A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (29 page)

Normally I love loading up the car to go to the kids’ events. I love packing the orange slices for the soccer games and the craft projects for the Brownie meetings. I like anticipating the event—sometimes I like that as much as the event itself—and I like the fact that I’m good at this kind of preparation, that I know what to take. I may not be a perfect mother, but I am one hell of a mom.

But this morning I felt disengaged, as if I were standing apart from myself, watching this mom gather up signs and clipboards, tablecloths and the cash box, her laptop computer and seven shoe boxes with slots cut into the tops. She didn’t take any folding chairs—the school had plenty of chairs—and she didn’t take any serving dishes—the bake-sale committee was taking care of that.

I had to stop feeling this way. This wasn’t me.

Most of the parking lot was being used for fair activities, and, the setup committees having worked late into the night, the lot was full of pop-up canopy tents and tables. Along one edge, a few parking places had been left open. An orange traffic cone sat in the middle of each one, and each cone had a laminated placard affixed to it. One of the cones had my name on it. I got out of the station wagon, moved my cone, and pulled into my place. I was the first one to arrive.

I popped the tailgate and reached into the station wagon to get out the signs that had been dropped at our house last night.

Then I stopped and slammed the tailgate. I had the school to myself. I needed to say good-bye.

Living in a small town teaches you a lot, but one thing it doesn’t teach you is how to say good-bye. Families don’t move away as much as they do in D.C., and even when you yourself leave, you don’t say good-bye because your parents are still there and you will be coming back.

My dad left without saying good-bye. He went back to his office one day after lunch, sat down at his desk, and had a massive stroke. And when I left my job, instead of saying good-bye, I promised I would come back and we would all go out to lunch, and then I had gone back only once.

This time I was going to say good-bye, bid farewell to the first place I had felt so completely a part of, so completely at home.

What precious, precious memories I had—the Halloween parades with the masses of little witches, Indians, and princesses; Erin and her friends wearing their Brownie uniforms for the first time; both Erin and Thomas being so excited about reading their first “chapter” book; and that funny, wonderful moment when Erin was in first grade and one of her classmates saw me and chirped, “Hi, Mrs. Erin’s Mom.”

Mrs. Erin’s Mom.
Shouldn’t I have hated being called that? My mother would have. But I had loved it.

I wasn’t just saying good-bye to the school; I was saying good-bye to my children being young.

Then I went up to the high school, that beautiful old white mansion that had always been our family’s future, the real heart of the school that now we would never know.

It was hard.

When I came back down to the parking lot, I saw Blair’s car and the custodian’s truck. A green minivan was turning into the lot. It belonged to the chair of the games committee.

She would need the signs that were in my station wagon, but she would have a million other things to unload. I had time to go find Blair. I needed to see Blair, not because she was cochair of the fair, but because she was my friend. Seeing her would be like putting tired feet in a clear, cool running stream. She was reserved and serene, this dear friend of mine, and the strength of her coloring—her blue-black hair and her ivory skin—and the vividly feminine hues of her clothes would energize me, turn me back into myself again.

The lower-school office was to be the fair’s command center for the day, and so I went there to find her. But she was not alone. With her, waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, were Annelise and Mimi.

My friend Annelise—my fellow midwesterner—the trees of Wisconsin had taught her the same lessons that the plowed fields of Indiana had taught me. And if Blair was water and Annelise the earth, then Mimi was the sun: bright, boldly honest, unrelenting.

I was
not
going to say good-bye to them.

“I saw you drive out this morning,” Mimi said, “and I realized that I couldn’t keep away. I wanted to be here in the thick of things so I called Blair—”

“Only to find out,” Annelise added, “that I had done the same thing.”

I was glad that they were all here. I touched Mimi on the arm, hugged Annelise.

They were looking at me curiously. “What’s wrong?” Blair said quickly.

“It’s not the fair,” I assured her, “nothing with the fair.”

It was such a beautiful morning. I wished that we could go outside. I didn’t want to tell them in this cluttered office, I wanted to be outdoors where the air was fresh and the morning light still soft, but if we went outside, the games committee people would want to get the signs from me, and someone else would want something from Blair.

So standing here in front of the open door to the supply closet, next to three boxes of copy paper, I said it. “Jamie and I are sending Erin and Thomas to Sidwell next year.”

Blair had been bending over to plug in her laptop. Annelise had been about to pour coffee. Mimi had been peeling printed computer labels off a pregummed sheet, sticking them temporarily along the side of the gray metal desk, her earrings swinging as she worked. They all stopped.

Mimi spoke first. “Lydia, no.”

“You knew we were applying,” I said.

“Yes, but …” This was Annelise.

“This isn’t about Erin not being invited to the movies. You don’t leave a school for that.” I knew that each of them was flushed with guilt over everything that had happened this year. “And it isn’t about Faith and Chris. It’s about the school not being right for Erin and Thomas. This school is strong in music and arts; it is a wonderful place for smart, creative kids. My kids color between the lines, and they always will. They like coloring between the lines. They’re good at math; they’re good at sports.”

“Not everyone here is musical,” Annelise pleaded.

She and I were wearing the same cotton sweater. That happened once in a while. Our coloring was the same; our taste, incomes, and figures were similar.

“But the best kids are,” I answered. “It’s going to be hard for my kids to believe in themselves here.”

“But haven’t we always said we’re not the type of people who need our kids to be best at everything all the time?” Blair said.

“Of course, but this isn’t—” I stopped.
I can’t do this. Please don’t make me do this. Don’t make me defend myself.
I ran my hand over the top box of copy paper. It was a red-and-white box with a separate lid. My fingers caught on the plastic strap that encircled the box, holding the lid on. “You have to believe me, Jamie and I honestly think we are doing what is best for our children.”

“I didn’t mean to question you,” Annelise said quickly. “It’s just that I don’t want it to happen. I can’t imagine you not being here. I feel as if I can’t breathe.”

If Blair were water, Annelise earth, and Mimi the sun, was I their air?

Blair nodded more slowly. “Of course, you’re doing what is right for your kids, but, Lydia, not have you here? It feels so completely wrong.”

“It does to me, too,” I said.

Mimi was fingering one of the adhesive labels. She spoke without looking at me, which wasn’t like her. “Lydia, everything I know about being a friend I learned from you—”

“No, no,” I interrupted. “We all learned together. And I’m not moving. I will still live across the street from you.”

“But not from me,” Annelise put in. “Not from me or Blair. When are we going to see you?”

We had never had to make arrangements to see one another. It had always been easy. I would go to a soccer game or to the musical at the high school, and my friends would be there. I would see them in the parking lots. I would talk to them when one of us dropped off the kids at the other’s house. We would pick up the phone to make arrangements for driving and then start talking about something else. All that was going to change. It wasn’t going to be so easy anymore.

“We will have to make an effort,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “We’ll have to make plans. Or set up a routine where we exercise together three times a week or something like that.”

Blair looked at me curiously, her head tilting, her black hair dropping across her shoulder. “You’re not worried?”

I looked at her and spoke more honestly. “I’m too overwhelmed to worry, too tired, too bewildered. I just know that I have to do what it is right for my children, even if it does feel wrong for me.”

Mimi looked down at her computer labels, little white flags ready and waiting to be stuck somewhere. “Just because it will be different doesn’t mean that it will be wrong,” she said. “Sometimes we get together and all we do is talk about school and the kids and nothing else. Lydia’s not going to want to obsess about Alden School politics every time we get together any more than we will care about Sidwell. And maybe that’s healthy. Either we will have to talk about something else or we will discover that we aren’t really friends, just mom associates.”

She was right. Before Spring Break I had been caught in that sucking morass of unproductivity, unable to fold a basket of laundry without checking my e-mail for the latest Alden School gossip. With Jamie never home, with all my friends as involved in Alden as I was, it had been too easy to give myself over to those addictive dramas. It would be easier to be something more than just a mom if my friends’ lives were a little different from mine.

But if our kids weren’t at the same school, could they still be my lighthouse?

Maybe … maybe not …

The problem with my lighthouse image was that the boats never left sight of the lighthouse; they weren’t going anywhere. They were simply struggling to make safe circles around the lighthouse. If I were to take my family’s boat on a journey up the coastline, we would need different lighthouses.

And I’d probably be able to find them because I knew how to make friends. I might not have known how to do that when I was a girl, but as a woman I knew how to do it.

“Are you going to burst into tears,” Blair asked, “the first time someone at Sidwell asks you to bring the paper products?”

“I certainly will.”

“We could submit an affidavit,” Annelise volunteered, “saying that you can be trusted to bring an entrée.”

“I don’t know … maybe bringing the paper products isn’t so bad. It’s certainly less work.”

A sharp rap on the office’s glass door made us look up. Three members of the auction committee were standing outside, looking flushed and urgent. “What do you think they want?” Annelise asked. The auction doesn’t start for another twelve hours.”

“I’ll deal with it,” Blair said. “Mimi, can you go check with the games people, see if they need anything?”

“Oh, no.” I winced, remembering the signs that were in my car. “I need to go.” I ducked around the auction people and hurried outside.

There were probably twenty volunteers in the parking lot, mostly women, but some men as well. More were arriving by the minute, backing their cars to the edge of the lot, unloading quickly, and then moving the cars out of the way. A woman from the development office was laying out the Alden School T-shirts and baseball caps that would be offered for sale. The cakes for the cake walk were being wheeled across the asphalt on rolling caterer’s racks. At the soccer-kick booth, two men were assembling the frame for the net, and the face-painting people were stringing yellow police tape between folding chairs in hopes of managing the line that always developed at that booth.

I went around to the lawn and the circular drive in the front of the high school. The kids from the theater-tech construction crew were assembling their “Powder Puff” goalpost for this afternoon’s football game between the girl’s soccer teams. The ponies had arrived, and the popcorn truck was backing into place.

Everything looked beautiful. So many of the parents at this school were creative themselves. The bake-sale table had cloth-swaddled tiers at the top of which the homemade breads, seeded and braided, cascaded out of a rattan horn of plenty. Even the Rice Krispie treats, individually wrapped for the pre-K trade, were each tied with a little ribbon and displayed on footed silver platters.

At nine o’clock, the first shuttle from the church parking lot arrived, dropping off a load of fairgoers. Ten minutes later my kids checked in with me. Mimi and I had told Thomas and Gideon that they could go around by themselves if they stayed together every single minute. That was always a big step for the kids—being allowed to go around the fair by themselves. Second children always got to do it a year or two earlier than their older siblings had.

Clouds of whipped pink sugar spun out of the cotton-candy machine, drenching the air with a high-pitched, slightly burnt sweetness. The smells from the popcorn machine were deeper and saltier. Parents were already carrying cakes their children had won at the cake walk. Kids took off their jackets when they went into the moon bounce and then forgot to pick them up when their turn was over.

Had I loved this place too much? Again … maybe, but maybe not.

I’m sure that if there were a raising-moms book, it would have advised me to have a more balanced life, not to throw myself so passionately into one set of activities, and certainly not to let my children’s activities become my own. I could probably write that book, calling it
Turning Moms into Mothers.

It would be full of very good, very sensible advice, but I wasn’t going to take it. I’m an all-or-nothing type. If I do something, then I’m going to overdo it. That’s who I am. I know that a balanced life is supposed to be the ideal, but actually I love the frenetic imbalance of my life.

But when you choose to get so involved in your kids’ activities, you need to be able to brake at high speeds. You need to stop when they’re ready for you to stop even if that is long before you are ready to stop.

So I was going to say good-bye to the Alden School and find something else to be gloriously and deliciously obsessed about.