Between Husbands and Friends (10 page)

“Mommy has bo-bo hair!” Margaret sang out, pointing at my crotch.

“And Margaret will have hair there, too, when she’s a big girl,” I told her. “Now close your eyes. I’m going to wash your hair.”

“My head hair.”

“Your head hair.”

The creamy muffins of Margaret’s bottom broke into goose bumps when I began to massage the shampoo into her scalp. I adjusted the water temperature. Steam rose around us. The baby shampoo foamed in my hands like the froth that had laced the shore.

“Now you wash Betsy,” I told my daughter, and she did, as I shampooed my own hair.

When our tanned skin was squeaky, free of the grit of sand, I turned off the water, pulled on a toweling robe, and wrapped my little girl in a towel.

“Oh, don’t we feel all healthy and clean!” I hugged her. She smelled fresh, as if all her pores exuded sunlight. I combed her hair. Her scalp was paler than her forehead. I dressed her in shorts and shirt, and she lay on my bed, dressing her doll while I pulled on shorts and a jersey.

Kate was already in the kitchen, chopping vegetables. In the three days we’d been here, we’d been virtuous, eating enormous fresh salads and giving the children tortellini and thin slices of chicken.

“What can I do?” I asked. I liked it that Kate felt so at home in my Nantucket house. It was one of the things that drew me to her, how easily she could take charge—or let me have it.

“Milk for M&M,” she said. “Their macaroni and cheese is heating.”

An outraged squeal came from the living room. Our children got along as well together as we did, but even the best child gets tired, and we had tried our best to tire these two today.

“All right, you go first,” Matthew snapped.

They were playing an ersatz version of Candyland. We let them play until we heard the petulance edging their voices. Then we herded them into the kitchen and fed them. We took them
to their separate bedrooms and read them stories and kissed them and tucked them into the soft clouds of their beds. We turned on the night-lights, turned off the overhead lights, and went out into the hall, leaving the doors open slightly.

Then I changed clothes and went off to get the babysitter.

This was to be our antidote to too much adult responsibility: an evening touring the local bars.

We showed Sadie, the babysitter, where the children were, and the food, and the emergency phone numbers. We promised we’d be home by midnight. We hurried out to the car.

I drove.

Kate said, “I’ll bet this will be the only Volvo station wagon in the parking lot.”

“I’m sure.” Already I felt more relaxed. It was just after nine and the air was soft and dark and inviting, like the pelt of a purring cat.

We went to the Muse, a bar outside of town on the Surfside Road. They had live music on weekend nights and tonight there was a local group performing.

We parked between a classic red Impala convertible and a Jeep Wrangler. We stood in line to pay the cover charge, squeezed between a clutch of already drunk college boys and two couples with mousse-backcombed hair (men as well as women), and gold chains around their necks and wrists (men as well as women).

“I don’t know about this,” Kate whispered.

But when we stepped inside, our spirits rose. The good hard beat of rock music pounded through the room. The dance floor was jammed and so was the bar. The faces of hundreds of males of all sizes and ages stirred in the shadows.

Kate, taller than I and more aggressive, cut a path through the crowd to the bar. I followed.

“Two margaritas, ice, salt,” she yelled at the bartender.

The air of the room was redolent with a complicated and entirely grown-up funk of tanned skin, alcohol, aftershave, and cigarettes. I sipped my drink; it tasted sweet and smoky. Kate squeezed and slid through the crowd to the edge of the dance floor. The drumbeat was like a primitive pulse, irresistible.

We watched the band: five guys in jeans and torn T-shirts. The lead singer’s dark hair
hung in wet hanks around his face. His chin and cheekbones were so sharp they could have cut paper.

“Love this!” Kate shouted at me, her words torn away in a thunder of music.

“Me, too!” I was downing my drink awfully fast, trying to hit my inhibitions with a knockout punch of alcohol.

Everyone on the dance floor looked young to me, and cool and glamorous and carefree. I was twenty-seven, and I felt ancient. The dancers looked buoyant; I was a wife and mother, weighted down for life.

Then a male body blocked my view of the dancers. A big guy, under thirty, with a lobster-red face and sun-bleached hair and brows leaned close to me. He yelled something at me. My first reaction, pathetically enough, was confusion. It took me a moment to understand that this stranger wanted me to dance with him. For a moment I teetered on the edge of rectitude, sobriety, propriety. Then Kate hit me between my shoulder blades and knocked me into the present.

“Get out there!” she yelled. “Give me your glass!”

I slugged back the last of my margarita, handed Kate the glass, and followed Lobster Guy onto the dance floor. For a few moments I only swayed and shuffled timidly, but my partner was one of those men who, although blocky and chunky and solid, seemed to connect, battery-like, right up to the music. He beat his hands as if he had invisible drums in front of him and shook his head and muttered and shouted out “All right!” He was demented. What did I care what he thought of me? I dropped my defenses and let the music flood in, churning my blood.

I looked over at Kate and grinned. And realized with a jolt of totally immature satisfaction that someone had asked
me
to dance first.

Not long after that I saw Kate being led to the center of the mob by a tall and really cute guy. I waved and grinned at her, then dove back into the electric frenzy of music.

Lobster Guy was inexhaustible. I danced for hours, until my hair and shirt and underwear were soaking wet and clingy. Sweat slid down my neck and into my bra as softly as kisses. How long had it been since I’d danced like this, been free like this, at once totally myself and also part of the music? No little hands tugged at me. No proper matrons were watching me. No one here needed me, and it was like being young again, when I could dance all through the dark night and step out into a morning as crystal-dewed and new as Eden.

Now at twenty-seven I was responsible for that world. Sometimes it felt like I was responsible for the very turning of the earth. Most of all I was responsible for the health and
safety and happiness of my daughter, and that was overwhelming. Here it was all heat and beat and freedom.

It was twenty after twelve when I looked at my watch. Across from me Kate tilted her pelvis toward her partner in what looked like a Zulu mating ritual. Her hair had come totally loose from its clasp and hung in wet limp strands around her flushed face.

“We have to go home,” I yelled at her. “Babysitter.”

“No!” she shouted.

“Yes!” I took her hand and dragged her off the dance floor.

“Not fair, not fair!” she yelled at me, stumbling against me.

The fresh air outside hit us like a slap in the face.

“Oh, God,” Kate groaned. “I feel like Cinderella.”

“You’re going to feel like Frankenstein’s monster in the morning.”

We fell into the Volvo. I drove home at a virtuous twenty miles an hour. With great earnest sobriety I paid the babysitter and drove her home. When I got back to the house, I found Kate passed out on the sofa. I smiled, covered her with a light blanket, and let her sleep.

“You look cool, Mom,” Margaret says. She’s lying on our bed, watching me dress for a posh summer cocktail party.

“Thanks, kid.” I’m wearing tight black slacks, black high heels, a sleeveless turquoise linen shirt.

“And I like your hair like that.”

Now I’m suspicious. My hair looks like it always does in the summer, a curly unruly mess. “So you’re all set for tonight?” When Margaret babysits Jeremy, we pay her the going rate; in return she has to pretend he’s not her little brother.

“Yeah.” She hears a car door slam and looks out the window. “Dad’s home.” She wriggles off the bed, busies herself with smoothing out the light cotton quilt we use for a summer spread. “You know, Mom, Jeremy’s watched
The Little Mermaid
about a hundred times.”

“So?” I’m carefully lining my eyes.

“So it’s kind of not fair. There’s a really good movie on HBO I’m going to miss so Jeremy can watch his dumb old video.”

“You’re babysitting.”

“I know. But still … why can’t we have two TVs in the house? Everyone else does.”

“Listen, kid, sometimes I think one set is too many.”

“Mom.”

Max rushes into the room. He looks hot and tired and miserable. “Give me a minute to shower and change.”

“You’d better shave.”

“Not enough time.”

“You look a little rough.”

Margaret protests, “Mom, he looks great like that. Urban chic.”

Max slams the door on our discussion, shutting himself in the bathroom. “Hello to you, too, Dad,” Margaret says sulkily to the closed door. Since Stan told Max about Paul Richardson’s involvement in the CDA corporation a few days ago, Max has been gloomy, taciturn with me, uncommunicative with Margaret and Jeremy. I can deal with his bad spells, but I hate it that he’s beginning to let them affect the way he treats his children.

Downstairs I kiss Jeremy, go over the rules for the thousandth time with him and Margaret, and then Max comes down the stairs, handsome in his navy blue blazer, his black curls glistening from the shower.

“Have fun, Dad!” Jeremy cries.

I can see the effort it takes Max to make his way through his dark self-absorption to answer, “Thanks, son. Be good.”

As we ride together to the Curtises’ home, I ask, “Are you okay, Max?”

He sighs. “Don’t start.”

“Max, you’re beginning to take it out on the children.”

“I’ve got a lot on my mind. That’s reality. They have to learn that.”

“Is there anything other than the CDA business troubling you?”

He makes a kind of snorting noise. “Does there need to be?”

“Have you talked to Paul about it?”

Max turns on the radio, plays with the dial, finds a talk show.

“Max.” I reach over and touch his hand. “Don’t shut me out.”

He moves his hand away from mine and turns up the volume on the radio.

Jiffer Curtis, our hostess, has opened her house and her expansive, elaborate garden, as a fund-raiser for the hospital. Young men dressed in white button-down shirts and khakis stand at the front door of her mansion, waiting to park our cars. Max chats to them all; we know these boys; Max coached them years ago in Little League.

As we walk around the side of the vast brick house, the sky turns dark and ominous with clouds, and a breeze begins to stir. I stand for a moment, just taking in the view: The garden is a masterpiece, formal, tended, with high and low hedges making little rooms here and there, and clever topiary standing like statues near the fishpond and the gazebo and the teahouse. Everyone in town is here, looking gorgeous. I love this town.

Max doesn’t stop but heads straight for the drinks table. By the time I make it through the crowd I see that our hostess has cornered him.

“I don’t see,” she trumpets furiously, “why you don’t do more with your editorials to support the hospital.”

“Jiffer. There are seventy-three nonprofit organizations in Sussex alone,” Max points out reasonably. “I have to be fair.”

“But surely the hospital is the most important!”

“And that’s why I’m so glad they have you to head their fund-raiser,” Max says, smiling. He takes her arm and leans toward her as he continues to speak in his charming, rational way.

Why can he do this? I wonder, watching him. Why can he summon up so much energy for his fucking newspaper and community, and so little for his own family?

A breeze sweeps past. I shiver. One fat drop of rain plops down on my nose.

“What a bother!” Jiffer exclaims, glaring at the sky. “I’d better tell the caterers to move things inside.” She waddles officiously away.