Al’s Blind Date: The Al Series, Book Six (10 page)

I looked at Al. She pretended to be dozing.

“Pretty good, huh?” I said.

“What's a belly band?” Al asked, with her eyes still closed.

“It's what they used to put around a newborn baby's belly to make sure the belly button didn't fall off and get lost,” I said.

“I never heard of such a thing,” Al said.

“Just because you never heard of it,” I said, “doesn't mean it doesn't exist.”

The bus slowed for our stop.

“Maybe the toddler furs are on sale today,” Al said. “Let us hasten inside and see what's up.”

“Which way are the toddler fur coats?” we asked the man who paces back and forth in front of the store and opens taxi doors for customers.

He pointed upward. I think he was giving us the finger, but Al said, “Thank you, sir,” to put him in his place.

First thing we saw was a Ferrari in kid's size that actually runs.

“How much?” we asked the man standing guard.

“Fifteen K,” he said.

“What's K mean?” Al said.

“Thousand,” the man said.

“Charge it,” we said, and zipped up on the escalator.

We checked out the gold-plated carousel and a nine-foot-tall stuffed giraffe. We ogled the black-walnut rocking horse and the miniature baby grand piano. But we never did find the toddler minks.

When we'd had our fill, we went back down and out.

“Unreal,” I said.

“Pure sci fi,” Al agreed.

“Let's go check the Russian Tea Room,” I suggested. The Russian Tea Room is close to F A O Schwarz. It's a celebrity hangout where the celebs chow down on caviar and blinis.

“There's Woody Allen!” I hissed.

“Where?”

“There. Just going into the Russian Tea Room. Don't speak to him, though. He gets very upset when fans say ‘Hi, Woody Loved your last picture.' He likes to travel incognito. That's why he always skulks around with his collar pulled way up.”

“Why doesn't he just eat lunch at home, then?” Al said.

“Polly said she saw Donald Trump coming out once,” I said.

“Phooey on Donald Trump,” Al said. “Let's shoot for a biggy like Jackie Onassis or Andy Rooney.”

“How about Shirley Temple?” I said. “I read she was autographing copies of her autobiography this week. I wouldn't mind seeing her. She's about our age, you know. I bet we'd have lots in common.”

“You're crazy,” Al said. “She's old. She's a grandmother and everything.”

“I saw her on the silver screen only last week,” I said. “She looked pretty young to me.”

“I understand she wears a wig,” Al said.

We hung around, but Woody didn't show. Neither did any other celebrity.

“You want to go to Carnegie Hall?” I said.

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Al said. Then, before I could beat her to it, she said, “Practice, baby, practice.”

“That's as old as the hills,” I said. “I heard my grandfather say that years ago.”

“If we had any moola,” Al said, “we could take a hansom cab through the park.”

“People always stare at people in hansom cabs,” I said. “I'd hate having all those people staring at me, thinking I was a rich tourist or something.”

“Maybe the Rockefeller Plaza skating rink is open,” Al said. “We could go down and watch them twirl.”

“Too early,” I said. “Anyway, I hate to skate there. I fall down too much and everybody stares. It's embarrassing.”

“Hey, you're getting a real complex about people staring at you, kid,” Al told me.

“Yeah, I know.”

“All right, sports fans, let's try Radio City Music Hall, see if we can get in for the Christmas show,” Al said.

“It hasn't started yet, dummy,” I said.

“We might have to give up and go home,” Al said.

“Let's walk,” I said. It had stopped raining.

We walked east, across to Park Avenue. Park Avenue's fun to walk up, it's so sort of snazzy.

“I read that when Shirley Temple was fourteen the Hollywood moguls wanted to keep her a child star as long as they could, so they bound her bust,” Al told me.

“No kidding?” I said. “That's a good idea. Why don't we try that?”

“I thought we already had,” Al said.

We laughed until we both came down with the hiccups.

“Hey, look!” I grabbed Al's arm. “I don't believe it. Twice in one day. It's Woody again.”

Al squinted into the distance.

“You may be right,” she said. “Let's say hello.”

“Hi, Woody,” we said. “Loved your last picture.”

The little man in the big glasses looked startled, then alarmed. Then he pulled up his collar even further and scuttled off, incognito.

Sixteen

Saturday my father and I tossed a coin. He got to do the vacuuming and the marketing and I wound up with the bathrooms. This is not uncommon when we flip a coin. Sometimes I wonder about that coin, about whether it's on the level.

Teddy was the designated duster.

My grandfather called and said he'd like to take us out to dinner.

My mother said she'd love to but how about next week.

My mother's sister, Tess, called from Connecticut. When she found out my mother had been sick, she offered to come and stay to help out.

“I'll send the kids to their father,” Tess said. “Serve him right.”

“How's things up in Mafia land?” Teddy hollered over the wire to Craig, the know-it-all cousin. When Teddy talks to Connecticut, he acts as if he's got a bad connection to Istanbul.

“Had any good drug busts lately?” Teddy shouted across the miles. I didn't hear what Craig reported.

Al came over and I made cream-cheese-and-olive sandwiches. On whole-wheat bread. It's important to use whole-wheat bread.

“My mother said to tell your mother that if there was anything she could do, let her know,” Al said.

“Know something?” I said. “We've got the perfect excuse. We call up Sparky's mom and tell her we can't come tonight on account of we have to stay home and take care of my mother.”

“Saturday night is the loneliest night in the week,” Al said. “It's also blind-date night. If I don't do it now, I never will. It's a challenge. It's practice. I've got my outfit all planned. I'm playing it straight. This nephew strikes me as a straight guy. I'm wearing my lavender sweater, my plaid skirt, and on my feet—guess!” She let fly with a piercer.

“Your orange hightops?” I guessed.

“My Sparky's-revenge shoes,” she said. She said she wanted to see whether Sparky remembered those shoes, and that if he did and he repeated his barf-pee routine, she was planning on poisoning him and burying him in an unmarked grave.

“I'm planning on wearing my taffeta party dress,” I said.

Slowly, Al shook her head at me. “That's being overdressed,” she told me. “We do not want to go to this fracas overdressed, thereby revealing that we expect great things of it. We want to be underdressed. My mother, who is in fashion, as you know, says it's always better to underdress than over.”

We thrashed through my limited wardrobe awhile.

“My taffeta dress is the only garment I have that
does
anything for me,” I said.

“Forget the taffeta dress,” Al commanded me. “It's the light of intelligence shining from your eyes that'll get him in the long run. Nothing else matters.” At last, we settled on my denim skirt and my Esprit shirt, which my mother bought from a street vendor on Sixth Avenue. It's phony Esprit, but it's sort of cute. In a trendy way.

“Where are you two bound for?” my father asked from behind his newspaper.

“We're going to meet Sparky's mom's nephew,” I told him. He didn't turn a hair.

“It's a blind date,” I added, testing him.

He put his paper down. “A blind date? Are you old enough for a blind date? I thought they were out of style. I remember a blind date I had when I was in college.”

Al and I looked at each other. My father? On a blind date? In college?

“I was a very young freshman,” he said. “Very naive. Still wet behind the ears, as my father used to say. My roommate had a date with a girl he knew from home and he fixed me up with a friend of his date's. I even got a haircut in anticipation. He said she was a hot number.”

My father looked at us.

“That's the way young men referred to women in those days,” he said. “I apologize for any sexism you can find in that statement.”

My father really does track at times, I was glad to discover. That's one of the things that makes him so lovable. Just when you think he's out of it, he jumps back in.

“Anyway,” he continued, “we drove to the meeting place and I was so nervous I told my roommate I couldn't go through with it. He said it was too late to turn back now. He was right. The girls were waiting. They were sitting down. I remember thinking my date had terrific legs. She was also the better looking of the two. To my eyes, she was very glamorous, very sophisticated.

“Well, when she stood up, she towered over me. Of course, she wore high heels, but even flat footed she towered over me. We were supposed to go to a dance. My date was all dressed up in something frilly. She was a very kind girl, though. Because, without any commotion, she let me know it was fine with her if we stayed put. Or maybe she couldn't face dancing with me at all. Whatever the reason, it turned out all right. We parted friends.”

“I never saw her again,” my father said, a little wistfully, I thought.

“That was a very romantic story,” Al said afterward.

“I thought it was sad,” I said. “I felt bad for him.”

“Your father is a very romantic man,” Al told me.

“You think so?”

“Extremely so,” Al said firmly.

I made a mental note to ask my mother about this.

“What time is it?” I asked Al.

“Well, last time I looked, it was six-oh-one,” Al said. She checked her Swatch and said, “It is now six-oh-four.”

“We don't want to look eager and get there too early,” I said.

“We can always eat and run,” Al said. “I'm starving. No offense, but that cream cheese and olive wasn't all that filling.”

“I would've made you another if you'd asked,” I said. “Let's go.”

“Wait just one sec,” Al said, and she made one more trip to the bathroom.

“Blind dates are very nerve-wracking,” she told me on her return.

At six-oh-twelve we rang Sparky's mom's bell.

We laid our ears against the door, listening. There was lots of noise coming from inside.

“It's probably an orgy,” Al told me, smoothing her hair.

“Yes?” The person who at last answered the door had eyes like two poached eggs, and when he talked I noticed his Adam's apple bobbed like kids going for apples on Halloween.

Al positioned herself behind me, ready to bolt if this guy turned out to be her blind date. I felt her tugging nervously on my skirt, telling me it was time to split.

What the heck. We'd been invited, hadn't we?

“Hi,” I said.

“Whom shall I say is calling?” the person with the Adam's apple asked.

“Are you the butler?” I asked.

Al turned to me and said, “Whom are we, anyway?”

“We're the girls from the elevator,” I said.

Sparky's mom swept into view, as if she'd been hiding behind the door.

“Oh, there you are!” she cried, happy to see us. “I thought you'd never get here.” She had on a skin-tight black jumpsuit and a huge gold necklace that came halfway down her chest and clanked noisily.

“Come meet Josh. He's dying to meet you. I've told him all about you two.” She took me by the hand and dragged me into the fray. I grabbed Al's hand and brought her along with me. If she thought she was going to escape at this stage of the game, she had another think coming.

My mother told me to check out the decor. She likes to know about colors of slipcovers, walls, rugs, et cetera. The room was so crowded it was hard to see much. I noticed an old woman with white skin and bright red hair, holding an unlit cigarette in a long holder and waving her long-nailed hands around. Others moved in what seemed like slow motion, laughing, talking, drinking, flicking ashes into the potted palms.

“Josh, darling! Did I promise you some lovely girls?” Sparky's mom sounded positively joyous. “Don't say I never do anything for you. Here they are.”

“Ta dah,” I heard Al whisper.

Josh reclined in a big chair, his legs draped over the arm. The first thing I noticed was his high-heeled cowboy boots. They were dark red, the color of old blood, and beautiful. He wore chinos and a button-down shirt. He didn't get up, only lifted a hand in greeting.

“Hey,” he said. “Have a seat.”

“I'm thirsty,” Al said.

“Of course you're thirsty,” Sparky's mom said, as if we'd traveled mile after dusty mile to reach this place. “Come with me and I'll show you where the refreshments are. Don't go away, darling,” she said to Josh, who looked as if he might fall asleep.

“He's so shy,” Sparky's mom said as we plunged through the crowd. “Be nice to him, will you? He needs attention, friends, love.”

“Who doesn't?” Al muttered under her breath.

“Just help yourselves,” Sparky's mom said. Then she turned to speak to someone and drifted out of sight.

“How tall is he?” Al asked me.

“In or out of his boots?” I said. “Have a shooter of Coke. You need sweetening.”

Al and I picked. We ate stuffed mushrooms, nachos, and crudités, which is French for carrot sticks.

“Maybe we better go back and talk to him,” I said after a while.

“Heck with that,” Al said. “Let him come and talk to us. Listen,” she said, frowning, “I have a hunch the guy might be a midget. I knew I should've checked out how tall he was before I got suckered into this mess.”