Play Dates Read online

  “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—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?” All the boys laughed. They said that diaries are for girls. I asked her if we have to show her what is in our diaries because I thought they are supposed to be secrets.

  When Mrs. Hennepin looks at me, she has a fish face. She doesn’t look at the other kids that way. I’m going to be the best at writing. That way, maybe she won’t hate me.

  Chapter 2

  Well, Zoë’s been in school for a full week and so far I’ve only gotten two notes from Mrs. Hennepin. In the first, she made a big deal out of Zoë and her little girlfriends calling her Mrs. Henny Penny behind her back and giggling about it. I laughed that one off. Besides, my generation called her that, and I bet every class before and since has done the same, so it’s about time she got used to it. Kids will be kids, and there’s much worse they could call her. Thank God they probably don’t know that the woman’s first name is Regina. I sound like my father—New York’s poet laureate at the time—who, faced with the same note brought home from school in my sweaty little hand, wrote back to Mrs. Hennepin reminding her that Henny Penny was a famous literary figure and urging her to accept the compliment graciously. His response earned me two weeks’ detention. And she wasn’t even impressed by getting his autograph.

  I seem to be forever planning my life around other people; and nothing my sister ever schedules works out exactly according to plan. To do anything sociable with Mia is to embrace Murphy’s Law.

  I realize this right after I drop Zoë at school, so I phone Jennifer Silver-Katz, the mother of Zoë’s best friend Ashley, to see if she can take Zoë this afternoon.

  I can hear in Jennifer’s elongated sigh that this would be an imposition. “We were going to take Tennyson for a lip wax.”

  Tennyson, Ashley’s older sister, is ten.

  “I guess I can try someone else,” I say, dejected and disappointed, wondering which mom might be more responsive at the last minute. I should have thought of this sooner. We get booked up pretty quickly days, if not weeks, in advance, if my own dry-erase calendar is any indication of the norm.

  “Well, I suppose I can swing it,” Jennifer says, “if Zoë doesn’t mind sitting around Bumble and Bumble while Tennyson has her treatment. She can sit there with Ashley and look at the pictures in Vogue. But,” she adds, drawing out the word, “I’ll need you to do me a favor on Wednesday and take the girls from school to ballet and bring Ashley back with you. It’s our anniversary.”

  “Oh. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks.” She sounds less than thrilled. “Oh—and that’s my day for snack, so you’ll have to pinch-hit for me there, too. This year two of the girls are on Atkins and Miss Gloo says that three of them are lactose intolerant. So no cheese and crackers. And of course, no sugar or processed foods. But you know that. So, you’ll pick up Zoë by five today?”

  I assure her that I will and hang up. This gives me thirty-seven minutes to 1) phone the school to let them know that Jennifer—she’s on my “okay to pick up” list—will be getting Zoë after school today; and 1 a) ask them to send a note up to Mrs. Hennepin so she can tell Zoë to go with Ashley and her mother this afternoon; 2) do a week’s worth of grocery shopping, get it home, unpack it; and 3) get to midtown to hook up with Mia.

  When I meet Mia and Gayle at the appointed place for the start of the sightseeing tour, Gayle gives me a big hug like she’s known me all her life. Gayle is very tall, very blonde, and very loud. In fact, she’s exactly how I’d pictured her.

  Mia met Gayle a few years ago when some hotshot designer flew her out to Houston to do the makeup for a trunk show he was doing at Neiman Marcus. Gayle is a rich, childless housewife with scads of disposable income, as demonstrated by her head-to-toe designer ensemble, so I’m guessing Mr. Struthers is in oil.

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” she crows. “So you’re Mia’s baby sister! Aren’t you just the cutest l’il thing!”

  I’m not that little, certainly much bigger than a “bug’s ear,” which was the next thing out of her mouth, but most women I know are significantly more petite than Gayle. We board the bright yellow “Trina’s Tours” double-decker faux London-style sightseeing bus for the four-and-a-half-hour, full-city excursion and clamber up to the roof, where we’re completely outdoors, so we can better enjoy the view. With the plethora of competing tour companies to choose from, Mia confesses that she selected Trina’s because it’s run by the mom and pop team of Bubba and Gladys Taylor, a pair of native Georgians whose brochure proclaims, “We all loved the Big Apple so much, we just had to worm our way in!” Trina herself is the couple’s over-weight, sullen daughter, a twenty-something who is the company’s receptionist-cashier. Not the best first impression, but the Taylors appear to be doing quite well for themselves, so I bite my tongue.

  Mia thought Gayle, being a Texan, would relate to the city sights presented with a distinctly Southern flavor. Gayle, however, explains that there’s a world of difference between Texas and the South, and only Yankees think the two are somehow synonymous. Mercifully, her annoyance with us non-Dixie chicks passes as quickly as a cloud scudding in front of the sun.

  “Are you psyched for this?! Because I’m psyched!” She hollers. “Here, hold these for a spell.” Gayle reaches into her voluminous leather hobo bag and pulls out three plastic cups, which she hands to Mia. “Okay, you hold tight to those, now,” she urges my sister, then dives back into her handbag, and drags out a large thermos. “We are going to partaaayyyy!” she warbles at top volume. I ask her what she’s got there. “Margaritas,” Gayle replies. “My own secret recipe. No adventure is complete witho
ut ’em.” Gayle unscrews the plastic cup that serves as the thermos cap and pours each of us a round.

  It’s 10 A.M.

  I haven’t had a drink this early in the day since my honeymoon.

  So, here we go.

  As the bus lurches away from the curb in a cloud of squirrel-colored exhaust, a young woman climbs up the stairs, grabs the microphone and cheerily welcomes us. Her name is Kathie—with an ie, like Kathie Lee, she emphasizes with a giggle, then apologizes if she’s disappointing any of “y’all” but she’s not going to give us the Southerner’s guide to New York.

  “Good thing,” Mia mutters sourly, then returns to her Margarita. “This is more than enough for me.” Evidently, Gayle’s lesson in regional whatever went in one multi-pierced ear and out the other.

  “I am a native New Yorker, now,” Kathie says proudly. Then she proceeds to tell us that although she hails from Raleigh-Durham, she completed a “very prestigious” acting program in “my old home state of North Carolina,” (which she pronounces dropping the r’s so that the first word comes out “Noth” and the second one sounds like “Ca’line-ah,”), “but I am proud to say,” she adds, beaming, “that thanks to my theatrical training I have completely lost my regional accent.”

  “Not. Or she’d better return her diploma for a refund,” Mia grumbles.

  “Well, she’s perky, anyway,” I say brightly.

  “She’s making my teeth hurt,” Mia says.

  We head up Eighth Avenue and round Columbus Circle. Kathie starts explaining the differences between uptown (“noth”) and downtown (smiling broadly, “south”), then points out Central Park to our right (“designed by Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux in the nineteenth century”—so far, so good; she’s got that right). We stop at 72nd Street.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, if you look to your left, you’ll see the famous Dakota apartment building. Now who can tell me what happened there?”

  “They shot Rosemary’s Baby,” I yell out, emboldened by Gayle’s tequila.

  “They shot John Lennon!” Mia screams.

  “Damn asshole did it because he was in love with Jodie Foster, didn’t he?” Gayle asks loudly. “Fool didn’t even realize she was a les—”

  “And on your right, Strawberry Fields,” Kathie says, having cranked up her volume so that it drowns out Gayle’s editorial comment. She starts to lead the bus in the Lennon-McCartney classic. Gayle shoves her margarita cup into my hand and starts playing air guitar and shaking her blonde mane to and fro like she’s having a mild epileptic seizure. As we continue uptown, past the Museum of Natural History, all three of us are in tears, weeping dolefully for John.

  This maudlin display of sentiment necessitates a refill. Gayle pours another round as we motor through the 96th Street trans-verse, heading toward Fifth Avenue and the East Side. Enroute, Kathie explains that Fifth Avenue is the dividing line between the east and west sides of Manhattan. Coming out of the trans-verse, the driver makes a right on Fifth and we begin to shake, rattle, and roll down the section of the avenue known as Museum Mile.

  As we get to the Guggenheim Museum, the trouble begins. “Ohhhhh, the teacup museum,” Mia sighs. “That was always my favorite, growing up. It still is, I think.”

  Mia’s much more into modern art than I am. I prefer the old masters and the Impressionists. Although, in college, I studied everything from the cave paintings at Lascaux to Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ,” my taste pretty much runs out post-Picasso. With Mia, the weirder the better. I think she claims to admire really strange stuff just to get a rise out of people.

  “This unique building, which many people think is shaped like a giant teacup, is one of the most famous museums in the entire world,” Kathie tells the tour. “The inside is one giant spiral, just like if you started to peel an orange in one go. If you stood at the top of the ramped floor and dropped a marble, it would roll all the way down, down, down, right to the bottom!”

  “Imagine that!” Mia says.

  “The Guggenheim Museum was designed in the mid-twentieth century by Andrew Lloyd Webber—”

  Jesus Christ. Superstar. I can’t believe what I just heard. “Frank Lloyd Wright!” I call out, correcting her. How can she not know the name of probably the most famous American architect in the world? And she’s a tour guide for goodness sakes!

  “I didn’t know Andrew Lloyd Webber was an architect!” Gayle says, genuinely impressed. “When did he have the time to build it, between writing Cats and Evita and Starlight Express?”

  “No! He didn’t,” I tell Gayle, leaning in so she can hear me. There’s a lot of traffic down below, a considerable amount of superfluous horn honking, and a bit of wind here on the upper deck. Our margaritas are sloshing around and I’m starting to treat my cup as if it contains some precious elixir. I’m going to be a real sight when I redeem Zoë from Jennifer Silver-Katz.

  “Oh, I’ve heard of him,” Gayle says, when I mention Frank Lloyd Wright. “He did that house in Pennsylvania…Running Water…”

  “Falling Water,” I whisper under my breath. (What can I say, I was an art history student.) “Yes, that’s the guy!” I add, clinking cups with Gayle.

  “You know, I did wonder about Andrew Lloyd Webber,” she says, her tone low and confidential. “Although it sounds like the inside of the museum is a real lot like the set for Starlight Express. At least the Houston production.”

  It gets worse. Kathie points out the glorious (and really famous) Gothic–style St. Patrick’s Cathedral (Roman Catholic, on Fifth Avenue at 50th Street, right across from Saks Fifth Avenue—another landmark, at least on my version of the tour), referring to the church as the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (Episcopal, and located on Amsterdam Avenue, just north of 110th Street).

  I grab Gayle’s thermos and empty what’s left of the margarita mixture into my cup.

  We reach 42nd Street. Kathie refers to the location of the main branch of the New York Public Library as having been the site of the former aquarium. “AQUEDUCT,” I shout, trying to be heard above the din and now feeling that it’s my civic duty to set the tourists straight. I begin to wonder if she’s not just making it all up, having a joke on the lot of us. She’s a performer, after all, delivering her lines with earnest cheerfulness, acting as familiar with New York geography as she is with her own name.

  As we get down to 23rd Street where Fifth Avenue and Broadway cross each other at the landmark Flatiron Building, I’m having a hard time containing myself. Kathie points to the Flatiron, New York’s very first skyscraper, then tells the tour, “If you look closely, you can see that this building also has a highly unusual shape. It’s a triangle! It’s a triangle because this building is where that terrible tragedy, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire took place, burning all those little immigrant seamstresses to death.” Boy, is this girl mixing up her local history! The only thing preventing me from jumping up and grabbing the mike out of Kathie’s hand and strangling her with the cord is that the tequila has shot straight to my brain, and the minute I try to stand up on the moving tour bus my stomach plummets to the floor and my legs feel like barely gelled Mr. Wiggle dessert.

  Nearly five hours later, we’re back where we began, at the Trina’s Tours office. Kathie’s got the gumption to expect tips, thanking everyone for coming, and, with her hand out, in case we miss her point, telling the tourists that she’s “always depended upon the kindness of strangers.” Mia sets the girl straight, telling Kathie that Bubba and Gladys should can her ass for ineptness and send her packing back to Belle Reve.

  I’m seething, too, and I can’t help sharing that with Mia and Gayle. First of all, I feel that Gayle got ripped off by getting a tour of New York that was only about 40 percent accurate. The sightseeing tour was the first thing in ages that I’ve done without Zoë, or that’s not in service of my daughter’s social agenda. And I feel gypped. “This is your idea of getting me out of the house?” I ask Mia. I’m mighty cranky.

  Defensively, she
puts up her hands. “How was I to know?” she says. “I’m just as pissed off as you are. I thought tour guides had to be licensed.”

  “Maybe she crammed for the test and after she passed, she just forgot most of it,” Gayle volunteers, peering into her empty thermos. “I’m that way with math. They taught me a bunch of stuff in school that all sounds like a foreign language to me now. Algebra? Forget it! Co-sign is what you do to a bank check.”

  Mia giggles. Mia rarely giggles. It must be the tequila. “All right, you two,” she says, “I’ll make you a deal. I’ll find out if Happy Chef is giving one of his Chinatown tours before Gayle goes back to Houston. That’ll show you what a good sightseeing trip can be!”

  Happy Chef is Mia’s “requisite gay best friend,” as she likes to put it. He’s a gourmet chef, a “master baker” (more giggles) and a fully credentialed New York City sightseeing guide. Before I dash up to West End Avenue to fetch my daughter from the Silver-Katzes, Mia phones HC and learns that he’d be happy (of course—he’s the Happy Chef) to add us to his roster for the following afternoon.

  When I come to collect Zoë, I am greeted by a red-faced, puffy-lipped Tennyson Silver-Katz, her pugnacious little sister, and their mom, who reminds me—twice—that it’ll be payback time at Wednesday’s ballet lesson.

  Zoë makes me a present of the little bud vase she’s made out of clay and decorated in her art class at school. She insists I buy a flower for it right away, so we stop at a Korean deli on the way home, where she becomes frustrated that all the single blooms are long-stemmed red roses. She wants hot pink. A gerbera daisy meets her stringent criterion, so I buy the pre-wrapped bunch of three and we return home, playing Lines and Squares, a game I taught her from one of A. A. Milne’s volumes of poetry for kids.