FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010

Under the Book of Palms is an assortment of Aubrey’s old school papers, book reports, stories, assignments. They are festooned with stars and happy faces, thumbs-up stickers, and rainbows. Notes scribbled in the margins exclaim over what a good writer Aubrey was. I pick up an essay from sixth grade on the topic of school uniforms, written in her careful cursive.

I know that there will be many who will attack school uniforms and say they are a bad idea because they hinder a person from being an individual. I disagree and say the exact opposite. School uniforms would actually help someone be who they really are. Instead of being forced to choose a group and try to fit into it through a certain exact kind of clothes, everyone would start off on an equal—

“Are you searching Aubrey’s room?”

“God, Dori, don’t sneak up on me like that.”

“If by ‘sneak up’ you mean pound on your front door, then come in and yell, ‘Cam! Cam! Oh, Miss Cam Lightsey! Hello! Are you in here!,’ then, getting no response whatsoever, come back here in order to start CPR or locate your corpse, then I’m sorry that I ‘sneaked up’ on you.” Dori’s sproingy curls, dyed a mauvey brown this month, quiver as she whips her head around. “You are, aren’t you? You’re searching Aubrey’s room.”

“No,” I answer, and she joins me in searching Aubrey’s room.

I had been friendless for more than a year when Dori showed up for back-to-school night at the start of first grade. Dori and I never would have been friends back in the city, where her tattoos and transgressions would have made her blend in rather than stand out. But, like two Americans who wouldn’t have talked to each other in their homeland, Dori and I became fast friends in the alien land of Parkhaven. We bonded over being single outcasts in a place where everyone was paired up like they were boarding the Ark, and over our shared amazement that none of the other mothers had any lives—past or present—outside of being supermoms obsessed with their children and with Parkhaven Elementary.

When I met Dori, I was still smarting from being dropped by the inner circle of Parkhaven moms, and I knew the instant I saw the armband of tribal tattoos encircling her biceps and the crescent of diamond studs curling around the top of her ear that she was my soul mate. Or the closest thing to one that I was going to find at Parkhaven, where Joyce Chaffee once caused a minor sensation when she got a few magenta streaks put in her hair. Streaks that were gone a day later.

Dori happily admits that she is an “attention whore.” Even when it is negative, she has to have it. Being the official Parkhaven Weirdo Mom inspired her to new heights of outrageousness. During rare playdates with other moms, Dori openly shared details of how her ex had taken up with a stripper, and how she got up every morning and balanced her Zoloft, Xanax, and Claritin with a couple of Red Bulls. There were never any second playdates. I was only too happy to let Dori take over as Parkhaven’s biggest Weirdo Mom, a role I felt I’d been assigned because I had no husband or garments made of khaki.

Dori called Parkhaven her “witness protection program.” She fancied herself a fugitive, hiding out from a scary ex-husband in the last place on earth where he’d come looking for her. After a few years during which the scary ex was revealed to be a rich boy living on a trust fund while he pretended to be Steven Tyler, I began to suspect that inertia more than anything was holding Dori hostage in suburbia. That and the fact that out here the attention addict was a showstopper, but back in the city she was just another former riot grrrl with tats starting to sag.

“Let’s sell our blood” was one of Dori’s many suggestions for how we could afford to move back to the city. She also thought we should turn tricks behind the concession stand at soccer tournaments and sell crack along with the Girl Scout cookies. But, even if we split a place in the city, the math never worked out. As part of the divorce settlement, Martin had paid off just enough of the house—sadly bought near the top of the market—so that I could barely afford the mortgage, but not enough that I’d have much left if I sold it. And even less since I was still paying off the home equity loan I’d taken out when Aubrey needed braces. Then I went even further into the hole when I broke some bones in my foot and couldn’t work for three weeks. Besides, in spite of the facts that Parkhaven Elementary was far from the exemplary school its test scores had led me to believe and Aubrey never made many friends there, I hated to think about how hard it would be for my shy girl to adjust to a new place. Which is another reason why, at first, Dori was a godsend. Twyla and Aubrey became best friends for the rest of their time at Parkhaven Elementary.

The girls had sleepovers almost every weekend. They watched Cinderella, Charlotte’s Web, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Little Mermaid together so many times that the VHS tapes got streaks, while Dori and I split endless bottles of Australian kangaroo wine and debated who’d gotten screwed worse in her divorce and what giant outcasts we were in Parkhaven.

Another favorite topic of discussion was the impossibility of meeting men in the suburbs. This led to us signing each other up—at first as a joke, then for real—for online dating services. We spent endless evenings culling through the candidates. Dori delighted in poking fun at the gooniest of them, the ones with hair transplants that looked like a connect-the-dots puzzle, or who bragged about “owning my own business,” which we’d find out meant the guy drove a cab. We both went on dates and ended up doing unforgivable things like calling each other from bathroom stalls and whispering about dodgy odors and tasseled shoes. We both endured periods where we boldly declared that we needed “friends with benefits,” and, for a few weeks, a month or two, managed to look past a guy’s icky mom issues, green-ringed toilet bowls, and compulsions to correct how we drove, cut our meat, and pretty much everything else, except the one unforgivable deal breaker, how we raised our daughters.

Once I realized that the postmortems with Dori were far more satisfying than any of the actual liaisons, I took my profile down and lived vicariously through her.

Now, as I search through Aubrey’s drawers, Dori asks, “Didn’t we have a pact that we’d never be like our moms and read our daughters’ diaries and violate their privacy?”

“I’m not violating anyone’s privacy. Short of discovering a syringe, I don’t care what I find.” I bite my tongue, but Dori doesn’t seem to take any notice of my syringe comment. I guess she believes that it doesn’t apply to her, since, before she left, Twyla was abusing prescription drugs she stole from her babysitting customers, instead of shooting up or doing anything that involved syringes. I want to ask Dori if she regrets our pact, since Twyla clearly could have benefited from a few room searches.

I comfort myself with the thought that at least Aubrey never had any interest in drugs. Then I feel bad that Twyla is my At Least. All mothers have them. The child who—no matter what our own offspring is smoking or drinking or failing at—we can look at and think, At least. At least my child is not pregnant or in prison. Or gone off to live with her drugged-out, Aerosmith-wannabe dad. Surrounded as I am by all the Parkhaven overachievers trying to decide between Duke or Stanford, I desperately need an At Least. I just wish that it weren’t Twyla.

“So what are we looking for?”

“Nothing, really. Okay, I’d love to find some proof that she’s using birth control.”

“You should have gotten her on the pill.”

“Don’t ‘should’ on me, Edith Piaf.”

“I think my mother crushed up birth-control pills and sprinkled them on my Pablum. Oh no, wait, now I remember. She had me locked up in a chastity belt. So you think Aubrey’s pregnant? Our little rule follower? No way.”

Dori eliminates the possibility. Twyla was the wild one. Aubrey was the sensible one. Until Tyler came along she was the diligent student, the neat freak, the conscientious grade-grubber who was going to keep us all organized.

“Jesus. Aubrey and I should be cruising the aisles at Target, arguing about minifridges like all the other mothers and daughters.”

“Well, not all.”

Dori flops down on Aubrey’s bed. She strokes the hardened remnants of BeeBee’s purple hair. “Remember when the girls went through their fairy period?”

Instantly, Aubrey and Twyla are back in this room with us. They sit together on Aubrey’s bed dressed in their fairy getups: gauzy wings from the dollar store and Goodwill prom dresses scissored into fluttery Tinker Bell creations. Twyla’s copper curls are dark, almost mahogany compared with Aubrey’s duckling-down blondeness. Like the two little girls in the locker room, they talk to each other with the solemn intentness that only girls of that age can bring to a conversation with a friend.

“You are the mama fairy,” Twyla dictated to Aubrey. “And I’ll be the baby fairy.”

“And you’re lost in the deep dark forest,” Aubrey improvised. “And I come and find you.”

“No!” Twyla shouted. Strong-willed and loud, like the little girl in the locker room she automatically vetoed any changes to her script. “I find the hidden treasure and there are jewels and rubies.”

Aubrey didn’t respond.

Our daughters were in sixth grade when they watched their last movie together, Moulin Rouge. Aubrey had liked the film all right, but Twyla, who’d recently gone as boy-crazy as any girl I’d ever seen, became obsessed. No matter what you asked her, she’d sing a lyric from Moulin Rouge in response. The last time Aubrey invited her to sleep over, Twyla stayed up all night watching the movie again and again while Aubrey slept. In the morning, I asked Twyla if she wanted waffles or cereal and she sang something back to me about the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. Aubrey rolled her eyes, shook her head, and went to see what was on TV.

Another Twyla-Aubrey memory crowds in. It was early in the summer, the girls had just finished first grade, Dori and I were sitting on my rarely used front porch while the girls played inside the house. We had citronella candles burning, a bottle of kangaroo red working, and were deep into telling each other the stories of how we’d lost our virginity when Aubrey yelled out to us through a crack in the front door, “Guys! Listen, guys! Shut your eyes! Are they shut? Are you ready?” This was before she had grown out of her speech impediment, so it came out, “Aw they shut? Aw you weddy?”

After Dori and I both covered our eyes with our hands, and assured Aubrey that we couldn’t see a thing. The door creaked open and the nails of our wild young rescue dog, Pretzels, clicked on the floor as she bolted out. She bumped against my legs, then swatted them with her tail as she bounded down the porch steps, rushing to check what Dori called her pee-mail.

Twyla announced, “Okay, you can look now!”

Aubrey collapsed in giggles the instant I uncovered my eyes and beheld the two little girls, Aubrey, the shy blonde, and, Twyla, the wild redhead, both done up with cartoon-sexy makeup jobs and draped in every scarf and shawl and flimsy, sheer bit of fabric that might be considered slinky in my sadly utilitarian wardrobe.

Twyla’s copper ringlets bounced as she pointed a showstopping finger at Aubrey’s pink boom box and commanded in her husky, baby Ethel Merman voice, “Hit it!” Aubrey, still the faithful handmaiden, rushed to press “play” and the girls sang along with an old CD of mine, “That’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh, I like it!” They put their hands on their hair and wiggled their skinny hips back and forth. Aubrey had glittered brightly at her own audacity, delighting in how shocking and outrageous she was.

But Dori, far from being shocked and outraged, jumped up and joined right in. She dragged me onto my feet so we all could have a girls-just-want-to-have-fun bonding moment. Dori and Twyla and I bumped our butts together and tried to outthrust one another. But Aubrey’s face had fallen the instant she saw that Dori, Twyla, and I were intent on outdoing her. When I’d tried to drag her into the fun, she’d gone back in the house and sat on her bed arranging her My Little Ponies by color.

Dori settles BeeBee back on the bed. “Well, at least on the untimely-pregnancy front, it’s a relief that Twyla is gay.”

I don’t say anything; I am still a bit dubious about Twyla’s lesbianism. Plus, I can’t get “That’s the way, uh-huh, uh-huh” to stop running through my head. Finally, I ask, “You talked to Twyla?”

“Yeah, she called last night. For money, of course. I told her to ask her father. He’s the one with the rich, ridiculously indulgent, terminally screwed-up parents who destroyed their son’s marriage. Then she told me to forget it and that I was a bitch and had ruined her life.”

“Oh, Dori.” I take her hand as the scarlet patches bloom like geisha makeup beneath her skimpy eyebrows. She turns from me, scrubs the palm of her hand against her eyes. They come away clean; she’s stopped wearing mascara since Twyla left. Cried it off too many times.

I open another drawer. Dori peers in and asks, “Jesus, how many pairs of identical running shorts can one human own?”

Aubrey’s Nike shorts are folded neatly as a store display. Dori picks up a pair, maroon with a pink insert, and says, “I never figured Aubrey for a brand whore.”

I pluck the shorts from her, tuck them back where they were—precisely placed between the powder blue with white inserts and the burnt orange pairs—and slam the drawer closed. Dori has broken the Mommy Pact: It is fine for me to criticize my kid, but woe betide she who jumps onto that dogpile. I don’t snap at Dori, though; if focusing on Nike shorts for a few seconds helps, I’ll give her that. Maybe at that moment she’s even thinking, At least. At least I didn’t raise a brand whore.

Dori, struck with a sudden realization, claps her palm against her chest. “God. She’s not really pregnant, is she? I mean, seriously? Oh, shit. With Tyler Moldenhauer? The way she is now, she’d probably want to keep it. Oh, well, always room at PCC. If Kyle Dunmore and Stacy Adovada can get in, they’ll put Aubrey on the faculty.”

A bowling ball crushes my solar plexus. I can’t draw in a breath or release the one stuck in my chest. Dori has just put names to my worst fears: pregnancy and Parkhaven Community College, where Kyle Dunmore and Stacy Adovada, everyone’s favorite drug burnout and teen mom, are currently attending.

“Dori, could you please shut the fuck up?” I always liked that I could say “fuck” to Dori. Now I’m sorry that I ever gave up that word’s power to shock, because I would seriously like Dori to zip it.

“Sorry. Bad joke. Really, though, you have nothing to worry about. Aubrey is not like that.” She puts her hand on my arm. “Really, Cam, don’t worry.”

Don’t worry?

Dori, mother of a daughter who left home with a stash of stolen pills, who only calls her for money, stands in front of me like a living memo, a breathing reminder of all the terrible things that happen when mothers don’t worry.

After Twyla left, I hired Dori to help me with my classes. At first it was sort of a charity move, something to keep my friend distracted, but Dori has turned out to be surprisingly good at handling registration, getting students to pay up, invoicing hospitals for my consultations, and, generally, keeping me and the business going. She is even working on helping me “establish a Web presence.”

Dori glances at her watch. “Just FYI, we’ve got class in twenty-five minutes.”

I jump up. “Shit! How did I lose track of an entire hour? Where’s my bag?”

“Chill. It’s all out in the great room. I’ll go pack up. You …” She eyes me, doing a quick triage. “Brush your hair, put on a clean top. Then we gotta hit the trail like a steaming cow patty.”

I run a comb through my hair with one hand as I gather up cell phone, car keys, keys to the classroom where I teach, and purse. In the great room, Dori is stuffing my class materials into the striped canvas beach bag I haul back and forth to classes.

“Where’s Britney?” she yells. Her years as a roadie girlfriend, then wife to a musician husband have left Dori with a sense of urgency about any show, even a lactation class.

“Shit, I put Britney in the laundry room. She needs to be washed. Pretzels was gnawing on her. We’ve gotta take Lady Gaga. Credenza. Second drawer down.” Dori calls the weighted dolls I use in class Britney Spears and Lady Gaga.

Dori digs out my backup demonstration doll and jams her into the canvas bag as I shuffle my feet into the pair of sandals I locate under the couch.

“Let’s turn this mother out!” Dori yells as we run for the door. “Give me your keys. I’ll drive! You put on makeup!”

In spite of myself, whenever I jump into my dilapidated Chevy Malibu with Dori, an oldie plays in my head about “head out on the highway. Lookin’ for adventure.” It makes me feel as if I’m fifteen again and cruising with my best bud.

“Dori, slow down,” I order as the succession of gas stations, Subways, liquor stores, and dry cleaners that line the road out of my subdivision, Parkhaven Country, whiz past. “I’d rather be late than dead. Besides”—I point to a sign—“school zone ahead.” I flip down the visor and lean in closer to the mirror to swipe on some lipstick and mascara.

At the top of the steep hill we are descending, a football coach in royal blue stretch shorts stands blowing his whistle at some small boys—made even smaller by oversize helmets and shoulder pads—who, red faced and streaming sweat, are chugging up the incline.

“Oh, great,” Dori says, “I see Child Brutality Month is in full swing.”

This is another well-worn conversation. At this point I would usually jump in and suggest that Amnesty International should investigate a school system that takes children who’ve spent an entire summer exercising only thumbs on game controllers, wraps them in nonbreathable polyester, sticks solar-collection helmets on their little heads, shoves them into killing heat, and lets a sadist with a whistle run them around. But I don’t repeat my lines. Instead, I marvel at Dori and her imperviousness to the constant, eroding drip of regret. On some level, she still thinks that we—she and I—had it all figured out. That we were the moms going our own way, unconventional but, ultimately, right.

She slows down as we approach the four-way stop at the edge of the elementary school. A moment after stopping, she mutters, “Go, asshole,” and makes a face at the driver of the Jeep Cherokee across from us. The driver gestures at Dori to go ahead. She holds her hand out, impatiently indicating the empty intersection, mutters to herself, “You go, asshole.”

He doesn’t move.

“Dori, just go.”

“No, he was here first. It’s his turn. Oh, look, now he’s giving me Little Lady Fingers.”

It’s true, the driver is gesturing with two fingers twitching above his steering wheel for us to go ahead.

“I hate that patronizing shit.”

The cars on either side get tired of our standoff and zoom through the intersection. Then the Cherokee squeals out. As he passes, the driver flips Dori off. She gets a good look at his face and screams, “Oh my God, it’s Pastor Jesus Juice from Six Flags over Jesus!” The youth minister from the nearby megachurch whom Dori has decided is a child molester is, indeed, flipping us a giant bird.

Just as we finally cross the intersection, I shriek and flail at my pocket.

“Crap! What did I hit? Tell me it’s not a kid.”

“No, you’re fine.” I extract my buzzing phone. “Sorry. I forgot I put it on vibrate. I didn’t want to miss it if Aubrey calls.” I check the number, see that it’s not Aubrey, and try to figure out which of my patients or students might be calling. My best guess is the dad from the young couple with preemie twins. Their case is complicated and I’m not certain I can remember all the details. I pull up a mental file on the twins. Chase and Jason? Charles and Jeremy? Chance and Jared! Six weeks premature. Nurse started them on formula at the hospital. Nipple confusion. They’re losing weight. Pediatrician is pushing for formula. Mom is understandably frantic. Dad is clueless and thinks life with twins would be a breeze if his wife would just give in and do formula. He’s always the one who calls, since Mom, literally, has her hands full. I put on my professional voice—calm, competent, warm—and answer.

“Hello?” I repeat when the dad doesn’t respond. A scrambled fragment of his urgent answer bleeps in, then cuts out. I hold my phone aloft to try to amplify the signal, then twist around until another bar appears and yell, “I can’t hear you!”

A disjointed Morse code of garbled words machine-guns my ear, then right before the connection is decisively dropped, a name jumps out of the gibberish.

Dori glances over at me. “Who was that?”

I don’t answer.

Dori glances over, sees my expression. “Cam, are you all right? Talk to me. What’s wrong?”

I watch Dori move her mouth, but I can’t hear her anymore. We move forward along the road, but the houses, the vet clinic on the corner, the convenience store, they all pass by in silent slow motion.

“Cam!” Dori explodes. The volume comes back on and the world starts running at the correct speed again. “Who was that?”

“Martin.” I let my hand holding the phone drop into my lap. “That was Martin.”