Nursery Crimes (2 page)

Normally that kind of demand would be greeted with a minilecture on why we can’t have everything we see. It is a mark of how desperately I wanted Ruby to get into that school that I leaned over and whispered in her ear, “I’ll tell you what, kiddo. If you are really, really good I’ll try to find you a pair of those boots.”

The principal walked in just in time to hear Ruby say to the proud owner of the boots, “I’m getting those boots if I’m weawy good!”

I blushed to the brown roots of my red hair, and Peter snorted with laughter. The nice couple smiled and the not-so-nice couple looked superior. Trophy wife hissed “Morgan, come here,” and hustled her daughter away
from Ruby as if she imagined that my baby would try to wrench the boots clean off her little treasure’s feet. As if Ruby would ever have tried that. At least not with me right there.

Abigail Hathaway, the founder and principal of the Heart’s Song School, was a woman in her mid- to late fifties, tall, thin, and striking. She had black hair, shot lightly with gray, that she wore rolled in a chignon at the nape of her neck. Her clothes were gorgeous, conservatively elegant, and obviously expensive. She wore a fawn-colored wool jacket buttoned loosely over a thick, creamy, silk blouse. Her skirt was in a matching herringbone. It occurred to me to wonder how she kept herself looking so splendid when she was surrounded every day by forty or so frenetic and filthy preschoolers. Ruby and I had already managed to acquire matching milk stains on our shirts, and my shoulder was festooned with a pink splash of toothpaste where she had wiped her mouth after brushing her teeth. I looked like the “before” picture in a Calgon bubble bath ad. Abigail Hathaway looked like she was heading out to lunch at the hunt club.

She perched herself on the edge of a minichair, introduced herself, and told us how she had come to start this most elite and special preschool fifteen years before. I put on my alert and interested expression, the one I had perfected in law school to impress professors with my zeal and engagement with the material. Actually, I was listening with only about fifteen percent of my brain. The other eighty-five was concentrating on Ruby as she wandered around the room, picking up toys and books.

“Heart’s Song is designed to be a place where children learn the most important of lessons, how to cooperate and communicate,” Ms. Hathaway said. “To that end we try to inculcate values such as empathy and concern for others.”

At that moment Ruby plucked a toy from the nice couple’s son’s hand. He began to cry.

“Look, Mama, I’m gwabbing!” she announced proudly.

“Ruby!” I snapped. “Don’t grab.”

“But Mama, I
love
to gwab.” She smiled hugely. I shot a quick glance at Ms. Hathaway to see if she’d heard. She had and was looking at me expectantly.

“Ruby, these toys belong to all the children and we have to share.” I was using my best Miss Sally, Romper Room voice.

“It’s virtually impossible for children of this age to share, Ms. Wyeth,” the principal said.

“Actually, it’s Applebaum, Ruby and Peter are Wyeth, I’m Applebaum,” I said automatically, then winced. Like I really had to make that particular point at that particular moment. I looked over at my daughter. “Never mind, Ruby.”

At that point Peter decided to take over for me, since I was obviously not wowing the room with my parenting skills.

“Hey, Rubes, come over to Daddy.” She ran over and jumped up into his lap.

The school principal continued on for a while, describing how at the end of the afternoon those of us who had been selected to move on to the next stage of the application process would be given forms to fill out and send in, along with the $125-dollar, nonrefundable application fee. After about five minutes of sitting quietly, Ruby had had it. She wriggled out of Peter’s arms and leaped off his lap. She was making a beeline for the sand table and had mischief on her mind. As she blew by me, I reached out an arm, stopping her in midrun. I hauled her onto my lap.

“If we’re all ready to settle down,” said Ms. Hathaway
with a disapproving glance in my direction, “I’d like to tell you about the pedagogical goals of the Billy Goat program.”

R
UBY
, it turned out, was on her best behavior after all. She played nicely and managed not to break anything. But none of that mattered. My parenting skills had not impressed Ms. Hathaway. As we gathered our belongings at the end of the morning, I watched as she handed a thick manila envelope to the pleasant couple, who, laughing delightedly, scooped up their shy little boy and rushed out the door. No packet came our way. I had a moment of sadness thinking that we probably would never get to know that nice family, who had seemed like people we could be friends with. Those thoughts were interrupted by a scene unfolding at the other end of the room.

“Excuse me. We haven’t received our application packet.” Morgan’s father had reached his arm out to stop Ms. Hathaway as she walked toward the door.

“I’m sorry, Mr. LeCrone,” she said.

“Sorry? What do you mean, you’re sorry? Where is my application packet?” He leaned over her, threateningly.

“We are only able to extend an invitation to apply to a small number of those who visit. I am sorry.”

“Look, what the hell are you talking about? Do you realize that I employ the parents of half your students? I suggest that you get me an application.”

His wife put her hand on his arm. “C’mon, Bruce. Let’s just go. Who gives a shit.”

Ruby, who had been staring at the drama unfolding in the doorway, gasped. “She said ‘shit,’ Mama!”

I leaned down and picked her up. “Shh, honey-pie,” I murmured. I wanted out of that room right away, but they
were blocking the only exit. Peter and I looked at each other. Neither of us could figure out what to do.

“I give a shit, goddamn it. Who the hell do you think you are, lady?” LeCrone’s grip tightened on Ms. Hathaway’s arm. Two spots of color appeared high on her cheeks. She looked genuinely frightened.

“Bruce, I’m leaving right now,” LeCrone’s wife said, grabbing their daughter by the hand. She pushed by him, out the door. He opened his mouth to speak, but before he could say anything more, Peter walked over.

“Hey, let’s just chill out here a minute. We’re all a little tense. Nobody means any harm,” my husband said as he put an arm around LeCrone’s shoulder. “I don’t know about you, man, but my back’s killing me from those little chairs, and I’m seriously coffee-deprived.”

LeCrone looked, for a moment, like he was going to snarl. But suddenly he seemed to change his mind. Angrily shrugging off Peter’s arm, he spun on his heel and marched out the door. Ms. Hathaway sighed with relief. She hugged her waist with her arms and shivered.

“Mr. Wyeth, if you’ll wait a moment, I’ll go get you an application.”

“That’s okay. You don’t have to reward me. We understand you have your selection process. It’s no big deal,” Peter said, motioning to me. I scooped Ruby up in my arms and accompanied him out the door.

“Thanks for everything and have a nice day,” I said, smiling over my shoulder at the principal. I’m not sure what prompted that, maybe I just wanted to show her that we were fine and unscathed by her rejection. At any rate, it turned out to be a singularly inappropriate comment, given what happened later that evening.

R
UBY
fell asleep in the car on the way home and Peter and I sat quietly, each immersed in private thought. I figured he was probably thinking about his latest script, the third in a lurid series about a marauding group of urban cannibals. It was definitely Peter’s biggest movie so far, and he was under a lot of pressure to make the script satisfy all the various parties, including a director who spoke virtually no English and a studio executive with artistic pretensions.

When Peter and I had met in New York City, seven years before, he was working at Movie Madness, a cult video store in the East Village, and writing horror screenplays in his spare time. Actually, he’d been writing screenplays at work instead of waiting on customers. Our first conversation involved my threatening to report him to his boss and his asking me out for a beer instead. I still have no idea why I went out with him. It probably had a lot to do with his soft, sexy, gray eyes.

At the time Peter and I met, I had been earning big bucks at a prestigious New York law firm. I married him six months after that first beer, fully expecting to support him for the rest of our lives together. Three weeks after we came home from our honeymoon (beach-hopping and rain-forest-trekking in Costa Rica), he got a call from his agent. Slasher movies were suddenly in vogue, and one of that year’s hottest producers had gotten his hands on Peter’s script for
Flesh-Eaters I.
He optioned it for more money than I made in a year.

Much to my joy, Peter’s success allowed me to quit my job. The short and only answer to the question of why I had ever become a corporate lawyer in the first place was money. I graduated from Harvard Law School owing seventy-five thousand dollars. Delacroix, Swanson, & Gerard offered me a starting salary of just under ninety thousand dollars a year. After two years at the firm I had lowered my debt to a mere fifty thousand dollars, higher than my parents’ mortgage but a slightly more manageable monthly payment than when I had started out.

During those two years I had billed six thousand hours, represented an asbestos manufacturer and a toxic-waste dumper, and helped to bust a union. My garment-workers’-union-organizing grandfather must have been spinning in his grave. I’d spent three weeks trapped in a warehouse in Jersey City, sifting through documents, and a month in a conference room in the Detroit Airport Hilton, listening to lying corporate executives. I’d done so many all-nighters that for a while Peter was certain I was cheating on him. The lunches at Lutèce and the Lincoln Town cars that drove me home each night were no compensation for the misery I felt during every one of my fourteen-hour days. By the time Peter got his big break, I was way past ready to quit.

We used Peter’s advance to pay off my law school loans, packed the contents of our apartment into a U-Haul, hooked it to the back of my aunt Irene’s 1977 Buick, and took off for the promised land, Los Angeles. We ended up in a 1930s apartment chock-full of period details and period appliances in Hancock Park, near Melrose Avenue, and I got the job I’d always wanted, as a federal public defender. For the next couple of years Peter wrote script after script, some of which were actually made into movies. We met a lot of interesting and creative people: writers, directors, and even an occasional actor. I represented gangbangers and drug dealers and became familiar with a side of L.A. that most of our new Hollywood friends tried to pretend didn’t exist. I was the only one of our set not either writing a script, producing a movie, or trying to do one or the other. Nonetheless, I managed to hold my own at industry cocktail parties, regaling studio executives with stories about my cross-dressing bank-robber clients and how I was “protected” by the Thirty-seventh Avenue Crips.

I loved my job, and I was really good at it. Everything was going wonderfully, and we were really happy. And then something happened that destroyed it all: We had a baby.

Anyone who tells you that having a child doesn’t completely and irrevocably ruin your life is lying. As soon as that damp little bundle of poop and neediness lands in your life, it’s all over. Everything changes. Your relationship is destroyed. Your looks are shot. Your productivity is devastated. And you get stupid. Dense. Thick. Pregnancy and lactation make you dumb. That’s a proven, scientific fact.

I went back to work when Ruby was four months old, and I quit ten months later. I just couldn’t stand being
apart from her and Peter. I’d call in the afternoon, snatching a few minutes to pump breast milk between court appearances and visiting clients at the detention center. Peter would tell me the latest cute Ruby story. I missed her first word (“boom”) and the day she started to walk. Peter wrote at night, slept in, and took over for the nanny at eleven each morning. He and Ruby spent the day together, going to the park, playing blocks, lunching with pals from Mommy and Me. I was jealous. Completely, insanely jealous.

I was also doing a lousy job at work. I didn’t want to be there any longer than I absolutely had to. I was relieved when clients pled guilty because that meant I wouldn’t have to put in the late nights a trial demands. I finally realized that I was giving everything short shrift—my work, my husband, and most of all, Ruby.

So I quit. I dumped three years of Harvard Law School into the toilet and became a full-time mom. That decision blew everyone away, including me. My boss, the kind of working mother who came back to work when her kids were three months old and never looked back, thought I’d lost my mind. My mother kept me on the phone one night for two hours, crying. I was supposed to have the career she’d never been able to achieve. She felt like I had betrayed her feminist dream. My friends who hadn’t yet had kids looked at me with a kind of puzzled condescension, obviously wondering what had become of the ambition that used to consume me.