Day cares in high schools?
It was truly a world gone insane.
There was a fine line, she felt, between making the best of a bad situation and encouraging bad behavior. She wasn’t sure which side of the fence the topic of “day cares in high schools” landed on.
“Well, if she is pregnant, I’ll just kill her.” Ava pulled out two bright yellow mums in order to make way for three orange tulips a bit more violently than she’d intended, and lost a mum head in the process. “I mean it. I’ll just kill her, throwing away her life like that.”
She thought for a moment as she wrestled with the greenery, as Suzanne tried to keep her breathing even and calm. She flipped right past pictures of the Royal Baby—she didn’t feel like seeing him just now—and found that even Johnny Depp’s perfect face didn’t have its usual calming effect on her.
“You were only twenty-eight when you had me,” Suzanne said weakly.
“Twenty-eight is a hell of a lot more than a decade older than eighteen.” Ava snipped another flower to emphasize her point. “That’s a formative ten years. Especially in my day.”
In my day. Suzanne wondered how often she’d heard those words in her life. Too many, she was certain, to count up just now.
“I won’t kill her till after she has the baby, though,” Ava decided after a moment. “Oh, I just love babies! I always wished you’d had more than one—just not with that bum.”
“You only had one.” Suzanne pointed out.
“That was different—after I had you, I couldn’t have another one.”
Suzanne hadn’t known that; she felt a wave of sympathy for her mother.
“I didn’t know that,” she said softly. “You never said anything.” After a moment, she pressed gently, “Why not?”
“Because,” Ava said emphatically, “it hurt too damn much.”
Well, I walked right into that one.
Suzanne laughed. That was one of the joys of having Ava for a mother; she was always good for a laugh or two—especially when she didn’t mean to be funny.
“But to have a baby around again . . . !” Ava said wistfully. “I love their chubby little legs and their bellies. I love their smell.”
“Mother . . .”
But it was too late; baby lust had already seized Ava in its mighty grip.
“Oh, a baby is a wonderful thing to have around the house!” she squealed delightedly. “Especially during the summer, waddling around its little wading pools—and on holidays!” She reached forward and grasped Suzanne’s arm happily, her eyes aglow with pure grandma fever. “Remember how we used to put Molly under the Christmas tree, and she’d stare up at the twinkly lights?”
Suzanne cleared her throat loudly, hoping to drag Ava back down to planet Earth, where she could realize the actual ramifications of Molly’s pregnancy, beyond the smell of baby powder and no-tears shampoo. Thankfully, Ava took the hint.
“But no, no, no, she’s too young,” Ava added hastily. “Far too young. So we’ll just kill her. That’s what we’ll do.”
She hummed for a moment, as she worked on her arrangement, before adding, “We’ll kill her, and then we’ll keep her baby.”
Suzanne jumped to her feet and glared at her mother. “Mother!”
“What?” Ava asked, her eyes completely innocent.
“My daughter,” Suzanne said firmly, “is not pregnant.”
“You’re sure? Absolutely, completely sure? No room for doubt at all?”
“Yes, of course I’m sure.” Suzanne snapped.
Her heart was pounding in her throat, and she realized she’d let herself get more worked up than she’d meant to.
“Look, I’m sorry I snapped at you, Mom. I’m just—well, as you can imagine, it’s a sensitive topic for me.”
“It ain’t a picnic topic for me, either,” Ava reminded her, arching her eyebrow.
“I know, I know, and I apologized to you for the shame of not being able to hold your head up in church a million times already.”
Ava snorted a little, but gave her daughter a guilty look. The second she’d held Molly for the first time, moments after her birth, an innocent bystander would have thought the idea to have Molly in the first place had been Ava’s.
“But, I’m telling you,” Suzanne insisted, “I know my daughter, Mom. I got pregnant because I was more concerned with sneaking beer out of your supply than I was about getting my hands on some birth control.”
“You can’t imagine the amount of pride that last sentence has given birth to within me,” Ava said wryly.
“My point,” Suzanne willed her voice to sound calm; in reality, her heart had jumped up into her throat the moment the words pregnant and Molly had been spoken in the same sentence, “is that Molly is much smarter than to get pregnant by accident.”
“Oh. You’re probably right, at that.” Ava looked oddly disappointed, sipping at her iced tea a bit forlornly.
Then again, once upon a time, anyone who knew me would have said the same thing about me.
Damn it!! Suzanne nearly wailed out loud. This persistent inner voice was going to drive her insane.
“Hmmm. Well, darn it all,” Ava’s voice was ironically tinged with sadness. “I was just starting to like the idea of four generations of Applebaum women in the world. Just think what a nice Christmas card we’d have, with the baby right in the center.”
“You don’t know it’d be a girl—and by the way, this is completely hypocritical of you.” Suzanne looked up at her mother, fanning herself with her magazine to try to dry her sweaty face. “When I told you I was going to have Molly, you freaked—no, more than freaked, you had a total meltdown. Jesus, we had to get you a bucket of ice and a compress for you head.”
“As well as an eight-ounce glass of vodka, straight up,” Ava nodded. “The good ol’ drinking days.”
“But,” Suzanne squeaked incredulously, “if Molly turns around and does the exact same thing, you’re suddenly Granny Poppins? It’s not fair!”
“Well, it’s different.” Ava looked at her as though this should be obvious. “You were my child. If Molly gets pregnant, it doesn’t make me look completely devoid of proper parenting skills.”
“Wow, you are really mean today,” Suzanne marveled. “Are you sure you’re taking all your meds?”
Ava heaved a deep, guilty breath and put a hand on Suzanne’s shoulder. “Okay, fine. The jig is up, you caught me. I’m not taking them.”
Suzanne jumped up, dropping the magazine and nearly kicking over her Diet Coke.
“What? Mother, are you trying to . . .”
“I’m selling them on the black market and using the proceeds to hire exotic dancers to perform on my coffee table,” Ava confessed, cutting her off. “I feel so much better now that it’s all out in the open.”
Suzanne glared at her mother for a full minute, but she realized she’d set herself up for it.
I’ll know better next time, she reassured herself, just like she always did, knowing, just like she always did, that she wouldn’t.
She pulled yet another cigarette from her pack of American Spirit, hoping it would annoy her mother, and it did.
“Well,” Suzanne mused, picking up her magazine and settling back down in her lawn chair, “at least I know she hasn’t done anything stupid.”
“That’s good, dear,” Ava replied in a voice that implied Suzanne couldn’t possibly be sure of any such thing.
Suzanne diplomatically chose to ignore it. It was either that or rip off her mother’s head, and what with the patrol cars coming by every few minutes . . . best not to take the chance.
“Which is not to say she’s never done anything stupid,” Suzanne conceded. “But she seems to stay stupid within, well, the reasonable sphere of stupidity, if you know what I mean. I mean, kids do stupid things. And afterwards . . . well, not right afterwards, usually, when the sting of embarrassment has faded a bit, she comes to me, and we talk about it. Isn’t that fabulous?”
“And you’re allowed your opinion, no matter how misguided,” Suzanne assured her. “For my part, I feel like . . . like . . . like such a mom during those talks with Molly. Think about it; in this day and age, my kid actually talks to me, keeps the communication going. You know how rare that is? And not just the little things, either—the big things. She called me from this party, once, when her girlfriend was too drunk to drive her home, so I could go get her. Or the time she got stoned behind the toolshed after school, or when she’s . . .”
“Uh-uh-uh!” Ava clapped her hands firmly over her ears, spun around, and started shouting, “La-la-la! La-la-la! Too much information!”
“Did your granddaughter teach you that trick?” Suzanne asked, amused.
“I saw one of the kids on Friends do it—that Chandler, I think.” Ava said; Suzanne should have guessed. Every time the show played—and it seemed to play at least eight or ten times a day—Ava watched each episode rabidly, as though it was the first time she’d seen it.
Now, she pulled her hands down from her ears, eyeing her child darkly.
“But, you see, that’s where you and I differ as parents. There are certain things I just plain damn well don’t want to know.” She patted Suzanne on the shoulder affectionately. “Oh, I suppose I want you to feel that you can confide in me—but do you actually have to do it?”
“So,” Suzanne grinned, “I take it that means you haven’t forgiven me for telling you about the time I transcended out of maidenhood?”
“No, I have not,” Ava retorted, “and neither have all twenty of my higher powers. You’re going to burn everywhere from hell to Hades for making me privy to that information.”
“Sorry.”
“I doubt that.”
Suzanne’s phone alarm shrieked, splitting the afternoon air. “Time for your blood pressure pill, Mom.”
“Who the hell made you the medication police?” Ava was not ready to have her daughter be her boss just yet, damn it, and probably never would be.
Her husband’s death, eight years ago, was still fresh in her memory too, but Jimmy had been out-and-out sick for years. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another, from arthritis to adult onset diabetes to emphysema. First glasses, then insulin, then a cane; hearing aids and a bucketful of pills followed not long after. His body, once literally glowing with health, was chipped down bit by bit over the years, until nearly every bit of him needed help to function.
But she, so far, had a perfectly clean bill of health, and she also had a doctor to tell Suzanne just that. Still, Suzanne treated her like she had one foot in the grave and was clinging desperately to the side with both hands. It made her feel old, and she hated it.
“You know, I hope your daughter doesn’t start to worry like you do. Actually,” she corrected herself in afterthought, “I hope she does. I just hope she does start to worry just like you do, and then she starts pestering you relentlessly, and finding ways to turn every single perfectly pleasant conversation into a health quiz.”
Then Ava’s cell phone, perched as always on its charger right in its place next to the landline phone, went off, singing its delicate bell-like ring.
“What’s the point of owning a cell phone, Mom, if you’re going to leave it in the house all the time?”
Ava stuck her tongue out at her, then strode up the stairs to the deck and into the kitchen with the same strong purpose she applied to everything.
Suzanne watched her mother go. The confidence Ava wore like an invisible cloak was comforting, it was familiar, and it was pure Mom. “The CEO of maternity,” Jimmy had once called his wife; Ava had airily demanded a raise, but no one had denied the label after she’d gotten sober, and no one ever would.
And right now, she needed her mother in a way that she hadn’t in a long, long time; and for the first time in an equally long, long time, Ava was completely there for her, in a way she hadn’t been capable of during Suzanne’s childhood.
Suzanne had long ago forgiven her mother for the “drinking days,” as Ava now called them, but forgiving Ava didn’t make up for the many years she took care of her mother instead of vice versa.
But now Ava was doing just that, happily caring for Suzanne the way Suzanne had taken care of Steve and Molly for so many years—and of Ava herself, for so long before that. It was now in her mid-thirties, instead of when she was a teenager, that Ava was making her breakfast and supper and washing her clothes. She was also washing the dishes the two of them used, paying the bills, doing the shopping, and keeping the whole house tidy.
Well, I suppose it’s better to get your mothering late than never.
Ava had also insisted Suzanne quit both her waitressing jobs until she got her divorce settlement.
“You need to rest,” Ava had told her when Suzanne weakly protested the idea of not working for the first time since she was thirteen years old; it was as scary as it was exhilarating. “You need to stop thinking about what Steve needs and what Molly needs and what I need, and think about what you need. I will hear no argument on this subject. Got me?”
All of this was a series of luxuries Suzanne couldn’t quite get used to.
It had been rougher than she’d expected to leave Steve. She didn’t miss The Mooch himself, not at all, but the final act of actually leaving him meant confessing that her eighteen-year-old marriage was a mistake. She was saying, in effect, that half her life had been a waste of time and energy, and frankly that was a bit hard to admit.
She wondered idly, as she sat in the sun sipping her ice-cold Diet Pepsi, if it was odd that she hadn’t cried about leaving Steve yet.
Was she such a cold person that leaving a mate of almost twenty years didn’t register in her feeling vault? Or simply had she, somewhere down deep, accepted this inevitability for so long that she’d finished mourning it before she’d even packed?
“A month . . . no, three weeks,” he’d called after her as she loaded the last of her boxes into the back of her car. There was a note of hysteria in his voice he only used when he was pulling out all the stops. “Three weeks and you’ll be hauling all this stuff back here, so don’t you even think about asking me to help you bring it back in.”
She closed the trunk, wiped off her hands, and turned to her soon-to-be-ex-thank-God.
“I’m leaving you everything but my clothes, the stuff I kept from Molly’s childhood, photo albums, my books, and my yoga mat,” she told him. “You can keep everything else; it’s all yours.”
“You might as well leave the yoga mat,” he scoffed. “It’s not like you ever use it, Pudge.”
She supposed that was supposed to enrage her, but she found she didn’t care if he found her pudgy; maybe she’d kept on an extra ten pounds in an attempt to keep his hands off her.
“You can keep the appliances, the furniture, and all the flatware. I’ve already filed the papers, so my lawyer will call yours—or rather, your mommy’s—about the rest of the details, after you’ve gotten served.” Suzanne couldn’t resist the dig, and Steve’s smug look turned into an almost comical snarl. “Mostly just to let you know how much you owe me for the house, if you want to keep it.” Her father had been right to insist she buy a house so that she wasn’t just pissing away her monthly rent, as he put it; now, it looked like she’d get it all back, and then some.
She got into the car then, backed out of the driveway, and suddenly she felt a huge whoosh, as all the air in her body escaped her. She gripped the wheel, unable to ca
tch her breath. It felt as though, very suddenly, a two-ton boulder had been yanked off her chest, and after eighteen years of taking shallow breaths, she could now inhale and exhale freely.
“I’m free!” she said aloud, gasping, laughing, and crying all at once. Her piece-of-crap Mitsubishi Gallant, which normally took one or more tries before it grudgingly turned over, had sprung immediately to life, as if it too approved of her decision. She patted the dashboard lovingly and again shouted, “Free!”
“You’ll be back!” he yelled, as she pulled out of the driveway, but there was real panic in his voice for the first time. She’d never mentioned lawyers before, let alone actually employed one.
Now he threw down the empty box he held in his hand; more than ever, he looked exactly like what he was—an overgrown toddler whose tantrums were no longer getting him what he wanted.
“You’re just throwing good money away to show me that you’re pissed!” he screamed now, stamping his foot. “You’re pissed because you work and I don’t! You can’t stand it that I don’t work! How sexist is that of you? Some woman-of-the-millennium you are!”
She didn’t bother to respond.
Steve’s idea of “woman-of-the-millennium” meant she should be more than happy to support him, clean the house, and raise his child, while he was holed up in his studio, getting baked and recording the same songs over and over again. Not only happy to do it but also feeling honored to do it, in his opinion.
After all, she thought tiredly, his mother had told him so. And he always listens to his mother.
She thought about shouting some icy response to his comment but, in the end, didn’t bother. What was the point? Sooner or later, he’d realize she wasn’t coming back; that he was really going to have to start taking care of himself now. Somehow, a man who had never held down a job or taken care of himself was likely to be a lot less attractive at thirty-eight than he had been at eighteen. And his mother was no longer young; she’d need care herself before long. He must be really scared now. There was no need to rub his nose in it.
He was someone else’s problem altogether now.
“Thank God Almighty, I’m free at last,” she sang, against Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” on the radio. Somehow, it seemed totally appropriate.
She Effin' Hates Me Page 2