Other People's Houses(82)
“Yeah, but nobody thought this neighbor was, either.” She stood to go empty her cup. “Do you and Carol fight a lot?”
“Of course. Everyone fights. But mostly we talk about the kids, or about moving back to the States, or about what’s for dinner. We’re sort of in a holding pattern right now, I don’t know.”
“Why don’t marriages just wheel along on their own? Once you’ve given them a good push at the beginning they should just keep trundling along.”
She could hear a shrug in her brother’s voice, and got a mental image of his tall frame, his angular face, and missed him. “If the path was always smooth then maybe they would, but, if we can stretch this metaphor too far, it isn’t smooth and all those bumps slow it down and send it off course. I think of it more like one of those old-fashioned hoops you see in Victorian illustrations, you know?”
“The ones with the stick?”
“Yeah. You have to keep it going by poking and prodding, and marriage is like that, maybe. Basically wheeling along, but needing a poke from time to time.”
“You need a poke.”
He laughed. “That’s a true story. OK, I gotta go.” The noise in the background had changed to the dull roar of actual warfare. “Someone’s crying and I’m not sure who.”
“Got it. Talk soon?”
“Yeah. Love to Sara and hug Wyatt, OK? Stop fighting and sort your shit out.”
“You sort your own shit out.”
“OK, babe.”
He hung up. Iris thought about him, about his wedding, about her other brothers, about her father and now her mother, all alone. Then she got up and went to find Sara and sort out her shit.
Thirty-five.
After dropping all the kids at school Frances had a high school committee thing to go to. She found herself wondering about the future. Next year Lally would be in kindergarten. Maybe it was time to get a job outside the family. It would be nice to bring in extra money, but she knew—because she wasn’t an idiot—that she would just be adding to all the shit she had to do, because everyone knows the division of labor between couples isn’t equal. She daydreamed a meeting between herself and Michael where they shared out the domestic duties, carefully writing them all on a whiteboard.
“Pet care?” she said in her daydream, holding a green marker.
“What’s involved with that?” Michael asked, looking up from his increasingly long list. His pencil wavered; he liked pets, this might be one for him.
“Feeding, walking, pee/poo/vomit clean up, minor first aid, flea medication and deworming, vet visit scheduling and attending, and anything else that comes up.”
He was shaking his head. “Nah, that sounds more like a you kind of thing. What else you got?”
“Laundry?”
“What goes with that?”
“Well, you pick up all the clothes on the floor and sniff them to see if they’re clean. Then you wash them, dry them, fold them, and either leave them in a giant pile somewhere to be rummaged through, or you carefully put Lally’s away and deliver Milo’s and Ava’s to their rooms, telling them to put them away themselves, only to discover them lying on the floor the next day, unworn. And you spend time pairing socks, time that could easily be spent doing pretty much anything else. Plus, every so often, you have to field the desperately delivered comment that ‘nothing is clean in this house’ or hunt through the dirty laundry for some particular piece of clothing a child wants.” She remembered something else. “Of course, soccer uniforms are bundled in there, too. I like to do that at nine o’clock on Friday evening in a panic, but you can do it on a Sunday morning and feel smug if you like.”
And then, when the meeting was over, she’d drop a folder the size of Poughkeepsie on the desk in front of him. “What’s this,” he would ask and she would reply, “It’s the contents of my head from the last fourteen years of taking care of everything.”
She found a parking space and sat there smiling for a moment. Then she sighed, rolled some “calming” essential oils on her wrists, ineffectively, and headed into the café.
* * *
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Like childbirth, volunteering to organize a school event was way more painful than you expected it to be, but the minute the event was over you forgot how awful it was. It’s the only possible explanation for why those lovely but exhausted women do it every year. This year Frances had decided to join the Parents Spring Fling Committee at Ava’s school. The Spring Fling was the school’s major fund-raiser. It had a theme, a silent auction, a raffle, and a tendency to produce the kind of drunken behavior that kept the school gate gossips warm for the rest of the year. Three minutes into the meeting Frances was already kicking herself, and it hadn’t even officially begun.
Sitting in a coffee shop, around the large central table, were a half dozen women who mostly wished they were somewhere else. Frances knew only one of them, and had already forgotten the names of the others.
One of them was clearly new to this game because she was talking about her daughter. Rule number one when meeting school parents you don’t know? Never talk about your child. Think about Fight Club, and double down. Whatever you say will get back to the other kids and be spread around school in no time. One time Frances had mentioned Ava was getting braces and by the time Ava got home that same day everyone in her class had asked her what color bands she was going to put on.