“What about you kids? Didn’t you do chores?”
“I don’t think that ever occurred to Alexandra. She was more interested in our grades and what we were going to do to save the world. Dad begged her to hire whoever she needed to keep the house up—a cook, a maid, maybe a couple of maids. He told her money was no object.
“But my mother couldn’t allow another woman to do the grunt work she was too liberated to do herself. When Dad got desperate and hired a housekeeper for us, the woman quit, because after a couple of months of talking to Alexandra she realized that she should aspire to a higher goal than cleaning up after other people. She did send us Christmas cards for years, though.
“My parents began to fight much more seriously than they had before. At first it was about housekeeping and work and lifestyle. But then it started to be about life. It got meaner and nastier. But I still thought—” I stalled out. This was the hard part, the part I still hate to think about.
“You still thought they could make it work,” Chicky said softly.
“I thought I could make it work. I wished on first stars and birthday candles, and I prayed. I set up a little shrine in my closet, and I lit candles.”
“In your closet where your clothes were hanging? You were lucky you didn’t set the house on fire!”
“Actually, I had a couple of near misses. So I dumped the shrine. But whenever I had some spare change I bought Ladies Home Journal—they had an advice column for couples called ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’—and I tried to pick up pointers for my parents.”
“I bet that went over big with your mother. Ladies Home Journal wasn’t exactly a women’s liberation rag.”
“I never told her where the advice was coming from. But I’d say something about pleasing your man, and she’d look at me like I had two heads.”
“When did you give up?”
“On the marriage? Never. I didn’t care how miserable we were, I wanted my family to stay together. Even if we hated one another.”
Chicky studied me for a moment. “Remember when you told me all you’ve ever wanted was to be happy? I think I can see why that hasn’t worked out so well for you.”
“Well, it didn’t matter what I wanted. My father found a woman who did please him, and he and my mother split up.”
“And the message you got was, If you want to hang on to a man, you have to stroke him like a pet Pekinese.”
“My dad wasn’t like that!”
“I didn’t say he was. I said that was what you thought. So when your husband didn’t understand what you were going through with your new book, you thought it was your fault.”
And right there she’d put her finger on the problem with being the kind of person who tries to learn life lessons. Sometimes you get one wrong. But I wasn’t about to admit that.
“Jake wasn’t all that bad.”
“Of course not. But there are men who can actually help you when the going gets tough.”
Before I could respond, there was a knock at the door and Show Biz poked his head in. “Hi, Francesca. Chicky, the van is downstairs.”
“The hospital!” she said. “I forgot the Swinging Grandmas were performing today.” She rushed over to her theater trunk, opened it, and pulled out a bunch of sheet music and a blue feather boa. “To be continued, Doll Face,” she said, as she tossed the boa around her neck with a flourish.
“Wait,” I said. “You were going to start talking me through the memoir.”
She turned back. “I have something much more useful for you.” She went back to the trunk and opened it again. “Let’s face it, at my age, I’m not exactly a linear thinker anymore. I ramble.” She rummaged around. “Aha, here we are.” She fished out a plastic grocery bag and held it out to me. “This should get you started.”
“What is it?”
“Some audiotapes I recorded for you. It’s just the beginning of the story. I have more I’m working on. And I’ve got some pictures in the bag too.”
“Chicky, we’ll be late,” Show Biz said.
“Right.” She held the door open for me. “Those tapes should be easy to follow. If they’re not, just give me a call.”
“But this isn’t the way I planned to work. I was going to listen to you and take notes and—”
“That’s so last-century. It’s all about technology now.”
“I’m not sure I can work from tapes.”
“Of course you can. I have total faith in you.” And then she reached up on tiptoe and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Working on this story is going to be good for you, Doll Face. You have no idea!”
I wanted to stop her, but she and Show Biz were already hustling down the hallway. There was nothing to do but follow with my plastic grocery bag. After all, she was the boss.
CHAPTER 12
I decided to walk back to my apartment. Reminiscing with Chicky had started the memories going, and I’ve found it’s easier to stroll down Memory Lane when you’re actually strolling, as opposed to fighting for a seat on the downtown bus. There may be a life lesson in that—but then again, I could be wrong.
I discovered the healing power of chocolate when I was fourteen. That was when Mother found out that when Dad said he was checking out the Cadillac dealership in Greenwich, Connecticut, he was actually in a motel in Rowayton with the twenty-two-year-old niece of one of his best friends at the club. The girl’s name was Sheryl, and she was tall and blond, with legs that began somewhere under her armpits. She personified the word cheery. Her romance with Dad had started when she’d asked him for a few pointers on her tennis game.
“I guess that wasn’t the only thing he gave her,” Pete said.
I told him to shut up.
“Francesca, grow up,” Pete said. “This family is history. Thank God.”
When Dad started sleeping in the guest room, I told Pete it was a good thing. “They’re giving each other space,” I said. The night we heard Alexandra crying as she came up the stairs alone—the one and only time she did that, by the way—I took as a good sign too. “She’s realizing how much she loves Dad,” I said.
Then my mother and father had the Talk with us (there’s the T word again). You know the one: where the parents call the kids into the living room and tell them they are not going to be part of a family anymore but they mustn’t take it personally because these things happen, and it’s nobody’s fault, and the parents will still love the kids very much, just from different zip codes, and maybe different time zones, and definitely on alternate weekends. After this preliminary announcement was out of the way, Alexandra added an upbeat little speech in which she told us that even though she and Dad hadn’t had a good marriage, they were going to have a great divorce; one that was low on drama and high on negotiation and compromise. Even after that, I still hoped my parents would work it out.
I finally believed the marriage was over when I saw Mother’s to-do list. Shop for groceries, it read. Take deposition for Sylwigger case. And then, after several other entries, at the bottom of the page I saw Divorce Nate. Seeing the words written out in Mother’s classy girls’-school handwriting finally drove home the truth.
Along with Pete, I refused the psychiatric counseling our parents offered us in case we had concerns we weren’t comfortable discussing with them. I reassured them that I agreed with everyone else that this was for the best. But I was lying.
No matter how hard I try, I am not a fan of make-the-best-of-it thinking. Maybe it’s true sometimes that when a door closes a window opens, but in my experience, most of the time you’re just locked in the damn room. And while I get it that we have to make lemonade out of lemons, I’m a hell of a lot happier if we can all admit that the process usually isn’t much fun, and when we’re finished we’d probably rather be drinking champagne.
But it seemed I was the only one who felt that way about our family. My mother and father were so glad to be getting rid of each other that they were nicer than they’d been in years. Dad was on his w
ay to California, where he was going to marry Sheryl and start a new life. His bride-to-be was a native of Pasadena—she’d been visiting the East Coast for the summer—and now she was homesick for perpetual sunshine and her family. And, to be honest, Dad wanted a fresh start. His affair with the niece of one of his now former best friends had caused something of a scandal in Westchester, and he didn’t feel comfortable in his old haunts anymore. Plus, he’d gone to California to visit his future in-laws—Pete enjoyed pointing out that Sheryl’s father was only a few years older than Dad—and he had loved the climate and the people and the business prospects. He was going to take a flyer on a new kind of dealership—selling fancy foreign cars to movie stars.
Dad had always loved the song “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” and he sang it a lot during the weeks while we were packing up the only life I’d ever known. Sometimes Mother sang along with him. She was already checking the Manhattan real estate section of the Times. As for Pete, he was glad the fighting was over and he could concentrate on his schoolwork—at twelve he’d already set his heart on early admission to Harvard. Even our dog Fierce was going to benefit; he was moving with Dad and Sheryl to Pasadena, where it only rained twice a year—so no more scary thunderstorms for him. Everything was working out for the best for everyone. I hated how civilized it all was.
I didn’t want Mother and Dad to be out for blood the way some of my friends’ parents had been during their divorces, but it seemed indecent that no one was grieving just a little. I did my bit for the cause by discovering chocolate and putting on another fifteen pounds. I was a walking cliché.
The love fest moved forward. Alexandra asked for nothing in the divorce settlement; Dad graciously insisted on giving her the house. She agreed he must have visitation rights with us for the entire summer vacation; he wanted her to have all the big holidays because he wouldn’t dream of taking us away from her. Dad did get a little teary before he left, when he took Pete and me for a fancy dinner at Ruby Foo’s—my family just couldn’t seem to shake the Chinese leitmotif—but he comforted all three of us with promises of his spring wedding and phone calls whenever we wanted to make them, and the fun we’d all have together during our California summers. By the end of the meal he was feeling quite perky again, I went to Ruby Foo’s ladies’ room and threw up.
Alexandra dumped the house in Rye and we moved back into the city. She bought a co-op in a prewar building on the Upper West Side, which, she said, was loaded with charm. But she never got around to furnishing it, so there really wasn’t much difference between it and our original dump in Greenwich Village—except that it was in a better neighborhood. And she did let Dad pay for private schools for Pete and me—defending abused women didn’t bring in the big bucks.
Pete was enrolled in the toughest prep school in Manhattan, where he quickly skipped two years and became the star of the mathematics department. Now he was in the same grade as I was. Ask me how much I loved that when I was fourteen. Especially since I was turned down at all the top-tier schools because I had developed what was diagnosed as a learning disability in math—and no, I don’t want to dig into the probable psychological ramifications of that. I tested off the charts in language skills and the humanities, but my overall grade average wasn’t all that hot. I finally wound up in that progressive school in Tribeca I’ve already described. The one for bright kids who need what the catalog referred to as a “special environment.”
Every morning I woke up in my bedroom with the boxes that Mother still hadn’t unpacked stacked in the corner, fought Pete for our one bathroom, and grabbed a stale French doughnut from the street vendor on my way to the subway to Tribeca. When we first moved back to the city, there were times when I missed Rye, but all I had to do was listen to one of Alexandra’s stories about a kid she was trying to protect from a mother’s abusive boyfriend or a molesting grandfather to know how lucky I was. I reminded myself of that every time I got on a packed subway train or stepped in dog poop on the sidewalk. I reminded myself that I lived in one of the greatest cities in the world, a city that was the rival of Rome, Paris, and London. And I came to believe it. By the time Pete and I were taking off for California and Dad’s wedding day, I had really settled in.
PETE HADN’T WANTED to attend Dad’s wedding. We were on spring vacation from our respective schools, and his physics teacher had offered to help him work on a project for some kind of statewide math-geek competition. But Alexandra had put her foot down.
“You’re going to see your father get married,” she’d informed Pete. “And you’re going to make nice. It’s good that someone’s finally making the man happy. Just as long as I don’t have to do it.” It was great that she felt that way—unless you were wishing that she’d be just a little jealous over the man who was the father of her children.
Sheryl’s three-ring circus of a wedding was everything my mother had raised Pete and me to loathe. It featured two bands, a buffet for three hundred, and the bride looking gorgeous in a cream-puff dress, with the Girls as her attendants. As I said before, this collection of die-hard pals had been together since high school, and they would stick by one another through college, marriages, divorces, second marriages, finding God, therapy, illness, and, in one case, substance abuse. They also shared mani-pedi moments and the same trainer at their gym. They were an eye-opener for me; I had never met a group of women who shamelessly admitted that they never thought about world peace—or the plight of anyone they didn’t know personally. On the other hand, they were very sweet, so I tried not to judge.
Actually, I tried not to judge anything in Dad’s new life. Not his huge new house, that was almost an exact replica of the one in Rye but decorated in sherbet shades of chintz, or his new friends, who never seemed to notice when they were being sexist, or the fact that Sheryl insisted on referring to Alexandra as my Mommie even though by that point Pete and I had stopped calling her Mother and now referred to her as “Alexandra” because she felt it was more empowering for us. I didn’t judge any of it. Pete, on the other hand, spent most of our time in Sheryl’s cheery home rolling his eyes and making slips like, “When I get home to the United States … sorry, I mean New York—”
“I’ll win him over,” Sheryl said to me. “I’m good at that.”
She did eventually. But it took years. And his resistance had nothing to do with Alexandra … at least, it didn’t directly; it wasn’t about Pete protecting her honor or any of that. Sheryl just wasn’t the kind of woman Pete could appreciate when he was young. He’d grown up with a mother who was brilliant; a conversation with Alexandra could hopscotch from affirmative action, to gay rights, to the Supreme Court, to animal cruelty, to blood diamonds, without her breaking a sweat. By contrast, when Sheryl went to England with Dad she wore a full-length mink coat, and as far as we could tell she never thought about its origins. Ditto for the diamond earrings Dad gave her. As for the Supreme Court, I’m not sure Sheryl knew what it was.
The differences between Sheryl and Alexandra didn’t end with political and global awareness. Alexandra’s idea of entertaining at home was to boil up a pot of pasta, dump some bottled sauce on it, and tell her guests to grab a seat on the floor. These fetes were known in her social circles as Alexandra’s Bad Spaghetti Nights. The ensuing discussions, fueled by some not-very-good wine, would become loud and impassioned and last until three in the morning. My mother would tell funny stories about the judges she argued in front of and the pols she worked with; her imitation of Mayor Giuliani was considered one of the best in the city. When Sheryl had a dinner party, a caterer cooked, a maid served, and finger bowls were involved. After the meal the sexes would separate to opposite sides of the living room to chat, which usually led to some comment from Pete about women binding their feet, which no one but Dad and I actually got.
I understood where Pete was coming from; there was no contest between our mother and the woman who had replaced her when it came to wit or worthy thoughts. And Alexandra was a good mother�
�she saw to it that Pete and I could use the Dewey decimal system the second we could spell the word library, and as soon as we were old enough to cross the street on our own we had memberships to the Metropolitan Museum, MOMA, the Museum of Natural History, and the New-York Historical Society. We saw Shakespeare in the Park every summer and The Nutcracker every Christmas. Alexandra also taught us both to play a mean game of poker.
But Sheryl had our father.
In addition to dressing badly and not allowing makeup to touch my face, I stayed faithful to my mother’s ideals by refusing to learn any of Sheryl’s homemaking skills—if I’m honest, that stuff really did bore the hell out of me—but I have to admit I was touched by the fresh flowers that showed up on the table next to my bed when I was in California. And I liked the embroidered hand towels in the bathrooms, and the special meals Sheryl made for me that were low calorie without tasting like it, so I always lost weight during the summer. I even enjoyed the spa days Sheryl planned. I liked the fancy robes they gave us, and the tiny lunch on the pretty china, and most of all I loved the idea that a dollop of avocado cream would make me into a raving beauty.
As far as Pete was concerned, Dad’s domestic tranquillity could never outweigh Sheryl’s deficiencies in the brains department. “What the hell can he find to talk about with her?” Pete would demand. “Doesn’t he go out of his mind?”
There were times when you could see that Dad wished she read more than celebrity and fashion magazines. But it didn’t really matter to him all that much. As I watched Sheryl smile her way through her orderly days, planning her pretty dinner parties and keeping her legs in shape, I knew she was a success at the one thing my mother had never mastered. I tried to learn a life lesson from that, but where the Sheryl model left me with my fabulous language skills, no discernible domestic ability, and not-so-taut inner thighs I had no idea. So I learned the wrong lesson. I didn’t figure out that Sheryl was genuinely loving and caring and that was why she made my Dad happy. I thought the lesson was, You’ve got to pet your man like a Pekinese. Thank you, Chicky, for pointing that out.
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