Chapter 8 - The Kitchen Table Homework
That evening, the kitchen at my house smelled of roasted squash and butter. Ren sat at the round maple table beneath the hanging lamp, her school books spread out around her like defensive fortifications.
Her homework for Tuesday morning was a single sheet of cream-colored construction paper with a printed border of autumn leaves. In the center was a prompt from her second-grade teacher, Mrs. Hallowell: MY FAMILY AT THE HOLIDAYS.
Ren was working with an eight-pack of Crayola crayons, her small forehead creased in intense, architectural concentration. She had drawn our station wagon in black lead, complete with the rust spot on the rear quarter panel, and beside it she had drawn two figures: herself in the sage-green dress with two enormous green pockets outlined in dark wax, and me in my blue winter coat with my hair tied back in a knot.
Above the car, she had written her first sentence in wide, rounded letters: My family is my mom.
I set a bowl of squash soup beside her notebook. "That’s a good sentence, Renny."
She didn't look up from her page. She reached for the brown crayon and began drawing a series of lumpy, oval shapes along the bottom margin. "The teacher said we have to list four people if we have them. Because of the table layout on the bulletin board."
"Do you want to add Grandma and Grandpa?" I asked, keeping my voice very neutral, the way I had learned to speak when we were observing birds through the classroom window. "Or Aunt Kelsey?"
Ren stopped her brown crayon mid-oval. She looked at the blank space beside her drawing of me, where there was plenty of room for an older man with glasses and a woman with a spray-varnished bob.
"Grandma and Grandpa are for company," Ren said.
She spoke with the simple, declarative certainty of a child who had observed a physical law—like gravity or the way water expands when it freezes in a plastic bucket.
"What does that mean, sweetie?"
"Like the good plates," Ren told me, looking up with her gray-green eyes clear and untroubled. "The ones with the gold flowers around the edge that live in the high cupboard behind the glass. Grandma only takes them down when the people with the clean shoes come over. Then she washes them with a little brush and puts them back where nobody can touch them."
She went back to her brown crayon, adding tiny black whiskers to the lumpy ovals.
"These are the sea lions," she explained. "From the computer video you showed me. The ones on the wood docks in Oregon."
"The ones in Astoria?"
"Yes," Ren said. "The ones who bark at the boats and don't wear dresses. Nobody tells them they're too loud. When they want to sleep, they just drop down on the boards and sleep in the sun, and if another sea lion comes over, they just go ARK, ARK, ARK until the other one goes to a different dock."
She wrote beneath the brown ovals: WE ARE GOING TO SEE THE ARK ARK ANIMALS FOR CHRISTMAS.
I looked from her homework paper to the refrigerator, where the Hanalei Bay brochure was still pinned beneath a plastic magnet shaped like an apple. The full-refund deadline was printed in tiny black type at the very bottom of the second page: CANCELLATIONS RECEIVED PRIOR TO 11:59 PM HST ON NOVEMBER 20 WILL RECEIVE A 100% REFUND OF ALL DEPOSITS AND ACCOMMODATION FEES.
November 20 was Thursday.
"Ren," I said, sitting down in the chair beside her. "If you could go anywhere for Christmas—just the two of us, nobody else—would you want to go to the beach with the big pool, or would you want to go see the barking animals in the rain?"
Ren didn't hesitate. She put the brown crayon down in the groove of her pencil box, looked at the drawing of the sea lions, and then looked at me.
"The barking animals," she said. "Because the rain doesn't care if your pockets are full of rocks."
At eight o'clock, after Ren had brushed her teeth and climbed into bed with her stuffed badger tucked beneath her chin, my mother’s silver sedan pulled into my driveway.
The headlights cut through the bare lilac bushes, sweeping across the front porch and into the dining room. I met her at the front door before she could ring the bell and wake the child.
Mom was holding a large, white shopping bag from an upscale department store in King of Prussia. She wore her black wool coat with the mink collar, and her lips were painted a fresh, bright coral that smelled of synthetic rosewater.
"I can't stay," Mom said, stepping into the small vestibule and shaking the cold air from her shoulders. "Your father is waiting in the car with the heater running. I brought Ren's shirt."
She reached into the bag and pulled out a child’s long-sleeved tunic made of crisp, stiff white linen, with tiny mother-of-pearl buttons down the placket and delicate pintucks across the chest.
"For the beach photographs on Kauai," Mom said, holding it up against the hall light. "The photographer Preston hired for the family portrait said everyone has to be in white linen or very pale beige. If Ren wears that green thing she’ll look like an olive in a bowl of cream."
"Why did you tell Kelsey to leave Ren at home on Friday, Mom?" I asked.
I didn't take the shirt. I kept my hands in the pockets of my cardigan, standing in the doorway that separated my warm hallway from the freezing porch.
Mom’s smile flickered, then settled into that hard, glazed porcelain that had protected her from reality for sixty years. "Oh, Darcy. Are we still on that? I was trying to manage an impossible situation. Kelsey was hysterical, Maryanne was being particular, and your sister’s happiness was hanging by a thread. A mother does what she has to do to keep the family moving forward."
"My daughter sat in that ballroom and heard her aunt call her annoying," I said. "And then she heard her grandmother say she shouldn't be allowed to attend."
Mom sighed, a long, theatrical exhalation of long-suffering maternal patience that she directed at the hall ceiling. "My mother made me eat in the pantry when the church elders came, Darcy. My father didn't let me speak at the dinner table until I was fourteen years old. Did I die? Did it scar me? No. It taught me manners. It taught me that the world doesn't rotate around a child’s feelings. I turned out perfectly fine."
I looked at the woman standing in my vestibule—a woman who had spent forty years terrified of the opinions of neighbors whose names she barely knew, a woman who had offered her seven-year-old granddaughter’s seat to a stranger because the stranger’s husband owned commercial real estate.
"Did you?" I asked.
Mom blinked. Her coral lips parted slightly, a tiny crack appearing in the porcelain. "Did I what?"
"Turn out fine," I said.
Before she could answer, a small sound came from the top of the stairs.
Ren was standing on the fourth step in her flannel pajamas, her gray-green eyes blinking through the banister rails. "Mommy? Is the woodstove out?"
Mom turned, her face instantly reassembling itself into that wide, false, public brightness she used on the sidewalk outside church. "Oh! Hello, Renny-bear! Look what Grandma brought you for the big trip! A beautiful linen shirt from France! You’re going to look like a little angel on the sand!"
Ren looked at the white linen shirt hanging from Mom's fingers. She didn't come down the stairs. She didn't smile.
"Not in front of company, sweetheart," Ren said, in a voice that was so perfectly, chillingly identical to Mom’s own inflection that the older woman visibly recoiled as if she had been slapped with a wet branch.
Mom’s hand dropped. The linen shirt bunched against her coat. Her face went gray under the hall light, the coral lipstick standing out like a fresh cut across her mouth.
"Well," Mom whispered, her voice shaking with sudden, uncontrolled fury. "I see what you've been teaching her. I see what kind of poison you're pouring into that child's ear."
She shoved the white shirt back into the shopping bag, turned on her heel, and walked out into the freezing wind without another word.
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"We'll see you at the airport on the twentieth, Darcy!" she called back from the driveway, her voice shrill and trembling against the sound of Dad's idling diesel engine. "And you better have that child's attitude sorted out before we get to the gate!"
I locked the door, turned off the hall light, and carried Ren back up the stairs to her bed.
