She punches the tooth back into place with a red-polished fingernail. “It doesn’t even hurt when I do that tooth thing. I like to stick my tongue up in the top.” Which is exactly what she does next.
“Stop, Maddie.”
“You know how there’s like the top of your teeth? And you can stick your tongue in the top and wiggle it around?”
“Kind of.”
“Well, I like to stick my tongue in there and make like buck teeth.”
“Terrific. Just do it with your tongue, not your finger, okay? And don’t show it to me or I’ll barf.”
“Why can’t I use my finger? It works better.”
“You’ll give yourself an infection.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Fine. Don’t blame me when your mouth explodes.”
She giggles.
“You think that’s funny?”
She nods and giggles again, so I reach under the covers and tickle her under her nightgown. “No. No tickling!” she says.
“But you love to be tickled.”
“No, I hate it. Madeline likes it. You can tickle her.” She fishes under the thin blanket and locates her Madeline doll, which she shoves at my chest. “Tickle her.”
I look down at the soft rag doll with its wide-brimmed yellow felt hat. Madeline has a face like a dinner plate, with wide-set black dots for eyes and a smile stitched in bumpy red thread. Her orange yarn hair is the same color as Maddie’s, but we didn’t name Maddie after the Ludwig Bemelmans books, we named her after Sam’s grandmother. When I gave Maddie the doll at age three, they became inseparable. “You really do look like Madeline, you know?” I say. “Except for the hat.”
“No, I don’t. She looks like me. I look like myself.”
I laugh. “You’re right.” I lean over and give her a quick kiss. Her breath smells of peanut butter. “Did you brush?” I ask, second-rate sleuth that I am.
“I don’t have to brush if I don’t want to.”
“Oh, really? Who said?”
“Daddy. He told me it was
“Don’t be fresh.”
“Don’t be fresh. Don’t be fresh. Daddy says you can break the rules sometimes.”
“Oh, he does, does he?” Easy for Sam to say. After his highly suspect charitable deductions, fidelity was the second rule he broke. Sam is a high-powered lawyer who lost interest in me at about the same time I became a mother and quit being a high-powered lawyer myself; ironically, I thought that was just when I was getting interesting.
“Gretchen says that if your tooth comes out too soon, you have to wait a long time for a new tooth to grow.” She twists a hank of Madeline’s yarn hair around her finger.
“Is Gretchen a girl in your class?”
“Gretchen knows about bugs and gerbils. She knows about why it’s a hamster and not a gerbil. She has three teeth out. Madeline likes her.”
“Then she must be nice.”
“She is. She has long hair, really long. Down to here.” She makes a chop at her upper arm. “She wears a jumper.”
Like Madeline. “Do you eat lunch with her?”
“Sometimes. Not usually. Usually I’m alone.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know that much people, so nobody ever sits next to me.”
I try to remember what I read in that parenting book. Talk so your kid will listen, listen so your kid will talk; it’s catchy, but it means nothing. “What can we do about that?”
“I don’t know.” She shrugs.
I forget what the book says to do when they shrug. “Would you like to have Gretchen over? Maybe one of the days I’m off from work?”
“She won’t come.”
“You don’t know that unless you ask.”
“But I don’t know her exactly as a best friend, okay?”
“But, honey, that’s how you get to know someone.”
“Mom, I already told you!” She turns away.
I am at a loss. There is no chapter on your child having no friends. I even spied on her at recess last month after I went food shopping. The other first graders swung from monkey bars and chased each other; Maddie played by herself, digging with a stick in the hard dirt. Her Madeline doll was propped up against a nearby tree. I found myself thinking, If she’s digging a grave for the doll, I’m phoning a shrink. Instead I telephoned her teacher that night.
“She’ll be fine,” she said. “Give her time.”
“But it’s March already. I’m doing everything I can. I help out in the classroom. I did the plant sale and the bake sale.”
“Have you set up any play dates for her?”
“Every time I suggest that, she bursts into tears.”
“Keep at it.”
“But isn’t there anything else I can do?”
“Let it run its course. She’s on the young side.”
“But she was fine last year, in kindergarten. She was even younger.”
“Weren’t you home then?”
Ouch. Then my alimony ran out and almost all my savings; with child support, I can swing part-time. “Yes, I only work three days a week, and she has her grandmother in the afternoon. It’s not like she’s with a stranger.”
“She’s just having some trouble with the adjustment.”
Well,
But I didn’t say it.
Bernice’s ears prick up at the sound of a soft knock at the front door and she takes off, barking away, back paws skidding on the hardwood floor. In a minute, there’s the chatter of a key in the lock; it has to be Ricki Steinmetz, my best friend. She’s the only one with a key besides my mother.
“Rick, wait!” I shout, but it’s too late.
The door swings open and Bernice bounds onto Ricki’s shoulders. “
“Bernice, no!” I yank the dog from Ricki’s beige linen suit, leaving distinct rake marks in the shoulder pads, and hustle Ricki and Bernice inside before my neighbors call the landlord.
“Is that a
I hold a finger to my lips and listen upstairs to hear if Bernice’s barking woke Maddie. Ricki understands and shuts up, her mouth setting into a disapproving dash of burgundy lipstick. There’s no sound from Maddie’s room. Bernice chuffs loudly on Ricki’s cordovan mules.
Ricki gasps. “Did you see that? She threw up on my shoes!”
“She just sneezed.”
“These are Joan and David!”
“Come in the kitchen, would you?” I take Bernice by the collar and walk her like Quasimodo into the kitchen. “What are you doing here? It’s almost nine o’clock.”
Ricki snatches a paper napkin from the holder on the dining room table and follows me into the kitchen. “Didn’t your mother tell you I called? I wanted to come over and see how you were, after what happened,” she