Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (5 page)

But when I was on shift, I didn’t do much around the house except cook. So, during the three days following our appointment
with Zack’s counselor, I didn’t check my home e-mail. When I turned on my computer Sunday morning, I found a message from Rose Zander-Brown, continuing an exchange we’d started the week before. She confirmed that the wedding would be the third weekend in June and would be an outdoor affair at their house on Long Island. She concluded the message by saying that she and her family were looking forward to meeting Zack and me in D.C. during the Columbus Day weekend.

I didn’t get it. Why was this meeting happening here? I thought she was going to invite Zack and me to Long Island.

Then I figured it out. Claudia must be having this engagement party during the Columbus Day weekend.

That was not going to work. I called Mike on his cell phone. “This engagement party—is it the Saturday before Columbus Day?”

“Yes.”

I wondered why no one had told me. “The Tuesday after Columbus Day is Senior Travel Day. You and Zack were going to look at colleges that weekend.”

Mike paused. He doesn’t like making mistakes. One of the unexamined assumptions of our marriage was that I made mistakes, and he didn’t.

“Oh,” he said slowly, “I guess I had just written that down as being for Monday and Tuesday.”

“But most families leave Friday afternoon. That’s what we did for Jeremy. Can Claudia move the party?”

“I doubt it. She’s already booked the caterer and ordered the invitations. I guess he and I can leave first thing Sunday morning. We’ll still have three days.”

I decided to talk to Zack before I got too huffy about this. As soon as he got up, I told him. I wanted him to be outraged.
Let me get this straight. We are prioritizing a party over my college search. You wouldn’t have done that for Jeremy.

But anything that spared him time with his father was just ducky with him. “I’m not going to want to go to any of those places anyway,” he muttered.

But this curiosity had never extended to an excessive interest in other people’s lives. I don’t gossip. As a kid I’d never joined the gaggle of girls who giggled endlessly about who liked whom. Once I had my own sons, I had stayed out of the mom-on-mom gab fests about which kids the coaches were favoring or which families didn’t supervise their children properly.

So I didn’t know much about Claudia Postlewaite. Mike had said that she was a “sewing educator.” I’d assumed that meant she taught home ec at one of the high schools. But with this party coming up, I felt that I needed to know more. So I logged on to the Internet, opened the Google search page, and typed in her name.

Thousands of entries popped up.

She was not a home-ec teacher. She was a “custom clothier and pattern designer” with her own Web site. The home page of the site was an intricately designed swirl of soft colors. The picture showed her to be a trim, small-boned woman with delicate features and short, dark hair. I guessed her to be in her early forties, younger than me, but not embarrassingly so.

The Web site had a variety of different pages, which the viewer accessed by clicking on buttons that were pictures of—since this was about sewing—actual buttons, all of them antique, all of them made from shells. One page listed her workshops and trade-show
appearances; she seemed to be on the road as often as two or three weekends a month. Another page posted photos of clothes she had made. Sometimes she was sewing for clients, sometimes for herself. The few children’s garments were described as being for friends’ children, so I assumed that she had none of her own.

There was also a lifestyle/self-help component to her Web site. She had trademarked the term
Managed Perfectionism,
and whenever she raised that issue, she inserted a little picture of a conch shell. She claimed to be standing up for perfectionists, saying that instead of being life-draining and stultifying, perfectionism could be a source of joy. Perfectionists, she asserted, earned their bad reputations because many of them tried to impose their standards on other people, either by judging those people or trying to control them. That, she said, needed to stop.

The individual who managed her perfectionism chose one area of her life in which she and she alone indulged herself. Claudia urged that unless you lived alone, this should not be the cleanliness or orderliness of your house. Your perfectionism would give you no satisfaction if you were forever battling with other people. She herself used sewing in that way. “I almost never cook,” she wrote about herself, “and I do not keep a calendar in the glove compartment of my car, reminding me when I’m supposed to have my oil changed. I don’t decorate my front door for every holiday or create a new Rolodex card every time a friend changes a phone number. I am not a perfect homemaker. But when I sew, every stitch is perfect.”

Her argument was well thought out, but was, in my opinion, hooey.

Perfectionism is an addiction, and addictions aren’t so easily managed. What if sewing that perfect seam makes you feel so fabulous that, by God, you just can’t resist pulling out a new Rolodex card when a friend changes phone numbers? Then pretty soon
you get mad at the rest of the family, who are all cheerfully pigging up the Rolodex.

But I suppose that after so many years of living with an undiagnosed ADD sufferer and a Rolodex that looked like post-WWII Dresden, Mike would have found even unmanaged perfectionism a welcome relief.

You aren’t competing with her,
I reminded myself.
You don’t want to be Mike’s wife, lady friend, significant other. Let her deal with his criticism.
Although maybe he didn’t criticize her.

The final page on the site was for a blog.

I don’t get the appeal of blogs, diaries that people post online assuming that the whole world will care about their new-car purchase or their most recent vacation. There are several cooking-related Web sites that I like a lot, but I never read the blogs associated with them.

But my ex-husband’s lady-friend’s blog? I was going to read that. I was so going to read that.

I clicked it open. The most recent entry had been posted yesterday. I started to read.

And then froze. She was writing about this party, the party for my son.

I couldn’t believe this. No one had told me the date of the party, but here she was posting all the details on the Internet.

It was a sit-down plated dinner for eighty. She didn’t like buffets at formal affairs.

Eighty? We didn’t know eighty people.

I scrolled through the previous entries. She was, she’d written in early September, so “honored” to have “been asked” to host a dinner to celebrate the engagement of “Michael’s son.” She wrote as if all her readers would know who “Michael” was.

No one, not his mother, not his childhood minister, no one called Mike “Michael.”

She mentioned no last names, but she did talk about how the feted couple were both pre-med students at a “prestigious California university”—which was wrong; Pomona was a college. She also talked about the bride’s parents, how successful they were, how they had recently purchased a twelve-bedroom house in the Hamptons.

A twelve-bedroom house? Rose Zander-Brown had invited me to stay in a house with
twelve
bedrooms? And in the Hamptons? I knew I was supposed to be impressed at this mention of the playground of the rich and famous. I had never been there, but Claudia wrote about it as if we all went there all the time, didn’t we, darlings?

I went back to reading about the party. Because Cami’s real name was Camellia, not the more common Camilla, Claudia’s centerpieces were to be camellias. Hardy hybrids provided autumnal flowering plants. And the table linens were . . .

This seemed so strange to me. Yes, when I’d had Jeremy’s graduation party, I had talked about the menu to a couple of the women at work who cared about such things, but I hadn’t posted my choices on the Internet weeks before the party. Who on earth would care about Claudia’s hardy autumnal hybrids?

But after each of Claudia’s entries, people could post messages to one another. I opened one of those threads and saw that plenty were interested. Apparently she had a sort of fan club, people who kept up with her activities via her Web site. They were almost like virtual groupies eager to feel involved in her life.

The blog included links to pages in which Claudia described the creation of her dress for the evening. “I wanted the gown to have a slightly Asian feel,” I read, “without it seeming to be a costume.”

Oh, crap. I was going to have to buy a new dress. Not only
was someone blogging about my family, but I was going to have to buy a dress. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

“No, you need to do it yourself.”

“But what about a tux? It says it’s black tie. Can I wear Dad’s?” Jeremy had been too broad-shouldered to wear Mike’s tux, but Zack had borrowed it for his prom last spring.

“He’s probably wearing it . . . unless he’s getting a new one.” That did seem likely . . . although maybe I was doing Claudia a disservice. Maybe she had managed her perfectionism so well that she didn’t care what Mike was going to wear. “So talk to him. Otherwise we’ll see about renting one.”

Mike was indeed getting a new tux, but apparently Claudia was writing an article for a sewing magazine about adapting vintage clothes, so she wanted to alter old tuxes for Jeremy and Zack.

Zack didn’t like this idea. “Don’t you think that’s pretty stupid, Mom, when I could just wear Dad’s old one? I can see her doing it for Jeremy since he can’t wear Dad’s and he’s the main deal for the party, but not me. Nobody will care what I wear.”

Apparently that was not true; Claudia did care what he wore. “You’ll have to take this up with your dad.”

“I tried,” Zack said, “but he said that I should cooperate.”

“Then maybe you should.”

As soon as he went up to his room, I went to the computer and logged on to Claudia’s Web site, feeling as secretive as if I were looking for male-escort services. Claudia was not only remaking tuxes for “Michael’s two handsome sons,” she was refashioning a vintage gown for “our lovely Camellia.”

Our?
Since when was Cami hers?

My father, out in Michigan, had gotten an invitation. “Well,
that was nice,” I said. My dad is a sweetheart, and his tux was as vintage as could be. “Why don’t you come?”

“I think I’d like to. I’ve never met Cami, and she’s wearing the ring I bought when I didn’t have a dime to my name.”

Since Claudia had invited my father, she would have invited Mike’s mother. I wondered how long it would be before Mike tried to dump the problem of his mother in my lap.

About thirty minutes, it turned out.

“Mother will want to see the boys,” he said. He was calling from the speakerphone in his car, and his voice sounded tinny.

“I’m sure that she will.”

“She’ll be staying at the Ritz with the Zander-Browns.”

Claudia lived in Great Falls, a Virginia suburb much farther out than Arlington, where I live. The Ritz-Carlton in Tysons Corner was the nicest hotel in that area. “I’m sure your mother will enjoy being at the Ritz.”

Mike didn’t reply to that, so I didn’t reply to his nonreply.

“Aren’t you going to say something?” he asked.

“No.” I’d taken a Ritalin twenty minutes ago, so my ability to inhibit—i.e., keep my mouth shut—was coming into its glory.

“Don’t you have any ideas about what we should do with her?”

How changeable were his first-person plural pronouns. When it came to the party, “we” was Claudia and him; when it come to his mother, it was me and him, and I’m sure that he would have been happier if he could have used the second person—“What are
you
going to do with my mother?”

Marjorie Van Aiken is a difficult woman. From the beginning of our marriage, she has been aggressive, whining, and annoying. “I’m not going to let you take my son away from me,” she’d said in that stupid, half-joking way people use when they want to make a point, but don’t want to be held accountable for it. “I’ve
seen it too often. Girls just won’t let their husbands go to their own homes.”

My family lived in Michigan. I wasn’t going to make Mike eat Sunday dinner there every week. Moreover, it wasn’t me who kept us from going to Philadelphia as often as Marge would have liked. It was Mike. He hadn’t wanted to go any more than I had.