Fathermucker (9 page)

Maude, smiling, fixes her eyes on the floor and does her little shyness dance, holding my hand and using my right leg as a peek-a-boo prop. Then she laughs, chomps hard on her pacifier, and takes cover behind the tail of my untucked T-shirt.

“Still with that binky, huh?” Jess says. “Isn't that for
babies
?” She's talking to Maude, and she's teasing, and she's also right, but it's hard not to take this as a judgment, especially when Jess makes the same damned comment every week, usually followed by an aside that too much pacifier now means orthodontia bills out the wazoo in ten years. Also—and this is a pet peeve, I realize—I hate that she calls it a binky.
Binky
sounds like a slang term for oral sex, if you ask me.
Gonna get me some binky.

Maude peers from my shirt-tail to address this last point. “It's not a binky; it's a
passie
,” she says, as if Jess were a complete idiot, and tauntingly chomps on the pacifier for effect. (This is one of those moments when I could just about burst with parental pride.) Then Maude hands me the passie and makes for the next room, where the faerie versions of Emma and Haven flit about, as Gloria implores her androgynous son to
be careful
, a sentiment she delivers so often, and in so many benign situations (such as now, when he's six inches away from the corner of a coffee table he's a good foot taller than), that she may as well just ignore him altogether. Aesop for the twenty-first century:
The Mom Who Cried Be Careful
.

“How are you?” Jess asks, hugging me firmly and pecking my cheek. “You look tired.”

“I feel tired.”

“There's fresh coffee,” she says. “Catskill Mountain, Moka Java blend. When did Stacy leave?”

“Monday.”

“Oh, you poor dear. Maybe you'd prefer a beer?”

“No, coffee's good. If I have beer, I'll sleep, and I'm not allowed to sleep.”

“Just as well. The only beer we have is this weird microbrew stuff Chris is into. Fin du Monde. There's so much alcohol in it, you're better off doing tequila shots. I had half a bottle over the weekend, and I swear, I had a headache for like two days.” We process through the kingly archway into the kitchen, and she takes out a cup—an oversized thing with the insidious face of Mickey Mouse on it; I can't escape rodents this morning!—and pours me a generous helping. “When's she back, tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

There's a crashing noise, and Haven starts whimpering. Leaving the coffee, Jess and I race to the next room to see what happened—and to make sure that our respective charges aren't the ones responsible for upsetting the little crybaby. I won't say Gloria is overprotective, but she makes the Secret Service look like a bunch of art school dropouts at the Phish Halloween show. Check that; I'll say it: she's overprotective. If she would just take a chill lozenge, these little gatherings would be a lot more . . . I hesitate to say
fun
, because I'm not sure the bonhomie derived from a good playdate constitutes fun, exactly . . . but the time would go by faster. And for all the horseshit about
socialization
and
learning to share
, that's the real purpose of playdates: to kill time. You know how if you go to a really awesome party—one without kids, I mean; a wingding in, say, a two-bedroom apartment in the West Village—and you get there at nine thirty, and you start drinking and dancing and schmoozing, and the next thing you know, you look at your watch, and it's two in the morning? That sort of thing rarely happens to me these days. Almost never, in fact. Parenthood is like prison in that regard. I'm always aware of the hour, aware of the fact that it's always earlier than I'd hoped, aware of the vast and intimidatingly vacant Sahara between now and the undependable oasis that is the kids' bedtime (a bedtime that may turn out to be a mirage!). Gloria, at times, can be a cellmate from hell, a fellow-traveler in the desert who grouses about the heat and bums water from your canteen.

Neither Maude nor Emma is responsible for Haven's agony, thank God. What happened was, he dropped the toy he was playing with—an oversized plastic Thomas engine that bleeps and chuffs and plays the irritating theme song
they're two they're four they're six they're eight
; at home, he doesn't have toys like that, so it's a playdate novelty—on the floor, and was spooked by the noise
shunting trucks and hauling freight
when it hit the polished hardwood. Rather than redirect him by introducing a new
red and green and brown and blue
toy, or a new activity, a new anything, or just ignoring his blatant attention-grab, Gloria's reacted in the worst possible way, which is to say, like Jackie Kennedy in Dealey Plaza.

“What's wrong, Haven?” she cries, cradling him in her arms (the tableau of mother and woman-haired child suggests a pietà, only with a midget Jesus wearing a hipster Nirvana T-shirt). “Oh, it's so
awful
that that happened. You must be
so
upset!”

Even Maude and Emma, who are closer to three than four, regard Our Lady of the Sorrows with puzzlement. Even the preschoolers know that Gloria, like the plastic surgeon who did Heidi Montag's boobs, is blowing things way the fuck out of proportion.

Before Gloria begins rending garments, Jess, who has
two
kids and therefore understands the Parenting 101 concept of redirection, intervenes. “Maybe it's time to have a snack. Who wants some cookies?”

This snaps Haven out of his sympathy ploy. At once he stops with the histrionics, breaks away from his
Mater Dolorosa
's tentacles, and follows Jess into the kitchen, a spring in his step, leaving me alone in the great room with the forgotten Thomas train and Gloria. She arches her eyebrow and gives me a sly grin. “So . . . McDonald's?”

Rather than defend my choice of restaurant—in three weeks, I'll be thirty-seven goddamn years old; do I really need to justify my decision to have an Egg Fucking McMuffin?—I fib. “I needed more coffee.”

“They have coffee?”

“They have coffee. It's pretty good.” I give the Thomas train a kick. “Not as good as Dunkin' Donuts, but better than Starbucks.”

This is a mistake. Although New Paltz has a McDonald's, a Burger King, a Subway, a Blimpie, and the two aforementioned coffee places, our many and vocal radical-Leftist citizens, veritable Jedi knights in their opposition to Evil Empires, are particularly outspoken about their contempt for chains of any kind. Chains, you see, are the bonds of our corporate oppressors.

“I get my coffee at Mudd Puddle,” Gloria says. “Fair trade.”

“McDonald's has fair trade coffee,” I tell her. I don't know if this is the case—it's probably not; McDonald's would buy coffee beans picked by orphaned Sumatran child prostitutes if it were half a cent cheaper a bushel—but I'm banking on the fact that she won't know enough or care enough to call my bluff. My stratagem works.

“I'll have to keep that in mind,” she says.

“They have Apple Dippers, too. Pre-packaged, pre-sliced apples. You know. For the kids.”

“Haven, honey, no mouth. No mouth!”

Her pride and joy has
Ecce Homo
returned, cookie in hand, but it's one of his long tresses that has found its way into his hungry maw.
I'll cut his hair when
he
wants to cut it
, Gloria'll tell us, although it's pretty clear to me that he'd at least appreciate a trim. He's forever blowing his stray hairs away from his nose or pushing them out of his face or putting them in his mouth and slurping on them, like he's doing now. Sometimes my crotchety neighbor, Bill—a divorced man in his late fifties who still has his McCain/Palin sign on his lawn, although that ill-matched tandem flamed out almost a year ago—will neglect to cut his grass in a timely fashion, probably because it's difficult to navigate his John Deere tractor around the ancient BMW carcass rusting on his lawn, and I have a powerful urge to get my own mower going and cut it myself. I feel the same way about Haven's hair. It's all I can do not to drag him to the bathroom right now and shave his head with one of Jess's Lady Schicks.

“Haven, I said
no mouth
!”

As I said before, the difference between Gloria Hynek and the rest of the moms (and dads; fuck, I just referred to myself as a mom; maybe I should sample one of Chris's microbrews, after all) is that Gloria only has the one child. If she had two kids, or three, like Cynthia Pardo, she wouldn't give a shit about one of them chewing on some hair. Although if she had more kids, she would keep Haven's hair short, because short hair is easier to maintain and harder for ticks and lice to hide in.

Jess returns, bearing a platter of Stop & Shop cookies (which, incidentally, are baked on the premises and quite tasty) and my cup of coffee. Thanking her, I take the cup and three chocolate chips. She then offers the platter to Gloria, who waves it off.

“They look delicious,” she says, “but I can't.” When no one asks her why she can't, she supplies the reason herself. “Isagenix.”

“Isa-who?”

“Isagenix. The cleanse? Sounds crazy, I know, but it totally works. I've lost four pounds, and I've never felt better.”

Gloria is short and curvy, with fair skin, strawberry blonde hair, pendulous breasts and a booty that would “spring” Sir Mix-a-Lot. Even at her slenderest—at age twenty-five, the magical and well-chronicled year she spent in Portland, dabbling in a raw foods diet and sleeping with both of her housemates—she wasn't slender, but she gained twenty-seven pounds when she was pregnant with Haven, twenty-seven pounds she's been unable to shed in the intervening three-plus years. It's not from lack of trying; she's gone on every fad diet, and attempted every fad exercise, known to man—South Beach and Crossfit, Zone and yoga, Weight Watchers and “willPower & grace,” Atkins and hooping—but the excess poundage remains intractable. Never mind that she looks great, that she wears the weight well (despite what the kingmakers in Hollywood believe, most straight guys prefer curvy women; whenever a Lindsay Lohan or a Kate Winslet starves away her God-given boobs and butt, rendering her figure as flat and uninteresting as Justin Bieber's, men the world over rend their garments). She's forever beating herself up for being beefier than her old friend Jess Holby, next to whom skeletons appear plump.

“Isn't that the starvation diet?” Jess wrinkles her nose. “Ruth told me about that.”

“Not starvation.” Gloria produces a barrette from her pocket and puts it in her son's hair, unobstructing his line of sight but making him look even more like a girl. “I mean, fasting is
part
of it, but it's all about, you know, purifying the body. You should
see
the stuff that comes out of your body. Disgusting.”

“Where
is
Ruth?” I ask, not wanting the conversation to veer into the scatological, which with Gloria, it would. Gloria is the Queen of TMI. She'll tell you
anything
about herself, no matter how private. This can be amusing when she's discussing clit piercings and Oregonian three-ways, but when the subject is odd chunks of green matter in the stool, it's best to change the subject. “Is she coming?”

“She can't,” Jess says. “Sarah has a stomach bug.”

“Bummer.”

“She thinks she got food poisoning from that batch of yogurt she tried to make from her breast milk.”

Before I can ask for elaboration on the breast-milk-yogurt story, on the other side of the (great) room, Emma whacks Maude in the arm, the first salvo in what will probably be a playdate-long battle over the former's coveted possessions. All necessary to their development, this child warfare, in some weird, twisted way that the Creator should probably have spent a bit more time thinking through before dickering around with marsupials and trigonometry. (Maybe a full day of rest on Sunday was too generous—I mean, would the extra half-day of work have killed Him?) Spiritual growth, in its simplest form, and in every major religion, concerns the transition from selfishness to selflessness.
The meek shall inherit the earth.
Unfortunately, the world remains under the sceptered sway of the selfish.
The kingdom the power and the glory are someone else's now and forever.

Before anyone can react, the girls settle it themselves. Ah, progress. Maybe we all
can
just get along.

“Hey,” Jess says, finishing the last of her cookie, “did you guys hear the latest Cynthia Pardo dirt?”

Cynthia Pardo: New Paltz's most successful real estate broker and most notorious adulteress.
Her vagina
, Meg once quipped,
is an open house
. Impossible to attend a social gathering these days and not have her name come up.

“I heard she almost got arrested,” Gloria says, “but I didn't get the whole story.”

“Arrested?”

“Oh my
God
.
Wait
until you hear.” Jess sits on the couch and takes a long sip of coffee, reveling in the dramatic-effect attention. “So, you know how she and Bruce Baldwin like to have sex”—she mouths the word
sex
, in case kids are in earshot; they aren't; they're in the spare bedroom now, playing a laughably uncompetitive game of hide-and-seek—“in public places?”

Jess happens to be looking right at me when she ends the question, so I nod. This is common knowledge. Meg, with whom Cynthia had a recent falling out, delights in regaling us with juicy tidbits of where the two lovebirds roosted. Last week, the tryst went down in one of the homes for which she has an exclusive listing.

“Well, they were in Beacon last week, at Dia? You know, the art museum?”

Sure—the art museum built in the abandoned Nabisco factory, specializing in the exhibition of modern-art installations too large for MoMA, such as the piece Roland and Maude were drawn to during our one ill-fated visit there, the untitled sculpture Stacy dubbed
Enormous Pile of Broken Glass on the Floor
.