Play Dates (22 page)

162

Leslie Carroll

“You can say that again!”

“He
better
come. And he
better not bring her
.”

I laughed. “That’s just an expression.”

“What’s an ‘expression’?”

“It’s like . . . a . . . saying.” She gave me a confused look. “An

‘expression’ is a figure of speech.” I’d made it worse. Claire is better at explaining these things. “An ‘expression’ is a silly thing that isn’t meant to be taken totally for real, but it sort of sums up a little part of life. Like when I said ‘you can say that again!,’ what I was saying, but as an ‘expression,’ was ‘you’re so right! I totally agree with you!’ ”

She nodded. “Oh. Okay. Like . . . like . . . like when you say it’s raining cats and dogs, it isn’t
really
raining cats and dogs but it’s raining so hard that the raindrops are
as big as
cats and dogs.”

“You’re better at this than I am, kid.”

Celestia lives on the top floor of a walkup on East Eighth Street, on the stretch better known as St. Mark’s Place. With what she charges for a reading she could live on Park Avenue, but Celestia expanded differently. She now owns the building, which is prime real estate, and enjoys her eight-hundred-square-foot roof garden and patio. Try getting a patch of green like that uptown.

“Hey, there, little fish,” she said, greeting me. I’m a Pisces, so she came up with that name the first time we met.

“It smells good in here. Like grapefruits and oranges,” Zoë observed.

“Thank you. It’s called incense. And I’m very glad you like how it smells. I think the smell puts me in a good mood.”

“Me, too. But I’m tired,” Zoë said, slumping against the wall.

She’s not used to climbing five flights of stairs and her legs are a lot shorter than mine.

“Well, ‘tired,’ can I get you some pink lemonade? I made it fresh. From pink lemons.”

Zoë laughed. “I want to see the pink lemons!”

“Nuh-uh. They’re my special secret.”

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“Where do you get them?” nearly-seven-year-old inquiring minds want to know.

“I grow them right here in my garden. And I’m the only one in New York who has them.”

“Watch it. Next thing, she’ll be believing you raise brown cows that only give chocolate milk.”

“They don’t?” Celestia said airily. “Listen, most of life’s funda-mentals revolve around people believing what they want to about something. It’s all a romantic equation. Belief equals faith plus an inexact science. Look at marriage. Organized religion. Astrology—

which is actually more exact and explainable than the workings of the other two. ‘God is everywhere’ is, you’ll admit, a bit more ephemeral than my saying that Mercury is in retrograde until the twenty-third of the month and—”

“And my Saturn is in the garage.”

“Don’t mock me, Mia.”

“I’m not. Or I wouldn’t be forking over a sizeable percentage of my salary.” I formally introduced her to Zoë and Celestia asked who wanted to go first.

“You,” Zoë said to me. Celestia brought Zoë her lemonade and explained that what she tells people is a secret, so would she mind waiting in the other room until it’s her turn.

Zoë was cool with that. She likes secrets. “Can I make a picture?” she asked, seeing an easel set up with a box of colored chalk beside it.

“Sure, go for it. That’s what it’s here for.” Celestia flipped the pad to a clean sheet. “This is to wipe your hands when you’re through,” she said, pointing to a Mason jar of water and a roll of paper towels. My niece made herself right at home. When one of Celestia’s cats slinked by and brushed her leg, Zoë exclaimed,

“Oooh, can I play with him?” She reached down to pet the pewter gray longhair.

“It’s a ‘she,’ and yes, you can play with her. She’s very friendly for a cat. Her name’s Diana.”

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Leslie Carroll

“Like the princess?” Zoë asked Celestia.

The astrologer shook her head. “Like the goddess. Diana was a moon goddess and the goddess of the hunt. She likes
mice
,”

Celestia whispered.

Zoë jumped back like she’d received an electric shock. “No!

I’m scared of mice.” Her lip began to tremble.

“Don’t worry,” Celestia soothed. “There aren’t any mice indoors. And she never goes hunting when I have houseguests.”

My niece brightened. She didn’t look totally convinced, but, as Celestia might say, she wanted to believe that was the truth. I went into Celestia’s reading room. The walls are deep lapis blue.

Her furniture—huge silk pillows and overstuffed couches—are upholstered in shades of blue and indigo. You feel like you’re sitting in first class on an astral plane.

“Your chart indicates some big changes coming up for you,”

she said, going over the printout she’d made in advance. “In the next few months, Jupiter will be moving into your tenth house, the house of social identity and career. Now that you’re aware of that, you can harness his wattage to really take some strides. Your aspects for creating business partnerships are sensational.”

We spoke some more about what that meant. Maybe
Mi
♥
amore Makeup
might become more than a pipe dream. Celestia said I should be alert for opportunities that would be placed directly in my path and that I shouldn’t pre-judge things because I might miss out. The universe helps those who help themselves, she reminded me. “However . . . this is not an auspicious time for romance,” she added.

“For this I needed to pay you over two hundred bucks?”

Celestia laughed. “Well, you’ll want to know that your outlook is much brighter come spring. And again, as with the career breaks, don’t make immediate assumptions about men, for better or for worse.”

“Oh, I think I can make
some
assumptions. Like my best friend PLAY DATES

165

Charles is not going to suddenly switch teams.” He wouldn’t be my type even if he did, but I wanted to make my point.

Celestia rolled her eyes skyward. “You know what I mean.

Now, later next year you’re going to have some powerful planets conjoining in both the career and romance sectors of your chart, which hasn’t happened for you in a while.”

“Try
ever
.”

“So be prepared for the unexpected.”

“How the fuck do I do that?” It sounded like a total oxymoron.

“You’ll know it when it happens.” She smiled.

“So if something
never
happens to
me
, and then suddenly it does happen, that’ll probably be ‘it,’ huh?”

“Something like that.”

I was giving her shit because it’s fun, but actually, she was very helpful. If something’s coming—whether it’s a bouquet of two dozen long-stems or a Mack truck at sixty miles per hour—I like to know about it beforehand.

I left Celestia’s inner sanctum and she called in Zoë. The kid took the “secrets” part of her session very seriously and refused to tell me what Celestia had said to her. She showed me the chalk drawing she had made while I was inside, though. It was a picture of her giving her mom a kiss.

“I think I want to go home now,” she said.

I brought her back to my place, we packed up her stuff, then called Claire. Zoë had added an inscription (“I love you Mommy”) to her picture. We rolled it up and secured it with a rubber band.

She clutched it tightly during the entire bus ride uptown.

“I see a penis!”

“What?” I turned to see what she was talking about. So did all the other passengers on the number 15 bus.

She pointed out the window. “Look! A penis!”

“Shhh!” I craned my neck and realized she was talking about one of the towers atop Tudor City, an apartment complex with faux-Elizabethan architecture, located across from

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Leslie Carroll

the United Nations. I had to laugh. The towers do look a bit like circumcised granite. I scoped out the other riders. A couple of them were blushing. I guess they saw what I did. What Zoë did.

“Just out of curiosity, where have you seen a penis?” At least she’d used an acceptable word, as opposed to one of the seven George Carlin joked that you couldn’t say on TV. It could have been a lot worse.

“I saw Daddy
and
Mommy naked when we went camping once. We had to take a bath in the lake because there was nowhere else to do it. And I saw Xander.”

“You—you what? This wasn’t when you asked him to elope, was it?”

She cocked her head and looked at me like I’m a goofball.

“Noooo.” She leaned over to whisper in my ear. “He took a pee-pee in the sandbox at recess.”

Great. I hope he doesn’t feel the urge to take a leak in one of Claire’s planters during Zoë’s party.

At 79th Street we boarded the crosstown; and after disembarking on the West Side, Zoë started to do her “we’re-almost-there” skip in front of the natural history museum. The elevator man greeted her as though she were Elizabeth the First returning from one of her Progresses. I had a lump in my throat and mixed feelings. A kid’s perspective on life is a great ass-kicker when you’ve become a little jaded or so busy being an adult that you’ve forgotten what it’s all about in the long run. I’d really miss having her around, and at the same time I was glad to bring her home to Claire. Maybe even a bit relieved. I could go back to my life, child-free. Some of what I felt was guilt. That I could have what Claire could not. But maybe she wouldn’t have switched with me for the world.

Claire had scarcely opened the door when Zoë threw herself into her mom’s arms. They held each other for a while, as I watched, a third wheel on a bicycle, Zoë’s chalk sketch crushed PLAY DATES

167

between them. “You know what?” I said to Claire, “I think the kid missed you.”

Zoë lit up like a bonfire. “You can say that again!”

Dear Diary:

I had the best time with MiMi. It’s like having a Mommy and a
big sister at the same time. She didn’t yell at me even one time,
even when I spilled chocolate milk on a scarf of hers that is old
and made of silk. I was using it for dress-up to play a lady from
Spain with a big comb in my hair and a piece of lace. The scarf is
shaped like a triangle and it’s black and it has fringes on the
edges and flowers sewn onto it. She said it was called a piano
shawl but I never saw a piano that was wearing one. Why does a
piano need a shawl?

I didn’t have to eat vegetables when I was with MiMi. She
doesn’t like vegetables so she didn’t make me eat them.

We went to see Celestia, who is MiMi’s astrologer. She told me
where all the planets were in the sky when I was born. She
showed me a picture she made and it had all kinds of squiggly little lines on it like the picture-writing I saw in the museum when
we took a class trip and saw the mummies. She said because of
where the planets were on the exact minute when I was born that
I act more grown-up for my age than a lot of other kids. And she
said that I get mad when I don’t get what I want. I thought that
was funny because I could have told her that without her making
a picture of the sky. She said a lot of things that are the truth
about me. It was like magic. She also told me that things would
get better at school for me by the end of the year. It’s sort of like a
birthday wish and I really, really, really hope it comes true. MiMi
wanted me to tell her what Celestia said, but Celestia said it was
a secret between us and I didn’t have to tell anyone else what she

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told me if I didn’t want to. I loved her house. She has a garden on
her roof, but I couldn’t really see it because it was night-time. And
the room where she told me all about the planets was dark blue
and it was so beautiful. I sat on the floor on a big pillow like
Mommy has under the piano, except Celestia’s pillow was purple.

Inside the room was like night-time when you look up at the stars,
like when we went camping in Lake George. I want to paint my
room blue so it looks like that. And maybe we could paint the
planets and the stars on the ceiling. Mommy is very good at art. I
know she could paint it. When I was little, my room had paintings on it that she made. There was a line of pink elephants and
their trunks were holding onto the tails of the ones in front of
them. And there was a purple cow that jumped over the moon.

We saw my daddy last night before we went to see Celestia. He
looked more older than he did when we all lived together. I wish I
could see him more. He’s busy a lot and he’s busy with HER. I
know what my birthday wish will be when I blow out my candles. I can tell it here because this is my diary and I’m not saying
it out loud. It will be that Daddy will come home forever and we
can all live happily ever after. And Mommy won’t be sad anymore and she won’t get angry at Daddy or at me and on Sundays
I can jump on their bed and we can have Daddy and Mommy
cuddles like we used to. And then Mommy will make bacon and
pancakes and we will play in Central Park and go on the
carousel and I would get on the biggest horse, the one that looks
like it has armor. When Daddy was here, I was scared to get on
it. But Celestia said I was grown-up for my age so now that I will
be seven I’m not afraid anymore.

Daddy said I was his “best girl.” I wish I had a second birthday wish that Mommy would be his best girl, too.

Chapter 11

There’s snow on the sidewalk and checkered tablecloths on the living-room floor. T minus three hours and counting, as they say in Houston. We’re not having the party on Zoë’s actual birthday since most people spend Christmas Eve with their families, so we chose to hold it on the last Saturday afternoon before the kids get out of school for Christmas vacation and jet off to St. Bart’s, Aspen, or Gstaad. A party on the weekend means some of the dads will come, too, but that also means I need to have some alcohol on hand. It’s an additional expense, since the moms never expect liquor, although with Nina Osborne in the house, I may require a little nip or two myself. Zoë has been fully aw