Carpool Confidential

by Jessica Benson

  “Yeah,” Randy said, when I bumped into her on the front steps as I was leaving, and told her how hard it had been to leave M.A. “It’s one of the great myths of parenthood, that the guilt and intensity lessen.”

  “So are you really up for it all over again, from the beginning?”

  “I know it’s crazy, but I am. I want a chance to do it again, differently.”

  Those words pulled at my heart. Wasn’t that what we all wanted? To have the time back, to have a second chance?

  “Do you have time for a quick coffee?”

  I hesitated. It was hard to get used to this new, relaxed, time-on-her-hands Randy. The weird thing was that I didn’t really have time. Humphrey was coming. I was having lunch with Charlotte. I looked at Randy, thought about how many times she’d been there for me. “Sure.”

  Over coffee I filled her in on the last few days. She confessed that she was getting together with Sue to talk about getting more involved in the PTA. “You know,” I said, “when I make the very long list of things I wish I could go back and redo, more meetings with Sue and Ken is not on it.”

  She laughed. “I see your point, but this is my do-over, not yours.”

  She thought she could make a difference, make something better in her childrens’ lives, give this last, still theoretical, baby the perfect experience. I knew all about that. “Fair enough.”

  She smiled. “Thank you for not saying any of it.”

  I gave her a quick, impulsive hug. “You’re welcome.”

  The lunch was fabulous. I felt like a grown-up (mostly). There were three of them—Russell Levenger, the web editor, Tanya Eisenberg, the senior editor, and Charlotte. I told the story of the no-shower-doggy-Heimlich-sexy-doctor lunch and the subsequent blurted orgy invitation. By some miraculous process it lost in the retelling the edge of utter humiliation it had carried IRL, and they were all almost rolling off their chairs with laughter.

  “That has to be your next entry,” Russell said. And then we started discussing the blog in earnest.

  “You’re up over a hundred thousand page views a day,” Russell said, “squarely in the A-list of bloggers. People are linking from all over.” Which led to a lot of discussion of other bloggers I’d never heard of, advertisers, and momentum. What it amounted to was they wanted more.

  “Maybe make the entries shorter,” Charlotte said, “but more frequent.”

  “The most important thing for a blog is to stay in motion.” Russell broke his roll in half. “Ideally, you’d update several times a day.”

  I looked at them. “Who wants to read about my life in different installments all day?”

  Charlotte laughed. “Try looking at it the other way—anyone desperate or bored or fucked up enough to care about your life at all is probably those things enough to care about it four times a day.”

  “Have you been reading other blogs at all?” Tanya asked.

  “Not really,” I admitted.

  “You should be. You should know what’s out there and how they do it.”

  Russell nodded. “The successful ones are the ones that stay in motion.”

  “It’s part of a thought process,” Charlotte said, “seeing yourself as a professional.”

  “A professional blogger?” I paused, my fork in midair. She was right; I hadn’t and didn’t. “Really?”

  “Does it help if we offer you more money?” Tanya asked and named a figure that, while still not anywhere near supporting-a-family money, was verging on respectable.

  “I’ll join the union tomorrow,” I said. “But how does the blog growing help the magazine?”

  “Advertising,” Russell said. “People come onto the site to read our articles once a week, but they come back several times a day to read our features that change, and right now yours is the one they’re coming back for most. So we figure the more it changes, the more they’ll come back. And since we charge our advertisers by the number of page views, repeated visits mean more revenue.”

  Then they started talking about how they could make things easier for me. Did I need a BlackBerry? How would I feel about them trying to line up television appearances once the time came to reveal my identity? Had I ever worked with a media coach?

  All three of them were smiling at me. I looked at them and almost wanted to stand up and run. This had clearly gone from Charlotte doing me a favor to me having something they wanted. Once again, I felt like my universe was reorienting around me. It was an almost completely unfamiliar sensation to be in the position of feeling like I had something to offer the world other than hugs, Band-Aids, and finding lost PSP games.

  A week passed. Humphrey had to reschedule because his case in California was dragging on. I immersed myself in being a blogger—wrote, read, ate, breathed, and slept blogs until I knew all the cool, the boring, the edgy, the overhyped, the fascinating. There were an overwhelming number out there. I was beginning to understand how lucky I’d gotten. Janice Streitmeier called to say she had another prospect on the Nantucket house (apparently the first had lost patience) and could I get her in?

  As I gave her the alarm codes and told her to call Harry directly for the keys, my insides twisted at the thought of the cozy family Christmas we wouldn’t be having there. Aside from the hassle of getting to it, I’d always loved that house. Despite the trappings we’d added to the outside—a pool and tennis court— it was a very imperfect house. Creaky and old, filled with our cast-off furniture, funky mismatched antiques we’d picked up here and there, and a healthy sprinkling of IKEA. The rugs were old and threadbare, the wide board floors mellowed with age and slanted, the windows let in gusts of cold air. It was a lovely place to be in the summer, with the smell of beach roses and the sea, but Christmas was my favorite time there. The air of expectation when we arrived, reassuring the kids that we’d remembered to leave Santa a note in Brooklyn reminding him of where to find them. The fog rolling in, making us feel marooned together on the unusually quiet island.

  Rick and I, in front of the fire wrapping gifts at 2 a.m. on Christmas Eve, laughing as we made plans to get around to all the things we’d forgotten (notably the duck for Christmas dinner one year and the boys’ stockings another), the silly carol singers in Victorian costume in the town square, our friends Zoe and Mike and their kids wandering up the hill through the fog for Christmas morning breakfast. Rick theoretically teaching the boys to fly kites as breaking waves arced up the rainy beach but ending up tied up in the string. The place on the wall above our rickety antique iron bed where there was a little, barely perceptible, dent from the headboard hitting the wall so many times over the years.

  I realized it was the first time since Rick left that I’d allowed myself to mourn the house and our time there. I was still pragmatic about needing to rent and eventually sell it, but I was letting myself feel it as a loss. I reminded myself to ask Dorothy whether that was a sign of healing.

  Rick called from a variety of locations around the country, which I duly jotted down. He was making noises about missing us and heading this way. I asked him not to say that to the boys because it would confuse them, but he did anyway.

  “Do you think he’ll be home for Christmas?” Noah asked.

  Jared put Daddy home on his Christmas list. Above Nintendo Wii.

  I didn’t say anything about Nantucket; I didn’t ask him if he was coming home for Christmas.

  I turned down my mother’s invitation to come back to Boston. Proving me wrong once again on which relationships have staying power, Luke was going to meet Caleigh’s family. Katya had not been heard from. Peter was spending the holiday as an embedded journalist with troops in Iraq for a major piece on how isolating it was for them to be separated from their families at Christmas.

  “So neither of them has been in contact to ask what you’re doing or where you’re going?” I asked Harmonye.

  She shook her head. “Sometimes we spend Christmas together, but mostly I go home with a friend.”

  I wanted t
o kill them both, seriously.

  I’d promised myself at Thanksgiving that I’d find something better for the boys. Christmas a deux with my parents didn’t figure into that plan. In the end I decided we’d spend the morning with Randy and Josh and the kids, and the afternoon and evening with Letitia. She had surprised me by offering to come to us so the kids could be at home. A box the size of Montana was delivered from her. It was so big that I had to ask the super to store it in the basement. It contained a Nintendo Wii, along with everything else the boys had even thought about asking for. Except their daddy.

  On Wednesday morning, the phone woke me up at six o’clock. It was Randy. “Throw some sweats on and go to the door.”

  I did, right as Josh struggled an eight-foot tree out of the elevator.

  It wasn’t the same as having Rick home and all of us going to pick a tree together, but the boys were ecstatic when they woke up. I promised to go down and get the boxes of ornaments for tonight, and they practically danced their way to school.

  “Cassie.” Sue nabbed me in the school lobby. She was looking puzzled. My heart sank. As the importance of the blog was growing in my life, so was my fear of unmasking. I pasted a smile on my face. “Are you and Rick not going to the Christmas Carol ball Saturday? You’re not on the list.”

  “We can’t this year.” I didn’t elaborate. Since I’m such a crappy liar, I figured anything further would just make her suspicious.

  She said, “Oh. OK. Next year then.” But she had a look in her eye that made me wonder whether a little elaboration would have gone amiss.

  Jen came by to pick me up in the sleek little BMW convertible she drove when she was child-free. I was going with her to look at a house in Connecticut that Nora loved and she was less enthusiastic about. We tore over the Brooklyn Bridge. She slipped into the right lane with no turn signal. As we roared up the FDR Drive, I uncurled my hand from the seat and clutched the door. I hated when anyone other than me (or Rick) was driving. Why on earth would I trust Rick more than Jen? Years of habit was the only possible explanation, nothing rational, for sure.

  “So the house is beautiful. Stunning.”

  I steadied myself against the dash and closed my eyes. If we were going under the wheels of the truck next to us, I didn’t want to know in advance. “Sounds good.” I tried to sound rallying, even though I felt like it would be one more loss than I could take right now.

  “I’m counting on you to hate it.”

  I dropped the cheerleading. “I already do.”

  I loved it.

  It was a sprawling, white, late-seventeen-hundreds clapboard with a stretch of lawn sloping down to a private dock on Long Island Sound. Old wooden swings hanging from an apple tree, a slate-bottomed pool that looked like it was from the south of France. A barn!

  I couldn’t lie. Finally, in the kitchen—which had an old stone floor worn smooth (that Kathy the nice real estate lady said was reclaimed from the ruins of a French monastery)—I turned to Jen. “This place is unbelievable. It’s like it’s been waiting—” I realized I was about to say for me and pulled myself up short.

  Jen started crying.

  “Oh, Jen.” I put my arms around her. “I think it’s fabulous, but it’s like”—I searched around for what it was like—“roast leg of lamb!”

  “Huh?” She stopped crying.

  “Some people love it, eat it every Sunday. And others, like me, think it tastes like a stringy sheep that’s been cooked for three days and no amount of saying It’s fabulous, everyone likes it or It tastes like something medieval peasants ate is going to change anyone’s mind either way. You’re a leg of lamb person or you’re not.”

  She shook her head, but she was laughing. “I like leg of lamb, but not every Sunday. So what does that say?”

  “Weekend house?” I suggested hopefully.

  Her tears not only returned but in such a deluge, I had to drive home.

  “How can I say no to that?” she sobbed in the passenger seat. “How? It’s perfect, right?”

  It was pretty damned perfect. I’d always believed that nothing could ever touch the splendor of the view from my apartment, but that house, there was something about the way it felt. Solid and serene and…permanent. It felt like somewhere you’d move when you were ready to be a grown-up and stay forever. By contrast, my view felt flashy and immature. It was like going to a wedding, meeting the groom, and coming home with the understanding that the guy you were dating wasn’t and never would be marrying material. “It’s only perfect if it’s perfect for you, Jen.”

  I was churning with conflict. There was the good friend part: I didn’t want Jen to move, because she didn’t want to and I hated the thought of her being unhappy. Then there was the good friend but slightly selfish part: I didn’t want her to move because I was afraid of losing her. Of course we’d still be friends. We’d start off talking on the phone all the time, meeting for lunch every few weeks (with my current budget it would have to be at Gray’s Papaya), but gradually our worlds would drift, our conversations become further apart both in time and in common ground, and no amount of trying would make things the same.

  And then there was an awful, reprehensible, greedy, green-eyed even more selfish part: I didn’t want her to move because I wanted the house, lusted after it, coveted it, didn’t want anyone else to have it. I’d pretty much dealt with the fact that due to certain life choices on my part, someone other than me was going to end up with George Clooney (if you have something to say about it maybe being more than life choices that accounts for this, please keep it to yourself). But this house was a different story.

  Not that it was a romance that could ever be. Financially, I’d be lucky to last the year where I was, never mind splurging on something that required actual capital. And middle-aged women with children who have been dumped leave the suburbs as fast as they can throw the minivan into gear—they don’t haul out and move there.

  My phone rang in my jacket pocket, startling me and making me put my foot on the very responsive gas pedal with more force than I’d intended. We shot forward, and my heart accelerated. Jen reached in my pocket and pulled the phone out.

  “Oh, hi, Betsy.” No one would ever have guessed she’d been sobbing two seconds ago. “No, it’s Jen…she is, but she’s driving…OK.”

  Actually, the car was surprisingly pleasurable to drive. It was both scary and liberating to not have the womblike protection of a massive Volvo SUV. An outer shell that created the illusion of security, like my marriage, like my apartment. I edged the speed up a little more.

  “I don’t know, Betsy…uh-huh…it sounds unlikely…OK.” She turned to me. “Betsy is starting to come around to Sue maybe being the blogger.”

  I sighed. “Oh?”

  “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Right. Uh-huh.” She looked at me, still listening to the buzzing. “Hold on a sec, Betsy.” To me, with some eye rolling: “Apparently Sue’s always said she couldn’t make meetings on Tuesday mornings because that’s her Junior League treasury meeting morning, but Lisa Klein got put on the JL treasury committee two months ago and she said that Sue resigned her post there last year.”

  “Maybe she got it mixed up with Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition meetings.”

  “Right. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” To me again: “No, those are Wednesday afternoons.”

  I was cruising along at seventy-five. “Neighborhood Association.”

  “Every third Monday,” Jen reported.

  “Brooklyn Kindergarten Society, art museum fund-raiser, Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, Brooklyn Public Library, Christmas Ball committee, there are only a million other commitments she could have.”

  Jen listened for a second. “Apparently none of those check out.”

  “Maybe Tuesdays she likes to stay home picking her nose, eating Cheetos, and watching Regis and Kelly.”

  Jen giggled. “What? No. I think she was kidding.” She looked at me. “Sue eats Smart Puffs and thinks Regis and Kelly are emotionally and intellectually
bankrupt.”

  “Doesn’t mean she doesn’t watch them.” I swerved into the right lane to pass the guy in front of me, who was meandering along way too slowly.

  “Hey!” Jen said. “Did you just pass on the right?”

  “Sorry.” I edged left again.

  “I don’t know, Betsy. It all sounds pretty circumstantial, but I’ll see what she thinks.” To me: “Deb Goldberg saw Sue coming out of the J Sisters, and when she said hi, Sue got flustered and started babbling about how she’d just had a facial—”

  “Definitely the blogger,” I said loudly, for Betsy. “I think that’s pretty much incontrovertible evidence.”

  “OK. OK. OK. Yup. Yup. OK. Bye.” She clicked the off button, and the two of us started laughing, like the scene in Mary Poppins where they all float up to the ceiling until Jen said, “Are those flashing lights for us?” and we landed with a thump.

  30

  I Write the Songs

  Between the length of time we’d spent in Connecticut and the hour it took the cop to actually issue the ticket, it was late by the time I got to Randy’s to pick the boys up.

  Her house looked like a bomb had gone off. An explosion of books, papers, drawings, shoes, broken pencils, socks, backpacks, hockey sticks, and (bafflingly) a blow dryer with a frayed cord decorated the narrow front hallway. When Josh had been the stay-at-home parent, the house had smelled of clean laundry and homebaked cookies. Now it smelled of wet dog, which was particularly strange as they didn’t have a dog. I hoped it wasn’t going to be me staging an intervention for her soon. “Were the kids a total nightmare?”