Learning to Swim(6)

“Unfortunately for you,” Barbie said, “Alice is not your mother. I am. And I said no.”

I should've never brought up Alice. I should've known that my mother would take it as a dare, like “I dare you to be as nice and understanding as Alice.” Barbie hated dares. She always said that as far as she was concerned, dares were just thinly veiled threats. Although I wasn't exactly sure what she meant by that analogy.

All of a sudden, I felt this pain in my throat, like a welling of anxiety. Now I wanted those swim lessons more than I'd wanted anything in my life. I could not bear the thought of not taking those lessons. Comebacks circled through my head, like “You're everything I don't want to be!” (Used before.) Or a simple “You're right, that is unfortunate!” (i.e., I wish you weren't my mom). Or the immature “I don't care what you think, I'm going to do it anyway!” But I never had a chance to say any of the above-mentioned retorts because we were being serenaded by Beethoven's “Für Elise.”

“Your phone is ringing,” I said.

Barbie looked irritated, as if I had conjured up this interruption in an effort to throw her off course. She grabbed her phone out of her purse and checked the number. I could tell it was a number she didn't recognize because she gave a little shrug before answering it. “Hello?”


And suddenly her whole face changed. It went from hard and kind of mean-looking to soft and flirty. “Heeeeey. How are you?” she said into the phone. And then she let out this sexy squeal of delight.

“I'll be right back,” she mouthed to me, flashing me a little smile, as if instead of being on the edge of a gigantic war, we had been talking about the weather.

Left alone in the kitchen with a lukewarm dish of Cheesy Nacho Hamburger Helper, I felt a pit form in the base of my stomach.

Stage two: the forbidden phone call.

And just like that, everything changed.

Suddenly, I was reliving our swimming argument fondly, as if it was at least a remnant of normality. A mother-daughter squabble not unlike the other mother-daughter squabbles occurring over plates of Cheesy Nacho Hamburger Helper across the country. If I was correct (and I was ninety-nine percent sure I was) and this was a forbidden phone call, the lack of swimming lessons was going to be the least of my problems. But there was nothing I could do except fasten my seat belt and hunker down for Ludwig's wild ride.

“Who was that?” I asked as my mother walked back into the room with a big plastic smile plastered on her face.

“Oh, that was Mr. Warzog,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “I'm sorry, sweet cheeks, but it looks like I need to go in to work tonight.”

I found her statement offensive on several different fronts. For one, she never called me sweet cheeks. For two, she was assuming that I was so na?ve I might actually believe that she would get all excited and turn beet red just because the man I affectionately referred to as Warthog (who bore a remarkable resemblance to the Pillsbury Doughboy) had called her. For three, we were supposed to drink a liter of Diet Dr Pepper and play a rousing game of Balderdash that night (note the irony of board-game choice).

“Why?” I asked.

“I don't know why,” she said, still not looking at me. She stood up and grabbed her plate. “Someone probably called in sick.”

“Who?”

“I don't know,” she said. And then she looked at me. “I'm sorry,” she said, softening a bit. “Look, about the swimming lessons. Let's talk about it later, okay?”

She was obviously desperate to pacify me in an attempt to avoid an altercation. Normally she never would have backed away from an argument, or even entertained the possibility of reversing a decision on one of her core idiosyncrasies, like something relating to bodies of water.

“If you want,” she said cheerfully, “I can drop you off at Alice's.”

Considering how much Barbie disliked my hanging out with Alice, I was now one hundred percent certain my mom was about to relapse into love lunacy. And so I took a deep breath, looked her directly in the eyes, and said, “Thanks.”





3


According to Alice, there was one thing in the world that was a tonic for all that ailed it: lists. It was something a girl in middle school would believe, but again, that's what made her so fun. On her refrigerator were a list of groceries she needed to get, a list of movies she wanted to see, a list of books she had to read, and a list of the hottest male actors of all time (for the record, Alice was obsessed with Keanu Reeves). She was so certain of the benefits of making lists that when I arrived at her house so angry at my mother that I was practically spewing lava, the first thing Alice did was yank out her notebook and pen. The second thing she did was fill the baby pool up with her garden hose.

I plopped down in the white plastic lawn chair and stuck my feet in the water to cool down as Alice wrote:

Proof that Barbie is on an illicit date.



Proof that Barbie is not on an illicit date.





A half hour later we were still sitting in Alice's backyard. We had a laundry list of reasons as to why I was so certain that Barbie was about to ruin my life, and absolutely no reasons as to why this whole thing might just be a not-so-silly misunderstanding.

“Oh!” Alice said excitedly. “I have one.”