Pug Hill - Alison Pace [43]
I pull a Sandra Boynton book from a shelf and bring that, along with the Groovy Girls doll to the cash register. Now that I’m here, I really have no idea if a Groovy Girls doll is age-appropriate for a two-year-old. Maybe it’s too advanced? Maybe two-year-olds are still all wrapped up in Elmo? I grab an Elmo marker set. “This, too,” I say, putting everything all together in a pile on the counter. “Could you wrap them, please?” I hand over my credit card, knowing on some level that if I am ever a grandmother, I might not be the grandmother who visits all the time, I might be more the kind of grandmother who stays down in Florida and compensates for her absence with gifts.
I walk up Lexington to Seventy-fourth Street and into Kara’s beautiful lobby. Kara and Todd’s apartment is pretty fantastic, pretty perfect actually. But of Kara you’d expect that, because she’s one of those people who’s always together and whose clothes are always stylish and always match, but she’s very cool even though she seems so perfect. And maybe she’s a little tightly wound about certain things but you’d have to be, wouldn’t you, to keep everything so perfect?
“Eleven-C please,” I tell the doorman.
“Your name?”
“Hope,” I say, and he buzzes up to what I am pretty sure is the domestic bliss epicenter of the universe.
As I step off of the elevator, Kara’s husband, Todd, is standing in the doorway. In front of him is Chloe. Chloe is red-faced, shaking her tiny clenched fists in the air, dressed only in her diaper.
“Maaaaaaan!” she screams the second she sees me.
“Hi, Chloe,” I say, even though I have this feeling that “Hi, Chloe,” might not be what she wants to hear.
“Maaaaaaan!” she wails again, and again, “Maaaaaaan!”
“No, honey, that’s not the man. Hi, Hope,” Todd says looking over at me, a brief flash of what I think might be desperation in his eyes.
“Hi, Todd,” I say, standing there a bit dumbly between the elevator and the doorway. I wonder if Chloe actually knew it was her birthday last week, and now she misses it?
“Maaaaaaaaaaaan!” Man. I try my best to push the thought from my mind that Chloe is speaking directly to me.
“Uh, sorry,” Todd says, picking up the screeching Chloe and moving aside.
“Man!” she says sharply, defiantly, right at me, as I walk past.
“She wanted rice,” Todd says to me, and I look back at him and say, “Right,” as if all this makes a tremendous amount of sense and I ask, “Is, uh, Kara in the living room?”
“No, kitchen.”
“Right,” I say again and head in the direction of their kitchen. Todd and Chloe, who is still screaming, just nothing so legible as man anymore, follow me.
As the three of us walk into the kitchen, Kara looks up from the banquette where she’s sitting. Kara and Todd have a sitting area in their kitchen, a little banquette right by a window. I love their banquette. If I lived here I think I’d do exactly what Kara is doing right this very second, sit with a magazine and look out the window from my kitchen sitting area; it seems so much more civilized, so much more grown-up than my apartment where everything from magazine reading, to watching television, to meal time, to computer time, takes place in the corner of my couch.
Kara is in a light purple cable-knit sweater, her very thick, very straight dark brown hair is pulled back in a flawless ponytail. I notice how tired she looks. Chloe has gone beyond language at this point to convey her feelings on this whole thing about the man. She’s transitioned into this sort of screeching that I’ve noticed all the babies like to do, the kind that gets so high pitched that it sort of disappears into silence, and then starts again, only louder, and more