“What are you two doing!” Raymond yelled at Mom and Anna. “You are driving away business!”
“Getting our money’s worth,” Mom said. “Filling our bags with strawberries.”
I think that might have been the first time that Raymond was speechless. He looked at us, shook his head, and said he was calling the cops.
I walked after him, apologized until he believed me, paid five times the admission price for all of us as “a gift for your kindness, Raymond,” and I explained that Mom and Anna were having “a moment.”
“I saw them pull out their little tubs of cream,” he said, “and that’s against the rules. We’d go out of business if people treated this like a dessert parlor. We’d have everyone from North Park and Hillcrest bringing their dates here, and you don’t know how many strawberries they can eat. But I said to myself, as a good Christian, I’m going to let those nice old people eat their cream with my strawberries because they seem like nice old people; they were my first customers today.
“They’re also listening to my favorite Almond Leather song, and Almond Leather makes everything OK. But one of the problems in this town is a breakdown in morals. People abuse other people’s property rights because, because, well, the world is upside down. It’s upside down, and there’s no turning it right side up. We’re an honest, family-loving business here at Strawberries Forever, and we stay in business because we’re by the book, and we follow best-in-class practices. You guys should leave because I don’t want any trouble.”
“He wants us gone?” Mom asked.
I nodded.
“I never liked him from the start,” Mom said. “Glib know-it-all, just like President Jim! Anyway, there’s Balboa Park, and we should stop for lunch before taking a walk around there if you’re all up for it. They don’t have any nonsense around there far as I can tell.”
11
I Chose Well
I was a few weeks away from maternity leave, and LSD, the new hire, came by my desk. Larry, Amandine, and Andy were up in Menlo Park for the day.
“You know, Janet,” LSD said, “people say I’m direct, but it never hurts to tell the truth. You’re pregnant, and you already have two kids. But I’ve been thinking as I’ve seen you walk around the office. You know, what they don’t tell you when you’re pregnant,” LSD continued with her characteristic frankness, “is that when you get over the excitement of being pregnant, you feel like your body’s been invaded by aliens that kick, move, stretch, and even flex in there. You get sick, so sick sometimes that you’re at the emergency room, and you have to put up with it and hold down a job. Then your kids come into this world and, boy, there they are, your kids, whom you’re supposed to love, but they’re complete strangers, and you have to take those strangers home with you and love them. That’s what people expect to hear: you love your kids.”
LSD shook her head and sighed.
“They could be the ugliest things you’ve ever seen.” [She smiled now.] “Like my brother’s sons, who look like Satan smacked them about before he let them go. But even my brother talks like a movie star of his ‘beautiful wife and kids.’ I’m glad I love my twins, Janet, but I completely understand those parents who don’t, not as a moral matter, but as a fact of life. Who loves screaming, shitting, pissing, and hungry little strangers who deplete your bank account and steal your sleep?”
LSD paused and held her head in her hands as if she were mimicking the look from an old poster for a horror movie.
“And you’ve got to be prepared to put up with that for the rest of your life, Janet, because some of them never leave home. It’s like a lottery for you and for them. I know parents who don’t love their kids and who’ll only admit it in private. What they’re attached to is the time and money they’ve put into that kid. They’re still hoping for a return on their investment; sunk costs.”
I thought she was crazy.
I already had two kids, and there she was giving me lessons in motherhood just because she had twins before I did. I didn’t want to be rude, so I smiled as she left, and I continued working.
Our twins, Nathaniel and Nathalie, were born on July 31, 2037. After the cesarean, the first thing I said to Mauru was, “I hate you. Look at what you did to my hips and my stomach. I get the major surgery, the stretch marks, the possible pinched nerve, and you get the pleasure of being a dad.”
He squeezed my hand and kissed me on the forehead, and I wanted to kick him.
I’d put on weight after Jon and Nate were born, but having twins did something to my hips and stomach that felt like it might never go away. Love jiggles and even more love jiggles. It was nature’s joke.
Mauru found me even more attractive after the twins were born, and he wanted to be intimate all the time, especially when he was bored, which I never understood, so I told him that I was in no mood to have any more kids. I was done unless he was going to carry them.
Mom and Dad couldn’t understand why all of our kids’ names had “nath” in them: ‘Jonathan,’ ‘Nathan,’ ‘Nathaniel,’ and ‘Nathalie.’
Mauru pointed at me.
“Janet sometimes hates being an only child,” he said, “so she wanted all our kids to have similar-sounding names, so that they’d be linked in more ways than one. I just went along because, well, I love to make my wife happy.”
Mom and Dad smiled at that, and I grunted and covered my mouth.
A few months after the twins were born came Halloween, my favorite holiday. When I was a kid, Mom and Dad did their best to make sure I enjoyed the day. They bought all the candy I wanted and walked me around our little part of Upstate New York.
My first memory of Halloween is of me dressed as a lamb, and I have the photo to prove it. I wasn’t going to dress any of our kids as lambs; I remembered how I’d boiled in that ovine costume, but Mom had insisted that I wear it because it made me look “biblical.”
When I complained, she said, “Remember Revelation 7:17, Janet: ‘For the Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes.’”
Mauru and I had just come home from the twins’ first vaccine appointment, and they’d finally fallen asleep after screaming up a storm.
Jon insisted that we go out trick-or-treating. He wouldn’t go only with his dad, so I dressed up as the lead singer from Almond Leather, whose most famous song is “Momma Is King.”
No one figured out who I was, even though I walked around with a bottle of almond milk as I wore a pair of jeans, a tan leather belt, and a T-shirt that said, “Momma Is King.” Mauru dressed up as Chief Justice Cathay (with a copy of the Constitution and a mask of the Chief Justice’s inimitable face). Jon dressed up as a female superhero (don’t ask), and we dressed Nate up as a clown (ask Mauru).
We walked around our complex in Rancho San Antonio as Mom and Dad watched over the twins.
Our first stop was the condo next to ours, where our new neighbors, the de Jongs, climate change immigrants from the Southern African Federation, had just moved in after they’d taught English in Thailand. They wanted to see the world “before it all disappeared,” so, after naturalizing as US citizens, they’d gone abroad to teach.
Who knew that Thailand was the world’s largest rice exporter. The de Jongs taught us it was. As a result of rising sea levels, the de Jongs saw parts of Bangkok, only twelve meters above sea level, submerged, and they saw how the rise in temperatures devastated rice crops, which led to food shortages and to riots. Like Indonesia had done,Thailand was thinking of moving its capital to an area less subject to the destruction wrought by rising sea levels.
The de Jongs chose San Diego as their home because it was “international,” and it was “California. You get everything here.” Jennifer was married to a German before she met Adam. She’d worked in banking in Dubai (“almost 120 degrees Fahrenheit”), London (“sinking”), Berlin (“the water utility is under stress”), and Cairo (“risi
ng sea levels in the Nile Delta”), following her husband around the globe before she decided that she wanted a family, and her husband told her that he didn’t. She moved back to Port Elizabeth in the Southern African Federation, where she met Adam a year later.
Jennifer de Jong was a talker.
I will say that again.
Jennifer de Jong was a talker.
I’ve met people who could talk your ear off (and I’ve been accused of being one such person myself), but Jennifer de Jong could talk both ears off in a heartbeat and still have something to say.
Halloween was a case in point.
Imagine the scene.
Mauru is dressed as Cathay, Jon is a female superhero, Nate is a clown, and I’m the lead singer from Almond Leather.
Jon knocks on the de Jongs’s door. Adam, Jennifer’s husband, sees us through the kitchen window, whispers to Jennifer, and they both disappear. We wait for a few minutes because we’ve probably caught them at a bad time, which makes us feel bad. We wait and knock again. More whispering inside, this time closer to the door. I’m tired of holding the bottle of almond milk, and Jon is telling me that he’s thirsty now, Mom; we give him a sip of cold almond milk.
“Mom,” Jon says as he finishes sipping the almond milk, “no one’s here.”
“I want candy,” Nate says. “Give me candy, Mommy.”
I wanted to sleep, but you can’t tell your kids you want to sleep when you’re wearing a T-shirt that says that moms are the rulers of the realm. My legs were sore, and I was worried that I was getting plantar fasciitis again, which I had had when Jon was born.
After the twins were born, I ordered several different types of expensive sneakers to help with the pain, but none of them seemed to help, and I didn’t want to go in for shots. On Halloween, I was wearing short heels because . . . Almond Leather. And that’s all I’m saying about that. I swallowed the pain and smiled, sighed, and looked at Mauru. He squeezed my arm.
“You’re the king, babe,” he said.
The door opened, and both Jennifer and Adam were dressed in pajamas.
Pa-ja-mas.
Only in San Diego.
“Trick or treat?” Jon said.
“Trick or treat?” the de Jongs responded.
Confused, Jon repeated, “Trick or treat?”
“Trick or treat?” Nate chimed in.
“Trick or treat?” the de Jongs answered in unison.
Then they stared at my sons, equally confused.
Jon stared at the de Jongs, and Nate asked for “Candy, Mommy.”
“Well,” Jennifer said in one of the many Southern African accents I recognized and loved. “Now what happens next, kiddies? I mean, we saw you through the window, and Adam says, ‘Love, I think we should dress up to fit in, hey.’ And I said, ‘We have nothing to wear, hey.” And he said, ‘Well, we can’t stick out like sore thumbs, man.’ And I said, ‘We’ll just have to stick out unless we come up with something.’ And he said, ‘The neighbors are busy standing out in the heat and dust, you’d think it was the Lowveld’s weather today, love.’ And I said, ‘Let’s improvise and put on our pajamas, and we’ll say we dressed like—what did we dress like?’ Anyway, that’s why we’re wearing pajamas, Janet, Mauru, and the kiddies. Happy Halloween!”
Jennifer seemed proud of herself for offering an explanation that confused my kids. She was not done, however.
Oh, no.
As the ads on TV used to say when I was a teenager, “Wait! There’s more!”
“Of course, we know what Halloween is.” Jennifer smiled as she dusted her pajamas. “We Africans didn’t invent Halloween, so we just don’t really celebrate it, hey. Shame, man, hey. Argh, Adam and I don’t really have any sweets for the kiddies. Jon and Nate, hi! Hello! And how are the twins? They’re probably not eating sweets yet, but it will happen one day, of course, Janet and Mauru.
“We have a few bottles of mango pickle we bought in Miramar at the wonderful Indian shops that we can give you for your people’s Halloween. The mango pickle will add some ‘savory’ to the ‘sweet’ of Halloween. If you really think about it, Halloween should probably be called ‘National Dentistry Day’ because dentists are probably the only ones who make a killing from all the cavities. Them and the sugar makers. Oh, and maybe the supermarkets also because they have mountains of sweets on sale at this time of the year.
“Argh, where’s my manners? I was about to forget, hey. Let me get you people the jar of mango pickle for Halloween, which I promised to give you. It’s delicious and a taste of home, Janet, even though you haven’t visited yet. And why haven’t you visited the Federation yet, Janet? There’s nothing to be ashamed about being African, Janet. We invented everything, except Halloween and cavities. Anyway, we finished our last boerewors sausages last night, which we know you and your family love, Janet, but we can bring you some later, hey. We were also thinking of making our special donuts called ‘koeksisters,’ and you’re welcome to stay for some.”
Mauru smiled at me. His look said it all: “Your people, Janet. Your African people.”
My African people, indeed.
“Thank you so much, Jennifer and Adam,” I nodded as we accepted the jar of pickled mangos. “This, this is just great. I’m not sure the kids will have it, but, um, yeah, this is so great, and we’ll cherish it. Oh, my, yes, what a thoughtful gift to give kids on Halloween.”
Mauru smiled at me as we walked away, and Jon and Nate asked if the jar was filled with candy, Mommy.
“I can’t wait,” I told Mauru, “till we meet some recent European immigrants. My turn to give looks. I promise.”
We left the de Jongs and walked around the complex gathering enough candy to last us until the Second Coming.
Then Mauru lost it.
He hardly ever cursed, but he cursed up a storm that day. Many parents in the complex were dressed as Hoviaks, and they had dressed their kids as “mini” Hoviaks as well, convincingly so. The Hoviak suits must have cost a lot to make because they looked better than the real thing. Or the parents could have bought the uniforms at the Hoviak stores, which were popping up everywhere in San Diego.
“How are my kids supposed to compete with that shit?” Mauru barked. “They’re taking over the airwaves, they have billboards, they’re everywhere now, and they’re in my fucking complex! They’re fucking up my country, buying politicians and judges, and now I must live with them in my fucking complex! Makes me so fucking mad! Fuck these assholes! Fuckers! ”
“It’s nothing to worry about, babe,” I said. “It’s just Halloween. People are goofing off. They’re probably making fun of the Water Party. I wouldn’t worry about it at all.”
I hugged him.
“Dad,” Jon asked, “what’s a fucker?”
“Fuxxer,” Nate said.
“OK,” I said, “Jon-Jon and Nate, we’re going home now. We have all the candy we need, right? Lots and lots of candy that we collected from our neighbors and a bottle of mangos in a jar. We can share everything with Grandma G. and Grandpa D. Dad’s having a moment right now because he’s mad at some people who want to change the way everything works, and he’s saying words we don’t ever want you to say even when you’re mad. OK? But everything’s OK. There’s nothing to worry about because everything’s OK.”
“But my teacher said my friend Lee left San Diego,” Jon said, “because his family moved to another state, Mom. And she also said that other people will also leave because the weather, the weather’s too hot and it’s dusty like today. She said it’s not OK here anymore, Mom.”
“I know, sweetie,” I said, “some people find it hard to live here because they have no family here. But we have Grandma G. and Grandpa D. here, and Dad’s friends, and my friends, and Dad’s job, and my job, and your school, and Nate’s day care, right? And you, and Nate, and Nathalie, and Nathaniel were all born here. This is home, right?”
My son nodded.
“Mommy,” Nate said, “I’m thirsty.”
&nb
sp; I gave him some almond milk.
Mauru was still glowering at those dressed like Hoviaks. I pulled Mauru by the hand.
“We’re all going home now,” I said. “Mommy doesn’t make a good singer on Halloween. She has sore legs from her plantar fasciitis, and these jeans are way too tight for Mom’s nice legs. Mom should have worn her flats, and she should have dressed up as a nurse or something else. Or she should have bought herself a muumuu.”
“I’m sorry,” Mauru said as we reached our condo. “I shouldn’t have talked like that. My bad. It’s all on me. Dad’s really sorry, Jon and Nate. Dad was wrong to talk like that, OK?”
I squeezed Mauru’s hand as we reached the door, sighed, and went inside, where the twins were having their diapers changed by my mom and dad. My first thought when I saw the twins: Thank God for the California law that requires six months of fully paid maternity leave and three months of fully paid paternity leave.
Some wanted it abolished because it was “too costly and burdensome,” but Governor Barrow held firm. Saint Martin de Porres, “a family institution,” also gave Mauru an additional three months of fully paid paternity leave, so we both could stay at home with the twins for a full six months. We were only three months into our six months of leave, and we thought that we’d get to enjoy every remaining minute of being at home.
No such luck.
I promised Linda Maywrot I wouldn’t mention the bad stuff of the early months of having twins. I wouldn’t talk about the sleeplessness, the exhaustion, the noise in the condo with four kids, and the smell of two babies having constant diarrhea as they rejected one baby formula and then another until we settled on a goat’s milk formula that was so pricey that Mauru and I looked at each other and said, “They’re taking us on holiday somewhere nice when they graduate from college.”
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