“What’s involved with that?” Michael asked, looking up from his increasingly long list. His pencil wavered; he liked pets, this might be one for him.
“Feeding, walking, pee/poo/vomit clean up, minor first aid, flea medication and deworming, vet visit scheduling and attending, and anything else that comes up.”
He was shaking his head. “Nah, that sounds more like a you kind of thing. What else you got?”
“Laundry?”
“What goes with that?”
“Well, you pick up all the clothes on the floor and sniff them to see if they’re clean. Then you wash them, dry them, fold them, and either leave them in a giant pile somewhere to be rummaged through, or you carefully put Lally’s away and deliver Milo’s and Ava’s to their rooms, telling them to put them away themselves, only to discover them lying on the floor the next day, unworn. And you spend time pairing socks, time that could easily be spent doing pretty much anything else. Plus, every so often, you have to field the desperately delivered comment that ‘nothing is clean in this house’ or hunt through the dirty laundry for some particular piece of clothing a child wants.” She remembered something else. “Of course, soccer uniforms are bundled in there, too. I like to do that at nine o’clock on Friday evening in a panic, but you can do it on a Sunday morning and feel smug if you like.”
And then, when the meeting was over, she’d drop a folder the size of Poughkeepsie on the desk in front of him. “What’s this,” he would ask and she would reply, “It’s the contents of my head from the last fourteen years of taking care of everything.”
She found a parking space and sat there smiling for a moment. Then she sighed, rolled some “calming” essential oils on her wrists, ineffectively, and headed into the café.
• • •
Like childbirth, volunteering to organize a school event was way more painful than you expected it to be, but the minute the event was over you forgot how awful it was. It’s the only possible explanation for why those lovely but exhausted women do it every year. This year Frances had decided to join the Parents Spring Fling Committee at Ava’s school. The Spring Fling was the school’s major fund-raiser. It had a theme, a silent auction, a raffle, and a tendency to produce the kind of drunken behavior that kept the school gate gossips warm for the rest of the year. Three minutes into the meeting Frances was already kicking herself, and it hadn’t even officially begun.
Sitting in a coffee shop, around the large central table, were a half dozen women who mostly wished they were somewhere else. Frances knew only one of them, and had already forgotten the names of the others.
One of them was clearly new to this game because she was talking about her daughter. Rule number one when meeting school parents you don’t know? Never talk about your child. Think about Fight Club, and double down. Whatever you say will get back to the other kids and be spread around school in no time. One time Frances had mentioned Ava was getting braces and by the time Ava got home that same day everyone in her class had asked her what color bands she was going to put on.
“Why do they even care?” Frances had asked, bemused.
“I don’t know! But why did you tell them?!” Ava had been deeply annoyed and went on and on about feeling violated until Frances had had to drift off into her mental happy place just to survive. In her happy place there was a gentle hum of bees and birdsong, and no one Ever Said Anything. But anyway.
“So,” this mother said, innocently enough, “Flora-Grace just got shortlisted for the art museum’s painting contest, isn’t that fun?”
A tall blond mom turned to another and said, “Didn’t Butterfly Absinthe win that last year?”
“Yes,” her crony replied, “I think she did. It was before the drug thing, of course.” She turned to the innocent mom. “Does your daughter know Anglepoise Whateverthefuck? In eigth grade?” The innocent one, slowly realizing she had transgressed in some way she didn’t really understand, shook her head. “Well,” continued the other mom, “I think she got shortlisted, too, and she’s super, super talented. We should introduce the two of them.”
“We should!” said the tall blonde. “I’m sure they’d have a lot to talk about!” Having taken ownership of this topic, she then turned to Frances. “So, how’s Ava enjoying eighth grade? I hear she’s doing much better.”
Fortunately for Frances, this was not her first rodeo, so she merely smiled and nodded. The best defense against aggressively competitive parents is a simple one: silence. Followed by a definitive changing of the subject. To whit:
“So, the Fling . . . What’s the theme this year?”
“Well,” said the tall blonde, pulling out a stack of glossy magazines. “I was thinking classic seventies spank rags. Winged hair, split beavers, and a disturbing amount of pubic hair compared to today’s sanitized Internet porn.”
“Great idea!” said the woman next to her. “And we could have an S&M raffle to bring in the Fifty Shades folks! Maybe we can get a ball gag in school colors?”
None of this happened, of course, but imagining it kept Frances sane throughout the rest of the meeting, and she managed to get out without volunteering for anything more onerous than coat check.
After that she had to pick up medication for one of the dogs, who had developed a skin condition only slightly more expensive to treat than the aforementioned braces had been, and go to Staples for printer paper. She came out with the paper, a blank composition book with kittens on the front (Lally), a pack of monster pencil toppers in a variety of colors (Milo), and several “to do” list pads with humorous headlines (Ava). She forgot the ink toner cartridge she also needed, and had to go back, of course.
