by Ariella Papa
“Do you want to go for a walk and I’ll stay and wait for the guy?”
“No, but thanks, I think that will only be worse.” I took a deep breath and turned back to Sage. I started singing “Jeremiah was a bull frog.” It didn’t help, but I didn’t stop singing and Sage didn’t stop wailing and Ruth didn’t stop bouncing Naomi in time to my song.
Finally, the locksmith showed up. He was about sixty and smelled of old cigarettes and looked like he had had a few drinks, too. I wondered how steady his hands were.
“Hi, there, cutie,” the locksmith said to Sage. This caused Sage to let out one blood-curdling scream after another and Naomi started crying as well. I took her back from Ruth and began a speedier bounce. I apologized to the man, who chuckled and shook his head as though he had seen it all before.
He pulled out a wire snake and started to shove it through the window. After his first two failed attempts, I realized that Sage had quieted down. He, Ruth, Naomi and I were staring hypnotically at the man’s attempt to lift the lock. He tried a few more times and then cursed. He pulled the snake out of the car and I was sure he was going to give up and we would be stuck forever or have break the glass. I couldn’t imagine how much worse this day was going to get.
The locksmith made a quick adjustment to the snake, twisting the wire a hair and when he tried again, it worked.
“Oh, wow!” I said and Ruth gave a little cheer. I quickly handed Naomi back to Ruth and scooped Sage out of the car seat covering his little face with loud dramatic kisses.
“My brave boy, you did so good,” I said, knowing that once again I was lying.
“All’s well that ends well,” the locksmith said with a dramatic flourish. “There is a fee of thirty-five dollars that isn’t covered by Triple A.”
“Oh, of course,” I said. I grabbed my keys and wallet out of the diaper bag, telling yet another person I wasn’t leaving. I only had twenty bucks in my wallet and I held it up and looked at Ruth. She smiled and shook her head. She pulled some cash out of her shorts pocket as if she had expected to pay. She took my twenty and handed the locksmith a few more bills.
“Thank you so much,” I said to both of them.
“Take it easy,” the locksmith said. He got back in his car and drove off.
“Thank you,” I called again. I was still clutching Sage tightly.
“I should get back to Abe,” Ruth said. She was already bending in the car putting Naomi in her car seat. I had no idea how to ever repay her.
“Thank you,” I said when she popped back up. “I’m really not usually this spacey.”
“No worries, I was happy to be the calm one for a change,” she said and laughed.
“Sage, how about a big hug for Ruth, who saved the day?” I didn’t wait for him to answer. I pulled her into us. Someone pulled up beside the car and beeped. I groaned and she giggled.
“Ok, I’m leaving,” I yelled. I squeezed the keys in my hand and held it up triumphantly. “Give me a minute.”
I buckled Sage into his car seat again, as best I could while still clutching the keys in my hand. I was never letting go of the keys. I gave Ruth another hug. I owed her the world.
“I have no idea how to ever repay you.”
“I’ll think of something,” she said. “But I’m sure the chicken potpie will be a great down payment.”
I got out of the spot and started the drive home. I was only a few blocks from my apartment. It had been so much trouble for such a small trip.
It only took two blocks for both Naomi and Sage to conk out. After all the drama it would be a shame to wake them so soon. I began to look for parking spots. The hunted had become the hunter. And as I passed my apartment I saw Jules and her dad walking up to our house. She looked thrilled to be strolling along with her father, but David looked bitter and tired. And beautiful. The thing about David was that whenever I saw him after not seeing him for a little while, I was still surprised by how attracted to him I was. His curly hair, his dark beard—sometimes he reminded me of a lumberjack. He had this warmth that drew me in. I wondered if I still had the same hold on him. From the tone of his voice on the phone, I might as well have been the old ball and chain.
I thought about calling out to them, waking the kids, explaining the day, but I wanted some quiet time. I needed to decompress, so I kept driving. I drove all the way to Coney Island and when I saw the ocean I parked for a few minutes watching the waves. Then I turned around and drove back.
That night, we barely spoke as we got the kids’ dinners ready. We knew our parts. I decided to save the chicken potpie for a better night, maybe a Sunday dinner or something more relaxed. David handled Julissa and Sage, and I tried to get Naomi to eat her baby cereal and peas. She wasn’t that into solid food so far. She shook her head away from the spoon when it came toward her.
I kept trying to catch David’s eye, but he refused to look at me, even when he put a sandwich in front of me on the table. I took a few quick bites between trying to negotiate the spoon into Naomi’s mouth. After a few minutes I noticed David staring at me. I was happy to be his focus, at last.
“What do you think of that bread?” he asked. “I let it ferment for a while.”
I wasn’t really sure what that meant. I should have been happy to be eating such fresh bread, but what I really wanted was a quiet meal with him, not this rush job. I wanted the mom portion of this day to be over. Unfortunately I had barely tasted my food. I was only eating for energy.
“It’s really good,” I said. He nodded. I wasn’t sure what he was looking for.
“I think it would be better if we had a brick oven.”
I wasn’t sure how to comment on that, but I didn’t get a chance. Naomi decided that merely letting the peas fall out of her mouth was no longer the way she wanted to articulate how offended she was that I was feeding them to her. Now she was shrieking.
“How was your day?” I asked him later. He was standing at the sink, washing out a sippy cup.
“Alright,” he said, not looking up.
“Sorry about all the confusion,” I began to explain. I meant with the car, dinner, everything.
“Well, it’s over now,” he said, quickly cutting me off. “Well, be more careful, I can’t just leave work like that again.”
I nodded and stood next to him for a minute.
“Hey, I got another gig,” I said, at last. A lioness in the wild might bring back a carcass to impress her mate. This is what I had. I had gotten a voice mail about a job for next week. He glanced my way and smiled. He certainly didn’t look as pleased as I wanted him to look.
“That’s great,” he said. He gestured to the dishtowel beside me. “Do you want to dry?”
“Sure.”
I stood at the sink, taking the dishes from him. I was doing what I could to get him to touch me, even brush my hand. It was pathetic, but he wasn’t going for it. We were doing a chore.
Back in school, before we got together, we lived in the same dorm my sophomore year. I used to try to time it so that I would run into him in the kitchen. He was always washing out some thing from one of his projects. And I would find him, holding my empty dirty teacup, making small talk, pretending to wait, staring at the stray paint that had made its way to his arms.
“Do you want me to get that,” he inevitably asked, pointing to my decoy dirty dish. “My hands are already wet.”
“Sure,” I always said. Standing there talking, we weren’t in any classes together. This was all I had. And finally at last after months of this, when he was done with the teacup, he handed it back to me and held my gaze. It was after midnight.
“Do you want to get out of here? Go for a walk?” I did. I ran back to my room and changed my yoga pants into jeans and we walked around campus in the middle of January. And that night we walked and talked about everything and we went back to our floor and virtually moved in together.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” I asked now in our apartment with three kids
milling about. I wanted him to remember. Us. Me.
“What?” he asked glancing up at me. “Did you need something from the store?”
Of course he can’t fathom that I might want to take walk alone with him, a romantic walk. How could I? It was completely out of the question. We couldn’t really go for a walk. Not when a walk would entail rallying the troops into their shoes and strollers. Not when a walk was suggested at almost bedtime.
I heard the sound of his phone vibrating in his pocket. He must’ve felt it but he ignored it, which was strange. He never wanted a cell phone. We got them because of the kids. Whenever we were together, we usually shut them off. Anyone who needed to talk to us could call our landline if it was an emergency.
“Are you going to get that?” I asked.
“No, it’s probably my dad about tomorrow, you know ’cause I left early,” he said. He hesitated. “My hands are wet.”
I rarely saw him lie, but I knew when he was lying. It wasn’t his father calling. I dried the plate in my hand quite thoroughly. I felt my hands tremble. I wasn’t going to drop the plate even though I wanted to throw it.
I looked up at him, ready to confront him on the lie, but he was already talking.
“Did you need me to get anything at the store? I am going to go out to the corner. I wanted to pick up a six-pack to bring to the guys tomorrow. “
“No, nothing,” I said, looking back down at the dish. He went to get his shoes on, so he could go for the walk and talk to whomever it was that he found it necessary to lie to me about.
Chapter 8
Claudia Meets and Greets
Once again I had played it all wrong.
I had rushed for no reason. I was more than sure that the meeting was supposed to start at seven and it was already twenty past and there was no one at the front of the room who even looked like they were prepared to host an open house of this size. There was nary a Power Point set up.
And people were still arriving as if a start time was merely a suggestion that could be ignored. I was the first one to get here at 6:25 on the dot and instead of being ushered into the classroom where the meeting was to be held, I was told by a janitor that I had to wait in the hallway. A janitor?
So I waited and waited and other people showed up and then at five after seven we were let in and had to scramble and almost elbow our way to the tiny chairs the children sat on during the day.
I shouldn’t have come from work. I rushed out of a five o’clock meeting after arranging for Peter to pick the kids up, so I could be early. As if early was going to guarantee admission. But now it seemed as though early meant overeager. I was prepared to bribe the janitor into never revealing the order of arrivals if necessary.
I was wearing a business suit and nylons. Everyone else was in the Brooklyn casual attire of most parents. They were all either hippies or art nerds. Didn’t anyone have real jobs in this borough? Almost everyone seemed to be there in twos with a partner or spouse. Would Peter not being there be a mark against us? I was prepared to testify that he was an involved father under oath. Even though as I looked around at all the fathers with children in their arms or siblings in baby carriers, I knew that Peter had never been that involved. Neither of us ever wore our babies. I hoped this wasn’t going to be another mark against us.
We could have brought the children. I saw now that they were providing child care in one of the other classrooms while the parents had the meeting. I don’t know why I wasn’t informed. I had studied all the literature. But I was more than sure that if we had brought the kids they would have done something that would have certainly negated our chances of being accepted as a Brookese family. I couldn’t give them that power.
At last, the meeting was beginning to get started. I was immediately unimpressed that there was no PA system set up and there really wasn’t going to be a Power Point presentation. Instead, we were expected to discern the words of the weak voiced director who said several times (in some bizarre accent that I could only detect because I was in the front row), “Can everyone hear me?”
No one could.
Finally, I turned to the group and said “shhhhh,” and that seemed to quiet the room. Perhaps it was a little harsh, but we were here for a reason and I, for one, did not have all night.
“Thank you,” the director said, looking surprised that someone else had stepped up and taken charge in a way that she did not. I hoped this would work in my favor. And then at last, Xionin Gonzalez y Lorenzo-Finkelstein, director of the Brooklyn Center for Early Childhood Education, began her spiel.
It wasn’t that easy to hear with all of the noise of the kids being “watched” in one of the other classrooms, but I jotted down notes as Xionin went on and on about the philosophy at Brookese. Rather than follow one philosophy, they used a variety of methods, so that they couldn’t be pinned down as Waldorf or Montessori or Emilia Romagna or whatever. They were “an eclectic place where we hope kids will learn to be themselves.” Whatever that meant.
It was difficult to understand her speech with the accent and all. I’m sure she was an excellent educator—she’d been mentioned by name in all the research I did—but she wasn’t an effective communicator. I found myself leaning over in the tiny chair, straining to hear her words. But the other parents loved it or maybe they were kissing up. Maybe they didn’t have a problem with her accent. They laughed at all her jokes as if they could understand them and then actually clapped when she completed her presentation. I thought it was joke for a minute, but when I looked around everyone was applauding, so I did too. I considered a standing ovation if it would get my kids accepted.
Xionin invited one of the current parents to speak about their experience with their kid at the school. This mousy woman glowed as she spoke on and on about how her son became a social butterfly and loved his experience being a Brookese kid. She pretty much regurgitated verbatim what Xionin said about the Brookese community being so important and gushed about the Brookese culture. She totally drank the Kool-Aid.
Then Xionin encouraged questions from the audience. After my applause hesitation, I was getting out of the gates quick on this one. I raised my hand.
“Yes,” Xionin said looking down at me. It had been a long time since I had been called on. It was a charge. And then I had that familiar feeling of wanting to make an impression on the teacher but not look like too much of a nerd to the cool kids.
“What kind of education do the instructors have?”
As I was in the front row, I could see Xionin was confused by my question. This never happened to me when called on before.
“Education?” She repeated, as if we weren’t in a place of education. As if the word education wasn’t integral to the title of where we were.
“Do they all have masters in education?”
Xionin was perplexed. “No.”
She didn’t say anything for an awkward minute. All eyes were on me. Even the children who had been screaming from the other classroom quieted down to punctuate my question. Xionin was giving me a look that one might give to imply that there are no stupid questions. In reality there are always stupid questions. But I rarely felt I was the person who was asking them.
“Our main instructors are fairly diverse. Some of them have masters and some of them have life experience. They go through a fairly, oh, I hate to use the word rigorous, but it is a fairly rigorous training with us. And it’s not a training in the conventional sense. We don’t expect our kids to come out of each day with a particular skill set. We expect them to come out of each day having had a lot of fun.”
There were some more questions. They were all fairly mundane about snacks and potty training. I glanced around the room and realized no one else had been taking notes. I closed my notebook. None of these questions gave Xionin any pause. Xionin recommended that we come on a Saturday for one of their playgroups to see for ourselves the culture of our school. I knew from my photographer that this was their way of checking you out.
We were invited to tour the school. I took one of the dairy-free, nut-free cookies and walked around the four rooms that made up Brookese. The walls were covered with children’s artwork and the large hieroglyphic letters that constituted the kids’ signatures and attempts to spell. It all looked a lot like the day care the twins were at. There was no indication that this school was churning out geniuses. I was underwhelmed. I couldn’t comprehend how this place had gotten such a good writeup. I kept hearing my mother’s voice in my head telling me that this was not the place the kids were going to learn the skills they would need to ace the SATs.
But I was not my mother and I was still convinced that this was where my kids should be. Maybe I just wanted to see if they could get in. If all these kids could do it, there was no reason the twins couldn’t.
I glanced in at the room where kids were being watched and I saw Kirsten, the photographer, who had only the days early finally sent me the photographs. I hadn’t expected much but when I opened the links, I was surprised. She had made my children into sweet angels. They almost didn’t seem to be my kids, but in another way they were so my kids. When I looked at those pictures, how happy they looked, how beautiful, for a moment, I felt like maybe I was doing a good job with them,
She was crouched between two girls helping them with some homemade dough, being supportive of their sorry attempts to construct an unrecognizable animal. She glanced up at me, and I smiled and waved.
“How have you been?” I asked.
“Fine, thanks,” she said, tipping her head the way she did. I was certain she didn’t remember me, but she was making an attempt to pretend she did and quickly try and place me.
“It’s Claudia,” I said. She cocked her head again, still unsure. “You photographed my twins a couple of weeks ago. You sent me the links to order.”
“Oh, Claudia, hi. I didn’t recognize you all dressed up.” She stood up and gave me a warm smile. “How are you? Here for the open house?”