Parallel Play

by Thomas Rayfiel

  “Alison?”

  “What's your daughter's name again?”

  “Ann.”

  “How are you, Ann?”

  Fine! I was tempted to pipe back, like a bad ventriloquist.

  “We were just getting supplies for our garden.”

  “You have a garden? I thought you lived in an apartment.”

  “It's going to be an inside garden, isn't it, Dominic? With flowers made of tissue paper. And maybe even a lake. With fishies.”

  She stopped to come around and adjust his hat, keeping her legs together, bending them sideways. She tickled him under the chin and talked baby talk to him. She had gone back to being the first Alison we had met, that day at the Parallel Play Group, but even more proper and fake. It was an act, a way over-the-top Upper East Side mom act, much crazier than when I'd seen her being crazy. The woman who had dragged me out to Snoopy's, with whom I'd listened to that overheard conversation, was nowhere to be seen.

  “We have to go,” she said. “Don't we? We need our rest.”

  “I thought maybe we could get a cup of coffee and let the kids play again. I had this really weird experience I wanted to tell you about, with a phone call, just like the time we—”

  “Ugh. I hate how unsanitary it is at Osbourne's. Do you think they ever wash those toys?”

  “Probably not.”

  She got back up and smoothed her coat. She was smiling, this glazed, reflecting smile, not showing anything.

  “Wait.” I didn't want her to go but couldn't think of anything to make her stay. I said the first thought that came into my head. “What's the name of that woman? The one you were dumping Dominic with before?”

  “I never dumped Dominic anywhere.”

  “You said she was older and she took care of kids.”

  She pretended not to remember.

  “That time we met at the Laundromat and came back to my place. The time we—”

  “Oh. You mean Frances. That was an emergency.” She looked both ways, as if we were under surveillance. “I'm not sure I could really recommend her.”

  “She doesn't wash her toys?”

  “Her house is just a little seedy. You know what I mean? And she takes in so many children. They don't get much individualized attention, which is very important at this age, don't you think?”

  I could see myself in her glasses. I liked my haircut. I really wanted to talk to her, even if she was acting nutty. She made me happy. She was this potential antidote to loneliness. But when I tried to express even a little of that, it came out in my usual free-form chatter, which didn't help.

  “This is so weird, because I lied. Last night I told Harvey I had run into you, when I hadn't. But now I have, so that kind of makes it all right. Although,” I went on, more to myself, “I said you were from the playground, which still isn't true. Yet. Maybe we could sit there now, if you don't like Osbourne's. We could brush the snow off the benches and—”

  “We have to go,” she said brightly. “It was nice seeing you.”

  “What's Frances's address?”

  She made this big show of not remembering. She even tapped her head.

  “Let me see. Fifth Street off Sixth Avenue? Near the corner? I'm not sure.”

  “Is everything OK? You seem kind of nervous.”

  “Everything's great.” She was either smiling or baring her teeth at me. “But we have to fly now. We're on a very tight schedule. Dominic, say goodbye.”

  “Goodbye, Dominic.”

  I watched them leave. I told Harvey I had seen her when I hadn't. But now I had. The future was just as jumbled up as the past. Lying was the key. Lying to myself and to others. Maybe lies weren't as bad as everyone said. Maybe they were really tapping into some Universal Vision where you saw what was going to happen before it did. Because how important was the order in which things occurred?

  I felt the ground giving way under my feet.

  “Mommy's tired,” I explained to Ann, still staring after them. “Mommy needs a little break.”

  • • •

  You could see babies through the ground-floor window. Hundreds of them, I imagined, from the outside, peering while I waited for someone to answer the buzzer. But when I got in, it was more like ten or twelve, some sleeping in strollers, others crawling around. A few bigger kids were camped out in front of a TV. More than the Department of Child Services would have allowed, I figured, but then again she was only charging eight dollars an hour. Frances was an energetic woman with white hair. She seemed totally unfazed by the chaos going on all around her. Her mother sat in the corner. She made it sound like the old lady helped, but I didn't see how. She was so shrunken she seemed more like one of the kids. Then I saw she had an infant in her lap.

  “And this is my daughter,” she completed introducing me to the staff, as a grumpy, middle-aged woman came out of the kitchen and stomped past us with a bottle.

  It wasn't at all what I imagined a day-care center or a preschool would be like. It was just a house, a floor-through apartment, with about seven times as many kids as it was designed to hold. But there was something very friendly and warm about it.

  “How long have you been doing this?”

  “Oh, years,” she said vaguely. “I always took in babies. A lot of women around here did, once their own left. It used to just be part of things.”

  Two of them began to cry.

  “I'll be right back.”

  She waded in and picked them both up.

  “What's the matter with you two?” she squawked, looking from one to the other. “Are you fighting again?”

  All right, this is definitely the gateway to being officially designated a Bad Mother, I thought. Then I looked around and asked, Are all the women who left their kids here bad mothers? And what about Frances and her mother and her daughter? Three generations. Are they all bad mothers too? It seemed like it was just a concept used to keep you in line, like Original Sin. No matter how hard you tried, how could you not be bad? After all, if you hadn't been “bad” you wouldn't be a mother to begin with. We were all of us just trying to get through the day.

  I lifted Ann out of the Snugli and put her on the floor. She crawled over to investigate colored rings stacked on a soft rounded spike, and started gnawing away at the plastic. She seemed happy enough. Still …

  “I don't know,” I said dubiously. “I just have to do something for a few hours.”

  “Go,” she said. “She'll be fine. All young mothers need some time.”

  “Should I say goodbye?”

  “It's better if you don't.”

  I walked out and got as far as the steps leading up to the sidewalk when a scream came through the window. I turned and looked inside again, but it was someone else's kid, wailing incon-solably while the daughter tried to give it a bottle. Ann was just where I'd left her, playing. Then I realized that eventually she would cry, in the natural course of things, and I better not be standing here when she did. Besides, I was paying for this time. I couldn't afford to waste it.

  Now, what did I truly want?

  “To be alone,” I answered aloud. “To be home, by myself, alone.”

  I went up the rest of the steps, walked home as fast as I could, and shut the door. I turned each lock, picturing the metal bolts sliding across, barring the entrance. I fixed the chain to its holder. If I'd had a chair that propped under the knob, I might have done that too.

  Now what? I prompted.

  Before, I never had free time. Not like this. Not with such pressure to make the most of it. I got out the journal, flipped past the pages I had scratched up or sketched on, and very neatly wrote:

  Dear

  Dear who?

  I decided to leave that blank. I could fill in whom the letter was going to later, after I saw what it said.

  Dear,

  I stared at the pencil. This made no sense. How could I write a letter when I didn't know whom it was addressed to? An overwhelming exhaustion came over me. I went to b
ed, cried a little, and slept.

  I dreamed I was back at the Colony. I was my mother now, taking care of me. Nothing happened in the dream. It wasn't a story. We were both in each other's arms. It was winter outside. I held her to me and watched the ice form on the inside of the window. It detached itself in chunks that I could slide around. But I pressed too hard and things broke, the glass or the ice, I couldn't tell which. Cold air rushed in. There was a pink tinge to everything. I had ruined the laundry again, mixed colors and whites. My hand was bleeding but I felt no pain. Oh, of course, I reasoned, it numbs you, the cold. But when spring comes, then you're going to feel it. I looked around on the floor for the broken piece, to plug the hole, and Mark bent over first to get it. He was so good at finding things. “But what are you doing here?” I asked. “Harvey's in Florida,” he said, which was news to me. And then I thought, Yes, of course, he's in Florida, and for some reason that made everything all right, gave me a freedom I didn't have before. I pulled my dress down over me, because I had been naked this whole time, and admired myself in the mirror. My reflection was almost ready. It would just take a little more time. It was one of those slow mirrors, but the reflection it did show, when it finally came, would be better than a regular one. Deeper. I waited patiently. And opened my eyes.

  It was dark. Dark in the bedroom. My body jerked to sitting, sweating and disoriented. I didn't know where I was and, worse, didn't want to know, was afraid of finding out. I had drifted far from myself. One thought came to me: Ann. Where was Ann? And then, Oh my God, what time is it? followed by the whole trailing interconnected rest of them, fitting together and weighing me down. I reached for the clock. I had slept on one of my arms, turning it into dead weight, and had to heave it forward with my torso. It flopped on the night table, cold and ineffective, a flipper. Blood burned as it entered the pinched-off veins. I squinted at the hands, trying to make sense of their position: 1:05. They were on top of each other, that's what had confused me: 1:05 in the morning? I looked to the window and saw the shade was down, that it was day, not night. One in the afternoon. I had only been asleep for an hour.

  I got up, rubbing my eyes. The tailor's dummy was still in the corner. Bits of my dream, shiny flecks, twinkled just beyond my ability to understand. I was the me of several years ago, waking up alone, not caring what time of day it was because nobody knew about me, nobody was waiting. I did what I always did then, hauled out my sewing machine. There was something reassuring about how heavy it was. It was an old-fashioned monster, packed with steel, so much more of a load than its small size made you think. I set it up and plugged it in. I couldn't remember when I'd last used it. There hadn't been some grand ceremony when I put it away, retiring it. It had been so unconscious, the change in my life. So unthinking. I never said, I'm giving up work for motherhood. How could I? I didn't know what those words meant. I found the fabric from the store. When I'd gotten back, the day of our anniversary, Harvey was already waiting for me, ready to whisk me off to our surprise dinner. I'd been so flustered I jammed the material I'd stolen high on the closet shelf, under some extra sheets. Now I unfolded it on the floor and took a look for the first time at what I'd taken.

  I was disappointed. It wasn't for making clothes. It was a very gauzy, almost weblike rayon, fraying at the edges. You could see it coming apart. On the other hand, it was beautiful, in a showy knock-your-eyes-out way, iridescent green with raised black polka dots that were furry, part of an endless butterfly wing. I had no idea what it was intended for. Not everyday use, that was certain. It was too delicate. For decoration, then. But decoration of what? The light caught it and shifted its spectrum.

  I'd taken a lot more than I thought. It kept unfolding until it covered the floor, three yards at least. Enough for a dress. Not a dress you could wear, but …

  I got out my tools: my ruler, pins, and fabric shears. This wasn't how you did it. You were supposed to have a pattern. And I did, but not one I knew. The pattern would come after the fact, I decided, getting down on my hands and knees. I didn't have much time, either. I was aware, every second she was away, that I had left Ann. The anxiety that she might be missing me sharpened my senses, gave my movements an urgency, as if this was somehow a way of getting back to her. One wrong cut, I reminded myself, and it's ruined. But I had made hundreds of dresses. On some obscure intuitive level, I knew what I was doing.

  I was still copying, just not from a source. It was the same process as when I used to have a photo and my own sketches to refer to, with cutout pieces of tissue paper or, when it was really complicated and I didn't want to screw up, a mock-up first in white muslin. You had to see it as panels, then go from flat to round. That was the hardest thing to do in your mind. And you had to hold it all together, what didn't exist yet, willing it to be, because as soon as you stopped, it stopped too. It froze and ceased, not having any momentum of its own. So I had to keep going, the dots swimming before my eyes, the green shimmering to blue, to yellow. Something was guiding my hand, I couldn't imagine what. Some long-repressed memory fighting its way to the surface. I had done this before. That was the overwhelming sense I had. I was making the ultimate copy. But from what original?

  The phone was ringing. I let it go. Harvey's voice came on and gave me a number to call him back at.

  The material was maddening to work with. I could see it was going to be impossible to sew together. This whole thing was a dumb idea, doomed to failure. But I couldn't stop. I crawled and cut and crawled some more. How long had it been since I tasted pins? They slid in my mouth. I felt again the bizarre fear I always had of swallowing one. Each piece I draped carefully on the dummy, trying not to damage the fabric, fitting them together, noting with pleasure how the sections met—overlapped a bit, yes, but that was good. Room for error. Wiggle room.

  When they were all pinned, I stood back and saw that, while it wasn't some fabulous creation, it was a dress. Or the beginning of one. Of course it was a miracle that with no pattern and measurements, with a length of stolen fabric and an hour's feverish concentration, I had made even that.

  I circled it, checking to see that all the raw pieces hung together. It was floor-length, not fancy though, not a ballroom gown. More like a pioneer dress, but without the puffy sleeves. Where had I seen it before? It was simple. I liked its simplicity, although the fabric, being wild and not for use, gave the whole thing a strange science-fiction quality. And then I saw, not in some power-packed tidal wave of recall that unlocked everything all at once but quietly, with surprise and regret, that this wasn't anything new at all; it was the first dress I had ever worn and the only dress I had worn for many years, what all the girls and women during my childhood wore. It was a Colony dress, the uniform of my youth. My mother had made ours with a needle and thread, by the light of a kerosene lamp, in heavy cotton: navy or black, white for special occasions. No ornamentation, no ostentation, permitted.

  I went up and fingered the sheer gauze, half expecting its powdery colors to come off on my hand. A line had definitely been crossed, though into what I couldn't say.

  Chapter Eight

  …which still doesn't explain how I found myself listening to Martin Cooper's sex confessions through the half-open door of his hotel bathroom.

  “He called it a monk's room. I was disappointed he did not come up with cell, a monk's cell, but plowed on with the obvious rejoinder of his crediting me with more restraint than I possessed.”

  “Are you all right in there?”

  Steam was pouring out. He must have had the shower on pure HOT.

  “It all fell on deaf ears, buried perhaps too deep in the baroque intricacies of his curls. There I go lying again. In fact, his hair was long and straight, with a little flip at the end like a ski jump.”

  “You know, I could come back later.”

  “We met at a bar called Tooled Leather, which I found amusing but he did not, before proceeding to what they have the temerity to call a McDonald's restaurant, where our prejudices were
reversed. We then returned here and, after a brief financial negotiation, waited for me to travel the few remaining inches that lay between us. Alas, the evening—I cannot be more specific—had succeeded in paralyzing the one normally aggressive bone in my body.”

  “I really don't want to hear about—”

  “Being impotent is like reaching for and not finding your wallet. There follows a wild-eyed eternity of self-recrimination and painful acceptance—my passport, credit cards, the picture of Mother—all of which takes ten minutes. The night was still young, even if I, apparently, was not. Even if my manhood was counterfeiting an overboiled length of tagliatelle.”

  “That's it. I'm out of here. There's something I want to leave you with, though.”

  The water stopped.

  “Then I did a very foolish thing indeed. I dialed room service for a bottle of your famous Kentucky bourbon whiskey, which explains the lamentable state you find me in this morning.”

  He came out wearing a terry-cloth robe, the kind with a belt knotted at the side. Maybe it was because he had just used the word, but a monk was exactly what it made him look like, short and plump. Pink-faced.

  “Sit.”

  The room was bare. I saw what his visitor from last night meant. All the pictures had been taken down and turned to the wall. There was only one chair, and it was piled high with dirty laundry. I sat on the edge of the bed, clutching the plastic bag to my chest. He scooped up the clothes, went over to the corner, let them fall, then came back and sat across from me, putting his feet on the mattress. They made a dip my body slid down into.

  “Where is your child?”

  “With a lady in the neighborhood who takes care of kids. Did you still have to pay him?” I wanted to show I'd been listening. “The guy you said you couldn't … you know.”