Play Dates

by Leslie Carroll

  If Zoë’s stay lasts into next week, I don’t know how I’ll swing it. I’m doing the makeup for the popular, wildly un-PC, reality TV series called Hissy Fit, where Southern belles, Jewish-American princesses, and gays compete to see who can be more demanding—and get away with it. I’ll be at the studio day and night when I’m not following one of the contestants around trying to make them appear as natural as possible. Zoë can’t tag along. And she won’t go home yet. True, we’re both having a blast. She has no bedtime and we make PB & J sandwiches at midnight if the kid is up that late. Claire gags at the smell of peanut butter so they don’t keep it in the house. We go out for pizza—I hate to cook—and ice cream cones. My niece was fascinated by all the tattoo parlors along St. Mark’s Place and asked for one. We picked out a design together, then I went home and painted it on her arm. She tapes a baggie over it when she bathes so it won’t wash away too soon.

  I haven’t talked to Claire since Saturday afternoon. She won’t call me. She could be pissed or she could be totally restructuring her life. Either one is in character for her.

  In a way, I feel bad—a bit guilty—that Zoë isn’t homesick. Yesterday I asked if she wanted to call her mom and she got moody and pouty and said no, adding, “I’m still mad at her.” Stubborn kid. A true Marsh chick. The only time my niece mentioned anything having to do with home was when I took down my old Twister game from the closet and taught her how to play. She loved it and suggested it might be fun to play at her birthday party. I agreed and said I’d bring it.

  This evening we had an appointment with Celestia for a reading; one for Zoë and one for me. We walked along 10th Street, holding hands. It was a scarf-and-mittens kind of night. I hate it when it gets dark so early. It makes me feel like, as the days grow shorter, I’m getting older. Which I am, I know, but the long nights emphasize the obvious and depress me. Maybe because I’ve had no one to share them with for a while—a guy, I mean. I’m doing this backwards. I should find the guy, then get the kid. I’m even surer now—from observing Claire and from six straight days with Zoë—I do not want to do this alone.

  Zoë was wearing one of my floppy velvet hats, which is about ten sizes too big for her. But she told me that she’s supposed to wear a hat when it gets this cold, so we scrounged through my stuff ’til we found one she liked.

  When we got to First Avenue and turned south, she suddenly broke stride and applied the brakes. “This is where my Daddy works,” she announced, as if I didn’t know it.

  Eden’s Garden was pretty empty. Scott’s usually at the restaurant in the evenings to handle whatever Serena wants him to. Most often, he’s at the cash register, which is tucked away in the back, since Serena learned it was bad feng shui to have the money near the front door, where it can spiritually fly out. “Do you want to go in?” I asked Zoë. She nodded. So we did. A rail-thin waitress, probably an NYU drama student, greeted us at the door, asking if she could help us. “Yeah, drink a shake,” I muttered. Her skin was so pale, I would have used up half my box of cosmetics just to make her look alive. “Do you eat here?” I asked her.

  “All the time,” she assured me.

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. She took it as a compliment.

  “Is Scott here?”

  The girl looked a bit stunned, as though this was a strange question. “Yes…he’s here.” She seemed unsure why anyone would come to Eden’s Garden to see him.

  “Tell him his kid is here to say hi,” I said.

  She brightened up. “Oh, I’ll go get him. Hi, there,” she said to Zoë in the kind of singsong voice kids hate. “What’s your name?”

  “Zoë.”

  “That’s very pretty,” the chick said, now out of conversation. “I’ll go get your dad, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I glanced down at Zoë, who was swinging back and forth from my arm. Her face looked anxious.

  The restaurant is pretty small, so it was a minute or less before Scott came out to greet his daughter. “Hey, kiddo! How’s my girl?” Zoë gave him a huge hug.

  “Are you growing a beard?” she asked, tickling the graying stubble on his cheek.

  “Maybe. But only if my best girl likes it. Do you like it?”

  She thought about it. “I don’t know yet. It isn’t a real beard yet.”

  “So, whatcha doing down in this neck of the woods?”

  Zoë giggled. “Woods don’t have necks!”

  Scott pretended to think about it. “You’re right, they don’t. It’s a silly saying. Made up by a grownup. So what are you doing in…Eden’s Garden?” He looked at me. I figured I’d let Zoë say whatever she wanted to. “Hey, Mia.” He gave my cheek a quick peck. “I haven’t seen you in…about two or three weeks!”

  “You’ll see me in another two or three, if you’re not going to fink out on her,” I said, my voice a low threat, my face a smile.

  “We’re…We’re…We’re going to see MiMi’s astrologer,” Zoë told her dad. “It’s for my birthday.”

  “What’s she gonna do? Tell you you’re going to be a year older?” he teased.

  “I don’t know. I will be another year older.”

  “Do you two want something to eat?” he asked, gesturing to an empty table.

  Zoë made a face. “No. I don’t like the food here. It tastes funny.”

  “That’s ’cause it’s good for you.”

  She stuck out her tongue like she’d tasted something foul. “No, it’s not. Roast beef is good for you.” It’s one of her favorite foods. “And cherry vanilla ice cream ’cause it has fruit in it.”

  “Would you like to say hi to Serena?”

  What a jerk.

  “No! I hate her. I want to say hi to you. Will you…will you…” She fought for the words, looking like she was afraid to learn the answer. “Will you come to my birthday party? Pleeaaaaaase.”

  “Of course I will, pumpkin.”

  “And don’t bring her.”

  “Yes, please don’t,” I added. It was worth saying twice.

  “Daddy?”

  “What is it, sweetheart?”

  “I miss you.” She looked back at me, over her shoulder. “And Mommy misses you, too.” I wondered if she would tell him where she’d been for the past few days…and why. “Why did you and Mommy have to get divorced?”

  I was waiting to hear it from his lips, too. Yeah, tell her. Tell your kid you fell in love with someone else—who, by the way, couldn’t hold a candle to my sister if it were hot-glued to her palm—and ran away from home.

  “Was it because I was bad sometimes?” she asked, tears rolling down her cheeks. “And if I’m never bad again, will you come back and live with us?”

  “You weren’t a bad girl, Zo,” he said, using the single-syllable nickname he came up with for her when she was an infant. Claire calls her “Z.” Funny, how they couldn’t agree on a pet name for their only child.

  “And, even when you misbehaved from time to time, I didn’t move away because of that. I promise you.”

  “Then what was it?” she asked, looking at him with the saddest Bambi eyes I’ve ever seen. She was breaking my heart.

  Scott took her hands in his and smoothed them over with his fingers. “It’s a long story, pumpkin.”

  “I have time,” said the wise-assed little pragmatist.

  I watched Scott to see how he’d dance out of this one, thinking how much scorn I felt for a man I once admired, the guy who’d rocked Claire’s world—and “Zo’s.”

  “You know something?” he said, looking into her huge eyes, “I don’t even know how to tell it. And that’s the truth. But can I have some time to think about how to do it? I mean a lot more time than five minutes,” he added, guessing where his own kid would be going. He’s not dumb. In fact he’s brilliant. Frequently clueless, often insensitive, but never dumb.

  “I guess so,” Zoë sighed. “We have to see Celestia anyway. You are going to come to my party, aren’t you?” she said, just to be
sure he remembered. “You. Not her.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it!” he grinned. “Just me. Promise.” He hugged her and bid us both goodbye.

  “He better come. And he better not bring her,” she said as we crossed the street.

  “You can say that again!”

  “He better come. And he better not bring her.”

  I laughed. “That’s just an expression.”

  “What’s an ‘expression’?”

  “It’s like…a…saying.” She gave me a confused look. “An ‘expression’ is a figure of speech.” I’d made it worse. Claire is better at explaining these things. “An ‘expression’ is a silly thing that isn’t meant to be taken totally for real, but it sort of sums up a little part of life. Like when I said ‘you can say that again!,’ what I was saying, but as an ‘expression,’ was ‘you’re so right! I totally agree with you!’”

  She nodded. “Oh. Okay. Like…like…like when you say it’s raining cats and dogs, it isn’t really raining cats and dogs but it’s raining so hard that the raindrops are as big as cats and dogs.”

  “You’re better at this than I am, kid.”

  Celestia lives on the top floor of a walkup on East Eighth Street, on the stretch better known as St. Mark’s Place. With what she charges for a reading she could live on Park Avenue, but Celestia expanded differently. She now owns the building, which is prime real estate, and enjoys her eight-hundred-square-foot roof garden and patio. Try getting a patch of green like that uptown.

  “Hey, there, little fish,” she said, greeting me. I’m a Pisces, so she came up with that name the first time we met.

  “It smells good in here. Like grapefruits and oranges,” Zoë observed.

  “Thank you. It’s called incense. And I’m very glad you like how it smells. I think the smell puts me in a good mood.”

  “Me, too. But I’m tired,” Zoë said, slumping against the wall. She’s not used to climbing five flights of stairs and her legs are a lot shorter than mine.

  “Well, ‘tired,’ can I get you some pink lemonade? I made it fresh. From pink lemons.”

  Zoë laughed. “I want to see the pink lemons!”

  “Nuh-uh. They’re my special secret.”

  “Where do you get them?” nearly-seven-year-old inquiring minds want to know.

  “I grow them right here in my garden. And I’m the only one in New York who has them.”

  “Watch it. Next thing, she’ll be believing you raise brown cows that only give chocolate milk.”

  “They don’t?” Celestia said airily. “Listen, most of life’s fundamentals revolve around people believing what they want to about something. It’s all a romantic equation. Belief equals faith plus an inexact science. Look at marriage. Organized religion. Astrology—which is actually more exact and explainable than the workings of the other two. ‘God is everywhere’ is, you’ll admit, a bit more ephemeral than my saying that Mercury is in retrograde until the twenty-third of the month and—”

  “And my Saturn is in the garage.”

  “Don’t mock me, Mia.”

  “I’m not. Or I wouldn’t be forking over a sizeable percentage of my salary.” I formally introduced her to Zoë and Celestia asked who wanted to go first.

  “You,” Zoë said to me. Celestia brought Zoë her lemonade and explained that what she tells people is a secret, so would she mind waiting in the other room until it’s her turn.

  Zoë was cool with that. She likes secrets. “Can I make a picture?” she asked, seeing an easel set up with a box of colored chalk beside it.

  “Sure, go for it. That’s what it’s here for.” Celestia flipped the pad to a clean sheet. “This is to wipe your hands when you’re through,” she said, pointing to a Mason jar of water and a roll of paper towels. My niece made herself right at home. When one of Celestia’s cats slinked by and brushed her leg, Zoë exclaimed, “Oooh, can I play with him?” She reached down to pet the pewter gray longhair.

  “It’s a ‘she,’ and yes, you can play with her. She’s very friendly for a cat. Her name’s Diana.”

  “Like the princess?” Zoë asked Celestia.

  The astrologer shook her head. “Like the goddess. Diana was a moon goddess and the goddess of the hunt. She likes mice,” Celestia whispered.

  Zoë jumped back like she’d received an electric shock. “No! I’m scared of mice.” Her lip began to tremble.

  “Don’t worry,” Celestia soothed. “There aren’t any mice indoors. And she never goes hunting when I have houseguests.”

  My niece brightened. She didn’t look totally convinced, but, as Celestia might say, she wanted to believe that was the truth. I went into Celestia’s reading room. The walls are deep lapis blue. Her furniture—huge silk pillows and overstuffed couches—are upholstered in shades of blue and indigo. You feel like you’re sitting in first class on an astral plane.

  “Your chart indicates some big changes coming up for you,” she said, going over the printout she’d made in advance. “In the next few months, Jupiter will be moving into your tenth house, the house of social identity and career. Now that you’re aware of that, you can harness his wattage to really take some strides. Your aspects for creating business partnerships are sensational.”

  We spoke some more about what that meant. Maybe Miamore Makeup might become more than a pipe dream. Celestia said I should be alert for opportunities that would be placed directly in my path and that I shouldn’t pre-judge things because I might miss out. The universe helps those who help themselves, she reminded me. “However…this is not an auspicious time for romance,” she added.

  “For this I needed to pay you over two hundred bucks?”

  Celestia laughed. “Well, you’ll want to know that your outlook is much brighter come spring. And again, as with the career breaks, don’t make immediate assumptions about men, for better or for worse.”

  “Oh, I think I can make some assumptions. Like my best friend Charles is not going to suddenly switch teams.” He wouldn’t be my type even if he did, but I wanted to make my point.

  Celestia rolled her eyes skyward. “You know what I mean. Now, later next year you’re going to have some powerful planets conjoining in both the career and romance sectors of your chart, which hasn’t happened for you in a while.”

  “Try ever.”

  “So be prepared for the unexpected.”

  “How the fuck do I do that?” It sounded like a total oxymoron.

  “You’ll know it when it happens.” She smiled.

  “So if something never happens to me, and then suddenly it does happen, that’ll probably be ‘it,’ huh?”

  “Something like that.”

  I was giving her shit because it’s fun, but actually, she was very helpful. If something’s coming—whether it’s a bouquet of two dozen long-stems or a Mack truck at sixty miles per hour—I like to know about it beforehand.

  I left Celestia’s inner sanctum and she called in Zoë. The kid took the “secrets” part of her session very seriously and refused to tell me what Celestia had said to her. She showed me the chalk drawing she had made while I was inside, though. It was a picture of her giving her mom a kiss.

  “I think I want to go home now,” she said.

  I brought her back to my place, we packed up her stuff, then called Claire. Zoë had added an inscription (“I love you Mommy”) to her picture. We rolled it up and secured it with a rubber band. She clutched it tightly during the entire bus ride uptown.

  “I see a penis!”

  “What?” I turned to see what she was talking about. So did all the other passengers on the number 15 bus.

  She pointed out the window. “Look! A penis!”

  “Shhh!” I craned my neck and realized she was talking about one of the towers atop Tudor City, an apartment complex with faux-Elizabethan architecture, located across from the United Nations. I had to laugh. The towers do look a bit like circumcised granite. I scoped out the other riders. A couple of them were blushing. I gues
s they saw what I did. What Zoë did.

  “Just out of curiosity, where have you seen a penis?” At least she’d used an acceptable word, as opposed to one of the seven George Carlin joked that you couldn’t say on TV. It could have been a lot worse.

  “I saw Daddy and Mommy naked when we went camping once. We had to take a bath in the lake because there was nowhere else to do it. And I saw Xander.”

  “You—you what? This wasn’t when you asked him to elope, was it?”

  She cocked her head and looked at me like I’m a goofball. “Noooo.” She leaned over to whisper in my ear. “He took a peepee in the sandbox at recess.”

  Great. I hope he doesn’t feel the urge to take a leak in one of Claire’s planters during Zoë’s party.

  At 79th Street we boarded the crosstown; and after disembarking on the West Side, Zoë started to do her “we’re-almost-there” skip in front of the natural history museum. The elevator man greeted her as though she were Elizabeth the First returning from one of her Progresses. I had a lump in my throat and mixed feelings. A kid’s perspective on life is a great ass-kicker when you’ve become a little jaded or so busy being an adult that you’ve forgotten what it’s all about in the long run. I’d really miss having her around, and at the same time I was glad to bring her home to Claire. Maybe even a bit relieved. I could go back to my life, child-free. Some of what I felt was guilt. That I could have what Claire could not. But maybe she wouldn’t have switched with me for the world.

  Claire had scarcely opened the door when Zoë threw herself into her mom’s arms. They held each other for a while, as I watched, a third wheel on a bicycle, Zoë’s chalk sketch crushed between them. “You know what?” I said to Claire, “I think the kid missed you.”

  Zoë lit up like a bonfire. “You can say that again!”

  Dear Diary:

  I had the best time with MiMi. It’s like having a Mommy and a big sister at the same time. She didn’t yell at me even one time, even when I spilled chocolate milk on a scarf of hers that is old and made of silk. I was using it for dress-up to play a lady from Spain with a big comb in my hair and a piece of lace. The scarf is shaped like a triangle and it’s black and it has fringes on the edges and flowers sewn onto it. She said it was called a piano shawl but I never saw a piano that was wearing one. Why does a piano need a shawl?