by Jana Casale
Beth was the only mother in the group who really knew them well. She’d been in the playgroup for seven years with all four of her children. She was the one who organized things and made sure that the snack rotation was in proper order. She was a squarish woman with a triangle haircut. She never wore makeup, and the vast majority of what she wore could best be described as expensive sportswear. Leda suspected that in her younger days she was the type of woman to don miniskirts and too much eyeliner.
Beth’s son Max was a wild little boy whom Annabelle actively tried to avoid on the playground. From a very early age Annabelle seemed to take great discretion in whom she became friends with. She was liked by most of the children, but she generally only spent her time with the toddlers who were unlikely to smack her over the head with a shovel. Her best friend in the group was a little girl named Eliza, a quiet, happy two-year-old who loved to play in the sand. Annabelle and she bonded right away, which was in part due to the fact that Leda and Eliza’s mother, Celia, had become fast friends. Celia was the only other mother in the group Leda truly enjoyed the company of. It was in meeting Celia that she had regained hope in the idea that she could befriend another woman over motherhood. Celia had wide hips and long, dark hair. Her laugh was deep and rich, and she was always joking. But what stood out about her was her seemingly impenetrable ego. She never appeared to be aware when other mothers were bragging about their children or trying to make her feel bad about her own, and what was more, she was happy to admit to her many insecurities and unwilling to run from all that could be perceived as flaws.
Leda took notice of this her third week at the playgroup. She’d been stuck talking to Lindy most of the morning, a woman who didn’t believe in vaccinations and drank green liquid out of a jam jar. Leda had asked her once what it was she was always drinking.
“It’s a mix of lentils and protein,” Lindy said.
Lindy’s son was kind of a strange little boy who seemed well-intentioned enough. Leda could never remember his name so she referred to him as “sweetie” if he ever came over to her.
“Balloon,” he said once and pointed to the sky.
“Do you see a balloon, sweetie?” She looked up, but there was no balloon.
Lindy had been going on all morning about how her son could count to ten in English and Spanish. Leda listened and nodded. She doubted it was true, but simultaneously with the doubt she felt a sense of worry for Annabelle, who, at just a few months younger than whatever his name was, could not count to ten and didn’t speak Spanish of any kind. She was usually unfazed by Lindy, because her son was so strange, and so it was pretty difficult to be jealous of him, but for whatever reason this morning it was making her feel sad. She’d been up late the night before trying to get the house in order and Annabelle had been cranky since she woke up. The whole day was getting to her; she suddenly felt exhausted, like her knees would buckle as they stood there talking. What would she do if I just fell over right now? Would she give me some of her lentils?
“I just think that if you can take advantage of their brains at this young age and teach them a foreign language then you should. I think it’s doing them a disservice if you don’t.”
Leda watched her daughter toddling over to a plastic wobbly horse that was at the corner of the playground.
“There’s just so much you can do,” she heard Lindy say as Annabelle put her arms around the horse’s neck. She stood there just hugging it, too small to get on by herself. Then she turned around and Leda could see that she was smiling.
Just before eleven the mothers gathered around for snack. That morning the snack rotation fell on Sundya. Leda preferred her to Lindy usually, but today she was talking about her older daughter getting into some kind of prestigious pre-K program. All the mothers buzzed around impressed, asking all sorts of questions about flash cards. Leda half listened to the advice that Sundya doled out as she served some kind of fancy cookie she’d baked. Annabelle sat in Leda’s lap and tasted the snack thoughtfully. A few seconds later she shook her head and handed the gnawed-on cookie to her mom. Leda took a bite. It tasted like soap. She put it in a napkin and put the napkin in her purse.
After snack she avoided Lindy for the most part by joining a group of other mothers by the swings. For a few minutes they talked about the weather and the upcoming winter, but it wasn’t long before the conversation turned into a bragging contest.
“Landon just loves his music class,” said Evelyn, a woman who only ever took her son to every third playgroup, as the rest of the time he was with one of his two nannies. “He can pretty much play ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ on the recorder at this point. I keep telling Matt we just have to get him onto the piano, but you know I can’t find a piano teacher willing to teach piano to a toddler, which I think is ridiculous. I mean, am I supposed to wait until he’s a preschooler for everything? It’s absurd.”
“You could give him a toy piano. Eliza loves her little wooden one at home,” Celia said.
Evelyn gave a sort of half smile. She didn’t know how to respond to someone who had so very much missed the point of what she was saying: My son is amazing and better than your child.
Leda couldn’t help but laugh a little. She looked at Celia, who happily pushed Eliza in the swing. That’s what I need to be like, she thought.
“The only thing is then you have to listen to them pounding away all day long. My sister gave her son a drum kit for Christmas. Can you imagine that? A drum kit. We went over to her house for New Year’s, and we couldn’t hear each other talk ’cause he was banging away. I told her to burn it,” Celia said.
Evelyn was still quiet. She looked like she was about to say something but then stopped herself.
“Just stick with the recorder is all I’m saying. Wait till he’s older before you subject yourself to any real torture,” Celia said.
At the end of playgroup as the mothers began to one by one leave the park, Leda went over to Celia.
“You’re hilarious,” she said to her. “Let’s meet up sometime with the girls.”
From that day on Leda and Celia were pretty much inseparable at playgroup. They’d roll their eyes whenever one of the mothers would brag about her child and confide in each other their most desperate motherhood moments.
“Eddy wasn’t watching Eliza this morning, and she smeared poop all over the bathtub. I swear to god I wish I’d married someone else sometimes. Someone with more money,” Celia would say.
“Aw, but you love Eddy!”
“That’s what I told myself this morning as I was cleaning poop off the wall.”
Their friendship and time together gave Leda confidence in herself in a way she’d never felt before. She no longer feared the judgments of the other women as she had. She’d lost that sense of despondency. It was calm and blissfully reassuring.
That was how things were for the first year at the playgroup: Leda would wake up in the mornings and John would have breakfast with her and then he’d go to work and then she’d spend a couple of hours with Annabelle and get her ready and put on her little shoes and little coat and she’d watch each season pass by and her daughter would laugh and run and she and Celia would tell each other about their days and about their worries and in between it all was so much coffee.
In late fall of the following year, Leda sat waiting for Celia and Eliza on a bench by a big oak tree. She and Celia had started getting to playgroup an hour early just to have enough time without the other mothers around to gossip properly. It was cool out, so she wrapped a sweater around her shoulders. Annabelle was playing in the leaves. She clutched a little stack of chosen specimens in her right hand. In her left hand she held a stick. Celia texted that she’d be a few minutes late, so Leda took out The Edible Woman and read the first few pages while she waited. She no longer read as much as she used to, so she’d formed the habit of carrying books around with her in hopes to catch a fe
w minutes of reading in here and there. It was rare that she’d actually get to it, but it made her happy to carry the books with her. Every time she’d come upon them in her purse as she reached for her wallet she had a momentary sense of relief. A relief from what, she was never sure of.
“Hi, hi, hi,” Celia said, running up with two coffees. Eliza was walking alongside, holding a big red ball. “I brought coffee as an apology for my lateness.”
“Oh, please, like I care? I’m late to everything.”
“I know, but I pride myself on being better than you.” Celia sat down and handed her the coffee. “It’s pumpkin spice, which I know you hate, but I forgot when I was ordering it.”
“You cow.”
“Sorryyyyyy.” She blew on the coffee and motioned to Leda with a nod. “So, what are you reading?”
“The Edible Woman,” Leda said.
Celia shrugged. “I’m not a big reader.”
“I’m not much these days myself, honestly.”
“What’s it about?”
“Well, I’ve only just started it, but supposedly it’s about this woman who gets engaged and can’t eat and starts to feel like she’s dissolving or something.”
“That’s really weird,” Celia said.
“Well, I’m probably not explaining it right.”
Celia looked uninterested. She flicked a bit of foam off her finger.
“It’s really good,” Leda said.
Celia nodded a bit but didn’t answer.
The women sat silent for a moment. Up until now they’d only ever really talked about the kids and the other mothers. Leda felt judged and distant from Celia in a way she had not felt before. In her heart of hearts she knew that she and Celia were different people and in any other context probably would not have been friends. She knew deep down that she too was an other mother. One who believed in teaching her child another language or eating organic. She could be both but not at once. Not in this friendship and its fragile dance on the crunching leaves of fall and the smell of a pumpkin spice latte that would grow cold and be thrown away, rotting at the bottom of a park trashcan to the sounds of snack times every Wednesday. Eliza would grow up big and strong and Annabelle would too, and they would go this way and that and maybe they’d keep in touch and think of each other toddling side by side in sandboxes, but probably they would not. It was inevitable, their own lives constantly diverting from the second they were born, the sound of it silent; if they could have heard it they would have heard its speed, the churning loud engine warped in passing, like a train rolling by.
Celia didn’t come to playgroup the next week. Eliza had a cold, and so Leda ended up sitting next to Lindy most of the morning.
“Jean and Audrey didn’t ever do it like that,” Lindy said in mid-memory of a story that had been relayed to her by Beth.
Leda had heard the story before from one of the other mothers who had also heard it from Beth, or maybe from Lindy. It was tough to say.
“What were their kids’ names?” Leda asked.
“What?”
“Jean’s and Audrey’s.”
“You know…” Lindy took a thoughtful pause. “You know, I really don’t know. No one has ever told me. Isn’t that awful?”
“It is.”
And it really was.
CHAPTER 37
Vacation
Somewhere in a parenting magazine Leda had read an article about taking your toddler on vacation that included tips like “bring bright colorful chalk” and “schedule your days out, including snacks.” At the time Leda thought this article was clever and helpful and so creative. She’d gone so far as to clip it out and save it on her fridge, sticking it in place with a hopeful-looking kitten magnet. There was a time when this was the level of faith she had in the decision to take a child under five on an airplane.
The way over, things had gone well. Annabelle was thrilled by everything new so long as Leda and John made sure to put on an excited two-person play over all of it.
LEDA: Look!! Airplane!!!!! Do you see the airplane??????? We’re going on an airplane!!!
JOHN: Wow!!!!!!!!! Did you see the airplane, Annabelle???????? It’s gonna be so fun!!!!!!!!!!!!
JOHN: Look at the sidewalk moving!!!!!!!! It’s like we have superpowers!!!!!!
LEDA: Yay!!!!!! WHEEEEEEEEEEE!!!
LEDA: Do you want a bagel???????
JOHN: Bagel!!!!!!!!!!!!
By the time they’d gotten on board Annabelle was so excited that she easily sat through the three-hour flight, watching movies and eating the scheduled snacks Leda had brought along.
Just before the vacation Leda had noticed a small red blemish in the middle of her forehead.
“Do you see this?” she asked John.
“What?”
“This. This!”
“The dot? I guess so.”
“It’s awful. I can’t stop staring at it.”
“It’s nothing. I’m sure it’ll go away.”
But it didn’t go away, and every single time Leda looked in the mirror it was the first thing she saw. The day they got to their vacation rental Leda felt so thrilled up until the moment she went in the bathroom and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror; even from afar she could see the red dot staring back at her. It marked the day, as if already it was not what she meant it to be.
“Pizza?” she asked John to console herself. And they had pizza that night.
Leda picked a beach vacation, figuring that Annabelle at her young age would enjoy it the most. She’d envisioned her little family in some exotic location soaking up the sun and splashing in the waves. There would be sand and laughter and showing her daughter the limitlessness of the ocean and sky as a singular horizon.
But the very first day Annabelle threw up all over the kitchen floor.
Pizza? Leda wondered as she wiped it up. They decided to stay in for the day and watch movies. She’d cook rice and hand out saltines. Unfortunately, the TV wasn’t working and the Internet was too slow to stream anything, so they ended up playing 462 rounds of Jenga to keep Annabelle from climbing the curtains out of sheer boredom.
“Tomorrow we’re taking her to the beach even if it kills us all,” Leda said.
The next morning Annabelle was better but John was sick.
“Do you think I could handle her on my own?” she asked him. A weary vision of herself managing a toddler in crowds of tourists passed through her mind. In it she could feel the sizzling exhaustion already searing the day away.
“I’ll make myself go,” John said. “It’ll be madness on your own.”
“No, no. Rest. We’ll go get pancakes and come back and check on you. Maybe by the afternoon you’ll be up for going out.”
They walked to an IHOP that was a block away. Before children Leda had had a strong aversion to IHOPs and all chain restaurants in general, but now she considered them to be holy sanctuaries. These were restaurants that got it. There were crayons and paper place mats with mazes and puzzles to be solved. The food was so tasteless no child would turn away. And, most important of all, none of the other patrons would judge you as one of your family members climbed under the table and rolled around on the carpet. There was no more room in Leda’s life to be a snob about it. Thank you, Jesus, is all she’d think as she ate a 1,200-calorie plate of fettuccini Alfredo while coaxing a two-year-old with unlimited breadsticks.
Annabelle raced ahead of Leda as they came upon the restaurant.
“Wait for me, honey.”
“I want to push the button.”
“What button?”
“In the lelevator.”
“There’s no elevator, Anna-B, we’re going to get breakfast.”
“No, there is.”
Leda tried to rack her brain for whatever lelevator her daughter could possibly be think
ing of. “The one in the apartment building?”
“Yeah.”
“Honey, we didn’t go in the elevator, we took the stairs down.”
“But I really want to push the button.”
“You can push it on the way back.”
“No!”
“Annabelle, don’t you want pancakes?”
“No!”
Leda felt what was coming. There was a certain look in her daughter’s eye in times like these. It was an inconsolable anguish at anything and everything in the world. Leda had read a book about it once. It was called The Inconsolable Anguish. It was written by Dr. Abigail Lee, a woman with a fearless expression and a confidence about pureeing root vegetables that was rivaled by little else. In it Dr. Lee explained the importance of why it is that children tantrum.
“Without allowing your child to tantrum you are stifling your child’s ego. They need to tantrum to grow into whole individuals.” Leda had bought the book to try to understand why it was that on certain occasions her own daughter seemed to be the most draining individual in the history of the world, and now she knew that the reason for this was some vague concept explained to her in a 347-page book.
“Annabelle, we’re going to eat pancakes and then we’ll go back to the apartment and see Daddy. And then guess what?”
“What?”
Leda felt a giant sense of relief that her daughter’s response wasn’t “no.” She needed to seize this moment by acting as if she weren’t as dead inside as any other thirtysomething blue-blooded woman. “We’re going to go to the beach!!!!!”
“No!!!!” her daughter shrieked. And then she started crying uncontrollably. “I want to go push the button.”
“We’ll push the button on the way back to get Daddy. You can push it five times if you want.” Why in the hell didn’t we take that fucking elevator?
“No!! I want to push it now.”
Leda knew she had two options: threats or bribery. Normally she would have gone to the threats first. She did, after all, have a responsibility to society to raise an individual who would learn that you can’t have a meltdown if you can’t push an elevator button, but considering that they were on vacation, in a strange place, and that she too wanted some terrible pancakes, bribery was the best solution at hand.