Goodbye To All That

by Judith Arnold

  Doug had been a boy, so her parents hadn’t been overly protective of him. They’d tried to be protective with Melissa, but she’d shrugged them off and they’d let her. By the time Melissa had been old enough to get into trouble, Jill had been in college, Doug in medical school, and her parents no longer had the energy to be vigilant. Their two older kids had survived adolescence, so maybe they’d felt less of a need to police Melissa, and she’d had the guts to take advantage of her freedom. And look at her now: a lawyer, with degrees from two Ivy League schools.

  And a boyfriend who colored and cut women’s hair for a living.

  Scolding herself for being such a snob, Jill stalked down the hall, passing Doug’s and Melissa’s bedrooms, both of which remained essentially untouched since they’d moved into adulthood. Through the open door of Doug’s bedroom Jill glimpsed the shelf holding all the model airplanes he’d built from kits as a boy. Lots of precision work on them, delicate painting and gluing of miniature decals. Good practice for slicing and rearranging people’s corneas.

  She also glimpsed a sliver of Melissa’s pink bedroom through her open door. Melissa had been awfully feminine as a child. She’d insisted on the pink walls, the pink bedspread, the pink curtains. Strawberry, Jill corrected herself. Or Pepto-Bismol. Did that count as a food?

  Jill’s childhood bedroom had been converted into a study, the bed replaced by a sofa, a small television sitting on a wheeled stand where her desk used to be. The shelves that had once held every Judy Blume book ever published, along with a teeming menagerie of stuffed animals and a milk-glass piggy bank that was usually heavy with money because she never did any naughty stuff—like buying pot or sneaking into bars with a fake ID—that cost money, now contained the obsolete family encyclopedia and rows of Consumer Reports magazines in chronological order.

  If Jill hadn’t already felt like a trespasser prowling through the house, entering the master bedroom would have done the trick. Guilt seized her as she stepped over the threshold into the room her parents had shared until her mother’s departure a month ago. The bed was made, barely. The blanket lay haphazardly across the mattress and both pillows looked mashed and misshapen.

  Both pillows? Were two people sleeping in this bed?

  Oh my God.

  No. Jill refused to believe it. If her father was sharing a bed with someone, it wouldn’t be this bed, the bed he’d shared with her mother. Jill simply couldn’t accept that possibility.

  He must be doubling up the pillows under his head. Or punching Jill’s mother’s pillow to sublimate his rage at her mother. Or alternating sleeping on her side of the bed and his own, since her mother had refused to rotate the mattress.

  She paused at the foot of the bed, debating whether she should sniff her mother’s pillow, just to see if it smelled of some other woman’s perfume, and then decided she couldn’t bear the possibility that it might.

  Turning resolutely from the bed, she marched to the closet. Her mother’s side looked slightly depleted, but she had apparently left most of her clothing behind when she’d moved out. Jill quickly found the turquoise V-neck and the white silk-blend shell. She pulled them out and hung them on the doorknob, then dropped to her knees and rummaged through the shoe boxes lining the floor. Her mother was no Imelda Marcos, but she did have a surprising number of shoes, including some Jill had never before seen. A pair of pumpkin-orange satin pumps—they must have been dyed to match a dress. Women used to do that for formal occasions—buy white satin shoes and dye them to match their gowns. Did her mother have a pumpkin gown? If so, Jill was relieved never to have seen her wearing it. Pumpkin was definitely not her color.

  A pair of thong sandals with plastic daisies glued to the straps. A pair of boat shoes, for a woman who claimed boating was for rich goyim. A pair of black pumps with three-inch heels. She’d specifically said she wanted her low-heeled pumps, though. If she was going to be dancing at this club in Boston . . .

  Jill shuddered again. The last time she’d seen her mother dance had been at Laurie’s wedding last year. Laurie was Jill’s cousin, her Uncle Isaac’s youngest. A while back, she’d spent a year studying Buddhism and ingesting hallucinogens in Katmandu, and she’d returned to the states with an extremely hirsute Californian whose name was either Chandaka or Ernie, depending on his mood. They’d had a vegetarian wedding—Jill’s parents had muttered profusely about the abundance of bean dishes and the absence of anything resembling meat in the buffet, and the wedding cake’s frosting had tasted suspiciously like tofu—but Uncle Isaac had insisted on hiring a DJ who’d played regular music for the party. Jill recalled that her parents had danced a sprightly fox trot to Neil Diamond’s “Song Sung Blue.”

  She hadn’t been wearing a pumpkin dress then. Nor had she worn those shoes with the three-inch heels. Why had she even bought them? She was such a pragmatic woman. She’d never wear shoes that could cause bunions.

  Leaving her husband of forty-two years hadn’t been pragmatic, Jill reminded herself as she peeked into another shoe box, and another. Four boxes later she found a pair of low-heeled black leather pumps. She hoped those were the shoes her mother wanted, because she was tired of searching.

  She lifted the box, stood and draped the two tops over her arm. Refusing to spare her parents’ rumpled bed another glance, she hurried out of the room and down the hall. At the top of the stairs she heard a noise.

  Someone entering the house. A door opening, then shutting. Footsteps.

  She froze, told herself not to panic and remembered that she’d left her purse, with her cell phone in it, on the front seat of her car. She contemplated racing back to her parents’ bedroom, where she could use their phone to dial 911, but before she could move she heard her father’s voice hollering up the stairs. “Jill? Are you here?”

  She almost would have preferred to confront a burglar. With a burglar, she could scream, kick, try to flee. With her father, she’d have to explain her presence, and the sweaters and shoes she was carrying. Getting robbed had to be easier than that.

  “Jill?” he called again.

  “Yeah, Dad, it’s me.” Jill might not have Melissa’s chutzpah, but she’d brazen her way through this. The man was her father, for God’s sake. Home in the middle of a workday. He had some explaining to do, too.

  She descended the stairs to find her father standing in the hall below, gazing up at her. “I saw your car in the driveway,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  Since she didn’t have Melissa’s chutzpah, she resorted to honesty. “I had to pick up some things for Mom. What are you doing home?”

  “What do you mean, what am I doing home? It’s my house. I live here.”

  “It’s the middle of the day. What about work?”

  “Oh.” He wilted, his shoulders curving downward, his entire posture melting into limpness. “I’m not feeling so good.”

  Concern swamped Jill, washing away her worry about justifying her mission. She descended the stairs, scrutinized his wan face and touched the inside of her wrist to his forehead, as if he were one of her children. Actually, much to Abbie and Noah’s disgust, she often tested their temperature with her lips, not her wrist. But her father was a doctor. She couldn’t just kiss his forehead and force Tylenol into him.

  Not that he needed Tylenol. His forehead felt cool.

  He tilted his head away from her hand. “It’s a stomach thing,” he told her. “Maybe I ate something I shouldn’t have.”

  He didn’t look particularly nauseated. Pale, sure, but not green. Well groomed and steady on his feet. Although his tie was loosened, his shirt was surprisingly crisp-looking.

  “What did you eat?” she asked.

  “Who knows? Without your mother here, I scrounge.”

  Scrounging didn’t sound particularly healthy, but Jill decided not to give him a lecture on nutrition. “What about your patients? Were you able to clear your schedule?”

  “Stan and The Kid are covering for me.” He turned and walked
down the hall to the kitchen. Jill followed. Not a wrinkle in his shirt, she noted. Was he sending his clothes out to the cleaners now that her mother wasn’t around to handle his laundry? Surely he wasn’t washing his shirts himself. If he was, they wouldn’t look so fresh.

  “Would you like me to make you some soup?” Jill asked as he settled heavily onto a chair, propped his elbows on the table and rested his chin in his hands. “Or some ginger ale? Do you have any? That can settle an upset stomach.” She draped the sweaters over the back of another chair, set the shoe box on the seat and crossed to the refrigerator. She should have expected it to be nearly empty, but seeing the interior light reflecting harshly against the bare shelves jolted her. “You want me to run out and buy you some ginger ale?” she asked, doing her best to mask her dismay. Maybe her father’s stomach thing was starvation.

  “No, but if you brought me some of that rugelach I love, I wouldn’t object. What’s this stuff of your mother’s? Shirts and shoes? How come she couldn’t come here and get these things herself?”

  “She’s working,” Jill said. Unlike me, she added silently. Of course, she should be working. If she didn’t get that copy sent in by the end of the day, Lois Forman might show up at her house and kick her in the butt with one of Prairie Wind’s mango-hued espadrilles.

  Jill’s father snorted. “Working? Your mother is standing at a cash register. It’s crazy that she’d rather do that than be my wife. So, she couldn’t come and get her things in the evening?”

  Jill closed the refrigerator door and stared at her father. He really didn’t look sick. “I don’t want to be drawn into the middle of anything,” she said. “Mom asked me to do this favor for her, so I’m doing it. You want me to bring you rugelach? I’ll do that favor, too. I live to do favors for you two.”

  He must have heard the sarcasm filtering through her tone. “Invite me to dinner and I’ll eat the rugelach at your house.”

  “Fine. When would you like to come to dinner?”

  “Anytime. Tonight.”

  “I thought you weren’t feeling well.”

  “I’m already feeling better. Just thinking about eating dinner at your house makes me feel better.”

  “Then you should go back to work and see your patients.”

  He winced, as if suddenly seized with pain. “I can’t go back,” he confessed. “Not today.”

  Jill lowered herself into one of the empty chairs and scrutinized her father. Whatever pain he was suffering appeared to be psychic, not abdominal. “What’s wrong?”

  “What’s wrong? You want to know what’s wrong?” His eyes flared with anger. “My wife walks out on me, and she won’t even come home to get her own shoes. She sends our daughter to run and fetch for her. What, she’s afraid to look at me? She’s afraid if she sets foot in this house, she’ll never be able to escape? I’ll lock her up and throw away the key?”

  “You should talk to her about that,” Jill said primly. Listening to her father gripe about her mother was almost as embarrassing as seeing two indented pillows on a bed her father was supposedly sleeping in alone. “What’s with your stomach?”

  “My stomach was supposed to have coffee poured into it this afternoon.”

  “Decaf, I assume,” Jill said.

  He made a puffing sound, impatient or disgusted, Jill couldn’t tell. “I was supposed to meet another doctor for coffee. A dermatologist.” He hesitated, then cringed and spat out the words: “A female dermatologist.” Sighing, he shook his head and let it rest deeper in his cupped palms. “I canceled. I called her office and said I wasn’t feeling well, and we’d have to do it another time. I couldn’t go through with it, Jill. I just couldn’t.”

  Jill decided this wouldn’t be a good time to tell her father her mother was planning to go bar-hopping in Boston on Saturday night. “A female dermatologist, huh.”

  “Gert set us up.” He shook his head without lifting his chin from his palms. His arms rocked back and forth from the motion. “I can’t do this. It’s practically like a date. I’m a married man.”

  She was touched by his rectitude. But the sad fact was . . . “You and Mom are separated. I think it’s allowed.”

  He raised his hangdog eyes to her. “You think I should have coffee with this woman?”

  No. “I think you and Mom should get back together and work out your problems, but nobody listens to me.”

  “I listen to you.” He lowered his eyes again, briefly distracted by something on the Globe’s front page. “There were no problems to work out. Your mother just wanted to be by herself, that’s all.”

  “The remote control?”

  “That bullshit,” her father retorted. “What does she care if I channel-surf a little? That’s enough to destroy a marriage?”

  “You’re very stubborn,” Jill pointed out. “If Mom agreed to come home if you stopped channel-surfing, would you stop?”

  “It’s unfair for her to make unilateral demands like that. She wants me to stop channel-surfing? She should lose five pounds. Not to be picky, but she doesn’t get enough exercise. When was the last time she played tennis? She should make an effort.”

  “Have you ever discussed this with her?”

  “What am I, crazy? I’m supposed to tell her to lose five pounds?”

  “You know,” she said, not willing to dwell on her mother’s weight, which was within the healthy range, “if you don’t want to have coffee with the dermatologist, you don’t have to fake an illness to get out of it. You could just phone her and say you want to cancel.”

  “Doug thinks I should do it,” her father told her. “He even helped me iron my shirt. He agreed I should look nice for this dermatologist.”

  “Doug is a guy. What does he know?”

  Her father actually smiled. Then he grew solemn. “I want your mother to come home, Jillie. If she wants something from this house, I want her to get it herself, not send you so she can avoid me. What, does she hate me so much she’s afraid to talk to me?”

  “I don’t think she hates you,” Jill assured her father. “I just think she’s trying some new things. Breaking out of her rut.”

  “Some rut. She’s free all day here. She wouldn’t even have to make my breakfast for me if she didn’t want to. Or dinner. We can scrounge, I’m getting good at it. She wants to work at First-Rate, she can live at home and work at First-Rate. She can still be my wife.”

  “You should tell her this,” Jill said. “Not me. It’s between you and her.”

  “She won’t talk to me. She won’t even come here to grab a sweater and a pair of shoes. Two sweaters,” he amended, glancing toward the chair.

  Jill ached to call her mother right now, hand the phone to her father and force the two of them to talk. She wanted them back together. She had not just Thanksgiving but Abbie’s bat mitzvah to think of. And her family. Tradition. The foundation beneath her feet. Bendels didn’t divorce.

  But her mother was at work. If she took Jill’s call while she was supposed to be working, she might get fired. Which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world, as far as Jill was concerned, but her mother would never forgive her. As a Good Daughter, she wouldn’t risk it.

  “I’ll tell her to talk to you,” she promised instead. “I’ll tell her you want her to come home. But you have to do your part, too.”

  Her father gave her an eager look. “What’s my part?”

  “Stop channel-surfing.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Melissa locked herself into one of the bathroom stalls and hit the speed-dial for Jill on her cell phone.

  This was not a good day. This was not a good bathroom. The sinks were ancient, the ceiling lights glared, the air smelled like Lysol and lemon cut with a cloying floral air freshener, and the floor was constructed of tiny square tiles that had probably started their lives white but were now a cloudy yellow that made Melissa think too many people over the years must have missed the toilet and peed on the floor. And this was a ladies’ room
. It wasn’t as if women had to aim to use the damn toilets.

  That her lovely leather shoes—three-hundred-ninety-five bucks at Bloomie’s, and worth every penny because despite their high heels and narrow toes they’d never given her blisters—were touching the suspiciously stained floor disgusted her. So did Judge Montoya, who’d decided there was no reason Melissa and Aidan O’Leary couldn’t hammer out a settlement that would satisfy everyone. Melissa had been shut into a tiny, dreary conference room with the Lord of Dimples for over an hour and she sure as hell wasn’t anywhere close to satisfied.

  Montoya had shot down her attempt to turn the case into a class-action suit. She’d shown the judge persuasive evidence that the factory in China that was producing counterfeit bags for sidewalk vendors in New York City was also producing counterfeit bags for sidewalk vendors in San Francisco and Seattle, and counterfeit belts from the same factory had shown up in Boca Raton, La Jolla and Winnetka, Illinois. This was obviously a huge racket. Designers were getting screwed left and right. But O’Leary had argued that her client’s suit was only against his client—the distributor of the counterfeit bags in New York City—and if she wanted to sue the Chinese manufacturer, she’d have to deal with international law and extradition. Montoya had given O’Leary a lovesick smile, tossed out Melissa’s motion and shut them up inside that ghastly little cell of a room with orders to “work things out, you two.” As if they were children arguing over a toy.