Play Dates

by Leslie Carroll

  We paired people up and sent them out to search again. Claire and I headed off in the same direction. “How far could she have gotten?” I wondered aloud. The maze of underground walkways reminded me of some kind of modern-day catacombs.

  “It stinks down here,” Claire said.

  “Well, the circus is in town,” I reminded her. “I’m told it doesn’t smell so bad upstairs, but I don’t believe it.”

  “Christ! The circus! That’s right!” Claire stopped dead in her tracks. “Wait—” I was about to say something but she held up her hand like a traffic cop. “There’s something…I have no idea if I’m right…but it’s just a thought. Zoë—Zoë wrote this essay for Mrs. Hennepin at the beginning of the school year. It was—it was about a favorite memory. And it was about one of the times Scott and I took her to the circus. And she met this elephant named Lizzie.”

  She grabbed my hand and began to drag me down one of the corridors. “It could be a long shot, but follow that smell!”

  The sub-basement was a ghost town. The circus performers wouldn’t be in the building for a few more hours yet. There was no one around, so we really did allow ourselves to be led by the nose.

  “Menagerie,” Claire kept muttering. “Menagerie. Where the hell do they keep the menagerie?”

  The click-click of our heels on the cement floors echoed off the cinder-block walls. It was eerily quiet. We had no more clues. Claire yanked my arm so hard it hurt. She pulled us to a standstill. “Listen,” she said. “Let’s just listen.”

  “What am I—?”

  “Shhhh. Just listen.” She cocked her head. “Hear that?”

  “No.”

  Claire grabbed my wrist and set us both in motion. “I think that was a roar.”

  The animal smell was getting even stronger, so I figured we were now on the right track—or at least the track Claire wanted to be on.

  We rounded a corner. “Tigers!” Claire exclaimed. “Look!”

  Half a dozen of the beasts were pacing restlessly behind a huge metal gate. They didn’t look happy. Outside the cage a guy dozed, slouching on a folding chair, his hat pulled halfway over his eyes. “Excuse me,” I said, waking him. “Have you seen a little girl?” He gave me an uncomprehending look, so I repeated the question a couple more times.

  “I don’t think he speaks English,” Claire said. “But I wonder what he does speak.” We couldn’t guess the man’s nationality. Could have been anything from South American to Mediterranean to Balkan. After exhausting our command of French and Spanish, with no success, we gave up speech and resorted to sign language and wild semaphoring.

  “Fuck! We’re getting nowhere,” I said.

  “Is anyone here?” Claire shouted. “Is anyone here? Has anyone seen a little girl?” She paused to wait for a reply. None came. “Okay, okay, okay, I know she’s down here somewhere,” my sister babbled. “I feel it. I can’t be wrong. I’m a mother. And a mother knows these things. Oh, God,” she added, turning to look at me, “what if—what if she—I don’t know—what if she got eaten or something. Or mauled. Like Roy. Or that guy up in Harlem a while back who kept a pet tiger and lied and said he’d gotten bitten by a pit bull.”

  I tried reason. “I doubt she got eaten by a tiger, Claire. Okay? We just passed their cage and I think if something had happened to Zoë, even though the guy didn’t speak any English, there’d be a whole bunch of people around, and—”

  “Elephants! Remember? Where do you think they keep the elephants? It’s got to be either elephants or clowns. Those are the two things Zoë mentioned in her essay. Oh, wait—I think there was something about dogs, too. A dog act.”

  “I don’t think we’re going to find any clowns down here, Claire. Only the animal trainers seem to be on this level. And there isn’t a performance for hours, so why would the clowns be here anyway?”

  “How would Zoë know that? It wouldn’t stop her from looking for them. Zoë! Zoë! It’s Mommy. It’s Mommy and MiMi. Zoë, baby, are you down here?”

  “I don’t see any dog acts, Claire.”

  “Sh-shhhhh. Hold on a sec. Hear it? She’s crying. At least I hope it’s her.”

  There was a little dogleg of a turn in the maze. It led to a cul-de-sac, where, huddled just outside the steel bars that separated a mommy and baby elephant from human traffic, was Zoë, sobbing and clutching her knees to her chest. There was a rip in her tights at the knee. Beside her sat the remains of her lunch: a half-eaten apple and part of a jelly sandwich.

  “Zoë!” Claire raced over to her. “Oh, my God! Sweetheart, are you okay?” Zoë looked up and threw her arms around her mother’s neck. “It’s all right. Mommy’s here,” Claire soothed. “Mommy’s here. What happened? Did you get hurt? Who hurt you?” Claire was hugging Zoë so tightly, the kid couldn’t even squeeze out a word. “What happened? How’d you get so far away from MiMi?” Now that Zoë seemed unharmed, Claire allowed herself, through hysterical tears, to express her anger as well. “Didn’t MiMi tell you to stay in one place and not to wander off?”

  “I had to pee,” Zoë said, her voice sounding small, forlorn, and slightly guilty. From the expression on her face it looked like she might have done it in her pants by accident. Claire fished in her purse for a tissue and began to wipe away her daughter’s tears. The front of her blouse was now splotched with her own.

  “Why didn’t you tell me that?” I asked Zoë. “That you needed to pee? All you said was that you were bored.”

  “You said you were busy. And you were really busy…”

  “Zoë, I could have taken five minutes to go to the ladies’ room with you.”

  She looked so helpless, even with her mother beside her. “I got lost,” she said finally. “I went to look for a bathroom but everything looks the same and I couldn’t find it and I was trying to get back to the room where you were, but I couldn’t find it, either.”

  “Is that how you ended up here?” Claire said.

  Zoë nodded. “But by accident. Because I wasn’t looking for the animals. I was looking for the bathroom.” She started to cry again. “I found one with a picture of a lady on the door but it was locked.” She buried her face in Claire’s shoulder, embarrassed.

  I looked into the cage behind her. I could swear the elephants looked solicitous. “Where’s the elephant man, as it were?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see anybody,” Zoë said. “But I saw the elephants and I wished I had peanuts to give them, but I didn’t have any. I wanted to feed them, especially the baby because he looked hungry. So I was giving him my apple, but then he touched my hand too much and I got scared. And then when I got scared I jumped away, and when I jumped, the elephant got scared and then the mommy elephant made a big noise, and then the noise made me more scared and I tried to run away but I tripped on the bump in the floor,” she said, pointing to an uneven patch of painted cement. “And I fell down, and my tights broke.” She showed us her skinned knee. “And I hurt myself and then I was lost and I didn’t know how to get back and find you. And I didn’t know if you could find me and I was hungry so I ate some of my sandwich but it smelled like poopy so I couldn’t finish it and I was still hungry…but I couldn’t eat my apple because the baby elephant ate part of it first and I didn’t want it after that.”

  Claire cupped Zoë’s face in her hands. “But you’re okay, sweetie? Apart from the skinned knee, right?”

  “Unh-huh. Except I peed in my pants. But it was an accident,” she whispered.

  “It’s okay,” Claire said gently. “It’s okay. We’ll just throw them in the laundry when we get home. Do you want to stand up now?” Zoë shook her head. “Okay, then we’ll just sit here for a while until you’re ready to go, all right?” She sat beside Zoë on the floor, cradling her in her arms.

  “You’re my favorite person, Mommy,” she whimpered.

  “Really?” Claire burst into tears again. “Because I know I haven’t been around as much as I used to be. And we haven’t had too much s
pecial time together in a long time…I mean to do fun things, not ‘homework time’ or running back and forth to school and to all your activities. And sometimes, when I get upset with you, I feel like I’m being such a meanie that I don’t even want to be around me! And I know you think that all I ever seem to do some days is tell you what you have to do, or what you’re not allowed to do and I have to make you sit down and do your schoolwork when you’d rather be playing. But somebody has to be in charge of things like that, and it’s just me, now. And it’s really hard having to be the boring old mommy, sometimes.”

  Zoë’s tearstained face looked up into Claire’s. “But you’ll always be my mommy. No matter what.” I watched the elephants watching them.

  “That’s right.” Claire hugged her daughter. “And you’ll always be my baby. You can’t ever get rid of me,” she joked.

  “And you’re not so boring. I just don’t like it when you make me do my math homework. And when you get mad at me.”

  “I’ve got news for you, kiddo. I don’t like to get mad at you. Or anyone else. Except maybe Mrs. Hennepin. I’m finally beginning to enjoy that, actually. Although it’s a good thing that we only have a month or so to go until we won’t have to deal with her anymore. But I’ll make a bargain with you.”

  “What?”

  “I know I haven’t been a lot of fun lately. Maybe not even since last summer. You know, Z, it’s been tough for me, too, adjusting to things without Daddy. And having to take care of a lot more stuff than I used to do when he was around. And having to get a job, so I’m not always able to spend the kind of time with you that I’d like to. I know I’m not as fun for you as MiMi. And I haven’t been able to take you for treats and special outings and things like MiMi does. So, if you’ll be a little bit patient with me, I promise you I will try really, really hard to be ‘fun’ again.” She gave Zoë a squeeze. “So, whaddya say?”

  I’d been hanging back, letting them have the space to reunite—without me. For a woman who was bubbling over with apologies to her kid for not having her act together, Claire was the most together mom I’d seen. More than ours, even. Maybe she didn’t realize this, but I did: Claire had not only risen to, but met—squarely in the face—every challenge she’d been faced with since Scott walked out the door last year. I think I’d been kidding myself, too. Thinking I was maybe ready to handle a child for more than a few hours at a time. The time I spend with Zoë makes me sure I want to have a kid…just not yet. I don’t know how to do the things Claire does. She might think she lacks patience, but, compared to me, she’s got it in spades. From where I stand, not just right this minute, but all the time, observing, watching her to see how she does it, Claire’s a total pro at motherhood. In Zoë’s mind, maybe I’m the “fun” one, but I’m a rank dilettante at knowing what to say to a kid and when to say it. How to say it. And maybe it won’t be ’til I have one of my own that I’ll learn.

  Zoë looked at me before answering her mother. From the look on her face, I felt like I’d failed her. Claire had taken a Wash’n Dri out of her purse and was cleansing Zoë’s skinned knee. When she finished, she put a Band-aid over the wound, kissed it, and pronounced the boo-boo all better. Zoë kept her eyes on me. I felt miserable, but I knew this little life lesson had to be learned, as much as it hurt both of us. For all the high heels and the dressing up and the glitter, MiMi isn’t really the Fairy Godmother who will always show up at the darkest hour and make the slight or the scrape go away with a graceful wave of her magic wand.

  “So, what about my promise, Z? Think your tired old mother can learn to have fun again?” Claire stood, then helped Zoë to her feet. Zoë wrapped her arms around Claire’s waist. “I’m taking that as a yes,” she said.

  I looked at my watch. “I should be getting back—”

  “Now I wish we’d left a trail of bread crumbs,” Claire joked. “I wasn’t paying too much attention to what turns we took.”

  “Tell you what, Zoë,” I said. “As soon as we get to the makeup room and I make sure all the faces are done, and you get the chance to wash up, I’ll tell Lucky we’re good to go. So, do you still want to go upstairs to watch the fashion show? Or would you rather go home?”

  She looked at me like I was nuts. “Upstairs!”

  I came over and hugged her. “That’s my girl! Way to go! So let’s all find our way back. While I finish the makeup, your mom can run out and buy a pack of new undies and a fresh pair of tights at the drugstore. There’s got to be a Duane Reade within spitting distance. After you change clothes, I’ll get you both a special escort to take you upstairs to the front row. So you can’t get lost again, all right?”

  I dashed ahead of them, but I could hear Claire’s voice resonating in the narrow corridor. She was telling Zoë, “Let’s call it a do-over. You and me, okay?”

  “Okay,” Zoë agreed.

  “And you know something?” Claire added.

  “What, Mommy?”

  “This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

  Chapter 24

  JUNE

  June is a lot like Christmastime. Everything winds down and heats up at the same time. Zoë is counting the minutes until school ends, and—I have to admit—so am I. The dry-erase board in the kitchen resembles some kind of Command Central. We’ve got Zoë’s year-end ballet recital, her final presentation for kinder karate, and parent day at bikram yoga, where the mommies and daddies are encouraged to sweat out their bad karma alongside their offspring. I’ve been finding a million excuses not to participate, but I’ve run dry of them. So, there goes a perfectly splendid Saturday morning in June.

  Then we’ve got the round of graduation parties. Nina Osborne has already invited the class—and their parents—to a Yankees game. Box seats, naturally.

  I suppose I should heave a huge sigh of relief at the fact that at least we have no double bookings or other end-of-term scheduling conflicts this time around. The prospect of summer camp hovers enticingly before me like the twinkly orb that announces the arrival of Glinda the Good Witch. Although, ironically, just as Zoë and I are beginning to set off on surer footing together and have a whole summer in which to hit our stride, she’ll be going off to camp for a month. But we both need the break. Zoë, particularly, needs to have the opportunity to run around outdoors, to chase butterflies, and to learn to sleep through the night after hearing a ghost story.

  I’m sitting on a bench in Central Park anxiously watching her cavort on the monkey bars. Part of my new promise to be more “fun” was to agree to these playground excursions. The clever minx had proposed a compromise. “You can talk to the mommies about your jewelry,” she said, “while I play.”

  A couple of weeks ago, we started making kid-jewelry, daughter versions of the mommy pieces, but with plastic and glass beads instead of semi-precious gemstones. Actually, Zoë helped design a number of prototypes, which I then whipped up. We’ve got three collections now: the adult jewelry, a Mommy and Me line, and a Completely Kids collection, comprised of the kind of stuff I created for her birthday party goody bags and for her Ariel Halloween costume—the mermaid necklace of blue and green beads and shellacked Goldfish crackers.

  I continue making pieces well into every night, long after Zoë has gone to sleep. She thinks I should peddle my wares in the playground, going from bench to bench with my sample case. I’ve been very hesitant about this approach, but I give it a try today, and net one immediate sale, two special orders, and four nannies who ask for my business card.

  As I wrap up my transactions, Zoë demands my attention. She’s now sitting in the mud, playing with, I believe, earthworms. It rained last night and the ground is still very damp in patches.

  “Mommy, come look!” she says. I join her, juggling my purse as well as the sample case. “No, closer!” I bend over. “No, you have to kneel down.”

  “Zoë, sweetie, this afternoon I came straight from work to pick you up, and I’m dressed all nicely. And there’s no clean place to put
my bags. I can see very well. It’s okay.”

  She sighs, fed up with me, and realizes she’s lost this round. Now she knows how I feel most of the time. She’s using a twig to cut the worms in half. I only hope she learned this in science class and not from Xander Osborne. When she bisects them, the two halves wiggle independently. “See! When you cut a worm’s tushie off, it makes it come alive again!” She’s delighted with her discovery. I hate creepy-crawly things and I feel, somehow, like an accessory to murder.

  “Do you have a jar?” she asks. “I want to take some of them home with me.”

  I finish our bottle of Snapple. “Will this do the trick, Z?”

  She regards it, frowning. “A mayonnaise jar would be better, see, because it’s fatter.”

  “Well, you’re welcome to give it a shot, but my best guess is that you won’t find any of the nannies or mommies out here who happens to have an empty mayonnaise jar in her purse, so we’ll have to make do with this, okay?”

  “Okay,” she sighs, with all the regret of an NIH scientist forced to make do with inferior materials. She rinses the bottle in the water fountain, a freestanding structure that always looks to me like a sandpaper-coated birdbath, then yanks a few leaves off a low branch and stuffs them into the bottle. Satisfied with their feng shui, she then drops three earthworms in after them.

  I look at the inert bodies lying on top of the leaves. “Z? They’re not moving.”

  She studies her new pets for a few moments. “They’re just sleeping,” she says, in a teacher voice. “They haven’t gotten up yet.” Her focus is distracted when something near the edge of the playground catches her eye. She runs over to a landscaped patch of grass and plucks a buttercup. “They need a flower to decorate their room,” she announces, an expert in interior design now. Carefully, lovingly, she washes the yellow petals in the water fountain, then introduces the flower into her makeshift terrarium.