by Noel Merczel
Perhaps it was a pre-pimple, or maybe that rosacea they talk about on TV? Maybe it was some sort of rash from a plant she'd touched outside...
Or from a parasite that had wormed it's way into her brain causing weird hallucinations and laying eggs inside her head?
Daniella sighed and snapped her compact shut.
Oh great. Something else to worry about.
"You might want to put something on that," Byron called out, gliding out onto the deck. "Meet me outside afterwards, sweetheart!"
Daniella grabbed her Cover-Girl cover stick out of her purse. Then she ducked into the guest bathroom downstairs and dabbed some light tan make-up over the spot. The cover-up worked pretty well since the spot wasn't bumpy. She just wished Byron didn't care so much about these sorts of things.
Daniella pushed open the sliding glass doors and joined Byron under the pergola on the deck. She usually enjoyed sitting out on the deck in the late afternoon and evening... except for the darn mosquitoes. They were really bad this year. But today, she just didn't feel relaxed because of the....incident.
What if she had a brain tumor? God. What a scary thought. Daniella envisioned people dying with inoperable brain tumors as shuffling around, slowly losing their minds - and their eyesight, while always feeling tired and nauseated. God, what could be worse?
Or wait...what was that disease....Mad Cow Disease, that was it...caused by...what was that protein that changes the nature of the brain? Daniella had seen a show on the history channel about the possibility of a zombie outbreak.
A zombie outbreak! How ridiculous! Like that could really happen. The narrator of the program spoke as though it was a real possibility, possibly brought on by a virus like Mad Cow Disease....
Prions, that was it! Prions were like a mix of protein and infection, and they turned the brain into mush, thus causing the host to stumble around in a confused daze looking like a zombie...
Daniella's husband was smiling and lounging on one their brand new two hundred dollar deck chairs. He looked like he was sunning himself on the Riviera...not a care in the word.
Daniella could just bet that her self-satisfied hubby never gave unpleasantries such as Mad Cow Disease or brain tumors a second thought.
"Well, whaddya think, sweetie?" Byron asked.
"Oh! I'm sorry," Daniella answered. "I think I'm getting a migraine. What did you say?"
Daniella wished she had her compact so she could check her face out in the light. She felt a little self conscious about the red spot, the same way she used to feel self conscious about acne. How ridiculous to feel self conscious in front of your very own husband. But Byron was Byron, and he had that effect on her.
A brain tumor! Honestly, of all the things to be wrong with you, that had to be....
"I said, maybe we should invite your new friend and her husband... what are their names again?"
"Sandy and Martin..." Daniella replied absently, her mind still on the horrible possibility of a brain tumor.
"Honey! You're a million miles away!" Byron commented, a huge happy clueless smile plastered on his overly tanned face.
Daniella's husband showered his wife with his mega-watt grin. His teeth were as white as a sheet of printer paper.
Of course Byron's teeth were perfect. His mouth provided great advertising for his own business. He looked like a celebrity who had just breezed in from a long vacation on his very own tropical island. Byron would love that description. Looks, status and image were so important to him.
Not that Daniella was any slouch in the looks department. She had thick glossy dark hair and great cheekbones, along with perfect teeth. Daniella's teeth were what attracted Byron to his wife in the first place.
She never even had them whitened, like everyone else was doing these days - even though she could have that procedure done for free. Plus, she was tall with a dynamic figure that looked perfect in a bikini; not too fat, not too thin.
Perfect waist to hip ratio.
It had been suggested, when Daniella was a teenager, that she should be a model. She had dreamed of pursuing this lofty profession as she flipped through the glossy pages of Glamour and Vogue while lounging in her postage stamp of a backyard. It was so much fun imagining herself in all the outfits of the day.
Daniella knew she would look so much better than the stick-figure women featured in the smooth thick pages of magazine.
However, after visiting her new friend Amanda’s gorgeous estate in Somerville, Daniella changed her mind. She decided she wanted what Amanda’s Mom had... a nice easy suburban life.
Beauty had a relatively short shelf life, after all. But money and possessions? Well, they could only grow bigger and better with time.
So Daniella didn't really pursue any career at all. She just decided to rely on her two biggest attributes; youth and beauty. Like many pretty girls, she learned early on that this is all you really need - nothing more. You just need to know how to make your looks work to your advantage.
Sure, Daniella knew lots of other pretty girls from school. But they acted like immature idiots, sleeping with a different guy every week; taking drugs and drinking too much. But not Daniella - or Amanda, either, who was on the prowl for either a doctor or a lawyer or maybe a guy involved in the stock market.
They were smarter than the others. They cared about securing a good future for themselves, and understood that men - not neighborhood boys - were the answer to that future.
Daniella wasn't quite so picky about careers when it came to the men she targeted. But she was picky about looks. Therefore, she only pursued cute, sexy, tall guys who belonged to Amanda’s family's country club. The guys also needed to have a prosperous air about them - which naturally, they all seemed to possess.
Daniella soon found out that it was ridiculously easy to get a guy's attention. All she had to do was sidle up to them at the bar and they were as good as in her pocket. She needn't utter a word...just being present with a little bit of moose in her hair and lots of high shine gloss smeared on her generous lips was enough.
Unfortunately, most of the guys were married. And Daniella was smart enough to know that a married man could not provide her with the life she envisioned. Enter Byron, who was seven years older and single. He had flown in from Illinois to visit his brother in New Jersey.
Byron had been enjoying the single life. By the time he met Daniella, though, he decided that settling down with a beautiful wife was exactly the next upwardly mobile move he needed to make.
The rest, as they say, was history.
Only, there was something Daniella hadn't counted on when she dreamt about her future life in a big beautiful house with French doors (the French doors were a must!), living with her rich handsome husband, and that was this:
When you marry from money, you end up paying for it.
A cliché - sure. However, as with most cliches, it contained more than a kernel of truth.
Living the rich "shallow" existence was hard on the soul.
Daniella would have described it this way: The real you was always begging to be let out for air....the real you that didn't care about always saying or wearing the "right" thing...the "real" you who didn't give a damn, er, darn what other people thought.
The real you that had a mad desire to just hang out on the boardwalk in Point Pleasant Beach down the Jersey shore wearing a comfy over-sized T-shirt and a silly floppy hat purchased at the local thrift store.
Daniella secretly watched Jersey Shore when Byron wasn't home. The show really cracked her up, but she knew her upwardly mobile husband definitely would not approve - and he certainly wouldn't understand why she found it so entertaining.
He would no doubt put her down for it, making some crack about his wife's "Jersey coming out," which to Byron, was as bad as toxic mold. So Daniella kept her clandestine reality TV viewing to herself... like a nasty little secret, akin to snorting coke or bedazzling her T-shirts in private.
Plus, another problem Daniella hadn't counted on, was that her husband was a big flirt. Sure she had encountered this problem before they were married. Her then fiance always made way too much eye contact with the cute cashier, or acted a bit too "familiar" with female customer service agents on the phone.
However, Daniella assumed Byron's overly flirtatious ways would abate once they were married...and especially, once they had a child.
Yea...right!
She just had to put up with it, though. It was all part of the "price" she paid for living the dream; scoring the "perfect" life that everyone else was so jealous of.
Daniella's old friend from NJ, Amanda, had married some computer guy, and they were currently planning a trip to Italy. Daniella received one of those God-awful Christmas letters every year from her rich and snobby old friend, reporting how wonderful life was and what overly lavish European trip or luxury cruise they were planning to take next.
Amanda was on Daniella's Facebook, of course, where Daniella also had to endure endless pictures of her old friend's "sunsets on the yacht," or "Camilla's birthday party" where everyone was at the mall getting mani/pedis, even though the party guests were barely out of diapers.
Amanda certainly made her perfect life seem flawless - but Daniella wouldn't be surprised if Amanda's husband had a little something on the side, or if Amanda and her perfect husband secretly found each other to be total bores.
Right now, though, Daniella could care less about looks or money or country clubs or expensive vacations, or old friends, or any of that stuff.
She only cared about one thing.
Her health.
She would have to write her mom an e-mail tonight. Daniella had been so wrapped up in her own existence, she had been completed neglecting her family back in New Jersey.
Daniella swatted at a mosquito. She saw the mosquito spin around in dizzying circles before flying in an elaborate figure eight. It was like the insect was performing some sort of miniature air show just for her benefit...
Oh no. Her brain.
"Earth to wife!" Byron called out in a singsong voice. "Are you thinking about your boyfriend Tommy? Is that the problem?"
"What?" asked Daniella. "Oh please! I talked to him one time, that's it."
"Sure.....," Byron teased, not really sounding concerned.
Tommy worked in the front office of Shady Oaks. Once, when Daniella went in to get a replacement I.D. for the main club house, she had a brief discussion with the guy about New Jersey.
Tommy had noticed Daniella's "accent" and asked where she was from. Then, come to find out, he was from New Jersey, as well. Morristown, to be exact. They had joked about being stranded out in the flatlands and missing the ocean; or as they put it in New Jersey, "going down the shore."
Byron was jealous when Daniella told him about the brief exchange, which made Daniella pleased. So pleased, in fact, that she had embellished the conversation by recounting how her and Tommy recalled all those wild and crazy times hanging out on the boardwalk in Seaside Heights.
This, of course, was total B.S. since Daniella only went to Point Pleasant with her parents, and Point Pleasant was about as tame as you could get. She never even went to Seaside Heights as a teenager.
Besides, Tommy was a skinny geek who looked like he wasn’t a day over twenty one. But if Byron wanted to act all jealous, Daniella couldn't do anything about that...except be secretly pleased. Especially since she'd gotten an eyeful of one particular girl who worked the front desk of the golf club house where Byron scooted off to all the damn time.
On a whim, Daniella had accompanied Byron to the golf course that evening. Brooklyn was at Byron’s sister’s house to visit her cousins, and Daniella was feeling at loose ends. Daniella's husband didn't seem all that pleased about this wife accompanying him. He reminded Daniella how she always complained about the mosquitos on the golf course, which backed up to a swamp.
“It’s okay,” Daniella said, wishing her husband could act a little happier about them spending some time together. “Maybe I could try playing.”
“No, no, no, babe,” Byron quickly replied. “You need to practice your swing first. I can help you. You should practice in the back yard. You start without a ball to get the feel of the club. After that, you can graduate to those plastic practice balls. I have a whole bunch. Also, you should start watching School of Golf on The Golf Channel.”
“I’ve seen Caddy Shack,” Daniella reminded him, attempting to make a joke.
“Oh...ha-ha!” Bryon smirked. “There isn’t a damn thing you can learn from Caddy Shack except that Rodney Dangerfield doesn’t belong anywhere near a golf course. No, what you need to do is watch some PGA videos online."
Daniella knew what sort of golf videos Byron watched online. Goficity's 10 Hottest Women in Golf. She'd seen the site left open on her husband's computer one time when he left to answer the phone.
"But you have to make sure the person knows what he – or she – is doing," Byron continued on in his overly preppy, know-it-all tone. "If you learn from a bad golfer, you’ll pick up bad habits. After that, you go to a driving range... maybe a pitch n’ putt. There are a lot of steps you have to take before you just waltz out onto the golf course.”
“If I go with you, I can watch you play!” Daniella pointed out. “You’re an expert, right?”
Byron, always a sucker for flattery, could not argue that point. So Daniella accompanied her husband to the golf course. When they walked into the bar area, a young girl in a skin-tight lemon yellow polo shirt unbuttoned down to there, greeted Byron profusely.
"Oh, hi Mr. Blackwell! How are you? Ready for another round of golf?" she gushed, completely ignoring Daniella.
It wasn't so much the girl's looks...she was actually a little buck-toothed and trashy looking in Daniella's opinion, her oversized boobs literally oozing out of her unbuttoned top.
Daniella had no idea a sporty polo shirt could look so slutty.
What really bugged Daniella, was the way the girl batted her eyes at Byron with this dreamy over-the-moon expression stuck on her stupid face. It was just so infuriating! She reminded Daniella of a student mooning over her much older English teacher in middle school.
What also really cooked Daniella's goose was the irritating way the girl responded to Byron's mega-watt charm, knowing full well that he had a wife - and that wife happened to be standing right beside him!
Unfortunately, Daniella witnessed her handsome charming husband have this effect on women all the time, from cashiers to waitresses to their damn real estate agent. They all acted like her husband was "fair game" for flirtation, despite the fact they knew he was married. Naturally, it didn't help that Byron flirted right back.
Of course he always denied flirting, claiming that he couldn't help it if women found him charming. But Daniella wasn't dumb. She could tell her husband got off on the whole “ladies' man” game.
Sometimes, Daniella wished she was married to someone a little less attractive. A little more paunchy. Not so charming. Definitely not so tall. Maybe a short balding guy with a good bank account. That wouldn't be the worst thing.
Never trust a handsome charming husband. If only she had been privy to that little kernel of wisdom back in her "man-hunting" days....would she have believed it though?
"Honey! Did you hear me?" her handsome charming husband was asking.
Now Byron was starting to sound annoyed.
"Oh! I'm sorry!" Daniella said. She made a big show out of rubbing her temples. "Just that darn migraine."
"Well take some pills and come back to the world, sweetie!" Byron exclaimed, his default "charm setting" firmly back in place. "We miss you!"
"Sorry..." Daniella said again. "I took pills already, but they don't seem to be working..."
Byron didn't say anything back. The man hated anything to do with sickness.
Daniella swatted another mosquito. This time she nabbe
d it, which seemed like a hollow victory, considering she smeared blood all over her leg.
Whose blood was it, after all? Somebody with Tuberculosis? HIV? Ebola? Hepatitis C...was that the one with no cure?
Daniella shook her head.
Stop being so paranoid! she scolded herself.
Daniella wiped the blood onto the bottom of the brand new deck chair.
Byron blew some bubbles for Brooklyn and the toddler laughed delightedly. Their cat, Tippy, watched jealously from the other side of the sliding glass doors. The rosy suburban scene made Daniella feel even worse.
She would ruin this perfect ideal life if she was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. The whole mood in their beautiful home would instantly change. Her husband wouldn't have that big happy smile plastered on his face any more. He would become grim and tight mouthed and irritated because his perfect wife was flawed.