added, “I’ll let you go. Nice to see you, Alice.”
When she was gone, I realized that the car in front of me was the Volvo of Beverly Heit, whose son was a year ahead of Ella. (I’d heard that the teachers at Biddle called the parents the Volvo Mafia, a nick-name in which I personally was complicit. More than once, though, I’d felt the urge, never acted on, to say to Ella’s teachers,
) I honked very lightly, and when I could tell Beverly was looking at me in the rearview mirror, I waved. Beverly waved back, then held up her wrist, tapping her watch:
I nodded:
As a product of public school, and as a former employee at two of them, I had initially felt a slight resistance to enrolling Ella at Biddle. It wasn’t that Charlie and I debated it, because we didn’t. Biddle, which started with a prekindergarten Montessori and ran through the twelfth grade, was where all of Ella’s cousins either went or had gone, where Charlie’s brother John was head of the board of trustees, where Charlie had attended second through eighth grade and Jadey had graduated from in 1967. (Until 1975, the boys’ and girls’ divisions of the school had been on opposite sides of the campus, now divided between the lower and upper schools.) Even though the public schools in Maronee were extremely well funded, and a far cry from those in the city of Milwaukee, Ella’s attendance at Biddle had been a foregone conclusion. Still, I had wondered if the students would be snobby, if the teachers would be overly pleased with themselves. As it turned out, I fell in love with Biddle’s white-wood lower school building with the colonnade in front, with its traditions—in third grade, everyone had a Japanese pen pal (Ella’s was named Kioko Akatsu), and in fourth grade, all the students, including the boys, cross-stitched a bookmark—and with its quietly hippieish leanings: The songs Ella learned in music class and came home singing were “If I Had a Hammer” and “One Tin Soldier” and “Imagine.” I could see how not having to follow a curriculum determined by the state allowed the teachers to be more creative, and I was especially looking forward to when Ella would be in fifth grade, and as part of a unit on colonial America, her class would get to dress up, the boys in tricorn hats and jabots and knickers, the girls in dresses that came with aprons and bonnets, and they’d all prepare a feast of stewed corn and apple cider and venison shot by someone’s father.
It was another five minutes before my car reached the entrance of the lower school, and as soon as it did, Ella flew into the front seat, her purple backpack falling off one shoulder, a bunch of loose papers in her hand; she thrust them at me before she’d closed her door. “You have to sign the permission slip saying I can go on the Slip ’n Slide even though the party’s at our house,” she said.
“I
to?” I repeated.
She turned and smiled at me—Ella had, without question, the best smile of anyone I had ever known, so lively and mischievous and affectionate—and she said, “I meant, will you please, pretty please, my pretty Mother? Did you bring me graham crackers?” Already, she had found the box between our two seats, and she opened it and began chomping, spilling crumbs down the front of her shirt.
was a new and ironic term for Ella, not that my nine-year-old daughter had the slightest idea what irony was. But calling me Mother instead of Mommy was something she’d borrowed from her friend Christine, who had worldly and irreverent older sisters. While I wasn’t crazy about it, I found it preferable to Ella calling Charlie and me by our first names, which she’d done for a brief time when she was about four, apparently having picked up on the way we addressed each other.
“Can I change the station?” she said, and before I could respond, she’d leaned forward and was twisting the radio dial from NPR to 101.8 FM, causing Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name” to erupt into the car. Ella sang loudly along with the chorus: “ ‘Shot through the heart / And you’re to blame . . . ’ ”
Oh, my daughter, my noisy, happy, strong-willed, irrepressible only child—I adored her. One of the things I had not anticipated about motherhood was how entertaining it would be. I’d known from my experience as a librarian that children were often amusing, sometimes outrageously so, but it was different, it was far more fun, when the amusing child was mine, when I spent hours and hours with her on a daily basis, knew her every expression and intonation, each appetite and anxiety and enthusiasm. Her current obsessions included stickers, hopscotch, nail polish (her Aunt Jadey had a much larger supply than I did), Nutter Butter cookies, and Uno, and her fondest wishes were to acquire a Pekingese, which was out of the question because she was allergic to dogs, and to see the movie
which I had told her I wouldn’t allow until she was in seventh grade because it was rated R.
Not infrequently, I was struck by how savvy Ella was, how much more pop-culturally aware than I had been at her age: She had requested a Jane Fonda exercise tape for Christmas (we hadn’t given it to her because I didn’t want her to become preoccupied with her weight—besides, she already played soccer, squash, and softball); she had encouraged me to “crimp” my hair, saying it would “jazz up” my appearance; and she had asked us at dinner the previous week if it was possible to get AIDS from a toilet seat. Charlie had said, “Not unless you’re using the bathroom at Billy Torks’s house.” This was a reference to Jadey’s interior-designer friend, whom Charlie had met only a few times. I’d shot Charlie a look and said to Ella, “You can’t, but you still should put toilet paper down before you go, because of other germs.”
In the car, Ella and Bon Jovi were still singing, and I said, “Ladybug, turn it down a bit.”
She leaned in, her long light brown hair falling forward. Of course my daughter had long hair, coming halfway down her back—I’d been wrong about the one maternal restriction I was sure I’d impose, and even as a very little girl, Ella had protested vehemently when I cut off over an inch or two. Although I’d spent more hours than I cared to think about untangling knots (and once removing grape-flavored gum), I recognized that Ella was very pretty: Along with my blue eyes, she had a dainty upturned nose sprinkled with golden freckles. I was relieved that so far, she appeared largely unaware of her prettiness. When she’d resisted my attempts to cut her hair, it had seemed more an assertion of free will than an act of vanity.
I knew that Ella was a little spoiled, and possibly more than a little. I suppose part of why I wasn’t good at saying no to her was that she’d inherited her father’s cajoling personality, but another part of it was that we hadn’t succeeded in having more children; I’d never been able to get pregnant after her. We’d considered fertility drugs or IVF—this was in the early days of the procedure—but I was wary, concluding that if my body was rejecting
