Carpool Confidential

by Jessica Benson

  I caved and told the boys Daddy was coming home for the day. I didn’t want to, was afraid it would jinx it somehow, but if I hadn’t, the frenzy of preparation would probably have scared them to death. They were so excited that they even submitted to haircuts. On Thanksgiving morning, they were practically exploding with anticipation. I’d sent Cad to the groomer, and fortunately her poor, elderly heart had withstood the shock of cleanliness. And for Rick, who hated her drinking out of the toilet, I locked her out of the guest bathroom.

  And it wasn’t just us. The apartment had never looked better. Maria had acquiesced to polish the silver, and I’d pulled out the crystal. The fire glowing in the living room sent out a whiff of wood smoke. Everything everywhere gleamed. It was like the infamous picture in Gourmet.

  The difference was that this one was for real. The food, the setting, my love for Rick—it had been sorely tested, for sure, but it remained—our children, our family. None of it was a photographer’s trick. No fake lighting, no retouching (unless you counted my hair, but you have to draw the line somewhere), no prop knives flying. He had to see that. There was no way he could come home and deny that reality, that this was not only where he belonged but where he wanted to be.

  “Not yet,” I told Randy when she called to check at noon. I yawned—I’d gotten up to par-cook the turkey at 3 a.m. because I hadn’t seen any way of preserving the effortless glamour I was going for other than to have it ready to push into a hot convection oven to finish to burnished perfection in the last hour before we sat down. Everything was so ready that I had nothing to do except play every board game we owned (about three times each) with the boys. After the third round of Yahtzee, when the sound of the dice in the cup started to edge me toward insanity, I finally caved on the Play Station front, and they were happily rapt— playing and waiting for their Daddy with the same intensity of excitement as waiting for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. “But I’m not worried. He said he’d be here, and even with all this he’s never broken a direct promise.”

  “Except a few marriage vows.”

  “Shut up, Ran.” I had reason to worry, but also, I told myself, reason to hold onto hope. I tried that phone number yet again. Still, I managed to cling to belief through the various cheery calls from friends and relatives. At two, when there was no word from Rick and his mother’s customary Thanksgiving call (always made from the backseat of her car as her driver whisked her to dinner at the club in Connecticut) came, I let the machine pick up.

  “Don’t forget, and I mean it, Cass, call me any time if you want to come over,” Randy said in her next phone call.

  “Thanks, Ran. Love you.”

  Same again on the 216 number. By three, the turkey was starting to look more desiccated than burnished and the boys were starting to look more frayed and hanging-on-by-a-thread than excited. The expressions on their faces made me hate both Rick and myself in equal measure. I’d allowed him and my stupidity to do this to them. I pitched the food in the trash, feeling guilty about not donating it somewhere, and bit into the raw hot dog: I picked up the phone, repressed the urge to try the Cleveland number just one last time, and called my mother.

  Come hell or high water, Noah and Jared were going to have some kind of family holiday. So what if my family sucked at them? I was making it happen. My mother was surprising. Without even a hint of I told you so, she said Luke would be thrilled to see the boys and me and volunteered to see if my father would join us.

  Noah was adamant about staying. Jared was more pliable, more interested in doing what Mommy wanted him to, but wavered. I knew, though, that if I let them wait it out, the heartbreak would be worse. I threw clothes into a suitcase, and we piled into the car, dropped Cad off at Randy’s house, with me trying not to think about the results of the mix of gas-prone dog and fried turkey that would be greeting us on our return, and headed to Boston. I’d thought the flurry of activity might distract the boys from their devastation, but between them it seemed one or the other was in tears the entire trip. Fortunately there wasn’t much traffic.

  For the first time in all this I was lit with fury. Every time I looked down, my knuckles were dead white on the steering wheel.

  “I’m sorry,” my mother said, as she dished up servings of super-market rotisserie chicken for everyone else and a soy burger for herself, “if I’d known you were coming I would have cooked.”

  The kids looked half asleep over their plates. It was late and it had been one hell of a long day. I was a seething ball of nerves. I wasn’t sure how much was due to the Rick debacle and how much was due to my parents being about to sit down at the same table. It had seemed like a thoughtful idea, to give my boys as much family as possible, back when I was two hundred miles away. In close proximity it was just plain alarming.

  Luke, who was currently occupied with ignoring his girlfriend Caleigh and playing some parentally-advised-against game on his PSP, said to my mother, “You knew I was coming. And bringing Caleigh.”

  “I bought Froot Loops,” she retorted. “And considering that I find mandated festivity artificial and frivolous, I’d think you would know I’m doing the best I can.”

  “Caleigh doesn’t eat Froot Loops,” Luke said.

  Frankly, Caleigh didn’t look like she ate period. I looked down at my congealed chicken. To give her the benefit of the doubt, maybe that was just her policy here. I was considering adopting it. I smiled at her. She didn’t smile back.

  God, this was fun.

  “How come Luke gets to play PSP at the table?” Noah wanted to know.

  “Cause I’m, like, a grown-up, dude,” Luke said.

  “Because Luke always plays PSP,” Caleigh said. “When he’s not at work. When he’s at work he plays FreeCell.” She did not seem to correctly understand the role of the outsider—to buffer dangerously close to conflagrating family relationships.

  “Cool!” Jared said.

  “What’s FreeCell?” Noah looked optimistic of having found his future calling.

  My father came in with the can of Ocean Spray cranberry sauce and plunked it on the plastic tablecloth. Due to his last-minute recruitment to this happy family occasion, he was missing whatever holiday delights his latest dental assistant had on offer. I was guessing they weren’t culinary.

  “Awesome!” Jared said, looking at the can. “Do we get to eat that? It looks like school cafeteria Jell-O.”

  “Yeah. Mom’s has nasty chunks in it,” Noah said accusingly. I hoped he wasn’t pinpointing my homemade Port and cranberry confit as the reason Rick had failed to materialize.

  “Yes, boys.” My father’s tone was all forced jollity. “You do get to eat it. Provided your grandmother actually owns a serving plate. It’s possible such a thing is too bourgeois for her. Maybe we’ll all dig straight into the can with our spoons!”

  Jared looked just a little too excited about that. I put my hand on his, forcing him to lower his spoon back to the table.

  “I thought you’d had enough holiday elegance the time you set up that magazine shoot, Bill.” My mother was clearly chafing at having him here. “That ended well for everyone. As I recall.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember well enough, Judy. They brought in that team of stylists who worked on you all day. Last time I saw you looking presentable.”

  A tug of memory. It hadn’t been a real Thanksgiving, of course. Magazines tend to work six months to a year ahead, so it had been shot the previous April, but it had looked incredibly real. And that (despite what my father had just said) was when the house and my mother both had still been beautiful—before she’d made lacking a sense of humor into her life’s work. That day I’d almost been able to fool myself into believing we were the family we looked like.

  “My mistake was throwing the knife at the wall,” my father muttered, but not low enough that we didn’t all hear.

  “Your mistake was not making sure you were alone when you grabbed the stylist’s ass,” my mother retorted.

  In case you
are having difficulty reading between the lines on my parents’ relationship, it might help to understand that:

  They have been divorced for almost thirty years and for all of that time have had competing dental practices next door to each other.

  My mother made Massachusetts legal history by being the first—and possibly to this day the only—woman in the state to file a restraint of trade suit against her (soon-to-be-ex) husband.

  My mother once bit my father on the arm and was charged with assault.

  You might deduce from this that my father is a jerk and my mother is, well, crazy. I know I have.

  “And the reason you can’t find the plate is because they’re in the same f—” My mother glanced at Noah and Jared. “—um, place they were when you lived here, Bill.”

  “I realize you might not be aware of this, but I’ve spent the better part of the last thirty years trying to forget everything about that time, Judy.”

  “Funny. And here I was thinking you managed that before you left.”

  That sounded so much like something I would say I found myself cringing.

  “Is Daddy going to forget where our plates are?” Jared looked ready to cry.

  “Of course not, sweetie,” I said in my most reassuring voice.

  “I doubt he ever knew,” my mother said.

  “Me?” My father asked, folding his arms. “Or Rick? Are we all the same to you, Judy? Anonymous, faceless, plate-forgetting, fornicating, interchangeable males?”

  “Luke doesn’t know where the plates are,” Caleigh said. She put her fork down, stood up, and left the room. Luke shrugged. I was guessing this wasn’t one for the long haul. Like I said, the family in general did not excel at relationships.

  Now Noah looked close to tears. I doubted complete dissolution was far for either of them, and considering the day, rightly so. Why couldn’t my family just play nice for once? “That’s not true, Grandma,” he said hotly. “My Dad does so know—”

  “Hey guys, wanna play Grand Theft Auto?” Luke asked.

  “Yes!” Since it was rated M, and, therefore, forbidden, that of course was a huge distraction. Jared frowned. “Can we, Mommy, please? Please?”

  “Er, I thought we’d go out after dinner and, you know, toss the football around or something,” my father said.

  We all stared at him. These were not, to the best of our collective knowledge, words that had ever left his lips before.

  “Pigskin,” Luke said.

  My father frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “See, normal fathers who say stuff like that, they call the football a pigskin,” Luke said. “It’s like a cliché.”

  “Thanks, Grandpa, but we play soccer,” Jared said very seriously. “Our dad used to take us on Saturday mornings, but now Mommy does.”

  My heart felt squeezed at the thought it might always be this way for them.

  Caleigh stuck her head around the door. “I’m going for a walk. Bye.” She stalked out. If she hadn’t weighed less than my elbow, I’d have suspected she was going out for a burger.

  “Do you have a football?” Luke asked my father. I wondered if he was going to point out that it was totally pitch dark and also freezing outside.

  “No, er, I thought maybe Judy—ah, your mother would.”

  Oh, I doubt it, but try asking her for a vibrator named Saddam. Then you’ll be in luck. “I don’t believe this.” Luke was glaring at my father.

  My mother snorted a laugh. “The latest whore has a son. You see, Luke, Cassie, Bill is finally learning how to be a father. It’s just a shame it’s not with either of you.”

  “You know, Judy.” My father crossed his arms. I felt my heart coming up in my throat. I’d had almost no sleep. I was simmering with rage at Rick. My children had just suffered a crushingly disappointing blow, which, sadly, looked to be the first of many, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to shield them from it. All I’d wanted was for them to have even a tiny, little meager slice of family life again, and these people—my parents—couldn’t even get through one dinner without ruining that. “If you didn’t always have to be such a goddamn—”

  “Goddamn what, Bill? Bitch? Person? Woman? What?” Her voice rose. She was starting to fly off the handle, like she always did with him.

  My boys didn’t seem to know what to look at—the forbidden fruit of an M-rated PSP game or their grandparents having a knock-down, drag-out.

  “Hey guys, look what this can do!” Luke pulled them back to the game. Even as they bent over it, Jared’s hand found its way into mine. I closed mine around it.

  “Only one of those really fits, and it seems obvious which one, doesn’t it?” My father’s voice was, as I always remembered it in these situations, a calm counterpoint to my mother’s rising hysteria.

  And suddenly, this time, I could feel what it did to her. There was something condescending about staying so calm in a fight. It was a tool, I realized with a flash of something. A way of minimizing her. It tugged something in me. Was I like her? On the surface not at all, but deep down? Was that how Rick and I fought? He was always calm, certainly. I’d loved what I’d thought was his serenity, but was it that? Or was he just like my father, standing coolly in the center of the storm while encouraging a hysterical female to fly around him? And then I remembered: We didn’t fight—ever—and I felt better. My children had never witnessed anything like this before, never having been in the same room with both grandparents.

  My mother was taking the bait. “All I know is that the only adjectives you like when it comes to a woman are doormat, homewrecker, skank, and whore.”

  “Mommy, what’s—”

  “Whoah! Noah, my man! Eyes on the game or you’ll lose to your little bro,” Luke said, fast. “Can’t have that.”

  “Mainly I prefer human.” My father flashed her a patronizing little smile.

  And, oddly, for a woman who never fought with her husband, I knew exactly how that smile made her feel. The fury rocketed through me, at Rick, my parents, me, the Mickey Mouse comforter I’d never had, the marriage I’d never had.

  My parents were glaring, each waiting for the other to throw down the next taunt. I looked at the boys, their heads bent with Luke’s over the game. Jared, with sticky-up brown hair and Noah, with the straight blond hair growing a little too long over his ears. Noah looked up at me. His big, brown eyes were Rick’s under delicately arching brows that definitely came from me. The new, uncertain set of his mouth, though, was very much his own.

  Why, why couldn’t my parents see that they deserved just the tiniest slice of normality? All I knew was that the urge to yell and scream at them to stop it now, just stop it, was so strong it was almost a surprise to realize I hadn’t actually said or done anything. The lump in my throat was huge. I knew if I gave way to tears I’d never stop. And besides, the last time I’d done that in this situation, I’d been seven. I wasn’t about to ruin that record now.

  I promised myself I would go back later and try to understand why I always felt the need to defuse any uncomfortable situation. “Gosh,” I said, brightly and completely falsely, “this chicken is delicious! It’s hard to believe it’s really from Shaws!”

  This seemed to do the trick. Everyone started eating, clattering forks and determinedly not arguing. The lack of a cranberry serving plate was forgotten. Even Caleigh loosened up a little on her return (after about five glasses of my father’s 2003 vintage Port). It all felt OK in the end. Not great, but OK. At least until after the table was cleared and we were all having coffee—did you know they still made Nescafé instant crystals, by the way?— and my mother said, “Well, Cassie, I hope you all are coming back for Christmas!”

  I smiled, blandly. “That sounds great.”

  I made a covenant with myself: Whatever might happen in my life—if Rick shows up and announces that he and Barry are actually lovers, if I am swept off my feet by Heath Ledger, if I am a celebrity blogger, if I am sitting alone with my children and stinky dog in New Y
ork wearing Rick’s old sweatshirt—we are not coming here for Christmas. I’d eat moose meat with Maria before I’d come back, and that was a promise.

  And then I smiled at my boys, promising them in my mind, if not in words, that somehow I would do better for them.

  11

  Some Kind of Friend(s)

  So much for the Thanksgiving-as-a-compass idea. If anything, I had even less clarity than before.

  I lay awake the three nights at my mother’s house, trying to will Rick to redeem himself, to find a way to make good on his words. I huddled in the small, hard bed of my childhood, listening to the night noises. Every sound, from the faraway whistle of the commuter train arriving at the station to the neighbors’ garage door closing, was like a flutter of the past. So familiar from childhood that I had moments of being suspended between knowing whether it was now or then.

  Each time I heard the train, I prayed to some long unattended God to have given Rick back his heart and his brain. For him to have gone to the apartment, found us gone, hopped a shuttle to Boston and a train to Concord. Maybe he’ll be on this train. Then I’d lie in the dark for the next fifteen minutes, my heart pounding as I waited for the slam of the taxi door. Then, Maybe this one. Pretty much the same vigil I’d held as a child. The difference was that instead of a taxi, that fantasy had revolved around the door of my father’s brand-new Mercedes. Then, as now, I’d heard the hollow silence of no one coming.

  When the last train pulled in at 12:13 and the night slid into morning, I turned to clutching my cell. I’d put it on vibrate so it wouldn’t wake anyone by ringing. I needn’t have worried. Eventually the boys crept in with me, one after another, warming me but competing for the limited bed space.

  The only good thing to come out of the entire trip was the phone call on Friday from Russell Levenger, the editorial director of the NYMetro site. It was practically the only time I could ever remember my cell phone functioning as an instrument of good. Well, sort of good. “So Charlotte tells me you’re going to crash the site with all the hits we’ll be getting.”