Something New (18 page)

T
hursday
dawns with the promise of being the best day of my week. I have managed to smooth things over with my two younger children, who I’m sure were just polishing up their letters to the producers of
Wife Swap
. As for Matthew, I was able to find a
Surf or Die
T-shirt on eBay, and although I had to endure a bidding war with someone whose username is shaka14, I won it for $39.95 plus shipping. (Crummy old “softly used” T-shirt: $39.95. Bribing your children for their forgiveness: priceless.)

I catch Matthew as he is rummaging through his dresser drawers for something suitable to wear, showering the room with the cast-offs, which are numerous. I let him know that a new (used)
Surf or Die
shirt is on its way via UPS Ground and will be here in three to five business days. I could have waited until it came and then led him to believe that I did, in fact, forage through smelly and slimy debris at the dump, but
I continually try to convince myself that honesty is the best policy, even if that in itself is a bald-faced lie.

After my heartfelt sermon on how, no, this is not the same shirt, it is exactly
like
the T-shirt his cousin gave him and he can easily transfer all of his warm fuzzy feelings for Luke onto the new T-shirt that, “for your information is a size larger and therefore will fit you for a lot longer than the original would,” Matthew seems unimpressed. Until I let slip accidentally on purpose exactly how much I spent on it. At the mention of $39.95 plus shipping, his eyes go wide, as he has never seen that much money in one place at one time, and he proceeds to throw his arms around me and start to cry.

“I didn’t mean it when I said I hated you,” he reveals. I pat his head and tell him that I knew it all along. Score one for Mom.

At breakfast, I make a point of being totally supportive of my daughter’s wacko decision to eradicate animals from her diet. I carefully set a platter of fresh fruit at her place, coupled with a whole-grain cereal and a pitcher of rice milk that I bought at Trader Joe’s the day before. When she enters the kitchen her eyes are cast downward and she says not a word. She heads for her seat, frowning, most likely expecting to see sausage or Canadian bacon or a suckling pig on her plate. It takes her a moment to process what is in front of her and I watch as her frown literally turns upside down. She looks up at me, her eyes glistening.

“Thanks, Mommy!”

I merely smile and say, “You’re welcome.” I do not want to make too much of this, but I’m pretty sure that Jessie stopped calling me Mommy when she was four. My heart is like the Grinch’s; I can feel it swelling inside my chest.

I ride this high through the day. It energizes me on the
treadmill, keeps my mood simpatico at Target when a woman whose basket is even more loaded than mine cuts in front of me at checkout, propels me through a painfully boring PTA meeting in which I actually volunteer to co-chair the End of the Year Festival. (What the hell was I thinking?)

By the time the after-school merry-go-round of activities begins, I am still in a good mood, no doubt because of the boost I got when both Jessie and Matthew gave me impromptu hugs right there on the school grounds in front of countless peers, teachers, and moms whose tight smiles betrayed their envy. According to the Ivers rotation, today I am Jessie’s spectator at ballet. I drop Connor at baseball, then head for the soccer field where I leave Matthew to Rita Halpern’s care. (I can’t help but glance around for Ben and Liam, but they have not arrived yet.) Jessie and I are thirty seconds ahead of schedule as we arrive at the Garden Hills Conservatoire du Ballet de Paris é Moscow de Vandermeer. (I swear that is the name.)

Madame Valenchenko stands at the door to the studio like an officer of the gulag, her unibrow furrowed and her deeply set, heavily lidded eyes sizing up each girl who walks through the door. The Madame is four foot ten, is as stout as a barrel, and uses a cane, but if you put her in the ring with Mike Tyson, my money would have to be on the ballet coach. Her stern look alone has reduced grown men to tears.

“I am glat zat you are on time today!” she barks as we push through the glass door. I jerk in surprise, as I always do, at the sound of her voice. She sounds like she has spent the last forty years chain-smoking while chewing on glass. “Qvickly, Jess, to ze barre, to ze barre! Now!” She smacks her cane against the concrete for emphasis and I practically shove Jessie into the studio.

I spend the next forty minutes splitting my focus between
my daughter, in her pink leotard and tights and her shoulder-length hair shellacked to her head because her dictator of an instructor won’t allow any student into class with flyaways, and my notepad, where I am making a list of all of the tasks I need to accomplish during spring break, when I will have six days of blissful alone time. Jonah is taking the kids to his parents’ house in Arizona so they can bond with their crazy Grandma and Grandpa Ivers.

As Jessie does her barre exercises, I think about the yearly crusade to my in-laws that I used to make with my family, how I endured the six-hour drive of “Are we there yet?” and “I have to pee!” and “I think I’m going to puke” and “Why can’t we stop and watch them castrate a bull?” We didn’t have the portable DVD player then, the one that straps to the back of the front seat and puts any and every juvenile passenger in the rear of the car into an LCD trance. We had Travel Bingo and Travel Checkers and Travel Backgammon that caused me to vacuum up magnetic playing pieces for months afterward. We had freeway games like the Alphabet Game where you end up stuck on the letters Q and X because license plates weren’t allowed. We had songs, like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” that were sung so many times I wanted to go into a coma just to escape.

When at last we arrived at Bill and Margaret Ivers’s home in the middle of a gigantic wasteland of clay, scrub, and cactus, we’d be ushered into the parlor where the lambasting from my father-in-law would begin.

“What a skinny little string bean you are, Matt-Matt. Doesn’t your mom feed you?”

“Hell, Jessie-Bessie, why’d you cut off your hair, you look like a boy!”

“Connor-my-man, you’ll never get yourself a girlfriend
if you wear holey pants. Can’t your mom sew on some patches?” (We already know that I could not.)

“Helen,” he would always call me, though I am certain he knows my name and just does it to piss me off. “I see the old bottom is getting a little wider, huh? Too many bonbons during
General Hospital
?”

With every jibe Bill made, my mother-in-law would merely giggle and say, “William! You’re terrible!”

Now, as I watch Jessie do pirouettes across the floor, I am struck by how much she has improved over the last year. She looks over at me when she reaches the other side of the room and I give her a thumbs-up, then safely glance down at my notepad and make an addition to my list. I write it at the top, underline it, and star it because I have to get it done before Jonah and the kids leave:
Get honey for Margaret.

My mother-in-law is partial to a rose-infused honey that’s sold at the local farmer’s market in downtown Garden Hills every Friday. Margaret says she uses it for her pound cake, which, I admit, is delicious, but I know for a fact she uses it for other purposes that I am not at liberty to share, except to say that the last time I went to Arizona, rose-infused honey in tow, I happened into the kitchen one late night when I couldn’t sleep and witnessed my father-in-law dipping his finger into the jar and dripping some of the golden goo on my mother-in-law’s left clavicle. Ewww! Luckily I was able to backtrack undetected, but I have never been able to present Margaret with her prized honey without shuddering. Thank God Jonah now has that task.

I should be honest and say that my in-laws are good people. They are. Good people. Jonah and his two brothers are all responsible, nice men. They make decent livings and none of them has ever spent the night in jail. So William and Margaret
have obviously done something right. But William cannot utter a sentence that isn’t laden with derision. He thinks that because he accompanies every insult with a wink everyone will know he is just kidding, a jokester extraordinaire. But I don’t find anything he says funny. And Margaret comes across as sweet and grandmotherly; she never forgets a birthday or anniversary or any other special occasion, and she is always the first to put our Christmas presents in the mail. But you have to wonder whether she has all her faculties, or whether she is addicted to Lithium, since she truly thinks that William the Terrible walks on water. And when I am with the two of them I always feel like I am under the microscope, and that whatever microorganisms they see on the Ellen slide either are foreign to them or need to be handled with a hazmat suit.

Three years ago, I was excused from the family vaycay because my mom was undergoing surgery and needed me to care for her during her recovery. So what if it was just a face-lift and not some lifesaving operation? And who cares that I begged her to push it up a few months so that it would coincide with the Arizona trip? Forget about the phone conversation during which my sister offered to play nursemaid and I told her to back the hell off. It all worked out for the best as far as I was concerned. For even though I had to unclog Mom’s drainage tubes more than a few times, and unpack and repack her bloody gauze, and despite the fact that I had to watch my beloved mother transform into the Creature from the Black Lagoon because of the cataclysmic bruising and swelling that accompany such a procedure, and which her plastic surgeon assured me was perfectly normal, not to have to spend six days with ball-busting Bill was heaven.

The following year, when Jonah broached the subject of
spring break, I hesitated only a millisecond before I told him that I didn’t want to make the trip. I expected anger and indignation, but what I got was close to relief. Apparently, the tension between his folks and me always stresses him out, and after six days of playing the peacemaker and diplomat, he would return from his vacation
in need
of a vacation.

I look up from my notepad and see that Jessie’s ballet class has concluded. My list has seven mundane items beneath the honey thing, like going through the kids’ closets and reorganizing the garage. No prizewinning entries like
take helicopter lessons
or
jump out of a plane
or
track down Hugh Jackman on his movie set
, but at least they are things I have a reasonable chance of accomplishing. That is, if I don’t get lazy or distracted or spend too much time with Jill or decide that it is more important to clear my TiVo…

Jessie is huddled with a small group of her friends in the corner of the studio near the piano, all of them looking almost as Asian as the Lee twins, with their tight buns on the tops of their heads. One of the girls, Suzette, says something that makes the others giggle. Madame Valenchenko waddles over to them, her cane making a rhythmic racket as she thwacks it against the hardwood floor, scowling as though her students’ gaiety is deeply offensive to her. Jessie is now talking animatedly, using her arms like an Italian mama to get her point across. Her friends listen, rapt, until their burly instructor smacks her cane across the piano bench, causing all of the girls to flinch. The group quickly disperses, each girl heading for her respective parent. Madame Valenchenko says something to Jessie that I cannot make out from where I sit and Jessie nods her head. Then the two, an odd couple if ever I saw one, approach me side by side.

“I have overheered zat Jess vud become vegan, da?”

“Yes,” I say, pasting a supportive smile on my face. I am expecting the coach to give us a lecture on how important protein is for muscles and that Jessie ought to rethink her choice. Instead, she totally blindsides both my daughter and me.

“Zis is very gud,” she says. “Perhaps now she vil get reed of zat horrible gut and not break ze floor wiz her tremendous girth.”

My jaw drops to my chest and I have that instant mama-bear rage that makes me want to grab her cane and shove it up her butt.

Jessie puts her hand in mine and looks up at me with glistening eyes. “Can we go now, Mom?” she asks in a small voice I don’t recognize.

I give her fingers a squeeze and smile down at her, then flash an if-looks-could-kill glare at Valenchenko. I hold that old Russian bitch’s beady eyes for a good ten seconds, then stalk out of the studio, my crushed eight-year-old daughter in tow.

Tonight, Jonah brings home Chinese food. Jessie has been locked in her room since we got home, and when she finally emerges and takes her place at the dining room table, she conspicuously pushes aside the tofu with mixed vegetables, grabs the kung pao beef, and proceeds to empty the entire carton onto her plate. Jonah, to whom I am still not speaking except when necessary, glances at me questioningly. Matthew and Connor also exchange quick looks of surprise. Wordlessly, we all watch my daughter as she shovels the formerly offending animal flesh into her mouth until her plate is clean.

As long as she doesn’t go upstairs after dinner and stick her finger down her throat, I’m okay with it.