A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (17 page)

This must be an ongoing problem for him—the single mothers who, even if they didn’t want an actual relationship with him, were eager for some occasional masculine validation of their womanly charms.

The warm apricot reflections in the dining room were flattering to everyone, but Mary Paige did look particularly well in her high-necked, sleeveless sheath. She could wear black, and even from across the room, I could see that her earrings were perfectly shaped, so perfectly that I was annoyed. Sometimes I can be way too much like my mother—unable to be at peace until I have found at least one fault with every person in the known universe.

I thanked Ben for my wine, and before I could decide if I should talk to him about world peace or next year’s Cub Scout popcorn sales, we were joined by one of Bruce’s business associates. Surprisingly he wanted to talk to me, not Ben. He reminded me that he had a son on Thomas’s soccer team, and that his son went to Sidwell Friends School.

“People are eager to get your boy at Sidwell,” he said. “You will enroll him, won’t you?”

Sidwell parents can’t imagine anyone ever choosing to send their kids elsewhere. “He hasn’t been admitted yet.”

The man looked a little alarmed. “That’s not going to be a problem, is it? I could make a few calls if you’d like.”

“No, no,” I said. If their father being a Quaker wasn’t enough to get Thomas and Erin into Sidwell, no calls from other parents would. But people like to believe that they have clout, that their “making a few calls” could advance the Second Coming.

He then asked about Jamie, and I went into my “nondenial denial” routine that lasted until Blair started gesturing people to come in to dinner.

I wouldn’t have been surprised if, during the place-card rearranging, she had demoted me from Bruce’s parents’ table, but my place card was still there along with seven other place settings. Clearly rather than leave this table short, she had moved someone into Jamie’s place.

Before I could look at the place cards, the answer to my question strolled up in his beautifully cut dinner jacket.

“I’ve been promoted,” Chris said, “and I get to sit at your table. I take it that your husband got held up somewhere and couldn’t make it.”

If that was Blair’s story, I wasn’t going to add the fact that the “somewhere” was the family television set.

On the other side of the room, Mary Paige, her lips narrowed and her face a little hard, was taking a seat at one of the tables now having only seven people. Blair was an alert hostess. She must have noticed the same little physics experiment that I had witnessed. Her “promotion” of Chris had been a rescue, and Mary Paige wasn’t happy about it. She was now the extra woman at what must seem to her like a losers’ table.

Chris was going to be sitting in Jamie’s place between Mrs. Branson and a woman whose name I recognized because she wrote for the
Washington Post.
But neither of them had come to the table yet, so Chris and I remained standing.

He spoke lightly. “Now it is your turn to tell me how you suffered during the snow day.”

“Charlie Carruthers was at my house, and Charlie’s Ritalin was at school.”

Chris winced. “You have my sympathies.”

I waved a hand. “It was nothing.” In fact, I decided that the snow day had been a good thing for our family. Erin had spent the whole day with Rachel, Brittany, and Elise and had come home tired and happy. Apparently Faith had kept calling, pleading with Rachel to get her mother to bring all the girls over to Faith’s house in Virginia, but Mimi had refused. Mary Paige too often needed to drop Faith off early or pick her up late, or simply had made no plans for the girl’s transportation. Mimi was starting to say no to arrangements designed primarily for the convenience of Mary Paige, who, in truth, had a far more flexible schedule than Mimi did.

“The Building and Grounds guy,” Chris said now, “kept assuring me that the contract-snowplow people would show up any minute, and the contract-snowplow people kept assuring me that their plows would be there. I was going to call the football team to come shovel the parking lot, but it seemed easier to cancel school.”

“Since we don’t have a football team.”

“Oh, no, you are wrong there. Haven’t you heard? As Spring Fair chair, you should have. Remember how we wanted the high-school kids to get more involved in the Spring Fair? Last week they came up with the idea of the girls’ varsity soccer team playing the girls’ j.v. team in a Powder Puff football game.”

What a good idea. That would bring out the older kids. “Do the girls have any idea how to play football?”

“No,” he said cheerfully, ‘but they don’t know what powder puffs are either.”

Bruce’s parents came to the table, and I introduced them to Chris. There were two other couples at the table. The husband of one couple was from Bruce’s firm; his wife was a lawyer for a child-services nonprofit. The other couple worked at the
Washington Post;
she was a reporter for the “Metro” section, and he was one of the senior marketing people for the Web site. We were all grown-ups, quite able to make dinner-table conversation with people we weren’t likely ever to see again.

But I was surprised at how easy and interesting the conversations were. Whenever the discussion started to drift into the “easy to talk about” topics such as traffic or housing prices, Chris would refocus us by asking one person questions, using his conversational skills rather as a talk-show host would, making a conversation between two individuals interesting to everyone. He asked me what I had learned about people from taking portraits, which turned out to be a topic that the rest of the table could get involved with.

I stayed much longer at the party than I had planned.

When I did finally leave, after saying a rather stilted thank-you to Blair, Chris came up to me. “Are you all right walking to your car?”

I paused. He was offering to walk me to my car. I had gone to parties alone all December, and no one had thought to go with me to my car. How nice of him. No,
nice
wasn’t the word. The word was
gallant.
This was a gentleman offering to escort a lady.

Black might not be my best color, but the jacket was exactly the right length, and the neckline couldn’t have been better. The skirt was beautifully cut and neatly lined. I felt light and feminine.

“If you do,” he continued, “I will go find Mr. Branson.”

Bruce’s father? I didn’t want Bruce’s father to walk me to my car. Bruce’s father wasn’t going to make me feel light and feminine.

And Chris Goddard shouldn’t. I had almost put myself on the Mary Paige side of the little physics experiment.

“I’m completely fine,” I assured him. “Absolutely.”

I hurried down Blair’s front walk, mortified with myself, feeling that somewhere in my heart I had crossed a line, wanting something from Chris that I had no right to expect and which, if he stepped forward to provide it, would lead to unhappiness for all.

But sometimes I get so tired of just being a mom.

Jamie and the kids were
all in bed when I got home, but the family room had been picked up.

As a family we are not great picker-uppers. Our house isn’t hopeless; we don’t have the seven cities of Troy layered on top of the coffee table, the Legos permanently mixed up with video adapters and little plastic combat figures. We never have more than a day or two’s worth of newspapers, coffee cups, and sneakers, but we often do have that.

Tonight, however, the popcorn bowl was in the sink, the cards had been put away, and the sofa cushions had been straightened. The kitchen counter had been wiped.

It was Jamie’s way of apologizing.

I was grateful. Of course, I was. But what had happened to the days when he had made me feel light and feminine? Was I so completely a mom that the most romantic gesture left was putting the popcorn bowl in the sink?

Sunday morning Jamie came to
church with the children and me. As he had remained a Quaker, he only occasionally came to St. Peter’s with us, but I suppose he was trying to make a point—that the four of us going to worship together was more Mom, America, and apple pie than two adults getting all liquored-up together Saturday night at a party they didn’t want to be at.

Except my self-esteem was, at the moment, far too heavily dependent on the Mom-America-apple-pie thing. I could have used a little of the liquored-up hot babe.

Jamie slept most of the afternoon; we had a quick supper at home and then took the kids to a movie in Bethesda. The same movie was showing at closer theaters, but we thought it would be fun to go to Bethesda.

This close-in Maryland suburb has actually made a success of the “urban village” concept. It has restaurants, art galleries, delis, bakeries, and clothing boutiques, all open late. In the warmer months the sidewalks are so crowded in the evenings that the pedestrians spill out into the street. Bethesda also has places that a real village—urban or otherwise—actually needs: grocery stores, shoe repairmen, and even a hardware store, something that we don’t have down in theme-park land since hardware stores can’t afford theme-park rents.

Washington weather is erratic, and although it was February, the evening was pleasant. When we came up from the movie theater and walked toward Woodmont Avenue, we could see that there were plenty of people out and about on this Sunday of a three-day weekend. Groups of teens were hanging out in front of the Barnes & Noble bookstore. Its broad, well-lit diagonal entry at the corner of Woodmont and Bethesda Avenues made it a popular gathering place. I supposed that next year we would have to face that parenting challenge—how much time you let your kids hang out in public places.

No, I was wrong. That challenge was already here. As we drew nearer to Woodmont, I could see that among those teens were Rachel Gold, Brittany Branson, Elise Rosen, and Faith Caudwell.

“Look,” I exclaimed, very surprised, “it’s the other girls.”

The girls didn’t see us. The sidewalk leading up from the theater ran perpendicular to Woodmont, and this side of the street was less well-lit. But the flood of light spilling from the Barnes & Noble windows put the girls onstage. They were at the edge of a group of clearly older teens, most of whom were boys, but only Faith was talking to those kids. She was very animated; the other girls were standing back, looking more hesitant. It was the inverse of the first-day-of-school scene. Now our girls were hovering uncertainly, feeling awkward and self-conscious.

“This can’t be right,” I said immediately. “Let me—”

“Mom,
no,
” Erin almost shrieked. “You can’t go over there. You can’t. I’ll die.”

“I’m sorry.” I could sympathize. She didn’t want everyone to know that she was with her
parents
when every other one of God’s creatures was hanging out in front of the Bethesda Barnes & Noble with cool-looking older kids. “But I need to know that they are all right.”

“They’re fine. Can’t you see that? They’re fine.”

No, they weren’t. Even Brittany, the prettiest of the three and the one who had gotten her period first, had her head down and her arms wrapped close around her body. The body language of all three girls screamed of discomfort and uncertainty.

“What’s going on?” Jamie asked. He and Thomas had been walking more slowly and had just now come up to the street.

“Erin’s friends are over there, and—”

“For God’s sakes, Lydia,” he exploded, “can’t we have one family evening that isn’t all caught up in other people’s issues? Can’t the four of us go to a movie, walk down the street to get some ice cream without having to rescue the entire world?”

“But—”

“Don’t give me that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ crap. It also takes a family, and you need to start putting our family first.”

Thomas was wide-eyed. I don’t think he had ever heard Jamie so directly angry with me. Erin was too caught up in her own mortification to care.

“Me?” I hissed at him. “You’re telling
me
to put our family first?” He had slept in our house eleven nights since the beginning of the new year.

“That’s right. I’m saying that you need to put the family first because right now I can’t.”

And just why couldn’t he? He had made a choice. This was a criminal case. His firm didn’t do criminal cases. Yes, the senior partners had urged him to take the case, but no one would have held it against him if he had said no.

The three girls were inching closer together. They were clustered at Faith’s back as if she were an overly hot campfire in the middle of dark night. You wanted to get away from the heat of the fire, but the darkness, while cooler, was too scary.

“They aren’t supposed to be here,” I said. “I can’t imagine that Mimi, Blair, and Annelise have any idea that they are just hanging out here.”

“I don’t question that, but Lydia, what is going to happen to them? This is downtown Bethesda at nine o’clock. It isn’t exactly a slum at midnight. They’re as safe here as they are on the school playground.”

He had a point. Within the next year or two we were going to let them do this. But it was the overall behavior that worried me and, I knew, worried my friends. Kids who are spending their evenings on the streets of Bethesda at age twelve are going to find that activity too tame by fourteen.

But, of course, this single evening wasn’t going to launch an inevitable slide into drug addiction. “Let me just speak to them, let them know that we are here in case they want to leave with us. I’ll be back in a second.”

I checked for traffic and started to cross the street. I didn’t stop to think about what would happen; I suppose I secretly imagined being welcomed as a rescuer.
Oh, Mrs. Meadows. You’re here. Could we use your cell phone or get a ride home?

It was always nice when you could help other people’s kids. I loved it when the kids knew that they could count on me.

Elise saw me first, and she clutched at the others. They shot nervous glances across the street, and then so quickly that I couldn’t tell who moved first, they whisked into the bookstore.