I taped a note to the inside of the possessed appliance that read, “Needs repair,” and handed it to the driver of the Salvation Army truck. He handed me a receipt and told me I was a “kind and generous person.”
Euphoric over my benevolence and giddy over thoughts of a new couch, I called Jeff to share the great news. Jeff was … well, less than euphoric. I think that was our worst fight ever. It certainly lasted the longest. Seven wretched weeks passed before we finally bought a new couch on credit. Jeff’s mother never forgave me for parting with the blender, which I had forgotten was a wedding gift from her sister.
In the Januarys that followed, I tried to confine my temporary lapses of judgment to areas that affected only me.
Penny used to say she liked it when I showed signs of entering my “New Year’s Fit of Madness” because she could talk me into things I wouldn’t normally agree to, such as the year we took a tap dancing class. We were the only students over the age of nine.
To our credit, we stuck with the dance class all ten weeks. To the relief of our husbands and children, we opted out of performing at the year-end recital.
I had to wonder if Penny calculated to the day when my fit of madness would strike this January. She cleverly timed her purchase of those two transatlantic airline tickets, sent them to arrive the very hour I was most vulnerable, and even prepared my husband ahead of time.
Even though I didn’t think this—her most outrageous dream yet—would last until it was full grown, I didn’t see the harm in playing along with it while it was still kitten-size.
I tucked the tickets into my top dresser drawer, dressed, and went through the rest of the day wearing one of my son’s baseball caps. Curiously, no one at the dinner table ventured to ask about the hat. Either Jeff had said something to the kids, or my theory about being the invisible mom at our house was more accurate than I had realized.
The next morning I managed to get a nine o’clock appointment with Joanie at the Clip ’n’ Curl. I told her about Penny’s Helsinki scheme while she worked her magic on my limey mane. She shifted the color back to a blah-blah-blond shade, which was at least within the normal range for human hair.
I tried to tip Joanie a little extra. She slipped all the money back into my hand. “Please. Let this be my treat. You keep your spending money.”
“No, Joanie, take it.”
“Not this time, Sharon. Save it for your trip. If you want, you can buy me a souvenir.”
Wide-winged guilt came swooping in and landed on the roof of my psyche. It was one thing for Penny and me to stir up a big cloud of dream dust, but Joanie shouldn’t be turning down money because of it. I left the Clip ’n’ Curl determined to pay Joanie double the next time I had my hair trimmed.
Most days, I pull my thin, straight hair up in a clip or a twist of some sort. Since Joanie had done such a nice job of styling it to gently skim my shoulders, I thought I might as well have my passport photos taken.
I drove to the closest mall, which was located twenty miles across the Columbia River in Portland, Oregon. I found a camera shop with a sign that read, “Passport photos while you wait.”
The young man snapped my picture before I was ready.
“Are you going somewhere?” he asked, as I wrote out a check for the two small, not-so-flattering photos.
I looked up, startled, and heard myself say, “Yes.” As soon as the word leaked out, guilt flapped its molting feathers and cawed, “Liar! Liar!”
The young man stood still, eyebrows raised, waiting for the rest of my answer.
“I, um, I’m going to Finland.”
“Cool. That’s like, all the way over in Europe, isn’t it?”
I gave a slight nod, paid for the photos, and went directly to the bookstore on the mall’s lower level where I bought a travel book on Scandinavia. I didn’t know that Finland was next to Sweden. I also didn’t know that Finland bordered Russia. Helsinki was on the other side of the globe, half a world away from Chinook Springs. Did anyone there even speak English?
My next stop was the post office where my husband’s partially deaf uncle has worked for thirty-seven years. Uncle Floyd was eager to help me organize everything and mail off for my passport application. Of course, I had to give him the details with my voice raised, so everyone within a two-hundred-yard radius heard me lie. This time I used words like, “I might be going” and “If it works out.”
Uncle Floyd enthusiastically handed me a ten-dollar bill. “This is for you so you’ll be sure to send lots of postcards home to everyone. Tell ’em to save the stamps for me. And try to get specialty stamps, will ya? Ask for the kind of stamps they don’t use for everyday. Will ya do that for me, Sharon?”
I left the post office biting the inside of my mouth. How could I return the ten dollars to sweet Uncle Floyd after he and the rest of the world discovered this Finnish fantasy was a hoax?
Within three days everyone in my small life knew about the trip and everyone was excited for me. Everyone, that is, except Jeff’s mother, Gloria.
Gramma Gloria and Grampa Max joined us on Friday night for our daughter’s high school choir performance. Kaylee was a freshman and prone to wild emotional dips. As normal as that is for a fifteen-year-old, I didn’t tend to be the most understanding mother. All I remembered about when I was fifteen was getting my braces off. I think I smiled a lot.
Kaylee seemed to smile at everyone but me.
Right before we were ready to leave for Kaylee’s concert, she dribbled the slightest bit of apple juice on her white blouse. I tried to clean it up using the dabbing method with a wet cloth, but of course, that made it worse. The large wet spots weren’t drying quickly enough, so Kaylee stormed upstairs, wailing that now she would be late.
Gramma Gloria shook her head. “This should be an eye-opener for you, Sharondear. How would your children manage if you took off for Iceland?”
Gramma Gloria made a hobby of conveniently forgetting the correct names for people and places whenever she wanted to cast a disagreeable light on them. My entire senior year of high school she called me “Sherrill” instead of “Sharon” even though she had known me since I was a child. Once Jeff and I were married, I became “Sharondear.” I decided that was better than many other options, so I didn’t try to correct her.
“Aw, the kids will manage just fine,” Grampa Max said to Gloria, carrying the last of the dinner plates to the sink. “Isn’t that so, Ben? You’ll get along without your mom for a week or so.”
“Twelve days,” Gloria corrected him.
“Eleven,” I said.
“Right in the middle of track season,” Gloria added with a cluck of her tongue.
My reserved son, who was old enough to vote in national elections, wisely continued his chore of loading the dishwasher and didn’t vote on this one.
Grampa Max motioned to our ten-year-old, who was trying to wedge his foot into his tennis shoe without untying the laces. “Come on, Josh. You can ride over to the school in my car. We’ll save some seats in the auditorium for these slowpokes.”
I ventured upstairs and tapped on Kaylee’s bedroom door. The distraught princess bid me enter. She had tossed the “ruined” white blouse on the floor. The very blouse I had washed, ironed, and sprayed with just the right amount of starch to make it perfect for her tonight. Ninety minutes of loving labor lay crumpled at her feet. Kaylee shot me a wounded look as if the apple juice disaster were my fault.
She had changed into a long-sleeved beige T-shirt that had once belonged to her oldest brother.
“That won’t do,” I said.
“I knew you would say that. But what else do I have?”
“I have a white blouse you could wear.”
“I don’t think so!” Kaylee rifled though her summer T-shirts. “I mean, no offense, Mother, but we don’t exactly, like, wear the same size, you know!”
Kaylee yanked the beige shirt over her head, and I noticed that not a pinch of baby fat remained on my daughte
r’s torso.
Where did it go?
She had the cutest little waist. Her 34A-size bra appeared too snug.
When did all this happen?
Kaylee was right. Nothing in my closet—not even my skinny clothes—would be small enough to fit her.
“I know you don’t want me to wear a T-shirt, but I don’t have any choice.” She pulled the wrinkled cotton shirt over her silky blond hair.
“I could iron it if—”
“Mom, we don’t have time! I’m supposed to be there in like five minutes!” Kaylee tugged the T-shirt over her black skirt and swished past me muttering, “Now my hair is so messed!”
That evening I watched with new eyes as Kaylee lined up on stage with the thirty other students. Nearly all the girls were wearing T-shirts. I counted only three white blouses in the choir.
Kaylee stood in the front row to the left. Under the bright lights none of the wrinkles in her T-shirt were as pronounced as I thought they would be. She blended right in. No one else in the auditorium would ever know how crisp Kaylee Andrews could have appeared onstage that evening. I wondered if I was part of a vanishing breed of mothers who owned an iron and knew how to use it.
I studied my daughter’s perfect posture, her steady concentration, and the way her mouth delicately opened and her chin rose when she held the long notes.
She was beautiful.
And she was oblivious. Oblivious to her poise and her winsome beauty. All the way to school she had groaned about her impossible hair and moaned that her shoes were too tight. She even said she wished her legs weren’t so long. Imagine!
From where we sat in the fifth row, all I saw was a gorgeous young woman blossoming in the right way at the right time, legs and all. Life would soon reveal the vast, wonderfully rich possibilities available to her. Gifted with an abundance of creativity, talent, and intelligence, my lovely Kaylee could become anything. She could go anywhere. Do anything. The possibilities were magnificent, and she was overwrought about speckles of apple juice; about long, silky, naturally blond hair; and about the “curse” of long legs.
When the choir came to the final number, I had to fumble in my purse for a tissue. I couldn’t stop crying.
I don’t remember what song they sang. Something patriotic that started with four boys in the back row singing in barber-shop-quartet style. On the chorus, my Kaylee straightened her shoulders, tilted up her chin, and sang as if both she and Eve had never had a run-in with apples in any form. She was free when she sang. Free and beautiful. A vibrant young woman.
I cried because my Kaylee was unmistakably fifteen.
And that made me, unmistakably, forty-one.
Two
Two and a half weeks after the Helsinki ticket arrived, the glittering possibility of our adventure had grown to Milky Way proportions. I called Penny on the last Thursday night in January to tell her my passport hadn’t arrived yet. I expected that by the end of our conversation we would come to our senses and agree the dreaming and scheming was fun while it lasted, but it was time to tell ourselves and everyone else the truth.
“People keep slipping me money and loaning me travel gear,” I told Penny. “This trip has become a big deal. A very big deal.”
“That’s exactly what it’s supposed to be. A very big deal. You and I are going to Helsinki, Sharon. Listen to me carefully. We … are … going … to … Helsinki.”
A pause followed. If Penny wasn’t going to speak the words that would begin the dismantling process, then neither would I.
The lovely delusion continued another week. That was the week everyone started to give me advice.
The clerk at the grocery store told me a terrible story about her sister. She went on a Caribbean cruise, but when she boarded the plane, she tried to heave her heavy luggage into the overhead bin and threw her back out. When they landed in San Juan, the paramedics had to wheel her from the plane on a gurney. She spent the week of her cruise lying in a Puerto Rican hospital.
Sufficiently motivated by her story, I drove around my neighborhood, measured a mile and a half on the odometer, then turned around and drove home. That became the three-mile course I walked every morning after the kids went to school.
Inspired by my determination, Penny bought some ankle weights and walked around her suburban San Francisco neighborhood. However, she outdid me by walking four miles every day and going on one of her protein shake diets.
“Have you lost any weight yet?” I asked Penny six days into her diet.
“Not yet. But I will. I need to. This always has worked before. It’s just taking longer this time. I guess I have more weight to lose.”
Penny and I were the same height and basically the same size. Her waistline was lower than mine, and she was larger on top. Over the years we shared maternity clothes and watched each other expand and shrink at different paces.
Penny’s biggest complaint after she turned forty was the effect of gravity. She said she believed that putting a man on the moon had to be a hoax because gravity was, in fact, an irrefutable law. Things go down, not up. If any of the NASA scientists wanted to challenge her facts, she said she had secret evidence up her sleeve.
I didn’t particularly like my size or the effect of gravity either, but until this trip I guess I thought what was happening to my body was inevitable. Even if we never boarded a plane or hoisted luggage into an overhead bin, I liked the way I felt after I walked. That bit of motivation in my normally sedate life was worth the price of the tour book and passport—the passport that still hadn’t arrived by February 6.
Penny called on the evening of the sixth to tell me her passport had arrived and she was sending me a tour book on Scandinavia that she had bought.
I asked why she was sending the book to me instead of gleaning the desired information herself.
“I don’t have time to read it,” she said. “This is supposed to be the slow time of year for real estate, but it’s been wild around here. I might have another house in Moraga sold before we leave.”
“That’s great, Penny.”
“I know. God must be providing us with extra souvenir money or something. I can’t believe this year is off to such a great start.”
I tried to image what life would be like with “extra souvenir money.”
“I hope you’re taking notes as you’re going over the tour books,” Penny said.
“I am.”
“Good. Anything interesting yet?”
“Did you know more saunas are in Finland than cars?”
“Seriously?”
“According to the tour book the ratio is one sauna to every five people.”
“Now that’s useful information.” I could hear Penny running the water in the kitchen sink. “Do you think you and I are going to upset the Finnish national sauna ratio when we show up and add two more people to the population for a week?”
“Finland isn’t as insignificant as you think. You really should read this book, Penny. Finland is the only country that has ever fully repaid the U.S. for a debt.”
“A debt?”
“We loaned them a lot of money after World War II.”
“Sharon?” Penny had turned off the water, and her voice grew low. “You do realize, don’t you, that this is supposed to be a fun trip, not a field trip? Immigration personnel will not make us take a test before we can enter their fine country.”
“Very funny.”
“What about fun places to shop? Tell me you marked those in the book, too.”
“I have them all marked. Restaurants, too. I don’t think you need to send me the other book.”
“Okay. I might toss it in my suitcase, if there’s room. All we have to do now is wait for your passport and a response from my aunt.”
“You still haven’t heard from her?”
“No, but I will.”
“Did you try to call her?”
“I only have an address. She’ll write back to me. You’ll see.”
T
he whole trip seemed to be hanging by a thread. I didn’t want to be the one to snip that thread.
On Tuesday afternoon, the second week of February, Gramma Gloria stopped by with a laundry basket full of craft materials.
“You’re the organized one in this family, Sharondear.” She planted herself at the kitchen table and unloaded bits of red ribbon, Styrofoam balls, a glue gun, and white streamers. “You can help me figure out how to make centerpieces for the senior citizen sweetheart banquet at church on Saturday.”
“What are you planning to make with all this?”
“Well, I don’t know, Sharondear. That’s why I brought it over. We need nine of whatever we decide on. We have fifty people coming this year. Isn’t that sad? I remember when we used to have a hundred come each year. One hundred and twelve one year. Do you have any coffee?”
“For the centerpieces?”
“No, Sharondear. For me. I’d like a cup of coffee, if that isn’t too much trouble. I don’t want to be a bother.”
This was one of my mother-in-law’s favorite lines. After delivering it she would wait with one ear cocked until someone, usually me, replied, “It’s no bother at all.”
I had enough coffee left from that morning for about two cups, but the coffeemaker automatically had turned itself off. I knew the coffee would be lukewarm by now, so I poured a cup for Gloria and headed for the microwave.
“Don’t heat it up, Sharondear. I burned my tongue the last time you did that.”
“It’s going to be cold.”
“That’s okay.” Gloria took the cup from me. She had a sip and made a face. “Why, this is ice-cold!”
“I know. Here, let me heat it up for you.”
“Oh no, Sharondear. That’s okay. I can sip it this way. I thought perhaps you had a fresh pot going, that’s all.” With a grimace she pressed her lips to the cup’s edge.
Jeff and I had spent not hours, not days, but the equivalent of weeks discussing the challenges we have with his mother. Gloria always has been opinionated and subtly manipulative. No one in town would disagree with that.