This short story, “Meeting Harold's Father” was written by Jenny Crusie as part of the back story to her novel Crazy For You. It was never supposed to go into the book, but it never went anywhere else, either.
Zoe McKenzie was minding her own business on the edge of the pond in Dennison Park when biology blindsided her.
She was standing by the water, confident in three-inch heels and a cream silk suit, when a little girl in a pink jumpsuit yelled, “Mommy,” and ran into the arms of a woman dressed in jeans and an OSU T-shirt, and Zoe’s uterus contracted.
The pain was so sudden that she sat down on the splintered green wood bench, silk suit and all, and said, “Oh,” partly from the pain but mostly from the cliché. She was thirty, she was childless, she was manless, but that was okay, she was happy, she was--
I want a baby, she thought, and the idea sat there, in the middle of her mind, implacable, bolstered by her hormones, unfazed by common sense.
She didn’t want a baby. If she’d wanted a baby, she could have stayed married, stayed buried in her hometown, she could have had half a dozen babies by now. More than that, probably.
I didn’t want one then.
Well, she didn’t want one now, either.
A husband would be good, too.
Zoe sat back and considered her situation.
There had been a day when she had been running up a hill and her mind had been chanting keep running keep running keep running keep running when Zoe had noticed that her body was walking. At some point, if your mind refused to pay attention to your body, your body just overruled your mind. Think whatever you want, it said. I’m going over here.
This was clearly one of those times.
So maybe she should pay some attention to her body.
First of all, her feet hurt. She kicked off her heels and felt much better.
Except she was hot. She looked at the cool green water and thought the hell with it. She went behind the high backed bench and stripped off her panty hose—that in itself was heaven—and then she took off her jacket and dropped it on the bench and waded into the water.
Much better.
So about that baby, her body said.
Rationally, it wasn’t possible. Even if she’d wanted a family, and she wasn’t sure she did, all the men she knew wanted vice presidencies, tech portfolios, and mutual funds. They wouldn't be dads, they'd be commuter fathers. And she had no interest in being a single mother. So it wasn’t going to work. Not feasible.
She sloshed her way around the edge of the pond, trying not to look at the little girl, and then she moved around a curve in the cement edge and saw him.
He was sitting with his feet in the water, his pants rolled up over his long bony legs. His fair hair flopped over his forehead, but otherwise he was pretty much the standard business male who populated Zoe’s life. Except for the feet in the pond part. Zoe frowned at him.
"Hello." His eyes dropped to her skirt, hiked up to mid-hip. "You have nice legs."
"Thank you." Zoe took another step back. "My husband Nick thinks so, too."
"That wasn't a pass," he said. "It was a comment. Like, 'nice day, isn't it?'"
"Oh." Zoe peered at him. He was a fairly attractive man if you could get past the feet in the fountain part. "Are you all right?"
"Me?" He squinted up at her. "Of course, I'm all right. I'm not thinking of ending it all in this pond, if that's what you're worried about." He sounded sarcastic which was annoying.
“It’s possible, you know,” she said severely. “You can drown in two inches of water."
"How?" The man shook his head. "You must be somebody's mother. Now tell me to put that stick down before I poke my eye out."
Zoe glared at him. "I think somebody needs a nap."
He laughed suddenly, a real full laugh, and said, "You are somebody's mother. I knew it. Got any pictures?"
"No." Zoe said and felt like snarling because she didn’t.
"What are their names?" he asked and without thinking, Zoe answered, "Bianca. Bianca and . . . Toby."
"Bianca?" The man scowled at her. "You named a helpless baby Bianca?"
"It's a lovely name," Zoe flared. "What did you name yours, Dick and Jane?"
"Harold," the man said. "Harold and Annabelle."
"Harold." Zoe sat down on the cement edge of the pond, disgusted. "You named your son Harold. How often does he get beaten up on the playground? Daily?"
"Harold happens to be the star of the Little League." Harold's father stopped, distracted for a moment. "If I can just get him to stop choking on his swing, I think we're talking big league potential."
"I bet you yell at him from the stands," Zoe said. "Poor Harold."
"I do not yell at Harold from the stands." He shook his head at her obtuseness. "I coach. I yell at him from the bench. Which he understands because he is All Boy." He grinned at her. "You wouldn't understand this stuff, because you're a girl." He held his hand out. "How do you do, Bianca's mother. I'm Ben."
His smile was a real killer, lighting his long face with intelligence, and his grasp was warm and firm. Zoe felt a moment of regret that he was Harold's father and not someone unattached that she might start a Bianca with. "I'm Zoe. Nice to meet you."
"Hello, Zoe. Now look, you've got to get Toby into Little League—"
"Why Toby?" Zoe asked. "Why not Bianca? What does Annabelle do? Stand on the sidelines and watch?"
"Annabelle is in the six-year-old league, of course. My wife Juliette—who also has excellent legs—coaches. And when Annabelle plays, Harold and I stand on the sidelines and cheer a lung out for her."
Zoe smiled at him and he smiled back at her, and the air around the fountain grew warmer. "Then what?" she said, hungry for more.
"Then what?" He blinked. "Oh. Well, then . . . we all go home and I grill hamburgers. And my wife mows the back yard and when it gets dark, we watch videos."
"Oh." Zoe felt a stab of envy that went to the bone. Lucky Juliette to have Ben who liked being a dad. "That's nice."
"Yep," Ben said almost to himself. "That's what we do. I suppose you and Ned have Toby in the ballet. That's no good. You've got to—"
"Nick," Zoe said. "And no, we do not have Toby in the ballet. Toby is into kung fu."
"Violent kid," Ben said. "Little League is a friendly sport."
"And Bianca plays tennis," Zoe went on. "She has a game tonight and then we're going out for pizza and home to watch videos." She stopped, conscious that she'd co-opted part of Ben's life.
"The kids always fall asleep halfway through the movie," Ben said, staring into space. "So it always ends up just me and Jeannette, stretched out on the couch, watching the puppies come home."
Zoe felt irrationally annoyed at the thought of Ben stretched out with Jeannette. Jeannette? "Who's Jeannette?"
"My wife," Ben said. "Who did you think it was, the babysitter?"
"I thought her name was Julie something," Zoe said. "What puppies?"
"We always watch 101 Dalmations--" Ben began.
"I used to lovethat movie." Zoe kicked her foot in the water as she remembered. "That's a wonderful movie."
"Well, it's not Citizen Kane," Ben said. "But I do admit to feeling a real bond with Lucky. Now there's a dog—"
"Not Lucky," Zoe said. "Roly. Roly is the best."
"Women." Ben shook his head. "Lucky is obviously—"
"Why weren't there any little girl puppies?" Zoe said, frowning again. "I never thought of that."
"Roly was a girl," Ben said. "Whence the term, puppy fat."
“Sexist,” Zoe said.
“Jeannette is not a feminist,” he said. “She has nothing to prove.” He considered the distance for a moment and then added, “She also has no puppy fat.”
“Sylphlike, is she? How nice for her,” Zoe said, and then relented. "Ignore me. I'm having a bad day. You're a lucky man."
"Yeah, that's me." He seemed depressed suddenly. "Tell me about you and Nick."
"Oh, we're like you and Jeannette," Zoe said, and they talked on as the sun dropped lower in the sky, trading stories that seemed washed with sunshine, and the more they talked, the more Zoe pictured them together which was wrong of her, of course. "And then, sometimes we put the kids to bed and lie in the hammock and look up at the stars," she finished, and she thought about the hammock and Ben and felt depressed. He was married. He had no business in her hammock.
"A hammock?" Ben looked annoyed. "The two of you in one hammock? Nick must be a real lightweight."
"Nick played fullback in high school," Zoe said, telling the complete truth for the first time that afternoon. “He’s an ex-Marine.”
"Better reinforce that hammock," Ben said. "Those guys run to lard in later years."
"Thank you," Zoe said. "You may want to feed Jeanette up a little now; those skinny women look like hell when they age."
"I'll pass that on." Ben cocked an eyebrow at her. "Why are we fighting?"
"I don't know," Zoe said, and then she looked at him and thought, because I don't want you to be married and watching videos with Jeannette, I want you in a hammock with me. The thought was ridiculous, born of biology which was, God knew, nothing to base a decision on. She did have one moment of despair--just her luck; she finally found someone she'd really enjoy becoming Bianca's mother with and he turned out to be Harold's father—and then she pulled herself together.
"I have to go," she said, standing up.
"Why?" Ben said, startled, and then he said, "Oh, hell, lunch is over, so I do." He stood up and looked down at her. "Tell Bianca I said good luck."
"Same to Harold." Zoe held out her hand. He took it, and his hand was still firm but warmer now, and they stood for a moment, calf-deep in green fountain water, while the sounds of the traffic came muffled through the buildings across from them.
Zoe let go of his hand and waded to the edge of the fountain to climb self-consciously over the edge, but when she turned back, he was gone.
Fifteen minutes later, Zoe sat down at the conference table, turned to the man at her right, and froze. It was Harold's father.
"Zoe, this is your opposite number: Ben O'Donnell," her boss said, introducing them. "Ben, Zoe McKenzie."
"Hi," Zoe said faintly and turned away to listen to her boss's presentation, only to leap a foot off her seat when a paper airplane landed in her lap.
She unfolded it. It said, "Is Bianca really playing tennis tonight?"
Zoe sighed. "No," she wrote underneath it. "Bianca is a figment of my imagination. I lost my grip on reality. Sorry."
She slid it back to him, feeling stupid and regretful, and then feeling stupid for feeling regretful because he was a married man so she shouldn’t have been feeling anything at all, and besides she had a career to concentrate on, damn it, and then moments later, the airplane flipped back over her shoulder into her lap again, and she was appalled to realize she was smiling about that.
Her boss looked at her, eyebrows raised.
She shifted her smile to him, the smile of a woman who hadn’t thrown the airplane and was therefore not guilty, and unfolded it.
"Make me a happy man and tell me Nick is a figment, too."
She scowled at the paper for Ben’s benefit and wrote. "Nick is alive and well and divorced from me, thank God, but I do not do married men, so just go hit the couch with Jeanette and her great legs."
She waited until her boss was looking the other way and then tossed the paper over her shoulder into the vicinity of Ben’s lap and tried to concentrate on the presentation. Married. He was married. Damn it.
The airplane landed back in her lap again, and she briefly thought of turning around and stuffing it between his teeth, but she unfolded it and read it instead. It said: "I can't remember this woman's name, and you still believe she exists? The only thing about her that's real is her legs and they're yours.”
Zoe closed her eyes. Jeannine, Jeannette. Oh, thank God. She took a deep breath and began to read again.
“So here's the deal. You are invited back to my apartment for pizza and videos. The couch is optional. What do you say?"
Zoe thought about it for approximately two seconds. Then she turned and looked at Ben. He was smiling at her and there was warmth and light in his face, and she thought of how he'd talked about Harold and Annabelle, especially Annabelle, and she thought about the couch, and suddenly Little League didn't seem like such a bad idea. She could coach.
"Is there a problem, Zoe?" her boss said.
"Yes," Zoe told him. "Harold is absolutely out of the question."
“Who’s Harold?” her boss said.
"As long as he plays Little League, I don't care what his name is," Ben said from behind her.
"Then there’s no problem," Zoe said and wrote, "Yes," on the paper, and tossed it into the lap of the father of her future children.
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