by Kim Green
“Is Phil having an affair with Tate Trimble?” I say. Quickly now: Get. Chocolate. In. Mouth.
“Not anymore, to my knowledge.” Like a normal person, Ren has stopped eating and is concentrating on looking embarrassed. Frankly, I am a bit shocked at his honesty. It hits me that I expected him to prevaricate a little, to deny knowledge or squirm or claim an urgent surgery that required his immediate attention. Also, a part of me, the newly lean, frequently bubbly, tentatively confident part, believed I was being paranoid, which, in spite of its psychopathologic implications, is infinitely preferable to actually being cheated on.
“Phil and Tate?” The words are gruesome; I choke on them.
Ren’s face darkens with that guardedness we are all familiar with from men-misbehaving movies, the one that indicates guilt over the betrayal of a fellow male’s right to poke his penis into anything human, animal, or PVC.
“Raquel,” he says. It is clearly a plea.
“What? Wait a minute.” I grab at the waiter’s sleeve as he rushes past. “Can I get another one—no, two—of these?” I point wildly at the half-eaten chocolate mousse. Tears have already started to blur my vision. The waiter darts away from me, his fluffy blouse escaping my hand like a set of reins trailing a galloping horse.
Ren leans forward and takes my hand. As on the day fifteen years ago when my father’s heart convulsed its way into a final infarction and Ren’s touch was my sole hope at temporary solace, my heartbeat slows and healing warmth pervades my bones.
“Look, obviously, this is none of my business. You and Phil need to talk, and soon. But our friendship goes back a long way, and that’s why I’m telling you this, Quel. Because I know you, and I trust you to do the right thing with this information. And because it is your right to have it.” Even after all this time, his touch is silken, narcotic.
“As far as I know, it was a brief, meaningless thing, a blip, and it ended years ago. Years. I know that’s small comfort now, but you have to concentrate on the big picture. Think about what you have together, what you’ve built. A marriage, kids, a home—there’s a lot at stake here. Phil fucked up, I’ll be the first to say it. But if it’s any consolation, he was a wreck afterward. It wasn’t just the guilt; he really felt like he’d made a big mistake. He wasn’t even into her. Let’s just say she made it real easy for him. Real easy. Caught him in a weak moment, I suppose. She may even have gone after him deliberately, back when she and Ross still gave a shit and were baiting each other.” Ren’s controlled voice drones on, drowned out by the slushy pounding of my own heartbeat. It occurs to me that Ren may have told Laurie. The idea that Living with Lauren! knew about Phil’s affair before I did sends shards of crazy rage deep into my spine.
“That shit!” I choke back the howl that threatens to explode out of me. Ren leans back, his hazel eyes brimming with concern, my hand still tucked under his. The fact that his eyes have yet to start the darting, frantic search for escape adds another layer of affirmation to my belief, deeply held, that my life took a potholed, dead-end detour the moment Ren broke up with me.
“I can’t believe Phil would make that mistake again. Are you absolutely sure it was him?” Ren says.
I think back to that night at the bar, about what I saw through the diamond of glass. It was a flash, so fleeting I am not sure even now whether I imagined it. If my neglected imagination plastered Phil’s face on the compact body of another wayward husband, pasted Phil’s overcoat over a pair of gray slacks I have, in actuality, never seen hanging in our closet, between Phil’s cracked leather bomber jacket and my too tight cocktail dress.
I don’t respond, can’t respond, as false nirvana in the form of chocolate delivers me from misery.
What do you do when you’ve just forced your sister’s husband to validate your own husband’s treachery and three hours remain until the lout slides his Accord under the garage door?
You go stark-raving apeshit, that’s what.
It’s not hard. Right now I am pathetic, horror-movie, spittle-flying, crazy-lady mad with hurt. Any minute the lantern-jawed men with pumped arms and fat batons are going to pull up in their paddy wagon, shake their oversize noggins sadly at the hurricane-force destruction that afflicts my living room, truss me up in white straps, and tote me away to drool down my days in a human paddock with a euphemistic name under a canopy of vomit and Lysol. Also, I am plain old pissed. The timing, as ever, is appalling, the latest horror falling on the eve of that most hallowed of events: my twenty-fifth high school reunion.
After lunch with Ren, which leaves me so damaged I cannot even manage to cop a feel when he hugs me good-bye, I sail home on autopilot and continue my eating spree in the tidy confines of my kitchen. Bologna, Brie, Triscuits, leftover refried beans with a scrim of blue fuzz, M&M’s, picked-over tri-tip all disappear into my gullet while I alternately gag and sob and curse.
At exactly 5:35 P.M., I hear the automatic garage door groan open.
Some weird melodramatic impulse prompts me to draw the drapes and stow my bloated body in a straight-backed chair. Standing sentry in the darkness, I am simultaneously interrogation subject and executioner, victim and attacker, wife and stranger.
“Quel?” Phil flicks on the kitchen lights and sees me. His face is creased and tired. Nobody, not even naturally gifted— yes, I’ll admit it—teachers like Phil can spend eight hours interacting with teenagers and not need a Valium and a sitcom glut to regain the equanimity they’ve lost.
In the interest of spontaneity, I have planned no speech. It shows.
“Philly, how could you? She is so”—my mind rifles through stinging adjectives— “Fresno.”
“Wha—”
“Tate.”
In the split second that follows my saying her name, a small, girlish part of me curls up and dies, because the rough crumpling of Phil’s face under a barrage of guilt, shame, and fear tells me all I need to know.
The phone rings.
We freeze. Because I am standing closer, I peer at the wall unit. The screen says “R. Greenblatt.” Ronnie. Who’s with Micah. At a game. In Marin. After school. Yet he is calling instead of my son. Visions of highway patrol checkpoints and gnarled wreckage cause my pulse to gush.
“Hello?” I nearly howl into the phone. In this thin slice of existence between ignorance and total devastation, I am very nearly Joan Crawford, and Joan is having a very bad day.
“Hey, Mrs. Rose. This is Ron. I’m really sorry to call so late. Is, uh, Micah there?”
Two questions: When did Ronnie Greenblatt of the washboard abs and after-school lawn-mowing venture graduate to Ron, and why isn’t he with my son?
“Um, no, Ronnie. Mike’s at a game. In Marin, I think.” With you, asshole, I want to scream. Like I don’t have enough to worry about?
Ronnie Greenblatt’s headed-for-Cornell 4.5 GPA brain kicks in. “Duh. Yeah, I was supposed to go with him, but my car battery was dead, so I was just going to meet them after I got a jump. I called his cell, but it went to voice mail, so I thought maybe he cut out early.”
“Sure, Ronnie.” We both know he is lying like George W. Bush at a press conference.
“Well, okay, bye.”
I turn back to Phil without hanging up. Thick smears of Taylor’s completely unnecessary concealing foundation stain the receiver. It is gross, and I resolve to make her clean it herself before the maid, Estrella, sees it. With alcohol.
“I want you out,” I tell Phil.
He scratches his ear. This enrages me. Doesn’t he know how insulting it is to engage in the mundane business of personal grooming when our marriage is imploding?
“No,” he says.
“No,” I repeat. Behind me, the cuckoo clock, an albatross of a family heirloom courtesy of Phil’s penny-squeezing nana Vanderhoeven, chirps out midnight. At a quarter till six. The screechy gong shreds my last nerve.
“Philip, it is customary for the dickhead to go to a hotel in these situations. I’m sure Tate can spot you if y
ou can’t afford it. Or you could try that Motel 6 by the freeway. You know, the one where the crackhead was gutted with a potato peeler last year.” The incident, so bizarrely horrific at the time, now unfolds almost sweetly, like one of Aesop’s fables. My eyes dart to the cooking-implement drawer, where our own peeler rests alongside its dangerous friends, spatula and garlic press.
“Get out!” I scream. This time he does.
CHAPTER 16
Things That Come in Flavors
It is 2:48 A.M., and I am staring blindly into the vacant eye of the computer, e-mailing, propelled by three coffees and a singular desire to grill my husband up nice and crispy on the Weber. Without the outlet Web surfing provides, I was starting to feel a little like the mystery brick I took out of the fridge for dinner last night: frozen, animal in origin, and too many years beyond freshness.
“Mom?”
Taylor is in the doorway, her Paul Frank pajamas slipping down her hips, her face rosy with sleep.
“What are you doing up, hon? Can’t sleep?”
“Where’s Dad?”
I had expected this, just not at three A.M., and not so soon.
“Dad and I had a little disagreement, and we decided together to give each other some space to cool off. He went to spend the night with a friend.”
Taylor’s brow puckers. “So you’re getting a divorce?”
“What? What makes you say that?” On the computer screen, the name Duke Dunne jumps out at me, causing a sliver of self-recrimination to wiggle its way into my dehydrated little heart. In a fit of desperation, I e-mailed Surfer Boy. I move over a little, hoping to block Tay’s view of the monitor.
Taylor shrugs. She has my shoulders, broad and brown as a swimmer’s. Unlike me, my daughter is still nubile enough to make shrugging in a camisole pretty. “I don’t know,” she says. “When Quinn’s dad left, her mom said the same thing, that they were giving each other space or whatever. But he never moved back, and then he got an apartment with Zora.”
A small spark of horror alights at the back of my neck at being tarred with the same brush as Marlene and Avery McWhorter, delusional social climbers who pretended marital bliss for about thirty seconds sometime in the early eighties. I happen to know that Avery’s former-babysitter girlfriend, Zora, is Ukrainian and all of twenty and that Marlene has a pixie-haired girlfriend in the city whom her kids know as Mom’s therapist, but I don’t tell Taylor that.
Taylor continues, “Besides, Dad doesn’t have any friends except Uncle Ren, and I seriously doubt he’s going over to Aunt Laurie’s if you’re divorcing him.”
I do not have a ready answer for this. Now that she has dismantled my propaganda as easily as she would a preschool LEGO set, Taylor flops into her father’s swivel chair, tucking her legs under herself. Recalling the occasional stealthy hiss and stifled shout of my own parents’ thirty-year marriage, fundamentally ideal though it may have been, I dredge up a feeling of panic at being talked down to, of being “protected,” that inevitably left me with fears worse than any reality could have been.
“Dad and I had a fight—”
“About Micah?” Taylor says it so quickly I can tell some buried truth has been partially excavated. The haze of alarm that has been hovering over me for weeks thickens
perceptibly.
“What about Micah?”
“I don’t know. Nothing, really. I just thought . . .” Taylor glances back at the hallway, as if afraid Micah is going to burst out of his room and put her in a big-brother chokehold. “I just thought you were worried because he didn’t meet curfew,” she improvises.
“Mike called in earlier, around one o’clock. He’s spending the night at Ronnie’s.” After the call, which calmed my worst death-by-Ecstasy-tab visions but did almost nothing to assuage my longer-term worries, I bit the bullet and called Ronnie back on his home phone to verify my son’s story. Barb Greenblatt answered with the same terrified hiss I would have used if awakened in the middle of the night in the same manner. After apologizing, I asked if Micah was indeed safely ensconced in Ronnie’s bedroom, without explaining why I wasn’t calling him myself. Barb sighed and told me she’d heard them come in after she’d gone to bed, and did I want her to get up and go check? No, I said, I’m sure everything’s fine.
“So why did you and Dad fight?” Taylor prods.
I test-think telling my daughter that her father has gotten naked with Ross Trimble’s skeletal excuse for a wife. This causes nausea to roil through my gut. The whole lying-toyour-kids-to-protect-them thing makes perfect sense to me. What’s so great about the truth, anyway? When I was Taylor’s age, I was cloddish, desperate, and hairier than is generally considered attractive outside of a few Kurdish villages. Would having these facts confirmed by an outside source have helped me any?
“It doesn’t seem that important now,” I fib while shutting off the computer. “Let’s go to bed. Things will be better in the morning.”
The breast-cancer support group meets in an Edwardian in the Lower Haight that houses the creepily named Institute for Attitudinal Adjustment. This just bugs me. For one, does a bad attitude really require an entire institute to wrestle it back into compliance? Can’t they just send my mother over to deal with it? Plus, aren’t there more important matters of personal growth at stake that could benefit from having their own institute—for instance, having a mullet or the inability to look good in low-cut jeans? More significantly, who gets to decide if an attitude is bad or just having, say, a bad day?
All told, there is something self-recriminating about cancer victims meeting here, supporting, as it seems to, the proposition that all one needs to do to increase one’s white blood cell count is put on a happy face and think about all the poor wretches out there who have cancer and halitosis, for instance. Then again, maybe the sign is a typo and they’re just borrowing the basement room from the adenoids people.
“I’ll get you a name tag. First names only,” Jean says, already scribbling my name on one of those stickers favored by conventioneers.
I pick up a flyer from the table, which features a rainbow of handouts and selected reading, including Grace and Grit: Spirituality and Healing in the Life of Treya Killam Wilber; Dr. Susan Love’s Breast Book; Holding Tight, Letting Go; and the alarming Estrogen & Breast Cancer: A Warning to Women. What, did estrogen go out of favor while I was in Mexico? I wonder if I’m supposed to know who Dr. Susan Love is, and quickly scan the jacket bio before Jean returns.
The support group is called Women Expunging Cancer of the Breast Because Life Endures. I’m not kidding; it’s really called that. The acronym, WE COBBLE, is printed, plain as the knot of spider veins on my left calf, on the upper-righthand corner of the flyer. Beneath it is a logo of a well-rounded woman with hair flowing in a modesty veil over her womanly parts, raising hopeful arms toward the sky, where, presumably, Dr. Susan Love awaits. Cobbling.
“Raquel? You want some coffee? Tea?” I accept an herbal tea from Jean and follow her to the semicircle of chairs.
So far, the support group is as I imagined it: the rickety card table of reading materials, the hushed chatter, the lovingly baked pastries, the weary ferocity of the women, the mood of mingled reprieve and dread at who may not show up this week. I hope I don’t have to stand up and confess my diagnosis, A.A.-style, because even with my newfound flair for storytelling, that would feel seriously wrong.
Part of me wants to be gone from here immediately. Another part wants to stay because, frankly, I deserve the torture. Sick people made me uncomfortable before; now they make me downright agitated. A third part is just plain curious. Call it empathy, voyeurism, or simple inquisitiveness, but after having spent a little time with these brave women, I want to hear more of their stories firsthand. I owe them that much and considerably more. Maybe, when I come out next month—and it is next month, I’ve even calendared it!—they’ll remember that I was here. Being supportive. Eating pastries. Holding tight. Letting go.
Cobbling.
A slender, well-dressed woman in front waves her hand. “Can everyone take a seat, please? Don’t be afraid— we don’t bite. Okay, Sharon bites, but we always stick her in the back near the zucchini bread.” A few laughs. “There’s plenty of room over here. There we go. So. Welcome. This is the primary-diagnosis support group. We focus on the needs of those facing a recent breast-cancer diagnosis, surgery, and treatment. Some of us are just entering this cycle, and others have transitioned to the other side and offer their wisdom and courage to our sisters.” Next to me, Jean squeezes my hand. I squeeze hers back, surprised by the rush of comfort I feel.
“I see some newbies I particularly want to welcome today. The way we do things is, nobody’s ever forced to share. If you want to talk, talk. If you want to cry, cry. If you want to run over there and eat every last Rice Krispie bar, go right ahead.” Giggles filter through the group. “I’m Kendall Calloway, group moderator. I was diagnosed in late 1998, treated in 1999, and I’ve been cancer-free since.” The assemblage applauds. “Lost and gained a husband along the way, but that’s neither here nor there.” Kendall looks around the room. “Does anyone want to begin today’s session?”
A fiftyish woman with thick faded auburn hair twined in a bun and a supermarket clerk’s green apron raises her hand. Kendall nods at her. “Doreen.”
“Thanks.” Doreen scratches her forearm, which seems to have a bad case of psoriasis. “Hi. I, uh, had an okay week. I’m actually feeling okay now that they’ve got me on the Zofran. The Compazine wasn’t doing a darn thing for my nausea, but the Zofran is great at taking the edge off. Anyway, I was sort of hoping now that I’m feeling better, I’d have a little more energy and Cliff and I might, you know, be able to spend a little more time doing something we like. Together, I mean. I’m at the hospital all the time, and when we’re home, most of the housework is falling on him. He never complains, but I can tell he’s having a hard time. He seems a little—I don’t know what you’d call it—depressed? He’s just not himself. The other day I went out to the garage to get some wrapping paper—I keep extra in there, ’cause why buy new when you’ve got all those nice gift bags from people—and I saw Cliff sitting in the passenger seat of the Taurus. Scared the bejeezus out of me. So, I’m like, ‘Cliffie, what are you doing sitting out here in the dark in the garage?’ And he starts crying, which I’ve never seen him do, not even when his father died of an aneurysm or when I was diagnosed or anything.” Doreen pauses to wipe a tear from her own eye. “He couldn’t stop crying, not even when I brought him back in the house and CSI: Miami came on. That’s his favorite.”