“Exactly!” said Gwen. “And we just assume she’d automatically be gorgeous, sexy, and slim, a temptation any husband couldn’t resist.”
We sighed, signaling it’s something we’d all thought about at least once.
“Maybe people should take turns,” I ventured, trying not to get too personal. “Like one time they do everything the man likes, and the next time it’s her turn to choose.”
“That is so . . . so Alice!” Pamela exclaimed, laughing. “Gosh, you’re so democratic!”
“Every couple has to work out their own unique way of making love—that’s what I tell my patients,” said Gwen. “And that can be half the fun. You know how the psychologist concluded her lecture? She said that she knows for sure that God is a man, because if God was a woman and wanted her female creations to climax during intercourse, she would have put that little button of pleasure inside the vagina where it would do the most good.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I find it handy right where it is,” said Pamela.
* * *
When school started again, I felt I could not bring myself to leave Patricia Marie. We needed a second income to buy a house, however, but Patrick and I talked it over and decided that was off for now. We missed having a study, but somehow we made do.
It would have been great if Patrick’s grandfather had written his trust so that Patrick got twenty thousand a year until he was twenty-five or even thirty, and then got the whole thing. But obviously his grandfather, like Patrick’s parents, wanted him to make his own way in the world, with just enough money from the trust to keep him from being destitute. And there’s something to be said for that.
Every day with the baby was different; every day a new discovery—the day she discovered her navel, the day she started to sing. I told Marsha Sims that I could not come back to counseling until Patricia was in school. She was more understanding about it than I had imagined, and she worked out an arrangement where I could do counseling one day a week on a consulting basis, keeping up with a few of the students I’d worked with before, and I was willing to entrust my daughter with a sitter for that long.
The first Halloween with Patricia, she wore a little clown costume, and I drove her over to Dad and Sylvia’s so they could make a fuss over her and put candy in her plastic jack-o’-lantern.
When she was two, I found a darling goblin suit and walked her to a few of the neighbors, where she determinedly climbed the steps to each house, pressed the doorbell, then stood dumbfounded when the door opened, forgetting the magic words but usually remembering to say a loud “Tank you” when the candy was dropped in her pumpkin.
When she was three, I pondered the little princess costumes, the cowgirl skirts and boots, and the pink tutu of a ballerina, and asked what she would like to be for Halloween.
“A box,” said Patricia.
I stared at her. “A box?” Could she mean a bat? A boy, even? A fox? “Wouldn’t you like to be a little princess or a ballerina?”
“No,” she said emphatically, and pointed to a cardboard box in a corner.
I couldn’t understand it, and neither could Patrick, but if Patricia Marie wanted to be a box, a box she would be. At the supermart I found one that had held a dozen packages of toilet paper. I cut holes in the bottom, one for each leg, holes in the sides, one for each arm, and a large hole in the top flaps for her head.
On Halloween night she stepped into the leg holes, thrust her arms out through the sides, and then we closed the top flaps where the half holes created a large circle around her neck. While the sidewalk filled with little witches and pirates and Supermen, Patricia Marie awkwardly made her way up the steps and across the porches.
“My goodness, what do we have here?” neighbors remarked thoughtfully as they opened their doors. “And what are you?”
“A box,” Patricia replied, and she took the Milky Way bars or the packages of M&M’s, dropped them through the neck opening of her costume, and listened for the thud as they hit the cardboard bottom. If they fell out the leg holes, I collected them as I followed along.
When the other children’s plastic jack-o’-lanterns were full, their parents told them it was time to go home. For Patricia Marie, however, she was just getting started.
“I want to be a box,” one child complained as Patricia added another Mars bar to her collection. The trick impressed even the older children.
“I bet she gets to stay out all night,” another kid said.
I smiled at my daughter, whose gait was even more awkward with the addition of still more lollipops between her legs. Neither princess nor pirate, she was her own little self, just the kind of daughter I’d hoped to have.
* * *
Two and a half years after Patricia was born, we had Tyler, and if we had felt cramped with Patricia occupying the study, it was really difficult now. Tyler’s crib and changing table took over half the so-called master bedroom. If either of us was foolish enough to get up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, we ran the risk of stepping on Kermit the Frog, and one loud rubbery croak at three in the morning would send the other partner bolting upright, heart pounding.
We decided that it was time to buy a house and settled on an old Victorian on a tree-lined street in Chevy Chase. It was the cheapest in the neighborhood because it needed a lot of work, though basically it was sound. An elderly man had kept it long after his wife had died, and he sold the house “as is.” Patrick and I figured we could do the inside painting and small repairs ourselves and would hire someone to install central air-conditioning when we could afford it.
But the wraparound porch made the peeling paint and missing shutters bearable—a wonderful place for Patricia to play in rainy weather while Tyler, in his playpen, would crow at her antics, and I kept a watchful eye folding laundry at a window. In winter we had our own backyard to cover with snow angels and a door to decorate at Christmas.
One Friday evening it had started to snow just after we put the children to bed, and around eleven, when I looked out, I saw that it had snowed three inches, then stopped. The moon was big and yellow, and the branches on the maple in the front yard were still. I stepped out on the porch to find that it was a perfectly lovely night, mild for winter, just cold enough to snow. I went back inside.
“Patrick!” I said. “Let’s take the kids for a sled ride.”
He paused with the apple he was eating. “They’re in bed.”
“Let’s get them up and take Tyler on his first sled ride.”
Patrick started to protest, then his eyelids crinkled into a smile. He woke Tyler and zipped him up in his snowsuit, and I woke Patricia.
“Sweetheart,” I said, “this is a secret. We’re going on a midnight sled ride.” Patricia rubbed her eyes and stared up at me, her hair dangling in front of her face. She simply watched sleepy-eyed as I pulled on her heavy pants over her pajamas, then her boots and cap, and tied a scarf around her neck.
Patrick and I hastily dressed, and then we were all out in the front yard in the big silent night with the cold moon looking down on us. Patrick got the sled from the garage, and Patricia Marie climbed on. We put nine-month-old Tyler between her legs, and she folded her arms around him as we started off down the street.
“Is it still a secret?” she whispered hoarsely, her eyes wide.
“Yes,” I whispered back, “because no one knows we’re out here. We’re the first ones to make tracks in the snow. The very first. Everyone else is asleep.”
“Everyone else is sane and sensible,” Patrick put in, laughing.
“And it’s just us and the snow?” said Patricia.
“Yes,” I said. “Just us and the snow.”
When we took them back a half hour later, their cheeks were a bright pink, but no one complained, no one whimpered. I made hot cocoa for Patricia Marie, and we gave the baby a few sips.
“That was the best night I ever had,” Patricia told us.
“One of the best,” I agreed, and gave Patric
k a kiss.
* * *
Tyler turned out to be as different from Patricia as salt from pepper. He was quiet, thoughtful, and dreamy, while Patricia was stubborn, outgoing, and vivacious.
“How can they be so different, when we’re raising them exactly the same?” Patrick said to me one morning.
But they each had their own set of genes, their own rank within our family. I wrote little stories for each of them, and each was the main character in his own drama. Patricia liked stories where she was the heroine venturing out in dangerous territory, while Tyler preferred gentle stories of animals befriended.
Patrick reveled in both of our kids. His favorite activity was to stretch out on the floor on his stomach after dinner and let them maul him, roll him over on his back, pull at his hair, try to lift his legs, and shriek when he’d grab them.
The most wonderful thing about children is that, with you, they are experiencing something for the very first time. The waves at the ocean that chase them screaming up the beach and send them padding back down to be chased again. The little holes in the sand where the sand crabs hide. The holes to be dug that mysteriously fill up with water.
I loved taking the children to an apple orchard, where Patrick picked the apples too high for us to reach, and the children ran from tree to tree, astounded at all the apples at their feet, showing each one to me to exclaim over and declare, “Perfect!”
“October has got to be my favorite month,” I said to Patrick as we watched the kids examine a wormhole in a Stayman. “I’m going to remember this day forever.”
Elizabeth had become pregnant again almost immediately with her second child, another girl. But she chose to keep teaching, and her mother took care of the children while she worked. Moe and Patrick hit it off, so we often got together on weekends and took the kids to a park or the zoo. If life ever seemed idyllic and serene, those were the years.
The main problem in our lives was the balancing of time—work and play, spouses and children, parents, friends, house, yard. . . .
“I can’t even find time to get a haircut!” I complained to Elizabeth after I’d picked up Patricia and Janine from their soccer game, and our four children were playing in her backyard. “The bathrooms need painting, Dad’s birthday is coming up and I don’t have his present yet; Sylvia’s having a knee operation and I want to take them some meals next week. Life is crazy!”
“Tell me about it,” Elizabeth said dryly. “I haven’t even had a chance to shave my legs!” She was wearing her dark hair in a French braid that looked glorious on her, but I was surprised—startled, in fact—when I noticed a couple of silver hairs in back. Gray hair! In our thirties! One of us was actually starting to go gray!
“Your life is just as hectic, huh?” I said, still obsessed with her hair.
She gave me a little smile. “And I’m pregnant again.”
“Really?”
“I just found out. This is absolutely, positively the last child. Moe wants to have six, so I told him if he wants to carry the babies and do the deliveries, that’s fine with me.” I’ll say this for Elizabeth: Marriage made her feisty.
* * *
When Tyler was two and a half, I took him to our pediatrician for a three-week check following a urinary tract infection and some pain in one ear. But now, as far as I could tell, both had cleared up.
“How you doin’ there, soldier?” Dr. Freeman said when he came in the room. “Got any more pain, buddy?”
Tyler solemnly shook his head.
“Can I peek in your ear?”
“I guess so,” Tyler said, and continued to sit stoop-shouldered on the examining table.
Dr. Freeman always stood to one side, I noticed, away from Tyler’s feet whenever he shone the light in his ears, having discovered long ago that a child in pain is capable of delivering a deadly blow to a doctor’s groin.
“Ear looks fine to me,” the doctor said. “Let’s get another urine specimen to make sure that’s okay, and then you can go home.”
I was angry at myself for not plying Tyler with juice or something before we came. I might have known they’d need another specimen, and getting Tyler to urinate on command was like asking the sky to rain.
“Want a drink from the water cooler?” I asked him as we left the room. He liked to press the little blue handle and watch bubbles rise in the jug. I gave him a small paper cup, which I’d filled. He drank two sips of it and poured the rest out.
“That’s all you want? Oh, it’s so good! Nice and cold!” I said.
He shook his head, so I guided him into the restroom.
“We need you to pee in this little cup so the doctor can check it out,” I said.
“I don’t have to go,” said Tyler.
“I know, but he only needs a bit. Just a teeny . . . tiny . . . bit.” I lowered Tyler’s little jeans and underpants and held the cup below his penis.
Tyler looked idly around the restroom and ran one finger through a drop of water on the edge of the sink.
“Try to pee, Tyler.”
“I can’t.”
I turned on one of the faucets so he might emulate the sound of running water. The minutes ticked by. I tried to think if I knew any songs about water. “Swanee River” was the only thing that came to mind, besides “Old Man River.” I didn’t think either would help.
“One little, two little, three little raindrops; four little, five little, six little raindrops . . . ,” I chanted in a singsong voice, totally off-key, of course.
Tyler frowned at me. “That’s not right. They’re supposed to be Indians.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well, this little Indian better be careful, because they’re paddling a canoe that’s coming to this big waterfall—water coming down everywhere—sloshity, sloopity . . .”
Tyler continued frowning. Someone tapped on the door.
“We’re just leaving,” I called, and pulled up Tyler’s pants.
We went back out in the waiting room and watched the other children building something out of Tinkertoys in one corner. I gave Tyler another cup of water to drink. He drank about half. I looked at my watch.
“Tyler, I need to get home. Patricia’s at a neighbor’s, and I have to pick her up.” I took him into the restroom again when it was vacant and once again lowered his pants.
“Don’t look,” Tyler said.
“I won’t.” I turned away. But after waiting thirty seconds, I turned back and Tyler was impishly running a bar of soap along the edge of the sink.
“Tyler,” I pleaded, “please try to pee. Just a little bit. Patricia’s waiting for us, and there’s an ice-cream bar in the freezer waiting for you.”
Tyler tucked his head to the left and continued rubbing the soap.
“Please?”
“Go away and I will,” he said.
“Really? If I leave the room, will you pee in the cup?”
He nodded.
“All right. And then be very, very careful. Don’t spill any of it, okay?” I handed him the cup and left the room, then stood just outside the door. Minutes went by.
“Tyler?” I called softly. “Are you ready? Did you do it?”
“Almost,” came the reply.
Finally, “Ready!”
I went inside, and miraculously, there was a small amount of urine in the cup, a few tablespoons, perhaps. I helped him pull up his pants, then carried the sacred specimen to the lab technician.
“Please tell me this is enough,” I begged. “We’ll be here till midnight.”
She smiled and looked at it skeptically. Then, “I think it will do,” she said. “Have a nice afternoon, Mrs. Long.”
“Can I have my ice cream?” Tyler asked as we walked to the car.
“Indeed you may, the minute we get home. Thank you, Tyler. That was a big help.”
I had barely pried Patricia away from her play with a neighbor and walked back in our house when the phone rang and I answered. It was the pediatric office.
“
Mrs. Long, the doctor wants to know if you could bring Tyler right back? His urine specimen was a little unusual, and he’d like to talk with you.”
I felt the blood draining from my face, my chest tightening. “W-What does he suspect?” I asked, barely audible.
“I think he just has some questions, but he wants to see both you and Tyler. Could you come?”
“All right,” I said. “We’ll be right there.”
I let Tyler eat his ice-cream bar on the way, Patricia assigned the job of wiping his hands and face when he had finished. I tried to drive extra carefully because I knew my mind wasn’t completely engaged in what I was doing. What could a urine specimen show? I thought of my mother. Leukemia? Sepsis? Kidney failure?
“Why do we have to go back?” Tyler complained when we parked.
“Honey, the doctor forgot something and he wants to see you again,” I said. “I’m sorry. Patricia, do you want to bring your book with you?” Reluctantly, the children followed me inside.
In the doctor’s office Tyler sensed my worry.
“Why does the doctor have to see me? Do I have to pee again?” he asked.
“You might.”
“Is he mad?”
“Mad at you? Of course not. Why would he be mad?” I asked, putting one arm around my little boy, who might have only a few more years to live.
“Mommy . . .” Tyler looked up at me. “I ax-i-dentally got some spit in it,” he said.
I stared down at him. As gently as possible, I said, “You spit in the cup?” I could imagine it now. A little boy impatient to get home, figuring that one body fluid was as good as another.
The doctor stepped into the waiting room, and I realized we were the last patients of the day.
“Dr. Freeman, he spit in it,” I said. “He just told me.”
The doctor stared at Tyler, who had his head buried against my arm, and suddenly he began to laugh. “That explains everything,” he said. “There were things in that urine that never should be, but I’ll give Tyler an A plus for creativity.”
Dinner was late and no one cared, Patrick as relieved as I was. It seemed like such a small thing to happen now that we knew Tyler had been spared the unimaginable, whatever that might have been, but that I had imagined anyway.