Part 27: Susan

Susan’s weekend job was to be Becca’s chauffer. And, like any good driver, she knew that she did her job best when she did it least. Jefferson would have been proud. So she abstained from all but the most essential parts of driving, the parts that Becca herself couldn’t do because of her size, brain development, or regard for the law. Pushing the pedal, turning the wheel. But all the other facets that make up the phenomenon that fully-realized human beings know as “driving” she had to leave for her daughter: control of the radio, the windows, the destination and route, the conversation. It was easier that way.

Today, it was a pool party. Not a birthday party, she had been sure to check: just a party for its own sake. A tedious afternoon of sitting and standing around in someone else’s backyard when she would have much preferred to be sitting and standing in her own.

Soon, Becca would reach the drop off age, but now that was still a faux pas. It could be done, but only with the right groundwork. Mention to one mom that you had somewhere else you had to be, but you were really going to try to get out of it if you could, you’d so much rather be at the party; let slip to another that you were going to make up an excuse to get out of the party, and suggest that she do so too. It all had to be done with great delicacy, so that the moms who wanted you to want to be there thought you did and the moms who wanted you there so you could not want to be there together didn’t feel slighted, and Susan had just forgotten to bother.

How had Ashley’s mom gotten out of it, exactly? Susan wondered, seeing the other little girl, her daughter’s best friend, come running out of her middle-class-mansion’s back door - they were a back door family - and bolt down the hill to where she had parked her SUV, leaving the engine on.

“Thank you for driving me, Becca’s mom,” Ashley said breathlessly as soon as she got into the backseat so that she wouldn’t forget. She buckled her own seatbelt without being reminded. Insufferable.

(Susan imagined the interrogation that night: “Did you remember to thank Becca’s mom for driving you? If not, no sticker for Being Polite.”)

“Oh, tell your mom it’s no problem, I know she would do the same for me.”

(“I did say thank you! She said it’s no problem, she knows you’d do the same for her.” Words memorized by rote without any sense of their meaning.)

“So are you gonna do it?” This question was for Becca, in what Ashley evidently thought counted as a secret code, uncrackable by parents. Susan was just their driver now, so she started to drive, navigating the labyrinth of virtually identical cul-de-sacs with a finesse that would have impressed and depressed her past self.

Listening to the prattle, she deduced there had been a development in her daughter’s love life: Monday at recess was way too far away, evidently, so she was going to ask Dylan C. out today, at the party. Which really meant that Ashley was going to ask one of his friends, probably Jake, to ask him out for Becca. Of course, neither Jake nor Dylan C. were actually going to the party, but Jake did live in the same neighborhood as the girl whose party it evidently was, so that meant Dylan C. must be at Jake’s house.

What part of her brain had she overwritten to contain such information? The part that used to know all the state capitals and US presidents? The part that was once devoted to planning her eventual wedding and honeymoon? Or a part so completely gone that she couldn’t even remember that it had ever been there? After all, if something was really, wholly lost, then she wouldn’t know it was lost. The satisfaction of remembering only came from things you hadn’t ever really forgotten.

How horrifying that you could think you were learning something for the first time, but in truth you had known it before.

What you want, Susan declared to herself, actually saying the words one by one in her mind, is to almost lose a memory, and then get it back right before it slips away. Retrieve it from the brink of the abyss. To solidify the point, she tried to bring the vehicle as close as she could to stopping - they were at a stop sign - without actually stopping.

Tantric driving, she thought. The Price is Right.

“Mom, why are you stopping? There’s no cars,” Becca objected.

Here it was: a teaching moment. Evidence to support Susan’s own philosophy of parenting, which was essentially reactive, not proactive: follow your children’s questions and interests, use those to guide them in the direction you would want them to go. Rousseau-lite. Because when they initiated the conversation, they would listen - look at how terribly things went when she tried to engage them, look at how she had failed with James this morning.

But still - how to respond? Susan imagined the parent who would just say “there are no cars” and leave it at that. But she would take the opportunity to explain, in terms that would make sense to a nine-year-old, that society works because everyone agrees to follow the law, even though it may not be in their individual interest.

It was Ashley who responded first, though: “There might be a cop hiding somewhere. Plus they’ve got cameras, too.”

Of course, the child raised on sticker charts would assume that she must be motivated by fear of punishment.

“No, they don’t,” Becca replied. “Do they, Mom?’

“I don’t know, maybe,” Susan said dismissively. She didn’t want them to get hung up on the cameras. “But that’s not why I stopped--”

“Like video cameras or regular cameras?” Becca asked, interrupting.

“Video cameras,” Ashley insisted. “There’s a room somewhere where some fat guy is sitting there watching them all, and if you don’t stop at a stop sign he calls the police.”

Vivid. The conspiracy theory must have been fed to her by a parent, though the detail about the fat man could have been lifted from TV.

“How would you know?”

“Everybody knows.”

“Well, I didn’t know. I still don’t think so, either. Mom, do they have video cameras in all the stop signs?”

“Not all of them.” Ashley started backtracking. “But some of them. And you don’t know which ones, so that’s why you gotta stop at all of em.”

The word “panopticon” drifted into Susan’s consciousness from somewhere on the outskirts of her mind. Not all the way on the edge, but close enough to bring her some satisfaction. She was still waiting for a pause in the conversation, so she could get back to her point. That still counted as following the natural flow of Becca’s curiosity, didn’t it?

But then the girls moved from stop signs to stop lights, from stop lights to some game they played at recess, and then they were back onto Dylan C. and so Susan had to concede that her moment had passed. But there would be another one. The question would come up again, because she and Becca still had innumerable car rides and dinner times and reality TV sessions together. There was still time.

Not with James, but with Becca at least. James had one foot out the door already. Now they had entered into a weird posthumous existence, still living under the same roof by convention, but not actually together in any meaningful sense, not actually speaking the same language. But she had done the best she could with him, hadn’t she?

What would he reproach her for, when he inevitably ended up in therapy and the therapist - despite learning in school that Freud’s theories had been largely discredited and his place of prominence was more of a Historical Forebear type of thing - inevitably asked about his mother? What sins would he saddle her with? Indifference? Apathy?

I was just trying to let you live your own life, she argued with him, turning the wheel forcefully. Make your own mistakes.

Well, you did a great job of that, her son spat at her sarcastically.

They were in an office somewhere; the image arose automatically. Standing up but with an air of having just risen from the couch behind them. A man with a beard and a clipboard sat in a rocking chair, saying nothing, just Letting It Happen, and being paid for it. He was an archetype from TV, just like Ashley’s overweight security guard.

You’re just like him, James added suddenly, indicating the man.

Was that what she was afraid of? That they saw her as detached? Cold, clinical? Well, that wasn’t fair at all. Here she was, driving Becca (and her friend!) all around town today, and she had bought the cookies for the party, and she really had tried with James on the porch this morning, and she had even gone online and read all about Our Beautiful Misery because they were something important in his life . . .

Last night’s rabbit hole returned to her with a flush of shame, as if she had gone out drinking or spent money recklessly. All she had done was read some interviews, click around a website, and listen to a few songs, but she had enjoyed it greatly. That was what she felt guilty about: the enjoyment. It was so stupid, it was so earnest, it was so pretentious - it filled her with a strange excitement that she couldn't express or explain.

Even that morning, she had thought about mentioning it to James. That was why she had gone onto the porch, wasn’t it? He had said OBM was stupid, she had confirmed it, so they could be allies. But face to face with her son, she couldn’t bring it up. She sensed that their hatreds were different in kind, and she didn’t want his to poison hers. How absurd. But the thought that she could go home tonight and continue to explore that weird, foreign world (assuming that James continued to abstain from the computer - a new phase or reactionary passion of his, not just a fluke) - that she could recreate the night before, or try to - suddenly made this party seem much more endurable.

They had arrived, at another cookie-cutter house in a neighborhood indistinguishable from Ashley’s (or her own, to be fair) to anyone but a connoisseur. They were fifteen minutes late, which meant they were on time. Susan parked her SUV in the line of parental vehicles, the right two tires on the lawn in some sort of symbolic pantomime of staying out of the way of traffic. There was no traffic, and if there had been, they would have been in its way. Ashley and Becca raced to the pool in the backyard while Susan performed her role and grabbed their bags from the seat and sauntered along in their wake, ready to make some trite comment about the martyrdom of motherhood.