Queen Of Babble: In The Big City

Chapter 2

One Week Earlier

“Well, at least you’re not moving in with him,” my older sister Rose says, as ten shrieking five-year-old girls take turns whacking a pony-shaped piñata hanging from a tree limb behind us.

This stings. Rose’s remark, I mean. The five-year-olds I can’t do anything about.

“You know,” I say, irritated, “maybe if you had lived with Angelo for a while before you got married, you’d have figured out he wasn’t your perfect soul mate after all.”

Rose glares at me from across the picnic table.

“I was pregnant, ” she says. “It’s not like I had much of a choice.”

“Uh,” I say, eyeing the five-year-old who is shrieking the loudest, the birthday girl, my niece Maggie. “It’s called birth control.”

“You know, some of us actually take pleasure in the moment,” Rose says, “instead of obsessing over the future all the time. So birth control is not the first thing that springs to mind when a handsome man begins making love to us.”

I think of lots of ways to reply to this, as I sit there watching Maggie decide that whacking the piñata with her stick is less interesting than whacking her father with it. But for once, I keep my mouth shut.

“I mean, God, Lizzie,” Rose goes on. “You go off to Europe for a couple of months and come back thinking you know everything. Well, you don’t. Especially about men. He won’t buy the cow if he can get the milk for free.”

I blink at her. “Wow,” I say. “Could you be getting more like Mom every day?”

My other sister, Sarah, can’t keep from snorting into her plastic margarita glass at that one. Rose glares at her.

“Oh,” she says. “You’re one to talk, Sarah.”

Sarah looks shocked. “Me? I’m nothing like Mom.”

“Not Mom,” Rose says. “But don’t tell me that wasn’t Kahlúa you were pouring into your coffee this morning. At nine-fifteen.”

Sarah shrugs. “I don’t like the taste of coffee straight.”

“Oh, whatever,Gran.” Then, narrowing her eyelids at me, Rose continues, “For your information, Angelo is my perfect soul mate. I didn’t have to live with him before we got married to know that.”

“Uh, Rose,” Sarah says. “Your perfect soul mate is currently getting racked by your eldest.”

Rose looks over and sees Angelo crumpled to the ground with his hands pressed between his thighs. Maggie, meanwhile, is now whacking the side of her parents’ minivan, to the enthusiastic support of her birthday-party posse.

“Maggie!” Rose shrieks, leaping up from the picnic bench. “Not Mommy’s car! Not Mommy’s car!”

“Don’t listen to Rose, Lizzie,” Sarah says, as soon as Rose is out of earshot. “Living with a guy before you marry him is the perfect way to find out if you two are compatible in the ways that really count.”

“Like what?” I ask.

“Oh, you know,” Sarah says vaguely. “If you both like watching TV in the morning, or whatever. Because if one person wants to watch Live with Regis and Kelly in the morning, and the other person needs absolute silence in order to face the day, there can be fights.”

Wow. I remember how mad Sarah used to get if any of us turned on the TV in the morning. Also, I had no idea Sarah’s husband, Chuck, was a Regis and Kelly fan. No wonder she needed that Kahlúa in her coffee.

“Besides,” Sarah says, running a finger along the side of what’s left of Maggie’s horse-shaped birthday cake, then sucking off the vanilla icing, “he hasn’t asked you, right? To move in with him?”

“No,” I say. “He knows Shari and I are getting a place.”

“I just don’t understand,” Mom says, coming up to the picnic table with a new pitcher of lemonade for the kids, “why you have to move to New York City at all. Why can’t you stay in Ann Arbor, and open a bridal gown refurbishment boutique here?”

“Because,” I say, explaining for what has to be the thirtieth time alone since I got back from France a few days before. “If I really want to make a go of this, I need to do it in a place where I can have the broadest customer base possible.”

“Well, I think it’s just silly,” Mom says, plunking down onto the picnic bench beside me. “The competition for affordable apartments and things like appointments to get cable installed in Manhattan are cutthroat. I know. Suzanne Pennebaker’s oldest daughter—you remember her, Sarah, she was in your class. What was her name? Oh, right, Kathy—went to New York to try her hand at acting, and she was back in three months, it was so hard just to find a place to live. What do you think opening your own business is going to be like?”

I refrain from pointing out to Mom that Kathy Pennebaker also has a narcissistic personality disorder (at least according to Shari, based on the many, many boyfriends Kathy stole from girls we knew around Ann Arbor, then dumped as soon as the thrill of the chase was over). That kind of thing might not have made her too popular in a place like New York, where I understand heterosexual males are in somewhat short supply, and the womenfolk not opposed to using violence to make sure their man stays that way.

Instead, I say, “I’m going to start out small. I’m going to get a job in a vintage clothes shop, or something, and get to know my way around the New York City vintage clothing scene, save my money… and then open my own shop, maybe on the Lower East Side, where rents are cheap.”

Well, cheaper.

Mom says, “What money? You aren’t going to have any money left, once you’ve paid your eleven hundred dollars a month just for your apartment.”

I say, “My rent isn’t going to be that much, because I’ll be splitting it with Shari.”

“A studio—that is an apartment with no bedroom, just a single open space—costs two grand a month in Manhattan,” Mom goes on. “You have to share it with multiple roommates. That’s what Suzanne Pennebaker says.”

Sarah nods. She knows about Kathy’s boyfriend-stealing habit, too, which would have made getting along with roommates, at least of the female variety, difficult. “That’s what they said on The View, too.”

But I don’t care what anyone in my family says. I am going to find a way to open my own shop somehow. Even if I have to live in Brooklyn. I hear it’s very avant-garde there. All the really artistic people live there or in Queens, on account of being priced out of Manhattan by all the investment bankers.

“Remind me,” Rose says, as she comes back to the picnic table, “never to let Angelo be in charge of the birthday-party planning again.”

We look over and see that her husband is back on his feet, but limping painfully toward Mom and Dad’s back deck.

“Never mind me,” he calls to Rose, sarcastically. “Don’t offer to help, or anything. I’ll be fine!”

Rose looks heavenward, then reaches for the margarita pitcher.

“Perfect soul mate,” Sarah says, chuckling to herself.

Rose glares at her. “Shut up.” Then she plops the pitcher down. “Empty.” There’s growing panic in her voice. “We’re out of margaritas.”

“Oh, dear,” Mom says, looking concerned. “Your father just mixed that batch—”

“I’ll go in and make more,” I say, hopping up. Anything to avoid having to hear more about how much of a failure I’m destined to be in New York.

“Make it stronger than Dad did,” Rose advises, as a papier-mâché leg belonging to the piñata pony goes sailing past her head. “Please.”

I nod and, seizing the pitcher, head toward the back door. I make it about halfway before I run into Grandma, who is just coming out of the house.

“Hey, Gran,” I say. “How was Dr. Quinn?”

“I don’t know.” I can tell Gran’s drunk, even though it’s only one in the afternoon, because her housecoat is on backward again. “I fell asleep. Sully wasn’t even in it. I don’t know why they bother making episodes that don’t have him in it. What’s the point? No one wants to watch that Dr. Quinn run around in her gauchos. It’s all about Sully. I heard them trying to talk you out of moving to New York.”

I glance over my shoulder at my mother and sisters. They’re all three of them running their fingers along the edge of the leftover cake, then sucking the frosting off the tips.

“Oh,” I say. “Yeah. Well, you know. They’re just worried I’m going to end up like Kathy Pennebaker.”

Grandma looks surprised. “You mean a man-stealing whore?”

“Gran. She’s not a whore. She just—” I shake my head, smiling. “How do you even know about that, anyway?”

“I keep my ear to the ground,” Grandma says mysteriously. “People think because I’m an old drunk, I don’t know what’s happening. But I keep it real. Here. This is for you.”

She shoves something into my hand. I look down.

“Grandma,” I say, not smiling anymore. “Where did you get this?”

“Never you mind,” Gran says. “I want you to have it. You’re going to need it, moving to the city. What if you need to get out, and you need cash, fast? You never know.”

“But, Grandma,” I protest. “I can’t—”

“For fuck’s sake,” Grandma yells at me. “Just take it!”

“Fine, I will,” I say, and shove the neatly folded ten-dollar bill into the pocket of my black-and-white vintage Suzy Perette sleeveless day dress. “There. Are you happy now?”

“Yes,” Grandma says, and pats me on the cheek. Her breath is pleasantly beery. It reminds me of all those times in grade school she helped me with my homework. Most of the answers were wrong, but I always got bonus points for imagination. “Good-bye, you rotten stinker.”

“Grandma,” I say, “I’m not leaving for three more days.”

“Don’t sleep with any sailors,” Grandma says, ignoring me. “You’ll get the clap.”

“You know,” I say with a smile. “I think I’m going to miss you most of all, Scarecrow.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Grandma huffs. “Scarecrow who?”

But before I can explain, Maggie, wearing the decapitated piñata pony’s carcass on her head, marches silently past us, followed by her suddenly mute party guests, each wearing a piece of piñata—a hoofed foot here, a segment of the tail there—on their heads, and stepping in perfect formation.

“Wow,” Gran says, when the last member of the macabre piñata-part parade has passed by. “I need a drink.”

A sentiment I readily second.