Fly Away Home

by Jennifer Weiner

  “I have considered resignation,” he continued. The flashes were firing, so many of them, so bright and so fast that Sylvie couldn’t see anything but light. She squinted until the lights turned into a blur. I’m going to be single again, she’d told Ceil the night before, and Ceil had said, You know, the problem with that is the maintenance. A man who’s never seen you naked before … Her voice had trailed off, but Sylvie took her meaning. There, on the stage, she started doing Kegel exercises, squeezing her pelvic floor as tightly as she could for a count of five, then slowly releasing. Probably it was locking the barn door after the horse had gotten out, or, more specifically, after the horse had had two kids, but it couldn’t hurt.

  The noise from the crowd rose as the reporters, three dozen of them, shifted in their seats and the cameramen jostled for their close-ups, a concussive murmur that threatened to drown out Richard’s voice. He leaned close to the microphone to compensate. “But resigning would be the easy way out. While I have hurt those who loved me, I have committed no financial improprieties, broken no laws. And I will stay the course. I believe that I can still effectively represent the interests of the people of this state in the Senate, and I will continue to do so.”

  Richard bowed his head. “I made a terrible mistake. I betrayed my daughters. I betrayed …” His voice choked up. He practiced that, thought Sylvie. “The woman who knows me best, who’s known me and loved me for thirty-two years. But I did not”—and here, he looked up, shoulders squared, jaw set, tall and solid in his expensive blue suit—“and I will not, betray the people I serve, the people of the great state of New York.”

  When Richard stopped talking she stood beside him, her left shoulder brushing his right one, while the flashbulbs fired. She had no idea how she looked, what expression she wore. The numbness was back, in full force, leaving her so frozen that she could no longer feel her face. Reporters shouted questions. Richard turned away. “That’s all,” he said, and reached for her hand. She let him take it, but as soon as they were through the bunting that separated the stage from the drafty corridor behind it she jerked it back.

  “Excuse me,” she said to Joe Eido, who stood at Richard’s side with a watchful look, his pale eyes narrowed, as if Sylvie had turned into a strange dog, one that might bite. Her bag was where she’d left it, tucked under a table loaded with bagels and coffee urns. In the ladies’ room, she pulled leggings and a loose sweater out of her bag, shucked off her suit, her hose, her Spanx and underwire bra, and shoved all of it into the capacious purse she’d brought along for the very reason that it could hold a change of clothes.

  She slipped on her comfortable outfit and pulled the car keys out of the zippered pocket of her purse. When she opened the door the hallway was empty. Someone had wheeled the bagels and coffee away. That was too bad. She’d picked at her meals all weekend long, even as Ceil had tempted her with creamed chicken and biscuits, cinnamon rolls and chocolate layer cake, and had, once again, offered to give Sylvie cooking lessons. In the early days of her marriage, Sylvie had cooked. She’d made the simple foods that Richard had liked—casseroles with ground beef and Campbell’s cream soups as their main ingredients; battered chicken dipped in breadcrumbs, a decent meatloaf. But then they’d moved to Manhattan, where you could get a dozen different kinds of takeout delivered to your door in minutes … and when your husband came home late and one of your daughters subsisted on buttered boiled noodles and peanut-butter sandwiches and the other had gone vegetarian at ten, delivery became the only sensible option. By the time the girls left home, Richard was spending the workweek in Washington while Sylvie took care of things in New York City, and saw him on the weekends. She ate most of her lunches out, with Ceil or at fund-raisers for the women’s shelter or the library, and the easiest thing to do at night after a day spent in the car or in meetings or with Richard was to order in soup or pick up a salad. Her mother cooked only on holidays, so there was no long-standing tradition of home cooking. Sylvie had come to think of her lack of skills in the kitchen as something she was powerless to change.

  Over the weekend, Ceil had coaxed her with poetically written cookbooks, with glossy photographs of boar prosciutto, oily olives on rustic pottery, and glistening, crisp-skinned roast duck with figs—pornography, Sylvie thought, for women of a certain age. Not that she’d been tempted. She would taste, she told Ceil. She would set the table and pour the wine, she would wash every pot and pan her friend used making beef tenderloin with a red-wine reduction and fresh-baked popovers and a salad of baby spinach greens slicked with walnut oil, but, she told Ceil, she just wasn’t interested in learning something new. Still, she wished she’d tucked a muffin in her bag, or even one of Larry’s horrible protein bars that tasted like strips of chocolate-flavored rubber, because now she was starving, and there was nothing left to eat.

  Joe and Richard stood a ways down the hall in front of a television set tuned to one of the cable news free-for-alls. Sylvie hadn’t intended to watch, but a flash of blue caught her eye. Her blue suit. She paused as the familiar, expected strains of “Stand By Your Man” filled the air, and she saw herself on that stage, live from fifteen minutes ago, looking busty and beaky and fat and old, hands folded awkwardly at her waist, the tweed fabric of her skirt straining over her hips, those extra inches, that bit of flab she’d devoted the past decade of her life to trying to eradicate, when she should have been … what? Servicing her husband, according to the leathery, turtlenecked crone currently being interviewed.

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” the woman said, in response to a question Sylvie had missed. “Wives, submit to your husbands as the church submits to God. That’s the Bible, and the Bible doesn’t lie. If Sylvie Woodruff had been taking care of business on the home front …” The woman gave the camera a broad, knowing smirk.

  “Now, Jane,” the avuncular host began. His name was Greg Saunders. Sylvie knew him; she and Richard had had him to dinner at the Georgetown apartment. “Are we talking just traditional intercourse here, or what?”

  Sylvie forced herself to breathe deeply, to try to forget the image of herself, wrinkled and dewlapped and old, in her too-tight suit, standing by a man who’d shamed her and broken her heart, standing there as if he hadn’t dishonored her, as if she still loved him, to try to forget that there were people, probably lots of them, who thought this was her fault.

  She stared at Richard’s back. He and Joe, standing beside him like a leashed capuchin, would watch the shows, they’d monitor the online chatter. Later, they would commission a poll, accurate to plus or minus 5 percent, starting with the magic words: If the election were held tomorrow …

  I’m done with this, she thought. Then she said it out loud. “Done with it.” Richard turned, his face softening as he saw her. He held out his hand, as if she’d take it, as if all the bad times were behind them now.

  “Sylvie?”

  She ignored him. Head held high, shoulders back, she walked right past his outstretched hand, his familiar face, without saying a word.

  PART TWO

  Not Waving but Drowning

  SYLVIE

  “Shh!” On the stage of an overheated South Florida ballroom, a woman in a pink mesh and satin hat that looked like an ambitious Easter bonnet was hissing into a microphone. “Ladies. Ladies! SHH!” Flecks of spittle sprayed from her mouth and pattered onto the podium. Sylvie winced and hoped she’d be able to wipe it off discreetly before her speech began. She inhaled, but not too deeply. The room smelled of the floral centerpieces and a dozen competing perfumes and, faintly, of the eye-watering undertone of animal urine. That was what you got, Sylvie supposed, for holding your event in the Monkey Jungle.

  Beside her, Selma squeezed her knee. “You doing okay?” Selma asked. Sylvie nodded, even though it wasn’t true. It was five days after Richard’s press conference, and she was a long way from home and a long way from okay.

  After the press conference, Sylvie had gone back to Ceil’s. Clarissa had e-mailed
Sylvie her schedule for the next six months, her speaking engagements and board meetings, the luncheons she’d promised to attend and silent auctions she’d pledged to organize. After several deep cleansing breaths and two glasses of wine, Sylvie and Ceil had worked their way through the list, calling various presidents and chairs and telling them that Sylvie was to take a leave of absence. Almost everyone had been understanding, from the chair of the library luncheon to the organizer of the ballet ball. The synagogue’s silent auction committee chair had balked—“we were really counting on you and the senator to be there,” she said plaintively—but Ceil had donated a weekend at her house on Shelter Island, plus a session with her daughter, Clemmie, who taught what New York magazine had judged the city’s best Pilates class, and the woman had grumpily agreed to take Sylvie’s name off the host committee.

  Everyone had let her off the hook except for the head of the South Florida chapter of Women for Women, a charity devoted to raising money for the formerly homeless making the transition from shelters back into the workforce. Sylvie had sat on their national board for years, and would occasionally attend events at local chapters, to give speeches, to hand out awards, to remind wealthy ladies of their obligations to their less fortunate sisters and their children.

  “You praw-mised!” the group’s president, one Wendy Silver, had said when Sylvie had called. Wendy lived in Boca, but had a Long Island whine so pronounced that it made Fran Drescher sound sedate and refined.

  “Of course,” Sylvie had said, struggling to keep her temper. “But I’m sure you understand that my circumstances have changed.”

  Wendy Silver was unmoved. “I’ve got five hundred women”—rendered as foive hundrit wimmin—“who paid a hundred and eighteen dollars apiece to see you.”

  “I understand that—”

  “And,” Wendy continued as if Sylvie hadn’t spoken, “our angels, who pay one thousand dollars a year to sponsor a child in need, and our silver angels and our Golden Halo circle.” She detailed the level of financial support each group gave, then added emphatically, “You can’t back out now!” Sylvie suspected that prior to the news of her husband’s infidelity, the women who’d paid to see her would have been perfectly happy with the substitute she’d volunteered to arrange. Now they probably were eager to see her—the disgraced wife, up close and in person. They were excited about the chance to look at her face and her figure and try to determine whether or not Richard had been justified in cheating. “You signed a CAWN-tract,” Wendy Silver shrilled triumphantly, “and we already paid you.”

  This was true. She’d signed a contract; they’d already paid her, and Sylvie, as usual, had given her honorarium to a halfway house for pregnant teenagers here in New York. So here she was, in the suit she’d worn at the press conference, with her entirely-too-amused mother at her side. (“The bitches of Boca Raton,” Selma had called them after checking out Wendy Silver, a predictably emaciated woman who could have been any age from thirty-five to sixty, with stiff, dyed hair and a face full of fillers. Wendy had worn Prada pumps, major diamonds, and a Missoni dress that Sylvie recognized from Saks and knew cost enough to support a formerly homeless mother and two of her kids for a month.)

  “I’d like to thank our sponsors, BMW of Boca, Jay Green Jewelers … ladies! Please! Shh!” Onstage, the hat lady was still hissing, and the women in the audience were continuing to ignore her. Sylvie had been to enough luncheons like these, as a speaker and as a guest, to know that the ladies weren’t there to listen to speeches, or even necessarily to support women making the journey from welfare to gainful employment. Their hundred-and-eighteen-dollar price of admission gave them the privilege to see and be seen, to sport four-figure outfits and four-inch heels, to show off their Botox and their spray tans, their diamonds and their gold, to pick at their lunches and ignore their dessert and gossip about who was getting a divorce, who was having an affair, who’d lost weight and who’d gained it, and feel good—even righteous—while they did it. The hat lady would have as good a chance of silencing the five hundred chattering ladies-who-lunch as she would herding cats.

  Sylvie lifted her fork and poked at the slimy rectangle of salmon on her plate, which would have been unpalatable even if the room didn’t smell like monkey pee. The good news was, she wasn’t the headliner—they’d hired a stand-up comedian for that. Sylvie’s job was to introduce the group’s Mother of the Year. Five minutes, she told herself, and sipped her too-sweet iced tea. Five minutes on stage, then she’d slip out the back door, where her car and driver would be waiting to take her to the airport, where she’d fly back to New York.

  She had the keys to the Connecticut house, but after leaving the press conference, she’d gone to Palm Beach, to her mother’s condo. Selma, normally in New York through Thanksgiving, had flown to join her, and Sylvie had spent the next three days shadowing her mother. She’d have a hard-boiled egg and a slice of toast for breakfast, go to an eighty-and-over water aerobics class, have tuna salad and a tomato for lunch, then nap—or, really, lie on the guest-room bed, stare up at the ceiling fan, and think of how angry she was and how betrayed. Dinner was at five o’clock, in one of the delis or Italian restaurants that Selma frequented—places where they knew her and greeted her not just by name but by title. “Good evening, Judge,” they’d say, setting her pasta on the table. Sylvie would pick at a salad or a slice of garlic bread while her mother kept up a steady monologue about everything from the state of the European Union to the state of Sylvie’s own. “Are you talking to him?” she’d ask, and Sylvie would shake her head. “Are the girls all right?” she’d continue, and Sylvie would nod. They’d be home by seven o’clock, eight at the latest. Selma would read—even in retirement, she kept up with the papers and the legal journals. Sylvie would try to read, but she’d find herself stuck on the same page of her novel.

  “And now,” said the hat lady, “I’d like to call to the stage, to introduce our mother of the year, Sylvie Woodruff.” Sylvie got to her feet as the woman recited her resume: Barnard and Yale, lawyer, national board member, mother of two, “and wife—of course—of Senator Richard Woodruff.” Thankfully the woman left it at that, but Sylvie could hear the whispers getting louder as she mounted the stage, could feel five hundred pairs of eyes on her, measuring and judging and probably finding her wanting.

  “Good afternoon,” she began, setting her notes on the podium. “I don’t need to tell any of you of the vital importance of the work your volunteers, and your dollars, are doing.” She gave them the statistics: how many women lived in poverty; how hard it was for them to improve their circumstances without help above and beyond what the government could provide; how it was the obligation of women—Jewish women in particular—to do the work the Talmud commanded, the work Tikkun Olam, repairing the broken world. A broken world, she thought, as the women applauded for themselves. That was what she had.

  Swallowing hard, she turned back to her notes and introduced the mother of the year, a full-figured foster mother of three in a black dress who hugged her warmly and whispered, “Good luck to you,” in Sylvie’s ear.

  Back at the table, her mother squeezed her hand. “Very nice, dear,” she said. Sylvie nodded numbly, still feeling all of those eyes on her. She kissed her mother goodbye and promised to call when she landed. Then she slid her bag out from underneath her seat where she’d tucked it and escaped to the bathroom. Pulling down her pantyhose in the stall, she heard the door open and shut, and recognized Wendy Silver’s unmistakable voice.

  “I thawt she’d be thinner,” said Wendy before starting to pee. “She looked thinner on TV.”

  Sylvie was surprised to find that her feelings weren’t hurt, the way they’d normally have been by this bitchy little critique. Maybe this was the benefit of what she’d lived through—have your husband admit to infidelity, be humiliated coast-to-coast, and you would no longer care about what your peers had to say about your body. She found herself biting back laughter. For someone so tiny, Wendy
Silver urinated as noisily as a three-hundred-pound linebacker. It was the kind of thing she’d once have told Richard, when the event was over and she was home, barefoot, with a cup of tea, and he was on the couch beside her.

  “And what about that suit?” demanded Wendy’s friend. “You think they don’t have irons in New York?”

  Sylvie looked down at herself, thinking ruefully that she could have had her suit pressed and her nails done. Then again, Wendy could have been decent and let her off the hook.

  “Well, I’m going to complain,” announced Wendy over the sound of the toilet’s flush. “There’s an evaluation form. I’m going to tell them that her clothes weren’t appropriate.”

  Sylvie opened the door of her stall and saw Wendy, at the sink, catch sight of her in the mirror. Wendy’s already-mostly-frozen face got even more frozen as Sylvie gave her one of her well-practiced pleasant smiles. “Sorry you were disappointed,” she said.

  Wendy’s mouth opened and closed like a fish tossed on a dock. “I … I’m …”

  “Have a good day,” said Sylvie, and breezed past her. It was evil, she knew, but there was a certain satisfaction in the stunned, stupid look on her face. Let them complain, she thought. Let them tell her fellow national board members that her suit was wrinkled and her nails unpolished. Given the circumstances, she was sure they’d understand.

  Outside, the humidity and the stink of monkeys hit her like a slap in the face. Her car was waiting for her. So was a young woman, standing on the sidewalk in jeans and a blazer, with her brown hair in a ponytail. She had a notebook in one hand and a camera in the other. Sylvie’s heart sank. The event was private, but it had been written up in the paper, which meant that people—and reporters—knew she’d be in town.

  “Ms. Woodruff?” the young woman asked pleasantly. “I’m Mandy Miller from the Miami Herald.”