Chapter Twenty-One
Lola had explained time and again that when you are lost in life, Taylor Swift should be your guide. I had never expected to find this advice useful, but here I was on the run from the paparazzi, so actually Taylor Swift would probably have had some constructive ideas.
My daughters, in contrast, had none, but they apparently found my sudden fame—or was it infamy?—an enormous inconvenience.
“The discharge instructions say Mom can’t be alone,” Alice informed her sister, whom she’d made move to the back seat. It didn’t matter whose car it was, Alice liked to drive.
“I can stay with her if you pick up the girls after you get the twins,” Darcy said in her doing-complicated-math voice. “Then you stay with them at Mom’s while I go get dinner for everyone.”
“B17 is picking up O&P,” Alice said.
Alice required so many babysitters, and went through them so quickly, she numbered them so I wasn’t constantly asking Who’s Kaitlyn?
Who’s Kylee? Who’s Kayla? Mind, if parents were more creative when naming their children instead of going for variations on the theme du jour, I’d have had more of a shot at keeping them straight.
“I thought you took the day off,” said Darcy.
“Half,” said Alice.
“These are extenuating circumstances.”
“That’s why I took half a day.”
“I’m the babysitter, not the babysittee.” Clearly I was going to be spending some time hiding indoors, so I might as well have company while I did so. “You two go to work, pick up dinner, run errands. Leave the kids with me. We’ll be fine.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Alice.
“How is that ridiculous? The discharge instructions didn’t say I couldn’t be alone. They said I shouldn’t be alone till I got home and settled. I’m. Fine.”
“You have blood coming out of a hole in your head,” Alice said. “You’re international news. You seem to be the oldest pregnant person in the history of time.”
“Sarah was ninety,” I said.
“Sarah who?”
“Sarah from Genesis.”
“The band?”
All those years of Hebrew school. “The Bible.”
“Fine.” Alice rolled her eyes. “You’re the oldest pregnant person AD.”
“There are lots of women who’ve had babies in their seventies,” I said.
“Lots?”
“At least half a dozen.”
Alice made a noise through her nose as if this actual factual information were completely irrelevant.
Another throng of cameras and mouths clustered around the Vista View entrance.
Were they the same ones from the hospital and they were faster drivers than Alice (unlikely), or were these new ones?
Maybe the paparazzi were bottomless, endlessly renewable, relentless as ocean waves.
They parted when Alice pulled up to the door, not because they were afraid Alice would run them over—though they probably should have been—but to better position themselves to take my picture some more.
Even Alice couldn’t drive into the lobby, though, so I had to get out.
It was hard to hear anything over the camera shutters.
In spite of myself, I was mildly gratified to rate a real camera instead of just the cell phone ones, though at least with the ones on your phone you can turn off that shutter noise.
(I mean, I can’t, but you probably can.) Over the shutters, real and artificial, there was also yelling:
Pepper! Pepper! Over here! Mrs. Mills!
Pepper, aren’t you too old to have a baby?
Aren’t you too old to be sexually active?
Aren’t you too old to become a mother?
(The answers to which were hell yes, none of your business, and I’ve been a mother for longer than you’ve been alive.)
And also:
Are you grateful for this miracle?
Do you think you were chosen by God?
Would you get an abortion if you could?
Do you have any comments about Texas abortion laws?
(No. No. Yes. And none that the FCC would let you air on network television.)
Not that I had any intention of engaging with any of them.
Alice had called ahead to warn Vista View about what was coming.
I didn’t hear this conversation, but I can only imagine whoever she spoke to had a lot of questions even Alice couldn’t answer.
They had, however, managed to call in extra security officers, who soon had me inside and everyone else still outside, speaking of miracles. I didn’t even get rained on.
Taylor Swift–like I may have been, but I did not have her entourage, and adding me to their to-do lists was impossible for my daughters to schedule around.
Alice’s office would fall apart without her.
Darcy had recently tacked the Austin JCC onto her volunteer rota.
So B17 picked up the twins, dropped them off with me, then circled back to get Lola and Sari.
The twins’ moods mirrored the wet, gray weather. They weren’t even interested in the box Moth had with him when he arrived.
“I brought dessert.” He thrust it into my hands—something sweet, I supposed, to mark the pause we were taking in proceedings till we saw what shook out.
I looked inside. Two hamsters were trying to bite each other’s ears. I was worried. “Are you having a stroke?”
“You know Ivy?” Moth asked. “She’s having hip surgery.”
This did not ease my concerns.
“I thought they were cookies.”
Nor this.
“I have a very old brain.” He pulled at his hair triangles to make us all laugh. “I’m hamster-sitting and grabbed the wrong box. I’ll be right back.”
“Leave this one,” I said.
But when the twins could not be cheered even by a box of hamsters, I figured something awful must have happened.
“After lunch was Author Celebration Day at school,” Oliver explained.
“That sounds fun,” I said. “What author?”
“Us. We’re the authors. We all wrote poems, and Ms. Dowler made them into a book.”
“Well, that also sounds fun.” God bless good teachers.
“Everyone read their poem,” Pierre said, “then answered a question from the audience, which was everyone’s mom except ours.”
“Your mom had an important meeting,” I said.
“She always has an important meeting,” said Pierre. “Ellie F read her haiku, and a mom asked her how many lines are in a haiku, but everyone already knows that except Ellie F because her haiku had four lines.”
“Chop off the last one,” Moth suggested. He had returned with the right box. “Bob’s your uncle, instant haiku.”
“Uncle Max is our uncle,” Pierre corrected.
“Jackson read a poem about how ice cream is good,” said Oliver, “which is a stupid thing to write a poem about because everyone already knows ice cream is good, and then a mom asked what was his favorite flavor.”
“Chocolate?” Moth guessed.
Both boys looked impressed by this show of clairvoyance.
“But then I read my acrostic, ‘D-O-G,’” said Pierre, “and no one asked who was my favorite.”
“Must have been a short poem,” said Moth.
“Who is your favorite dog?” I asked obligingly.
But that wasn’t the point of the story.
“Instead a mom raised her hand and asked if our grandma was really seventy-seven and also pregnant.”
I gasped.
“Ms. Dowler said she couldn’t ask that,” Oliver reported, “but then I read my rhyming poem, ‘Where Is the Hair of Pierre?’ and no one answered.”
“Perhaps that is fair,” Moth offered while my head spun, “for Pierre’s hair was right there.”
“That was not the reason,” Oliver told Moth. Then he turned back to me. “The reason was the same mom from before. She had witches on her fingernails.”
It took me a minute to remember where I’d just seen witches on fingernails, but what was the beast doing at O&P’s school?
“She held up her phone,” Oliver continued, “and there was a picture on it that looked like you except you were really fat and naked, and she said, ‘Is this your grandma?’ and then Ms. Dowler said, super mean, ‘Who is your son or daughter?’ and the mom got big eyes that looked all around and then she said ‘Olivia?’ and then Ms. Dowler said, ‘Olivia S or Olivia L?’ and then the mom said ‘Olivia L?’ and then another mom said, ‘My daughter is Olivia L,’ and then the first mom got up and ran out of the room. And then Ms. Dowler called the principal, and the moms all shouted a bunch and took their kids and went home except we couldn’t leave because our mom had an important meeting, and the cookie party we were supposed to have for Author Celebration Day got canceled. ”
No one said anything.
Then Moth said, “You can have a cookie now.”
He opened the right box for them.
Their eyes went wide. “Mom says no dessert before dinner,” Pierre said.
Moth winked. “Aren’t you glad she had an important meeting?”
As if that weren’t bad enough, Lola and Sari arrived in moods even worse than the twins’.
“My life is over.” Lola slumped in, shed her overloaded, soaking-wet backpack in the middle of my hallway, and flung herself on my sofa, wet jacket, muddy boots, and all.
“My life is over too.” Sari threw herself on top of her sister.
“Get off.” Lola kicked her. “I was here first.”
“You can share.”
“You’re wet.”
“So are you.”
“You’re gross.”
“So are you!”
“Girls!” I tried to be stern, but they looked so ridiculous.
“Don’t laugh, Grandma,” Lola warned. “This is all your fault.”
“How is it my fault?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Lola said.
“I do.” Sari started trying to pat her hair dry with a napkin. “Our entire school knows, Grandma. Everyone’s talking about it. Everyone’s seen and shared. Greta King put a gif of you being wheeled out of the hospital on her note to get out of gym.”
I didn’t know what that meant, which was probably just as well.
“So we had to wait for pickup in the rain,” Lola said, “because waiting inside was too humiliating.”
“More humiliating than hair that looks like this,” Sari added.
“I’m sorry for embarrassing you.” Compared to the rest of the indignities of the last couple days, this one seemed pretty minor, but high school is brutal, and I knew it.
“It’s okay,” Lola sighed. She didn’t sound like she meant it, but it was sweet of her to say. “I shouldn’t have said it was your fault. You didn’t choose to be scandalous.”
“No one ever does,” I said.