Carpool Confidential

by Jessica Benson

  “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe—” Letitia had what I could only describe as an evil glow in her eyes.

  “Oh, no,” Randy said. “Forget it. I’m no way considering adopting her baby.”

  “Hey! I never said you could,” Harmonye pointed out. “But why wouldn’t you?”

  “First of all, I know this is small of me, but I want my own. Secondly, you said it yourself. Griffin’s like gross and random and has no chin.”

  Harmonye wrinkled her nose. “It’s true. I can’t believe I like did it with him.”

  “I might.” Letitia was holding the blender.

  “You might do it with Griffin?” Harmonye said. “No offense, but that’s like double gross.”

  “No.” Letitia put the blender in the dishwasher. “I have no desire whatsoever to do it with Griffin, who I’m certain was completely unsatisfactory in that arena.”

  “Yeah.” Harmonye made a face. “It’s true.”

  “What I could do,” Letitia was starting to look excited, “is adopt the baby. I have the means and the time—”

  “And the space,” Randy pointed out. “Not that I’m bitter.”

  “And the space,” Letitia agreed. “Of course, Bouvy would be jealous at first, but I could get him the appropriate counseling, so why not?”

  A thousand, no make that a million, why nots rampaged through my brain with Rick as exhibit A.

  Letitia was really going now. “I’ll get you in to see my gynecologist tomorrow. He’ll get you on the right diet and sup plements, and you can stay with me. I’ll have to see if my mas seur can do pregnancy massages. We’ll go to Lamaze classes together—”

  Harmonye had progressed from starting to look frightened straight to terrified.

  She needed a rescue. “Why don’t we give H—Mary Alice”—that took getting used to—“a chance to get a decent night’s sleep and let her tongue de-swell before we start making life-altering decisions for her. OK?” Talking about people making life-altering decisions for others reminded me of my own situation (which, with all the drama, I’d actually managed to forget). I started to cry.

  “You owe me twenty,” Randy said to Jen. “I’ll take a check.”

  “You guys bet on what time I was going to cry?”

  Jen put an arm around me. “There’s nothing like a sure thing. So what’s up?”

  I filled them in on my visit to Murray, the drugstore, and my trawl through Rick’s desk. “Look.” I put the Rick, FYI page on the table. “He had a cheat sheet for leaving.”

  Letitia was tightlipped but didn’t say anything. Was it worse for me to have to accept this about my husband, or for her, about her son?

  “Lesbo Gangbang,” Jen said. “Can’t believe I missed that one.”

  “I still have it. I’ll give you a good price on it,” I offered.

  “I’ll pass, thanks.”

  “How bad are things?” Randy asked. She was reading the cheat sheat. “Holy shit.”

  “They’re—bad. He seems to have systematically drained the accounts, and we owe a bunch of taxes. We aren’t going to starve, but unless something changes pretty drastically, I’m not going to be able to maintain things the way they are, yet I’m stuck. I can’t sell the apartment, and I can’t sell the Nantucket house because they’re joint properties and he’s not dead. And although I’m tempted to arrange that, I have to find him first. The co-op board here would rather let me go into foreclosure than rent this apartment out, so I’m left with renting out the Nantucket house, which we’ve never done before, and finding a way to get myself employed.”

  “What about finding Rick?” Jen asked. Randy handed her the sheet. “And killing him when you do,” she said, after she’d skimmed it. “Is this for real?”

  “It exists,” I said, “unfortunately. Is the show for real? I have no idea.”

  She was shaking her head as she passed the sheet to Letitia. After a second, Letitia looked up. “You need Humphrey.”

  Why did that sound vaguely dirty? “Excuse me?”

  “My PI. He’s fabulous.”

  “I know a lot of—” Randy started to say, but Letitia cut her off with an emphatic head shake. “None of them can do what he does.”

  “Presumably even Humphrey can’t force Rick to come back to the marriage and resume being a recognizable human being,” I pointed out.

  “True”—Letitia passed the sheet to Harmonye—“but he might be able to find out whether Rick was compos mentis when he did this.”

  “I don’t know.” They all looked at me like they couldn’t believe I was still dragging my heels.

  “What are you afraid of, Cass?” Jen asked.

  “What I might find out, who he’s become, what it says about me,” I admitted. “That he was compos mentis.”

  “How many things could be worse than what you already know?” Randy asked.

  I thought of Nancy Bosworth. Secret lives. Other children. “Plenty, but now that Jen’s ruled out my main moneymaking scheme by refusing to buy Lesbo Gangbang, I guess I have no choice.”

  “You could like sell his stuff on eBay,” Harmonye suggested as she put the sheet down.

  “Not bad,” Jen said. “Rick does have a lot of stuff.”

  “He’s always liked stuff,” I agreed.

  “Which was shackling him, right?” Randy said. “You’d be doing him a favor.”

  “If you look for him you’ll almost certainly find some answers, but in the meantime, if you start blogging you might find you” Jen said, gently.

  I looked at her. “Maybe. I guess I’m just not sure how living my first Brazilian out loud is going to do that.”

  “Of course one never knows until one tries,” Letitia said, which was true.

  “Your first Brazilian?” Harmonye got up and got the remaining four puddings out of the fridge. “Like no one has pubic hair anymore.”

  “Are you saying people have evolved since I was last out there?” I asked. “Because that’s going to be a huge blow for the anti-Darwin lobby.”

  Letitia reached over and took a pudding.

  “Hey.” Harmonye made a swipe. “I’m eating for two.”

  “Right, not six.” Letitia pulled the top off the one she’d grabbed. Randy stood and handed her a spoon. “Thanks. Take my advice, don’t do it the week before your period, Cassie, it’s agonizing then.”

  “Well, it’s scheduled for tomorrow, and anyway I don’t seem to get that anymore.” I contemplated my empty teacup. “I’m probably in some sort of early menopause brought on by the horror show of my life. It should make me very attractive in the dating world. Dumped for Barry Manilow, broke, single, menopausal mother of two.” I looked up, waiting for a little sympathy.

  They were all grinning.

  “Is it just me, or would that make a great opening for the blog?” Randy said.

  19

  Read ’em and Weep

  I tried it at four in the morning, but I couldn’t make it work as the opening. By five I had a blog. At six-thirty, I smacked the alarm off. Jared was curled up next to me, and I didn’t even remember him coming in. He smelled of kids’ shampoo and laundry detergent. His thumb was in his mouth again. I gathered his warm little body against me for a minute and debated not getting up.

  I was so not a confessional first-person kind of writer. Just thinking about the fact I was going to have to reread it this morning made me want to cringe. Late-night writing tends to be like a drunk one-night stand—what looks witty and charming before bed can appear so appalling the next morning that you want to hide in the closet until it leaves. Sadly, this was not going to wake up and go away on its own.

  In the meantime, the kids had school, I had Harmonye and financial problems to sort out. We will get through this, I told myself. We have to. I looked at Jared, still curled into a little ball under the comforter. I have to for them.

  I got up, making the usual kinds of promises people make themselves after a bunch of alcohol and an hour
of sleep, crept down the hall, and peeked in on Noah, who was still sleeping, and then on Harmonye, who was doing the same. She looked so peaceful and innocent and young that my heart felt like it was going to split for her.

  By comparison I felt about a thousand years old. It felt weird to admit, but I couldn’t understand why she’d chosen to come to me. I’d always loved her in a fond but distant way. It wasn’t like we spoke on the phone or emailed often. She was actually closer to my mother, who, in her limited way, seemed to recognize that Harmonye was essentially an orphan with parents and seemed to do her best to compensate, so it would almost have made more sense for Harmonye to have gone to her.

  Since I wasn’t going to find any answers standing in her doorway, I hauled myself into a scalding shower. In the kitchen I made coffee and, thinking it would be less painful in voice mail than conversation, left a message for Janice Streitmeier, the realtor who had sold us the Nantucket house, saying that I needed to rent it out, like, instantly. Then I thought again about Harmonye.

  I was not good, had never been good, at admitting I needed help. If a situation was too much for me, I smiled through it. It didn’t mean I wasn’t terrified or furious or both on the inside, but the phrase I need help wasn’t really in my vocabulary. Right now, though, at this moment, I didn’t care if I undid a lifetime of self-sufficiency. I picked up the phone and dialed my mother.

  “Hi, Mom.” I gulped in a huge breath. “I need help.”

  “Cassie? It’s 6:30 in the morning.” Could she sound any crankier?

  “I need to find Katya.”

  “She’s in the Himalayas. In an ashram. I doubt the swami encourages his disciples to bring cell phones. My guess is that he doesn’t see them as accoutrements on the route to inner peace and enlightenment.”

  “There’s got to be some way of getting hold of her.”

  “Katya needs this retreat, let’s give her some peace.”

  I felt like I was going to explode. What about Katya’s life of doing absolutely nothing other than what she wanted to was so difficult she had to retreat from it? If she just wanted a vacation, fine, but what was all this tiptoeing around, Katya needs this retreat crap? Was this fair, or was this me as an adult having a childish reaction to a lifetime of jostling for parental affection and attention? “From what?”

  “She has a difficult marriage,” my mother said.

  I laughed unpleasantly. “More difficult than mine?”

  My mother sighed. “You and Katya are different. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all equation.”

  “Why do you care so much about what Katya needs and so little about what I need?” It hurt to even ask the question.

  “You don’t believe yourself to need anything, Cassie. That’s been clear since you were eight.”

  “I’d imagine that’s because it was so painfully obvious that needing anything was useless. It was much better not to.” I was working up a serious fury.

  She sighed again. “I might have been self-absorbed at times, but there’s no point in beating this to death. After a while it just comes down to a pointless chicken or egg argument.”

  I forced myself to stop and get to the point. “Harmonye’s here.”

  I heard my mother’s quick intake of breath. “Why?”

  I hesitated. Shouldn’t Harmonye decide who to tell? “I can’t—you have to ask her. But she left school and she’s here, and since she’s a minor, I doubt it’s legal.”

  “Send her back.”

  I hesitated. As tempting as it was, I couldn’t offload this child and her problems. “I won’t if she doesn’t want to go.”

  “Is it life threatening?”

  She did have a way of cutting through the waffle. “No.”

  “OK. I’m her guardian in Katya’s absence. I’ll deal with the school. I’d come—” I waited for the but. The day there isn’t a but with my mother when it comes to helping someone else is the day Letitia confesses that Rick was fathered by Richard Nixon during a grope in a janitorial closet at a Manhattan Republicans Club shindig. “—but—”

  Told you. “Instead of the but, how about, How are you coping, Cassie?”

  “What?”

  “It’s what most mothers—actually, people in general— would ask in this situation. I love Harmonye, and of course I’ll do everything I can for her, but her arrival is an added complication in an already complicated life.”

  “You’re a coper, Cassie. You’ll be fine. Look, I have to tell you something.” She sounded uncharacteristically nervous. “Your father and I are trying to work things out.” Good thing I’m a coper. When I finished laughing, she said, “I’m serious. We’re going to an intensive marriage counseling retreat this week.”

  “Are there any rules about the participants having to have been married at some point during the last thirty years?”

  “You didn’t used to be so bitter.” She sounded sad.

  Which made me sad.

  “I hope it doesn’t poison you from the inside out. Remember, Cassie, you control your own happiness.”

  Apparently she’d had a self-help book-reading binge. I figured if I went by her model, that gave me thirty more years of being crazed with fury before I had to worry about the effects of the internal poison.

  Then my father got on the phone. I repressed a mental shudder at the idea of them in bed next to each other. That’s one of the few upsides of being the child of an acrimonious divorce— you don’t have to deal with the idea of your parents sleeping together. Unfortunately, it appeared I’d only put if off, not escaped it altogether.

  He filled me in on how he’d been driven to the brink of in-sanity with jealousy when he’d seen her cozying up to that dorky oral and maxillofacial guy Evan Yablonsky at the Arizona dental conference and how after their huge fight Thanksgiving weekend they’d confessed their true feelings to each other.

  This left me with no choice other than to accept that even my parents’ relationship appeared to have been more successful than my own. I know I’ve mentioned a few highlights of theirs, like the Thanksgiving knife throwing, the restraint-of-trade lawsuit, the biting, but I’ve left out a whole lot more, including the oops-didn’t-realize-your-foot-was-under-the-car debacle, so I think it’s understandable that this was not a truth I was thrilled to come to grips with.

  I’d barely clicked the off button when the phone rang. Hopefully not my mother calling to ask for birth control recommendations. Would my heart ever stop doing that double-time Maybe it’s Rick thing every time it rang? I didn’t even like him anymore. Probably.

  It was Charlotte. “You’re up early,” I said.

  “Yes,” she chirped. “Pilates at seven. So? How’d it go?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I know I hate it.”

  “That means exactly nothing,” she said cheerfully. “Email it to me. I’ll give you a call later. When’s the waxing?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “I can hardly wait.”

  “That makes two of us. I’m going to give it a quick reread.”

  “Make it fast and don’t feel compelled to rewrite every word six times.”

  “What about four.”

  “Make sure there are no stunningly laughable grammatical misuses and that’s it. On second thought, I’ll fix any of those. Just send it.”

  After we hung up, I pulled the file up on the computer.

  www.carpoolconfidential.blogspot.com

  A couple of months ago I assumed I was at the stage in my life where I’d done most of my firsts. Or the good ones, anyway. First tooth, date, hangover, sexual experience, child, husband. I figured I had some time before the next batch: colonoscopy, root canal, starting to enjoy Florida. But as far as husbands went, I was pretty much counting on keeping it at one.

  Unfortunately, he had different ideas. So, since the night he came home and announced that his life, our life, had been a sham, that all those years of scaling the heights of corporate success had stifled and enslaved him
and he was leaving to pursue his creative dream: mounting a Barry Manilow revival, there have been a whole ’nother slew of firsts.

  Some have been deeply emotional and significant—First Thanksgiving without him; some inconvenient—Saturday morning soccer and walking the dog; and some just new, like Sunday night dinners as a different and smaller kind of family. So with all of that significance dripping all over my life on a daily basis, providing a rich vein of material to mine, you may be surprised that the first first (ha ha) I’m going to tackle is Brazilian waxing.

  Why that one? Sensationalism, I’m afraid, pure and simple, on the part of NYMetro. And I’m going along with it because, well, my husband just left. I need the job. And if NYMetro is willing to pay me at this point in my life to talk about the experience of humiliating myself on the J Sisters’ table, I damn well will.

  I have to admit right off the bat, that in many years of marriage my husband never once turned to me and said, “I really want you to take it all off.” He said a bunch of other stuff about me and my flaws as he was leaving, but most of it sounded pretty directly lifted from a men-in-midlife-crisis handbook and, frankly, at that point discussing my pubic hair would have signaled a nice break from the state of total self-absorption that accompanied him out the door.

  I’m not a total throwback. I get it that pubic topiary has been the thing in certain circles for a while. But here among the private-school mom set, while there’s plenty of fashion jockeying, it tends to involve things that can be envied and ogled at afternoon pickup. So between that and a—I like to think healthy and intelligent—dislike of pain, I’ve managed to live all these years without it. But now I’m told that for the dating (or potentially dating) woman, it’s as essential a grooming must as brushing your teeth.

  It’s something I have to do, I’m told, before I can even consider logging onto match.com or having a friend set me up on one of those awkward come-to-dinner-and-meet-our-dumped-friend nights. Never mind that I’m in no hurry to do either of those and that when I think of non-fatal things worse than lying spread-eagled while someone waves boiling wax over your vulva, I really only come up with one: having your husband desert you to pursue a Barry Manilow fetish.