If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home Now (6 page)

We entered a cavernous room where a few women were grouped around the biggest coffee table I’d ever seen—it had to be at least
six feet by six feet. Two people could
have slept
side by side on that coffee table, although not at that particular moment, since it was spread with plates of muffins, bagels,
cut fruit, coffee cups, plates, napkins, and silverware. There was enough food there for the entire parent body of the school,
and definitely too much for the small number of skinny women grouped around it.

Heads turned as we came in and Tanya ushered us toward the others. “Everyone, this is Melanie Correa—daughter in fourth and
son in kinder, right? And Rickie Allen, who has a son in first.” She had done her homework. She probably
always
did her homework. And her kids’ homework too.

Tanya pointed to the other women, each in turn. “This is
Maria Dellaventura.” Another thin woman with blond hair, longer and more layered than Tanya’s, raised her hand briefly. “You
probably know her already, Rickie, because she has a son in first”—I didn’t—“and also a daughter in sixth. And this is Carol
Lynn Donahue”—yet
another
thin blond woman, clad in a tight spandex running tank, raised a tautly muscular arm in acknowledgment—“two in middle school,
one in the high school.” She gestured to the woman who was just setting a carafe of coffee on the table. “And Linda Chatterjee.”
This one was thin like the others but at least her hair was dark. She was also strikingly beautiful. “She’s got a son in fourth.
And this is her house.”

“Please sit down and eat something,” Linda said. “
Someone
has to eat something.” Looking around, I could understand her plea: none of the women had anything on the plates in front
of them except a slice of fruit or two.

Tanya sat down next to Carol Lynn, taking up all the easily accessible sofa real estate. I plunked down on the floor, crisscrossed
my legs, and reached for a muffin. Melanie studied the sofas hopefully, but the women had resumed the conversation we had
interrupted, and no one moved to make room for her. I patted the floor next to me but she shook her head and gestured at her
nice pants.

Linda, who was still standing, noticed Mel’s uncertainty and said, “Hold on—there are more chairs in the kitchen.” She put
down the carafe of coffee and ran into the adjoining kitchen. “Here you go!” she said, reappearing and lugging a barstool.
She set it down near where I was sitting. It was a very high stool.

Melanie looked slightly horrified but thanked her and climbed up. Once she was seated, her knees were at the same level as
the others’ shoulders. She was too high to reach the food, so I offered the muffin plate up to her but she shook her head
at it.

Too bad for her: my muffin—carrot? zucchini? apple? I wasn’t sure—was delicious, moist and warm.

Meanwhile, the conversation we’d interrupted was resumed. Carol Lynn said, “I hear all the sixth-grade girls have huge crushes
on him.”

Tanya was punching away at her BlackBerry but she looked up briefly. “Is that true, Maria? Are the sixth-grade girls all in
love with Coach Andrew?”

That caught my interest.

“Only the ones who’ve started puberty,” Maria said with a laugh. “But forget about
them
—I could name a dozen
mothers
who’ve invented reasons to go see him in his office. And not just the ones who are divorced, either.” She tossed her gorgeous
mane of highlighted hair. “Which doesn’t leave any space for those of us who are.”

“What happened to that coach they had last year?” I asked. “The woman?”

“Coach Brianna? She got ‘married,’ ” Maria said, raising her fingers to make quotation marks, which confused me until Carol
Lynn explained with a simple “Same-sex union.”

“Her wife moved up north,” Maria said. “So they lost Brianna. That’s why they pulled Andrew out of the computer lab—he was
really hired to teach computers and manage the school network, you know, but then they needed someone to do PE and he took
over there.”

“Maybe it won’t be permanent, then,” I said.

“God, I hope he stays,” Maria said. “My kids love him. Doesn’t yours?”

“No,” I said. “And neither do I.”

“Why not?” asked Carol Lynn.

I didn’t want to launch into the whole story. “I just don’t think he’s a good coach. Noah hates PE now.”

There was a short pause.

“Noah’s on the small side for his age, isn’t he?” Maria said then, meaningfully.

“Yeah, he’s a runt.”

She gave a little nod as if something had been explained but all she said was, “He’s cute.” She crossed her legs, which were
sleek in a pair of dark-rinse jeans, and leaned back into the cushions, eyeing me. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but
everyone in our class is dying to know your story. You know, because you look so young.”

“I’m not as young as I look.”

“Really?” She narrowed her eyes. “So how old
are
you?”

“Thirty-seven.”

Melanie said, “Don’t listen to her. She’s twenty-five.”

“And Noah’s, what, six?” Maria said. Doing the math in her head, counting back the way people did.

“Something like that.” I knew my son’s age, but this woman with her perfectly dyed and styled long blond hair and smoothly
unmoving skin unsettled me, and that made me turn on my indifferent-mother act.

“So you had him pretty young.”

“Right,” I said. “He was just a baby.”

“Good choice. The older ones hurt more coming out.” Maria turned to Tanya. “Should we start? Are we still waiting for anyone?”

Tanya glanced at her watch. “Marley said she would try to come—”

“My son’s in the same grade as her daughter,” Melanie said. I winced.

“Did she happen to mention to you if she’s coming or not?” Tanya asked her, a bit too politely.

Mel flushed. “I don’t really know her that well.”

Tanya didn’t seem surprised. “I’ll try her cell, just in case she’s on her way.” She picked up her phone again.

I reached for another muffin and looked up to discover they were all watching me. Maria said, “Oh, god, girls, remember when
we were in our twenties and could eat like that without gaining a pound?”

“Your metabolism just
stops
when you turn forty,” Carol Lynn said. She raked her fingers through her two-toned hair. “Nothing will budge that extra inch
around my waist. It showed up the week I turned forty and I’ll never lose it. I do an hour of Pilates every day and play tennis
or run four times a week—and it’s still there.” What was she talking about?
What
extra inch? The woman was one narrow slab of hard muscle.

Tanya lowered her phone, and Melanie said, “Did you reach her?”

“I got her assistant. Marley won’t be able to make it but she’s really sorry and said we should sign her up to donate whatever
we need to the event.” She dropped the BlackBerry on the coffee table and pulled a notebook off of the stack in front of her.
“Let’s get down to business.”

The Autumn Festival was an annual Fenwick School event, a purely celebratory family party with bounce houses, cotton candy,
sno-cone and popcorn machines, and carnival-type games. Later in the year there would be a serious fund-raiser, but the goal
of this one wasn’t to make money, just to have fun and make the kids feel enthusiastic about being back at school. Costs were
covered by the Parent Association, which made me wonder how much my parents donated in addition to paying Noah’s hefty tuition,
but it wasn’t the kind of thing I thought about for long.

The Event Hospitality Committee, I learned, was responsible
for supplying lunch that day (hot dogs, hamburgers, and chips) and drinks (soda and water) and for serving them. By the time
the meeting ended about an hour later, various exciting topics, like whether or not we should have tofu hot dogs and whether
Heinz really was the
best
ketchup, had been debated and hastily resolved, since time was running short: the festival was only two weeks away.

As we got up to leave, Linda begged us all to take some food home. The pastries had hardly been touched. I would have been
more than happy to score some of those carrot muffins, but Melanie cut me off with a shake of her head and a “Thanks, but
we better not.”

“Why couldn’t we take any food?” I asked her when we’d left.

“I didn’t want them to think we were pigs.”

“You should have told me that before I ate three muffins in front of everyone.”

We got in the car and she said, “So what did you think? That was kind of fun, wasn’t it?”

“Well, it was better than taking Noah to have his blood tested… but not by much.”

“Really? I thought they were nice.”

“They were scary,” I said. “So blond and blow-dried and Botoxy—”

“Linda wasn’t blond.” She carefully aimed the car out onto the road. Melanie was a painfully cautious driver. “Don’t be so
judgmental. Maria has a kid in your class. How lucky is that? Now you’ll have someone to say hi to and sit with at class parties
and stuff.”

“Oh, yeah!” I said. “I can already tell that we’re going to be BFFs!”

“Didn’t you think she was beautiful? Maria?”

I rolled my eyes. “Who even knows what she really looks like? She’s had so much work done.”

“I think she looks great.”

“You’re prettier,” I said. “By far.”

“No, I’m not. Did you see how thin they all were?”

“For god’s sake, Mel, don’t admire them for
that
.”

“I wish I could lose five pounds,” she said, glancing down at her stomach, which barely curved above her seat belt. “Just
five pounds. That’s all.”

I let out a strangled moan. “Stop. Thinness isn’t a goal. Or a virtue. Or a sign of beauty. It’s just thinness.”

“Easy for you to say. You’re thin.”

“Not as thin as those women,” I said. “But you don’t hear me complaining about it.”

“It’s the kids’ fault. I had a flat stomach before I had them.”

“Yeah. They really weren’t worth it, were they?”

“Shut up,” she said, but at least it got her off the subject.

M
y mother had been dragging me to the Autumn Festival every year for as long as I could remember. The only time I missed it
was the fall of my freshman year of college. But since I got pregnant later that year and moved back home that summer, I was
around for the next festival—only that time I had an infant Noah with me.

I didn’t want to go that year, but Mom insisted.

Her smile was a little brittle that day, but she held her head
high. My teenage pregnancy gave her something to be strong about, and she liked to be strong. As soon as we arrived, she snatched
Noah out of my arms and carried him around the entire field, introducing him to all her fellow board members and declaring
over and over again that the whole family was deliriously happy to have him in our lives. While she showed him off like Baby
Simba, I found a place to sit in the shade and thought about how I was right back where I’d started, living in my parents’
house and going to the Autumn Festival because my mother wanted me to—the things I thought I’d left behind forever when I
went off to college. And I had only myself to blame.

It helped when she brought Noah back to me to nurse. Holding him helped it all make a little more sense, or at least made
making sense irrelevant.

The festival was always held on the high school PE field—not the football field or the baseball diamond, of course, because
those were sacred to their sports. Fenwick was huge, three schools (primary, middle, and high) spread out on one campus, having
patiently and gradually bought up any available neighboring land over the previous few decades. It was an institution on the
Westside of LA, beloved by the several generations of residents who’d gone there and hated by everyone who lived nearby who
couldn’t afford its outrageous tuition or whose kids had been rejected, but who still had to deal with the insane amount of
traffic it generated during pickup and drop-off.

Disgruntled neighbors weren’t invited to the Autumn Festival: it was only for members of the school community. In addition
to the bounce houses, mountain climbing wall, and petting zoo, there were several carnival-type games, usually manned by faculty
members. I still remembered my childhood thrill at seeing the usually conservatively dressed faculty
in jeans and T-shirts. Except for Louis Wilson, who of course always still wore a jacket and tie, merely switching his usual
formal wool for some light, linen-y fabric, which in his universe probably counted as wildly casual, verging on indecent.

The morning of this year’s festival, Mom and Noah and I were all ready to leave the house at 10:30, but when Mom called to
Dad to come join us, he came downstairs still in his pajamas.

“You’re not ready?” Mom said.

He looked blank. “For what?”

“The Autumn Festival! I’ve told you five times already.” She sounded exactly like I did when I was exasperated with Noah.

“Oh, is that today? I forgot.” My father sighed. “I was looking forward to a quiet morning. I have that article to write…”

My mother said wearily, “You want to stay home?”

His face lit up. “Do you mind?”

“I don’t suppose you’d let
me
skip it?” I said.

She didn’t even bother answering, just gave me a gentle push in the direction of the garage. And the truth was that now that
Noah was a student at Fenwick he got totally excited about going to the festival, so I had to go for his sake, anyway.

As we started to get into Mom’s car, I asked her if I could drive.

She warily handed me the keys and got into the passenger seat.

There wasn’t a lot of traffic on Sunset because it was Sunday morning.

“You’re going a little fast,” my mother said about a mile into the drive.

I accelerated.

“Seriously, Rickie,” my mother said. “Slow down.”

I darted into the left lane to pass a car.

“Slow down,” Mom said sharply. “It’s not funny.”

I nodded and sped up a little bit more, whipping through an intersection before passing another car by moving to the right.