Husbands and Other Sharp Objects: A Novel

by Marilyn Simon Rothstein

  “I guess you heard most of it,” I said to Dana. “What do you think? Yellow house or no yellow house?”

  Dana held up one hand like a stop sign. I assumed she was about to advise, “Halt. It’s too soon to move. Don’t buy. Don’t rent. Don’t do anything.”

  Instead, she fixated on her pinkie and said, “I need a manicure.”

  “Dana, I’m asking you a question. Focus.”

  She took a nibble of her kale.

  “Marcy, I think you should stay where you are. The grass is not always greener. In fact, sometimes it’s brown.”

  This advice was from a woman who was on her third marriage. Though, the third time really did seem to be the charm. She adored Calvin.

  “My mother told me to move,” I said.

  “When she was alive?”

  “No, I imagined her saying it the first time I stood outside the yellow house.”

  I could feel myself choking up at thoughts of my mom. But it wasn’t just about my mom. I had lingered on the porch, looking at the sky, telling my late mother that I was okay, convincing myself that I was solid enough to move on, to transfer from my colonial on steroids to the kind of place I thought was really me. I had felt that doing so would signify moving on. Dana’s advice was breathtaking.

  “Candy said I should move,” I pointed out like a petulant child.

  “What is this? A poll?” Dana said.

  Candy was my newest friend, my personal crisis center. She was 911. As for Dana, we had been best friends since before infants were in car seats, before real men changed diapers, before people worshipped their own kids. When I first encountered Dana, the only way to call home was to take a coin from your penny loafer.

  We had met in a bodega on Ninth Street in Greenwich Village, both wearing bell-bottoms, tight T-shirts, and brown sandals. She looked like the blond Cher. I looked like an NYU girl in jeans. That day, Dana had been choosing a flavor of yogurt. It wasn’t difficult. In the late 1970s, the only edible yogurt was Dannon with fruit on the bottom—Greek yogurt was mostly found in Greece. I had a cache of Dannon in my wire basket, mostly strawberry, some coffee. Dana had pointed to the mountain of yogurt in my basket and asked if I had a boyfriend. I said that if I had a boyfriend, I wouldn’t be into yogurt at all. I’d be eating cookies. She had laughed. Then she bumped my shoulder. I bumped her back, and we have been bumping shoulders ever since. Such a simple sign of kinship. It was a cinch to start a friendship back then. You could make a friend waiting for a red light to turn green. At my current age, initiating a friendship practically took FBI clearance.

  I explained my problem. “You know I have trouble making decisions. And, now that Harvey and I are kaput, I have to make all the decisions on my own. For example, the other day I decided I am only using the largest garbage bags. You know, the green ones. Harvey used white kitchen-size bags, but I like lawn bags.”

  “You’re one person. You’re filling a lawn-size garbage bag?”

  “I have a very large carbon footprint,” I said.

  “What else are you doing? Let’s hear about your changes.”

  “Harvey always took the Volvo in for repair, but after the airport incident, I went to Atherton Auto Works on my own.”

  “Big deal,” she said, unimpressed.

  I would not allow her to belittle my accomplishment. “What do you mean, ‘big deal’? It is a big deal. Those mechanics poke each other and size up your legs before you open your mouth.”

  She joked, “So what? You have good legs.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Wear pants,” she said.

  “Thanks, Dana. I’m going to present your advice at a conference.”

  “I’ve been to that garage. The owner wears a white oxford shirt. He smiles, offers you a coffee, a fat muffin, and a ride home so you don’t have to wait for the car. The waiting room has a TV, a playpen, and more magazines than Condé Nast.”

  “I can’t believe you’re knocking my achievements.”

  She chuckled. “I’ll tell you about an achievement. Monica got a scholarship to go to Paris to study fashion this summer.”

  I was happy for Dana’s daughter. But I knew one thing—if I asked Dana about Monica’s trip to Paris, I’d be in a nursing home before I heard what to do about the house.

  “The house, Dana. What about the house?”

  “Okay. So here’s what I think. If you’re planning to move out of your current place, you better tell Harvey. And I mean, up front. Before you do anything. Because whether it’s out of big-time guilt or because he loves you, he still hasn’t filed for divorce, and he has been a regular Boy Scout about paying the bills. You don’t want to piss him off right now. You lost your mother and your husband. You don’t want to lose your best friend.”

  “Dana, you are my best friend.”

  “I was thinking about your other best friend—American Express.”

  I sighed. “I don’t know what Harvey is up to—about money or anything else. Everything he has done made me think he would file for divorce. But I’ll tell you now, I am not filing. He owns this mess. He started it. He has to finish it. My kids will never be able to blame me for the demise of the marriage. Not happening. I spent my entire life trying to set a good example. It’s not going to be ruined by him. And no matter what, I am taking the high road.”

  My throat felt dry, as though I had made a major speech in the driest heat. I poured some water.

  “Want me to come over, sit next to you, and knock your shoulder?” Dana said.

  “No. I am fine.”

  “Then taste this salad,” she said, lifting a fork laden with kale and baby lettuce. I hate the term “baby lettuce.” Worse is “Boston baby lettuce.” It’s not bad enough you’re eating the baby. You have to know where it comes from.

  Obligingly, I tasted the salad. I didn’t like the dressing.

  Dana hailed the waitress. Here’s a sentence I never heard before 2005: “More balsamic vinaigrette, please.”

  “You should try my soup,” I said. “It’s great.”

  “I only like the cheese,” she said.

  “Dana, it’s onion soup. The cheese is the whole point.”

  She took the spoon from my hand and scraped it around the rim of my bowl, taking the cheese. Worst of all, she took the burned cheese, which was my favorite part.

  Now I looked for the waitress. She was helping another table. When she turned, I waved her over. “We would like one more soup, please. Heavy on the Swiss.”

  “It’s Gruyère,” the waitress said.

  “Heavy on that too,” I said, but I could see she didn’t know I was joking. After she left, I said to Dana, “Ask me how Jon is.”

  “I don’t have to ask. I could see from your smile when you just said his name. Jon!” She swooned as I tried not to grin.

  “Thank you for asking. He’s fine.”

  “Okay, what’s up?”

  “He wants to meet my kids.”

  “Too soon. I would wait. Spare myself the aggravation.”

  “Well, when do you think I should introduce them?”

  “About four years after you marry him,” she said, picking at her salad. “I have news, big news.” Her eyes lit up. “I’m opening a satellite office. In Boston,” she said, proudly.

  “That’s fantastic!”

  Dana had been looking for a way to expand her advertising agency. I was almost excited enough to jump out of my seat.

  “Do you have clients there already?”

  “My lips are sealed,” she said as she placed a finger over her mouth.

  “Wow. What an accomplishment!” I raised my water glass. We clinked. “How often do you plan to commute?”

  “Right now, twice a week. But if everything works out, Calvin and I will relocate,” she said.

  I put down my water and threw up my hands. “I can’t decide whether to move down the road, and you’re relocating?”

  “I said Boston. I didn’t say Anchorage
.”

  I wondered what the rules of best friendship were, exactly. I was pleased about her success. But I didn’t want her resettling hours away. I decided I wouldn’t speak of myself first. I wouldn’t mention that if she moved, we wouldn’t be able to lunch at Francesca’s every Wednesday or stop by and hang out together at a moment’s notice. Also, I wouldn’t see her family as often. Her son lived in Boston and when the girls came home from college, they would go to Boston. But Dana could see what I was thinking. It was on my face.

  “I will miss you, Marcy, more than anyone or anything else, but it’s an ideal time for us to relocate. Calvin is retired. So he’s up for it. And Boston is a larger market. There’s just no comparing. Anyway, it’s not happening for a while. I have to get things going.”

  Dana is moving. That was all I could think about as I walked to retrieve my car. Her Boston venture would be a huge success in no time at all. Then, poof, she’d be gone—gone from my lovely dot of a town, Atherton, Connecticut.

  After lunch, I returned to work. My job at the Guild for Good, where I worked with artists who were interested in doing good, was perfect. But there was a problem—I didn’t know enough about social media. I definitely needed an assistant. Maybe a college kid who thought making a telephone call was a lifetime commitment. I had called Price College, looking for someone.

  Since I had been promoted, the Guild offices had relocated down the hall. There was an outer area, completely decked out with the work of our members—paintings on walls, ceramic on shelves, sculptures sitting on posts—just like at a museum. There were two royal-purple armchairs, an oak reception desk, a copier, an inset coffee area, and a brand-new red sofa. The end tables had art magazines. There were three offices, one for me and two with conference tables for the volunteers who came by to help out.

  I sat at my glass-and-chrome sawhorse desk, which I thought was young and cool, looking at the best picture ever of my three kids. It was taken at Harvey’s last birthday bash. I loved the way my kids all looked so related.

  I heard the front door open and close. I looked out to the reception area, and there was a girl.

  She was slim—and like me, about average height. She had thick black hair. I noticed an earring in her nose, a chain of minute beads extending from the bottom of one nostril to the other. She had two studs in her lip. Her face had more jewelry than Tiffany’s.

  She was in a short romper the color of bubblegum. Her ankle-high hiking boots were untied. As she approached my office, she dragged a tweed winter coat behind her, mopping the floor. I hadn’t seen a bigger mess since my basement was flooded.

  The girl was college age, and I knew immediately she had shown up for the job interview without an appointment. I thought back to the Age of Aquarius, when I went on interviews at New York advertising agencies—in a boxy Bobbie Brooks navy suit and a white blouse with a bow in front. Navy tights. Navy shoes. Navy bag.

  Stay open-minded, Marcy. This is no longer the Pepsi generation.

  “Come in,” I offered as I approached the wreck of the Hesperus, extending my hand. “I’m Marcy Hammer.”

  “Cheyenne. I go to Price. My counselor told me you had a job?”

  She followed me to my desk, pulling up a chair and putting her coat and her camouflage knapsack in her lap, covering her romper.

  “Let me hang that up for you,” I offered.

  She said she was fine.

  Because of her name, I asked whether her parents were from someplace out west.

  “No. Brooklyn.”

  Makes perfect sense, I thought.

  “They were on a road trip, stopped in Cheyenne, and had me.”

  I figured she was fortunate they hadn’t stopped in Podunk or Iowa City.

  “You know your website sucks,” she said out of nowhere.

  Yikes. Don’t hold back, Cheyenne. Come right out with it.

  “Really bad, but don’t worry, I can make it better,” she said.

  “That’s good to know,” I said, thinking she was the only person I knew who was as direct as Dana.

  “And you need a social media platform.”

  I said, “Hmm,” and nodded. Of course, she was right about that.

  “I mean, to find out anything about you, I had to read up on your daughter.”

  “Elisabeth?” I said.

  “The doctor. Did you know she was seeing a married man?”

  What is this girl, a CIA agent? “You found that out online?”

  Why, I wondered, would anyone put anything so personal on the Internet? It was nobody’s business at all. I decided I should mention this to Elisabeth. Then I remembered she was not in junior high school but was thirty-one years old, and I needed to put that whole married man incident behind us. Still.

  “She broke up with him December something,” Cheyenne said. “It’s her important date.”

  I asked Cheyenne if she wanted a bottle of water. She nodded, and I went to fetch her one.

  “Can I see your laptop?” she said when I returned. She twisted the cap off the Poland Spring.

  I turned my computer toward her. “Can you teach me how to use Facebook?” I asked.

  “How do you reach people now?”

  “E-mail. Sometimes I even phone.”

  “That must annoy them,” she said, concentrating on the screen.

  “I use a pay phone,” I said, joking.

  “I’ve never used a pay phone,” she said, typing away.

  Her casual attitude made me feel chatty. “When I was your age, I kept a quarter in my pocket.”

  “Just in case you were in trouble?”

  “Yes,” I said, sipping coffee.

  “But you would have to be in trouble near a phone,” she concluded.

  “Back in the day, life was extremely inconvenient. If you wanted to meet a friend, you had to agree on a time and place in advance.”

  “But what if you were running late?” she asked as she looked at the screen.

  I thought back. What did we do? I shook my head and shrugged.

  “What else?” she asked.

  I couldn’t believe Cheyenne was interested. This was exactly the type of “in my day” conversation that would result in my two daughters fleeing the earth for a planet devoid of oxygen.

  I tried to think of something that would boggle her mind. “No microwaves.”

  “But what if you wanted to eat immediately?” she joked.

  “You’re hired,” I spouted.

  She looked up from the computer. Her eyes widened. “I’m hired? Just like that?”

  “Just like that.”

  “When do I start?”

  “Today, if you can. Right now.”

  Cheyenne pulled my picture off the Guild website she had just criticized. She rattled off a few questions. I gave her the answers. In no time, I was on Facebook.

  “Who do you want to friend first?” she asked.

  “Dana Davenport,” I said.

  The screen flashed with a message from Dana. “Dinosaurs are no longer extinct. My best friend, Marcy, is now on Facebook.”

  “How many friends do you have?” I asked her.

  She went to her page. She had 540.

  “You know that many people?”

  “I don’t know them. I’m ‘friends’ with them.”

  “Of course,” I said, as though I thought this made sense.

  “So, in addition to promoting Guild for Good, you may want to post some personal stuff. In that case, post only good news—unless, of course, you have to put your pet to sleep, or you are diagnosed with a really atrocious disease.”

  “I would put that on Facebook?” I shook my head, baffled. “Tell you what. You’re in charge of posting.”

  The next day, the Guild was closed due to a storm. Jon came over to my house, because he loved to go out in the snow. Everything about him was cold when he walked in the door—his parka, his jeans, his face, and his hands. Yet I rushed right up to him, and somehow warmth enveloped me. I m
ade him a cup of hot cocoa. We squirted whipped cream into one another’s mouths. He started a fire in the fireplace.

  For a while, we simply sat on the sofa in the family room, each one of us with a novel. The whole thing reminded me of Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal reading together in Love Story. That movie was a conundrum. I always thought that if I grew long straight hair and wore tights, a pleated skirt, and a beret, I might attract a handsome Ivy Leaguer. On the other hand, I worried that, like Ali, I might die too soon to enjoy it for long.

  “Do you think I should move?” I said.

  “Never. Stay right here on this couch in front of this fire with me forever.”

  I grinned. “I meant should I move to another house.” I had asked him once before what he thought, and he had been noncommittal.

  “I don’t think I should weigh in.”

  “Why not? Everyone else has. Dana practically said I should start a polling company before the next presidential campaign. But most important, your opinion really matters to me.”

  “Am I more important than 85 percent of people polled?” Jon asked. Then he said, “I’m good with being wherever you are. Let’s leave it at that.”

  I might have had my own little Love Story going.

  Later, Jon and I looked out the front window to find the roads had been cleared. We sat down in the kitchen, discussing what to have for a snack. Amanda rang on the house phone. That was surprising. People I knew hardly ever called on the landline anymore, which was good because I liked to keep that phone open for insurance types who mispronounced my name and financial advisors hawking upside-down mortgages.

  “Sorry for any confusion at the airport,” Amanda said.

  It was Thursday. I hadn’t expected to hear from her until Friday.

  “So tell me,” I said, fiddling with the phone cord, “are you having a good time?”

  “Yes,” she said, full of cheer.

  “Good for you.”

  “I know. Isn’t Jake great? He was called into work for a few hours, so maybe I will stop by today.”