My daughter Jessie insisted that Hammertro was a deadringer for a white Kanye West, and clearly he used his looks to his advantage.
In another time and place, and gangster lifestyle aside, I would go for a man like him in a big way.
‘Stay cool, Mrs T,’ he instructed, as he sashayed out through my broken front door.
‘And I’d get that door fixed if I was you. It ain’t safe around here.’
With a huge, white smile and some sort of strange gesture with three fingers of his right hand, Hammertro disappeared back upstairs.
CHAPTER TWO
Thursday November 23
‘Remember what you might lose. Most people are more unhappy after a divorce.’
Jocelyn Priestly.
WHY DID I KEEP reading the moronic burblings of Jocelyn Priestly? How could I be more unhappy than I was at that moment? I was preparing for a Thanksgiving meal at the Teesons’ huge mobile home, located an hour’s drive upstate.
‘Why do we have to go there?’ Twelve-year-old Jessie eyed us both with the surly expression of a kid who is wise beyond her years. I saw she was wearing last year’s party dress, and that the buttons were stretched to breaking point across the front of it. The kid loved that dress, and I didn’t have to heart to suggest she’d outgrown it. Particularly as it was already a size 14.
‘You’ll fight in the car, you’ll fight with Gran and Aunty Cecily, then you’ll fight in the car home. That’s not being thankful, is it?’ she said, pouting.
‘They’re addicted to the trauma,’ her older brother J informed her, slumping against the doorframe.
At fourteen, he was the image of a young Carson, with hair just a shade darker.
‘You’re not wearing those,’ Carson told him, pointing at the filthy jeans that hung midway between his son’s hips and knees.
‘Come off it,’ I said. ‘Your mother dresses as if she is touting her wares on a street corner. J looks fine.’
My darling husband slid his famous look of detestation up and down my own rotund figure. ‘Jeans aren’t ‘fine’ for thanksgiving, Scar.’
‘How dare you!’
I wasn’t just in jeans and a dirty tee – I was wearing a flowing flowery top and chunky jewelry, both on loan from Lolly’s shop.
I looked, as far as was possible in my present state, relatively hip and trendy.
Or so Lolly had insisted.
Unlike my son, who looked as if he’d just dragged himself out of a conflict-ridden Middle Eastern warzone.
‘I didn’t mean you, I meant–‘
‘Bullshit, Carson. You hate the way I look. You’re always making sly digs.’
‘Here we go,’ remarked Jessie. ‘What did I say?’
‘Happy thanksgiving,’ J added.
‘Let’s just go, shall we?’ Carson held open the front door, which he’d fixed as best as he could – which was ineptly and haphazardly – on his return from work the night before.
As we sat in the car and watched Carson turn the key in the ignition over and over again, I prayed that the car wouldn’t start and we’d be saved. Or that it would and we could ward off the possibility of hyperthermia. Idly, as I shivered, I thought about the daily quote on that stupid calendar.
Would I be better off alone?
Was I better off before I’d met Carson?
Would I have been better off now if I’d never met Mr Harvard?
- Cue telephone call with Lolly last week:
‘You’ll never guess who called in at the shop today?’
Lolly had a successful boutique and stocked her own label, ‘LollyBliss’, plus other trendy labels. With her waist length blonde hair, legs up to her ears and a figure that nervous energy kept trim and taught, Lolly had everything I’d ever wanted – the looks, the job, the apartment, even a vintage 1967 Mercedes like the one my Uncle Hugh from Cumbria used to have. Despite the fact that we hardly saw each other, mostly because she was busy being successful and adored and I was busy being unsuccessful and ignored, Lolly called me up once or twice a week. Out of duty, I suspected, but I appreciated it, nonetheless.
‘Hairy McWeary?’ Hairy had declared his desire to wed Lolly at college and couldn’t seem to grasp that the word no really and truly meant no. I suppose it hadn’t helped that Lolly had slept with him once in the late 80s, when pissed out of her mind on schnapps.
‘No, that bloke you liked. Dickie Something?’
I filtered her words. ‘Robert?’
‘Yes, that’s it. Robert Simpson?’
‘The one who looked like a dark Brad Pitt?’
‘Yes. You called him Dickie because–‘
‘I had a puerile sense of humor, yeah, yeah.’
‘But anyway, he asked about you.’
‘No!’
‘Said he wouldn’t mind catching up.’
‘No!’
This second ‘no’ had a different meaning. How could I meet the one who got away looking like the one who’d been recently dragged from a swamp?
‘Come on. You’re always saying your life is boring and that you’re so darn miserable. Some harmless flirting with a hottie from your past isn’t going to ruin you and Carson, is it?’
‘It will when Robert takes one look at me and asks what the hell happened? At which point I will top myself.’
‘Don’t be crazy, Scarlet. You’re still gorgeous.’
‘I’m a fat lump.’
Lolly wasn’t one to lie. ‘You just need a little makeover, that’s all. New clothes, new hair. You’re still the same person.’
‘I’m about two of the person he knew.’
‘A coffee wouldn’t hurt, would it?’
It was out of the question. ‘What is he doing now, anyway?’
‘Same as before, something boring like corporate banking. Looks incredible though. Slightly graying, but still gorgeous. More Clooney than Pitt now. Delicious! I could never figure out why tall, dark and handsome wasn’t your type.’
‘I was dating Carson, remember? He asked me out too late.’
‘Never too late,’ Lolly said, and then there was some ruckus in the background and she abruptly hung up, leaving me with memories of Robert Simpson and my earlier, slimmer, life.
‘Scarlet!’
Carson’s sharp voice jolted me out of my flashback, and my seat.
‘What?’
‘Get out and push.’
‘Why do I need to push?’
‘Because you can’t drive, remember?’
‘And whose fault is that?’
‘Here we go,’ said J to Jessie this time, from the backseat.
Because it was Thanksgiving, I decide not to argue further and got out to push. No snow, thank goodness, but it was freezing and I realized I’d left my gloves in the flat.
‘Come on, Scar,’ called Carson, revving the engine of the clapped-out Toyota.
What the hell kind of man was he? It was hardly gallant, making me do this.
Never mind, if all the skin was ripped from my hands during this pathetic attempt to attend the world’s worst Thanksgiving celebration, at least I wouldn’t have to do the washing up.
Again.
The wheels spun, the engine struggled, and finally, the car shot forward.
I had to run in my heels to get back into the car, because Carson couldn’t risk stopping in case the bloody car seized up again.
As I jumped in, my shirt caught on a bit of metal near where the seatbelt had been reinstalled by one of the previous five owners, presumably after an accident.
The metal tore a hole in the shoulder of my outfit.
‘Well, that certainly completes the look,’ Carson remarked, without taking his eyes off the road.
It was supposed to be a joke, but if I had some sort of sharp implement, I would have plunged it into his neck then and there, kids or no kids.
I turned around to check that Jessie and J had their coats – it seemed colder in the car than outside, now that we were moving. There were breezes leaking t
hrough from every panel of the old motor.
‘Slow down, Carson. The faster you go, the quicker the kids freeze.’
‘Stop telling me how to drive, will you?’ Carson muttered, which triggered the decade old Thanksgiving Day argument about driving.
‘I might, if you’d do it properly.’
‘Care to take over?’
Bastard!
‘You know I can’t drive.’
‘Are you still blaming me for that, too?’
‘Maybe you should learn to drive, Mum,’ Jessie said in a soft voice, seeing the tears in my eyes and trying to avert a disaster.
I rolled my head around and threw her a sad little smile.
‘Maybe.’
- Cue depressing recollection from the past:
‘Everyone needs to be able to drive.’
It was nearly Christmas and we were standing on the corner of 5th, near Saks.
‘Why? We live in New York City, Scar. And we don’t have a car.’
I watched the people around us, rugged up in their warm coats, struggling with their many bags of unnecessary gifts, and wondered if I was making the right choice in marrying Carson.
I loved him – of course I did – but doubts were beginning to gnaw at me. The blond foppish clown was slowly morphing into a serious, boring adult, whilst I was content to be young and carefree for a while longer.
‘You have free will Scarlet,’ my mother told me sternly on the phone. ‘Just tell him what you want.’
Mum and Dad couldn’t make the wedding because of Mum’s blood pressure making it impossible for them to fly. They’d promised to visit as soon as the doctor gave the go ahead.
‘I love him,’ I’d told Mum stubbornly. ‘It will be fine, as long as I love him.’
I looked at him now. My snuggly, clever teacher. He wasn’t being unkind. Just careful with our money. But that didn’t change the fact that everyone needed to know how to drive, did it?
‘One day we’ll have a car,’ I said to Carson, ’and then it might be too late for me to learn. Lolly says she can get me a deal because she’s learning, too. It will be almost half-price.’
‘Baby,’ Carson murmured, nibbling my ear, as we waited for yet another light to turn green, ‘it’s never too late to learn anything, but we can’t afford it right now. I’m only a poor teacher, remember?’
We were still in love. Still courting: that’s the excruciating word Cecily used – courting. My future mother-in-law also used the most eye-watering swear words I’d ever heard, so I couldn’t quite account for the change in tone, and the use of words such as ‘courting’, when it came to Carson.
Anything he did was spoken of with the reverence afforded a British royal.
Meanwhile, the rest of Cecily’s life took on the resonance of a late-night re-run of a Jerry Springer unplugged episode.
‘It isn’t all about you, Carson. I have to have a life too, don’t I?’
He ran a hand over my still slim tummy. ‘We discussed this. Being a wife and mother – that’s what you want, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, no, maybe.’
’Maybe? You’ve been telling me for months how you hate working with Lolly on that stall and that going to college is a waste of time.’
‘Standing out in the cold selling clothes to people who don’t want to pay more than five dollars isn’t exactly what I wanted to do with my life.’
‘But what do you want to do, then?’
‘I don’t know, study something else?’
‘What? Law?’
He’d laughed at the thought.
Loudly.
‘No, of course not, but I do want to do something with my life.’
‘You will. You’ll need to work if we’re to live in New York and have kids.’
‘Maybe we need to move – somewhere where we can afford. I’ll need to learn to drive then.’
Carson grinned. ‘Sure. Find me a job with another private school that pays a decent wage and we’ll go.’
It would be impossible to do that and he knew it. Private schools were closing. Jobs were scarce.
‘Now, how about one of those amazing pretzels from Rimnies?’ Deftly changing the subject, Carson wrapped an arm around me and directed me across the road.
He wasn’t telling me no, I realized later.
He never told me no.
He just never said yes.
Cecily and Cecily 2 were waiting by the door.
‘Gosh, you are so late,’ said the former.
‘Late,’ echoed Howie, suddenly appearing, holding a packet of crisps in one hand and a new Nintendo in the other.
‘We have to come further than you,’ J told him.
Cecily 2 lived in a nearby static caravan a short stroll from her mother’s.
‘Do not,’ Howie said.
‘Do.’
Not.’
‘Do.’
‘Not.’
‘Do.’
‘Not.’
I gave up.
‘You look nice,’ I said to the mother-in-law. She didn’t – she was wearing something that was shiny and had the texture and appearance of rubber. The hair was a helmet of red mixed with the usual peroxide streaks.
‘Is that what you’re wearing,’ barked the daughter, prodding me roughly.
‘No,’ I said sweetly, ‘I’ve got a nice little Calvin Klein in the car.’
‘Really? That’s what I’m wearing. Did you get yours from Harry the Crook?’ Cecily 2 was clueless; and was wearing something so tight and short that it was defamatory to accuse Calvin Klein of having anything to do with it.
‘That’ll make a bruise,’ Jessie whispered to me, patting my hip in sympathy.
Cecily 2 was a complete moron. An oaf of a women, with a face that the any natural history museum should be interested in acquiring for its missing link section, she also, and inexplicably, had the body of a supermodel.
In fact, Cecily 2 had once been employed as a leg model for some Japanese company that sold depilatory cream, which meant she now called herself an ‘ex-model’.
It was impossible to express how much I hated her, expect to say that if I there was a choice between her and joining a fundamentalist group with a fetish for semtex, I’d probably plump for the latter because it was safer.
Before she was eighteen, Cecily 2 had been twice arrested for GBH, and once for assault with a deadly weapon. ‘It’s a fuckin’ stiletto,’ she’d insisted in court, in mitigation, and the judge, deciding she was insane and that prison wardens had enough to deal with, let her go. Admittedly, since she’d had Howie she’d given up violent assaults for petty theft and shoplifting. Considering the designer gear she got about in, she was bloody good at it.
She was called Cecily 2 because Carson’s father had decided that the tradition of naming a son after the father was sexist.
‘It’s a triumph for feminism,’ he’d apparently famously declared, signing off the birth certificate with a flourish.
‘It’s a sign of insanity,’ I had told Lolly when I’d heard, but Carson didn’t seem to find anything unusual about having a sister known throughout her school years as ‘Number Twos’.
Cecily 2’s husband was a meek little man who was the nicest of the whole Teeson bunch. His name was Rufus and he was a distant relative, originally from Canada. By his pained expression at family gatherings, I guessed that most days he wished that he was back there.
I’d once asked where he’d met Cecily 2, because they seemed like such an unlikely couple. ‘Internet,’ had been the abrupt answer.
‘She was the only one who looked like her photo. Plus, we had the same surname. I was curious.’
And despite all that, he had still wanted to meet her.
The voice I detested more than root canal without anesthetic barked out an order: ‘Well, come in, come in. The turkey isn’t getting any warmer, are you Rufus?’
Cecily 2 guffawed unattractively at her mother’s pathetic joke, and Cecily clapped her
petite hands in glee. ‘What fun, eh? All the family together on Thanksgiving.’
My kids were shuffled into the hall and out into what was called the sun porch. It was a poorly insulated lean-to that was impossible to heat, but Cecily lured the children back there with a Wii from the back of a truck, and bottomless glasses of sugarless coke.
‘Don’t worry,’ she told me, running her beady eyes over my girth. ‘It’s fat free.’
Once the children were out of way, the serious business of drinking began.
‘Make mine a double,’ Cecily 2 called, without bothering to see what was on offer.
‘Triple,’ her husband echoed, clearly desperate to blot out the horror of being married to her.
Given that they were drinking wine that was, to all intents and purposes, lighter fluid, I couldn’t see how they remained alive.
I declined a glass. Carson went for the diet soda.
‘So, guess what, Mom?’ Cecily 2 yelled at her mother.
‘Do you have to yell?’ Carson asked politely.
‘Do you fuckin’ well have to live, Carson?’
I sniggered at that, but soon set my mouth straight after Cecily shot me a withering glare.
‘So guess what?’ Cecily 2 yelled again. It was one of the woman’s unfortunate quirks – yelling. Carson said she’d had an ear infection a few years back and since then her hearing came in and out.
A bit like her mental acuity.
‘What darlin’?’ Cecily said.
‘I’m gonna do some more leg modelin’!’
This was shocking news. Since Cecily 2 had last modeled, ten years previously, her legs (and lanky body) had been subjected to so many sessions at the Tanning Joint in a nearby static home that her knee wrinkles could be seen from the moon. Even her mother couldn’t maintain a straight face.
Howie appeared, on the prowl for something a little more substantial that zero calorie cola for his Thanksgiving dinner, and heard the momentous news.
‘Is it some hospital show? You gonna be like the decimated limb?’
I had to give it to the kid, that was actually hilarious, and even Carson gave a little chuckle.
The Great Christmas Breakup Page 2