Pug Hill (14 page)

“He’s upstairs in his office.” Relinquishing the phone to my father is a constant issue for Mom. We do not know why.

“Okay,” I say slowly, “would you like to yell to him, or would you like to hang up, and I’ll call back, and we can let it ring until he answers?”

“No, I’ll get him. But, Hope?”

“Yes?”

“I do not want you bringing up the commune with your father. Your father is very upset about the commune. Under no circumstances are you to discuss the commune with your father.”

“No problem,” I tell her, “no commune.”

“Okay, talk to you soon, and thanks for coming out.”

“No problem,” I say again.

“Write it in your calendar, so you don’t forget.”

“Sure thing.”

“Henry!” I hear Mom shouting, more or less directly into the phone. I move it slightly away from my ear. A moment later Dad is on the line.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he says, and though I can still hear my mother breathing on her end of the phone, the stress that is a phone conversation with my mother begins, ever so slightly, to dissipate.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“Okay, Caroline, you can hang up now,” Dad says.

“I was just waiting to be sure everyone was on,” she informs us with a slight harrumph, and we listen to the click as her phone is returned to its charger.

“How are you, Dad?”

“I’m good, good, you? How’s work, Evan?”

“I’m good, work’s good, but Evan and I broke up,” I say, adding on quickly, “I’m fine though, really, it’s all for the best.”

“Oh, well, sweetie, I’m sorry to hear that, but I’m glad to hear you sound okay. You let me know if there is anything at all that you need.”

“Thanks, but I’m fine, really.”

“Great, then, while I have you on the phone, I have a question for you. Do you know much about this Google? On the Internet?”

“Sure, what do you want to know?”

“I want to know what I do? I want to search.”

I start from the beginning, explain opening up the Internet browser, keying in
www.google.com
, and typing what you want to find out about into the blank space. “Okay, okay,” Dad says softly, methodically as he goes, signaling the completion of each step.

“And now I just type
communes
?
”

“Communes?” I say and hold my breath. I wait for my mother, surely listening with supersonic hearing downstairs to pick up her phone, and admonish, “Hope, I told you not to talk about the commune!”

“Yes, I want to do a search on communes, on why people join them,” Dad explains, and I know it might say terrible things about me, might reveal the fact that somewhere along the way, I lost any sisterly instinct, but I worry so much less about Darcy than I do about how everything she does, all the drama, affects my parents, takes up so much space in their lives.

“Right,” I say, taking a breath, “you could type just
communes,
or
communes people joining.
Play around with it for a while until you find what you’re looking for,” I explain. “But, Dad?”

“Yes, dear?” he says and I think his voice sounds tired, and in all the time I’ve been speaking to my dad on the phone—how long has it been since I left home, fourteen years?—I’ve never heard him sound so tired.

“I don’t think Darcy’s really going to join a commune. I wouldn’t just say that, either; I really believe it. We know Darcy;

she’s not the type—she just likes saying it, she just likes causing a stir. I think it’ll all be okay.”

“Yes,” he says, and I listen to him exhale, feel how hard it must be for him when he’s always been the type of dad to fix everything, and he can’t fix this. “But I guess I just want to learn a little more.”

“I understand,” I say, “and, look, we’ve got a whole week together coming up, that’s really great.”

“Yes, yes, I’m looking forward to it,” he tells me, but he sounds so far away. We say things next about love and good-bye and seeing each other soon, and by the time I put down the phone, object of endless anxiety that it always is, it’s been one of those mornings that has been so long. It makes me nervous about the rest of the day.

A few hours later, I find myself at Mary Arnold Toys on Lexington Avenue and Seventy-third Street, buying a Groovy Girls doll for Kara’s daughter, Chloe. I did not, as it turns out, quite make it to Chloe’s second birthday party yesterday. I had all the best intentions. No, really, I did. It was just that the closer the party got, I just couldn’t bear the thought of being the only single woman at a baby birthday party. I have done this before, and it is far from fun. Have you ever been the only single woman at a baby birthday? The best thing I can liken it to is to being a two-headed monster with a terminal disease. Really. I’m pretty sure I’m not imagining it. People see you there, childless,
alone,
and look at you first as if you are a very strange specimen indeed and then, pretty much, they feel very sorry for you. The closer I got to the party, the more I envisioned the secret conversations, so very “Lorlelai-on-
The-Gilmore-Girls
-before-it-all-worked-out-with-Luke” in theme I imagined them to be:

“Kara’s friend, the one who works in a museum, she’s
still
single?”

“I think it’s more like, she’s single
again.”

“Poor girl.”

“I know. It’s sad.”

“It really is.”

Luckily, Kara is the type of friend—perfect, as I may have mentioned—who once I called to say I couldn’t make it, did not counter with guilt, did not counter with telling me how much Chloe was looking forward to seeing me, even though it’s entirely possible that Chloe has no idea who I am. She simply said she understood. By way of further explanation, I told her via phone and not in person as I’d planned, that Evan and I were no more, and she’d said she understood that, too, and then she said, just like me, and oh my God,
just like my mother,
that she thought it was for the best.

Then, as soon as I was off the hook in terms of the party, in celebration of it being the second Saturday in a row of not having to go outside at all if I didn’t want to, I didn’t. But as it turned out, I felt guilty, and kind of sad, for not being at Chloe’s party. I tried to tell myself that guilty, and even a little sad, was better than the two-headed and terminally ill monster alternative. And I can admit it: I watched the Zoloft commercial. Twice.

I pull a Sandra Boynton book from a shelf and bring that, along with the Groovy Girls doll to the cash register. Now that I’m here, I really have no idea if a Groovy Girls doll is age-appropriate for a two-year-old.
Maybe it’s too advanced? Maybe two-year-olds are still all wrapped up in Elmo?
I grab an Elmo marker set. “This, too,” I say, putting everything all together in a pile on the counter. “Could you wrap them, please?” I hand over my credit card, knowing on some level that if I am ever a grandmother, I might not be the grandmother who visits all the time, I might be more the kind of grandmother who stays down in Florida and compensates for her absence with gifts.

I walk up Lexington to Seventy-fourth Street and into Kara’s beautiful lobby. Kara and Todd’s apartment is pretty fantastic, pretty perfect actually. But of Kara you’d expect that, because she’s one of those people who’s always together and whose clothes are always stylish and always match, but she’s very cool even though she seems so perfect. And maybe she’s a little tightly wound about certain things but you’d have to be, wouldn’t you, to keep everything so perfect?

“Eleven-C please,” I tell the doorman.

“Your name?”

“Hope,” I say, and he buzzes up to what I am pretty sure is the domestic bliss epicenter of the universe.

As I step off of the elevator, Kara’s husband, Todd, is standing in the doorway. In front of him is Chloe. Chloe is red-faced, shaking her tiny clenched fists in the air, dressed only in her diaper.

“Maaaaaaan!” she screams the second she sees me.

“Hi, Chloe,” I say, even though I have this feeling that “Hi, Chloe,” might not be what she wants to hear.

“Maaaaaaan!” she wails again, and again, “Maaaaaaan!”

“No, honey, that’s not the man. Hi, Hope,” Todd says looking over at me, a brief flash of what I think might be desperation in his eyes.

“Hi, Todd,” I say, standing there a bit dumbly between the elevator and the doorway. I wonder if Chloe actually knew it was her birthday last week, and now she misses it?

“Maaaaaaaaaaaan!”
Man.
I try my best to push the thought from my mind that Chloe is speaking directly to me.

“Uh, sorry,” Todd says, picking up the screeching Chloe and moving aside.

“Man!” she says sharply, defiantly,
right at me,
as I walk past.

“She wanted rice,” Todd says to me, and I look back at him and say, “Right,” as if all this makes a tremendous amount of sense and I ask, “Is, uh, Kara in the living room?”

“No, kitchen.”

“Right,” I say again and head in the direction of their kitchen. Todd and Chloe, who is still screaming, just nothing so legible as man anymore, follow me.

As the three of us walk into the kitchen, Kara looks up from the banquette where she’s sitting. Kara and Todd have a sitting area in their kitchen, a little banquette right by a window. I love their banquette. If I lived here I think I’d do exactly what Kara is doing right this very second, sit with a magazine and look out the window from my kitchen sitting area; it seems so much more civilized, so much more grown-up than my apartment where everything from magazine reading, to watching television, to meal time, to computer time, takes place in the corner of my couch.

Kara is in a light purple cable-knit sweater, her very thick, very straight dark brown hair is pulled back in a flawless ponytail. I notice how tired she looks. Chloe has gone beyond language at this point to convey her feelings on this whole thing about the
man.
She’s transitioned into this sort of screeching that I’ve noticed all the babies like to do, the kind that gets so high pitched that it sort of disappears into silence, and then starts again, only louder, and more piercing. The level of piercing is such that it could make a person pretty sure the
entire
reason they haven’t met the right guy yet isn’t actually because they are unlovable (as they often suspect) but because maybe, deep down, they are just not cut out for motherhood.

Kara looks past me, at Todd, and blinks. Kara’s a good blinker. I believe that there are actually really good blinkers in the world, and that Kara is one of them; she can convey a lot with her blinking and if I’m not mistaken, right now the blinking at Todd, it seems to be saying,
What the fuck?

“She wanted rice,” Todd says, a little defensive.

Kara blinks again, the meaning this time unmistakable, and we wait as Chloe finds language again and goes back to screaming,
“Maaaaaaan,”
and Todd exhales.

“There is no rice
Kara,
and so I ordered Chinese food, and told her the man was going to bring her rice.”

“You know you can’t tell her that. You know she has a hard time with patience and with the concept of time,” Kara snaps, getting up from the banquette and crossing over to where Todd and Chloe are standing behind me. “Hi, Hope,” she says to me as she passes.

I say, “Hi,” but what I really want to say instead is, “Um, great then, here are some things for Chloe, and I’ll just be going,” because this is so unsettling. And it’s not that anything so bad is going on, except for Kara looking tired and snapping, and Todd looking something close to desperate, and Chloe not wearing any clothes. It’s just that I’m not used to Todd and Kara’s pre-war classic six, not right on Park Avenue but pretty close to it, with all the fabric, and the decorating, and the linens from Schweitzer Linens, being anything less than perfect.

And it’s not that I can’t handle a little less-than-perfect (believe me I’m pretty accustomed to the less-than-perfect) it’s just that Todd and Kara,
this,
right now, seems to go against the proper order of the universe. Ever since I realized that the pugs aren’t always at Pug Hill, I feel like that’s happening more and more often.

Kara reaches over to Todd who hands off Chloe. I’m still wondering what all of this has to do with Chloe only wearing her diaper, but decide it’s best not to ask, best to assume that not wanting to get dressed is just one of those things babies sometimes do.

Todd and I both watch silently as Kara sets Chloe down on the floor and squats down next to her, speaking slowly and softly. “Honey, the man isn’t here yet. The man might not get here for a while so you need to try and be patient.”

And, really, that’s it. Chloe takes this news startlingly well and puts her arms around Kara’s neck and sighs. It’s all so beautiful, and it all makes up for the screeching. The mysterious reason of why Chloe’s wearing only her diaper doesn’t seem to really matter at all anymore. Even though there’s still the tension, and even though I think Kara’s now rolling her eyes at Todd, who’s slipping into this office room they have, I feel very emotional over the fact that even when their apartment is really far from domestic bliss, it’s still pretty close. I’m about to tell Chloe that I have some birthday presents for her, but she looks at me first, quite solemnly for a two-year-old, and says, “The man may not be here for while.”