“You got any peanut butter?” asked Teenie, sullenly pushing her plate away.
“Raw cookie dough?” Mush added hopefully.
“Well, yes,” I said, taken aback. “But peanut butter is for breakfast,” I rationalized, remembering I’d seen Teenie eating it at that meal, “and the raw cookie dough was supposed to be for dessert.”(All single women keep raw cookie dough on hand. It’s one of life’s few absolutes.)
“Why wait if you can have it now?” Mush wondered. “I could have a heart attack during dinner, and then where would I be?”
“You don’t want us to starve, do you?” Teenie demanded, more sullen than ever.
“No, of course I don’t want you to starve…”
I looked at the two creatures I’d voluntarily invited into my home: Mush with his tousled dirty-blond hair that was definitely more dirty than blond, his mushy jeans hanging low on his mushy eight-year-old hips, his oversize Chicago Bulls shirt stained with a substance I didn’t even want to guess at; Teenie, with her mother’s bouncy Southern looks, wearing a gauzy top, giving me an unlooked-for look at breasts that appeared to be growing bigger even as I looked at her.
I wondered, in passing, if they’d somehow be more likable if they weren’t so visually unappealing, well, okay, disturbing.
“How old are you, anyway?” I demanded more than asked her.
“Eleven,” she said, all defiance.
“Eleven?” I asked, surprised. She was almost as old as Sarah, and while there was something more…sexually knowing about Teenie, she also seemed less mature. “Weren’t you playing with Lego when I was at your house a few months back?”
“So? I’ve grown up quickly,” she said. Then she backed down. “Okay, I’m ten! Eleven’s just what I tell my boyfriend. He’s in high school.”
“He is not your boyfriend,” said Mush. “She’s lying,” Mush then said to me. “Max Wilbur don’t even know she exists.”
“Well, he would,” said Teenie, “if you weren’t always hanging around with me and my friends, staring at our breasts.”
This was so much more than I ever wanted to know about these kids. I excused myself to the kitchen.
“Dessert, anyone?” I offered brightly, coming out with a tray on which I’d put a big new jar of Jif, a spoon, a roll of Pillsbury cookie dough and a knife.
“Cool,” said Mush, ignoring the knife, then poking a hole after much effort in the plastic around the cookie dough using only his dirty thumbnail and scooping out a large mouthful’s worth with his pointer and middle fingers.
“We’re bored,” Teenie said, about a quarter of the way through the jar of peanut butter, having, like her brother, neglected to bother with the cutlery.
“How do you know that Mush is bored, too?” I asked, oddly offended, trying to enjoy the remainder of my lo mein. Damn, that cookie dough looked good. “Maybe Mush is having a great time, only his mouth is too full for him to say so.”
Teenie looked at me over the top of her jar as though I were the stupidest sow who ever lived. “I know that Mush is bored, ’cause he’s started to eat slower,” she said.
I looked at Mush, saw that she was right: he was down to using just one finger, his middle one, and it looked like his heart was no longer in it. I could relate. I’d noted in the past that it was really only the first half dozen or so spoonfuls of cookie dough that were satisfying; after that, it was merely rat-pressing-a-lever-for-cheese kind of behavior until the roll was done and then all that was left was an empty tube with that pathetic little metal thing still tying together the end like a twist on a sausage casing. In really desperate moments, that metal thing could be forcibly removed, the plastic tube cut open so that a person could get to the one or two millimeters of cookie dough left in the creases. Not that I would know about such a thing.
“Y’all done with dinner?” I said, lapsing into the kind of speech I found myself lapsing into whenever around T.B., Delta or Delta’s kids.
“We-all are bored,” Teenie reiterated, sneering a bit to let me know what she thought of my adopting their form of speech.
“We could play a game,” I offered.
“Or we could go to the mall,” Teenie said.
“We could watch some TV,” I said. “I’m sure there must be something educational on PBS.”
“Or we could go to the mall,” Mush said.
“Or,” I said, forcing a smile, “we could go to the mall.”
Somehow, I’d always imagined my first time at the mall with kids to be different.
When I’d imagined it in the past, it had always been singular kid, not plural kids, and the kid in my mind had been a newborn baby—mine—whom I would push through the mall as it slept peacefully in its stroller, accepting the compliments of passersby. I’d stop to get a bite to eat—something warm if it was winter, cold if it was summer—and my baby would drift up to consciousness, open her eyes, and we’d cast beatific smiles on each other.
What I got instead was…
Teenie: “Can I have some money for clothes?”
Mush: “I want to go to the video arcade!”
While I could see that Teenie could indeed use a new look, I was worried that if I took her into a clothing store, she’d talk me through my own weakness into buying her something wholly inappropriate, and later I’d have to worry I’d done something to contribute to an increase in the world’s population without even getting any sex for myself out of the deal.
“The video arcade sounds great,” I said.
Of course, it was something less than great, but it was a sight better than preteen pregnancy, and by the time they’d cleaned me out of forty dollars’ worth of tokens, I had a headache from all the flashing lights and noise, but at least I’d learned how to kick ass on Planet Puke, a game I’d just as soon not describe.
“I’m hungry,” said Teenie, when I refused to change any more bills into tokens.
“You never gave us any dinner,” Mush accused, “only dessert.”
So I bought them, on request, pizza at Sbarro’s, cheesy fries at Nathan’s, mocha-chip sundaes at Häagen Dazs and cool-attas at Dunkin’ Donuts on the way out to the car.
“I’m kinda full,” Mush burped.
“That’s because of all the cookie dough you had before,” scolded Teenie.
I didn’t know much about kids, but I kind of had the impression that if the older kid was ten, the parents felt reasonably safe leaving them home alone together for brief periods of time. And yet Delta always got sitters for Mush and Teenie. As soon as Teenie had told me how old she was, I’d wondered why that was. Now, with my own firsthand knowledge gleaned from a whopping four hours in their company, I could see why: if left to their own devices, like goldfish, they’d eat until they blew themselves up.
Not that I’d done anything to try to stop them.
I could see that it was tougher to be a parent than I’d thought. Well, okay, maybe not tougher to just be a parent; anybody could be the bare husk of anything. But I could certainly see where it would be tough to be a good parent, a disciplined parent. After all, it was so much easier just to give in, to do anything to cut off or forestall the dreaded sound of whining.
“You said we could watch TV,” Mush said sullenly when we got home.
“You said there’d be games,” said Teenie.
Thinking it would be better to engage in some form of social interaction, rather than merely plunking them down in front of the TV, but realizing that I probably had no games in the house that they would recognize as such, I fell back on the old standby: a deck of cards.
It was easier than one might think, teaching those two seemingly brain-cell-challenged kids how to play poker—five-card stud to be specific. What was hard was accepting the fact that once they learned, they alternated beating me every time. I could not draw better than three of a kind to save my life.
“This is fun,” said Mush, raking in a pile of leftover Halloween candy, which was what we were playing for.
>
“Yeah,” said Teenie. “It’s like being part of a real family.”
I was charmed with them and charmed with myself for winning them over.
“TV, anyone?” I beamed my best June Cleaver smile. I would have liked to play a little longer, but I was out of chips, which in my case were mini Snickers bars. Tempting as it was to beg Teenie for some of her mini Three Musketeers—she somehow seemed like she’d be more amenable to sharing during a game than Mush—it felt like it would somehow lack maturity to do so.
I put their winnings in a big wooden bowl, then set them up in front of a scary movie with the remote.
When I’d originally extended the offer to Delta, somehow I’d pictured the good-night phase as being me tucking them in, even though I didn’t have a spare bedroom to tuck them in to. But they’d absolutely worn me out, no doubt, and if I wanted to have energy to deal with another whole day with them the next day—and I needed that energy—then I was going to have to leave them to their own candy-eating, remote-clicking, sleeping-bag devices.
But there was one thing, despite their relative, um, uncleanliness that I had no intention of leaving out.
“Good night,” I said, kissing Mush on the forehead.
“Good night,” I said, kissing Teenie on the forehead.
Teenie looked at me, startled.
“Hey,” she said, looking at me more closely, suspicious. “Didn’t you used to look different?”
How long had it been since I’d started changing my looks? Hell, I’d been at their house the other day and they’d seen me then…
Mush yawned at the bad guys on the TV. “She used to have longer hair,” he said, “and she didn’t wear glasses. The big dresses are a new thing, too. You can’t see her boobs as much in them.” Then he stole his gaze from the TV long enough to settle it on me, a disturbed frown worrying his brow. “You can’t see her boobs at all in them.”
It made me slightly uncomfortable in a real squirming-in-my-seat kind of way to think that Mush noticed me…as a woman.
“Huh,” said Teenie, considering. “Why’d you go and do that? If you saved your hair, I could probably do something with it.”
I hadn’t saved my hair, hadn’t thought to do so, and didn’t like to imagine now what Teenie would do with it. But somehow, she made me wish I had kept some, as a part of a memory of someone I used to be.
“Sometimes,” I answered her, “I don’t know why I did it.”
“Weird.” She shrugged. Then: “It don’t matter. I like you better like this.”
“You do?” I was surprised.
“Yeah,” Mush answered for his sister. “We’re here, aren’t we?”
Saturday morning I woke to the phone ringing, feeling nearly as bad as I’d felt on the morning after Halloween. This time, I wasn’t hungover from too much drink, I was just dreading the day ahead, wondering how I’d keep Mush and Teenie occupied for another whole day and night. Not to mention Sunday, too, until Delta came, hopefully early, to collect them.
“Scarlett! Phone!” I heard Teenie yell.
I scrambled for the receiver by my bed, shocked that she’d actually answered my phone. God only knew what she might have said to whoever was calling.
But I didn’t have a horrified moment to spare for that, because who was calling turned out to be…
“Hey, it’s Saul,” he said. “I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind.”
He had a funny way to show it, I thought, given that more than a week had gone by since our night together, with no word from him. In another incarnation, I would have most definitely said something about this and then I probably would have made him suffer for a bit; not to be a tease, but on general principle. Still, given that I was on kiddie overload, I was grateful, pathetically grateful, to hear his voice.
“Hey,” I said, feeling twelve.
“That girl answered your phone funny,” he laughed softly. “She said ‘Scarlett Stein’s residence.’ Wasn’t that the name you first wrote on the napkin the night we met? What have you got, some kind of alter ego?”
“I, um…”
But he wasn’t waiting for an answer. “Are you free tonight,” he asked, “whoever you are?”
I scrambled around in my brain, wondering how I could make myself free tonight with Mush and Teenie on my hands. Well, Delta had said that she didn’t care if I hired another babysitter, and I was sure my mother wasn’t doing anything…
“I think I can be,” I said, and we made arrangements before hanging up.
When I picked up the phone again to call my mother, I heard the special dial tone that meant a message had come in on voice mail while I was on the phone with Saul. I’d had voice mail ever since my mother, trying to reach me one night and failing to do so for two hours because I was on the phone with Best Girlfriend, had said, “Get voice mail, dammit. What if I died one day? How would I reach you?”
But I ignored the dial tone, calling my mother first to see if she could sit for Mush and Teenie that night.
“Did you just call?” I asked her.
“No, why? Were you on the phone?”
I didn’t answer, preferring to dive right into my request.
“Of course I’ll be happy to sit for Delta’s kids while you go out with Saul,” she said. “What a question! I’d be delighted.”
“But they are rather, um, difficult.”
“Difficult, schmifficult. I raised you, didn’t I?”
Not wanting to know what she was getting at, I set a time and we hung up. I figured that if she arrived early enough, maybe I could just leave her in the house with the kids and go out to meet Saul in the driveway.
Having dispensed with my mother, I punched in the code for voice mail, listened to the message that had come in while I was making my date with Saul.
“Um, hi, Lettie? This is Steve. I know this is incredibly short notice, so I’ll understand if you say no, but you did say that you’d be maybe willing to go out with me, and while I’ve been trying real hard to restrain myself, I was wondering if that maybe could be tonight. I should be in and out, so just leave a message whenever you want. If maybe not tonight, then maybe you could maybe go out with me another night soon.”
He left his number and I took it down, put it aside, not knowing what to do with it since I’d just made a date with someone else.
How bizarre. After the longest drought I’d ever recorded, to be asked out by two different men on the same day for the same night. Hey, maybe having kids was working for me!
We spent the entire day pretty much how we had the night before: at the mall, with Mush and Teenie spending dollar bills like they’d been minted to be exchanged for tokens. It may have been the lazy-mother’s way out, but it kept them occupied, contained in a relatively small space, and it gave me the opportunity to fantasize to my heart’s content about the coming evening with Saul while mastering my skill at saving Venus from getting doused in a bucket of vomit, using only my plastic gun against the screen.
As I rushed them home at the end of the day, I realized that we’d stayed too long for me to have time to do much of anything about my appearance before it came time for my mother and then Saul to arrive. That was all right, though, I figured. After all, Saul had known me to look like this before our getting together on Halloween. Certainly he’d still like me like this, now that he liked me, now that he “couldn’t get me out of his mind.”
Okay, so maybe my not allowing myself time to change had been a subconscious decision on my part. So sue me.
As luck would have it, my mother, for the first time in her never-been-late-once life, was late.
I had just barely had time to change my dress. Well, I did need to not smell, didn’t I? The dress I’d selected was the most daring of my Empire tents, dark blue with silver trim in honor of the Hanukkah season yet to come. I’d washed my face, combed my short hair that never needed combing anymore, wiped the lenses clean on my glasses.
Ding-dong!
&nbs
p; It was Saul, arriving five minutes early to my mother’s fifteen minutes late.
“Hi—” he smiled when I opened the door, continuing on to what was obviously a preplanned “—you look…” And he stopped. I’ll never know how he would have gone on to finish that sentence—would he have continued on to the preplanned “great” or “fantastic” or “amazing”? or would he have dropped back to a more moderate “clean”? or worse, “as bad as you used to”? I’ll never know, because it was then that Mush and Teenie made their joint entrance from the kitchen, where they’d been cleaning me out of house and cookie dough.
“Mommy!” cried Mush, hurling his big little self at my skirts.
“Mommy!” cried Teenie, coming up beside me and grabbing on to my hand. “Is this hunk of man your date?”
Saul looked unaccountably embarrassed. I supposed it could be merely Teenie’s words that were doing it, but somehow I suspected it was something else.
“These aren’t my—” I started to say, only to be cut off by Saul.
“You didn’t tell me you had kids,” he said. “Where were they the night of the Halloween party?”
“These aren’t my—” I tried again, only to be cut off by Mush.
“Mommy got a sitter for us,” said Mush.
“Mommy wanted a night without the kids,” added Teenie.
This was all very well and true, but Delta was the mommy who’d got the sitter, who’d wanted the night out, not me.
“I understand,” Saul said. “Really.”
Even as I tried to come up with the best way to clear up the misunderstanding, I saw Saul backing out of the doorway.
“I really only came by,” he said, “to tell you I can’t make it after all tonight.”
“You can’t—”
“Something’s come up, something unavoidable. I would have called, but your place was on the way. It just seemed easier.”
He was already at the door to his car.
“Hey,” I shouted. “You never finished your sentence! I look…what?”
He was confused a minute. Then: “Okay. You look okay, Lettie.”
A Little Change of Face Page 20
