by Heidi Pitlor
Me: Will do. Any favorite stores?
Lana: I’d rather not use store names—just say “children’s clothing store” pls. Between you and me, some of those execs are also big donors to important causes, and have nothing to do with inventories anyway.
She was starting to sound like Betsy McGrath. Betsy had insisted that I include the following in her memoir: a history of the native tribes that once lived along the shores of the Connecticut River; its Dutch and Puritan settlements; its industrial past. My first draft of her book was over six hundred pages. “The editor thinks there are too many detours,” I reported back to the congresswoman. “He said that people want to hear more about you.”
“I’m not sure how much more I have to say about myself.”
Betsy was mild-mannered and agreeable. She had married her high school love and had emotionally if not financially supported him and their children for decades before stepping into his congressional seat after his sudden death from a heart attack. Her favorite subjects of conversation were her grandchildren and a new bill that she was cosponsoring, a bill that would limit the estate tax in Connecticut. In the end, I trimmed some of the detours and pulled a few more memories from her, but the book was what it was.
Most reviews were courteous and tepid. One said, “Rep. McGrath gives us Connecticut in all its Connecticut-ness. Her memoir read like a beloved great aunt’s high school research paper about her home state.”
“Mom.” Cass hovered in his pajamas in the doorway of my bedroom. “I had a nightmare. Can I sleep in your bed?” He yawned wide.
“You want me to turn on your closet light?”
“No. I just want to be in your room with you.”
Letting him sleep with me when I was too tired to argue was not going to strengthen his ability to be apart from me. “Hold on. Let me finish what I’m doing and we’ll figure it out.”
I wrote to Lana that I would get something back to her soon and awaited her response before logging out. Cass had already crawled on top of my sheets. “When is Kurt coming home?” he asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said. I looked at Cass’s shiny hair and his robot footsy pajamas. Although he had grown attached to his Barbie, he had never much cared about wearing pink or blue. He did tend to prefer clothing with images of robots or animals to those with tools or sexist sayings, thank God, or maybe it was really me that preferred these things. “I actually talked to Kurt tonight. He said he misses you.”
I leaned over to tuck him beneath my sheet, and lay down beside him. I knew that I should walk him back to his bedroom, establish boundaries, and teach him independence, but he was warm and sleepy and felt so good next to me. I always slept better with someone next to me.
You shouldn’t use your child to fill your loneliness, some voice within me said.
It’s just for one night, another answered.
The revision went quickly the next morning.
We were looking for an outfit for him to wear to an upcoming wedding. To the left of the store were clothes for boys, and to the right, girls. I guided Norton toward the display of blue blazers and khakis, the small striped ties hanging on a rack in the corner. I tried to find a blazer his size, but when I did, he was gone.
I found him leafing through a rack of puffy white dresses. “This is the girls’ section,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, and his eyes dropped. The navy blazer in my hands was so plain, so uninspiring and adult compared to the soft lacy fabric with the enormous satin sashes.
Sometimes I imagine a children’s clothing store arranged like this: a large, open area segmented by age and size only, with affordably-priced blue skirts and pink blazers and green and yellow pajamas and blank T-shirts on which children can determine whatever it is that they want to say: “I Want Candy” or “I Need a Hug.” Bins of stuffed animals, a corner with bean bags and shelves of books, colorful maps of various countries on the walls. I might call the place Be You.
I had agreed to transport a washing machine across town to two of Jimmy’s other tenants. Jimmy and I struggled as we heaved it into the cargo bed of my truck, and afterward, mopping sweat off his forehead, he said, “You see that he’s officially in? The electoral college gave him the green light?”
“We aren’t supposed to talk about the news,” I said. I tried, sometimes in vain, not to think much about the election and its possible impact. It seemed that for Jimmy, the whole thing had been a sort of game, that victory had not only been sweet, but the only thing that mattered. Not whether Russia had interfered, not whether the president himself would do a decent job or be a decent person or really anything else. Jimmy’s team had won and mine had lost.
It turned out that the two tenants had been in the year ahead of me at high school, but we had starred together in a production of Oklahoma! Jen and Gary were now a couple, but he was off at work at the Sunoco in town, where he was manager. Outside of their place, a mint green bungalow in better repair than my place—although not by much—she and I caught up on what we had been doing over the years. “I work at a nursing home in Pittsfield,” she said. “My true calling is fostering rescue Greyhounds, though.” Jen had put on a little weight and gone blonde. Both suited her, I thought. We laughed about being “Jimmy Pryor’s suckers,” and then gingerly lowered the washing machine from the back of my truck onto a dolly. We rested a moment before rolling it into the house.
That night, after I got Cass into the bath, I lowered the toilet seat and sat down across from him. He lay on his back and let his hair float in the water. He said, “Look, my peanut is getting bigger.”
“Peanuts will do that.” In this moment, I wished that I had one so that I could talk about this stuff from a place of greater intuitive understanding. “Sometimes they get bigger, but then they go back to their normal sizes.”
“Why?”
I tried my best to explain how blood circulates and what happens when pressure builds inside of veins.
“Barton Haller told me I have a girl’s name.”
“So what if you do?”
“Why did you give me a girl’s name?”
“Your name is Cassidy, not Cassandra. But there are lots of names that both boys and girls can have. You know, if I wanted to, I could have named you Cassandra or Emily or Lisa.”
He looked like he was not buying it.
“Anyway, I really named you after a song. ‘Ah, child of countless trees. Ah, child of boundless seas, What you are, what you’re meant to be,’ ” I sang. “It’s from this band called the Grateful Dead.”
“What does Grateful mean?”
“Glad,” I said.
“The Glad Dead?”
“I guess so, yes.”
“Who is Iron Man? Barton hit me because I didn’t know who Iron Man was and then I didn’t want to go on the big slide with him. Then he broke my hair.”
“Oh, Sweetie.” I wondered just what he meant by “hit” and “broke.”
“I started to cry and then he called me a fag.”
I swallowed hard. “Where was Suze? She is going to get one hell of a phone call from me tomorrow,” I said quietly. I stopped myself from launching into a full-blown rant, which would only upset him more.
Sometimes I felt as if, in raising Cass, I were introducing a small, perfect alien to the terrible planet earth. Here are the earthlings who will make fun of you for looking the slightest bit different. Here are the feelings—sadness, fear, inadequacy—that, as a male, you will be expected to only rarely admit. Here are the very few interests that boys are expected by most people to have. Here is the sort of earthling that you are supposed to be, an earthling who is nothing, not one tiny bit like the being you really are.
“Sometimes people aren’t nice,” I began.
“Then why are you always telling me to be nice?”
“Because someone has to break the cycle. Kindness can be contagious. And it has to start somewhere, right?”
He grew quiet. I may have raised more ques
tions than I had answered.
We were unprepared for Norton’s early questions about gender and sex. I suspect that children wait until their parents are least anticipating it to broach these topics. Norton’s first came when I was helping him with his bath one night. I could find no words. My mind was an instant traffic jam, and I spoke haltingly in biological terms, and of physiology and physics, verbiage of course too sophisticated for a four-year-old.
Afterward, I worried that he detected a degree of shame in my answer, something I was loathe to impart. Would he think that women were cowed by such things, that maleness had the power to shame even his own mother? I had in mind for him a more European and open, less puritanical attitude toward the body. I filed away my concern under the heading “One More Subject I Would Have to Untangle as a Feminist Parent of a Boy.”
“I’m so sorry, Allie. I’ll have a talk with Barton about the word ‘fag’—and about being kind to other children,” Suze said over the phone.
“That’d be great. And maybe you can say something like, ‘Not every boy loves Iron Man or going down the big slide like you do.’ ”
“If only that were true!” She had a laugh with herself. “Listen, Allie, Cass is in good hands here. We have very strong, clear kindness rules.”
I had seen the kindness poster that hung above the rows of cubbies near the front door. Although well-intended, the rules seemed vague and unenforceable to me: “Always be nice! Make a new friend today! Be kind to your planet! Remember to smile!”
“Suze, Cass told me that Barton doesn’t wash his hands after using the bathroom. I think he’s been wiping them on the walls and on some of the other kids, too,” I said. I sounded uptight, like a helicopter mom. And a snitch.
“Boys!” she said. “What can you really do but laugh, right? Another one peed all over the caterpillar slide today. I’m telling you, I saved at least three other kids from getting drenched. Unfortunately, I did not save one of them from throwing up on the same slide about ten minutes later. It was a day!”
“Oh my god.” I wondered why anyone would choose this sort of employment.
At least christmas vacation was approaching, and then Cass would get a break from Barton. As the holidays approached, so did cold and flu season, which meant it was also substitute teacher season. I picked up shifts in both the middle and high schools. Even so, my bank account came close to being overdrawn just after I paid a steep heating bill. Bertie loaned us her old fake Christmas tree and the three of us hung ornaments and draped it with multicolored beads from Maggie’s trip to Bolivia. I had written and printed up for Cass a children’s story about a boy who lived underwater with a school of fish, and thought that he was one of them. At Walmart I charged a few toys and a pair of pajamas.
Bertie came over on Christmas day with a frozen pot pie and, for Cass, a coloring book and some new markers, as well as a tiny stuffed lion. He was excited and went to find Hippo. “Dad and his baby son,” he said, smashing the animals together.
I nodded. The absence of a flesh-and-blood father in the room could not have been more apparent. “But aren’t they different species?”
“Parents can have babies that are different,” he said.
Bertie’s eyes flashed between us.
“Of course they can,” I said, nervous about what he might say next.
“Hippo loves his lion son,” Bertie said, nodding.
Jimmy brought us a box of Munchkins and another of salt-water taffy just for Cass. I grew teary with gratitude for them—and maybe also exhaustion.
“Oh, Al,” Bertie said, squeezing my hand between hers.
We sat around the living room and even sang some Christmas carols, and I tried not to compare this day with the Christmases of my own childhood, when we would make the long drive to my aunt’s townhouse in Norwell and enter to the aroma of something roasting and the sounds of my cousins chasing each other in and out of the kitchen and bathroom. I would join the two of them in their bedroom, where we played Twister or watched Miami Vice, happily awaiting the “Ho, ho, ho’s” of my Uncle Nathan, who dressed as Santa Claus the years that he came with my Aunt Setti from Jamaica, where they still lived. He would pull from his backpack gifts like beaded T-shirts or carved wooden masks or blue fish-shaped glasses of sand. He and my aunt had always smelled faintly of skunks, a smell that took me many years to identify.
Somehow, we had eked out a nice Christmas, but things were getting so tight that I considered pulling Cass from Little Rainbows or even cutting Bertie’s one day of sitting for him, although losing even the small amount I paid her each week would, I knew, be hard on her. I thought about asking Colin to advance me part of my next payment, but echoing in my mind was something Ed had told me long ago: “Don’t ever tell your employer that they are responsible for paying your bills. You’re there to add value, not take it away.”
“But my value is my skills, not my bank account,” I’d said.
“Not everyone can differentiate between the two,” Ed said. I resented it, but he was right then, and unfortunately, he still was.
Without any warning, a filling in one of my teeth apparently broke. I took a sip of coffee and yelled out in pain. I had done some landscaping last summer for Aaron, a nice guy I had known back when I was a kid who was now a dentist, so I called him to tell him about my tooth. Reluctantly, I confided that I was temporarily short on cash.
“Just come on by and I’ll take a look,” he said brightly. “We can set up a payment plan if need be. Not to worry.”
In his waiting room, I apologized to him up and down for having brought my son. “Being a single mom isn’t always easy,” I said, maybe to garner sympathy and a better deal.
“Okay,” he said vacantly. He appeared disappointed in something, and it dawned on me that his friendliness both last summer and over the phone may have been tinged with flirtation. He had asked me to meet him for coffee last summer, but I’d had other plans. Maybe now that Aaron knew I had a son, I no longer qualified for his payment plan. Sure enough, there was no wedding ring on his left hand. “I’m running a little behind, so give me twenty minutes or so,” he said.
I arranged some toys in front of Cass. He played with a wooden abacus and a fire truck happily for a while, then not so happily. A few other patients waited, and then Cass began to kick an empty chair. A woman shot us both looks. “Hey,” I said, and tugged him closer to me.
Twenty minutes passed. Thirty minutes. Cass began to march in circles and then behind the reception desk, and accidentally knocked a stack of files onto the floor. I raced over to him, apologized to the receptionist, and led him back to the chairs.
Forty-five minutes passed. An hour. I read to him from a torn copy of The Wind in the Willows, my jaw twinging with pain as I spoke, and after a few pages, he wandered off. Seconds later, he returned with a replica jaw from one of the patient rooms. He dropped it in the large fish tank in the corner of the room with a loud plunk.
“Cass! Oh God.” I rolled up my sleeve and retrieved the jaw from the murky tank, the tetra shooting off to the sides. “None of you saw that, right?” I feebly joked to the other patients waiting as I set it on the receptionist’s desk.
One man half-smiled, and a woman only raised her eyebrows in response. I knew her from somewhere. Barbara Kinzer, I remembered. The director of the Berkshire Gilded Age Society, a foundation that oversaw the preservation of the many local historic mansions. Long ago, my mother had established a fair-weather friendship with Barbara. She had a daughter my age, an unpleasant and clingy girl named Sandrine whose sole interesting trait was her uncanny ability to recite passages of Stephen King’s books from memory. Barbara appeared not to recognize me in my adult form.
What if Aaron changed his mind and asked for full payment today? I felt like a child among adults here.
At last Aaron appeared and said he was still running late. He suggested that his sister come pick up Cass. “She’s at home with her baby Dylan right now anyway,” he sai
d. Vanessa lived a few houses down in a renovated Victorian that a decade earlier had been an art gallery. I had met them when we were kids, back when I used to hang around Tanglewood while my mother worked in the gift shop. Their parents had had a summer home here and season tickets.
“Thanks, Aaron, but I can handle it.” I pulled Cass past the reception desk and into the restroom.
“You are not allowed to touch a fake mouth or anything else in those patient rooms ever again,” I said to him. “You are not allowed to put anything in that fish tank. Those are living creatures. You could have hurt the tetra—you could have killed them. I need for you to behave perfectly right now. Do you understand?” Others could probably hear me. I lowered my voice and said, “Don’t you want my mouth to stop hurting? If you keep this up that nice dentist won’t want to help me.”
He nodded, big-eyed.
Vanessa showed up about ten minutes later, “glad to help out,” Dylan in a Baby Bjorn on her chest. She did not look glad. “This motherhood thing is no joke. Dylan sleeps for at most an hour at a time. I’m so tired I drove over my cell phone yesterday.” She stood there across from me in a batik headband covering most of her short black hair, a smear of something white on her cheek, and sighed heavily as she waited for me to hand over my son.
“You don’t have to take Cass. Your hands are already full.”
Barbara Kinzer coughed into a fist. Cass wandered toward the fish tank and began tapping on the glass.
“What’s one more kid?” Vanessa said.
“Maybe he can help entertain Dylan,” I offered meekly.
After they left, I headed to the bathroom, where, sitting on the institutional toilet, I tried to gather myself. If I had been able to make an appointment like everyone else, I would not still be here, waiting and panicking about the bill. In my mind, I ran through my poor life choices. Why on earth had I wasted all that time earning nothing at the magazine in San Francisco? Why hadn’t I stayed at the equity firm in New York, ill-suited work and my questionable after-work persona notwithstanding? Oh, the life I—and Cass—would be able to enjoy now if only I had been more Machiavellian then. Integrity—and real feminism—were clearly for people more financially secure than I.