This Beautiful Life Read online

  “It’s not the same city you grew up in,” Richard had said, to reassure her.

  It was a thought she’d held on to.

  “Just think of all the museums and the galleries,” he said.

  He was right about that, Liz thought as she waited for Coco—the Upper East Side in this new moneyed century was not the New York she’d grown up in at all. Hyacinths in spun sugar colors bloomed in the window boxes of the town houses across the street. Cherry blossoms wept snowy petals in the breeze. The stoop she sat on was a far cry from the benches she’d hung out on in Section Five of Co-op City, the soulless middle-class housing project where Liz twisted in the winds of boredom during her own rather turbulent adolescence. All those concrete towers and windswept sidewalks, the outdoor shopping centers and indoor garages, the basketball courts without basketball nets, like chain-linked prison yards where the boys played shirts and skins all afternoon before feeling you up in some dank, stinky stairwell later that evening. The absolute dearth of trees. That hard, unyielding concrete universe that her adult world would determinedly negate and her children would not grow up in.

  With her eyes closed, Liz could hear the chitchat chattering background hum of the other mothers, the way she used to hear the ch-ch-ch of the lawn sprinklers while she sat in her car by the curb across from the ball fields in Ithaca and waited for her offspring to explode out of school when the final bell rang.

  Liz had loved all that: living in the country, the cocoon of her car with her music on. Teenagery stuff like Lucinda Williams. Yo-Yo Ma and the music of Ennio Morricone from all those Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns—the CD finding its way into her Hanukkah stocking last year alongside a pretty carnelian red bangle with a little lump of ironic coal lodged in at the toe. Oh, the bennies and compromises of a mixed marriage! The cello had been so awesomely beautiful it seemed to actually bend her insides. She’d arrive early and park, just to savor the music a little longer, idling outside of Cayuga Heights Elementary after half-day nursery, or the Dewitt Middle School later in the afternoon, waiting for Jake post-soccer. In the passenger seat next to her always was a pack of healthy snacks—lady apples and cucumber slices, peanut butter and banana sandwiches on wooly bread—anticipating the kids’ descent. Homemade. Local. Organic. (Well, the peanuts weren’t local, but they’d been crushed into mush at the local food co-op; the bread was homemade there, too, homemade at the store.) This happy, lazy array of nourishing, nutritional foodstuffs made Liz feel maternal, nurturing, and beneficent, practically winged. That station wagon was like a little mobile home for her and the children: Mother Ginger and her skirts. She’d reveled in the privacy. That was life in Ithaca, and it did not suck.

  Since the move, Liz spent her time mostly ferrying Coco around town, from Wildwood to occupational therapy to play dates to ballet class to Chinese school. What had happened to all the gallery hopping Richard had dangled as bait? Liz did more commuting here in the city than she’d ever done in Ithaca. Picking up and dropping off. Picking up and dropping off. It sounded like the lexicon of drug dealers.

  Today at Wildwood Lower, like all days when it wasn’t raining, the stay-at-homes gathered in little cliques for kindergarten pickup at their various stations along the sidewalk: the JAPs with the JAPs, the head-banded preppy moms with the preppies, the stray earth mother in Birkenstocks with a baby in a sling, singing softly to herself and swaying her hips to rock the baby to sleep.

  Next on the food chain, the “caregivers”: a couple of grad students reading Kierkegaard or Sartre and listening to their iPods; the pierced and tattooed European au pairs staring off into space, dreaming of a night in the dance clubs; and the small dark fortress of the Caribbean nannies, with their slow, sexy patois as they greeted one another on the opposite side of the staircase from the mothers, the two groups almost never commingling, a tale of two cities, two pickups.

  Liz opened her eyes and saw a clutch of yummy mummies at the foot of the steps; she’d been part of this scene for only nine months but she knew queen bees when she saw them. They were tall in their metallic sandals; their skinny yoga butts trim in their designer jeans, their long, shiny, blown-out, streaked hair (Breck Girl hair, Liz thought, silently dating herself) flowing halfway down their backs in glossy sheets. Only experience told her that when these ladies turned away from their gabby circle to place a cell phone call to their driver or decorator or art consultant, that the skin on their faces would be pure leather. “It’s just like high school,” Liz wrote to her best friend, Stacey, in an email, “the scene at pickup. The blond girls. Everybody else. Me.”

  In the nine months her kids were at Wildwood, Upper and Lower, Liz had met literary agent mothers and banker mothers, cancer researcher mothers and former microbiologists; she’d met a lot of formers. Former lawyers and former investment bankers and former PR people. Wasn’t she a former art historian herself ? The husbands worked too much and traveled too much—they were always in Mumbai opening up offices. They earned too much money for their wives to justify being away from the kids the long hours their former careers required. The “formers” made up the bulk of the PTA.

  Case in point was Casey, Juliana’s mom, the hostess of tonight’s slumber party at the Plaza. Casey was the PTA president. She used to oversee concessions for all the Loews movie theaters in the country. A former concessionaire. Meanwhile, her husband, an ophthalmologic surgeon, was always flying around the globe heroically saving the sight of some corrupt third world leader.

  The Plaza Hotel was going to be shut down for two years; a developer was remodeling it into condominiums. “It’s our girls’ last chance,” Casey, mouth full of cheese cubes, had whispered into Liz’s ear over warm white wine on curriculum night. It would be just three girls plus Juliana, three girls and their moms. “So don’t tell anyone.” Wildwood had a no-cut policy regarding birthday parties; it was simply verboten not to invite the entire class to absolutely everything. And preferably, the entire grade.

  Juliana was a sweet kid, all button nose and sass and a sprinkling of cinnamon-colored freckles. The girls had had a few play dates, and Liz liked Juliana; she said her pleases and thank-yous and, like Coco, was able to play on her own. Some of the kids Coco brought home required play instruction. They needed art projects or cookie baking or Build-A-Bear Workshop, Xbox, constant supervision. Sometimes, when Liz was exhausted and sick of writing the script of their activities, she’d resort to popping in a video, cracking a beer, and watching the girls zone.

  Liz knew only one of the other kids attending the sleepover: Clementine, a small-boned, quiet, introspective sort with a cloak of long dark hair. The kind of girl who grows up to be a poet or to play the guitar in the high school yard off by herself at lunchtime, a certain kind of sensitive boy staring at her longingly, a boy, Liz thought, a lot like Jake.

  Clementine was the kind of kid Liz would have made into her own best friend, mysterious and hard to reach, doling out the sweet satisfaction of breaking through to her, the pleasure in being chosen, anointed. But Clementine wasn’t for Coco, the party animal. Coco would steamroll over all that subtlety.

  The last guest was Juliana’s best friend from preschool. “You’ll like Marsha, the mother,” said Casey. “She’s very down-to-earth; the little girl’s name is Kathy.”

  Although Liz had jawed on the phone about the party with Deep Throat Marjorie—the extravagance! The expense!—she was actually looking forward to this night. It had been kind of hard these last few months. Liz felt too old and specific now to make new friends, and except for Marjorie, she hadn’t, really. Richard was right to worry. Midlife was like that. High school and college and grad school had been all about hanging out. Then there were work colleagues and cocktails. Babies meant hanging out again, too, long days in the playground, pizza suppers in the park by the lake. But now Liz was an astronaut traveling solo in her own little capsule, which was better sometimes than not, but still lonely. There were probably some people in New York she should look up—
school pals; that couple they’d been so close to in D.C., when Richard and the wife both worked at the World Bank. But oddly, Liz hadn’t had the appetite for it. Email had become an enabler, practically paralyzing her when it came to picking up the handheld, and yet she hadn’t written her way back in touch with a whole lot of people, either. She was afraid that there was both far too much to catch up on and way too little to say. Liz’s best friend lived in Marin, and over the years her relationship with Stacey had dwindled from hours on the phone to short staccato bursts of email, sometimes a week or two in between, though every so often there was a daily volley through cyberspace, two or three in a matter of minutes, as if they were engaging in honest-to-God conversation. Lately, Stacey had taken to Googling her old boyfriends and forwarding the results to Liz—a barrage of balding, fat oral surgeons. Liz kept emailing her back: “You dodged a bullet!” and “Count that baby’s chins!” Email allowed her flexibility, a cruelty that could be whisked away and out of sight with the one-two punch of a double click.

  In the last set of emails, Stacey had changed her tactics. She’d taken to Googling Liz’s exes—maybe because she’d finally run out of her own. One, a “Writing from Experience” TA Liz had had a short, unhappy affair with as a freshman, produced the mother lode. Daniel Feigenbaum. This guy kept a blog, a cyber journal. Stacey sent her the link. Unbeknownst to anybody, including him—oh, the blessings of online obscurity—Liz had been tuning in every day for a month. Now she was as addicted to his blog as she’d been addicted to General Hospital in college. Most of it was boring stuff (his work, at an ad agency), some of it was painful (he still dreamed of becoming a novelist), some of it was embarrassingly enthralling (his sexual fantasies about transvestites). It was so intimate, being this close to Daniel Feigenbaum—closer than she’d ever been in real life, even when they’d lain naked together, skin to skin—that after a week or two Liz had felt sympathy for him, although in college he’d barely been nice to her. Booty calls, some retarded conversations about Thomas Pynchon, cashew chili dinners. And then when she’d fallen for someone who had actually wanted to date her and be her boyfriend, Daniel Feigenbaum had published a mean little story about her in the graduate literary magazine.

  Surely if Liz were now to run into Daniel Feigenbaum in an airport or a grocery store after all these years, he wouldn’t catch up with her by telling her about the tranny porn he downloaded regularly, if he even remembered her at all. Yet he posted all this info online, for the whole world to see. It was his choice. So why did she feel like she was crawling through his apartment window and rifling through his drawers? Trolling his diary entries—she’d gone back weeks and even months, sometimes in a single sitting—made her teeth ache, like when she’d eaten too much candy. Yet, over time, with all this intimate access to the inner workings of Daniel Feigenbaum’s heart, she also found herself rooting for the home team. She wished for his success. Liz had yet to confess her newfound addiction to the Feigenbaum blog to Richard, who doubtlessly wouldn’t care, or to Stacey, for that matter, who could sometimes cut to the core of what was wrong with her too quickly for her to bear. Maybe little Kathy’s mom, this Marsha, would be someone easy to talk to—Liz could tell her the bare minimum of her cyber-sleuthing and they could laugh about Liz’s idée fixe over tea. Liz had always wanted to stay at the Plaza. She’d had her Eloise fantasies, same as anyone.

  “Busers exiting,” announced Kevin, the red-haired, gray-jacketed, six-foot-six security guard, as maybe ten kids of differing heights and ages walked out of the school single file and were led by two assistant teachers to two waiting yellow minibuses. All the kids at school knew his exact height; they’d point up at him and holler, “He’s six foot six.” Kevin would smile tolerantly. The man was a mountain. He reminded Liz of one of those mozzarella pigs she’d seen hanging in the shops in Rome, his skin a little yellow and oily like a giant smoked cheese. On Halloween, he’d good-naturedly don an XXX-large version of the Lower School girls’ pleated gray skirts; it was the size of a beach umbrella, his mammoth naked calves goose-bumped and hammy in the breeze.

  As Kevin roared his edict, “Kindergarten pickup!” the clusters of waiting adults immediately began to merge, funneling like sand in an hourglass toward the two red doors where the children would exit the building class by class and line up in rows on the sidewalk. Liz stood and stretched, yanking up her low-slung jeans as she rose, and smoothing out the pretty embroidered Indian shirt—soft blue velvet with tiny mirrors—that she’d unearthed from her closet when she saw its exact facsimile hanging in a posh storefront window on Madison Avenue with a price tag of one zillion dollars. She felt pretty in that shirt. She’d felt pretty in it three decades ago. A miracle, still feeling pretty. She twisted her long brown hair into a loose knot, swung her duffel over her shoulder; Coco’s Barbie bag came with wheels and could be dragged along the sidewalk like a poodle toy.

  Coco wouldn’t have been caught dead in a party dress, so Liz had folded up some leggings and a tie-dyed mini, a couple of different T-shirts to choose from: Happy Bunny, Cocoa Puffs, Paul Frank’s Monkey Julius—the one where the toothy ape was wearing braces—plus the requested Chinese pajamas, and packed them in her bag. The children in the Lower School wore uniforms, that is, a solid pant (not jeans) or said pleated skirt and a white polo shirt. A plain gray cardigan sweater with the school’s logo stitched into the corner in a silvery thread. Coco would be tearing hers off halfway down the block, throwing it over her shoulder in a wadded-up ball, confident that her mother would be there behind her to catch it. She’d pull a white leather newsboy cap—she loved that cap! (but Mrs. Livingston said no caps in school)—out of the backpack that Liz’s older sister, Michelle, had sent from Italy for Coco’s last birthday. She was particularly prone to the latest fads, Coco. Liz could only hope that tattooing and scarification would no longer be de rigueur when Coco was old enough to self-mutilate.

  Liz felt a light hand on her shoulder and turned around. Casey. Same freckled face and shoulder-length reddish curls as Juliana. Hollow cheeks. Tired eyes. She’d probably been pretty cute as a girl, but now she looked prematurely old and too skinny. It’s your butt or your face—you can’t have both, Liz thought. Some movie star had said this; she’d read it or heard something like it somewhere, and had stored a smudged replica of the quote in the hash of celebrity trivia her brain had accumulated without effort, along with all the other stuff and nonsense that passed for knowledge these days from print magazines and whatever: TV, the Net, idle chitchat, the air . . . But it was true, about your butt or your face.

  “I see you’ve brought your bags . . . Please don’t tell anyone, Liz . . .”

  “I won’t, I won’t,” Liz said, in response to Casey’s stricken expression. “I’ll just say we’re going away for the night.” As if anyone would ask, anyway. They all took off for somewhere every weekend, limos destined for Teterboro Airport clogging the street in front of the school, Hummers with Connecticut plates lining up at the curb. Nobody here would notice Liz’s little overnight bags.

  “You look like a teenager,” Casey said, approvingly, taking in Liz’s jeans and blouse, the platform clogs she’d walked across the park in, her soft, messy knot of hair. “You look like a teenager from behind.” And then: “Isn’t that Coco B. getting chewed out by Mrs. Livingston again?”

  Of course it was Coco B. Liz didn’t even have to turn around to know.

  “Oh no,” she said, feigning . . . fear? Surprise? Disappointment? Whatever it was a proper mother was supposed to feel, aside from resignation and a little residual renegade thrill. The truth was, Mrs. Livingston, in her flesh-colored stockings and Pappagallo flats, inspired juvenile delinquency: whenever Liz was called into school to meet with her, she had the urge to go to the ladies’ room first and light up a cigarette. She’d even smoked a little weed in Central Park before the last parent-teacher conference. Richard chewed her out after that meeting was over. He said he hoped he was the only one who’d noticed
her red rims.

  But half the moms were zoned on Xanax anyway and the other half had foreheads that didn’t move, so even if they were emoting, they looked like zombies. Mrs. Livingston was surely used to checked-out mothers, Liz had assured Richard. She was no better or worse than most of them—which was really the secret of life, her life, Liz had decided at that moment, while she was still stoned: she was neither better nor worse than most. The ones with the frozen foreheads, there was always a little curl of flesh near the hairline that the dermatologist forgot to paralyze. When the mothers got excited it would roll up toward their roots, like an awning.

  There she was now, Mrs. Livingston, her ropey hand firmly on Coco’s chin, forcing Coco to stare back at her. “Show me your eyes” was a favorite tool of Mrs. Livingston’s, a vote-with-your-feet proponent of pediatric hypnotism.

  “Uh-oh,” said Liz. A little too halfheartedly. Lamely enough to elicit a quizzical stare.

  “We’ll meet you later at the hotel,” said Casey, with cool curiosity. “We have to go home first to get our bags anyway.”

  “Sounds good,” said Liz, pushing through the crowd toward her daughter. And then, over her shoulder, as a polite afterthought: “We’re so looking forward to it.” This was clearly the wrong thing to say, for Casey shot her a look of pure hatred.

  Liz fought her way through the various coteries toward Coco, the big kids lining up in front of the Mister Softee truck waiting for ice cream, mothers using their shopping bags like mountain dogs to shepherd their offspring and play dates past the vacant-eyed Mexican balloon seller from whom Liz had never, not once, seen anyone buy anything. There she was, anxious Liz!—now more eager to get to her delinquent kid. She could spy through the crowds Mrs. Livingston holding Coco by both shoulders in a teacherly death grip. So Liz pushed on through the hugging, scolding, shooing, Italian-ice-buying throngs. She bypassed boys on scooters and girls skating on their Heelys, navigating a Fellini film’s worth of activity, and still managing to nod a worried hello to the occasional father in a business suit (determined to get an early start to “the country”) and to the coaxing, nagging nannies proffering donuts in outstretched hands, luring the miniature circus ponies home. Like a suicidal salmon, Liz swam relentlessly upstream to claim her daughter.