasonably. “Just me.”

“I swim. I swim!” Lucas tugged at Karen’s T-shirt. “I swim, please?”

“When you’re a big boy, you can take lessons, too.”

Lucas sent up such a wail of dismay that she had to promise him a treat from the club’s vending machines just to get him to calm down. When Ethan protested, she had to assure him that he could buy something, too.

“Treat,” said Lucas happily as she buckled him into his carseat.

“I’m going to get Cheetos,” said Ethan.

“Cheetos,” shouted Lucas. “Cheetos, too!”

Karen muffled a groan. Nate would have a fit. She would have to scour the boys’ fingernails clean of all traces of blaze orange cheese residue before he came home from work. What did it say about her that she so quickly resorted to bribing her sons and hiding the evidence from her husband?

“Mom,” said Ethan as they pulled into the parking lot of the swim club. “I’m hungry. Can I have my treat now?”

“Treat,” echoed Lucas.

“No, honey, we don’t have time.”

“But I’m starving.”

“You should have eaten breakfast.”

“Daddy didn’t give me anything.”

“I’m sorry, sweetie.” They were already five minutes late. “You’ll have to wait until after your lesson.”

Ethan grumbled as she rushed them into the locker room and threw him into his swim gear. To her dismay, the exchange had given Lucas the impression that snack time was imminent. “Cheetos,”
he cried plaintively as Karen carried him while she led Ethan from the locker room to the pool. The room smelled of chlorine and wet cement, and Lucas’s every wail echoed off the walls. Karen left Ethan with his instructor and hurried Lucas into the waiting room. Catching sight of the vending machine, Lucas struggled in her arms until she had to set him down. He ran across the room and flung himself at the Plexiglas. “Cheetos! Cheetos!”

Three mothers sitting near the tinted glass overlooking the pool broke off their conversation and stared at him, then looked daggers at Karen. Smiling weakly, Karen hurried over and wedged herself between her son and the vending machine. “Lucas, honey. After your brother’s lesson. Remember?”

“No! No! Now!”

Bewildered, she picked him up and winced as she avoided his flailing limbs. This was so unlike him, the mellow kid, the one who made her and Nate realize just how challenging Ethan had been. “Honey, calm down. It’s okay.” She held him close and patted his back as he squirmed in protest. “We talked about this. Remember? We’ll have a treat after your brother’s lesson—if you’re a good boy.”

“Cheetos, Mama,” he wept. “Please.”

It was pitiful to watch. “All right. Okay.” She set him down, a howling mass of fury and tears and despair on the blue industrial pile carpet. She dug around in her back pocket for change and came up with a quarter and two dimes. With a sigh of relief she slipped the change into the slot, pressed the buttons, and waited for the snack to dispense—cheerfully narrating each action in a vain attempt to assure Lucas his precious Cheetos were on the way. His misery abated only after she placed the open bag in his hands.

“There.” She straightened and rested her hands on her hips. “All better?”

He smiled wanly up at her. Only then did she become aware of the conversation by the window. The other mothers were not trying to keep their voices low, and although they did not look at her, she suddenly had the impression that they wanted her to overhear.

“I can’t believe she rewarded that tantrum—”

“I pity that child’s teachers in a few years—”

“—that’s what a diet of junk food does to children—”

“—someone needs a parenting class—”

“yes, a lesson on how to redirect negative impulses—”

After the moment Karen needed to realize the women were talking about her, she scooped up Lucas, yanked open the door to the locker room, and ducked inside. The door closed too slowly to block out the derisive laugher she had left behind. “Stupid, gossipy bi—” Just in time, she remembered Lucas’s rapidly developing vocabulary and clamped her mouth shut around the word.

This was not the first time she had earned outright disdain from mothers like these, women who managed to handle, apparently effortlessly, the tasks of motherhood and look good doing it. They made their own baby food from organically grown fruits and vegetables. They wore white cashmere twinsets knowing their children would never dream of spitting up on them. They had shiny hair and manicures and wore their prepregnancy clothes within six weeks of their deliveries. They found time to iron. Their children had never tasted a trans-fatty acid. They read all the current books and articles on the latest trends in child development. Having stepped off the fast track for the noble art of motherhood, they pursued their new profession the way they had once pursued advanced degrees and corner offices. They scorned and pitied mothers who stuck their kids in day care and regarded with bewilderment mothers such as Karen’s best friend Janice, mother of four with one on the way, who seemed not to know when to say when, and Karen, scattered and disorganized and unable to pull
herself together. When Karen had resigned from her job within a week of returning from her eight-week maternity leave, she had tried to befriend such women at Kindermusik and library story hour, but they smelled her desperation and gave her polite but chilly rebuffs. They did not know that she had once been as successful and confident as they. What was it about motherhood that made her doubt everything she had once admired about herself?

“One, Mama?” offered Lucas, holding a gnarled orange twig of Cheeto to her mouth.

“No, thank you.” She redirected the offering and looked up at a sudden movement in the mirror. On the other side of the locker room, a smiling, slender woman in a perfectly tailored suit turned away from a locker, a gym bag slung jauntily over her shoulder. Karen nearly choked. With Lucas balanced on her hip, she swiftly turned toward the nearest locker, ducked her head, and spun the dial as if she knew the combination.

The click of black pumps on concrete paused beside her. “Karen?”

Reluctantly, Karen turned around. “Oh, hi, Lucy.”

“Karen! I can’t believe it’s you.” Lucy’s makeup was flawless, and she looked well rested and refreshed. Karen dimly remembered feeling like that once, long, long ago. “You’re looking—” Lucy sized up Karen in a swift glance. “Wow! How long has it been?”

Karen rose and instinctively tucked loose strands of hair behind her ears. “Um … almost five years now. Four and a half.”

“It’s hard to believe it’s been so long.” Lucy smiled at Lucas. “He’s gotten so big! Is something wrong, little guy? You look sad.”

Karen took in his tear-streaked face and runny nose and cringed. “This is actually my youngest, Lucas. You met my older son, Ethan.”

“You had another one! How great is that? Two boys. He is just so cute.” Lucy pressed a hand to her chest, as if it ached from adoration. “You know, every time I see all the precious little girl
clothes at Neiman Marcus, I think I should have a baby, too.”

Karen nodded, her face straining from the effort of maintaining a pleasant expression. Why couldn’t she have taken five more minutes before leaving the house to fix her hair and put on makeup? “So, how have you been? Are you still seeing Eric?”

“Eric?” Lucy laughed. “You
have
been gone a while. I haven’t seen him in years.”

“Is that right?” For some reason Karen found this enormously depressing. They had seemed so in love. “What’s new at work? How is everyone?”

“Don’t get me started. Last year we moved into the new building—you probably heard that—but hardly anyone’s happy with the office assignments. Riegert retired last fall, Donnie got married—” Lucy waved her hand. “You know. The usual.”

Karen nodded, though she did not know and desperately wanted to. For years she had spent most of her waking hours with these people, but four and a half years ago, they had abruptly vanished from her life.

“But what about you?” said Lucy, concerned. “How do you like the whole stuck-at-home-mom thing?”

What could Karen say? “It’s everything I hoped it would be, and so much more,” she enthused, forcing a grin. “It was definitely the right choice for me. And … we usually go by stay-at-home mom, not stuck-at-home. It feels more voluntary that way.”

“That’s wonderful,” said Lucy, relieved. “I really admire you. I could never give up everything I’ve worked so hard for.”

“You’d be surprised what you can do when you believe it’s right for your family.”

“I suppose so. I admit sometimes I envy you. It must be so nice not to have to work.”

Karen kept her smile fixed in place and nodded.

Despite the swim lesson, Karen and her boys were not the last of the playgroup to reach the park. Janice and her four children did not arrive until more than twenty minutes after Karen parallel parked her compact car between the minivans already lined up along the curb.

Janice’s three eldest children ran for the playground as Janice followed, carrying the oversized tote bag with their lunches and balancing her one-year-old on her hip. Though she was only five months into her pregnancy, she could easily pass for eight, a fact that had panicked her until an ultrasound confirmed that she was not carrying twins. Janice had said that whenever she took all of the kids to the grocery store, other shoppers regarded her with either profound sympathy or alarm. Once, a well-meaning elderly woman had taken her aside and kindly encouraged her to discuss birth control options with her physician, secretly if she had to, if her husband disapproved. At her last prenatal appointment, a pregnant woman struggling to amuse her bored two-year-old in the waiting room remarked that Janice was either very brave or very insane. Janice laughed as she recounted the stories, but Karen knew she had begged her husband to get a vasectomy two children ago. Whenever she was especially annoyed with him, she threatened to perform the operation herself.

“Sorry I’m late,” said Janice, panting, as she spread out her blanket and settled herself and the baby upon it. “I got trapped in a phone call with the food police.”

“What was it this time?” asked one of the other mothers, who was changing her three-year-old’s pull-up pants on a nearby blanket. “Peanut butter?”

“No! God forbid. Even I know enough not to bring peanut butter. Peanuts can kill.”

“You forgot to cut the grapes in half,” guessed Karen, who had committed that same infraction on her first turn to provide the morning snack for Ethan’s nursery school class, earning herself a lecture on hidden choking hazards from the room parent.

“Your school is strict,” remarked Connor, the only stay-at-home
father in the playgroup. “We can bring anything except candy and soda.”

“The food police aren’t official representatives of the school,” said Janice. “The peanut rule is a school policy, and understandably so, but the others have been tacked on by a few overzealous parents with too much time on their hands.”

“So what did you do?” said the oldest mother in the group. She and her husband had been surprised by a late-in-life third child, and she regarded with bemused skepticism the innumerable new parenting rules that had sprung up since her first two children passed through the preschool years.

“I brought the wrong kind of milk.”

“Buttermilk?” asked one of the mothers. She was an uncertain parent who often described her child’s development in terms of the dog obedience classes she had put her standard poodle through a few years before. “Chocolate?”

“Spoiled?” said Karen.

“No! Honestly, do you really think I’m that bad? I brought milk. Fresh milk, regular nonchocolate milk. However, I failed to select organic, BGH-free milk.”

“What’s that?” asked the oldest mother.

“One more thing to worry about,” said Connor, who regularly regaled them with magazine articles on subjects such as pesticide residues in applesauce.

Janice smote her brow in mock dismay. “I thought I brought those children something healthy, but apparently it was not quite healthy enough. Tell me, where am I supposed to find organic, bovine growth hormone-free milk? And how much more than regular milk does it cost?”

They all laughed, except for Connor, who looked ready to defend the food police, and Karen, who knew exactly how much that kind of milk cost and where to find it because it was the only kind Nate allowed in the house other than soy.

“Some kids are allergic to dairy,” one of the mothers warned,
then excused herself to chase down her youngest daughter, happily wandering from the playground.

“I promise I’ll take soy next time,” Janice called after her. Then, all at once, every child seemed to need something: a push on the swing, a snack, a referee, a cuddle. The conversation broke up in a scramble of caregiving, as most of their conversations did. Few of their chats were as long in duration as this one had been. They had learned to converse in bits and snatches.