Chapter 17

Tina's view:

Sometimes I curl up on the sofa in those rare moments when I need some 'me' time and I think about things.

Mommyhood. Little girls always think of being mommies. I did until I realized that my own 'mommy' saw me as a problem to be solved. Fortunately the solution was her own mother, Grandma, who did me right. When Grandma died and I ended up with Mom again, I pretty much decided that motherhood wasn't for me, not if I had a chance of ending up like Mom and me.

Rethinking that. Found out what it's like to be loved and cared for. What it's like to have a person to focus on in life, to share life with. That's Alan.

And then there's Terri. I've spoken with several people who advised me that step-kids are part of the package deal when you marry somebody who's got 'history'. I have analyzed the thought that I could have really thrown a fit and dodged the whole question of Terri in my life. Could've ended up with a very unhappy Alan. Could've ended up back out on my butt by myself, too. None of those things happened.

First, Alan was very open about Terri. I remember the first mention of her, a day after we first met, the sadness in his voice. "I'll never get to be the dad I want to be with her." Second, the first time I talked with Terri, we connected. She was open, happy, effusive, and excited to hear that her daddy had somebody. Third, the first time we met, Christmas of last year, it was like I'd collected a missing piece to the puzzle that is my life.

So I'm sitting here in our brand new apartment on a brand new sofa, graduated from high school and still psychically drained from a day with some of the staff at Auburn University and I'm a wife and a mommy and a college student. Overwhelming. A few months ago, 'overwhelming' would have been cured by falling back into Alan's arms, but today Alan's at the office eyeball-deep into FEED (Front-End Engineering and Design) for a new client's facility, and he's not available.

And Terri's across the way at her friend Rachel's apartment. Heaven only knows what they're up to. Rachel Weismann is a bright young girl in her own right, but compared to Terri, well, I love the term 'order of magnitude'. It applies to being intelligent. I now live with an intelligent bunch. Two of my younger sisters, Cindy and Nikki, have side-stepped a big part of a four-year degree program. And Terri's right up there with 'em. It's all confusing at times.

Life is supposed to be a series of carefully measured steps, you know. Zero to six, you're just a little kid, then for the next twelve years you're in school, one year at a time, until you graduate high school. And then college and marriage, you know. But I went from Grandma's where I was stepping through life, to Mom's where chaos reigned. And then the hurricane. And the diner. And Alan. I went from eleventh-grade dropout to advanced placement high school senior. And wife. And mom.

"Tina, we're here!" and the giggles of two seven year old girls is as good a way to break out of a reverie as any. I was presented with two cuties, one blonde, one dark-eyed, walnut-haired brunette. "Is summertime a bad time to make cookies?"

"And why are we making cookies, may I ask," I replied. I watched Terri doing a bit of light manipulation as she nudged Rachel.

Rachel giggled, struggled with the phrasing: "Cooking is an exercise in chemical reactions and aesthetic combinations of sight, smell, texture and taste."

I cut my eyes at Terri. "Okay, Terri-scooter! That sounds like YOUR words."

Rachel said, "See! You told me she'd probably figure it out!"

Terri grinned. "But we have to try! And no, actually it's a Cindy phrase."

"Cindy's trying to learn to cook," I sighed. "What sort of cookies?"

"Oh, we were thinking oatmeal. With nuts and raisins."

"Very healthy," I said.

"And lots of cinnamum an' spices!" Rachel added.

"CinnamON," Terri corrected.

"That's what I said! Cinnamum!" Rachel retorted to Terri's sigh.

"Let me do an inventory," I said. "Do you have a recipe?"

"Of course!" Terri said, whipping her iPad out of her backpack. "This one!"

"Sent it to the desktop computer and print it, then go see what we need. I know we don't have oatmeal."

A half-hour later we're getting into my car and I'm realizing that one point of this exercise is 'Let's get Tina to take us to the store!'. Happily, these two aren't the feral kind of kids you see running wild in the grocery store. They did look at the bakery department's oatmeal cookie offering, though, with running commentary.

"Ours will have more spices," Rachel said. "And love."

"Yes," Terri emphasized. "We will put love and happiness into ours."

Okay, now you KNOW we're gonna make these cookies.

The kitchen was a flurry of bumping into a pair of 'helpful' seven year olds and running discussions about ingredients and origins and mixtures and chemical reactions.

"You sound like Cindy," Terri said.

I could have been upset that I was being compared with a girl three years my junior, but we're talking about Cindy, and at this stage of our lives, I think Cindy is somehow the pivot. Or maybe the keystone. My first sister, with emphasis on the 'first' part. "Nobody sounds like Cindy," I said. "Except Terri!" Which was the truth. Seven and fourteen both horribly intelligent and precocious, and there's some sort of attraction between the two.

Alan and I had a discussion about Terri's place in the Community.

"My daughter..." he said.

"OUR daughter," I corrected.

And then we met the Weismanns when they moved into our apartment building, Sim Weismann is a Sociology prof and Beck, his wife. I get the idea that she's matured out of one of those, as Alan says, 'Kumbayah hippie socially aware' phases. Said Beck, pointing to a book on her shelf, "It Takes a Village. Hillary Clinton's name is on it although I doubt she wrote much of it. But when I see how Terri and Rachel flit around here, I see where my daughter and your daughter (she called Terri 'my daughter' and I melted inside) are indeed being raised by this strange village. On an intellectual level, I see this as a very good thing. I was worried about the sociological implications..."

"Yeah, all those teeny-bopper girls and their perpetually sexual husbands and all that," I said. That was another conversation, another set of fears put to rest.

"You have to admit..." Beck said.

"I know I would," I laughed. "But this 'village'..."

"Good thing. Right down to what goes on through the back door of that Indian restaurant," Beck said. "Terribly multi-culti, don't you know," she laughed.

"Oh, Mizz Desai told me that she was lamenting that all her grandchildren were grown up and not yet producing a generation of great-grandchildren and now she has two, one blonde, one brunette."

"Look," I said to Beck, "Let me make some coffee. Or tea."

"Oh, why don't you come to my place. I'll do that. You need a break."

"Okay," I said. I like Beck. Jewish. That's not a problem at all. Has strong family background. I like that. New recipes. She'd called us all over for... "Kasha varnishkes. I'd say 'like Grandma used to make', but there's no way. I tried, though. You'll get the idea."

Was good. Hard to be sad with stuff like that.

Not sad, though. Thoughtful. Lots of things to think about. Some days were just a tumble of things, like when I started taking tests. "CLEP out of as much stuff as you can," Alan said. 'CLEP' was an archaic program to allow one to take tests on college subjects and receive credits based on knowledge acquired through, to use the accepted term, 'non-traditonal means', like reading everything I could get my hands on. My results got me interviews with department heads in history, literature and language. And credits. A handful of them. I sighed. Maybe not the 'Cindy and Nikki' kind of credits in hard math, but I was at least good through the second year math. But I was satisfied. So was Susan, although Susan was the recipient of a much more traditional education experience. School. And smart.

Susan and I didn't create quite the stir that Cindy and Nikki did on campus. Both of them are so obviously young, and Cindy, well, we giggle and pick at Cindy sometimes. She's almost a caricature of a fairy tale pixie with that red hair and green eyes. And no, NOT jealous. If you took those two out of my life, I was still wonderfully blessed. Putting them IN my life was a happy thing. And they're my first sisters, Cindy from my new life, Nikki from the old. And Cindy's the one that came up with the whole community thing in the first place, on the first night we met. Yeah. It's like that.

Aside from everybody's apartments, we had a couple of other meeting places. The apartment had a pavilion, covered, in a back corner of the property. In late afternoon tall trees on the west side shaded it early, letting it cool to a kind of balmy place that one could sit in the evenings, alone (like I was ever alone when I didn't want to be) or with friends. The first time we ended up there, Cindy came out with a big pitcher of iced tea.

"Look! I made this myself!" she giggled, knowing how we'd discussed her desire to learn to cook. The pavilion immediately became known as 'Cindy's Tearoom' among us. Like the 'Nikki Granger Memorial Data Network'. And the 'Susan Ellerbee Arboretum', three cherry trees and a bed of petunias, most of them blue, that Jason publicly claimed matched the eyes of his true love.

I have something, too. Tina's Daughter.

I was puttering around the kitchen at the end of the day when Alan walked in. "How was college today?" he asked.

"I think I'm gonna still have to do two semesters of English. I'm thinking literature."

"Why don't you do something with writing?" he said.

"Writing? Cindy's the writer."

"You do as well," he said.

"Let me think about it. And stop that. You're my biggest fan."

"I just see your capabilities. You make the choice."

"I chose you, didn't I?" I said, kissing him.

"Yeah ... I'm awfully happy with that choice." He kissed me back, nuzzled the hair away from my neck and rendered me uncontrollably giggly. "Where's Terri?"

I know what that means. "She and Rachel are at Nikki's. We have time." We did have time. Time that was put to good use, I might add. Still, the languorous ennui afterward was cut short because we knew that Terri would be back soon. Of course we also knew that she knew that Alan had come home and we were alone and she's smart enough not to barge in unannounced.

And dinner. "Forget it," I said. "Cindy's been at the Desai's all afternoon learning to cook Indian food. They're laying a spread for the whole bunch."

"Who's paying for that?" he asked.

"I dunno. Figured that's one of those beancounter details," I giggled. I know that my engineer husband turns colors when we get to talking about financial considerations.

"Tell 'em to give us a bill and we'll sent it to Susan's mom. Deduct it from the lease."

"Oh, okay," I said.

"What time?"

"Six," I said. "Go shower."

"Come with me."

"Our daughter's gonna catch us," I said.

"She's already caught us," he retorted. She had. Well, not blatantly, but late night, watching TV, a blanket over the two of us on the sofa, covering us, and I was in Alan's lap with him inside me. The next day, Terri had asked, "You and Dad, last night..."

"You were supposed to be asleep."

"I didn't see anything," she said. "'Sides, you're married. Married people do that."

"Yes, married people do that."