Suzanne Davis gets a life

by Paula Marantz Cohen

  Finally, there was the smattering of really old mothers, who had just managed to beat their biological clocks and for whom motherhood represented a deeply desired shift in the nature of their universe. The smallest details of child care fascinated these women; they couldn’t get enough of them, which made you worry about the recipients of their attention. All that care—how could it not result in serious neurosis?

  Seated off to the side of the play area, I was in a position to survey this scene. I have to admit that I liked watching the kids at play. It’s not that I like kids exactly—that would be going too far—but I don’t dislike them, which is what distinguishes me from my friend Eleanor. She freely acknowledges that, for her, children fall into one of two categories: extremely annoying and outright loathsome. Cute just doesn’t come into it at all for her. Eleanor’s biological clock seems to be broken: “No children for me, thank you,” she likes to say, “I’ve already had my share.” She is referring to Ronnie, her ex-husband, recently indicted for insider trading, who, I admit, is as close to an infant as a grown man can get. Still, in fairness to Ronnie, Eleanor never had any maternal instincts, as far as I could see, and I’ve known her since the fourth grade. Even when I point out a toddler in the supermarket in one of those outfits—if it’s a boy, there’s usually a vest involved, and if it’s a girl, a headband with a floppy flower—and say, “Isn’t that adorable?,” Eleanor always says, “No. He/she looks like a dressed-up monkey.” And when the kid throws a tantrum on the checkout line, holding everyone up as the mom tries valiantly to reason with what is clearly an irrational creature, she says, “Don’t tell me you think that’s cute, too.” And the truth is that though I don’t, exactly, I know I probably would if the child were mine. This, I surmise, is what qualifies me to be a mother.

  But getting back to my morning vigil. You might think that the mothers in the play area would be disturbed seeing me there, sitting for hours watching their children play. But this turns out not to be the case. While a man lingering in the vicinity of a playground would immediately be assumed to be a pedophile, a woman, unless she has excessive tattooing or unseemly cleavage, is felt to be vicariously indulging her maternal instincts. This is a double standard that, if I were a man, I might consider protesting, but as a woman I am content to leave alone.

  So there I was, sitting on my bench, surveying the playground scene for a few days. I should note that the more I watched, the more I saw a definite pattern to the proceedings. It went like this: The kids would be playing, and the mothers would be talking for a while among themselves. Then, one of the mothers would suddenly turn her head and bark at the kid she had all the time been watching out of the corner of her eye (though seemingly deep in conversation about biodegradable wipes): “Caitlin, take that out of your mouth. Did you hear me?” Or: “Jacob, stop hitting Spencer. Jacob—what-did-I say! I want you over here this minute!”

  When these commands were barked out, the other mothers would halt their conversation and watch for the results. Did Caitlin take whatever it was out of her mouth? Did Jacob stop hitting Spencer? If the order was followed, talk would resume smoothly; if not, the other mothers would sigh in mock sympathy and give the mother in question an invisible demerit, after which things would proceed, until another mother (or sometimes the same one) would feel obliged to bark out another order that would be effectively followed or ignored—and so on.

  I’d been sitting on the bench for three days surveying this ebb and flow before I made what an anthropologist would call “contact.” It was during the early part of the morning, when only one mother and child had made an appearance. Having eavesdropped on the playground mothers over the past few days, I knew that the mother in question was named Iris. I now had occasion to speak with her, when her child, a four-year-old boy with a small scrunched-up face, began hurling dirt near where I was pretending to read The New Yorker. Iris came over and apologized, and I said it was no problem; her kid was free to dig near me if he wanted; I enjoyed watching him; he was adorable. Saying a child is adorable is de rigueur if you want to have any standing with the mother. Iris seemed pleased when I said it. In point of fact, he looked like a ferret—a ferret with a certain wild charm, it’s true, but I guessed he was rarely described as adorable, except by his grandparents.

  The day after my initial contact with Iris, I decided to build on the headway I’d made by bringing her child a small snack. I thought a lot about what to bring, knowing how important food is in the maternal lexicon, and, after contemplating a number of possibilities, settled on a mandarin orange. A mandarin orange struck me as just the right choice. For one thing, it’s not threatening—you can’t poison a mandarin orange very easily. For another, it’s a bit out of the ordinary: not a banana or a regular orange, which would seem to lack imagination. Finally, of course, it’s healthy, and one thing these Upper West Side mothers are into is health. In a few years, they’ll be grateful if their kids aren’t snorting cocaine, but for now, they’re serious about soy products and avoiding refined sugar.

  As I had hypothesized, the mandarin orange went over well. It seemed that Iris had forgotten to bring snack that day (not “a snack” but “snack,” in the parlance of the playground; the dropping of articles is one of those tics that seems to set in when women start taking their mothering lifestyle seriously). She said oranges were a special favorite of Daniel’s, though she didn’t know that he’d ever had a mandarin orange.

  “Have you ever had a mandarin orange, Daniel?” she asked. “This nice lady is offering you one.”

  Daniel looked at me with suspicion.

  “You can take it,” said his mother, “but say thank you.”

  I could see that Daniel was in a tug of war with himself. Part of him didn’t want to take the orange. It was in his nature to be suspicious, both because it had been drummed into him to beware of strangers (and he was not yet clear about when a person ceased to be one) and because he sensed that I had ulterior motives. Though he wasn’t sure what he was being bribed for, he could tell that manipulation of some sort was in the air. But the orange looked nice; it was bright and smooth, so he took it.

  “Shall I peel it for you?” I asked.

  Daniel, however, was now through with me. He gave the orange to his mother to peel and turned his face away in what mothers call shyness but which I know really amounts to plain old dislike.

  “I told you to say ‘thank you,’” said Iris, irritated not only at Daniel but also at me for having provoked a situation where her mothering skills were being tested and found wanting.

  “It’s OK,” I said. “I read somewhere that kids shouldn’t have to say ‘thank you’ when they’re this age. If they come to it on their own when they’re older, it’s more genuine.” I had not, in fact, read this; I had extrapolated it from my own experience, since my mother had forced me to say “please” and “thank you” in every possible transaction, and I had grown up with a profound distrust for these terms. In short, I was on Daniel’s side here—another example of what Eleanor has termed my natural mothering instincts. Iris, who had difficulty getting Daniel to do anything, looked relieved.

  “Are you a writer?” she asked, after the orange had been peeled, sampled, and discarded, and Daniel had run off to shove one of the smaller toddlers around. I wondered where she had gotten this idea and realized that I had, during my vigil, sometimes jotted things down on a pad in my pocket, mostly grocery lists or random points to be added to I-ACE press releases.

  “I suppose I am,” I said carefully. I had occasionally thought about writing something—who hasn’t?—so why not make it official, since this would give my presence at the playground an elevated creative purpose that Iris could respect.

  “That’s so neat,” she said. “I used to write poetry in college.”

  “I could never write poetry,” I said, which is true and, again, just the right thing to say. It united Iris and me as fellow writers with no future who were not in competition with each other.<
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  “Actually, I make my living doing technical writing,” I continued. “Only I work mostly at home, and I like to think about more creative things in the morning. Watching the children play is very inspiring.”

  Iris nodded. She seemed to find it altogether natural that, without a child of my own, I would be inspired in the presence of Daniel.

  Other mothers had by now begun to appear on the playground, their children in tow. I had already taken particular stock of two of these women, regulars who seemed to represent two extremes among the older mothers. One was a woman in her mid-forties named Karen, who, based on my eavesdropping, I knew to be the haggard veteran of many infertility treatments. She was among the most nervous of the mothers, her eyes continually darting toward the fragile specimen of a child in padded clothing whom she had incubated. Karen, I had gleaned, was once a financial analyst, her dry demeanor and no-nonsense air suggesting that she was more at home dealing with large abstract sums of money than the mood swings of a four year old. Her husband, also in finance, periodically made an appearance on the playground to confer about some detail relating to their child: the effectiveness of the special ointment on the rash behind the right ear, the consistency of the last bowel movement, the girding of the loins for the next vaccine. He and Karen had a look of barely suppressed hysteria as they confronted the prospect of overseeing the life of another human being who was worth, given the outlay required for his conception and ongoing hothouse care, more than the GNP of a small African nation.

  The other older mother was named Pauline. Whereas Karen was rather nondescript and WASP-y, wore Talbots blouses, and was soft-spoken if tightly wound, Pauline had a dramatically Semitic profile, wore black leggings and turtle-neck sweaters, and spoke with a snappish authority that made even the most recalcitrant preschooler jump to attention. I had heard her reprimand Daniel (Iris’s child), who had elbowed the delicate Matthew (Karen’s progeny), with a sharpness that had brought Daniel practically to his knees. Pauline’s own child, Rose, was a soulful, deliberate creature who often stood scrutinizing the swing as if trying to decide whether it was worthwhile to give it a try, invariably concluding that it wasn’t. Pauline was a former intellectual property lawyer married to a mayoral aide, and she could often be heard pontificating to a group of cowed other mothers about what, “under no circumstances,” she would permit her child to do. The forbidden activities included eating candy (Rose had been tricked into thinking pineapple was candy), watching television (only DVDs recommended by a professor at Columbia Teachers College), and playing in a sandbox (thanks to an episode of House where a child contracted a virulent and—were it not for House’s diagnostic skills—deadly MRSA).

  Now that Daniel was occupied with the other children, Iris was free to take advantage of being left unencumbered for a rare interval, and called out to the other women that they should come over to meet me. This fell largely on deaf ears for the reason that there was a brouhaha in progress regarding the mid-morning distribution of the juice boxes, an event that occurs ritualistically at 10 A.M. Today, one box appeared to be missing its affixed plastic straw, giving rise to high-level deliberations as to how the juice in the defective box was going to be accessed. The mothers were bent over the box and did not raise their heads to respond to Iris’s call—with the exception of Pauline. I knew Pauline had had me in her sights since I’d begun sitting on the bench, and had probably hoped that she would be the first to delve into my back story. But even though Iris had beaten her to it, she was still interested, so she extricated herself from the juice-box controversy and came over.

  “I want you to meet someone new,” Iris said to Pauline. “This is … ?” She cued me to fill in the blank.

  “Suzanne Davis,” I said.

  “Suzanne,” repeated Iris to Pauline. “Suzanne is a writer.” I had noticed that the playground mothers applied the same simple speech patterns used with their young children to all conversations, having apparently forgotten that in the adult world pronouns and subordinate clauses were often used.

  “Pauline Gartenberg,” said Pauline, looking at me approvingly. A writer is always welcome on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

  I quickly explained about the air-conditioning engineers, which did not seem to faze her. It was understood that being a writer didn’t necessarily mean you were a successful one— indeed, it was better if you weren’t successful since it left everyone free to believe in your talent without having to be jealous of you.

  “Which one is yours?” I asked, casting my eyes around queryingly. Of course, I knew which one was hers, but the ritual of the playground involved paying deference to the child, in the manner of fealty to a sovereign. Once that was done, one could move on to other things.

  “That’s Rose.” She pointed to the sallow-faced moppet with doleful eyes who was studying the slide before deciding not to slide down it.

  “What an intelligent face,” I remarked.

  Pauline nodded. “Everyone thinks I’m her grandmother.”

  I waved a hand to suggest this was ridiculous, but I have to admit that Pauline looked pretty old. I had noted this the first day, and had indeed thought she was the child’s grandmother until I saw the dexterous way she unzipped the flannel duffel bag and the surety with which she put the straw in the juice box. The sight of the elderly Pauline had, truth be told, lifted my spirits considerably. Vistas of extra time seemed to unfold by her example. “How old were you when you had her?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “Forty-five. Five years older than Karen.” She motioned to the nervous mother hovering near the child on the swing set. “Roger and I hadn’t intended to have children and then one day I said, ‘Why not?’ and wham!—I was pregnant a month later.”

  Both Iris and I listened to this with admiration. Considering what Karen had gone through in order to conceive, Pauline’s story had a quality of the miraculous about it. Then again, one wondered if Karen had just been trying too hard or hadn’t put the right spirit into it (the “wham” of Pauline’s account suggested a zest that Karen might not be capable of).

  “I’m the poster child for plenty of time,” noted Pauline— then paused to appraise me more closely. “Do you have one?” she finally asked. The form of this question, at once casual and focused, suggested that having a child was akin to having a desirable if slightly out-of-date commodity, like one of those Tiffany bracelets with the dangling heart that everyone had a few years ago.

  “No,” I said, feeling it best to be direct. “I don’t even have a husband.”

  Pauline cocked her head, as if listening to the ticking of my biological clock. I tried to look unperturbed, but I could tell that she was onto me. Even if I’d told her I was thirty-one, she would have sniffed out the missing three and a half years in a heartbeat.

  “You should come to my book club,” she finally said. “We’re doing all the books we were assigned in college but didn’t bother to read. Next week it’s The Great Gatsby. As a writer, I’m sure you’d add a lot to our discussion.”

  I told her I didn’t know about that, but Pauline wasn’t listening. She had made up her mind about me and nothing I could say would make a difference. It was a style familiar to me from my mother, and I felt a pang for little Rose and the years of therapy that lay ahead as a result of so much benign intervention.

  “Tuesday, 8 P.M., Apartment 5J.” She scribbled this information on a work sheet that she extracted from her Vera Bradley flannel satchel, then added with a certain briskness: “There’s someone in the group who I think might be right for you. I can’t promise, but my instincts are usually good.”

  Of course, I said I’d come. I didn’t mind discussing The Great Gatsby; I’d been an English major in college and knew it well, having read it three or four times (it happens to be one of those books taught over and over again, probably because the professors are too lazy to read new ones). It would be nice to pretend that I didn’t know The Great Gatsby as well as I did and thus gai
n points for being smarter than I was. Besides, I could use some intellectual stimulation. Eleanor and I mostly talked about things like which one of us Mrs. Moynihan, our fourth-grade teacher, had liked better, and whether our junior-high-school gym suits had been forest green or pea green. Most of my friends with whom I might once have had an intelligent conversation had married and moved to the suburbs, where their mental energy was focused on organic lawn fertilizer and finishing their basements. In comparison to these people (some of whom didn’t even have children yet), a woman like Pauline seemed a veritable Einstein.

  Finally, I intuited that I could do worse than put myself into the capable hands of Pauline Gartenberg. Given her efficiency in procreation, she seemed just the right person to help me with my biological clock.

  THE APARTMENT OF Pauline Gartenberg, the site of the book club meeting, was a medium-sized three-bedroom decorated in the minimalist style favored by those Upper West Siders who don’t go in for cluttered Victorian. One or the other of these two styles is, from my experience, the norm among the inhabitants of this part of the city. In Pauline’s case, there were a few colorful throws and pillows on the furniture and large pieces of abstract art on the walls, including what looked to be a cubist portrait of Pauline over the mantel. The members of the book club were all perched on metallic and leather chairs and sofas, very low to the ground, as though they were sitting around a modernist campfire.

  Pauline, who had exchanged her leggings and turtle neck for a loose, tent-like dress, was clearly in control of the proceedings, while her husband, Roger, a short, bearded man in a bright geometrically patterned sweater, was pouring wine and passing out hummus and crackers.

  I had arrived ten minutes late, and Pauline chastised me. “We treat book club seriously,” she explained, giving me the kind of look she might have given Rose for not putting her napkin on her lap. (As with “snack,” “book club” was used without the article, suggesting a mysterious kinship between the two activities.)