by Jane Heller
I gave myself the once-over and whistled. I had to admit it: I looked better than I had in years. And after living through The Night From Hell. But how was it possible that I had been transformed while I slept? That I had gone to bed a dumpy matron and woken up a bodacious babe?
Maybe it’s because Mitchell left, I decided. Maybe my body is celebrating.
Whatever the reason for the change in me—of course, I didn’t have a clue then—I embraced it and dressed for the office with absolute gusto, singing in perfect pitch with Bonnie Raitt, Elton John, and Boyz II Men. I chose a blue cotton dress that had been relegated to the back of my closet because it was too tight. It fit like a second skin now, hugging the contours of my body as if it were sprayed on.
When I walked outside to my car, Pete was not only still planted on my front steps, but he greeted me by depositing a puddle of drool on the hem of my dress.
“Shit. Now look what you’ve done,” I said, wondering what I was going to do about the dog.
I marched back inside and quickly called my brother, who was between dogs at the moment.
“Ben, it’s Barbara,” I said when he answered the phone.
“Oh, Barbara. Hi…Uh, just a second, okay?”
His voice was muffled, as if he had a sheet over his head, and there seemed to be someone else in the room with him. Apparently I had interrupted something.
“Sorry,” he said when he came back on the line. “It’s a little early for me. I’m still in bed.”
“I sensed that.”
“So how are you?”
“Pretty good, except that Mitchell left me for a twenty-four-year-old.”
“Mitchell took off?”
“Yup.”
“You must be ecstatic. Mitchell is an asshole. I can’t stand him. Never could.”
Without waiting even a second to consider what I was about to say, I said, “Mitchell has his faults, but the reason you can’t stand him is because he’s successful, Benjamin. You have an abiding resentment for people who are successful.”
My hand flew to my mouth and I gasped. Had I really said that to my brother? My dear sweet brother to whom I had never uttered a harsh or unkind word? What on earth was happening to me?
“Barbara? Did you get up on the wrong side of the bed or something?” he asked.
“No. I’m just saying what I think for a change: You can’t stand people who make a lot of money. You act as if you think capitalists are agents of the devil.” Another outburst. I didn’t even know it was coming. I just opened my mouth and out it came—including the bit about the devil, which, looking back on it now, should have told me something.
“That’s not true, Barbara. It really isn’t.”
But it was true. My forty-four-year-old brother was a deadbeat. A nice deadbeat, but a deadbeat nevertheless. Our parents had been killed in a car accident seven years before and they had left Ben and me a little money in their wills. I saw my inheritance as a cushion, money to be saved for a rainy day. Benjamin saw his as an opportunity to loaf for the rest of his life. He bought fifty acres west of I-95, built a log cabin reminiscent of the commune he had lived and screwed in during the sixties, and spent his time listening to rock ’n’ roll and having sex with half the women in Florida, many of whom he impregnated. In fact, every time I saw a kid with the kinky, prematurely gray hair that runs in our family, I was sure he or she was one of Ben’s offspring.
When he wasn’t spreading his seed around town, he grew things. One year, it was tomatoes. The next, it was orchids. His latest venture was raising emus. When I had asked why, he’d replied, “Why not?”
He had about as much ambition as I had interest in emus, but, aside from some thoroughly uninteresting aunts, uncles, and cousins, he was the only family I had. We loved each other. I hoped to take advantage of that love by dumping Pete on his doorstep.
“Listen, Ben. Remember that black Lab you had?” I asked.
“You mean Jethro? Sure, I remember.”
“Would you like another Lab?”
“Whose is he?”
“That’s a long story. Suffice it to say, he’s mine to give away. Would you take him? Please?”
“Sure, why not? I’ve been thinking about getting another dog. Janice wants one too.”
“Janice?”
“Yeah. My new lady. She moved in last week. Right, honey?”
I heard someone giggling in the background, someone very young, and then I heard Benjamin kissing her—loud, wet smooches. It was nauseating. When he came back on the line, I asked, “What happened to Denise?”
“Nothing,” said Benjamin. “She’s still in my life. As a friend. Janice is her younger sister.”
“What does Janice do?”
“Do?”
“Never mind. I keep forgetting that the word ‘do,’ as in ‘do for a living,’ goes right over your head.”
“Man, you must be more upset about Mitchell’s defection than you’re letting on,” said Benjamin. “You’re really bitchy this morning.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Maybe I’m still in shock about the whole thing.” Was I? Was that the reason for my inexplicable candor?
“Sure. I understand. Now, what do you want me to do about the dog?”
“Would you mind coming over to pick him up? Tonight? I’d bring him to you, but I really don’t want to mess up my car. A messy car is a turn-off to my customers, you know?” I hadn’t shown a house in months and had forgotten what it was like to have customers, but I was hopeful my luck would change, the way everything else about me was changing.
“I’d like to, Barbara, but Janice, Denise, and I are having a séance tonight.”
“A what?”
“A séance. You remember. Where you sit in a dark room and communicate with spirits? Everybody was into them in the sixties.”
“It’s the nineties, Benjamin. When are you going to grow up and get a life?”
I wanted to take the remark back the instant I made it, but it was too late.
“Hey, Barbara. Why don’t you take your dog and your attitude and have a nice day.”
He was about to hang up on me when I stopped him.
“Wait! Ben! Don’t go! I don’t know what I’m saying.”
“Oh, come on. Get mad at me if you want to, but don’t give me the ‘I don’t know what I’m saying’ routine. It’s pretty lame.”
“But it’s true,” I said. How could I explain? I didn’t understand what was happening to me. How could I expect someone else to?
“Fine. Whatever. Anyhow, we’re having this séance tonight at seven o’clock,” Benjamin went on. “Janice and Denise want to get in touch with their grandmother, who died last year without telling anyone the ingredients in her meat loaf. They say Grandma Patrice made unbelievable meat loaf and that if we contact her spirit, maybe she’ll share the recipe with us. It’s worth a shot, don’t you think?”
“You don’t want to know what I think,” I said, wondering what out-there fad Ben would embrace next, trying to imagine how a brother and sister could be so dissimilar. We came from the same rigidly conventional parents, people who would rather die than shock their neighbors, and yet we conducted ourselves in such vastly different ways. Ben coped with our parents’ sanctimoniousness by rebelling, by refusing to move in their narrow world, by pursuing the kind of lifestyle he knew they disdained. I went in the opposite direction; I did exactly what they wanted me to, feared displeasing them, turned myself into a mouse. Where Ben became his own person, I became a nonperson. “Just make sure that if you happen to talk to Mom and Dad while you’re communicating with the spirits, you keep quiet about Mitchell and me,” I added. “They’d be mortified if they found out that their daughter was dumped for a buck-toothed weatherperson. You know how they were.”
“I’ll just give them your best,” said Ben.
“I’d appreciate that. Now, back to the dog. If you can’t come and get him, I guess I’ll have to keep him until tomorrow.”
Jeremy Cook was Ben’s best friend and my least favorite person, aside from Mitchell. A charter fishing boat captain who also sang in a rock ’n’ roll band, Jeremy was an unrepentant redneck—crude, rude, and incredibly infantile. He once took Ted Kennedy fishing and when Kennedy didn’t tip him, Jeremy showed his displeasure by pulling down his pants and mooning the senator. He wasn’t any more dignified with me. In fact, he loathed me as much as I loathed him. It all started when we were in high school. He had asked me to be his date for the prom and, terrified by the idea of spending even five minutes alone with such a wild man (he rode a motorcycle, wore a black leather jacket, and was rumored to have had sex with Miss Peterson, our biology teacher), I had faked sick and stayed home. He never forgave me. Whenever we had the misfortune to run into each other, he made sure I knew how he felt. No, he didn’t moon me; he just treated me as if I were bait fish.
“Do you think Jeremy would mind picking up the dog?” I asked Ben.
“Naw, he loves dogs,” he said.
“Yeah, but he hates me,” I pointed out.
“He does not. He just thinks you need a good…Well, let’s just say he thinks you should loosen up a little.”
“Give me a break,” I said. “When Jeremy Cook says a woman should ‘loosen up a little,’ he means she should climb onto a pool table and dance topless in front of twenty guys who have more tattoos than they do teeth.”
“Barbara, what is it with you this morning?” said Ben.
“Nothing. See if he’ll stop by around six.” I sighed, resigned to the fact that it was either put up with Jeremy’s bullshit or listen to Pete bark. Talk about having to choose between the lesser of two evils. But then I didn’t know the first thing about evil. Not yet.
Chapter 4
It had been nine years since I first became a real estate agent. I had chosen to work at Home Sweet Home because, unlike the other small firms in Banyan Beach, it hadn’t been swallowed up by national chains like Coldwell Banker and Century 21. It was the last remaining independent real estate company in town and that had appealed to me. I was a hometown girl, after all, and I liked the fact that Home Sweet Home was a hometown business, not beholden to some parent company in Omaha or Dallas whose primary interest was in acquiring “units” and then selling them off.
Housed in a candy-pink Victorian building on Main Street, Home Sweet Home was owned by seventy-two-year-old Charlotte Reed, a faded Southern belle who fancied herself the grande dame of Banyan Beach society, even though there was no Banyan Beach society. Not in the way there was a Palm Beach society. There was just a handful of old-moneyed WASPs who had their main residences in places like Locust Valley and Grosse Point but who, when they wanted to get away from it all, repaired to the family compound in “Banyan” and had gads of fun drinking and fishing and pretending they were locals.
A short, benign-looking woman with watery blue eyes and wispy white hair that was always coming loose from her bun, Charlotte Reed could fool you. She appeared to be a ditzy, spacey relic of another time, a woman who had absolutely no head for business, but she was still, after thirty years, in business. A profitable business. Which was no small accomplishment, given that many local businesses had gone under. In recent years, she had delegated the actual running of the office to Althea Dicks, one of Home Sweet Home’s longtime agents, and worked from home, coming in only to conduct her once-a-week meetings, during which she served us tea in delicate little Limoges cups, doled out lumps of sugar with sterling silver tongs, and showed us grainy old photographs of Banyan Beach the way it used to be. An anachronism, that’s what Charlotte Reed was. Completely out of touch with the way real estate brokers operate in the nineties. She was so out of touch that when I once suggested that we get a toll-free number so that Home Sweet Home could attract out-of-state buyers, she asked me what I meant.
“An 800 number,” I explained. “Where the caller doesn’t get charged.”
She gave me a bewildered look and then said that she didn’t care for telephones; she much preferred written correspondence.
“Then what about getting a fax machine for the office?” I asked.
Another bewildered look.
“Fax!” I repeated, louder this time, not knowing whether she didn’t hear or didn’t understand.
She scowled, then drew herself up to her full five feet two.
“I don’t find that sort of language very becoming, dear,” she replied, and walked away.
Ah, Charlotte. As I said, she could fool you. When George Bush’s second cousin went house shopping in Banyan Beach, it was Charlotte who sold him a two-million-dollar estate, not some hotshot from Prudential.
I got to work at ten o’clock that July morning, and the first person I saw was Althea Dicks, who was not only Home Sweet Home’s office manager, but also its resident sourpuss. We had driven into the parking lot at the same time and then walked into the building together.
“What have you done to yourself?” she asked, seeming appalled by my new hair and figure. Althea hated change about as much as everybody hated Althea.
I didn’t know how to answer her question, so I winged it.
“I spent a few days at Canyon Ranch,” I said casually, referring to the expensive health spa in Arizona. Althea was hardly a health spa aficionado and wouldn’t know Canyon Ranch from the Grand Canyon, but she nodded disapprovingly, as she always did when she pictured someone having a good time.
“Were you out with customers early this morning?” I asked.
“What else?” she replied.
“How did it go?” I asked with a twinge of envy. For the past year, I’d had to watch her sell one house after another, even though she was about as engaging as Scrooge.
“The usual,” she said. Her lips were pursed, as if she’d been sucking on lemons instead of showing houses. She was forty-seven, but her grumpiness made her look ten years older. She had short, reddish brown hair, narrow, wary eyes, a tall, thin frame, and terrible posture. If anyone was a candidate for osteoporosis, it was Althea. Brittle personality, brittle bones.
“Tough customers?” I asked.
“Oh, please. Customers today just don’t have their priorities straight. Years ago, I’d show them a house and they’d ask, ‘Is it close to the schools?’ Now, I show them a house and they ask, ‘Is it close to the mall?’ This town isn’t what it used to be and neither are the people who want to live here.”
“I wouldn’t be so quick to put down your customers, Althea,” I said. “Without them, you’d probably be selling vacuum cleaners door to door.”
Her eyes bulged and her cheeks flushed—with good reason. I had never spoken up to Althea Dicks. No one in the office had. At least, not to her face.
Too stunned to reply, she gave me a long, withering look before turning away and proceeding to her desk.
My inability to censor myself was putting a crimp in my ability to make chitchat. But, then, chatting with Althea Dicks was more depressing than reading the obituaries. I wondered how her husband put up with her black moods and long faces, and then I remembered that he was an undertaker.
Suzanne Munson was the only other agent in the office when I arrived. She had just made a fresh pot of coffee in the little kitchen off the conference room and I went in and poured myself a cup.
“Barbara! My God!” she said when she saw me. “You have cheekbones! And your figure! And—you’ve had work done without telling me. Which plastic surgeon did you see? Danford? Milenowski? Who?”
“Come on, Suzanne. You know I’d never go under the knife. I won’t even let the manicurist cut my cuticles.”
“Well then, how come you look like you do?”
“I…I went on one of those liquid diets,” I sputtered. “And I started lifting weights to build up my breast muscles.”
“Wh
at about the hair? You never mentioned anything about wanting to go blond.”
“You know what they say,” I chuckled. “Blondes have more fun. Since I haven’t been having any fun at all lately, I thought it was time for a change.”
“I guess you have been kind of in the dumps lately,” she conceded, knitting her brow in that ultra-concerned way people have when they wonder if you have a drinking problem. The last time I’d seen Suzanne, she had stopped by my house at ten o’clock in the morning and found me finishing off a bottle of Merlot.
“I’ve been better,” I said.
“You haven’t come into the office in days,” she said. “I tried calling you last night, but I kept getting your answering machine.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You should be glad you didn’t reach me though. I wasn’t myself last night.”
“God, I know what you mean,” she said. “I wasn’t myself last night either. I think I had my first hot flash at about nine-fifteen.”
I braced myself for yet another discussion of menopause and how it was to blame for virtually everything that went wrong in a woman’s life. Suzanne was obsessed with menopause. She had read Gail Sheehy’s book so many times that she knew every page by heart, and when she was in her car, she’d listen to the audiotape version, even when customers were in the car with her. Nevertheless, in spite of how well read she was on the subject, she remained undecided on the estrogen/progesterone question and fretted over it whenever there was nothing better to fret over. What made all this particularly silly was the fact that Suzanne was only thirty-five. I once told her that she still had a few good years left before menopause set in, but my comment had only provoked a long discourse on perimenopause, which, she had explained, could strike at any time.
“Listen, Suzanne. I may as well tell you: Mitchell and I are splitting up,” I said. Suzanne had her quirks, but she was my best friend in the office. I had to tell someone about Mitchell and Chrissy and she was the someone.