Family Life Part 4 of 8
Harris Teeter
Post Pentagon Row
Arlington, Virginia
1300 EST
Mattie and Amy wanted to go to the mall, so Harm and Mac dropped them at the Pentagon City Mall, and then headed over to get groceries at the nearby Harris Teeter. Harm still could not understand how or why the girls could find an afternoon at the mall with no particular goal in mind fun.
Mac and Harm went up and down the isles of the crowded store. It was clear they were not the only ones stocking up before the upcoming storm. Harm put the staples in the cart with a variety of meals in mind. Mac kibitzed and added a few things that the rest of the family considered necessities.
Mac picked up a box of Tampax and added them to the cart. Harm looked at her as if he was confused and queried "Ah, Mac, I know there are some things I'm kind of clueless about, but doesn't being pregnant mean that you don't need those things?"
Mac said, "No, I don't need them, but Mattie does. I know you think of Mattie as a kid, but she's not. That's one of the hardest things about being her age. In certain ways she's still a child, but in other ways she is a young woman."
Harm, who was somewhat embarrassed, answered "I wasn't thinking. Mattie's lucky to have you in her life and so am I."
Mac said "Thank you. Mattie and I are pretty lucky to have you in our lives too. Let's get moving. I'd like to get home before this storm hits."
Harm and Mac finally got to the checkout lines. "Argh why do the lines always have to be so long," groaned He then pushed the cart to the shortest looking line.
Mac took out her cell and called Mattie. "Hi Mattie. The lines are really long, so we'll call you when we are ready to leave. You can meet us outside."
As the line continued to move slowly, Harm began to get antsy. He was mentally revising the store's procedures to see if he could find a way to speed up the checkout. Mac read the tabloid headlines and laughed at what they said. Then she began to scan magazine covers. She smiled when she saw the line "20 Ways to Drive Your Man Wild in Bed," and pointed it out to Harm. He blushed saying, "Mac, I don't think you need any help driving me wild."
Rabb/Mackenzie Apartment
North of Union Station
Washington, District of Columbia
1800 EST
Mac and Harm were sitting in the living room reading. Mattie and Amy were in the kitchen not making dinner (they had "talked" Harm and Mac into ordering pizza), but were working on a social studies assignment. It was the strangest assignment either Mac or Harm ever heard of. The assignment sounded normal enough to begin with. The girls were studying the building of the Cathedrals in Europe. Everyone in the class had to choose a Cathedral and prepare an oral report on its history. Each report was required to include pictures of the Cathedral. The teacher indicated that extra credit points would be awarded for any kind of creative visual aid. Amy and Mattie heard rumors that this teacher was particularly impressed with visual aids that involved food. Mattie and Amy were in the kitchen trying to find some way to represent their Cathedrals or one of its features in food. Neither Harm nor Mac really understood how this was supposed to improve the girls understanding of either Cathedrals or European History, but then again they were lawyers not teachers. The girls had turned down offers of help.
A knock at the door indicated dinner had arrived. Mac went to pay for the pizza and Harm headed to the kitchen to set the table and get the drinks. As he approached the kitchen, Mattie stopped him. She said, "We aren't done yet and we want our projects to be a surprise. We'll bring plates and drinks out and we can eat in the living room."
Harm agreed. While he thought that the assignment was a silly one he was pleased to see both girls taking it seriously and putting real effort into it. Besides, good smells were coming from the kitchen.
They ate dinner in the living room. Mac asked the girls about the upcoming Valentine's Day Dance she had read about in the PTA newsletter. Both girls were a bit closed-mouthed about the dance and both said they were unsure if anyone would ask them.
"So tell us about school dances you guys went to when you were young?" asked Mattie. Mac replied she wasn't really a school dance kind of girl while in high school. She did tell the story of a formal ball she attended in Okinawa while stationed there.
Harm told the girls he'd been too shy to ask anyone to dances during his freshman or sophomore year. Mattie and Amy said they couldn't imagine any girl turning him down. He tried to think of a suitable story from his junior or senior year in high school. The stories that flashed through his head all seemed inappropriate to share with the girls since they either involved spiked punch, time spent in the backseat of a car, time spent at the house of whoever's parents were out of town at the time or a combination of all three. He finally decided to tell them about how hard he found it to pick out a corsage and then how awkward it was to pin it on his date. He told them experience made him decide that wrist corsages were the way to go.
After dinner, Mattie and Amy head back to the kitchen carrying the dishes and empty pizza boxes. They continued to work on their projects. Mattie had noticed one of the fountains in her Cathedral looked like an upside down bundt cake mold. She decided the base would be a bundt cake and was trying to figure out what else to do. Amy decided she would recreate one of the rose windows from her Cathedral on a frosted cake using colored sugar painstakingly applied through wax paper guides with cut-outs for each color.
Harm and Mac sat in the living room and talked about the earlier school dance conversation. Mac said, "I wish I could be the kind of mother that had sweet stories to tell about big dances. There's not much from my teenage years I want to share with Mattie because it's not an example I want her to follow."
Harm agreed, "Are you sure it's not too late to have a no dating rule 'til she is thirty? The most memorable moments I have from school dances aren't things I want to share with Mattie or things I want her to do. I would ground her for most of them."
Mac replied, "Well, you had to keep your nose clean to get into the Academy, so I doubt you did anything too bad. Tell me. I'm curious about you as a teenage boy."
Harm replied, "I'm not sure I was so good, just good at not getting caught. At senior prom, my friends and I spiked the punch bowl. My friend Dave's parents were out of town that weekend. We all convinced our parents that we were staying somewhere supervised. Instead, we took over Dave's house; set up a keg in the yard, drank, and played in the hot tub and on the beach. Couples occupied every place in the house with a closed door and some without. My date and I ended up making out on the beach until we fell asleep."
Mac replied, "I can see why you don't want to share that story with Mattie. Although, since the drinking age was 18 then I would imagine most of you were old enough to drink legally and you weren't driving. That covers senior prom. What about your junior prom?"
Harm smiled and continued, "Well junior prom someone spiked the punch but it wasn't me. There was no wild after party, but my date and I did spend a good amount of time in the back seat of my mom's station wagon."
"Harmon Rabb are you telling me you had sex with your junior prom date in the back seat of a car?" Mac quizzed her husband.
"Well, no, we didn't actually have sex, but things went pretty far," said a rather embarrassed Harm. "Again, I can't imagine sharing this story with Mattie or letting her think it is acceptable behavior."
"Harm we don't have to tell her everything we did as teenagers, besides I'm sure she'll figure some of this out no matter what we say or don't say and probably do some of it too. We just need to make sure she knows what to expect from us and that she should never be afraid to come to us if she is in a situation she feels uncomfortable in."
Mac started to laugh, "I just realized my high school principal, vice principal, guidance counselor and teachers would be shocked to find out that I'm a card carrying member of the PTA and worry about such things."
Harm and Mac had just wrapped up this conversation when the girls called them into the kitchen to see what they had created. In the middle of a rather messy kitchen, were two very satisfied looking teens.
Mac exclaimed "Wow! Those are really great. You both did great jobs. Tell us about what you made."
"Well," said Amy. "I traced the outline of the window on wax paper. I cut out the spaces in each color on a different sheet. I then used them as a guide to spread the sugar on."
"It looks great," said Harm as he was digging around in a high cabinet for the cake plate and cover.
"Here," he said when he located what he was looking for "This should keep the cake from getting disturbed until Monday."
"Tell us about your fountain Mattie. It is a fountain right?" asked Harm.
"It is a fountain. The fountain base is a bundt cake, the columns holding up the other layer are vanilla wafers stacked on top of each other with frosting to hold them together. The top layer is cake baked in a small round pan with cake baked in little tart pans decorating it."
"Very impressive," Mac said as Harm was again rummaging in the cupboards. He pulled out a very tall pot –which he used for steaming lobsters in. He handed the pot to Mattie "If you put this over your fountain it should keep it fresh until Monday."
Mac had slipped out of the kitchen and returned with a camera. She started to take pictures saying, "This kind of creativity needs to documented. I'm sure your teacher will be pleased."
Authors Note: I actually made a cake fountain (except I used thread spools for the pillars) as a visual aid to my senior Humanities report on a Cathedral in Portugal whose name escapes me a decade later. It got me tons of extra credit (enough to make up for Cs on two tests) and an A in the course.
