Name Dropping

by Jane Heller

  Ah-ha, I thought. What’s going on here isn’t a joke or an intrigue. It’s a mistake. A clerical error.

  I called American Express to report the mix-up and was informed that there was a simple explanation behind it. Another woman named Nancy Stern had recently moved into my building and her mail must have been placed inadvertently in my mailbox. The customer service representative apologized for the error and promised to advise the other Nancy Stern to include her apartment number in her address in order to avoid this type of confusion.

  The other Nancy Stern, I mused after I hung up. A Nancy Stern who’s chummy with ambassadors and movie stars, apparently. A Nancy Stern who travels, shops, dines fine. A Nancy Stern who, according to the American Express lady, lives in 24A, on the rarified penthouse floor of the building, not in 6J, on my thoroughly average floor. A Nancy Stern who, I’d be willing to bet, doesn’t regularly get vomited upon by four-year-olds.

  Yes, there was a simple explanation for the invitations and the $10,000 charge card bill that had appeared in my mailbox. The trouble is, simple explanations often obscure the complicated situations to follow. At least, that was the case with me.

  Chapter Two

  “You’ll never guess who I ran into last night,” said Janice as we were setting up the classroom the next morning.

  “Who?”

  “Gary, the nutritionist I met in the Hamptons last summer. You remember.”

  I winced, remembering. Janice, who was also something of a nutritionist when she wasn’t succumbing to Play-Doh, had not only slept with Gary on their very first date but told him she loved him, proposed marriage to him, and declared that she wanted to have his children. Needless to say, she’d never heard from him again.

  “Where did this reunion take place?” I asked.

  “At the Korean market at Seventy-sixth and Lex,” she said. “Gary was cruising the salad bar.”

  “Did you have a conversation?”

  “Yeah. I told him it was nice to see him and he told me it was nice to see me too. Of course, he didn’t have a clue who I was.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “He called me Linda and asked if I still liked working in real estate.”

  “Sorry.”

  She waved me off. “Obviously, Gary’s a sociopath.”

  “Obviously.” I paused. “What, exactly, is a sociopath?”

  “Oh. A psychopath with really good social skills?”

  I smiled. “Sounds reasonable. Listen, don’t hate me for saying this, Janice, but the next time you go out with a man, maybe you shouldn’t come on as strong as you did with Gary. I think your, um, enthusiasm scares guys off.”

  “Nancy,” she said, running her fingers through her spiky blond hair. “I can’t help how I am. If I feel something, I flow with it. Isn’t that what we teach the kids to do? To express what they’re feeling deep inside? To be open and honest human beings?”

  “Yes, but in terms of adult male-female relationships—”

  “Look, Nance. The truth is, I’m not like you. I don’t hold back.”

  Hold back? Was that what I’d been doing? Was that why I was manless? Because I held back?

  While Janice rambled on about Gary, I considered her assessment of me, tried to take an unbiased look at myself. I certainly didn’t hold back my feelings with the children, I decided, never with the children, not in the nine years I’d been a teacher at Small Blessings. I was crazy about all the kids, even the Fischer Levin types, and I put my love out there, unreservedly. But, I had to admit, I could see where someone might find me a little standoffish with men. Sweaty guys on dance floors aside, I suppose that ever since my divorce, I was wary of feeling too much, wary of letting my emotions overwhelm me, wary of getting hurt. I don’t mean to suggest that I was romance-phobic, just guarded, undaring, the anti-Janice.

  Oh, poor little Nancy, you’re probably thinking. Another victim of an ugly breakup. Sob sob.

  The thing is, I didn’t see myself as a victim, nor was my breakup ugly or even especially dramatic. I didn’t find John in bed with another woman (or man), didn’t find him on a street corner selling drugs, didn’t find him on a wanted poster. He didn’t beat me, he wasn’t a boozer, and he wasn’t averse to doing the dishes. He just didn’t love me.

  Some people say that married couples don’t love each other equally, not really; that one spouse loves the other more; that one is the adorer and the other the adored. Well, for six years, I was the adorer of John Stern, and I was so busy adoring him, so busy saying “I love you,” so busy asking “How was your day?” and “What do you want for dinner?” and “Does this feel good when I touch you here?” that I didn’t notice he wasn’t adoring me back. And then one day I did notice. I stepped outside myself and began to observe how we were together; how he was the receiver of my affection, never the initiator. And I said: Enough.

  Why did he marry me if he didn’t love me, you’re wondering? Maybe because his parents were fond of me. Maybe because two of his closest friends had just gotten married and he wasn’t about to be the odd man out. Maybe because I’m a decent person and I have a brain and I’m very pretty in a wholesome, girl-next-door sort of way. Maybe because he sensed early on that I would be the kind of woman who would dote on him, cater to him, let him be the high-maintenance spouse. What he didn’t count on was that, eventually, I would figure out that I deserved better, deserved a man who wanted a wife, not a groupie.

  “Nancy? You there?” I heard Janice asking through the haze of my memories.

  “Oh. Yes,” I said, coming to.

  “So what did you do last night?” she said as we both sat on tiny chairs cutting up pieces of yarn for the day’s art project.

  “Nuked a frozen dinner, watched a little TV, went to sleep,” I said. “My usual high-wire act. Wait. Something moderately interesting did happen last night.” I told Janice about the movie screening and the American Express bill. “It turns out, another woman named Nancy Stern just moved into my building, and I’ve been getting her mail. Which explains the invitation to the party at the U.N. that I mentioned to you yesterday. It was meant for her.”

  “Wow,” Janice remarked. “This other Nancy Stern must be well connected.”

  “Well constructed too,” I said. “You should see the boobs.”

  “You met her?”

  “I saw her. The doorman pointed her out as she was getting into a cab this morning, although she was the one doing the pointing, if you get my drift.”

  “They’re implants, I suppose.”

  “I have no idea, Janice. I didn’t reach out and touch them.”

  “What does she look like, besides the boobs?”

  “Long legs, long blond hair.”

  “God, doesn’t she understand that the Baywatch babe thing is totally been-there? Even the four-year-old girls in our class understand it. They come to school with Mulan on their lunch boxes now instead of Barbie.”

  “Except for Heather Wilcox. She has a Louis Vuitton lunch box.”

  Janice rolled her eyes. It never ceased to amaze us how extravagantly accessorized some of the children were. Alison Spitz’s Prada backpack, for example, cost more than my rent.

  “Anyway,” I said, “the doorman told me the other Nancy Stern is a freelance writer who interviews famous people for magazines. I guess that’s why she’s invited to so many swanky parties. She’s always doing a profile on some celebrity.”

  “She must know everybody,” Janice sighed. “Picture her Rolodex.”

  “Right now I’m picturing my mail going into her mailbox. If I’m getting hers, she must be getting mine, right?”

  “Yeah, but if you think that’s gonna be a pain, wait until the phone calls start coming in.”

  “Phone calls?”

  “Sure. If the other Nancy Stern is such a hotshot, she probably has an unpublished number. Which means that anybody looking for her in the phone book is gonna call you instead.”

  “Swell. A similar thin
g happens to my father. He has a land title company that’s listed in the Yellow Pages under ‘Escrow Services.’ Unfortunately, ‘Escrow Services’ comes right after ‘Escort Services.’ Talk about mix-ups.”

  “I bet,” said Janice. “If I were you, I’d be prepared for some interesting wrong numbers.”

  I was contemplating the sort of wrong numbers I might be in for when the kids began arriving, and Janice and I turned our attention to greeting them and getting them settled in the classroom’s various play areas. Forty-five minutes later, we all took our customary positions on the rug, gathered in a circle, clasped hands, and sang the “Good Morning Song,” which goes like this:

  “Good morning! Good morning! It’s another great day!

  But which day is it?”

  At this juncture, Joshua Eisen, the designated calendar person (we assign the children jobs each week), yelled out: “Thursday!” and we went back to the song.

  “And now we’d like to know who is here!

  So let’s count!

  Ready? Set? Go!”

  On cue, Alexis Shuler, the week’s designated counter, glanced around the circle and counted how many children were present and how many were not. “Thixteen are here!” said Alexis, who had a lisp and was spending after-school time with Small Blessings’s speech therapist. I asked her to take another look around the circle, as several of the children were out sick that day, and explained the concepts of addition and subtraction. She processed the information for a minute, or so I thought, and answered: “Fifty-hundred are here!”

  After the matter of attendance was finally resolved, we moved to Melyssa Deaver, the week’s designated weather person, who picked through the pictures of suns and raindrops and snowy streets that we kept in a basket and correctly chose the one of the snowy streets, which she then affixed to our calendar with Velcro. “Before coming to America, my nanny never even saw snow,” giggled Melyssa, whose nanny was from Jamaica. “My nanny won’t let me eat thnow,” lisped Alexis, the counter. “She thays there’s dog pee in it and I could die if I ate it.”

  Alexis’s remark provoked a spirited discussion among the children about pee as well as doody, subjects they found hilarious, and about dying, a subject they found fascinating, ever since Small Blessings banned peanut butter from the lunch menu after a child with an allergy to nuts had gone into anaphylactic shock. (Each classroom was now equipped with an EpiPen Auto-Injector, as well as a list of each child’s allergies and the name of his or her pediatrician.)

  “Okay, everybody,” I interrupted, after Fischer Levin had announced that he’d heard his mother say she was allergic to his father. “Before we sit down in the circle, we’re going to do our warm-up exercises.”

  I was about to lead the class in our morning round of “Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes” when I heard Fischer bragging that his father, the wizard of Wall Street, was, “in real life,” a pirate who hunted for buried treasure and brought it home to their apartment. James Woolsey, the boy standing next to Fischer, was unimpressed by this latest whopper, and his nonchalance inspired Fischer to sock him in the arm. James, a sweet boy whose twenty-one-year-old au pair had recently become his stepmother, started to howl.

  “I didn’t do anything, Miss Stern,” Fischer maintained, on his feet the instant he saw my eyebrows arch. “I don’t know what he’s crying about.”

  After the usual lecture, I put Fischer in Time-out and got on with the activity.

  Later, while Janice took the class down the hall to Creative Movement, I took the opportunity to speak to Penelope Dibble, Small Blessings’s long-time director, about Fischer.

  Her office, a suite of rooms on the first floor of the two-story building that housed the school, was decorated to resemble an English country house with lots of chintz, precious little antiques, and copper pots overflowing with plants. As for Penelope herself, if I had to describe her in one word, I’d say pearls. She always wore them—a single strand around her pale, scrawny neck. She wore them so often it wouldn’t surprise me if she slept with them. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if she slept with them but didn’t sleep with men. Penelope was in her fifties and had never been married, and I had a suspicion that she had something going with her administrative assistant, a stocky, square-shouldered woman named Deborah who requested that everyone call her Deebo.

  When I arrived at her office, Penelope was in conference with a prospective parent but saw me within a few minutes.

  “Is there a problem, Nancy?” she asked as she motioned for me to sit in one of the two visitors’ chairs opposite her Queen Anne desk. She was thin, small-boned, neat, tidy. Her straight, brown hair was cut crisply, bluntly, just below her ears. Her eyes were a watery hazel, her nose as long and narrow as a finger. And her lips were lipstickless and tight; when she spoke she did so without moving them, and I often thought she’d make a terrific ventriloquist.

  “It’s Fischer Levin again,” I said.

  She nodded. We’d discussed him before.

  “The shame of it is, he’s such a smart, imaginative boy,” I said. “The most precocious, verbally advanced boy in the class, with the exception of Carl Pinder.” Carl Pinder’s parents were out-of-control yuppies who had taught their child to speak five languages before he was three. Unfortunately, Carl was yet to be fully potty trained; I had a hunch he might go postal someday. “But Fischer’s so disruptive that I’m neglecting the other kids. I can’t teach them if I’m always disciplining him, and teaching is what I do.”

  “Of course it’s what you do. Small Blessings is a preschool not a daycare center,” Penelope said contemptuously.

  “I’ve tried to talk to the Levins, to encourage them to attend a parent/teacher conference, but I haven’t had any luck,” I said, remembering that the last time I’d called, they were out of the country, horseback riding in Patagonia. “I have a feeling that if you called them, Penelope, they might—”

  “I?”

  “Yes, since you’re the director. Something tells me Mr. Levin is the type who only responds to people in charge.”

  “He does seem to have a lofty opinion of himself.”

  “If you would invite him and Mrs. Levin to come in and then let Janice and me talk to them about Fischer, it might work, Penelope. We’d explain—tactfully, of course—that if they would take a greater interest in their son’s activities, give a boost to his self-esteem, he might perform better and we wouldn’t have such trouble with him.”

  “You sound as if you’re suggesting we tell them that we’re giving up on Fischer.”

  “Not at all. I think Fischer could thrive at school—if he got a little attention from his parents.”

  She shook her head vehemently. “The boy has been in your classroom for a mere two months, Nancy. It’s far too early to admit defeat.”

  “Defeat? You’re not listening, Penelope. I’m here because I want Fischer to succeed.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s not to know?”

  I regarded her, regarded the lips, the pearls, the strict, unyielding, headmistress-y demeanor. Having to interact with her was not the most rewarding part of my job.

  “All right. I’ll be candid with you,” she said. “The Levins have been very generous to Small Blessings.”

  “How generous?” I said.

  “They’ve offered to donate the new library.”

  “Donate it?”

  “Pay for it. The Levin Reading Room, they’d like us to call it.”

  “Give me a break.”

  “I’m sorry, Nancy. I simply cannot drag those people in here and confront them with the fact that their son is a delinquent.”

  “He’s not a delinquent.”

  “Fine, he’s not a delinquent. The point is, I don’t want you upsetting them or giving them the impression that we don’t know what we’re doing at Small Blessings.”

  “Because you’re afraid they’ll pull their kid and their money out of here and take them to some other prescho
ol?”

  “Let’s just say that it would be a detriment to our school and to the children if the plans for the new library were suddenly scuttled. So there we are.”

  She stood, indicating our meeting was over. Then she came around to my side of the desk, placed her hand on my back, and, ever so gently, pushed me out the door.

  “You’re a wonderful teacher,” she said, smiling now. “If anyone can turn that boy into a little angel, it’s you, Nancy.”

  When I got home from school, I found several intriguing pieces of mail in my box. I brought them upstairs and opened them, only to discover that most of them were for her.

  An invitation to a party celebrating the publication of a new novel. Yet another movie screening. A letter from her agent confirming a future assignment. And—I almost fainted when I took a look at this one—a personal thank-you note from Kevin Costner for the “really neat” piece she’d done on him.

  As if all that wasn’t enough to make my own mail (the electric bill, the cable TV bill, the flyer from the neighborhood supermarket promoting a special on Butterball turkeys) seem hopelessly mundane, the doorman buzzed me at about five-thirty. He announced that someone had sent me flowers and that the delivery was on its way up. Before I could point out that it might be the other Nancy Stern who was expecting flowers, my doorbell rang. I went to answer it and there stood a heavyset man clutching a vase full of long-stemmed red roses.

  “Are you sure those are for me?” I asked him. It wasn’t my birthday. I didn’t have a boyfriend. I hadn’t been named teacher of the year.

  “You Nancy Stern?” he said impatiently.

  “Yes,” I said, “but—”

  “This is 137 East Seventy-first, right?”

  “It is, but there’s another woman in the building who is probably the—”

  “Please, lady. Spare me the speech. I’m double-parked.”

  He thrust the roses into my arms and waited. It took me a second before I realized that what he was waiting for was a tip—for a delivery that wasn’t even mine! I set the vase down on the kitchen counter, retrieved a dollar from my purse, and handed it to him. Without thanking me, he took off.