Odd Mom Out

“I’m tired,” Mom suddenly says, her voice quivery. “I want to go home. I want to go to bed.”

“So do I,” Dad agrees grimly, getting to his feet and helping Mom up.

I don’t try to stop them as they head for the door. I don’t get Eva, either. But Eva rushes out as she hears Dad start the car. “Where’s Grandma and Grandpa?”

I feel as if I swallowed a piece of glass. My throat and stomach hurt. “They went on home. Grandma was tired.”

She turns toward the kitchen. “They didn’t even try my cake.”

I can’t tell her how upset I am. I can’t let her know that her grandparents, my parents, have disappointed me badly, too. “Well, let’s have some now.”

“But I made it for Grandma.”

I give her a quick hug, then turn her around and march her into the kitchen. “We can take her a piece tomorrow, after school. But I can’t wait till then. I’ve got to have some of that yummy cake now.”

Chapter Seven

Eva and I sit in the kitchen facing each other on stools at the counter, each of us with our slice of gooey chocolate cake.

One woman, one child, I think. It’s a very tidy, compact life, this life of ours. Unlike the families surrounding us, cocooned in large elegant shingle houses, we have just us. And that’s good. It’s all we want. All we need.

“Have everything you need for school tomorrow?” I ask, licking frosting from the prongs of my fork.

Eva nods, a mouthful of chocolate cake preventing her from speaking. When she swallows she drinks some milk and wipes the back of her mouth on her hand. I push a napkin toward her, but the damage is already done. The back of her hand is smeared with frosting now.

“If I’m going to volunteer, what do I do?” I ask Eva casually.

Eva jerks up her head, her mouth stained with chocolate. “What?”

“I’m thinking that maybe I’ll volunteer more this year.”

Eva just stares at me agog. “Is this a joke?”

I nearly choke on my last bite of cake. Am I that bad of a mom? Do I lack that much legitimacy? “No, it’s not a joke, but if you don’t think I should, then—”

“No, no,” she interrupts, taking the napkin to scrub her mouth clean. “You should. So what are you going to volunteer to do?”

“I don’t know. Help out in the class, probably.”

“Last year each teacher had their own sign-up sheet. All the moms that helped in the classroom signed up on that. They came in the first week of school to sign up,” Eva answers. She’s always been better at reading the packet sent home from the school office than I have. She likes knowing all this stuff, whereas the details just give me a headache. “If you want to help out in my class, that’s what you’ll have to do.”

“Okay.”

She’s staring at me again. “You’re going to do that?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

I can’t help laughing at her stunned expression. “Why not? I’ve decided I’m going to try to be different from now on. I’m going to be like the other moms. Sign up for things. Do committees. Have meetings.”

And do you know how my darling Eva thanks me? She laughs so hard that she falls off her chair.

The weatherman might say summer doesn’t officially end until September 21, but ask any kid and you’ll be told summer ends the first day of school. And today is that day.

Eva sleeps in her new clothes to make sure she’ll be ready for school on time, and now she’s up, pacing the house at six in the morning, no longer smirking, no longer finding humor in anything.

She’s scared. Worried sick.

I don’t know how to calm her, so I make her breakfast, a Belgian waffle topped with strawberries and a big whiz of canned whipping cream. But she eats only a third of her waffle before she puts down her fork, saying she’s going to throw up.

While I finish making her lunch, I listen to her making retching sounds in the powder bath near the kitchen. She’s gagging, but no throw-up, at least not yet. Eventually she emerges, pale, ghost eyed. “I didn’t throw up.”

“Do you feel better?”

“No.”

“Would you like some SevenUp?”

“I just want to go back to bed.”

“But you’ve been so excited about school starting.”

“But I’m not anymore. What if the teacher hates me? What if Jemma doesn’t talk to me? What if I never make friends?”

“Your teacher won’t hate you.”

Eva nearly cries. “But what if no one else ever likes me?”

She and I both know that being teacher’s pet doesn’t exactly help popularity contests. “There are four classes of fourth grade at Points Elementary. Half of those kids are girls. You’ll make friends. You’ve just got to give some of the other girls a chance.”

I’d meant to be reassuring, but from Eva’s alarmed expression I think I’ve done just the opposite. She rushes from the kitchen and flings herself in the bathroom, and I hear her retch again.

And this time she does throw up.

Twenty minutes later, I tell Eva, who is now lying on the couch staring woefully at the ceiling, that it’s time to go.

“I don’t want to do this,” she says mournfully, rolling off the sofa and onto her feet.

“I know. But it’s the law. It’s what kids have to do.”

She makes a face at me. “Is that the best you can do?”

“Well, it is the law. And be glad, otherwise you could be a child laborer, slaving away in a factory—”

“Mom. Let’s just go.”

I hide my smile. I might not be the most “normal” mom, but my methods work. After grabbing my keys and wallet, I head to the garage door, but Eva stops me with one hand.

“Are you going to school like that?” she demands, indicating my tattered jeans with the holes at the knees and one high on the right thigh.

Suddenly, Eva sounds eerily reminiscent of my mother, who is giving me yet another lecture during my “coming out” year, the year she insisted I enter society as a privileged Seattle debutante. Each of those achingly boring lectures would begin with, There comes a time in a young woman’s life when appearances matter.

I hated my mother’s lectures, but I learned she was right.

There was a time right out of college when appearances did matter and you did whatever you had to to get the job.

If you were applying for a financial position, you dressed like a banker in a navy suit with a white shirt and serious sensible dark pumps.

If you wanted a job in education, you chose something brown—tweedy skirts or slacks with another crisp white blouse and maybe a single strand of pearls or a gold chain with a pretty locket.

A job in advertising? Lose the pearls and gold chain with locket. You wore bold, clean designs in unfussy neutrals—black, white, gray—and then just for pop, a jolt of lime, orange, or cherry red.

I glance down at my supersoft faded Levi’s and then lower, at my favorite combat boots, the laces loose, the toes scuffed. I’ve worn these boots for years, and no one had a problem with them until now.

“Mom, can you just put on nice slacks or something?” Eva asks delicately, as though aware that she’s broaching a sensitive subject.

“Sure. But my boots are okay?” I ask in mock seriousness.

She frowns. “You want to create a good impression.”

Do I?

Do I really?

Um, no. Because I don’t really care about pleasing everyone else or wanting everyone’s good opinion. I don’t even know why I should want everyone’s good opinion.

And my boots are just boots. They’re not hurting anyone, are they?

But that’s not really the point, and I know it.

In my jeans and boots, with my hair in a long ponytail, I feel tough. I feel cocky, confident, brash. And feeling this way, I walk with a little more swagger in my step. To quote

Nancy Sinatra, these boots are gonna walk all over you.

And this is what keeps me from blending in at school. It’s not the boots. It’s the attitude.

I try to stick out. I like being the sore thumb.

But I change. And I swear, I wouldn’t do it for anyone else but her.

Although Eva usually takes the bus, today I drive her as promised. As we cross from the parking lot to her new classroom, she carries her book bag gingerly, holding the supplies as if they’re the most precious thing on earth instead of a school bag stuffed with plastic binders, boxes of tissues, and a dozen yellow number two pencils already sharpened.

“Are you sure about this?” Eva asks as we near her classroom door. “You don’t have to volunteer—”

“You’re making me nervous, Eva.”