Dating Big Bird (14 page)

In all their efforts, they barely noticed me, which I was secretly glad about, as I was not awake yet and ready for conversation. I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down at the kitchen table next to Lynn, who was sipping tea from a mug and listening to the whole exchange, dumbfounded that they weren’t even bothering to consult her.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.”

“Everything okay?”

“Sure. I mean, I’m just the mother who feeds my child every day, but why should they ask me what she eats? Not to mention the fact that it’s
my
Thanksgiving dinner in
my
house, but I didn’t really want to have anything to do with it.”

“Are you feeling—”

“Infantilized? Yes.”

“Do you want to—”

“Say something and start World War III? No. I’ll just regress here in silence.”

I told Lynn to go up and shower and get dressed and take
her time while I helped feed Nicole. She finished her tea in one big disgruntled gulp and left the kitchen. I took the box of Eggo waffles out of my father’s hand and told him I’d take over, so I toasted two waffles—one for Nicole and one for me.

“Auntie LaLa, you have to cut my waffle for me,” Nicole said at my side.

“What do you say?”

“Please.”

“Please what?”

She giggled. “Auntie LaLa!”

I finished buttering hers and started cutting into it, when she screamed. I dropped the knife, terrified that I’d somehow sliced off her finger.

“I want you to cut it the way Mum-Mum cuts it!”

I looked at her.

“Please.”

“Okay. How does Mum-Mum cut it? In half like this?”

She nodded. “But smaller.”

“So she cuts it again. Like this?”

She nodded. “But smaller.”

I sliced the waffle once more, then handed her the plate of bite-size waffle cubes. I brought my plate over next to hers, then sliced mine in eighths, too.

“You cut your waffle the same as mine, Auntie LaLa.”

“I know. I wanted to be just like you.”

“We’re the same.”

“Yup. We’re the same.”

After we finished eating, we went into the dining room and took the good dishes out of the built-in china cabinets, and I set the table, explaining as I went along about plates and napkins and silverware and tablecloths. Like she cared.

By two in the afternoon, the table was set and the food was just about ready and everyone had dressed for dinner—Nicole in a new green velvet dress with white lace tights and
heavy-soled faux Doc Martens ankle boots. She couldn’t have looked cuter. She and Lynn and I went into the living room to find Paul, who was on his hands and knees building a fire. If Malcolm had been there, he would have offered to do that task—he took great pride in his ability to build the perfect fire. I wondered where he was then—what he’d decided to do and how he was holding up under the strain of his memories. I thought there might be enough time to call him before dinner, but just as I got the cordless phone and tried to find a quiet place to go, I heard my mother call all of us to dinner.

“Well, this looks great,” Paul said as he moved into position at the head of the table. Lynn and my mother and I were bringing things out from the kitchen. Once we’d all sat down, plates started being passed left and right—turkey, stuffing, baked potatoes, asparagus, chopped liver (a new “low fat” recipe from someone my parents had met at one of their Elderhostels)—and Lynn made a plate of food for Nicole.

“No asparagrass, Mum-Mum.”

“Okay. You don’t have to have any asparagrass.”

“And I don’t want any sweet potatoes,” I chimed in.

Lynn glanced at me over Nicole’s hair. “Don’t worry. I know all about your fear of orange vegetables.”

“It’s not my fault,” I said, catching my mother’s eye. “If someone who shall remain nameless hadn’t force-fed me cooked carrots when I was four, I probably wouldn’t have an issue with them.”

“I didn’t force-feed you carrots,” my mother said.

“Excuse me, but I seem to remember you prying my mouth open and shoving them in until I gagged.” I turned to Nicole and pretended I was barfing. “Carrots are yucky.”

She made a face back. “Carrots are yucky,” she parroted. I stared at my mother and smiled in victory. How old was I?

A few minutes of silverware clanging and chewing and compliments to the chef ensued before Nicole announced that she could eat her stuffing with her hands.

“Can you eat it with your fork, please?” Lynn said, which made me laugh. I always made fun of how she asked Nicole to do something instead of telling her to do it, and how she always said please, too—as if there were a choice.

Nicole picked up a hunk of stuffing and put it in her mouth with her hand and then giggled. Chunks of breading and celery and onion were all over her face and dropping off in clumps onto her beautiful green velvet dress. Our mother looked on disapprovingly. “Tell her to—”

“Tell her to what?” Lynn snapped.

“To stop—”

“To stop what?”

“She has to learn that she can’t—”

“She’s only three and a half, okay? Three-and-a-half-year-olds don’t understand the concept of ‘having to learn that they can’t.’ ”

“She might not understand it, but at least she’ll learn that she needs to behave herself during—”

“She doesn’t need to behave herself during—”

“It’s just us,” I said. “It’s just—”

“Family,” Lynn finished.

“I know it’s just family, but even with family, she should learn how to behave.”

“Why?” Lynn said, and put her fork down. “Just because we were pathologically well behaved—”

“Like Stepford children,” I said.

“Doesn’t mean she should be raised like that.”

“Raised like what?” my mother asked. She put her fork down and looked umbraged.

“Always afraid of making a mess,” Lynn started.

“Or getting yelled at,” I added.

“You weren’t always getting yelled at.”

Lynn shook her head. “Yes, we were.”

“No, you weren’t.”

I shook my head now, too. “Yes, we were.”

Paul lifted the plate of white meat turkey and smiled at it. “Does anyone want more?” He had long since appointed himself the family-pathology-ignorer during get-togethers like this, and he was playing his part again now with obvious relish.

“I’ll take a little if no one else is going to have any more,” my father said, comparing what was on his plate to what was on everyone else’s in order to reassure himself that he wasn’t a pig. He’d always been somewhat phobic about overeating—especially at holiday meals—which was why, deep into his sixties, he was still so trim.

“It doesn’t matter if anyone else is going to have any more or not,” Lynn said. “You can have more. You can have more of anything you want. It’s a free country.”

“Well, I don’t want to make a pig of myself.” Again he looked around at everyone’s plate.

Lynn looked at him in disbelief. “A pig of yourself?” she said. “You eat like a woman.”

“A woman on a diet,” I said.

She nodded over at me. “He weighs less than me. Not that that’s saying much.”

“He weighs less than me, too,” I echoed, “not that that’s saying much, either.”

“Well,” my mother continued in her tone of high umbrage, “if you think you were always getting yelled at—”

“I didn’t say we were always getting yelled at,” Lynn clarified. “I said we were always
afraid
of getting yelled at.”

“Don’t start with me.”

“Start what with you?”

“Mincing words.”

“I’m not mincing words. Getting yelled at and being afraid of getting yelled at are—”

“Two very different things,” I piped in.

“Oh. Another country heard from.”

“She’s allowed to talk,” Lynn said, rushing to my defense.

My mother made her famous face: mouth turned down at the sides, neck muscles taut. Clearly we were headed for disaster. “Okay. I see.”

“See what?”

“You’re ganging up on me.”

“We are not,” I said unconvincingly.

“Yes, you are. You’re saying ‘we.’ ”

“Now who’s mincing words?” Lynn said.

“I think what your mother’s trying to say,” my father said, “is—”

“I don’t need a translator.”

“She meant that Nicole should be controlled.”

“Disciplined,” my mother corrected.

“If you’re saying that I should squeeze the life out of her—”

“I’m not saying you should squeeze the—”

“Or that I should break her will until she’s completely compliant and—”

“Submissive,” I offered. God, would I have to go back to therapy?

“Like we were—then I’m not interested.”

“Being told ‘no’ once in a while isn’t the worst thing in the—”

“Having your will broken and your spirit crushed at the age of three and a half isn’t exactly what we had in mind.”

Paul looked up from his plate, which he’d been concentrating on with false intent in order to avoid entering the fray. “Are you talking to me?”

“I was
say
ing,” Lynn said, glaring at him for support, “that breaking Nicole’s will and crushing her spirit isn’t the kind of parenting philosophy we subscribe to.”

“It isn’t?”

“No.” Lynn threw a pea at him, and then Nicole threw a pea at him.

“Well,” he said, picking one pea off his lap and the other out of his hair. “Maybe it should be.”

After dinner was over, when Nicole had finally gone down for a nap, taking Paul along with her; after Lynn and I had apologized to my mother for regressing and my parents had gone out for their daily walk despite the cold, Lynn and I went into the back room, which served as a den. She looked exhausted as she cleared a path for herself on the couch and sat down, pushing toys and dolls and stuffed animals out of the way.

“Well, that was a nightmare,” she said.

I sighed. “I know. But at least it’s over.”

“Over? It’s only Thursday afternoon. There are three more days left until Sunday.”

“That’s true, though the big fight is out of the way. Anything now will just feel like little aftershocks.”

“You’re right,” she said, putting her legs up onto the coffee table. “So. How are things?”

I shrugged. “They’re okay.”

She winced, then lifted herself off the couch.

“Shit!”
She pulled out a hard plastic pointy windmill-wand and rolled her eyes. “It’s a good thing I’m so fat now, otherwise I would have really felt this.”

“You’re not fat.”

“Yes, I am.” She let out her stomach and let her arms and legs go limp so she would look as bloated and bloblike as possible.

“You’re
not fat
,” I repeated emphatically, thinking we sounded frighteningly like Karen and her sister Gail. “It’s just that you used to be really thin, so now you just look normal, like the rest of us.”

“Whatever.”

We smiled at each other. I loved sitting with Lynn like this. It reminded me of when we were younger and our parents would go out and we’d have the house to ourselves.

“So how are things going with …?”

“Malcolm? They’re fine. They’re the same.”

“So no change.”

“Nope.”

Though she and I were close and though we were never judgmental with each other, I had learned over the years not to say too much—otherwise she’d worry about me more than she already did.

“What are you going to do?”

“About him? I don’t know yet.”

“Maybe you should—” She hesitated, I knew, because she didn’t want to sound disapproving, or like she was going to tell me what to do. “I mean, since you want kids, maybe he’s not the most promising prospect. Not that it’s any of my business.”

“No, you’re right,” I said. “I should probably start thinking about finding someone else. Especially since I’m running out of time.”

“You’re not running out of time. You’ve got plenty of time. Lots of women don’t start having kids until they’re forty.”

“But I don’t want to be forty. I don’t want to be that old and doing it for the first time. I barely have enough energy now, for myself.”

“I know,” she said. “Maybe if I’d had Nicole earlier, I wouldn’t be so exhausted all the time.”

“Should I”—I blurted out suddenly, then held my breath—“have one? A baby?”

“Of course you should.”

Maybe she didn’t understand what I meant.

“I mean alone,” I clarified.

“Sure.”

The simplicity and surety of Lynn’s response took me by complete surprise.

“So you don’t think it’s wrong?”

“Wrong how?”

“You know, like, not good for the child. To have only one parent. Selfish.”

“No. It’s definitely something to weigh because it’s an important issue. But there are far worse things a child could have to deal with than that, I’d say.”

“I’ve been looking into it a little—you know, how I’d do it if I decided to do it. Someday. Do you think I’m crazy?”

“No. I don’t think you’re crazy. It’s just that it’s a lot of work, though.” She let her head roll back onto the sofa cushion. “A lot of work.”

“I know.”

“It’s hard enough having a child when you’re married. But at least there’s some help, some relief, at the end of the day, when you think you’ll shoot yourself if you’re alone with the baby for one more minute.” She reflected on it, and even the thought seemed to exhaust her. “I can’t really picture that. Doing it by myself.”

“I can’t, either, really.” I shifted uncomfortably on the couch. I couldn’t help feeling slightly defensive about having her tell me how hard it would be. As if I hadn’t already taken that aspect into consideration.

“I wasn’t trying to imply that you were romanticizing having a baby alone.”

“Because I’m not.”

“I know. It’s just that you have to really want a baby. Really, really want one. Having a baby changes everything. Everything. In your entire life. Forever. No one ever tells you that. Or if they do, you don’t believe them, or you’re not listening.”

“Changes it how? You know, besides the obvious ways—no time, no privacy, no selfishness.”

“Well, in those obvious ways, like you said. But there are other things that happen—things you don’t expect.” I waited while she gathered her thoughts. “Like, you lose yourself. You completely lose a sense of who you are. Not that it would matter, since you become a totally different person afterward anyway. But I don’t know, it’s almost like you forget who you were; forget what it was like to be the way you used to be. Your body changes, your mind changes, your marriage changes, everything changes so suddenly and so completely that it takes a while to realize the extent of what’s happened. You get glimpses sometimes, here and there, of how things used to be—late at night when you’re too exhausted to go to sleep after a feeding, or at the end of the day when you’ve just put them down and you have the first moment of peace and quiet that you’ve had all day—it’s like a flashback. You have this vague, distant memory of this person, this life, you used to know—
I used to look like this, and I used to wear this, and I used to think about this and read about that
—only it’s gone, and it’s been replaced by this other person and this other life. It’s not a bad thing. That’s not the point. It’s just different.”