City Mouse

by Lender, Stacey;

  “Don’t sell yourself short,” I told Carolann. “You’ve got legitimate fundraising experience. Party planning, operations. Organizing a team to raise over twenty-five grand involves a huge set of skills that lots of companies need.” I wasn’t saying those things to make Carolann feel better; they were all true. But she didn’t look convinced.

  “Two years in a row now you’ve proved you’re a pro at on-the-bar dancing,” Alyson teased. Not the direction I was heading, but at least it made Carolann smile.

  Tami joined in: “That’s perfect! Flexible hours. A nice fat paycheck. Your boobs are still perky enough to take your shirt off every once in a while.” Carolann looked embarrassed but let out a laugh. “Now we just have to come up with your stripper name. What was the name of your first pet and the street you grew up on?”

  “I had a cat named Sunshine. And I lived on Woodridge Terrace.”

  “Sunshine Woodridge,” Tami said. “I like the wood part. How about Sunshine Hardwood? That could work. How about your mom-stripper name, Aly? Although you used to make more money than a stripper when you were out selling drugs.”

  Alyson selling drugs? Then I remembered that she had done it legally, in pharma sales.

  “I meant to tell you, I ran into your old work nemesis in the Muddy Cup the other day. Cynthia Kelly. I remember you used to fight her tooth and nail for those hot doctor accounts. She’s at Novartis now and said they’re hiring. She said you should call her.”

  Alyson casually picked up the magazine on her lap and started flipping through the pages as if she might find her response inside. Finally she said, “You know, I’m way too busy with my very important job of picking the napkins for Jeff’s little two-hundred-person I’m-the-Greatest, Vote-for-Me event at our house next Saturday.”

  Tami snipped back, “God, Aly, enough already about the freaking napkins. Every time you mention Jeff’s campaign it’s like, let me go get my tiny violin.”

  I hadn’t ever heard Tami zing Alyson like that before. I waited for Alyson to take a swipe back but she just sat there, silently turning page after page. I couldn’t tell if she was fuming or upset, or both.

  Tami didn’t let it drop. “If you’re so miserable being Jeff’s honey-do campaign wife, just tell him to fuck off and have someone on his staff do the grunt work. I mean, you don’t have to necessarily go back to work to get out of it, but you used to love your old job, out there hustling, kicking Cynthia’s ass every quarter. It’d be good for you to get some of that Aly-fire back instead of sitting around seething on the sidelines, watching Jeff.”

  Alyson slapped the magazine down on the chair. “You honestly think I’m jealous of Jeff? Running for these stupid positions that mean absolutely nothing except to fuel his pathetic ego? It makes me sick what a big fat waste of time and money it is, and all of it for what, the Ramapo Council of Village Idiots?”

  “Well, at least he’s out there trying for something.”

  Ouch. This fight was going way past their usual barbs and I wondered why Tami was bringing this all up with Alyson now? I thought this was all home shit and we were supposed to be away.

  “You think you know everything, Tami, but you don’t, you don’t have a clue!” Alyson yelled, her eyes blazing with rage. “Maybe you’d like to know, maybe you’d all like to know: Jeff has basically used up all of our savings and has been pulling out of our 401(k) to fund his little bullshit pipe dream, even with all of these fundraisers I have to host. Maybe that’s why I’m not walking around singing his fucking praises all the time.”

  Pulling from their retirement? I thought they had loads of money. All their luxury cars and arcade games and three-speed rotisseries; the personal training sessions and expensive fertility treatments, if they were even still trying—who knew at this point? And now the campaign. It all added up, it added up to miserable, and I wished Tami hadn’t pushed Alyson to expose their private financial troubles.

  Troubles, relatively speaking. Alyson was lucky to even have a 401(k) to pull from; she was better off than 99.9 percent of the rest of the planet, but I certainly wasn’t going to say that. I knew that stressing about money, no matter how much you had or didn’t have, was one of the ebbs of marriage everyone goes through at some point, one of those biggies no one warns you about before you begin. I wanted to tell her I knew what it felt like to live through the dreams of your husband, and when they didn’t pan out exactly as you hoped—financially or otherwise—that hollow sense of disappointment and loss when you realized that the perfect life you wished for in your fifth-grade diary isn’t where you are, or might ever be. But we learn to compromise along the way; we move to the suburbs and we host fundraisers if we have to; we spend and save and take and give and hope the checkbook—and the partnership—ends up balancing in our favor in the end.

  But I couldn’t say anything even close to these things. People were weird about money. You could talk about stripper names and IUDs and how many times a week you’re having sex with your husband, but any real talk about money, no way.

  Alyson sat there looking gaunt in her bikini, her face twisted in an infuriated pout, and I suddenly felt sorry for her. She had put herself out there and everyone was silent.

  I took a deep breath. “I understand how—”

  “NO. YOU. DON’T!” Alyson screamed. “I’m sick of everyone saying they understand, you DON’T understand, NO ONE understands.”

  “You don’t have to bite my head off,” I mumbled, and then Tami jumped in.

  “I care about you, Aly,” she said in a softer voice, as if she realized she had taken things too far. “We all do. And we can help you get through this.”

  But Alyson didn’t seem to appreciate Tami’s conciliatory tone. She looked even more angry, her face and neck turning a shade of purple under her sunburn, and she shouted, “If you really cared you’d leave me the fuck alone!” and then took off down the beach.

  There was something in the slow sigh as Tami stood up and started after her that made me think this wasn’t the first time she’d been here with Alyson. “Save my seat,” she called back over her shoulder.

  I watched as the two became distant dots on the shore. Tami knew Alyson longer and better than any of us—if anyone could calm Alyson down, it was her. But I still couldn’t understand why she had felt the need to set Alyson off in the first place. I hated how she always instigated fights and then was the one to fix them, the sadist and the savior. It was one thing to motivate and support your friends to do more and to be more, but Tami knew the election was a sore spot for Alyson. And now we all knew more about why.

  The little boy who had been splashing in the waves started wailing, “I don’t want to get out now, Mommy, I don’t want to!”

  “Tami was awfully harsh on Alyson, don’t you think?” I said to Ivy and Carolann.

  “Close friends can be as vicious as sisters, Jessica,” Carolann replied. “I love my sister but she’s always telling me just about everything I don’t want to hear.”

  “Alyson has seemed kind of down lately, maybe she did need a Tami intervention,” Ivy said. “Although I don’t think Alyson going back into sales is the answer. You can be perfectly happy and not work.”

  “That’s true,” I said, not wanting to revisit that topic. My head pulsed in a dull, dehydrated ache and I felt the backs of my legs sticking to my chair. I stood up and walked down to the water to cool down and my feet froze as the first wave hit them, but after a few minutes I eased my way in up to my waist and dunked the back of my hair. I loved the beach but rarely swam in the ocean, too worried about pinching crustaceans and jellyfish and the umpteen million other treacherous sea creatures swimming underneath.

  Yet even after my dip, the pressure in my head persisted. “I think I need to go back and lie down in the air-conditioning for an hour to get rid of this headache,” I said, drying my legs with a towel. “The humidity out here is killing me.”

  “Are you okay?” Ivy asked, looking concerned.

/>   “Thanks, I’m fine, except for my head. After a nap in the A/C, I’ll be good to go.” I gathered up my belongings. “Meet you guys back at the house later?”

  “Feel better,” Ivy said. “We’ve got a big night ahead of us.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll be good to go,” I assured her.

  Back in the room, I turned up both the air and the fan on high and lay down on my bed, but the second I closed my eyes my phone vibrated on the nightstand. It was a text from Aaron. Home from party, lunchtime & getting P&M down for a nap. Have fun. He was dreaming if he thought he would get both of them to nap at the same time. But for today, that was his problem to deal with, not mine.

  I tried to close my eyes again but kept thinking about Tami and Alyson’s fight and couldn’t fall sleep. I rolled over and stared at the ceiling fan whirling and remembered reading on the plane about the Sanctuary’s newly renovated five-star spa. Maybe I could stop by and see if they could fit me in for a massage. A massage could help make my headache go away—and might even let me escape that looming tennis lesson. The more I lay there and thought about it, the more excited I became about a possible hour of pampering, and I finally decided it was worth a shot.

  I got up and threw on a sundress. What else? Sunglasses, my wallet. A book. I automatically picked up my phone but paused before putting it in my bag. My fingers wrapped around it like a Venus flytrap. Put it down, my vacation voice commanded. You’ll never truly be away unless you leave it behind. I pressed down on both buttons to turn it off, all the way off, until the screen went black. There. I left it on the bed, slipped on my flip-flops, grabbed the keys, and went out into the bright afternoon, feeling better already.

  The reception area was empty and I crossed my fingers it was a serendipitous sign everyone was out enjoying the gorgeous beach day instead of at the spa. “May I help you?” the lady behind the counter asked in a smooth Southern lilt.

  I smiled sweetly and tried to look especially weary. “I hope so. I’m away from my toddlers this weekend for the first time and I would do anything if you could fit me in for a massage.”

  “I remember what it’s like to have little ones,” she said, eyeing the schedule on her computer. “My babies are seventeen and twenty now. How old are yours?”

  “Almost two and almost four. Two girls—and quite a handful. And you look amazing—you must have given birth when you were a toddler yourself.”

  She smiled and clicked the mouse a few times. “Normally we’re booked solid but I do have a last-minute cancellation for an Abhyanga treatment with Marilyn in about forty minutes. You can sit in the sauna or have a spa lunch out on the veranda while you’re waiting, if you’d like. And if you really want to relax, we could add thirty minutes of Reiki for a total of ninety minutes. How does that sound, dear?”

  I had no idea what Abhy-whatever or Reiki was, but the thought of spending an hour and a half in a dark room with someone doting over me sounded like heaven.

  After lunching in my white waffle-weave robe and slippers, I curled up on a comfortable couch in the solarium to wait for my appointment, sipping cucumber water and breathing in the spa air redolent of lavender. What a find this place was. I felt like I had slipped into someone else’s life, playing the role of the Southern belle. And boy did it feel wonderfully decadent to be by myself on my own free time with nowhere to be but right there, and no one to be with but me.

  Marilyn led me into a treatment room and covered my body with warm blankets. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on the music, a faintly tribal Indian or Asian chant of some sort. She laid her hands on my forehead for nearly a full minute without moving them, then rubbed her hands together and placed her fingertips gently on the tops of my shoulders. It felt nice to have someone’s warm hands on my body, but where was the massage part? I hoped it would start soon.

  Suddenly a drop of warm liquid hit in the center of my forehead. And then another. “This will start to remove your stagnant energy and stimulate your Prana,” Marilyn said in a whisper. Uh-oh, was I in for one of those holistic treatments where they do a lot of hocus-pocus but don’t ever give you an actual massage? The hot oil drip continued on my shoulders, my wrists, on each of my open palms, and then I even felt drops above my belly button, which tickled a little. It felt as if my body was being prepared for an embalming. Goodbye, Aaron, I thought, picturing myself entombed underneath the resort’s floorboards along with the other uptight Northerners they wanted to get rid of.

  I sincerely tried to listen to Marilyn’s voice to imagine my impurities loosening, but my mind kept drifting back to Aaron and wondering how he was doing, shuttling the girls in the car to and from their activities. And that stupid deer eating up our bushes. I didn’t believe in guns but I had a serious death wish for that deer. Why couldn’t it snack next door on Jeff and Alyson’s shrubs or the ten gazillion acres of trees and forest around us? What was it that made our bushes so goddamn deer-delicious? Just thinking about it made me tense up and Marilyn must have felt it because she reminded me to take deep breaths in through my nose and out through my mouth. “That’s good, like that. Now keep breathing.”

  Maybe I couldn’t clear my mind though I could keep breathing—breathing was one thing I could do automatically, in and out, and as she starting rubbing my shoulders I could feel the tension finally start to release. The music of the waves built up and then gently washed over the shoreline, washing over me, and I lost myself for what felt like a minute, maybe two, and then felt a gentle nudge. “Ms. Almasi? I hope you enjoyed the treatment. There’s a glass of water on the table for you. When you’re ready, you can get dressed and I’ll show you back to the locker room.”

  It was over? I squinted at the clock on the counter behind me and could see that it was true, my ninety minutes had passed. I must have fallen asleep! But as I got dressed and was about to lament the most expensive nap of my life, I realized I felt pretty terrific: not only had my headache completely disappeared, but my muscles felt blissed-out and rejuvenated, as Marilyn had promised. Whatever shamanism she was performing in that room had worked.

  Behind the register I saw a display of rings and hair bands and delicately woven macramé bracelets, and in my post-treatment high decided to buy a purple bracelet for Tami and a green one for Carolann, light blue for Ivy and red for Alyson, little mementos of our trip. The receptionist placed each bracelet in its own color-coordinated silken bag and at the last minute I decided on an ivory one for myself and wore it to go.

  Bejewel your spirit, awaken your soul, it said on the receipt, and for the first time in my life an advertising slogan actually spoke to me. With my Prana now in better balance, I drove back to the house feeling fantastic and looking forward to the night ahead.

  * * *

  I opened the front door and was surprised to hear voices upstairs. I walked through Tami’s room to get to the porch—her room was a mess, suitcases open on the floor with clothes overflowing—T-shirts and a lilac bra and sweat socks rolled up in a ball next to her dress and sandals from last night. As I got closer to the veranda I could smell the distinct aroma of pot.

  “I thought you were playing tennis,” I said.

  “Shhhh!” Ivy said. They were all standing against the railing looking down, including Alyson and Tami, who I noticed were next to each other. Nothing like smoking a peace pipe to help smooth things over. “Come here, you’ve got to see this.”

  I peered down into the swampy brown water next to the house and saw tangled trees and reeds and some rocks along the edges. “What—I don’t see anything.”

  “See that?” Alyson said, pointing to what looked like a rock. “Watch it.” I stared at the rock for a minute and nothing happened. Maybe I needed to be stoned to appreciate staring at a rock. But then it dipped slightly below the surface and came up a few inches away. Tami picked a stone up off the porch and threw it at the mound. It landed a couple of feet away.

  “What on earth is that?” I asked.

  “An allig
ator,” Tami said nonchalantly. “Or is it a crocodile? I can never fucking remember—pointy nose, square nose. One or the other.”

  The creature submerged under the murky water and for a minute I lost sight of it. Where did it go? It came up once again, closer to the shore—it must have been five feet long. Its middle was protruding as if it had recently eaten a big meal.

  “That thing is so huge it looks like it just swallowed a child!” Ivy exclaimed

  “Maybe it did,” Tami said.

  “That is so not even funny. How do they even let alligators in here?”

  “Duh, they live here. They’re protected, like eagles,” Tami answered. She flopped down on the couch and took a long toke from the tail end of the joint between her fingers. The smell was faintly sweet, almost like a piece of burnt pizza sprinkled with oregano that had dropped to the bottom of the toaster, and for a second I thought about asking for a hit, but I’d just spent all that money to cleanse my body, so it seemed like such a waste to now breathe in smoke, even if it was technically organic.

  Tami passed the joint to Ivy. She took a turn and then Carolann grabbed the last little stub and inhaled deeply, like a real expert. I hadn’t remembered ever seeing Carolann smoke pot before.

  “These beasts are protected?” Ivy asked. “We’re the ones that need to be protected. It’s sooo dangerous. I mean, what if? Can you, like, imagine walking alone at night—one bad step and you’re that thing’s dinner.” Her eyes were red and wide in stoned paranoia.

  Death by alligator wasn’t a danger I’d ever considered to be a real possibility. I shuddered and sat down next to Tami who was now thumbing through a copy of Cosmo sitting on the table.