Still Life with Plums (4 page)

I remember when all my school friends started babysitting, earning money for the movies or a sundae at Nierman’s. I especially remember the day Mrs. Goebel called to ask if I could watch her two-year-old son. I had to ask Mother first, but her response put the skids on that venture. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “But tell her you might consider cutting grass.” I understood then that I could not be trusted with children. I could, however, preside over turf.

A tremulous voice bleats from the parking lot, “Well crap!” It’s one of those church women standing beside a sun-faded Buick, hands on her hips as she surveys the flat left rear tire. She stoops to assess the damage and warbles, “What on earth am I going to do now!”

I scuff through the yard toward her. “Flat tire?” I say,
duh
.

She swivels toward me, no doubt expecting the cavalry, and says, “I’ve got a tire iron and spare if you know how to use them?”

“Sorry,” I say. The closest I’ve come to automotive repair is adding AAA to my speed dial.

Her disappointment is visible, but she straightens up and sighs, “I have twenty-four-hour road service, though it may take twenty-four hours for them to get here.”

We head back into the kitchen, which is abuzz with kitchen activity,
and, feeling as though I have let the world down, I belt out, “Anyone know how to change a flat tire?”

“I do.” It’s my huarache-wearing, loud-mouth comrade pouring an envelope of Kool-Aid into a pitcher. She wipes grape-stained hands down her shorts and says, “Where to?”

The deflated Buick woman re-inflates. “Right out here.”

I tag along to offer moral support and watch my mechanically inclined sister hoist the tire iron and jack from the trunk, pry off the hubcap, and start twisting off lug nuts, sinewy muscles straining. Twice I open my mouth to offer assistance, but really, what would be the point. Instead I head back inside and commandeer her Kool-Aid chore, stirring up a whirlpool in the purple liquid with my spoon. I carry the pitcher to the drink table in the fellowship hall just as M-O-H settles Pam on a chair in the middle of the festivities to open her gifts. The sugar-hyped flower girl spins pirouettes beside her, lacy dress billowing out like a bell.

Lucky for me the food table is unattended and now’s my chance to grab more cake, ignoring my ex’s jibe,
Like you need more cake
. Or is that Mother’s voice?
Up yours
, I snarl at both, heading right for the confection, opting for a corner piece with a massive pink flower. I lean against the counter and shovel it in, enjoying the tacky feel of lard frosting coating the roof of my mouth.

Afterwards, I resist the urge for a third piece and fix a to-go plate for Jeremy, my current husband, endowed with a kind, kind heart. The only human who loves me as unconditionally as my four dogs and three cats, a man who lavishes me with praise that I someday hope to believe. I am still very much recovering from Husband Number One, and maybe from Mother, too. Who, by the way, is still angry at me for depriving her of her own mother-of-the-bride moment because her only daughter, her only
child
for that matter, eloped not once, but twice. A scab she picked at as
recently as yesterday when she helped me select a shower gift for Pam. Of course I wanted to go to Spencer’s for something slightly pornographic, but Mother bribed me into Macy’s china department with the promise of a free lunch that would involve red meat
and
, if I truly behaved, beer.

I obliged, a regular angel, even kept my elbows in and my smart-aleck remarks to myself as I scooted past $150 Lenox salt and pepper shakers and napkin rings. I owed Mother that much, or so she always claimed, because I was such a gross disappointment. Of course she never used those words, but she often tells the story of when the doctor first held up my slippery seven pound, eight ounce body (the only minute of my life I was not overweight) and pronounced my gender—
It’s a girl!
Mother claimed that my whole life flashed before her eyes.

Not
my
life, it turns out, but my life as her daughter. Days filled with matching dresses, shopping sprees, joint hair appointments, and tea lunches with cucumber sandwiches and delicate cookies that I would primly nibble.

I am not a nibbler—as evidenced by the cashew and cake-snarfing incidents. I hate dresses and pantyhose, white gloves, and clutch purses. I cut my own hair—mostly symmetrically—and, as a child, I liked to splash around in mud puddles when I wasn’t playing with fire or sawing off my Barbie dolls’ hands. (I preferred Troll dolls, I confess, their stout bow-legged bodies and wild vertical hair a closer fit to the reality that was me.)

Squealing laughter pulls me away from my beloved Trolls to the spectacle before me—poor, poor Pam wearing a paper-plate hat piled high with her shower gifts’ bows. She looks at me and shrugs, resigned to the humiliation that comes with the bridal territory. I nod in a manner that suggests I
will
be circulating hyperbolic stories about this around the doggy dryers come Monday morning.

Someone taunts, “She broke another ribbon. She’s up to
five
kids now!”

Please don’t make us name them
, though I can always use the spare names Mother accumulated for the other children she never had (my father, lucky bastard, making his great escape when I was three, even if his freedom only came in the guise of a massive coronary, snuffing out my tadpole siblings too)—Marcia, Helen, Barbara, Stephen, Matthew, and Nicholas. Mother kindly offered—if that’s the right word—to let Husband Number One and me have those anointed titles when we started our own family. It’s a good thing we lived three states away when she delivered that list over the phone, because we weren’t even expecting, or expecting to expect any time soon. Number One had strong feelings about children. Or against them, I should say. Jeremy is softer on the issue.
Whatever you want
, he has said numerous times.
I just want you to be happy
, he says, and I think I believe him.

Someone has taken my seat next to Andi (or perhaps Andi had enough of my shenanigans and bribed them: Pa-lease sit here, won’t you? No, she’s
not
coming back—and don’t touch those nuts!). So I head for three vacant seats at the end of a different table, place settings untainted so I know they’re empty, and if I’m lucky, will remain so for the duration. I can be quite anti-social on occasion, surprise-surprise. This is a better seat, actually, closer to the bridal action, where I can inventory the opened gifts and see if there is anything worth borrowing, like that fancy-schmancy espresso machine, or that margarita maker complete with jumbo glasses and a special dish to salt the rims. Now
that’s
a gift worth getting. Maybe I should have opted for the shower after all.

But no, I take that back as I assess Pam’s other spoils: place settings and flatware and irons and cookbooks. The detritus of a marriage that may not last, and though I’m hopeful for Jeremy and me—I give us a good sixty/forty chance—it’s hard to make a quick
exit with all that junk piled on one’s back. Of course one could always leave it behind, like I did with my first marriage: Grandma’s mahogany dresser, that hand-blown cameo vase my best friend sent all the way from West Virginia, my jewelry box, dammit, with Aunt Frankie’s brooch and my favorite ankle bracelet. Leaving me to forever wonder if some other woman is wearing that brooch, if she’s sliding her underwear and socks into Grandma’s dresser, plunking dried roses in my cameo vase.

God help you
, I offer to the conjured woman, understanding the bruising price tag that comes with those treasures.

A finger taps my shoulder. “Is anyone sitting here?” It’s my huarache-shod, tire-changing hero, and I gratefully blurt, “No! Have a seat!” She pulls in with her fresh plate piled with ample servings, I note, though she is not ample herself by my standards, the weighty infraction reduced when I see the tire smudges on her shorts, the grit under her nails.

“What did I miss?” she asks, mouthful of chicken salad, poor table etiquette endearing her to me even more.

“Most of the cooing-over-the-pricey-gifts,” I say.

“Thank God.” She nods toward the stack. “Has she opened my case of shoe liners yet?”

“No, but my twelve-pack of air fresheners was a tremendous hit.”

“I’m Peggy,” she says, not even bothering to wipe off the streak of mayonnaise on her palm before offering her hand.

“Jackie,” I say, a blunt version of Jacquelyn, my honest-to-god name. Not Clodda, the fib I offered to Aaaandreaaaa, though a better fit than Jacquelyn, which is far too snobby, my mother’s precise intention that, like so many of her expectations, fell flat.

Peggy, I learn, is the groom’s sister who owns a bakery in San Diego.
Does it get any better?
I again eye her stomach, only slightly convex, certainly not to the extent mine would be if I were
surrounded by cake batter and cookie dough all day—my version of heaven.

I ask her to please, please tell me what a typical workday for her is like, and not to gloss over details like setting the oven temperature or greasing pans. She obliges, spinning a fantasy about baker’s chocolate and egg yolks and heavy cream. Caramel glazes and toasted almonds and liqueur-soaked lady fingers. She is a goddess and everyone in the room should bow down to her magnificence.

And then the flower girl pukes—too many pirouettes—replacing the warm, gooey fragrances concocted in my head with the putrid stink of bowel-slung punch and partially digested chicken salad.

Half a dozen women rush to her aid, including Peggy, who lunges off with two words, “Oh, fuck.” Another six scatter for wet paper towels, quickly returning to wipe down the girl’s face, dress, fingers, and the chunky mess on the floor. Peggy comes back with the now-bawling child in tow.

“It’s okay,” Peggy says, sitting, hoisting the child onto her lap.

I’m stunned. “Is this… is she…?”

“My daughter Emily.”

“Oh,” is all I can manage, my goddess roped back to earth and now saddled with children.

“My dress!” Emily whines, running her little fingers across the lime stains on her lacy togs.

“That’s what Spray ’n Wash is for,” Peggy consoles. She leans close to me. “I swear, the child can barely tie her shoes and already she’s into high fashion. Didn’t get that from me,” Peggy says, and by the look of her, I believe it, though I can only imagine Mother’s dismay if that were me throwing up, not just on my good dress, but in front of the guests: Oh, the humiliation—for her.

Peggy simultaneously rocks Emily into a torpor, eats her potato salad (not put off by the vomit smell still emanating from her child),
and delivers a description of a seven-layer chocolate torte, her specialty, with a gooey center that explodes in your mouth when you bite into it. She wants to know about my job too, and though I can’t offer up anything as exquisite as volcanic cake, I volunteer my best dog stories, including—Mother still doesn’t believe this—my great joy in detailing them with ribbons and tuxedo vests and plastic tiaras.

We yak for an hour, I swear, Peggy painting visions of driving cross-country to attend this shower. Two thousand miles in a car with no relief drivers, on Route 66 no less, all the way to St. Louis, with a side trip to the Grand Canyon and every funky hot dog stand along the way. The woman is describing my top-down, hair-whipping, dream vacation (sans child’s car seat) if I only had the guts.

Emily snores, and I am once against stunned to find myself having a real adult conversation with a woman who has a sleeping child draped across her lap, not one who is tugging on Mommy’s thigh or smearing oatmeal-coated fingers down her blouse or screaming for a drink, or a cookie, or that seductively placed toy on the lowest shelf in the impulse-buying zone at the grocery store. I don’t even flinch when Emily’s hand flops over and rests on my forearm, tiny fingers wiggling, and I wonder what she’s up to in her sleep: making Easy-Bake cookies, playing chopsticks on the piano.

Emily is not the only surprise. Up comes a boy, maybe seven or eight, with three cherry popsicles clutched in his hands. “Mom!” he says, drawing Peggy’s attention to the booty. I love him already because, unlike his spindly sister, he’s a chubby kid, looking like Pugsley Addams in his well-worn striped shirt and uneven buzz cut. I watch Peggy’s face to see if it collapses the way Mother’s did whenever I plodded up to her.

But Peggy just extends an arm toward him. “There’s my Toby,” she says, drawing him into this maternal tableau. “This is Miss Jackie,” she says.

Toby looks at the popsicles in his hands and his face puckers up as he labors over long division. “I only brought three,” he says, looking from Emily to Peggy, the other apparent recipients.

“I don’t think Emily is up for one right now anyway,” Peggy says.

Emily blows a spit bubble in her sleep.

“Okay,” Toby whispers, handing mine over first.

“Thank you, sir,” I say.

“You’re a good man,” Peggy says.

Toby delivers some circuitous, non sequitur tale about his exploits in the choir loft, about discovering a box of Jesus puppets, about the wooden-slatted organ pedals. Peggy listens intently, as if he’s divulging directions for Blackbeard’s treasure, offering encouraging blurbs:
Is that right? Really! How totally cool
.

I marvel at her patient, uncritical attention.

Finally Toby gallops off and Peggy asks quite unexpectedly, “Do you have kids?”

For once I am not irritated by the inquiry. It’s an earnest one.

“No,” I say, wondering how I should finish, because I always feel compelled to offer an excuse for my childless state. A defense. I have a whole catalogue of answers depending, some absolute lies: That I married too late. That my ovaries are shriveled. That I really don’t like babies. Have such a weak stomach that just the thought of poopy diapers and snotty noses sends me gagging, and I don’t believe it when all those mothers say:
It’s different when it’s your own!

Some truths that I only recently unearthed for Jeremy: That I’m a workaholic, too invested in my kennel and it wouldn’t be fair (though Jeremy said he’d be perfectly content as Mr. Mom).