Mommy Tracked

by Whitney Gaskell

  “Trust me,” Melinda said, after demonstrating the technique on her condom-encased dildo. “Do it and he’ll weep with gratitude.”

  Grace fished a dry-cleaning flyer out of her Kate Spade diaper bag and jotted down some notes. Anna raised her eyebrows at this, but Grace just grinned and shrugged.

  “I don’t want to forget anything,” she whispered.

  “And now we’ll end with a quiz on what you’ve learned tonight,” Melinda said. She held up a bag of silver Hershey’s Kisses. “Call out the answer, and I’ll throw a Kiss to whomever gets it right. First, what foods make a man’s semen taste sweeter?”

  “Strawberries!” Jana Mallin yelled out.

  “Melon,” Kari Clem said.

  “Pineapple!” Grace called out.

  “Very good,” Melinda said, tossing the foil-wrapped chocolates into the audience.

  “How many calories are there in an average ejaculation?” Melinda asked.

  “Six calories,” Justine Silkey said, with a giggle.

  “That’s right,” Melinda said, tossing her a Kiss. “So being on a diet is no excuse for not swallowing.”

  Laughter erupted. Over the last hour, almost everyone had lost their initial shock at the material, and the atmosphere was now more like a bachelorette party than a subdued MCT meeting.

  “And last but certainly not least, what is our new motto?” Melinda asked.

  “Tend to the Testicles,” the group chorused back, and Melinda beamed out at them like a proud parent.

  “Excellent. You’ll be amazed by how far a little attention there goes. Your man will love it,” Melinda said. “And I think we’ll end on that note. Thank you for your time, ladies. It’s been a pleasure.”

  Wild applause broke out, and Melinda smiled graciously.

  After the meeting, Grace walked out to her car, accompanied by Juliet, Anna, and Chloe.

  “Thanks for inviting me, Anna. This was fun,” Chloe said. She yawned widely and then smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. I guess it’s past my bedtime. Which is about eight o’clock these days.”

  “I remember that from when I was pregnant with Charlie. I was bone tired for nine months straight,” Anna said.

  Juliet also suppressed a yawn, and Grace looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Something you want to tell us, Jules?”

  “What?”

  “She’s asking if you’re knocked up,” Anna said.

  “Jesus, no. Bite your tongue,” Juliet said with a shudder. “I was up late last night working on that damned dead-baby case.”

  “Oh, please. You never sleep, anyway,” Grace scoffed. “You just plug yourself into a socket and recharge.”

  “Dead-baby case?” Chloe asked.

  Grace heard the note of panic in her voice and turned to Juliet, willing her not to go into detail, but, as usual, Juliet was completely clueless.

  “An otherwise perfectly healthy baby died during delivery. My firm is suing the doctor—well, suing his insurance company—for botching the C-section. And right now we’re in the hellish bowels of discovery,” Juliet explained.

  Even in the dim lights shining over the dark parking lot, Grace could see that Chloe had paled.

  “Juliet,” Anna said warningly.

  “What?” Juliet asked.

  Grace sighed. Juliet was a brilliant and talented lawyer, but sometimes it seemed like she lacked even the most basic interpersonal skills.

  “Ignore her,” Grace said to Chloe. “She doesn’t know any better.”

  “What? What did I say?” Juliet asked again.

  Anna looked pointedly at Chloe’s very pregnant abdomen.

  “Oh,” Juliet said, finally catching on. “Don’t worry. Hardly anyone dies during childbirth anymore.”

  Grace and Anna exchanged an exasperated look. But Chloe seemed to rally.

  “You’re a working mom?” she said, looking at Juliet with interest. “I’m doing an article for Mothering magazine—I’m a freelance writer—and I’d love to interview you for my story. It’s about women trying to balance work and family.”

  “Why not?” Juliet said. She pulled a business card from her pocket and handed it to Chloe. “Call my secretary, and she’ll set up a lunch appointment.”

  “Which Juliet will cancel at the last minute, because she never eats lunch,” Anna added. “But I think she would be a great addition for your story. Chloe’s interviewing me too.”

  “How about you?” Chloe asked Grace, turning toward her with a keen interest. “Do you work?”

  Grace hesitated, her lips pressed together as she swallowed back her annoyance.

  Yes, I work, she wanted to say. I run around after the children, and prepare three meals and two healthy snacks a day, and vacuum, and do the shopping and the dishes and the laundry, and run a zillion errands, and I even, for God’s sake, produce milk from my breasts. In fact, I work so hard that at the end of the day I’m often too tired to brush my teeth before passing out in bed. I’m like a goddamned modern-day Cinderella.

  But that wasn’t the sort of work Chloe meant, Grace knew. She meant office work. Paid work. Important work.

  “No,” she finally said, managing a rueful smile. “I’m just a stay-at-home mom.”

  “Just?” Anna protested. She shook her head. “Come on. I couldn’t do what you do.”

  “Me neither. Grace is like the superhero of mothers,” Juliet said.

  “Supermom,” Anna said with a grin.

  “Yeah, that’s me. I have the cape and suit with a big M on it and everything. Although I’ve sworn off my spandex superhero suit until I lose the baby roll.” Grace laughed. She pressed the button on her remote-access key chain to unlock the doors, and her minivan flashed its lights in response. “And now I should probably get the Mom-mobile home. I left Louis in charge, and I’m afraid the girls are going to have staged a coup and taken over the house in my absence. I’ll catch you guys later.”

  “Hey, hon,” Louis said, when she walked in the back door.

  He had changed into sweats and was standing at the kitchen sink, loading dishes into the dishwasher. Grace felt a stab of guilt. She had meant to do the lunch dishes before she left for the MCT meeting, but then she’d gotten busy with the girls, as well as monitoring an eBay auction for a pair of sixties-era Lucite lamps—which she ended up losing in the final seconds of the auction—so she never quite got around to the dishes. So much for being Supermom.

  “Hi. Sorry, I didn’t mean to leave you with the dishes.” Grace put the plastic storage container full of brownies that she’d brought home from the meeting on the counter.

  She walked around the island and gave him a perfunctory kiss hello.

  “No biggie.” Louis smiled at her. He had a little blob of dish soap foam on his cheek, which Grace wiped off.

  Louis had a lightly freckled face, thinning copper-red hair, and the square, boxy build of the wrestler he’d once been. Like Grace, he’d put on some weight since their marriage a decade earlier, but unlike her, Grace thought, he carried it well. It was one of the great injustices in life: men aging better than their wives. Louis’s laugh lines and gradual loss of hair just made him look more distinguished, more likely to be taken seriously by his colleagues.

  “How are the kids?” she asked.

  “Everyone’s in bed and asleep.” Louis gave her a mock salute.

  “Wow. Miracles do happen.”

  “Nat took a while to go down, so I told her all of the gritty details about one of my tax cases, and that seemed to do the trick.”

  Grace laughed. “I bet.”

  “How was the meeting?” Louis asked. He began to scrub out a frying pan crusted with eggs from that morning.

  “It was fun. The sexpert seemed to go over well. I don’t know how I’m going to top it next time.”

  “I hope you took notes,” Louis said, grinning at her. “It’s been a while.”

  It had been months, actually. The last time had been before Nat’s birth. Grace’s libido alway
s went into a freefall while she was nursing. Still, Louis looked so hopeful that she didn’t shoot down the idea immediately.

  “I might have picked up a tip or two,” Grace said, smiling back at him.

  The phone rang, echoing across the kitchen. Grace picked up the cordless phone and clicked it on.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hey, it’s me.” It was Anna. From the slight delay on the line, Grace guessed that she was calling on her cell phone. “I just wanted to make sure everything was okay. You scooted off so quickly after the meeting.”

  Grace cupped her hand over the phone and turned to Louis. “It’s Anna.”

  “Say hi from me. I’m going to take a shower,” Louis said. He headed out of the kitchen.

  Grace uncovered the phone. “Hey. Louis says hi. No, I’m fine.”

  “Oh, good. Chloe was worried she’d offended you when she asked if you worked,” Anna said.

  “Oh, no, not at all.” Grace felt a warm trickle of guilt. She should have made more of an effort with Chloe; it was always hard being the new one in a group. “It’s just…”

  “What?”

  Grace turned and stared out the back window overlooking the pool. The backyard was dark and still, lit only by the small lantern that hung over the back door. Grace reached over and turned on the pool lights, flooding the backyard with light, but then thought better of it and switched them back off. She didn’t want Mrs. Christie—the crotchety old bat who lived next door—to complain, as she unfailingly did whenever they used the pool at night.

  “Well, sometimes I do feel like I’m the odd man out around you and Juliet. You both work, have careers. I’m just a housewife.”

  “Will you stop with that ‘just a housewife’ crap? I wish I could have stayed home with Charlie, at least for a little while,” Anna said wistfully.

  Grace snorted.

  “I’m serious,” Anna insisted.

  “Anna, you’re a restaurant critic. Which means you have the most amazing job in the world. It’s better than being a rock star. You don’t have to deal with tours, or groupies, or your band ending up in rehab,” Grace said.

  “Yeah, well, I love my job, you know that. And I don’t think I could have stayed home full time; I would have been climbing the walls. But still. It’s hard sometimes leaving Charlie all day,” Anna said, and she sighed heavily. “It was especially tough at first when he was a baby. In fact, he was fine with it; I was the one who was a mess at the day-care drop-off.”

  Grace thought of Natalie lying upstairs in her crib and tried to imagine leaving her every morning at a day-care center. Just the thought made her stomach roil.

  “You’re right, I don’t think I could stand handing my baby over to a stranger like that,” she said.

  The silence went on for a full three beats before Grace realized what she’d just said. She slapped her hand against her forehead.

  “Oh, shit, Anna, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to sound like such a judgmental bitch.”

  “That’s okay,” Anna said, although Grace could hear how hurt her friend sounded, and it made her want to beat herself to death with the telephone.

  “Anna, really and truly—I envy you. I wish I had something outside the house and kids that was just mine.”

  “Well, you know what I think.”

  “Yeah, I know.” In her premom life, as distant as it seemed, Grace had worked as an interior designer. Well, she’d worked for an interior designer, anyway, although she had handled a few smaller projects on her own. As much as she loved design work, she’d mostly hated the job. Her boss had been such a demanding diva—she actually snapped her fingers at Grace when she wanted something handed to her—that Grace hadn’t been at all sorry to quit when Molly was born. Occasionally, Grace wondered aloud if she’d done the right thing giving up her career, and Anna had told her time and time again that she could pick up some part-time clients if she wanted.

  But the truth was, Grace didn’t think it was as easy as all that. She hadn’t exactly been a huge success in her chosen field. In fact, being a mom was the only thing she knew she was good at. She was the fun mom, the one who played Barbies and dress-up and who baked batches of chocolate chip cookies with her kids and was there to apply Dora the Explorer Band-Aids to their boo-boos. She kept the art-project cupboard stocked with glitter and feathers and washable paints, regularly took her kids on outings to the zoo and the children’s museum, and custom-made all of their Halloween costumes (every year, Grace got desperate last-minute calls from other moms, begging to borrow the Blue’s Clues costume she’d sewn with fake blue fur or the green tulle fairy-princess outfit complete with gossamer wings).

  “So Chloe seemed nice,” Grace said instead, changing the subject. “I think I’ll invite her to our pool party.”

  “Yeah, she’s great. Very shy, but sweet. She and her husband just moved into the neighborhood a few months ago. I think they came here from Texas.”

  “When is she due?”

  “I think in about a month. She looks ready to pop.”

  “I thought she looked adorable,” Grace said.

  “Yeah. I never looked that cute when I was pregnant. I just swelled everywhere,” Anna said.

  “Tell me about it. Only in my case, the swelling never went away. I still look like one of those dancing hippos from Fantasia. You know, the ones with the tutus?” Grace laughed—this is what the fat friend is supposed to do, she rationalized, make funny, self-deprecating jokes—but Anna didn’t join her.

  “Don’t do that,” Anna protested. “Don’t run yourself down.”

  “I was just kidding,” Grace said quickly.

  “Hey, I have to go. I just pulled up to my mom’s house,” Anna said.

  “Okay. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Bye.”

  Grace clicked the phone off and continued to stare out the back window into the darkness for a few minutes, mentally going over the day’s events. Her bit introducing Melinda had gone all right—at least, she hadn’t spoken too fast or stumbled over her words. She just wished she’d had more time to get ready. She’d spent the afternoon helping Molly learn about traditional Japanese tea parties for the next Foreign Friends Day at school. Then Hannah had insisted on getting her finger paints out, which had been fun but messy. And Natalie needed to be fed, so Grace had to give up trying to wipe the remaining smears of paint off Hannah’s hands and turn her attention to nursing the baby. By the time Louis got home from work, Grace hadn’t had time to do much more than pull a brush through her hair and swipe a lipstick on before she had to run out the door. The previous president of MCT, Tara McFadden—a thin, elegant woman whose straight ash-blonde hair was always frizz-free—had always looked so polished at the monthly meetings.

  Pretty much the opposite of me, Grace thought unhappily. When had she become so frumpy? It seemed like just yesterday that she was paging through fashion magazines, trying to imitate the styles she found there. Nowadays, she lived in sweats and sneakers.

  She looked gloomily down at the now-rumpled linen pantsuit, which she’d already decided to burn, and saw a streak of powdered sugar smeared across the top. Gah. Had that been there earlier? Had she stood up in front of everyone covered in sugar?

  Grace turned and popped the lid off the storage container and took out a brownie. Three bites later the brownie was gone, and she took out another one. And when that one was gone, she ate another. Twenty minutes later she looked down and saw that the storage container was empty. She blinked. Had she just eaten…How many brownies had been in there, anyway?

  Revulsion surged up inside her, hot and fierce. The brownies felt heavy in her stomach, and suddenly Grace felt like she was going to be sick.

  Thank God, she thought.

  She ran to the bathroom. After taking care to turn on the water, so Louis wouldn’t hear, she knelt down in front of the toilet and waited. But nothing happened. Grace panicked. She couldn’t allow her body to digest five thousand calorie
s of sugar, butter, and chocolate. Finally, she did something she hadn’t done since she was in high school—she stuck three fingers down her throat until she began to gag, until her stomach cooperated and began to heave. She did it again, and again, and again, until there was nothing left to purge.

  three

  Juliet

  Juliet was already awake when her alarm went off at five a.m., and she hit the buzzer before it woke Patrick. She always woke up a minute before the alarm went off and didn’t know why she even bothered to turn it on every night. Habit, probably. Habit, and the fear that the one time she didn’t set it would be the one morning she’d oversleep. And that would be a disaster. Juliet barely had enough time in the day as it was.

  She slid out of bed, shucked off the oversize Tulane Law T-shirt she’d slept in, and pulled on her running clothes. Ten minutes later she was pounding down Ocean Street, the main avenue that ran from downtown Orange Cove to the public beaches on Pelican Island. Duran Duran played on her iPod, and Juliet matched her pace to the music.

  It was still dark out, although the sky had the ethereal glow it got just before sunrise, changing so slowly from inky black to sorbet shades of pink and orange that it always took her by surprise when the morning suddenly dawned. She ran past the Dunkin’ Donuts, which was already lit up inside, and the oil-change place, which wasn’t. She sprinted by an assisted-living center for seniors, with its clusters of mod, seventies-built condos, and then past the fences of the few houses that backed against Ocean Street. And then she was running up the bridge that arched over the intracoastal river, connecting Orange Cove to the island. The wind was stronger at the top arch of the bridge and tasted sharply of salt. Juliet tucked her head down as she ran into it.

  This was her favorite time of day, the one hour when there were no demands on her other than the physical ones she placed on herself. She didn’t have to think, or be anything for anyone. No one was asking her for the status of a case, or pushing her to stay late at the office, or putting her on a guilt trip for staying late at the office, or begging her to turn on the television so they could watch Kim Possible over their morning bowl of cornflakes.