Chapter 15

nnie had not been a good mother. Age and experience had taught her this. She had been a competent mother. Her sons never went without clean clothes or a good meal or expensive medical or dental care. They were provided with all the material possessions a late-twentieth-century child could possibly want. They attended church and good private schools and had grown up in a stable, conservative, two-parent family. They had been raised in the structured environment so often touted by educators and television child psychologists. And that’s where Annie had gone wrong.

She had lived her life, their lives, by schedules. Most mothers kept dry erase or bulletin boards hanging in the kitchen by the phone but Annie’s schedules had taken up the entire back of the pantry door. Six sheets of neatly typed and numbered pages taped up like Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses nailed to the door of the Schlosskirche. And the schedules had an almost religious significance for Annie; they were studied by her faithfully every morning, followed with unswerving devotion every day, and were the last things she consulted every evening before laying her weary head down upon her goosedown pillow. Meal schedules, nap schedules, doctors’ appointments, reading enrichment, fun with mathematics, supervised television viewing, art lessons, soccer lessons, and piano lessons were all listed and sublisted in outline form down to the most trivial of details. Even playtime was scheduled. An anthropologist studying child-rearing customs and preadolescent development in the late twentieth century could see the whole of her children’s sad and dreary childhoods outlined on the back of her pantry door.

The problem with scheduling, Annie now realized, was that in your rush to meet the deadlines set forth in front of you in black and white, you missed the more important things. Things like lazy summer afternoons spent lying in a hammock reading, or fishing for crawdads in the creek, or water gun fights on the lawn, or impromptu games of tag or blind man’s bluff or Hi-Ho Cherry O! Annie never played with her sons. She wasn’t that kind of mother. Lola had once told her that she and Henry had built an entire castle out of refrigerator boxes they painted and taped together, cutting out doors and windows with serrated knives. (Serrated knives!) The idea of wild-child Henry Furman wielding a sharp and dangerous instrument had been enough to fill Annie with a sense of doom and impending disaster. What had Lola been thinking?

She repeated the story that night for Mitchell as they got ready for bed. “What was Lola thinking?” she said sharply. “Henry could have stabbed himself in the heart! He could have put out an eye!”

“Now, honey, boys need to be boys,” Mitchell said and something in his tone made Annie think he was criticizing her.

“Yes, well, boys given sharp instruments to play with are often dead boys!” she said, astonished at her own outburst. Why should she care that Lola gave her son knives to play with? Or that she played with him at all?

“Oh, now, Henry’s a good boy,” Mitchell said, as if to confirm her suspicions that she was being unreasonable.

She gave him an indignant look. “I never said he wasn’t.”

“Now, honey, don’t go getting your shorts in a knot,” Mitchell said, reaching for her. “And speaking of shorts, why don’t you put on that little black lace bikini thing I bought you for Valentine’s Day?”

Now that she was older she could see it. Henry Furman was a good boy. He’d turned out fine, despite the fact that he’d never been on a schedule his entire childhood. Despite the fact that Lola had let him go to bed whenever or wherever he wanted to, just dropping wherever he was when he got tired, on the sofa in the den, at the foot of Lola’s bed, on the floor in the upstairs hallway. Annie had been appalled at Lola’s lack of routine and had on more than one occasion offered to help her make up a schedule.

“A schedule?” Lola had laughed in her silvery little voice. “Oh, Henry wouldn’t like that at all.”

And now Lola had had the last laugh, although she wasn’t laughing, of course; there wasn’t a mean bone in her frail little body, and Annie was left with the feeling that she had cheated her boys out of something important in their childhoods.

Not that they blamed her, of course. They were always calling her and teasing her about one little thing or another. William, the eldest, had gone off to UVA first, and Annie had worried that he wasn’t being fed right in the school cafeteria. When he called she would always ask him, “What’d you have for dinner?”

The first time he said, “filet mignon au poivre” and the second “trout amandine,” but it wasn’t until he said, “oysters Rockefeller” that she began to get suspicious. But by then she’d already bragged to the women in her garden club about the gourmet meals served in the UVA cafeteria. When Carleton went off to Duke two years later, he’d done the same thing.

“What’d you have for dinner?”

“Lobster with truffle butter.”

It had been a big joke among the three of them, William, Carleton, and Mitchell (because he’d been in on it, of course) and now whenever they were home they teased Annie about how her home-cooked meals didn’t come close to the gourmet fare they were accustomed to at college.

She was proud of them, proud of the tall, sturdy young men they had grown up to be. And despite her constant interference in their lives and fretting over them (what was it some pundit had called her generation—helicopter parents?) they still managed to come across as contented and well-adjusted young men.

Still, if Annie had it to do all over again, she’d throw away the schedules and spend each day just enjoying it as it came. She’d ride bikes, and play board games, and build castles in the backyard out of refrigerator boxes and she wouldn’t listen to anyone who tried to tell her how to be a better mom. She wouldn’t listen to pastors or television child psychologists or well-meaning but misinformed neighbors who tried to give her parenting advice.

When William was four years old she’d let a neighbor convince her to paint his thumb with Mavala to break him of his thumb-sucking habit. And when he’d started kindergarten and was still sleeping at night with a blanket she’d let that same neighbor, who had read every child-rearing book ever written and therefore considered herself an expert, advise her to tie the “bankie” to helium balloons and let William release them into the sky in a kind of symbolic goodbye-to-babyhood ritual. With this in mind, Annie had gathered the neighborhood children for a festive affair complete with streamers, party games, and ice-cream cake, and had allowed the stoic but trembling William to “free” his bankie before the assembled guests. Unfortunately, the balloons carrying the blanket became entangled in the top of a tall pecan tree, where they exploded one by one like firecrackers to the accompanying screams of the watching children. The tethered bankie, rather than continuing its symbolic ascent, became snagged in the branches at the top of the tree, where it hung forlornly above the yard for several weeks like a rotting corpse dangling from a gallows. Every time William went outside he would look up into the branches of the tree and scream. Annie finally paid a tree service to come into the yard with a crane to take it down.

Given that experience she should have known better than to listen to this same neighbor, who advised her that, according to a new book written by the eminent child psychologist Dr. Ernest Witherspoon, a toddler could now be potty trained in less than one day. Dr. Witherspoon’s technique involved locking the child and mother in a bathroom together for twelve hours. The trauma of this experience was so great that Annie came into Carleton’s room several weeks later to find him squatting in a corner, furtively reaching into his pants to pinch off pieces of a giant turd that he rolled into pellets the size of BBs and dropped surreptitiously into the heating register.

Both her sons had managed to survive her mothering, although there were times when Annie wondered how. With the clear-sighted advantage of age and experience, she was now able to see how woefully inadequate she had truly been. Although William and Carleton seemed mentally healthy now she was sure the failures of her parenting would come to light years from now during some long, gloomy period of middle-aged psychotherapy.

With any luck at all, it would happen long after she was dead.