Pug Hill - Alison Pace [42]
“Sure, what do you want to know?”
“I want to know what I do? I want to search.”
I start from the beginning, explain opening up the Internet browser, keying in www.google.com, and typing what you want to find out about into the blank space. “Okay, okay,” Dad says softly, methodically as he goes, signaling the completion of each step.
“And now I just type communes?”
“Communes?” I say and hold my breath. I wait for my mother, surely listening with supersonic hearing downstairs to pick up her phone, and admonish, “Hope, I told you not to talk about the commune!”
“Yes, I want to do a search on communes, on why people join them,” Dad explains, and I know it might say terrible things about me, might reveal the fact that somewhere along the way, I lost any sisterly instinct, but I worry so much less about Darcy than I do about how everything she does, all the drama, affects my parents, takes up so much space in their lives.
“Right,” I say, taking a breath, “you could type just communes, or communes people joining. Play around with it for a while until you find what you’re looking for,” I explain. “But, Dad?”
“Yes, dear?” he says and I think his voice sounds tired, and in all the time I’ve been speaking to my dad on the phone—how long has it been since I left home, fourteen years?—I’ve never heard him sound so tired.
“I don’t think Darcy’s really going to join a commune. I wouldn’t just say that, either; I really believe it. We know Darcy;
she’s not the type—she just likes saying it, she just likes causing a stir. I think it’ll all be okay.”
“Yes,” he says, and I listen to him exhale, feel how hard it must be for him when he’s always been the type of dad to fix everything, and he can’t fix this. “But I guess I just want to learn a little more.”
“I understand,” I say, “and, look, we’ve got a whole week together coming up, that’s really great.”
“Yes, yes, I’m looking forward to it,” he tells me, but he sounds so far away. We say things next about love and good-bye and seeing each other soon, and by the time I put down the phone, object of endless anxiety that it always is, it’s been one of those mornings that has been so long. It makes me nervous about the rest of the day.
chapter fourteen
Man!
A few hours later, I find myself at Mary Arnold Toys on Lexington Avenue and Seventy-third Street, buying a Groovy Girls doll for Kara’s daughter, Chloe. I did not, as it turns out, quite make it to Chloe’s second birthday party yesterday. I had all the best intentions. No, really, I did. It was just that the closer the party got, I just couldn’t bear the thought of being the only single woman at a baby birthday party. I have done this before, and it is far from fun. Have you ever been the only single woman at a baby birthday? The best thing I can liken it to is to being a two-headed monster with a terminal disease. Really. I’m pretty sure I’m not imagining it. People see you there, childless, alone, and look at you first as if you are a very strange specimen indeed and then, pretty much, they feel very sorry for you. The closer I got to the party, the more I envisioned the secret conversations, so very “Lorlelai-on-The-Gilmore-Girls-before-it-all-worked-out-with-Luke” in theme I imagined them to be:
“Kara’s friend, the one who works in a museum, she’s still single?”
“I think it’s more like, she’s single again.”
“Poor girl.”
“I know. It’s sad.”
“It really is.”
Luckily, Kara is the type of friend—perfect, as I may have mentioned—who once I called to say I couldn’t make it, did not counter with guilt, did not counter with telling me how much Chloe was looking forward to seeing me, even though it’s entirely possible that Chloe has no idea who I am. She simply said she understood. By way of further explanation, I told her via phone and not in person as I’d planned, that Evan and I were no more, and she’d said she understood that, too, and then she said, just like me, and oh my God, just like my mother, that she thought it was for the best.
Then, as soon as I was off the hook in terms of the