Play Dates (20 page)

Better judgment evanesces. I retaliate, calling him a bastard and a pig in his native tongue, which isn’t nearly as nasty as what he’d just said to me.

It could get uglier in a minute or two. And it’s starting to snow.

I herd my group back onto the bus, trying to do enough damage control to stave off a true battle royal. But, as we motor to the next sight, Tavern on the Green, my nemesis continues to push, prod, and provoke, until the words just come tumbling out of my mouth. “Yes, your country is gorgeous and your food is superb, but what about that fly-space issue during the Gulf

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War? And your government’s inflexible position on the invasion of Iraq—which, no doubt, was at least partially predicated on the extent to which France and Saddam had been cuddling up to one another economically. And there were the centuries of anti-Semitism.” I’ve never been political in my life, and suddenly opinions are pouring out of me like water over an unchecked dam. I have violated one of the cardinal rules of international camaraderie:
Never discuss sex, religion, or politics.

By the time we return to the Go Native! tour office, it would have taken the entire General Council of the U.N. Assembly to reestablish détente.

Monsieur Fouché—the same name as Napoleon’s infamous Minister of Police, oh, this does not bode well—marches himself into the tiny room and immediately launches into an emotional tirade. He is the group’s organizer, and on behalf of his countrymen he demands a full refund. My boss asks for my side of the story and I explain that it began as a linguistic misunder-standing that quickly got out of hand, degenerating into child-ish name-calling, which I admit was less than professional on my part, but (putting aside my earlier remarks as hyperbole), I doubted that the unfortunate skirmish of words heralded the end of official diplomatic relations between our two nations.

My boss rolls his eyes at me and without another word, proceeds to quiescently refund the Parisians’ money. This seems to satisfy Monsieur Fouché, leading me to wonder whether his group tries this everywhere they go, provoking their guides into fits of pique, then insisting on reparations.

They depart the Go Native! office for their next tour: the Statue of Liberty, where I suppose they will congratulate themselves on their country’s generosity to this city of non-smoking ingrates. If they could, they would probably rewrite the final line of Emma Lazarus’s ode to immigration so it snidely reads,

“I lift my lamp beside your golden arches.”

“I’m sorry about what happened this afternoon,” I tell my PLAY DATES

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boss. I am genuinely contrite. “At least I’m willing to admit my mistakes,” I add, with a nervous half laugh. I cross my fingers behind my back the way I used to when I was a little girl.

My boss motions to the chair opposite his desk, a gunmetal gray monstrosity that might have looked modern during the dawn of the Cold War. “Have a seat, Claire.” I do. This doesn’t feel good. “Claire, you’re a very intelligent woman.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“And when you’re on the ball, you’re really on it. You’re bright, articulate, personable . . . in essence, everything we look for at Go Native!”

“Thank you, sir.”

“But . . . we have some judgment issues to discuss. I know you have a young child at home or in school, but you can’t just up and leave a tour to fetch her.”

“That was an extenuating circumstance. I got a call from the school nurse. My daughter was ill and I had to take her home. I don’t have child care anymore, now that I’m divorced—” This is far more information than this man needs to know. So I bite my tongue and leave it at that.

“Once, I can understand. And, although we placed a reprimand in your file, had nothing else occurred, I could overlook it. But you abandoned an entire marching band in the middle of the Roosevelt Island tramway, Claire!”

“Almost, but not quite,” I admit sheepishly.

“Another ‘extenuating circumstance,’ I suppose.”

“Well . . . yes, actually . . . and the chaperones said they were fine with my needing to leave. The tour was running over schedule, and I had to pick up my daughter at four P.M. on the other end of town.”

“Not everyone was ‘fine,’ Claire. And even if they had been, this is your job and your responsibility is to finish what you start. I have a business to run and much of my success depends on good word of mouth. Now, I’m aware that this is your first

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job. And I don’t think you take the concept of employment very seriously.”

I assure him that I do and that this job is very important to me and that I can’t afford to lose it. What can I do to atone for my transgressions?

My boss shakes his head. “I’m afraid that today was the third strike. I can’t have you insulting our clients, no matter how ob-noxiously they may behave. You’ve got to be the grown-up and pretend to be deaf, or turn the other cheek.”

I’m being told to act either retarded or Christ-like. And I feel like I’m seven years old.
I will not cry. I will not cry. I will not cry.

And I wish I didn’t always have to be the grown-up. It’s exhausting.

He opens a file drawer and removes a large check ledger. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.”

“But . . . but . . . but . . .” I sound like Zoë. “But Christmas is just around the corner. I won’t be able to buy my daughter presents.” I may sound like the beleaguered Bob Cratchit, but it’s true. “And her birthday is coming up. It’s on Christmas Eve, and I haven’t shopped for that yet, either.”

“You know I’m not a hardass,” my boss says. “But I can’t do it, Claire. I run a competitive business and three complaints about a single employee within just a couple of months’ time . . . ?”

He leans back in his chair and folds his hands across his ample belly. I notice a gravy stain on the front of his navy double-knit shirt. “If you were in my position, what would you do?”

“
Four
strikes?” I ask meekly, hoping for a smile, at least.

He shakes his head and writes a check. “This is for this week’s pay plus two weeks’ severance. I can’t give you another chance; I’m no patsy. But I’m no Grinch either. I hope this will help you pick up a couple of things for your kid.” He hands me the check and feels the ridiculous need to shake my hand and wish me luck.

The world of the suddenly unemployed would like to welcome Claire Marsh to its ranks.

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*

*

*

Zoë and Mia, who has a set of keys to my apartment, are already there when I arrive home. Zoë is in full dance regalia, wearing one of her ballet class outfits, complete with pink slippers and floral headdress. She’s prancing around the room to
Peter and the Wolf
, humming along with the music. Mid-pirouette, she stops to glance at me and her little face pales.

“Are you sick, Mommy?” She runs over to give me a hug.

I can’t decide whether to talk to Mia and our parents before sharing my bad news with Zoë, or to not bottle it in and let her and my sister hear it all right now. But I don’t want to burst Zoë’s happy bubble. There’s something about a state of innocence, almost like a state of grace, that’s as beautiful and fragile as a Fabergé egg. “How was the ballet? Did you enjoy it?”

“Uh-huh!” She launches into a play-by-play, dancing around the living room to recapture some of the scenes. Watching her, I begin to wonder if
The Nutcracker
might have been performed just as effectively to Prokofiev.

“Hey, Mom, can I watch a video?”

“Sure.”

Zoë removes a package from a shopping bag and hands it to me. “MiMi bought it for me, for an extra early Christmas present. It’s the video of
The Nutcracker
.”

“Well, that was mighty generous of MiMi.” I smile at Mia.

“Did you thank her properly?” My daughter nods, then gives her aunt a huge hug. “I like their dancing in ‘The Waltz of the Flowers’ better than what we’re doing in Miss Gloo’s class. But I know it’s only because we’re just kids and we don’t know so many steps yet.” She hands me the box to open for her and I get her set up in front of the TV in the den with a glass of juice and a few cookies. Then I lead Mia into the kitchen, where it always seems that life’s most meaningful conversations—from family conferences to drunken party confessions—take place.

Mia removes an opened bottle of Chardonnay from my re-

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frigerator and pours a goblet for each of us. “What’s up, kid? You look like shit.”

There’s no easy way to do this. “I just got fired.”

“You
what
?” As Mia’s hand flies to her mouth I encourage her to use it for volume control. “What happened? I thought they loved you at Go Native!”

“Three strikes,” I say glumly. “Two involving needing to leave a tour to pick up Zoë.”

“And the second one was my fault, wasn’t it? Oh, shit, Clairey. I should have just stuffed it and gone to get her from that birthday party. This is at least one-third my fault. Fuck.”

She buries her head in her hands. At this moment, I don’t know which of us feels worse. I come over and put my arms around her and when she hugs back, we both start to cry.

“I don’t know what to do,” I sob. “I thought I had something perfect. I really did enjoy being a guide. How often do you get

‘fun with fairly flexible’ when it comes to jobs? How often do you get even
one
of those things? I’ve got a check that will barely cover us for a few weeks . . . in a slow month. But this couldn’t have come at a worse time of year. How do I tell Zoë I need to cancel Christmas? And her birthday?”

Still holding me, Mia reaches for my wineglass. “Here. You’ll think better.” At least she cadges a laugh out of me. “First of all, we’re not canceling Zoë’s party. You’ve already gotten the favors, the paper goods, and the decorations. We—me and Mommy and Daddy and Charles—have planned all along to help out with the food.”

“Presents. I haven’t even shopped for her yet. And what about the rest of you?”

Mia swats my head in a playful love tap. “You don’t think we love you just ’cause you give us stuff, you nut job? We’ve all got everything we need, and some of us have more than we can handle or deserve. You owe me squat. I bailed on you and got you up shit’s creek with your job. I’m going to Sibling Hell for this.”

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I chuckle. “Oh, that might have been the final straw, but your transgressions are far worse than that. You’re going to Sibling Hell for giving all my dolls haircuts while I was at Amy Reis-man’s for a sleepover.”

“I made them look
stylish
. And that was almost twenty years ago!”

“You think there’s a statute of limitations on Sibling Hell?

And you promised me that their hair would grow back! I had to use all my saved-up allowance to go to the doll hospital on Lex-ington Avenue and get a wig for Baby Dear. And if you hadn’t given her a mullet, my Ginny would have been a collector’s item by now.”

“No way. She was not in mint condition. You’d spilled ink on her arm.”

“That was
so
not me,” I insist, regressing further. “That was you. You were trying to give her a tattoo.” Mia blushes, a clear acknowledgment of guilt. “And then there was the time that you thought my birthday poem from Daddy was better than your poem, so you stole mine out of my scrapbook, and scribbled your own name on it.”

“I did that?” she asks, evidently not recalling such a seminal incident from our childhood.

I nod. “You said the older sister should get the better poems.

You turned it into a form of literary primogeniture.”

“I don’t remember that at all. What happened to the poem?”

I grin. “I stole it back, brought it to Daddy, and he typed up a replacement for me.”

She tops off our wine and changes the subject. “What was the third strike with Go Native! by the way?”

“I nearly destroyed diplomatic relations between us and the French.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t blame yourself. That’s been going on for centuries. Didn’t Mark Twain say something bitchy about them around a hundred and fifty years ago?”

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“Not in front of a busload of them.” I look down into my wine and begin to cry again.

“You’ll be fine, kid,” she says, stroking my hair. “You’ll get through this. You’ve braved worse.”

“Nice platitudes, Mia, but this isn’t a goddamn after-school special. I’m totally broke and now I need to look for a new job at the worst time of year. I can’t ask Go Native! for a reference—

I got fired for cause—and that’s the sum total of my work experience. I probably can’t even go to a rival tour company because I’ll still have to finesse my way around how I left my last job, and all they’d need to do is call my boss and the whole truth will come out.”

I polish off my wine and Mia empties the bottle into our glasses. “I hate the way my life is impacting Zoë. You know some of her classmates’ mothers have called me to ‘make sure’ I’m really having the birthday party
here
, because it’s so out of their realm of comprehension. I can hear the disapproval in their voices, hear them mentally tallying up what I’m most likely spending on Zoë’s party and the kind of party it is versus what they all do these days—you know, renting Shea Stadium or taking forty kids and their mothers to a Broadway matinee. It’s that horrible ‘store-bought versus home-made’ snobbery. It’s between their words. In their silences. I feel it, like a damp, cold chill. At best, they think poor Zoë’s mom is doing something

‘quaint.’ They make me feel church-mousy. And if that’s the way a bunch of grown women are acting, imagine how their kids are treating Zoë. Seven-year-olds have a remarkable capacity for cruelty. She was really into the July-in-December theme until a couple of the girls teased her about having a party at home, which they think is for little kids who are too young to appreciate the finer points of the planetarium. When I picked her up at ballet class this week, she was in tears because her supposed friends Chauncey and Bathsheba Marie had been calling her a baby.”