All Is Vanity

by Christina Schwarz

  The “Mother Who Works Outside the Home” is going to shape cookies one by one by hand, whereas I, the “Stay At Home Mother,” am planning to beat a box of cake mix and three eggs for four minutes with an electric mixer or swing by Ralphs for prewashed, plastic-packaged produce. Don’t I have anything more to show for all the time I’ve chosen to lavish on my child?

  “Petit fours,” I blurt out. “Petit fours with candied sweet pea blossoms and angelica leaves.” Where did that come from?

  Alex lifts her wrist to check the time. The motion shows off her manicure, which is exquisite, the nails oval, pale pink. Her fingers, in fact, look like they could be on television. I think I’d like a manicure, Margaret. Is that a terrible thing to admit?

  But here is the important part. Alex is wearing the very same watch I am. The one Hunter picked out for me, with the large red hearts on its face. The one that could be attractive only to a child under ten.

  I hold my own wrist up. “Zeke?” I ask.

  “Hunter?” she answers.

  And in that moment, I wish I’d said mini carrots fast, fast, fast, before she’d announced the tuiles, so that she could have said “Chips Ahoy.” Because now she must speed off in her vehicle capable of summiting Swiss Alps to spend all night creating her delicately flavored lesson in French culture, while I have exactly fifteen hours to produce twenty-seven too-pretty-to-eat teeny, tiny cakes.

  After frantic consultation with Craig Claiborne and trusty, but often too heavy-handed with the sugar, Fanny Farmer, I find that petit fours can be made relatively simply by baking a sheet cake and cutting it into finger-sized portions. So simply, in fact, that once I’ve fed the children their turkeyburgers, played with Mr. Squeeky, Wally Whale, and a slew of other bath toys, found The World of Pooh, which had slipped behind the couch, for Michael to read to Noah and Hunter, and nursed Ivy while listening to Mario read chapter four of Caddie Woodlawn, I realize that all petit fours are not alike and the product of my half measures won’t be impressively spectacular.

  In retrospect, I cannot believe the folly of this. We’re talking about feeding a fourth-grade class here! Nevertheless, I think of the tuiles and decide to complicate my contribution by trisecting the cake with two layers of jam and one of custard. But first, I must purchase a jelly-roll pan and a fine-mesh cake rack. And, as it turns out, my 24-hour grocery doesn’t stock a fine-mesh rack, but ingenious chef that I am, I buy two regular-meshes and stack them together crosswise.

  As I scrape the bits of hardened pink frosting from under the rack and put them back in the pan to remelt, so I can give the petit fours a third coat (this, by the way, is only the first batch—I’m also doing a white and a yellow set), I’m actually pleased with my inspiration. Like the tuilles, these old-fashioned cakes project precisely the right image. They demonstrate that my children come first in that I’m devoting my time and creativity to delighting my daughter’s class with ephemeral finger food, but at the same time they prove that I’m too sophisticated to be limited to a smiley-faced cupcake kiddie world. Not to mention that they all but scream “See the woman who can concoct with careless grace a sweet fit for presentation at Le Cordon Bleu.” Who would have thought a snack could say so much? And who will know the custard curdled twice and I had to drag Michael out of bed to go out for another dozen eggs? Who will know I was gathering rose petals with a flashlight at three-thirty a.m. from the neighbor’s yard (sweet peas, it seems, are poisonous) and dipping them in sugar water at four?

  At five, I gaze proudly at the cookie sheet checked pink, yellow, and white with the little square confections, each like a perfect ring box. Petit fours, I think, c’est moi!

  If I’d not been so staggeringly tired today after lunch when I strapped Ivy and Noah into their car seats and adjusted the sunscreens so they wouldn’t get too hot and inserted the tape of “Songs to Grow On” into the cassette player so we could all sing along, I might not have forgotten that I’d set the cookie sheet on the roof of the Tercel. It clanked onto the concrete just before I reached the corner.

  I didn’t even have time to go to the market for carrots and had to settle for Hostess Gems from the 7-Eleven. That the kids clearly preferred the mini doughnuts to the tuilles was no comfort. No comfort at all.

  The letter covered other issues. Michael had purchased a computer “for the kids” and had already wasted two weekends that could otherwise have been spent on beach trips and backyard ball games unsuccessfully attempting to set up Internet access. Hunter had gone to a birthday party at which the favors—not the gifts!—the favors, which every child got, were CD Walkmans. Hunter, Letty explained, did not even own a CD, which seemed reasonable to me, since Ted and I have only about seven compact disks ourselves because we’re unable to justify the extra expense when records have perfectly good sound quality. Of course, this means we can’t buy any albums produced after 1981.

  Ivy was teething. Mario was angling for figure skating lessons. Letty enclosed a little drawing Noah had done that may have been one of the cats, or possibly some owl-like bird.

  For both of us, I thought, magneting the cat-bird onto the refrigerator, it was good that the school year was over. Now that it was summer, Letty and I would be able to shake off the world beyond ourselves choc-a-block with continually assessing observers. Without Alex Prescott looming in the doorway, Letty would be free to mother along in her naturally excellent way, unconcerned about how that would appear to others. For my part, I would retreat into the universe of my novel. I would think nothing of what others thought of me, and in that way emerge with something that would stun them all.

  CHAPTER 3

  Margaret

  I NEEDED A COMPELLING PLOT, a connected thread of events that could draw me, like Theseus, through the labyrinth. Back in my study, I pushed the laptop aside. Time to get to work. I uncapped my pen. “Her mind furiously churning, she uncapped her new Mont Blanc,” I thought. “The nib hung quivering over the porous, yellow page, which waited, patient and still, laying itself open for her words.”

  Plot, I told myself sternly. I tried to think. “Theodore wants desperately to get through med school, (med school = Minotaur),” I wrote. “He comes from a long line of doctors. His father is demanding, controlling, sort of a Joe Kennedy with his eye on Mass General as his empire.” I broke off here. Best if I used another color to represent motivating background material.

  It took about half an hour to locate my colored pencils in a tin marked “Art Supplies” under my shoe boxes, but time devoted to organization is never wasted. At the top of the page I constructed a key. I would continue the plot in blue-black fountain pen; fill in character traits, tragic flaws, outside influences, etc., in red; insert secondary plots in green; note any quirky supporting details, symbols, particularly apt metaphors and allusions in pink.

  “On his own, he’s doomed to fail,” I wrote in red. I could figure out why later.

  “His wife, Anna, is brilliant. She helps him cheat on his exams so he passes.”

  “Problem.” Problems would be blue. Why doesn’t Anna just become a doctor herself, if she’s so smart? I was stumped for a minute, and then I had a sensation surprisingly similar to the one cartoonists depict with a lightbulb. “Anna is doctor,” I scribbled, in my excitement making a mess of my color scheme by continuing with the blue pen. Anna’s being a doctor would make cheating easier and also cause conflict for her—she’s not only loosing an incompetent doctor on an unsuspecting population of sick and injured, but also endangering her own career. Maybe the book should be from Anna’s point of view.

  Theseus left Ariadne. “Once Theodore has used Anna, he leaves her while she’s sleeping, preferably on an island. Maybe Barbados?” Ted and I could take a research trip. “He can’t stand to live with her knowing what she’s done, even though she did it to help him.”

  It was a great plot. I could tell by the way the snags unraveled after only a moment’s thought. I waltzed with the legal pad around the room. I passed my ha
nd over the page of scribbled, colored lines in awe. Even by itself, it was a work of art I would be proud to have displayed someday among my collected letters and drafts.

  Faulkner printed the plot of As I Lay Dying around the walls of his study in Oxford. I was reluctant to write directly on the walls myself—after all, we were renting—but I did have several large sheets of white paper left over from the “Literary Map of the United States” I’d done for my eleventh-grade class. If I transferred my diagram to those, using one sheet per pivotal event, I could tape them up along the hallway, around the bedroom, and in the space that remained between the bookcases and the windows in the living room. I would leave room to add the chapters in between once I’d decided what would happen in them.

  Ted had a dinner meeting, so I worked without interruption. It was five-thirty on the West Coast by the time I taped the final sheet onto the closet/study door and called Letty.

  “I’ve got the plot!”

  “You’re kidding. That’s great! Not until you’re done with your homework.” The last was not to me, of course.

  “Mario?” Mario was her eldest, my goddaughter.

  She sighed. “Yes. She wants to go roller blading with Patrick and Conor.” Neighbor kids. “But I told her—”

  Mario warbled in a high, faraway voice, “Help me, Auntie Margaret! I’m being held prisoner by an evil queen!” She stomped off in what I assumed was the direction of the tiny bedroom she shared with her infant sister, Ivy.

  “No skates in the house! So,” Letty said, “the books going well?”

  “No, better than that. I have the entire plot worked out, actually taped all over the apartment, like wallpaper.”

  “You should have written it right on the walls, like Faulkner.” This was one of the many things I loved about Letty—she remembered everything I told her. “So? Tell me. What’s going to happen?”

  I told her, keeping the story as fluid as I could while still injecting the crucial background information. I walked around the apartment as I talked, moving from one segment to the next, just as I anticipated I would when I began to write. I’d easily be finished with this thing in six months. Or, I could work ten hours a day and polish it off in four or five. I wondered if the sculpture of the recumbent Ariadne could be photographed for the cover. Would that cost a publishing house more than a cover designed by their own art department?

  “That’s great, Margaret.”

  I ignored the fact that this was a response one would give to a recitation by a six-year-old. Letty hadn’t much practice critiquing literary works. “I think it’s a book I’d like to read,” I said. “Don’t you?”

  “Definitely. I can’t wait to read it. And when it comes out, I’ll casually pick a copy off the shelf and say, ‘Have you seen this book? My friend wrote it.’ I can’t wait to do that. I’ll just spend the whole day in the bookstore.”

  I laughed. “Feel free to break for meals.”

  “Can I ask you about one tiny thing? It’s no big deal, but I was just thinking—” She broke off. I could hear water filling the dish-pan and small voices making the noise of gunning engines in the background.

  “What’s that?” I was open to suggestions. I’d come up with the idea in a single afternoon; there were bound to be some pesky details to tweak.

  “Well, I just know, you know, from Lottie”—Letty’s older sister was a hematologist—“that they’re extremely careful with the boards. I mean, a lot of it’s oral. I’m sure you’ve figured this out, but I can’t really see how a person could cheat.”

  “What if Anna was one of his examiners?”

  “That’s a really good idea, but I’m not sure it would be allowed. I mean, probably definitely not if anyone knew about their connection.”

  “Could she change the score later?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure. I mean, security is pretty tight. I guess it might be possible.”

  Maybe Letty just didn’t want to believe there was any way to cheat on the test that her sister had passed. “What if she wasn’t his wife, but secretly his girlfriend? Then could she be one of his examiners?”

  “Well, that could happen, sure. But I’m just wondering, if he’s not giving the right answers, how’s she going to convince the rest of the panel to pass him?”

  “Maybe she could kill them.” She laughed at this and I joined her, but the walls of our apartment no longer looked like a masterpiece.

  “Margaret, I really don’t want to be a naysayer. I’m sure there’s some way to make this work. Because it’s such a great story, especially with the myth and all. And I really love the characters.”

  “No, no. I want you to be honest. What if I’d spent two months writing and then ran into this problem? You’re saving me.”

  I yanked at the first of my drawings. The tape peeled away from the wall, carrying with it a large swath of paint.

  “Margaret, I’ve got to pick Hunter up from his play date. Let’s talk in a couple of days. I’ll call you.”

  “No, let me call you.” What with the four children and Letty not earning an income, the MacMillans’ finances were tighter than ours. It didn’t seem right for her to have to spend money to be my cheerleader. Or wet blanket.

  We hung up. I retraced my earlier, hopeful steps, pulling down my faulty framework. Every strip of tape left a ragged track, a dotted line leading only in a cramped circle around the apartment. My novel was still stuck at the beginning—Margaret = Minotaur?—and I was going to have to repaint the walls.

  “It’ll help me write,” I told Ted. Three tenants ago the landlady had attempted an antique effect by painting the apartment a color akin to yellowing linen. As a writer, I was hyperattuned to my environment, and such surroundings were a drag on my wits.

  Also, to be honest, I was desperate to destroy the evidence of my mistake. I’d noticed very early in my life that I couldn’t tolerate being wrong. I was understanding when others erred, but, unfortunately, this was only in part from kindness. The rest of my forgiving instinct derived from the conviction that others couldn’t live up to the towering expectations I set for myself. Everyone made mistakes, but I was not everyone.

  When, in second grade, I relied on my own experiences with vegetables and recklessly colored the stem on a mimeographed picture of a pumpkin brown, rather than the requisite green, as the directions had clearly instructed, I begged Mrs. Reynolds for a chance to do it over. “No,” she said, “one pumpkin to a customer.”

  During recess, she taped the pumpkins colored side out to the windows, blocking the afternoon sun so that the classroom took on the gloomy cast of the earth under an eclipse. Obviously, the whole pumpkin-coloring endeavor had been merely an attempt to provide seasonal, albeit prosaic, decoration. Still, she’d given my picture a C, which would now be prominently displayed in all its oversized scarlet shame—until the pumpkins were replaced by the inevitable trace-around-the-hand turkeys—to anyone waiting to board a schoolbus, in fact, to anyone casually strolling by the school, possibly even to those driving past, given the leisurely school-zone speed. Even Dougie Resnicki, who was still using fat crayons, had been granted a B.

  Nevertheless, I would like the record to show that I did not wheedle to be taken to the supermarket that evening on a search for evidence to prove the accuracy of the brown stem position. My mother, however, discovered that we were out of spaghetti just as the Bolognese sauce had simmered to the proper consistency. My father was already jingling the car keys, this being a nearly nightly ritual that varied only in the identity of the missing essential ingredient, and since he seemed to enjoy my company, I abandoned the map of the autumnal night sky I was plotting on sixteenth-inch graph paper and went along. The Halloween pumpkins were piled unceremoniously in and around refrigerator-sized cardboard boxes in the Ralphs parking lot. I could not help but observe their stems. Their brown stems.

  I felt at once vindicated and outraged. I had correctly rendered the pumpkin in living color and had been rewarded with
ignominy.

  I found my father already in the checkout line with the spaghetti and a shaker can of Parmesan cheese he’d thought to pick up just in case. “What color is this?” I held up the pumpkin I’d heaved inside and pointed at the stem.

  He frowned, suspecting a trick. “Orange?”

  “No, not the pumpkin, the stem.”

  “Who cares about the stem?”

  I sighed. “Just what color is it? Brown or green?”

  “I’d call it beige.”

  Beige, sand, dun—those were fine distinctions I, as a normal second-grader, was unwilling to make.

  “So brown?”

  “Brownish,” my father conceded.

  As we drove home, I complained at length about Mrs. Reynolds, as well as the creators of the pumpkin outline and its nonsensical instructions, accompanying my diatribe with much angry snapping open and shut of the ashtray on the armrest.

  “That’s exactly the way the world is, I’m sorry to say.” My father’s eyes flicked up to check the rearview mirror.

  “How?”

  “Objective reality counts less than what people say. How do we know what green and brown are anyway? They’re just those colors because we, as a society, say so. Your class, as a society, agrees that stems on pumpkins colored by children should be green.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, that’s a common problem. Especially if the society is led by a cliché-dependent despot.”

  “Does that mean if Mrs. Reynolds says it, it’s right?”

  “Pretty much.”

  I hadn’t needed his thirty-five years of life experience to understand that.

  “Still,” he said, turning into our driveway, “we can take comfort in the fact that we know better. We can gleefully sneer at those misguided fools.” He looked at me as he turned off the engine. “That’s what I recommend. A hearty dose of gleeful sneering. You may begin now.”