Live a Little

by Kim Green

  “The way you described her, I expected Paulina Porizkova or something. Laurie’s pretty but, you know, girl-next-door pretty, not centerfold material,” Ren says, as if centerfold material is what the Whites want for their only son.

  Ren and I see each other two more times, each date a paler, more anemic version of the last. Then the inevitable unpleasant conversation, conducted by telephone, peppered with words like “space,” “bad timing,” and “great girl.” Ren disappears onto campus. I open my mouth like a motherless baby bird and let Sue feed me jelly beans. On a campus of twenty thousand students, I employ complex measures to make sure I don’t see Loren White’s face again that year. That summer he transfers to Amherst so that he and pretty-as-the-girl-next-door Laurie can have sex on his varsity lacrosse jacket while the New England leaves fall amber and crisp against their faces. I don’t see Ren again until Laurie’s wedding day nine years later. That afternoon, despite the efforts that have been taken to spare me needless suffering, I vomit into the azaleas outside the synagogue. Thus, my violet matron of honor gown bears a spray of dark seltzer spots fanned out like blood spatter.

  It’s true, I think, you can’t help whom you love—any more than a diabetic can be blamed for consuming that final candy bar.

  Sue clicks the remote, muting her—our—televised morning victuals. In recent days, we have descended from the somewhat justifiable Good Morning America to less defensible reruns of The Nanny. It’s all a time-killer until we get to celebrity chef Rachael Ray at nine A.M., so that I can finally learn how to cook and Sue can vent her life’s frustrations on a chef perkier than she.

  “So, I’m having it,” Sue says.

  I put down my to-do list. After work, Duke Dunne and I are heading south on a motorcycle ride along Highway 1. The plan is to sample the view, the artichoke soup at Duarte’s Tavern, and maybe, you know, other stuff. In a weird, testy, unanticipated little way, I am addicted to the . . . other stuff. To call what I feel for Duke—for Duke’s body—an addiction is surely to overvalue its importance. Yet I find myself thinking about him—it—in a slightly compulsive, somewhat exhaustive, definitely creative sort of way.

  Okay: minor addiction.

  Sue’s words jar me out of yet another replaying of Duke and me romping around in one or another beachy paradise. I don’t have to ask what Sue is talking about. “Are you okay?” I say.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you relieved?” I press.

  “Yeah.” Sue scratches her stomach. “It was the weirdest thing, how I decided, I mean. I’d just dropped Fina off at school and was walking to the car, and there were these teenage girls with babies in strollers walking by, and they stopped to talk to these boys. Don’t ask me how, but I just knew they were the fathers—what do they call them?”

  “Baby daddies.”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Anyway, when I saw those little girls and their baby daddies and those sweet babies all enveloped in white lace like they were going to their baptisms, and none of them was in school, and God knows how the poor things are getting by. I just had this overwhelming feeling of peace and acceptance, like, if they can do it, I know I can. And I knew that even if Arlo doesn’t come around, we’ll be okay.” Sue’s eyes shift to the TV screen, which has churned onward into Chef Rachael’s realm in silence. “Why are you putting the soy sauce in so early, you idiot!” Sue yells out of nowhere.

  “Isn’t it good to get it over with?” Personally, I like Rachael Ray’s approach, which seems tailored toward culinary bunglers like me whose conception of sauce is limited to that which you can dump on the finished product in the hopes that it will mask whatever damage came before.

  Sue’s face crumples. “No, no. . . it’ll curdle. It’ll burn. It’ll all burn straight to hell!”

  “You seem full of peace and acceptance,” I say.

  The rush of wind at my face seems to dispel any inhibitions I may have had about . . . well, anything. I experiment with singing a Dylan song that pops into my head, but the lyrics are ripped away before the melody ripens. Eyes stinging, I bury my face against Duke’s shoulder. It smells of pot, sweat, and a hint of starchy detergent. I like it, the triumph of dirty over clean, nature over artifice.

  Naughty over nice.

  I slip my hand under his T-shirt. His abs have intervals between them, gullies. I strum them like a guitar, switch to a Rolling Stones standard—

  Hot shriek of wheels. Ocean and mountains flip-flopping, crazy ripping yell from person and thing.

  Crash.

  CHAPTER 22

  The Machine That Goes Ping

  I awaken to the rustle of my family setting up camp at the foot of my bed.

  The last time I spent the night in the hospital, almost sixteen years ago after Taylor was born, the height of excitement was the ice pack the nurse gave me to stuff in my underwear every three or four hours. That and the free cranberry juice.

  Things change.

  “Oh my God, weird—is that what’s-his-name, Dude? Duke?” Taylor asks point-blank about five seconds after she, Micah, Sue, and Sarafina arrived in Sue’s much maligned, cloud-covered VW bus.

  Sue grimaces and shifts Sarafina off the small swell that’s just starting to poke out beneath her shirt. “Guys, your mom’s really tired right now. Why don’t we wait until after the doctor comes back to nail her to the cross?”

  Duke Dunne, whose knack for performing oral sex vastly outweighs his motorcycle-driving acumen, hangs his head and skulks out of the room. Good. I close my eyes. The walloping mallet in my head downgrades to dull throbbing. Better.

  “What’s he doing here?” Taylor stands, hands on slim hips, glaring at me, Sue, and Micah. A frightened-looking Sarafina and the licorice-breathed male nurse are the only ones who escape Taylor’s wrath. Slowly, the identity of my partner for the high school reunion chicken dance dawns on her, and shock clots her features.

  “Oh . . . gross.” Taylor covers her mouth in horror.

  “That’s enough,” I say rather weakly.

  “Tay, lay off.” Micah stares into my eyes, simultaneously coming to my rescue and putting me on notice that he is, on some level, relishing the irony. Somehow, witnessing my son having sex has peeled back the layers of distance between us. We know each other in a way we never have before. It’s as if we can smell the sweet char of sexual depravity blazing on the other.

  “Did anyone get hold of your grandma? Or Dr. Meissner? She threatened to, uh, call him,” Sue says loudly and elongatedly.

  Meissner? Ma? Oh, shit. . .

  “Grandma’s on her way,” Micah says. “I told her not to bother calling him. I’ll go call Dr. Meissner now if someone gives me his—”

  “No!” I yelp. Micah stops in his tracks. Too shrill. Take it down a few notches. “Micah, honey, you know I can’t eat the hospital food. It will aggravate my heartburn. I think I need . . . I need you to go get me number eighty-seven,” I say with a fine show of calm. My favorite chow fun noodles are at least eighteen miles away from the hospital, plenty of distance to ensure damage control. I shut my eyes again. “Sue will call Meissner.”

  “I’ll call him.” Sue.

  “Did he do this?” Taylor.

  This is me in the hospital, banged up but fine, held for overnight observation to rule out possible brain damage (not caused by the accident, but they don’t know that). This is also me in the utterly embarrassing situation of having fallen off a motorcycle manned by a lover half my age whom I should have sent packing after our first—and only—encounter. This is what happens when you get a taste of something rich and decide you want just a few more licks. This is spelled G-R-E-E-D-Y.

  “It was an accident.” Nobody has to know where my left hand was when we went down, do they? That’s between me, Duke, and Duke’s 501s.

  “That’s why you don’t let us ride motorcycles,” Taylor points out.

  “That’s true. I doubt I will ride one again,” I say slowly, thinking of something else entirely.

&nb
sp; “I’ll go get you some dinner,” Micah says. “I’m just glad you’re okay.” He pats me on the shoulder and stands up. In spite of my son’s newfound toughness and our little fight, his voice cracks. “You promise they’re only keeping you overnight to be safe?”

  “I promise.” My eyes burn. Even Licorice Breath slows his hypodermic reorg and turns a sentimental eye to the proceedings.

  Sleep suddenly seems possible. But first I want to do something to make Taylor understand. My head wags from exhaustion. I focus my eyes. There. Daughter. Our eyes meet. I broadcast: I know I’m a mess, but I love, love, LOVE you, you brat! Her gaze incendiary, Taylor manages to squeeze my frayed palm. Enough. It is enough. Gripping my girl’s strong hand, I let the call to sleep pull me down.

  The next time I open my eyes, the room is dim with hushed lights and the spectral feeling of deep night, and Phil is sitting beside me. He is awake. For a second I believe he is watching me with the sort of lovelorn, hard-won relief depicted in romantic movies, in which our hapless heroine is reunited with her chastened husband following terrific trauma. After I squirm into a more upright position, I see that Phil is actually transfixed by a machine to my right that spits out a thin fluorescent blue line accompanied by a spoof-worthy ping.

  It is not even hooked up to me.

  Phil stretches his legs, which are encased in— where the hell does he find these things?—dark brown elastic-bottomed sweatpants.

  “The dog needs another course of antibiotics,” I hear him say.

  “What?”

  “So . . . how’s the head?” Phil leans over to inspect my bandages. I brush at the mental cobwebs. Is it my imagination, or did Phil just mention the dog’s well-being before mine?

  I decide to give him a pass. I mean, it is late. “It’s fine, I guess. A little sore. I’m surprised they made me stay at all. I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”

  “Raquel . . .” The ice cracks.

  “Yeah?”

  “This has been a bad week for us, hasn’t it?” To my horror— why do women always react to men crying with horror?— it appears that Phil is about to break down. While I watch, awash in a jumble of guilt, pity, repulsion, admiration, and fascination, my husband’s hand hovers over his eyes. A deep quaking racks his body, rippling from chest to arms to jaw, before he pulls it together and swallows the spasm whole with a giant snort that harmonizes nicely with the machine’s ping.

  “Remember the trip to Tahoe?” Phil says, not too brokenly.

  “Which one?” I know exactly which trip he means, but something small and unyielding inside me refuses to grant him relief.

  “The one where the pipes broke.”

  In spite of everything, a grin tugs at my mouth. “And the car was buried.”

  “And you got frozen to the toilet—”

  “And the neighbors called the manager on us for burning cardboard—”

  “We ran out of food on the third day—”

  “Because the general store closed early—”

  “Your mother called the highway patrol to come look for us— ”

  “And he came in right when we were doing it on the living room floor—”

  “Then there was the sled—”

  “Twenty stitches!”

  “Thirty. I think it was thirty,” Phil gasps. My husband’s gaze on me feels thick and warm, a far cry from the flinty terseness that has passed for affinity in our household as of late.

  “Move over,” he says. “I’m coming in.”

  “Philly! There’s no room. It’s a twin—” I start to argue, but Phil has already peeled back the coverlet and inserted himself between the crisp sheets. “Watch out for my head,” I say foolishly, causing a fresh round of laughter.

  After a minute, the giggles subside and taut silence descends, the kind you can bounce a penny on. Given our recent backstory, it seems unlikely that, even with a few chuckles under our belts, Phil is going to make a play for the goodies, so I try to relax into the narrow channel of bed. For some reason, our proximity has the tense expectancy you’d expect from lying half naked with a stranger, not the person with whom you’ve shared a hamper and a health insurance plan for the better part of two decades. I can tell he feels the same, and I train my eyes on a point above his head to avoid the clash of awkward eyes. Oh, trusty ping machine ...

  “I saw him in the hallway,” Phil says. “The kid.”

  Ick. How in hell could I have violated that most sacrosanct of all Jewish-mother covenants: Thou shalt not, for any reason, ever, ever, EVER straddle a motorcycle?

  “It’s okay. You were right, what you said the other night. I guess this is what separated is.” Phil shifts uncomfortably. The sheet slides off, baring my bottom. He tugs the coverings back over me, so as to spare Licorice Breath several years of hard-earned therapy.

  “Philly, this thing with the, uh, kid—”

  “Don’t.”

  Good advice, that. Except it’s too late, ’cause I did.

  Lying stiffly next to the object of my separation, I begin to sob uncontrollably. What is wrong with me? More important, why didn’t good sex with a handsome stranger fix it? How is it possible to suck as royally at sexual liberation as I did at marriage? Shouldn’t I by rights be gifted at one of them?

  Phil puts his arms around me. This time he is neither careful nor awkward. A cable of sob-drool connects my mouth to his chest. Our feet tangle. His body feels unexciting but essential, like a part of me I wouldn’t want to do without. A heart or a kidney. A lung. Something important. Something you could conceivably replace but that won’t function as seamlessly as the original.

  I hiccup. Licorice Breath breaches the doorway, intent on measuring my vitals, takes in our middle-aged version of high passion, and beats a speedy retreat. We watch him go. I like the feeling of collusion this lends—so much less exhausting than conquest.

  “I guess this means everything’s fine now?” I say, only half joking.

  Phil sighs. “Couldn’t be better.”

  Ma and Eliot live five or six towns away from us in Woodside. There was an article recently in the San Francisco Chronicle magazine that pointed to the prevalence of larger families there, a recent demographical phenomenon spawned by post-dot-com wealth and nonworking former-executive wives who can afford indefinite IVF. Multiple children are now a status symbol among the upper classes. The syndrome has been termed “Woodside Fours” (as in four kids). As I drive slowly through the town’s winding, richly landscaped hills, signs of affluent late-in-life fertility are everywhere, from the gleaming Volvo Cross Country wagons to the Bugaboo strollers skimming proudly down the byways, manned by Latina nannies. In some cases, real mothers trail behind, cell-phone headsets wedged in their ears.

  I hate this place. No, wait. Let’s be honest, Raquel: I envy this place.

  Eliot himself earned his money the old-fashioned way: He created a company that made millions supplying cheap, nutritionally meager, pesticide-soaked “food” to public school cafeterias nationwide. Nowadays, at least, my stepfather wouldn’t deign to let a nonorganic grape pass his lips, and he throws a few thousand dollars at this or that children’s charity every year, but that hasn’t stopped him—or, to my continuing shame, me—from living finely off the proceeds of his treachery.

  As I turn in to the oak-shrouded drive that welcomes visitors to Casa Abramaschultz, I cannot help but stew about the day when Ma introduced us to Eliot.

  Set the scene: It is the summer of 1996. The period in question falls six years after the precipitate death of Minna Louise Schultz’s first husband, Stuart Myron Schultz, bylap-swimming.

  (Okay, so technically, it was a massive cardiac event—how the hell do they get away with this sort of euphemism?—but Raquel prefers to think of her loss as death by exercise, an idea she embraces and vows to promote for the rest of her life.)

  For most of the intervening years, Minna has, at least in Raquel’s view, conducted herself in a manner befitting an angry, frumpy, slightl
y crazy Jewish widow. During the first few years, for instance, she throws herself into the futile malpractice lawsuit against the hospital—who cares if the paramedics pronounced Stu dead before his rapidly cooling body even got there?—segueing smoothly into her volunteer work at the battered-women’s shelter and potluck nights with her widow-studded bridge club.

  Until she meets Eliot.

  Her firstborn daughter, Rachel “Raquel” Schultz Rose, knows nothing of the impending shitstorm. On the day in question, she is consumed with the latest in a series of minor familial setbacks that, if weighed carefully, portend more unfortunate events ahead. Tuition has just gone up at her children’s pricey private school, and although the reasonable part of her brain knows her kids will still likely flourish if they transfer to the perfectly acceptable—indeed, enviable—local public school, a louder voice inside her cautions against relying on gumption and merit to help them achieve their life’s goals, and sounds an alarm in favor of granting her offspring every possible advantage. That’s what the dean called it at the open house, after all: “Our goal—and, presumably, yours—is to offer your child every possible advantage in his ascent to a successful existence.” It sounded so gloriously preordained, so unequivocal, so philosophically sound: every possible advantage. A successful existence.

  Now their successful existence is being threatened by that scourge of middle-class people everywhere: lack of wealth. It’s not that Raquel has the desire for the sort of bonuses affluence brings, per se. At least not for herself. But when she gazes at the wide-open faces of her son and daughter, nearly effervescing with the glorious entitlement of the young and aspirational, she thinks, shockingly, of money—money and the way it lies, stacked and thick and insulating, between them and the forces that would claw away at their existence.

  Their successful existence.