Pug Hill (11 page)

“Well,” he says, his beautiful green eyes bright, “she likes camping, but she doesn’t actually fish. She’s getting more into it though. She’s really psyched about it; she says this time she wants to learn how to gut fish.”

Two thoughts run through my mind. One:
she lies.
And, two:
I could gut fish.

“Sounds fun,” I say and turn, defeated, back to my Rothko. In this past week, this first week of being single, I have learned that it is a hell of a lot harder being unrequitedly in love with Elliot from afar, now that I don’t have a boyfriend, a reason why we couldn’t be together even if there was no Claire, even if the love for Elliot was not so unrequited.

Also, this past week has gone by very quickly. Apparently, a week goes by much more quickly when there is a class called
Overcoming Presentation Anxiety
at the end of it. My plan for tonight had been to stop by Pug Hill before going to the first class. Though I know now that there is always the chance that the pugs won’t be there, I’m beginning to learn that, just maybe, that’s okay. I’m beginning to think that while for me it will always be more about the pugs, just like for Holly Golightly it was always more about the diamonds, the place itself holds some, if not quite a lot, of importance, too. There’s a reason
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
was not called
Breakfast Anywhere There Happens to Be Lots of Diamonds.
The Tiffany’s part, just like the Pug Hill part, is pretty important, too. Just think if it had been
Breakfast in the Diamond District,
think how much poetry, how much symbolism would have been lost.

I thought I’d go to Pug Hill after work, hang out there for a while and just try to chill out. I thought Pug Hill, even without any pugs, would be the best place to try to get ready for class; for the inevitable introducing of ourselves, saying our names and our occupations, all of this while very possibly standing in front of the room. I had it all planned out. I’d even brought along my fleece gloves, in case it was cold. It’s important, I often think, to have a plan, and what with the fleece and all, I had mine.

As I leave the museum, it’s a downpour. A downpour I was not at all aware of, having spent the day, as I spend so many of them, in the basement of unrequited love. The Conservation Studio, to protect the vulnerable paintings from light damage, is in the basement; the unrequited love part you know about. There are, to be fair, windows right up at the top, close to the ceiling, and even though it seems like it would be easy to tell if it was raining through basement windows, it’s actually never very clear.

I stand in the doorway of the staff entrance of the museum and look out at the rain pounding down on the plaza like darts. On a few different levels, it’s not looking so good. The plaza in front of the museum, while a great place to get a coffee, a pretzel, a black-and-white photograph, or even a bus, is not the best place to find an umbrella stand. I head back into the museum but I pass the Conservation Studio, I don’t want to go back there again today. I keep walking down the internal hallway, to the end of it, emerging at the far end of the Antiquities Wing. I pull my ID out of my pocket and slip it around my neck, turning right into the Met’s gift shop, open late, along with the museum because it’s a Thursday. I stand on line with so many other people, and think how something like this, me being out in the museum rather than always in its background, was how I met Evan. If only that hadn’t been a lie.

I buy a bright orange Metropolitan Museum of Art umbrella with my employee discount, wondering how many of these umbrellas I have stashed away at home, and if I always select orange umbrellas because my mother believes with some conviction that red heads should sooner die than be seen carrying or wearing anything orange. It clashes.

I exit through the grand front entrance of the museum. A glance at my watch reveals that in my plan, I had not left much extra time for walking the length of the museum and back, and then waiting on line in the store. There isn’t much time left now in which to go to Pug Hill. Even if I had, come to think of it, wanted to go there right after it turned dark. It’s the second time in as many weeks that it has been revealed to me that a good plan consists of more than just fleece.

I stand for a moment, up at the top of the great steps, and look out. It’s one of those great New York scenes, the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the rain. It’s a Woody Allen view, standing at the top of the stairs of the Met and looking down at Fifth Avenue. I love that about New York: all the great Woody Allen scenes you can pretend you are part of. I open up my orange umbrella; I walk down the steps and forget for a moment how much I am dreading the rest of the night.

Of course the thing with New York is that as soon as you are the star of your very own Woody Allen film still, you’re not. As I approach the entrance to the subway on Eighty-sixth and Lexington, the crowds get thicker and thicker, and the scenery gets vastly less poetic. All it takes in New York is a few blocks, a few minutes, and you’ve gone right from being Goldie Hawn in the opening scene of
Everyone Says I Love You,
all the way to Best Buy.

I put down my new orange umbrella, forget all about the Woody Allen movie I starred in so briefly, albeit only in my mind, and head down into the subway to catch the downtown train.

Twenty dread-filled minutes later, I emerge into the hustle and bustle of Union Square, about seventy blocks and a universe away from the uptown New York vista in the basement of which I spend most of my days. The downpour has not subsided at all, quite the opposite really; it’s that type of rain that comes sideways at you, that’s determined to drench you, no matter what.

I picture myself standing in front of a room full of strangers, saying, “Hi, my name is Hope,” maybe saying what my job is, and depending on the brutality of the teacher, maybe saying what brought me to
Overcoming Presentation Anxiety
class in the first place. And the self that I picture standing up there, in front of the classroom in my mind, she has an extra bit of confidence because she’s wearing nice shoes and her hair is straight.
Good-bye to that,
I think, looking down at the suede high-heeled boots that I wished I hadn’t worn.
Good-bye
, I feel I have to say again, because as I march on, past University Place and over to Fifth Avenue, I can literally feel my hair frizzing.

I’ll admit, I’m a person whose confidence does increase if I feel I’m looking good, and I’ll admit that for me that might be a bit of a vicious circle. See, in addition to having spent her career making rooms beautiful, my mother is also a person who has spent a lifetime having people see her from across those rooms and think that she is beautiful. My sister, Darcy, inherited this from her, the beauty along with the accompanying poise, the charm, the charisma, the ability to light up a room, and to always be the center of it. I didn’t.

All my life people have felt it necessary to tell me how beautiful my mother is, and how my sister is the spitting image of her, too. People seem to think this is a nice thing to say. People seem to think that your life must be filled with glamour simply because the people around you are so pretty, that everything is as shiny and bright and filled with laughter as a sitcom.

“You’re sister, Darcy,” people used to say to me, time and time again, “looks just like Marcia Brady.”

“Just like
Marcia Brady,” they’d say. And you know what that made me; that made me Jan.

I wonder sometimes about where Jan Brady would be now. Not Eve Plumb the actress, but Jan Brady, the
real
Jan Brady, if her character had actually existed, had actually continued on, lived a life, not just in syndication, but out in the world. I hope she’d be fine and all, but part of me also thinks that maybe she’d be lighting up in a crack den somewhere, and if not that, at the very least, she’d be spending a tremendous amount of time in a therapist’s office. And you might think that sounds a bit rash, and you might think that maybe I’m getting a little carried away. I might be, I’ll give you that much, but I think what’s more likely, I think what makes so much more sense, is that it’s just really hard to understand what it does to you, growing up with a sister who is the new Marcia Brady. It gets to you. Really, so much more than you’d think.

Maybe it was all the thinking about being Jan Brady, something I try most of the time not to think about, but as I look at my watch, even though I thought I was going to be early, I am just barely on time. Finally inside the building, I dig in my dripping wet bag for the registration piece of paper I got in the mail. Everything is wet. I think how I hate the rain. And while that thought for me is so very true, I imagine it also must be so very unoriginal. I worry sometimes that a lot of things that are mine are that way. I locate the piece of paper and pull it out to double-check that my classroom is 502. It is. I dive through the elevator doors right as they close.

I see room 502. The door is shut. I have that feeling in my stomach: that feeling that not only have I just done something wrong, but that also, I am about to. It’s a very high school-oriented feeling for me, and I can’t help but think,
Why have I done this?
But the reasons, I know, they are many and vast. The only choice I will let myself have is to turn the handle on the door and walk in.

I pause for a minute, just inside the door, and smile an apology to the teacher as she stops saying what she was saying and looks over at me, as does everyone else. The teacher smiles at me, really pretty nicely and I think that’s good that she did that, so at least I don’t instantly hate her.

All the chairs are organized in a horseshoe shape around the room; I sit down quickly and soggily in an empty chair, right at the end of the horseshoe. The moment I am situated, the moment I have wriggled out of my coat as inconspicuously as possible (not very), I realize I have chosen poorly. This is a bad chair. I don’t like this chair, how it is right on the end, so vulnerable. I stare at the surface of the desk part of my chair. The chairs, they’re all the kind of chairs with desks attached to them. Immediately, I start wondering if I’ve missed all the important stuff and will never quite catch up or (much better) if maybe I’m actually so late that I missed the whole introducing of oneself part. I look at my watch; I am only about four minutes late.

“Okay, so, I’m Beth Anne,” the teacher says and what I have just suspected crystallizes into clearness in front of me: I have not missed the introductions, or more importantly, I have not missed mine. I take a breath, I remind myself for what seems like the millionth time that there’s not going to be some sort of escape hatch that opens up for me at the last minute, that I’m really here, that I’m in for the long haul. Or at least for the next six weeks. I breathe out and move my head from side to side slightly, trying to relieve the mounting tension in my neck. I wonder how it can feel like it’s been such a long night already when it hasn’t even really started. I look to the blackboard just to be sure there isn’t any math there. There isn’t.