The Cradle Robbers Read Online Free PDF

lessons are fifteen minutes long, which wouldn’t give you enough time to get to know someone unless you were a woman with small children used to cramming an intimate conversation into the time it takes to change a diaper. While her little boy and my two kids were paddling around in their flippers and wings and bobbing after rubber dinosaurs to the cheers of their pathologically good-natured college student instructors, Frances and I sat side by side in the shade and exchanged life histories. By the time Ruby was jumping off the diving board, I knew everything about Frances, from the complications of her mother’s third divorce to the frustrations her husband felt at having been passed over for partner at his law firm. Best of all, I’d gotten lots of free medical advice. There’s nothing that pleases a hypochondriac so well as an obliging new physician friend. Frances hadn’t practiced since her daughter was born, but she was a gynecological surgeon by training and we’d already discussed everything from prolapsed uteruses to incontinence to fibroid tumors. Not that I sufferedfrom any of those ailments, but you can never be too prepared.
    Tonight, however, Frances was showing off her skills as a sushi chef. She’d prepared a lavish spread of raw and cooked fish and Japanese salads and rice, and was handing out bamboo mats and sheets of seaweed. The other women all valiantly attempted a variety of maki rolls, but I kept to the hand rolls and was soon contently balancing a heaping plate on my lap.
    Playing with our food loosened us up even more than usual, and by the time the heated sake and various wines were passed around, the gossip had already started. Inevitably, as is always the case when a group of married women in their thirties gathers, conversation began with our children and moved quickly to our husbands. There was one woman in the group whose spouse was female, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter; she complained right along with the rest of us. Rachel bitched about how her husband would walk in the door every evening after being at work all day and announce that he needed time to “decompress” in front of the television before being forced to deal with her or the kids. “Honestly,” she said, “sometimes I just feellike pitching the baby at his head and taking off. When do
I
get to decompress?” Nods all around at that one.
    Colleen was on a tear about her husband’s new passion—his rock and roll band. “They practice every weekend. Every single weekend. He’s a thirty-seven-year-old orthodontist, and suddenly he thinks he’s Eric Clapton. And when I dare to suggest that maybe he should consider missing practice so that he could go to Nicky’s hockey game, then I’m the old lady who’s bringing him down. He gives me this adolescent grief, like I’m his mother!”
    “I wish Zach would miss Dylan’s games,” Beth said. “He gets absolutely insane about soccer. You guys had to sign that positive cheering pledge, didn’t you?” We had all signed the league’s pledge to cheer on our children using only affirming and encouraging words. “Well, I
laminated
ours and put it on the fridge. It hasn’t done any good. Zach still stands there on the sidelines screaming like a maniac. And poor Dylan just keeps running back and forth pretending he can’t hear anything his father is saying to him.”
    I opened my mouth to tell the women about my own aging adolescent, with his thousands of dollars’worth of superhero toys and his comic books. The truth is, however, that I find that part of Peter’s personality endearing. I knew from our very first date that he was an overgrown child—he’d shown up with a Fantastic Four button clipped to his lapel. But he’d also had a bouquet of irises in his hand. Peter is almost always willing to share his toys with my other children. And, frankly, he is a whole lot better at playing with Ruby and Isaac than I am. No, the difficulties we were