The weird hair and eyebrow hardware notwithstanding, Wade seemed like a nice boy. If only he were a little older and better groomed, and had a better job and a more believable last name than Smith and no metal puncturing his face, she could introduce him to Melissa. A sales clerk at a convenience store didn’t exactly sound like someone on the fast track, but Ruth was a sales clerk at a convenience store, and she was a fine person. And that guy Melissa had brought to Massachusetts with her last week, Lucas Brondo, was a beautician, which in Ruth’s estimation wasn’t that many rungs above a convenience store clerk. Even if he was a Manhattan beautician. Even if he was a good-looking Manhattan beautician who’d worked wonders on Melissa’s hair.
A First-Rate clerk could buy Melissa all kinds of hair gels and mousses and conditioners and use his employee discount. Manhattan beauticians weren’t the only route to pretty hair.
Not that Wade Smith was the boy for Melissa. He was too young. Too scruffy. And she’d bet good ka-ching that he didn’t play the piano. A waste of those long, graceful fingers.
“So, let’s do this truck,” Wade said, pushing the cart with the nutritional supplements out into the store. Ruth trailed behind him. En route to the pharmacy corner of the store, he introduced her to several clerks whose names blurred and blended together. One had a Spanish-sounding name—Rosita or Rosalita or something—and one reminded Ruth of a gym teacher Jill and Melissa had had at high school. The pharmacist looked like something out of a magazine ad, youthful and clean-scrubbed and smiling as if to say, “I can sell you great drugs,” which was pretty much what he did.
One clerk was a man past retirement age, balding and short, with bits of white hair growing out of his ears like lint, and thick-lensed bifocals, the top halves of which magnified his eyes in a creepy kind of way. Ruth hoped he wouldn’t decide they should be friends because she was closer in age to him than to the rest of the staff. Everyone else appeared on the young side of forty.
Maybe they weren’t so young. Maybe they just looked good because they gobbled vast quantities of the pills on the cart she was pushing. Ginseng. Echinacea. St. John’s Wort. Ginkgo Biloba. So many products, and Ruth had no idea what any of them were used for. She hoped a customer wouldn’t ask her. What could she say to someone who approached her in her official-looking apron and inquired about what to take for a failing memory? Ruth would have to answer, “I don’t remember. My memory’s going, too.”
The hell with all these herbal things, these mysterious elixirs and their miraculous promises, she thought as she surveyed the contents of the cart. She’d stick with her plain, old-fashioned multivitamin. A multivitamin and homemade chicken soup could cure just about anything, as far as she was concerned.
Wade set her up in the aisle near the pharmacy and told her to replenish the supplies of pills. “Put the newer bottles in back and pull the older bottles forward so we can sell the older bottles first,” he instructed her.
She suppressed a smile. Whenever she shopped, she always checked the expiration dates of the items stashed in the rear on the shelves. For the same sixteen-ninety-nine—geez, the black cohosh was expensive, so much money for such a small bottle—why should she buy an old, stale item from the front of the shelf if a more recent, fresher item lurked behind it?
He watched her place a couple of bottles of garlic extract on the shelf, then backed up a step, and another step, as if he wanted to leave but was hesitant to take his eyes off her.
“I can handle this,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound overconfident. She could handle it. For decades, she’d been unloading bags of groceries and organizing the cans of pureed tomato and boxes of corn flakes inside her cabinets. She knew how to put things on a shelf.
Wade nodded, tucked a clump of stringy hair behind his ear and shuffled off, calling over his shoulder, “Find me if you need anything.”
Abruptly she discovered herself alone in the nutritional supplements aisle. What if she did need something? What if she couldn’t find him? Was she really ready to fly solo?
For God’s sake. Of course she was. She was a competent woman. She’d purchased a platform bed and a futon couch without any input from Richard. She’d bought a coffee maker, read the instruction manual and set the clock and timer up, all by herself. She’d been living alone for a week and hadn’t discovered anything she couldn’t handle.
It took her only a couple of minutes to find the area on the shelf for flaxseed oil gel caps. She pulled out the older bottles and started loading the new bottles at the back. A rumbling voice reached her from behind: “The pills are easy. Wait ’til you’ve got to do the beach toys. Bend, stretch, bend, stretch—it’s like an aerobics workout.”
She turned to find the short, balding man standing behind her. What was his name? Barney? Harvey? Five minutes ago she’d been introduced to him and she couldn’t remember. She ought to take some of that cohosh stuff, or the ginko biloba.
Smiling politely, she said, “I guess they’re starting me slowly. They’ll get to the aerobics my second day.”
“Beach toys are gone for the season, anyway. The Halloween stuff is out, and the day after Halloween, we’ll have to pull whatever is left and set up the Christmas stuff.”
“No Thanksgiving merchandise?”
“Oh, yeah, some. Not much. That area is for toys. We sell lots of Halloween paraphernalia, lots of stocking stuffers, but what kind of toys would you sell for Thanksgiving?”
“Stuffed turkeys?” she joked.
He laughed.
His smile pleased her. She tried to remember the last time she’d become friends with someone new and came up empty. The same old friends, ladies from the neighborhood, from the B’nai Torah Sisterhood, from her volunteer work, from the tennis club she’d joined because Richard had wanted her to get exercise, even though she was the world’s worst tennis player . . . Friends she knew as Richard’s wife. This man, like Wade and Rosita and the others, belonged to her alone. They were her friends—or they would be, if she decided she liked them and they decided they liked her. They would befriend her as Ruth, not as someone’s wife or mother or grandmother.
“I’m sorry,” she said, realizing this was not a good way to start a friendship. “I don’t remember your name.”
“Bernie,” he said. “Bernard O’Hara to the police and the tax man, Bernie to everyone else. And you’re Ruth, right?”
“That’s right.”
“You retired?” he asked, gathering a handful of bottles labeled Calcium Citrate and carrying them to the calcium area of the shelf.
“Retired?” She remained busy with the flaxseed. “No. I just started working here.”
“I meant, retired from another job. Like me. The accounting firm I worked at had a mandatory retirement age, but I wasn’t done yet. I wasn’t ready to get sent out to pasture. Not me, no sir. I worked for a year as a bagger at the Stop & Shop up the street but hated it. So I came here. First-Rate is much better.”
“What did you hate about Stop & Shop?” she asked, surprised to find herself genuinely curious.
“All that food. All that gluttony. You’d see a young mother buying candy and soda and sugary cereals for her toddlers and want to lecture her. Or someone using food stamps to buy potato chips. It drove me crazy. Besides, bagging is dreary work. Here you get to do a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And what a great group of people you get to work with.”
Yes. New friends, Ruth thought. She wasn’t going to have time to see her old friends now that she was working full time. No more luncheons. No more kaffeeklatches that were supposed to focus on fundraising for the synagogue but instead were mostly just excuses to gossip: Did you hear about Edna’s father, with the Alzheimer’s? They found him in his underwear Sunday morning, walking along the shoulder of the Mass Pike. And Marsha’s granddaughter, the bassoonist? She got accepted into the New England Conservatory’s after-school program. And that rumor I heard about Lillian and Al getting a divorce? True.
Now R
uth’s old friends were probably having kaffeeklatches and whispering about her and Richard, saying, True.
“I guess I am retired,” she said as she straightened out the Vitamin C. All the bottles were white, their labels featuring a large red C. When she lined them up evenly, all the C’s extended across the bottles like links in a chain. “I’m retired from being a housewife. It was time to try something new.”
Bernie laughed. “Tell that to my wife. She’s the one who pushed me into finding a new job when the accounting firm handed me my gold watch. My pension pays for our expenses and First-Rate pays for our vacations. Last year we went on a Caribbean cruise.”
“How lovely.” Ruth had never been on a cruise, but some of her old friends went on cruises almost every year. Myrna had celebrated her eye lift with a cruise to the islands, and she came home eight pounds heavier. So much for the beautifying effects of the plastic surgery. She said she and Morty spent the entire six days eating and drinking and gambling in the ship’s casino—“Oh, and we visited Nassau and St. Thomas and shopped like maniacs,” she’d added. It was wonderful, she’d insisted. She would do it again in an instant.
Ruth had asked Richard if he’d like to go on a cruise and he’d said he’d rather rent a place on Sanibel Island for a week in the winter. They’d gone, eaten sensibly, he’d played golf and she’d sat in the shade of a cabana on the beach and read three novels. No gambling, no fancy evening wear, no maniacal shopping. Maybe it wasn’t glamorous, maybe it wasn’t adventurous, but they’d had a good time.
They could go again this winter, she thought. They could pay for it with her earnings. She’d wag the airline tickets in front of Richard’s face and say, “This trip’s on me.”
No, she couldn’t do that. They were separated. And she couldn’t really see the point of going to Sanibel Island without him.
Not this winter but next. She could save as much as possible and then treat the twins to Walt Disney World. Or Noah and Abbie, although Abbie would probably think she was too old for Mickey Mouse and a ride in a teacup like Francine’s.
But Madison and Mackenzie would be the perfect age for the Magic Kingdom. They’d love the rides and the Mickey-Mouse shaped ice-cream pops. They’d get a room at one of the Disney hotels and have breakfast with Snow White. They’d spend a day at the water park. They’d stay up late and watch the fireworks.
And the best part was, Ruth could plan the trip without any input from Richard. She could do it all herself. She was flying solo.
Chapter Ten
“I’m sorry,” said Gloria, sounding not the least bit sorry. “It’s just a three-dollar-a-person increase.”
“Just a three-dollar increase?” Jill fumed. “Just? We’ve got more than a hundred people on the invitation list.” And if Jill and Gordon had let Abbie have her way, there would have been more than two hundred. Bar-mitzvah and bat-mitzvah receptions at her middle school were extravaganzas with extensive invitation lists.
One of Abbie’s classmates had invited the entire seventh grade to his bar mitzvah a couple of weeks ago—two hundred-seventy-eight kids running amok for four hours at the Westin Hotel in downtown Boston. According to Abbie, at least half of them didn’t even like Toby Klotzenberg, the bar mitzvah boy. Abbie had reported that she, Caitlin and Emma Tovick had grown bored with the party—the DJ had been obnoxious, and the boys had taken to sticking pencils up their noses and competing in belching contests while most of the girls holed up in the bathroom and experimented with one another’s lipstick—so Abbie and her friends had wandered down the hall to a wedding reception with better music and excellent pastries, where they’d remained unnoticed for an hour and left ten minutes before Emma’s mother was scheduled to pick them up.
A reception at a downtown Boston luxury hotel for the entire seventh grade wasn’t in Abbie’s future. Unlike Toby’s father, who owned a chain of sneaker stores, Abbie’s father was a high school English teacher and her mother brought in a little spare change writing enticing descriptions of things people didn’t need for catalogues created to convince people they really did need those things. Just that morning, Jill had emailed some tankini text—“Make him wonder what’s under this luscious suit! Removable cup pads give your bustline a rise; adjustable side ties lift the bottoms as high on your thighs as you dare to go”—to Sabrina Lopez at Velvet Moon. Sabrina was sure to love the assonance. Wonder, under. Rise, side, ties, high, thighs. Jill had found her groove.
The caffeine from the Diet Coke she’d guzzled—one and a half cans by the time she’d settled in front of her computer at the kitchen desk—had energized her that morning. It had slaked the thirst of her muse. How could she wean herself from the stuff when it helped her to assonate?
Swimsuit text finished and sent, she’d driven to the Old Rockford Inn, which she and Gordon had booked for Abbie’s bat mitzvah reception. Gloria, the inn’s events manager, had sent her an email mentioning that the inn had made a slight change in its catering menu.
Jill had assumed that “slight change” meant a few new appetizers or side dishes. She hadn’t expected a price hike.
“We signed a contract,” she reminded Gloria, deciding she didn’t like the woman, who was too thin and whose face was the same shape as an olive, a perfect, shiny ellipse. She was irked by Gloria’s phony smile and the burgundy polish on her nails, which were also olive-shaped. She even disliked Gloria’s title: events manager. It sounded athletic, as if she were a gym teacher who coordinated the beanbag throw and the three-legged race at Noah’s school’s annual Carnival Day.
Abbie’s bat mitzvah wasn’t an event. It was an affair. One of Jill’s mother’s favorite jokes, repeated on the occasion of every family wedding or bar mitzvah, went: Mrs. Cohen runs into Mrs. Goldberg and says, “Sadie! I hear you’re having an affair!” Mrs. Goldberg grins and says, “It’s true. I am.” Mrs. Cohen says, “So? Who’s the caterer?”
“The contract includes a clause explaining that we may impose price adjustments on the food up to one month before the event’s date.” Gloria managed to recite this through her fake smile. She could be a ventriloquist. Her lips barely budged.
“Why? I mean, why are the prices going up, not why does your contract have a clause explaining that you can—” rip me off, Jill almost said. “Raise the prices.” She scanned the updated menu. The offerings appeared to be exactly the same as what she and Gordon had seen when they’d signed the contract in August. Prime rib. Poached salmon. Dijon-crusted chicken breast. Steamed green beans, which Jill knew damn well would be boiled, not steamed, and no one would eat them anyway. Fresh fruit cup—which would be canned, not fresh. A salad of mixed greens, including but not limited to spinach, romaine, bibb lettuce, arugula, radicchio, cress and iceberg, depending on availability—tossed with a delicately herbed vinaigrette which, Jill was willing to bet, would not be delicate.
“Gas prices have gone up,” Gloria responded to her question, still smiling.
“We’re not serving our guests gasoline at this affair.”
“Food has to be trucked in. We have to factor in the shipping costs.”
Jill pressed her lips together to keep from shouting, “Bullshit.” If she lost her temper, Gloria might tear up their contract and re-book the place for some other affair on their date, and then where would Abbie’s reception be? Much as Jill wanted to pound Gloria’s offensively tidy desk with her fist, she had to be a Good Mom.
“How about if you charge us the original amount per plate and provide us with a separate bill enumerating the shipping costs?” Jill asked, modulating her voice so she sounded utterly reasonable.
Gloria’s smile was so brittle, Jill half expected it to crack and then shatter, spilling tooth and lip splinters across her desk. “We find it easier just to add a fuel surcharge to each plate.”
“Easier for you,” Jill said.
“Well . . . yes.”
They’d reached an impasse. Either Jill could yield on the higher price or she could void the con
tract. And she couldn’t do that to Abbie, who was already pissed that she’d been limited to inviting only forty of her best-friends-forever to the reception.
Good Mom, Jill cautioned herself. Good, but not a complete pushover. “I’ll discuss the new rates with my husband,” she said, folding the print-out of the menu Gloria had given her and tucking it into a pocket of her purse. She wouldn’t commit to the new price yet. Let Gloria sweat for a few days before Jill got back to her.
She left the inn, resenting its charming clapboard façade, its sloping roof, the beautiful landscaping—sugar maple and oak foliage just reaching the peak of color, evergreen junipers and powder-puff-shaped white and rust chrysanthemums flanking the slate front walk and the perimeter of the parking lot. In the spring, when Abbie’s affair would take place, the mums would be replaced by tulips and crocuses, and the azaleas and rhododendrons bordering the front porch would be in full bloom. It was a lovely facility, even if it treated its clients like shit.
“Shit,” she said aloud. She was alone in the parking lot. She didn’t have to be a Good Mom anymore.
She slumped into the driver’s seat of her Subaru wagon and sighed. She couldn’t phone Gordon; right now he was—she glanced at her watch—teaching his fifth-period class on Greek and Roman classics. He was probably explaining the Iliad to his students. Some girl was probably asking him whether Achilles really looked like Brad Pitt in the movie, and he was trying not to laugh.
Nor could she call her mother to complain. Jill didn’t lean on her mother. She was the leanee, not the leaner. Her mother called her, sounded her out, asked her to solve problems, and Jill did.
Unfortunately, this problem didn’t spark any ideas in her mind. She saw no logical solution. She knew there had to be one; she just couldn’t imagine it. She felt exploited and resentful and upset. For once, she wanted to call her mother and lean. Maybe adding a fuel surtax to the catering bill had become a common practice. Maybe all her mother’s friends in the B’nai Torah Sisterhood had been discussing this very subject at their last meeting, and someone was filing a class-action suit, and her mother could tell her how to become a member of the class.
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