Not everyone has the luxury to just not email. I know. I’m blessed.
I’m lucky to have a career where I’m not sitting at a desk all day, replying to messages from John in Accounting about where the invoices are for the whatever thing. I’m lucky not to be sitting at home wiping nuts and butts nonstop.
When I was in high school, I took a series of tests with my guidance counselor to help me figure out what to do with my life, but I already knew what I wanted to be. I wanted to be my guidance counselor. Lisa—she never let us call her Ms. McCarthy—was smoking hot. She was the only teacher at our school who wore heels in the winter, when this godforsaken place is covered in feet of snow for months at a time. She’d wear her frumpy winter boots only as far as the lobby, and then change right into a pair of stilettos. The other teachers thumped around like rhinos, but Lisa click-click-clicked down the hallway, tight skirt hugging her butt. She reminded me of my mom, only employed, and she had a way of looking into your eyes that made your skin feel hot and your brain feel loose in your head. I found myself saying things to her that I hadn’t said to anybody else, spilling my little teenage guts all over her floor and taking a tissue when she gently slid them across her desk toward me. My mom always told me that I should just get a job in a correctional facility so I could find a man, but I wanted to make people feel like Lisa made me feel: like they mattered.
And thanks to all those tests, that’s exactly what I do! Every day, I wake up, put on my face, hike up my tits, and make the world a more beautiful place, one vagina wax, one manicure, one facial at a time. I know more about the women of our city than their husbands, their best friends, and their therapists combined. By the time they get to my table, they’ve spent fifteen minutes sipping cucumber water in the sunroom, ten minutes listening to nature sounds and having an “aromatherapy experience,” and anywhere from thirty to forty-five years saving up their deepest secrets and insecurities.
The rules of my table are the same as a therapist’s office: it is a safe space, and I won’t tell anyone about the hole your child punched through your labia during childbirth, or about the confusing weekend you spent with your best friend from college where you maybe had sex but does it count as sex if it’s mainly hands? (Yes, it does.)
What’s funny to me is how my table works like a two-way mirror. These women pour out their secrets to me like they’re cheap liquor on Thirsty Thursdays. They tell me the things they haven’t told anyone else in their lives, things they probably don’t even admit to themselves when they’re paying thirty-five dollars to sit in a dark room riding a bike that doesn’t even fucking go anywhere. And you know what they know about me? Nothing. They don’t know my last name, or my star sign. They don’t know that I’m a mom, or that I rely on whatever they choose to write into the tip area when they sign their credit card slip as they go.
These women, who I see every day at the grocery store or at school pickup, don’t see me like I saw Lisa. They don’t see me at fucking all.
8
Amy
“What I’m about to show you is highly confidential, and intensely personal. Please hold all commentary until the end of the presentation.”
Jane is standing next to her desk, her hair brushed and parted neatly in the center. She is, for some reason, wearing one of my blazers over her soccer T-shirt. I thought she’d called me into her room to tuck her in, but instead, she confiscated my phone and seated me in her beanbag chair the moment I crossed her threshold.
“Sixth grade is a critical year for me,” she says. “What happens this year can and will impact the rest of my life. Every grade, every goal: it counts. It could be the difference between me having it all . . . or losing it all.”
Jane takes a deep breath and hits the spacebar on her laptop, and IN IT TO WIN IT: JANE MITCHELL’S TEN-YEAR PLAN shoots up onscreen with a flourish. When did my kid learn PowerPoint?
Jane’s presentation includes her goals for what she called “the three pillars of personal success,” broken down by one, three, five, seven, and ten years. She’s calculated the amount she would need to save each year to retire comfortably at age sixty-three, and the projected cost of a four-year college with and without an athletic and academic scholarship. My first thought was Why the hell did I do her summer report if she’s apparently a PowerPoint savant? My second thought was How does my kid know more about personal finance than I do? And should I hire her to plan the next ten years of my life? Jane has always been an intense child. As a baby, Mike and I would look into her eyes and say, “She’s onto us.” She was wiser than us from the start, an old soul who happened to land in the laps of two people who conceived her older brother after a night of keg stands and body shots.
“What do you think she’s thinking?” we’d ask each other as her giant brown eyes fixed on us, boring deep into our souls.
“Probably that she was born into the wrong family,” Mike would say, and we’d both laugh at this serious little creature, evaluating us with such skepticism.
Jane had every right to be skeptical. We were barely twenty-two when Dylan was born, and not even twenty-five when she joined us on the planet. Most of the parents in our Baby and Me group were closer in age to our own parents than they were to us, and they looked at Mike and me as if we were irresponsible teens, instead of irresponsible legal adults. But Jane did belong in our family. She does belong in our family.
I had been just like Jane growing up. I didn’t have PowerPoint at her age, but I did have a series of journals and a copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which I had dogeared and underlined. The book had been a gift from my own mother, and at the time I dreamed of passing it down to my own daughter one day. But I knew from Jane’s birth that she would not need any help getting motivated or being a self-starter.
“MOM.” JANE’S IRRITATED VOICE SNAPS ME BACK TO HER focus group of one. I can tell from her pursed lips that she was annoyed with my lack of participation. “Do you get it? A lot is riding on my making the soccer team this year.”
When Jane gets worked up, she can’t get her words out fast enough. She is definitely worked up, flipping back through her presentation as her voice gets higher and higher. “Soccer is everything this year. Making the soccer team will prove that I am a well-rounded student-athlete. That will ensure I am admitted into a competitive high school, which will ensure my attendance at a quality university, which will set me up for a good life! If I don’t make the team, I’ll die alone and on the streets. Is that what you want?!”
I struggle to get up from the squish of the beanbag chair.
“One second, baby.”
I’VE MADE IT A POINT TO INTENTIONALLY AVOID OUR BASEMENT. It’s a hole in the ground that our house sits on. An oversize storage unit for all the detritus of our life together. Also, there are spiders.
I find the box under our staircase. It’s one of many my mother had left on our doorstep when Mike and I had moved in together. Her writing was still on top, scrawled in permanent marker. Mike! These are Amy’s. She’s yours now, and so is her mess! Ha!
There it is: my childhood in a box. I dig through the blue ribbons and the postcards from my friends’ trips to Florida until I find it, a blue composition notebook, clearly labeled: AMY MITCHELL. 6TH GRADE. MOM DO NOT READ THIS!