The Underside of Joy

While the kids gathered eggs and my mom slept, I sat on the back porch drinking more coffee, my mind pinging from the kids to Paige to Joe to the store to our bank account. I looked to the trees. They always calmed me. The redwood grove stood like our own appointed guards; their trunks rose straight and solid from the land, their branches so large, we had seen wild turkeys perched in them. The birds huddled, as big as Labradors, barely able to scrabble up from one branch to the other, letting out shrill laughter that kept startling us, as if a bunch of old British ladies were up there, gossiping. We watched them for hours one winter afternoon, a giant’s version of a partridge in a pear tree.

Our oaks were more like wise, arthritic grandparents. If you pulled up a chair and sat awhile and listened, you usually learned something useful. The fruit trees were like our cherished aunties, wearing frilly dresses and an overabundance of perfume in the spring, then by summer, indulging us with their generosity, dropping apples and pears and apricots by the bucketfuls, more than we could ever eat, as if they were saying, Mangia! Mangia!

By the time my mom woke up and joined me with her coffee, I felt somewhat better from my group-therapy session with the trees. I wasn’t as worried about starving, anyway.

‘Wow,’ she said. ‘I conked out. I didn’t even hear you come in last night.’ She took a sip from her cup. ‘Jelly Bean.’ She leaned over and moved a strand of my hair off my face. ‘We need to talk. I have to head back tomorrow, and we haven’t really had a chance to talk about the insurance and your whole financial picture. I can help you figure it out, but they need me back at the centre the day after tomorrow.’

I didn’t tell her that although she had slept, I hadn’t, and I was in no shape to discuss what I’d discovered. I hadn’t even begun to wrap my mind around the whole situation. And as stoic as she could be about some things, like the time Zach wiped the contents of his diaper all over the crib, systematically covering each wooden slat with baby poop, this little financial dilemma would positively and completely freak her out. My mom worked as a bookkeeper for a nonprofit. She didn’t make a lot of money, but she lived simply and, with the help of my dad’s life insurance, had managed to never go broke. And so I said, ‘It’s all fine. I just need to talk to an accountant in the next few weeks.’

She looked at me, sipped her coffee, kept assessing me. ‘You’re exhausted. Are you sleeping?’

I shrugged, teeter-tottered my hand.

‘Why don’t you try to rest today, then, and I’ll take the kids and go do something. We’ll go to Great America or someplace that will exhaust them, and then everyone will be in the same boat.’

I was tired. But the kids needed me and I needed them. Their birth mother had begun circling and I didn’t know if she was looking for a place to land, or preying, ready to snatch up Annie and Zach, or at best, keeping a distant watch on the nest she’d abandoned years before.

‘Let’s all go. I want to hang out with you guys.’

‘You’re going to have plenty of time with Annie and Zach, honey. Puh-lenty. And I’ll be back as soon as I can. You need to take care of yourself.’

‘I need to be a mom. I can rally. Let me have another three cups of coffee and a shower and I’m there.’

When I came back out, my mom was looking through one of our photo albums, shaking her head. ‘You guys really perfected the art of the picnic, didn’t you?’

I sat on the arm of the sofa. The only time the kids ever went to theme parks was when grandparents were involved. Joe and I avoided them. But we went on picnics whenever we could. It was something all four of us loved equally, but for different reasons. Joe liked to pursue his photography and still spend time with his family. I was enthralled with all the redwood-lined hiking trails, the abundance of animal and plant life. The kids loved to catch bugs and see if I could name them. Annie kept a little bug, flower, and bird book in which she painstakingly printed each letter I spelled out to her.

And of course, we all loved to eat. These were not your basic PBJ types of picnics. We made salads and spreads using whatever we could from our garden’s stash, and I discovered an untapped joy of cooking. We had two kids who would eat anything, so I kept trying new ideas and we’d lie back in the sun and groan at how good everything tasted.

‘Honey, would you rather go on a picnic today? It might be easier. We have all that food.’

I shook my head. Going on a picnic without Joe right then would feel like taking a dull knife and cutting a hole through the centre of me . . . and it wouldn’t feel any better for Annie and Zach. ‘No. Great America it is! Land of the expensive! Home of the brave moms and grandmas! Let’s do it.’

After that day, whenever my mother and I referred to Great America, we called it Ghastly America – and it wasn’t a political statement. It had to do with my lack of sleep and my dead husband and the ninety-five-plus-degree weather and the kids amped up on too much cotton candy and ice cream sandwiches. It had to do with me getting my period, and my body using the occasion to purge my emotions – which suddenly included being extremely pissed off. The heat baked everything, so the only ride that sounded good was the roller coaster called Big Splash. We waited in line for one hour and thirty-five minutes before we realized that Zach was way too short. Annie and my mom went ahead while I stayed behind with Zach, who had a screaming tantrum, not because he couldn’t go on the ride so much as because he couldn’t go with my mom, whom he’d become more and more attached to during the past week.

Zach had been such a laid-back kid, I had very little experience in how to handle a tantrum like that – he screamed and jumped up and down and then splayed himself on the ground, refusing to get up. A blur of people shook their heads and stared. I stood there, unmoving. What did the experts say? I tried to remember something, anything, from one of the parenting magazines I’d read in the doctor’s office. Walk away? Yeah, right. In a crowd of hundreds. Don’t give in. Don’t reward. But I finally got down and yelled over his screams, ‘Zach! Listen! Stop screaming and I’ll buy you another cotton candy! Would you like that?’ He kept wailing. ‘Cotton candy, Zach! Do you hear me?’

He stopped suddenly. He swiped his nose along his arm. ‘And a Slushee?’

‘And a Slushee.’

He got up and took my hand. I heard one woman say, ‘No wonder,’ and a man said, ‘Way to work the parents, buddy.’

I stood and stuck my face about three inches from the guy’s bloated, sweaty one. I said through clenched teeth, ‘He no longer has parents, plural, buddy. Because, you see, his father just died, buddy.’

We walked away and I didn’t look back. I bought Zach another cotton candy and a cherry Slushee and watched his lips turn as red as the rims around his eyes.

While my mom took Zach to a table to finish his treats, I took Annie on the Ferris wheel. Why I thought it might be fun to sit sizzling in a metal basket escapes me now, but that’s what we did, and when a disgruntled operator deserted her post, we sat for ten minutes and willed another operator to take over or at least for God to stir up a breeze, or rain. Where was the fog when you needed it? Someone yelled up in a megaphone that a replacement operator would be there shortly. Great. I’d worked in a doctor’s office in college, and they trained us to say the doctor will be with you shortly, never in a minute. Shortly was subjective. Shortly lacked any concrete commitment.

At first Annie was happy to point out the different rides, enjoying the view, but then she started whining. ‘How much longer? I’ve gotta pee. I’m hungry. I’m hot. I wanna go home.’

I wanted to know: How could someone just walk away and abandon us, leaving us suspended in midair? I’d have to ask Paige about that one. How do you say to your babies and your husband, ‘I’m done. Buh-bye,’ and never look back? Leave them suspended, unable to move forward until a replacement operator by the name of Ella came up and pushed the right buttons. The replacement mother, the replacement wife. Is that how she saw me? Is that what I was? Is that all I was? But after sitting up there for ten minutes, I loved the replacement operator; when she let us off that ride, I wanted to hug her. I said, ‘Thank you! We wouldn’t have survived another minute without you.’ She nodded, looking bored, directing us back into the hordess of people. Annie said, ‘Mommy, aren’t you being a little dramatic?’

Despite our being saved, the day kept on its downward spiral. I shuffled around, squinting. Too bright, too many primary colours, too many loud noises. And one of the loudest? Zach, who threw a tantrum whenever my mother let go of his hand. Her trip to the bathroom cost me a churro and another Slushee – this time grape.

On the way home we got stuck in five o’clock traffic, which, anywhere in the Bay Area or its ever-outstretching vicinities, begins at three o’clock. The kids fought over every toy like wild dogs over a porterhouse, and my mom, who always received compliments on her youthful appearance, looked every one of her sixty-two years and then some. The air-conditioning malfunctioned so that it felt like a person with a high fever was blowing at us through the vents, while in the rearview mirror I watched Annie rip Zach’s Bubby from him until my mom screamed, ‘Ella! Stop!’ I slammed on the brakes just in time to stop us from smashing into a yellow Hummer. You know who would have survived that crash. Not us in the Jeep.

I calmly and quietly said to my mother, ‘We almost got into an accident. Accidents happen randomly and with no warning. Joe was killed in a drowning accident, and now we could have been killed in a car accident. Just. Like. That.’

‘Jelly? Are you okay?’

I shook from top to bottom, and the kids kept right on fighting. I hit the steering wheel with both hands and shouted, ‘Goddamn it! I can’t drive! Now, you two shut up! Shut up!’

And they did. No one said another word the entire drive home except the voice in my head, which told me over and over, You, my dear, are the very worst mother on the planet.

When we pulled up our driveway, Callie loped up to greet us, but the kids were out cold. Annie’s cheeks were pink despite the sunscreen I’d covered them with. The side of Zach’s face stuck to his car seat; drool ran down his T-shirt, which now held red and purple splotches that coordinated with his lips and chin. The Slushees had left what looked like bruises, but I felt I’d done far worse damage with my own temper tantrum. I could almost see their wings, so angelic were they in sleep, certainly incapable of causing an adult to scream at them at the top of her lungs. I carefully pried Zach from his seat; his arms and legs hung loose and heavy; his head lolled before resting on my shoulder. He let out a long, stuttered sigh. These were my angels who had just lost their dad. Whose birth mother had decided it was okay to poke and prod from a distance, enough to do little more than remind them that she’d left them. And now their evil stepmother had yelled at them for being kids.

We got them settled in their beds and tiptoed out to the kitchen. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to my mom.

‘For what?’

‘You know. For losing it in the car.’

‘Well, honey. It’s understandable. They were acting up. You’re exhausted. Give yourself a break.’

‘But they’re bound to act up right now.’

‘That doesn’t mean you let them scream and fight in the car. It was an intense situation. You didn’t have time to remind them, “Use your inside voices and nice words, children.”’

‘I didn’t remind myself to use my nice words. I don’t remember you ever yelling at me like that.’

‘I didn’t?’ She knit her eyebrows. ‘Didn’t I? Well, after your dad died, you hardly made a peep. You’d been such a yacker, always into everything, disappearing for hours with that little notebook of yours. You know how the kids started saying “Why? Why? Why?” when they turned three? You were still asking that all the time, even when you were eight.’ She shook her head. ‘Such a character, you were. And a handful! But then you got really quiet. All that happy hoopla just drained out of you.’

She stopped talking, pulled a bracelet back and forth over her hand.

We were a pair of skaters trying a new leap, a new twist, but it was time for one of us to pull back into our familiar routine, each of us depending on the other one to stay clear of obstacles or warm spots. ‘You’ll all get through this.’ She smiled. ‘I’ve been where you are. And you’ve been where they are. And we got through.’

Now she made it sound like it had been easy. Out the window I saw a squirrel stop on our porch railing to inspect some kind of pod, turning it in its paws. ‘I still think about Dad all the time. All those camping trips on the Olympic Peninsula, how much he taught me in eight short years.’ She reached out and squeezed my hand. ‘So, Mom, how did you make it through that?’

She opened the refrigerator and took out a bottle of pinot blanc.

‘Oh, that’s how.’

She smiled. ‘Tempting, I admit, but no.’ She poured us each a glass.

‘Actually, at first I did check out, as you probably remember . . . But then I kept thinking about my grandmother. Your great-grandma Just. She waited in Austria while her husband went to America. He said he’d find work and send for her. She waited a year and never heard from him. So she sold every single thing she had and took her two children and got on a boat bound for America. She didn’t speak English. She didn’t know a soul. I can see her as if I were there: a tiny woman with a braid past her waist, an arm around each child, freezing and miserable, holding on to them for dear life. Can you imagine? Huddled on that ship, bound for the great unknown . . .’ She shook her head and looked at me. ‘And when I felt bad about my situation, I drew strength from her.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘Well. She found him. She actually found him! He’d drunk away everything he’d earned. Penniless, sleeping around, and worse, violent. So she kicked him back out and, ironically, set up a moonshine business during Prohibition, and raised those two kids – my mom and Aunt Lily – with a trapdoor covered by a braided rug under the kitchen table. It’s the same kitchen table I still have.’

I didn’t say anything. I was trying to figure out what part of the story she and I could relate to. Not the secret trapdoor. Not the moonshine business. Not the tiny mother with the two kids on the ship. Not the sneaky drunk husband. Callie barked and I turned to see the squirrel dive for the trunk of an oak and disappear.

‘Ella.’ My mother held my shoulders. ‘We come from a line of strong women. I see that strength in you.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, our faces only inches away, almost too close to each other, too close to all the unspoken. I could have asked more right then, but I knew better; I’d learned my lesson long ago. I stepped back and picked up my wine, and she did the same. ‘Hey, does that mean I get the old pine table? I love that table.’

She raised her glass. ‘Not while I’m still breathing you don’t.’ We clinked our glasses. A wordless toast to another success: once again, we’d talked about my dad without talking about my dad.

Chapter Eight

The next morning I dropped my mom off at the airport shuttle bus, but not before she offered to postpone leaving and get someone else to cover for her at work.

I didn’t want her to go. But I knew postponing her departure wasn’t going to help us all get to the other side, or wherever the hell we were headed.

And so we drove her to the DoubleTree Inn, where she stepped onto the shuttle bus to the San Francisco airport and I pulled out cookies and juice to distract Zach, who otherwise would have definitely run up and grabbed her. We all waved, and I felt inspired by the fact that Zach’s tantrums from the previous day had vanished. I buckled the kids into their car seats and headed home. At a stoplight, I turned to them and said, ‘I’m sorry I yelled in the car yesterday. That wasn’t a nice way to tell you to stop fighting. I’m sorry. Will you forgive me?’

Zach nodded big exaggerated nods and said, ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.’ I’d never heard him do that before.

Annie said, ‘Of course we forgive you, silly. But if you need a break, now might be a good time for us to visit Mama in Lost Vegas.’

The person in the car behind us honked, and I just made the light as it turned yellow again. Need a break? That was an odd thing for Annie to say, I thought, but the kids started singing ‘I’ve Got Sixpence’ and seemed almost happy. I didn’t want to ruin the moment by drilling her. I just said, ‘Annie, believe me, I don’t need a break. Being around you and Zach is what I love most in this world.’ But the thought niggled at me. Either Paige was asking Annie to visit, or perhaps Annie had come up with the idea all on her own. I wondered what Paige wanted, but I wondered more what Annie wanted. It made sense that she might want to spend time with Paige. But what if Paige built up something with the kids and then pulled her disappearing act again?

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