The Girlfriend Curse

by Valerie Frankel

  “Don’t worry, Peg,” said Wilma. “Next week is packed with activities. You’ll find out exactly what you’re made of.”

  “How about a morning run? Linus? A quickie to the lake road? I don’t mean a quickie. A longie? A long, punishing run?”

  “Can’t,” he said. “Sorry.” Then Wilma and Linus left the kitchen together, holding hands. Watching them, a rock landed in Peg’s stomach. Had they reconciled sometime between Peg’s orgasm and breakfast?

  The group resumed eating, and then cleaned up. Standing at the sink, Tracy whispered to Peg, “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to get Linus alone.”

  Peg whispered back, “That’s absurd.” And then to the group, “Well, I’m going for a run. My farm is about five miles away. Anyone want to join me?”

  Demures from the group, especially Ray, who announced he was too stiff from sleeping in the car to run five inches. Tracy said, “Take your cell. Call me, and I’ll come pick you up at your farm. I’d love to see the place.”

  “Don’t expect much,” said Peg, afraid herself of what she would find. It’d been almost two weeks since she’d been out there.

  Peg suited up, stretched and hit the road. Running was a strain. It always was for the first mile. She’d loosen up and then get into cruising mode. She made it to the mile mark. Trudging along, she wondered why her legs weren’t falling into a rhythm. After two miles, her body still not kicking into automatic pilot, she slowed to a walk, put her hands on her hips and breathed laboriously.

  She was pathetically out of shape. She shouldn’t have expected to go five miles in this condition, but now she was two miles out, exhausted, the sun high and hot. No way was she going to run back.

  Peg turned on her cell. Amazingly, she got reception. She checked voice mail. She had forty-three messages. Finding a rock in the shade, Peg sat to listen to them.

  Twenty-one were from Nina, increasingly agitated. Her last one, recorded yesterday at midnight, said, “Where are you? Peg, please, please call me. I’m frantic here. So is Jack. A few notes do not ease my mind. Are you okay? Why aren’t you checking in? You must call me immediately.”

  Fifteen were from her mom, including this one: “Peg, sweetie. No pressure. I don’t want to put pressure on you. You’ve moved, and have the right to privacy. I just want to make sure you’re okay. Am I a horrible mother? Are you intentionally trying to hurt me?”

  Three were from Jack. From yesterday: “I’m sure you’re fine. But I’m the only one who is. Nina is calling me fifty times a day. Mom and Dad are freaking out. I can’t stand to be near them. If you don’t call soon, I may be forced to move out and pay rent in some shithole.”

  Three from the real estate broker who’d sold her the farm, asking how the extermination was going.

  One from the exterminator, placed an hour ago. “Ms. Silver. Chuck Plenet here. I’m over at your place. The cats are doing a great job with the mice. There has been a small unforeseeable complication. Give me a call.”

  Peg pushed the buttons to return the call. Got Chuck Plenet’s voice mail. She called Nina. Got hers. Same with her parents and Jack. She called the Federal. Thankfully, Tracy answered. Peg asked her to come get her, and they’d go out to the farm.

  In ten minutes, Peg was sitting next to Tracy in her Camry, cruising toward Old Dirty Goat Road.

  “Can you really run this far?” asked Tracy.

  “Once upon a time. I’ll have to work up to it again.”

  “Why?” asked Tracy. “I mean, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”

  Which made Peg think of Linus on the couch. “Here it is,” she said.

  The Camry pulled into the driveway. Tracy made all the right noises. “My God, Peg. The view! The pasture! The pond! It’s beautiful. And this house is so cute. This is all yours? How did you find it?”

  Peg said, “Hold those thoughts. You’re not allergic to cats, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” said Peg. They got out and walked to the front door. “Stand back. I’m going to open it.”

  Peg opened the farmhouse door. She and Tracy slipped inside.

  The stench engulfed them like a green fog. A mix of decay, cat litter, shit and ammonia. Peg covered her mouth and nose with the bottom of her shirt and forged farther into the house. Tracy followed.

  When they walked into the kitchen, five cats jumped off the countertop. One sat in the sink, content as the day was hot, with the freshly killed body of a mouse in its mouth, little drops of blood on its white snout.

  Tracy said, “That mouse has no head.”

  The women looked down at the floor by the sink. The freshly severed mouse head lay there, dead eyes open. The tiny puddle of blood made Peg think of crime scene photos on Law & Order. But in miniature.

  As the women watched—as in, before their very eyes—the decapitated head was suddenly surrounded by a cascading wave of ants that had flowed from under the kitchen counter. Had to be hundreds of them. They surrounded the mouse head, feasting, making it shrink, and then lifting it and carrying it away, back under the counter. All that remained of the crime scene was the puddle, smeared and tracked by an army of crawling insects.

  Peg tore through the whole house. Everywhere, scenes of carnage, trails of entrails, thousands of scavenger ants on the move, carting away dinner, or just indulging on the spot. The overflowing cat litter boxes, which Peg doubted had been cleaned in weeks, were also festoon with insects.

  It was enough to make a girl sick. She had to get air. Peg ran outside, onto the deck. Dialing furiously, Peg tried to reach Chuck Plenet. No signal. She dialed again. Nothing. The phone a hunk of useless plastic in her hand. She dialed again. No signal. She would have dialed again, but instead, she heaved her cell phone into the pond.

  Tracy, seeing that Peg might be losing it, ushered her down the deck steps and into the Camry. She drove the hell out of there.

  “An exterminator who bring bugs in?” said Tracy. “You should sue the bastard.”

  Peg said, “Sue him? I can’t even call him. I just threw away his number.”

  Chapter 25

  When Peg and Tracy returned to the Federal, Linus was waiting in the front doorway.

  “Perfect timing,” he said excitedly.

  “I need the phone,” said Peg.

  He said, “Our guest speakers have just arrived. They’re having a drink, and then we’ll get started.”

  Tracy headed inside, curious to see who the speakers were. Peg held her ground. “I really need the phone.”

  “Their subject matter is of particular relevance to you, Peg.”

  “Unless they’re experts ant killers, I don’t care,” she said.

  “Ant killers?” he asked.

  “Just give me the phone,” she demanded.

  Excitement dimming, Linus said, “They can’t stay long. And it wasn’t easy for them to get here.”

  He might as well have said, “You are a rude, selfish, demanding New York Jew bitch who shows no consideration for the efforts others make on your behalf.” Or maybe she was overreacting.

  She sighed. “As soon as this is over, I madly, truly, deeply need the phone.”

  Linus nodded and directed her to the back porch, where the Inward Bounders were seated in chairs and on the railing. Wilma sat cross-legged on the floor, and seemed eager to begin. Two rockers were left empty. Peg leaned against the door frame, and waited.

  After a minute, Linus brought an elderly man and woman to the porch. The woman had a bright silver braid twisted into a bun. She wore corrective sneakers, a mid-calf-length denim skirt and a flannel shirt in ninety-degree heat. The man had a full head of white hair, and also wore denim and flannel. He had on bright red Nike sneakers, which clashed violently with his orange socks. Despite their advanced age, they walked solidly to the rockers. A learned shine in their watery eyes. A natural dignity in their manner. Peg assumed they were accomplished veteran psychologists. Maybe they i
nvented Wilma’s OCEAN model of personality traits. They were certainly old enough to have clacked clipboards with Carl Jung.

  Linus stood behind them, and said, “Donna, Stewart, I’ll let you introduce yourselves.”

  The ancient ones nodded. Donna went first. She said, “My name is Donna Judd. I’ve lived in Manshire for eighty-six years. I have ten children, seventeen grandchildren and thirty-three great-grandchildren. I own the Manshire used bookstore. Right up the street, next to the post office.”

  The woman nodded at the man. He said, “I’m Stewart Connor. Eighty-nine years young. I’ve got nine sons, and each of them has three sons, and each of them has a couple kids. I used to run a bed-and-breakfast outside of Woodstock, but I’ve been living in Manshire for the last ten years, to be closer to the hospital.”

  Linus said, “Donna and Stewart have the distinction of being the most married Vermonters in state history.”

  Tracy asked, “Most married? They’ve been married for the longest time?”

  The geezers laughed at that. “We’ve never been married to each other. I’m not married at all right now,” said Donna.

  “I am,” said Stewart. “Wish I weren’t, though.”

  Donna brushed some silver strands out of her wrinkles and said, “I’ve been married eleven times. My ten kids are from five different fathers.”

  Stewart said, “I’ve been married twelve times. But only three of them gave me children. The other marriages didn’t last long enough, or the women were too old. My current wife, her name is Jane, was eighty-two when I met her at the hospital.”

  “How old is she now?” asked Ben.

  “Eighty-two,” said Stewart. “We met just four months ago.”

  “Between the two of you, you’ve been married twenty-three times,” said Ray, blinking his non-swollen eyelid in disbelief.

  Stewart said, “Sounds like a lot, but when you’re going through it, getting married and divorced, makes sense each time. I was a widower twice.”

  “I was a widow twice, too,” said Donna. “All the rest divorces.”

  “Vermont has an unusually high divorce rate,” said Linus. “I think these two have distorted the averages.”

  Donna and Stewart laughed with pride. “It’s the winters,” said Donna. “Every November, you get so damn cold, you need a body to keep you warm. So you just latch on to someone, and then, after the April thaw, you realize you’re knee-deep in mud.”

  Stewart said, “Yup.”

  Tracy said, “But why get married? Why not just live together?”

  Stewart said, “I started getting married sixty-five years ago. Back then, you had to buy the cow, because no one was giving milk away for free.”

  Donna laughed and slapped Stewart on the knee. They loved their cow jokes in Vermont.

  “He’s comparing women to cows,” said Tracy.

  “It’s just a figure of speech,” said Donna. “Lighten up.”

  “As I was saying, the women wanted to get married, so I married them,” continued Stewart. “Women always want to get married. Even to me, when they know my track record. I think my history makes them want me more, like they know I’ll say yes to them, or that getting married is more important than staying married.”

  Linus said, “What about you, Donna?”

  “I represented a challenge,” she said. “At least five of my husbands told me when we first started dating that they’d be the one to last. I would just nod and tell them I thought they might be right. Even if they didn’t like me much, or like being married to me, they’d fight like dogs to stop me from divorcing them. It was pride.”

  “Was it ever love?” asked Peg, finally finding her voice after being stunned silent. “For either of you?”

  Donna said, “The first few time, yes, it was about love. But after that, marriage was about food. I had kids. I needed money and the protection of a man. I don’t expect you girls to understand that. You live in a different world. My last marriage was the closest to a love match I’ve ever had. No kids to feed, no pressure to undo the stigma of being a single woman. That one lasted seven years. My record.”

  “He died?” asked Gloria.

  “No, I divorced him, too. He had an affair with a younger woman, that cradle robber. She wasn’t a day over seventy.”

  Stewart said, “I married for love. Every single time. I loved those women with all my heart. Until I didn’t anymore. And each time I fell out of love, it took me by surprise. I never saw it coming, and I never believed it would happen. I fell asleep in love, and woke up the next morning in despair. Every married man alive knows what I’m talking about. The ones who stay married ignore the despair, or they work around it. I woke up in despair yesterday. After only three months this time. It’s getting worse as I get older.”

  Linus said, “By the time you’re ninety, you’ll be filing for divorce on your wedding night.” The seniors laughed at that, heartily.

  Peg could not believe her ears. How could Linus be joking about this? These people were unthinking, unfeeling heathens, to take their marriage vows so lightly, callously leaving a trail of broken families in their wake. And look at them! Clean-cut and preppy; not rednecks by any stretch. They appeared to be socially conservative Protestant members in good standing in their community. But, in truth, they were home wreckers and heart-breakers.

  She had to speak. “Marriage is serious, Linus. It’s not a punch line.”

  “You misunderstand me, Peg,” he said. “I was using divorce as the punch line.”

  Her jaw dropped. She stood there like that, mouth open, catching flies, while Donna and Stewart took questions for an hour, until Wilma drove them home.

  After dinner, Peg tracked down Linus in his bedroom. He was alone; Wilma had gone food shopping. She entered his room and closed the door behind her. Linus, who’d been sitting at his computer typing what appeared to be a journal entry, turned toward her and said, “You wish to speak to me privately?”

  “I have nothing in common with those people,” she said.

  “You said, ‘Their subject matter is of particular relevance to you.’ ”

  “Wasn’t it? Look at your reaction,” said Linus.

  Peg started to defend herself. Linus spoke first. “Donna and Stewart are kind, loving people, and deserving of kindness and love in return. They’re both devoted to their children and grandchildren. I went to school with a dozen of Donna’s grandchildren, and I know firsthand that she’s made huge sacrifices for her family, and that her life hasn’t been easy. But she’s still got a sense of humor, and wants to have a good time. I hope I do at eighty-six. Don’t you?”

  “Of course,” said Peg. “That’s not—”

  “Yes, getting back to you,” said Linus. “I didn’t think you’d relate to Donna and Stewart directly. How did you feel about the way they described their spouses?”

  “Desperate women and vain men. I felt sorry for them.”

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “What else? Stewart’s wives married for the sake of getting married, so they deserved what they got. Donna’s husbands were driven by a knuckleheaded challenge with no ultimate reward.”

  “Okay, then,” said Linus. “Why don’t you meditate on that, and I’ll finish up my business here.”

  “I’ll meditate of what an obtuse asshole you are,” she whispered under her breath. And that’s the last time I molest you, she thought spitefully.

  “One more thing,” said Linus. “Something important happened last night.”

  Peg froze. Was he talking about what happened on the couch? No, couldn’t be.

  She asked, “Something good?”

  “It sounds bad, but it’s good,” Linus said, “Telling you about it does violate my professional distance policy. But the information is relevant to how the program will be run for the next couple of weeks.”

  “Are you going somewhere?” asked Peg, suddenly hating that idea.

  “Wilma and I broke up last night,” h
e said. “After all of you left for Sunbridge, we sat down to talk. She went over her key problems in our relationship. The same ones I’ve heard about for a year now. I tried to pay attention to her complaints. But I could not keep my eyes open. Usually, I never feel tired unless I’m lying down in my bed. I realized then that Wilma must not engage me. The sound of her voice has the soporific effect of, say, a powerful prescription sleeping pill.”

  “It wasn’t her voice,” said Peg. It was a powerful prescription sleeping pill. Should she tell him?

  Linus shook his head. “We’ve been having a hard time for a while. She’s twelve years younger than I am. And we have other, crucial incompatibilities of a personal nature. Which was driven home even harder last night by the dream I had.”

  “Listen to me, Linus. You crashed because—” Peg paused. “What dream?”

  “It can’t tell you the details,” he said. Was he blushing? “But this dream was very stimulating.”

  “Stimulating in what way?” asked Peg. “Just pretend I’m not a client for two minutes.”

  Linus paused. “I’ve had some doubts in the last year about my abilities to, uh, help Wilma in all the ways a woman needs to be helped. And in this dream, I helped a woman. I helped her very well. And fast. My head spun from how fast.”

  His head spun. Peg’s head had spun clean off her neck. She said, “So the dream gave you confidence. Sexual confidence.”

  “The confidence you enjoy every day,” said Linus. And then, as if he got a flash of insight, he said, “Maybe that explains it.”

  “Explains what?” asked Peg.

  “Nothing.”

  “Who was the woman in the dream?” she pressed. “Anyone I know?”

  Linus definitely blushed this time. He said, “Here’s how it’s going to work. Wilma will stay on for the rest of the July session. I’ll edit her dissertation as promised”—he patted the top of the computer—“and in August we’ll go our separate ways.”