Friday Mornings at Nine

by Marilyn Brant

  “Yeah, yeah. I suppose…” Tamara ran her long fingers through her hair, skimming over the tangles, but they were there nonetheless. “I don’t think telling him about it is a good idea, though. Do you?” She glanced between the two of them. “I mean, what good would it do anyway? It’d only make it harder for us to live with each other.”

  “You still want to be with him?” Bridget asked, the emotionally stressful nature of this conversation—even though it didn’t involve her directly—making her nibble mindlessly on her muffin. She had already finished the second section she had cut up and moved on to the third without realizing it.

  “Well, yeah,” Tamara said, downing the last of her espresso despite its tepidness. “We have to stay together. For Benji.” She stated this as a given, as if the other two women would accept it without question. And, to a degree, they did. What loving mother didn’t want to do everything she could for the sake of her child?

  The problem, from Bridget’s perspective at least, was Jon himself. She’d never liked the guy. The few times she had been in a social situation with him, he acted so smug, so above his company, she always dreaded having to be in the same room with him. Her mom used to say that people who went out of their way to make others feel uncomfortable were just really insecure, so maybe that was it. But he irritated her, and she had never been able to figure out what Tamara saw in the man.

  Jennifer was not nearly as mystified. She got Tamara and Jon as a couple, or at least she could see how they must have been drawn to each other once. They were both intelligent and outspoken, with a tendency toward sharp edges. If what Tamara had told her about their families was true, neither of them had had particularly strong marital role models growing up, and both desperately wanted to break that pattern. They shared the appreciation for a well-appointed house, a long-held allegiance to moderate liberal politics and an unyielding devotion to their son. These days, though, Jennifer couldn’t help but observe their mutual indifference toward each other.

  “It’s important to consider the children,” Jennifer said, thinking of her own daughters and the potential trauma that would be inflicted upon them if she and Michael were ever to separate. The thought of Veronica’s face hardening in anger and Shelby’s falling in dejection made Jennifer shudder.

  “Exactly,” Tamara said, although she was starting to believe she had already protested the matter too much. That she was just saying lines from a very old script. However, she couldn’t quite break free of her private fantasies of a capricious escape from the constrictions of her wedding vows. The problem, of course, was she no longer knew how to state her true beliefs about marriage because she had no idea anymore what, precisely, they were.

  “You still didn’t tell us about the kiss,” Bridget said. “Other than that it was really good. How did it happen?”

  Ah. Well, this was concrete. A step-by-step stage direction performed on the library loft’s theater in the round. This Tamara knew she could do.

  She set the scene for them with eloquent detachment: He was drinking, she was drinking, Jon was elsewhere. It was a dark, secluded, intimate cove, away from the eccentricities of the maddening crowd. And, then, like the climactic moment of a soap opera, she described (to the best of her memory) the instant their lips met, attaching no real emotion to the act and none of the mental confusion. Purposely making light and superficial something her friends knew was, unequivocally, a rather big deal.

  “And then what?” Bridget asked. “Did he say anything?”

  Tamara snickered. “He ran away, and when I saw him on Monday, he apologized. That was it.”

  Jennifer exhaled. This was making her think too much about David. She didn’t have to imagine what it was like to kiss him. She knew. She remembered. “No harm, no foul,” she murmured to Tamara, though she didn’t believe her own words. “If you’re not going to go forward with Aaron, then it’s probably better not to mention it to Jon.”

  Although Bridget nodded in agreement, she couldn’t keep from wondering how Jon would be able to miss the signals of restless discontent his wife was sending. Even Graham, who wasn’t known for his intuitiveness, had sensed Bridget’s unhappiness at home and her greater enjoyment at work. Even Graham, once he realized how important Dr. Luke and Smiley Dental were to her, took steps to try to please her. Little steps, sure, but wholly unexpected ones. Like his surprise visit to the office yesterday. To meet Dr. Luke in person.

  “Hey, there,” Graham had said, smiling first at both Bridget and her favorite dentist, and then reaching out to shake Dr. Luke’s hand while Bridget held her breath.

  “Hello,” Dr. Luke had replied, returning the smile, grasping her husband’s hand and shaking firmly. One man on one side of the dental desk, the other man on the opposite side—with Bridget sitting uncomfortably between them.

  Then Dr. Nina had walked by, paused in front of the desk and eyed them all curiously. Bridget resorted to fiddling with her paperwork, Dr. Luke immediately excused himself to go check on a patient, and Graham…well, he just stared the Witch down until she rounded the corner. Then he kissed Bridget goodbye and took off himself.

  Even the next day, Bridget couldn’t quite get over the oddness of it. Of Graham’s silent assertion to her coworkers that she had a very present husband and, perhaps, that he supported her and watched over their interactions with her. It pleased her slightly more than it discomfited her but, more than any other reaction, she was surprised.

  Might not Tamara’s husband, Jon, if he recognized things in his marriage were amiss, do something unpredictable, too?

  Tamara concurred with her friends’ professed opinions and, not being privy to their unspoken ones—nor really wanting to know them—she pushed aside the baffling nature of Aaron’s kiss and moved on to her simmering questions about working from home.

  “How do you juggle your day?” Tamara asked Jennifer. “Do you set aside the same hours every week for working on your projects or does it vary wildly depending on what else you have going on?”

  Others had asked Jennifer about this a number of times, but she found it interesting that Tamara had never broached the subject before now. Tamara was a different creature from her. Unlike Jennifer, Tamara didn’t spend countless hours loitering in the past or projecting herself into the future. She had an altogether idiosyncratic and immediate relationship with time. If she asked about working from home, it wasn’t a hypothetical matter. The idea must have taken root in Tamara’s present and been of some urgency.

  “People have multiple approaches,” Jennifer said carefully. “I’m able to be flexible within any given day, but I try to spend at least four or five hours on designs and updates every weekday. A few hours on the weekends, too, if I need to finish something.” Or, she added to herself, if Michael wasn’t talking to her and she needed a place to escape. “Tomorrow morning I’m meeting with a new client for an hour—Thrifty Gifty, you know?”

  The other two nodded. The bargain gift boutique had opened in town just a month ago. To Bridget and Tamara it seemed a cute place, but they’d been too preoccupied with other affairs to shop there yet.

  “They have a very basic Web site up already but, now that they’ve settled in and feel established in the community, they’re looking to do more with it. They need a redesign to accommodate additional Web pages, to feature better ads, to optimize the Internet search engines.” Jennifer smiled slightly as she spoke about this, enjoying the undivided attention of her friends. It was simple stuff to her, but very strange to recognize how they considered her an expert in something. Stranger still was the fact that she was finally taking her skills more seriously. She needed to do that. If nothing else, being back in contact with David succeeded in reminding her that she’d fantasized about being an innovator once, and she wanted, even in her more limited suburban-mom way, to do more complicated work than she’d done in years.

  “Anyway, I’ll spend more time today gathering ideas for them and sketching a few design layouts,” she c
ontinued. “Tomorrow the owner will meet with me and tell me what she’s hoping to do with her site. We’ll brainstorm and then set a tentative date for completion. Then, I’ll just work on it until it’s done. Until the client is satisfied.” This was underplaying it a bit. Jennifer didn’t stop polishing a site until the client reached the point of all-out raving.

  Tamara asked a series of follow-up questions that left Jennifer with no doubt her friend was rather determined to reenter the workforce. But, when confronted directly, Tamara hedged.

  “I’m just gathering information,” Tamara claimed, a statement Jennifer didn’t believe in the least and one even Bridget found unlikely. “With Benji away at school now, I think I need some new challenges.”

  However, from Tamara’s point of view, she was being partially honest, which was pretty close to fully truthful, right? To admit openly to her interest in being self-supporting would mean to acknowledge her plan to cut one of the ties binding her to Jon. It was safer to put the blame on her son’s absence, and hardly an implausible reason, after all.

  The ripple effect these partial truths had on her friends would have surprised the Glendale Grove locals had they learned of it. Tamara’s determination to paint as insignificant her kiss with Aaron worked like a floodgate in reverse. All the details and confusion Bridget and Jennifer longed to pour out of their souls were whooshed back in, allowing only trickles of truth to dribble out.

  Jennifer refused to discuss David’s text messaging or the silent stalemate with Michael, even when Bridget hinted that she’d sensed something amiss on Saturday evening. “It was just a really late night,” Jennifer deflected. “We were both really tired after the party.”

  Bridget, however, had no intention of harshly judging Jennifer’s finely honed sense of discretion. Despite a few nebulous allusions, she couldn’t bring herself to divulge the brief but momentous occasion of Dr. Luke and Graham’s first meeting the day before. Nor did she tell her friends about Dr. Nina’s comments at the Wieners’ house or how that’d led to Bridget and Graham reaching a new level of understanding with each other. For one thing, it would seem like bragging. And for another, she would then be required to fess up about her luncheon date with Dr. Luke…and why would she want to unearth all of that?

  She was just about to pop the last bite of muffin in her mouth when she realized she had devoured three-and-three-quarters sections. She dropped the last quarter of the last section on her plate like it was crawling with fire ants, and she bit her lip. Guess she didn’t have as much willpower as she’d thought.

  Tamara, meanwhile, was pleased to have had, in her opinion, a very open conversation with her friends. Incapable of being truly elusive, she remained relentlessly herself, experiencing a rush of self-congratulation on her (nearly) unguarded disclosure. Her life was, really, quite a mess, though, and she knew it. But in attempting to wade through the ruins and create a small measure of order, she found little nuggets of joy. A joy so dizzying and brief it felt like the thrill of a roller coaster ride once the terror of the big plunge had passed.

  The three parted ways after ninety minutes, having had three very different morning encounters:

  Bridget—budding with new hope for her marriage but distrustful of most everything outside of it.

  Tamara—dealing with those same qualities but neatly swapped. Long-term marital distrust, yes, but a fresh sense of hopefulness on the fringes of her environment.

  And Jennifer—who would not have recognized any aspect of her life were it not cloaked in distrust, and who refused to give credence to the notion that hope could appear out of nowhere and sweep her away on its air current (that simply wasn’t rational), stayed in the safe cradle of her holding pattern.

  Their choice in determining the next correct step varied accordingly. Jennifer returned home and began obsessing about the font style and page width for her new client. Bridget went grocery shopping—kiwifruit was in season! And Tamara drove to Aaron’s house and parked in his driveway. She was going to have it out with him.

  19

  Tamara

  Wednesday, November 3 through Friday, November 12

  Tamara rang Aaron’s doorbell. No answer. She traipsed around to the backyard. No Aaron. She listened for the distinctive bark of a specific dog. No Sharky.

  Bloody hell. Her confrontation would have to wait.

  But when she was snug in her own house, her irritation gave way to second-guessing. Like an ace whizzing across the net, served by an opponent on the court, it surprised her and forced her to take a step back. It had been so long since she had been mired in any decision worthy of self-doubt, and the simple relief in having shared the kissing incident with her friends dissipated somewhat in the sanctuary of her living room. It left, in its wake, the unease of holding real human emotion in her hands. Emotion, in her case, that was astonishingly contradictory. She hardly knew herself.

  Last night, she had spoken with Benji. He had sounded so happy. So full of possibility. And she was reminded of Aunt Eliza and her quest for joy no matter what a person’s age. That life was too short not to seek out its lighter side.

  Aunt Eliza lived by her own wisdom, and Benji, her darling boy, was well on his way to embracing a similar philosophy. Tamara wished for him every nuance of happiness this life could offer. But—and here was where the oddly disgruntled voice in her head confounded her—she also wished some of that delight for herself. Fully and clearheadedly.

  Despite her practical nature, she wanted to feel the elation of life seeping into her body, all the way from her highlighted locks to her professional pedicure.

  Despite her acceptance of duty, she wanted there to be the potential for joy even in the midst of mundane tasks.

  Above all, and despite her reputation as a woman who could down a few drinks, she wanted to achieve momentary states of happiness without needing to drug herself with 80-proof vodka to do it.

  She checked the time. Almost eleven A.M. Might be possible to catch him before he went out to lunch. She snatched her cell phone and punched in Jon’s number.

  “Everything okay with Benji?” he asked, even before saying hello. Unlike other husbands, he didn’t spot his wife’s number on the Caller ID and open with, “Hey, honey. How’s your morning going?” Nope. Not Jon.

  “I think he’s fine. That’s not why I’m calling.”

  “Oh.” There was a pause and the sound of typing. Jon, ever the multitasker, wasn’t going to stop working for so much as forty-five seconds if he didn’t have to. “What do you need?”

  “We haven’t updated the calendar for November,” she told him, referring to his work and event calendar they always kept on the fridge at home with the dates of his trips blocked off. “I don’t know when you’re traveling this month.”

  He grunted. “Hang on.” More super-speedy typing. “I just pulled it up on my computer. Only two trips in November. The eleventh through the sixteenth and a short one just before Thanksgiving—the twenty-first through the twenty-fourth.”

  “Thanks.” Tamara grabbed a pen and inked the dates on her hand.

  “Okay. I’ll see you later tonigh—”

  “One more thing, real quick,” she said, her words purposely rushed. “You know our neighbor Aaron?” There was a longish pause on the line, so she added, “Runner guy?”

  “Yeah?” Jon must have resumed his typing because she could hear the clickety-clack of his keyboard in the background.

  “He’s given us a lot of vegetables from his garden this fall, so I thought I’d invite him here for dinner sometime soon. To say thanks. Is that all right with you?”

  There was a sigh. “You know, Tamara, I don’t care. Invite him if you want. I don’t have much to say to the guy, though.” More hurried typing.

  Almost holding her breath, she said, as if it were the first time it’d occurred to her, “Well, I could have him over for lunch instead. Or for dinner when you’re on one of your trips. Would that be better?”

  �
�Yeah. Yeah, it would. Do that.” Another sigh and another burst of rapid-fire typing. “Look, I’ve gotta get some work done here. Do whatever you want with that Aaron guy, but I’d just as soon skip it.”

  “Okay. No problem.” Tamara hung up, unable to neatly braid the mixed strands of emotions: disappointment in her husband’s indifference, glee at the cleverness of her machinations and uncertainty over what to tell Aaron. Her neighbor could no longer claim she had kept her objective of getting together with him from Jon. Jon, having stated it quite clearly, “didn’t care” what she did with Aaron…or when. Although, let’s be honest, Jon probably would care if he knew they had once done something more physical than steaming broccoli. Or toasting over a few drinks.

  The following Thursday, late afternoon, her index finger millimeters from the doorbell, Tamara stood facing Aaron’s front door again, this time without any intention of confronting her neighbor and every intention of proceeding with their friendship as if it were a perfectly normal thing and not remotely an act of pushing marital boundaries.

  She had permission, after all. And she’d had eight days with which to think about the implications of Jon’s apathy. If he’d have cared more or acted even minutely interested or concerned, would that have had an impact on her behavior?

  Hell, yeah.

  Then her feelings of guilt might have been a reasonable thing, not some leftover hang-up from her childhood. She dropped her hand to her side and took a deep breath. She didn’t need to be all introspective and philosophical to recognize that she had grown accustomed to her parents’ frigid but long-lasting marriage. That she had managed to emulate it in her own. And that the relationship model Aunt Eliza had set forth contrasted greatly from her mom’s and Tamara’s, but her aunt’s way didn’t have the ring of familiarity she had come to associate with the state of marriage.

  So, hey—finally—she was taking steps to be more like her beloved aunt and less like her neurotic mother. Nothin’ wrong with that.