by Jill Kargman
“Noooo way,” I said, defiantly. “Trust me, you could not pay me to relive this stress. All those people who say these are the best years of their lives are so pathetic. If that is true, then I’m leaping off the Transamerica Pyramid.”
“You’ll see,” he said knowingly. “You never get times like these with everyone around you, every meal across from friends who are on call every night. You have a built-in support system.” He took his feet off the desk and smiled at me, opening an F. T. Marinetti book from his shelf and flipping through the pages, ’til I saw warm recognition in his eyes as he cleared his throat. He looked at me for a second before reading. This was a momentary, key eye-lock.
Chopsticks in one hand, he read:
We stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging Mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts.
Sitting in my apartment in New York, I snapped out of my reverie, realizing now that he was right. Though I did get stressed out at school and I wasn’t going to whitewash those hard moments in gilded hindsight, I was nostalgic. Those times were stressful but always safe. A paper here, a quiz to cram for there, but in the end it was a system, and I worked well in a system. To so many people, school was a great big map of options and they were perpetually lost. But I was great with maps. I knew how to navigate and always get where I needed to be. But, of course, life post-school had no atlas, especially here. So I sometimes longed for the coziness of a calendar’s locking grids, or a syllabus’s directives, and hoped one day I could figure out what that might be. But when you’re a grown-up, those directives have to come from yourself, and though what I wanted to do was still a blur, reconnecting with something that got me psyched up and feeling alive would be a step in the right direction.
Thirty-four
The weekend was nice and cozy. Joshie took Violet while I slept in ’til eleven, the first time since her birth I’d coma’d out like that. It was pouring cold rain, which my hermit-ass self actually guiltily reveled in—but I was just so happy to be at home and relaxed. I told Josh about my Brooklyn sojourn, which had him dying laughing, but he urged me once again to snap out of my doldrums. Just take Violet on some long walks and bag the whole playgroup thing.
Saturday night, afraid to leave the house in the gales of Hurricane Hermione, we decided to do a Time Warner On Demand instant movie. We scanned the endless choices. We were down by the Ts when I saw Team America, and remembered how my friend Trip in San Francisco was obsessed with it, declaring it the most genius, hi-fucking-larious movie of the year.
“And Joshie, it’s perfect because it’s puppets!” I said, selling my idea. “Violet will love that and it’ll be operating on two levels, you know, like SpongeBob!” Josh relented, not particularly psyched to watch marionettes for two hours, but as a die-hard South Park fan he decided to give it a shot. Within minutes we were howling. It seemed to be a great selection—Violet was giggling hysterically and we were dying laughing about elements that went over her head, like a genius spoof of Rent. It was all peachy keen until an uncensored sex scene between puppets came on. We were laughing at first, but then it got so graphic, with so many insane contortionist sex positions (remember, puppets are bendy!) that even Kama Sutra devotees like Sting would have blushed. Worried we’d scar our daughter and probably have Bee dialing children’s services should this get out, we decided to turn it off.
“Mommy, Daddy, look! Two bodies lying down!” Violet said, pointing at the television set as we tore through the couch pillows to retrieve the remote. Click. Phew. So much for movie night.
Sunday, Josh had to work all day to make up for his absence Monday when we’d be at our school interview, so I took Violet for a nice long walk. We trolled the perimeter of the park, up by the Harlem Meer and then down Central Park West with the beautiful but somewhat haunting Gothic buildings with impressive names. I remembered one of Josh’s teachers died when a gargoyle fell off of a CPW building and killed her. Pancake, like the cartoons. Can you imagine some winged, beaked stone goblin taking you out like that? Talk about a New York death. With that in mind, we stayed on the park side of the avenue, as the thought of falling stone beasts made me shudder. When I got home, I talked to Leigh for an hour—she was in a hotel room in Dallas with another band, The Scratchy Throats, and said she had bumped into Parker at the airport on her way down there. They both had thirty or so minutes until their respective flights, so they plopped at a LaGuardia eatery and said “cheers” with four-dollar bottled waters.
“He is just a gem, Hannah,” she sighed. “Alas. All the good ones are taken.”
“It’s so strange,” I said, picturing Bee’s beautiful but harsh face compared with Parker’s ever-smiling one. “They just so don’t go together. He is the sweetest, most nurturing guy and she’s such a competitive ice queen. I don’t get it.”
“Love is weird that way,” said Leigh, flipping through the channels on her in-room entertainment center. “Opposites attract. And you never know what happens behind closed doors.”
“True. They just seem so suited on paper but not in real life. She’s soulless.”
“Ooh, gotta go, my room service is here and I just found that new Ewan McGregor movie on Spectravision. Good luck with your bigass mini-Harvard interview tomorrow!”
Monday morning, with Joshie looking so dapper and cute in his best suit, we settled Violet with Amber and hailed a cab uptown for Carnegie Nursery School. My heart was pounding through my blouse, Roger Rabbit–style. Josh laughed—he knew I was a wreck and he told me to chill out. It didn’t matter that much but all I could think about was Bee’s blithe pronouncement that rejection here meant a torpedoed chance for the Ivies.
We approached the stunning nine-story Beaux-Arts building, which had nannies in starched, pressed white uniforms waiting outside with a fleet of Bugaboos all in a row. Triple-parked Lincoln Navigators, Cadillac Escalades, and town cars literally blocked the entire avenue, inspiring a cacophonous orchestra of taxi and truck honks. Not that any of the expertly coiffed moms emerging from said tinted-glass vehicles gave a shit. In their Michael Kors and Zac Posen and Valentino garb, they emerged from each SUV with the help of a uniformed chauffeur, who aided their descent from the cars (their spike Manolo Blahniks and Jimmy Choos hardly meshed with the words “sport” or “utility”). Each walked up the stairs to the school’s grand revolving doors; the entrance might as well have been a Paris runway, the fashion was so haute. Josh and I looked at each other silently and followed them into the lavish school, which had an airport-style security conveyor belt in the lobby that the moms ran their Fendi bags through. I’d heard that because there were so many children of billionaires, ambassadors, and celebs, security was quasi Quantico.
“Wow, this place is like a mini museum…” I said, looking up at the jewel-box lobby complete with painted fresco ceiling and marble staircase, after we passed through security. The ornate façade was even more elaborate than Milford Prescott, with a carved mahogany entryway, receptionist, sitting room with upholstered furniture, and coffee table with leather-bound books. A chipper assistant welcomed us and offered us cappuccinos (“Skim or one percent? Cinnamon or cocoa on that?”), then guided us to a waiting area with suede couches and some class projects made by the kids. We looked at each other and sat down, flipping through books that contained such projects as “Froggie’s Travels.” The first page had a little laminated frog encased in the plastic page protector and all the following pages had pictures of the frog around the world. Families took it on trips throughout the year during all the school breaks, and there were tons: Rosh Hashanah, Columbus Day, Yom Kippur, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Martin Luther King Weekend, President’s Day Weekend, Ash Wednesday, Easter Break, and Memorial Day. Despite the $20,000 tuition (for three-year-olds!), school was practically always out, leaving time for the students to go on very glamorous trips indeed. There was the 2D amphibian in a temple in Shanghai,
at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, at Buckingham Palace in London being held by a guard, in the Coliseum in Rome, at an American resort in Bali, the needle in Seattle, the Sears Tower in Chicago, by a mountain in Gstaad, and on safari in Africa! With Abercrombie & Kent tents in the background, natch.
“Sweetie, maybe this school is too posh for us,” I whispered as Josh lay back on the overstuffed couch and looked like he might fall asleep.
“It’s cute,” he shrugged.
“Cute? Babe, this fucking frog from these three-year-olds’ class project has been to more places than I have.”
Just then a tall, very attractive gray-haired woman in a Chanel suit came into the waiting room. “Mr. and Mrs. Josh Allen, I presume?”
We both stood up like a shot.
“I’m Mrs. Kincaid, the director of admissions. Please, do come in.”
We followed her into a beautiful office overlooking the sunlit street. Orange leaves fluttered by. “Welcome to Carnegie Nursery School. Now, before I give you your tour, I’d like to tell you a bit about our philosophy. We believe children should enter kindergarten fully knowing how to read and write.”
We sat quietly as she spoke for fifteen minutes about their methods—reading homework, the Chore Wheel (where each toddler has a responsibility for the day, i.e., help serve snack or clean up after crafts), and other elements of the curriculum (dinosaur species, geometry, ancient Greece). We peppered our attentive listening with nods in agreement and a few mmhmms. It was semi-odd and surreal to me that it wasn’t so much that we were choosing the school; they were deciding whether to choose us.
“And, lastly, on a personal note, I understand you’re working with my husband looking for a new place. How nice.”
“Yes! Troy—Mr. Kincaid has been so helpful and patient. I’m sure we’ll find something soon, I hope.”
“Now, before we take you to see the school, I’d like you to write a statement about Miss Violet, just about three hundred words is fine. I’ll leave you for about ten minutes. We just want to see the first thoughts that flow about your daughter.”
I was…stunned.
A surprise “statement”? Nice how Bee didn’t mention that tidbit when I asked for tips. A little Oh, you might wanna prepare for the pop essay would have been nice. Mrs. Kincaid laid a crisp sheet of paper watermarked with the school crest and some pens in front of us, and exited.
“Sweetie, this is nuts,” I said.
“Calm down. You can write, I read some of your school stuff. Okay, let’s just calm down.”
We exhaled together, and for the first time, I saw my usually calm, cool, and collected hubby actually seem slightly rattled. First we brainstormed about our daughter. She was too amazing and wonderful to jam into a page. No matter what we wrote, they could never see all the amazing things that we see in her. Everyone says his or her kids are smart, funny, energetic, spunky. We decided to go with the essence of Violet—how loving she is—and how there has been no shortage of affection in our home. The girl hugs the supermarket checkout lady, the flower shop guy, any kid on the street. And in holding hands and connecting with people, her spirit and love of people is contagious to the point where even the most crotchety Scrooge seems to melt in her shiny-eyed gaze. Finally we finished, my wrist tired from jotting down our thoughts, and I felt that while it would be truly impossible to fully capture Violet, especially in ten minutes, we had at least showed Mrs. Kincaid that we were utterly devoted to our daughter. Mrs. Kincaid reentered her office, taking the piece of paper and sticking it into our file. “So, let’s begin the tour, shall we?”
We rose and crossed the marble floors to a sweeping staircase, the only sounds the click-clacking of Mrs. Kincaid’s heels. Through the soundproofed doors we saw children at play, in the most beautiful outfits I’d ever seen.
“Pickup is right about now, so you’ll be able to see some of the children,” she said. We strolled all nine floors of the school, which was not only charming but also so beautiful it put most high schools to shame. It was truly a mansion. There was an Olympic-sized pool, a gilded library, and a state-of-the-art gymnasium.
Suddenly a little bell chimed and the doors opened in synchronized bursts. Streams of preened children spilled out.
“Hello, Cossima!” Mrs. Kincaid said to a little girl with two long braids. “Hello, India! Hi, McSorland! Good afternoon, Lorelei!”
Josh and I ended up back down in the foyer behind Mrs. Kincaid when her formerly chipper and now meek-looking assistant came out to meet us.
“Mrs. Kincaid? Mrs. Elliott, Weston Elliott’s mother, is in your office, she says it’s quite important.”
“All right, Tracy,” she said, then turned to us. “Josh, Hannah, it was a pleasure to meet you, and I look forward to meeting Miss Violet Grace next month when we commence our childrens’ interviews. Good day.”
She went into her office, and I then heard Bee’s voice, in a very anger-infused tone.
“Mrs. Kincaid,” she snapped. “I have a serious, serious problem.”
“Yes, Mrs. Elliott, what is the issue?”
Josh’s cell rang. He talked for a second then said he had to take the call and bolt to the office. He gave me a peck on the cheek and left the school. Curious about Bee’s issue, I lingered, pretending to fix my boot on the sofa near the ajar door.
“Yesterday was the third time Weston was sent home with yellow watercolor on his sweater. His Ralph Lauren, three-hundred-ninety-five-dollar quadruple-ply-cashmere sweater!” Bee screamed. “I don’t think I need to tell you again that Miss Glassman is doing an unacceptable job in keep my son tidy.”
“Mrs. Elliott,” began Mrs. Kincaid, clearly used to dealing with women like this. “With all due respect, this is a nursery school. The children paint, they play outdoors, they get dirty. Perhaps you can send him in clothes that can be easily washed?”
“How I dress my son is my concern. I simply will not accept him coming looking like he just finished a game of paintball.”
Pause.
“Well, I shall let Miss Glassman know to put a smock on him. As I recall, we tried, but Master Weston simply didn’t want to wear one. We don’t believe in forcing him.”
“Well, make him. Or I can just send Miss Glassman our dry-cleaning bills.”
I heard a chair pull out, scraping the floor. I quickly bolted outside so she wouldn’t see me. Wow.
On my way home to see Violet, I realized what a beautiful day it was outside with the cool air and changing leaves. I paid Amber and packed Violet in her stroller for a long walk. Violet and I cut through the park, down by the old Plaza Hotel, where she studied all the horsies and their carriages. We walked down Fifth, past the Disney store (also a hit), all the way down to the Empire State Building. Before I knew it, we were crossing Houston Street into Soho. I looked at the hip kids and fashion-istas. With models and students aplenty, it was just an overall younger scene.
“Mommy, my store!” Violet said suddenly.
I turned to see the most adorable kids’ boutique, Makie, with a teeny tiny sign tied onto the door in twine. We went inside and the designer was there, and I gushed about how sweet and original her creations were. Violet ran around for about fifteen minutes as I selected some new clothes for winter. She didn’t have any real coats and heavy sweaters, and everything uptown was so outrageously priced I couldn’t bear to slap the plastic down. We tried on the cutest boots that looked circa 1928, fully Little Orphan Annie, and Violet looked beyond adorable in them.
We went to a little girls’ lunch at KinKhao and shared dumplings (her fave) before saddling up for our walk back uptown. The little nugget passed out in the stroller en route, and it was chilly so I’d switched her little T-strap sandals to the shiny new brown boots we’d just bought at Makie. She looked like a little angel out cold, and I decided to take advantage of the zzz’s and maybe try a little shopping for myself.
I went into Barneys and scoped the racks of beautiful things. I spied Kelly Osbourne with Richie
Rich, the Heatherette designer I admired from afar, and ten minutes later I saw Liv Tyler delicately handing a saleswoman her purchases with her long fingers.
Suddenly, as I was waiting for a dressing room, I heard, “Oh my God!”
I turned to see one of the moms from Kidsplosion, who was on her cell. “Hold on,” she said into her phone, turning to me. “Where did you get those adorable shoes?”
“Um, this place downtown…”
“Where? Name! Address!” She practically looked like she was breaking a sweat, her tone so urgent she may well have been on a vital nation-protecting fact-finding mission for the CIA.
“Um, this place called Makie? On Thompson between, I guess, Prince and Spring?”
“Milos, it’s me,” she barked into her cell. “I need you to go drive down to this place Makie. Ask for these brown leather boots in size 8 for Calliope. Yes…size 8. Then drive back uptown and pick us up at Via Quadronno. Bye.”
She snapped her cell shut and walked away. No thank-you, no nothing. Just a dispatch to her driver to go get the same boots. Ugh.
Violet was asleep in her stroller when we got home, and I enjoyed a simple luxury I hadn’t yet experienced in New York, a hot, late afternoon bath. Ahhh. My legs were killing from the long-ass walk, but I actually felt really good. And as I soaked in the lavender bubbles and looked out my window, the sun was starting to set into an electric blue, Maxfield Parrish sky.
