by Sally Koslow
“This stay-home-mommy stuff—do you love it?” he asked about twenty minutes into lunch. I did an instant replay to search for condescension. You never can predict on which side of the fence men your own age will stand regarding whether a mother belongs at home. Even ardent, high-toned, prochoice, antiwar, carbon-footprint-shrinking recyclers sometimes shock you silly with polemics about why a mother needs to make every peanut butter sandwich until kids become postdocs—especially when the mom in question is his wife. Whatever their own mother did was wrong, you invariably discover, and lots of these guys are the sons of fervent seventies feminists.
Nonetheless, my derision meter failed to buzz.
“You’re the first person who’s had the nerve to ask me that question,” I answered, to stall. In fact, I’d originally planned to return to work, but a month after Annabel arrived, my boss was replaced by a new editor in chief whose reputation preceded her like a rogue tidal wave of entitlement. The two of us had one short meeting as my maternity leave was due to end. With an expression straddling shock and boredom, she quietly flipped through a portfolio featuring my last three years’ worth of decorating stories. Two days later, the head of human resources called to say my boss was “going in another direction”—and I wasn’t on her map.
Since I was twenty-two years old, I’d always had a job. Isolation terrified me. Even after all these months, I still couldn’t picture life at home full-time. At a feverish pace, I’d put out feelers for a new position, but every job I heard about had such an insignificant decorating department that I’d be spending half my time ordering bubble wrap and the remainder packing and unpacking boxes the size of refrigerators. My ideal job would have been part-time, but when I raised that flag, interviewers all but shouted, “Next!” I suspected that each editor who interviewed me thought that, as a new mom, I’d be taking off every other day for this or that baby-related emergency.
“I love being with Annabel,” I finally said with what I hoped was conviction, because it was gut-honest true.
“Something tells me there’s more to the story,” Luke said as he began to sip his second glass of wine. “My brother’s wife tells me she can’t figure out how one small body can manufacture so much poop.”
“What gets me is the competition,” I said tentatively. It wasn’t just the running tab of which mommy had slimmed down to thinner than before she was pregnant or which child crawled faster, farther, and earlier. People kept score in ways I never would have imagined. Any mother who owned fewer than three strollers—an umbrella model for zipping in and out of taxis, a three-wheeled jogger for all the running she may or may not do, and, for everyday cruising, a heavy-duty Bugaboo Frog, which costs more than most people’s first used car—was treated as if she were on food stamps. “I feel as if the rules for being a mother in this town are written in secret code and no one’s given me the manual.”
I read the expression on Luke’s face as sympathetic and kept going. “All the other moms apparently got up at five one day and stood in line in a sleet storm to grab a spot in a pre-preschool swim class at the local Jewish community center. I tried to enroll Annabel the next week, but the class was sold out. When I expressed surprise to the woman at the desk, she looked as me as if I’d just wandered over the Mexican border.”
“Ooh, nasty,” he said, chuckling. “You don’t get this in the e-mails. Let’s hear more.”
I rose to his challenge. “Okay. Nursery school. Really on-the-ball martyr-mommies are already discussing where to apply, and these are babies who can’t even sit yet.” Luke might have thought I was exaggerating for comic effect. I was not. “While they’re mopping up drool, they’re dissecting the schools’ differences as if they were Harvard and Yale”—my voice sounded like I’d gulped helium—“which they may as well be, because I’ve been assured that if Annabel doesn’t go to one of the ‘right’ schools, she can kiss her Ivy League dreams goodbye.” As if fantasies of rowing crew on the Charles were what was making her sleeping eyelids flutter whenever I peered into her crib. “Not that I haven’t started to get sucked into stuff myself,” I admitted. In a few months, my daughter and I were slated to begin Magic Maestros, where we’d be entertained by live musicians who, for all I knew, might be off-duty violinists from the Philharmonic.
“So go back to work,” Luke said after I ranted for ten minutes. “Or does Dr. Marx disapprove?” His tone had crossed into snide.
“Barry’s okay with whatever I do,” I told Luke, sounding as defensive as I felt. “But where, exactly, would I work?”
He idly ran his fingers around the rim of his wineglass. “How about with me?”
I imagined those fingers on my leg—and elsewhere—and shook my head to erase the image.
“Hey, why are you saying no without hearing more?” he said. I was fairly certain I detected disappointment.
“I’m not saying no. I’m not saying anything, because what exactly are you proposing?”
“Nothing full-time. But the jobs are really coming in now,” he said, knocking the wood table twice, “and I could give you a lot of regular styling. I’ve been using lame freelancer after lame freelancer, and either these girls and boys won’t get off their lazy rears or they have zero imagination. When they’re good, they get booked up by my competitors or raise their rates to prices I can’t afford.”
Now it was my turn to offer the occasional “hmm.”
“I can’t pay you benefits or promise the arrangement will last forever—you know how work comes and goes,” he continued. “Editors could get sick of me and not renew my contracts.” Neither one of us mentioned that Luke owed part of his good fortune to editors’ past fickleness: he’d come along when everyone was hungry for a new face and a new look. “Molly, all I can say is that you know how well we work together—you’re the other half of my brain.”
I couldn’t disagree. I thought Luke’s talent was astounding. Two-thirds of the glossy pages in my current portfolio came from our shoots.
“And you’d be doing me a favor—not that you owe me.” He looked right into my eyes in a way that was both intimate and alarming.
Was this a come-on? Don’t flatter yourself, Molly, I decided. This is business. Nothing more. And not only is it the best offer you’ve gotten lately it’s the only offer, discounting a position that required commuting to a suburban location whose most attractive feature was the office’s proximity to a Dairy Queen.
“It could be fun,” he added.
“Fun, huh?” A quaint concept.
I was trying to digest Luke’s offer when I heard Annabel. Usually I didn’t rush to grab my child from her crib—I liked to eavesdrop and try to translate her babble—but it was already close to two. I was eager to show off. “Do you hear her?” I said. “You’ll have to excuse me for a few minutes.”
I returned with my chubby, sweet-smelling daughter. At seven months, Annabel’s hair had grown in blond and her skin felt as velvety as petunias. I’d dressed her in a lilac striped dress that matched Luke’s sweater. My heart swelled with pride as I presented my baby.
Luke looked at her with his photographer’s eyes. I knew him well enough to recognize appreciation. “So happy to meet you, Miss Annabel,” he said, shaking one of her fat little fingers. She smiled, revealing three newly cut teeth, and kicked her legs like a baby ninja.
“Could you keep her company while I get her sippy cup?” I asked as I secured Annabel in her high chair. Learning to drink from a cup was a recent accomplishment, and I couldn’t have been prouder had she mastered Italian verbs. When I got back to the dining room, Luke was playing peekaboo like a pro and Annabel was squealing with delight. He had that effect on women.
“Don’t forget her present,” he said, handing me the box. I opened it slowly and methodically, a habit that always drove Lucy—a born ripper—nuts. “It was this or the Brad Pitt action figure.”
Inside was a large, squishy white rabbit with floppy ears. Annabel reached for it and promptly sucked its
gumdrop-sized nose. “Thanks,” I said, smiled, and reached over to kiss his cheek. “I’m glad the funny bunny won. What do you think we should call him?”
“Excuse me, but he already has a name. He’s Alfred, just like my father—long legs, big ears, loved carrots.”
“It’s Alfred the bunny, Annabel,” I said, rubbing the velvety plush against her arm. “He’s from Uncle Luke.”
Luke grimaced.
“Correction. He’s from Mr. Delaney.”
“Alfred is from Luke, Annabel,” he said, checking his watch. “Luke, who has to leave now. Sorry. Meeting downtown.”
I walked to the closet, pulled out his coat, and gave his cheek another hurried, virginal peck.
“Will you think about my offer?” he said.
“I will.”
“Really?”
“Promise.”
“Promise, then,” he said as the elevator arrived. “I’ll hold you to it.”
When I checked on Annabel, she was curled around Alfred. She slept with him that night, and for every night thereafter, until love rendered him bald. Lack of fur never, however, diminished his appeal. Alfred the bunny became king among animals. He understood Annabel like no teddy bear or donkey ever could, and whenever I looked at them together, Annabel and Alfred, my mind invariably turned to Luke.
As for me, on Monday I interviewed nannies. Two weeks later, Delfina Adams entered our lives. The next week, I ordered business cards. And the week after that, I flew to Sonoma. Luke and I were scheduled for our first shoot.
Twenty
PICKUP LINE
hy is this night different from all other nights? This night is different from all other nights because this night is Passover and this morning Kitty, as she does every year, is putting the finishing touches on a seder worthy of Gourmet. It’s my tough luck that when I was alive I didn’t tail her like I’m doing today, because I have finally learned how she makes her featherweight matzo balls. The recipe she guards as if it were the formula for Ecstasy is—the hubris!—square on the back of the Manischewitz matzo meal box, although she substitutes seltzer for water. That I can’t bust that woman is driving me insane. Whom in the Duration can I report to who will care? Bob? I don’t think so.
“Pinky, can you get the phone?” Kitty shouts to her maid, which is how she refers to Pinky Mae Springer, who has worked for Kitty these last thirty-eight years.
“It’s Dr. Marx,” Pinky yells back. She has known Barry since he wet his bed, but when he graduated from med school Kitty insisted that Pinky call him by this honorific.
“In a minute,” Kitty says as she slips a large damask napkin into a sterling silver ring. Every napkin is fanned to exactly the same breadth. I admire Kitty’s perfectionism. Even her mind, I suspect, has hospital corners. She walks to the phone in the kitchen, her stiletto mules tapping on the tile floor like a snare drum. “Darling,” she says to Barry in a voice she reserves only for him and which I believe she considers melodic and charming. “Did they arrive?”
They would be my parents, who were due in at eleven. Lucy is boycotting the seder and leaving tomorrow for St. Bart’s to join a new boyfriend.
“They’re in?” she says, having hoped my parents would cancel at the last minute. “Now I have to figure out where to seat them.” Kitty always plots her table as if she were giving a state dinner for the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. With the phone still to her ear, she opens a drawer in the Sheraton buffet and retrieves two thick parchment place cards elegantly lettered in calligraphy. Kitty sets my father’s card next to her own seat, while she puzzles over my mother’s.
“The Girls are taking bets about what Claire will wear,” she tells Barry. Linda, Suzette, Nancy, and Kitty have been steadfast friends for decades, with matching bracelets on their ankles. They’re not just the original Mean Girls. They’re resourceful. Before Google, there were the Girls. Whether you need a hot stock, a hot tamale, or a hot date, they always know the one. Had any of these ya-yas chosen to work, I have no doubt that they would have blasted the glass ceiling to Mars, but I never realized until now that my mother was of sufficient interest for them to critique her wardrobe, too label-deficient for their taste.
“I’m a what? Now don’t call your mother that, darling,” Kitty says, but she comes off playful, as if Barry has served up the most heartfelt term of endearment. “That isn’t becoming.” While she chats, she straightens the tall ivory tapers in their towering candlesticks and examines the kiddush cup that belonged to Barry’s father. Its sterling silver, embossed with vines and grapes, is marred by a millimeter of tarnish. “Pinky,” she shouts. “Can you come in here?”
In her crisp gray uniform, Pinky steps to it and removes the offending cup for a second round of polishing.
You can tell from one glance at this dining room that my mother-in-law is someone who takes herself seriously, and you’d better, too. She set the table yesterday, and I have to agree the woman has, as she herself might say, flair. I adore her china, which she had the foresight to select and receive—service for twenty-four, no less—when she married her second husband, Seymour Katz, who died three years ago. The dishes are an old Meissen pattern featuring a fierce dragon in a color she calls amethyst but which to me looks like regulation shocking pink, nearly the shade Annabel turned last year when she first laid eyes on them and asked why her grandmother uses “monster plates.”
Nevertheless, I love the way these dishes set off spring flowers. For tonight’s meal, Kitty has cornered the market on dogwood, freesia, and irises, which she’s arranged in bouquets worthy of the entrance to the Metropolitan Museum. Her tablecloth is heavy French linen. I can picture it hidden in the bottom of a steamer trunk as an aristocratic family fled Paris when the Nazis came to call, although I believe the real story is that she inherited it from her mother, who won it playing cards at Lido Beach.
I love Passover. I miss Passover, my favorite holiday, although it wasn’t always so. Christmas used to be way out in front until Lucy said, “Molly, can’t you see through all the hype?” a word she learned when we were eleven.
Most Jews like me—who barely know Purim from Durham—agree that Passover is mostly about the singing. It’s definitely not about the matzo, the bread of affliction that our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt, and which their descendants know as the direct route to constipation.
At Kitty’s, Barry always chants the four questions—even though he is not the youngest at the table, as tradition demands. Off-key but with gusto, guests chime in on “Dayenu,” “Eliyahu Hanavi,” and “Had Gadya.” The tunes aren’t “Away in a Manger,” “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” and “Deck the Halls,” but they’ll do.
Tonight, I plan to play the part of the Marx family’s own personal stunt double for the prophet Elijah, said to drop in on seders worldwide. I’m hoping I’ll run into Elijah in the Duration. Maybe the two of us could chat, spirit to spirit. Get his take on the Palestinian situation. But I’ve had enough seder prep for now. Kitty is moving on to gefilte fish, never my favorite.
I’ve been checking on Annabel all morning, but soon the teachers will be letting the children out early in honor of the holiday. Hauling my spectral ass to Central Park West takes, of course, no time. The first person I see in the lobby isn’t Annabel—school hasn’t let out yet—or even Delfina, waiting for her. It’s Stephanie, who’s hard to miss in low-rise jeans and an eye-popping bronze leather jacket. She appears to be talking to herself, though in fact she’s carrying on a conversation through her headset. Judging by the volume, she’s engaged in a full-contact sport with a travel agent, wrangling over the price of first-class tickets to Barcelona. I don’t have to wonder who her seatmate will be.
So intently am I watching Stephanie that it almost fails to register that there’s something off about this scene. It’s not the security guard who peers halfheartedly into people’s bags, the one you’d expect to miss a monogrammed set of assault weapons. It’s not the nannies gossiping about their
bosses in the corner, divided from the moms like the muggles from the wizards, and it’s not the three handsome gay fathers who stand to the side in their own fraternity, where the price of admission is an adopted Chinese daughter or a son grown in a rented uterus. It’s her.
As she stands still among at least a dozen women her own age, pretending to read People, I see her out of the corner of my eye, like the rat in the subway you sense before it scampers along the rails. Fading into the crowd, she’s one more woman in a black coat and black boots with a black bag waiting for the elevator door to open and dislodge a group of giggly three- and four-year-olds.
Stephanie’s son is in the first group that hits the lobby, and her curly-headed boy runs to her side, tugs her jacket, and shouts, “Mommy.” She brings her index finger to her lips and mouths “Jordan, shhh.” Part of me would like to Taser my sister and say, “Her! That’s who Barry’s seeing!” But that part of me would be the single once-living cell that isn’t wondering what the hell Lucy Divine thinks she’s doing here, casually pretending she has permission to pick up Annabel.
Two more groups of children run off the elevator. I am hoping that Delfina, usually prompt, will glide through the door. Then I remember that Barry gave her the day off because tonight she’s going to help Pinky serve the seder meal. Annabel is supposed to go home with her buddy Ella and Narcissa, Ella’s nanny and Delfina’s best friend.
The elevator door opens one last time and both girls escape, waving goodbye to their teacher. Each bears a carefully crayoned matzo cover. Annabel’s is decorated with rabbits and eggs in Easter colors. My girl, all right.
“Annie-belle,” Lucy shouts. “Over here. Surprise!”
