Liz Hennigan’s kitchen island on Tuesday night looked like a Bath & Body Works got dragged behind a hay trailer and reassembled by committee, which is essentially what happened. Twenty-one moms had Venmoed in twenty bucks apiece, and the result was a wicker basket the size of a Britax car seat, shrink-wrapped in pink cellophane, ribbons curled with the back of a butter knife. I was there to help with the ribbon. I ended up reading every label out loud.
I love Mrs. Ackerman. She got Ember through a year that included a lice scare, two stomach bugs, and a six-week stretch where my daughter would only answer to “Ranger.” This isn’t about Mrs. Ackerman. This is about the fact that the basket on Liz’s counter contained, by my count, thirty-seven separate products, and the word fragrance appeared on the back of thirty-five of them. Per a screenshot somebody posted in Scented Like Soap, Sick Like Tuesday, “fragrance” can legally mean up to three thousand undisclosed chemicals. Mrs. Ackerman is six months pregnant. I would like that on the record.
I unscrewed the cap on the Twilight Woods Pillow Mist in Liz’s kitchen and by the time I was in my Subaru I had a headache that started behind my left eye and traveled in a straight line to the back of my neck. Pillow mist. You spray it on the place where you put your face for eight hours. The first ingredient after water is a number. Not a name. A number with a hyphen in it.
My sister-in-law Marcy works the front desk at a pediatric office in Weaverville, which makes her essentially a nurse, and she has told me — twice — that she sees kids come in with rashes after their moms plug in a Wallflower in the nursery. She is not allowed to put it in the chart. The chart says “contact dermatitis, etiology unclear.” But Marcy knows. Marcy has eyes.
I had, in fairness, floated an alternative in the class group chat. A jar of my homemade elderberry syrup, a beeswax taper from a woman in Burnsville named Cherith who keeps her hives behind a Methodist church, an organic cotton handkerchief I would have hand-embroidered with Mrs. Ackerman’s initials and a small chamomile sprig, and a card from each kid drawn on actual paper, not the cardstock from Hobby Lobby that smells like a Kia showroom. I had even offered to do the embroidery myself. I sew at night. It would have been fine.
Jess Pendergrass replied at 9:47 PM with “Brooke we’re not doing this again” followed by a single laughing-crying emoji and then nothing else for the rest of the evening. I was not doing anything. I was offering. There is a difference between offering and doing, and somebody on the PTA executive committee should look that up before the fall meeting agenda gets locked.
So tomorrow at the class breakfast I am bringing my own envelope, separate from the basket, addressed to Mrs. Ackerman by hand. Inside is a card that Ember drew of the two of them holding what I think are otters. Tucked behind the card is the elderberry syrup in a four-ounce jar with a hand-tied jute ribbon, a printed information sheet on indoor air quality during the third trimester, and a note that says, in my own handwriting, “Open the windows. Even in August. Especially in August.” That’s all. I’m not making a scene.
Mrs. Ackerman is welcome to the basket. She is welcome to every shrink-wrapped, fragrance-numbered, twilight-wooded inch of it. She just shouldn’t have to wonder, in the dark, at three in the morning, six months pregnant, why her pillow smells like a parking lot. That’s all I’m saying. That’s all I’ve ever been saying.