Mommy Tracked

by Whitney Gaskell

  Grace gestured toward the back corner of the room, where Ivy had finished setting up and was now standing with her hands clasped behind her back. When everyone turned to stare at her, Ivy waggled her fingers in a wave and smiled.

  “Ivy’s an aesthetician. She’ll be waxing anyone who’s up for it back there behind the white curtain while we hold our meeting. So if any of you are interested in getting waxed, Ivy’s your go-to girl,” Grace continued.

  “What kind of waxing do you do?” Jessica Swanson called out.

  “You know. Pretty much everything. Standard bikini, Brazilian—I can even do shapes, if you want,” Ivy said. “Like hearts and letters and stuff.”

  “You mean shapes in your…pubic hair?” Rachel Baum ventured.

  “Uh-huh. Whatever you want. Well, almost anything. I used to do monograms, but it takes too long to get all of the initials to overlap,” she said.

  “So how do you want to handle it, Ivy? Should we do a sign-up sheet or have those who are interested line up?” Grace asked brightly.

  “Whatever.” Ivy shrugged. Clearly, she was not going to take it upon herself to impose an order to the project. “But whoever’s going first, come on back. The wax should be, like, hot enough by now.”

  Ivy disappeared behind her white privacy curtain, and there was another wave of nervous laughter. For a minute it looked like no one was going to take Ivy up on her offer. But then Nadia Cohen stood up.

  “I’m not going to pass up a free wax job,” Nadia said with spunk. “I’ll go first.”

  Some of the mothers cheered for her as she marched to the back of the room. A few others stood and followed her back, forming a short line.

  Who knew there were so many women interested in getting their pubic hair shaped into four-leaf clovers? Grace thought. She smiled. Maybe this would go over even better than the sexpert. And she’d be remembered as Grace Weaver, the hippest president in the history of MCT. Maybe she’d even be invited to speak at the national meeting on how to liven up meetings and increase membership.

  “Okay, so let’s get started with our brainstorming ideas for the fund-raiser. We’ll have only three months to plan and execute the fund-raiser, so we can’t get too elaborate. But I think we can come up with something a bit more creative than a bake sale or jumble. One of my ideas was—” Grace began.

  She was interrupted by a sudden loud ripping sound from the back of the room. Everyone turned in their seats, necks craning as they looked back at the curtained corner.

  “Ouch!” Nadia yipped.

  Grace cleared her throat and raised her voice. “Um…to have a charity luncheon. Maybe one of the local department stores would even host it for us and put on a fashion show. I know that Saks sometimes does events like that.”

  “That’s a great idea,” Anna said supportively, and Grace smiled at her. “We could have door prizes.”

  “It sounds expensive,” Kari Clem said.

  There was another loud rip. This time, Nadia let loose with an expletive.

  “Um…” Grace was momentarily distracted. What’s happening back there? “Ah…well, we’d sell tickets. If we sold enough, we should be able to cover the costs plus clear a nice profit.”

  Ivy’s curtain suddenly snapped open, and Nadia shuffled out, walking with her legs spread unnaturally far apart. She looked like a crab scuttling down the beach.

  “That woman is a sadist,” Nadia said, not bothering to lower her voice.

  “Next,” Ivy barked.

  Kelsey Jennings, who was at the front of the line, flinched visibly and then went reluctantly behind the curtain.

  “Take your pants off,” Ivy said loudly, her voice carrying clear across the room. “How much do you, like, want to have taken off?”

  Kelsey murmured her reply.

  “Yeah, that’s what we call the landing strip. Basically everything comes off but, you know, a thin line right here at the top.”

  Everyone in the room winced, and three of the women who were standing in line returned to their seats.

  “Um, so back to the luncheon. I’ll need volunteers, of course, especially if there are any marketing or advertising whizzes out there,” Grace said gamely, trying to focus on the business at hand. But no one was paying any attention to her, especially when there was another set of loud ripping sounds, accompanied by Kelsey’s sharp exclamations of pain.

  “Ow!” she squeaked. Rip. “Oh, dear God…Eep!”

  “What is she doing to Kelsey?” Liza Green asked.

  “I don’t know, but I’m not about to find out,” Sarah Dunn replied with a grimace.

  “I’ve never had a waxing hurt that much,” Nadia announced. “I think she took off a few layers of skin along with the hair. Seriously. I may have to go to the ER after this.”

  Grace rolled her eyes. Nadia Cohen had always been a drama queen. But even so, maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea after all.

  “So, uh…back to the fund-raiser?” Grace suggested hopefully.

  “It was a total nightmare,” Grace said the next day. Louis was driving her minivan, and Grace sat in the passenger seat, her bare feet propped up on the dashboard.

  “I’m sure it wasn’t that bad,” Louis said.

  “It was that bad. It was humiliating. Britt Howard—do you know her? She’s sort of mousy with really short man hair?—got a second-degree burn on her thighs. God, I hope she doesn’t sue.”

  “Is she a lesbian?”

  “Who? Britt? No. Actually, I’m not sure. She’s never mentioned it. Why?”

  “The man hair.”

  “Mom, what’s a lesbian?” Molly asked. Molly and Hannah were strapped into their car seats in the backseat of the minivan, listening to a Hilary Duff CD on headphones, but they always seemed to develop bionic hearing at the least opportune times.

  “Um…a lesbian is a woman who likes other women,” Grace said. Louis snorted, and Grace shot him a look. “You want to explain it to her?” she hissed at him.

  “No, you’re doing just fine,” he said, his mouth twitching with amusement.

  “You mean, like I like Sasha?” Molly persisted. Sasha was Molly’s best friend.

  “No, not quite. It’s more like…like how Mommy likes Daddy. How married people like each other,” Grace explained.

  Molly went silent, and Grace hoped that she’d lost interest in the discussion.

  “So, you mean, I could marry Sasha?” Molly asked.

  “Well…,” Grace began, not sure exactly how she was going to explain the politics of same-sex marriages to a five-year-old.

  “I want to marry Izzy and Emma,” Hannah piped in. She worshipped the Cole twins, who were a whole year older than her and already knew how to swim without water wings.

  “Good job clearing that up, honey,” Louis said, snickering.

  “But then who would get to be the bride and wear the fancy white dress?” Molly said, frowning. She had a way of putting her finger on an issue.

  “We all would,” Hannah said dreamily. “Me, and Emma, and Izzy. We’d all wear princess dresses, like Cinderella wears.”

  “You can’t,” Molly said, with the certainty of one who’s halfway through kindergarten. “There can only be one bride in a wedding.”

  “There can too be more than one! Mommy just said!” Hannah said.

  “There can not.”

  “Can too!”

  “Can not!”

  “I probably could have handled that better,” Grace said.

  “Live and learn,” Louis said.

  Grace looked out the window. They were driving through the front gates of the subdivision. A big sign that read

  WHISPERING OAKS

  hung over a decorative fountain. Just what the hell is a whispering oak anyway? Grace wondered. Louis stopped and gave their name to the guard, who—after taking an unnecessarily long time to check that, yes, they were on the approved list of visitors—raised the security bar and allowed them to enter.

  “Tell me a
gain why we’re doing this?” Grace asked softly, so that only Louis could hear.

  “Because they’re your parents, and if we don’t show up with their grandkids every few months they start threatening to visit us,” Louis reminded her, as he drove into the subdivision and turned onto her father and Alice’s street.

  “Not my parents,” Grace reminded him. “My father and stepmother.”

  Alice and Victor Fowler lived just outside Orlando, in a gated golf-course community. They’d moved there three years earlier, after Victor retired from his medical practice in Orange Cove. The reason for the move: Mark, Alice’s son. He lived in Orlando with his bitchy wife and their two sociopathic children.

  “Now we’ll be able to see the grandchildren every day!” Alice had told Grace, after announcing they were moving.

  Grace had bit back the obvious observation—that the move would actually take Victor away from his biological grandchildren—but what was the point? Alice always got her way.

  The grounds at Whispering Oaks were impeccably kept by a crew of vigilant landscapers. Hibiscus trees stood in precise rows, each covered with enormous red flowers. Ornamental grasses were planted in neat clusters, surrounded by bunches of purple queen. The grass was lush and even. Retirees dressed in pastel golfing clothes were zipping around in golf carts, stopping to chat or wave their hats at one another.

  “It’s like a whole other world here,” Grace mused. “Everything’s so…perfect. So neat. So unspoiled.”

  “Unspoiled?” Louis looked amused. “Every last inch of this place has been landscaped into submission.”

  “You know what I mean. People here don’t have to worry about anything,” Grace said wistfully.

  Louis snorted. “Except for cirrhosis and heart disease.”

  As soon as Louis pulled into the driveway, Hannah and Molly started to shriek with excitement.

  “Nana! Papa!” they yelled out. Molly unhooked the straps of her booster seat and hopped up before the car came to a complete stop.

  “Molly,” Grace said in warning voice. “What have I told you about getting out of your seat before we park?”

  “You said it’s a crime, and if the police see me, they’ll put me in jail,” Molly said in a small voice.

  “That’s right,” Grace said approvingly.

  “Nice,” Louis said, giving his wife a sidewise grin. “Did you get that one out of the parenting manual?”

  “I tried telling her that they’d put me in jail, but she didn’t take that threat very seriously. In fact, I think she liked the idea. You know how Molly’s always fantasizing about being an orphan, like Sara in A Little Princess,” Grace explained.

  Alice and Victor Fowler walked out the front door, smiling and waving. The sight of their grandparents caused the girls to start shrieking again. Grace smiled wanly at her father and stepmother and raised one hand in greeting.

  “Hi, Louis,” Alice cried out, throwing her arms around her son-in-law as soon as he was out of the car. Grace couldn’t help rolling her eyes. Alice would probably prefer it if Louis and the girls came to visit without her.

  “Remember me?” she said, climbing out.

  “Gracie,” her dad said, folding her into his arms.

  Victor Fowler was a tall, thin man, with a full head of hair, now gray, and a trimmed mustache. He was meticulously neat, with knife pleats ironed into his shorts. Grace inhaled deeply, smelling his bay-rum aftershave, a scent that had always made her feel safe and protected.

  “Hi, Daddy,” Grace said. “Hi, Alice.”

  Alice kissed Grace’s cheek and then stood back to look at her stepdaughter. “You’ve lost a little weight, Grace,” Alice said approvingly. “Your stomach is finally going down.”

  “Um, yeah, a little,” Grace said, stiffening at the observation. But before she could say something healthy, like, I’d rather we didn’t discuss my weight, Louis was letting the inmates out of the van. Chaos ensued as grandparents and children were united, and the moment passed.

  I’m not going to let her get away with another crack like that, Grace promised herself, as she turned to pluck Natalie out of her infant car seat. At the same time, she couldn’t help feeling a tickle of pleasure that her stepmother had noticed her weight loss. Grace rested a hand on her stomach, which was indeed finally starting to go down—thanks to the Miracle Diet Tea—and felt a wave of pride.

  “How does she do it?” Grace whispered to Louis later that night, when they were lying in the double bed in the cramped guest room. The room doubled as a home gym, and Grace was constantly stubbing her toe on Alice’s treadmill. “How does she always manage to make me feel like I’m this big?”

  Grace held her thumb and index finger an inch apart.

  “Mmm,” Louis said, nuzzling her shoulder. “Want to feel how big I am?”

  “Oh, please.” Grace batted him away. “We are so not going to have sex here.”

  “We used to have sex in your parents’ house all the time when we first started dating,” Louis reminded her.

  “Not my parents. My father and my stepmother. And, besides, look where it got us,” Grace said, with a nod toward the travel crib where Natalie had finally—mercifully—fallen asleep, after exhausting herself with an hour-long screaming fit. Hannah and Molly were sleeping in the den on the uncomfortable pullout couch, which they seemed to think was a treat.

  “Yeah, but now I’m shooting blanks,” Louis reminded her.

  “Thank God,” Grace said fervently. “But still. No. I’m too annoyed at Alice to have sex right now.”

  Louis sighed and rolled back over. “And that pretty much takes care of that,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I’m good, but it would take a stronger man than me to stay in the mood while you’re talking about Alice,” Louis said.

  Grace snorted with laughter.

  “Shhh,” Louis warned her. “You’ll wake the baby.”

  “I just don’t know why Alice has to be so awful to me. And if I have to hear one more story about how successful and wonderful Mark is, I’m going to hurl. Right there at the dinner table.”

  “That would be subtle,” Louis said.

  Louis grew up in a bizarrely normal family, where everyone actually liked one another and wanted to get together; they didn’t just show up at holiday dinners because they’d been guilt-tripped into attending. He was the second of three sons, all still close even now that they were grown and married, and his parents—Sissy, a middle-school French teacher, and Malcolm, a retired dentist—were still happily married. So while he’d known Grace’s family long enough to be familiar with its myriad problems, he’d never really experienced such dysfunction firsthand.

  It was, Grace suspected, the reason Louis was so irritatingly vice-free. He didn’t drink too much, or do drugs, or gamble, and he wasn’t addicted to Internet porn. All good qualities in a spouse—but sometimes it just made her feel even more imperfect.

  “Don’t you think it’s weird how close Alice and Mark are?” Grace asked. “Did you know he discusses his sex life with her?”

  “He does? You never told me that.”

  Grace turned on her side to face him, bunching the pillow up for support. She curled her legs under the cool weight of the cotton sheets.

  “Yeah. She said he was worried he had prostate cancer, because he couldn’t—you know, get it up,” Grace said. She wrinkled her nose.

  “Mmm, yes, I do know,” Louis said. His eyes glittered, the way they always did when he was feeling horny. He reached over and put an exploratory hand on Grace’s bum.

  “Louis,” Grace said, exasperated, removing his hand. “Absolutely not.”

  Louis sighed. “So does he have cancer?”

  “Of course not. He’s fine, he’s just a hypochondriac. But Alice was all up in the air about it. Seriously, what man talks about his erections with his mother? It’s freakishly weird.”

  “I’d actually prefer not to talk about Mark’s erections,” Louis
said. “I thought Alice was on her best behavior tonight.”

  Grace rolled her eyes. “Well, of course you would think that. ‘Louis, would you like another slice of cake? I baked it just for you. I know carrot cake is your favorite,’” she said, mimicking her stepmother’s voice perfectly. “‘Gracie, you probably don’t want to eat that. The frosting has two sticks of butter in it.’ Which was just gratuitously controlling, since I’d already told her I didn’t want a piece of her stupid cake.”

  “Maybe she just likes me better,” Louis conceded. He grinned wickedly. “But can you blame her?”

  Grace picked up her pillow and whacked Louis in the side of the head with it.

  “Ouch!” he said.

  “Shhh! Don’t wake the baby!” Grace said, and then she bopped him in the head with the pillow again.

  The next morning, Louis and Victor had plans to take Hannah and Molly to Disney World. Grace didn’t want to drag Natalie around the amusement park, so she elected to stay home. Alice also abstained from the trip.

  “As far as I know, hell hasn’t yet frozen over,” Alice said. “And that’s what it would take for me to go to Disney World.”

  “It’s supposed to be the happiest place on earth,” Grace said, as she blew on her Miracle Diet Tea to cool it. It tasted disgusting, like a mixture of brewed grass and dirt, but the results were worth it.

  “Please,” Alice said, waving a dismissive hand. “Bloomingdale’s is a far happier place. Besides, I need your help. I’ve decided to redo the living room, and I wanted to get your opinion on the fabric samples I picked up.”