Growing Girls Read online

  “Iss,” she said, pointing to the TV, which was also now broken.

  I wondered if this was a sin of some sort, wishing a lightning-inspired miracle upon my child. I wondered if that was tantamount to suggesting to God that I thought my child needed‘a miracle, that His work up to that point wasn’t quite up to snuff.

  I went to find Alex to get his opinion on the matter, but he was busy in the bathroom noticing that the ceiling fan was blown. It once was white but now it was brown, burnt around the edges. The lightning had zapped it, too.

  “You were standing under this thing, soaking wet,” Alex correctly pointed out. I was right here in the shower when the lightning came into our house and mixed everything up and burnt holes in our walls. “I just don’t understand why it didn’t zap through you, too,” he said.

  We stood there staring up at the burnt ceiling fan.

  “Jeeezus—” he said.

  I walked around with that one for the rest of the summer and into the fall, noticing a most fervent and eager desire to stay alive. Poof! It could have been me, fried from the inside out with one quick zap. Poof! I imagined over and over again and too many times what would happen to Alex and to the girls if I up and died; I imagined all the trouble, all the subtracting, and then I went to get all the routine checkups I was overdue on. My gynecologist told me I had fibrocystic breasts—she said they were like oatmeal—not that that in itself was a problem, just that I’d need a diagnostic mammogram, not a regular one, meaning they would take extra pictures and maybe do a sonogram. The mammogram place was all atriums and skylights, very modern and cheerful, and try as she might the radiologist with the long ponytail just couldn’t get the look she wanted. She kept calling me back in for more X-rays, and more, and more, and in between X-rays I sat in that dark room with the sound of little fans whirring and waited. “We’re just going to have to take another.” This went on for more than two hours with no one explaining anything to me, which I did not take as a good sign. Waiting in a room alone like that, waiting for someone to come tell you what sort of monstrous tumor they were all so fascinated by, or ten monstrous tumors, or perhaps sixteen smaller ones, waiting in the dark like that is a fine time to take note of exactly just how far fear can propel the imagination. Soon I found myself curled up into a tight little ball, arms wrapped around my legs and feet purple and freezing, and I was in tears. The crying wasn’t about dying so much, not about fear of the great unknown—really any of that. The crying was buried in the thought: Well, now what? Another mother gone. First the ghost-mother, then the adoptive mother; they’d see pictures of me in their scrapbook. Remember her? Oh, yeah, she’s one of those moms we had early on, right? Another mother gone. How much subtraction could these girls take?

  Nothing, as it turned out, was wrong with me. They didn’t find any tumors or even pre-tumors. And I didn’t get hit by lightning. And my blood pressure was normal and so was my cholesterol. Nothing was wrong with me except that now, in a way I never knew before, now I was a person who couldn’t read a book on the beach, now I was a person who knew a kind of tired that went deep into my bones, the fatigue of mothering that could lead a person into prison fantasies. Now, really for the first time, now I mattered.

  fashion statement

  We’re working in the barn, putting down some hay. Anna in this moment is just two and a half. She has hold of a rake, and she’s mirroring my every move. Except I do not have a pink tutu around my waist to negotiate. The tutu, which features several layers of tulle, each edged with sparkles, has an elastic waist. Thank goodness. How else would it fit over her snow jacket? It’s an amusing look, the sort that would send a lot of parents running for cameras, and later, into slaps of laughter. Oh, look at that silly getup you put on that day!

  I have stacks of pictures like this. I stopped taking tutu pictures months ago, when it became clear that this was more than just a moment to capture. Anna now wears her tutu to the playground, to the grocery store, to the zoo, to bed, everywhere. I keep two backup tutus hidden in a drawer in case of emergency. Like so many little girls her age, she has embraced dance. She’s a twirler, a slider, a leaper. Recently she learned that, somewhere in this world, there are tap shoes. She saw a girl in a movie going clickety clack with her feet, and understood it as destiny.

  “Oh, I’ll die if my kid goes into a tutu stage,” my friend Wendy said. “But don’t feel too embarrassed. She’s bound to grow out of it.” Embarrassed? It had actually never occurred to me to be embarrassed, although I was certainly getting weary of the questions from strangers. (No, Anna is not now enrolled in ballet lessons. Yes, she probably will be someday. Uh-huh, she sure loves that tutu.) But embarrassed? I wasn’t, after all, the one in the tutu. Nor was I, however, ignorant of the reality that a child’s outfit can be a billboard announcing the parenting style of the attached parent. Hello, world, lam a mother who allows her kid to pick out her own clothes. Yup. I figured the tutu stage might be a dry run for a day about eleven years from now when Anna comes home with green hair and lots of nose piercings. How will I be? Will I be a parent who encourages self-expression? Or one who cracks the whip and disciplines free-thinking right out? I believe, at least in the abstract, in the lessons taught by the former. “I am a parent who encourages self-expression!” I announced to Wendy, and I fluffed Anna’s tutu. This was back before she wore out her white tutu, precipitating a need for a purple, which she wore out; we have recently moved on to pink.

  “Oh man, if it were me I’d toss the tutus,” my sister Claire said. She has three kids, two of them toddlers, and said the tutu deal would not fly in her house. “Mom is in charge in our house.”

  First Wendy, now Claire. Busted. Apparently, I was indulging my child by allowing her to have as much tutu as she wanted. Like sugar. I got defensive. I said lots of kids have security blankets, binkies they haven’t grown out of, stuffed animals with little stuffing left. Surely good parenting isn’t a matter of depriving your child of the thing that makes her feel secure.

  “No,” Claire said. “But you need to set limits to establish who’s boss.” Of course. I reevaluated my stance on the tutu issue, which really hadn’t been an issue before. Be the boss. Establish boundaries. Set rules as to when the tutu is acceptable and when it is not.

  Yes, well. I suppose I haven’t made a lot of progress. Exhibit A: the tutu over the snow jacket that Anna is sporting today. When is this going to end? What have I done? Is it too late?

  “Okay, sweetie, I think we’re done here,” I say, wrapping up the twine from the distributed bales of hay. “Let’s go up to the house and get cleaned up.” We have errands to run, a day of shopping. Anna does not want to get changed. Anna wants to wear this same outfit to the mall. As if. Does she think I’m some pushover of a mother? “Listen, we do not wear stinky barn clothes to the mall,” I say, all strict and righteous. “That is the rule.”

  Soon enough she agrees to clean purple slacks and a clean purple shirt, and when it comes time to choose coats, she picks her favorite leopard-print faux fur. “Anna’s tutu?” she says, handing it to me.

  “Are you sure, honey?” I say.

  She throws me a look that is half horror and half exasperation. You expect me to go out in public without a tutu?

  I take a deep breath. I help her get the tutu on. The coat is thick and robs her of any semblance of a waist, so the tutu is about as wide up top as it is at the bottom. “Glasses?” she says. “Anna’s glasses?” She finds her sunglasses, a purple plastic pair given to her by her otherwise wise and loving father.

  Well, then. She looks up at me. Are you ready?

  At the mall, I don’t bother looking at the people staring. I don’t want to talk about it. Yeah, this is my fabulous child. Yeah, I’m the mother of the girl in the getup. I try to get Wendy’s voice out of my head, and Claire’s. I am a mother who encourages self-expression. Surely there is something good about this.

  The display in the front of the Payless shoe store calls Anna as
if put there by her own private angel. “Tap shoes!” she cries. “Tap shoes!” An entire rack of shiny patent leather shoes with bright silver cleats.

  “Mommy, look! Tap shoes!”

  Would another parent refuse? Would another parent steer her child away? We find a size 6.1 tie the silky laces. They fit just fine. “Anna’s tap shoes!” she says, standing up. They’re only 111.99. Would another parent refuse?

  The shoes do not disappoint. The shoes offer her a completeness that will take years to understand and name. She clicks and clacks and swishes and twirls, then, through the mall, her head bent so she can watch her magic feet. “Anna’s tap shoes!” she exclaims on the downbeat, and on the upbeat, too. It is a sight to behold. It is joy in motion, all happiness and delight spinning by Hickory Farms and Spencer’s Gifts and right on through the food court, too. The surly teenager cracking gum, the cranky old man arguing with a clerk about change, the sad old lady drooping her shoulders low and lower still—everyone looks up, everyone looks to see where that clickity clack sound is coming from. They look and see her, a round girl in leopard and tulle and purple shades. A one-girl parade. They look and they are transported to some small better place, smile after smile, like a wave.

  a stupid feud

  We decided the heck with George. We decided to get our own damn sheep. This was after many hours of consideration.

  Our back hill is about twenty acres wide and in some places the drop is as sudden as a cliff. When we first moved here, Alex mowed that hill with his big blue farm tractor, and we both nearly had heart attacks, him from aiming straight down like that, strapped to the tractor seat with a nylon belt, and me from just watching and wondering how it would be if he and the tractor ended up tumbling into the kitchen.

  “So you’re the guy who mowed that hill,” neighbor farmers would say to Alex in the hardware store. Apparently, news that someone had actually taken a tractor to that cliff had hit the old-time farmer circuit as a piece of lore no one was sure was true or not.

  “Yup,” Alex would reply, all proud and trying to sound farmer-like. But in time he came to understand why everyone was so impressed. (“That dude is nuts….”)

  George was the one who offered to help. He pulled Alex aside. He said, “Listen, buddy.” He said, “You’re going to kill yourself” Then one day he came up the road with about a hundred of his sheep following behind, and he opened our gate and shooed the sheep in.

  The sheep ate the grass, and they fertilized it, and they required nothing of us, not even a thank-you. Summer after summer, with George lending us those sheep for a few months, we had a back hill that came to resemble a smooth golf course, albeit crazily steep.

  George accepted no money for this service and we came to understand that it was rude to even offer. This was just a neighbor-to-neighbor thing.

  Then the silent feud started and no sheep came. We sat and wondered why George had stopped talking to us and if we were supposed to do something about it and if so, what that might be.

  Meantime the grass grew, as Alex watched and got worried and woeful, thinking about what he was going to have to do. I said let’s not mow the hill. I said let’s just regard that growing vegetation as a very young forest to admire and accept. He said no, he would have to mow it. It was the right thing to do; it was a matter of stewardship and honor, a farmer keeping his fields clean and healthy. He started eating a lot of ice cream in anticipation of taking the tractor up there. The sugar from the ice cream kept him up at night. He’d finally fall asleep and wake up with a headache.

  I said maybe he should just go over and make up with George, so we could get the sheep back. He said how can you make up with someone when you don’t even know what you’re fighting over? He said he wanted none of it. He said if whatever we did was really that bad then why didn’t George just come over and confront us with it?

  “True,” I said.

  We decided the heck with George. We decided to get our own damn sheep to eat the grass on our terrible hill.

  Now, I have no reason to believe that children’s author Laura Numeroff meant ill will when she wrote the popular book If You Give a Pig a Pancake. My girls love this book. Sadly, I have had to ban it from the house.

  In this book, the pig on the receiving end of the pancake is not satisfied with just that. Like most of us, that pig wants syrup. Syrup leads to another request, inevitably and quite logically to another, and another; in fact, pages and pages of others that would seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with breakfast foods at all. The pig is not, I don’t think, particularly greedy or even needy. No, the pig quite blithely and reasonably moves forth with her requests for tap shoes, wallpaper glue, all manner of nonsense—until finally, in the end, we are brought unavoidably and maddeningly back to her appeal for another stinkin’ pancake.

  Reading this story, thinking about this story, my head goes into a spastic twitch and soon enough I’ll drool.

  Too close to the bone. Too many of my nightmares right there in pig form. The tumbling effect of one stupid thing leading to another, the complications upon complications, the way you just want to kick that pig out of your house and start some particular sequence of your life over.

  But it’s too late for that. By the time you notice what’s going on, it’s too late.

  The sheep would be Alex’s project. He would become fluent in the language of ewes and rams and worming medications and ear tags and antifungal sheep foot dip.

  He called Gretta, by now our official agent of animal acquisitions, and she taught him about Dorpers, a breed of sheep just now being introduced to the U.S. from South Africa. “They’re hair sheep!” Alex reported back to me, having moved remarkably swiftly along the learning curve after just one phone call. Hair sheep, he explained, were different from the far more common wool sheep. You have to shear wool sheep, since the wool keeps growing and growing until pretty soon the poor animal is wearing the equivalent of twenty-five sweaters. The hair on hair sheep falls out in time, like human hair. So you don’t have to shear them. Beginners in love with the romance of knitting scarves made from the wool of their own sheep may find the prospect of owning a hair sheep disappointing and pointless. But any sheep farmer worth his mutton knows that the labor involved in shearing a flock is the single most costly aspect of the business. There is no market in the U.S. for wool; sheep farmers are all about meat, mostly lamb. Shearing costs more than you’d ever get back selling wool.

  So, hair sheep. That’s the future. That’s what Gretta told Alex. She was about to introduce Dorpers into her own flock and said she could get some for us, too. It was, she assured him, a good investment. Get in early, that’s how it works with these designer animals. That’s how it worked with llamas and that’s how it worked with alpacas and that’s how it worked with miniature donkeys. Those animals could fetch five thousand dollars or more when those markets hit their peak.

  One Dorper ewe was at the time going for about a thousand dollars. But Gretta said we wouldn’t have to spend that much. We could “breed up,” get a ewe that was 75 percent Dorper and mate it with a 100 percent Dorper ram and eventually our sheep would have enough Dorper in them to be put on the official purebred registry.

  Alex took in all this sheep knowledge and he took notes and he started a file folder and you could tell already he felt a sense of purpose.

  So one day Gretta showed up and in the back of her pickup she had six “three-quarter Dorper” yearling ewes we bought for six hundred dollars apiece.

  It made a surprising amount of good sense, although no one stopped to remark upon the fact that six ewes weren’t going to eat even half our hill, which was the whole original point.

  We had, that is, already given the pig her pancake.

  The thing about farming is a lot of the original points get lost. You find yourself headed in a direction for one reason or another, and then another, and then a few left turns and then a right, and then one day there you are trying to coax six yearling hair sheep
to go ahead and climb out of the bed of your friend’s pickup truck.

  Come on! Come on, little girls, come on!

  They were gentle animals, white as the blossoms on the nearby petunias, and their faces carried the expressions you might imagine on very alert, and very worried, angels. They moved as one unit, each seemingly completely attuned to the nervous systems of the others. They weren’t animals you would pet or even get to know. They were scared of us and preferred each other. In that way, they were our first official farm animals. We had goats and horses and a pony and a mule and chickens and a sheep raised by goats who thought herself a goat—all these were pets, animals with names that we talked to and imagined as family. But the Dorpers were livestock, an investment.

  Come on! Get down, yee-hawwww!

  Humans seem to instinctively make guttural noises when moving livestock. The ewes came off the truck and then we yee-hawed them into the paddock. We stood down at the barn with our hips jutted out, making noises like this, standing like farmers stand.

  Soon enough, in the evolution of any new sheep farmer with six expensive ewes, there comes the realization: “Hey, we need to get ourselves a ram.”

  Gretta told us about a good lead she had on two “pure” Dorper rams, and she said she was going to buy one and she asked if we wanted to buy the other. We really couldn’t think of a reason to say no.

  When the ram came he was square with a barrel chest and he was packed tight as a linebacker and he had enormous testicles hanging down. I felt rude looking at them but couldn’t seem to help myself. They looked like birthday balloons the day after. They looked like wobbly, sagging breasts. They looked painful to own. The ram wasn’t shy about jumping off the back of Gretta’s pickup truck. He took one whiff of the apparently ripe air and tore up the hill after our ewes. It was … impressive. We never actually saw the ram in the act of mating with those ewes, and for that I was and remain grateful.