The Continuity Girl (3 page)

Meredith took her cue. “Where are the brats?”

Elle sighed. She often pretended (though not very convincingly) to be bored by motherhood for the sake of her as-yet-childless
girlfriends. “In the backyard being molested by Krusty the Clown. You should see this guy—talks like a thug and charges a
mortgage payment an hour—but the kids are absolutely bonkers for him. He’s like the pied piper of Summerhill.”

The kitchen was at the back of the house, a half-renovated addition that Elle and Andrew had started before getting pregnant
for the second time. The stainless steel appliances, imported from a restaurant supply shop on the Boulevard Saint-Germain
in Paris, were already covered in a lifetime’s worth of tiny fingerprints. The floor was plywood covered in blue plastic.
The tarp snagged on Elle’s kitten heel as she led Mish and Meredith into the room, trilling the praises of white wine sangria.

“Oh hell,” she said, bending down to detach herself. “I was afraid the kids would get splinters. Half their fathers are lawyers
and Andrew is completely paranoid. You know he kept saying we should just have the party at Chuck E. Cheese’s instead? As
if.”

She poured pale cloudy liquid into tumblers as she spoke, clawing extra chopped berries out of the pitcher and plopping them
in each glass with her fingers. Elle shook her head and smiled, seeming to marvel for a moment at the vast stupidity of it
all, the excess of poor taste and misjudgment that she alone had to put up with. Her facial expression was one Meredith recognized
from wives in television sitcoms, usually adopted after their husbands had returned home with something laughably out of place,
like a Christmas tree too big to fit in the front door.

Mish took a glass of sangria from Elle’s hand, and her friends watched as she drained it in a single swallow.

“What’s Chuckie Cheese’s?” Meredith asked, hoping to distract Elle.

The other two women looked at each other and snorted. This was a joke they shared among the three of them: Meredith’s astonishing
ignorance of mainstream popular culture. What she did know had been gleaned through movies and television as an adult. Meredith
had retained the overly literal, slightly alien quality of a child who had grown up in an institution. In this case, as a
boarder at the girls’ school where the three of them had met. Mish and Elle had attended the same school, but as day students.
Meredith had spent her summers and Christmases with her mother at artists’ retreats and friends’ vacation houses in Arizona,
Ibiza and Banff.

“Chuck E. Cheese’s is a kiddie trough in the ’burbs owned by a rodent in a red hat by the name of Chuck,” Mish said. “Imagine
a lot of horrible people and their screaming, puking offspring eating greasy pizza and swimming in vats of coloured balls.
It’s enough to make you run to the bathroom and tie your own fucking tubes.”

As she spoke, Mish began walking around the kitchen with her face parallel to the floor, scanning flat surfaces for food,
probably hoping for some sort of dairy product—the orange, processed, high-sodium kind. Meredith thought she seemed to be
making a comeback. Either that or she was falling apart.

“Right,” Elle continued. “So
obviously
I’m not taking the offspring of the Audi brigade to Chuck E. Cheese’s for a birthday
party. I haven’t given up
completely,
you know.”

“So where is he?” Meredith asked, keen to draw Elle’s attention away from Mish, who was now rummaging through the fridge’s
crisper with a bagel between her teeth.

“Upstairs napping.” Elle smiled and motioned to the baby monitor leaning cockeyed against the windowsill.

“Your
husband
?”

“Oh God, not him, I meant the baby.” Elle laughed dismissively. “He’s gone into the office for a couple of hours. Big deal,
you know. Super important. Couldn’t bear to miss a second of it. All those exciting tax loopholes to negotiate.”

From the backyard came an enormous
thud
followed by a screeching chorus. Meredith ran to the window, then turned to look at
her friend. Elle cleared a spot on the counter between a bag of silver sugar-balls and a water-swollen copy of
Vanity Fair
and set her drink down. Hers was the reaction of a soldier with acute post-traumatic stress disorder reacting to a grenade
going off in the next trench. That is, no reaction at all.

“What is it?” she asked Meredith, searching for a strawberry trapped beneath the ice at the bottom of her glass.

Elle was clearly happy to have someone else analyze the crime scene before she rolled up her sleeves and stepped in to do
the dirty work.

“The kids are all right but the clown guy appears to be dead. Or dying. It’s unclear.”

“Shall we?”

They walked out onto the back deck, leaving Mish with the fridge.

The scene outside looked like the aftermath of a tornado touchdown in the land of Oz. Mud-smeared children ran in all directions,
clutching whatever scraps of party trash they could hold in their jammy hands. The weak hid under peony bushes or crouched
behind faux seventeenth-century cement garden ornaments, waiting for it to be over. In the center of the lawn was a half-collapsed
picnic table, three of its four legs splintered to bits, and on top of that a blue ice-cream cake, flattened and oozing out
from beneath the twitching body of a grown man in a pink gingham jumpsuit. Starsky the terrier lavished hind-pumping love
on the clown’s left oversize shoe, ears pinned down in amorous concentration. Detached streamers and balloons floated through
the air. In the corner, two boys in matching overalls squirted green Silly String into a bowl of blue Jell-O and taste-tested
their creation.

At the center of the melee, the birthday girl—five-year-old Zoe—presided with queenly authority. She stood over the man’s
body in a gold lamé fairy dress and rhinestone-encrusted tiara. In her hand was a wooden spoon with a tinfoil star glued to
one end. When she saw her mother and Meredith emerge from the house, she shrugged sweetly, gave a pageant-winning smile, and
returned to her task of beating the clown with her wand.

“Bad! Bad! Ucky!” Zoe scolded, increasing her volume as the women approached. She beamed at her mother. “He stood on the table,
Mummy. He made a bad mess. My cake—” Her small face collapsed into a coursing river of snot.

Elle crouched and hugged her daughter, murmuring mummy-ish things in her wet ear. “Don’t cry. The clown didn’t mean it. He
was just trying to be funny. Remember the time when you were trying to do a cartwheel and you fell and hit your face on the
rock? It’s like that.”

“That was different.”

“No, it wasn’t, honey. The clown was just trying to be funny.”

“It was
different.
”

“Why?”

“
Because,
Mummy. It was
me.
”

Elle and Meredith paused. Zoe raised her wand to clinch the argument.

“And
I
didn’t wreck the cake.”

Elle nudged the clown’s thigh with her heel. He groaned. “Uh, sir? Mr. Clown? Assuming you’re okay, do you mind getting up?
You’re scaring the kids.”

“Bad clown! Scary!” Zoe whacked him once more on the back of his head for good measure.

“Don’t be evil, Zoe. Mr. Clown is in pain.”

The clown rolled his head to the side and revealed one watery eye that he trained on Meredith.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Urrghyehfinkso.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” He paused to spit a handful of disintegrated gummi worms from his mouth. They lay glistening on the grass, the punch
line of a forgotten magic trick. Starsky began slurping them up.

“I hate you.”

“Zoe!”

The clown struggled to his feet, pulled off his wig and rubbed the damp, sandy hair underneath until it stood on end. His
torso was plastered in blue, black and white icing. If you looked closely, the vague silhouette of Cookie Monster was discernable.

Under the makeup, the clown looked to be in his early twenties. The kind of young man who wore wraparound sunglasses and reversed
ball caps and made the “hang loose” hand sign to his friends from the window of his yellow Jeep.

Meredith whispered, “Why don’t you take him inside and see if he’s okay? I’ll deal with the kids.”

Elle looked relieved to be receiving an order rather than issuing one for once. She led the clown inside. Meredith looked
down at Zoe. She had finished crying and was chewing the top of her tinfoil wand. She turned her tear-streaked face up and
glared at the sky.

“I hate my birthday,” she said.

Meredith silently agreed.

Looking around the garden, she felt like an insecure Mary Poppins recently dropped from above. Faces peeked out from behind
clay pots and shrubbery. After ascertaining the coast was clear they began to emerge. Dirty fingers attached to doughy arms
attached to stout bodies, punctuated with outie belly buttons. A couple of the children still had diapers popping out from
the waistline of their Gap Kids corduroys, which Meredith found slightly frightening. She stayed put in the center of the
yard, waiting for them to come to her. She wanted so much for them to like her that she became paralyzed with the need. More
than men, or figures of professional authority, Meredith desired the approval of dogs and children. She sensed it was best
not to try too hard—she had noticed that when it came to getting other people to feel the way you wanted them to feel, the
head-on approach never worked. So Meredith did with kids what she did with all people whose attention she craved. She hung
back quietly and pretended to have other things on her mind.

“Mer-dith?” Zoe looked up at her.

“Yes?”

“Can we do bobbing for apples?”

And so they bobbed.

After the boiled wieners, veggie patties and McDonald’s rental cooler of “orange drink” were laid to rest, along with great
scoops of smushed cake on paper plates, the mothers arrived to collect their broods. They came all at once in a gypsy caravan
of Saabs and Subarus, rushing in, accepting glasses of mineral water in lieu
of sangria (they were driving), collecting their goody bags and swirling out.

These Yummies of the Backyards, Meredith observed, were of a different order from the downtown soy-latte sippers in her prenatal
yoga class. In their fleecy weekend-warrior wear and brutalist haircuts, the uptown Yummies were more weather-beaten, less
sexy but far more efficient. Children aged you—that much was evident. But maybe they aged you for the better. Meredith envied
their matronly
gravitas.
These women lacked the starry-eyed wonder of the new Yummies but had developed other skills—such
as the ability to break down a baby jogger and pack it into the backseat of an SUV in six and a quarter seconds flat. They
hitched their kids on hips and made intense small talk about kitchen renovations, real estate and private versus public education.
They pulled washcloths out of thin air, spit and rubbed infant faces with just enough abrasion to buff without eliciting complaint.
Smacking their lips to each other’s cheeks and fishing around for car keys in handbags the size of small arms carriers, the
uptown Yummies were galvanized by the reality of life. Watching them, Meredith felt light as helium.

When the last guest was gone, Elle walked back into the kitchen, slipped off her apron and collapsed on the floor in a convincing
stage faint that Meredith recognized from their seventh-grade production of
Gone With the Wind.
Starsky speedboated into the
kitchen and began slathering his mistress’s face with goober. Zoe snorted at her mother’s performance. Meredith could see
it was a game they often played.

Elle opened one eye. “I’m glad
that’s
over.”

“Me
too,
” Zoe said, with a stamp of her sequined slipper.

“Thanks a lot, Zoe. Time for bed.”

Elle lifted herself from the floor and scooped up her daughter in one movement.

“But Mummy, where’d he go?”

“Who?”

“You know. The
clown.
”

Elle looked at Meredith. Zoe was right. The clown had disappeared. Also conspicuously unaccounted for was Mish.

“I doubt he’d leave without his money,” Elle said, not without suspicion.

Then they heard it. A female giggle followed by an unmistakable mouth-to-mouth slurp. It came through the speaker of the pink
plastic Fisher-Price baby monitor sitting on the kitchen windowsill.

“Oh God.” Meredith looked at Elle.

“Gross. I mean, for a
pregnant
woman,” said Elle.

“It’s a long story,” said Meredith.

“Should we interrupt?”

“It’s your house, but...”

“In the
baby’s
room. You’d think they’d have the decency to go to the bathroom, at least. I did notice she was getting a bit
sloshed. I was going to say something, but you never know with Mish. I just got the vibe, you know? And anyway, the next thing
I knew she went into this Florence Nightingale routine—dabbing the guy with iodine where he scraped his chest on the picnic
table. Anyway, he had his shirt off and she offered to go up and help him wash it in the sink...” Elle looked at the kitchen
clock and lowered Zoe to the floor. “That was about forty minutes ago.”

“Where’s your nanny?”

“Night off.” Elle stared at Meredith meaningfully. “What’s up with Mish?”

Meredith opened her eyes wide and grimaced.

Elle left the room with Starsky and her daughter in tow. As usual, she was bent on truth and justice. Meredith shrugged. Whatever
the circumstances, the continuity girl never calls “Cut.”

When she returned home that evening, Meredith found a chartreuse envelope in her mailbox. As far as she knew, only one person
on the planet regularly used chartreuse writing paper. She poured herself a glass of wine and made a dinner of organic peanut
butter spread on a celery stick before opening the letter.

Dear Moo,

It’s time you came for a visit. I may be a wretched old cunt, but I’m still your mother. Everything here is very nice. The
forsythia is out and I have a new lover called Jose. He is a Colombian political refugee and poet I met on the jury of the
Diaspora Prize—absolutely gorgeous. The drizzle has given him a bad case of psoriasis, which puts the poor boy in a cranky
mood much of the time. Luckily I am treating him with the Crème de la Mer you sent me for Christmas. Now don’t be jealous.
Enclosed is a one-way ticket. You can get your own way home.