Play Dates

by Leslie Carroll

  Ouch. I dread the day when Jennifer decides it’s time to sit the girl down for the serious sex talk.

  “I really wondered if you were going to pull it off,” Jennifer says, bypassing the eggnog and going directly for the hard stuff, applying to Scott, who is tending bar.

  “I had my doubts, too.” Nina chimes in. She’s a nearly unnatural shade of bronze. It’s the kind of color one acquires through genuine exposure to sunlight at someplace very expensive like St. Tropez or Cabo San Lucas, and then touches up at Completely Bare. “You have a lot of empty space, though, so you can manage the crowd. I’d have my heart in my mouth if it were me. I can’t imagine fifty or sixty people traipsing all over the place, scuffing up my hardwood and soiling my upholstery. But I guess you don’t really have to worry about things getting ruined. How lucky! I don’t see much that anyone could damage.”

  I smile malevolently. “Oh, I’m sure your son will find a way to make his mark. He’s so resourceful.”

  “He gets that from me,” Nina replies with just as much venom. She looks around the living room and peers into the dining gallery where the floor is all set for a picnic, but with paper cloths, pointed hats, loot bags, and colorful, curlicued blowers. “It certainly is quite…retro,” she says.

  “Oh, look!” A mother I have never met, a blonde woman who points to an adorable Asian girl and introduces herself as “Mei-Li’s mom,” is fascinated by one of the party games. “A pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey! I didn’t know they still made those. The last time I saw anything like this was at a house party in the Hamptons where we played a sort of…adult…version. It was called ‘put the you-know-what in the you-know-where.’ Well, that wasn’t the real name, but we are in mixed company. And,” she giggles, “there was no single right answer! Almost everybody went home a winner.” She winks and I feel like I need another shower.

  I thought I knew all of Zoë’s friends’ parents. I’m beginning to wonder, who are these people?

  My daughter seems to be having the time of her life. I’m tremendously relieved, and glad that the party is coming off so well. Her classmates were pretty hard on her when they found out her birthday would be celebrated at home and not somewhere more customary—like Disney World. But the kids themselves do appreciate the simpler things when they’re presented to them, and they’re all having fun. Even Scott is behaving in an exemplary fashion. At the moment, he’s got twenty-five of the pint-sized guests playing duck, duck, goose.

  I notice a serious-looking little child leaning against my father, who is now seated in an armchair reading a book while all around him, chaos reigns. I go over to speak with the boy in an effort to draw him into the game, but he’s not interested. His name is Bram and he’s got an awkward, owlish quality that makes him seem two decades older. I hear him tell my father that he wrote a poem for Zoë for her birthday too, but he would never want to read it out loud. “You could put snakes in my bed and I wouldn’t do it!” he insists. I’m charmed that there’s a little boy who has a crush on her and who apparently feels so deeply that he’s poured his heart out in, I assume, rhyme. Yet, I’ve never met this child before today. He’s here because she had to invite the entire class. For all his seven-year-old angst, Bram evidently isn’t on my daughter’s radar screen. Not like—

  “Zoë!” The girl of the hour has dragged Xander Osborne under the mistletoe and is kissing him fully on the lips. Surprisingly, he’s not objecting; not tossing something in her face, not climbing a tree to get away from her. This does not bode well. But…can I admonish her? Them? I was the one who hung the mistletoe and I know perfectly well what the customs are.

  “You know what?” Mia says, suddenly sailing over. “Mistletoe gets attached to tree branches by bird poop. It’s a parasite, which is as bad as a weed. So, you sure you still want to keep that up?” she adds, referring to the lip lock.

  “No way!” Xander says, jumping backwards. He’s wearing a Jeremy Shockey football Giants jersey. If I recall correctly, this is a player who gets his name in the news through his much-publicized altercations, both verbal and physical, with colleagues and coaches.

  “Way,” says Mia.

  Zoë makes a face. “Yuck!” she exclaims.

  Xander wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. I’m not sure what that has to do with Mia’s need to share a stunning tidbit of scientific knowledge, but I know I’ll never look at mistletoe the same way again.

  “I’m very surprised at his behavior,” Nina says, and for once I concur. “He hates girls these days. He was on a play date recently with Drew Rockefeller and he snapped off the heads of her Barbies. Only the blonde ones, actually.” I rake my hand through my own golden hair, remember Nina’s story about the fate of her former au pair, and look at my dark-haired sister, who has been eavesdropping. Mia exhales, relieved. She’s long over Robert Osborne, anyway. At least she certainly acts like it. This afternoon, she’s been flirting up a storm with Gideon Rathbone, the “veddy British” daddy of Zoë’s ballet classmate, pudgy little rosy-cheeked Chauncey. I’m so busy playing hostess and cruise director that I haven’t had too much of a chance to watch them, so I can’t tell whether he’s suffering her attentions with the utmost politeness, being English, or whether he fancies her.

  Suddenly, there’s a shriek from the living room. Ashley runs over to her mother, who is busy self-medicating near the bar cart. “He pulled my hair!” she yowls, pointing to Xander. Duck, duck, goose has become something of a melee. I think that’s my cue to serve lunch.

  The parents wrangle their respective kids and soon they are sitting on the floor at the designated place settings with a minimum of territorial squirming and fighting over preferred seating assignments. Xander is to Zoë’s right. Ashley is to her left. At the other end of the room, little Bram, who is so far away because I’d never really heard of him, looks forlornly northward toward the guest of honor. Something in me wants to warn the poor bespectacled boy that it never gets any better, no matter how old you are.

  Tulia’s macaroni salad is pronounced “weird” by a few of the kids, but essentially it’s a hit. Apart from Xander acting like a hellion, which I expect he does no matter where or when, the children have really embraced the July-in-Christmas concept and are having a good time. I feel very relieved for Zoë. However, I can sense, as well as see, some of the parents—only the moms, really—wearing their disapproval like a pashmina. I wish I could just walk up to a couple of them and tell them to go screw themselves, but I hate ugly scenes, even though I’ve been caught up in more than a few of them in my lifetime.

  Just before it’s time for cake, my father commands center stage. He tells the guests that this is a tradition in our family and there are a couple of exclamations, like, “Oh, yeah, he did that last year, too.” The kids aren’t as impressed. Poem-shmoem. Some of them probably get a birthday pony.

  My father clears his throat and holds up his hands for silence, a gesture that may be effective among the literary set, but not with this crowd, particularly since they are embarking on a major sugar high. Finally, we get the room quiet enough to hear one’s thoughts above the din, and Brendan begins.

  For My Only Grandchild On Her Seventh Birthday

  Now that you are turning seven,

  And the world has more to offer,

  Treat each yummy bite of heaven

  Like a treasure for your coffer.

  Let each day be an extra present,

  Think of it a brand new toy,

  You’ll find each fresh adventure pleasant

  Brimming with untrammeled joy.

  “Happy birthday, sweetheart,” he says, kissing Zoë on the top of her head. She says thank you and applauds him, which gets the other kids, and then their parents, clapping, too. Later, Zoë will be asking us what some of the words mean, and being a poet’s granddaughter, she’ll regard each definition as a gift. Words, to Zoë, are like Jelly Bellies. You can never have too many.

  Finally, it’s time for cake and watermel
on. There are gasps of delight from more than two dozen jaded second graders when they see the masterpiece that Happy Chef has created. Zoë’s mermaid—like a fishtailed Godiva riding a red-nosed reindeer, is quite a cake. It must have taken Charles several hours to put the whole thing together and decorate it and it’s his gift to us. I turn out the lights, everybody sings, mostly on key, and Zoë closes her eyes for a wish. I find myself tearing up and I clutch my mother’s hand. Zoë extinguishes all seven candles plus one to grow on in a single breath, then opens her eyes and surveys the results. She beams, utterly satisfied, as we cut the cake and enlist the parents to pass out the slices.

  The rest of the afternoon goes by in a blur. Mia’s Twister game results in much giggling, although there are a few smushed fingers and toes. Pin the Tail on the Donkey is received as a tremendous novelty; and I derive great satisfaction out of hearing the overindulged sons and daughters of the privileged, pushy, and powerful beg their mothers and fathers to have the game at their next birthday party. Bewildered little Bram ends up winning that one, garnering a Brooklyn Cyclones baseball autographed by manager Tim Teufel, a former Met who played second base for the World Series Championship team in 1986. I can tell that the other boys—and all the dads in the room, except for mine—are jealous. Secretly I’m pleased that the lovestruck little bookworm got the biggest treat of the day.

  June Miller sidles over to me, a smidge tipsy. “Zoë’s party is delightful,” she whispers, “but—and I’m speaking as a friend—you really shouldn’t award prizes when the kids win a party game. It’s not nice. See?” She points discreetly to a sore loser named Sheraton Sheridan, a little girl who is none-too-discreetly bawling her head off, having just learned the hard lesson that some things in life aren’t fair.

  At least my homespun goody bags are well received. Despite Sheraton’s tearful tantrum, neither she, nor anyone else, is going home empty-handed. The females of all ages pronounce my jewelry designs “fun.” They immediately don their bangles and show off for one another, indulging in the occasional trade. I don’t mind as long as everyone is happy.

  At long last, the madding crowd disperses, my family helps with the cleanup, Zoë falls asleep on the couch, and I would give my last nickel for a foot massage.

  And then there were two.

  “Well, happy birthday, Z.”

  “Thank you, Mommy.” Zoë’s got her head in my lap. I’m stroking her hair, which feels soft as cornsilk.

  “You liked your party?”

  “Uh-huh,” she says, her voice sleepy. “At first I was afraid it wasn’t going to be fun, but it was. It was really fun. I know that Xander was bad, but I still like him.”

  “Obviously.” I expect her to respond, but she doesn’t. “I mean, you kissed him under the mistletoe. You didn’t kiss anyone else under the mistletoe.”

  “I know. He’s the only one I wanted to give a kiss to.”

  “You don’t like Bram? He seems very nice.”

  Zoë scrunches up her face. “Yuck!”

  Poor Bram.

  Chapter 12

  Dear Diary:

  My hand hurts a little bit, but it’s okay because I had a play date with Xander today. His nanny came to meet him and me at school and we went back to his house. His nanny is very nice but she is very funny-looking, too. She has black hair and when she took her coat off she was wearing a short-sleeved shirt so I saw that her arms were really hairy and she has hair over her lips like a chocolate milk mustache and on the sides of her cheeks near her ears. It was hard not to look at her a lot. Xander calls her fuzzy face but her real name is Frida. I told him I thought he was being mean to her.

  Frida gave us sushi for a snack. I think the seaweed is icky so I just ate the rice off of it with my fingers. Then we went to play with Xander’s Legos. He has more Legos than I have ever seen. I said I wanted to build a castle so we made the biggest one we could but then Xander put his little army men on the top of it and they have guns and he said they were going to shoot anybody who tried to come into the castle and if anybody tried to go outside except the king, the army men would shoot them, too.

  Xander was mad at me because he didn’t win Pin the Tail on the Donkey but I told him he couldn’t win because he cheated. He smushed the blindfold up over his eyes and peeked out from it and MiMi caught him cheating so she DISQUALIFIED him. That means she kicked him out because he didn’t play fair. He wanted to win the baseball. But he said if he kept asking his mom, she would buy him a baseball and she would get people who were even more famous to sign it. Xander said his mom says that if you have enough money you can get anything.

  Xander pulled Ashley’s hair during duck, duck, goose and made her cry and Daddy ended the game. And MiMi disqualified Xander from musical chairs, too. He pushed my friend Ben from yoga class off his chair so hard that Ben broke his glasses and got a cut on his face. MiMi was funny. She said it was good that Ben knows how to do yoga so he didn’t break himself. Xander’s mom thought that MiMi was not being fair but MiMi said that it was Xander who didn’t play fair. It was a surprise that Mommy let me have a play date with Xander because Xander’s mom doesn’t like her. But Mommy told me that was exactly the reason that she said I could go over to his house. She was smiling a lot when she said it.

  While we were playing castle Xander’s mom came home with a present for him. She bought him a puppy. I wish I could get a puppy. My daddy said that dog hair made him sneeze so we couldn’t get one. He didn’t like it when we went to visit Granny Tulia and Grandpa Brendan because Ulysses would jump on him and give him doggy kisses. Xander’s puppy doesn’t look anything like Ulysses. It’s brown and sort of ugly. His mom said it was a “rotten” dog. It’s a boy dog and Xander named him Draco.

  Draco was barking a lot. I think it’s because he wasn’t used to Xander’s house. His house looks like a museum with beautiful paintings on the walls. There is a painting of his mom that is as big as she is. She’s wearing a beautiful black dress and she looks like a princess. We were only allowed to play in some of the rooms. Xander’s room is much neater than my room. He said that Frida puts all his things away for him every day. Hilda always wanted me to put my own things away when I was finished playing with them. I didn’t like that but mommy said if I took something out to play with it I should be the person to put it away again when I was finished playing.

  I wanted to play with Draco because a puppy is much more fun than Legos. I wanted to pet him the way I pet Ulysses.

  “It’s always something with you Marsh girls, isn’t it?” This afternoon Mrs. Hennepin is wearing her reading glasses, little rectangles that make her resemble the unfortunate, though mercifully hypothetical, progeny of Ben Franklin and the Peanuts character Sally Brown. We’re in the parent-teacher conference room, which is tastefully decorated for the holidays with a poinsettia plant and a menorah (at least it’s not one of the electric ones), resting on top of a runner made of kente cloth.

  In my corner of the couch I tuck my legs underneath me, reverting to curled-up, childlike body language. I’m about to pull a lock of hair in front of my face when I remember Mrs. Hennepin’s previous comment about my hair-chewing habit. “You talk as if there’s a whole raft of us,” I say. “Actually, eighteen years has passed since I had you, and Mia was never in your class.”

  Like a campaigning politician caught in the glare of the media headlights, Mrs. Hennepin chooses to ignore the facts, preferring to maintain her revisionist version of events. “You and your sister always expected special treatment, which your parents not only encouraged, but championed. And if I make an exception for Zoë, then I have to make exceptions for other students and then exceptions become the rule.”

  “Zoë’s a special kid,” I argue. “And she happens to have a scheduling conflict with the Thackeray pageant and the final dress rehearsal for her ballet class recital. She’s been practicing for weeks.”

  “Then she shouldn’t need to attend the rehearsal,” Mrs. Hennepin counters, using tea
cher logic.

  “If she doesn’t go to the rehearsal, she’s pre-empted from performing in the recital,” I explain. I feel like Sisyphus pushing that huge boulder up the side of the mountain, ready to rejoice when he nears the plateau, only to slip even further backward down the slope, forcing him to begin anew the arduous labor.

  When someone has spent the better part of the past half century in a room full of seven-year-olds, it can’t help but severely limit their ability to speak to adults without the cadences of condescension creeping into their voice. “Claire, in the eyes of the Thackeray faculty—and most assuredly in the eyes of every parent who has a child enrolled here—each one of them is special. Exceptional.”

  “Then if it’s widely accepted that every kid in this school is exceptional, then the exceptions have become the rule, haven’t they?” This is Marsh logic. If my father could see me now! Brendan would be so proud.

  “I didn’t agree to this conference in order to argue semantics with you, Claire.”

  “Too bad,” I mutter.

  “My point is, that if I give Zoë permission to leave the assembly early—after the second-grade presentation—I’ll have to acquiesce to every other parent who wants to color outside the lines.”