Just Like Other Daughters (13 page)

This time, my smile is genuine as I pop my trunk to retrieve a cooler of deviled eggs. “Chloe’s been looking forward to this picnic all week,” I say.

“Thomas, too!” Margaret generally speaks in exclamations. It drove me crazy at first, but I’m getting used to it. “We brought a fluffy Jell-O salad. Our Thomas loves fluffy salad!”

Green fluffy Jell-O salad with marshmallows grosses me out, but I don’t say so. Thomas had never had couscous or hummus until he came to our house. It’s only right that Thomas and his family introduce Chloe to fluffy Jell-O salad.

“Danny, get the salad! And my diet soda.” She looks at me. “I’ve got
the sugar
.”

Thomas’s father comes around the van. Sure enough, he’s wearing the same Velcro shoes . . . and plaid shorts and a hibiscus-flowered shirt. He’s short and bald on his crown. I’ve wondered where Thomas got his height, but never asked. I never ask anything beyond “How are you today?” I don’t want to be friends with the Eldens. I don’t know why, but I don’t want Chloe to be friends with them, either.

As if I could stop her.

That’s how I feel lately, as if my daughter is a train barreling down the tracks and I can’t set the brakes. A month ago, she asked for some new clothes because she wanted to look pretty for Thomas. For her boyfriend. She wouldn’t listen to me when I told her she was already beautiful without the new T-shirts with kittens and puppies on them.

Then, last week, she asked me about getting her some makeup. Susan, at Miss Minnie’s, wears makeup. I bought Chloe some mascara and lip gloss, but I know sparkly blue eye shadow is in our future. For Chloe’s whole life, I’ve been her major influence, her
only
influence. Now, suddenly, she’s taking advice from TV commercials and mentally handicapped girls.

Danny nods to me. To my knowledge, he doesn’t speak. At least, he’s never spoken to me. He just smiles and nods. I know he’s not deaf, though, because Margaret is always ordering him around and he does as she tells him. It seems like a strange relationship to me, but who am I to judge? Look at Randall and me. When was that ever
not
strange?

We head toward the pavilion, me carrying my cooler and two chairs in bags. The Eldens follow behind me. Margaret talks nonstop. She keeps up Danny’s end of the conversation. Mine, too.

“I think it’s so nice that the church planned this picnic for the kids! I have such fond memories of the church picnics of my childhood. I wonder where the kids are?”

Margaret always refers to Thomas and Chloe as
the kids
. I sort of get it; they’re children, at least mentally. But Thomas shaves and Chloe menstruates. They’re not kids.

“Thank goodness there’s shade! Danny, look, there’s shade under the pavilion,” Margaret calls over her shoulder. “I’m so glad there’s shade! Thomas burns easily. I made him put suntan lotion on this morning before he left for church, but he burns. Like his mother!”

Someone has already taped plastic tablecloths to several tables under the pavilion marked with a poster board sign that reads
St. Mark’s
. A young woman in red pigtails whom I recognize from somewhere is lining casserole dishes up on one of the tables. A young man with a goatee is manning an enormous cinder-block grill just beyond the pavilion. The smell of burgers wafts in the air.

“Dr. Richards,” the girl says. She holds out her arms for the small cooler I’m carrying. “I didn’t know you would be here.” She must be able to tell from the look on my face that I can’t place her.

“Jennifer Smith,” she says. “I took your E212 Romanticism class last fall. I sat in the back of the class, on the right.”

“I’m sorry,” I apologize. “I’m not good with names, but I usually remember my students’ papers.”

“It’s okay. I never talked in class. My final paper was on how the ancient North was re-created for contemporary national, political, and literary purposes.”

Margaret reaches my side and is fussing with her husband about how he packed the fluffy Jell-O salad in the ice.

“I
do
remember you, Jennifer. It was a good final paper.” I grimace. “Please tell me I gave you an A?”

The student smiles as she pulls the deviled eggs out of my cooler. “I got a 93 on the paper and an A- in the class, which I was thrilled with.” It’s her turn to make a face. “Bio major. British literature, not my thing.”

I laugh with her. I can tell Jennifer is a bright kid, and for just a second I imagine she’s mine, my daughter, and we’re discussing the Romanticism movement in British literature in the nineteenth century. With the red hair and the blue eyes, she could
be
my daughter.

“Mom!” I hear Chloe’s voice from far behind me and I’m instantly annoyed with myself. Chloe’s my daughter and I love her. I wouldn’t give her up for anything in the world, not even for ten biology students named Jennifer.

Jennifer slides my now-empty cooler across the table toward me. “I love Chloe. Funny girl.”

“You know Chloe from . . . St. Mark’s?” I ask.
Chloe is funny?
That’s never been a word I would use to describe her. I wonder how she’s funny at church. Is it things she says? Does she make faces? Do silly things? How did I not know that Chloe is funny when she’s with other people?

“Uh-huh. I had a rough schedule this spring so I didn’t get to help out much at church, but now that the semester is over, I have more free time. Chloe’s cool.”

“Mom!” Chloe hollers. I can tell she’s running.

I turn to wave at her, to see her sprinting across the grass toward me. She runs awkwardly, her short limbs pumping hard for the distance she covers. “I won! We practiced the egg roll and I won the practice!” she tells me.

“Mom!” Thomas hollers from behind Chloe. He’s running, too. Lumbering gracelessly, large limbs flailing.

“And Thomas, too,” Jennifer is saying. “I think it’s cool that Chloe has a boyfriend.”

I turn back to Jennifer. “You do?”

“Sure.” She grins, accepting Margaret’s enormous plastic bowl of Jell-O salad. “Everybody at church does. Everybody at school thinks you’re cool, too. The way you let Chloe wear her hair and wear sneakers and stuff like everyone else. You know, like she’s normal.” She makes a face. “Sorry. That wasn’t very politically correct, was it? You know what I was trying to say.”

“The students think I’m cool?” I can’t hide my surprise. I didn’t know my students thought I was cool. I don’t know why I care, but I do, and I’m tickled.

“Mom!” Chloe runs right into me and I have to put my arms around her to keep her from knocking me over.

“Chloe!” I laugh, because she’s so excited. So happy.

“I won the race,” she tells me, out of breath. “It was just practice, but I won!”

“K . . . Koey, she w . . . won!” Thomas shouts from behind her.

“Thomas, you’re so loud.” Margaret covers her ears. “My Thomas, he’s always been so loud!” she announces to no one in particular. “Danny, take the cooler back to the car. I don’t want to lose my good cooler.”

“Hey, Chloe,” Jennifer says. “You won? That’s great.”

“Just practice.” Chloe looks up at me, her face filled with joy. “But that means I’ll really win, right?”

“I don’t know. I hope so,” I tell her. Then I see that families are starting to take their seats on the benches at the picnic tables. The assistant pastor is standing at one end, apparently waiting to make an announcement. “I guess we’d better find a place to sit, Chloe.” I glance over at my student. “It was nice talking with you, Jennifer.”

“You, too, Dr. Richards.”

“We should sit,” I tell Chloe, gently herding her toward the tables.

“With Thomas!” She bounces up and down on the toes of her sneakers. “We have to sit with Thomas.”

“C . . . ’Cause K . . . Koey is m . . . my g . . . girlfriend,” Thomas volunteers, grabbing my daughter’s hand.

Margaret meets my gaze. “It’s so nice that they’ve found each other, our Thomas and your Chloe.”

I smile but I look away. Jin says I need to talk to Margaret, that we need to discuss Chloe and Thomas’s relationship and where it’s going, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Over the last few weeks, I’ve come to the conclusion that Margaret doesn’t realize her son is mentally disabled. She’s in some incredible land of denial.

A place I wish I could go, if only for a visit.

 

We dine on burgers, salads, and green fluffy Jell-O salad. Thankfully, Chloe eats all of the Jell-O salad on my plate. Then we play picnic games: a three-legged race, rolling a hard-boiled egg race, a sack race. Tug-of-war. Chloe loves every minute of it. She jumps and claps and screams with glee, even when a boy with Down syndrome beats her in the hard-boiled egg race.

After the games, a young man comes to talk to us about the Special Olympics. A mentally handicapped girl stands in front of the group, grinning as she tells us she plays softball on a team for the Special Olympics and how her team is traveling to Delaware this summer to compete regionally. Chloe nudges me several times during the presentation to tell me she wants to participate. Of course no matter what activity is mentioned, badminton, figure skating, even power lifting, she’s on board with it.

When it grows dark, the hot coals are raked together on the outdoor grill and everyone toasts marshmallows to make s’mores. I chat with a few parents, a few LoGs, but I don’t enter into any serious conversation with anyone, really. There’s one single guy there about my age. His son, Pedro, was invited by one of the other LoGs. Doug and I chat, but he’s just going through a divorce from Pedro’s mom and all he talks about is her. I can tell that even if Chrissy’s done with the marriage, Doug’s not, and I quickly conclude that even if he was interested in going out with me, I should not walk away; I should run.

It gets chilly as the sun goes down, and I wait for my turn to roast my marshmallow over the coals. A few feet away from me, Thomas pulls his Penn State Football sweatshirt off and gives it to Chloe. My first impulse is to call to her and remind her that her sweatshirt is in our car, but it’s such a sweet moment. I keep my mouth shut, and I watch as Chloe tugs the sweatshirt over her head and Thomas arranges it for her. He kisses her on the mouth and they laugh because, apparently, she has marshmallow on her lips and he can taste it.

“Ah, young love,” Margaret says from behind me . . . with a sigh, rather than the usual exclamation point.

It was another important milestone in my life and Chloe’s, but again, I didn’t see it. Chloe wore Thomas’s sweatshirt for days before I convinced her to return it.

Summer passes too quickly. I begin to let Chloe go to Thomas’s occasionally. There’s no way Danny Elden is a pervert; he’s just a nice, quiet little man with a bossy wife. The plumbing in my house continues to be the bane of my existence. I think I see more of Mark-the-Plumber that summer than I see of Theo, whom I began dating the week of the LoGs picnic. Chloe’s relationship with Thomas shows no signs of fizzling out, and before I know it, it’s September again and my fall classes are starting.

“F
our . . . five. . . . I need a dress,” Chloe says. She’s counting out apples she and Thomas picked in the local orchard this afternoon with Margaret. “A pretty dress, one. And a cat costume, eight!”

“You skipped six and seven.” I’m standing at the kitchen counter beside her, rolling out the piecrust dough. I didn’t make it from scratch, but at least I bought the kind in the grocery store that you have to roll out and actually put in your own pie pan. “We need eight apples. Try again. Why do you need a dress? And you already have a cat costume. From last Halloween.”

Chloe puts the apples back in the bag and begins to count again. “One, two, three—but it’s a
black
cat. I want to be a
white
cat. Five, six, eight.”

I reach over in front of her. “One, two, three,
four,
five, six,
seven
, eight,” I say, counting out the Granny Smith apples in front of her. “Now you count. What do you need the dress for? You never wear dresses.”

“One, three, four . . .” She giggles. “For the dance, silly head!”

“One, two, three.” I recount the apples in front of her. “What dance?”

“LoGs dance. I have to wear a dress.” She pirouettes with an apple in each hand. To anyone else, she might have seemed awkward, her movements jerky, but to me, she’s beautiful. Graceful.

“Miss Margaret says girls wear a pretty dress,” Chloe continues. “Thomas is going to be my
date.
Me and him, he’s my
date
. Five, seven, eight—”

“One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight apples.” I count them out with one floury hand. I move the paper bag to the other side of the counter. I take a breath, feeling more impatient about the dress than the counting.

I look at her, feeling a mixture of happiness and sadness; happiness for her, but sadness for myself. There’s probably some truth to what Dr. Tamara, Randall, Minnie, Jin,
everyone
continues to say about me being overprotective. Chloe really has demonstrated that she can continue to learn and continue to grow, when I give her room.

What no one brings up, what no one seems to want to discuss with me is, where is Chloe’s limit? At what point will I go from being the parent who encourages her child to be all she can be, to the parent allowing her to walk too close to the edge of a cliff?

I press my lips together, smile, and say, “Try counting just four apples, first. You’re good with four.”

“I’m good with four,” Chloe repeats proudly. This time, she successfully counts out four apples.

“Now count four more.” Satisfied with the almost circular shape of my piecrust, I reach for my red ceramic pie plate. “And that makes eight.”

Chloe counts out four more apples. “That makes eight!” She jumps up and down, clapping. She does another pirouette, hands high above her head. She’s somehow managed to get a dusting of flour on her cheek and her hair has come loose from her droopy ponytail. She’s gorgeous.

I still remember her jumping up and down in the kitchen. Pirouetting. She was so happy that day about the apples, about going to the dance with Thomas, about a kitten Halloween costume. If only I could have frozen that moment in time. I remember how good I felt, watching her dance in the kitchen. For once I wasn’t worried about anything imminent. I wasn’t scared. I took pleasure that day in the simple task of baking a pie with my daughter. Of being with her and enjoying her beautiful smile. I remember the smell of the pie baking: the sweet of the fruit, the spiciness of the cinnamon and nutmeg.

Chloe and I were happy that day. Happy with each other, happy with the world. Why couldn’t things have just stayed that way? Chloe was happy with her relationship with Thomas and I was . . .
content
with it. Thinking back, I see now that life was pretty good. My dating life was down the tubes again and I’d put on three pounds instead of losing the fifteen . . . but I was . . . happy.

Chloe went to the dance at church with Thomas that fall, in a pretty blue dress. Of course it was blue. Luckily, we couldn’t find a blue dress with kittens on it in Chloe’s size.

It was Chloe’s first dance. There were other firsts that fall. In November, I walked through the doors of a Friends’ Meeting House for the first time in more than two decades. I can’t say that I immediately felt at home there, because I didn’t, but it felt . . . like there might be something there for me.

Quakers worship in different ways in different parts of the country and the world. Some have services very similar to Methodists or Baptists, or any other Protestant faith, with ministers, hymns, and the recognition of particular religious holidays. This two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Friends congregation, however, was
old school
. There was no hierarchy in the church: no ministers, no lay speakers. It was non-liturgical, so they celebrated no holidays. What set it apart the most from other Protestant services, however, was that it was conducted, for the most part, in silence.
Friends
gather in expectant waiting. They clear their minds and wait for a whisper of God’s word.

The hour of near silence was hard for me. I was used to noise, the noise of others, my own noise, noise that was making me silent inside. Maybe the noise was holding back the anger I felt toward God for making my Chloe . . . what? Less than she could have been? Less than the child Randall wanted?

I only went once that fall; it was a Sunday morning when Chloe had begged to go to St. Mark’s with Thomas and his family. I wasn’t invited. Not that I would have gone. But somewhere between driving her to St. Mark’s and driving home, I turned the car around and headed north. I arrived at the Meeting House a little late, and when it was over, I slipped out as quietly and inconspicuously as possible. I can’t say that, that winter, I was dying to go back . . . but I can say that I thought a lot about it in the following months. I thought about the sense of peace I felt at one point. It only lasted a fraction of a second, but over the next months that fraction of a second teased me. Tantalized me.

Christmas came and went. I cut back on how much I spent on Chloe, but she didn’t notice. Randall began teaching fewer classes and contributing less money to Chloe’s
upkeep
, as he liked to call it. Like she was a piece of livestock . . . or a pet. I made enough money to pay the mortgage, to buy groceries and other necessities, but there was no possibility of any big-ticket items under the Christmas tree. You’d think a tenured professor in a private liberal arts college would make big bucks. You’d be wrong.

Things seemed to stay the same that winter: my classes, my students, Jin’s friendship. But they didn’t, really. They changed. Life is that way. Things change even when you feel like you’re standing still. One of my students committed suicide. My first. She was in my Brit Lit Two class. A nice girl. Quiet. My students said she killed herself over a boyfriend. I couldn’t imagine being her mother. The pain she must have felt. Losing a daughter over a boy? It made me cry just to think about it.

That winter, Jin was not only talking to Abby, but seeing her a couple of times a month. And keeping it from Huan. I knew they were taking things slowly, but I noticed that Jin seemed happier. I also noticed that she wasn’t dating anyone else.

In January came Chloe’s and Thomas’s
anniversary
. I should have declined the invitation to Thomas’s house for the celebratory dinner, but Chloe was so excited.

Dinner is fine. We have pork chops and macaroni and cheese and peas and carrots. I think the menu is a little heavy on the carbs for Margaret, who is a type 2 diabetic, but it’s right up Chloe’s alley. She’s never liked leafy green vegetables, and I’m always trying to make them more palatable to her with cheese or ranch dressing.

We talk about the LoGs’ upcoming field trip to go snow tubing in Pennsylvania. Margaret and I are both going. We talk about how to make chocolate chip pancakes, and about the snow in the forecast. The evening is fine. It’s fine.

“And now for anniversary cake!” Margaret announces, carrying a big cookie sheet with a white homemade cake on top into the dining room. “Can you get paper plates, Danny? In the pantry.”

Danny obediently rises from the chair at the head of the table and goes into the kitchen. He hasn’t said a word all evening, but he’s pleasant enough. He smiles a lot.

“Cake!” Chloe cheers.

“Cake, K . . . Koey!” Thomas echoes.

“Does it got candles?”

“I don’t think it
has
candles,” I tell Chloe gently. “Anniversary cakes don’t usually have candles.”

“I have candles if Chloe wants candles!” Margaret insists. She sets the cake on the table between my daughter and her son and goes to the china cabinet to dig through a drawer. She pulls out chopsticks, matches, a tea candle, a pack of cards; the drawer seems bottomless.

My attention strays. The Eldens live in a three-bedroom prefab house in a cozy neighborhood on the east side of town. Their dining room is separate from the kitchen, but it’s very small and I feel like there’s too much furniture in the room. The décor is very busy. It reminds me of one of Margaret’s skirts. There’s flowered wallpaper and flowered place mats and bouquets of plastic flowers in vases. There are family portraits hung on all the walls, framed in thick, ornate gold-colored frames. Lots of pictures of Thomas grinning. The room makes me feel a little claustrophobic, but Chloe obviously feels comfortable here.

Thomas and Chloe are beaming at the white sheet cake. He’s in a Thomas the Tank Engine sweatshirt; she’s wearing puppies tonight.

Happy Anniversary, Chloe and Thomas!
the cake from Walmart says in blue icing.
Many More!

“I know I have candles here somewhere!” Margaret is saying. She’s still pulling things out of the drawer.

Danny comes back into the dining room carrying Thomas the Tank Engine paper plates, the kind you get for a kids’ party.

Thomas spots them. “M . . . my p . . . p . . . plates,” he sings. “M . . . my s . . . s . . . special plates.”

“Your special plates, honey.” Chloe pats his hand.

Chloe uses those kinds of endearments now. She and Thomas call each other
honey
and
sweetie
and
baby
. It bothers me. It grates on my nerves, especially when he calls her
baby.
Because she’s
my
baby.

But she’s so happy. How can I begrudge her this happiness?

“Aha! I told you I had candles!” Margaret triumphantly holds up a little box of multicolored birthday candles. She brings the candles and the matches to the table, leaving all the stuff she pulled out of the drawer of the china cabinet on the edge of the dining table. A part of me actually envies her at that moment. I can’t imagine feeling the freedom to just leave a pile of junk on the counter with guests in my home. Am I really that controlling? That controlled? I make a mental note to try to be more spontaneous, less fastidious. I’ve always told myself that I run my household the way I do because it’s easier for Chloe. I told myself that structure is what
she
needs, what
she
craves. Would Dr. Tamara agree, or would he say that I am, again, using Chloe as a crutch?

“Hold hands!” Margaret insists as she sticks several candles in the cake. “Hold hands and be ready to make a wish.”

Chloe and Thomas grab hands, holding on to each other as if they’ve just been set adrift in a life raft on the ocean. Margaret lights the candles. Danny peels five plates off the pile.

“Make a wish! A special wish!”

Chloe closes her eyes so hard that she scrunches her face. “Close your eyes, Thomas,” she tells him.

Only then does Thomas close his eyes.

“Don’t say your wish out loud!” Margaret warns. “Whisper it to yourself!”

I see Chloe’s lips moving. Her eyes are still shut. Thomas’s eyes are shut, too, but he seems to better understand what making a
silent
wish means.

“Now blow out your candles!”

Chloe’s and Thomas’s eyes fly open, and they both lean over the cake. They blow hard. Chloe knows how to blow out candles. No spit. Thomas makes a raspberry sound and I try not to be grossed out.

Margaret claps.

Thomas claps. “I m . . . made the wish, M . . . Mama! I . . . I m . . . made the w . . . w . . . wish! I wished m . . . me and K . . . Koey g . . . get married!”

There’s something about the way Thomas says it that makes me think he and Margaret have discussed the
M
word. For some reason, when I look up, I look not at Thomas, or Chloe, or even Margaret. It’s Danny’s gaze I meet for the briefest moment and when I do, I see the same fear in his eyes that I feel in my heart.

 

I had fun at my ann-versary with Thomas. I don’t think Mom had fun. I don’t think she liked the cake. Maybe she don’t like white cake if it’s got colored sprinkles in it.

I don’t look at Mom’s face when we drive home in the car. She don’t look at me, either. I know why. It’s not because of the white cake.

Thomas said his wish. He made his wish because we blew out candles on our cake. Then he told.

I love Thomas. He’s my boyfriend, and he does what I tell him because I’m his girlfriend. He’s my honey and that’s what you do if you’re someone’s honey. He says we can get married. Belle and the Beast get married. I think Jasmine and Prince Ali get married, too. Boyfriends get married to girlfriends. They can sleep in a bed together. They can kiss whenever they want and they can touch boobies.