Tiny prickles of hesitation poked at that desire, of course, much like tiny freckles dotted the creamy skin on her nose. But just as she often tried to mask the freckles with a pat of powder, she likewise covered her niggles of disbelief with a cool film of determination and the protective coating of forced faith. She fervently avoided questioning Tamara’s sincerity in their friendship because she so actively wanted to avoid questioning her own.
Soon it was Bridget’s turn in the spotlight, however. Tamara, being unusually solicitous, asked about her family and inquired—almost gently—about her “work relationships.”
“Oh, the office was closed yesterday,” Bridget said by way of breezy evasion. “But things are going fine.” She reasoned it would take too long to explain about the restaurant visit with Dr. Luke and, anyway, it was just a fun lunch with a friend. There was nothing to report, right?
Instead, she launched into an explanation of what’d been going on with Evan. “I’m worried about him,” she confessed, because it was a safe admission. “I think the extra sleep is helping, though. I just wish he weren’t so sensitive to everything. That he was more of a Just Do It kind of kid and didn’t think so much.”
Jennifer, who’d often been accused as a child of being overly sensitive (her parents’ favorite method of dismissing her fears, in fact, until she’d learned to conceal her anxieties) and too much of a thinker in just about everyone’s opinion, nodded. She found this conversational turn very interesting indeed, but largely because of Bridget’s curious omission. Glendale Grove might be near Chicago, an anonymity-allowing metropolis, but at its essence, the suburb remained very much a small town. Bridget, sweet though she was, ought to have the sense to know she wasn’t invisible in it.
Jennifer repressed a grin as Bridget prattled on about the foods her son didn’t like to eat anymore and how he wasn’t himself in class. Jennifer had been at Franklin’s Diner the day before, picking up carryout for their dinner, and she had seen a very smiley, not-remotely-worried-looking Bridget slipping out of Dr. Luke’s car and into her own. But, hey, if Bridget didn’t want to kiss and tell about her adventure with the dentist (what did they do?), Jennifer sure wasn’t going to make her. They would have to drug Jennifer with a truth serum before they would be able to pry any real feelings out of her about her meeting with David.
Not that Tamara didn’t try.
“So, we never really got the details on the whole campus visit thing,” Tamara said eventually, getting comfortable on the vinyl cushion and taking a long swig of her latte. “Did seeing him again put things into perspective for you or did it just make you wanna jump his bones?”
“I did not jump his bones—” she began, but Tamara cut her off.
“Not what I asked,” Tamara said mischievously. “Did you want to?” Tamara had been pretty much fixated on the idea of bone-jumping lately, a problem that intensified for her whenever she saw Aaron working out in his yard, which had been the case the previous afternoon. Even reasonably good sex with her husband didn’t completely obliterate her desire to see their handsome neighbor with far fewer clothes on, and she had this recurring fantasy involving him wearing his tool belt and a pair of handcuffs….
“No,” Jennifer said, taking care not to speak too quickly. It wasn’t a lie. She may have found David attractive, even after all of these years, but she was still furious with him. And she couldn’t sleep with anybody who made her so angry.
“Well, what’d you two do down there? What’d you talk about? Spill.” Tamara had a persistent streak.
Jennifer halfheartedly obliged, giving a cool rundown of the places she and David visited and their ultimate decision to hold the reunion at the Vat Building. Jennifer knew the other two wouldn’t understand its significance, and she wasn’t about to enlighten them. “We really only talked about the locations,” she said, which was a sweeping falsehood, even by her standards of restraint. And there was no way in hell she was going to reveal the heightened degree of confidence sharing, the intimate questions asked and the frequently inappropriate commentary of their IM’ing sessions and phone calls since that day. Not a chance.
“Was it painful to be with him again?” Bridget asked, her voice tender, her soft hand squeezing Jennifer’s forearm. “Did he show any signs of regret at the way he’d ended your relationship?”
Jennifer bit the inside of her cheek. How much could she admit to before she’d find herself in danger? At what point would the level of disclosure be too high for her personal sense of self-protection?
“It was awkward,” she confessed, figuring she had to tell her friends something, “but I didn’t ask him for any reasons or explanations.”
Tamara huffed at her. “You had him right there and you didn’t ask? Jeez, Jennifer. Talk, would ya?” She massaged her forehead with both palms. “So, okay, maybe you weren’t feeling a huge connection with him, but did seeing him at least answer your question of wanting to test your marriage? Do you feel you made the right choice in moving on or are you still questioning that?”
To Jennifer, this inquiry showed that Tamara knew her Not At All. When wasn’t she questioning? With more ineptitude and appliance malfunctions at home à la Michael, and more impropriety and suggestiveness (to the point of near phone sex and sexting) with David, how could she decide anything?
She feigned a light shrug. “Maybe I’ll know more after the reunion.” Then, taking a page from Bridget’s book, Jennifer finally succeeded in shifting the conversational focus onto her family. “But I do know it’s tough being the mom of a teen. Veronica has been pushing a lot of buttons lately.” She told them about what’d been happening in Mr. Ryerson’s U.S. history class. About the two boys. About the Homecoming Dance, which would be held that very night.
“Veronica’s been doing all that?” Bridget said, her tone one of surprise. But Jennifer suspected this was more out of politeness than any real shock. Bridget had a spirited daughter of her own and had grown up with a couple of sisters. Bridget knew what girls were like.
“Oh, yes. She’s been behaving much better in class these past two weeks because we told her if Mr. Ryerson kicked her out, we’d forbid her from attending tonight’s dance. But she isn’t making life easy at home, and we just found out Tuesday that she’s not going to it with Tim anymore, the guy she’d liked so much she just had to join the Homecoming committee. No. Now she’s crazy about this new guy Erick.” Jennifer shook her head. “I guess he’s meeting her there. I think that way they figured they could avoid having to deal with Michael, me and our questions.”
In a stroke of hypocrisy so profound she’d stunned herself, Jennifer had actually had a conversation with her daughter last weekend about “figuring out who she really liked” and “needing to be honest” with both boys. And while Jennifer did not openly tell her friends this, both Bridget and Tamara were indeed thinking some variation of the phrase “Like mother, like daughter.” Tamara’s was a somewhat harsher and more judgmental version than Bridget’s, however.
For all of her renewed spirits after having seen her beloved son again, Tamara’s restlessness kept rising up within her and taking the form of silent jabs. She wanted to scold Jennifer on the freakin’ ridiculousness of not asking a guy she hadn’t seen in eighteen years why he’d bolted. C’mon already. Grow some bloody guts.
And then there was Bridget, who kept absentmindedly fondling the salt shaker at their table like it might change shape with just a little nurturing. Argh! Tamara was this close to blurting out a crude comment about giving it a hand job but, instead, she gulped her coffee, pasted a smile on her face and tried to behave.
Until fucking Fleetwood Mac came on.
“I hate this song.” She groaned. Loudly. “Turn. It. Off,” she commanded the Bose speaker levitating in the upper-left corner of the café’s ceiling and piping out its endless excrement of seventies music. Goddamn XM radio.
Not surprisingly, the song—“Dreams”—kept playing.
“What’s w
rong with it?” Bridget asked, recognizing that, while it’d been overplayed to death and that Stevie Nicks woman looked like a druggie flower child in platform boots who’d been locked in the attic (kind of the way those crazy ladies in Gothic novels always were, and they always wore a lot of lace, too), there were far more annoying singers from that era. Like the Captain & Tennille. Or Debby Boone. Ugh. She’d take “Dreams” over “Muskrat Love” or “You Light Up My Life” any day.
“I have never been able to figure out what these lyrics mean,” Tamara ranted. “Not even after listening to this nonsensical song five million times.” She set down her coffee and squeezed her fists as if choking a couple of invisible offenders. “The only thing I’m sure of is that Stevie must’ve been having some pretty strong hallucinations when she was writing it. Listen.”
The second verse started and Tamara stabbed the air with a venomous index finger, shooting death wishes at the ceiling speaker. “Hear that? Here she goes again seeing ‘crystal visions.’ She says she keeps those visions to herself, but she doesn’t.” Tamara crossed her arms and struck a pose of pure irritation. “Her voice is scratchy. She has a serious enunciation problem. The words that aren’t slurred are depressing as hell. It’s a sucky song, and it should’ve been banned from all airplay thirty years ago.”
Jennifer shot her an impish grin. “Any further commentary?”
“No,” Tamara said. “The prosecution rests its case.”
Bridget bit her lip but didn’t suggest that, perhaps, Tamara had been too long in the company of her quick-tempered and often irritable lawyer husband. She set down the salt shaker she’d been toying with and was about to reach for the pepper when, in a most unusual display of contentiousness on Jennifer’s part, their quiet friend stated, “It’s one of my favorite songs from that decade, Tamara. What part of it, exactly, don’t you understand?”
Tamara blinked at her, then laughed. “I don’t understand any of it. Seriously. Start anywhere.”
And, to Bridget and Tamara’s astonishment, she did.
“I think it’s about resignation,” Jennifer began. “A woman is being told by the guy she loves that he wants his freedom. She senses his attitude toward her and their relationship—like other men she’d dated before him—is more indifferent than it should’ve been. That he feels he can get another woman whenever he wants one. But, in her opinion, he’s not thinking about the reality, not anticipating the loneliness he’ll feel in quiet moments later, if he allows himself to feel deeply. She’s been through this before and she knows. But it’s no use trying to convince him now. He’s set on leaving, so she’s resigned to the fact that she understands the situation better than he does. She sees with crystal clarity what he’s giving up, but she lets him go and lets go of the dream of their future together, knowing that one day he’ll recognize his mistake. But, of course, it’ll be too late then to recover their relationship.”
Bridget thought Jennifer was, perhaps, putting herself a bit too much into the lyrics.
Tamara, convinced she’d inadvertently found herself stuck in the middle of one of those horrible literary discussions where earnest young poets or songwriters tried to ascribe meaning to the works of their famous and often dead predecessors, said, “Gah!” and rolled her eyes at Jennifer. “What? Did you and Stevie get together for happy hour one night and lament your lost loves?”
Jennifer, drained from so much speaking, clenched her jaw. “You’re not required to believe me, but you did ask.”
Tamara held up her hands. “Yeah, yeah, I asked. It just seems way heavy handed in some spots. The whole crashing of symbols with the thunder and raining part. And going all Edgar Allan Poe with that madness-inducing heartbeat. The rest is just incomprehensible to me.” She shrugged. “How d’you crack the lyrics anyway?”
Jennifer gave a small smile. “I Googled them.”
“Figures.” Tamara played with her stirring stick and stared into space. She hadn’t thought to Google anything. Not even Aaron. She might just have to do that.
Jennifer didn’t mention that she’d also read about the song on Wikipedia. That singer Stevie Nicks wrote it in ten minutes during a time in the band’s history when she and guitarist Lindsey Buckingham were breaking up after eight years together. Vocalist and keyboard player Christine McVie was separating from her husband, bass player John McVie, and the band’s drummer, Mick Fleetwood, was getting a divorce. Clearly, this was a group of people who knew something about deteriorating relationships.
But it did no good to try to explain this to friends who didn’t want to listen. Tamara was showing no interest in hearing any more about the music, and Bridget, while feigning attentiveness, pretty evidently had her mind elsewhere, too. Jennifer was just about to excuse herself for yoga—which she should go to, even though she really didn’t want to—when a force she was incapable of circumventing burst into the Indigo Moon and rushed their table.
“Oh! I spotted you three from the window and had to say hi,” Leah Wiener said, with more energy and exuberance than should be allowed in a woman pushing retirement age. “I just sent out the invites last night.” Her eyes crinkled everywhere as she beamed enthusiastically at them. “You know it’s that time of year again. Kip and I hope you and the hubbies can all come to the party.” She whipped out her BlackBerry, punched something into it and announced, “Saturday the thirtieth. From nine in the evening until the Witching Hour. Mark your calendars! We’ll mingle and catch up for a bit and then, at midnight, we’ll have some tasty pumpkin cake and do a beheading, okay?”
Bridget sucked in some air and kind of nodded.
Jennifer blanched.
“Sounds…un-missable,” Tamara said for all of them. “As always.”
“Yeah,” Bridget echoed faintly.
“Great,” Leah enthused. “Then I’ll put down six yeses. No need to RSVP again. Just show up with your darling hubsters at nine o’clock sharp.” She whirled around and took a flurry of steps toward the door. Halted. Shot a look at them over her shoulder. “And, oh, it’s a fairy-tale theme. Don’t forget to wear costumes!” She cackled gleefully and waved goodbye.
“Oh, my God,” Tamara muttered when Leah was out of view. “I’m so sorry. I couldn’t think of a single excuse with her standing right there.”
“Don’t feel bad,” Bridget said. “I couldn’t either.”
Leah and Kip Wiener were the town’s most avid Halloween aficionados, as well as bigwigs on the public library’s board of trustees. They knew everyone in at least three counties, put up more house lights in the month of October than some entire neighborhoods at Christmas and had roped Bridget, Jennifer and Tamara into years of library fund-raisers. Their annual adults-only “Hallowiener Party”—a “reward” for their scores of fund-raising volunteers—had become a Glendale Grove tradition and one that inspired weeks of post-event gossip. Although it puzzled Bridget exceedingly how a woman as sweet and grandmothery as Leah could host such horrifically gory gatherings.
Last year, Leah, Kip and a few of their friends performed a midnight reenactment of the movie Saw, followed by “refreshments” of bloodred fruit punch and ax-shaped sugar cookies decorated with real razor blades. She couldn’t imagine what this year’s party would have in store.
“She isn’t someone you can say no to,” Jennifer commented, thankful that Michael had experienced being cornered by Leah or Kip more than once in the past and wouldn’t hold her assumed acceptance of the invitation against her.
Bridget and Tamara nodded and, if in nothing else, the three women were united in their dread of this particular event. The last of Jennifer’s motivation to attend yoga fled, despite how much she could have used help with her breathing. She drained the final drops of her beverage and grimaced at her friends, thankful in a small way not to have to discuss relationships—broken or otherwise—for the remainder of their morning together. “Guess we’d better coordinate our costumes, huh?” she murmured.
Tamara flagged down their wai
tress. “We’re gonna need more coffee,” she informed the young woman.
“And more muffins,” Bridget added.
15
Bridget & Friends
Thursday, October 21 & Friday, October 22
Bridget, who’d foolishly dismissed Dr. Luke’s idea of her son having a food allergy because Evan wasn’t the kind of kid who’d had a reaction to any food in his life, now studied the contents of her refrigerator, hunting for glutens—hidden or obvious.
A wheat allergy, Evan’s pediatrician had suggested, when she pulled him out of school early and took him in to be examined this afternoon. And possibly rice, barley and other grains. “Test Evan for a reaction to glutens first,” Dr. Statenbach suggested when her son’s blood work showed signs of anemia. “It’s possible it’s an intolerance or a mild allergy. Or, it’s possible it’s celiac disease.”
The word “disease” didn’t sit well in Bridget’s gut. It created an intense and immediate pang of terror, actually. But, in the brochure the nurse had so helpfully handed to Bridget on the way out of the doctor’s office, the various symptoms of celiac disease did seem to mirror those she’d been noticing in her son. Symptoms that had finally gotten her to call for a doctor’s appointment. The list included: abdominal cramping, bloating, irritability, decreased appetite, various bowel ailments, vomiting, anemia, fatigue and even depression. Now that she thought about it, Evan hadn’t gained any weight in a few months. Odd for a growing six-year-old boy. She should’ve guessed something medical was wrong sooner.
She sighed and snatched a gluten-loaded loaf of Hearth & Harvest from the middle shelf. For eight weeks, there would be no wheat, farina, durum, matzo, semolina, rye, barley, spelt, udon noodles or modified food starch for her son. She didn’t think she’d have to worry about rooting out couscous or bulgur—both were off limits, too, but neither item was on Evan’s dietary radar. Breakfast cereals were another matter, though. So were biscuits and pastas. Coming up with meals for Evan without these would be a culinary challenge she wasn’t sure even she was prepared to handle.
Friday Mornings at Nine Page 19