One

DECENT PEOPLE BEWARE

BAD MOMMY

The young mothers were telling each other how tired they were. This
was one of their favorite topics, along with the eating, sleeping,
and defecating habits of their offspring, the merits of certain
local nursery schools, and the difficulty of sticking to an
exercise routine. Smiling politely to mask a familiar feeling of
desperation, Sarah reminded herself to think like an
anthropologist. I'm a researcher studying the behavior of boring
suburban women. I am not a boring suburban woman myself.

"Jerry and I started watching that Jim Carrey movie the other
night?"

This was Cheryl, mother of Christian, a husky
three-and-a-half-year-old who swaggered around the playground like
a Mafia chieftain, shooting the younger children with any object
that could plausibly stand in as a gun--a straw, a half-eaten
banana, even a Barbie doll that had been abandoned in the sandbox.
Sarah despised the boy and found it hard to look his mother in the
eye.

"The Pet Guy?" inquired Mary Ann, mother of Troy and Isabelle. "I
don't get it. Since when did passing gas become so
hilarious?"

Only since there was human life on earth, Sarah thought,
wishing she had the guts to say it out loud. Mary Ann was one of
those depressing supermoms, a tiny, elaborately made-up woman who
dressed in spandex workout clothes, drove an SUV the size of a UPS
van, and listened to conservative talk radio all day. No matter how
many hints Sarah dropped to the contrary, Mary Ann refused to
believe that any of the other mothers thought any less of Rush
Limbaugh or any more of Hillary Clinton than she did. Every day
Sarah came to the playground determined to set her straight, and
every day she chickened out.

"Not the Pet Guy," Cheryl said. "The state trooper with the split
personality."

Me, Myself, and Irene, Sarah thought impatiently. By the
Farrelly Brothers. Why was it that the other mothers could never
remember the titles of anything, not even movies they'd actually
seen, while she herself retained lots of useless information about
movies she wouldn't even dream of watching while imprisoned on an
airplane, not that she ever got to fly anywhere?

"Oh, I saw that," said Theresa, mother of Courtney. A big,
raspy-voiced woman who often alluded to having drunk too much wine
the night before, Theresa was Sarah's favorite of the group.
Sometimes, if no one else was around, the two of them would sneak a
cigarette, trading puffs like teenagers and making subversive
comments about their husbands and children. When the others
arrived, though, Theresa immediately turned into one of them. "I
thought it was cute."

Of course you did, Sarah thought. There was no higher praise at
the playground than cute. It meant harmless. Easily
absorbed. Posing no threat to smug suburbanites. At her old
playground, someone had actually used the c-word to describe
American Beauty (not that she'd actually named the film; it
was that thing with Kevin what's-his-name, you know, with the
rose petals). That had been the last straw for Sarah. After
exploring her options for a few days, she had switched to the
Rayburn School playground, only to find that it was the same
wherever you went. All the young mothers were tired. They all
watched cute movies whose titles they couldn't remember.

"I was enjoying it," Cheryl said. "But fifteen minutes later, Jimmy
and I were both fast asleep."

"You think that's bad?" Theresa laughed. "Mike and I were having
sex the other night, and I drifted off right in the middle of
it."

"Oh, well." Cheryl chuckled sympathetically. "It happens."

"I guess," said Theresa. "But when I woke up and apologized, Mike
said he hadn't even noticed."

"You know what you should do?" Mary Ann suggested. "Set aside a
specific block of time for making love. That's what Lewis and I do.
Every Tuesday night at nine."

Whether you want to or not, Sarah thought, her eyes straying
over to the play structure. Her daughter was standing near the top
of the slide, sucking on the back of her hand as Christian pummeled
Troy and Courtney showed Isabelle her Little Mermaid underpants.
Even at the playground, Lucy didn't interact much with the other
kids. She preferred to hang back, observing the action, as if
trying to locate a seam that would permit her to enter the social
world. A lot like her mother, Sarah thought, feeling both
sorry for her daughter and perversely proud of their
connection.

"What about you?" It took Sarah a moment to realize that Cheryl was
talking to her.

"Me?" A surprisingly bitter laugh escaped from her mouth. "Richard
and I haven't touched each other for months."

The other mothers traded uncomfortable looks, and Sarah realized
that she must have misunderstood. Theresa reached across the picnic
table and patted her hand.

"She didn't mean that, honey. She was just asking if you were as
tired as the rest of us."

"Oh," said Sarah, wondering why she always had so much trouble
following the thread of a conversation. "I doubt it. I've never
needed very much sleep."

Morning snack time was ten-thirty on the dot, a regimen established
and maintained by Mary Ann, who believed that rigid adherence to a
timetable was the key to effective parenting. She had placed
glow-in-the-dark digital clocks in her children's rooms, and had
instructed them not to leave their beds in the morning until the
first number had changed to seven. She also bragged of strictly
enforcing a 7 p.m. bedtime with no resistance from the kids, a
claim that filled Sarah with both envy and suspicion. She had never
identified with authority figures, and couldn't help sensing a sort
of whip-cracking fascist glee behind Mary Ann's ability to make the
trains run on time.

Still, as skeptical as she was of fanatical punctuality in general,
Sarah had to admit that the kids seemed to find it reassuring. None
of them complained about waiting or being hungry, and they never
asked what time it was. They just went about the business of their
morning play, confident that they'd be notified when the proper
moment arrived. Lucy seemed especially grateful for this small gift
of predictability in her life. Sarah could see the pleasure in her
eyes when she came running over to the picnic table with the
others, part of the pack for the first time all day.

"Mommy, Mommy!" she cried. "Snack time!"

Of course, no system is foolproof, Sarah thought, rummaging
through the diaper bag for the rice cakes she could have sworn
she'd packed before they left the house. But maybe that was
yesterday? It wasn't that easy to tell one weekday from the next
anymore; they all just melted together like a bag of crayons left
out in the sun.

"Mommy?" An anxious note seeped into Lucy's voice. All the other
kids had opened Ziploc bags and single-serving Tupperware
containers, and were busy shoveling handfuls of Cheerios and
Goldfish crackers into their mouths. "Where my snack?"

"I'm sure it's in here somewhere," Sarah told her.

Long after she had come to the conclusion that the rice cakes
weren't there, Sarah kept digging through the diaper bag,
pretending to search for them. It was a lot easier to keep staring
into that dark jumble of objects than to look up and tell Lucy the
truth. In the background she heard someone slurping the dregs of a
juice box.

"Where it went?" the hard little voice demanded. "Where my
snack?"

It took an act of will for Sarah to look up and meet her daughter's
eyes.

"I'm sorry, honey." She let out a long, defeated sigh. "Mommy can't
find it."

Lucy didn't argue. She just scrunched up her pale face, clenched
her fists, and began to hyperventilate, gathering strength for the
next phase of the operation. Sarah turned apologetically to the
other mothers, who were watching the proceedings with
interest.

"I forgot the rice cakes," Sarah explained. "I must have left them
on the counter."

"Poor thing," said Cheryl.

"That's the second time this week," Mary Ann pointed out.

You hateful bitch, Sarah thought.

"It's hard to keep track of everything," observed Theresa, who had
supplied Courtney with a tube of Go-gurt and a box of
raisins.

Sarah turned to Lucy, who was emitting a series of whimpers that
were slowly increasing in volume.

"Just calm down," Sarah pleaded.

"No!" Lucy shouted. "No calm down!"

"That'll be enough of that, young lady."

"Bad mommy! I want snack!"

"It's not here," Sarah said, handing her daughter the diaper bag.
"See for yourself."

Fixing her mother with an evil glare, Lucy promptly turned the bag
upside down, releasing a cascade of Pampers, baby wipes, loose
change, balled-up Kleenex, books, and toys onto the
wood-chip-covered ground.

"Sweetie." Sarah spoke calmly, pointing at the mess. "Clean that
up, please."

"I...want...my...snack!" Lucy gasped.

With that, the dam broke, and she burst into piteous tears, a
desolate animal wailing that even made the other kids turn and
look, as if realizing they were in the presence of a virtuoso and
might be able to pick up a few pointers.

"Poor thing," Cheryl said again.

Other mothers know what to do at moments like this, Sarah
thought.  They'd all read the same book or something. Were you
supposed to ignore a tantrum and let the kid "cry herself out"? Or
were you supposed to pick her up and remind her that she was safe
and well loved? It seemed to Sarah that she'd heard both
recommendations at one time or another. In any case, she knew that
a good parent would take some sort of clearheaded action. A good
parent wouldn't just stand there feeling clueless and guilty while
her child howled at the sky.

"Wait." It was Mary Ann who spoke, her voice radiating such
undeniable adult authority that Lucy immediately broke off crying,
willing to hear her out. "Troy, honey? Give Lucy your
Goldfish."

Troy was understandably offended by this suggestion.

"No," he said, turning so that his body formed a barrier between
Lucy and his snack.

"Troy Jonathan." Mary Ann held out her hand. "Give me those
Goldfish."

"But Mama," he whimpered. "It's mine."

"No backtalk. You can share with your sister."

Reluctantly, but without another word of protest, Troy surrendered
the bag. Mary Ann immediately bestowed it upon Lucy, whose face
broke into a slightly hysterical smile.

"Thank you," Sarah told Mary Ann. "You're a lifesaver."

"It's nothing," Mary Ann replied. "I just hate to see her suffer
like that."

Not that they would, but if any of the other mothers had asked how
it was that Sarah, of all people, had ended up married, living in
the suburbs, and caring full-time for a small child, she would have
blamed it all on a moment of weakness. At least that was how she
described it to herself, though the explanation always seemed a bit
threadbare. After all, what was adult life but one moment of
weakness piled on top of another? Most people just fell in line
like obedient little children, doing exactly what society expected
of them at any given moment, all the while pretending that they'd
actually made some sort of choice.

But the thing was, Sarah considered herself an exception. She had
discovered feminism her sophomore year in college--this was back in
the early nineties, when a lot of undergraduate women were moving
in the opposite direction--and the encounter had left her
profoundly transformed. After just a few weeks of Intro to Women's
Studies, Sarah felt like she'd been given the key to understanding
so many things that were wrong with her life--her mother's
persistent depression, her own difficulty making and keeping female
friends, the alienation she sometimes felt from her own body. Sarah
embraced Critical Gender Studies with the fervor of a convert,
taking from it the kind of comfort other women in her dorm seemed
to derive from shopping or step aerobics.

She enlisted at the Women's Center and spent the second half of her
college career in the thick of a purposeful, socially aware,
politically active community of women. She volunteered at the Rape
Crisis Hotline, marched in Take Back the Night rallies, learned to
distinguish between French and Anglo-American feminism(s). By
senior year, she had cut her hair short, stopped shaving her legs,
and begun attending Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual dances and social
events. Two months before graduation, she dove headlong into a
passionate affair with a Korean-American woman named Amelia, who
was headed for med school in New York City in the fall. It was a
thrilling time for Sarah, the perfect culmination to her
undergraduate voyage of self-discovery.

And then--suddenly and with astonishing finality--college was over.
Amelia moved back to Westchester to spend the summer with her
family. Sarah stayed in Boston, taking a job at Starbucks to pay
the rent while she figured out what to do next. They visited each
other twice that summer, but for some reason couldn't recapture
what had so recently been an effortless rhythm of togetherness. On
the day before Sarah was supposed to visit her in her new dorm,
Amelia called and said maybe it would be best if they didn't see
each other anymore. Medical school was overwhelming; she didn't
have the space in her life for a relationship.

Sarah had nothing in her life but space, but she didn't get
involved with anyone else for almost a year, and when she did it
was with a man, a charismatic barista who did stand-up comedy and
said he liked everything about her but her hairy legs. So Sarah
started shaving again, got fitted for a diaphragm, and spent a lot
of time in comedy clubs, listening to tired jokes about the
difference between men (they won't ask for directions!) and women
(they want to talk after sex!). When she tried to explain her
objections to humor based on sexist stereotypes, Ryan suggested
that she extract the metal rod from her ass and lighten up a
little.

Along with dumping Ryan, applying to graduate school seemed like
the perfect solution for escaping the rut she was in--a way to
recapture the excitement of college while also making a transition
into a recognizable version of adulthood. She cultivated an image
of herself as a young professor, a feminist film critic, perhaps.
She would be a mentor and an inspiration to girls like herself, the
quiet ones who'd sleepwalked their way through high school, knowing
nothing except that they couldn't possibly be happy with any of the
choices the world seemed to be offering them.

Within a couple of weeks of starting the Ph.D. program, though, she
discovered that she'd booked passage on a sinking ship. There
aren't any jobs, the other students informed her; the profession's
glutted with tenured old men who won't step aside for the next
generation. While the university's busy exploiting you for cheap
labor, you somehow have to produce a boring thesis that no one will
read, and find someone willing to publish it as a book. And then,
if you're unusually talented and extraordinarily lucky, you just
might be able to secure a one-year, nonrenewable appointment
teaching remedial composition to football players in Oklahoma.
Meanwhile, the Internet's booming, and kids we gave C pluses to are
waltzing out of college and getting rich on stock options while we
bust our asses for a pathetic stipend that doesn't even cover the
rent.

Sarah could see that it was all true, but she didn't really mind
once she adjusted her expectations. Graduate school didn't have to
lead anywhere, did it? Wouldn't it be worthwhile just to spend a
couple of years reading and thinking, reawakening her mind from a
long stupor induced by too many espresso drinks and lame
one-liners? She could just get her master's, maybe teach in a prep
school after that, or join the Peace Corps, or even figure out a
way to climb onto the Internet gravy train like everybody
else.

What did her in was the teaching. Some people loved it, of course,
loved the sound of their own voices, the chance to display their
cleverness to a captive audience. And then there were the
instructors like herself, who simply couldn't communicate in a
classroom setting. They made one point over and over with
mind-numbing insistence, or else they circled around a dozen
half-articulated ideas without landing on a single one. They read
woodenly from prepared notes, or got lost in their muddled syntax
while attempting to speak off the cuff. God help them if they
attempted a joke. The faces looking back at them might be bored or
confused or hostile, but mostly they were just full of pity. That's
what she got from her two semesters of teaching: enough pity to
last her a lifetime.

Broke and demoralized, Sarah quit school and landed back at
Starbucks, this time with a seriously diminished sense of herself
and her future. She was a failure, a twenty-six-year-old woman of
still-ambiguous sexuality who had just discovered that she wasn't
nearly as smart as she'd thought she was. I am a painfully
ordinary person, she reminded herself on a daily basis, destined to
live a painfully ordinary life.

As if to illustrate this humbling lesson, her old lover Amelia
walked into Starbucks one chilly afternoon that fall. She looked
absolutely radiant, with a strong-jawed Korean husband standing
proudly beside her, and a plump, wide-eyed baby strapped to her
chest in a forward-facing contraption. The two women recognized
each other right away. Amelia froze in the doorway, exchanging a
searching look with Sarah across the length of the floor.

Sarah smiled sadly, trying to acknowledge the strangeness and
emotional richness of the moment, but Amelia didn't smile back. Her
face--it was fuller, less girlish, with a touch of fatigue around
the eyes--didn't betray the slightest sign of desire or regret or
even simple surprise. All Sarah could find on it was a familiar
look of pity, as if Amelia were just another bored freshman who
didn't know what the hell the teacher was going on about. She
whispered something to her husband, who cast a quick, startled
glance at Sarah before mouthing the word, Really? Amelia
shrugged, as if she didn't understand how it was possible that she
even knew this pathetic woman in the green apron, let alone that
they'd once danced to Aretha Franklin in their underwear and
collapsed onto a narrow bed in a fit of giggles that seemed like it
would never stop. At least that's what Sarah hoped Amelia was
remembering as the perfect little family retreated out the door,
leaving her to fake a smile at the next person in line and explain
for the umpteenth time that there was no such thing as "small" at
Starbucks.

That, she would have explained to the other mothers, was my
moment of weakness. Except that it wasn't really a moment. It
lasted all through that winter and into the following spring, which
was when Richard stepped up to the counter one tedious morning--he
was a regular, a middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed beard and an
air of quiet authority--and asked if she was having as bad a day as
he was, which for some reason felt like the first kind thing anyone
had said to her in years. And that was how she'd ended up at this
godforsaken playground.

Sarah knelt down and began slowly gathering up the vast assortment
of crap that had been disgorged from the diaper bag. She knew she
should have asked Lucy to help--at three, a child was old enough to
begin taking responsibility for the messes she'd created--but
asserting this principle was hardly worth the risk of provoking
another tantrum.

Besides, the less help she got, the longer she could stay on the
ground, away from the accusatory faces of the other mothers,
letting the sharp edges of the wood chips dig even deeper into her
kneecaps, inflicting a dull pain Sarah thought she probably
deserved and might even begin to enjoy in a second or two.

Her copy of The Handmaid's Tale was lying cover down, on top
of The Berenstain Bears Visit the Dentist, and the sight of
the two books filled her with an odd sense of shame. She felt a
sudden burst of kinship for those medieval flagellants who used to
walk through town, publicly thrashing themselves to atone for their
sins. Pretty soon she'd be packing a whip in the diaper bag.

"Maybe you should make a checklist," Mary Ann told her. "Tape it to
the door so it's the last thing you see before leaving the house.
That's what I do."

I am not long for this playground, Sarah thought. She looked up
and forced herself to smile.

"Thank you," she said. "That's a really helpful
suggestion."