Pug Hill - Alison Pace [55]
chapter seventeen
Under No Circumstances Are You to Mention the Tent
The phone is ringing.
As I may have mentioned, I am not quite the fan of the ringing phone. I am even less of a fan of the ringing phone when it rings and wakes me up on a Saturday morning. I open one eye, look over at the clock: nine-fifteen again, exactly. Definitely there is the possibility of being depressed, even though, strangely for much of Friday I felt buoyant at work. Perhaps all the relaxation exercises that I may have prematurely counted as useless, have somehow, secretly, seeped into to my psyche.
The phone keeps ringing. It could be Pamela calling to see if I minded that she left me alone at the bar at ’Cesca last night, on one of my first nights out on the town as a newly single woman. Actually, I kind of did mind that she left me there, left with the guy dressed all in black, the guy who I thought, with the black shirt and the black pants and the black belt and the black shoes, reminded me so much of the old Mike Myers skit on Saturday Night Live, “Sprockets.”
“Now is the time on Sprockets ven ve dahnce!” is what I’d said to Pamela when she said she thought he was looking our way. She hadn’t laughed. Instead, she’d gone to talk to him on her own, and they had left together a short while later. She had waved coquettishly to me on her way out, and I’d wished that being single didn’t mean you had to have single girls’ nights out with friends like Pamela.
Rather than pick up the phone to hear Pamela tell me that being single can be fantastic if only I’d embrace it and not call potential suitors Sprockets, I let the machine pick up. I picture Pamela and the Sprocket, hear Mike Myers saying, “Do you want to touch my monkey? Touch him!” in my mind. I always prefer to screen, right now is no exception.
I listen as my machine clicks over to record mode, and then, through the speaker, “Hope, it’s you mother. Are you there?”
I stare at the phone, right there. I weigh my options. I sink down deeper into my pillow.
“Okay,” she continues. “I’m just calling to tell you, under no circumstances are you to mention the tent to your father. Your father is very upset about the tent, and I really don’t want it discussed,” she says sternly, and then brighter, much more full of cheer, “Talk to you soon, look forward to seeing you.”
I have no idea, no idea at all, what she is talking about with the tent. I assume it is, as so many things are, Darcy-related. I sit up in bed.
“Hello! Hello! Hello!” I say a few times, to no one, to be sure there is no sleeping sound in my voice. I want to know what this is about: the tent. As I turn to grab the phone, begin dialing my parents’ number, I think it’s a good thing that I’m such a dog person—the way curiosity always kills cats and all. Mom doesn’t answer, Dad does.
“Hi, Hopey,” he says, “What’s up?”
“Oh nothing, just calling to say hi,” I say. We exchange pleasantries, work is good, arrangements for the party are good, everyone’s looking forward to the party, and then, just as I am about to switch gears, to ask to talk to Mom, Dad says, “While I have you on the phone, do you know anything about L.L. Bean donating money to pro-life causes?”
“Uh, no, I don’t.” I don’t ask why. I may have arrived at my ripe age of thirty-one (or thirty-two depending on whom you ask) with the feeling that I have not learned as much as I should have along the way, but I have learned enough to know that if Mom just called and said not to talk about a tent, then a sentence that includes L.L. Bean could very well lead to a conversation I was just told to not have.
“Well, see ...” I listen to Dad exhale, get ready to explain something. “C.P. doesn’t want to sleep in the house when they come for the party, he wants to sleep outside in a tent.”
Oh, I think, no.
“A tent?”
“Yes, and I was going to buy them a tent to sleep in.”
“You’re buying them a tent?”
“Yes, but Darcy says C.P.