Carpool Confidential (22 page)

So for now I'm still the woman next to you at the PTA meeting or yoga class or Whole Foods. Or just maybe your friend, your neighbor, the cochair of the Christmas Crafts Fair, your child's playdate's mother, or someone you used to work with.

 

There was something to be said for writing something you were too busy to read. I attached it to an email telling Charlotte to edit to her heart's content, sent it, threw myself in the shower, and was about to head out when Harmonye came wandering into the kitchen.

“Hey.” I buttoned my coat. “How are you feeling?”

“OK.”

While I waited for her to say more, I glanced out the window. The glory of the view seemed to have lost some of its hold on me. It looked a lot like just a city. Hot in summer, frigid in winter, crowded, noisy, and dirty.
It's that time of day
, I told myself,
where the flaws are stark
. “I'm going into the doctor this afternoon, should I make an appointment for you, or is there someone you usually see when you're home that you'd prefer?”

“Yeah,” she said vaguely. “I'll give them a call later.”

I understood all too well that this was going to be an unpleasant reality to face head-on, but I couldn't let her just drift—amazing how much easier it was to see that in someone else's life. “You really need to do that today, OK? Do you want something to eat?”

She yawned and stretched, revealing smooth, teenaged stomach between the top of her flannel pj bottoms and cropped Foo Fighters T-shirt. I couldn't help wondering how thrilled she'd be with stretch marks. “Just coffee.”

I opened my mouth to say something about nutrition and pregnancy, then shut it. “OK,” I said. “Beans are in the silver canister. How's your tongue?”

“Still sore, but better, thanks.”

I started searching for my left glove, which seemed to have left the premises, simultaneously running through, in my mind, all the stuff I needed Maria to pick up when I remembered that Maria was no longer employed by me. I looked at Harmonye. “Do you think if I left you a list and some money you could run up to the store for me?”

She looked sulky. “I guess. And do you think you could remember to call me Mary Alice? I
hate
Harmonye. I'm never answering to that again.”

In the cold light of day my houseguest was looking less sweetly charming. “Sure.” I smiled at her; maybe positive reinforcement would defeat the surliness.

“Is that like the price for me staying here? I get to be the slave errand girl?”

“Yes,” I said sweetly. And then I remembered. “Hey, guess what.”

“What?”

“You're not going to believe this one. Grandma and Grandpa are going to marriage counseling.”

She frowned. “They're like both getting married? To who?”

I did not say,
“Don't you mean, To whom”
? Just, “Each other, apparently.” Figuring I wasn't going to get a better parting line than that, I grabbed my stuff, left her a list, and took off.

www.carpoolconfidential.blogspot.com

“Your”—Ingrid, the waxer, shoots a glance at my left hand— “husband, he will love it. It's a surprise?”

“No husband,” I stare at the ceiling. “Ignore the rings.”

She laughs in a girlfriendy kind of way. “Boyfriend then, he will love it.”

“No boyfriend.” I decide that if this is what the single life has in store for me—lying naked and spread-eagled on paper-covered tables while a woman who is part personal trainer, part beautician, part gynecologist, and part serious pervert prepares to work me over painfully—my husband, Will, deserves some really awful fate while I move on gracefully, finding fame, fortune, professional success, a place in my children's future therapy as The Good Parent, and a really fabulous single guy who does not require any special brands of sparkling water or someone to personally deliver his shirts for hand ironing ninety-four blocks (including avenues) from my home.

*By the way: Names, occupations and some identifying details are changed so there's no use trying to figure out if anyone knows of a corporate lawyer named Will who's fussy about his sparkling water and shirts and just quit his job.

My cell rings. Ingrid doesn't look happy. “We ask that you turn those off in here. You are supposed to relax.” She dusts places I didn't even know I had with talcum powder. Relax. That's a good one.

I mutter something about children and emergencies as I hop off the table and grab the phone out of my bag. It's Trudy Bonham, someone Very Big in the PTA at my children's school.

“Delphine, how are you?”

“Good, thanks, Trudy. And you?” I climb back on the table.

“Oh, you know. Not great.”

I'm pretty sure I could tell Trudy a thing or two about not great. Ingrid is looking at my pubic hair through a magnifying glass to “determine texture.”

“Listen”—Trudy drops her voice “—the crisis has blown up in a major way. It's very bad. Can you be at the school in ten minutes?”

The last time Trudy cried emergency, it turned out that there was hydrogenated oil in the cookies being served at snack. The school listed organic graham crackers on Wednesday but was really serving generic brand animal crackers. She wanted us to make a statement by setting the boxes on fire and dumping them in New York Harbor.

“Not too coarse,” Ingrid decides.

“I'm sorry,” I say to Trudy, “I can't.”

“But it's an emergency.”

Ingrid gives a sadistic grin and starts stirring a vat of liquid that, judging by the steam, is slightly hotter than what erupted on Pompeii.

I'm going to need a lie here and I need something big because Trudy didn't get to be Someone Very Big in the PTA by taking no for an answer. “I'm sorry, Trudy, I can't. I'm in Manhattan because I'm…sick. Really sick. It came on suddenly and no one knows for sure what it is. A strep mutation or something. I'm on my way to an infectious disease specialist as we speak.” (And no, that's not really the excuse I used.)

Ingrid gives me a strange look. I immediately start worrying that something karmically awful will happen to me for having lied. Ingrid's wax will be contaminated and I'll get a raging in fection and die. In the sensational newspaper articles that are sure to follow, Ingrid will be interviewed about how I'd been glibly lying on the phone (while lying on her table) just hours previously. Trudy will recognize our conversation, because the newspapers won't change the facts as I just did. I'll be posthumously outed.

Will will come back as a widower superdad. He'll tackle PTA meetings, doctor's appointments, soccer matches, first dates, four-course dinner preparation, and emcee the annual school fund-raising auction with the aplomb of Tiger Woods playing a round of mini golf. Everyone will talk about how he's obviously been a great guy all this time but living with me has kept him down. And in the end that's all my children will have to remember me by—faded newspaper clippings revealing me as a pubicly well-groomed liar.

“Oh my God, how awful! Feel better.” Trudy does a quick hangup.

I look at Ingrid. “Sorry. I can't tell her the truth. It's— complicated.”

She doesn't say anything, just stirs her boiling wax.

“That is sterile, right?” I can't resist.

She grabs my ankles and pushes my feet over my head so my left knee is up my own nose when my phone rings again.

“Aieeee.” Ingrid has just—I will refrain from saying exactly where with a sense of delicacy not hitherto shown in this blog, but I absolutely refuse to be more specific than that—waxed an area I did not think we would be visiting today. I know in the intellectual part of my brain that it is possible to be in more pain than this. The problem is the rest of my brain—i.e., the pain centers— don't agree. My ears are buzzing. My eyes, tearing. “Hello?”

“This Delphine Lennox?” It's a male. Older and a smoker, by the sound of his voice.

“Yes.” I answer through the metallic taste in my mouth. I forgot to ask Ingrid if this could cause internal bleeding.

“Hi. It's Fred.” Silence while I try to get my brain to function enough to figure out if I know a Fred. “The P.I.”

The P.I. Oh, my mother-in-law's P.I. He's going to be hunting down my husband. “Hi,” I say—aieeee—Ingrid rips again.

“I'm all up to speed on your current situation.” I hope he doesn't mean at this precise moment. “Can I come by and get some more information from you on Friday morning?”

I say sure and start to tell him where and then stop. Is it insulting to give a P.I. your address, like implying he can't figure it out on his own? “Would you rather I didn't tell you?”

He sighs. “Mrs. Lennox, I'm a P.I. Not a psychic or an idiot. Just tell me where you live.”

After two or three more hours of ripping, Ingrid pronounces us done. I lift my shaking hand to look at my watch. The two or three hours have taken precisely fifteen minutes real time. To those of you wondering if I feel it's pointless to be going through this not even for a man—I'm glad I haven't done it for a man—I'd have to kill him in return.

“Thank you,” I say fervently. I mean for letting me live.

But Ingrid seems to think I mean the look. She beams. “Much better than that…forest you had before, no?”

I hadn't exactly been an ungroomed ape when I'd come in, but never mind.

My first stop is a drugstore. Since the pharmacist refuses to sell me codeine without a prescription, I settle for Advil. I swallow three outside the store and then hobble next door to the supermarket, where I buy a bag of frozen peas. Outside, under the cover of my coat, I shove the bag down my jeans.

And so begins my new life as a sex goddess.

“Is that a bag of frozen peas?” Elizabeth Katz, my OB/GYN said to me an hour later. “Oh, I see. Ouch. Why did you go and do that?”

After the usual,
Relax, this will feel cold for a second, can you try to relax your abdomen a little more
chitchat, she said, “Everything seems fine, Cassie. I don't see any physical reason at all for the missed periods.”

My cell phone shrilled from my bag. My days were taking on a certain alarming predictability, with way too much lying on paper-covered tables involved. Elizabeth stood up, snapped off her gloves, and handed me my bag while I scooted up the table and tugged the gown closed. By then, the phone had stopped ringing. I swung my legs over the side. It rang again.

“Cassie,” Letitia said. “Let's have lunch.”

Elizabeth was motioning to me. I covered the phone. “Since you're here, let's just do a quick sonogram and run some blood work to cover all our bases.”

In the abstract I was willing to have lunch with Letitia, but I didn't particularly want to discuss the finer points of scheduling at this moment. Elizabeth was motioning for me to scoot back down the table. “I'm in the middle of a doctor's appointment, can I call you back?”

“Don't bother. I've already booked a table for one o'clock Thursday at Esta.”

“My mother-in-law,” I told Elizabeth. “At least I have two days before I have to see her.”

She snapped on new gloves and started rolling a condom over something.

I brightened. “Hey,” I said. “Does that thing vibrate?”

Somehow, directly after my appointment with Elizabeth, I found myself in an Upper East Side shrink's office. Having pronounced me definitively not pregnant; tallied up the amount of weight I'd lost since my last checkup; watched me dissolve in hysterical tears; and heard the entire story, Elizabeth had picked up the phone and called her friend, Dorothy Hallowell, who'd agreed to squeeze me in on her lunch hour.

I'd never been to a shrink before. Like anyone who's lived in New York for a long time, I know enough to recognize the shift in energy in the city in August when all the shrinks are on the Vineyard. Manhattan is an edgier, more dangerous-feeling place then. Better than the Vineyard, of course, which, with all those shrinks on holiday with their families, is like a powder keg, but subtly altered from Manhattan-as-usual. Anyway, I'm not saying I didn't need it, just that I'd never been before.

The waiting room was empty, very sleek, all leather and chrome. I was lost on the protocol. Did I sit and wait? What should I be thinking about? What if, at the end of an hour with me, Dr. Hallowell said she didn't blame Rick for what he'd done? Or what if we sat in silence for an hour? Or, oh God, what if she asked about my parents? The saga of their relationship was just the kind of thing that was likely to accidentally slip out in therapy and require further examination, which frankly was one of the reasons I'd never been. I'd lived through it. I hardly wanted to revisit it now.

The door on my left opened and a young woman came out. I scoped her out covertly over the
Atlantic Monthly
(which I'd chosen over
People
in the hopes of making a better impression). I didn't know if I was supposed to go knock on the door she'd come out of, or just wait, so I settled for sitting and obsessing about it for a while. After a couple minutes of this, the door opened again, and a tall, imposing woman with glossy, expensively cut gray hair in a nice pair of dark pants and the Anne Fontaine shirt I'd been coveting came out.

She smiled but did not look at my magazine, which was disappointing since I could have spent my wait time catching up on the latest in Jessica Simpson's love life instead of wading through a lengthy article on Darfur (which admittedly did feature George Clooney but not in any interesting or salacious way). “Cassie?”

“Yes. Hi.” I put the magazine down and followed her into her office. There was a desk and chair against one wall and a grouping of furniture on the rug—a sofa, facing two armchairs over a coffee table.

“Take a seat,” she said.

The first test. I debated what the various choices might mean:

Couch = classic Freudian believer, easily psychologically manipulated by shrink. Chair = control freak, refusal to accept power balance of patient/therapist relations. Coffee table = lunatic. Standing and staring at furniture, trying to make correct psychological choice so shrink doesn't think you're crazy = all three.

“How about here.” She inclined her head toward the couch. “You don't have to lie down. You can sit.”

“Okay.” I perched near the arm.

“Everyone does that,” she said. “They think I'm going to decide something about them based on where they sit.”

I smiled, like someone who has accidentally arrived early at their boss's dinner party.

“So”—she smiled—“would you like to tell me what brings you here?”

Not really. Almost before I'd finished thinking that, the whole story came bubbling out. She didn't interrupt or ask any questions.

“That's a lot of stuff,” she said, when I paused for breath.

I was starting to suspect I could get into coming here once a week to talk uninterruptedly about me without worrying about boring anyone to death. But—Oh my God! Did I even have health insurance any more? I'd just written Elizabeth Katz a whopping check, and it had never even occurred to me I might be doing so without eighty percent reimbursement. I was guessing that Rick hadn't bothered with any tedious COBRA forms before making his getaway. I instantly started panicking about one of the kids having a very expensive accident right at this very moment and me having to use all my money to pay doctors and hospitals and ending up on public assistance.

“Cassie?” Dr. Hallowell looked concerned.

“Health insurance.” I crossed my legs. There was something about taking up less space on her couch that made it feel like I was in more control of myself. “I was panicking about whether we still have it and one of my kids having a major accident.”

“Because you're convinced sitting here panicking about it will stop it from happening?”

“When you put it like that, it sort of deflates it,” I admitted.

She smiled and asked me about my childhood. “So,” I dropped my huge wad of soggy tissues in the wastebasket what felt like about three hours later. “Do you think I'm crazy?”

“No, Cassie, I don't.” She smiled at me and I started to stand.

She looked surprised. “You can go if you want, of course, but the session's not over yet.”

I sat back down. “Sorry. Thought we were done.”

“Do you want to be done?”

I looked at her. “I don't know. That depends on what comes next. And please don't say, what do I want to come next. I mean, ask what I want to come next.”

“Well,” she said, “what
do
you want to come next?”

“The part where you unfuck my life—Hey! You tricked me.”

She wrote something on her pad—probably
psycho
, but in a more technical way—but didn't say anything.

It was about three seconds before the silence got to me. So I said, “Well, if you don't think I'm crazy, what do you think?”

“Considering,” she said slowly, “that I've only known you for fifty minutes, it's hard to make generalizations. I think you've been handed a rotten deal, but at this point only you can unfuck your life. And I suspect I see some patterns from what kind of living room furniture you have to your reluctance to tell your children the truth about their father that speaks to a way of dealing with things that upsets as little as possible, to always want to take the path that creates the least conflict. I think it's interesting that you've tried to build a life and a family that was as far away from the household you grew up in as you were able. That you aggressively pursued the image of whatever you view normal to be. And I'm curious—while your parents were engaged in conducting personal and commercial warfare against one another, who was taking care of you children?”

I thought back. “Housekeepers and nannies over the years, and Katya is six years older, so I guess she pitched in a lot.”

“And when Katya's daughter was young, before she went away to school, who took care of her?”

“Nannies.”

“Interesting,” she said, “but I meant emotionally.”

“Oh, I don't think it was in the mix,” I told her. “In either case.”

“And how long have you been estranged from your father?”

“We're not estranged,” I explained. “We're just not close.”

“Do you find it at all interesting that he essentially abandoned you when you were eight and now Rick's done the same?”

“Abandoned me or the children?” I asked.

“Well,” she said, “I think both, don't you? It seems to me you've been abandoned by the significant man in your life twice.”

I stared at her. How could I have been so blind I'd never seen the parallel? I felt dizzy with realization, like the different strands of my life were waving around me and I didn't know whether to pull them tighter or let them blow away.

“And how would you characterize your relationship with your brother?”

“Fine. Not close. I'm older. We're not really in the same place.”

“I'm also interested in the fact that your sister and her husband, not to mention their daughter and her father are also essentially estranged.” It was like light switches were flicking on left and right. “Does she even see him?”

“Other than on TV? Not a lot.”

“Rick seems to have been the only real male presence you've allowed into your life,” she observed.

“Because he was safe.” I didn't know where that had come from, had never realized I felt it, but as I said it I knew it was true. “Except he wasn't.”

“Which may be something to think about. We're going to have to stop now, but did you want to set up another appointment?”

“Do you think I should?”

“Well.” She smiled. “Bearing in mind that you are a woman who sat here forty-five minutes ago trying to remotely control whether or not one of her children had an uninsured accident, I'd say, if you're happy, it's completely up to you.”

I laughed. “What do you have available?”