Young Wives (17 page)

In which Michelle, Brownie Queen, has to let them eat cake

Michelle hadn’t been able to sleep since the bust. She was exhausted, but every time she started to drift off, she’d start awake, a cold sweat covering her. She couldn’t stop her mind from racing. She didn’t want to wake up Frank, so she shuffled down to the kitchen and decided to straighten up the cubicles that held mail, magazines, and Frankie’s school papers. There she found a neon green paper with the reminder of the bake sale that was being held today during all lunch periods. Bake sales were always the best fund-raiser, she decided she’d bake. Making brownies at three-thirty in the morning wasn’t exactly a normal thing to do, but she needed to do something.

Michelle had to admit to herself as she measured out the dry ingredients—flour, sugar, walnuts—and the eight eggs for the four pans she would make, that baking had a soothing affect on her. As the aroma of chocolate filled the kitchen, she was grateful for the roteness and optimism of the task.

Now Michelle walked up to the front door of the Eleanor S. Windham Middle School with one hand tightly clutching Frankie’s and the other hand holding a huge box of her homemade brownies. Frankie was beside her, but Jenna had run ahead to make it less clear that she’d been driven here by her mom; she was already old enough to be humiliated by being seen at any time with her mother at school, and this was a much more abnormal situation.

Michelle was doing her best to recover and help her kids recover from the horror of the arrest, but she wasn’t even sure that driving Jenna over was the thing to do; she and Frank were part of the problem for Jenna, so perhaps she shouldn’t expect that she could be part of the solution. Normally she thought kids should learn to stand up for themselves. But this wasn’t a normal situation. She couldn’t let her daughter be picked on by the bus bullies because of her parents’ legal problem. It was too much.

Michelle knew how cruel kids could be from her own experience—once or twice her mother had shown up to pick her up at school and Michelle, horrified by the sight of her, drunk and slovenly, had prayed that she would live it down. Afterward there had been taunts and Michelle had simply braved it out, pretending that she didn’t hear them. But she was altogether tougher than Jenna—she’d had to be. Michelle didn’t ever want her daughter to have to be as tough as she had been. It wasn’t good for a child. Now, as she watched Jenna duck into the crowd and join the bunch of little backs that were presented to Michelle as she entered the slate-floored school foyer, Michelle made herself loosen the hold she had on Frankie. She didn’t want him to feel just how frightened and desolate she was. She wasn’t sure how she could face Mrs. Spencer, the principal, or even Mrs. Spencer’s nosy, daunting secretary.

The bust had been bad enough, but Michelle hadn’t known the worst—that her private agony had been spread all over the pages of the newspaper. For two days, as bad as it was, Michelle had been an ostrich, silly enough to think that her humiliation had been a private one—or as private as a police raid with twenty cop cars in the middle of the night could be. She didn’t realize the whole humiliation had been spread out on breakfast tables all over Westchester County until Rick Bruzeman had mentioned over the phone that the press coverage wouldn’t help the grand jury.

“What press coverage?” she’d asked, and he’d thought she was joking. Michelle had driven to his office to see what he was talking about; she had been so shocked that she hadn’t cried or behaved badly there, despite the growing distaste she felt for the man. She’d waited until she got home to her wreck of a house, and then had locked herself in the bathroom for two whole hours. She’d set the alarm clock for two-thirty so she would have enough time to soak her face in ice and wouldn’t scare the children when they came home from school.

But they’d come home with new horrors. Jenna was crying because two older girls on the bus had pulled off her backpack in front of the whole gleeful group of kids and pretended to go through it looking for drugs. Jenna had run to her room and locked the door. Frankie had come home silent but holding up a note. He went to the window, looking for the lost Pookie while Michelle read it.

It was from Frankie’s teacher, reporting that he had wet his pants in class and that she shouldn’t be expected to clean up after him. She’d punished him. Michelle had taken off Frankie’s urine-soaked Osh-Koshes, bathed him, and sat him in front of the television before she went up to comfort Jenna. Then she let Frank take over that job when he came home. It had all been, it still was, hellish. But she and Frank had decided that facing it down was the way to go.

Now, at the school door, Michelle lifted Frankie up. He was so small, so light. As she walked down the school hallway, surrounded by noisy children, she focused on how all she’d ever wanted was to love her husband and her kids. Why was it the nature of the world to take the one thing you wanted and twist it into so much pain?

Walking into the principal’s office this morning was as difficult to do as it had been for her back in the days when she was only eleven. But Michelle wouldn’t let them hurt her son or her daughter without fighting back. She didn’t expect that the school would be responsible for fixing things, but they shouldn’t be allowed to make everything worse.

Michelle walked in, nodded to the random teachers at their mailboxes, and moved directly up to Hillary Gross, the secretary. “I’m here to see Mrs. Spencer,” she announced and was proud her voice didn’t quaver. “May I leave these here while I go in to meet with her?” she asked, lifting a heavy box onto the counter.

“What is it?” Hillary Gross asked, her voice suspicious.

Michelle was ready to snap something at her—like “Heroin tarts”—but maintained her dignity and instead smiled at Frankie. “Just something for the bake sale,” she said in what she thought of as her Professional Mom’s Voice. She moved smoothly and directly toward Mrs. Spencer’s office door. Someone was just leaving, and before anything else could happen, Michelle put her head in, held Frankie a little higher, and entered Mrs. Spencer’s den, shutting the door behind her on all those curious, hostile eyes.

Mrs. Spencer was at her desk, her back to the light. She was one of the older women bureaucrats, a little more modern than the battle-axes that Michelle had been taught by, but certainly not what you could call dedicated or progressive in her thinking. She had over-permed gray hair and her burgundy lipstick was darker, but not by much, than the age spots around her eyes, nose, and mouth. “Don’t rock the boat” could have been the motto they ran under her photo in the middle school yearbook. Michelle tried once again to paste on a pleasant smile and sat down in the chair opposite Mrs. Spencer, still holding Frankie against her shoulder.

“Thank you for seeing me,” she said, her voice cheerful and soft. “I have to be at the bake sale in just ten minutes so I don’t have much time, and I know how busy you are.” Mrs. Spencer nodded. She wasn’t looking for gossip or trouble. “You know Frankie, don’t you?” Michelle asked.

“Yes. Of course,” Mrs. Spencer said but Michelle doubted that the woman did. She was strictly a desk model, leaving her office as rarely as possible.

“I’m going to ask. Frankie to sit in the chair outside,” Michelle said, her voice still pleasant. She turned to her son. “I brought you a book and I won’t be long,” she promised.

She stood up again, went to the door, settled him on the bench there and gave him not only his
Pat the Bunny
book but a box of juice and a tiny box of raisins. Frankie just stared down at his feet. Michelle’s heart broke as she looked at him, but she left him there and went back to sit opposite Mrs. Spencer, again closing the door.

“I’m not sure if you’re aware of it,” she said, her voice now brisk, “but my family has been upset by a false accusation. Anyway, it’s important for you to know that though police were involved, there hasn’t been an indictment and there probably won’t be. We’re considering suing the town and the county for false arrest.” Michelle felt Mrs. Spencer straighten up at that. She searched in her bag, as if she weren’t acutely aware of the location of the insulting note from Frankie’s kindergarten teacher, folded carefully in the side pocket.

Mrs. Spencer leaned forward across her desk as if she was willing to help with the search. “I had heard about the arrest and I—”

“As I just said, there’ve been no indictments,” Michelle interrupted. “My husband and I were held for a few hours, badly frightened, and released. He and I have been the victims of some kind of smear campaign. Anyway, whether you believe me or not, our children are certainly innocent, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Well, in these cases the children always are exposed to—”

“In our home my children have been exposed to love, respect, and moral behavior,” Michelle said as she pulled the letter out and thrust it forward at the principal. “This, on the other hand, I consider
un
loving,
dis
respectful, and
im
moral behavior.”

Mrs. Spencer picked up the letter and looked it over briefly. “I didn’t know about this,” she said. “I don’t know anything about it, but I’ll look into it.”

“No,
I
am looking into it,” Michelle said. “What’s needed here is a reassessment. Surely Miss Murchison was aware that my son had been exposed to some stress. And that children can be unkind to one another. Frankie has never had an accident at school before.” Michelle’s voice began to rise and her hands to shake. “How dare she let him sit in his urine all morning? In front of the other children. In the corner like a bad boy. How dare she humiliate him and betray him that way?”

“You know the administration policy here is that children have to be toilet-trained to attend kindergarten. But I do think that Miss—”

“I know for a fact that these accidents have happened to other children and that when they do, the standard practice is to dry the kid off as quickly and discreetly as possible and move on. Why was Miss Murchison doing otherwise? Why was she punishing my son?” Without waiting for an answer from the useless woman, Michelle stood up. “It had better not happen again, Mrs. Spencer,” she told her. “In fact, what better happen is that my son is given some extra kindness and special treatment to make up for this or else this school is going to be slapped with a law suit so gruesome that it will take the pension of every principal in the county to
begin
to pay it off.” Michelle turned and walked to the door. “I’m taking Frankie down to Miss Murchison’s room,” she said. “Then I’m going to the bake sale. I count on you to speak to that woman and make sure that my son gets to be monitor tomorrow and that today he gets to sit beside her at story time. Because he could use a little help right now.”

Michelle felt like she had to keep moving. She swooped up her son and her brownies, nodded at Hillary Gross and the rest of the audience that had gathered in the room. Her head was up, her ponytail high, and attitude was expressed in every line of her long, stiffened body. Now, brownies and her son in tow, she turned her back on all of them and strode down the hall.

She dropped Frankie off with Miss Murchison, had a whispered but fierce conversation with her, and then went on to the cafeteria. There two women had already set up the traditional “we’re having a bake sale” paper tablecloths and were spreading out the incoming sweets.

Going into the big, echoing cafeteria was hard for her. She really needed Frank. She needed his strength. But the funny thing was that his strength was sometimes a terrible problem. He would have wrecked Mrs. Spencer’s office. He would have made things worse. He would have screamed and Hillary Gross and all the others in that office really would have had something to gawk at. That was why, despite his strength, Michelle had learned to do some things on her own. She wasn’t really good at them, but in the long run, it was the best thing. Now, however, she missed him desperately.

Keep moving
, she told herself,
and keep your head up
. Another mother, an older woman with dyed black hair, was unwrapping an angel food cake while a redhead Michelle had met at PTA—Minna or Mona, Michelle couldn’t remember which—sat with a money box, counting out paper and silver change. Michelle swung the heavy box up beside Mona (or Minna) and smiled brightly again. “Hi,” she said, putting out her hand. “We’ve met before. I’m Michelle Russo.”

Minna-or-Mona nodded but then looked away, her eyes wandering somewhere over to the closed cafeteria windows. She didn’t offer her hand or her name. Michelle knew she should be cold and just shut up, but she had to try to push through this. “I brought brownies,” she sang out. “Mrs. Russo’s famous double chocolate specials.” She turned to the other woman who was watching her, silent. “I know a lot of women bring brownies,” she said, “but mine are baked from scratch. I know other people say that, but mine really are. Mine always do well.”

The silence was a little frightening. She looked down at the table. Crumbs. She began to put them together into a tiny pile. One was stuck to the Formica and she scratched at it with her fingernail. “I baked four pans,” she continued, horrified at her own desperation. “That’s forty-eight brownies. And I ground the nuts for them. Don’t you find that store-bought shelled walnuts never taste really fresh?”

There was nothing. No response at all. It was as if they hadn’t heard her. These two human beings stared at her as if she were a guppy from another planet, floating before them in the air, her mouth opening and closing to no effect.

Michelle didn’t have time to reflect. She was there in front of them and had to make contact. She swept the crumbs into her hand, but then she didn’t know what to do with them. She couldn’t just drop them on the floor, so she stuck them in her pocket. Disgusting. “You know, one of the funniest things that happened when my daughter started school here was when the second grade had a big bake-off to pay for, oh, I don’t know, I think more laptops…” She stopped for a minute to think and heard a little laugh escape her. The two women simply stared as another woman joined them, a platter in hand.