Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway?

by Stevi Mittman

  “I’m an idiot,” I tell my mother as I pick up the phone and dial. “I couldn’t see what was smack in front of my face.”

  Bobbie answers on the first ring. “Hello?”

  I take a deep breath. When Mike left her she made a big deal about telling me that until I was in her shoes, I couldn’t tell her what I’d really do if Rio left. I tell her that now I’m allowed to tell her.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I tell Bobbie that Rio is obviously having an affair. Rather than poo-poo it, Bobbie says sympathetically, “Oh, baby! You know I didn’t wish this on you, don’t you?”

  “Of course I know that,” I say. “I’m lucky that I have you to turn to. Can you come over?”

  There is a moment’s hesitation on Bobbie’s part. “Uh, sure. I can come over for a little while,” she says, adding something vague about having something to do.

  There must be a new subway line beneath my kitchen, or some fault in the earth disturbed by the pool excavation. What else explains the fact that I feel the ground shifting beneath me? Rio is gone. And now Bobbie has something to do.

  “Teddi? Don’t be mad. I tried to tell you, but you didn’t want to hear it. And I didn’t want you to hate me.”

  I don’t say anything. My mother is studying me, her eyes narrowing to slits as if that will help her hear better.

  “I knew you wouldn’t like this,” Bobbie says.

  This is ridiculous, I tell myself. Just because Rio is off hunting without a rifle and Bobbie can’t come over doesn’t mean…ridiculous!

  “And I know that you wouldn’t do it, if you were in my shoes.”

  Well, Bobbie’s shoes won’t be on for long, will they?

  “But I’ve never been as strong as you are.”

  Oh, puh-lease! I turn away so that my mother can’t read my face.

  Bobbie waits and then says, “You’re not saying anything.”

  “You haven’t actually told me anything yet,” I answer, wanting to hear Bobbie choke on the words.

  “Well, let’s face it. You know what’s going on. You could have called it. You know me better than I know myself. You know that I’m weak and I need a man in my life, and I need creature comforts and I’m not getting any younger.”

  “None of us are,” I say, like it is a song to which I often sing the refrain.

  “Yes, but you don’t have to worry. Rio won’t ever leave you. After all, where can he go? Your father would fire him in a heartbeat.”

  My mother is crowding up behind me, trying to get close enough to hear Bobbie’s words. I can almost hear her whispering I told you so.

  “And there are the kids. They need a father.”

  “Don’t they all?” I want to sound smart, but it comes out a whine.

  “So when Mike asked—no, begged—me to let him come home, what was I supposed to do? Kick him to the curb? Stand on my principles? You can’t eat principles, Teddi. You can’t trade them at the store for the newest Diesel jeans.”

  “Mike?” I say, only the name comes out garbled by the tears that are filling my eyes.

  My mother takes a step back and studies me while I squirm.

  “You think I’m horrible,” Bobbie says.

  I meet my mother’s gaze, vindicated. I am thinking that maybe, by some chance, my mother hasn’t guessed where my mind ran to, and I vainly hope that I have fooled her. “No, I don’t. Believe me, there are far worse things you could do than take Mike back. Far worse!”

  “You think I’m doing it for the money.”

  Of course she’s doing it for the money. And the status and the way of life she set her sights on twenty years ago. Isn’t it all part of the package she was primed for from birth—grow up, get married, buy a house and fill its closets? And am I any better, any stronger? If I were in her Stuart Weitzman slides, would I teeter on my principles?

  Have I ever?

  “Of course I don’t,” I say, knowing it is what Bobbie wants to hear, and wondering, like Tina Turner, what love has to do with it. “But don’t be so sure about Rio never leaving me. He could get a job somewhere else in a minute. He could get a woman somewhere else in half that.”

  There is silence on the other end of the line. “Bobbie?”

  My mother cocks her head like some spaniel.

  “I think she hung up on me,” I start to say, but my voice trails off when I hear footsteps on my back deck.

  “So what’s wrong?” Bobbie demands as she steps through the French doors.

  “Nothing,” I say, so used to giving that answer I’m not sure if I have ever given a different response to that question. I suddenly laugh out loud, and my mother and friend stare at me as if my marbles are rolling off the kitchen counter and bouncing on my terra-cotta floor.

  “I was thinking about when I was having Dana, and my contractions started and Rio asked what was wrong, and I told him ‘nothing.’ My water had broken and I was in agony, not to mention scared, but what did I say? ‘Nothing.’ Talk about denial!”

  “Honey, you’ve been in denial so long you could get elected president of Egypt,” Bobbie says.

  “Well, she might as well get on the ballot now,” my mother says. “Seems to me she thought for a moment there that you and Rio were having an affair.”

  “Mom!”

  My mother waves away my horror. “And now that you aren’t, it doesn’t occur to her that he could be hiding his salami in someone else’s icebox.”

  “You really thought I would sleep with Rio?” Bobbie looks more horrified at the prospect than hurt by my suspicions.

  Never good at lying, I nod, sniffing wildly.

  “Teddi, your husband is good-looking, but he and I—” She shivers. “No way!”

  I blow my nose while she continues to dig her own grave.

  “It’s not that he isn’t…It’s that I could never…I mean, there’s you and I. I love you. I would never steal your husband. Maybe your Judith Leber handbag—the one with the stones? Or maybe the Gucci sweater your mother gave you. Your necklace with the diamonds…Something material, maybe. But not—” She shudders again, exchanges a look with my mother and then throws up her hands. “Not Rio.”

  I feel my neck. Is that where my missing necklace has gone? I want to shoot myself for even thinking it. “I guess I figured that I’d leave me if I was Rio. And I’d go running into your arms if I was stuck with me….”

  “And I’d let him? You do not need your head examined—you need a fucking lobotomy! What did you think? That since I’m not getting any, anyway, what with Mike gone, I needed it so bad that I’d screw you along with him?”

  “This isn’t about you,” my mother says, lighting up and offering Bobbie a cigarette. “It’s about Teddi—”

  “—who doesn’t allow smoking in her house,” I say, pulling the cigarette from my mother’s hand and throwing it into the sink. I turn the water on and watch it soak through the thin paper over the tobacco. Without turning to face them, I admit quietly to Bobbie that Rio left on a hunting trip without his rifle.

  “And he doesn’t strike me as the bow-and-arrow type,” my mother adds.

  “He put at least two rifles in the Expedition this morning,” Bobbie says, her hands folded across her chest. “Of course, I was passionately kissing him goodbye when I noticed this, and not merely getting the paper before the sprinklers beat me to it.”

  I know he has more than one rifle. We’ve fought enough about how many he could possibly need. The one with the long-range sight, the one with the night scope, the one with this, the one with that.

  “I guess he’s not so wrong about me being paranoid,” I say, slumping against the counter and shaking my head.

  “What’s the difference between being smart and being paranoid?” my mother asks.

  Bobbie and I both give up.

  “A paranoid woman is just looking over her shoulder, while a smart woman is watching her back.”

  CHAPTER 23

  “I ate too mu
ch,” my mother says when we get back to the house. It is a welcome change from “I can’t believe she’s taking that sonofabitch back,” as though she cares what Bobbie does. Is the message really that she won’t take her own sonofabitch back?

  With her ensconced in Dana’s room, I don’t like the prospect. I play my phone messages, which, of course, she listens to intently.

  “Hi Teddi. And hi there, June. I’m up at the cabin and I thought I’d just check how my girls are doing. This might sound funny, and I don’t want to scare you, but there was a ratty-looking old truck at the end of the street when I left this morning, and now that I’m too far away to do anything about it, I’m starting to worry about it. I’m sure it’s nothing, but don’t forget to lock the doors before you go to bed. Where are you two, anyway? Give me a call when you get in. I’ll leave my cell on. Love you.”

  Beep.

  Beep.

  “Teddi, where the hell are you? You should be back by now. I’m not getting any answer on our cell phone, and when I tried to check the messages to make sure nothing was wrong, I couldn’t get the damn thing to work right. By the way, Teddi, I apologize for saying you didn’t buy those melons I asked for last week. Why the hell you put them under the seat in the car, I don’t know, but I’m sure they’ll get the smell out at the car wash. Hope your mother isn’t listening to this and thinking that, well, you know. Anyway, call me as soon as you get home.”

  “I don’t like that man,” my mother says when his messages are finished. She is standing by the kitchen sink. “If I throw up, do I not get the calories from that sundae? Is that how bulimia works?”

  How should I know how bulimia works? Does she think that because it’s so prevalent on L.I. they’re giving courses in it at the local junior college? Maybe she thinks that Dana and I have taken a class together. Maybe we should, what with Dana worrying so much about her weight.

  “Did you see a truck?” I ask her, ignoring my mother’s less-than-enthusiastic attempts to stick her finger down her throat. I dial Rio’s cell phone number and walk to the front window to look out. As I pull the curtains aside, a car seems to speed away from the house across the street.

  The Cingular customer you are trying to reach is either on the phone or has traveled out of the area. Please try your call again later and…

  “Well, of course he’s out of the area,” I say to the phone as I press the off button on the portable.

  In the kitchen I can hear my mother retching.

  “Mother, you get the calories,” I shout. If the woman asks, she has to want to hear that answer, right? “Stop trying to throw up in my sink!”

  The phone in my hand rings as I am on my way to hang it up. “Hello?”

  There is a slight crackling on the line.

  “Rio? Is that you?”

  A dial tone replaces the crackling.

  “He must be in a bad cell area,” I tell my mother, feeling bereft that I can’t reach him.

  “He’s in a jail cell?” she asks, lifting her head from the sink. “What’d he get arrested for?”

  “Bad cell,” I repeat, helping her straighten up.

  “Bad dude,” she replies, pushing her hair off her face.

  “You tired? Ready for bed?”

  “You think all men are bad? Or only the ones we know?”

  “I think,” I say, “that there are good ones and bad ones. Like women, they’re human.”

  “Well, we deserve better,” she says. “Look at that friend of yours, taking back the man that walked out on her and the kids. I would never—”

  “No, Mom, you wouldn’t. That’s why you’re here, with me, and Bobbie’s next door in Mike’s arms. And I think you’re right and she’s right, because we all do what we need—it’s as if we send out these vibes and the universe sends back what we’re asking for, which isn’t always what we want.”

  “What in the world are you talking about?” June asks.

  “Well, maybe what Bobbie needed was to see what life was like without Mike, and when she did, it humbled her. And maybe you need to see what life is like without Dad.”

  “It won’t humble me,” June says.

  “Then it will strengthen you,” I agree.

  “And what about you, Teddi? What if Rio is having an affair?”

  Does she honestly think this has never occurred to me? That I’ve never wondered? Can she not know that this is someplace I simply cannot go? Not now? That if I worry about it, I have to allow for the possibility, and if I allow for the possibility, right now in my life, I might as well sign my own commitment papers?

  “Mother,” I say with all the conviction I can muster, “you heard his message. Did it sound like a man who is away with some woman? ‘Call me? I’m worried about you?’ Does that sound like a man who is off getting laid?”

  My mother looks noncommital. “It sounds like your father.”

  “What happened between you and Dad is different.”

  “How?” June asks.

  When the phone rings, I can’t resist announcing I’ve been saved by the bell.

  “Where were you?” Rio shouts at me. “I’m going oobatz here with worry. I almost turned around and came on home.”

  “We went up to the shopping center to eat,” I say. “Why were you so worried?”

  “Christ, Teddi. I got two loonies home alone with matches. You keeping an eye on your mother? Whatever you do, don’t let her fall asleep with a cigarette lit or anything, okay?”

  “I’ll make sure,” I say. Even though my mother knows the rules about smoking in the house, I have no doubt that once she’s closed Dana’s door, she will not hesitate to light up and puff away.

  “And keep an eye on her. Jeez, I never should have let you bring her home with you. What if she tries to off herself in our house? In Dana’s room? How would the kid ever get over that?”

  “Are you trying to scare the hell out of me, Rio? Because you’re doing a good job,” I tell him, stretching the kitchen phone cord as far as it will reach in order to keep an eye on my mother, who has gone down to the den.

  “Two defenseless women,” Rio says, almost to himself. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I swear I’ll never be able to live with myself if something happens to you.”

  “What could happen?” I ask.

  “Oh, a break-in, some rapist on the loose looking for a gorgeous woman….”

  “You think I’m gorgeous?” I ask, sucking in my stomach and regretting the Carvel I joined my mother in having.

  “I’m telling you you’re in danger, and you want to know if I think you look good? Yeah, you’ll make one helluva corpse.”

  “Why did you say that?” I ask. Rio sounds almost certain that something not only can happen, but that it will.

  “I don’t know,” he says, and I can see him scowling a couple of hundred miles away. “It’s not like I’m late with a payment or anything….”

  “You mean the men you used to know? You borrowed from them again, Rio? For Christ’s sake!” I nearly bite my tongue. Rio has funny standards about using his Lord’s name in vain. Not that Christ is his Lord anymore, but he always cringes when I say it, while all the jeezes that pass his lips don’t seem to bother him at all.

  “I didn’t ‘go to them,’” Rio says, and I don’t miss the implication.

  I don’t ask him to explain. My plan was to grow up and be Elyse Keaton or Maggie Seaver, and instead I’ve become Carmella Soprano. Through the window I see a car with its headlights off cruising down the street.

  “I happened to run into the Nose when I was getting the new grill for your car.”

  “You bought a hot grill for my car?” I can hardly breathe. Is there a bomb in the car like in The Godfather? Is Rio safe?

  “I looked into it. I mean, I wasn’t paying over a grand on top of that vet bill, Teddi,” he says.

  “Oh, Rio.”

  “Look, there’s nothing to worry about. Bridge loans are nothing to these guys.”

  �
�Except that if you don’t pay their bridge loan, they throw you off some bridge in a pair of cement shoes,” I tell him.

  “Nose was like a father to me,” Rio says. “He’d never hurt you. You girls have some ice cream and watch a movie or something and I’ll see you tomorrow night. I’ll take care of everything when I get back.”

  “Take care of what?”

  “The damn battery’s beeping, Teddi. I’m gonna lose you.”

  “Go find a pay phone!”

  “I’ll recharge it and you can call me later, okay? I’m sure everything’ll be okay.”

  “Rio!”

  “Don’t forget to lock the doors before you go to bed.”

  “Go find a pay phone!”

  “You’re breaking up.”

  “Rio?”

  Breaking up? Try cracking up.

  My mother finally heads off for bed around midnight, though how anyone can sleep after an entire pot of coffee, I don’t know. I’ve only had two cups myself, and I am wired to the chandelier and jumping at every noise. Must be the three or four Valiums my mother ate as if they were M&M’s.

  By 1:00 A.M., I’ve started and put down three new books. I’m pacing between the living room and the kitchen, going from window to window watching for wayward cars and any motion in the bushes. The mounds of dirt in the yard are casting shadows that mock the ‘mountains out of molehills’ I am making with my ridiculous worries. I have the outside lights on as if I am expecting a 747 to land in the driveway, but I’ve turned off the inside lights so that any loan shark with the middle name of an animal or a body part won’t be able to see inside and get a clear shot at me when he decides to make me an example.

  Man, I can be morbid, I think as I feel my way around the kitchen and open the refrigerator for some light. Okay, for some light and some Mallomars. If I am pegged to die, anyway, why not go fat? Will Rio and David and my father groan at the weight of my casket? How embarrassing, I think, but it doesn’t stop me from first taking one Mallomar, then two, and then bringing the whole box out along with a carton of milk.

  Well, it must take a few hours for the weight to make its way to your thighs, right? I think this while sitting at the counter bar stool fiddling with the box of cookies and peering out into the backyard. I hear a cat screech in the darkness, and one of the backyard lights goes out. When is the last time I changed the bulbs?