Eliza Starts a Rumor

by Jane L. Rosen

  Growing up in New York City, Olivia had felt as if the boys were everywhere that she was. One smile, and there was never one who didn’t ask for her number, who didn’t call, who didn’t call again—but more importantly, never one who she cared enough for to call back. The attention overwhelmed her, so much so that when it came time to go to college, she only applied to all-girls schools. It wasn’t that she didn’t like men, but she liked books more and she knew she would get to the men part eventually. Eventually came on that train to Florence.

  When Olivia returned to her seat after a bathroom break, she found Spencer sitting in it, refusing to get up until she agreed to accompany him for a drink in the bar car. There was nothing especially distinctive about Spencer. In Olivia’s world, handsome, educated, wealthy, sporty guys with an entertaining undercurrent of immaturity were a common entity. There was really no one reason why Spencer had succeeded where others had failed. Maybe it was timing, maybe it was Florence, maybe it was the romance in the book she was reading at the time—the story of a somewhat serious young woman falling for a free-spirited young man—or maybe a combination of them all: a perfect storm.

  She went for the drink, then dinner, then the rest of her time in Florence followed by a sunflower-flanked drive down the Tuscan coast to Porto Ercole. She was not one to deviate from a plan, nor to ditch her friends, but somehow she got caught up in Spencer’s deep blue eyes and the way he undressed her with them. By the time they reached the coast, she had fallen in love for the very first time. And, as it turned out, Olivia loved being in love. She especially loved the promise of it—being “taken” felt quite satisfying on many levels.

  After their semester-long European courtship, they dated long distance throughout their senior years. She traveled to visit him at Duke for his formals; he met her in Boston, where they barely left their hotel room. By graduation they were pinned, two years later engaged, and six years later inhabiting their new home in Hudson Valley, with Olivia staring at the campy wedding portrait while their baby slept soundly in her nursery.

  The two men stepped back to see if the painting was straight.

  “What do you think?” one asked, bringing her back to the moment.

  She took a beat. It was a funny combination of classic and modern, like her.

  “I love it,” Olivia decided, right there on the spot.

  “It’s a real nice picture, lady,” one of them said with sincere appreciation.

  As Olivia escorted them out, a station wagon filled with a gaggle of babies pulled up to the house. She watched from the doorway as the woman she’d been expecting—their mother—stepped out. Olivia was pretty sure she was still in her pajamas. She went up to greet her.

  “Hi!” she said, excited to possibly make her first suburban friend. It was obvious from the woman’s response, “Yeah, hi,” that she was not similarly interested. Her tone and the three babies strapped into car seats, two of whom were crying, made it quite evident that she was not in the mood for small talk. Her attitude, her attire, and the fact that she was selling Olivia her barely used Thule Urban Glide jogging stroller, all pointed to the fact that Olivia might never see this woman again, except possibly at the pediatrician’s office.

  They exchanged the stroller for the agreed-upon hundred dollars and the woman was on her way.

  “Nice meeting you!” Olivia tried again.

  “Yeah, bye,” she scoffed at her, as if it were Olivia’s fault that she’d given up on jogging.

  Olivia had found the notice for the prized stroller on the Hudson Valley Ladies’ Bulletin Board, which she’d joined the same day that they had closed on the house. There, she was happy to discover the source for everything she needed in her new life. She had no way of knowing then that it would also provide the seed for its destruction.

  CHAPTER 3

  Eliza

  Eliza dropped her grocery bags on her kitchen counter and rummaged through them, carefully pulling out the frozen food and perishables before collapsing into a heap on her kitchen floor. She had made it through her shopping list and was thankful for that. But every bit of strength she’d summoned at the supermarket seemed to have declared mutiny and turned against her on the car ride home.

  It would have been so much better for Eliza if her husband, Luke, knew what was going on, but she had made every effort over the past few months to cover it up. She certainly had practice. This may have been her first major flare-up since high school, but in the years in between, she’d still preferred the safety of home—often using the excuse of having something in the oven. It was hard to know if she loved to bake and loved running the bulletin board or just loved how they tethered her to her kitchen and computer.

  So though it wasn’t unusual for her to be a bit of a homebody, hiding it all was like a job in itself. Her go-to list of fun things to do on weekends was substituted with a list of well-crafted excuses. She perfected the facade of the busy housewife coming and going—placing her tennis racquet by the front door on the days of her usual game and putting the things she bought online in old shopping bags strewn on the floor of the bedroom closet. Sometimes she would have to turn to illness: a stomach bug, a bad headache. Those were easy to pull off because both were actual symptoms of her anxiety. All she needed to do was come close enough to the estimated due date without a good excuse and she would soon find herself massaging her temples or vomiting into the toilet.

  At first she missed Luke, really missed being close to him. For as long as she could remember they had looked forward to the empty nest phase of their lives. They loved being parents, but they also loved being alone together. They were lucky that way, lucky that the spark hadn’t fizzled and that they truly liked each other’s company. But lately she resented having to answer his solicitous questions, resented his unintended part in making her feel pathetic. When that happened, when she started wishing he would just leave her alone so she could stop dealing in excuses, that’s when she worried that she had done irreparable damage to her marriage and her family.

  Eliza had held on to the notion ingrained in her since childhood that mental health issues were not to be spoken of. Though she was smart enough to know that being in a constant state of fight-or-flight was not good for her health, mental or otherwise, she never did anything about it.

  Back when Eliza had missed four months of high school, the first time her agoraphobia rendered her nonfunctional, her mother pretended she was home with mono. Her daughter’s bout with mental illness, though it manifested itself differently, was the first time Birdie Reinhart had seen a glimpse of herself in her child. There was no way Eliza’s polished, stick-thin mother, with her shiny golden hair, would have admitted that her daughter, who did not receive her skinny gene or her shiny gene, had only inherited her crazy gene.

  From the day Eliza was born, Birdie would stare at the chubby baby with brown eyes and dark curly hair and look for some reflection of herself, but none existed. Eliza inherited her looks from Birdie’s Jewish mother, while Birdie was an obvious by-product of her Protestant father. She had even changed her name from Bertha to Birdie at age eighteen, officially transitioning from Jewess to Wasp.

  Back in high school, thankfully, Eliza’s problem departed as quickly as it had appeared. One day she woke up, got dressed, and went to school. Just like that. She never discussed with the psychiatrist, or her parents, or her best friend, Amanda, what had brought it on in the first place. In fact, none of it was ever mentioned again.

  Years later, when Eliza met Luke, and he set about falling in love with her every flaw, she didn’t reveal that one. She wondered now, if she had been truthful from the outset, whether she would still be lying there in hysterics on her kitchen floor. As it had nearly every night since the twins’ high school graduation, the memory of the commencement ceremony took hold.

  On that beautiful June day, Eliza had sat in the high school auditorium enveloped in a particular
sense of pride she had never felt before. She had been prepared for it by other parents, who’d told her, “There’s nothing quite like watching your children graduate.” She was thrilled to be experiencing it for herself.

  She had waited impatiently for the ceremony to begin, anticipating the pomp and circumstance to come. Luke, equally excited, sat by her side. He put his hand over hers, squeezed it tight, and smiled at her with nothing but love in his eyes. It was common for him to look at her like that. He had no way of knowing how much it meant to her. She had a much harder shell than her husband did. Of course, she loved him and the twins with all she had, but she tended to keep her own heart behind a wall—a very tall wall. She was beyond grateful that Luke had persistently leaped over it, and on that day she had personally dismantled more than a few bricks—her heart felt more open than she had ever remembered.

  Commencement was taking a while to begin. She imagined the kids lined up in the hallway of the high school trying their best to be quiet, but too hyped up to stand still. “Imagined” may be the wrong word; a better choice would be “remembered.” Eliza had graduated from the same high school as her children some thirty years earlier. She had lined up in the same hallway where they stood now, as she and her best friend, Amanda, rearranged the line so that they could march down the aisle together.

  Eliza looked down to see Luke fidgeting with the program, rolling it between his palms like he was shaping dough. She took it from him; she wanted to keep it for posterity. She straightened it out, bending it in the other direction, then pressing it flat on her lap. She opened it up to read, first turning to the page that listed the students. There they were: her graduates, Kevin Hunt and Kayla Hunt. As she silently read their names, she could almost hear the voice of the principal calling them up for their diplomas. She imagined the cheers as they each made their way across the stage. The anticipation was palpable both in her mind and in the room.

  She turned to the order of events, glancing through what she already knew. The principal’s remarks would be followed by speeches from the valedictorian, a girl she had known since the kids were in kindergarten, and the salutatorian, a boy who played lacrosse with Kevin. She was eager to hear what they both had to say: smart young minds ready to take on the world.

  She turned to the next page in the program, a special dedication. As she read it, she began to shake. She tried to steady her hands in her lap but seemed to have no control of her own body. The program dropped to the floor, and Luke bent down to pick it up. As he went to hand it back to her, she saw panic in his eyes.

  “Oh my God, Eliza, what’s the matter?”

  Sweat poured out from under her arms, soaking the lavender A-line cotton dress with cap sleeves that she had worked so hard to fit into. She could feel the heat radiating from her scalp at the point where her hairline met her neck. Beads of sweat rolled off her upper lip and landed in her lap with such frequency that it seemed as if the roof was leaking. Her heart was literally shaking inside her body and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath, as if she was always one step behind it.

  “Eliza, are you OK?” he asked in a panicked voice. “Should I get a doctor?”

  Eliza looked down at the now melon-shaped circles of sweat under her arms.

  “No, I’m OK. It’s just a hot flash.” She constructed her first outright lie to him on the topic.

  It shut Luke up, as anything associated with menopause or menstruation always did. The first familiar notes of the graduation march began and all eyes, including Luke’s, turned to the auditorium doors. They swung open, revealing the graduates entering two by two.

  Eliza didn’t hear a word of the speeches, didn’t relish the photos of her children in the montage. She sat, dazed and confused, as Kevin and Kayla walked across the stage to collect their diplomas. She stood when the audience stood, sat when they sat, clapped when they clapped, but didn’t hear a word of the commencement program.

  As she stumbled out of the high school and into the June sun, she was only grateful that they had come in two cars. She slipped away from the crowd and got into hers alone. She locked the doors and drove down the block from the school, where she turned off the engine and screamed so loudly and so uncontrollably that she wondered if she might die. Wondered if her heart would explode right there, right on the spot.

  Now, as she lay on the floor of her kitchen drenched with perspiration, just as she was then, she heard the loud screams once again. It took her a moment to realize that they were coming from her own mouth.

  CHAPTER 4

  Jackie Campbell

  Jackie Campbell was a creature of habit. No matter what was going on at the office, he made sure to be on the 5:49 train out of Grand Central in order to be home for dinner with his teenage daughter. Tonight would be no different.

  “If Obama had dinner with his girls, then I can certainly manage to have dinner with mine,” he would say when the notion seemed impossible.

  That’s not to say it wasn’t difficult—Jackie often felt like he was doing loop-the-loops trying to be in two places at once—but their dinnertime ritual remained sacred. It was all about connecting with his daughter, Jana, even when she had no desire to connect with him. Never was that more true than right now.

  Jackie had always worried about the day Jana would get her period. The first time he held her, alone in the nursery after the reality began to set in that he would be raising her on his own, the thought ran through his head. Through the unbearable shock and his streams of tears he actually thought, What will I do when she gets her period? And he was right to worry. It was as if she went to sleep one night a rough-and-tumble toddler and woke up a young woman. A young woman who suddenly looked very much like her mother. That part of it Jackie loved. To see Ann’s face again, and sometimes her smile, that was a gift he would never tire of.

  But yesterday morning when his assistant interrupted his presentation on the current risk appetite for currency trading with a call from his housekeeper, his fears felt warranted.

  “Jana’s friend has arrived,” the housekeeper announced.

  “Well, tell her that Jana’s in school,” he answered, annoyed by the silly interruption.

  “No, no, Mr. Campbell. I found a few pairs of Miss Jana’s dirty underwear in the garbage. Her lady friend has arrived, and I think you need to buy her supplies.”

  “Oh. Oh,” he repeated aimlessly. And then again, “Oh.”

  “If I could give you some advice, Mr. Campbell?”

  “Please do.”

  “Don’t get tampons, sir. Just pads. Tampons lead to sex.”

  Jackie felt the room spin around him as he thanked her and hung up. He repeated her warning again in his head, replacing his housekeeper’s voice with the voice of God: Tampons lead to sex.

  When his meeting was over, he went down to the drugstore, where he purchased every kind of pad on the open market: maxis with wings, ultra-thin scented minis, super-absorbent overnights, and various-sized liners with names like Always and Ultra and Stayfree and Poise. If his mother were still alive he would have delegated this entire situation to her. Today he missed her even more than usual.

  He arrived home that night with his triple-bagged purchases and stood at his daughter’s door. He paused before knocking, reminding himself that he was a grown man: accomplished, formidable, and possibly even brave. Though he didn’t feel very brave at that moment. He knocked gingerly.

  “Come in, Daddy,” she said.

  So far, so good.

  “Hi, baby girl.” He sat down on the bed. “I’m very sorry your mom or Grammy is not here to talk to you about this, but we always get along pretty well, don’t we?”

  She shook her head yes.

  “So, I bought you some things that I think you may find helpful.”

  He nervously opened the treasure trove of sanitary napkins. As he did, he wished he hadn’t gone so overboard. Lu
cky for him, she laughed.

  “I don’t need all that, Daddy. I went with Ivy after school and bought a box of tampons. I’m good now.”

  “You can’t use tampons!” he shouted with an urgency one usually reserves for reporting a fire in a theater or, more likely for Jackie, a catastrophic drop in the Dow Jones. Her face immediately morphed into her “you don’t know anything, and I hate you” look. Jackie tried to backpedal, but he knew from experience that once her ship of adolescent contentiousness sailed, it didn’t return for days. He took a breath.

  “I’m sorry I yelled. I hoped you could start with these.”

  He opened the bag.

  “Any of these.” He pulled out the ones with wings. There had been nearly a year somewhere between three and four where she had insisted on wearing her sparkly fairy wings every day, even over her pajamas. He pictured her sleeping on her belly with her little tush in the air and those wings sprouting from her back like a butterfly.

  “These have wings,” he said, hopefully.

  It was clear that she got the reference but didn’t find it funny.

  “Ugh, Dad, you’re being so extra! I’m not a child. I know what I’m doing.”

  But you are a child, he thought, and what the hell does being “extra” mean?

  She retreated into her phone as if the conversation was over, a tactic that always infuriated Jackie. He retreated into his overwhelming need to control everything that he could, ever since the uncontrollable had happened to them.

  The box of tampons sat right out on her desk. He knew he had two choices: to leave and let her have her way, or to take them and insist on his. The voice of God came back: Tampons lead to sex.

  He grabbed the box of tampons and placed the bag of pads on her bed.

  “You can use these until you’re older,” he said without once pausing for breath. And got out of her room as quickly as his feet allowed.