Car Pool (4 page)

Damn right, Anthea thought. Of course I’m trying to hurt you! I can’t believe you did what you did — you promised it wouldn’t happen again. Anthea clamped down on her anger. “Are you implying it would be good for my psyche not to end our relationship? I should let you go on sleeping around?”

“I think you’re just acting out some old issues with your parents —”

“Don’t you dare,” Anthea said in a voice that came painfully out of her chest. “Don’t you dare imply that if I had worked out my feelings about my parents I wouldn’t care about you cheating on me. Sure I have possessiveness issues, I happen to feel possessiveness is just fine in moderation. I think it’s pretty moderate to want honesty and fidelity from someone I love.”

Lois drew herself up with a grimace of distaste. “The least you can do —”

“Is not let you walk all over me again. You break our agreement and expect me to show you consideration? To be kind and forgiving? Once was enough for me.”

Lois shook her head slowly. “Is that all it was, an agreement?” Her voice rose. “A relationship isn’t something you can notarize. Don’t you want to talk about it? That’s all you ever want to do.”

“I’ve been trying to talk to you for two weeks, but you’re just not there. So I have nothing to say,” Anthea said, forcing her voice to steely calm. “You, on the other hand, had plenty to tell me. But you didn’t say a word. You’ve forgone your right to ask for my consideration.”

“You have got to be the most wooden person I

have ever met!” Lois’s voice peaked at a shrill. “Can’t you show some emotion for once?”

“Is that why you did it? To make me feel something? That’s … sick.”

“You said you forgave me that nothing little fling, but you’ve been about as warm as a glacier ever since. You don’t have a spontaneous bone left in your body. Not that you were ever open to being spontaneous.”

“Is ‘spontaneous’ a new euphemism for thinking with your crotch? I’m not spontaneous because I’m not sleeping around?” Anthea bit her lower lip to steady her voice. “Is spontaneous what you are? Do I call you that instead of deceitful?”

“Even when you’re pissed off, you’re anal retentive. You don’t even care enough about me to get mad,” Lois said. “You don’t have a real emotion in your entire body.”

Anal retentive — well, she’d let that go by. Her voice was even and low as she said, “Would you feel better if I yelled and threw things? You used to think my… even temper was a good point.”

“It doesn’t outweigh your negatives. So you have a nice house but the silence in here is deafening.”

“And you liked the vacations, didn’t you? And the season tickets to Berkeley Rep and the Women’s Philharmonic and the San Francisco Ballet and—”

“And that’s another thing. I’m tired of the crushing obligation I feel just because you pay for all the luxuries. I never forget it.” Lois exhaled loudly. “I’m still in the doghouse about that lousy vase.”

“I never said anything —”

“I know, but the place where it was is still

empty. It’s like you’re reproaching me every second of every day.”

“It wasn’t special—”

“But it was yours. Everything in here is yours.”

“When did you start hating that that’s the way it was?” Anthea was truly bewildered now. What had Lois expected from her — community property without any commitment? Anthea had hinted that she would like to register as domestic partners, but Lois had shrugged it off.

Lois was shaking her head. “Oh, I don’t know. You’re stifling me. You can’t blame me for looking for fun somewhere else.”

“Oh, I see. This is my fault,” Anthea said with a mocking smile. “I’m not the one having an affair with the other woman in our car pool. So okay, don’t call me adventurous.”

“I won’t call you a lesbian either. The closet you live in is so tight I can’t breathe. I’ve had enough of it.” Lois stalked out of the kitchen, the crack of her heels echoing irately over the tile.

It’s not fair, Anthea thought. She acts like I forced her to sleep with Celia. She realized she was still holding her briefcase. She set it down in its accustomed place next to the living room door. She wasn’t going to follow Lois to fight. It wasn’t worth it. She needed to think.

She stepped out onto the deck. Following the redwood railing, she walked to the end farthest from the house where the wind was the strongest. Loose tendrils of hair at her temples whipped back from her eyes. From here she could see the flickering lights of Marin, fifteen miles or more — two bridges

and a big bay away. Yesterday’s rain had left the air clear and sharp, and it had brought the temperature up to a mellow mid-sixty range. At her feet, seemingly close enough to touch, she watched someone’s headlights illuminating the incline behind the Claremont Hotel on their way up to this neighborhood. She wished she had brought a cigarette outside with her, but right now she wouldn’t go back inside to get one.

She watched the Oakland Tribune building’s red neon lights flicker on and off until she was shivering. She thought she was cold, but when she went inside the shivering didn’t stop. She was shivering with anger. Control, she told herself. If you lose control there’s no telling what you might do. Don’t risk it.

Lois was in jeans and a T-shirt… the black T-shirt that made Anthea want to slide her hands under it, up, unhook Lois’s bra… . Anthea shook the image out of her mind. Lois didn’t want her anymore. She stomped from the garage to the bedroom again, and Anthea kept out of her way. Her hands itched for something to do, but she wasn’t going to offer to help, so she made a salad and forced herself to eat it. She forced herself to do the dishes. She forced herself not to watch as Lois carried yet another box out to her car.

Well, this departure would be quick. Having lost everything in the fire that had swept across the East Bay hills, Lois had been renting all her furniture when Anthea met her. Since they had moved in together a few months later, Lois had

never replaced what she lost. She had preferred spending her money on clothes and her annual solo vacation… and tae kwon do classes.

Why had she forgiven Lois that first affair? Was forgiving it permission to do it again?

Lois appeared with a paper bag from the top of which peeked the hair dryer and a bra. I guess I’ll be using the travel dryer, Anthea thought. Lois paused for a moment, the door to the garage open, and Anthea looked up from the sink.

“Monica is putting me up until I find a place.”

That figures, Anthea thought. Monica had been the first affair.

“Well,” Lois said, “I wish you the best of commuting by yourself. I’m guessing you won’t want to ride with us. I’m sure you’ll find some new people for a pool.”

“The car pool pass is in my name. It’s been in my name for six years.”

“Don’t be childish. It’s two against one. It should be ours.”

“Possession is nine-tenths.” The car outside was locked and the alarm system was on. Anthea swept a crumb from the counter into the sink. She dusted her hands. I’ll be damned if I’ll give it to them. All she needed was to find one more person and she’d be back in car pool business again… it only took two to use car pool lanes on this side of the bay and to get a parking pass at the refinery.

Lois swept out of the kitchen, yanking the door closed after her.

The vibration from the slamming door knocked a

porcelain sconce off its hook. Anthea jabbed her thumb on a sharp edge as she cleaned up the shattered pieces.

She wished she had said, just for the record, that Lois wasn’t leaving her, she was throwing Lois out. It seemed an important distinction. She dabbed a little peroxide on the cut, then carefully wound a Band-Aid over it.

There. Now everything would be okay. Her thumb throbbed for a while, then it went numb. She wondered when she would start missing Lois. She smoked one cigarette after another in between spoonfuls of a pint of Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk, telling herself all the while what she was really upset about was having to commute alone.

She would not cry. She hadn’t cried since she was seven and she wouldn’t start now.

Anthea stomped on the gas pedal. The Legend surged forward, covering the unexpected two-car length gap ahead of her in moments. She slammed on the brakes and stopped a few inches short of tapping bumpers. “Only another fifteen minutes to the bridge at this rate,” she said aloud, glaring in the rear view mirror. Behind her — and ahead as well — was the usual massive line-up to get on the frontage that bypassed some of the freeway leading

to the Dumbarton Bridge. It was slightly faster than taking the freeway all the way. Even though there was no toll this direction, it still took longer to get on the bridge going home than on the way to work.

She fumbled in her purse on the passenger seat for a cigarette, then remembered her New Year’s resolution. No smoking in the car. One after breakfast. One from car to the office. One at each of her two self-allotted breaks, maybe one at lunch. One when she got home and then after dinner whatever was left of her half-pack allocation. She could hear Lois telling her she was being anal retentive about quitting.

“Shut the fuck up, Lois,” Anthea said to her reflection in the mirror. One of the many consequences of commuting alone was the habit she was developing of talking to herself and the dreadful language she was getting too accustomed to using. She reached the turn to the frontage road and quickly pulled out. The Legend settled down to a steady pace of twenty miles per hour.

She’d spent her afternoon going over the time survey data from the Groundwater Protection unit — something Ruben would have done if he’d still been there. The task had recalled the way she’d let that… that… technician treat her. She had only been doing her job — there was no reason to be treated like a leper. It was bad enough her unit didn’t get any respect from upper management. It was bad enough that Lois had treated her like a doormat. But to let some complete stranger step all over her self-esteem like that… what had she been trying to prove, that Anthea wasn’t up to the rigors of field work?

She’d been through every inch of that refinery at one time or another, back in her product accounting days, explaining time surveys, or learning the manufacturing stages, and she’d done it in heels and a suit when her tour guides and hosts had worn boots and jeans. She probably knew more about production than everyone in Groundwater combined. Accountants had to know everything about everything or they couldn’t do their job. Something Ms. Superior Field Geologist obviously didn’t think about. Something Lois had never believed. Accounting, she had said, was an exact and limited science. No creativity. Not like marketing, where it was tense, tense, tense every minute keeping up with competition. Marketing was an art form.

Hah.

Anthea turned the cassette player volume up, but it was already too late. She was thinking about Lois again. The BMW in the next lane began to merge over into Anthea’s door. She honked, swore, yelled, honked again, and when the car veered off, she gave the driver the finger. She saw the older man’s eyes widen in panic, as if he thought Anthea was going to pull a shotgun out and squeeze off a couple of rounds in retribution. I’m turning into the kind of driver I hate.

Traffic came to a complete halt, then sluggishly moved forward again. Anthea leaned on her horn when the driver ahead didn’t fill up the gap in front of him, allowing three cars from the adjacent lane to merge ahead. Her car inched forward. Her pressure must be off the scale, she thought — partly the traffic, and partly because she was thinking about what Lois had said about her being a computer.

When Anthea had met her briefly to hand over some more clothing she’d come across, Lois had reiterated that fact, and added a few more along the same lines, accusing Anthea of being unsupportive during Lois’s transition and summing her up as heartless and selfish. How was I supposed to be supportive… help her move? Pay the deposit on her apartment? And heartless is calling up CPS and saying the car pool was dissolved so I had to turn in the pass and park in the hinterlands again.

The bitch.

Maybe, Anthea thought, Lois was trying to deliberately provoke her. Make Anthea take her back again, like last time. But there was no going back. Okay, she acknowledged that ever since the first affair, she’d held a piece of herself aloof. She didn’t want to get hurt again. She didn’t want to trust again. So maybe Lois was justified in saying Anthea had cooled a little.

She hit the horn again for the fifth time in as many minutes and realized she had become a raving shrew. Still, she had to yell at someone. It was therapeutic. Adrian had expressed his opinion — in terms so plain as to avoid any misunderstanding — that she had been a virago lately. They both felt completely overworked and abused, and because she was the boss Adrian got to blame her, which made her feel worse. She blamed her boss, but Martin hardly cared, so blaming him lacked any psychic value. She missed Ruben’s competence. She would cheerfully kick Reed’s butt out the nearest window.

Martin had asked one day if there was something wrong, but what was she supposed to say? That she wanted Ruben back? It would have only pissed him

off. That she was going through a divorce? She didn’t have the right to say that. God knew she’d listened to him during his divorce. But because she’d never been — and couldn’t be — legally married, she wasn’t allowed the same sympathy in return. Somehow it wasn’t supposed to be as big a deal if they’d never been married. There were no legal formalities to go through. But the house was just as empty, the rejection was just as painful, she hurt all day every day and it wasn’t getting better like she thought it would. And because she’d been the one to insist on ending it, what friends she and Lois had had in common blamed her for the breakup.

When she reached the ramp to the freeway, she seized an opening to cross several lanes and position herself for the fast lane. After a mile or so, the pace abruptly increased, and Anthea floored the accelerator for the steep ascent. As she picked up speed, Anthea found she was able to let go of the memories again. As soon as the traffic backed up, she felt trapped. When she felt trapped, she thought about Lois. When she thought about Lois she went over the same stretch of road again and again.