Carpool Confidential

by Jessica Benson

  Ingrid gives me a strange look. I immediately start worrying that something karmically awful will happen to me for having lied. Ingrid’s wax will be contaminated and I’ll get a raging in fection and die. In the sensational newspaper articles that are sure to follow, Ingrid will be interviewed about how I’d been glibly lying on the phone (while lying on her table) just hours previously. Trudy will recognize our conversation, because the newspapers won’t change the facts as I just did. I’ll be posthumously outed.

  Will will come back as a widower superdad. He’ll tackle PTA meetings, doctor’s appointments, soccer matches, first dates, four-course dinner preparation, and emcee the annual school fund-raising auction with the aplomb of Tiger Woods playing a round of mini golf. Everyone will talk about how he’s obviously been a great guy all this time but living with me has kept him down. And in the end that’s all my children will have to remember me by—faded newspaper clippings revealing me as a pubicly well-groomed liar.

  “Oh my God, how awful! Feel better.” Trudy does a quick hangup.

  I look at Ingrid. “Sorry. I can’t tell her the truth. It’s— complicated.”

  She doesn’t say anything, just stirs her boiling wax.

  “That is sterile, right?” I can’t resist.

  She grabs my ankles and pushes my feet over my head so my left knee is up my own nose when my phone rings again.

  “Aieeee.” Ingrid has just—I will refrain from saying exactly where with a sense of delicacy not hitherto shown in this blog, but I absolutely refuse to be more specific than that—waxed an area I did not think we would be visiting today. I know in the intellectual part of my brain that it is possible to be in more pain than this. The problem is the rest of my brain—i.e., the pain centers— don’t agree. My ears are buzzing. My eyes, tearing. “Hello?”

  “This Delphine Lennox?” It’s a male. Older and a smoker, by the sound of his voice.

  “Yes.” I answer through the metallic taste in my mouth. I forgot to ask Ingrid if this could cause internal bleeding.

  “Hi. It’s Fred.” Silence while I try to get my brain to function enough to figure out if I know a Fred. “The P.I.”

  The P.I. Oh, my mother-in-law’s P.I. He’s going to be hunting down my husband. “Hi,” I say—aieeee—Ingrid rips again.

  “I’m all up to speed on your current situation.” I hope he doesn’t mean at this precise moment. “Can I come by and get some more information from you on Friday morning?”

  I say sure and start to tell him where and then stop. Is it insulting to give a P.I. your address, like implying he can’t figure it out on his own? “Would you rather I didn’t tell you?”

  He sighs. “Mrs. Lennox, I’m a P.I. Not a psychic or an idiot. Just tell me where you live.”

  After two or three more hours of ripping, Ingrid pronounces us done. I lift my shaking hand to look at my watch. The two or three hours have taken precisely fifteen minutes real time. To those of you wondering if I feel it’s pointless to be going through this not even for a man—I’m glad I haven’t done it for a man—I’d have to kill him in return.

  “Thank you,” I say fervently. I mean for letting me live.

  But Ingrid seems to think I mean the look. She beams. “Much better than that…forest you had before, no?”

  I hadn’t exactly been an ungroomed ape when I’d come in, but never mind.

  My first stop is a drugstore. Since the pharmacist refuses to sell me codeine without a prescription, I settle for Advil. I swallow three outside the store and then hobble next door to the supermarket, where I buy a bag of frozen peas. Outside, under the cover of my coat, I shove the bag down my jeans.

  And so begins my new life as a sex goddess.

  21

  Memory

  “Is that a bag of frozen peas?” Elizabeth Katz, my OB/GYN said to me an hour later. “Oh, I see. Ouch. Why did you go and do that?”

  After the usual, Relax, this will feel cold for a second, can you try to relax your abdomen a little more chitchat, she said, “Everything seems fine, Cassie. I don’t see any physical reason at all for the missed periods.”

  My cell phone shrilled from my bag. My days were taking on a certain alarming predictability, with way too much lying on paper-covered tables involved. Elizabeth stood up, snapped off her gloves, and handed me my bag while I scooted up the table and tugged the gown closed. By then, the phone had stopped ringing. I swung my legs over the side. It rang again.

  “Cassie,” Letitia said. “Let’s have lunch.”

  Elizabeth was motioning to me. I covered the phone. “Since you’re here, let’s just do a quick sonogram and run some blood work to cover all our bases.”

  In the abstract I was willing to have lunch with Letitia, but I didn’t particularly want to discuss the finer points of scheduling at this moment. Elizabeth was motioning for me to scoot back down the table. “I’m in the middle of a doctor’s appointment, can I call you back?”

  “Don’t bother. I’ve already booked a table for one o’clock Thursday at Esta.”

  “My mother-in-law,” I told Elizabeth. “At least I have two days before I have to see her.”

  She snapped on new gloves and started rolling a condom over something.

  I brightened. “Hey,” I said. “Does that thing vibrate?”

  Somehow, directly after my appointment with Elizabeth, I found myself in an Upper East Side shrink’s office. Having pronounced me definitively not pregnant; tallied up the amount of weight I’d lost since my last checkup; watched me dissolve in hysterical tears; and heard the entire story, Elizabeth had picked up the phone and called her friend, Dorothy Hallowell, who’d agreed to squeeze me in on her lunch hour.

  I’d never been to a shrink before. Like anyone who’s lived in New York for a long time, I know enough to recognize the shift in energy in the city in August when all the shrinks are on the Vineyard. Manhattan is an edgier, more dangerous-feeling place then. Better than the Vineyard, of course, which, with all those shrinks on holiday with their families, is like a powder keg, but subtly altered from Manhattan-as-usual. Anyway, I’m not saying I didn’t need it, just that I’d never been before.

  The waiting room was empty, very sleek, all leather and chrome. I was lost on the protocol. Did I sit and wait? What should I be thinking about? What if, at the end of an hour with me, Dr. Hallowell said she didn’t blame Rick for what he’d done? Or what if we sat in silence for an hour? Or, oh God, what if she asked about my parents? The saga of their relationship was just the kind of thing that was likely to accidentally slip out in therapy and require further examination, which frankly was one of the reasons I’d never been. I’d lived through it. I hardly wanted to revisit it now.

  The door on my left opened and a young woman came out. I scoped her out covertly over the Atlantic Monthly (which I’d chosen over People in the hopes of making a better impression). I didn’t know if I was supposed to go knock on the door she’d come out of, or just wait, so I settled for sitting and obsessing about it for a while. After a couple minutes of this, the door opened again, and a tall, imposing woman with glossy, expensively cut gray hair in a nice pair of dark pants and the Anne Fontaine shirt I’d been coveting came out.

  She smiled but did not look at my magazine, which was disappointing since I could have spent my wait time catching up on the latest in Jessica Simpson’s love life instead of wading through a lengthy article on Darfur (which admittedly did feature George Clooney but not in any interesting or salacious way). “Cassie?”

  “Yes. Hi.” I put the magazine down and followed her into her office. There was a desk and chair against one wall and a grouping of furniture on the rug—a sofa, facing two armchairs over a coffee table.

  “Take a seat,” she said.

  The first test. I debated what the various choices might mean:

  Couch = classic Freudian believer, easily psychologically manipulated by shrink. Chair = control freak, refusal to accept power balance of patient/therapist re
lations. Coffee table = lunatic. Standing and staring at furniture, trying to make correct psychological choice so shrink doesn’t think you’re crazy = all three.

  “How about here.” She inclined her head toward the couch. “You don’t have to lie down. You can sit.”

  “Okay.” I perched near the arm.

  “Everyone does that,” she said. “They think I’m going to decide something about them based on where they sit.”

  I smiled, like someone who has accidentally arrived early at their boss’s dinner party.

  “So”—she smiled—“would you like to tell me what brings you here?”

  Not really. Almost before I’d finished thinking that, the whole story came bubbling out. She didn’t interrupt or ask any questions.

  “That’s a lot of stuff,” she said, when I paused for breath.

  I was starting to suspect I could get into coming here once a week to talk uninterruptedly about me without worrying about boring anyone to death. But—Oh my God! Did I even have health insurance any more? I’d just written Elizabeth Katz a whopping check, and it had never even occurred to me I might be doing so without eighty percent reimbursement. I was guessing that Rick hadn’t bothered with any tedious COBRA forms before making his getaway. I instantly started panicking about one of the kids having a very expensive accident right at this very moment and me having to use all my money to pay doctors and hospitals and ending up on public assistance.

  “Cassie?” Dr. Hallowell looked concerned.

  “Health insurance.” I crossed my legs. There was something about taking up less space on her couch that made it feel like I was in more control of myself. “I was panicking about whether we still have it and one of my kids having a major accident.”

  “Because you’re convinced sitting here panicking about it will stop it from happening?”

  “When you put it like that, it sort of deflates it,” I admitted.

  She smiled and asked me about my childhood. “So,” I dropped my huge wad of soggy tissues in the wastebasket what felt like about three hours later. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “No, Cassie, I don’t.” She smiled at me and I started to stand.

  She looked surprised. “You can go if you want, of course, but the session’s not over yet.”

  I sat back down. “Sorry. Thought we were done.”

  “Do you want to be done?”

  I looked at her. “I don’t know. That depends on what comes next. And please don’t say, what do I want to come next. I mean, ask what I want to come next.”

  “Well,” she said, “what do you want to come next?”

  “The part where you unfuck my life—Hey! You tricked me.”

  She wrote something on her pad—probably psycho, but in a more technical way—but didn’t say anything.

  It was about three seconds before the silence got to me. So I said, “Well, if you don’t think I’m crazy, what do you think?”

  “Considering,” she said slowly, “that I’ve only known you for fifty minutes, it’s hard to make generalizations. I think you’ve been handed a rotten deal, but at this point only you can unfuck your life. And I suspect I see some patterns from what kind of living room furniture you have to your reluctance to tell your children the truth about their father that speaks to a way of dealing with things that upsets as little as possible, to always want to take the path that creates the least conflict. I think it’s interesting that you’ve tried to build a life and a family that was as far away from the household you grew up in as you were able. That you aggressively pursued the image of whatever you view normal to be. And I’m curious—while your parents were engaged in conducting personal and commercial warfare against one another, who was taking care of you children?”

  I thought back. “Housekeepers and nannies over the years, and Katya is six years older, so I guess she pitched in a lot.”

  “And when Katya’s daughter was young, before she went away to school, who took care of her?”

  “Nannies.”

  “Interesting,” she said, “but I meant emotionally.”

  “Oh, I don’t think it was in the mix,” I told her. “In either case.”

  “And how long have you been estranged from your father?”

  “We’re not estranged,” I explained. “We’re just not close.”

  “Do you find it at all interesting that he essentially abandoned you when you were eight and now Rick’s done the same?”

  “Abandoned me or the children?” I asked.

  “Well,” she said, “I think both, don’t you? It seems to me you’ve been abandoned by the significant man in your life twice.”

  I stared at her. How could I have been so blind I’d never seen the parallel? I felt dizzy with realization, like the different strands of my life were waving around me and I didn’t know whether to pull them tighter or let them blow away.

  “And how would you characterize your relationship with your brother?”

  “Fine. Not close. I’m older. We’re not really in the same place.”

  “I’m also interested in the fact that your sister and her husband, not to mention their daughter and her father are also essentially estranged.” It was like light switches were flicking on left and right. “Does she even see him?”

  “Other than on TV? Not a lot.”

  “Rick seems to have been the only real male presence you’ve allowed into your life,” she observed.

  “Because he was safe.” I didn’t know where that had come from, had never realized I felt it, but as I said it I knew it was true. “Except he wasn’t.”

  “Which may be something to think about. We’re going to have to stop now, but did you want to set up another appointment?”

  “Do you think I should?”

  “Well.” She smiled. “Bearing in mind that you are a woman who sat here forty-five minutes ago trying to remotely control whether or not one of her children had an uninsured accident, I’d say, if you’re happy, it’s completely up to you.”

  I laughed. “What do you have available?”

  22

  The best of Me

  Cad needed to be walked, and after my unexpected detour through Dorothy Hallowell’s office I was going to be pushed for time to get home, do that, and get to school in time to pick up the boys. I tried calling to see if I could get Harmonye to do it, but there was no answer. No sign of her in the apartment. No groceries, no note, nothing.

  If she had a cell phone, I didn’t know about it. How stupid could I be? It had never occurred to me to ask. If she’d been, say, hit by a car, no one would know who to call. Panic sent pins and needles to the tips of my fingers. Did she even have ID on her? It was a safe neighborhood, but that’s what people always thought before the fact, wasn’t it? I threw Cad onto a leash and ran downstairs. The doorman hadn’t seen Harmonye since she’d left to go to the grocery store.

  I tore up to Henry Street, looped Cad’s leash to a pole, and crossed the threshold of D’Agostino’s like a marathon runner crossing the finish line. Since no one rushed up with Gatorade, I just stood there, panting. “Ms. Martin?” It was John, the manager, who had weathered Jared’s kleptomaniac phase. “You all right?”

  “It’s my niece.” I’d regained enough lung power to articulate. “She came up for a few things this morning and never came back.” Deeper panic mode hit. What if she had never even made it to the store? My children weren’t going out by themselves until they were thirty. “Her name’s Harmonye. Or possibly, um, Mary Alice.”

  He looked perplexed. He already thought I was weird enough what with the kleptomaniac kid. “Which name is it?”

  “All. Either. Mary Alice, probably.”

  “What does she look like?” I was pretty sure he was thinking she didn’t exist at all, that I’d finally drifted all the way around that bend. “Can you describe her?”

  “Oh.” I came back from my imaginings—morgues, ambulances, somber policemen knocking on Katya’s door and finding no one at
home. Me picking up the paper tomorrow to read about the body of a teenaged girl whose identity was being withheld until the family could be located, that kind of thing—and tried to remember what she’d been wearing. “About five foot five, long blondish-brown hair, brand-new tongue stud, olive green pants, and a Foo Fighters T-shirt. Black down jacket.”

  “Oh, yeah. I remember her. Don’t think she bought any groceries, though. She was talking to Dylan—you know, the guy who stocks the shelves and does deliveries? She left with him. He only works a half-day today.”

  “Dylan? But she doesn’t even know him,” I said—stupidly, I know.

  “Seems like she does now.”

  “But I don’t understand. Where did they go?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t track employees on their own time.”

  I was going to kill her. Here I was panicking, running all over, worrying myself sick about my poor, pregnant, fragile niece, and she was waltzing off without so much as a courtesy call to do God knows what with Dylan the cute-grocery-delivery-boy. “Do you have his phone number? Can you tell me where he lives?”

  He crossed his arms. “Give out personal information about an employee? What do you think?”

  “Thanks loads.” My sarcasm evaporated as I remembered. “Oh, no,” I yelped. “What time is it, John?”

  “Two fifty-five.”

  Argh. I was going to be late to pick up the boys, and I hadn’t had time to make them snacks. Being late to pickup at Meeting-house was courting reputational disaster. Jared would be waiting with his teacher in the lobby, no doubt the last child sitting forlornly on the bench for all the other parents to see while his peers all around him were enveloped in warm arms, Did you have a good day, honeys, and homemade nutritious snacks. Noah would be waiting to be released from the purgatory of the seventh floor. And in case you think teachers (and other parents) don’t know which moms are late and exactly how often, you’d be wrong.