Mattie Saunders, CPA

Mattie Saunders ended up becoming a CPA. This was a disappointment to her parents, who were theater people, but not really a surprise. She had always had a thing for numbers, and for order, that had manifested itself early in her sorting of blocks and charting of days of parental absences per month against household income. Her childhood friendship with her parents, so different from the much too intimately knowledgeable relationship she would hold over them as an adult, was mediated by her seeming maturity and their only sometimes feigned childishness.

An enormous fan of graph paper from around the age of three, Mattie obsessively collected data about her life and plotted it. When she was nine, one of her secretly cherished charts measured her father's mood, which rose and fell on what appeared to be a 24-32 day cycle. Sometimes the peaks of this cycle corresponded with the final frenzied week before one of his shows opened. Then the point Mattie added to the long running Critical Review of Daddy's Work As Measured By Number of Congratulatory Calls Received in First 10 Days of the Run chart would be a little above the curve.

Sometimes the troughs of his cycle, which she would later learn in the supplemental reading to Abnormal Psychology 211 did not constitute clinically recognized manic depressive disorder until the diagnostic revision in DSM-IV, unfortunately fell along important dates in Mattie's own life progression. Her seventh birthday party felt his absence, though her eleventh did not. Christmas 2005 was a bit of a bust. She was disappointed that he was unable to give much of a speech at her wedding, but that was in part balanced out by his enormous helpfulness six days earlier in negotiating with the florist over the total disaster of a plan for the table decorations she provided, finally, after three weeks of delays. And considering his opinions of Mattie's fiance it was perhaps all for the best.

In the age range of nine to thirteen, Mattie wondered what it would be like to have parents who went to an office during the week, came home on weekends, slept at night and only at night. She took in stride the weeks and sometimes months on end when she would leave for school to a cheery wave from her mother and return six, seven, or, by high school when she had a little more choice in the matter, eight to ten hours later, to find her in exactly the same spot at the breakfast table with another novel or script in hand. Then at a sleepover at Laila Sanchez's house in eighth grade she complained about having parents that were never there except when they were there too much and the general consensus was that all parents were like that, whether on a month-to-month schedule or the more typical phases of the week. Thirteen was a good age to start to realize that her life was actually quite similar to those of her friends and peers, as it gave her something to talk about with them. Also it helped dissipate the aura of superiority her parents had mostly successfully wafted about her through sparkling and witty conversation with their own friends and peers that was undoubtably meant for Mattie's ears as well. Mother, in particular, was very good at keeping all of her audiences in mind at once.