The Continuity Girl

by Leah McLaren

  Her project was to study the Yummies in the hope that she might one day learn the secret of their effortless perfection. That is: how to get knocked up.

  She assumed the lotus position, placing one hand palm up on her knee, the other cupping her belly just above her pubic bone, and in unison with the Yummies, commenced her first set of cleansing breaths.

  Halfway through her second toe stand, Meredith heard a familiar hiss. She turned and saw Mish standing in the doorway, dressed in pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt, her face raw and unfamiliar without its usual makeup. Meredith disentangled her limbs and scurried to the door. Mish pulled her into the hall.

  “I tried to call you all night but your phone was turned off,” Mish whispered. “I couldn’t— I didn’t know where you were.”

  “I was shooting. What’s wrong?”

  Her friend’s face squashed in on itself. “Shane was away at a design show in Philadelphia. I called my doula and she was away too. The doctor said...”

  Meredith put her arms around her friend as the last of Mish’s words twisted in a sob. “. . . She said—just to ride it out.”

  “You need a drink.”

  “No,” said Mish, wiping her nose with the heel of her hand. “I need six.”

  Forty-five minutes and two Bloody Caesars later Mish and Meredith sat huddled outside a crowded brunch spot. Mish was smoking hungrily, lighting each new cigarette from the smoldering butt of the last.

  “Turkey fuck,” said Meredith.

  Mish’s head bobbed up and down at the end of her neck like a marionette’s. “Huh?”

  “That’s what my mum used to call it when you light one cigarette from another. Some sixties term. She thought it was so hilarious. Made me want to die of embarrassment.”

  This got a snort out of Mish. “Do you think I would have made an even more embarrassing mother than yours?”

  “I’m sure you will yet.”

  “Fuck it. I’m done. This in vitro thing’s a come-on. These fertility doctors make real estate agents look like straight shooters. Pun intended.”

  “But, hon, you were so close. I’m sure next time.”

  Mish looked at Meredith and sucked so hard on her smoke it crackled.

  “Fuck next time. I can’t go through this again. I’d rather die.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t, then.”

  “I wish I’d never even tried in the first place.”

  This was not the first lost baby for Mish. In her twenties, she’d had two abortions—the first ten weeks after a one-night stand with the former bassist in a semi-famous Detroit thrash band, the second the result of a desperate year-long love affair with a married psychotherapist whom her girlfriends had disapprovingly nicknamed “Herr Doktor.” Like most of the women in her postal code (thirty-odd, unmarried, urban-dwelling, career focused in an aesthetic rather than hard-nosed way), Mish had never pondered, even for a millisecond, the thought of having a baby until she was thirty-five. In her case, the hunger came on suddenly in the middle of being dumped, for the third and definitive time, by an Israeli merchant banker whom she had been faithfully dating for two years but in whose company she had probably collectively spent only a week and a half.

  “It was as if I woke up one day and my leg was hollow,” she had told Meredith.

  In the two years since, while taking time out from her job as a freelance wardrobe stylist, Mish had tried to get pregnant, finally employing the sympathetic sperm of Shane, the man with a pompadour whom she referred to (somewhat depressingly, Meredith thought) as her “gay husband.”

  Now, seven months, six thousand dollars, five botched inseminations and two miscarriages later, Mish—a gal famous for her ability to chug a bottle of tequila only to get up the next morning and run a half-marathon—was finally exhausted. Meredith could see it in her eyes: she looked beaten.

  “Guess we better head out,” Mish said.

  It was their friend Elle’s daughter’s fifth birthday party this morning. The party, which was being thrown at Elle’s and her husband Andrew’s house uptown, had started off as a birthday dinner party for Meredith but had evolved into a daytime reception with hired magicians and a Barbie ice-cream cake for Elle’s daughter. Zoe and Meredith shared a birthday—a coincidence Meredith had thought mystical when Elle called her from the hospital in the midst of her thirtieth birthday celebration and asked Meredith (happily stoned off a mother lode of birthday Moroccan Gold Seal) to be godmother of her firstborn. Meredith had cried sisterly tears and reminisced about the days when the three of them—Mish, Elle and Mere—were kids at school, sneaking smokes in the furnace room at lunch hour. She went on in this slightly embarrassing but unstoppable vein until Elle, exhausted after twenty-six hours of labor and an emergency Caesarian, said she loved her too, and hung up.

  Since that moment, Meredith’s birthday had become a shadow of its former self. Gone were the dope and hired DJs, replaced by goody bags and glasses of supportive sangria for Elle (now a mother of two).

  “You sure you want to go?” asked Meredith.

  “We can’t miss your birthday party.” Mish managed a small, wet smile. “Mommy would kill us.”

  3

  Elle and Andrew lived in Summerhill, an enclave of pointy-peaked toy houses whose modest, postwar facades belied the opulent salaries of their occupants. The neighborhood, though average in every outward way, was one of the most sought-after in the city. The reason for this was purely practical: it happened to be located six subway stops away from the financial district. Four stops away from the place where Andrew, like many of his fellow Summerhill residents, toiled in a tower seventy hours a week arranging the smooth transfer of vast millions from one multinational conglomerate to the next.

  Elle and Andrew’s house was a solid place. A house constructed as much with the false memory of a bygone era when men were men and women wore A-line skirts and red-checked oven mittens as with mortar and bricks. Just the sight of it made Meredith feel nostalgic for a past she had never known, a vision of a time of domestic balance that, she knew, probably never existed in the first place.

  As she pulled into the driveway and shifted the car into park, Meredith reached over and patted her friend on the knee.

  “I’m fine. Really.” Mish emptied her lungs of smoke with a whistle. “Let’s do it.”

  Elle appeared on the front stoop, waving, in a cotton sundress. It was an unseasonably warm day in April and everyone except Mish was dressing hopefully. Elle mouthed the words New car! (Meredith had recently traded in her old black Volkswagen for a new black Volkswagen) and made a wide, fingers-splayed Broadway-chorus-line gesture with both hands.

  Mish began to unbuckle her seat belt. She tried the door but it was locked. “Fuck-a-duck,” she muttered. Then she noticed Meredith sitting stiffly in her seat.

  “What is it?”

  “I think I quit my job yesterday. I mean, this morning.”

  “Seriously? Aren’t you freelance?”

  Meredith thought this over. The lack of sleep and the two Bloodies were beginning to take their toll on her cognitive abilities. “I am, but I had a fight with Felsted—not even a fight really—and I just walked off the set.”

  “In the middle of shooting?”

  “It was sort of at the end but, yeah, pretty much.”

  Mish hooted. “Right on!” She punched her friend on the shoulder before prying up the door lock with her fingers and hoisting herself out of the car. “It’s about time. That guy’s an asshole. I’m just sorry you didn’t do it sooner.”

  Meredith removed her key from the ignition. Elle was now clipping down the driveway with a puzzled expression, pulling on her fingers with a dishcloth. A Jack Russell terrier bounced around her ankles emitting a series of high-pitched barks.

  Mish leaned back into the car and pinched Meredith on the thigh.

  “Let’s not mention it to her today, okay? I can’t deal.”

  “No prob.” Meredith got out of the car and took a deep brea
th.

  “Down, Starsky. I said down! Don’t— I told you NO. Guys—” Elle pulled her friends together and hugged them both at the same time. “Welcome to bourgeois hell. Don’t worry, I’ve got spiked punch for the grown-ups. And pregnancy punch pour vous.” She bumped her hip against Mish’s and began clicking her way along the flagstones back to the house. “How sick are you of cranberry soda? By my second trimester I couldn’t even stand the sight of the stuff.”

  Meredith took her cue. “Where are the brats?”

  Elle sighed. She often pretended (though not very convincingly) to be bored by motherhood for the sake of her as-yet-childless girlfriends. “In the backyard being molested by Krusty the Clown. You should see this guy—talks like a thug and charges a mortgage payment an hour—but the kids are absolutely bonkers for him. He’s like the pied piper of Summerhill.”

  The kitchen was at the back of the house, a half-renovated addition that Elle and Andrew had started before getting pregnant for the second time. The stainless steel appliances, imported from a restaurant supply shop on the Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris, were already covered in a lifetime’s worth of tiny fingerprints. The floor was plywood covered in blue plastic. The tarp snagged on Elle’s kitten heel as she led Mish and Meredith into the room, trilling the praises of white wine sangria.

  “Oh hell,” she said, bending down to detach herself. “I was afraid the kids would get splinters. Half their fathers are lawyers and Andrew is completely paranoid. You know he kept saying we should just have the party at Chuck E. Cheese’s instead? As if.”

  She poured pale cloudy liquid into tumblers as she spoke, clawing extra chopped berries out of the pitcher and plopping them in each glass with her fingers. Elle shook her head and smiled, seeming to marvel for a moment at the vast stupidity of it all, the excess of poor taste and misjudgment that she alone had to put up with. Her facial expression was one Meredith recognized from wives in television sitcoms, usually adopted after their husbands had returned home with something laughably out of place, like a Christmas tree too big to fit in the front door.

  Mish took a glass of sangria from Elle’s hand, and her friends watched as she drained it in a single swallow.

  “What’s Chuckie Cheese’s?” Meredith asked, hoping to distract Elle.

  The other two women looked at each other and snorted. This was a joke they shared among the three of them: Meredith’s astonishing ignorance of mainstream popular culture. What she did know had been gleaned through movies and television as an adult. Meredith had retained the overly literal, slightly alien quality of a child who had grown up in an institution. In this case, as a boarder at the girls’ school where the three of them had met. Mish and Elle had attended the same school, but as day students. Meredith had spent her summers and Christmases with her mother at artists’ retreats and friends’ vacation houses in Arizona, Ibiza and Banff.

  “Chuck E. Cheese’s is a kiddie trough in the ’burbs owned by a rodent in a red hat by the name of Chuck,” Mish said. “Imagine a lot of horrible people and their screaming, puking offspring eating greasy pizza and swimming in vats of coloured balls. It’s enough to make you run to the bathroom and tie your own fucking tubes.”

  As she spoke, Mish began walking around the kitchen with her face parallel to the floor, scanning flat surfaces for food, probably hoping for some sort of dairy product—the orange, processed, high-sodium kind. Meredith thought she seemed to be making a comeback. Either that or she was falling apart.

  “Right,” Elle continued. “So obviously I’m not taking the offspring of the Audi brigade to Chuck E. Cheese’s for a birthday party. I haven’t given up completely, you know.”

  “So where is he?” Meredith asked, keen to draw Elle’s attention away from Mish, who was now rummaging through the fridge’s crisper with a bagel between her teeth.

  “Upstairs napping.” Elle smiled and motioned to the baby monitor leaning cockeyed against the windowsill.

  “Your husband?”

  “Oh God, not him, I meant the baby.” Elle laughed dismissively. “He’s gone into the office for a couple of hours. Big deal, you know. Super important. Couldn’t bear to miss a second of it. All those exciting tax loopholes to negotiate.”

  From the backyard came an enormous thud followed by a screeching chorus. Meredith ran to the window, then turned to look at her friend. Elle cleared a spot on the counter between a bag of silver sugar-balls and a water-swollen copy of Vanity Fair and set her drink down. Hers was the reaction of a soldier with acute post-traumatic stress disorder reacting to a grenade going off in the next trench. That is, no reaction at all.

  “What is it?” she asked Meredith, searching for a strawberry trapped beneath the ice at the bottom of her glass.

  Elle was clearly happy to have someone else analyze the crime scene before she rolled up her sleeves and stepped in to do the dirty work.

  “The kids are all right but the clown guy appears to be dead. Or dying. It’s unclear.”

  “Shall we?”

  They walked out onto the back deck, leaving Mish with the fridge.

  The scene outside looked like the aftermath of a tornado touchdown in the land of Oz. Mud-smeared children ran in all directions, clutching whatever scraps of party trash they could hold in their jammy hands. The weak hid under peony bushes or crouched behind faux seventeenth-century cement garden ornaments, waiting for it to be over. In the center of the lawn was a half-collapsed picnic table, three of its four legs splintered to bits, and on top of that a blue ice-cream cake, flattened and oozing out from beneath the twitching body of a grown man in a pink gingham jumpsuit. Starsky the terrier lavished hind-pumping love on the clown’s left oversize shoe, ears pinned down in amorous concentration. Detached streamers and balloons floated through the air. In the corner, two boys in matching overalls squirted green Silly String into a bowl of blue Jell-O and taste-tested their creation.

  At the center of the melee, the birthday girl—five-year-old Zoe—presided with queenly authority. She stood over the man’s body in a gold lamé fairy dress and rhinestone-encrusted tiara. In her hand was a wooden spoon with a tinfoil star glued to one end. When she saw her mother and Meredith emerge from the house, she shrugged sweetly, gave a pageant-winning smile, and returned to her task of beating the clown with her wand.

  “Bad! Bad! Ucky!” Zoe scolded, increasing her volume as the women approached. She beamed at her mother. “He stood on the table, Mummy. He made a bad mess. My cake—” Her small face collapsed into a coursing river of snot.

  Elle crouched and hugged her daughter, murmuring mummy-ish things in her wet ear. “Don’t cry. The clown didn’t mean it. He was just trying to be funny. Remember the time when you were trying to do a cartwheel and you fell and hit your face on the rock? It’s like that.”

  “That was different.”

  “No, it wasn’t, honey. The clown was just trying to be funny.”

  “It was different.”

  “Why?”

  “Because, Mummy. It was me.”

  Elle and Meredith paused. Zoe raised her wand to clinch the argument.

  “And I didn’t wreck the cake.”

  Elle nudged the clown’s thigh with her heel. He groaned. “Uh, sir? Mr. Clown? Assuming you’re okay, do you mind getting up? You’re scaring the kids.”

  “Bad clown! Scary!” Zoe whacked him once more on the back of his head for good measure.

  “Don’t be evil, Zoe. Mr. Clown is in pain.”

  The clown rolled his head to the side and revealed one watery eye that he trained on Meredith.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Urrghyehfinkso.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah.” He paused to spit a handful of disintegrated gummi worms from his mouth. They lay glistening on the grass, the punch line of a forgotten magic trick. Starsky began slurping them up.

  “I hate you.”

  “Zoe!”

  The clown struggled to his feet, pulled off
his wig and rubbed the damp, sandy hair underneath until it stood on end. His torso was plastered in blue, black and white icing. If you looked closely, the vague silhouette of Cookie Monster was discernable.

  Under the makeup, the clown looked to be in his early twenties. The kind of young man who wore wraparound sunglasses and reversed ball caps and made the “hang loose” hand sign to his friends from the window of his yellow Jeep.

  Meredith whispered, “Why don’t you take him inside and see if he’s okay? I’ll deal with the kids.”

  Elle looked relieved to be receiving an order rather than issuing one for once. She led the clown inside. Meredith looked down at Zoe. She had finished crying and was chewing the top of her tinfoil wand. She turned her tear-streaked face up and glared at the sky.

  “I hate my birthday,” she said.

  Meredith silently agreed.

  Looking around the garden, she felt like an insecure Mary Poppins recently dropped from above. Faces peeked out from behind clay pots and shrubbery. After ascertaining the coast was clear they began to emerge. Dirty fingers attached to doughy arms attached to stout bodies, punctuated with outie belly buttons. A couple of the children still had diapers popping out from the waistline of their Gap Kids corduroys, which Meredith found slightly frightening. She stayed put in the center of the yard, waiting for them to come to her. She wanted so much for them to like her that she became paralyzed with the need. More than men, or figures of professional authority, Meredith desired the approval of dogs and children. She sensed it was best not to try too hard—she had noticed that when it came to getting other people to feel the way you wanted them to feel, the head-on approach never worked. So Meredith did with kids what she did with all people whose attention she craved. She hung back quietly and pretended to have other things on her mind.