Читать книгу Mommies Behaving Badly - Roz Bailey - Страница 12

December sped up like a tape of Christmas carols played on hyperspeed—Alvin and the Chipmunks singing: “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” the disco version. We got the tree up and decorated, but Dylan seemed to think those shiny balls were his for the picking, and he didn’t understand why Mommy hyperventilated when he tried to roll the blown glass Santa head she’d gotten from her grandma down the stairs. Becca auditioned for the church play and got the part of an angel, much to her delight until she realized that Shant Kevalian and Alexis Sanford from her class would see her onstage.

Scout kept revising her Christmas list, adding impossible, not-yet-invented toys like rocket boots that could shoot her over houses and yards and land her right in the schoolyard—“No waiting at traffic lights, Mom!” she beamed. She also wanted a hovercraft that could carry a handful of friends to fun places like the bowling alley or out for ice cream, and she’d recently added a shape-shifting device to spoof your friends and avenge bullies. In a sweat, I stared at the emptying shelves of remote-control cars and talking robots at Toys “R” Us and tried to think of what to say to Scout to ease the disappointment of not getting anything on her list.

All along I did my best to appear to be in the game, squeezing in batches of cookie-baking sessions, caroling with the Sunday School classes, and running around the house like a fiend plugging and unplugging Christmas lights at dusk and dawn. I was a merry-old, jolly-old elf, but I was mentally vacant, my mind on the work that kept me at the computer each night until three A.M. or when I faded off, whichever came first. In my mind I like to compare writing under deadline to accepting a mission on a nuclear submarine that takes a dive and stays deep in the ocean for months at a time. I also like to think that in some ways writing is harder since you’re not completely cut off from the outside world, which demands that you participate and contribute and bake twenty-four nondenominational holiday cupcakes for your child’s first-grade class, which is not having a holiday party but a publishing celebration that just happens to be falling in December near Christmas and Chanukah. Whatever.

Knowing I’d be working at odd hours, I’d moved my PC out of Dylan’s room and set it up in the center of the dining room table—the only space available, though I’ll admit that glowing screen definitely detracted from our Christmas decorations.

“Where in the world are we going to eat dinner?” Rebecca asked, throwing her hands up and reminding me of my eighty-three-yearold grandmother.

“We’ll eat around it. Or in the kitchen,” I said, not allowing dining etiquette to waylay my efforts. Must write book… Besides, half the time the kids ate in a daze in front of the television, especially when Mommy was under deadline. I’d read all those articles that warned how it was unhealthy, but one look at them, half-stretched out and dropping grapes into their mouths as if they were sultans surrounded by harem girls and, well…I’m a sucker for relaxation.

Must write book…

I told myself that I didn’t mind working through the holidays because this book was for me. After years of writing to format, I was having some fun writing characters who were more like me. Janna, the main character of Chocolate, was pushing forty, an age that would be considered rode hard and put away wet by most romance publishers. One of her friends was a single mom. Some of her relationships didn’t work out, even after she slept with the guy. I was breaking some rules and enjoying it, and by doing so my story came alive for me. When it was time to string popcorn with the girls, I was there in body but my mind was wrapped around my main character and the choices she would make leading to the climax of the book.

One week before Christmas, Jack was summoned to Dallas. He came home early from work with a look of resignation and a ticket on a flight that night.

“Oh. My. God! Tell them no!” I knew I was arguing after the fact, as Jack was already tossing balls of clean socks into the pocket of his suit bag, but I had to state my case. “You’ve got three little kids, and Christmas is a week away.”

“Don’t get so emotional, Rubes. I’ll be back the day before Christmas Eve.” He kept his eyes down as he packed, as if to avoid facing my wrath.

“But you’re missing the season. Christmas isn’t just a day, it’s the whole buildup of expectation, the excitement of the kids. Honey, it’s such a short window that they believe in Santa. Dylan’s almost two and he doesn’t really get it yet, and I suspect Becca’s got it figured out at seven. Don’t miss Christmas because of some trumped-up emergency.”

“Calm down, would ya? I won’t miss Christmas, I promise. And I couldn’t say no. Apparently Bob asked for me by name.”

“Summoned by the pope. I guess you should be flattered.” I sat on the bed, refolding his undershirts.

“Yeah, well, flattery can be a pain in the ass.” He hung a clean suit inside the bag, still not making eye contact.

“Honey, I know you’re under a lot of pressure. We both are.” Must write book… I would miss him at night, freeing me up from baths and bedtime stories. But I was getting close to finishing, Christmas was bearing down on us, Jack had been handpicked for a task by the company’s CEO—events slammed toward us like a runaway train, and I had learned that sometimes it’s easier to go with the momentum than to stop the train.

“I’m sorry.” He looked up from his travel kit, his silver eyes flashing with concern. “This really isn’t fair to you.”

I grabbed a ball of socks and launched it toward him. “Just promise me you’ll work fast so you can get your butt home.”

“I’ll do my best,” he promised, handily catching the socks.

Having Jack out of the house did have its advantages. I didn’t have to pick up the trail of clothes he left on the way into the shower or rinse and load dishes and mugs left in the sink, half-full of water and floating crumbs. Jack didn’t mind doing housework, but his cleaning sprees came in spurts in clear opposition to my drive to clean up immediately, at least in the kitchen. Also with Jack gone I wouldn’t feel obliged to take time off from working to have an abbreviated adult dinner with him; once the kids were fed I could get them set up in front of the television or at the kitchen table for homework and cruise through another page or two of the manuscript while scarfing down wheat toast.

One of the downsides of being a single parent was the dreaded homework. Becca managed her own work but worried about making mistakes, so she insisted that I check everything over. Scout had been placed in an advanced reading group, and although she could handle the reading on her own, she needed help composing written answers to the comprehension questions.

One evening, when I was hot into a love scene, my fingers flying over the keyboard, she appeared in my doorway with a book in hand. “Mom, can you help me with this?”

“Read the story, honey, and I’ll help you answer the questions.”

“But I can’t read the story. It’s filled with something very inappropriate for kids.”

Must write book…

I tore myself away from the computer and motioned her closer. “What’s this?” The book she was reading was called Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, an anecdotal account of a woman who helps parents get their children to behave. “Sort of a Nanny 911 from old times,” Scout had said last week when she started the book.

“This chapter…” Scout handed me the book, squirming. “The boy’s name, I can’t say it. I can’t even say it to myself in my head.”

I took the book from her. The boy’s name in this chapter was Dick.

I hid a smirk. “I see.” Scout and Becca had encountered only a handful of forbidden words, most of them spotted in graffiti on the back of the school. This was one of those words.

“You know, it’s short for Richard,” I said. “Why don’t you change it in your head when you see it? Call him Rick. How about that?”

My six-year-old daughter scowled at me. “Are you kidding me? I don’t have a computer brain.”

“Okay, then.” With a sigh I pushed the laptop closed, settled back into the old chintz chair and made room for Scout. “I’m going to read this to you with a new name,” I said.

She settled in beside me, and I read the story, editing as I went along. When I was finished, she thanked me and headed back downstairs, calling to Becca: “Guess what? The kid in this story is named Penis!”

Must write book…

By turning off the world, writing at night and paying the sitter to work extra hours, I managed to get within striking range of the end of Chocolate three days before Christmas. I had been e-mailing the manuscript to Morgan in five-chapter installments, and we planned to meet today for a working lunch to go over her notes and revisions so that I could smooth and polish the entire manuscript and have it ready for her to messenger to editors January second when they returned from vacation, fresh and fat and still feeling generous with holiday spirit. I felt flattered that Morgan was giving me so much time and attention, grateful that she’d pushed her flight to Detroit back by one day so that she could meet with me today and pull it all together.

As luck would have it, Dylan had chosen the previous night to wake up in crying fits, moaning of pain in his teeth. By the time I flopped down the stairs in my fluffy robe and started making peanut butter sandwiches while I held for the pediatrician, a dull pain twisted at my forehead and my mouth felt dry and sour. I felt hungover without any of the glory of the night before, hit by the Stress-monster. I popped two Tylenol capsules and washed them down with black coffee as Scout scampered down the stairs and clicked on the TV.

“Good morning, sweetie,” I called over SpongeBob’s cackle.

“I’m not going to school today,” she warned me.

“Oh, yes you are. Today is your last day before Christmas vacation.” And my last chance to grab a few free hours to kibbitz with Morgan.

“Some kids are already on vacation, from a hundred days ago. It’s not fair.”

“You’ll get your share of vacation,” I promised her as Becca came down and gave me a kiss, then gave out a little whimper that she was sick of taking peanut butter sandwiches for her lunch. Which launched us into the lunch discussion of how the girls always demanded one lunch item, like peanut butter sandwiches, for two months straight—until they were sick to death of it.

“This is the last school lunch for two weeks,” I said smoothly, trying to avert a major disaster on this day of days; I was so close to the finish of my book I could taste the happy ending, and nothing would deter me. “Tomorrow you can have Easy Mac, or fish sticks or a yogurt parfait.”

“Yuck.” Scout’s nose wrinkled, her face puckered. “Yogurt parkways are gross.”

But I just smiled at her as I dashed up the stairs to wake Dylan with kisses and the promise of a trip to the doctor to help him feel better. I managed to coax them all through breakfast, get them dressed and shepherd them past the frost on the ground and into the car, where I strapped Dylan and Scout into car seats. Unfortunately, the frost was thicker than I’d realized, and I had to scurry around the car, scraping windows and windshields, much to Dylan’s delight. Then the girls bellowed that they’d be late for school, but I didn’t care. I knew the wicked witch of a principal had to let them in the door, and so they were dropped off in the nick of time so that I could work my way through stoplights and past double-parked cars to the pediatrician on the other side of Bayside.

Thirty minutes in a stuffy waiting room of howling tykes revealed Dylan needed an antibiotic for his ears, and so I headed to the pharmacy, wishing they had a drive-thru window. Wonder of wonders, there was a spot right in front, though I had no quarters for the meter. I decided to chance it, bundled my son in my arms and raced down the aisles of the pharmacy, scraping tissue boxes and toilet paper displays in my haste.

While the prescription was being filled I tried to get change for the parking meter, but the cashier told me no quarters could be given out. She said this, pointing with annoyance to the Laundromat across the street, as if they were robbing her of silver. I bought a pack of gum and, chewing like a cow, strolled to the car to drop a quarter in the meter. Three cars behind me a man in a brown uniform, a so-called brownie, was writing a parking ticket for an expired meter, and I felt like the luckiest gambler in Vegas as I dropped my quarter into the slot and cranked the knob. But instead of registering twenty minutes, the red EXPIRED flag remained in place.

“Dang it!” I shifted Dylan to my other arm, fished for the other quarter and fed the meter a second time. Again, without success.

I glanced up at the parking policeman, who was now circling the car behind mine. “Did you see that? I put two quarters in and neither of them registered.”

He stood beside the other car and stared through me, as if trying to assess whether he could get away with not answering me.

“This meter is broken,” I said. “I just put two quarters in it and nothing happened. Didn’t you see me?”

At last, he let his eyes meet mine from nine feet away. “You can’t park at a broken meter,” he said.

“But how am I supposed to know it’s broken before I lose my quarters in it?” I demanded, my temper flaring.

“I’m just letting you know, the policy is, you can’t park at a broken meter.”

“But I put two quarters in, and I’m waiting for my son’s prescription to be filled in the pharmacy.” I yanked a thumb toward the pharmacy door and hitched Dylan up in my arms as he let out a little whimper. There. That’d win the sympathy vote.

But the brownie wasn’t having any of my pity stew. He stepped toward the store, making a wide arc around me, perhaps to stay out of reach. He went up to the meter beside my car, twisted the knob and nodded.

“See? Broken?”

He flipped his ticket book open.

“It’s broken,” I shouted louder, thinking maybe he hadn’t heard me.

“Says expired.”

“Oh, for God’s sake…” Burning with righteous indignation, I unlocked the door of the car and proceeded to strap the baby into his seat, all the time muttering like a crazy person. “You try to pay for the damn parking, but no! You can’t! You can’t park at all! Unless you want to pay a forty-five dollar ticket!”

Burning with fury, I pumped the gas and my car shot out of its spot with a squeal of wheels. I had the mad desire to smash my car into the brown traffic cop’s, repeatedly, until his car was squashed into a toy car the size of a sardine can. Then I could kick it aside with my boot and swoop up his spot on the street.

But no. I stopped at the red light like a good citizen. I flipped on my blinker and turned right, kicking myself for not getting the brownie’s name and badge number. Like that would have mattered. Like anyone would answer my complaint to the City. I circled and circled and circled in a wider arc until I found a place to park in the surrounding neighborhood. By that time, Dylan had fallen asleep and I was sorely tempted to leave him in the car and let him rest. But it just wasn’t safe. What if he woke up, panicked and tried to get out of the car on his own? Or what if someone stole my car with him in it? I unbuckled his car seat and tried to hoist him into my arms as gently as possible.

It’s not easy to walk three blocks with a shifting thirty-pound weight. I braced myself, imagining that I was in the final paces of the gold medal round of the Olympic Baby-Carrying Competition, set to bring home the gold for mommies across the U.S. My arms and upper back ached, but this one was for the mommies, dammit!

By the time I got home I was exhausted and it wasn’t even ten yet. By some stroke of good fortune Dylan remained asleep, so I shifted him to his crib, stripped my clothes off in the hall and raced into the shower, hoping, for once, to be ready for my meeting with Morgan by the time Kristen arrived.

With my hair in a lather I felt a twinge of remorse over the situation with the traffic cop. It was rare for me to act out that way, but the man was ruining my quality of life and it was all just so…so wrong. That was a tight area for parking, but then so was most of Queens these days. Should I drive out to Nassau County to get my prescriptions filled? Just thinking about it had me tugging knots from my hair, so I stepped back into the hot spray and pushed the topic off till later…another day, another month or year when I wasn’t under deadline, pressed, stressed.

Wrapped in a towel, I checked Dylan. Still asleep, his downy lashes looking impossibly dark on that chubby cheek. A wave of tiredness doused me and I had to resist joining him in sleep, the steady ebb and flow of our breaths the only sound in the house.

Resist! The angry whir of my hair dryer in my ear cut short that dream.

Forty minutes later I began to worry about Kristen, my incredible, reliable babysitter who was now ten minutes late when, ironically, I was all made-up and blown dry and ready to go. Kristen had said she was finished with finals, hadn’t she? Had she forgotten about today? And why wasn’t she answering her cell?

The phone rang and I bolted for it, nearly turning an ankle in my Jimmy Choo boots.

“Hey, Rubes, how’s it going?”

“Fine,” I lied. “Except that Kristen’s late, not here, and if I don’t get out of here in the next ten minutes I’m going to miss my train. But anyway, how’s tricks in Texas?”

“You’ve got your meeting with Morgan.” He remembered aloud, and I was sort of surprised that he remembered at all, since my schedule is secondary to the calendar in Jack’s Blackberry. “I’ll let you go then. It’s just that I had some fast-breaking news and…never mind. It can wait.”

“What?”

“You go, finish getting ready. We’ll talk later.”

I could hear the pent-up tension in his voice. “What’s going on?”

“Well, the good news is that I’ve been offered a promotion,” he said. “Assistant general manager of a station. Turns out I was right about Bob taking a shining toward me. He likes me. He really, really likes me.”

“Assistant GM? That’s great!” It was the position Jack had his eye on, though we’d speculated that the current assistant GM, Byron Smith, would never leave the job. “So where is Byron going?”

“That’s the snag. The job isn’t at the New York station. They want me to relocate.”

My puff of happiness rapidly deflated. “To Dallas.”

“Actually, they want me in Portland.”

“Maine?” Images of fat red lobster tails and inky blue lakes sailed through my mind like an “I Love Maine” commercial.

“Oregon.”

“What?” I laughed, feeling as if someone had pulled a chair out from under me. “That’s way out West, isn’t it? Cowboy country?”

“Uh, more like lumberjack land, from what I’m hearing. Though apparently they have cowboys, too. Rodeos in the summer. Starbucks and Nordstrom and Nike.”

“Well, we wouldn’t have to give up coffee or shoes.”

“And lots of rain.”

“Like Seattle,” I said, thinking aloud. Seattle was the only thing I could picture from the Northwest, and that was thanks to the sitcom Frasier. Perhaps not the most accurate image. “Did you tell them thanks but no thanks?”

“I didn’t give them an answer. It was so out of the blue, I wasn’t expecting a promotion, and I’m certainly not planning to uproot my family and leave New York.”

His words placed me back on steady ground. Leave New York? Ha! Like that was ever going to happen. “Okay, now I can admit I’m relieved. I suspect your distinctive New York charm won’t play well in lumberjack land, though it sounds like your day is going better than mine.” The doorbell rang and I hurried down the hall, heels clacking on the wood. “Maybe you can parlay this into a position you want. I mean, if they’re offering you assistant GM you’re definitely GM material.”

“Spoken by my biggest fan.”

“You rock, honey. Kristen’s here, so I have to go.”

“Go catch your train. We’ll talk tonight.”

“Love you.” I hung up as Kristen stepped in the door, shaking out her muffler.

“I am so sorry! Some of the students from my sociology class got together at Starbucks for a finals-over thing, and I lost track of time.”

“No problem.” I threw on my coat, grabbing an umbrella when I noticed the wet shoulders of her coat. “Dylan’s asleep. He’s had his meds. His ears again.”

“Oh, poor baby.” She slipped off her Diesels, which seemed amazingly white and clean for a New York winter, and padded to the stairs. Turning toward the door, I flashed back to those twentysomething years, a time when I had some fashion sense, a budget to support a style and a lifestyle to maintain a wardrobe minus drool stains and spills. “I’ll go check on him,” she said. “Good luck at your meeting.”

“Thanks!” I called over my shoulder, ducking into the rain and fumbling to balance my leather satchel fat with manuscript as I opened the umbrella. The sky was stained a deep pewter gray and raindrops bounced on the wet pavement. I headed to the corner where I’d parked the car, pausing at the sidewalk as a big American car thundered by. Its front tires plunged into a pothole filled with water, which sprayed up in my direction.

With a squeal I jumped back, too late. My pants and coat were streaked with muddy water. Great, just great. Thank God I was meeting Morgan and not some stiff publishing mucky-muck.

The toes of my designer boots grew dark with cold saturation as I crossed the street to the corner. Fumbling for my keys, an unsettled feeling came over me as my heel crunched on the crumbling ledge of curb. The Volkswagen Bug on the corner belonged to one of my neighbors, as did the aging Impala behind it. I traipsed on through the rain, disconcerted.

Wait. Where was my car?

I swung around, checking the corner, the cross street.

No sign of my Honda.

The car had vanished…But my heels crunched on a spray of glass clotted with mud by the bumper of the VW Beetle.

Someone had stolen my car.

I hitched my bag onto my shoulder and cradled the umbrella as I slid out my cell phone and speed-dialed Jack.

“It’s raining in New York, I’m going to miss my meeting, my car’s been stolen, and Portland is looking better by the minute,” I said in a voice so calm it surprised even me. “Let’s get the hell out of here. How soon can you start in Portland?”