Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt Page A

leaning back on a bench, Bubbies standing behind it pulling my hair. In each picture, the hair, eyes, and skin are different colors. Ginny and I hung it in our bedroom where Bubbies likes to look at himself with green hair and me with blue. He comes down to the room all the time, to steal and hide Ginny’s curlers, or try to take my car keys, or to ask, “What is that?” about everything. Our room has become a home, with places for books, shoes, and suitcases, pictures of Amy and the grandchildren on my desk, and the kids bouncing in and out. Sammy will watch TV on our bed when Jessie has commandeered the one upstairs. Jessie wants to know how my IBM Selectric typewriter works. It fascinates her to see me at it—one antique using another.
    One evening, Sammy rushes into the room naked from head to toe. “Boppo!” he says, having just watched a DVD of 101 Dalmatians . “The dalmatian puppies were saved!” I ask, “Sammy, where are your clothes?” He says, “The puppies were going to be skinned for coats!”
    He glances at Amy’s picture. “I miss Mommy,” he says. “Me, too,” I say.
     
    To the array of the children’s activities have been added martial arts for Sammy, a new gym with balance beams and monkey bars for Bubbies, and yoga for Jess. On Saturday mornings in the fall, she has soccer. Her team, the Flames, wears uniforms of blazing yellow. Games are played simultaneously on three adjacent fields. Rob Hazan, the Flames’ coach, is married to Jill, a high school friend of Harris’s. Jill and the other mothers sit together on collapsible canvas chairs in the cool fall air, and Ginny sits with them.
    This is the way it was when our children were small—parents loosely convened for recitals, plays, pageants, basketball, Little League. In Vermont, where we rusticated for a year between my jobs at the Washington Post and at Time in New York, we cheered in the bleachers of drafty school gyms with John in his stroller, as Carl hit a winning jump shot in a local basketball tournament and Amy scored all her team’s points in an elementary school game—four. In Bethesda it is as Ginny noted: she is leading Amy’s life. With one mother, she makes plans for a trip to the National Zoo; with another, a date to see Madagascar . The women speak of their children’s teachers. They praise, they complain, they collaborate, they gossip.
    On Halloween, we go to the Burning Tree School to admire Sammy, Jessie, and the other children in their costumes and to watch a parade. Jessie’s second-grade teacher, Deirdre Salcetti, is a creative, quick-witted blonde in her forties, with a you’re-safe-with-me smile, which readily surrenders to laughter. She has the body of a gymnast. She teaches the yoga classes. Dressed as a bee today, she has antennas on her head and wears translucent wings and a tag that reads, “Don’t worry. Bee happy.” Mrs. Salcetti stands before the class. “I’m not going to start until everyone is quiet.” The children prepare to present themselves to the visitors.
    A girl steps forward as Indiana Jones, and explains who she is. Another girl appears as one of the Jedi. Katie, who has no hair, is a wizard. I surmise that she is being treated for cancer, but am told that she has a genetic disorder. Her face is startlingly white. She smiles readily. A girl named Amy is a witch with a cat and a broom.
    “Will you be riding your broom later?” asks Mrs. Salcetti.
    “I’m a good witch,” says Amy.
    Here comes Dorothy, carrying Toto in a basket and wearing glittery red shoes. She clicks her heels three times. Here is Michael, the Incredible Hulk. Jaraad is an alien with a green face. Others arrive: a Tootsie Roll, an Eloise, an Uncle Sam, a Bride of Frankenstein with a white stripe in her hair. “I really need to see better with this helmet on,” says another Star Wars character. I ask a boy in an Obama mask, “Are you running for President?” He says, “No.” Jessie appears. Confident and