by Judy Baer
“Oh, yes, I’m sure there is.”
She looked at me appraisingly. “We haven’t seen much of Him around here, but maybe…”
We had definitely come to the right place.
At that moment, Mitzi pulled up and flung open the door of her Porsche.
She does know how to make an entrance. She tottered out of the car wearing designer denim jeans, a pale blue silk blouse and a faux fur jacket. On her head she wore a billed baseball cap.
So this is Mitzi’s idea of working clothes. Working a runway, maybe. At least she’d deep-sixed her fake eyelashes.
“Here I am!” she chortled. “Ready, willing and able. What do you want me to do first?”
I was certainly the wrong one to ask about that, considering I had no idea what I was doing here, either.
“How do you like it?” Mitzi spun around so that I could see the rhinestones on the pockets of her jeans.
I bit my tongue so hard I tasted blood but, to my credit, I didn’t say what I was actually thinking. Then Kim trudged over in her battered hiking boots and lumberjack attire. The diva and the hired hand, both ready to get their hands dirty.
Arch walked up to us and kissed Mitzi full on the mouth, delighted to see her. She batted her eyelashes at him and gave a Southern belle sort of giggle and a look that asked the question, “How’s my big, strong, handsome man?”
Besotted, Arch gazed at her in adoration. Note to self: Start batting eyelashes at Chase.
Kurt and Chase sauntered up beside us to get directions from Arch who was foreman of this operation. Before they left, I, as a test, fluttered my eyelashes in Chase’s direction.
He paused to stare at me and grew serious. “Are you okay, honey? If your eyes are bothering you, I think there’s some Visine in the car.”
Okay, so controlling a man by batting one’s eyelashes may be a little harder than it looks.
“We’re going to insulate pipes,” Arch announced as I willed my eyes to stop twitching. “Maybe you three ladies could empty the bottom cupboards in the kitchen for us. We’ll repair windows inside the house, and then we’ll have to retouch or repaint those walls. We can use help with that, as well.”
“Shall we?” Kim gestured toward the house.
Inside, Mitzi walked up to the kitchen sink and squatted down in front of it to peer into the cupboard. “Ohh. One of you will have to do this.”
“I can,” I offered. “But why can’t you?”
“She keeps onions under here. And potatoes. Do you see the white thing coming out of that one?”
“That’s a potato sprout. It just needs to be broken off so that the potato doesn’t go soft. I keep my potatoes under the sink, too.”
“It looks like a worm. I don’t do worms. And onions make my hands smell. I don’t do onions.”
We quickly discovered that Mitzi did not “do” a lot of things. She refused to kneel because it was hard on the knees of her jeans. She declined to touch cleaning supplies because they were too caustic for her delicate hands. Mitzi also did not scrape paint, caulk cracks or wield a hammer. She declined to lift, bend, stretch or flex. She would not drink coffee that was not made from freshly ground beans, go to the bathroom without piling six layers of toilet paper on the seat or dry her hands on anything but a fresh towel. She did not believe in holding things while someone else worked. Nor did she act as a gofer for anyone. Mitzi is practiced at saying, “Get it yourself.”
Three minutes into our cleaning venture, Mitzi broke a fingernail.
When we first heard her scream, I thought she’d shattered her arm. Mitzi latched on to her wrist and did a dance that should have brought rain pouring down upon us. Then she sat down at the table to examine the extent of the damage.
“Oh, look at the poor little thing,” she moaned. “Gone, completely gone. And it was so pretty, too—the one they put a rhinestone on. It was art, really, with little gold swirls….”
I bent and picked up the artificial nail from the floor. “It’s so thick and heavily lacquered that we could glue it right back on. The guys must have brought along some wood glue….”
She screamed again, this time as if I’d tried to remove her toenails through her mouth.
“Don’t even joke about that, Whitney.” She stood up. “I’ll have to go to the salon and get this taken care of right away.”
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Kim and I said in unison. We each grabbed her by a shoulder and pushed her back into the chair.
“Who knows how many more nails you might break before the day is over? You’d never get a lick of work done here with all that running back and forth to the salon. Stay here, brave the emotional pain, and go later.”
She glared at me so icily that I felt my blood start to congeal, but she stayed where she was.
I thought she’d be completely useless for the rest of the day—and she was, workwise.
She did, however, prove to be a remarkably adept cheerleader, manager and chief. From a chair in the middle of the kitchen, Mitzi got us to do everything that Arch had assigned to the three of us and more. And she didn’t even demand a sling for her “bad arm.”
“Good job, girls,” she crowed as Kim and I sank wearily onto the floor, tired from doing double duty kneeling, scraping, caulking, lifting, bending, stretching and flexing. “Don’t you think it would be nice if instead of just touching up the paint on these walls, we repainted the entire kitchen?”
“Right. Nice.”
“We can’t just change the James family’s decor,” Kim protested, even though the “decor” was desperately in need of a pick-me-up.
“Sure we can. I asked the lady who lives here what her favorite colors are and if we could paint for her.”
“So you didn’t come here to work,” I said in a moment of clarity. “You came to play interior decorator.”
“I work to my strengths,” Mitzi said primly. “You should know that by now, Whitney. I do it in the office all the time.”
She views avoiding work as a strength. This explains a lot.
“So let’s go shopping!”
This, too, was an evil plan on Mitzi’s part. While Kim and I trudged around the store like two mountain men shopping for paint and curtains, Mitzi was the best-dressed woman in the place. When Kim and I stopped to look at floor tile, a salesman eyed us warily, as if we had room under our large, dumpy work clothes to shoplift enough flooring for an entire family room. Then Mitzi arrived, and he spent the next twenty minutes discussing the merits and durability of wood versus tile.
Feeling part workhorse, part lackey, Kim and I loaded the car while Mitzi sat behind the wheel, fiddling with the radio.
“Why does this feel so familiar to me?” Kim murmured.
“Because it’s just like a day at Innova with Mitzi. We do the work and Mitzi takes the credit.”
“It’s our own fault, you know. We let her get away with it.”
“We not only let her get away with it,” I said, resigned to our fate, “we don’t even know how to stop her.”
“You’re her superior. Aren’t you supposed to know how?”
“Somehow, despite driving everyone crazy and never seeming to work, she manages to get things done—lots of things. As soon as I figure out how she does it, I’m going to write a book about it, tell her secrets and make a million dollars. Until then…”
“I know, I know. Keep loading.”
By the time we got home after the long, long day, my legs were leaden and every fiber of my body ached. Despite that, I felt a glow of satisfaction that I’ve rarely experienced. Every ache and pain I would have tomorrow was worth it, just to see the expression on the Jameses’ faces when they returned home. The delight on our husbands’ faces told another side of the story. The satisfaction of digging in and getting dirty, of seeing immediate benefit from their work and getting out of their coats and ties, had had a remarkable effect on their spirits, as well.
The pleasure didn’t last long however. Shortly after we g
ot home, I found Chase lying in bed.
“Honey? Are you okay?” Chase is usually the one who has to scrape me up off the floor after a long day.
“Just tired, that’s all. You don’t have to worry about turning off the lights. I’ll be able to sleep with them on….”
He dozed off in midsentence. My Energizer Bunny husband’s batteries had run out.
Chapter Thirteen
Saturday, April 24
Never ask a toddler to hold a raw egg.
That is only one of the instructions I would have given Mitzi for the care and handling of Wesley, but apparently Kim forgot.
Mitzi, acting on a continuous string of daft ideas, decided that it would be good for her to spend some time with a child before she had one of her own. I don’t disagree with that, but I do think she should have started with something smaller—like a six-pounder. Or at least one with slightly less energy. Wesley exists on a natural, permanent sugar high. She should also have chosen one with fewer creative ideas that run in the direction of mayhem, turmoil, pandemonium, bedlam, destruction and annihilation.
Did I miss anything Wes is good at? Neither would I have chosen a child with such a strong fascination for bathroom plumbing, rodents, reptiles, dish soap and garbage cans. I also would have weeded out a budding Van Gogh armed with his mother’s lipstick and access to an oatmeal-colored living-room couch.
I mentioned this to Kim, but she brushed me off, saying I worry too much. She had an evil gleam in her eye when she said she viewed this whole experiment as a wonderful learning tool. Mitzi had the potential to learn a lot, considering the aptitude, skill and capacity of the pint-sized teacher.
Kim and Kurt left at two o’clock for an afternoon at the movies. I, acquainted with Wesley’s propensities, chose to stay home and wait for the phone to ring.
Mitzi lasted forty-five minutes—forty minutes longer than I’d expected—before she sent up a smoke signal calling for help.
“Do you want to come with me?” I asked Chase. “It might be fun.”
He waved at me from the couch, where he, Mr. Tibble and Scram were tangled together like a bunch of rubber bands. “Go ahead and tell me all about it when you get back.”
“You’ve been hanging out on the couch a lot lately,” I commented.
“Just being lazy. Have fun rescuing Mitzi.”
I bent to kiss him on the lips and smoothed hair away from his forehead. “You’re warm. You’d better shake those two live fur coats you’re wearing.”
Chase wiggled his leg, and Scram leaped to the floor. Mr. Tibble didn’t budge.
“I’ll manage these two. You’d better hurry. A lot can happen in five or ten minutes over there.”
Ain’t that the truth!
As I rang the doorbell, I eyed Mitzi’s Porsche in the driveway and entertained myself thinking of Mitzi in a Mom-mobile, a minivan with room for her children, groceries, three dogs and an entire team of little soccer players.
Fortunately, she opened the door before my head exploded from trying to imagine it.
Well, at least someone answered the door. Wesley stood there wearing a pair of soggy Spider-Man underpants and a smile.
Evidently little boys are much harder to potty train than little girls. Though the odds are now running in Kim’s favor, Wes still has accidents—particularly when he’s having too much fun to stop and take care of business.
Mitzi appeared from around the corner, limping on a broken shoe heel and waving a pair of dry SpongeBob SquarePants underwear in her hand.
“You can’t just open the door!” Mitzi panted to Wesley. “What will the neighbors think? Here, put these on and we’ll find the rest of your clothes.”
“I want Spider-Man.” Actually, Wesley pronounces it “Piderman.”
“Piderman is all in the wash. You have to wear this pair.” Mitzi examined the underwear closely. “What is this? A sponge?” She sounded horrified. “No wonder you don’t want to wear these. Who on earth thought of dressing children in household cleaning equipment?”
Finally, she noticed that I had arrived. “Hi, Whitney. Don’t let him escape. I’ve got to find him something more appropriate to wear. Sponges? What will they put on children’s clothes next? Toasters? Mops and brooms?”
Muttering to herself, she hobbled off, a woman on a mission to ban kitchen utensils from boys’ underpants.
Wesley took me by the hand and tugged me into the living room or, more aptly, the former living room.
Every toy Wesley owned was piled in the center of the room. A condominium made out of a card table, Kim’s good comforter and a series of large boxes sat in one corner. Broken crayons ground into the beige carpet made a lovely contemporary bit of artwork on the floor. A splash of artificial orange-flavored drink was an exclamation point for the Dadaist look of the crayons. Wesley probably could have gotten hundreds of dollars for it at a gallery. Too bad it was all done on wool carpeting instead of canvas.
“Ridiculous!” Mitzi tromped into the room holding an assortment of underwear. “Ponies, puppies, Cat in the Hat, Mickey Mouse, teddy bears, Pluto, Goofy…but not another Spider-Man.”
“Piderman. I want Piderman.”
“Well, you’re just going to have to choose something else.”
“Nooooooooo!”
I took the toon underwear and studied it carefully. “Uncle Chase has a tie with Pluto on it. Did you know that, Wes?”
He eyes me appraisingly. “Unca Chase?”
“Yep. And Mickey Mouse socks, too.” Chase never takes himself too seriously. No matter how formally he dresses, I can count on a bit of silk in a Donald Duck motif or a money clip shaped like mouse ears in his pocket.
“Unca Chase?”
Sometimes visiting with Wesley is like talking to an echo.
He stomped toward me and took the Pluto-adorned undies. He held them up to Mitzi. “These.”
To Mitzi’s credit, she didn’t lose it. Her fingers didn’t twitch and her hands didn’t encircle Wesley’s neck. Her eyes, however, wore the glazed look of someone who has been knocking her head on a wall and is relieved to have stopped.
“This is harder than I thought.” She looked at Wes as if he was a school science fair experiment gone bad.
I sniffed the air. “Is something burning?”
“My pizza!” Mitzi dashed out of the room as Wesley clapped and chortled “Peeza, peeza.”
It was only a tiny bit brown on the crust, I assured her, as she studied the charred pizza. That was much better than serving it underdone. Once we sat down at the table, however, Wesley took one look at the table set with paper plates and glasses of apple juice and burst into tears.
“What is it, honey?” I asked.
“Eatinthetent, Mommy says.”
“What’s ‘eatinthetent’?” Mitzi asked. “Some weird language they speak in this household?”
“What did Mommy say, Wes?”
“Eat in the tent,” he enunciated carefully. “Mommy says.”
“What tent?”
Wesley tore off into the living room, where we found him sitting happily under the card table draped with Kim’s comforter. “My tent!”
“Your mother told you that you could eat in there?” Mitzi gasped, appalled.
I was just happy to have deciphered his request so early in the game.
That is how the three of us came to be sitting under the card table, dining off burned pizza on paper plates. It was a squeeze for Mitzi and me. We sat, heads touching the underside of the table, shoulders hunched. Mitzi eyed me like a crabby vulture and glared at me as if this were my fault. Wesley, however, ate two pieces of pizza and dozed off in one of the adjoining boxes—er, rooms—in his makeshift condo.
“How does Kim do it, Whitney?” Mitzi asked after we’d untwisted ourselves and crept out from beneath the table. She rubbed her shoulder and sat down on a chair in the kitchen.
I handed her a cup of tea and opened the sack of cookies Kim always keeps in her secret, kno
wn-only-to-us stash.
“She loves it and she loves him. She’s a very devoted mother and Wes is a happy, normal little boy.”
“With the energy of a nuclear reactor,” Mitzi muttered.
I recalled having used that comparison myself.
“Maybe I can’t do it,” Mitzi murmured. “Maybe the reason I can’t get pregnant is that I’d be a terrible mother.”
“That’s ridiculous and you know it.” I shoved the cookies closer to her. She delicately picked the chocolate chips out of them as she ate.
“Then why? There’s got to be a reason.”
“Bodies aren’t all perfect.” Especially not in two-piece swimsuits. “Sometimes they need a little help with something—insulin, thyroid medication…”
“And, in my case, fertility pills. I suppose I should be happy we have options, but it seems so unnatural, so forced. If nature doesn’t want me to have a child…”
“Mitzi, you’ve been improving on nature for as long as I’ve known you. Those false eyelashes, fake nails, fake and bake tanning lotions, push-up bras…”
“I do not wear a push-up bra! Usually.”
“…electrolysis, dermabrasion, foundation makeup.”
“Okay, I get it.”
Maybe it was because in her tussles with Wes all her makeup had rubbed off or because, for once, she wasn’t done up like a mannequin in an expensive department store, but she looked soft and vulnerable, as genuinely lovely as I’d ever seen her.
“Do you want me to hang around until Kim and Kurt come home?”
Mitzi glanced at the clock on the wall. “How long do you think Wesley will sleep?”
“A couple hours, I’m sure. He plays hard, and he sleeps just as hard.”
“Then I’ll lie down with him. Kim should be back in an hour or so.”
As I got ready to leave, Mitzi went down on her hands and knees and crawled back under the table where Wesley was napping. She lay down next to him, cradled her head in her arm, and before I got to the door, she was asleep.
