So I think it’s pretty safe to say that I understood firsthand that externals—silent stainless appliances, interior designers of the moment, killer views, telegenic looks, and family pedigrees that make magazine editors want to do pictorial spreads on you—don’t necessarily buy happiness. Stability, responsibility, constancy, and love. Those buy happiness: a man whose sense of commitment ensures he’ll never leave for the long legs of a dental assistant buys happiness.
And I was grateful every day—or every day that I remembered to be—that despite a few flaws, like a sense of humor that was on the slight side, the occasional lapse into pomposity, the smallest tendency toward rigidity, my husband was that man. Rick had those qualities in spades.
2
Something’s Comin’ Up
Tonight, back in the present, Rick leaned back, sprawling his arms along the top of the sofa, and stared absently past me, out at the lights, as though he was seeing them for the first time in a very long while.
He usually changed his clothes the second he walked in the door, but tonight he hadn’t. He actually looked pretty hot, in that way that someone you’ve known intimately for years, slept with hundreds—thousands?—of times can look when they suddenly look different from the way you’re used to seeing them. In fact, I might just find myself needing to jump on him later. True, he looked pretty tired, but he didn’t exactly make a habit of saying no if I offered.
I stared out the window past him. Had I really slept with Rick thousands of times? We’d been together fifteen years and married for eleven—
“Cass? Where are you?” His left hand was at a funny angle, along the top of the sofa. And since his shirt cuffs were customsized to perfectly accommodate his watchband, I could clearly see the face of the Tag Heuer Limited Edition I’d bought him when he’d made managing director. It was almost 11:00.
I wasn’t sure he would see the humor in me trying to figure out how many times we’d had sex. “Have you eaten?”
“No.” His gaze was fixed again on the windows, on the light of the police boat under the bridge. I wondered what it was like in there. Two policemen, listening to the crackle of some kind of police radio. Whiling away the long hours of the night while they waited for someone to try to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, talking about wives, girlfriends, maybe the Yankees. “I’m not really hungry,” Rick said.
“Rough day?”
“Sort of.” He looked like he was preoccupied by something from the office. “Do you ever wonder”—he motioned around at the living room—“whether there’s more than this?”
Just like that, straight out, no buildup, no I have something big to ask you, no you know that nice, safe world we’ve made for the boys? Kiss it good-bye. Nothing. There are no words that convey exactly how taken by surprise I was. I could tell you stuff about dizziness, my heart slamming into my ribs hard enough to hurt, buzzing in my ears, but it wouldn’t do it. Not really.
I laughed, shakily, because I had a vague notion that by not responding too much, I could limit the damage. “Scrubbing snot off the furniture at eleven at night? Sure. I’d have to be a total idiot not to.”
“No, Cass.” He leaned forward, toward me. “Whether there’s more out there for me.”
“Oh.” I had that falling sensation, like the first time I ever went on the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland. I didn’t know it was a flume ride, and I was terrified to suddenly find myself hurtling down in the dark. “I’m guessing whatever you did all day was more interesting than scrubbing snot.”
“You’d be surprised.”
I doubted that. “Rick, what’s going”—my voice cracked, I swallowed—“on?”
The phone rang, cracking through the hush of the room. I was still on my knees, holding the Pellegrino bottle and the wadded-up paper towels. It was one of those moments when it feels like a bunch of time has passed but not much has. I reached for the phone.
“Leave it.” Rick put his hand on mine. I stared up at him.
It seemed like you could have soft-boiled an egg in the amount of time it took the next three rings. Until, finally, from the kitchen, I heard my own voice announcing cheerfully that we couldn’t get to the phone right now followed by Sue Moriarty’s voice. “Hi, Cassie. I know it’s late, but I figured you’d still be up. Just wanted to remind you that you’re chairing the Committee for Foreign Language meeting tomorrow a.m. Oh, and have you and Rick reserved tickets for the Christmas Carol Ball yet? It was such fun last year, wasn’t it? Okay, see you tomorrow. Bye.”
“Ah. Sue.” In a previous incarnation, before she’d become the Parents Association doyenne of Brooklyn Heights, Sue and Rick had been—in one of those coincidences that seem contrived in fiction but happen in life—in the same class at Wharton, so he’d known her a long time. “Another committee, Cass?” He sounded wryly amused. I don’t know why, but this added to my creeping discomfort. Wry amusement was not his thing. Earnestness, yes, wry amusement, no.
“I’m chairing for Grace Finn who broke her leg, poor thing,” I babbled, trying to quiet the discomfort. “They want foreign language added to the curriculum by the time the kids are four because they think it will help with college admissions.”
“So why do you do it?” Do what? my mind flailed. “Ridiculous committees, benefits, all this time with overinvolved parents with no lives of their own,” he added.
I did it because it was, well, what I did, what we’d both wanted—for me to be involved, there for our children, in a way our parents hadn’t been for us. Did I really, suddenly, need more justification than the fact that I loved the feeling of building a fence of security around my little family, keeping my boys’ worlds safe and comfortable?
“You never wanted to be Sue Moriarty.” He sounded sad, the wryness was gone, or maybe just imagined after all.
“And I’m not,” I said fiercely.
“Are you sure?”
I started to laugh, because it’s in my nature to always try to diffuse an awkward situation with a joke, and Rick was really scaring me, making this a bona fide awkward situation. “Well I’m not sleeping with Tim,” I said. “For starters.”
“Neither is she, I’m guessing,” he said and then gave me a look, you know, a significant one. My heart, which had slowed to probably double time, took off again. “But that’s not what this is about. Cass.” He leaned down, put his forearms on his knees. “Before, when I said do you ever wonder if there’s something more, I meant this, all of”—he motioned at the living room, at me—“this.”
“‘This’ being our life?” My voice was shaking audibly. “Marriage, children?”
He was silent long enough for me to know the answer.
Now, I am a serious worrier. I worry about everything from whether my kids’ sneakers have proper arch support to which subway line is most likely to have a derailment to the polar ice-caps melting to tsunamis in the East River to exactly what North Korea is doing with those nukes. So you might think this scenario was one I’d have been semi-prepared for, but this of course was precisely the one damn thing on earth I’d never given anxiety time to. It had simply never occurred to me.
This was so uncharacteristic that even as Rick was in the very act of doing it and I was watching him, hearing him, do it, I was having trouble making myself believe it was actually happening. This can’t be for real. Because the thing about Rick was that his traits, the good and the bad, were flip sides of the same coin. Heads, his predictability, certainty, absolute rock-solid devotion to family life. Tails, his occasional smugness, inflexibility, utter predictability. But neither side had cowardly, scum-sucking, mid-life-crisis-having, bastard, so obviously there was some kind of misunderstanding. I was going to explain that to him, very calmly and rationally, until I looked up at him again, saw the expression on his face. And then I understood.
All that worrying? Useless. It didn’t stop planes from slamming into the World Trade Center and it hasn’t prevented global warming or the existence of Michael Ja
ckson’s plastic surgeon, kept my kids from getting sick or staved off the arrival of those weird mosquitoes with the tiger striped legs that give bites the size of Frisbees and transmit hideous diseases. And it wasn’t doing a damned thing to keep the inevitable from unfolding in my living room.
Total freaking waste of time.
3
You’re Leavin’ too Soon
I’d like to say that right then and there was the end of the worrying, that I realized on the spot that it hadn’t done me any good in the past and therefore was not going to be of any use to me in the future. That I then and there turned over a new leaf and started moving ahead as a happier, healthier, freed person. But I’d be lying. The words weren’t even out of his mouth before I went to work on: Is there someone else? Does he still love us? How devastated on a scale of one to ten will the boys be? Will he be generous with money? If I have to get a job, am I qualified to do anything other than clean toilets? Are we almost done with this national obsession with reality TV? I sat there, staring at him, worrying about all of the above and then some, knowing I should move, say something, do something, but stuck in my mind on his question Do you ever wonder whether there’s more out there?
Anyone who’s been a stay-at-home mom for any length of time (officially defined as longer than a week) will tell you that there is no simple answer to this: yes and no, depends on the day/ hour/minute, always, never, mostly, occasionally, sometimes, of course there’s something more out there, what do you think I am? a moron? and what else could there be? are all in there, mixed up together. Asking someone to pull one answer out is like throwing different colors of paint into a bucket, stirring it up, and trying to take one color out.
On the most basic level, the decision to stay home is often made at a moment when you’re not at your best—i.e., unshowered, unrested, hormonally imbalanced, leaking milk at inopportune moments and unable to fit into anything in your wardrobe. You are alternating second by second between panic at what you’ve done (I’ve ruined my life. This is so not like having a goldfish and actually, how well did that work out?) and the un-shakable conviction that each blink of your child’s eye is the most fascinating spectacle on earth and to miss even one constitutes unthinkable neglect.
That first month, we spent so many hours staring at Noah’s perfect little head it’s a wonder in retrospect that the poor kid wasn’t traumatized by having two zombies looming over him every time he woke up. When he was a week old, Rick rolled over in bed one night, looked at me thoughtfully, and said, “God your face is huge.” Do we sound like people who should have been entrusted with deciding what color to paint the bathroom, never mind life-altering decisions?
Nonetheless, when Noah was nine weeks old, I said, “So I’ve been thinking. Maybe I should freelance instead of going back as a staff writer.” I was, at the time, on staff at City Woman magazine, where I was writing a lot of stories like “The Briefcase You Can’t Live Without: It’s functional, it says power, yet it’s still thrillingly, sexily, feminine.” I didn’t exactly feel like I’d be depriving the world of the next Christiane Amanpour.
Rick spent a few careful seconds observing Noah perform the amazing feat of sleeping in the middle of our bed before saying, “Maybe even wait on the freelancing until he’s a little older, Cass. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to give him your full attention? You can always go back later.”
“It’s not like knowing how to write is a skill that loses its marketability,” I’d agreed.
Did I regret it? Sometimes. Although to be honest, mostly (a) when discussing the decision with my mother and (b) at Rick’s work dinners.
“Oh come on, before the LTOM became part of LIFFE, the C& F on LPG far outweighed the PPG, unless you’re using the SOFFEX LEPO,” the person across the table from me would say. (I admit this isn’t an exact transcription, more an interpretation and possibly, even, a slight exaggeration.)
Finally, when talk of the PPG waned, which could take several hours—each more thrilling than the last—some twenty-something whiz woman of investment banking with thighs like Kate Moss’s and that perfect work-to-dinner suit would turn to me and say, politely, “Are you in finance, too?”
My reply that I was at home with two kids would be met by an infinitesimal split second of silence—like I’d just said I feel everyone should open themselves to the exotic possibility of eternal damnation. After the silence, a quick inquiry into the age and sex of offspring would follow, and then: “My God! You are working, then!”
“Oh, yes!” I’d say, with an equal degree of false enthusiasm, much as though I was raising a troupe of wacky performing chimps. “They’re a handful!”
Let’s just say that I rarely eyed a wine bottle with as much affection as at these dinners. But I’m not altogether convinced that’s the same thing as real regret. It’s wistfulness in a wouldn’t-it-be-nice-to-be-putting-on-a-designer-skirt, grabbing-an attaché-case-instead-of-this-humongous-tote-bag-stuffed-with-papers-pencils-action figures-plastic-animals-Legos-juice-boxes-and-dried-up-peanut-butter-sandwiches kind of way. And I don’t know one woman with children, regardless of how passionately she loves the choices she’s made, who doesn’t have regrets.
When she was six months pregnant with her third child, my friend Kate Hoenig dumped a high-profile job in advertising. A month into her time as a domestic goddess, we were at one of those indoor play spaces, watching our children hurtle themselves headlong over dangerous objects and wallow in the toxin-infested ball pit. It was the first time that afternoon that one of the four children we had between us wasn’t hanging off us crying and/or expounding on the evil ways of their sibling.
“Do you regret it?” I asked.
“Deciding to stay home?” Kate averted her gaze from the sight of her four-year-old son practicing his javelin-throwing technique on a group of unsuspecting toddlers. “Absolutely not. Being with the kids, despite all the chaos and tedium, it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. The fulfillment is just…impossible to describe.”
And then she carefully removed the glob of Geno’s frozen pizza from her formerly perfectly highlighted hair, looked toward the CIA-style security system she would have to negotiate her pregnant bulk through to get to a garbage can, shrugged, and ate it. “Not bad,” she said.
Ten weeks after the baby was born she’d unresigned and was back in the office. I went into Manhattan to meet her for lunch a few weeks later.
“I feel like such a failure.” She looked down at her black cod with miso, tears in her eyes.
“A failure?” I was trying not to salivate with envy at her Manolos and her once-again perfectly highlit hair. “Kate, what are you talking about?”
“I just couldn’t do it. I tried. I told everyone how fulfilled I was, staying home, but, God! I hated it. It was like I was dead most of the time, and when I didn’t feel dead it was because I was so depressed killing myself seemed like too much effort. I’m not together like you are, Cassie.”
“Together?” I put down my fork, smiling modestly.
“No, really. To do it, day after day, and not mind the numbing tedium, the depression, the boredom.” She took a delicate bite of her cod. “You have to be together to survive that!”
“I mean, haven’t you ever wondered if your life would have been more fulfilling if you’d gone in a different direction, Cass?” Rick pulled me back from lunch with Kate to the present. He looked at me encouragingly, like a little support might help me consider the question. “It’s okay if you have. I mean, it’s only natural.”
He pushed his glasses up his nose in a gesture so familiar to me that I felt a split second of confusion over whether it was my habit or his. And I don’t wear glasses. “Do I wish I was editing the New York Times instead of going to PTA meetings? Sometimes, sure.” Mostly while I was at the PTA meetings.
“But what about something really new? Different? Something more unexpected, like, I don’t know…acting?”—was it my imagination, or was he starting to look unc
omfortable?— “Singing? Something creative?”
I shot him a look. “Do you know me at all, Rick?”
He smiled. “I like to think I do.”
“In seventh grade I tried out for a part in No, No, Nanette. They suggested I look in a different direction for my future.” And then, feeling completely sick to my stomach, I waited for the train with no brakes I knew was headed right at me to hit. “Why?”
“Actually, Cass, I, um, didn’t so much mean a different direction for you. I meant me.” He looked down at the floor, suddenly bashful.
I could tell he wanted me to probe further, pull it out of him. “So?” I said in as close to a this-better-be-good kind of voice as I could muster. “Can you act? Can you sing?” Because if he (a) could and (b) wanted to, it was a revelation to me.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But that’s not really the point. A person’s creativity’s not always so overt or readily measured by external standards. And maybe, just maybe, mine’s been stifled by all this”—he looked around like he was trying to figure it out—“these—”
“Children? People who love you and rely on you?” I was desperately hoping to break through whatever this was.
He looked at me. Or maybe past me. “Responsibilities. The stuff, the apartment, the wine cellar, the house on Nantucket.”
“Who insisted on all that? Because as far as I’m concerned the whole thing has always been mostly about delivering a great big fuck you, I can do it on my own to your mother.” Then I clapped a hand over my mouth. I have always believed that there are some things you intrinsically understand about your spouse that you hold against your heart for them, that you get but never throw in their faces. And as soon as I said this, I regretted it. It was the panic speaking.
Carpool Confidential Page 2