When the door slams shut I pour the buttermilk batter down the sink and run cold water to dilute it. Cammy shuffles in rubbing her eyes, smudging the leftover makeup she never takes off before bed. The cabinets bang open and closed. The jars and bottles on the door of the fridge clatter when she pushes it shut with her foot, balancing milk in one hand, a bowl of cereal in the other.
“It smells like pancakes in here,” she says. She shimmies onto a high counter stool and hunches over the bowl, shoveling food into her mouth while she stares at the cartoon riddles on the back of the box, tipping it back to read the upside-down answers at the bottom.
Cammy’s most beautiful in the morning, still soft from sleep. Her skin is olive-colored and gets deeper, more Mediterranean looking, in summer. It’s flawless. She is petite with bird wrists and a graceful neck. Bee-stung lips. Large brown eyes. Her natural hair color was a deep rich brown before she dyed it. It looked like a caramel apple. Wavy and thick with bangs she used to trim so they didn’t catch on her eyelashes like they do now. She looks younger than sixteen. Until she layers on makeup that’s more like face paint. Hard teenage edges build up when she gets dressed. Her black clothes look like Halloween costumes.
She finishes her cereal and, climbing down from her stool, she almost trips, milk almost spills. She is all limbs, lanky, knobby knees, flat chest, unsure of where her arms and hands should go when she’s standing. Her lashes curl and her teeth are straight without having had braces. Now in the grip of the rebellious stage, she is fighting anything attractive about herself. She shrinks if she thinks someone’s staring at her and is horrified when someone says, “Wow, Cammy Friedman? I can’t believe it. I haven’t seen you since you were this big. Look at you.”
When Cammy was young she had a natural impulse to hug. Like Jamie now does. When she was a little girl I was still in the habit of crying on Mother’s Day. One year—I can’t remember how old she was—I’d thought Cammy and Bob were down making me breakfast in bed but then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I sniffed back my tears and turned to her, she put her arms around me and patted me on the back saying, It’s okay, Mommy. Then she quietly left me to blow my nose and screw a smile onto my face in preparation for the lumpy pancakes coming up the stairs on a rickety wicker breakfast tray with a handful of wilting dandelions bobbing in a jelly jar.
About a decade later and she flinches at any human contact. When forced into a hug she bends forward so her shoulders and arms are the only things touching, keeping the rest of her body as far away as possible. It annoys Bob but then everything seems to annoy Bob these days.
We see things differently, Bob and I. I look at people’s eyes. Sometimes, not often but sometimes, I’ll catch the eye of a stranger by accident and there’s a feeling of depth or recognition, a strange familiarity like we’re the same breed of dog. Usually it’s people who have the same eyes I do: wide set and round and a shade of dark brown that deepens to match my pupils when I get upset.
But Bob sees everyone as feet. As in, “You mean Eddie with the Hush Puppies?” And I’ll say, “No, Eddie with the penny loafers you think have holes in the soles,” because I speak shoe now too.
To Bob, crowds are simply approaching feet. When he walks down the street he looks down. Nikes. Flip-flops. Manolos. Payless knockoffs. In winter, Uggs and L.L.Bean. When it’s someone in sneakers his eyes follow each step like it’s a beautiful woman he’s checking out but really he’s always watching heel impact. He majored in sports medicine. We had dinner with Mike and Lynn and toasted his new job at Nike and for a while he was bubbling over at the end of every day, telling me about how he was working on things that would make a tremendous difference for the next generation of runners. Somewhere in that first year he stopped bubbling and started drinking. Not too much but just enough to amplify his growing cynicism. Lynn said once that it was weird to see someone in their twenties so jaded, but I got all defensive and she dropped it. She and I both knew she was right, though.
Bob’s business is sport shoes, as they’re called in the industry, but mostly I tell people he designs sneakers. Before he started working at the top sport-shoe company in the world I never knew “shoe architecture” existed. Of course I’d read somewhere about how Nike started with a running coach and a waffle iron, but beyond that I was ignorant of all that went in to building a cross trainer.
The feet in Bob’s world can be divided into two categories: healthy and unhealthy. Healthy means equal wear and tear through from the ball to the heel. Unhealthy is everything else and to Bob most feet are unhealthy. So he speaks in declarations that sound like fortune cookies at a foot-fetish restaurant.
“Whoever thought of taking flip-flops mainstream?” he asked his bewildered dinner partner at a school fund-raiser.
And:
“That guy has no idea that in ten years he’ll be seeing a podiatrist for collapsed arches,” he said to me while we were Christmas shopping at Old Orchard Mall.
And:
“In a perfect world, we’d outlaw high heels and everyone would wear orthotics.”
He said that to the principal at Cammy’s school after a tense meeting in which the headmaster told us she was on probation again. The principal, Mr. Black, looks like the doctors used forceps when he was born. His pinched face matches his prim boarding-school Oliver Twist personality. I can’t stand him mainly because he seems not to be able to stand me. Or my family. Even before Cammy was in trouble, Mr. Black acted like we were a problem. Like we were high maintenance. When Cammy was in first grade we’d gone in to talk to him about moving her to another class with a more patient teacher and he started shaking his head halfway through our request and held up his hand. He said, “It’s a poor sportsman who blames the equipment.” I wanted to wring his neck. We tried talking to him about Cammy’s special needs and he waved us off like it was all bullshit. Bob said, “The kid’s in first grade … what could it matter?” And Mr. Black leaned across his desk and hissed, “Exactly.” Bob said, “No, I mean, what’s the big deal about her going into Miss Landis’s class. We hear she’s great with—” But before Bob could finish, Mr. Black stood and said, “We’ll see what we can do.” We were dismissed. Being new parents we actually thought he’d come through, but now that I know him I know he didn’t give us a second thought. Son of a bitch.
So, years later, Mr. Black was walking us to the front door on his way up to a class he needed to audit and I knew he was trying to mask the click of my shoes in the empty hallway when he halfheartedly asked Bob how work was going. He made me feel embarrassed to have such loud footsteps when they’re just footsteps, for Christ’s sake. Bob had us standing inside the front door for nearly five minutes talking about the latest in heel air cushioning until I saved the impatient principal by taking Bob’s arm and saying, “Honey, we’ve got to get going.” I purposely avoided what I knew would be grateful headmaster eyes because after all he’d just slammed my daughter and anyway he’d always been a son of a bitch. I guess, then, I was saving myself from having to hear Bob’s foot philosophy. Again.
“Jesus Christ, what’re we going to do?” I say on the way to the car. “I swear to God I honestly don’t know what else we can do. We’ve grounded her a million times. I’ve tried to get her to open up to me … she’s just always so angry. Why the hell is she so angry all the time?”
“Allen Edmonds shoes,” Bob says, reaching for the keys he’d given me to hold because he insists they make his gait uneven. Four keys. Like he’s running a marathon at the Olympics.
“The guy’s got good taste in footwear, I’ll give him that,” he says.
“Bob. Focus. What’re we going to do about Cammy?”
“He’s being way too harsh,” he says, starting the car and adjusting the rearview mirror even though he was the one who drove us there. “Probation? For ignoring a teacher?”
“I swear to God I can’t believe it. How’d we get to this? And Bob, she didn’t just ignore Mrs. Cummings. You know that death stare she
gives. That Goth stare is crazy scary. I guarantee you she was clamping her jaw shut and doing that stare. I’d send her to the headmaster, too, if I were her teacher. When that look comes over her it’s like a cloud or something. And that’s not even the issue. She’s been cutting class. She’s smoking on school property. What the hell? I’ve never smelled smoke on her, have you?”
“I think it’s a little much to suspend someone for a death stare,” he says, looking to the right then the left before inching out of the school parking lot. “And kids cut class from time to time. Give her detention, for God’s sake, but suspension?”
Right and left again a second time. You’d think he was pulling onto the Daytona Speedway the way he looks for cars before moving. Like they’re going to whiz at him at triple-digit speeds and send him spinning into the boards.
“He’s not suspending her,” I say. “He’s putting her on probation. You’re fine on this side, by the way.”
“Suspension, probation, same thing. They both look bad on her school file.”
“Exactly my point,” I say. “It’s green, that’s why everyone’s honking.”
“Will you just let me drive?”
“All I’m saying is we’ve got to be a united front when we get home.” I turn in my seat to face him because I can’t bear to watch him drive. He’s terrible behind the wheel and the worst part is he has no idea. Completely clueless. Cars will slow down alongside him, the drivers’ faces gnarled in anger, mouthing swears, but he doesn’t see them.
“What’s the party line?” he asks.
“She’s grounded, for starters. No computer. No cell.”
“How’s she going to call if something gets canceled or she needs to be picked up from somewhere?” he asks.
“What good is taking away the computer if she still has her cell? All she does is text. We’ve got to take it if the grounding’s going to have any impact. Besides, what’s so wrong with her finding a pay phone if there’s an emergency or she needs a ride? I don’t know why you’re worried about that part of it anyway since I’m the one who does all the picking up.”
“What the?”
“When was the last time you picked up Cammy or the boys from anything other than a random weekend soccer game? They’re your kids, too, Bob.”
He looks ahead and I find myself wondering how upset I’d be if he died. I’d be worried about the kids growing up without a father, but me? I don’t know that I’d feel much.
“I think it’s about the adoption,” I say. My stomach twisting up tells me this is not a good time to bring it up, but there’s never a good time to bring it up.
“Oh, my God, so we’re blaming everything that goes wrong on the adoption? Are we going to dredge this up for the rest of our lives? Jesus, let it go.”
“You want to know what I think? I think most of everything that’s gone wrong with her is because of how she found out about the adoption.”
“Oh, please …”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. To tell a little girl the reason why she feels like she looks different from her brothers is because she’s not our ‘real’ child? Honestly? What the hell, Bob. How many years ago was that—ten years? No, eleven. For the last eleven years she’s been feeling like an outcast in her own family.”
“Stop. It’s not like that and you know it,” he says. I feel our speed increasing and we are uncharacteristically in sync with the other cars along Lake Shore Drive.
“Oh, yeah? What’s it like then? Huh? You’re saying you didn’t blurt it out? You’re forgetting that we had a plan … that we were going to talk to her together at an age-appropriate time like the books say? You just plunge in without me and say something without thinking it through and then you scratch your head in amazement like you’re surprised she remembers it word for word after all these years and then you sit here all smug and tell me it wasn’t like that? It was exactly like that, Bob. Exactly.”
Bob slows down and once again cars are swerving around us. A guy in a Prius gives Bob the bird and I wonder whether it’s because we’re the enemy now in our hateful gas-guzzling SUV or that Bob is driving under the speed limit or maybe just maybe he sees me spitting angry words at this man in my car, this man I no longer recognize, and he flips him off for me.
“Things have gotten so out of hand with her,” I say, backing off the adoption subject like I always do. “I don’t even know where to start. I put my finger on one leak and another one spouts.”
“I know,” he says. He’s lying. He doesn’t know. At least not when it comes to the kids, and frankly I’m sick of hearing how awful work is every single day. The boys crave time with him. Lately it’s taken me nagging him to get him to spend any kind of time with them. We ride the rest of the way in silence, which is fine by me.
I look at him and honestly? Honestly I am not in the least bit attracted to him. So that brings me back to my point:
Not one of my friends wants sex. Seriously. Not one. Well, not any of the ones with kids. I look around at other forty-something moms and they fall into two categories. One group has surrendered to the uniform of motherhood: sensible shoes, mom-jeans, sweatshirts, bulky full-length gray Michelin Man parkas in winter, shapeless old T-shirts in summer.
The second group is the pilates group. They’re hot. They wear jeans their daughters covet. They have defined biceps and flat tummys. Oh. And abs. Six-pack abs. Working out is a full-time job for them. It’s like there was a secret memo to do yoga, be in the best shape of their lives and shop in stores that carry tight T-shirts with plunging necklines, but the irony is there’s nowhere to go with it since no one’s having sex. I love a good crisply laundered white shirt, button-down like a man’s but formfitting. My jeans aren’t too tight but they aren’t baggy. My favorite shoes are a pair of old Gucci loafers I splurged on years ago when Bob got a great Christmas bonus. The best buy I’ve ever made: they’re well made so I’ve never had to have them resoled. The leather’s buttery and camel colored. They go with every pair of pants I own. Mostly though I wear skirts. I’ve never understood why more women don’t wear skirts. At school pickup not so long ago, Ann Slevick looked me up and down and said, “You’re always so put together,” and I thanked her but she didn’t smile. So the next day I made a point of wearing my jeans with the holes in them.
Sometimes at night when I’m changing into Gap boxers and an old Mount Rushmore T-shirt with holes and yellowed armpits, I inspect myself in our full-length mirror. I’ve got a decent hairstyle: that shoulder-length layered cut everyone seems to have. I haven’t overcolored it, so the brown looks natural, which is lucky. My ass isn’t so bad. Not for a forty-five-year-old. I’ve seen worse. It’s the front that bugs me. I hate my stomach. Lying down it feels flat if I don’t run my hands along my hips. It actually feels like it used to be before the boys. So all in all I suppose my body hasn’t started the middle-age decline yet, but it’s only because I’m tall and my limbs are long and there’s something deceiving in that. In old class pictures I would be the one standing on the side of the bleachers where all the kids were neatly sitting in rows. Our teacher stood on the other side. I cursed my height and wished I could stop shooting up like the Jolly Green Giant. It felt like a creepy magic trick, the way I grew taller and taller. It felt like Guinness World Records tall. My classmates looked like Lilliputians to me and I hunched over, folding into my chest to try to compensate. Like Cammy, I had knobby knees and clumsy bruises. With no spatial reasoning I found myself cutting the corner into another room, my whole right side hitting the door frame on the way in. I finally stopped growing at five feet nine inches and boys started reaching and then passing me and all was forgiven, but I still have to remind myself to sit up straight.
“Have you guys heard about all these sexless marriages?” I ask my book club. We’ve been together for about five years now. It started with me and Lynn and Ginny from down the street. Ginny’s sweet. Maybe too sweet, but still. She’s thirty, fifteen years younger tha
n me. She and her husband, Don, live in a bright green house everyone calls the Traffic Light. She’s the one I call when I need another set of hands for something around the house. Like hanging the drapes I sewed. She’s always home. While I never set out to, every once in a while I end up talking to her about life and I’m reminded why I like her so much. I think we bonded when she left her job as an investment consultant at a downtown banking firm about four, five years ago. Around that time on a summer night in white wicker chairs on my front porch we talked about what we really wanted out of life. I said I wasn’t sure but I knew it hadn’t happened yet. I remember this: she seemed startled. When she said, “But you have children,” I realized why. I used to think the same way. That life would make sense once we had children. Ginny mentioned she and Don had been trying to have a baby. She talked about finding something else in her life. Something with purpose. Something she could feel proud of. I told her what I wish someone had told me. I told her not to be in such a hurry to have children. I told her sometimes it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. She nodded and sipped her wine. There wasn’t a hint, even a twinge of judgment from her. I knew this was something she’d share with Don in bed that night. “She doesn’t really love her children,” she’d marvel. “I never would’ve guessed it.”
Most people I know think the sun rises and sets on their children. They orbit around them like planets. So it was a big deal to feel open enough with someone other than Lynn about something so personal. I told Lynn we needed to let her into our friendship. She balked at first but after a little while, months maybe, she admitted Ginny’s pretty great.
So book club started with the three of us. Then Ginny asked if she could bring a friend she works out with, Leanne, who is kind of a pain in the ass but I don’t mind her. She’s funny but she doesn’t seem like she has a whole lot of depth. Or intelligence. I’ve always suspected Leanne cracks the bindings on her books to make it look like she’s not only read them, she’s studied them. She might even dog-ear them then flatten out the folded triangles on random pages. Teresa Wdowiak came in along the way—I can’t remember who brought her. Then Sally Flanders cornered Lynn when Lynn was weeding some years ago and asked if our book club was accepting new members and if so could she be one of them. What choice did we have? There’s no stopping Sally Flanders.