by Kelly Fordon
“Theresa’s business is kind of like shabby chic,” I said.
“Oh, I love shabby chic,” my mother said.
“Well, I don’t know if it’s a business,” Theresa said. “But I enjoy it. It’s much less stressful than my old job.”
“What did you do?” My mother zipped up her bag and placed it next to the brownies on the coffee table.
“Marketing and PR for Proctor & Gamble. I used to fly all over the place, and that’s a little hard to do when you have three kids.”
“Three kids!” Mrs. White said. “Good Lord!”
Just the week before, Mrs. White had announced that she would not be able to help me with babysitting when I returned to work. “I didn’t enjoy it the first time around,” she explained.
I had bit my tongue to keep from saying, “Gun shots, heart attacks, and domestic violence more your speed?”
Apparently, now Mrs. White felt the wine could wait. She returned to her perch on the edge of the love seat. “Take a seat,” she said to Theresa, patting the cushion next to her.
“I can only stay for a minute. I’ve got to get back to my kitchen,” Theresa said. “Did I tell you I’m painting it?”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“What I want to do is paint the linoleum so that it looks like black and white tiles.”
“You can do that?” Mrs. White said. “It won’t come off when you’re scrubbing the floor?”
“Polyurethane. I’m going to put a coat on afterward.”
“On linoleum?” my mother asked.
“I saw it on HGTV,” Theresa said. “Do you ever watch that?”
Mrs. White shook her head. “We don’t watch television,” she said.
“I don’t have time,” my mother said.
The phone rang.
“Excuse me,” I said.
When I returned to the porch, they were glued to a talk show. The talk show host was interviewing mentally ill people who couldn’t see their own image in the mirror. They didn’t see the person who was actually standing there. They saw a monster.
According to these people (who were, for the most part, beautiful) what they saw in the mirror horrified them. They saw thinning hair when their hair was actually thick. They saw a unibrow when their eyebrows were perfectly etched. It got so bad for these people that they couldn’t leave the house. The talk show host couldn’t wrap her mind around it.
“That makes absolutely no sense,” my mother said.
When a commercial came on, I said, “I have to nap. I have to get some rest while the baby is still asleep.”
“Of course you do!” Mrs. White jumped up. “And I have to grab that La Crema before someone beats me to it.”
Theresa put her treats back in the basket. “I’ll just take these to the kitchen,” she said. “And then I’m off to start painting.”
The six months after Christopher’s birth were the hardest of my life. I was the youngest child by eight years in my family. I’d never babysat much, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I dreamed about the easy carefree days when I could read or go to the movies or even eat a meal in peace. Every single day I scrolled through scads of be-a-better-mommy sites—probably the worst thing I could have done for my mental health. In the afternoons I studied my mottled, amoeba-like stomach in the bathroom mirror.
It didn’t help that my neighbor kept getting so much accomplished. After Theresa painted the kitchen floor, she redid the attic stairs to resemble Rapunzel’s hair and turned a storage space in the basement into a palace, replete with miniature furniture.
“The point of this space is that adults don’t even fit in this room,” she said as we peered in through the small opening. “It’s a safe zone for kids. Isn’t that great?”
The ceiling was so low she must have painted the entire room on her knees. It looked like she had sawed the legs off all the tables and chairs. The room was so elaborately decorated—floral needlepoint rug, down throw pillows, double swags with rosettes on the windows—it might have been a display in a Junior League show house.
I started to avoid Theresa. Some of the other mothers felt the same way.
“There are only so many amazing projects I can ogle,” Andrea said.
“She told me she weighs less than she did in college,” Mary Ellen added. “I mean, did I ask her for that information?”
“And what about her kids? She says that if they want to take out a new toy, they put back the one they are playing with,” Andrea said. “She claims they actually do it on a regular basis.”
“I have never heard one peep out of those kids,” Mary Ellen said. “It’s weird, if you ask me.”
“When she came to the door the other day, I didn’t answer it,” I admitted.
The winter passed. While Theresa’s perfection irritated us all, she remained our go-to person in a crisis. I sought her out when anything unprecedented happened. She knew what to do when Ed spilled red wine on our new living room carpet. She gave me a beautiful hand-knotted entryway rug she wasn’t using. One day, I complained about the comforter in my master bedroom, and two days later she showed up with one she had “happened upon” at Pottery Barn. It turned out to be perfect for the room. She showed Andrea how to re-grout her tub and gave me a copy of the Household Companion for my birthday, which shed light on many of my domestic conundrums but annoyed me all the same. She was a little like the smart girl in the class—we resented the fact that she knew all the answers, but it certainly came in handy.
In the beginning of March, I accepted an invitation to a party at her house. Ed wondered why we were going, seeing as I clearly had issues with her.
“How can we avoid it?” I asked. “We’re neighbors!”
It turned into more than one party—it became a weekly neighborhood bash. She called it Margarita Night, and she began charging ten dollars per person. Her sister was in the Peace Corps in Ghana, and she had decided to raise money for the orphanage. Her sister even sent her pictures of the children, which she tacked to a large poster alongside the red donation tub.
The great thing about Margarita Night was that Ed and I could bring the baby, and then when it was time for bed, we’d take him home, pick up the TV monitor (our one extravagant purchase that year), and plug it in Theresa’s kitchen. We were able to study our sleeping baby (whose window was visible across the street) while sipping margaritas and talking to grown-ups. It was a dream come true! No matter how irritating Theresa was, she was better than being stuck at home.
We were usually the last people to leave.
By May, there were twenty to thirty couples who regularly attended Margarita Night. The neighbors behind Theresa had fashioned makeshift openings in the fence so their kids could travel back and forth freely while the adults relaxed. One night, I sat next to Jim in one of the wicker chairs that Theresa had repainted earlier that week. Purple, pink, and white impatiens flooded the pots surrounding the deck. Lavender petunias dripped down from mossy planters suspended all around us. I would not have chosen to sit next to Jim as he had never been particularly friendly, but the backyard was teeming with people. I’d just put the baby to bed, and I was badly in need of a chair.
“I don’t know how your wife does it!” I said.
“Humph,” he grunted, looking down at his drink.
“No, seriously,” I continued. “I can barely function, but I looked out my window yesterday and she’s out here painting these chairs with three kids darting all around her! It’s truly, truly amazing.”
“It’s exhausting,” he said. He looked up and stared vacantly at the partygoers.
“Not for her,” I said. “She never gets tired.”
Theresa raced up to us. She was carrying a tray of empty margarita glasses. She was frantic. I had never seen her in such a state.
“You know,” she said to Jim, “I think we should start serving more food. People drink too many of these. The chips and dip are not cutting it. Maybe we can charge more and order out fr
om Chicken Shack from now on. The kids are hungry. Can you run to the store for me? I need more margarita mix. I need to make a Caesar salad and some corn dogs. I need some more toothpicks and another gallon of vanilla ice cream. Can you hurry?”
“I wish I knew why Jim is always so blah,” I said to Ed in bed later that night.
“It’s like that battery commercial.” He closed his book and put it back on the nightstand. “She’s the Energizer Bunny, and he’s the dud knockoff.”
“It almost seems like he’s depressed,” I said. “If I were him, I guess I would get kind of bummed out living with such a busy bee.”
“I agree.” He turned out the light. “But it would be nice if one of us were a little more motivated.”
“Nice!” I rolled away from him.
“I include myself in that assessment. Think about how great this place would look like if either one of us were like Theresa.”
The conversation about Jim proved an omen, but it did not portend what I expected. At the time, I imagined she was neglecting him, driving him too hard. I even entertained the thought that he longed for someone (like me) who knew how to put her feet up.
“Maybe he’ll get so worn out, he’ll leave her,” Andrea said. The thought had crossed my mind. Conjecturing about how hard it would be to live with a perfectionist made me feel so much better about the laundry overload and the dirty dishes and the moments when I whispered, “You’d better shut up!” as I closed the baby’s door.
One night about a month later, I woke up to red flashing lights circling the ceiling, the static mumbling of walkie-talkies, and the sound of car doors slamming. I peeked out the window. A fire engine was parked in front of Theresa’s house, an ambulance in the driveway. A few minutes later, a cruiser arrived, and two officers strode into the house. Jim came out in shorts and a T-shirt holding the baby. The other two children emerged and stood behind him watching silently. I batted Ed awake and he joined me. We remained in that window for what seemed like hours, peeking through the blinds. Finally, a stretcher emerged from the house, the sheet pulled all the way up.
“Oh my God,” I whispered. “Is she dead?”
“Shit,” Ed said.
“Is she dead?”
“Shit.” Ed shook his head in disbelief.
The ambulance pulled away. The fire truck followed. The cruiser stayed behind. I called Andrea, because she lived directly across the street. She had watched the whole thing, too. We continued to talk and peer through the blinds until the cruiser left, followed by Jim in the minivan with the kids about twenty minutes later. I went downstairs and sat in the kitchen. I sifted through the drawers until I found an old pack of cigarettes. I stood outside the side door shaking in the cold, smoking three in a row. Afterward, I sat in the den flipping through the stations until morning. No matter how many blankets I piled on, I couldn’t stop shaking.
The next morning, Andrea called when I was in the shower. She left a message on the answering machine, which I played, dripping and shivering in the hallway in my flimsy towel.
“It’s about Theresa,” she said. “Call me back. I know what happened.”
According to Andrea, Jim had been afraid this was coming. Apparently, Theresa had had these episodes before, and he knew that the more painting, decorating, and entertaining she did, the more manic she was growing. Theresa had swallowed so many antianxiety meds and sleeping pills and painkillers (left over from the C-section) that she was dead by the time Jim had awakened in the night to pee. Jim told Andrea that she must have been stockpiling pills.
“She was sick,” Andrea said. “I guess we should have guessed, but honestly, it never even occurred to me.”
After I talked to Andrea, I walked back to my room and sat down on the edge of the bed. My teeth were chattering hard enough to chip a tooth, and my hands shook like someone unseen was operating my levers. I got back into bed and curled up into a ball to warm up. It took me a long time.
Often during those early years of parenting, I found myself staring at Theresa’s house, wishing she was still there with me, missing her enthusiasm for life, even if, in the end, it was just a symptom of her illness. Three months after she died, Jim sold the house and moved to Atlanta. The rumor was he’d married a work colleague and was happy with his new life.
One night many years later, when I had three kids and was finally feeling fairly competent as a mother, I had a dream about Theresa. In the dream, she was sitting in a field of yellow flowers. Buttercups, maybe? She was smiling. She said, “Tell them I’m happy now.”
It was the type of dream that seems real. When I woke up, I was sure I had actually been talking with her. She had been very adamant about wanting her family to know she was fine, but of course, I never called them.
How It Passed
The First Year:
Accompanying the pregnancy: bloating and the gentle chidings from older women in grocery aisles. “I wouldn’t eat that ice cream, sweetheart. It’ll take you a year to work it off.”
A year? What a laugh! We’ve never needed to watch our weight.
After the baby, we spend endless days reminiscing about sleep and the free time we used to squander. Remember reading the New York Times cover to cover? Spending the whole weekend on the couch? Dancing until 3 a.m.? Sleeping until noon? Remember when we could just get up and go? To the movies? To pick up Chinese? To grab a gallon of milk?
We form a playgroup to combat the dawning realization that this is no temporary matter. The playgroup affords a forum to talk about the people we used to be. The people we’ll be after we’re done here. The babies zone out in their bouncy chairs, alternately crying or cooing or nodding off while we guzzle coffee and try to avoid eating too many donut holes.
It’s hard because the donut holes are the best thing going.
We talk about the husbands. The husbands are not suffering enough. We picture them heaving a collective sigh of relief as they drive off down the road every morning.
The husbands complain about how hard they work, how ornery their boss is, how many deals they’ve sealed. The pressure is on. They need a drink. They NEED the remote control. They offer to help with the diapers but often botch the job. They don’t hear the baby, or they do hear the baby, but they want to watch one more inning before they get up to get him. They spoon food into the baby’s mouth, but they forget the burp rag or the bib. They rinse the dishes, but they leave them in the sink. How hard is it to load a dishwasher? They put their dirty clothes in a nice neat pile by the side of the bed. Why bother with the nice neat pile if the clothes are still on the floor?
They are useless, we decide. Before long we are peeling them apart like string cheese with our ragged, misshapen nails.
Morgan doesn’t want to have sex with Cheryl. Ever.
Steve wants sex. Steve has all sorts of wacky, off-beat fantasies: Sex in the 125-year-old oak tree behind the garage? Sex in the bathroom at the Tap Room with the door unlocked?
Margery is so put off by some of the bizarre positions Steve points to in his book (of course he has a book!) that she sleeps downstairs in the study in front of the TV.
Zane is moody and unpredictable according to Tina. She’s been walking on eggshells ever since his father died. She would sympathize with him if he hadn’t complained so much about his father when he was alive.
Shelly is a teacher and her husband Bob is a reporter at the Detroit Free Press. They are broke and probably always will be. Most of their college-educated friends consider these first homes “starter homes,” but Shelly knows her three-bedroom ranch is the Alpha and the Omega. She and Bob were both only children, and the one thing they agree on unequivocally is they want to have a passel of kids, no matter the cost.
The husbands might benefit from getting to know each other since we have nothing in common with them anymore. Several couples, an offshoot of the playgroup, form what we refer to as the Dinner Club. We want to see these husbands in the flesh, these men about whom we know every inti
mate detail.
Year Two:
Playgroup disbands. Too many babies crawling and running and knocking things over. One mother who routinely brings her coughing, hacking baby to the meetings. She always claims not to have noticed the runny nose before it starts dripping all over the coffee table.
“What’s this?” she’ll say, incredulous, scurrying to wipe it up.
We are so incensed we can hardly control ourselves. Why bother driving across town for organic food when we are surrounded by people who are bent on sabotaging our children’s health?
Another death knell for playgroup: Cheryl’s husband, Morgan, is cheating on her. We’ve read about infidelity, but we can’t believe it’s happening on our street. Cheryl’s husband moves in with the new girlfriend. We bring Cheryl casseroles and commiserate with her, but privately we chalk it up to her atrocious beef pineapple stew, her lackluster sense of humor. Each of us decides (though no one says it) that if we were married to Cheryl, we would have run out on her, too. And then right after that we feel like jerks. Why are we such jerks?
Year Four:
We have more babies. No more naptime for mom. One baby bellowing all morning. Another ramming into walls all afternoon. This constant racket is getting to us. We yell and scream and cuss and then we gather at the park for mass absolution.
“Honey, I do the exact same thing!” we say. “I’m losing my mind!”
We don’t know what day it is; we can’t remember how to spell. What’s that word? What’s that thing? You know that thing you put around the baby’s neck when he’s eating? What is that thing called?
We crawl into bed at 8 p.m. We go back to the park. The awful bone-numbing park. Swing, swing, swing. We don’t want to hear, “Mommy, can you push me?” ever again. We sit on benches drinking coffee. We plan the next Dinner Club; we talk about the last one. Did anyone notice how much Zane drank last month? Can you believe Tina is smoking? She’s pregnant! Is that a vestige of her West Virginia upbringing? And what is Margery wearing around her neck? A portable ionizer? She’s gone off the deep end, hasn’t she? Did you hear the latest? She has some sort of vaginal dysfunction. She says it’s painful when they . . . you know . . .
