All Is Vanity (30 page)

I stared at the screen for a moment, flummoxed, but then I plunged forward. Somehow, Lexie’s children had cleaner faces when she imagined them putting their educational toys neatly away in the solid wooden cupboards she would purchase for this house from a catalog specializing in furniture for kids. In this house, their beds would always be made. Their manners, decent now—they said “please” and “thank you” and held out a hand when introduced—would become polished. They would learn to play chess and tennis with the kids next door, games they could enjoy for life. She and the other neighborhood mothers would organize trips to the art museum and to the kids’ music series at the Hollywood Bowl. All of this she sees in the future as she stands on the porch, peering through the green windows, waiting for Merrie to let her in.

That night I printed seven pages and added them facedown to the stack.

Margaret
,

It’s Friday night and Michael is working again. Or else he is having an affair. What is it wives are supposed to look for? Lipstick on collars? Victoria’s Secret on the Visa bill? (I have actually spotted the latter, but the lingerie is mine. I’m wearing it.) It’s not that he didn’t work a lot of hours as an academic, but most of those were at home (the advantage of having a hateful office). Of course, then we didn’t splurge on the lacy undergarments
.

You say you remember me complaining about Michael’s working so often at home? The difficulty of keeping the children and the dogs quiet, the irritating requests for snacks at inconvenient moments
.

This job, though, just swallows time, what with breakfast meetings and drinks with donors. And that’s not counting the hours devoted to upkeep. Have I mentioned the biweekly stylish haircut? He used to be satisfied with Vivian Lu at Terrific Cuts, in the mini-mall just down the street—$8 a trim. Every time he went, he’d take one of the children and Vivian would give them tiny, crunchy fish to snack on, sort of the multi-culti 1990s L.A. version of the Norman Rockwell barbershop experience. Recently, however, Michael has decided he’s embarrassed to walk around his office with a “terrific cut,” so he has to drive every two weeks to West Hollywood and park in an unvalidated lot, so that Lance at The Razor’s Edge can give him a $45 cut with “edge.” OK, I grant you, this cut has more style, but not $37 more!

Speaking of haircuts, I just spent over a hundred dollars on trims for the two boys and lunch. Jeanette called the other day and begged us to go with her to the Calliope, this salon especially for kids in Santa Monica (is it called a “salon,” if it’s for kids?). I would have thought the only excuse to go there was to prepare to have a Christmas card picture taken at Sears, unless you’re of Jeanette’s ilk, in which case you go there any time your child needs his bangs trimmed (and you hire a professional photographer to come over to the house in September). She was having a hard time with Jake, who said he wouldn’t go without Hunter, which made India say she wouldn’t go without Noah, so Jeanette wondered if we’d go, and then, she said, we could all have lunch afterwards. Fool that I am, I said, “Sure.” I’ve been cutting the boys’ hair myself since Michael stopped taking them to Vivian and they’re getting a little raggedy. I could use a professional line to follow. Lunch, I assumed, would be chicken nuggets. After all, we’d have the kids
.

These haircuts ended up costing more than I’ve ever spent on my own hair. And while Jake and India sat on their little carousel horses sweetly sucking their lollipops, Noah decided he was deathly afraid of carousel horses, except possibly the red one, on which another child was sitting, and Hunter tried some sort of rodeo move, in an effort to impress either Jake or the stylist—probably both—and fell off his steed
.

Still, their hair looks so much better than it ever has. Hunter and Noah look, really, like different children, like children who mighty in fact, need head shots, if I ever became that kind of mother—which, of course, I wouldn’t! I can see now that they even may have looked a little dorky before, the way I was doing their hair. I would say that doesn’t matter, especially since they’re boys. Especially since they’re seven and four. But probably that kind of thinking isn’t fair to them. Probably they should look their best. Jeanette says it’s good for their self-esteem to have great haircuts. She says we owe it to our kids to make the best of their looks, because although we may hate it—and, obviously, any thinking person has to hate it, but the problem is that there are a lot of unthinking people in this world—looks do matter. They even affect the way teachers treat a child in school. They’ve done studies to prove this. I mean, I don’t want to put my children at a disadvantage, as long as we can afford not to
.

“I can’t believe you cut your children’s hair!” Jeanette said. “I’d never have the time!”

This is presumably because she has more important things to do, like drive the children to the salon, wait while someone else cuts their hair, and then go out to lunch
.

Jeanette, by the way, has a spectacular cut, sort of understated, obviously stylish without looking like she copied it from a sitcom actress. I asked her where she gets it done
.

“I’m so glad you asked!” she said. “Edward is amazing with color. ”

(I leave you to draw your own conclusions about why exactly she was glad I asked, but I’ll admit that I wished I were wearing a hat at that moment to hide my rendezvous with Miss Clairol.) Anyway, I now have Edward’s number. He’s in Beverly Hills
.

Jeanette wanted to have lunch at the sort of café that turns out a lovely bruschetta. “I promised the kids,” she told me, when, having emptied our checking account preparing my children for their acting careers, I countered with Hot Dog on a Stick. Apparently, Jake and India are small Jeanettes, preferring sit-down restaurants and cloth napkins
.

And then there’s that whole nightmare where you know you’re going to split the bill, so you have to order at least as much as the other person or be stuck subsidizing her lobster. “Dessert?” she asked, so we all had to have one. The kids, of course, ate two bites of theirs and you can’t take “freshly churned ice cream topped with a seasonal assortment of wild berries” home
.

After lunch, we straggled along Montana for a few blocks, admiring the French infant sleepers and the Nepalese yak-milking stools in the windows. It was Noah, actually, who pointed out the African ceremonial mask, carved of dark wood, fitted with straw and feathers, a long, almost Modigliani-like face with almond-shaped holes for the eyes. Michael, I knew, would love it. He would love it, and he would never buy it for himself Jeanette was already two stores farther on when I called her back
.

“I just want to take a look at this,” I said
.

Jeanette agreed, when the saleswoman had unhooked the mask from the window and brought it to the counter for us to examine, that it was special. She held it up to her face. “You can never have too much art,” she said
.

“Let me see it,” India said, so Jeanette bent and held her masked face close to her daughter’s
.

“No! Let me see it,” India said, by which she meant touch it
.

For a family whose livelihood depends on art, we own pitifully little: those two small drawings we bought on our honeymoon in La Jolla and a painting I couldn’t resist at the flea market. Other than that, just framed posters
.

“I’m going to buy it,” I said. “For Michael.” He’d finally bought me an engagement ring after he got the Otis job, but I’d never gotten anything really nice just for him
.

“Congratulations,” the saleswoman said “This is one of my favorite pieces.” She wrapped it carefully in yellow tissue paper and then laid it in a box
.

“Let me see it!” India insisted, pushing up on her toes next to the counter
.

The first time the saleswoman swiped the card, she smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Sometimes we have trouble with this machine,” she said
.

The second time, she frowned. “I’m sorry.” She handed the card back. “Is there another you’d like to use?”

Jeanette politely began unnesting a set of nesting bowls somewhere on my left
.

“You mean it was declined?” I said. “I don’t see how that can be.”

“Sometimes they don’t like it if you use it twice in one hour,” Jeanette said. “That’s happened to me.”

“Maybe I should call,” I said, “I can’t have reached the limit on that card.”

By now India was lying on the floor of the shop, her heels and fists pounding the kilim-covered floor. “I want to see it!” she wailed
.

The saleswoman handed me the phone
.

“India, honey,” Jeanette said. She turned to the saleswoman. “Would it be all right if we took it out again?”

“You saw it,” Jake told his sister impatiently
.

“I want to see it!” India screamed
.

I was on hold. Ivy, luckily, was asleep in her stroller, but Noah picked up a small carving and tried to give it to India to appease her
.

“Noah!” I said too sharply. “Put that back! It’s not a toy!” Which made him start to cry
.

The woman unwrapped the mask and Jeanette held it up to India’s face. “Here, honey, here,” she said. “You can see it.”

It turned out I had reached my limit on that card, even though it was the one I saved for big purchases, the one I’d never come close to maxing out before. I’ll have to check the next statement scrupulously and make sure there’s no mistake, because I don’t understand what could be on there. Luckily, there were other cards in my wallet
.

Michael loves the mask as much as I knew he would. He’s already hung it in the living room. The straw bits are supposed to be uneven, so the ones India broke off aren’t obvious
.

We’ve cut a corner on the house expenses because my cousin, Paula, and her husband from Pittsburgh are visiting my Uncle Frank next week and he has no idea what to do with them. My mother suggested that he inspect our house—he does do something in construction, but I always thought it had mostly to do with cement pouring—in exchange for a personal, Michael-led tour of the museum. I’m officially annoyed with my mother for meddling but also a bit relieved, given that the tickets to the aquarium, not to mention the cafeteria lunches, are going to pretty much gut the inspection fund. And who’s more likely to have our interests at heart, the Peri-recommended inspector or Uncle Franky?

What if he finds something horribly wrong? I will collapse in a crumpled heap. I couldn’t stand to start this process over
.

L

Start over? No. Lexie does not want to start over. Lexie cannot afford to spend the next fifty pages rejecting houses, getting nowhere like Robert. Where would the dramatic tension be in that? Whatever Letty and Michael did, Lexie and her husband, Miles, were committed to buying, so they could start their new and improved life as soon as escrow closed. In fiction, it’s easy to find money to pay an inspector. Lexie borrows from her children’s savings accounts and pushes her fingers into the crevices of the couch, groping for change. Lexie also delights at the way the stylists transform her children at the Merry-Go-Round and vows no other scissors will touch their precious locks, as long as she draws breath. Also, because the most basic element of a wardrobe is a good haircut, she gets her own hair trimmed and foiled at a salon two blocks from Rodeo Drive. Her hair is short, so she’ll have to return every four weeks to maintain the shape. I printed five more pages for my stack.

“Dear L,”
I replied,
“treat yourself. Go to Edward. You should have hair at least as stunning as your four-year-old’s.”

Letty’s color had, in fact, looked a teeny bit brassy at Christmas, and though I agreed that it shouldn’t matter, I suspected that this would put her at a disadvantage at those museum parties. People formed their impressions. There was no stopping them.