Aunt Marvelle hangs up, satisfied that she now possesses her circle’s top news morsel of the day. At least for about five minutes.
My phone rings again, just as I’m relieving a bladder that seems to have shrunk to the size of a pea. I survived two successful pregnancies with no bladder repercussions. This youngster seems determined to rectify that good fortune in the first trimester. A phone in the bathroom was to give me access from the tub. I would never admit this to anyone, but I sometimes pick up from my seat on the throne.
“Tallulah!” Aunt Marvelle again. “Jane just dropped by. She had an appointment with Dr. Templeton today, and I think you should hear what she has to say. Now, just hold on.”
“Tallulah, sweetie. Marvelle’s just been telling me about you and Dr. Templeton. You sly thing!” No need to correct Jane. I won’t be believed. “That’s why I thought you should know that you’ve got some competition for Dr. Templeton’s favor.”
I love the language of the elder set. For them, men still pledge their favors, the knight-in-shining-armor kind. “Really?”
“Luckily, I had just arrived for my appointment when a deliveryman brought in a huge bouquet of flowers. Huge! And expensive, in a very showy kind of way. There were roses and peonies and snapdragons and tulips in that arrangement, not your standard mums and daylilies. The nurses made such a fuss Dr. Templeton came out to the waiting room to see what was going on. Are you ready for this? After he read the card he just smiled and returned to work, leaving the bouquet out there for all prying eyes to see.”
You’ve got to admire the way these women tell stories. It’s the way they play bridge, cards held close to the chest as they wait to see who will trump who with what.
“Did someone else read the card?”
“Who didn’t? I would never have actually touched it. That’s just not done. But when I stopped to get weighed, the flowers were there on the counter right next to the scale. The card was in its plastic holder, facing out.”
“Wow. What did it say?” I feel like the straight woman in a comedy routine.
“The thrill! The rapture! Life is a banquet, after all! Your secret admirer.” Cleo whispers the last, as though it’s obscene.
“Gee.” It seems a like-minded kind of response.
“I tried to finesse a confession out of Dr. Templeton while in the examining room. Pretended I was jealous, for fun. Tallulah, he didn’t turn a hair. Just smiled that inscrutable smile he has, and told me that as long as I kept our quarterly assignations, I will never lose his favor! Now, what do you think of that?”
That you’ve got to admire the savoir faire of a man who’s being leaned on by a seventy-eight-year-old flirt. “I had no idea he was so popular.”
“That’s what we were just saying. The nurses swear they don’t know who he’s seeing. So, I stopped at the florist who’d made the delivery to make some inquiries. I said I wanted to order a bouquet exactly like the one they made for Dr. Templeton. I was certain the girl would tell me who ordered it. Merchants out here like to brag on certain clientele.”
“Don’t tell her that,” I hear my aunt Marvelle say in the background. “She’ll think we spy on people!”
“No, she won’t. Besides, I couldn’t get a peep out of the clerk. Probably a summer hire. Personally, I think the sender’s married. Or an actress. You get all those aging Broadway types moving out here, looking for a little tea and sympathy.”
“Give me that phone!” I listen as a short, dignified scuffle, accompanied by jangling jewelry, takes place on the other end before Aunt Marvelle says, “Jane never gets to the point of anything. Tea and sympathy!”
“That means sex!” Jane calls out, in case I might be in doubt.
“Cleo didn’t tell you the most important part. Subtlety is not her strong suit. That’s why she prefers musicals to dramas. Who cares about the flowers? Women are always throwing themselves at Dr. Templeton. The point is, Cleo says Dr. Templeton wasn’t wearing his wedding band when he examined her.” I have to admit this tidbit makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. “Was he wearing a wedding band when you saw him last Friday?”
“I particularly noticed that he was.” At the beginning of the evening.
“I knew you’d notice. That’s because you’re related to me. I’m going to say this only once, Tallulah. If he’s made up his mind to start looking for companionship, he won’t stay in the market long.”
Wonder if William knows he’s being talked about like a side of beef with an expiration date on the wrapper? “Thanks for the advice, Aunt Marvelle. But I really just finished dealing with one man. I don’t need another in my life right now. Bye.”
Time to fess up. I did one other thing while lying in Andrea’s guest bed. I ordered flowers and composed that “mash” note. It was the least possessive way I could think of to say thanks to William for the resuscitation of Lu Nichols.
And to think I wondered if I was being paranoid to tell the florist I did not want that bouquet traceable to me. Marvelle’s Marvelous Matrons are dangerous.
William isn’t wearing his wedding band! I feel the ancient seminal female urge to confess to my indiscreet weekend to my best girlfriend after all. But how can I gush to Andrea about my Dr. Yummy after she sacrificed a night with her doc for me?
I think of calling Mom. But she had a bad week last week, what with the news that she needs a double root canal. If you don’t know someone with a real and true phobia about dentists, you can’t imagine what that news did to her, or what my father has been dealing with since. He’s offered her a Hawaiian cruise as amends for being born with such mutinous teeth. This is not a woman who needs to hear that her eldest child is pregnant by her ex, and sleeping with abandon with a stranger who makes love as if he invented it!
The wage of this sinning must be that I have to bear the guilty pleasure of it alone.
I wander into the breakfast room where the mail and weekend newspapers that Cy picked up are neatly arranged on my kitchen table. He’s such a good friend. Too bad his kids would have him committed if he tried to marry again.
He will absolutely understand my situation. I think. I hope. When I tell him. But I have to tell my family first.
I pick up the phone and call Dallas’s home phone and leave a message, inviting her to spend Saturday night of Memorial weekend with me. Davin will be home by then, serving his one-week parental duty time before heading off to his summer job in the Berkshires. We’ll make it a family sleepover.
15
“Hey, Lu. Waz up?”
“Not—Oh!” My hand rises to cover my mouth as I behold the sight in my office doorway. I almost don’t recognize Curran with his sandy-red brows and lashes, minus black mascara. More than that, his head is covered with little inch-and-a-half bundles of matted hair, held together with red rubber bands at the scalp and tip. “Curran, you look just like Binky the Clown.”
Curran scratches his chin where a few scraggly reddish hairs have sprouted since last week. “Who?”
“A doll I once had.” Binky was a Raggedy Ann-type scarecrow with a clown face and hair made out of orange yarn knotted at the scalp. Curran looks just as silly to me as that clown but I won’t contribute that thought. “You, ah, got—”
“Dreads.” He grins and nods. “I found a shop in Newark that does Caucasian hair. The stylist is K’Shonde. Gave me props for checking out her stuff. Told her I’m too dope to try weak shizz like chemicals, or peanut butter and toothpaste. My stuff is tight.”
He’s been working on his hip-hop language, too. So far, I’m barely keeping up with the syntax.
I remember my youthful suffering for beauty’s sake—sleeping in hard curlers, wearing spiked heels and pointy toes. But as I touch one of Curran’s tightly bundled dreads I have to say, “Those rubber bands look like they hurt.”
“No doubt. It takes eight or nine months to create dreads, but only four or five weeks for the hair to lock up. Then I can take off the scalp bands.”
I can’t help it. Looking at them makes me scratch my scalp. “Don’t they itch?”
His head nods forward as he casts me the doubtful look of a young conqueror who’s begun to suspect he’s laid his booty before an unappreciative audience. “You’re misconceptualizing, Lu. Peoples are misled to think it’s about dirty hair. Clean hair is the secret of phat dreads.”
At the moment KaZi stops at my open door, her hair today so vivid a pink a Mary Kay consultant would blush. “Hey, Lu. I brought you the mock-up for the revamped August issue.”
Curran leaps off the edge off my desk at the sound of her voice and spins around to face the doorway. “Whot’s up, KaZi?”
“You got dreads. Cool.” KaZi deadpans these words, but I can tell she’s impressed because she actually walks up to him and examines one little thumb of hair. “Don’t do something stupid like put conditioner on them.”
“A brother’s down.” Curran actually preens as he begins rolling a clump of hair between his thumb and fingers. “Using beeswax and tea-tree oil.”
KaZi shrugs. “Nice fragrance.” She turns and hands me the layout pages. “The art department thinks they need work. They also left room for your column. See what you think. We’ve got until Monday morning to make adjustments.”
“That’s what I came to tell you.” Curran pats the layout stack. “Your ‘before’ photos are in here. Tai e-mailed her final choices from Lucerne yesterday. I’da made the same, but for one. The layout’s dope!”
KaZi nods.
“Thanks. I think.” I have seen the negatives under the light using the magnifier, but not the cropped and touched-up final results.
My fingers nervously run the scales over the top page. Though they have both seen them, I don’t want a lot of witnesses as I look at my magazine-size images for the first time. In fact, I want to share this moment only with Curran. After all, his reputation and my self-esteem are tied up in these photographs.
I look up at KaZi, who’s paying an unusual amount of attention to her cuticles, and hope she gets the hint.
Finally she glances sideways at Curran. “You got panty hose yet?”
He dumbly shakes his head.
“You need them to wash dreads. I’ll buy you a pair at lunch. But you got to pay. For lunch, too.”
“That’s cool.” Curran bops his head. That must mean Tai ponied up the bonus she promised him if she was pleased with his work. My stomach clinches at the thought of what Tai would consider good shots of the “before” me.
As she turns to leave, Curran says to KaZi, “I’m hittin’ the shore this weekend. Dip my dreads in the ocean. Drying in the sun will tighten ’em down quick. You down for that?”
KaZi comes close to smiling. “Probably.”
“Cool!” He leaps forward to follow her.
As they wander away from my door in the too-cool slouch of a matched set, I realize I’ve just witnessed a twenty-first-century mating ritual. I feel somehow deserted.
It’s not that I hadn’t had in the back of my mind thoughts that KaZi would make a great East Coast girlfriend for Curran. I could just have used a few minutes more of his best-bud adoration to get me through the ordeal of the photos. In return I would have bought him panty hose.
Okay, I didn’t understand the connection between washing dreads and panty hose, but I don’t have to. This is not my generation.
Ah, love.
Ah-choo!
As I wipe my nose I tell myself this is not a real cold, but a reaction to the stress of the last weeks.
I’ve had a few days to compare my weekend dealings with the two men in my life. Well, the two men I dealt with over the weekend.
William handled things remarkably well, considering. More than the physical, he showed me the possibilities of my future. His methods might be unorthodox, but he punched a big crack in the wall of my life. For the first time in a long time I see the sunshine on the other side.
Still, I’m too wise in the ways of the world—okay, too old—to attach romantic destiny to the magic. Men look a lot better if you don’t tack forever over their snapshots. William had a great moment just when I needed someone in my life to be great. I’m too grateful to expect more. So, just as he suspected, I won’t be calling him, but not because of the reason he feared.
Things with Jacob haven’t gone so well. We’ve talked on the phone three times in the two days since my announcement.
He called Monday evening to apologize for not “being there” for me. Then he told me how he had had a chance to think things over, and while it would be nice to think about another child, it wasn’t practical in any sense.
I made the mistake of agreeing about the practical part. Before I knew it, he was planning doctor visits and making a payment plan to cover his share of the not-having-the-baby expenses. I told him thanks, but those weren’t the expenses I hoped he would bear. I said I thought he might want to be part of the baby’s life. He said I was trying to control things. Not giving him options. It went downhill from there.
I shouldn’t count call number two because I had hung up on him to end call number one. He was still shouting, and so I hung up again.
The phone didn’t ring again until late afternoon yesterday. He was at the airport, heading for Bogotá.
“Lu, be reasonable. Think what this could do to your health. Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but turning fifty means you’re grandmother material. Many a twentysomething single mother can’t cope. I don’t want you to be a victim of Post Blue Baby syndrome.”
“I assume you mean postpartum depression.” He and Davin share this tic of wrong-word association.
“Yeah, that’s it. Besides, you have a career to think about. I know you can’t afford child care. Jeez, Lu. A baby stuck in day care at six weeks! Think of the harm you’d be exposing it to.”
“You’re not winning me over, you know that.”
“I’m trying to consider what’s best for all.”
“Including me? Because the best thing for me would be unconditional support for whatever comes.”
There’s a long silence. “Don’t do this, Lu. You will regret it.”
I think about this, and almost say that of all the things I really regret the one I regret the most is that closure weekend in February. But that’s no longer true. I’m excited about the prospect of being a new mother again. Coping with family and friends is another issue altogether.
I reach for the portfolio. Somehow it is now easier to face my face in print than to entertain thoughts of future conversations with Jacob.
It comes as a shock when I spread out the layout pages and see my face. It is mine, surely. But I don’t quite recognize myself. The images are black and white. But more, they are truly old-fashioned glamour photos like those Curran hoped to emulate. While the subject isn’t quite an aging classic beauty—say Katharine Hepburn or Lena Horne—Curran saved me from the Bette Davis/Joan Crawford spooky painted look.
What I notice first is not the ravages of time—as Tai so kindly dubbed the concept of the “before” pictures before she even saw them—but the life within my face. I didn’t realize I have a jaw that angular, or cheekbones that prominent. Yes, the shadows reveal fine-line wrinkles, but more, they show a depth of things I haven’t noticed before. There seems to be wisdom in those heavy-lidded eyes, an acceptance of life in the softening of a generous mouth. I look content. Until the last photo.
I remember the moment, when I thought to myself, I can’t do this! That is an image I recognize. That startled expression is the shape of my life these days. It could be titled “Home Alone—And Other Middle-Age Atrocities.”
I fold up the layout and push it away.
The good news is Tai is out of town for the week, at an Italian Alps run, slogging through air-deficient regions of Italy. What a waste of a great vacation. But I do not begrudge her one exhausting moment of the trip. For it’s giving me the breather I need to take care of some personal business.
I look d
own at the want ads I just managed to tuck away when Curran entered. There are a remarkable number of low-paying journalism-type jobs available. Who’s going to hire a pregnant woman? That’s the real question. Because my days at Five-O are numbered, given Tai’s ultimatum and my decision.
She said we’d talk when she returned. It will no doubt go something like this.
“You’re ready for lipo?”
“No.”
“Face-lift?”
“No.”
“Surely, Botox.”
“No, and never.”
“You’re fired.”
“I figured.”
Realizing that I’m rubbing my tummy, I stop, hoping no one saw me. Had to tell the Radish it was indigestion when she caught me at it this morning. But that story won’t fly much longer. At three months and counting, I’m outgrowing even my elastic waists. My bras are bulging to an embarrassing degree. So, before the word is on the street, I plan to hit both my fledglings with one big mother of a stone this weekend.
16
Dallas is letting her hair grow. Lucy, the wedding consultant, told her that all New York Times-hopeful brides wear their hair long or up for their portraits, giving them a timeless look. An up-to-the-moment fashion image quickly dates itself. This decision was made a week after the Oscars and three days after Dallas got a Halle Berry pixie cut. It’s been over a year, yet Dallas is still a long way from flowing locks. Her hair has reached yet another unmanageable stage. As she enters, carrying a leather backpack for our Saturday-night sleepover, she looks like a Hobbit.
“I know,” Dallas says after she’s hugged me at the door and I’ve swept back a thick chunk of hair from her brow before giving it a kiss. “My hair’s a mess. Lucy says that if by my portrait date it isn’t long enough to be slicked back with a chignon hair piece, I should consider extensions.”
“Why can’t Lucy just admit that you have a face made for short hair.” I watch her finger-comb the same chunk of hair back from her quite pretty heart-shaped face. “All that hair overwhelms your delicate features.”
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