Today Will Be Different(4)

“Mommy, look at Yo-Yo. See how his chin is sitting on his paws?”

Yo-Yo was positioned on his pink lozenge so he could watch for dropped food, his little white paws delicately crossed.

“Aww,” I said.

“Can I have your phone?” Timby asked.

“Just enjoy your pet,” I said. “This doesn’t have to turn into electronics.”

“It’s very cool what Mom is doing,” Joe said to Timby. “Always learning.”

“Learning and forgetting,” I said. “But thank you.”

He shot me an air kiss.

I pressed onward. “‘His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen’—”

“Don’t we love Yo-Yo?” Timby asked.

“We do.” The simple truth. Yo-Yo is the world’s cutest dog, part Boston terrier, part pug, part something else… brindle-and-white with a black patch on one eye, bat ears, smooshed face, and curlicue tail. Before the Amazon invasion, when it was just me and hookers on the street, one remarked, “It’s like if Barbie had a pit bull.”

“Daddy,” Timby said. “Don’t you love Yo-Yo?”

Joe looked at Yo-Yo and considered the question. (More evidence of Joe’s superiority: he thinks before he speaks.) “He’s a little weird,” Joe said and returned to the poem.

Timby dropped his fork. I dropped my jaw.

“Weird?” Timby cried.

Joe looked up. “Yeah. What?”

“Oh, Daddy! How can you say that?”

“He just sits there all day looking depressed,” Joe said. “When we come home, he doesn’t greet us at the door. When we are here, he just sleeps, waits for food to drop, or stares at the front door like he has a migraine.”

For Timby and me, there were simply no words.

“I know what he’s getting out of us,” Joe said. “I just don’t know what we’re getting out of him.”

Timby jumped out of his chair and lay across Yo-Yo, his version of a hug. “Oh, Yo-Yo! I love you.”

“Keep going.” Joe flicked the poem. “You’re doing great. ‘The season’s ill’…”

“‘The season’s ill,’” I said. “‘We’ve lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean catalogue’—” To Timby: “You. Get ready.”

“Are we driving through or are you walking me in?”

“Driving. I have Alonzo at eight thirty.”

Our breakfast over, Yo-Yo got up from his pillow. Joe and I watched as he walked to the front door and stared at it.

“I didn’t realize I was being controversial,” Joe said. “‘The season’s ill.’”





It’s easy to tell who went to Catholic school by how they react when they drive up Queen Anne Hill and behold the Galer Street School. I didn’t, so to me it’s a stately brick building with a huge flat yard and improbably dynamite view of the Puget Sound. Joe did, so he goes white with flashbacks of nuns whacking his hands with rulers, priests threatening him with God’s wrath, and spectacle-snatching bullies roaming the halls unchecked.

By the time we pulled into drop-off, I’d recited the poem twice perfectly and was doing it a third time for charm. “‘One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull.’ Wait, is that right?”

Ominous silence from the backseat. “Hey,” I said. “Are you even following along?”

“I am, Mom. You’re doing perfect.”

“Perfectly. Adverbs end in l-y.” Timby wasn’t in the rearview mirror. I figure-eighted it to see him hunched over something. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” Followed again by that high-pitched rattle of plastic.

“Hey! No makeup.”

“Then why did Santa put it in my stocking?”

I turned around but Timby’s door had opened and shut. By the time I swung back, he was bounding up the front steps. In the reflection of the school’s front door, I caught Timby’s eyelids smeared with rouge. I rolled down my window.

“You little sneak, get back here!”

The car behind me honked. Ah, well, he was the school’s problem now.

Me peeling out of Galer Street with seven child-free hours on the horizon? Cue the banjo getaway music.





“‘I myself am hell; nobody’s here—only skunks, that search in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our back steps and breathe the rich air—a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail. She jabs her wedge-head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.’”

I’d nailed it, syllable for syllable.

Alonzo stuck out his hand. “Congratulations.”


You know how your brain turns to mush? How it starts when you’re pregnant? You laugh, full of wonder and conspiracy, and you chide yourself, Me and my pregnancy brain! Then you give birth and your brain doesn’t return? But you’re breast-feeding, so you laugh, as if you’re a member of an exclusive club? Me and my nursing brain! But then you stop nursing and the terrible truth descends: Your good brain is never coming back. You’ve traded vocabulary, lucidity, and memory for motherhood. You know how you’re in the middle of a sentence and you realize at the end you’re going to need to call up a certain word and you’re worried you won’t be able to, but you’re already committed so you hurtle along and then pause because you’ve arrived at the end but the word hasn’t? And it’s not even a ten-dollar word you’re after, like polemic or shibboleth, but a two-dollar word, like distinctive, so you just end up saying amazing?