CHAPTER 37

Vacation

Somewhere in a parenting magazine Leda had read an article about taking your toddler on vacation that included tips like “bring bright colorful chalk” and “schedule your days out, including snacks.” At the time Leda thought this article was clever and helpful and so creative. She’d gone so far as to clip it out and save it on her fridge, sticking it in place with a hopeful-looking kitten magnet. There was a time when this was the level of faith she had in the decision to take a child under five on an airplane.

The way over, things had gone well. Annabelle was thrilled by everything new so long as Leda and John made sure to put on an excited two-person play over all of it.

LEDA: Look!! Airplane!!!!! Do you see the airplane??????? We’re going on an airplane!!!

JOHN: Wow!!!!!!!!! Did you see the airplane, Annabelle???????? It’s gonna be so fun!!!!!!!!!!!!

JOHN: Look at the sidewalk moving!!!!!!!! It’s like we have superpowers!!!!!!

LEDA: Yay!!!!!! WHEEEEEEEEEEE!!!

LEDA: Do you want a bagel???????

JOHN: Bagel!!!!!!!!!!!!

By the time they’d gotten on board Annabelle was so excited that she easily sat through the three-hour flight, watching movies and eating the scheduled snacks Leda had brought along.

Just before the vacation Leda had noticed a small red blemish in the middle of her forehead.

“Do you see this?” she asked John.

“What?”

“This. This!”

“The dot? I guess so.”

“It’s awful. I can’t stop staring at it.”

“It’s nothing. I’m sure it’ll go away.”

But it didn’t go away, and every single time Leda looked in the mirror it was the first thing she saw. The day they got to their vacation rental Leda felt so thrilled up until the moment she went in the bathroom and caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror; even from afar she could see the red dot staring back at her. It marked the day, as if already it was not what she meant it to be.

“Pizza?” she asked John to console herself. And they had pizza that night.

Leda picked a beach vacation, figuring that Annabelle at her young age would enjoy it the most. She’d envisioned her little family in some exotic location soaking up the sun and splashing in the waves. There would be sand and laughter and showing her daughter the limitlessness of the ocean and sky as a singular horizon.

But the very first day Annabelle threw up all over the kitchen floor.

Pizza? Leda wondered as she wiped it up. They decided to stay in for the day and watch movies. She’d cook rice and hand out saltines. Unfortunately, the TV wasn’t working and the Internet was too slow to stream anything, so they ended up playing 462 rounds of Jenga to keep Annabelle from climbing the curtains out of sheer boredom.

“Tomorrow we’re taking her to the beach even if it kills us all,” Leda said.

The next morning Annabelle was better but John was sick.

“Do you think I could handle her on my own?” she asked him. A weary vision of herself managing a toddler in crowds of tourists passed through her mind. In it she could feel the sizzling exhaustion already searing the day away.

“I’ll make myself go,” John said. “It’ll be madness on your own.”

“No, no. Rest. We’ll go get pancakes and come back and check on you. Maybe by the afternoon you’ll be up for going out.”

They walked to an IHOP that was a block away. Before children Leda had had a strong aversion to IHOPs and all chain restaurants in general, but now she considered them to be holy sanctuaries. These were restaurants that got it. There were crayons and paper place mats with mazes and puzzles to be solved. The food was so tasteless no child would turn away. And, most important of all, none of the other patrons would judge you as one of your family members climbed under the table and rolled around on the carpet. There was no more room in Leda’s life to be a snob about it. Thank you, Jesus, is all she’d think as she ate a 1,200-calorie plate of fettuccini Alfredo while coaxing a two-year-old with unlimited breadsticks.

Annabelle raced ahead of Leda as they came upon the restaurant.

“Wait for me, honey.”

“I want to push the button.”

“What button?”

“In the lelevator.”

“There’s no elevator, Anna-B, we’re going to get breakfast.”

“No, there is.”

Leda tried to rack her brain for whatever lelevator her daughter could possibly be thinking of. “The one in the apartment building?”

“Yeah.”

“Honey, we didn’t go in the elevator, we took the stairs down.”

“But I really want to push the button.”

“You can push it on the way back.”

“No!”

“Annabelle, don’t you want pancakes?”

“No!”

Leda felt what was coming. There was a certain look in her daughter’s eye in times like these. It was an inconsolable anguish at anything and everything in the world. Leda had read a book about it once. It was called The Inconsolable Anguish. It was written by Dr. Abigail Lee, a woman with a fearless expression and a confidence about pureeing root vegetables that was rivaled by little else. In it Dr. Lee explained the importance of why it is that children tantrum.

“Without allowing your child to tantrum you are stifling your child’s ego. They need to tantrum to grow into whole individuals.” Leda had bought the book to try to understand why it was that on certain occasions her own daughter seemed to be the most draining individual in the history of the world, and now she knew that the reason for this was some vague concept explained to her in a 347-page book.

“Annabelle, we’re going to eat pancakes and then we’ll go back to the apartment and see Daddy. And then guess what?”

“What?”

Leda felt a giant sense of relief that her daughter’s response wasn’t “no.” She needed to seize this moment by acting as if she weren’t as dead inside as any other thirtysomething blue-blooded woman. “We’re going to go to the beach!!!!!”

“No!!!!” her daughter shrieked. And then she started crying uncontrollably. “I want to go push the button.”

“We’ll push the button on the way back to get Daddy. You can push it five times if you want.” Why in the hell didn’t we take that fucking elevator?

“No!! I want to push it now.”

Leda knew she had two options: threats or bribery. Normally she would have gone to the threats first. She did, after all, have a responsibility to society to raise an individual who would learn that you can’t have a meltdown if you can’t push an elevator button, but considering that they were on vacation, in a strange place, and that she too wanted some terrible pancakes, bribery was the best solution at hand.

“Listen, Annabelle, listen to me: if you’re a good girl we’ll go get you a special present after breakfast.” Where they would go for this special present Leda wasn’t sure, but there was something somewhere plastic and pink that would suffice at any given moment. This she could count on.

“No! I want to push the button. I want the button. The button.” Annabelle sunk down to her knees and then sat on the ground. Leda felt a little sorry for her child then. She was tired and had played too much Jenga the day before. So far this trip had been puking and sleeping in a strange bed. Leda found traveling as an adult stressful enough, but as a child with so little control over what terrible pancakes she ate, it really was no wonder that she wanted to push a button.

“Do you want to go back to the apartment and push the button and come back for breakfast?”

“No! I want to push it now. The button, now. The button.” Annabelle was sobbing so hard that Leda was sure passersby would think “the button” was a code word for some kind of paddle those religious people use to beat their children.

“Annabelle, stop it! There’s no button here. If you want to push the button, we have to walk back to the apartment to get on the elevator and push the button.”

“Nooooooooooo.” Annabelle was now lying down on the concrete in front of the IHOP. Leda looked out over the parking lot. Everything was hot and sticky. It reminded her of a scene from Breaking Bad in a vague way. I wish Jesse were here, she thought, tapping into an old celebrity crush she had in hopes of escaping the moment at hand. It worked briefly.

“Noooooo, the button, the button.”

An older woman exited the restaurant. “I’ve been there, honey,” she said as she passed by. “I’ve got six of them myself.”

Six of them? Leda thought. Do you hate yourself?

“Annabelle, you need to stop it. You need to calm yourself down so that we can either eat pancakes or go back to the apartment. Sit up.”

Leda pulled Annabelle into a sitting position, but the child fell back down and cried to herself. She seemed no longer to be tantruming for anyone or anything, really, but more just letting her ego develop here in this parking lot. Leda thought to call John but then had a better idea.

“Hey!” she called out at the woman who hated herself with the six children. “Can you do me an enormous favor?”

Minutes later the woman came back out of the restaurant holding a single pancake in a napkin.

“Thank you so much.” Leda went to hand her a five-dollar bill.

“Oh, no, they didn’t charge me,” she said. “Good luck with her.” It sounded like a mean remark, but Leda knew that this woman meant to her very core to wish her luck.

“Thank you,” Leda answered.

The woman nodded a solitary nod. If she could say what she’s thinking, she’d say “Godspeed,” Leda thought.

It was less difficult than Leda had anticipated to get Annabelle to eat the pancake, and as soon as she did she calmed down and Leda convinced her to go inside to get more. By the time they sat down her daughter looked as if she’d been through some kind of childhood war. I hope this is the last bad day of this vacation.

But it wasn’t. The next day Annabelle got burned on a candle at a gift shop. And the day after, they made it to the beach, but the water was too cold to go in. They sat on the sand and eventually left after it looked as if John was getting sunstroke. Leda tried to apply some wisdom from the article. She brought snacks with her and scheduled in naps, but the days were long and fell apart easily. Annabelle was stressed-out and cranky, and as a result at every turn they ended up buying some kind of plastic novelty gift.

“We’re going to need another suitcase for all this crap we’re buying,” she said to John as she stood in line to purchase a stuffed unicorn that glowed in the dark.

The second-to-last night of the trip Leda had a labored dream about having sex with Jesse from Breaking Bad. It was an intensely divine dream where he was kind to her and said things like: “You’re the hottest one I know, yo.” They made love on a mattress on the floor in slanted light. She felt so alive it was hard to believe she was asleep. The next morning when she woke up the dream weighed heavily on her. It was one of the best dreams she’d ever had, certainly one of the best she’d had in recent memory, and that’s why she hated it. There was an element of escapism in it all, as there had been that day at IHOP, and that bothered her on a certain level, that here on her vacation with her little family she was seeking refuge in the hands of an attractive fictional meth addict, but what upset her more was the reminder of a vague ambition she’d felt after watching the series those few years ago. She and John had watched all five seasons in the span of one week. It was a feverous time when blue meth and indulgent violence kept them up till 2:00, 3:00 a.m. every day. After they’d watched the finale Leda felt inspired. She wanted to write something like that, something so suspenseful that you could not look away, only she thought she’d like to write it about women.

“Would there be a way to write a show like that that’s just as thrilling but not about men asserting their masculinity over each other? What about women?” she’d asked John.

“A woman superhero maybe?” John said.

“No, that’s too mannish.”

Leda wrote out a few ideas but nothing came to fruition. Soon after, she got pregnant with Annabelle and forgot all about it.

Having sex with Jesse reminded her of all of it and it made her sad, although that sadness itself she could hardly understand, really. Nevertheless, the last two days of the vacation she couldn’t stop thinking about it, which was a shame because the last two days were the best days of the entire vacation. Annabelle finally got over what little bug had made her so disagreeable and the weather was perfect. They went to the beach and swam and had cookouts and picnics. The sunsets were extraordinary, and she and John had sex the last night that was exceptionally sweet. But despite it all she kept turning to the dream, looking for clarification.

The plane ride home started out fine. They tried to keep Annabelle as thrilled as was possible over flying again, but she’d moved on emotionally and wasn’t quite as keen to go along with everything. She knows it’s not that great, Leda thought as they boarded, Annabelle standing silently at her side.

After they got seated, Leda watched as an older-middle-aged woman shuffled around the plane trying to be sure her family of two teenage children, a husband, and some kind of extended relatives were all settled. She didn’t look tired, really, even though given the circumstance she very well should have been. “Don’t worry about me,” she’d overheard the woman say at one point. “I’m fine.”

During the flight things went fairly well. Annabelle slept through most of it, for which Leda was grateful. A baby a few rows down cried for almost the entire three hours and the mother, a slight-looking woman who probably looked thinner pregnant than most women look not pregnant, tried to soothe the child by carrying him up and down the aisle. Leda tried to smile at her a few times in the same solidarity that woman at IHOP had given her. It was best to continue passing that along.

When they landed the captain came on the loudspeaker to explain to the passengers the reason that they’d have to taxi for “a little bit.” “A little bit” turned out to be code for two and a half hours. And it was here in these last two hours that Leda made the solemn promise to herself that when she got home she would burn that article. Annabelle didn’t want to sit even though the seat belt sign was still on. The TVs were shut off for some reason, and despite the colored chalk available to her, Annabelle continued to try to get up exactly every thirty-eight seconds. The mother of the baby was also feeling the ills of being forced to sit as the child screamed bloody murder, hardly taking the time to catch a breath. Leda got so used to the sound that she could almost hum along with the baby’s screams. She memorized the varying pitch and could nearly make out a melody in it all. Somewhere at the front of the plane a child was complaining about missing a soccer game, and to her right was the older mother still managing her family even as there was little managing she could do.

“We’ll call the car when we get out and let them know,” she said loudly enough so each scattered family member could hear.

Leda thought then again of the dream and of sleeping with Jesse. But the thought disgusted her, and with some kind of ruthless whimsy she thought of herself writing again and being a writer far away from this plane and this place. She could see herself as someone else, and the feeling she expected to feel from the thought, the relief she wanted so badly, she didn’t feel at all. Instead she felt what it was, and what it was was that she wanted to want something else, but she didn’t. She wanted this. And she knew all the mothers on the plane wanted this as well. They weren’t trapped like some literary heroine who burned toast and felt sorry for herself. They were fearless and they were fierce. We’re no more trapped than men with all their anger and all their violence, she thought. But we’re mothers and that’s better. And what did that mean about her that she didn’t miss Jesse and the sex? That she didn’t miss writing? That a vacation as horrible as this one was the light of her life?

And then, without worrying about the seat belt sign, Leda got up and she walked to the bathroom and she looked at herself in the mirror and that red dot was there in the middle of her forehead staring back at her, and she took her index finger and pointed at it and held it there on the dot, wishing for it to go away though she knew it wouldn’t. Who are you? she thought. But she wasn’t scared and she wasn’t all that sorry. And somehow she felt free, trapped in a plane that skated along the tarmac, unable to stop enough so that she and her family might be able to get off.