Dating Big Bird, page 2
“You … are … my … Pickle!” I said, my face so close to hers, she became a giggling blur of fluffy hair and baby teeth.
“No way!” She grabbed my nose with one hand and tried to stick the fingers of her other hand into my mouth.
“Yes way!”
“No way! I’m not a pickle. I’m Nicole.”
I grabbed her cheeks and put my face up against hers. “Okay, then: Nose kiss!” I yelled.
“Nose kiss!” she yelled back.
We were both laughing so hard that before the one of us not wearing the diaper peed by accident, I reached for the book she’d picked out for me to read—Curious George Goes to the Hospital—and opened it up. Exhausted, we curled up next to each other as we turned the pages—me, for once, thinking only of my delight in her being there and not about how, in less than twelve hours, her perfect smooth chubby baby-flesh would be gone. But it didn’t take long before Nicole became distracted, restless—I was never quite sure if she actually listened to the stories when I read them to her or if she just enjoyed soaking up the attention of being read to—pushing the book away and sitting up to ask me a seemingly urgent question.
“Where’s your hud-band?”
I blinked. “My hud-band? I don’t have a hud-band,” I said without shame and with just enough lilt in my voice to even suggest pride.
“Do you have a Big Bird?”
“You mean, like, a boyfriend?”
She nodded.
I blinked several times.
Kind of.
Sort of.
In a manner of speaking.
It depended on how you defined boyfriend.
“No.”
Her forehead grew furrowed.
“Do you have a Elmo?”
Ditto my forehead.
“No.”
“Do you have … a Barney?”
“No.”
“Do you have … a Mickey Mouse?”
“No.”
“Do you have … Teletubbies?”
She stared at me, then shrugged her shoulders with her arms outstretched at her sides.
“Then what do you have?”
“I have nothing,” I exhaled, now thoroughly deflated and humiliated, not only by the naked horror of the word that had seeped out of my mouth but by the look in the Pickle’s eyes when I’d uttered it:
Pity.
“Auntie LaLa needs something to have.”
And before I knew it, she was climbing down out of the bed and heading over to the pile of stuffed animals Lynn had brought with them. When she turned back to me and handed me her Big Bird, it was with a child’s absolute conviction that loneliness and sadness could be made to disappear—just like that.
“Big Bird,” she said, “to sleep with Auntie LaLa.”
2
I did not always want to have a child.
For a while, the idea of procreating and reproducing and all that came with it was completely unappealing:
The stretch marks and weight gain and exhaustion and complete lack of privacy. And freedom. And time.
The mysterious pod-person personality-replacement that transformed previously normal women into Spalding Gray–type monologuists, carrying on at cocktail parties or in supermarket aisles about vaginas and episiotomies and effluvia of every sort and variation without any visible signs of embarrassment. Or irony. Or stopping.
The Jeeps and minivans and Portacribs and strollers and enormous shoulder-strapped survival bags stuffed with toys and dolls and stickers and puzzles and hundreds of little Ziploc Baggies filled with every imaginable contingency cereal and cookie and candy and fruit to prevent—or at least contain—public tantrums since all the new parenting theories seemed to denounce the previously accepted concept of no.
The desire to recognize traces of myself in a child’s face, to be reflected in a child’s eyes—to be reached for, cried for, needed at all times of the day and night—did not haunt me—did not occur to me, even—until three years ago. Before then, my vision of love and absolute connection and bliss—a man and me, frozen in time and space, in mid-breath, in mid-sentence, in mid-kiss—had always been the same.
My vision had never included a baby.
Or was the baby.
With or without a Big Bird.
That vision took longer to appear.
It took until I grew tired of myself and wished for the relief of distraction.
It took until the nights became too quiet and too lonely to bear.
It took until I laid eyes on my niece.
That’s when I knew.
When I knew I didn’t want to live without one.
Nothing had prepared me for what I would feel for her, that enormous wave of rapture that came over me the first time I laid eyes on her right after she was born.
Paul had called me at three in the morning from the hospital pay phone to give me the news, and while I was excited to be a first-time aunt, I had no idea that my life would be so completely changed.
What it was about her that captured me so, I’ll never know, since she had a big head and no hair and looked far more like my brother-in-law than my sister—or me—she had a round face instead of a long and narrow one; blue eyes instead of brown; white skin instead of olive—but capture me she did, right then and right there, that first time when I lifted her out of my sister’s arms and carefully draped her over my shoulder and felt her short shallow breath on the side of my neck.
Maybe it was because I finally had someone I could lavish attention on and love without restriction.
Or maybe it was simply the benign narcissistic thrill of being part of a child’s growing consciousness, of feeling that you are becoming and will remain a permanent fixture in their universe. Of needing to affect someone, to make a difference in someone’s life, to prevent the secret wound of loneliness and sadness from ever existing in them the way it exists in you. Whatever it was, my attachment to her became a certainty that grew stronger with every visit—as sitting and crawling turned to cruising and walking—as the gurgling sounds and monosyllables over the phone once a week turned into words and half sentences and little conversations and then, even, my name—albeit her version of it—I knew, with a sureness I had felt about little else in my life, that I would have to have my own child someday, some way, somehow.
Because for those three or four or five days every few months when we saw each other, my Pickle and I would be inseparable.
We’d eat together.
Read stories together.
Sleep together.
And wake up early together.
Behavior completely befitting two people in love.
Since It’s harder to be left than to be the one leaving, it was always worse for me when Lynn, Paul, and Nicole left after a visit, and the Waldorf wedding weekend was no exception. The quiet; the order; the overwhelming stillness where there had just been so much chaos and noise and movement was what I dreaded most.
Paul would want to be on the road by eight A.M., so I always took precautions the night before her departure to remove any reminders of the Pickle’s presence from my apartment: After she’d go to sleep, I’d put the books that we’d read over and over and over—Curious George, Stone Soup, Amelia Bedelia, Make Way for Ducklings—back on the shelf; I’d melt the red Jell-O down the sink and rinse out the bowl; I’d sweep the floor clean of cereal and cookie crumbs and M&M’s. That way, when I closed the door behind them, it was easier to pretend she had never been there at all. But there was always something left behind—a sock; a lollypop wrapper; a Cheerio stuck to the floor that I’d somehow missed; or the smell of soap and baby shampoo on my sheets and pillowcases, which I could hardly bear to launder away.
And when they’d gone—when the car had pulled out of the parking garage across from my building and driven slowly down the street and turned onto Sixth Avenue; when I’d stood long enough on the sidewalk with my palms pressed into my eyes to stop the tears and to keep the picture of her in my mind for as long as possible—her waving good-bye from her car seat and her hair, dark and curly and uncombed and wild just visible in the window—I’d come back in to my apartment, where the inescapable silence and solitude would overtake me, and where the traces of her always reemerged as if in high relief, like the sticky handprint on the living-room window did where she’d had her time-outs that visit.
Then I would sit and stare into the empty space, completely and utterly alone, and I’d consider the increasingly urgent question of how I was going to get my own Pickle.
If there were one thing I could do besides having a baby and besides coming to see that the way my life has turned out really isn’t all that bad and is, in fact, even pretty good most times—it would be this:
To eradicate from the face of the earth all traces of the phrase biological clock.
I hate this phrase.
Not only is it annoyingly overused and pejorative, but it is stupid and incorrect.
Late at night, when I lie awake in the dark, wondering how I got to wherever it is I’ve gotten to, the image of a huge Big Ben clock ticking away my childbearing years is not the first one that comes to mind.
At least, not to my mind, anyway.
This is what comes to my mind:
A gum-ball machine.
Dispensing its limited supply of eggs.
One by one.
Month after month.
Year after year.
Egg.
Egg.
Egg.
3
A week after the Pickle had left, I walked up University Place on Sunday morning on the way to the office to put a few hours of work in before my nightmarish week ahead. “Fashion Week”—when New York was transformed even more into Style Ground Zero than it already was by bringing in designers and models and scary thin rich people from around the world for shows and benefits and cocktail parties and dinners—was less than forty-eight hours away. As one of the many behind-the-scenes industry slaves, I had a million things to do; most of which—or all of which—had to do with making sure nothing went wrong.
Please.
Like it mattered now.
The day before, a three-year-old had, in so many words, pointed out that I had nothing.
No Barney.
No Elmo.
No Teletubbies.
Just a relationship with an older Big Bird (by almost twenty years), who was complicated (divorced, depressed, despondent), difficult to explain (we slept together but didn’t sleep together), and whom I’ll get to later.
And a big job working for a big designer.
The job: Director of marketing, Karen Lipps New York.
The designer: Five foot five. One hundred and seventy-two pounds. Easily a size sixteen if she weren’t a clothing designer and couldn’t sew her own size-six labels into whatever she wore.
Karen Lipps was only ten years older than I, but she had a multigazillion-dollar company that had just gone public; four homes and another under contract; a husband; and a little girl, Marissa, two years old.
The latter of which was why she wasn’t as thin as she used to be.
“She’s not as thin as she used to be, ever since she had … the child,” her fawning but slightly evil British Uriah Heep–like assistant, Simon Marder, once whispered to me upon exiting a meeting. Karen had been particularly harsh about a pant sample that made the model look like she’d actually eaten in the past three weeks, and she had thrown a peeled banana at Annette, who oversaw the sample seamstresses. Whenever Karen threw food or anything else at someone, Simon felt it was his responsibility—and perhaps his one opportunity to get a word in edgewise all day—to deconstruct her pathology to anyone who would listen.
“It drives her absolutely mad when the clothes don’t lie completely flat against the body or if there’s even the slightest bit of puckering,” he continued in his hushed tone. “She considers it an injustice: the illusion of fat where there really isn’t any.” He paused then and tucked his straight chin-length hair neatly behind his ears. “She hates fat, you see. Because she hates being fat. Not that she’d ever admit to it, poor thing. In her mind she’s still a size four.”
“Try telling her pants that,” I suggested.
“Believe me, I’ve tried,” he said, sucking the life out of a Dunhill. “But Lycra will only stretch so far.”
I knew Karen back when her name wasn’t plastered on billboards and buses and full-page newspaper ads and sneakers and baseball caps and perfume bottles and underwear. Back when her name was still Karen Lipsky and she was indeed a size four. But I have to say, I liked her better now that she was heavy. What Karen had gained and never lost after her pregnancy made her more human, more vulnerable than she’d been when I first met her.
I wish I could say it was her incredible talent that had attracted me to go and work for her—her exquisite taste, her ability to design clothes that were sleek and sophisticated and understated, and her legendary loyalty to those who worked for her (not to mention the free and steeply discounted clothes you got if you worked there). But it wasn’t really. I hated my job at the time I met her (then as now; some things never change), and the marketing position she was offering me sounded like I might just hate it a little less.
Right after college (University of Michigan), I moved to New York and got a job in advertising (Young & Rubicam) and then another job in advertising (J. Walter Thompson). I was a copy writer at the latter when Karen hired us to position her new company in the market. She had just gone out on her own, having worked her way up, and through, more than a few design houses in the city in the 1970s and 1980s—Halston, Perry Ellis, Gloria Vanderbilt—where she had become known for her bald ambition and raw talent. Especially during the last five years in her position as head in-house designer for Henri Bendel. But though she’d bounced around from house to house, everyone knew where her true inspiration for designing women’s fashions had come from: Diane Von Furstenberg. Karen’s first job in the business had been as her assistant, and she had never gotten over the wrap dress.
“That dress is genius—pure genius,” she’d said in countless interviews and in countless conversations since then. “It was the quintessential ‘basic.’ The fit, the fabric, the way it hung—I knew the second I put it on that my life was never going to be the same.”
And indeed it wasn’t. Just before she’d left Bendel’s to start her own company, she’d come up with the concept and the design for her own basic: a women’s body-suit. Produced in a palette of neutral colors (black, white, brown, navy, gray, for starters), Karen’s “second skin” was intended to be the foundation to a woman’s wardrobe, over which a suit jacket, pants, sweater, or evening skirt could be worn with ease. Simple and sexy, Karen believed it was to become her signature piece—one that she would take with her when she struck out on her own.
But there was a catch.
The body-suit didn’t sell at Bendel’s.
And the reason it didn’t sell was because another body-suit—exactly the same in design and material—had just hit the market and was flying off the racks in major department stores like Saks and Neiman’s and Bloomingdale’s, which, unlike Bendel’s, had branches all over the country. The success of that designer—Donna Karan—and the untimely coincidence of their both coming out with the same item had haunted Karen ever since. Even after Karen’s own star had risen and her success rivaled Donna’s, the press always asked her about it. And though they never accused her of copying Donna and though it was clear to them that Karen was immensely talented—more so, the sharpest ones knew, than Donna—that early wrinkle in her career was a scar that in Karen’s mind would never ever completely disappear.
But that day seven years ago, during one of the many long strategy meetings Karen insisted on attending at our offices to discuss her new company, I came up, out of sheer desperation, with the idea that she should change her name.
“Change my name?” she said, her skeletal frame turning in her swivel chair to face me. She bit her big lipsticked lips and stared at me over the plume of smoke coming out of her nose. “What do you mean, change my name?”
I had no idea what I meant.
What I did know was that she needed to have a corporate identity ready before the fall buying season began, and all we had so far was LipskyLook. With that, we’d be lucky if J.C. Penney took her line.
“Maybe the name of your company should relate more to your design philosophy,” I heard myself pontificate. “Maybe the name will help connect the wearer to the clothes.”
She was still biting her lips, but she hadn’t yelled at me yet. Which I took as an encouraging sign.
“A name,” I said slowly, gathering all of my bullshitting skills in one glorious breath—I was a copy writer, after all, with layers and layers of creative talent that were, as yet, untapped!—“that describes the woman who will wear your clothes. A name that evokes style. Urbanity. Sophistication. Sex.” I came up for air and to buy myself another crucial few seconds of time, and when I did, I noticed her mouth—licked clean of her signature mud-matte pigment and ravenous for success.
“Lipps,” I said suddenly.
Then I wrote it on my pad and held it up so she could see the crucial addition of the second p.
“Karen Lipps.”
But back to that Labor Day weekend, when I started sleeping with the Pickle’s Big Bird.
It was a crisp early September Sunday morning, the kind of autumn morning that makes living in downtown New York seem movie-worthy: wisps of white clouds against a bright, clear, relentlessly blue sky; sleek sunglassed people dressed in black jeans and T-shirts on their way into the church of Dean & DeLuca or emerging from the ever-hip News Bar, holding white paper bags filled with black currant scones or lemon coffee cake or corn-carrot muffins. I myself was walking up University Place with my Starbucks coffee when I noticed a woman—tall and thin with long perfect legs coming out of khaki shorts—pushing a baby stroller toward me. When the light at the corner of Twelfth Street changed and she wheeled the stroller into the crosswalk and revealed the shit-eating grin of a blissfully happy mother, I knew immediately that I had seen that smile before. I just couldn’t remember where.
