Carpool Confidential (7 page)

I'd been wrong about wanting to know. I really didn't want to think about this. “That's the thing about marriage,” I said, feeling desolate, “after a while you stop knowing who's who.”

“Do you want to tell me what happened?”

Why not? “He left me to find himself.”

“He was lost?”

“Apparently so. Lost, stifled, shackled and enslaved, actually.”

“Wow,” she said. “Lost is tough. Lost and stifled is miserable, even without the shackled, but lost, stifled, shackled
and
enslaved! Well, no wonder.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But it turns out, it was my fault for enabling all this misery.” Then I told her about the Barry Manilow thing.

When I was done: “You're making this up.”

Somehow I suspected I'd be getting this response again before all was said and done. “Charlotte,” I said. “How bad would the truth have to be for me to make this up? And do you honestly believe I'd have come up with the phrase
post-ironic discourse of blank parody
on my own?”

After the moment of silence this deserved, she said, “I don't suppose you've thought about the million ways you could spin this professionally?”

“So far I've pretty much confined myself to managing to breathe.”

“Totally understandable, but seriously, this is a lot of material. It's like a gift.”

“I prefer the ones from Cartier.”

“Well, who doesn't? But you gotta work with what you have. And this is like gold. I mean, if he'd left you for his secretary, ho hum, you and half the women in the world, but come on, Cass, he freaking left you for Barry Manilow. It doesn't get better than that.”

“I can't believe I didn't see it that way.” But I was laughing. Going on the theory that any laughter was better than lying prostrate on the floor at this point, this conversation was turning out to be a good thing. I was grateful to whatever impulse had made me call her.

“So?”

Was she going to offer? Should I ask? I stared down my insecurities, fears, and worries (I've been out of the work force forever). There are a million really good writers out there. Why would she want something from me? She did say some really nice stuff about me, though. What if I can't write anymore? What if she says a point-blank
no?

Down Boy!
What did I have to lose? “What if I did? Think about it from a professional standpoint, that is. Would you be interested?” Not exactly a hard sell, but edging into the water.

“Considering I just finished a whole character assassination on Rick for not encouraging you, do I have a choice other than
yes
?”

“Yes.”

She laughed. “True.” My heart thudded when she went silent for a minute, then: “Would you do something on spec?”

Spec was a nightmare. It meant I wrote the entire piece, submitted it, waited for them to decide whether to use it, and then waited again until they decided to pay me. It's like telling the doctor to go ahead and do the tests and you'll pay him if you like the diagnosis. “No.”

More silence. “What was the last piece you had published?”

I knew she knew. She'd been writing the same stuff— “Shoulder pads, the briefcase as a fashion accessory. Something like that. OK, you've made your point.”

“Let me have a think and I'll call you back in a bit.”

I didn't want to do that. I was afraid that if we hung up I was letting go of a chance, but what could I do? Refuse? “OK. And thanks, Charlotte.”

“Call you later.”

After we hung up, I looked out the window, at the sun slanting off the glass across the river, and wondered whether she really would or whether that was a brush-off. And then Rick and last night invaded. I tried not to want to curl up and die as pain and fear welled up in me, but it was hard to see my life stretched out in front of me as anything other than a series of days, like a mountain of ice, too slippery to climb.

I told myself I had to muster the togetherness to take Cad out before disaster struck, but the phone rang before I could get far.

“Cass.”

Rick. My heart skyrocketed so hard it was like the breath had been forcibly knocked out of me.

“Are you there? It's a lousy connection.”

“Yes.”
Please come home. Please. I need you
. It took everything I had to hold onto my pride and not say it out loud.

“I—,” he said.

Kind of bypassing the pride thing, I burst into tears. “Please, Rick. Where are you? Please, come home. That's where you belong. I love you and I need you and the kids do too, more than anything, and I can't—”

“You'll be fine, Hon. Listen, I don't have much time, but I realized I forgot to cancel my personal training and massage sessions at NYAC—City House, not Travers Island—for next week. Monday was squash, Wednesday was Pilates, and Friday was a total cardio. You should do it ASAP because if you don't give forty-eight-hours cancellation, they bill you for no-shows.”

“Rick, please.” Snot was running down my face.

“I thought I was doing you a favor by giving you a heads-up, Cass. Those sessions aren't cheap, and I know it's not my call how you spend it, but in my opinion you don't have that kind of spare cash right now. I guess I shouldn't have bothered letting you know.”

He sounded so put out, so wronged, I found myself apologizing and thanking him for letting me know. Hmm. Even as I did it, I recognized there was something wrong with that picture. I was just so desperate to placate him. Some part of my mind must have thought if I was accommodating enough, he'd come home.

He hung up, and I noticed for the first time that the caller ID was kindly explaining to me that the caller had withheld their number. Of course he fucking had. I could have pretty much guessed that one. I couldn't decide whether to sob or throw something, but was saved from the decision by a face-slapping waft and the corresponding telltale expression of guilt on Cad's face.

I stood up to get cleaning stuff from the kitchen. “Don't worry, Cad,” I said, blotting my tears on my sleeve. “You're not the first to shit all over me today.”

Katya said, “Hi, leave a message and I'll get back to you,” on her machine.

“Dr. Tooth's—just kidding! Dr. Judy Traske's—office is closed for vacation this week,” my mother's receptionist chirped into the answering machine.

My father's receptionist was in person and more dignified. “Sorry, Cassie. He's at a conference. Do you want to leave a message in case he checks in?”

“Hey! Leave a message.” Click. This is what Luke's said. At least it didn't say “Dude! Leave a message” any more.

Then I did the same drill with home numbers for parents (no answers). Cells for all except my mother (same again), and work for Luke (ditto).

How was it possible that in this age of instant communication my entire family and my husband could all manage to be incommunicado? Most days I couldn't make it through the paper towel section in the grocery store without my cell ringing five times. Maybe they'd all been abducted by the same alien pod that had gotten to Rick.

It was debatable anyway whether any of them would see this as a crisis—just another family marriage tanking. In fact, I should probably think of it as genetic. Inability to stay married as something that should go in your medical file, like the breast cancer gene or high blood pressure. You can be aware of the predisposition, struggle against it, but in the end, if it's going to get you, it's going to get you.

My maternal grandmother prided herself on never having spoken more than twelve words in a single day to my grandfather since 1969. She was not kidding. And on my father's side, my grandfather announced—formally, at his ninetieth birthday party—that as a gift to himself, to mark his entrance into his ninth decade, he would be leaving his wife of seventy years and moving himself into a bachelor pad at an upmarket retirement complex. Within a month, he announced plans to take my grandmother back. She had, by this time, set off on a cross-country mobile home trip with a woman named Ralph whom she'd met over the Internet. She didn't come back until my grandfather dropped dead of a heart attack following a vigorous Thursday morning water aerobics session.

At the funeral, she wore a chic little black veil that she claimed to have picked up in Paris in 1959 and had kept wrapped in the finest tissue in heady anticipation of this joyous day. She also drank about thirty glasses of champagne and then announced to the mourners that the old fart had been a victim of premature ejaculation, in that his last one had been in 1952. As my grandfather had been a prominent pediatrician with a practice on the ground floor of their gracious sprawling Victorian in Cambridge, Massachusetts, there were any number of mourners who likely saw that as way TMI.

My sister's been married twice. The first one was disastrous; the second has hung on only, she claims, because they make it a policy never to be in the same place at the same time for more than three days running. They also, she has been known to confess after a glass or two of wine, have a strict don't-ask-don't-tell policy. My brother has been the only one of us smart enough to stay single, and my parents—Suffice it to say, I don't even want to think about that.

At this moment all I wanted (well, other than my husband and marriage back) was a warm, cuddly, let-me-make-it-all-better-darling mother. The sad reality was that I'd have to settle for the one I had instead. So I did the Thing That Under Ordinary Circumstances I Would Never Do Without Either a Life-Threatening Emergency or a Good Stiff Drink. Also known as: called my mother's cell phone.

My mother is not a stupid woman. She went to Smith College and NYU Dental School. She has successfully practiced dentistry for thirty-five years. Cell phones, though, are a technological step too far for her. Her phone rang about ten times before being followed by ear-shattering static. This I knew was the sound of her having hit the answer button while fumbling in her purse for the phone. Someone—a man!—in the background, said: “Judy! It's your phone. I think it's ringing.”

That was a surprise because (1) anyone who only thought her phone was ringing clearly belonged in the too stupid to speak category and (2) my mother does not do men. Romance, love, and/or sex are completely unnecessary commodities in her view. I contemplated this surprising development through the next round of scrabbling and heavy breathing, until finally: “HELLO?”

Me:
“Hi, Mom?

Her:
“Hello? Hello? HELLO?” My mother won't put her ear on the phone because of potential radiation so she can hear exactly nothing.

Me:
“Mom!”

Her:
“HELL-O?”

Male voice:
“Is there anyone there? Are you talking loud enough, Judy? Can they hear you?”

I was guessing people in Montana could hear her. I pitched my voice up, also to Western State reaching volume. “MOM, IT'S ME, CASSIE.”

Male voice:
“It could be one of those scams. You know they can get your credit card number by calling you and cross-referencing your SIM card!”

My mother:
“CASSIE? IF IT'S YOU, SPEAK UP. IF YOU'RE NOT CASSIE, DON'T EVEN TRY TO GET MY CREDIT CARD NUMBERS FROM MY—” I could still hear her like she was standing next to me—with a megaphone—as she said to him, “What's a SIM card?”

Me:
“RICK LEFT ME.”

Despite the three rooms and two closed doors between us, Maria could and did hear me. Two seconds later she stuck her head around the door without knocking, put her hands on her hips, and glaring like it was all my fault, demanded, “He left you? Mr. Martin, he left you?”

I covered the mouthpiece. My mother screamed, “CASSIE? IS THAT YOU? ARE YOU THERE?”

“Yes,” I said to Maria. “In the last twenty-four hours my life has been destroyed. Now will you walk the dog?”

“CASSIE!!!”

“No.” Maria backed out, muttering—I swear—something about me not having fed Rick enough red meat and something further about him being so nutritionally deprived that he, unlike her husband, would not be able to carry a refrigerator up the stairs. But we live in a building with an elevator, I almost said. Plus, I can't think of the last time I needed a refrigerator moved. Then I got distracted by my mother shrieking into my ear that she was going to report me to the police.

I opened the desk drawer, shook two Advil into my hand, and swallowed them dry. My mother hung up. I debated crying, but frankly, didn't have the energy.

Five minutes later, while I was waiting for the Advil to kick in, the phone rang. It was my mother. “Cassie? Did you try to call me, or was it one of those scams?”

“Me,” I said, glumly. “It was me.”

“Well.” She sounded severe for someone who had just been shouting about SIM cards like a deranged person. “My cell is for dental emergencies only. You scared me.”

My tears blurred the outlines of the skyscrapers across the river. Why couldn't my life just be normal? With a husband who hadn't gone nuts, a housekeeper who cleaned, and maybe one of those nurturing, momlike moms? “I'm sorry,” I said, “but has it ever occurred to you there are emergencies having nothing to do with teeth?”

“What? What is it?” She actually almost sounded panicked, like the possibility of any other kind of emergency was only now occurring to her.

“Rick left me.” The third time I'd said it (four if you count Maria). I won't say it tripped off my tongue, but I managed to get it out.

She was silent. Then, “Oh.” Followed by more silence.

As usual, her sympathy was underwhelming. Humiliatingly, I started sobbing. Crying on the phone to her was the absolute last thing I wanted to be doing. I hated the part of her that was happy to have been proved right about my marriage. “He”— God, how did I even say it? It sounded so stupid—“felt his creativity was being stifled.”

She laughed.

“No,” I said. “I'm serious.”

“Who?” she asked when I got done filling her in on Barry Manilow.

“A singer. Had a lot of dentist's office type hits in the seventies and eighties.” This did not sit well, as it was a sensitive topic. She only plays world music in her office and deeply resents being lumped in with the Lite FM crowd.

She let her doubt drip down the phone connection. “Honestly, Cassie, I'm sorry he left you, and, nothing personal towards Rick, but you know how I feel about marriage. It's just not an institution that was properly designed. I don't understand why society hasn't caught on as a whole to the fact it just doesn't work. And anyway, if anyone's creativity was being stifled in that marriage, surely it was yours?”

“You know, Mom”—I wasn't even trying to keep the exasperation out of my voice or my tears off my sleeve—“some people might dole out some sympathy right about now.”

“And some people don't recycle,” she said. “Some people saluted Adolf Hitler.” This has always been her standard line to any some-people-type statement she dislikes. “Besides, if you want sympathy, you know I'm the wrong person.”

True. And I knew it. But still, I couldn't resist going for just the smallest smidgen of sympathy: “He came home last night and, totally out of the blue—”

She interrupted me. “I don't see the value in being a listener who doesn't help you pull up your socks and move on. I tell it like it is, not like you want it to be.”

“You know, Mom, it really bugs me,” I was surprised I was saying it even as I was saying it, “that you pride yourself on never being nice.”

“Nice is an overrated character trait,” she replied. “Imposed on women by patriarchal societal—”

“And never nice is just crappy.”

“Maybe if you weren't so damned worried about being nice, you'd be doing something productive instead of venting your hostility on me. Look, I'm sorry you're disappointed in him. I thought maybe he could go the distance—God knows, he never seemed interesting enough to have much internal life—and I understand that, going the distance, was important to you, but I'm not your problem. And frankly, he's not your problem either. You and your codependency, your lack of individual self, your overreliance on a flawed societal construct. Those are your problems.”

“Thanks.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Delivered briskly, just in case I might have thought she meant it.

I didn't.
Mean it when you say that. Offer to come and take care of the kids and me
, I wanted to say. Would she if I asked? Maybe. But I knew that more than I wanted her to come, I wanted her to offer. And even if she did, it wouldn't make her the person I wanted her to be. “Not really.”

“My greatest regret in all this—” I stopped listening. Even from my current place of residence, in the bottom of the swamp of misery, it struck me as wrong that we were discussing
her
greatest regret. I tuned back in for “—didn't manage to raise you to be more resourceful than to rely on any man for your sense of self, which—”

“Mom”—yeah, yeah, I know it's rude to interrupt—“why are we discussing your greatest regret? It's
my
marriage?”

“Cassie, that's what you don't understand. You're talking about your marriage. I'm talking about you.” She sounded sad.

“Oh.”

“Look,” she said. “My motto is and always has been a body not moving forward is a body dying inside. Believe me, it's helped me through some very tough times.”

So instead of maternal comfort I got something that sounded suspiciously like she got it from a fortune cookie. “I don't suppose you know where Katya is?”

“Himalayas. On a trekking expedition.”

“Luke?”

“At a conference in Paris.”

“What about Dad?”

“I don't keep tabs on your father.” Her tone was so cold I knew she was lying.

Which reminded me: “Hey, Mom? Are you with a man?”

“A man? Don't be ridiculous, Cassie.” She was rushing now. “I'll give you a call tomorrow, OK?”

Interesting, I thought. “But Mom,” I said, “I could have sworn I heard one in the background. Talking to you,” I added, in case she was going to try to brush it off as someone passing by.

“It must have been someone passing by,” she said. “Honestly, what on earth would I want with a man?”