Other People's Houses
Abbi Waxman
To my three daughters: Julia, Charlotte, and Kate. May your lives be free of drama, unless it’s really entertaining.
And to the children of my neighborhood: Eve, Hannah, Millie, Louis, Avery, Truman, Little Charlotte, Henry, Chela, Sofia, Stella, Nolan, Olivia, Rosetta, Juliette, Ruby Fern, and Nerys. Without you it would be just another place to live.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank everyone at LPQ, Larchmont, and The Hatchery, who give me endless cups of coffee and a place to work: Wilder, Kacy, Vanessa, Carter, Amy, Maria, and Talia. If I’ve forgotten your name, it’s not because I don’t appreciate you, it’s because I’m an idiot.
I’d like to thank my editor, Kate Seaver, who says positive, constructive things about my work then deftly suggests changes that improve it immeasurably.
I’d also like to thank Margalo Chellas Goldbach, a lovely, intelligent, and highly creative child, who provided the original version of one of the more impressive tantrums in the book, and who will now, sadly, never be allowed to forget it.
Lastly, although Larchmont is a real neighborhood in Los Angeles, and many of the sights I describe are real and lovely, all of the characters are completely fictional. Any resemblance to actual people is completely coincidental and unintentional. I used my imagination, as writers are wont to do.
One.
It was amazing how many children you could fit in a minivan, if you tessellated carefully and maintained only the most basic level of safety. Four in the very back, two of whom were painfully wedged in the space normally afforded to one child. A single lap belt over those two, a choice both illegal and stupid, but there you go—and thank goodness they were skinny. Frances Bloom always had this vague belief that, in the event of an accident, the pressure of all those little bodies would hold them in place. Ten seconds with a physicist would have cleared that up, but she didn’t know any; and seeing as she rarely made it above twenty miles per hour in traffic, she might have been right. She was a careful driver, especially with other people’s kids in the car, and so far she hadn’t needed to put her nutball theory to the test.
In the middle, the two littlest ones sat securely in actual car seats. And next to her in the front, holding sway over the CD player with the attention to power and detail only a teenager could wield, her eldest daughter, Ava. Seven children, the genetic arsenal of four families. One big crash and the entire neighborhood would have had funeral scheduling issues. Not that it was a joking matter, of course. Frances just had these thoughts, what could you do? Rather than fight them and run the risk that they’d deepen her wrinkles, she just let the buggers run.
She’d been doing this carpool for too long, she thought. It probably wasn’t a good sign that a car crash sounded like just one of several options, rather than something to be avoided. But honestly, how many times could you break up a fight over the CD player, or who had to sit in the middle, or whether they could watch a DVD, which they couldn’t—and never could have, even before the in-car machine broke. When it was a full house, like this morning, it got so raucous that a tribe of howler monkeys would have fallen silent in awed appreciation. Mind you, these were professional children, the offspring of creative people and deep thinkers, who’d marveled over them as babies, encouraged them to express themselves as toddlers, and wished they’d been more consistent and mean to them now that they were old enough to sass back.
In the far backseat she had the two sibling children of her neighbors Anne and Charlie Porter: Kate and Theo. Lovely names, less-than-lovely children. Kate, six, specialized in the surprise attack, and often sat silently through the entire trip, rousing herself only to shove her brother viciously out of the van at the other end. Theo, ten, never saw it coming. It wasn’t that he was thick, per se, it was just that he never saw it coming. Theo himself preferred a full-frontal physical assault, with optional screaming in the ears. God knew how that dynamic would play out in therapy.
Interleaved between them, like two all-beef patties, were her son, Milo, who was ten, and his cousin Wyatt, who was six. They weren’t really cousins, they were second cousins, or cousins once removed, or something. Wyatt’s mother was Iris, who was actually Frances’s cousin, but it was just easier to call the kids cousins and have done with it. Wyatt reveled in the riches of two mothers—his other one was an actress famous for being America’s Honey. It wasn’t a secret she was gay, it was just that America apparently didn’t give a shit.
Right behind her—where she could reach back and hand them stuff at the traffic lights, which she often did—were her youngest child, Lally, and her neighbor Bill’s son, Lucas, both of whom were four. It was a complicated carpool that had evolved over time. At first the various parents had tried to take turns driving, but as Frances had a kid at every school, it quickly became clear it was just easier if she did it. She preferred it; she was the only parent who wasn’t “working” (let’s not get into the atom splitting of who’s doing more work, stay-at-home parents or not; let’s just agree it’s a shit show for all of us, and move on), so she wasn’t trying to get anywhere herself, and often did the driving in pajamas. She also hated the feeling in the house just after the kids had screamed and yelled their way through getting ready—finding shoes and losing shoes, hunting down books and bags and hats and whatever, all of which they could have gotten ready the night before, not that she was making a point or anything—and had scrambled through the door and down the path to someone else’s car . . . It made her feel like she’d been picked last for a team, or left behind at a train station, or like when she’d come home to an empty house after her own days at school. I want to go, too, her inner child cried, and her outer adult volunteered to do all the driving and everyone was happy.