ALSO BY ANNA QUINDLEN
Good Dog. Stay
Rise and Shine
Being Perfect
Blessings
A Short Guide to a Happy Life
How Reading Changed My Life
Black and Blue
One True Thing
Object Lessons
Living Out Loud
Thinking Out Loud
BOOKS FOR CHILDREN
Happily Ever After
The Tree That Came to Stay
For my children, who saved my life
There is an evening coming in
Across the fields, one never seen before,
That lights no lamps.
Silken it seems at a distance, yet
When it is drawn up over the knees and breast
It brings no comfort.
Where has the tree gone, that locked
Earth to the sky? What is under my hands,
That I cannot feel?
What loads my hands down?
--PHILIP LARKIN
This is my life: The alarm goes off at five-thirty with the murmuring of a public-radio announcer, telling me that there has been a coup in Chad, a tornado in Texas. My husband stirs briefly next to me, turns over, blinks, and falls back to sleep for another hour. My robe lies at the foot of the bed, printed cotton in the summer, tufted chenille for the cold. The coffeemaker comes on in the kitchen below as I leave the bathroom, go downstairs in bare feet, pause to put away a pair of boots left splayed in the downstairs back hallway and to lift the newspaper from the back step. The umber quarry tiles in the kitchen were a bad choice; they are always cold. I let the dog out of her kennel and put a cup of kibble in her bowl. I hate the early mornings, the suspended animation of the world outside, the veil of black and then the oppressive gray of the horizon along the hills outside the French doors. But it is the only time I can rest without sleeping, think without deciding, speak and hear my own voice. It is the only time I can be alone. Slightly less than an hour each weekday when no one makes demands.
Our bedroom is at the end of the hall, and sometimes as I pass I can hear the children breathing, each of them at rest as specific as they are awake. Alex inhales and exhales methodically, evenly, as though he were deep under the blanket of sleep even though he always kicks his covers askew, leaving one long leg, with its faint surgical scars, exposed to the night air. Across the room Max sputters, mutters, turns, and growls out a series of nonsense syllables. For more than a year, starting when he was eleven, Max had a problem with sleepwalking. I would find him washing his hands at the bathroom sink or down in the kitchen, blinking blindly into the open refrigerator. But he stopped after his first summer at sleepaway camp.
Ruby croons, one high strangled note with each exhale. When she was younger, I worried that she had asthma. She sleeps on her back most of the time, the covers tucked securely across her chest, her hair fanned out on the pillows. It should be easy for her to slip from beneath the blanket and make her bed, but she never bothers unless I hector her.
I sit downstairs with coffee and the paper, staring out the window as my mind whirrs. At six-thirty I hear the shower come on in the master bath. Glen is awake and getting ready for work. At six forty-five I pull the duvet off Ruby, who snatches it back and curls herself into it, larval, and says, "Ten more minutes." At seven I lean over, first Alex, then Max, and bury my nose into their necks, beginning to smell the slightly pungent scent of male beneath the sweetness of child. "Okay, okay," Alex says irritably. Max says nothing, just lurches from bed and begins to pull off an oversized T-shirt as he stumbles into the bathroom.
There is a line painted down the center of their room. Two years ago they came to me, at a loose end on a June afternoon, and demanded the right to choose their own colors. I was distracted, and I agreed. They did a neat job, measured carefully, put a tarp on the floor. Alex painted his side light blue, Max lime green. The other mothers say, "You won't believe what Jonathan"--or Andrew or Peter--"told me about the twins' room." Maybe if the boys had been my first children I would have thought it was insane, too, but Ruby broke me in. She has a tower of soda cans against one wall of her bedroom. It is either an environmental statement or just one of those things you do when you are fifteen. Now that she is seventeen she has outgrown it, almost forgotten it, but because I made the mistake of asking early on when she would take it down she never has.
I open Ruby's door, and although it doesn't make a sound--she has oiled the hinges, I think, probably with baby oil or bath oil or something else nonsensically inappropriate, so we will not hear it creak in the nighttime--she says, "I'm up." I stand there waiting, because if I take her word for it she will wrap herself in warmth again and fall into the long tunnel of sleep that only teenagers inhabit, halfway to coma or unconsciousness. "Mom, I'm up!" she shouts, and throws the bedclothes aside and begins to bundle her long wavy hair atop her head. "Can I get dressed in peace, please? For a change?" She makes it sound as though I constantly let a bleacher full of spectators gawk as she prepares to meet the day.
Only Glen emerges in the least bit cheerful, his suit jacket over one arm. He keeps his white coats at the office. They are professionally cleaned and pressed and smell lovely, like the cleanest of clean laundry. "Doctor Latham" is embroidered in blue script above his heart. From upstairs I can hear the clatter of the cereal into his bowl. He eats the same thing every morning, leaves for work at the same time. He wears either a blue or a yellow shirt, with either a striped tie or one with a small repeating pattern. Occasionally, a grateful patient gives him a tie as a gift, printed with tiny pairs of glasses, an eye chart, or even eyes themselves. He thanks these people sincerely but never wears them.
He is not tidy, but he knows where everything is: on which chair he left his briefcase, in what area of the kitchen counter he tossed his wallet. He does something with the corners of his mouth when things are not as they should be--when the dog is on the furniture, when the children and their friends make too much noise too late at night, when the red-wine glasses are in the white-wine glass rack. It has now pressed itself permanently into his expression, like the opposite of dimples.
"Please. Spare me," says my friend Nancy, her eyes rolling. "If that's the worst you can say about him, then you have absolutely no right to complain." Nancy says her husband, Bill, a tall gangly scarecrow of a guy, leaves a trail of clothing as he undresses, like fairy-tale breadcrumbs. He once asked her where the washing machine was. "I thought it was a miracle that he wanted to know," she says when she tells this story, and she does, often. "It turned out the repairman was at the door and Bill didn't know where to tell him to go."
Our washer is in the mudroom, off the kitchen. There is a chute from above that is designed to bring the dirty things downstairs. Over the years, our children have used the chute for backpacks, soccer balls, drumsticks. Slam. Slam. Slam. "It is a laundry chute," I cry. "Laundry. Laundry."
Laundry is my life, and meals, and school meetings and games and recitals. I choose a cardigan sweater and put it on the chest at the foot of the bed. It is late April, nominally spring, but the weather is as wild as an adolescent mood, sun into clouds into showers into storms into sun again.
"You smell," I hear Alex say to Max from the hallway. Max refuses to reply. "You smell like shit," Alex says. "Language!" I cry.
"I didn't say a word!" Ruby shouts from behind the door of her room. Hangers slide along the rack in her closet, with a sound like one of those tribal musical instruments. Three thumps--shoes, I imagine. Her room always looks as though it has been ransacked. Her father averts his head from the closed door, as though he is imagining what lies within. Her brothers are strictly forbidden to go in there, and, honestly, are not interested. Piles of books, rand
om sweaters, an upended shoulder bag, even the lace panties, given that they belong to their sister--who cares? I am tolerated because I deliver stacks of clean clothes. "Put those away in your drawers," I always say, and she never does. It would be so much easier for me to do it myself, but this standoff has become a part of our relationship, my attempt to teach Ruby responsibility, her attempt to exhibit independence. And so much of our lives together consists of rubbing along, saying things we know will be ignored yet continuing to say them, like background music.
Somehow Ruby emerges every morning from the disorder of her room looking beautiful and distinctive: a pair of old Capri pants, a ruffled blouse I bought in college, a long cashmere cardigan with a moth hole in the sleeve, a ribbon tied around her hair. Ruby never looks like anyone else. I admire this and am a little intimidated by it, as though I had discovered we had incompatible blood types.
Alex wears a T-shirt and jeans. Max wears a T-shirt and jeans. Max stops to rub the dog's belly when he gets to the kitchen. She narrows her eyes in ecstasy. Her name is Virginia, and she is nine years old. She came as a puppy when the twins were five and Ruby was eight. GINGER says the name on the terra-cotta bowl we bought on her first Christmas. Max scratches the base of Ginger's tail. "Now you'll smell like dog," says Alex. The toaster pops with a sound like a toy gun. The refrigerator door closes. I need more toothpaste. Ruby has taken my toothpaste. "I'm going!" she yells from the back door. She has not eaten breakfast. She and her friends Rachel and Sarah will stop at the doughnut shop and get iced coffee and jelly doughnuts. Sarah swims competitively and can eat anything. "The metabolism of a hummingbird," says my friend Nancy who is Sarah's mother, which is convenient for us both. Nancy is a biologist, a professor at the university, so I suppose she should know about metabolism. Rachel is a year older than the other two, and drives them to school. The three of them swear that Rachel drives safely and slowly. I know this isn't true. I picture Rachel, moaning again about some boy she really, really likes but who is insensible to her attentions, steering with one hand, a doughnut in the other, taking a curve with a shrieking sound. Caution and nutrition are for adults. They are young, immortal.
"The bus!" Alex yells, and finally Max speaks. This is one of the headlines of our family life: Max speaks. "I'm coming," he mumbles. "Take a sweatshirt," I call. Either they don't hear or they don't care. I can see them with their backpacks getting on the middle-school bus. Alex always goes first.
"Do we have any jelly?" Glen asks. He knows where his own things are, but he has amnesia when it comes to community property. "It's where it's always been," I say. "Open your eyes and look." Then I take two jars of jelly off the shelf inside the refrigerator door and thump them on the table in front of him. I can manage only one morning manner, so I treat my husband like one of the children. He doesn't seem to mind or even notice. He likes this moment, when the children have been there but are suddenly gone. The dog comes back into the room, her claws clicking on the tiled floor. "Don't feed her," I say, as I do every morning. In a few minutes, I hear the messy chewing sounds as Ginger eats a crust of English muffin. She makes a circuit of the house, then falls heavily at my feet.
After he has read the paper, Glen leaves for the office. He has early appointments one day a week and late ones three evenings, for schoolchildren and people with inflexible jobs. His office is in a small house a block from the hospital. He pulls his car out of the driveway and turns right onto our street every single morning. One day he turned left, and I almost ran out to call to him. I did open the front door, and discovered that a neighbor was retarring the driveway and a steamroller was blocking the road to the right. The neighbor waved. "Sorry for the inconvenience," he called. I waved back.
I put on a pair of khaki pants, a white shirt, and soft flat slip-on shoes with rubber soles. "Those are such ... mom clothes," Ruby sometimes says. It is not exactly an insult. I am wiry and tan from work, or perhaps from genetics. My mother taught English to high school students, not exactly a physically taxing profession, and she, too, is wiry and tan. At seventy, she still wears tennis clothes without thinking about it.
At eight-thirty a dump truck pulls into the driveway. On its side is a trio of primitive painted flowers, the kind that second-grade girls draw in their notebooks in colored markers. A blue flower, a pink flower, a yellow flower, and to one side the words LATHAM LANDSCAPING. One day I was a freelance copy editor, then I had three children, then I took a master gardening class, then I started a landscaping business. The business is successful.
"Hey Mary Beth," says Rickie from the truck. He's wearing his Latham Landscaping windbreaker, but the zipper strains over his big hard belly. The truck is tidy, but I know that the glove compartment is filled with candy wrappers and greasy waxed paper. Rickie runs the equipment; he's past being able to use a shovel or do the weeding. We are going to see a copper beech two towns over that is losing its bark. It's probably a fungus that's been going around, moving slowly and silently through the forests and the front yards, the way a cold does through the kids' classes at school: first one, then another, then a half dozen or so. This tree is probably a hundred years old, and it's probably not going to get much older. It's a shame; it's a glorious tree, the kind that looks immutable.
That's the humbling thing about doing what I do for a living: You can look at the pin oak in a front yard, or even the daffodils you put in the autumn before, and know that long after you are gone there will be shade, and color, and you won't be there to see it. In many ways it's a soothing feeling, like telling your daughter that someday she will have your diamond earrings, without ever spelling out what "someday" means.
"Want to stop for coffee?" Rickie says. What Rickie means by coffee is a box of assorted doughnuts.
"Sure," I say. "There's never enough." I rummage in my bag. "Wait, I forgot the phone again. I'll be right back."
We might still have a nighttime frost, so there's not much we can do yet in people's gardens. Last year around this time, a woman hired us to put in hundreds of flowering plants for her daughter's outdoor wedding. God had smiled on her. The spring afternoon had been sunny and warm, and the delphiniums, the lobelia, and the sweet-faced purple and blue pansies glowed against the green of the grass, vying with--overshadowing, I would have said--the Dutch blue of the bridemaids' dresses. The next night there was a hard freeze. Those pansies were the saddest things imaginable the next morning, splayed on the ground. I hated the sight of them.
"We got a call for a big job around the courthouse," Rickie says. "The county clerk wants you to give them a proposal."
"Oh God, save me from the county clerk. No matter what I come up with they're going to want geraniums."
Rickie hits a pothole and the tools jump in the back of the truck with a jangling sound. I take a tissue from inside my bag and blow my nose. A woman I only vaguely recognize waves as we wait at a red light. Every day, with few variations--snow, minor illness, the failure of the paper to arrive, a lost backpack, a sleepover that's left us one, or two, or sometimes even three kids shy of the usual full set--every day is like this. Average. Ordinary. More or less.
I am sitting on a small padded bench outside the dressing rooms at Molly's Closet. The dressing rooms look like shower stalls. In fact, I suspect that Molly's dressing-room curtain is really a shower curtain. It is a lively print of flowers that I know are not found in nature. The bench outside is far too low for even a middling-sized woman in good physical condition. My back hurts, I'm hungry, and I have to go to the bathroom. The trifecta of the over-forty female crowd. At least I don't have cramps. Ruby does. "I so need chocolate," she said in the car, which is a warning not to talk about school, or her friends, or anything else of moment. Tears hover.
Ruby is trying to find a dress for the prom. This has become her life's work, along with a short story that I have not been permitted to read but which apparently may be the lead story in this year's literary magazine. Ruby will edit the literary magazine next year. She is als
o president of a club that concerns itself with what they call the enslavement of the people of Tibet, and a member of the council that meets with the principal once a week to tell him what is going on at school. "Oh, you're Ruby Latham's mother," people sometimes say to me when I introduce myself. She is not what I envied in high school, the popular girl. She is something I'm not even sure existed then, the sure-footed girl. She gives the impression of being completely herself, and only a part of that impression is false.
"No way," I hear her groan from inside the dressing room, and yet another dress is thrown over the bar that holds the curtain. The bar looks as though it's a shower bar, too. Molly's husband, who is a builder, built her shop, but on the cheap, she always complains. "Anything that didn't make it into another job, I got," Molly says, but with that mock irritation that means it's not a big deal.
"Can I see?" I say.
"There's no point," Ruby replies.
Two weeks ago, Ruby went to look for a prom dress at the vintage store in the next town. The doodles on her desk suggested that she had hopes of finding one of those dresses my mother wore for important occasions when she herself was young: a snug bodice, a belted waist, a long full skirt. When I was a child, there was a trunk in the basement with my father's name stenciled on it, but instead of old suits and books inside there were dresses of my mother's that we wore to play princess. My mother didn't care. She was usually upstairs at the kitchen table, drinking tea, correcting papers, looking up toward the yellowish fluorescent fixture, then down to scribble comments in the margins. "Oh, Mary Beth, I have no idea where those dresses got to," my mother had said when I called her in Florida the other day to ask about them.