Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (11 page)

She was probably right. When I didn’t react, when I just brushed people off, they kept poking and poking, trying to get a reaction, not stopping until they could tell that they had hurt me. But I couldn’t make myself respond; I couldn’t let them see that I was hurt. I wasn’t going to let them know that they had any power over me.

But they do have power over you,
my therapist said,
they do hurt you.

Yeah, okay, but I didn’t have to let them know.

Why don’t you stand up for yourself?
she asked.

She was wrong. This wasn’t about standing up for myself; this was about not letting other people see me sweat. There was a difference. There had to be.

This left Zack, although he was a year older than Annie, stuck at the younger-siblings’ table, in charge of Finney. He couldn’t have been happy, but he was soldiering on. He had his arm propped up on the table, the side of his wrist twisted toward Finney. Finney was trying to reinsert Zack’s cufflink. At one point Zack bent sideways, his black hair brushing close to Finney’s head, so that he could observe the procedure and offer advice.

I was proud of him . . . and wished there were some way to let college-admissions committees know about this moment.

Just as my table was trying to figure out how to eat our spun-sugar flying buttresses, Guy came over to me. “Here you are,” he said, kneeling so that I didn’t have to crane my neck to talk to him. “I hope you’re having a good time.”

“Of course.” What else could I say?

“Finney’s about had it. I don’t know where the communication breakdown occurred, but the caterer thought he had a peanut allergy, not corn.”

Virtually all the dishes had been sauced or glazed. “What did he eat?”

“Salad with oil and vinegar and a fruit plate. Apparently he kept wanting to come sit with you because he was sure the food at your table had to be better.”

“That’s the nicest thing anyone has said to me all evening.”

“I hope that’s not true,” Guy said gallantly. “But when you decide to write a cookbook, you need to let me represent you.”

I had no interest whatsoever in writing a cookbook. “Don’t hold your breath.”

“I never do.” Then he got down to his real business. It was long past Finney’s bedtime, and the driver had arrived to take him back to the house. “We knew he would want to leave before we
could, so Annie agreed to go with him. That’s when we thought we would all be at the hotel. What should she do about getting into the house? And what can he eat? I’m afraid you’ve become the bell to his Pavlov’s dog. He’ll see your house and start to want to eat . . . as would I.”

“The leftovers from lunch are in the refrigerator. Annie can figure out the microwave, can’t she?” I glanced over to the table where Annie was sitting. Rose was talking to her, one hand on the back of her chair.

Annie didn’t want to leave. Who could blame her? Eight tall college rowers were fawning over her. Even if a major bribe had been involved in Annie’s agreeing to leave, Rose couldn’t be having an easy time trying to get her to stick with the plan.

I dropped my napkin next to the dessert plate. Whatever sweets I had at home would almost certainly be tastier than this minicathedral. “Let Annie stay. I’ll go with Finney. My father is probably ready to leave too.” He had been seated next to Mike’s mother. “If Finney’s comfortable with us, we can put him to bed.”

Guy was looking at me, his bright eyes assessing.

“I won’t feel like Cinderella,” I assured him.

“Then that will be great,” he said. He was going to take me at my word, not wasting time on “are you sure?” polite mumbo jumbo. He went to tell Rose and get the EpiPen. I found Claudia and thanked her. For which she thanked me. We were getting good at that.

She glanced down at her wrist. Her pearl bracelet was an interesting little evening watch. She was checking the time.

If she had been anyone else, I would have told her that I liked her watch, but undoubtedly she would have thanked me, and I’d again be standing here, trying to figure out what to say. So I moved off to the younger-siblings’ table and reminded Zack that he and Mike were leaving for their college visits tomorrow
and they had a six a.m. flight. I was offering him an excuse in case he wanted to leave early. He nearly trampled me to get to the door.

Cami and Jeremy were going back to New York with the Zander-Browns, so the car returned midmorning to pick up the kids for the return trip. Finney went dashing outside, eager to show his parents the tie around his neck. “The grandpa . . . Doctor . . . Doctor Bow-wow . . . he stood behind me, and I put my hands on his. Like this.” Finney launched into a full-body, air-guitar version of a four-in-hand knot, his arms waving as if he were signaling aircraft.

Typical family chaos followed. Annie couldn’t find the little bag with all her earrings. Guy’s cell phone was ringing. Rose noticed that Annie’s school backpack was still exactly where it had been on Saturday; she hadn’t worked on her paper. Cami hugged me, telling me that she’d known we would love Finney. I got the rest of the Kosher-for-Passover Coke and gave it to Finney. He thanked me. Then Rose thanked me. Finney tried to decide if he wanted the Coke in the trunk or in the car with him. Then Guy and Annie thanked me. Finney thanked me again. Finally, Rose got them all into the car.

Dad put his arm around my shoulders as we watch the car pull away.

“That seemed like a success,” he said. “Your mother would have liked them.”

That was true. She would have been drawn to Guy in the way everyone was, and she would have approved of the way Rose was
bringing up her kids. But what would she have thought of Claudia? That’s what I wanted to know.

That was something I would have to get used to.

I stripped the sheets off Dad’s bed, put them in the washer, and tried to figure out what to do with the leftovers that had accumulated in the refrigerator. I opened my laptop and searched on my favorite Web sites, but found no useful advice about what to do with two-day-old grilled, corn-free hamburger patties.

I was kidding myself. I wasn’t online to do culinary research. I was there to check out Claudia’s Web site, to see if she had written up a description of the party. I typed in her URL and clicked on the link for the blog. The most recent post was from the Thursday before the party, in which she had warned her readers that she wouldn’t be posting until after the event.

I scrolled through some of the replies posted since Thursday. People were wishing her the best, saying that they were sure the party would be wonderful.

Maybe I should post:
Hey, folks, I was there, and it sucked. Everyone was late because she lives so far away from everything, and she tried to poison a very sweet little boy . . . but everything was beautiful, and she had gone to a tremendous amount of work, and everyone, except for me, seemed to have a good time.

I got up and switched the sheets from the washer to the dryer. I gathered up the towels from Zack’s bathroom and started those. My laptop was in the dining room. On my way to the kitchen, I hit the Refresh button, but it was still Thursday in Claudia’s Web site world. I threw out the hamburger patties and put the leftovers container in the dishwasher. I wrapped the buns and froze them so that I could
throw them out next month. The sheets wouldn’t be dry yet, so there was no point in going to the basement. I hit Refresh again.

And there it was, a new message, posted while I was throwing out leftovers.

She thanked everyone for their kind thoughts and was sure that their good wishes were behind the party’s great success. She said she was amazed at how satisfied she felt; creating an evening for others to enjoy could be as satisfying as completing a new dress from a pattern you’ve designed yourself. She went on about the guests, the “high-profile Washington journalists” and the “powerful K Street lawyers,” people she described as “our” friends.

Our?
How many of those people had she met before the night of the party? Only that one neighbor couple who had been seated at the losers’ table with me.

The final paragraph was marked with the conch shell she used whenever talking about her trademarked Managed Perfectionism. She acknowledged that one incident had happened that could have spoiled the evening. An appropriate meal was not prepared for a guest with severe allergies.

Don’t expend energy trying to assign blame,
she wrote.
Blaming doesn’t solve the problem. Nor does dwelling on the mistake, offering endless apologies. You’ll ruin the evening for everyone else. Give yourself ten minutes to fix things, but no more. Do the best you can and then send flowers in the morning.

Well, damn. That was good advice, sensible, practical, well expressed. I didn’t want Claudia to be sensible and practical. I wanted her to be shallow, superficial, and pretentious. I wanted to be able to dismiss her in the way she seemed to be dismissing me.

If she were dismissible, she wouldn’t be dangerous.

Travis Jackson, his school counselor, called me Wednesday afternoon. “He needs to visit a college by himself. Let him try to imagine himself being a student there.” He recommended that we have Zack drive himself up to Stone-Chase College, a small liberal-arts school about sixty miles north of D.C. Travis thought we should do this right away. He would set up the appointment at Stone-Chase and make arrangements with Zack’s teachers.

As close as it was, I had never heard of Stone-Chase College. It wasn’t a place that D.C. private-school families send their kids.

“It’s only a visit,” Travis said. “It’s a friendly place, and the campus is beautiful. He needs to start feeling more positive about the college experience.”

So Zack spent Friday up there. “How did you like it?” I said as soon as he came home that afternoon.

“It was okay,” he said.

Normally a comment like that from Zack came with a shrug, a physical disclaimer asserting the unimportance of whatever was being discussing.
Sure, it was okay, but what a stupid-ass thing to care about.
But this time he did not shrug.

“People weren’t totally stressed out like they were at those other places,” he continued. “They weren’t all full of themselves, either.”

This was extremely high praise.

We had been here before, when Zack, miserable at Selwyn, had visited Alden and its “kick-ass” light board. Alden had been right for Zack. I was very encouraged by his response to this Stone-Chase place.

“How competitive are the admissions?” I asked, a tactful way of finding out what his chances of getting in were.

“They’re cool,” he said. “They seem to be all about ignoring freshman grades if you can just show that you’ve gotten better. In fact, you’d think that they actually liked people who had shit to figure out. The lady I interviewed with said that there was no question about my getting in. It was just a question of how much money I’d get.”

“Money?” There was no way that Zack could qualify for financial aid. We hadn’t even picked up the forms.

“It’s merit money. They discount the tuition when they want somebody. And the more my SAT scores go up, the less Daddy will have to shell out.”

He said the word
Daddy
with fierce sarcasm. He wanted to thumb his nose at Mike. Right now he would have loved not to take any money from him at all.

“Dad doesn’t mind paying the tuition,” I said urgently and truthfully. “You shouldn’t pick a school because of the money. What do you like about the place?”

His answer was vague. He was done talking.

As soon as he left for his Friday-night prowls, I picked up the material he had brought home. All schools make themselves sound great in their brochures and catalogs. I couldn’t figure out what he found so appealing about Stone-Chase. Monday morning I called school and left a message for Travis Jackson.