Playing House

by Lauren Slater

  At six o’clock I heard a key in the lock, the dogs barking, and when I raced downstairs I saw them standing together, mittened-hand-in-mittened-hand. “Where were you guys?” I said. I was nearly wheezing with panic.

  “Field trip,” Ceci said.

  “Field trip?” I said.

  “To Foss Park. I chaperoned. It was fun, wasn’t it, Clara?”

  And Clara looked up, smiled, nodded. “Fun,” she said.

  “But I didn’t . . . You didn’t tell . . .” And then I stopped. I held tight to the banister. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Aren’t parents supposed to sign a permission slip before their kids go on a field trip?”

  “Yes,” said Ceci, and if she thought her next comment was strange, she betrayed it not a bit. “I signed that slip weeks ago,” she said.

  I did what any woman at once indebted and enmeshed would do. I said not a word to Ceci. The next day I called the school. “All permission slips,” I said to the teacher, “must be signed by me. Not Ceci. Me.” I paused. The teacher didn’t say anything. Her silence sounded accusing. Where was I at the end of every day, during pickups? Working. Working. Working. Where was I? “I’m Clara’s mother,” I said, and I heard it echo down the line.

  When I became pregnant with Lucas, Ceci, who had lived with us for four years, moved out. She found a fantastic apartment in Harvard Square, just minutes away. It was not a big change. She left most of her clothes, her bed made, her pictures up on the walls. “What are we,” I said to my husband, “a storage facility?”

  “You’re just jealous,” he said.

  “Picture it,” I said. Suddenly, I was speaking slowly, newly aware of an anger. “Picture it. You and I have a child. We hire another man to move into the house and be the nanny. Your child falls in love with the man-nanny, this other father. I come to love the other father too, and I listen to all his child-rearing advice.”

  “I don’t listen to all her child-rearing advice,” he said.

  “If I think she has an ear infection and has to go to the doctor and Ceci doesn’t, you always agree with Ceci.”

  “I’m just being polite,” he said. “She’s still a guest. You’re my wife.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “That’s exactly my point. I’m your wife. I’m Clara’s mother.”

  “Clara loves you a lot,” he said.

  “Of course she does,” I said.

  “You have to have more confidence,” he said.

  “You tell me,” I said, and I was surprised by the depth of my anger. “You tell me how you would feel having another father around for your kid.”

  “I would hate it,” he said thoughtfully. “It is something I would never allow.”

  It was full-blown winter when I gave birth to my son, the trees splashed and mottled, my newborn’s face patchy with different hues of reds and blues. When I looked into his brand-new face, I saw nothing of my mother and nothing of myself. In part because of gender, in part because of experience, I approached my second with much more confidence, lifting him up by his armpits, swaddling him deftly, bathing him both swiftly and softly, and he felt it, my calm hands. He stopped crying whenever I picked him up. I picked him up as often as I could. Ceci seemed to like him less. “Boys,” she’d say and sigh. “Girls are fun,” she’d say. “The clothes . . . Boys are . . .” And then she wouldn’t finish. From his earliest days Ceci dressed him in little baseball shirts and high tops. She called Clara “mi amore” and Lucas “señor.” “It’s a cultural thing,” my husband said. “It’s Latino machismo.” Sometimes she let Lucas cry and cry. “Oh,” Ceci said to me one day. “Oh, he is a big bad boy. He has a terrible temper.” At the time, Lucas was two months old.

  I see this gender bias as one of Ceci’s unintentional gifts to me, for it left a space, and I slipped in. I held my boy. I called him “mi amore.” He grabbed my nose, felt my face. I know he saw me, looming large over him, as someone safe. And I learned, from him, that I was safe, that I was not my mother, that I did not have claws or cruelty, that I could never hurt a child, my children, never, never, ever, girl or boy, no matter, these were indeed my children. My life. The best I had to offer.

  Every child changes you in different ways. Clara curved me towards my past and, in doing so, forced me to consider its complex intersection with my present curving relentlessly towards my future. Lucas revealed for me the beauty of the single dimension. As a writer, unidimensionality is something I have always avoided. The worst thing that could be said about one’s work was that it lacked facets, was flat. Clara and I are two pieces of a single prism that keeps catching the light at an infinite number of angles. With Lucas, the surface is smooth. It is smooth, peaceful, a lake without wave or ruffled ripple, a lake whose very depth is implicit in its liquid skin. I could float here, catch my breath. I sang silly songs to him:

  His name is Lucas

  Lucas Palookas

  And he’s the best

  Lucas in town

  I heard my voice. I saw the soft skin of my hands. He pressed himself against my chest, put his mouth on me, found a way to suck in the sound of my heart. “Come,” I said to Clara one afternoon, as I held him, as she watched us, saw me, mother. “Come here, Clarita.” She came. I pulled her close. We stood together, the dyad now a triad, three points, the triangle nature’s strongest shape.

  A year after Lucas’s birth, Ceci’s visa expired. In order to renew it, she needed to return to Mexico, submit an application, and wait for a response from the embassy there. Her chances of getting a new visa: fifty-fifty. My husband and I did whatever we could, sought legal aid, attempted sponsorship, suggested she marry her American boyfriend. In the end there was no choice but for her to leave us for many months, maybe forever. I cried and cried. I cried mostly for Clara, such a huge loss, so early on, and I cried for the girl I once was, standing in front of my house on a hot summer day, waving good-bye to my own mother as the car drove me far away—forever—and who knew when, if ever, we would see each other again. I cried in relief and fear, the sense of something opening, something ending. Clara cried too. That night, she slept with me, in my bed. Dreaming, she moved towards me. “We are finally finding each other,” I thought.

  Ceci had left behind her clothes, her shoes, her artwork, she was everywhere in our home, her plan to return obvious. But a few days after she left, I found myself packing up her clothes, slowly at first, and then picking up speed, boxing the dresses and skirts and shirts, moving her toothbrush and cosmetics into storage, taking down the puzzle pictures, the lacquer shiny, the cracks everywhere.

  “What are you doing?” my daughter asked.

  I knelt down, took her chin in my hand. “I know Ceci is your very best friend,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “But she is not your actual family,” I said. “Ceci has her own family, in Mexico.”

  “I know,” she said. She looked straight at me. “I know you’re my mother,” she said. “And Ceci is my stepmother.”

  “No,” I said. “Ceci is your nanny. She loves you with her whole heart. But nannies do not stay forever, even though they love you forever.”

  “Do mothers stay forever?” she asked.

  “Most mothers do,” I said. “Some don’t. But this mother,” and I pointed to myself, “this mother will stay with you for as long as you want.”

  “Until you die,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “Until I die.”

  “When will you die?” she asked.

  “I hope not for a long time.”

  “I know you will die before Papa,” she said.

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “You’re forty-one,” she said. “And he’s only forty.”

  “You never know,” I said. “But don’t worry.”

  “I’m not worried,” she said. “I’m not the worrier. You are.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I worry.”

  “Someday,” she said, “Ceci will have her own baby.”


  “I hope so,” I said.

  “And you know what I’m going to be when I grow up?” she said.

  “No,” I said.

  “That baby’s nanny,” she said. “I’m going to be Ceci’s baby’s nanny and a mama too.”

  “That’s a great plan,” I said.

  “My plan,” she said, “is to have four babies of my own, plus take care of Ceci’s. So that’s five,” she said. “That’s my limit.”

  We hired someone else to take Ceci’s place during the months she was in Mexico. Vanessa was not nearly as good. She lacked Ceci’s keen competence, her motivation, her spark and humor. She lacked the enormous blessed love Ceci had to give, and this too was, in its own way, fine with me, for I felt I had more room, more say-so, more authority and simple space. There were small tasks Ceci had always done without ever being asked, like making Clara’s lunch for school each day. Now that fell to me. It is important to make your child’s lunch. It is important to cut the bread, wrap it, arrange the lunchbox, tuck in a sweet snack. It is important to know that when, the next day, she opens it, she will briefly see that in the arrangement and choice of foods, you have loved her, and always will.

  It is important to claim the tasks of motherhood, even when time or trauma makes it difficult. You must, of course, sign the permission slips, shop for shoes, cook when you can, do her hair, with or without the knack. How one balances this with the competing demands of career or long-standing insecurities, I really have no idea. No advice. Only that it must be done, here and there, wherever you can. Motherhood is at once a great and sentimental abstraction and, in its true nature, a series of tiny tasks, not a lifetime but a day, which brings you to another day, which brings you to a third, and so you go. It is all dirty work, full of germs and life.

  I gave my mothering away, and for too long a time. I did it one-eighth out of busyness and seven-eighths out of fear. I did it because I had the great good luck and simultaneous misfortune to find another mother so willing and skillful, so comfortably maternal, that I could not quite find my way, my voice, so to speak, the silly songs, the lettuce leaves. I did it also, and paradoxically, out of a keen desire to protect my girl, my best girl, my great love, from the badness I believed was in me. My daughter, my son, I owe everything to them. They have given me more than anyone could ever ask for. They have proven, by their very ruddy and vigorous existences, that even though my own mother gave me up and found me flawed, I had at least two good eggs to give the world, and I gave them.

  Ceci was, after several months, granted a new visa and wanted to return to work. But I knew it could not be. I knew I had stepped into some new space and wanted not to step back but forward, enlarging my maternal role, helped but not too much. To say we “fired” Ceci would be wrong, but we did let her go, the perfect nanny, Mary Poppins, who in the end drifts up on an umbrella, leaving the children to their parents’ care. Ceci had no umbrella and the rupture was painful, her sense of betrayal enormous and understandable. “No,” I told her over the phone, “no, Ceci, we love you absolutely, but we just don’t need . . .”

  “It is up to you,” she said.

  “We will find you another job,” I said. “We will find you a rich family who can pay you more.”

  “I can take care of myself,” she said.

  We both hung up, in tears.

  Every once in a while now Ceci visits us. She is, indeed, working for a far wealthier family, earning much better money, so all’s well that ends well. Sort of. “You know,” Ceci said to me a few weeks ago when she was visiting, “Vanessa is not keeping up Clara’s Spanish. Since I’ve been gone, Clara’s Spanish has really degraded.”

  “I will talk to Vanessa,” I said.

  “Clara doesn’t like Vanessa,” Ceci said.

  “Clara will never love another nanny the way she loves you,” I said.

  But the strange thing is, while that is true, it is also too dramatic. For Clara, the transition was terrible, but she has moved on. When Ceci comes to visit, she spends less and less time with her, wanting to leave after only a minute now, to play with her best friend next door. So Ceci and I are left together, sitting in the kitchen, watching the girl we both love best out the window, playing on the green grass of our neighbor’s yard. Upstairs, Lucas, the boy I love best, churns in his sleep, the monitor crackling, full of the sound of him. “I have always wanted to ask you,” Ceci said to me one day, “why did you fire me?”

  “I didn’t fire you,” I said, then began to stammer: “I didn’t need as many hours . . . we were . . . the money . . . expensive . . . I didn’t want to work so much—”

  “Were you jealous?” Ceci interrupted.

  Brief pause. “Yes,” I said. “You were always the better mother.”

  “That is not so,” she said. Her eyes filled with tears. “I am thirty-eight,” she said. “Clara may be the closest I ever get to having my own daughter.”

  “She belongs to both of us,” I said.

  But it was clear, looking out the window, that Clara belonged to no one but herself. There she was, leaping up to catch a ball, dancing in a clown costume, holding hands with Maya, her best friend. I tapped on the window. Clara looked up, briefly waved at us, went back to the business of her life. Ceci and I sat together in the kitchen. It was so quiet. We could hear the heat turn on, the furnace tick and fire. We boiled water on the stove. We filled our mugs, peppermint and chamomile. In the end, the unbreakable bond was perhaps not between Ceci and Clara or between Clara and me, but between Ceci and me, two women, two other mothers, knowing without words how hard and fierce and fabulous mothering can be, understanding the inherent losses of it all, soothing ourselves together, here, in the kitchen, at the very end what is left: two women taking tea.

  10

  The Suit

  I’ve never been good at fashion. Some people have the knack; even a scarf flung casually about their neck looks somehow silken and august. I, on the other hand, am a rumpled person, both literally and philosophically. I see the universe as messy, black cloth crumpled with pins and rips. My view is fundamentally pessimistic. I have never understood the expression “freak accident.” Given the existence of black holes and burst blood vessels, it astounds me that anyone really has the courage to get dressed up in the morning. Accidents are not the exception. They are the rule. Therefore, one should outfit oneself accordingly. The truly paranoid should wear yellow hard hats and carry candles. The others, like me, who live on the perpetual edge of an overprocessed ironic worry, should just be frumpy. And that is what I am.

  One of my earliest memories involves clothes. I was six years old. I had a great future in front of me. I wanted to be a zoologist, a chemist, a teacher, and a tailor. Mrs. Pichonio, the old widow who lived down the street from us and had a magnificent high hump in her bent back, owned a sewing machine. It was stored in a golden-wood cabinet with iron scrollwork legs and many miniature drawers. The machine itself had Singer written on it, each letter red and formed from tiny painted flowers. The needle nosed in, nosed out with a chattering sound. Once she let me try it, and it amazed me, that cloth could come together, that the open ended could be so easily seamed, that you could cuff and button and hem.

  Back at home, I set to work with a plain old needle and thread, the only supplies I could find, plus a large swatch of pink fabric from my mother’s rag basket. Within a few days I had fashioned for myself a skirt, a lopsided article of clothing, sticky with glue and snarled with knots. I proudly wore it to school. Having become frustrated with the process of fastening silver snaps, I simply clasped it at my back with masking tape. I was not the kind of kid one laughed at; people simply stared.

  Thus began my clothing career, or what I should more accurately term my anti–clothing career. I looked like a frowzer, and I loved it. After a while, the love went away and it became my habit, a manifestation of who I essentially was, something snarled. I lost my interest in sewing, no surprise, but the tendency towards clothes that did not fit,
ugly clothes, sloppy clothes—that became ingrained. For the past twenty or thirty years, almost every day, I have rolled out of bed, grabbed for the raveled sweater, the paint-splattered pants. I never understood why people bothered to change their outfit every day. I have always worn the same outfit, minus the underwear, for one week at a time. It cuts down on laundry and so simplifies things. During the darkest parts of my life, I have even slept in my clothes, thereby avoiding the tiring task of getting dressed in the morning.

  That I am a writer, a freelancer with no office to go to, has only more deeply ingrained my tendency. But as occasionally happens to writers, a few weeks ago, someone read my work and liked it and asked me to go on TV for two minutes. That didn’t excite me. I have been on TV for two minutes before and I’ve long lost the illusion it will make me famous. And it probably doesn’t help that I have almost always refused the makeup, with the exception of my Oprah appearance, because she insisted.

  The publishing company, however, the one that has consented to print my work despite obvious profit loss, that company did not share my attitude. For the publicist this was a great opportunity—it was CNN—and she instructed me to dress accordingly. She knew me. She knew that without firm direction and tutelage I would probably not look good. She told me to go to Ann Taylor and buy a suit. A suit! “Expense it to us,” she said, sounding a little desperate. Ann Taylor! I only shop at Target, and before Target came to the East Coast, I shopped at Bradlees, whose bankruptcy I am still in the process of mourning.