The Solomon Sisters Wise Up

by Melissa Senate

  Then again, given that Zoe’s own ex-friend had stolen Daddy Dearest away from Zoe’s mother, I doubted Zoe would be flying anywhere near New York City to smell floral arrangements and taste rubber chicken.

  My father was out of his mind. Had been for as long as I’d known him. And my stepmother-to-be was twenty-five.

  That reminded me. Also added to my list of stressors was the fact that said stepmother-to-be was younger than myself and my younger sisters.

  And one of those sisters was pregnant. Without trying. With trying not to get pregnant.

  It was so goddamned fucking unfair!

  I’ve learned a lot from Ally, but she curses excessively in the office, and I don’t think it’s professional….

  Ally has screamed at me four times in the past month over minor errors in minor briefs. I’ve documented every instance….

  Ally, the senior partners and I commend you on another stellar performance review. However, several of the male associates have commented that your management style is a bit emasculating….

  Yeah, because I don’t have a penis, you wuss! I’d wanted to yell at Funwell number two this morning. (Funwell number one was long dead.)

  That was one more thing to add to my list. Not the penis, but the double standard. Why were the male senior attorneys allowed to yell their heads off and bully the associates, but I wasn’t? Because I was a woman, that’s why.

  “Why would you want to bully anyone?” my sister Sarah had asked last week—pre-knowledge of pregnancy—when we’d met for lunch to discuss how many Wedding Fest “events” we’d really have to attend. Sarah thought three, tops. I thought one. We both thought Princess Zoe should have to pick up the slack since she had always been our father’s favorite, but Sarah also doubted Zoe would make an appearance. “My boss is a bully,” Sarah continued, “and all it does is alienate people.”

  “No, Sarah,” I told her, pointing a bread stick at her. “Intimidating people, especially in the workplace, is a good thing. It gets things accomplished and gets you what you want, what you need. If you weren’t so nicey-nicey, you’d probably be a senior editor by now.”

  She rolled her eyes and sipped her Coke (would she ever learn to order iced tea in a real restaurant?). “I’d rather be a nice junior editor than a bitchy senior editor.”

  “And what do you have for being so nice?” I demanded.

  “I have good friends,” Sarah said. “I have a job I’m very happy with, thank you very much. I have a new black leather jacket from you. If I weren’t so nice, you wouldn’t have gotten me such a great birthday present, and a whole week early.”

  “You’re wrong,” I told her. “I didn’t get the jacket for you because you’re nice. I got it for you because you need it. And you need it now, not a week from now. That ratty sweater-coat you’ve been wearing is three seasons ago and covered with your roommate’s cat fur. You’ll never get promoted if you show up for work at a women’s magazine in that thing.”

  “Now who’s nice?” she singsonged.

  I pointed the bread stick at her again. “Nice has nothing to do with why people do things for you. Last year, you waited in line for two hours in the freezing cold to get me tickets to the Rockettes’ Christmas show for my birthday. You didn’t do it because I’m nice.”

  “You’re right. I did it because I’m nice,” she countered, grabbing the bread stick. She tore off a piece and popped it into her mouth. “And, anyway, Mom was nice.”

  I held my tongue. I wasn’t sure whether Sarah brought up our mother because she knew it would always shut me up or because she didn’t understand why it always shut me up.

  My mother had been nice. And it had cost her.

  Sarah was nice and she was pregnant.

  So which was it? My mother was nice and had ended up with nothing. My sister was nice and had ended up with what I wanted more than anything.

  Was I being denied a baby because I was a little bitchy?

  Bitchy. Ten years ago, when Andrew and I were barely out of the newlywed stage (and having sex three times a day), Sarah had called me a bitch over something I’d said to Zoe during a tense Thanksgiving dinner, the last Solomon Thanksgiving I attended. The verbal slap hurt. Our mother had died several months earlier, and there Sarah and I were—sitting like Cinderellas at the Solomon dinner table two thousand miles away in bizarrely warm Los Angeles with our father, our crazy stepmother, Judith, their Princess Zoe, who at the time was sixteen, her anorexic aunt and pontificating uncle, their rude kid and Zoe’s shedding Persian cat, which kept rubbing up against my new black pants—celebrating Thanksgiving without our mother for the first time in our lives. Our father was our only connection to that table, to the holiday, and that wasn’t saying much. Sarah was all I had. And she’d called me a bitch.

  Had I said a mean thing? Yes. Had I deserved to be called a bitch? Probably. But not by Sarah, not by my own sister, my only ally left in the world. And that night, in one of my father’s guest bedrooms, after Andrew and I had made love, when we were entwined in each other’s arms and legs, my head on his chest and his hands in my hair, my greatest pleasure listening to the gradual slowing of his racing heartbeat, I asked him, hiding the tears in my eyes and the pain in my voice, if he thought I was a bitch.

  He’d kissed the top of my head and said, “You’re quite possibly the sweetest person I’ve ever known, Allison Solomon Sharp.” And then he drifted off to sleep, and so did I, and I’d woken up okay.

  I’d also woken up with one of those personal paradigm shifts from seeing what I didn’t have to seeing what I did. When had I reverted back?

  Honk!!! Honk!!! Honnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnk!

  Only one of those honks was mine—but it was the long one. Traffic was crawling! Honk!!!

  Calm down. Calm down. Calm down. Stress is not good for making a baby.

  Soon I’d be luxuriating in a lavender-scented bath, reading the new In Style, slipping into the new nightie and doing my hair—about which Andrew had commented last week he liked longer and less red-red, though according to me and the Vogue page I’d handed the stylist, my newly short tresses and You Rock Red color were superhip.

  We’d have some wine, nibble on some cheese and crackers and make love. In under twenty-five minutes.

  And (please God) maybe we’d make a baby.

  As the traffic moved at a two-miles-an-hour pace, I stared at the Baby On Board sign in the back window of the SUV in front of me and wondered why I had allowed Andrew to put me off for those first five years of our marriage—the years my eggs were at their peak!

  “We’re too young,” Andrew had said. “I want to spend time with my beautiful wife for a while. I want to make love to you at two in the morning, not change diapers or feed a screaming baby. I want to travel the world with you. Ally, we make a fortune. We’re young and ambitious. We have a great social life. Let’s enjoy our lives for a few years, and then start a family. What’s the rush?”

  The rush turned out to be time itself. Yes, we’d enjoyed our lives. Yes, we lived very well. We had an amazing house in Great Neck, Long Island. We took vacations. I had expensive facials; Andrew bought pricey golf clubs. We had a Jaguar, a Mercedes SUV and a Volvo for crappy weather.

  But we had lived well for a long time.

  And the nursery in our house, all set up for its tiny occupant, remained empty.

  Sigh. The day after I returned from my honeymoon (Greek islands), I’d driven straight to Baby Central and spent over three thousand dollars outfitting the nursery. I had the Italian crib, the Diaper Genie, twelve receiving blankets—including one made out of cashmere that I’d bought in Greece—diapers in two sizes, just in case I had a particularly large baby (Andrew was six-two and very muscular). I had the mobiles, the car seat, the stroller. The bouncy seat, the breast pump, the changing table.

  I had everything I could possibly need or want, except the baby.

  That shopping trip had been eleven years ago.

  Which meant I
’d been through changes in safety regulations, recalls and my own taste. Back went the Italian pecan-colored crib for a white sleigh model from Pottery Barn Kids. Back went the car seat with a three-point harness for one with a five-point harness. Back went the brightly colored mobile when I read an article stating that infants prefer black-and-white.

  Lately, I’d started giving some things in the nursery to Allison, the six-month-old who lived two houses down. I wasn’t particularly close with Allison’s mother and barely knew her father, but the couple had named their baby girl Allison, and I’d felt particularly close to my tiny namesake (despite the fact that they refused to call her Ally and chastised anyone who did. “Her name is Allison,” they’d snap.). She was a colicky little thing, constantly crying, her skinny legs stiff, her tiny fists balled, that newborn face red and scrunched. A week after her mother, Tara, had brought her home from the hospital, I’d gone over with a Baby Gap gift to get a peek, and Tara, close to tears of frustration and exhaustion, had asked me if I’d hold Allison for just five minutes while she washed her face and took a breath.

  Thrilled, I sent Tara off to the sofa for as long a nap as she wanted. And while she snored, I walked that little swaddled bundle up and down the length of the house for an hour. I sang nursery rhymes to her, I fed her a bottle of formula, I rocked her, I nuzzled her cheek.

  I fell in love with that screaming thing before I’d even laid eyes on her.

  Tara and I hadn’t become friends over the months; we were too different (she was the Earth mother type), but we had become friendly enough, and she had taken me up on my offer to baby-sit many times. One Saturday afternoon, Andrew had come home to find me trying to calm Allison, my ivory Donna Karan suit jacket soaked with projectile-vomited formula and drool, and he’d stared at us with an expression I couldn’t name. It wasn’t the expression of a man touched by the sight of his wife holding an infant. And it wasn’t horror, exactly. It was fear, maybe.

  And it was fear that had kept me from asking him about it. If he had any hesitations about having a baby, I didn’t want to know about them.

  And so I’d continued to baby-sit Allison, showing her the nursery in my house that her new little friend-to-be would live in, letting her play with the colorful, squishy Lamaze toys, watching her eyes follow the hanging animals on the activity gym, calming her in the vibrating bouncy seat.

  I planned to name my baby after my mother, Leah. Leigh for a girl and Lee for a boy.

  “Ally, you can’t get desperate,” my gynecologist had said. “You have to relax to make a baby. You hear all the time about women who spend a fortune on fertility drugs and don’t conceive, only to eventually conceive on their own when they stop trying so hard….”

  I was desperate.

  And desperate was exactly how I felt when I finally pulled in to my driveway at six-thirty. The path to the house was pitch-dark, and I almost tripped on a branch that had fallen during Wednesday’s near-monsoon. I craned my neck around the huge oak tree in the front yard to see if Tara and Allison were home, but the lights were out at their house.

  Allison had outgrown her colic but was now beginning to teethe, and I’d picked up a cute teething ring for her in the drugstore when I’d been restocking my supply of Tums. It was probably a good thing that the lights were off at Allison’s; if I stopped by, I wouldn’t be able to resist fussing over her, and I had only a half hour to get ready for Andrew.

  Get ready for Andrew. There had been a time when all I had to do was appear. Sweatpants or naked, it hadn’t mattered. Now, I had to work hard. Fifty minutes of Pilates twice a week. Kundalini yoga three times a week. Three-mile run four days a week. And the hard work paid off—at thirty-five-to-be, I had the body of a woman in her twenties. A killer body, Andrew used to say.

  When? Up until six months ago? A year ago? Two years? Five? When had Andrew Sharp stopped salivating over me?

  “You’re such a goddamned bitch sometimes, Ally,” he’d said a few times this year.

  Maybe that was when he’d stopped. Somehow I’d gone from being the sweetest person he’d ever met to being a goddamned bitch.

  Why? Because I asked for what I wanted? Because I didn’t let him get away with crap?

  I was back to my original question. Why was I a bitch for wanting?

  Bark! Bark-bark!

  The moment I opened the front door, Mary Jane, my Maltese terrier, tried to jump up into my arms.

  “Hello, precious,” I cooed. I threw my briefcase, keys and suit jacket on the back of the couch, then scooped up Mary Jane and nuzzled her soft white fur. She licked my chin (“And you expect me to kiss you?” Andrew liked to ask when he witnessed Mary Jane’s affection for me), then she flew out of my arms for the doggie door leading to the backyard. I heard her scamper on the pile of dry leaves that Andrew had raked last Sunday. Great. He’d have a fit. He hated Mary Jane as it was.

  “What the fu—” I heard my husband yell.

  Andrew was home?

  I walked to the door that led to the deck. And there, barely visible in the gathering darkness, was Mary Jane on the hammock between the two evergreens. She was sitting on Andrew’s bare back.

  I was about to call out to ask him what the hell he was doing taking a nap naked on the hammock (it was unseasonably warm for late October but it wasn’t that warm), when I noticed one long, slender leg shoot up around his.

  As I stood there squinting to see, Andrew tried to shoo Mary Jane off him, and he raised himself up so that his penis was dangling.

  Someone was underneath him.

  “Forget the stupid dog,” said a woman’s voice, a familiar voice I couldn’t place, and then she grabbed Andrew’s ass and pulled him against her. In seconds, his ass was bobbing up and down, accompanied by grunts.

  A ponytail of long, thick blond hair was tossed over the side of the hammock, and Andrew fisted it. The woman let out a series of sounds I hadn’t made in years.

  I knew that hair. Very well. Twice a week well. My husband was screwing my Pilates instructor.

  As the old grandfather clock tick-tocked, I stood there and watched Andrew’s ass bob up and down, listened to him and Marnie moan, listened to Andrew say, Shush, the neighbors might hear, listened to Mary Jane kicking up leaves under the hammock.

  And I was still standing there when the two of them got up, bare naked, and came through the door into the living room.

  At the sight of me, Andrew’s eyes went wide and he froze.

  Marnie gasped, said, “Oh, shit!” and ran for the couch, where she threw on her jacket and bolted out the door.

  Andrew’s expression went from nervousness to anger back to nervousness.

  We stared at each other for a good half minute.

  “I didn’t think you’d be home until at least seven-thirty,” he said, raking a hand through his thick, chestnut-colored hair. “You’re never home before seven-thirty.”

  “That’s what you have to say?” I asked.

  The spots of red on his cheeks flamed in and out the way they did when he was flustered and trying to get himself out a mess. “I just mean that I wouldn’t have—If I knew you were coming home early, I never would have—”

  “So you didn’t plan on getting caught,” I said. “Is that it?”

  Those shrewd green eyes were measuring me, taking stock of my expression, of whether I was more hurt or angry. I always could tell when Andrew was trying to figure out how to play me. “I just meant that—Ally, hurting you is the last thing I’d want. Of course I wouldn’t want—” He paused, taking in the fury sparking off me. Even I could feel it. “Al, it was just sex,” he said, reaching for his underwear, which I hadn’t noticed, on the floor next to Mary Jane’s pet bed. “It didn’t mean anything.”

  He put on his underwear and his pants and then stepped closer to me.

  I stepped back.

  “Ally, you know it didn’t mean anything. I love you.”

  Was he kidding?

  “Ally, I’m sorry.
I’m really sorry. It didn’t mean anything. I swear.”

  A little harmless nooky…

  I slid down on my butt and covered my face with my hands. This was happening. This was really happening.

  “Al, sweetie,” he said, kneeling down next to me. I smelled the familiar scent of Marnie’s sweat and perfume on his body. “Come on, Al. It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Of course it means something!” I screamed. “Get the hell away from me!”

  He didn’t move. “Ally, it’s just sex. Sex. No emotion attached to it. It never means anything. I come home to you every night, don’t I?”

  My head shot up. This wasn’t the first time?

  “Look, Ally, I know we need to talk. I know things between us haven’t been so great lately. We’ve just both been so busy that we haven’t had time to even sit down and have a conversation. We just need to get back on track.”

  “You mean, back on track in our new open marriage?” I asked, springing up.

  He chuckled as though I’d said something truly amusing and also stood. “Ally, it was just a fuck. No big deal. You know I love you.” He slipped his hand under my chin and caressed my cheek, then brushed my hair behind my ear. “I do love you. You know that, right?”

  I scooped up Mary Jane, slapped Andrew across the face and ran out the door.

  3

  Zoe

  “I think my biggest problem with men is that I tend to sleep with them too soon,” my client said to her date, an attractive man in his mid-thirties. “My shrink says I do it because I’m really seeking intimacy—not sex.”

  The moment the words sleep with them too soon came out of her glossed mouth, her date’s eyes traveled south from her eyes to her cleavage and remained there.

  What she said next wasn’t important; her date was no longer listening to her. He was fantasizing about sex.