by Sally Koslow
While her teacher chats up one of the mothers, Annabel spins like a dial and winds up pointed at Lucy. “Aunt Moosey!” she squeals. “Daddy said you weren’t coming to New York!” She barrels into her aunt’s open arms for a tight, lingering hug.
“What’s this pretty thing you’ve made?” Lucy says, admiring Annabel’s handiwork. “You know what? You can tell me about it later. Why don’t you let me zip your jacket?” Lucy speaks quickly, releases Annabel, and gently pats her on the back.
Oy, caramba! Has Lucy lost every last marble? Where is my sister taking my daughter? It doesn’t even matter if her motives are innocent—which I want to believe that they are. I have to. I must.
Annabel looks at her friend standing across the lobby and turns to Lucy. “But I was supposed to go home with Ella.”
Hearing her name, Ella, who had been waiting near the door for Narcissa, trots over to Annabel and Lucy. There is no doubt in my mind that Ella will grow up to be a Supreme Court justice—that or a prison matron. She considers Lucy with deep suspicion. By the time this child is twenty, she will have a deep furrow requiring state-of-the-art facial filler. “And you would be?” Ella says, sounding flintier than I did, ever.
“I’m Annabel’s aunt,” Lucy replies. She glances around to look for Ella’s mother or nanny and is relieved to see that the child is alone. “We have to run now, but you have a wonderful holiday. Bye!”
“But where’s your yellow slip? Annabel needs permission to leave with you. Where is it?” I am expecting Ella to cuff Lucy while she arranges for an AMBER Alert. “It’s the rule—you’re breaking the rule,” she adds loudly, which causes the few mothers left in the lobby to rubberneck toward Lucy. Stephanie is among them, still talking into her Bluetooth.
You little four-foot troll, I hear Lucy think. I hope you grow up to get acne, cankles, and a nose even Barry can’t fix. She grasps Annabel’s hand and tugs. Annabel won’t budge.
“Ella’s right, Aunt Moosey,” my daughter says gravely. “It’s the rule.”
“Annie-belle,” my sister says, crouching down and whispering, “I’m going to tell you a secret. One of the things they don’t teach you in school is some rules are made to be broken. Got that? Come on. Trust me. I’m not just your aunt. I’m a nursery school teacher and I know stuff.”
This time, when she tugs, Annabel looks at Lucy long and hard, hesitates for only a moment, then waves to Ella and follows her aunt. They are on the street when Narcissa ambles heavily through the door, a bakery box in hand. She bends down to kiss Ella, singing out, “Ready, my darling? Sorry I was late. Now where’s your friend?”
Ella drags her nanny back to the door and points down the block. “She went with her,” she bellows. “That lady. She says she’s Annabel’s aunt.” Lucy and Annabel are still standing in the street, Lucy trying to hail a taxi as one after the next sails by filled with passengers. As Narcissa takes it in, her brow furrows, and I see where Ella has acquired her expression. “Annabel went with that bad lady. We need to do something.”
“Stop that woman!” Narcissa belts out. Aretha Franklin has nothing on her. “Kidnapper! Pervert!” Ella echoes every word of the tirade, which Narcissa repeats in a loop, and like a sow and a piglet, the two of them begin to make their way down the block just as Stephanie and Jordan walk out of the building.
“What’s going on?” Stephanie shouts.
“That woman,” Narcissa turns around and yells. “She be stealing Annabel Marx.”
“Annabel Marx? No!” Stephanie says, and thinks, Un-fucking-believable. “I’ll get the security guard. Watch my son.” She turns back into the building, leaving a bewildered Jordan standing alone, wondering whom he should chase after, Narcissa and Ella or his mother. Narcissa, weighing in at 210 pounds, is not fleet of foot, but she and Ella reach Lucy and Annabel just as the door of a taxi slams. Narcissa bangs on the car’s side with her enormous vinyl tote. The driver presses down on the brakes so fast his turban tilts.
“You two get out this minute!” Narcissa yells as she continues to beat on the door. “Driver, she be stealing that little girl. Stop her! Kidnapper! Don’t go!”
Lucy rolls down the window just enough to yell, “Mind your own business, you bitch. I am this child’s next of kin. Driver, take off.” But the driver stops the car and leans back, taking it all in. He pulls out his cell phone.
“You! Drop that phone!” Lucy orders. I know what’s best for this child, I hear her think. Molly would want me to look out for my own flesh and blood. Barry, that sorry excuse for a husband, he doesn’t deserve this beautiful daughter, like he didn’t deserve my beautiful pain-in-the-butt sister and made her life hell and—
“You be stealing that child!” Narcissa says, flapping her arms as she pounds the window. Her bakery box falls, and black-and-white cookies spill into the gutter. Ella begins to whimper—those cookies are her favorite—and turns and points down the street, where Stephanie is running with the security guard at her side. She pokes Narcissa, who takes it in. “The cop, he’s on the way,” Narcissa shouts to Lucy. “Annabel, now don’t you worry.”
“Lady,” the driver yells to Lucy, “you give that child back.”
“Don’t you dare talk to me that way.”
Annabel’s heart-shaped face darts back and forth between Lucy, Narcissa and Ella, and the driver, who has lost his turban. She starts to cry, quietly at first, but the noise builds to a wail. “Let me out, Aunt Lucy,” she cries. “I’m scared. I want Delfina.”
“Annabel, stop that!” Lucy snaps. The loudness of her voice makes Annabel cry harder. “Everything’s okay. You’re with me, Aunt Moosey. Driver, take off!”
The man won’t budge.
“You ain’t going nowhere,” the guard, who has reached the taxi, shouts as he raps on the window. “Hell, woman, open that door.”
“Or what?” my sister shouts. “You’ll find a real cop?”
Stephanie is behind him. “I’m calling Dr. Marx now,” she says, taking her phone from her right pocket and rapping the window with her left hand. “Whoever you are in there, you’re insane. Let Annabel Marx go!”
“Fuck!” Lucy says. I’m trapped, she thinks. Shit out of luck. “God damn it.”
She opens the door. Annabel tumbles into Narcissa’s doughy, welcoming embrace. Lucy slams the door shut as the guard gives it a wallop. “Driver, take off,” she says. This time he peels away as if he’s leading the cavalry.
“Annabel, you poor baby, I’m here, I’m here,” Narcissa says as she rocks my daughter’s birdlike body. “Narcissa and Ella are here. Everything’s okay.”
But everything is not okay. My child is shaking. My lunatic sister should have known better than to duel with a tough Jamaican nanny. She should have known better, period.
I get inside Lucy’s brain as she speeds away in the cab. I try to understand why she would behave like a crackpot, if I may use the technical term. But the inside of Lucy’s mind roars with tumult. She is asking herself why she always makes the wrong choice. For now, at least, my sense of filial loyalty has been plucked away as if it were snatched by a big, black crow. All I can hear are my daughter’s sobs. I have never felt more useless, more frustrated, or more dead.
Twenty-one
BORDEAUX WISHES
on’t you love it?” Luke all but wagged a tail as he ran, arms outstretched, from corner to corner of the house and up an open metal staircase.
“It’s great if you’ve always dreamed of living in a giant sardine can,” I said.
The house du jour was in Sonoma County, designed by a big-league architect for a Silicon Valley boy genius who’d cashed out just in time. I felt three feet tall standing under the terrifyingly high ceiling and turned full circle to take in the mottled gray concrete floor with its artful random cracks, the gunmetal walls, and the exposed circulatory system of pipes. The front window, a glass waffle with six-foot-square panes, had been manufactured for a car dealership. I squinted into the sun and saw miles of vi
neyards, green and gold, gold and green, that terraced the northern California hills.
“What’s with the attitude?” Luke asked. “It’s dazzling.”
It was dazzling, all right. I’d read that at night you could see the place from miles away, blazing like a UFO, and the instant the residence was finished, zoning ordinances were voted into place to bar Erector Set knock-offs from pockmarking the countryside.
“C’mon,” he said “This light—it’s amazing. I would kill for a space like this.”
“Mr. Delaney, you’re not cool enough to live in a space like this,” I shouted up to him. But I knew Luke and I would have no trouble taking jaw-dropping photographs here. I started to get excited, too.
“You’re lucky I don’t have a water balloon to drop on your head,” he said, ripped a sheet out of the notebook he always carried, and sailed a paper airplane through the air from the balcony.
A few hours before, Luke had met me at the Oakland airport. He’d had a job in Big Sur and driven up from Los Angeles on the Pacific Coast Highway. As we made our way north, his voiceover described the view with childlike glee. “Seals playing tag in the water!” “Waves like Moby Dick!” We hadn’t checked into our hotel yet. Luke was too eager to scope out the house where we’d be shooting, starting the next day. We went there first, slowly driving up a steep hill. The air here felt clean and dry. I forecasted three good hair days.
To say I had overprepared for my first job in more than a year was generous. For the past three weeks I’d noodled about the details day and night, putting in so much time that if I averaged it against the fee I’d be receiving, I might have earned more by cashing in bottles salvaged from the street. But I didn’t want to disappoint Luke Delaney, my discriminating new boss. I fiddled and fussed, compensating for the fact that the house was not at all my style. I am, after all, the secret love child of Marie Antoinette and Charles Dickens.
“What did you think of the art?” Luke said after we’d cased the place and gotten into our rented convertible, unfurled the car’s top, and started driving down the mountain. If Barry had been the driver, I would have bitched about how my hair was blowing into a Marge Simpson updo, but instead I acted as if I thrilled to the sensation of hot red dust grinding into my scalp. I was also aware of the fact that I might not smell all that clean. It was ninety-four degrees, and the minute you stepped outside you felt as if a Navajo blanket had fallen off a mule and onto your head.
The only contemporary art I knew beans about was hung on museum walls, and most of the last Whitney Biennial left me thinking that each artist had simply tattooed his neurosis onto a canvas. “That big blue one looked like Paul Bunyan’s ox.”
“You mean the Julian Schnabel?” Luke said.
Time to switch topics. From my straw tote I pulled out a pile of restaurant reviews. “Are you getting hungry? I’ve been reading up.”
“I’m always hungry when it’s on the client’s dime,” he said. “This is why I made a reservation for us two weeks ago.” He mentioned wine pairings, foie gras, and basil ice cream.
“Terrific—I’m starving. In New York it’s past dinner.” Seven thirty-six, to be exact, and I was eager to get to my room and check on Annabel. I knew if I spoke to her in front of Luke, my coo would sound maddeningly precious. “Will Eric and Jasper be here in time to join us?” I asked. They were the assistants booked for the shoot.
Luke checked his watch. “They should’ve arrived by now.” I was relieved. Chaperones, even if they were twenty-three, would set a tone of festive camaraderie.
We pulled into a village built around a leafy square. Healdsburg was a few blocks’ worth of wine shops, pricey boutiques, restaurants, and hotels, and ours was supposed to be the hippest among them. While Luke disappeared to make sure every last piece of his equipment had arrived, I registered, and as soon as I got to my room, I phoned home.
“Delfina, it’s me again,” I said in my seventh call of the day. “How’s Annabel?”
“She’s fine, ma’am,” she said. “Ate tofu for dinner.” My baby was a little green dragon. “Loved her bath. Already sound asleep.”
Aw. I’d wanted Delfina to put the baby’s ear to the phone so we could have one of our one-sided heart-to-hearts and I could at least hear her squeak. “Well, that’s good, Delfina,” I sighed. “That’s great. And don’t forget, please call me Molly.”
“Molly,” she said. “I’ll do that, Molly. Now, good night, Mrs. Marx. Speak to you tomorrow.”
My room cost hundreds of dollars a night—the hotel was revered for its high-principled design, which meant that I had not one drawer or armoire in which to unpack and only a sliver of a closet half covered by a filmy curtain. Piles of clothes landed on every snazzy, pristine, uncluttered surface, until the place looked as if I were closing down a small boutique. I walked into the vast shower tiled with delicate mosaic in the greens of wasabi and edamame. As the warm water hit my head, sandy trickles rolled into the drain. I lathered my hair with grapefruit and aloe vera shampoo, conditioned with linden blossom balm, and stood comatose for minutes. Dripping and chilled, I dashed across the stone floor to retrieve the white terry robe hung on the bathroom’s sole, ill-placed hook.
But first, I glimpsed myself in the full-length mirror—and froze. Who was that small but distinctly pear-shaped woman and what was she doing here? I was three thousand miles, three time zones, and one played-out flirtation away from where I belonged. All the scented body cream and caviar in the world, I suddenly realized, couldn’t stop me from being homesick. I missed my child and, to my surprise, my husband. I must be out of my mind to have made this trip.
I should be in New York, snapping digital photographs of Annabel to send out to a list of fifty friends and relatives, some of whom, I was sure, would delete the e-mails without even opening them. I should be shopping for a new batch of children’s books, looking into classes that would max out Annabel’s potential, soaking up every moment of once-in-a-lifetime motherhood like French toast and maple syrup.
Much to the surprise of the woman who used to be me, back in the city Barry, Annabel, and I had settled into snug domesticity. Barry had become reasonably housebroken, and when the weather cooperated, we’d spend hours each weekend at the playground, steaming cups of coffee in hand, eager to meet others who tottered on this strange new precipice called parenthood. After his morning runs, Barry would often be the one to change Annabel’s soggy nighttime diaper and give her breakfast. Sometimes I would catch him dancing around the room, Annabel in his arms, and my heart would be jelly.
Every night, after I put the baby to sleep, I’d fix my version of a low-fat homemade dinner, and while we ate, Barry and I would rattle on about Annabel, obviously the most precocious and charming baby on earth. Each Saturday, we paid Delfina an outrageous sum so she would sleep over, and we’d splurge on an evening out, even if all we did was eat pad thai at a local joint.
It wasn’t a glamorous Manhattan life. It wasn’t even a glamorous Sioux Falls life. But it was comfortable, which was the last word I’d have used to describe how it felt to be sitting in an over-air-conditioned, overdesigned hotel room, weary from travel, knowing that for the next four hours I’d be trapped in a flouncy four-star restaurant, trying to verbally joust with Luke and two recent graduates of Wesleyan and Yale.
I picked up the phone. “Hey Luke,” I said, trying to sound like one of the guys. “Please don’t think I’m a thankless wretch, but room service is looking pretty sweet right now.”
“I totally understand,” he said, too quickly. “It was clear you were wiped.”
Did I look that bad?
“Get some rest,” he said, “and I’ll see you tomorrow. Seven-thirty?”
I thanked him, hung up, and expected to feel relieved, but my vanity kicked in. Perhaps the real reason I hadn’t wanted to have dinner with Luke was because I was afraid he’d put the moves on me, and I wouldn’t know how to react. Since it was clear that wasn’t going to happen, I fel
t like the hound at the pound that no one wants. I circled the room twice, flicked the television on and off, called Barry and discussed whether we should install a garbage disposal, devoured my artisanal vegetable salad in seven bites, and fell asleep while watching Johnny Depp on pay-per-view. I was in the wine capital of North America and hadn’t even ordered a glass.
For the next three days, I labored like a migrant worker. Rise at six, quit thirteen hours later. Unpack. Pack up. Push away the ottoman. Move it back. Arrange a tray for imaginary guests. Pick a different tray and do it over, once with gherkins, once without. Lay down the hand-tufted wool rug. Decide it’s better suited to an English boardinghouse. Roll it back. Run upstairs, forty-seven times. Make the bed. Sweep the floor. Remove stains from the marble counters. Resist the impulse to allow this loftlike aerie to metastasize into a Parisian flat crammed with flea market frippery.
“Beautiful, beautiful,” the good-natured Eric would say after every setup. He was working as hard as I was, and not averse to pushing a sectional couch around the room until I decided where it should park.
“You go, girl,” Jasper, the Yalie said to me, again and again. That expression should be banned, especially when repeated with an English accent via Nashville. I longed to stuff a linen pillow sham down his throat.
But the best praise came from Luke. “I think this one’s going to be great,” he’d say before he took a shot. Every time he finished, he’d turn to me with “Told ya so, Molly. Perfect. Just perfect.”
As Jasper snapped Polaroids of each setup, he put them in a book, and by two o’clock on the third day, we could all see that our efforts had yielded a major success. There was nothing left to do. If the editor who’d sent us on this mission had any sense, the minute he saw Luke’s film he’d put him under contract in perpetuity.
“How shall we celebrate?” Luke said after we’d packed up and gotten into Eric and Jasper’s SUV to drive back to Healdsburg. The question was meant for all of us, but he was looking at me, sitting next to him in the backseat. Luke was wearing a black T-shirt and khaki cargo shorts, and his legs were stretched out, tanned and strong.
