All Is Vanity

  “Sorry, Noah,” I said. “I didn’t mean to be eating your food.”

  “Have you ever made jam?”

  “Well, that chutney …” I began.

  “That’s right, it’s your fault. If you hadn’t given me that chutney, I’d have just bought some gourmet baskets at Gelsons and been done with it. You have to help me.” She started for the kitchen.

  “What are we doing?”

  “We’re jamming.”

  Letty’s new granite kitchen counters, which I’d not yet had time to admire, were covered with unaffordable fruits. Teeny wild blueberries, raspberries, currants, gooseberries, and champagne grapes were heaped in pint-sized plastic baskets next to cardboard trays of apricots, each globe nested safely in its own molded depression. A green glass bowl I recognized from the Williams-Sonoma catalog was mounded with ripe persimmons. Blood oranges were packed in excelsior in two small wooden crates. Letty rolled her eyes. “I thought I’d save money if I did it myself,” she said.

  “What’s this?” I asked, my hand on a greenish, lumpy, elliptical object.

  “Papaya.”

  “No, I mean, what’s all this? What are you doing?”

  “You mean what are we doing.”

  I nodded.

  “We are daringly combining exotic fruits to fill cunning antique ceramic pots with homemade jam and marmalade, matching as closely as possible the flavor to the personality of the recipient. We will then nestle said cunning pots among various packaged delights from foreign lands with bright amusing labels in baskets made to resemble wattle and tied with French ribbon available exclusively at a store in Malibu that’s open only on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. Can you come over tomorrow, too?”

  “Where are the ceramic pots?”

  “I don’t know, Margaret.” Letty’s voice was again overcome with despair. She let Noah slither to the floor and he scampered off, no doubt to play again at whatever had caused his earlier tears. “I’ve been to five different stores and called seven others, but they seem to exist only in my mind.”

  “Who are you giving these things to?” I asked. “Not the kids, obviously. And not us, I hope.”

  She laughed. “No! Would you want such a thing? I’ll probably give you and Ted a loaf of Wonder Bread and a package of sliced cheese, if I get around to it. There’s no time to find gifts for people I like. This,” she said, waving dismissively at the spread on the counters, “is for people Michael has met through work. People we’ve eaten with at La Limonade. People who have given us this.” She reached into the cupboard over the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of champagne so expensive I’d only read about the brand in novels. Ivy, who’d been throwing Cheerios one by one onto the kitchen floor from her high chair, ran out of cereal and began to scream.

  “Does anything need to be washed?” I said, moving toward the new, deep “farm kitchen” sink.

  “All of it.”

  M,

  You despise me now, don’t you? Admit it! How can you not when the actual words “at least glass will allow the jewel tones of the cooked fruit to show through” came from my actual mouth. Was I drunk? What did I offer you to drink anyway? I seem to remember apple juice in a sippy cup.

  They’re there, those jars of jam, massing on the dining el table, squat, perky, gorgeous little monsters. I woke from a sound sleep with the idea that they must each be swaddled in thick, Victorian reproduction gift wrap sold exclusively in the Otis’s gift shop, before they can leave the house.

  What’s happened to me? Last Christmas I made fudge and wrapped it in red and green Saran. But the thought of giving Jeanette Peabody a square of plastic-wrapped fudge makes me choke.

  I told you, didn’t I, that I’m not giving these jars over which we sweated all day, jars that made my children cry for attention and forced my husband to dine on boxed macaroni and cheese, jars that cost—oh, God, I can’t even tell you how much that fruit was—and the blueberries that Hunter put down the garbage disposal were the most expensive of all (I keep telling myself that if I hadn’t redone the kitchen, I wouldn’t have had a disposal to grind them up! But then, if we’d had a disposal all along, it wouldn’t be so fascinating to Hunter now)—where was I? oh, yes … I’m not giving these to dear friends, who’ll remember me with every sweet spoonful. No, I will present them to people who think my name might be “Leslie” or possibly “Lexie.” And I will give the finest one—the guava/damson/satsuma—to Jeanette Peabody. That’ll show her.

  I’m not sure you ever met Jeanette. We were both production assistants at KSMC right after college. We did things like help set up the mikes in bowling alleys and in front of the Federal Building to record background sound effects. This is what one does after college with degrees in music theory and sociology. And then we got that apartment together in Palms, the one Michael and I lived in after we were married.

  Someone’s crying—hang on.

  Noah fell out of bed—he was just startled, but then he had to tell me his dream, which was long and complex, and I suspect he was just making it up as he went along. This is why you can do nothing other than pay attention to your children when you’re a mother, because if you’re dying to get back to something else—your own endless story, for instance—you just feel impatient, whereas otherwise you would be utterly charmed by this little creature who really hasn’t been talking for all that long wanting to tell you and tell you and tell you things he’s made up out of his clever little brain. You wouldn’t then feel the urge to say, “Yes, sweetheart, that’s very interesting, but maybe we should save a little of it for tomorrow,” which is what I did and now feel guilty about. “How to Squelch Creativity in the Early Years” by Letty MacMillan.

  So, anyway, I had the bedroom, because I had a steady boyfriend, even though Michael didn’t technically live with us because he had his graduate housing, and we partitioned off a piece of the living room for Jeanette with the Indian-print bedspread—Yes! Yes! the one covering the hideous brown, inherited-from-Aunt-Louise couch! My life! My life!—and she and I spent a lot of time sitting in beanbag chairs after work with bottles of beer between our bare feet analyzing her dates and the possibility of these encounters developing into relationships and decrying the general poor state of available men—the usual thing. Except then I felt just a teeny bit smug Because I had Michael, you see, and we already knew we were getting married, and it seemed my life was going along pretty well, that I was maybe even a little ahead, what with my desirable, artsy, public-radio, vaguely “save the world” type of low-paying job and my right to talk about china patterns and color schemes for bridesmaids’ dresses.

  So I can’t say it isn’t a contest now, can I? It wouldn’t be fair to say it was when I was winning and now say, no, of course it isn’t, when I’m so far behind Jeanette that it’s like we inhabit two different worlds. I can hear you saying, “Different, yes, but equal.” But that is where you’re wrong. Hers is much, much better.

  Our worlds converged last month. It turns out she’s an events consultant—do you have any idea what that is? It seems to be a professional party thrower. She’s eventing the Norton Simon in February, and she recognized Michael at some interart-museum meeting. I can’t believe he’s now going to meetings about parties! He hates parties! So she and I arranged to have lunch, and it was one of those awkward things where she suggested a place with a chef who makes appearances on Charlie Rose and then I just couldn’t bring myself to say, “How about the Cuban place on Venice where the roasted garlic chicken is $5.95,” so I ended up saying, “Why don’t you come over here?” Which, of course, turned out to be worse than spending sixty dollars on lunch because not only did I feel compelled to spend over three hours in the car driving to the Santa Monica farmers’ market for teeny-tiny purple potatoes and then to this new gourmet place on Third Street for tarragon mustard and then back to Santa Monica for a quarter pound of the best niçoise olives, I also had then to create something with these ingredients that appeared to be casu
ally yet elegantly tossed off between committee meetings—no, I am not on any committees! It’s just that I had to seem busy with the right things, not, in fact, busy, as I actually am, with mopping up vomit, reinstalling a mini-blind, and trying to convince Noah that he’ll like a red Popsicle as much as a purple one.

  Altogether it took three days to prepare this special lunch—if you include the trip to Pier 1 to buy fish-shaped plates, one chartreuse and one turquoise, and coordinating placemats and napkins, and the evening of homemade crouton preparation—and then I got a call at eleven-thirty this morning Jeanette had an “event planning emergency.” Something about candles or canned dal.

  I’d like to say that it didn’t turn out so bad, that Marlo and I put on dresses and ate the salad, like ladies-who-lunch, and the boys were delighted with fish sticks on the fish plates, and I fashioned the napkins into a charming poncho for Ivy, but no. Marlo tasted the salad niçoise and declared her preference for “plain tuna”; Hunter and Noah fought over who would use the blue plate, which then, perhaps predictably, fell off the counter and shattered on the new slate floor—which is murder on the calves, by the way, when you stand on it for any length of time; Ivy threw up on a coordinating place mat. Lunch is overrated, anyway.

  I take comfort in the fact that Jeanette can’t be doing a good job with her children. She cannot possibly be touching them as much as she should be—her linen shirts would be spoiled. (I can tell by the way her voice sounds on the phone that she wears linen shirts—or possibly those stretchy sort of shrunken-down blouses which appear not to allow you to move your arms. And her hair is straightened or crimped or layered or razored, or however hair is supposed to be right now.) And while I’m sure she’s got a hand in all the big decisions, like what schools her children will attend and whether they’ll join the soccer league (her son, it turns out, will be on Hunter’s team this year), those, at least in my opinion, are not the moments of true mothering. No, it’s the little things that crop up hourly, the six hundred daily trips to the potty, the singing in the car on the way to the grocery store, the debate over the amount of jelly that should rightfully go on a peanut butter sandwich, the kissing of the stubbed toe, that’s when you do the real work of helping your child grow into a thoughtful and sensitive adult. At least this is why I’ve chosen the path I’ve taken, isn’t it?

  Please let her children be brats.

  Love, Letty

  CHAPTER 11

  Margaret

  TED WAITED UNTIL WE WERE ON THE PLANE TO ASK. “So,” he said, shaking the last of his Bloody Mary mix from the can into his plastic cup, “are you really halfway through?”

  I was engrossed in Alias Grace, but I did hear the question.

  Ted tilted his head forward to look into my face. “It’s all right, you know, if you aren’t. A third of the way would really be just fine at this point.”

  When I didn’t answer, I could tell he was worried that he might once again have said something I would think he had no right to say. Which, in fact, he had. “I mean, I would think the later stuff would come more quickly, once you’ve got your characters established,” he went on, trying to gain a purchase. And then he gave up altogether. “Are you going to eat your peanuts?”

  “Yes,” I said. I bit down on the crinkled edge of the stubborn little bag the flight attendant had dropped on the napkin beside my club soda.

  “ ‘Yes’ you’re halfway through or ‘yes’ you’re going to eat your nuts?” Evidently, he had not given up altogether.

  And, I, evidently, was no longer a scrupulously honest person. “Yes to both,” I said. This book had made a liar of me. Which could be good, I thought, staring down at the Great Basin. Maybe my habit of truthfulness had been standing in the way of my being able to fabricate a story.

  “Well, that’s great, Margaret. Really great.” Ted sat back for a moment and then turned to me again. “Can I read it?”

  The man in the seat ahead of me tilted his chair back so that his head hung just over my tray table, squeezing my space down to the compact L my body made pressed against the upholstery. “I think,” I said slowly, as if I were actually considering Ted’s question, “that I’d rather if you waited until I had a whole draft done. That’s when your response would really be constructive.” As opposed to now, when your response would be moaning and shouting, I thought.

  “Sure,” he said. “That makes sense. It would just be fun to read.” He closed his hand over mine on the armrest. “It sounds so good.”

  I wished it were possible to open the scratched rectangle of Plexiglas at my shoulder and allow myself to be sucked into the blue oxygenless air. I felt, for the first time in my married life, utterly alone, as if I were not sitting pinched in a plane with my husband on one side holding my hand and some stranger in front of me with his head in my lap but was instead dragging my way across the hard sands of the endless, empty beige desert below. Deliberately, one by one, I ate all of my peanuts. At least I would make good on that.

  Getting back to work in our unfestive apartment was more difficult than I’d imagined. A week after our return I was poring over the Federal Truth in Lending Disclosure Upon Renewal of Annual Fee statement, written in fine print on the back of our credit card bill, instead of extracting Robert from a warren of North Vietnamese tunnels, when Ted interrupted me.

  “Come here, Margaret. There’s something I want to show you.”

  Warily, I advanced as far as the doorway. “Shouldn’t you be going to your office?”

  “Not yet. Just come over here.” He spoke calmly, but there was obviously nothing pleasant over on his side of the room.

  “What?” I said again, as casually as possible. I stood beside him at the table now.

  “I just want you to see this,” he said. “Just so we’re on the same page.”

  “Literally,” I said, as he opened the ledger.

  He smiled weakly and patted the seat of the chair beside him. I sat in it.

  “See here?” he said. He actually wanted me to look at the back of an envelope. The ledger was only to support his case. On the envelope, he’d printed with his Razor Point the months from January through July. “I’m going to make two columns.”

  “Would you like to use my markers?” I suggested, jumping up. “Sometimes things look more organized when you use color.”

  “Black will be fine.”

  So I had to sit down again.

  “We’ll call one column,” he said as he wrote, “monthly credits and the other monthly debits.”

  “Ted.” I was getting annoyed now. “I have to get back to work. What’s the bottom line?”

  He raised his finger. He had an infuriating way of raising his finger. “You see,” he said, “I don’t know yet. I want us to do this together. I don’t want it to be me telling you. You’re perfectly free to check the ledger, you know. Any time you want to take some responsibility.”

  I closed my eyes so as to keep from closing my teeth around that finger.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s see.”

  “OK, here’s my monthly salary, minus FICA and taxes and so forth.” The figure he wrote beside each of the months included pennies.

  “You know the cents?”

  “Of course.” He looked at me as if I were the crazy one. “Then there’s a little interest on our savings.” He knew this figure by heart, as well. He wrote it next to January.

  “What about the other months?”

  “We’ll have to see. If our savings drop, the interest will be less.”

  “What do you mean, ‘If our savings drop’? We’re saving to buy a place. We don’t want to spend that.”

  “No,” he agreed, “we don’t want to, but …” He made a little box in the lower left-hand corner and labeled it “Savings as of January 1.” The envelope was getting crowded and it really would have looked much better in colors. “What’s our savings at right now?”

  I shrugged.

  He shook his head. “You see, Mar
garet! This is exactly what I mean!”

  “I know what it is approximately,” I said defensively.

  “Approximately is no good here! We need exact figures! Are you going to say to the scary guy at the A&P, ‘I’ll pay you approximately what I owe’? I don’t think so!”

  The analogy was not at all clear to me, but I forbore pointing that out.

  “All right. This is what we have in savings right now. And this is what we have in the checking account. Of course, there’s no interest on that.” He wrote both these figures in the corner box. “We can draw on the money in the savings account. If we have to.” He looked at me. “Now, let’s see if we have to.” He opened the ledger. “We can estimate our expenses for January will be very similar to December’s,” he began, but I interrupted.

  “But we were away for a week in December.”

  “Good thinking. So, in fact, we’ll have to add more for the paper we stopped and for the electricity we didn’t use.” He scribbled some figures on the envelope.

  “But we can’t count the plane tickets!” I said, “We won’t be buying plane tickets in January!” I was feeling a little frantic. When it suited his purposes, Ted seemed to think approximation was perfectly acceptable.

  “Actually, we bought those in November.”

  “All right,” I agreed, sullenly. “January will be a little more than December. Approximately,” I couldn’t resist adding.

  He wrote that figure in the monthly debits column. “Which will mean …” he said, looking at me significantly.

  Ted was right. Black was fine. It looked like red anyway when the debit number was larger than the credit number. Which it would be, according to Ted’s projections, beginning in July.