The rule at Awaken Academy was that no parents should enter the building in the mornings, in order to minimize long, weepy separations. Of course, those still happened, but I guess they thought it was better if the children associated the tears with what happened outside, rather than what happened in the classroom. These good-byes at the door were so hard; sometimes the parents wept along with their children. Lucy was one of those kids who didn’t want to let go, clutching my hand long after the teachers had called for the students to line up.
She’d invariably whine “No, Mommy! No go!” while clinging to me like a tree monkey. I’d have to slowly peel away her tiny grip, all the while feeling like a monster for sending her on into the unknown. Of course I’d toured the school and knew exactly what was inside—miniature tables and chairs, play kitchens and carpenter benches, pots of finger paint and child-safe easels, and shelves filled with brightly colored toys and picture books. A wonderful place, very clean and bright, but the daily lineup seemed so rigid and regimented that I had to remind myself every morning that once Lucy got inside the classroom she was fine.
As I stood there one morning, watching my daughter throw me the big-eyed, pitiful looks of an abandoned animal, a smartly dressed, redheaded woman said, “For all we know they’ve got a sweatshop going on in there.” She smiled at me and at the father of another child standing near us. “Little kids tethered to sewing machines and assembly lines.”
The man looked confused and slightly nervous, but I burst out laughing, surprised. The woman’s smile widened and she laughed, too, adding, “Do you think they’re making clothes for Baby Gap or the Neiman Marcus kids’ collection?”
“Oh, don’t be elitist,” a short woman to her right said. “It’s probably Walmart or Toys ‘R’ Us and our kids are the ones adding the enormous boobs to Beach Blanket Barbie even as we speak.”
The first woman winked at me and stuck out her hand. “I’m Julie Phelps, a.k.a. the mom of the little boy who refuses to share with anybody.”
“Sarah Walker.” The shorter woman thrust her hand past Julie to give mine a vigorous shake, her dark curls bouncing. “She means Owen, who is not nearly as bad as my son, Sam, who enjoys crashing trucks into everybody—warn your daughter.”
And that’s how we met. I sometimes wondered why Julie chose to ask me to join them. I thought maybe it was because the preschool was small, and the other available mothers all seemed nearly identical, with their flat-ironed hair and preppy suburban clothes, chatting about tennis or golf games. There were only a few mothers who stood out among this set—one, a glamorous banker who wore silk shirts with dark, pinstriped suits and liked to make snarky remarks, which she’d invariably follow with a braying laugh and “Of course, I’m just joking!” Another was a tiny, miserable-looking woman whose name I never did get, but who had an equally tiny, miserable-looking little boy with a perpetually runny nose named Jonathan. I only know this because his name accompanied every high-pitched shriek she leveled at him: “Jonathan, be careful!” “Jonathan, say thank you!” “Jonathan, don’t run!” I have to say that her nasal voice turned me off that name for life.
Sarah stood out, too, but in a good way, beautiful and biracial in a sea of pasty white women, and with a penchant for wearing brightly colored scarves and jewelry that another mother had dubbed “ethnic,” even though Sarah bought them at T.J.Maxx.
In hindsight, it’s easy to see that I also stood out among this crowd. Tall and introverted, I didn’t chat with the other mothers, had zero interest in or aptitude for country-club life or team sports, and brought books to read to avoid appearing to be all alone in that sea of conversation. I’d stand off to one side holding my book aloft, my free arm folded protectively across my middle.
My nervousness must have seemed like aloofness, perhaps even disdain, at any rate interesting enough to merit Julie’s attention. If she’d known how desperate and lonely I felt, would she have been so welcoming? If she’d known my real history, not the abbreviated version I shared? That we’d moved to Pittsburgh because of Michael’s job transfer. As far as Julie knew, I was from the eastern part of Pennsylvania, like Michael, who grew up in comfortable Bucks County. What if I’d told her that I’d spent my childhood in hardscrabble Braddock, no more than thirty miles, but an entire lifestyle, away? What if she’d known we depended on food stamps after the mills had closed, and lived in an aluminum-siding house whose Easter-egg pastel yellow exterior had faded to dingy gray, the walls so thin that in the winter my mother filled cracks with tin foil and old newspapers to try to keep out the cold? Perhaps I’m underestimating Julie; if she’d found out about my past she might have considered it exotic.
While she was friendly with everyone, I’d learn that Julie hand-selected friends who were different. Before I moved to Sewickley, there’d been Brenda, a computer-science professor who was also tall and bookish, her similarities to me something that both Julie and Sarah liked to exclaim about. As in, “That’s just what Brenda would have said!”
After our first meeting, I saw Julie and Sarah again at pick-up and again the next morning at drop-off and at every drop-off thereafter, but it was always Julie who came to stand near me and started each conversation. I was hesitant to impose, and Sarah, while friendly, seemed perfectly content to hang out only with Julie. Until one Friday morning when it started to rain while we chatted in the parking lot, and Julie said, “Shall we get coffee?”
I thought at first that she was only talking to Sarah, but then she looked at me and I realized she meant both of us. I’m embarrassed by how thrilled I was to be included—like I was back in high school and being accepted by the cool girls.
As we walked through the door of Crazy Mocha that first time, I was aware of people turning to look at the three of us laughing and chatting. It was exciting, all of that attention. I wasn’t used to it. I worked from home as an IT consultant, so I didn’t have to dress up, wearing jeans and casual shirts, comfortable albeit boring clothing that would hide the “curves” I needed to lose. Michael always wanted me to show off my body, which he loves in a frankly admiring way that makes me love him. Julie always claimed to admire my curves, too. Like Michael, she was good at focusing on the positive. Sarah would have called my self-assessment “self-pity.”
Sarah didn’t have patience for whining—she was very can-do. “If you don’t feel good about your body, change it,” she said once in an effort to convince Julie and me to join the Mommy Yoga class at the YMCA for which she’d impulsively registered. “Too much Halloween candy,” she’d said, patting her stomach, which I thought looked better than mine. “I told myself, stop complaining and do something about it—that’s my pre–New Year’s resolution!”
Julie was obsessive about fitness, a runner and healthy-diet devotee, so she certainly didn’t need to add any more exercise, but she enthusiastically signed up for yoga, because it would be “so fun” for the three of us to take a class together. Of course I signed up as well—peer pressure, sure, but it was also another excuse to hang out.
I regretted it almost immediately. Downward-Facing Dog, the Crane, the Big Toe—all of these wacky names for poses that reminded me of that old game, Twister. It turned out that I was terrible at yoga, because I was very inflexible. So inflexible that the instructor—a skinny twentysomething who looked glamorous in Lycra and called herself Shanti even though she was clearly not from the Indian subcontinent—kept commenting on it. “You’re very tight, Alison, very tense—we need to do more Shavasanas with you.”