by Jill Kargman
“To the event. You know, it’s like a pre-event.”
A photographer from W snapped pix of the swans smiling together in clusters, including a close-up of Bee and Lila with their arms around each other.
Finally, Bee stopped vamping for the camera and came over to sit with us.
“I am pooped!” she wailed, putting a manicured hand to her head. “West is so sick, poor kid.” She looked at her diamond-bordered watch.
“You must have to go back,” I said sympathetically. “I actually have to go, too.”
“Oh, I’m not going home! I have a dinner for LAMP—Less Acne More Pride—and then some friends are in town and we’re going to Bungalow 8.”
So much for rushing home to the sick kid.
I got up to excuse myself so I could go home to my daughter and tried to find Lila, without success. Finally, I turned a corner and heard her voice. I stopped when I heard my name.
“Hannah is simply no Bee,” she said in confessional tones to another blond skeletore. “I need to talk to Josh about having her try a little harder. I just don’t want my granddaughter to end up in the wrong world: playgroups, schools, activities, everything.”
“Oh, Lila, that could never happen,” her friend promised.
“With a mother like that, you never know! Look at Bee Elliott and her friends. They are just so charming and their children all go to Carnegie. I pray that happens for little Violet. Then she’d be on the right track for life.”
Tears burned in my eyes and I quickly darted to the elevator vestibule before a lone tear could escape. I burst through the gold-bar-covered glass doors onto Fifth and burst into tears. All my worst suspicions were true: Lila saw me as a liability and not an asset. I guess I always knew it, but hearing it loud and clear was a wake-up call. While I wanted to say Screw you, I knew I needed to do everything in my power to keep her happy so she didn’t go running to Josh about how I was a shitty mom and not part of the scene. Lila was Josh’s only family and I didn’t want to make him choose; I’d have to be on her team.
Twenty
There’s nothing I hate more than a Sanctimommy. The more I thought about that beeyotch Hallie saying I had to “get on it” with Violet’s potty training, the more I wished I’d told her to fuck off. But that wasn’t me. I always wanted to have the great zinger, the right-back-atcha line, but I was the Monday-morning quarterback who always thought of what to do in hindsight. That particular Monday morning, the heat was unbearable. I was walking down the street, each step an effort, with sweat covering my whole body. Per Bee and then Lila’s urging, I had tried calling Dr. Careth, society pediatrician, and was put on hold. For twenty-three minutes. “Baby Beluga” was playing on a loop and I almost hurled the phone out the window. I thought it must have been a mistake and they’d forgotten about me, so I hung up and called again. The woman who answered spoke as fast as those fine-print voiceover people in car and drug commercials, “Sideeffectsincludenauseaandanalleakage,” whatever.
“DrCarethsofficepleasehold.”
So I held for another thirty-one minutes. I thought I would go insane. I wanted to find the “Baby Beluga” guy and slaughter him. Finally, the woman came back on. “Hello how can I-help you?” A trillion shrill phones rang in the background as if Jerry Lewis were conducting a telethon on the premises.
“Hi, um—I—my family just moved here and I wanted to make an appointment for a checkup? For my two-year-old. Bee Elliott is a friend and she said—”
“Pleaseholdonemoment.” More waiting. “Hello? Yes, we can take you December seventeenth at eleven forty-five.”
Huh? “You mean, like, in four months?” I asked.
“Yes. He’s fully booked until then.”
Great. What if Violet, God forbid, had a problem? I wasn’t going to wait on hold every time she needed to see this guy, even if he was “the best.”
“Okay. Um, I think I need to find someone sooner than that. Thank you so much, anyway—” Click.
Violet came scampering in, singing the “Elmo’s World” theme song. Today Elmo was thinking about: airplanes! The TV showed a montage of children traveling to all corners of the earth. I thought about how nice it would be to just jet off somewhere—Rome, Chicago, New Delhi, even the Alps to accompany Josh on his business trip, not that we were invited or that I wanted Violet near tanks of piranhas. When Sesame Street was brought to us by the letter K and the number 11, we went outside and hit Oren’s Coffee Roasters, my daily crack dealer, I mean, coffee bar. The cool-looking (un-Starbucksian) barristas all knew Violet’s name and gave her a happy shoutout every morning when we wheeled in. It reminded me of my cool indie coffee joint at home, where all the nose-pierced artists would work to make ends meet. After Josh and I drove cross-country, we realized that in every small town the edgy cool people all work at one of two spots: the local record store or the coffee bar. As I waited for my iced coffee with extra half-and-half and vanilla syrup (I liked it to taste like melted Häagen-Dazs), a sweet-looking older gentleman was smiling at Violet. She giggled as he made funny faces then smiled at me. “You’re great with kids,” I said, as Violet beamed with a coy smile.
“I’m a pediatrician,” he replied. Jackpot.
“Really? Because we just moved here and I need a doctor for Violet! Is your office nearby?”
“Right up the street,” he said, handing me his card. “Dr. Smith.”
“She still hasn’t had her two-year checkup, so I’m calling right now.”
“I think we can get you in there, Violet,” he said, pinching her cheek.
Phew! That was easy. I called his office from my cell after he’d left with his espresso (which I would need to mainline were I to have that job) and his sweet office assistant answered right away. And though there were still phones ringing in the background, they could get us in that afternoon. Bingo!
As Violet and I walked around, we passed a bus shelter with an ad for the Morgan exhibit. I felt a jolt in my midsection that I was actually meeting Professor Hayes and walked around in a daze until lunch. Violet and I strolled to Three Guys diner on Madison and Seventy-sixth Street, near Dr. Smith’s offices, and got a table for lunch. The place was packed with toddlers and yummy mummies, dressed perfectly, some with nannies on hand to assist in lunchtime feeding. It was a kiddie explosion complete with cacophony of whines, thrown fries, and spilled milk. Violet sat in her high chair and ate her grilled cheese, which I’d sliced into strips. Just as I was realizing that this was the epicenter of mommypalooza—that all roads led to Three Guys for lunch—Bee walked in with Weston.
“Hi, Hannah!” she said, looking us over. “Great to see you! How was the rest of your weekend? You know, after the whole party thing?”
“Fine, we just relaxed. We spent a lot of time walking around, playing in the Sheep’s Meadow.”
“Really? Ugh, I hate that place! It’s all these stoners playing Hacky Sack. Weren’t you scared those ultimate Frisbee junkies would hit you?”
“Not really.”
“I just always feel like I need to boil myself after spending time there. I mean, at Chapin we’d sit there and smoke with the guys, but I honestly haven’t been back since.”
“Oh.”
“So, Troy said he hasn’t heard from you in a while.”
“Who?”
“Troy Kincaid. The broker? He said you all were rethinking the budget?”
So much for broker privilege. “Well, yeah, we may just stay in a rental, actually.”
“Hiii guys!” Maggie then walked in with Hallie and Lara and broods. Great.
“Sorry we’re late, Bee!” said Maggie. “Hi Hannah, hi Violet!”
The posse plopped at the booth adjacent to our table. We could still talk, but clearly they were one unit and Violet and I were another, with the aisle between us signifying a lot more than a path for the Greek waiter.
Just then, a blond woman, her six towheaded children, and three nannies came in and headed to the back, where the bigger tab
les were.
“Hi Cindy!” said Bee as she passed.
“Oh, hi guys.” She waved, looking frazzled but still immaculately put together.
Bee leaned across the aisle to me after she passed. “That’s Cindy Hetherington, billionaire. Her in-laws invented the reaper. She’s a competitive birther.”
I almost spat out my Sprite. “What?”
“You know, bangs out a trillion kids. She has six kids under six years old. Makes her feel superior to everyone. It’s like she has something to prove.”
“Wow, I commend her.”
“Don’t. Her family was so screwed up,” said Maggie conspiratorially. “Her dad was banging the secretary and her mom became a lesbo afterward. Nightmare!”
I felt awful as I looked at the perky Cindy getting her litter settled at the massive back table.
“Dr. Poundschlosser said on the QT that clearly she’s trying to right the wrongs in her family history by having this massive blond brood,” Lara added in a confidential whisper. “Speaking of which,” she said, looking over Violet. “Hannah, where on earth did Violet get her goldilocks? ’Cause you could not have darker hair.”
I heard this all the time, but this time it was almost as if Lara was like mad at me that Violet was blond. Maybe it was because Lara was blond and Maxwell had brown hair? “Um…yeah, I know. I have blond in my family, though, and Josh used to be blond as a kid—”
“But I thought brown always wins,” Maggie said, confused. Wait, were they like accusing me of banging the postman? Plus, brown wins? Did she mean genetically dominates?
“Well, it doesn’t always…win,” I said. “I must have recessive blue eyes and blond hair somewhere, ya know, like that big B, little b Punnett-square stuff?” Blank faces. “Ninth-grade biology?” Didn’t these people go to fucking Princeton?
“Sometimes I see that,” said Bee. “It does happen sometimes. Like a freak thing.”
“I don’t get it,” Lara said, almost pissed. “I couldn’t be blonder and Maxwell still ended up with dark hair! It’s so unfair.” Um, was Hitler reincarnated? If she wanted an Aryan nation, she should move to God’s country in the rural Pacific Northwest.
Unfair? Okay…weird. I mean, who cares? Plus, it was semi-weird and overtly narcissistic for a blonde to just come out and say it’s better to be like her.
“Maybe this summer in the Hamptons the sun will bleach it,” she said, patting Maxwell’s fluffy head.
Poor kid. I knew damn well she was about to pour vats of Sun In, lemon juice, and probably pure peroxide on his locks and come home chalking it up to sunshine at the beach. Gag. After a lifetime of telling dumb-blonde jokes, it was almost funny sometimes that my daughter would be one of them—except brilliant, naturally!
“Meanwhile,” said Hallie, “I need a new weekend nanny. Do any of you know of anyone? I was going to use Miffy Henderson’s but—”
“No, no, no, no,” instructed Bee. “Never share help.”
“Why?” asked Hallie.
“Bad idea. Miffy could use her to get information on you. Or just poach her back later when she needs more help. Trust me, not a good idea.”
Jeez, who knew there was nanny espionage?
“It’s hard to find a live-in just for the weekends,” sighed Hallie. “It’s just that Thatcher likes to go out and party, so we want to sleep in. Oh well, if you hear of anyone let me know.”
Just then Hallie’s perfect, amazing, potty-peeing, brilliant-IQ’d Julia Charlotte threw a fistful of peas at me across the aisle, which was our cue to leave. I said bye to Bee and Co. and gathered Violet for our walk to Dr. Smith’s office.
We walked in to find a friendly waiting room filled with fun toys, rolling cars, dinosaurs, and a full play kitchen. “Mommy, kishen, kishen!” Violet was in heaven and darted off to fake bake. After a few minutes, Dr. Smith came out to get us by singing Violet’s name, opera-style. It was so cute and she scampered across the room and jumped into his arms, giving him a massive hug.
She loved him immediately, and almost more important, I loved him as well. He was old-school, not just in age and granddad looks but with his glasses and lab coat and worn hands that had held thousands of babies. I felt immediately reassured I wasn’t doing a horrible job. All was fine with the checkup, and after I’d inquired only out of curiosity, Dr. Smith told us that Violet was ninetieth percentile in height and weight and he practically laughed up lunch when I asked about head circumference.
“You’re not serious,” he said.
“Someone asked me,” I laughed. “I’m not kidding.”
“Listen. Don’t listen to these crazy moms around here,” he ordered. “They’re all creating things to compete about. They’re Momzillas.”
I smiled, imagining Bee in T. rex form, giant and reptilian, carrying a huge Hermès bag with one claw, while biting the heads off unfashionable moms.
“I know, I just…get stressed out sometimes. I feel like I am the worst mother on the planet ’cause Violet is still drinking from her bottle!”
“She won’t go to college with it.” Dr. Smith smiled.
“Oh my gosh, that’s verbatim what my husband says about her pacifier!”
“Sounds like a smart man.”
“What about her attachment to her SpongeBob doll?”
“She won’t walk down the aisle with it, I assure you,” he said.
I felt soothed by the balm of his common sense. Like I said, old-school.
“She also still spits up once in a while—”
“Too bad your husband’s not a dry cleaner.”
I laughed. What other questions did I have? “She also gets diarrhea like maybe once every few weeks for no reason. Is that normal? I mean, she’ll just all the sudden have it, but only once.”
“Keep her away from juices afterward, and if her spirits are high, keep her away from doctors.” He patted Violet on the head and I felt totally taken care of, like I was back in California.
As we walked home, I tried to tell myself that it wasn’t all peachy keen everywhere else in the country—Momzillas are clearly not a New York–only phenom. My friend Victoria lived in L.A. and had told me about the nightmarish Santa Momicas that infested the west side of the city, preaching about nursing as they handed their kids off to a flock of nannies. Plus, with the showbiz angle, all these parents would work the room at every little birthday party since each tot was the child of a studio exec, power agent, producer, or famous actor.
But still, New York was different. I realized that Bee’s friends, despite clearly lacking the understanding of how DNA worked, were all obviously bright. They were just bored. Being a stay-at-home mom was a ton of work, probably more than most day jobs. But these women all had hot-and-cold-running help and I suspected they were dying slowly of boredom. I couldn’t engage in their hangups and worries about the best school, the best clothes, the best doctor. I just couldn’t. Because I knew myself, and that slope was too slippery; if I became immersed in that world, I would wither on the vine. The problem was, Violet did deserve the best. So even if I hated that scene I had to suck it up and play ball. Bee and her posse made it look like they were supermoms, but it was kind of smoke and mirrors. They even had substitutes should their weekend nanny fall through. God forbid they were alone with their child!
I thought about what Josh once wisely said when I was wiped out one night after a long day with Violet: “Pay now or pay later.” And it was true; maybe Bee’s fancy friends needed 24/7 live-in people, but the Nobel Prize winner Julia Charlotte might rebel. Or Maxwell might be a performance artist. You can’t control what your kids will be or how they’ll develop. I just needed something to take me out of that world so I wouldn’t get bogged down in it. And that something was coming the following afternoon.
Twenty-one
After kissing Violet’s forehead as she lay sleeping, I tiptoed out, waving to Amber, and made my way down to meet Tate Hayes. It was four P.M. exactly when I saw him standing by the double doors of
the Morgan in a loden green jacket over a white oxford shirt and jeans.
“Hannah,” he said, drawing out the two syllables as if my name were the first word of a poem.
“Hi, Profess—Tate.” I looked down, blushing. I still thought of him as my professor. How strange that now we would maybe become friends. But never equals, as he was too vaunted a persona in my life to be a mere peer.
“Shall we?” he asked.
We strolled the marble halls of the enchanted former home of J. Pierpont Morgan on Thirty-sixth Street and Madison Avenue. Even after watching movies that stylishly captured turn-of-the-century architecture, I could not believe that people had actually lived in the city’s center in such lavish, all-enveloping velvety surroundings. Beyond the extensive collection of prints which we were there to see, the museum had preserved Morgan’s library of rare tomes and a study so ornate and astonishing, you can’t imagine how anyone could ever get work done: I, for one, would have been too distracted by the rich brocade curtains, the intricately carved furniture, and the oils that hung on the hand-stenciled walls.
We walked through much of the space, accompanied by the sound of my black flats practically tiptoeing on the marble floor. When we reached a small oil-on-copper, we paused to look at it. I remembered Professor Hayes always loved oil-on-copper, and he got up very close, as if to penetrate the frame’s glass with his piercing gaze.
“See this enameling here,” he said, gesturing. “Look at this fruit in the lower right corner.” He put his hand on my shoulder and pushed me closer to look at the work; the subject was Adam and Eve. “The paint just sits on the copper, none seeping in as it would into a panel’s fiber or canvas’s pores. It’s as close as we can be to the paint, this creamy, sensuous paint, with a vibrancy you really don’t see on other surfaces. He delivers us Eden itself in these strokes,” he said, as I studied the work in my own incredible private lesson.
He described the leaves as sighing and weighty with verdant glistening streaks of paint, and earth’s first man and woman were supple with silken tones, as their fleshy bodies drew our eyes to their milky skin and up to Eve’s buttery cascading hair.
