Read by Lin Sagovsky
Elizabeth and her son Jason are standing in the atrium of the Museum of Design on Columbus Circle, bewildered. They took the train into Grand Central that morning just to see the exhibition of Danish Modern children’s toys. Elizabeth thinks for a moment of her Saab station wagon sitting where she left it at the Mamaroneck station and wishes she could walk outside right now and get into it. But then, what’s the rush?
“Ma’am, the galleries are closed today for a private event,” says a museum guard.
“I know - you’ve said!” Elizabeth snaps at him.
Jason tugs at her arm. “Mommy, I’m hungry,” he says.
“We just had lunch!”
“It was yucky,” Jason says.
Elizabeth produces a dusty protein bar from the recesses of her purse, but Jason is uninterested in food that lives in his mother’s purse.
Not twenty feet from them, men and women in business attire mingle, sip white wine and coffee, nibble on sandwiches and hors d’oeuvres.
What, thinks Elizabeth, would it hurt if a little boy and his mother just joined in and looked at the Danish toy exhibit that they’d come all the way in from Mamaroneck to see? I’m just like those people … or at least I would be, had I put myself together.
More often than not, Elizabeth thinks, I'm on the right side of the rope.
Wearing a white wool cardigan and a black Gap turtleneck covered with lint and scattered strands of her own prematurely shedding hair, Elizabeth feels sour, itchy, and unclean. Soon Elizabeth and her son will gather their wits and regroup. She grabs Jason’s hand and walks over to the rope line. The guard rushes toward her.
“This is a private event, the galleries is closed ma’am.”
“The galleries are closed,” Jason corrects the grown man without reservation.
“Just one minute,” Elizabeth pleads.
“Ma’am the gallery’s closed today for a…”
“If you repeat yourself to me one more time!” Elizabeth says this without really losing her temper.
The security guard backs away, and Elizabeth notices a striking woman who seems to be at the center of the private event. The woman, a tall stately redhead, is wearing a gray Chanel suit, cradling a wine glass and talking to a man whose back is to her. It is clear to Elizabeth that the woman is the actress Sigourney Weaver. Sigourney Weaver surely can’t miss Elizabeth staring at her with an expression that begs to start a conversation. She speaks at Sigourney Weaver from behind the rope, but she doesn’t respond. Elizabeth half-mouths, half-speaks the words, pausing after each utterance to allow time for Sigourney Weaver to reply.
“Hello…” she breathes. “I’m a big fan. You know, you and I go to the same salon - sometimes I’ve seen you there. I know the owner…”
Elizabeth shoots her hand out to Sigourney Weaver to get the assertively elegant looking actress’s attention. “Would you mind,” Elizabeth continues, “could my little boy and I join you? We’re nice people, good people.” What Elizabeth really wants to say is “rich”, not nice but rich, although this realization leaves a bad taste in her mouth and she moves on to a subtler approach.
“I could write a check to the museum! Or become a member if you’d like, I do think it’s a very good cause, I’m a big supporter of the arts. We came for the toys exhibition and I’d love to contribute.”
Elizabeth almost reaches for her checkbook, but instead adjusts her beige calfskin Lambertson-Truex purse to the front for Sigourney Weaver’s benefit. “We’re from Mamaroneck. Please, we just want to see the…”
But Sigourney Weaver isn’t listening, she has turned her back to ascend the stairs and view the forbidden exhibition.
The security guard approaches Elizabeth and Jason again and glares at Elizabeth who looks down at her son fidgeting with the hood-cord of his LL Bean sweatshirt. Defeated, they go to the gift shop.
Among the hand-blown glass vases, driftwood salad bowls and delicate organza scarves, Elizabeth finds a elegant notepad. The plywood board cover has a painting of a Japanese Maple tree in a field, and the empty pages within are of a thick handmade parchment. On the side, three holes are tied together with thin leather rope. Elizabeth buys it, along with a nonadjustable androgynous wooden Dutch doll for Jason. Together they walk out onto West 59th Street and into the soporific winter afternoon. Jason shivers and Elizabeth pulls the collar of his pea coat up to his earlobes and he clutches her soft hand as they walk south through Columbus Circle.
“Why don’t we get something to eat, huh?” says Elizabeth.
Jason smiles and nods, and Elizabeth notices a café on a quiet shadowy corner of West 56th street. It seems to be a popular spot; inside a few people are on line waiting for coffee and pastries from the to-go counter, and the dining room to the right is half-filled with couples and young people peering into laptops. Glancing at the menu Elizabeth sees Elderberry Jam and Chestnut Puree on Nine Grain Toast, and interprets it for Jason.
“You want a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” she asks.
He nods happily and the day is not a total loss.
“Table for two,” says Jason as they approach the hostess.
The hostess smiles at Elizabeth, as she shows them to a spacious corner table looking out onto Columbus Circle where she quickly orders the fancy sandwich for Jason and coffee and a linzer torte for herself.
Though the sky is still overcast and she’s still too cold to take off her sweater, Elizabeth can smell the baked goods in the air and finds the restaurant almost preternaturally soothing. She sinks into the blond wood chair and feels a tremendous sense of relief as Jason plays silently with his doll. The soft classical music coming from the built-in speakers she sees as she cranes her neck up to the ceiling makes her feel sophisticated again… So much more civilized than being in a cavernous museum lobby drinking cheap white wine!
Eventually, Elizabeth knows (as does Jason) that they’ll have to leave the city and go home. In the calm of the café that she has found so immediately inviting, Elizabeth finds that she no longer looks forward to getting back to her Saab or Mamaroneck or even her house. Henry will be at home, waiting, and the house will be cold. She tries to forget about it- reality- and just take pleasure in the café for now, but it’s impossible.
Since he lost his job at Lehman Brothers, Elizabeth’s husband Henry had made a habit of turning off all of the heat in the house as soon as he came home. He would follow everyone around turning off lights the second they had left the room. When Elizabeth and Jason were there, she would keep the temperature as low as possible, but couldn’t abide his demands that everyone simply wear sweaters all the time. Elizabeth has viewed Henry’s aggressive frugality in the wake of his layoff as excessive, not to mention depressing and, on her more embittered days, weak. They had planned to renovate the house and build an addition over the garage, but lately Henry had begun to express reservations.
“We can’t afford it,” he told Elizabeth, who took it as punishment.
“You’re only trying to scare me!” she said.
“That’s not so, Liz,” Henry told her. “I want you to be happy, but this isn’t the time to redecorate the house. Not now. We have to be careful until things pick up. If they pick up.”
“If they pick up?” she said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It just means that we’re going to have to make sacrifices. You can’t go get your hair blown every week, you can’t have fresh flowers all the time. It’s bad Elizabeth, you don’t understand, we may have to sell.”
“Sell what? The house? Then what am I going to do Henry? Then what? I don’t understand! This doesn’t make sense.”
“Well let me clarify: we are running out of money. I no longer have an income, and what we have is what we have. It is not being replenished. So wear a god damn sweater, and don’t touch that thermostat.”
Elizabeth had begun to hate him by that point. The truth was that they didn’t have the money anymore, but Henry did take some pleasure in forcing the truth on Elizabeth in a more aggressive tone than was necessary.
He had promised her a different life, the life to which she’d become accustomed, or to be more accurate, the life to which she always planned to become accustomed. But now, so close to reaching her goals, she felt as if everything had been derailed- Henry never softened a single blow- and Elizabeth felt every day as though she were falling helplessly backward, watching as her former life on the top of a hill became smaller and smaller.
More than herself though, Elizabeth did worry about the lifestyle to which she’d hoped her son, Jason, would become accustomed. Now, they would be just like everyone else, Henry seemed to delight in telling her.
“We must re-do the house,” she’d told her husband. “I’ll let the decorator go. We’ve already put aside money for it, and if I do it all myself, it’ll be fine. We must re-do the house, because I can’t take these…these walls. These…cabinets and doorknobs and carpets. It’s going to be so much nicer, Henry, so much warmer when I’m done.” The house had taken on a horrible chill to Elizabeth; even in the summer it was cold.
“You’re not listening to me,” Henry said.
“I’ve already ordered fabric samples!”
“You’re not listening to me!”
“Mommy,” Jason whimpers.
Elizabeth shakes her head. “Did you say something sweetest?”
“I’m tired. Can we stay at the Plaza tonight?”
“No, honey,” she laughs, “we’re going to go home soon, though.”
“Can we take a taxi to the train?”
“No, it’s too…no, we’ll take the bus.”
Elizabeth looks down over her chest to see Jason nearly asleep on her lap, clutching the featureless doll she’d bought him and feels as if she might cry. She almost does- seeing how comfortable her son is splayed across two café chairs- as she had cried when Henry had taken a hard line with her that their home would always be a cold, dark place.
As she stirs skim milk into her coffee, Elizabeth strokes her new notebook. The waitress returns with Jason’s sandwich and Elizabeth gestures for her to put it down gently so as not to wake the boy.
We can catch the 4:45 back to Mamaroneck if we leave soon. Or the 5:30.
Elizabeth settles on the later train and begins to consider the design of the café, it occurs to her that she might be able to adopt some of its elements for her own home. The walls panelled in latticed wood with a curved wainscoting several inches below the ceiling. Sepia toned photographs of Norwegian farmers perched on handsome lacquer shelves running the perimeter of the room that is otherwise free of unnecessary decoration, clutter. Elizabeth admires this device. She likes the muted taupe that the shelves are painted. It’s clean. Elizabeth scans the room, tapping her index finger against her pursed lips, then decides to christen her notebook with a sketch of the wall.
Scandinavian design would be nice when we re-do the house, she thinks, but not necessarily with these hard chairs. We can upholster the chairs we already have with something nice and soft, but new. The red ink bleeds into the bumpy expensive paper. Scandinavian Design, but not cheap, not Ikea, NO HARD CHAIRS.
She writes “NO HARD CHAIRS” with such force that her pen pierces the page.
Elizabeth closes her notebook and laughs at herself for bothering to make a reminder for something so obvious. Oh, yes, she thinks, thank God I wrote that down. I could have ended up buying cinderblocks instead of nice soft furniture. I can do the Scandinavian thing, but make it my own – a pastiche.
She savours her coffee and her moment in the café. It’s good coffee, she thinks, she’s pleased with it, not like the swill that would be simmering in a samovar all morning in the museum lobby. Elizabeth looks at a decorative dry goods display in the corner that had been blocked since she came in by a group of Australian tourists. It has rows of open teak drawers with smoothed knobs, overflowing with dried beans and grains.
She notes this as an idea for her own home.
Elizabeth opens her mouth with an impulse to ask Jason his opinion, how would you like your room to look like this place? The little teak knobs painted white on those drawers. How about a new bed painted taupe, grayish taupe? This is going to be a big renovation and we’re not going to do another one again, certainly can't afford it. The room we make for you now will be the room you’ll grow up in probably, and live in until you move away.
She has this impulse, but it passes, and Elizabeth closes her mouth, and writes the words “teak knobs” in her $35 notebook.
Day Trip by Bill Adelson was read by Lin Sagovsky at the Liars' League Faith & Hope event on 14 December 2010 at Upstairs at The Fellow in London.
Bill Adelson is from New York City, but currently lives in Los Angeles, where he is definitely not pursuing a career as a screenwriter. He received his MFA from Columbia University. Bill recently completed a collection of short stories, To Happier Times, and is currently working on a novel.
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