Opening Belle (7 page)

“Hey, I don't believe you never rode a skateboard before,” he yelled after me. “Nobody skates like that her first day out.”

I hadn't exactly lied to Bruce, but I hadn't told him I was a decent snowboarder and a lot of the movement is the same. I didn't tell him because some part of me wanted to impress him, wanted to actually flirt with a guy I had absolutely nothing in common with.

I climbed a staircase to get ready to drop into a half-pipe. Something was overpowering me. I felt a ridiculous high from the danger while Bruce just stood with folded hands, either daring me or incredulous that I would do something so stupid. I had no business being on a half-pipe, with no shoes, no helmet, and on a little kid's board, but I felt nothing but brave and something bordering euphoric. Batman wasn't so sure.

“Not sure you should take this your first day out.”

The boys had lined up to watch.

“Don't give in to peer pressure,” Bruce continued. “Twelve-year-old dudes are not your peers.”

“Whatever,” I said, “I live in New York,” as if this actually meant I was badass or something.

“Well, you want to drop into this one fast and then move horizontally to slow your speed.” Batman looked generally concerned. I'd done this in the snow. I was about to blow his mind.

Just as I dropped into it he shouted, “I live in New York too.”

There's a terrific difference between hitting snow and hitting cement. With no boots, or any footwear at all, I got a scraping that was a confusing blur of which body part was hurt more. When I stopped spinning, I mostly felt relief, glad that I had movement everywhere and confused that my butt felt like it was smack on the cement with no fabric between us. After the relief of being alive passed, everything started to hurt.

“Did I hit my head?” I asked nobody. “ 'Cause I don't think I hit my head.”

Bruce was everywhere, several Bruces in fact, and it was hard to tell what he was doing to me. He kept telling me I was okay, which I knew. He told the boys to get the fuck away 'cause they kept saying things like “Holy shit” over and over. I said something like “Don't curse at little kids,” which made him laugh, but then his dude-who-stands-arms-folded-outside-the-front-door-of-an-Abercrombie-store face crinkled in real concern again, and the shirt that I so admired back in the conference room was off him and getting pulled up my legs.

“What are you doing?” I said while being sharp enough to note the guy had one decent set of abdominals, and “Wooo,” because this time I could see his tattoo. It was the face of the Caped Crusader.

“What a girly tat.”

“Just try not talking,” he said. “You scared the hell out of me and I need a minute.”

He pulled me up into his arms and carted me off to his rental car, putting me across the backseat. He got a jug of water from somewhere and moved from cut to cut, dabbing at my wounds.

“Damn, you're really not hurt too badly.”

“It must have looked so funny,” I said, slightly giggly. I hadn't done anything dangerous in so long. I saw him grin.

“You are so competitive. What the hell was that about?”

“I just thought I could nail it and, you know, impress you.”

“Damn,” he said, looking at some bump on my forehead, just when I looked down and noticed I had no skirt.

“Where is my skirt?”

“You shredded it, you crazy shredder.” But he wasn't laughing. “I think I should take you to the hospital.”

“No way. No hospital for me.” Having no skirt on seemed like the funniest thing I'd ever heard of. I had no skirt. I laughed and laughed until I stopped seeing Bruces and I was left with only one. “I liked it more when there were four versions of your torso,” I said, which made his face crinkle again.

“Definitely taking you to the hospital.”

“No hospital!” I shouted, and then laughed again with the sudden thought,
Who doesn't wear a skirt to the hospital?

“It tore right up the back. Those little kids will remember this as the happiest day of their lives, seeing a woman with your ass in a thong. Holy Mother of God. Good thing I'm gay.”

I put my hands down around my bottom; everything was all covered up down there.

My heightened clarity was making me blanch. “Did I really just moon those boys?” I asked tentatively, thinking that gay guys have the nicest manners and man, did I have Bruce Wayne pegged all wrong.

“My shirt makes a good skirt,” he said kindly. “Let's go get you some ice.”

The problem with pulling up to the Bellagio Hotel, where the guest rooms number exactly 3,933, is that swooping bellmen and valet parkers need to keep things moving. They don't want to hear the story about how you lost your skirt. It was then that I saw that Bruce, a guy whose real last name was McElroy, didn't care what anyone thought. He hoisted me over his shoulder and carried me through the casino, now conveniently filled with hundreds of fellow bankers and clients—a bare-chested Adonis carrying me in my bloody white blouse, a purple welt across my forehead, a shirt making do as a skirt, and no shoes. It was our oil and gas analyst who started applauding when he saw me, and soon the whole place looked up from their pursuit of money to join in the clapping. That's how Bruce and I made our way to the elevators, to thunderous applause and whistles. These guys had never once seen me behave badly and here I was, after I finally went on a date, a one-hour date, and I returned bloodied and half-naked. They told that story for years.

I remember thinking in my semi-woozy state that the blinging money machines in the background were telling me that this time I had really hit the jackpot, 'cause as the elevator doors closed, Bruce whispered into my ear, “Was only kidding about the gay thing.”

I
T IS THURSDAY
. Thursday is the new Sunday in our house—as decreed by the higher power at our Park Avenue preschool. Thursday is the dreaded school chapel day.

Chapel goes something like this: children arrive dressed for the
Titanic
crossing—bows, cashmere sweaters, itchy tights, even crinoline. They shuffle with one or both of their parents into the chapel room, where a very talented group of teachers play and sing their heart out to happy God music. The main storyteller relates a sugar-infused Bible story such as David just wrestling Goliath or Moses taking a boating vacation, or my personal favorite—when Adam and Eve eat forbidden fruit, they are punished by having to wear fancy party clothes. Then we all sing songs, while sitting on the floor holding on to our squirming children, and wonder how we can possibly stand up again since our legs have gone to sleep.

There is an order to how the parents and children sit in chapel. The billionaires sit along the front sides of the room. They tend to be cooler than the rest of us and usually have only one parent in attendance. They don't have to care if anyone likes them so they don't show up just to be seen. The billionaires rarely wear business suits and seem to know it's all right to have a wife with a little paunch. They have hired enough help to insulate them from the annoying millionaire parents who are pining for a playdate. Instead they have their kids play with either fellow billionaire offspring or the full-scholarship kids, of which there are three. They seem genuinely enchanted by their children.

In the front of the chapel sit a group that Bruce, who used to hail from this land of exclusion, calls the “PA Ladies,” the not-employed-out-of-the-house, Park Avenue mothers. The school thinks PA stands for “parents association.” These are the wives of the millionaires who want to hang with the billionaires. They feel the need to have two adults frame their three-foot kid and they work the crowd like a networking slam. They titter back and forth with their grown-up friends while insisting their kids remain quiet, making a low-level noise that's distracting. They give their children the names of expired ancestors such as Baxter, Ford, and Wyeth. Not coincidentally, some are also the names of New York Stock Exchange companies. Their men wear sharp suits and smell good, and their women wear triple-ply cashmere tops tossed over super-tight low-riding jeans. Their abdominals that occasionally peek from beneath their sweaters reveal nothing about having had multiple children because they only stay pregnant for eight months, induce early, have a Victoria's Secret C, which is the cesarean combined with a tummy tuck, before returning to their two-hour daily workouts. Their shoes tend to be expensive, with delicate high heels that rarely hit pavement, and they have jewelry usually purchased from each other. They are the peer group of my coworkers' wives and they look at me either with pity for not marrying one of their tribe or with what I believe is the bad-mother glare, like they know something about my kids that I don't. It doesn't help that my daughter's contribution to the “Whose Mommy Am I?” bulletin board contains a drawing of a straggly haired lady with text transcribed from her mouth stating, “My mommy only likes to read the
Wall Street Journal.
” The other darlings' pictures state, “My mommy reads
Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!
” or “
Goodnight Moon.
” Who is that sucky mommy who only reads the
Journal
? Needless to say, we don't socialize too much.

Toward the back of the room are the working schlumps—the oddballs, including me and three other moms in business wear. We tote oversized bags with electronic gear all set to silence. We sit on the carpeted floor with the most difficulty, given the way we are dressed, and we try our hardest to not check our phones during chapel time. We don't necessarily want to hang with the billionaires but wouldn't mind living like them.

The other parent type that sits with us are the one-offs. There's one jock mom clad in spandex who pushes a double stroller from somewhere far away and begins each day looking exhausted. There is the token overweight mother who wears orthopedic sandals with socks—either a woman completely comfortable in her own skin, or someone who has totally waved the white flag of surrender. Who can compete with this crowd? Also with us sit two former rock stars who aren't aging well, three adopted girls from China who live on 5th Avenue, and the two African American students of the school: one has a dad who is the CEO of a media company and one is the son of another student's chauffeur.

Every Thursday, as I did with Kevin and now do with Brigid and Owen, I commit my skirt-suited bottom to a piece of floor in the back of the room with the rest of the misfits. We are happy there.

How the McElroy family ever ended up in such a fancy school, being neither blue-blooded, famous, nor rich in New York City terms, is another story. The old adage that it is easier to gain admission to Harvard than to an elite Manhattan preschool is weirdly true.

If your child is to be accepted to a Manhattan private preschool, an application has to materialize first. There is one day of the entire year that this can happen, provided you have access to multiple phone lines and at least one decent secretary, because you have to call and request one of a limited number of applications. I had an able intern work the phones that first Monday after Labor Day, and after seven hours of dialing, he produced nine applications for the McElroy family. This little exercise is just for the new people. Should your uncle Winston or grandma Hitchcock be a legacy, you're in. Our school gives out three hundred applications for thirty-four spots each year; 90 percent are sibling or legacy spots, leaving about three or four openings to compete for about a 1 percent acceptance rate.

Fifth Avenue Preschool is know as the most difficult to get into. We applied, and given I had no connections, I put zero effort into an impossible situation. On the way to the interview, we got caught in traffic moving at the rate of sludge. I jumped out of the cab, ran the remaining twenty blocks, arrived sweaty, panting, and slightly late. Bruce brought up the rear carrying Kevin piggyback. The director made no eye contact with my cute-as-hell Kevin, my non-billionaire husband, or me. Instead she seemed fixated on the V of sweat that was forming at the top of my breasts and showing itself magnificently through the silk of my blouse. In her eyes, I felt we were the urban version of trailer trash and we were shown the door in fifteen minutes. In my haughty, defensive, and naïve way,
Not a problem
, I thought,
Kevin will go to our local YMCA preschool.

When we received exquisitely worded rejection letters for not only that preschool but also the other eight that Kevin applied to, including the Y, Bruce and I felt like terrible parents. I had panicked ideas about quitting my job and homeschooling my kids but Bruce pointed out that first, we would have very little income, and second, it is a tad early to throw in the towel on the whole education game when a three-year-old gets rejected.

I revisited all the materials and pored over lists of board members at each school. Surely I knew someone in this town. And I did. The president of that fancy-pants Fifth Avenue Preschool board was none other than Henry Thomas Wilkins III. My ex-fiancé, Henry. The guy who left me on the street. I didn't dare call him. No way. I had made a vow never to speak with him again. No way. Well, maybe.

After seven years of being madly in love, we parted and never spoke another word to each other. I never trolled his name on the Internet; I unsubscribed to my college alumni magazine and broke up with all our mutual friends. When I want to clean my slates, I do it with bleach. The months and months in a black pool of hurt seemed long ago now—buried in some cavern of the heart that modern medicine could never find. Had enough time finally passed for me to pick up the phone?

I talked this over with Bruce, the guy who had made me laugh after Henry was gone. Surely he would agree I should never call regardless of what it meant for preschool admission.