Double Pop

by Jamie Bennett

  Then we went on a tour. It was, perhaps, not as fun as it might have been with me a little gimpy and with a small child in tow, but Maia was a trooper and said she was glad to have us there. I couldn’t believe how amazing this huge, gorgeous university was compared to what I had done for school—me, who had scraped my way through two years of community college then driven daily to the nearest state college campus to get my degree between shifts as a waitress and later, also between shifts of throwing up from pregnancy. “Maia, this is so nice,” I kept whispering, as we walked through one of the beautiful libraries, a gym, a classroom building with soaring ceilings and a glass wall of windows.

  “Maybe I’ll get to go here.” She shrugged. It all depended on where she a got in, and where they gave her the most money. She didn’t seem to have her heart set on it, like I did for her after seeing its awesomeness.

  “Maybe I should start telling people that you do volunteer work rehabbing rabid lizards and you single-handedly invented cranberries, like how the parents in the information session were talking about their kids. I’m pretty sure they were lying, too. Do you think that would help your chances?”

  “Maybe you should focus on your own child. Nola just ate a rock,” Maia responded.

  I squatted down next to my daughter. We had dragged the stroller with us, but right now, Nola was refusing to ride in it, and we were losing the rest of the tour group while my limp got more pronounced and she dawdled.

  “Nola. What do you have in your mouth?” I put my hand below her chin and she let a grey, spit-covered pebble dribble into it. “Why?” I asked her, and she shrugged. Previously, she had licked a handrail as we descended some steps. I took a baby wipe and dabbed around her mouth, as if that would mitigate the trillions of bacteria she had ingested.

  “I’m hungry,” she told me, and we didn’t have the time to discuss why eating rocks was not a good solution to that issue. The tour group was disappearing quickly on its way to visit the famous campus bell tower.

  “Maia, go ahead,” I sighed. “We’ll catch up. Text me where you guys are.” She nodded and hurried off. I spread out the blanket that I kept in the bottom of the stroller on the grass of the plaza we were passing through. This had probably been too much for Nola, but I had really wanted to see the school, for Maia, but also (a little) for me. I kept imagining if I had made different choices and ended up at a place like this. Not that I was sorry about how things had turned out, but it was crazy to think that maybe I could have been a student here too, meeting my friends for a game of bocce or squash or drinking jumbo soy iced lattes between classes. If I had ever learned to play those games, and I was good with regular milk, anyway.

  “No more rocks,” I told my daughter. “If you’re hungry, ask for food.”

  “No more rocks. Cookies are good,” she suggested. I handed her a rice cake with peanut butter from my snack bag, pulled out her water cup, and opened a container of carrots. She ate healthy, or as healthy as I could force it.

  A college-ish guy, with a backpack over one shoulder, squatted down next to our blanket and smiled at me. “Hi. She’s cute.” He smiled at Nola, too.

  “Thanks,” I said, smiling back. Yup, quickest way to my heart was through my kid. Smart man.

  “How old is she?” he asked me.

  “Nola, how old are you?” I prompted.

  She held up three fingers, two on one hand and one on the other.

  “And she knows addition!” the guy said, and I laughed.

  “Super smart, just like her mom,” I told him. “Me,” I felt I needed to add, when he looked at me in confusion.

  “Oh, you’re her mother? I thought you were her nanny! Oh, wow.” He stood quickly, adjusting his backpack. “Yeah, ok. Have a good lunch.” He took off so fast, I thought I saw a plume of smoke leave his butt.

  “Who was that boy?” Nola asked, licking her fingers, the ones I should have wiped before she ate.

  An asshole. “Nobody. You can talk to people we don’t know when Mommy is here, right?”

  She nodded, still licking, and I took this quiet moment as an opportunity to discuss strangers. I also took the opportunity to wipe off the accumulated goo from her hands.

  That guy’s response had been, unfortunately, pretty typical. I looked young: a round face and not a lot of height would do that for you. And long, curly hair that I should have cut years ago…but I digressed. I looked young, and I was, in fact, on the early side to have a three-year-old where we lived. In our area, most moms seemed to be older, starting families mid- or post-career. I got mistaken for Nola’s nanny or babysitter all the time.

  And, unfortunately, most men had a similar reaction to finding out that I was the mother of a small child. Of any kind of child. Guys ducking, running, hiding, pretending to no longer speak English—these were all things that had come up in the years since I’d had Nola. Which was one of the reasons that I had been out the night before, looking for a quick good time. Besides the fact that I didn’t want anyone, they sure didn’t want me, either. It was really a perfect scenario.

  I sighed, looking around the beautiful campus and all the college kids starting out fresh. Yeah, perfect. But then my daughter smiled at me, and I smiled back. I had Nola, and she was, in fact, perfect, even with the peanut butter and rice cake on her face and in her brown curls. I was the luckiest woman alive to have a daughter like this, the sweat little bean who had gotten bored by my Stranger Danger talk and was at present involved in telling me a long story about her best stuffed bear friend, Pinky. Nola thought that when Pinky wasn’t at our apartment, she lived in a house with a bed with curtains, like in one of the picture books we had checked out of the library. Pinky was allowed to eat hot dogs every day and also had a pool in which she could swim whenever she wanted, all by herself.

  “Maybe some day, we can have a pool, like Pinky,” she said. At present, our apartment building had a large puddle due to poor drainage in the parking lot that sometimes had a duck in it, but that was it.

  “Maybe,” I told her. “Maybe you and I can go swimming together next week at the Y. What do you think?”

  She put both her little palms on my cheeks and kissed my nose.

  “I love you, Noles.”

  “I love you, Mama.”

  I took a wipe and removed the peanut butter that she had transferred to my face. “Let’s go find Aunt Maia before she gets into trouble.”

  “Up.”

  “No, I can’t carry you. Time to get into the stroller.” And by this point, she was tired enough to do it. I cleaned up the detritus of our quick picnic and we moved off to find Maia.

  “Where are you?” I texted as I walked, steering the stroller with one hand. Nola was talking in a sing-song voice I could only partly hear about the collection of baby dolls that Pinky had at her house and how one could pee pee on the potty. Pinky had a lot of dolls, just like Nola wanted.

  My phone rang, and still listening to Nola’s story, I answered. “Are you close?” I asked Maia.

  “I’m in San Francisco,” a man’s deep voice answered me. “Were you not able to find the car?”

  I stopped in the middle of the brick pathway and a woman ran into me, pushing my stomach into the stroller bar. “Oof!” I gave her a dirty look and she responded with her own. “Sorry, who is this?” I asked my phone.

  “Luca. Luca Visconti. I drove you last night…”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry! I thought you were someone else.” I looked quickly at my screen, and saw that I had responded to his text about my car’s location in the parking lot from the night before, rather than writing to my cousin to ask where she was on campus. “I found the car just fine. Thank you again for your help.” Nola peeked around the stroller hood to find out what the hold-up was, and I started walking again.

  “And you made it home?” Luca asked me.

  “Yes, everything is good.”

  “Your ankle, too?”

  “Great.” I shook it out a little as I walked. It
had been better, but it was ok.

  “What was wrong with that man, Rocky?”

  “Stoney. But his real name turned out to be Bob, Stoney was just his stage name. I helped him fill out the intake forms so I know way more than I wanted to about him. Yeah, anyway, he had a concussion. I left him with his poor wife and went home. I had no idea, by the way, that he was married.”

  “That was obvious when you yelled loudly enough to break the windows out of your car when he said it,” Luca told me, and laughed.

  “Sorry! The whole night was a bit of a shi…bummer. It had to have been for you too—I’m sure when you left home last night, you didn’t plan to get puked on by a stranger.”

  “Oddly enough, I’ve never planned for that any night.”

  I laughed again. “Me neither. But puke happens.”

  “Unfortunately, we both found out first-hand that it does.”

  I was still smiling as I spotted the tour group coming out of a building, some parents already with their hands up with questions/offers of proof of their children’s overall brilliance. Sigh.

  “I was going to get in touch with you anyway,” Luca was saying, “to make sure you got the car and could drive it, but I ended up…” At this moment, I pushed the stroller past a woman with a megaphone angrily talking about humanity’s mistreatment of Norwegian roof rats, and I missed his next words.

  “What? Sorry, it got loud here.”

  “Who’s yelling? Where are you?” Luca asked.

  “I’m college touring with my cousin in Berkeley and there are a lot of people protesting various things. It’s a little scary.”

  “They’re violent?” He sounded concerned.

  “No, I meant this college process is scary! I didn’t have a clear idea of how pushy these parents would be.” But I should have known, based on the behavior of some of the parents of my second grade students. Of course it just amplified as the kids got older.

  “Well, have fun on your tour. Maybe we’ll run into each other again sometime under better circumstances,” he suggested.

  I felt a little deflated. “Yeah. Yes, maybe we will.”

  “Bye, Jolie.”

  I said goodbye also, and stuck the phone back into my purse. Now, why couldn’t I have hooked up with a guy like Luca Visconti at Pijos Lounge? So cute, fun to talk to, helpful, and able to lift me up into the air like we were ice dancers? I sighed and waved back at Maia as she spotted me limping up to the tour group.

  I couldn’t have hooked up with Luca, because guys like that weren’t sitting by themselves at a bar, drinking a fifth of gin like my good pal Stoney had been. Guys like Luca were out buying organic wildflowers for their girlfriends, or going to interesting STEAM lectures to challenge their big brains, or flying off on exotic vacations and simultaneously offsetting their carbon emissions. Probably that was what he did, anyway.

  Guys like that weren’t waiting around in a bar for a woman like me to say the things that I had to Stoney: “Last chance for sex, hurry it up,” or other romantic notions like that. Luca probably only did it on high thread count sheets with a string quartet playing in the other room as background music. He had that classy vibe. I sighed. Maybe I would run into him again, but I doubted it.

  “The tour’s almost done,” Maia told me. She squatted in front of Nola’s stroller. “Are you ready to go?” she asked my daughter. “I’m bored. What about you?”

  “I’m bored!” Nola agreed, loudly. The tour guide, who was another cute college guy, laughed, but most of the parents looked annoyed. They were taking this very, very seriously.

  “Do you still want to drive down south and look at more schools? You wanted to see Stanford, right?” I asked her. I wanted to see it, too, but I was a little worried about the mileage on my car and also the price of gas.

  “There’s no point,” Maia said. “I’ll never afford it and I won’t get in, anyway.” She didn’t seem upset by this. “Let’s go eat something.”

  I thought about the state of my own finances. “Sure, my treat,” I said. As the tour group started off again, we went quietly in the other direction, laughing because we were ditching them, laughing just because it was fun to be together.

  ∞

  I walked faster, my ankle still nagging at me, trying to get to my car in the faculty parking lot and get myself out of the misty, grey rain. The weather matched my mood on this Monday afternoon. We had put Maia back on the bus north after we got home from college visiting on Saturday. Nola had cried and I had too, a little, and then I had stuffed her tiny bike in my trunk and tried to take her to the nice little park where Stoney had gone bush-diving, but it had started to rain again and we had headed home.

  For the rest of the weekend, we were cooped up in the apartment because of the weather. We listened to the bongo drumming coming from the unit upstairs as I looked vainly for free, child-friendly activities that didn’t involve a lot of driving to give my car a break, and also tried to do all the tasks that I didn’t have time for during the week: laundry, food shopping, shaving my legs, teaching Nola to read super young so that I would be able to brag about on her future college tours, etc.

  Weekends always seemed crammed to me, as I tried to make up for the time that I couldn’t spend with Nola Monday through Friday, as I tried to get all my general life-tasks done, and my work-tasks, too. There just weren’t enough hours any day of the week, which often meant me extending my days late into the night.

  And then…sometimes I just wanted to be alone. Five days a week I was at school, with little hands and voices and bodies needing me, then I picked up Nola. As much as I loved her, and as much as I liked the kids at school, at times I needed a break, to check out. I would find myself sitting on the couch at one in the morning watching old movies when I really needed to be asleep, just so I could enjoy some time by myself. Then the next day, I would wake up with another headache and make a promise that I would be more responsible. I would go to bed promptly at nine, fill my diet with leafy, green vegetables, and learn to meditate or something.

  The thing was, sometimes I was tired of being responsible. I wanted to be young and crazy, reckless, the exact opposite of responsible. Those feelings were the reason I had ended up at Pijos looking for a guy, and why I had ended up with Stoney. In other words, those feelings were wrong and would lead me to sleeping with a married man! I would have to learn to ignore them better.

  “Jolie!”

  I hesitated and slowed my footsteps a little. Chad, the middle school science teacher here at Starhurst Academy, hurried up behind me. “I saw you limping,” he said. “You ok?”

  “Great, yeah. Don’t worry, I’ll be ready for track season,” I told him.

  “I hope so,” Chad said. “I’d hate to have to break in a new assistant coach.” He smiled at me.

  All of the teachers at Starhurst had to do some kind of coaching, or lead an after-school activity, as part of our contracts. As someone with not a lot of skills beyond horticulture and child-rearing, I had somehow gotten sucked into “coaching” cross country in the fall and track and field in the spring, along with doing after-school tutoring in the winter.

  The tutoring was fine; the running was a whole new game for me. I had been the kid in high school with the 12-inch spiked goth hairdo that I was not going to ruin by doing some kind of silly thing like exercise. Which had meant that I was a little butterball up until my senior year, when I realized that my favorite jeans wouldn’t close anymore, even with a pair of pliers to pull up the zipper (this made them really not so comfortable, either). Since I hadn’t wanted to change my so-stellar eating habits, I grudgingly, unhappily, had started to exercise. The weight had come off, mostly, although I was never entirely happy with the hips/ass/thighs situation.

  My first year teaching at Starhurst, I had been randomly assigned as assistant coach to Chad, who had been a huge runner, even on the track team at his big college. My job as his assistant mostly meant was that he led the practices and I ran at the
back of the back with the slow kids and encouraged them. They went about my pace and I never minded if they stopped to rest for a while, because most likely I needed it, too. Oh, and I also had my own whistle and clipboard to use at meets. Nola had fun with the whistle.

  “Did you have a training accident?” Chad asked me, looking at my bad leg, and I laughed, then immediately stopped when he looked confused. That question had implied that I had been running without someone making me, which was pretty funny.

  “I fell. While, um, hiking.” Liar. Of course, the true story was not really work-appropriate. “But I’m fine,” I assured him.

  “Good, because I was thinking we could go for a run together, to get ready for the season.”

  I stopped. “Doesn’t it start in April? That’s more than two months away.”

  “How long do you usually take to prepare?” he asked me, puzzled.

  For the lower school track and field season? Uh, no time, absolutely none. “I try to stay in shape all year long,” I told him. Yet another lie. The most exercise I had gotten lately was washing our clothes, hurrying on the steps carrying loads back and forth from my apartment to the first-floor laundry room. “Chad, sorry, but I really have to run,” I said. “I mean, I have to hurry, not actually run.”

  I needed to get Nola from her extended daycare, which she didn’t mind, but I didn’t love. Her day was so long already for such a little girl, but I had to stay until 4:00 or later at Starhurst, unless I stopped the after-school activities and came early to complete my contractual requirement for extra-curriculars by working in the library. If I did that, then Nola wouldn’t eat enough breakfast because it took her a while to get going in the morning and build up hunger…it was an old battle I waged with myself and I always came out the loser, feeling like I was selling my daughter short, somehow. As always, I told myself that I did the best I could, and I tried to believe it.

  “What do you think, though? Just a few miles,” Chad pressed.

  “A few miles,” I repeated bleakly. But as he kept talking about us hitting the trails together, and I heard myself vaguely agreeing to go with him so I could leave. We settled on a run before our next faculty meeting, when I knew I would have to stay late at school anyway. It felt like it was far enough in the future that I didn’t need to worry about it now, tonight. Chad and I had gone running together before, me huffing through the pain, him trying to hold conversations and exhorting me to keep going. I went slower and slower until it was more of a shuffle-walk than a run and he had ended up ten steps ahead, jogging in place, and confused by my lack of forward movement. My fourth and fifth grade peeps at the back of the track and field running pack were all about the shuffle-walk; Chad, not so much.