Plan C (13 page)

Bebe examines the sale tag on a cashmere scarf she’s pulled out of a Henry Bendel bag as I pull my stool up to the lunch counter and sip the iced tea she’s already ordered me. She smiles as me, twirling the sweater in front of her face. “I’m helping the economy by shopping,” she beams.

“That’s nice,” I say.

And there’s Kitty, making her way to us through the revolving door, scrolling her Blackberry, banging into other patrons.

“Okay, spill it, I’m late for work,” says Kitty, glancing up. “And I have to pick up my prescription pain killers before tomorrow’s face lift.”

“You’re really going through with that, aren’t you?” I ask.

Kitty examines her profile in the window’s reflection. “I want to stop apologizing for the way I look. I’d rather make excuses when people tell me ‘I don’t know what it is, Kitty, but you look younger and refreshed.’” She turns her head the other way.

“You’re salted cashew nuts!” I say.

“Really?” she says, “Well after my face, I’m planning vaginal rejuvenation.”

“Girls!” says Bebe, startling us to attention, a little more forcefully than usual. “I need to change the subject. I wanted to say goodbye to both of you. This is really it. I’m leaving. I’m going to get my daughter.”

“Oh my god, you’re really sure about this, aren’t you?” I say, lighting up.

“Oh my god, you’re really sure about this, aren’t you?” says Kitty mocking me disdainfully. “If somebody is counting on a baby to rock her world, and give her peace of mind, she’s in for a big surprise.” The waiter is at her side. “Make mine a Long Island Iced Tea. Heavy on the Long Island. Oh no, wait. Shit! I can’t drink. I have surgery. Cancel the Long Island. Just the iced tea.”

“Kitty,” says Bebe, reaching over to pat her hand. “Children are wonderful. You just aren’t a mother yet.”

“Oh she’s a
mother
all right,” I say.

“There’s no yet for me,” says Kitty. “Children take a bright sunny life and turn it into a tsunami. A toddler would take my perfectly content and selfish life about the Kitty, Kitty, Kitty, and turn it into a self-
less
life all about it, it, it.”

“Your child would give you love you’ve never known,” says Bebe.

“Hey, I don’t want to wear macaroni-and-cheese encrusted Prada pants!” says Kitty. “And I certainly don’t want to open my fridge and see strained carrots and some
pump
full of
breast
milk. I want to see a chilled Sauvignon Blanc and a nice block of Brie. I figure I’ve got five good years before pre-menopause kicks in and ten years until my first stroke. I’m not wasting them on raising kids.”

“Well, not everyone’s cut out for motherhood,” I say, “but kids do provide some pay-offs.”

“Really? Name one,” she says.

Well….um, there’s ahh…”

“See?” says Kitty.

“ Well, my daughters,” I say. “They’ll be there for me when I’m old. Right?”

“Oh sure, they’ll be there, after you’ve sacrificed the first twenty -five years of your life driving a minivan with side air bags and a bumper seat before they drain your nest egg. They don’t care if you’re using your retirement to pay off their student loans that they have fifty years to pay! You don’t have fifty years left!”

“Gee Kitty,” I say. “Now maybe you can tell us what you really feel.”

“I want to remain reckless, free – without constraints,” Kitty rants, “not like some caged lion longing for the free world. I don’t want to prioritize, organize and get all serious. Nobody likes serious.” The waiter brings Kitty her iced tea and she sips it while checking inbox messages but still talking to us. “And nobody likes seeing a fifteen-month-old kid who should have been tippy trained sucking on his mother’s breasts!” She glances over the screen to the woman next to us, whose fifteen-month old happens to be.

Bebe looks completely deflated. Now I’m doing the hand patting.

“Look, I’m not trying to be a bitch and rain on your parade, Bebe,” says Kitty. “It’s just that my brother, the fisherman – well he’s suffering up in Maine.”

“You have a fisherman in the family?” I say. “Cool.”

“Yes. I was a Daddy’s girl so I chose to tour with Daddy on his bus – saw the world from the eyes of his concerts. My brother stayed with mama, moved to Maine. Like Steve Tyler’s ex-wife from Aerosmith?

“Sort of,” says Kitty. She sips her iced tea again. “It’s just that I’m good old Auntie Kitty to my brothers’ four-mouths-to-feed. It’s been red tide, so he hasn’t been out to sea in months. Who do you suppose is supporting his children?”

“You?” asks Bebe, her eyes bright with the wonder of it. “Kitty, that’s so kind. What a generous thing…”

“Yes, I know!” says Kitty. “And I’m about to have a baby.”

“What?!” I blurt out.

“No not my baby,
her
baby! My niece! She went and got knocked up by some high school football star.”

“Oh the poor dear,” says Bebe. “That’s just horrible. Must have gotten in with the wrong crowd.”

“It doesn’t take a crowd to knock you up. Just one horny teenage boy,” says Kitty. “And the pregnancy was intentional.”

“I’ve heard about that,” I say. “There was a lot of press about Gloucester, one of the fishing capitals of New England. The school nurse noticed that in one semester she suddenly had a dozen pregnant teen girls. Turns out these girls had a pact and got pregnant on purpose.”

“Really?” says Bebe. “Maybe they were looking for something they couldn’t get at home. Love.”

“A lot of them are under age sixteen,” I say. “And maybe can’t get contraception because the health clinic is in a nearby town and they don’t have cars.”

“Well she wasn’t part of any pact, but that’s exactly what happened to my niece,” says Kitty. “And with the strong Catholic community, she can’t be
seen
going to a clinic for pills. She was afraid neighbors would recognize her mother’s car outside the clinic.”

“It’s so sad that these girls are losing direction,” says Bebe. “Their fathers are out of work and now they don’t know what the family’s future will bring. We should pray for them.” She bows her head in silence.

Okay, Miss Melanie, I think to myself, lowering my head. Kitty just rolls her eyes. I note the time on my watch. “Oh my god, I have to go,” I say, grabbing my purse. “Kitty, if you need me to pick you up after surgery let me know. “And Bebe. Call me when you get to Kazakhstan,” I say, digging for my wallet. “Shit, I’m late!”

The waiter drops the check off. Kitty grabs it.

“I’ve got it.” says Kitty. “Just go to your other job.”

“No,” I say, fighting for the bill.

“Let me,” says Bebe, putting a hand out that still bears Henry’s wedding band.

“I said I’ve got it,” says Kitty to Bebe. “You save your money for baby Borat. And you,” she says, pointing to me, “Save your money to save your families little cottage on Cape Cod.”

“But…”

“You gonna argue with me?” says Kitty, “I made $10,000 in commissions yesterday off of Helmut.” In one smooth motion, she swipes the bill from the table, hands it to the waiter, and returns to checking her messages on her crackberry.

The sign outside the shelter reads “
We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.” Winston Churchill.
I know this because I’ve just tripped in a pothole and landed flat out on my back looking up at it.

When times get rough for me, I don’t get a facelift or pull out the Saks Fifth Avenue credit card. I try to do something that reminds me it could be a lot worse. I volunteer.

Buzzed into the building, I enter a dark and dismal foyer with worn carpeting. The smell of mildew mingles with the stale-beer stench from the nubby-checkered fabric of the couches. It’s all very reminiscent of a frat house the night after a major blow-out.

A wall of bullet-proof glass separates me from the women at the front desk. One of them, Yvette, wearing a head of elaborate dreadlocks, acknowledges me and proceeds to buzz me through the next door.

“Where the hell you been?” says Yvette. “You know how she depends on you.”

“Sorry. The train broke down,” I lie.

“Okay, but she’s waiting. Says she only wants
you.
Imagine that?”

“I know but... Wait, she really said that?”

“Yes, she said that,” says Yvette. “As you can imagine, it ain’t easy learning that your step-dad’s your baby’s father.”

“Okay, but I’m here for her now.”

“Let me call upstairs and tell them,” says Yvette, shaking her head at me, and punching in a number. “And don’t go ak-sing me about my date last night.”

“Okay, I won’t,” I wink.

“It was okay, but he’s fifty-five.”

“That’s not so old.”

“Not old?” she says. “Honey it’s old seeing as he had his first child at seventeen, and that baby had
his
baby at seventeen and then you finds out his granddaughter is pregnant! You know what that means?”

“That they’re a very fertile family?”

“No. My date is gonna be a great-granddaddy!”

“Oh my God!” I say. “That’s funny.”

“Uh-huhhhh…,” says Yvette with a lot of attitude.

*

As Yvette chats on the phone, my mind drifts back to the day we met. It was about eight months ago, when I showed up here to volunteer for what I intended to be only a short while. I ended up staying six extra months, all the while wondering when they’d offer me a salary. Two of the teen mothers had done a complete turnaround since
I came into their lives and the other girls requested me when things went down. One was a pretty sad case, always writing in an imaginary journal that I found on the underside of her dresser drawer secured with duct tape. The girl wrote that she dreamed of killing off her family. Her mother was dying of cancer, her father went to look for a cure and got murdered at the corner store, while her brother drowned in the bathtub because he’d been left home alone. Then she’d say that after they all had died, she lived happily, riding off on the back of a unicorn.

That’s when the Head of the Department offered me “a dollar above minimum wage. It’s the best we can do.”

“I’ll take it!” I proclaimed, not because the money was any good, but just because it meant they took me seriously.

It was around the same time I met Yvette. “Hi, I’m here about volunteering,” I chirped like a naïve fool through the bullet-proof glass. Another black woman with a Pucci-esque turban around her head gave me the once-over. Her two phone lines rang, she held up a “wait a second” sign with her perfectly polished French-manicured acrylic nails. Several heavy silver charms dangled from her wrist. She transferred the two calls and then looked me in the eye. “Did you fill out the online form?” She sounded as if she hoped to trip me up instead of hiring me.

“Yes, I did it two weeks ago, remember? You were going to run a background check on me. Did you do that?” I asked.

She ignored my question. “Have a seat and I’ll call upstairs,” she said curtly, with a new tone that sounded like she was doing
me
the favor even though I was the one volunteering. As she picked up the receiver all her other lines rang like the bells in a
Venetian steeple calling parishioners to prayer. She seemed unaffected by the ringing and moved about her station slowly. I couldn’t tell if it was lazy, overworked, or utterly bored.

I took a seat in a row of plastic chairs mounted to the wall, underneath a poster that talked about the importance of being checked for STDs. A young woman who sat next to me jostled a cute African-American baby on her knee. I smiled. She shot me a look that seemed to say, “I have to be tough because I can’t let fear creep in. I’m lost, I’m beat, and I’m broke, but I can stay tough.” That look pierced me to the core. It was enough to keep me from staring at the rest of the women, so I searched the walls covered in birth control announcements and welfare programs.

Birth mothers, real mothers, natural mothers, or biological mothers - all the same name for the same woman though maybe some of these were adoptive mothers or foster mothers. And then it hit me. I was a step mother. Of all the kinds of mothers that existed stepmothers got the worst wrap of all.

“Libby Crocket?” said a dreadlocked Yvette with a clipboard. “This way.” She sized me up with that same “She’s white bread” look everybody was giving me. I suddenly understood what it felt like to be a minority.

I followed her down a long dingy hallway, my eyes darting into various doorways as we passed. We got to the end of the hall, and she pushed a button next to an elevator that looked as if it might be about to plummet into the shaft below.

“Gosh, I said,” stepping in and trying to calm myself by making light of it. “This elevator is so old. Wonder when it last had an inspection.” I smiled at her and she stared
me down with a stone-cold expression. Okay, great, I’ve offended her about her elevator, but eventually she’d have to warm up, wouldn’t she?

“Yvette,” she finally announced sternly.

“Oh, yes.” I smiled, “Libby Beal Crockett.” I extended my hand. “Happy to meet you, Yvette.” But she didn’t take it, so my hand flopped back down to my side.

“Why does a successful journalist like you want to work at a shelter?” she asked.

“To give back?” I said. Is this a test? Is that a good answer?

She just kept looking at me, and the looking was making me nervous. But not as nervous as her silence.

“I’m just a mom. Daughters are both grown now,” I began. “We lived in suburbia our whole lives, Cape Cod, on the ocean – far cry from what I imagine you’re used to seeing. I miss my girls. I miss them bringing home their high school friends who trusted me with their secrets, and we’d all hang out on the sofa and talk and...” Gradually my nervousness disappeared. I could feel my sincerity shine through. What was I afraid of? My intentions were good. She had to sense that. I exhaled from deep in my diaphragm and said, “You know Yvette, I remember having one of these nights at the dinner table. Three girls joined us. My daughters were always bringing somebody home for dinner - one friend who ran away, one who got pregnant, even one who had bulimia. I listened to their stories over the second and third helpings, and this feeling came over me that I didn’t have a degree in psychology, but I had a gift for just listening to them. And I got the sense that nobody else did. That’s all they wanted - just somebody to listen and to hear their pain, validate them. Those girls, every one of them, for some weird reason, felt that they could tell me anything. I wasn’t there to judge them, just to care and listen.”