Today Will Be Different(3)

“Morning, darling. Look at you, up and awake.”

He stopped what he was doing. “Can we have bacon?”

Timby, in the mirror, waited for me to leave. I lowered my eyes. The little Quick Draw McGraw beat my glance. He pushed something into the sink before I could see it. The unmistakable clang of lightweight plastic. The Sephora 200!

It was nobody’s fault but my own, Santa putting a makeup kit in Timby’s stocking. It’s how I’d buy myself extra time at Nordstrom, telling Timby to roam cosmetics. The girls there loved his gentle nature, his sugar-sack body, his squeaky voice. Soon enough, they were making him up. I don’t know if he liked the makeup as much as being doted on by a gaggle of blondes. On a lark, I picked up a kit the size of a paperback that unfolded and fanned out to reveal six different makeup trays (!) holding two hundred (!) shadows, glosses, blushes, and whatever-they-weres. The person who’d found a way to cram so much into so little should seriously be working for NASA. If they still have that.

“You do realize you’re not wearing makeup to school,” I told him.

“I know, Mom.” The sigh and shoulder heave right out of the Disney Channel. Again, my bad for letting it take root. After school, a jigsaw puzzle!

I emerged from Timby’s room. Yo-Yo, standing anxiously, shivered with relief upon seeing that I still existed. Knowing I’d be heading to the kitchen to make breakfast, he raced me to his food bowl. This time he deigned to eat some, one eye on me.

Joe was back and making himself tea.

“How’s things?” I asked.

“Don’t you look nice,” he said.

True to my grand scheme for the day, I’d showered and put on a dress and oxfords. If you beheld my closet, you’d see a woman of specific style. Dresses from France and Belgium, price tags ripped off before I got home because Joe would have an aneurysm, and every iteration of flat black shoe… again, no need to discuss price. Buy them? Yes. Put them on? On most days, too much energy.

“Olivia’s coming tonight,” I said with a wink, already tasting the wine flight and rigatoni at Tavolàta.

“How about she takes Timby out so we can have a little alone time?” Joe grabbed me by the waist and pulled me in as if we weren’t a couple of fifty-year-olds.

Here’s who I envy: lesbians. Why? Lesbian bed death. Apparently, after a lesbian couple’s initial flush of hot sex, they stop having it altogether. It makes perfect sense. Left to their own devices, women would stop having sex after they have children. There’s no evolutionary need for it. Our brains know it, our body knows it. Who feels sexy during the slog of motherhood, the middle-aged fat roll and the flattening butt? What woman wants anyone to see her naked, let alone fondle her breasts, squishy now like bags of cake batter, or touch her stomach, spongy like breadfruit? Who wants to pretend they’re all sexed up when the honeypot is dry?

Me, that’s who, if I don’t want to get switched out for a younger model.

“Alone time it is,” I said to Joe.

“Mom, this broke.” Timby came in with his ukulele and plonked it down on the counter. Suspiciously near the trash. “The sound’s all messed up.”

“What do you propose we do?” I asked, daring him to say, Buy a new one.

Joe picked up the ukulele and strummed. “It’s a little out of tune, that’s all.” He began to adjust the strings.

“Hey,” I said. “Since when can you tune a ukulele?”

“I’m a man of many mysteries,” Joe said and gave the instrument a final dulcet strum.

The bacon and French toast were being wolfed, the smoothies being drunk. Timby was deep into an Archie Double Digest. My smile was on lockdown.

Two years ago when I was getting all martyr-y about having to make breakfast every morning, Joe said, “I pay for this circus. Can you please climb down off your cross and make breakfast without the constant sighing?”

I know what you’re going to say: What a jerk! What a sexist thug! But Joe had a point. Lots of women would gladly do worse for a closet full of Antwerp. From that moment on, it was service with a smile. It’s called knowing when you’ve got a weak hand.

Joe showed Timby the newspaper. “The Pinball Expo is coming back to town. Wanna go?”

“Do you think the Evel Knievel machine will still be broken?”

“Almost certainly,” Joe said.

I handed over the poem I’d printed out and heavily annotated.

“Okay, who’s going to help me?” I asked.

Timby didn’t look up from his Archie.

Joe took it. “Ooh, Robert Lowell.”





I began from memory: “‘Nautical Island’s hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze above the sea. Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer’s first selectman’—”

“‘Her farmer is first selectman,’” Joe said.

“Shoot. ‘Her farmer is first selectman.’”

“Mom!”

I shushed Timby and continued with eyes closed. “‘… in our village; she’s in her dotage. Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria’s century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall. The season’s ill—we’ve lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue’—”