Carpool Confidential (2 page)

By outside glance, my life was pretty perfect. We'd been spared from the disaster literally outside our window. We were healthy, had wealth by anyone's standards, and if we weren't greeting each morning with ecstasy, we were certainly happy enough. But here's the thing about lives: they never feel the same from the inside. And that's a truth I'm intimately familiar with.

You know those families you see in magazines at Christmas? The house is glamorous, fires are snapping in the hearth? Everyone is glowing with health, good looks and prosperity? The sidebar fills you in on a couple of family traditions and an heirloom recipe? You instantly know that these people have perfect lives and are completely and confidently certain of their place in the world.

They're clearly having a much better, more meaningful, more joyful family holiday than you are. For sure, Great-aunt Lorraine isn't taking out her dentures to chew desiccated Butter-ball turkey before demonstrating her technique of hooking her orthopedic stockings up to her Victoria's Secret garter at their house. No one's getting drunk and abusive on cheap sherry there because they're too busy eating the finest food, sipping vintage champagne by a wood fire, and opening boxes from Tiffany's.

That's my family (see
Good Housekeeping
, December 1974 and
Gourmet
, November 1976—“A Very Concord Christmas” and “A Thanksgiving to Behold,” respectively). The food— those heirloom family recipes?—fake, dreamed up and created completely by food stylists. As fake as the smile my father is wearing as he carves the glistening bourbon-glazed, wild-mushroom-and-chestnut-stuffed turkey in the picture that was taken two days before he drove out of the familial driveway with his belongings in the trunk. By the time the magazine hit the newsstands, six months later, he was living in the Back Bay with his twenty-two-year-old dental assistant.

So I think it's pretty safe to say that I understood firsthand that externals—silent stainless appliances, interior designers of the moment, killer views, telegenic looks, and family pedigrees that make magazine editors want to do pictorial spreads on you—don't necessarily buy happiness. Stability, responsibility, constancy, and love. Those buy happiness: a man whose sense of commitment ensures he'll never leave for the long legs of a dental assistant buys happiness.

And I was grateful every day—or every day that I remembered to be—that despite a few flaws, like a sense of humor that was on the slight side, the occasional lapse into pomposity, the smallest tendency toward rigidity, my husband was that man. Rick had those qualities in spades.

Tonight, back in the present, Rick leaned back, sprawling his arms along the top of the sofa, and stared absently past me, out at the lights, as though he was seeing them for the first time in a very long while.

He usually changed his clothes the second he walked in the door, but tonight he hadn't. He actually looked pretty hot, in that way that someone you've known intimately for years, slept with hundreds—thousands?—of times can look when they suddenly look different from the way you're used to seeing them. In fact, I might just find myself needing to jump on him later. True, he looked pretty tired, but he didn't exactly make a habit of saying no if I offered.

I stared out the window past him. Had I really slept with Rick thousands of times? We'd been together fifteen years and married for eleven—

“Cass? Where are you?” His left hand was at a funny angle, along the top of the sofa. And since his shirt cuffs were customsized to perfectly accommodate his watchband, I could clearly see the face of the Tag Heuer Limited Edition I'd bought him when he'd made managing director. It was almost 11:00.

I wasn't sure he would see the humor in me trying to figure out how many times we'd had sex. “Have you eaten?”

“No.” His gaze was fixed again on the windows, on the light of the police boat under the bridge. I wondered what it was like in there. Two policemen, listening to the crackle of some kind of police radio. Whiling away the long hours of the night while they waited for someone to try to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge, talking about wives, girlfriends, maybe the Yankees. “I'm not really hungry,” Rick said.

“Rough day?”

“Sort of.” He looked like he was preoccupied by something from the office. “Do you ever wonder”—he motioned around at the living room—“whether there's more than this?”

Just like that, straight out, no buildup, no
I have something big to ask you
, no
you know that nice, safe world we've made for the boys? Kiss it good-bye
. Nothing. There are no words that convey exactly how taken by surprise I was. I could tell you stuff about dizziness, my heart slamming into my ribs hard enough to hurt, buzzing in my ears, but it wouldn't do it. Not really.

I laughed, shakily, because I had a vague notion that by not responding too much, I could limit the damage. “Scrubbing snot off the furniture at eleven at night? Sure. I'd have to be a total idiot not to.”

“No, Cass.” He leaned forward, toward me. “Whether there's more out there for
me
.”

“Oh.” I had that falling sensation, like the first time I ever went on the Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland. I didn't know it was a flume ride, and I was terrified to suddenly find myself hurtling down in the dark. “I'm guessing whatever you did all day was more interesting than scrubbing snot.”

“You'd be surprised.”

I doubted that. “Rick, what's going”—my voice cracked, I swallowed—“on?”

The phone rang, cracking through the hush of the room. I was still on my knees, holding the Pellegrino bottle and the wadded-up paper towels. It was one of those moments when it feels like a bunch of time has passed but not much has. I reached for the phone.

“Leave it.” Rick put his hand on mine. I stared up at him.

It seemed like you could have soft-boiled an egg in the amount of time it took the next three rings. Until, finally, from the kitchen, I heard my own voice announcing cheerfully that we couldn't get to the phone right now followed by Sue Moriarty's voice. “Hi, Cassie. I know it's late, but I figured you'd still be up. Just wanted to remind you that you're chairing the Committee for Foreign Language meeting tomorrow a.m. Oh, and have you and Rick reserved tickets for the Christmas Carol Ball yet? It was such fun last year, wasn't it? Okay, see you tomorrow. Bye.”

“Ah. Sue.” In a previous incarnation, before she'd become the Parents Association doyenne of Brooklyn Heights, Sue and Rick had been—in one of those coincidences that seem contrived in fiction but happen in life—in the same class at Wharton, so he'd known her a long time. “Another committee, Cass?” He sounded wryly amused. I don't know why, but this added to my creeping discomfort. Wry amusement was not his thing. Earnestness, yes, wry amusement, no.

“I'm chairing for Grace Finn who broke her leg, poor thing,” I babbled, trying to quiet the discomfort. “They want foreign language added to the curriculum by the time the kids are four because they think it will help with college admissions.”

“So why do you do it?”
Do what?
my mind flailed. “Ridiculous committees, benefits, all this time with overinvolved parents with no lives of their own,” he added.

I did it because it was, well, what I did, what we'd both wanted—for me to be involved, there for our children, in a way our parents hadn't been for us. Did I really, suddenly, need more justification than the fact that I loved the feeling of building a fence of security around my little family, keeping my boys' worlds safe and comfortable?

“You never wanted to be Sue Moriarty.” He sounded sad, the wryness was gone, or maybe just imagined after all.

“And I'm not,” I said fiercely.

“Are you sure?”

I started to laugh, because it's in my nature to always try to diffuse an awkward situation with a joke, and Rick was really scaring me, making this a bona fide awkward situation. “Well I'm not sleeping with Tim,” I said. “For starters.”

“Neither is she, I'm guessing,” he said and then gave me a
look
, you know, a significant one. My heart, which had slowed to probably double time, took off again. “But that's not what this is about. Cass.” He leaned down, put his forearms on his knees. “Before, when I said do you ever wonder if there's something more, I meant this, all of”—he motioned at the living room, at me—“this.”

“‘This'
being our life?” My voice was shaking audibly. “Marriage, children?”

He was silent long enough for me to know the answer.

Now, I am a serious worrier. I worry about everything from whether my kids' sneakers have proper arch support to which subway line is most likely to have a derailment to the polar ice-caps melting to tsunamis in the East River to exactly what North Korea is doing with those nukes. So you might think this scenario was one I'd have been semi-prepared for, but this of course was precisely the
one damn thing on earth
I'd never given anxiety time to. It had simply never occurred to me.

This was so uncharacteristic that even as Rick was in the very act of doing it and I was watching him, hearing him, do it, I was having trouble making myself believe it was actually happening.
This can't be for real
. Because the thing about Rick was that his traits, the good and the bad, were flip sides of the same coin. Heads, his predictability, certainty, absolute rock-solid devotion to family life. Tails, his occasional smugness, inflexibility, utter predictability. But neither side had cowardly, scum-sucking, mid-life-crisis-having, bastard, so obviously there was some kind of misunderstanding. I was going to explain that to him, very calmly and rationally, until I looked up at him again, saw the expression on his face. And then I understood.

All that worrying? Useless. It didn't stop planes from slamming into the World Trade Center and it hasn't prevented global warming or the existence of Michael Jackson's plastic surgeon, kept my kids from getting sick or staved off the arrival of those weird mosquitoes with the tiger striped legs that give bites the size of Frisbees and transmit hideous diseases. And it wasn't doing a damned thing to keep the inevitable from unfolding in my living room.

Total freaking waste of time.

I'd like to say that right then and there was the end of the worrying, that I realized on the spot that it hadn't done me any good in the past and therefore was not going to be of any use to me in the future. That I then and there turned over a new leaf and started moving ahead as a happier, healthier, freed person. But I'd be lying. The words weren't even out of his mouth before I went to work on: Is there someone else? Does he still love us? How devastated on a scale of one to ten will the boys be? Will he be generous with money? If I have to get a job, am I qualified to do anything other than clean toilets? Are we almost done with this national obsession with reality TV? I sat there, staring at him, worrying about all of the above and then some, knowing I should move, say something, do something, but stuck in my mind on his question
Do you ever wonder whether there's more out there?

Anyone who's been a stay-at-home mom for any length of time (officially defined as longer than a week) will tell you that there is no simple answer to this: yes and no, depends on the day/ hour/minute, always, never, mostly, occasionally, sometimes, of course there's something more out there, what do you think I am? a moron? and what else could there be? are all in there, mixed up together. Asking someone to pull one answer out is like throwing different colors of paint into a bucket, stirring it up, and trying to take one color out.

On the most basic level, the decision to stay home is often made at a moment when you're not at your best—i.e., unshowered, unrested, hormonally imbalanced, leaking milk at inopportune moments and unable to fit into anything in your wardrobe. You are alternating second by second between panic at what you've done (I've ruined my life. This is so not like having a goldfish and actually, how well did
that
work out?) and the un-shakable conviction that each blink of your child's eye is the most fascinating spectacle on earth and to miss even one constitutes unthinkable neglect.

That first month, we spent so many hours staring at Noah's perfect little head it's a wonder in retrospect that the poor kid wasn't traumatized by having two zombies looming over him every time he woke up. When he was a week old, Rick rolled over in bed one night, looked at me thoughtfully, and said, “God your face is huge.” Do we sound like people who should have been entrusted with deciding what color to paint the bathroom, never mind life-altering decisions?

Nonetheless, when Noah was nine weeks old, I said, “So I've been thinking. Maybe I should freelance instead of going back as a staff writer.” I was, at the time, on staff at
City Woman
magazine, where I was writing a lot of stories like “The Briefcase You Can't Live Without: It's functional, it says power, yet it's still thrillingly, sexily, feminine.” I didn't exactly feel like I'd be depriving the world of the next Christiane Amanpour.

Rick spent a few careful seconds observing Noah perform the amazing feat of sleeping in the middle of our bed before saying, “Maybe even wait on the freelancing until he's a little older, Cass. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to give him your full attention? You can always go back later.”

“It's not like knowing how to write is a skill that loses its marketability,” I'd agreed.

Did I regret it? Sometimes. Although to be honest, mostly (a) when discussing the decision with my mother and (b) at Rick's work dinners.

“Oh come on, before the LTOM became part of LIFFE, the C& F on LPG far outweighed the PPG, unless you're using the SOFFEX LEPO,” the person across the table from me would say. (I admit this isn't an
exact
transcription, more an interpretation and possibly, even, a slight exaggeration.)

Finally, when talk of the PPG waned, which could take several hours—each more thrilling than the last—some twenty-something whiz woman of investment banking with thighs like Kate Moss's and that perfect work-to-dinner suit would turn to me and say, politely, “Are you in finance, too?”

My reply that I was at home with two kids would be met by an infinitesimal split second of silence—like I'd just said
I feel everyone should open themselves to the exotic possibility of eternal damnation
. After the silence, a quick inquiry into the age and sex of offspring would follow, and then: “My God! You
are
working, then!”

“Oh, yes!” I'd say, with an equal degree of false enthusiasm, much as though I was raising a troupe of wacky performing chimps. “They're a handful!”

Let's just say that I rarely eyed a wine bottle with as much affection as at these dinners. But I'm not altogether convinced that's the same thing as real regret. It's wistfulness in a wouldn't-it-be-nice-to-be-putting-on-a-designer-skirt, grabbing-an attaché-case-instead-of-this-humongous-tote-bag-stuffed-with-papers-pencils-action figures-plastic-animals-Legos-juice-boxes-and-dried-up-peanut-butter-sandwiches kind of way. And I don't know one woman with children, regardless of how passionately she loves the choices she's made, who doesn't have regrets.

When she was six months pregnant with her third child, my friend Kate Hoenig dumped a high-profile job in advertising. A month into her time as a domestic goddess, we were at one of those indoor play spaces, watching our children hurtle themselves headlong over dangerous objects and wallow in the toxin-infested ball pit. It was the first time that afternoon that one of the four children we had between us wasn't hanging off us crying and/or expounding on the evil ways of their sibling.

“Do you regret it?” I asked.

“Deciding to stay home?” Kate averted her gaze from the sight of her four-year-old son practicing his javelin-throwing technique on a group of unsuspecting toddlers. “Absolutely not. Being with the kids, despite all the chaos and tedium, it's the best thing I've ever done. The fulfillment is just…impossible to describe.”

And then she carefully removed the glob of Geno's frozen pizza from her formerly perfectly highlighted hair, looked toward the CIA-style security system she would have to negotiate her pregnant bulk through to get to a garbage can, shrugged, and ate it. “Not bad,” she said.

Ten weeks after the baby was born she'd unresigned and was back in the office. I went into Manhattan to meet her for lunch a few weeks later.

“I feel like such a failure.” She looked down at her black cod with miso, tears in her eyes.

“A failure?” I was trying not to salivate with envy at her Manolos and her once-again perfectly highlit hair. “Kate, what are you talking about?”

“I just couldn't do it. I tried. I told everyone how fulfilled I was, staying home, but, God! I hated it. It was like I was dead most of the time, and when I didn't feel dead it was because I was so depressed killing myself seemed like too much effort. I'm not together like you are, Cassie.”

“Together?” I put down my fork, smiling modestly.

“No, really. To do it, day after day, and not mind the numbing tedium, the depression, the boredom.” She took a delicate bite of her cod. “You
have
to be together to survive that!”

 

“I mean, haven't you ever wondered if your life would have been more fulfilling if you'd gone in a different direction, Cass?” Rick pulled me back from lunch with Kate to the present. He looked at me encouragingly, like a little support might help me consider the question. “It's okay if you have. I mean, it's only natural.”

He pushed his glasses up his nose in a gesture so familiar to me that I felt a split second of confusion over whether it was my habit or his. And I don't wear glasses. “Do I wish I was editing the
New York Times
instead of going to PTA meetings? Sometimes, sure.” Mostly while I was
at
the PTA meetings.

“But what about something really new? Different? Something more unexpected, like, I don't know…acting?”—was it my imagination, or was he starting to look uncomfortable?— “Singing? Something creative?”

I shot him a look. “Do you know me at all, Rick?”

He smiled. “I like to think I do.”

“In seventh grade I tried out for a part in
No, No, Nanette
. They suggested I look in a different direction for my future.” And then, feeling completely sick to my stomach, I waited for the train with no brakes I knew was headed right at me to hit. “Why?”

“Actually, Cass, I, um, didn't so much mean a different direction for you. I meant me.” He looked down at the floor, suddenly bashful.

I could tell he wanted me to probe further, pull it out of him. “So?” I said in as close to a this-better-be-good kind of voice as I could muster. “Can
you
act? Can
you
sing?” Because if he (a) could and (b) wanted to, it was a revelation to me.

“I don't know,” he said. “But that's not really the point. A person's creativity's not always so
overt
or readily measured by external standards. And maybe, just maybe, mine's been stifled by all this”—he looked around like he was trying to figure it out—“these—”

“Children? People who love you and rely on you?” I was desperately hoping to break through whatever this was.

He looked at me. Or maybe past me. “Responsibilities. The stuff, the apartment, the wine cellar, the house on Nantucket.”

“Who insisted on all that? Because as far as I'm concerned the whole thing has always been mostly about delivering a great big
fuck you, I can do it on my own
to your mother.” Then I clapped a hand over my mouth. I have always believed that there are some things you intrinsically understand about your spouse that you hold against your heart for them, that you
get
but never throw in their faces. And as soon as I said this, I regretted it. It was the panic speaking.

But his voice was mild when he said, “As was yours to become the perfect organic food buying, PTA meeting attending, bake sale organizing, Stepford, private school mom. Different mother, different methods, maybe. Same message, definitely.”

Damn. “Touché, Rick.” I forced myself to look at him.

“See, Cass, I understand now that I don't need any of that stuff, but
thinking
I did shackled me to a sterile, deadening, materialistic way of life. And you”—he was definitely not meeting my gaze now—“well, like it or not, you enabled me in those beliefs.”

I enabled him?
Was this psychobabble? Coming from Rick Martin?

“I understand that you don't want to believe you were complicit, Cass, but you're fooling yourself just as much as I was when I told myself I was happy.”

“Are you saying you've never been happy?” If he hadn't been, I must have been the most insensitive person on earth, because I'd been convinced he was. It was impossible to have this conversation without flashing on all the times that seemed to make his words a lie. Our wedding day, him crying over the boys in the delivery room, nights spent walking Jared when he'd had colic. Us, on Nantucket, on the beach with the kids, making love on the kitchen floor, reading in front of the fire, playing endless games of Sorry and Go Fish. Rick, his eyes misted with tears at the preschool concert. “Never?”

“I thought I was.”

I felt like I'd been punched. Hard. “It's our life, Rick.” I wasn't doing much of a job of holding back the tears. “Maybe it is imperfect, but it's ours.”

“We hate it,” he said.

Tears were sliding down my face now. “Have I ever said I hated our life?”

“No.” He looked down, and I wondered if he was going to blame me for the $75 cashmere socks he was wearing. “But just because you're willing to lie down and make yourself a doormat doesn't mean the resentment doesn't radiate off you in waves, Cass.”

“Resentment?” I said, really surprised. I tore a paper towel off the roll I was still holding and wiped my face. “Resentment at what?”

“You're just as tied to it as I am. No, was,” he said, looking me straight in the eye for the first time in the past few minutes. “All the stuff, the material stuff, private schools, second houses, you either wanted it more than you told yourself, or you were willing to sacrifice your desires completely. And to be honest, I don't respect either.”

I was so scared I could hardly breathe. I figured I could live without respect if I had to. “Rick, if you want to make changes, we can do that. But maybe you should go see someone, to talk?” I was almost begging.

“No,” he said, in a way that told me clearly that
that
discussion wasn't going to happen. “I understand this perfectly. It's about me having put myself, my own interests and needs, behind everyone else's. But don't you see, Cass?” He reached over and put his hand over mine. “It doesn't matter what catalyzed this feeling. What matters is that I have it and there's no denying it. But it's for you too! Try thinking of it as me gifting you with an opportunity to find your real unshackled self!”

I looked down at his hand on mine and had to repress the quickest flash of myself, leaning down and sinking my teeth, right into his hand.
My husband's going around the bend, and I'm channeling my mother
. Shit. What if my real, unshackled self was her?