by Laura Zigman
18
Patricia was coming over for dinner on Saturday night, and whenever Patricia came out to Larchmont on a weekend night she slept over. In her mind, Larchmont was “the country,” and because it was “the country” she thought it didn’t make sense to travel that far for anything less than an overnight.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said when Julia picked her up at the train just after six. “But a Thermage appointment opened up at the last minute and I figured I’d squeeze it in.”
“What’s Thermage?” Julia asked, reaching for one of Patricia’s three overnight bags.
“It’s the latest advance in nonsurgical wrinkle management and prevention.”
“You sound like a press release.”
“I am a press release. Thermage is a client.”
Julia put Patricia’s luggage and a shopping bag full of presents for Leo into the trunk of the Volvo. “What do you need with wrinkle management and prevention? You don’t have any wrinkles.”
“But I will.”
“But you don’t yet.”
“But I would if I didn’t do things like this.”
“But you’re only thirty-six.”
“So are you.”
“I know.”
“So what’s your point?” Patricia said with her low-slung tight jeans, her expertly highlighted blond hair, and her trademark firm ass that seemed to be defying science by becoming firmer as Patricia got older.
“That you’re too young for wrinkles.”
Patricia laughed and slid into the car. “The only one who’s too young for wrinkles is my Scoob. Now take me to him.”
They left the parking lot and made a quick stop at the supermarket to pick up a few last-minute items Peter needed for dinner. He was preparing an incredibly complicated sounding four-cheese vegetable lasagna (having deviated from his original intention of making an incredibly complicated sounding three-meat lasagna after remembering that Patricia didn’t eat meat) from Cook’s Illustrated—a magazine so infinitely detailed and complex and with so many directions and ingredients and diagrams it was the perfect match for Peter’s obsessive-compulsive love of order and perfection. Then they stopped at the local Blockbuster Video to get a movie to watch after dinner.
Julia and Patricia traced the outer perimeter of the store, looking from floor to ceiling at all the new releases—most of which, at almost seven p.m. on a Saturday night, had already been taken out. But after coming to the end of the line and being unable to agree on a single thing to rent—Patricia had seen everything, Julia had seen nothing—Patricia suggested they rent some of Mary Ford’s old movies.
“Do we have to?” Julia said. She wanted to forget about Mary Ford, not host a Mary Ford Film Retrospective in her living room.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what you do when you’re a big-time publicist. You show off your client to anyone who will listen.”
By the time they got home, the house was filled with the smells of Peter’s dinner. Leo was in his favorite pajamas—the ones with the moons and planets from The Gap that were way too small for him with rips in both knees that neither Peter nor Julia had been able to talk him out of—and when he saw Patricia and she saw him, both their faces instantly lit up. Watching Patricia lift him into her arms, Julia couldn’t help registering her taut biceps and triceps and her shocking lack of underarm flab and wondered what, if anything, Thermage could do for other parts of the body besides one’s face.
After a long hug, Patricia finally gave Leo the bag of presents she’d brought for him: a faux-leather bomber jacket from a French children’s clothing store on Madison, two Bob the Builder videos, and the Thomas the Tank Engine battery-operated Carousel and Zoo Animals set. Overwhelmed and overjoyed, he disappeared into the living room, where he remained amazingly quiet and distracted for the next hour during the last part of Peter’s dinner preparations.
“I thought you always said he couldn’t cook,” Patricia said, clearly impressed, when Peter at long last brought the picture-perfect lasagna and salad and basket of garlic bread to the table before disappearing again into the kitchen.
“He didn’t. Until I went back to work. At first he seemed to be doing it out of necessity but now he’s really into it. It’s like Martha Stewart moved in. Not that I’m complaining, of course.”
Patricia’s eyebrow went up. “Yes, you are.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. You’re thinking he should get a job already—a real job.”
“This is a real job. Being home, taking care of a child. I mean, I should know. I did it for almost four years.” Julia rolled her eyes and laughed a little too loud.
“Hey, I don’t blame you,” Patricia said. “I’d probably be thinking the same thing if I were married and my husband was starting to like being home a little too much. Although I must say—” she paused long enough to look around at the neat and well-organized room and smell the food, “I think I could get used to this.”
Julia nodded. So could she.
“Then what’s the problem?” Patricia pressed.
“There is no problem.”
“But?”
“But yes,” Julia finally conceded. “I’m thinking he should get a real job already.”
“Any leads?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t talk about it?”
“Not anymore.”
Julia had assumed Peter stopped talking about his visits to the executive placement office because things had been so hectic with her travel schedule, but now she wondered if he was losing interest in his hunt for gainful employment. He certainly had his hands full with Leo and Batman and coffee after drop-off with the preschool moms. Not to mention all the cooking and shopping and household chores, which, now that she thought about it, she didn’t miss at all, and which he was far better at than she ever was.
Case in point: the architectural-baking project that was now well under way. The house had reeked of gingerbread when she’d come home on Friday, and when she’d opened the refrigerator there were all the pieces baked and carefully wrapped and waiting to be assembled. All the obscure black licorice candies had been located and purchased and even the family schedule flow-chart had been updated to include his scheduled timetable of progress, with turquoise squares labeled Gingerbread in heavy concentration all week. By Saturday morning the house was glued together, and by the time she’d done her errands in the afternoon and come back from the train station and video selection process with Patricia, the roof was covered with rows of black licorice discs and the shutters cut from grape Fruit Roll-Ups were hung.
Not exactly the project-from-hell she’d experienced.
She wanted to explain to Patricia that there was a difference between not missing the housework and all the labor involved with being home with The Scoob and missing being home with The Scoob himself, but it was too hard.
Or maybe she just couldn’t explain it to herself.
Peter had a cold bottle of white wine in one hand and the digital camera in the other when he came back to the dining room. Patricia, thinking he was going to take a snapshot of her and Julia, leaned across the table and posed, smiling.
He looked confused. “Oh. Okay,” he said finally, as if suddenly understanding the misunderstanding. “Let me just get a few shots of the food and then I’ll take one of the two of you.”
If the food hadn’t looked and smelled so spectacularly good, Patricia probably would have made merciless fun of Peter for taking pictures of the food, but once she tasted the lasagna and the salad and the bread, she was silenced. By the time dessert arrived—in the form of a chocolate layer cake with mocha butter cream frosting that Peter had made using another incredibly complicated recipe from Cook’s Illustrated—Patricia herself picked up the camera and took the pictures. Already impressed by Peter’s startling range of domestic abilities (his cooking, his reorganization and reconfiguration
and creation of “new and improved household flow” he’d described during dinner, and the chart with all the colored blocks of time she had seen in the kitchen), Patricia was about to be even more impressed when Julia, who had gotten up from the table sometime after nine to put Leo to bed, returned to the dining room, Scoob-less.
“He wants you,” she said to Peter, forcing a smile. Then she turned to Patricia and continued to smile as if her life depended on it—which, given her fragile working-mother’s ego right now, it kind of did. “He usually wants me to put him to bed. But I guess since I’ve been away, he’s gotten attached to Peter.”
Peter tried to contain himself but he couldn’t help grinning. “We’ve started doing this new thing,” he said. “It’s called ‘Making a Sandwich.’” He stood up at the table, wiped his mouth, and took one last bite of cake and swig of coffee. “After I read to him, we get the long body pillow from our room and I roll him up in it.”
“Since when does he know what a wrap is?” Julia said, incredulous, as if he couldn’t possibly have changed that much to have learned about wrap sandwiches in the short time she’d been working.
“He doesn’t know what a wrap sandwich is,” he said, putting his arm around Julia and kissing her in an attempt to be reassuring. “He just calls it a sandwich because he’s inside the pillow.”
Peter told them to leave the dishes and start the movie without him since it might be a while, so Julia went into the living room with the Blockbuster bag and got very busy with the videotape boxes in an attempt to hide her devastation from Patricia. But it didn’t work.
“I don’t get it. Aren’t you relieved?” Patricia said, settling onto the couch with her wine and helping Julia with one of the video boxes. “I mean, it gives you a break, a little time to relax.”
Julia glanced up at the ceiling above the living room and tried to ignore the peals of laughter coming from Leo’s bedroom.
“Especially after the week you had with the whole white limousine debacle and the hotel fire alarm.”
And she didn’t even know the half of it. Within minutes Julia filled her in on everything except that first fateful plane ride—the veal chop incident, the PETA situation, and the solution she’d come up with which Jack had told her only made matters worse for the already doomed Legend product launch.
“This Lindsay Green sounds like a real piece of work,” Patricia said.
“Like mother, like daughter. Do you know anything about her?”
Patricia shrugged. “Not much. Just that the two of them never got along because Mary always put herself and her career first. And that like every child whose parents ignored them growing up, Lindsay Green will probably spend the rest of her adult life trying to get her mother’s attention.”
Julia was reminded of what Jonathan had said before she’d gone home the previous night—that for people like Mary’s daughter, even negative attention is better than no attention.
“They’re that desperate,” he’d said.
Julia couldn’t imagine being that desperate (assuming desperation was even quantifiable) for attention. But as the laughter upstairs died down and she imagined Peter snuggling with Leo, squished against the protective side guard rails, she was suddenly able to imagine herself doing lots of ridiculous and infantile things to win Leo back.
“I think I remember her shopping around a novel some time ago,” Patricia said, handing Julia a videotape to slip into the machine. “But there were no takers. Maybe if it had been nonfiction she would have had better luck.”
Julia turned the lights out, settled into the other corner of the couch, and pressed the Play button on the remote to start What I Did for Love.
“I remember when I first saw this,” Patricia whispered while the opening credits were still rolling. “I was fourteen, in ninth grade, going to boy-girl make-out parties every weekend; learning how to smoke, how to French-kiss. One night my friends and I took the train from Greenwich into Manhattan to the Thalia on the Upper West Side, where they used to show old movies. It was so romantic and she was so beautiful. We all fell as hopelessly in love with Mary Ford as we did with Ray Milland.”
An ill-fated romance set in England at the end of World War II and shot entirely in black-and-white, What I Did for Love was a star vehicle in the most classic sense of old studio pictures. Tall, willowy, and sophisticated, with luminous skin and a voice that was subtle and melodious and deeply affecting, Mary Ford, it appeared finally, was everything she had once been cracked up to be.
Later that night, after Julia got Patricia settled in the guest room, and after she’d done the dishes, since Peter had fallen asleep with Leo while putting him to bed, and after she ejected the video from the VCR and slid it into its box and put the box in the new mudroom area in a basket marked Out-Going, Julia stood in the kitchen. It was quiet, and still, and except for the sound of the dishwasher heaving its way through its cycles there wasn’t a sound in the whole house. Standing alone by the sink with everyone asleep upstairs, she felt both lonely and peaceful. This had always been her favorite part of the day—when it was dark and silent and she could sit at the table for a few minutes before bed and think about things—but the last few weeks since she’d returned to work had been such a blur of activity and anxiety and exhaustion that she hadn’t had a moment to call her own.
Peter’s digital camera was on the table, still out of its case from dinner, and she couldn’t help smiling when she thought of him coming into the dining room with the camera to take a picture of the food he had prepared and Patricia thinking he wanted to take a picture of her. She turned on the camera and started to scroll through the photos he had just taken of the lasagna and the chocolate layer cake. Scrolling back beyond that, she started looking at all the other digital pictures Peter had taken during the days she’d been at work and the week she’d been out of town—a 1950s-worthy baked macaroni and cheese casserole topped with breadcrumbs for Leo, a deep brown pot roast surrounded with carrots and potatoes and laid out on a platter, a stack of pancakes with melted butter and warm syrup dripping down the sides. Had the photos been only of food, Julia might have started to feel as if Peter were in the throes of some strange and almost pornographic food fetish—creating mouthwatering dishes, posing and arranging them in sensual tableaus, and then photographing them for future enjoyment—but in all the pictures (except for those taken that night and the one he’d made of the chicken potpie), there was Leo, beaming with pride:
This was Daddy’s food; this was food Daddy had made for him, for the two of them to share.
Julia dug deeper, searching for other clues to what Peter and Leo had been doing without her. Back in the mudroom, she found his little backpack (which was now, of course, in a deep metal bin marked Backpacks) and, on the shelf above it, a large black box marked Leo’s Artwork. Inside it were all the little art projects he had done at school since she’d been gone—handprints and wax paper leaves; pumpkins cut out of orange construction paper and bats cut out of black paper—and she realized suddenly half the fall was gone and Halloween was right around the corner and she hadn’t even thought about what Leo was going to be, what he was going to wear.
Going through the box and looking at each piece of paper he had brought home—pieces of paper with sometimes nothing more than a single sparkle glued to it, or a single crayon mark, or a single sticker stuck in the center of the page, but always with his name at the bottom, written by one of the teachers in straight block letters—she thought about how her parents had kept her artwork in a drawer to the left of the refrigerator, in the house they still lived in but in the drawer that wasn’t there anymore, and how, except for an occasional drawing on the refrigerator stuck on with a tag of shiny, gummy Scotch tape, they almost never hung any of her pictures up the way her friends’ families did—their sons’ and daughters’ drawings and paintings tacked onto cabinets, the backs of doors, bedroom and bathroom walls; houses filled with the sounds and activity and energy of happy children.
>
But the house she grew up in was different. It was quiet and she was quiet and no one knew how to have fun.
Still looking through the pile of his efforts, she remembered reading in one of the child-rearing books that instead of hanging up every single piece of a child’s artwork, parents should be selective—choosing, perhaps, one piece a week to display in order to preserve the sense of specialness. Unwilling to risk being stingy with her affections or withholding of her praise—and unable to pick a single favorite—Julia decided on three—one for every week she’d been at work—and hung them on the refrigerator door with two dinosaur magnets and one brightly colored interlocking-gear magnet.
Ready, finally, to leave the kitchen and call it a night, her attention once again was drawn to Peter’s giant time chart. Staring at it this time, she couldn’t help feeling an urge to change a few things. Making a handful of new orange squares from the supplies left over in the utility drawer, she placed them firmly on the current weekend and on the Friday of the following week when she would be back from the next leg of the Mary Ford tour. Standing back to admire her handiwork—a pointillist abstract picture that represented what their family life was like now—she couldn’t help but feel better when she saw the orange squares breaking up the large blocks of blue Julia at work ones:
Julia home.
Julia home.
Julia home.
19
While Julia was entertaining Patricia, Lindsay Green had spent the weekend bad-mouthing her mother’s perfume—or, rather, the maker of her mother’s perfume—on Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Inside Edition.
And when she wasn’t doing on-camera interviews, she was apparently on eBay selling her mother’s underwear.
“Jesus, Jack,” Julia said when he called her at home on Sunday afternoon. “Who told you?”
“No one.”
“Then how did you find out?”
“Don’t ask.”
Given all the bad publicity, Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s had canceled both of Mary Ford’s appearances scheduled for the end of that coming week—in Chicago and Detroit, respectively—and Jack said he expected Bloomingdale’s to cancel their appearance in Boston and Macy’s to cancel theirs in Orlando as well. All the retailers knew they would have enough to deal with at their flagship stores in Manhattan—the front line for demonstrations and protests by PETA activists (the Manhattan-based national entertainment, fashion, and business media always covered local protests)—let alone having to deal with actual live appearances by Mary Ford.