Switcheroo (2 page)

“Well, that
is
an inducement. I haven’t eaten charcoal since July Fourth. You know, Kenny says Grandpa’s burgers are carcinogens. Something about free radicals.”

“The only free radical I know about is Patty Hearst,” Mildred snapped. Sylvie giggled while she opened the Sun Holidays envelope. It was the glossy brochure she’d written away for. She unfolded it, her heart beating a little faster. The photos were like gems, glowing deep sapphire and emerald in the dimness of the hallway.

“I thought I’d do your birthday dinner on Thursday,” Mildred continued, “in case Bob was taking you out someplace fancy on Friday.”

The only place she wanted him to take her was Hawaii, Sylvie thought. “He hasn’t mentioned it. I’ll ask him.”

“Maybe it’s a surprise.”

Oh no! “No surprise parties, Mom. I mean it,” Sylvie warned. “It’s bad enough being forty. I don’t need the whole cul-de-sac gloating. Not to mention Rosalie.” Just the thought of her ex-sister-in-law made Sylvie shiver. She held up the brochure. There was a picture of a guest room showing a canopy bed hung with white. She and Bob, tanned, lying under the canopy…Well, she couldn’t tan but she could turn pink and put her arms around him and…

“Sylvie, are you moping? Not that I’d blame you, with the twins gone. It’s hard that both children had to leave at once. For me, I had six years to get used to Ellen, Phil, and then you leaving…”

“I’m not moping. I’m happy.” Sylvie clutched the brochure and dropped the other mail into the basket. “I’ve got to get ready for my lesson.”

“All right, dear. Call if you change your mind.”

There was a tapping on the glass of the French door. Mrs. Harriet Blank—Honey to her friends, if she had any—was standing at the back entrance. “You have a lot of leaves in the pool,” she said as she stepped into the room. “You should get one of those automatic pool sweepers.”

“Nice to see you too,” Sylvie said mildly. “It’s been a long summer.”

“I practiced
every
day,” Honey assured her, as defensive as Sylvie expected her to be. The lazy students always were. Honey took off her sweater and laid her bag on the armchair. She moved toward the bench, but paused and looked intently at Sylvie. “I saw you at L’Étoile, out by the lake, last week with Bob. You did something great to your face…”—Honey took an even closer look at Sylvie—“…
that
night, anyway. I thought maybe you had a face-lift over the summer. You know, Carol Meyers did. She looks awful. Stretched. I hear she went all the way to Los Angeles for it. Waste of mileage. Anyway, you looked great—at L’Étoile—”

“Bob and I haven’t been out to dinner for months,” Sylvie said mildly. “Not since Bob started campaigning for the Masons’ grand vizier or whatever the boss is called.”

Honey made a face of disbelief. “Are you lying or did you forget?” she asked.

“I wouldn’t he about being with my husband,” Sylvie said, laughing, “or about a face-lift.” She touched the part of her neck that had just begun to go a little crepey. Lately, when she glanced in a mirror, she sometimes saw a shadow of her mother’s face. God. She pushed the thought from her mind. She was letting this woman get to her. And Honey was such a ditz. She was too vain to wear her glasses most of the time, even when she drove. But…“When was it?” Sylvie couldn’t help but ask.

“Last Tuesday.”

“We were home,” Sylvie said. Then she remembered that Bob had been late on Tuesday. But not very late. “We were both home,” she emphasized.

“Come on. You were there,” Honey insisted. “The two of you were flirting like crazy. That’s why I didn’t even say hello.” Her voice drifted off. “You guys looked so romantic,” she murmured.

“That proves I wasn’t there,” Sylvie said, relieved. “In Shaker Heights, husbands don’t flirt with wives—at least not with their own.”

“It was you.” Honey paused. “Only your face was somehow…up. And you had only one chin.” Honey examined Sylvie’s face again. “You didn’t seem to have a wrinkle. And you were tan.”

“Honey, I
never
tan. Not since I was born. I turn red, crack, and peel. My mother can verify that.” Honey was a pain. “Shall we?” Sylvie asked, gesturing to the keyboard.

Honey leaned closer to Sylvie, still examining her face. “Well, you were tan two weeks ago. Did you buy that thing on QVC with the tape and the rubber bands? That temporary face-lift thing?”

“No, but I once did get the Thighmaster. It’s still under my bed. Want it?” Sylvie smacked her right leg and gestured for Honey to sit at the bench. “Obviously, I never used it.”

Honey seemed miffed by Sylvie’s response. They settled down to some finger exercises. It was clear that Honey
hadn’t
been practicing. Slowly they moved through the lesson. Somewhere near the end of the tiresome hour Sylvie thought she heard Bob’s car. She wanted to finish up quickly with Honey and present her new plan to her husband, but she was too professional to do it. She merely glanced over at the Hawaii brochure, propped at the edge of the music holder, and smiled.

At last the session was over. Sylvie gave Honey a new assignment and walked her to the French doors. What a day! The autumn air refreshed her, the crisp underscent of apples combining with that of drying leaves. Sylvie took a deep breath, then patted the sheet music she had handed Honey and raised her eyebrows, the strictest she ever got with an adult student. But subtlety was wasted on Honey. They said good-bye. Honey took the sheet music, looked up at her, and moved her hand to her own eyebrow, lifting the skin into a wrinkle-free arch. “If a person is going to look
that
good, even for one night, I think it’s really mean not to share how you did it with a friend,” Honey sniped.

“I share all my musical tips with you, Honey,” Sylvie said. “Here’s my best one: practice.” Gently she pushed the door closed and turned to join her husband.

Bob wasn’t at his desk or in the living room. Sylvie checked the kitchen, flipped over the chicken that was sitting in its marinade, and sighed. Bob must have already slipped upstairs.

Sylvie was halfway up the stairs herself before she realized that she had left the travel brochure down in the music room. Honey, Sylvie admitted reluctantly, had flustered her. She turned around, bounded down the stairs, got the brochure, and doubled back. Now she could hear the sound of the shower in the master bath. That was what she’d been afraid of! It meant that Bob was probably going out again this evening. The chicken would be wasted. Damn it! Sylvie didn’t want to have to put off this conversation, but she didn’t want to be forced to sandwich it in between Bob’s ablutions and his departure.

Since Bob had begun to talk about becoming the grand panjandrum of the very secret Masons he’d been so busy. Why did he even want the position? It didn’t pay anything and it couldn’t really be any fun. Walking around in aprons, or whatever they wore, and singing secret songs seemed so unlike Bob. And why he needed to shave, change, and dress up for a smoke-filled room was also beyond her. He’d become more vain lately—she didn’t remember him ever bothering to shower and shave before Rotary, even when he was the president of that. Well, for all she knew, it was a Masonic rule or something. Sylvie got to the bedroom door, paused, and nervously smoothed her hair and then smoothed the brochure in her hand. It was time for a change. She’d just
have
to make Bob see that. Charm and quirkiness worked with her husband. She stopped for a moment at her bedside table and took out a roll of adhesive tape. She smiled to herself as she walked through the bedroom. She’d get his attention.

Sylvie marched aggressively into the bathroom. The steam pushed up against the door, then up against her body with a wet force. She couldn’t stop herself from looking at the place on the wall where, months ago, the paint had begun to peel. She wished, for the hundredth time, that Bob would remember not to turn the hot water up quite so high—but he never did. Acceptance was just a part of marriage. Sylvie shrugged and walked over to the glass shower wall.

Through the mottled texture of the glass she could see Bob’s body, but the glass seemed to turn him into what looked like animated blots of color—kind of like the way technicians electronically scrambled guilty people’s faces on television when they were being interviewed against their will. Sylvie stared. Pointillistic Bob. Then she picked up a hand towel and wiped down the glass. She’d be cute and quirky. Jauntily, Sylvie pushed the brochure up against the shower wall and, despite the moisture, used the adhesive tape to secure it there.

“Hi, honey. I have a surprise.”

“Your lesson over?”

Sylvie could see that the white dots topping the pink dots of Bob’s head had just about been washed off the animated figure that was her husband. Which meant that the shampooing was over and that he could safely open his eyes. She tapped the glass. “See what I brought you,” she said. She watched as he moved closer to the glass. He bent, suddenly, almost against the textured partition and his face clearly emerged. Very wet, but recognizably Bob’s nice-looking face. Close to the glass the wavering images didn’t blur. Sylvie knew he was close enough to see the brochure.

“Show and tell?” he asked casually.

“Show and go,” she responded, trying to be cute.

But then, to her disappointment, cuteness failed. His head disappeared again. He became a Seurat painting: Tuesday in the Shower with Bob.

Sylvie felt her jauntiness drop like a wilted leaf from a tree. No. He
had
to pay attention. She tapped the shower stall again. “Bob! Look! There haven’t been colors like this since the seventies.”

He was fumbling for something on the corner shelf. “Beautiful. What is that? Something like Hawaii?”

“Good, Bob. It
is
Hawaii.” For a moment she felt hope surge, but then realized he wasn’t even looking. She’d have to try again. “You see those two people snorkeling? Isn’t it weird how they look just like us? They could
be
us, Bob.” Sylvie paused for his reaction. Then, to her dismay, she saw more white animated dots appearing at the top of her husband’s wavering form. He was shampooing twice. That was
truly
unusual. Bob never read the directions on any product or appliance, not since she’d met him. When did he ever read the instructions on the shampoo tube? Since when did he soap up
twice?

The steam was taking over. Sylvie took the brochure down. Already its crisp new feel had begun to be transformed by the bathroom dampness. The pictures now sagged across the double-page spreads. For a moment the sag was echoed by the sag of Bob’s little belly, which emerged first from the stall, followed by the rest of him, only to be quickly wrapped in the special bath sheet he liked to use. Then, swaddled, he turned and inserted his arm into the shower, shutting off the water at last. The silence seemed startling to Sylvie, who felt more than a little bit forlorn. Perhaps Bob noticed, because he turned and gave her one of the big bear hugs that he was famous for. Just as she started to relax into it he dropped his arms, turned to the sink, and took down his razor and can of foam.

“You hear from the kids?” he asked casually.

“Nothing from Kenny, but Reenie sent a card. She says she wants to change her major again.”

“No more French poetry?” Bob asked, spreading the foam along his right cheek and stretching his neck up in that way men did before they patted the cream on their jowls. Sylvie wondered if shaving had some age-defying quality—Bob’s neck looked more taut than hers did, though he was already forty-four.

“She feels she has to major in post-Communist Russian studies.”

“
Has to
? That seems like something no one
has
to do,” he said as he pulled the razor down his cheek.

As always, Sylvie felt she had to spring to the defense of their mercurial daughter. Temperamentally Reenie and Bob were so similar that sometimes Sylvie had to run interference. “She’s been thinking about it a lot. I admit she’s a little at sea right now.”

“Well, she better move up to an A, or a B plus at the very least,” Bob punned. He flashed her a quick smile. His teeth seemed yellow against the unusually white-white of his foamy beard. It gave him an almost unpleasant wolfish look. Sylvie thought of the phrase
long in the tooth
. “She has to get a scholarship by next year is what she has to do,” Bob continued. The razor sliced another path through the foam. “First she had to pick the most expensive school in America. Now she
has
to study irrelevant recent history. You can’t even make a living with a degree in irrelevant
ancient
history.”

“The two of us felt we had to major in music,” Sylvie reminded him.

“Yeah. It sure helped me in my career,” Bob said, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “When I’m giving a test drive, I know all the classical radio stations.”

Sylvie didn’t like the tone of this conversation. Bob seemed distracted and cranky. Normally, he was an indulgent father, a loving husband. Feeling a little desperate, Sylvie leaned forward and taped the buckling brochure to the mirror, beside the reflection of his now almost shaved face. It was hard to get the tape to stick to the wet glass.

Bob ignored the thing and rinsed the razor. “It’s not the seventies or eighties anymore,” he said. “Reenie has to begin thinking responsibly. Realistically. Do you realize the kids are older now than we were when we met?”

“They’re too short to be that old,” Sylvie told him.

He laughed and used one hand to pinch the nape of her neck, giving her the tug that connected deep inside her. Sylvie smiled into the mirror at him and started to gesture to the brochure, but he pulled his hand away and bent over, rooting around in the cabinet under the sink. “Bob, when we finished Juilliard, we were going to travel around the country in a painted bus. And play music wherever we felt like it. Why didn’t we do that?” Sylvie asked. Her voice, she realized, sounded plaintive. Where was quirky? Where was jaunty?

Bob was slapping his face with an aftershave. “Two reasons,” he said. “We were a decade too late and we had a life instead.”

“Bob. About Hawaii. For my birthday I’d really like to—”