Class - Cecily Von Ziegesar [58]
A small white TV that hadn’t been there before showed the preparations for the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Huge balloons hung in the air over the trees of Central Park. Clifford the Big Red Dog. Babar the Elephant. The Pink Panther. Goofy. Nick’s family had always pooh-poohed the parade. It was too commercial, too crowded, too bridge-and-tunnel—not genuinely New York.
Dee Dee spun around and grabbed a piece of toast off her plate. She was five years old, but small enough to pass for three. “I can’t wait, I can’t wait, I can’t wait!” she sang.
“Well, hurry up then,” Morty said. “Get your coat on.” He turned to Nick. “We’re going to the parade. You coming?”
In the movie version of this Nick and Morty would bond over losing Dee Dee in the parade and then finding her again. Or Morty would choke on a parade-side pretzel and Nick would give him the Heimlich maneuver, indebting Morty to him for life. Nick would ask Morty to leave his mother alone, and in an effort to win him over Morty would get Nick tickets to Paul Simon’s sold-out concert, or courtside seats at a Knicks game. Eventually Nick would embrace him as the father he never had. But this wasn’t a movie.
“Mom, are you going?” Nick asked.
“I’m staying here to cook,” his mother said. “But you should go. I could use the peace and quiet.”
Nick bit his lip. “I think I’d rather just grab a bagel and walk around for a while. I’ll give you a hand when I get back.”
He walked around the corner to H&H on Broadway and bought a still-warm poppy seed bagel and a cup of black coffee. Avoiding the mayhem of the parade near Central Park, he headed over to Riverside Park and down to the Boat Basin, wondering for the millionth time what it would be like to sleep on a houseboat docked in Manhattan. Probably not the same as sleeping in a yurt in the woods in Maine. He’d wanted to tell his mom all about the yurt. He’d even brought pictures.
That’s my babe, he’d imagined her saying. You’re the coolest.
He didn’t even know why he’d built the yurt anymore. He didn’t like camping out. It hurt his back, it was cold, and there were noises—bats and raccoons and hunter’s gunshots before dawn. There wasn’t enough light to study by, there was no heat or toilet or running water. It was unpleasant.
Come to think of it, maybe he shouldn’t have gone to Dexter at all. He could’ve gone to NYU or Columbia or even City College. That way he could’ve lived at home and kept his bed and prevented his mother from sharing hers with Morty.
He thought about calling his friends from Berkshire. Dewey and Bassett both lived in New York, and they were both big potheads. Dewey had gone to UC San Diego and Bassett was at UNH. Seeing them could go two ways: he’d either get majorly bummed out about how much things had changed, or they’d cheer him up. But his mood was far too gloomy for that even to be possible.
“Don’t say anything about the election,” his mother warned him when he got back. Morty and Dee Dee were still at the parade. She handed him a colander full of potatoes and a peeler. “Morty’s a Republican.”
“Jesus.” Nick sat down and hacked at one of the potatoes. He sneezed violently. “Is there anything good about him?”
His mother looked up from the plate of tofu she was marinating. “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that.”
Nick’s shoulders sagged. He picked up another potato and sneezed again.
“It would help if you could be nice. Morty might well be Dee Dee’s father.”
Nick put down the potato. “Jesus,” he said again. He’d always known he and Dee Dee had different dads. Dee Dee knew it too. “I’m a free spirit,” his mom would say with an easy laugh. It occurred to him now why she’d been so keen on his going to boarding school. She’d said it was because boarding schools had better sports, but Nick had never been very athletic. The truth was she’d wanted him out of