The Drifter(79)
“Mommy, why do you wear makeup?”
Betsy wanted to say Because I feel like death without it. Because worry has carved deep lines all over my face. Because I am the oldest forty-year-old in the world.
But instead she smiled at her daughter and said, in the studied tone of nonchalance she was trying to perfect, “Sometimes it just makes me feel pretty.” She paused. Was it working? “It’s one of the things grown-up women do to make themselves feel good.”
“Are you wearing that shirt because it makes you look pretty?” asked Remi, studying the shimmering bronzer she’d smeared on the back of her hand and the vaguely boxy, abstract floral Marni top that her mother slid over her head. Remi looked up at Betsy, looking her straight in the eyes.
“I guess so. Do you like it?” Betsy asked.
Remi lay on the floor and kicked her fleshy legs out in front of her. “Umm, not exactly.”
How this pattern was established, a mother’s attempt to preserve a daughter’s ego, protect her innocence, only to have the daughter snap back with a crushing blow to her own, was a mystery. Was this how mean girls were made? Or was it just childhood innocence? Whatever it was, Betsy fell for it every time, fighting the urge to retreat to the closet to change her shirt. “Let’s go say bye-bye to Daddy, OK?” Ending sentences with an approval-seeking “OK?” was another habit Betsy found almost impossible to break. Betsy was learning what it meant to be a parent, that even if you want something, desperately, for your child, you can’t will it into being. They can’t be coerced or molded, only occasionally persuaded—and protected, of course, but Betsy’s focus on guarding her daughter from the evils of the world was as hot and precise as a laser. Children are born who they are. The challenge for Betsy was to learn how to get out of Remi’s way.
It had been three days since Gavin busted her lurking on the stoop. Out on the street, tiny backpack and lunch in hand, they tromped down the sidewalk, Betsy and her girl—in ladybug galoshes on one of those perfect, blue-sky September mornings—ready to face the world. Just choosing a route for the morning walk to the Montessori school in their neighborhood had been a challenge for Betsy. They’d tried a few paths, sampling them for distance, horn noise, exhaust from idling cars, and the number of street crossings, and Betsy had decided on a slightly longer, less direct path that she timed at seventeen minutes.
She was determined to walk her daughter to school. For starters, if she subtracted the walk to school from their time together, she was spending only three waking hours with her child every day. She also didn’t want to give the other mothers at school another reason to criticize her. She had to go.
The division of parental duties was an illusion, Betsy was convinced, which existed so working fathers and mothers could feel like they were pulling equal weight in the contemporary American family. Trading off the rituals of meal preparation, bath time, and dish duty was fine. But the other hidden tasks, including decoding the subtle signals at school, tipped heavily to the maternal side. Gavin had offered to do drop-off, but he was so oblivious to his surroundings, the dynamics between the kids and the school director, the dreaded Elodie, that she knew he’d return with no pertinent information and decided to take on the task herself until she was satisfied that she’d gathered sufficient intel. During her early years in town, Betsy had fought (and lost, mostly) her own social battles before she gave up on the idea of meeting new people. Then she had a baby, and it all started again. When would she be free of the tyranny of the alpha female? The pattern that began in grade school repeated itself again and again, in high school, college, at work, and now in the well-lit hallways of her daughter’s preschool, decorated with construction paper cutouts.
BETSY WAS SURE the other parents had heard about her lurking and crying in front of the school. She was so humiliated by Elodie’s admonishing leer out of the window, the way she’d been chastised for stalking the school and had to have Gavin swoop in to save her from herself, that she had decided that going back for a college reunion, a hastily organized gathering around a few of her pledge-sisters’ fortieth birthdays, might not be a terrible idea. Or it might, in fact, be a terrible idea, but it was her only idea. She was surprised that she had even been invited. Betsy pictured the women she went to college with riffling through old photos and memorabilia and thinking, with blurry and faded memories, “I wonder what ever happened to Betsy Young?” Betsy’s memories, on the other hand, were permanently etched, and they stuck to her skin like wax. Going back to Gainesville to reconcile with her past, to see how tiny the buildings looked, how small the town felt, and how hundreds and thousands of students had shuffled sleepily through that campus since she left, might be her only way forward. In the meantime, she repositioned herself on a different stoop, a few doors down and out of Elodie’s sight, set her timer for twenty minutes, and accepted that those tortured moments in front of the school were part of her morning routine until she could sort herself out.
By the time she made it to midtown, an hour late to work, and into the austere white marble lobby, she was fully aware of all of the people she was disappointing. When she breezed past the front counter, past the latest crop of fresh-faced Client Services and Catalogue girls, she envied their youth, their utter lack of real responsibility. The more academic of the specialists liked nothing more than to poke fun at them, wondering what kind of “special” client services they really offered behind closed doors. But Betsy remembered enough about being that age to understand that they had more on their minds than waiting to pounce on the next eligible bachelor to walk through the door. Life was never as simple as it seemed. She caught her own distorted reflection on the polished brass doorframe, which looked as twisted and tortured as she felt.