Carpool Confidential (12 page)

“It can be.” That sounded ominous. “I know what he's done defies belief, Cass, but you're starting to scare me. Have you ever watched anyone fade away?”

“Just my mother.” I didn't know where the words had come from, didn't remember watching it, but as soon as I'd said it, I knew it was true. Even though it seemed like it now, her transformation from glossy, privileged, and successful to bitter and defensive hadn't happened overnight. I sighed. I knew I wasn't going to win this one and for my own good probably needed not to. “I just have to walk the dog again first.”

“Maybe,” Randy suggested, “you should FedEx the dog to Rick. Oh, right. You need an address for FedEx.”

I laughed. What else could I do? “You're a hateful woman.”

“Don't I know it. Be at Starbucks in an hour.”

 

When I walked in, Jen got up and hugged me, kind of like the way you hug someone who's just been given a terminal diagnosis; like she was afraid to send cancer cells racing to new tumor sites.

Randy glanced at the counter. “It's Double I.” (Incompetent Ivan.) “We'll be waiting all day for him to get the order right. Assuming he's having a good morning.”

“Do you think you could manage not to say that to him this time?” Jen worried that he secretly spat in our cups because Randy tormented him. “On second thought, you guys sit down, I'll get the coffee.” She warmed up her most soothing smile.

Randy and I staked out a table. I passed her the list of numbers from the caller ID. “I crossed out all the ones I could identify.”

As she put it in her bag, I saw her glance at a couple with a very new baby. The woman still had that dazed look, and the man was pushing
the
stroller of the moment, a red Bugaboo. “I never had a Bugaboo,” she said. “It's like there's a whole new generation of parents. Maclarens might as well not even exist anymore.”

She was right. Even our strollers had become obsolete. It made me feel like all those years of marriage and family were just…gone. Like some fragile and elaborate sand castle, flattened by a rogue wave. “I'm going to be one of those old women”—I understood this was a total non sequitur—“who tells strangers on the crosstown bus about my bunions. If I even go out. I could end up hanging around in my bathrobe waiting to get my jollies by cornering the mail carrier.”

Randy stopped looking at the stroller. “You have bunions?”

“The point,” I said, glancing at Jen; Double I was smiling back at her, so I assumed our lattes were safe, “is the kind of sad, pathetic life I'm going to lead.”

“And you were thinking Rick was all that stood between you and that?”

Not for the first time, I looked at Randy and wondered how anyone who looked so angelic could say stuff like that. Actually, I knew the answer—it was
because
of how she looked. One too many people in her life had underestimated her one too many times based on nothing more than that. “How come there's no one I'm close to who's nice?”

“Maybe that says something about you,” she said, “who you choose. No one's stopping you from spending your days with nicer people. And anyway, Jen's nice.”

“I'm what?” Jen came over to the table and handed us cups.

“Nice,” I said.

She smoothed her Chanel jacket over her Pilates-sculpted hips and sat down. “Someone has to be.”

We whiled away a few minutes discussing the fact that Jen's daughter, Emily, was in Theresa Stinson's class and was working on the assignment requiring thirty-six yellow pegs in descending size, manufactured on the West Coast of Bali by a yurt-dwelling hermit, and, oh, by the way, native dress of the ancient Sri Lankan tribe we're studying would be nice for the five-page oral presentation segment.

“Noah never even mentioned the thing until the night before it was due. Too late for me to go to Bali. I had to make pegs out of old chopsticks from Chinese food delivery and he had points deducted because the Farrow & Ball yellow I had wasn't authentic enough and wasn't completely dry and it stained Theresa's new poly/cotton blend Talbots pants suit.”

“The night before it was due? First I heard was when I got the note that Owen hadn't completed it.” Randy still looked annoyed.

“Thankfully the hermit FedExes now. For a hefty fee,” Jen said. “Poppy Strauss already has the yellow pegs because Betsy, showing her usual forethought, bought them during their educational visit to the hermit last summer.
And
Poppy made her own costume from authentic fabric. After touch typing her oral presentation.”

“Ah,” Randy took a drink of her coffee. “But that, Jen, is because Poppy's—”

“—
very
independent,” Jen finished.

Betsy only mentioned that about fifty or sixty times a week.

“
She
can handle it,” Randy added Betsy's other mantra.

“We probably shouldn't be making fun of a seven-year-old,” Jen said. “Talk about visiting the sins of the fathers.”

“Mothers.” I looked at Jen. “You can't make everything patriarchal just because you're a lesbian.”

She laughed.

This conversation was almost lulling me into believing my life was normal. At moments like this it was like my mind could shut out the realities. I'd be coasting along in pretty much the same life I'd always had until I hit a bump: remembering Noah's eyes in the rearview mirror yesterday, Jared's hand, looking for mine at the Thanksgiving dinner table, the blog that was due at the end of the week, it would wash over me, each time bringing with it a wave of horror and desperation—Rick, the man I'd loved and trusted and believed I would spend my life with, had abandoned us.

Jen was looking at me. “I'm so sorry, Cass. How
are
you?”

Ugh. I hated that she needed that inflection. “Fine. Good.”

“Oh,
come on
.” Randy didn't even try to hide her exasperation. “You are not fine or good.” To Jen: “She's not fine. She's not good.”

“I'm sorry, Cass.” Jen ignored Randy. “I'm shocked. I can't believe Rick would do something like this. And Barry Manilow?”

Is there anyone else on earth who starts sniffling at those two words? If so, I'd like to meet them. Maybe we could start a support group. Jen reached into her Prada bag and handed me a tissue. I dabbed my eyes. “Making fun of a seven-year-old seems kinder than making me talk about this.”

“We were actually making fun of the seven-year-old's forty-year-old mother,” Randy reminded me.

“Betsy means well,” I sniffled.

Randy looked at me over her cup. “Betsy is one of the Oreo gossipers you were so bummed out by before. The big cheese of Oreo gossipers.”

“Is this some committee I don't know about?” Jen asked.

“No,” I told her, “this is stay tuned for today's installment of the good moms versus the bad moms. I'll shortly be crossing over to bad, courtesy of Rick.”

“Oh, yeah.” Jen sighed. “It's so confusing. I never know which side I'm on.”

I looked at Jen, in her Chanel suit and huge diamond earrings. She was the kind of mom who never raised her voice to her children, always actively listened, boosted their self-esteem without overdoing it, fed them a one hundred percent organic diet, and read them Shakespeare in the womb. If she didn't know where she fit, what was the hope for me? “You look pretty good to me,” I said. “How many committees are you doing this year?”

“Three. But here's the catch. I look good. SUV, check. Financial security, check. Left a prestigious career to stay home, check. Upper East Side doctor spouse, check. Overscheduled kids, check. PTA committees out the ears, check. Lesbian feminist, great big black X.”

Randy shook her head. “I think they give you extra credit for that, because otherwise they're discriminating. Don't forget, we're all one big, happy community, celebrating our differences and individuality—diversity is our only similarity.”

“And if you believe sexual orientation is genetically predetermined, you can't get points for it. That's no fair,” I objected.

Jen gave me a look. “Do you know how many times I've had to stand and smile while someone I didn't even know told me how
Heather Has Two Mommies
is little so-and-so's absolute, most-favoritest, bestest book ever?”

“Okay. Maybe one extra point,” I said.

“But that's just it,” Randy looked down as she rolled her empty paper cup between her hands on the sticky table. Then she looked back up at us. “The diversity is only celebrated if it looks good on paper: look at the beauty of our rainbow. If it's diversity of thought, if you're different, if you work, or you're not wealthy—maybe you're managing the tuition but you only have one house—”

“If you're dumped or divorced,” I added helpfully.

She nodded. “—if your kid's ADHD or dyslexic, if you disagree about anything, really, from foreign language to the ideal class size, if you won't drink the Kool-Aid, you're never quite there. You know?”

I stared at her. “Do you care?” It had never occurred to me that she might.

“Maybe a little. I'm human.” She leaned back in her chair. “Look, I'm not advocating doing what I've done, working like a lunatic, trying to juggle it all and probably doing a shit job of it—”

“So what are you advocating?”

“Balance.”

“Are we talking about the school community at large here, you, or me?”

“I'd advocate it for the school community at large, but it would just be a waste of time and breath. With you I might have a chance.” I knew she was going to say something I wasn't going to like, because she stopped and took a nerving-up breath. “Sometimes I wonder why you're so set on being a superwife and mom, because you don't seem to like it all that much. I mean, if PTA committee meetings seemed to fulfill you, more power to you, but I don't think they do.”

“I don't know that I'd say they fulfill me, exactly. It's just…they're what I do. You know?” That sounded unconvincing, so I added, “To be involved in my kids' lives, I guess.”

“You're telling me if you were never in another committee meeting in the school conference room again, you'd have no involvement in your kids' lives? Come on, you need to do better than that, because I'm not buying it.”

“This,” Jen said, “is why I'm her friend. Imagine having her against you?”

I took a breath. How to explain this? “You know, you have a couple of kids and you want to stay home with them, which I did, and then after a while you go along to a meeting and get involved in something. And because you're reasonably competent, people start calling you up to do more and before long you're doing a lot. And between the kids and the high-maintenance husband, you spend a lot of time…maintaining, and before long you're so busy you don't have time to breathe, let alone think about the larger meaning of any of it. And you might not be challenged beyond your wildest dreams, but you're in love with your husband and children and the life you're all making together so you're not sitting around thinking about whether you're at the pinnacle of personal fulfillment or not.” I looked at Jen. “You know how it goes.”

She nodded. “Yeah, I do. But I also say no more than you, Cass. Despite what Randy said about me, I'm not all that nice. I have a pretty good sense of self-preservation.”

“Face it, Cass,” Randy chimed in, “we're surrounded by Ivy League—educated women channeling the energy they used to put into running departments and hedge funds into running their children's lives and looking down on anyone who doesn't do the same. It's hard to resist. But being a superwife and mom is not the be-all and end-all. The end of a marriage doesn't have to mean the end of you. I know all about that firsthand. Remember?”

Randy had been married before. She and Glenn had gotten married right after college graduation. It had lasted until the day she'd come home from law school and told him that while lying on the couch smoking pot had been OK as an undergrad major, she didn't consider it a viable career.

“But it's organic! The wave of the future, babe,” he'd said. He'd been packed and gone within a week.

The joke was that Glenn had gone on to make a fortune as the drug dealer to pesticide-conscious Hollywood stars, ended up married to a supermodel and living in an estate in the Hills, proving Randy completely wrong about the career thing.

“You were young,” I said, “already in law school, so you knew who you were and what you were going to be. And you had no kids to worry about.”

She looked at the napkin she was tearing into neat little pieces. “Look, the no kids thing is true. But the rest isn't. We'd been together since we were freshmen in college, I had no idea who I was. I knew we were fundamentally incompatible, had no common interests, and our sex life was a disaster because he was always jumping up to answer his pager and even so, I cried for six months after he left, ate nothing but M&Ms for three, and almost got kicked out of law school.”