Dating Big Bird (4 page)

But there was a catch.

The body-suit didn’t sell at Bendel’s.

And the reason it didn’t sell was because another body-suit—exactly the same in design and material—had just hit the market and was flying off the racks in major department stores like Saks and Neiman’s and Bloomingdale’s, which, unlike Bendel’s, had branches all over the country. The success of that designer—Donna Karan—and the untimely coincidence of their both coming out with the same item had haunted Karen ever since. Even after Karen’s own star had risen and her success rivaled Donna’s, the press always asked her about it. And though they never accused her of copying Donna and though it was clear to them that Karen was immensely talented—more so, the
sharpest ones knew, than Donna—that early wrinkle in her career was a scar that in Karen’s mind would never ever completely disappear.

But that day seven years ago, during one of the many long strategy meetings Karen insisted on attending at our offices to discuss her new company, I came up, out of sheer desperation, with the idea that she should change her name.

“Change my name?” she said, her skeletal frame turning in her swivel chair to face me. She bit her big lipsticked lips and stared at me over the plume of smoke coming out of her nose. “What do you mean,
change my name
?”

I had no idea what I meant.

What I
did
know was that she needed to have a corporate identity ready before the fall buying season began, and all we had so far was
LipskyLook
. With that, we’d be lucky if J.C. Penney took her line.

“Maybe the name of your company should relate more to your design philosophy,” I heard myself pontificate. “Maybe the name will help connect the wearer to the clothes.”

She was still biting her lips, but she hadn’t yelled at me yet. Which I took as an encouraging sign.

“A name,” I said slowly, gathering all of my bullshitting skills in one glorious breath—I was a copy writer, after all, with layers and layers of creative talent that were, as yet, untapped!—“that describes the woman who will wear your clothes. A name that evokes style. Urbanity. Sophistication. Sex.” I came up for air and to buy myself another crucial few seconds of time, and when I did, I noticed her mouth—licked clean of her signature mud-matte pigment and ravenous for success.

“Lipps,” I said suddenly.

Then I wrote it on my pad and held it up so she could see the crucial addition of the second
p
.

“Karen Lipps.”

But back to that Labor Day weekend, when I started sleeping with the Pickle’s Big Bird.

It was a crisp early September Sunday morning, the kind of autumn morning that makes living in downtown New York seem movie-worthy: wisps of white clouds against a bright, clear, relentlessly blue sky; sleek sunglassed people dressed in black jeans and T-shirts on their way into the church of Dean & DeLuca or emerging from the ever-hip News Bar, holding white paper bags filled with black currant scones or lemon coffee cake or corn-carrot muffins. I myself was walking up University Place with my Starbucks coffee when I noticed a woman—tall and thin with long perfect legs coming out of khaki shorts—pushing a baby stroller toward me. When the light at the corner of Twelfth Street changed and she wheeled the stroller into the crosswalk and revealed the shit-eating grin of a blissfully happy mother, I knew immediately that I had seen that smile before. I just couldn’t remember where.

And then it came to me.

High school.

At seventeen, Amy Jacobs had been everything I was not. And now, given the child in the stroller, at thirty-five she was obviously still everything I was not.

Back then, she got straight A’s and was one of the most attractive girls in the school.

I got straight A’s (except for math) and had one eyebrow that grew together.

She was on the varsity field hockey team. And swim team. And gymnastics team.

I was editor in chief of the literary magazine but was short several hundred thousand gym credits by senior year, which almost prevented me from graduating.

She was popular with preppy girls and jocks.

I was popular with the tough girls who kept trying to drag me into the bathroom and dunk my head in the toilet while flushing to give me a “swirlie.”

She was dating the cutest nicest smartest boy in the school—well-adjusted adolescent poster-child Jonathan Glebe, a Robby Benson look-alike—advanced placement math, chemistry, French, and English; captain of the soccer team; managing editor of the school newspaper—whom she had been dating since ninth grade. At the end of senior year, they were both headed off to Princeton. And then, of course, they would get married and live happily ever after.

I was not.

I did not.

And so far I had not.

As you can see, I’d really made a lot of progress since the insecurity of my teens.

I froze at the intersection without crossing. I hated moments like this:
to say hello or not to say hello
. Finally something—perhaps the baby—perhaps the fact that I knew, given my state of mind that particular day, that I couldn’t take another person asking me if I had a hud-band—tipped the scale of indecision and made me edge a little farther away to make my escape.

But that was not to be.

“Ellen?”

I froze again.

“Ellen Franck?”

I feigned surprise, as if I hadn’t been caught trying to hurl
myself into oncoming traffic in order to avoid her.

“Amy …?” I started. “Amy …”

“Jacobs.”

“Amy Jacobs.” I nodded hazily. “Of course.”

“Brookline High School.”

“Of
course
.”

“Seventeen years,” she said, parking the stroller out of the line of foot traffic on the sidewalk and pushing down the wheel brakes. “You look great. And you still have great hair.” She rolled her eyes to call my attention to her short straight brown hair. “I always envied your hair.”

Amy Jacobs used to envy my hair?

I was shocked.

Still, out of habit, I couldn’t resist pulling it out from the sides of my head like Bozo.

“But
you
were the one with the perfect hair.” I let the hair drop and then tried, unsuccessfully, to comb my fingers through it.”
You
were the one with
wings
!”

I said
you
as if I were accusing her of something heinous. Which I was: a happy adolescence.

She rolled her eyes again. “Yours is thick. Mine’s too thin. Not to mention the bald spot.”

I stared at her as she pointed to the front of her head, just above and to the right of her forehead.

“Bald,” she said, giggling. “Bald, bald,
bald
.”

I almost liked her right then and there.

Who would have believed!

Amy Jacobs going bald and making fun of herself!

But then I remembered.

Jonathan Glebe. Who, I’d heard from someone as miserable during high school as I was, had gone to medical school and become an ob/gyn. An oppressive weight settled over me like a thick dense wet mist when I imagined their perfect life together: his Park Avenue practice; the pregnant women coming
and going all day long; their huge fabulous apartment in a nearby doorman building, complete with F.A.O. Schwarz—equipped nursery; her weekly pedicures and manicures; the live-in nanny who was obviously off on Sundays.

It was time to cut this conversation short.

But. I couldn’t take my eyes off the Pickle-esque bundle of cuteness in the carriage.

“Great baby,” I said, beginning to salivate over the big brown eyes and the pink fleece Baby Gap cardigan and flowered stretchy leggings she had on. Her ensemble reminded me of a similar outfit Nicole had worn at that age. I bent down to touch her silky-smooth blond hair, but ended up kissing her head instead. At such close range her baby-smell made my eyes almost water. I could have eaten her whole.

“Thanks.”

“What’s her name?”

“Isabel.”

“That’s a beautiful name. How old is she?”

“Eight months.”

Eight months.
Walking?
Maybe.
Talking?
Probably not.
Toilet trained?
Definitely not.

I wasn’t really sure. My sister and the Pickle living in New England made it impossible for me to acquire the knowledge of a child’s day-to-day minutiae firsthand.

“You must be thrilled,” I finally managed.

“We are.”

We
.

“Do you …?”

“Stay home with her full time? No. We have a nanny.”

“A nanny? Sure. That’s great.”

Dr. Glebe’s baby business must be booming.

“Well, I mean, she’s full time, but she doesn’t live in,” she clarified.

I nodded, then felt my stomach drop when I realized the
baby was smiling at me. I bent over and made a big face—eyes wide open, mouth and tongue making goofy sounds—then rubbed her stomach until she giggled. See? It wasn’t just Nicole who liked me.

Amy cleared her throat. “So do you—?”

“Have one?” Not unless you counted the Pickle. Oh, what the hell. “No, but I really want one.”

“I know,” she said, nodding. I couldn’t tell if the expression on her face was pity or self-satisfied smugness, but whatever it was, I suddenly wanted to get away from it—and her.

“Well, listen,” I said, reining in the initial warmth I’d stupidly let fly because of her female-pattern baldness, “I’ve got to run.” Then I mumbled something—
big job, big week, big big big life
—and put my KLNY sunglasses back on.

“Speaking of which, what do you do?” Amy asked. Isabel had now put all her fingers in her mouth and was smiling—and drooling—profusely. Adorable.

“I work for Karen Lipps. Marketing director.”

So what if I was running out of eggs? At least I had a job. And
hair
.

“That’s great,” she said.

“Why? What do you do?”

“I’m a real estate attorney.”

“You’re a lawyer?”

“What, you hate lawyers?”

“No. It’s just that … well, I just thought that—you know, what with a baby and all, you probably wouldn’t—”

She waited for me to finish my sentence, but I didn’t.

At least not audibly.

Since you were lucky enough to have a baby, I didn’t think you would also be lucky enough to have a big job
.

Amy suddenly looked uncomfortable, as if she, too, had had enough of this conversation, confirming my belief that high school is a place that should never, ever be revisited.

“She’s not mine.” She blushed, then laughed guiltily. “She’s my brother’s. Sometimes I just pretend she’s mine. I mean, why is that so wrong?” She looked around and grinned without a trace of guilt. “It’s not like I do it with people I know. I just do it here. In the park. With strangers. And I don’t even do it on purpose. Things just come out of my mouth, and somehow at the time they seem—”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“True,” I said. “I know. I do the same thing with my niece. So whatever happened to that boyfriend of yours?”

“Jonathan? It’s a long story. What about you? Any potential—”

“Sperm donors? No. Not really. It’s a long story, too.”

“I’d like to hear it.”

“Well, we should get together sometime,” I said. “Form our own Imaginary Mommy Group.”

“I could get a sitter.”

“Or we could just double up on your nanny.”

She laughed and reached into her bag to get out her date book. “This is a bad week, though.”

“For me too,” I said, flipping through my ten-pound multilayered multitiered multitabbed color-coded-insert date book. “And the next two weeks aren’t much better: I’ve got two weddings and a baby shower.”

“I’ve got two baby showers and a briss.”

Then, after going through about twenty-three possible lunch-drinks-dinner dates, we finally settled on one—dinner, on a Thursday, three weeks hence.

“By the way,” I said, “do you like your job?”

“No. Do you?”

“No.”

We smiled, then exchanged business cards.

I had a feeling we were finally going to become close friends.

Not that I needed any more friends, really.

I had quite enough already.

Or so I thought.

And yet in retrospect I see that the ones who were single or childless had been dwindling steadily for years without my really noticing.

First there were the recent couplings:

Lisa:
Engaged
.

Katie:
Engaged
.

Nicky:
Engaged
.

Then there were the semirecent betrothals:

Susan:
Married six months
.

Jill:
Married one year
.

Cathy:
Married two years
.

And then there were the ones who had been quietly building families for a while now:

Julia:
Married six years. Two children: five and two
.

Anne:
Divorced twice. One five-year-old
.

Rachel:
Not married. No boyfriend. Sperm bank baby on the way
.

And of course, my sister: