“I let myself get lost in the greatest love affair of my life, and before I knew it, Parker was on the way. We got married and after Parker was born, Reid insisted that I stay home with him. When I complained of isolation from adult humans, he hired a nanny, a nineteen-year-old English girl named Gwendolyn Strathmore. He ran off with her four months later and left me unemployed, broken-hearted and solely responsible for the well-being of one very colicky infant son.” I can’t be sure, because she stops talking, but I think I hear a catch in her voice, like she could cry.
“I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
“It was all for the best. I hid in the bedroom for a week, lost and paralyzed by panic and simple exhaustion. Then I picked myself up and started pounding the pavement. A friend of a friend introduced me to legal search. Within three years, I’d spun off my own firm. When I met Evan and Janice’s father, I promised myself he’d never get to me like Reid did, and that I’d never give up my own ambitions for a man again.”
She puts down the Harvard application and asks to see Princeton. “Your alma mater,” she remarks with a smile. “You’re a smart girl, Zoë, and if you don’t screw up your life, you’re going to go far.”
“Thank you.” Even though she’s dealt me yet another back-handed compliment, I feel I have to acknowledge it. Carol has never been this calm, rational and open for such a sustained period of time. And equally importantly, she’s not running me through the ringer over every detail of every page of every application. I hold my breath and wait for the proverbial other shoe to drop.
She opens the Princeton file and flips to the essay section. “Some sadistic fuck composes these questions.”
That’s for sure. Carol blinks at the page and stares in disbelief. I could recite the question she’s reading verbatim, even though I can’t see the page in front of her. I racked my brain for days over how to compose Janice’s answer. The Princeton admissions committee wanted to know: “Using the quotation below as a jumping off point, tell us about an event or experience that helped you define one of your values or changed how you approach the world.” When I first saw the quote, I wondered whether the whole essay question was a joke. The lines, pulled from some obscure poem, deal with unanswerable questions and smooth rocks washed up by the surf.
Carol looks up from the nonsense I’ve written, which relies heavily on Janice’s two hours of experience volunteering at a homeless shelter, and says, “I’m not done yet. Listen to me very carefully. This older man, who’s turned your world upside down and made your financial worries go away...”
I look up and meet my boss’s gaze. I’m about to ask how she knows that when she says, “Don’t look so surprised. I know everything. Anyway, I’m going to give you advice, whether you want it or not, alright?”
At first I don’t nod or give her any affirmative answer. It’s so unusual for her to ask permission before holding forth on any topic that I’ve been conditioned not to react to her questions. Safer to assume they’re always rhetorical.
“Don’t ever surrender control of your financial future to a man. When Reid left me, I got nothing but child support, and the ‘right’ to live in what I thought was my house for six months. And it’s not like I didn’t have a decent lawyer. My parents put a second mortgage on their home in Long Island to pay him for me. But it turns out Reid had everything squirreled away in trusts that I didn’t understand—and wouldn’t have cared about anyway—because I was so dippy and in love. I signed all sorts of papers early in our marriage, because he said he was protecting our future. I didn’t bother to ask questions, and I didn’t realize until it was too late, that the whole time, he had been securing his own nest egg. Not ours.”
Wow. Carol Broadwick was dippy. Surely not in this lifetime. When she pauses to shake her head and presumably marvel at her own naiveté, I feel like I need to say something. But I’m not so stupid as to try to nudge the conversation in my own direction. What she craves now, like always, is praise.
“Even though he treated you horribly, you became an enormous success in your own right.”
“I did, didn’t I? But my point to you, Zoë, is that it would have been so much easier for me if I’d had some of my own money to throw into the business at the get go. Instead I saddled myself with debt and left my toddler with strangers every day, and dragged him into the office with me on weekends. So it kills me to watch one of my brightest stars start down the same road that almost derailed my life.”
I’m one of her brightest stars? That’s a new development. It occurs to me that she’s neither cursed nor criticized for at least ten minutes. That must be a record. Then, as abruptly as she digressed, Carol shifts her focus back to Janice’s college applications. Our moment of personal connection has ended, but her review seems cursory at best, and we’re finished in way less than the time she allotted.
She watches as I carefully arrange each package into its pre-labeled FedEx mailer, and when I say, “I guess that’s it, then,” and get up to leave, she hands me an envelope.
“Whatever you all say about me, you can’t say I’m not a woman of my word.”
Inside is a personal check, not a C.R. Broadwick & Associates one, from her to me, for $10,000.
I relate most of the details of my tête-à-tête with Carol to Oscar, in the car on the way to LaGuardia. We’ve got time for the long version, since we’re sitting in brutal traffic. I leave out her overt warning about him. Instead I go on and on about how I get her now that I know where she’s coming from, and while I’ve never begrudged her hard-won success, I’ve never liked the woman. Maybe that’s about to change.
Despite everyone’s (alright, mainly Kevin’s) admonitions that my job lacks social utility, my primary complaint has never been with the substance of my work. I actually don’t mind talking to stressed out lawyers whose careers are the most important thing in their lives, day in and day out. But I have spent years living in real and palpable fear of my boss. I don’t want to develop a twitch like the poor Town Crier, whose face ticks uncontrollably whenever Carol invades her space. Maybe this conversation is a defining moment for me. Instead of passively hoping to succeed, I need to take a page from Carol’s book and be more assertive. Maybe not psychotic like her, but at least more proactive professionally. For the first time in ages, I see my future ahead of me and I’m not overwhelmed. I’m actually kind of excited.
As I hold hands with Oscar in the back seat of the black sedan, I wonder if I’m wrong to take him home so soon. We’ve only known each other for a couple of months, and it’s been less than half a year since my break up with Brendan, whom my entire family had embraced as one of their own. Even though everyone knows his sexuality drove our split, and I certainly garnered heaps of sympathy, maybe it’s too soon to ask them to welcome a new man.
Oscar sets aside my doubts by saying exactly the right thing. “I’m proud of you. You’re finally coming to grips with the fact that you’re great at what you do. And you do it in the shadow of a crazy lady, with a great deal of grace, as far as I can tell. I think it’s fantastic.” He leans over and gives me a quick kiss. I feel myself starting to glow.
He looks calm and collected, not at all like an anxious boyfriend being dragged home to Mom and Dad for inspection. His ease should put me at ease, but it doesn’t, and I’m not sure why. It must be normal anticipatory anxiety about the weekend.
Oscar’s BlackBerry beeps and he consults his watch before scrolling to the new message. “We should be fine, even if it’s gridlocked all the way out to Queens.” While he reads email, I notice he’s brought his scratched up briefcase. Even now that he’s bought a replacement, he’s still attached to the original. That’s so sweet, I think as we pull onto the Tri-Borough Bridge at a snail’s pace. I’m so content being with him that I don’t even mind the traffic jam. How pathetic is that? Especially since he’s ignoring me at the present moment, typing madly with his thumbs. I stare out the window and watch a blinding orange Corvette inch along beside us.
Oscar makes me happy, deliriously so at times, but I can’t seem to relax and enjoy my good fortune. I’m too worried about whether I’m good enough for him, despite the fact that he’s given me no reason to be insecure. I waste so much time thinking about what I’m wearing, and what I’m saying, and whether he thinks I’m smart and beautiful and sophisticated enough. Sure, I go through the motions of being his settled in girlfriend, but I hate when he sees me without make-up, or with my hair not blown dry, or my clothes not quite right. He’s never seen the comfortable shirts I sleep in when I’m alone, and I don’t invite him in my apartment without launching a massive clean up first. I’d die if he ever opened one of my closets and saw all the things I deem too common for his eyes.
Which is ludicrous, because everyone has that stuff. Even Oscar, I presume. He’s just got more storage space than the average city dweller, which lets him hide it better. So I should stop trying to undermine myself. Everything is great. I should not be searching for a problem where there is none. He obviously thinks I’m good enough, so maybe I ought to believe it myself. The weekend will go beautifully. Everyone will say we’re made for each other, and when we get back to New York in three short days, things will be different. Easier. More settled. More solid.
TWENTY-FOUR
My mother greets us in the chaos of Thanksgiving Wednesday at Miami International Airport, dressed in her usual ensemble of diamond earrings, immaculate coiffure, billowy dress made of hemp or some other politically correct fabric, and Birkenstock sandals, circa 1982. Not that they’ve changed the design much over the decades, but I think it’s kind of noteworthy that my mom, who spends $75 twice a week to have her hair blown dry, keeps having her old sandals repaired. I stopped noticing her self-contradictory sense of style years ago, but maybe I should have been more thorough in my pre-flight briefing to Oscar. I catch him doing a double-take. He tries to cover by removing his jacket and commenting to me about the weather, even though we’re inside the air conditioned terminal.
Mom comes hurtling at me for a big hug, then lurches back suddenly as if shocked. “Did you get your breasts done?” she demands in a loud hiss, that lets everyone within twenty feet know that she’s visibly horrified by the thought of her own flesh and blood going under the knife to have inorganic pouches of perk inserted.
“No. Mom. God. What are you thinking?”
“They feel pretty fake to me,” she presses the issue.
“Mother, I did not have a boob job. I’m wearing a good bra, that’s all. And now that you’ve totally embarrassed me, this is Oscar.”
Oscar struggles to stifle a laugh and extends his hand. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.”
“You are every bit as good looking as Zoë claimed. Which is surprising, because I was afraid she might be getting a bit desperate.” Mom’s eyelids flutter. She’s a pretty lady, even though she’s spent most of the past sixty-five years baking her skin in the sun. She has huge blue eyes with flecks of green that none of her kids were fortunate enough to inherit, cheekbones like a cover girl, and every month she has her hair painstakingly restored to its original honey blonde color. Under the tent-like garments she lately favors, she’s disguising a great figure to boot, from swimming at least a mile a day, every day. Sadly, while I can always predict what she’ll look like, even if it’s been a long time between visits, I can never guess what will fly out of her mouth at any given moment.
“Mom, please. Where’s Dad anyway?”
“He went looking for a Starbucks.”
“Dad puts away seven or eight cups of coffee a day,” I explain to Oscar.
“I see nothing wrong with that,” Oscar says, just as Dad appears down the hallway. He’s balancing one of those cardboard cup holder trays as he pushes upstream against the throng of deplaning travelers.
He reaches us and sticks out his free hand to Oscar before greeting his only daughter. The steaming coffees list precariously to the left but miraculously don’t fall. Oscar shakes Dad’s hand and relieves him of the tray.
“I expect a man like you would drink black coffee,” my father says in a tone I’m sure he thinks is his man-to-man voice. Oscar accepts the grande black graciously even though I know he usually drinks it with three blood jolting sugars.
“And green tea lattes for the ladies.” Dad looks to Mom for affirmation. I make a face and protest that he knows I love coffee. It’s been one of my major food groups since high school.
“It’s healthier for your ovaries, darling,” my mother says, as she foists the unwelcome beverage at me. “At your age, you can’t be too careful.”
“Mom!” I hiss. Oscar stifles another laugh. I consult my watch. We are less than ten minutes into an almost 72-hour visit. I take a drink of my parentally hijacked hot beverage and almost spit it out. It’s that foreign. “What the heck is in this?”
“Soy milk, darling,” my mother trills.
Of course. I keep forgetting that the vegan thing means non-dairy creamers. I make a mental note to dash to the grocery store for real milk before anyone needs further caffeination. And maybe I’ll stop at the liquor store on the same trip. God knows I’m ready for a drink.
As we start to push through the crowds towards the exit, my mother takes Oscar’s arm and begins earnestly explaining about the horrors of the American dairy industry. “They used to get seven or eight years out of a cow, and now they normally cull them after two,” she laments. Oscar, to his credit, doesn’t venture an opinion. He arranges his face into a suitably sober expression and nods solemnly.
Once they’re safely four or five paces ahead, my dad takes pity on me and offers to switch drinks. I wouldn’t normally take him up on this, but it’s the only way he can find to rebel against the tyranny of his wife, and I can’t bring myself to take that away from him. He grins conspiratorially as I relieve him of his high test coffee.
We’re not quite in the driveway when my brother’s kids stampede out to meet us. They’ve recently turned five and I, being the prejudiced aunt who sees them two or three times a year, think they’re the most gorgeous little beings ever. Ben sports what looks like his Halloween costume. “Auntie Zoë! I’m a pirate!” he calls happily.
I roll down the window and give him my best arrrggh before he adds, breathlessly, “And Courtney’s going to walk the plank!”
“No I’m not and you can’t make me!” Courtney starts to make her own dash towards me, blonde banana curls streaming underneath a glittery pink tiara. She’s tripping over the folds of her princess dress but somehow managing to stay upright.
As I step out of the car, Ben swings his pirate sword to keep his sister at bay so that he can pounce on me first. “Auntie Zoë! Come see my pirate ship!”
“No! Come see the castle first!” Courtney squeals, as she tries to muscle her way in. After I manage to sneak in quick hugs and kisses, each of them seizes one of my hands, and united in their task for the moment, they start to drag me towards the front door. I glance back at Oscar apologetically. He smiles and shrugs and looks uncharacteristically indecisive about whether to join the children’s pirate expedition, or to stay behind and risk whatever line of questioning happens to fly out of my mother’s mouth. Maybe he regrets coming already.
Ben stops short on the front step. “A coconut hit Daddy’s rental car yesterday and made a big dent,” he reports, suddenly solemn. “And then Daddy said a very bad word.”
“That’s too bad,” I say. “But at least it didn’t hit a person.”
“That’s what Mommy said.”
My brother, Scott, has registered our arrival. “Hey, sis.” He plants a kiss on my cheek and asks, “So aren’t you going to introduce your new man? He must be either brave or severely limited to come here for the weekend.”
“I’m hoping for brave. I hear you had a coconut incident.”
“Yeah, it took me four hours to sort out a new rental car, with the holiday weekend.”
“Auntie Zoë!” Ben pleads. “Let’s
go!”
“You go see the pirate stuff. I’ll help Oscar with the bags,” Scott says.
We step into the foyer and one of my father’s paint by number projects, a large homage to Rembrandt, greets us. Thank God I told Oscar about Dad’s hobby. He said it sounded harmless, but this particular example of his early work might be enough to force a re-evaluation of that opinion.
Ben and Courtney stop, drop to the floor and exchange their sneakers for slippers. Another quirk of Mom’s that I failed to warn Oscar about. Though if he’s planning to stick around, he might as well get used to the craziness now. I kick off my own boots, and trade them for the least offensive available option, rubber flip flops. Laurie, my sister-in-law, who I’m sure brought her own slippers, yells hello from the kitchen.
“Let’s go say hi to your mom on the way to the castle,” I say to the kids.
The kitchen, which normally has so little to offer it propels me to seek fast food outlets I’d never patronize in New York, looks as if it’s been transformed into a set for Martha Stewart’s program. That is, it would look like their set if every inch of wall space weren’t covered with examples from Dad’s paint by number still life period. Most of these, his early works, clash with each other. Mom says he likes the kits because he’s colorblind. I always thought she was joking, but now that I see the arrangement of finished work, I understand that she’s been right all along.
Laurie rolls out dough for pie crusts, next to several overflowing bowls of perfectly cored, peeled and sliced apples of various varieties. I know this because each one is labeled. Laurie is one of those women whom other moms love to hate. She has two rambunctious children, but her house is always immaculate and the meals are always to die for. And she does it all while looking an awful lot like a modern take on one of those fifties TV commercial housewives who smilingly pushed their vacuums around in dresses and high heels. Laurie used to work as an associate in one of San Francisco’s biggest law firms, but she gave it up when she ran out of maternity leave, and as far as I know, she’s never been happier.
The Hazards of Hunting While Heartbroken Page 25