Adult Conversation: A Novel

CHAPTER ONE

It Was Small, But It Was Something

The banging was relentless. And then came the screams. I curled my body inward, as if shielding myself from a bomb about to detonate on the other side of the door. I sat there rocking sideways, wringing my hands and cursing in a low whisper with eyes closed, wishing the attacks would cease and that this relationship wasn’t so abusive.

The screams turned to low, loud wails and the banging intensified. I felt my feet vibrating against the cold tile floor. The bangs became a full-body assault against the door. It would not be standing much longer. I knew what I must do. The last thing on this precious Earth that I wanted to do.

I clenched my anus and accepted the demoralizing fate of a half-taken shit and opened the quaking door to an incensed, tear-covered toddler with doll-like eyelashes and gorgeous wispy curls.

I gritted my teeth and began with step one from the Peaceful Parenting article that Facebook had forced upon me that morning: validate your child’s feelings (even if you’d rather tell them to suck it).

What I’m hearing from you, Violet, is that you want Mama to be done in the bathroom.

Violet nodded a firm yes.

I understand that, but there are things that mamas have to do and those things include going to the bathroom. And sometimes we want a little privacy. I smoothed my dark, shoulder-length hair behind my ears. One side of my hair hung a little longer than the other, and at a sharp angle, for when I needed to feel edgy at Bed, Bath and Beyond.

No! Violet dropped her arms to her sides as if they had fallen out of their sockets, and stomped her bare feet.

I took a breath and steadied myself with a hand on the wall. This was resistance number forty-four of the day.

Your words tell me that you disagree with Mama, but remember when you go poop, you also like to have some priv . . . But before I could finish Mom-splaining in third-person—always an act of desperation—Violet threw herself to the ground, hitting her head on the way down, now crying even harder than before. I instinctively moved toward my girl to console her.

No! she raged, amid tears and kicking, pushing me away.

At that, I hit my threshold for bullshit. I stepped over the crying mess and tiptoed to the nearby fridge for salvation. The upside of having a small home is less square footage to clean. The downside is the kitchen’s too-close proximity to the crapper.

The afternoon sun beamed through the kitchen windows like a laser. I opened the fridge door with the quietest tug. I stealthily pulled my chocolate bar from the covered butter inlet, knowing that toddler ears would perk up at the detection of any wrapper rustling. I whisked around to the little corner where the fridge bulged out further than the kitchen counter, making a perfect hideaway cove for freebasing sugar while my children were in the vicinity. I closed my eyes, savoring a medicinal bite of dark chocolate. It was small, but it was something.

Suddenly, my eight-year-old son threw open the door from the garage. I choked the rest of the chocolate square down to hide the evidence. Before both of his feet were even fully inside the house, his pants were off, laying in a human-shaped heap on the ground, as if he had spontaneously combusted inside of them. This was my Elliot, lanky and with sparkling blue eyes that could see right through you. He liked comfort above all else, a trait we shared. In high school, I lasted two days as a smoker before I realized you have to do it outside in the cold and rain.

I licked my chocolate-covered lips and turned around. Hey, Honey! I forced myself to sound upbeat, despite having been debased on the toilet moments earlier by Violet.

Elliot came in for a hug, and I rested my chin on the top of his head while we squeezed. Our puzzle pieces fit just so, but his next growth spurt would change that. He looked up at me with a chiseling grin. Can I play on the iPad?

I paused, paralyzed by this trap. Saying yes would make my life easier now, but I would pay for it later because surely there was homework to be done. Elliot had a master’s degree in sensing a possible opening.

Please, please? I finished my homework at school. He jumped frantically in front of my face and I barely dodged a skull to my chin. Violet, who had suddenly aborted her hostage situation outside the bathroom, came running over holding my chiming phone.

Mama, phone. She carefully placed it in my hands like it was the Heart of Te Fiti.

There was a text from my husband, Aaron. I read it, leaning into the counter for support as my eyes filled with tears, which I stifled. I was always stifling something. His was a message I’d received countless times before, yet it still brought me to my knees:

I’m gonna be late tonight, April. Label mishap. God forbid people have to wait until mid-September for their paleo pumpkin pancakes. PEOPLE LOVE FALL. FML.

Aaron was a packaging designer for Market Street, a specialty grocery store chain on the West Coast that valued form more than flavor and preyed on the insecurities of the urban hipster with its open-air European vibe. The original store had laid out actual cobblestone only to realize that grocery cart wheels and bumpy stones don’t work together. But Market Street was wildly successful and it was Aaron’s job as head designer to create quirky sketches, ironic themes, and appetizing fonts to sell mediocre, over-priced ego food.

Because it was spring, he was preparing for the onslaught of fall—the season of everything pumpkin-flavored. Their star employee, Aaron was outgoing, rarely said no to higher-ups, and had an insanely powerful knack for pairing fonts and food. His bosses exploited him on the regular, which I could see, but Aaron, somehow, could not. As a design school graduate with more eagerness than edge, Aaron loved his job and the art he got paid to create, especially when he threw in a microscopic obscenity or two—a secret that only we shared.

But hijinks aside, if there was one thing I wished I had been told before becoming a mother, it was that even with all the immediate, whine-soaked, child-induced atrocities violating my personal space and sanity as a stay-at-home mom for eight straight years, the one person who would consistently dole out the final push over the edge would be my husband. All the parenting books had left that minor detail out.

CHAPTER TWO

Royalty

Nine hours earlier, I had woken up consensually—a rare parental victory.

I reached my arm below our Nate Berkus line-art sheets and rested it on Aaron’s broad chest, purposefully avoiding the lower zip code of obligation. He opened one eye, sleepily smiling with male optimism. The pink morning sky blushed behind the shutters as if it were eavesdropping.

Aaron and I lay on our sides, face to beard, the ends of our pillows kissing, our legs pressing against each other’s. His soft, green eyes widened as he looked around. He must’ve been confused since we were both awake and touching without the air-raid siren of children. On the nightstand, his phone lit up with a simultaneous alarm blare and reminder ding. We had enjoyed ten whole seconds of uninterrupted marital connection.

He made his way to the bathroom, phone in hand, as I peeled myself out of the warm bed, walked into the closet, and slipped on my light blue fuzzy robe—the one I’d worn during labor with Elliot. The one Violet referred to as Mama wobe.

I opened Elliot’s door, drinking in the image of my sleeping boy, who woke up at 5:30 a.m. on weekends, but slept in on school days. The wall above his bed was adorned with a row of green Kindness Kounts awards he’d received for being an upstanding citizen at school. I moved his robot covers aside and sat in bed next to him, rubbing his back. Time to get ready for school, I whispered, kissing him on the cheek.

Then came the melodic, Mama. Ma-ma, through the wall from Violet’s room. Past data showed that her murmurs would quickly escalate into Guns N’ Roses–esque shrieking if I didn’t attend to it within ten seconds, so I went.

Upon seeing my face, Violet’s lit up and her tiny, two-year-old legs rocketed her to standing. Her slept-on hair flipped to the sides like Lisa Rinna’s and her diaper rustled inside her footed, pink owl jammies. I plopped us both into the fuzzy, worn glider—a distant cousin of Mama wobe’s. She laid her head on my chest and the two of us snuggled as we greeted the day together. I breathed in the peaceful moment and Violet’s sleepy, sweet head. No one needed asinine things from me yet.

Mama, I have jelly beans? Violet said, lifting up her head. And just like that, the first no of the day was administered. Did I even get three minutes?

The kitchen greeted us with its standard décor of kids’ art, yesterday’s dirty dishes, and a rustic sign that read This Home is Filled with Love and Laughter—more of a threat than a boast. As I passed the thermostat, I forcefully tapped the cold button to the off position. Aaron wished we lived in a casino, blasting air conditioning at all times, while I was considering buying a nice property on the sun.

I set Violet down on the tile floor. I would need both of my hands to make breakfast—a reasonable request—but it was a fact that she couldn’t accept, so she leveled herself against the ground, sobbing at the injustice. It was far too early to deal with this shit, so I picked her up, knowing it would immediately flip her toddler volume switch to off.

And it did.

I grabbed a bowl of strawberries from the fridge, trying not to think about the fact that I’d cheaped out and gone non-organic this time. Seared into my memory was the day the too-cute-to-be-a-produce-manager had so graciously bestowed his berry prophecy on me as I reached for a tub of pesticide-riddled red beauties. Strawberries are like little sponges. Always go organic on those. Since then, any time I so much as saw a conventional strawberry, his words, Little sponges . . . little sponges . . . echoed in my head, evoking deep shame.

Juic-ee, Violet mumbled with a messy mouth that dripped strawberry juice down her chin and onto the front of her full-price Hanna Andersson pajamas. She’d snagged one while I was meditating on toxins.

I groaned, reaching down into the sink cabinet for my forever friend, OxiClean. Violet jerked forward and knocked the canister and its lid to the ground. The tiny white and blue grains of poisonous sand spread all over the floor.

Dammit, Violet! is what I wanted to say. But I didn’t utter any words. It felt wrong to be at the end of one’s rope so close to where it started. So instead, I swallowed my irritation and pulled the vacuum out from beneath a scattering of board games and Shopkins in the closet. The weight of it was almost enough to make my uterus drop directly out of my body.

There was an insistent yell coming from somewhere, competing with the deafening whir of the vacuum. I looked up and saw Elliot mouthing something with urgency.

MOM! he was still half-shouting when the vacuum subsided. Can I have a waffle?

Shit. Breakfast.

I popped a waffle in the toaster and scooped Aaron’s favorite beans into the coffee maker.

A layperson may think that Aaron took twenty-minute showers because that was how long the water ran. But the actual time Aaron spent in the shower was about four minutes. California state officials had talked a lot about ways residents were wasting water, but one avenue they had not publicly explored was the amount of time husbands spent masturbating with the shower running. But this was something I knew better than to complain about, or else the job would fall on my shoulders. Or knees, rather. Sex was scarce these days, but exhaustion and two-year-old tantrums were not.

A horn honked outside.

There’s Liam, Elliot called, stuffing the last of his waffle in his mouth and bolting from his chair.

Did you say goodbye to your dad? I asked as Aaron came galloping down the stairs, freshly showered, like fucking royalty.

Bye, El, Aaron said, hugging Elliot.

You brushed your teeth, right? I asked. Elliot flashed a guilty, stinky grin as he grabbed his backpack and fled. I sighed the sigh of a thousand mothers wishing their kids cared about stank mouth, and then ran over to my purse and grabbed a mint.

Take this, I said, chasing him outside.

Can I have two? he asked with a sly smile. My eyes went cold. He’d pressed his luck and he knew it. One’s good. He quickly kissed me goodbye. He was not yet too cool to show me public affection, but I knew the expiration date on that was just around the corner.

I walked back inside to see Violet cramming two discs into the DVD player. Could you not try to break everything we own?

I watch? she asked.

No, Sweetheart. I scurried over to her and gently took the discs even though I wanted to run out the door, away from the day full of toddler resistance and mother rage that I knew awaited me. Like always.

She moved on to a more favorable option, Aaron. Dada, I watch?

Sure, Baby, which one? He held out the two discs for her Highness to choose from. Both of them were royalty and I was the fucking servant.

Seriously? I said, trying not to go full wife on him before 9 a.m. She can’t watch a movie now if I have any hope of showering later. A movie is the only thing that grants me clean pits.

His head turned toward Violet, lulled by her small voice singing along to Alice in Wonderland. You need to relax about this stuff, he said, pointing to a euphoric Violet as if she were evidence. I felt words escaping my mouth faster than I could swallow them back down.

"I need to relax? You swoop in here, give a hug, put on a little movie and you don’t have to deal with any of what happens before or afterwards."

Fine. I won’t put movies on for her when she asks anymore, jeez. He reached to press the stop button.

No! You can’t turn it off now, I said, grabbing the remote out of his hand. You’ve already said yes. This now has to play out. You get to drive away from it. I don’t.

He couldn’t argue with that. After all, I was wearing Mama wobe and he was wearing real human clothes. He pulled me toward him, for a hug. My arms hung limply at my sides. Anti-hug.

Sorry, A.B., he said.

That name transported me back to college, when our new love was so electric that we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. Spending summers apart were torturous, as if we were living in a Shakespearean tragedy. In addition to daily two-hour phone calls, we stayed connected by sending each other quirky care packages. Aaron would send me detailed drawings signed by him, A.S., along with mixtapes, and pictures of him as a round, shiny-faced Stewart kid at Medieval Times. I would reciprocate by sending him homemade Chex Mix, pictures of me in fourth grade with mushroom hair like Carol Brady’s, and my attempts at art, which I would sign with my initials, A.B. Although marriage had made me an A.S. like him, he sometimes still called me A.B., which was a sweet reminder of how we began, and who I used to be. But it didn’t work like a Magic Eraser or anything.

It’s fine, whatever, I said.

His phone buzzed. He looked down at it while still embracing me. He grimaced.

What? I asked.

Today I get to design a label for pumpkin-scented tampons, he said, with a terrified stare.

I didn’t realize I could experience fall vaginally.

He ran over to Violet and playfully showered her head with kisses as she giggled. I wished I could be the dad. I poured him a to-go mug of fresh coffee and shoved a kid’s energy bar in his hand. I never intended to be a doting housewife, but it seemed to be an unadvertised side effect of being a stay-at-home mom.

As I stood in the doorway watching him sit in the car and scroll for the perfect drive-to-work music, I couldn’t help but wonder what it must feel like to have all that autonomy. If the giant smile on his face every day as he backed out of the garage was any indicator, it was fucking paradise.

He rolled down his window, Snoop Dogg’s nasally voice wafting from the car. He cranked it for effect. The high-pitched synthesizer and heavy beat took me back again to when we were young together, when our only real responsibility was acquiring a giant burrito at some point in the day or night.

This is for you. Hang in there, A.B., he yelled out the window of his Prius. He cranked the music even louder, bobbing his head like a white man in a Prius.

Only twelve more hours to go, I said, giving him a slow and sarcastic thumbs up, and then I pressed the garage door button to guillotine his flaunting of freedoms.

CHAPTER THREE

All Roads Suck Balls

Something I couldn’t shake, but never knew how to accurately verbalize to Aaron, was my quiet resentment about his daily life having changed very little since we had the kids, whereas mine was now unrecognizable. Parenthood had exacted something from me that it hadn’t exacted from him—not even close. His morning routine, his leaving the house, his job, his luxury of coming home late if needed, his weekend surfing, all looked nearly the same as it did before the kids. I, on the other hand, was filling my days with wiping ass, bleaching vomit, feeling shame about conventional fruit, and generally serving as everyone else’s snack bitch and more—a far cry from my past duties as owner of a handmade clothing line.

Our inequality and my jealousy of Aaron’s balanced life made me feel like a dick because I chose to be a stay-at-home mom. No one forced me. We both agreed that we wanted to raise our own kids. Sure, that choice was made blindly, and we really meant me, but I had made my bed and now had to lie in it. Ironically, I never got to literally lie in my bed anymore. And I also hated Aaron’s face some days because he reaped all the perks of parenthood with-out having to do the heavy lifting of it. Also, his nipples didn’t resemble chewed gum.

The next task of the day that wasted my college degree was grocery shopping—that is, after clothing a small, angry person. There is no on-the-job training that prepares one for the task of wrestling a shirt and pants onto a person who is running. Working with the severely mentally ill was the closest thing, but caretakers were legally allowed to use tranquilizers. The only tranquilizer I had was an essential oil called Serenity, and Violet’s room reeked of it.

My dad, Wayne, who always had a story on the tip of his tongue about his three favorite things—snakes, Harleys, and the Florida panhandle—had once told me a tale wherein a swampy, backwoods town had a local anaconda they were trying to capture because it kept eating people. The town’s solution? Sew incredibly thick jean material together and create a giant tube that they would try to catch the snake in. That was the whole plan. But they saw it out and the snake did, in fact, find its way into the denim tube—and this is the part that I especially remember—the snake thrashed inside that jean tube in such a violent way that the town’s people weren’t sure if this anaconda was about to burst the seams open and eat all of them. That visual is what I thought of every time I tried to put pants on a bucking Violet.

But today, I won the war on pants. She stood up from the fracas wearing her hot pink leggings with puffy diaper butt and soft grey smock dress covered with smiling rainbows. I was sweating.

The necessary supplies for leaving the house with Violet included a smattering of snacks in containers that couldn’t be dumped out, sippy cups that couldn’t spill (which were none), copious amounts of hand sanitizer, animal figures that would be immediately dropped on the backseat floor, and of course, cloth grocery bags, which were going to save the Earth at the expense of the sanity of mothers everywhere.

I hauled Violet and her provisions into the garage, making sure to leave the big garage door down until she was strapped down in her car seat. A strategy existed for every task with her. I knew that an open garage door plus an unrestrained toddler meant the high likelihood of a Benny Hill–style wild goose chase down the street. These were the things Aaron did not know, because he didn’t have to.

With Violet shackled into her seat, the tranquil