Carpool Confidential

by Jessica Benson

  “I don’t know, Charlotte.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “Oh, you know, the usual. Conscience, disbelief, morality, fear, privacy issues, ethical questions, reluctance, lethargy.”

  Charlotte laughed. “You are one potent cocktail of neuroses, Cassie.”

  “So I’ve been told. But it’s not just my story, you know?” I said, trying to get her to understand my misgivings. “There are a lot of other people involved.”

  “Boo fucking hoo.” She sounded fierce. “Long before you were the perfect wife and mother you were a writer. And that’s what writers do. They take what life hands them and use it. Instead of letting it be something he did to you, take it back, make it yours.”

  “Can I think about this?”

  “Sure, just not for too long. God knows what could happen if you wait. He could come back”—If only—“anything. So how are things?”

  “Pretty awful. And you know what I realized after I spoke to my mother?”

  “You’re adopted?”

  “I wish, but no. That I might never have sex again.”

  Granted, in recent years Rick and I hadn’t been in much danger of sending our Frette sheets (my tastes had definitely refined post—Mickey Mouse comforter) up in a molten blaze, having settled into a definitely married kind of routine in both frequency and variation. We were both busy, tired at night, and Rick often got home late. Plus having two kids around at all times, a dog to walk, a social life, and a phone that seemed to ring endlessly wasn’t exactly conducive to seductive lolling around in a pearl thong when and wherever the mood struck, but I hadn’t planned on giving it up completely just yet.

  Charlotte laughed. “In that case I hope the last time was fabulous.”

  Maria came in, looked at me huddled in my chair by the window, and shook her head.

  I glared at Maria, implying I was waiting for her to leave. “I’m trying to remember.”

  Maria folded her arms to let me know she wasn’t going anywhere. I covered the receiver and suggested that she take the money and the grocery list on the kitchen counter and actually go to the grocery store. I knew she’d substitute whole milk for low fat and Velveeta for cheddar in retaliation for her morning TV schedule being interrupted, but I didn’t care. I uncovered the receiver. “Sorry.”

  “No problem,” Charlotte said as Maria stomped out. “Does the lack of memory imply passage of time or lack of fabulousness?”

  “Hey.” I was, maybe, a little defensive—after all, I’d been married to him by choice for a lot of years. “That’s not really fair. Rick was…good.” Which was true.

  “Mmm. Maybe. But best for himself, I bet.”

  “Charlotte,” I started to object but changed my mind. “Well for sure, he never had any complaints.”

  She laughed. “Uh-huh. I’m familiar with the type. Did he check his BlackBerry in the middle?”

  “Not too often.”

  “Once”—she had a definite BTDT tone—“is too often.”

  “Never at a crucial moment.” I had to stick up for him a little.

  “Crucial for who?” she wanted to know. “You or him?”

  I laughed.

  “Get yourself a Rabbit,” she advised. “The battery kind, not the pet kind.”

  “Now I’m even more depressed.”

  “Are you kidding me?” she sounded amazed. “Think of all the boring banker dinner parties you don’t have to endure any more just to get a little action later.”

  “Charlotte, that’s often called sharing a life,” I pointed out. “I miss it.”

  “That,” she said, “is because you don’t know any better. I’ve named mine Grey.”

  “What,” I said, “are we talking about?”

  “My Rabbit. I’ve always liked the name Grey. I think it sounds interesting. It’s currently my only sexual relationship, so why not?”

  “Are you saying you don’t date anymore?” Charlotte was the kind of woman who never lacked for men offering to whisk her off to Rome for romantic weekends, polish her toenails, carry her grocery bags, debug her computer, buy her diamonds. So this was hard to imagine.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I date. I just don’t have sex with anyone except Grey.”

  “Charlotte,” I said. “Do me a favor and don’t call me anymore until I’m back on my feet, OK? I don’t think I can take many more conversations like this.”

  “See,” she said, “that’s where we’re different. This conversation’s depressed you, but I’m thinking this should all be in the blog. It’s real, it’s intimate, it’s exactly where every other dumped woman your age”—hmm, maybe I could convince her to adopt a new catch phrase on this—“ends up. It’s practically universal.”

  Pretty much as soon as we’d hung up in order for me to ponder the universality of unlooked-for celibacy in over-35s, my mother called and said, “So, tell me what you’ve done to get your life back on track.”

  “Not so much other than mope.” I didn’t see any reason to fill her in on my conversations with Charlotte just yet.

  “You’re in denial.” I might have detected a trace of concern in her voice. “You think you’re going right back to that nice, little world of cozy financial security and PTA meetings and quasi-suburban dinner parties where everything is nice and fake and no one mentions anything of substance, don’t you?”

  God, I hoped so.

  “Accept it, Cassie, he’s moved on. He’s left you, he’s not thinking about you, he’s thinking about him, and now you need to get your head out of the sand and figure out your life, not wait for him to give it back.”

  “It’s not denial, it’s optimism,” I explained, although really no sane person would have used the words PTA meetings and optimism in a related context. And I loved those dinner parties where the houses were always beautiful and fabulous food was prepared by unseen hands in unseen kitchens. Even if they could occasionally be, um, slightly dull, they were so shimmeringly different from the bean-pot-tofu-banjo-strumming singalongs that had been the mainstay of my mother’s post-divorce social life, I couldn’t help but love them. “A concept I don’t think you get.”

  “Oh, I get optimism all right,” she said. “It’s the tool of stupid people everywhere, Like Marx said on religion—”

  “He’s been gone less than two days,” I said. “Why don’t we revisit this conversation if necessary in a few weeks?”

  “I’m worried about this willfully blind stupidity, Cassie.”

  “Mom”—I thought with a clever segue I could maybe move the spotlight off of me and my failings—“have you been lonely being on your own all these years?”

  She made a noise suspiciously like a snort. “I assume that by ‘alone’ you really mean without a man?”

  “I guess so.” Now I was kind of embarrassed. Was my definition really that narrow? “I didn’t mean to—”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m used to societal attitudes towards single women. I’d rather be by myself for eternity than spend a weekend in your father’s company, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “Oh,” I said. “OK.” What other answer was there to that?

  “Unlike my Stepford days, I know myself. I have my practice, politics, my friends, and my Rabbit,” she went on.

  Argh. I so did not need to know that. Also, I was apparently the only woman on the planet without one. Maybe tomorrow I’d ask Sue Moriarty about hers.

  “I find Saddam’s all I need.”

  I gulped. Double argh. And I’d thought Grey was weird. “Saddam?” I said.

  “Has it ever occurred to you, Cassie, how much Western propaganda we’re spoon fed? Who’s to say Saddam was really what he was made out to be by the bigoted oppressors in charge of our own country? I, for one, happened to find him a vibrant and interesting man. And by the way, I’d suggest you get yourself one.”

  “A Rabbit or a dead dictator?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. Why was it that
she had such a severe sense of humor failure? “Of course I meant a Rabbit. It’s no joke to be a woman without a sex life. Studies have shown—”

  Time to end this conversation in a hurry. While I did not agree with her on a number of points (Rabbits or dictators), I had to admit there might be something to what she’d said about optimism and denial. Over the next week, every time I picked up the phone to find Rick on the other end, it was a stretch to hold onto either of those. Today, I told myself each time, he’s going to apologize for having been out of his mind and say he’s coming back. Apparently I’d forgotten to tell him that, as he was invariably polite but uninterested in the travails of my new life as a single mom. Yes, he was happy, he said, yes, he was creatively fulfilled for the first time in years, and, yes, the production was coming along very well, thank you, and, no, he did not have either a bouffant hairdo or a prosthetic nose, no they hadn’t yet decided how to incorporate the tragic hip surgery chapter of Barry’s life, no phone number yet and no he didn’t think there would be anything for me to gain by knowing exactly where he was but he’d call again in a day or two. Could I put the kids on?

  The kids. “We have to talk about them,” I told him. I alternated between relief that the boys still inhabited the nice secure world they always had, and panic at how close to toppling that world was. I felt awful for them and their imminent status as children of a failed marriage—that they were about to understand being on the outside looking in—and wanted to hold them close every minute. I read newspaper articles on studies of children of divorce with horrified fascination, like glancing at the scene of a car accident. When they were at school, I missed them with an almost physical ache. But then, the minute they were home, I felt overwhelmed.

  “They sound great,” he replied jovially.

  “Yes,” I said, “they do. But that, Rick, is because I am lying to them.” Them and everyone else. “I am lying for you, Rick,” I explained, “to protect you and our children. You have turned me into a liar.”

  “I haven’t turned you into anything, Cassie. You are what you are.”

  What the fuck did that mean? It made me furious beyond reason and, also, well, struck just the tiniest chord. I could hear Charlotte: Secrecy is to your benefit. No point in going there with him.

  His calls always came up number withheld. “Rick,” I said one afternoon, “you don’t need to block your phone number. I’m not going to be calling night and day like a desperate Manilow groupie.”

  He replied in the endlessly patient tone he’d taken to using with me, as though he understood I wasn’t quite capable of adult conversation, “You not being able to contact me is part of the exercise.”

  “I hadn’t realized we were doing an exercise. How fun! It’s almost like a corporate retreat!”

  “It’s about you being forced to give up control,” he explained. “You need to be helped to realize that nothing’s going to happen. Everything will be fine.”

  “But Rick,” I said, “what if something does happen?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” I hesitated, closing my eyes against the images. Airplanes in a clear sky. Glittering arcs of glass. Smoke pouring across the river, through the windows I hadn’t thought to close. “Something.”

  “It won’t. Gotta go.” He hung up, pretty much nullifying the patient tone.

  My mother was right—he was all too clearly not pining for either me or his old life, so it didn’t seem fair that I was spending my days immobilized, waiting for it to resume.

  9

  When October Goes

  In all honesty, I’m not sure why I was keeping the desertion a secret. Charlotte’s advice combined with embarrassment, denial, cowardice. Whatever went into it, I was pretty invested in maintaining the little deception of everything being fine, Daddy’s just on a long business trip.

  I dried the bedtime missing-Daddy tears with aplomb, fended off the weekend why-can’t-he-come-home? blues by uttering reassurances and redoubling efforts to be both father and mother, and comforted middle-of-the-night-misery by allowing the boys to crawl into bed with me.

  I shivered with the dads at Saturday morning soccer, talking lamely into their uninterested ears of Rick’s grueling travel schedule. When I ran into someone from his squash league or I got a phone call inviting us to a dinner party next Saturday, I scrambled away from the truth as fast as I could. I proffered excuses for his lack of attendance at co-op board meetings. I went to the October Ball alone (well, with Randy and Josh, but fundamentally alone) and made excuses for his absence. I went to PTA meeting after PTA meeting and pretended to listen to the discussions of the name-change committee or the foreign language committee and smiled. In short, I made our life without him look exactly like our life with him.

  Which worked in the short term, anyway, for everyone except me. Going through the motions felt sort of like watching CNN—there was one thing on the screen, but I was reading something different on the headline ticker. And what I was reading there left me almost immobilized with misery. I could keep up the faux pace when I had to, but as soon as I was home alone, I’d basically sit by the window, bundled in the castoff sweatshirt of Rick’s I had taken to wearing 24/7, looking out at Manhattan and moping. I quit running. I bailed on both personal trainers— Steve, who did cardio, and Jaden, who did Pilates. I quit taking my calcium pills (thinning bones seemed way too ephemeral a concern).

  I spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about the moments that make up a life. I’d become almost obsessed by the idea that there are actually a finite number of times you will do the little things that knit the fabric of your existence—walk into City Bakery to buy a pretzel croissant and a café au lait, promising yourself you’ll exercise it off later, kiss your children goodnight, fill the car with gas, push a grocery cart, brush your teeth, drive up the West Side Highway, open the newspaper.

  You’ll do these things over and over, without thought. And then one time will be the last, probably without you even realizing it. When these last times are gone they’re just gone, a moment that has slipped by unrecognized, and can never be recaptured.

  It’s funny that in reality it’s the small things like these that put together the pieces of our lives, but in fiction, and in memory, it’s the larger ones that count. The ones that can in an instant so neatly divide a life into two distinct halves, before and after: a marriage, a birth. A death. Planes slamming into buildings. A husband leaving. One moment it’s life as usual, and the next you are thrown into a sudden alternate reality and the world looks so different from there that you can’t quite grasp the fact that all that separates the now from the before is a few minutes. And you simply can’t believe that you were so stupidly unprepared that just a few moments before you were thinking about something completely mundane, like the fact that, hmm, there’s boogers on the sofa, better scrub it off with some Pellegrino.

  “Have you given the blogging idea any real consideration?” Randy asked me, when I repeated my moments that make up a life theory to her for the second, or possibly tenth, time. She sounded worried.

  “No. It seems like a weirdly, badly wrong idea. And I’m extremely dull. As you know.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I do know. But see, as a writer you get to gild the mundane with brushstrokes of genius and fascination, spin dross into gold.”

  “That was very literary sounding,” I said, “maybe you should do it.” And then tried with Charlotte: “I’m extremely dull.”

  “That’s the beauty. It doesn’t matter.” She stopped to think. “If anything, it’s kind of an advantage because it makes your new life that much more entertaining in contrast. I’ve been working our conversations in my head, the one about never having sex again and intimacy being a key thing here, and I totally think the content has to be more than journaling your feelings crap. No one cares about that except maybe three friends and your mother.”

  “Well, maybe not my mother, but I see your point.”

&
nbsp; “Cassie”—I could tell she was switching mental gears— “what makes you buy a magazine?”

  “Umm, a long subway ride coming up.”

  “But what makes you decide which magazine to buy?”

  “The promise of a really compelling, thought-provoking article.”

  “Think like a normal person, Cassie.”

  “George Clooney on the cover. Orlando Bloom. Colin Firth dressed as Mr. Darcy.”

  “Right. Sex. There’s your angle—what it’s like to be late thirties, forty waving over the hill at you, totally set and settled, dull like you said, out of the dating mainstream and then suddenly, tossed out where you never thought you’d be—back out there looking for men to sleep with again, and these days women, too, if you’re cool…. Make that kewl. The rules have totally changed!”

  “But, Charlotte, you do know that even in college I basically had to meet the parents before I put out, right? I never was kewl and frankly doubt I knew the rules the first time.”

  “That makes it even better,” she said. “You’re going into it already at a disadvantage. Anyway, you don’t have to actually have sex. The British sex blog woman’s was all about how much she was getting and enjoying. Yours can be the opposite—how little you’re getting and how sex and singlehood have changed.”

  What could I do? I recognized a good idea when it smacked me in the face. I still couldn’t resist one last, clinging look back at who I thought I should be. “I don’t know, Charlotte, I was envisioning some thoughtful and provocative without being sensational musings on the divide between working and non-working moms, a look at how each side vilifies the other without any real understanding of the compromises made in both camps. How this very division undermines the core principles of feminism—”