Carpool Confidential

by Jessica Benson

  At the funeral, she wore a chic little black veil that she claimed to have picked up in Paris in 1959 and had kept wrapped in the finest tissue in heady anticipation of this joyous day. She also drank about thirty glasses of champagne and then announced to the mourners that the old fart had been a victim of premature ejaculation, in that his last one had been in 1952. As my grandfather had been a prominent pediatrician with a practice on the ground floor of their gracious sprawling Victorian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there were any number of mourners who likely saw that as way TMI.

  My sister’s been married twice. The first one was disastrous; the second has hung on only, she claims, because they make it a policy never to be in the same place at the same time for more than three days running. They also, she has been known to confess after a glass or two of wine, have a strict don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy. My brother has been the only one of us smart enough to stay single, and my parents—Suffice it to say, I don’t even want to think about that.

  At this moment all I wanted (well, other than my husband and marriage back) was a warm, cuddly, let-me-make-it-all-better-darling mother. The sad reality was that I’d have to settle for the one I had instead. So I did the Thing That Under Ordinary Circumstances I Would Never Do Without Either a Life-Threatening Emergency or a Good Stiff Drink. Also known as: called my mother’s cell phone.

  My mother is not a stupid woman. She went to Smith College and NYU Dental School. She has successfully practiced dentistry for thirty-five years. Cell phones, though, are a technological step too far for her. Her phone rang about ten times before being followed by ear-shattering static. This I knew was the sound of her having hit the answer button while fumbling in her purse for the phone. Someone—a man!—in the background, said: “Judy! It’s your phone. I think it’s ringing.”

  That was a surprise because (1) anyone who only thought her phone was ringing clearly belonged in the too stupid to speak category and (2) my mother does not do men. Romance, love, and/or sex are completely unnecessary commodities in her view. I contemplated this surprising development through the next round of scrabbling and heavy breathing, until finally: “HELLO?”

  Me: “Hi, Mom?

  Her: “Hello? Hello? HELLO?” My mother won’t put her ear on the phone because of potential radiation so she can hear exactly nothing.

  Me: “Mom!”

  Her: “HELL-O?”

  Male voice: “Is there anyone there? Are you talking loud enough, Judy? Can they hear you?”

  I was guessing people in Montana could hear her. I pitched my voice up, also to Western State reaching volume. “MOM, IT’S ME, CASSIE.”

  Male voice: “It could be one of those scams. You know they can get your credit card number by calling you and cross-referencing your SIM card!”

  My mother: “CASSIE? IF IT’S YOU, SPEAK UP. IF YOU’RE NOT CASSIE, DON’T EVEN TRY TO GET MY CREDIT CARD NUMBERS FROM MY—” I could still hear her like she was standing next to me—with a megaphone—as she said to him, “What’s a SIM card?”

  Me: “RICK LEFT ME.”

  Despite the three rooms and two closed doors between us, Maria could and did hear me. Two seconds later she stuck her head around the door without knocking, put her hands on her hips, and glaring like it was all my fault, demanded, “He left you? Mr. Martin, he left you?”

  I covered the mouthpiece. My mother screamed, “CASSIE? IS THAT YOU? ARE YOU THERE?”

  “Yes,” I said to Maria. “In the last twenty-four hours my life has been destroyed. Now will you walk the dog?”

  “CASSIE!!!”

  “No.” Maria backed out, muttering—I swear—something about me not having fed Rick enough red meat and something further about him being so nutritionally deprived that he, unlike her husband, would not be able to carry a refrigerator up the stairs. But we live in a building with an elevator, I almost said. Plus, I can’t think of the last time I needed a refrigerator moved. Then I got distracted by my mother shrieking into my ear that she was going to report me to the police.

  I opened the desk drawer, shook two Advil into my hand, and swallowed them dry. My mother hung up. I debated crying, but frankly, didn’t have the energy.

  Five minutes later, while I was waiting for the Advil to kick in, the phone rang. It was my mother. “Cassie? Did you try to call me, or was it one of those scams?”

  “Me,” I said, glumly. “It was me.”

  “Well.” She sounded severe for someone who had just been shouting about SIM cards like a deranged person. “My cell is for dental emergencies only. You scared me.”

  My tears blurred the outlines of the skyscrapers across the river. Why couldn’t my life just be normal? With a husband who hadn’t gone nuts, a housekeeper who cleaned, and maybe one of those nurturing, momlike moms? “I’m sorry,” I said, “but has it ever occurred to you there are emergencies having nothing to do with teeth?”

  “What? What is it?” She actually almost sounded panicked, like the possibility of any other kind of emergency was only now occurring to her.

  “Rick left me.” The third time I’d said it (four if you count Maria). I won’t say it tripped off my tongue, but I managed to get it out.

  She was silent. Then, “Oh.” Followed by more silence.

  As usual, her sympathy was underwhelming. Humiliatingly, I started sobbing. Crying on the phone to her was the absolute last thing I wanted to be doing. I hated the part of her that was happy to have been proved right about my marriage. “He”— God, how did I even say it? It sounded so stupid—“felt his creativity was being stifled.”

  She laughed.

  “No,” I said. “I’m serious.”

  “Who?” she asked when I got done filling her in on Barry Manilow.

  “A singer. Had a lot of dentist’s office type hits in the seventies and eighties.” This did not sit well, as it was a sensitive topic. She only plays world music in her office and deeply resents being lumped in with the Lite FM crowd.

  She let her doubt drip down the phone connection. “Honestly, Cassie, I’m sorry he left you, and, nothing personal towards Rick, but you know how I feel about marriage. It’s just not an institution that was properly designed. I don’t understand why society hasn’t caught on as a whole to the fact it just doesn’t work. And anyway, if anyone’s creativity was being stifled in that marriage, surely it was yours?”

  “You know, Mom”—I wasn’t even trying to keep the exasperation out of my voice or my tears off my sleeve—“some people might dole out some sympathy right about now.”

  “And some people don’t recycle,” she said. “Some people saluted Adolf Hitler.” This has always been her standard line to any some-people-type statement she dislikes. “Besides, if you want sympathy, you know I’m the wrong person.”

  True. And I knew it. But still, I couldn’t resist going for just the smallest smidgen of sympathy: “He came home last night and, totally out of the blue—”

  She interrupted me. “I don’t see the value in being a listener who doesn’t help you pull up your socks and move on. I tell it like it is, not like you want it to be.”

  “You know, Mom, it really bugs me,” I was surprised I was saying it even as I was saying it, “that you pride yourself on never being nice.”

  “Nice is an overrated character trait,” she replied. “Imposed on women by patriarchal societal—”

  “And never nice is just crappy.”

  “Maybe if you weren’t so damned worried about being nice, you’d be doing something productive instead of venting your hostility on me. Look, I’m sorry you’re disappointed in him. I thought maybe he could go the distance—God knows, he never seemed interesting enough to have much internal life—and I understand that, going the distance, was important to you, but I’m not your problem. And frankly, he’s not your problem either. You and your codependency, your lack of individual self, your overreliance on a flawed societal construct. Those are your problems.”

  “Thanks.”

  �
��Is there anything I can do?” Delivered briskly, just in case I might have thought she meant it.

  I didn’t. Mean it when you say that. Offer to come and take care of the kids and me, I wanted to say. Would she if I asked? Maybe. But I knew that more than I wanted her to come, I wanted her to offer. And even if she did, it wouldn’t make her the person I wanted her to be. “Not really.”

  “My greatest regret in all this—” I stopped listening. Even from my current place of residence, in the bottom of the swamp of misery, it struck me as wrong that we were discussing her greatest regret. I tuned back in for “—didn’t manage to raise you to be more resourceful than to rely on any man for your sense of self, which—”

  “Mom”—yeah, yeah, I know it’s rude to interrupt—“why are we discussing your greatest regret? It’s my marriage?”

  “Cassie, that’s what you don’t understand. You’re talking about your marriage. I’m talking about you.” She sounded sad.

  “Oh.”

  “Look,” she said. “My motto is and always has been a body not moving forward is a body dying inside. Believe me, it’s helped me through some very tough times.”

  So instead of maternal comfort I got something that sounded suspiciously like she got it from a fortune cookie. “I don’t suppose you know where Katya is?”

  “Himalayas. On a trekking expedition.”

  “Luke?”

  “At a conference in Paris.”

  “What about Dad?”

  “I don’t keep tabs on your father.” Her tone was so cold I knew she was lying.

  Which reminded me: “Hey, Mom? Are you with a man?”

  “A man? Don’t be ridiculous, Cassie.” She was rushing now. “I’ll give you a call tomorrow, OK?”

  Interesting, I thought. “But Mom,” I said, “I could have sworn I heard one in the background. Talking to you,” I added, in case she was going to try to brush it off as someone passing by.

  “It must have been someone passing by,” she said. “Honestly, what on earth would I want with a man?”

  8

  Brooklyn Blues

  I don’t know. Maybe sex, for starters.

  You might think that being dumped so spectacularly would make the aftermath an interesting story. It didn’t. After the initial blaze of shock dispersed, it was the same dreary depression that follows all of those more mundane we just grew apart marital splits.

  The reality of my new aloneness sunk in slowly, inch by inch. I was cold all the time. It felt like ice had seeped into my brain, leaving it stiff, the way fingers get in the cold. I had no energy to do anything above and beyond getting us through the day, so I was pretty much neglecting anything not qualifying as either urgent or necessary.

  I was always tired, but could never seem to sleep except in the half hour before the alarm went off. I spent hours lying awake imagining everyone I knew, cozily tucked next to their husbands, while I lay shivering alone in the dark. Much as I’d done as a child. Except then, instead of husbands as the comfort object, it had been Mickey Mouse comforters. I’d pictured all the other children I knew asleep beneath those stiff, shiny quilts from Sears, night lights burning, two fond parents tucking them in, while I’d huddled in my bed, plain, no-nonsense quilt pulled up over my head to drown out, in earlier years, the shouting from the living room, and then in later years, the absolute silence.

  My life, I’d firmly believed, would be completely changed for the better if only I could have one of those comforting pieces of middle-American normality to curl up under. I’d no longer be on the outside looking in. I knew it couldn’t possibly be true, but it was like a talisman: if only I had one, my life would be smoothed from messy patchwork into smooth, glorious, Disney perfection.

  Instead of being a blueblood-should-have-been-

  deb-turned-divorced-bohemian-with-a-vengeance-dentist who drove a twenty-year-old Volvo with one door tied closed with rope so you had to climb in on the driver’s side and slide over and a MAKE LOVE NOT WAR bumper sticker, my mother would be transformed into a stay-at-home mom who wore lipstick, baked cookies for the PTA bake sale, and went to the Junior League meetings that were practically her birthright. My little brother would be cute instead of grubby, snotty-nosed, and annoying. Katya would no longer mope palely around, holed up in her room reading Ayn Rand and listening to the Grateful Dead, but instead be someone with a pink fuzzy room who would say omigod and giggle. We’d do each other’s hair and listen to Olivia Newton-John together. She’d have dozens of cute jock boyfriends, who would treat me like a kid sister.

  It goes without saying that in this version, instead of going home at night to his bachelor pad in the Back Bay with his dental assistant du jour (and dutifully taking us to Legal Seafoods on Saturday evenings, where he tried to think of enough conversation to kill the two hours until he could drop us back home), my father was pulling a station wagon into the perfectly edged driveway at 6:00. I never did get the comforter and here I was, thirty years later, feeling, once again, very much on the outside looking in.

  Two days after our initial conversation, Charlotte called back. When I heard her voice I couldn’t decide if I was thrilled or terrified.

  “So I had an idea.” Thrilled. “You’re not going to like it.” Terrified. “But it’s a good one.” Both. “You’ll want to say no.” Terrified. “But don’t, you’ll regret it.”

  Terrifyingly thrilled, I decided, or was that thrillingly terrified? “Are you planning to put me out of my misery?”

  She laughed. “Or further into it, depending. You should be blogging.”

  “What?”

  “A weblog. You know where you—”

  “I know what it is,” I said. “We even have broadband out here in 718 now.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “How do you think Jonathan and Nicole zap their manuscripts in?”

  “They do litfic,” she said. “At the rate they’re required to produce they can messenger them.”

  “Back on topic: could you be more specific?”

  “They only do a book like every three years—”

  “Your idea. I should blog about what exactly?”

  “Your life, what’s happening. In daily installments, like a diary.” She sounded excited. “You know how I said it was like a gift? Hell, the reason he claims to have left is more entertaining than the premise of most novels. I guarantee people will be hitting it every day to see what’s going on. It’ll be like Dickens for the Internet generation.”

  Charlotte’s ideas often seemed a little off at first look, but usually ended up yielding something good, so I suppressed my first are you fucking crazy reaction and said instead, “I don’t know. Announcing this on the Internet seems a little over the top. The boys don’t even know. They think he’s on a business trip.”

  “Change the names and maybe a detail or two. Make Rick a lawyer or something. He’ll recognize himself, but the little fuck’s hardly in a position to complain, is he—Cassie, wait!” She was getting really excited. “Actually keeping it secret is perfect.”

  “Charlotte.” It had been a long few days. I was tired. “I’m sorry, but I’m not getting this. First of all, in case I was too oblique the other day, I need to get paid for working, and second, I’m guessing you got that, so if I’m blogging I’m presumably doing it for the exposure that will then lead to people assigning me big paycheck articles, so how is keeping it secret going to help?”

  “We’re going to pay you.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “I don’t do that when it comes to money. I have to warn you, though, it’s not support-the-family money, it’s more like not-really-worth-the-walk-to-the-bank-to-deposit-it money.”

  “I’ll take electronic transfer then.” At this point I wasn’t saying no to anything. “But what about keeping it secret? Why?”

  “To start, I think for you to give your best on this, you’re going to need anonymity. I mean, you’re not exactly a spill-your-guts person, Ca
ss. Writing about the most intimate areas of your life isn’t going to be easy.”

  “Intimate? I figured I could do distant but ironic.”

  “Look, everyone and their mother has a blog now. You could spend all day reading people’s ramblings on everything from their screenwriting ambitions which you know from the first sentence will never amount to anything to the crap they took this morning. So you’re going to have to make it stand out which, fortunately, you can do by taking a great hook—how and why he left you and how you’re coping—and combining that with humor and intimacy.”

  I took a breath. Was this whoring myself out? Maybe, but I could probably live with that if I had to.

  “We’re going to run it on the NYMetro site like we did with the snarky food guy. We had to keep him anonymous because otherwise he never would have worked in New York again and it ended up working in our favor. A rumor started that he was actually Daniel Boulud and his hits went crazy.”

  “But no one’s going to mistake me for Daniel Boulud,” I pointed out. “At least I hope not.”

  “Even better, they might think you’re someone they know.”

  “Now I know I’m not getting this.”

  “Look, non-New Yorkers think it’s just a huge city. New Yorkers know the truth—it’s basically a big small town at heart. And like all small towns, it thrives on gossip. If you make it clear you’re part of the charmed inner circle of New York private-school bake-sale moms but be oblique about exactly who you are, everyone is going to be convinced they know you. They’ll be coming back to read more and talking about it and gossiping about it. We could run a thing in the mag, where people try to figure out which school your kids are at or something. I’m sure Gawker.com will be all over it. I’m probably biased because I came up with it, but, God, it really is a fabulous idea. In the meantime, I can get you some small article assignments and we can try to work up from there. Who knows, if it catches on it could end up a cover story or even a book like that British sex blogger, in which case you’ll want to reveal your identity, but until then, secrecy is to your benefit.”