I'm Not Julia Roberts (8 page)

I wonder sometimes if you have any idea how ridiculous you sound. If the boys aren’t supposed to be involved in “adult matters,” then why did you introduce them to your boyfriend before we even separated? Why were the boys attending Alan’s family functions before I even knew the man existed? And why would you tell them that you were “just friends” when it was clear to them and to the rest of the world what you were doing?

You are in no position to moralize. If they’re confused and upset, maybe YOU need to look into the mirror for the reason why.

Ward

December 4, 1996

Ward:

As per our temporary agreement, I will be picking the boys up from school so that we can spend my birthday together. Since we are planning a late dinner, I will need to keep them overnight. Please let me know if there’s any problem with this.

I’d also like to bring something else to your attention. You need to be more careful about what you say to the boys. Frankly, I don’t care what you think of me, but please don’t take your anger out on our children. They’re scared and confused enough as it is. They need their father right now, not some babbling lunatic. I don’t know what you told them about Alan, but I don’t appreciate your comments or insinuations. They don’t understand adult matters and shouldn’t be involved in any of them. As I’ve told you repeatedly, the breakup of our marriage has nothing to do with him and everything to do with YOU. If you’re looking for a villain, you might try looking in the mirror.

Beatrix

Posted on SPLITSVILLE.com, November 28, 1996:

What a great website! I’m so glad I found you guys. I’ll start hunting down those receipts right away. I had another quick question for you all: I received a small (2K) incentive bonus from my employer. Is this considered income? I got it after we separated. Thanks!

2Good2BeBlue

November 2, 1996

Beatrix:

Hey, thanks for turning off the boiler and opening all the windows when you left. The autumn leaves on the dining room table were an especially nice touch.

Ward

Note on kitchen table:

November 1, 1996

Good-bye!! Good luck!! Feel free to take the lamp in the living room. I’ve always hated the damn thing.

September 10, 1996

Ward:

I don’t think you understand. Nothing in my life is up to you, now.

Beatrix

September 6, 1996

Beatrix:

Do whatever you have to do. But I don’t want that sweaty asshole you’re hooked up with to step foot in my home.

Ward

September 5, 1996

Ward:

I’ll be moving out on the first of the month. I’d appreciate it if you’d make arrangements to be away from the house during the hours of 8 am to 4 pm. I don’t think we need to make this any harder than it has to be.

Beatrix

August 9, 1996
To: [email protected]
Fr: [email protected]

So maybe you’re right, it’s just like back in high school, all chicks are bitches and we just have to deal with it. I just wanted to know when she stopped wanting to be married to me. How long this has been a sham, you know? I thought that was a pretty simple question. I mean, we’re talking about the woman who has an answer for everything. So why doesn’t she have an answer for the most important thing? (Yeah, I know, maybe she doesn’t think it’s the most important thing. Shut up already.)

You won’t believe this book she gave me, supposedly written by some marriage expert. She’s an expert all right. She’s been married four fucking times, I looked it up. What the hell am I supposed to do with a marriage book by some dumb bitch who’s been married four fucking times?

Shit. Everything’s shit. And my language is going down the fucking toilet.

Ward

July 20, 1996

Beatrix:

I don’t believe you. But I guess it doesn’t matter now.

Ward

July 19, 1996

Ward:

I got your letter and I don’t know what to say except that I’m sorry. I have tried, tried as hard as I could for as long as I could, tried to tell you I wasn’t happy, tried to get you to understand, but I can’t try anymore. I just can’t.

It’s clear to me now that we’re not meant to be together. You’re a good man and a wonderful father, but we’ve both changed so much. It goes deeper than the arguments we’ve had about having another baby, or my job, or your job, or who’s doing what around the house—I just don’t love you in the same way, and I’m not sure if I ever did. We were so young, we never got a chance to experience the world—what did we know about love and marriage and all of it? Now we—and that means the both of us—will have a chance to find out. In the long run, I know this is the right thing. If you looked into your heart, you’d know it, too.

I’m giving you this book, which has really helped me to understand what went wrong with us, and what we can do to keep that from happening with other people. I hope it helps you, too.

There is something you need to understand: Alan has nothing to do with my decision. I’ve known for a long time that I had to leave, meeting him simply gave me the courage to do it. I never meant to get involved, I never meant to hurt you or the boys. Believe me, this has caused me more anguish than you’ll ever know.

Beatrix

July 17, 1996

Beatrix:

I’ve tried to write this letter so many times in so many different ways that I’m hip deep in wadded papers. I think I just have to come out and say it: I don’t know what went wrong.

I try to see it, understand it, but I can’t. I guess I didn’t meet your needs. I worked too hard. I didn’t help around the house or help with the boys enough. I didn’t listen. I didn’t encourage you enough, or in the right way. I pushed you into the arms of someone else. I don’t like cats. Is that it? I don’t know.

But whatever it is, I’m sorry for it all. For disappointing you, for taking you for granted. Right now I have no clue what would make me turn my back on you the way I must have, what small shiny thing could have captured my attention for so long that you felt I had forgotten about you. Because I didn’t. I never have.

Do you remember that day we were window-shopping, just a few months after we met? You were so busy staring at those shoes you liked—they were the red ones, you always liked red, red like your hair—and you walked right into a telephone pole, nearly knocking yourself out? And you laughed so hard that you were snorting, and you demanded to know why I wasn’t snorting, too? Why I kept asking you if you were hurt rather than collapsing into hysterics myself? And you assumed that I was just a nice, concerned guy hoping that you didn’t have a concussion? I wasn’t a nice guy then, I’m not one now, as you’ve said many times. So, I’ll tell you, I asked if it hurt because standing there, watching you laugh, I hoped so much that
I
could knock you out like that, I wanted it so much my heart hurt. I wanted you to feel that same way. I wanted you to hurt, too.

So, I can see that this isn’t making much sense, but then, my head’s a fucking mess; I feel like I’ve just plowed into a telephone pole, only it isn’t funny. I don’t think I can get through this, and I don’t want to. Do you want to? Do you really? I’ll say I love you, but after ten years of marriage, it’s not that simple. I everything you. You’re the mother of my children. There isn’t a corner of my world that doesn’t have you in it, somewhere, in some way.

This guy you’ve been with, I won’t forget about him, I can’t, but I won’t ask about him, either, I swear—I don’t want to know. He’s your memory, your secret to keep. I want you—laughing you, snorting you, you in the red shoes. And I know that we can work it out if we tried.

Let’s. Please. Try.

Ward

SAFEKEEPING

I
n an old photo album, dragged out only on holidays, there is a picture of Lu on Santa Claus’s knee. With lips pressed into a grim smile, one eyebrow cocked, and her arms folded tightly across her chest as if to protect her heart, Lu looks every inch the kindergartner who turned her back on Santa Claus a long time before, dismissed him the same way she dismissed all those other Technicolor phantoms of childhood: the Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, the white rabbit on the cereal boxes.
Silly rabbit.
This photograph was a sentimental favorite of Lu’s mother’s. It was taken around the time she had divorced Lu’s father. “If I’d wanted another child to raise,” she’d told Lu, referring to Lu’s dad, “I would have gotten knocked up again.”

Lu thought of this photograph when, on the way to the mall, she and her three boyfriends saw Santa Claus. Santa was driving an old Dodge Dart striped with blue house paint and talking on his cell phone. A cigarette that bobbed from the corner of his mouth threatened to set his frothy beard on fire. Lu, who had just given up cigarettes for good for the fifth time in her life, could practically taste the tobacco.

“Hey,” said Britt, the middle boyfriend. “Santa.”

“What? Where?” yelled Ollie, the youngest, craning his neck to see. “That’s not the real Santa. Santa doesn’t smoke, does he, Lu?” Just the other day, Ollie told her that she was not allowed to have a baby for at least five more years, when he was fifteen. “I’m the baby of the family,” he’d said. “Me.”

“Looks like Santa’s a smoking fiend,” Britt said.

“No, he isn’t.”

“Duh,” said Britt, an expression that always sent Ollie into a spasm of flailing limbs aimed in his brother’s general direction and which did so now.

“Guys,” Lu said halfheartedly. “I’d like to get to the mall without having to make a pit stop at the emergency room, okay?”

“Ow!” said Ollie. “He hit me!”

“No, he hit me,” Britt said.

“A likely story,” said Lu. “If you keep it up, I’m going to drive this car into a ditch.”

“Is that any way to speak to your stepsons?” said Britt.

“It’s the only way to speak to your stepsons,” Lu said.

“I don’t know why we have to go fricking Christmas shopping,” Britt mumbled irritably. “It’s not for weeks and weeks.”

“I don’t want what happened last year to happen again,” Lu said.

Ollie stopped flailing. “What happened last year?”

Last year, Lu had decided to blow her holiday budget on a weekend getaway for Ward, plus a little joke gift she claimed was from Picky the cat. It was the first year that they had all three boys on Christmas morning, yet she hadn’t thought to remind them to get anything for their father, nor had she bought presents on their behalf, as her own mother used to do. It simply hadn’t occurred to her until they were gathered around the tree, when she saw that she and the boys each were tearing through piles of gifts, and Ward, poor Ward, was left holding nothing but a picture of a lakeside cabin in Wisconsin and a spiked dog collar.

At the time, the boys hadn’t noticed. And here, Ollie didn’t even remember.

“Your father didn’t get any presents last year, that’s what happened,” said Lu. “Not one of you bought your own father a present.”

“I was only nine last year,” Ollie said.

“And I don’t have a car,” Britt added.

Lu glanced at Devin, the third and oldest boyfriend, sitting in the front passenger seat, but Devin wasn’t in the mood to provide excuses. Actually, Devin wasn’t often in the mood to provide much of anything but scowls, sneers, and vacant stares that made him look like a photograph of himself rather than the real thing. The approaching holidays had made him touchier than ever, and she had begun to dread coming home. He’d scrape his flinty eyes over Lu, over Ward, and over his own brothers and then whip his head away as if he couldn’t bear the sight of any of them. “At least he’s quiet,” Lu had told Annika, her sister. “At least he’s not taking drugs or robbing little old ladies.”

Annika had said, “How do you know what he’s doing in his spare time?”

Devin turned up the volume on his Walkman and jerked his head spastically. He loved music, but music did not love him back. “I gots ta go,” he muttered.

“Yes, you do,” Britt said, sending Ollie into a theatrical giggling fit.

“Yoodoo!” said Ollie, stressing both syllables, yoodoo, yoodoo, reminding Lu of the vast amounts of spam she got. She had spam on the brain. She read all of it that wormed through her filter, mostly because of the names. Spam was never from Sally Smith or John Jones. Spam came instead from the mailbox of Yes Yoodoo. Tragically Pigged. Transport P. Intoxicating. The names tickled her brain like poetry. They seemed to provide a running commentary on her life, a sly sort of jabberwocky. Just that morning, she’d gotten a message that read:

You look familiar. Haven’t we met somewhere previously?

Fathers, do not exasperate your children. Instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. [Ephesians 6:4]

Lu Klein, are you searching to shop for antidepressants?

Adults are obsolete kids.

Gray hairs are signs of wisdom if you hold your tongue. Speak and they are but hairs, as in the young.

To accept civilization as it is means accepting decay.

There was something about it, that message, something nonsensical yet apt. And then there was its mystery sender, Disagreeably Dimorphosed. Now that she thought about it, Lu thought it was as good a label as any. And this was what she said out loud: “I’m Disagreeably Dimorphosed. Capital D, capital D.”

“Huh?” said Ollie.

But Lu could see Britt nodding in the rearview mirror. “Maybe you’re just plain disagreeable, no capital?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps I’m less Disagreeably Dimorphosed than Tragically Pigged,” Lu said.

Britt snapped gum he wasn’t supposed to be chewing on account of the retainers. “Could be.”

As they passed, Britt waved at Santa, and Santa waved back cheerily, ash spraying out the window like seed.

Lu turned the car into the parking lot, shut down the engine, and herded the boys into the mall. True, it was early in the season, but the crowds, the relentless holiday Muzak, and the dispirited plastic wreaths with their limp red ribbons made Lu’s head ache even before the shopping began.

In front of a cart at which a bored teenager sold clip-on ponytails, Lu turned to her recalcitrant crew. “Where to?”

The boys looked at her like a trio of cats, as if to say,
This is your show, Mrs. Claus. We’re just along for the ride.

“Okay,” said Lu. “How about we try the Gap first?”

“My favorite store!” Britt said with excessive sarcasm.

“Your father likes the Gap,” Lu said in a prim voice that embarrassed her as soon as she heard it. Being with the boys sometimes made her that way, prim and fussy, though she tried not to be. They were skilled at eliciting defenses, getting backs up. And the more they saw it happening, saw that you were on some downward spiral toward schoolmarm, the more they enjoyed themselves.

In the store, Lu started flipping quickly through sweaters. “What do you think of these, guys?”

Ollie climbed into the center of the circular rack and stuck his head up in the middle. “I’m a Christmas tree!” he said.

“You’re a Christmas fruitcake,” Britt told him. “Those sweaters are nasty, Lu.” Devin drifted over to stacks of oversize jeans, bobbing his head arrhythmically.

“Okay,” Lu said. “No sweaters.” She turned to the next rack, where desperately wrinkled dress shirts crumpled in on themselves as if they were ashamed. “How about some of these?”

Britt flipped his retainer out of his mouth and sucked it back in. “Doesn’t Dad have like sixty of those?”

“A hundred!” Ollie said, popping like a jack-in-the-box from the center of the rack.

“I don’t think Dad needs a salmon-colored shirt, Loop,” said Britt.

Ollie crawled out from under the rack. “Salmon is a fish!”

“He does have a lot of shirts,” said Lu. “I don’t know. We need something.
You
need to get him something.”

“Give us a break,” Britt said. “We just got here.”

That’s when Lu saw the man, hovering behind the boys. Because he was wearing khaki pants paired with one of the nasty Gap sweaters, Lu guessed that he was an employee or manager who didn’t appreciate the public denigration of the merchandise. But then he pulled little yellow cards from his pocket.

“This is for you,” he said, handing them each a card, which they took without thinking. “Have a nice day.”

“What’s this?” said Britt, but the man was already walking away, the bald spot on the back of his head gleaming under the fluorescent lights.

Lu looked down at the yellow card: “God holds you in His hand and in His heart.” Next to the message was a smiley face.

Ollie frowned at the card, his lips moving as he read. “I know this already,” he said. “Does the man think I don’t know this already?”

Devin sneered, tossing the card to the ground. “
I
don’t know this,” he said, his voice thick as a smoker’s. “Who says God cares about us?”

Ollie bit his lip, and Lu could see he was calculating the benefits of a tantrum. “Ignore your brother, Ollie,” she said.

“Right,” Devin said in a flat voice. “Ignore me.”

Was Devin seething or sarcastic or his characteristic nothing? It was so hard to tell. “Devin’s just mad because I won’t buy him one of these pretty sweaters,” said Lu. “But we’re here to buy presents for your dad.”

“
Christmas
presents,” said Ollie. He glared at Lu and then at Devin. “I’m keeping my card.”

“Sure you are,” Devin said. Britt yawned.

“That’s fine, Ollie. Do you need me to hold it for you? I can put it in my purse.”

“No,” Ollie said. “I’m going to hold it in my hand. Just like God holds me in His.”

Next stop, Old Navy. More sweaters, cargo pants with pockets ballooning off them like polyps, kitschy old-man pajamas, mango-and-banana-colored shirts that Ward would never wear. Pink shirts were “in” back when Lu was in college, where Lu had majored in bad boyfriends. The first, a blue-eyed blond, tan as a surfer, often wore pink shirts to accentuate his coloring. It made him look innocent, he claimed. He’d told her this while lying naked on her dorm room floor, waggling his penis at her.

“I’m not sure if pink is right for your dad,” Lu said.

Britt poked at the tables of clothes and racks of garments. “All this stuff sucks.”

“What are you talking about?” said Devin. “You have tons of crap from this store.”

“I’m talking about Dad. He can’t wear any of this.”

Ollie tugged on Lu’s arm. “Devin said ‘crap.’”

“Stop saying ‘crap,’ Devin.”

“Well, when you put it that way . . . ,” Britt said, snickering.

“Are we at your house on Christmas or are we at Mommy’s?” Ollie said.

“Mommy’s,” Lu told him. “You’ll be with Daddy and me on Christmas Eve.”

“I thought we were going to be at Grandma’s on Christmas Eve?” Britt said.

“Early in the day you will. But you’ll be at our house for dinner. Then you go to Mom’s Christmas morning, and then I think it’s Aunt Louise’s afterward,” Lu said, surprised that she could keep it all straight. Blended family holidays were less blended than they were pieced up and fractured, balled up like old drugstore receipts at the bottom of a purse. With Lu’s mom and dad living in two separate states and Lu in a third, with Ward’s sons alternating households on alternating Thanksgivings, Christmases, and Easters, Lu and Ward ran from one end of the country to the other, one house to the next. The gifts piled up, and the kids couldn’t even remember which grandparent or stepgrandparent or not-really-my-aunt-but-whatever did the giving. Sometimes Lu herself gave up entirely and got on a plane to visit her own family by herself. On those occasions, it was hard not to feel a shameful relief.

She checked her watch, figuring that she had less than an hour before the boys’ patience would be worn down to the nibs and she would be stuck buying all the presents alone. And of course that would be the easier thing. But after her colossal gaffe last year, she wanted this year to be authentic. She wanted each of Ward’s sons to say to him, “I picked that out for you myself, Dad. Do you like it?” Just one genuine Christmas, and she would be satisfied that she had done her job right.

“Let’s move on,” she said. “There’s a Carson’s a couple of doors down. Maybe we can find something there.”

Carson’s, unfortunately, had some sort of thing for T-shirts with “funny” sayings on them. The boys, unfortunately, also had a thing for T-shirts with “funny” sayings.

“Look at this, Lu!” Ollie said, holding up a bright orange T-shirt.
I’m a Secret Agent!
shrieked the shirt.
This is my disguise!

“That’s cute, Ollie.”

“Can I buy it for Daddy?”

“Uh, why don’t you look through some of the other shirts?”

Beam me up, Scotty. Denial is cheaper than therapy. I’m with Stupid.
All the reasons why beer was better than women and why women were better than men. There was
Sorry, this is not a slogan,
but in letters so tiny that you had to have the shirt three inches away to read it. Britt took a liking to
Mad as a box of frogs
and got about as mad as a box of frogs when Ollie didn’t understand what it was supposed to mean.

“Huh?”
Ollie said in that irritating way of his, curling his lips up to the gumline.

The huhs alone could drive a person crazy, Lu thought. Rule number 4,289 of stepparenting: Beware the huhs! “Ollie, don’t needle your brother.”

“But I still don’t know why the frogs are mad,” Ollie said.

Britt shrugged. “How about this, Ollie?” he said, holding up a shirt:
This is my clone.

Ollie frowned. “Ooo!” he said, getting it, grabbing at it.

A woman motoring her way through racks of wrinkle-resistant slacks, blabbing into her cell phone, smacked into Lu and didn’t stop to apologize. “Ham?” the woman shouted into the phone. “Since when do you like
ham
?” Lu rubbed her shoulder. When she was young, she used to think that people were full of delicious and dangerous secrets, private thoughts about desire and despair. Now she knew that mostly they thought about meat products and who was getting the milk.