Young Wives

by Olivia Goldsmith

  It must be the Soprano’s. Had Reid already invited her to live with him? Angie and Reid had been separated for less than a month. Could it be that?

  Angie left the dress there and walked back into the bedroom. Sure enough, there in the closet was a jacket, a couple of pairs of unfamiliar jeans, two blouses—one white, one blue—and a gray business suit. Below them there were four pairs of shoes, neatly lined up: two pairs of pumps, one black, one navy; a pair of Reeboks, and another pair of flats. Angie crouched down. They were size seven-and-a-half. She picked up one of the black pumps and caressed the suede. Suddenly, squatting there on the floor, Angie felt as if her heart might break.

  “I’ll take this one out to the hall,” Sean said, holding the full wardrobe box. “Shall I bring in the other?”

  Angie turned her face to him and nodded.

  “You know, I’d wondered if … well, before we start up the truck, you’d like to have a beer with me?” Sean asked. “That is, if you drink with the help.”

  Angie smiled. He was cute, with Irish dimples. But she had other things to think about right now, though she appreciated the compliment.

  “I’m married,” she said. Sean raised his eyebrows, but said nothing. He left her alone and she got up, still holding the pump, and sat on the little chair in the corner, the one she had taken from her old room. She gripped it with both hands, as if she might be thrown out of it. The shoe lay like a dead thing on her lap. She was taking this chair, she thought. It and everything and getting out.

  She couldn’t understand what Reid was. She could, perhaps, understand how he might have cheated on her, and even changed his mind and wanted her back. Maybe giving her the ring had been a sincere gesture. But what she couldn’t understand was how he could have told her he wanted her, that he wanted to renew their vows, and go on immediately to start living with another woman in just a few weeks’ time. Had he ever loved her? Would any partner do? Had she merely been a Reid Wakefield accessory, like his golf clubs, his squash rackets, his navy blazers?

  The realization that she had called him, opening a door, horrified her. How embarrassing, how weak. Her face flushed deeply. He might yet show up. It was the last thing she wanted. God, she had better get out of here fast.

  Angie stood up and called out to Sean. “I’m taking this,” she said, meaning the chair, when Reid walked into the bedroom.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. “Thank God you’re home.”

  “I’m not home,” Angie said. “I’m packing to go back there.”

  She couldn’t help but be stunned by how tall, how really beautiful he was. The too-long bones and the too-broad shoulders should have made him hulking, but there was some innate grace, some trick of movement he’d been given, that made him seem graceful. She pulled her thoughts away from his looks, or her attraction to them, although it was difficult to do. Her stomach tightened yet again. She thought she might actually be sick

  Reid took only one step into the room. “Please, Angie,” he said. “Tell me you want to stay here.”

  “Like hell I will,” Angie said and pointed into the closet. “Why would I? So she and I could both share the bathroom with you? Just tell me if she’s the one you’ve been sleeping with all year, or if she’s some new one.”

  Angie hated how she sounded—shrewish and, underneath it, so obviously hurt. But what else could she do except try to be a true Wakefield and keep her mouth shut? Forget about that. Reid moved toward her and she took a step backward, stumbling against the chair. Just then Sean stuck his head in.

  “We finished with the books,” he said. “What’s next?”

  “The coffee table and the two blue lamps,” she told him, her eyes never leaving her husband’s face. Sean quickly looked from her to Reid and didn’t say a word. Once he had disappeared, Reid took another step toward her.

  “Angie, please. Pay absolutely no attention to that. I know it was wrong, and stupid. It’s just that I was so lonely without you.” He sat down at the edge of their bed.

  The thing about Reid, she realized, was there was a certain attractive childishness about him. Perhaps if he wasn’t so good looking, he wouldn’t seem as sweet and vulnerable. But to see a sexy, handsome, tall man admit to his weaknesses, to fess up to his fears as Reid had always done, was, in a way, deeply moving to Angie. Like a child, Reid was controlled by his feelings. Maybe that had made her feel powerful. Or maybe it had given her the false feeling that she alone had pierced the shell of his perfection.

  “You don’t know what it’s been like. Just when I realized how empty, how shallow I was, and that your love was the only thing that mattered, you left me.” He had his head in his hands, but then cocked it toward the closet. “I’ve only been trying to hold it together,” he said. “I can’t concentrate. I can’t eat. I’m drinking half a bottle of Scotch each night. I feel like shit. I mean, I know I am a shit, but I also feel like shit all the time.” He looked at her and his lashes were wet. “Nothing works for me, except you. And you took yourself away.”

  Yes. His naiveté was attractive. The thing was, Reid probably meant what he said. But he had probably meant what he had said to whomever the Soprano was. Somehow his simplicity was duplicity. He was so vulnerable.

  “So you asked your girlfriend to move in—even though you don’t want her,” Angie said, and took the suede pump in her hand and chucked it at him as hard as she could. It hit his chest, but he’d got his hands up fast enough to ward off most of the impact. That was Reid—never really without some protection. Angie couldn’t help shaking her head. What a stupid, ineffectual woman weapon—throwing a size seven-and-a-half black suede pump at your soon-to-be-ex’s heart. Why not a .38-caliber bullet, one of the kind that was scored on top so it would explode once it hit its target?

  Reid rose from the bed, dropped the shoe, and moved across the room to her. All at once, it felt to Angie as if everything went in slow motion—as Reid walked closer, he seemed to get farther away. She didn’t know if she wanted him beside her or out of the room, out of the building, out of her life. She couldn’t move. She felt as if minutes, maybe hours, were going by as he took one step, then another, toward her. At last he was in front of her, so close that she could smell the laundry scent coming from his shirt. He stood silently before her, but even if they didn’t speak in words, she felt every cell in her body drawn to him. Was this, she wondered irrelevantly, what they called animal magnetism?

  Finally he spoke. “I love you, Ange. I swear I do. If you forgive me, you’ll never regret it.”

  Angie leaned her head against his shoulder, and his arm gently, so gently, tightened around her. “I gave away the ring you gave me,” Angie said.

  “I’ll get you another one,” Reid assured her.

  “I told my parents what you did,” Angie told him.

  “I’ll spend the rest of my life living with the shame.” Gently, tenderly, he stroked her hair. She couldn’t help but shiver. Her face was fine, her hair was fine, all of her was fine. Her mind went blank and that was a relief. Any guilt, any doubt she had, she ignored.

  It felt so good to be sheltered in his arms. Angie wanted to rub first one cheek and then the other against his chest, the way cats did to mark their territory.

  The Soprano meant nothing to him. Maybe this whole bizarre time could be written off, forgotten. Maybe it was just a lapse and Reid had learned a lesson. But at the moment Angie couldn’t think. This wasn’t about thinking.

  There was some noise out in the living room, the sound of something toppling over, but thudding, not crashing. One of the men yelled something, and then a woman’s voice answered him. Angie froze. It couldn’t be. It was. The voice. The Soprano.

  The door swung open and Lisa stood there. Angie, feeling caught out and guilty, took a step back from her husband. Reid took a step back from her as well. “What the hell is going on?” Lisa asked, clearly furious as she looked from Angie to Reid.

  Angie felt ashamed. After all, she’d burn
ed up hours of Lisa’s time talking about how she hated this man. She stared at Lisa, who looked very, very good; her hair was blonder, and she seemed taller and thinner than ever. “You got my message,” Angie began, but at the same time Reid said, “How did you—”

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Lisa said to Reid.

  “It’s my house,” he answered, defensive as a child.

  “Lisa, it’s okay,” Angie said. “We’ve started to talk things over.”

  “The hell you are,” Lisa said, still looking at Reid. “I ought to report you to the department of narcissism. They’d come right in here and shut you two down.”

  “What are you talking about?” Angie asked.

  “Oh, shut up,” Lisa said, violently. “Do you know how sick I am of listening to you whine?” She looked at Reid. “What do you think you’re doing to me?” she asked.

  It took that long for Angie to get it. But then she did—big time. She looked from Reid, who averted his eyes, to Lisa, who stared insolently at her. The blue dress, the shoes, the advice to stay away—now it all made sense. Size four. The Soprano. Why, in all those hours of talking, of complaining and bitching, had she never noticed Lisa’s voice? Angie shook her head, pushed past Lisa, and walked out into the living room. “That’s it,” she told Sean and Thomas. “Wrap it up. I’m out of here.”

  16

  In which Michelle, Brownie Queen, has to let them eat cake

  Michelle hadn’t been able to sleep since the bust. She was exhausted, but every time she started to drift off, she’d start awake, a cold sweat covering her. She couldn’t stop her mind from racing. She didn’t want to wake up Frank, so she shuffled down to the kitchen and decided to straighten up the cubicles that held mail, magazines, and Frankie’s school papers. There she found a neon green paper with the reminder of the bake sale that was being held today during all lunch periods. Bake sales were always the best fund-raiser, she decided she’d bake. Making brownies at three-thirty in the morning wasn’t exactly a normal thing to do, but she needed to do something.

  Michelle had to admit to herself as she measured out the dry ingredients—flour, sugar, walnuts—and the eight eggs for the four pans she would make, that baking had a soothing effect on her. As the aroma of chocolate filled the kitchen, she was grateful for the roteness and optimism of the task.

  Now Michelle walked up to the front door of the Eleanor S. Windham Middle School with one hand tightly clutching Frankie’s and the other hand holding a huge box of her homemade brownies. Frankie was beside her, but Jenna had run ahead to make it less clear that she’d been driven here by her mom; she was already old enough to be humiliated by being seen at any time with her mother at school, and this was a much more abnormal situation.

  Michelle was doing her best to recover and help her kids recover from the horror of the arrest, but she wasn’t even sure that driving Jenna over was the thing to do; she and Frank were part of the problem for Jenna, so perhaps she shouldn’t expect that she could be part of the solution. Normally she thought kids should learn to stand up for themselves. But this wasn’t a normal situation. She couldn’t let her daughter be picked on by the bus bullies because of her parents’ legal problem. It was too much.

  Michelle knew how cruel kids could be from her own experience—once or twice her mother had shown up to pick her up at school and Michelle, horrified by the sight of her, drunk and slovenly, had prayed that she would live it down. Afterward there had been taunts and Michelle had simply braved it out, pretending that she didn’t hear them. But she was altogether tougher than Jenna—she’d had to be. Michelle didn’t ever want her daughter to have to be as tough as she had been. It wasn’t good for a child. Now, as she watched Jenna duck into the crowd and join the bunch of little backs that were presented to Michelle as she entered the slate-floored school foyer, Michelle made herself loosen the hold she had on Frankie. She didn’t want him to feel just how frightened and desolate she was. She wasn’t sure how she could face Mrs. Spencer, the principal, or even Mrs. Spencer’s nosy, daunting secretary.

  The bust had been bad enough, but Michelle hadn’t known the worst—that her private agony had been spread all over the pages of the newspaper. For two days, as bad as it was, Michelle had been an ostrich, silly enough to think that her humiliation had been a private one—or as private as a police raid with twenty cop cars in the middle of the night could be. She didn’t realize the whole humiliation had been spread out on breakfast tables all over Westchester County until Rick Bruzeman had mentioned over the phone that the press coverage wouldn’t help the grand jury.

  “What press coverage?” she’d asked, and he’d thought she was joking. Michelle had driven to his office to see what he was talking about; she had been so shocked that she hadn’t cried or behaved badly there, despite the growing distaste she felt for the man. She’d waited until she got home to her wreck of a house, and then had locked herself in the bathroom for two whole hours. She’d set the alarm clock for two-thirty so she would have enough time to soak her face in ice and wouldn’t scare the children when they came home from school.

  But they’d come home with new horrors. Jenna was crying because two older girls on the bus had pulled off her backpack in front of the whole gleeful group of kids and pretended to go through it looking for drugs. Jenna had run to her room and locked the door. Frankie had come home silent but holding up a note. He went to the window, looking for the lost Pookie while Michelle read it.

  It was from Frankie’s teacher, reporting that he had wet his pants in class and that she shouldn’t be expected to clean up after him. She’d punished him. Michelle had taken off Frankie’s urine-soaked Osh-Koshes, bathed him, and sat him in front of the television before she went up to comfort Jenna. Then she let Frank take over that job when he came home. It had all been, it still was, hellish. But she and Frank had decided that facing it down was the way to go.

  Now, at the school door, Michelle lifted Frankie up. He was so small, so light. As she walked down the school hallway, surrounded by noisy children, she focused on how all she’d ever wanted was to love her husband and her kids. Why was it the nature of the world to take the one thing you wanted and twist it into so much pain?

  Walking into the principal’s office this morning was as difficult to do as it had been for her back in the days when she was only eleven. But Michelle wouldn’t let them hurt her son or her daughter without fighting back. She didn’t expect that the school would be responsible for fixing things, but they shouldn’t be allowed to make everything worse.

  Michelle walked in, nodded to the random teachers at their mailboxes, and moved directly up to Hillary Gross, the secretary. “I’m here to see Mrs. Spencer,” she announced and was proud her voice didn’t quaver. “May I leave these here while I go in to meet with her?” she asked, lifting a heavy box onto the counter.

  “What is it?” Hillary Gross asked, her voice suspicious.

  Michelle was ready to snap something at her—like “Heroin tarts”—but maintained her dignity and instead smiled at Frankie. “Just something for the bake sale,” she said in what she thought of as her Professional Mom’s Voice. She moved smoothly and directly toward Mrs. Spencer’s office door. Someone was just leaving, and before anything else could happen, Michelle put her head in, held Frankie a little higher, and entered Mrs. Spencer’s den, shutting the door behind her on all those curious, hostile eyes.

  Mrs. Spencer was at her desk, her back to the light. She was one of the older women bureaucrats, a little more modern than the battle-axes that Michelle had been taught by, but certainly not what you could call dedicated or progressive in her thinking. She had over-permed gray hair and her burgundy lipstick was darker, but not by much, than the age spots around her eyes, nose, and mouth. “Don’t rock the boat” could have been the motto they ran under her photo in the middle school yearbook. Michelle tried once again to paste on a pleasant smile and sat down in the chair opposite Mrs. Spencer, still holding Frankie a
gainst her shoulder.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” she said, her voice cheerful and soft. “I have to be at the bake sale in just ten minutes so I don’t have much time, and I know how busy you are.” Mrs. Spencer nodded. She wasn’t looking for gossip or trouble. “You know Frankie, don’t you?” Michelle asked.

  “Yes. Of course,” Mrs. Spencer said but Michelle doubted that the woman did. She was strictly a desk model, leaving her office as rarely as possible.

  “I’m going to ask Frankie to sit in the chair outside,” Michelle said, her voice still pleasant. She turned to her son. “I brought you a book and I won’t be long,” she promised.

  She stood up again, went to the door, settled him on the bench there and gave him not only his Pat the Bunny book but a box of juice and a tiny box of raisins. Frankie just stared down at his feet. Michelle’s heart broke as she looked at him, but she left him there and went back to sit opposite Mrs. Spencer, again closing the door.

  “I’m not sure if you’re aware of it,” she said, her voice now brisk, “but my family has been upset by a false accusation. Anyway, it’s important for you to know that though police were involved, there hasn’t been an indictment and there probably won’t be. We’re considering suing the town and the county for false arrest.” Michelle felt Mrs. Spencer straighten up at that. She searched in her bag, as if she weren’t acutely aware of the location of the insulting note from Frankie’s kindergarten teacher, folded carefully in the side pocket.

  Mrs. Spencer leaned forward across her desk as if she was willing to help with the search. “I had heard about the arrest and I—”

  “As I just said, there’ve been no indictments,” Michelle interrupted. “My husband and I were held for a few hours, badly frightened, and released. He and I have been the victims of some kind of smear campaign. Anyway, whether you believe me or not, our children are certainly innocent, wouldn’t you agree?”