Keep Me Posted

by Lisa Beazley

  Singapore

  July 27 Cassie,

  Well, I finally confronted Adrian about the cheating. I’m not leaving quite yet, but relax, because we’re not exactly together anyway. We see him fewer than ten days a month, and the rest of that time he’s flying between Bangkok, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur. He’s cried, groveled, declared his undying love, etc., etc. I surprised myself by being unmoved by the whole display. The truth is that I do love him and I am shattered over this, but despite the temptation to believe him and give this marriage another chance, to give Lulu a childhood with a mother and a father, I can see so clearly that he isn’t really going to change. It’s almost like I’ve been granted temporary clairvoyance. I feel kind of “in the zone” about the whole thing. I got this flash of him reciting the same apology again and again, me having misgivings about his whereabouts for the rest of my life. Oddly, I feel sorry for him, which is not what I want to be feeling—good old-fashioned anger would be more cathartic, I suspect. I do feel bad, really bad, for Lulu and River. But I’m determined that Adrian’s wayward penis disrupt their life as little as possible. It seems selfish and juvenile to leave in a huff. So we’re staying for now, and I’ll figure out my next steps at some point. You know what they say . . . It is what it is! Love, Sid I couldn’t believe how well she was handling this. And she knows it drives me crazy when people say, “It is what it is,” so she was even making jokes.

  I read back through all of the letters for earlier hints that she and Adrian were in trouble. But instead I just found evidence of my own bad behavior. I cringed as I read myself going on and on with my stupid, selfish complaints while she was enduring something truly wretched. But how do you listen better in a letter? I could have asked more questions. Perhaps waited for answers before barreling through with every shallow observation in my head. Between this and Quinn’s accident, I had all the motivation I needed: Things had to change; I had to change. Over the next week, I felt like Michael Keaton in the “getting stronger” montage in Mr. Mom. No more listlessly scrolling through Facebook while I halfheartedly played dinosaurs with the boys. No more being dragged out of bed by them at seven and placating them with TV while I had my coffee and shower. I forced myself awake when the alarm sounded at six and was ready to greet them with hugs by the time they awoke. I tried to talk the way Mrs. Pteranodon from Dinosaur Train talked to her dino kids. I begrudgingly made an effort to implement the strategies Jenna had outlined in her “Zen of Parenting” blog post. There is only now, I coached myself. And sometimes it worked. I became completely absorbed watching Joey spend five minutes eating a single peanut M&M as if it were an apple, falling a little bit more in love with him as he carefully chewed off the candy shell bit by bit so that by the time he reached the peanut, which he licked clean and then handed to me, his face and fingers were covered in chocolate. The fact that he either hadn’t noticed or wasn’t bothered that his brother had quietly polished off the rest of the bag helped me understand him a little better. I felt love and appreciation for Quinn then too, for being wily or kind enough not to gloat to his brother about eating all the candy. If I could be so moved by this seemingly mundane episode, I wondered what else I had missed while my face was buried in my phone. When Quinn peed his pants in the stroller, I undressed him from the waist down, and when he wiggled free and started running away, casted hand and bandaged face, yelling, “I’m make-did! I’m make-did!” (his word for naked), I followed behind at a safe distance, enjoying the laughs and even the startled and disapproving looks from passersby. I did take out my phone, but only to film him. I had taped a list to the fridge of things I imagined good moms did with their kids. I’d made my way through sidewalk chalk in our building’s courtyard, homemade Play-Doh, and brown-bag puppets, all of which I’d proudly documented on Facebook as if they were normal activities for me. “Make cookies” day had arrived, but I decided that cookies were a bit ambitious and switched to brownies from a mix. I set out the ingredients and measuring cups and then read the instructions aloud to the boys, forcing myself to let them do everything. I clenched my hands into fists and winced while offering encouraging words as milk sloshed out of the bowl and a good portion of the dry mix ended up on the counter. It’s possible I gave them too much freedom, because when Joey picked up the bowl and Quinn began ushering the lumpy wet mix into the pan with a spatula, the bowl shot out of poor Joey’s arms and landed upside down on the corner of the rug. I slopped up what I could in one big swipe of a kitchen towel while refereeing a brief screaming match regarding whose fault it was. Leaving the rest of the mess on the floor, I took the boys back to the store and bought a new mix—something the Cassie of even two weeks ago would never have done. As we commenced batch number two, I realized we didn’t have an egg. The finished brownies were to be an emblem of my improved attitude and capabilities, and I was determined to see this project through with a smile on my face, even if the vein on my forehead was about to burst through my skin. I turned on the TV to distract the boys, ran across the hall, and knocked on Jenna’s door. She didn’t have eggs either, but she offered to watch Quinn and Joey while I ran to get some. “That’d be great. You are a lifesaver,” I said, and I meant it. She called to Valentina, who was munching on what looked like endive while paging through a book. “Okay, Mom,” she said, and wiped her hands and face on a cloth napkin before getting up to follow her out the door. Jenna and Valentina stood in the doorway to my kitchen/living room, surveying what must have seemed a foreign land—TV blaring, one boy standing on his head on the sofa while picking his nose, the other one, naked, huddled over the pile of spilled brownie mix, repeatedly dipping his finger in and licking it. “Do you mind if I just pop this off?” Jenna asked in her best attempt to sound casual as she sidestepped the brownie spill and made her way to the TV, where she frantically groped, her fingers locating buttons underneath that I didn’t even know existed, which only caused brightness and contrast screens to pop up. “Noooo!” Joey shouted. I sighed and reached around Jenna to press my finger against the red dot in the bottom-right corner of the set as Joey erupted in tears. “Oh, I am sorry, kiddo. How about we do a puzzle?” Jenna said, her eyes scanning the room for something wooden or educational. I hated that she made me feel like a bad mother in my own house, but before I broke my new vow to not hate Jenna, I quickly forced some undies onto Quinn and then scooped up the still wailing and shoeless—but thankfully clothed—Joey, grabbed my keys from the hook, and ran out the door, calling, “Be right back!” “I wanna watch Wonder Pets!” His cries echoed through the marble corridor. “I know, sweetie,” I said, descending the stairs with him on my hip. “We can watch it later, okay?” By the time I reached the main doors, he had calmed down enough for me to shimmy him around to my back. I let him hold a dollar and hand it to Amir in exchange for one egg. Like he does with everything, Amir put the egg in a little black plastic bag with a wad of napkins and handed it to Joey. I’d been meaning to talk to him about that. If I buy a can of Diet Coke, it does not need to be placed in a plastic bag with four napkins. But for now I was grateful I’d yet to intervene, because it meant that Joey was able to transport the single egg upstairs without incident. I thanked Jenna and hoped she would disappear, but she lingered for another mommy intervention. “I forwarded you an invite for this ‘Superfoods for Kids’ workshop happening next week,” she said. “Sounds cool. Thanks,” I said, choosing to ignore the implication that I was in need of a class on how to feed my children. “It’ll be amazing. It’s being organized by Kendra Watts, the chef from Artichoke? And Brooke Klein, this awesome holistic-minded dietitian? Her daughter is in Valentina’s kindergarten class.” “Will you be there?” I asked. “Oh, I’m not sure. I think I sort of know most of what they’re going to say.” “Mmmm,” I said, both irritated and encouraged by her response. I did actually want to go to the workshop, which promised to teach me fast, easy ways to incorporate
“superfoods” into my kids’ diets. I love food, and feeding my family delicious and healthy meals had long been on my to-do list. I’d always pictured myself as the kind of mom who would do that. Alas, food preparation and I had just never clicked thus far. So even though it fell on the coming Thursday, which was to be the first of Leo and my weekly date nights (another tactic of Operation Better Mom/Wife/Sister/Person), I RSVP’d yes. The session—less of a workshop and more of a lecture—was at seven p.m. in the back room of the Cowgirl, a kitschy American restaurant on Hudson Street, and Leo met me there when it ended. When I found him sitting at the bar, we decided to just get a table there. Our waiter wore tight dark jeans, a gingham shirt, and shimmery blue eye shadow, which made it hard not to smile each time I looked at him. “How about next time we go someplace a little more adult?” I said, nodding to the stack of high chairs in the corner. “Done. First rule of date night: no restaurants with high chairs,” Leo said. Although, with the cost of paying Wanda—eighteen dollars an hour plus forty dollars for a car service home—our options were limited. I told him all about the workshop, and I could tell he was impressed that his non-foodie wife was making an effort to feed the kids better food. “I’m gonna do it. I am. I’m ordering FreshDirect tonight. Those boys are eating salmon cakes with Greek yogurt red pepper aioli and kale chips for dinner tomorrow.” I pounded my index finger on the table to show I meant business. The chef who led the workshop and who had bragged that her baby’s first food was runny eggs—eliciting a dramatic inhale from a woman in the front row—had convinced me that I could go from a dinner rotation of cereal and milk, chicken nuggets, and Chinese takeout to preparing home-cooked meals from scratch every night and that it would be supereasy. The nutritionist delivered an ode to wild-caught salmon, which, even—especially—out of a can (a can!), was basically a ticket to Harvard. “Here’s to canned salmon,” Leo said, raising his Ball jar of beer to mine. Leo and I had the best conversation we’d had in months. (Not that it had much competition.) Sitting across from him and just talking was unusual, and, as depressing as that realization was, we were having fun. I ordered a second beer and told him about the sweetly earnest parents in the class—most of them either pregnant or with babies about to start on solids. The vigorous nodding, the copious note taking, the unabashedly ignorant questions: Can you freeze food in plastic containers? When can you start blueberries? Would cauliflower—organic, of course—be a good first food? We laughed at their opposition to the show-offs in Leo’s cheese classes, who were masters at coming up with questions that aren’t really questions at all but thinly veiled attempts to demonstrate their knowledge. He has a theory that these people come to the classes with the single goal of being heard on the subject of cheese. We reminisced about a “Mystery of the Caves” class he took me to while we were dating, where we toured the cheese caves in the shop’s Bleecker Street basement. There were a few people in the class asking such specific questions that they must have either been working on their own cheese cave—in Manhattan!—or had come in from the suburbs, or had researched the temperatures and conditions of cheese caves to the extent that they were able to challenge the instructor on optimal temperatures and number of weeks to properly age a Humboldt Fog or a Coupole. “Oh, wait, we did have one of those,” I said. “This lady who stood in the back as if to monitor the speakers. She constantly interrupted but never had a question. She was kind of a heckler, actually. But the poor thing, her son has all kinds of food allergies—gluten, dairy, nuts, you name it. She said she eliminated these foods one by one from their whole family’s diet, and it started curing them of all of these random ailments.” “Like what?” Leo asked, automatically dubious of people who claim to have food allergies, as if they were making it less easy for him to refuse a food group on ethical grounds. “Well, apparently her husband’s eczema cleared up and her older son stopped complaining of leg pain every day. So I started thinking about my restless legs, and I’m going to try an elimination diet and see what happens.” Leo could barely contain his amusement. I was notorious for my undisciplined and dairy – and carb-rich diet; it wasn’t unusual for me to have a bagel and cream cheese and a latte for breakfast, a slice of pizza and a Diet Coke for lunch, and a beef and cheese burrito for dinner, interspersed with snacks of cereal and milk. “Oh, really. When’s this starting?” he said, nodding to the cheeseburger on my plate. “Tomorrow.” As it turned out, it was dairy. I’m officially lactose intolerant. After a few false starts on a full elimination diet, I decided to start with dairy, which was hard, but within two weeks my legs were better. I couldn’t believe it. I went to bed and fell asleep and didn’t wake up kicking and twitching. I hadn’t felt truly rested in years. To wake up in the morning and not immediately go through my day looking for a window where a nap might fit in was terrifically refreshing. I saw dairy as the poison in my body that was causing me to be such a slacker of a mom and wife, and as it left my system, so too did the apathy, the unfaithfulness, the general blah-ness I felt almost all of the time. I pictured my blood running pure red instead of a milk-tinged pink. And I have to admit, if Jenna hadn’t sent me to that workshop, I wouldn’t have found the cure and had that great date with Leo that renewed my hope in my marriage. CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A week after the Hoboken disaster, I took Quinn to the neurologist to check the nerve endings on his hand. Mom had arrived the day before for a visit, so Joey stayed home with her. The waiting room was small and dark and devoid of any toys or books, so I handed him my phone to watch YouTube videos of toads catching flies in slow motion. Digging through a pile of Cosmopolitans and Good Housekeepings, I found a battered copy of New York magazine, which featured a two-page spread on Jake and his now-famous beer-and-bacon-braised Brussels sprouts. Forcing myself to skip past the article, I instead flipped to the back page for the Approval Matrix.

  Had I not resisted the temptation to read the article on Jake, had I been remotely interested in what Cosmo says he’s really thinking in bed, had I chosen to abide by my resolution to be more present with Quinn instead of handing him my phone, I might have remained blissfully in the dark for just a bit longer. Maybe even long enough for evidence of my improved behavior and mothering skills to show up in my letters. But this was the moment that the shutter closed on the snapshot of my life. There, in the Lowbrow/Brilliant quadrant of the “oversimplified guide to who falls where on our taste hierarchies” from the editors of New York, right between a chubby nine-year-old in a tuxedo singing a tear-jerking rendition of the National Anthem and a new Muslim superhero movie, was this: Our latest voyeuristic guilty pleasure, the Slow News Sisters. And there was a teeny-tiny picture of one of my letters. It was on my graph paper and I couldn’t make out any of the words, but I recognized my writing and the big heart I had drawn at the bottom. For the second time that week, my heart dropped right out of my chest. I shoved the magazine in my bag, as if it were the only copy in the world. “Mama, come on. That lady saying my name!” Quinn stood in front of me, pulling me by the hand. He sounded far away; my ears were ringing with some sort of internal alarm. When I started walking, my heart, having bounced off of my cushy pelvic floor, made its way up to my throat, and I felt like I might vomit it right out. “Do you need to sit down?” I heard someone ask. A woman was leading me by the arm to a chair inside the doctor’s office, and I muttered something about low blood sugar and skipping breakfast. Quinn studied me silently, looking like he might cry. I knew I should pull it together and stop freaking him out, but I felt trapped inside a body that was unable to do anything but physically react to seeing what I had just seen. A nurse brought me a juice box, and I pretended that it was exactly what I needed. If only. I took a sip and offered some to Quinn. He pushed the juice back toward me. “Uh-uh. You drink,” he said. The nurse gave me a look, and I nodded at her. “I’m okay. Thank you so much.” When she left the room, I took a deep inhale and slid the magazine out of the top of my bag to look
at the date. It was this week’s issue. The mind is a funny thing, isn’t it, that it could come to the following explanation and hold on to it until midway through the subway ride home: It’s simple, really. This is some kind of bizarre coincidence. It was a movie or a book or a TV show or something with the same name as my private blog. What a coincidence. I muttered it like a mantra while leading Quinn to the Thirty-fourth Street station. I was gripping his forearm the way a clueless bachelor in a movie might hold on to a three-year-old he’s been tasked with keeping safe for the day. In a daze, I led us onto an empty car on an otherwise packed train and then cursed my amateur mistake when the doors closed and we found ourselves alone on that express train with a ranting, awful-smelling person. I knew better than to try to get Quinn to move to another car—he was (rightfully) terrified of that space between the cars. So we sat as far away from him as we could, and I focused on distracting Quinn by softly singing “Baby Beluga” and fishing a stick of peppermint gum out of my bag, hoping the scent might alleviate the violent odor in some small way. Quinn watched me intently, not singing along. When I finished, he said, “Mama, are you happy with me?” “Yes, sweetheart, I’m happy with you. Of course I’m happy with you. Are you happy with me?” He rolled his eyes and said, “Yes.” “How’s that finger feeling?” I managed, putting my arm around him and pulling him closer. He let his head fall into my lap and looked up at me. “I’m all better. ’Member? Doctor said. I’m getting bigger and bigger and bigger, you know.” “I do know.” I glanced back at the man to make sure he had no plans of moving from his seat. While I rarely found encounters like this alarming, being alone with Quinn in that car and in the state I was in had me feeling vulnerable and uneasy. His pushcart had fallen over, and some empty water bottles and a beer can littered the floor. The beer had been full only moments ago, by the look of the fresh puddle making a small river down the middle of the car. The Velcro was undone and the tongues stuck out of his black shoes, which seemed about two sizes too small for his balloonlike feet. We rattled through the Twenty-third Street station, and the rants grew louder. “Fucking spies! Fucking criminals!” “Is he a bad guy?” asked Quinn. “I’m not sure. Probably not. What do you think?” “He smells like poop and pee.” “Yes, he does, honey,” I said, finding my earphones in my bag and playing him “Here Comes the Sun” off my phone. He listened and pulled his T-shirt up over his nose. “Goddamn secrets. Everyone knows. Stupid bitch.” And then my heart was in my throat again because my cerebral cortex, or whatever part of the brain it is that’s in charge of grasping reality, kicked in. I woke up and smelled the poop and pee, and I was in deep shit. CHAPTER SIXTEEN