And college? Would it be like—oh, God—those many California state colleges that look like Czechoslovakian bunkers, with lowering seventies buildings of gray cement blocks, foreign engineering students with pockmarked skin, crumpled under knapsacks, their glasses dourly reflected in vending machines full of Cheetos?
And while dazed in this reverie, I hear Mike say, “Oh yeah. No worries.”
Aimee puts down her BlackBerry.
“What’s your school district?” she asks, in a weirdly light, unconcerned voice.
And Mike replies, “Well, I don’t know. City of Los Angeles? I guess, what, that makes us L.A. Unified?”
And now here is what happens.
Both Jonathan and Aimee imperceptibly freeze.
Aimee makes almost no sound, except for this small, telltale intake of breath that sounds like “Whoa.” She doesn’t say anything more than that, nor does her expression change. But she does give this small, involuntary “Whoa.”
And then Jonathan jumps in, a shade too quickly.
“I’m sure it’ll be just fine!” he says. He has that oddly high-pitched tone friends use when insisting, too loudly, “Of COURSE your mole isn’t cancer!” Jonathan waves his wineglass in boisterous encouragement. “What with all the new charters and magnets and re-districting and…” Here he says a bunch of other words I can’t follow—I want to say “permits with transportation” and, of course, that circling crow “GERRYMANDERING.” It is a whole list of frantic and, to my mind, impossibly complex contingencies.
Mike, in the manner of unflappable Midwestern men, accepts on face value Jonathan’s proffered—probably absurd—wavelength on the hope/fear spectrum. Mike accepts and cashes the blithe “Of course it isn’t cancer” voucher.
“Yes, magnet schools…” Mike says. “All my musician friends sent their kids through magnets. Said they were great. Bob Someone and Chuck Someone Else…”
And he says names that surprise me. I was unaware that these mangy, pushing-sixty, divorced Harley-driving former Iron Butterfly drummers and Vanilla Fudge electric-bongo players even HAD children.
Mike even names his chain-smoking cartage guy, Ricky. The last time I saw Ricky was thirteen years ago, when we rode to Ensenada in the back of his van, whose wildly listing “backseat” was an old couch bungee-corded to the floor. Mike, Ricky, and I drank tequila mixed with frozen limeade, popped hallucinogenic mushrooms, and ate octopus hand-scooped out of murky lukewarm water by toothless Mexican octogenarians pushing battered unrefrigerated wooden carts. What could go wrong?
But apparently even Ricky is now part of this dubious network of rheumy L.A. Unified arteries. Now even Ricky’s surly tattooed teen daughter, Reyna, is doggedly studying modern dance in some brave little performing arts magnet in Pacoima.
Aimee, however, sits, skinny arms crossed, unmoving.
And it is safe to say the klieg lights on my mental “big board” have snapped on. The supercharged lights have suddenly come up, at midnight, on a previously dark football field. Linda Blair’s eyes have popped open.
I am like a giant mother-to-mother satellite dish, turned on Aimee, who is notably…silent. The “Of course it isn’t cancer” canape plate is being passed around and Aimee is conspicuously saying “No thank you”—she isn’t having any.
I can sense humming, vibrating…this is a door I shouldn’t open.
But the thing is, I already have a problem with insomnia. So I don’t want Aimee’s narrow face rising up at me tonight at 2:07 as I wonder what informational cards she was holding.
Because yes…I have a vague suspicion that we do not live in a good school district. Because typically, if fellow parents aren’t roundly congratulating you about your FANTASTIC school district, you probably don’t live in a good one.
And it’s true that the names of good school districts have a certain ring:
Maybe not exactly Harvard. Yale. Princeton. St. Albans.
But at least Briarcliff. Westerland. Heathersford or Heatherstone.
Often the good public schools are named after some pleasing form of geography—a little copse, glen, wood, or grove where one might like to live. Like…
“Greenbelt Forest Heights.”
“West Montclair Meadows.”
Any titles with “Aspen,” “Laurel,” “Mulberry,” “Walnut,” “Willows,” or “Birches” in them…For California, nonnative foliage is good. East Coasty foliage. Not so good are more native plant items such as “Cactus,” “Palms,” “Yucca,” “Jalapeño.”
Sometimes good public-school names are simply mellifluous. At one point, Mike dreamed of buying a house in Carmel Valley because he found it so leafy and idyllic. “And it’s just forty minutes from the Monterey airport! You could be anywhere in California in about three hours!” This from a musician whose skin explodes into hives when a drive to a session takes more than twelve minutes. (And yet, year after year, Mike goes on summer vacation and real estate–fantasizes. “Why don’t we live HERE?” he exclaims, flinging his arms open before the Bear Tooth Mountains. Which, as my sister, Kaitlin, puts it, can be filed under “Conversation #703.”)
But Carmel Valley charmed even me. To this day, I can’t even utter the words “Carmel Valley” without going into my husky Sally Kellerman “Hidden Valley Ranch dressing” voice. And, as you might expect, it was also home to (cue Sally Kellerman voice) “Carmel Valley Elementary,” which looked, as we drove by it, cute, bucolic, absolutely adorable. Unfortunately, houses were also, like, a zillion trillion billion dollars. They all were, in all the charmingly named Carmels—Carmel Valley, Carmel Village, Carmel Heights, Carmel Woods, Carmel-by-the-Sea. Probably more affordable would have been homes in Carmel Buttes, Carmel Badlands, or Carmel Stinkpots, but…Carmel doesn’t have those.
It is true we live in braying-voiced “Van Nuys,” as opposed to the tonier “Sherman Oaks.” However, I’ve sensed recently that the area is gentrifying. It must be. For God’s sake, according to the L.A. Times, houses in our zip code are going for over $700,000. And who knows how long we’re even going to be in “Van Nuys”? The west of The Nuys has fallen off and become “Lake Balboa.” The south has become “Valley Village,” the east has become “Valley Glen”…Surely “Valley Heights” can’t be far behind…even though, geologically, that makes no sense. But that hasn’t stopped Angelenos before. “Toluca WOODS?” Hello! We live in a desert!
But perhaps the schools are NOT gentrifying.
I put my hand on the forbidden, humming door and give it a little shove.
I say, “I notice Aimee…is a bit hesitant.”
And Aimee says, in the quietest voice you can imagine, practically a whisper: “L.A. Unified…the horror, the horror.”
“That’s why we moved to La Cañada Flintridge,” Jonathan says apologetically, politely regretful over the fact that they do NOT have cancer.
“But really,” I shrill, taking another giant swallow of wine, “what IS it about the Los Angeles Unified School District?”
Aimee makes another sound, like an “ach.” It is similar to the sound one might make if someone breezily asked, “So…the Middle East? Things aren’t so perky, are they?”
And Aimee finally says, tersely, “It’s just big. Very big.”
“Big?” I say.
Aimee spreads her arms out, to indicate impossible size.
“Seth and Ben would get lost. Utterly lost.”
Jonathan leans in, drops his voice as though he might be overhead, possibly by spies under the employ of pro–school district government officials. “Elementary’s not so bad. But the high schools…If we’d stayed where we were in LAUSD, our high school would have been—?”
Aimee utters the words: “Grant! Ulysses…S…. Grant!”
She spits out the president’s name as though it were “Nixon!” As if to say: “Our children would have had to attend that filthy high school on Sepulveda behind Costco…NIXON!” But what about middle school? “AGNEW!”
“So La C
añada doesn’t have those problems of…size?” Mike asks.
Aimee puts her hands up.
Jonathan takes a deep, weighty breath, then admits: “Of course, the irony is that as excellent as the La Cañada schools are…”
“Because Seth tested so highly gifted,” Aimee adds, tearing apart a tiny crust of bread.
“In the top point-five percent…”
“Probably point-one percent,” Aimee amends, sharply.
Here Jonathan pushes back, just a little.
“We don’t know that for sure. In the end we have to go with the number Dr. Viswanathan gave us…”
Aimee flashes out, bitter, with the wound of it: “It’s very HARD for gifted children!”
And here Jonathan and Aimee entered a brief marital snorl over the fact that while they are lucky enough to live in La Cañada Flintridge, and in fact are paying through the nose for it, La Cañada schools being ones the entire world including Taiwan would kill for…Well, even amid all this academic excellence, because of their freakish, off-the-charts giftedness, their sons have to be sequestered for EVEN MORE money in a secret private academy in Pasadena for frighteningly gifted children called The Coleman School, or simply, Coleman. Now on top of their astronomical mortgage (which includes the second-story remodel) they are paying dual full tuitions. And fund-raising!
And Aimee isn’t even that wild about The Coleman School (or simply, Coleman).
“Developmentally speaking, the ideal school in Los Angeles for HG’s is Wonder Canyon, but it’s so exclusive, even GETTING A TOUR is impossible. They won’t even release me a brochure. You have to sleep with David Geffen or something.”
“Isn’t he gay?” Jonathan asks, momentarily sidetracked.
“If David Geffen had test-tube babies, THEY would go to Wonder Canyon,” Aimee declares, flatly. “All the experimental Hollywood children go there. If Diane Keaton married I. M. Pei…The code is impossible to crack.”
“But I’m sure YOUR children will be fine,” Jonathan concludes, a little madly. It is as if all at once he has realized how awkward the whole conversation has become…The implication being that, as opposed to his and Aimee’s, Mike’s and mine are such stupid children, any old rotten HUGE school district would be fine for them, even if it fell to our daughters to go to a disease-ridden HBO Oz prison-like high school with a name like “Millard Fillmore” (“Where will they matriculate to, after fifth grade?” “Warren Harding!” Or even worse, for middle school? “Ike Turner!”)…
So to ease the sting of it, Jonathan leans forward wincing, as though it is actually THEY who have cancer. Voice dropped, Jonathan shakily throws us a bone:
“The thing is…Seth may have Asperger’s.”
“What’s your local elementary?” Aimee can’t help herself from asking.
And Mike says, “Our corner school? It’s…I can’t recall, this elementary has a funny name…Sort of like some obscure Ecuadorian melon. Oh, I remember…”
He brightens in the act of remembering it:
“Guavatorina!”
2
Into the Vortex of the Snorl
What I know, at age forty-two, is that maintaining Emotional Serenity is important.
Angst is a state of mind—an act—that you select. Angst is not a thing that “happens” to you. External phenomena occur, and you have a choice. Given a troubling development, you may choose calm…or you may choose angst.
This is what Motherhood has taught me. Because Motherhood itself is Promethean—well, let’s call her “Mrs. Prometheus.” Which is to say, yes, you bring fire to humanity, but you also end up being chained to a rock and having your liver pecked out over and over again, every day, with ever-fresh, dive-bombing black crows of Worry.
Further, Motherhood today is unbelievably complicated, and has never been more scary. For instance, in the twenty-first century, babies now apparently swallow everything…And what’s worse is, these are typically going to be things so small you can’t see them. So your world is a minefield. (“Oh no! What’s that on the coffee table! Beads! Little beads! Teeny tiny beads!”) I found that the only way to get through those early years without actually descending into gibbering madness was to maintain a certain middle-focus glaze. One time, in the splattersville of my younger one’s diaper, I found the small tooth of a purple comb, a comb I hadn’t seen since college. Imagine if I’d seen it go in! So I was spared one—that was one folder of worry, in the middle of the night, I never had to mentally take the rubber band off of.
And now, somehow, Child #2 has made it to toddler graduation and is finally joining her big sister in preschool. Off she goes to preschool…
The first day of which can be hard. Hard hard hard…
I bend gently down to our baby, Isabel…whose name has never fit her. Not even today. “Isabel” is too grown up, implies too many sophisticated language skills, a Good Driver discount, an aversion to shellfish, and perhaps a mutual fund. Perhaps when she is thirty-eight years old her name will fit her. Until then, #2 is our Squidlet, our Shrimp, our Poopsadella. I smooth out the folds of her little red Kittykat skirt, cup her pointy chin in my hand.
“Don’t be scared, sweetie,” I murmur, in honeyed tones. “Mommy will be sitting RIGHT HERE in the hallway, all morning, with her computer. She is going to plug her laptop right there into that wall. Your mommy is not going to BUDGE, sweetie. Your mommy will be writing her radio commentary right outside this window. If you feel lonely, or sad, or have anything at all you want to share with Mommy—”
WHOOOMP!
I am almost knocked over by the force of my two-and-a-half-year-old tearing away from me. There are practically tire marks, and a little wisp of smoke, where she once stood.
“Sweetie!” I cry out in alarm. “Don’t forget your lunch box! Here’s your lunch box!”
Frantic to join the others, like a small scrabbling animal, she pushes open the bright green classroom door…which through sheer force, ricochets shut behind her.
BAM!
I fly like a bird to the glass window, tap at it, tap, tap, tap.
“Sweetie! Your lunch!”
The door opens again. The teacher, in a blue apron—and is that a slightly pitying expression?—takes the lunch box, closes the door again.
I had reserved the whole morning to be here, to stand faithfully by in case of tears, collapse, hysteria, but…
Well!
Mike and I sit at Nat’s Early Bite in The Nuys, looking over our menus.
We haven’t breakfasted out together, just the two of us, in—what is it? FIVE YEARS?
It’s strange to have a whole morning suddenly open.
But there you have it. Both girls are suddenly in preschool. They bolted into their classrooms and the Red Sea has closed up behind them. And the cell phone is not chirping. Is the ringer even on? Yes. Okay!
Okay. Back to the menu. A menu! Wow! Look at this! Look at all the things a person might eat, just for the asking! Bagel. Whitefish. Eggs…
“I’m going to have the cheese, sprout, and avocado omelet,” I declare boldly.
“Corned beef hash…” Mike muses.
“When did you last have corned beef hash?” I exult.
“Never!” he says.
“Have it!”
We continue looking at our menus.
“Coffee?” the waitress asks.
“I think I’m coffee’ed out,” I say.
“Me too,” he says. “Maybe just some water.”
“With ice?” she asks.
“Yes!” I agree. “Me too! Ice!”
She goes away.
A beat.
“You want a section of the paper?” Mike says.
“Sure,” I say.
“Front page?” he says.
“’Kay,” I say.
We open our papers. And here we sit.
Here my beloved and I sit on a Monday morning at 9:30 A.M., eighteen years in.
I hear a burst of muffled laughter, then “Shhh!�
� I turn. Several booths down is a young, pimply rock-and-roll couple with black skinny jeans and green hair. They lean forward across their shiny diner table, gripping hands, their voices low, urgent with excitement.
And in the mirrored wall, a few booths down, by contrast, I can see us—two lifted newspapers.
I turn back.
“Oh my God,” I say. “We’ve become one of those couples!”
“What couples?” Mike says, eyes still on the paper.
“You know—those couples you see in restaurants…On the dripping eleventh shoal of marriage…who have absolutely nothing left to say to each other anymore.”
He lowers his paper, thinks about it.
“Well…I just…feel like when I share my thoughts, half the time I’m repeating myself.”
“Try me!” I challenge.
“For instance, as you know, I’m not working very much right now. There’s Don’s album project and those two possible cable things MAYBE, but overall work has been a bit, shall we say, thin. I used to panic when I hit a dry spell. But as you know, I’ve decided not to obsess about it anymore. But nor am I going to belabor it. Best left undiscussed.”
I see my husband’s point, all too well. I was asleep by the second sentence. Mike’s Not Working—as Kaitlin would say, that is Conversation #409. In the eighteen years I’ve known him, as a musician in Los Angeles, Mike always DOESN’T work for a while, and then he always DOES. Then he has no work. Then he has too much work. (You’ve heard the joke: “How do you get a musician to complain? Hire him.”)
Mike’s working and NOT working. It’s…what do you call it? Oh yes! A cycle.
I suddenly notice, on the back of his Calendar section, a sudoku puzzle…
But, trained in therapy, he dutifully lobs the “Let’s check in with each other” ball right back at me.
“And how are you?” he asks, a bit dubiously.
Oh, Lord. If I thought his inner life was tedious…
“Oh hey! I’m fine,” I reply lamely.
Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$@ Story About Parenting! Page 3
