Family Affair

by Caprice Crane

  • • •

  I walk into the office, and Brett is already there in the waiting room, seated by the window. There’s an air conditioner jutting out of the wall, dripping condensation on a pile of month-old New Yorker magazines. What, are they trying to keep us awake by keeping it cold, or does the therapist just like to avoid seeing his patients sweat? Brett’s nervously tapping his fingers on his lap.

  “Hi,” I say, trying to be civil—a grown-up. He’d already left the house when I woke up. It shocked me. I left a message on his cell phone telling him where to show up. “Thank you for agreeing to this.”

  “Of course,” he answers distractedly, as a door opens in front of us.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Foster,” the therapist says, as he gestures toward the empty room behind him. “Please, come in.”

  The first half hour is awkward. I imagine the first half hour with any new therapist is awkward, but our therapist has an enormous flesh-colored mole just slightly to the left side of his nose, and for some reason I can’t get past it. So while I make it seem like I’m making eye contact, I’m actually just trying not to stare at the mole. My eyes drift back and then dart away, and I put my hand on my chin and crinkle my eyes as if thinking, You’ve got a really good point there, but instead I’m thinking, You’ve got a really big mole there. How am I supposed to focus on fixing my relationship?

  The fact that I have no idea what is going on with Brett makes everything even more confusing. I try to get Brett to tell me what needs to change, because obviously he’s not happy, but he doesn’t offer anything. I explain away my stupid real first time with big-mouth Doug, and aside from the one comment Brett barks out about our whole relationship being based on a lie—a bit of an exaggeration, given how truly unimportant to me the encounter with Doug was—he’s not particularly combative. He just seems uninterested. At one point he actually asks the therapist, “You have a Chase branch next door. Do you know what time it closes?” Apparently, he’s more interested in his savings account than saving our marriage.

  Finally, when I bring up the whole seven-year-itch thing, he snaps. “This isn’t about other women, Layla.”

  “Then what?” I plead. “What is it?”

  “It’s you! It’s you … with my sister, you with my mom, you with my dad, you with my brother!” The therapist’s eyebrows rise.

  “There’s nothing going on with me and his brother,” I say. Then I add, “Or his dad. And for the record, the Doug thing was more than fifteen years ago—before I even kissed Brett.”

  The therapist writes something down on his yellow legal pad. I’m not sure why he’s taking notes, and I’m not sure how I feel about it, but I’m hyperaware of the beads of sweat forming above my brow. Guess the air-conditioner trick didn’t work. “You’re not like a wife,” Brett blurts.

  “What do you mean by that?” the therapist asks, and I’m all ears because I think I’m a pretty damned good wife.

  “I mean that she’s all over my family. She’s very close with them. Too close. It’s like they all come first. Her relationship with them takes priority over our marriage. She’s partners with my sister, and shops with my mother, and plays card games with my father. I didn’t get married to have another sister.”

  “I’m hearing you feel neglected,” the therapist says.

  “This is helpful,” I add. “This at least lets me know what I’m dealing with. I know you don’t want a divorce. I know you’re frustrated, and I guess I understand. So okay, I’ll make changes. Trish and I have a successful business, so that’s not exactly going away, but I won’t play any more Rock Band on the Xbox with your brother. And I’ll cut down on the poker with your dad.”

  Brett just looks at his lap. One bead of sweat starts to make its way down my temple.

  “Okay, fine. I won’t spend so much time with your mom?”

  Still he says nothing.

  “Are you serious?” I ask. “Do you really want me to stop being partners with Trish?”

  “I didn’t say I want any of that,” Brett says, still not looking at me. “You’re not getting it.”

  “Tell her what you want,” the therapist says. “Tell her what she isn’t getting.”

  Finally, Brett looks at me. “I feel like you’re my sister. Not my wife. And I do think we should get a divorce.”

  • • •

  When you set out to live according to some grand master plan, you are essentially assuring yourself a lifetime of letdowns.

  Expectation is planned disappointment, and I am nothing if not a planner. At twelve, I planned how I’d lose my virginity to the man I loved (I suppose the how is obvious, but I meant “how” as in: not in a car, not on prom night, and not to any current pop song that would one day be irrelevant and embarrassing), how I’d wear my hair at my wedding, and how old I’d be when I had my first child (calculating also how old I’d be when that child turned twenty-one).

  Let’s revisit those three things. We’ve just learned that I lost my virginity—no, not in a car, but alas to the scintillating soundtrack of Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You)” with a side order of Beck’s “Loser.” And to Doug. My wedding hair? On my wedding day my hair was still growing out from an Unfortunate Bangs Incident, so my updo was actually an updon’t. And I’d planned to have my first child at the ripe old age of twenty-five, which would make me forty-six when the kid turned twenty-one. I am not only already four years late for that projection, but on the night I thought I was going to start the baby-making phase of my life, I learned instead that I’m quite possibly on my way to being single again. I’m also driving like a fugitive on the 405 to get home.

  But not my home.

  I need my family. So I’m driving straight to the only home the adult me has ever known: the Fosters’.

  • • •

  When I walk in I head straight to the basement and dig through five boxes until I strike gold—or rather gingerbread. I pull out the gingerbread-house kits and dust them off. I know that Ginny usually buys new ones each year, but there’s always one or two tucked away in the basement, and I have a desperate need to decorate a gingerbread house.

  I don’t even go upstairs into the kitchen. I take off my jacket, turn on the AM radio, which barely gets reception, roll up my sleeves, and start decorating. A few moments later I hear Brett’s dad calling down to me, although he doesn’t know it’s me who’s down here. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Bill. It’s just me.”

  “Layla-cakes!” he bellows, as he bounds down the stairs. “What are you doing down here?”

  I wave my right arm before me to show off the beginnings of my house. “I am creating.”

  Bill cocks his head backward and bunches his mouth to one side. He reaches up to scratch his neck and looks to the stairs as if an explanation will be heading down—or at least maybe his wife. You see, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with me helping myself to the basement and these gingerbread house kits, if it weren’t October.

  “Gin?” he calls out.

  “Yeah, BillyBoo?” she answers, using one of her pet names for him.

  “We’re in the basement,” he says. “Come join us.”

  “Who’s we?” Ginny asks, as she makes her way down, in her cute gold slippers with the silver detail.

  “LayLay!” she exclaims, overjoyed as always to see me. But her smile soon turns to a look of concern, and suddenly I know why Bill called Ginny downstairs. Although I hadn’t decided at any point to start crying, apparently my eyes did and forgot to clue me in. The drip onto my house’s gingerbread dog gives it away.

  Ginny and Bill surround me, then sit on either side as Ginny rubs my back and Bill sighs heavily and looks down at his lap.

  Finally, he speaks. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  I open my mouth, but the words don’t come out. I look at Ginny and remember our dinner and everything we talked about. It wasn’t just me. She’d thought the same thing.

  “Honey,” Ginny says. “Whatever
it is, we love you and we are here for you.”

  I look back and forth at them and open my mouth again to speak, but this time only a yowl comes out. I am sobbing like a baby.

  “For gosh sake, whatever it is,” Bill says, “it can’t be that bad.”

  I sniff back a few tears and pick up a candy cane.

  Bill takes the candy cane from my hand and a smirk spreads across his face. “Hey, what did Adam say on the day before Christmas?”

  “What?” I ask.

  “It’s Christmas, Eve!”

  “Oh, Bill,” Ginny says, and I laugh at his silly joke, which turns into an even harder cry.

  Sammy Davis Junior, always the intuitive beast, comes bounding down the stairs and jumps straight onto my lap.

  “I love you guys,” I say.

  “And we love you,” Bill says. “Dearly. Now, do you want to tell us why you’ve decided to start Christmas before it’s even Halloween?”

  “Not that we mind,” Ginny adds. “I think it’s brilliant to get a jump start on things.”

  “I just wanted to go to a happy time. I love our rituals. I love making these houses and cooking with you and going shopping and … and …”

  And I’m sobbing again.

  Ginny and Bill look at each other, both at a loss, and then Scott comes down to save the day.

  “What’s the hubbub, bub?” Scott says, directed at me. He’s brought down a cup of Tropic of Strawberry, my favorite Celestial Seasonings tea. A tea that nobody else likes, yet they keep it in the cupboard just for me. I take the cup from him and sip. He must have heard me wailing from all the way upstairs, and he’s on the second floor.

  When I’ve had a few more sips of tea and finally stopped hyperventilating, I take a deep breath and tell the Fosters what happened at dinner, what happened in the therapist’s office, and that Brett wants a divorce.

  To say they side with me would be putting it mildly. To say they are furious with him would be an understatement. But to say that fifteen minutes later when Brett shows up, they tell him to go away—their own son—would be telling exactly what happened.

  scott

  Hearing Layla cry makes me feel like throwing up. Literally. I hate my brother. How do you have someone like Layla and not want to have like fifteen kids with her? There are no other Laylas around. Believe me, I’ve looked.

  Brett is a giant fucking asshole.

  ginny

  October 9

  Dearest Ev,

  I have set pen to paper—remarkable in this day and age, I know—because you once told me that if I ever felt like my heart couldn’t take any more, I should contact you posthaste. Remember that? I never forgot it. I write you now with a heart so heavy I fear it may tear right out of me.

  I don’t exactly know how to say this, so I’m just going to go right ahead and tell you: Things here are suddenly about as serious as a heart attack, as Mother used to say. But I’m already getting ahead of myself. I fear I’m going to have a nervous breakdown, and then Bill will be proven right when he tells me I’m too dramatic and getting worse all the time, never letting things go, rehashing the bad over and over. He calls it “repetitive emotion disorder,” which I don’t think is funny one bit.

  So tonight, well past the time Bill typically drifts off to sleep in front of the TV upstairs, our dear Layla charged into the house and began acting strangely. We asked where Brett was, and that made it worse. She cried and cried, so much so that we couldn’t make out what she was saying, until Bill picked out the word “divorce,” and naturally we both wanted to know who, and then when we found out, we were sorry we’d asked, because it turned out to be her and Brett. Our own Brett told this beautiful, precious girl whom we consider our very own—with all she’s been through and her being an orphan, or as near as God made to it—that he doesn’t want to be married to her anymore. And all the while, the poor dear told us, she was thinking that he was taking her out to dinner to talk about having children! To think.

  Naturally, we thought at first it was the product of a bad argument, and we did our best to assure her that Brett must be either kidding or not in his right mind. But while I stayed with her, there was a knock on the door, and it was Brett. Evelyn, sure as I’m born, he wasn’t even sorry, really. He kept insisting we listen to “his side of the story,” and then he and Bill yelled at each other in the front hall. Bill came back looking somewhere between angry and downcast, and I knew. Brett and Layla had fought before—what couple hasn’t, other than Bill and me, *wink*—but this was different. Brett said he was through. And you remember how impossibly determined he is, once he gets committed to an idea. His best quality and his worst quality all in one, just like his father.

  Needless to say, I’m beside myself. It feels as though someone or something has died. I spent most of the night on the couch, clutching my Virgin Mary—the little plastic one you gave me with the painted flowers on her robe. Let me know if you think it would help for me to take out one of those Saint Jude ads in the paper.

  I will tell no one, absolutely no one, that we talked, and I hope you’ll do the same. Hard to say what they’d think if they knew I was reaching out to you again.

  Ever your loving sister,

  Ginny

  brett

  I just got the Heisman from my family. The Heisman is an award given each year to the most outstanding college football player. The actual trophy is a bronze statue depicting a player in action-arm thrust forward—stiff-arming some unfortunate would-be tackler who is unaware in that moment that he’s being shoved aside by greatness. But I didn’t get a trophy for being outstanding. Instead, I’m just out. I got the stiff arm when I tried to go see my parents—my parents—to tell them what went down with Layla.

  She beat me to the punch. Probably got on the phone with them thirty seconds after we left that quack’s office so she could start “spinning” like a presidential campaign manager. Great. Who knew I married Layla friggin’ Stephanopoulos. And now they’re all mad at me. So in the absence of a loving family, I decide to turn to my friends. First stop is Doug’s house. He’s only about a mile from my folks’ place now, and we need to clear something up.

  But Doug doesn’t answer the door. Aimee does.

  “Hey, Brett,” she says, but she doesn’t motion me in.

  “Hi, Aimee. How are ya?”

  “I’m good,” she answers, and then closes her mouth, lips pursed.

  There’s a long, long awkward pause, and I’m reminded why I don’t hang out at Doug’s more often. Although, in Aimee’s defense, this is bitchy even for her.

  “Fantastic,” I say. “Is Doug home?”

  “Doug!” she screams, seemingly at me, since she’s looking me square in the eyes, but she can’t be mad at me because I just got here.

  Finally, he appears behind her. “Hey, buddy,” he says, as he steps outside to join me and closes the door behind him.

  “Sorry, man. Didn’t mean to just show up.”

  “No worries, man. You’re always welcome.”

  “Was I interrupting something? Like a fight? Aimee seemed a little upset.”

  “Yeah, she is,” Doug says, and looks down.

  “Well, join the club, dude. I think you and I need to have a beer.”

  “Yeah…I can’t go, man.”

  “She’s already mad,” I rationalize. “And you haven’t even done anything yet. I say you double down on this thing. And you kind of owe me.”

  “No, man. She’s mad at you.”

  “What’d I do?” I ask, but before I even finish my sentence I realize exactly what I did. News sure travels fast in these circles. “Oh, you guys heard?”

  “Yeah, we did. Are you okay?”

  I look at my watch. “That’s gotta be, like, record time. I mean, it just happened. How the fuck did you hear?”

  “Layla called Aimee. She wanted to arrange a time to return a mixing bowl that she borrowed. She was very emotional. About a stainless-steel half-quart mixing bowl
. It … came out.”

  “Wow. Chicks.”

  Doug just nods. Then Aimee separates the blinds from the window and sticks her face through, bugging her eyes out at Doug. It’s a cue for him to get his ass back inside.

  “Go ahead, man,” I say. “It’s cool. I get it. We’ll catch up soon.”

  “I am here for you, though, buddy. It’s just a little raw right now. And since you seem okay, I’m going to calm Aimee down.”

  It’s raw? For Aimee? She’s not even that close to Layla. Maybe it’s part of that female mutual defense pact. Or maybe Aimee is projecting, wondering if she’ll get the dinner “talk” next. Whatever. She’d deserve it.

  • • •

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Jared says. It’s the first thing that comes out of his mouth when I arrive at his front door. “You heard, too, I see.”

  “Do you have any idea of the level of awesome that is your wife?”

  “Well, awesome is relative.” I picture Layla for a second, but the thought quickly transforms into a disturbing family portrait, with her at the center and me nowhere to be found. “And right now, awesome is not someone who turns all your relatives against you. I have a frickin’ side in this, too.”

  “In all my years,” Jared starts. “In all my years, I’ve met a lot of guys’ girlfriends, and some of those guys got married to these girls, but not one of them was as cool as Layla. Layla is like the holy grail of wives. I mean, if you had any idea of what goes on in my innermost thoughts about your wife—”

  “Dude,” I cut him off. “There’s a reason they’re called your ‘innermost’ thoughts. Because they’re mostly supposed to stay inner.”

  I let out some air in disgust, turn around, and walk back to my car. It’s clear that I’m not getting any sympathy from the guys, who all are siding with my wife. They all want to sleep with her—or have already slept with her, I remind myself. Before even I did.