“Pepper. Too much red pepper,” Bobbie pronounces without taking a bite.
“Impossible,” I counter. I don’t use red pepper in my burgers. I use salt, garlic powder, onion powder and paprika.
“Don’t eat that,” Rio says to Jesse, who, as always, is spaced out and not paying attention. He starts collecting everyone’s plates. “Guess I have to run over to Mickey D’s. Make a list.”
Bobbie says she’s got burgers in the freezer and will defrost them in the microwave. “Take me five minutes,” she says, sashaying down the stairs with a wave. If I didn’t adore her, I could easily hate her guts.
Rio brings the plates into the house and I follow a minute later to examine what’s on the counter. There are my jars of spices: garlic powder, onion powder, red pepper. Rio picks up the red pepper and raises an eyebrow at me. “Well, that was fun,” he says sarcastically. “What comes after poisoning the kids? Hiding razors in the candy?”
“It’s not like I did it on purpose,” I say. I can’t believe I’d make such a mistake. Where is my head at, anyway?
“You sure you didn’t subconsciously want to make the kids sick so they wouldn’t go off to camp tomorrow?” Rio puts the spices back in the rack in the wrong order.
I pull them out of his hands and put them where they belong so that a mistake like this doesn’t happen again. “Are you asking me if I purposely planned to make our children sick? That’s just…sick.”
“So what, then? Another one of those ‘lapses?’” he asks, putting quotes around the word. “Isn’t that what your fancy doctor calls it when you’re having a nutzo moment?”
I really don’t like how this conversation is going, and I tell Rio as much. He says he doesn’t like how our life is going, but quickly takes the comment back and offers to take the kids out for Carvel after dinner so I can relax. “Maybe you should take a nice bath,” he says, and winks. “Get, you know, in the mood.” He even offers to run and straighten up the bathroom for me, admitting he just threw his clothes from work in the general direction of the hamper.
After Bobbie’s perfect burgers, Rio takes all the kids out for ice cream, leaving Bobbie and me to clean up from dinner.
“You okay?” she asks me when we’re alone. “You seem more frazzled than usual.”
I ask if not being able to make a simple hamburger wouldn’t frazzle her. She admits it would, but we both know this is one of those hypothetical questions that have no basis in reality. Bobbie’s husband left and she still has a stocked freezer. She isn’t likely to screw up hamburgers.
I sit down at the kitchen table and Bobbie sits next to me, giving me a concerned look that makes me uncomfortable.
“I know I put paprika in,” I tell her. She tells me it doesn’t matter, but she’s never sat through a meal at my mother’s table pretending that the food tastes fine because her mother would come apart if it didn’t. She’s never seen my mother put sugar on eggs or salt in coffee or stand with the cream in her hand wondering what she’s supposed to do with it. I have. My father has. Rio has.
A bath seems like a good idea, and I send Bobbie home and go up to take one. As I’m running the water I hear the kids and Rio come home, hear him shushing the kids and telling them to lay out their clothes for the trip up to camp tomorrow. I start to slip my foot into the water just as he opens the bathroom door to check on me. It’s freezing cold.
“How can we be out of hot water?” I ask Rio. “There must be something wrong with the water heater.”
Rio runs the water in the sink, sticks his hand in and pulls it out quickly. He shakes his head at me.
“Well the bath’s cold,” I say, indicating he should touch it while I gather a towel around myself. He sticks his hand in gingerly, like I can’t tell hot from cold, and then turns on the cold-water tap, feels it and seems satisfied. “Why are you turning on the cold water?” I ask.
Only he tells me he’s turning on the hot water. “Jeez. Hot on the left, cold on the right,” he says, his shoulders sagging. “I’ll run it for you.”
“Rio, the faucets are backward,” I say. I ought to know. They’ve been driving me crazy since we moved in more than a decade ago. “Remember, even the house inspector noticed it when we were buying the house?”
“And remember that we switched it about eight years ago because it was driving you crazy? Guess we were too late on that one, huh?” Rio exhales a breath so deep it raises the hair on his forehead.
All I can manage to say is “we did?” as I try the faucets and find that sure enough, we did.
He gives me a hand as I climb into the tub and then stares at me for a good minute before walking out of the room and shutting the door behind him.
“Rio?” I call out, and he tips his head back in. “Dana asked me today if my father and Angelina were…you know, doing it.”
“Look, Teddi,” he says. “You can’t go falling off the deep end, burning things, forgetting things, throwing things, every time you hear something upsetting, you know? You’re gonna wind up hurting someone. Why do you think the kids are going away? Because they’re safer away, that’s why.
“Just remember, Teddi. If you don’t get on top of this thing, you’re gonna hurt someone you love.”
CHAPTER 14
The mall is teeming with mothers who have just put their kids onto the camp buses and dutifully looked forlorn as they waved goodbye to responsibility for two months. Despite Bobbie’s reassurance that Lys will be fine, I feel like I should be arrested for child neglect or endangerment or something. I stop in front of Gap Kids, where I occasionally buy Alyssa clothes to wear to my mother’s house. Everything in the window is an exact duplicate, in miniature, of what is in the window of the real Gap—sort of Princesses-in-Training…or training pants, anyway. I remember Alyssa’s little stretchy things. I remember shoes that fit in the palm of my hand. I remember her thinking I could fix anything. “She’s a baby. You know how fast they change? She’ll come home doing new things and I won’t have been the first to see them.”
“Ahh,” Bobbie says, getting the picture now. “So this is about you, not Lys. Okay, well, you are on vacation, girl. You and me. What do you say? Should we head for Elizabeth Arden’s Red Door at Saks? Ask them to match a foundation for us at Sephora? Spend two hours trying on lipsticks at M.A.C? Or should we be boring and settle for being made over at every counter at Bloomingdale’s?”
“I’d just as soon go on home,” I say. “And let the money I put in my account this morning settle in and feel at home. Maybe it’ll get comfortable enough to start multiplying.”
“Come on, Teddi, please? We’ve got the whole mall and no whiny kids who want to spend an hour looking at every CD in the Wall before deciding they don’t have enough money to buy one. We can stop at the cash machine again on the way home and see how much interest your money earned while I had fun spending mine.”
“Nobody’s gonna touch every card in LeMarc’s while I hurry to pick out one that doesn’t drip schmaltz?” I ask, trying to get into it.
“Hell, girl, you can get a year’s worth of birthday cards and no one will have to go to the bathroom before you can pay. Well, maybe I will, but you won’t have to take me. Or watch!”
“If we go to the Body Shop, will you behave, so that I don’t have to tell you that the testers are meant for people who are actually planning to buy?” I ask. Now I am on a roll.
“You could try on fifteen bras at Victoria’s Secret and I promise not to put even one on my head or giggle or anything. I won’t even sigh and tell you that I’ll wait outside.”
A woman with a stroller walks by, stopping at Gymboree and struggling with the door. I run to help her and then stand with the door open, debating whether or not to go in.
“I miss them,” I tell Bobbie.
“I’m sure people miss psoriasis, too,” she says in answer. “But that doesn’t mean that they can’t enjoy themselves while it’s gone. Wanna get something to eat?” She looks at me and asks if
I’ve lost weight. I’ve tried Atkins, I’ve tried Weight Watchers. I’ve tried the grapefruit diet, the cabbage soup diet and the Scarsdale diet and I’ll tell you this: nothing works like the Fear of Losing Your Mind Diet, where everything tastes like sawdust, and the weight melts right off.
We stroll toward the upscale pizza place, our sandals clacking on the marble floor we agreed was a mistake from day one. In the winter it’s slippery from the snow people track in, and if you don’t wear shoes with leather or rubber soles…well, as Bobbie says, people who buy plastic shoes only get what they deserve.
As I said, the mall is crowded, full of too-old-to-be-shipped-off-to-camp teenagers who are hanging out, nothing-more-pressing-to-do mothers who are wasting the day with their babies, don’t-stick-me-in-a-senior-center-while-I-still-have-money old people who are resting on the benches keeping cool, and actual the-kids-are-gone-and-now-its-my-turn shoppers who can take advantage of the summer sales already in full swing. I generally come to the mall only for gifts, and, I’m embarrassed to say, to buy makeup. According to Bobbie, and hence, The Rules, you have to buy your makeup at Saks or Lord & Taylor, where the salesgirls fawn over you and put all those little samples in your bag since it isn’t discounted anywhere, anyway. As Bobbie always says when we are at the Chanel counter, anyone who buys makeup at Macy’s is begging to be ill-treated.
“So, what does Dr. Benjamin say about your memory lapses?” Bobbie asks me once we’re seated and handed menus.
“She says I’m fine.” It’s sort of the truth, since she has said that all my tests have proved that there is nothing organically wrong with me.
“Does she think that sleeping pills would help?” Bobbie asks.
Now, I know that I keep forgetting things, but I never told her that I’m having trouble sleeping. This fact must be written on my face, because she confesses that Rio has told her about our “nocturnal situation,” as I have taken to calling it.
“And when did Rio start confiding in you?” I ask, my voice a whisper. “Are you and he talking about me behind my back?”
Bobbie picks up a napkin and calmly and deliberately wipes at the corner of her perfectly-lip-glossed-in-this-summer’s-new-shade mouth. Her back is ramrod straight, and if looks could kill, I know the waiter would have to step over my poor dead body to serve Bobbie her grilled chicken Caesar sandwich on focaccia bread. Bobbie doesn’t even bother to answer me.
“You had this conversation when?” I repeat.
Bobbie points a freshly refilled French-tipped acrylic fingernail at me. She tells me that she is only answering me because she thinks I must really, truly be getting sick. “If you could think that Rio and I—” She shudders. “Last week when he helped me drag out the camp trunks to the truck. Remember? After he managed to get up your three, he came over and moved my two.”
Of course I remember. I warned against it, what with his back hurting from moving the furniture at Bayer, but did he listen? No, so the very next day he had to run to the therapist again. I don’t dare try to say I’m sorry to Bobbie, because I know that if I stop biting the inside of my lip, I’ll start to cry and I’m not sure I’ll ever stop.
Bobbie reaches across the table and lays her hand over mine. “How could you think that I would keep anything from you, or that Rio would betray you?”
“You’ve kept lots of things from me. Important things. You kept Mike’s affair from me for nearly a year, didn’t you?” I throw this in her face because I didn’t learn about it until he actually left, and I guess I’m still mad about it. “I mean, I tell you everything. I told you about how I called out dirty things in my sleep, even. And you couldn’t tell me—”
“Well, you told me it happened once, and you didn’t tell me what you said, actually.” She raises one of her eyebrows, a gesture I have tried to emulate and failed miserably at. She is trying to tease me, I guess, but it’s too late for that.
“I told you Last Tango in Paris. You know what I must have said.”
“Yeah, but did you say, like ‘Rio, I want it in the—’”
“Shut up!” I say, glancing around her to see if anyone is still paying attention to our conversation. The women at the table to our left are each on cell phones. On our right, two women who have enough makeup on to attend the Academy Awards are arguing with the waitress about whether or not their IBC root beers are diet. Both are claiming to be diabetics who absolutely can’t have sugar. Odd, since they are splitting a slice of dulce de leche cheesecake. I suppose eating only half the sugar won’t kill them.
“Or was it like—” Bobbie continues, but I override her.
“How do I know what I said? I was asleep. Why don’t you ask Rio?”
She ignores my question.
“And why didn’t you tell me about Mike?”
“I didn’t tell you,” Bobbie says, “because if I did, you’d have expected me to kick him out. And because, if it had blown over and he didn’t leave me, like I was praying he wouldn’t, then every time you looked at him, you’d remember, and every time you looked at me, you’d be disappointed.”
Well, she is right. And I would have been more than disappointed. I’d have been appalled.
“I don’t understand how you could have known and still wanted him to stay.”
“The same reason that would make me take him back in a heartbeat if he showed up at my door,” Bobbie tells me. “I love him.”
“You love a man who ran around behind your back, then walked out on you and the girls? How could you love that?”
“Well, we can’t all be married to Mr. Perfect,” Bobbie counters sarcastically as the waiter delivers our food and I look down at my vegetarian sandwich on which they’ve put the mozzarella after I specifically asked them not to. Bobbie notices and goes to call the waiter, but I stop her. “You can’t eat that, Teddi. Aren’t you going to send it back?”
“And get the right sandwich in time for dinner?” I ask, knowing from previous experience how long that would take. “Watch,” I say, peeling the cheese off the grilled peppers and setting it on her bread plate with a flourish. “Something I can fix! All by myself—no help from anyone. Done deal.”
“But they got it wrong,” Bobbie attempts to explain to me, as if there should be consequences for them. I sense a new Rule. “People who work here resent people who eat and shop here,” she explains to me. “This is total passive-aggressive stuff, this getting orders wrong, and you have to call them on it or they’ll put peanuts on an anaphylactic kid’s sundae and watch them die.”
I’m not sure what the Rule actually is, but I am relieved my kids have no major allergies, since clearly everyone is out to get them.
She’s taken some of the joy out of my accomplishment, but I tell her that I was able to make the sandwich right myself. It isn’t something I can say all that often, and I am actually glad for the chance, though I think that ought to exhaust the subject.
“Where were we?”
I remind her that I was asking how she could love someone who treated her like dirt.
“Because I don’t walk around in rose-colored glasses. Because I don’t like to eat alone. Because the world is based on couples with two children and I want to fit into it again. And because I’m weak, okay? And my life isn’t the magical one yours is, maybe. But Mike’s a good father—better than mine ever was. Like he takes the girls to both Burger King and McDonald’s because Kimmie likes the fries at one and Kristin likes the chicken nuggets at the other.”
“And do you love the way he probably hand feeds those fries to Circa ’69?” As far as I am concerned, Phyllis doesn’t even rate a name.
Again Bobbie says she is weak, and all I can think is that if Bobbie is weak, I must be a bowl of mush.
“Okay, how about how he can make me feel sexy and innocent all at the same time?”
There was a time when Rio could do the same for me. When did that stop, and why hadn’t I even noticed before this moment? Must be that old “taking things for granted”
thing Redbook is always warning against. “Do you love how he can make you feel seduced and abandoned? Bobbie, the man is sleeping with another woman. He’s left you and the kids—”
“That’s right,” Bobbie tells me. “And I still love him, so why do you think that you can decide if I should or shouldn’t?”
“Because I know what you’re worth. Because that man isn’t good enough for you. That’s why.”
“Maybe he just needs some time.”
“A year wasn’t enough?” I demand.
“Not for him,” Bobbie says.
“Just tell me this one thing,” I say. “I’m surely no expert on the Rules of Long Island. You’re always having to remind me why I have to buy baby gifts at Bloomies and not Macy’s, but I do know the Rules of Marriage. They’re called vows and they involve little things like honesty and fidelity. So explain this to me. Why don’t the rules apply to him?”
CHAPTER 15
I am standing at the edge of the abyss. Bobbie is next to me, but in reality, I am alone. I see a mass grave in some Third World country. I see the crater from a dropped bomb.
Funny, because Rio sees a pool.
“It’s not too late to fill it in and forget the whole thing,” Bobbie tells me. “I’ll even have my landscape guys replant the roses for you.”
I cannot look down into the hole. I cannot look anywhere else. “Don’t be silly,” I say, taking the tall drink with the umbrella Bobbie is pushing on me, despite the fact that it is the middle of the day.
“Rio wants a pool,” I hear myself say, as if he is the pharaoh, or the king, or Donald Trump, and nobody can tell him no. “And the kids want it. And it’s not as if I believe in history repeating itself. Aren’t you the one who says that just because my mother has problems doesn’t mean that I—”
“Problems? Your mother is in South Winds. Again,” she says. “And it started with a pool in her backyard not unlike this one, right?”
One thing about Bobbie. She doesn’t dance politely around subjects. There are days I treasure her for this. Today isn’t one of them.
Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway? Page 11