The First Wives Club (10 page)

“Sold another table!” she sang out to Brenda. The AIDS benefit, a relatively new charity, had been stuck with a tough date—the second Friday in June. Everyone left town in June, and tables were a little difficult to unload. But Brenda had done her part and impressed Annie, who’d gotten Elise to help, and in the end Brenda had done well. Not as well as Lally, though, who had the goods on eveyone.

“You’ll never guess who bought a whole table,” Lally cooed to Annie.

“Aaron.

Isn’t that lovely of him?”

Annie looked stunned, but only for a minute. Brenda knew she had asked Aaron herself, but he’d said he’d be away, though his partner, Jerry, had bought two seats. Brenda watched as Annie recovered, looked at Lally, and smiled.

“Aaron always supports worthy causes.”

“Yes,” Lally agreed. “He seems very into psychology right now.” She smiled, turned, and waltzed away.

What the fuck was that supposed to mean? Brenda wondered. She looked over at Annie, first so happy, now upset. “What’s with you, Annie? Is it Sylvie? Do you want me to come with you tomorrow?”

Annie sighed. “No. No, we’ll be fine.”

Was it Aaron, Brenda wondered, going to the benefit? “You know, if you don’t want to go to the AIDS thing, you don’t have to.”

“Oh, no. Chris is taking me. He’s bought his first tux and he’d be disappointed not to go.”

Brenda tried another tack. “How was Alex’s graduation? You haven’t told me anything about it. Who was there?” Brenda noticed Annie tighten up just a bit.

Getting warmer.

“Just the family—you know, Chris and Alex, the grandparents, and Aaron, of course.”’ Annie’s eyes didn’t meet Brenda’s.

“And?”’ Brenda said.

“And what? That’s it. We all went out to dinner together and had a perfectly nice time. Alex was delighted.”

Brenda was relentless. The trail was getting hotter. “And after dinner?”

“Brenda, now really, you’re such a snoop,” Annie said, but she had a guilty smile on that good-girl face of hers. “Let’s just go to lunch.

” Bingo! Brenda turned to Annie and looked at her, suddenly understanding. “You fucked him, didn’t you?”

Annie eyed Brenda with a look of shock. ‘Brenda! I did not!” she said, but she blushed.

“Oh, yes, you did! You fucked him!”

Annie shrugged, giving up her pretense. “I prefer to say we made love.” She shook her head, dropping her haughty pose. “It was after the graduation party. Oh, things went so well, Brenda. It was so good to be with him again.”

Brenda winced, disturbed, but she saw Annie didn’t notice. For a moment she wished she hadn’t pried this information out of her friend.

As far as Brenda was concerned, it was not good news.

“So what does this mean, Annie? Has Aaron changed his mind since the divorce?”

Annie’s face froze. “Well, we haven’t talked since then.” Brenda nodded slightly, but Annie quickly went on before her friend could speak. ‘He had to go to New Hampshire on business. Right after the graduation.”

“Did he call yet?”

“No,” Annie admitted, “but it’s only been two days. I think he’s still out of town.”

“They have phones in New Hampshire.”

Neither of them mentioned Lally Snow or the table Aaron had bought for the benefit. Obviously the bastard hadn’t invited Annie. Brenda busied herself for a moment, applying lipstick. Then she turned and looked directly at her friend.

“You were used, Annie,” Brenda said, as gently as such harsh words could be spoken. “He had the warm and friendlies from the graduation.

Just one for old times’ sake. He’s used you again.”

Annie picked up her towel, patted the moisture from her forehead, and crammed the towel into her gym bag. Brenda saw that her eyes looked frightened. ‘He’ll call, Brenda. I know he will.”

”Oh, yeah. Expect fair treatment. What a laugh. Like Morty treated me fair.

An amicable divorce. What an oxymoron. Well, I guess I’m the oxymoron.” She sat down heavily on the bench beside the locker and told Annie about the stock, about how stupid she’d been, about how Morty had robbed her.

“Oh, Brenda! I’m so sorry. But you have to do something. You have to sue.”

”Yeah? With what? Lawyers cost money.” Brenda paused. She couldn’t tell Annie about her father, about all that. “I’m afraid of the courts. Morty knows it.”

“Brenda, you can’t let him take advantage of that. I’ll lend you money. Or we can find a lawyer who will work on contingency.”

”You think so?”

“Yes, because you have to do something, Brenda. This is dreadful.”

Brenda was surprised and touched to see tears fill Annie’s eyes. What a good friend. But boy, she was taking this hard.

Then Annie sat down on the bench beside her. She reached into her purse and pulled out a note.

“Brenda, I want you to read this,” Annie said, handing her Cynthia’s letter.

Brenda’s brow furrowed as she unfolded the pale notepaper, began to read it, then searched for a signature. “It’s from Cynthia,” Annie told her.

“But Cynthia’s dead!”

”She wrote it just before she died.”

Brenda read it through again, slowly shaking her head.

“A suicide note?”

“Oh, Brenda, it’s more than that. It’s about us all.”

Upset Upstate It was only a few minutes past seven A.M. and Annie was already exhausted.

After Cynthia’s suicide, the weekend in Boston with Aaron, and Sylvie’s tearful good-bye to Chris yesterday, this day would surely be the roughest to get through yet.

She had already packed all of Sylvie’s necessities—plus lots of things that weren’t—and arranged for the porter to take down the baggage.

She put a bag of buttered rolls and fruit out, ready for the trip. She called the garage to be sure that Hudson and the car would be downstairs at eight. She no longer kept a driver, but Hudson had been one of those limo owners who catered to a few of “his ladies.”

Discreet and courteous, he had ferried Annie to Saks, Mortimer’s, Kenneth’s, and other exclusive daytime destinations. But this trip was different.

Annie had wanted to savor this time before she had to disturb Sylvie.

It was impossible, of course, she knew that already. Yet she shrank from waking her, and so she sat in the comfortable kitchen, taking in the last few moments of having her daughter in the house. Everything normal, for the last time.

When she looked back, Annie could clearly see that her life was divided into two parts, the twenty-seven years before Sylvie was born, and the sixteen years after. Real demarcations weren’t the shallow events-graduations, parties, relocations—but the bone-deep markings of birth, death, love, loss. And those only if they marked you forever.

Alex’s and Chris’s births had been wonderful, miraculous, of course, but they occurred during that long period when Annie was in the dream of her life, not her life itself. With Sylvie’s birth, Annie woke up.

Sylvie was a problem that prayers or patience or time would not heal.

And in the fire storm of rage, and pain and blame and guilt, Annie woke up—and finally grew up. She wished she’d done it years earlier.

Except in growing up, she’d left a husband and a son behind.

She worried about Alex sometimes, her beautiful, gifted golden son.

Did he really want to study medicine? She sighed. Most mothers would be grateful for a boy who was drug free, dean’s list, and about to go to med school. But Annie worried that he might be in that obscuring fog of ambition and social pressure that she had once lived in.

And Chris—she wondered, would he be all right? He was the middle child, the problem-free sunny one, but hadn’t Aaron always favored Alex and hadn’t she become immersed with Sylvie? Chris had dropped out of Princeton and was working with his father at the ad agency. Was it just his way of getting Aaron’s attention at last? Chris was working hard, and Alex was working hard, and both seemed headed for success.

But did they know joy? Were they really okay? Because the rest just didn’t matter.

And it was Sylvie who had made her see all this. Sylvie, without trying, had juggled Annie’s values, thrown the givens out the window.

It wasn’t what you earned, how you looked, what you achieved, whom you knew, how much you had. It wasn’t even how smart you were. Those were not important. Every precept Annie had been carefully taught, every value she had swallowed, they all amounted to nothing. Catholicism.

Being nice. Staying attractive. Ignoring the unpleasant.

Denial. Wrong, wrong. All wrong. But once you realized all this, once these precepts were abandoned, the world sometimes became a painfully ridiculous place.

Annie looked out the kitchen window, over the East River, watching the sunrise this last morning with Sylvie at home as it spread a blush across the man-made landscape below. “The earth is the Lord’s, and the illness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein,” she murmured.

She was no longer religious, having left the Catholic Church years ago, but she felt the truth and beauty of some of the psalms, and they comforted her. Today she needed comfort.

Today Sylvie will leave me, she thought. Even before Cynthia’s funeral, Annie had cried, secretly, most nights that previous week.

She had to do it privately. Sylvie became so very upset when Annie cried.

Annie, of course, had known the separation would be hard for Sylvie.

But Annie also knew that Sylvie lived in the moment, and if her moments away were filled with sunshine, a pet, good food, and some friends, Sylvie would be all right.

But what about me? Aaron thinks I’m doing this for me, but he’s so wrong. This is my gift to her, Annie thought. And it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

She wiped her eyes again, then took a shuddering breath. Maybe this is the start of the third period in my life, life without Sylvie.

Maybe it would also be a new start for Sylvie. She needs this school, despite what Aaron and Alex say. Annie had seen what was happening to her. Day by day, week by week, year by year, surrounded by others who were smarter, faster, quicker, Sylvie had grown more and more frustrated, more and more alone. Annie saw that she hadn’t given her daughter what she needed, just as her own mother hadn’t given Annie her birthright.

But unlike her own mother, Annie wouldn’t run from the problem. She was fighting for Sylvie. She’d researched the schools and sheltered communities out there and found Sylvan Glades. Though it would cost her everything to give up her little girl to strangers, she knew she had to do it. And Chris, bless his heart, had seen Sylvie’s need and agreed.

The irony was that for years Aaron had accused her of being too close to Sylvie, of being too protective, of “spoiling” her. He had tried to present the issue as his selfless concern, but Annie knew it was otherwise. I don’t think he could love anything, anyone, so imperfect.

He’s just like that, Annie thought. Having a child with Down’s syndrome had not fit in with Aaron’s image of himself. It had hurt him, somewhere deep, deep inside, and as time passed and Sylvie grew, it became harder, not easier for him. She wasn’t as cute at ten as she had been at six, and at thirteen she wasn’t cute at all. To him she was simply imperfect.

And much else became imperfect as well. Certainly, after Sylvie, things between them had changed. It had been a difficult birth, Annie had healed slowly and had then been depressed. And Aaron had not been good at comforting her. Thrown against adversity, he ran from it. He wanted her to “get over it.”

At last, when their intimacy resumed, she had not achieved orgasm.

Ever. From then till now.

Aaron had tried, at first, to be patient. She’d had minor surgery, started therapy, had been prescribed tranquilizers. For a long time they had simply lived with it. But by now Annie, too, in his eyes was imperfect. It was too much for him. Aaron had read about Dr. Leslie osen, the sex specialist, and finally insisted that Annie consult with her.

To be sure, Dr. Rosen had helped her tear away many of the veils that had hidden the truths of her life. Dr. Rosen helped Annie see how poorly she had been mothered, how sad, how angry, she was. Annie had even brought Aaron to her. Then Dr. Rosen helped Annie see the problems in her marriage. She helped her decide to find a school for Sylvie. Then Aaron had left, and the doctor had terminated therapy when Annie refused to give up on her marriage. And now, now with all this happening, Annie felt abandoned by Dr. Rosen, dropped just when she needed support the most. “You’re still in a dreamworld. You refuse to see reality,” Dr. Rosen had said. “There is nothing more I can do.”

Annie felt dizzy again. She would just have to take this day slowly.

She thought of calling Brenda. Brenda had offered to come with her to take Sylvie to school, but Annie had declined. She wanted all the time alone with Sylvie that she could get. Now, however, she realized she needed to talk to someone.

She looked at her watch and realized it was only a quarter after seven.

She couldn’t call, Brenda would kill her. After all, no one had died, she thought to herself dryly. I just feel as if I might, she thought.

Well, I can survive without the call. I’ve done most of this alone up till now. Surely I can get through this, too.

She walked down the hallway to Sylvie’s room. It was almost empty of Sylvie’s treasures. Only Pangor, the Siamese cat, and Sylvie herself waited to be readied for the trip. Quietly, Annie opened the curtains and turned to look at her sleeping child. Sylvie’s white-gold curls lay across the pillow, her face relaxed in sleep. She had the distorted eye structure that had once labeled such children ‘mongoloids,” but in sleep she looked younger and the blankness that was so telling when she was awake was more appropriate.

“Sylvie.” Annie touched her shoulder gently. So far as she knew, Sylvie had only been touched with gentleness and love her whole life, just like Pangor, their cat. And like Pangor, Sylvie stretched, arched, and rolled onto her back. She opened her arms to her mother.

As Annie hugged her, she hoped that Sylvie would always be protected so that she could stay open and loving.

“Hi, Mom-Pom.” Sylvie’s speech was slightly slurred, but easily understandable if anyone tried. Many didn’t.