All This Heavenly Glory (5 page)

Karen doesn’t wait but a second to bring Charlotte Anne into her parents’ room, opening the door to a walk-in closet lit by
a bare bulb attached to a long string. Karen Pink-Park turns on the light, revealing Karen/Charlotte Anne—high stacks of a
newspaper called
Screw
lining the walls of the closet. “He sits in here,” Karen says casually. “Look,” she adds, pointing to a cover illustration
of a man and a woman, undressed in what appears to be some kind of lap-sitting arrangement. Charlotte Anne finds this to be
a thoroughly repulsive image, and decides it’s time to go home.

The following week, Charlotte Anne’s friend Meg Davidson invites her over for a playdate, and Charlotte Anne, who knows there’s
some weirdness over at the Davidsons’ too, thinks it’s a better weirdness, and overlooks the cockroaches and the openly pot-smoking
mom (“It’s just a roach,” Meg says, naturally causing Charlotte Anne to question the smoking of bugs, but still not being
as openly creepy as Karen Pink-Park’s dad’s bounce-spectating and
Screw
magazines). Meg also has a Beautiful Crissy doll that Charlotte Anne is interested in, even though she correctly suspects
that Meg’s Beautiful Crissy will also have a non-working ponytail. In fact, Meg’s Beautiful Crissy does have a pixie cut similar
to Karen Pink-Park’s Beautiful Crissy, except for Meg’s Beautiful Crissy’s pixie cut has also been painted blue. (Meg Davidson’s
mother is an artist and encourages this sort of activity, which blue doll—painting Charlotte Anne knows for sure would not
result in any kind of praise at her house but might possibly result in her mother moving to Encino.) Charlotte Anne knows
it’s just a matter of time before the blue-haired Beautiful Crissy becomes part of Meg Davidson’s “doll sculptures,” a series
of “works,” Meg calls them, in which mostly naked dolls and/or doll parts are glued together into big piles, and sometimes
painted or sprinkled with glitter. Next to each sculpture is a 3x5 card with little titles Meg wrote on them, such as RED
DOLL PILE, like Charlotte Anne has seen next to the paintings at the museum. Since the Beautiful Crissy experience at Meg’s
is also unsatisfying, Meg and Charlotte Anne have an afternoon of painting the hallway whatever color(s) they feel like, and
when Charlotte Anne’s mother arrives, the girls whine that they’ve just put on a Beatles record, so her mother says to Meg,
“Enjoy, I’ll go catch up with your mom,” which statement is curious in and of itself, since at home, on the rare occasion
that anything besides classical music is audible, her mother will invariably say, “I don’t know what that is, but it’s not
music.” Charlotte Anne, age nine, has found this alliance of mothers peculiar from the beginning, given their divergent tastes
in music
and
aesthetics (Charlotte Anne’s mother not being likely, at any given moment, to paint her bedroom walls black, or orange, and
for sure not to let her paint the hall), nevertheless her mother disappears into Meg’s mother’s black bedroom from which room
some giggles and whoops can be heard even over the kind of loud
Rubber Soul.
During the hall-painting Charlotte Anne mentions to Meg that she’s been over to Karen Pink-Park’s house for a playdate. Meg
sticks out her tongue and says, “Her dad’s such a creep. He once showed me his dick and asked me to rub powder on it.” Charlotte
Anne has never heard the word
dick
before, has not had any kind of “talk” with her mother yet, but suddenly has a very visual image in her mind of an extraneous
part she had noticed on the cover of the
Screw
magazine that hadn’t been of particular appeal to her, which she also recognized as a part she didn’t have. Charlotte Anne,
curious and repulsed to know the outcome but more concerned about being rude, doesn’t ask what happened, but the barely concealed
look of horror on her face causes Meg to say, “Ew, I didn’t do it. Didn’t your mom tell you not to touch some guy’s dick when
he puts it in your face?”

“Sure she did,” Charlotte Anne says, wondering why she didn’t, not considering that maybe her mother wouldn’t think there
was any reason to say such a thing to a fourth grader, that this wouldn’t be anything she’d need to worry about, really, although
there was that Charlie Chop Off the bigger kids kept talking about. Charlotte Anne’s mother comes out of the black bedroom
looking sort of sleepy, and pats her daughter on the head with a limp hand. “Time to go, honey,” she says. “Bye, Meggie,”
she says, waving the floppy hand behind her. Charlotte Anne will end up never seeing a fully functional Beautiful Crissy doll
and will grow up and never find out if the Charlie Chop Off story was real or a tall tale, but the thing about Karen Pink-Park’s
dad seemed realer, and kind of even creepier, and she adds all of it to her list of mental notes, for future reference.

A
ROUND THE NEIGHBORHOOD
, there are people who are kind of famous, and I’m one of them. We’re not like movie stars, just people you see sort of
around,
all the time, either where we work or just even on the street. I wait tables at a sort of upscale pizza joint on the corner
of 8ist and Amsterdam called Pie. (Not a very well-thought-out name, although the owners don’t like to admit that out loud,
but the fact is that a lot of people come in asking for pie and then leave when they find out it isn’t apple.) I didn’t realize
I was one of the famous people until this guy came up to me on the street one day and said, You! sort of accusingly, and for
a second I seriously thought I’d done something to him, except then he goes, You’re
that girl, from the pizza place.
I didn’t recognize him as a regular or anything, but I was relieved as soon as I realized his tone was friendly, and then
finally he said,
I have wanted to meet you for the longest time.
And I didn’t want to be rude, but all I could think to say was,
Why?
I don’t mean to be naive. I’m cute enough. I wear a short denim skirt, and the blue t-shirt we wear definitely brings out
my eyes. And I know there’s a waitress thing, for some guys. But that second, I thought, Okay, so you think I’m cute, but
how do you know I’m not a terrible person? I felt like he put me in some place that was different than him. I never saw him
at Pie again after that. I probably made him feel bad.

Anyway, like I said, there are other famous neighborhood people, like the bartender from KCOU next door, Mike, who every night
gets a scoop of vanilla ice cream with hot fudge to go, and this creepy guy with those kind of giant glasses that make your
eyes look blurry, like they’re not even there; he’s tall but kind of hunches over and leaves twenty-five-cent tips no matter
what, and is apparently outside at all times. I see him every day. He knows a lot of people, or vice versa, and it doesn’t
seem like he could possibly have a job, but I’m sure he’s not homeless either. Or he’s like, a homeless mover and shaker.
Then there’s Mary, who
is
homeless, who wears two pairs of glasses taped together and complains about the food we give her for free. You hand her a
take-out container and she says,
I hope this doesn’t have too much pepper like last time.
At Pie, the owners are all pretty famous too, seven Italian brothers and sisters, the most famous being the youngest, identical
twin brothers. I have sort of an on-again off-again thing with the middle brother, but really, we don’t have a lot in common.
I think it’s just for the purposes of trying to get into his family. I’m an only child. Well, I have steps, but they live
in Iowa.

There are a lot of regulars at Pie, some of whom actually are famous away from the Upper West Side, and some of whom are famous
except I had no idea who they were until one of the sisters told me. This one cute guy came in a lot and would always wave
to me when he walked by.
That’s Declan Reed,
the sister said. I nodded like she was just telling me his name, which obviously made her realize I was missing something,
because she said,
Declan Reed. From The Basement. He lives in the basement?
I asked.
No, Charlotte, the band, The Basement.
I wasn’t really a fan or not a fan of The Basement. They’re sort of the Philadelphia version of Bon Jovi, but not so focused
on hair. Anyway, one day he came in and I said,
I didn’t know you were in The Basement,
and he said,
And when you found out, were you just like, he lives in The Basement? Pretty much,
I said, and he laughed, and he started coming around a little more often and then one of his bandmates came in with him and
was just like,
Dude totally wants to go out with you and is afraid to ask.
Declan nodded indicating the truth of it and somehow we ended up making plans without either of us exactly asking the other
out.

On our so-called date, we had lunch at Peretti’s and he asked me stuff like,
Who are you? Where are you from? What do you think about god?
I’m not sure anyone really has the time to hear my feelings about god, which are muddled at best, but I love that someone
asked, anyway. Afterward we walked around Central Park for a while even though it was a little drizzly, and he held my hand,
and I did like him, although did you ever have an experience when someone was holding your hand but it was just sort of, not
necessarily romantic? Practically the first thing he told me about himself was that he’d just broken up with someone, and
he told me more about it than I might have needed to know, you know, private things that maybe he could just as well have
explained to me in the abstract, which isn’t unusual though, guys talk to me, I don’t know why, and generally I don’t mind
talking about anything except romantically it’s not so good to really like someone who’s just gotten out of a relationship.
Although he did get cuter and cuter, because he was obviously really smart, graduated from Penn with an art degree, and he
was very funny, and those are two things that always make someone much cuter to me. The second thing he told me was that he
was in therapy, and that he was an alcoholic, and that he had been in A.A. for four years, which I thought was cool and all
for him, but also kind of fascinating. I knew that there were a lot of cool people in A.A., but I just couldn’t really imagine
someone not ever drinking again. It seemed kind of extreme. The third thing he told me was that he hated his job. And I thought,
Okay, maybe you’re not in the coolest band in the world, but I think I could stand trading places with you.

So anyway, we got to be really good friends, and nothing romantic ever did come of the hand-holding, which was fine with me.
I was still on-again off-again with the brother and Declan was still preoccupied with his ex, who he was also on and off with.
I thought he’d given me quite a number of details about the ex-girlfriend until it came out that she was a model (which, I
have to say, is information I rarely want to have) and that she had graduated from the Sorbonne when she was, I dunno, eight
(meaning she was super smart as well as being a model), and that she was nineteen. When they broke up. And apparently, at
least when he first told me this, her age had nothing to do with it. I guess I maybe didn’t mention that Declan Reed is forty.
I’m only twenty-six myself, but you know, okay, whatever. He looks younger and theoretically I feel like it shouldn’t matter
but twenty-one years seemed like a lot. It wasn’t like I thought he had it all sewn up, that’s for sure, but I think sometimes
older people think they have it all sewn up when the truth is they’re not even near the machine, which is its own kind of
problem.

Declan was always talking about
issues,
and some of his more obvious ones were kind of hard to deal with, and you know, fine, everyone in New York goes to therapy
at one time or another but he was very into telling me about certain particular issues, like his lust, while also being very
into exhibiting other particular issues he seemed to be unaware of. For example, he would describe certain behaviors of his
as being
classically alcoholic,
he called it, e.g., obsessing about people, or obsessing about anything (which also describes everyone I know), or doing
anything more than is commonly considered normal. Like let’s say we go into a record store, 1’11 put one record in my basket,
actually I don’t really even take a basket, and he’ll put seriously about fifteen in his basket and then he’ll pay for mine
too. (I certainly don’t hate that habit, but I mean, I don’t take advantage of it either, which I’m sure is part of why he
likes me.) Or you know, he’ll eat Chinese food every single day for a week. Well, guess what, I’ve been eating Froot Loops
for breakfast every single day since forever. I’m pretty sure I don’t need to examine the deeper meaning of that. Once I made
the mistake of saying that Johnny Depp came into the Pie and I made him an ice cream cone, and I didn’t even have a chance
to say how gorgeous he was (which he was) before Declan seriously grilled me on exactly how gorgeous he was, and in what way,
and was he as good-looking as Johnny Depp (is anyone?) like a dog that will just not let go of a bone. The whole conversation
was all about me reassuring Declan that he too was incredibly handsome—I also reminded him that he had the whole rock star
thing as a bonus, and that I didn’t see any girls throwing their bras at Johnny Depp or anything—as many compliments as I
could come up with. But then it would come up again and again, how his hairline was receding (it wasn’t) and in what way,
or should he get a tattoo to seem younger (what kind of rock star asks anyone else if he should get a tattoo?), or could I
see his crow’s-feet (no). And then after I convinced him as sincerely as possible that he didn’t need to do any of those things,
he asked me to tell him which of his features were my favorite. I actually participated in this for a while. I told him that
his eyebrows were truly underrecognized. Later on I was just like,
Okay, we’re not doing that today.