by Amy Ephron
“Bobby Marks.”
“Bobby Marks?” Bobby Marks owned a gallery in West Hollywood. “I didn’t know you were going back into the art business. I thought you hated it.” But as I said it I realized . . . “Kelly Marks?! They’re not even separated.”
“We denied it. The kids were playing. We were watching TV in the living room and I had my shoes off.”
“And?”
“And he found my socks in the bedroom.”
“And he decked you in front of the kids?”
“No. He showed up at my office the next morning. And I decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to hit him back.”
I went to the refrigerator to get the icepack that I always kept on tap in case Ethan or one of his friends had a fall. I wrapped it in a dishcloth and handed it to Sasha.
He put the icepack on his eye and said sort of sheepishly, “It was her idea, I swear it.”
That didn’t surprise me. Kelly Marks walked around like she didn’t have anything else on her mind, low-cut ruffly blouses, big hair, a lot of mascara, and high heels even when she was wearing shorts, which was most of the time even when it wasn’t weather appropriate. But it wasn’t for me to judge. It had nothing to do with me. I tried to say it like a mantra to myself. This has nothing to do with you. Another mother at school will dislike you. So what? They never liked you that much anyway. I wondered if Bobby Marks would try to bond with me over the experience but I wouldn’t give him that opportunity.
A few weeks later, Sasha had a movie green-lit, which was good on two counts: he would pay his child support (temporarily anyway) and it required him to spend two months in London. Ethan and the girls were going to miss him, but I found the prospect sort of blissful. Two months when he wouldn’t be in the kitchen or on the playground, so to speak.
There were two events at the Country Day School that involved parents—Open House, which the children also attended and which involved an art fair, a science fair, and pizza, and was an absolutely mandatory parental appearance, and Parents’ Night, which only the parents were invited to and was a group meeting in their child’s classroom. I thought about not going, but Sasha was still in London, and Ethan had asked me four times that afternoon if I was going.
I liked the Country Day School. It was provincial, old-fashioned, private. It had a white picket fence and a lawn in front with a white walkway and a big playground. It backed onto a public park that had a soccer field and a basketball court (we hadn’t learned yet about the asbestos in the soil, but that was a different story). It was a small school. There were only 23 kids in Ethan’s class and—I did a mental count as I walked up the walkway—17 of the 23 sets of parents in Ethan’s class were separated. It was almost like a cancer cluster (or there was something in the water). My heart was beating. I felt the way I imagined it felt when you’d been fired from a job and had to go to work for two more weeks. Nobody really wanted you there. That wasn’t true. Mrs. Rothbart liked me. Mrs. Rothbart was Ethan’s second-grade teacher. Mrs. Rothbart had pulled me aside one day and told me that she’d really liked my last book and had given it to her sister for Christmas. I didn’t think she’d make that up—not the part about her sister anyway. And it was Parents’ Night. And I was Ethan’s mother. And I had a perfect right to be there.
I walked down the hallway to Mrs. Rothbart’s classroom and opened the door. None of the fathers had arrived yet. There were only seven mothers sitting in their childrens’ chairs around the wooden tables. I walked over to Ethan’s chair, close to the blackboard because he’s always been a little nearsighted. As I sat down, all the other mothers stood up, almost in unison, and glared at me. The usual suspects and a couple I didn’t suspect, at all. Kendra Rosenberg, Stephanie Delaney, Tory Feldman (why was Tory mad at me?), Sam Maddox (I didn’t think that was fair), Kelly Marks, Dinah Dinsmore (that was a surprise), and Sloan Wilson, who probably had no idea why she was standing, she was just going with the crowd. It reminded me of a game we used to play when I was in the second grade called “Musical Chairs.” The children would run around the table while a song played on the record player and the teacher would snatch away one chair. When the music stopped, the children scrambled to sit down and the one left standing would be out. In the end, the last person sitting won the game. And even though I was the one sitting, I wasn’t certain that if anyone had asked me, I would have agreed to play the game.
Sasha married a British journalist, and my son, Ethan, who is now twenty, has a four-year-old sister.
Sam Maddox married the Norwegian record producer and her son, Sam, now twenty, has an eight-year-old sister.
Stephanie Delaney moved to Oregon. Personal history unknown.
Kelly Marks and Bobby Marks separated and were divorced a year later. Bobby Marks closed his gallery and is living in London.
I married an attorney who comes home every night. It is the second marriage for both of us. My husband thinks one of the keys to our marriage is that he also had a fairly nutty divorce.
Kendra Rosenberg never remarried. She went back to school and got a master’s in psychology. She is presently counseling women with addiction issues. It makes sense, in a way. Kendra knew a thing or two about impulse control. I wonder if anyone ever told her about the pies.
Eight
Staying
I always wanted the New Yorker to run a cartoon of Hillary Clinton standing on the steps of the White House with the caption: And another thing, I’m keeping the house!
Having said that, Hillary Clinton may get the White House yet—and President William Jefferson Clinton will, most likely, be standing by her side.
Question: If Hillary Clinton were to be president, would he still be addressed as “President Clinton” and would she be “President Clinton,” too? (I know, he would be called the First Gentleman, but he would also be called “President Clinton” by many.) It’s very confusing (sort of like when someone calls out “Mom” in a mall and six women turn around).
But at the risk of inciting someone’s feminist wrath—I understand why she stayed (or why she let him stay). I think they love each other and that both of their lives are better for having the other one in it. No one can judge a marriage from the outside. Those that look perfect often turn out to have secrets. Those that seem flawed often turn out to work perfectly for the parties involved. But in the case of the Clintons, there was so much history, and family, and a healthy codependency that had made each of their lives a success, and, that little incident aside (and a few others, apparently), mutual respect for one another. Not to make apologies for him, but being president is a little like being a rock star and stuff happens. (Note to everyone I know who’s 25: Think hard before marrying a rock star.) But as things like that go—it wasn’t really a capital offense. Although for someone with his political savvy, he wildly misjudged the conservative backlash in the country.
I could go on about the political irony of that—Governor Mark Sanford comes to mind and, to her credit, Jenny Sanford did not stay. But it was also a slap in the face to the first President Clinton’s supporters, that he could have been so careless with their trust. (It also would have been nice if it hadn’t spiraled into an impeachment hearing and shut down Capitol Hill for as long as it did, but judging by what’s been going on around there, it seems like anything, even a benign health-care bill, can shut down Capitol Hill for months.)
A number of years ago, I was at a dinner party at a restaurant in New York. Our hostess asked if I would walk down the street with her for a minute to the convenience store on the corner. She had a young child at home
and needed to buy diapers. There were rumors flying rampant at the time about her husband, sort of up there with the kind of rumors that got Eliot Spitzer in trouble.
As soon as we hit the sidewalk, she asked, her voice soft and deep, “Did you stay longer than you wanted to?”
I’d recently separated from my first husband, and her meaning was clear. “Maybe,” I said. “A little bit.”
“Why?”
“Who knows. I think we were in love with each other. The kids . . .”
I didn’t say Stockholm Syndrome because that wouldn’t have been fair or true. And then I added, “codependency,” which comes in many forms.
She was quiet for a minute.
“Why?” I asked. “Are you thinking about leaving?”
She hesitated and then said, very softly, “Things you know that you don’t want to know,” and she walked into the 7-Eleven on the corner.
The sentence resonated for me and still does. Things you know that you don’t want to know. Things you know that you pretend not to know . . .
I’d had a similar conversation with a friend shortly after my first husband and I separated, in some moment of semi-despair or self-examination, the gist of which was, “Why did I stay so long? What’s wrong with me? Why wasn’t I confident enough to leave?” My friend, who’d known me for a long time and is somewhat forgiving, pragmatic, and a 20-year AA veteran, i.e., forward thinking, said, “Because you loved him, because the children were so young, and because you did.”
It took the woman and her husband about a year to split up. She probably shouldn’t have waited, but I understand why she did.
The staying syndrome isn’t limited to women, though; one could ask, in some cases, why men stay. For many of the same reasons: love or the memory of love, children, a healthy or unhealthy codependency, money (this relates to women, too, and can be due to an abundance or a lack of). No one really knows what it’s like to be in a relationship unless you’re one of the participants.
Dr. Laura (Schlessinger), in one of her more appalling displays (some years before the famous n-word rant that caused her to resign), appeared on television the morning after the Eliot Spitzer rumors broke, and she blamed Silda?!! Actually saying, Governor Spitzer cheated because his wife failed “to make him feel like a man.” She added somewhat gratuitously, “I hold women accountable for tossing out perfectly good men by not treating them with the love and kindness and respect and attention they need.” Note to Dr. Laura: She didn’t toss him out. He had a personal problem. They had a personal problem. He resigned. They kept it to themselves. They’re still together. And, now he’s thinking about making a run for a Senate seat. Or he was, before he became a news anchor. I hope Dr. Laura never runs for Senate.
But there’s another side to this, which is if you do decide to leave a relationship, if you do split up, one of you (at least) is more than likely to be single again.
I was always certain. If I was ever single again, I’d be better at it than I was in my 20s. I like and respect most of the people I’ve dated, not all (that psychopath from the country founded for expatriate criminals comes to mind). I was convinced I would take all my life lessons and roll them into a more mature, laissez-faire, water-off-my-back attitude.
It wasn’t true. I was just as bad at it the second time. And driving around with a shopping bag full of clothes in the car because you weren’t exactly certain where you were going to be in the morning is even more irritating if you have three kids at home you’re worried about, too. (No, I didn’t abandon them: There was always someone with them.) But there’s a certain teenage aspect to dating that doesn’t change. Will he call? Did I do something wrong? Long-distance relationships can’t work. Is there a girlfriend he forgot to tell me about in another city? What do you mean you don’t check your emails on the weekend (which could be construed as a number-one warning sign that the person you’re dating is in another relationship).
I am violently opposed to (and terrified of) Internet dating sites. I honestly believe it’s not that hard to meet someone if you actually leave your house, answer your telephone, make yourself available at the drop of a hat, and, also, make yourself believe, while exercising due caution, that at any point, the next minute of your life could be the beginning of the rest of your life. Having said that, my present husband and I were fixed up by mutual friends. It is the closest I’ve ever come to a blind date. We talked on the phone a number of times, exchanged emails, and, as we both confessed later, looked each other up online. He later told me that he told his best friend that he only went out with me again to see if he understood anything I said the second time, since apparently he found me incomprehensible on our first date. But I think it was the cassoulet. After he “researched” me, he came to a stereotypical conclusion, that I would order white wine and a salad, hold the dressing, fish, hold the sauce, that I was just that kind of girl. He took me to a French restaurant and while he had been right about the white wine (and the bottled water), he was totally startled when I ordered the cassoulet. And that was it. He looked at me with respect and I smiled back at him and neither one of us have any plans to do anything whatsoever that would cause the other one to weigh the reasons why they’re staying.
Nine
Security Check
I used to work for someone who had a pilot’s license who told me that the two most dangerous parts of flying are the 30 seconds of takeoff and the landing. Whenever I fly with anyone I know—whether it’s a friend, a child, or a husband—I hold their hand during takeoff and landing.
I’m not really afraid of flying. I had a brief period when I was, but a psychiatrist told me that “fear of flying” isn’t really fear of flying, it’s fear of something else, i.e., misplaced anxiety. When I pressed the psychiatrist on whether that was true or not, he said, “I have no idea. Just go with it. It works.” And so I did. I have passed this theory on to other friends who are frightened of flying, not too successfully, but nonetheless it works for me.
I’m not sure I believe that the most dangerous parts of flying are the 30 seconds of takeoff and the period of landing—it may be statistically true but I’m not sure it’s an absolute fact.
For a brief time (between husbands), I had a boyfriend in San Francisco and three almost-teenage children in Los Angeles. In my defense, I will say that I had help but it was still a little complicated. The relationship was doomed and somewhat short-lived but in the few months that we were dating, I logged a lot of hours on the United Airlines flights between LAX and SFO. In itself, that was difficult because at the time, there was only one runway open at the San Francisco airport. A three-hour delay was par for the course. There were tricks: get to know the people at United; if your flight was canceled or delayed, try to get on another one; cut the line; flash your United Airlines Platinum card (part of which you’d earned from the number of hours you’d logged on the round-trip flights from LAX to SFO); beg; pray that the weather was good and that, at least, the one runway that was open wasn’t fogged in.
It was a spring day in 1999 and I had a reservation on the 1 P.M. United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Miraculously, the flight was on time and boarding. I had a suitcase (carry-on) and my computer, both of which were a little heavy, so I sat and waited until the rest of the passengers had boarded so as not to get stuck in the walkway holding my luggage. By the time I started to board, the walkway was empty except for one other passenger, who was walking behind me: a Middle Eastern man wearing a sports jacket who appeared to be in his late 30s or early 40s, with a full ear-to-ear beard that was closely cropped. As I started to walk onto the plane, he stepped in front of me, stroked the side of the plane, gave me the strangest smile, and said in a heavy accent, “Going to explode.”
I said, “Excuse me?” I didn’t think I’d heard him right.
He stroked the side of the plane again and said, “Going to explode. You’ll see.”
And he gave me another strange smile and boarded the plane.
It was taunting, it was suggestive. I felt as if I’d had an encounter with pure evil, but I remember thinking to myself, “Okay, what am I supposed to do now?” I resisted the impulse to turn around and just keep walking. I boarded the plane and pretended I was a first-class passenger. I handed my coat to a small Filipino stewardess (who I still think is the calmest person I’ve ever met) and whispered, “The man who got on before me just made a threat to the plane, and I’m not sure what to do.”
She took my coat and said, “I understand.” She nodded so that I knew she understood. “Please take your seat. What seat is he in?”
I looked behind me briefly as he was sitting down. “5D,” I said.
“Please,” she repeated. “Take your seat. I’ll deal with this.”
I did as she asked, being careful not to look at him as I passed his seat. The plane was full, and the thing I knew that no one else did was the one o’clock to Los Angeles was no longer taking off on time. It was effectively grounded. I knew I couldn’t tell anyone on the plane what had happened, and I sat in my seat for what seemed like the longest time . . . in fact, it was almost half an hour.
At one point, I closed myself in the bathroom and called my ex-husband, who, among other things, had been front-line intelligence in the Israeli army, to see what he thought of what had just happened.
Sasha was very calm about it. “He sounds like a crazy person,” he said. “It happens.”
I remember saying to him, “Sasha, I understand why you say that, but it didn’t seem like that to me. It seemed to me he had a secret that he couldn’t keep to himself. And there was a way he said it, ‘Going to explode, you’ll see,’ that made me think he wasn’t talking about this plane—he was talking about something that was going to happen in the future.”