By the time we return to the Go Native! tour office, it would have taken the entire General Council of the U.N. Assembly to reestablish détente.
Monsieur Fouché—the same name as Napoleon’s infamous Minister of Police, oh, this does not bode well—marches himself into the tiny room and immediately launches into an emotional tirade. He is the group’s organizer, and on behalf of his countrymen he demands a full refund. My boss asks for my side of the story and I explain that it began as a linguistic misunderstanding that quickly got out of hand, degenerating into childish name-calling, which I admit was less than professional on my part, but (putting aside my earlier remarks as hyperbole), I doubted that the unfortunate skirmish of words heralded the end of official diplomatic relations between our two nations. My boss rolls his eyes at me and without another word, proceeds to quiescently refund the Parisians’ money. This seems to satisfy Monsieur Fouché, leading me to wonder whether his group tries this everywhere they go, provoking their guides into fits of pique, then insisting on reparations.
They depart the Go Native! office for their next tour: the Statue of Liberty, where I suppose they will congratulate themselves on their country’s generosity to this city of non-smoking ingrates. If they could, they would probably rewrite the final line of Emma Lazarus’s ode to immigration so it snidely reads, “I lift my lamp beside your golden arches.”
“I’m sorry about what happened this afternoon,” I tell my boss. I am genuinely contrite. “At least I’m willing to admit my mistakes,” I add, with a nervous half laugh. I cross my fingers behind my back the way I used to when I was a little girl.
My boss motions to the chair opposite his desk, a gunmetal gray monstrosity that might have looked modern during the dawn of the Cold War. “Have a seat, Claire.” I do. This doesn’t feel good. “Claire, you’re a very intelligent woman.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“And when you’re on the ball, you’re really on it. You’re bright, articulate, personable…in essence, everything we look for at Go Native!”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But…we have some judgment issues to discuss. I know you have a young child at home or in school, but you can’t just up and leave a tour to fetch her.”
“That was an extenuating circumstance. I got a call from the school nurse. My daughter was ill and I had to take her home. I don’t have child care anymore, now that I’m divorced—” This is far more information than this man needs to know. So I bite my tongue and leave it at that.
“Once, I can understand. And, although we placed a reprimand in your file, had nothing else occurred, I could overlook it. But you abandoned an entire marching band in the middle of the Roosevelt Island tramway, Claire!”
“Almost, but not quite,” I admit sheepishly.
“Another ‘extenuating circumstance,’ I suppose.”
“Well…yes, actually…and the chaperones said they were fine with my needing to leave. The tour was running over schedule, and I had to pick up my daughter at four P.M. on the other end of town.”
“Not everyone was ‘fine,’ Claire. And even if they had been, this is your job and your responsibility is to finish what you start. I have a business to run and much of my success depends on good word of mouth. Now, I’m aware that this is your first job. And I don’t think you take the concept of employment very seriously.”
I assure him that I do and that this job is very important to me and that I can’t afford to lose it. What can I do to atone for my transgressions?
My boss shakes his head. “I’m afraid that today was the third strike. I can’t have you insulting our clients, no matter how obnoxiously they may behave. You’ve got to be the grown-up and pretend to be deaf, or turn the other cheek.”
I’m being told to act either retarded or Christ-like. And I feel like I’m seven years old. I will not cry. I will not cry. I will not cry. And I wish I didn’t always have to be the grown-up. It’s exhausting.
He opens a file drawer and removes a large check ledger. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to let you go.”
“But…but…but…” I sound like Zoë. “But Christmas is just around the corner. I won’t be able to buy my daughter presents.” I may sound like the beleaguered Bob Cratchit, but it’s true. “And her birthday is coming up. It’s on Christmas Eve, and I haven’t shopped for that yet, either.”
“You know I’m not a hardass,” my boss says. “But I can’t do it, Claire. I run a competitive business and three complaints about a single employee within just a couple of months’ time…?” He leans back in his chair and folds his hands across his ample belly. I notice a gravy stain on the front of his navy double-knit shirt. “If you were in my position, what would you do?”
“Four strikes?” I ask meekly, hoping for a smile, at least.
He shakes his head and writes a check. “This is for this week’s pay plus two weeks’ severance. I can’t give you another chance; I’m no patsy. But I’m no Grinch either. I hope this will help you pick up a couple of things for your kid.” He hands me the check and feels the ridiculous need to shake my hand and wish me luck.
The world of the suddenly unemployed would like to welcome Claire Marsh to its ranks.
Zoë and Mia, who has a set of keys to my apartment, are already there when I arrive home. Zoë is in full dance regalia, wearing one of her ballet class outfits, complete with pink slippers and floral headdress. She’s prancing around the room to Peter and the Wolf, humming along with the music. Midpirouette, she stops to glance at me and her little face pales.
“Are you sick, Mommy?” She runs over to give me a hug.
I can’t decide whether to talk to Mia and our parents before sharing my bad news with Zoë, or to not bottle it in and let her and my sister hear it all right now. But I don’t want to burst Zoë’s happy bubble. There’s something about a state of innocence, almost like a state of grace, that’s as beautiful and fragile as a Fabergé egg. “How was the ballet? Did you enjoy it?”
“Uh-huh!” She launches into a play-by-play, dancing around the living room to recapture some of the scenes. Watching her, I begin to wonder if The Nutcracker might have been performed just as effectively to Prokofiev.
“Hey, Mom, can I watch a video?”
“Sure.”
Zoë removes a package from a shopping bag and hands it to me. “MiMi bought it for me, for an extra early Christmas present. It’s the video of The Nutcracker.”
“Well, that was mighty generous of MiMi.” I smile at Mia. “Did you thank her properly?” My daughter nods, then gives her aunt a huge hug. “I like their dancing in ‘The Waltz of the Flowers’ better than what we’re doing in Miss Gloo’s class. But I know it’s only because we’re just kids and we don’t know so many steps yet.” She hands me the box to open for her and I get her set up in front of the TV in the den with a glass of juice and a few cookies. Then I lead Mia into the kitchen, where it always seems that life’s most meaningful conversations—from family conferences to drunken party confessions—take place.
Mia removes an opened bottle of Chardonnay from my refrigerator and pours a goblet for each of us. “What’s up, kid? You look like shit.”
There’s no easy way to do this. “I just got fired.”
“You what?” As Mia’s hand flies to her mouth I encourage her to use it for volume control. “What happened? I thought they loved you at Go Native!”
“Three strikes,” I say glumly. “Two involving needing to leave a tour to pick up Zoë.”
“And the second one was my fault, wasn’t it? Oh, shit, Clairey. I should have just stuffed it and gone to get her from that birthday party. This is at least one-third my fault. Fuck.” She buries her head in her hands. At this moment, I don’t know which of us feels worse. I come over and put my arms around her and when she hugs back, we both start to cry.
“I don’t know what to do,” I sob. “I thought I had something perfect. I really did enjoy being a guide. How often do you get ‘fun w
ith fairly flexible’ when it comes to jobs? How often do you get even one of those things? I’ve got a check that will barely cover us for a few weeks…in a slow month. But this couldn’t have come at a worse time of year. How do I tell Zoë I need to cancel Christmas? And her birthday?”
Still holding me, Mia reaches for my wineglass. “Here. You’ll think better.” At least she cadges a laugh out of me. “First of all, we’re not canceling Zoë’s party. You’ve already gotten the favors, the paper goods, and the decorations. We—me and Mommy and Daddy and Charles—have planned all along to help out with the food.”
“Presents. I haven’t even shopped for her yet. And what about the rest of you?”
Mia swats my head in a playful love tap. “You don’t think we love you just ’cause you give us stuff, you nut job? We’ve all got everything we need, and some of us have more than we can handle or deserve. You owe me squat. I bailed on you and got you up shit’s creek with your job. I’m going to Sibling Hell for this.”
I chuckle. “Oh, that might have been the final straw, but your transgressions are far worse than that. You’re going to Sibling Hell for giving all my dolls haircuts while I was at Amy Reisman’s for a sleepover.”
“I made them look stylish. And that was almost twenty years ago!”
“You think there’s a statute of limitations on Sibling Hell? And you promised me that their hair would grow back! I had to use all my saved-up allowance to go to the doll hospital on Lexington Avenue and get a wig for Baby Dear. And if you hadn’t given her a mullet, my Ginny would have been a collector’s item by now.”
“No way. She was not in mint condition. You’d spilled ink on her arm.”
“That was so not me,” I insist, regressing further. “That was you. You were trying to give her a tattoo.” Mia blushes, a clear acknowledgment of guilt. “And then there was the time that you thought my birthday poem from Daddy was better than your poem, so you stole mine out of my scrapbook, and scribbled your own name on it.”
“I did that?” she asks, evidently not recalling such a seminal incident from our childhood.
I nod. “You said the older sister should get the better poems. You turned it into a form of literary primogeniture.”
“I don’t remember that at all. What happened to the poem?”
I grin. “I stole it back, brought it to Daddy, and he typed up a replacement for me.”
She tops off our wine and changes the subject. “What was the third strike with Go Native! by the way?”
“I nearly destroyed diplomatic relations between us and the French.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t blame yourself. That’s been going on for centuries. Didn’t Mark Twain say something bitchy about them around a hundred and fifty years ago?”
“Not in front of a busload of them.” I look down into my wine and begin to cry again.
“You’ll be fine, kid,” she says, stroking my hair. “You’ll get through this. You’ve braved worse.”
“Nice platitudes, Mia, but this isn’t a goddamn after-school special. I’m totally broke and now I need to look for a new job at the worst time of year. I can’t ask Go Native! for a reference—I got fired for cause—and that’s the sum total of my work experience. I probably can’t even go to a rival tour company because I’ll still have to finesse my way around how I left my last job, and all they’d need to do is call my boss and the whole truth will come out.”
I polish off my wine and Mia empties the bottle into our glasses. “I hate the way my life is impacting Zoë. You know some of her classmates’ mothers have called me to ‘make sure’ I’m really having the birthday party here, because it’s so out of their realm of comprehension. I can hear the disapproval in their voices, hear them mentally tallying up what I’m most likely spending on Zoë’s party and the kind of party it is versus what they all do these days—you know, renting Shea Stadium or taking forty kids and their mothers to a Broadway matinee. It’s that horrible ‘store-bought versus home-made’ snobbery. It’s between their words. In their silences. I feel it, like a damp, cold chill. At best, they think poor Zoë’s mom is doing something ‘quaint.’ They make me feel church-mousy. And if that’s the way a bunch of grown women are acting, imagine how their kids are treating Zoë. Seven-year-olds have a remarkable capacity for cruelty. She was really into the July-in-December theme until a couple of the girls teased her about having a party at home, which they think is for little kids who are too young to appreciate the finer points of the planetarium. When I picked her up at ballet class this week, she was in tears because her supposed friends Chauncey and Bathsheba Marie had been calling her a baby.”
“Kids have always been cruel,” Mia commiserates. “Particularly the Thackeray crowd. You and I didn’t escape unscathed, you know. What about our clothes?”
Eek. We wore Tulia’s custom one-offs, which would now be considered funky and trendy. To have a mom that was a fashion designer? Now it might be the height of super-coolness, but back then, we were just considered weird. I guess we were, sort of. We were Mommy’s pint-sized guinea pigs—and she didn’t design children’s garments, so there we were, tricked out in ultra-sophisticated, offbeat clothes. Jump back several years and imagine Roberto Cavalli couture, worn by a couple of preteens. Come to think of it, that’s how they dress these days!
I take a deep breath. “I’m going in to speak with Zoë before I lose my nerve. Don’t go anywhere yet. I may need you for moral support.”
My daughter is still in the den, mesmerized by the same ballet she saw just a couple of hours ago. The sound is up so loud, the orchestra might as well be sitting in the living room. I grab the remote and mute the volume, then kick off my shoes and curl up beside her on the sofa, putting my arm around her shoulder.
“Hey! Mom! I was watching that!”
“I’d like to talk to you for a few minutes.”
“Can we do it later?” she whines.
“No, young lady, we can’t. As long as I pay the maintenance, I make the rules around here.” She wrenches away from me and pulls her knees into her chest, showing baggy little elephant wrinkles in her white tights, just around the ankles. I reach out for her again, but she shrugs away. She’s probably a bit over-tired.
“Well, it looks like I’ll be spending more time around here from now on.” Zoë’s face lights up and she launches herself into my arms, but when I tell her the reason and what it’s going to mean in the belt-tightening department, she doesn’t take it as well as I’d hoped. In fact she bawls as though a dam had burst behind her eyelids.
“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents!” she laments and a smile flits across my lips for barely an instant. In a few years, when she reads Little Women, she’ll know the reason.
“I didn’t say there weren’t going to be any presents, Z,” I reply, searching for words of mollification. “We’ll have a few really special ones, instead of—”
She vaults from the couch with the same intensity she’d used only a minute ago to hug me, nearly landing on her tush as she skids in her stocking feet across the slippery hardwood floors. “It’s not fair!” she wails as she heads for the kitchen. “What are you trying to do to me?”
This is a phrase she heard me say all too often to her father when our marriage was in tatters, specifically after he’d confessed that he had fallen in love with someone else. She has mimicked perfectly the same moaning tone, with the emphasis and rising inflection on the word do. “Zoë…” I say, trailing her. She’s not listening. “Zoë, honey, I’m not trying to do anything to you. Believe me, I’m not doing anything on purpose. I’m not trying to hurt you or punish you. Zoë, look at me. Look at me.” She refuses. I try again, my frustration increasing. “Z, look at me. We’ll get through this together. There will be Christmas. I promise.”
My daughter can go from adorable and docile to full-fledged temper tantrum faster than a Ferrari can reach its maximum mph. In this case she’d already been working up a head of steam. “I don�
�t want to live here anymore!” she sobs, throwing her arms around Mia’s waist. “I want to live with MiMi!”
Stricken, and feeling as though I’ve just been stabbed in the heart, thinking it would be better just to die quickly rather than know I’ll live forever with the pain, I look at my sister. We converse above Zoë’s head, through intense eye contact and by reading each other’s lips. “I can solve this,” I insist.
“Take a day or so of quiet time,” Mia says. “You need it.”
We spar for a couple of minutes. Mia thinks she’s helping. My head is spinning. Zoë continues to cling to her aunt, tossing in the occasional insult at me, who is, in her eyes, always taking things away from her, or a compliment, for Mia, who always gives her things, takes her great places, does “fun stuff,” and gives her treats “just because.”
And so…a half hour later, I am watching my only child and sole proprietor of my heart, Baa tucked under her arm, march out the door with her savior: my older sister. I wait until the yellow knapsack and wobbly Powerpuff Girls suitcase disappear into the elevator, listen as the car descends, then return to my empty apartment, locking the door and sliding to the floor, too blinded by tears to move.
I don’t know how long I stay there, my back against the door, hugging my knees to my chest, Zoë-style. It doesn’t matter.
Chapter 10
It’s been a great few days. I love having a kid around. It’s so cool to see the world through Zoë’s eyes. Though I don’t know how Claire does it. I’ve been working at Bendel’s helping to launch Lucky Sixpence’s makeup line, taking my lunch break later in the day so I can pick up Zoë from school. If she’s got an after-school activity, she heads over there with another kid and its nanny and then goes home with them until I can get her. It’s a quick cab ride from the store, but it’s a bit of a haul from the Upper West Side, where all of her activities are, to the Lower East, where I live. There are times when I think I spend half the day in transit.
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