Growing Girls Read online

  He wasn’t thinking. He was doing. He had the sheep in position, holding her steady by the chest, grabbing her close between his legs. She had no energy to fight. He pointed the gun at the back of her head. Did he need me for this? Should I stay?

  I could tell he was going to do it. I could tell there was no turning back. My face was hot and I ran in fear, just took off as fast as I could as I held my hands to my ears as hard as I could and I ran, a chicken, a stupid chickenhearted excuse for a wife. I ran.

  The pow was more vibration than sound. I felt it through my feet. It was only one shot. I came running inside and I didn’t want Ellen to see me cry so I ran to the bed and covered my head with pillows.

  “Meee! Meee!” The lamb was out there screaming for her mom, with no reply. None of the aunts filled the void with an answer. None of the goats, nobody. The lamb just kept screaming into the blankness. Say what you will about nature, but nature is cruel and maybe this fact alone helps us forgive our own darkest sins.

  It took an hour before Alex came in. He had cleaned everything up. He had taken the body up on the hill, put it in a large pile of brush, and burned it. It was all so very far out of my league.

  He looked like hell.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, but he didn’t seem to hear me.

  “I’m sorry!” he said. “I saw you running, I saw you covering your ears.” He was close to tears. “You know I never did anything like that before. I never killed anything before. I know you think I’m evil now.”

  I held him. I told him we were so far out of our league. Gretta would have just gone ahead and made sausage. We had no idea what we were doing, or maybe the problem was we did.

  The lamb was still screaming. I told Alex what I heard in that cry, Anna and Sasha and the ghost-mothers. He said he heard himself, still crying for the mom he had lost decades ago. It happens all the time, a child loses a mother. It happens all the time.

  We went down to try to calm the lamb down, but nothing we could think of doing worked.

  Powerless, we told ourselves we would just have to get used to this. Powerless.

  love, kindergarten style

  Report from the playground:

  The news came from other mothers, from nannies, even from other kids, but not from Anna, who seemed, as is her way, oblivious.

  It was big news. Michael had a girlfriend. Anna had a boyfriend. Here it was: Michael and Anna, the first kindergarten couple.

  I should have seen the signs. In her backpack each day I would find drawings of green and orange and blue superheroes, some with supersonic goo shooting from their eyeballs. “To Anna from Michael,” the pictures would say. Then one day Anna got her first-ever time-out from a teacher. The offense: “Bopping Michael on the head.”

  Love was in the air. I got the full story from Michael’s mother.

  “I can’t sit next to you anymore,” Michael had said to Elaine, the nanny who had devoted her previous five years to his care. “I can only sit next to Anna.” It was a major topic of dinnertime conversation in Michael’s house. After weeks of hearing about Anna’s every move in school, his mother finally said: “What is it about Anna? Is she really nice to you?”

  “Oh, she’s nice to me,” he said. “But she’s so beautiful.”

  He announced that Anna was his girlfriend, and that was that. “They’re really good together,” said one of their classmates to me one morning by the lockers. Other kids reported on Michael’s acts of heroism. When Stevie accidentally knocked Anna over on the playground, Michael ran to her. She was hurt. She was crying. Michael soothed her. “I just petted her and petted her until she felt better,” Michael proudly told his mother.

  I asked Anna about the incident, and she confirmed the details, adding, “He’s a great man.”

  As the weeks went on, I found myself pushing for news, hoping for bits of intrigue like you do when you read People magazine. “So, did anything happen with Michael today?” I would say on the ride home from school.

  “No, but Zoe had a hole in her tights,” she said once. Much of her news has been of this ilk, and so I’ve come to depend on Michael’s mother and others to keep me apprised.

  Inevitably, the crisis occurred: Tritan. He had been Michael’s best friend for two entire years. And now Michael was too busy for him. Too busy with a girl, of all things. For a while Tritan merely stepped aside, occasionally looking glum. Then he made his move. Michael was handing out invitations to his Halloween party. When he turned to give one to Victoria, Tritan dashed forth. “You can’t do that!” he said. “Because she’s mine!” Victoria was reportedly surprised by the news, but not disappointed. And so Michael found in himself a streak of valor. He did not give the invitation to Victoria but rather handed it to Tritan to give to her. “I had to,” he later explained. “Because he is my friend.”

  So this, so far, is it: Michael and Anna. Tritan and Victoria. The two happy couples of kindergarten. You can tell that Tritan and Victoria are still in the honeymoon stage, with Victoria only recently getting in trouble for yanking Tritan around by the neck. Michael and Anna have moved on to spats. She got mad at him yesterday; she said he stepped on her foot and would not apologize. He continued to refuse to apologize, despite his mothers insistence in the parking lot after school. “I didn’t do anything,” he said. “And she tried to kiss me.”

  Anna vehemently denies the charges.

  It’s hard to know where this relationship will go. Last night I overheard Anna talking on the phone to the cousin she hasn’t seen since summer. “I have a boyfriend,” she announced casually. “His name is Michael. He has black hair, and his pencil box broke.”

  Tritan and Victoria have already consulted each other on the costumes they plan to wear to Michael’s Halloween party. He’s going to be “an amazing superhero,” and she’s going to be “a beautiful Barbie bride.”

  Anna wants to be a duck.

  Michael’s mother has expressed her concern. “A duck? Are you sure she doesn’t want to be Cinderella or something?” She says Michael is having trouble holding in his heart the truth that Anna is actually going to attend this party. His princess is really coming to his house?

  Yes, and she’s going to be a duck.

  He’s going to be Spider-Man. I have expressed my concern. Anna has been afraid of Spider-Man since she was two. It is as close to a phobia as anything she has. Last summer she noticed a picture of Spider-Man on our Rice Krispies box, and she took the box outside and flung it in the compost pile.

  I’m looking forward to going to Michael’s Halloween party. An amazing superhero and a beautiful Barbie bride. You can see potential there. But a monster of a Spider-Man and an oblivious duck? I just don’t know.

  holy days of obligation

  Life is a promise; fulfill it.

  —MOTHER TERESA

  Our ducks were two-day-old ducklings when we got them and somewhere along the line maybe we did something wrong. Maybe that’s why they’re stupid. All grown up now, nine handsome and rigorous characters, these ducks still can’t find our pond. They hang out together in the barnyard, desperately slopping about in any available puddle, the horse trough, a wayward bucket, when just over the bank—about a sixty-second waddle away—is a pond full of lily pads and bugs and cool spring water.

  With patience and forgiveness we have escorted them to the pond. We have chased them there and tried to explain. Each time they simply quack neurotically, fitfully, and hightail it back on up to the barnyard.

  One hot week I got to feeling sorry for them, so I filled up our little Barbie swimming pool, which they loved. But Alex said I was probably just enabling them so eventually we dumped out the water and went back to chasing them over the bank.

  “I’m done worrying about this, ducks!” I shout out my window. “I don’t even care anymore!” If they want to be dryland ducks, so be it. I have provided for them a suitable wetland habitat. I have shown them the way to it. I have done all I can do.

  Sti
ll, they look so pathetic down there on the driveway, fighting over space in a pothole filled up with rain.

  Alex took the girls to the swim club, as a favor to help me get through what is left of this, my rotten day. The idea was to give me some quiet time, some work time, a good three-hour chunk to tend to all the stuff I never got to, on account of the day rotting. It was a kind gesture on his part, it really was, but the fact of the matter is I now feel even worse. All I can do besides worry about the ducks is think of Alex and the girls at the swim club. I think of splashing and frolicking on this sticky night, laughing as the girls play with the plastic blow-up dolphins I won for them last night at the church fair. One of the dolphins is orange and the other is green and I won them by knocking the teeth out of a big, wooden mouth with the little beanbags they gave you, three for a dollar. Go, Mommy! Yay, Mommy! I figured out that if you just whacked the mouth hard enough with the beanbag it didn’t matter where you hit it because the force would make the whole display jiggle and the teeth would fall out from the vibration. Not once until long after my victory did it occur to me that this technique might be considered cheating (the point of the game was to aim), especially there at a church fair where all proceeds more or less go toward salvation. No, I just fired the beanbags, fwoom, fwoom, fwoom, and when the teeth fell I jumped victoriously, took the orange dolphin as if it were my God-given right, and then I repeated the whole thing for the green dolphin.

  “Go, Mommy!” I said, putting the power of suggestion firmly and distinctly right there in the hot summer night air. It’s important to sometimes help your children see you as the phenomenon that you are. “Go, Mommy! Yay, Mommy!”

  The girls did not repeat the mantra, but it hung there, sure it did, like a little tag-along balloon.

  Go, Mommy. Yay, Mommy. Have a beer, Mommy. Go soak your stupid head.

  Rotten day. This is the way your brain works on rotten days. Little imaginings go from sweet to sour and lead you straight down that spiral staircase of self-loathing.

  Last night I had a dream set at Gym Dandy’s gymnastics studio, which is where, in real life, Anna and Sasha take tumbling classes on Tuesdays from five-thirty to seven-thirty. Two hours is a long time to stand around a gymnastics studio, let me assure you, but Anna is too old for Roll Tots and Sasha is too young for Kinder Tots, so I had to sign them up for separate classes. In the dream I showed up at Gym Dandy’s at the usual time, but it turned out I had forgotten all about the fact that this was the night of the big gym show. All the kids but mine were dressed in their lime green sparkle outfits, ready to perform. “Wait!” I said, insisting that I could be back in twenty minutes with the outfits, if they would be kind enough to afford me one chance to be the hero. I bolted, zoomed home, grabbed the bag with the outfits, but then on the way back I got lost. Around and around in circles I went, as the clock ticked. Then I looked in the seat beside me and noted that the bag I had grabbed did not have green sparkle outfits in it, but rather green butterfly costumes. Wrong bag! Wrong outfits! Now I was lost, late, and without sparkle outfits, a perfect trifecta of motherhood malfunction.

  I’ve had dozens of test-anxiety dreams in my life, those nightmares everybody gets when you show up for school having forgotten all about the big exam, or you show up for work having forgotten all about the big presentation. I believe this one to be my first test-anxiety dream: Mom edition.

  I couldn’t get back to sleep so I put on CNN and soon enough had to try to stop thinking about the fourteen-year-old girl swimming in the Florida panhandle who had just met a most violent death in the teeth of an eight-foot-long bull shark.

  Hmm, I thought. Hmm. Then I sang my ABCs, trying to lull myself back to sleep. Then I tried counting backwards from one hundred by threes, which I can never do, so I went by ones, and then the rooster started crowing and so of course the birds started chirping and then I could smell the coffeemaker going, which Alex sets up to start automatically at six.

  Whatever. How many recent nights have I spent this way? How many nights so full of drama and information and failed attempts to go backwards by threes and ABCs and spiraling thoughts of inadequacy? Increasingly the thoughts are not of things I’ve done to fail my children, but of all the holes. The missed opportunities. The afghan I never knitted when they were tiny. The “life book” I never started in the “scrapbooking” class I never took to learn how to lovingly mount their first lopped locks of baby hair. The photos I never took of them frolicking in fields of daisies with puppy dogs yipping and yapping about. The kites we haven’t flown on the sunny beaches filled with laughter and happiness. We’ve done plenty of these sorts of beautiful things, but not nearly all of the other specifically beautiful things I seem to have on my list; how do you know what is enough and how do you stop yourself from feeling that nothing ever is?

  I might be hanging out with the wrong people. If I spent more time with my friends from work instead of my new mom friends, maybe I wouldn’t have a to-do list so crammed with fantasies. This morning, after the night of insomnia, I saw my new mom friends and that’s when things really went downhill. It wasn’t their fault. I love these women. Zoe’s mom, Kaitlin’s mom, Victoria’s mom, and Tritan’s mom. These women have their own actual first names, which I have never had the courage to use. I am not entirely sure these women exist outside their roles as mothers; when I am with them I don’t either. We have been circling around each other for about three years, ever since our kids started preschool. We’d bump into each other in the parking lot, at Valentine’s Day parties, and later as one or the other shyly suggested we all sign our kids up for soft-ball, gymnastics, dance. You do enough of these things together, you bond.

  We decided to sign the kids up for a little summer day camp and today was the first day. I trudged up there with Anna with my bleary eyes, the world already feeling all heavy and too much. It turned out that the camp, which was run by the church that runs our school, was a whole lot more Jesus than what I thought it would be. Upon entering, Anna received a “Shape up and ship out with Jesus” T-shirt and then Captain Jesus showed up to take the kids aboard the USS CHRISTline, but not before inviting the parents to attend the Captain Jesus Dinner Cruise on Wednesday night at six-thirty featuring Hawaiian Ham Salad and a Surprise Island Dessert.

  “Wow,” I wanted to say to my new mom friends, and “Whoa.” But I didn’t know any of them well enough to seek spiritual advice. What sort of religious indoctrination were our children about to receive? Would they undergo exorcisms in the basement? Would they be asked to handle snakes? The charismatic bent was never anything I had run into at school. One of the things I like about having my girls in Catholic school is that I went to Catholic school so I know all the prayers and I’ve already done plenty of work around doubt, anger, and forgiveness, so I have some sense of how to steer. But I’ve never been aboard the USS CHRISTline. No, I have not.

  Zoe’s mom had sent Zoe to the camp the year before and had loved it. She was still all gung-ho, so I found myself trusting her and kissing Anna and shooing her along inside, then closing my eyes and just praying, which under the circumstances seemed oddly conflictual.

  “So how about we go to Bob Evans for breakfast?” Kaitlin’s mom said, in the parking lot. Everyone said yes to Bob Evans, except me. I had to work, I said. I had deadlines, I said.

  “But you have to eat!” Victoria’s mom said.

  “I already had my banana,” I said, pathetically. I didn’t quite know how to explain that a Bob Evans breakfast would fill me to the point of needing a nap, as opposed to even a hope of a good day of writing. Nor did I think my work habits to be of much interest to anyone, so I said goodbye, drove off, called Alex on my cell phone.

  “Yo, Captain Jesus has invited us on a dinner cruise aboard the USS CHRISTline” I said.

  “Whoa,” he said. And “Wow.”

  God bless him.

  “What kind of camp is this?” he said.

  “I think pretty innocuous,” I said, reassuring
him that I didn’t think Anna’s soul was about to get co-opted by some loonies. “I’m thinking they just went a little overboard with the need for a theme.”

  “All right,” he said, generously. His Jewishness and my Catholicism have coexisted with remarkable peace and tranquility, but the obvious fact is he does the bulk of the compromising.

  “All my new friends went to Bob Evans for breakfast,” I said, and I must have sounded forlorn.

  “You should go with them,” he said.

  “You know I can’t,” I said.

  “Yes, you can.”

  “I have calls to make, a million e-mails before I even get started on my chapter.”

  “You can take an hour.”

  “I’ll never get anything done if I eat a Bob Evans biscuit,” I said.

  “You can have a coffee,” he said. “And they probably have fruit there.”

  “Yeah.”

  I hung up, kept driving toward home, wondering how a person could feel this miserable about not going to Bob Evans, and if anyone else ever did. I was sick of being a working mom. Career shmameer! I wanted to be a regular old mom. I wanted to be a beefy lady choosing the one-stop-shopping convenience at the Super Wal-Mart. A lady with three screeching kids tugging at her shorts and a baby in the shopping cart and a case of Slim-Fast underneath that she would swear she would drink instead of any more of those damn SpaghettiOs.

  Those kinds of moms, I thought, now those are the kinds of moms who knit afghans and make life books and mount locks of baby hair. Why am I answering the call of a nagging, stupid career, instead of just being one of those kinds of moms?

  Worse—I am trying to do both. Like so many women, I am trying to do both. How ridiculous. What a perfect setup for failure.

  Too damn much. Work plus motherhood, the weight of conflicting responsibility on top of responsibility. Driving home, still half-drunk from my night of insomnia, I wondered if my problems sleeping weren’t just this. Nothing so spectacular. Responsibility piled onto responsibility. Just too damn much.