Lauren Takes Leave (8 page)

Some people find this behavior of hers shallow and
aggressive. I find her self-absorption wholly refreshing.

In small doses.

I tune back in to her drama of the moment. “What was that?
Is this about
shoes
?” I ask.

“
Ugh!
Yes! Aren’t you even
listening
? I was
in
Palazzo
Shoes and I was just
trying
to return a pair of
Manolos
,
but the woman was giving me such a
hard
time,” she moans.

Jodi has a way of elongating words so that they sound,
well, naughty.

“But that’s not why I’m calling. Let’s meet for lunch. I
have something important to discuss. Oh, PTA call coming through.”

We agree to get together soon, and then she disconnects
midsentence.

Inside the house, the kids are glued to the television
set and Laney is nowhere to be found—again.

I actually panic for a moment: Did she leave early? Could
the kids have arrived home from school without her waiting there to open the
door? Child neglect! I think of the court case I’ve been assigned to.

I will have to prosecute Laney.

But then I will be prosecuted for hiring an illegal. No
good.

I know she didn’t arrive until after the morning rush,
because I had to put the kids on the bus. Then she gave me some attitude and
disappeared into the depths of the house. And after that? My mind flashes to a
terrible scene: Laney lying dead somewhere, our immigrant babysitter, with no
identification except her Planet Fitness membership. How would I describe her
to the police? As a beautiful, twenty-two-year-old Latina who chose to tramp
herself up with long blond Shakira hair and really tight stretch jeans? A man
in blue would come to my door with just a diamond belly stud in his palm, and I
would burst into tears.

“Laney!” I shout. “Donde esta?”

She emerges from the basement slowly, with her head down.
I can tell instantly that she’s in one of her black moods, but I don’t care.
She’s not dead! My children were not neglected, exactly. I practically hug her.

“Hola,” she mopes.

“Hola!”

Laney sighs. “There is so much laundry.”

“Yes!”

“I just couldn’t…” She gestures toward the kitchen. I turn
and see that nothing—and I mean
nothing
—has changed in the kitchen since
I left the house at 8:00 this morning. Some dishes are piled in the sink and
some are holding firm at the spots on the island where the kids ate half their
breakfast. It’s like a ghost-town kitchen, or something dug up from Pompeii,
abandoned yet completely intact. It’s an art installment at the Whitney:
Still
Life with Sour Milk
.

“What the—?” I crush an enormous ant underfoot for
emphasis.

“I just couldn’t…” She trails off. Because really, what is
there to say? We both know that she hasn’t cared about her job for a long time.

We stand in silence for a moment, evaluating the tangled
mess of the kitchen and the inertia in our respective lives.

Then I remember Laney’s text from earlier in the day,
which I never responded to. She perks up considerably when I tell her that,
yes, she can leave a half hour early tonight to catch a train into the city for
a concert at Madison Square Garden.

She consults her watch. “So, I go in…twenty-seven
minutes?”

“Sure, Laney. Knock yourself out.” She does mental
calculations. That gives her roughly seven minutes to clean the kitchen and
twenty minutes to style her hair—no doubt with
my
ceramic straightening
iron.

“Okay!” she decides, clapping her hands together like,
now
I’m really going to get down to work
!

When Laney calls out her good-byes a few minutes later and
the screen door slams behind a trail of spicy perfume, I breathe a sigh of
relief.

My house, my kids, my little world. “Ben and Becca! Time
for dinner!” I sing, imagining the nice family conversation we will have
huddled around the table.

“Ow!” Ben cries from the sunroom.

“Give it back!” Becca wails.

“No! It’s mine!”

There is a crashing sound. I reach the sunroom in time to
tear my kids apart, yelling something asinine like, “Stop it this instant! One
of you could lose an eye!”

When that doesn’t get them to lay off each other, I reach
deep into my bag of mom tricks for more powerful weapons. “No television for
the rest of the night! No dessert! No stories before bed?”

Not working. Ben is now kicking Becca and she is pulling
his hair.

I throw a biggie at them. “If you don’t get off each other
right now,
Jackie won’t come to babysit this week!”

Instantly, they jump apart. Becca smooths her hair back
from her face, and Ben sucks his lips in tight. Both are straight-backed and at
army-like attention, with their big eyes on me.

My kids love Jackie more than they’ll ever love me. She’s
an education major at a local college who is so popular with neighborhood kids
that I have to book her sometimes months in advance. If she didn’t come to
sleep over on Thursday night, they’d be devastated.

“Now, that’s more like it,” I sigh. “Come have dinner.”

“What is it?” Ben asks.

“Mac and cheese and chicken nuggets.”

“Again?” they complain in unison.

“Laney was supposed to make meatloaf, but she didn’t. Sorry.”

“You could make something else,” Becca suggests, “like a
call for sushi.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” I muse.

The kids are tucked into their beds and I am nursing a
headache. I can hear Doug in the shower when I come up from the basement,
having just folded the laundry that Laney left in the dryer.

I go into the bathroom and knock on the glass wall. “Hi!”
I call out.

He wipes away some condensation so that I can sort of see
him in there. He waves.

“How was your day?” I ask.

“Whah?” he answers over the running water.

I try again, louder. “How was…nothing,” I say. “Forget
it.” I already know the answer.

I turn to the bedroom door handle where I have hung the
dry cleaning, and begin removing it from its plastic wrap. I open the closet
and push aside my cheerleading uniform from high school. Laney borrowed it for
a costume party and actually returned it. Surprise.

Doug opens the shower door. “Hey, Lauren? Where’d you go?”

“I’m here,” I call from the bedroom.

“Is that a new pocketbook I saw downstairs?”

“Not new!” I yell. Technically, this is true. Sophie said
it had been used once for a Chloe ad.

After a moment’s pause, Doug says, “Really? Because I
haven’t seen it before.”

“That doesn’t make it new.”

“The blue one?”

“Right.”

“Huh.”

“Also,” I say, “if I may point out, I am working hard. I
know that my paycheck is needed for real stuff, like our electricity, for
instance. But sometimes it’s nice to…break out a little bit. Splurge on
something. To make me feel…”

“Can you hand me a new razor?” Doug interrupts.

I go into the hall closet and come back, still talking.
“Just to make me feel…special.” I pass the razor through the mist. He closes
the door behind him and we go back to raised voices.

“Lauren, those ‘special’ items are things like college
funds and 401Ks! Not Gucci bags.”

“Chloe,” I correct.

“Who’s she?”

“Nobody new, that’s for sure.” I’ll have to bury the new
Chloe dustcover that the bag came with in the back of my underwear drawer. No
need to invite further suspicion.

I’ve tried to talk to Doug about my feelings, really I
have. It’s not like I want to lie. I’d love to be able to come home and say,
Look
at my gorgeous new pocketbook! Don’t you just love it?
And he’d sigh and
say,
It’s just what you’ve always wanted. I’m so happy for you.
But
anyone with a husband knows that that’s about as realistic as a Disney princess
movie. And so, the big purchases get hidden. They come into the house when he’s
not home, the shopping bags magically disappear, and then the items get
seamlessly added into the rotation as if they were there all along.

It doesn’t matter if the conversation is about shopping,
or about traveling, or, most recently, about feeling these urges to party like
it’s 1999. He always shuts me down.
We don’t have money. We don’t have time.
Can we talk about this later? When I’m not exhausted from work?

I finish hanging the dry cleaning and raise my voice over the
shower. “I’m going downstairs to watch TV. You coming?”

“In a few. I have to return a call from my client at Bank
of America first.”

“Okay.”

“What’s for dinner?” Doug shouts, as an afterthought.

“Nothing!” I say. Since returning to work when Becca
turned two, I have sucked at making dinner, and Laney has not been a great
help. Why is preparing dinner nightly
my
job? Why are all the things I
did when not working—like scheduling doctors’ appointments, getting presents
for birthday parties, going to the supermarket and dry cleaner’s—still
my
job exclusively now that I work full-time again, just like Doug? Sometimes I
wonder who put me in charge.

And then I wonder what would happen if I just decided one
day
not
to be.

I roll down the window of my car and pull up to the
security booth at the courthouse parking lot. As instructed, the special juror
permit is on my windshield, and I motion to it while saying good morning to the
guard. He barely looks up from his newspaper as he waves me through. “Thanks!”
I call. “Have a nice day!”

Making my way up to the main entrance, I’m feeling rather
cheerful indeed. My first day as a juror! I have purchased a new notepad for
the occasion, as suggested by the bailiff yesterday, to jot down any technical
notes from the case that I might need to recall during deliberation. While
waiting in line at the metal detector, I sip my coffee and imagine the jury
deadlocked. Flipping through my notebook, I will find the one loophole to knock
the whole case wide open. Juror number four saves the day!

Law & Order
has messed with my head.

I enter the juror waiting room attached to our courtroom
on the fifth floor. “Morning,” I say to the group.

“That it is, doll,” Sweetheart says. No one looks up.
Carrie gives a little wave, but her eyes are glued to her BlackBerry.

“You smuggled yours in, too?” I ask. She nods faintly in
reply, not looking up from her screen.

It was a risky move, but I really wanted to listen to a
new mix I made off of iTunes, so I hid my phone deep in my pocketbook and told
the security guard that I didn’t have my phone on me.

I thought I was being such a rebel. Apparently, I was only
following the herd.

No one’s chatty this morning, so I take out my iPhone and
pretend to be busy. Something catches my eye as the incoming e-mails unroll
down the screen. There’s a message from “lkatzenberg.” Lenny. I scroll back
through the uploading messages to find it, but just then a bailiff enters and
clears her throat. I drop the phone into my pocketbook.

“Hello, jurors, my name is Delilah and I am the bailiff
assigned to this case.” Delilah is such a feminine name for this woman standing
before me, with no makeup on her cocoa skin and her black hair pulled back
tightly into a bun. Women in uniforms always look like men to me, even if they
are wide hipped and big bosomed like Delilah. She fingers the gun in her
holster and I snap back to attention.

“The judge and the lawyers for the case are in chambers
right now, preparing for the start of the trial. Until the judge tells me to
call you in, you will stay here. In this room, you may eat, you may talk to
each other, and”—she looks my way—“you may use your cell phones, as long as the
other jurors don’t mind.” She then tells us how to find the bathrooms on the
floor and warns us to be prepared to wait for a while. “Could be up to an hour,
give or take, depending.” She shrugs before leaving the room.

“Depending on what?” Sweetheart asks after she’s gone.
“That doesn’t make no sense!”

“Any,” Carrie says emphatically. “Doesn’t make
any
sense.”

“Exactly.” He nods in agreement and smiles at her. Carrie
returns the smile hesitantly. Then she looks my way and rolls her eyes.

One older woman takes out some Sudoku puzzles and another
one picks up the novel she’s been reading. A young guy gets up to stretch and
tells us that he’ll be on a call in the hallway. “Come get me if the judge
needs us, okay?” I remember him from yesterday, the guy with a new job. Poor
thing. He thinks work matters.

Then I remember the e-mail. Leonard. I can’t remember our
last exchange, exactly, except that I had the feeling I’d somehow pissed him
off. In the midst of all the junk e-mails from department stores, I find his
note.

Subject: New Video

From: [email protected]

Date: April 10

To: [email protected]

Hey All,

I have posted my new video on YouTube. Please take a look,
and share the link if you like it. (If not, forget I ever mentioned it.)

MC Lenny

I’m a little bit disappointed that this isn’t a personal
message, a shout out or joke just for me. But the video intrigues me, as
always. I plug my headphones into the phone and click on the link, which takes
a moment or two to load.

Leonard is a friend from high school with whom I
reconnected last year at our twentieth reunion. The regular rules of high
school were suspended for him. While I was stuck in my B-plus crowd of
above-average-but-not-quite-awesome people, Lenny was allowed to move effortlessly
between cliques, from the cool varsity basketball team to the hip jazz band,
from the geeky honors society to the even geekier Stock Market Club, and back
again. No questions asked.