“What does your Dr. Benjamin say about the pool?” she asks. I’m grateful that she has asked very little about my sessions, as if she is aware that, as close as we are, there are still boundaries between us that I need her not to cross.
I tell her that we haven’t discussed it, which is, after all, the truth. “I mean, it’s my decision, not hers, right? Why would her opinion carry more weight than what my husband and children want?” It would probably be more convincing if I wasn’t sniffing at the moment and gasping at my upturned roses, my raped lawn and the hole that looks like Haleakala Crater.
“Because she’s a mental-health professional who cares about your sanity?” Bobbie asks. “Or because you know she’ll tell you to tell Rio to fuck off and forget the pool, and you’re afraid to do that?”
“Do you really think that telling Rio I don’t want a pool is harder than living with this deathtrap in my yard? That I’m taking the easy way out by allowing this?”
I see the lightbulb go off for Bobbie as she smacks her forehead. “You ought to ask your shrink what it is about you that keeps making you raise the goddamn bar, Teddi. Why do you always have to be stronger today than you were yesterday?”
I tell her that she wouldn’t understand. She’s never come up short. With the rum only halfway down her throat, Bobbie chokes. She goes around in a circle, coughing and trying to pat herself on the back. “Rio’s right. You are as crazy as a loon. I never come up short?”
It’s hot out and I know my rose bushes are going to die if their bare roots aren’t soaking in water, but I can’t seem to move myself to do anything about it.
Bobbie is still going on about my standards. “You think I never fail? Of course I don’t. Set the bar low enough and even I can’t. Keep raising it, the way you do, and you’re bound to reach a limit eventually.”
Well, the pool isn’t going to be my limit. “A stupid pool is not going to beat me.”
“And you don’t see how talking to the shrink you’re already seeing might help you get over this totally moronic, self-imposed, test-yourself, go-to-the-mat hurdle?”
Unless I manage to take charge of the pool situation, I have decided not to confide in Ronnie Benjamin. If it beats me I won’t need her to point it out to me. And if I conquer it, she’ll be the first person I brag to about it.
“Well, what do you talk about, then?” Bobbie asks me. “Or would you rather tell me over my rightfully renowned chicken in plum sauce, which after all these years, I certainly ought to do divinely?”
“You know we could have called in Chinese,” I tell her while I kick at a dirt ball until it tumbles over the edge and rolls down and down to the bottom of what is to be the pool.
“Yup, with Mike gone and the kids away, that’s what I need,” Bobbie says. “A time-saver.”
She cringes when I look at her sympathetically.
“Well, I appreciate the fuss,” I say. “And this,” I add, raising the hurricane glass she’s brought me complete with fancy laser-cut paper napkin and sipping gingerly.
She ignores my thanks and presses me about what I talk to Dr. Benjamin about. I hate it when she refers to her as my “shrink.”
I tell her about how I report on all the things I keep forgetting and we talk about what I can do about it.
Bobbie suggests I make lists, preferably in my Palm Pilot. Everyone she knows keeps lists, she says. She offers to go shopping with me for a different Palm Pilot or a little notebook or something, anything.
“Rio got me a Palm, remember?” I tell her. “But I’m interested in fixing the problem, not working around it.”
“Naturally,” Bobbie says, and there is contempt rather than admiration in her voice. I try to explain how I feel about relying on mechanical things that I really don’t even understand.
“You know how annoying it is when you go to a register and you find the four pennies that would stop the cashier from giving you ninety-six cents in change, only she’s already pressed the buttons and she doesn’t know how to add or subtract without them?”
“You might lose your gizmo,” Bobbie extrapolates, and I nod.
“I hate it when they can’t add. Why do they hire people to make change who can’t add?”
Bobbie gives me a look that tells me I’m flirting with untethered status and I change course and tell her about my new memory-strengthening plan that involves hiding things around the house to see if I can find them again the next day.
“Nothing valuable,” I say. “Or should I say nothing else valuable? I could have sworn I put my good earrings in the freezer, but they weren’t there this morning.”
Bobbie suggests that I either tell her where I’m hiding things or make an answer key, but I say it wouldn’t be a test then.
We stand shoulder to shoulder staring into the hole. “So what movie do you think Diane’s bringing tonight?” Bobbie asks, knowing that neither of us actually care. “The Deep? Twenty-Thousand Leagues Under the Sea?”
I try to laugh and sip at the same time, and wind up snorting and coughing.
“You have to do better than that. Imitations of people drowning—” She stops herself, mortified by her reference to someone drowning in a pool. “I’m so sorry, Ted,” she says soberly. “I didn’t mean—”
I wave away the apology. “How about that awful one with Shelley Winters on the boat? Or what about something with David Schwimmer?” I offer gamely.
“Dirty Harry and the Dead Poo—Oh, shit. I did it again.” Bobbie smacks herself on the forehead. “If I can’t stop thinking about it, kiddo, I don’t see how you—”
I pick up my sandals. “I hope Diane’s bringing one of those cop movies,” I say, making it clear I don’t want to talk about the damn pool any more. At least I hope it’s clear. “The Eliot Ness ones with Robert what’s-his-name—” I stop in my tracks and bite at my lip, a habit my mother abhors. “Why can’t I remember his name?”
“Stack,” Bobbie supplies. “Don’t you think that Robert Stack looks a little like Mike around the eyes?”
“Why can you remember his name and I can’t?” I ask, heading toward Bobbie’s house with my empty glass in one hand and my sandals now in the other.
“Because he reminds me of Mike? And Mike likes his women ‘stacked’?”
“Mike likes his decks stacked,” I say, relieved to be talking about anything but the pool-to-be. “How many aces does one man need?”
“Who knows what another person needs?” Bobbie asks, sounding very philosophical. “Look at you and Rio. You’ve got all this class and he’s…” I promise myself that if she dares to make again that crack about how Rio and I are a match made in one of those children’s flip books where you can put the fireman’s hat on the clown’s body and add a mermaid’s tail, I will head for my own house and never look back.
“—a good father and a good, patient, loving husband,” I finish for her.
“Well sure,” Bobbie agrees with a knowing look. “Every husband is.”
“Damn!’ Rio shouts, jumping up from his lounger in the den. “Did you see that?” I look in the direction he’s pointing—the base of the far wall—and see nothing.
“What?”
He says it must be from the pool excavation. Okay, he says it’s from the damn hole. I still don’t know what it is.
“It’s dirty?” I ask, getting up to have a closer look.
“It’s a friggin’ mouse,” he says. “Now I’ve got a goddamn friggin’ mouse in my house.” He’s shaking his head and looking at me as if the pool was my idea. I am standing on the couch. The leather couch that Rio is so proud of and doesn’t let the kids eat on.
“There!” he shouts, pointing behind me and running with the newest issue of Redbook in his hand.
“Call an exterminator,” I tell him, pointing at the phone as if he doesn’t know where it is.
“I’m not paying some loser fifty bucks to put down the same poison I can buy at Home Depot for three bucks,” he says, grabbing up his w
allet and his keys.
“You’re leaving me here?” I shout as I watch him head for the garage door.
“Somebody’s got to keep their eye on him,” he says. “You can do that much, can’t you?”
“I’ll go get the stuff at the store,” I offer, but my shoes are all the way across the room and I’d have to run barefoot on the floor.
And besides, Rio’s already gone.
CHAPTER 16
Today I have managed to find South Winds. This time the irony is that I am ashamed of myself for being proud of myself for getting here. Anyhow, I got here and now, shoulders back, grin in place, I breeze into my mother’s room.
Sun streams through the windows, which for security reasons have neither drapes nor miniblinds, but the old-fashioned roller shades with cords too short for hanging yourself. Naturally the room is beige, maybe with a hint of pink, as though it has been painted to match her unique shade of hair.
In this wing of the hospital, where patients are in various stages of recovery and considered minimum risks, June is allowed her wall phone (no cord long enough to reach around her neck); her own sheets (three-hundred-count Egyptian cotton, in ecru, of course); and an abundance of flowers (all in plastic vases). It is amazing what the hospital deems dangerous. Do they really believe my mother would break a Baccarat crystal vase in order to slit her wrists? Then why do they bring her morning orange juice in the scratched-up kind of glasses they use in diners?
I find her sitting by the window, studying her nails in a beige chair made out of that fabric you could stick a pen through. “What are you doing in here on such a gorgeous day?” I ask her, handing her the requisite box of Godiva chocolates I have brought with me.
“Waiting for you,” my mother says, glancing at the clock with a grimace and tossing the box of chocolates onto the window sill where the sun will melt them in a matter of minutes. She pretends she doesn’t want them, but there would be hell to pay if I didn’t bring them. “I didn’t want to miss it if you called to explain how come you’re so late.”
“I couldn’t find my keys,” I say, moving the box to the nightstand.
“Which explains why you didn’t have time to get the paint off your hands,” she says, poking the box until it is nearly off the edge of the table. “Or change your clothes. I understand perfectly.”
There is one lousy speck of Superman Blue paint on my right hand. And the floral overalls are clean and, if my mother were more flexible about fashion, kind of adorable. Bobbie, another arbiter of fashion (as everyone is but me), tells me they fit my image perfectly. Possibly that is a veiled insult. I decide not to move the candy. If my mother wants shards of great chocolate, so be it.
“Have you told Rio that I’m coming home with you when I get out of here?” my mother asks, her Louis Vuitton train case sitting on the foot of her bed.
I give her the Hertz answer: “Not exactly.”
“And what does ‘not exactly’ mean? I’m telling Dr. Cohen to sign my release papers this morning. I’m packed. I already called the florist and told him to deliver my welcome-home bouquet to your house.”
I don’t look at my mother. “The kids send their love. Dana is learning to dive and Jesse is memorizing the Morse Code—no doubt to send secret messages to other wizards. Even Alyssa sounds all excited about finding salamanders under the rocks after it rains.”
“That’s nice, dear.” My mother rubs at a speck on the window. “The cleaning staff tries to make it over here on their break from McDonald’s. Did you have Dana’s room cleaned for me? Her rug needs a good steaming, I’m sure.” I think about bringing her home to my mouse-infested house and shudder.
“What?” she asks me.
“Dana’s got a part in the play,” I say, ending the topic. “Can you believe they’re doing Sweet Charity? I guess if they could bring it back to Broadway, they can bring it back to Westwood Lake.”
“Tell me you aren’t going to drag me up there to see her in it and expect me to pretend that she can sing,” my mother says as she lights up a Newport Light under the No Smoking sign.
“You’re not supposed to—” I point at the cigarette.
“I am not supposed to?” she demands. “I? What about your father and what he is not supposed to do? Is he supposed to keep his wife and his mistress in the same house? Is he supposed to offer to share the same bed with me that he shared with her?”
“Mom, I don’t think that Dad—” I start, and am almost grateful when my mother interrupts, since I really don’t want to defend my father’s behavior, especially to my mother, who, in my weakest moments, I have to admit may have driven him to it.
“I bore you in my body,” June says, clutching a stomach that, despite her age, is still remarkably flat. Well, two tummy tucks will do that. “I had Angelina stay up with you when you were sick. I made your brother take you with him to the movies. I gave you that necklace your father bought me for my fiftieth birthday….” The one that she had him replace with something she considered more suitable to the occasion, which means that it had to have fifty diamonds, for one thing, and be set in platinum for the other.
“I was there for you every step of the way. Who do you think hired that man to teach you to ride a bicycle? Do you think your father would have thought to do that? Who do you think he would have engaged to help you with your diet?
“But if you don’t want to help me now, when I need you, when you finally have the chance to pay me back for all I’ve done for you, well…I can certainly find a hotel or a spa that will send a cab and—”
How ironic that my mother is asking for payback! Rio would get a good hoot over that one—if I weren’t actually bringing her home. I don’t think Rio is going to laugh about anything regarding June until I have her back in Cedarhurst where she belongs.
“Are you going to live in a hotel forever?” I ask. “If coming to my house for a little while is going to help you work things out with Daddy, then Rio and I will pick you up when the doctor says you are ready to come home and we’ll take you to our house.”
“For a woman whom everyone seems to think is ready to sign herself in here, you sound pretty sure of yourself,” she says.
My mother refuses to talk to my father. She refuses to talk to Angelina. How the heck can she have any clue about where my head is? “Excuse me?”
“Was that supposed to be a secret?” She raises her eyebrows until they disappear behind her plastered bangs. “Your brother didn’t tell me it was a secret.”
“You’ve been talking to David?” I ask, not sure if it is my mother who is off the deep end again, or me. I remind myself that even if she had talked to David, which is as likely as a sale on beachfront property in the Hamptons, David can’t know that Rio is concerned about me.
“I saw him yesterday,” June says, fluffing her hair before reaching for another Newport. “Isn’t it wonderful that he’s come back? I invited him to join us for dinner tonight at your house to celebrate.”
“Well, let’s wait until you’re released for that, shall we?” I say, trying to sound reasonable while inching toward the door, since if my mother is seeing David, Dr. Cohen had better put off her release indefinitely. God, next it’ll be Markie, and then watch the accusations fly.
“Teddi!” The voice—manly, deep, and yet with a childish eagerness—comes from behind me.
Slowly I turn around, not believing the image in my mother’s unbreakable mirror.
“David?” I ask, but the frog in my throat steals the word.
He nods sheepishly. Dear God, I’m sharing my mother’s hallucinations! Now we’ve both got Beautiful Minds, and it’s like in the movie when the kid who wasn’t really there doesn’t get any older, because except for the tan, no one would ever guess David has spent twenty years in the tropics. He is still dressed in khaki pants, a white sport shirt with a collar, and a navy blazer with brass buttons. He has on brand-new cordovan tasseled loafers and his hair looks freshly cut. His alma mater, Harvard, woul
d be proud of him. That is, providing they didn’t know any of the details of his life. He spreads his arms. “The prodigal son returns,” he says with ease, and I can’t help but think that will be the way Rio will see it.
I cannot think of a thing to say.
“Nothing? No ‘hello’? No ‘long time no see’?” he asks, coming toward me awkwardly, apparently unsure if he should take me around and hug me, or kiss me, or maybe simply shake my hand.
Do apparitions get confused, too? I can hardly ask old Mom if the man we are both seeing is real. He stands in front of me, waiting for me to do something. I offer my cheek to him and he kisses it lightly, leaving a whiff of something that may be English Leather. I touch my cheek and it is slightly damp. David is real. “Welcome home,” I say when I can find my voice. “How long have you been back?”
“Since Monday. Rio didn’t tell you? Ran into him on Tuesday at the store. He looks real good.” While he apparently assesses me, I try to hide the fact that my husband didn’t bother to mention my brother is back. It isn’t as if the guy has come back more than two or three times in what—twenty years? And Rio didn’t say a word. “You do, too. I should have called you when I got in, I—”
“What about me?” our mother asks, preening. “I don’t look good?”
“Yeah, Mom, you look great,” David says, with more resignation than warmth. “You always do.”
“So, David,” I say, pretending I’m not reeling, and am not going to call Dr. Benjamin from my car before I even pull out of the lot, even if it is July Fourth. “What are you doing back? Nothing’s wrong, is it? I mean, how come you’re here? Not here, but…What brings you back?”
I can’t believe that no one has told me. My father can call me for the kids’ camp address when Rio is there with him every day, but he can’t call to say my brother is home? Of course, he probably figures that Rio told me.
“What do you think he’s back for?” June asks, blowing her smoke toward the ceiling where the smoke detector winks at her. “He’s here to take over Bayer Furniture.”
Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway? Page 12