The Smart One (7 page)

“I’m Max’s clumsy aunt,” Maureen had said. Claire, Martha, Cathy, and Ruth had watched the whole thing with their mouths hanging open. Cleo brushed off her arms and insisted she was okay, that there was no problem. She’d even laughed.

Later in the kitchen, as Weezy poured Maureen a glass of wine, she said, “I told you.”

“You weren’t kidding,” Maureen said. “Good lord.”

It wasn’t that she didn’t expect Max to bring home a lovely, pretty girl. She did. But Cleo was something else altogether. She seemed out of place in their house, like a runway model that had been dropped out of the sky and into their Thanksgiving. She was nearly as tall as Max, and she wore strange, funky outfits that looked amazing on her, like the fake fur vest that kept shedding, so that little tufts flew behind her when she walked, making Will sneeze.

Weezy was immediately worried that she was too much for Max. She wanted Max to date someone just a little less stunning, someone who didn’t seem like she would break his heart so easily. And so, although Cleo seemed perfectly polite and nice, Weezy prayed every day that they would break up.

Claire had defended Cleo. “Just because she’s so pretty doesn’t mean she’s not a good person,” she’d said. Claire was always protective of Max, and she’d gone out of her way to be nice to Cleo.

But Weezy could hear something in Claire’s voice now, like she didn’t want Cleo to go to the shore for some reason. Maybe Claire finally sensed that Cleo wasn’t the right match for Max? Weezy started to ask Claire about it, but Claire interrupted her.

“Okay, Mom. I’ll ask at work and let you know, okay? I’ll call you later.”

Weezy hung up and started to cross the item off her list, but then realized she couldn’t because it wasn’t taken care of yet. She did add
Empty dishwasher
to the list, and then crossed it off, because she’d already done that and it made her feel like she had accomplished something.

She sipped her coffee, which was starting to get cold, and tried to plan out her day. There was so much to do, and already she was exhausted. How was it that even as her children got older, it seemed harder to get things done? It was supposed to be the other way around, she was pretty sure of that. But it seemed like the more she tried to get things in order, the more she tried to corral them, the more they squeezed out of her grasp like a group of little greased pigs, determined to do the opposite of whatever she wanted.

WEEZY COFFEY HAD ONCE BEEN
Louise Keller. No one called her Weezy until she met Will, when they were freshmen at Lehigh University and were seated next to each other in World Civ class. She’d introduced herself as Louise, but the next day Will called out to her from across the quad, “Hey, Weezy!” It made her laugh, made her heart beat faster to hear him call her that. (Of course, if she’d known it was going to stick, she would have put a stop to it right away.)

They were in college, and everyone was new to everyone else, and this crazy nickname took the place of her real name. Half of her friends from college never even knew her as Louise. With time, even her parents and sisters adopted the name, and eventually she just stopped fighting it. She almost forgot that she’d ever been Louise in the first place.

Even her own children sometimes referred to her as Weezy when talking to each other or to their friends. And a couple of times in high school, when Claire was annoyed, she’d say, “Chill, Weeze,” which made her sound like a frozen treat.

Weezy had graduated from Lehigh with a degree in education, even though she had never really wanted to be a teacher. Her mother had pushed her toward it, telling her that it was a doable profession for women. Weezy took a job in a sixth-grade classroom for one year, and then she’d gotten pregnant with Martha and then Claire, and she never went back.

She hadn’t missed it. After her first week of teaching, she knew she wasn’t going to like it, but she had committed to it, so she gave it a try. The kids she taught were right on the brink of adolescence, that time when they don’t quite fit in their bodies, when they can turn nasty in a second and gang up on each other, on teachers, on anyone, really.

It didn’t make sense for Weezy to work those first few years, not with two babies at home. When both of the girls were in school, she’d started looking into other jobs. “But not teaching,” she told Will. She wasn’t even sure that she wanted to go back to work, but she felt like she should. Not for money reasons—they’d actually been quite fortunate, inheriting enough from Will’s father to buy the house, and it wasn’t like they lived an extravagant life. No, it was more that Weezy had always talked about how women had the right to work, how they were equal, and now she felt that she should act on it.

She’d worked on and off for years—at the front desk of a medical office, as the office manager of a small law firm, and most recently at an accounting firm running the day-to-day operations of the office. She’d been there for almost six years, and she couldn’t say she was sorry when they started suggesting they were going to eliminate the position.

The secret she never told anyone—not Will, not Maureen, and certainly not her mother—was that she much preferred the times when she was at home, when she wasn’t working. During those years she was able to make her life more orderly, was able to spend more time with the kids and Will. And even though it had felt chaotic a lot of the time with three kids and a dog, she still loved it.

Her favorite times were Sunday nights, when the house was clean and picked up, the laundry was done, the lunches for school were made and sitting in brown bags in the refrigerator, homework was done, and everyone was asleep. It was those nights when Weezy felt she’d accomplished the most, when the quiet of the house buzzed through her, made her feel like she’d won a prize.

Maybe it would have been different if she’d majored in something besides education, something that she was interested in. But then again, maybe not. Her parents had always told her she was the smart one, right in front of Maureen, like Maureen wasn’t even there. In their eyes, Maureen was the pretty one. “Maureen will marry well,” her mom said once, but that wasn’t true. Maureen had married an awful man, and they’d stayed together long enough to have two kids and then he’d left, moved clear across the country and barely saw his children.

No, it had been Weezy that had married well, married a kind man who was a caring father and a good provider. It had been Maureen who had found a career she loved and raised Cathy and Drew practically on her own. Sometimes Weezy wondered if they’d almost done it on purpose, fulfilled the part of their lives that their parents doubted they would, just to show them they could.

Weezy found herself overcompensating when she talked about women in the workplace, as if her children were going to pick up on her desire to stay at home and get some sort of subliminal message that told them women couldn’t make it. No, she didn’t want that. She couldn’t raise two daughters and let them think there was anything they couldn’t do.

Her rants became almost background noise to her children. They were so used to hearing her go off on the way the world viewed women,
in a commercial, or a TV show, or a billboard. She wanted to make sure that they knew it wasn’t right, but sometimes she wasn’t even sure if they were listening.

She remembered once overhearing a friend of Claire’s say that she “wasn’t a feminist or anything,” and Weezy had scolded her. “Do you know what a feminist is?” she’d asked. “Do you even know what you’re saying by denying that? Do you think you’re worth less simply because you’re a woman?”

The girls had all giggled at being called women. They were twelve and uncomfortable at the thought. Claire had sat there, her face red and hot, trying to get Weezy to stop talking, rolling her eyes to the top of their sockets, saying, “God, Mom, come on, stop!” But Weezy didn’t care. So her child was humiliated by her—so what? Wasn’t that the job of a parent? And when Claire was embarrassed enough to answer back, embarrassed enough to react, well, then at least Weezy knew that she’d been heard.

WEEZY COULD HEAR WILL WALKING
around in his office upstairs on the third floor. Sometimes it sounded like he paced back and forth across the room all day long. Will was the head of the sociology department at Arcadia University, a small liberal arts school near their house. He’d started working there in the eighties, when it was still called Beaver College. It had existed as Beaver College for over a hundred years, but as the Internet grew, parents who went searching for “Beaver College” didn’t find the school’s homepage—instead they found themselves on some pretty disturbing pornography sites. And so the school decided to reinvent itself.

Will was a popular professor at the school, teaching classes in sociology and in cultural anthropology. His most popular class was Society and the Cyberworld, which looked at the way culture changed because of technology. He used the name change of the college as his first example, pretending to be a prospective student as he searched the Internet, then faking his surprise at what he found. He always made the kids laugh, as he covered his eyes and shook his head at the results. His students loved him, found him entertaining and engaging. They
begged to get into his classes, even after they were already full. He was almost a campus celebrity.

Will had written a book in the late eighties called
Video Kids
, which had become something of a phenomenon. It was a look at the effect that television and video games had on children. He hit something in the culture at that moment, and his book had become a best seller. He’d appeared on talk shows, and was still invited to sit on panels and give speeches.

It had been somewhat of an amazing time when the book came out. They’d been plugging along just fine, and then all of a sudden Will was a celebrity. He’d gotten a two-book deal with the publisher, and the movie rights to the book were snatched up. The good news just kept coming, and Will’s job as a professor turned into something much more profitable.

Of course, the next two books that he’d written,
Video Adults
and
The Anger We Teach
, hadn’t done nearly as well. The movie rights were still being optioned by the production company, but at this point there was almost no hope of those books’ ever being made into anything. Will was at work on his fourth book, which he was reluctant to talk about at all. Weezy understood that. She knew he’d been shaken after the mild reception of his two follow-up books. She reminded him that since he started out so high, anything would seem like a letdown. And
Video Kids
was still used as a textbook for college classes all over the country, which made for some nice royalties. But Will had seen his requests for speaking engagements and panels diminish in the past few years, and Weezy knew that he was anxious for another success.

Will had even cut back on his classes this year, and now was home three full days during the week, which took some getting used to. He was teaching three different sections of Society and the Cyberworld, but he could do the class in his sleep and he had teaching assistants, so it wasn’t a big time commitment.

It was amazing to Weezy that Will could spend days locked away, studying how other people lived their lives and what it meant for them, and how the culture influenced choices, and vice versa, but she could barely get him to talk about his children for more than five minutes.
His attitude was that they were grown, that he and Weezy had done their job and now it was up to the children to choose their own paths. It drove Weezy up the wall.

“What do you want me to say?” Will would ask sometimes, when she went on about Claire’s calling off the engagement.

“I want you to have an opinion,” Weezy said. “I want to know what you think.”

“I think Claire’s a smart girl. I think if she thinks it was the right decision, then it was.” And that was all he offered.
Claire’s a smart girl
. Like she was just a distant relative he didn’t know that well, instead of their own daughter. They’d always assumed Claire would be fine. She was the most independent one, the one who was ready to live on her own by age five. But then, last year, Claire’s plans had all fallen apart, and Weezy felt like they’d failed her, like they hadn’t been paying enough attention. Will still believed she’d work it out.

Weezy wanted to shake him until he got some sense. “These are our children,” she wanted to say. “Our flesh and blood, the people we made, and you really don’t care what they do with their lives?”

WHY DID EVERYONE ACT LIKE
it was so wrong of her to want her children to be happy and healthy and successful and settled? Wasn’t that what everyone wanted for their children? Was she really supposed to stop caring, stop getting involved, now that they could vote and drive?

Will always pointed out that he and Weezy hadn’t had the same support that they gave their kids. “Once I was eighteen, I was on my own,” Will said. And Weezy knew that he was right, but why did they have to raise their children the same way they’d been raised? That didn’t seem right. Wasn’t there some sort of cultural evolution that took place? Will of all people should be interested in that.

Her children were her greatest accomplishment. Wasn’t that what every mother said? Well, it was true. And Weezy didn’t know how she was supposed to stop being a mother now. She’d grown them, raised them, and now she was still raising them and she probably would be until she died. What was wrong with that?

Weezy had loved being pregnant. It had agreed with her—everyone
said so. She didn’t have any of the vomiting or swollen ankles that Maureen and her friends had. Her cheeks got rosy when she was pregnant, and she loved the feeling of her babies swimming inside, loved watching her stomach move with the fists and the feet of the baby. Toward the end of each pregnancy, she mourned just a little. She was excited for the baby to come, but she knew the things that went with it: bottles, diapers, spit-up. She loved how neat and tidy being pregnant was, carrying everything with you, giving the baby everything it needed without having to think about it.