Lauren Takes Leave

by Gerstenblatt, Julie

  “Really?” Martha asks, clearly intrigued but not yet quite believing me.

  “Abso-lutely.” I begin wild gesticulations to add authentication to my tale. “She’s, like, yea high and she has, like, brownish-blackish-blondish hair that’s not too long or short and is basically straight when it isn’t curly. I think you know her. Her mom’s on the board of ed, maybe?”

  “Lucy Williams?” She is really getting into it now, going through her mental Rolodex of faces. “Fourth grade?”

  “Perhaps. Could have been third or fifth, though. Here. Evidence.” I put the remainder of the slightly damp confection in her hand. “But now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to run…I have a parent meeting in five,” I add, pushing open the bathroom door.

  “But wait! Mrs.…Lauren. Are you back from jury duty?”

  “Nope…case starts tomorrow. Could be a really long trial. Don’t you worry, though; I’ll call the sub service. Unless you want to continue filling in?”

  Martha’s brain is still catching up, and I’m not about to let it finish processing.

  “Nope? Then, see ya!”

  And with that, I am off across the quad and through the double doors of the middle school building.

  “That is hi-lari-ous!” Kat declares from her bar stool perch. She swivels around a few times, beer glass in hand. “Jim, isn’t that hi-lari-ous?”

  “Yup,” Jim concurs, handing each of us another Jell-O shot. Kat takes one, but I decline.

  “To the diministration!” Kat toasts, holding the small paper cup high over her head before sucking the contents out in one giant slurp.

  “You sure?” Jim asks me, still holding the extra Jell-O shot. The three of us were hired by the Hadley School District around the same time, in our twenties, when Jell-O shots were a fun diversion from grading homework after school. At some point, I stopped joining the fun, but Kat and Jim still go out at least once a month.

  “I’ve got to get home to the kids soon, relieve the babysitter. One-eighth of grain alcohol a day is plenty for me, thanks.”

  “Always so responsible, Lauren is,” Kat pipes in.

  “Wise for someone so short, Kat is,” I reply.

  “How’s that babysitter working out?” Jim asks. “The one you found on Craigslist last summer?”

  I shrug. “Oh, you know. Same. Horrible.”

  “You haven’t fired her yet?” Kat laughs. “I thought you were going to get rid of her at, like, Christmas. That was…” She counts on her fingers. “Four months ago!”

  “Yeah, but who can fire someone at Christmastime?”

  “Scrooge!” they both call out together.

  “Jinx!” Kat adds, clearly tipsy.

  “So why don’t you fire her now?” Jim adds.

  “Because I need her. I hate her, but I need her. Otherwise, I can’t go to work.”

  “So, don’t go to work!” Kat says, taking the last Jell-O shot from Jim’s hand and inhaling it. Like it’s that simple, I think. “Hey, speaking of work, where is Jim Number Two?”

  “You mean James, the other physical education teacher?” Jim asks.

  “Yup,” Kat hiccups. “And Bo, the sort of lady one?”

  Jim leans in close, whispering conspiratorially in Kat’s ear. His short-sleeved T-shirt stretches tight across the Hulk muscles in his chest and arms. “I told them they couldn’t make it.”

  Kat’s momentary confusion is replaced with a knowing smile. “Ah! Very crafty!”

  I wink, then wave in their general direction as I leave Flannigan’s, though neither one is looking at me. It might be Kat calling out “See ya tomorrow, Lauren!” over Def Leppard, but I don’t reply.

  Chapter 5

  On my way home, my cell phone rings. Moncrieff comes up on the screen, so I answer and put it on speakerphone. “Jodi!”

  “I can’t talk right now,” a husky whisper responds, wrapping my car in her distinctive voice.

  “Then why did you call me?”

  “I mean, I want to talk to you—I need to talk to you—only I’ve gotta go.”

  “Why is everyone doing this to me today?” I ask no one in particular, since Jodi’s already hung up.

  Two minutes later, Jodi calls back as I’m pulling into my driveway. I idle in the car to listen to her tirade.

  Jodi, like Kat, is one of my good friends. I met them both at Hadley Middle School, though Jodi stopped working right before her first daughter was born. “Why would I want to be with someone’s else’s children when I could just be with mine?” she’d said one day in the teachers’ lounge, rubbing her diamond-encrusted left hand across her protruding belly. No one could come up with a sufficient retort, so we all just shrugged in her general direction and let her go.

  Actually, no one ever can come up with a sufficient retort to anything that Jodi says, ever. Not her husband, her mother, her best friends, her kids, or any poor worker bee forced to deal with her wishes at any hotel, restaurant, or store of any kind. It’s all in her delivery. That, plus the fact that she’s disarmingly gorgeous. Suffice it to say that, in this universe at least, Jodi’s always right, even when she’s completely wrong.

  Some people find this behavior of hers shallow and aggressive. I find her self-absorption wholly refreshing.

  In small doses.

  I tune back in to her drama of the moment. “What was that? Is this about shoes?” I ask.

  “Ugh! Yes! Aren’t you even listening? I was in Palazzo Shoes and I was just trying to return a pair of Manolos, but the woman was giving me such a hard time,” she moans.

  Jodi has a way of elongating words so that they sound, well, naughty.

  “But that’s not why I’m calling. Let’s meet for lunch. I have something important to discuss. Oh, PTA call coming through.”

  We agree to get together soon, and then she disconnects midsentence.

  Inside the house, the kids are glued to the television set and Laney is nowhere to be found—again.

  I actually panic for a moment: Did she leave early? Could the kids have arrived home from school without her waiting there to open the door? Child neglect! I think of the court case I’ve been assigned to.

  I will have to prosecute Laney.

  But then I will be prosecuted for hiring an illegal. No good.

  I know she didn’t arrive until after the morning rush, because I had to put the kids on the bus. Then she gave me some attitude and disappeared into the depths of the house. And after that? My mind flashes to a terrible scene: Laney lying dead somewhere, our immigrant babysitter, with no identification except her Planet Fitness membership. How would I describe her to the police? As a beautiful, twenty-two-year-old Latina who chose to tramp herself up with long blond Shakira hair and really tight stretch jeans? A man in blue would come to my door with just a diamond belly stud in his palm, and I would burst into tears.

  “Laney!” I shout. “Donde esta?”

  She emerges from the basement slowly, with her head down. I can tell instantly that she’s in one of her black moods, but I don’t care. She’s not dead! My children were not neglected, exactly. I practically hug her.

  “Hola,” she mopes.

  “Hola!”

  Laney sighs. “There is so much laundry.”

  “Yes!”

  “I just couldn’t…” She gestures toward the kitchen. I turn and see that nothing—and I mean nothing—has changed in the kitchen since I left the house at 8:00 this morning. Some dishes are piled in the sink and some are holding firm at the spots on the island where the kids ate half their breakfast. It’s like a ghost-town kitchen, or something dug up from Pompeii, abandoned yet completely intact. It’s an art installment at the Whitney: Still Life with Sour Milk.

  “What the—?” I crush an enormous ant underfoot for emphasis.

  “I just couldn’t…” She trails off. Because really, what is there to say? We both know that she hasn’t cared about her job for a long time.

  We stand in silence for a moment, evaluating
the tangled mess of the kitchen and the inertia in our respective lives.

  Then I remember Laney’s text from earlier in the day, which I never responded to. She perks up considerably when I tell her that, yes, she can leave a half hour early tonight to catch a train into the city for a concert at Madison Square Garden.

  She consults her watch. “So, I go in…twenty-seven minutes?”

  “Sure, Laney. Knock yourself out.” She does mental calculations. That gives her roughly seven minutes to clean the kitchen and twenty minutes to style her hair—no doubt with my ceramic straightening iron.

  “Okay!” she decides, clapping her hands together like, now I’m really going to get down to work!

  When Laney calls out her good-byes a few minutes later and the screen door slams behind a trail of spicy perfume, I breathe a sigh of relief.

  My house, my kids, my little world. “Ben and Becca! Time for dinner!” I sing, imagining the nice family conversation we will have huddled around the table.

  “Ow!” Ben cries from the sunroom.

  “Give it back!” Becca wails.

  “No! It’s mine!”

  There is a crashing sound. I reach the sunroom in time to tear my kids apart, yelling something asinine like, “Stop it this instant! One of you could lose an eye!”

  When that doesn’t get them to lay off each other, I reach deep into my bag of mom tricks for more powerful weapons. “No television for the rest of the night! No dessert! No stories before bed?”

  Not working. Ben is now kicking Becca and she is pulling his hair.

  I throw a biggie at them. “If you don’t get off each other right now, Jackie won’t come to babysit this week!”

  Instantly, they jump apart. Becca smooths her hair back from her face, and Ben sucks his lips in tight. Both are straight-backed and at army-like attention, with their big eyes on me.

  My kids love Jackie more than they’ll ever love me. She’s an education major at a local college who is so popular with neighborhood kids that I have to book her sometimes months in advance. If she didn’t come to sleep over on Thursday night, they’d be devastated.

  “Now, that’s more like it,” I sigh. “Come have dinner.”

  “What is it?” Ben asks.

  “Mac and cheese and chicken nuggets.”

  “Again?” they complain in unison.

  “Laney was supposed to make meatloaf, but she didn’t. Sorry.”

  “You could make something else,” Becca suggests, “like a call for sushi.”

  “Maybe tomorrow,” I muse.

  The kids are tucked into their beds and I am nursing a headache. I can hear Doug in the shower when I come up from the basement, having just folded the laundry that Laney left in the dryer.

  I go into the bathroom and knock on the glass wall. “Hi!” I call out.

  He wipes away some condensation so that I can sort of see him in there. He waves.

  “How was your day?” I ask.

  “Whah?” he answers over the running water.

  I try again, louder. “How was…nothing,” I say. “Forget it.” I already know the answer.

  I turn to the bedroom door handle where I have hung the dry cleaning, and begin removing it from its plastic wrap. I open the closet and push aside my cheerleading uniform from high school. Laney borrowed it for a costume party and actually returned it. Surprise.

  Doug opens the shower door. “Hey, Lauren? Where’d you go?”

  “I’m here,” I call from the bedroom.

  “Is that a new pocketbook I saw downstairs?”

  “Not new!” I yell. Technically, this is true. Sophie said it had been used once for a Chloe ad.

  After a moment’s pause, Doug says, “Really? Because I haven’t seen it before.”

  “That doesn’t make it new.”

  “The blue one?”

  “Right.”

  “Huh.”

  “Also,” I say, “if I may point out, I am working hard. I know that my paycheck is needed for real stuff, like our electricity, for instance. But sometimes it’s nice to…break out a little bit. Splurge on something. To make me feel…”

  “Can you hand me a new razor?” Doug interrupts.

  I go into the hall closet and come back, still talking. “Just to make me feel…special.” I pass the razor through the mist. He closes the door behind him and we go back to raised voices.

  “Lauren, those ‘special’ items are things like college funds and 401Ks! Not Gucci bags.”

  “Chloe,” I correct.

  “Who’s she?”

  “Nobody new, that’s for sure.” I’ll have to bury the new Chloe dustcover that the bag came with in the back of my underwear drawer. No need to invite further suspicion.

  I’ve tried to talk to Doug about my feelings, really I have. It’s not like I want to lie. I’d love to be able to come home and say, Look at my gorgeous new pocketbook! Don’t you just love it? And he’d sigh and say, It’s just what you’ve always wanted. I’m so happy for you. But anyone with a husband knows that that’s about as realistic as a Disney princess movie. And so, the big purchases get hidden. They come into the house when he’s not home, the shopping bags magically disappear, and then the items get seamlessly added into the rotation as if they were there all along.

  It doesn’t matter if the conversation is about shopping, or about traveling, or, most recently, about feeling these urges to party like it’s 1999. He always shuts me down. We don’t have money. We don’t have time. Can we talk about this later? When I’m not exhausted from work?

  I finish hanging the dry cleaning and raise my voice over the shower. “I’m going downstairs to watch TV. You coming?”

  “In a few. I have to return a call from my client at Bank of America first.”

  “Okay.”

  “What’s for dinner?” Doug shouts, as an afterthought.

  “Nothing!” I say. Since returning to work when Becca turned two, I have sucked at making dinner, and Laney has not been a great help. Why is preparing dinner nightly my job? Why are all the things I did when not working—like scheduling doctors’ appointments, getting presents for birthday parties, going to the supermarket and dry cleaner’s—still my job exclusively now that I work full-time again, just like Doug? Sometimes I wonder who put me in charge.

  And then I wonder what would happen if I just decided one day not to be.

  Chapter 6

  Tuesday

  I roll down the window of my car and pull up to the security booth at the courthouse parking lot. As instructed, the special juror permit is on my windshield, and I motion to it while saying good morning to the guard. He barely looks up from his newspaper as he waves me through. “Thanks!” I call. “Have a nice day!”

  Making my way up to the main entrance, I’m feeling rather cheerful indeed. My first day as a juror! I have purchased a new notepad for the occasion, as suggested by the bailiff yesterday, to jot down any technical notes from the case that I might need to recall during deliberation. While waiting in line at the metal detector, I sip my coffee and imagine the jury deadlocked. Flipping through my notebook, I will find the one loophole to knock the whole case wide open. Juror number four saves the day!

  Law & Order has messed with my head.

  I enter the juror waiting room attached to our courtroom on the fifth floor. “Morning,” I say to the group.

  “That it is, doll,” Sweetheart says. No one looks up. Carrie gives a little wave, but her eyes are glued to her BlackBerry.

  “You smuggled yours in, too?” I ask. She nods faintly in reply, not looking up from her screen.

  It was a risky move, but I really wanted to listen to a new mix I made off of iTunes, so I hid my phone deep in my pocketbook and told the security guard that I didn’t have my phone on me.

  I thought I was being such a rebel. Apparently, I was only following the herd.

  No one’s chatty this morning, so I take out my iPhone and pretend to be busy. Something catches my eye as t
he incoming e-mails unroll down the screen. There’s a message from “lkatzenberg.” Lenny. I scroll back through the uploading messages to find it, but just then a bailiff enters and clears her throat. I drop the phone into my pocketbook.

  “Hello, jurors, my name is Delilah and I am the bailiff assigned to this case.” Delilah is such a feminine name for this woman standing before me, with no makeup on her cocoa skin and her black hair pulled back tightly into a bun. Women in uniforms always look like men to me, even if they are wide hipped and big bosomed like Delilah. She fingers the gun in her holster and I snap back to attention.

  “The judge and the lawyers for the case are in chambers right now, preparing for the start of the trial. Until the judge tells me to call you in, you will stay here. In this room, you may eat, you may talk to each other, and”—she looks my way—“you may use your cell phones, as long as the other jurors don’t mind.” She then tells us how to find the bathrooms on the floor and warns us to be prepared to wait for a while. “Could be up to an hour, give or take, depending.” She shrugs before leaving the room.

  “Depending on what?” Sweetheart asks after she’s gone. “That doesn’t make no sense!”

  “Any,” Carrie says emphatically. “Doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Exactly.” He nods in agreement and smiles at her. Carrie returns the smile hesitantly. Then she looks my way and rolls her eyes.

  One older woman takes out some Sudoku puzzles and another one picks up the novel she’s been reading. A young guy gets up to stretch and tells us that he’ll be on a call in the hallway. “Come get me if the judge needs us, okay?” I remember him from yesterday, the guy with a new job. Poor thing. He thinks work matters.

  Then I remember the e-mail. Leonard. I can’t remember our last exchange, exactly, except that I had the feeling I’d somehow pissed him off. In the midst of all the junk e-mails from department stores, I find his note.

  Subject: New Video

  From: lkatzenberg@yale.alumni.edu

  Date: April 10

  To: laurenworthing@gmail.com

  Hey All,

  I have posted my new video on YouTube. Please take a look, and share the link if you like it. (If not, forget I ever mentioned it.)