Carly Alaimo
We hinge back, Vera pops the starting pistol, and we’re off. Like geese, we fly in a line that changes. In seconds, the sveltest of us, Candance, takes her place at the point. The rest of us concede, bobbing behind her, chins down, breast-folds crying sweat, already breathless.
We’d texted one another when the sign-up sheet was posted, resentful and suspicious: Whose idea was a mom race? But we volunteered anyway. No one wanted to get pied, dunked, or bob for apples this year, direct traffic, or pour coffee for the teachers who hated our kids, so we’re here, at the mom race, us moms, wanting to get involved, be present, show we care.
Candance was the one who had all the answers about the race.
Parent mental health is a national health crisis.
Exercise is the number one way for women to stave off depression, suicidal thoughts, perimenopause.
The mom race is ceremonial, a display of maternal strength. I read they did it in ancient Greece.
It’s a legacy event for the students of Whitney Elementary—to remember that women are strong. Mothers are strong.
So here we are.
Less than a minute in some of the moms slow to a regretful trot, accepting they may have overcommitted. A few begin to walk. We knew who they’d be—the first to give up. The moms who sleep in their makeup and drink too much canned wine at the kids’ birthday parties. They forget it’s their week to bring snacks. Like Vera, who’s always missing Wet-Wipes at the park and has to go from mom to mom, begging. They let their kids drink full-fat Cokes, pound endless fruit snacks, binge-watch Avatar on a Tuesday afternoon because they haven’t signed them up for an extracurricular, or worse, they’re paid up and registered and just don’t go. We see Pam has actually collapsed, her Stanley bounces and rolls off the track into the sand pits. How embarrassing for her children. What a shame.
With Candance in the lead, we’re keeping up. Alicia’s so close she could reach out and pull Candance’s hair if she wanted, yank her by the neck, drag her ass to the ground. Alicia won’t, though, because she’s what you’d call a henchmen, in the softest sense, of course. Meaning she hangs out exclusively with Candance and ignores the rest of us. She organized the meal-train last November when Candance’s husband Vince had meningitis. He has one foot in the grave, she’d explained. Panic spread about what to prepare for Candance—Candance, who refused cupcakes and didn’t drink tap water. We landed on grain salads, smooshed them in Tupperwares we didn’t need returned, whispered when she didn’t send us thank you notes. We gossiped about Candance, and maybe she knew, but she still hooked her defined arm around us when we broke down crying at soccer because two of our kids were diagnosed with autism in the same week. Sometimes, when Candance held her son Henry in her rock hard arms, if he cried or was hurt, we wished she was our mother. She always looked so sure of herself. We’d try to pick our kids up like that, without struggle, in one confident swoop and straight into a kiss on the neck, but it didn’t feel natural not to just yell at them from across the park without getting up, so we stopped.
On the track, a few of us are concerned about the fallen moms, we even turn back, lift them limp, by their soaking armpits. Keep going, think about the kids. Other moms wave us on, they’re good, they don’t need to finish the mom race. We’re jealous of them for not feeling an overwhelming obligation to participate, but also laugh at them a little, like, it’s not that hard to run. They could try harder.
We’re rounding the bend in the track now, the four or five of us left. Alicia has joined Candance at the front. Their ponytails whip one another’s necks, leaving rosy rash marks behind their ears.
Tricia gets a second wind and pounds the flattop like a spooked wildebeest, and for a second is in front of Candance, but it’s as if Candance has a secret booster in her North Face fanny pack because the bitch just picks up speed and smokes Tricia, smokes us all.
We’re sure Candance will win the mom race, the rest of us not far behind, but never able to catch up, what with our perimenopausal mood swings, our joblessness and our jobs, waiting in the carline late while Candance whizzes by with her caravan of children on a mechanical bike, dropping her kids off at school ten minutes earlier than us, while Henry gets a gold star for good behavior and Lucy and Matteo’s moms get calls from the assistant principal—something about Lucy throwing chairs, something about cutting down on screentime, what are they watching at home?
At this point we can see our spouses on the bleachers. They don’t have a race. They’re sitting calmly talking to each other while the kids run up and down the benches. And that’s when a few of us see him—Henry teetering at the edge of the highest seat, arms out like Jesus Christ, and there’s a wobble of the structure causing him to fall.
We moms sprint from the track, cause none of our partners are paying any fucking attention, and we do catch little Henry before his head hits the dirt. Cheering erupts, and we lift our heads thinking it’s for us, but it’s not. It’s for Candance. She’s broken the ribbon with her sternum, fists in the air, she falls to her knees. She turns back to embrace her witnesses, but looks confused when we’re not there to swarm her. That’s when she spots us holding Henry, pale as a pebble in the nest of our arms.
Candance dashes over to the group of us Thank you, thank you, she says into Henry’s hair, to none of us, slapping grass from his calves, looking elsewhere for somewhere to hide.
We meet the other moms and their partners on the bleachers, sip Gatorade and La Croixs. We hold our kids a little tighter like they say you should when something scary happens to a child. A few of us text Candance that we’re here when she’s ready to talk. Alicia accepts the award on behalf of Candance, a one hundred dollar gift card to Bundt City.
The flaky mascara moms are planning to meet up somewhere for drinks, one or two of them twist out their cigarettes on bike racks. We saunter over and invite ourselves, sheepishly. They’re happy to have us. We tell our partners to put the kids down, where to find the clean underwear, the melatonin, a stuffed polar bear. We could use a drink.
We make a pit stop at Bundt City, use Candance’s prize money to buy ourselves a party-size chocolate frosted cake and dig into it like a kettle of raptors. Through her cake-stuffed trap Alicia assures us Candance would’ve donated the gift card to the PTA anyway, so we’ve essentially closed the loop.
We end the night at Applebee’s and drink green martinis and many other drinks that we’re told will cause bone loss, cervical cancer and dementia. We order apps they say will make us fat and tired and eventually immobile, unable to care for our children and our spouses. There seems to be a consensus that tonight is a one-off. In the mom race we’ve all been beaten, it seems. Alicia, who’s had three Blue Razz coolers, unbuttons her blouse, sits on the bar and declares she’s talking to her husband about the division of labor in the household for the first time ever, first thing in the morning! We all cheer. New rule: Whatever happens after the mom race at Applebee’s, stays at Applebee’s. At some point there is a conga-line to Ashlee Simpson. A huddle about campaigning for year-round school. The working moms dip out early work they grumble with a piercing side-eye, while the remaining moms who work or don’t work or don’t talk about what they do for work schedule Uber pickups an hour, thirty minutes from now.
Why don’t we do this more?
seems to be the question. And while we know there are many answers this, we promise each other to make this a regular thing, for real, no, for real this time. The mom race has been so wild. Tonight has been so fun.
Good night!
Love you!
Stay safe!
we call out in the toasted dark. Our mom voices echo through the empty playgrounds and darkened home offices. We are the static in our children’s bedrooms, the wind flipping the magnolia leaves, the whoosh of air-conditioning over our husband’s hair plugs. From the backs of Teslas, we wonder if Candance can hear us from her back porch, where she and Vince sometimes watch Ted Lasso on a projector and share a respectable glass of wine. But, tonight, maybe not. In the morning, at drop-off, some moms will say they saw her out past midnight running through the neighborhood, the white streak of her reflector shorts, the bounce of her Camelbak.
She was just running so fast, they tell us, it was almost like
Yes? Yes? We want to know.
It was almost…like she was being chased.
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Carly Alaimo is a writer from Augusta, GA. She received her MFA in Fiction from Georgia State University. Her work is published in The Los Angeles Review, The Harvard Advocate, Phoebe Journal, Split Lip Magazine, The Offing, Hobart, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best American Short Stories. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and two children, and reads for Split Lip Magazine. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @carlyalaimo.