Excerpt of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits by Ayelet Waldman
(Page 3 of 4)
Printer Friendly Excerpt
I cut north to the trail along the Reservoir. There is one more
playground in my path, but it is far enough away that I can keep
my eyes averted from the Lincoln Log play structure and the
red-and-yellow slide. It is late for the mommies with jogging
strollers, and if my luck holds I will miss them entirely. Last
Wednesday I left a couple of hours early, to meet a friend who
had decided that a morning of shoe shopping would bounce me out
of my despondency, would turn me back into someone whose company
she enjoyed. Mindy did not, of course, say that. Mindy said that
her husband had given her a pair of Manolo Blahniks for her
birthday in the size she had led him to believe that she wore,
and she needed to see if the store carried the shoe in a ten and
a half.
On that day, I came upon a whole row of new mothers crouched
down in back of their strollers, their postpartum-padded behinds
thrust out, their hands gripping the handles as they rose up to
their toes and then squatted back down, cooing all the while to
their well-bundled infants who squawked, laughed, or slept in
$750 strollers, Bugaboo Frogs just like the one parked in the
hallway outside our apartment, next to the spindly table with
the silk orchids. The blue denim Bugaboo that kicks me in the
gut every time I stand waiting for the elevator. They squatted
and rose in unison, this group of mommies, and none of them said
a word when I stopped in front of them and grunted as if I'd
been punched. They looked at me, and then back at each other,
but no one spoke, not when I started to cry, and not when I
turned and ran, back along the path, past the first playground
and then the second, and then back out onto Central Park West.
Today I am lucky. The mommies have stayed in, or are sharing a
post-workout latte. I don't see one until I am on the Bridle
Path on the East Side. She runs by me so fast that I barely have
time to register the taut balls of her calves pumping in shiny
pink running pants, her ears covered in matching fur earmuffs.
The babies in her double jogging stroller are tiny purple
mounds, pink noses, and then gone. Too fast to cause me anything
but a momentary blaze of pain.
At Ninetieth Street, having made it safely and sanely across the
park, I look at my watch. Shit. I am late, again, with only five
minutes to make it up to Ninety-second and then all the way
across to Lex. I quicken my pace, pinching my waist against the
stitch in my side. The tails of my long coat flap against my
legs, and with my other hand I do my best to hold the coat
closed. I can button it now, but it looks dreadful, my thick
torso straining against the buttons, causing the fabric to gape.
While I'm not vain enough to buy a new winter coat--I will not
spend hundreds of dollars on a piece of clothing I am bound and
determined not to need a month from now--I am sufficiently
self-conscious to leave the coat open, counting on a thick scarf
to keep out the bitter damp.
It is not until I run around the white fence barriers and the
cement planters, show my ID card at the security desk, pass
through the metal detector, and am shifting from foot to foot in
front of the bank of elevators that I remember that I have set
my watch forward fifteen minutes for this very reason, so I will
not be late again, so that Carolyn will not have yet another
reason to call Jack and berate him for my capricious negligence,
my disregard for her and all she holds sacred. I feel myself
deflate, as if the only thing keeping me buoyant was my
agitation and anxiety. By the time the elevator arrives I am
tiny, I am shrunken to the size of a mouse, I am the smallest
person in the 92nd Street Y.
Excerpted from Love and Other Impossible Pursuits by
Ayelet Waldman, pages 1-8 of the hardcover edition. Copyright © 2006 by Ayelet Waldman. Excerpted
by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced
or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
