by Greg Olear
Maude peers from my shirt-tail to address this last point. “It’s not a binky; it’s a passie,” she says, as if Jess were a complete idiot, and tauntingly chomps on the pacifier for effect. (This is one of those moments when I could just about burst with parental pride.) Then Maude hands me the passie and makes for the next room, where the faerie versions of Emma and Haven flit about, as Gloria implores her androgynous son to be careful, a sentiment she delivers so often, and in so many benign situations (such as now, when he’s six inches away from the corner of a coffee table he’s a good foot taller than), that she may as well just ignore him altogether. Aesop for the twenty-first century: The Mom Who Cried Be Careful.
“How are you?” Jess asks, hugging me firmly and pecking my cheek. “You look tired.”
“I feel tired.”
“There’s fresh coffee,” she says. “Catskill Mountain, Moka Java blend. When did Stacy leave?”
“Monday.”
“Oh, you poor dear. Maybe you’d prefer a beer?”
“No, coffee’s good. If I have beer, I’ll sleep, and I’m not allowed to sleep.”
“Just as well. The only beer we have is this weird microbrew stuff Chris is into. Fin du Monde. There’s so much alcohol in it, you’re better off doing tequila shots. I had half a bottle over the weekend, and I swear, I had a headache for like two days.” We process through the kingly archway into the kitchen, and she takes out a cup—an oversized thing with the insidious face of Mickey Mouse on it; I can’t escape rodents this morning!—and pours me a generous helping. “When’s she back, tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
There’s a crashing noise, and Haven starts whimpering. Leaving the coffee, Jess and I race to the next room to see what happened—and to make sure that our respective charges aren’t the ones responsible for upsetting the little crybaby. I won’t say Gloria is overprotective, but she makes the Secret Service look like a bunch of art school dropouts at the Phish Halloween show. Check that; I’ll say it: she’s overprotective. If she would just take a chill lozenge, these little gatherings would be a lot more . . . I hesitate to say fun, because I’m not sure the bonhomie derived from a good playdate constitutes fun, exactly . . . but the time would go by faster. And for all the horseshit about socialization and learning to share, that’s the real purpose of playdates: to kill time. You know how if you go to a really awesome party—one without kids, I mean; a wingding in, say, a two-bedroom apartment in the West Village—and you get there at nine thirty, and you start drinking and dancing and schmoozing, and the next thing you know, you look at your watch, and it’s two in the morning? That sort of thing rarely happens to me these days. Almost never, in fact. Parenthood is like prison in that regard. I’m always aware of the hour, aware of the fact that it’s always earlier than I’d hoped, aware of the vast and intimidatingly vacant Sahara between now and the undependable oasis that is the kids’ bedtime (a bedtime that may turn out to be a mirage!). Gloria, at times, can be a cellmate from hell, a fellow-traveler in the desert who grouses about the heat and bums water from your canteen.
Neither Maude nor Emma is responsible for Haven’s agony, thank God. What happened was, he dropped the toy he was playing with—an oversized plastic Thomas engine that bleeps and chuffs and plays the irritating theme song they’re two they’re four they’re six they’re eight; at home, he doesn’t have toys like that, so it’s a playdate novelty—on the floor, and was spooked by the noise shunting trucks and hauling freight when it hit the polished hardwood. Rather than redirect him by introducing a new red and green and brown and blue toy, or a new activity, a new anything, or just ignoring his blatant attention-grab, Gloria’s reacted in the worst possible way, which is to say, like Jackie Kennedy in Dealey Plaza.
“What’s wrong, Haven?” she cries, cradling him in her arms (the tableau of mother and woman-haired child suggests a pietà, only with a midget Jesus wearing a hipster Nirvana T-shirt). “Oh, it’s so awful that that happened. You must be so upset!”
Even Maude and Emma, who are closer to three than four, regard Our Lady of the Sorrows with puzzlement. Even the preschoolers know that Gloria, like the plastic surgeon who did Heidi Montag’s boobs, is blowing things way the fuck out of proportion.
Before Gloria begins rending garments, Jess, who has two kids and therefore understands the Parenting 101 concept of redirection, intervenes. “Maybe it’s time to have a snack. Who wants some cookies?”
This snaps Haven out of his sympathy ploy. At once he stops with the histrionics, breaks away from his Mater Dolorosa’s tentacles, and follows Jess into the kitchen, a spring in his step, leaving me alone in the great room with the forgotten Thomas train and Gloria. She arches her eyebrow and gives me a sly grin. “So . . . McDonald’s?”
Rather than defend my choice of restaurant—in three weeks, I’ll be thirty-seven goddamn years old; do I really need to justify my decision to have an Egg Fucking McMuffin?—I fib. “I needed more coffee.”
“They have coffee?”
“They have coffee. It’s pretty good.” I give the Thomas train a kick. “Not as good as Dunkin’ Donuts, but better than Starbucks.”
This is a mistake. Although New Paltz has a McDonald’s, a Burger King, a Subway, a Blimpie, and the two aforementioned coffee places, our many and vocal radical-Leftist citizens, veritable Jedi knights in their opposition to Evil Empires, are particularly outspoken about their contempt for chains of any kind. Chains, you see, are the bonds of our corporate oppressors.
“I get my coffee at Mudd Puddle,” Gloria says. “Fair trade.”
“McDonald’s has fair trade coffee,” I tell her. I don’t know if this is the case—it’s probably not; McDonald’s would buy coffee beans picked by orphaned Sumatran child prostitutes if it were half a cent cheaper a bushel—but I’m banking on the fact that she won’t know enough or care enough to call my bluff. My stratagem works.
“I’ll have to keep that in mind,” she says.
“They have Apple Dippers, too. Pre-packaged, pre-sliced apples. You know. For the kids.”
“Haven, honey, no mouth. No mouth!”
Her pride and joy has Ecce Homo returned, cookie in hand, but it’s one of his long tresses that has found its way into his hungry maw. I’ll cut his hair when he wants to cut it, Gloria’ll tell us, although it’s pretty clear to me that he’d at least appreciate a trim. He’s forever blowing his stray hairs away from his nose or pushing them out of his face or putting them in his mouth and slurping on them, like he’s doing now. Sometimes my crotchety neighbor, Bill—a divorced man in his late fifties who still has his McCain/Palin sign on his lawn, although that ill-matched tandem flamed out almost a year ago—will neglect to cut his grass in a timely fashion, probably because it’s difficult to navigate his John Deere tractor around the ancient BMW carcass rusting on his lawn, and I have a powerful urge to get my own mower going and cut it myself. I feel the same way about Haven’s hair. It’s all I can do not to drag him to the bathroom right now and shave his head with one of Jess’s Lady Schicks.
“Haven, I said no mouth!”
As I said before, the difference between Gloria Hynek and the rest of the moms (and dads; fuck, I just referred to myself as a mom; maybe I should sample one of Chris’s microbrews, after all) is that Gloria only has the one child. If she had two kids, or three, like Cynthia Pardo, she wouldn’t give a shit about one of them chewing on some hair. Although if she had more kids, she would keep Haven’s hair short, because short hair is easier to maintain and harder for ticks and lice to hide in.
Jess returns, bearing a platter of Stop & Shop cookies (which, incidentally, are baked on the premises and quite tasty) and my cup of coffee. Thanking her, I take the cup and three chocolate chips. She then offers the platter to Gloria, who waves it off.
“They look delicious,” she says, “but I can’t.” When no one asks her why she can’t, she supplies the reason herself. “Isagenix.”
“Isa-who?”
“Isa
genix. The cleanse? Sounds crazy, I know, but it totally works. I’ve lost four pounds, and I’ve never felt better.”
Gloria is short and curvy, with fair skin, strawberry blonde hair, pendulous breasts and a booty that would “spring” Sir Mix-a-Lot. Even at her slenderest—at age twenty-five, the magical and well-chronicled year she spent in Portland, dabbling in a raw foods diet and sleeping with both of her housemates—she wasn’t slender, but she gained twenty-seven pounds when she was pregnant with Haven, twenty-seven pounds she’s been unable to shed in the intervening three-plus years. It’s not from lack of trying; she’s gone on every fad diet, and attempted every fad exercise, known to man—South Beach and Crossfit, Zone and yoga, Weight Watchers and “willPower & grace,” Atkins and hooping—but the excess poundage remains intractable. Never mind that she looks great, that she wears the weight well (despite what the kingmakers in Hollywood believe, most straight guys prefer curvy women; whenever a Lindsay Lohan or a Kate Winslet starves away her God-given boobs and butt, rendering her figure as flat and uninteresting as Justin Bieber’s, men the world over rend their garments). She’s forever beating herself up for being beefier than her old friend Jess Holby, next to whom skeletons appear plump.
“Isn’t that the starvation diet?” Jess wrinkles her nose. “Ruth told me about that.”
“Not starvation.” Gloria produces a barrette from her pocket and puts it in her son’s hair, unobstructing his line of sight but making him look even more like a girl. “I mean, fasting is part of it, but it’s all about, you know, purifying the body. You should see the stuff that comes out of your body. Disgusting.”
“Where is Ruth?” I ask, not wanting the conversation to veer into the scatological, which with Gloria, it would. Gloria is the Queen of TMI. She’ll tell you anything about herself, no matter how private. This can be amusing when she’s discussing clit piercings and Oregonian three-ways, but when the subject is odd chunks of green matter in the stool, it’s best to change the subject. “Is she coming?”
“She can’t,” Jess says. “Sarah has a stomach bug.”
“Bummer.”
“She thinks she got food poisoning from that batch of yogurt she tried to make from her breast milk.”
Before I can ask for elaboration on the breast-milk-yogurt story, on the other side of the (great) room, Emma whacks Maude in the arm, the first salvo in what will probably be a playdate-long battle over the former’s coveted possessions. All necessary to their development, this child warfare, in some weird, twisted way that the Creator should probably have spent a bit more time thinking through before dickering around with marsupials and trigonometry. (Maybe a full day of rest on Sunday was too generous—I mean, would the extra half-day of work have killed Him?) Spiritual growth, in its simplest form, and in every major religion, concerns the transition from selfishness to selflessness. The meek shall inherit the earth. Unfortunately, the world remains under the sceptered sway of the selfish. The kingdom the power and the glory are someone else’s now and forever.
Before anyone can react, the girls settle it themselves. Ah, progress. Maybe we all can just get along.
“Hey,” Jess says, finishing the last of her cookie, “did you guys hear the latest Cynthia Pardo dirt?”
Cynthia Pardo: New Paltz’s most successful real estate broker and most notorious adulteress. Her vagina, Meg once quipped, is an open house. Impossible to attend a social gathering these days and not have her name come up.
“I heard she almost got arrested,” Gloria says, “but I didn’t get the whole story.”
“Arrested?”
“Oh my God. Wait until you hear.” Jess sits on the couch and takes a long sip of coffee, reveling in the dramatic-effect attention. “So, you know how she and Bruce Baldwin like to have sex”—she mouths the word sex, in case kids are in earshot; they aren’t; they’re in the spare bedroom now, playing a laughably uncompetitive game of hide-and-seek—“in public places?”
Jess happens to be looking right at me when she ends the question, so I nod. This is common knowledge. Meg, with whom Cynthia had a recent falling out, delights in regaling us with juicy tidbits of where the two lovebirds roosted. Last week, the tryst went down in one of the homes for which she has an exclusive listing.
“Well, they were in Beacon last week, at Dia? You know, the art museum?”
Sure—the art museum built in the abandoned Nabisco factory, specializing in the exhibition of modern-art installations too large for MoMA, such as the piece Roland and Maude were drawn to during our one ill-fated visit there, the untitled sculpture Stacy dubbed Enormous Pile of Broken Glass on the Floor.
“Apparently,” Jess says, “there’s this like big exhibit in the basement. These sort of big steel mazes?”
“Yeah,” I say, “they’re really something.”
“Well, they were there on this like rainy day, and it wasn’t crowded. So they went into one of these mazes, right, and they decide to, you know.”
The steel mazes comprise a permanent part of the collection, a Richard Serra installation of massive sheets of gray-brown steel, the kind used to make ships, twenty-some-odd feet high, heavy as fuck, arranged in spiral patterns. Roland was fascinated by them. You walk into the things—there are half a dozen of them, I think—and the effect is spooky and disorienting. Like getting lost in a steely corn maze. You don’t see them; you experience them. The last thing that would be on the mind of any sane individual interacting with that installation is, Wow, this would be a great place for some afternoon delight. I mean, there’s nothing remotely aphrodisiac about them. “They did it in the installation?”
“Um . . . yeah. And when they get it on, they don’t go halfway, so Cynthia’s skirt is all hiked up, and Bruce’s pants are around his ankles, and she’s loud, louder than she should be, and it echoes off the steel walls . . . and that’s when the cops show up.”
“No shit!” Gloria says, and immediately covers her mouth and scans the room for Haven, lest his immaculate ears be adulterated by her potty mouth.
“Apparently there’s a surveillance camera down there, so there’s like a tape of this.”
“Is it on YouTube yet?”
“Wouldn’t that be a fun link to discuss on Hudson Valley Parents,” says Gloria, and we all laugh. She can be very witty, Gloria, when she’s not crimping her son’s playdate style. “So what happened?”
“What happened is, museum security called the police, and the officer who responded, he trains with Bruce at the gym, so they got off . . . ”
“ . . . in more ways than one . . . ”
“ . . . with a warning. But, Jesus! That’s only a misdemeanor, but it would have been in the police blotter if they got busted . . . ”
“Oh, they got busted, alright.”
“ . . . and Peter would . . . ”
“He’d find out.”
“ . . . find out. But isn’t that gross? I mean, why would you do that?”
“Well,” Gloria says, batting her eyes as she always does when she’s about to reveal information more personal than any of us wants to know, “sex in a public place can be intensely erotic.”
“This isn’t on the beach or whatever.” Jess wrinkles her nose. “Or the Mile High Club. It’s an art museum. Kids go there. It’s like so disgusting. She’s such a skanky skank. It makes my skin crawl.”
“She is kind of a succubus.”
“The only reason you’d have sex at Dia:Beacon,” I offer, “is because you want to get caught.”
“That’s what I said,” Jess says. “She wants out of the marriage, but she doesn’t want to be the one who leaves. She wants him to find out.”
“Unfortunately, he’s oblivious.”
“Or in denial.”
“How do you know about this?” I ask.
“She told Mike DiLullo, who told Cathy, who told Ruth, who told me.”
“Jesus.”
“I know, right?”
“Poor Peter,” I say.
; “And the kids,” says Gloria.
“All three of them,” adds Jess.
If there were a thread about Cynthia Pardo on the Hudson Valley Parents website, most of the comments would harp on the fact that Cynthia has three kids, and that her abundant offspring makes her indiscretion even more abominable. This is the tack most people take when the subject comes up. How could a mother of all those children—not to mention the doted-upon wife of Peter Berliner, a nice, non-abusive, faithful guy with a steady job and top-drawer fathering skills—stray so brazenly, so wantonly, so self-destructively? Sure, Gloria is not the paradigmatic wife, but next to Cynthia Pardo, she looks like Donna Reed. Donna Reed with genital piercings, but still.
“Seriously,” Jess says. “She skeeves me out.”
A few years back, on one of those rare occasions when Stacy and I went out with a group of people—and one of the not-rare occasions when we were in the middle of a bad patch—a bunch of us went to Eighties Night at Cabaloosa, and as we formed a crude circle, I found myself dancing next to Cynthia (Peter, it should be noted, wasn’t there; he’s kind of antisocial and doesn’t get out much, unless bowling is involved). As I watched her shake it to Cyndi Lauper, I remember thinking, This is someone you could have an affair with. She has three kids. She’d never break up her marriage, so you wouldn’t break up yours. Discreet encounters in far-flung motel rooms. The occasional clandestine rendezvous at the house, when Stacy’s out of town. We’d use the futon in the basement. Look at her move. You know she’s good in bed. She probably hasn’t had a good fuck in almost a decade. And when’s the last time someone’s face was buried in her thighs? Looking back at that night at the dance club, I see that Cynthia was putting out a distress call, and I merely picked up on it. She wanted out, period. She was a princess locked in a tower, and it didn’t really matter who came to the rescue: me, Bruce Baldwin, Prince Charming, Shrek; it was all the same to her. If I had pursued her that night, or soon thereafter, I might be the one schtupping her in art museums, the trending topic on the mental Twitter feed of moms all across town. Whenever her name comes up, then, I breathe a sigh of relief. Her name, like some secret incantation, makes me swell with contentment at my own marriage, and renews, in some hard-to-define way, my own wedding vows.