All Is Vanity

by Christina Schwarz

  Speaking of haircuts, I just spent over a hundred dollars on trims for the two boys and lunch. Jeanette called the other day and begged us to go with her to the Calliope, this salon especially for kids in Santa Monica (is it called a “salon,” if it’s for kids?). I would have thought the only excuse to go there was to prepare to have a Christmas card picture taken at Sears, unless you’re of Jeanette’s ilk, in which case you go there any time your child needs his bangs trimmed (and you hire a professional photographer to come over to the house in September). She was having a hard time with Jake, who said he wouldn’t go without Hunter, which made India say she wouldn’t go without Noah, so Jeanette wondered if we’d go, and then, she said, we could all have lunch afterwards. Fool that I am, I said, “Sure.” I’ve been cutting the boys’ hair myself since Michael stopped taking them to Vivian and they’re getting a little raggedy. I could use a professional line to follow. Lunch, I assumed, would be chicken nuggets. After all, we’d have the kids.

  These haircuts ended up costing more than I’ve ever spent on my own hair. And while Jake and India sat on their little carousel horses sweetly sucking their lollipops, Noah decided he was deathly afraid of carousel horses, except possibly the red one, on which another child was sitting, and Hunter tried some sort of rodeo move, in an effort to impress either Jake or the stylist—probably both—and fell off his steed.

  Still, their hair looks so much better than it ever has. Hunter and Noah look, really, like different children, like children who mighty in fact, need head shots, if I ever became that kind of mother—which, of course, I wouldn’t! I can see now that they even may have looked a little dorky before, the way I was doing their hair. I would say that doesn’t matter, especially since they’re boys. Especially since they’re seven and four. But probably that kind of thinking isn’t fair to them. Probably they should look their best. Jeanette says it’s good for their self-esteem to have great haircuts. She says we owe it to our kids to make the best of their looks, because although we may hate it—and, obviously, any thinking person has to hate it, but the problem is that there are a lot of unthinking people in this world—looks do matter. They even affect the way teachers treat a child in school. They’ve done studies to prove this. I mean, I don’t want to put my children at a disadvantage, as long as we can afford not to.

  “I can’t believe you cut your children’s hair!” Jeanette said. “I’d never have the time!”

  This is presumably because she has more important things to do, like drive the children to the salon, wait while someone else cuts their hair, and then go out to lunch.

  Jeanette, by the way, has a spectacular cut, sort of understated, obviously stylish without looking like she copied it from a sitcom actress. I asked her where she gets it done.

  “I’m so glad you asked!” she said. “Edward is amazing with color. ”

  (I leave you to draw your own conclusions about why exactly she was glad I asked, but I’ll admit that I wished I were wearing a hat at that moment to hide my rendezvous with Miss Clairol.) Anyway, I now have Edward’s number. He’s in Beverly Hills.

  Jeanette wanted to have lunch at the sort of café that turns out a lovely bruschetta. “I promised the kids,” she told me, when, having emptied our checking account preparing my children for their acting careers, I countered with Hot Dog on a Stick. Apparently, Jake and India are small Jeanettes, preferring sit-down restaurants and cloth napkins.

  And then there’s that whole nightmare where you know you’re going to split the bill, so you have to order at least as much as the other person or be stuck subsidizing her lobster. “Dessert?” she asked, so we all had to have one. The kids, of course, ate two bites of theirs and you can’t take “freshly churned ice cream topped with a seasonal assortment of wild berries” home.

  After lunch, we straggled along Montana for a few blocks, admiring the French infant sleepers and the Nepalese yak-milking stools in the windows. It was Noah, actually, who pointed out the African ceremonial mask, carved of dark wood, fitted with straw and feathers, a long, almost Modigliani-like face with almond-shaped holes for the eyes. Michael, I knew, would love it. He would love it, and he would never buy it for himself Jeanette was already two stores farther on when I called her back.

  “I just want to take a look at this,” I said.

  Jeanette agreed, when the saleswoman had unhooked the mask from the window and brought it to the counter for us to examine, that it was special. She held it up to her face. “You can never have too much art,” she said.

  “Let me see it,” India said, so Jeanette bent and held her masked face close to her daughter’s.

  “No! Let me see it,” India said, by which she meant touch it.

  For a family whose livelihood depends on art, we own pitifully little: those two small drawings we bought on our honeymoon in La Jolla and a painting I couldn’t resist at the flea market. Other than that, just framed posters.

  “I’m going to buy it,” I said. “For Michael.” He’d finally bought me an engagement ring after he got the Otis job, but I’d never gotten anything really nice just for him.

  “Congratulations,” the saleswoman said “This is one of my favorite pieces.” She wrapped it carefully in yellow tissue paper and then laid it in a box.

  “Let me see it!” India insisted, pushing up on her toes next to the counter.

  The first time the saleswoman swiped the card, she smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Sometimes we have trouble with this machine,” she said.

  The second time, she frowned. “I’m sorry.” She handed the card back. “Is there another you’d like to use?”

  Jeanette politely began unnesting a set of nesting bowls somewhere on my left.

  “You mean it was declined?” I said. “I don’t see how that can be.”

  “Sometimes they don’t like it if you use it twice in one hour,” Jeanette said. “That’s happened to me.”

  “Maybe I should call,” I said, “I can’t have reached the limit on that card.”

  By now India was lying on the floor of the shop, her heels and fists pounding the kilim-covered floor. “I want to see it!” she wailed.

  The saleswoman handed me the phone.

  “India, honey,” Jeanette said. She turned to the saleswoman. “Would it be all right if we took it out again?”

  “You saw it,” Jake told his sister impatiently.

  “I want to see it!” India screamed.

  I was on hold. Ivy, luckily, was asleep in her stroller, but Noah picked up a small carving and tried to give it to India to appease her.

  “Noah!” I said too sharply. “Put that back! It’s not a toy!” Which made him start to cry.

  The woman unwrapped the mask and Jeanette held it up to India’s face. “Here, honey, here,” she said. “You can see it.”

  It turned out I had reached my limit on that card, even though it was the one I saved for big purchases, the one I’d never come close to maxing out before. I’ll have to check the next statement scrupulously and make sure there’s no mistake, because I don’t understand what could be on there. Luckily, there were other cards in my wallet.

  Michael loves the mask as much as I knew he would. He’s already hung it in the living room. The straw bits are supposed to be uneven, so the ones India broke off aren’t obvious.

  We’ve cut a corner on the house expenses because my cousin, Paula, and her husband from Pittsburgh are visiting my Uncle Frank next week and he has no idea what to do with them. My mother suggested that he inspect our house—he does do something in construction, but I always thought it had mostly to do with cement pouring—in exchange for a personal, Michael-led tour of the museum. I’m officially annoyed with my mother for meddling but also a bit relieved, given that the tickets to the aquarium, not to mention the cafeteria lunches, are going to pretty much gut the inspection fund. And who’s more likely to have our interests at heart, the Peri-recommended inspector or Uncle Franky?

  What if he finds some
thing horribly wrong? I will collapse in a crumpled heap. I couldn’t stand to start this process over.

  L

  Start over? No. Lexie does not want to start over. Lexie cannot afford to spend the next fifty pages rejecting houses, getting nowhere like Robert. Where would the dramatic tension be in that? Whatever Letty and Michael did, Lexie and her husband, Miles, were committed to buying, so they could start their new and improved life as soon as escrow closed. In fiction, it’s easy to find money to pay an inspector. Lexie borrows from her children’s savings accounts and pushes her fingers into the crevices of the couch, groping for change. Lexie also delights at the way the stylists transform her children at the Merry-Go-Round and vows no other scissors will touch their precious locks, as long as she draws breath. Also, because the most basic element of a wardrobe is a good haircut, she gets her own hair trimmed and foiled at a salon two blocks from Rodeo Drive. Her hair is short, so she’ll have to return every four weeks to maintain the shape. I printed five more pages for my stack.

  “Dear L,” I replied, “treat yourself. Go to Edward. You should have hair at least as stunning as your four-year-old’s.”

  Letty’s color had, in fact, looked a teeny bit brassy at Christmas, and though I agreed that it shouldn’t matter, I suspected that this would put her at a disadvantage at those museum parties. People formed their impressions. There was no stopping them.

  As it turned out, neither Uncle Frank nor Lexie’s inspector found anything to excite major alarm, although they both amassed a respectable list of minor essential repairs to be made by the current owner, so as to justify the hour or two they’d spent in the house. Purchase proceeded as planned (one and a half pages).

  Inspection went less well for both of them when it came to the house they were selling. Letty and Michael had to pay for a new roof, while in Lexie’s case the roots of a ficus tree were destroying the foundation. The foundation had to be shored up and the tree chopped down, prompting Miles, a philosophy professor at Clear Mountain University, to hold forth for five pages on the antipathy between man and nature, thus bringing my total for two weeks’ work to twenty-five and a half pages.

  For several weeks, Letty wrote infrequently, being busy with the packing, although she did describe the trip to the aquarium with seven children—everyone except Ivy got to invite a friend—for which she had to rent a van and hire a babysitter to accompany her. Jake vomited his fifteen-dollar lunch on the return trip, which meant the van had to be kept for an extra day to allow for professional detailing. I appropriated the aquarium trip for Lexie, resetting it at Griffith Park Observatory.

  So, at first, this was all I was doing, borrowing bits and pieces, using Letty’s experiences as “inspiration.” Or at least that was how I thought of it. Gradually, though, as The Rise of Lexie Langtree Smith began to take shape, I did more. I reread all of Letty’s letters from camp, for instance, the ones I’d retrieved from my parents’ attic, and used them, often verbatim, to create a past for Lexie, childhood experiences in which she’d learned the subtle but decisive cues communicated by elements of appearance and behavior—a particular brand of shoes, a certain style of shorts, a disdain for Jell-O salads with pieces of canned fruit floating in them. Letty, in fact, had been partial to that salad when it was served in the middle school cafeteria, but at camp she learned to know better.

  Letty would want to help me. That’s what I told myself. I did not, however, tell her. Instead, I asked her questions. My e-mails probed for details. What brand of paint had she chosen? Did she want a convection oven? What ideas did she have for landscaping?

  M—

  India is learning Japanese. Jake has devised an experimental protocol for determining the frequency of specific hybrids. Have I mentioned that they are four and seven? Is this freakish, or should I worry about my children’s elementary school? We’ve pretty much resigned ourselves to private high school and probably middle school, but if Jake and Hunter are competing for a spot, who’s going to get it, Peewee Mendel or the kid who’s all excited because the marigolds that got the water and the sun grew?

  L

  What good, I wanted to respond, did it do a seven-year-old to understand genetics? What would be left to learn in third grade, let alone in the fancy private high school? But Lexie was also concerned with these issues.

  I’d toyed with giving Lexie five children, but settled for two—Alberta and Saskatchewan—since I doubted my ability to keep track of more. If Allie and Sas went to local, public elementary schools, how good a chance would they have of getting into the best private middle and high schools? And, in a way, weren’t the elementary years, during which children learned the most basic study skills and developed a lifelong attitude toward education, the most crucial?

  Margaret,

  I never thought about it that way. You’re right—maybe Hunter isn’t excited about school because his school isn’t exciting. Even though this is a good public school, maybe it’s just not good enough, especially since elementary school is, as you say, the time for him to acquire the tools for learning that he’ll use the rest of his life. Jeanette says she can get Hunter into Jake’s class at Curman. The Director of Admissions is her cousin Rosemary, and Rosemary has told her that some movie director is withdrawing his child from second grade—he’s taking the whole family to Hungary to shoot a movie (a move which, according to Rosemary, is really a misguided effort to round out the college admissions packet of an older sibling)—and Curman is refusing to hold the second-grader’s place for fear of establishing a dangerous precedent. Anyway, Hunter is in, if we please. I’m not sure we do, but if we have the money, isn’t it wrong not to invest it in our children’s schooling? I mean, our children and their futures are our top priority, and Curman could definitely give Hunter more one-on-one attention than he’s getting. What it comes down to is that you’re right when you say we can’t afford to make any mistakes with his education. Unlike Marlo, he’s not going to teach himself. Anyway, he’d look adorable in the navy shorts and white polo shirt. I always wanted to wear a uniform.

  L

  Letty had not always wanted to wear a uniform. In fact, I distinctly remember sitting on her front steps, idly separating the strands of fringe on our cutoffs, and discussing how lucky we were that we didn’t have to go to the East Mountain School for Girls precisely because we would have to wear that uncomfortable-looking plaid skirt and white blouse every day. We didn’t know how those girls could stand it. It seemed silly to me, then, the school’s concern over what its students wore, although I thoroughly approved of it now that today’s children’s clothing struck me as infinitely sillier. I wondered, though, about Letty. Did she just imagine she’d wanted a uniform to make the idea of her son having to wear one attractive? Or had I never known how she truly felt? Had I only paid attention to myself? This was a troubling thought, but the notion of someone long desiring something for herself and securing it for her child seemed useful for my novel.

  Lexie, I wrote, had always wanted to wear a uniform to school, so she is pleased when her son, Sas, so impresses the admissions director with his experiment proving the existence of gravity that he secures a highly coveted place for himself at a private elementary school that requires its students to wear blue shorts and white shirts in the manner of Christopher Robin. Pages describing fictional experiment, fictional eucalyptus-laden grounds of fictional private school, and fictional uniform (despised by young Sas): two and three-quarters.

  On Saturday, I was worrying a passage in which Lexie holds a yard sale and watches with mingled sadness and relief as various shabby but sentimentally valuable items are loaded onto the beds of pickup trucks or trundled off by old women with wagons in exchange for a handful of rumpled dollar bills, when the telephone rang.

  “Margaret, we had an accident!” Letty wailed.

  “Are you all right?” I was practically shouting at her, and Ted hovered at my elbow. “Is anyone hurt?” This was, I am relieved to say, all that occupie
d my mind at first.

  “Yes, yes, we’re all fine. It was just me and Marlo and Ivy in the car—poor little Ivy, strapped in the back. The Tercel is completely wrecked, though.”

  “Just car damage,” I said to Ted, who nodded and opened the refrigerator.

  “Not ‘just’ car damage,” Letty said. “Total car damage.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “I understand. What happened?”

  “Do we have any bread?” Ted asked. His head was under the counter, where the bread was never kept. I carried the cordless phone into the kitchen, opened the bread box, and put the loaf on the counter.

  Letty described the terrifying minutes and then the tedious hours they’d endured the previous afternoon. She’d been sandwiched between a Suburban that she couldn’t see around—“I couldn’t anticipate anything; I couldn’t even read the road signs. I’d already gone three blocks out of my way without knowing it!”—and a Lincoln Navigator, driven by a woman on a cell phone who’d been too engrossed in her call to put her foot on the brake when first the Surburban and then Letty stopped. “I saw it coming, Margaret. This huge grille in the rearview mirror, right behind Ivy, and I’m honking my horn, and I have nowhere to go, because the back doors of the Surburban are right in my face. I hate SUVs. They’re a menace. People who drive them have no sense of civic responsibility. I mean, how can you deliberately choose a car you know is very likely to kill other people in an accident? They’re selfish beyond belief.”

  Having heard this rant several times before from Letty, who had been feeling increasingly besieged in her tiny tinny car over the past few years as four-wheel-drive vehicles, used almost exclusively for trips to the grocery store and to chauffeur small children to soccer matches, inflated around her, I was able to give a good portion of my attention during this tirade to the preparation of Ted’s sardine sandwich.