Short fiction by Milly Heller

Toni Rensler reminded herself that her life was perfectly nice. She didn’t know why she turned in the cereal aisle this morning at A&P and snapped at the men with long white hair, black cravats and hats, men with identical pleasant expressions, “Shut your Quaker faces.” She knew they were pretend men on the labels of cartons of oats. Also, she admired the Quakers.

Sitting in the Children’s Shoe Department at Gus Mayer’s, Toni tried to emulate the Quakers. Her daughters argued over whose feet had higher arches. Clara smacked Jenny. Jenny shrieked and slapped Clara. Toni used peaceful tones, told them they both had beautiful feet. It was 1970, the year of the clogs. Her two older daughters each had a pair, and they sounded like buffaloes stomping around while Toni made breakfast and dinner. The craze had drifted to Jenny and Clara, ages nine and eight. Toni hoped she wasn’t spoiling these two, but their clothes were hand-me-downs, and the big girls’ shoes too scuffed to pass along. Jenny and Clara had discussed clogs all week and agreed, for once in harmony, that suede clogs were best, and red suede the very best.

The saleswoman, Miss Ruth—Toni knew her from years of shopping here—opened the box in Clara’s size first. Jenny, as the older sister, took that as an insult and swung back her arm. Toni squeezed her hand, seemingly in sympathy but mostly to prevent another slap. Jenny and Clara were slappers. Her older two, now sixteen and seventeen, had been hair-pullers. Toni preferred the hair-pulling: it came with hisses, while shrieks accompanied slapping. Her older two had finally outgrown the hairpulling; they stood united against their parents. Toni didn’t mind; she wished she’d rebelled against her parents more, but she thought, considering all the songs about peace her older daughters listened to, they’d want more of it at home.

Four girls! A son might have tempered the emotions careening through the house. When Toni was pregnant with her second daughter, Kathy, and later with Jenny and Clara, her friends and family said, “This one will be a boy.” Toni replied, “I don’t care, so long as the baby is healthy,” but she had hoped for a boy. She would never, of course, confess that to her daughters. Indeed, she overcompensated. Last month Jenny asked, while Toni was at the sink peeling shrimp, “Mom, did you want four girls?” Toni said, “I dreamed of it! From my first reading of Little Women! Four girls! A perfect household!” Later she heard Jenny on the patio asking Ned, who was clipping hedges, “Dad, did you want four girls?”

He said, “Let’s put it this way: if Kathy had been a boy, you wouldn’t be standing here.”

The clogs for Clara gleamed dusky red in the tissue paper. Clara yanked the shoes out of the box, robbing Miss Ruth of the chance to regally present them, and shoved them onto her feet. She paraded around the shoe department. She looked ridiculous, like a wren wearing, well, clogs.

Miss Ruth opened the box for Jenny: clogs of white patent leather so shiny they reflected the fluorescent lights. Miss Ruth spoke fast, said this was the only pair left in Jenny’s size. Jenny fell face-first onto the floor. Toni knelt beside her, murmured they’d try D.H. Holmes and Godchaux’s this weekend, just the two of them, but right now Jenny had one job: to sit in the chair. Jenny shrieked that no one loved her. The other mothers, all accompanied by children who seemed unnaturally well-behaved, or maybe that was just their Catholic school uniforms, shot Toni pitying, superior glances.

Toni felt like a failure. After the myriad lessons she learned raising her older girls, the younger two should be perfect. Instead, they marked a decline. If she’d had fifth and sixth daughters, imagine their savagery. And she would be so diminished she’d be vapor. Four children: they’ve sapped not only vitality but decades from her life, especially with the age gap, seven years, between the two sets. Toni had planned to get her MSW, but had a surprise pregnancy with Jenny, thanks to a faulty IUD. Clara followed a year later, thanks to a faulty pill. Toni then had her tubes tied and tried now to recall how bereft she felt afterwards, how along with celebrating each of Clara’s milestones, she wept.

Clara returned from her promenade. She made a point of stepping over Jenny and said, in a carrying voice as she sat down, “It’s appropriate I get the red clogs, since I’m in Red Jays.” That was cruel. In Miss Lentz’s School of Ballet, Clara had been promoted to Red Jays and was dancing on point, whereas poor Jenny was repeating Blue Jays. Toni had tried to steer Jenny into a different activity, but Jenny refused and always eyed Clara’s toe shoes as if ravenous. Now, transferring that hunger, Jenny grabbed onto Clara’s leg and bit down on the clog. Clara threw herself on top of Jenny.

Toni remembered her cousin Louise. Back in high school, Toni’s mother took her to visit Louise in the hospital when Louise had her first baby, a girl. Toni’s mother said, “Maybe your next will be a boy,” and Louise said, practically dusting off her hands, “One and done.” Toni’s mother said Louise would change her mind, but Louise never did and had a long career as a court reporter, always in demand for big trials.

Clara had Jenny in a chokehold. Jenny pounded the floor with a clog that had a bite-sized scrap of suede missing from it. Toni thought, “One and done.” She began combining her daughters’ best traits to create one ideal child. She set strict rules: no using talents they didn’t possess, which meant, sadly, no musical genius, but she could take her oldest daughter’s love of reading and French, add Kathy’s math skills and ease at making friends, throw in Clara’s quickness and scientific bent. She needed something of Jenny’s. Was it cheating to convert her near-constant hysteria into a flair for acting? A life-sized cutout of Buster Brown stood nearby. His eternal, jaunty wink said, “Go ahead,” but right then Jenny raised her arm high in an arc before landing a punch on Clara. Toni, relieved she didn’t have to fudge the rules, gave the ideal child a smashing tennis serve. The other mothers drew their children closer.