“And you’re just telling me this now?”
“Honey, I haven’t been home much in the last two weeks. This has been our first chance to sit down together.”
“Forester would pay for everything?”
“For the most part. I think we would be responsible for our monthly food bill.”
Rebecca and Robert ran onto the porch, breathless. Karen looked at her watch; one of their favorite shows had just ended. “We’re starving!” said Robert, holding his stomach with two hands.
“Me too,” said Bob, scooping his son into his arms. “Let’s get the shotgun and shoot us some bear for dinner.”
“Dad!” said Robert, laughing.
“Yuck!” said Rebecca. “I’d rather starve than eat a poor old bear.”
The conversation at the dinner table was livelier than usual. Rebecca and Robert both had a number of school stories to share with their father. Karen, who had already heard their tales that afternoon, listened again, delighting in the sounds of their voices and easy amusement. After dinner, Karen did the dishes while Bob supervised baths and read bedtime stories. Both children were in bed by eight, Karen’s goal on a school night. She and Bob sat on the living room couch and watched TV for an hour, then retired to their bedroom, where they read for thirty minutes before having sex.
Bob had always been very complimentary about Karen’s body, with a slight dip when she had gained weight after having the children. He routinely told her she was more attractive to him now than she was in college; her body was stronger. She could hold herself above him; she could wrap her legs tightly around his. Karen responded to his compliments. She had worked hard at losing the weight. She exercised four times a week and watched what she ate, and she was pleased with herself. Her health was important to her, but not as much as her image. Successful women with successful husbands were in control of their lives, and that included their appearances. Like Karen, Bob made time for the gym or a run three days a week. His workout was simply built into his day. When he traveled, he used the hotel fitness room. They all had them now. He, too, was as trim as he had been in college. They appreciated the shape and size of their bodies most when they were in bed together.
Afterward, they lay back on the pillows and talked more about the country club. While it was exclusive, Bob would be able to get a membership quickly by virtue of his position at Forester. The company’s board members were impressed with Bob and would pave the way. He’d mention something to his boss the next day, and they would be members inside a month. It was after the golf season, of course, but he could book lessons in the spring. Maybe Karen could learn how to play as well. Karen said she liked the idea, but she was more interested in the dining room and social perks. They’d meet new friends. They’d attend great parties. And they’d have somewhere to show off their fabulous bodies. Bob laughed, wrapping his arms around his wife. She took a deep breath, then asked him about replacing their living room furniture. “Go right ahead,” Bob said, before kissing her once more on the lips and rolling over to go to sleep.
CHAPTER 11
DECEMBER 2002
At three forty-five, Sarah, Britney, and Jeremy walked in the back door. Rebecca, who hadn’t seen her friend in weeks, ran to Britney and hugged her. The two girls then hustled up the stairs to Rebecca’s room and shut the door. “That’s the last we’ll see of them for a while,” said Sarah, smiling.
“What’s in your hands?” Robert asked Sarah, who was holding a cylindrical plastic container.
“A cake!” said Jeremy.
“Hey, it’s my turn to do snacks,” said Karen, giving her friend a look.
Sarah shrugged. “You know me. I couldn’t stop myself.”
“Can we have some, Mom?” Robert asked.
“Well, boys, do you want store-bought cookies or homemade cake?”
“Cake!” they shouted in unison.
“Good choice.” Karen poured the boys cups of milk, then put the kettle on for tea.
“Shall we call the girls?” asked Sarah.
“You can call all you want,” said Karen. “They won’t hear a thing over Rebecca’s CD player.”
“What does she listen to?”
“Teenage girls. It seems anybody can make a record now.”
“Yuck!” said Robert. “I hate girls.”
“Me too,” said Jeremy.
“Except for your sister,” said Sarah.
“And you, Mom,” said Jeremy.
When the boys finished their chocolate cake, they scooted down from their chairs and headed downstairs to the basement. Robert loved the new playroom and couldn’t wait to show his friend. The builders finished the work ten days ago. Since then, the painters had coated the walls with Wow, Orange!; the guys at Flooring, Etc. had laid multicolored striped Berber carpeting; and the brightly colored retro furniture that Karen purchased, after the saleswoman called it indestructible and groovy, had arrived. Bob replaced the old television with the better one from the living room (and bought a new flat screen for the den) as the final touch, and Robert had spent almost every hour he was home down there since.
“I’m going down there with them,” said Sarah. Karen followed her friend down the stairs, which had also been carpeted. The boys were sitting at the large table in the middle of the room building with Lego blocks. They ignored their mothers’ presence. “This looks great.” Sarah appraised the room with her hands on her hips. “I love the color. And that couch is fantastic.”
“Isn’t that fun? I found that first and bought everything else because of it.”
“You can’t go wrong with lime green. And a piano? I had no idea you were in the market for one.”
“I didn’t know either. Rebecca wanted to take lessons, so I started reading the classifieds. It’s a pretty nice instrument when no one’s playing it.”
“You’re a genius to put it down here. Practice times can be brutal.”
“And how silly are those purple swivel chairs?”
“Very silly,” said Sarah. The boys hopped into the chairs and immediately began playing the spaceship game Robert had been playing on his own all week. Sarah and Karen walked back up the stairs and into the living room. “I still can’t get over what you’ve done to this room,” said Sarah. “It’s undergone a complete transformation.”
“It felt nice to get rid of that old stuff.”
“What did you do with it? I know for a while you were thinking about using it in the basement playroom.”
“I was,” said Karen. “But it didn’t really fit into the theme I have going down there. Bob said he was happy enough to get a charitable receipt from Salvation Army.”
“Well, you’ve done a good job. I would love to have a playroom like that.”
“You have your family room,” Karen offered, leading Sarah back to the kitchen.
“Which is supposed to be for the whole family. Most days, the kids take that room over, and I’m stuck in the kitchen if I want quiet time to myself.”
Karen sat at the kitchen table and poured two mugs of hot tea from the teapot. “Does your basement have potential?”
“Very much so. And I would love to see it become a room for the kids. It’s expensive; we have to make choices.”
“I understand that. I’d love to do this kitchen, but we’re just going to have to wait. At this point, we don’t have a lot left over.”
“Ummm.” Sarah sipped her tea. “This is good. Do you want some cake to go with it?”
“Absolutely,” said Karen, reaching for the knife. She cut a generous piece for Sarah and a smaller one for herself.
“Are you trying to make me fat?” Sarah smiled as she accepted the larger piece.
“That would take a lot more than a piece of cake. Although, if you talk to Rebecca, she’ll tell you fatness begins in fourth grade.”
“Same with Britney. Suddenly she thinks she’s fat. She won’t have an after-school snack anymore.”
“I can’t believe this is starting a
lready. I didn’t think about my weight until I was in college.”
“None of us did. We ate what we wanted and ran off the rest.”
But it was a different world now, both women acknowledged. The pressures on children began earlier, curtailing the carefree portion of their childhood. Girls wanted to be thin and pretty, and boys sought intelligence and success. Britney no longer ran around the playground at recess because she didn’t want to risk ruining her clothes. Instead, she stood and talked with other like-minded girls. Occasionally, they approached the boys and taunted them into a game of chase, but it was more flirtation than exertion. Britney had not said a word of this to her mother. The news had come to Sarah from Britney’s teacher, who was more than a little worried her fifth-grade girls were growing up too quickly. She’d seen an incredible shift over her twenty-year tenure and, socially, didn’t like what she saw.
Rebecca was going through a similar stage. She spent an increasing amount of time in her room with the door shut. She teased Robert without mercy, seemingly resenting his mere presence. She’d play with him when she had absolutely nothing else to do, but what used to come naturally, willingly even, was now endured. Fourth grade, according to Rebecca, was the beginning of her adult life. She simply didn’t have time for babies anymore. Karen and Bob tried to ignore her dramatic statements because, in some ways, Rebecca, at nine, was more a child than she had been at seven. She pouted when she didn’t get what she wanted. She cried easily. She had what Karen described to Bob as meltdowns a couple times a week. Typically, Karen sent her daughter upstairs when she was rude or unreasonable, but it didn’t seem to be much of a punishment since Rebecca liked it there. When Karen was really angry, she’d follow Rebecca into her room, where Karen would unplug the CD player and take it with her. Rebecca went berserk when Karen did this, however, so the crime had to be worth the screaming. Bob and Karen had thought about getting Rebecca involved in a service organization like the Girl Scouts, but Rebecca told them she’d rather sleep in a snake pit than join the ultimate nerd club. “We’re bored,” announced Rebecca, walking into the kitchen with Britney.
“Have some cake,” said Karen.
“Are you kidding? There’s about a billion calories in one piece.” She looked at Brittney, who nodded.
“Okay, that’s more for us,” said Karen.
“Well, that’s really selfish,” said Rebecca, showing off for Britney.
“Hey, I asked.”
Rebecca opened the fridge and stood in front of it. “Do we have any Diet Coke?”
“I don’t buy Diet Coke.”
“Can you put some on your grocery list?”
“We’ll see.” Karen already knew she was not going to let her daughter start a diet soda habit at nine years old, but hedged her response to avoid a verbal battle.
“There’s nothing to eat,” said Rebecca, who had moved on to the cupboards.
“There’s cake.”
Rebecca turned to face her mother and give her the full benefit of her weariness. “We’ve been through that.”
“So we have. Dinner will be at six thirty.”
“We’ll starve before then.”
“Not if you have some cake.”
Rebecca glared at her mother, then stomped out of the room. Britney raised her eyebrows at her mother before following her friend. “How did you like the show?” Karen asked Sarah after they left.
“It’s a rerun. I live it every day.”
Karen poured more tea into their mugs. “Rebecca’s changing. While she’s always been a precocious child, she was still a child. Now she’s a preteen monster.”
“She’s a monster for you,” said Sarah. “She’s an incredible student. She’s always good at my house. She has simply entered that stage of peer influence.”
Karen sipped her tea. “You’ve been reading again.”
“Always. I don’t know how to parent without parenting books.”
“Maybe I’ll read this latest one when you’re done. I don’t like what I’m seeing.”
“I’m seeing the same thing,” said Sarah. “Britney can come home with such attitude sometimes that I don’t even want to be around her. And yet, when I make the time to be with her, she softens.”
“Rebecca softens, too. But only after she’s spent some time in her room. She seems to need to unwind after school.”
“As does Britney. And that seems crazy for a ten-year-old. What are they going to do to deal with the pressures and stress of life when they’re our age?”
“They are growing up way too fast.”
“Yeah,” said Sarah, taking a sip of her tea. “And it’s our impossible job to slow them down.”
The more Karen wanted to slow their lives down, the more the world sped things up. Rebecca was busy with piano lessons on Thursday afternoons, modern dance on Mondays and Wednesdays, and Excellent Students First!—an after-school problem-solving and brainstorming session for smart kids—every other Tuesday. Karen offered to spend time with Rebecca in the evenings after dinner. But Rebecca had homework and then usually preferred reading or listening to music than having what Karen called “girl time.” The one time Rebecca came to her, wanting her attention, Karen had already committed to attending an evening lecture with Sarah at the library about raising teenage girls. Later that night and for many days afterward, Karen wished she had changed her plans to accommodate her daughter. Karen tried to make up, but Rebecca’s intractable nature had become an art form. She was cooler than ever.
Karen’s tennis buddies felt the same way about their lives; everyone was too busy, especially the kids. Since Ginny had four, she spent her weekday afternoons in the car. The weekends weren’t much better. Her older two boys played soccer and usually had games on Saturdays and Sundays. They hadn’t been to church as a family in months. When Ginny had to fill in for the organist, it was a scramble. Caroline’s two daughters were doing the same thing Rebecca was doing: music lessons and dance. Only Chelsea and Annie both played two instruments and took two dance classes. They had no free time during the week. Caroline was in a carpool for the dance classes, but for the music lessons, she was on her own.
In spite of their busy lives, Karen and her friends still made time for lunch after tennis. They had tried different restaurants in town, but routinely chose the country club as soon as Karen announced she had become a member. Caroline had been a member for several years, as had Ginny. Stephanie and her husband had joined the previous fall and had both taken golf lessons, but were, in Stephanie’s words, worse than awful. Her husband, Patrick, had hit the side of the clubhouse once, barely missing the picture window overlooking the notorious water hazard on the seventeenth hole. The big draw for the women was not the golf course or even the tennis courts; it was the food, gourmet and dazzling at dinner and special events and quick but innovative at lunch. They always ate lunch in the Patio Room, decorated with circular iron tables that had been painted white and covered with glass tops, surrounded by matching chairs cushioned in green and yellow floral fabric. The staff was pleasant and courteous and appeared to know Karen’s name after just one introduction. And Karen and her friends didn’t have to change for lunch because the dress code in the Patio Room accommodated both weekday and weekend casual athletes.
The chilled white wine was the best thing about eating at the club. Caroline suggested the indulgence one day after a particularly challenging clinic, a substitution for the ibuprofen all of them kept in their car glove box as a means to ease muscle fatigue. Karen was skeptical at first. Alcohol took away her motivation, as well as her energy, and she couldn’t afford an afternoon on the couch. Caroline agreed with Karen, but said there was nothing she couldn’t accomplish after a glass of wine as long as she drank two glasses of water and a cup of coffee afterward. And that worked really well, until they started drinking two glasses of wine instead of one. It was always fun at the time. They laughed a lot, engaged in the telling, let’s-be-honest discussions had by women drinking wine.
They complained about their husbands and their children as well as, in lowered voices, the people at the club who let everyone know where they were going for vacation and what renovation was taking entirely too long at their lake houses up north. Karen justified both the wine and the gossip as her downtime, which she told herself she deserved. She, like Caroline and Ginny, had survived the baby years; they were entitled to do whatever they pleased, at least during school hours.
After school was a different story. Most of the time Karen managed to keep it together. She had to, especially when Bob was traveling. Occasionally, however, Caroline’s remedy didn’t work, and Karen was simply too tired to deal with Rebecca’s and Robert’s schedules and demands. On those days, she would read magazines on the living room couch, and the children simply missed their activities. They never seemed to mind watching TV, often separately, with Rebecca in the den and Robert in the basement, instead of stuffing a snack in their mouths and running to the car. It worked well for everyone, until the day Bob walked into the house at four o’clock one Thursday afternoon after grabbing the last seat on an early flight home from Boston, and found his wife sleeping under the cashmere throw she had bought for herself, even though Bob had prohibited non-Christmas purchases. “Karen,” he said, gently shaking her shoulder. Karen slowly opened her eyes. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.” Karen sat up and yawned. “I guess I fell asleep.”
Bob looked at his watch. “Doesn’t Rebecca have dance on Thursdays? And what’s this blanket all about?”
“I got it on sale. You can wrap it up and give it to me for Christmas. And yes, as you well know, Rebecca does have dance today. We both just needed a day off.”
Bob sat down on the couch. “A day off from what?”
“A day off from life, Bob,” said Karen, her voice serious, an ache developing in her left temple. “You have your days off, too.”
A Changing Marriage Page 16