All Eyes on Her

by Poonam Sharma

  “Yes,” she murmured, then glanced over my shoulder for someone more interesting. “I’m sure that he is.”

  “Monica’s handling some of our most difficult clients at the moment,” Niles offered, slipping an arm around his wife’s increasingly stiff frame. “And she’s doing a great job for us from what I hear.”

  “Oh, thank you, Niles.” I was blushing a little, which made me glad to be wearing so much white powder.

  “How nice for you,” Barb replied tactfully, without making eye contact.

  Now, I finally appreciated what was really going on here. You see, any confident single professional woman is always aware that people are on the lookout for signs of her inflated ego. Obviously, the best way to ingratiate yourself with anyone is to ask them about themselves. But in the case of a boss’s wife, one always runs the additional risk of slicing herself open on the obligatory, double-edged question: should I ask about her career, and risk offending her since she might be a housewife who’s questioning that choice, or should I inquire about her children, and risk offending another professional woman by presuming she doesn’t work outside of the home?

  “So Barb,” I opted for Door Number One and continued, “are you an attorney as well?”

  “No.” Her voice was as flat as a gymnast’s cleavage. “I take care of our three children. Do you have any children, Monica?”

  “No.” I gave up. “Not yet.”

  “And are you married?” Suddenly she had tons of attention just for me.

  “Nope. Not yet.” I tried not to react.

  Immediately, her thin, pursed lips snapped into a smile, and she placed a signaling hand on her husband’s back.

  “Well, I think I see the Hudsons over there. We should go and say hello, Niles. I haven’t seen Laura since our Mommy-And-Me classes. But really, how nice that you could make it, Veronica,” she concluded, while gliding away.

  Now would have been a good time for that boost to my ego. Where was a wolfman when you needed him?

  Last year, on the morning after the Fete, it looked as if a fairy had been bludgeoned to death in my bathtub. But that was attributable as much to my drunkenness as it was to Raj’s haste to get me out of my naughty-harem-girl getup. I was still finding traces of body-glitter in the towels and tile-cracks, and frankly, just the memory of his sparkly biceps peeking out from his tattered slave-boy outfit was enough to convince me to spend just a little longer in the shower the morning after this year’s Fete.

  Showered and fresh, I kept gritting my teeth while I repeatedly poked myself in the eye trying to remove the last of my fake eyelashes. Applying them individually may have looked more natural, but removing them one at a time was about as much fun as tweezing my bikini line. My eyelids were still puffy thirty minutes later as I settled into my breakfast nook with my latte and my latest copy of Pucker. I was just about to flip to the horoscopes when the phone rang.

  “How come you aren’t answering your phone?” Sheila asked. “It’s Saturday.”

  “Good morning to you, too.” I pulled my robe tighter around me.

  “I called twice, a half hour apart. And you didn’t answer. Did you bring somebody home from that Fete last night? Don’t lie to me.”

  “No, Sheila. I was in the shower.”

  “Fine, sorry. It turns out that pregnancy makes you horny. And it also makes you gassy, in case you were wondering.” Talk about too much information. “Which kind of puts a dampener on the horniness, since nobody wants to be around you.”

  “Gas is not sexy,” I agreed, leaning my head against the wall behind me and looking out the window. “But don’t worry. You’re not the only horny woman who has no one to play with but herself.”

  “Is that what you were doing in the shower for so long?

  “The showerhead started it!” I squealed.

  “I wish my showerhead would start something. I swear I’ve never been so frisky in my life. And Josh is hiding from me, I think. Seriously. He went out golfing at like…6:00 a.m. He never does that on his days off. So now I’m all alone, feeling rejected by my showerhead. Also, Josh’s mom found out, and that pisses me off. Who knew pregnancy was so complicated?”

  “Not me. Any motherly advice from the monster-in-law?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact. She told me to spend as much time as possible looking at attractive people while I’m pregnant. She says it will make my baby come out good-looking.”

  “I always thought that the best way to have good-looking kids was to have sex with a good-looking man.”

  “Then I guess you have a lot to learn about motherhood.”

  “Or your crazy mother-in-law’s superstitions,” I decided, glancing at a photograph of Raj and myself at Zuma beach that was tacked to the refrigerator door. “So, how are you feeling, anyway? Do you need anything?”

  “We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you.”

  “We are?”

  “Monica, stop it. I know you. What’s wrong?”

  “Okay, okay.” I gave in, thinking that my concerns seemed impossibly petty compared to those of a woman with uncontrollable flatulence, looming hemorrhoids and the certainty of having to squeeze a watermelon out through a pinhole in her very near future. “It’s nothing. A bunch of silly stuff. You know that my mom changed her mind about moving here and asked me to sell the house for her. Well, there was this annoying contractor who was there when I went to take a look at the place and he was just rude. And then Raj sent me an e-mail saying he’s staying in London longer and telling me we’ll talk when he gets back, which I think was a way of telling me to back off, since he obviously has no intention of calling me anytime soon.”

  “What were his exact words?”

  “Take care.” I felt hurt all over again.

  “Ouch.” She obviously felt it, too.

  “Yeah.” I propped my feet up on the table, rearranging my bathrobe.

  “You think maybe you should fly over there and surprise him? Make some grand gesture?” She brightened. “Maybe that’s what he needs to see from you right now.”

  “I don’t know, Sheila. I’m not interested in playing games. With werewolves or otherwise. I met one last night, by the way. And now my mom expects me to clean up her mess for her. And everyone misunderstands me. Like that partner’s wife at the Fete last night. And you know what? That damn roofing contractor was just so…just…”

  Cocky dipped in irritating, wrapped with uncouth, rolled in presumptuous and sprinkled with generous chunks of both grimy and self-importance?

  “Sexy?” she asked.

  “What? The contractor?” I thought about it for a second. “I don’t know. Maybe a little bit. But that’s not the point.”

  “Sexy like you wouldn’t kick him out of bed if you woke up next to him, or sexy like the cover of a romance novel?”

  “Sheila, I’m engaged!”

  “And I’m pregnant! Have some sympathy. I’m a crazy-gassy-horny-pregnant lady, remember? I should wear a hardhat with a flashing strobe light, so that people can run for cover when they see me coming. Or at least they can reach for a gas mask. Seriously, I’m disgusting. Anyway, I gotta go. I have a pregnancy massage at noon. But listen, why don’t you come over for dinner tonight, and we’ll relax, and everyone but me will have some wine, and you’ll feel better, okay?”

  Having worked alongside her for so long, some folks might expect me to be immune to Stefanie’s sarcasm. Fair enough. After so many years of negative publicity around the videos, I might expect drunken coeds to stop flashing the Girls Gone Wild cameras. And, after so many years of being like sisters, you might expect me to recognize Sheila’s every ulterior motive.

  We would all be very sadly mistaken.

  As soon as I noticed the three cars parked in their driveway, I should have gunned it out of there. I would have, in fact, if Sheila’s mother hadn’t waved at me. Now I understand why my clients insist on tinted windows.

  “I’m sorry, Monica.” Sheila gras
ped my arm tighter than that werewolf had, adding an equally beseeching look. “But please please please please please don’t leave me alone with these people. The tension is just too thick. I haven’t brought out the salads, yet, because I’m afraid someone might casually stab someone else with their fork.”

  Originally, her parents and in-laws had gotten along like a sailor and his rifle: not necessarily made of the same stuff, but they knew they could help each other get where they wanted to go (namely, the altar). But Sheila’s mother was far too protective not to eventually take Karen’s hostility toward her daughter personally. Tension didn’t begin to describe it, and now that there was a grandchild on the way, the floor might as well have been carpeted with eggshells. Because despite my being more than vocal on the subject, Sheila and Josh had made the typical mistake of tying the knot before agreeing on the religion of their future children.

  “Monica, beti, come in here and sit beside your Renu Auntie,” Sheila’s mother called to me from across the living room. “How have you been?”

  “Great! Fine.” I smiled at everyone, and then glared at Sheila, recognizing immediately that I had been called here to witness and then mediate in the aftermath of the inevitable familial explosion. “How is everyone? Karen? Jim? Good to see you all.”

  “You should try the Kegel which Karen has brought along,” Renu Auntie insisted, proffering a crystal serving plate containing minislices of something. “She really did a wonderful job with it. Very tasty.”

  “It’s Kugel, Renu,” Karen corrected, with more than a little aggression in her voice. Both of their husbands stifled smiles over the sexual reference.

  “Thanks. Mmm…” I moaned, and tried my best to deflect everyone’s attention from this horrifying wordplay. “This is good. And how are Paul and Adam doing?”

  “Oh, you’re such a dear, Monica.” Karen didn’t miss a beat. “My other boys are doing well. Everyone’s doing well. And I made that Kugel from scratch, actually. I’m glad you liked it. You know, I have time for that kind of thing, being a full-time mother and wife.”

  Awkward. Somehow during the course of our conjoined childhoods, I had become the daughter one would’ve expected from my Renu Auntie, who was also an attorney, and famously well-composed, while Sheila took more closely after my mother, living at home until she got married, and not really giving much thought to a career outside of raising her children and battling her anxieties.

  I knew that the comment was aimed at my aunt, but even though it was only a flesh wound, I had definitely been hit in the crossfire.

  twelve

  THROUGH THE WINE, THE SALAD, AND EVEN THE FOUR DIFFERENT entrées, everyone had managed to keep the peace.

  If Karen had this much to say over dinner, I thought while shoving the last spoonful of Indian rice pudding into my mouth, how had that poor man made it through the past forty-three years of living with her?

  “So, I can see that your breasts have been swelling a bit, dear.” In one smooth move, she shifted the focus from her son’s financial health toward the details of her daughter-in-law’s pregnancy. “Tell me, any hemorrhoids yet?”

  “Mother,” Joshua interjected, meekly. “Umm…how about some more coffee or chai? Anyone?”

  “What?” She was undeterred. “These are perfectly normal side-effects of pregnancy, Joshua. You know that, being a doctor. And there’s nothing shameful about it. I had hemorrhoids when I was pregnant with you.”

  Sheila’s father wasn’t about to intervene because as we were well aware, he had problems of his own. A recovering alcoholic, he was clearly doing his best to concentrate on his coffee cup, although he seemed to want nothing more than to take just one swig from that bottle of sherry that Karen insisted on having a helping of.

  “Karen,” Renu Auntie tried, china cup full of steaming chai in hand, “I think that perhaps that kind of detail is a little bit too intimate for the dinner table. We don’t want to embarrass the children, right?”

  “No.” Karen’s husband Jim finally threw in the towel and decided to pour himself a glass of sherry. “Sharing a bathroom with someone for forty-three years is too intimate.”

  “James!” Karen warned. “We will discuss this when we get home.”

  “Umm…Mom? Do you think maybe we should…” Joshua tried.

  “It’s okay, Josh. Your father can do what he wants, but I will not reward this kind of behavior, publicly or otherwise.” Karen turned her attention back to her fellow mother hen. “And we’re Jews, Renu. We don’t avoid. We talk.”

  “I want my own bathroom! There, I said it.” Jim congratulated himself. “Even if no one is listening to me.”

  “Enough, Karen!” Renu Auntie slammed her fist down onto the table, nearly awakening her own husband, who’d been dozing nearby. “If you insist on getting this out into the open, then fine. I think we should do so now. The religion traditionally passes through the mother to the child in all cultures. The mother is Hindu. Therefore, the child will be Hindu.”

  Jim slammed his second glass of sherry onto the table. “One with black marble everywhere…” He was speaking to my uncle, who swallowed and made his best efforts to pay attention, presuming this was what he had been woken up for. “Or maybe steel from floor to ceiling—no claw-footed bathtub! No wood floors with area rugs. No fireplace. And a urinal, so that I can pee standing up!”

  My uncle nodded aggressively, suddenly captivated by the magical mystical world of unfettered masculinity that Jim had laid out before him. By the end of the evening, Karen had invoked everything from Josh’s hefty income to the Holocaust in insisting that the child be raised Jewish, while Renu predictably refused to back down. Having had enough of Josh’s failure to intervene, Sheila had quietly walked off and locked herself in their second-floor bathroom while I was clearing the table.

  “Maybe it’s time that you and Josh thought about counseling,” I told Sheila through the door an hour later. “To talk about some of the issues that the two of you, and only you two, need to decide on before the baby gets here.”

  Technically, I may have been talking to her, but I took the opportunity of being face-to-face with Josh to look him in the eye when I said it.

  “And until you start standing up for her, this is never going to end,” I whispered, tilting my head at both sets of parents who were gathered at the foot of the stairs. “For them it may be about the religion, but for her it’s really not.”

  Before he could respond, my cell phone rang, and startled everyone.

  “It’s Luke,” the contractor announced. “You got a problem with your roof. You better get over here right away.”

  “It’s eleven-thirty,” I argued, watching Karen toss Jim’s coat at him before walking out the front door. “Can’t this wait until tomorrow?”

  “Sure, if you want your roof to collapse. That’ll do wonders for the resale value.”

  “The roof is going to collapse?” I blurted.

  Jim told my uncle, “She wanted heated floors. And did I make a peep? No.” He waved up to us before he got to the front door and stopped to ask, “But you tell me—who has a fireplace in their bathroom?”

  Water damage. Of course. Maybe a pipe really had burst while they were working on the roof. Or maybe the keg they had been nursing all day was just too much weight for the roof to handle. Either way, Luke refused to do anything to stop the water without my consent, which I had to provide in writing, after personally examining the damage. Great.

  “The world is a pretty litigious place,” he told me over the phone. “I can’t take the chance that someone won’t pay me because they never formally authorized the work in the first place.”

  Maybe the most important thing that law school didn’t teach me was that contractors don’t appreciate being preemptively rejected by the attorney-daughters of the women who have hired them. It was really very unlike me, I thought, as I pulled up at the house. Engaging emotionally was a rookie mistake, especially since my first encounter with Luke
had been such a perfect opportunity to set the groundwork for negotiating on my terms. I parked in the driveway, asking myself, How could I win him back over? How could I make peace? How could I get the cursed roof fixed, the cocky contractor paid, and the damn house out of my life? From what I could tell, he didn’t have all that much to be arrogant about, anyway. And if it hadn’t been for the fact that I needed his help, fuelled by all of that sherry I probably would have told him as much already.

  I slammed my car door shut, threw my purse over my shoulder, and carefully traversed the unlit cobblestones. Rather than charming in the moonlight, the house was looking to become the bane of my existence. And rather than a spurting water pipe, a sagging roof, or any hint of his team of heavy lifters, I arrived at the porch to find virtually no visible signs of damage. All I could find, in fact, was Luke, waiting patiently for me on the porch swing. In a suede jacket?

  He rose to his feet and came toward me, treating me to a whiff of his cologne. Had he brought a date to my mother’s house? I took a step back and paused, wrapping my pashmina tighter around my shoulders.

  “Don’t run away,” he begged. “At least, give me a chance to say something stupid first.”

  At night, his ponytail did seem less greasy than glossy and less cheesy than ruggedly chic. Maybe it had just been too long. Maybe Sheila’s friskiness was infectious. I needed to get this over with, I decided, and get myself home and into a cold shower.

  “Okay, I’m here.” I tried my best to sound serious but unruffled. “Where’s the leak?”

  “Technically?” The skin around his eyes crinkled. “There is none.”

  I jutted my jaw out. “Then…why am I here, Luke?”

  “Oh, so we’re playing that game?” he asked, moving closer, and grazing my belly with the back of his hand in a way that made my insides somersault.

  I stepped away. “What game?”