* * *
I didn’t want a new husband, but a new ride—that was a different story. The dented Honda minivan had kept me and my kids safe for twelve years of carpool lines and road trips, but driving it now felt like piloting a wet mattress, soggy with the tears of an entire generation of unhappy, unappreciated wives forced to drive minivans. I wanted to puke every time I got in it, and not from the smell of stale dog vomit.
However, before I could ditch the Odyssey, I had to prove I owned it. One of the legal documents Marty, the judge, and I had all signed that bizarre day in court was a piece of paper that said the Odyssey was now mine. But the car, like everything we owned, was in Marty’s name. I couldn’t register the car, much less sell it, without the title. My expensive, brilliant lawyer had neglected to get Marty to sign the title over to me. The same husband who couldn’t come home in time for dinner with us for two decades was spending six weeks parasailing in Nice and hiking Mont Blanc. He’d torture me before signing it, if he ever actually did sign it, anyhow.
So I went to the DMV headquarters, feeling like a kid secretly trying to shoot the moon with the queen of spades tucked in my sweaty hand. At eight o’clock, I stood obediently in the hot morning sun waiting for the DMV’s dingy concrete block headquarters to open, amidst North Philadelphia’s boarded-up apartment buildings and auto repair shops with spray-painted signs. Once inside, I sat on a yellow plastic seat next to a plastic plant, both bolted to the floor, feeling like the cheap fluorescent ceiling lights were frying my brain. After forty-five minutes, my number was called.
I walked to the designated cubicle and laid my cards across the Formica counter: the unsigned title with Marty’s name in bold letters, the divorce decree, and the page of our terms sheet with “Leslie shall keep the Honda Odyssey” highlighted in yellow. The clerk was an expressionless African-American woman in a faded 76ers T-shirt, who looked like she could be anywhere from twenty-eight to forty-eight years old.
She looked so bored she could hardly keep her eyes open. I didn’t blame her.
“Can’t do it,” she said after a minute of studying my three documents. “Title needs to be signed over to you by the owner. Sorry.”
She pushed them back. I took a deep breath.
“It was a nasty divorce, ma’am.”
When I said “ma’am,” she raised her eyebrows like she knew I was sucking up to her, which I was.
“You wouldn’t believe what I had to go through to get him to sign this document,” I said quietly, pointing to his signature on the terms sheet.
“It cost me more than a year’s pay to get these papers. He’ll never sign the title. I’ll have to take him to court. It’ll take another year and cost more in legal bills than the car is worth.”
Then I waited. She stared back for a solid five seconds. I didn’t blink. Inside I was whispering please please please. But I knew not to beg. After her reaction to my “ma’am,” I didn’t want to risk triggering her bullshit monitor with any more flattery, for fear my hopes for a new car would go straight into the DMV trash can.
She shook her head as if to say They don’t pay me enough for this crap, then started typing into her computer.
“I’m gonna do it,” she muttered to herself. “But I’m gonna cover my ass, too.”
She typed away, checking the divorce decree date and the judge’s signature.
“What’s your address? Full name? Driver’s license number?”
I gave them all to her, afraid to exhale.
“We’re gonna say this was his gift to you,” she said, not looking at me. “So you don’t have to pay any taxes on the transfer.”
A tiny smile fluttered across her lips.
Then she held up the title and ripped it right through Marty’s name. She kept ripping until the pieces wafted down to her desk like confetti.
I looked around to make sure no other employees were watching.
“Thank you so much,” I whispered, leaning into her. “You have no idea what this means to me.”
She looked at me with eyes the color of Hershey’s chocolate syrup.
“I was married for eighteen years,” she said quietly. “He tried to take everything I worked for. My car. My house. My kids. So honey, I do understand. You’ll get that car title—in your name—in the mail in ten days.”
Sure enough, I did.
* * *
Gorgeous Yoga Man reached out three days later. I read his first text with delight: Hey, L! Great to meet you! Checking up on you. After a few rounds of texting banter, we started talking on the phone at night. At first, the topics centered on our kids. He had a daughter in addition to his son. He was a writer, too, in his spare time, and one evening he recited several of his spoken-word poems. He was good.
“Do you want to go to yoga and have dinner together?” I forced myself to blurt out one night when we both lying in bed, separately of course. I didn’t dare use the word date. I got the feeling that traditional dating had gone the way of the cotillion during my long stretch of married life.
A few days later, Damon drove from his job at Penn, parked his faded silver diesel Mercedes in my alley, and got out of the driver’s side with a slow grin that made me feel like my ribs were melting. We walked the mile to the studio together for the late-afternoon power hour, talking so intently I was surprised when we arrived at Down Dog; it was as if we had floated there. In the back corner of the studio, we put our mats next to each other. In the quiet of Savasana, I reached for his hand, and he squeezed mine and held on until the teacher broke the silence a minute later. We ambled home to my place afterward, still sweaty in our yoga clothes, for a hot tub soak and late dinner on my back deck.
I made my favorite salad with avocado and dates, and grilled salmon steaks. When we were planning the evening, he’d mentioned he couldn’t eat meat or drink alcohol. He didn’t explain why, as if it was important, yet private and complicated, as if he’d converted to Islam or made a similarly profound life change. I didn’t press. We went in the hot tub after dinner and he said he needed to keep his T-shirt on. Again, he didn’t explain why.
Sitting with our legs on the edge of the tub, in an awkward silence, I slipped my arms around his neck and leaned in to kiss him. Making the first move may have been bold, but it seemed like the natural thing to do. I slipped my hand down to the small of his back and let the tip of my tongue cross between his parted teeth. He kissed me back, his lips wet and sweet, as the fireflies glowed in the yard around us.
“You look beautiful, Leslie.”
He kissed me again, as if to show what he meant, closing his eyes. Then he opened them and unwrapped my hands from his back and neck. He took my palms and pressed them up against his, pushing back.
“I have to tell you a few things,” he said. His voice was low and blue. “Things I haven’t told you before. But I’m not ready yet.”
“Okay,” I said, confused. “Let’s dry off. We can talk another time. Whenever you’re ready.” I gave him a quick kiss to show I wasn’t kicking him out, just giving him space.
I walked him to his car in the gloaming twilight and watched him drive away, feeling naked and exposed as I stood there in my wet bathing suit, totally confused.
* * *
Now that I had the Odyssey title, the next step was selecting which set of wheels and metal symbolized my future. I’d never bought a car for myself, by myself. It couldn’t be that hard. The sticky wicket quickly became: which symbol?
That weekend, back in Southampton, I saw a sixteen-year-old blond boy driving a baby-blue convertible Bentley in the July sun. A middle-aged, suspiciously tan mustached man in a yellow Ferrari winked at me. I eyed more Porsche Cayennes and Boxsters than I could count. Southampton seemed to specialize in vehicle upgrades that were unrealistic for a divorced almost-fifty mom with two kids to put through college. Plus, I’d never coveted a flashy ride. I’d owned two vehicles in my life. My automotive priorities had always been affordability, reliability, and how many ca
r seats you could fit across the back row. Just as I’d never eyed men with bold ambition, I’d never once thought, God, I’d like to drive that car.
Then one day, I saw a curvy black two-door with a flared hatchback parked outside a fudge shop. It had the rings that looked vaguely like the Olympic symbol. I texted a picture to Timmy at baseball camp.
“Mom, that’s an Audi TT,” he wrote back. Subtext: My mom is utterly clueless.
Next, I turned to the Google. According to Kelley Blue Book, I could trade in the Odyssey and replace it with a preowned Audi TT, as long as I could come up with a small chunk of cash to close the gap. With all the articles I’d been writing, I could swing it. You’re worth it, I told myself.
I began trolling the Internet for used TTs. They were hard to find. None in New York. One in Pennsylvania. Then I found a three-year-old white model with twenty thousand miles on the odometer. It was at a dealership in Nashville. A flirty salesman with a deep southern drawl named Phil put his iPhone on the dash for a FaceTime test drive. The engine purred like a lioness when he took it up to a hundred miles per hour. What the hell, I thought. I sent a check to Tennessee.
* * *
“May I speak to Leslie?”
My phone had lit up with the caller ID of a local Philly television station.
“It’s Beth Critton. I’ve booked you a few times—”
“Oh, hi, Beth. Great to hear from you,” I interrupted. I figured she wanted a quote about a recent high-profile domestic violence murder-suicide in an oceanfront Victorian on the Jersey Shore.
Instead, she explained she’d heard that NPR had canceled a moms roundtable I’d contributed to semiregularly. She invited me to do weekly on-air segments based on my mommy blog. Three minutes of live pithy parenting advice in exchange for free publicity. Of course I said yes, even though it meant traveling from Southampton to Philly each week.
The TV station staff wore jeans and blazers and got regular haircuts, in contrast to the wonky NPR crew, whom I also loved, in a different way. Each week, as I waited outside the green room for the on-air cue for my segment, I felt like I had transferred to a party school after a year at Yale. Everyone in Philadelphia, including my kids and all their friends, seemed to catch my segment. Which gave them a lot to give me grief about.
“Mom, come on,” Timmy said one day after we’d caught the replay of my latest topic. He shook his buzz-cut head at me. “You, a parenting expert?”
We both laughed. He had a point.
As I prepped to go on air my second or third week, I stood by the plastic blue and white watercooler. The adjacent cubicle had previously been unoccupied. That day a very cute human, with chestnut hair, big brown eyes, and razor stubble, was working there. The nameplate next to his computer said Marc Jessup.
Of course, KC loved this when I called her to dish. “Marc with a C? Classic eighties baby,” she snorted.
With a smirk that she couldn’t see over the phone, I promised to keep her posted.
* * *
Wrapped in oversized beach towels, Damon and I sat next to each other in the glow of the fire table. He’d driven in again, we’d gone to yoga, and we’d eaten dinner on my deck before getting in the hot tub. This time, he made the first move, putting his arms around me and kissing me.
“Your lips are so soft,” he said. After we’d kissed for a few minutes, he sighed. “Okay, I’ll tell you my story. You sure you’re ready?”
I nodded and squeezed his hand. He leaned forward and put both his elbows on his knees, staring out at the fireflies in the backyard without seeing them.
“First, I was in prison. It was a long time ago. I had a football scholarship to the University of Virginia, right out of high school. Charlottesville. The South, you know?”
He looked at me ruefully. A mosquito bit my upper arm. I ignored it, afraid to look away.
“At training camp, one night in this bar parking lot after second practice, a few of us got in a fight with some other kids. I was the only one arrested.”
“Oh, Damon, how awful.” It was all I could say.
“I was the only black kid. Nineteen eighty-three. Virginia, right? The local lawyer wanted a thousand-dollar retainer. My mom couldn’t cover it on her teacher’s salary. Coach couldn’t help me since it was summer training and I wasn’t officially enrolled yet. So I went to jail for eight months. Lost my scholarship.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “That must have been heartbreaking.”
Damon and I had both graduated from high school the same summer. The police stopped me as well, in a small-town speed trap when I was driving to the shore for Beach Week with a keg full of beer in the back of my parents’ station wagon. The small-town officer—older, white, gruff—had asked if I was heading to college in the fall. When I told him I was going to Harvard, he let me leave without a ticket. “Good luck,” he said. I remember him smiling at me through the car window, as proud as my own father. I can only imagine how differently he would have treated me if I’d been black and male.
“Moms cried for a week,” Damon said, taking my hand in both of his. “No scholarship. No college. She’d been so proud when I got into UVA. And dang, it’s hard to get a job with an arrest record. After a few years working odd jobs, manual labor, I got lucky.”
A family friend told him about a loophole: university job fairs didn’t check applicants’ arrest records. After that, he interviewed only for academic jobs. He’d gotten hired at the Penn physics research lab. Unable to risk interviewing for another job, he’d worked at that one without ever considering leaving.
“The other thing. I don’t like to talk too much about it. But the reason I can’t eat meat or drink, or take my shirt off in yoga or your hot tub? I had a massive heart attack seven years ago. I died, but the EMTs brought me back. Open heart surgery, though. Changed everything for me. Everything.”
He paused and sighed. “I might as well show you.”
He lifted his wet T-shirt up over his head.
Above his slim waist and six-pack abs, a ten-inch scar split his massive barrel chest. It looked like a brownish-red railroad track across his heart.
“Docs say I’ll never really be the same. Yoga is pretty much the only exercise I can do. And sex . . . kinda off the table. I’d love to kiss you all night, but that’s probably all I can do.”
He smiled, but his green eyes looked terribly sad.
To my surprise, I experienced a flare of kinship sparked by his confessions. Despite appearances, and my high-end Rittenhouse Square and Hamptons real estate, I’d lived my own version of parking lot fights and prison, although according to a decidedly more privileged, lily-white script. Damon’s confessions washed away the shame of my family alcoholism, domestic violence in my twenties, and the divorce from Marty.
I didn’t want to fetishize his past. We weren’t the same, not even close, but both our lives had been derailed at a young age, his by racism and prison, mine by relationship violence, although arguably, Damon had paid the higher price over time. But the compassion I felt for him helped me accept myself as well. I never again wanted to hide my scars, to wear a Chanel top and pastel lipstick and pretend to be any man’s plastic toy with shellacked hair and sensible heels. I wanted to be me, to make my own rules, to follow my own path, to be loved for myself. Damon’s honesty made me feel like I could. Compared to my Lilly Pulitzer neighbors, the Martha Stewart moms at the kids’ school, and even the twentysomething lifeguards I fantasized about, it felt more real to be nestled next to someone who’d traveled a road longer and harder than mine.
I leaned back into him and kissed his chest, right above the scar.
“Oh, Damon, that’s all okay. I’m glad you told me. I’d love to kiss you all night, too.”
So we did.
* * *
Crunch crunch crunch. I ran down the slate steps of the beach house to see if the biggest gift I’d ever given myself had arrived. Sure enough, a box truck was backing onto the gravel of our Southampton
driveway. The driver, whose potbelly and wrinkles made him look seventy when he was probably my age, got out of the cab stiffly, carefully placing each scuffed brown work boot on the truck running board. He had a red pouch of tobacco sticking out of his wrinkled Wrangler jeans pocket. He asked gruffly, all good ole southern boy, “You Miss Leslie?”
“Yes,” I told him as we both walked to the back of the truck. “Do you have my divorce present in there?”
He seemed taken aback by my effusiveness, and nodded without saying anything. After all, to him this was a routine delivery. He pulled down the six-foot corrugated metal ramp on the back of the truck. He leaned in to propel himself forward as he walked up the steep incline. He paused before he rolled up the back door, playing the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.
“Ready?”
The door made a gritty rattling sound as he pulled up the handle. Sitting there in the darkened box truck, like a new pony in the backyard on Christmas Day, was a gleaming white Audi TT. The circular logos on the hood made it look as if the car were smiling at me.
The driver jumped down, landing with a heavy thud. Before he could take a step back, I hugged him hard. His T-shirt smelled like sweat, whiskey, and chaw. “Thank you so much,” I managed to blurt out as a few tears sprung up in the corners of my eyes, embarrassing me and probably him, too.
After I let go, he shook himself awkwardly, smiled a little, and fished the key out of a small brown leather pouch. He climbed back into the truck and turned the TT ignition. A sweet rumble echoed inside the metal walls. He inched the car down the ramp and left the engine running while he got out a clipboard with yellow carbon papers for me to sign. Then he reached in and turned off the ignition. In the ensuing midmorning quiet, he held out the key.
The Naked Truth Page 10