What Came First (3 page)

I keep looking at him.

“You don’t like it.”

I put the case on the table. “I guess I expected something else. That you’d do more than burn a CD.”

There will be no ring for Valentine’s Day either. I know that now.

“I didn’t just burn the CD,” he says. “I had to spend a lot of time listening to music. I had to think about what you liked, what I liked—how the qualities might combine and carry over to something we hadn’t heard before. So then I bought the best ones from iTunes. I loaded everything onto your iPod, too.”

There’s nothing left to say. I push back my chair and run to the bedroom, slam the door.

He doesn’t come after me right away. By the time he knocks, I’ve stopped crying, and I’ve swapped my purple dress for ratty old pajamas. I don’t ever want to wear that dress again. It will always remind me of tonight.

“Dinner’s ready,” he says, standing in the open doorway.

“I’m not hungry.”

He nods. We are quiet for a moment, until he speaks again. “I’m sorry you didn’t like my gift.”

“I wanted a ring, Eric!”

He lets out a deep breath. “I know you did.” When he closes the door, it barely makes a sound.

Tuesday-night scrapbooking is the highlight of my week, which speaks volumes about just how crappy my life has become. There are fourteen of us in the group, all stay-at-home mothers, but typically only five or six women show up on any given evening. I’m always there.

No one ever asks me to host. Scrapbooking involves cutting tools, and my son Harrison’s preschool scissor incident looms large in the collective community memory. I’d like to say that he’s outgrown his aggressive behavior now that he’s in kindergarten, but he hasn’t, any more than his twin sister, Sydney, has moved beyond SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF HER LUNGS EVERY TIME SHE DOESN’T GET WHAT SHE WANTS.

So: scrapbooking. I’ve been at it for just over a year, and I’m on my eighth volume,
Bath Time for Babies!
Thanks to the water theme, I’m going with blue: blue covers, blue pages, blue stickers. Blue is calming.

Wine is calming, too. It flows by the gallon at these things, Chardonnay, mostly, though we have a handful of Merlot drinkers. We all live in the same North Scottsdale housing development, so home is always a short drive (or stumble) away.

Annalisa Lemberger scored hostess duties tonight. Annalisa lives a street away in a beige stucco house identical to mine, right down to the forest-green front door and the yellow lantana planted along the concrete walkway. Years ago, before the twins, a few months after Darren and I had moved to Arizona from Chicago, I drove my groceries “home” to Annalisa’s house. My garage door opener didn’t work, of course, so I parked in the driveway and lugged my plastic sacks of food and toilet paper to the front door. I spent maybe ten frustrating minutes trying to turn my key in the lock before the woman who lived there (not Annalisa—she’s new) called neighborhood security. The guard assured me that people in our development confuse houses all the time, but I burst into tears anyway and didn’t stop crying till I’d spent a half hour in the darkness of my own garage.

The house mistake pushed me over the edge, but it wasn’t the true source of my unhappiness. Before stopping at the grocery store, I’d had an appointment with a fertility specialist. With no success after three years of what we all referred to as “trying,” I needed to face facts. I might never become pregnant.

The idea of a childless future plunged me into an instant depression. How could I ever lead a full life without a house full of little people to call my own?

Ha! If only I could have seen into the future!

“You’re the first one here!” Annalisa chirps now, opening her green front door. She’s started in on the Chardonnay already, a sparkly wine charm clinking at the base of her heavy, green-rimmed Mexican wineglass. She looks Scottsdale-perfect as always: tall, trim, and frosty blond, wearing a teal sweater set, cream trousers, and silver sandals with delicate heels.

“Actually, I thought this was my house,” I quip. Annalisa loves my wrong-house story. (I never told her that it ended in tears.)

When she laughs, she shows off her superstraight, bright-white teeth. Annalisa always laughs at my jokes, even the predictable ones, so I like her even though I can’t help thinking of her as Scottsdale Barbie.

As much as our houses resemble each other from the street, walking into Annalisa’s is like entering a different world. My house has that “lived in” look: once-white carpet; stain-resistant couches that aren’t; and a mishmash of tables and chairs, all showing the effects of two active five-year-olds. (“Active” sounds so much better than “out of control.”) Everything in Annalisa’s house looks like it was bought in one day at a Southwestern decorating superstore. Which it probably was.

If I were a positive-thinking kind of person, I’d appreciate that my house has more personality than Annalisa’s. But I am not a positive-thinking kind of person. Personality is overrated. I’d switch homes in a minute.

In Annalisa’s combo living/dining room (we use it as a toy room), Colbie Caillet croons all barefoot-folksy-feminine from the stereo while cinnamon-scented candles flicker on the end tables. I wouldn’t dare light candles like that in my house. Even matches hidden on hard-to-reach shelves make me nervous.

In addition to wine, Annalisa has laid out a seven-layer dip, an artichoke spread, a cheese platter, and brownies. Why do the skinniest women always serve the fattiest food? For years, I’ve moaned about my inability to lose my “baby weight.” I put on sixty-five pounds with Sydney and Harrison and lost twenty-three in the year after their birth. The rest has settled quite comfortably onto my stomach, belly, hips, thighs, and—shoot me now—back. Now that the kids are in school, I’ve got to admit that all that padding can no longer be classified as “baby weight.” It is just plain old fat, and it’s not going anywhere. Pass the artichoke spread.

I have just finished affixing a cactus wine charm to my glass when Annalisa’s husband, Roger, comes clomping down the stairs with their two little blond girls, whose names I can never remember. One of the girls is a year older than the twins, and the other is a year younger. Or maybe she’s two years younger. I can never remember that either. It doesn’t matter. As a rule, I get along better with women who don’t have children in the twins’ class.

“Hiya! Good to see you again!” Roger booms, his voice echoing off the too-tall ceiling. He has no idea who I am.

“You, too,” I say. “Taking the girls out?”

“Yup.” He puts a hand on each blond head. “Movie date with Dad.”

Roger is the other reason that I don’t hate Annalisa even though she looks like an unnaturally proportioned plastic doll (I mean that in a good way). Roger is a beast. That’s not to say that he’s not a nice man, because as far as I can tell, he lets Annalisa do pretty much anything she wants. But Annalisa is younger than me, in her early thirties, and Roger has got to be sixty. And not a youthful sixty. I don’t know what’s going on with his face, but the skin is all red and saggy, and he has pores the size of sesame seeds.

“What are Darren and the twins doing tonight?” Annalisa asks.

“Just, you know. Having a quiet evening at home.”

When I left, Darren was at his computer, lost in a Sims trance, while Harrison and Sydney chomped on dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets in front of the Cartoon Network. By now they’ll have finished eating and be engaged in hand-to-hand combat, but whoops! I’ve left my cell phone in the car, so if Darren tries to call me, I won’t even know.

“That’s
nice,
” Annalisa, says. “Sometimes we moms just need to get out of the way so the dads can have their one-on-one time.”

In Sims, Darren is a childless sports agent with a knack for Cajun voodoo—his powers recently imbued by the Sims Makin’ Magic Expansion Pack, which his mother gave him for Christmas.

She never did like me, and not just because she spent so many years blaming her lack of grandchildren on my faulty female plumbing. When Darren’s sluggish sperm were finally identified as a far bigger obstacle to pregnancy than my irregular ovulation, she hardened herself against me even more. Now she sends “the children” (never “Harrison and Sydney,” never “my grandchildren”) ten dollars each for their birthdays and Christmas. I’ve learned not to expect or want any more from her.

The doorbell rings. Annalisa puts down her already-empty wineglass and opens the door to another frosty blonde, slightly shorter and not quite as pretty as herself (Scottsdale Skipper). Two more women arrive shortly after. Annalisa pours them wine and refills her own glass. We pull out our supplies: binders, papers, scissors, stickers, and photographs—so many, many photographs.

We coo and giggle over the images: bath time, beach time, birthdays, and Christmas. Such adorable children. Such dashing husbands.

Thank God they’re not here.

In the backyard, the screeching chickens rush to greet us, peering through the chicken wire like inmates in a prison yard longing for visitors. Oh, who am I kidding? They’re not happy to see us. They just want to see what we’ve brought to eat.

“Check the gate,” I tell Ian, placing our steaming mugs on the teak patio table. Not surprisingly, it’s chilly outside, the grass drenched with dew. I push our chairs out of the shade of the house and into the sunshine.

After running to the side yard to make sure the chickens can’t escape, Ian unlatches the coop and throws in leftovers from last night’s meal: peas and tomatoes, pasta and bread. Carmen makes dinner Monday through Friday. Saturday and Sunday we either eat out or order in. It’s not that I can’t cook, but my time with Ian is limited, and I don’t want to waste it in front of a stove.

Okay, truth: I can’t cook. I make a mean hot chocolate, though. And I’m an ace with a can opener and a microwave.

As the chickens peck at the leftovers, Ian checks for eggs. The henhouse has two levels, which we refer to, jokingly, as the Great Room and the Loft. The chickens sometimes sleep in the Loft, but all of the laying takes place in the lower left corner of the Great Room. The chickens take turns sitting on the pile of eggs.

I can’t help wondering what it feels like, day after day, to force something that big out of your body. Does it hurt them? Does it sadden them to have their eggs snatched away? Do they hold out hope that warm eggs will hold new life? Could I anthropomorphize poultry any more?

Ian is a master of doing nothing, of living in the moment and feeling the world pulse around him. Me, I’m a bit more restless, my brain an endless whir. Shivering at the table, I think,
The concrete needs to be sealed maybe I should get pavers too bad we don’t have a swimming pool but there really isn’t room the avocado tree is doing well not sure what’s going on with the lemon must ask Carmen to talk to the gardener I hope the chickens were a good idea what happens if one dies will Ian fall apart?

The chickens. They’re supposed to help me relax.
Think about the chickens.

There are five birds in all. The two big Rock Bards have black and white speckles and bright red crowns: very French country. They lay the most and the biggest eggs. Inasmuch as creatures that operate almost entirely on instinct and reflex can be assigned personality traits, the two Rhode Island Reds, brown with red crowns, are the friendliest. Finally, the one Americana—small, brown, and skittish, vaguely reminiscent of a tubby, earthbound hawk—would be a total write-off if not for its small and precious eggs. The eggs are green. And yes, we have been known to eat them with ham.

Ian named all the chickens. He swears the two Rock Bards, Salt and Pepper, are easy to tell apart (they’re not) but that only he knows the difference between the two Rhodies, Rusty and Red. I refer to all four of them as the Chickens, even though Ian protests. He says that’s like calling him the Kid. Thanks to her green eggs, Ian took inspiration from Dr. Seuss and called the Americana Sam.

We started out with six fluffy yellow chicks, two of each kind, all supposedly female. But at eight weeks, it was clear, at least to anyone who’d been examining pictures of bird genitalia on one of several Web sites devoted to backyard chickens, that one of the Americanas was a rooster.

“Why can’t we keep him?” Ian asked.

“Because he would mate with the girl chickens.” I’ve never shielded my son from the facts of life.

“So?”

“So roosters can get aggressive. Besides, we don’t need the eggs fertilized, so there’s no point.” Of course, sex is easier to explain when it’s something that other people do, without any uncomfortable images of Mommy and Daddy groping in the darkness.

“We couldn’t keep the rooster even if we wanted to,” I told Ian. “We’re zoned for hens but not roosters. Roosters are too noisy.”

After they finish eating, most of the chickens venture into the yard, stepping like ladies in high heels navigating an icy sidewalk. One Rhodie walks up the ramp to the henhouse and settles into the egg-laying corner.

Ian plops down into the chair next to me. “What do you think chickens think about?”

I run a hand over his hair. “Nothing. I think they think about nothing.”

“Well, I think you’re wrong.”

The whipped cream and marshmallows have already dissolved into his hot chocolate, but Ian doesn’t care. He sips the sweet brew, watches and waits. And waits. And waits.

“You have any homework this weekend?”

“No.” A white foam mustache quivers above his lip.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

A third grader, Ian began a gifted program this year. The greater workload resulted in some initial growing pains; during his fall conference, his teacher expressed concern about missing and incomplete assignments. After the conference, I bought Ian a giant calendar and helped him devise a filing system. It has made a world of difference.