“Okay then. I’m off . . .” Valerie says, stalling as she glances around the room, pretending to look for something. When this charade is exhausted, she kisses Charlie once more, walks out the door, and makes her way down to the cold, dark parking garage. For a few moments, as she hunts for her dusty teal Volkswagen with its political bumper sticker now two elections old, she becomes convinced that it was stolen, somehow chosen over the trio of BMWs parked on the same level—and she feels one part relief that she’ll have no choice but to go back inside. But then she remembers squeezing into a narrow space designated for compact cars after a burrito run a few days before, and finds it just where she left it. She peers into the backseat before unlocking the door, something she has done for years, since a teenager from her hometown was kidnapped in a shopping-mall parking lot days before Christmas—the chilling moment captured on a surveillance camera.
Tonight, though, Valerie’s backseat search is not hair-raising, but perfunctory and halfhearted. It is a silver lining, she thinks—when a greater fear is realized, lesser ones fall away. Hence, she is no longer petrified of parking-garage rapists. She shivers as she slides into her car and starts the engine. The radio, left on high from her last trip, blares R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming,” a song that vaguely depresses her, even under the best of circumstances. She exhales into her hands to warm them, then turns the dial, hoping for something more uplifting. She stops at “Sara Smile,” figuring that if Hall & Oates can’t help her, nobody can. Then she drives slowly toward home, humming an occasional refrain and doing her best to forget the last time she left her son for a boys-only sleepover.
Only she doesn’t go home. Not right away. She fully intends to, even planning to return a few phone calls—to her friends at work and a few girls from home, even Laurel, who had heard through the grapevine, aka Jason, of Charlie’s accident. But at the last second, she bypasses her exit and heads straight for the address she looked up on the computer, then MapQuested and memorized last night, just after Charlie fell asleep. She wants to believe her detour is a lark, a flight of fancy, but nothing can truly be called a lark or flight of fancy given the current state of things. It can’t be boredom, either, as she is never bored; she enjoys solitude too much for that. She convinces herself that it must be a simple matter of curiosity, like the time in the mid-nineties when she and Jason went to L.A. for a cousin’s wedding and drove by South Bundy, the site of the double homicide in the O.J. Simpson trial. Only tonight her curiosity is of the idle, not morbid, variety.
As she makes her way toward the heart of Wellesley, a light rain begins to fall. She puts her windshield wipers on the slowest setting, the mist on her window giving her the veiled feeling of protection. She is undercover, gathering clues—about what she is not quite sure. She makes a left turn, then two rights onto the street—which is elegantly called a “boulevard.” It is broad and tree-lined with neat sidewalks and classic, older homes. They are more modest than she expected, but the lots are deep and generous. She drives more slowly, watching the odd numbers on the right side of the road diminish until she finds the house she is looking for—a storybook Tudor. Her heart races as she takes in the details. The twin chimneys flanking the slate roof. The huge birch tree with low, climbable branches just off center in the front yard. The pink tricycle and old-school red rubber ball, both abandoned in the driveway. The warm yellow light in one upstairs bedroom. She wonders if it is his—theirs—or one of the children’s, and imagines them all tucked neatly inside. She hopes that they are happy as she does a three-point turn and drives home.
Sometime later, she is taking a bath, her favorite Saturday-night pastime. Normally, she reads a magazine or paperback book in the tub, but tonight she closes her eyes, keeping her mind as blank as possible. She stays submerged, the soapy water up to her chin, until she feels herself nod off and it occurs to her that she might be tired enough to fall asleep and actually drown. Charlie would be an orphan, forced to forever speculate whether her death was a suicide—and if it were somehow his fault. She shakes the morbid thought from her head as she stands and steps out of the tub, wrapping herself in her coziest, largest bath towel—a bath sheet, to be precise. She remembers the day she ordered the set of fine, Egyptian-cotton towels, the most luxurious ones she could find, even opting for a French-blue monogram with her initials for an extra five dollars per towel. It was the day she received her first bonus check at her law firm, a reward for billing two thousand hours—a small fortune she had planned to spend on everyday creature comforts. After the towels, she ordered Austrian goose-down pillows, sateen sheets, cashmere cable-knit throws, heavy cast-iron cookware, and fine china for twelve—quality domestic goods that most women acquire when they marry, before they buy a house or have a baby. She was doing it backward, maybe, but she was doing it all by herself. Who needs a man? she thought with every item she added to her cart.
It became her mantra. As she worked long hours at her firm, saving more money until she and Charlie could finally move out of their depressing basement apartment—with its stark white walls the landlord wouldn’t let her paint and the perpetual smell of curry and marijuana from the neighbors across the hall—into the cozy Cape Cod they still live in now. As she shoveled the driveway in the winter, watered grass seed in the spring, pressure-washed their front porch in the summer, raked leaves in the fall. As she did all the things to make a home and a life for Charlie. She was self-sufficient, self-reliant, self-contained. She was every empowered lyric that she heard on the radio: I am woman, hear me roar . . . I will survive . . . R-E-S-P-E-C-T.
Yet tonight, after she eats a peanut butter and jelly sandwich over the kitchen sink and tucks herself neatly into bed, wearing her favorite white flannel nightgown with eyelet trim, she feels a sharp lonesome pang, an undeniable sense that something is missing. At first she believes the void is Charlie, who, for the first time ever, is not sleeping in the room next to hers. But then she thinks of that upstairs glow in the stone Tudor, and realizes that it is something different altogether.
She stares into the darkness and tries to imagine what it would be like to have someone in bed next to her, tries to remember the feel of being entangled in another, sweaty, breathless, satisfied.
That’s when she closes her eyes and sees his face, and her heart starts to race again, just as it did in the hospital cafeteria over coffee and in front of his house.
She knows it’s wrong, having these thoughts about a married man, but she lets herself drift there anyway, rolling onto her side and pressing her face into her pillow. Who needs a man? she tries to tell herself. But as she falls asleep, she is thinking, I do. And more important, Charlie does, too.
11
Tessa
“How’s the school search coming along?” Rachel asks me on Sunday morning as she sits cross-legged on the floor of our guest room and packs for their return trip to New York. It is the first we’ve been alone all weekend, and are now only because my mother had an early morning flight home and Dex and Nick are taking the kids out for a walk—or as Rachel called it after she peeled her girls off the couch, “a forced march outdoors.”
“Ugh,” I say, making a face. “What a pain in the ass the whole thing is.”
“So you’ve definitely ruled out the public elementary school?” she asks, pulling her shoulder-length hair into a ponytail with the ever-present elastic band she wears on her left wrist, seemingly in lieu of a watch.
“I think so. Nick’s in favor of it—probably because he went to public schools . . . But obviously Dex and I didn’t . . . I think it’s all what you’re used to,” I say, hoping that this is the actual reason for Nick’s public leanings—and not that he simply wants to get out of school tours and applications and conversations on the topic.
“Yeah. I was squarely in Nick’s camp—public school girl all the way—but didn’t think we could go that route in the city,” she says as she lays one of Sarah’s little floral blouses facedown on the floor, then neatly smooths out
the wrinkles, tucks in the arms, and folds the whole thing into a neat square with the skill of a department-store clerk. I memorize her technique, but know I will never recall it—just as I can never quite remember how to fold our dinner napkins into the origami-like shapes Nick mastered while working as a waiter at a country club during college.
“I vowed not to let it stress me out,” I say, “but now that it’s upon me, I’m right there in the frenzy with everyone else.”
Rachel nods and says, “Yeah. I was more stressed out filling out those applications for Julia and Sarah than I was when I applied to law school. It’s one thing to brag about your own qualifications and credentials, but bragging about your five-year-old—it just feels so crass . . . Dex had an easier time with it. For our Spence essay, he actually dubbed Julia a ‘bubbly, brown-eyed wonder.’ ”
I laugh. “He wrote that?”
“Sure did.”
“So cheesy,” I say, shaking my head, consistently amazed that my banker brother, who appears to be so cool and dignified, can be such a colossal dork behind closed doors. At the same time, I think this is part of why his marriage works so well. At heart, he is cheesy, the polar opposite of slick, and having observed many relationships over the years, I have discovered that slick does not a good husband make—my own father leading that charge.
“Yeah. No wonder they rejected us, huh?” Rachel says with a sardonic smile. For a high achiever, she seems to wear this rejection as a peculiar badge of honor, as if it is their loss entirely, and it occurs to me that although she is unassuming, sometimes even downright shy, she is actually one of the more confident people I know—as opposed to April and so many other mothers who seem to strive for perfection as a way of dealing with their underlying insecurities.
She continues, “I knew I should have edited Dex’s essays . . . But deep down, I knew Spence wasn’t the right fit for us anyway. So I didn’t bother . . .”
I ask her why, always intrigued to hear the details of their life in the city—so different from my own childless memories of Manhattan.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she says, pausing before moving on to a pink cashmere sweater with tiny pom-poms sewn along the neckline. All of Julia and Sarah’s things are exquisite and girly, which is incongruous with Rachel’s own wardrobe of denim; cozy earth-toned sweaters; and long, bohemian-chic scarves that she drapes twice around her neck even in the summer. “You just hear all the stereotypes of all the schools . . . Chapin is blond, precious, WASPy . . . Spence is full of wealthy, connected society girls. Or spoiled, materialistic sluts, according to the haters . . . and Dex when we got rejected.” She laughs and then imitates his low voice—“How dare they turn down our brown-eyed wonder!”
I laugh at my brother’s expense and then ask about Brearley’s reputation—which is the Upper East Side all-girls’ school that Sarah and Julia attend.
“Hmm . . . Let’s see . . . I’d say bedraggled intellectuals,” Rachel says.
“You are a far cry from bedraggled,” I say, pointing to her perfect piles that she is now stowing in the girls’ monogrammed canvas L.L. Bean bags.
She laughs and says, “So is Longmere still your top choice for Ruby?” she asks.
I nod, impressed with her memory of Boston schools and even more so when she asks, “That’s where April’s daughter goes, right?”
“Yeah . . . Which at the moment isn’t a selling point for Nick,” I say, giving her the full story about Nick’s patient. “He wants to avoid the entire drama . . . Or at least avoid the types he perceives to be meddlesome, do-nothing drama queens.”
“Meddlesome, do-nothing drama queens are everywhere,” Rachel says. “Private schools, public schools. Manhattan, the Midwest. They’re unavoidable.”
“Yeah,” I say. “But tell that to Nick. He seems to have a chip on his shoulder these days.”
As soon as the words are out, I regret them, both because I feel disloyal uttering them to Rachel who never breathes a negative word about her husband—and because I feel as if I’ve solidified my brewing criticisms of my own husband.
She gives me a sympathetic look which only sharpens my guilt. “Chip on his shoulder about what?” she asks.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say, trying to backtrack slightly. “I understand where he’s coming from. I totally see that April and Romy and everyone in their clique should back up and give this woman and her kid some space. And I told April as much—which wasn’t an easy thing to say to a friend.”
“I can imagine,” Rachel says, nodding.
“But Nick takes it to such an extreme. You know how he can be. Self-righteous isn’t really the word . . .”
“Blunt? No-nonsense?” she guesses.
“Well, yes, there is that. He’s always been on the serious side,” I say, realizing how difficult it is to describe the people closest to you, perhaps because you are aware of all their complexities. “But it’s more that he has zero tolerance for anything he deems frivolous, be it gossip, celebrity magazines, excessive drinking or consumption.”
She nods hesitantly, walking the fine line between supporting me and denigrating Nick.
“I know I’m making him out to be so humorless . . .”
“No, no. You’re not. Listen—I know Nick. I get him. He has a great sense of humor,” she says.
“Right,” I say. “He just seems more reclusive lately. He never wants to get together with friends . . . And as far as parenting goes, he’s either the laissez-faire dad or Mr. Devil’s Advocate . . . Or maybe I’m just noticing it more lately . . .” I say pensively, thinking of the recent conversations with my mother and tentatively sharing some of the lowlights with Rachel.
“Well, Barbie’s a cynic. You have to take her with a grain of salt,” she says. “You know what she recently said to me? Right in front of the girls?”
“What?” I ask, shaking my head in anticipation.
“She said getting married is like going to a restaurant with friends. You order what you want, and when you see what the other person has, you wish you had ordered that instead.”
I drop my head to my hands and laugh. “Brutal,” I say.
“I know. She made me feel like a big pork chop that Dex might send back to the kitchen.”
“How about this one?” I say. “After she saw Nick open the car door for me recently she offered this nugget: ‘When a man opens the door of his car for his wife, you can be sure of one thing—either the car is new or the wife is.’ ”
Rachel laughs and then says, “Well? Was the car new?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” I say. “Brand spanking . . . So anyway, I would never admit this to her, but quitting my job hasn’t really been the panacea I was hoping for. I feel just as frazzled and exhausted—and there still doesn’t seem to be enough time for the kids . . . For anything, really.”
“Yeah. It almost makes you feel more guilty, doesn’t it? For not being an arts-and-crafts kind of mom?”
“But you are,” I say, giving her an accusatory look.
“I am not,” she says. “I can’t tell you the last time I got out the art supplies with the girls. You theoretically have so much more time at home, but you fill it with the minutiae that you somehow managed to avoid when you were working.”
“Yes!” I exclaim again, feeling intense relief, as there’s nothing so despair-provoking as thinking you’re the only one who feels a certain way, especially when it comes to matters of motherhood—and correspondingly, nothing more comforting than knowing you’re not alone. “That’s exactly it. I feel like I need a wife . . . Someone to handle the class projects and—”
“Run all the errands,” Rachel says.
“And buy the gifts.”
“And wrap them,” she says.
“And write the thank-you notes.”
“And put the photo albums together,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I’m two years behind—and only halfway finished with Julia’s baby book.”
“Hell, forget the albums. I?
??d settle for some help taking the photos,” I say, thinking of how I recently told Nick that if something were to happen to me, the kids would have no photos of their mother. He told me not to be so morbid, grabbing the camera from me and snapping a dark-circles-under-my-eyes, Clearasil-coating-a-big-zit-on-my-chin shot that I later deleted, shuddering to think that I might be remembered in such a grisly light. Or worse, viewed that way by another woman, Nick’s second wife, the only mother my children would ever know.
Then, just as I feel our playful gripes transforming into a no-holds-barred bitchfest, Rachel smiles and says, “Ahh. Yes. But lucky for them they are so darn cute. Inept though they are.”
I smile, puzzled at the idea of calling children “inept” and then realizing that she is not talking about the kids, but rather Dex and Nick.
“Right,” I say, my smile stretching wider. “Good thing.”
That night, long after everyone has departed and the kids have gone to sleep, Nick and I are in our room, getting ready for bed.
“That was a great weekend,” I say, rinsing my face. I pat it dry and apply a generous amount of moisturizer to my face and neck. “I love seeing the cousins together.”
“Yeah, it was fun,” Nick says as he rifles through his drawer and pulls out a pair of chambray pajama bottoms. “And your mother managed to behave herself reasonably well.”
I smile, going to my own dresser and selecting a black nightgown. It is made of a cotton-spandex blend and is not sexy in an obvious way, but the cut is flattering and I’m hoping it might spark something between Nick and me. It’s not so much that I’m in the mood for sex as I am for the intimate aftermath.
“Yeah,” I say. “But she gave me an earful yesterday morning.”
“About what?” he asks.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say. “She continues to worry . . .”