by Jill Kargman
“Uh-huh,” I said, feigning enthrallment.
“I have the most wonderful Indian gal. But I’d get a Malaysian. They’re quite fastidious,” said Bee. “I had just the best one as a baby nurse right after I had Weston.”
“I thought Noona was Thai,” said Maggie.
“Same noodle, different sauce,” shrugged Bee. “But go with someone from Asia.”
I was starting to feel very uncomfortable.
“And avoid the Islands,” added Bee. “I had this one woman from Trinidad. So much ’tude. And lazy! She moved like a glacier, and was the size of one, too. I’d have to point out everything. Like, hello? This silver picture frame could not be more tarnished! And the South American nannies, they’re all busy gossiping and speaking Spanish and meanwhile the kids are dangling from the highest rung on the jungle gym.”
I sat silent, stunned.
“Everyone has issues. I mean, even with the Malaysians, be careful,” Bee continued. “A lot are very sneaky. There’s always a sick relative or some reason they need a day off or more money suddenly.”
“Iceland is really big these days,” piped in Maggie. “Tons of nannies on the scene from Reykjavik. I’ve heard good things.”
“But be careful if you go that route,” said Bee with a glint of warning in her eye. “You don’t want a sitter hotter than you. Everyone knows about Janie Ribicoff’s husband banging the Swedish nanny. My advice is stay away from Scandinavia. Clichés exist for a reason, Hannah. Do not get someone that might turn Josh’s head.”
What? Were they implying Josh’s head would turn? Not that I was Miss America, but I was not worried in that department. To be totally honest, I probably wouldn’t hire a supermodel doppelgänger anyway, but I barely knew Bee and Maggie, so the whole horrifyingly racist convo made me ill. How could they make proclamations about entire islands, let alone continents?
It was as if Bee truly saw herself as a superior being to her staff. I never grew up with “help.” My parents were hands-on, and when they wanted to go out, we had a cool college girl come and hang with us—never a starched white uniform in sight. So the whole concept of my being someone’s boss was too strange to me. I watched Violet giggling as she ran under the racks of clothes.
“’Scuse me one sec,” I said, pulling my ejector seat on the convo and bolting to go play with Violet.
I sat down cross-legged next to her on the floor, and when I looked up and saw a few blond-bob types looking down at me in more ways than one, I realized perhaps I shouldn’t be plopped on the carpet of the suite. So I picked up Violet, put her on my hip, and began to peruse the clothes.
The handmade lace was more intricate and well tailored than anything in my closet. The little dentelle collars so delicate, the tiny cashmere sweaters softer than anything I’d touched aside from Violet’s skin. The prices? Two hundred seventy-five smacks for the sweater, which I don’t even spend on myself, unless it’s a whole outfit. But a top? That she’ll wear thrice? Sheesh. A little velvet holiday dress was $375, a wool pinafore, $250. A wool coat with a gray velvet collar and covered buttons was $450. I wondered if it would be tacky to bolt and not buy anything. I’d already snarfed five of those little tea sandwiches so I felt pressured to cough it up for something. Plus the loot was beyond adorable. Too bad Josh would cut my credit card into pieces if I even dared order anything that exorbitant.
“Hiiiii!” a somewhat familiar nasal voice said. “Tessa Finch-Saunders. Didn’t we meet at the Seventy-second Street playground?”
“Oh, yes, hi—Hannah Allen.”
“I just did some major damage!” she confessed with faux dread. “But this stuff is to die for, the cutest.”
The logo-covered pixie gave me a wide smile as her sales consultant tallied her total on a Lucite clipboard. “Okay, that’ll be three thousand six hundred seventy-two with tax,” she said, smoothly swiping Tessa’s AmEx black card. Tessa simply nodded casually and took out the pen to sign.
“I’m gonna go find Bee,” I said. “Have a great day.” I bolted, stunned by her purchase and psyched to report the “major damage,” until I saw that Bee and Maggie were buying easily as much, if not more.
I peered into the boys’ apparel section of the suite, replete with navy blue blazers, mini preppy striped ties, and crisp shirts like mini versions of those worn by their Wall Street daddies, who brought home the bacon so the wives could go on these crazy sprees. Bee and Maggie were chatting breezily while piling stacks and stacks of samples to order on their arms.
I walked in to say au revoir. “The stuff is gorgeous. Thanks for inviting me.”
“Byeeee!” Violet said.
“Oh, good-bye, Violet. Are you leaving, Hannah?” asked Bee. “Did you even get anything?”
“Yes, I’m getting this little blouse,” I said, holding up a cute Peter Pan chemise, which was the one thing I could actually stomach plonking down multiple dead presidents for. Maybe Violet was not a “little duchess” to their little dukes, but monarchies are getting crusty anyway.
“Okay, well, let’s do lunch tomorrow. Why don’t you drop Violet and my nanny will watch her with West? Sh’we say noon? I’ll make a reservation at La Goulue.”
“Um, okay, sounds good.”
“See you tomorrow!” said Maggie, barely turning from her rack of miniature cable-knit sweaters.
AND AFTER THEIR SHOP FEST…
Instant Message from: BeeElliott
BeeElliott: Boys are sooo much better, girls are so difficult and bratty. Aren’t you so glad we had boys?
Maggs10021: Oh, totally. Boys are delish, they love their mommies.
BeeElliott: Thank God you’re having another! I’m so excited to meet little Talbott Xavier. I hope when we get preg I have another boy.
Maggs10021: No, just as long as it’s healthy…
BeeElliott: No, I reeeally want another boy. I love being the woman of the house, you know? Just me and my boys. I just couldn’t deal with having a girl running around. They become the apple of the husband’s eye.
Maggs10021: I think girls are sweet though…Violet Allen is a total cutie.
BeeElliott: You think so? I don’t know. Hannah kinda bugs.
Maggs10021: Why?
BeeElliott: Did you see she barely bought one thing?
Maggs10021: Whatev. Psyched for lunch tom.
BeeElliott: Yeah, I promised Park I’d intro her to the gang. I just don’t want her to Krazy Glue herself to us. She could turn out to be a serious barnacle.
Eight
I showed up at Bee’s apartment at noon to find a spread out of an editorial in a shelter mag—full lavish patterned drapes, overstuffed velvet couches, gorgeous gleaming white carpets—definitely a pad that little Violet would destroy in a nanosecond. She was used to humbler surroundings.
“Wow,” I said, wide-eyed. “Your apartment is beautiful, Bee.”
“Oh, thanks. We just had it redone last year by Huniford and Sills,” she said.
“Oh, my decorator is Crate and Barrel!” I added with a smile. She didn’t smile back.
“Hi, Hannah,” said Maggie coming out of the kitchen, drinking a liter of Evian. “Shall we?”
“Hello, Weston!” I said patting his head. He stuck his tongue out at me and ran off.
I hugged Violet good-bye and felt a pang of guilt leaving her with strangers, but she seemed eager to bolt off into Weston’s bedroom.
At lunch, Bee and Maggie introduced me to two other women whom I hadn’t known were joining us: Hallie, a Julianne Moore–esque dark redhead, and Lara, a human skeleton with a diamond ring so big, Sasha Cohen could do a triple axel on it and still have room to skate into a double sow-cow.
Lara wore small, thin frameless glasses on her nose and put a hand through her shiny mane of platinum blond hair. “Uh, I’m frizzing so badly. I just went to Fekkai and now you wouldn’t even know it,” she complained.
“No, you look amazing,” said Bee, sipping her iced tea with fresh mint. “TDF.” It
took me ten seconds to realize that meant to die for.
“My hair is in two zip codes!” I added, pointing at the wavy frizzfest atop my noggin. No one countered.
“Hannah’s mother-in-law is Lila Allen Dillingham,” Bee said to her pals.
“Oh, she is so chic,” raved Hallie. “I pray I look like her at that age, she’s stunning.”
I didn’t feel like telling her if she wanted to shell it out for Dr. Dan, she could.
“Yeah, she’s so out of the pages of Vogue,” I said. “I feel like I’m totally bringing down the family’s style quotient!” No one said anything to the contrary. The ladies perused the menu, all opting for salads, dressing on the side. No wonder they weighed the same as their kids.
After we ordered lunch, I sat quietly, barely contributing to the convo about schools, clubs, and people I had never heard of. After about fifteen minutes, I gleaned the lay of the social land as they gossiped about all things mommy—recent births, names that were tacky, who’d lost the weight, who “had a long way to go.” While Bee was the definitely the ringleader, Lara, who had a son, Maxwell, was quite opinionated herself (“It’s so strange to not at least try and skip the epidural”—she’d even had the words natural childbirth engraved on the lower left corner of her kid’s Cartier birth announcement). I wondered what she’d thought of her friend Bee’s elective C-section at eight and a half months. I remembered how a few years back Bee, always the trend arbiter, was a huge proponent of the Too Posh to Push movement, telling me in a whisper that if I got sliced open that Josh would thank me for it. After that moment, I was somehow always haunted by her implication that now my post-birth vag was not unlike the Holland Tunnel.
Then there was Hallie, the crispy bobbed redhead, who almost immediately rubbed me the wrong way. Hallie had a two-year-old daughter, Julia Charlotte. Not Julia. Julia Charlotte. Like Sarah Jessica, one of those middle name junkies, and not just when they’re in trouble, like, “Violet Grace, you stop that right now!” I’m talking “Julia Charlotte could be in Baby Gap ads” and “Julia Charlotte is completely bilingual” and “Julia Charlotte is sooo brilliant it’s frightening.” I also got the vibe that Julia Charlotte’s mom, Hallie, was extreeeeemely competitive.
Within seconds of establishing that we both had daughters, she began her battery of statistics questions. What percentile was Violet’s height? What percentile was Violet’s weight? What percentile was Violet’s head circumference? I rattled off the answers I knew as best I could (I really didn’t keep track; my California doctor was not so obsessed with charts and graphs and rankings), and then came the doozy. Hallie asked me, dead seriously, what Violet’s Apgar scores were. I had to stop and place what the hell those even were when I remembered reading about the quick post-birth tests in The Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy, my bible when I was knocked up.
“Gosh, I can’t remember,” I said, honestly. “I know they took Violet away to demucus her and put her under that French fry–warmer thing,” I recalled. “Then they brought her back and said she was perfectly healthy.”
“Did she get a perfect score, though? ’Cause Julia Charlotte got all tens. They only give out nines. Ever. But Julia Charlotte got tens. All tens. It’s so funny, with almost everything she’s off the charts!”
A feeble “Oh, cool” was all I could muster.
Then Lara started talking about how “gifted” her son, Maxwell, was. “Oh you guys, Maxwell is so genius it is scary. Literally, he says things sometimes and I am scared. His Mandarin teacher said he’s a quicker study than the Asians! He is scary smart. Better than the Asian kids!”
Deep down I guess all mothers think their kid is the smartest and the greatest, but I still would never say stuff like that. I also would not send a toddler to Chinese class, unless maybe we were moving to Hong Kong. I of course thought about all the cute clever things Violet had said which seemed, naturally, even cuter and smarter than Lara’s brags about Maxwell memorizing the ROYGBIV color spectrum at twelve months or doing times tables at twenty-six months. In Chinese. And what the hell was this “twenty-six months” thing. Couldn’t she just say two? I mean, can I please do without the math? Even basic division is a hassle for me at this point. No months for me. Two. Two-and-a-half. Three.
“So, ladies, Thatcher and I saw the best film this weekend,” started Hallie. “It’s called Memoirs of a Nobody—have you heard of it?”
“Oh, yes! I’m dying to see that,” said Bee, surprising me. “I read a piece about it in the Wall Street Journal. It sounds very powerful.”
“Oh yeah!” exclaimed Maggie. “Is that the one from Sun-dance that was all made on an iMac for like forty dollars?”
“Yes, that’s the one,” Hallie said. “I cried for two days, it is so disturbing.”
I hadn’t heard of it. In fact, I felt so out of it, I wasn’t even up on the latest splashy blockbuster, let alone an indie documentary. I guess these gals really kept up with their reading. I was so low-energy lately, the only thing I even cracked was fashion mags and cheesy celeb-packed weekly tabloids. I’m sure my lunch companions would be horrified that while I knew little about the current documentary scene, I did know plenty about Britney and K-Fed’s marriage, who was suddenly obese, and what trendy baby names were sweeping H’wood.
“Oh, I heard the film is devastating, just gut-wrenching. But highly provocative,” said Maggie.
“It’s funny,” I said, venturing to join the conversation. “So many people recommend these movies that they love, but get so upset after. I’m such an emotional freak, I never go because I don’t want to get down,” I said.
Silence.
“What do you mean?” asked Lara, as if I’d just said I eat maggots for snacks.
The sudden heat of their four gazes made me shift anxiously in my seat. “Well, it’s just whenever people say something’s disturbing, I kind of think, okay that’s not for me.” I shrugged, nervously. “I guess I’m just never in the mood to cry for two days is all.”
“How sad!” said Hallie, astonished, looking at Bee as if wondering how on earth she could have dragged such a loser to their lunch. “I mean—Hannah, is it?”
I nodded.
“Don’t you want to be stimulated and challenged and therefore be a better mother to your child by having a brain that’s not mush?”
My heart was racing. Okay, my brain was mush, I’ll admit it. But I wasn’t retarded or anything.
“I guess since I had Violet I just don’t like upsetting, tragic things or violence,” I replied, defending myself. “Maybe because, I don’t know, maybe having Violet made me feel more vulnerable or something.”
“Fine,” Lara said, lifting her Perrier. “Suit yourself. If you want to ‘feel good’ and sit around watching Shrek for the rest of your life, be my guest.”
Ouch.
“I don’t know, I guess I see your point,” I said, feeling wounded by her belittling comment.
“Oh good, food’s here,” said Maggie, changing the topic. “I’m starving.”
Nine
When I told Josh about my day, he seemed interested—particularly by some of the funny choice quotables—but thoroughly exhausted. His new job was sapping the life from him, but I knew he was so happy to finally be home that he didn’t mind. The problem was…I minded. I missed him so much. So despite my visceral loathing of Greenwich and feeling stranded at Lila’s house, I was just happy to all be a family again.
But Saturday morning when we woke up, while it was so nice to have Violet jump on our bed and watch Josh do “flying baby” with her (his feet on her tummy as she’s lifted up in the air, giggling), I couldn’t distract myself from the pit in my tummy. I felt like if I had a soundtrack at that very moment, it would be the noise you hear when Ms. Pac-Man dies: a slow withering followed by a putt-putt as the poor yellow circle-with-hairbow expires. We got into our rickety Volvo and hit the road for Connecticut, one of my least favorite states in the union. It’s so fucking Ice Storm. On our way, w
e pulled over to Pick a Bagel and scored some carbolas for the drive—I always stocked up because the Dillinghams were so überwaspy the fridge was empty save for some Miracle Whip and white wine bottles, swear. I patted Josh’s head; he looked so cute but I knew he was still so tired. We blared K-Rock and as we finally got on the FDR and shifted gears after interminable traffic on Ninety-sixth, I turned up the volume to eleven, Spinal Tap–style, and chair-danced to Nine Inch Nails. I got Joshie to smile as I got wilder, shaking my head and spaz air-drumming like Animal from The Muppet Show. I looked in the bag, deciding which bagel to devour first, and cracked open my apple juice. Ahhhh, elixir of the gods, this stuff. Like liquid honey.
I fed Josh bites of bagel as he drove, and we cruised pretty quickly, my staticky beloved hard rock station flickering on the Merritt Parkway. I knew we were officially in Creepsville, Suburbia, when strains of Thom Yorke’s melted croon waned. That was always when the mental piranha set in, nibbling away at my freedom—I knew we were almost there when my music was gone. We wove through the swirling roads leading up to his family’s house. I actually preferred going in the winter—at least then the empty black trees had a wistful graphic punch off the white sky, like a film still from a Tim Burton movie, crisp and bold and proud, not even wanting back their clichéd and gauche green leaves that covered us in wilted verdant canopies now.
We pulled in the grand driveway and parked as my heart raced. We unpacked the trunk and sprung Violet from her baby seat and knocked via the enormous lion’s-head knocker on the giant double portal. A cute Latin-looking woman opened the door, in full black-and-white maid’s outfit. Mrs. Dillingham fired the “help” (as she called them) so frequently that Josh and I could never remember their names—it was a revolving door of pressed, starched uniforms.
“Hello,” Lila said, descending the large white marble staircase. “Josh, my aaaangel, come here.” She approached him and hugged him, barely acknowledging me. “And Violet, love, you wore one of your new dresses! How divine you look!”
