I'm Not Julia Roberts

by Laura Ruby

  “You,” Beatrix said with reptilian flatness. “What are your feelings for my child?”

  “Excuse me?” Lu gave a little laugh. “What do you mean?” She’d recently been thrown off an electronic message board, secondwivesspeakeasy.com, for suggesting that not every stepmother falls madly in love with her stepkids on sight, and vice versa, and that she couldn’t quite believe the women who said that they did. At least, that was the excuse the moderators used. The real reason they threw her off the board, Lu believed, was the fact that she had dared to mock the movie Stepmom, a wildly unrealistic and weepy favorite with the second wife set. Lu thought that it was because Julia Roberts had played the beleaguered stepmother, and didn’t every stepmother secretly aspire to be Julia Roberts, well scrubbed and well-meaning, the girl next door with the big smile and bigger heart? “First of all,” Lu had posted in a particularly weak moment, “the movie is set in some fantasy New York Cityland where there is no traffic. Ever. Second, the bio-mom gets cancer and DIES in that idiotic movie. Who here is going to get that lucky?”

  “It means you need to explain your feelings for my son. He seems to think that you hate him.”

  “He what?” Lu said.

  “Do I need to write it down for you?”

  “You asked me to come here. I can leave if you’d prefer to be alone.”

  Beatrix exhaled through her nose. “I just want to know what’s going on. He told me that you look at him funny, that you don’t like him or want him around. That’s why he refuses to go to your house.”

  Lu’s mouth dropped open. “That’s what he told you? ’Cause he told me that he didn’t want to come over because we don’t have a Sony PlayStation.”

  Beatrix didn’t speak for a full ten seconds. Then she said, “Are you saying my son’s a liar?”

  “I’m saying that he might be telling you what you’d like to hear.”

  “Maybe that’s what he’s telling you,” Beatrix snapped.

  “Okay,” said Lu.

  “Okay, what?”

  “Okay, okay,” Lu said. “It’s obvious he’s telling you one thing and telling us another. And that’s not the worst of his problems. He’s a big boy—”

  “He is not!”

  “I meant that he’s not a little boy, not a baby, and he’s still throwing temper tantrums that would make a toddler green with envy. If you hadn’t whipped him out of therapy—”

  “I didn’t whip him out,” said Beatrix. “Who said I did that? Ward could have taken him if he thought it was important. Anyway, that therapist was a quack. He had us all doing homework, for God’s sake. Like I don’t get enough work at work! I don’t need to be filling out charts and handing out bribes. It’s ridiculous.”

  “So much for discussion,” Lu muttered. With a fork, she stabbed at her pie, not caring that the crumbs showered into her lap. It had been years now, and sometimes, sometimes, the boys were alien to her, like some lost tribe who’d never seen a wheel or a spoon, like bugs with which you could speak. As soon as it seemed that they were lurching toward something real—if not love, then something like it, a delicate affection, a shy sort of fondness—they moved into another possessed-by-demons phase and Lu felt the ground shift beneath her.

  Avoiding Beatrix’s angry, splotchy face, Lu observed the people at the next booth. There, the mother and the father continued to chew as placidly as ruminants as their son bloodied his torn placemat with giant blobs of ketchup. She wondered what those parents felt about their son, if, at that very moment, they were thinking of him as an infant, how his little baby head had smelled of powder and musk, how his laughter had sounded like the distant chime of bells.

  The waitress floated by again, a spray of silverware in one hand. “That’s a nice shirt,” she said, nodding at Beatrix. “Where’d you get it?”

  Beatrix frowned even more deeply than she had been, fingering the cloth of her shiny green blouse. “A catalog.”

  “Oh yeah? Which one?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Oh,” said the waitress. “I’d like to get a shirt like that. My mom got engaged, and we’re having a party for her. Just a house party, but me and my sister want it to be nice. Dressed up, you know?”

  “Congratulations,” Lu said.

  The waitress looked at her. “For what?”

  “On your mom’s engagement. I mean, if that’s a good thing. For her or you or anyone.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” said the waitress, tucking a fringe of bleached hair behind her ear. She glanced from Lu to Beatrix. “You want a piece of pie? It’s good. They make it fresh every morning.”

  “No, thank you,” said Beatrix.

  “Watching your weight, huh?” Heather the Waitress said. “Me too.”

  Beatrix stared at the skinny, skinny girl. “I don’t like pie.”

  “Oh,” said Heather, looking as if she had just been hit in the face by a cobweb. “Well. I’ll be at the counter if you want me.”

  “Good for you.” Beatrix flipped open one of the folders and paged through her notes and letters. The smell of the pie was driving her nuts; she’d just started Atkins, and the coffee alone was a huge no-no. She couldn’t afford to eat pie, too. It made her furious that Lu was eating it. She wasn’t so thin, either. At least, not as thin as she’d been when Ward started parading her around as if she were the prom queen.

  At least Lu was close to Beatrix’s age. So many other first wives she knew had to deal with second wives like Heather the Waitress, emaciated little twits not even twenty-five, teetering around in too high heels and too tight jeans, acting as if life hadn’t officially begun until they strutted through the door. Please. Beatrix remembered her early twenties quite well, thank you, remembered the cluelessness, the shallowness, the head-up-the-assness. Wasn’t that when she’d chosen to marry Ward? Didn’t that prove that no one should be allowed to get married before the age of thirty?

  There should be laws, thought Beatrix, there should be rules and requirements and guidelines. No second wives under twenty-five, no second wives who looked like movie stars. Here, Beatrix had lucked out. Lu was no Julia Roberts.

  Lu was again examining the doctor’s bill that she had tossed next to the sugar packets and mustard, her expression unreadable. What? Beatrix thought. I’m not allowed to take my son to a specialist when it’s perfectly clear that there’s something wrong with his eye? I’m not allowed to emphasize that payment should be made immediately when Ward’s concept of “immediately” seems to be “if and when I feel like it so get off my case”?

  She wondered what, if anything, she was allowed to do in Lu’s opinion. Thank Lu for making her youngest feel fat and unwelcome in his own father’s house? Thank her for trying to purchase her oldest son’s affections with expensive jeans and gym shoes? Thank her for going to her middle son’s afternoon sporting events—events that Beatrix could not possibly attend because she had a regular nine-to-five—and making Beatrix look like an uncaring, unsupportive hag? Rules! she thought. Rules!

  Beatrix felt the anger like a spike through the top of her head, the heat of it racing through her veins, and she took a gulp of water. She would kill for her kids—any mother would—but she didn’t like being so intimate with that knowledge.

  The gargoyle busboy sidled by the table, smelling of smoke and Parmesan. He waved his hand at Lu’s plate. “Finished?” he mumbled.

  Lu pushed the plate with the half-eaten piece of pie toward the edge of the table. “If I’m not, I probably should be.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, Lu could see Beatrix fussing with her files again, her lips in a tight, sour pucker. She was sure Beatrix felt judged, and judged lacking, by Lu, and while that was true, it was also true that Lu didn’t want Beatrix’s job. In Ward, Lu had found that rarest of things: the nearly perfect husband. He loved her so well when he was around and yet went on business trips just long enough and often enough to convince her that she hadn’t lost herself completely, hadn’t turned into a bubbl
e-headed, tittering wifey-wife the way some of her old friends had, or a seething bitch who complained constantly about how unappreciated she was, like some of her other friends. Yet this satisfaction didn’t trickle down to the kids, not in the triple-exclamation-point way all those women on secondwivesspeakeasy.com claimed it did (“I like to call my stepchildren my bonus children!!!”). It might have been normal to feel differently about the boys, but it didn’t feel right. It was like trying not to stare at a person with a prosthetic arm: You worked so hard not to focus on the arm that it was all you could think about. Prosthetic arms everywhere.

  Lu sighed. Just once, she would like to have a triple-exclamation-point moment. “Other than his eye, Britt seems to be doing better.”

  “Britt was just tossed off the tennis team for throwing a racket at the umpire.”

  “Besides that,” Lu said.

  “Besides that?”

  “Yeah,” Lu said. “He’s a funny kid, don’t you think?”

  Beatrix didn’t know how to respond to this comment. “Sometimes he could try being a little less funny.”

  “But then he wouldn’t be Britt.” Lu hated herself for the chirpy tone of her voice, but she couldn’t help it. She was simply not normal around this woman.

  “Yes,” said Beatrix, rolling her eyes. “I suppose not.” She paused. “What about Devin? How’s he doing?”

  “Okay.” Lu realized that she should probably say more, as both of them knew that Devin had been avoiding his mother ever since he came to live with his father. This might have made Lu feel superior if Devin hadn’t calcified into some walking statue of teenage blankness and rage, and if that walking statue wasn’t perched in Lu’s living room every day, staring stonily at the TV. But then, there were cracks here and there. She’d seen them. And besides, Lu believed that Devin had moved in with his father not because Ward was a better parent, but because Devin wanted to torture him up close and personal.

  This was not what she told Beatrix, however. “It’s hard to tell with Devin,” Lu said carefully. “You know he doesn’t say that much. I think he’s . . . better.”

  The corners of Beatrix’s mouth twitched. “Is he still dating that girl?”

  “Ashleigh?” said Lu. “Unfortunately.”

  “Aren’t you friendly with her mother?”

  “Just because I like Moira,” said Lu, tugging at her collar, “doesn’t mean I like her kid. Every time I see Ashleigh I want to tell her to tuck her boobs back into her shirt.”

  “Maybe you should,” said Beatrix.

  “That’d be nice.”

  “No, really. She looks like that singer, what’s her name? The one who can’t sing but distracts everyone by falling out of her clothes.”

  “You could be describing one of dozens of people. Hundreds, maybe. Entire junior highs full of kids. Grade school kids are wearing Sesame Street thongs.”

  “Well, anyway, who knows where it will lead?”

  Lu nodded. “I know.”

  “I’m talking about Ashleigh. A girl with clothes like that. I bet she has a collection of thongs. . . .” Beatrix trailed off, raising her eyebrows.

  “Lots of girls who don’t wear thongs,” Lu said, “do all sorts of stuff that their moms wouldn’t approve of. Besides, isn’t that something you should discuss with Devin? Boys are just as accountable for their behavior as girls are.”

  “We wouldn’t have any trouble if they were properly supervised,” said Beatrix.

  Lu’s blink came in stages. “Supervised.”

  “I have to explain this to you?” Beatrix barked.

  “What do you want? Cameras in his backpack? We can only supervise them so much.” Lu used her index and middle fingers to put quotation marks around the word supervise. “We can’t be with them every minute of every day. We can only present them with the facts. We have to hope and trust that they’ll be responsible.”

  “Hope that they’ll be responsible? How about demand that they be responsible?”

  “Hope, demand, expect. When it comes down to it, they’re going to do what they’re going to do.”

  Beatrix’s face tightened into a mask. “That’s a perfectly insane way to think about this issue. But I’m not surprised to hear this from you.”

  Lu grabbed for her fork, then remembered her place had been cleared. “Oh, God. Do they serve alcohol here?”

  “I don’t appreciate the way that the subject of sex was introduced to my sons.”

  “Maybe I’ll order myself a whole pie.”

  “If you and Ward hadn’t spent so much time carrying on in front of my children, maybe they wouldn’t have so many problems. Maybe Devin wouldn’t have gotten so many ideas.” Beatrix’s finger came down like a jackhammer upon the pile of folders, as if she already had all the evidence she’d ever need.

  Lu watched the jackhammering finger, remembered a night in which Britt had come upon Lu and Ward kissing. It was just kissing. We should outlaw kissing? “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I never did. And speaking about carrying on, how about what you and Alan were doing?” Lu attempted to make more quotation marks, but her hands slashed at the air, like a person having a seizure. “Don’t you think that might have given the boys some, uh, ideas? And don’t you think they would have gotten ideas no matter what you or Ward or your husband or I did?”

  Beatrix wiped the table with a napkin. “I guess some people,” she continued as if Lu hadn’t spoken, “don’t like to take responsibility for what they’ve done.”

  “You got that right,” Lu said. This was her life now, a life of revisionist history, marked by petty skirmishes over bills, curfews, meals, clothes, visitation, TV, computer time, housework, holidays, even residences. How long could she tough it out? How long till she punched the next sanctimonious jerk-off who said: You knew he had kids; you knew what you were getting into.

  Heather the Waitress hovered, her skinny little arms behind her back. “Do you guys want anything else? More coffee or anything?”

  “No, thank you,” Beatrix told her. Lu merely shook her head in unconscious defeat.

  “Okay, then. Here’s your check.” The waitress turned and almost crashed into the little boy, the one from the next table who had been so artfully mutilating his placemat. In his hands he held a stiff piece of toast on which was balanced a pepper shaker.

  “Whoa!” said Heather.

  “Dakota, get back here, you’re going to break that,” his mother said. She stood and zipped up her brown hoodie sweatshirt to her neck. “Leave those ladies alone.”

  The little boy grinned as he set down the toast and shaker on Lu’s side of the table. “Meat!” he said.

  “Maybe in another dimension. Here, it’s just pepper,” Lu told him, taking the shaker off the toast and placing it on the table. Beatrix scowled, though it wasn’t obvious whether she was displeased with Lu or the boy or both.

  The boy’s mother crouched behind him. “Say good-bye to the nice ladies.”

  “Meat,” snarled the boy.

  At the next table, the boy’s father laid a twenty on top of his check. He smiled sheepishly, lips pink and womanly in his white face. “He calls everything meat now. We don’t know why. Last month it was ‘bug.’ Everything was ‘bug.’ You’d say ‘hi,’ he’d say ‘bug.’ Kids are crazy.”

  “Crazy,” agreed Beatrix. “You said it.”

  Lu sneezed abruptly, like a dog.

  “Say good-bye, Dakota,” his mother insisted.

  “Dakota!” said Dakota.

  Dakota’s mother sighed, then swung the boy onto her hip. Her perfume wafted over Beatrix and Lu’s table, a mommy scent, cloying and heavy and sweet. “Sorry for interrupting your visit,” she said. “Are you two sisters?”

  Heather the Hovering Waitress took a tiny step forward. “I was just thinking that. You have the same kind of, um, way about you. The same . . . what’s that word? I just learned it in psych class . . . oh! Gestalt.”

  That did it. Beatrix scoo
ped up the check before Lu could get it and before Heather the Waitress could expound further.

  “Let me,” Lu said. “I had the pie.”

  “No, no. This was my idea.” Beatrix opened her wallet and fished for a ten, which she gave to Heather the Waitress.

  “I’ll get your change,” Heather said.

  Beatrix gathered up her folders and her umbrella. “You keep the change.”

  “Thanks!” Heather said. “Have a nice day.”

  “You too,” said Lu, sliding from the booth. “And you,” she added, slipping past Dakota and his mother.

  “Meat!” said Dakota.

  “Bug!” Lu said.

  The two women exited the restaurant and stood silently for a moment. Beatrix opened her automatic umbrella directly over her own head, not in the mood to share. Lu didn’t care. The gray drizzle was cool and bracing, like the spray from a breaking wave.

  Beatrix and Lu did not look at each other; they didn’t have to. Each thought: So we both have dark eyes, so what? I am not like her. And she is nothing like me. She will never understand how terrible it is, how much it really sucks, to have so much responsibility and so little control.

  “What were they babbling about in there?” Beatrix said finally.

  “I think Heather used the word gestalt,” said Lu.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Gestalt means—”

  “I know what the word means, but what does it mean that Heather knows what it means?”

  “The end of the world,” said Lu.

  What it did mean: They wouldn’t be coming here again. Rage, hostility, jealousy, resentment—these things they could bear; people endured worse than that every day. They were not poor, not hungry, not plagued by plagues or flattened by natural disasters. They didn’t have the energy, maturity, frontal lobotomy, or whatever else you needed for this first-wife-second-wife-Chinese-royalty crap, and they didn’t know anyone who did. The old battles made so much more sense.

  “Well,” said Beatrix. “I guess that’s it.”

  “Yep,” said Lu. She watched Beatrix run to her car, the woman’s heavy footsteps spraying stars all around her. Lu shivered under the buzzing baked potato long after Beatrix had gone, the rain picking at her hair, her face, her sudden, bitter grin. Here I am, Lu thought. Julia Roberts, smiling bravely into the future with my big, big teeth.