LUCKY DUCK

Six of the seven deadly sins can be attractive, pure eye candy. Greed is a handsome Wall Street mogul in an expensive suit, hair slicked back, holding a cigar. Pride is those Lululemon-clad soccer parents, sipping Starbucks while watching their son score the winning goal. Lust is the glossy pages of the Victoria’s Secret catalog you stole from your older sister. Gluttony is taking your buddy out for sushi, steak and back room bottle service in Vegas for his bachelor party. Wrath is road rage, a sleek sports car swerving then speeding away after flicking off the texter-driver in the next lane. Even Sloth can be sexy, lovers lying in late on an unmade hotel bed, feeding each other from last night’s room service tray.

But Jealousy? Jealousy is ugly. Jealousy is embarrassing, unwanted, unloved, unlovable. Pimple-faced. Jealousy is standing out in the rain, looking inside at the party you weren’t invited to. Jealousy is a big fat loser.

1980

My first memory of feeling jealous is from when I was five or six. My mom and I went to Sara Walker’s apartment for a play date. She lived on the Upper East Side, as did we, in a large but not fancy apartment, similar to ours. She had two married parents, just like I did. She had an older brother and I had an older sister. We went to the same private school, The Town School, on East Seventy-Sixth Street, with only twenty-five kids per grade. Neither one of us had pets. We both had skinny legs but were good at running. Her room was pink, mine, yellow. At the start of this play date, we were on an even playing field. I did not want anything that she had, as I already had it, or something similar.

The polite thing to do when you have someone over is to ask them if they want a drink and, when you are a kid, it is the polite thing for your mom to do. So it was Elaine Walker who asked me what I wanted to drink. Elaine was Sara’s soft-spoken, somewhat spacey mother with squinting, smiling eyes who, looking back, may have been stoned all of the time.

Growing up, there were orange juice households and apple juice households. Apple juice homes usually had a drooly baby somewhere on premises and they served all kid guests in plastic cups that still tasted like apple juice, even when there was water inside. I hated apple juice. Thankfully, Sara’s was an orange juice house, like mine.

Out came the Tropicana carton which, in those days, featured a barefoot young girl with oranges on her head, wearing a grass skirt. “Can you pour?” was a question my friends and I had been throwing around lately. Some of us could, some of us couldn’t. Sara’s mom didn’t wait for us to have this discussion. She got out two mugs from a high cabinet and Sara and I watched her do the pouring; this was not a serve-yourself kitchen.

“I want the ducky cup,” Sara announced, gleefully.

The ducky cup?

Sara’s mom lifted one of the mugs to show me what was inside: a ceramic, three dimensional yellow duck. It was the kind of thing that a child might love as a toddler and perhaps retain an attachment to when she was a little too old for it. The duck itself looked ready to retire, its tiny black eye dots partially flecked off after one too many washes. Not that this bothered me then, at least not consciously, but it was also a germaphobe’s nightmare – so many nooks and crannies for bacteria to multiply in. In summary, it was babyish and a little gross and I no more wanted that ducky cup than I did someone else’s undies or their old teddy-bear with a drool stain next to the remnants of its bitten off ear.

“Are you OK if Sara gets the ducky cup?” Elaine asked. She pronounced her name Saaaaaara like the first syllable was way more important than the second.

“Yes,” I replied.

Of course. Ew.

Elaine poured us our orange juice, Sara’s into the ducky cup and mine into a regular mug – nondescript, no ducky inside.

As we reached for our drinks, I noticed the satisfied smile on Sara’s face, like she had won a game I didn’t realize we were playing. Why was she excited about this cup? I certainly wasn’t. What was so great about it? It wasn’t like you could even see the ducky. He was completely covered by the juice. Was there something wrong with me for not caring about the ducky cup? No, more likely, there was something wrong with her. What a baby!

I supposed that as you drank the juice, the duck would show himself, little by little. But still, was that really something to get excited about? It’s not like you could take him out and play with him. He wasn’t a toy. He wasn’t fun.

Yet now, Sara was jumping up and down, squealing with excitement, like she was waiting to go on a carnival ride. What was she so hyped up about? The slow reveal of a silly little duck? First his tiny yellow head, then his ugly little bill, then, after your juice was gone, his entire glued-down, non-removable body? Was it really so fabulous to have him there while you drank, a visible indicator that you had, eventually, finished all of your juice? Like he was some kind of all-important juice-drinking finish line? Some kind of….prize?

I wanted the ducky cup.

“Wait!” I said as Elaine handed us the drinks. “I do want it. I want the ducky cup.”

Oh, and I did. I wanted it, more than I wanted the juice, or this playdate, or anything else in the world. I wanted to drink from that cup. I wanted that ducky to hang in there with me as I sipped my orange juice. I wanted to see the top of his head, then his bill, and then more of him and more of him until he was ready to come out fully, show his whole ducky body, and celebrate with me, for me. I wanted him to be my prize.

Sara turned to me, stunned, her lips quivering, her stare cutting through me, irises like two dark frisbees, filled with hatred. “No! No! I want the ducky cup!” she screamed. “That’s my cup!” Tears formed.

“But Saaaara, she’s your guest,” Elaine offered. “Don’t you want to share your cup?”

“No!”

It was my turn to tear up. “I want the cup.”

The more insistent I became about wanting to drink out of the cup, the more resistant Sara became to sharing it. Our respective tantrums escalated until my mother and I went home, the moms agreeing that “we’ll have to try this again another time.”

“It made no sense to continue,” my mom said when I asked her if she remembered this incident. My mother did not remember that the fight was about a cup, only that there had been crying and that she and I had “high-tailed” it out of there. And that’s exactly what I remember too, leaving in a teary blur with barely a goodbye.

“And Elaine didn’t handle it well,” my mom continued, when I asked her what else she remembered. “She must have wanted to ring Saaaara’s neck. The child was being obnoxious.” My mother has never been one to see it from both sides. She would have been a great prosecuting attorney. “But she just kept cleaning her sink, passing the rag back and forth, like she needed to to get it shinier and shinier. She probably was just trying to get rid of tension!” My mother may have also missed a calling as a behavioral psychologist.

Sara and I still talk occasionally and I have seen her from time to time over the years. She lives in Brooklyn, works in marketing and has two girls of her own.

I texted her to see if she remembered the ducky cup incident. She didn’t remember our fight, but she remembered the cup.

“It was a mug, like a coffee mug, and it said ‘Who lives in this cup?’ on it, with a little ceramic yellow duck inside.” As soon as she said it, I remembered the words on the outside of the cup. But I’m not sure if I could read at the time. So maybe someone had had to tell me that this was what the words said, which may have made the cup even more mysterious, more exciting.

“I definitely drank out of the cup a lot,” Sara continued. “I’m not sure where it came from. It was old. It might have been my parents’ at some point. But I really loved the mug and always wanted it.”

“Yes, you did!!” I texted back.

“I’m sure if we were young I wouldn’t have shared. Probably after that, I wouldn’t have cared,” she replied. Perhaps.

I asked Sara to talk to Elaine and see what she remembered from that day but Sara was not in the mood to “engage” with her mom at the moment because they were currently dealing with some other issues. “Old people things,” Sara said. This brought to mind an image of Sara, passing her own rag back and forth inside her own stainless steel sink, trying not to engage with her mother.

Sara and I spent a while catching up. Afterwards, I went onto Amazon where I found a modern version of the ducky cup and ordered one for her. I thought about buying two, one for each daughter, to prevent a potential argument. But then I thought that sending just one might inspire a story of its own.

I have learned how to hide my jealousy whenever I feel it bubble up. That’s what adults do. When I want what you have, I bury it like an animal buries its poop in the woods lest you detect the scent. Best to keep that sort of thing to oneself, I reason.

Sometimes I wonder, though. What if I didn’t hide it but, instead, shouted it out, let everyone know when I wanted what you had? What if we all did this? “I’d kill to make as much money as you do! I feel poor when I’m around you.” “Why do so many people like your Facebook posts when almost nobody likes mine? Am I that unlikeable?” “Your kids are so much more well adjusted than mine are. Where did I go wrong?” We’d be seen as pathetic, right? “I want your goddam ducky cup!”

Or perhaps not. Perhaps we’d be thanked, because maybe the person we were envious of hadn’t realized how good their lives actually were.

Or maybe we’d see that we were wrong, that the things we thought they had were simply smoke and mirrors, that these people we envied were just as incomplete and lacking as we believed ourselves to be?

Or what if we were lucky enough to have someone who loved us – who knew us better than we knew ourselves – whisk us away, before our tantrum escalated? What if they “high-tailed” us out of there, brought us home, dried our eyes and forced us to take a look around? What if then, for the first time, we could actually see the things we still wanted but no longer thought about? Not because they weren’t important, but because they were already ours.

2023

I am forty-eight. I get divorced and move back to New York and start reconnecting with old friends. Sara is one of them. One night, we meet for dinner in Brooklyn.

I ask about her brother.

“Paul’s divorced,” she tells me. She says that he lives on the Upper East Side, where we all grew up, where I’m living now.

“You should give me his number!” I say.

Paul is seven years older than we are so we never hung out when we were kids, though I was aware of his existence. I think I found him good looking when I was younger, but he never seemed interested in talking to his much younger sister and her friends so I rarely got close enough to him to really evaluate.

Sara had worshiped him.

“Don’t call Paul,” Sara says.

“Why not?”

A sigh and a pause.

“Paul is going through a hard time.”

I love people who are going through a hard time.

“I’m sorry to hear that. Maybe he needs a friend,” I say.

“Yeah, I would stay away if I were you,” she repeats.

I can’t decide whether to be offended because she doesn’t think he’d benefit from knowing me or flattered that she’s somehow protecting me.

Months later, I’m scrolling through a dating app, and someone named Paul likes my picture. He writes me a message:

“Are you friends with my sister, Sara?’

The only way to reply is to like the person back. He doesn’t look nearly as cute as he did when I was eight.

I like him back, but I say this:

“Oh, wow. Hi! Yes [smiley face]. I’m matching with you to continue this conversation, not because I think we should date. How are you, Paul?”

“Hi Amanda - Sara had asked me a couple of months ago if I remember you and told me you moved back to NYC. I think that Town School was so small that everyone knew everyone….” He goes on to tell me about his life. He doesn’t seem to be as much of a mess as Sara had intimated. I suggest that I get his phone number and respond by text, which is always easier.

“I only give my number to women who want to date me,” he says. He is funny. I am a sucker for funny.

For the next few days, Paul and I text constantly. I text him from my desk at work, pretending to look at an Excel sheet, while crossing the street, dodging people and cars and Citi bikes using only my peripheral vision, while on the subway, waiting for the 5G bars to appear each time the train stops so I can hit “send.” Something is happening, but I am not sure what. What I do know is that I am enjoying this and I know that he is too. I rarely if ever use “lol” in texts, so I don’t, but I am legitimately laughing out loud because he is witty and sarcastic and unpretentious. I like him.

I tell him that I once wrote about his sister and I text him the story about the ducky cup. He says he likes the story but that I should have written more about how handsome Sara’s brother had been.

We decide to meet for a drink. We go to Dorrian’s Red Hand, the Upper East Side bar that we New York City kids used to go to in high school. This bar had become famous in 1986 as the bar that Robert Chambers and Jennifer Levin went to before Chambers killed Levin in Central Park. This story, dubbed The Preppy Murder by the papers and on TV, scared the shit out of all of us but didn’t stop us from frequenting one of the only bars we knew that routinely didn’t card.

When Paul shows up, I give him a hug and a kiss which is what you do when you haven’t seen someone in forty years but he seems surprised by it and a little stiff. He is not bad looking but he is not my type. Well, I don’t really have a type but if I did, this would not be it. Maybe it’s because he’s short — my height. He’s muscular, not fat, but because of his stature, I think you’d describe him as “stocky”. He also has a bit of a New York accent. Well, maybe not, but he says things like “yuge” instead of “huge” and a few other things – I can’t recall exactly what – that New Yorkers with accents say, older New Yorkers. Even so, he looks much younger than his fifty-six years. He is nice looking, actually. He has a sweet smile. But he really resembles Sara and for some reason the idea of romance with him seems incestuous.

But that’s not why I’m here. I’m here to have a drink with someone I have things in common with. We are both single and recently divorced and have kids and live on the Upper East Side and went to the same elementary school. This is not a date, this is just a drink. Anyway, it’s a no. He’s a no.

He orders me a Tito’s up with olives, which is the only thing I ever want, and he orders a vodka on the rocks for himself, I think. We get a table away from the bar. It’s loud and crowded but we’re far enough away from the action that we can still hear one another.

“I have a surprise for you,” he says. “You are not going to believe this.” Paul puts a cloth Morton Williams grocery bag on the table. I stare at it. Paul’s eyes get wider and he smiles. Dimples form. He looks handsome. Whatever the surprise is, he seems very excited to give it to me.

“Oh my God,” I say when I realize what it is going to be. “No way.”

I reach into the bag, and there it is. Exactly how I remember it.

“Did part of you think it didn’t really exist?” He asks.

“Absolutely. Yes,” I say. “Memory can be so unreliable. How did you get this?”

“My mom is a hoarder. She keeps everything.”

“Does she know you took it?”

“No,” he says. “I snuck in.”

“Paul.”

“Yes?”

“This is the most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me,” I say this because it feels true, even though I don’t exactly know what I mean.

We talk about the ducky cup and then we talk about other things. We laugh.

“We have a connection,” he says. “And it feels good.”

We do and it does.

After I finish my martini, and I’m halfway through the next, I decide that he is no longer a no. He is a yes. For a moment, he’s talking and I’m not even listening. “Yes, yes,” I say to myself. “I am changing the no to a yes. He is a yes.”

He kisses me once in the bar, and once when we’re out on the street.

We go our separate ways. He doesn’t even suggest otherwise. Which is good, because after my “yes” light goes on, I have no boundaries. Maybe it’s a result of having been married for twenty years. I still have a vague idea of the bases which I’m assuming are the same as they were before I was married but, frankly, I don’t really see the point.

Paul texts me a picture of the tulips he sees on his way home, but I don’t get it until the morning because I pass out as soon as I get back to my apartment. Literally, I fall asleep with my coat and shoes on, which is something I have never done before. I realize in the morning that I hadn’t had dinner, and so I’d been drunker than I normally am after two martinis.

In the morning, I take the ducky cup out of the Morton Williams bag and wash it. I hadn’t realized this at Dorrian’s but it’s dirty. Very dirty. I’m not sure why or how it got this way, as I imagine it’s been sitting in a cabinet for at least forty-five years. I scrub a little too hard and some of the yellow paint comes off of the ceramic duck. I decide to let it soak for a while in the sink.

Who Lives In This Cup? Sara was right. That’s exactly what it says on the outside. The duck itself is in worse shape than I’d remembered. In fact, the body is lumpy and slightly misshapen. I understand how, as a young child, I was initially unimpressed.

I let it soak for several hours, towel it to dry. It’s still a little dirty but I don’t want to push my luck. Paul and I text about it. I tell him that I think a spray of bleach will do the trick but that I’m afraid to apply harsh chemicals. I tell him that the Task Rabbit who comes to assemble my IKEA cabinet is thirsty but I don’t have any clean glasses so I might have to give him the ducky cup.

“No. Ducky is just for you,” he says.

My heart swells.

Today, Paul and I are not a couple. I’m pretty sure that’s what you are wondering. I wasn’t interested in continuing in the direction we were going in. I wasn’t attracted to him. Or maybe I was, but not enough. I try to ask myself why but I can’t answer. Attraction, or the absence of it, isn’t explainable. And I am free now. Autonomous. Untethered. I don’t need to offer explanations to anyone for anything, ever again. This is the truest thing I’ve ever written, yet I still need to remind myself of it, every single day.

Still, the cup remains on my kitchen counter. It has no purpose, no function. Maybe I keep it here to remind me that, in the end, we all eventually get what we want, or what we think we want, or what we once thought we wanted. Or maybe I keep it here to remind me that my story is not over. That no story is ever over, that the camera keeps rolling, even if we’ve stopped paying attention. Maybe I want a reminder to pay attention.

Or maybe, I just like looking at my prize.

Amanda Klarsfeld graduated from Tulane University with a concentration in creative writing. She has since worked as copywriter for multinational brands and a community news writer, food section writer and blogger for Sun-Sentinel, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper. One year ago, Amanda returned to New York City, where she was born and raised, after almost thirty years in other, less exciting places.