Keep Me Posted (9 page)

Any meaning my look imparted was quickly diminished when she said, “My name is Yiren and this is Flow One. Welcome.”

Maybe it’s spending my days with a couple of three-year-old boys, but at the combination of her name, which sounded exactly like “urine,” and the word “flow,” my eyes bulged and I stifled a giggle. A quick scan of the faces in the mirror that spanned the front of the room revealed that I was among mature adults. I wished Monica were there. We would have dissolved into a giggling fit and had to leave the class, embarrassing ourselves, yes, but that would have been preferable to what I endured for the next hour.

I had to watch Jenna and Jake to know what to do next, my shoulders weren’t opening the way everyone else’s were, and I kept defaulting to ballet-style turned-out feet and pointed toes, which repeatedly drew Yiren over to correct my stance. My faded Detroit Tigers T-shirt and Old Navy brand yoga pants weren’t helping. Jake and a few of the model types looked straight off the ashram in some loose-fitting linen-hemp blend pants and tight ribbed tank tops, while Jenna and the rest were all wearing the same brand of extremely flattering yoga outfits. I made a mental note to find out where to buy a pair of those pants that made Jenna’s butt look ten times better than it actually was without having to ask her.

I muddled my way through the next hour and then rushed out at “Namaste,” without even a glance in Jake’s or Jenna’s direction. To put some extra distance between Jenna and me, I jogged home, dreading the annoying yoga tips she was probably already planning to work into our next hallway encounter.

Needless to say, I was not feeling like the goddess I wanted to
feel like in order to kick off the sex challenge—plus I needed a dose of Jenna antivenom, so I was relieved to get a “yes” in response to my text to Monica:
Need a drink. Wine bar in 1 hour?? Please!

I took the stairs two at a time, hoping to catch the boys before they fell asleep and get Leo’s blessing to go back out for a drink. Leo had the boys in pajamas and was reading
The Circus Ship
on our bed when I came in. I climbed aboard and nuzzled the boys while Leo finished the book, and things were already better. We each took a boy and lay in bed with them, singing, “If I Had a Hammer.” They were asleep before the final verse.

I didn’t stop singing until we had crept out of the bedroom.

“Hon. Would you mind if I grabbed a quick drink with Monica?”

“No. Go ahead. Have fun.”

I kissed him on the lips, lingering a bit longer than our typical goodbye peck, as if to signal forthcoming intimacy and as a “thanks” for always being so cool when I needed to escape. I showered quickly, put on a non-cotton bra and undies, jeans, and a brown knit cowl-neck top, blasted my hair half dry, and ran downstairs.

I grabbed a stool at the oval-shaped bar and ordered two of the second-least-expensive glasses of red zinfandel and a cheese and olive plate. With no sign of Monica, I fished my notebook out of my purse and began a letter to Sid, my second that day. Monica showed up just as I had stopped to apply a Spider-Man Band-Aid (also found in my purse) to the writing callus on my middle finger. Looking and smelling fabulous, she planted kisses on my cheeks while I crumpled the Band-Aid wrapper and slid my notebook back into my bag. Monica had been a party girl about town before the twins, so she’s in her element in a bar.

“I need your help,” she said, settling into her barstool. She took a sip of the wine I had ordered for her. “Mmm. Thanks.” Then she opened up her laptop and we hovered over her draft post: “The Racist’s Guide to Child Care.” We snickered our way through a completely offensive and simplistic nationality-by-nationality guide to selecting a nanny. It was all based on actual comments we’d heard from other moms. “You’ve got to get a Tibetan; they’re so gentle and calm.” Or, “Jamaicans can cook, and nothing fazes them,” or, “An Eastern European will never complain.”

A group of banker types hovered nearby, and a few of them approached Monica at different points during our two hours there. She was ruthless. I felt so bad for them.

Sid, who was approached just as frequently, would talk to anyone, which often annoyed me. I’d try to shoot the guys a sympathetic yet firm look that conveyed that they had no shot, despite the confidence they felt in the warm glow of Sid’s smile and eye contact. But they seldom got the hint. I’ve never been one to suffer fools gladly, and so in addition to being the plain sister, I was often also the rude sister. With Monica, I was the plain, but kind, friend, often finding myself stuck talking to some guy she’d just heartlessly rebuffed.

I like to think I played each of these roles to equal effect. I’ve never minded being the “friend” or the “sister” of the person of most interest in any given social setting where men are present. But I do fear it’s made me a bit superficial. I don’t mean to, but I catch myself judging people based on their appearance all the time. It’s ironic, really, considering I do things like go to a bar with damp hair.

New York

June 1

Dear Sid,

It took me thirty-six years, but I have finally accepted that I need to put more of an effort into my appearance. I’m sitting in a bar surrounded by people looking lovely and put together in the flickering candlelight and feeling like a bit of a slob. The truth is that I grew up sort of letting that whole area slide because I was always intimidated by you. I guess I was hoping people would assume that I actually looked just like you but I just didn’t try. I didn’t want people to see me in an outfit with my hair just right and makeup on and think, “That’s the best she can do?”

It sounds so silly and it’s embarrassing to write it down, but I sometimes have that thought when I see a person who has clearly put a lot of effort into their appearance and the result is kind of meh. I’ll think, Oh, how sad. That is the best they can do. I’m not a nice person, I know, but it’s what has kept me in sweatpants all these years, so maybe that has been my punishment! I guess I wanted to create the illusion that I had potential. At the same time, I took pride in what I felt to be a certain authenticity that comes with not trying too hard. Of course, now I see that authenticity and putting effort into your appearance are not mutually exclusive. The clothes were a start, and this week I have a hair appointment and may just stop by Sephora on the way home.

And that’s what’s up with me. Your turn.

xoxo,

Cass

PS—How would you sum up the Filipino people as a whole in regards to child care?

When I arrived home, Leo was snoring on the sofa with a bowl of popcorn on the floor next to him. I disappointed myself by feeling a tad relieved that I wouldn’t have to seduce my husband, and after checking on the boys, I climbed into bed with my novel.

In the next scene in my book, the main character, a married woman, begins a steamy affair with a sexy drug addict she meets at an art gallery. I put the book down, got out of bed, and went back to regard Leo. His face was a little weathered, but he still looked as handsome as ever—the main difference being that instead of wild and wavy, he wore his dark brown hair shaved close to his head, a preemptive strike against male-pattern baldness.

I went to the fridge to pour myself a glass of water and found half of a brownie on the countertop. I knew immediately he had saved it for me. He was always saving me halves of things. If someone at work brought cupcakes, he’d eat half and wrap up the rest for me, keeping it in his bag until after the boys were in bed. He was the first good guy—okay, great guy—I’d ever fallen for. I was always more into the bad boys, and I wondered for a minute where I would be now If I’d married a guy who didn’t save me half of his brownie.
Probably in bed with him
, I thought, sighing, and went back to my book.

I knew it was Jenna by her knock.

“Hi, Jenna. What’s up?” I said, hoping to convey with my voice that I didn’t have time for chitchat.

“Great yoga class last night, right?”

“Eh.” I shrugged.

“Where do you normally practice?”

I noticed an envelope in her hand. Ignoring her attempt to get me to ask her for yoga advice, I said, “Is that my mail?”

“Oh, yeah. I found it in my box.”

“Thanks,” I said, holding out my hand.

“It looks like fu-un,” she said, looking down at the envelope, annoyingly still in her clutches. I could see that it was from Sid and that indeed it did look fun, with my name in big bubble letters and sparkly rainbow stickers festooning the edges (Lulu’s contribution, no doubt). “You’re lucky I checked. I rarely check my mail.”

I gave her a
that’s weird
look and said, “Okay, thanks, then . . .” But she went on.

“I get all my important mail in my PO box. I set it up when I was going through the divorce and I didn’t know where I’d be living.”

Damn her
. Defeated, I said, “Do you want to come in, Jenna?”

“Sure—Valentina’s at school, and I’m stuck on this blog post. I could really use a coffee, if you have any.”

Leo was home for the morning, a rare occurrence. Having just finished a wrestling session with the boys, he was sprawled out in the middle of the floor, groaning and stretching while they all watched cartoons together. He’d been working late the night before, so he stayed home until ten to spend some time with the boys. Leo was good like that; he made a point to see them every day, even if it meant dashing home for twenty minutes in the middle of the afternoon.

“Leo, are you okay?” Jenna asked.

“Oh, hi, Jenna. It’s just my back. I’m not used to our new mattress.”

“Here, let me show you something,” she said, sitting down on the carpet beside him and then proceeding to guide him through a few yoga poses, much to the annoyance of Quinn and Joey, whose view of the television was now obscured by Jenna’s and Leo’s butts.
That didn’t take long
, I thought.

I started washing the breakfast dishes, my back to the room, as much to demonstrate my indifference as anything else.

Done with Leo, she made her way back over to the table. I poured her a cup of coffee and continued to tidy up while she prattled on about the post she was working on—something about how she talks to Valentina about the “bad nannies” they encounter out at the playgrounds. At some point I joined her at the table. As irritating as I found her, I was glad to sit and drink coffee with an adult for a few minutes while the boys were occupied with Leo.

Singapore

June 5

Cassie,

Adrian was in town all week—a rare occurrence. This is terrible to say, but we’ve gotten so used to him being away that his being here was as disruptive as it was nice. He messed up my whole routine. I eat dinner every night with the kids, and
with Rose doing all the cleanup, my evenings are so relaxed. I love playing music and rocking Lu to sleep, then watching
Mad Men
with River. It’s become my idea of a perfect evening.

When Adrian’s here, he comes flying in the door, usually on the phone, just as I’m about to take Lulu to bed, adding this whole frantic energy to our night. He’ll try to read her a story, but a client or his boss will call and he’ll have to excuse himself, leaving me to take over. And then I find myself eating two dinners—one with the kids at six and then one with him at nine, which is not an ideal schedule when it’s swimsuit season year-round. Poor Rose was a wreck about what “sir” was going to have for dinner every night. She hardly knows him, so she’s all nervous when he’s around.

And now I have a request for you: more talk about the weather, please. I want to remember what it feels like not to be hot. I miss the seasons so much. It’s actually hard to remember important events, because when you look back on the day, it was hot and you went to the pool. In real life, you can rely on what you were wearing or whether you had to shovel the driveway or buy more sunscreen to set things in time, but here, every day is kind of the same. Did you know that we’re eighty miles from the equator? Lulu and I practically live at the swimming pool, and you should see her go. She loves the water. Speaking of swimsuits, I took Rose shopping for one today. She doesn’t know how to swim, so I’m enrolling her in lessons.

Kisses!

—Sid

PS—If you know anybody at John Deere or Toro, you might let them in on this hot tip: A wealthy nation in Southeast Asia has never heard of you. I’m watching the elderly Chinese gardener cut the grass on the hill outside my condo with scissors. Scissors! Maybe too many people complained about the noise, and since this guy is making only a few bucks a day, they can afford a half-dozen more of them to spend all day snipping the blades of grass like they were
bangs.

O
ut of the blue, my old boss from the magazine e-mailed and offered us tickets to an Alvin Ailey dance performance at Lincoln Center. When I called Wanda to see if she was available, she said we had already booked her for that night. I checked my calendar and discovered it was Leo’s brother Stevie’s fortieth birthday party in Hoboken. Irritated because I really wanted to go to the dance performance, I begrudgingly got to work on an eighties costume for the theme.

On the bright side, I would get to hang out with my sister-in-law Emma. Emma, Stevie’s wife, is British, which makes her more of an outsider than me. She’s giggly and mischievous and hands down the best thing about spending time with the Costas. She keeps a stack of British celebrity gossip magazines in her purse and drinks sparkling wine almost exclusively. No matter what else is going on, we manage to sit down and drink and flip through magazines. Forty-five minutes with her is like a mini vacation.

I came into the family only a few months after she did, and we
bonded quickly, probably because she clung to me like a life raft in icy shark-infested waters. Which isn’t far from the reality of, say, a lunch with Becky and Alyssa, who, as the wives of Rob and Tony Costa, had formed an early alliance, both being Jersey girls and—either actually or pretending to be—at ease with what Emma and I saw as an unusual family dynamic.

Rob Costa the first was killed in a truck accident when Leo was in high school, and Mary had received a large insurance settlement. The trucking company also provided a big payout, which she’d used to buy a house on the Jersey Shore. I have a feeling it was always this way, but Rob Sr.’s absence likely ramped up Mary’s intimate involvement in each of her sons’ lives, perhaps best summed up by this anecdote: A week before our wedding, she pulled me aside and suggested I “powder
down there
to keep things fresh for the wedding night.” I was unable to look Mary in the eye for weeks afterward.

While I eventually surrendered to Mary’s lack of boundaries and built a friendly relationship with her, Emma hadn’t made much progress since those early days. To make matters worse, I think Mary enjoyed keeping her on edge. She made a lot of xenophobic comments, which were mostly based on Wimbledon or the royal family or crumpets, to which Emma would guffaw and say things to only further alienate herself, like, “But I’m from Hounslow!” as if it were proof against the snootiness that Mary couldn’t separate from her accent, which did sound more Dick Van Dyke than Julie Andrews. For all Mary knew, she may as well have been from Timbuktu. Mary had never been out of the tristate area and was wary of anything unfamiliar.

Long ago, Emma learned to stop mentioning the summer she’d spent working in Italy, because Mary’s lack of interest could seem
downright hostile—especially if the topic was authentic Italian food. I used to think she was intimidated by Emma’s worldliness, but what I think it mostly boils down to is a fear that Emma would take Stevie to live in some far-off land, which, I have to admit, I get.

The fact that I’d delivered Mary’s only two grandsons—her prized princes among a gaggle of granddaughters—is the chief reason for our improved relationship. I did suffer some major setbacks, including my decision to keep my own last name when Leo and I married and the awful Easter lunch—late in my pregnancy, at the height of my blood-sugar problem, when I had dared to help myself to a plate of food before fixing one for Leo. I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and was feeling light-headed when we arrived at Mary’s house just as she had finished setting out the food. With Leo still in the yard catching up with his brothers, I went straight to the table and filled my plate greedily. When I slumped into the closest chair I could find, and balanced the paper plate of lasagna on my belly, poised to slice into that red-and-white rectangle of goodness, I felt a pair of cold eyes on me. One look at Mary told me that I had broken the natural order of things: Women never eat before all of the men and children are fed. But with my mouth watering and my blood sugar dropping, I felt I had no choice but to continue with plan A.

“Leo, sweetheart,” she yelled out of the kitchen window, her eyes still on me. “You must be starved. What can I get for you?” as if he were incapable of figuring out a standard buffet line.

There is a unique brand of vulnerability associated with eating food you are not welcome to, especially if you are a woman and currently weigh something in the neighborhood of 170 pounds, and my cheeks burned with shame as I chewed. Slowly, my dizziness
subsided, and as I ate, I cycled through the embarrassment all the way to anger, which eventually dulled to annoyance. I was annoyed that Leo wasn’t in the room to defend me, to tell his mom that I hadn’t eaten since seven a.m. and that the doctor said I should be vigilant about my blood-sugar swings. Annoyed at Mary for reducing me to the meek little wife sitting in the corner and annoyed at myself for allowing it to happen.

By the time I got up from that chair, I had decided that this whole dynamic was not going to work for me. I wasn’t going to let her push me around, yet I had no interest in bucking her firmly established system. Swimming upstream when it’s not absolutely necessary is a fool’s errand, if you ask me. I vowed to stop behaving like a watered-down version of myself, ramped up my mirror neurons, and found a way to be the most Mary-complementary version of myself I could be. I embraced my role as prep cook in her kitchen, and she even had me over to learn to make sauce. She also taught me lasagna and stuffed shells—“with meat, for when Leo grows out of the vegetarian thing and you can cook nice family meals.”

New York

June 15

Sidney Sue—

It’s Saturday night, we have a babysitter coming later, and Leo and I are headed out to—what else?—spend time with his mother and his brothers. Bleh. What we need is to spend time together, but every second is filled with his obnoxious family. I mean, it’s fine when the kids are involved. I like them to spend time with their cousins. But when they encroach on our kid-free time—ugh.

I should go get ready for this party—the theme is eighties, and I have to try to repierce one of my ears (remember how you did it with a needle and a potato the first time—in the eighties!!) so I can wear these awesome plastic
earrings I bought for $4 in Union Square. My look is very
Desperately Seeking Susan
. To be continued . . .

Hi again—well, I looked like a prostitute at the party. Seems everyone else went with a preppy tennis-court look. Popped collars, turtlenecks, and argyle, and there I am in my black miniskirt, garish jewelry, bra straps, and black panty hose complete with a run. Needless to say, I drank more than was advisable. I don’t know why Leo didn’t stop me from dressing like that. Of course, he was wearing a bolero tie and puffy pleated pants, so he looked almost as ridiculous as me. Emma, bless her heart, tried to make me feel better and got drunk with me while giggling about the awkward way their friend Carl kept steering his eighteen-month-old daughter away from me.

Yes, there was a toddler at the party. They have these friends, Carl and Michelle, nice people, but they bring their kid EVERYWHERE. The rest of us are putting down good money to leave the kids behind, dress like harlots, and say “fuck” with abandon. And there’s Carl, behaving as if we’re at the after-Mass doughnut reception. He does this thing where he narrates his kid’s every move, in a faux-clever, overrehearsed monologue. “Yep, there she goes for the doorknob. Fascinating contraptions, aren’t they?” His poor wife must endure his ridiculous routine every time they go out. It has got to be hard to have sex with someone like that.

Speaking of sex, I am having a slow start to the challenge (although compared to Carl, Leo’s looking pretty damn good). But on the way home from the party, Leo and I held hands, which led to kissing, and I think we both assumed we’d pick things up when we got home, but honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d still be in the mood by the time we got home, and—emboldened by my outfit and seven or eight champagnes—I was very much in the mood right there, so I climbed on top of him. Oh Lordy, our livery-cab driver completely freaked. He flipped on the interior lights in the car and yelled, “No sex in my car! No sex!” My miniskirt was pulled up high around my waist and my Pillsbury Doughboy tummy was bulging out of my control-top panty hose. It was about the least sexy sight you can imagine. We played the part of the loudmouth bad kids getting busted. “All right! All right!” I yelled, in my best eighties Madonna voice, shielding my eyes and dismounting Leo. Leo rested his head on the back of the seat and said, “We’re not doing anything, man. Can you turn off the lights?”

By the time we got home, as I had predicted, the mood had passed. Leo was asleep by the time I returned from the long session in the bathroom required to rinse off four coats of black eyeliner and mascara. So I’m sitting up writing to you so I can make the morning mail.

But wait—I haven’t even covered the evening’s low point. Leo’s sister-in-law Becky, that bitch, suggested (in front of a bunch of people) that I have Joey “tested.” Leo and I were
telling some story about him, and she interrupted to say, “Have you thought about having him tested?”

Me: For what?

Her: Well, perhaps to see if he might be on the spectrum?

Me: What spectrum?

Her: Autism?

Us: Blank stares.

Her: It’s just that some of the things you are describing sound a little spectrumy.

I mean, don’t get me wrong; sometimes I think I could be more patient with Joey if he had some sort of label or diagnosis. I could tell people that he has “special needs” or whatever you’re supposed to say, and then, instead of looking like a shitty mom who can’t control her kids, I’d get nods of respect or smiles of empathy. But he’s three! I don’t want to dive down a rabbit hole of coping strategies and therapy for kids “on the spectrum” unless we really need to. My pediatrician says he’s probably fine, and I’m going with that.

Love you.

—Cass

That wasn’t my only letter written under the influence, but I really should have had a rule about writing after drinking. It hurts to read that one. I can think of a hundred more diplomatic ways to have said all of that, but the things you say when you think no one is listening are a lot different from the things you would say
otherwise.