“Oh, Ted, really,” Kirsten moans. “Let’s not get divorced for them.”
The word startles me. I’ve had the nerve not to contemplate it much.
“Call,” Kirsten says.
I tell her I will. I head back to the car where a fight is in progress. I promise them milkshakes for endurance.
It’s a matter of being impervious, this returning. Just live. Let your grass grow. Let your kids yell at you, advise, hate, disown you. Let the creditors come. Let the husband who thought he loved you find out he doesn’t. Whatever happens will be the truth.
At Burger King I pick up two chocolate shakes. Half of mine goes into Daisy’s bottle, and westward we wend, slurping all the way.
• • •
“He’s distraught,” the roommate, Travis, explains. “He left here about an hour ago. I offered to drive him into the city, but he wanted to take the train. So Garland took him to the station and put him on a train and then we phoned your husband about arrival time.”
I hadn’t expected this sort of welcome, or the fresh esthetic of the place, very leafy, lots of wicker and shining parquet. And I hadn’t expected to be treated to iced tea and cookies, now arriving on a silver tray borne by Travis, another man with, seemingly, only one name. We establish ourselves in the living room with Travis, a subdued Garland trailing us. The girls, despite the recent milkshakes, dive into the cookies, an assortment of Peek Freans and Lus.
“How’s my Otter Troop leader?” Garland says to Jane, who smiles. “You’ve got a beautiful family,” he tells me.
“Have more,” Travis says. “That boy of yours should be in the movies. His eyes! They see everything. You’ve got to watch your step around that one!”
Mother would call Travis a dandy. Older (by a lot) than Garland, he wears the ascot and is more meticulous about hair and wardrobe. I learn that he works at a gallery in the city not far from Mother’s apartment.
“We finally got coverage,” Travis sighs. “Years of free clinics, and I want to tell you, those places are not clean, and I’m on the policy!” He raises his glass to this fact, and I, not sure if it’s the right gesture, join him.
“Do you think that he would talk to me?” I venture.
“All boys want to talk to their mothers,” Travis says.
“Do you want me to speak to him about that tomorrow?” Garland offers.
“Yes,” I decide. “Yes, would you? Would you just tell him I miss him?”
“Of course.”
“Mom, can I borrow a tape?” Jane says from the foyer. The video collection, I noticed when we arrived, in a glass cabinet, includes several we don’t have.
“Did you ask our hosts?”
Travis is over there instantly, consulting with Jane about what would be best. He recommends Bringing Up Baby and Ghostbusters and then puts them in a small Bloomingdale’s shopping bag, the size they give out at the makeup counters. He also packages the remaining cookies in tin foil and holds them out to Daisy.
“At some point,” I say awkwardly, “I’ll figure out how to thank you properly for your help.” I can’t see how my son fits into the lives of these men, but I do know they’ve made room for him.
“Call,” Travis advises. “We’re here.”
It doesn’t even bother me that Travis tends to speak for his mate. He’s eloquent, at any rate, and I don’t fear in them what Liselotte complains of so continually—an inner circle that excludes her so she won’t interfere, une cabale.
“Can we go home now, Mom,” Jane says on the way to the car.
“We are going home.”
“Good.” She then informs me that she won’t be put in the middle of me and Simon the way other kids are when their parents are fighting. Again I mentally blame Adrienne for this pronouncement.
“Can we put you in the middle when we’re not fighting?” I ask.
“It’s not funny, Mom.”
“Of course it isn’t.”
“Mommy funny!” Daisy cackles.
• • •
Just how riotous it isn’t becomes evident later when I call Simon at the Essex House and he starts about the money it’s costing him to stay there and about making some decisions about where everyone’s going to be living. Isaac won’t speak to me, so I can’t get his side except through Simon, who responds flatly in the negative when I ask if Isaac will consider coming home the next day.
“I’ve been to see his friend from the camp,” I say. “I don’t know what else to do.”
“I can’t advise you on that. What’s your plan?”
“Well,” I say, furious. “I’ll make it easy for you. I’m staying in the house with whichever of my children will have me.”
“We’ll see who they are,” he says, and hangs up.
I sit, stunned. Whatever people fear and loathe about infidelity sits with me on the sofa, which is now a monstrous piece of furniture that will probably have to be decided upon as well.
• • •
Monday I wake to a singing pain in my head shortly before five. Ordinarily I might make better use of this time, delve back into Liselotte’s life in search of inspiring chestnuts, do laundry, sewing, letters. But instead I stand in the bathroom fingering every facet of my mouth, tortured by the pain and my inability to locate it. I can find no puffiness, and it isn’t my wisdom teeth, as these were, all four, broken in my jaw and extracted when I was twenty-four. I remember weeks of mushy food and crankiness and reliance on Mother to occupy Isaac. My face was square from the swelling.
I get a cold pack from the freezer and stretch out on the couch. I tune in to World News and am treated to fires, murders, layoffs, and global hopelessness. A few minutes of this, and then the notion that the pain is not in the roots of my upper eyeteeth, on which I’ve been focusing, but in the front of my mouth, where my two front teeth are, the ones Fowler once remarked made me look like a small version of Carly Simon, breaks over me. I know in that seeping, inevitable way that people know they have cysts or cancer or implacable internal damage, that this dental repair is going to be major, that it will require multiple visits and definite tooth loss.
My own teeth mock and revile me. Hag! they cry.
I’m going to need some help with this one. I can’t call Mother, because she’s visiting a Smith friend on Nantucket. Daddy wouldn’t understand why a situation like this would require help from anyone. Kirsten: not this time. Fowler: out of the question.
I call Elliot.
“You won’t believe this,” I say.
“You don’t know me,” he says, very alert.
“You were up?”
“Up?” he croaks. “I’ve done Fonda, the beds, and blueberry buckle. I’m about to scoot into the shower so I can get over to my cubicle for inventory.”
“Don’t!” I shriek. “You have to take the morning off. I’m desperate!”
“Who didn’t know that?” he mutters. “The morning off? What a novelty. But it can’t happen. I’m supposed to give a week’s notice.”
“Tell them you’re sick.”
“Think of something better. In your case, the truth might do nicely.”
“You do love me,” I say.
“Get to it.”
“Tell them you’ve got a friend whose mouth is on fire with pain and she has to get to a hospital and you have to watch her kids there for her at least until lunch, that is unless surgery is warranted.”
“What’s with your mouth?”
“If I knew, I might know how to handle this without calling you. Can you meet me? Please?”
He asks what hospital and I tell him Lenox Hill.
“I’ll meet you in the lobby in an hour,” he says.
I wake the girls and we whirl through dressing, crying, eating, soothing. I apologize more for this than I have for my entanglement with Fowler. We’re in the car by seven, and Jane is even asking how I’m doing every exit or so.
“Okay. Just keep talking.”
“What do you want me to tal
k about?”
“Just talk! I don’t care!” I shout. It irritates me that a child who has never been at a loss for words is now, when I’m desperate for distraction.
“Okay, Mom,” she says. “It’s okay.”
• • •
At the hospital I discover that it is anything but okay to have this happen to your mouth early on a summer morning. The dentists on call don’t respond to the page.
“Well, where are they all?” I demand of the receptionist, who’s looking at me as if she’s never witnessed such an inconvenience.
“I told you I would have the doctor beeped. You’ll have to be patient. We don’t get a lot of dental emergencies. Now, please have a seat.”
Things always have to be this way with me. I wake up to world war in my mouth and have to drive myself and my children to the emergency room for this sort of reception. I have to cheat on my husband for the first time with a man who may not last the winter. I have to fall in love for the first time and become a mother in disgrace.
“There’s a man with a gun by the newsstand outside who might put you out of your misery if you ask nicely.”
It’s Eliot, a miracle in khakis and pinstripes. I fall into him.
“Oh, shit,” I whisper, already crying. “Shit, shit, shit, shit.”
“Come,” he says, guiding me to the line of connected chairs where the girls are exploring the contents of a tin with Santa and his sleigh riding across the lid. “I’d like to introduce you to two of my women friends. They’ve already agreed to try my buckle.”
“Mom! Look! Blueberry!” Jane is ecstatic. “Is this your friend? He’s a great cook!”
Hands splayed over my face, as if this will keep it from cracking, I try to smile through. Jane is making such an effort for me.
“This is Eliot,” I say. “He’s going to make sure we all live through this.”
Jane makes a twirling gesture by her ear to let Eliot know that I’m insane.
“You’re telling me!” he says. “Do you know that when I met your mother last week she invited me to lunch immediately just so she could plan this toothache?”
Jane screeches over this. Daisy tears apart a square of the buckle.
“You are so dear,” I manage through my hand web, but then I can’t keep my gaze up. The toothache has gone to my forehead.
“Don’t talk,” he advises. “You talk too much.”
• • •
Having one of my front teeth ground away to a thin, gray post is a shaming experience for me, only made worse by Daisy’s wandering in and out of the room where I’ve been sent, in the hospital’s dental clinic. When she stands by the chair tugging at my shirt (she can do this only when the dentist’s back is to me as he mixes his powders for this combined root canal-crown procedure), I don’t know how to manage my face for her: the lower half is numb, and I’m missing most of a prominent tooth, a tooth she’s used to and I’m frantic without. But Dr. Peterson has assured me that this is the only solution to what he calls my “sensitivity.”
Daisy starts to cry when she sees me without my tooth.
“Eliot!” I call out pathetically, but he’s already in the room trying to coax her out.
“Where’th Jane?” I lisp, everything being out in the open. My younger daughter has seen her future as the caretaker of a toothless woman before she puts me in the nursing home. “Can’t thee help with Daithy?”
“I’ve sent her across the hall for bagels,” he says. “There’s lots to eat here. They wheel the food by as often as they do the people.”
“Excuse me,” Dr. Peterson says with annoyance. He’s handsome, like a Ken doll, and has an obvious interest in skiing. The office walls are plastered with professionally done photographs of him and his family at the tops of mountains, fabulous vistas flanking them.
“I’ll be leaving now,” Eliot announces, swooping up Daisy and raising his eyebrows at Dr. Peterson’s back. “Come on, princess, let’s get ourselves another breakfast. We’re not wanted here.”
Nothing makes a dent in Peterson, who works at stretching a rubber sheet over the square of metal he’s clamped to one of my molars. I hear Daisy crying, probably over the sight of this miniature scaffolding. I try to think pleasant thoughts of Jane and Daisy and Eliot, happy with food. I don’t see how I’ll ever eat again.
• • •
I’m out in two hours, a cement prosthesis in place of the offending tooth, now gone, my lower face tremendous with novocaine. The smell of the ground tooth stays with me. Jane and Daisy cling to me, as if I’ve undergone life-threatening surgery and we are a family again, as if we’re going home to Simon and Isaac for lunch after the disaster. And Eliot, my new friend, is behind them, trying not to avert his eyes.
“It doesn’t look bad, really,” he says. “The new one’s a bit off in color, but I assume it’s temporary.”
Eliot has lovely teeth, unmarred by bonding, falseness, or silver. I don’t dare go near a mirror.
“Eliot has some books at his house for me,” Jane brags, “and they’re worth a lot of money. He says we can have them for free.”
“Eliot ith a dear, dear man,” I say.
“Will ye be needin’ me any more today, mum?” Eliot asks in credible brogue.
“I think I can get uth home,” I say. “I think we’ll be fine.”
“I’ll call you tonight,” he says. “And I’ll want to talk to your manager about getting her those books. I’ve got an original Bemelmans, you’ll swoon.”
We bid Eliot adieu in the hospital lobby after endless waiting by the elevator. The logistics of retrieving the car are smooth, and we ride home on an empty highway, Jane nattering on about Eliot and his jokes the entire way, Daisy taking refuge in sleep from all the novelty.
• • •
Later I talk to Simon. Of course I’m in the habit of telling him when enormous things happen to me, particularly ones that demand coverage. And, of course, I exaggerate.
“I scared Daisy. She’s never seen a witch before. Never mind having to race into Manhattan with my head in a vise of pain.”
“We’re falling apart,” he says.
“I just let the dentist do whatever. I didn’t even care, it was so unbearable. It’ll probably cost the moon.”
“Just send in the forms,” he says. “They’re under ‘Medical’ in the file cabinet. And there are envelopes already addressed.”
I thank him, then ask how Isaac got to camp this morning.
“I put him on a train with cab money. He’s going to need clean clothes, so perhaps you could drop some off at the camp before dismissal.”
I tell him I’ll do that. “What about you? Don’t you need clothes?”
“I’ve got enough to last me. I’ll be home on the weekend and we can have our discussion. The children deserve some sort of information, I think, and I’d sort of like to know where I’ll be spending the rest of my life.”
“Who knows that.”
“Don’t be glib about this, Leigh.”
“I’m not. I want to say how sorry I am, but it sounds despicable.”
“You might have thought of that before deciding to honor an old urge. Really, Leigh, we have people depending on us not to do that.”
I despair over how right he is, how difficult I’ve made things, how much my mouth hurts.
“Simon,” I say. “Tell me that if wife number one came back at a low point in your life and suddenly you saw yourself a much younger man facing a world of possibility and she told you she’d be dead in a year and then came on to you like a Mack truck, tell me you’d stay your course without flinching.”
“Now I would. Now I’ve got kids with a woman I thought could save me from people like Carly.”
I can’t say any more on my behalf, so I don’t try.
“Feel better,” he says, and hangs up.
I hurry with the clothes, some jeans and T-shirts and underwear and socks, these things I’ve worked to collect for Isaac. I try Fowler’s n
umber, to no avail, with the idea that I should be keeping him posted about myself. Then I make sandwiches and stick them and juice boxes, cookies, and iced coffee in a Mason jar into the cooler and carry it all with Daisy out to the car. We drive over to the high school where I just left Jane, who was protesting about her own dishevelment and lack of gym bag and the ridiculous hour I saw fit to drop her off at camp. I establish us on a blanket under a tree near the breezeway and wait for a glimpse of my son at his official duty, like anyone waits for a sign of love from a child who is rightfully angry, as if my life depends on it.
chapter eight
I feed Daisy green grapes as I dial Pam’s number on the cellular phone from our spot under the tree. I can’t imagine Pam will be in at two o’clock on a Monday afternoon, and I’m right. A woman who sounds polished enough to be her secretary takes my number and says Pam will be glad to return the call. Then I get Gillette’s machine and tell her I want a meeting because I’m not going to change course on the book without the affirmative from Barry. I think Gillette will appreciate my tone, as she likes hardball. Next I do Fowler, who is home.
I ask him how he’s feeling.
“It’s not so much a question of feeling any way in particular,” he says. “It’s a question of gradually discovering new incapabilities. For instance, today I haven’t brushed my teeth, not because I forgot or don’t want to, but because every time I try, my hands decide it’s time to go on vacation. And right now it isn’t just my hands. One of my arms has decided the same thing. I can’t move it. So in answer to your question, I don’t know how I’m feeling, except amazed and scared out of my fucking mind.”
“Do you want me there?”
“Another tough one,” he says angrily. “You sound like you’re calling from the space shuttle. It might take you years to get here.”
“The great outdoors of Ardsley,” I explain. “Daisy and I are outside the high school in head-splitting sun. I have a new tooth. I’ll come show you if you want.”
“I’m still thinking these moments will pass, and I won’t need any help. I want to hang on to that comfort for as long as I can.”
“Okay. I need to know one thing.”
Every Day Page 13
