The Very Principled Maggie Mayfield

by Kathy Cooperman

  Isabelle blinked in confusion, as if she’d just been roused from a cozy nap. “Okay, but no big wars. Big wars are like when all the men get dressed up in uniforms and go off to France or something. I don’t see anybody going to France, do you?”

  Lucy retorted, “No, but these wars aren’t in France.”

  Isabelle rolled her eyes, bored with Lucy’s tedious details. She clearly regretted letting Lucy sit with her.

  From then on, she and Sophia excluded Lucy from their conversation. And when the bell rang, they ran ahead together to their classroom while Lucy trudged behind.

  That afternoon, Lucy raised her hand seven times, easily fielding the teacher’s questions. Flipping the old aphorism on its head, she thought bitterly, If you can’t join them, beat them.

  6

  RAGING RACHEL

  Halfway through recess, the school hit a milestone: the first fight of the year. Rachel Klemper had charged like a bull at her twin brother, Alec. Alec—a tall, fair-haired soccer prodigy—had suffered a bruise and a few scratches, but was otherwise unharmed. Still, like most playground victims, he wanted his attacker prosecuted to the full extent of the law—sister or not.

  By the time Maggie got back to the front office, the perp—Rachel—was planted in a seat across from Diane’s desk. Maggie’s heart sank when she saw the girl. As a principal, Maggie wasn’t supposed to pick favorites, but as a human being, she had no choice. And Rachel was one of her secret favorites. Rachel was tall like her brother, but she looked like she came from a different wolf pack. Dark-haired and chubby, she wore her long, bushy hair in a low ponytail. She kept her arms crossed defensively against her chest most of the time, like a live-action poster for low self-esteem.

  Up until a year ago, it had looked like Rachel had come up snake eyes at the genetic craps table: her brilliant lawyer father’s bad looks, and her gorgeous blond mother’s (lack of) brains. Rachel had been a triple threat: lousy at math, reading, and writing. Her teacher had sensed something amiss, so Maggie had the girl tested. The child’s intellectual colonoscopy uncovered big news. Rachel was dyslexic, but her IQ was sky-high. Maggie set her up with a special reading tutor to get her up to speed over the summer. Rachel worked hard and made up lost ground quickly. But she still had to repeat third grade.

  Now Maggie led Rachel into her private office. She started off stern. Maggie had to do that whenever things got violent. Warnings had to be given. Parents had to be called, due process and all that. But she cut short her usual “no hitting” spiel when Rachel started crying. Rachel began with a whimper and then moved into full-on sobbing territory. Maggie got up from her chair and came round her desk to comfort the child. Elementary school principals do a lot of comforting. Funeral director amounts.

  When Rachel got her breathing under control, Maggie asked what had happened. Sniffling, Rachel answered, “Alec called me a name.”

  “What name, sweetheart?”

  “Pickles.”

  It took a long time—and more than a few Kleenex—but Maggie managed to coax out the pickles story. Evidently, Rachel’s mother, Andrea Klemper, had arranged for the family’s bathrooms to be renovated over the summer. The Klempers lived in a posh McMansion, and Andrea got it in her head that each of her bathrooms needed a bidet. Rachel explained, “A bidet’s a fancy fountain that shoots water up your butt.”

  Maggie nodded. She knew what a bidet was, and more importantly, she knew what Andrea Klemper was. Andrea was one of the school’s alpha moms. An attractive blonde with a slightly upturned nose, Andrea pranced her tight, overaerobicized tush all over the place, showily volunteering for everything.

  While the bidets were being installed, all but one of the house’s bathrooms were off-limits, and toilet access became a problem. Alec took to secretly peeing on a houseplant near the grand piano. Rachel explained, “So, one day, Mom was off cheering Alec at some soccer game, and I’m home with Gramma. And I had to go. So I ran for the bathroom, but Gramma was in there. And Gramma likes to, um, take her time. So I didn’t know what to do.”

  Maggie nodded. “It’s a tough call.”

  “So I ran back to the kitchen, and I grabbed this pickle jar from the recycling bin, and I . . .” Rachel faltered, her cheeks reddening.

  Maggie prodded, “You used it?”

  Rachel blushed furiously. “It was number two.”

  Maggie repressed her impulse to say “yick.” Instead, she patted Rachel’s arm. “I think you were very resourceful.”

  Rachel looked up in surprise at Maggie. The girl had obviously never thought of herself as resourceful. “I didn’t want to stink up the house. So I put the lid back on the jar and closed it real tight. But then, I couldn’t just stick the jar back in the recycling bin. Someone would see it. You know?”

  Maggie nodded.

  Rachel went on, “So I started getting all nervous and stupid.” She pantomimed panic for Maggie: waving her hands, widening her eyes, and saying, “Ohmigod. Ohmigod.” Maggie struggled not to smile. “So I hid the jar in the garage behind some of Alec’s soccer stuff. I figured I’d take it out later on—when Gramma got out of the bathroom—and, uh, get rid of it.”

  “Ohhhkay. So then?”

  “But then, I forgot.” Rachel hastened to add, “I know it’s weird I forgot, but I did. Honest.”

  Maggie believed her. It was classic kid: out of sight, out of mind. Kids’ distractibility made them lousy criminals. Maggie prodded her again. “Then what?”

  “So, a week ago, my mom had people over for dinner. My mom is going on and on about how great Alec is, how he won all his soccer games. Whatever. And it got me mad. So I said he’s not perfect. And Alec says, ‘Better than you, twerp.’ And I say, ‘Oh yeah?’ And he’s like, ‘Yeah.’ And then, I just lose it, and I go, ‘At least I don’t pee on Mom’s plant!’”

  Maggie winced. “How’d that go over?”

  Rachel bit down on her lower lip. “Bad. My mom got real angry. She’s like, ‘Alexander’—my mom calls him that when she’s mad—‘I can’t believe you peed on my plant.’

  “So then, he runs out of the room. My mom says something about how Alec needs to cool off. She and the guests start talking about boring adult stuff: calories and real estate. And I’m sitting there, feeling guilty but sorta happy, ’cause Alec can be such a . . .” Rachel stopped herself.

  “So, after a while, Alec comes back in. He has this serious look on his face, like a superhero about to make a big move. And everybody’s looking at him, and he says—real loud—‘Hey, Mom, look what your daughter did!’ And he pulls out the pickle jar and holds it up so everybody can see. Only it didn’t look like poop anymore. It’d been in the garage for weeks, so it just looked like nasty soup. But then Alec opened the jar, and everybody knew what it was ’cause the smell was . . .” Rachel stuck out her tongue and gagged. “The guests ran out of the house. And my mom ran after them, yelling, ‘Sorry! Alec didn’t mean it. He’s lactose intolerant’ or something.”

  The aftershocks of the poop incident were still rocking Rachel’s home life. Rachel overheard her mom telling her dad Rachel “wasn’t normal.” She took Rachel to a shrink named Miss Madeline, and Rachel had to sit through fifty minutes of prodding: Why did Rachel poop in the jar? How did it feel to poop in the jar? Did she get pleasure out of pooping in jars? Because if so, there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s something Rachel could “explore” when she got older. But for now, pooping in the toilet would be best.

  Rachel went on, “It wasn’t fair. Alec didn’t have to talk to a shrink about peeing on Mom’s plant. Mom just made the plant disappear. She kept right on taking him to soccer games. Every time he scores, my mom jumps up and yells, ‘Bull’s-eye!’”

  The envy and longing in Rachel’s face as she said this was unmistakable. And Maggie felt a surge of rage at Andrea Klemper. Maggie hated it when parents were stingy with their love. “So that’s where Pickles comes from?”

  Rachel nodded. “Alec calls me that when o
ur parents aren’t around. Only, I didn’t think he’d say it at school. I . . .” Her chin trembled with the threat of tears again. “I hate coming back to school. I suck at everything here.”

  Maggie countered, “You don’t suck. Your tutor says she’s never seen anyone work as hard as you did over the summer. You’ll be caught up in no time.”

  “Okay, I don’t suck. But I’m not good at anything. Not like Alec. He’s got soccer and all those friends. And I’ve got . . .” She trailed off to nothing.

  Maggie said, “That’s not how I see it. You’ve got a spark. It’s like there’s this energy coming off you, this raw potential.”

  “Potential?” Rachel raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes. It’s like with dragons.” Maggie had been binge-watching Game of Thrones, hardly a model for sibling harmony. She continued, “There’s this story where a princess has nothing. No castle, no family, no money. But then she finds some baby dragons. Other people avoid the dragons, but not the princess. She loves them. She sees what they can become, how strong and beautiful they can be. So she feeds them and protects them until they get to be big and strong. And then . . .”

  “They smite her enemies?” Rachel brightened.

  “Uh, well, yes. That, but other things too. They carry packages through the air. They give people rides in the clouds.” By now, Maggie had totally Disneyfied the khaleesi’s dragons.

  “The point is, your potential is huge,” Maggie said. “And a lot of people can’t see that yet. They don’t know what you’ll be able to do when you grow up, and you don’t either. So for now, your job is to be like that princess. Hope for the best, and care for your talents. Make them grow. And one day, you and your talents will soar.”

  Rachel said happily, “And I’ll smite my enemies?”

  “Hopefully, there won’t be much need for smiting.”

  7

  MAGGIE’S WORSE HALF

  By four o’clock, Maggie was exhausted. Her facial muscles were sore from smiling so much, and her feet ached from her high heels.

  And the day wasn’t done yet. She’d have to sit through Edutek’s “Community Listening Session” later that night. For now, all she wanted to do was sink into a bath, like the star of her own private Calgon commercial. But her bubble burst as soon as she rounded the street corner near her house. There, on her front porch, stood her ex-husband, Richard.

  Though their marriage had ended two years ago, Richard still occupied prime real estate in Maggie’s psyche. He had not just broken her heart. He had diced and pureed it. She had fallen hard for him. He had been an everything-she-wanted buffet: a sweet-natured midwestern boy with brains, a wry sense of humor, a solid job as a software engineer, and a dazzling, aw-shucks-ma’am smile. His face was almost too pretty: blond hair, high cheekbones, strong jaw, and blue eyes framed by long lashes. What saved him from girlishness was his physique. A triathlete in his spare time, Richard was just six inches taller than Maggie, but every inch of his body was as firm as whipcord. He was, to be blunt, sexy as hell. Just the sight of his well-muscled calf could cause a stir in Maggie’s groin.

  Early on in their courtship, Maggie had worried that some woman would steal him away. But Richard’s over-the-top, borderline compulsive honesty made her relax her guard. He was so unrelentingly decent that any suspicion of him seemed not just stupid, but pathological—like Gollum clutching at “the precious” as a Boy Scout walks past.

  And Maggie had been right. There wasn’t a single woman alive who could have lured Richard away. No, it took legions of women to do that, legions of pixelated porn stars to be more exact.

  The trouble began three years into the marriage when hyperathletic Richard got benched by a biking accident. The doctor ordered him off his bike for six months, and Maggie foolishly hoped he’d lavish his newfound free time on her. Instead, he began pouring all his time into his “work.” He still tromped through the front door every night by six—he had a hitherto almost sleepy job in corporate compliance at a big company. But now, he always headed straight for his study, mumbling about projects and deadlines. When Maggie pressed him for details, he’d turn a fire hose of mind-numbingly dull financial information on her, boring her inquisitiveness away. When his six-month recovery milestone came, Richard did not even try to return to his bike.

  Blissfully ignorant of her hard—but not hardworking—husband’s new secret life as a porn addict, Maggie tried to be supportive. When Richard started having trouble performing in the bedroom, he blamed stress, and Maggie nodded in sympathy. Later, much later, she’d learn all about porn-induced erectile dysfunction (PIED). Whacking off for hours a day to an online harem made it impossible for heavy porn users to be aroused by an actual flesh-and-blood woman.

  On the increasingly rare occasions when they did have sex, Maggie made heroic efforts to seem turned on by her husband’s growingly elaborate stage directions. One time, he told her to strip, bend over, and then slowly rise up and look back at him over her right shoulder. She complied but was tempted to ask what scores the judge from the Czech Republic would give her for this. She also feigned delight at the sleazy lingerie he started bringing her, though she’d drawn the line at a full-body fishnet suit because it made her feel like a butterball turkey in plastic netting.

  Eventually, their sex life flatlined. When Maggie complained about it, delicately at first and more bluntly later on, Richard told her she was “oversexed” and that sex was “not that important” to him. His ascetic posturing shamed and enraged her. A more sexually confident woman would have challenged him outright, demanding explanations for his celibacy.

  But Maggie was not confident that way. True, she had her va-va-voom, I-feel-pretty moments. And she knew her coloring was beautiful: green eyes against milky white skin, framed by dark hair. But Maggie’s faith in her own desirability, like that of many women, was far from unshakable. In fact, it was highly shakable. She hated her body’s proportions: oversize boobs (okay, no man had ever complained to her about those), long torso, and short legs. It was as if God had used too much modeling clay on the top part of her and had skimped on the rest. And worst of all, thanks to her short stature, Maggie could never discreetly hide extra weight. Every pound she gained announced itself—with trumpets.

  Lacking the confidence to have it out with Richard, Maggie threw herself into work and food, approaching despair with a planner in one hand and a doughnut in the other. Already a workaholic, she pulled longer hours than ever before. And when she did come home, while Richard “slaved away” in his secret porn cave, Maggie stress-ate, and the pounds poured on. Eventually, Richard started using her girth as an excuse for his sexual disinterest, which only prompted more stress eating. As she grew more disgusted with herself and ever more desperate to save her marriage, she began compulsively exercising and even flirted with bulimia. She wasn’t big on vomiting, but she developed a taste for chocolate laxatives, the bulimic’s after-dinner mint of choice.

  She finally discovered her husband’s porn habit while he was away on a business trip. He usually kept his study door closed, and Maggie rarely went in there. She intended to surprise him by tidying, maybe even sprucing up the room with some flowers. But as soon as she entered the study, she knew something was very wrong. She did not find a psycho-killer-style wall of hard-core porn photos à la Criminal Minds or SVU. And inept as she was with computers, she was not capable of any Lisbeth Salander–esque hacking to uncover her husband’s tracks. No, it was Richard’s wastebasket that tipped her off. It was overflowing with used, wadded Kleenex and an empty Costco-sized bottle of Jergens. Plus, the telltale odor of semen made the room smell saltier than Lot’s wife.

  Maggie immediately lost all interest in her cleaning spree. She walked out of the study, sobbed on the living room couch for a long time, and called the one person she always called: Diane. Diane came right away. She made Maggie lie down on her couch, put a damp washcloth across her temples, and tucked a blanket around her—as if Maggie were a child who
’d had a bad scare. Diane then asked if she could go into the study and “sort this out.” Maggie nodded, and then—amazingly—fell into a deep sleep.

  When she woke up, Diane was sitting in an armchair next to the couch, a stack of papers in her lap. She fetched Maggie a glass of water, and then treated her to an Agatha Christie–style drawing room recounting of Richard’s crimes. Computer-savvy Diane had crawled through Richard’s browser history. He had been so confident of Maggie’s misplaced trust that he had not bothered to conceal anything.

  Diane found that Richard—the same man who’d taunted Maggie as “oversexed”—visited dozens of hard-core porn sites every day. His favorites sounded like a perverse Parade of Nations: Russian prostitutes, British blow jobs, Finnish fisting, Swedish S&M. The list went on and on. He’d paid for access to all this, using untraceable, store-bought hundred-dollar credit cards. Diane found $5,000 worth of them in his top drawer alone. She also considerately cleaned out his wastebasket, a feat that should have required a hazmat suit.

  The news devastated Maggie. To lose her husband to a flesh-and-blood woman would have been hard enough, but to lose him to a computer screen was particularly galling. And creepy. A little porn would not have unnerved her. And she was all for a bit of self-love. But she squirmed at the thought of Richard locked up in his study for hours every night—a thirtysomething man whacking off to dozens of videos of surgically enhanced, sticky-looking women. Maggie wished she could Purell her brain.

  Before and after confronting Richard, she researched porn addiction on her own, experiencing bitter pangs with each fresh explanation of her husband’s bizarre behavior. She sobbed when she read about the Coolidge effect, a man’s biological hardwiring to endlessly seek sexual novelty whenever possible. When only one female was sexually available, a man had incentive to court and care for her, even after she’d grown familiar to him. But the male libido—forged millions of years ago—did not differentiate between live women and the naked ones prancing across a computer screen. Confronted with the infinite array of beautiful, oh-so-willing women doing everything all the time on the internet, a man’s libido went wild, like a kid with a bottomless bag of tokens at the world’s largest Chuck E. Cheese’s. In one session, a man could “have” more beautiful women than Elvis did in a lifetime, without swiveling his hips once.