All Is Vanity (31 page)

As it turned out, neither Uncle Frank nor Lexie’s inspector found anything to excite major alarm, although they both amassed a respectable list of minor essential repairs to be made by the current
owner, so as to justify the hour or two they’d spent in the house. Purchase proceeded as planned (one and a half pages).

Inspection went less well for both of them when it came to the house they were selling. Letty and Michael had to pay for a new roof, while in Lexie’s case the roots of a ficus tree were destroying the foundation. The foundation had to be shored up and the tree chopped down, prompting Miles, a philosophy professor at Clear Mountain University, to hold forth for five pages on the antipathy between man and nature, thus bringing my total for two weeks’ work to twenty-five and a half pages.

For several weeks, Letty wrote infrequently, being busy with the packing, although she did describe the trip to the aquarium with seven children—everyone except Ivy got to invite a friend—for which she had to rent a van and hire a babysitter to accompany her. Jake vomited his fifteen-dollar lunch on the return trip, which meant the van had to be kept for an extra day to allow for professional detailing. I appropriated the aquarium trip for Lexie, resetting it at Griffith Park Observatory.

So, at first, this was all I was doing, borrowing bits and pieces, using Letty’s experiences as “inspiration.” Or at least that was how I thought of it. Gradually, though, as
The Rise of Lexie Langtree Smith
began to take shape, I did more. I reread all of Letty’s letters from camp, for instance, the ones I’d retrieved from my parents’ attic, and used them, often verbatim, to create a past for Lexie, childhood experiences in which she’d learned the subtle but decisive cues communicated by elements of appearance and behavior—a particular brand of shoes, a certain style of shorts, a disdain for Jell-O salads with pieces of canned fruit floating in them. Letty, in fact, had been partial to that salad when it was served in the middle school cafeteria, but at camp she learned to know better.

Letty would want to help me. That’s what I told myself. I did not, however, tell her. Instead, I asked her questions. My e-mails probed for details. What brand of paint had she chosen? Did she want a convection oven? What ideas did she have for landscaping?

M—

India is learning Japanese. Jake has devised an experimental protocol for determining the frequency of specific hybrids. Have I mentioned that they are four and seven? Is this freakish, or should I worry about my children’s elementary school? We’ve pretty much resigned ourselves to private high school and probably middle school, but if Jake and Hunter are competing for a spot, who’s going to get it, Peewee Mendel or the kid who’s all excited because the marigolds that got the water and the sun grew?

L

What good, I wanted to respond, did it do a seven-year-old to understand genetics? What would be left to learn in third grade, let alone in the fancy private high school? But Lexie was also concerned with these issues.

I’d toyed with giving Lexie five children, but settled for two—Alberta and Saskatchewan—since I doubted my ability to keep track of more. If Allie and Sas went to local, public elementary schools, how good a chance would they have of getting into the best private middle and high schools? And, in a way, weren’t the elementary years, during which children learned the most basic study skills and developed a lifelong attitude toward education, the most crucial?

Margaret
,

I never thought about it that way. You’re right—maybe Hunter isn’t excited about school because his school isn’t exciting. Even though this is
a good public school, maybe it’s just not good enough, especially since elementary school is, as you say, the time for him to acquire the tools for learning that he’ll use the rest of his life. Jeanette says she can get Hunter into Jake’s class at Curman. The Director of Admissions is her cousin Rosemary, and Rosemary has told her that some movie director is withdrawing his child from second grade—he’s taking the whole family to Hungary to shoot a movie (a move which, according to Rosemary, is really a misguided effort to round out the college admissions packet of an older sibling)—and Curman is refusing to hold the second-grader’s place for fear of establishing a dangerous precedent. Anyway, Hunter is in, if we please. I’m not sure we do, but if we have the money, isn’t it wrong not to invest it in our children’s schooling? I mean, our children and their futures are our top priority, and Curman could definitely give Hunter more one-on-one attention than he’s getting. What it comes down to is that you’re right when you say we can’t afford to make any mistakes with his education. Unlike Marlo, he’s not going to teach himself. Anyway, he’d look adorable in the navy shorts and white polo shirt. I always wanted to wear a uniform
.

L

Letty had not always wanted to wear a uniform. In fact, I distinctly remember sitting on her front steps, idly separating the strands of fringe on our cutoffs, and discussing how lucky we were that we didn’t have to go to the East Mountain School for Girls precisely because we would have to wear that uncomfortable-looking plaid skirt and white blouse every day. We didn’t know how those girls could stand it. It seemed silly to me, then, the school’s concern over what its students wore, although I thoroughly approved of it now that today’s children’s clothing struck me as infinitely sillier. I wondered, though, about Letty. Did she just imagine she’d wanted a
uniform to make the idea of her son having to wear one attractive? Or had I never known how she truly felt? Had I only paid attention to myself? This was a troubling thought, but the notion of someone long desiring something for herself and securing it for her child seemed useful for my novel.

Lexie, I wrote, had always wanted to wear a uniform to school, so she is pleased when her son, Sas, so impresses the admissions director with his experiment proving the existence of gravity that he secures a highly coveted place for himself at a private elementary school that requires its students to wear blue shorts and white shirts in the manner of Christopher Robin. Pages describing fictional experiment, fictional eucalyptus-laden grounds of fictional private school, and fictional uniform (despised by young Sas): two and three-quarters.

On Saturday, I was worrying a passage in which Lexie holds a yard sale and watches with mingled sadness and relief as various shabby but sentimentally valuable items are loaded onto the beds of pickup trucks or trundled off by old women with wagons in exchange for a handful of rumpled dollar bills, when the telephone rang.

“Margaret, we had an accident!” Letty wailed.

“Are you all right?” I was practically shouting at her, and Ted hovered at my elbow. “Is anyone hurt?” This was, I am relieved to say, all that occupied my mind at first.

“Yes, yes, we’re all fine. It was just me and Marlo and Ivy in the car—poor little Ivy, strapped in the back. The Tercel is completely wrecked, though.”

“Just car damage,” I said to Ted, who nodded and opened the refrigerator.

“Not ‘just’ car damage,” Letty said. “Total car damage.”

“Yes, yes,” I said. “I understand. What happened?”

“Do we have any bread?” Ted asked. His head was under the counter, where the bread was never kept. I carried the cordless phone into the kitchen, opened the bread box, and put the loaf on the counter.

Letty described the terrifying minutes and then the tedious hours they’d endured the previous afternoon. She’d been sandwiched between a Suburban that she couldn’t see around—“I couldn’t anticipate anything; I couldn’t even read the road signs. I’d already gone three blocks out of my way without knowing it!”—and a Lincoln Navigator, driven by a woman on a cell phone who’d been too engrossed in her call to put her foot on the brake when first the Surburban and then Letty stopped. “I saw it coming, Margaret. This huge grille in the rearview mirror, right behind Ivy, and I’m honking my horn, and I have nowhere to go, because the back doors of the Surburban are right in my face. I hate SUVs. They’re a menace. People who drive them have no sense of civic responsibility. I mean, how can you deliberately choose a car you know is very likely to kill other people in an accident? They’re selfish beyond belief.”

Having heard this rant several times before from Letty, who had been feeling increasingly besieged in her tiny tinny car over the past few years as four-wheel-drive vehicles, used almost exclusively for trips to the grocery store and to chauffeur small children to soccer matches, inflated around her, I was able to give a good portion of my attention during this tirade to the preparation of Ted’s sardine sandwich.

“And I’d just seen that show where they tell you about the insurance scams where people deliberately make you have an accident,” she
went on, “which of course isn’t really an accident then, so I was afraid I was being conned or maybe about to be carjacked, so somehow I pulled Ivy out of her car seat with one hand, while holding Marlo by the wrist with the other, and kind of propelled myself out with both of them to leave the car for the carjacker—except part of me is outraged because I thought the one good thing about driving a Tercel was that I’d never be carjacked: who would want to carjack me?”

“So you were carjacked?”

“No, no. I was just hit by a careless woman with overstyled hair in a Navigator, but the trunk of my car crumpled like a rag. Like a potato chip bag.”

Was that an effective image? A potato chip bag? I jotted it down on a paper towel. Would it be better using a specific brand? How about a bag of Fritos?

“So Miss Cell Phone finally hangs up and slides down from her SUV. ‘What are you doing?’ she yells at me. Now she’s slapping the air with the phone. I just stare at her. I don’t understand what she’s getting at. ‘You just backed into me,’ she says. I’m still just standing there like an idiot. And, of course, everyone’s honking at us by now. I look around. No witnesses are coming forward. ‘What are you doing, backing up in the middle of the street?’ she demands. ‘See, that’s what I mean,’ I say, although I haven’t said a word up until now and so can’t possibly have meant anything, ‘what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense. Why
would
I back up in the middle of the street?’ ‘I don’t know why you did it,’ she says. ‘Can I read your mind?’ ”

“So she’s not going to pay for the damage?” I asked.

“Nope. Also, get this—she lives just a block away from our new house.”

“How did that come up?”

“It didn’t. I saw her in her driveway this afternoon. She lives in the house where they were filming that commercial for long distance last week.”

Given that no one had been hurt, I felt no moral qualms in seeing this accident as a fortuitous beginning for Lexie, a symbol of the old life destroyed so that the new could take its place.

“Maybe you should get an SUV,” I suggested.

“Ugh. No!”

But there were plenty of arguments in its favor.

It took Letty and Lexie only five days to make a purchase.

M—

It’s a Ford Explorer. I know, I know, I know—no sense of civic responsibility, selfish beyond belief, etc., etc. But if you’d seen that behemoth looming behind little Ivy, you’d understand. I mean, like you said, it’s irresponsible of me to put my children at risk, just to uphold some moral principles. If we can’t keep other people from buying these things, we have to buy one ourselves or be squashed like bugs. I’m convinced now that this is why all these mothers I see climbing down from them at Ralphs buy them
.

We did, after all, need a bigger car. That’s obvious. And even though the Explorer costs more than we’ve ever spent on a car, it’ll pay for itself eventually, as you pointed out. No more van rentals, for instance
.

In answer to the important question that no doubt plagues you: forest green, like the trim on the new house
.

L

Lexie buys a Range Rover after she has an accident that seriously damages her Mazda 323. She isn’t very upset about having to replace her embarrassing car (one of its doors was held shut with a
coat hanger). The Range Rover will look more appropriate than the 323 in front of her new house. It’s gray to match the shingles.

And so, with charming houses in very desirable neighborhoods, children in private schools, and vehicles suitable for young, successful West Los Angeles matrons, both Letty and Lexie were well-equipped to embark upon their new and improved lives.

We canceled all but two of our credit cards before we tried for the home loan. I read somewhere that they count anything you can borrow against you, even if you don’t owe it yet. Afterward, though, when the offers arrived, stiff envelopes with low interest rates printed on the outside, and return addresses to places like Delaware and North Carolina, I checked the “yes” boxes. Why not? I thought. I didn’t have to use them. I would just have them, a little brightly colored bundle in a drawer like Hunter’s baseball cards, money we could use, if we needed it.

With a new house, a new life, it seemed there might be things we would need.