Husbands and Other Sharp Objects: A Novel

by Marilyn Simon Rothstein

  For many reasons, I always thought Candy was a better person than me. She had garnered national awards for her children’s books, including Walter in the Water, which was about a walrus but really about her father. If I had written a book about my father, it would have been called Do What I Tell You or Die. She was elegant, sophisticated, and soft-spoken.

  Candy gave a surprised look and a salute from the top of the escalator. I gave one back from below, but mine was akin to someone waving at a Yankees game.

  “You’re here?” she said. “I told you I would take a cab.”

  “I couldn’t wait to see you.” Candy had become my rock. I hugged her gingerly. She was not a hugger.

  “I’m thrilled to be home. I can’t wait to sleep in my own bed. And I missed my mail.”

  “Your mail or your male? You know, m-a-l-e?” I said.

  “There were so many times I wished you were with me. We would have had an unbelievable adventure in Florence. Talk about art. The food was art.”

  That, I didn’t doubt. But I was sure she ate very little of it.

  “Harvey went to Italy a lot on business, but I never went with him.”

  “Please, Marcy, Italy is no place to go with a husband. The men are incredible.”

  “I bet you can’t wait to see Leonardo.”

  Leonardo was Candy’s personal trainer and lover. Her casual relationship with Leonardo had helped her through the breakup of her marriage to a physician known around the hospital as Dr. Bang.

  “I did miss Leonardo,” she said. “But it’s not that difficult to make do in Italy.”

  “Tell me, tell me.”

  “Let’s just say the pasta was delicious.”

  “Describe the pasta.”

  “Long,” she said, raising an eyebrow.

  We walked to baggage claim, smiling at each other, and waited. One suitcase at a time dropped onto the carousel. We craned our necks for Candy’s luggage.

  “How have you been?” Candy said.

  “Good, but eating too much if I want to stay in shape.”

  “It’s important to watch that,” she said, and I wondered if that meant she thought I had gained some weight. It’s not like she would ever say it.

  “You’re right,” I said, nodding seriously. “No more strawberry shortcake in bed. You’re home, and the good times are over.”

  “How are your kids?”

  “Elisabeth and Ben are great. Ben has a new boyfriend named Jordan. You just missed Amanda. I’m fine, but I had a minor mishap in the parking lot with the guy who was here to pick her up.”

  “Marcy, you have to be more careful.”

  I was beginning to think “you have to be more careful” was my middle name. Who was more careful than me? I’d been careful for over thirty years. Married to the same man, living in the same town, in the same house. I had bought the same brands of detergent, deodorant, and toilet paper since I had first left my parents’ home.

  In fact, prior to the last few months, my biggest risk was driving to Walgreens without a seat belt.

  “Wait a minute. What makes you think I caused the accident?” I said.

  “Um, I’ve seen you drive? Tell me about Amanda’s guy.”

  “Turns out he’s Harvey’s lawyer.”

  “She’s seeing her father’s lawyer?”

  “Yes, and there are countries where that is considered incestuous.”

  Candy pointed to her rolling suitcase. We hustled to the carousel to pull it off the track.

  I grabbed her second bag. “All done?” I said.

  “No. There’s a third.”

  We waited for what seemed like a few months until Candy’s largest suitcase appeared. Of course it matched the first two. I wouldn’t need multiple suitcases unless I was leaving America for good, which I wouldn’t do, because I’d miss my family too much.

  I hoisted the final piece of luggage. “Geez, what’s in this? A safe made of steel?”

  Outside, it had stopped snowing. We trudged to the lot and found my car.

  “I’ll drive,” she said.

  “You don’t want me to drive?”

  “Marcy, a blind man wouldn’t want you to drive.”

  I was happy to hand her the keys.

  “Leonardo is coming over tomorrow,” she offered as she started the car and looked over her shoulder to back up.

  “What’s the story with him?”

  “It’s all good for now,” she said.

  “For now?”

  “He may decide to move on. I may decide to move on.”

  “Very cavalier,” I said.

  “Well”—she shifted into drive and headed toward the exit—“I guess there are other alternatives. I’m fifty-six. We could start a family. First, a boy; then in a few years, if we’re very lucky and I consult a world-class specialist, I could have three girls at once.”

  “And you could name them after me!” I patted my heart.

  “Yes, Marcy, Marcy, and Marcy. By the way, in Milan, I met a real Leonardo.”

  I was happy she had had such a good time.

  Candy turned out of the lot and onto the slippery road. “Did you decide whether you are going to move?”

  The car slid forward on a patch of ice. Candy took her foot off the gas.

  “I’m still thinking,” I said. “The market is slow now, so I have time to decide. I ran into my Realtor at the library. She was checking out the maximum number of books.”

  “Before I left for Italy, I told you to stop thinking and start doing. You don’t even like your house. Didn’t Harvey have to talk you into it all those years ago?”

  “I can’t shake the memories. When we moved to Connecticut, Elisabeth was a baby. I brought the other two kids home from the hospital to that house. When Harvey and I arrived with Amanda, my mom was in the driveway, waiting.”

  “I miss your mom,” Candy said.

  Not long before, Candy and I had become fast friends at Saint Mordecai Hospital. I had been visiting my mom. She had been there for her father. We had held each other up. When they both passed on, we held each other up some more.

  “I wish I had known your mom longer,” Candy said. “Most of all, I wish I had met you sooner. Can you imagine if we had been friends all through high school? Or if we had been roommates in college?”

  “You will know me for a very long time,” I said.

  Hopefully, I thought, for a lifetime.

  Chapter 2

  When I came home after dropping off Candy, I was thrilled to see my house lights ablaze, not just because the electrician had come, but because Jon London’s Subaru was in the driveway.

  In the kitchen, Jon, tall and sturdy, with longish blond hair, blue eyes, a strong nose, and an eternally scruffy face, was cooking at the grandiose stove that Harvey had imported from some European country where people really care about stoves. He was wearing a red-and-black checked flannel shirt, jeans, and his signature thick red wool socks. He was holding a carton of eggs.

  My habit was to buy whatever eggs I found on sale, but Jon had introduced me to organic cage-free eggs. His favorite brand was Cluck in the Muck, so that’s what I bought. I felt virtuous when I thought that the hens that laid my dinner eggs were not poisoned with the pollutants and ingredients that I myself consumed in highly processed foods on a regular basis. Also, I liked that the chickens roamed free.

  Jon kissed me hello.

  “Eggs?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I answered, joyously. As far as I was concerned, a great-looking guy kissing me hello and saying “Eggs?” was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. What’s more, I adored the way Jon made eggs, the manner in which his sculpted wrist appeared to crack with the shells, how he stirred his lovely yolks in a chef’s bowl with a whisk, how he heated the copper pan and melted a bit of his organic butter from Maine so I could sniff the scent while listening to the sizzle as he poured the lustrous eggs. And, finally, how Jon reached for a little bit of salt and freshly ground pepper. Watchi
ng Jon make eggs was a sex act.

  But there was a lot more to Jon. I had met him eons ago when we had both started volunteering at the Guild for Good. In college, I had majored in art history and enjoyed being with creative people. He was involved with the Guild, because in addition to being an English professor, he was an accomplished painter who was well recognized for his work. He had two paintings, coastal scenes of Maine, in the Portland Museum of Art. Now Jon was on the board of the Guild, and I had recently been hired as executive director.

  My new position, paid with benefits, was the only decent thing that had happened to me in the previous year. In addition to my husband’s announcement that he wasn’t certain he wanted to be married anymore and, even more impolite, that he was having a child with a girl young enough to have another baby in about twenty years, my mother had passed away. In a matter of weeks, Mom had fallen off a stool and broken both legs, found out she had cancer, and died in a rehabilitation facility. My mother was such an overachiever.

  During this time, Jon had commiserated with me in the office. Commiseration had led to coffee, which had led to organic eggs. I never again planned to eat an egg that cost less than seven dollars a dozen.

  “The electrician was here a while ago, but I told him you didn’t need him, that I had already changed the fuse.”

  “How did you know where to find the fuse box?”

  “I looked in the basement.”

  “Oh,” I said in wonder. Jon was just so talented. “Guess who else was at the airport?” I was anxious to tell him about Amanda.

  “Harvey?”

  “Wrong Hammer.”

  Jon liked his eggs soft, so he emptied half the eggs onto a plate. He left the other half frying on a very low fire for me.

  “Amanda. With Harvey’s lawyer.”

  “Harvey’s lawyer? Did you tell him to triple his rates?”

  I laughed. “Darn it. I only said to double them.”

  “Thinking small, Marcy.”

  “What about this, then? I banged into his silver Lexus and recommended that he bill Harvey for all the repairs.”

  He put down his plate. “You had an accident?”

  “A scrape.” I really didn’t want him to make a big deal about it.

  “You have to be more careful.”

  Okay, so that was the third time in a day someone had told me to be more careful.

  “I was careful.”

  A moment passed; then Jon switched the subject.

  “Will I meet Amanda this week? I would really like to meet her—and Elisabeth and Ben.”

  I wasn’t ready for such an occasion.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Amanda might be too busy.”

  “Too busy to meet me? No one is that busy,” he said with full-throttle sarcasm.

  “Jon, maybe it’s too soon for you to meet my kids.”

  “Well, I’ve been listening to all of these stories, and I would like to meet them. No pressure. I understand they’ve been through a lot, and you’ve been through a lot, but without knowing them, I feel like I’m missing out on a part of you.”

  Lightly, he shook Tabasco on his eggs. I don’t know why, but there is something alluring about a man who likes to spice things up. Harvey used ketchup on his sunny-side-up eggs. Often, he ordered them one up and one down, driving the waitress in our breakfast place, Kerry’s, crazy.

  I kissed him.

  “Is that ‘Yes, Jon, you will meet my tribe’?” he said.

  I had just separated from Harvey. Jon was the only man I had dated since—except for a blind date in a Chinese restaurant. It was so awful that I swore I would never eat a spring roll again. I was such a newbie that I had never been on a dating site. If I had, I would have chosen a Jewish one. Maybe Lox on Bagel or Matzoh Finds Ball. I would have posted an Instamatic photo taken back in the 1990s, when my skin had tone.

  “Don’t you think they want to meet me?” Jon asked, interrupting my thoughts.

  No. I don’t think they want to meet you. I think they would be elated if I had a group of women friends, divorcées and widows who enjoyed Wednesday matinees in the city, women who split the prix fixe pretheater lunch bill ten ways with a pocket calculator. We just weren’t to the point where my children thought their mother needed a man—unless of course I wanted to go back to Harvey. I hoped the meet-the-kids conversation would wrap up soon.

  “Eggs?” Jon said again, this time handing me mine on my Mickey Mouse plate. I loved that plate. I’d bought it for Ben at Disney World when he was five and kept it all these years. I had lots of stuff like that. I also prized the talking-moose cookie jar we had procured when my Amanda was four and screamed in the general store until Harvey bought it. Those were the things that mattered to me. Everything else, who cared?

  “I thought you told me Amanda was flying in on Friday,” Jon said. “And why would Harvey send his lawyer?”

  “Amanda is seeing the lawyer. She came in early to spend time with him.”

  “What did you think?”

  “Once we got past the scrape—again, a very, very minor one—in the parking lot, I liked him. I don’t understand what the big secret is, except that Amanda likes to keep her personal life to herself. She’s always concerned that people will criticize her or interfere with her plans.”

  “What people?”

  “I guess mostly me.”

  “You? You couldn’t care less about what your children do,” he said, sarcastically.

  I wanted to get off the subject. “Do your trick,” I said.

  “My trick? I have lots of tricks,” he said, flirting.

  “The one where I say the name of a novel and you recite the first line from memory.”

  “Shoot.”

  I started easy. “David Copperfield.”

  He was amused. “I see you are pitching softballs.”

  “So let’s hear it.”

  “‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life . . .’”

  “The Great Gatsby.”

  “‘In my younger and more vulnerable years, my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.’”

  “Harvey quoted a book once. His checkbook. He recited the amount I had paid for a day at a spa.”

  “Oh, I forgot,” Jon said. “Do you want toast? I didn’t make any, but I could.”

  I really wanted toast, specifically sourdough, but I said no, recalling my conversation with Candy at the airport. What’s more, I had read online that if I eliminated all white foods, I could drop a pound or two quite easily. Is bread still considered white once toasted?

  “You always have toast,” Jon said.

  “I think Candy thought I could lose a few. You know how she is—her name is Candy, but she’d rather expire than touch a piece of it.”

  “That’s ridiculous. You’re perfect.”

  I cracked a smile. I seized two thick slices of pumpernickel from the breadbox, because pumpernickel is definitely not a white food.

  “Have a third piece and pile on the butter,” Jon said. “You could gain a few pounds and still look great.”

  Hmm. Maybe I should introduce him to my children after all.

  Chapter 3

  I am Jewish. My friend Dana is Narcissist. Every Wednesday at noon I have lunch with Dana at Francesca’s Café. The restaurant is painted magenta and white. The floors are weathered gray. We had our regular table—a booth with a picture window overlooking snowbound woods. Above the booth, an enormous white lampshade hung from the ceiling on a slender white cord.

  That morning, I had dressed for work in a hunter-green V-neck sweater that set off my strawberry-blond hair. I was like Christmas—I looked good in green and red. I added corduroy pants, knee-high leather boots, and a wide silver belt. Dana liked thick belts, and she had bought the one I was wearing for me. It was my birthday present. I don’t really know how I became this unmentionable age—because the last time I checked, I was thirty-four.

  Once l
unch was served, my phone rang. It was my Realtor, Judy Redstone. Back when our kids were in high school, I had been president of the PTO, and Judy had served as treasurer. I was president for six years. It was so long that other parents had called me “president for life.” Judy had since gone into real estate. Her picture and her company name were flashed before the movie in the local theater. That thing with having your photograph all over town, that’s why I could never be a Realtor.

  When I picked up the phone, Dana winced, but I said it was important when I saw it was my Realtor calling.

  “Have you decided about the house?” Judy asked.

  The house I had been admiring was a serene color, a buttercup yellow. It had three good-size bedrooms, two and a half baths, a great kitchen large enough for a table and chairs, a living room with an archway connecting to the dining room, and best of all, a front porch. I loved that porch. I imagined myself in a rocking chair with a glass of lemonade, lots of ice, and a book. Sometimes, I imagined three chairs lined up and all my children sitting there, waiting for me. What could be better than that? Talk about living the dream. To top it all off, the house was on a winding country road just two miles from Candy’s place.

  “Did someone else make an offer?” I asked Judy, afraid to hear the answer.

  “No, no. Just checking in.”

  Whew, I thought. I wasn’t sure if I should buy it, but I certainly didn’t want anyone else to come along.

  “Still thinking,” I said to Judy.

  “Well, I know you’re in a situation. But a lot of women don’t stay in their homes after a divorce.”

  I hadn’t told her I wasn’t divorced yet. I wondered what percent of women moved before the divorce. I would have to look it up online. I didn’t think it was common.

  “I’ll call if I hear of another offer.”

  When I hung up, I decided to ask Dana for her opinion. Dana was the perfect person to ask, because she was always direct, a pot of strong black coffee, always with grind, devoid of filter. Dana smoothed her long blond hair, flipping it over her silk blouse, which was the hue of vanilla custard. Anyone could see her cleavage, but I guess that was the point.