I HAVE A FAVORITE CHILD. I HEAR YOU GASPING IN HORROR. I ACTUALLY believe every mother does, but won’t admit it. It’s the dirty little secret of motherhood. Why is it so horrible? It’s not Sophie’s Choice or anything. I’m not saying I don’t love all of my children equally, just that I don’t always like all of them, at least not every day (or week, or month, or year).
I have favorite shoes, movies, and foods; why not a favorite child? It’s not as though I won’t help you with your homework if you’re not my favorite. The task is just less insufferable for me with some of my children than with others. My children know I play favorites; they actually compete to be held in my highest esteem. We call their rank order the List.
“Don’t do that,” I say, “you’ll go to the bottom of the List.”
“If I rub your feet, will I go to the top of the List?” Truman says, willing to work for it.
“Just put me at the top,” says Peik, angling for a freebie.
“Mom, I’m paying my own way through college,” Cleo helpfully points out. “I’m working two jobs and saving my education fund to start up a business when I graduate.” There is a pause. “Where am I on the List?”
“I sure do love you,” Pierson says, applying himself to me like spray tan. “There isn’t a List, is there, it’s just me, right?”
“Lawa, Pake is twying to gib me a wedgie,” Larson says, not really understanding what’s going on, but smart enough to take his brother down a peg.
“Gaga baga dada mama ist,” Finn squeaks.
I prefer certain childhood stages to others, and by virtue of being in one of the preferred stages, a child can find itself higher on the List. I find babies cute and innocent, while teenagers seem hell bent on ruining my life; I’ll forgive a ruined dozen of eggs more quickly than a lost-for-the-fifth-time cell phone.
Some of my kids operate like me, so I understand them better. These are the ones who, less intellectually gifted, work harder to succeed. Some of my children are better suited to my husband’s personality: he totally gets them, while I stand there dumbfounded. I find nothing more frustrating than a child who is superintelligent but uses that intelligence to find ways to beat the system.
If you swear you have no favorite, and think you are fooling your kids, you’re wrong. Kids are short; they aren’t stupid. I find that, just as personalities are formed partly by birth order, they are also formed by preference order. I know a woman who thought her brother’s name was MySonPaul, she was so clearly not her mother’s favorite. Today this woman is a successful publishing executive, driven by her childhood striving to be on top. Her brother still lives at home.
Not only am I convinced that this competition is healthy, but I would also venture to say that overprotective mothering does more damage. So bring me that List, and who wants to give me a back rub?
I’ve given up hoping for another girl, and have really gotten the swing of a houseful of men. But don’t think even for a minute that I don’t wonder what would happen if we were to go bananas and throw the dice again. People say I’m crazy when I tell them I’m open to just one more. Really—six, seven, eight, what’s the difference? Peter and I are already grossly outnumbered. We have no current plans to have any more children, but if we did get Finn’s name wrong, we would just throw another kid on the pile with the rest of them and it would be as well loved, exquisitely neglected, and—we hope—entertaining as all the others.
MANIFEST DESTINY
“I can see trapping a man with one pregnancy, but five?”
LATELY, PETER IS SHOWING A DISTURBING INTEREST in card tricks. He learns them from videos on YouTube.
“Come see this, kids,” he says as he tries to get the five boys to gather around. After the first chorus of “How’d you do that?” and “Do that again!” they typically lose interest and move back to their video games, TV shows, and guitars.
“Peter,” I say to him in an indignant tone.
“What?” he replies, all innocent.
“What? What? Card tricks? What the hell are you thinking? Do you know what this means?” I almost shout. “Who does card tricks, Peter? Think! Old men! That’s who does card tricks. This officially makes you an old man!”
While I can take some solace in the fact that he learns these tricks on the Internet, a venue not normally associated with the oxygen tank crowd, the truth is that performing card tricks is second only to writing letters of complaint and carrying an AARP card as a true indicator that you have officially arrived at old age. It is not that I mind if Peter is old. I actually like being married to an older man; it makes me feel young by comparison, and it means that no matter how old I get I’ll always be a babe to him. It is true that at least his letters of complaint are usually about the inefficiency of an interface or a flaw in the calculation system of a financial website, but card tricks still cross the line.
It seems like a lifetime ago. I was living in Houston, and one of my girlfriends came to visit. Kathryn and I had worked together folding panties at Victoria’s Secret, but then her husband was transferred and they had moved to Kansas City.
“Let’s go get our fortunes told,” she said, telling me about this guy in Houston she had heard of who was reported to be the real thing. I demurred for myself—I don’t need a roadmap to navigate my life—but agreed to drive Kathryn to an address an hour across town, not such an unusual distance in the urban sprawl of Texas. We arrived at a typical-looking apartment complex with no discernible universe-shaking auras, located the proper apartment, and were shown into what could have passed for any retiree condo south of the Mason-Dixon Line. No red velvet curtains with thick gold fringe, no crystal balls, not even a single neon sign flashing promises of the future being unlocked. Nope, just beige décor and an equally beige-looking guy in his late thirties. After awkward hellos, he showed me to a beige couch while he and Kathryn retreated to a breakfast nook table graced with nothing more supernatural than a deck of tarot cards, the one and only indication that spirits were about to descend on suburbia.
Sensing a presence nearby, I found nestled next to me against a beige pillow a tiny, ancient, beige Chihuahua. She moved a little, arthritically, and waggled what looked like long, stringy moles hanging from her grayed jowls. The psychic lovingly introduced us, and I felt that though this guy was probably a fraud, he must at least be a good person to care for such an unfortunate little creature.
Kathryn’s reading began with a gathering and a shuffling of the deck. I didn’t really pay much attention to the peek into Kathryn’s future, as Hanging-Mole Dog transfixed me. I didn’t mind sharing the sofa with it, but I was definitely trying to avoid physical contact. I was interrupted from my task when the psychic cleared his throat. I looked up and saw him staring at me.
“I see you in the future in upstate New York or Connecticut with a man who has blue eyes, white hair, and a mustache,” he offered me from the cosmos. “Living in a raised ranch house.” He stopped talking. Apparently that was all the great otherworld had for me.
“Wow, okay, thanks,” I said. He then turned his attention back to Kathryn. I grew up in the South and had lived there all my life. At that moment, I certainly had no plans, immediate or otherwise, to move to the Northeast. I hadn’t even heard of a “raised” ranch house before; it’s not something they condone in architecture school, and it didn’t sound like a future home to be excited about. In fact, I had heard “raised ranch” as “razed” ranch, as in “no longer standing,” or “bulldozed,” or even worse, “demolished by an ugly-house-hating tornado.”
My father has blue eyes, white hair, and a mustache, so I assumed there was some kind of weird Electra mixed signal being sent. I was married to a man with dark hair, dark eyes, and no mustache, and he wouldn’t have been thrilled about the outside chance that any of this revelation might be true. I filed it under “Never mind” and eventually put the whole episode behind me.
Four years later, I was living in the Northeast. A new acquaintance invited me
to her house for a dinner party. These were my freewheeling newly single days—wine, roses, dinner parties, dates with lots of eligible bachelors, quiet nights at home with pizza and Cleo. Sure, I said, I’d love to. I’m always up for meeting a new roomful of people. I’m like a human party favor—throw me into a group of unknowns and I’ll have met everyone by the end of the evening. I put on my discount Donna Karan, strapped on some sexy heels, and made my way to an address down in SoHo. Outside the building I noticed a man just standing there, looking up at the parapets, looking down at the sidewalk, then pacing back and forth.
“Excuse me,” I said, eyeing him for a bit and deciding he looked the type, “are you here for the party?” He nodded. “Would you like to ride up with me?” He smiled and said yes. We chatted in the elevator; we chatted in the foyer; we chatted during drinks before dinner; we chatted until we were seated. He was easy to converse with. He was also an architect, but we didn’t discuss architecture, which was a huge relief because “What’s your favorite building in New York?” between architects is as tired as “What’s your sign?” for the rest of the trolling population. When dinner was called and we all gathered around the table, I saw his tiny place card off down the table, next to what looked to be another single woman; the company around me soon carried me away into other possibilities. I was popular in the room that night, and I lost sight of my pre-dinner friend until it was time to leave. As the other guests were saying their goodbyes to our hostess I sought him out to share a cab uptown.
The next day I was in my office when a Peter Shelton called. The name didn’t ring any bells.
“Hi, this is Peter,” he said. “We met last night. I’m doing a modified bed check.”
“A bed check?”
“Yes, I’m calling to see if you took Mr. Deep Pockets up on his offer to go to the Cowgirl Hall of Fame gala in Fort Worth.”
“Oh, please,” I huffed, as though I had never had any intention of going on this jaunt. I was a bit surprised that Peter had overheard that particular tidbit. The truth was, in my newly single dating days I was up for anything; but I had a set of architectural drawings to get out of the office, and Mr. Pockets’s private jet was leaving soon. I glanced at the clock. No dice. I was about to cut my losses and engage Mr. Shelton in some date-driven witty banter when the phone went dead. My office was being wired for a new computer system, and a guy with a tool belt poked his head in my door and said, “Oops.” I looked at the phone in my hand and mused over Peter’s choice of the term “bed check.” When I had first moved to New York and left my first husband back in Texas he would brokenheartedly call at all hours, an activity my close friends and I began referring to as “bed checks.” I placed the phone back in the cradle and looked at the clock to see if maybe I could still swing liftoff.
Three days later, my friend Julie offered to take Cleo to a movie. Free babysitting for a single mother is not an opportunity to miss. I phoned the hostess from the dinner party to get Peter’s number, and without regard for the Rules I bravely dialed it.
“Would you like to go for a drink tonight?”
“How about tomorrow? I have to work late.”
“No, it has to be tonight. What time are you done?”
“Ten?”
“Perfect.”
Julie took Cleo to the movies and Peter and I went to a bar near my apartment for martinis. I wore the dress and shoes from the night of the dinner party—it was my best outfit, and honestly, the man didn’t notice. Probably because he still wears the same clothes he wore in boarding school, nametags intact, but also because he just doesn’t get hung up on superficial details. Owing, no doubt, to the martinis, I don’t really remember much from that first date, except Peter sitting in the gutter trying to tie the tiny ankle strap of my high-heeled shoe.
Then, breaking every other rule in the dating book, he ignored both my drunkenness and my high-maintenance footwear and called the very next morning to invite me for the weekend to his house upstate. With my child. Who does that? Let’s see, I thought. Fifty years old, never married, no children. Two possible explanations: severe commitment phobia or gay. What did I have to lose? I certainly wasn’t ready for a second husband, and really, what single mom doesn’t need all the gay help she can get?
I drove. There were two things I had kept from my marriage: my daughter and my Porsche 911 (a girl’s got to have a sexy getaway car). I was going broke paying for a garage in New York City, so this was my big chance to show off the Porsche. The weekend found us speeding up the Palisades Parkway, headed to Peter’s house in Cold Spring, New York.
“So what kind of a house is it?” I asked, curious about what style a fellow architect might have chosen.
“Nothing fancy.” He sounded slightly embarrassed. “Just a raised ranch.”
I immediately turned the wheel to the side of the road and threw on the brakes. I got out of the car, walked around to Peter, leaned down, and looked in at him. Blue eyes. Mustache. White hair. I looked up at the side of the road and saw the “Welcome to New York” sign. Peter and Cleo both just stared at me. Raised. Flicking. Ranch. The entire beige-infused psychic episode came flooding back to me with amazing clarity.
“You are my destiny,” I told him. I didn’t stop to think about how a fifty-year-old bachelor would take such a revelation. It just popped out. Peter continued to sit there. He didn’t get out of my car and run away down the Palisades. I returned to my side of the car and drove off (into the sunset). We have never looked back.
PETER’S MOTHER TOLD ME THAT HE WAS GAY. I GUESS THAT’S WHAT A mother tells herself after watching fifty years of her son’s failed relationships. Or she could have seen the destiny on the wall and was looking to scare me off. The reason might have been the location of our first Big Date: Africa, a marked upgrade from Peter’s usual helicopter ride over Manhattan. Or perhaps what troubled her was the fact that we didn’t bother to get married before we had Peik. Anyway, something about me threw her, and all the other people in Peter’s life, way off. They came just short of telling me I “trapped” him by getting pregnant. After all, a determined bachelor who had slunk away from three engagements—once, after the invitations had gone out—must have been tricked by a pretty determined hussy. I can see trapping a man with one pregnancy, but five? The man is obviously a willing participant. Even so, one of Peter’s past loves still describes him as the love of her life. Others continue to call and write or stop by his office to catch up with him. I get the feeling they all see him as the one that got away, and I’m pretty sure they’re on to something.
That being said, picture this: you’re walking down the halls of an ivy-covered institution of higher learning, or perhaps the robotics-parts aisle at the local Radio Shack. You see a man of average build, with shocking Einsteinian white hair and round tortoiseshell spectacles, from behind which peer magnified round blue eyes. There is a brushy mustache and a toothy grin. The man is dressed in vintage nutty-professor wear: tweed jacket, detached suede elbow patches, wrinkled chinos cuffed over Converse Jack Purcell sneakers. A carefully constructed, haphazard disheveled state. This man is the mad scientist right out of central casting. Now tell me, does your mind jump to “God, what a catch!”? Or do you think, “What the hell is the six-foot redhead in the sexy dress doing with him?” Well, in either case, it was—and is—love. Peter once told me that he had been waiting his entire life for me to come along. As the beige spirits predicted, I had no choice in the matter—he is my destiny.
THEN AGAIN, MRS. SHELTON MIGHT HAVE HAD A POINT. ONE DAY I was paging through the arts section of the newspaper and spotted a sure loser.
“Oh, look,” I told Peter, “another all-star-cast movie. Those never work. Something called The Women.”
“The Women?” he asked, looking up at me through his glasses. “That’s not new. It’s a remake of the 1939 classic starring Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Norma Shearer, and Joan Fontaine.”
“How do you know that?” I asked, stunned by
his offhanded remark, and not a little scared by the list of women—gay icons, each in her own way.
“How do you not?” he said, a small amount of disdain in his voice. I reflected on how his mother once told me he was “light on his feet.”
“He’s one of the boys, you know,” she imparted. “One of the boys.”
Well, thank God he’s also a pyromaniac, because his utter love of all things incendiary marks him as completely not gay. Whenever we travel through states where fireworks are legal, he stops at the roadside stands and stocks up. He keeps a stash in the basement of our country house and brings a few out on special occasions. On Truman’s birthday, a rocket Peter had lit took off flying on the horizontal, aimed squarely at Peter. He caught the noise over his shoulder and immediately started running through the field. In his defense, the rocket did look as though it were heat seeking. We all watched from the house, laughing hysterically as he ran like a girl to avoid the explosion of color. He later claimed that he was going for the laugh, but he wasn’t very convincing, sweating and huffing as though he’d just run a marathon of fear. Okay, maybe not completely not gay.
I have found a way to use some of Peter’s, let us say, more feminine traits to my advantage. He is always willing to help me with the design of a dress, and he is never leery of carrying my purse at a party, he is so secure in his manhood, or lack thereof. I think he secretly likes the sparkle of the tiny Judith Leiber clutch against his old Rat Pack black tuxedo. Even more amazing, though, is his complete lack of hesitation when I send him out for tampons or yeast infection cures.
Didn’t I Feed You Yesterday? Page 3