Carpool Confidential (19 page)

At this point anything that meant getting to the bottom of things with Harmonye and not getting to the bottom of things with Letitia sounded pretty good to me. I looked at Harmonye.

“Can you call me Mary Alice?”

We all nodded.

“Griffin—” She started sobbing again. “I hate him. He's gross and totally random and has no chin. His family hasn't since William the Conquerer, it's like a point of pride, and now”—her tears picked up steam—“my baby might have no chin.”

Oh, God. Queasy, stomach-churning shock for, what, like the fifteenth time today? I'd had no idea earlier
how
out of my depth I was. “Har—Mary Alice—” I stopped then, because even though I had a million questions, I had no idea which were helpful to ask and which were not.

“You're pregnant.” Randy said it rather than asked it, but it seemed like as good a place as any to start.

“The condom broke.” Harmony hiccupped. “And when I told him about being pr-pregnant, he just said that I knew what to do and I should do it. And he's already seeing Tabitha Foster. And I don't want to tell anyone at school because they make you go to the counseling center and talk about stuff with old people with lard asses and thick cardigans”—she looked at us—“like
way
older than you guys, like the shrink my mom used to drag me to, and they try to ask you how you feel about things and like try to make it seem like they understand even though you all know they don't.”

“Cardigans?” Letitia could not have been more horrified.

“Thick ones,” Harmonye assured her. “With those little ball-y things from being old and gross—”

“Acrylic!” I hoped Letitia wasn't going to get the vapors.

I tried, “But, M.A., sweetie, that doesn't mean they can't be good at—”

“Are you saying you would talk about your innermost problems to someone in a thick cardigan with pilling, Cassie?” Letitia demanded.

“I would if—”

“Never.” She sat down next to Harmonye and offered her hand. Harmonye took it, and the two of them sat there glaring at me. Like
I
had done something wrong.

“So.” Randy looked at me. “You think you're pregnant but you're not—”

“What?” Harmonye looked at me too.

“False alarm.”

“—Harmonye—”

“Mary Alice,” Harmonye interjected.

“—should not be pregnant but is, and—” Randy started crying again. Jen, still holding her own soggy tissue, patted her back. “—I want to be and should be but I'm not. Nonspecific secondary infertility. That means I've been pregnant before but it's not happening now and they have no fucking idea why not.”

She did? She should? She wasn't? I'd had no idea—none at all, not even an inkling—that Randy wanted another child. I couldn't decide whether or not this was because she'd done an amazing job of hiding it or because I was either
the
most self-centered person in the universe or going through an incredibly self-centered time, or worse, both. I looked at Jen. “Did you know this?”

She shook her head. “No idea at all.”

Jen was demonstrably not the most self-centered person in the universe, so this made me feel a little better.

“I'm married and old enough to know what I want, and my husband has one hell of a chin,” Randy said.

“True.” I did a quick mental flip back to Randy, mooning over that stroller in Starbucks. How uncharacteristically upset she'd been by my thinking I was pregnant. It made sense now. “But Ran, how long has this been going on? Why didn't you tell us?”

“About two years.” She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “It's just been so”—she paused—“boring. It's boring and it's depressing.”

“Unlike my recent life,” I glared at her. “God, Ran, I'd never have dumped all this on you if I'd known you were having your own rotten time.”

“At least yours hasn't been boring.” She sniffled angrily.

I was working on the ground-shifting revelation that Randy, too, had weak spots. “But I would have liked to have been there for you, too.”

“Me too,” Jen said.

There was a noise behind me. Letitia had let go of Harmonye's hand, gotten up, and opened the dishwasher. She wasn't loading it, exactly. More staring into the empty drum like she'd never seen anything quite like it, but she appeared to be thinking about loading it. “I'm sorry,” she said to Randy. “Infertility is heartbreaking.” She looked far away, and I wondered what she was seeing. It was almost like she was human.

“I might quit my job,” Randy said. “They say stress is contributing, and that's the only real way to reduce it. But IVF is expensive, and not only do I make more than Josh, my health insurance is way better, so quitting would just bring on a whole new kind of stress. I just don't know what to do.” Her eyes were brimming again.

At this Jen welled up again.

“I'm finished.” Randy pulled herself together. “I've even bored myself. So, Jen, what's up?”

“It's way more boring than yours.” Jen gave a soggy laugh. “Nora wants to move to the burbs—better for the kids, more space, you know, the usual. We've looked at Scarsdale, Short Hills, Greenwich, I've hated them all. Nora's absolutely set on it, and it seems like all we do is fight. I'm starting to feel like as long as I take care of other people and worry about what they want, then everything's fine, but heaven forbid I have my own opinions, then everything falls apart.”

I felt dizzy. “What about all that stuff in Starbucks about you knowing who you are?” It was like Jen and Randy were suddenly different people. Maybe I'd never really known them at all, only what I'd wanted them to be.

“It was then that I realized I was saying all that stuff while simultaneously debating the merits of ten-thousand-square-foot mcmansions I hated—”

Randy looked stunned. “
Ten thousand
square feet?” You'll have to excuse her—we are New Yorkers, after all, a species known for being able to house a family of five in a space the size of a suburban walk-in closet. Randy and Josh owned a brown-stone with
potential
—i.e., fifteen feet wide, dropped acoustic tile ceilings hiding the Victorian decorative plaster, and the previous owner's indoor-outdoor carpeting “protecting” the original floorboards (maybe). Josh figured they'd have the money to fix it up right about the time they were too old to climb the stairs. “How many is your apartment?”

“Um, maybe four,” Jen said. “It seems more spacious than it is because it's a loft.”

Randy turned to me. “What about yours?”

“About the same as Jen's but not nearly as cool.” I nodded at Letitia. “Yours?”

“Oh, dear, I really don't know exactly.” Silence. Everyone knew Letitia knew. “Seven thousand, four hundred and eighty.”

Randy shook her head. “I'd go to Greenwich in like ten seconds if Josh would consider it. Is it ten thousand nice square feet?”

“Excuse me”—Jen was sort of laughing—“that's not even on the same page as my point, which is that all the stuff I said in Starbucks, I don't even know how much of it is true anymore. Maybe none. I'm definitely not who I used to be.”

“I don't get it.” Randy frowned. “Why can't you go back to work? You're a doctor. It's not like you're not qualified to do anything.”

“I've spent so many years bolstering Nora's career…I just don't know.” Jen wiped her eyes. “And we agreed I should be home for the kids.”

“So the agreement's changed.” Randy looked at Jen. “I mean, that's life, right?”

Jen shook her head. “You make it sound so simple, but it's not. I still believe one of us should be home, and the reality is that she just makes so much more money than I ever did.”

“Just like a real husband.” I drained the dregs of my warm margarita. “Does she complain about the dry cleaning all the time?”

“And that we never have the right kind of raisin bran or shampoo.”

I knew all about this. “Has she started complaining about bottled water?”

“She used to drink anything—Polar brand, Schweppes, but now—”

“It doesn't have to come from Finland, does it?” I was having dark memories.

“So you're like really a doctor?” Harmonye looked at Jen like she couldn't believe it.

Jen smiled. “Yeah. I like really am.”

“And you quit after all that work just because someone told you to?”

“It wasn't that simple. I was thirty-six. I was in love with Nora and my new baby. At the time it seemed like not much to give up.”

I nodded. Definitely knew that feeling too.

Harmonye hiccupped a sob. “Oh, God. I'm so not ready to be a mom. Even you're confused, and you're like a million years older than me.”

“Thanks,” Jen said dryly.

I though of Katya and then of Rick and it hit me how misplaced Harmonye's faith in the power of a couple of decades was. “How far along are you, M.A.?”

“I don't know. Maybe like,” she looked down again, “a month or two.”

“Do you want—what do you want to do?”

“I don't know.”

“Maybe—” Letitia had what I could only describe as an evil glow in her eyes.

“Oh, no,” Randy said. “Forget it. I'm no way considering adopting her baby.”

“Hey! I never said you could,” Harmonye pointed out. “But why wouldn't you?”

“First of all, I know this is small of me, but I want my own. Secondly, you said it yourself. Griffin's like gross and random and has no chin.”

Harmonye wrinkled her nose. “It's true. I can't believe I like did
it
with him.”

“I might.” Letitia was holding the blender.

“
You
might do
it
with Griffin?” Harmonye said. “No offense, but that's like double gross.”

“No.” Letitia put the blender in the dishwasher. “I have no desire whatsoever to
do it
with Griffin, who I'm certain was completely unsatisfactory in that arena.”

“Yeah.” Harmonye made a face. “It's true.”

“What I could do,” Letitia was starting to look excited, “is adopt the baby. I have the means and the time—”

“And the space,” Randy pointed out. “Not that I'm bitter.”

“And the space,” Letitia agreed. “Of course, Bouvy would be jealous at first, but I could get him the appropriate counseling, so why not?”

A thousand, no make that a million, why nots rampaged through my brain with Rick as exhibit A.

Letitia was really going now. “I'll get you in to see my gynecologist tomorrow. He'll get you on the right diet and sup plements, and you can stay with me. I'll have to see if my mas seur can do pregnancy massages. We'll go to Lamaze classes together—”

Harmonye had progressed from starting to look frightened straight to terrified.

She needed a rescue. “Why don't we give H—Mary Alice”—that took getting used to—“a chance to get a decent night's sleep and let her tongue de-swell before we start making life-altering decisions for her. OK?” Talking about people making life-altering decisions for others reminded me of my own situation (which, with all the drama, I'd actually managed to forget). I started to cry.

“You owe me twenty,” Randy said to Jen. “I'll take a check.”

“You guys bet on what time I was going to cry?”

Jen put an arm around me. “There's nothing like a sure thing. So what's up?”

I filled them in on my visit to Murray, the drugstore, and my trawl through Rick's desk. “Look.” I put the
Rick, FYI
page on the table. “He had a cheat sheet for leaving.”

Letitia was tightlipped but didn't say anything. Was it worse for me to have to accept this about my husband, or for her, about her son?

“Lesbo Gangbang,”
Jen said. “Can't believe I missed that one.”

“I still have it. I'll give you a good price on it,” I offered.

“I'll pass, thanks.”

“How bad are things?” Randy asked. She was reading the cheat sheat. “Holy shit.”

“They're—bad. He seems to have systematically drained the accounts, and we owe a bunch of taxes. We aren't going to starve, but unless something changes pretty drastically, I'm not going to be able to maintain things the way they are, yet I'm stuck. I can't sell the apartment, and I can't sell the Nantucket house because they're joint properties and he's not dead. And although I'm tempted to arrange that, I have to find him first. The co-op board here would rather let me go into foreclosure than rent this apartment out, so I'm left with renting out the Nantucket house, which we've never done before, and finding a way to get myself employed.”