by Maria Semple
And then, squeals.
The first-graders had burst onto the lawn wearing butterfly wings shellacked with colorful bits of tissue paper. The young moms (and the one dad) turned their backs to me and basked in the slipstream of their children’s spontaneity and delight. The energy in the room shifted from bubbly conviviality to hushed reverence. All the choices these young moms (and the one dad) had agonized over—to work or not work, to marry young or keep looking, to have a kid now or see the world first—had led to hard decisions. And with decisions come regrets. And sleepless nights, and recriminations, and fights with their husbands (and the one wife), and whacked-out calls to the doctor for pills. The “catatonic vision of frozen terror” the poet had called these moments of existential doubt, or certainty, it was hard to know which. But seeing their children now, in this instant, these parents knew in their teeth that their decisions had been the right ones.
So, with a perfectly timed cough, I grabbed that young mom’s ring of keys, dropped them in my purse, and slipped out.
That’s right, I stole them.
Timby was lying on a cot in a corner of the office looking, to my trained eye, pretty darned pleased with himself.
“Get up,” I said. “I’m officially sick of this BS.”
On the downside, I’d said that. On the upside, it was so unnecessarily nasty that Lila and the other administrators pretended not to hear. Timby darkened and followed me out.
I waited until we were standing at the car. “We’re going straight to the doctor’s. And you’d better pray there’s really something wrong with you.”
“Can’t we just go home?”
“So you can drink ginger ale and watch Doctor Who? No. I refuse to reward you any more for faking stomachaches. We’re going to the doctor and straight back to school.” I leaned in close. “And for all I know, it’s time for you to get a shot.”
“You’re mean.”
We got in the car.
“What’s this?” Timby asked with big eyes upon seeing the gift basket.
“Not for you. Don’t get your paws near that thing.”
Timby was crying now. “You’re getting mad at me for being sick.”
We drove to the pediatrician’s in silence, me angry at Timby, me angry with myself for being angry at Timby, me angry at Timby, me angry with myself for being angry at Timby.
His little voice: “I love you, Mom.”
“I love you too.”
“Timby?” said the nurse. “That’s an unusual name.”
“I was named by an iPhone,” Timby said around the thermometer in his mouth.
“I named you,” I said.
“No.” Timby glared.
“Yes.” I glared back.
When I was pregnant, we learned it was going to be a boy. Joe and I ecstatically volleyed names back and forth. One day I texted Timothy, which autocorrected to Timby. How could we not?
The nurse pulled out the thermometer. “Normal. The doctor will be right in.”
“Nice work,” I said after she left, “making me look bad.”
“It’s true,” Timby said. “And why would an iPhone autocorrect a normal name to a name nobody’s ever heard of?”
“It was a bug,” I said. “It was the first iPhone—oh God!” I’d just realized. “I think I insulted Alonzo.”
“How?” Timby looked all sweet but I knew he just wanted to lure me in for ammo to use against me.
“Nothing,” I said.
It was the look on Alonzo’s face as I left the restaurant. Maybe he wasn’t sad to see me go. Maybe he was insulted that I’d called him “my poet.”
Timby hopped off the table and opened the door.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To get a magazine.” The door slammed.
My phone rang: Joyce Primm. As usual, 10:15 on the dot. I turned off the ringer and stared at the name.
You know me from Looper Wash. And yes, I’m responsible for giving the show its retro-violent and sherbet-colored aesthetic. (I’d long been obsessed with the outsider artist Henry Darger. Lucky me, I bought one of his paintings while they were still affordable.) I’ll even concede that in the pilot script, the four lead girls were flat on the page. It was only when I dressed them in ’60s-style pinafores, gave them tangled hair, and, just for fun, put them on bored ponies that the writer, Violet Parry, understood what the show could be. She did a feverish rewrite and gave the girls nasty right-wing personalities, thus transforming them into the fabled Looper Four, who misdirected their unconscious fear of puberty into a random hatred of hippies, owners of purebred dogs, and babies named Steve. That said, Looper Wash wasn’t mine. Nobody’s ever heard of Eleanor Flood.
I’d been semi-working, semi-broke, and living in New York. A children’s catalog I’d illustrated caught the eye of Violet, who took a gutsy gamble and made me her animation director.
The first thing I learned about TV: It’s all about the deadlines. An episode not being ready for air? It could not happen, not even once. Settling for uninspired angles, hacky hand gestures, mismatched lip flap, wonky eyes, excessive cycling of backgrounds, signs misspelled by foreign animators, color errors? Oh, that happened plenty. But it would never occur to even the laziest, craziest animation director not to turn in the show on time.
Publishing, on the other hand…
While my name meant nothing, my style was instantly recognizable. And for a while, Looper Wash was everywhere. A rising-star book editor named Joyce Primm (that’s right, Joyce Primm, circling around, a method to the madness) had seen some drawings I’d done of my childhood and gave me an advance to expand them into a memoir.
I’m a little past my deadline.
For the longest time I didn’t hear a peep from Joyce. But here she was, calling every day for the past week.
My phone stopped ringing. Her voice mail joined the boneyard of other voice mails.
JOYCE PRIMM
JOYCE PRIMM
JOYCE PRIMM
JOYCE PRIMM
JOYCE PRIMM
All with little blue dots, none I dared listen to.
Timby returned with a People magazine. On the cover, someone I didn’t recognize, no doubt a reality-TV star.
“They should rename it Who Are These People?” I said.
“I’ve heard of him,” Timby said, hurt on behalf of the famous person.
“That’s even more depressing,” I said.
“Knock, knock!” It was the pediatrician, Dr. Saba, her disposition even gentler than the nurse’s.
“So, Timby,” she said, disinfecting her hands. “I hear you have a tummy ache.”
“This is the third time in two weeks I’ve had to pick him—”
“Let’s hear it from Timby,” the doctor said with a forgiving smile.
Timby addressed the floor. “My stomach aches.”
“Is it all the time?” Dr. Saba asked. “Or just sometimes?”
“Sometimes.”
“And you’re in third grade?”
“Yes.”
“What school do you go to?”
“Galer Street.”
“Do you like it?”
“I guess.”
“Do you have friends?”
“I guess.”
“Do you like your teachers?”
“I guess.”
“Timby.” Dr. Saba wheeled up on a stool. “A lot of times when people get tummy aches, it’s not because they have a bug, but because they have emotions that make them feel yucky.”
Timby’s eyes remained down.
“I’m wondering if there’s anything going on at school or at home that’s making you feel yucky.”
Good luck with that, I thought. Timby, the king of the nonanswer.
“It’s Piper Veal.”
(!!!)
“Who’s Piper Veal?” the doctor said.
“A new girl in my class.”
Piper’s family was fresh from a yearlong trip around the world. Is this not
a rarefied but most annoying trend? Families traveling around the world to unplug and immerse themselves in foreign cultures, then parents frantically e-mailing you to please post comments on their kids’ blogs so they won’t think nobody gives a hoot? (Come on, New York Times, do I have to come up with all your most-e-mailed articles?)
“What’s Piper doing?” asked Dr. Saba.
“She’s bullying me,” Timby said, his voice cracking.
My life zoomed into awful focus.
Here, now, Timby.
The gentleness, the celebrity gossip, the overidentification with Gaston from Beauty and the Beast. Was Timby gay? It had certainly occurred to me. But there were also the Snap Circuits, MythBusters, the obsession with escalators. Of course, the smoking gun would be the flirtation with makeup, but that was his Pavlovian response to being loved up by a harem of Nordstrom hotties. If anything, it proved Timby was all man. A mother knows. Or, in my case, a mother will love him regardless and let it play out the way it’s going to play out.
Which is more than I can say for Galer Street.
Our first interview, we’d come straight from Nordstrom, where the girls had adorned Timby with a beauty mark and very subtle mascara… darling! As soon as we walked in the conference room, I could practically hear the admissions director shouting, “Eureka! We’ve got a transgender!” Joe and I joked about it later that night. After we’d been accepted, and without telling us, the school had taken it upon themselves to switch all the boys’ and girls’ bathrooms to gender-neutral. “I hope you didn’t do this for Timby,” I said to the head of school, Gwen. “Oh no,” she said. “We did it for all our little genderqueers.”
To that, there could be only one response: to laugh my ass off. But I had the good sense to wait until I got outside.
Was I in denial? Had I become lulled into complacency as a reaction against Galer Street’s fervent embrace of everything? And just because the administrators were so tolerant of the occasional pink thumbnail, the same might not be said for the kids on the playground…
“Have you told your mom about Piper?” asked Dr. Saba.
“No,” Timby said.
Dr. Saba didn’t have to shoot me a disappointed look. I could feel it beaming through the back of her skull.
“Have you told your teachers?”
“No.”
“What kind of things is Piper doing to you?”
“I don’t know,” Timby said.
“Is she hurting your body?” Dr. Saba asked.
“No,” Timby said, his mouth full of saliva.
“What did Piper do?”
I twisted in my chair and held my breath.
“She told me I bought my shirt at H&M.”
Oh.
“You bought your shirt at H&M?” repeated the doctor.
“When Piper was in Bangladesh she went on a tour of a factory with child slaves and they were making clothes for H&M.”
“I see,” said Dr. Saba. “Timby, third grade is when things start to get complicated with your friends. Sometimes your feelings can get so big they cause a tummy ache.”
Timby finally looked up and into Dr. Saba’s eyes.
“Do you know the best medicine for that?” she asked.
“What?”
“Talk to your grown-up,” Dr. Saba said. “Your mom. But if it’s not your mom—”
“It is his mom,” I said.
“—talk to your dad, your grandma, your favorite teacher. Tell them how you’re feeling. They might not be able to fix it, but sometimes just talking is enough.”
Timby smiled.
“You look like you’re feeling better already.”
“I am.”
“That’s what I like to hear,” she said, standing.
“Good,” I said. “We can go back to school.”
Timby hopped off the table and pulled open the door.
“Hey, where’s he going?” I asked.
The door shut. It was just me, Dr. Saba, and the mural of zombie-eyed lemurs.
“Do you have to go right back to work?” Dr. Saba asked. “Because what Timby really needs is mommy time.”
“I’ll move some stuff around.”
Dr. Saba stood there, calling my bluff. I dialed Sydney Madsen and got voice mail. “Sydney. I have to reschedule. Something came up with Timby.”
Dr. Saba gave me a nod and headed out.
Timby was at the nurses’ station, whistling as he ferreted through a cardboard box covered with wrapping paper.
A nurse asked, “Do you want a Wash Your Hands pencil or a Good Job tattoo?”
“Can I have both?” Timby said, still scrounging. “Ooh, is this gum?” He picked up a box but dropped it instantly when it turned out to be chalk.
That was it. Timby was going back to school. And I was going to get this Sydney Madsen lunch behind me. The last thing I needed was a fresh round of passive-aggressive subject lines: “Remember Me?” “Hello, Stranger!” “Lunch with a Friend?”
(So needy! As far as I’m concerned, the only thing sweeter than seeing a friend is that friend canceling on me.)
I dialed Sydney’s number. “Hi! Forget my last message. I’ll see you at noon—”
Somehow Dr. Saba was standing there.
“—some other day. Just making sure you got the message.”
“Am I going back to school or not?” Timby asked.
The spotlight was on me.
“We’re going to have some mommy time!” I said.
“Mommy time?” he said, not unafraid.
We left Dr. Saba’s office and stepped onto the streets of downtown, my mind a muddle. What I needed now was Joe. Joe could cut through my confusion. Joe the sword.
There’s a phenomenon I call the Helpless Traveler. If you’re traveling with someone who’s confident, organized, and decisive you become the Helpless Traveler: “Are we there yet?” “My bags are too heavy.” “My feet are getting blisters.” “This isn’t what I ordered.” We’ve all been that person. But if the person you’re traveling with is helpless, then you become the one able to decipher train schedules, spend five hours walking on marble museum floors without complaint, order fearlessly from foreign menus, and haggle with crooked cabdrivers. Every person has it in him to be either the Competent Traveler or the Helpless Traveler. Because Joe is so clearheaded and sharp, I’ve been able to go through life as the Helpless Traveler. Which, now that I think about it, might not be such a good thing. It’s a question for Joe.
His office was a few blocks away. Even just seeing him through the glass would be enough to center me.
“Wait,” Timby said. “We’re going to Dad’s? Can I play with the iPad?”
Joe and I were waging the altogether futile war against electronics by not letting Timby play video games. The one loophole was the iPads in Joe’s office.
“Is that something you’d like to do?” I asked Timby in an unexpected singsong, like a stranger offering candy. “I could drop you off while I popped over to lunch.”
“Whoa,” he said, processing his unbelievably good fortune. “Yeah!”
I called Sydney yet again.
“Guess who? Disregard my messages. I’ll see you at noon!”
“Hey, look!” Timby had spotted the sign for Jazz Alley. “It’s that place with the oily hummus and they make ginger ale by combining Coke and Sprite, and you have to sit at tiny tables smooshed together with people you don’t know.”
Perhaps I’d complained more than once about being dragged there by jazz-loving Joe. If you were ever driven to the brink of madness listening to Rush’s “Tom Sawyer,” try sitting through an aggro jazz trio doing a baffling forty-five-minute version.
“I’m not a fan of jazz,” I said to Timby. “No woman is.”
“You should tell Dad to go by himself,” he said.
“Don’t think I haven’t tried,” I said. “But there’s something about me the guy can’t quit.”
We shared a shrug and headed to Joe’s office.
The first thing that should have tripped my alarm was the empty waiting room. But this wasn’t completely unprecedented. Joe had celebrity clients (athletes and musicians) who, for a variety of reasons (ego and ego), couldn’t be in the same waiting room as civilians. Therefore, down the hall from the double-doored entrance to the Wallace Surgery Center was a row of single, unmarked private waiting rooms. Conceivably, Joe’s patients could have been in there.
The second thing I noticed, which did trip my alarm, was the top of the aquarium lying across the couch.
In defense of celebrities (!), they all love Joe. No matter how coddled the quarterback or preening the guitarist, as soon as something goes wrong with their hand, they fly to Seattle because they’ve heard about The Guy. When The Guy turns out to be unpretentious Joe, they become smitten. Joe waters the plants himself. His desk is a mess. The office is in constant chaos because he spends too long with each patient. He treats everyone the same, his curiosity a gentle rain. You’d have to draw him a picture to explain why it’s cooler to save the pinkie of a Cy Young Award–winning pitcher than the wrist of a checkout lady with carpal tunnel. Stars like the people who fawn over them; they trust the few who don’t.
Nobody was behind the reception window. I moved closer. On the desk was an open container of tortellini salad, its bottled Italian dressing a Proustian blast back to a past I wanted no part of: broke, in New York, eating Korean-deli salad bar.
Deep in the office, Luz the receptionist caught sight of me. I waved. Luz walked over, wiping her hands on her jeans. Jeans + stinky desk food = three-alarm situation.
Luz slid the glass over. “You’re back!”
One thing that happens when you have an alcoholic for a parent is you grow up the child of an alcoholic. For those of you who aren’t children of alcoholics, hear me now and believe me later: It’s the single determining factor in your personality. I don’t care if you get straight As, marry a saint, and break the glass ceiling in a male-dominated profession, or if you bounce around from failure to failure with pit stops in cults and nuthouses: if you were raised by a drunk, you’re above all the adult child of an alcoholic. For a quick trip around the bases, it means you blame yourself for everything, you avoid reality, you can’t trust people, you’re hungry to please. Which isn’t all bad: perfectionism makes the straight-A student; lack of trust begets self-sufficiency; low self-esteem can be a terrific motivator; if everyone were so gung-ho on reality, there’d be no art.
