The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (17 page)

Hicks is all ears.

“She and I weren’t the type to write little poems about our every feeling, you know. Like I have to tell you that we are—were—very different.”

“Keep going.”

“My point is, I can’t say I’d have blamed her if she played around.”

“Uh-huh,” Hicks urges—too obviously, it seems to me. As if Lucy needs encouragement.

“She was too damn trusting. If you ask me, to a fault.”
Which no one would accuse me of
, Lucy thinks. “Molly was the big-city girl, but she could be alarmingly dense.”

Hey. Rewind. I always had to take care of
you
. Did you forget?

“Oh well, I’m talking out of my ass,” she admits. “Probably wasting your time.” Lucy turns the key in the ignition. “If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m not the crown jewel of the Divine tiara,” she says. “Molly is my mom’s clone, and my dad idolizes my mother. End of story. But, God damn it, I did love my sister. I loved her.” I wait for Lucy to cry. Not today. I may as well wait for the Pope to get married.

No one speaks for several blocks. As they turn into the drive, Hicks says, “I’ll need the names of the friends you were going to meet that day to snowboard.”

Lucy twitches ever so slightly. “Of course,” she says. Ten minutes later, after goodbyes all around, she’s on the road.

Hicks is not so lucky. His driver, once again, gets lost. By the time the man arrives, the wind is whipping snow into a tango and his return flight has been cancelled along with every other airplane flying east.

“I won’t hear of a hotel,” my mother says.

Which is how Detective Hiawatha Hicks came to spend the night under a faded lavender duvet in the twin bed that was mine, his head on my down pillow. Drifting into sleep, his last thought is of Lucy. He dreams of his first-grade teacher, who placed him in the slow group and was convinced he might never learn to read.

even months after Annabel was born, I was four pounds over my pre-pregnancy weight, which had been only five pounds over my lifelong goal, a number I glimpsed once on the scale fifteen years ago after a camping trip where the nightly entrée was—I’m fairly certain—squirrels. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t mind what I saw. My hips were a tad wider, my belly even less flat than before, but my breasts appeared no worse for having nursed—I was glad I’d invested in two hundred dollars’ worth of bras engineered by the likes of NASA.

“Guess who’s paying me a visit?” I said to Brie one morning when she’d called en route to a trial.

I hated that on the first beat she answered, “Luke,” and laughed. “Why?”

“Because he’s an old friend,” I said as I patted a mask over my face. It smelled of apricots and vanilla and promised to make each pore invisible.

“Right,” she said, the way that means “I’m not buying it.”

“Luke’s sweet. He sent Annabel the most exquisite antique rocking chair.” It was two feet tall, with original paint the pale yellow of sweet
butter. It awaited my daughter like a throne. I could picture her when she was older, reading as she quietly rocked, identifying with Cinderella, lusting after glass slippers, and starting to plan her wedding.

“And I assume you wrote a lovely thank-you,” Brie said. She knew I believed the ghost of Emily Post would stomp on my head if within a week of receiving a gift a sincere, original acknowledgment was not in the mail.

“Of course.”

“You’ve fulfilled your social obligation. Why are you letting him come over?”

“He wants to see the baby, not me.” Even I didn’t believe me.

“You know how I feel. It’s a mistake to let him near you.”

“You’re not giving me credit,” I said, feigning indignation.

“Call me a realist,” Brie said lightly. “Luke’s always been crazy about you, and you’re a little bit lonely and misunderstood.” She hummed something that sounded like a dirge.

“Hey, everything’s good here,” I protested. Despite the fact that Barry was working exceptionally long hours, she knew I felt we were once again on terra firma. No missile launchings. No “promises” bouncing off walls.

“I’ll shut up—you’re a grown-up,” she said, to my relief. “Give him a big, sloppy kiss for me.”

“Highly unlikely,” I said with my goodbye.

Luke was due in ten minutes. I washed my face. My pores stared back at me, still good-sized pixels. I dabbed on the tiniest bit of makeup and thanked God for inventing black boot-cut jeans. Annabel, all sixteen pounds of powdery innocence, was sleeping in her cool, darkened room. I’d put her down an hour earlier, and if I knew my daughter, she’d wake up merrily right after Luke and I ate lunch. On the kitchen counter, our meal waited—richly gold curried chicken salad, heirloom tomatoes layered with buffalo mozzarella and basil, a few small sourdough rolls, and one formidable fudge brownie, takeout artfully arranged on my second-best dishes. White wine was chilling along with a pitcher of iced green tea garnished with cucumber slices. I wanted Luke to think I’d made an effort, but not too much.

There’s no reason to be nervous
, I told myself.
Whatever you once felt for
Luke is an aberration, buried under layers of life
. Good, solid, fortunate life. I thought of my father’s credo:
Make mistakes—just don’t keep making the same goddamn ones
. There was no reason that philosophy couldn’t apply now, except that a more cynical brain worm was wiggling for attention:
If you get to live your life over, make the same mistakes, only sooner
.

I fluffed the living room pillows and rearranged the roses. That still left a few minutes to mindlessly scan the arts section of the
Times
before the doorman called to announce that Mr. Delaney had arrived. On the way to the door I checked my reflection. The woman I saw was trying. I hoped only I noticed this.

“For you,” Luke said, offering a large bouquet of deep purple anemones, an ear-to-ear grin, and the graze of lips on my cheek. I liked that he didn’t wear cologne. He didn’t need it. “And for the other lady …” From a large shopping bag he pulled out a package wrapped in pale pink paper, tied with a floppy orange silk bow.

I placed the gift on the coffee table. “The other lady needs to finish her nap or she will make a very bad impression,” I said as I hung Luke’s size forty-four long Burberry next to Barry’s forty regular.

Luke’s hair was shaggier than I remembered, and I had an impulse to brush it away from his eyes. Perhaps he’d lost weight—his cheekbones punctuated his face like parentheses. He was wearing a V-neck sweater the color of wisteria, which on most men would have been a questionable choice. On Luke it deepened the blue of his eyes.

“I’m glad to see your home hasn’t become a toy showroom,” he said in a sly, familiar tone. “My brother and sister-in-law apparently hold a major stake in Fisher-Price.”

Since I’d stuffed the rest of her possessions in closets, only one basket of Annabel’s most presentable playthings was in sight. “Come back in another year and then you can judge me,” I said. Annabel had already acquired an obscene number of gaudy plastic contraptions that did everything but burp, and her drawers overflowed with clothes, half of which she’d outgrown before wearing. I was embarrassed by how the Marx family was single-handedly bolstering the gross national product, but was unable to say “Enough,” especially to Kitty, my parents, Lucy, or Brie.

“She looks like you,” Luke said, picking up a photograph of Barry and me in our Sunday-cozy robes. We were hugging a freshly scrubbed, two-month-old Annabel.

“Especially if you can picture me buck naked.” The minute those words slipped out they seemed 200 percent too intimate.

Luke followed me into the kitchen, where I put the flowers in a vase. A few minutes later we sat down to lunch. He gave me an update on his recent shoots—Santa Fe, Prague, Sydney—and the studio he’d bought in Dumbo with a partner, Simon someone. I waxed proud about what a great sleeper Annabel was, how I’d discovered at least ten new cable television channels, and why I’d decided, after considerable debate, to stop making my own organic baby food.

“This stay-home-mommy stuff—do you love it?” he asked about twenty minutes into lunch. I did an instant replay to search for condescension. You never can predict on which side of the fence men your own age will stand regarding whether a mother belongs at home. Even ardent, high-toned, prochoice, antiwar, carbon-footprint-shrinking recyclers sometimes shock you silly with polemics about why a mother needs to make every peanut butter sandwich until kids become postdocs—especially when the mom in question is his wife. Whatever their own mother did was wrong, you invariably discover, and lots of these guys are the sons of fervent seventies feminists.

Nonetheless, my derision meter failed to buzz.

“You’re the first person who’s had the nerve to ask me that question,” I answered, to stall. In fact, I’d originally planned to return to work, but a month after Annabel arrived, my boss was replaced by a new editor in chief whose reputation preceded her like a rogue tidal wave of entitlement. The two of us had one short meeting as my maternity leave was due to end. With an expression straddling shock and boredom, she quietly flipped through a portfolio featuring my last three years’ worth of decorating stories. Two days later, the head of human resources called to say my boss was “going in another direction”—and I wasn’t on her map.

Since I was twenty-two years old, I’d always had a job. Isolation terrified me. Even after all these months, I still couldn’t picture life at home full-time. At a feverish pace, I’d put out feelers for a new position, but every job I heard about had such an insignificant decorating
department that I’d be spending half my time ordering bubble wrap and the remainder packing and unpacking boxes the size of refrigerators. My ideal job would have been part-time, but when I raised that flag, interviewers all but shouted, “Next!” I suspected that each editor who interviewed me thought that, as a new mom, I’d be taking off every other day for this or that baby-related emergency.

“I love being with Annabel,” I finally said with what I hoped was conviction, because it was gut-honest true.

“Something tells me there’s more to the story,” Luke said as he began to sip his second glass of wine. “My brother’s wife tells me she can’t figure out how one small body can manufacture so much poop.”

“What gets me is the competition,” I said tentatively. It wasn’t just the running tab of which mommy had slimmed down to thinner than before she was pregnant or which child crawled faster, farther, and earlier. People kept score in ways I never would have imagined. Any mother who owned fewer than three strollers—an umbrella model for zipping in and out of taxis, a three-wheeled jogger for all the running she may or may not do, and, for everyday cruising, a heavy-duty Bugaboo Frog, which costs more than most people’s first used car—was treated as if she were on food stamps. “I feel as if the rules for being a mother in this town are written in secret code and no one’s given me the manual.”

I read the expression on Luke’s face as sympathetic and kept going. “All the other moms apparently got up at five one day and stood in line in a sleet storm to grab a spot in a
pre
-preschool swim class at the local Jewish community center. I tried to enroll Annabel the next week, but the class was sold out. When I expressed surprise to the woman at the desk, she looked as me as if I’d just wandered over the Mexican border.”

“Ooh, nasty,” he said, chuckling. “You don’t get this in the e-mails. Let’s hear more.”

I rose to his challenge. “Okay. Nursery school. Really on-the-ball martyr-mommies are already discussing where to apply, and these are babies who can’t even sit yet.” Luke might have thought I was exaggerating for comic effect. I was not. “While they’re mopping up drool, they’re dissecting the schools’ differences as if they were Harvard and Yale”—my voice sounded like I’d gulped helium—“which they may as
well be, because I’ve been assured that if Annabel doesn’t go to one of the ‘right’ schools, she can kiss her Ivy League dreams goodbye.” As if fantasies of rowing crew on the Charles were what was making her sleeping eyelids flutter whenever I peered into her crib. “Not that I haven’t started to get sucked into stuff myself,” I admitted. In a few months, my daughter and I were slated to begin Magic Maestros, where we’d be entertained by live musicians who, for all I knew, might be off-duty violinists from the Philharmonic.

“So go back to work,” Luke said after I ranted for ten minutes. “Or does Dr. Marx disapprove?” His tone had crossed into snide.

“Barry’s okay with whatever I do,” I told Luke, sounding as defensive as I felt. “But where, exactly, would I work?”

He idly ran his fingers around the rim of his wineglass. “How about with me?”

I imagined those fingers on my leg—and elsewhere—and shook my head to erase the image.

“Hey, why are you saying no without hearing more?” he said. I was fairly certain I detected disappointment.

“I’m not saying no. I’m not saying anything, because what exactly are you proposing?”

“Nothing full-time. But the jobs are really coming in now,” he said, knocking the wood table twice, “and I could give you a lot of regular styling. I’ve been using lame freelancer after lame freelancer, and either these girls and boys won’t get off their lazy rears or they have zero imagination. When they’re good, they get booked up by my competitors or raise their rates to prices I can’t afford.”