Looking for a Love Story (12 page)

YORKIE OWNER: Lancelot, stop!

ME: Stay cool, Annie!

LANCELOT: (to Annie) I’m gonna tear you apart! I’m gonna shred you!

ANNIE: (to Lancelot) What are you, nuts? My head is bigger than your entire body
.

LANCELOT: (to Annie) Bring it on, Big Stuff! (He pulls free of his leash, leaps at her chin, comes away with a mouthful of fur.)

ANNIE: (to Lancelot) Okay, now you’re gonna die. (to me, as I grab her harness and pull her back) Come on, you gotta let me kill him. It’ll be fast, I promise
.

Meanwhile, the kid in the stroller had started to cry.

The nanny put away her cell phone, rammed a pacifier in her charge’s mouth, and as the kid, Lancelot’s owner, and I watched in fascination, she reached down, picked up the snarling Yorkie by the back of his neck, looked him in the eye, and began talking to him in Spanish. Whatever she said apparently convinced him to rethink his agenda, because he shut up instantly.

By the time Lancelot had chilled out enough to be handed back to his mistress, we’d reached the lobby, but the incident had acted as an icebreaker for us, so instead of taking off we hung around long enough to introduce ourselves. Lancelot’s mommy—her word, not mine—was Abigail Barrow; she lived in the penthouse and was a partner at one of the biggest law firms in the city. The nanny’s name was Gabriela.

“I don’t know what gets into Lancie,” Abigail said. “He’s just started being so aggressive.”

“You are using a new dog walker, yes?” said Gabriela.

“Canine Cuties, yes,” said Abigail. “We just started with them.”

“They take him out with the big dogs,” Gabriela said.

“Oh, no, he gets an individual walk three times a day. I pay extra for that. A fortune.”

“Maybe you pay, but I see him with the other dogs when I am in the park with the baby. The other dogs knock your dog over. I don’t think it is to hurt him. Maybe they think he is a chew toy, you know?”

“Oh, God.” Abigail moaned. “Canine Cuties came so highly recommended.”

“Better find someone else,” advised Gabriela, and with those comforting words she and the kid split.

“‘Find someone else,’” Abigail repeated. “This is our third dog-walking service! The first one quit the business, the second one hired a kid who said it helped him bond with the dogs to urinate with them in the park, and now this! What am I going to do? I work twenty hours a day! I can’t walk Lancie myself.”

I thought about saying I’d do it for her. When I was writing I needed to take breaks, and Annie always stuck to her no-farther-than-the-curb-when-strolling policy. Walking Lancelot would be relaxing for me. But workaholics like Abigail make me feel like a slacker, and I knew I’d spend at least half an hour trying to explain why I had enough time to walk her dog, and then I’d start apologizing for my entire life. So I didn’t make the offer.

After I’d settled Annie back in the apartment, I put on some lipstick in honor of my new status as a solvent person and headed off to Yorkville House.

“COFFEE? TEA?” CHICKY
asked. “I can get you a bagel from the dining room. This joint buys really good bagels.”

“Nothing, thank you,” I said. I don’t like to eat things that can stick in my throat when I’m nervous—and in a pinch a really
chewy bagel can substitute for whatever that stuff is that expands to fill up the holes in plaster. What surprised me was, I was nervous. I hadn’t expected that. I told myself I was being ridiculous. Chicky said she had the whole story in her head, so all I had to do was listen to her and take notes. It would be a couple of days before I actually had to confront my computer again. Not that I was afraid to confront it, I told myself.

Get real
, said a voice inside my head.
You’re scared to death of the damn thing. And given your last experience with it, who can blame you? Add to that the fact that you’ll be writing a love story—

“So, about our phone call last night,” Chicky said, breaking into my thoughts. “What bugs you about writing a love story?”

I could have told her she was imagining things, but I don’t think that fast when someone is reading my mind. “It’s not an area of expertise for me.”

Chicky sat on her daybed and gestured to me to take one of the chairs. “Tell me about that,” she commanded.

“What do you want to know?”

“Why did your parents get a divorce?” She said it casually, but she seemed really interested.

“Excuse me, but what does this have to do with me writing your book?”

“I read
Love, Max
, remember? I don’t think it was your dog who was angry when your folks split up.” She grinned at me. “Doll Face, I’m a nosy old lady. I want to get to know you better.”

I reminded myself once again that she was the boss. “Mostly, it was Betty Friedan’s fault.”

“The woman who wrote
The Feminine Mystique?”

I nodded. “The book that launched the women’s movement. My mother didn’t get around to reading it until I was seven, but once she did she’d found her calling. See, Alexandra had always
been a rebel. Maybe on some deep level she was pissed off at the world because her birth mother died. Or maybe it was because Grandma Karras indulged her too much trying to compensate.”

“Your mother was willful?”

“When Alexandra was fourteen she wrote a term paper for history class, at her very conservative prep school, in which she attempted to prove that the United States government had railroaded the Rosenbergs to the electric chair without cause.”

“I remember that case,” Chicky said. “How’d she do on the paper?”

“How much do you know about pricey girls’ schools in the late sixties?”

“She flunked.”

“And she flunked again the next year when she wrote an essay saying that Charles Lindbergh was a Nazi, because Lucky Lindy was a big hero at Westwood Academy for Girls. Alexandra was also gung ho for the peace movement and civil rights. She was always trying to sneak out of the house to protest things in Washington—but she never could get out without waking her parents. Then she met Dad and lost interest in everything but him for a while.”

“Until Betty Friedan and the women’s libbers,” Chicky supplied.

I nodded. “First she tried joining a consciousness-raising group. But she said they were nothing but a bunch of women grousing about the quality of their orgasms.”

“Your mother talked to you about orgasms?”

“We were an open household.”

“God love her.”

“After the consciousness-raising didn’t work out, my mother joined the National Organization for Women. Dad was afraid it would be bad for his business, because there were people who said
the women in NOW were Commies. But Alexandra managed to smooth him down—in those days she still could—and then she went right back to her meetings. And marches. You name the cause—sex-segregated help-wanted ads, hiring practices that discriminated against women, the ERA, women’s reproductive rights—my mother was there. She marched at the White House and at the Supreme Court. In her spare time, she went to college, where she graduated with honors and continued on to get her law degree.”

“And what was your father doing?”

“He’d become the star salesman at his Cadillac showroom in Rockland County. Originally, he’d taken the job to piss off his family, but it turned out to be perfect for him. Dad loved cars, especially Caddies. His record for bringing in repeat business was legendary in northeastern automotive circles.

“Then one of his maiden aunts died in the mid-eighties and left him a small inheritance, and Dad bought a dealership of his own. He picked a location twenty minutes away from the town where he’d made his name and his customers not only followed him but brought him new buyers. He was really happy in those days; he made buckets of money, and he loved being his own boss.”

I paused for a second and remembered my daddy back then. Sometimes after he’d closed up at night, he could be seen wandering around his showroom, lovingly stroking shiny fender fins and chrome grilles.

Chicky brought me back to the present. “Go on,” she prompted. But suddenly it seemed kind of weird to be spilling so much personal family history. I’m usually more discreet. Chicky seemed to sense what I was thinking, because she added, “You tell a story so well, Doll Face. You got me hooked. No wonder you’re such a terrific writer.”

I’m sure anyone can imagine how these words sounded to a
woman who had just spent the last three years fighting a soul-sucking writer’s block. I forgot about discretion fast.

“My mother didn’t share my father’s enthusiasm for his product,” I went on. “If she found herself in a place where there was no public transportation, she preferred to drive the old Renault she and Dad had bought secondhand their first year together. It was an ugly little thing that had been scarred by years of being parked on New York City streets, and as soon as they could afford it Dad tried to persuade Mother to trade up, but she clung to it. Especially after we left the city—a move my brother and I agreed probably pounded the final nail into the coffin of our parents’ marriage.”

“I was wondering when we were going to get to that,” Chicky said. “So far it sounds as if they were different, but they’d managed to adjust.”

I thought about that one for a moment. “It probably was more of a strain than any of us realized, including them, but yeah, they did adjust. Even though Dad wasn’t really comfortable with Alexandra’s politics and she had real issues with big showy American cars.

“It was my mother’s law practice that finally did Dad in. She worked on women’s rights issues—sexual harassment, equal pay for women, child molestation, rape and domestic violence—and she annoyed some seriously hostile types. Our family started getting threatening phone calls at two in the morning. And Dad wanted her to quit.”

“But she wouldn’t, of course,” said Chicky.

“He said she was endangering her kids. She said she was teaching us to stand up for our beliefs. Finally Dad said if she insisted on antagonizing thugs who enjoyed beating up women, he wanted us to move out of the rat trap where we lived to something safer. At that time, we were still in the building in Greenwich Village my parents had moved to after their wedding. It didn’t have a doorman,
and sometimes it didn’t have a front door. If Mr. Stroika on the first floor had had one too many and forgotten his key when he came home at three in the morning, instead of waking his family, he just ripped the door off its hinges.

“But it wasn’t just a safety issue for Dad. We had three bedrooms—well, two and a sleeping alcove for me—and the one bedroom with access to fresh air opened onto a fire escape, so the window was sealed and there were bars on it. It was okay in winter, but when the electric breakers shorted out in the summer and the air-conditioning went off, the place was an oven. The hot water was dicey because the furnace had been installed during the Hoover administration, and sometimes when the exterminator hadn’t been around in a couple of months, calling the place a rat trap was the literal truth. Plus, back in the seventies, New York wasn’t the well-heeled place it is today, and Dad was tired of the dirt, the noise, and the mayhem.

“To my mother, our Manhattan nest was a little slice of heaven. She loved the city, loved living on our street with the Chinese place on the corner that delivered our dinner most nights, and the greasy spoon on the other corner where she grabbed her breakfast coffee and roll on her way to work. She was even fond of Mr. Stroika, when he was sober. As far as she was concerned, all this far outweighed the lack of space and trivial annoyances like irregular heat and no fresh air. But she couldn’t fight Dad about the safety problems. Our neighborhood was what was known as marginal, and the front-door thing was worrisome. She agreed to move out of the city.

“Dad bought us a big, beautiful Victorian in Rye, New York, where he installed a state-of-the-art security system and a big German shepherd—”

“Max,” Chicky broke in.

“His name was Fierce, which turned out to be wishful thinking
on Dad’s part. Fierce was a lover, not a fighter; he greeted strangers with big slurpy kisses, and he cowered in our laps during thunderstorms. But as far as we knew, the security system was perfect. It was never tested.”

“No crime in Rye?” Chicky said.

“Alexandra said the police carried briefcases instead of weapons. She didn’t say it fondly. But Dad was in heaven. He’d already opened two more Cadillac dealerships in Westchester County, and he was glad to be moving closer to his work. He figured he’d seen the last of the Chinese takeout; he enrolled us in a country club, the most exclusive one in the area. It never occurred to him to find out if it had any minority members.”

I watched Chicky process this information. “Your mother disapproved?”

“She said it was clear that the club was racist—just like the rest of the goddamn suburbs. Dad said,
Now who’s being prejudiced?
She said,
When was the last time you saw a black person in Rye?

“Alexandra never set foot inside Dad’s club, not even after an African American lawyer and his family joined it. My mother just couldn’t wrap her brain around the idea of grown-ups getting together to play sports and hang around a clubhouse for the fun of it
—fun
being a four-letter word in her dictionary. More important, she hated our new life. For the entire time we were in Rye, she and my brother, Pete, mourned for Manhattan.”

I have to admit that as I was talking, I kept checking Chicky to make sure she still seemed enthralled. And every time I did, she did. That was what made me keep going, even though I was getting into more and more private stuff. I’m not proud of this, I’m just saying.

“I know now that Dad had dreams for us when he moved us to the burbs,” I told my audience of one. “He saw himself playing tennis with Pete at the club on summery Saturday afternoons, and
he hoped I’d become one of those cheery girls who swam in the club pool and collected a bunch of friends. Pete developed into a precocious math genius with lousy hand–eye coordination. I did my best to please Dad by signing up for swimming lessons, but I was seven pounds overweight by the time I was eleven, and I burst into tears every time I saw myself in a bathing suit.