The Stork Club

by Maureen Freely

  When did they turn on you? What did they say? Whatever they blamed you for, I want you to know I had nothing to do with it. I was too miserable to care.

  I don’t know if you ever saw the video of the four husbands taking three Princess Leias, two Spidermen and one ET out for half a city block of safe trick-or-treating. So let me describe it for you:

  First Mitchell walking ahead towards a porch that has a pumpkin on it. Then Mitchell looking up and straight into the camera as Trey the cameraman calls him back. Mitchell coming back. Trey telling him, ‘Now you hold this and record me leading the group.’

  Mitchell asking, ‘Why?’

  Trey (still behind the camcorder) saying, ‘I hope you realize that everything you say will be part of the finished product.’

  Mitchell saying, ‘OK, OK, just show me how to hold it,’ and then holding it upside down. Trey showing him how to hold it correctly.

  Trey leading the group of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg characters down the street towards the porch that has the pumpkin on it. Trey leading the characters up the steps, only to be stopped by Mitchell from behind the camcorder. ‘Wait a minute. That’s a designer pumpkin.’ Shot of designer pumpkin. ‘This can’t be the right address. Let me check the list.’

  Trey coming down, reaching out for the camcorder, then straightening it out to get a shot of Kiki standing on the corner, gazing absent-mindedly into a second- or third-storey window while all three Princess Leias chase ET around his legs. Trey, still behind the camcorder, shouting, ‘Don’t let them run into the street!’

  Kiki still gazing up at that window. ET and the three Princess Leias running into the frame and then out of it. ‘Stop them!’ This is Trey. He gets no reaction. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’ Now the picture becomes jerky, now it is sideways, now it is upside down. Children’s screams. ‘Could you come and restrain these girls of yours?’ Trey says to Mitchell (who is still inspecting Becky’s list).

  Finally Mitchell says, ‘Honestly, I don’t see the point of all this vigilance. It’s not as if Becky’s going to let them keep any of the candy anyway.’

  Pan to me at the top of the porch, next to the designer pumpkin. I am bending over it, using its candle to light up a cigarette.

  I can imagine Trey playing back the recording for Charlotte in his study. I can see her standing in the doorway while he keeps up a steady pace on a treadmill set six feet away from the TV. ‘See what I mean?’ Trey is saying.

  Charlotte says, ‘I could tell from his cough he was still smoking, but I didn’t realize he was doing it this openly.’

  ‘You should see his muscle tone,’ says Trey. ‘And his complexion. Not to mention his posture. Or the way he stoops his shoulders when he walks. You’d think he was carrying the world’s biggest backpack,’ he says.

  She says, ‘Oh Lord,’ and goes up and puts her arm on his shoulder. He cringes, then leans over to turn up the speed of the treadmill.

  While at the Mendozas, Kiki and Ophelia are sitting in the jacuzzi. The plan is to try again tonight to see if they have made love instead of having the kind of bambam sex she has claimed in counselling she finds so distasteful. The idea is that the jacuzzi might help relax her. What it is supposed to do for him Kiki doesn’t quite know. He’s not in any hurry, though, that’s for sure. If he shows her the kind of affection she says she wants, the odds against his getting it up are considerable. If, by some miracle, he gets excited, she’ll accuse him (in front of the counsellor) of attacking her like a jungle beast.

  He’s glad to have something to criticize her about.

  ‘I’m surprised you didn’t notice it,’ he says to Ophelia. ‘Seeing as you have daily contact with him. It should have been obvious just by looking at his eyes.’ He is talking about me. ‘Which one did you say you were giving him?’

  She names a tranquillizer. ‘Honestly, Filly. There was a scare about that one, when? Two years ago? He may be too far gone for us to help him. What dosage were you giving him?’

  ‘Ten milligrams,’ she says.

  ‘You must be joking,’ he says. ‘Why so high?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ophelia says miserably. ‘I thought you knew about it and agreed with me.’

  He sinks down into the water and turns up the jet –

  While Mitchell follows Becky into what used to be his store room and is now her changing room. Sitting down on another box of unfiled correspondence (the very one Trey rifled through while pretending to be looking for the upstairs bathroom) Mitchell stretches his arms and then says, ‘Mike always had a strong self-destructive streak. So when you ask me did I see this crisis coming, I have to say yes.’

  He watches Becky step out of her dress. Make the best of it, boy! ‘Because you see, Mike has zero money sense. He refuses to see opportunities even when they’re staring him in the face.’

  ‘He sounds like me,’ says Becky as she slips into bed. Mitchell chuckles as he follows her. He thinks she’s joking, but in fact she is not.

  In fact, I am the only fantasy that works tonight – although she conscientiously tries out all the others first. They don’t do a thing, not even the one in which she pretends to be an au pair undressing at a bedroom window across the street from a primary school, because one of the fathers waiting outside the school gates assumes a face – my face.

  She switches to pretending to be a waitress wearing no panties at an all-weekend card game. Until – again! – I become one of the players.

  Desperate now, she scans her memory for a better, more effective fantasy that will allow her to come before her husband gets creative. She pretends to be working in a peep show. She tries not to imagine the men who are watching her, because she doesn’t want any of them to have the chance to become me.

  She ends up having to pretend to come.

  Even then, she can’t stop thinking of me. The real me. The one who has all the same faults as she does. Why is Mitchell so eager to knock me down? What is it about men that makes them incapable of helping each other?

  The hours pass. Soon the clock says five and Ophelia is sitting in traffic on her way home from a false-alarm birth management, asking herself the same question –

  While Charlotte sits on the side of her bed, next to a pile of self-help books. She puts on her sneakers, then takes them off, puts on her boots, then takes them off, puts on her running shoes, and stares at them –

  While I lie on my living-room couch. I have my earphones on. The sky is beginning to get light.

  By six o’clock I had given up hope of the pills working. I was not as desolate as I might have been: I had an appointment with Ophelia that morning. I was planning to ask her for a higher dosage.

  So it was just a question of getting through the next few hours. I knew the drill. I could float through it. First: stand up. Brush away the records and earphones and ashtrays. Plunge towards the windows. Use one expansive gesture to open them. Do not fall out and then use the equal and opposite reaction to swish down the corridor to the children’s bedroom. Circle in on the chest of drawers, retrieve clothes, paddle back into the living-room, lay the clothes out on the armchairs that remind me of rocks in a shallow sea. And drift with the current into the kitchen.

  The first pot of coffee did nothing for me that morning. I was on to my second when the doorbell rang, but I was too tired to be surprised it was Charlotte.

  ‘Get your shoes on,’ she told me. ‘We’re going for a run.’

  I told her she might be, but I wasn’t.

  ‘I’m not taking no for an answer, actually,’ she said.

  ‘I have to get the children up in five minutes.’

  ‘We’ll only be gone half an hour,’ Charlotte insisted. ‘Can’t she stand in for you for once?’

  I was too tired to resist her when she pulled me in front of the mirror. ‘Look at yourself! You have to get out there. You can’t just stop exercising because the people you live with don’t take your needs seriously.’

  I told her that first
I had to start feeling awake enough to put one foot in front of the other.

  And she said, ‘That’s what I mean. If you exercised on a regular basis, I guarantee you, you’d sleep better.’

  I told her that might be true but that it didn’t solve my immediate problem, which was how to get my children to school when I’d gone for two weeks without sleep.

  ‘Listen, I’m here to help.’ She insisted on staying, which made everything twice as difficult. She didn’t think I had used the right socks for Maria. She wanted to know why Jesse blinked so much – did he have defective eyesight? It was like dancing with someone who kept stepping on your feet. ‘And what do you eat for breakfast?’ she asked me. I told her nothing much and she made a face. ‘I’m going to have to get you some new cookbooks.’

  I couldn’t get rid of her. We ended up going to school in her car. Then she force-drove me to Ophelia’s office. I had been sitting there at least an hour by the time the nurse came up to me. ‘Dr Mendoza is waiting for you in her car.’

  ‘In her car?’

  ‘Out that door, turn left, and you’ll see two spaces marked “Doctor”.’

  She already had the engine running. ‘We’re late,’ she said. ‘So don’t ask me what’s going on until we get there.’

  She parked outside a building I had always assumed was a bank. She marched me to the back entrance, up an elevator to the fifth floor, and into an office marked ‘Dr White, Psychiatrist.’

  There were two black teenage girls giggling in the waiting room. Ophelia waited until they had left before turning to me to inform me (without looking me in the eyes) that she had been wrong to prescribe me tranquillizers. I was probably addicted. But she assured me that Dr White, a friend, would help.

  It was hard to see how. Hard also to imagine this overweight man in his late forties as her friend.

  Fixing me with an unfriendly stare, he said, ‘I am going to subject you to a list of questions that may appear unrelated.’ He went on to ask me if I liked the colour green, and what I thought about when the word ‘rodent’ came up in conversation, and if I had ever travelled or made a purchase on the spur of the moment.

  ‘You don’t seem to understand. I was brought up to do this,’ I protested.

  ‘How long have you had trouble sleeping?’ was his response.

  I did my best to describe my pattern.

  ‘You have a mood disorder,’ he informed me. He prescribed me a course of antidepressants. I was too tired to protest. Ophelia picked the pills up for me. She made sure I took my first one in front of her.

  It did the trick all right. I was sound asleep on the couch when the phone rang at six that evening. Where were my kids? I didn’t even know. It was all I could do to remember that Charlotte was coming to pick me up. I had no idea why or where she was taking me.

  My legs almost buckled while I was waiting on the street corner. They almost buckled again as I was walking into the JCC.

  She said, ‘OK now. We have forty-five minutes. I’ll meet you outside the men’s room.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘On the poolside.’

  We’re going swimming. Whether you like it or not.’

  I told her I couldn’t. I had not brought my suit.

  She tossed me a bag and told me to look inside it. Inside it were my trunks. ‘I picked them up this morning.’

  I told her I couldn’t use the pool as I was not a member.

  ‘You are now,’ she said. She led me to the changing room.

  I took one look at the lockers and turned around. Charlotte was lying in wait. ‘I thought you’d try that,’ she said. ‘Now for God’s sake, you piece of lardy cake, get in there!’

  She was waiting for me at the side of the pool. The lanes were marked for speed and all six of them full. ‘When was the last time you swam?’ asked Charlotte.

  I told her I couldn’t remember.

  ‘Then you had better start out here,’ she said, pointing at the grandmother lane.

  I baulked. I chose one of the fast lanes. But at the end of the first lap I was out of breath. I had to rest. A burly swimmer swam into my chest. He informed me that all resting had to take place at the shallow end. And so I tried to do all my resting from then on at the shallow end. But even though I did every time I managed to get there, I could hardly make it back to the deep end. The burly swimmer ran into me again. He rose out of the water like a sea monster. He called the lifeguard, who demoted me to the grandmother lane. Even they were faster.

  Charlotte was grotesquely sympathetic at the coffee place afterwards. She told me you had to start somewhere. She handed me my membership card and the adult swimming schedule. I told her I didn’t know if I was going to come back. ‘Nonsense!’ she said, and then she told me the story of her own swimming success. ‘Trey, too!’ she said. It was while she was describing his amazing progress that I lit up a cigarette.

  ‘Put that out,’ she said.

  I exhaled into her face.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘This will not do. I said put that out. I can’t let you kill yourself. I’m going to get you healthy if it’s the last thing I do. Listen,’ she said, ‘Three months from now, when you’ve renewed your cardiovascular system, you’ll thank me for it.

  ‘Just think how Trey used to be,’ she continued, ‘and compare that to the Trey of today.’

  I did. Then I put out my cigarette.

  I decided to demolish her.

  35

  That night I got my old bike out of the storage locker. All it needed was some oil. The next morning I got up at 5.30 and rode to the JCC. The first thing I saw when I walked into the locker room was Poseidon West standing in front of a mirror adjusting his bathing cap. I almost turned around and walked out, but then I decided, fuck it. I wasn’t going to let this man intimidate me.

  There was a new lifeguard on duty. As I surveyed the pool, trying to decide which lane to use, he stared at me as if he knew which lane his colleague had demoted me to the previous evening. But I was not about to join the little old ladies in the slow lane. Instead I went into the lane marked ‘medium slow’. The only other person in it was a smiling, heavily made up woman about my age who was trying to do the breaststroke without getting her hair wet.

  I began with a paddle: I was going for strength, not time or distance. But when Poseidon West emerged from the changing room to do his pre-swim warmups at the side of the pool, I switched to the crawl. I went too fast and overtaxed my lungs, but I took care not to act in such a way that would advertise to him or anyone else that I was out of breath.

  I kept count of the laps. Twenty was all I could manage that day, but the following morning I did twenty-four. On the bike ride home I had an unprecedented rush of well-being. This more than made up for the wave of fatigue that hit me in the afternoon. By the end of the week I was managing thirty-two laps with only four rest periods. Already that Sunday I felt cheated that I could not make it to the pool for my daily fix.

  The object had originally been to build up my strength in private and without sacrificing cigarettes. My plan was to light up one day in front of Charlotte and provoke her into giving me a repeat of that lecture. I would then allow her to coax me into the pool, and get her to time me, and proceed to do a mile in under thirty minutes. And then light up another one, right there in the pool. Unfortunately, I had to revise my plan when half-way through my second week I began to find smoking unpleasant. By the time I had graduated to the medium lane, all I could manage was the token cigarette to keep them thinking I was still smoking.

  My companions in the medium lane were pregnant career women and men recovering from operations. It was hard to do the crawl in this lane without bumping into people, so I varied my strokes according to how much space I had. I was up to forty-six laps when Charlotte happened to come in for a swim during the evening session. She stood at the shallow end with a fixed smile and folded arms while I crawled to the deep end and backstroked back.

  ‘Wowee,’ she sa
id. ‘You’re really coming along, aren’t you?’

  I told her I was still working up to it.

  She assumed a pensive stance. ‘And how long have you been doing this now?’

  I told her.

  ‘And you’ve been coming how many times a week?’

  I told her this, too.

  She made a silent calculation. ‘Well, that’s not too bad considering you’re still smoking.’

  I made the mistake of telling her I had cut way down.

  ‘That goes without saying,’ she replied. ‘You could not be doing what you’re doing if you were. Of course if you gave up altogether the sky would be the limit.’

  I told her that that was my business.

  She agreed vigorously. ‘The time will come when you make that decision by yourself,’ she said. ‘In the meantime, maybe I could give you some correctives to your backstroke.’

  She hopped into the pool. ‘You have to arch your back more,’ she said. ‘And also pay some attention to your right arm. You’re not keeping it straight. Look at how I do it.’ She went a quarter length down the lane and then walked back to me. ‘Now let’s see you try it.’ I protested. She insisted. When I finally went along with it, I did so half-heartedly and therefore incorrectly. She called me back. ‘Really watch that arm this time.’

  To keep myself from throttling her I took her instructions to the limit, annoying the man in the medium-fast lane who was swimming with a floater between his legs. Everyone in the pool heard him put me down, me put him down, and Charlotte tell us both not to act like babies. My only comfort was that Poseidon West was not in the pool.

  I had no sleep, no sleep at all that night. All I could think was what I could have said to Charlotte. What makes you think you can run my life? or, What makes you think you don’t bend your arms when you backstroke? or, Why the hell do you think you have all the answers? But by the time I got to the pool the next morning, I had convinced myself that I would achieve nothing by trying to reason with this woman. Action, I thought, not words. Which meant that, from now on, the hell with the backstroke. I wanted speed. I wanted distance. From that point on I confined myself to the crawl. It was only a matter of days before I reached the one-mile mark.