I'm Not Julia Roberts (15 page)

Glynn shuddered, suddenly frantic. She’d have to draw the line somewhere, but where to draw it? The Little League games, the parent-teacher conferences, something.

The ringing phone banished thoughts of pelting Stacey with baseballs and chalk-choked erasers. George snapped up the receiver with one hand while still punching buttons on the game console with the other.

“Yeah, speaking,” he said. “Yeah.” He glanced at Glynn, then at Joey. “No, we’re not doing anything, either. I’ll be by in five minutes. I’ll bring Joey.”

“George,” Glynn said, her voice a warning.

“Relax,” George said after he’d hung up. “Stiller’s wife left him with the kids. We’re just going out for a little ice cream.”

“Ice cream?”

“Ice cream,” George said firmly.

“Hey!” yelled someone from downstairs, Moira. “Someone die up there or what?”

Entropy measures the tendency of energy to disperse, to diffuse, to become less concentrated in one place or one energetic state. But entropy, sometimes called time’s arrow, moves, comfortingly, in a logical direction, something that could be anticipated, something that could be understood. Rocks don’t roll uphill of their own volition. Water doesn’t freeze without impetus. Kettles don’t suddenly heat up by themselves.

Glynn watched her husband and her son slip out the front door, tearing off one of her fingernails with her teeth, considering the physical laws that governed her personal universe: people shooting every which way, bouncing off one another, and spinning out on unknown trajectories.
Ice cream,
she told herself.
He said they were just going out for ice cream.
She had to start trusting them sometime, hadn’t she? Otherwise, where would her husband and son end up launching themselves?

The girls had rearranged themselves in her absence, the winners moving to the head table and the losers to the losers’ table. They’d played several rounds, someone rolling for Glynn, and Glynn and Moira had come up winners. Now Roxie and Lu sat across from each other at the winners’ table. Both blanched with embarrassment when Moira said: “Hey, you guys are practically related! It’s like some sick game of six degrees of separation or something!” After that, they played a few more games in relative silence, until Moira got bored and grabbed the dice.

“Come on, fours!” Moira yelled, the word
fours
sounding like
force.
One four. One four. Two fours. She rolled three sixes—five points there—then nothing. “Damn it,” she grumbled. She tossed the dice to Roxie, who tried to catch them with one hand and missed.

As Roxie plucked the dice out of the carpet, Lu said, “I meant to tell you, Glynn. There are some openings at my agency. That is, if you’re still looking for a job.”

Roxie rolled a four. “I thought you worked for a real estate agency.”

“I do,” Lu said.

“Oh,” Glynn said, looking from one woman to another. “I didn’t know real estate agencies need librarians.”

Moira slapped a palm on the table. “Everybody needs librarians.”

“They don’t need a librarian. They need an office manager.” Lu took the dice from Roxie. “I’m sorry. I thought you just wanted something to do during the day, when your son’s at school.”

“She needs a job, not a little something to do,” said Moira, slurring. “Some of us have to work for our bunko antes, you know?”

“Sorry,” Lu said. “I just thought . . . sorry.”

“No,” said Glynn. “Thanks for letting me know.”

Lu shook the dice in her hand. As there had been a bunko drought since she’d gotten hers, she’d brought the bunko bunny with her, propping the thing on the table. Before each roll, she eyed it warily, as if it might suddenly begin leaping about.

Roxie swallowed visibly. “So, Lu. What’s your husband up to these days?”

“He’s in Virginia,” Lu said, blowing her bangs off her forehead. “Then Tennessee, then Georgia.”

“Does he have to go?”

Lu frowned. “Sure he has to go; it’s for work. . . . Crap. I’m busted. Here—” She thrust the dice at Glynn.

“So you’re a single girl this month?” Roxie asked.

Lu snorted. “I’ve got Devin full-time. I’ll have the other boys this weekend, because their mom is going out of town.”

“It must not be easy for you, Lu,” Roxie said. “With the boys. Stepfamilies can be so complicated.”

“You think?” said Lu. She was pretty, but in a hard way. She had a U-shaped line forming underneath her nose, possibly from sneering too much.

“I don’t know. Joey’s doing all right with George,” Glynn offered.

“Ward’s kids are okay. Mostly, anyway,” Lu said. She met Roxie’s eyes. “Their mother’s another story.”

“Oh, I’m sure she’s trying,” Glynn said.

“Yeah, well, she could try a little harder.”

Glynn threw the dice, sending one careening off the table. “Heh,” she said. “I guess I don’t know my own strength.”

Roxie leaned back in her chair. “Kids aren’t easy whether they’re your own or someone else’s. Believe me, I know.”

“Yes,” Lu said, her face softening, the little U-shaped line smoothing out. “Of course you’re right.”

“We all just have to do our best,” Roxie added.

Lu put her elbows on the table, her expression suddenly open. “But then, that’s the thing, isn’t it? Everyone is doing something different, and everyone thinks whatever they’re doing is best.”

Another loud bang, the front door flying open, whacking against the wall. The girls swung their heads toward the noise in unison, like a herd of prey animals at the crack of a branch.

“Mom! Mom!” Joey shouted, running into the living room. “I saw a dead guy!”

“Was it my ex-husband? Please say it was my ex-husband!” Moira said, nearly tumbling out of her seat. Her eyes found Roxie. “You date Tate. You date my ex! How could you?”

Roxie laughed, got up, and helped Moira back into her chair. “You were the one who set me up with your ex. How could
you
?”

Glynn looked at George, who was standing in the hallway, half-sheepish, half-irritated. He’d probably told Joey to keep it a secret, not knowing, not understanding that Joey would be too excited to keep his mouth shut, that children don’t have the willpower for mystery.

“He was hit by a bus! But he wasn’t all smushed up or anything.”

Glynn sighed. Really, after all the death they’d witnessed on TV, was it so bad that her husband and son had gone out to see an actual dead person? Death was an inevitable part of life, wasn’t it? Part of the cycle of things.

Then again, maybe the vodka-tonic had addled her brains. She should have fought harder, that was her problem. So many things seemed inevitable to her, had the hypnotic perfume of fate about them, that she was beaten before she even began, like the one lame antelope on the plain.

“Why didn’t he look smushed, Mom?”

“I don’t know, Joey. Sometimes people don’t look smushed even when they should look smushed.”

“Mr. Stiller is going to drain all his blood into a bucket. That’s what George said. Right, George? They hang the guy from hooks.”

The woman whose name Glynn always forgot gasped in horror and sucked on her lips so hard that they disappeared into her face.

With her son and husband and all the girls watching, Glynn rested her forehead against the cool table. There was no controlling this, her luck. She would have to let Joey go a little; she was already doing it. Through her, Joey and George were united in all their gross and glorious boyness; through Joey, she and her ex-husband were locked together forever in their awkward, stupid dance. And if Derek married Stacey . . . well, her stupid-beautiful face would be everywhere. And they’d all expect Glynn to make room at the parent-teacher conferences. The Communions. The weddings. The baby showers. Joey’s relationships would become something else, something outside of Glynn’s reach, as prodigious as that reach—the reach of mothers—was. And wasn’t she herself moving out of her own reach? Becoming some other woman, married to some other man, possibly, soon, mother to some other person. Dispersing. Spiraling outward into the world, both more and less than before.

Fine. Fine,
she thought.
But not now, not yet.
Didn’t she deserve some stillness? Some silky vacuum into which she might slip, secure in the fact that no rocks would ever roll uphill and nothing would ever change?

With the girls still watching—gaping—Glynn lifted her head and scooped up the dice, rolling idly at first and then with more purpose. She rolled again and again, until she got what she wanted. Three fours. Bunko. “Take the box,” she said, telling them, telling them all. “Take the booze. Take the candy. Take whatever you want. The bunny’s mine.”

THE DOG NEXT DOOR

T
ate’s sister is calling about her latest obsession: family therapy. Ever since her ex-husband announced that he was getting remarried, Glynn calls to ponder aloud which school of thought might be best, which members of the family should attend, which issues should be explored (as if the predominant issue isn’t Glynn’s hatred of her ex’s wife-to-be).

“Glynn,” Tate says, sneaking a glance at Roxie, who’s scratching at her bare foot in a distracted way, “can we talk some other time?”

“I was just thinking that all of this is connected somehow.”

Tate sighs. “All of what is connected?”

“To our parents. They’re divorced and divorced again. Then I got divorced.”

“But you are married now,” he reminds her. “To a great guy.”

His sister is not to be stopped. “And you’re not only divorced, you date bimbos. Don’t deny it, Tate.
Bimbos.
Well, except for Roxie. I like her. Anyway, don’t you think all these things are connected? Shouldn’t we explore these connections so that our children don’t suffer the way we did?”

At the moment, the only connection Tate wants to make is the naked kind, the only suffering in his pants—which are, disappointingly, still on his body. Roxie’s knee begins to bob up and down, and he knows he can’t keep her waiting; Roxie is perpetual motion personified. Thirty seconds longer and Roxie’s knees will bob her right out the door.

“Glynn, I have to go, okay? We’ll talk when I come get the kids. Or at the beach house this weekend.”
Or never. The twelfth of never. How’s that look for you?

“I didn’t call to talk about therapy. Your son bit Joey, that’s why I called.”

Tate squeezes his eyes shut. “Boys hit each other.”

“
Bit.
As in
bite.
As in
teeth,
” Glynn says. “This has really got to stop. You shouldn’t be begging me to watch your kids when you’re supposed to be spending time with them. You shouldn’t be on a date right now. Ryan shouldn’t be biting people. There’s a problem here.
You
have a problem.”

Another glance at Roxie. “I hear you, Glynn. Really. And I promise we’ll discuss it later.”

There’s silence on the line, then: “Fine.” Before she hangs up, she adds, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Ten minutes later, he’s cupping Roxie’s pointed elfin chin in one hand and using his other to trace her clavicles. Roxie has delicious clavicles, one slightly lower than the other. He rubs the thin skin between them as if making a wish. For a moment, he almost wishes that she could come with him to the beach house. Roxie would look amazing in a bathing suit. Marilyn Monroe, all soft skin and dimpled elbows.

“The dog’s watching,” Roxie-Marilyn says, pulling away from him.

At first he thinks it’s one of those off-kilter Roxie jokes, the kind that don’t make much sense but are sort of funny because she won’t stop making them. He doesn’t have a dog. He smiles and leans in to kiss her.

“Really, Tate, the dog’s watching. That dog next door.” She gestures to the basement window, where a rectangular vent is open in the center of the glass blocks.

And there he is. Small, white, wiry haired. Black nose, black eyes, gnashing teeth bared. For once, he isn’t barking. He’s too busy staring. And breathing weird panty dog breaths.

“Great. A doggie voyeur.” Tate shrugs and inches closer to Roxie. “Ignore him.”

“I can’t.” Roxie looks at her watch. “Besides, I have to go.”

He wants to stamp his foot like a child. “Why? It’s only nine.”

“Liv’s out with her new boyfriend. I don’t want them to come home to an empty house.”

Tate gets it but pretends he doesn’t. “And?”

Roxie smooths her hair and tugs at the hem of her blouse. “Tate, you have a teenage daughter. You know what I’m saying. I don’t really need to make it so easy for them to hook up, do I?”

Tate doesn’t tell Roxie that the top two buttons of her blouse are unbuttoned, because he’s still hoping that he might unbutton the blouse all the way. He reaches out and curls his arm around her waist. “Hooking up sounds like an excellent idea.” Actually, it’s the whole idea, the reason he brought Roxie into the basement in the first place. It’s cool down here, and dark, and the red couch is the pullout kind.

Roxie submits to a few minutes more of kissing, sighs in his ear when he puts a hand on her breast, but then pulls away again. “Sorry, Tate. I can’t relax with that dog staring at me. And I really do have to go.” She gets up from the couch and gathers her purse and shoes. “You’re not mad, are you?”

“No,” he says, though he’s exasperated. Roxie is sexy but flighty, too often running off to her bitchy daughter, or to the university library, or to her “job” as a counselor on a suicide hot line. And if she isn’t running off, she’s questioning her role in the universe and the meaning of life and the meaning of meaning so much that he gets too annoyed and distracted to pull out the couch.

Next time, he thinks, he’ll pull out the couch first.

But he sees those lovely clavicles peeking out of the top of her shirt and gives it one last try. He presses his lips to the base of her neck, sliding his fingers around her rib cage.

“I won’t be seeing you for a week,” he says.

“Whose fault is that?”

“My dad’s. He’s the one who wanted the trip.”

Tate sees that Roxie wants to say, You could have asked me to come with you, or, I’ve never met your parents. But she doesn’t. She’s given up on such things. Instead, she says: “Can’t blame Daddy for your whole life.” She squirms in his Pepe LePew arms, trying to get free.

The trip from O’Hare Airport to Surf City, New Jersey, which should have taken a grand total of five hours—including the flight and the drive to the beach—takes twelve instead, due to storms, crew problems, and strong winds (which Tate hears as “strong whims”). Tate spends the whole flight trapped next to a crazy man, who, between loud air phone calls, rocks in his seat, weeps, and prays in a mystery language. Toward the end of the flight, the attendant barks at Tate for having his tray table down when he wasn’t supposed to. “Okay,” Tate mutters like a teenager, “that’s fair.”

“Where have you been?” his father wants to know when Tate and the kids drag themselves into the house at nine
P.M.
Tate’s father is deeply tanned, but his normally silver hair seems thinner, whiter. He’s holding a glass of clear amber liquid.

“Where do you think we’ve been?” Tate says, setting the suitcases on the floor. There are at least four hundred suitcases.

“If I knew where you’ve been,” says Tate’s father, “I wouldn’t ask. What happened?”

Tate grunts. “Various natural and unnatural disasters,” he says. “Strong whims.”

Ryan slumps into the nearest chair. “Daddy had to sit next to a crazy guy. And then they made him put his table up.”

“Who?” says Tate’s father. “What table? The crazy man’s table?”

“Never mind,” Tate says. “It doesn’t matter. We’re here now.”

“Thank God,” says Ashleigh, kissing her grandfather’s cheek. “I need a drink.”

Tate’s father starts. “Excuse me?”

“Kidding, Grandpa,” Ashleigh says. “Cool house.”

Technically, the house belongs to Renee, his father’s wife, who inherited it from her parents. It’s a modern affair, gray and boxy and enormous, with decks on all three floors and a fourth on the roof. With his drink, Tate’s father points out the high ceilings, Italian tile floors, open staircases, private outdoor shower, Jacuzzi.

“So, how are you doing, Dad?” Tate says after every architectural detail has been duly noted and appreciated.

His dad takes a sip of his drink, and Tate sees that his hands are shaking and his eyes are bloodshot. “How does it look like I’m doing?” his father says.

Well, Dad, it sort of looks like you’ve been smoking crack for a day or ten.
But Tate won’t say it; he’ll leave the interventions to Glynn. “You look fine,” he says.

His dad holds out one quaking hand and smacks Tate’s cheek lightly. “That’s it,” he says. “We’re all fine, aren’t we?”

Like the house, Renee—Tate’s “stepmother”—is also a modern affair. After the tour of the beach house, she appears from nowhere, sweeping down the steps in a champagne-colored pajamalike outfit. The only thing missing are the jewel-studded mules; Renee’s feet are bare, the toenails painted a bright pink. There’s a thin silver ring around the second toe of her right foot.

Tate nods a greeting. “Say hello to your grandma Renee,” he tells Ryan, nudging him toward her. She hates to be called “Grandma.” She’s only forty-nine, just four years older than Tate, and takes great pride in the fact that most people think she’s at least a decade younger.

“Call me Renee,” she says for the thousandth time, giving Tate one of Renee’s patented Looks of Doom and Destruction. Tate rather enjoys Renee’s patented Looks of Doom and Destruction and does what he can to keep them coming. Renee detonated his parents’ marriage in nuclear fashion some twenty-nine years before, and Tate has never forgotten it, or quite forgiven it. Payback, bitch, and all that.

“Where’s Glynn?” Tate says.

“She’s not getting here till tomorrow morning,” Tate’s father answers, sounding relieved. Tate himself is relieved. He’d had enough of his sister a few nights ago, when he went to pick up his kids after his date with Roxie. Glynn threw open her door and began berating him as soon as he stepped onto the porch. She said that Ashleigh was too old for a baby-sitter, that this was the second time Ryan had bitten Joey, that all of this was related to their parents and possibly their parents’ parents—their grandfather had divorced their grandmother back in the 1950s. It was about time, Glynn announced, that they saw a family therapist to work it all out, connect the dots. There were so many, many dots. Dots upon dots.

Tate stood there trying to connect the dots, trying to remember the first time Ryan had bitten Joey. He had a dim memory of someone crying, but that could have been anything. Someone was always crying somewhere. “I don’t remember Ryan biting Joey before,” he said, then followed her into the house.

“Of course you don’t,” Glynn said. She lowered her voice to a whisper so that the kids, wherever they were, wouldn’t hear it. “You weren’t there, you idiot. You were out on a date with that woman, What’s-her-name. The one with the boobs.”

“Actual boobs? Crazy.”

“And now he’s bitten Joey twice. When I told him to leave Joey alone, he called me a jerk.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Tate said.

Glynn put her hands on her hips. “What are you doing? You date all these girls, rattle around in that huge house, and you dump your kids whenever and wherever. These kids need you, Tate. Especially now that Moira’s not with Ben anymore.”

Ben. Right. Überdad. Superstep. Not so superüber after all, since he cut out. But then, Tate didn’t have much to say on that score, since he’d cut out once, too. He felt a small abrasion of guilt, and then more guilt because he didn’t feel guilty enough. He could never feel guilty enough. But then the kids were fine, mostly. Mostly, they were fine.

Glynn didn’t think anything was fine. Glynn talked and talked and talked: “They’re totally lost. And what did Ashleigh do to her hair?”

After Moira told Ashleigh that she couldn’t dye her hair colors not found in nature anymore, Ashleigh had dumped a bottle of peroxide on her head. Now her hair was a peculiar shade of orangey blond usually seen only in servings of sherbet.

“It’s better than the pink,” Tate said.

“I liked the pink,” Glynn said. “That was interesting. This is frightening.”

“That’s her job,” Tate said, “to frighten her parents.”

Glynn snorted. “She hasn’t frightened you yet. But she will.”

Renee doesn’t look frightened as much as irritated by Ashleigh’s sherbet hair, cutoff shorts, and sloppy tank top that displays the straps of her navy blue bra. “Let me show you to your room,” Renee says. “You and your brother will be staying downstairs, right by the—”

“What?” says Ashleigh. “I’m not sharing a room with
him.
Let him and my dad share a room.”

“Ashleigh,” Tate says.

“What?”

Tate raises a significant eyebrow at her, a gesture that seemed to hold some power when his ex-wife did it. Ashleigh raises her own brow, probably because she’s seen her mother do the same thing. “You never said anything about sharing rooms,” she says.

“You thought we’d rent you your own hotel suite?”

“Why not? You’re a doctor. You can afford it.”

Though she seems to be enjoying the exchange, Renee steps in. “You can stand your brother for a few nights, Ashleigh, I’m sure. Follow me. Bring your suitcases. And don’t drag them. I don’t want any scratches on the tile. It cost my parents a fortune to fly it in from Milan.”

“I’m not staying in a room with him,” Ashleigh announces.

“Well, then,” Renee says, “I’m sure you’ll be very comfortable sleeping on the driveway.”

She sweeps out of the room and down the hall, Ryan and then, after a few minutes, Ashleigh waddling haphazardly behind her like gormless ducklings.

Tate’s dad laughs. “Renee always had a way with children.”

In the morning, Renee makes blueberry crepes with fresh whipped cream.

“Ryan doesn’t eat blueberries,” Tate tells her. “He doesn’t like fresh whipped cream.”

Renee dusts sugar over a plate. “Everyone eats blueberries,” she says.

“Ryan doesn’t.”

Renee looks at Tate. “Everyone does.”

At the beach, Tate buys Ryan a hot dog with mustard, which Ryan then feeds to the seagulls.

“I’m not buying you anything else, then,” says Tate. “I don’t care how hungry you get.”

Ryan says, “I don’t like blueberries.”

The lifeguards watch as Ashleigh peels off her jeans and T-shirt. Underneath, she is wearing a red bikini with letters scrawled across the ass.

“What’s that on your butt?” Tate says, too loudly.

“Everything she wears has something on the butt,” Ryan says.

“What are you talking about?” says Ashleigh, twisting to see. “Oh, that. It says,
Dump Him.
”

Tate sticks his feet in the sand so that the tops don’t get burned. “Who’s ‘him’?”