by Wendy Walker
“I don’t want it,” Love said, tossing the book on the bed. “I’m sorry, I know you meant well.” Then the tears came.
“Oh, Lovey,” Gayle said, stroking her face.
“Let me see that damned thing.” Bounding in from the doorway, Marie grabbed the book and opened up to a random page. “Hmmmm … I didn’t know the great Alexander Rice had penile enlargement! Let me see what else is in here.”
She flipped some pages, then pretended to read again. “He likes to wear women’s underwear? Shit’no wonder you don’t want to read it,” Marie continued with a dramatic sarcasm. Then she pressed the book to her chest and looked pleadingly at Gayle. “Can I keep it? There’s some good stuff in here!”
Through the tears, Love felt a smile break free. Still, she wouldn’t take the book.
“Come on, Lovey. Just poke through it,” Gayle said, feeling a rush of anger. Love was a mess’physically, emotionally. How could a father do this to his own child? She wanted to tear the book to shreds, buy every copy they made and burn them all. More than that, she wanted Love to read it, to be OK with whatever it held. To be well again.
She felt the blood pounding against her temples, blood that had been racing through her all night and into today. She had learned to live with Troy, his fits of rage against her and the acts of contrition that followed. But last night he had crossed a line, and the invisible scars she could sense within her son evoked something more powerful than her walls of tolerance.
And for the first time in a long time, she let some of it out.
“Damn it, Love!” she said, drawing looks of shock from her friends. “What good are all my fucking connections if I can’t help you!”
Silence filled the room as the women took in the change. Over the years, they had fallen into their roles’outspoken misfit, fragile caretaker, frantic supermom. With one sentence, Gayle had reshuffled the deck.
Marie was the first to acknowledge it. “Excuse me, Miss Manners’what would the Haywoods say about such language?” she asked from across the small room. Then she started to laugh. Gayle followed, and finally Love, until the laughter filled the room. Baby Will opened his eyes, then nuzzled deeper into his mother. He pulled his thumb into his mouth, sucking hard and drifting off again.
“Stop’it hurts!” Love said between breaths, but the release was powerful.
Marie joined her friends at Love’s bedside. She placed the book on the nightstand, then leaned down to give Love a kiss.
Downstairs, Yvonne listened to her daughter’s laughter. It had been some time since she’d heard it, years perhaps, and it lifted her up to that place reserved for motherly joy. That she had not been the one to break through and incite it mattered not one bit.
“How’s that, Grandma?” Jessica asked, holding up a mirror for her grandmother.
Yvonne looked at her bright red cheeks, her frosted blue eyelids. Lipstick covered her lips, and a good inch around them. Her eyebrows were black and full, clashing terribly with her lighter hair. Still, she examined herself with serious scrutiny, shifting her head to catch all the angles as she might before shooting a scene. With the girls looking on with bated anticipation, her daughter’s laughter still filtering through from above, Yvonne smiled.
“It’s just perfect!”
TWENTY-NINE
SECRETS
THERE WAS A KNOCK on the bedroom door. Yvonne entered before anyone answered. Janie Kirk was trailing behind her.
“What are we discussing today, ladies?” she asked, playing dumb as Janie took a seat in the corner.
“Hi, Janie,” Gayle said, greeting her friend with a cautious look.
Marie jumped in to aid in Yvonne’s cover. “Golf and cereal boxes.”
Yvonne shook her head at Marie and gave her a wink. “Not again. Really, Marie. You must get over it!”
Yvonne held her hand in the air, then walked out of the room, closing the door behind her.
“Your mother thinks I should let Anthony remain in a state of Nean-derthalic idiocy,” Marie noted for the record.
With her baby still nuzzled into her, Love nodded. “Don’t get me started. It’s the generation.”
There was a brief moment of silence to acknowledge the truth of the statement.
“So,” Janie said, after getting settled with her folder and a pen. “Besides golf and cereal, what did I miss?”
Love looked at Marie, and Marie knew. She wasn’t ready to tell another soul about her father’s book.
“Let’s see … I’ve got this case with the dead baby, and this damned cute intern looking over my shoulder all the time …”
“Poor baby.” Love smiled, giving Marie a thankful look.
“I think it sounds sweet’a young man infatuated with his brilliant boss. We could all use some of that,” Gayle said, eliciting looks of confusion.
“What?”
“What do you mean, what? Marie is flirting with her employee.” Love smiled again, and Marie flipped her the finger.
“I am not flirting. End of discussion. Now, what’s happening with this fundraiser? Have we done enough to save the world yet, or are there more flowers to arrange?”
From across the room, Marie caught the look that passed between Gayle and Janie. As protective as she was of Love, she sensed something similar now between the other pair of friends.
“Something happening, ladies?” she asked, trying to keep it light.
Janie shook her off. “Nothing.” It was almost convincing.
Then Marie remembered. “The vote! Gayle’why didn’t you say anything? The meeting was last night, wasn’t it?”
Gayle didn’t answer.
“Gayle?” Love asked. “What happened?”
The silence in the room provided the answer.
Janie sighed, looked at Gayle one last time, then finally spoke. “They voted for the facility upgrade.”
“Throw pillows? You have to be joking! Who voted against you?” Marie was now irate.
Gayle shrugged, her eyes averted. “I didn’t go.”
Marie was perplexed. “Isn’t that what all of this is for? Giving up your house, your time, not to mention all the years of generous donations?”
“I’m sure something came up. She did the best she could,” Janie tried, though she was, as usual, at a loss to contain Marie.
“I’ll call them,” Marie said, reaching for her phone.
Love tried to stop her from her place on the bed. “Marie …”
“What?”
“Please, Marie. Just let it be.” Gayle sounded desperate.
Holding the phone in her hand, Marie gave it a squeeze as she looked with frustration at her friends. “Fine,” she relented. “But I don’t understand any of this. They need your money. They need your connections. You have incredible power here. And … you’re right about the direction for the clinic.”
Love frowned at Marie.
“What? Am I wrong?” Marie needed answers’to a lot of things at the moment. She would settle for the ones that were right in front her.
Gayle shook her head, then looked down, her thoughts quickly reducing to an image of her mother, the sound of breaking glass, and the pills in her vanity drawer. It was almost five, two more hours and she could stop feeling this way. Yes, she had missed the meeting. Yes, they had used the opportunity to vote against her wishes for the clinic. She had planned to go, to fight for the program. But after the altercation with Troy, the meeting was more confrontation than she was able to face. How could she possibly explain any of that without revealing everything?
Pulling herself together, swallowing down the anger to the deep well she had built for all things unpleasant, Gayle began to shut down.
Janie stepped in to defend her. “They’re a tough crowd. I wouldn’t want to face them either.”
“Gayle?” Love said. But the chilling vagueness she saw in Gayle’s eyes was something she knew too well, and it had her worried.
Marie carried on, reciting her knowle
dge about boards, and people who used them to feel important. Who cared what they thought of Gayle? The point was to help the clinic. The rest was just noise, tedious, annoying noise that had to be stopped.
Listening, nodding, Love tried to pull Gayle into the plotting to save the situation. But Gayle was nowhere to be found. She waited for a pause in Marie’s diatribe, then politely excused herself.
“I have to get home. Oliver needs dinner.”
“Gayle …” Marie tried to stop her, but Gayle walked through the door without as much as a parting glance.
“I’ll go after her,” Janie said, rushing to gather her things. “It’ll be fine.”
When she was gone, Marie stood still, her eyes now fixed on the empty hallway just outside the room.
“What the hell is going on?”
Love sighed and stole a hug from Baby Will. “There’s something wrong with her.”
“What?” Marie asked, turning to face Love.
“I don’t know. Something’s not right in that house.”
They both knew Gayle’s life was complicated’the family that was richer than God, the estate and staff that needed managing, her son who grew more reclusive each year. And, of course, the arrogant ass who tried to pass as a husband, and a man.
“She never talks about any of it,” Marie said, checking her watch. As always, she was running late for dinner, homework, and the rest of her life that was waiting.
Love looked at Marie until she finally had her full attention. “Do any of us? Talk, I mean. About what’s really going on.”
Marie could not pretend to be surprised. They were the best of friends. They knew everything about each other. Their kids’ worst moments, their husbands’ choice of underwear. How they drank their coffee. Still, Love was hiding behind the present conflict to avoid the book sitting beside her’the book containing her life. And Marie hadn’t brushed the surface of Randy Matthews.
“I know, I know,” Marie said, waving her off as she leaned across the bed. She gave Love a kiss on the cheek and squeezed her hand. “Even so’ nothing in my life is real until I tell you about it. You know that, right?”
Love smiled at her and nodded, wishing that were true.
THIRTY
THE STEPFORD WIVES
“So I WOULD HAVE the children for dinners during the week, then longer stretches on the weekends?” Craig Hewett was trying to get it all straight in his head.
“Yes. That’s usually how it works,” Marie answered her client.
“And I would live in an apartment, maybe in Cliffton?”
“We’d have to crunch the numbers. We could require your wife to move as well, to a smaller house. Obviously, maintaining two households is more costly than one.”
Hewett took a long moment to reflect, and Marie knew what was coming, if not now, then soon, as those secret thoughts played out over the next several days. JVho will clean, who will shop, who will cook for me? And what will I do when I have the kids? Will the nanny come with them? But where would she stay? It was cynical to make this assumption, that her client would be worried about such trivial details in the face of such a monumental decision. But it was not unfounded. For most of his adult life, and probably all of his childhood, Craig Hewett had been taken care of by a woman. The mundane yet necessary tasks of sustaining a household, of keeping life running on time, had never been on his to-do list, and this would surely be a factor in his decision. And what was ironic to Marie, what was so maddening, was her conviction that his reliance on his wife as a servant was the very thing that was killing their relationship.
Marie covered the broad strokes of the divorce process, the filing of the petition, the mandatory court hearing, and the different roads it could wind down. If everyone was rational, if they stayed calm and focused on the end result, it could be kept under the radar, settled amicably and wrapped up within the year. If, at the other extreme, one of them wanted to cause trouble, the court would be more than happy to stick its nose in every aspect of their lives. The Hewetts could spend their lives being scrutinized by judges and court shrinks, overworked and obstinate bureaucrats who could not possibly know what was best for them, but would insinuate themselves into every aspect of the separation. They could be at it for years, then find themselves with a similar result’only significantly poorer and emotionally spent. In short, it would behoove Mr. Hewett to be nice.
“I’ll be in touch when I’ve figured out what I want to do,” Hewett said, ready to leave.
Marie stopped him. “Look, I want you to go home and think about this. Think about whether or not you can get through the next few years. When the kids are in school, and your wife has more time for herself, she may have more to give you as well.”
Sitting back now, Mr. Hewett exhaled for what felt like hours. Then he nodded with resolution. “And what if she doesn’t? What if we can’t ever be happy again?”
“That’s the gamble,” Marie said. Then she paused. “Look’we only get one shot at a unified family. You might remarry, have more kids. People make it work. But what you have now’two natural parents together with their children’this is it. You can’t recreate this or get it back, and there are always consequences when it breaks apart.” The words came out from a place deep within her, the same place that had spoken to her every day and every night since her husband began his vanishing act.
Paul Hewett nodded, and Marie could tell he had considered this and weighed it against his own happiness.
Marie sighed. This was, surely, the beginning of the end for the Hewetts. His mind had started down the path. He now had the knowledge that would occupy his thoughts at every possible moment, and those thoughts would, by necessity, be held in secret as he moved farther away from his wife, and their family. He would, instead, begin to ponder his new life. Sitting at the dinner table’flanked by his children as his wife cooked and served, prodding the littlest one to eat her vegetables, then puttered and cleaned up to avoid sitting in front of a plate of food herself’food that she might actually consume and then regret the next day when she squeezed herself into her size 2 AG jeans’Paul Hewett would be thinking about how bad it would be. Marie could see the wheels turning already.
“Just please’think carefully.”
Marie watched him leave, knowing he would be back by the end of the month. Then she turned to Randy, who had been silently observing the consult from across the table.
“Ugghh,” she said, sitting back down in a defeated posture.
Randy looked at her slumped down in the chair. “Did I miss something?”
“No. It’s just that I know his wife.”
“And she’ll be crushed?”
“Yes,” Marie answered, then lifted her head so she could see her young protege. “And no. She’s the perfect Stepford wife. That’s why this will crush her.”
Randy laughed at her depiction. “How does one detect a robot wife from the flesh and blood variety?”
“Easy. The human form does the housewife detail but bitches about it to her friends. She goes out in gnarly sweats without a shower, has dust under her bed, chronic exhaustion, and secretly longs to be Angelina Jolie.” Marie smiled with endearment as she thought about Love, herself, and the small handful of friends she had collected over the years.
“Hell, I long to be Angelina Jolie,” Randy said, now thoroughly amused.
“Yeah, right.”
“OK. Maybe not. But Mrs. Hewett?”
Marie scowled. She had nothing against the woman’except the fact that she was one of the coveted. “Where to start? She has a perfect body, which she parades through town in tight black pilates pants. She lunches with friends but orders nothing but green tea, doesn’t drink or smoke, is always nicely dressed, and keeps an immaculate home. Her children are brilliant, uninterested in television, and eat broccoli. She adores her husband, never says no, and never’ever’speaks poorly of him. But the worst part about her is that she pretends all of this is easy, and completely fulfilling. S
he pretends that it doesn’t faze her to never sleep, or eat, or have an intellectual conversation.”
“Sounds like the Housewife Olympics.”
Marie nodded and smiled. “Exactly! Her purpose in life is to make other women feel like shit for not being her.”
“Until her husband bails,” Randy noted, his eyebrows raised.
“Ahhh’you have no idea! Divorce means immediate disqualification. Like bikers on steroids.”
Randy sat back and folded his arms, his face lit up by the energy force field Marie’s diatribe had generated. “You’ve given this a lot of thought.”
“Well, it is my life, after all.”
“So what is a double H like yourself doing in a place like this?” Randy asked, referring to her two Harvard degrees. “There must be something good out here. Something that made you come.”
Marie rubbed the side of her face, as if trying to remember. She knew the answer’the one she told herself these days. But the real reason? She was almost too embarrassed to say it out loud.
“The grass.”
“Grass?”
“Haven’t you noticed it? The lush, vibrantly green grass? I had this idea that it would bring us serenity. Back to nature and all of that. I wanted my kids to walk outside in their bare feet and feel the ground.”
“That seems like a good reason.”
“Only they don’t do that. My girls prefer to flaunt their designer sandals at the mall. Don’t know where I went wrong, but now, I swear to you’I think if I don’t keep one step ahead of this place, it might actually catch up with me.”
“And the robot Marie Passeti will kill you and take over your life,” Randy teased her, an ominous expression taking shape around his eyes.
Marie smiled then dropped her head to the table, her dark hair spreading out around her face. “Sometimes I wish she would just hurry up and do it.”
Randy was smiling when he reached out his hand. Marie felt her heart jump into her throat as he shifted her misplaced hair with one finger, careful not to touch her cheek with the others.