Best Intentions by Emily Listfield

post-argument haze when you haven’t quite regained your balance yet and are still eyeing each other, sniffing for clues. The fact that we never really had a fight only makes the space between us harder to navigate. I leave him eating a bowl of high-fiber cereal and flipping through the papers.
    Despite the fact that I agreed to let Claire take Phoebe alone on the Madison Avenue bus this year, I’m finding the follow-through a little difficult. This morning at least I have a perfectly valid excuse to accompany them—albeit one my family finds curious, to say the least. In a moment of temporary insanity I signed up to be on the steering committee for the annual Weston fund-raiser. It’s not that I haven’t volunteered for things before. I’ve gone on my fair share of class trips to the Museum of Natural History, baked umpteen cupcakes for the never-ending stream of bake sales to benefit the homeless shelter three blocks away, breast cancer research, the middle school dance. But I have always felt more comfortable when these efforts involve being with children. The truth is, I am thoroughly intimidated by the other mothers, with their cliques and their mind-boggling efficiency and their birthday parties for the entire grade offifty-six kids at venues I can’t afford to go to with my own friends. Nevertheless, when Georgia Hartman suggested it, I found myself agreeing, realizing too late that the request was made only because I had accidentally wandered into a conversation she was having with someone else about it. She never expected me to acquiesce. Why do I always get it wrong with these people?
    We head out into the cooler air, the girls registering their protest at my presence by walking a few feet ahead of me. Once on the bus, Phoebe balances her notebook on her lap, doing the math homework she forgot about last night, though she refuses to admit a causal relationship between this and her resistance to writing assignments down. I can already predict the conversation at the first parent-teacher conference, where it will all be framed as a fatal flaw in parenting skills destined to consign my daughter to a second-rate college, a dead-end job, a slacker husband.
    Claire, who has been tormented for the last twenty-four hours over whether or not she should get bangs, is tugging at her hair and studying her reflection in the grimy window. She has conducted an overnight poll of all of her friends and, to her consternation, they are evenly divided over whether it would be “super-cute” or “total, like, catastrophe.”
    â€œWhat do you think, Mom?” she asks, without taking her gaze off of her own diffuse image.
    I try not to betray my shock—and pleasure—that my advice is actually being solicited. I think the idea is disastrous but I know better than to go on record in case she decides otherwise. “Your hair’s like mine,” I say carefully. “It’s going to get poofy if it’s too short.”
    Claire considers this. “Well, Lily thinks I should.”
    I wonder if children ask your opinion with the express purpose of ignoring it, or if, after the glint of vulnerability, they need to regain their pride with a show of stubborn disinterest. I’m clueless about what surreptitiously sinks in, what is sloughed off.
    â€œWhatever,” I say, muttering the outlawed word.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œNothing.”
    As soon as we get to Weston the girls meld, guppylike, into their own groups and, stranded, I feel a wave of jealousy for their easy sense of belonging. I head up to the boardroom on the second floor, a sedate wood-paneled oasis more suited to Wall Street than a bustling school. I often try to arrive a little bit late to this type of thing to lessen the time I will have to struggle through awkward chitchat or, worse, sit silently while others talk around me. It is not lost on me, by the way, that it is ludicrous for a professional woman