But now that I was in the library, finding my way to the Storytime Room, I wasn’t smiling any longer because I had no idea what to expect.
The Storytime Room was brightly decorated with children in mind and had a capacity of about thirty people, judging from the seating setup. Most of the seats were already taken and I had to search for a minute before finding the last vacant seat in the middle of the third row. Seating myself between a grandfatherly man and a fiftysomething woman in a business suit who was reading a book while waiting for whatever was supposed to start to start, I noticed that in front of the first row of seats, down on the ground, were a couple of rows of small children.
The grandfatherly man had a hearing aid on the ear that was to my side so, worrying that if I asked him I might still have to shout, I leaned toward the woman on my right, started to whisper, “Do you know what the program—”
But before I could finish, a librarian type of woman wearing a laminated name tag on a lanyard made an announcement.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, we here at the Las Vegas Library are pleased to welcome back today Chris Westacott, yo-yoist extraordinaire!”
Everyone clapped politely, with the exception of the woman to my right, as Chris took the center of the nubby gray carpeting. Gone were his slick dealer clothes and while he obviously couldn’t grow his shaggy hair back overnight, his whole appearance was more like the version of him I’d originally met. Instead of black pants, he now had on low-slung long khaki shorts that came to the knee. Instead of a cummerbund, he had on a brown leather belt that was barely holding up the khaki shorts. Instead of a crisp white shirt, he had on a maroon T-shirt that said Spanky Ate Here.
Chris took the microphone from the librarian and gave a slight bow to his audience.
“Thanks,” he said. “First, I’m going to do a few tricks and, in between, if there are any questions, I’ll be glad to answer them. Actually,” he smiled winningly, “I sweat so much under these lights that if you ask me questions, you’ll be doing me a favor.”
And then he went to work, much of what he was doing being things I’d seen him do before: round the world, walking the dog, the two-handed yo-yo trick. But there was a difference between seeing him here and the times I’d seen him performing in the lobbies of casinos. Oh, he still lost control of his yo-yos here occasionally, but there were no Billys to heckle him and the crowd, young and old alike, were so entranced with what he was doing that no one seemed to mind if he made a few fumbles.
“Isn’t he terrific?” I asked the lady next to me as he made a hot-pink yo-yo go round and round.
“Oh, that’s one word for him all right,” she said.
Chris finished the trick and he paused, obviously hoping someone would ask him a question. A little boy in the front row obliged.
“How many hours a day do you practice?” the boy asked.
“That’s a great question,” Chris said, wiping his brow. “Eight, if I can get it in. Yo-yoing, if you want to be good at it, is a full-time job.”
He did another trick, this time turning out the lights and using glow-in-the-dark yo-yos so that it was like two ghouls revolving in the night.
“Can you make a living at what you do?” a little girl asked during the next break.
“It’s not easy,” Chris said, “but I suppose that if a person could fill their calendar with enough jobs and was willing to travel all over the country to do libraries and exhibitions and things, sure, why not? Now watch this…”
But when Chris tried to do his next trick, it turned out there was a competing performer in the room: a little girl, about five years old, with long brown hair, big brown eyes like chocolate drops, and a pink Lycra halter dress on with yellow-and-green trim, who obviously thought her half-executed cartwheels were an entertainment match for the yo-yo-meister. Even though she was interrupting Chris’s show, he didn’t seem to mind, and I smiled along with him as she cartwheeled in a misshapen circle around his performance area. I’d never given any thought to having kids of my own before, but watching that energetic girl, with her personality brighter than a shooting star, I suddenly wanted one.
“God,” I said aloud, “I’d love to have a kid like that.”
“That’s my kid up there,” said the lady to my right.
“She is?” I was surprised. The lady would have had to have had her when she was in her late forties at least, if that was indeed her little girl.
“Not the girl,” she said, eyes focused on the performance area, where Chris had started to do yet another trick. “The boy. Or, I guess I should say, man.”
“The guy with the yo-yos is your son?”
I mean, it wasn’t exactly like meeting Mary, mother of you-know-who, but it was close enough.
I looked at her more closely: steel-colored hair, matching glasses, gray eyes. She didn’t look a thing like Chris and not just because of all of that. It was the suit. She looked like she’d been wearing a suit for thirty-five years. Well, maybe not the same one, but you get the picture.
“He’s my son all right,” she said, and I couldn’t tell from her tone if she was proud or not.
“You must be very proud of him,” I said.
“You think? I just thought I’d come here today to see how he was doing. I don’t get to see him perform very often. Usually, he does it too far away or it’s during hours when I’m working, but this time it was right at home…Of course, I couldn’t get his father to come.”
“You must be so proud of him,” I said again, eyes glued on Chris and realizing how much I meant it. “You and your husband must both be so proud.”
“Why?” she asked earnestly, as if she really didn’t know.
“My God,” I said, “look at him.” I gestured. “Look at them.” I pointed to the rows of kids, each face enraptured by whatever the heck it was Chris was doing with that oversized yo-yo. “Your son creates real joy in the world. He makes other people happy. I mean, I don’t think those kids could be any happier if he’d given them each a dozen donuts and I don’t think the adults could be happier if he’d washed all their windows.”
“Huh?”
“Think about it,” I said. “He’s smart. He could have been a doctor or a lawyer or a businessperson—” “Which is exactly what his father and I wanted him to be.”
“—but instead, he does something that brings genuine happiness into the world to everyone he performs for. Well, so long as it’s not in casinos. Honestly, what better job could he possibly ever have? He makes people happy.”
“Huh.”
Before leaving for the airport the next day, I tossed my copy of Blackjack Winning Basics, by Tony Casino, in the trash.
Epilogue
From Shakespeare we learn that tragedy ends in death, while comedy ends in marriage.
Has anyone died here?
People have surely been dying all over the place while I’ve been telling my story—from disease, from accident, from war, from evil and from sheer stupidity—but I don’t think anyone has died here. On the contrary, not only is there one marriage of sorts looming on the horizon; there are several.
Conchita and Rivera have realized that they are each the better other half of the other.
Stella is giving up Squeaky Qlean for good in favor of becoming Elizabeth Hepburn’s live-in companion, enabling Elizabeth to give scheming Lottie the sack.
Black Jack Sampson has permanently laid down his nickname and will go back to being simply Jack Sampson for all time on the day he marries Vanessa Parker. As Jackie Mason would say: mazel tov.
Hillary Clinton will go the whole traditional route, marrying Biff Williams in a white satin gown with red roses and baby’s breath threaded through her hair. Old habit will make her toss the bouquet to the woman who will stand closest to her during the Episcopalian service and then she will need to rethrow it since her best friend is not her maid of honor, but rather her matron of honor, since her best friend—drum roll, please!—is already married.
Two years after the Vegas debacle—Sin City!—Chris and I tied the knot. In the interim, he persuaded me to finish my degree and I am now, like my mother before me, a teacher of English, only in my case I teach Shakespeare to senior high-school students who show more interest in sex than sonnets. Still, it allows me to channel my obsessive nature into something I love since, while teaching, I get to read my beloved Shakespeare over and over and over again.
As for Chris, he is now a full-time yo-yoist who travels all around the country for his work. This means that I do not get to see him as much as I would like, but being married to someone who is content is far preferable to being married to someone who is miserable.
We got married on a mountain in Maine in the autumn, our less sturdy family and friends needing to ride the ski lift up. When it came time to exchange rings, he had an extra surprise for me that he’d had Biff, his best man, carry up the slope. Out of a backpack he pulled a shoe box, within which was a pair of Jimmy Choos: the Ghost. Then he took out a high-heeled sandal, copper-colored, more pink than bronze, with diamond-shaped sapphire-colored stones encrusted with crystal stones across the toe strap and more sapphire and crystal bejeweling the intricate mesh of chain around the ankle with three straps of chain anchoring it to more copper leather at the back. I swear, when he slipped that gorgeous shoe on my foot, I felt as though my mother was kissing me on the cheek.
And on our honeymoon in Saint Croix, where we didn’t leave our hotel room for a solid week? Chris didn’t drop his yo-yos. Not once.
We now live in our own house in Danbury, where our cabinets are stocked with organic cocoa-flavored cereal, our freezer stocked with almost every organic product Amy’s has ever made. We’re still addicts, but we’ve learned to compensate, to make our addictions work for us rather than hurting us, and I’ve learned to forsake Diet Pepsi Lime and Jake’s Fault Shiraz for the nonce because—second drumroll here, please!—I’m pregnant with our first child. And, with a little luck, I won’t become so addicted to having babies that I turn into The Old Woman In A Shoe.
BABY NEEDS A NEW PAIR OF SHOES
A Red Dress Ink novel
ISBN: 978-1-4268-2146-2
© 2008 by Lauren Baratz-Logsted.
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