I Liked My Life Page 7

  Well, Eve is officially a sophomore. The cliché “Where have the years gone?” doesn’t seem so trite when it’s your child. I’d never hear the end of it if she read this, but sometimes I stop and smell her laundry before putting it in the wash. She’s my favorite smell.

  As anticipated, the status of our relationship swings wildly based on her needs, fears, and struggle for independence, but I continue to find evidence there’s more going on in her head than she lets on. Today I told her I was proud to be her mother. I expected an eye roll but instead she said, “Thanks for not judging me.” Just like that, a compliment.

  She’s wrong, though, I do judge. She’s perfect.

  Mom had a journal? She loved my smell? She thought I was perfect?

  I was wronged, cheated out of a gift that was right in front of me at a time when I was too selfish to open it.

  I ask Dad if I can read more, but he gently tugs the journal from my hands. “Someday,” he says. “Some of it will serve you better later. As I read ones like this, about you, I’ll pass them along.”

  “’Kay.” There’s no point fighting about it. The man is never home. What’s he gonna do, lock it in a safe?

  Out of nowhere he asks if I want a party for my birthday in two weeks. I don’t point out that he just grounded me. It’s a short conversation.

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  “Because.”

  If he pushes the list is long: because most likely no one would come, because I’m not excited enough about life to celebrate, because it would be a total sham if I got presents after driving my mom off a rooftop. Luckily for both of us he just says, “All right.”

  It’s not really, but I’ll keep pretending.

  Brady

  If Paige hadn’t printed a wiki page on why it’s disgusting not to, I would’ve left the bedding from when Dan and Meg stayed for the funeral. But here I am, home from work an hour early, in a three-way wrestling match with sheets and a mattress.

  Paige has morphed into a representative of Maddy’s previous interests, operating a step ahead of my next mistake. How she knew I planned to throw a guest into a dust-mite haven I’ll never know.

  Goddamnit it … No matter how high I lift the mattress to shove the hanging sheet underneath, a section still falls lower than the comforter. And no matter how many times I circle around tugging each side, the top border isn’t parallel to the headboard. I can’t believe Maddy did this every week, on every bed in the house, without complaining. Or, at a minimum, bragging. I’m adding it to the cleaning lady’s list, which used to take four hours a week and now requires two full days. I hope she doesn’t quit, because I’d have no idea how to recruit a replacement. Every week I leave more money on the counter next to a note outlining additional requests, praying it’s still worth her time.

  I’m redoing a particularly sloppy corner when Eve walks in. “Why are you grunting?”

  “I’m not grunting,” I snap. “I’m making the bed for Bobby.” Her expression is blank. Now I grunt. “I’ve told you a hundred times.” Still nothing. “My friend from high school? He’s coming for the weekend.”

  She ticktocks her index finger in sarcastic recollection. “Ohhhh, that’s right. I think it’s hard to remember because I didn’t know you had any friends.”

  I remind myself that a normal person would laugh, then force myself to act like a normal person. It’s amazing how quickly in life your standards can change. At Christmas, a good moment was eating Maddy’s homemade tortellini, listening to Michael Bublé, and hanging out with my family. Now, a good moment is getting made fun of by my daughter and not losing my temper.

  Eve turns to go so I can complete this impossible domestic task, but I stop her. “Did you see my note? The Y called to confirm your lifeguard schedule for the summer.” She nods. “I told her you were volunteering at a special-needs camp every morning, so afternoons were probably best. I left out that it’s mandatory community service.”

  Eve flaps her wrist. “Whatevs. I’m not working anyway. I’ll call to let them know.”

  I put the last pillow in place—it looks like the work of a monkey—and sit on the bed, trying to hide my disappointment. “Why not? You love that job.”

  “I don’t feel like saving lives right now.”

  I’ve noticed showing I care about an outcome tends to work against me, so I stick with questions. “What will you do all afternoon?”

  Eve purses her lips, annoyed. “Mom found plenty to keep busy around here.”

  “But how will you earn spending money?”

  She shrugs. “You only need money if you’re going places.”

  Apparently, that’s the end of the conversation, because she walks away. Of all my behaviors, it serves me right that this is the one she emulates.

  Clearly Eve needs therapy, but even thinking about that conversation makes me wince. Her moodiness gives her an upper hand. I’m the lion in The Wizard of Oz, searching for my courage. Maddy once shared this whole working theory about professional men who spend the day building an empire and ego at work, then come home assuming they deserve the same status, despite the fact that it’s a different audience. I’m such a moron; I missed the obvious connection that she was referring to me. Maddy made the façade succeed in our house. She was the liaison between Eve and me, negotiating my sense of entitlement down while playing up my role as provider with Eve. Without my wife’s intercession, Eve doesn’t see me as successful at work, at least not as much as she sees the failure I am at home.

  I am trying. I put a moratorium on travel until Eve leaves for school, and I get home from work by seven with dinner in hand, cognizant that forgetting to secure food for my daughter over the past several months is a substantial parenting offense. But these are easy, tactical changes. My temper still wins more than it loses, and I end each day housing reprehensible thoughts, like, What if we never had Eve? Appalling, I know. But when night hits and loneliness takes over, I imagine our life as it was in our late twenties, when all Maddy and I had was work and each other. Without a child, we wouldn’t have gotten rid of the cappuccino machine we sold when Eve turned one and it consumed prime bottle-cleaning, baby-food-making real estate. And if we still had the cappuccino machine, I would’ve had coffee with Maddy every morning instead of alone at Starbucks. And if we had that extra time together, I would’ve known she was unhappy. It’s at this point in my nightly spiral that I start to gulp the bourbon I’m plowing through, drowning my despicableness until Maker’s Mark tucks me in for the night.

  Perhaps my daughter isn’t the only one in need of therapy.

  The doorbell rings. Hearing Eve greet Bobby brings me back to the now. My daughter won’t be impressed. I should’ve had Paige host a sleepover. Bobby is an entertainer who never found a career that sponsored his talent with a paycheck. Twenty-seven years after high-school graduation and he’s an insurance adjuster for auto claims, the same job he held when I left for college. It seems a cruel waste of a great personality, but the job does feed him good material. When I get to the kitchen, he’s already started on a story.

  “She didn’t want her husband to know she’d hit the boat trailer, but she had a huge dent that needed to be fixed, so the genius decided to hit her mailbox too.”

  “How do you know it was intentional?” Eve asks, I assume to be polite versus actual interest.

  “When the mailbox didn’t tip on the first try, she backed up and hit it again. A neighbor called nine-one-one thinking she was having a stroke or something.”

  “For real?” Eve questions, skeptical.

  Bobby holds up a hand. “Take everything I say, divide it by three, and it’s exactly what happened.”

  They laugh until they see me standing there. “Wow,” I say. “I really know how to bring down a room.”

  I expect Eve to disappear to her bedroom straightaway, but somehow the three of us end up parked in the living room listening to Bobby’s tales. They all end with an observation like, �
��Look at any couple where both people have a visor on and one person will also have a fanny pack.” Or, “Women tell their estheticians everything. Eve, you should know there’s no client confidentiality just because some lady did your Brazilian.” I don’t appreciate his uncouth delivery, but Eve seems to be enjoying herself.

  Bobby and I are a six-pack in when he gets going on a guy who totaled a classic Corvette by self-installing a six-hundred-pound chandelier in his garage. “The wiring was old, and apparently the installation was shoddy too, because when he flipped the switch it pulverized the car.”

  “Why would someone put a chandelier in a garage?” Eve asks.

  Bobby’s lighthearted air evaporates. He shifts his weight on the couch and takes a sip of beer. “His wife liked them.”

  “I bet his wife died.” I meant to think it, but I can tell by their faces I said it out loud.

  Bobby takes another sip, bigger this time. “Yeah,” he says. “Sorry, man, I forgot that part.”

  “I bet they fought over it,” I continue, not wanting to put myself out there, but unable to shut up. “Now the guy understands what a waste that was, and he wants to make it up to her, but he can’t.”

  I’m greeted with silence. I can read Eve’s mind; she’s wondering about my failures with Maddy, about the regret behind the tears in my eyes.

  I am too. Until this moment, I’ve allowed anger to grant me absolution. Who jumps off a building? Now the chandeliers of our marriage present themselves. Who refuses to go on vacation? Who routinely comes home an hour late without calling, knowing two people are waiting to eat dinner? The epiphany would be meaningful if Maddy were here and I could do something about it, but she’s not, so I get up and head to bed. There’s no off switch once my mood sours. I need to sleep it off.

  Not wanting to be left sole hostess, Eve also stands and exits without a word. I hear Bobby finish his beer in the living room before calling it a night. I’m sure he spends the time lamenting his decision to visit.

  I apologize the next morning on the way to golf, but the awkwardness can’t be undone. Bobby waits until we’ve finished a Bloody Mary to attempt a serious discussion about loss, but some people aren’t wired for topics like that. Neither of us knows how to pull it off. I’m trying now with Eve, but it’s not smooth. I say things like, “I missed Mom a lot today,” or, “You sounded like your mother when you said that.” She just nods. Now, with Bobby, I take Eve’s approach and stay silent, hoping he’ll shut the hell up. But, like me, he doesn’t. On the sixth hole he says, “It must suck.”

  I don’t stop walking until I get to my ball. “It does.”

  “If you want to talk about it, I’m here.”

  “Nah,” I reply, swinging hard. The ball goes far, but not straight. Story of my life.

  “Remember the time I brought that girl from Rhode Island to your house?” Bobby asks as we head to the seventh. I nod. “When she was in the bathroom, I asked Maddy what she thought. ‘Well,’ Maddy said, all sweet-like, ‘she wears a shirt that covers her entire abdomen, so she’s better than the last girlfriend I met.’ She was a pistol, your Maddy. Funny and brutally honest. I always wish I found someone like that, you know? That I had a chance to have what you guys had.”

  “I said I don’t want to talk about her, Bobby.”

  He scratches his cheek. “Yeah, you did. Sorry.”

  It’s a relief when Sunday comes and he leaves. I guess Eve’s comment that I had no friends was more a prophecy than a joke.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Madeline

  Eve was an accident. It’s hard to admit that my greatest accomplishment was thrust upon me, but it’s the truth. I was convinced women lacking strong maternal mentors had no business procreating. Friends accused me of being careless; I was not. I took that small blue pill every day at noon sharp, but Eve wanted in.

  We’d been married almost three years. Our advertised stance on not having children was very sophisticated. (Or maybe self-righteous is more accurate.) We circled around topics like population growth, questioning the responsibility of adding life when we were educated enough to understand the long-term consequence on humankind. We poetically feared raising a child in a world where the most violent show on TV was the evening news. We regurgitated statistics about the pathetic state of public education, giving ourselves a pat on the back for having the foresight to not have a child who’d fall victim to it. But this hyperbole was a cover. I didn’t know the first thing about being a good mom and I was at a selfish point in life, loving the attention corporate America doled out to hardworking women in the nineties. That the pay wasn’t commensurate to the work didn’t bother me as much as it should have. It was the era of DINKs—Dual Income, No Kids. Brady and I took last-minute weekend trips, went out for nice dinners on a whim, and procured whole outfits worn by shop mannequins. We’d recently returned from Jamaica when that powerful little stick made a plus sign.

  My immediate reaction was terror. Not regarding our carbon footprint or in fear for our future child’s safety in this ever-violent world, but because of my overabundance of vacation indulgence. Jamaica was a blur of rum punch and mai tais. I didn’t need to worry about how terrible public schools were because I’d probably done enough brain damage to the baby on my own.

  When our first sonogram showed a healthy heartbeat and viable fetus, Brady and I made a silent agreement to ditch the political rhetoric and be grateful. And I was, at least publically. Privately—and by that I mean without even whispering the words in an empty room—I dreaded the impact a baby would have on my career and marriage. Who the hell was I to be someone’s mother?

  I was a kick-ass saleswoman. I found it intoxicating to use femininity and charm to seduce stores into buying more from me than my male competitors. And—this was the heart of it—my career stomped out an innate fear of turning out like my mother, a homemaker who didn’t take care of her home. How much of my persona would be stripped away with a hungry, crying human to tend to? Were Meg and I the reason my mother became what she became?

  In a way my fear was justified; Eve changed my life. But it wasn’t the sacrifice I imagined. When she arrived I felt this tremendous call to action, like a soldier going to war, and I was honored to serve. Without acknowledging it, I’d never cared about anyone more than myself, not even Brady. Motherhood enlarged my heart. I found a reserve capacity to love that trumped my initial supply tenfold. I had more to give everyone because I had more to tap into. When I quit, my boss warned that it was the biggest mistake of my life. I told him I certainly hoped he was right. That’d be a damn good life.

  Eve arrived at midnight on her due date. When she was young, I kicked off the celebration of her birthday with a gentle kiss as the clock struck twelve. Later, when she reached double digits, I awakened her to tell the story of our labor. I’d sit at the edge of the bed, careful not to disrupt the covers since Eve sleeps naked with sheets tangled around her like a full-body bandage. From the moment she was born, Eve preferred to be nude. When a bottle and diaper change failed, stripping Eve naked to rest in front of an open window saved my sanity. She loved it so much that we pushed the envelope on how old was too old to swim with no bathing suit and walk around the house in only underpants. Brady joked she’d better grow out of the preference before puberty. At six, I finally called it, and we slowly adapted her to society’s expectation of clothing, but she never succumbed to pajamas overnight. She’d wear something right up until bedtime, then strip before jumping under the covers. Don’t get me wrong; she was shy about this penchant and as she grew older she got mad when we teased her about it. An oddity. Brady’s mother suggested I send Eve to a therapist. “Nip it in the bud before she’s old enough to be sleazy,” she cautioned. I replied that there are worse things in life than being comfortable with yourself.

  I consider the beginning of Eve’s life the true beginning of mine. Motherhood put to rest a slew of unhealthy anxieties and obsessions. People’s opinion of me became wholly insigni
ficant, while my opinion of me was considered for the first time. No more social climbing. No more following seasonal fashion trends. It was time to find a cause and give back. To become a role model. Eve was the catalyst for everything I’m most proud of. I will not break our birthday tradition; I’ve disappointed her enough already. So here I am, at midnight, telling the familiar story.

  It was ten when my water broke. Your father’s plane was supposed to land at eleven-thirty, so I assumed he’d be able to take me to the hospital, but an hour later it was clear you had no intention of accommodating Dad’s travel schedule. We were new to the neighborhood, so I settled for a cab. Your father had gotten his first cell phone two weeks before for this exact occasion. I left a message that he’d probably be a dad by the time he listened to it.

  The taxi was stuffy. The driver went faster and faster as my contractions got closer and closer. I tried to space my breathing how they taught at Lamaze, but it felt better to scream, so that’s mostly what I did. Through the pain I pictured you making your way, on your first true adventure.

  When we arrived, I thought the driver would stay with me, like they do in the movies, but he took the cash from my shaking hand and sped away. For a brief moment I felt alone, but then you reminded me of your presence. I walked in the waiting room, convinced by the pressure that I’d give birth right there on the gray vinyl couch. I howled deliriously at the thought of it.

  You were the world’s fastest delivery. I only pushed for twenty minutes. Your father ran in right as you came out, fists clenched, arms raised, and one eye open. You looked intense but ardent, ready for anything to come. When I saw you I knew I was looking at my life’s purpose.

  Eve, you’re still intense, ardent, and ready for anything to come. Happy birthday.

  When I finish, Eve has her knees tucked to her chest. We’re embracing; I feel it. I send a burst of energy. As the sensation flushes through her, she’s aware it’s unworldly. I’ll remember that trick, a way to send love without competing with her thoughts.