The Wee Ones Music Class met in a big, historic church on Pine Street that had stained-glass renderings of Christ over the altar and Alcoholics Anonymous posters in the basement where class was held. On Tuesday morning, Kelly pulled off Oliver’s snowsuit and hat and scarf and sat down on a carpet remnant with her husband beside her. Steve waved at Becky and Ayinde as Galina, the leader, started thumping on the elderly piano, launching into the opening chords of the “Welcome” song. “Hello, good morning, good morning to Nick. Hello, good morning, good morning to Oliver.” They sang to Cody and Dylan and Emma and Emma, to Nicolette and Ava and Julian and Jackson. “Hello, good morning to the mommies. Hello, good morning to the nannies,” Galina sang, pounding the keys. “Hello, good morning to the daddy…”
Steve bounced Oliver on his knee, waving his maraca to the beat as the group started singing. “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands!” Kelly stifled the urge to look at her BlackBerry. “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands!” She knew Elizabeth was still unhappy about the Wartz party. “If you’re happy and you know it and you really want to show it…” She slumped against the wall, feeling conflicted and displaced, and tired. Above and underneath it all, tired.
“Hey,” Steve whispered. “If you need to get going, the Big O and I are doing fine.”
“No, I’ll stay,” she whispered back. There were daddies who took their sons and daughters to music class, including a fiftysomething fellow who brought a three-year-old (Kelly had never been able to figure out whether it was his grandson or his child). Andrew had taken Ava more than once. Even Richard Towne, with a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, had shown up one Tuesday morning, steadfastly ignoring the stares of the other parents and the one mommy with a digital camera who’d surreptitiously snapped a shot of him with the baby in his arms, singing “The Farmer in the Dell.” But those daddies had jobs to return to, not just a job search. A so-called job search, she thought sadly, as Steve arranged Oliver’s fingers around a baby-sized tambourine and helped him to shake it.
Kelly looked at the poster and considered Step One of the Twelve Steps: We Realize That Our Lives Have Become Unmanageable, and We Turn Them Over to a Higher Power. Her life had become unmanageable. But where was the twelve-step group for overextended mothers married to men without jobs?
“Let’s play!” said Galina, unzipping a gym bag, sending a dozen rubber balls bouncing into the circle. The big kids—the two- and three-year-olds, the ones who could walk—screamed with delight and toddled toward the balls. Oliver gave a hiccupy gasp and started to cry as Steve put a red ball in his lap. “Shh, shh, it’s okay,” he said, showing Oliver the ball.
Kelly straightened Oliver’s sweater and thought of the phone call with her sisters the night before. “How’s Mr. Perfect?” Doreen had asked.
“Fine!” said Kelly. “We’re all fine! Everything’s fine!” After she hung up the phone, she sat at the kitchen table, writing checks. Steve came over and sheepishly handed her his credit-card bill. Eleven hundred dollars. “For what?” she asked, a little more sharply than she meant to.
Steve shrugged. “Dinner. Clothes. Oh, my mom’s birthday.” Kelly looked at the bill. Steve had spent three hundred dollars, probably for something useless to gather dust on her mother-in-law’s étagère. She’d felt sick as she’d written out the check.
“Why don’t you let me cash in some of our bonds?” he’d asked.
She shuddered. What would happen if they ran through their savings and Steve still wasn’t working? What would happen if they couldn’t pay their health insurance and one of them got sick? She knew how that story ended—bill collectors on the phone at seven in the morning. Used cars and hand-me-downs. No way. She’d worked too hard for Oliver to have to endure any of that.
“A lion looking for her food is walking through the grass,” Galina sang. Kelly sang, too. All of the mothers sang; all of the nannies sang. Steve sang, too, loudly enough so that Kelly couldn’t help but hear him. “Who knows another animal?”
“Cow!” called a nanny.
“And what does a cow do?”
The nanny got onto all fours as her charge—one of the Emmas, Kelly thought—giggled, knowing what was coming. “Moooooo!” she sang out. The children laughed and clapped and mooed.
“Does Daddy know an animal?” Galina asked, looking at Steve.
“Um,” he said, looking at Oliver. “Dog?”
“Dog! Doggie is good! And what noise does doggie make?”
Steve grinned gamely. “Ruff, ruff?”
“Bark louder, Daddy, louder!” Galina coaxed.
“Ruff, ruff,” Steve barked.
“And what does doggie do?”
“Wags his tail!” chorused Emma One and Two, Cody, Nicolette, and Dylan.
“Let’s see Daddy wag a tail!”
Across the circle, Ayinde was looking studiously down at the top of Julian’s head, and Becky was biting her lip. She knew better than to laugh, Kelly thought; Becky had been on Galina’s shit list ever since she’d used one of the toddler-sized xylophones to plink out the bass line of “Smoke on the Water” three weeks before.
“Wag, Daddy!” Galina instructed. Her Russian accent gave her the sound of a lesser Bond villain. “Wag!”
Steve laughed and shook his butt. Oliver giggled and tried to clap his hands. “Go, Steve!” Becky called.
“Nice work, Daddy. Okay, everyone. Let’s put our balls away!”
I think he’s done that already,
Kelly thought, as the Good-bye song started.
Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, mommies…good-bye, good-bye, good-bye, babies…
She worked a sleepy Oliver back into his snowsuit, pulled his hat snug over his ears, and she and Steve wheeled him through the crowd of AA attendees and the fog of cigarette smoke that surrounded them. Out in the lobby, Kelly glanced toward the chapel, the stained-glass Mary looking serene in her halo and white robes.
Probably because Joseph had a job.
Back at home, Kelly changed Oliver’s diaper, kissed his belly and his cheeks, and looked longingly at her bed.
Maybe just for a minute,
she thought, slipping off her shoes.
The next thing she felt was being shaken awake. She kept her eyes shut. She’d been having the most wonderful dream about Colin Reynolds, her eighth-grade crush, whom she’d French-kissed in the junior-high gymnasium. In her dream, Colin Reynolds was all grown up, and they were doing a lot more than kissing, and there wasn’t a baby, or a husband, in sight.
Steve shook her again. “Kelly. Telephone.”
“I’m sleeping.”
“Oh,” he said. “I didn’t know.” Kelly buried her face in the pillow, hearing a Becky-style wisecrack in her head—
Yeah, that lying in the dark with my eyes closed thing must have really had you fooled.
“Take a message,” she said, as the baby started to cry. Shit. She pushed herself upright and looked at the clock: 5:03? That had to be wrong.
“Have I been asleep all afternoon?” she asked, lifting Oliver out of his crib and onto the changing table, as Steve trailed behind her with the telephone.
“I guess you were tired,” he said.
Five o’clock,
Kelly thought. She hadn’t done any work, and the dog probably needed his walk, and she hadn’t even looked at her in-box. Elizabeth was probably fuming.
She tucked the telephone under her chin. “Hello?”
“Kelly Day?”
“Yes.”
“Hi, my name is Amy Mayhew. I’m a reporter for
Power
magazine, and I’m hoping you’d help me with a story I’m working on.”
“A story about what?”
“Having it all,” she said. “Women who’ve managed to succeed in the workplace while raising families.”
Succeed. The word alone was almost enough to send Kelly into gales of laughter. Either that, or a crying jag. But if she could pull it off—if she could appear to the public like a woman who was managing to succeed in the workplace while raising a child—it might help her work her way back into Elizabeth’s good graces.
“I’ve been doing a little research about you.” Kelly could hear a keyboard clacking in the background. “You’re with Eventives, right?”
“That’s right,” she said. “I was doing IT venture-capital consulting, and I sort of wandered into the event-planning business. Now I work with Eventives, which is considered the top operation in Philadelphia, and we’re looking to branch out into New Jersey and New York. But I’m only working part-time right now.”
Kelly could hear more typing. “You just had a baby, right?”
“July thirteenth,” she said, unsnapping Oliver’s jeans and whipping his diaper off one-handed. “So I’m just working twenty hours a week. Well, technically, that’s all. But you know how it goes.”
“Not really,” Amy Mayhew said. “No kids for me yet.” From her oh-so-serious tone and brittle little laugh, Kelly could picture Amy Mayhew—her sharp navy suit and a pair of just-right heels. On her desk there’d be a slim little mock croc clutch that managed to contain her keys, a wallet, a lipstick, and a few condoms and still be approximately one-sixteenth the size of the diaper bag that Kelly routinely lugged around town. Amy Mayhew would not have three inches of bangs hanging in her eyes because she hadn’t been able to get to her hairdresser in four months, and her fingernails would be manicured, and she’d smell like some subtle perfume, instead of Kelly’s signature scent of B.O., breast milk, and desperation.
“Hello?”
“I’m here,” Kelly managed to say as she resnapped the baby’s pants.
“So listen,” she said, “I’d love to set up an interview. What does your month look like?”
“Well, I’m pretty flexible.” Kelly hurried back to the bedroom, set Oliver in the middle of the empty, unmade bed, grabbed a pen from the bedside table, flipped to a fresh page in Oliver’s baby book, which hadn’t been updated in months, and started scribbling.
Hair. Manicure. New suit (?).
She still couldn’t fit into her old ones. New shoes, too. She’d have to find her briefcase. She’d had a gorgeous briefcase once. Calfskin leather, gold handles. She thought she’d glimpsed it in the closet, wedged underneath the car seat Oliver had already outgrown.
“Is next Friday good? Maybe we can have lunch.”
Lunch Fri,
Kelly wrote. She used to have lunch. She used to take clients out for two-hour expense-account meals at the Capital Grille and Striped Bass. She’d have a glass of wine and a salad and grilled fish or roasted chicken. Lunch, back then, did not consist of peanut butter eaten while Oliver napped, scooped straight out of the jar and licked off her fingers because there weren’t any clean knives because neither she nor Steve had run the dishwasher.
“We were thinking we’d want some photographs of you in the workplace, and then some of you at home, with your baby…”
Shit. Shit. Shit, shit, shit. She’d have to clean—the kitchen floors were way past nasty; Steve had spilled a bottle of formula in front of the refrigerator and hadn’t done a very good job of cleaning it up. She’d need fresh flowers, she’d need to vacuum, she’d need to get Steve to clean up the office, and find someplace to stash the bags of zero-to-three-month baby clothes she’d been meaning to take to Goodwill…Furniture. She’d need that, too. Or maybe she could tell them that she had furniture that was being cleaned or something, or that they’d moved it because they were having the carpet replaced…
“…and your husband.”
“Husband?” Kelly repeated.
“Right,” Amy Mayhew said, laughing a little. “You know, the family unit.”
“Um, my husband travels a lot for business.”
“Remind me what he does again?”
“Consulting for Internet start-ups.” The words flew out of her mouth like a flock of malevolent birds.
Oh, God,
she thought,
what if Amy Mayhew Googled Steve to check?
“He’s just starting out…nothing official yet, no website or offices or anything, but he’s on the road a lot. He’s working with some of his business-school friends.
Shut up,
she told herself. This was always how she’d known when her sisters were lying. Instead of a simple answer, you’d get Hamlet’s soliloquy. “So he might not be able to be in the pictures.”
“Oh, well, how’s this Friday?”
“Perfect!” Kelly said. They set a time. Amy Mayhew said she was looking forward to meeting her. Kelly said she was looking forward to it, too. Then she hung up the phone and carried the baby into the kitchen. Steve was lying on the couch.
“What was that about?” Steve asked.
“Some survey,” Kelly said. “I’m going to take Lemon for a walk. Can you give Oliver his rice cereal?”
“Sure,” said Steve.
“And can you maybe get dressed?”
Steve looked down at himself as if he was surprised to see that he was wearing only boxer shorts and a T-shirt. “Why?” he asked. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She bit back the insults that wanted desperately to make their way out of her mouth. “I know you’re not going anywhere, but it’s five-thirty at night and it’s a work day…” She let her voice trail off.
“Fine,” he said, pulling a pair of jeans off the floor. “Pants,” she heard him mutter. “Your mother’s a stickler!” he called to Oliver. Kelly rubbed at her temples. She could feel her customary late-night headache making an early appearance. She swallowed two Tylenol, started a load of laundry, scraped her hair back into a ponytail, and jogged into the living room.
Lemon was sitting by the front door, with his tail wagging, and Oliver was sitting in his high chair with cereal dotting his face. Steve was in the kitchen, feeding the baby. “Once upon a time,” Steve said, “there was a brave prince who lived in a castle.” Oliver waved his hands in the air and made a pleased-sounding coo. “The prince was so brave that he could swim across moats full of sharks and alligators and Dallas Cowboy fans,” Steve continued. “He could slay dragons with a single stroke of his terrible sword, and parallel park in even the tiniest parking space, and he could rescue the beautiful princess from spells and enchantments.” Steve sighed. “And then he got laid off, and the beautiful princess didn’t want to talk to him anymore.”
Kelly’s heart twisted.
I’m sorry,
she started to say—but sorry for what? Sorry that he’d gotten laid off? She’d told him that, and it hadn’t made a difference. Sorry that he felt so terrible? Well, he wouldn’t feel so terrible if he’d just find a job, and Kelly had told him that a few times too many already and if he’d do it, they’d be fine, and she could quit walking around fantasizing about killing him and making it look like a shaving accident so that his life insurance policy would pay off.