by Ariella Papa
“Travis, put that fork down,” I heard one mother say. I couldn’t see what was happening, but it was already distracting. I had only eaten half my crepe. I heard the same voice explain “He’s discovering everything.”
“Wait until he starts walking, we can barely keep up with Shelley.”
“Lynn has taken her first few steps. She’s been crawling all over the place. I bet walking will be worse. Is Shawn crawling?”
The women were yelling between tables, completely oblivious to everyone around them. I began cutting bigger pieces of my crepe.
“Shawn hasn’t started crawling,” I heard a nervous voice say.
“You have to give him some more belly time.”
“I try, but everyone’s always picking him up. He’s very vocal, though,” the mother offered, obviously trying to compete with the rest.
I waited for these women to start talking about themselves, but the conversation continued to revolve around the toddlers. Two of the people who had already been in the café when I got there, settled their bills and left.
The waitress finally meandered over to the mommy cult.
“We haven’t even looked at the menu yet,” one of them said.
I wanted to tell her to look now, because she might not see the waitress again for twenty minutes.
The mothers began to discuss the menu. At last, I thought, something else could occupy them. But I was wrong, of course. They all began talking in weird high-pitched voices, asking their kids what they wanted, even though I doubted the kids would know the difference between lemon and sugar, or orange crepes. They continued to list off facts about their kids by pretending to talk to them instead of each other.
“Lynn, would you like to get a baguette with jam or fruit salad? I think you want some fruit salad, I think you do. Yes, I think you do.”
“Travis, do you think you want to eat a Nutella crepe with Mommy?”
“Shawn can’t eat Nutella, can you, honey, because you are allergic to nuts. We’re going to have a nice savory crepe with yummy spinach and cheese.”
“Shelley, you know Mommy can’t eat cheese because she’s still breastfeeding, and dairy makes you gassy.”
I looked to the lone survivor from before the mommy invasion. He was desperately waving for the waitress, who was leaning against the counter sipping a gargantuan cappuccino. I tried to catch his eye, to smile and show him that I knew how horrible it was, but I think he was scared to look my way.
“Oh, he’s spitting up. Honey, are you okay?”
When the waitress finally brought the guy his check, I asked for mine, too. I needed to get out of the crossfire of baby nonsense. I had lost my appetite. It took five excruciating minutes for the waitress to bring it to me. In that time Travis got Nutella all over his hair—but wasn’t it adorable? Shawn continued to spit up, eliciting all kinds of advice from the other mothers. And from what I gathered, Shelley nursed happily at a breast. I sensed the other mothers disapproved of nursing an almost-one-year-old, but I couldn’t tell why. I didn’t know enough about their strange culture.
Back out on 9th Avenue, I glanced in at the tribe. Who were they? I wondered if any one of them could have had a conversation with me about the celebrity couple breakup. Could they have talked about anything but breast milk or allergies or the color of poop?
I am easily amused by observing people. I enjoy embellishing little stories to Jamie to make her laugh. I planned to tell Jamie about the mommy invasion the next time we talked, but then it occurred to me: as soon as the missile hit the target, Jamie was going to be one of those women too.
3
I was impressed that Armando had pulled it together so quickly and got the interviews squared away. But I wasn’t surprised that all five of the people he’d narrowed it down to were women.
The interviews started at one p.m. The first one didn’t show up.
“I hope you have a B-list,” I said to him.
“Che?”
“Forget it.” It was forty-five minutes until the next one got there. Karin, candidate number two, arrived early, and I knew immediately that she was a lesbian—and not someone who dabbled either. This was a wife-beater-shirt-wearing, many-earringed, combat-boot-stomping lesbian. In case there was any doubt, she had two women signs tattooed on her substantial biceps and a rainbow patch sewn onto her baggy jeans pocket. It was a check in my book. Armando wasn’t her type and she wasn’t his. Also, she worked in construction and said she liked overtime. That meant she would be out of the apartment while Armando slept and I wrote.
“I liked her,” I said when she had gone.
“She no look like she sound” was all he said.
I put a star next to her name in my notebook.
The next woman, Kelly, arrived twenty-five minutes late. I wrote that down. When she finally got there, she was a bit wound up and apologized profusely. Apparently her train had gotten stuck. She was a freelance camerawoman. She was kind of hot. She also sported a wife-beater, but was braless and beaming. Her jeans rode extremely low.
“She nice, I think,” Armando said after she had left.
“I don’t think so.”
“Why you no like? Because she no like girls?”
“Listen, I’m just being realistic. She said she works three to four days a week and has slow times. We don’t want someone who might not make the rent.”
“She make lot of money. Dose people in TV, you know, like Raj.”
“She was late for us—that says irresponsible.”
“Was de tren. C’mon, Vu-laaa.”
“Don’t think with your dick, please.”
“No, I jus appreciate.”
“You’ll appreciate us into having this same problem in a month. Besides, I don’t want a roommate who is going to be here as much as I am. I need space.”
The next woman was even better looking. Her name was Jill. She was a buyer for Bloomingdale’s. She traveled a lot and didn’t seem to be fazed by how hot Armando was. I liked that she looked us both in the eye when asking questions about the electric bill.
“Well,” I said to Armando when she had left. I was a little nervous about him going for her, but she seemed like she could handle it.
“She okay.”
“You don’t think she’s pretty.” I didn’t want him to. I was just surprised by how nonplussed he appeared.
“No, the other one better.”
I would never understand men’s taste. Did it all really come down to boobs and exposed skin?
“I think Jill is the front-runner. I totally oppose the one before her. I wish you had picked some men. Did you call all those people back?”
“No, I mus work yesterday.”
“Great, so now they’re going to keep harassing us.”
“Was too many,” he argued.
“Welcome to my world,” I said.
“Eh?”
It wasn’t worth getting into.
Our last prospect was in her late forties. She had recently divorced, and worked as a salon manager. She was nice enough but didn’t make a big impression on me. She had two children in college who were spending the summers in their college towns. They might come down to the city for a weekend or two, but mostly she wanted to travel on her own over the summer. Her schedule worked for me, but I preferred Jill.
“She very old, eh?” Armando asked.
“She’s probably in her forties.”
“Sound different on de phone.”
“I still like Jill best.”
“What about—” He paused and held his hands up to his chest.
He had such a one-track mind. I swatted him.
“You pick ’Arry. I no like ’Arry.”
“You did like Harry, except that he had a penis.”
“Maybe he like me.”
“Surprisingly, Armando, I don’t think he did.”
Armando smiled at me. But I had been a victim of the smile before. He may have found this place, but now it was my home too
. I was not going to let him get his way on this.
“Look, the last one, Delilah, she makes the most, but she’s also got kids, and who knows what kind of debt she might be in from her divorce?” I could tell I was confusing him, which would work to my advantage. “Jill makes almost as much. I think we should get her, and if you agree, I’ll run the credit checks and call the references. What do you think?”
“Managia te” is what I thought he said. He said it a lot. I had no idea what it meant in Italian, but for me it meant yes.
When I called Jill a few days later, after doing all her background checks, she was very excited.
“Hector and I will be able to move in at the end of the month.”
“Great. Wait. Who’s Hector?”
“My cat.”
“Your cat?” I wanted to cry. Ever since the diarrhea dog, we had banned pets.
“He’s great. You won’t know he’s there.”
It didn’t sit well with me that she hadn’t told either of us about the cat. I’m sure that Armando would have mentioned it in an attempt to get his favorite to live with us. I knew that cats could be independent, but they could also rub themselves over your legs seductively while you were trying to concentrate on not procrastinating. One of the Olsen Twins had a cat and cats reminded me of her. I would have done almost anything to avoid going through the whole rigmarole of reference checks for someone else, but I didn’t think it was fair to violate our house rules just because I liked her best.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Armando is allergic to cats.”
“Oh,” she said. “That’s too bad.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Take care.”
I looked at my notebook. Karin had two checks. I called her to see if she was still interested before starting to do reference checks, but by the time she got back to me, she had just signed the lease on a place in Chelsea proper.
“Maybe next time,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, fearing that next time would probably come soon enough.
I left Delilah a message and waited. We’d pulled the ad and I had deleted the messages from other interested parties. I so didn’t want to go through this again. If I could settle it without getting Armando involved, I would be happier, but of course he asked when Jill was going to move in.
“Actually, she has a cat. She can’t move in.”
“She lie,” he said.
“Yes, she lie,” I said in his accent. I have this strange habit of taking the accents of people I talk to. I can’t seem to help it.
“So now, de one I like.”
“I left Kelly a message,” I lied. “And Delilah. We’ll see who gets back to me first.”
What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
Finally, Delilah got back to me. She was still interested. I checked her references, and by the end of the week told her she could move in the first weekend of the month.
“Kelly no call,” Armando said.
“No, Kelly no call.”
“Porca butane,” he cursed, or so I thought.
He would get over it, I was sure, and I would have what I hoped would be an unobtrusive pet-free roommate who would not sleep with him and who would stay for a long, long time.
I relayed the whole saga to Jamie over veggie burgers at Trailer Park, another one of our midway meeting spots. I liked how they had cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, no matter how ubiquitous the beer was becoming in hipster hangouts across the city. Jamie decided against the beer.
“If this woman is recently divorced, the Italian Stallion might be just what she needs.”
I had my suspicions that Jamie had slept with Armando on one of my overnight visits to my mom. It was during my crush phase, but I never asked. I just didn’t want to know.
“Well, I’m hoping for the best.” I gestured to her lemonade. “Any reason for the abstention tonight?”
“No,” she said, looking down. “No dice. I’m on the rag yet again.”
“I’m sorry. ‘Maybe your womb is a rocky place where his seed can find no purchase,’” I said doing my best Nicholas Cage in Raising Arizona.
She was unimpressed.
“You spend too much time with Netflix. I think I’m going to see a doctor.”
“Don’t these things take like a year sometimes?”
“Sometimes, but I don’t know if I can wait that long.”
“You’ve really got the fever, huh?”
“Yeah,” she said, taking a big bite of her burger. “I do.”
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t ask anything else. I just started eating my sweet-potato pie.
“Hey, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you.” She looked nervous.
What now? What more? Was she flying somewhere to adopt a baby because she just couldn’t wait?
“What is it?”
“It’s Dan the Man.”
I rolled my eyes at the sound of his name. “What about him?”
“Well, um, he’s, um, getting married. I’m sorry.”
I rolled my eyes again and shook my head and laughed. Jamie laughed too, but I noticed she was watching me, kind of studying me.
“Does the wife know about me?”
“You mean, that you’re still going out? I don’t think so.”
“Well. Someone should tell her to stay away from my man.”
Jamie laughed and took a sip from my beer. “That’s what I said to Raj.”
Dan the Man was Jamie’s only pseudo-successful setup. He had gone to college with Raj and had come down to visit and meet me. We hit it off, sort of, and he had returned to the city almost every other week for a total of five weekends. We had sex seventeen times, which surpassed anyone else—the other two—I had ever been with by sixteen. Jamie and Raj were really excited about it. I imagined they stayed up nights discussing our wedding. I mean, at first I wasn’t too attracted to Dan the Man. But I wanted to see what it would be like to actually date someone, even if that someone lived in Providence, Rhode Island.
Jamie polled me periodically on my feelings for Dan the Man, and when I questioned where it was going, she encouraged me to keep dating him. I had been all set to ask him to come with me to Jamie’s family’s place in Block Island, when he decided to stop calling, just like that. I left him a couple of messages and e-mailed him, but he never responded. He avoided Raj for a while too. When they finally saw each other at another college friend’s bachelor party, Dan said he wasn’t sure why he had behaved that way and he was sort of embarrassed about it. Raj spread it around to all of their friends, and Dan was ridiculed for being such a coward.
Jamie had been really upset about it and had told Raj that Dan was never welcome in her house again. I laughed it off, and called Dan the Man my boyfriend when his name came up. I said that since we had never officially broken up, we were still together.
“Honestly, Jam, did you really think I would be upset?”
“No, but I didn’t know if you were just making jokes because you were covering up how you felt about him.”
“Tears-of-a-clown style.”
“Exactly.”
“Why? Don’t I deal with my issues head-on?” I smirked. She sort of sighed, and I wondered for a second if maybe there was a tiny bit of her that pitied me. I covered it up myself. “Honestly, Jamie, I think I wanted to like him more than I actually liked him.”
“I know that. I mean, I know you said that, but I knew it wasn’t normal for you to be involved with someone, and when it finally happened, it ended badly, and oh, I don’t know—”
“Trust me, I’m not going to cry any tears for my boyfriend. I think it’s kind of funny that he’s a coward, but believe me, I wish him the best with his new wife.”
“Okay,” she said. “But we don’t have to close the book on this conversation if you want to talk about it again…”
“Really, Jamie, I’m fine.”
She looked back down at her plate and starting eating the rest of her fries.
“Do
you want to split and get some Krispy Kreme?”
“Yeah,” Jamie said. “I have one more thing I want to talk to you about.”
“I can only imagine,” I said, bracing for the worst.
“Do you mind if I go to the wedding?”
“Only if you promise to stand up at the appropriate point in the ceremony and demand he come back to me.”
Jamie giggled and shook her head. I motioned for the check.
No one was home when I got back. I wondered when exactly Harry was moving out and if I would see him before he left. I got ready for bed and thought about Jamie’s expression when she told me about Dan the Man. Did she really think that I cared about him? Was it easier for her to imagine that I had been pining away for someone than to think I never really cared about Dan?
Dan was all right. We didn’t really have the same sense of humor. Like, I would say something sarcastic and he didn’t get that I was being funny, so he’d respond as if I was serious. Then, I would have to explain my joke and he would look puzzled and I would question why it was so important for me to make him laugh anyway.
The thing about Dan was that I had been kind of getting used to him. I’d never slept with anyone so many times, and sleeping with Dan the Man was becoming familiar to me, you know, I was growing accustomed to it. It wasn’t predictable— it was just starting to be less awkward.
But, no, I didn’t care that Dan the Man had found his woman. I was happy for him. Sure, he was a coward, but the world is full of cowards. Maybe Dan had taken the easy way out with me, but it was bound to happen sooner or later.
My history with boys is basically nonexistent. I didn’t date in high school. I wasn’t allowed to. My mother would call to make sure I was at Jamie’s, which was like the only place I was allowed to go. She was so strict it was embarrassing, but by then it was only her and me in the apartment in Astoria. Cristina was gone, my dad was in Cyprus, and Helen had already been kicked out or had run away, depending on how you looked at it. I was only allowed to go to Jamie’s after Jamie’s mother called and assured Mom that I was welcome. Finally, junior year, my mother let me join the drama club because my aunt Effie convinced her that the more extracurricular activities I had, the more chance of a scholarship for college. I loved drama troupe. I was really into set decoration.