Something New (9781101612262)

by Thomas, Janis

  “Thanks, Mommy!”

  I merely smile and say, “You’re welcome.” I do not want to make too much of this, but I’m pretty sure that Jessie stopped calling me Mommy when she was four. My heart is like the Grinch’s; I can feel it swelling inside my chest.

  I ride this high through the day. It energizes me on the treadmill, keeps my mood simpatico at Target when a woman whose basket is even more loaded than mine cuts in front of me at checkout, propels me through a painfully boring PTA meeting in which I actually volunteer to co-chair the End of the Year Festival. (What the hell was I thinking?)

  By the time the after-school merry-go-round of activities begins, I am still in a good mood, no doubt because of the boost I got when both Jessie and Matthew gave me impromptu hugs right there on the school grounds in front of countless peers, teachers, and moms whose tight smiles betrayed their envy. According to the Ivers rotation, today I am Jessie’s spectator at ballet. I drop Connor at baseball, then head for the soccer field where I leave Matthew to Rita Halpern’s care. (I can’t help but glance around for Ben and Liam, but they have not arrived yet.) Jessie and I are thirty seconds ahead of schedule as we arrive at the Garden Hills Conservatoire du Ballet de Paris é Moscow de Vandermeer. (I swear that is the name.)

  Madame Valenchenko stands at the door to the studio like an officer of the gulag, her unibrow furrowed and her deeply set, heavily lidded eyes sizing up each girl who walks through the door. The Madame is four foot ten, is as stout as a barrel, and uses a cane, but if you put her in the ring with Mike Tyson, my money would have to be on the ballet coach. Her stern look alone has reduced grown men to tears.

  “I am glat zat you are on time today!” she barks as we push through the glass door. I jerk in surprise, as I always do, at the sound of her voice. She sounds like she has spent the last forty years chain-smoking while chewing on glass. “Qvickly, Jess, to ze barre, to ze barre! Now!” She smacks her cane against the concrete for emphasis and I practically shove Jessie into the studio.

  I spend the next forty minutes splitting my focus between my daughter, in her pink leotard and tights and her shoulder-length hair shellacked to her head because her dictator of an instructor won’t allow any student into class with flyaways, and my notepad, where I am making a list of all of the tasks I need to accomplish during spring break, when I will have six days of blissful alone time. Jonah is taking the kids to his parents’ house in Arizona so they can bond with their crazy Grandma and Grandpa Ivers.

  As Jessie does her barre exercises, I think about the yearly crusade to my in-laws that I used to make with my family, how I endured the six-hour drive of “Are we there yet?” and “I have to pee!” and “I think I’m going to puke” and “Why can’t we stop and watch them castrate a bull?” We didn’t have the portable DVD player then, the one that straps to the back of the front seat and puts any and every juvenile passenger in the rear of the car into an LCD trance. We had Travel Bingo and Travel Checkers and Travel Backgammon that caused me to vacuum up magnetic playing pieces for months afterward. We had freeway games like the Alphabet Game where you end up stuck on the letters Q and X because license plates weren’t allowed. We had songs, like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall” and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” that were sung so many times I wanted to go into a coma just to escape.

  When at last we arrived at Bill and Margaret Ivers’s home in the middle of a gigantic wasteland of clay, scrub, and cactus, we’d be ushered into the parlor where the lambasting from my father-in-law would begin.

  “What a skinny little string bean you are, Matt-Matt. Doesn’t your mom feed you?”

  “Hell, Jessie-Bessie, why’d you cut off your hair, you look like a boy!”

  “Connor-my-man, you’ll never get yourself a girlfriend if you wear holey pants. Can’t your mom sew on some patches?” (We already know that I could not.)

  “Helen,” he would always call me, though I am certain he knows my name and just does it to piss me off. “I see the old bottom is getting a little wider, huh? Too many bonbons during General Hospital?”

  With every jibe Bill made, my mother-in-law would merely giggle and say, “William! You’re terrible!”

  Now, as I watch Jessie do pirouettes across the floor, I am struck by how much she has improved over the last year. She looks over at me when she reaches the other side of the room and I give her a thumbs-up, then safely glance down at my notepad and make an addition to my list. I write it at the top, underline it, and star it because I have to get it done before Jonah and the kids leave: Get honey for Margaret.

  My mother-in-law is partial to a rose-infused honey that’s sold at the local farmer’s market in downtown Garden Hills every Friday. Margaret says she uses it for her pound cake, which, I admit, is delicious, but I know for a fact she uses it for other purposes that I am not at liberty to share, except to say that the last time I went to Arizona, rose-infused honey in tow, I happened into the kitchen one late night when I couldn’t sleep and witnessed my father-in-law dipping his finger into the jar and dripping some of the golden goo on my mother-in-law’s left clavicle. Ewww! Luckily I was able to backtrack undetected, but I have never been able to present Margaret with her prized honey without shuddering. Thank God Jonah now has that task.

  I should be honest and say that my in-laws are good people. They are. Good people. Jonah and his two brothers are all responsible, nice men. They make decent livings and none of them has ever spent the night in jail. So William and Margaret have obviously done something right. But William cannot utter a sentence that isn’t laden with derision. He thinks that because he accompanies every insult with a wink everyone will know he is just kidding, a jokester extraordinaire. But I don’t find anything he says funny. And Margaret comes across as sweet and grandmotherly; she never forgets a birthday or anniversary or any other special occasion, and she is always the first to put our Christmas presents in the mail. But you have to wonder whether she has all her faculties, or whether she is addicted to Lithium, since she truly thinks that William the Terrible walks on water. And when I am with the two of them I always feel like I am under the microscope, and that whatever microorganisms they see on the Ellen slide either are foreign to them or need to be handled with a hazmat suit.

  Three years ago, I was excused from the family vaycay because my mom was undergoing surgery and needed me to care for her during her recovery. So what if it was just a face-lift and not some lifesaving operation? And who cares that I begged her to push it up a few months so that it would coincide with the Arizona trip? Forget about the phone conversation during which my sister offered to play nursemaid and I told her to back the hell off. It all worked out for the best as far as I was concerned. For even though I had to unclog Mom’s drainage tubes more than a few times, and unpack and repack her bloody gauze, and despite the fact that I had to watch my beloved mother transform into the Creature from the Black Lagoon because of the cataclysmic bruising and swelling that accompany such a procedure, and which her plastic surgeon assured me was perfectly normal, not to have to spend six days with ball-busting Bill was heaven.

  The following year, when Jonah broached the subject of spring break, I hesitated only a millisecond before I told him that I didn’t want to make the trip. I expected anger and indignation, but what I got was close to relief. Apparently, the tension between his folks and me always stresses him out, and after six days of playing the peacemaker and diplomat, he would return from his vacation in need of a vacation.

  I look up from my notepad and see that Jessie’s ballet class has concluded. My list has seven mundane items beneath the honey thing, like going through the kids’ closets and reorganizing the garage. No prizewinning entries like take helicopter lessons or jump out of a plane or track down Hugh Jackman on his movie set, but at least they are things I have a reasonable chance of accomplishing. That is, if I don’t get lazy or distracted or spend too much time with Jill or decide that it is more importa
nt to clear my TiVo…

  Jessie is huddled with a small group of her friends in the corner of the studio near the piano, all of them looking almost as Asian as the Lee twins, with their tight buns on the tops of their heads. One of the girls, Suzette, says something that makes the others giggle. Madame Valenchenko waddles over to them, her cane making a rhythmic racket as she thwacks it against the hardwood floor, scowling as though her students’ gaiety is deeply offensive to her. Jessie is now talking animatedly, using her arms like an Italian mama to get her point across. Her friends listen, rapt, until their burly instructor smacks her cane across the piano bench, causing all of the girls to flinch. The group quickly disperses, each girl heading for her respective parent. Madame Valenchenko says something to Jessie that I cannot make out from where I sit and Jessie nods her head. Then the two, an odd couple if ever I saw one, approach me side by side.

  “I have overheered zat Jess vud become vegan, da?”

  “Yes,” I say, pasting a supportive smile on my face. I am expecting the coach to give us a lecture on how important protein is for muscles and that Jessie ought to rethink her choice. Instead, she totally blindsides both my daughter and me.

  “Zis is very gud,” she says. “Perhaps now she vil get reed of zat horrible gut and not break ze floor wiz her tremendous girth.”

  My jaw drops to my chest and I have that instant mama-bear rage that makes me want to grab her cane and shove it up her butt.

  Jessie puts her hand in mine and looks up at me with glistening eyes. “Can we go now, Mom?” she asks in a small voice I don’t recognize.

  I give her fingers a squeeze and smile down at her, then flash an if-looks-could-kill glare at Valenchenko. I hold that old Russian bitch’s beady eyes for a good ten seconds, then stalk out of the studio, my crushed eight-year-old daughter in tow.

  Tonight, Jonah brings home Chinese food. Jessie has been locked in her room since we got home, and when she finally emerges and takes her place at the dining room table, she conspicuously pushes aside the tofu with mixed vegetables, grabs the kung pao beef, and proceeds to empty the entire carton onto her plate. Jonah, to whom I am still not speaking except when necessary, glances at me questioningly. Matthew and Connor also exchange quick looks of surprise. Wordlessly, we all watch my daughter as she shovels the formerly offending animal flesh into her mouth until her plate is clean.

  As long as she doesn’t go upstairs after dinner and stick her finger down her throat, I’m okay with it.

  Seventh Post: March 22, 2012

  SomethingNewAt42

  PEOPLE ARE MEAN

  I was going to title this por weird or a geek. And although we grow and mature and learn to put a filter on our thoughts and manage to be civil to each other most of the time, the underlying fact is that we are mean on the inside, where it counts. We see a homeless guy on the street and we might say, “God bless you,” but on the inside, we’re thinking, Damn, you stink! Go take a freaking shower. One of our peers shows up to a dinner party wearing a particularly unflattering ensemble and we say, “You look fabulous! Where did you get that skirt?” but what we’re thinking is, God, you look like a whale! Didn’t you look in the mirror before you left the house? By some strange accident of evolution, we actually feel better about ourselves when we are putting other people down. How messed up is that?

  And just as often, we do give voice to the inner meanie. Words are weapons, but few people are trained enough to wield them safely. It takes diplomacy and tact, and who has time for that? In moments of stress or panic, we hurl words at our enemies. When our inhibitions are lowered (in other words, when we are drunk as skunks or high off our asses), we fling words about without the least bit of concern over the effect they may have. Our mouths open, our tongues twitch, and out they fly. “You’re a piece of shit!” “Your meat loaf tastes like cow dung!” “You couldn’t get it up with a forklift.” “What kind of a moron flunks home ec?” And on and on.

  The fact is, being mean is not our fault. It’s a part of us, encoded in our DNA all the way back to caveman times where a couple of grunts equaled “Fuck you” and some guttural snorts meant “Damn, you’re ugly.” And going against our nature can be counterintuitive. Today I was proud of myself for showing remarkable restraint when I didn’t allow myself to scream at Madame Wankersky that she was nothing more than an over-the-hill former mediocre ballerina nobody commie with a bad dye job who looks like a bloated beach ball with legs. At the same time, I understand the therapeutic benefits of letting it all out. The whole ride home from the studio, I white-knuckled the steering wheel, nearly got into two accidents, flipped the bird to an unsuspecting octogenarian driver, laid into the postman for not sorting our mail properly, and screamed at the dog to take a fucking leak before I sent her to the pound. (She is still hiding under my daughter’s bed as I write this post.) So, if I had just gone with my human instincts and berated the person who deserved it, I would not have put my children’s lives in jeopardy or alienated our mailman or given my poor dog the mother of all anxiety attacks.

  Now, I know we should try to rise above our genetics and be good to each other. We should adhere to the old adage If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. But then again, whoever said that was probably just a stupid bitch anyway.

  • Thirteen •

  TGIF. Yeah, right. Today is the capper on my week. In the end, it turned out to be pretty great, but I’ll get to that later. First things first. The major downer. The end of my innocence. The disillusionment of a mother about her twelve-year-old son. Cue tragic music and grab a hankie.

  “Mrs. Ivers?” comes the nasal voice through the phone line. “Ms. Rodriguez requests that you come to the school as soon as possible.”

  My heart skips a beat but I manage to keep my words even. “Is Connor all right?”

  “In terms of his physical well-being, your son is fine.”

  “Then what is this about?” I demand. This is Connor we’re talking about. Straight-A student, terrific athlete, popular with peers and faculty, tells his mom he loves her, all-around great guy.

  “I am not at liberty to say,” the voice drones.

  I resist the urge to ask if my son needs a lawyer and merely tell the woman I will be there shortly. On the drive to James Meriwether Middle School, I briefly consider calling Jonah but decide against it. I don’t want to bring our current marital discord into the principal’s office, where it will only pull focus from the matter at hand. Whatever that matter may be. For the life of me, I cannot imagine what Connor has done to warrant a visit from his mother. Maybe someone made a mistake. That must be it. Someone got the wrong kid. It happens all the time, right? By the time I pull into the parking lot, I am all but convinced that Connor is innocent.

  Until I see his face. Guilty guilty guilty, it says when he looks up at me as I enter the office. He is seated in a blue plastic chair outside Ms. Rodriguez’s office, his hands folded in his lap. His face is covered with splotchy scarlet angst, his eyes pleading.

  “Sorry, Mom,” he says immediately.

  Mrs. Frawley, a gray-haired biddy with the mandatory pencil stuck behind her ear, stands on the other side of the counter giving me a harsh look. “Mrs. Ivers.”

  “Mrs. Frawley,” I return, trying for pleasant but falling short of the mark. The sight of Connor has suddenly sideswiped me and I feel tension shoot up my spine.

  “Ms. Rodriguez is waiting for you,” she says solemnly. Jesus, what the hell did he do?

  “I’d like to talk to my son for a minute,” I tell her, but she briskly shakes her head.

  “You’ll have plenty of time for that later, since Mr. Ivers will not be returning to school today.”

  “What?” I am instantly indignant. But my anger is cut off by the appearance of Herr Rodriguez, as the kids call her. She opens her door and stands in the doorway, narrowing her eyes first on Connor and then on me. She is tall, probably six feet, with striking Latina features that she does her best to disg
uise. Her hair is bleached blond and perfectly coiffed, and her skin is like coffee with a hefty serving of half-and-half. Her eyes are the perfect shade of sky blue, clearly fake, as are her breasts. She wears a tailored black suit over a charcoal blouse and a pair of black, sensibly heeled pumps. I peg her for midthirties, but she may well be my age, just surgically enhanced.

  “Thank you for coming, Mrs. Ivers.” Her voice is steel, her gaze cold and piercing, and I have no trouble understanding why her students are scared shitless of her. This is the first time I’ve had to deal with her on this level, and I can feel my underarms dampen as I withstand her unwavering stare.

  However, I have been out of middle school for more years than I care to admit, and I am not some simpering mom who will wither and submit to Herr Rodriguez’s idea of intimidation. I throw my shoulders back and say, “I would like to know what’s going on. Right now.”

  Ms. Rodriguez squints at me, perhaps wondering if I am really an alpha female or just putting on a show. I’m actually not sure of the answer to that one myself.

  “Please come into my office,” she commands.

  I give Connor’s shoulder a quick squeeze, then follow the principal into her lair.

  She directs me to one of the two chairs facing her desk, and as I sit, I notice that her office is sparse and unadorned. None of the usual picture frames holding photos of a smiling family or grinning toothless children, no plants, no coffee mug with the legend World’s Best Principal or Is It Five o’Clock Yet? The walls are a drab shade of beige and the only color accents are from the school flyers tacked to a cork board on one side of the room. Her desk contains a stack of file folders on the left, a notepad on the right, and an open file folder right in the middle, which she peers at as soon as she is seated.