by Rita Ciresi
I looked directly in her face, for I wanted to know exactly what kind of model Strauss had traded me in for. Do my eyes deceive me, I thought, or am I looking at a woman who sings soprano in the Presbyterian church choir? Of course, she might have had a nose job on top of that bad dye job, but I was almost positive she’d never make the mattress shake in an excess of glee, as I did, when Strauss told this dumb joke: Why did the bee wear a yarmulke? He didn’t want to be taken for a WASP!
She smiled. Strauss didn’t look at either one of us. For a moment I feared he was going to introduce me to her. But courtesy failed him.
“Hello,” she said, in the kind of soft, feminine voice I’d never have.
“Hi,” I said. In the moment of silence that followed, I decided to take matters into my own hands. “My name is Lisa,” I said, hoping this might ring more than a few jingle bells with her.
“Where are my manners?” Strauss said.
“Yes,” I asked, “where are they?”
He introduced me to Miranda Anderson—the kind of pretty, storybook name I’d always wished I had. Only he said it Mirandar, and never did a final R so break my heart.
“Your last name sounds familiar,” I heard myself say.
She looked at me as if I were retarded. “It’s a common last name,” she said. “But maybe you know my brother, Paul? He’s a statistician at Boorman.”
I thought a moment before I finally found the connection between Paul and Strauss. “The catcher on the corporate baseball team?” I asked.
“How did you know?”
“I’m a secret cheerleader,” I told her, and as I reached to take her outstretched hand, my cuff pulled back and the price tag of my dress inched forth.
“Oh, my God,” I said. “I left on the label.” I stuffed it back in.
Miranda smiled—a very pretty smile, if I did say so myself But Strauss frowned, as if he had caught me shoplifting the dress—which he had, after a fashion. I hastily draped my coat over my arm. I picked up my shoes, and for some reason I put them on my hands instead of my feet, the stiletto heels forming a couple of gargoylelike claws. Strauss once criticized me for wearing these very shoes. What’s the matter, I had asked, you don’t want me to be taller than you? No, he’d said. I want you to be safe. If someone pursued you, you wouldn’t be able to get away.
Not much danger of being pursued tonight. Strauss merely stepped out of my way to let me through, dismissing me with a quiet, “Merry Christmas, Lisar.”
“I doubt it,” I answered. My only consolation as I walked quickly through the back halls of Boorman was that I noticed Strauss had not taken Miranda’s coat off the hanger and helped her into it.
Boorman’s industrial carpeting felt rough beneath my stockinged feet. Although I headed in that direction, I had no intention of leaving by the back door. I could not face Gussie with tears streaming down my face. I could not take off solo in a Jeep while Strauss followed me (Miranda riding shotgun) in his Audi. I didn’t dare drive. I felt drop-dead drunk—or at least I hoped I was drunk, because if I didn’t have alcohol to blame for my emotions, I really was in deep psychological shit.
At the back of the building I took a detour into my office. Strauss’s office looked out onto the fountain and the rolling lawns. Mine had that excellent view of the parking lot. I tossed my heels beneath my desk, sat down on my chair, blew my nose, and looked out. The cars were dusted with a fine coat of snow. After a few minutes I heard Strauss and Miranda pass by my office, and then I saw them cross the asphalt—but not too far, for Strauss had a reserved spot in the VIP lot. His Audi was parked right beneath the streetlight.
You park beneath a light, don’t you, when you go out at night? I wish you’d do that. It’s safer.
Strauss unlocked the passenger side first. I remembered how he always used to put his hand on my back, as if he were afraid I would bolt away from him in the split second it took him to open the car door. I watched him. He held the door open. But he did not touch her.
Then—inexplicably—he dashed back out of my sight toward Boorman’s back door. After a few moments he came back out again. I watched him brush the snow off his windshield and get in. The Audi started, warmed up, and then took off.
After they left, I sat and looked out onto the night. How wonderful to believe, I thought—in a star that shone so bright it led three kings to a manger, in a cruse of oil that lasted eight days and nights instead of one. But there were only the cold lights of the lab burning below the hill. Then they, too, began to go out, one by one, and the snow began to fall again, and I sat there, all by myself, in the dark. I listened to the hum of my humidifier and the buzz of the fluorescent lights in the hall and my own breathing.
But it wasn’t all my breathing. My breath had been joined by someone else’s.
I turned. In the doorway stood Hook, and in his hands were two more glasses of champagne.
“Thought I might find you here, Lisa,” he said.
I sucked in my breath.
That was the moment when I realized the truth of what Dodie and the feminists had been telling me all along: There were other ways to play with the boys than by taking off your clothes and dancing naked for them. And that was the moment when I proved the falsehood of Strauss’s high-heel theory. There were times in a girl’s life when a three-inch stiletto could come in mighty handy.
As Hook moved forward, I reached down below my desk.
Chapter Seventeen
Home for Christmas
To get myself in the holiday mood, I listened to WAVZ while driving on the Merritt Parkway to my mother’s house. It was the day before Christmas, and the annoying jazzed—up versions of traditional carols were punctuated by even more-obnoxious commercials from Crazy Eddie, Bradlees, and Caldor, furniture stores up and down the Boston Post Road, and every Ford and Chevy dealership between here and kingdom come. Good thing I’m not still going with Strauss, I thought. Good thing I haven’t married him, or any other man for that matter. I couldn’t imagine spending every December for the rest of my life walking the men’s department, trying to pick out the perfect tie. I couldn’t picture myself trying to look happy when my husband got me a sweater in exactly the wrong cut and color.
Only when I reached the Milford town line—less than a half hour from my mother’s house—did I admit that this was exactly my problem. I could imagine it. And I wanted it—not the drudge of Christmas shopping for a man, or throwing his undies into the wash along with mine, or even the dubious pleasure of cooking him (or rather, us—since both people in a couple had to eat) a well-balanced dinner complete with green vegetables every night. I wanted the man himself—not just as a lover, but as a friend. Failing that, I was thinking—seriously—about buying a vibrator. But I knew the moment I threw the switch, I’d be incapable of anything beyond giggling, and I’d have to stow the damn thing beneath my bed, next to the Trojans and the ninth draft of Stop It Some More.
As I pulled up in my mother’s driveway, some velvety-voiced asshole started crooning about the joys of coming home for Christmas. I snapped off the radio. Well, there I was. Home. But where was my mother? The back door was locked, the lights were off, and the curtains were drawn. Wasn’t that just like Mama? I told her I was going to pull in around three, and she chose that time to make her one trip of the day to Stop & Shop. She probably was still smarting from the joyous smile I had given her five years ago in the Sarah Lawrence dorm room, when I gleefully surrendered my house key.
My hands felt cold and frozen as I knocked, one last time, on the back door. I felt like climbing back into my Jeep and gunning it back to New York, but I settled for a more sane solution: walking two blocks down to Carol’s house. I deliberately took the back way so I didn’t have to pass by the house where Dodie grew up. I didn’t want to bump into Auntie Beppina or Uncle Gianni.
I’d almost forgotten how vulgar the Christmas decorations in my old neighborhood could be. In yards already cluttered with statues of Saint Francis of As
sisi and Mary on a half shell, our neighbors planted reindeer—all eight of them, and some even had the odd Rudolph in the lead—pulling sleighs full of jolly Saint Nick and his sack of toys. Plastic Dickensian lamplighters and caroling Brits sang with pursed lips the songs of the season. My favorite were the displays that mixed the religious and the secular themes—Frosty the Snowman rather than the ox or the ass admiring the Christ child in the manger. Also high on my list were the crèches with only two kings instead of three (because the third wise man was black, and they didn’t belong in this neighborhood). All of this was brilliantly lit at night, so our street looked like Luna Park in Coney Island’s heyday, and pilots probably used it as a marker when touching down at Tweed New Haven Airport. It was a wonder we didn’t have a Cessna or a Piper occasionally mistake our street for an actual runway.
Christmas was the only time of the year I gave thanks that my parents were cheap. Through all of this, our house stayed dark. In fact, darker. My parents always scrimped on electricity—refusing to own a dishwasher or a coffee maker or a blender—and Mama used the holiday season as an excuse to eat by candlelight. She bought votives for three cents apiece at the Christmas bazaar—which went down to five for a dime, if any were left on the table during the last hour.
My sister, Carol, also was too thrifty to pay a huge electric bill. But she made up for it in other ways. Cutout silver snowflakes sparkled on her front window. A pasteboard Santa, winking merrily as he shouldered his heavy sack, hung on her front door. I knocked firmly on his fat belly—loud enough to be heard, but not loud enough to wake the baby if he was sleeping. But why was I concerned about the baby? The TV was on loud enough to filter through the front door. It was soap-opera time.
Ever the stickler for security—Al had her well-trained on this count—Carol peeked through the lace curtains. Carol owned nothing worth stealing. But after an episode on a crowded public bus when a guy pushed himself too hard against her, Carol had become deathly afraid of being raped. In spite of my lifelong flirtation with danger—and my modified gang-bang fantasies with the twins—so was I. That episode with Hook—thankfully aborted when he saw the murder weapon I brought up from below my desk—proved just how frightening men could be. Hook had laughed and said, “Take it easy! Just wanted to see if you wanted another drink!” but I noticed he shielded his family jewels with a glass of champagne just in case I decided to get serious. That night he had forced me to leave by the back door whether I wanted to or not. Never was I so thankful that Gussie’s eyes—and gun—were watching over me—until I had to sign my name below Strauss’s and Miranda’s on the log.
Gussie kept his eye on the pen as I signed, and afterward, he examined the signature. “Funny, Miss Lisa,” he said. “Doesn’t look like you had too much to drink.”
“Who said I did?”
“Mr. Strauss.”
“What?”
“Not in so many words. But he did ask me to make sure you got home all right. First he checked the sign-out log—everybody seems interested in that sign-out log all of a sudden—and outside I saw him looking in the snow for footprints. Then he came back in here—why do you think he came back here, trying to figure out whether you left?”
“Maybe he wants to steal my Jeep.”
“Oh, no. He definitely doesn’t like that Jeep of yours. At least not half as much as Dr. Schoenbarger. Twice I’ve seen her out there, giving it the once-over.”
“Did she kick all four of my tires?”
“No, but once I came back from the men’s room and I saw Mr. Strauss reach in—it was a foggy Saturday morning—and turn off your lights. ‘Good thing Miss Lisa left that door unlocked,’ I told him when he came in, and he said he was surprised a car like that even had locks, never mind a safety belt—”
“Next time tell him I have a DieHard battery.”
Gussie held up his hands. “I mind my own business.”
I peered down the hall to make sure no one was coming. “Mind mine a little bit more.”
He smiled. “When are you getting married?”
“Who is spreading these vicious rumors?” I asked.
“I got it—indirectly—from Mr. Strauss. At first I thought he got it from Dr. Schoenbarger—”
“I’m sure he did.”
“But now I’m starting to think he got it from Mr. Anderson.”
“Such gossip is bad for morale,” I said, and gave Gussie my arm. “Walk me out to the lot, will you? And shoot Mr. Roberts—right in the breadbasket, you got me?—if you see him leap out from behind a car.”
“It would be a pleasure,” Gussie said.
Carol unlocked the dead bolt and chain and cracked the door. “Shh. The baby’s finally down.”
I did a dramatic tiptoe inside. Once in the living room, I slipped off my coat, smiling.
“Ewww,” Carol said. “What happened to you?”
My smile instantly disappeared. “What do you mean?”
“You’re so skinny—”
“I am not!”
“You are too. You look sick—”
“I’m not sick—”
“—like you crawled out of a concentration camp.”
Now it was my turn to draw in my breath, to feel the sharp pull of my bones against my lungs. Maybe Carol had more smarts than I gave her credit for. Or some kind of sisterly ESP. As if to confirm that my thinness was in response to Strauss’s rejection, a husky-throated woman in too much mascara and a choker fashioned from oversize pink pearls appeared on Carol’s Zenith console and bemoaned, “I should have known he never loved me.”
After the bitter cold outside, Carol’s living room felt overheated. I was afraid I was going to faint. I wanted to go over the edge, but I was damned if I would do it while The Guiding Light was playing.
“Lisa, sit down,” Carol said, snapping off the TV. The soap opera faded, then disappeared altogether. Now I had no excuse. I sat down on the couch, landing on a squeaky toy—a cheerful pink pig with a purple bow around his neck. The pig squealed, but I didn’t laugh and neither did Carol. Carol sat next to me. She hesitated before she put her hand on my hand, and then she put her arm around me. Nobody had touched me in such a gentle way in months. Carol and I hadn’t touched each other in years. But I put my head on her shoulder (where else was I going to put it? it felt so heavy it just needed to go down somewhere) and I started to cry.
Between sobs I said, “Oh, God, I’m in trouble—”
“Lisa! You’re pregnant!”
“No, I feel sick, I just feel so sick—”
“Say what’s wrong. Tell me what’s wrong. Do you have cancer or something?”
After Carol got me some Kleenex, I told her sick in the head.
“Oh,” Carol said. “That.” She seemed relieved. “You could go to a doctor. There are doctors for that.”
“I know.”
“Why don’t you go then?” she asked. She paused. “I went to one.”
“You! You went! Why?”
For a moment, while Carol hesitated, I thought she was about to confess something was wrong with her marriage. Just as those with an illness sometimes unconsciously wished it on others, I wanted my sister to blurt out, Al’s been screwing another woman and he’s going to leave me!
Instead, Carol confessed she went to a shrink after she gave birth to Al Dante Junior and postpartum blues flattened her like a tractor. “I couldn’t help it, I just felt all weird and crazy, like I was going to kill somebody, and then I would cry and cry and cry, and I felt like I couldn’t get up from the bed.”
“So what happened when you went to the shrink?”
“He gave me drugs.”
“Oh, they always give women drugs—”
“Fuck it, I wanted them. I would have swallowed the whole bottle and then some just to feel like myself again—”
“They worked?”
“Man, they’re great,” Carol said.
“What’s the brand name?”
Carol held up her finge
r and tiptoed into the bathroom off the kitchen, where she tried—unsuccessfully—to quietly open her squeaky medicine cabinet. She came back holding a brown vial.
“I don’t know how to pronounce it,” she said.
“You said they work?”
“Like a charm.”
“Any side effects?”
Carol hesitated. “They lessen your sex drive.”
“I’ll take two,” I said. “You got anything to eat?”
Carol gave me half—half only, because I was so skinny more might knock me out—then popped her third one of the day. We went into the kitchen and downed the pills with water. She got out a jar of Skippy peanut butter and a Hershey bar she admitted she was saving for Al’s bowling night, as a reward for dealing all morning, afternoon, and then into the evening with a fussy, demanding Al Junior.
“The baby drives me nuts, Lisa,” she said. “And then I feel so guilty because I prayed to have him! And I waited so long for him! And now that he’s here all he does is cry and cry! And I can’t figure out what he wants from me, and he pisses me off, and I think how could I ever have wanted him in the first place?”
“Sounds more like a husband than a baby,” I said.
“At least Junior takes naps. Al’s always in my face.”
“What’s he bitchin’ about now?”
“He wants to—you know—have sex.”
I slapped my face to indicate disbelief.
“Lisa, I’m exhausted from this baby. I have zero interest in anything—you know—below the belt. But if I don’t—you know—keep him happy in bed, then he doesn’t help out with the housework and I’m even more exhausted.”
“So what are you saying? If you give him a blow job once a week, he’ll take out the garbage?”
“Lisa!”
“If you swallow, will he wash the dishes?”
“Why do you always have to be so crude and disgusting?”
“Because life is crude and disgusting.”