This Beautiful Life (3 page)

As Kevin roared his edict, “Kindergarten pickup!” the clusters of waiting adults immediately began to merge, funneling like sand in an hourglass toward the two red doors where the children would exit the building class by class and line up in rows on the sidewalk. Liz stood and stretched, yanking up her low-slung jeans as she rose, and smoothing out the pretty embroidered Indian shirt—soft blue velvet with tiny mirrors—that she'd unearthed from her closet when she saw its exact facsimile hanging in a posh storefront window on Madison Avenue with a price tag of one zillion dollars. She felt pretty in that shirt. She'd felt pretty in it three decades ago. A miracle, still feeling pretty. She twisted her long brown hair into a loose knot, swung her duffel over her shoulder; Coco's Barbie bag came with wheels and could be dragged along the sidewalk like a poodle toy.

Coco wouldn't have been caught dead in a party dress, so Liz had folded up some leggings and a tie-dyed mini, a couple of different T-shirts to choose from: Happy Bunny, Cocoa Puffs, Paul Frank's Monkey Julius—the one where the toothy ape was wearing braces—plus the requested Chinese pajamas, and packed them in her bag. The children in the Lower School wore uniforms, that is, a solid pant (not jeans) or said pleated skirt and a white polo shirt. A plain gray cardigan sweater with the school's logo stitched into the corner in a silvery thread. Coco would be tearing hers off halfway down the block, throwing it over her shoulder in a wadded-up ball, confident that her mother would be there behind her to catch it. She'd pull a white leather newsboy cap—she loved that cap! (but Mrs. Livingston said no caps in school)—out of the backpack that Liz's older sister, Michelle, had sent from Italy for Coco's last birthday. She was particularly prone to the latest fads, Coco. Liz could only hope that tattooing and scarification would no longer be de rigueur when Coco was old enough to self-mutilate.

Liz felt a light hand on her shoulder and turned around. Casey. Same freckled face and shoulder-length reddish curls as Juliana. Hollow cheeks. Tired eyes. She'd probably been pretty cute as a girl, but now she looked prematurely old and too skinny. It's your butt or your face—you can't have both, Liz thought. Some movie star had said this; she'd read it or heard something like it somewhere, and had stored a smudged replica of the quote in the hash of celebrity trivia her brain had accumulated without effort, along with all the other stuff and nonsense that passed for knowledge these days from print magazines and whatever: TV, the Net, idle chitchat, the air… But it was true, about your butt or your face.

“I see you've brought your bags… Please don't tell anyone, Liz…”

“I won't, I won't,” Liz said, in response to Casey's stricken expression. “I'll just say we're going away for the night.” As if anyone would ask, anyway. They all took off for somewhere every weekend, limos destined for Teterboro Airport clogging the street in front of the school, Hummers with Connecticut plates lining up at the curb. Nobody here would notice Liz's little overnight bags.

“You look like a teenager,” Casey said, approvingly, taking in Liz's jeans and blouse, the platform clogs she'd walked across the park in, her soft, messy knot of hair. “You look like a teenager from behind.” And then: “Isn't that Coco B. getting chewed out by Mrs. Livingston again?”

Of course it was Coco B. Liz didn't even have to turn around to know.

“Oh no,” she said, feigning… fear? Surprise? Disappointment? Whatever it was a proper mother was supposed to feel, aside from resignation and a little residual renegade thrill. The truth was, Mrs. Livingston, in her flesh-colored stockings and Pappagallo flats, inspired juvenile delinquency: whenever Liz was called into school to meet with her, she had the urge to go to the ladies' room first and light up a cigarette. She'd even smoked a little weed in Central Park before the last parent-teacher conference. Richard chewed her out after that meeting was over. He said he hoped he was the only one who'd noticed her red rims.

But half the moms were zoned on Xanax anyway and the other half had foreheads that didn't move, so even if they were emoting, they looked like zombies. Mrs. Livingston was surely used to checked-out mothers, Liz had assured Richard. She was no better or worse than most of them—which was really the secret of life, her life, Liz had decided at that moment, while she was still stoned: she was neither better nor worse than most. The ones with the frozen foreheads, there was always a little curl of flesh near the hairline that the dermatologist forgot to paralyze. When the mothers got excited it would roll up toward their roots, like an awning.

There she was now, Mrs. Livingston, her ropey hand firmly on Coco's chin, forcing Coco to stare back at her. “Show me your eyes” was a favorite tool of Mrs. Livingston's, a vote-with-your-feet proponent of pediatric hypnotism.

“Uh-oh,” said Liz. A little too halfheartedly. Lamely enough to elicit a quizzical stare.

“We'll meet you later at the hotel,” said Casey, with cool curiosity. “We have to go home first to get our bags anyway.”

“Sounds good,” said Liz, pushing through the crowd toward her daughter. And then, over her shoulder, as a polite afterthought: “We're so looking forward to it.” This was clearly the wrong thing to say, for Casey shot her a look of pure hatred.

Liz fought her way through the various coteries toward Coco, the big kids lining up in front of the Mister Softee truck waiting for ice cream, mothers using their shopping bags like mountain dogs to shepherd their offspring and play dates past the vacant-eyed Mexican balloon seller from whom Liz had never, not once, seen anyone buy anything. There she was,
anxious
Liz!—now more eager to get to her delinquent kid. She could spy through the crowds Mrs. Livingston holding Coco by both shoulders in a teacherly death grip. So Liz pushed on through the hugging, scolding, shooing, Italian-ice-buying throngs. She bypassed boys on scooters and girls skating on their Heelys, navigating a Fellini film's worth of activity, and still managing to nod a worried hello to the occasional father in a business suit (determined to get an early start to “the country”) and to the coaxing, nagging nannies proffering donuts in outstretched hands, luring the miniature circus ponies home. Like a suicidal salmon, Liz swam relentlessly upstream to claim her daughter.

W
hen they finally arrived at the hotel—a mildly chastened Coco and her thoroughly castigated guardian—it took a moment to spy the three little girls and their mothers in the pink, frondy Palm Garden, hidden behind the harpist. The girls were balancing on their knees on the Louis XIV chairs, using their thumbs to lick whipped cream off their plates, while the ladies picked at the remainders of their tea sandwiches at a neighboring table. Above them, palm trees soared like giraffe parasols, all long necks and sporadic splayed leaves. There were little potted pink azaleas in marble urns throughout the room, lending the inhabitants a youthful, rosy glow, even the smattering of Park Avenue dowagers and a rather large, boisterous group of women of a certain age, all wearing red hats and purple dresses. At the girls' table, Juliana was sporting an Egyptian collar of Mardi Gras beads and a feather boa; Clementine, the future poet, was staring dreamily at the harpist; and a little blonde Liz assumed was Kathy was sorting through a pile of geegaws and feathers. Coco took one look at the booty and hightailed it over there, left hand already outstretched, reaching for the gold.

At the grown-up table, directly below a huge, glittery chandelier, Casey was inclining her head toward Sydney, Clementine's mother, a tall, angular woman with attenuated features and a long, narrow, wedge-shaped head. With her closely cropped dark hair and wide-set ears, she looked like a purebred Siamese cat, sleek in her black cashmere leggings and feather-light sweater. The woman who must have been Liz's new best friend, Marsha, sat on Casey's other side, slathering clotted cream and jam on the remainder of a scone. She had shoulder-length center-parted brown hair, and wore mom jeans; she had already begun to let herself go. Why was Liz surprised? Casey had described her as “down-to-earth.” Parenthood made strange bedfellows—there was no other moment in time that these four women would ever have spent an entire evening together. Yet, there was a happy buzz to the group, thank God. Liz could feel its vibrato as she approached. All that sugar, plus what looked like two bottles of champagne still sweating in their ice buckets next to the table, had created a lovely cloud of conviviality.

“Hey, ladies,” Liz said, stepping in, it seemed, on the heels of what must have been the punch line of something hilarious.

The mommies looked up from their laughter with just-woken-up surprise. Perhaps they'd forgotten that Liz and Coco were joining them.

“What did that old bitch have to say?” asked Casey, by dint of greeting. She had the happy, drunken sheen in her eyes, like a coat of clear nail polish smeared across her blue irises, of a hostess at a successful party.

“She sent us to see Jane Perskey,” Liz said.

Liz and Coco had spent a half hour waiting on an old blue velvet sofa outside the headmistress's office and a half hour on the newish burgundy velveteen sofa inside the office staring at the headmistress's porcelain pig collection. “I've never seen so many pig tchotchkes in my life.”

“Oh my God,” gasped Casey. “We sent Jane a Limoges pig when we were trying to get Jules into the school. As a Christmas bribe. She had it returned to us that very day, with a firm no-thank-you note. It came by car and driver. I was mortified, but they took Jules anyway.” Casey sipped her champagne. “We were lucky. Juliana ERB'd off the charts, and my husband is a legacy. They had to take her.” The ERB: the Educational Records Bureau exam kids took to qualify for kindergarten admissions. Luckily, the university had lent a hand in finding spaces for both Liz's kids and paying their tuition—it was almost impossible to get into these schools without pull. Marjorie had told Liz this much. That she was lucky. But it was evident.

“She got called into Perskey?” Sydney said, laughing. “Good for her. She must have transgressed royally to get inside the inner sanctum.”

Well, yes. This time Coco had displayed such an outstanding array of bad behavior, a virtual peacock's tail of criminal activity, that Mrs. Livingston had washed her hands of her and sent Coco to the principal's office. So much for progressive education.

Or rather, so much for
the synthesis of the very best of progressive and traditional pedagogy as manifested by the Wildwood Plan
, Liz thought.

Here was today's list of transgressions: (1) Coco had pushed another girl by accident (maybe) down the stairs on her hell-bent journey to gym, resulting in blood (both elbows); (2) she'd started a water fight in the
boys'
bathroom; but, worst of all, (3) at the end of the day, during free time, she'd hopped up onto Mrs. Livingston's desk in the front of the classroom and said, “Nobody play with Juliana.” That's right, the birthday girl, and their hostess for the evening, the one whose mother—thanks to the health insurance plans of several third-world dictators—was footing the hotel bill. Why would Coco B. do such a thing?

Liz asked her this (sans the initial) in front of the somewhat bemused, seen-it-all headmistress, Jane (that the teacher was addressed as Mrs. and the headmistress by her first name was just another example of Wildwood's nuanced eclecticism). Apparently Juliana had cheated in musical chairs. According to Coco—Coco with her heightened sense of social justice—cheating was for cheaters, especially when Coco didn't win.

“But she's the birthday girl,” Liz said. “Coco, you don't ostracize a kid on her birthday.”

It was decided that Coco would write Juliana a letter of apology that she could mail through the school's post office—a unit that effectively combined mathematics, art, and the social sciences, and was a perfect method of keeping track of who was popular and who wasn't by charting the number of letters sent and received, so it was also a unit on statistics. The fact that Coco knew only half her letters, and the ones she could accurately identify were often formed facing the wrong direction or sleeping on their tummies, didn't matter. She could use kindergarten spelling, said Jane. Even with this caveat, the whole endeavor would take hours of their weekend time at home. Coco hated to sit. She hated to write. She loathed apologizing. All this clucking and coaxing, back and forth between Liz and seen-it-all Jane—they sounded like a dovecote of cooing birds, a scripted dovecote—plus Liz's feeble attempts at being smart and funny and supportive in front of a discerning audience, and trying to appear publicly and sufficiently horrified by her daughter's errant behavior when she secretly found it sort of humorous, was finally enervating. By the time they left Casa Jane (that's what the enamel hand-painted sign outside of Jane's office read; when pressed, she admitted to winning it in a dance contest at Club Med Turks and Caicos after her divorce), Liz needed a martini.

How lucky she was that she was now regaling a bunch of drunken mothers with her tales out of school at the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel, where it was easy enough to procure a drink. Grey Goose, heavy on the olives. Which Liz would ask for, as soon as she could grab the waiter's attention. After glancing furtively at the kids' table—Juliana and Coco were performing a charming tango together to the angel-winged rustlings of the harp—she sank back in her chair in relief, for it didn't seem that Juliana held any of Coco's misbehaviors against her. She was a good kid, Juliana.

Sydney called the waiter over. “Enrique, could you get our friend Liz here a drink?” And then quietly to Liz, “Honey, you look like you could use one.”

Liz mouthed a silent thank-you.

“My pleasure, madam,” said Enrique, an elderly man in uniform, who possessed a studied European elegance.