October 17, 2003, 8:42 a.m.
If You Can’t Scowl, Can You Feel Grumpy?

'Juice! Juice! Juuuiiice!"

"How do you ask properly?"

There is a sob in Phoebe's voice, "Pease may've juice, Mummy?"

"Here you go, sweetheart. Juice."

Her scream rises: "No! No! No!"

"You don't want juice?"

"No! No!"

"Right then." I take the juice away. Her face crumples.

"Juuiice!"

I do not know how soaring blood pressure is experienced by actual sufferers, but I suspect they feel as though their heads are about to explode. Mine certainly is.

"She wants juice," Violet remarks.

"I'm sorry, Phoebe," I say dangerously, "But you have used up your patience quota and I am going to have to ask you to leave." Like a nightclub bouncer with a 98-pound weakling, I pick her up under the arms, carry her into the next room, and drop her — gently but firmly — on to a chair. Returning to the kitchen, I join Violet at the table, and massage that little headachy spot between my eyebrows where other women get their Botox shots.

"I'm eating a grown-up egg," says Violet, spearing a half-frozen strawberry on the end of her fork.

"Yes," I reply abstractedly.

Somewhere I read that when women get their facial nerves numbed, cosmetically, it actually reduces the range of feeling they can experience. Dr. Laura is always telling her listeners that their emotions follow their actions; but what if they've been Botoxed? If you can't scowl, can you feel grumpy? I once met a Palm Springs matron whose impassivity in the presence of her lively, witty guests was downright awesome. It was only afterwards that I realized she couldn't have twinkled her eyes if Liberace himself had been tickling her ivories. This erasure of normal human expression has always struck me as ghoulish, but perhaps I should look into getting Phoebe some injections. Just while she's terribly two.

"Sorry, Mummy," comes a dear, heartbroken voice. Phoebe stands in the doorway, two fingers tucked contritely into her mouth. She takes them out again: "Sorry, Mummy."

"Oh, sweetheart," I melt, and I am just wrapping her in a forgiving maternal embrace when she catches sight of the carton of — -

"Juice!"

Domestic life is sometimes so clichéd I am tempted to look around for documentary cameras. We are freshly returned from a "coffee morning," which was, in fact, a "coffee disaster." Other, better-organized mothers drafted a plan whereby over two mornings, parents would gather at our children's school, become cozily familiar, and foment rebellion against the academic bureaucracy. One by one, like murder victims in an Agatha Christie novel, these capable and experienced coffee-givers dropped out — strep throat in one household, a delayed return plane journey in another — until by default only I am left to run things the first morning. And I am late, as usual.

A strange, stony silence greets me as I push my way into the school hall with a borrowed industrial coffee vat under one arm and three dozen Styrofoam cups under the other. I fear I do not exude jovial confidence, the way better-organized mothers do.

"Um, does anyone know how to make coffee in one of these?" I ask.

The group stirs, but is not shaken.

"Well," I say brightly, "I'll just figure it out." I drag my burden, plus Phoebe, into the hall's stainless-steel kitchen. Upon inspection, vat technology is laughingly simple. You fill the thing with water, bung in a great many scoops of ground coffee, let it burble for what seems like ages, and when the little red light comes on — presto! You have produced a fluid that looks and smells just like coffee, only more watery.

"It's a little watery," says the first mother to try it.

I begin to wring my hands. There aren't even any mitigating doughnuts; the woman who was supposed to bring them didn't. At last a kindly Brazilian takes pity on me. "Let's just add more coffee on top," she suggests, "And run some of it back through the machine."

It works, thank heaven, but isn't life odd? You fall in love, marry, have babies, and next thing you know you're standing in an echoing hall with a passel of disapproving women serving out hot drinks.

The next morning, Phoebe and I walk into the same hall for the second coffee session. Gone is the desolate Sparta of yesterday. Soft jazz is beating gently in the background, the scent of percolating beans wafts from not one but two vats — one is decaf — and there's even hot water for tea. A large table stands draped with festive autumn bunting, and on it are laid platters of shortbread, chocolate-chip cookies, and a tray of exquisite chocolate-dipped apricots. There's even a vase of roses. The contrast could not be more humiliating if someone had tried to make it so — and, what do you know, someone has!

"Well, after yesterday..." the presiding Capable Mother is heard to murmur, as she moves smoothly through the clusters of admiring parents. The Capable Mother has brought her housekeeper; this individual is bustling about topping up sugar bowls and arranging heaps of juice boxes just so. "I mean," the Capable Mother remarks confidingly to the woman next to her, "If you're not going to make an effort..."

I smile, and chat, and am all the while aware of the knife wound in my back, bleeding gently and metaphorically. The funny thing is, though I feel the cut, I don't really mind. I watch the Capable Mother basking in her triumph, and think, well, you are certainly much better at giving coffee mornings than I, but I am a writer, which means you, madam, are material.

"Waaah!" a scream erupts from behind the table, and a decorative Jack-O-Lantern tips over. We all turn to see what's causing the ruckus. It is Phoebe. She has spotted the —

"Juice! Juice! Juice!"

*   *   *

YOU’RE NOT A SUBSCRIBER TO NATIONAL REVIEW? Sign up right now! It’s easy: Subscribe to National Review here, or to the digital version of the magazine here. You can even order a subscription as a gift: print or digital!