Andi shook her head slowly, a pained look crossing her face. She handed me her phone and I had to read the text twice before it sunk in. “This can’t be happening,” I wailed. “It just can’t.” The text was from Andi’s sister, Jennifer. U won’t believe this, your friend Max is trending on Yahoo. Clicked on it. She’s in a blog about MILFs. Seriously? BTW, she’s trending on Twitter too with #housewifeporn. Seems everyone is talking about her. Did I miss something?
“Yes!” I yelled at the phone. “You missed something—my life imploding!”
Chapter Four
WHOEVER KRISTY S. WAS, she had a large following, and somehow her blog and my video went viral. She lauded my imperfections, celebrated the slight jiggle here and there. It seemed women sick of seeing perfect airbrushed bodies found solace in my cellulite and passed the video from friend to friend, which was far better than Sloane’s followers, who likely retweeted it to simply share my flaws. But, however it got out there, it was out there in a big way. I have never been very tech savvy, to tell you the truth, but I was pretty sure going viral meant a whole shitload of people had seen it—a nightmare by anyone’s standards.
“Hot Mama,” aka Sloane, apparently tweeted my video to her 53,692 followers with the message, Ladies, you never want to look like this when you have sex! #fatass She must have tweeted it at least twenty-five times in the space of a few days. I suppose I should have been happy that at least she didn’t mention my name, but it was right there embedded in the link. Each tweet was retweeted dozens of times. And who knows how many times those retweets were retweeted. At least some of them must have changed the hashtag from #fatass to #housewifeporn, since that was trending too, according to Jennifer. Perhaps I should have taken some solace in that.
After the park, I went home and let Thomas the Tank Engine entertain Sam again while I locked myself in the bathroom with my laptop and searched Twitter for Sloane. I was fairly shocked to see that searching for Hot Mama brought up more results than I would have ever guessed. I tried to imagine feeling that confident in myself to not only use Hot Mama as an e-mail address, but as my even more public Twitter handle. I couldn’t and not just because my self-esteem was at an all-time low. I never felt confident, at least not after becoming a mother and all the physical changes that wrought.
For a moment, I was insanely jealous of Sloane—red-faced, steam-coming-out-of-the-ears jealous. Then it just morphed into extreme hatred when I finally found her—@HotMamaSloane—and I saw the fatass hashtags. She was clearly hell-bent on destroying my life and there was nothing I could do about it. I didn’t know you could even tweet porn. It seemed like it should be illegal. It seemed like everything Sloane had done was illegal—sending the video to Emma, a minor, was completely illegal and tweeting the video, putting my body out there for everyone to see without my permission seemed like it should be illegal too.
I didn’t expand any of the tweets, not even Sloane’s. I didn’t want to know what anyone had to say. I had never even been on Twitter before and it was all just too humiliating. I sat in the bathroom on Sam’s little Sesame Street stool and rested my head against the wall. I didn’t know how I could ever escape from the hell I had landed in.
Over the next few weeks, my phone rang off the hook with tabloid reporters calling for a scoop. It was the perfect storm—not only was my video out there in the ether being discussed and dissected, but my husband had been stolen by the “Hot Mama,” already a bit of a tabloid darling herself. Plus, Kristy the blogger apparently wielded even more influence than Sloane. Her followers were numerous and passionate about their monogamous lifestyles. I had somehow become their mascot—a naked mascot, but a mascot nonetheless. Her blog post about me was reblogged over and over again, with each blogger adding her own take on it. Of course, that got picked up by the tabloids as well.
Pretty soon the paparazzi had taken to following me around, snapping pictures of me in all sorts of disarray. I told the kids that they were my friends and they were putting together a special scrapbook for another friend. It was the best excuse I could come up with and it worked for a while, until the photographers started getting in our faces and I couldn’t hide my dismay.
Sam asked me why they kept taking my picture when I wanted them to stop. I told him they simply weren’t being good friends. “Oh, you mean like Lindsay wasn’t a good friend when she called me weird?” he asked.
“Exactly.” There was nothing else I could say and nothing I could do, except hope that they got bored with me.
Even worse, I was the hot gossip topic at school, the mothers whispering about me and shooting me glances. Even if no one knew about the affair before I did, they certainly found out about it pretty quickly. They also knew all about the video the moment it was launched it seemed. East Hollow could be a model for how to disseminate information quickly to a town. Need to design a new disaster warning system? Look no further than the East Hollow gossip chain. These ladies can get any information to anyone, especially if you throw in the word adultery—“Coastal flooding with a wave of adultery…” Add in sex tape and within ten minutes it will be the talk of ShopRite and the yogurt place.
There were even a few calls, though none official yet, for me to resign from my PTA post, because having my naked form floating around the Internet apparently didn’t mesh with PTA values. I hated, just hated, knowing that I was the one being talked about, especially since I never partook in gossip with the malicious glee others did. Sure, I may have listened, but I felt pity, not a voyeuristic thrill.
As bad as the gossip, glances and the calls for resignation were, they weren’t even half as bad as Emma not forgiving me, or even speaking to me. She spent most days and nights at Kate’s house. She didn’t answer my phone calls or even my texts, and I seriously thought about shutting off her phone to teach her a lesson, but I just couldn’t bring myself to. What if she changed her mind and answered or responded? I couldn’t give up hope on that, and I really couldn’t blame her for being so angry. Deep down, I did feel like it was my fault, even though it was totally out of my control. I missed my baby girl terribly, even though she was no longer a baby and even though she clearly hated me. At least Kate’s mom let me know when they got home from school, so I wasn’t worried sick that she ran away or worse.
Will, my sensitive boy, asked me often if I was okay. He loaded the dishwasher for me, brought me snacks and told me that he loved me. Sam read his books, (none on divorce yet—just his new obsession, tornados), and asked nightly if Daddy was coming home, but that was it. I think he assumed Nick was at the extended stay hotel up the street on business, even though he was so close and he saw him on Wednesdays and every other weekend. He knew Daddy went to hotels on business trips, so this wasn’t too different to him.
Every night I offered the same answer to his question about Nick coming home. I simply told him that Daddy would be living in a different place, but that didn’t mean that he loved him any less. It crushed me that he still asked the next night and the next, but as long as he was accepting my answer, I considered it a victory.
Even Trevor seemed okay. He just went about his business, playing basketball with friends and doing his homework, but I didn’t know if he was really okay. He’d always bottled his emotions, even when he was very small. He’d fall and skin his knee and not cry—not even a tear. I asked him why once and he just bit his lip. No answer. Sometimes he would wake up crying during the night and I worried so that all those pent-up emotions were destroying him inside.
I still worried about that, but the stakes were higher. I was shocked that he didn’t wake during the night or show any signs of stress—however well hidden. Then again, thankfully he, Will and Sam hadn’t seen the video like Emma had. At least not that I knew of, and I was pretty sure I would know. All they knew was that Nick moved out and I was sad. Getting used to Nick’s weekends with the kids was even harder than getting used to Nick being gone. But, the last thing I wanted to do—no matter how much I hated him—was
take my kids’ dad away from them when everything else was going crazy.
The first weekend they stayed with him, I was beside myself with loneliness and anxiety. Before Nick cheated on me, I was convinced that I would never get divorced; not only because I loved him, but because I didn’t want to share my kids. Being a control freak, I didn’t know how I would deal with them spending weekends away from me. Well, I was right. I hated it and couldn’t wait for them to come home. I stayed up late that first weekend, Googling myself and crying, so I could get it all out when the kids weren’t around. Most of the blogs and comments were kind, but some were scathing. More than one comment asked how I could let my video leak when I have children. Several posters pondered whether I was aware that Jesus would judge me. Then there was the one who said my ass was fat, and asked, “Why would anyone want to watch it?” After a while, I decided to give up.
It didn’t seem fair that this was all Nick’s fault—well, his and Sloane’s, of course—and not one comment berated him. There was hardly any mention of him, other than a few comments evaluating his relative hotness to my lumpiness. The only thing I could do was ignore everything, good and bad. I grabbed my dog under one arm and my cat under the other, carried them upstairs and went to bed, curling up with both of them. For now, they were the only ones I wanted sharing my bed. If I ever had any thoughts about reconciling with Nick—which I really didn’t—they had been obliterated.
The days and weeks went by and I was sure the furor would blow over, but it only increased. People tweeted about me, and debated in moms’ message boards about whether they would let their husbands tape them. I only knew this because Andi told me. She thought it was great that I was sparking heated conversations about beauty, boundaries and the Madonna / Whore paradigm. I just wanted it to be over. I tried to live my life as normally as possible and shield my kids from any attention, which brings me back to that trip to ShopRite…
***
As soon as I walk in the door, groceries balanced on my hip and slung over my arm, the phone rings. I sigh—heavily. Sam is dragging a bag across the kitchen floor, shouting, “I put everything away. Just leave it to me!” That would be great, if it didn’t mean that the milk would end up in the cupboard and the dog and cat food in the fridge.
“I’ll be right there, Sweetie. We’ll do it together,” I say as I spy the phone between the couch cushions and grab it just before the machine picks up. I glance at caller ID and drop the bag still hoisted on my hip. Nick always made fun of me because of my compulsion to pick up a ringing phone, no matter what I’m doing. He always chastised, “That’s what answering machines are for. Let it ring.” Why couldn’t I have for once done that without looking at the caller ID? Then I wouldn’t have just dropped a dozen eggs, most likely broken and oozing now through the brown paper bag onto my rug.
I look at the name again as the machine clicks on, and the very long outgoing message my kids recorded kicks in. Ben Miller. The ex who left me in bed with Ben and Jerry’s for a week. I was nineteen years old the first time I laid eyes on Ben, wearing nothing but faded, shredded Levis and black engineer boots. His hair fell over his face in a glossy, chestnut curtain as he leaned over his guitar, pulling out a searing solo from the strings. I would be lying if I said it was only his musical talent that I noticed. He was tall with washboard abs, and behind that hair his crooked smile gave even his bad boy rocker vibe a sweet edge.
When the song was over, Ben leaned over the stage and handed me his guitar pick. It was just a college battle of the bands, but it felt like I was at Giants Stadium and he was Springsteen. We didn’t start dating that night, though. His band won the battle and I made my way over to congratulate him, but he was swept off in celebrations. I began plotting my route to classes in order to run into him, but as soon as he got close, I walked the other way, shyness getting the better of me. Though I quickly learned his name, my friends and I called him “Guitar Boy.” We used code names for all the guys we had crushes on, lest someone overhear us.
I did finally get up the courage to approach Ben a few weeks later, after a basement gig at a broken-down house off campus. The lights were low and the speakers blared Madonna’s bar love anthem, Crazy for You. I drained my warm beer as Madonna, singing about longing, swirled around us. The moment was just perfect in my mind, exactly what I had been waiting for. I was wearing my favorite turquoise belly shirt, my lucky studded and fringed white ankle boots and painted-on Guess jeans. It was a fashion hat trick. My hair was toweringly high, thanks to a liberal application of Sebastian Shaper hair spray.
My vocabulary, however, fell short. “Hey,” I said.
Ben didn’t even glance up from packing his guitar as he answered me, “Hey.”
“Awesome show,” I barely whispered. He finally looked up and sucked in his breath when he saw me.
“You,” was all he said as he stood up, but that one word had so much longing in it, I couldn’t walk away this time. Ben didn’t say another word; he just gazed down at me. I saw myself reflected in his hazel eyes—light brown, almost amber circling his pupils, olive edging that. He had the most amazing eyes and gazing into them left me breathless.
Within a few weeks we were inseparable. Ben’s best friend, Simon, called us the bread and butter couple, because we went together so well. Talking for hours, knee to knee on my bed, we discovered each other. It was a miracle to us that we both loved Mel Brooks movies, preferred seventies rock over sugary pop, that we were both shy in high school. We both grew up on Long Island, feeling out of place with our classmates who drove convertibles and had closets full of designer clothes—even the boys. We’d both take vanilla over chocolate any day and ate our scrambled eggs with maple syrup. We both folded our pizza and cut the crusts off sandwiches. We couldn’t believe our luck.
“Who finds their soul mate at nineteen?” I whispered before we made love for the first time. We were both virgins, another miracle, especially since being in a band practically guaranteed a teenage boy could get laid. Despite his bad boy persona, Ben was saving himself for true love.
I was so happy that Ben was my first and not that jerk in high school, Jason. Ben was so sweet and I couldn’t imagine ever having sex with anyone else. After, he popped open a bottle of champagne he’d bought just for the occasion. We all had fake IDs, and Ben confided in me that he felt so grown up buying champagne, while all his friends were buying beer.
Ben’s voice invades my thoughts—it’s been over twenty years and yet the moment I hear it on the machine, it’s instantly familiar. “Hey, Maxie.” Pause. “It’s Ben. Ben Miller. Cute message.” A throat clear. “It’s been years.” Pause. I’m about to press talk, really, I am, when he continues. “I saw you on Yahoo news—you know, about the whole, um, Internet thing.” I panic and run to cover Sam’s ears. “Seems like you’re going through a tough time. I, um, I saw your video too. Give me a call if you get a chance and maybe…” My machine cuts him off—the damn thing always runs out of space. I curse myself for constantly forgetting to erase messages once I’ve returned the call.
I uncover Sam’s ears and he looks up at me indignantly. “Why did you do that?” he yells. “Was that someone’s daddy on the phone?”
“Ah yes, it was a daddy from your soccer team. He wanted to know if he picked out a good snack for the game tomorrow and I wanted it to be a surprise for you.”
“Is it an Internet snack? What kind of snack is that? Isn’t that Optimum? Can we get the Triple Play?” I vow not to let my way too observant four-year-old watch ESPN with his older brothers anymore. I suppose it wasn’t as bad as when he asked for a Coors Light after watching Sports Center last week, but he should be spouting off commercials for Hot Wheels, not cable. I know, in a perfect world he wouldn’t watch anything, but my world is not perfect.
“No, Honey Bun, it’s not an Internet snack—you must have heard him say, ‘Interesting snack,’ sounds like Internet.”
“What’s the intenesting snack?” Oh, how I love
those mispronunciations. Emma used to say, “invasion ring,” instead of “engagement ring.” Maybe she was on to something.
“Orange wedges,” I answer.
“That’s not so intenesting!” Sam stomps out of the room and I realize that I’m shaking.
My face is on fire. Ben saw me naked. He hadn’t seen me naked in over twenty years. I do not look now like I looked twenty-two years ago. Knowing that my first real love, who surely has me ensconced somewhere in his mind in my pre-cellulite splendor—firm boobs, tight ass—has very likely had the illusion of that memory shattered has left me shaken. I don’t even know what he was going to say, since the machine cut him off. Did he want to see me? Was this a pity call? I put the phone down, sweaty fingerprints left where I was gripping it, and lean against the counter. The granite is cool under my fingertips and I breathe in and out slowly. Do I call him back or just let it go? Can I bear the humiliation? Suddenly, what I’m sure is an incredibly goofy smile spreads across my face. Ben Miller called me even after seeing me naked. That has to be a good thing.
Even before my life went so horribly awry, I thought about Ben. I looked him up on Facebook one morning while the kids were at school and Nick was at work. I couldn’t find him. Just typing in Ben Miller brought up a huge list, so I searched University of Massachusetts alumni. There were thousands of results, but no Ben. That was months ago, though, so I decide to check again. Bad mommy that I am, I slip in yet another Thomas DVD; I reason that at least Sam learns not to be cheeky—the biggest lesson Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends impart.
I bring my laptop into the kitchen, pour myself a glass of iced tea and log onto Facebook. I click on Find Friends, then University of Massachusetts and type in his name. There he is. It is like staring at a ghost. That face that I had memorized, that I hadn’t seen in twenty-two years is right there on my laptop, gazing back at me. Okay, so he has crinkles around those hazel eyes, but really, he looks the same. His chestnut hair is cropped close now and receding a bit—I always found that kind of sexy, though. And, he still has that crooked smile. Maybe crooked isn’t the word—it’s not like he’s in need of orthodontics—crooked in a sexy way, a grin that makes you wonder what he’s thinking about, yet still has a sweetness about it. In other words, it still makes my heart race. I click on the About section, but it’s all blank—no current city, no work and most importantly, no relationship status. I wonder briefly if Ben looked me up on Facebook before calling and saw that I’m single. I’m worse than a teenager. Seeing him makes me feel like one, though.
Goddess of Suburbia Page 6