real?”
“Please,” I said. “I dropped in to chat, but not about
that.”
“There you go,” said Brodsky. “If you came to do me a favor, then you should chat about what I want to chat about. Otherwise, good riddance to you.”
I admitted he had a point.
“So the boobs,” he nodded. “Are they real?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’m glad you like them.”
“I didn’t say I liked them. From what I can tell from the TV, everyone gets them done nowadays, so even the not-so-good ones might not be real.”
“Thank you for that,” I said.
“I didn’t say I didn’t like them.”
“I don’t really care what you think,” I said, though of course I did. I cared what everybody thought, even a slovenly octogenarian like Brodsky, which (according to Dr. Chitturi) was a large part of my problem.
“So do you have a boyfriend?”
“No,” I replied, trying to sound nonchalant. “I’m afraid I’m still single.”
“Hmm,” said Brodsky appraisingly. “You’re not a bad-looking girl, but you’re not my type.”
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’ll have Pedro send up another
model.”
“I don’t like sarcastic women,” Brodsky countered. “Besides, I’ve had enough wives. I don’t have it in me to handle another.”
“How many wives have you had?”
“Three. Four if you count the last one. But I wouldn’t marry you. Your boobs aren’t big enough. And you’re sarcastic.”
I have to say that Brodsky was beginning to depress me. I hadn’t realized that as part of my social work I would have to be rejected by an eighty-seven-year-old man.
“I could give you a try in the sack if you promise to keep your mouth shut and do most of the work. But I won’t marry you.”
I must have looked hurt because he continued, “I know someone who might like you, though. My nephew—but he might be gay.”
I HAVE TO ADMIT that the old Jews, though not polite, were colorful, so by the end of the week, I had gotten to a point where I enjoyed visiting them, in a masochistic sort of way. One day, however, when I stopped by the front desk to pick up Mrs. Schwartz’s Meals on Wheels, Pedro informed me that, though I was free to continue the visits on my own account, I was no longer obliged to do so as his replacement. The management had caught the guilty dog or, given that dogs really can’t be blamed for this sort of thing, the guilty dog owners. It was one of the bichons in the bandanna who, it seems, had a weak bladder and would dribble. Pedro had caught a whiff after the couple exited the elevator at 7 one evening when I was upstairs having Brodsky reject me.
There seemed to me to be a lesson in this discovery, insofar as the Wetsons, as the couple was aptly named, had seemed so above the fray at the Doggie Meet and Greet. The seemingly most innocent often happen to be the guiltiest— or, as Eleanor likes to say, you can’t trust a goddamn soul. This is a dictum she has embraced religiously ever since her seemingly listless and ineffectual husband was discovered to be engaged in high-level financial chicanery while frequenting expensive call girls on the side. Ronnie had never seemed to be very smart, which must have been his cover, and a very shrewd one at that. It brought to mind the “appearance versus reality” essays I had written in my college Shakespeare class. We’d all written them, though no one, as far as I knew, ever registered the fact that they might have some connection to the way things happened in actual life. But Ronnie was right out of one of those papers. He had duped hundreds of people by appearing to be a boring, garden-variety dunce. Unlike many of the men I had dated, whose bad character was of a more subtle variety and whose infidelities could not be simply condemned (and might, in fact, be blamed on me), Eleanor’s ex was a wolf in lamb’s clothing—underneath his ineffectual facade he was a scoundrel, pure and simple. There was real catharsis in that.
The Wetsons offered a similar if not quite as far-reaching dramatic revelation. They had presented themselves as model citizens, occupying the doggie elite of the building. Now that they had fallen from their pedestal, they would have to slink around with their tails between their legs, so to speak. I noted that the bandannas, the emblems of their complacency, disappeared once they were unmasked. I also learned from Philip and his partner Kurt (who were now my devoted friends) that the Wetsons had ceased frequenting Riverside Park and been sighted in Central Park, a real schlep and generally considered an inconvenient and déclassé dog area by the experts in our building. Justice, at least of a dog-centric variety, had been served.
I’D BEEN MEETING Pauline for lunch on a weekly basis for a few months now, and she’d been trying to get me to start coming to book club again, explaining that if I was interested in getting Derek back, it was just a matter of time. The reconciliation with Bathsheba was not going well. They had had a fight during the discussion of sleeplessness in One Hundred Years of Solitude, when Bathsheba had begun complaining that Derek snored right through the kids’ crying and that it was the old story all over again. He had lashed back: “It’s never enough for you. You’re insatiable. I improve and you raise the bar.”
“They’re thinking of marriage counseling,” said Pauline, “but it’s my opinion that Bathsheba is very demanding and he won’t be able to meet her standards. I know he’d love to get back with you again, if you’re really interested.” She was obviously trying to gauge whether my standards were lower than Bathsheba’s, which wouldn’t say much for me.
I therefore proceeded to spell things out: I had no interest in Derek anymore and, indeed, had never had much interest in him to begin with.
“Thank goodness,” said Pauline, as though she could now finally be frank and also view me with more respect. “He really is a monumental asshole,” she observed.
I have to say that I appreciated Pauline’s sensitivity here. She had kept this uninflected assessment of Derek to herself until she knew where I stood. This is the sign of good manners, I explained to Eleanor, who has a habit of blurting out her opinion of people with whom I have not yet become disillusioned, thereby creating awkwardness between us until I come around to her view. Eleanor insists that it’s the role of a friend to speak the truth no matter what, and that she would have appreciated it if I had been franker with her about Ronnie, who everyone except her seemed to realize was worthless, though without guessing he was also a gigantic sociopath; if I had spoken out, maybe she would have thought twice.
I could see her point, but I still liked Pauline’s tact, which might also be attributed to the fact that she hadn’t known me since the fourth grade and wasn’t familiar with my abysmal record with men.
“There’s always Stephen,” Pauline noted now.
I remembered the colloquy I’d had with Stephen during the Doggie Meet and Greet, and how he had seemed less wispy than I originally thought.
“He’s the math teacher I had in mind to begin with,” clarified Pauline. “He’s smart, though he may be too serious for you.”
I don’t know if this was meant to incite me to prove her wrong or just a simple statement of fact. That I was frivolous and not very smart was not an illogical deduction based on my fling with Derek and my misunderstanding about Philip.
The latter, I should note, had at least yielded benefits, which is more than I can say for the former. Philip and Kurt had already had me back to dinner twice: once for blackened char and once for mussels in a white wine reduction. Both men were gourmet chefs and deep into fish. The tilapia and sun-dried tomatoes should have been a giveaway during that initial conversation, but then lots of things should have been a giveaway. We had all laughed uproariously about my dimwittedness as we enjoyed these subsequent expertly prepared dinners.
“It’s not entirely your fault,” Kurt had said, ladling out the mussels. “Philip has that effect on women, and he’s so sweet that he doesn’t realize it.”
This was said with that mixture of flattery and facetiousne
ss that somehow only a gay man can carry off, which left me wondering whether Philip was actually not so sweet and had realized exactly what he was doing: leading unsuspecting women like myself on to what, in reality TV parlance, would be called “the great reveal.” This was in keeping with Eleanor’s dictum not to trust anyone, and it had the further advantage of allowing me not to label myself a complete moron. When I mentioned this to Philip and Kurt, they only laughed harder and glanced flirtatiously at each other, which I suppose could be taken to support my theory.
But it was all water under the bridge now, and they had become very interested in my love life and promised to keep a lookout for me, though they admitted they didn’t really know any eligible men. Most of their friends were either gay or women like me. Hanging out with them was like being in San Francisco without the hills.
EXCEPT FOR PAULINE, I hadn’t seen the playground women for a long time. But one day I got a call from Iris, mother of the pugnacious Daniel. She was sobbing, saying that I was the only one she had to turn to, which struck me as a reason in itself to be upset.
It turns out that Daniel had hit the in-vitro-generated Matthew with an action figure in a blow that had come very close to the eye. Karen had declared this to be the last straw and had spearheaded a campaign to have Daniel banished from the playground. It was true, Iris admitted, that Daniel was an energetic, high-spirited boy with an emergent case of ADHD, but he meant no harm, anyone could see that, and Matthew was a fearful, overprotected child whose mother went berserk over every little scratch and had singled out Daniel as the scapegoat for her anxiety.
Yet, Iris concluded tearfully, though all this was patently obvious to everyone, the other mothers had not come to her defense. Karen had special status as a result of her more advanced age and her long and expensive in-vitro ordeal. No one felt inclined to challenge her. Iris, by contrast, was an ordinary mother. She had no claim to prestige and thus no following, which is why she had turned to me as an unallied individual with a connection, albeit a tenuous one, to the activity of the playground.
“Even though you pretend to be cynical, everyone knows you have a heart of gold,” Iris noted as an addendum to why she had contacted me. “I noticed how you played so well with your boyfriend’s kids.”
“Ex-boyfriend,” I corrected, feeling a momentary pang. The fact is that though I didn’t miss Derek, I did miss his boys and had even contemplated asking him to drop them off for a play date—if I hadn’t worried that it would sound too pathetic.
Iris’s observation regarding my heart of gold (something that, presumably, the other playground mothers were privy to as well) took me aback. I hadn’t realized that anyone had been paying close enough attention to come up with such a layered assessment of my personality. Dr. Chitturi always said that my sarcasm was a defense, and that I’m actually a very sensitive person, deeply desirous of pleasing and doing what’s right. But Dr. Chitturi is my therapist, for God’s sake; I pay her to put a good spin on me. But for Iris and her friends, engrossed in the vicissitudes of toilet training and pre-school enrichment, to arrive at such a conclusion was surprising. Perhaps they were all more perceptive than I’d given them credit for. Perhaps Iris, at least, had developed a knack for character analysis from having to decipher Daniel’s violent nonverbal behavior. Or perhaps she was just trying to butter me up so that I would do her bidding.
“Won’t you come and help me talk to them?” Iris concluded plaintively. “The other mothers have so much respect for you, as a person and a writer.”
She was now scraping the bottom of the barrel, but it didn’t matter; I was hooked. I agreed to help out, either because I have a heart of gold or because I was a sucker for flattery—you decide.
WHEN WE ARRIVED at the playground the next morning, most of the mothers had already assembled at the picnic table behind the swing set. As we approached, Karen was in the process of holding forth on the need to protect their children from bullies like Daniel.
Karen had initially struck me as a nondescript, shy sort of person. Both on the playground and at book club she had been soft-spoken and reticent. But the injury to Matthew had activated some latent but powerful part of her being, and she now took a strident, rabble-rousing stance. It was a case, in another register, of what I had observed with the seemingly-humdrum-turned-extravagantly-predatory Ronnie: still waters run deep.
The other mothers were not sure how to react to Karen’s furious eruption, and were glancing nervously at each other as Iris and I walked toward them with the guilty Daniel in tow.
As we neared the group, Karen stepped forward to block our approach. “I’m afraid Daniel is not welcome to join the other children,” she announced.
The other mothers drew together expectantly. There was excitement in the air as everyone looked forward to a fight that they would have the luxury of not having a stake in.
“I beg your pardon?” said Iris.
“Daniel has shown himself to be a violent and dangerous child, and we cannot risk having our children exposed to him,” Karen continued.
Daniel, meanwhile, understanding vaguely that they were speaking about him and that it was not flattering, began to whimper.
Karen spelled it out: “We are asking your son to leave.”
The other mothers looked slightly sheepish in being affiliated with this inflexible opposition, but did not protest. Karen had an air of barely contained hysteria, and no one wanted to risk having so much unpredictable emotion turned in their direction.
“I live in this building, and I will not have my child barred from my own playground,” said Iris.
“This playground is a community space, and your child is a menace,” Karen retorted.
Daniel’s whimpering had now escalated to outright bawling, causing the other mothers to look at each other in consternation. A child who could cry couldn’t be all bad, and the suspicion began to emerge that Karen might be going too far. It may have occurred to them that if Daniel was a bully, Karen was one too, and she was forty-five years old.
Feeling the tide turn, it struck me that this might be a good time to intercede.
“May I say a word?” I broke in tentatively.
“What do you want?” snapped Karen, turning on me angrily. “You don’t belong here. You don’t even have a child.”
This was a low blow for which I was not prepared. Tears welled up in my eyes, a response that, as it turned out, worked to my benefit. The other mothers noticed and grew quiet. It was sad enough that I didn’t have a child of my own, but rubbing it in was simply going too far. I could see that Karen had lost a good deal of leverage in making both Daniel and me cry in the course of a few minutes.
But in the temporary lull of that moment I also had a revelation. The play group had appealed to me in one respect, if in nothing else—it had seemed to promote kindness as a value. Kindness was something in short supply in this world, and I had, if only unconsciously, warmed to the notion that these mothers, despite their inane preoccupations, had created a utopia based on this value. Daniel’s ostracism from the group contradicted this idea, and it was this violation, I realized, that bothered me. If mothers and their kids couldn’t be kind to each other, who the hell could? There would be no solving the crisis in the Middle East, for one thing, if this presumably most benign group on earth couldn’t figure out how to get along.
At the same time, I must concede that I also understood Karen’s response. Who was I to meddle in these women’s business? What did I know about child-rearing? To my surprise, however, I no sooner raised these questions in my own mind than I answered them reflexively out loud, stepping forward to address Karen and the other mothers with uncharacteristic forcefulness: “It is precisely because I don’t have a child of my own that I feel entitled to address you all,” I said, wiping away the tears that I pretended had made it down my cheeks (a few of which actually had). “As someone who isn’t blessed as you are, I feel obliged to remind you of the sacred trust that accompanies y
our good fortune.” I now assumed some of the spirited verbosity of a civil rights preacher: “You must not, tempting though it is, retreat into selfish complacency, caring only for your own child,” I said, looking severely at Karen. “You should, instead, see yourselves as the mothers of all”—I made a sweeping motion at the toddlers who had begun rifling through the Vera Bradley quilted bags in search of juice boxes and fruit snacks—”and help make a better, more equitable world, where all children are nurtured and accepted. You have it in your power to produce a better world, where the lion will lie down with the lamb”—I motioned to Daniel, the lion, and Matthew, the lamb. “This challenge is bestowed on you as a sacred trust, and I call on you, from the bottom of my heart, to meet it.”
The mothers were staring at me, wondering for a second what to make of my words—which most people would have put down to the ravings of a lunatic. But, let’s face it, when it comes to New York mothers, there’s no amount of meaning that you can impose on their role that they won’t accept. Savior of the western world? Sure. Model for peace and prosperity? They could buy that. The whole “sacred trust” thing fit in perfectly with their need to justify having quit that job in high finance, dropped out of med school, thumbed their nose at the fellowship opportunity at the London School of Economics, in order to spend their days slicing apples and watching SpongeBob SquarePants.
There was a murmur of approval from the mothers, and after some whispering and affectionate pushing, Iris and Karen actually hugged. There was applause. Everyone began to cry. The mothers surged forward to embrace the frightened Daniel. Matthew was paraded up and thrust into Daniel’s arms. The whole thing, really, was pretty dramatic, and had you told me that I had it in me to negotiate such a resolution, I wouldn’t have believed you.
AND SO IT ALL was happily resolved: Daniel would be worked over by the mothers and taught to be less aggressive, while Matthew would be encouraged to stand up for himself and not depend so much on maternal protection. This seemed like an acceptable compromise for all concerned, and Karen was able to relax and discuss the literature of risk relating to Matthew’s next vaccine, which, as it turned out, was really what was worrying her anyway.
Suzanne Davis gets a life Page 8
