Alicia Pierce
August 12, 2020 5:10 PM
Growing Pains by Alicia Pierce
Alicia Pierce closed her eyes and reminded herself of two things.One: she loved her son.
Two: she did not shout at people she loved. Nor did tell them to shut up. Or shake them until their teeth rattled and they could no longer continue the line of questioning which exasperated her.
“Nicholas,” she said, with forced calm, “we talked about this. Weddings are special occasions. We can’t have them every day.”
Nicholas’s small, straight eyebrows lowered over his eyes – an expression which hers often wanted to sink into. Nicholas had his father’s coloring, the striking coloring of the Pierces, but he had her eyebrows, her pointed chin and wider jaw. She thought he had Thad’s nose, though, and she could not tell which of them he resembled more closely in temperament.
“But I want play ‘gain,” repeated Nicholas.
From what she understood, Nicholas was currently using a tactic which might indicate a natural leaning toward his father’s style of dealing with obstacles. At some point, it seemed, Thesius and Katrina had asked Thad what he thought about the girls he’d met at school. He’d indicated an interest in Alicia. His parents had rejected the idea, apparently pretty absolutely – and yet, Thad and Alicia had been married for over a decade. Where Alicia might have tried to make things happen to change the situation, Thad had simply…stayed on one idea, as Nicholas was doing now.
Well, unless Thad had somehow caused an experimental charms facility in the Arizona desert to have the meltdown which had imprisoned the entire school staff in a secret part of the building for half a year, giving Alicia a change to stand out enough in a crisis to bring Thesius around to the idea of accepting her. As impressed as Alicia would be if he one day admitted that had been the case (it was not a very good plan, as far as it went, too many variables that could go either way, but the sheer nerve and skill of the thing would be enough to counterbalance that, especially considering he had been seventeen at the time), though, she somehow doubted that was secretly what had happened.
If, then, her current understanding of events was correct, once Thad had an idea, he simply stayed with it. This was generally a good thing for Alicia – for one thing, she was happily married and had the most wonderful children in the world, and for another, she didn’t have to waste time and energy worrying about other women becoming problems for her marriage – but right now, seeing this behavior in their son, she felt a tiny twinge of sympathy for her father-in-law.
“You want to play again,” she corrected Nicholas automatically, emphasizing the word he had not used correctly, and he nodded.
“I want to play ‘gain,” he parroted her. The books said that was the way to correct speech mistakes – saying the same thing correctly, without calling the child out on the errors. Why did none of the books tell her what to do when the child wanted something which would not, technically, be bad for him, but which Alicia suspected she was only marginally less likely to be able to get for him than she was to literally draw down the moon?
“You play every day,” she said, playing semantics herself. “Or did we buy all those toys in the nursery for nothing?”
“Wanna play with wednin people more.”
“With wedding people again,” she corrected before she thought about it, and then sighed. “I’m sure they had fun with you and Alexander, too, but that was a special occasion, Nicholas. Now the special occasion is over, so we’ve all gone home to stay with our families again, the way we did before.”
“You go away sometime,” objected Nicholas. “People come see you.”
It is a good thing that your children are observant. It is a good thing that they are willing to argue. It would be terrible to have children so dull or so cowed that they had no wills of their own.
“People come to see me because we need to do things together to…” How could she begin to explain society in a way that a five and a half year old child would understand? “So we can all help our families,” explained Alicia. “And I go see them for that, too. It’s like when you and Alexander do school. You have to do school before you can play, and I have to see people before I can come play with you.”
Nicholas thought about this for a moment, his expression difficult to read, before he responded. “Wanna play with wednin people ‘gain,” he repeated.
Reason, she could see, was not going to work. It hadn’t worked on his father, either. As far as she knew, though, Thesius and Katrina had never stooped so low as using Appeal to Emotion….
Alicia dropped down to his level, her much longer legs folded under her and resting on the balls of her feet. “Now, what do you want to do that for?” she asked, reaching out to smooth down a bit of his hair. “You already have Alexander to play with, and May, and me, and Daddy, and Grandmother and Grandfather sometimes. Do you not love us anymore?” she asked, feigning a sad expression.
“I love!” Nicholas protested indignantly, and threw his tiny arms around her neck, sending her rocking back onto her heels. “I love – and I wanna play ‘gain.” He drew back, putting his little hands on either side of her face. “Please, Mama?”
Was her five-year-old turning every strategy she used back around on her? She had tried to reason with him – he had argued back. She had tried Appeal to Emotion – he was now using Appeal to Emotion. His versions were crude and simplified, but she couldn’t imagine she’d really been any better at his age. This was why she was never quite sure where he got his disposition.
She had, however, been quite sure that this would happen sooner or later. She’d just hoped that it would be later – much later – and momentarily idly thought of reconsidering her position on murdering Winston and Emerald and their parents. If they had only not allowed children at the wedding…Really, though, it had been inevitable, and she had known it. From the day she’d been sure she was pregnant, there had been some corner of her mind which had known: one day, her children would encounter a social…problem, and that problem would exist not because of anything Alexander or Nicholas had done, but simply because she was their mother.
She had even known, she thought, that it would happen while they were still very young. Thad and Thesius were conventional enough in their thinking that she expected her sons would, by the time they were eleven, consider it utterly unacceptable to stand by and allow someone to call their mother a dirt-veined social climbing whore. Even if they somehow didn’t know all the words, the tone would be obvious enough to offend a conventional thinker into making a response. This was why she fully intended to start teaching the boys a little defensive and offensive wandwork when they were about ten, and the law be hanged; she’d not have them spend seven years cringing because anyone and everyone felt free to answer any argument with name-calling. If their classmates refused to love them, then she fully intended that said classmates should fear them instead.
Ten, however, was a long, long way from five and a half. She had known this would become a problem, to some degree, before the boys went to school. She had never dreamed this would become a problem now.
“I can’t promise anything,” she said wearily. “But I’ll talk with Dad and we’ll see.”
Nicholas beamed at her, apparently thinking this was as good as an Unbreakable Vow. When, after all, had she ever let him down before? “Ok. I tell Anezander,” he said, only a couple of syllables off from saying his brother’s name correctly, and darted away before she could decide whether or not to try to discourage him from that course of action.
Should she actually go to the effort of trying to figure out which brat had belonged to which of Emerald’s relatives and then attempt to arrange a playdate, of all things, in the full awareness that the brats would – in the best case scenario – suddenly and conveniently develop allergies to being outside the house? The end result would still involve gently informing the boys that the ‘wedding people’ didn’t want to play with them anymore…even if she happened upon one enlightened enough that the individual wouldn’t recoil at the thought of their precious darlings playing with children who had a background like that, there was also the tiny problem that no matter how polite they all were to each other’s faces, everyone knew perfectly well that Emerald’s grandfather-in-law had usurped the position which (Derwent having suddenly become one of those subjects which nobody ever, under any circumstances, spoke about, though Alicia thought of him often; you really never did, she thought, know what people were capable of until they were pushed to their edge) had been properly Alicia’s father-in-law’s. Alicia would invite Emerald around for tea the way new relatives ought to when the girl was back off her honeymoon, but she rather expected the child to also suddenly fall ill, at least if she was polite about it….
Perhaps she could add a line about how much her sons had enjoyed playing with the Brockert littles on that invitation. She’d get to gauge how smart Emerald was and possibly make them think she was stupider than she really was at the same time. Maybe. She’d talk about it with Thad; he was less pessimistic about her position than she was, which meant the real degree of success of her decade-and-change-long campaign to convince the East Coasters to regard her as one of their own probably lay somewhere between their respective views on it, and he had lived with Evan for seven years.
What she would not do, though, was think gloomy thoughts about how it wasn’t really that long, the gap between five and a half and eleven, and how she might actually be relieved if any overtures she ended up making were rejected, because she wanted to keep the boys all to herself as long as she could. That would be sentimental nonsense. Alicia Bauer had never had any use for sentimental nonsense, and neither did Alicia Pierce.
At least, not in front of people. Maybe while she did her morning routine, before Thad woke up. She was nobody in particular then, before her hair was brushed and her first cup of tea consumed. But never, ever in front of people.
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Alicia Pierce
Growing Pains
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