Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway?

by Stevi Mittman

  I look up from my work to see a doctor not satisfied with her patient’s progress. “What?” I ask her when she can’t seem to stop frowning.

  “Your friend called and told me to drop everything and get over here, so I race here like a maniac, have to talk a state trooper out of a ticket on the Northern State Parkway, and then play Name That Tune with your friends. What is all this, Teddi?”

  “Okay, you know how I kept asking you if I was paranoid?” I say, giving her just enough time to nod but not to tell me once again that I’m not. “You were right. At least I think you were. Otherwise I’m totally paranoid and there’s no hope for me.”

  She tells me that isn’t a good-enough hint, and I’ve got to actually spell out what the heck I am talking about.

  “Well, call me John Nash, but I look at these—” I indicate the bills and notes on my bed “—and I see a message.”

  “You’re in debt?”

  I am digging in a stack of MasterCard statements, but I stop and look up at her. “Well, yeah. But look at what I’m in debt for—or to whom I’m indebted. CVS Pharmacy. Remember the toothpaste I swore I bought?”

  She looks less convinced than confused, and before she gets the chance to tell me that the fact that I’ve charged something at CVS doesn’t prove much, Bobbie and Diane come running back in, shrieking about the bank.

  “We’ve got him! We’ve got him!” Bobbie is chanting.

  “How about we start at the beginning, ladies,” Dr. Benjamin says. “Slowly, calmly, rationally?”

  Bobbie and Diane look at her with contempt and start saying things like ” it’s all here!”

  “Humor me,” she says with enough finality to calm the banshees down.

  “Well,” Diane says, warming to the telling of the tale, and gesturing toward her sister. “Teddi asked us to get her last bank statement, so Nancy Drew here and I went over to her house this morning and ‘Nancy’ told Rio that she thought she owed Teddi some money from the business. She said that she’d asked Teddi about it, but since Teddi can’t remember squat—” Her face reddens while Bobbie jumps in to say that that was what they had told Rio, not what they thought—

  “And the jerk gave us Teddi’s last couple of bank statements like Teddi said he would. And he is so busted!” Diane shrieks like some kid whose arch enemy has been grounded for life.

  Dr. Benjamin clears her throat and I look up at her. Suddenly I don’t feel as euphoric as my friends.

  “Why did you want the bank statements?” she asks me. “And what’s with all the bills and paperwork?”

  Once I say it, I feel there will be no going back. Merely suggesting it means the end of my marriage, the end of the life I’ve been living for twelve years. So I’m taking a minute to find the right way to phrase it, to give me a back door, an escape hatch. Bobbie has no time to wait. She tells her about the phone call to Mike starting the whole thing. And before I can explain, Diane interrupts her, urging her to get to the part about Charles Boyer.

  “I think…” I say, and my voice comes out so softly Dr. Benjamin has to bend forward to hear me “…that it might be possible—and I’m only saying possible—that some of the stuff that I thought I was responsible for someone else might have actually done.”

  “Might?” Diane says, waving the MasterCard statement. “Might? Look. The location you make your deposits and withdrawals shows up on the statement. And unless you were driving to the Throgs Neck Bridge branch to make your withdrawals after you were at the Woodbury branch making your deposits, someone else was making them. In the Bronx. It’s that or I need to issue you a speeding ticket for making the hour-and-a-half trek from Woodbury to the Bronx in roughly twenty minutes.”

  I ask if Diane is sure that the bank branch is in the Bronx. She assures me that it is not far from my father’s store. She and Bobbie are so gleeful they don’t seem to understand the full measure of what they are saying. They only want me not to be crazy. They don’t care that I could have been married to a man who makes that husband in Rosemary’s Baby look like a saint.

  “You know, I don’t think he could have made the withdrawals,” I say, though of course I think he could. “I changed my PIN number and I never told him what the new one was. So even assuming that Rio would ever do this to me, which is a large leap of faith, or lack of faith, I don’t see how he could.”

  They are temporarily stymied, until Dr. Benjamin reminds us of my Palm Pilot—the one Rio fiddles with regularly. “We’re talking Gaslight here, yes?” she asks, referring to the old Charles Boyer movie just to make sure. When I reluctantly nod, she asks if I didn’t write the new PIN in there. “And I suppose that you didn’t hide the thing. I mean, wasn’t it right where Rio could find it?”

  “But it doesn’t make sense,” Bobbie says. “If he wanted to loot the account, why put it in Teddi’s wallet?”

  “Why’d Charles Boyer fiddle with the lights…” I say in response “…when he could have sent her on a shopping trip to the mall?”

  “They had malls then?” Bobbie asks. Diane whacks her on the arm.

  “ (a) that was rhetorical,” Diane says, “and (b) it was so that Ingrid Bergman would think she was losing it. God knows, Teddi’s always saying she’s on the brink. He must have figured one little push…”

  I really don’t want to believe this.

  “There could be another explanation,” I tell them all. They look at me, waiting, and I wish I could think of anything besides an alien possession of my husband’s body. “You realize that my father must pass that bank every day, too.”

  “And what would he gain by taking your money out and putting it in your wallet?” Diane says.

  “Motive, means, opportunity,” Dr. Benjamin points out. “The toilet paper rolls coming and going? The food appearing and disappearing? Who else could have done it?”

  “I forgot about the toilet paper,” I say. “See? I have a memory problem. It could have been me.”

  “Putting a pool in the backyard,” Dr. Benjamin says. “He knows your fears. I can’t think of a better way to drive you right to the edge.”

  “Okay, but what about the nail place?” Bobbie asks. “They said that you called and left a message to cancel your nail appointment. How could he know when your appointment was for?”

  “You know, I thought for a minute that you’d switched that appointment,” I tell Bobbie. “You’d know when my regular appointment is, and if you weren’t sure you could always…” I slap my forehead and say, slowly and deliberately, “Check the calendar on my fridge.”

  “Maybe,” Bobbie concedes, “but how could he know when you wanted to change it to?”

  “What about the to-do list in her Palm?” Diane suggests.

  I concede that yes, it was doable, but how could Rio have sounded like me?

  No one says a word. And then Diane says, almost apologetically, “Maybe there’s a woman? A female accomplice.”

  I can’t look at Dr. Benjamin, who, knowing about the nosedive my sex life has taken, must be thinking that this is a more-than-likely scenario. She asks Diane if she can find out who Rio is calling on his cell phone.

  Diane seems to think this will be a piece of cake. “Give me his cell phone number,” she tells me.

  While we all watch, Diane identifies herself and asks for the last dozen numbers dialed from Rio’s cell, scribbling only two phone numbers on the back of the bank statement on the table.

  I point to the first one, indicating it is the main desk at South Winds. I’ve called it often enough in my life to check on my mother.

  Diane calls the precinct and cajoles, wheedles and kisses butt until the officer on the other end provides the name of the recipient of ten of the last twelve calls Rio made.

  We stare at the name below the number.

  “Who is Marian Healy?” Bobbie asks. “Why is that name so familiar?”

  For someone whose memory is in trouble, it doesn’t take me a minute to remember Marian Healy. I don’t think tha
t the anger I feel has anything to do with jealousy. For that, I’d still have to care for Rio—and it has been a long time, when I think about it, since I have truly cared about the man himself rather than the institution of marriage. Well, being in one institution surely gives a woman a different perspective about being in another.

  Maybe I never loved Rio. Maybe I wanted to love him so desperately that I convinced myself I did.

  At any rate, I refresh Bobbie’s memory of the woman in the yellow dress at the girls’ Moving-Up Day Ceremony. “I guess she meant the biblical sense when she said she knew Rio.”

  “So he had an accomplice,” Diane says.

  I finger my neck while I sift through the bills on the bed. “I’ll bet she’s wearing a lovely diamond necklace, too.”

  “Are you finding anything else?” Bobbie asks. “Think about all the things you supposedly did or didn’t do.”

  “Oh!” I say, looking through the papers for the tenth time, unable to find what I am looking for. “Tell Dr. Benjamin about the car.”

  Diane tells the doctor that Rio had rented a black Ford Expedition exactly like the one I drive.

  Dr. Benjamin asks if I have any idea what he might have wanted another car for. She is tentatively getting on board.

  I think about the man at the Dairy Barn asking me what I was doing with all the milk I kept buying. If Marian was driving the car…

  “How did you find out about the car, anyway?” Dr. Benjamin asks.

  If Diane was any prouder, she might explode at the table. “This is so cool. Best part of being a rookie. We’re always supposed to be learning. So I went over to the precinct before we came here and had the sergeant show me how to run a few things through the computer. Then I called around. You know—‘this is Officer Reynolds of the Nassau County Police. I’m checking out a possible 947 and…’”

  “What’s a 947?” Dr. Benjamin asks.

  Diane appears to think a minute. “I forget, but the car rental company didn’t know, either, did they?”

  “But how did you know there was a rental car?” Dr. Benjamin asks.

  “Right here on the bill,” Diane says, pulling a paper out of her purse.

  Across from me, Dr. Benjamin pulls the MasterCard statement away from Diane. “And you got this…how?” she asks her.

  “Oh, I can’t imagine how that happened,” Diane answers, all wide-eyed innocence as she looks at Dr. Benjamin “Rio pulled out a bunch of papers this morning when he was getting the bank statement, and I guess when I put my purse down on the counter, they all stuck to the bottom. Teddi, you really ought to clean your counters more thoroughly.”

  Bobbie stares at her sister admiringly. “I see Detective in your future,” she says, and Diane blushes.

  “Bingo,” I say leaning across the table and pointing out the E-ZPass charge to Dr. Benjamin and Diane.

  “So?” Bobbie asks.

  “So I’m pretty sure that the time you go through a toll is recorded by the machine that accepts the pass.”

  I look hopefully at Diane, who nods and picks up the ball. “So while we couldn’t tell where Rio was when he got Teddi’s call on Saturday night, because a phone bill doesn’t say where a call is made from or received, we can at least tell when he was on the bridge.”

  “Or not on the bridge,” I say quietly. “Or if he was ever on the bridge at all.”

  Diane’s jaw drops. “You mean, if he never went upstate, but hung around…”

  “Scaring her…” Bobbie jumps in.

  “The sergeant says that I can find out everything he’s ever charged to a credit card,” Diane says, impressed with her own potential power. “It’s amazing what you can find out about your ordinary Joe.”

  “But Rio isn’t your ordinary Joe,” I say, feeling all the steam run out of me—feeling more tired than after delivering my children, after staying up three days straight when Alyssa had the croup—but pressing forward, anyway. “He’s my husband. The man I’ve lived with and slept next to for twelve years. For God’s sake, I’m his children’s mother. I refuse to believe that he could hurt them or me like this. Never.”

  “Right,” Diane says. “Those calls to Marian Healy at 2:00 A.M. were probably business calls.”

  “And he rented the car because…” Bobbie is clearly stretching here. “He wanted to mate it with yours and get little Honda Civics.”

  Dr. Benjamin hushes my friends. “I guess I should go see about springing you, huh?” she says, sounding like one of us. “I’ll just—”

  “No,” I say, laying my hand on her arm to stop her. “I need to know if what I’m thinking here, what I’m accusing Rio of, is true or not before I take one step outside this hospital.”

  “But you’re not crazy,” Bobbie says with a whine.

  “Maybe not, but if I’m not, then I’m not all that safe, either, am I?”

  CHAPTER 29

  My father, with whom I’ve reached a delicate rapprochement, is visiting me when Diane and Bobbie come bounding into the solarium clutching one of those brown accordion files, calling out my name.

  “Wait’ll you see what we found,” Bobbie sings like a first-grader at recess. “Wait’ll you see what we found!”

  That tiny piece of me that wants to go back, deny what is in front of my face, hopes vainly that in the brown accordion file is proof that Rio isn’t really the scum of the earth. Since the girls left to investigate exactly what Rio has been up to, I’ve been trying to put two and two together. All I’ve come up with is more and more twos to add into the equation. There is so much to figure out and too little time to figure it out in. God only knows what Rio is doing out there, if Bobbie and Diane are right about him pushing me to the edge.

  And let’s face it. They’re right.

  My father is ready to go after him with a shotgun, but I convince him that would be pointless—we have to be calm.

  I swallow my wishes and gesture for Diane and Bobbie to show me what they’ve found. Diane smacks the Redweld file on the table. “Plenty,” she says, presenting me with a copy of a bill from the Bloomies in Manhattan, signed by Mario Gallo for bra and panty sets in a size small. With a bit of embarrassment she guesses they weren’t for me and hurries on to the three receipts from CVS Pharmacy for a total of a dozen tubes of toothpaste among other things, all signed by me.

  “There are the toothbrush holders and soap dishes,” I say, reading the receipts line by line. “I did buy them!”

  “This is the tip of the iceberg, honey, and the Rio-tanic is going down.” Bobbie rifles through the papers and puts the cell phone bills on top. There are a million calls to that same number in the Bronx.

  “More Marian Healy,” I say. No wonder he didn’t need to have sex with me. The poor man must have been exhausted from all the phone sex he was having with Miss Healy.

  “Marian Healy?” Marty asks. “From Rothman’s?”

  “The deli?” I ask.

  “Mr. Bayer, what does this Marian Healy look like?” Diane asks my dad, and before Bobbie and I can tell her, my father looks guiltily at me.

  “To tell you the truth, she reminds me a little of Teddi,” he says. “Not as pretty, not as good a figure, not that I notice such things…”

  “Could she pass for Teddi?” Diane says.

  “Funny, she’s even got a necklace like Teddi’s. Wore it once at the deli. Of course, she’s maybe ten years younger, but—”

  “My necklace! And he brought her to Dana’s graduation! Can you believe he’d—”

  Bobbie looks at me knowingly. Of course she can believe it.

  I study the photocopies while my father goes berserk. Bad back, my ass, he yells. Sure! Guilt is heavy. He is pacing fast enough for a stress test. Gotta go to the physical therapist—ha!

  This is, he tells Diane, a matter for the police, and he demands to know what is being done about it. When Diane says “nothing” and starts to explain, he is in no mood to listen and he storms from the room, yelling about how he will “
just see about that.”

  After my father is gone, she admits to me that there is no law against trying to drive your wife crazy. What did Rio do, after all? Rent a car? Lie to his wife? Give his mistress his wife’s necklace? How many men would be in jail for that particular crime?

  He took his own money out of the bank and put it in my wallet. Hardly indictable. He poured out milk and replaced it. Or maybe he merely hid it and brought it back.

  While Diane shows me still more papers, Dr. Benjamin comes in and joins us.

  “Hello!” she says, her eyes twinkling. “Don’t you look like the cat who swallowed the canary?”

  “Hardly,” I tell her. “But at least he didn’t swallow me.”

  “Speaking of the cat, or is that cad, have you seen Rio?” Bobbie asks.

  “I’ve been feigning sleep since I started putting things together. He comes, he goes, he leaves flowers or candy or a note.”

  “Well, you can’t hide in here forever,” Dr. Benjamin says. “I’ve signed your release papers and you can go as soon as you want. You just have to decide—”

  Dr. Benjamin stops, distracted by the yelling in the hallway. I recognize not merely the voice, but the tone. A little voice deep inside me says placate. Diffuse. But I’ve cowered to that tone for too many years, never really aware of how hard I was trying to be a good wife, a good mother, and losing myself in the process. That life is over.

  “Where is she?” Rio is demanding. “I’m taking her outta here and taking her over to Bellevue. Didn’t Dr. Peller call you guys? He’s her new doctor. Benjamin is out.”

  He is ranting closer, and I nod at Diane, who goes to the doorway and asks, “You looking for Teddi Gallo?”

  “If it isn’t the third witch…er, watch,” Rio says. “You know where—” He comes into the room and lets out a sigh when he sees me sitting in the big rattan chair, dressed and ready to go.

  “Rio,” I say politely, as if I am at some tea party and it is a pleasure to meet him. I clasp my hands together to stop the shaking. “Do come in. We were just talking about you.”