by Marian Thurm
“That must have been incredibly hard for you,” Stacy said to Kim, as Barbara murmured her sympathies.
“Totally, I mean, what kinda guy fucks his ex-girlfriend when he’s got a fiancée waiting for him at home? Tell me, girls, WHAT KIND?” Kim shrieked.
Kim was so petite (and almost pretty, actually, despite her crazy hair and chapped, wind-burned face), and the words that were coming out of her mouth so fierce, Stacy could hardly believe it. “I think you need to take a deep breath, Kim,” she said. She scored a parking space on Second Avenue—a miracle, really—and she and Barbara climbed into the backseat with Kim. Barbara stroked Kim’s shoulder, and Stacy said, “A . . .nice . . . deep . . . breath . . . that’s right . . . nice . . . and . . . deep . . . nice . . . and . . .” There was a van parked directly opposite them on the west side of the avenue; the words “GUM BUSTERS” were painted across the doors, and underneath that, “CHEWING GUM REMOVAL SPECIALISTS.” Even with Kim about to suffer a meltdown here in the car with them, Stacy had to smile; she imagined a piece of turquoise bubble gum stuck to the toe of her favorite shoes, and picking up the phone, in a panic, to call the gum busters. What a way to earn a living! She could just see a couple of guys suited up in coveralls rushing into a Fifth Avenue apartment and scraping Juicy Fruit from an antique Louis XV gilt settee, while the client looked on, wringing her hands and praying for a good outcome.
Doctor, dentist, lawyer, teacher, social worker, chewing gum removal specialist. Hey, what did she care, everyone’s got to make a living and pay the rent, right?
“I’m having an anxiety attack,” Kim reported somberly, but then, a few moments later, she turned frantic. “Oh my god! Oh my god! Oh my god!” Clutching her head with both hands, she moaned, “I’m having an anxiety attack. Oh, God. Fuck fuck fuck.”
It was getting steamy in the car; Stacy unrolled the window next to her, and looked outside, where she saw a pair of smiling blonde women in red peacoats walking abreast with what she could guess were their adopted daughters, two little Chinese girls around six or seven with lovely, perfectly straight, obsidian-black hair that skimmed their shoulders. Thinking of Clare, she imagined the adoptive mothers’ protracted struggles with infertility, with pregnancies gone wrong, with teenage mothers who promised them everything but then withdrew those very promises, saying, not-quite-apologetically, I thought I could but now I see that I just can’t. And the terrible disappointment, one thing after another. Yet here the four of them were now, happy with themselves, happy with each other, two mothers and two daughters, chatting away, swanning along Second Avenue on a cold sunny afternoon in December, turning now into the entryway of a Mexican restaurant, maybe the four of them stopping in for an after-school margarita; how bad could a little tequila and Triple Sec be, even for a six-year-old?
What? Now she’d gone too far, envisioning those little six-year-old cuties sipping at their margaritas, maybe the glasses rimmed with granulated sugar instead of salt, while their classmates were safely home drinking hot chocolate at the kitchen table.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” she heard Kim say, and, for the first time, Stacy just couldn’t listen to it anymore, didn’t want to hear it, didn’t even want to entertain the thought of ushering a reluctant Kim into Goodwill and pulling together some outfits for her—nice, clean, gently worn clothing that Kim’s mother in Greenwich would probably be humiliated to see her daughter wearing. The mother who knew that Kim was out on the street but was tired of footing the exorbitantly expensive bill for her daughter’s treatment and rehab at the Sunrise Center, a facility not far from their home where at least she’d been cured of her heroin addiction. If only Kim could be counted on to take her antipsychotic meds, but the dry mouth and drowsiness that came with them were just too annoying, Kim had told Stacy and Barbara, and was that so hard for them to understand? No, it wasn’t, and yes, of course they understood, they’d told her patiently, but without the meds, well, just look at her holding her head with both tiny hands, just listen to her moaning fuck fuck fuck here in the backseat of the Chevy. Turning her gaze away from Kim and out the windows of the car again, Stacy saw a Latino child with Down syndrome walking hand in hand with his young mother. The woman had a cell phone held against her ear, and, slung over her shoulder, a shiny backpack of purple vinyl decorated with the same Furby that Nathaniel had brought to the engagement brunch a few weeks ago. Stacy smiled at the boy and his backpack, and thought of her plans to spend the weekend shopping for a wedding gown with Clare. She was reminded that, unlike Kim, and the woman with the Furby backpack, she herself inhabited a life that some might actually consider enviable; after all, the man she loved reciprocated that love and wanted to marry her. And, as far as she knew, everyone in her family and his was healthy in every important way.
So, yes—entirely enviable.
A life to be grateful for.
“I’ll stay here with Kim, and you go in and find her some stuff,” Barbara was saying.
“Are you sure?” Stacy was happy to make her escape, even for just a few minutes. But she didn’t want to abandon Barbara, who probably wouldn’t make much progress with Kim while Stacy went scavenging for a new wardrobe for her.
“Go on, get outta here!” Barbara encouraged her affably.
The Goodwill store gave off a damp, dusty smell, as if everything in it had, until recently, been stored away in cartons in someone’s dank basement or attic. At the front door was a crudely constructed bookcase crowded with hardbacks missing their dust jackets, and thick paperbacks, their dented covers embellished with illustrations of women in Grecian gowns showing off the extravagant bosoms God had so generously bestowed upon them. Seated in a folding chair next to the bookcase was a beautiful child with a dirty face who was reading a book called Stories from the Bible, all the while picking her nose enthusiastically and wiping her fingertip on the pages of the book, her parents nowhere in evidence.
STOP that! Stacy wanted to say, and headed off to the racks and racks of women’s sportswear, where she hit on a couple of pairs of brand-new jeans, their original price tags still attached, and some colorful sweaters that looked perfectly clean. Everything was priced between five and seven dollars; feeling buoyant, Stacy went straight to the cash register with the agency credit card, her arms full. She thought of Kim’s mother in Greenwich, a woman she’d never met, but whose pursed mouth and disapproving stare she could so easily imagine.
When she got back to the car, Kim was beating those extra-small fists of hers against the window and crying, Oh Lord Oh Lord Oh Lord; even through the closed windows, Stacy didn’t have to strain to hear her.
Sliding behind the wheel, with Barbara’s help in the backseat, she drove Kim downtown to Bellevue. They got her admitted, an endless four hours later, to the psych ward, her newly purchased wardrobe safely tucked away under the seat of the car.
The next day, when she and Barbara returned to the Chevy, this time escorting a middle-aged, alcoholic client to a nursing home in the Bronx, it saddened Stacy to see the flimsy supermarket shopping bags full of Kim’s new clothes, and she wondered how Kim was managing in Bellevue, forced to swallow down her 300 milligrams of Seroquel a day and to confide in the shrinks who were assigned to her. Days or weeks from now, when Kim was ready to be discharged from Bellevue, it wasn’t her mother who would be waiting for her in the lobby, but Stacy and Barbara, who were willing to take charge where Kim’s own family wasn’t. Stacy would never understand how families could turn their backs on their damaged children or parents or siblings. What kind of parents did Kim have who would throw up their hands in disgust at this poor imperfect daughter of theirs? What was wrong with people? If only, Stacy thought, as she had so often, there were official written tests, both short answer and essay, that wanna-be parents were required to pass before being allowed to proceed with a pregnancy—tests that would definitively prove that the applicants could be counted upon to act, at all times, with compassion and generosity during the course of raising their child
ren.
“So, any plans for Christmas?” Barbara asked, as they were driving back to the city from Staten Island. “Do you mind if I smoke?” she added, and lit up a Winston Ultra Light. Barbara had problems of her own—a crappy ex-husband who had once been a successful TV writer, but didn’t believe in paying alimony, and a twenty-eight year-old son who needed a lot of help with his rent—but she was endlessly generous. She routinely brought plastic bins of homemade biscotti to the office, handed out inexpensive but beautifully wrapped birthday gifts, and hosted a Thanksgiving dinner every year, in her cozy studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, for any of her colleagues who had nowhere else to go. That included Stacy, who, the Thanksgiving after her mother was killed, got sucked into a ridiculous argument with Lauren about what time they would be sitting down to dinner, and ended up at Barbara’s instead of with her family.
There had always been something pleasingly maternal about Barbara, and Stacy had, from time to time, confided in her; once, the night of that Thanksgiving dinner, after all the other guests had gone, she’d rested her head on Barbara’s broad, middle-aged shoulder following a weepy meltdown of her own. Where Stacy’s mother had been slimly built and without much padding, Barbara was soft and rounded, better suited, perhaps, at least physically, for the comfort a daughter might need.
Stacy took one hand off the steering wheel and touched Barbara’s shoulder now, hidden beneath the puffy down coat she wore. “You asked me about Christmas?” she said, going on to tell Barbara about the five-day trip to Antigua she and Roger had planned.
Barbara smiled. “Antigua? You’re a lucky duck,” she said, and how could you possibly argue with that?
S
It’s a long way past midnight, closer to two a.m., and while her family sleeps, Stacy sits alone on the spacious terrace that overlooks the Intracoastal Waterway. She’s thinking of a most surprising thing Roger had hidden but Clare had confided to her, and that was the breakdown he’d suffered during his first semester of college—a complete emotional collapse that required a two-month stay at Emerald Hills, a residential facility in northern Westchester. Stacy had learned this small but vital piece of Roger’s history during one of the numerous visits she’d made to Clare’s bedside in the final months before her sister-in-law died. The two of them had fallen into a conversation about high school and college when Clare, assuming that of course Stacy was familiar with the details, happened to refer to Roger’s time at Emerald Hills. Which Stacy at first mistakenly thought was a summer camp. Or country club. Those painful adolescent struggles of Roger’s had to do with a first love, a smart seventeen-year-old named Lucy Eisenstein, whom he dated all through his senior year in high school, only to find himself kicked to the curb the day before she went off to the University of Chicago.
According to Clare—who was clearly a little embarrassed to share this part of the story with Stacy—the teenaged Roger had believed Lucy was his one true soul mate and that they were meant to spend their lives together. But Lucy didn’t want to hear about it, she’d just wanted to get away from Long Island and out to Chicago and the beginning of the rest of her life.
According to Clare, Roger had been devastated. (“Totally crushed,” were the words Stacy remembered.) And he’d started thinking of Lucy obsessively. He couldn’t get her out of his head, couldn’t concentrate for more than a few minutes at a time on his school work that first semester of college at the University of Michigan, could barely haul himself out of bed in the morning to get dressed and go to classes. Mostly he could only lie there and think of Lucy and how she was gone from his life. Then one night he went over to student health and confessed that he’d been contemplating killing himself.
That kind of thinking got you a bed in Emerald Hills, and it hurts Stacy even now to imagine how Roger had suffered over this Lucy Eisenstein so long ago. (It hurts, too, to think of the worrisome possibility that Olivia or Will may have inherited whatever tendency Roger had once had toward this sort of crippling depression.)
“How dare he not tell me!” she’d cried to Clare, who apologized for raising a subject that apparently was, for Roger, just too excruciating to share with his own wife.
But Stacy didn’t want Clare to be sorry about anything. “You’re in a hospital bed trying to get well,” she reminded her sister-in-law, “and you shouldn’t spend even an instant apologizing to me, sweetie.”
Hours after she heard the story from Clare, Stacy worked hard to get the kids into bed earlier than usual, and then approached Roger at his laptop in the den. “How could you keep this from me? Why would you ever keep anything from me? Don’t you know that you can tell me everything? That you could always tell me everything?”
“Listen, it was a lifetime ago,” Roger said after a long silence, and finally turned from his desk to look in her direction. His turquoise eyes appeared ordinary; she was no longer impressed with them, and it felt like a loss to her, one that hit her surprisingly hard. “It was a bad scene,” Roger admitted, “but I got over it, went back to school, and that was that.”
Stacy was shaking her head. She’d been rattled ever since talking with Clare in her hospital room; how could she put this breakdown of Roger’s out of her mind? She thought of him in Emerald Hills, shuffling in slippers to the dining hall, swallowing down meds from a pleated white paper cup. “You completely fell apart,” she said, and tried to keep her voice low and calm. “Seriously, you don’t think that was something I needed to hear about?” She waited for him to get up from his seat and come and sit next to her on the couch, but he stayed where he was.
“Look,” he said, pointing to the small TV that was set into their crowded bookcase. It was tuned to CNN, and a little boy, perhaps a year or two older than Olivia, was talking into a microphone about the pig who lived with his family in the suburbs of New Jersey. “My pig, Mr. Dilly, is like a brother to me,” the boy said earnestly. His voice trembled. “You can’t take him away from me and my sister, even if the landlord says you can.”
Roger was laughing. “Man, what a fucked-up family,” he said. “I mean, come on, where’s the pig sleeping at night? In his pajamas in bunk beds with the kids? No wonder the landlord wants to evict them.”
He went on, highly amused, about the little boy and his pig, and got up out of his chair and used the remote to replay the clip on the screen. He’d had enough talk of Emerald Hills and the unhappy circumstances that had landed his teenage self there; Stacy saw that whatever he’d given her was all she was going to get from him on the subject. It was pointless to try and steer him back to where she wanted him, willingly discussing something that he’d made clear was ancient history, and, frankly, none of her business.
She locked herself in the bathroom—shutting the door quietly so she wouldn’t wake the kids—and could feel herself grinding her teeth. It was hard to avoid her face in the mirror, and what she saw was a youngish-looking woman, pale and frightened. Of what? A husband who, after his high school girlfriend left him, had ended up on the psych ward?
The truth is, she tells herself now, she hates to think of him as someone who’d once been emotionally fragile, and who, these past few weeks, seems to have returned to that worrisome place again. In the days when she was working with her homeless clients, her professional life overflowed with fragile souls, and most of the time she knew just how to soothe them and their fears, just how to quiet their demons. But she isn’t even entirely sure what Roger’s particular demons are. And isn’t able to dig deep into his psyche to uncover them, because he just isn’t talking. At least not to her . . . Ah, to have been the smallest insect nesting in a corner of the ceiling in Dr. Avalon’s office, the one place where, she bets, Roger was willing to share every last thing.
She’s always respected the notion of privacy, of a person’s right to keep things close to the vest if that’s what he chooses. But hey, she thinks, this is different—this is her husband! Doesn’t she deserve to know every last thing about him?
She realiz
es just how much she misses talking to Clare, whose cell number is still stored in her phone; once, maybe six weeks or so ago, before Marshall had shut down the account, Stacy accidentally hit the number with her fingertip. Connected to Clare’s voice mail, she was startled, and then stricken, to hear her sister-in-law’s lovely clear voice, brimming with energy and good will.
The very sound of it would have killed Roger, she’s sure of it.
Sitting on a slightly damp, upholstered chaise longue out here on her mother-in-law’s muggy terrace, she draws her legs up under her chin, clasps her arms tight around her knees. A speedboat churns noisily through the waterway; after it’s gone, she can hear the sound of drunken voices eight stories below rising from the swimming pool.
She hears Olivia cry out in her sleep now, and opens the terrace’s sliding glass door all the way, paying close attention, prepared to make a run for it if necessary, to ease her daughter’s nightmare. But the apartment is silent, except for the dishwasher, making a bit of a racket in the kitchen where everything is that laughably unfashionable avocado-green, and her children’s small sandy feet have left grit on the worn linoleum.
She gets into bed beside Roger, slides her hand under his T-shirt, then rests her ear lightly against his heart, listening for all the secrets he’s withheld.
Maybe she’s imagining it, but her husband’s heart seems to be fluttering so wildly, it’s a miracle he can actually sleep.
~ 13 ~
Stacy wasn’t much of a shopper; she’d never been the sort of person who would set her alarm for seven a.m. just to get to Bloomingdale’s before the doors opened the day after Christmas. She lost patience as other shoppers—in their eagerness to snap up whatever skirt or pair of leggings they absolutely had to have—unintentionally stepped on her heels as they shoved past her, women gone wild, but for what? For another shmatta, as her grandmother would say, to hang up in their closet or stuff into their already overstuffed dressers. After an hour or two, Stacy had always had enough, and couldn’t wait to get back home to Park Slope and chill.