Postcards From Last Summer (28 page)

“B
ehold, the Diaper Genie—magical processor of poop!” Skeeter Fogarty lifted the plastic contraption, which reminded me of a lunar space module for a mouse, and placed it on the table with a grin. The presents had been opened, the sparkling cider served, and most everyone at Darcy's baby shower had finished eating, and the conversation paused now as Skeeter captured the guests' attention. “I shall demonstrate. God knows, I've packed enough of these with my kids' diapers. Does anyone here have a doody?”

“I do!” His brother Johnny pressed his right hand over his chest. “I was a Boy Scout. I promised to do my duty, every day.”

“Not that kind of doody, you bonehead.” Skeeter rolled his eyes. “We'll have to improvise. Okay, so what else can we stuff in? Old socks? Styrofoam packing chips? Mrs. McCorkle's Irish meatballs? Just kidding, Mrs. Mick. Okay, so you start by opening the hatch here, stuff in the baby's poopy diaper, though in this case these packing peanuts will work just fine. Press 'em in as far as you can—really get your arm in there. Then you put this little top on, twist and . . . voila! No smelly diapers in sight!”

People clapped and laughed.

“But wait!” Skeeter interrupted.

“There's more!” Johnny added.

“The next time you got a doody diaper, you pop it in, twist the top, and just go about your business.” He demonstrated with balled-up gift wrap, repeating three more times. “Easy as that, folks. And then, here's my favorite part, the final product.” Skeeter opened the hatch on the bottom of the Diaper Genie and pulled out a string of white plastic bulges. “Sausage links.”

“Only it's not really sausage,” Johnny added. “So don't eat it.”

“Stanky! Who'd want to eat lumps of baby poo?”

“You called it a sausage. Lots of people eat sausage links. I love those little half-smokes.”

“Speak for yourself,” Skeeter said to his brother. “Personally, I like my links full size, if you know what I mean . . .”

“Okay, guys, let's keep it clean,” Steve McCorkle interrupted, taking the diaper machine from Skeeter and walking it over to the heap of gifts.

“Who invited them?” I asked Ma as I stacked empty paper plates.

“Everyone is welcome at the McCorkle house, you know that.” My mother laughed at the demonstration as she adjusted the brakes on the Rolls Royce of strollers and moved it behind the couch. “You boys are too much!”

“I have a trick I can do, if anyone can loan me a fifty dollar bill. Anyone interested?” Skeeter announced, but people shook their heads. “Oh, come on. What have you got to lose, besides fifty bucks?”

Watching them joke around, I felt a sore spot for Bear. Of all Steve's friends, why was he the one who'd left town and shacked up with some girl in Hawaii? “Bear's got an island bride,” Skeeter was saying one day in the lineup, much to my alarm. “He truly is the Great Kahouna.” When I went to Steve for verification, he just shrugged. “I don't know. I think he would have mentioned if he got hooked up with her. Why? Did you want to send a blender or something?”

It would be two years, this September.

Sure, I had moved on, and I was dating a really great guy now, but I still missed Bear. Maybe because we'd been friends, too.

“I hope you boys appreciate all the work that went into this affair.” My mother pretended to scold Skeeter as he helped himself from the buffet table. “My Irish meatballs included.”

I grabbed an empty tray and headed into the kitchen. “At least we managed to keep them out until after all the gifts were opened,” I told Tara, who was gathered at the kitchen table with her boyfriend, John Sharkey. They sat across from Milo and Darcy, the four of them lapping up the last of the Coney's Banana Flambé that I had made for the group.

“I like this new tradition of having men at baby showers,” Ma said as she rinsed glasses in the kitchen sink. “In my day, it was all women, and the amount of oohs and aahs over each little pacifier that was opened was enough to put a person in sugar shock.”

“I think that's how showers still go in my family, Mrs. McCorkle,” Sharkey said. Tara had met attorney John Sharkey through her father almost six months ago, and much to Mr. and Mrs. Washington's delight, one date had evolved into a steady relationship. I found Sharkey very entertaining, always regaling us with tales of people he'd helped and injustices he'd righted. An active proponent for equal rights, Sharkey had emerged over the years as a spokesman for African Americans at rallies and marches, boycotts and fundraisers. While Tara agreed with his mission in theory, she had confided to us that he sometimes made her feel guilty for not being as involved in the campaign as he was. Today he was in fine form.

“In my family,” he went on, “men are kept away from the business of child rearing, and that's fine by me. My sisters have had three babies in the last five years, and they wouldn't let me within a mile of the baby showers. That's female business.”

“And did the dads help in the delivery room?” Tara asked.

“You kidding me? They want nothing to do with it. My brother-in-law, Vince, he thought he'd step up and help my sister out, but one look at Mother Nature and he was out. That brother went down—all two hundred pounds of him.”

Ma and I exchanged an amused look. “I hope I can hold it together for you, Darcy,” I said. Darcy had asked me to be her labor coach, and we'd been attending childbirth classes together—a new experience for both of us. We practiced the breathing techniques in class with a great deal of skepticism. One day Darcy even raised her hand and asked, “Can't we all just get a whopping dose of pain meds?”

“Just make sure you're there,” Darcy told me now. “I'm not going to be very kind when some nurse tells me to blow tiny breaths and forget that my body is being torn in half.”

“Can we not go there?” Wincing, Milo dropped a fork onto his empty plate. “I swear, men just aren't built to tolerate thoughts like that.”

“I'm with you, Milo,” Sharkey agreed. “When I'm a father, I'll be quite content to wait outside with a box of cigars.”

“You're so old school,” Tara teased him.

He pushed away from the table and untucked his tie from his shirt pocket. “You got that right. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going out front to talk about manly things. Baseball and circular saws. Not to mention Brownie Beaver. My nieces will be devastated if I don't get an autograph.” Elle was outside with her boyfriend Ricardo, who played a beaver on
Woodchuck Village,
a PBS show that was gaining popularity among preschool kids.

“He's not in costume,” Milo told him, “but look for the tall, winsome gentleman who could be Antonio Banderas's twin.” Milo also worked with Ricardo, as Elle had brought him into the studio a few months ago to assist the set builders and he'd worked his way up to assistant set designer.

“Ask him to sing you the one about Beaver's teeth-brushing tips. It's very cute,” I said.

Sharkey headed out the screen door, adding, “I live for it.”

“Aw, he's a keeper,” Ma crowed. “Very polite.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Mick,” Tara said.

“Ma, you like every boy who comes around here.” I was careful to reserve my own comments as I removed a tray of cheese tarts from the oven and set them on the stove to cool. Zack and I had gone out with Tara and Sharkey a few times, for dinner and drinks, and I'd found the man just a little too flashy and full of himself for the judicious Tara. Everywhere we went, he tried to monopolize the conversation with stories about cases he'd taken pro bono. He insisted on ordering apple martinis for everyone, then stuck Zack and me with the bill.

“If a man has good manners, I admit I'm a pushover,” my mother admitted.

“He's got my vote, Tara,” Darcy said, pushing herself up from the table. “Okay, I'm going to go out there and act maternal again. Madonna's got nothing on me.”

Milo followed her. “I'm going with you. Time to say my good-byes if I'm going to meet my friends on Shelter Island.”

Steve passed them on his way in and went straight to the tray of tarts. “I love these things,” he said, grabbing one.

“They're for the guests!” I insisted.

“So? I'm a guest, Gidget. Man . . . this is hot.” He juggled it over to the table and took a seat beside Tara. “Hey, T. What's new in the world of politics?”

She shrugged, a light in her dark eyes. “Same old bureaucratic bullshit.”

“Sounds tedious. You still thinking about a career change?”

“She already took her LSAT,” I butted in. “Columbia Law wants her in the fall.”

“I've been accepted there,” Tara said, her eyes on Steve. “But it's not like I was their number-one draft choice or anything.”

He nodded. “So it'll be law, like the old man.”

“Yeah, the apple falls near the tree. I know it's boring, but I think it's a good match for my skills.”

“It's a great match.” Steve broke the tart in two and held one steaming half up to his lips. “You deserve better than what you've got. I mean, in the senator's office.”

My eyes went wide at the obvious chemistry between them. Steve was flirting, and Tara was flirting right back at him.

“You should give me a call sometime, in the city,” he was saying. “Maybe we could hook up for lunch or something.”

“Maybe . . .” She glanced over at the screen door, obviously thinking of Sharkey. “Did you meet my boyfriend? John Sharkey. He's a civil rights attorney.”

“Heard about him,” Steve said. “But who hasn't? His face is on the evening news every time there's an allegation that someone farted in the wrong direction.”

“Steve!” I said.

“All I ask for is a modicum of manners . . .” Ma shook her head. “My own children . . .”

But Tara was laughing. “I agree, New York's flatulence statutes are simply archaic.”

Steve swiped another cheese tart and headed into the living room. “So call me sometime.”

“What was that about?” I asked Tara as I dished the tarts onto a platter.

Tara laughed. “I really don't know.”

“Flirtation is harmless,” Ma said, drying a bowl.

“But you've got Sharkey,” I said.

“And you've got Zack,” Tara said. “And Elle is in love with Ricardo, and Darcy is with Kevin . . . some of the time.” Darcy was less than enchanted with Kevin's position as a New York City firefighter, a job he'd embraced wholeheartedly, loving the excitement, the hero potential, the camaraderie of the firehouse. I suspected it was probably a very good thing for Kevin to be far from his father and his Hamptons crowd, but all Darcy could see was that he was working in a civil service job, living in an apartment on Staten Island. “Staten Island . . . didn't they secede from the rest of New York City? Aren't they part of Bayonne or Jersey or something?” Although Darcy focused on criticizing his choices, I suspected the real issue was that he kept pushing her to marry him, and she wasn't comfortable with that idea.

I wasn't sure if Darcy and Kevin belonged together, but for now, it was kind of fun to see my friends paired off with guys. “Finally, a summer when we're all dating someone,” I said. “And professional guys. Lawyer, actor, stockbroker, and firefighter. I feel so grown-up.”

 

Although I had planned to stay behind and help Ma clean up while my friends went ahead to Elle's house, my mother pushed me out, insisting that she had plenty of help from her neighbor Nancy and two other friends who'd seemed happy for an excuse to get together. “You just scoot and let the old crones handle this,” Ma said. “Besides, your boyfriend doesn't seem to know anyone in the group.”

“Zack isn't shy,” I assured her. We'd met at a Hamptons party a few weeks ago, where Zack was impressed that I actually stripped down to my bikini and jumped in the pool when temperatures soared to triple digits (as opposed to the other women, who sat around wilting but didn't dare ruin their makeup and hair). He'd challenged me to a race, and I'd almost beat him in the backstroke heat. “You're good,” he'd told me that afternoon. I'd smiled and, surprising even myself, zinged him with, “You have no idea how good I can be . . .” And we were off and racing into a relationship.

Back at Elle's, everyone had settled in around the pool, recuperating from too much food as Prince's “1999” played over the pool speakers. “Whoever thought we'd be hearing this song in 1999?” I said as Zack and I crossed the patio. “When it came out, it seemed the year would never arrive.”

Zack squinted at me. “What were you, like two?”

Darcy sat at the edge of the pool, swirling her feet in the water while Kevin paced behind her. Obviously, they were arguing again, but no one dared get into that. Elle and Ricardo sat under an umbrella table with earphones hooked into her laptop, picking songs from CDs to make a party mix of music. Tara and Sharkey looked every inch the
Ebony
couple in their straw hats and dark sunglasses, reading quietly and sipping Sharkey's favorite apple martinis.

One look at the complacent pool scene was all it took to send Zack into a twitch. “We need to do something. All this sitting around is getting to me. How about a jog on the beach? Or a round of tennis? Your friend was just saying that no one uses her tennis court.”

I agreed to a set of tennis, though I knew he'd win handily. Zack was extremely aggressive and competitive—assets when it came to trading on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, annoyances during a friendly game of tennis.