Growing Girls (24 page)

“No,” he agrees.

“I just have a lot of responsibilities,” I say. “Any mother does. Anyone who takes the job seriously. And then when you throw work on top of it, it’s … a lot.”

“Of course.”

“But it does not mean I have excessive compulsive disorder.”

“No,” he says. “If you did have obsessive-compulsive disorder, you wouldn’t be calling it’ excessive compulsive disorder.’”

I look at him. “Is that what I said? ‘Excessive compulsive disorder’?”

“About sixteen times,” he says.

Oh. “Well, that’s good news then, isn’t it?”

“I think so.”

I climb into bed. We stare at the TV. He eats his ice cream. I close my eyes and begin a list of all the things I am not going to worry about if and when I awake at 4 a.m., as per usual, which I know is a recipe for insomnia and so I yank myself free. I start counting backwards by threes, get stuck at seventy-two. I say my ABCs. Nothing is working. I try Anna’s guardian angel prayer, slightly edited.
No dreams for Mommy until she’s, um, dead, amen
.

I drop like a bomb into sleep. I do not have any dreams. In
the morning I awake, stretch, look out the window, and prepare myself for another day of forgiving the ducks. Where are the ducks? Every morning they’re usually right here, outside the bedroom window, pecking through the geraniums for bugs. Why aren’t they here? I throw my sandals on and head down to the pond to see if perhaps God has taken care of this job overnight; the sight of nine gleefully splashing ducks would certainly fit my mood on this post-perfect-sleeper morning. “Hallelujah, ducks!” I will say.

But no. I find them leaping into the air, one, two, three, taking turns trying to access a puddle formed at the bottom of the girls’ tire swing.

“This, ducks, is getting embarrassing.”

So, Zoe’s mom just called to say Zoe is expressing some confusion about Captain Jesus. We have just completed day three of camp.

“Mom, I thought Jesus was dead,” Zoe reportedly said. “The nails through the hands? The cross?”

“Well, He did die, honey, but you know that’s not the end of the story.” She started to remind Zoe of Easter.

“So He came back as a captain? He drives a boat?”

“No, honey. That’s not the real Jesus.”

“Yes it is, Mom. He is real. I saw Him.”

“No, sweetie, that one’s more like a mascot. Like, at Disney World?”

This explanation apparently did not help Zoe sort through her spiritual crisis.

I tell Zoe’s mom that it’s probably very good Zoe is articulating her confusion about Jesus returning to earth as a nautical figure. I tell her Anna has yet to even mention the captain, although at night she has been walking around our house in song:

“Love one anudder. hove one anudder. hove one anudder … as I have loved you.”

She was already on to the second verse before I had a chance to correct her:

“Care for each udder
…”

I was so afraid of the possibility of finding out that Anna thought this was a song about cows that I decided to just let it go.

She is such an unaware child. Academically, she is rungs ahead of her classmates, but ask her what she had for lunch and she will look at you blankly. She will, no doubt, grow up to be a book-smart person with little common sense and dressed, now and again, as a kitty. She has been dressing as a kitty on and off since she was two, a headband of fuzzy ears, feather boa wrapped around her waist to simulate a tail, and whiskers painted on.

“Face it, she’s eccentric,” my sister Claire recently said. This when she got wind of the fact that Anna had started sleeping with the ice bag on her head, and the ice chips on her night-stand. She just wanted to sleep … surrounded by ice.

“Whew,” Claire said. “Eccentric.”

“And your point is?”

“I just want to understand her mind—”

I suppose I could try to curtail Anna’s odd behaviors, try to rein her in, but why? What good would it do? She’s a happy kid. She’s well behaved. She does well in school and has begun to form friendships. Sometimes I imagine her having been adopted by another mother, someone with little patience for neurotic behavior, someone who would try to
reason
with her and I think,
Whew
. She landed in the right place.

If I have one overarching responsibility to her and her sister, I suppose it is in applauding them as they grow, unhindered, into the people they are aching to be.

It isn’t until day four of camp that Anna finally comes home with a Jesus observation. “Mom, Jesus goes to camp,” she says.

“Oh?”

“Yeah, He comes off a boat,” she says. “But not a real one. It’s, like, cardboard.”

“Oh.”

“But Jesus is real, right?”

“Well, of course Jesus is real, but—” I don’t quite know how to field this one, and I wonder if perhaps she and Zoe have been sharing spiritual doubts. I’m so happy she’s asking. I’m so happy for this opportunity. What is a mother’s number one job if not to guide her child through life’s mysteries? “I mean, Jesus is always with us,” I say.

“Well, He sure knows a lot of songs,” she says. “He has a good voice.”

“That’s … good.”

“Then He goes behind a curtain, but I don’t know what happens to Him back there.”

“Oh, I’m sure He’s fine back there,” I say.

“Oh, I’m sure He’s fine,” she says. “He probably gets a hamburger. Plus He has to feed His cats.”

“Jesus has cats?”

She shrugs.

“Did they teach you today that Jesus has cats?” What the hell kind of camp is this?

“No,” she says. “I don’t know how I know that. Sometimes you just know things, Mommy.”

“Right.”

In Anna’s mind, all is fine with Jesus, so I don’t see any point in pushing it. But then again I sort of do. I stand here with my lips pushed out and my eyeballs stuck up in the ten o’clock position, the very portrait of competence.

In a happy turn of events, a few days later the ducks find the pond. They’re down there swimming hysterically, gleefully bobbing their heads in and out, and so we all go down to watch. It is one of God’s minor works, I know, but these days I am clinging to any miracle I can get.

the young folks’ home

“Inside every old person is a young person trying to get out.” This is my mother’s maxim for the weekend. She often has one of these sayings she walks around with. I’m certain she makes them up, but her authoritative delivery has a way of suggesting Aristotle or Benjamin Franklin.

The new saying has been her refrain as she watches her granddaughters, with their infinite energy. She keeps catching herself. She thinks, for a split second, that she can jump out onto the driveway and join them on their tricycles, and then, in a burst of awareness, she remembers.

“Inside every old person—” she says.

“I know, Mom,” I say. “You already told me.”

This is the first time in about four years that my parents have visited our house. It is, in that way, a big deal. All
their previous attempts over these past years were thwarted by illness—a broken hip, a heart thing, an intestine thing, a whole bunch of undiagnosed things, neuropathy. “Face it,” my mom told me last summer, “we’re too old.”

Her surrender only made me more determined to help my parents make the five-hour trek to my house. Recently I cooked up a deal with my brother, who would drive them out. When it finally looked like it was really going to happen, I got on to the business of worrying. Would they be comfortable here? We live on a slope. We have a lot of mud. We’re hardly handicapped-accessible. Would they be able to handle the noise of my rambunctious girls? And all the stinky pets?

So I reserved a room for them at a nearby hotel. One of those suite places with a walk-in shower and no steps. I washed the dogs. I told my girls, “Now listen, they’re
old
, so you can’t be bashing into them.”

“They could fall over?” Anna asked.

“They could fall over,” I said.

“Well, I would like to find out how they got so old,” she said.

My parents took on celebrity status as we prepared for the visit. Actual old people
in our house
! We see plenty of senior citizens when we visit my parents in their retirement village, but this would be the first time my girls had them on the home turf. I didn’t think the novelty factor would last. In fact, I worried that my kids would quickly grow bored with the old folks, as kids do. I figured my job for the weekend would be to keep the old folks entertained, while at the same time keeping the kids … quiet.

And now look. We’re already on day three of the visit, and
the novelty has not worn off. At the moment, the two old people and the two young people are hunkered down together in my living room. It’s raining outside. My mom is on the couch drawing pictures of cats and witches and rainbows with Anna. On the big leather chair next to them, my dad is all smiles and applause, as he watches Sasha dance and bow and curtsy.

I’m watching this. I’m thinking: Well, this isn’t a disaster at all. I’m marveling at just how well old people fit with very young people, and vice versa.

Sasha is all flirt. My father is all flirt. These two have discovered each other in a way they never have been able to before, when we’re at the retirement village and all the cousins are around. Sasha has been following my dad, curling up next to him and, in her Sasha-speak, whispering in his ear. “Bess frenz, Granddat,” she said this morning. “Bess frenz.”

Anna, the artsy sister, has taken charge of my mother, an artist who had her muse largely stolen by a body of aches and pains. My mom has not drawn this much in years. She has found in Anna a mission: “You’re going to be an artist when you grow up, aren’t you, sweetie?”

Anna looks at her with gentle confusion. “I
am
an artist,” she says.

The two have been working all day on a picture book about how people get old. Anna thinks her hair will get curly like Grandmom’s and that she’ll walk on very skinny legs.

It has gone on like this, these four people, two old, two young, forming a club that excludes the likes of me. I’m the cooker and the cleaner and the driver. I wonder if I’ve ever been so happily irrelevant.

When the rain stops, Sasha is the first to react. She grabs her shoes, then finds my father’s shoes. She wants to take him out to the sliding board. He says, well, then, let’s go get a towel and dry that sliding board off! My mother protests. She says he won’t be able to climb the hill to the swing set. My father says, yes, he will. My mother says, well, then, he has to take her cane. The negotiations continue. Eventually, I stand with my mother at the kitchen window and we watch my father out there splashing in puddles.

“Inside every old person is a young person trying to get out,” she says.

Yeah, well, I guess he made it.

the foggiest notion

In the beginning there was fog. That’s how that one should have started. Every new idea, the dawning of every adventure, begins in the worst kind of fog—thick, murky slop you can’t see through and so you half consider pulling over and going to sleep.

Alex is plugging along. He’s just chattering away up there, leaning forward as if that will help with visibility, telling stories about the good old days in college, and quoting Voltaire.

We’re in the pickup. It’s after 2 a.m. We are somewhere in the mountains of West Virginia, driving home, and I’m squished back here in the so-called “extended cab” portion of the truck, Anna snoring on my left shoulder and Sasha’s head, hot with dreams, resting on my thigh.

Behind us we’re towing a horse trailer and inside the horse trailer we have “À Votre Santé,” an enormous four-year-old
Standardbred gelding, and “Strong Fort,” an even more enormous ten-year-old Thoroughbred gelding. Both of these big boys, with a combined weight of well over three thousand pounds, are retired racehorses, and we are taking them home to live with us.

I can’t believe we’re doing this. I can’t believe no one in this truck is saying, “I can’t believe we’re doing this.” Even I think we’re lunatics, and I’m usually the one cooking up schemes like this, owing in part to my failure to fully tame my inner Lucy Ricardo and my inner Ethel Mertz.