Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (7 page)

Zack had not been looking forward to this photo session. He couldn’t see the point of it. Why should he have to get out of bed to go put on “used” clothes? Why did anyone need a picture of him anyway? But he was having a fine time and so were Cami and Jeremy.

When Jeremy was at Selwyn, our house had always been full of his friends. We had one of the “fun” houses. The kids knew that there would always be something to eat and that we weren’t going to fuss about mud on the carpet or a broken glass or two. The parents knew that Mike or I would be home and that we weren’t going to allow underage drinking.

But this morning Cami and my boys were having a good time at Claudia Postlewaite’s. She was the “fun mom” today. I didn’t like that. I wasn’t going to compete with her for Mike . . . but for my boys? She’d be well advised not to underestimate me in that
fight. She might be able to order a deli platter, but that was nothing compared to what I could slam out of even this small kitchen.

What kind of family has a second home with twelve bedrooms and goes places in a limousine?

I felt at a disadvantage. They were expecting to see their daughter for the first time in several months, and I had seemingly misplaced her.

I’d had this feeling so often as a kid, the feeling that I had done something wrong, something that I needed to apologize for, but I didn’t exactly know what it was. How many moments like this were there going to be between now and the wedding in June? How many times were the Zander-Browns going to have to consult etiquette books and make elaborate adjustments to the seating charts because Jeremy’s parents were divorced?

Had I been too impulsive? Should I have, as Mike had said, given the separation more time? Or, at the very minimum, stayed in the old house longer so that I could give Cami and Jeremy a party? Would all this be easier if I were still in my big house with a husband at my side? Had I torpedoed myself with my need to be doing something—anything—with my need to feel in control?

Well, there was nothing I could do about it now. My father joined me on the front porch. He was, as always, lean and dignified. I moved closer to him, glad that he was here.

“So what do we know about this family?” Dad had asked me when I picked him up at the airport yesterday.

I actually knew a fair amount. The Zander-Browns had three children. Cami’s sister, Annie, was sixteen, and their little brother, Finney, was eight. Jeremy talked mostly about Cami’s father. An extremely successful literary agent, Guy Zander-Brown was an outgoing, exuberant person. “You’ll love him, Mom,” Jeremy had said. “Everyone does.”

Cami spoke of her father with good-humored affection. Once, she was wearing a scarf so beautiful that even I noticed it. “Oh, it’s from my dad,” she had laughed. “He loves to buy presents, and the more expensive the better.”

I’d asked Jeremy about Cami’s mother. “I think she’s the one who keeps them all on track,” was all he’d said.

The rest of my information came from Mike, who had apparently googled them just as I had Claudia. The literary agency provided a comfortable living; their twelve-bedroom wealth was comparatively recent, coming largely from a few blockbuster clients and a shrewd, aggressive investment strategy that Guy had been pursuing for the last five or ten years. Mike had been interested in that. More interesting to me was a link he had sent me about Rose, Cami’s mother.

The link was to an article from the archives of a glossy women’s magazine. Written before their son, Finney, was born, it featured Rose and a seemingly perfect life. Beautiful herself, she had two exquisite daughters and a neat brownstone in Park Slope, a gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn full of artists and writers, filmmakers, doctors, and lawyers. Her days were full of children, friends, and books. She walked her daughters to school in
the morning and scooped them up at the playground in the afternoon. Monday mornings she had coffee with the other moms from the school; Friday afternoons they all walked their kids to the ice-cream parlor together. She and her two next-door neighbors had connected their back decks so that they could pop into each other’s kitchens without having to go through the long, narrow houses and up and down the front stoops. On Sunday nights she and Guy had drop-in pasta suppers, mingling neighbors, kids, dogs, and clients.

Yet she still had time to work, nestled into a big chair or sitting at her kitchen table, reading manuscripts, looking for the silvery potential in what everyone else had thrown aside. She could spot literary talent anywhere. She had persuaded the mom who wrote the co-op preschool newsletter to write a novel. Her Brooklyn neighborhood was full of people trying to write their first books. They all knew Rose and were eager to get her to read their work.

In the article, Guy had been open about how much the agency depended on her ability. “She has such an ear for individual voices, and she knows how to help authors reach their potential,” he was quoted as saying. “I only sell the manuscripts. Lots of people can do what I do. Not many can do what she does.”

I don’t know why magazines publish articles like this. Are other people’s perfect lives supposed to be inspiring? They just make me hate the person being profiled. Sure, you can have it all if you have healthy kids, a husband with a job, and a talent you can use while sitting at your kitchen table. I have a talent. I can get an IV into anyone. It’s a good skill, a useful one. I can save people’s lives with it, but I can’t make a living doing it from home.

I knew that Rose’s life had become slightly less perfect after Finney’s birth. Cami had told me that he had been born with a midgut malrotation that had required several surgeries. He also had a severe corn allergy and what she termed
cognitive challenges.
I
had asked Jeremy about those “cognitive challenges,” and he’d used the term
learning disability,
so I had assumed that this was a case of a high-achieving family needing to explain why one of their children had intellectual abilities that were only average. Private schools are full of families like that. God forbid that anyone should have an average child. The least variation from brilliance had to be explained as a learning disability.

I watched as the doors to the limousine opened. Rose emerged first. She was, I saw, slightly taller than me, and her build was much curvier than mine. She had auburn hair, which she had scooped up and clipped to the back of her head, one of those casual get-this-out-of-my-way styles that looks messy unless you have a really great haircut, and apparently she did. She was a very attractive woman, and she had probably been a lovely girl, but a bit of flesh had settled around her chin and jaw, giving her face a squarish look that kept it from beauty.

We shook hands, she first with me, then with my father. Her voice was pleasant, her gaze direct. She was wearing a traditionally cut white blouse, open at the throat, and the cuffs flipped back so that with her dark red hair spilling from its clips, she could have been an idealized portrait of a Scottish laundress, looking up from her washtub, her face flushed from the warmth of the water.

But her blouse was a heavy silk that moved with liquid smoothness. Her tweed slacks didn’t have a single wrinkle although she had been sitting for four or five hours. She was wearing the kind of shoes that I can never find, a low stacked heel, a thick, soft sole, but with enough detailing—bands of black suede inset with dark green leather—that the shoe seemed narrow and elegant. From the haircut to the shoes, this was serious money very well spent.

This wasn’t fair. People with money were supposed to be jerks. They were supposed to have scary face-lifts and fashion-victim
clothes. Then you could feel superior to them. But Rose Zander-Brown seemed to be doing it right. If I were willing to spend a month’s grocery bill on a pair of shoes, hers were exactly what I would buy.

Rose was beckoning to her son, encouraging him to come to her. Eight years old, he was small for his age, a little boy with light hair and the utterly perfect skin that only little boys have. He came forward to shake my hand with the earnestness of someone who has been carefully taught.

“Finney starts with an
F,
” he told me. His voice was thick, as if his tongue were a little too large for his mouth. “Phineas starts with a
P.
”

I noticed that he had a small fanny pack around his waist. “Is Phineas your real name?”

He nodded earnestly. “It starts with a
P.
”

“I’ll remember that.”

He nodded, then realized that he didn’t know what to say next. He looked back at his mother anxiously. She mouthed “thank you.”

He looked relieved. “Thank you.”

“You are so welcome,” I answered.

I shot a quick glance to my dad, and he nodded, agreeing with me.

I had misread the euphemisms. This boy did not have your garden-variety learning disabilities. He truly was cognitively challenged. He was developmentally disabled. He was, to use the most blunt term, retarded.

The Zander-Browns had not intended to mislead us. Cami had brought up the “cognitive challenges” almost immediately, and in an e-mail about his corn allergy, Rose had mentioned them again, noting that Cami had said she’d told us. It was my own Jeremy who had used the misleading “learning disabilities.”

And I, of course, had assumed that since these people had money, they must be jerks. I winced with guilt.

Rose touched Finney’s shoulder, pointing him in my father’s direction, apparently knowing enough about us to introduce Dad as “Dr. Bowersett.” Finney again shook hands with assiduous determination. Dad, his forty years as a pediatrician not wasted, asked the boy if he knew what letters were in his name. As an opening line, this was a big hit, and they chatted away about the alphabet. In a moment, Dad was patting his pockets, looking for pen and paper so he could show Finney that his name, “Douglas,” didn’t have any of the same letters as “Finney.”

I turned my attention to Cami’s sixteen-year-old sister.

Oh, my. Here was the pretty one. I’m not one for dwelling too much on what people look like, but this girl was exquisite. It was hard to stop looking at her. She was petite, no more than five-two or -three, with warmer coloring than Cami’s. Her hair was a perfect strawberry blond, and as she stepped out from the shadow of the oak tree, the sunlight shimmered against the rose-hued highlights in her hair. Despite her short stature, she was an ectomorph; her neck was willowy, her fingers were long, and, although her clothes hid them, I was sure that her femur and her humerus, the bones in her thigh and upper arm, would be elongated.

Unlike Cami, Annie Zander-Brown carried herself as if she knew exactly how lovely she was. Her head was back, her shoulders were open, and her gestures were expansive. She wanted people to look at her; she expected it.

Her clothes were dramatic as well. She was wearing a calf-length skirt and boots. The skirt was complicated with seams that ran around her body instead of up and down as on a normal person’s clothes. On top she had multiple layers, a little stretch something, another little stretch something in a different color and with
a different neckline, a sheer blouse with more stitching, some scarves and necklaces—too much for me to comprehend.

“What a cute house,” she exclaimed after greeting me. Her voice was light but without the squeaky little baby tones some pretty girls affect. “I love the porch swing . . . it must be so much fun to live here.” Then she turned to Rose. “Mom, Dad’s still on the phone.”

This was spoken with a slightly tattletale air.

From everything I had heard of his effusive personality, I would have expected Guy to be the first one out of the car, but he had not emerged yet. The limo’s front passenger door was open, and a man’s leg was out, with a foot on the ground. It was as if the leg’s owner were promising his family that he would be with them in a moment, and in the meantime they could look at his foot. The leg was in jeans, but the shoe was a leather loafer, with heavy stitching that looked seriously expensive.

“We make him sit in the front,” Annie explained, as if she were drawing me into a family secret, “so we don’t have to listen to him talk on his cell.”

She went back to the car, moving with a skipping, almost dancelike step, and rapped on her father’s leg as if she were knocking on a door. A second later the front door opened the rest of the way. Another leg joined the first one, and Guy Zander-Brown emerged from the car, slipping his phone into his pocket.

Over his jeans and expensive shoes, Guy Zander-Brown was in a blazer and an open-collared blue shirt. He was not at all tall, but he looked strong, mesomorphic with a muscular build. His salt-and-pepper hair was trimmed close.

“I’m sure my family has told you that this is the kind of rudeness you can always expect from me.” His gaze was direct, his handshake firm. “I wish I could tell you that they’re lying.”