by Jane Porter
“I’m tired,” Mom suddenly says, her voice quivery. “I want to go home. I want to go to bed.”
“So do I,” Dad agrees grimly, getting to his feet and helping Mom up.
I don’t try to stop them as they head for the door. I don’t get Eva, either. But Eva rushes out as she hears Dad start the car. “Where’s Grandma and Grandpa?”
I feel as if I swallowed a piece of glass. My throat and stomach hurt. “They went on home. Grandma was tired.”
She turns toward the kitchen. “They didn’t even try my cake.”
I can’t tell her how upset I am. I can’t let her know that her grandparents, my parents, have disappointed me badly, too. “Well, let’s have some now.”
“But I made it for Grandma.”
I give her a quick hug, then turn her around and march her into the kitchen. “We can take her a piece tomorrow, after school. But I can’t wait till then. I’ve got to have some of that yummy cake now.”
Chapter Seven
Eva and I sit in the kitchen facing each other on stools at the counter, each of us with our slice of gooey chocolate cake.
One woman, one child, I think. It’s a very tidy, compact life, this life of ours. Unlike the families surrounding us, cocooned in large elegant shingle houses, we have just us. And that’s good. It’s all we want. All we need.
“Have everything you need for school tomorrow?” I ask, licking frosting from the prongs of my fork.
Eva nods, a mouthful of chocolate cake preventing her from speaking. When she swallows she drinks some milk and wipes the back of her mouth on her hand. I push a napkin toward her, but the damage is already done. The back of her hand is smeared with frosting now.
“If I’m going to volunteer, what do I do?” I ask Eva casually.
Eva jerks up her head, her mouth stained with chocolate. “What?”
“I’m thinking that maybe I’ll volunteer more this year.”
Eva just stares at me agog. “Is this a joke?”
I nearly choke on my last bite of cake. Am I that bad of a mom? Do I lack that much legitimacy? “No, it’s not a joke, but if you don’t think I should, then—”
“No, no,” she interrupts, taking the napkin to scrub her mouth clean. “You should. So what are you going to volunteer to do?”
“I don’t know. Help out in the class, probably.”
“Last year each teacher had their own sign-up sheet. All the moms that helped in the classroom signed up on that. They came in the first week of school to sign up,” Eva answers. She’s always been better at reading the packet sent home from the school office than I have. She likes knowing all this stuff, whereas the details just give me a headache. “If you want to help out in my class, that’s what you’ll have to do.”
“Okay.”
She’s staring at me again. “You’re going to do that?”
“Yes.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
I can’t help laughing at her stunned expression. “Why not? I’ve decided I’m going to try to be different from now on. I’m going to be like the other moms. Sign up for things. Do committees. Have meetings.”
And do you know how my darling Eva thanks me? She laughs so hard that she falls off her chair.
The weatherman might say summer doesn’t officially end until September 21, but ask any kid and you’ll be told summer ends the first day of school. And today is that day.
Eva sleeps in her new clothes to make sure she’ll be ready for school on time, and now she’s up, pacing the house at six in the morning, no longer smirking, no longer finding humor in anything.
She’s scared. Worried sick.
I don’t know how to calm her, so I make her breakfast, a Belgian waffle topped with strawberries and a big whiz of canned whipping cream. But she eats only a third of her waffle before she puts down her fork, saying she’s going to throw up.
While I finish making her lunch, I listen to her making retching sounds in the powder bath near the kitchen. She’s gagging, but no throw-up, at least not yet. Eventually she emerges, pale, ghost eyed. “I didn’t throw up.”
“Do you feel better?”
“No.”
“Would you like some SevenUp?”
“I just want to go back to bed.”
“But you’ve been so excited about school starting.”
“But I’m not anymore. What if the teacher hates me? What if Jemma doesn’t talk to me? What if I never make friends?”
“Your teacher won’t hate you.”
Eva nearly cries. “But what if no one else ever likes me?”
She and I both know that being teacher’s pet doesn’t exactly help popularity contests. “There are four classes of fourth grade at Points Elementary. Half of those kids are girls. You’ll make friends. You’ve just got to give some of the other girls a chance.”
I’d meant to be reassuring, but from Eva’s alarmed expression I think I’ve done just the opposite. She rushes from the kitchen and flings herself in the bathroom, and I hear her retch again.
And this time she does throw up.
Twenty minutes later, I tell Eva, who is now lying on the couch staring woefully at the ceiling, that it’s time to go.
“I don’t want to do this,” she says mournfully, rolling off the sofa and onto her feet.
“I know. But it’s the law. It’s what kids have to do.”
She makes a face at me. “Is that the best you can do?”
“Well, it is the law. And be glad, otherwise you could be a child laborer, slaving away in a factory—”
“Mom. Let’s just go.”
I hide my smile. I might not be the most “normal” mom, but my methods work. After grabbing my keys and wallet, I head to the garage door, but Eva stops me with one hand.
“Are you going to school like that?” she demands, indicating my tattered jeans with the holes at the knees and one high on the right thigh.
Suddenly, Eva sounds eerily reminiscent of my mother, who is giving me yet another lecture during my “coming out” year, the year she insisted I enter society as a privileged Seattle debutante. Each of those achingly boring lectures would begin with, There comes a time in a young woman’s life when appearances matter.
I hated my mother’s lectures, but I learned she was right.
There was a time right out of college when appearances did matter and you did whatever you had to to get the job.
If you were applying for a financial position, you dressed like a banker in a navy suit with a white shirt and serious sensible dark pumps.
If you wanted a job in education, you chose something brown—tweedy skirts or slacks with another crisp white blouse and maybe a single strand of pearls or a gold chain with a pretty locket.
A job in advertising? Lose the pearls and gold chain with locket. You wore bold, clean designs in unfussy neutrals—black, white, gray—and then just for pop, a jolt of lime, orange, or cherry red.
I glance down at my supersoft faded Levi’s and then lower, at my favorite combat boots, the laces loose, the toes scuffed. I’ve worn these boots for years, and no one had a problem with them until now.
“Mom, can you just put on nice slacks or something?” Eva asks delicately, as though aware that she’s broaching a sensitive subject.
“Sure. But my boots are okay?” I ask in mock seriousness.
She frowns. “You want to create a good impression.”
Do I?
Do I really?
Um, no. Because I don’t really care about pleasing everyone else or wanting everyone’s good opinion. I don’t even know why I should want everyone’s good opinion.
And my boots are just boots. They’re not hurting anyone, are they?
But that’s not really the point, and I know it.
In my jeans and boots, with my hair in a long ponytail, I feel tough. I feel cocky, confident, brash. And feeling this way, I walk with a little more swagger in my step. To quote
Nancy Sinatra, these boots are gonna walk all over you.
And this is what keeps me from blending in at school. It’s not the boots. It’s the attitude.
I try to stick out. I like being the sore thumb.
But I change. And I swear, I wouldn’t do it for anyone else but her.
Although Eva usually takes the bus, today I drive her as promised. As we cross from the parking lot to her new classroom, she carries her book bag gingerly, holding the supplies as if they’re the most precious thing on earth instead of a school bag stuffed with plastic binders, boxes of tissues, and a dozen yellow number two pencils already sharpened.
“Are you sure about this?” Eva asks as we near her classroom door. “You don’t have to volunteer—”
“You’re making me nervous, Eva.”
“I just don’t want you to do something you’ll regret.”
“I’m not going to regret pitching in and helping out in your class. That’s what real moms do,” I say, stressing her choice of words. Real moms. I haven’t forgotten her little dig last Saturday as we sat in the truck after leaving the Youngs’ house.
I’ve always prided myself on being a good mother—a mother unlike my own mother, who was too busy, too involved, too interfering—yet now I discover that just might be the kind of mother Eva secretly wants.
“Real moms,” I say with a tight white smile, “love spending time with their kids.”
She gives me a strange side glance. “Are you watching Dr. Phil again?”
“I’ve never watched Dr. Phil.”
She makes another of her funny little hmph sounds and mutters, “Maybe you should.”
We’ve reached her classroom door, and with a huge gulp Eva smoothes her short brown skirt over her long legs and opens the door. We go in.
Feeling oddly out of place (what kind of mom goes to school on the very first day?), I walk with Eva to the back of the room, where Mrs. Shipley is receiving boxes of tissues and zipper plastic gallon-size bags.
I introduce myself briefly to Mrs. Shipley, tell her I’ve never been a room parent before but I’d love to help out, do whatever I could do, and Mrs. Shipley thanks me, asks me to leave my name and contact info, and then that’s that. I give Eva a quick kiss and go.
As I step outside, I walk straight into Jemma and Taylor Young.
“Well, hello,” Taylor says brightly, her straight golden hair brushing her shoulders. “You’re just the person I was looking for!”
“I am?” I’m not sure why I’m so uneasy around women like Taylor Young, women who always look immaculate, women with hair the color of honey who wear pearls at their throats and loafers on their feet.
Maybe it’s because they’re so put together.
Or maybe it’s because I’m afraid they’ll judge me.
“An invite to our annual back-to-school brunch,” Taylor explains, extracting a sheet of paper from her purse. “It’s thirty-five dollars and a must-do. All the moms attend—as well as a couple of the more modern stay-at-home dads. Jill makes fabulous mimosas, and we just have a ball. It’s Thursday at nine-thirty. Hope to see you there.”
It’s not until after she rushes off—she’s just spotted a mom she has to talk to—that I remember Eva’s watch.
In the studio at my desk, I study the invitation.
Brunch at the Belosis!
Champagne, great food, and great conversation.
Catch up with all your friends and hear the exciting news about what’s happening at Points Elementary this year!
I don’t know the Belosi family. But then I don’t know most of the families here, unlike our neighborhood preschool in TriBeCa. There, I knew almost everyone at least by sight, if not by name. Clearly, I’ve played the lone wolf card in Bellevue a little too long.
What the hell, I’ll go to the brunch. What’s the worst thing that could happen? I get food poisoning and die?
I reach for the phone, call the number at the bottom of the invitation—get voice mail, thank God—and RSVP that I will be coming and that I’ll pop a check in today’s mail.
Hanging up, I feel good about myself. I feel fantastic. In fact, I think I’m on my way to Mother of the Year.
Five hours later, I’m still at my desk and so immersed in my work that I’ve lost complete track of time.
At Z Design, we’re in the final stages of putting together the newest proposal for Jet City Coffee, a regional coffee company in the Pacific Northwest. Keller & Klein handled their account two years ago (which means I handled the account), but when Keller & Klein was bought out and the Seattle office closed, Jet City Coffee took their business to another Seattle ad group with disappointing results, so they’re back with me now and I want them happy.
We’re known at Z Design for our quirky designs as well as what we like to call “retro reborn,” where we take a style popular in one time period and reintroduce it with a twist, like the new series for Jet City.
The cheeky 1940s- and 1950s-inspired ads (think Ward and June Cleaver, smiling housewives with aprons, retro Maytag washers, fin-tail Cadillacs) will appear in the big Pacific Northwest newspapers—Portland, Seattle, Olympia, Boise—as well as the regional lifestyle magazines with the biggest circulations. The graphics in these ads are strong, and the colors are bold reds, blues, golds, and bronzes.
I’m still playing with one of the final mock-ups when Eva trudges into the studio, her book bag slung carelessly over her shoulder.
“Hi, Mom. Hi, Chris, Allie, Robert,” she says, greeting my team with a heavy sigh before sinking in a heap at my feet.
This isn’t the nervous but buoyant Eva I dropped off at school this morning. “What’s wrong?” I ask, pushing back from my desk and leaning over to tug on her shoe.
Eva lies back on the ground, closes her eyes. “Nothing.”
“First day didn’t go well?”
She stretches her arms over her head. “No. It’s fine. If you like—” She breaks off, shoulders rising and falling in an evocative shrug. “Being laughed at.”
“You were not,” I say.
She opens her eyes and looks at me. “I had no one to eat lunch with, so the duty made me eat with the boys, and then the girls all laughed and started saying I’m in love with one of them.”
“Are any of the boys cute?”
“No. They’re the grossest guys in fourth grade. They were doing weird things with their food and then talked with their mouths open just to make everyone sick.”
“It sounds like it worked.”
“Yeah, too well.” She slides her arms slowly across the floor, reminding me of a snow angel on a Pergo floor.
I reach for the invitation now buried on my desk. “Well, I have something to tell you.”
“What?” She rolls up, sits cross-legged.
I wave the invitation in front of her before letting it fall into her hands. “I’m going to the back-to-school brunch at the Belosis’ on Thursday.”
“You’re not!” she exclaims, doing an amazing Lindsay Lohan imitation.
“I am.”
“Do you know who the Belosis are? Only the richest family in the whole school.”
I actually think there are other families that are probably richer, but I don’t correct her.
“Devanne’s dad has his own jet,” she continues excitedly, “and when they go on vacation they use his jet, and Jemma’s gone with Devanne in the jet and says it’s so cool. There are no airport security lines and no waiting to board. You just go to this terminal near Boeing Field and get on. How cool is that?”
“That’s pretty cool.”
“I want to go on the jet. I want to go to Aspen or Vail or wherever it is they go for Christmas.”
“I thought everybody went to Hawaii for Christmas,” I tease her.
She sticks out her tongue at me, knowing exactly what I’m referring to. “Well, lots of people do, but the rest go skiing. You know, Whistler or Sun Valley. Aspen. Jackson Hole.”
In New York, Eva had no id
ea this world of wealth even existed, and now she sounds like a writer for Vanity Fair or Travel & Leisure.
“Can we do that sometime? Go with everybody to a ski resort?”
That doesn’t sound fun at all to me, but I smile, try to appear enthused. “Maybe.”
Behind Eva, Robert and Chris are trying to keep a straight face. The team has heard everything by now, and it’s one of the negatives of working from a home office. We sometimes have too little separation between the personal and professional lives.
Our office, “the studio,” is really a guesthouse I converted into a work space. It was a savage remodel to make it work where I gutted the guesthouse’s kitchen, knocked holes in all the walls, and added skylights to the ceiling, but I now have what I need: a bright, white, light-filled professional space with large windows that overlook the garden.
Eva grabs her backpack. “Well, I’m going to get started on my homework. I’ve got a lot to do. Mrs. Shipley has already assigned an essay we’re supposed to turn in tomorrow.”
She blows kisses to everyone and breezes out.
“Isn’t she the little drama queen,” Chris says, bursting into laughter as soon as Eva’s gone.
“She’s not a drama queen,” Allie defends. “She’s just a girl. If you think she’s intense now, wait until her teens.”
Like that’s not scary at all.
I take a break an hour later and find Eva working diligently at the kitchen table. She’s not writing her essay, though, she’s doing math problems.
“How’s it going?” I ask, coming behind her to drop a kiss on the top of her head.
“Okay. But I hate math. I really do.”
“You’re great at math.”
“I don’t know. Not anymore.” She hesitates. “I think this year I might need help. You know, get some tutoring.”
Tutoring? Eva?
I pull out a chair at the table and sit down. “What’s going on?”