All Is Vanity (23 page)

Letty was born knowing how to write letters. She never said, “How are you? I am fine.” She never delivered a long dull list of the day’s activities or described a setting in brochure terms. Instead, she jumped into the good stuff—“Rachel and I had another fight today”—or, if nothing was happening, she made just sitting around counting mosquito bites sound interesting. The secret, I realized, was in the detail. She did not just paint her toenails, she painted them “Very Cherry,” which did not, as it turned out, go with her new pink sandals. I am not ashamed to say that I modeled my own missives after hers, stuffing them with colors and textures and crumbs of conversation I’d never otherwise have noted even to myself. Thanks to her lead, when I was writing to Letty, my own everyday world became surprisingly full and amusing, nearly as fascinating as those of past civilizations. Sometimes, before I sealed the envelope, I marveled at all that had happened to me.

I piled my own papers back into the box and wove the corners closed. Letty’s stack of envelopes, however, I took with me downstairs and tucked into the underwear pouch of my suitcase. I had no illusions that a twelve-year-old could teach me anything about writing now. I just thought it might be comforting to have her old voice near me.

Letty’s adult voice betrayed an edge of desperation, as she opened the front door. “Will Christmas never end?” she said. “I know we were going to have lunch, but you have to help me with the gifts.” A thin but rising wail, akin to her own but somewhat louder, issued from down the hall, and she hurried after it, handing me half a sandwich as she went. I bit tentatively into the soft white bread. American cheese and mayo.

“Don’t eat that!” Letty was back with Noah on her hip. She looked into his face to check that the crying had stopped and brushed some strands of hair back from his warm forehead with two motherly fingers. “I mean, you can if you want, but you don’t want to, do you? I mean, it’s kind of gross. Not that it isn’t absolutely delicious,” she added for Noah’s benefit, taking the sandwich from me and putting it into his outstretched hand.

“Sorry, Noah,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be eating your food.”

“Have you ever made jam?”

“Well, that chutney …” I began.

“That’s right, it’s your fault. If you hadn’t given me that chutney, I’d have just bought some gourmet baskets at Gelsons and been done with it. You have to help me.” She started for the kitchen.

“What are we doing?”

“We’re jamming.”

Letty’s new granite kitchen counters, which I’d not yet had time to admire, were covered with unaffordable fruits. Teeny wild blueberries, raspberries, currants, gooseberries, and champagne grapes were heaped in pint-sized plastic baskets next to cardboard trays of apricots, each globe nested safely in its own molded depression. A
green glass bowl I recognized from the Williams-Sonoma catalog was mounded with ripe persimmons. Blood oranges were packed in excelsior in two small wooden crates. Letty rolled her eyes. “I thought I’d save money if I did it myself,” she said.

“What’s this?” I asked, my hand on a greenish, lumpy, elliptical object.

“Papaya.”

“No, I mean, what’s all this? What are you doing?”

“You mean what are
we
doing.”

I nodded.

“We are daringly combining exotic fruits to fill cunning antique ceramic pots with homemade jam and marmalade, matching as closely as possible the flavor to the personality of the recipient. We will then nestle said cunning pots among various packaged delights from foreign lands with bright amusing labels in baskets made to resemble wattle and tied with French ribbon available exclusively at a store in Malibu that’s open only on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Can you come over tomorrow, too?”

“Where are the ceramic pots?”

“I don’t know, Margaret.” Letty’s voice was again overcome with despair. She let Noah slither to the floor and he scampered off, no doubt to play again at whatever had caused his earlier tears. “I’ve been to five different stores and called seven others, but they seem to exist only in my mind.”

“Who are you giving these things to?” I asked. “Not the kids, obviously. And not us, I hope.”

She laughed. “No! Would you want such a thing? I’ll probably give you and Ted a loaf of Wonder Bread and a package of sliced cheese, if I get around to it. There’s no time to find gifts for people I like. This,” she said, waving dismissively at the spread on the
counters, “is for people Michael has met through work. People we’ve eaten with at La Limonade. People who have given us this.” She reached into the cupboard over the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of champagne so expensive I’d only read about the brand in novels. Ivy, who’d been throwing Cheerios one by one onto the kitchen floor from her high chair, ran out of cereal and began to scream.

“Does anything need to be washed?” I said, moving toward the new, deep “farm kitchen” sink.

“All of it.”

M
,

You despise me now, don’t you? Admit it! How can you not when the actual words “at least glass will allow the jewel tones of the cooked fruit to show through” came from my actual mouth. Was I drunk? What did I offer you to drink anyway? I seem to remember apple juice in a sippy cup
.

They’re there, those jars of jam, massing on the dining el table, squat, perky, gorgeous little monsters. I woke from a sound sleep with the idea that they must each be swaddled in thick, Victorian reproduction gift wrap sold exclusively in the Otis’s gift shop, before they can leave the house
.

What’s happened to me? Last Christmas I made fudge and wrapped it in red and green Saran. But the thought of giving Jeanette Peabody a square of plastic-wrapped fudge makes me choke
.

I told you, didn’t I, that I’m not giving these jars over which we sweated all day, jars that made my children cry for attention and forced my husband to dine on boxed macaroni and cheese, jars that cost—oh, God, I can’t even tell you how much that fruit was—and the blueberries that Hunter put down the garbage disposal were the most expensive of all (I keep telling myself that if I hadn’t redone the kitchen, I wouldn’t have had a disposal to grind them up! But then, if we’d had a disposal all along, it wouldn’t be so fascinating to Hunter now)—where was I? oh, yes … I’m not giving these to dear friends, who’ll remember me with every sweet spoonful. No, I will present them to people who think my name might be “Leslie” or possibly “Lexie.” And I will give the finest one—the guava/damson/satsuma—to Jeanette Peabody. That’ll show her
.

I’m not sure you ever met Jeanette. We were both production assistants at KSMC right after college. We did things like help set up the mikes in bowling alleys and in front of the Federal Building to record background sound effects. This is what one does after college with degrees in music theory and sociology. And then we got that apartment together in Palms, the one Michael and I lived in after we were married
.

Someone’s crying—hang on
.

Noah fell out of bed—he was just startled, but then he had to tell me his dream, which was long and complex, and I suspect he was just making it up as he went along. This is why you can do nothing other than pay attention to your children when you’re a mother, because if you’re dying to get back to something else—your own endless story, for instance—you just feel impatient, whereas otherwise you would be utterly charmed by this little creature who really hasn’t been talking for all that long wanting to tell you and tell you and tell you things he’s made up out of his clever little brain. You wouldn’t then feel the urge to say, “Yes, sweetheart, that’s very interesting, but maybe we should save a little of it for tomorrow,” which is what I did and now feel guilty about. “How to Squelch Creativity in the Early Years” by Letty MacMillan
.

So, anyway, I had the bedroom, because I had a steady boyfriend, even though Michael didn’t technically live with us because he had his graduate housing, and we partitioned off a piece of the living room for Jeanette with the Indian-print bedspread—Yes! Yes! the one covering the hideous brown, inherited-from-Aunt-Louise couch! My life! My life!—and she and I spent a lot of time sitting in beanbag chairs after work with bottles of beer between our bare feet analyzing her dates and the possibility of these encounters developing into relationships and decrying the general poor state of available men—the usual thing. Except then I felt just a teeny bit smug Because I had Michael, you see, and we already knew we were getting married, and it seemed my life was going along pretty well, that I was maybe even a little ahead, what with my desirable, artsy, public-radio, vaguely “save the world” type of low-paying job and my right to talk about china patterns and color schemes for bridesmaids’ dresses
.

So I can’t say it isn’t a contest now, can I? It wouldn’t be fair to say it was when I was winning and now say, no, of course it isn’t, when I’m so far behind Jeanette that it’s like we inhabit two different worlds. I can hear you saying, “Different, yes, but equal.” But that is where you’re wrong. Hers is much, much better
.

Our worlds converged last month. It turns out she’s an events consultant—do you have any idea what that is? It seems to be a professional party thrower. She’s eventing the Norton Simon in February, and she recognized Michael at some interart-museum meeting. I can’t believe he’s now going to meetings about parties! He hates parties! So she and I arranged to have lunch, and it was one of those awkward things where she suggested a place with a chef who makes appearances on Charlie Rose and then I just couldn’t bring myself to say, “How about the Cuban place on Venice where the roasted garlic chicken is $5.95,” so I ended up saying, “Why don’t you come over here?” Which, of course, turned out to be worse than spending sixty dollars on lunch because not only did I feel compelled to spend over three hours in the car driving to the Santa Monica farmers’ market for teeny-tiny purple potatoes and then to this new gourmet place on Third Street for tarragon mustard
and then back to Santa Monica for a quarter pound of the best niçoise olives, I also had then to create something with these ingredients that appeared to be casually yet elegantly tossed off between committee meetings—no, I am not on any committees! It’s just that I had to seem busy with the right things, not, in fact, busy, as I actually am, with mopping up vomit, reinstalling a mini-blind, and trying to convince Noah that he’ll like a red Popsicle as much as a purple one
.

Altogether it took three days to prepare this special lunch—if you include the trip to Pier 1 to buy fish-shaped plates, one chartreuse and one turquoise, and coordinating placemats and napkins, and the evening of homemade crouton preparation—and then I got a call at eleven-thirty this morning Jeanette had an “event planning emergency.” Something about candles or canned dal
.

I’d like to say that it didn’t turn out so bad, that Marlo and I put on dresses and ate the salad, like ladies-who-lunch, and the boys were delighted with fish sticks on the fish plates, and I fashioned the napkins into a charming poncho for Ivy, but no. Marlo tasted the salad niçoise and declared her preference for “plain tuna”; Hunter and Noah fought over who would use the blue plate, which then, perhaps predictably, fell off the counter and shattered on the new slate floor—which is murder on the calves, by the way, when you stand on it for any length of time; Ivy threw up on a coordinating place mat. Lunch is overrated, anyway
.

I take comfort in the fact that Jeanette can’t be doing a good job with her children. She cannot possibly be touching them as much as she should be—her linen shirts would be spoiled. (I can tell by the way her voice sounds on the phone that she wears linen shirts—or possibly those stretchy sort of shrunken-down blouses which appear not to allow you to move your arms. And her hair is straightened or crimped or layered or razored, or however hair is supposed to be right now.) And while I’m sure she’s got
a hand in all the big decisions, like what schools her children will attend and whether they’ll join the soccer league (her son, it turns out, will be on Hunter’s team this year), those, at least in my opinion, are not the moments of true mothering. No, it’s the little things that crop up hourly, the six hundred daily trips to the potty, the singing in the car on the way to the grocery store, the debate over the amount of jelly that should rightfully go on a peanut butter sandwich, the kissing of the stubbed toe, that’s when you do the real work of helping your child grow into a thoughtful and sensitive adult. At least this is why I’ve chosen the path I’ve taken, isn’t it?

Please let her children be brats
.

Love, Letty