By the end of the first week Sarah’s had sprouted and had three green leaves on its stem. Craig’s cup had a little green seedling getting ready to explode through the dirt. He laughed at my Dixie cup. My seedling hadn’t grown at all.
When Mom asked how my plant was growing, I lied and said, “It’s so beautiful that Ms. Grant wants to keep it, but I won’t let her because it’s for you.”
By the end of the second week Sarah’s had a little bud that would soon be a flower. Craig’s was three inches tall and had leaves. Mine was still just a cup of dirt. There was an ant crawling in it.
I said to Ms. Grant, “I’m not going to give my mom a Dixie cup full of dirt and ants for Mother’s Day.”
She said, “I don’t understand what’s happened. When Lulu was in my class, her plant ended up growing to be eight inches tall.”
I thought to myself, I’m surprised Lulu’s big Amazon hands didn’t squash the little seed.
“I’m sure it will grow,” said Ms. Grant. “Just be patient.”
I went back to my desk and started being patient. I let the ant crawl all over my hand.
At home that afternoon Mom was watching the Weather Channel and ironing some of my shirts. She asked again how well the plant was growing.
But I changed the subject. I glanced at the Weather Channel and said, “Oh, good, rain in California. This should be an excellent year to buy California chardonnays.” I had heard Uncle Max say this to Grandma once when the news showed mudslides in California. Grandma told him not to think about his palate when others were suffering.
Mom just looked at me and then went back to ironing.
When it was time to take our plants home for our mothers, I showed Ms. Grant that mine was just like me and hadn’t grown an inch.
“That’s so weird,” was all she said. She didn’t seem to care that all I had to give my mother for Mother’s Day was a cup of dirt.
On the bus ride home India told me to tell Mom that she could use it as a mud mask to clean her face. I imagined Mom running and screaming through the house with mud and ants all over her face. I threw my stunted seedling in the trash can on my way off the bus.
“Bye, darlin’.”
I just waved at the bus driver without looking at her.
I ran quickly through the kitchen so that Mom wouldn’t notice that I didn’t have a plant with me. She knew that today was the day we were bringing them home. She didn’t even see me.
The manny was in the hallway putting the freshly washed towels in the closet. He knew something was wrong, so he wrapped a towel around me. It was just out of the dryer, so it was really warm.
“What’s shakin’, bacon?” the manny asked.
I started telling him the story without breaking up the sentences or stopping for a breath. “We were growing plants at school for our mothers, and mine didn’t grow at all, and Ms. Grant didn’t seem to care, she just told me to be patient, and I was, but it still didn’t grow, and there was an ant in mine that I named Ferdinant, but he died, and now I don’t have anything to give Mom for Mother’s Day!”
“Whoa,” the manny said. “You better take a breath before you lose consciousness.”
I took a deep breath in and then let it out. “But what will I give her?”
“Give her something that you put a lot of thought into. What does your mother like to do on Mother’s Day?”
“She likes to relax and sleep in,” I said.
“How about sleeping pills?” said the manny.
I laughed and then thought about what Mom would like. “How about serving her breakfast in bed?” I looked at the manny.
“Brilliant!” he screamed, like I’d just discovered electricity. “You’ll need the perfect serving tray,” he said.
That’s the thing about the manny. He really gets it.
We told Mom that we had “business to take care of” and hopped right into the Eurovan. The manny said that this would be good practice for next year, when he was going to be Sarah Jessica Parker’s personal shopper. I don’t know who Sarah Jessica Parker is, but I guess she needs help carrying her shopping bags.
We drove to a store that was full of stationery, martini shakers, and books about throwing parties. There was one called Be My Guest that had beautiful table settings and overdressed people laughing as though the photographer had just said, “Pretend that somebody said something funny.”
I want to go to a party like that.
The manny flipped through the book while I carefully tested each breakfast-in-bed tray. I tested for the perfect weight, beauty, and shine. The man at the shop was a friend of the manny’s, so he showed me all the good deals. I chose a black lacquered tray with gold trim. It wasn’t too heavy to carry, and it would hold a breakfast plate, a juice glass, and the morning paper.
“Excellent choice,” said the manny’s friend. “Donatella Versace was just in here and bought the same one for her mother.”
I saw a picture of Donatella Versace in one of Mom’s Vogue magazines. She pushes out her lips like she’s getting ready to kiss somebody. I pushed my lips out the rest of the time I was in the shop.
The manny’s friend wrapped the tray in beautiful silver wrapping paper and put a dark purple velvet ribbon around it. The manny said that it looked pretty enough to give to the queen of England.
I pulled my allowance money and some old candy wrappers out of my pocket to pay. The candy wrappers dropped on the floor, and I started to bend down to pick them up.
“Don’t you dare,” said the manny’s friend. “Do you think that Donatella Versace picked up the candy wrappers that fell out of her pockets? It’s my job to pick up after the important people who come into my shop.”
I laughed, but when he wasn’t looking, I picked up the candy wrappers and put them back in my pocket.
The manny bought something too, but he wouldn’t tell me what it was. He said it was a surprise.
As we walked out of the store, I looked up at the manny. He had his lips pushed out too.
When we got home, Mom was putting away the ironing board. I sneaked around the back of the house and up into my room so that she wouldn’t see. I hid Mom’s present underneath my bed. I was hiding it from Mom and from Belly. Whenever Belly finds a wrapped present, she opens it. Last Christmas we left her alone in the living room for ten minutes one night, and she opened every single present under the Christmas tree. She came into the kitchen wearing a diamond bracelet that Dad had gotten for Mom.
After dinner that night the manny handed me a brown leather book wrapped in a white satin ribbon. I had picked it up and looked at it at the manny’s friend’s shop.
“It’s a journal,” said the manny. “You’re supposed to write all your secret thoughts inside of it. It’s sort of like Lulu’s ‘The Manny Files,’ except nicer.”
Lulu looked mortified and said, “I’ll use it as evidence someday.”
I thanked the manny for my journal and went to my room. The journal smelled like Dad’s leather coat and felt expensive when I rubbed it against my cheek. The pages were blank and completely clean. They weren’t white. They were that cream color that fancy stationery is made of.
On the first page I wrote:
If you are reading this and your name is not Keats Rufus Dalinger, then may you suffer the guilt of knowing that you are reading somebody else’s private thoughts. READ NO FURTHER UNLESS YOU ARE WILLING TO ADMIT THAT YOU HAVE A CRIMINAL MIND.
I turned the page and began my first entry into my journal.
May 11
Today during recess I went to my secret spot behind the Dumpster and started to cry. Nobody seemed to care that my plant hadn’t grown at all. Ms. Grant even laughed with the rest of the class when Craig colored his thumb brown and said, “Hey, look, I’m Keats.” I wasn’t crying because of Craig. I was crying because Mom was expecting a plant that I had grown, and now she wasn’t going to get one. When we had to line up to go back inside after recess, Sarah asked me if something
was wrong. I told her that I thought I was getting a cold. She told me that our moms could share her plant. The manny told me that Sarah was very “thoughtful.” I wrote her a note on Mom’s fancy stationery.
I’m excited for Mom to open her new breakfast-in-bed tray. I can’t believe I cried over a Dixie-cup plant.
Born on this day: Martha Graham, Salvador Dalí, Irving Berlin
On Mother’s Day, I woke up before Mom did and went downstairs to make her the surprise breakfast in bed. I’m not allowed to use the stove, so I served her a bowl of Cap’n Crunch, a side of string cheese, untoasted bread, and a glass of orange juice. I put a bright yellow daffodil in a little vase on the tray. Mom says daffodils are divine. I say the word divine when we eat out at fancy restaurants.
“How is your Roy Rogers?”
“Divine.”
“How is your Shirley Temple?”
“Divine.”
Mom sat with the tray on her lap and crunched on her cereal.
She loved her new tray. I could tell by the way she kept polishing it with her napkin. She opened her presents from Lulu, India, and Belly and stacked them on her new tray.
We all sprawled across Mom and Dad’s bed while they read the Sunday edition of the New York Times. Mom rubbed my back while she read the Arts and Leisure section.
I closed my eyes and wondered if Mom remembered that she was supposed to get a plant from me for Mother’s Day.
Almost like I had thought it out loud, Mom said, “Those plants always die by Memorial Day anyway.”
I guess moms do know everything.
9
Meltdown Limit
When Mom was little, Uncle Max would tease her until she cried. He used to hide in the big heater vent and sinisterly bellow, “I’m coming for you,” whenever she walked through the living room. She’d scream and cry and then go tell on him. Grandma would scream back, “You’re both driving me insane.” Uncle Max says that it was her favorite thing to say. I heard her say it once to him when she asked him what he wanted for Christmas and he told her, “Tattoos all the way up my arms.”
Now Mom likes to scare us the way Uncle Max used to scare her. Sometimes she pretends to be a zombie, with her arms straight out in front of her and her eyes wide open but not blinking.
“Slowly I turn. Inch by inch. Step by step,” she groans slowly, never turning her head or making sudden movements. When she does this, we squeal and laugh until eventually one of us hits our meltdown limit. That’s what Mom calls it when laughter and fun are so overwhelming that they turn into terror and tears. I am usually the one to hit my meltdown limit first, even before Belly. It’s embarrassing. I usually try to pretend that I’m having an allergy attack, but everybody knows that I’m crying.
With the house clean and the manny gone for the weekend (he said he wouldn’t be back from the queen of England’s country house until Monday), Mom decided it was a good day to stir all of us into a frenzy. When we asked her questions or spoke to her, she didn’t respond. She just sat there like she was in a coma, only her eyes were open and she stared straight ahead with a blank expression.
She bugged out her eyes and taped her nose back like a pig nose with Scotch tape and chased us all over the house. Belly was slower, so Lulu and India took turns carrying her through the house and screaming. Up and down the steps. In and out of rooms. We screamed and screamed, but we were smiling. “Moooom,” I whined with a little laugh, “stooop.”
She cackled, “If I catch you, I’m going to put you in the attic.” The attic has a big, old-fashioned door on it that creaks open to reveal steps that are much too steep to carry anything up. I went up there once with Dad. There are little board walkways that you have to stay on because if you step off of them and onto the pink insulation, you’ll fall through the ceiling and into the room below. It happened to Grandma once at her house. She was putting away the Christmas lights and lost her balance and stepped into the insulation. Her legs went flying through the floor of the attic, which was the ceiling of the living room. Grandpa Pete was taking a nap in his easy chair when he was suddenly covered with white flakes of ceiling. He looked straight above him and saw Grandma’s legs hanging and kicking from the ceiling. Mom says that Grandpa Pete didn’t mind because Grandma had nice legs. Grandpa Pete died before I was born.
Anyway, Lulu, India, Belly, and I hid, perfectly quiet, underneath the bed.
I held my hand over Belly’s mouth so that she wouldn’t reveal our hiding spot. She slobbered all over my fingers. I wiped it on the carpet.
Lulu whispered, “India, stop tickling my feet with your toes.”
“I’m not touching you, sweetie,” said India.
India calls people sweetie when she has attitude. She says it like this: “sa-WHEAT-eeeee.”
We looked down toward our feet and saw Mom tickling Lulu’s toes. We screamed louder than before and barely escaped from underneath the bed. Mom even got one of Belly’s socks off of her feet when she was grabbing at our legs.
Belly peed in her big-girl pants. Belly has just started to wear big-girl pants. Lulu claims that she was wearing big-girl pants when Mom and Dad brought her home from the hospital.
We ran down the hall, Belly with one sock on and a wet spot on the front of her sweatpants. We let out our breath and locked ourselves into the bathroom.
“Whew!” We all collapsed into the empty bathtub, which was cool and still had a few crunchy drying bubbles near the drain from the night before, when I’d washed my hair. I like washing my hair because afterward Mom dries it with the blow-dryer. She calls it styling.
Lulu said, “You know that she would never actually lock us in the attic if she caught us, because that would be child abuse and we’d sue her.”
I got out of the tub and laid my head flat on the bathroom floor so that I could see through the thin slat underneath the door. There was a line of light with two dancing, shadowy socks.
India turned on the water to wash her hands, and I lifted my head up and said, “Shhh! She’s on the other side of the door.”
I put my head back down on the floor to take another look, shoving my eye as close to the door as I could to get a better view. There was Mom’s eye staring right into mine.
“Ahhhhhhhh!” I screamed, very close to my meltdown limit.
“Ahhhhhhhh!” Belly screamed too.
We were all too scared to move. The only sound in the tiny porcelain room was our quick, thumping heartbeats trying to escape from our excited chests. We were prisoners trapped in our own bathroom, but instead of having striped uniforms and handcuffs, we had terry-cloth bathrobes and scented potpourri. Belly changed out of her sweatpants and into her tiny bathrobe with the hood that had mouse ears on it.
As we were lying there on the bathroom floor devising our escape plan, the telephone rang. Mom answered, and we could hear her talking. She didn’t laugh like Woody Woodpecker and say, “You’re kidding,” like she usually does when she’s on the telephone. We exploded out of the bathroom and quietly stood around her.
Mom said things like “Is she okay?” and “How bad is it?”
Lulu whispered, “Who is it?” and Mom shooed her away with her hand.
Mom hung up the telephone and sat down on the couch. Belly, who still wanted to play, tugged at her pant legs. Mom sat just as she had before, like she was in a coma, but this time her face didn’t seem blank.
I knew she wasn’t playing.
India said, “Come on, I’ll chase you.” She started chasing Belly.
Mom called Dad at work and cried into the telephone.
She had hit her meltdown limit.
That night, after we were all supposed to be asleep, I could hear Dad’s muffled voice on the other side of the wall. Usually Mom and Dad talk and laugh at night. Tonight they didn’t laugh. They just talked.
I couldn’t sleep, so I sneaked out of bed and tiptoed down the hall to India’s room. The floor creaked, so I stopped in the hallway and looked at Mom and Dad’s
closed bedroom door. The light was shining from underneath it. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. They always stand up when I’m afraid of getting caught out of bed after lights-out. Sometimes, after eleven thirty, I sneak through the dark house and down to the kitchen and have a glass of cranberry juice. Mom and Dad don’t know.
I tiptoed faster when I reached India’s room, and finally ran for her bed. She was awake too.
“I can’t sleep,” I told her.
She said, “Maybe there’s another jar of earwax underneath your bed.”
“That’s so funny I forgot to laugh,” I said. Uncle Max slept over once, and I stayed up late with him. We watched old episodes of his favorite show, Saturday Night Live. There was a lady with frizzy hair who said, “That’s so funny I forgot to laugh.” I said it to Ms. Grant once, and she said I shouldn’t be staying up so late.
She said it again when there was a knock at our classroom door.
“Who is it?” she said.
“Land shark,” I said.
She glared at me.
She has no sense of humor.
I climbed into bed with India and felt her icy-cold toes touch mine.
“Who’s sick?” I asked India. India always knows what’s going on in our family. Mom and Dad talk to her like she’s all grown up. Everyone talks to India like she’s all grown up. At school one time India and I were walking down the hall together to catch the bus. Mr. Allen, our school principal, walked by going the other way and said, “Hey, India, thanks for your advice.”
I looked at India, but she didn’t look back at me. I still don’t know what she advised him about, but it obviously wasn’t about his toupee. He still wears that.
“Grandma fell and broke her hip,” India said.
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