We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier

by Celia Rivenbark

  Yes, they dive to the floor and yank the curtains shut. We’re like Moses and Addie Pray selling Bibles door-to-door in Paper Moon. Oh, except they were crooks. Then again, charging eight bucks for a three-pack of microwave popcorn could be considered stealing in some circles.

  As I huffed down the sidewalk, a box of candy bars in each hand, I wondered again why we can’t just write the school a check and get on with our lives. I mean it’s not like this is a useful service. Most people don’t hug us with relief, and say, “Oh, thank you!!!! Thank you!!! I was just telling my husband that I was so tired I dreaded going to the grocery store and buying our six oversized chocolate nougat bars for tonight. Oh, God bless you and your whole entire little family!!!!”

  After it was all said and done, pink fur key chain in our possession, we basked in the strangely satisfying smiles from the homeroom teacher (one can only imagine that the kids who don’t sell the quota are sent into the coal furnace to hang out with the pale and sweaty custodian whose personality reeked of Carl in Sling Blade and always called to mind the phrase, “Police described him as a drifter….”

  Although she was still having a devil of a time getting those storm windows installed, I decided it would be a good idea to take my daughter and her little friends for a well-deserved treat after all that Willie Loman–esque foolishness.

  The children’s museum was a surprise, honestly. I thought it was going to be lifelike wax figures of Great Kids in History (“Kids, look! It’s Danny Bonaduce from The Partridge Family when he was just a copper-haired cut-up instead of a burned-out DJ picking up transvestite prostitutes!”) but it turned out to be a bunch of “handson” scientific experiments, animal facts, and art stuff. Talk about your bait and switch.

  The tiny telemarketers in training were thrilled, although I wasn’t. There was exactly one chair in the building for any weary adult who might have grown tired of oohing and aahing over the baking-soda-makes-volcano demonstration. Got it; it fizzes; let’s move on.

  I spied a muscular young dad holding a camcorder sitting on the only chair. Apparently, chairs, like Mesozoic Pterosauria, had become extinct. After a few minutes, he walked over and tied his kid’s shoe. I leaped into the chair with the grace of the endangered dama gazelle.

  Young dad turned back toward “his” chair, saw me happily sitting in it, and gave me the evil eye.

  Now, I am no stranger to the evil eye but the guy had vacated the chair. Whatever happened to chivalry? He was at least twenty years younger than me and looked as if he could bench-press Indiana. He turned in a huff and perched illegally on a Lego sculpture that looked like it could pierce the, ahem, child-producing materials area if he so much as coughed.

  The girls were happily playing, I had my chair, and there was a fascinating fight brewing between a six-year-old and her mom beside me. Suh-weet!

  The kid was flinging a fit to be carried to her car. Her mother, one of those slim, muscular granola moms wearing garden clogs, was trying to use reason.

  “I imagine that right now you are feeling sad about leaving and I understand that emotion,” said the mom. She then proceeded to devise clever and fun-sounding ways that her daughter could go to the car.

  “Perhaps you’d like to skip or hop on one foot all the way to the car!” she said brightly.

  Whoa. What was this woman on?

  Did she miss the whole parenting-by-bribery hormone that the rest of us got in the delivery room? The one that empowers us to say things like, “Junior, you either get your scrawny butt off that floor right now or you can just kiss your banana Popsicles good-bye and don’t even think about that Star Track lunch box. (Rednecks always say Star TRACK, you know.)

  I’m not saying that PBB is right, but I am saying it works.

  In the end, the kid won, of course, and Mommie Weirdest hefted the smug and smiling sixty-pounder onto her narrow shoulders and carried her to the car.

  I bet I know who sold all the candy in that family.

  7

  HOW TO BE A HANDS-ON PARENT USING

  Field Trips, Dead Butterflies, and Beefaroni

  In an attempt to expose our five-year-old to as much flora and fauna as she could possibly stand before she started kindergarten, we visited an alligator theme park, the state zoo, an aquarium, and a butterfly “pavilion,” all in one week. And, yes, as a matter of fact, we are clinically insane.

  First stop: the butterfly place, where there’s also a bird room. Unlike normal zoos, where birds fly about in tall cages like God intended, this was an “open aviary” so you felt very much like Tippi Hedren in The Birds except without the safety of a telephone booth.

  Four shrieking cocka-somethings landed on my husband’s shoulders at one time and he damn near fainted. Our daughter began to wail when I screamed to him, “Cover your eyeballs!”

  In the butterfly room, things were much calmer. Too calm, in fact. A soothing butterfly “counselor” explained how to lure a butterfly onto our outstretched honey-soaked arms. After an hour of wandering around, gooey arms stuck straight out in front, Night of the Living Dead style, we had not so much as a candle moth to show for our efforts.

  “They hate us,” my husband moaned. He was right. Multipierced teens and Reebok-ed seniors sat eating rain-forest crunch bars while enormous blue-and-orange butterflies nibbled their ears and nuzzled their necks. After ninety minutes, we were crazy with envy. We had painted on so much honey that we looked like walking baklava.

  Finally, in a very low moment, I whispered to my husband, “You know, butterflies look pretty much the same dead as they do alive when they’re not moving.” Well, it’s true you know.

  At long last, hubby coaxed one rather puny brown butterfly onto his hand and so did our daughter. Two hours in, and all I had to show for our Fun Family Day was a smattering of bird poo in my hair from an enraged parakeet.

  “We’re not leaving till I get a !@#$% butterfly to land on me,” I said, loud enough to earn a mean look from one of The Chosen, who was taking pictures of large lemon-colored butterflies gently flapping on the knees of her sleeping toddler.

  “That is so not fair,” I pouted. “That kid didn’t even pay admission and I got fifteen ninety-five invested in this.”

  “Aren’t those beautiful? They are called painted ladies,” said a well-meaning woman wearing tan Easy Spirits and pointing to the orange wonders sweetly resting on her earlobes.

  “Oh, shut up,” I said with a bright smile.

  “Relax,” my husband said. “The butterflies can probably sense your tension.”

  Oh, great. He was suddenly Mr. Butterfly Expert just because he had managed to lure one substandard moth that was now helplessly mired in his honey-armhairs.

  “See,” my husband cooed. “He’s not going anywhere! He’s happy! Yes him is! He’s a happy little butterfly.”

  You might wonder just what kind of depraved loser would consider a visit to a peaceable kingdom of butterflies a competition and, yoo-hoo, that would be me.

  After three full hours, something did light on me, finally: the American Housefly, pestus grandus.

  We decided to cut our losses, wash our arms off, and drive four hours to the zoo. I’ve always been a little afraid of zoos since I was five years old and my parents watched in horror as a lion peed on me through the bars of its cage during a family trip to Texas. I think somebody shot it. Things weren’t so PC in those days.

  But zoos are relentlessly educational. This would truly give the kid an edge in kindergarten. Besides, we’d read that it was the last chance to see Carlos the Gorilla because he would soon be shipped out to, get this, teach social skills to Atlanta gorillas.

  Like every other North Carolina parent, I have met Carlos. And if you consider turning your hindquarters up in the air and into the horrified faces of your guests “good social skills,” then, yes, Carlos is your man.

  Having first met Carlos in the mortified company of my mother-in-law when my daughter was too young to remember him, I can’
t imagine why they think Carlos will be “something of an etiquette expert” when he hits Atlanta. As I recall, he had an inordinate fascination with his, er, Carlos parts.

  We read that the North Carolina Zoo had spent quite some time preparing Carlos for the move to Atlanta and I envisioned that might include learning how to order various forms of chevre crostinis in trendy Buckhead nightspots. Turned out they just meant they had to train him, news reports said, “to enter a crate so he wouldn’t have to be sedated during the drive to Atlanta.”

  What’s wrong with a little sedation? This guy is thirty years old, ugly as a mud fence daubed with tadpoles, and he wears the same stinky suit every day. I say give him as many drugs as he can stand.

  Once safely ensconced in Zoo Atlanta’s rain-forest exhibit, Carlos will show off his “etiquette training.” One hopes this will include a demonstration of how to write a proper thank-you note.

  WRONG: “Thanks for the bananas.”

  CORRECT: “Thank you for the bunch of bananas. We used them to entice the trainer to bake lovely banana-walnut-carrot muffins for Sunday brunch.”

  Of course, if he didn’t like the gift so much, he could just turn his hindquarters in your face.

  We were so eager to make sure that our daughter had a good start at her science and math magnet kindergarten (a phrase I can now actually say without snickering), that I even brought along some science books to read between our little field trips.

  I chose them carefully because of all the flap about how many mistakes they’ve found in textbooks. The most hilarious of these boners was a photo of singer Linda Ronstadt that is captioned “Silicon Crystal,” not to be confused with Ronstadt’s songbird buddy, Silicon Crystal Gayle, I suppose.

  As my daughter starts her formal education in public school, I have to admit that it’s a little scary to find out that some of the textbooks are full of errors. Then again, I feel completely exonerated regarding a certain eighth-grade experiment that went awry. (Note to Mr. Hodges: See, it’s not my fault you still can’t grow eyebrows.)

  All the family field trips in the world won’t help when kids are using books that—and I am not making this up—show the equator passing through the rural South or an incorrect depiction of what happens to light when it passes through a prism. Correct depiction: toss the light an orange jumpsuit and tell it to be very careful in the prism shower.

  There was also a reversed photo of the Statue of Liberty showing the torch in the wrong hand, although I don’t really see what that has to do with science anyway. Everybody knows from studying our history textbooks that the Statue of Liberty is actually a large piece of cheese first discovered by famous explorer Ponce de Leon Redbone and his ships, the Larry, the Curly, and the Moe.

  Textbook researchers compiled more than five hundred pages of errors, then boiled them down to about one hundred, presumably because their heads were beginning to hurt. (And speaking of boiling, class, let us not forget that water reaches its boiling point at precisely two degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit, depending on whether the equator is setting in the west or the east that day.)

  Despite these little problems, I was optimistic that, after a frantic week of field trips, science experiments, and lunch-box buying, my daughter was finally ready for kindergarten.

  We survived the first week pretty much as predicted. Day one: me sniffling, red-eyed, and videotaping (“Here she is placing her little Barbie lunch box on a little hook [sob] beside [sob] her little [sob] naaaame.”) while my daughter rolled her eyes and said in a low voice, “Uh, Mom, don’t you have somewhere you need to be?”

  Harumph! Out of the mouths of five-year-olds. Clearly I couldn’t compete with the new laptops, classroom iguana, and free cinnamon rolls. Hell, when I heard about the cinnamon rolls, I wanted to stay all day myself but feared I would hear that familiar refrain: “Security!!!!”

  I’m not a typical kindergarten mom. While the others dutifully signed up for volunteer hours (“Bulletin boards are my specialty!” they wrote with little smiley faces), I just scrawled “No Crafts” in my best serial-killer handwriting.

  On day two, my daughter wanted to take something for “share time” but she didn’t actually tell me this until we were parked in front of the school that morning. Exasperated, I tossed her the loose gear shift knob and told her to share with the class that sometimes it takes Daddy forever to fix something because apparently your needs come last! All right, so that was probably unnecessary.

  On day three, there was a curriculum meeting with all the other kindergarten parents. I arrived exactly two minutes late and found that the staff was already two minutes into the program. I’d totally forgotten how they take that punctual thing so seriously in school. Balancing my forty-five-year-old butt on a chair designed for a Cabbage Patch doll, I whispered to my seatmate, “I can’t believe I’m missing Fear Factor for this.” She gave me a don’t-talk-to-me look.

  On day four, I got a mean look from a skinny mom wearing a Greenpeace T-shirt and I knew she was cheesed because I was sitting in the carpool line, AC cranked up on high, reading a People magazine and eating God knows how much ozone. Oh, sue me. The carpool line is the most fabulous “me time” I’ve had in five years. You’re doing something useful and important but you’re all alone, icy air blasting, diet Coke in hand, and a terrific article about how much Brad Pitt likes mission-style furniture just waiting to be devoured. Life is good.

  On day five, my daughter was in a particularly sunny mood because “We got two outside times and nobody even throwed up.” She explained that when somebody throws up or poops in their pants, the rest of the class gets to play outside. That seemed fair. We used to be the same way in my old newsroom. Her mood changed quickly, however, when she saw a new friend in the bus line. Suddenly, she was demanding to ride the bus like the other kids. Well, dookie. I love the carpool line. I had

  to nip this in the bud.

  “I wanna ride the school bus!” she wailed.

  “Fine,” I huffed back. “You’ll bounce all over town like popcorn and learn all kinds of new swear words.”

  “But that’s just like riding with you, Mommy.”

  Ouch.

  After a few more weeks of this, I decided that I should be a more involved kindergarten mom. If for no other reason, if I was more of a classroom mom, my kid might manage to stay out of the euphemistically named “thinking chair,” where, I’m told, the little girl who likes to lick everyone’s nose has to go for a few minutes every day.

  Out of guilt, wistfulness, or maybe just because it’s been a while since anybody offered to lick my nose, I signed up to shelve library books.

  Three hours later, I was silently cussing the fact that they had given me all the 500s on the bottom shelf. My knee joints seized up and, for a panicky few minutes, I was positive I’d have to duck-walk out of the school and into the parking lot. (“Hmmm? Oh no, nothing’s wrong. I just had to shelve some books today. Quack-quack.”)

  In a surge of motherly devotion, I even ate lunch at school one day.

  “What is it?” I asked a third-grader as a ladle full of something tomatoish went splat onto my foam tray.

  To paraphrase Andy Griffith, what it was was Beefa roni. And I must say it was shockingly tasty.

  “See?” my daughter said in some psycho role reversal. “Sometimes you find out you like something if you’ll just try it.”

  If you’ve never eaten with kindergarteners you don’t know true popularity. As the only grown-up in our corner of the lunchroom, I was asked by no fewer than six kids to open cheese sticks, milk cartons, and fruit roll-ups. One rather spoiled little girl asked me to peel her grapes but I told her to wait until we got home.

  At lunch, I nearly fell off my undersized molded plastic chair when I heard my daughter and her friend discuss where babies came from.

  “Babies come from God,” said my daughter.

  “No, they don’t,” said her friend, shaking her head for emphasis. “They come from your bah
-gina.”

  When all is said and done, hanging around school still isn’t easy for someone who spent way too much time writing “I must nots” and washing blackboards. When I showed up to take my kid out of school an hour early, the assistant principal asked why.

  Suddenly, I was thirteen again, lying to avoid the horror of having to wear that red one-piece gym suit in PE.

  I mumbled something about how we’d be doing lots of higher math because we were going to the outlets. I even ma’amed her even though she’s a good twenty years younger than me.

  The truth is, I honestly like kindergarten, and not just for the Beefaroni. My favorite part? The communication via backpack thing. It’s so efficient. Class pictures or T-shirts or announcements or report cards are sent home in the backpack; payment or comments or signatures are sent back the same way. Sort of like some wonderful Pony Express only with Powerpuff Girl saddlebags.

  The whole thing makes me think that we should all communicate via backpack in this great nation using sweet little flower-shaped notes.

  Bush to Saddam: “Do you like me? Check one, yes or no.”

  Don’t thank me now. Just send me that Korbel Peace Prize.

  Part 3:

  COUPLES THERAPY,

  Southern

  Style

  Lord, Please Don’t Let Me Kill Him Till the House Is Paid For

  1

  “PAPA,

  Don’t Preach”

  You’re Late for Church, Got Mary Kay on Half Your Face, and He’s Honking in the Carport

  Why is it that Sunday morning, the time when you should be enjoying a mood of gentle reflection and contemplation as you get ready for church, is the most stressed-out, irritating time of the week?

  Sure, everybody ends up in the car and you, sort of, make it on time (although my husband likes to say we attend “the eight-forty-two service”) but most of us are still tugging on jackets and swatting Pop-Tart crumbs off our pants when we arrive.