Woman in a circle

Judy was in Spain with her husband and two teenage sons. It was her first trip to the country of her ancestors. About time, she thought, seeing as how her five brothers had already visited there and returned to bore her with their photo albums and stories of the shrewd bargains they’d made on touristy junk in tiny Spanish towns. A talent for haggling must be in their blood, each one of them had bragged. After saving for a few years, Judy and her husband Jerry had managed to secure two weeks in a small pension near Spain’s northern coast. They’d also found a decent rate on a nonstop flight from JFK for the four of them, though it was still an appalling sum. Yes, it was Judy’s turn now, and here she was, sunning on the beach while Jerry and the boys rode bikes in the small beach town.

Before he’d left with his father and brother, her younger son Will had drawn a rough circle around her chair in the sand, intoning mock-seriously, “Stay within this ring, fair lady, while I search for golden treasure in the land of our ancestors. Do not leave the protection of this circle or you will surely perish.” Judy laughed and waved him off, glad of a few moments to herself in the midst of the tumbling togetherness of their vacation. She loved her husband, her chivalrous Tolkien-besotted son and his quieter, less demonstrative older brother, but she wasn’t used to spending this much time with all of them.

Judy gazed out at the harbor. Gleaming white yachts floated serenely at anchor. She imagined their owners, suntanned and clad in white, the women with gold earrings and bangle bracelets, the men with ascots and double-breasted blazers, their faced hidden behind designer sunglasses, stepping off their dinghies into waiting town cars, being carried off to three-star restaurants where they would be attended by obsequious yet punctual wait staff at intimate meals designed by world-famous chefs. She envied them, these yacht people. Their wealth cushioned life’s sharp edges, their passages made smooth by factotums and drivers and maitre’ds, all anxious to please. As she watched the shadows lengthen at her feet, she mentally added up what they’d spent on food so far and began scheming a way to get dinner into her hungry boys for as little as possible. Eating meals in restaurants was so expensive, and their travel funds were dwindling fast. She contemplated what it would be like to walk into the finest bistro in town and let her boys order anything they wanted, never even glancing at the prices on the menu, insouciantly dropping a wad of Euros on the table at the end of the meal and then strolling back to the hotel, slightly tipsy on champagne and overfull of rich foods. No use wasting time lamenting what you cannot have, she thought. Better to be grateful, to make the most of this brief interval in the sun.

Around her, children played in the sand. Their parents—mothers, mostly—stole glances at magazines or paperbacks they’d stashed in beach bags in hopes of reading a few sentences in a row while their young charges busied themselves in the shallow water. Judy remembered the years when her boys were little, when she would have given a large sum, if she’d had it, for a few moments alone on a beach, or even in her own back yard. She knew that she was supposed to look back fondly on that time, and regret that her babies had grown into awkward, pimply, fractious teenagers, but she didn’t. Honestly, she hadn’t enjoyed taking care of tiny, helpless people who made messes, failed to take regular naps, and sucked her dry with their demands for attention every moment they were awake. She watched the young mothers, who sighed as they left their books to chase errant toddlers, and felt, mainly, relief that that stage of her life was over.

She thought about Will, how he’d spent all of his free time in the past year reading and re-reading The Lord of the Rings, watching and re-watching the Peter Jackson films, writing about Middle Earth and debating with other fans on his blog, which he’d sweetly titled “My Precious.” Of course he also played video games and chatted with several friends at a time on MySpace, but at least he usually did his homework before he logged on. Will was 15, and hadn’t yet shown any interest in dating. Judy admired his energy and focus, and wished she could write 500 words a day on anything she cared about. Maybe she should start her own blog. What would she call it? Life in the Middle Ages? It Sucks to Be 40? She wasn’t sure she could think of enough things to write about to keep a blog going, anyway. Not that she really had time for writing, between work and family and everything.

Judy mentally smacked herself on the forehead. Here she was, sitting on a gorgeous beach in Spain, nothing to do but relax in the sun, and she was worrying about money and complaining to herself about not having enough time to take up a hobby. Worrying and complaining, those were her hobbies. They were portable, at least. She could do them during those wakeful hours in the middle of the night, during her commute, even on a sunny beach. She sighed and looked down at the imaginary moat that Will had drawn for her. Will was such an easygoing son, demanding less and less of her time as he grew into young adulthood. Her other son, Walt, was another story. Walt was, well, difficult.

Walt had been born too soon, in more ways than one. She’d become pregnant with Walt on their honeymoon. What a cliché, she thought. They had waited until their wedding night to have sex. They had used birth control. And yet, Walt had arrived less than nine months later. He’d been born at 36 weeks. Really. Not like the kids in high school who had had to get married, and who told their elderly aunts that their babies were premature. No, she and Jerry had done things in the proper order, yet on their first anniversary they already had a four-month-old squalling son. They hadn’t been ready for an infant, as if anyone ever was.

He was colicky, crying for hours every day during that first year. No amount of rocking comforted him. Judy discovered that if she turned on the faucet, the sound of running water would sometimes calm him. So she spent a lot of time in their small apartment bathroom, watching her own tired face in the mirror as she paced the floor with her son. She and Jerry had just learned to cope with this stage when Walt left behind colic and started throwing screaming purple tantrums whenever anything around him changed. Walt, it seemed, was exquisitely, overly sensitive to his environment. They learned that they had to move slowly with Walt, talking soothingly and trying desperately to avoid startling him.

As he grew into a toddler, the allergies and asthma had started. Walt’s early school years had been fraught with the difficulty of finding foods he could eat and preventing him from taking foods that might kill him. He couldn’t eat the home-made cupcakes other kids’ moms brought to school on their birthdays. He couldn’t eat most of what passed for food in the school lunches. Judy packed him safe lunches every day and dreaded phone calls from the school nurse. Walt was now in high school, and still had difficulty adjusting to changes. He hadn’t outgrown that or the allergies. He was finicky and unattractive, possessing not a lot of brains or particular gifts or talents to counterbalance his lack of good looks. He was the kind of kid that other kids teased and avoided. A loser, in short. What a thought for a mother to have about her own flesh and blood, Judy chided herself. But it was true.