The Guy Not Taken (24 page)

Alice steeled herself and walked over to the slide, where Maisy crouched, scowling.

“Come on, Maisy, time to sit in a circle.”

Maisy shook her head.

“We’ll play later,” she said, scooping her daughter into her arms.

“No!
No!
Noey noey
No! Play now, Mommy!
” Maisy shrieked, and kicked Alice sharply in the left breast. Alice gasped. Her eyes filled with tears, but she struggled to keep her voice calm as she carried Maisy over to the circle.

“Maisy, we do not kick. Feet are not for kicking.”

“Want . . . to go . . . down! Now!” Maisy screamed, writhing in her mother’s arms. Alice winced, imagining she could feel the other women’s stares.

“You can go down the slide later, but right now we need to sit down,” she said in the firm-but-patient tone she’d been practicing, to little avail, for weeks.

“Well!” said Lynn, giving the eight women and their charges a smile and trying her hardest to ignore Maisy, who’d ramped up into a full-on tantrum and was shrieking and pounding her fists on the floor. Lynn raised her voice above the little girl’s wails. “Let’s go around the circle and say our names and our child’s name.”

Mom One was Lisa and her daughter, a porcelain-skinned
redhead contentedly sucking her thumb, was Annie. Mom Two was Stacy, and her little boy, vrooming his firetruck over the carpet, was Taylor. Alice patted Maisy’s back ineffectually and caught a name here and there. Pam . . . Tate . . . Manda . . . Morgan. The mothers, like Alice, appeared to be in their thirties, with expensively highlighted hair and dark circles under their eyes masked with sixty-dollar concealer. Any one of the diamonds on their left hands could have been swapped for a small used car.

With one mother left, Maisy finally stopped crying. “I don’t like you,” she said, glaring at Alice, who felt her heart contract helplessly, as if she’d been kicked there, too. “Not one wittle bit.” Maisy hooked her thumb into her mouth. Her cheeks were blotchy, and her fine blond hair, which had been neatly combed and secured with pink bunny barrettes that morning, stood up around her head in a frizzy, tangled corona.

The blue-haired babysitter lifted an eyebrow and resettled the dimpled, pigtailed girl in her lap. “I’m Victoria, and this is Ellie. She’s two and a half exactly.” The other mothers nodded, murmuring hellos.

“And she’s potty-trained, I see!” exclaimed Lynn the leader. The sitter gave a modest shrug. Alice grimaced. She’d been unsuccessful at getting Maisy to do anything with the potty except occasionally wear it on her head. Then it was her turn.

“I’m Alice, and this is Maisy. She’ll be two and a half next month.” She pulled a tissue out of her diaper bag and tried to wipe her daughter’s face.

“Go away from me!” Maisy whined, slapping at Alice’s hands. Pick your battles, Alice reminded herself, putting the tissue back in her pocket and starting a mental tally of Victoria’s piercings. There was one silver ring through her lip, a diamond twinkling in her nostril, and a silver barbell run through
her eyebrow, in addition to black rubber plugs that stretched quarter-size holes in her earlobes. Alice thought she couldn’t have been older than nineteen.

“Free play time!” said Lynn, clapping her hands again. The other mothers, the ones with the expensive suede moccasins and diamond-and-platinum rings, gravitated toward the crafts table. Victoria resumed her slouch next to the radiator, idly twisting a studded leather cuff around one wrist as Ellie happily glued cotton balls to construction paper. Alice shepherded Maisy back to the slide and sat down next to blue-haired Victoria. She wondered what kind of mother would entrust her child to a sitter dressed like this. Probably a very hip mother, a downtown girl. Alice and her husband had recently relocated to suburban Haddonfield, where only the little old ladies had blue hair.

“How long have you been taking care of Ellie?” she asked.

Victoria raised her pierced eyebrow. “Excuse me?” Then she shot Alice a quicksilver grin. “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m not the nanny. I’m her mom.”

•   •   •

“How was your day, ladies?” Mark asked that night, trying not to sound harried as he hung up his overcoat and suit jacket and came to the kitchen to help Alice wrestle Maisy into her booster seat.

“Fine!” Alice shouted back. One of Maisy’s sneakered feet caught her in the bicep as Mark finally pulled the straps around his daughter. Alice grabbed the plastic Disney princess plate and Maisy’s preferred orange sippy cup from the counter. “We went to playgroup. It was fun!”

“It was not,” said Maisy, abruptly going limp and sliding bonelessly underneath her straps, out of her booster seat, and down to the floor. She paused for a moment, as startled as both of her parents were at this new development, before opening her
mouth and starting to scream. Mark scooped her back into the seat and tightened the straps, while Alice retrieved a steaming bowl from the microwave. Maisy’s wails stopped abruptly. “Chicken noodle! My fav’rit!”

Mark frowned, loosening his tie. “Noodle soup again? Didn’t she have that last night?”

“She had it for lunch today.” And breakfast, Alice didn’t add. “She won’t eat anything else,” she said, collapsing into her own chair.

“Noodles! Yommmy!” said Maisy, slurping wetly. There was clump of glue stuck in her hair, a remnant of her stint at the crafts table that morning.

“You like those noodles, kiddo?” asked Mark in the bluff, too-loud tone he always used with his daughter, the tone that, just lately, made Alice want to slap him.

Maisy ignored him, slurping away. Alice set their dinner on the table: rotisserie chicken fresh from the supermarket, a salad she’d recently dumped out of a plastic bag, and a reheated container of mashed sweet potatoes with a candied-pecan crust that she’d purchased for the unbelievable price of $9.99 a pound. For that much money, she’d thought, steering a screaming Maisy through the checkout line and ignoring her daughter’s wails for lollipops, she could have bought five pounds of sweet potatoes, not to mention the butter and brown sugar and pecans, and whipped up enough mashed sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner for twelve. But when? That was the question. With what time?

Mark filled his plate, then turned to his daughter. “Want to try some sweet potatoes?” he wheedled, holding out a bite on his fork.

Maisy scowled at him. “No sweepatoes!
Not eating that! I will not!
”

“Honey . . .” Alice began.

“Well, she can’t just eat noodle soup for the rest of her life!” Mark said.

Maisy snatched the fork loaded with sweet potatoes and flung it toward the living room, where it probably landed on the Oriental rug—the one nice thing Alice had brought from her single-girl apartment into her married-lady home. The dog whimpered. Ever since Maisy had gotten mobile, Charlie, their sweet shelter dog, had lived in mortal terror of the little girl Alice privately called—just in her own thoughts, never out loud, never to Mark—the bad seed.

God, give me strength,
Alice thought. “Maisy, we do not throw food in this house. Food is for eating. And we especially do not throw forks. You scared poor Charlie!”

“I didn’t want that thing!”
Maisy wailed, and upended her soup bowl onto the table. Mark shoved his chair back to avoid the encroaching tide of noodles and broth.

“For the love of God . . .”

“Please don’t raise your voice,” Alice asked him. “Firm but patient, remember?”

“No yelling!”
yelled Maisy.

Mark sighed, picked up the bowl, and carried it into the kitchen. Alice sopped up as much of the mess as she could with a handful of paper napkins as Maisy picked noodles off the table. “Noodles! Yommy!” she said. She tilted her head back and opened her mouth wide. “Mommy, feed me like I am your baby bird,” she said.

“Can’t we do something?” Mark asked in a low voice as he passed Alice the sponge.

Alice dropped a noodle into Maisy’s mouth. “Like what? Hire a full-time nanny? Leave her on the street corner?” She’d meant to sound like she was kidding, but when the words came out of her mouth they didn’t sound joking at all. She took a
deep breath and fed Maisy another noodle. “She’s just . . . you know . . . spirited,” she said, parroting the lingo she’d gleaned from the parenting books she devoured late at night as if they were pornography. “She’s a spirited child.”

Mark muttered something that sounded like
bullshit
and scooped the sodden napkins into his hand.

•   •   •

“We wanted her so much,” Alice said the next week at Mother’s Hour. The leaves outside the windows had deepened from pale gold to rust, and they rustled in the brisk wind. She’d spent ten minutes that morning getting Maisy into a jacket, dreading the day when she’d have to add a hat and boots and mittens to the routine. The mothers balanced on toddler-size chairs while their children mushed homemade Play-Doh at the arts-and-crafts table. (Maisy, of course, had refused to join in and was back on top of the slide.) “She was a very wanted child.”

A few of the women nodded sympathetically. Victoria fiddled with her studded bracelet, listening intently. “I was thirty-six when she was born,” Alice continued. “We went through two cycles of IVF before we conceived for the first time, and we lost that . . . that pregnancy.” The word
baby
had been on the tip of her tongue, but she didn’t want to say it. Pam, Tate’s mother, who she knew from Baby Beethoven class, had a miscarriage at sixteen weeks. What was a positive pregnancy test followed by getting her period three days later compared to that? “Maisy was such a wanted child. And now . . .” Her voice trailed off. The private part of her brain, the place where she called Maisy “bad seed,” also had repeatedly advanced the theory that the first baby, the one she’d lost, was the one she’d been meant to have, and that Maisy was some kind of changeling. Either that or a punishment. For what, Alice wasn’t sure.

“It’s tough,” Lynn the leader said.

“Two’s hard,” Nora agreed.

“You ever tried whiskey?” asked Victoria.

Seven highlighted heads swung around to stare. There was a hint of a smile playing at the corners of Victoria’s lips.

“You give Ellie whiskey?” Lynn asked faintly.

Victoria smiled more broadly, shoved the cuff up high on her forearm, and recrossed her long, skinny legs. “Nah. My mom used to tell me she’d put whiskey in my bottle so I’d sleep. But I know better.” She hugged Ellie against her, dropped her voice to a whisper, and said, “I use cough syrup.”

Someone sucked in a horrified breath. “You’re kidding, right?” Taylor’s mother, Stacy, blurted.

Victoria rolled her eyes. “Well, duh,” she said. Alice laughed—a bright, uncomplicated sound that one of the children could have made. Her eyes met Victoria’s over the knee-high table covered with fingerpaint and a vinyl Dora the Explorer tablecloth, and Victoria tipped her a wink.

•   •   •

“It’s, you know, the same old story,” Victoria told her after class had let out at noon. They’d crossed Washington Square Park for lattes from Caramel, and were sitting on a park bench with their paper cups underneath the brilliant, cloudless blue sky. Ellie sang to herself while she chased pigeons around the empty fountain and Maisy slept in her stroller, mouth open, a bubble of spit on her pink lips expanding and contracting with each breath. “I got pregnant when I was sixteen, my mom pitched a fit and threw me out of the house . . .”

“That must have been awful,” Alice said reflexively.

“It was a blessing in disguise,” said Victoria. “She and I never really got along. I moved in with Tommy’s family.”

“Tommy is your boyfriend?”

“My husband,” said Victoria, sounding proud and shy. “We got married when I was six months pregnant. We lived with his mom and stepfather for a while, then with his sister and her husband, but that didn’t go so well.” She made a face and tugged at a strand of blue hair. “So we saved up and moved here, and Tommy works as a bicycle messenger. We’re both taking classes at community college, and we found this great place in University City. Well, west Philly. It’s not really that near the university. But it’s not so bad.” She looked sideways at Alice as the wind sent leaves rattling past their feet. “You guys could come for a playdate some day.”

“Sure!” Alice said, recognizing her husband’s too-loud, too-hearty tone coming out of her own mouth an instant too late. West Philadelphia was what the newspapers called a neighborhood in transition, the kind of place where Mark would drive only if he got lost, and where he’d take pains to lock the car doors until he escaped. “I mean, we’d like that,” she said, more quietly. “Poor Maisy,” she said, bending down to pull a wayward leaf out of her daughter’s hair. “The way she carries on, I don’t think she’s going to have any friends unless I make some for her.”

Victoria shrugged. Alice braced herself for one of the platitudes her friends, her own mother, the other mothers she knew, would have delivered.
Oh, no, she’s just sensitive! Don’t worry, she’ll outgrow it!

Instead, Victoria said, “She is a little bit of a drama queen, isn’t she?”

“From the moment she was born,” said Alice. “They put her on the table, and she looked up at the nurses with this expression of absolute disgust.” She sighed. “Then she started screaming, and sometimes I think she hasn’t stopped since.” She shook her head. “Maybe I should put cough syrup in her sippy cup.”

“Couldn’t hurt,” Victoria said. Ellie trotted over, beaming at her mother, with a pigeon feather clutched in one hand.

“Is it lunchtime?” she asked. There wasn’t a trace of a whine in her voice, Alice noticed. How had the high school dropout, the teenage mother, wound up with this angelic child while she, who had a master’s degree and a mortgage and a husband, who’d insisted on a drug-free birth and had breastfed even after her daughter bit her at least once per feeding, ended up with a shrieky, miserable brat?

Victoria glanced at her heavy man’s watch, then at Alice. “You want to go get a burrito?”

In the stroller, Maisy opened her eyes. “Hungry!” she said.

“Sure,” said Alice. “That would be great.”