From River to Ridge by Hope McCann: 'Job Satisfaction'

The sound of the heavy outer door to the Tack Room swinging open and thudding shut.

A moment to dump coats and kick off shoes, and Sadie’s hardy bare feet smack with irrepressible determination up the corridor at speed.  She bursts into the room, rushing up to me, eyes shining, apple cheeks rosy with excitement and exertion.  I’m struck, as I always am, by the huge rush of love that washes over me every time I behold her after a long absence – a night’s sleep, a day at school, hours spent roving the ranch with her devoted Dad.  I never knew I had it in me to love anything as much as I adore my little girl.

“Mommy, can I ride Dora?”

My first response is to say ‘No, you’re tired; you’ve just got in.  You need to eat something, have a rest…’  Is it pre-programmed, because what my mother always did on my arrival home from school was prevent me from burning off the frustrated energy that had been accumulating all day, so I automatically feel it’s correct parenting to inflict the same restriction upon my own daughter?  And I was a London child, accustomed to confinement.  The most I wanted to do was go outside and play tag in the street with the other kids for half an hour.  It must be three times more unbearable for Sadie to be denied the chance to roam, growing up as she is in Wyoming’s wonderful wilderness, loving nothing so much as spending all day outside with her pony, the aptly-christened Dora the Explorer.

I therefore bite back my first impulse to refuse her request, and consider what my liberated, free-spirit of a husband would say.  Surely, his approach is better for our American child and Western way of living than the buttoned-up primness of my English past?  I need to get a little more ‘country’.  In the seven years I’ve been here, I think I’ve changed a lot, relaxed more than I’d ever have believed possible…but you can’t erase a lifetime’s ingrained habits of behaviour and thought overnight.  I’m still instinctively English and uptight, however hard I try not to be.

Everett appears in the doorway, “Oh, she’s in here.  I was looking for her in the kitchen.”

They’re so alike – the same blue eyes, straight nose, jut of jaw: a determined face.  Sadie’s clambering onto my lap.  Her skinny little body is warm, wiry, and strong.  Never still, she’s like her Dad – active, resilient, unstoppable.  My daughter’s very definitely a McCann.

“Daddy, can I ride Dora?”

Everett yawns, lowers himself wearily into one of the big armchairs before the fireplace, stretches his long legs across the footstool and murmurs, “Later, Honey.  Why don’t you have a snack and a drink and talk to Mommy for a little while…and then maybe we can go for a ride before dinner, huh?”

Sadie considers this like a negotiator at a political conference, little brows drawing together in concentration before nodding decisively, the proposal meeting with her approval, “Ok, Daddy.”

I wrap my arms around her and push my face into the white-blonde hair that smells of baby shampoo, but she writhes and wriggles, not wanting to submit to a cuddle but instead keen to show me something.  She pulls her satchel across the desk, spreading my papers more haphazardly than before, “Mommy, I got a star in my book, and Miss Young put a big red smiley face on my writing.”

Even as I respond – “She did?  Wow!  Show me, then.” – I can see Everett cringeing out of the corner of my eye.  While Sadie thumbs to the correct page, getting distracted by content she’s forgotten about – spellings, pictures, other things she’s written – I direct a questioning glance across the room at my husband, who’s looking more than a little sheepish.  I mouth, “What?” but he mimes an inability to elaborate in the presence of our six-year-old.

“Sade, why don’t you go and get some milk and something to eat…and I can read what you got your star for…and then you and Daddy can go up to the horses, yeah?”

She’s sliding off my lap before I’ve even finished talking, the sound of little feet slapping back up the hall, the creak of the heavy fridge door opening, and I turn to Everett, “Ok, quick!  What?”

Everett’s smiling, but uncharacteristically embarrassed too.

“What?!”

“I honestly didn’t know what to do with myself.”

“Why?”

“I got there a little late because they’re still clearing that rock-fall…and so I was one of the last into the schoolyard.  The charming Miss Young, her teaching assistant whose name I can never remember – “

“Miss Hayward,” I remind robotically.

“Right.  Well, her and a couple of the other teachers were there shepherding the last of the kids out…and they spotted me and started nudging and whispering, so I’m swaggering across the schoolyard towards ‘em, thinking, ‘Yep, still got it’ – “

I roll my eyes at this, and he starts to giggle like a naughty kid…bearing in mind he’s fifty-seven and Miss Young and her cohorts barely thirty.

“I get up to them and they’re all smirking like crazy.  I start worrying maybe my fly’s undone…and I can’t check because it’s not exactly polite to rearrange your junk right in front of a group of young ladies – “

“What?” I query playfully, “Not even when you’ve ‘still got it’?”

He sticks out his tongue at me and carries on, “I’m starting to feel awkward, when luckily Sadie comes running up to me, giving me an excuse to look down and check.  It’s not undone…which is good, of course, but then what the hell are they grinning about?  I’m just about to front up and ask what their problem is, when Sadie tells me she got a star in her workbook.  Miss Young confirms – with a big, suspicious, beaming smile – that Sadie did a great piece of work today.  I’m asking Sadie what it’s all about when Miss Hayward pipes up, enquiring whether I get ‘job satisfaction’, at which all the other teachers collapse into laughter, and I’m left standing there knowing the joke’s on me, but with no idea why.  She apologises, and says I’ll understand when I read Sadie’s workbook…and then one of the others says – ‘What is it you both do for a living?’  I explained you were a writer and I ran an organic farm – and they all erupted into instant hysterics again.  I almost wished my fly was undone, because at least then I’d know why they were laughing at me.  Eventually, Miss Young gets herself together, praises Sadie for doing very good work, and that’s that.  Sadie’s pulling me down the road to the truck ‘cos she wants to get home, and they all line up at the fence, waving in quite a flirty way, and still giggling!

We get in the truck and I’m going to Sadie – ‘Gimme your book!  I wanna read what you put!’ – snatching it off her like some crazy man…and then I read it…and then I understood.  I want you to know I’m probably going to be too embarrassed to ever fetch her from school again.”

I’m already reaching for the exercise book, flicking through to the last completed page, the deliberate curves of Sadie’s rounded hand debossing the paper where she presses so hard in intense concentration, carving her words into the surface of the page with the crumbling pencil lead.

She’s back, nearly-consumed glass of milk in her little hands, a half-moon of cream framing her top lip.  I wipe it off with my fingers, and she climbs onto my lap again.  I push her straw-like hair off her hot little face, tucking it behind her ears, “Daddy said what you wrote made a big impression on Miss Young.”

Everett’s chuckling.  He’s looking away and trying to be quiet, but his broad shoulders jump with mirth.

“It made her laugh, but I don’t see why,” Sadie is endearingly defensive in her explanation, “We had to write about our family and what our Mommies and Daddies jobs were…so I did that!”

“Don’t worry, Sweetie.  Miss Young definitely liked it, didn’t she…because she gave you a star and a smiley face.”

“I just don’t see why she was laughing so much.”

I look down at the page half-filled with wonky childish scrawl.  A gold star sticker occupies the bottom right hand corner; next to it a precisely-drawn smiley and the comment ‘Job Satisfaction!’ in Miss Young’s almost-prissy hand (my husband – the amateur psychoanalyst – thinks she’s repressed.  He says anyone with handwriting that pathologically neat clearly can’t let themselves go.)

Still perplexed, I hurry through the bit at the top concerning who lives in your house and what pets you have, skipping the inevitable waffle about cows, horses, chickens, random farmhands etc to arrive at the punchline – the reason Everett may never have the guts to show himself in the schoolyard again; the artless pronouncement that made Miss ‘Hospital-Corners’ Young and all her usually meek and sober cronies dare to giggle and flirt so outrageously with a man old enough to be their father.

Underneath the printed question – What jobs do your Mommy and Daddy do? – Sadie has written with characteristic American openness and honesty, and without a hint of the English irony I do hope is sloshing around her gene pool somewhere, and might eventually make an appearance to dilute the relentless earnestness:

"Mommy makes things up for money, and Daddy farms orgasmically."

Needless to say, I photocopied it, framed it, and I keep it on the corner of my desk.  Whenever I have a trying day, I glance over and consider how satisfying it really is to do something you truly love.

Oh, and Everett spent the next three months conveniently being “way too busy” to collect our daughter from school.  I wonder why…?

 ‘First Sight’, the novel upon which Hope's Blog is based, is available to buy worldwide as paperback or eBook on Amazon.

www.annieholder.com/first-sight/