Spence is eight months old when I start to see how this is going to go. I’m going to be home with him, from the moment he wakes until Pat walks in the door in the evening, returning from whatever mid-level actor job he’s managed to score that day. I have given up the notion that Pat and I would trade off stay-at-home childcare duties – not because Pat’s unwilling to do so, but because he’s simply more likely to earn chunks of money faster than I would.
    Alone together, Spence and I live like bears. By the time Spence wakes, Pat is already gone. So I bring Spence into bed with me and we roll around till he tires of that. Spence has become an easy, cheerful baby since he stopped non-stop screaming around his fifth month. Now, we pad through our days, eating and napping, eating and napping. Sometimes we see a friend. Which gives us a reason to change out of our pajamas.
    One friend is Milly. She says I should come to her Mommy Group. It would get Spence and me out of the house.
    Now, I’ve never been much of a joiner. As a whole, people in groups make me nervous. People in groups do things that they would never do on their own. On the upside, groups of people can feed the hungry, free political prisoners, and get medical marijuana legislation passed. On the downside, groups of people burn books, lynch people, and drive through the streets in limousines, grabbing their crotches, screaming “Do you want a piece of this?”


    I almost always consider the downside, so a Mommy Group doesn’t immediately appeal. But when Milly says I should go, I go. I go because much as I adore Spence, I can’t bear another week of afternoons twisting ahead of me like a Figure 8 – pick up baby, feed baby, change baby, pick up baby, feed baby, change baby.
    So I go because I think that maybe there are more mothers like me, bewildered by their discontent. I go because I think that surely these new mothers ache for what I ache for: Adult conversation, a safe place to let the baby roam, and booze. I go even though I’m pretty sure that my shyness with strangers will make me appear mute and simple. And I go because Milly says not to judge Mommy Groups before I’ve been to one. Milly is the least judgmental person I know – a quality both charming and maddening.
    Before she had her daughter, Emma, Milly had been a pretty actress who liked books, vintage cars, and gossip. We met in acting school and our friendship was cemented at a party one night when, on a dare, she moved an egg from one chair to another with just her ass.
    Lately, Milly’s voice has acquired a hysterical edge and she admitted to me that on her daughter’s birthday she ate the whole birthday cake after removing it from the oven, and had to make another. The Mommy Group, she says, is the brightest spot in her week.
    This Mommy Group meets at Patti’s. The house is immaculate, the wooden floors glistening like they’ve been computer enhanced. Patti is as immaculate as her floors -- her shiny blonde hair pulled into a perfect ponytail that I think might be fake. She wears a pressed white men’s shirt and a pair of shorts that shows her flawlessly tanned legs. A friend of mine recently told me about spray on tans and I wonder if Patti has sprayed hers on. As I index everything about Patti and her home, I realize that I’m generally assuming that nothing here is real.
    Eight mothers sit around a long glass table that has a cushy gray childproofing strip around the edge of it. In the middle of the table, rests a bowl of grapes. The women sip from glasses of what I hope is vodka. Milly sinks into a pillow on the floor and pushes Emma toward a gaggle of children who are pounding on things and ignoring each other nicely. I perch on the edge of the sofa and slide Spence down to the floor next to me so that he can suck on my knee.
    Patti stands in hostess mode. “Brett,” she says, “Can I get you anything? Water, Ice Tea, or a Diet Snapple? We have Strawberry Kiwi Snapple and Ice Tea Snapple. The real Ice Tea has sugar, the Ice Tea Snapple is ‘diet’.”
    It’s not vodka, I think.
    “I’ll have some water.”
    “What’s his name?” she asks, nodding at Spence.
    “Spence.”
    “Nice,” she says. “You know there’s two girl Spencers at my son’s Day Care.”
    I mentally grope for an appropriate response.
    “Wow,” I say, as if both shocked and impressed.
    Patti cocks her head and says, “Yeah,” like maybe I’d better consider changing Spencer’s name.
    We both look at each other and nod for a very long time.
    “Which one is your son?” I ask.
    She points to a bald baby who sits staring at a wall.
    “Sebastian,” she says. “He scratched his own eye yesterday.”
    “That must have hurt.”
    “You’d think so,” she says. “But he seems fine.”
    I look at Sebastian staring at the wall and wonder what he’s seeing.
    “Patti,” says a woman who’s crystal meth skinny, “I went to that ‘Music and Mommy’ class at Kids Place last Tuesday. It was great. But I thought you’d be there with Sebastian.”
“You know,” says Patti, “I thought the class was really great too. But the week before, Sebastian put a drumstick up his nose and really hurt himself.”
    I watch Sebastian lean his cheek against the wall.
Milly pulls off a branch of grapes. “I like Kids Place,” she says, “but I think it’s weird that they don’t have some kind of padding on the steps. I mean it’s all about kids and those concrete steps are just an accident waiting to happen.”
    “You’re telling me,” says Patti, “the first day we were there, Sebastian fell and slammed his chin on the top step. If he had any teeth, I’m sure he would have lost them. As it was, the fall made his face to swell up and he has to take an anti-inflammatory that he ended up being allergic to. It took a month to get his face to go down and to get rid of the rash and the scabs.”
    “The rash and the scabs?” asks Milly.
    “He got the rash from the anti-inflammatory. Then he scratched the rash and got these scabs all over his face.”
    It looks like Sebastian has fallen asleep leaning his face against the wall. I think of all those self-inflicted wounds. Sebastian must be sending out a crude kiddie cry for help. Without words, he can only bang himself up badly enough to require removal. I am impressed by the simplicity of his plan.
I want to join Sebastian against the wall. I’m not a general kid-lover. I like some kids and not others. But I’m drawn to Sebastian – poor guy. He’s living in a fake home. Right now, he’s perfecting his ability to nod off in any situation. A skill my husband has honed, having grown up in not a fake home, but a terminally dull one. Pat can actually nap while playing cards, which his family does for hours on end, while talking about which are the fastest routes for getting to towns no one else wants to go to.
    The Mommy Group winds on through the early afternoon like a Figure 8 – discuss latest accomplishment of babies, pick up and reposition babies, remark on how hard it is to get anything done with babies, discuss latest accomplishment of babies, pick up and reposition babies, remark on how hard it is to get anything done with babies.
One woman says that she’s afraid her daughter’s teeth are coming in crooked. Another says that she’s pretty sure her daughter’s going to be left-handed and “Isn’t that a sign of creativity?” Another says that a real sign of creativity was when a kid smears his feces on things “like it’s paint.” I wonder if Milly realizes that she’s eaten all of the grapes and that no one else has had a chance at one.
Spence’s rhythmic gumming of my knee makes me feel heavy and groggy.
    I hear a woman say, “Well, of course, you need to cut juice with water. It’s too much sugar otherwise.”
    I doze off somewhere in here then come to with a jerk, quickly reaching up to wipe my mouth.
    A woman says, “Daphne throws a fit if you put anything green on her plate.”
    I lean over to Milly, “Can you watch Spence for a minute? I need to run to the bathroom. Just let him suck on your arm, he’ll be fine.”
    Patti’s bathroom sparkles like a television commercial bathroom in which germs are cute and animated, and toilets talk. I look in the mirror. I can’t imagine that all these women, by themselves, are this dull. I mean, Milly told me that one was a journalist and another owned a gallery. It must be something about putting them all together in a group. And what about Milly? She seems to blend right in. The Milly-I-know can pick up an egg with her ass, for God’s sake.
    Is there something about motherhood that turns one’s mind to goo? I look at myself. Am I them? And what about the other things? Where’s the food? Are grapes all we’re going to get? Maybe this is my answer. These women are existing on water and grapes. And in this case, they don’t even get the grapes.
    I turn on the cold faucet. The water feels good against my skin. Nice cold water.
    How am I going to make it through the afternoon? I’ll have to come up with some way not to fall asleep. And with no food, I’m losing energy fast.
    I lean over and splash water into my face. That, too, feels very good. I look up to see myself dripping with water, my vision fuzzy.
    Yes, I think, it’s something about groups. Something that dulls the active mind and subdues the eager heart.
    I reach for a towel, press it to my face and breathe in the clean.
    Looking in the mirror, I see myself, washed and make-up free. Without eyeliner, I look like a fetus -- round brown corneas, a shock in the pale landscape of my featureless face. I look strange to myself. An alien.
    A knock at the door startles me. My alien eyes grow bigger.
    “Brett,” says Milly, from behind the door. “Are you OK?”
    “Sure,” I say, glancing down at Patti’s white towel, noticing a dark brown swath of make-up smeared across it. Christ, I think, I’ve ruined the perfect towel that lives in the perfect bathroom of the pristine house that Patti built.
    “Because Patti has to get in there with Sebastian,” Milly says. “There’s a cortisone cream the cabinet that she needs for his scalp.”
    My hands tighten around the towel.
    “I’ll be out in a minute.”
    “Brett,” says Milly, “Did you notice that I ate all the grapes?”
    “Yes. But I’m sure it doesn’t matter,” I say, laying the towel next to the sink.
    “Well, Patti just ordered pizza. She’s throwing a plastic tarp on the floor and letting the kids all sit on it and chew on crusts.”
    “Great,” I say picking up the towel again.
    My stomach gurgles in anticipation of the pizza, as I listen to her click into the living room on the glossy wood floor.
    What if one of the others finds the towel? Looking around the bathroom, I return to the stack of identical towels on the windowsill. Aha. I am -- though alien -- practiced at trickery. I refold the foul towel with the telltale dark stain now facing the inside, and slip it under all the rest.
    Then I slide open a drawer under the sink. My hand sorts through some loose tampons, lipsticks, and a brush. I take out a lipstick, dab color on my cheeks and rub. Not bad, I think, the color makes me look more awake. I put the lipstick on the counter, fluff my hair, and smile my public smile.
    I reach for the door -- then pause. Turning once again to look at Patti’s bathroom, I see the lipstick. And before I think of why, I slip it into my pocket.