by Marian Thurm
Well, he couldn’t.
He was blown away by the news of Allyson’s betrayal that night in their apartment, having thought, mistakenly, that they had a rock-solid marriage, one of those marriages that, he explained to her, was “built to last.” (You sound like you’re talking about a car, Allyson mocked him. Or a washing machine.) As Roger spoke to her, reeling from the shock of her announcement about this Whitcomb guy—someone he’d never met, and could only picture next to a blackboard littered with diagrams of isosceles triangles, the tips of his fingers coated in chalk dust the color of spoiled milk—Allyson scanned his face briefly. And then shrugged in a way that was so half-hearted, so utterly lacking in regret and compassion, it was as if Roger had merely said, “Wait, I don’t understand, you mean we’re NOT having filet mignon for dinner tonight?”
Allyson and her new love, Warren, never did marry, though they lived together in a house in Scarsdale that had been in the Whitcomb family for generations. Roger heard all about the pleasures of their suburban life after running into the two of them on Broadway, in the lobby of the Nederlander Theatre, where he’d taken his mother to see Rent for her birthday. He and Allyson, the know-it-all, got into an argument about Jonathan Larson, the creator of Rent, who’d died, so tragically, of a torn aorta, though Allyson insisted it was a brain aneurysm. They argued for several minutes in the lobby about Larson’s death, Roger’s mother and Warren Whitcomb looking on impatiently, until Roger shrugged and said (even though he knew damn well that Allyson was dead wrong), “Fine, you win; if you say it’s an aneurysm, who am I to doubt you?”
He fell in and out of a series of relationships, not one of them what he would have called “serious” and most of them lasting weeks rather than months. A couple of years later his fortieth birthday came and went, with a modest celebration in his parents’ dining room on Long Island. Surrounded by his mother and father, his sister, brother-in-law, and six-year-old nephew, Roger himself accompanied by a somewhat strident publicist he’d been dating for several weeks and had already grown tired of, it hit him that, because of bad luck, bad karma, or whatever it was, he might never find himself in love ever again.
This sort of thinking turned out to be unduly pessimistic on his part, because, as it happened, a little more than two years after that disappointingly subdued birthday party, Stacy accidentally dropped her wallet and Pinocchio key ring onto the floor of the muffin shop, while Washington, Jefferson, and Adams looked on gravely from the blue-and-gray wallpaper behind her.
S
The rental car they pick up at the airport smells like “something bad,” Olivia complains, and Will immediately agrees with her, though neither of them can explain exactly what they mean by “bad.” Maybe just hot and plasticky.
“Anybody hungry for breakfast?” Stacy asks, but no one answers. She asks Roger to power down all the windows to get rid of the imaginary smell, puts on her sunglasses, and gazes into the rearview mirror at her three-year-old and five-year-old in the backseat, both of them light-haired and blue-eyed, and looking nothing like her at all. Both of them beautiful, she thinks. She might be just one more deluded mother blinded by love for her son and daughter, but, in her case, she actually has official confirmation of her children’s beauty: both Will and Olivia were signed by a top-drawer modeling agency in Manhattan a year ago and have worked plenty of jobs—Gap Kids, Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, lots of catalogue work for department stores she’d never heard of in the Midwest, and once, for Olivia, the cover of the New York Times Magazine. (Stacy would never have gone after this sort of thing on her own; it was only that someone who worked for the children’s division of the modeling agency happened to approach her with his card one day when she’d taken Olivia and Will to a playground at the edge of Central Park.) On occasion she’s had to pull both kids out of school in the middle of the day for these jobs of theirs, and has been feeling guilty about that lately, especially about Olivia, who is in a fasttrack reading program and shouldn’t be missing a single thing in the classroom. And so Stacy has made a promise to herself to put an end to all of this as soon as they return to New York after vacationing this week in Florida while the kids are on spring break from school.
Call her superficial, but she gets a thrill from hearing the stylists and photographers at the modeling shoots admiring her kids; after all, what parent wouldn’t?
The truth is, there’s another reason she’s pulling the plug on the kids’ far-from-lucrative careers; there’s an urgent need for her to go back to work herself. She’s been happy enough as a full-time mother these past five years, though she couldn’t have predicted it. The time has come, however, for her to get back out there and start earning a living again.
This isn’t simply her opinion, it’s a fact.
Roger doesn’t want to talk about it.
A couple of nights ago, when she told him she was planning to contact her former boss, and also some headhunters, he didn’t bother to stop typing on his laptop, but merely said, “Fine.”
“Did you hear what I said?” she asked him, fixed in the doorway of their bedroom, addressing the back of his head. “I’m going to start checking Craigslist, too, when we get back Sunday.”
Roger turned around to look at her. “What?”
“Not Sunday, I mean a week from Sunday,” she said, and saw him wince. “I promise I’ll find something, okay?”
“Whatever you want, no problem.” Turning away from her again, he took his hands off the keyboard of the laptop, picked up his BlackBerry and began texting.
“Who are you texting at one in the morning?” Stacy said. She wasn’t expecting a response, but thought she’d give it a shot anyway.
“No one,” he murmured.
Now in the rental car, studying her kids in the rearview as Roger drives them out of the airport and onto US 1, she tries to imagine them grown up, tries to imagine a time when she’ll be nostalgic for Will and Olivia’s childhood selves, a time when they’re already teenagers—teenagers not too challenging for her to handle, but struggling a bit to come into their own. She imagines buying a first bra for Olivia, who will have already lost some of the soft, rosy-cheeked beauty of her childhood but will still be lovely, though in a different way, a thirteen-year-old who wants to shave her legs for the very first time and needs to be shown how . . . And she can see Will with his arm slung around a girl, his voice deepening, his feet filling size-ten Nikes, his T-shirt reeking of adolescent sweat after a game of pickup basketball on a court somewhere in the city. Because of course she’s determined never to leave Manhattan, to raise her children there where the pulse of the whole world can be felt every time you step out from the lobby of your building. After Will was born, Roger had made noises about moving out to the suburbs, but has, more recently, stopped talking about it.
He understands that he’ll have to carry her out kicking and screaming to get her to move to a place where the streets are named Jessica Drive and Bittersweet Lane.
NOT going to happen.
“Not,” she murmurs out loud, and hands over two Juicy Juice boxes, kiwi strawberry for Olivia and apple raspberry for Will, who struggles to unwrap the cellophane from his straw for only a moment or two before Olivia takes over.
“What do you say to your sister?” Stacy reminds Will. “
Gracias, muchacha,” he says, a New York City kid so savvy that at the age of three, he already knows how to roll his “Rs” flamboyantly.
Fiddling with her own straw now, Olivia says, “Il n’y a pas de quoi.”
“Are these kids wonderful or what?” Stacy says. “I mean, how impressed are you with these kids of ours?”
“Pretty damn impressed,” Roger agrees.
In a couple of hours the temperature will hit eighty, and the already humid air will feel like eighty-five, and Stacy will remember some of her chief reasons for hating Florida. For the moment, though, she’s happy just to hear her children speaking a little French and Spanish, happy to see the relaxed way Rog
er angles his elbow out the window as he drives, his impressively thick hair blowing back across the top of his head in the summery breeze.
~ 3 ~
Stacy had been instructed by the social service agency she worked for never to dress in a manner that would make her homeless clients feel even worse about their profoundly troubled lives than they already did. So while it was perfectly acceptable for her to come to work in jeans and T-shirts or sweatshirts, it was considered highly inappropriate to arrive at the office dressed in pointy-toed designer pumps and furlined leather jackets. Also frowned upon were gold bracelets, diamond earrings, and Cartier eternity rings. Unlike some of her colleagues, who tried to get away with a little bling here and there, Stacy showed up in store-brand sneakers and in Levis ripped at the knees. The faded, gray leather satchel she carried to work had belonged to her grandmother long ago, as had the wrinkly, colorful silk scarves she often wore draped around her neck. (Her mother would have judged Stacy’s wardrobe “shlumpy,” but, in fact, both of her parents had died—her father of a heart attack while Stacy was in college, her mother, a decade or so later, in a single-engine two-seater piloted by the brand-new boyfriend who, on a fiercely windy afternoon, crashed his plane into the ocean en route to Atlantic City. Stacy frequently reminded herself to lay off the Chicken McNuggets and fries, exercise vigorously and often, and keep the hell away from small planes. She still missed her parents enormously, especially her mother, whose shocking death she hadn’t yet made peace with, but what could you do? You still had to go to work every day, and take care of your laundry and the dishes from last night, and savor whatever pleasures were within your reach.)
Because she was advised against dressing with any flare at all during the workweek, she relished her weekend wardrobe, and sometimes went a little too far, outfitting her tall, slender self in short, tight skirts and high-heeled boots, hanging long, sparkly earrings from six of the eight holes in her ears, and overloading each of her arms with more than two dozen thin silver bracelets that jangled seductively whenever she gestured with her hands. Her grandmother, Juliette, who had outlived her daughter and son-in-law, was eighty-three and, thankfully, had all her marbles—not to mention excellent vision and hearing—and she scolded Stacy for dressing as she did.
“A nice pair of pants, a nice pair of flat shoes, what would be so terrible? What are you doing going around like that in those high heels and that skirt up to your pupik?” she said one Saturday afternoon when Stacy stopped by to see her.
Juliette lived in Brooklyn, in a neighborhood that was neither hipster-cool nor particularly safe, and Stacy worried about her. It was clear, though, that her grandmother was perfectly content where she was and wouldn’t dream of moving to someplace better, like Park Slope, where Stacy lived alone in a small second-floor apartment in a well-kept townhouse.
She and Juliette were sitting in her grandmother’s tiny living room now, on a warm afternoon in late September, surrounded by photographs of Stacy’s mother and uncle; some of them taken in black-and-white back in the forties, and some in color and far more recent; in almost all of them, Stacy’s mother, Grace, wore that sweet, winning smile of hers. She had been gone for nearly two years, but it still hurt Stacy to look at the photographs. Someday, she believed, when her grief over her parents had fully subsided, she would grow accustomed to the idea of her mother and father having vanished from this earth, never to reappear. But like a five-year-old, she thought, she sometimes found herself fantasizing that her parents would be returned to her, like a lost book or favorite stuffed animal from childhood that had inexplicably disappeared, left behind somewhere by, perhaps, her own carelessness. This was how it would go: there would be a voice mail from some vast lost and found somewhere in the ether, and a soothing voice, probably female, would say, I’m trying to reach Stacy Harrison? Are you missing a mother and father? If so, you’re invited to claim them at your earliest convenience. Or, if you like, we can put them on our shuttle and deliver them to you free of charge. Please give us a call at our toll-free number. Operators are standing by . . .
She watched as her grandmother lit up a cigarette. Stacy rolled her eyes at her.
“Get me an ashtray, will you, please?” Juliette said. “And while you’re at it, you can drop that disapproving look, okay? If you think that look of yours is going to get me to quit smoking, you’re sadly mistaken, sweetheart. I’m over twenty-one, and I’m allowed. It’s been almost seventy years I’ve been smoking these Parliaments, and I’m still going strong.” She turned her head to the side and exhaled a nasty-smelling stream of smoke toward the window.
“Still going strong,” Stacy agreed. Her grandmother did her own grocery shopping, her own laundry, and even her own windows; she was small and round and determined, and, like a cat whose tail you’d accidentally stepped on, could turn on you in an instant, showing those razor-sharp claws of hers. Juliette kept a mental list of relatives and friends who she believed had betrayed her in some way and whose company she no longer could tolerate. The list stretched longer and longer, but Stacy made sure her own name was never on it, not even for a day. She was an expert at concealing her anger at, and disappointment with, the people in her orbit. It was a talent she believed she was born with, and she used it lavishly, whenever she found herself bumping up against the prickliness of those who just couldn’t chill out and be Zen. That included the guy on the subway today in a thin, shiny black jacket with a skull outlined in winking rhinestones: after he poked his elbow in Stacy’s side as they entered the packed subway car, not only did he fail to apologize, he inexplicably growled at her, saying, “Hey, whatever happened to fuckin’ etiquette?” Her face burning, Stacy’s response was to look down at the tips of her black patent leather high heels, which, she noticed, could have used a quick polishing.
“Do you have any shoe polish?” she asked Juliette, whose Parliament was leaking ash onto the linoleum floor because Stacy had forgotten all about the ashtray until that moment.
“What color polish and why?” Juliette said as she took the ashtray from her; lining it, under a circle of clear glass, Stacy saw, was a photograph of a close friend of her grandmother’s whom Juliette was no longer speaking to.
“Answer to question number one: black; question number two: because I’m having dinner with Roger and his family tonight.”
“Who’s Roger? And no, I don’t have any shoe polish for you, black or otherwise.”
“You know perfectly well who Roger is,” Stacy said, waving away the cigarette smoke as violently and obnoxiously as if she were a reformed smoker.
“I’m teasing you, sweetheart. If you say he’s your boyfriend, who am I to dispute that?”
“As grandmothers go, you’ve very weird,” Stacy told her. “And I mean that in the best possible way.”
“I mean this in the best possible way: you’re not planning on meeting Roger’s family wearing an outfit like that, are you? Because you’re too old and too tall to be walking around in a skirt that short, never mind those trampy high heels.”
Stacy was insulted, but wouldn’t say so. Instead she said, “I’m thirty-three, Gram, okay? By most people’s standards, that’s young enough to dress any way I like.”
“I’m not most people,” Juliette said.
Indeed she wasn’t. After she’d lost her daughter on that ill-fated and foolhardy flight to Atlantic City, the eulogy she delivered at the graveside service was short and anguished: This is the worst thing that could ever happen to a mother. There’s nothing left for me now. Nothing. It’s just all fucked up.
As if Stacy hadn’t felt bad enough, her grandmother’s eulogy was the last thing she’d needed to hear. She remembered, at this moment, her father often and affectionately (well, maybe not so affectionately) referring to Juliette as a tough old broad. But her words and demeanor at the cemetery proved him wrong; anybody could see that her grandmother was the furthest thing from a tough broad. What you could see was a broken woman in a black dress with a
white handkerchief stuffed into the sleeve, a handkerchief that was soaked through with her bitter tears. She hadn’t even allowed a rabbi at the gravesite, only Stacy and her sister, Lauren, and their uncle, and some of her mother’s friends, every one of whom flinched at Juliette’s raw, ugly words as Stacy’s mother was lowered into the space that the bored-looking gravediggers had carved for her.
“Fine,” Stacy said now. “I’ll change into something a little more subdued when I get home, okay?” The high heels would stay; only the short skirt would go back into the mess of a closet she’d been meaning to clean out for ages now.
Extinguishing her half-smoked cigarette against the photograph of her former best friend that ornamented the ashtray, Juliette said, “Don’t do it on my account. It’s for you, babydoll. You just don’t want what’s-his-name’s family to think of you as trashy, you see what I’m saying?”
Fine. “I have to go now, Gram,” Stacy said. “I’m getting my hair trimmed before the big dinner tonight.” She got up from the folding chair she’d been seated on, and leaned over to kiss Juliette good-bye.
Her grandmother squinted at her. “What big dinner?”
“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response,” Stacy said, and both of them laughed.
“Before you leave, can you get me a pack of cigarettes from the freezer?”
“Get it yourself,” Stacy said; honestly, why should she aid and abet that half-pack-a-day habit? But she found her way into the kitchen nevertheless, because her grandmother was, after all, eighty-three, no spring chicken. If Juliette insisted on storing her cartons of cigarettes in the freezer to keep them fresh, alongside a pint of high-cholesterol mocha chip ice cream and a half-pound package of ground sirloin, well, whose business was it anyway?