“Fudge,” says Kiki, “I need diapers for the twins. They’re like twice as expensive here.”
“That’s ’cause they know they’ve got your balls in a vise,” Carla explains. “Formula costs more than a case of decent beer, you know why? Because they know you’re gonna pay it.”
“Just like they know if they put juice boxes with cartoon character faces on it right at kid level, you’re going to buy it because it’s easier to spend three extra dollars than it is to physically wrestle your child in public.” I can’t imagine Kiki wrestling her child, but I can see why she wouldn’t want to. She’s very petite.
We cruise through the aisles, pointing out all the ways that the Patriarchal Capitalist Machine attacks us: diet soda in slim cans, razors for women that cost more than the same ones for men, scented tampons! I say “pointing out,” but to clarify, we are definitely using outside voices.
We’re just rounding the corner from Dairy to Cleaning Goods when I see her. The face of everything wrong with modern motherhood. No, not Gwendolyn. The “spokesmom” for a name-brand chemical company whose entire ad campaign centers on a mom who “does it all.” The campaign is called—I kid you not—“Like a Mother,” and features a C-list actress showing how much easier her life is with the help of this all-purpose cleaner that smells like lavender. In every video she’s breezing through life: working like a mother, cooking like a mother, being very hot in a bathing suit like a mother? This woman haunts me in Facebook videos that blow my cover with loud voiceover when I’m just trying to enjoy a little scroll time during a boring meeting, in commercials when I’m just trying to enjoy a marathon of a show where people suck at baking, and now in the grocery store? Do we really need a life-size cutout of a woman who likely has someone to clean her home for her looming over us in this sacred space where we come to page through gossip magazines while we wait to pay for the food our kids will whine about?
The decapitation is Carla’s idea. Or maybe Kiki’s. Kiki definitely starts it, ramming her cart repeatedly into the display while shouting, “I’ll show you how to clean like a mother!” It’s Carla who performs the final ritual, ripping off the cardboard head and presenting it to Kiki like an offering.
“For our Queen,” she says, bowing down, then hoisting Kiki’s little body into the cart. If I have to pinpoint where our night changes, it’s this moment. Because once Kiki is named our Queen, once we get her into the cart and start referring to it as a chariot, once we allow ourselves to get sidetracked by the impulse purchases at the endcaps (a lemon-shaped plastic dish to store . . . your lemon?), we are no longer three moms at the grocery store. We are three wild animals with debit cards, spraying diet soda like we’re NBA players celebrating a championship, taste-testing the flavored lube (which does not taste like cherries), and moving all the full-fat yogurt to the front of the dairy case because who the fuck decided our yogurt had to be fat free?!
It’s clear during checkout, as Carla slips her number to the manager and Kiki begins to sort her coupons like she’s the star of her own reality show about extreme frugality, that I will never be able to return to this Stop-N-Save again.
16
Carla
Jaxon is supposed to wake me up by seven, but he either didn’t try hard enough or I was unresponsive, because by the time I snap out of my near coma, it was time to leave ten minutes ago.
Lucky for me, Jax knows the drill. I slap on some makeup and perfume; he grabs a Pedialyte from the pantry and cracks it open for the drive to school. If I can chug a liter of this shit before drop-off, I’ll be okay.
Lucky for Jaxon, his mom only needs six minutes to go from hot mess to just hot. If you can’t apply mascara while driving a stick shift, you have no business driving a car.
“Ma,” Jaxon shouts from the kitchen, “why is there a cardboard lady head on the kitchen counter?”
17
Kiki
Kent didn’t wake up when I came in last night. He didn’t wake up when I dropped a gallon of milk on the kitchen floor and tried to clean it up with a broom. He didn’t wake up when I tripped over his underpants trying to sneak into our bedroom. But he’s awake now, and the smell of his coffee breath makes me want to puke all over him.
“Keeks, babe, you feeling okay?” The back of his hand is on my forehead, checking me for a fever. I do feel sweaty. And cold. Should my skin hurt? I remember the time I was drunk in college, when my roommate and I split a Mike’s Hard Lemonade and I immediately threw up in our sink and she threatened to report me to our Resident Assistant if I didn’t let her borrow my Abercrombie hoodie. This is worse.
I want Kent to leave, and to take his pleated khakis with him. All the things I usually love about him—the smell of his cheap generic bar soap, the sight of his biceps in a polo shirt—make me want to drop dead. After what seems like a hundred years, Kent is done taking my temperature.
“You’re burning up. You forgot to use hand sanitizer at that PTA thing, didn’t you?”
Downstairs, I can hear the kids going absolutely bonkers.
“Take a vitamin, you’ll feel better,” Kent says, heading for the door. “I’ll be home around five thirty. The kids are starving, by the way. And the floor is really sticky.”
18
Amy
One of my eyes seems to be glued shut, but with my one good eye, the room begins to come into focus. It appears the sun has already risen. That . . . can’t be right. I peel my eyelid up. I slept in my mascara? Jesus. I slept in my clothes? What the actual hell happened last night?
Next to me is a life-size cardboard cutout of a popular TV spokesperson used to advertise cleaning products. She’s headless. Each of my heartbeats echoes inside of my head, and I realize with horror that I’m . . . hungover. Not “I had two glasses of wine with book club last night and I’m a little fuzzy this morning.” No, this is “I disassociated from my body and my life last night and became a college sophomore in a thirty-something-year-old body.”
The stairs seem particularly treacherous today, like someone has rearranged them while I was sleeping. Why am I so sore? Why are my legs so tired? My brain serves up a small flash of me teaching Carla and Kiki a short barre routine in the cereal aisle. “Tuck! Tuck! Tuck!” Carla scooped her hips back and forth like a natural. Kiki peed a little bit, which is totally normal—she’s had four kids.
“MOM.”
Dylan and Jane are sitting at the kitchen island, expectantly.
“Where’s our breakfast?” My instinct is to panic: to grab two frying pans and four eggs and get my babies fed. It takes two pans because they have different breakfast requirements: Dylan will have two “scrambied” eggs with sausage links. Jane will have two “poachies” with veggie bacon. And I do reach for the pans, but there’s a dirty baking sheet on the stovetop covered in . . . nachos? Or, at least some tortilla chips covered in what must have been cheese before they were burned to a crisp. I made nachos last night? I pull a few cheese-crusted chips from the baking sheet and turn to assess the situation.