A terrible thing happened to me a few months ago: I discovered wrinkles in my cleavage.
This may not seem like a big ol’ deal, but life is changing fast, and wrinkles in the cleavage, well, that just seals it. For one, the doors of the strip bar are now closed. I used to think, “Well, I could always go serve drinks at the strip bar.? I figured if I got fired from my teaching job for getting a tattoo in the wrong spot or making the wrong queer quip to the wrong kid, or showing Michael Moore films and teaching Sherman Alexie books, then I could always answer the perpetually running ad in our local weekly and go serve drinks to drunk or creepy straight guys. But even Fox’s has some standards, and wrinkled cleavage along with butt cellulite? Snowball’s chance.
Unfortunately, with the wrinkles have appeared some difficult attitudes. For instance, I also can no longer bring myself to consider voluntary welfare or unemployment. Don’t get me wrong – I have never volunteered to be a card carrying member of the working poor, though I have stood in both of those long lines. But I used to be able to consider it on the bad days, the days when a kid came to school after watching her best friend kill herself, the days when I found myself becoming the meanest teacher I ever had. Now, the thoughts of bailing just don’t come. Even if the career is soul sucking and miserable, it’s food on the table three weeks out of the month. Even if we never have grocery money the fourth week, I can overdraw my account since I know there’s another check coming. I have grown too old to consider a voluntary move to the dole.
There are no more twenty-something escape routes. I am firmly encrusted in middle age and forced to take my career path seriously. My friends have all written books, got great jobs, started non-profit agencies and businesses. So it’s hi ho, hi ho and back to school I go. Last summer I took out a fat loan and enrolled in an administrative credentialing program on top of full time teaching.
I will not be able to rest doing the full time work of mediocre teaching like my colleagues who married doctors or real estate agents. Teaching well, of course, is a seventy-hour a week gig, and teaching poorly can be done in thirty-five. I’ve been skating in the middle with a forty-five hour average for almost ten years now. Doing enough to feel prepared and competent, but not so much as to win awards and miss watching my kids grow up. Until the cleavage wrinkles appeared, that is.
Because now I’m having to suck it up and join the big kids. I’m moving into administrative work and embracing the 70 hour week.
I’m going to school full time and working full time. Two days a week I do not see my kids at all, as I am gone before they get up and home after they’re in bed. I’m trying to get a gig working at kid summer school while going to wrinkled cleavage summer school. Once I get certified as a principal, I’ll work more hours than my combined school and work hours now. I’ll chaperone dances, where I will separate hormonal teens who are “freak dancing? in blatant disregard of school rules. I will send home girls whose thongs show and boys with beer ads on their shirts. I will give lunch detention to smart asses. I will try to convince embittered 35 year vets to either retire or be nice to kids.
I will not have time for poetry slams or roller derbies. I will not have skin for new tattoos. I will not write novels or read at festivals. I will administer. I will learn what to administer. I will have time only to administer.
Granted, I’m not thrilled about this. And I’m betting my soul that it’s not all true.
The days after my first child was born I wept and moped and wept and moped and could not bring myself to find my center, find my joy. My teen-aged breasts produced milk enough for quadruplets, and my baby snacked in 4 minute feedings every twenty minutes. I limped through my days still sore from a tear during the birth, soaked in milk and panicking that the baby would starve. I believed the prospects of bathing and feeding myself to be impossible. It all seemed impossible, and the thought of working or going to school while keeping the baby and myself alive was just crazy.
And now I’m here again. Weeping and moping and staring at the wrinkles in my cleavage. Weeping and moping.
About a month into motherhood, the baby went to sleep. She hadn’t slept until then, at least not that I remember. I knew I should be sleeping too, felt guilty for not sleeping, but the fall sun shone onto my little writing desk and the journal I bought to write about motherhood sat in its little plastic sleeve getting warm in the light. I pulled my torn body into the chair, pulled a sweater over my milk-soaked nightie, and stared at the pink and blue handmade paper. I had bought it the day I cancelled the abortion, the day I decided to go ahead and do what was clearly not possible.
I opened its cover and began to write. It doesn’t matter what I wrote, and I can assure you it was crap, as perhaps this is crap. What matters is that into the ink soak the paper with my anger and fear. Inarticulately, I mourned the child I could no longer be and drenched pages in my sadness. And when I was done? A miracle. I felt human. I felt normal. I felt like myself.
I peer down now into the valley between my breasts, breasts which finally produce nothing but wrinkles. I remember deciding a long time ago to choose to be a mother and be myself anyway. I remember how writing kept me alive. This work thing can’t be harder than that was, can it? Midlife, too many responsibilities, the prospect of entering the middle class can’t keep me from what is real, can they? As sure as I eventually slept not only with that first baby, but with the second, and with the two sleepless step-babies I picked up a few years ago, as sure as I can still put pen to pulp, push keys earthward, I will hold onto myself through middle age. And maybe I’ll be able to buy groceries without going into the red.
Sarah Talbot lives without sleep in the lutefisk capital of the American West. She has so many children she doesn't know what to do.
On Monday, she woke, poured two cups of coffee and set the table. She made breakfast and served everyone when they came in. They all kissed her cheek as they ran out the door. She washed, rinsed, dried and put away the dishes. She opened all the curtains and windows. She gathered discarded clothing from the floor in each of the bedrooms into her laundry basket and went down to the laundry room. While she washed the first load, she sat and wrote her grocery list. She moved the clothes into the dryer and began a second load of wash. She dusted the living room and family room before it was time to take the clothes out of the dryer and begin the final load. She folded and put away the laundry.
She went into the kitchen and made a sandwich and had lemonade. She washed, rinsed, dried and put away the plate and cup. She folded and put away the next load and moved the other clothes into the dryer. She vacuumed the living room and family room. She took out the iron and ironing board. She ironed and folded and put away the last load of laundry. She went to the grocery store and bought off her list. She came home and put away the groceries. She turned on the oven and baked a dozen cookies for after-school snacks. She chopped vegetables for a salad and prepared a chicken for dinner. She poured milk and served cookies when the children came home.
She set the table and served dinner. They all thanked her as they ran to watch television. She washed, rinsed, dried and put away the dishes. She rinsed out the coffeepot and set it for the morning. She closed all the curtains and windows. She turned off all the lights. She locked all the doors. She checked on the children in their rooms. She took a shower. She turned off the television and woke her husband from the couch. They went to bed.
On Tuesday, she woke, poured two cups of coffee and set the table. She made breakfast and served everyone when they came in. They all kissed her cheek as they ran out the door. She washed, rinsed, dried and put away the dishes. She opened all the curtains and windows. She straightened and vacuumed the three bedrooms. She scrubbed and cleaned the toilets and the bathtubs in the two bathrooms. She swept and mopped the bathroom floors. She washed the mirrors and polished the chrome.
She went into the kitchen and heated up leftover chicken and vegetables and had a cup of coffee. She washed, rinsed, dried and put away the plate and cup. She wiped down and scrubbed the counters, the stove and the kitchen table. She swept and mopped the kitchen floor. She made some rice cereal bars for an after-school snack. She put a roast and potatoes in the oven for dinner. She lay Cub Scout and Junior Scout uniforms on the beds. She poured lemonade and served krispy treats when the children came home. She drove the children to their meetings and picked up the dry cleaning on her way home.
She set the table and waited for her husband to bring the children home. She served dinner. They all thanked her as they ran to watch television. She packaged the leftovers. She washed, rinsed, dried and put away the dishes. She rinsed out the coffeepot and set it for the morning. She closed all the curtains and windows. She turned off all the lights. She locked all the doors. She checked on the children in their rooms. She took a shower. She turned off the television and woke her husband from the couch. They went to bed.
On Wednesday, she woke, poured two cups of coffee and set the table. She made breakfast and served everyone when they came in. They all kissed her cheek as they ran out the door. She washed, rinsed, dried and put away the dishes. She opened all the curtains and windows. She stripped down the beds and removed all towels from the bathrooms into her laundry basket and went down to the laundry room. While she washed the first load, she washed the windows in the living room. She moved the towels into the dryer and began a second load of wash. She washed the windows in the family room and the master bedroom. She moved the sheets into the dryer and began the final load. She washed the windows in the kitchen and bathrooms. She folded and put away the laundry.
She went into the kitchen and made a sandwich and had lemonade. She washed, rinsed, dried and put away the plate and cup. She folded and put away the next load and moved the blankets into the dryer. She baked a pan of brownies and a frozen apple pie. She made the beds with new linens and put out fresh towels. She made a rice and bean casserole with the leftover chicken for dinner. She poured milk and served brownies when the children came home.
She set the table and served dinner. They all thanked her as they ran to watch television. She gave her husband the apple pie to take with him to his poker game. She washed, rinsed, dried and put away the dishes. She rinsed out the coffeepot and set it for the morning. She closed all the curtains and windows. She turned off all the lights. She locked all the doors. She checked on the children in their rooms. She turned off the television and went to bed.
On Thursday, she woke, poured two cups of coffee and set the table. She made breakfast and served everyone when they came in. They all kissed her cheek as they ran out the door. She washed, rinsed, dried and put away the dishes. She opened all the curtains and windows. She gathered discarded clothing from the floor in each of the bedrooms into her laundry basket and went down to the laundry room. She thought she heard a voice. No one was home. While she washed the first load, she watered the houseplants. She moved the clothes into the dryer and began a second load of wash. She dusted the living room and family room before it was time to take the clothes out of the dryer and begin the final load. Again, she thought she heard a voice. She couldn’t tell what it was saying. She shook her head and she folded and put away the laundry.
She went into the kitchen and had a slice of apple pie and a cup of coffee. She washed, rinsed, dried and put away the plate and cup. She folded and put away the next load and moved the other clothes into the dryer. She vacuumed the living room and family room. She took out the iron and ironing board. She ironed and folded and put away the last load of laundry. She went outside and pulled weeds from her flowerbeds. She swept the walkway to the front door and the driveway. She swept the sidewalk in front of the house. She turned on the sprinklers. She turned on the oven and baked a dozen cookies for an after-school snack. She chopped up the leftover roast and vegetables into a potpie for dinner. She poured milk and served cookies when the children came home. She turned off the sprinklers.
She set the table and served dinner. They all thanked her as they ran to watch television. She washed, rinsed, dried and put away the dishes. She heard the voice again. She went to the family room. They were all watching the television. They didn't even look at her when she walked in. She stood there a minute. She shook her head and went back to the kitchen. She rinsed out the coffeepot and set it for the morning. She closed all the curtains and windows. She turned off all the lights. She locked all the doors. She checked on the children in their rooms. She took a shower and went to bed.
On Friday, she woke, poured two cups of coffee and set the table. She made breakfast and served everyone when they came in. Again she heard the voice. No one else heard anything. They all kissed her cheek as they ran out the door. She washed, rinsed, dried and put away the dishes. She opened all the curtains and windows. She scrubbed out the oven and removed everything from the refrigerator. She washed the inside and replaced last month's box of baking soda. She threw out any old leftovers. She washed, rinsed, dried and put away the containers. She defrosted the freezer.
She had a piece of potpie and a cup of coffee. She washed, rinsed, dried and put away the plate and cup. Again she heard the voice. She shook her head. She packaged the brownies and rice cereal treats in baggies. She packed soccer and cheer uniforms into over-night bags along with pajamas and change of clothes for each of the children. She poured milk and served apple pie when the children came home. She drove them to their friend's homes.
She picked up burgers and fries for dinner. She rinsed out the coffeepot and set it for the morning. She closed all the curtains and windows. She turned off all the lights. She locked all the doors. She went to bed.
On Saturday, she woke, poured two cups of coffee and set the table. She made breakfast and served her husband when he came in. Again she heard the voice. He heard nothing. She shook her head. He kissed her cheek as he went out the door to golf. She washed, rinsed, dried and put away the dishes. She opened all the curtains and windows. She heard the voice clearly now. "Wash us, rinse us, dry us, put us away," the dishes said. She shook her head. She went around the house to see who was talking. "Wash us, dry us, fold us, put us away," she heard the clothes on the floor in the bedrooms say. She shook her head, harder. The floors in each room said "sweep us, mop us" or "vacuum us" as she ran through the house. In the bathrooms, the sink and bathtub and toilets called to her to "scrub us!" She ran back to the kitchen.
"Wash us, rinse us, dry us, put us away!" "Wash us, dry us, iron us, fold us, put us away!" "Sweep us, mop us!" "Vacuum us!" "Dust us!" "Scrub us!" "Clean us!" "WASH US!" "Clean us!"
She screamed.
Her husband brought the children home. They found her throwing dishes against the kitchen wall, screaming " Wash us, rinse us, dry us, put us away!"
MamaKia writes, edits, struggles with teen angst, grooms the future 1st woman POTUS*, keeps her fingers busy with Riled Rags (her line of handmade children's accessories), feeds professional chefs, directs Back on Track Care Packs (a non-profit set up to help children displaced by Katrina), spends hour after hour logged onto HipMama, and generally gets very little sleep, not necessarily in that order, somewhere very near the Pacific Ocean. She can be contacted at ransomnoteproductions [at] yahoo.com.
*president of the US
My name was supposed to be Paul Harvey Merritt. In the hospital room after the birth, my father accidentally wrote "Pual" on the birth certificate and gave it to the nurse while my mother was asleep. When my mother found out how much paperwork was required to change it, she decided to pronounce the name "Pool," and told anyone who asked that it was French.
I should mention that my mother is a woman who likes to leave things up to chance. Every morning, she consults her horoscope before making plans for the day. She got pregnant with me because she and my father decided to stop using birth control and, as she puts it, "see if it was meant to be."
Apparently, it was; she got pregnant within two months. And from that moment on, every relative and stranger she came into contact with was certain -- either intuitively, or using such time-honored methods as dangling her wedding ring from a string over her belly -- that the baby would be a boy.
My parents were young and easily convinced. They bought a dictionary of baby names at the used bookstore for a quarter, and they only opened the male half. When I was born a girl, they were still frozen in position, and it never occurred to them to name me Paula or Pauline. I'm thirty years old now and could have changed it myself, but I guess that I, too, like to leave some things to chance.
~
So at any rate, you can understand why I wasn't surprised to get a call from my mother telling me that she had met a man in the shoe department at Sears and was driving to Minnesota to get married that weekend.
"My horoscope said to be on the lookout for love," she said, as if that explained everything.
I was in my cubicle, at work, and I asked if I could call her back. Mondays are always my busiest days, and I had two customers on hold.
"All right," my mother said, "but call me soon. I need your opinion on flowers."
"As soon as I'm done, I promise." I hung up, pasting a bright smile on my face before I pressed the button next to the blinking red light for line 2.
~
It is my job to make other people happy.
My desk is located in the customer service division of Sun Day, Inc., which manufactures a wide variety of products, the most popular being our nylon support hose and upright vacuum cleaners. People are upset when they call me, in the mood to complain or yell or insist on speaking to my supervisor.
I answer the phone from my cubicle, where I am always dressed in a smart suit, whether it's 8 o'clock in the morning or 10 o'clock at night. And though I remain faceless to all but the most dedicated and geographically close complainants, I wear a nametag pinned over my left breast. Sun Day's founder, Peter Day, insists on it. My name is etched in white calligraphy on a royal blue background:
Pual Merritt
Your friendly customer service representative.
~
On my lunch break, I called my mother back. "You met him this morning?" I asked.
"I've been buying shoes from him for years," my mother explained. She sighed happily. "He said I have beautiful calves."
I winced, envisioning a perpetually part-time college student with a foot fetish kneeling next to my mother's lap.
"And now you're getting married?"
"We have a lot in common," she assured me. "We're both passionate about Greek food, Victorian novels, and hiking."
There was a long silence.
"I don't know what to say," I said.
~
My parents' meeting was also somewhat unconventional. They were both young, partway through college, moonlighting as clowns in a small local circus and working at children's birthday parties on weekends.
Even after the divorce, when one of them was having a bad day, they would put on their red noses and big clown shoes and head over to a nearby park, where they juggled and fashioned animals out of balloons. By the time we got back to my mother's house, they would be laughing and joking, and she sang as she wiped off her makeup in front of the bathroom mirror.
As a child, this ritual was fun for me, too; I might have called it charming if I had known the word. But as a teenager I watched them from a secluded park bench, squirming in my navy plaid skirt and penny loafers, wishing that they acted more like my best friend Susan Carter's parents. Her parents were both lawyers, and Susan said that their dry-cleaning bill was over a hundred dollars a month.
Despite a series of odd jobs, my mother tended to call herself a homemaker. In her spare time, long before health food became trendy, she made her own yogurt and baked whole wheat cookies sweetened with molasses or maple syrup. Other kids surveyed the contents of my lunch box with pity as they wolfed down their white bread and bologna sandwiches and store-bought chocolate chip cookies.
My father was an inventor, but not of anything cool like computer games or flying vehicles. Instead, he fixated on things like a device to help toilet water run more smoothly without splashing.
"See here," he told the first boyfriend I brought home from college. "You don't want to clog the toilet, right? So you flush while you're still sitting there, before you wipe. And you don't want that filthy water splattering all over your backside."
I groaned.
Ever since the divorce, my father had lived next door to my mother and me. A few years earlier, he had married a woman named Petal who grew her own organic vegetables in the garden behind their house, and they had arrived just before dinner carrying armloads of produce. My mother, who loved Petal like a sister, had kissed them both and ushered them into our living room.
~
After work, I met my current boyfriend, Ronald, for dinner.
"Mom called me this morning and said she's getting married," I told him over a basket of bread.
Sounding amused, he said, "That Audrey."
"She bought a pair of sling-back pumps from him, and I guess it was love at first sight. They're driving to Minnesota. Apparently there's a wedding chapel at the City of Gold Hotel and Casino."
Ron snorted. "Your mother and her hare-brained schemes. Good Lord. Where does she come up with these things?"
"So do you want to come with us?"
"Oh, you're going, too?" He shook his head. "When is this blessed event?"
"Saturday."
He straightened. "Wait a minute -- this Saturday? I have tickets to the Brewers game. You said you were going with me."
"I'm sorry. Maybe you can take Jeff."
"Are you kidding? You're canceling our plans so you can drive to rural Minnesota with your mom?"
"It's for her wedding."
The waitress arrived with our food. As soon as she had walked away, Ron leaned forward. "Let me get this straight -- she met him this morning?"
"He's been selling her shoes for years."
"That's his job. Of course he has. What else does she even know about this guy?"
"She said they have a lot in common. They both like Greek food and…Victorian novels…"
"Wow. He sounds perfect."
I sighed. "I know."
Ron drummed his fingers on the table. "We've been engaged for a year, and you won't even move in with me."
"I know."
We ate our food in silence.
When I got home that night, I removed the Pual Merritt pin from my suit jacket and laid it out with my clothes for work the next day.
~
My mother and her shoe salesman arrived at my apartment late that Friday afternoon, not long after I got home from work. I had packed a bag the night before.
"Pual, this is George," my mother said.
"It's good to meet you," George said pleasantly, offering his hand for me to shake. Despite my fears, he was around my mother's age and had a bald spot on the crown of his head that he didn't try to conceal.
My mother, playing the role of a movie heroine, was wearing big sunglasses with a scarf tied over her hair. George put his arm around her and said shyly, "This has been the best week of my life. I've admired Audrey for years."
Mom couldn't seem to stop smiling. "Oh, George," she said.
Downstairs, I half-expected to find a cherry red convertible with the top down, but they had rented a dark blue van with captain's chairs and a state-of-the-art speaker system. My father was perched on the edge of the passenger seat tuning the radio, and Petal sat in one of the middle seats flipping through an issue of Utne. As George opened the sliding side door, Petal said, "Harvey, for goodness' sakes, pick a station and leave it."
Dad paused on Simon and Garfunkel singing "Cecilia" and raised the volume. He turned toward Petal, melodramatically singing along: "Cecilia, you're breakin' my heart, you're shakin' my confidence baby…"
"It's ‘daily,'" Petal corrected, but she was laughing.
Leaning over to avoid hitting his head on the van's ceiling, Dad gestured wildly as he moved back to the middle seat next to Petal, singing, "Oh, Cecilia, I'm down on my knees, I'm beggin' you please to come home…come on home."
Petal had set the magazine aside, and she, Mom, and George were laughing and singing along.
~
I called Ron when we got to Minnesota. My father and Petal were in the hotel room next to mine, and through the wall I could hear them talking softly.
"We're here," I said. "Did I wake you?"
"No. I was reading."
"We had fun on the drive over. I wish you were here."
Ron didn't answer right away, and I could almost see him shaking his head. "I'm sure I'm really missing out."
"You are! My dad and Petal got -- "
"Your dad? Harvey's there?"
"Yeah, he's in the room next-door."
"Harvey came along to your mother's wedding."
"Why wouldn't he?"
"I don't know, Pual. It just seems a little weird."
I was sitting up on the bed, twisting the phone cord around my fingers. My father's room had fallen silent. "How was work?" I asked.
"Fine."
"Mine, too. I had this one really irate customer, and she insisted on speaking to Mr. Day himself."
"Why don't you quit?" Ron said. "I've never understood why you work at that Sunshine place anyway. You have a degree in biology. Why don't you use it?"
"It's Sun Day," I told him.
"Whatever."
"I like helping people."
"So become a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher. There are a lot of ways to help people that don't involve sitting at a desk making minimum wage."
"But I don't want to quit."
"When we get married, you won't have to work, anyway."
"I don't want to quit."
Ron sighed loudly. "I should go. I'm planning to get up early tomorrow."
I hung up the telephone and lay flat on my back on the bed.
"You okay?" my mother asked. She was lying on her side, propped up on one elbow, facing me. As a bow to tradition, she was staying in my room until after the wedding.
I picked at the bedspread with my fingernails. "Why are you getting married?"
Mom looked pensive for a moment. "In general, I guess I'd say because I'm a little lonely. I like having other people around. Specifically, though, I'm crazy about George. He's a good guy."
"A good guy," I repeated, unintentionally changing the emphasis of her words. The phrase now sounded as though it had more to do with heroes and villains than with an aging shoe salesman. "But you only met him a few days ago," I said. "You don't know anything about him."
"Well. . . . That's not strictly true."
"What do you mean?"
Sounding reluctant, she said, "We've been dating for a while."
"Then what happened on Monday?"
"He asked me to marry him."
"In the shoe department at Sears."
Mom hesitated. "Not exactly."
"Where, then?"
"Over breakfast at IHOP. But then he had to go to work," she assured me quickly, "and I went with him and bought the sling-back pumps. The shoes were real."
"Well, that's good, I guess."
"We'd already driven into Minnesota and applied for the marriage license."
I shook my head. "I don't understand. Why didn't you tell me all this in the first place?"
Mom looked slightly apologetic, but she shrugged. "Didn't my version make a better story?"
~
As I fell asleep that night, I thought about a phone call I had gotten at work. A woman had been leaning over, vacuuming under the bed, when she accidentally vacuumed up her own hair.
"Please don't hang up," she told me. "I got the 1-800 number off the bottom of the vacuum. I'm trapped here and my husband won't be home for an hour."
"Don't worry, ma'am," I said. "Believe it or not, this isn't the first time this has happened."
"Really?" she asked. "I feel like such a fool. I should have tied up my hair."
"Do you have a screwdriver?"
"Not with me, but in the house, yes."
"You're going to need to unscrew the panel on the bottom of the vacuum and loosen your hair from the rollers. Unfortunately, you may lose some of it."
"That's all right," the woman said. "I was due for a change anyway."
That night, lying in bed next to my mother at the City of Gold Hotel and Casino, I dreamt that I was playing the slots and got my hair caught in the arm of the slot machine. In real life, no one in my family gambles, and my hair is not much more than shoulder-length. In the dream, though, I played the slots like my life depended on it, and my hair had grown almost to my feet.
When a manager arrived with an enormous pair of silver scissors, I begged him not to cut me free. "Just leave me here," I kept repeating. "Please. All I want is to blend in."
~
Outside the wedding chapel, propped on a black vinyl chair, was a ridged black board with removable white letters. Before we arrived, someone had spelled out the arrangement for the day:
"That's progressive," my mother said. We were on our way back up to the room after eating breakfast at the City of Gold buffet with Petal. My father had taken George out to avoid any mingling of the bridal couple before the ceremony.
"Wait a minute," I said. "Paul and Ronald?" I looked furtively around.
"What's the matter?" Petal asked.
"Surely Ron would have called you before he drove all the way down here," Mom said.
"I don't know."
"I'll go find Marcia," Mom told me. "She's the wedding coordinator."
"When's the last time you spoke to Ron?" Petal asked as my mother walked into the chapel.
"Last night, when we arrived."
Petal glanced past me, and her eyes widened. I knew what I would see before I even turned around.
Walking down the dim hallway toward us, clad in a black tuxedo and carrying an army of red roses, was my boyfriend, Ron.
"Pual!" he exclaimed. "What are you doing here?"
I stared at him. "Going to my mother's wedding. What are you doing here?"
"Well, I was planning to do this later, but…" He shifted the flowers, fumbling with the hip pocket of his jacket. "Could you hold these for a minute?" he asked Petal.
She accepted the pile of roses, peering around them curiously.
Ron pulled a black velvet jeweler's box out of his pocket and got down on one knee. He cracked the box open with a flourish, revealing a large square-cut diamond ring. "Pual Merritt," he said. "Will you marry me?"
"We're in a casino," I hissed. "Do you really think the floor is clean enough for that?"
My mother emerged from the chapel and threw her hands in the air. "What are you doing? It's bad luck for the bride to see the groom before the ceremony."
"We're not getting married!"
"That's not what Marcia told me," Mother said. "You're scheduled for four p.m." She smiled happily. "You know what my horoscope said this morning? ‘Today is your lucky day.' Isn't that fabulous?"
I frowned. "Fabulous."
"How long does the guy usually stay down here?" Ron asked. "My knee is starting to hurt."
"Didn't you propose once before, anyway?" Petal asked. "I thought you two had been engaged for a long time."
"A year," Ron said. "I took her out to dinner and asked her to marry me over strawberries and champagne."
"And everything just fell into place," Petal mused dreamily.
"I guess you could say that." Ron turned back to me. "Look," he said. "I've got the tux, I've got the flowers, I've got the place, I've got the ring. What more do you want?"
Helplessly, I shook my head. Ron was exactly the type of man I had always envisioned myself marrying: clean-cut, with a stable, respectable job and a good family. More importantly, though, he was the man I had always envisioned myself marrying. I had spent my entire adult life -- and, if you wanted to be honest, my entire adolescence -- pining after Susan Carter's beautiful older brother. I had literally been waiting years for this moment.
So I did the only logical thing I could do. I stalled. "What about your family? How could they miss your wedding?"
"Mother's in the Caribbean," Ron said. "Dad's in New York on business. And you know Susan. She's always running in ten different directions."
"So she said that she couldn't come?"
He shrugged. "I didn't bother calling."
"If we got married today, it wouldn't even be legal."
My mother put her arm around me and in a hushed voice said, "Honey, it's almost time. I'm going upstairs to get dressed."
I glanced down at my own T-shirt and jeans. "I'm coming, too."
"Wait a minute," Ron said. "What are you doing?"
"Sorry," Petal said, placing the flowers gently back in his arms. "I haven't even showered yet."
"Pual," Ron said sternly. "This is getting ridiculous."
"I'll see you in a bit," Mom told me. "Bye, Ron." She and Petal headed down the hall.
"I'm the maid of honor," I said. "I have matching shoes and everything."
"I drove all night to get here in time. I'm going to miss the Brewers game."
I began backing down the hall. "Besides, I promised my mom I'd help her."
In his steady lawyer's voice, Ron said, "If you go upstairs right now, we're through."
"I'm sorry. I said I'd help her get ready." I turned away from him.
His words hit my back with the angry force of buckshot. "I can't believe you're throwing all this away."
When I reached the end of the hall, I looked back. Ron was still down on one knee with his arms full of red roses. "You have an unhealthy attachment to your parents," he yelled as I turned the corner and walked toward the elevator.
In the hotel room upstairs, Petal's hair hung in wet ribbons down her back. Wearing nylon stockings and a plain white slip, she stood behind my mother, who had propped a large mirror and a halogen lamp on the desk and seated herself in front of them.
"Are the fake eyelashes too much?" Mom asked as I entered the room. She had already slipped into her cream-colored dress, and Petal was carefully pinning up her hair.
I closed the door and walked toward them. "No," I said.
~
George stood at the front of the little chapel, flanked by the minister on one side and his brother and a friend on the other side. The groomsmen had driven over early that morning.
To their right was a small black piano. A portable stereo had been placed on the piano bench, and a tinny version of Pachelbel's Canon in D Major played as I walked slowly toward them, keeping time with the music while trying to ignore the blisters forming inside my purple pumps and holding my bouquet at just the height recommended by Marcia-the-wedding-coordinator.
I reached George and his coterie at the front of the room. To the tune of "Here Comes the Bride," my father walked my mother down the aisle and kissed her cheek before sitting down next to Petal in the first row of seats.
The bride's bouquet was a combination of cream and lavender flowers, and Petal had removed some of the smaller blooms and arranged them among the soft pinned-up curls of my mother's hair. Mom smiled radiantly at George as she joined him and they linked arms. The music discreetly ended, and the minister began to speak.
~
Ron had left the red roses on a row of black vinyl chairs along the wall just outside the chapel. He, or perhaps Marcia, had removed our names from the black board. I could imagine him arguing coolly over a nonrefundable deposit, playing a couple rounds of blackjack, and climbing into his BMW to drive home.
I must have looked sad, because my father reached forward and squeezed my hand, smiling. "Don't worry," he whispered cheerfully, mimicking the words he had repeated so often after my parents' divorce. "We'll always have plenty of love for you."
Though he had mistaken the source of my melancholy, I was touched by the sentiment, and I smiled back at him.
I turned again toward my mother. Looking at her here, all decked out in a cream-colored sheath with flowers in her hair, it was hard to imagine her anywhere else. Yet I knew that a few weeks from now, she would undoubtedly be back in the park with my father, wearing white makeup and a red nose, shaping balloon animals for little children. I grinned, thinking of it.
And at that moment, George gazed down at her with an expression of deep affection, as if he, too, had just realized how lucky he was.
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You can hear the author read this piece! Click here!
Leah Browning is the author of two nonfiction books for teens and pre-teens, Babysitting Basics and Babysitting Rules (Capstone Press, 2006). Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Mamaphonic, Mothering Magazine, Literary Mama, MotherVerse, and other less parent-centric venues such as The Saint Ann's Review, Blood Orange Review, Salome Magazine, and Autumn Sky Poetry. In addition to writing, she serves as editor of the Apple Valley Review, an online literary journal. Her personal website is located at http://www.leahbrowning.com.
Christine poured herself a cup of coffee and picked up the newspaper. The headline jumped out at her: OSAKA MAN STABS 23 ON SCHOOL GROUNDS. A shudder rippled through her body. She glanced over at her twins, Emi and Koji, who were just dipping their spoons into their bowls of corn flakes, and slammed the paper face down on the table.
“What’s wrong, Mommy?” Koji asked.
“Nothing, sweets. Just some bad news. In a place far away.”
Her husband, Hideki, who was engrossed in his Japanese-language newspaper, grunted. He thought that Christine was overprotective. He didn’t like the way she switched off the news as soon as something disturbing flashed on screen – tanks in the desert, the detritus after a tsunami, a house on fire. He didn’t understand how sensitive Koji was, how he’d fret all day, tears pooling in his eyes. The nightmares. He was afraid to go down the hallway to the bathroom by himself. Whenever Christine took the little boy’s hand and walked him to the toilet, her husband shook his head.
Now, she was tempted to ask him to tilt the paper away from her son, even though he wasn’t looking at the photo of the bodies covered with sheets. He couldn’t read the Chinese characters for “death” or “knife.” Neither could Emi, who was less fearful, anyway. Christine wondered if her deafness shielded her somehow. Or maybe the cerebral palsy – maybe the part of her brain that registered fear had been damaged at birth.
She nibbled on a piece of toast and tried to think of other things. Emi’s presentation, for example. She had to go up in front of all of the other deaf school kindergarteners and talk, well, sign, about her spring vacation. Christine had blown up digital photos of Emi sitting in Grandpa’s boat with a fishing pole. There was another photo of Emi in a wagon being pulled by Koji in her parents’ big backyard. In Japan, that much land would hold an entire neighborhood. She couldn’t help thinking that the other mothers would be impressed.
After breakfast, she quickly filled the dishwasher and rounded up the children’s bags and thermoses. Her husband carried Emi to the car and buckled her into her car seat. And then they were off.
The presentations were scheduled for the morning. The kids went straight to the Playroom and lined up their little chairs in rows. The first kid up was Naoki. He folded a beetle out of black origami paper, narrating all the while, and then showed photos of a real stag beetle, clinging to a tree. He drew a net out of a paper bag and demonstrated how he’d caught the beetle. Lastly, he pulled a small terrarium out of the bag, and showed his classmates his new pet.
Everyone clapped. The other woman leaned in toward Naoki’s mother and congratulated her. “What a good job!” “He did it all by himself!” “His speech is so clear and easy to understand!”
Now it was Emi’s turn. Naka-sensei scooched Emi, chair and all, to the front of the classroom. Christine knelt beside her, handing up the props and photos, one by one.
Emi pointed to a picture of an airplane. “Uh..uh..uuuuh.” She signed “airplane” and “Grandpa and Grandma” and “America.”
Then the next picture, the boat. Here, Emi tugged on the orange life jacket they’d bought at K-Mart. Christine handed her a fishing pole they'd made together out of a chopstick and a piece of string with a magnet tied to the end. She tossed some paper fish affixed with paper clips onto the floor and Emi “caught” them.
Finally, Emi tacked the blown-up backyard photo to the white board.
“Amerika hiroi na!” Naoki blurted out. America is wide! He waved his hand like an American flag, the sign for the country. Then he pointed his index finger and said, “Pow! Pow!”
Christine sighed. She was so sick of the stereotype of America as the land of guns. How was it that a four-year-old deaf kid had developed such an idea anyhow? Did his parents let him watch the news? Did his mother tell him that in America everyone packed heat? She glared at Naoki’s mother, who wasn’t even paying attention. The woman was whispering behind her hand to the mother sitting next to her.
She wanted to tell Naoki’s mother that every time a toy gun found its way into her house, she threw it immediately into the trash. She was trying to teach Emi and Koji about peace and love.
Back when she’d been teaching English in the local adult education, she’d invariably had at last one student, smugly confident about his or her language ability, who’d gone on about how fat foreigners were, and how the United States was such a violent country. Christine had always snapped that her family was on the thin side, and that she’d never laid eyes on a hand gun and there hadn’t been any pistols in her house.
The truth was, she’d grown up in a family of deer hunters. Every November they’d convened – cousins, uncles and aunts – and gone out into the woods behind her grandmother’s house. During the summer, Christine had loved to wander through those trees. She’d carved her initials – and those of whichever boy she liked at the time – into half a dozen trees with the Swiss Army knife that she still carried in her purse. She’d once come across a beaver building a dam in the pond out there. Another time, she’d stumbled upon a doe and her fawn. She’d looked straight into their big, brown eyes. During deer season, she avoided the woods. The men and boys– and sometimes her aunts - went out to their blinds where they’d wait until they were ready to shoot.
Christine had never joined them. She and her mother had stayed in the house reading novels and playing Scrabble. But sometimes she’d venture out to the barn and stare at the carcasses hanging from the beams. The blood made her stomach turn.
When hunting season was over, her father and brother stored their rifles in the back of the coat closet. Although she didn’t like the killing, knowing those guns were there, and that her dad could shoot a six-point buck at 100 yards made her feel safe. She slept soundly, guarded.
She remembered waking one night to footsteps thudding on the lawn. The motion-sensitive light at the edge of the driveway had flashed on, and then a sliver of light under her door. She’d stumbled into the hallway, blinking against the glare, to find her dad reaching into the back of the coat closet.
“Go back to bed, Chrissie,” he’d whispered.
She’d slipped back into her room and parted the curtains. She could see someone in dark clothes crouched by the bushes, and then, at the window, the silhouette of her dad’s rifle. The prowler suddenly bolted off toward the road, and then there was the sound of an engine revving, fading, and then the closet door shutting, her father padding back to bed.
Sato-sensei, the head teacher at the deaf school kindergarten, announced that in response to the Osaka incident, there would be a new drill. In addition to periodic earthquake and fire drills, from now on the children would practice evading fushinsha – suspicious strangers. Although the mothers wouldn’t be taking part in the drill, they were invited to watch from a second story window.
The children were playing outside during their morning recess – digging in the sand, soaring on swings, scrambling over the jungle gym. Christine could see Emi down below, filling a plastic bucket with a small shovel. Everything was peaceful until a teacher disguised in a trench coat, stocking cap and sunglasses lunged into the play area. She reached into a pocket and pulled out a knife. No one noticed at first, then Naoki shrieked and pointed and another kid started to cry. They all ran to the teachers – all except for Emi, who couldn’t run, couldn’t even walk. If this were real, she would be the first victim. But Emi didn’t look all that alarmed, at least not at first. Christine saw that she was curious. She watched the weirdly dressed teacher until her own teacher, Naka-sensei, swooped down and picked her up and carried her to the verandah where the others were huddled in fear.
Christine shook her head. They’d done nothing but scare the children. She remembered what her Sunday school teacher had said long ago about the devil: He wouldn’t be some ugly red ogre with horns; he’d be handsome and friendly and he’d come bearing candy.
Christine envied the mothers at Koji’s preschool who dropped their kids off and then went on to yoga classes or aromatherapy or jobs in climate-controlled offices. According to deaf school policy, the kindergartners’ mothers were required to hang out at school while their kids were in class “in case something happened.” Christine thought the rule was meant to throw the mothers together and force them to bond. Left to their own devices, they might fall into depression over their disabled children. They might be too ashamed to talk about their problems. They might try to hide their deaf kids and develop ulcers from accumulated stress.
So the mothers were stuck at school, and the teachers thought up little tasks to keep them busy. They had to clean the toilets on the second floor, pull weeds from the playground, sift pebbles from the soil before rice planting. It was like work, Christine thought – one of those menial minimum wage jobs she’d had in high school or college, yet she didn’t get paid and she wasn’t bonding.
The next big project would be designing and sewing costumes for the annual Culture Festival. Sato-sensei called a meeting to discuss the event.
The mothers knelt at a low table, with Sato-sensei at the head. Various photocopies were distributed – schedules, memos, diagrams.
“This year’s theme is ninjas,” Sato-sensei announced. “The children love ninjas.”
The other mothers nodded, but Christine’s jaw dropped. Ninjas went around hurling death stars. They carried knives. They killed people in the dark of night. How could they even think of putting these children onstage as killers when there were all these stabbings in the news? She’d read that in the United States, after Columbine, a child had been sent home from school for picking up a chicken drumstick and saying “bang bang.”
Sato-sensei paused. “Yamada-san, is there something you want to say?”
Here was her chance. She had to speak out. She remembered how, a couple of years before, she’d convinced a teacher that the children shouldn’t feed rice to the pigeons in the park. The grains, she’d explained, would absorb moisture in the birds’ stomachs, swelling and killing them. That’s why no one tossed rice at weddings in the States anymore. The teacher had been moved and they’d wound up feeding the pigeons bread crumbs instead.
“Well,” she began, trying to arrange her thoughts in Japanese, “ninjas killed people, right? And there was that guy in Osaka…”
Sato-sensei stared, uncomprehending.
“It just seems that with these problems of violence, maybe something more… peacefull would be better.”
Sato-sensei nodded. “I see. Well, that’s one opinion.”
Obviously no one else felt the same. Down the table, someone snickered.
When the meeting was over, the other mothers began discussing costumes. Naoki’s mother went off to the library to look for illustrations of ninja attire. Christine remained in place, her face red, her legs cramped, her lips pressed together. Why didn’t they get it? How could they not care?
She was still angry two hours later when she pulled into the parking lot of Koji’s school. He came running out of the gate as soon as he saw her, and she felt her spirits lift. So much energy! It was hard to believe he’d ever been a pound and a half baby struggling in an incubator. He handed his tote bag over to her, hugged her legs and then went spinning off to join his friends.
Then she looked into his bag. More memos, making her worry about the rain forests in Indonesia, and what was this? A tightly rolled newspaper insert, looped and taped at the end into a handle. Another saber, she thought with a sigh. Every morning when she brought Koji to school, she saw the boys parrying like Musketeers with their homemade swords. Once a kid had even pretended to slash her thigh. Koji’d told her before that his teacher helped make them.
That evening, after the twins were in bed, she brought up the matter of the ninjas with Hideki.
He sighed. “Ninjas weren’t evil. They were just trying to protect their masters.”
“But the weapons…”
He shook his head. “You think too much, Christine.”
The next week, she brought her sewing machine to the deaf school. Up in the mother’s room, she ran the yellow fabric under the needle. Real ninjas wore black, but the mothers had decided that more vivid colors would be better onstage.
At home, Emi folded death stars out of origami – something she had learned at school. She slid them between her palms, making them fly across the room.
After the costumes were finished, the mothers spent every spare minute making Christmas ornaments for the school bazaar, part of the Culture Festival. None of the Japanese mothers were Christian, but they all put up trees in December. Christine let her mind go blank as she sewed beads onto felt. She was determined not to care.
The morning of the event, she staked out folding chairs for herself and Koji in front of the stage. She’d brought along a camera and a video recorder. Hideki, was off coaching baseball; he would watch later.
She sat through the sixth graders’ taiko drum performance, the high school girls’ fashion show, and then the first little ninjas came onstage, flinging death stars into the audience, little cardboard daggers tucked into their sashes.
Christine readied her video camera. Finally, Emi came out in her walker. She twirled a long pink ribbon in spirals, her face alight with joy. She looked so fierce and confident up there in her ninja costume in front of all those people. Watching her daughter through the viewfinder, Christine felt a surge of love and pride. Emi looked almost like she could take care of herself. Almost, but not quite.
When Emi had left the stage, she lowered the camera and began to clap. She reached into her purse and touched the Swiss Army knife that she’d carried for years. She thought of all the things she would do to protect her children.
Suzanne Kamata is an expat mama in Japan and the fiction editor of Literary Mama. Her first novel, Losing Kei will be published in January by Leapfrog Press. She is also the editor of two anthologies - The Broken Bridge: Fiction from Expatriates in Literary Japan (Stone Bridge Press, 1997) and Love You to Pieces: Creative Writers on Raising a Child with Special Needs (Beacon Press, 2008).