Glitter and Glue (11 page)

Eventually, Sharon gave me my instructions, and I settled in. But all day, all week, people kept stopping by my desk, interrupting my scrapbook project, to tell me about my mother.

“Oh, Mary, what a crack-up.”

“That Mary C., she makes sure we don’t take ourselves too seriously around here.”

“She’s a trip!”

Toward the end of the week, I was back in the break room buying a Diet Dr Pepper when I heard my mom say, “Yesterday at the brokers’ open, I heard a great joke.” I froze, like you would if you heard your mother flatulate or let out a peel of ecstasy behind a closed door. My mom didn’t do those things, nor did she tell jokes. As far as I knew, she didn’t know how.

“Well, one Christmas,” she started, pulling her audience in, “sweet Janie Smith was worrying about what to give the mailman for a gift … a plant? a batch of cookies? She checked with her husband, who said, ‘Screw him, give him a dollar.’ So, the next morning, when the mailman arrived, Janie answered the door in her raciest lady-wear”—Sharon clucked,
Oh la la!—
“and invited the mailman in. She took him by the hand and led
him upstairs to the master bedroom, where she treated him to a first-class lay, after which, Janie cooked the mailman a mouthwatering platter of eggs Benedict. Before he left, she handed him a single dollar bill. The mailman, confused but polite, thanked her. As he walked to the door, he turned back and said, ‘Mrs. Smith, this has been a perfectly perfect morning—the lovemaking, the gourmet breakfast—but I gotta ask, what’s going on here?’ ” My mother delivered the punch line in the dippy voice of Janie Smith. “Well, when I asked my husband what to give you for Christmas, he said, ‘Screw him, give him a dollar!’ The eggs Benedict was my idea.”

The Realtors erupted. The joke landed. My mom held a crowd with a bit about screwing out of wedlock. I couldn’t have been more disoriented. All my life my mother was my mother, nothing more. Not Greenie’s saving grace, not the funny woman in the office.

But now I see there’s no such thing as
a
woman,
one
woman. There are dozens inside every one of them. I probably should’ve figured this out sooner, but what child can see the women inside her mom, what with all that Motherness blocking out everything else?

John came home yesterday with four tickets to Australia’s Wonderland. The kids wanted Evan to go, but that was never going to happen. Then they asked if Pop could come, and John laughed and explained that the fourth ticket was for me, which made Martin bounce on his tiptoes and Milly sulk off to her room. After a tease of a breakthrough, her opposition is back in force.

We start the day on the Scooby-Doo merry-go-round, which Milly is so beyond that just waiting for her brother to take his turn offends her. We parade from there down a long path under a striped canopy past the Bam Bam Ball Pit, which, Milly notes, is “for babies,” to bumper cars, which are, thankfully, “Brilliant!” On Milly’s command, she and Martin ambush me. For all the times she’s wanted to carve me up with every heinous word she knows, me and the entire adult world that has replaced her top-quality mother with a ninny of a nanny, I say,
Bring it on
. She’s too young to box or split wood. I hope it helps. But after a few minutes of them ramming me from both sides, John reins her in.

By lunch, moods are dipping. It’s broiling. Martin’s hairline is wet. Milly stares at the goo on the tip of the ketchup bottle, making me wonder how long it’s been sitting here and how many grubby hands have touched it. Here comes John with a
tray of fried food, his forehead dripping. In the photographs on the brochure, no one is sweating, and all the tables are clean. Families of four eat fresh fruit and drink milk while mums and dads share satisfied looks over their children’s heads.

On the way to the gondola after lunch, we pass a doddering Captain Caveman. Milly waves, and Martin leans in for a hug.

“If you give me your camera,” I say to John.

“Right.”

I take their photo. In this light, the shutter opens and closes in a thousandth of a second. And for that thousandth of a second, the Tanners look full of life. That’s how this outing will be recorded.
Look at this one!
they’ll say decades from now.
Oh, that was a great day
. But I can’t tell if John is really here or not. He smiles on command, ginning up cheeriness as best he can, buying lollies and chocolates for everyone, but when I lower the camera, his cheeks drop.

On the monorail ride to Hanna-Barbera Land, I raise the topic of Evan with John, looking for some insight into their discord.

“So how long has Evan been living in the garage?”

“Long time,” John says, surveying the park below.

“Always,” Martin says.

“He pays rent,” John wants me to know.

“He’s really been helpful,” I want him to know.

John considers his response, weighing out how blunt he can be. I raise my eyebrows just enough to say,
Go ahead, tell me
, but he abstains.

“Good,” he says with firm punctuation, reminding me of my mother saying,
If you can’t say something nice, keep your fat mouth shut
.

Inside the park’s theater, we buy tickets for a stage performance
that brings together Yogi Bear, the Tasmanian Devil, and Australia’s favorite bad boy, Ned Kelly. John’s energy picks up, probably because of the air-conditioning, though I’ve noticed he loves a musical.

After the show, we make our way to the flume ride, where the line folds back on itself many times. People lean heavily on the handrails and linger under the eucalyptus trees for shade. Many men have their shirts off, several of whom should not. Parents around us refocus their kids’ attention from the long wait to the big payoff to come—
Just a few more minutes! Look at that drop!
Being a kid is all about learning to bide time, proving just how unnatural it is to delay gratification.

“This was my favorite when I was little,” I say.

“You came here?” Martin asks, making the mother in front of us in line smile.

“No, we have these in America, too. Every spring vacation, my parents took us to this place called Busch Gardens.”

“Every vacation!” Martin repeats breathlessly, like I’ve said we lived in a tree with elves and pet squirrels.

“My dad sold ad space in a women’s magazine, so we got free family passes,” I explain to John.

“Free!” Martin says, looking at his dad for some sort of visual confirmation that he, too, is hearing this astonishing news, but John has dropped out of the conversation, so I just keep talking to Martin, the only one who’s trying hard enough to have a good time.

Finally, it’s our turn. Milly pulls her dad beside her, so Martin comes to me. We sink into our seats and the safety bars drop. A teenager in an Australian Wonderland polo shirt walks backward, giving each bar a quick jiggle. An announcement runs through the loudspeakers, and then the operator leans forward
on a lever, and we’re jerked out of the shed and into the daylight.

All the tension of the ride is tied to that first crawl up the ramp, metal on metal, gears grinding. The bold and the brave shout, “Here we go!” waving their hands over their heads. The others, pale and tight-lipped, grip the handles and lean into their parents, burying their faces.

We reach the top. Martin takes my hand. We look at each other as we tilt over the pinnacle and scream as we plummet down the chute. We’re yanked around the track, closer and closer to the final drop, where we will be soaked through and look like all the waterlogged families we saw cackling and pulling their wet shorts off their thighs as they filed out. As we freefall, a wall of water comes over the bar and into our laps and Martin screams out,
Mummy!
An instant later, the boat is righted and he is snapped back into today, and although I know Milly heard his glaring, forgivable, heartbreaking
Mummy!
—and although this is just the kind of reckless transference she has worked so hard to prevent—not a word is said about it. In fact, as we exit the ride, she sidles up beside him and takes his hand, making something clear for the first time: She will look after Martin, better than anyone.

Before John leaves for New Zealand, he gives me grocery money and an apology for not stocking the kitchen himself. I try to tell him not to worry, I can go to the store, but he doesn’t know—or can’t remember—how to hand things over.

At the market in St. Leonards, the cereal selection is the same as back home, though they’ve put koalas and kangaroos on all the boxes. I pass on the chocolate cartoon garbage and reach for Shredded Wheat, my mom’s go-to. In the raw food section, I load up on berries and dried fruits and three kinds of nuts. If the kids won’t eat it, the Rover will. I toss a box of graham crackers in the cart for Martin, whose puppy affection makes me feel magnanimous. In the refrigerated section, ground chuck is on special. I decide, after standing there with the door open too long,
like I think electricity grows on trees
, to buy five pounds. I can divide it up into burgers and freeze them, like my mom used to. (Once or twice a month after a sale, she’d pull a block of anemic brown turds from the freezer, slap it against the Formica to break the patties apart, and
voilà!
—dinner for five.)

In the shampoo aisle, I slow down to find a mousse Tracy told me about, but I’m distracted by the rows of hair dye, something I’ve never tried. Each shade is displayed on a twist of shiny plastic hair that sticks off the shelf like a tongue. Deepest Mahogany, Sassy Amber. My mom, usually a blonde, went
red once. I remember seeing a photo of her posing with her monogrammed tote bag in London. She was young—my age, actually—and pregnant with GT. She wore crisp cotton pedal pushers over her belly, and had trim ginger locks. I pick Scarlet Fire.

I turn down the baking aisle, and there, just ahead, is Eugenia Brown, the woman who sacked me.

I’m moving fast now. I can’t wait to run into her.

“Eugenia? Is that you?” She looks up from the instant cake mix. “Kelly, it’s Kelly,” I say, prompting her, forcing her. “Remember? You hired me? Well, hired and fired.” I don’t know where this surge of cockiness is coming from, but I am hot to embarrass her. I glance around, hoping to draw in a witness to make it more awkward.

She smiles tentatively. “Oh, yes, hello.”

“Hello to
you
! I’m just here shopping for my new family,” I say, beaming. “Wonderful children. Great situation. Really love them.” I’m on a roll.

“Oh, that’s good,” she says.

“It’s better than good. It’s fantastic! We make such a good team. They are just so”—I pause, flipping through attributes, looking for something with just the right bite—“grateful!”

“All right, well, I better keep moving.”

I stand square to her, pulsing with out-of-control bravado. “I hope you were able to find a suitable replacement. A young Asian, isn’t that who you said worked out best for you?”

“We’re fine,” Eugie Brown says, looking angry now. “Good day.”

I may have gone just a touch too far. “Okay, well, tell the kids I said hello! Richard, too.”

In the checkout line, I salute myself. I am a competent individual, a freethinker, a force. No one works me over!

But while I load the grocery bags into the back of the van, I catch sight of myself in the side mirror and realize that I don’t look so much like an independent woman as I do a barely distinguishable version of my mother on any given day of the seventies or eighties—snubbing sugar cereal, stockpiling hamburger meat, sorting through hair dyes, demanding eye contact, standing down the occasional adversary. Even more surprising is that the recognition of her in me does not give me pause. Here, in this moment, I find the likeness kind of exhilarating.