Play Dates (3 page)

PLAY DATES

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Then Daddy got a job. He went to work in a restaurant and he
fell in love with the lady who runs the restaurant. Her name is
Serena Eden. She’s really skinny and has dark hair. She only eats
foods that aren’t cooked and she’s old like him. Not like Mommy.

Mommy looks the same way she did in the picture we have when
she married Daddy. Daddy was a teacher at Thackeray in the
Upper School. I’ll go to school there when I’m older. Mommy was in
his computer class. Then after she had her graduation they fell in
love and got married and had me. Mommy looks like my Barbies,
too. My Aunt MiMi is four years older than Mommy. Mommy’s
hair is blonde. MiMi’s hair is almost black and she sometimes has
an earring like a little dot in her nose, and more than one earring in
each of her ears, but she dresses more like my Barbies than
Mommy. She wears really fun clothes and fun shoes and fun hats. I
like to go over to her house because we play dress-up. She lets me
wear any of her things, except stuff she calls “vintage.” Her real
name is Mia but I call her MiMi because Mommy said that was
her nickname when she was little. When she wanted something she
would yell “Me! Me!” So people started calling her MiMi.

She’s really fun. And she has a fun job. She puts makeup on
models and movie stars and she gets a lot of free clothes because
of her job. Sometimes she gets really nice presents from people who
are happy at the way MiMi made them look. And she lets me
play with her makeup when I go to her house to visit. MiMi is
more fun than Mommy now. Mommy got grumpy when Daddy
went to live with Serena Eden. He comes to pick me up on weekends to take me places. He tries to be her friend but she doesn’t
want to talk to him. He came to take me to the planetarium and
he told Mommy she would be happy again if she started to go out
on dates. Mommy looked like she was going to cry.

I saw her looking at grown-up party shoes today when we went
to Harry’s to look for school shoes for me. They were Cinderella
shoes. When I get older, I want shoes like that, too. We met a lady
named Nina who is really mean-looking. She has a son named

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Leslie Carroll

Xander who is my age. Nina was looking at the shoes, the kind
like MiMi wears with very high heels. Mommy was looking where
Nina was looking and I felt sad because she looked like she
wanted the shoes. Maybe wearing shoes like MiMi would make
Mommy act more like her, because MiMi is happy and making
jokes all the time. MiMi is my favorite person in the world because she is funny and she lets me dress up and put on her
makeup and she doesn’t scold me. I don’t think Mommy is funny
like MiMi. Mommy only tells me stupid knock-knock jokes.

“Hal’s history,” I told Claire. She’s the best shoulder to cry on; if there’s anyone who knows about bad breakups, it’s my sister Claire. Her spouse left her for an older woman, for Chrissakes.

Like some sort of midlife crisis in reverse. Scott just walked out on her and their kid and took up with the owner-manager of Eden’s Garden, the eatery where, after his dot-com company tanked and they ran through most of their savings, he got a job doing the books.

Serena Eden, who weighs, like, twelve pounds, and whose skin shines like glow-tape under a blacklight, glommed onto the uncooked food fad and is making a killing in undead food, though I would have thought her type wouldn’t even kill a carrot because they believe it was a much-respected mystic in a past life. Maybe it’s not some weird vegan thing about murdering livestock and produce. Maybe it’s about having a healthier colon, or something. Whatever. The food is gross either way you slice it. Serena Eden serves “meat” made out of chopped nuts and has the nerve to charge fifteen bucks a plate for it. Call me opinionated, but I don’t trust anyone who isn’t an omnivore.

Come to think of it, I don’t trust too many people, period. It’s safer that way. And, quite possibly, if I want to totally depress my-PLAY DATES

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self by analyzing it, one reason why I’m still single and unat-tached as I slide precipitously toward my thirtieth year.

Back to food. I’m a total carnivore. That’s why I was so attracted to Hal. We met on the Fourth of July at a bash in Hampton Bays hosted by my friend Gina who has a share there. Hal was doing his macho men-with-tongs thing over the grill and it was lust at first sight. Now, when I look back, maybe it was the sirloin I was salivating over. I went straight up to him and said I liked the marlin tattoo on his right bicep. “Nice ink,” I think I said.

I’d had three beers and felt pretty proud of my opening line. In spite of what my folks think of my so-called bohemian lifestyle—

which I come by honestly, having a former Beat Generation poet as a dad and an offbeat dress designer for a mom—I’d never dated a man with a tattoo, although I have my own—a unicorn—

just above my right ankle. The unicorn would have freaked my grandmother. Nana would have said it meant I couldn’t be buried in a Jewish cemetery. Stuff like that is why my dad became an atheist.

After the barbecue, Hal and I hopped on his motorcycle and sped over to the Central Pine Barrens, where we snuck in through a gap in one of the fences and fucked like bunnies amid the wildlife.

Hal’s greatest talent was that he knew where—and how—I liked to be touched without my drawing him a road map. This, of course, immediately qualified him to be my sexual soul mate. I thought I’d finally arrived at the end of my hunt-for-the-perfect-boyfriend. Last stop. Everybody out at Montauk.

That’s my holy grail. A real, full-time boyfriend. But so far, I’ve done lots of research with little reward. If we’re all created equal, how come some people have so much luck in the love thing while the rest of us—the un-loved—seem doomed to roam the earth like the un-dead—ever searching, never resting, until we find The One?

So spring has sprung and my summer fling has flung. Fourth of

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Leslie Carroll

July to Labor Day. Some track record, huh?
Two
months. Wow.

Now that I’m doing the math, I’m discovering exactly how bad I am at this mating game. It’s not that I’m super-picky, like Gina, who once dumped a guy because he had a thing for Adam Sandler flicks. I just have laughably bad luck with men—the kind of lifelong losing streak that makes me want to stay away from Las Vegas.

“What happened?” Claire asked me. She’d just dropped off Zoë for her first day of second grade with the dreaded Mrs.

Hennepin. I’d managed to avoid being in her class—my first and last luck of the draw—but Claire suffered through her shit eighteen years ago. For some reason, that woman had it in for my baby sister. Claire’s changed a lot since we were kids. She used to be a hellion, like me. I am still, in some ways. But how bad, really, can a seven-year-old kid be? I think Claire was the only second grader in the history of Thackeray to be assigned detention.

Claire had just told me that Zoë sat down on her butt right there on the pavement and refused to go in. The kid threw a full-fledged tantrum. Everyone was staring. Claire said she never felt more powerless as a parent. Zoë wouldn’t budge an inch. Parked herself on the sidewalk and screamed her lungs out.

“You’d think Mrs. Hennepin was Torquemada,” I said.

“She is,” said Claire. “Which only made it harder to deal with Zoë. I had to be the bad guy and get her to go inside, when, in fact, I agreed with her. We tried to get her switched into the other class as soon as we received the teacher assignment, but Thackeray wouldn’t do it. They’re as stubborn as Zoë.”

It wasn’t ’til Ashley, one of Zoë’s friends, came by, all upbeat, with her dad and her Powerpuff Girls knapsack, that my niece agreed to set foot inside the school. Note to self: arrange to meet Ashley’s dad, if single. I like the Powerpuff Girls. They kick butt.

“Mia, are you there?” Claire said. “I just asked you what happened with Hal?”

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“This was a new one,” I told her. “He thought he was allergic to me. Said his skin broke out in hives whenever we were together.”

“You’re kidding!”

“I wish.”

“I never liked him!” Claire said supportively.

“
Now
you tell me!” Unlike me, whose love life has been more like a landslide, Claire was always rock-solid in the relationship department. It was a bit weird at first that at age eighteen she married her high school computer teacher, Mr. Franklin, who’s fifteen years older than she is, but he was definitely a hottie, and everything was great between them until he lost his job and hit crisis mode. A bit early for mid-life, in my opinion, but who knows? Maybe he plans to drop dead at eighty.

“So, I guess it’s time to get back on the horse,” I told Claire.

“Maybe you need to go solo for a while,” she suggested gently.

I thought about it. She’s been making a lousy go of that, herself, so it’s interesting advice, coming from her. On the other hand, although she’s not doing too well in the recent divorcée department, she hasn’t been out there looking for love. She’s really not ready, anyway. Of course, she hasn’t had the time, either. The way Claire’s life is structured these days,
Zoë
has a better chance of getting a date on a Saturday night. And the way
mine
is,
Zoë
, who is a total social butterfly, will be eighteen before
I
find a husband.

Claire focuses her every waking minute around Zoë. For the sake of her psyche, she has
got
to get out of the house. I don’t mean so she can meet men. That can come later, when she’s emotionally up for it. For now, she needs to do it for herself. To that end, I had an idea. An old pal of mine, Gayle Struthers, comes into town from Texas next week. She’ll be here for just a few days, and, since she’s never been to New York City, she wants to see it all. Crammed in, nonstop. I asked Claire to join us.

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Leslie Carroll

“Be a tourist for an hour or two,” I urged her. “C’mon, it’ll be a kick!”

She hemmed and hawed. “But I’ve got Zoë and she needs to be taken to school and picked up every day and then she’s got ballet on Wednesday . . . or is that Saturday? No, Saturday’s yoga. I’m breaking a sweat just thinking about it. And Zoë’s teacher’s a bit of a zealot. I’m not sure I like the altar in the room, with the bikram guy’s photo surrounded by little candles. I think I prefer nondenominational exercise, at least for children. And we were going to sign her up for that Museum Adventures program for kids because she loves to do art projects, so I thought she’d get into going to all the museums with other kids her age and learning about the paintings, and you should have seen her the other day. She came home from school with this picture she made that was all drizzles and dribbles and she said, ‘Look at my Jackson Pollock!’ She’s such a precocious little—she remembered the style and the name of the painter because she used to sit on my lap when I was studying and look at my art books with me and point to the color reproductions with her finger and ask

‘What’s this?’ ‘What’s this?’ It was—”

“Whoa, there, honey! Now, repeat after me: A Claire who takes good care of
Claire
will be a
better
Claire who takes care of
Zoë
.”

She refused to repeat the little mantra, but she got the point. Still, she insisted that she wouldn’t be able to join me because it was her one chance this week to grocery shop in peace. Zoë has zero tolerance for supermarkets. I know this from personal experience. My niece has a particularly short attention span for stuff she doesn’t like to do.

“Look, Zoë will be in school while we’re off sightseeing with Gayle. We’ll work around your drop-off and pick-up schedule.

Even your grocery schedule. Okay? You need to get out and have some fun. Do something on your own. Remember what the rest of life is all about.” Reluctantly, Claire agreed. I felt like I was performing an act of tough love to get my sister to do something—

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anything—for herself. Granted, this excursion is
my
idea, but still . . .

Claire rushed me off the phone. It was time for her to head over to Thackeray to pick up Zoë and bring her over to kinder karate. The kid’s really picking it up fast. Gives some real credence to the “get ’em while they’re young” theory.

Dear Diary:

I
hate
Mrs. Hennepin. She’s stupid and she dresses like a little
girl. They should make HER wear a uniform and see how she
likes it. Everybody in class looks so boring. Why couldn’t they pick
pretty colors if we all have to dress the same? I would pick yellow.

Yellow and orange. And maybe pink. But a real bright pink, like
the color of one of MiMi’s lipsticks. Not a pink that’s for babies.

Mrs. Hennepin read the names of everyone in her class. When
she came to my name, she said, “Zoë Marsh Franklin. Are you
going to be as much trouble as your mother was?” I thought that
was a mean thing to say. There are two best parts of second grade.

One is that Xander Osborne, the boy from the shoe store yesterday, is in my class. I don’t think he likes girls, though. I don’t
think he likes anybody. He acts kind of angry all the time. I like
him, though. And I was nice to him even when he wasn’t nice to
anybody else. And my friends Ashley and April and May are in
Mrs. Hennepin’s class too. April and May are twins but they
don’t look alike. April has dark hair and May has blonde hair.

And their chins are a different shape. Their mom’s name is June. I
think that’s funny.

The other best part of second grade is that Mrs. Hennepin said
that she wants us to practice writing, so she wants us to write
things down every day. Xander said, “You mean, like a diary?”