Hooked (23 page)

“I’ll sell it for you!” she exclaimed. “Believe it or not, I sell a ton of stuff in here.” She pointed to the hats with colorful nubs and the baby sweaters hanging from the rafters on hangers attached to fishing wire. “I know it seems like no one’s ever in here, but some days I make more money from the clothes than the yarn.” She held the top up to the window, seesawing it back and forth in the air. “I’ll sell it for you. Not for five hundred, though. Three hundred feels like the right price point to start. Two ninety-five.”

“Whatever you think,” I said. “It’s a much more compelling prospect than trying to lose twenty pounds.”

“You just had a baby,” she said, looking me up and down. “You look great.”

“Thank you,” I said, running my hand along the pudge hanging over my jeans, the pudge that wouldn’t budge. “I’ll just say thank you.”

“You know,” she said, arranging the bikini top on the shelf and folding the ties over, “self-loathing is the evil curse of the twenties. I see that now that I’m thirty.”

“You’d really be willing to hang it up?”

“Definitely. Like I said, I love it. I’ll put my money where my mouth is. And how about I get ten percent if it sells?”

“At least that, you designed it, after all,” I said. “Thank you.”

“No, thank
you
,” she said with exaggerated politeness.

She helped me pick more colors—a bright teal, a gorgeous spectrum of oranges and reds and a purple and green that went strangely well together—exactly the colors I’d imagined in my head, only better.

“I can see how you’d get obsessed with yarn,” I said. “Some of them are so beautiful, and they’re so different, how they’re made, how they hold dye. Even if you make something in one color, there’s so much to look at with the variations.”

“It can get addictive,” Carmen agreed. “I have women who come in here and buy tons of yarn, you know, for later projects, but then they don’t do anything with it. They just have to own it.”

Ian started to squirm around in the sack, so I undid the clips and pulled him out.

“So how’s it going?” Carmen asked. “Do you like being a mother?”

“My dad once told me the best way to answer a question you didn’t know how to answer was to compliment the question,” I said. “Interesting question.”

“You’re right, what was I thinking, asking that?” She pushed Ian’s sock, which was close to falling off, over his ankle. “Can I hold him?”

“Sure.” She took him, gripping his bum. “God, what an angel,” she said. “Such a yum. He’s got the perfect-shaped little
baby face. Like a Gerber baby. I’ll bet everyone says that, right?” She brushed her cheek against his head. “How’s your boyfriend?”

“Not so good,” I admitted. I rolled my eyes and she made a sad face. I’m not crying in front of her, I told myself. I’m not. It was important that she thought I was tough and could handle things. “Anyway, thank you again,” I said pointedly. “Thanks for offering to sell it for me.”

“Fingers crossed,” she said.

The weekend rolled around and Dad pushed me to go out. “You deserve a break,” he said. “I’ll watch the kid.” So I called Donna to hang out. Donna went to Barnard. She was more of a quasi-friend—she was really closer to Vanessa—but I called her because I couldn’t think of anyone else who was still in the city other than Will.

I got Ian ready for bed, praying he wouldn’t poo since I didn’t think Dad could handle it. I pumped milk with the machine Mom had given me for the first time, the repetitive sucking noises sending me into a trance. “Ya homesick, ya homesick,” it chanted over and over. Ian was fed and cleaned up and when I left, he and Dad were lying on the floor under Ian’s mobile, jingling the terry-cloth hearts.

“We won’t wait up for you,” Dad said.

Donna lived in a ground-floor apartment on 104th and Amsterdam. A girl wearing magenta tights and motorcycle
boots that fit her calves like gloves answered the door. Her hair was impossibly thick and messy—some of it had to be extensions—and she had on a plaid miniskirt with some sort of rainbow sweatshirt material squeezed around her midriff, clashing flawlessly with the skirt.

Before she could say anything, a guy yelled to her from inside.

“Cloudia!” he said, then something about a
“bacio.”

Cloudia, whom I guessed was Claudia to mere Americans, couldn’t be bothered with introductions. I thought, This girl knows how to dress in a way I never will. I took comfort in the knowledge that I could recognize, understand and accept that fact as I watched her backside swing toward an emaciated guy in leather pants.

Donna was on the phone in the kitchen. It was weird to see her living here, actually inhabiting Manhattan. When we were in high school, she was a tourist, with her black leggings–black sneakers combo and her iPod wires always hanging off her, helping her bide her endless hours on the R train from Queens. But ah, how things had changed.

“Oh, please,” she repeated into the phone. “Oh, please.” Her eyes crinkled with a self-confidence I’d always found off-putting. I imagined it came from growing up with the kind of family who were very clear and straightforward about how they loved her. A lot of kids from Forest Hills had that.

Eventually she hung up.

“How are you?” She reached out from halfway across the room for a hug.

“I’m good, really good,” I said, my enthusiasm nowhere near hers.

“Come,” she said, grabbing a tray with a bottle of wine
and some glasses. “Ginny’s in my room.” Ginny was Donna’s best friend from high school.

“Ginny’s here?”

“She just transferred to Barnard in the beginning of January. You didn’t know?”

“No, I didn’t,” I said.

“Claudia, come have some wine,” Donna called to the living room, where Claudia was playfully straddling Emaciato.

“Your roommate?” I whispered, though it was obvious. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Ginny was sitting on the radiator in Donna’s room, hunched over in an attempt to blow smoke out the window.

“Hey, Thea, how’s mothahood?”

“Hey, Ginny,” I said. Ginny’s big, stiff, blue-black Queens shag remained intact in spite of the wind blowing in. I looked at her and felt the instant affection I’d always felt toward her. Why weren’t we better friends? If we’d spotted each other on the street now, we would have just waved and stayed talking on our cell phones.

“Donna, I am not living in this dump, I will tell you right now,” Ginny said, laughing her husky laugh. “You’ve got termites or something, I’m telling you. You see this dust?” She pointed a magenta pinky nail toward the windowsill.

“I’m trying to get Ginny to move in with me,” Donna explained. Claudia slinked in, poured two glasses of wine and left without a word.

“My mothah won’t have it,” Ginny said. “Not when she sees this.” It was an interesting comment, given that Ginny’s mother worked in the garment industry and barely noticed Ginny was alive—at least, that was what Donna used to say. Donna’s family was Ginny’s surrogate family. That was the lore.

We went to a Columbia fraternity party. Part of me wondered if I’d see Will there, but I knew there was very little chance of him showing up at a party like this. It wasn’t exclusive enough for him. They played music from the eighties and there were guys in big plaid shirts with the sleeves cut off and greased-back hair, jumping and fist-popping like I remember people doing at Mom’s club. It reminded me of Mom sticking shoulder pads into her black silk blazer and going to work.

I ended up getting rip-roaring drunk, sitting bored at a cafeteria table where Donna and Ginny glommed onto some guys from Long Island. Later on I found this guy Florian and made out with him in the stairwell while people trudged by us, their rainy shoes stepping on our coats.

For a while it was nice to kiss someone new, to erase Will from my lips. Florian had a rich, spicy smell that I attributed to his being Greek, and he wanted me to come back to his room, pulling my face toward his in a wonderful need-you, need-sex way. But I played coy. The truth was, I thought of Ian and that little spot under his chin I loved to kiss, his God-spot, and what if Florian was an ax murderer and killed me while we were doing it, leaving Ian motherless. Donna and the cheesy guys ended up going to a club in the West Twenties. I bullied the cab driver into letting five of us ride, thinking I might go too, but I ended up bagging and was home by one, and even that felt too late.

“How was the night?” Dad came out of the kitchen with a plate of cheese. He’d been at work all day, working on a deal, which he rarely did on Sundays anymore. “How’s your friend Donna?”

“Okay.” I eyed the cheese and thought of Mom with a plate of Brie resting on her chest, how she’d dig at it and keep it lying around on her bed all night. Dad always precut his cheese and put a predetermined, matching number of crackers—in this case, six—on his plate. Then he would sit down purposefully to eat, as though it were an eating “session.”

“How’s she liking Barnard?” He swiveled in his chair. The only thing Dad knew about Donna was that she went to Barnard.

“She didn’t say,” I answered, relishing the first few moments of an Ian-free room. He’d finally gone to sleep after a never-ending stream of hungover hours I’d spent feeding, changing and entertaining him and trying not to call Will. As much as I wanted to talk to him, I didn’t know where he was with the adoption thing—how much he was going to push it—and I was afraid to find out.

“What did you guys do?” he asked, a chipper lilt in his voice. I didn’t know why he thought seeing Donna would make me feel good about things.

“Not much, Dad, we just went out. Hung out.” I picked up a
New Yorker
and leafed through it, trying to find the movie reviews. “The whole college thing makes people very smug, doesn’t it?” I asked. “Is everybody just so damned happy with themselves? Their schools? Their jobs?”

“What do you mean, smug?” Dad asked, watching me carefully.

“Just, you know, just very, very pleased with their little lives. Donna’s doing some integrative studies thing. She thinks this somehow makes her very, very special. Her prof this, her prof that. She’s reading St. Augustine. So what?”

“Is she enjoying it?” Dad asked, inserting a stack gingerly in his mouth.

“Yes, she’s enjoying it,” I said. What an asshole, I thought.

“Sometimes smugness, if I understand what you’re getting at, is just another way of dealing with anxiety.”

“Huh?” It occurred to me that I’d never complained about my friends to him. I’d preferred to let him think we were sophisticates; any dirty laundry was too cool to be leaked to outsiders.

“Most people have a lot of anxiety, Thea,” he said. “Even when things are going well.”

“What does that have to do with it?” I asked. “I’m just saying she’s being annoying. Her GPA and how it’s the highest in her seminar, blah blah.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want it to end,” he said, sweeping crumbs to one side of his plate.

“Doesn’t want what to end?”

“Whatever success she’s experiencing at the moment.” He picked up another cracker and held it pensively in front of his mouth.

“What, is something up at work?” I asked.

“No, it’s okay.” He leaned back. “Not great. It’s been a tough year. I’m only down thirty percent, better than some, but I’ve still got lots of layoffs.”

“Are you going to get the ax?”

“Who knows?” He sighed, setting the plate on the ottoman. “I’m sure I’m on someone’s list.”

“You’re being very cool about it,” I said.

“Not cool, just resigned, maybe. Now, how about that salad? I’ve got some Parma ham and I’ve boiled some eggs to throw in.” He got up and went to the kitchen with his plate.

“Great,” I said, stretching my sore, hungover muscles on the couch.

“In the meantime, it’s no fun having to fire a bunch of people. A lot of them have kids Ian’s age.”

“Do you call them into your office”—I lowered my voice, trying to imitate him—“Look, I have some bad news.…”

“It’s not a game, Thea,” he said, turning around from the kitchen counter to glare at me.

“I didn’t say it was. It’s just that you never seem to be …”

“To be what?”

“I don’t know, too engaged in what people think anyway.”

“What kind of thing is that to say?” His back was to me again and he was making big sweeping motions with his hands, tossing the salad.

“Well, why don’t you have any friends? How come you’re alone so much?”

“Am I alone? I wouldn’t describe it that way.”

“Besides us, I mean, and work.”

“You take up more of my life than you realize.” He pulled the plastic string on a bottle of olive oil and the wrapper popped off. I had a guilty pang that came in a rush. What was that supposed to mean? Were we really that much of a burden? Then I immediately resented him for pinning all his social failures on
us
.

“Look, Thea,” he said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but
I’m not that interested in what a twenty-five-year-old kid starting out has to say. Why does he need to get up on the table and do the Macarena, or whatever.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

He peeled an egg and dumped the shells into the garbage. “Why does he need to make an impact that way? Moreover, why does he need to tell me, to
explain
to me, that that’s what he does at parties? Why is this a defining feature for him? One he needs to tell people about? Tell
me
about?” He shook the new olive oil into the bowl.

“What’s your point?” I asked. “That you don’t care?”

He made a shooing motion with his hand as he carried out the bowl on two plates. “I don’t know what the point is, maybe I
am
intrigued by these people, these young guys who come in so eager and giddy, with their elephantine egos, their inflated, fragile sense of self.” He shook his head and sat down at the table. I dragged myself to the chair in front of him. “Maybe I’m even fond of them. From afar, ideally.” He rubbed his hands together. “Salad du chef.”

We chewed in silence.

“Maybe we should go wake up Ian,” Dad said. “He’ll cheer me up.”

“Wake him and die,” I said. My phone rang and I reached for it on the table.