Carpool Confidential (30 page)

I didn't say anything about Nantucket; I didn't ask him if he was coming home for Christmas.

I turned down my mother's invitation to come back to Boston. Proving me wrong once again on which relationships have staying power, Luke was going to meet Caleigh's family. Katya had not been heard from. Peter was spending the holiday as an embedded journalist with troops in Iraq for a major piece on how isolating it was for them to be separated from their families at Christmas.

“So neither of them has been in contact to ask what you're doing or where you're going?” I asked Harmonye.

She shook her head. “Sometimes we spend Christmas together, but mostly I go home with a friend.”

I wanted to kill them both, seriously.

I'd promised myself at Thanksgiving that I'd find something better for the boys. Christmas
a deux
with my parents didn't figure into that plan. In the end I decided we'd spend the morning with Randy and Josh and the kids, and the afternoon and evening with Letitia. She had surprised me by offering to come to us so the kids could be at home. A box the size of Montana was delivered from her. It was so big that I had to ask the super to store it in the basement. It contained a Nintendo Wii, along with everything else the boys had even thought about asking for. Except their daddy.

On Wednesday morning, the phone woke me up at six o'clock. It was Randy. “Throw some sweats on and go to the door.”

I did, right as Josh struggled an eight-foot tree out of the elevator.

It wasn't the same as having Rick home and all of us going to pick a tree together, but the boys were ecstatic when they woke up. I promised to go down and get the boxes of ornaments for tonight, and they practically danced their way to school.

“Cassie.” Sue nabbed me in the school lobby. She was looking puzzled. My heart sank. As the importance of the blog was growing in my life, so was my fear of unmasking. I pasted a smile on my face. “Are you and Rick not going to the Christmas Carol ball Saturday? You're not on the list.”

“We can't this year.” I didn't elaborate. Since I'm such a crappy liar, I figured anything further would just make her suspicious.

She said, “Oh. OK. Next year then.” But she had a look in her eye that made me wonder whether a little elaboration would have gone amiss.

 

Jen came by to pick me up in the sleek little BMW convertible she drove when she was child-free. I was going with her to look at a house in Connecticut that Nora loved and she was less enthusiastic about. We tore over the Brooklyn Bridge. She slipped into the right lane with no turn signal. As we roared up the FDR Drive, I uncurled my hand from the seat and clutched the door. I hated when anyone other than me (or Rick) was driving. Why on earth would I trust Rick more than Jen? Years of habit was the only possible explanation, nothing rational, for sure.

“So the house is beautiful. Stunning.”

I steadied myself against the dash and closed my eyes. If we were going under the wheels of the truck next to us, I didn't want to know in advance. “Sounds good.” I tried to sound rallying, even though I felt like it would be one more loss than I could take right now.

“I'm counting on you to hate it.”

I dropped the cheerleading. “I already do.”

 

I loved it.

It was a sprawling, white, late-seventeen-hundreds clapboard with a stretch of lawn sloping down to a private dock on Long Island Sound. Old wooden swings hanging from an apple tree, a slate-bottomed pool that looked like it was from the south of France. A barn!

I couldn't lie. Finally, in the kitchen—which had an old stone floor worn smooth (that Kathy the nice real estate lady said was reclaimed from the ruins of a French monastery)—I turned to Jen. “This place is unbelievable. It's like it's been waiting—” I realized I was about to say
for me
and pulled myself up short.

Jen started crying.

“Oh, Jen.” I put my arms around her. “I think it's fabulous, but it's like”—I searched around for what it was like—“roast leg of lamb!”

“Huh?” She stopped crying.

“Some people love it, eat it every Sunday. And others, like me, think it tastes like a stringy sheep that's been cooked for three days and no amount of saying
It's fabulous, everyone likes it
or
It tastes like something medieval peasants ate
is going to change anyone's mind either way. You're a leg of lamb person or you're not.”

She shook her head, but she was laughing. “I like leg of lamb, but not every Sunday. So what does that say?”

“Weekend house?” I suggested hopefully.

Her tears not only returned but in such a deluge, I had to drive home.

“How can I say no to that?” she sobbed in the passenger seat. “How? It's perfect, right?”

It was pretty damned perfect. I'd always believed that nothing could ever touch the splendor of the view from my apartment, but that house, there was something about the way it felt. Solid and serene and…permanent. It felt like somewhere you'd move when you were ready to be a grown-up and stay forever. By contrast, my view felt flashy and immature. It was like going to a wedding, meeting the groom, and coming home with the understanding that the guy you were dating wasn't and never would be marrying material. “It's only perfect if it's perfect for you, Jen.”

I was churning with conflict. There was the good friend part: I didn't want Jen to move, because she didn't want to and I hated the thought of her being unhappy. Then there was the good friend but slightly selfish part: I didn't want her to move because I was afraid of losing her. Of course we'd still be friends. We'd start off talking on the phone all the time, meeting for lunch every few weeks (with my current budget it would have to be at Gray's Papaya), but gradually our worlds would drift, our conversations become further apart both in time and in common ground, and no amount of trying would make things the same.

And then there was an awful, reprehensible, greedy, green-eyed even more selfish part: I didn't want her to move because
I
wanted the house, lusted after it, coveted it, didn't want anyone else to have it. I'd pretty much dealt with the fact that due to certain life choices on my part, someone other than me was going to end up with George Clooney (if you have something to say about it maybe being more than life choices that accounts for this, please keep it to yourself). But this house was a different story.

Not that it was a romance that could ever be. Financially, I'd be lucky to last the year where I was, never mind splurging on something that required actual capital. And middle-aged women with children who have been dumped
leave
the suburbs as fast as they can throw the minivan into gear—they don't haul out and move there.

My phone rang in my jacket pocket, startling me and making me put my foot on the very responsive gas pedal with more force than I'd intended. We shot forward, and my heart accelerated. Jen reached in my pocket and pulled the phone out.

“Oh, hi, Betsy.” No one would ever have guessed she'd been sobbing two seconds ago. “No, it's Jen…she is, but she's driving…OK.”

Actually, the car was surprisingly pleasurable to drive. It was both scary and liberating to not have the womblike protection of a massive Volvo SUV. An outer shell that created the illusion of security, like my marriage, like my apartment. I edged the speed up a little more.

“I don't know, Betsy…uh-huh…it sounds unlikely…OK.” She turned to me. “Betsy is starting to come around to Sue maybe being the blogger.”

I sighed. “Oh?”

“Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Right. Uh-huh.” She looked at me, still listening to the buzzing. “Hold on a sec, Betsy.” To me, with some eye rolling: “Apparently Sue's always said she couldn't make meetings on Tuesday mornings because that's her Junior League treasury meeting morning, but Lisa Klein got put on the JL treasury committee two months ago and she said that Sue resigned her post there last year.”

“Maybe she got it mixed up with Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition meetings.”

“Right. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.” To me again: “No, those are Wednesday afternoons.”

I was cruising along at seventy-five. “Neighborhood Association.”

“Every third Monday,” Jen reported.

“Brooklyn Kindergarten Society, art museum fund-raiser, Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, Brooklyn Public Library, Christmas Ball committee, there are only a million other commitments she could have.”

Jen listened for a second. “Apparently none of those check out.”

“Maybe Tuesdays she likes to stay home picking her nose, eating Cheetos, and watching Regis and Kelly.”

Jen giggled. “What? No. I think she was kidding.” She looked at me. “Sue eats Smart Puffs and thinks Regis and Kelly are emotionally and intellectually bankrupt.”

“Doesn't mean she doesn't watch them.” I swerved into the right lane to pass the guy in front of me, who was meandering along way too slowly.

“Hey!” Jen said. “Did you just pass on the right?”

“Sorry.” I edged left again.

“I don't know, Betsy. It all sounds pretty circumstantial, but I'll see what she thinks.” To me: “Deb Goldberg saw Sue coming out of the J Sisters, and when she said hi, Sue got flustered and started babbling about how she'd just had a facial—”

“Definitely the blogger,” I said loudly, for Betsy. “I think that's pretty much incontrovertible evidence.”

“OK. OK. OK. Yup. Yup. OK. Bye.” She clicked the off button, and the two of us started laughing, like the scene in Mary Poppins where they all float up to the ceiling until Jen said, “Are those flashing lights for
us
?” and we landed with a thump.

Between the length of time we'd spent in Connecticut and the hour it took the cop to actually issue the ticket, it was late by the time I got to Randy's to pick the boys up.

Her house looked like a bomb had gone off. An explosion of books, papers, drawings, shoes, broken pencils, socks, backpacks, hockey sticks, and (bafflingly) a blow dryer with a frayed cord decorated the narrow front hallway. When Josh had been the stay-at-home parent, the house had smelled of clean laundry and homebaked cookies. Now it smelled of wet dog, which was particularly strange as they didn't have a dog. I hoped it wasn't going to be me staging an intervention for her soon. “Were the kids a total nightmare?”

“Oh, no, they were great.” Randy pushed back her hair and bit into the slice of cold pizza she was holding. “I gave them snacks and forced them to do their homework. They complained that Josh makes cookies with them. I explained that the only kind of cookies I do come in a bag, gave them two Chips Ahoys each, and then barely saw them again until I ordered pizza. Do you want some?”

“Sure.” I went to the top of the stairs and called down to the boys that it was time to go home. Judging by the reaction I got, choruses of groans and
Just five more minutes please and then we swear we'll be ready
s from both my own and Sarah and Owen, they hadn't exactly been pining for me. “So.” I looked around at the debris. “How are things?”

She followed my gaze. “Pretty good. I'm just not into the picking-up-every-day thing like Josh was, and delegation doesn't seem to work as well here as it did at the office, so I'm doing it strictly on an as-needed basis.”

“So what constitutes need?” I asked. “Actual decomposition?”

She laughed. “Josh is decomposing, that's for sure. He can't stand the mess. Come on through to the kitchen, where I promise basic standards of hygiene are being practiced. I'll even heat your pizza up. See how domestic I am now?”

“Wow,” I said, as I sat down at the table. “Nice stained-glass candle holders. New hobby?” I was getting seriously worried here.

“Josh's mother keeps sending them. The kids think they're stunning. My plan is to wrap them up and give them to Jen as a housewarming gift.” Randy handed me a glass of red wine while she made herself a cup of some kind of skunky-smelling herbal tea. I asked her about the doctor's appointment. She said they were going to try harvesting in two weeks.

The first sip of wine tasted like heaven. I turned my attention back to the candle holders. “Those will fit in perfectly with Jen and Nora's gallery-quality modern art collection.”

She laughed and handed me a plate of pizza. “Tell me about the house.”

“It's—” I almost didn't want to talk about it. I felt like I'd had a deeply personal experience with it. Realizing I needed to get a grip, I said, “It's beyond gorgeous, but nothing can change the fact that Jen doesn't want to move.”

She sat down with her cup. “Do you think they will?”

I took a bite. “Probably.”

“It's the first in a long time.” We looked at each other, both remembering those early years, when it felt like we lost friends in droves when the kids started reaching kindergarten age.

Randy and I had met in a playgroup that we'd both been in when Noah and Sarah were babies. There had been twelve of us, and we'd been so tight it had been impossible to believe we wouldn't always be in and out of each other's kitchens, on the phone, taking care of each other's children. It had seemed like those endless lazy days sipping lattes and chasing the kids around the playground would last forever.

But one by one, people had moved on and things had changed. I hadn't understood until later that when you're home with babies, you form friendships with people you probably would not have passed the time of day with under any other circumstances. By the time the kids had started first grade, we'd had seven wine-soaked farewell parties, and only five of us were left in the city. Of the five, one had gone massively crazy, in the true sense of the word, one had decided for undisclosed reasons that she loathed both Randy and me violently and had stopped speaking to us, and the other had become a born-again Christian and left with her husband to go join a back-to-the-land movement in Iowa.

“When was the last time you heard from any of them?” she asked me.

“Hillary left me a what's up message a couple months ago, but I haven't returned it. I got Christmas cards from Maria and Susan. And Laura and I email every once in a while, but, honestly, I can't remember the last time. What about you?”

“Ruth and I have lunch once in a while. Mel and I talk probably once a year, and I get Christmas cards from Maria and Susan too, but that's about it.”

We were quiet for a second. “That's the thing about life,” she said, “you know? You get in that groove and you just assume you'll always be there and then one by one things change so gradually you don't even notice it until it's all different.”

“Or sometimes,” I pointed out, “they change so fast it's like a sonic boom.”

We both laughed. “Yeah,” she said and then asked, “do you think that's what I'm doing here? Trying to hold onto days that have already passed?”

“I don't know,” I said honestly. “If you are, it's not going to work, because new baby or no new baby, those days are still passing.”

“That's the whole point.”

“Tell me about it. You're talking to someone who's waking up to the reality that I spent a dozen years, give or take, confusing marriage with a full-time career.”

She smiled. “And you're talking to someone who spent the same confusing a full-time career with a life.” I laughed. “So do you think it's OK to want to do it again when I'm not exactly the earth mother of the year?”

“Yes,” I told her. “I do.”

“Can I make a confession?”

“Of course.” But as I said it, I was steeling myself. I didn't think Randy had any major skeletons, but no one knew better than me that you never knew.

“I hated nursing, couldn't wait to wean, frequently didn't bother with organic baby food, and sometimes used the television as a babysitter. And not always PBS.” She lowered her voice. “Nickelodeon!”

“Never mind another baby, you should just be shot,” I said.

“But I feel like such a hypocrite putting everything on hold to have another when half the people we know would say I didn't do a very good job with the first two. And it's not—” She stopped. “I know I've always seemed dismissive of the whole supermom thing, but now I wonder if it's just that I didn't want to admit I couldn't be bothered.”

I clearly wasn't the only one doing some major self-assessing. “But if the proof is in the final product, then you've succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. Sarah and Owen are fantastic. Smart and funny and empathetic and sweet. So what if they've seen a few episodes of
Rugrats
?”

She sighed. “But the good stuff, was that me? Or Josh?”

“Can you separate your contributions? Would you want to?”

“Not really. I guess.” She didn't sound totally convinced.

“Hey,” I said, remembering, “I have a gift for you.” I ran out to the hall and grabbed the pregnancy test that I (or rather, Sue Moriarty) had bought her. “It's not exactly a Bugaboo,” I warned as I came back in. “More symbolic and less expensive.” I put the EPT on the table.

“An EPT!” she was crying. “Thanks, Cass, I can't wait to use it.”

Before I could answer, her phone rang. It was clear from her end of the conversation, which mostly seemed to consist of phrases like
transitioning
and
bringing him up to speed
, that it was work-related. I pointed at the door to ask if she wanted me to go out. She shook her head, so I started flicking through the newspapers on the table. Not that the conversation wasn't fascinating from this end, but…

I pushed aside the
New York Times
as being too intense for me at the moment, as they had actual articles about actual topics of significance, and, pretending to myself that I might once again have a life and want to leave the house recreationally, I picked up the new
Time Out
and started flipping through.

My face went numb. Again. I got up, walked over to Randy, who was leaning on the counter, and started flapping the magazine under her nose. She gave a
what the fuck?
look. I gave her a
read this!
one and slapped the magazine, open, on the counter in front of her. She nodded, whether to me or the person on the phone, I wasn't sure, and said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” but I could tell she was reading.

I splashed a refill into my wineglass and pretty much chugged it. I could almost feel my face again.

“Listen, Steve, let me give you a call back, OK?” I heard her say. “Something's just come up here…yup…great…talk to you then. Thanks.” Then she hung up and turned to me. “Holy shit! It never even occurred to me he was telling the truth.”

“No kidding. This thing sounds legit. I can't believe it.”

“That makes two of us.” She was reading it again, like she was expecting it to have a pop out that was going to fly off the page saying, FOOLED YA! Actually, she wasn't the only one.

“What do you think it means?” I asked her.

She sat back down, looking at me like she was troubled. “What do
you
think it means?”

“I don't know.”

“Does this being—surprising as it is—for real means you forgive him?”

I knew topping up the wine again was a bad idea, but I was seriously tempted. As if reading my dilemma, Randy got up and did it for me. “It's weird”—I took a sip—“but I don't feel like I care all that much whether he was telling the truth or not. It doesn't change the other stuff he did along the way. Where he actually is and what he's doing doesn't make as much difference as it probably should.”

Randy nodded, and then after a minute said, “So. Do you think you can finesse us VIP opening night tickets? Hey, maybe Charlotte will let you cover the premiere for the magazine!”