“‘Sandra’s for the public schools?’ said another editor. ‘Yes, apparently she thinks we’re all evil for having our kids in private school,’ said this other NPR journalist and now they all descended on me in a mob, like a gang in West Side Story, looking for blood. They all jab their champagne flutes moralistically at me because I’m not writing enough about global warming! Oh sure, their kids may be sequestered from our ninety-eight percent Hispanic, free and reduced-lunch elementaries by going to the twenty-two-thousand-dollar a year Willowwood School—”
“Willowwood?”
“Yes, Willowwood is really into honoring diversity—they have to ‘honor’ it because they don’t actually have it. Their ‘diversity’ looks like fourteen white kids and madly-tapping Savion Glover. The kids never see brown people because while Willowwood teens have ridden the Metro in Paris and the London Underground, they would never dare set foot on a bus in L.A. Last year the senior diversity ‘retreat’—retreat from diversity, more like it—was going to Santa Barbara to see the movie Crash.”
“Well—”
“And these journalists have no shame! They aren’t embarrassed at all! Oh no, they’re so proud that they gave canned food for the tsunami and that Willowwood School recycles! And I’m yelling, ‘How dare you try to jump your hybrid Lexus SUV over my Mexican kindergarten ass!’”
Ruth moves us to the hot tub on the deck. Marta lays out plates and silverware, platters of Thai food appear.
“So now the charisma is draining out of me and I’m literally starting to feel hobbled by my cause, the Angel of Public School. Utter even the phrase ‘public school’ and rooms clear. This Angel is like a little social-working Blue Nun for whom I am merely her driver. I work for this Angel—I follow her dour instructions. The other week I was delivering a stack of old computer printers for her to an address some tired public-school teacher wrote down wrong, one digit off.
“And I’m screaming while trolling down Slausen, ‘Shit, shit, shit! Someone ELSE should be helping the poor! They’re called BOOTSTRAPS—ever HEARD of them? At forty-three I should be sampling Chardonnays in wine country!’
“My gift is charm, and the people you meet along the Way of the Flat Brown Shoes are impervious to charm. I got the wrong Angel! I’m so horribly ill-suited to be carrying around this Angel! I could have had the Angel of…of neutering puppies. I could have a cable show about puppies. Because I’m a type A person. I’m used to getting an idea, making a plan, and swiping the VISA card to make it happen. But no, in the public-school world you have to work with the system. I signed up to volunteer to teach reading at a Van Nuys elementary. I expect some kind of medal, because I’m so fabulous, and I’ve given up my whole glamorous former life and instead, this tired volunteer coordinator’s first words out to me, as she tosses me a ten-page-long application to be a volunteer, are:
“‘YOU need to get a tetanus shot!’”
“There ARE all those rules and regulations,” Ruth murmurs, heaping pad Thai on our plates. “I certainly remember those from when I did therapy in the women’s prisons.”
“And God!” I cry out, with my mouth full of pad Thai. “The fluorescent lighting in public schools! The linoleum. The putty-colored buildings! The chain-link fence! The crispy grass! Queer Eye or somebody really needs to come up and do a makeover!”
Ruth lifts her fork.
“Don’t forget that in this corporate age, that ‘third place,’ ‘the public square,’ that place where we feel most comfortable is Starbucks. Starbucks!”
“Exactly!” I say. “My generation…our psyches, our aesthetics have become totally Starbucks-ized! I expect every space I enter to look like Starbucks. I walk into a room and expect to be immediately bathed in earth tones, track lighting, and a story on a chalkboard about how far organically grown Costa Rican beans have traveled to see me, me, me…Along with an adult contemporary remix of something jazzy with John Coltrane on the cover, to make me feel better about myself, like I am somehow consorting with Black History Month while slurping my hazelnut latte…That to me has become normal. By contrast, our humble and drab public schools cannot even expect to compete with such exquisitely honed, consumer-targeted architectural design. All the fluorescent lighting of our public schools! The drooping American flags! Such a cumbersome design, the American flag! The jangling primary colors, and that mess of stripes! It depresses! It harkens back to the dull school assemblies of one’s childhood! It feels visually discordant! And wrong!”
Ruth is now pouring us two glasses of “a very dry rosé. It’s the new rosé. Open your mind. Give it a try!”
“Oh my goodness,” I exclaim. “That combined with the pad Thai. It’s perfect.”
“What to drink with Thai food has always been a puzzle for me. But Renard explained it to me…Never mind. Go ON. The point is…You began by saying…YOU WERE HAPPY.”
“Yes, because in the meantime, I realize I’ve actually been on an extraordinary ADVENTURE. Through the clanking, integrational government machinery of my daughter’s LAUSD magnet school—”
“Wait a minute. Didn’t you tell me on the phone how much you loved the elementary down the street?”
“I did!” I said. “With the gay assistant principal! But the very next day we got a letter saying we also got into the magnet, which is K through 12, so Mike said we’d better go.”
“Magnet? Hannah got into a magnet? Don’t you have to test gifted to get into those?”
“No, no, no!” I exclaim. “Here’s the beauty. In L.A., the magnet system was started in the seventies to kind of”—here I make a circular hand motion as though I am stirring a pot—“swirl around the races. It’s about racial swirling around. Kids get assigned magnet points based on how heavily minority and overcrowded their home schools are, and then they mix these kids together in magnet schools—the kids from high-minority overcrowded schools, like so many of the ones we have in Van Nuys—”
“So your magnet school is more racially integrated than the one down the street?” Ruth asks, massaging her temples.
“Sort of,” I say. “In Hannah’s kindergarten class of twenty, she’s still the only blonde. But instead of just Hispanic immigrants, our brown children come from many, many countries. Not that Mexico and Peru and El Salvador are the same country, but—”
“And…” Ruth waves her pen, trying to find a through line. “Growing up in Malibu in the sixties, you were the lone brown kid in a sea of white.”
“Exactly!”
“But your magnet school is more affluent than—”
“No, no, no!” I retort. “It’s poor! It’s Title One! It’s fifty-nine percent free and reduced lunch! It’s practically all immigrants living in apartments, but instead of just poor Hispanic families, there are Hispanic mixed with Armenian, Middle-Eastern, Russian, Filipino…Often I don’t know WHAT the hell they are…And one day I realized they don’t know what I am, either—how could they? I look like the Third World nanny to my blond daughter, so it was up to me to be the welcome wagon! I would have to strap on my fear-of-rejection social armor! I would have to hurl myself across the cultural divide!”
“Very empowering,” Ruth agrees, spreading sauce for the spring rolls.
“Which can at first be jarring. At Hannah’s magnet school, for the first few months, I felt like I was continually crossing the parking lot behind a cabal of what seemed to be perpetually disapproving-looking mothers, who were always chattering almost secretively together in another language. So one day, just before getting to my car, I turned to the group and—as though hurling my body before bullets—asked them, point blank, ‘So…What language are you speaking?’
“And the head disapproving mom—whom I called their union boss—stops, in surprise, then puts her hand on my arm and says, ‘Oh, honey, it is Armenian!’ And I realize Hasmik is actually very warm. She will give you the sweater off her generous meaty back. She just has…Anxious Armenian Face. And then we all went belly-dancing at the Y!”
“How marvelous!” Ruth exclaims. “I love belly-dancing!”
“And then there was the school bus incident.” I put my rosé down to steady myself, at the traumatic memory. “We’d had our babysitter Nan over so Mike and I could get some work done and go out for dinner. We’d walked Nan to the bus twice, she knows where it is, it’s three-fifteen, Nan says she’ll go to the corner to pick up Hannah…
“And twenty minutes later, she calls us on her cell phone in a panic. ‘Hannah did not get off the bus! Hannah has disappeared!’ And now I freak out and jump into the minivan and go screaming through the neighborhood—And you remember our neighborhood, right? We’re in Van Nuys! I’m screaming past the tattered pupuserias, ninety-nine-cent stores—”
Ruth puts her hand over her heart.
“And then it occurs to me to actually drive past the school bus stop, in front of Van Nuys Elementary. And catty-corner from the bus stop, I can see Nan running the wrong way up the street and weeping—I guess she got her directions confused—”
“Yes?” Ruth whispers, hand still over her heart.
“And right where she’s supposed to be, on the steps of Van Nuys Elementary, I see Hannah sitting calmly with what I might previously have assumed to be a chunky gang girl, with a pierced nose, gold cross, and black tank top. They are sitting very quietly, chatting, holding hands.
“And I run up to this teen girl and scream, ‘Thank YOU for waiting with my daughter!’ And the Hispanic teen says in a high, soft voice, almost as though mildly insulted, ‘This is what I always do. I always wait with the little kids.’ And I drive this girl—her name is Monica—home and she lives just off Vanowen Boulevard in one of those teeny bungalow units, with the couch on the front porch, and a giant hanging carpet of the Virgin of Guatemala.
“And now her mother, Teresa, who speaks very limited English, invites us to a ‘posada’! Meaning on Saturday night they will come to our house for ten minutes and sing, like, Mexican carols or something! They will play Joseph and Mary, and we will play the innkeepers who will deny them. Three times. In Spanish. And Saturday night sixty Hispanic people walked up to our porch, holding candles, singing—It’s so very beautiful—And we all sing the printed lyrics together in Spanish, and even as the denying innkeeper—‘Yo, Jose, even though you’re a humble carpinterio, no molestar’—I couldn’t help flashing a huge smile at everybody, as if to say, ‘This is all really…so very, very fabulous!’
“Then we walked to Teresa’s house, where she’d laid out a simple meal of tamales and pozole soup for seventy. And there in back is the giant, illegal iron springs pointing everywhere…Homer Simpson trampoline. And as if in a dream, I find myself jumping on it with eleven kids, five Chihuahuas, and three chickens.
“And then mariachis come, and they play ‘Cielito Lindo,’ and everyone dances and I think…The violin! I love the violin! Why in this competitive Western culture do we always have to sit around frozen while some eight-year-old gifted monkey prodigy, the son of lawyers, plays Suzuki for us? Music should be a group activity! And P.S.: Violins, we should have those in public school! Violins in the schools!
“And then I wrote a grant, I brought all these violins to our little fifty-nine percent free and reduced lunch school…”
“How marvelous!” Ruth exclaims, eyes wide. “Good for you!”
“Except that did you know violins come in different sizes?” I chatter on. “My mistake was that violins don’t just come in full size, they come in three-quarters, one-half, one-fourth, one-eighth, one-tenth, one-sixteenth, and even, God help us, one-thirty-second. Ahhhhh! For a second, I feared my Violins in the Schools project was going to culminate with me, a wild-eyed mother, staggering out onto a school campus, opening her tiny violin case, and taking out the world’s teeniest Uzi—!
“But the point was, I fixed the problem, I re-ordered the violins in the right sizes, and I now feel very empowered that I can write a grant and fill out forms and that I am not afraid of bureaucracy!”
“‘Not afraid of bureaucracy’!”
“That’s another thing! I’ve learned bureaucracy isn’t necessarily boo! some evil thing. It’s just paperwork. I’m a writer! I can fill out forms! I’m becoming a kind of paperwork dominatrix. In fact, I’ve come to believe that government—and laws—are really interesting! Sometimes when plant managers or similar cite ‘bureaucracy’ as an obstacle, that’s just code for ‘I don’t feel like it.’ ‘Bureaucracy’ is just a convenient metaphor for personal futility, like ‘big’! I’m so into…” I throw out my arms in excitement, sending little glass noodles scattering. Marta kneels to scoop them up. “CITIZENSHIP!”
“‘Government is interesting,’” Ruth repeats wonderingly, writing another thing in her notepad.
“And in discovering ever new ways in which these wheels and dials fit together, from the personal to the political to—to the community at large, the big democratic cathedral… It’s like I’m on some kind of high!”
“Why do you suppose that is?” Ruth asks, lifting some small pastries off a dessert tray.
“Because after four decades I have found myself.”
“And who are you?” Ruth says, pouring limoncello into two perfect tiny glasses.
“Well, the answer goes back to the damn bra ball.”
“Which you called me about. You couldn’t burn your bra because you have too many…”
“Last year I went to this Auberge in Napa, which had this patio upon which the women would relax after their treatments. And what has stayed with me is the image of all of us women lying in our white robes, with cucumbers over our eyes, while wind chimes play. And it has occurred to me that for the past decade or so I’ve been asleep. I think so many women of my generation have. We’ve been lying in state, Sleeping Beauties, paraffin-wrapped on biers of three hundred-thread Percale sheets, ringed by eucalyptus aromatherapy candles and soporific fans of Real Simple. I actually had a four-handed massage! Did I tell you? A four-handed massage!”
I take a sip of the limoncello. “Wow! Fabulous!”
Ruth is writing: “You’re lying on a bier of aromatherapy…”
“Yes—the bier!” I say. “Not that this is unpleasant, but in my mid-forties, old as the women’s movement itself—I like to say I feel as old as Betty Friedan’s hair—I realize I am bored to death with this life of consuming. I’m tired of being an obedient participant in this, the high-water period of feminism’s Condé Nast–icization…a weird Island of Dr. Moreau–like union of feminism with capitalism where our Self-hood—or Self magazine-hood—boils down to two questions: One, how am I feeling? And two, what should I buy? You know? Instead of ‘I think, therefore I am,’ it’s ‘I feel, therefore I buy’—or in mothers’ cases, ‘I fear, therefore I buy.’ So when we high-five each other, ‘You go, girl!,’ it’s all about splurging on a fabulous pair of Jimmy Choos, chugging that third Cosmo, or shimmying onto the dance floor for some sizzling salsa. Which I’m not against, but I have to say so many decades in, I am bored to death with the frantic hamster-on-a-wheel cycles of losing weight! buying things! oh my God! eucalpytus candle! Several decades in, I am now thoroughly exfoliated. I have run out of product to spray into my hair!
“In this capito-feminist era, it seems there’s no female desire that can’t be granted by VISA…Be it the dream bra, dream sandal, dream lipstick, dream couch, dream neighborhood, dream kindergarten, or even dream friends. But what we forget is that women are the very people who’ve always had the gift of being able to creatively imagine—and ingeniously fashion—their own lives, relations, and communities. Women used to impact not just sales but the world!
“And what I realize is that I’m tired of being a napping, well-creamed girl. I’m so bored of looking at myself in the mirror. It’s been decades now. When will the tedium end? Fuck it! I want to paint on the big canvas now. To be a pioneer woman. To construct a log cabin with my own two hands. Maybe kill a bear. I smell the heady salt air of people unmet and sights unseen. I y
earn to be, from my own bloated navel, Outward Bound. Because it appears that I am grown up now. I have tools. I have skills. I can pick up a telephone. I can paint a mural! I can do things!”
Ruth pumps a fist supportively in the air and madly writes in her notepad.
“Look at Anna Karenina,” I say finally. “In the end, she was just bored. After she lands Vronsky, it’s just four hundred pages of boredom. Four hundred pages of buying stuff. That is the true meaning of…her little red handbag. She jumps under the train, leaves the handbag.”
“That so?” says Ruth.
“And even better,” I say, “I have found my community.”
“Your community!” she exclaims.
“Yes! Do you remember that old Woody Allen routine where a television hypnotist convinces a member of his studio audience that he is a fire engine? After pooh-poohing the bit, Woody Allen goes to sleep, only to wake up in the middle of the night with an irresistible urge to don red pajamas and bolt into the street. Block after block, he is joined by other equally excited men in red pajamas, running—they decide giddily to join forces, and off they sprint together to find the fire. This has been my experience—while much of my brown-shoe public-school journey has been unspeakably drab and vexing, over and over again, at the eleventh hour—what with the ‘You need a tetanus shot!’—I’ll meet a complete stranger consumed with the exact same fever dream. It’s like reliving, over and over again, the adrenaline rush of your best-ever eHarmony/match.com, where thirty seconds into lunch you’re literally screaming your mutual enthusiasm, grabbing each other’s wrists like pincers while becoming instantly FRIENDS FOR LIFE.”
Ruth does not recall the Woody Allen routine. “I can’t quite follow—”
“It’s like in the movie Close Encounters, where you keep coming across a new person, sitting in a diner, making that same tower-shaped pile of mashed potatoes.”
“I still don’t recall the Woody Allen—”
“Oh, forget Woody Allen. I used to love him, but now I feel so betrayed by him. He’s just an elite Manhattanite pedophile whose children—what are their names, Satchel? Snatchel?—will never mix with the rest of us.”
Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! Page 25