by Greg Olear
This puts me, as a grown man at a preschool playground, in a delicate position. I could, of course, easily grant her request. But to give her a decent push, I have to touch the small of her back; should I be touching the small of the back of a girl I don’t know, whose parents, for all I know, may be litigious assholes who see pedophilia everywhere? What if they accuse me of molestation? Or another dire possibility: she falls off the swing, and I get sued. That I am actively worried about these outcomes, unlikely though both may be, does not reflect well on our society. What have we become?
And there I go, sounding like Andy Rooney.
I decide to compromise. “Do you know how to swing?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Hold on tight.”
Instead of pushing her, I reach well over her head keep your hands where I can see ’em, grabbing a chain in each hand. I pull the swing back as far as I can go, count three, and release. She pumps her legs—she wasn’t lying about knowing how to swing. Same result, no physical contact. Problem solved.
“Daddy!” Roland calls. “I need a push!”
“Thanks,” the little girl says.
“You’re welcome.”
“Daddy . . . ”
“I’m coming, Roland.”
Now I’m starting to get bored. And, as always happens when I come to the playground, I have to pee. There’s no bathroom at Hasbrouck—after Labor Day, the Port-o-Potty they keep on the grounds during the summer, one of the more disgusting Port-o-Potties you’ll ever donate bodily waste to, flies south for the winter—so I’ll either have to take Roland across the street to the well-appointed men’s room at van den Berg Hall, or just hold it. I decide to hold it. We won’t be here that much longer.
“Roland, should we go see what your sister’s doing? And the twins?”
“No, no sisters. No twins. No girls.”
“Five more minutes,” I tell him. “I want to talk to Meg.”
“Oh, okay . . .” he says, drawing out the word like a long sigh. “We can go see Maude.”
He drags his feet along the ground, his toes sliding through the mud, until he slows down sufficiently to jump off. Then he races into the playground proper, tumbling once in a hole in the grass but catching himself before falling. By the time I catch up to him, he’s already in the sandbox, mud-caked Merrills off, right in the middle of the entryway. Brooke—who, while only four, operates as the leader when the kids are all together—has integrated him into the game, which involves piling sand into a broken orange bucket. Maude, her legs practically buried, rakes up big piles of sand with a miniature rake that was once bright yellow but is now the color of watered-down lemonade. Beatrix is in the far corner, pouring sand from a broken green bucket into a hole some older kid—or, more likely, some overzealous dad; maybe the corporate-bald guy—must have dug. Too advanced for this crew.
“You made it,” Meg says.
“At long last.” I pick up Roland’s shoes, clomp them together to get the mud off, set them beside the other three pairs. “How’s Maude doing?”
“Oh, she’s having fun.”
“Maude, honey. Give me that passie.” I snatch the thing out of her mouth—it makes a pronounced popping noise like after the third lollipop lollipop oh lolly lolly lolly lollipop—and put it in my pocket. She makes no move to resist.
I collapse into the bench next to Meg.
“Oh my God,” Meg says. “Wait until you hear the latest gossip.”
“Is this about Dia:Beacon? Because Jess told me that this morning.”
“Dia:Beacon? What about Dia:Beacon?”
I tell her an abbreviated and euphemism-laden version of the story: Cynthia Pardo and Bruce Baldwin, her pants down, his dork up.
“Sheesh. You know, she didn’t use to be this way,” Meg says. “But nothing she does surprises me anymore. Especially when he’s involved.”
“He” would be Bruce, Meg’s prom date, the charmer who forcibly groped her at the post-prom party. If he hadn’t been so drunk, he might have raped her. Does Meg know that I know that story? I lose track of what I’m supposed to know and what I’m not.
“So what’s your gossip?”
“Well,” she says, “I had lunch with Cathy DiLullo this afternoon. She’d just come from Cynthia’s office, and she told me Cynthia’s pregnant. Can you believe that shit? Like this isn’t going to be hard enough on her kids.”
“Bruce knocked her up already, huh? No big shock, I guess.”
“No. That’s what’s so crazy. Peter’s the father. She’s, like, sixteen weeks, and she’s only been with Bruce for a month.”
“Didn’t Peter Berliner get a vasectomy?”
Vasectomy: a fatherly rite of passage. Fourteen minutes of discomfort, a day of ice-packed boxers, and you’re home (and condom) free. I’ve been snipped; so has Soren, and Dennis Hynek, and Chris Holby, and pretty much every other dad I know. The choice between vasectomy and another kid is no choice at all.
“Yes! That’s the other crazy thing. God, those two are fertile.”
“Wow.” I kick a hole in the sand with the heel of my Doc Marten. “What a mess.”
“I know, right? Brooke! Knock it off.”
Brooke, who had been flinging sand at her sister, grudgingly complies.
“And—get this—Peter doesn’t know. She doesn’t want to tell him. She knows he’ll want to keep the baby, and she wants to get rid of it. That’s why she told Cathy—she wanted Cathy to get her the morning-after pill. Like that would work!”
“That’s . . . man. I don’t even know what to say.”
“Brooke!” She turns back to me. “I know, right?”
“We just saw him. At Lowe’s. He looked so . . . sad. So defeated. He must know something’s up.”
“Brooke! I mean it!”
“So is Soren recovered from his big night out?”
“I guess. I haven’t talked to him all day, the fucker.”
At the curse, the only word in our entire exchange that Meg does not mumble, the other adult in the sandbox area, a slovenly middle-aged woman with a pot-gut and a faded tattoo of indeterminate design on her bicep—incarnate proof that the tattoo fad is on its last legs (and arms); it’s over, people! really, if you’re going to get inked in the tens, the only appropriate design is of Fonzie jumping a shark—gives us the Evil Eye. This is the same trucker grandma who was smoking a Newport Light when we first arrived—and probably the negligent guardian of the little girl I pushed on the swing.
If Meg notices, she does not react. “I don’t care what he does,” she says. “I really don’t. Soren can suck it.”
I’m reluctant to disclose the truth about her husband—that he wasn’t out drinking with Peter Berliner, that he lied to her—because the last thing I want to do is unleash the Headless Whoresman upon Meg’s mind, too. Then again, if she really doesn’t care what he does, there’s no harm in telling her. Tall, ruggedly handsome, and blessed with a Danish accent, Soren was quite the ladies’ man in his bacchanalian bachelor days—he once confessed to me, nonchalantly, that he’d bedded seventy-two women before meeting Meg—so an affair is certainly in the realm of possibility, but if he’d been out with a secret mistress last night, chances are, he wouldn’t have come home that knockered. And even if he was, then the sting of betrayal is something Meg and I could go through together. Misery loves company.
“Listen, I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
“Soren wasn’t out with Peter Berliner last night.”
She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t react at all. Shit. I should have kept my mouth shut. In situations like this, messengers turn up dead. But I already opened the can of worms, so now I have to empty the damned thing. “Yeah, Peter was at HoeBowl. Tournament game. He bowled like crap, he said, but they still won. I just . . . I don’t know. I thought you should know.”
Finally, Meg makes a face. “That little shit.”
With another grimace in our direction, the
trucker grandma scoops up the plump toddler she’s presiding over Come on, Jakey, let’s go and hightails it to the baby swings, leaving in her wake an invisible cloud of burnt menthol.
“Christ,” Meg mutters, once she’s safely past. “Large Marge.”
“I’m sorry, Megs. I probably shouldn’t’ve . . . ”
“No, it’s fine. I know where he was. He was out with fucking Bruce Baldwin. They’re, like, friends. Which of course is not something I’m thrilled about. So when he goes out with him, he doesn’t tell me.”
She shakes a few Late July cheese crackers out of their red box, then tilts it toward me.
I grab a handful. “Thanks.” The crackers taste good. Really good. “Soren is friends with Bruce Baldwin?”
“They met at the gym. They hit it off. I guess he’s a pretty cool guy,” she shrugs, “when he’s not drunk and horny on prom night. I just think it’s disrespectful, you know? I don’t want to make a big stink about it, but the guy did things to me that were not very nice. My husband should want to slice his balls off, not buy him a beer. Fuck Soren.”
I’d never looked at Sharon Rothman in a sexual way before this morning, and my feelings toward Meg are even less libidinous. She’s pretty (a younger, curvier, crunchier Michelle Pfeiffer), she’s smart, she’s funny, she’s cool, I love her, sure—but I could make the same claims about my sister. Hooking up with Meg would feel like incest . . . and yet . . . and yet . . . if Stacy rode off into the sunset with her Headless Whoresman, and Meg and Soren broke up, wouldn’t it make perfect sense to . . .
“Would you ever, you know, leave him?”
“So I can be a single mom, consigned to a life of poverty, with sleazy men marking me for easy nookie? No effin’ way.”
Not that I’m eager for this to happen. I’d prefer to dance with the lady that brung me, and keep Meg in the CLOSE FRIENDS & FAMILY column, where she belongs. But if the towers collapse, something must be built at Ground Zero.
“What if there were a better alternative?”
“Who? David Rothman?”
She laughs, but the mention of Sharon’s husband makes my stomach lurch.
Across the playground, the corporate-bald dad is now overcompensating for his endless cell phone call, chasing after his kid, his arms up over his head Godzilla-style, making too-loud monster noises, running too fast. He’s having QUALITY TIME, or thinks he is. He’ll go back to work tomorrow—a guy like that works on Saturdays, too, probably spends sixty hours a week in some office where the secretaries are leggy and willing—and feel good about himself, that he kicked off after lunch to spend a nice afternoon with his kid. Never mind that the boy looks legitimately terrified.
“You know,” Meg says, “this place would be perfect if there were a tiki bar. I could really use a mai tai right about now.”
“Me, too,” I tell her, eager for a change of subject. “How great would that be. A playground–slash–tiki bar?”
“Specializing in yummy girlie drinks. Cosmos and Bellinis . . . ”
“ . . . Harvey Wallbangers . . . ”
“ . . . Sex on the Beach and Blowjobs . . . ”
“. . . but with toddler names. The Dora, the Diego, the Elmo . . . ”
“ . . . the Buzzed Lightyear . . . ”
“Ha! We should draft a business plan. We’d make millions. All we need’s a catchy name.”
“Why not The Playground?”
“That’s not bad.”
“No, wait—I got it: Mother’s Little Helper.”
“Perfect! I mean, unless the Rolling Stones object.”
“There’s a Ruby Tuesday; why not a Mother’s Little Helper?”
“Why stop there? We could open a whole block of Rolling Stones–inspired businesses. A youth hostel called Gimme Shelter. A coffee shop called Brown Sugar. Make your own pottery at Paint It Black.”
“Right. Vanessa could manage it.”
Meg’s made funnier jokes, but I’m a bit punchy, and the dig on my drippy babysitter’s choice of major convulses me with giggles. Really, who the fuck majors in ceramics? I laugh so hard that all four of the kids—who are, for once, actually getting along; the meltdown at the pumpkin patch behind him, my son has reassumed the persona of Good Roland, dutifully playing with the twins and Maude—stop their game and look at me.
“Daddy’s being silly,” Maude says.
“Meg made a funny joke.”
“What is the . . . excuse me . . . what is the funny joke, Daddy?” asks Roland.
“It’s too hard to explain. Go on. Keep playing.”
After another beat, they mercifully do. I use the diversion to appropriate the cheese crackers. “Do you mind? I’m ravenous.”
“Go for it.”
“I don’t want to take food from your kids’ mouths.”
“It’s fine. I have another box in the car.”
“Thanks.”
Most of the culinary staples my children regularly consume nauseate me—I would rather eat deep-fried shit, for example, than ravioli—but these Late July cheese crackers? Man, are they good. I don’t know what they put in them, but they have achieved cheese-crackery perfection. Even Steve the cat has been known to feast upon Late July cheese crackers, if we happen to leave an open box on the counter.
“I fired her. Vanessa. Gave her the heave-ho.”
“What happened?”
I stuff my face with cheese crackers and tell her the story.
“Good for you!”
“You know,” I say, “it would be great to have a bar here. I really do think that’s an inspired idea. I’m not even joking.”
“It’s the new thing, in Park Slope,” Meg says. “Seriously. Hipster parents bringing their toddlers to bars in the afternoon, so they can get knockered.”
“What’s a toddler supposed to do at a bar? Play darts? Come on, now. Just make a wine spritzer in your bottle of Vitamin Water and go to a playground, like the rest of us.”
“Don’t tell anyone,” Meg says, a guilty look crossing her face, “but I totally poured like two shots of Baileys into my Starbucks.”
“Really?”
“Really. I’ve got a nice little buzz going right now.” Through my laugh, she says, “Half a glass of wine when I get home, and I’m good through bedtime.”
“I’m really dreading bedtime today.”
“Oh, I dread it every day. If I was a gazillionaire, I’d hire a live-in nanny just to put the twins to bed. I could deal with the rest of the day, if I could somehow skip bedtime. I’m not even joking. If I won the lottery, that’s like the first thing I would do.”
Out of nowhere, Maude rips a fart that sounds like a minor earthquake. “I fart,” she announces, as if anyone didn’t hear her. The other kids freeze, look at her, and then burst out laughing, as do Meg and I.
“What do you say?”
“Excuse me!”
More laughing, and then the kids resume their game. Thank God for the sandbox.
“I know it’s hard,” Meg says, “that Stacy travels so much, and I know it’s hard for you to, you know, keep the home fires burning and all, but I tell ya, I envy you guys. I really do.”
The notion of my so-called life—the lack of sleep, the lack of sex, the lack of money, the lack of social status, the lack of a social life, the lack, really, of almost everything—being enviable, even without factoring in the alleged affair, is so preposterous that I can’t help but chuckle.
“I’m serious. You love her, she loves you, you respect each other, you get along great. You communicate. Soren,” she says, “he’s just not like that. He’s a typical guy. He sucks at communicating.”
We get this a lot, Stacy and I. People comment on what a perfect couple we make, how right we are for each other. Even Rob, who must, by virtue of his job as a couples counselor, view long-term unions with pessimism (and must recognize that the central premise of every romantic comedy that ever was—namely, that there is such a thing as One True Love—is total crap; that j
ust as there are any number of restaurants where we could enjoy a sumptuous meal, there are any number of people with whom we could, under the right circumstances, fall in love and live with more or less happily ever after; that love, as Eugenia Last and every astrologer worth her horoscopical salt well knows, is, above all, about timing) never fails to mention how in love we seem and how much we seem to genuinely like each other. Is it all an illusion? Are we just good actors (I know she is), playing time-honored roles in a time-honored play? The last session with Rob, Stacy said, It’s just . . . I’m afraid we lost something . . . a spark . . . something . . . and it’s just . . . I’m just worried that it’s gone forever, that we can’t ever get it back. I laughed that off, assured her it wasn’t the case . . . but she’s always been more perceptive about matters of the heart than her out-of-touch husband. Was Stacy right? Has the flame of our love smouldered to nothing? And what then? Divorce? Some Femi-Nazi judge denies me custody because I must, by virtue of my penis, be the subordinate caregiver, and my kids are taken from me, my house is taken from me, and I wind up in one of those sad bungalows on the outskirts of town, where the truffula trees are all chopped down, where the divorced dads go? No fucking way. She can take her love to town all she wants; I’ll be the cuckolded albatross around her neck, impairing the view of her cleavage; I’ll be human baggage, if that’s what it takes to keep the kids. No way I grant a divorce. And in New York, I’d have to. Harder to get a divorce in New York than any other state in the union. Blue laws. Blue ball laws.
“He’s either lobbying me for sex, or he’s brooding in the basement,” Meg says. “There’s no middle ground. The only time we really talk, I mean really talk, is at Rob’s.”
Maybe I should give Rob a call. He might have some insight into my predicament. It’s been months since we’ve been to see him—late July, I think (like the crackers), when Stacy made that grim the-spark-is-dead pronouncement—but he always said we could contact him if we ever needed to talk something through “in a pinch.” And doesn’t my wife cheating on me, and my entire life threatening to collapse like the WTC, constitute a pinch? If not that, what?