Play Dates Read online

  At dinner, Zoë and I discuss our respective days. Mia and I grew up doing that. In the Marsh household, we all went around the table sharing with one another what we did that day. You see, “Fine,” was an unacceptable answer to “How was your day?” No monosyllabic responses for the Marshes, unfortunately for Mia. With a dad who’s a poet laureate, iambic pentameter was more like it.

  When Mia and I didn’t want our parents to know what we’d been up to, we became very adept at making things up. We invented a secret signal, which would indicate that we were about to tell a straight-faced whopper, but as we grew older, we discovered that blackmail was a very useful tool. When sibling rivalry was in its fullest swing, and we couldn’t even trust each other, we would just lie outright and neither of us would know whether it was true or not. Our parents, idealists that they were, insisted on an environment where the channels of communication were open and free; but honestly, would Mia really admit that after receiving a particularly miserable math grade she’d taken a nip of Sake from the bottle she kept hidden in her high-school locker? Would I dare share that I’d cut gym for the third time in two weeks to make out in the deserted science shed on the roof with tall, dark and handsome Neil Forlani, the first boy in my class to shave? I knew that science shed like I knew my own name. Better than I ever knew science, that’s for sure.

  Of course there came a time when Mia and I began to wonder if our parents invented tales from time to time as well.

  Tonight, Zoë was going first. I used to encourage her to go first all the time, saying the youngest had to go first, (which is how we did it when I was growing up), but she decided that wasn’t fair (Why didn’t I ever think of that?), so now we take turns.

  “Mrs. Hairpin gave me a note for you,” she tells me, then jumps up from the table to hunt for it at the bottom of her yellow knapsack. “You’re gonna have to be class parent sometimes. You get assigned it. Everybody has to.” She thrusts the note into my hands.

  I open the envelope to read a form letter. It could have been worse. There could be a personal note written at the bottom like my mom used to get from Mrs. “Hairpin.” There was always some sort of second-grade infraction of which I was invariably guilty. Talking while on line for the cafeteria. Whispering in class. Passing notes during math. Giggling. Existing.

  I sigh, relieved. “So are you getting along any better with Mrs. Hennepin?” I resist using one of the students’ nicknames aloud, figuring I’d be setting a bad example. When I was in her class, the woman had been called “Mrs. Henny Penny,” “Mrs. Hairpin,” “Mrs. Hatpin,” “Mrs. Henne-face”—and kids who knew about turtles called her “Mrs. Terrapin”—though nothing too awful could really be done with her last name. At least we hadn’t thought of it yet. Not so for poor Mrs. Lipschitz in fourth grade. And Mr. Dong, who taught chemistry in the Upper School.

  “She still hates me.” Zoë shakes her head emphatically. “And yesterday she called me Claire by mistake.” I laugh. “It’s not funny!” Zoë insists, her eyes beginning to fill with tears. “And she doesn’t want me to make my Zs the way you showed me. In script. She wants me to print them.”

  I take a deep breath. “Why?”

  “Because she says we’re not supposed to start learning script until the spring. But I can write script already.”

  “Tell you what,” I say, “we’ll keep practicing script here at home.”

  “But I want to do it in school.” Her eyes brim with tears. “And Mrs. Heinie-face won’t let me.”

  Silently, I award her cleverness points for “Heinie-face.” Why didn’t we ever think of that one back in my day? It’s so obvious! But back to the business at hand. How dare this woman hold my daughter back? For some reason most of the parents have always adored her, so Mrs. Hennepin will undoubtedly remain in her second-grade classroom until the day she suffers an embolism at the blackboard. “Okay, then,” I tell Zoë, “go ahead, write script in school. And you know what?”

  “What?” she sniffles, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

  I give her a dirty look and she picks up her napkin, cleans her hand, and wipes her nose properly. “This is what. I’ll deal with Mrs. Hei—your teacher, if she sends another note.”

  My daughter beams. A gap-toothed smile that melts my heart. She’s proud of herself for getting her way. For being ahead of the class. For feeling very grown-up. “And how was your day?” she asks in perfect imitation of my own singsong delivery of The Question.

  “Well, I went on a tour of New York with your Aunt MiMi and her friend Gayle.”

  I provide a few more details, omitting the tequila, which is now no more than a memory, and Zoë scrunches up her face. “Why did you do that?” she says, as though I am a total idiot. “You live here.” I explain that Gayle doesn’t live here, she lives far away, and MiMi thought it would be fun if I joined them on the sightseeing tour. I can tell from her expression that Zoë is not quite satisfied with my answer. “Then why didn’t you and MiMi give her the tour? Why did you have to get on a big yellow bus with a stranger giving it?”

  She’s got a point. So I tell her that tomorrow MiMi and I will be taking Gayle to Chinatown on a walking trip with MiMi’s friend Happy Chef. This is a bad move. Practically catastrophic. Zoë bursts into spontaneous—and spectacularly loud—sobs, as though she’d left her favorite toy (Baa, a cuddly lamb, now significantly less woolly than he was when my parents gave it to her for her first birthday) on a subway.

  “What’s the matter, honey?” I reach out to stroke her hand, but she dramatically yanks it away, placing it in her lap.

  “I want to go!” More wailing. The words themselves are a slurred mess of tears and fury and betrayal.

  I try gentle pragmatism. “You’ll be in school, sweetie.”

  “No!” Zoë repeats her demand. “And I don’t want to go to school. I hate Mrs. Hennepin. And I already know script!”

  I didn’t realize she’d find such a convenient excuse for her cursive precocity so quickly. I should have known. Mia and had I tried similar tactics whenever possible. Now come the attempts to reason with a six-year-old; that there are more things to learn in second grade besides the ability to make curly letters.

  She’s worked herself up to full-fledged hysteria. “You. Never. Take. Me. Anywhere,” she sobs, each word choked with torment.

  “Zoë, you know that’s not true,” I soothe, then launch into a litany of her after-school and weekend activities. I do nothing but take her places. Ivy League pre-med students have a lighter program.

  “But. I. Want. To. Go. With. You. Tomorrow!” she wails, a tacit concordance that Mommy is right, at least on some level. She hurls a Belgian baby carrot as far as she can toss it. It bounces off the wall opposite the dinette table and lands on the kitchen counter.

  “All right, that’s it!” I take her by the arm and lift her off the chair. “In your room! Now!”

  “Noooooooooooooo.” She’s struggling to release my grip.

  “Time out, Zoë. We do not throw food.” I manage to get her into her bedroom amid a sea of protests.

  “I want to watch Ariel,” she whimpers.

  “No. No video tonight.”

  The bawling increases. “But. I. Want. To.”

  “Tough. Do you have homework from Mrs. Hennepin?” She nods and wipes her sniffles away with a bare arm. I hand her a Kleenex. “Ladies use tissues,” I say, sounding like…who? My mother—Tulia—never talked like that. She let Mia and me act like hoydens in the privacy of our own home, until we figured out on our own that such primitive behavior wasn’t the way to get what we wanted. But I’ve got no male authority figure to back me up here. My parents formed a mutual support system, a safety net I no longer have. If Mommy couldn’t handle us, she’d turn to my father, arms akimbo, and plead “Brendan, it’s your turn.” And Daddy, who never, ever raised his voice, would speak to us so softly and steadily and sternly, his deadly placid manner far more terrifying than any amount of yelling and screaming
, particularly since, from an early age Mia and I had recognized that high volume was a sign of parental weakness. This doesn’t seem to work with Zoë. Not since I’ve become a single parent, anyway. I think I used to be pretty good at being a mom. Now I feel like a slumping major leaguer who’s being forced to try a whole new batting stance.

  I hate this. I hate fighting with my daughter. I don’t want her to grow up resenting me. On the other hand, I’ve got to be the one to rule the roost, or chaos reigns.

  “I’ll be in to check your homework in one hour,” I tell Zoë firmly, then close the door, leaving her to her own video-less devices. I return to the breakfast nook and pilfer the remaining baby carrots from Zoë’s plate. No more wasting food in the mini-Marsh household.

  Dear Diary:

  Mommy is being mean to me. I hope she snoops and reads this so she knows that I think she’s being mean. She’s going to China Town with MiMi tomorrow and they won’t take me. I have to learn the times table with Mrs. Heinie-face instead. We have to draw a chart to make our own times table and fill in all the numbers. She gave us up to five for homework today. Mommy helped me make the chart with a ruler because she’s better at making straight lines than I am. Mine are wobbly and they don’t look pretty and Mrs. Heinie-face will give me a bad grade if the lines are wobbly. Who cares what five times ten is? I hate math and I hate Mrs. Heinie-face and I almost hate Mommy. I don’t want to do any math. Ever. For homework we also have to write a story about a good memory we have and draw a picture to go with it. I don’t know what to write about but I like to write stories and I love to draw and I know that Mommy and Daddy and me will all be in it and we will all be happy.

  “Did we ever give mom and dad the silent treatment?” I ask Mia, as we trundle along Canal Street behind Happy Chef, bound for the heart of Chinatown.

  “I did,” Mia reminds me. “You could never shut up long enough.”

  “Thanks. Zoë’s being sullen. She’s punishing me for being the mother. For insisting that she go to school today instead of playing hooky and joining us.”

  Mia laughs. “I would have let her come along. Tell Mrs. Henny Penny to get over it. Life experience is more important than a day of second grade.”

  I consider her point, which isn’t a bad one, but that’s the kind of stuff that works in a two-parent household with a good cop/bad cop system of checks and balances. For every “sure, why not-er,” you’ve got a “stop-wait-don’t-er.” With Zoë, these days, all I seem to do is “don’t-ing.” When do I get to be the good cop?

  We’ve got a nice little group for Happy Chef’s Chinatown food tour. Me, Mia, wild-and-crazy-Gayle, and a delightful couple from Colorado, Bud and Carol Tate. Bud’s a Mets fan, believe it or not, so I take an immediate shine to him. And Carol throws pots—I mean, she’s a potter, not someone with a violent temper—so we’ve got some common ground in art appreciation. Zoë, who loves playing with clay, would throw a fit if she knew. Although she’s got her own ceramics activity after school today. I check my watch and realize I’ve got only a little over two hours before I have to pick her up at school and then drop her off at Our Name is Mud to make pottery with one of her friends from the Museum Adventures program.

  Gayle seems to be the kind of person who would get along well with anyone. She’s refreshed her tequila thermos this afternoon, but Happy Chef, a.k.a Charles, reminds her that everyone but me will be walking for nearly four hours and the pit stop locations may have negligible sanitary conditions, so Gayle stashes the thermos in her purse, after graciously offering everyone a round, nonetheless.

  As we head across Mott Street, I catch a whiff of something delicious that smells like frying dumplings, become immediately hungry, and ask when we’ll hit the first tasting stop, whereupon Charles leads us to a tiny shop on the one-block-only incline that is Mosco Street. The Fried Dumpling House, fittingly, sells only fried dumplings. The shop is smaller than my bathroom. Mia looks at the place and quips, “You’d have to leave the store to change your mind.”

  As our tour progresses and we are treated to more of the native tastes, sights, and smells of one of the city’s oldest and most exotic neighborhoods, I become increasingly impressed with Happy Chef’s range of knowledge of the area, its history, and its culinary treats. As I say goodbye to everyone, needing to skip the end of the tour so I can get up to Thackeray on time, I tell Gayle that this is the polar opposite of yesterday’s tour with Mason-Dixon Barbie.

  “You shoulda heard Claire,” Gayle crows to Charles, stretching my name into a sizeable diphthong. “She kept correcting the tour guide. She really knows her stuff!”

  Mia corroborates Gayle’s testimonial. “Add this to your ‘what I do well’ list, Claire. Why don’t you try to get a job as a tour guide?” she asks me. “You’d be a natural.”

  “I’d be happy to coach you,” Charles offers. “So long as you stay out of Chinatown!”

  A Happy Memory

  by Zoë Marsh Franklin

  When I was little, Mommy and Daddy took me to the circus every year. I was scared of the clowns because they were noisy. When I was five we got seats right in the front and a clown came over and honked a horn at me. He made me cry and Daddy bought me cotton candy to make it better. Then we were all laughing, Mommy and Daddy and me, because there were other clowns who weren’t noisy with little dogs dressed up like people and the dogs were smarter than the clowns and it was silly. And it was so fun.

  And then the man with the elephants came over because, before, he saw I was crying. He had a baby elephant named Lizzie. The man gave me some peanuts to feed the baby elephant. He said that elephants have feelings just like people. Like when another elephant dies they get sad. I liked feeding Lizzie so Mommy and Daddy bought me a whole bag of peanuts and Lizzie ate them all before the circus started.

  The man said if we came to see him after the show was over he would give us Lizzie’s auto graph. So at the end of the circus Daddy and Mommy took me back to see the man with the elephants and he gave me a piece of paper with an elephant footprint on it. And he said in case I forgot who the footprint belonged to, he would write Lizzie on the piece of paper.

  I still have the paper with Lizzie’s footprint and her name on it. That day when we went to the circus was one of the funnest times I ever had with Daddy and Mommy. Here is a picture that I drew of all of us with the elephant man and Lizzie and my pink cotton candy. We are all smiling, even Lizzie.

  Chapter 3

  OCTOBER

  My kid sister has become an inspiration. Her search for a fun yet flexible job has been like a kick in the butt to get my own life in order. Time for me to enter the twenty-first century. They didn’t start up the computer science classes at Thackeray until the year after I graduated, so I never learned that stuff in school. I’m one of those techno-challenged people with a fear of heavy machinery (which is why I don’t drive a car), and a severe distrust of things that can think faster than I can. I do own a computer, at least. Typing I can do, e-mail I have mastered, as Claire would say, “to procrastinatory perfection.” And I now prefer it to just about every other means of communication, but for the most part, “software” remains a mystery. It sounds more like the kind of stuff you’d find at a Macy’s semi-annual white sale. Software. Fluffy towels, thirsty terry bathrobes, and sheets with a 400-plus thread count.

  I’m a self-taught kind of gal. That’s how I became a professional makeup artist. I liked to play with eye shadow. I hung out at a lot of clubs in my not-so-misspent youth. Over time I formed a network of social connections that led to a lucky break that turned into a tidy living. No complaints there. But I’m thinking down the road of marketing my own line of cosmetics, although at this stage in the game, or maybe because I always tend to think visually, I mostly dream of the packaging. It’s a play on words of my name. Miamore makeup. Or maybe I should move the heart. Miamore. Happy Chef would swear to the fact that I can spend days just trying to figure out which graphic looks better. I guess it dep
ends on whether I want to look self-aggrandizing—or Italian.

  I could ask Claire for help, but she’s so swamped with Zoë and stuff that she doesn’t have a minute. So, I’ve started to teach myself Excel, to learn how to make spreadsheets and other things that left-brain types are good at.

  Speaking of Italian, I just met a guy on a shoot for a repeat client. I do the makeup for the runway, trunk shows, and print ads for a hot designer named Lucky Sixpence. He—or she—is English, maybe Scottish, I’m never quite sure. Nor am I sure about Lucky Sixpence’s gender. For those who remember the eighties, fondly or otherwise, Boy George is the closest I can come to explaining Lucky Sixpence. Lucky struck it rich creating affordable versions of the latest trends for the calorically challenged, which is about ninety-seven percent of the female population. You have a poochy tummy but want to wear a rhinestone-studded belly tee; your ass—as my Gran used to say—is “six axe handles across” but you crave a pair of low-rise boot-leg distressed snakeskin jeans; you want to dress like Courtney or Britney, Lucky’s your man—or woman. Lucky prefers to be referred to as “she.”

  When I first met Luca and he pointed to his chest to introduce himself, I thought he was saying “Lucky” in his sexy Italian accent. But he calls the designer Cara Fortuna—“Lucky Dear”—so the confusion about the name thing was quickly cleared up. I liked his deep-set, sad eyes and three day stubble, the way his hips swayed in opposition to the movement of the spare camera dangling from his neck and the fact that I didn’t understand a damn thing he said (except “boo-dee-fool, bebe, boo-dee-fool”), but it sounded great. Like he was making love nonstop.

  He called me Cara Mia and I couldn’t resist him, though I admit it didn’t occur to me to try. Luca was the opposite of Hal: Eurotrashy and verbal (though unintelligible). An injection of Italian culture was just what the doctor prescribed. And I’m a big fan of self-medicating.