Part 7: Susan

Is this really what life is? Susan Cooper thought, as she pulled her vehicle - a blocky SUV incongruously named the Melody - into one of the many open parking spots in the absurdly large strip-mall parking lot. Going to the grocery store and doing loads of laundry and buying new appliances when the old ones get worn out, and then someday you die? She put the car into park, turned it off, tossed her keys into her purse, and thrust open the door. And if it is, then doesn’t dying just mean you don’t do those things anymore? No more laundry, no more grocery shopping. That didn’t sound so terrible, really. 

There had been a time when she had suspected there was more to life, or that there would be more eventually. But at forty-six, it seemed like if that eventually was ever going to come, it would have come by now. These days, she found that her idle fantasies were things like getting all the family’s laundry done, once and for all, so that she wouldn’t have to do it ever again. 

But if that did happen, somehow, what would she do instead? 

Susan walked across the great expanse of the parking lot, passing rows of cars that were a variety of different shapes, colors, and sizes and yet still managed to convey an impression of monotony, and tried to recall the things she had once suspected would enrich her future life. Love? Well, she had that. As much as anyone did. She loved her husband, she loved her children, but . . . no, there was no but. She did love them, but that didn’t mean she was going to feel  flooded with it, twenty-four-seven. That was an unrealistic expectation. 

She entered the grocery store and felt the blast of air conditioning hit her, a welcome relief. She hadn’t even realized it was hot. There was a list typed on her phone, but she didn’t need it yet. The produce section was easy: she always needed “salad stuff.” 

But there were moments - that Sunday afternoon at the flea market, for instance - she and David had dragged the kids along so they didn’t spend the entire weekend on the computer (James) or watching the same three movies over and over (Becca) - and the weather had been perfect, and there had been a string of good songs on the radio, and the four of them were all looking at the assorted crap spread out on one of the tables, herself at an ugly ceramic leprechaun, and she had thought, I really am so lucky. 

And then the thought flew away and she had forgotten it entirely - until now, recalled by - what? The green of a car in the parking lot? The way the produce was lined up on the table? Or fate? Chance?

But there were Leprechaun Moments, that was the point, Susan reminded herself, as she checked different tomatoes for ripeness. They didn’t always come when you expected them - she had felt nothing on her wedding day, for instance, besides physical discomfort and exhaustion and like she was repeating the same stock phrases over and over like a doll with a string - but they did come. 

When had that been, though, at the flea market? March? April? What was it now - the end of May? And how many loads of laundry had she done in the meantime, how many boring afternoons at the office had she endured, how many times had she searched her mind for something good to think about only to come up short? And all that time, the Leprechaun Moment had been in there. 

Susan finished up her shopping in the produce section and moved towards the bakery. This was the real, official purpose of her visit - though every time she came here, she always ended up getting more than she planned to - it really was remarkable how fast her family went through food, how much of human life revolved around this stuff, and everyone just seemed to consider it normal, to be matter that consumed and absorbed other matter - but she needed to get cookies for Becca’s class party next week. She was graduating fourth grade, and after you graduated fourth grade you had a class party and all the parents sent in something, which meant there was always way too much. 

When they had first moved to Carlsdale, a suburb so suburban that part of Susan thought it was a movie set - James had been in the second grade and Becca had been four years old. And when you graduated second grade, you got to have a party as well. And Susan remembered going to the grocery store - not this one, the slightly more-upscale one two plazas over, which she had since realized carried the exact same products at slightly higher prices, but did determine which parents and coworkers you would run into - and buying flour, sugar, baking powder, so on and so forth, all the ingredients you would need to bake just about anything. She had spent all night making three separate batches of cookies and subjecting David to an interrogation about which one was the best and why, until David finally exclaimed that she was making him feel like they all did when James’s math homework demanded that he explain how he knew one plus one was two. 

But David had grown up in the suburbs, after all, so he ought to know. She was a city girl, a transplant, an outsider, and she was afraid that all the other parents would know it if her cookies didn’t stand up to scrutiny. There had been some lesson, or series of lessons, that she had missed; while she was busy learning how to navigate public transportation or ignore panhandlers without facing an ethical dilemma, they were all learning how to bake. 

She had been so naive. 

It turned out, incidentally, that the right move in the suburban mom circuit was not to make cookies from scratch. But to buy them from the store and then half-apologize for it. 

Susan had first perceived she had done something wrong when one of the other moms, a tall, statuesque woman with dark hair - Denise Collins, or "Courtney's mom" - came up to her at the party and said, “Susan, those cookies you brought were fantastic! And you made them from scratch!” She smiled in a way that resembled how a robot might interpret “warmly.” 

Then Denise had leant in closer to Susan, put a hand up to her mouth as if she was about to confess a minor crime - shoplifting, say, or light tax fraud  - and stage-whispered, “My brownies? Storebought!” The last word was in a singsong voice. Denise put a manicured finger up to her lips and glided away across the classroom. 

And in a flash, Susan knew she had fucked up. If she was really supposed to make her cookies from scratch, no one would have said anything about it. 

She heard herself as the subject of a thousand conversations amongst these suburban moms, who knew each other from kindergarten and preschool and various Activities, none of which James had been signed up for yet. At first, it would be, “Can you believe James’s mom made those cookies from scratch? She is so good!” And then, subtly, “so good” would become “too good.” And eventually, someone would be bold enough to cross the Rubicon, and venture: “I’m sorry, but making cookies from scratch? For a second-grade party? A little much, don’t you think?” And then she would be done. 

But now she knew better, Susan reflected cheerfully as she grabbed the first box of halfway-decent bakery-department chocolate chip cookies she saw. She would buy the box, bring them home, put them on a party tray, send them in with Becca the day of the party, and then, during the actual party, confess to each mom she talked to individually that they came from the grocery store - at which point the other mom would invariably confess the same. It was a bonding ritual, a way for the two of them to distinguish themselves from the Other Moms, the Good Moms, the Moms Who Baked. 

There were a few of those, but they were vastly outnumbered by the minority group who were too lazy or busy or tired to bake. 

And Susan was confident of her place in the social structure of classroom moms. Her urban upbringing was no longer a liability, but an established part of her identity, one that inspired more envy than resentment. Her life must have been so exciting, so interesting, to be surrounded by all that diversity and culture, words that were uttered by the other moms with some blend of reverence, awe, and fear, the way the devoutly religious talk about their respective gods. Susan knew intuitively how to play it up, how to conjure up images of squalor and degradation lifted straight from the crime shows they all consumed at 8PM on weeknights. 

She knew how to make them visualize black people without ever saying the word “black.” 

None of what they pictured was anywhere close to the truth, but it was what they wanted to hear. 

Susan pulled out her phone to check her list against what she had in her cart. She had a missed call from Becca, which wasn’t surprising - ever since they had caved to her incessant pleading and bought her a phone for her birthday (David had been pushing for one of those half-phones that only lets a kid call their parents and the police, but Susan had put her foot down, knowing it wouldn’t stop the whining and might even exacerbate it) she had been calling her about every twenty minutes. Assuming she had gotten everything she needed - figuring that, worst case scenario, she would drive the fifteen minutes back to the store - she used her left hand to push the cart towards the checkout while her right redialed Becca’s number and put her phone up to her ear. 

“MOM!” Becca’s voice was loud but revealed nothing about her emotional state. 

“What’s up, Beck?” Susan tried not to sound too disinterested. 

“Mom you’re never gonna believe it guess what happened today!!!” 

“What?” 

“So me and Ashley were at recess and we were over by the swings and we saw Jake and Dylan coming over to the swings and then Ashley was like Dylan do you like Becca and Dylan was like no but then Jake was like yeah he does and then later we were playing tag and Dylan was it and Ashley said he kept chasing me like more than anyone else so she thinks he likes me and I think so too and then on Monday she’s gonna ask Jake to ask him out for me and AHHHHHHH!” 

“That’s great, honey,” Susan replied, a stock response - as was the slight eyeroll, done for the benefit of the man in front of her in line, a neat, trim middle-aged guy who surely had done the whole Kids thing already in his life, though judging by the items in his cart (salmon, asparagus, red wine) he and his wife now lived alone together, had gotten into cooking and probably something like jazz or avant-garde film or something as well. 

“Ok well I gotta go I just wanted to tell you see you at home BYE!” 

“Bye, Becca.” Becca’s crush on Dylan C. (not Dylan B., never Dylan B., she would tell you, although to Susan, Dylan B. was a perfectly nice, polite kid, though a bit on the sensitive side, a kid who would probably wear sweaters and write poetry under trees in college, poetry that would impress a certain type of girl - though not Becca, never Becca, that was true) was a fixture within their family. Just as all her previous crushes had been - each one announced, declared, broadcast to the world with all the fanfare and self-importance of Napoleon declaring war on Russia. 

How interesting that her children could be so different, that Becca could be so external and James so secretive. Only once had she tried to engage him in conversation about Hannah, and it had been a failure comparable to . . . say, Napoleon’s actual campaign in Russia. (Last night, after David had gone to bed early with a headache, Susan had watched part of a History Channel show about Napoleon.) On that unhappy occasion, James had stormed off to his room, even eschewing his usual post-dinner routine of sitting at the computer until bedtime - muttering about how she didn’t understand, would never understand, could never understand. 

“I was a teenager once, too, you know!” she had shouted after him, though his headphones were already on. 

But in saying that, she had proved that she didn’t really remember what it was like. No teenager wanted to hear that you understood or related or could empathize. They wanted you to be astounded; they wanted you to be floored, to be awed. To marvel that someone could suffer so much and complain so little. 

Or no - maybe they wanted you to not listen so they could yell at you for not listening; they wanted you to say you understood so they could tell you that you never would. 

No matter what you did, it was wrong. 

That was it: they wanted you to be wrong. 

Satisfied that she had finally pinned it down, the core issue at the heart of her relationship with her son, Susan began to place her groceries onto the conveyor belt. Mr. Salmon-and-Red-Wine had been courteous enough to place the divider there for her. This detail, along with his neatly trimmed gray mustache which caught her eye, made Susan wonder if she might not have been slightly mistaken in her first impression, and the wife she had pictured might not actually be a husband.