“It’s a flower!” Teresa says, grabbing a piece of shortbread, laughing at her handiwork.
“Sure it is, T, sure it is. Might be time to get back to the sexy part of your list!” Lynne says, looking at her own paperweight, with a perfect purple swirl in the middle and a netting of air bubbles over, as if she had been a glass artist her whole life.
“At least yours looks like something. What the hell am I going to do with this?” I say, gesturing to mine, which essentially looks like a solid green lump.
“Give it to your mom for Hanukkah,” Lynne says. “Parents have to love the handmade gifts from their offspring, right, Teresa?”
“No. No, we don’t have to love them. We have to accept them. We have to praise them, and express gratitude and excitement, but we don’t love them, we love the intent of them. The actual reality of them is a huge pain in the ass, and frankly we count the days till our offspring move out of the house so we can box them all up and stop looking at them.”
We all laugh at her vehemence. “Duly noted, Mama,” I say, making a mental note to give my mom permission to get rid of all the various art projects I foisted upon her over the years, many of which still grace the shelves and display spaces in her house.
“Well, I like mine, it’s a keeper,” Marcy says with thick sarcasm. Hers isn’t as bad as mine, but it is a close second. She was going for a colored internal sphere inside a clear one, but it isn’t really round, so it looks more like a deep red, misshapen blob encased in glass.
“And it’s benign, which is a relief,” Lynne says snarkily.
“It’s not a toomah!” Marcy says in a perfect Arnold Schwarzenegger Kindergarten Cop imitation. The two of them have been sparring a bit all night. It has been sort of friendly, but there is an undertone of something else that I can’t put my finger on. Not quite a pissing match, but close. Lynne keeps making jokes from high school, and Marcy retaliates with stories from our culinary school days and our European adventures. It all seems good-natured enough, but I won’t know for sure until I hear privately from each how it was to meet the other. I’d say it seemed a bit like they were jealous of each other, but for the life of me I can’t figure out what that would be about.
“Oh, God! I love that movie,” Teresa says, clapping her hands in delight. “I have got to show it to my boys on our next movie night!” Teresa and her family have been having movie nights of the classics from the 1980s and ’90s ever since Antony turned twelve and was deemed old enough to handle John Hughes.
“Remember when we went to see it?” Lynne snorts. “Peter’s Purple Puke!”
Teresa starts laughing. “I forgot about that.”
I turn to Marcy, as I have been doing all night when Lynne tosses out these references. “We went to see the movie and ran into some other kids from school, one of whom was this guy Peter that Teresa liked. He had snuck in some booze in a huge bottle of grape pop, and then ate an enormous bucket of popcorn with extra butter, and as we were leaving the theater, he projectile-vomited purple across the parking lot. That was the end of Teresa’s crush.”
Marcy nods, with a look on her face that indicates this is not exactly the hilarious amazing tale that Lynne’s tone implied. I immediately try to forget it, since I cannot handle puking of any kind. The first and only time Simca yakked up some foam and fluff from a chew toy she had destroyed when she was three months old made me gag over and over as I cleaned it up. She’s been very accommodating to my sensitive stomach by not ever throwing up again. I appreciate that about her.
“Meanwhile, who is up for a nightcap at my place? I have some good news that I want to celebrate, and some really yummy bubbles!” Lynne says, changing the subject.
“I can do just one,” Teresa says.
“We’re in?” I say, confirming with Marcy.
“Great, let’s get out of this hot box!”
We gather up the remains of our picnic and leave, headed for Lynne’s apartment.
“So, what do you think of the girls?” I ask Marcy when we get into the car.
“Teresa is a sweetheart, such a classic Italian mama, I just want her to adopt me.”
“Don’t worry, she will. Wait till summer when her whole family starts putting up gravy from the tomatoes in her aunt’s garden. You won’t have to make pasta sauce for yourself all year!” I used to get invited to sauce day when the big harvest came in, fifteen loud, lovely Italian women covered in tomatoes, busting one another’s chops, sharing recipe secrets, interrogating the single ones and poking at the married ones about childbearing, and drinking more red wine than would seem rational. I loved those days.
“I’ll take that!” Marcy pauses. “Lynne seems, um, very sure of herself.”
I laugh. “Large and in charge, we always said.”
“I feel like I don’t really know anything more about her than you shared with me before we met, you know? Like all her stuff is very surface.” Marcy pauses. “I mean, she’s totally nice, I don’t want you to think . . .”
I hold up my hand. “I get it. She’s sort of a closed system. But it’s just how she is before she knows you. I think it’s because her job means that she is endlessly meeting new people that she has to feign interest in, and so she is really practiced at the whole small-talk thing. Once you spend some time with her, she will open up a bit.” It is interesting, Marcy picking up on some of the stuff that bothers me about Lynne, but my impulse is still to defend.
“Yeah, that’s probably it,” Marcy says in a tone that says that she doesn’t really think that at all.
? ? ?
What are we celebrating?” Marcy asks when we are all sitting in Lynne’s living room, glasses of Krug rosé in our hands, since clearly Lynne is waiting for someone to broach the subject.
“I have officially landed my first seven-figure client!” Lynne says proudly. “Here’s to Angelique Morris!”
“Wow, the fashion designer?” Teresa asks. “That is huge!”