Carpool Confidential (11 page)

“My mistake was throwing the knife at the
wall
,” my father muttered, but not low enough that we didn't all hear.

“Your mistake was not making sure you were alone when you grabbed the stylist's ass,” my mother retorted.

In case you are having difficulty reading between the lines on my parents' relationship, it might help to understand that:

1. They have been divorced for almost thirty years and for all of that time have had competing dental practices next door to each other.
   
2. My mother made Massachusetts legal history by being the first—and possibly to this day the only—woman in the state to file a restraint of trade suit against her (soon-to-be-ex) husband.
   
3. My mother once bit my father on the arm and was charged with assault.
   

You might deduce from this that my father is a jerk and my mother is, well, crazy. I know I have.

“And the reason you can't find the plate is because they're in the same f—” My mother glanced at Noah and Jared. “—um, place they were when you lived here, Bill.”

“I realize you might not be aware of this, but I've spent the better part of the last thirty years trying to forget everything about that time, Judy.”

“Funny. And here I was thinking you managed that before you left.”

That sounded so much like something I would say I found myself cringing.

“Is Daddy going to forget where our plates are?” Jared looked ready to cry.

“Of course not, sweetie,” I said in my most reassuring voice.

“I doubt he ever knew,” my mother said.

“Me?” My father asked, folding his arms. “Or Rick? Are we all the same to you, Judy? Anonymous, faceless, plate-forgetting, fornicating, interchangeable males?”

“Luke doesn't know where the plates are,” Caleigh said. She put her fork down, stood up, and left the room. Luke shrugged. I was guessing this wasn't one for the long haul. Like I said, the family in general did not excel at relationships.

Now Noah looked close to tears. I doubted complete dissolution was far for either of them, and considering the day, rightly so. Why couldn't my family just play nice for once? “That's not true, Grandma,” he said hotly. “My Dad does so know—”

“Hey guys, wanna play Grand Theft Auto?” Luke asked.

“Yes!” Since it was rated M, and, therefore, forbidden, that of course was a huge distraction. Jared frowned. “Can we, Mommy, please? Please?”

“Er, I thought we'd go out after dinner and, you know, toss the football around or something,” my father said.

We all stared at him. These were not, to the best of our collective knowledge, words that had ever left his lips before.

“Pigskin,” Luke said.

My father frowned. “Excuse me?”

“See, normal fathers who say stuff like that, they call the football a pigskin,” Luke said. “It's like a cliché.”

“Thanks, Grandpa, but we play soccer,” Jared said very seriously. “Our dad used to take us on Saturday mornings, but now Mommy does.”

My heart felt squeezed at the thought it might always be this way for them.

Caleigh stuck her head around the door. “I'm going for a walk. Bye.” She stalked out. If she hadn't weighed less than my elbow, I'd have suspected she was going out for a burger.

“Do you have a football?” Luke asked my father. I wondered if he was going to point out that it was totally pitch dark and also freezing outside.

“No, er, I thought maybe Judy—ah, your mother would.”

Oh, I doubt it, but try asking her for a vibrator named Saddam. Then you'll be in luck
. “I don't believe this.” Luke was glaring at my father.

My mother snorted a laugh. “The latest whore has a son. You see, Luke, Cassie, Bill is finally learning how to be a father. It's just a shame it's not with either of you.”

“You know, Judy.” My father crossed his arms. I felt my heart coming up in my throat. I'd had almost no sleep. I was simmering with rage at Rick. My children had just suffered a crushingly disappointing blow, which, sadly, looked to be the first of many, and there wasn't a thing I could do to shield them from it. All I'd wanted was for them to have even a tiny, little meager slice of family life again, and these people—
my parents
—couldn't even get through one dinner without ruining that. “If you didn't always have to be such a goddamn—”

“Goddamn what, Bill? Bitch? Person? Woman? What?” Her voice rose. She was starting to fly off the handle, like she always did with him.

My boys didn't seem to know what to look at—the forbidden fruit of an M-rated PSP game or their grandparents having a knock-down, drag-out.

“Hey guys, look what this can do!” Luke pulled them back to the game. Even as they bent over it, Jared's hand found its way into mine. I closed mine around it.

“Only one of those really fits, and it seems obvious which one, doesn't it?” My father's voice was, as I always remembered it in these situations, a calm counterpoint to my mother's rising hysteria.

And suddenly, this time, I could feel what it did to her. There was something condescending about staying so calm in a fight. It was a tool, I realized with a flash of something. A way of minimizing her. It tugged something in me. Was I like her? On the surface not at all, but deep down? Was that how Rick and I fought? He was always calm, certainly. I'd loved what I'd thought was his serenity, but was it that? Or was he just like my father, standing coolly in the center of the storm while encouraging a hysterical female to fly around him? And then I remembered: We didn't fight—ever—and I felt better. My children had never witnessed anything like this before, never having been in the same room with both grandparents.

My mother was taking the bait. “All I know is that the only adjectives you like when it comes to a woman are doormat, homewrecker, skank, and whore.”

“Mommy, what's—”

“Whoah! Noah, my man! Eyes on the game or you'll lose to your little bro,” Luke said, fast. “Can't have that.”

“Mainly I prefer human.” My father flashed her a patronizing little smile.

And, oddly, for a woman who never fought with her husband, I knew exactly how that smile made her feel. The fury rocketed through me, at Rick, my parents, me, the Mickey Mouse comforter I'd never had, the marriage I'd never had.

My parents were glaring, each waiting for the other to throw down the next taunt. I looked at the boys, their heads bent with Luke's over the game. Jared, with sticky-up brown hair and Noah, with the straight blond hair growing a little too long over his ears. Noah looked up at me. His big, brown eyes were Rick's under delicately arching brows that definitely came from me. The new, uncertain set of his mouth, though, was very much his own.

Why, why couldn't my parents see that they deserved just the tiniest slice of normality? All I knew was that the urge to yell and scream at them to stop it now, just stop it, was so strong it was almost a surprise to realize I hadn't actually said or done anything. The lump in my throat was huge. I knew if I gave way to tears I'd never stop. And besides, the last time I'd done that in this situation, I'd been seven. I wasn't about to ruin that record now.

I promised myself I would go back later and try to understand why I always felt the need to defuse any uncomfortable situation. “Gosh,” I said, brightly and completely falsely, “this chicken is delicious! It's hard to believe it's really from Shaws!”

This seemed to do the trick. Everyone started eating, clattering forks and determinedly not arguing. The lack of a cranberry serving plate was forgotten. Even Caleigh loosened up a little on her return (after about five glasses of my father's 2003 vintage Port). It all felt OK in the end. Not great, but OK. At least until after the table was cleared and we were all having coffee—did you know they still made Nescafé instant crystals, by the way?— and my mother said, “Well, Cassie, I hope you all are coming back for Christmas!”

I smiled, blandly. “That sounds great.”

I made a covenant with myself: Whatever might happen in my life—if Rick shows up and announces that he and Barry are actually lovers, if I am swept off my feet by Heath Ledger, if I am a celebrity blogger, if I am sitting alone with my children and stinky dog in New York wearing Rick's old sweatshirt—we are not coming here for Christmas. I'd eat moose meat with Maria before I'd come back, and that was a promise.

And then I smiled at my boys, promising them in my mind, if not in words, that somehow I would do better for them.

So much for the Thanksgiving-as-a-compass idea. If anything, I had even less clarity than before.

I lay awake the three nights at my mother's house, trying to will Rick to redeem himself, to find a way to make good on his words. I huddled in the small, hard bed of my childhood, listening to the night noises. Every sound, from the faraway whistle of the commuter train arriving at the station to the neighbors' garage door closing, was like a flutter of the past. So familiar from childhood that I had moments of being suspended between knowing whether it was now or then.

Each time I heard the train, I prayed to some long unattended God to have given Rick back his heart and his brain. For him to have gone to the apartment, found us gone, hopped a shuttle to Boston and a train to Concord.
Maybe he'll be on this train
. Then I'd lie in the dark for the next fifteen minutes, my heart pounding as I waited for the slam of the taxi door. Then,
Maybe this one
. Pretty much the same vigil I'd held as a child. The difference was that instead of a taxi, that fantasy had revolved around the door of my father's brand-new Mercedes. Then, as now, I'd heard the hollow silence of no one coming.

When the last train pulled in at 12:13 and the night slid into morning, I turned to clutching my cell. I'd put it on vibrate so it wouldn't wake anyone by ringing. I needn't have worried. Eventually the boys crept in with me, one after another, warming me but competing for the limited bed space.

The only good thing to come out of the entire trip was the phone call on Friday from Russell Levenger, the editorial director of the
NYMetro
site. It was practically the only time I could ever remember my cell phone functioning as an instrument of good. Well, sort of good. “So Charlotte tells me you're going to crash the site with all the hits we'll be getting.”

This, of course, had the instant effect of making me paranoid about living up to expectations. “I wouldn't add extra bandwidth just yet.”

He laughed, asked me a bunch of questions, told me he was going to have Charlotte be the editor for the time being, and asked if I had an agent. We talked about how often I would update, and then he asked if I thought I could have the first one done by the end of next week.

Since the hurdles were all mental, a week, six months, basically made no difference. I told him that would be fine.

“Who was that?” my mother asked when I got off the phone.

“No one.” There was no way I was ready to discuss this with her just yet.

“The tone of your voice sounded very professional.” She looked both suspicious and interested; her Cassie-needs-a-life antennae were quivering. I didn't know why, but I wanted to hoard this for a while. “Are you talking work with someone?”

“My pimp,” I told her and went outside to play soccer with the boys.

All in all, it was a relief to get in the car on Sunday morning. The boys were subdued. I didn't blame them, I was too. For the first time, the dissolution of my marriage was starting to feel very, very real. And every time I thought about blogging, I got this little half spark in my stomach. I was terrified of what it meant in terms of leaving things behind, but also, for the first time, a little enticed by the idea of taking a step forward.

Jared was asleep by the Massachusetts-Connecticut border. “Mom?” Noah said, around Guilford. “Will Daddy be home when we get there?”

“I doubt it very much, honey.” I said it as gently as I could.

“Where is he? Is he coming back?”

I hesitated only briefly. “I don't know,” I admitted.

“How could you not know?”

“I know this sounds strange, honey, but he decided he didn't want to share with us where he was going.”

“Are you getting divorced?”

“I don't know.”

“Oh.”

When I glanced in the rearview mirror, he was looking out the window, his face closed. “Do you want to talk more?”

“No.”

By Westchester he was asleep too. The rage was coming up in me, creeping up my legs into my stomach. It was so powerful that I was almost afraid of it. I could understand, maybe for the first time in my life, in a real way, how people do things, violent, hateful, angry things that can never be taken back.

When it came to Rick's actions so far I'd been able to avoid looking directly into them, adding some maybes and some mitigating factors that made things not completely black and white. But not showing up for the boys when he'd said he would, there was no other way to see this. For the first time since the night he'd left, I honestly wasn't sure I would take him back.

 

“So guess what the new term for the blogging world intelligentsia is,” Randy said on the phone the next morning.

I'd been lugging a headache around since about two-thirty the previous Thursday. The fury that had come on in the car still glowed, but instead of filling me with energy and fire it felt like it was sucking the last vestiges of energy and life out of me. “Dunno. And I'm too miserable to make any oxymoron jokes.”

“Blogerati! I've been reading up.”

“Ran”—I grabbed my now-cold coffee with its film of half-and-half and took a gulp—“any particular reason you felt compelled to tell me that?”

“Just for that I hope you get blogstipation.” She paused, then added, helpfully, “That's when you can't think of anything to blog about.”

“Thanks. I didn't ask.”

“I know. I just didn't care that you didn't ask. Did you hear from him?”

“There was a message on the answering machine saying he was really sorry, he ran into travel difficulties and would call soon. Don't say it, OK?”

“ 'K. Did you get the number off caller ID?”

“I'm not sure. There was so much junk on the answering machine and some hang-ups, it's hard to tell what number's what. I wrote them all down, though.”

“Bring them when you meet me at Starbucks after dropoff this morning. I'll have my secretary call down the list and see if she gets anything.”

“I don't do Starbucks any more.”

“See you there at nine-thirty.” She hung up.

The kids tore in and we began the usual round of foraging for lost items, slapping together forgotten homework, bargaining over breakfast, and arguing over whether Jared (blue stitching) was wearing Noah's (grey stitching) socks.

“Mom, why can't we call Daddy or IM him?” Noah said. “How come only he can call us?” He stopped ignoring his toast and gave it a vicious poke. “I don't get it.”

I straightened up from retrieving Jared's pajama bottoms from under the table and looked at him. He hadn't wanted to talk about things last night. He, they, deserved so much better than this. “I don't know, honey, I really don't. I think maybe the best thing would be to ask Daddy that yourself the next time he calls.”

“He never talks about anything like that.” He took a kick at a chair, and I didn't say anything. “He just asks about school and soccer and stuff and says how he's working really hard and can't wait to see us but that he needs to be where he is right now. I don't know what that means and he doesn't answer any questions. Like when I asked you if you were getting a divorce and you said you didn't know, he always just says, no, why would you think that? and then says he has to go.”

“Why hasn't he called, Mommy?” Jared came through the kitchen door, his eyes swimming.

“He did leave that message on the answering machine while we were at Grandma's,” I pointed out. I hated that I was defending Rick, but what the fuck was I supposed to do? It was one of the things that was starting to edge me over to rage—it wasn't enough that he was choosing to hurt our sons; he was forcing me to do his dirty work for him.

“How come he didn't call on your cell when we were at Grandma's instead of leaving a message here?” Noah asked. “Didn't he care where we were?”

“I don't know, honey.” It was taking everything I had not to cry.

“He doesn't love us,” Noah said, not tearfully now, an angry statement of fact.

I hugged him. “He does love you guys. No matter what, we both do.” I really hoped I wasn't lying. I couldn't imagine, no matter what, that I was.

“You know what's funny?” Jared asked.

Not much.

“Strange funny or funny funny?” Noah asked. I figured he was hoping for funny funny. I know I was.

“Strange funny. He says he has no BlackBerry now because he says he doesn't like them anymore and they don't always work.”

“He's lying,” Noah said.

“Daddy hates lying.” Jared looked aghast.

“BlackBerrys always work.” Noah sounded as confident as someone imparting an indisputable truth would, and he was. Skiing in the Alps and Colorado, on the beach in Thailand, in tavernas on a Greek island, by the Redwoods in California, through the thickest Nantucket fog, you name it, the fucking BlackBerry had not only worked but worked aggressively. “Always.”

“Mommy?” Jared had his hand in his backpack as he turned to me. “Is that true? Is Daddy—
ugh!
” And then we all got distracted by his discovery that sticking a half-drunk milk box in his backpack, forgetting about it, and leaving it over a four-day weekend was not the most awesome idea.

 

When I got back from dropping them at school, all I really wanted was to pull the shades and crawl under the two down duvets it currently took to thaw me out. I dialed Randy's cell. “Why don't you come here?”

“Agoraphobia is being whispered about in the speed-walking-moms group.”

“It's not agoraphobia. I can go out any time I want. I just don't want to.”

“Time to bite the bullet and have coffee in a public place,” she pressed. “Jen's worried about you. She says rumor has you crying in the frozen food aisle at D'Agostino's and that you're ducking her calls.”

“They were out of mini pizza bagels. And I am ducking her calls.”

“Cassie. Your husband's been gone nearly two months and you haven't even told one of your best friends. Although considering you haven't told your own children—”

“I'm trying my best to answer them, Randy.” I sounded shrill. Pissed off. And I knew it wasn't at her. “But what am I supposed to tell them?
I
don't even understand it. And what's better for them? To be told the honest version of what I do know when it contains some pretty unpalatable truths about their father? If you know the answer to that, please share, because I'm not so sure.”

“I
don't
know, Cass. I was trying to be funny, but it wasn't. I'm really sorry.”

“It's OK, Ran. It's an impossible situation. Besides”—my attempt to lighten things up—“if I'm going to be a mystery blogger, I have to be a mystery.”

“Surely not to Jen?”

“No, but it's hard. Is there anything more aggressively normal than a couple of committed, nuclear-family-raising lesbians?”

Randy laughed. “She already knows that Rhonda Mitchell-Guertzmeier's nanny saw you buying the mini pizza bagels.”

“This is exactly what I was afraid of. Everyone's going to be staring into my grocery cart while I try in vain to hide the Double Stuff Oreos behind the organic apples and saying,
Poor Cassie, poor kids
in that superior thank-God-it's-not-us-so-let's-gossip-about-it-and-go-right-on-only-feeding-our-kids-those-organic-Newman's-Own-fake-Oreos way. Well, frankly I think those Newman's Own things suck. I'll take an Oreo any day. Next they'll be talking about my fake boobs.”

“Are you trying to tell me something?”

“No,” I said sulkily. “It's just that they all talk about Nancy Bosworth's.”

“Oh.” She was quiet for a second. “To be fair, Nancy does kind of display those puppies. Why are you so sure everyone's going to pity you?”

“Because I pitied Nancy and others of her ilk—”

“
‘Of her ilk'?
What does that mean?”

“Women whose husbands leave them,” I admitted. “I'm not proud of it, Ran. It's one of my uglier traits, looking not so far back. And”—even now it was hard to say—“I know all about the pity thing.”
Those poor Lorimer-Traske kids
. How many times had I heard it before I'd decided to make sure I'd never hear it again? I'd learned early that if you don't look weak or scared, no one ever needs to know you feel weak or scared. I'd become a master at presenting exactly the right outward appearance by the time I was ten, and I wasn't about to let that go now.

“Jen might feel some anger on your behalf, I know I do, but that's not the same as pity.”

“Is this coffee an intervention?”