The stone path isn’t a straight line. We thought it would be prettier winding to the garage like a miniature Yellow Brick Road. Now we all use the direct route across the grass. Lynn and Mike bought a house two streets over in our tree-lined neighborhood that feels like the suburbs but is just a few minutes from downtown Chicago. The two- and three-story houses on our street are similarly designed with small squares of grass, front porches, patios, decks and grass out back. Two-car garages that open to a long narrow alley that requires a tap on the horn and a wave to someone waiting politely to back out. Barbecues with large spatulas and tongs. Brick chimneys. Wreaths and roping in winter. American flags in summer. Indian corn in the fall. On any given week there can be three, four visits from Boy Scouts selling wrapping paper or magazine subscriptions, clipboards held by crunchy-granola college kids wanting to save the planet, a local guy down on his luck offering to clean up leaves with a flimsy rake he carries with him from house to house. In the winter he comes to shovel snow off our short walkways up from the sidewalk. He says we can pay him whatever we think it’s worth.
By the late 1980s Mike and Bob started losing their hair and watched their midsections thicken. Bob got glasses, Mike got contacts. One day I looked at my husband and realized he looked old. Not old old but … old. Like a grown-up. It was hard to see the college kid I’d married. Lynn and I stayed in shape together, enrolling in the same health club up the street, the one with aerobics classes that were only just catching on around the country. We got the Jennifer Aniston haircut just like everyone else. Then we grew it long and straightened it. Just like everyone else.
“Bye, Mom.” Jamie turns to give me a hug before trailing off after Andrew and Bob to soccer. “Thanks for the pancakes.”
When the door slams shut I pour the buttermilk batter down the sink and run cold water to dilute it. Cammy shuffles in rubbing her eyes, smudging the leftover makeup she never takes off before bed. The cabinets bang open and closed. The jars and bottles on the door of the fridge clatter when she pushes it shut with her foot, balancing milk in one hand, a bowl of cereal in the other.
“It smells like pancakes in here,” she says. She shimmies onto a high counter stool and hunches over the bowl, shoveling food into her mouth while she stares at the cartoon riddles on the back of the box, tipping it back to read the upside-down answers at the bottom.
Cammy’s most beautiful in the morning, still soft from sleep. Her skin is olive-colored and gets deeper, more Mediterranean looking, in summer. It’s flawless. She is petite with bird wrists and a graceful neck. Bee-stung lips. Large brown eyes. Her natural hair color was a deep rich brown before she dyed it. It looked like a caramel apple. Wavy and thick with bangs she used to trim so they didn’t catch on her eyelashes like they do now. She looks younger than sixteen. Until she layers on makeup that’s more like face paint. Hard teenage edges build up when she gets dressed. Her black clothes look like Halloween costumes.
She finishes her cereal and, climbing down from her stool, she almost trips, milk almost spills. She is all limbs, lanky, knobby knees, flat chest, unsure of where her arms and hands should go when she’s standing. Her lashes curl and her teeth are straight without having had braces. Now in the grip of the rebellious stage, she is fighting anything attractive about herself. She shrinks if she thinks someone’s staring at her and is horrified when someone says, “Wow, Cammy Friedman? I can’t believe it. I haven’t seen you since you were this big. Look at you.”
When Cammy was young she had a natural impulse to hug. Like Jamie now does. When she was a little girl I was still in the habit of crying on Mother’s Day. One year—I can’t remember how old she was—I’d thought Cammy and Bob were down making me breakfast in bed but then I felt a hand on my shoulder. I sniffed back my tears and turned to her, she put her arms around me and patted me on the back saying, It’s okay, Mommy. Then she quietly left me to blow my nose and screw a smile onto my face in preparation for the lumpy pancakes coming up the stairs on a rickety wicker breakfast tray with a handful of wilting dandelions bobbing in a jelly jar.
About a decade later and she flinches at any human contact. When forced into a hug she bends forward so her shoulders and arms are the only things touching, keeping the rest of her body as far away as possible. It annoys Bob but then everything seems to annoy Bob these days.
We see things differently, Bob and I. I look at people’s eyes. Sometimes, not often but sometimes, I’ll catch the eye of a stranger by accident and there’s a feeling of depth or recognition, a strange familiarity like we’re the same breed of dog. Usually it’s people who have the same eyes I do: wide set and round and a shade of dark brown that deepens to match my pupils when I get upset.
But Bob sees everyone as feet. As in, “You mean Eddie with the Hush Puppies?” And I’ll say, “No, Eddie with the penny loafers you think have holes in the soles,” because I speak shoe now too.
To Bob, crowds are simply approaching feet. When he walks down the street he looks down. Nikes. Flip-flops. Manolos. Payless knockoffs. In winter, Uggs and L.L.Bean. When it’s someone in sneakers his eyes follow each step like it’s a beautiful woman he’s checking out but really he’s always watching heel impact. He majored in sports medicine. We had dinner with Mike and Lynn and toasted his new job at Nike and for a while he was bubbling over at the end of every day, telling me about how he was working on things that would make a tremendous difference for the next generation of runners. Somewhere in that first year he stopped bubbling and started drinking. Not too much but just enough to amplify his growing cynicism. Lynn said once that it was weird to see someone in their twenties so jaded, but I got all defensive and she dropped it. She and I both knew she was right, though.
Bob’s business is sport shoes, as they’re called in the industry, but mostly I tell people he designs sneakers. Before he started working at the top sport-shoe company in the world I never knew “shoe architecture” existed. Of course I’d read somewhere about how Nike started with a running coach and a waffle iron, but beyond that I was ignorant of all that went in to building a cross trainer.
The feet in Bob’s world can be divided into two categories: healthy and unhealthy. Healthy means equal wear and tear through from the ball to the heel. Unhealthy is everything else and to Bob most feet are unhealthy. So he speaks in declarations that sound like fortune cookies at a foot-fetish restaurant.
“Whoever thought of taking flip-flops mainstream?” he asked his bewildered dinner partner at a school fund-raiser.
And:
“That guy has no idea that in ten years he’ll be seeing a podiatrist for collapsed arches,” he said to me while we were Christmas shopping at Old Orchard Mall.
And:
“In a perfect world, we’d outlaw high heels and everyone would wear orthotics.”
He said that to the principal at Cammy’s school after a tense meeting in which the headmaster told us she was on probation again. The principal, Mr. Black, looks like the doctors used forceps when he was born. His pinched face matches his prim boarding-school Oliver Twist personality. I can’t stand him mainly because he seems not to be able to stand me. Or my family. Even before Cammy was in trouble, Mr. Black acted like we were a problem. Like we were high maintenance. When Cammy was in first grade we’d gone in to talk to him about moving her to another class with a more patient teacher and he started shaking his head halfway through our request and held up his hand. He said, “It’s a poor sportsman who blames the equipment.” I wanted to wring his neck. We tried talking to him about Cammy’s special needs and he waved us off like it was all bullshit. Bob said, “The kid’s in first grade … what could it matter?” And Mr. Black leaned across his desk and hissed, “Exactly.” Bob said, “No, I mean, what’s the big deal about her going into Miss Landis’s class. We hear she’s great with—” But before Bob could finish, Mr. Black stood and said, “We’ll see what we can do.” We were dismissed. Being new parents we actually thought he’d come through, but now that I know him I know he didn’t give us a second thought. Son of a bitch.
So, years later, Mr. Black was walking us to the front door on his way up to a