Diary of a Heretic

Oh The Humanity

Come the weekend, if the temperature hadn’t dropped, Manny would tell the kids we were going swimming at the county’s communal pool. At nine a.m., surrounding us in an hour-long line were tiny, bronzed teenagers in tinier, thong bikinis. If these perfect Barbie dolls had lounged by the pool, I would have liked it. Were I in a position to eavesdrop, I felt certain their conversations would abound with teenage truths.

Unfortunately, once we had paid our five dollars for adults, no charge for kids under ten, the beautified girls had disappeared to the eighteen-and-older pool; though I’d have guessed they were younger.

The Olympic-sized family pool was a stew of wide-bodies overflowing their bathing suits, and helpless babies, either naked or bottom heavy from multi-layers of soggy disposable diapers. Many children screamed, because the water (and/or the body-to-body crowd) terrified them. But then other little kids zoomed underwater trying to torpedo the multitudinous, stationary giants above. Which they did, sending the adults and others in range crashing into the brew. 

Manny and my son apparently loved this. They spent the day playing in the water cascade, for which my daughter was too little. I ventured into the thigh-high soup, holding my baby, who wasn’t nearly afraid enough. So, after soaking up enough chlorine to smell embalmed for days, we found the smaller pool for smaller babies. Ankle-deep, and seemingly not chlorinated, this area was equally crowded.

Under an umbrella-style water sprinkler, I finally let my daughter free. Until—a bent-over old woman in a house dress like my great-grandmother used to wear, asked me to help her find her teeth. Hoisting my daughter back onto my hip, the old woman and I searched around the sprinkler. In the nearby grass, my baby screaming, I asked the two men upping the volume on their cassette players, trying to drown each other out, to please stand up. Were they, per chance, sitting on dentures?

I even braved the ladies’ locker room, also crowded, but dark, slimy, and smelling of shit. When I emerged, shifting my shrieking child from one hip to the other, a brawny, sunburned woman was yelling at the old lady. Turning, the younger woman apologized to me. Her mother never wore dentures to the pool, because she always lost them here.

Later a friend asked about my weekend and when I mentioned the escapade, she asked, “So, did ‘Miss Winnetka’ fit in?”

Yes, but only in the purest physical sense, because it was impossible to extricate myself from the mob. A mob that put no limit on our grosser albeit natural, human needs. (Unlikely as it may seem, I have censored several observations.) So that while it can’t be true that women were giving birth under the few scrawny trees, telling her so seemed an apt representation. And still does.

Snared

Shirley and Peter's friend Cynthia was trim and attractive with straight, thick white hair almost to her shoulders and a distracted air. She couldn't stay long. Don't count her in on the game; she had just stopped by to say hello. Peter urged wine and cheese puffs on her. "Try some of Manny's guacamole, or else Shirley's special home-made brownies and some decaf."

Shirley decided to take half a brownie up to her mother: Who really should not eat sweets, but had  no other real pleasures left.

Immediately, Peter begged  "Oh, please, let me. It's okay, Shirl. I want to give her my best."

As he loaded a paper plate and hurried upstairs, Shirley told us that she and Cynthia and Peter had gone to school together, from kindergarten through high school. Then after college, (as I noted in an earlier post, Vassar for the women; Yale for Peter, including Yale Law School), all three had moved back home with their parents.

Cynthia was quick to add that she alone of the threesome had married and raised a child. She and her beloved husband Tom bought a house two blocks away.

Shirley added, tipping her head toward me, that before Cynthia married, she had worked as an editor on a woman's magazine. She and Shirley  both did, for a while. But once Cynthia's daughter was born, Cynthia had remained at home.

And now, what a saving grace the nineteen-year-old girl had been, through Tom's sickness and recent death. It had been heart-wrenching to take the girl back to Bowdoin College two days ago. Shirley excused herself for the kitchen and returned with a box of tissues. When Cynthia wept, Shirley joined in, out of sympathy and solidarity. Bob and Jessie, the other couple at the table, turned to Manny and me and began telling us their life stories. Bob had met Peter back when Peter was clerking for the judge who was forced to retire. Bob ran a construction company and the judge had ruled in his favor in a malpractice suit.

When Peter reappeared, he wrapped his arms around my shoulders from behind and above."What scandalous things are they saying about me?"

Without really thinking, I said, "Just that while the three of you were the top three in your class, they always had to cover for you when you sneaked home to watch soap operas."

Everyone laughed. Peter said, "I don't believe it. They told you that?" Quickly then he refilled his glass and took his place at the head of the table. Shirley's mother, he reported, was watching British television very comfortably. "She was glad to hear my mother sends her best and all that."

Cynthia, fighting fresh tears, stood up and nodded, waving good-bye and slipping into her coat until Peter hopped up with practiced gallantry and helped her by smoothing it in back, near the shoulders.He walked her upstairs, whispering about a bereavement group, which a priest who was a friend of his, led twice a week.

Game night proceeded inexorably with the incessant rolling of dice, squabbling over the wording of answers or the placement of tokens on the board. There was a break in which  Shirley presented a platter of finger sandwiches--the crusts cut off--and cookies. We had been there for three hours and the game appeared nowhere near the end. A barrage of impolite speculations snappped on and off in my mind. "Reality TV" had not taken over yet, but I was clearly envisioning Game Night in Shirley's Basement, a giddy comedy of manners that would tip into horror when we discovered--there was no way out.

Manny, like the rest of them, was drinking wine. Except he was drinking his wine, not Peter's, which was, just as we had tacitly half-suspected, screw top wine. Suddenly, Manny was also two moves from winning. But it was Peter's turn.

Jessie began to clear her throat and look at Bob. She explained to us that they had three little girls, to whom she had promised she would return home early enough to hear their bedtime prayers. So everyone stood up. Bob shook my hand and Manny's, claiming it had been a pleasure. Jessie told me, good luck with my novel about a lustful, intricately atuned woman with lofty sexual amibitions, and ensuing obsessions.

I could not have really described it like that, but then  I could not deny the gist, nor an uncanny semblance to my regular speaking cadence. "Thank you," I said. "I'll need it."

Good sports that we were, Manny and I stayed long enough for Peter to win. And then we stayed to help Shirley clean up. In the kitchen, while Manny and Peter were rearranging the basement furniture, Shirley giggled. "You know what you said about Peter sneaking off to watch soap operas? He did! He always returned to school with updates about 'As The World Turns' and "General Hospital.' "

"Oh, I said that totally off-the-cuff. It wasn't even a guess."

"Still."

"Well, yeah. Shirley, we really do need to hurry home now."

Peter and Manny had joined us in the kitchen and soon enough we were all gathering around the front door. "Yes," I agreed with Peter, "it was quite an evening."

"We hold Game Night, usually at my house, every other Friday," Peter said.

If  I were acting true to character, I must have gasped.

Either way, Peter said, "Okay, you're right. That might be too often. We would never get the same round of players twice. So, let's say, the first Friday of every month."

I shook my head. "Even that sounds too often for us."

"But you will come to the next one--at my house."

"We will certainly try." Manny was leaving this all up to me. "But, of course, we can't promise."

"I'll call you," Peter said, hugging me good-bye.

"Thanks for everything."

"Kath, we'll talk about it."

An Invitation We Did Not Refuse

I agree with J. Capozzola at the The Rittenhouse Review . He's wrapped in silence. And though I can hear people singing hymns outside my place, after five years I am still recoiling. I haven't forgotten so I can not remember yet. The challenge or duty to cope will not change anything. But I find myself committed to remaining sane. The discipline involved in continuing daily little fictions supports me even if it fails to sweep me back from the edge.The goal, the act of writing, of course, aims for more, a constant attention to the heart as well as mind.  With that in mind, I do what I can. ________________________________________________________________________________________

Overall,  my friendships burned out quickly--if they started at all. Acquaintanceship, though, happened all the time: Hello, a brief chat, "How are the children?" A nod, yes, of course.

My acquaintance and I would acknowledge we were traveling along parallel paths--passing the same milestones, at the same time. "Call me. We'll get together and talk." Another nod, "I'd like that. But, I'm much more available than you. So why don't you call me?" We smiled; maybe I would touch her shoulder, as a sign of approval. This pas-de-deux would occur again and again.

Although my children excelled in this community, and maintained an enviable popularity, I did not. My social position here amounted to a walking, talking embodiment of that Michael Stipe song: Oh no, I've said too much. I haven't said enough.

Then, too, the women I found most interesting held demanding jobs: one worked as an art restorer at the Met; another, an expatriate from India, traveled often for Chase Bank. Yet we could not say enough to each other on weekend afternoons, eyes bright, huddling face to face as our children played soccer or field hockey, basketball or baseball, organized by the school or the park district. We tapped each other while finding our seats at the winter concert and, again, at the spring performances. Should we land side by side, we would whisper during the entire program, only to chatter all the more hectically at the intermissions, our sentences overlapping and barely intelligible. Eager to indicate that we admired each other, we would signal one another beyond misinterpretation: How simpatico we would be, were there time...

For all our shared and hasty rapport, we would remain busy acquaintances. Only very occasionally did I find a friend. But by now, after experiencing numerous fast friendships that dissolved too soon for me, for reasons never named, I had fallen into the habit of waiting for any potential friend to do the pursuing. And that did not happen anymore: I had lived in this pretty little town too long. Then, too, I had lost friends who moved away, friends overwhelmed by a child's excruciating illness, and in one case, death.

So when Shirley went to the trouble of looking for me in the phone book, where I was not listed as an entity separate from my husband, I was nonplussed. No one had time to go to such lengths. When people did call, they wanted to know what I thought about my son's saxophone teacher or my daughter's fifth grade teacher. Sometimes, people telephoned with warnings: The person I regularly carpooled with was, as we all knew, an alcoholic, but recently the problem had grown more chronic.

But Shirley had called to invite Manny and me to her house next Friday evening, for "Game Night." When did Manny arrive home? Some people, she explained, would probably arrive earlier. Her friend, Peter, for instance, who was the instigator of Game Night:

He and she were co-hosting the get-together. Peter had led these games for years, but due to recent attrition, he needed to develop a new group of participants. Not that he wasn't always looking for another smart player. But this year, his mother's condition had kept him housebound. Next Friday his brother and sister-in-law had offered to stay with her so he could go out. Taken by surprise, I volunteered that Manny made exceptional guacamole.

Oh, no: Why did I say that? I needed a handy excuse, when for ages I had never needed one. I did backpedal. I would have to check with everyone. "Really, Shirley, the only way I can manage is to focus one day at a time. So, I don't know, a week from Friday? I can not be totally sure. What kind of games do you and Peter play? It's not charades, is it?

"I guess you would call them board games."

"Oh, I have always hated Monopoly. I just can not get into it."

"Not Monopoly," Shirley said. "Remember, I told  you my friend Cynthia wants to meet you? But she won't want to stay long. Her husband died of cancer last month and her only child, a girl, leaves for college tomorrow."

Not charades. Not Monopoly. Was it poker, then? Bridge?

"Not Trivial Pursuit," Shirley said. "But not all that different from Trivial Pursuit either. Peter collects some of the 'Anniversary' editions."

"Oh, Shirley, I really don't know."

"Please. You don't know until you try. And if you don't want to play a special edition of Trivial Pursuit, he has other board games. One of them involves someone choosing a word from a stack that is beyond arcane. Really, no one knows what these words mean anymore. The participants make up definitions and everyone listens to the various made up meanings along with the real one. Whoever choses the real definition the most times, wins."

"And you've done this with your friends before?"

"It's not dangerous, Kathleen. It certainly won't kill you."

"Okay."

"Just to be sure, I'll call next week and remind you."

__________________________________________________________________________________-___

A while ago, the people singing hymns moved on. Now a stream of angry protesters are screaming they want  the truth. They are furious and phalanxes of armed police keep pace with them. Terrified as I am of  police, this action disturbs me much less than the singing of hymns.

 

 

Social Strata in the Rehab Room

At the physical rehab clinic, Alice was in charge, supervising three other women who worked on predominantly female patients like me.

The two male patients radiated an entirely different energy from the women. One man, a strong, well-groomed silver-haired carpenter dipped into the work area now and then to operate the pulleys and flex his hands around rubber balls, improving mobility. The other one, a Hispanic man of indeterminate age, arrived with authorization to recoup strength after finger joint injuries. But anyone who paid him the slightest attention could recognize a person suffering from serious internal damage or disease.  His name was Ernesto and he sat on a bench doubled over, arms hugging his waist. Pain brought beads of sweat along his hairline.

The man and his condition provoked Alice's sympathy. Once or twice she even turned to the rest of us and reviled the indecency of a medical care system that sent him to do finger exercises while a visceral ailment prevented him from sitting up. But every time Alice thought she'd found reason enough to refer him to the ER, a sleek black woman appeared from an office across the hallway, her hair braided tightly and evenly, multiple braids pulled into a neat chignon, to discuss the matter. They looked out the window side by side so that even an inveterate eavesdropper like me could not quite gather the gist of their conversation. Still, it was not hard to guess. Quietly, respectfully, Alice was arguing with her boss. Her body shook so adamantly that she gave the impression she was shaking her fists at rules and regulations that made no sense--though in fact she held her arms loose but straight, close to her sides. Her own wrists turned, palms up, in an unspoken, careful  plea to the window ledge in front of her.

The first two weeks that I tied and untied knots in a thick, heavy rope, a 16-year-old black girl sat with her back to us. When her therapist arrived, a man in hospital-white clothing, he set her arm on a table covered with bright puzzles and games. He glued pads of pink Velcro to her thumb and fingernails. Attached to these were what looked like ordinary rubber-bands. Her fingers and thumb curled in on her palm and she was supposed to stretch each one straight. The therapist adjusted the rubber bands every ten minutes or so. And the girl worried out loud about getting back to school. She operated a cell phone with her good hand and phoned  her boyfriend, her mother, her girlfriend, and/or sister, to please pick her up outside the clinic and drive her to the public high school. As soon as someone agreed to drive her back, she performed another set of finger stretches and asked the white-clad therapist to please remove the Velcro.

I introduced myself, asked her name, Margaret, and asked what had happened. Someone was coming at her with a knife and to stop it, she grabbed the blade, which sliced straight through her tendons. Until the deep, ugly cuts healed, her fingers hurt. Oh but they hurt. But that was a year ago. They had healed in a curled position. She couldn't use her hand, but it no longer hurt as much. The doctors gave her samples of anti-inflammatory drugs. She was sixteen.

The next week, Alice finally got Ernesto admitted to the hospital. But her mouth held the same bitter  expression. "They'll keep him one night. He'll get one night of sleep, but no MRI, no X-rays, no blood test. By Friday, he'll manage to make his way back here."

Ernesto did return on Friday, appearing as ill as before. And Alice went right to work, taking his pulse and temperature. I overheard her hiss at Margaret's male therapist, if they only would feel his stomach... "He has a tumor of irregular shape and rock hard."

The male therapist was gluing Margaret's Velcro pads and rubber bands to her fingernails. "I've asked Dr. K to take a look at  her finger range. He'll be here in fifteen minutes. Maybe if you asked him, he'd talk to Ernesto..."

Alice held her forehead. Of course she'd try. Of course it would do no good.

I could crank a two pound weight up from the floor to the work bench already. I could work a fake manual can opener.

Dr. K arrived from a door at the far end of the area, where I had never been. He crouched down beside Margaret and held her malformed hand very gently, asking her to move one finger after another. Margaret and the two men attending her stared silently at her Velcro-covered fingernails.

Then Margaret announced she had good news. Dr. K. straightened his back. "Oh? What's that?" Margaret said, "I'm going to have a baby." And Dr. K. responded without hesitation, "Well congratulations. You won't be able to take the anti-inflammatories, though."

Dr K. did not betray his judgment in any way one could name. He did not sigh or look away. He held her hand as gently as before. And yet, I recognized it: a force field of disapproval unfurling from him and surrounding her. No one whispered about how young she was. No one inquired further. What were her circumstances?

My husband's insurance policy had approved four more months of therapy, but I could already make the guitarists' finger strengtheners meet. The purple one offered the highest resistance and after working at it over the weekend, I had it mastered.

Margaret never attended  the clinic again. Or perhaps she rescheduled her sessions so they didn't interfere with school. I didn't know and when I asked Alice, she looked directly at me, holding our  eye contact for an uncomfortably long time. So I didn't ask again.

Ernesto continued to arrive at least once  a week. And Alice sought a need for emergency admission each time. She hushed us as we made pancakes out of Play-Doh. No talking when Alice was searching for thrush, sciatica, strep throat, heart arrhythmia, anything anyone could think of, since the obvious disease was not covered by his insurance.

Go Home and Stay There

For many years, after I had written all I could for the day, I would run four to six miles along the aqueduct, a fairly level path along the steep banks of the Hudson River. Running exhausted my frustrations; the effort soothed a frazzled identity.

Ambitious back then, my hope still steady, still flexible (if this didn't get published, certainly my next effort would), I wrote all day and then dressed in shorts and moisture-wicking shirts, two sports bras, one on top the other, little socks and one hundred-plus dollar, brand-name air-cushioned sneakers. (That's what we call trainers or athletic shoes in the Midwest: sneakers.)

Usually the air was clear, birds sang from the huge bushes or trees flanking either side, and I might pass a pair of women "power walking," swinging their limbs strenuously, and carrying miniature plastic bar-bells. As I propelled myself past with all my might, I'd twist around to wave.  Hello, hi, ta-ta! I passed men walking home from the train station, and young women running to or from heartbreak. (Or so I imagined.)

After struggling all day to control my runaway mind, the babblers, that narrator who was so in love with description, the restrained thinkers and their dialectic, the lustful, the sick, the betrayers and the betrayed, I ran all out, determined to zip past anyone in my path.

Of course, I did not try to run faster than the high-school track stars, especially if they ran singularly and not en masse. I matched men in pairs, length by length, until they changed course, running up a side street or down. But one old man, a handsome old collection of very long bones, nice white hair, and a hippity, off-balance gait, outstripped me no matter how hard I pushed. His steps were short and looked effortless. He did, however, run all day, from before dawn and past sunset. That, I supposed, gave him an advantage as long as he didn't twist an ankle.

Another man, who never crossed my path, perhaps because he ran on the sidewalk, also ran all day, every day. People who tended not to talk to me asked me what I thought about the man. Or, they warned me, don't run with him, not even for a short distance. He's very weird. (Well, they thought I was very weird, too.) This man wore a watch cap and black compression shorts, fancy sneakers and a beard that fell into two cone shapes from his face to his waist. In humid weather, the beard frizzed and separated, appearing unruly but less substantial.

One afternoon when my son was eleven, he came home, pale and fighting back tears. He had walked home from school along the aqueduct. A big man with a huge beard had hanged himself from the tree that loomed over the elementary-school crossroad.

"My God!" I covered my mouth. Did he report this to the police, the school counselors?

No. The police and two volunteer fire departments had arrived while my son was just standing there, dumbfounded. The emergency service experts had yelled at him. One man grabbed his arm and demanded, What did he think this was? A circus?

My son was always big for his age, smart and athletic, but like me and his grandfather, he cried easily about unrecoverable loss, be it time or the end of a friendship. He had explained "The Apache Code" to his friends, and when challenged, to the Boy Scout leader who'd dismissed it as the typical sissy excuse. I asked my son if he didn't think he had outgrown the Boy Scouts? But all his friends were still Boy Scouts. He liked camping. And, when he turned in an essay for the "Service" badge, he'd written about the fear and prejudice underlying the Boy Scout's official ruling regarding gay boys or men. When the leader was out of town, the assistant leader approved the essay and hurried it along the process, so the leader would never see it.

By now the infuriated emergency worker was shaking my son by his shirt collar. No, my son said, he had not mistaken the hanging for a circus. The volunteer fireman, who did not belong to the engine company across the street from us, kept swinging my son by his shirt, hoisting him just above the ground.

One of the other workers yelled that the kid should scram; he had no business here. And when was the butt-right-in volunteer going to get to work? They needed a crane and something to cover the body before the whole town saw him swinging from the bough arching over the elementary school entranceway.   

What If He Has A Gun?

The incident is tragic. I never lose sight of that. The ruinous habits of a long-married couple, vying to get the better of the other, both given to whip-crack meanness, compounded by the neediness of a grown daughter had erupted into violence.

But my son's reaction gave me a selfish thrill I have not known since.

Years ago my boy and a neighborhood buddy liked to ring an old man's doorbell and hide in the bushes. Poring over my lastest page of a doomed novel, I did not notice. The other boy's mother had to telephone me, something my neighbors seemed to avoid. She wanted me to know my son and hers were harrassing a man with a reputation as a mean drunk.

That afternoon I sat my son and his friend in the kitchen, offering them glasses of skim milk and ginger snaps. (At seven, the boys still talked to me. Once they hit thirteen, I could expect no more than a grunt or two.) Why, I asked, do you keep bothering the same man? Not that I condone you guys harrassing anyone. But choosing the same mean man every day is dangerous.

They told me the old crab was hilarious. When he opened the door, they could see him from their hiding place, jumping up and down on his porch till the boards shook. He shouted and raised his fists. He spouted filthy words they'd never heard anyone say out loud before. His anger turned him into a cartoon.

Does steam,  I asked, shoot from his ears?

Just about.

All the more reason not to annoy him. You can't bug people for your own pleasure. It's wrong. And for all you know, he has a gun.   

I rarely saw the man during the next seven years. His daughter divorced her husband and moved in with her parents one winter, sending her two daughters to the same bus stop as my son and his friend. I continued to hear what a mean drunk he was. I learned he was a retired police chief. And I heard, too, about what a shrieking old bitch his wife was, strapped into an oversized wheelchair.

A real termagent, the other boy's father said. Wow! Termagent, I needed to look that one up. The father (call him HT) beamed. A GM worker who hadn't gone to college, and sometimes fixed our plumbing and electricity after his night shift, HT loved to tease me about my high-falutin' vocabulary. And termagant? He had me with that one.

An early morning in spring, as I cut what I considered the most beautiful sentences from a story, because even I realized they interrupted the plot, I heard a shot. My father and father-in-law used to shoot clay pigeons and empty beer bottles as sport. I knew what a gun sounded like. HT did not. He thought a car had backfired. But we both ran into the street when, from our facing houses, we saw a man in a white t-shirt running, clamping the back of his neck as if to staunch the blood spilling down the back of his shirt. HT insisted I hide inside my house, in the basement, beneath some furniture. I crouched in the livingroom, peering up through a window to see what was happening. HT had gotten the victim on to HT's porch and told him to wait there.

HT, trained as a volunteer fireman, eased his way inside the old man's house. The old man sat slumped on the livingroom couch and handed HT his service revolver, which he had kept legally. Then he said, Go in the kitchen. He had shot his disabled wife and thirty-year-old daughter.

Within half an hour after the damage was done, our street filled with SWAT teams. Helicopters flew overhead and police units filled every yard. Ten minutes before the police would force me to leave the house (as if every murderous old man on the street was about to go on a rampage), the phone rang. My son was calling me from the high school to make sure I was okay.

I was glad to hear his voice, and I think he was glad to hear mine. He said, You know, we always think you are totally crazy. Everybody does. Remember when you told me and J, you never know who has a gun? The two of us laughed so hard at that one. And we told the other guys. Other mothers were weird, but you were the weirdest. But not now. This time you were right!

If it had not resulted from such a sad event, I would have jumped in the air and pumped my fist. "I was right, I was right, I was right!"

As I waited behind a police barricade before I could return to my house, the local TV station interviewed me. Of course, I did not think the state should execute the old man. The state is just a bunch of other people deciding whether one killing will ameliorate the others. The wife and daughter died. The bleeding man, who was her fiance, not yet her husband, recovered from a bullet wound that just missed his spine.

The station let me talk. I wondered if maybe this primitive need for vengeance did rise from magical thinking, the idea that perhaps just this once if the killer dies, the slain will return to life.

HT told me the next day he had seen me on TV and I had looked very pretty. The camera closed in and pulled out while I spoke. Did they, I asked him, include what I said about vengeance and magical thinking? He did not think so. As he recalled I said the word, "ameliorate." He'd looked it up.

You Must Remember This

This never happens to me. A friend from a by-gone era actually tracked me down, with an interest in talking to me or at least "catching up." Her daughter and mine went to pre-school together.

Everyone wants the best for her baby. A toddler's future appears limitless. So even though the pre-school cost as much as a semester at a big State college, we would scrape the money together.

What if your three year old reads to you, sings like an angel and can finish a jigsaw puzzle before you've finished fixing dinner?

You send your adorable little prodigy to the best pre-school you can find. Manny and I took out second mortgage, which for our broken down old house should not have been legal. We sold my husband's grandfather's Patek Phillipe watch, and my great-grandmother's 18-carat gold charm bracelet and any other valuables we found stashed in drawers. I volunteered to answer the phones and feed the all-day students their lunches. This provided just barely enough for use to send her to Montessori for Westchester's Pip-Squeak Heirs of Millionaires.

As the months fly by, you scrounge up other credit lines. Believe me, it's possible. With a gross income of $45K, a tract house with two mortgages, and a car that stalls out making left turns you can spend $10K dropping them off at a playground where one teacher for every six toddlers shows them how to peel carrots and polish sneakers. Your baby will toy with something reminiscent of Rubik's cube, solving it faster than you ever could--AND get invited to birthday parties more lavish than any wedding or bar mitzvah you've ever known.

My big fear when my little girl attended parties was that the Lego set we had chosen as a gift would be the same one in the "goody" bag. Usually these goody bags contained either a Lego set or a small but European-made stuffed animal, a whistling yo-yo, an battery-animated dinosaur, little boxes of Godiva chocolate, and an adorable little collection of Maurice Sendak books.

Oh well, you tell your child. Now the birthday boy has an extra Lego car and all that duct tape we used to wrap it in the original watercolor art you painted yourself. So last week this long-lost Montessori mother/carpooler sought me out. I was thrilled! I wondered, too, if enough time had passed for me to ask her about one of the grand suburban mysteries of my time. I grew up in a suburb of Chicago, Winnetka, which is famous as the place where people earn the second highest annual income.. Nearby Kenilworth, which is considerably smaller in population and tonier in style, all the houses are lake-front, usually rates first.

I reconnected with my long lost friend, whose house and car, wardrobe and haircuts might cost more than mine, and yet I never felt she was condescending to me. The car pooling family seemed, like us, to live a more or less normal life with the exception of that insanely expensive pre-school.

Near the end of the nursery school days my daughter and the girl we carpooled with were both invited to a little boy's birthday party.  The boy was named P***R and the mother was young, blonde, and friendly. Bl*** presented herself and her little boys as super-WASP or so I thought. Everything she and her sons--P***R the oldest, then a two-year-old, P**L, and then and infant son, named P****P. Sweet natured, Ferrari-driving Bl*** and her little boys, wore Ralph Lauren outfits at all times. Socks, Docksiders, little sweaters and plaid button down shirts all featured a Polo logo that couldn't be missed. I never saw her or the boys without it.

Just before the birthday party the family had moved into a monolithic new house farther north, in Pound Ridge. The house was enormous, belonging to an entire enclave of McMansions, though these more resembled the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The uncles, aunts, and grandparents were all out by the pool with the children. One uncle was serving food from a fancy, clean, apparently made-to-order hot dog cart. And family members made unabashed jokes, which my carpooling-friend and I both distinctly heard more than once, that these hot dogs were the uncle's last meal in freedom. He was off to jail early the next day.

The eighteen or so party children either ran around a play-set similar to the those in parks that include tents filled with balls they can jump around in, or the four-year-olds worked to make original T-shirts in empty-for-the-party six car garage. Decorations included puffy paints, glitter, splatter guns, sponges, and poke-through silver stars, which an adult would secure for them.

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The newborn P****P attended the party in an adorable basket lined in blue gingham with matching blanket. Bl*** handed the baby to one of the nurses in attendance and asked if my friend and I would like a tour of the house even though almost none of the furniture had arrived.

"Of course!" The mother was not wholly without a sense of humor in that she promised we would not get lost if we followed her closely. Without the carpets, lamps, statues, grand piano, the leather couches and tapestry wing chairs to mark out way, we might get swallowed up among the unfurling marble floors and towering, glossy stucco walls.

I asked my long lost car-pool friend would confirm what we'd seen on the house tour. Except that she couldn't. She remembered the house, the maids and relatives, the new baby, the hot dog cart, and off-to-jail jokes, but was unsure about the movie stars. Not me. I was and always will be entirely sure they hung in giant, careful frames--well-lit stills of Ingrid and Bogart; Claude Rains and Laszlo sprang to life in all their black and white glory.

At least two of the walls rounded out, as they formed towers rising up from the slate roof. The art-prints were matted in frames that curved to match the curving pink walls. When asked what I thought of the place I was too nonplussed to mention the Casablanca prints. For some odd reason they deeply embarrassed me, on a level, or place I had never really burned and blushed before.

In terrible discomfort, I stared at my feet and complimented the exquisite marble floors. Even if my long-lose friend did not remember the Casblana picture, suppose they were there. What would that have signified? My friend shrugged. Someone owed them money and paid with the prints? Since they had just moved in, the enormous stills of "Rick's Place" and "Sam Playing It Again" and "Here's Looking At You, Kid" were SO disorienting that I still can't fathom what they might represent? I liked the movie just fine, but honestly how could anyone be THIS enthusiastic about it? My carpool friend suggested that perhaps they were investments. And I answered, in curved frames to match the curves of the walls? Or--maybe it was that year's hot house-warming gesture.

Is it plausible that "Casablance" and nothing else lit the fire between the mother and father? It was their romantic signature the way some couples used to have "favorite songs?" And yet that possibility is so unlikely compared to the SPECTACLE that I have imagined for years just what the black and white movie stills could conceivably evoke. If someone reading this has a thought or has experienced something similar and wants to let me in on a secret--such as: almost everyone has huge Casablanca photographs on their walls but they put them away when someone as clumsy as you stops by, please! Offer a comment!  Your small-brained grasshopper.