Domestic Affairs

by Joyce Maynard

  It’s not that hard, from the calm distance of September or early October, to know which route is the right one to choose. (Trying to match some calendar or magazine’s images of what a Christmas tree, or a Christmas, is supposed to look like. Or inventing one’s own.) Beauty comes from within, I teach my children. “Tis a Gift to Be Simple,” we sing every night, for our grace. And then they start piping all those songs into the supermarket (“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire, Jack Frost nipping at your nose …”), and before you know it, I’m heading for the aisle where the chestnuts are and longingly eyeing a perfectly symmetrical twenty-five-dollar blue spruce as I pull out of the parking lot.

  I had been trying to get out and do some Christmas shopping for weeks, and every time it looked as if I’d found the time for the sixty-mile round trip to the nearest city, something went wrong. I thought I had things set up last Sunday, but ten miles from home our car broke down (clutch problems, $250 plus towing). So home I went, empty-handed again.

  Because it’s so hard for me to get to stores, I delegate a lot of my shopping to friends or to our babysitter, Joanie. I read the sale circulars every week, circling the things I’d get if I could ever make it to those stores. Sometimes I’ll hear that my friend Laurie or Sheri or Randy is heading to the city, and I’ll ask her, could she pick up those sale pantyhose, or the Barbie Bubbling Spa, or mittens for Charlie. I trace my children’s feet and send off the outline, with a request for winter boots or jelly shoes. About half the time something goes wrong: The shoes are fluorescent green, the boots don’t have felt liners. My panty hose are baggy, or too short. My beach towel says “Surfs Up,” Charlie’s mittens are pink, with pictures of Rainbow Brite on them. Still, we’re all used to this around here. My family seldom complains. Only, lately I’ve been feeling as if my inability to shop for my family is some kind of indication that I’ve lost control of my life. A couple of weeks ago I even had to ask a friend to pick up a bra for me. Not surprisingly, it didn’t fit.

  So this month, when one of the biggest discount stores announced it would be open round the clock through Christmas Eve, I figured I’d found my answer. I’d get the children to bed, pack the lunches for the next day, put away the laundry, make myself a strong cup of coffee and head out to go shopping. I could even stop at the all-night supermarket in the same city and pick up the sort of fruits and vegetables I can never find at my local grocer’s. Persimmons. Leeks. Fresh bagels. A bunch of carnations, maybe.

  It was midday when I hatched my plan, and the sun was shining. At eleven-thirty, when I had finally got myself ready to go, it was harder to get moving: There was a fire in the fireplace. Our children were murmuring softly in their sleep. Steve was just brushing his teeth, getting ready for bed. And the night outside was bitter cold, the wind howling. I made myself a second cup of coffee, then grimly headed out into the night, with a shopping list in my pocket and a bag full of items to return, bought the last time I asked someone to do my shopping for me.

  Ten minutes later, the car had begun to warm up. I turned on the radio, but all I got was static, so I drove in silence, slapping my cheeks to stay awake. I studied my shopping list as if it were a battle plan: Masters of the Universe figures or Sectaurs? Construx or Legos? Walkie-talkies or the Fisher-Price sing-along radio with microphone?

  In good weather it takes about half an hour to get from our house to the city where I was headed. That night, of course, the roads were nearly deserted, except for truckers, night-shift workers, and maybe (I liked to imagine) some hopeful young couple just heading off to the hospital to have a baby. So I made good time, exited onto Main Street just before midnight. Drove past the big plaster nativity grouping, an all-night convenience store, a bank (temperature reading, eighteen degrees). Not a whole lot of night life in this city.

  Then I reached the discount store, with maybe fifteen cars parked outside and the lights blazing. I got myself a shopping cart and skimmed my list again.

  If I came to this store at this time of year on a Saturday afternoon there would be shoppers everywhere; the merry jingle of cash registers, and carols piped in over the loudspeakers. There might be a Santa Claus outside ringing a pair of handbells, and announcements for shoppers to hurry over to this department or that one for a special lasting fifteen minutes only. Traffic would be so thick I’d have to keep both hands on my shopping cart to steer. I’d hear children’s voices, asking for candy, asking for GoBots, Cabbage Patch Kids, My Little Ponys. My own children would be with me, hopping in and out of the cart, wanting me to come look at some treasure they’d just spotted.

  In the middle of the night, it’s different. There’s no music. No voice announcing, “Shoppers, hurry over to the small appliance department.” No Santa. No children leaning out of carts, grabbing for toys. Only one register open, and the cashier at that one just standing there, reading Soap Opera Digest.

  I had been having trouble keeping my eyes open as I drove to the store, but once I started shopping I wasn’t tired anymore. For the first time in years, I was alone in a department store, with no child in my shopping cart. I went up and down every aisle.

  What I bought: toys, of course. I spent ten minutes studying the various superpowers of an array of Masters of the Universe figures, trying to decide between Spikor, with telescopic arm, and Stinkor, with gas mask. I stood in front of the Barbies for a good quarter of an hour, comparing the evening-gown selections as if I were shopping for myself for a dinner at the White House. This could be my last Christmas of doll-related purchases. The choices were hard.

  Money was an issue, of course, but I had a charge plate in my wallet, and the dangerous, illusory sense of limitlessness that comes with it. What really held me back (as I looked at the motorized, child-sized three-wheeler, knowing how Charlie would love tooling around on that thing, and the Cabbage Patch Twins, and the thirty-five-dollar Voltron figure, and the hundred-dollar GI Joe aircraft carrier) was a different sort of restriction: the internal kind. Like most mothers, I want to give my children everything. But I also know that part of what I need to give them is the understanding that Christmas is something more than a toy festival. Not having enough money to buy everything is only one reason not to buy everything.

  I reached the checkout counter (no line) a little before three A.M., stocked up with not only Christmas purchases but also shampoo, paperclips, a garlic press, pantyhose in my size. Handing over my charge card, I asked the saleswoman if it was always this quiet during the nighttime shopping hours. “Things usually pick up around five A.M.,” she said.

  On my way home I stopped for groceries and then for gas at a self-service pump manned by a young boy in a glass booth. I was wide awake by now, could’ve kept on going, even, if there’d been any other stores open. Driving home I sang Christmas carols and watched the moon—so large in the sky, and low to the horizon, that at first I thought it was a UFO. Passing through the streets of our town I saw the lights on in one or two houses (hard to tell if those people were getting up or just going to bed). It was four o’clock in the morning.

  I pulled into our driveway. I carried in my bags quietly, so I wouldn’t wake anyone, and put my groceries away. I put on my nightgown, crawled into bed beside my husband. “Mission accomplished?” he asked. “We’re all set now until the birthday season starts,” I answered, starting to reel off a list of my purchases. But he was fast asleep again before I was halfway through.

  All three of our children have had good and simple births. All three were born at home, on our bed, within a few hours of the first labor pains.

  But something happens to me between the births and the birthday parties. It seems that all the worry I don’t put into the original event gets spent on every subsequent celebration of the date. For the whole month before, I am thinking about the presents, the games, the cake. I debate the designs on ten different plates at three different party stores. I try (unsuccessfully) to engage Steve in debates over Fisher-Price versus Tonka. The morning of the party, i
f the sky looks overcast, I picture a blizzard and no one showing up.

  For seven years now I have been trying to put together the perfect birthday party—where everybody wins a prize and gets the color of balloon they wanted, and no one cries, and when it’s over the birthday child is gracious, thoughtful, and happy, instead of overwhelmed, overtired, overwrought. For seven years now, the perfect birthday party has eluded us. And still, every year, I knock myself out again.

  It was Audrey’s seventh birthday and of course I wanted it to be perfect. Weeks before, I had reserved the swimming pool at the Y for an hour, and rented a VCR and two movies for afterward. I hunted in half a dozen stores for a certain kind of bracelet Audrey loved, that I figured the other girls would appreciate too, for favors. We studied a dozen styles of invitations before arriving at the design we liked best (a jazzy-looking sneaker, sealed with a bow-shaped sticker, that opened to reveal party details). We bought an ice cream cake, with Audrey’s name in purple, edged in roses. We hung streamers, and I stayed up late, writing the clues to a treasure hunt and then planting the treasures: miniature Cabbage Patch Kid figurines, all different. I had driven fifty miles to find a store that carried them.

  The morning of the party, one mother (of twin guests) called to say her girls were sick and couldn’t make it. I managed to say something about hoping they’d feel better soon, but I got off the phone with my stomach in knots. I presented the facts to Audrey with attempted casualness. “Megan and Erica can’t make it, Aud,” I said. “We’ll have them over another time soon.”

  She looked sad, a little troubled maybe, but not devastated certainly, or even (as I was) worried. The girls’ absence would bring the guest list down to four.

  I mentioned to Audrey the names of a couple of friends from last year’s school, whose mothers I could call to see if they were free, but Audrey shook her head. “No, thanks,” said my daughter (who proved herself, once again, to be a good deal more rational than I). Then she went back to playing with her new birthday present from us—an elaborately outfitted model of the Love Boat, with dolls, swimming pool, and shuffleboard.

  The guests arrived, with much giggling and many purple accessories. They all brought purses, and carried them throughout the treasure hunt. Then they made their way into our living room to watch Audrey open her gifts.

  The one she saved until the last was from Charlie. She could tell it was a Barbie doll, she said, from the shape of the box. Not just any Barbie, as it turned out: This was a Crystal Barbie, in an iridescent gown, with diamond earrings and a ruffled stole. But the thing she loved best were the shoes: see-through, and slightly iridescent, dainty as Cinderella’s glass slippers.

  “Why don’t you wait till later to study them?” I suggested as she slipped them off the doll’s feet. “Yup,” her friend Kate concurred sadly. “I have a Crystal Barbie too, only I lost the shoes and now she doesn’t seem special.”

  After we’d all had cake, we headed out to the Y and then home again for pizza and a double feature of Splash and Charlotte’s Web. Got everybody into sleeping bags around ten-thirty listened to the giggles die down. Woke a little after midnight, to find Audrey’s friend Tammy—a girl who had seemed fearless, only hours before, on the diving board—trembling beside our bed, wanting to know if she could get into bed beside me.

  The next morning I made blueberry pancakes. The girls played for a couple of hours before I drove them home, with balloons and streamers blowing out the car windows and everyone calling out, “Hip, hip, hooray for Audrey!” Sitting in the back seat, and with a bow off a package stuck on top of her head, she was a little quiet (she had been waiting for this birthday, as she put it, a whole year, and now it was over), but I knew she’d had a happy time.

  And then, home once more, with the house finally tidy again and quiet, I noticed my new seven-year-old on her stomach, peering under chairs in the living room and reaching under sofa cushions with attempted casualness.

  “You lost something, didn’t you?” I said.

  She nodded miserably. “One of Crystal Barbie’s shoes.”

  I didn’t have to say I told her so. I pushed back all the furniture and took every pillow off the couch. I lifted the rug, and I emptied the wastebasket full of wrapping paper. Something had taken possession of me—I was irritated, upset, even a little frantic at the mess I was making in the room I’d just finished cleaning a half hour before, but I couldn’t stop looking for that shoe.

  “It’s okay, Mom,” Audrey said finally—more upset by this time, I think, by the vision of me going crazy than she had been by the lost shoe. I would be embarrassed to say how many wastebaskets I went through before I finally gave up.

  It was a few hours later that the memory came to me of something eerily similar that my own mother had done, one spring twenty years before. I had just got a new Skipper doll—to cheer me up, because my father had been in the hospital. I’d taken the doll outside and lost her shoe. My mother had spent an hour on her hands and knees, helping me search for that shoe in the thick grass. My mother—who, I always believed, could do anything—found it.

  I always tell that story with affection, but I have always made fun of my mother a little for that too. What a lot of fuss to make over something so small, I have thought to myself.

  Only the fuss was about something besides a doll’s shoe, of course. It was about loss and pain. Small pain, minor loss, in the scale of things. The kind of pain a mother can still control, can still prevent, maybe. Knowing, all the while, how many other sorrows there will be that she can’t do anything about: Little girls who don’t come to her party. Children on the playground who make fun of her overalls. Boys who ask someone else to the dance instead. Colleges she won’t get into. A lover who leaves.

  The next day we went for a walk. It was a sunny, spring-like day. Maple sap was dripping into our buckets. Up ahead Charlie splashed happily in a muddy puddle. Willy, in the backpack, grabbed for branches overhead.

  “You know what I wished for when I blew out the candles?” Audrey asked me. (She could tell me, because she hadn’t got them all out in one breath anyway and knew that meant her wish wouldn’t come true.) “I wished I’d never have to die, and you wouldn’t either, and neither would Dad and the boys.”

  As I said, I wanted that birthday to be perfect, and I wanted to shield my child from loss and pain. And I actually thought that if I could only find that Barbie shoe, I could do it.

  Charlie’s birthday comes a month and two days after Audrey’s. And because hers has always required such elaborate preparation, his tends to catch us short. Of cash, and of energy. The year Charlie turned two there was also the birth of Willy—two days after Audrey’s birthday. Followed two days later by the broken arm Audrey sustained on the Smurfette roller skates she got for her birthday, and two weeks after that by the broken arm Steve sustained at the end of an afternoon of skiing that was designed as a celebration of our having apparently survived the other calamities. (An excursion he made, incidentally, out of a desire to escape our house, and my high anxiety, on the eve of Audrey’s postponed party for twenty-two of her classmates.)

  So on March 24, the second anniversary of Charlie’s amazing birth, all I could do was whisper the news to Audrey and tell her to keep it from her brother. Charlie had been primed for the event by Audrey’s two cakes and innumerable presents, and would (I thought) expect more hoopla than either Steve in his full-arm cast or I, nursing newborn Willy, felt able to orchestrate just then. We postponed his party until things got more normal.

  Time passed, and I stopped knowing anymore what normal was supposed to be. Willy proved (by necessity) to be what’s known as a good baby. Dinners at our house, that spring, featured hot dogs with ever greater frequency. The aquarium started smelling pretty strongly of fish, and the plastic scuba diver had tipped over and was now buried, up to his goggles, in blue gravel, but no one had time to do anything about it. Steve found a mouse nest (but no socks) in his sock drawer. And Charlie too
k to asking every few days, “Where’d Charby’s birthday go?”

  It was April by this time—and the longer I’d put off the birthday, the greater my anxiety and the more elaborate, it seemed, the party had to be. I made lists of things to buy, while Charlie checked the closet from which his sister’s presents had emerged back in February, asking “Birthday cake now? Candles for Charby?”

  Then one afternoon Audrey came home from school and instead of turning on Love Boat or going upstairs to play, she asked if she could bake. I was nursing Willy and trying, at the same time, to do a puzzle with Charlie. With his good arm, Steve was working on the car, which had been running erratically again. When I told her I couldn’t bake with her, she asked if I could just put out some ingredients and she’d do the whole thing herself. And though the house was a terrible mess, and I was pretty frayed (but maybe because of those things too) I said okay.

  I gave her a couple of eggs, a little pitcher with some milk in it, a few nuts, a few sesame seeds, some cocoa powder, and lifted canisters off the high shelf. I suggested an oven temperature of 350 degrees, but beyond that I left everything to Audrey, who did a lot of rushing back and forth to the mixer, mashing in a banana, tossing in a spoonful of mayonnaise. She cracked the eggs herself and chose a pan shaped like a star, which she greased, and into which she poured her batter. She cleaned up most of her mess. I turned on the oven light so she could look in and watch her cake as it baked. I told her not to expect too much. A cake is a pretty delicate thing, I said. She wasn’t worried.