The Stork Club

by Maureen Freely

  By the time I got off the phone, we were half-way through the second showing of Sesame Street. Maria was tired of sitting still. She started to giggle. I told her to pipe down. She started crying. By the time we had made peace, the light was beginning to fail. As I tried to remove my second nit with my nonexistent thumbnails in inadequate light, I began to ask myself how I had landed in this nightmare.

  I got to work on the third nit. As I slid it down the hairshaft, I decided that it had come to this because you had made it come to this. Why were you making it so hard for me to do my job? I decided to call and ask you: I was more indignant than annoyed when Mitchell told me you weren’t there. Terrific, I said to myself. As I got to work on the fourth nit, I began to imagine, one by one, the places where you might be. After the sixth nit, I called the office again. This time I got the machine.

  By now we were on to the second showing of Mister Rodgers. I got to work on the seventh nit, but my hands were so shaky that I lost the strand. I picked up another one. The same thing happened. I decided to give my hands a rest. By the time they had recovered, the light had gone altogether. I turned on the overhead. It didn’t work. I went to look for a new bulb. There weren’t any. I tried to take the one out of the bathroom. I burned my fingers.

  This meant that removing the next nit was not just frustrating and time-consuming: it was also painful. I ran my wounded fingers through my daughter’s hair: there were hundreds more.

  I called up Ophelia again. She said try tweezers. I tried them. They didn’t work. I called her up again. She said try olive oil, and then the nit comb. I did, to no avail. I called her up again. She said why didn’t I just comb the oil through Maria’s hair nonstop for fifteen minutes and then see if I dislodged any. After five minutes, I could see nothing was happening. I turned off the light in the hope that darkness would help me keep my patience.

  This was how Becky found me. To understand what happened next, it is important for you to know how bright she looked to me after sitting in darkness for God only knows how long. ‘Those idiots!’ she said when she saw Maria’s oily hair and the discarded nit comb. ‘Didn’t they look at this girl’s hair before they told you what to do? That Ophelia drives me nuts sometimes. She is all goddamn theory. She has never even seen a nit in real life. And that Charlotte. She is so damned supercilious about her so called prophylactic methods, when in fact they count for nothing. The fact is, some kids are prone to nits and others aren’t. The day she has to pick her kids up from school because of nits … I’m being terrible, I know, but between you and me I’ll be overjoyed.’

  She took Maria into the living-room and seated her under the spotlight lamp. ‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been through this,’ she said. I remember she was wearing a suit with a slip for a blouse.

  ‘I’ll take this side, and you start on that side, and we’ll see who gets to the parting first.’ She showed me how to do the thumbnail method correctly. We got to work. As her hands flew from strand to strand, she told me her repertoire of nit-nightmare stories. It was while she was telling me about the bombscare in the drugstore that her hand and my hand accidentally grazed against each other.

  I looked up more out of surprise than curiosity. She gave me back the exact same look. We continued working as if nothing had happened. But something had. I don’t know what, but I found myself talking about some childhood memory I had from Princeton.

  ‘You lived in Princeton? I didn’t know that!’

  It was, I think, when we established that we had both – albeit at different times – lived on Linden Lane that she made a comment about destiny. Or was it parallel lives?

  Whatever it was, it made me look up again. She looked up at the same time. There was a moment of awkward silence. Then we went back to Maria’s hair. ‘Do you think your parents knew my father?’ She launched into a story about her father and his definition of love, but I was no longer listening to her. I was thinking to myself: My God. Why didn’t I ever see it? She’s the one. And then I thought: What if it’s too late to do anything about it? What if I’ve missed out on my only chance for happiness?

  Oh my regret! Why hadn’t I seen it before? Five whole years of missed opportunities. Five years and she was drifting away from me!

  I forced myself to return my attention to what she was saying. And what she was saying was that she had just about had it with all things Californian. In my unnatural state, I took this to mean that my chances were already used up. She was moving on, this apparition of overlooked potential, this last ticket to fulfilment. She was leaving me.

  This thought made me feel as if I was drowning. I think that is why, when she completed work on the left side of Maria’s head and joined forces with me on the right side, and her hand grazed against mine for the second time, I grabbed it.

  When she blushed, I thought it was because she was feeling the same way I was feeling.

  Then she let it drop on Maria’s head in such a way as to make me falter.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ she hissed. ‘Huh? What did you do that for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. I took a step back.

  ‘You don’t know?’ she said. ‘You don’t know? What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I just thought…’

  ‘You just thought, did you? You just fucking thought? Well, think about this for a while.’

  And then she slapped me across the face.

  Then she said, ‘I’m sorry, but I had to do that.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ I said, even though it wasn’t at all.

  We continued working.

  31

  You may remember that I was quiet when you got home that evening. You may also remember that I chose to spend a second night on the children’s floor.

  The next morning I woke up at 6.11 precisely. I had the children fed, dressed, and armed with acceptable lunches by 8.03. We took the bus to the Marina, arriving at the school at 8.27. Vampyra was waiting for us in the cloakroom.

  I handed her my pile of certificates and forms. I informed her that I had received a special dispensation with regard to the TB test. She nodded to something behind my left shoulder.

  She got out a red pen. While she checked through my forms, Maria and I watched Jesse march over to his cubby. Hang up his jacket. Roll up his blanket. Park his lunch. Having accomplished these tasks, he reported to Vampyra. She put her pen down and ran her fingers over his bowed head. This time I knew what she was looking for.

  Maria was trembling when it was her turn to be checked. But she passed the test. ‘Righteo,’ said Vampyra. ‘We’re ready to roll here.’ Looking up again at that indefinable something hovering just above my left shoulder, she said, ‘You are free to go now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You are free to go now.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I was so surprised I forgot to say goodbye to Maria.

  It was a sunny day for a change. I sat down on the wall and watched the Volvos and the Peugeots and the BMWs and the spacewagons come and go.

  First came a man in a suit and in a hurry. He herded his charges into school without registering my presence and then ran out again glancing at his watch.

  Then came a woman in a suit. She had to drag her daughter screaming from the car.

  Then came a car-pool robot who dropped her children off at the kerb. She looked like she spent her whole life driving around in circles.

  Then came an au pair who was reading a romance in her left hand while she guided two frowning girls with her right.

  Two stationwagons drew up next to me. Two identicute mothers emerged to greet one another. They had shiny straight blonde ponytails, freshly laundered pastel-coloured T-shirts with Arran sweaters thrown over their shoulders, and jeans, and teeth that matched their new Reeboks. Together they got their respective three year olds out of their carseats. Then one woman took them into the school while the other guarded the infants who were asleep in pristine
carseats facing backwards in the front seats of both cars.

  Like me, these women were doing their most important outside job of the day. Once they had gotten their girls to school on time, they could switch gears and take it slow. One of the identicute mothers had brought a catalogue of children’s clothing. As the other woman leafed through it, she kept saying, ‘And you’re sure it’s all natural fibre?’

  The first woman nodded vigorously. ‘That was the founding concept,’ she said. ‘I know because I know someone who knows the women who started it.’

  ‘Oh wow,’ said her friend. Turning a page in the catalogue, she leaned against a car and set off the burglar alarm. She shrieked. ‘Oh God. How embarrassing!’

  They both put their hands over their ears as a man came out of a nearby apartment house to turn it off. They both giggled as they peered into their respective car windows to check on their sleeping infants.

  ‘Amazing what they can sleep through at this age, isn’t it?’ said the one in the pink T-shirt.

  ‘It doesn’t last, though,’ said Blue T-shirt. ‘This sleeping through noises syndrome, I mean.’

  They both smiled at me in a way that indicated they were expecting an answer. So I said, ‘No, it certainly doesn’t.’

  ‘Do you have yours in school here?’ asked Pink.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘both of them.’

  ‘Oh wow,’ said Blue – as if this were an amazing feat. ‘Oh wow, that’s really great.’

  I lit up a cigarette so that they wouldn’t invite me to stand closer to them.

  And while I sit there blowing smoke at the women and their Volvos, I imagine …

  Trey sitting in his newly repainted office, sitting in front of his computer screen which he has moved so that it is framed by the window, framed by the outer edges of a view that had – for so many years – sucked his attention away from his work. Nevermore:

  He has before him on the bright-green screen a sea of figures, figures only he can understand. Technically, he shouldn’t have access to them. Technically, he shouldn’t have walked out of Mitchell’s house on Sunday, with all those discs. But he’s sure that Mitchell won’t be missing them. After all, Trey had located them under a carpet of dust. That is the one thing Trey won’t be able to duplicate – the dust on the discs so that they look like no one has touched them. But so what. He is fifty-four per cent positive Mitchell won’t notice anything amiss, ninety-five per cent positive he’ll be able to sneak them back into that study before anyone even notices they’re gone. Either he’ll drop by the house on a pretext with a pre-arranged diversion designed to give him sixty seconds of unsupervised time. Or else he’ll just wait until they’re all out and climb up to the kitchen from the back.

  It’s all coming together now. Finally he has a project that requires every one of his disparate skills. Even rock climbing, if he has to stage a break-in! Although maybe he should start looking for a new word. Break-in implies a broken law – and Trey has a right to these discs. Unless you are going to be technical. You could almost go so far as to say he was the wronged party. After all, he had been Mitchell’s accountant for the tax year in question. And Mitchell had lied to him about his personal investments. And jeopardized Trey’s professional reputation by getting him to put his signature to a tax return that was, because of the suppressed information, a hundred and one per cent bogus.

  Of course Trey had had a hunch all along. His mistake had been to be upfront. He had asked Mitchell point blank: Are you a freemason? Dumb question: he ought to have stuck to specific questions about specific claims and expenditures. By exposing his suspicions before acquiring the information to back them up, he had given Mitchell and company a golden opportunity to ruin Trey’s burgeoning business.

  No doubt about it: he had given Mitchell and Co. a chance to consolidate their interests. It is no accident, thinks Trey, that Mitchell had managed to swindle me, Mike, out of his operations and replace me with Kiki. It all fits into the scheme Trey now thinks he is close to unearthing.

  And how neat it all is, too! There he goes again, counting his eggs … He returns his attention to the bright-green screen. He presses a button. A new set of figures appears before him. He scans it, scratches his neck, gets up from his desk, goes to sit down on his couch, fiddles for a few minutes with his son’s Rubik’s Cube, looks up at the screen again, tries to determine the message in the pattern. And while he does this, I imagine …

  The clock radio going off next to Kiki’s head. It makes him startle: it is on ‘buzz’, not ‘music’. It is not Kiki’s first morning on the office couch, but the experience of waking up here is still new enough so that it takes him a moment to remember why he’s here. When he does remember, it’s like he stuck his head into a garbage compactor. Ouch! Jesus and Mary! Why, oh why, did he ever think he was going to get off the hook by telling the truth?

  He checks the time: 8.50. He is cutting it close. His first choice of the day is, should he get on his feet now, or should he lounge around here on this sofa for a few more minutes luxuriating in the absence of female voices?

  Of course he can always count on Filly to make up for lost time during counselling sessions. What’s today again? Wednesday? Great, that means two days of peace until the next one. On that happy note …

  He sits up, looks around, surveys the damage.

  The desk will pass. It sure is cluttered, now that Ophelia has decided to make it home for all his family pictures – this leaves little room for the executive puzzle, the silver paperweights, the gold golf ball she got him for Christmas – but what the hell. It’s worth it The fish tank looks sort of weird now that he has had to flush its last two inhabitants down the toilet – must pay a visit to the pet store some time, and ditto for the liquor store. He can’t keep filling the bottles in that cabinet with water, especially not the Bourbon bottles. His main problem is the wastepaper basket, which contains the remains of last night’s Korean take-out (never again) not to mention beer cans (at least six of them, maybe more).

  Not the end of the world, he says to himself, if Filly catches this wastepaper basket looking like this. But better to get it out before she arrives.

  So. Here goes. He gets himself standing. He pushes the sofa bed back into its daytime position. He looks at his clock: 8.55. He has five more minutes. Into the kitchen to the coffee maker. Fill it with water from the dispenser. Find the coffee can behind the urine samples. Make sure it contains coffee! Into the office closet for his clothes. Oh no! Mom has not dropped off the new consignment of socks and underwear! Does this mean that she is opting out of her last remaining personal service? Did Filly talk to her about the things he said about her in counselling? Or has Filly banned men’s apparel in her washing machine?

  In the meantime … what to do about underwear?

  He is about to look for those paper things the rep gave him the other day when he remembers … saved by the bell, his sports bag. Which smells like shoes, but which contains the items he needs.

  And so. On with them. And now, what next? The Bachelor’s Shower! Whoopee!

  Time to push those urine samples manfully to one side. And then – careful with that pink soap from the dispenser. A little goes a long way. In fact, a little goes too far. Skip over into the bathroom for a roll of paper towels and wouldn’t that be the time one of the women in his life would choose to come into the office.

  He pauses behind the door and tries to figure out which one it is. He hears noises behind the reception desk. Then the easy-listening station comes on. Then Mom on the phone, complaining about a headache to her only friend. He prances back into the kitchenette with his arms over his head in the style of Prince except with his armpits all soaped up.

  By the time he has them rinsed, the floor is practically a swimming pool. But the coffee is ready.

  He tiptoes back into his office, locks his door, gets out a fresh pair of pants and a shirt, puts them on, gets his shoes on, checks the closet for something to hide the wastepap
er basket in. The best he can do is a drycleaner’s bag. But it doesn’t matter. He can still access the back door.

  After he has unlocked his own door, he pauses with his load and sniffs, and makes a mental note to turn up the air-conditioner.

  He turns around. There, smiling at him, is the new, sensationally virile-looking nurse. God, Ophelia went overtime tracking down this one. ‘Can I help you there?’ she asks. She looks like she could help him move a house. While he pauses in front of her, I imagine …

  Mitchell, standing in his office, pausing in a similar pose in front of you.

  32

  You are at the front desk. ‘Did you find them?’

  ‘Not yet,’ he says. He picks up a box he has already gone through three times and begins to check the names of each and every disc. But he has begun to lose hope of ever finding those missing tax records.

  When the phone rings, he jumps. He watches you pick up the receiver, watches your smile disappear as you listen to the voice on the other end of the line. Who is it? Bruno? If so, what is Bruno saying? More to the point, why has Mitchell let it go so far?

  You put the phone down. He doesn’t even know if he should ask. He is still thinking it over when who should appear but Becky and the ecumenical baby. ‘I couldn’t find those tax records,’ she says. ‘But I did find this inside a phone book.’

  Aagh! Has she found the document in which she signed her life away, which he had hidden in that phone book only this morning? No, it’s some old letter from the university-loan people. What a relief.

  ‘I have some good news,’ Becky tells you. ‘Maria finally made the grade this morning. She’s in.’

  ‘Oh,’ you say. Which in Becky’s opinion is just not good enough.