What Happens in Suburbia… (Red Dress Ink Novels)

by Wendy Markham

  At that point, anything—and I mean anything—round-the-clock morning sickness, childbirth without pain meds, endless sleepless nights, death by firing squad—would have been better than taking the subway to midtown every morning and dealing with my anal-retentive boss, account group director Adrian Smedly and an array of bitchy Clients.

  Luckily for me, Jack didn’t think an eight-week maternity leave was sufficient incentive for motherhood. At the time, I was a little miffed. But since it takes two to make a baby the original old-fashioned way, and I couldn’t find a willing sperm donor ( just kidding ), I reluctantly set aside the baby dream—half hearted and short-lived as it was.

  Not so long after, I found my salvation—or so I thought, pre-Crosby Courts—when I was at last moved into the Creative Department.

  Meanwhile, Jack and I pretty much dropped the baby-making subject. I figured it would come up again, though, when one of us found a burning desire to procreate—or play hooky from work for a few months.

  Or forever.

  Which is how I feel right about now.

  Seriously. I need to get out at some point. I’ve been at Blaire Barnett, aside from a brief foray as a catering waitress at Eat, Drink and Be Married, for my entire adult life. I’m so over agency life. And city life.

  Things have to change.

  So last night when I was eating overpriced turkey on overpriced bread with overpriced lettuce and drinking an overpriced Snapple, while keeping one eye out for cockroaches, trying to ignore the deafening crashes from 10J and watching the ten o’clock news with its usual urban murder and mayhem, I came up with a plan. A good one.

  Nope, pregnancy isn’t my proposed ticket out this time. This new plan doesn’t involve nearly as much physical pain. Or sex.

  Unless, of course, I need to use my wiles to bribe Jack.

  Just kidding. I don’t really do that.

  Much.

  “So, look, I think we should start thinking about moving,” I tell my husband, officially launching Operation Fresh Start. “We said we were going to do it someday, and we’ve got the down payment.”

  Thanks to his dad, who surprised us with a pretty big chunk of change for our wedding gift. I say surprised because even though he was filthy rich, he also was never the most generous guy in the world, and like I said before, he and Jack weren’t on the best terms.

  But he had mellowed a little over the years, and he did give us money to use toward a house. Jack—who, as a media planner, is proficient with handling large sums, though it’s usually the Client’s tens of millions and not our own tens of thousands—decided to invest it in a CD until we need it. That sounded like a good idea to me, and Jack and I have always been on the same page about our household finances.

  Unlike my parents, who have always argued over money—not that they’ve ever had any.

  Also unlike Kate and Billy, who have also always argued over money—not that they’ve ever had any shortage of it, as bona fide blue bloods.

  Anyway, Jack might be getting an inheritance, too, once his father’s will is sorted out. Jack Candell Senior had remarried a few months before he died, and his new wife is contesting his will, which left everything to his kids. She says he made a new one leaving—surprise!—everything to her. Only there seems to be some discrepancy about that.

  Even without a cut of his father’s fortune, though, Jack and I can probably afford a decent house in the suburbs.

  “So,” I say to Jack, “we’ve got the down payment, and I think we should start thinking about a move. Out of the city.”

  Jack looks at me, shifts his weight in his chair. “I don’t know.”

  Okay, the thing is…I didn’t ask him a question, so why is he answering one?

  “You don’t know…what?” I ask. “What don’t you know?”

  “Just…why do you want to leave the city?”

  “I’m sick of it. It’s crowded and noisy and expensive and stressful and dangerous and it smells and we’re surrounded by strangers, some of whom are circus freaks and pickpockets and perverts. I can’t take it anymore. I want to live in a small town.”

  “You grew up in a small town.”

  “I know, but—”

  “You left your small town the second you were out of college and moved five hundred miles to New York because you didn’t want to live in a small town. Remember?”

  Of course I do, but he doesn’t. I didn’t even meet him until I’d been in New York a few years. I hate when he uses my past against me like this.

  Okay, he’s never really done it before. But he’s doing it now, and I think I hate it.

  “So are you saying you want to go back?” he asks.

  “To Brookside? God, no!”

  “Good. Because I don’t think I can live there. Nothing against your family.”

  “I know I can’t live there. Everything against my family.”

  Don’t get me wrong—I love my family. Do the Spadolinis have their little quirks and oddities? Absolutely. Like, as much as they resent stereotypes about Sicilians and organized crime, they do have a hush-hush sausage connection (my family pronounces it zau-zage, and I’ve never been sure why).

  What the heck is a sausage connection, you may ask? Or you may know already, though unless you’re Spadolini compare, I doubt it.

  See, my brother Danny knows this guy, Lou, who furtively sells homemade zau-zage out of the trunk of his car and let me tell you, it’s the best damn zau-zage you’ll ever taste, see?

  It’s even better than Uncle Cosmo’s homemade zau-zage, which has too much fennel in it, see. When one of my nephews once told him that, he inadvertently started what is now referred to in Spadolini lore as the Great Zau-Zage Wars of Aught-Six.

  So, yeah. We have our quirks and oddities, just like any other family.

  Well, Jack’s family doesn’t exactly have quirks and oddities, per se. The Candells may have an organic-produce connection, but their (probably organic) family tree is barren of colorful relatives like Snooky and Fat Naso and Uncle Cosmo of the Homemade Zau-zage and Spastic Colon—who will tell you, usually over a nice zau-zage sandwich, that one has nothing to do with the other, but I’m not so sure.

  Oh, and the Candells don’t discuss bowel function—or malfunction—around the Sunday-dinner table, either. In fact, they rarely even gather around the dinner table on Sundays or any other non holidays in the first place. When they do, it’s usually for takeout. Usually chicken. Not KFC, though. The Candells don’t go for battered, deep-fried food.

  My family would batter and fry lettuce—iceburg, of course. They privately refer to the Candells as a bunch of health nuts, and they don’t mean that as a compliment. When my brother Frankie Junior found out at our wedding that Jack’s sister Rachel is a vegan, he practically shook her by the shoulders and screamed, “What the hell’s the matter with you? For the love of God, eat a cheeseburger, woman!”

  So, while I do love my family, I do not want to live anywhere near them or, for that matter, in the bleak and notorious blizzard belt of southwestern New York State.

  You’ve probably heard about the prairie blizzards of yore, and the historic Buffalo blizzards fifty miles north of my hometown. Let me tell you, that doesn’t compare to what we get in Brookside every year once the Lake-effect snow machine kicks into gear—and it lasts for months on end. Our Columbus Day and Memorial Day family picnics have both been snowed out more than once.

  A few Christmases ago, my brother Joey parked his van on my parents’ side yard and when Lake-effect snow started falling, it quickly became mired. He had to leave it there overnight. Well, the snow kept falling, foot after foot after foot, and by the next afternoon, the van was completely buried. I’m talking buried—no one knew the exact spot where he had parked it, so it couldn’t even be dug out. Joey had to rent a car until well after Martin Luther King Day, when the roof emerged after a fleeting thaw.

  So, long story that could go on and on—no, I don’t want to live in Brookside.
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br />   But I don’t want to live in Manhattan, either.

  “I want to live someplace where the sun shines and we can have a house, and a garden—” I see Jack cast a dubious glance at the barely alive philodendron on the windowsill “—and trees,” I go on, “and a driveway—”

  “We don’t have a car.”

  “We’ll get one. Wouldn’t it be great to have a car, Jack? We’d be so free.” It’s funny how basic things you took for granted most of your life—like cars, or greenery, or walls, ceilings, and floors without strangers lurking on the other side—can seem luxurious when you haven’t had them for a while.

  “I don’t know,” Jack says again.

  “Come on, Jack.”

  “But…I get allergic smelling hay!” he quips in his best Zsa Zsa Gabor as Lisa Douglas imitation, which, I have to say, isn’t all that great.

  “There’s no hay. I’m not talking about the country. Just the suburbs. It’s time for a change.”

  “I’m not crazy about change.”

  “Change is good, Jack.”

  “Not all change.”

  “Well, whatever, change is inevitable. We might as well embrace it, right?”

  Jack doesn’t seem particularly eager to embrace it—or me, for that matter. He’s starting to look pissed off. He aims the remote at the CD player and raises the volume a little.

  “I just feel like we’re stagnating here,” I tell him, above Alicia Keys’s soulful singing. “We can’t go on like this. We need a change. I desperately need a change, Jack.”

  I should probably drop the subject.

  But I’ve never been very good at that—not one of my more lovable qualities, but I can’t seem to help myself.

  “I really think we’re missing out on a lot, living here,” I tell Jack.

  “Missing out? How can you say that? This is the greatest city in the world. It’s filled with great restaurants and museums, and there’s Broadway, and—”

  “When was the last time we took advantage of any of it?”

  “I took advantage of it just last night,” he points out, and immediately has the grace to look apologetic and add, “It wasn’t that much fun without you.”

  “Well, I feel like all we ever do is go to work and come home, and on the weekends, we scrounge around for quarters and hope we can find an empty washer in the laundry room. Wouldn’t it be great to have our own washer? We could leave stuff in it if we didn’t feel like taking it out the second it stops. We wouldn’t have to worry about strangers coming along and touching our wet underwear.”

  “I don’t worry about that.”

  “Well, I do,” I say, shuddering at the memory of walking in on the creepy guy from 9C fondling my Hanes Her Way. “Seriously, Jack. I want a washer. In a laundry room. In a house…”

  “That Jack built.”

  “No! You don’t have to build it,” I assure him, and he laughs.

  “No, it’s Mother Goose,” he says, and I’m relieved that he seems a lot less pissed off. “Didn’t you ever hear that nursery rhyme? This is the cat that killed the rat that lived in the house that Jack built. Or something like that.”

  “There are rats,” I say darkly. “They’re living in the alley behind this building. I saw one the other day when I took stuff down to the Dumpster.”

  “There are rats all over the city.”

  “Exactly! And now there’s a bad roach problem in the building.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Gecko told me. He also told me the Mad Crapper has struck again.” I fill him in.

  “Nice.” Jack rolls his eyes.

  “Why do we live here, Jack? Let’s move.”

  Oh my God! He’s tilting his head! He only does that when he’s seriously contemplating something!

  Then he straightens his head and says, “This isn’t the greatest time to invest in real estate.”

  “Sure it is!” I don’t care, the initial head-tilt gave me hope, and I’m clinging to it. “This is a great time! We’ve paid down our credit cards, we don’t have kids yet, we’re both making good money in stable jobs…”

  Mental Note: save part II of Operation Fresh Start—in which we quit our jobs, or at least I do—for a later discussion.

  “I don’t mean it’s not a great time in our personal lives,” he clarifies. “I mean it’s not a great time in the country’s general economical climate.”

  “Oh, come on, Jack. It’s not like there are soup-kitchen lines around the block. The economical climate is fine,” I assure him, while wondering, um, is it?

  “Anyway,” I add quickly, lest Jack point out that lately my current-events reading has mostly been limited to page-six blind items, “real estate is the most solid investment you can make.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “So you’re saying you don’t think we should buy a house somewhere?”

  “No, I’m not saying that.”

  “Then what are you saying?” I ask in a bordering-on-shrill voice I hate.

  But I swear, sometimes Jack’s utter calm makes my voice just go there in response. I can’t help it. It’s like the lower-key he is, the shriller I become.

  He shrugs. “I don’t think we should jump into anything.”

  “We’ve waited over two years!” Shrill, shrill. Yikes. I try to tone it down a little as I ask, “How is that jumping in? The least we can do is start looking at real-estate ads.”

  “That’s fine,” he says with a shrug. “Go ahead and start looking.”

  I promptly reach into the catchall basket on the floor by the chair, which is overflowing with magazines I never have time to read anymore.

  Pulling out the New York Times real-estate section—which I pored over while he was still in bed earlier—I thrust it at him.

  “What’s this?”

  “The listings. For Westchester.”

  “Westchester?” He frowns. “We never said we were moving to Westchester.”

  “Back when we got married, we said we’d look in Westchester.”

  “Did we? I don’t remember.”

  I frown.

  “What? It was a long time ago,” he says with a shrug.

  “Well, then, to refresh your memory…we decided Manhattan is too expensive, the boroughs are also expensive and if we’re going to pay that much we might as well live in Manhattan—”

  “Which we can’t afford,” Jack observes.

  “Right. And Long Island is too inconvenient because we’d have to go through the city to get anywhere else, and the commute from Jersey can be a pain, Rockland is too far away, Connecticut is Red Sox territory…”

  Kiss of death for Jack, the die-hard Yankees fan. I am nothing if not thorough and strategic.

  “So,” I wind down, “by process of elimination, it’s Westchester if we’re going to live in the New York suburbs at all.”

  “You’ve got it all figured out, don’t you?”

  “Yup.” Pleased with myself, I watch him scan the page of listings.

  Westchester County, directly north of the city, is an upscale, leafy suburban wonderland. It just so happens that Jack grew up there. His mother still lives there, as do two of his four sisters.

  “Won’t it be nice to live near your mom?” I ask Jack. “This way, you wouldn’t have to run up there every time she needs something. You’ll be close enough to go running over there all the time.”

  To some sons, that might sound like a threat. But Jack adores his mother. They’re really close. And as mothers-in-law go, Wilma Candell is the best.

  “And when we have kids,” I add for good measure as he scans the newspaper page without comment, “your mom can spend a lot of time with them.”

  “I thought we weren’t talking about starting a family yet.”

  “We aren’t. We’re talking about finding the house where we’re going to eventually raise our family when we start one.”

  Jack barely gives the paper another cursory glance before handing it back to me
. “Okay, well…good.”

  “Good…what?”

  “This is good. There are houses in our price range, so if we decide to look up there at some point, at least we’ll have something to look at.”

  We have a price range? And these houses are in it?

  Hallelujah.

  “But we have to strike while the iron is hot,” I tell him, and add for good measure, “You know, we can’t let the grass grow under our feet.”

  “Slow and steady wins the race,” Jack returns with a grin.

  “Maybe,” I say, slipping from the arm of his chair onto his lap, “but a rolling stone gathers no moss.”

  What does that even mean? I don’t know. But it sounds motivational.

  I guess not to Jack, though.

  “We’ll look someday,” he says, pushing a clump of my hair out of my eyes, “when we’re ready.”

  “I’m ready.”

  “For family starting?” he asks, and I laugh and shake my head.

  “No family starting yet,” I tell him.

  Jack reaches for the remote, aims it at the CD player and presses a couple of buttons. Alicia Keys gives way to U2’s “With or Without You.”

  Which happens to be a major aphrodisiac—at least for me.

  Go ahead, try it—listen to that song and see if it doesn’t instantly put you in the mood.

  The opening bass is enough to do it for me, every time—and Jack knows it.

  “How about a dry run on the family-starting thing, so to speak?”

  I loop my arms around his neck. “I’m game…if you’re game for a dry run on the house-hunting circuit next weekend.”

  Jack tilts his head.

  I kiss his neck.

  Bono sings.

  We are so there.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Let’s take a drive through the village first, shall we?” asks Verna Treeby, slipping behind the wheel of her silver Mercedes.

  Yes, we shall, because Verna Treeby of Houlihan Lawrence Real Estate is calling all the shots today here in suburbia on this cold, gray Sunday.

  Jack settles himself into the backseat, and I climb into the front. I was thinking maybe he’d be the one to sit up here, but he made such an immediate beeline for the back that I’d swear someone must have said they’re giving away cold Heinekens and Fritos back there.