Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

But now there is something else. Now there are, creeping like a well-intentioned but ultimately suffocating and murderous weed, these new and vague half responsibilities, which are choking the life from all growth in this garden, which could also be considered human productivity and the national GDP. These optional things, these middling things, they sneak and kill like rust on flora. Like communism. No, not like communism. The communists knew balance, and worked hard. Did they work hard? No one is sure. But these other parents and their judging eyes: When do they work? Their jobs are attending these events. That is their work, they imply, and they also imply that you, and your actual work, are fine but also neglectful and sad. They don’t say that, though. They say, Don’t worry if you can’t be there, at the mid-fall solstice sing-along, the late-winter sledding-song craft fair and potluck. Not a big deal with the mid-spring parent-student doubles badminton under-the-lights evening funmaker. No problem with the mother-daughter pajama party on every third Wednesday movie day Sound of Music bring your own guitar or lyre. No need to bring treats on your child’s birthday. No need to come in for career day. No need to swing by the opening of the new art studio which features real clay-throwing technology. Don’t care about art? Not an issue. No need, no need, no need, it’s fine, no problem, though you really are selfish and your children doomed. When they are first to try crack — they will try it and love it and sell it to our culture-loving children — we will know why.

And so Josie calculated, for her own amusement and for some likely future deposition, the hours it would take to actually attend all of these middle-mandatory events in a given November, and she arrived at just over thirty-two hours. That would sum up the time in the school, on campus, watching and cavorting, thanking and congratulating. But wait. Consider the time to get from and back to work, through traffic, against traffic, everything, all the tragedy of driving at all, it added up to forty-six hours. Forty-six hours in one month to attend the daytime and nighttime events, all of them optional, for which you are not expected, no problem, no worries, everything is optional, your children are doing so wonderfully, don’t worry, we know you need to work, Josie.

Josie did have to work, because there were the kids, and Carl did not know how to generate income, personally contributed no funds whatsoever — his mother Luisa supported him, though she was anguished about it, and she paid for Ana and Paul’s things occasionally, too. It did not help that Josie had not taken on another dentist into her own operation, she was a fool not to, and it did not help that she offered her services on a sliding scale. None of it helped. All of it was ill-advised, and proved she should not have started a business, should not be living with her children in that town, with those gleaming people who balanced joy and obligation effortlessly. Every time she would attend some event, some cupcake soiree, some ceremony of the cupcakes of the oral presentation of the choral club, she saw them. All of them. The dads were there, the moms were there. They were all there, and when she saw them, inevitably and firstly, they would want to talk about the last event, the one the week before or the day before. The event she did not attend. Oh, it was great, they would say. The class killed it. They killed it! The parents would say this with wonder, with wonder at it all, the things these kids do, that these young children are capable of, and while saying this, they may or may not be aware of the shiv they were sliding between Josie’s ribs. They may or may not have any idea. But then they would turn the knife: And your son, they would say, wow, he was the star. Another twist: I think I have him on film, at least for a second. I’ll send you a link . Was this an Ohio thing? Was it happening everywhere? Was it helpful that Paul sang both “The Long and Winding Road” and “In My Life” in some daytime talent show that Josie hadn’t gotten proper notice of? It was not helpful. One parent said, afterward, Better you weren’t there. It was too sad seeing Paul sing those words . She really said this. Meaning this eight-year-old understood the words, connected them somehow to Josie’s split with Carl. This happened.

The wonderful apex of it all was the email from a woman, another mother, a week later. “Dear Josie, As a service from the school community to our working parents, we’ve started an innovative program we call All in This Together, whereby each student whose parents can’t be at schoolday events is “adopted” by a parent who can be. This parent will take extra time with your child, will take pictures at events and post them, and in general give the child the support enjoyed by the students who…” The email went on for another page. Josie scanned to the bottom to see who had been assigned to her children, and found it to be this woman, Bridget, who she remembered being precisely the kind of mother she’d never leave her children with — loony-eyed and fond of scarves.

Josie had chosen this kind of environment. She had left her former tribe, the searching ranks of Peace Corps alums, to go to dental school, to move to Ohio, to come to live in this suburb, among stable people — so stable they were willing to “adopt” her children during the school day — but she remembered her other people, other friends from the other life, those still roaming the planet like the undead. None of the Peace Corps friends had had kids. One had spent a year in bed, her healthy limbs unable to take commands (she’d since recovered). One had moved back to Panama, another learned Arabic and found some mysterious consulting job in Abbottabad and claimed to have watched the bin Laden raid from his rooftop. One was dead of an apparent suicide. A now-married couple ran a llama farm in Idaho, and had asked Josie to come, to move in, to be part of their commune ( It’s not a commune! they insisted), and Josie had almost done it, or had almost thought about considering it, but yes, the rest of the ragged race of Peace Corps people were still wandering, unwilling to stop, unwilling to live in any traditional or linear way.

Only Deena, a mother of a boy in Paul’s class and manager of a pet food store, understood, seemed to have any past at all. Josie had mentioned her emancipation to another couple and they had not been able to hide their horror. They’d never heard of such a thing.

“I didn’t know that was possible,” the man said.

“I ran away once,” the woman said. She was wearing capris. “I slept at a girlfriend’s house and came back in the morning.”

Another time, at Moms’ Night Out — no three words more tragic — Josie had mentioned the Peace Corps and Panama, how she’d known someone, Rory, who had managed to become a heroin addict there. Josie thought she told the story in a funny way, an American smuggling drugs into Central America, but again there was the chasmic silence that implied Josie was bringing some hint of apocalypse to their fine town.

But Deena understood. She was a single mother, too, though her husband was not a deserter, but dead. He’d been a contractor in the Nigerian delta, was kidnapped, ransomed, freed, and, upon returning to the U.S., died two months later of an aneurysm. Deena’s other child, also named Ana but spelled Anna, was adopted, and between that and the dead father, Deena, too, had been threatened with Anna being adopted by the scarf woman from All in This Together.

Josie and Deena talked about being the only people in the school that anything had ever happened to. Josie felt right telling Deena anything, but she hadn’t gone far into her own childhood, her parents’ broken world. Those were untouchable years. It was one step too strange, so with Deena they left it at the particular absurdities of being a single parent — the making of money to pay children to watch their children so they could make money to pay these people to watch their children. The confiding in their children, complaining to them, lying too long with them at bedtime, telling them too much.