Do They Wear High Heels in Heaven? (2 page)

Michael

T
he CIA has nothing on Lily. Nothing. Come our birthday week, she can fuck with my mind in ways psychological torturers
wish
they could come up with. Drop her into enemy territory and the opposition will be begging for surrender.

So the night
before
my fortieth birthday, she actually pulled off a surprise party. In order to do this, she enlisted the help of the departmental chair of the English department of Hudson University, Martin Robeson. Until the moment when ol’ Marty yelled “Surprise!” I hadn’t even known he had a sense of humor.

That Friday morning, I heard him in his office yelling, “Damn, damn, damn!” at the top of his lungs.

I poked my head into his office, “What’s up, Martin?”

In a performance worthy of Shakespeare, he passed his hand across his brow. “I have a potential professor for the opening next fall flying in from Scotland, and damn that Helen also has me scheduled to meet with the dean for dinner.”

He eyed me slightly desperately. “I don’t suppose you could…”

“Oh no.” I held up my hands. “Most definitely not, Martin. Entertain some Scottish windbag…I don’t think so.”

“Please, Michael. I’m desperate. I’ll owe you. Handsomely.”

He is my boss. So next thing I knew, I was headed to the airport in Westchester to pick up Professor Hugh McDonnell. He, all two hundred and eighty pounds and red beard, was waiting on the curb at six o’clock. He had the loudest voice I’ve ever heard in my life and a brogue so thick I could barely understand him. He also apparently believed in punctuating any sentence with the slightest bit of emotion with a slap on the back.

“Marty tells me you teach Milton,” Professor McDonnell said, his voice rising and falling in a lilting way.

“I do.”

“Ahh yes, he of the many sins.…Sin’s a wonderful thing, is it not? Rich fodder for teaching literature.” “Sure, sure.” I nodded, trying to keep my eyes on the road.

“And not too bad for having a bangin’ good time, eh?” His voice boomed, and he laughed, which sounded like a cross between a howl and a guttural hoot. Then he punched me in the arm.

Martin had promised the good professor dinner at a place down on the water in Nyack, New York. So, being punched in the arm every few minutes, I headed to the Wharfside restaurant, walked in and was bombarded with “Surprise!” and the sight of everyone I knew—and even some I didn’t—gathered for my party. At that point, Professor Hugh McDonnell nearly collapsed with laughter. He also lost his brogue. I’d been had. And Martin, uptight little anal-retentive that he is, looked very pleased that he was at last “one of the gang” and had pulled off the ultimate surprise.

And there was Lily. Front and center in a little black cocktail dress, stilettos—she was in chronic denial about her five-foot three-inch height-challenged size—and her hair and makeup perfect.

She walked over and hugged me. “Gotcha!”

“I drove all the way to the airport for nothing?”

“Don’t be bitchy,” she urged with a pout. “Not for nothing. For this surprise, Michael. You should see your face.”

“Next year all bets are off.”

“Darling, you’ll never be able to top this.” She turned to “Hugh.” “Thanks, John. I owe you one.”

He was still wiping tears from his eyes. “Classic! Classic! Oh my God, but that was fun.”

Turned out Professor Hugh McDonnell was the brother-in-law of one of Lily’s coworkers at the paper—and an actor from Manhattan.

Tara and Noah, Lily’s kids, were there, along with everyone from the English Department at Hudson University, Lily’s friends from the paper, my book editor and his assistant, my literary agent, Charlie, even my high school buddy, Zack, who’d flown in from St. Louis for the occasion. By nine o’clock I was blind drunk, and I recall lots of sloppy kissing, many hugs, and I believe I repeated the expression, “I love you guys” about a hundred times, each one successively more effusive.

After the party, Lily decided I was in no condition to drive home, so she—helped by the burly imposter Scots-man—piled me into her minivan and drove me to her house. The kids had been brought home earlier by her neighbor, Connie, who has yet to accept I am gay and has tried to seduce me too many times to count.

I stumbled up the stairs, after nearly tripping over Gunther, who was lying in the foyer. I went into the master bedroom and flopped onto Lily’s bed and flicked on the television. She brought me a glass of water and changed into her pajamas, then went to each of the kids’ bedrooms and checked on them. She came back into her bedroom and lay down next to me on top of her goose-down comforter.

“That went well, don’t you think?”

“Yeah…. Thanks.”

“I got you so good.” She poked me, smiling.

“Yes, you did.” I was determined to stay awake until I sobered up a bit. Hate bed spins.

“Were you surprised?”

“You just said you got me good.”

“I know, but I’m fishing for compliments on what a great party it was.”

“It was a brilliant party.”

“You’re forty, you know. It’s after midnight.”

Forty.

Actually, part of the reason I drank so much was the sight of Lily and the kids, front and center. I never had, being gay, that dream of marriage and a family and two-point-three kids and a dog. No picket fence. Chintz sofa. None of it. I never expected that to be part of the deal—not for me. Those were the cards dealt me, and I never bitched about them. But turning forty…maybe, just a little part of me wanted that. The two-point-three kids thing. Not the dog. Gunther is enough dog on a part-time basis. He snores—and slobbers. I like my goldfish. Glenda the goldfish has lived for four years, which I consider some sort of record.

“You didn’t answer me, Michael. How does it feel?”

“You should know. You turned forty last week—gray pubic hair and panic is what I recall.”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“It feels…weird…. I keep thinking about death.”

“God, you’re morbid. I keep thinking about sex. Lack of it.”

“I don’t have that problem.”

“No, you don’t. You have your little boy toys.”

“Feels…a little empty at forty.”

“Put on Conan O’Brien.”

I clicked over and took a sip of water. Less spins, slightly queasy.

“You’re lucky, you know. Having kids and all that.”

Lily leaned up on one elbow. “I know. But you have them, too. By proxy.”

“Yes, by gay proxy.”

“Now if I could only have as much sex as you by proxy.”

“Well, you could, but my kind isn’t what you’re really dying to have.”

“No. I suppose not.” She yawned. “God, you’re an old hag.”

“Old fag.”

“That, too.”

“Thanks again, Lily. It was fabulous. Loved the chicken satay.”

“Mmm. Me, too. Though the crew from the English department was hogging them. Don’t they feed you people?”

“No. They keep us locked up in the ivory tower on bread and water.”

“’Night, Michael.”

She rolled over and got comfortable, and soon her eyelids grew heavy. I sipped some more water.

We were like an old married couple. Minus the sex.

Though, given what my over-forty married friends say about their sex lives, maybe we had it right. Most of my over-forty married friends say they never do it anymore. Too tired. Too busy. Too apathetic. God, what happened to our wild years?

When Did I Become My Mother?
by Lily Waters

E
very woman has the moment when she becomes her mother. The time comes in an instant of shock and awe. Real shock and awe—not the Donald Rumsfeld variety.

My daughter, Tara, has never missed an opportunity in the years since she turned twelve to point out to me that I ceased to be cool the moment I had to buy my first box of Nice ’n Easy to cover my gray. For four years now, she has pointed out I no longer wear cool clothes, listen to cool music or have the cool lingo down. Only cool’s not cool anymore anyway. It’s
hot.

I have refused to believe her, of course. I
am
cool. Hot. Whatever. I still like rock and roll blasting from my stereo. All right, no self-respecting cool person would drive a minivan with juice stains on the seats and a plethora of baseball gear in the back, including cleats with mud still clinging to them, but I still roll down all the windows and sing at the top of my lungs. I like to drive fast down the hills of my hometown feeling the wind whip my hair around. I let my dog sit in the front seat. I wear Abercrombie jeans. I still have three earrings in my left ear and four in my right. I no longer wear big 1980s hoops—but I notice they’re “in” again, proving my grandmother right: If you hold onto things long enough, they’ll come back in style again. I wonder if that holds true for leg warmers and Pet Rocks.

I also have another “cool” thing that drove my late mother insane. I have a tattoo.

But when Tara asked me yesterday if she could get a tattoo of a soccer ball on her left shoulder, I answered with a fast, “Over my dead body!”

“Why?”

“Because…you could hate soccer four years from now and then you’ll be stuck with this stupid ball on your shoulder.”

“So?”

“Every time you want to wear a strapless dress, it’ll show.”

“That’s the whole idea, Mom.”

“You could get hepatitis.”

“I’ll go to a good place, Mom.”

“There’s no such thing as a
good
tattoo parlor.”

“But it’s my life.”

“You can’t permanently mark your body until you’re eighteen. I mean it, Tara.”

“
You
did,” she said accusingly. “So why can’t I?”

“Because I’m your mother, and I said so.”

And there it was. I had turned into my mother—the most uncool, squarest, nerdiest, old-fashioned woman on the planet. Right there. Right in front of my daughter.

So I did what any self-respecting uncool woman would do.

I added, “And that’s final!”

Lily

M
onday morning

The Boomtown Rats’ “I Don’t Like Mondays” played inside my head because the list of why I don’t like the first day of the workweek would, if I rattled off the reasons, last longer than the song. After Bob Geldolf finished his cross between a warble and a wail, I would still be going on.

For starters, my whole life seems to run on its own watch, which is perpetually twenty minutes slower than everyone else’s watch. This means that I can’t seem to get myself and my two kids, Tara and Noah, out the door in a way in which it would be possible for them to arrive at school on time, unless we managed to somehow score a lift on the space shuttle.

Both my children have inherited my organizationally challenged genetic defect. So, inevitably, when I get the three of us in our minivan—which frankly I can’t believe I drive—one of them will have forgotten something. Whatever this something is will not be the same something from day to day. Monday it might be the lunchbox on the counter for Noah, Tuesday Tara’s high school science report, Wednesday a permission slip in which I promise not to sue the school if they manage to lose Noah in the gorilla exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, Thursday…well, often it’s not them and
I
actually forget something, like my wallet. Friday I am so sick of the whole morning process that I just want to declare it a day to play hooky. Of course, going back to the “I was so much cooler before I had kids” thing, I
was
actually the type of kid who played hooky. Often. But now that I am semiresponsible—to go along with my semisanity—I can’t very well encourage that sort of thing.

Somehow, the universe must have figured out my flaw—my incapability to get anywhere on time—and gave me the gift of gab. Or at least writing. So after laboring as a newspaper reporter for ten years in my hometown of Rivers Landing, when I was thirty-six I finally landed my own biweekly column in the paper—actually one with a sizable circulation. Between that and a book I wrote—a humorous
Divorce Survival Guide
that was moderately successful—and freelance writing gigs, I manage to make a living, though the roof on my house leaks and I have had a family of chipmunks living in my walls and can’t afford the exterminator until next paycheck. And I guess I feel bad for the little guys, so maybe they can keep their home in my walls. In my somewhat ugly financial picture, I also make due with rather dismally small child support from my ex-husband, Spawn of Satan, who lives in London with his vapid Child Bride. All of this combined means I am able to work from home. Except on Mondays. On Mondays, I am required to come into the offices of the
Herald Tribune
and have a meeting with my editor, Joe Streep.

Now, with technology, this Monday meeting is archaic. E-mail me. Call me. Videoconference me. Fax me, for Christ’s sake. But Joe likes a face-to-face on Mondays. Personally, I think he likes having someone to argue with. I think I am his Monday-morning pick-me-up. I get his blood moving faster than a cup of coffee. I am the human equivalent of the hair of the dog that bit him, coupled with a triple shot of espresso.

Speaking of dogs, on this particular Monday, Noah’s dog, Gunther, ran away. Michael gave Gunther to us two years ago, a Heinz-57 mutt Michael bought for five dollars from a kid selling pups from a shopping cart outside the grocery store Michael frequents. And Gunther apparently resents not having a better name—or he resents something—because he will listen to Michael but ignores me as if I were a rubber toy Gunther no longer cared about. So when Gunther, aka That Damn Dog, took off that Monday, I spent thirty minutes tracking him down and arrived at the office, finally, sweating, with mud on my dress pants and shoes, and my hair deciding that windblown was going to be the look for that day.

“You’re late, Waters!” Joe snarled.

“Do you know you spit when you yell?”

“You have mud on your pants.”

“Your tie’s ugly.” It was a wide paisley one whose colors recalled a time Gunther had vomited up a plate of spaghetti he had jumped up on the table to eat. Oh, and that was another thing about Gunther. Michael’s “gift”—our “cute” little pup—grew to weigh ninety-six pounds.

“I can change my tie. You’re stuck with that hair.”

“At least I have hair. Your head reflects the fluorescent lights.” And for the record, when not windblown, my hair is actually quite lovely—long, black and shiny-straight.

“I have an assignment for you.”

“The last assignment you gave me involved a color piece on what you can find at the town dump.”

“This is less smelly.”

“Thanks.”

“I want you to squash your breasts like two pancakes—for the sake of the paper.”

“Sure. And why don’t we cut your dick off—for the sake of the paper.”

I saw Joe bite the inside of his cheek for a minute, trying to keep up that “Mr.Perry White-crabby-editor-of-Lois-Lane-and-Clark-Kent” routine. Then he burst out laughing.

Joe is about sixty. He keeps swearing he’ll retire—because of how crazy I make him some days—and he is an old-time newshound. And though his bark might scare the young reporters fresh out of school and working the obit desk, I know he is a devoted grandfather of triplet girls, born to his only daughter after she had a long struggle with infertility.

“Well,” he said, wiping at a tear from laughing so hard. “I’d like to keep my dick. But your breasts…they’re going off to a mammogram for Breast Cancer Awareness month. We’re going to run your column with a pink box around it.”

“A mammogram? I’m only thirty-five. I don’t even need a baseline yet.”

“Lily…you’ve been lying about your age for so long, I think you forget how old you really are. At the very least, you forget that
I
know how old you really are. You’re forty, and you can go get your baseline for the good of the paper and women everywhere. We’re even picking up the tab.”

“Oh, gee, thanks.”

“Just do it.”

“Fine. But I draw the line at pulling a Katie Couric and getting a colonoscopy. My breasts can get smashed. My ass is off-limits.”