Pug Hill, page 8
chapter eleven
I Am Jan Brady
“Okay, so I’ll be sure to get out of here by six, six-thirty at the latest. I’ll pick up the rental car and then come to get you.”
Elliot is on the phone with Claire. It’s easy enough to know when he is on the phone with Claire because, as far as I can tell, she is the only person he ever talks to. But more than that, whenever he talks to her, his voice gets softer, so considerate, and his posture relaxes. I try not to listen. I stare through my magnifying visor at the lower left section of the red and try not to hear anything.
“See you soon,” I hear him say softly, in spite of my best efforts not to. And then, in spite of all my best efforts not to get busted again looking over at Elliot, I look up at him right then, just as he’s hanging up the phone. He looks up, and the instant I always dread, but also must always secretly want, is upon us. Our eyes meet, and I smile awkwardly. I am, for some reason, perhaps to quell the awkwardness, perhaps more to quell my curiosity, compelled to ask, in a way that I hope is cheerful, merely conversational, “So, you’re going on a trip?”
As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I realize that this was, of course, the wrong thing to ask, as asking it simply screams across the Conservation Studio, I WAS LISTENING TO YOUR PERSONAL PHONE CALL BECAUSE, TRY AS I MIGHT, I JUST CAN’T HELP MYSELF!
“Yeah,” Elliot says, “just for the weekend, we’re going fishing.”
Fishing, I think. In March, in the cold. It takes a moment for it to settle in, that Elliot may in fact be a cold weather outdoorsytype person. Thoughts race through my mind: this could in fact change everything; this could in fact set me free! But can I, right now, in fact deal with any more change?
“Cool,” I say, and though I know nothing at all about her, mostly because I have steadfastly avoided like the plague asking even the smallest of details about her, I need to know. “Does Claire like fishing?”
“Well,” he says, his beautiful green eyes bright, “she likes camping, but she doesn’t actually fish. She’s getting more into it though. She’s really psyched about it; she says this time she wants to learn how to gut fish.”
Two thoughts run through my mind. One: she lies. And, two: I could gut fish.
“Sounds fun,” I say and turn, defeated, back to my Rothko. In this past week, this first week of being single, I have learned that it is a hell of a lot harder being unrequitedly in love with Elliot from afar, now that I don’t have a boyfriend, a reason why we couldn’t be together even if there was no Claire, even if the love for Elliot was not so unrequited.
Also, this past week has gone by very quickly. Apparently, a week goes by much more quickly when there is a class called Overcoming Presentation Anxiety at the end of it. My plan for tonight had been to stop by Pug Hill before going to the first class. Though I know now that there is always the chance that the pugs won’t be there, I’m beginning to learn that, just maybe, that’s okay. I’m beginning to think that while for me it will always be more about the pugs, just like for Holly Golightly it was always more about the diamonds, the place itself holds some, if not quite a lot, of importance, too. There’s a reason Breakfast at Tiffany’s was not called Breakfast Anywhere There Happens to Be Lots of Diamonds. The Tiffany’s part, just like the Pug Hill part, is pretty important, too. Just think if it had been Breakfast in the Diamond District, think how much poetry, how much symbolism would have been lost.
I thought I’d go to Pug Hill after work, hang out there for a while and just try to chill out. I thought Pug Hill, even without any pugs, would be the best place to try to get ready for class; for the inevitable introducing of ourselves, saying our names and our occupations, all of this while very possibly standing in front of the room. I had it all planned out. I’d even brought along my fleece gloves, in case it was cold. It’s important, I often think, to have a plan, and what with the fleece and all, I had mine.
As I leave the museum, it’s a downpour. A downpour I was not at all aware of, having spent the day, as I spend so many of them, in the basement of unrequited love. The Conservation Studio, to protect the vulnerable paintings from light damage, is in the basement; the unrequited love part you know about. There are, to be fair, windows right up at the top, close to the ceiling, and even though it seems like it would be easy to tell if it was raining through basement windows, it’s actually never very clear.
I stand in the doorway of the staff entrance of the museum and look out at the rain pounding down on the plaza like darts. On a few different levels, it’s not looking so good. The plaza in front of the museum, while a great place to get a coffee, a pretzel, a black-and-white photograph, or even a bus, is not the best place to find an umbrella stand. I head back into the museum but I pass the Conservation Studio, I don’t want to go back there again today. I keep walking down the internal hallway, to the end of it, emerging at the far end of the Antiquities Wing. I pull my ID out of my pocket and slip it around my neck, turning right into the Met’s gift shop, open late, along with the museum because it’s a Thursday. I stand on line with so many other people, and think how something like this, me being out in the museum rather than always in its background, was how I met Evan. If only that hadn’t been a lie.
I buy a bright orange Metropolitan Museum of Art umbrella with my employee discount, wondering how many of these umbrellas I have stashed away at home, and if I always select orange umbrellas because my mother believes with some conviction that red heads should sooner die than be seen carrying or wearing anything orange. It clashes.
I exit through the grand front entrance of the museum. A glance at my watch reveals that in my plan, I had not left much extra time for walking the length of the museum and back, and then waiting on line in the store. There isn’t much time left now in which to go to Pug Hill. Even if I had, come to think of it, wanted to go there right after it turned dark. It’s the second time in as many weeks that it has been revealed to me that a good plan consists of more than just fleece.
I stand for a moment, up at the top of the great steps, and look out. It’s one of those great New York scenes, the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the rain. It’s a Woody Allen view, standing at the top of the stairs of the Met and looking down at Fifth Avenue. I love that about New York: all the great Woody Allen scenes you can pretend you are part of. I open up my orange umbrella; I walk down the steps and forget for a moment how much I am dreading the rest of the night.
Of course the thing with New York is that as soon as you are the star of your very own Woody Allen film still, you’re not. As I approach the entrance to the subway on Eighty-sixth and Lexington, the crowds get thicker and thicker, and the scenery gets vastly less poetic. All it takes in New York is a few blocks, a few minutes, and you’ve gone right from being Goldie Hawn in the opening scene of Everyone Says I Love You, all the way to Best Buy.
I put down my new orange umbrella, forget all about the Woody Allen movie I starred in so briefly, albeit only in my mind, and head down into the subway to catch the downtown train.
Twenty dread-filled minutes later, I emerge into the hustle and bustle of Union Square, about seventy blocks and a universe away from the uptown New York vista in the basement of which I spend most of my days. The downpour has not subsided at all, quite the opposite really; it’s that type of rain that comes sideways at you, that’s determined to drench you, no matter what.
I picture myself standing in front of a room full of strangers, saying, “Hi, my name is Hope,” maybe saying what my job is, and depending on the brutality of the teacher, maybe saying what brought me to Overcoming Presentation Anxiety class in the first place. And the self that I picture standing up there, in front of the classroom in my mind, she has an extra bit of confidence because she’s wearing nice shoes and her hair is straight. Good-bye to that, I think, looking down at the suede high-heeled boots that I wished I hadn’t worn. Good-bye, I feel I have to say again, because as I march on, past University Place and over to Fifth Avenue, I can literally feel my hair frizzing.
I’ll admit, I’m a person whose confidence does increase if I feel I’m looking good, and I’ll admit that for me that might be a bit of a vicious circle. See, in addition to having spent her career making rooms beautiful, my mother is also a person who has spent a lifetime having people see her from across those rooms and think that she is beautiful. My sister, Darcy, inherited this from her, the beauty along with the accompanying poise, the charm, the charisma, the ability to light up a room, and to always be the center of it. I didn’t.
All my life people have felt it necessary to tell me how beautiful my mother is, and how my sister is the spitting image of her, too. People seem to think this is a nice thing to say. People seem to think that your life must be filled with glamour simply because the people around you are so pretty, that everything is as shiny and bright and filled with laughter as a sitcom.
“You’re sister, Darcy,” people used to say to me, time and time again, “looks just like Marcia Brady.”
“Just like Marcia Brady,” they’d say. And you know what that made me; that made me Jan.
I wonder sometimes about where Jan Brady would be now. Not Eve Plumb the actress, but Jan Brady, the real Jan Brady, if her character had actually existed, had actually continued on, lived a life, not just in syndication, but out in the world. I hope she’d be fine and all, but part of me also thinks that maybe she’d be lighting up in a crack den somewhere, and if not that, at the very least, she’d be spending a tremendous amount of time in a therapist’s office. And you might think that sounds a bit rash, and you might think that maybe I’m getting a little carried away. I might be, I’ll give you that much, but I think what’s more likely, I think what makes so much more sense, is that it’s just really hard to understand what it does to you, growing up with a sister who is the new Marcia Brady. It gets to you. Really, so much more than you’d think.
Maybe it was all the thinking about being Jan Brady, something I try most of the time not to think about, but as I look at my watch, even though I thought I was going to be early, I am just barely on time. Finally inside the building, I dig in my dripping wet bag for the registration piece of paper I got in the mail. Everything is wet. I think how I hate the rain. And while that thought for me is so very true, I imagine it also must be so very unoriginal. I worry sometimes that a lot of things that are mine are that way. I locate the piece of paper and pull it out to double-check that my classroom is 502. It is. I dive through the elevator doors right as they close.
chapter twelve
How Awful Would It Be If This Thing Stopped?
I see room 502. The door is shut. I have that feeling in my stomach: that feeling that not only have I just done something wrong, but that also, I am about to. It’s a very high school-oriented feeling for me, and I can’t help but think, Why have I done this? But the reasons, I know, they are many and vast. The only choice I will let myself have is to turn the handle on the door and walk in.
I pause for a minute, just inside the door, and smile an apology to the teacher as she stops saying what she was saying and looks over at me, as does everyone else. The teacher smiles at me, really pretty nicely and I think that’s good that she did that, so at least I don’t instantly hate her.
All the chairs are organized in a horseshoe shape around the room; I sit down quickly and soggily in an empty chair, right at the end of the horseshoe. The moment I am situated, the moment I have wriggled out of my coat as inconspicuously as possible (not very), I realize I have chosen poorly. This is a bad chair. I don’t like this chair, how it is right on the end, so vulnerable. I stare at the surface of the desk part of my chair. The chairs, they’re all the kind of chairs with desks attached to them. Immediately, I start wondering if I’ve missed all the important stuff and will never quite catch up or (much better) if maybe I’m actually so late that I missed the whole introducing of oneself part. I look at my watch; I am only about four minutes late.
“Okay, so, I’m Beth Anne,” the teacher says and what I have just suspected crystallizes into clearness in front of me: I have not missed the introductions, or more importantly, I have not missed mine. I take a breath, I remind myself for what seems like the millionth time that there’s not going to be some sort of escape hatch that opens up for me at the last minute, that I’m really here, that I’m in for the long haul. Or at least for the next six weeks. I breathe out and move my head from side to side slightly, trying to relieve the mounting tension in my neck. I wonder how it can feel like it’s been such a long night already when it hasn’t even really started. I look to the blackboard just to be sure there isn’t any math there. There isn’t.
Beth Anne Nelson is written largely across the blackboard. Underneath it, slightly smaller, she has written, Overcoming Presentation Anxiety! The exclamation point, justifiably so, causes me concern. Yet the writing is so loopy, in such a big, sweeping script that it makes me want a drawing of a flower, or at the very least a smiley face, to follow it. I look to the woman standing before her girlish handwriting on the blackboard. She’s wearing a long, flowing skirt and a necklace of large brown shellacked beads. She wears her graying brown hair behind her in a long braid. I think her eyes seem kind. I wonder if what she is going to teach over the next six weeks will indeed unlock the secret of how to be normal. It’s a secret that’s been kept from me for so long. I tell myself I will pay attention to every word; I tell myself I will try my very best to embrace this.
But first, I have to check out my fellow public speaking-impaired classmates. I am concerned, of course, that there are only eight other people here. I double-check, thinking that maybe there are more. But no, there are only eight, and while you might think that eight is a good number because it’s not as hard to get up and speak in front of only eight people, that’s not true. If it’s hard to get up in front of a room and speak, I don’t think it matters if there are eight or eighteen or eighty people in it. It is hard no matter what. Trust me on this. I am nothing if not an expert in the field.
What causes me grave, grave concern is that eight people is actually not enough. The thing about eight is that, including me, it is still only nine. This could mean we all have to get up and make speeches in front of the class a lot more times than if there were, let’s say, twenty people, or even twenty-five. Are there not twenty-five people in all of New York City who need help overcoming presentation anxiety?
My inner math whiz, the one I’ve never come close to letting out, is stretching out inside of me. It’s raising its hand, and for some reason that I don’t fully understand, it’s doing somersaults as it tries to figure out how many people will have to give speeches each week. Two? Three? Four? And if there’s six weeks, then what’s the maximum amount of time we’ll have to spend giving speeches?
My inner math whiz flips over and disappears without answering any of the questions it posed. I think with dread that, worst case scenario, we could each have to stand up and give a speech every week. I don’t need to have an inner math whiz to figure out that I very well could be making a speech in front of all these people six times. Six times seems like an awful lot. I wonder if that’s what everyone is thinking? I wonder if they are looking around the room, in a similarly panicked, though much more mathematically organized frame of mind, trying desperately to figure out the same thing as me.
“Why don’t we all introduce ourselves?” Beth Anne says, freeing me from my fun with numbers. I snap back to the present, contemplate my position in the room and think, Oh no, I bet she’s going to start with me.
“Let’s start here,” she says to the guy right across from me, and really, thank God. I relax ever so slightly.
“I’m Lawrence,” he says, and I wonder if he hates his chair as much as I, right now, love mine. Lawrence, I’d say, is in his late forties. He lisps a little bit on the end of his name. That, along with the way he’s got his legs crossed in a very ladylike way, and the way he’s got his arm stretched out across the chair-desk with his wrist hanging off the end, makes me wonder, I hope not stereotypically, if he’s gay. I notice there’s a gold band on his finger.
“I’m Diana,” says a serene and peaceful-seeming woman in a wrap dress. Next to her are two women in pantsuits, their chairs are angled in toward each other, and they seem so similar, their pantsuits both so elegant and tailored. The way they keep looking up at each other makes me think they’ve come to the class together. I notice how nicely accessorized they are, one has a Marc Jacobs purse slung over the back of her chair.
“I’m Lindsay,” “I’m Jessica,” they say, just short of in unison. I envy their camaraderie, along with their outfits, as much as I am intimidated by it.
“Amy,” says the woman next to them. Her exhausted tone is matched perfectly by the expression of boredom she wears and her tight-fitting black sweater, black skirt, heavy wool tights and clunky boots. She has very short hair; almost white it is so blond. She has black roots, the kind that look deliberate, the kind of hairstyle that makes me feel even more un-hip than I generally do.
“Je suis, uh, I am Martine,” says a very thin blond woman with a French accent. Maybe it’s just the accent but she seems haughty, mean, hostile. And this has nothing to do with the accent, but I wonder if she’s anorexic and then, if she seems hostile because she’s hungry. Anorexics, I imagine, are generally hostile. I would be.
“I am Rachel,” says a woman with black frizzy hair and enormous breasts. Her eyes are very glazed over, a little freaky looking, if you ask me. And I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking that maybe I’m being jealous right now because it’s pretty much a toss up as to what I want more, to have enormous breasts or to be really skinny. But I’m not being jealous, I’m really just being descriptive, this is what they look like.
