Or the closest thing to one that I was going to find at Parkhaven, where Joyce Chaffee once caused a minor sensation when she got a few magenta streaks put in her hair. Streaks that were gone a day later.
Dori happily admits that she is an “attention whore.” Even when it is negative, she has to have it. Being the official Parkhaven Weirdo Mom inspired her to new heights of outrageousness. During rare playdates with other moms, Dori openly shared details of how her ex had taken up with a stripper, and how she got up every morning and balanced her Zoloft, Xanax, and Claritin with a couple of Red Bulls. There were never any second playdates. I was only too happy to let Dori take over as Parkhaven’s biggest Weirdo Mom, a role I felt I’d been assigned because I had no husband or garments made of khaki.
Dori called Parkhaven her “witness protection program.” She fancied herself a fugitive, hiding out from a scary ex-husband in the last place on earth where he’d come looking for her. After a few years during which the scary ex was revealed to be a rich boy living on a trust fund while he pretended to be Steven Tyler, I began to suspect that inertia more than anything was holding Dori hostage in suburbia. That and the fact that out here the attention addict was a showstopper, but back in the city she was just another former riot grrrl with tats starting to sag.
“Let’s sell our blood” was one of Dori’s many suggestions for how we could afford to move back to the city. She also thought we should turn tricks behind the concession stand at soccer tournaments and sell crack along with the Girl Scout cookies. But, even if we split a place in the city, the math never worked out. As part of the divorce settlement, Martin had paid off just enough of the house—sadly bought near the top of the market—so that I could barely afford the mortgage, but not enough that I’d have much left if I sold it. And even less since I was still paying off the home equity loan I’d taken out when Aubrey needed braces. Then I went even further into the hole when I broke some bones in my foot and couldn’t work for three weeks. Besides, in spite of the facts that Parkhaven Elementary was far from the exemplary school its test scores had led me to believe and Aubrey never made many friends there, I hated to think about how hard it would be for my shy girl to adjust to a new place. Which is another reason why, at first, Dori was a godsend. Twyla and Aubrey became best friends for the rest of their time at Parkhaven Elementary.
The girls had sleepovers almost every weekend. They watched Cinderella, Charlotte’s Web, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, and Little Mermaid together so many times that the VHS tapes got streaks, while Dori and I split endless bottles of Australian kangaroo wine and debated who’d gotten screwed worse in her divorce and what giant outcasts we were in Parkhaven.
Another favorite topic of discussion was the impossibility of meeting men in the suburbs. This led to us signing each other up—at first as a joke, then for real—for online dating services. We spent endless evenings culling through the candidates. Dori delighted in poking fun at the gooniest of them, the ones with hair transplants that looked like a connect-the-dots puzzle, or who bragged about “owning my own business,” which we’d find out meant the guy drove a cab. We both went on dates and ended up doing unforgivable things like calling each other from bathroom stalls and whispering about dodgy odors and tasseled shoes. We both endured periods where we boldly declared that we needed “friends with benefits,” and, for a few weeks, a month or two, managed to look past a guy’s icky mom issues, green-ringed toilet bowls, and compulsions to correct how we drove, cut our meat, and pretty much everything else, except the one unforgivable deal breaker, how we raised our daughters.
Once I realized that the postmortems with Dori were far more satisfying than any of the actual liaisons, I took my profile down and lived vicariously through her.
Now, as I search through Aubrey’s drawers, Dori asks, “Didn’t we have a pact that we’d never be like our moms and read our daughters’ diaries and violate their privacy?”