The Penny Pinchers Club

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  About the only good thing happening in my life back then was Liam Novak. Liam was a wunderkind on PharMax’s corporate track, destined to be CEO with his Wharton degree and uncanny memory for the most mind-numbing pharmaceutical minutiae.

  It helped that he was a rather sexy, Polish-Irish version of Dudley Do-Right, right down to his dimpled chin, fit physique, and blond hair that, unlike Dudley, he wore with a shock of long bangs, a style left over from his days at the all-boy Jesuit boarding school, George town Prep, where he’d starred as lacrosse captain and cross-country record holder.

  Lucky for me, I met Liam’s ideal of a perfect potential wife, probably because I’d been raised Roman Catholic, which pleased his conservative Irish Catholic mother, and because with my own white-blond hair; fair, almost transparent, complexion; ridiculously high forehead; and pale, pale blue eyes, I resembled the living incarnation of every beatific Madonna hanging over every Polish grandmother’s bed west of Warsaw. Not that that was something to be proud of, mind you. Back then I’d have much preferred to be compared with the other gap-toothed Madonna in pearls and lace bustiers—as would have most of the guys I dated.

  Except for Liam. He pursued me with the same gung-ho energy he used to win over PharMax’s shareholders and blitz his friends with ninety-five-mile-an-hour aces. Dinners at the upscale Princeton Inn, huge bouquets of flowers sent to my desk, shopping sprees on Fifth Avenue, and weekends at his family’s beachside compound in Avalon, New Jersey, were par for the course.

  This worked out well because I loved his family and they loved me. Such a boisterous bunch of mindless consumers like myself, not a deep thinker in the group. With Liam and at least two of his seven brothers and sisters, I’d spend entire days at the beach playing Frisbee or zoned out on the sand, shopping for bric-a-brac along Ninty-sixth Street in Stone Harbor and hitting the beachfront clubs afterward. No matter how late we stayed out on Saturday nights, though, Bridget Novak (Liam’s haggard mother) managed to rouse us out of bed and get us to the ten A.M. mass at Maris Stella every morning, delicate lace veils perched primly on our occasionally hungover heads.

  My own smitten mother used to call them “Kennedy South,” but she was wrong. Yes, like Joe Kennedy, Liam’s father, Karol, had come to America and “done good,” becoming the hands-down gypsum king of the tri-state area. But that was where all similarities between the Kennedys and the Novaks ended. Karol Novak had no more sense of noblesse oblige than Paris Hilton, and his politics were lever-pulling straight Republican like that of my father and so many other first-generation American Eastern Europeans.

  Even with a patriarch like Karol calling the shots, though, it was easy being Liam’s girlfriend because he loved me to death and also because he was gorgeous with a terrific sense of style. From his choice of automobile (BMW 3 series, nothing less) to Gucci loafers to Ray-Ban Aviators, everything Liam owned was top notch. It might sound shallow, but that made being with him all the more thrilling.

  Wherever we went, Liam would be mistaken for a minor actor (on General Hospital?) or even a fashion model. Perfect strangers—middle-aged housewives, mostly—would stop him in the grocery store and ask if he’d been that man on the Calvin Klein billboard, the one in the white cotton briefs that was so obscene. (And sexy!)

  He’d win me over with his modest response, shrugging off the double takes and drinks sent to him from admirers across a crowded bar as nothing more than the benefits of fleeting youth. Liam was that rare commodity—a heterosexual American male who loved style for style’s sake, whether it pertained to his car, his clothes, or—my personal passion—interior decorating.

  And he loved to go shopping. Happily. Half the time it would be his idea. My roommate Suzanne used to claim I’d hit the jackpot with Liam, though that might have been because she was miserably dating a chef who spent his off-hours watching football while sharpening his knives.

  That said, Liam was not perfect. For one thing, he had a tendency to automatically issue decisions without my input, like making dinner reservations and advising me what to wear. At restaurants, he’d occasionally order for me or he’d take my car in for tune-ups without asking. Once, he called up my dentist to make an appointment to have my teeth cleaned.

  I’m sure he thought he was being masculine and protective, or maybe he was emulating his father, who also tended toward the dictatorial, but I found it increasingly annoying to be told what I would do and when to floss.

  Then there was the day when he stepped into my cubicle at PharMax and plunked down a purchase agreement for a classic Morrisville colonial on a shady oak-lined street with a brick fireplace, kitchen nook, and five bedrooms.

  “The kids might have to double up,” he said.

  Kids? Just how many kids was he talking about, because if Liam was entertaining notions of me turning into another Bridget Novak, with her dropped uterus and bulging varicose veins, he had another think coming.

  “Go with it,” my sister Viv advised when I mentioned this over lunch. “You just know Liam’s going to propose to you this spring, followed by an August wedding at Our Lady of Perpetual Pain in South River. It’s the script! Then all you’ll have to do is spit out babies like a royal princess while he climbs the corporate ladder. With nannies galore—what could be easier?”

  I took a bite of my chicken salad and thought about the possibility of being Mrs. Liam Novak.

  “In between stints in the maternity ward, you can spend your days working out and driving around in your wood-paneled station wagon from mall to mall, shopping to your heart’s content. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

  I put myself inViv’s picture. Me with a highlighted bob and bright pink lips, one of those little woven purses in the crook of my arm. Entire summers at the Shore making peanut butter sandwiches on Wonder bread for when the kids got back from swimming. Bright green lawns. Blue country club swimming pools and the squeaky clean perfume of chlorine in my children’s hair. Perfectly appointed living rooms with fireplaces and deep shag. Whole school days devoted to choosing new drapes before the kids got home at three and I had to chaperone them to piano and catechism.

  That wasn’t so bad.

  Besides, I loved Liam—or so my twenty-three-year-old self assumed. He was kind to me and I was kind to him. Our religious and ethnic backgrounds were comfortably similar and yet different enough to spice up the mix. My only concerns were his mother—who no doubt would be at our house every single day organizing the sock drawers—and those controlling tendencies of his that seemed to be growing stronger the closer we got to marriage.

  But, heck, I could nip that in the bud, right? We were still young and flexible. It wasn’t etched in stone that he had to turn into his father.

  As Viv predicted, Liam did propose on Easter Sunday while we took a chilly walk on the beach in Avalon after church and brunch. We were holding hands and chatting about nothing in particular, dodging the frigid waves, when I felt something cold on my ring finger, looked down, and saw his grandmother’s diamond, repositioned in a spectacular Tiffany platinum setting.

  “All I can promise you,” he said, gently kissing me on the forehead, “is that I’ll do my best to provide us a beautiful life, Kat. A home, children, and my undying love forever. You’ll never want for anything.”

  It was an irresistible package and there’s no doubt in my mind, looking back, that had he popped the question three weeks before, I would have eagerly and gladly responded with a resounding “Yes!” Nor is there any doubt that we would have gone on to lead that beautiful life with the home, the children, and me never wanting for anything.

  But something had happened in the meantime. Something unexpected and terrifying and more life altering than I’d have ever expected.

  I’d fallen head over heels in love.

  CHAPTER TWO

  It happened shortly after I began working for Chloe Sykes, having left PharMax on the advice of my supervisor, who worried, rightly so, that my romantic relationship with Liam could create is
sues for the corporation. No matter. I never cared much about OvuTerm—as my sales records proved—and Chloe was in dire need of an assistant when I went hunting for an interior decorating job. Sometimes, the stars are just aligned.

  Chloe owned Interiors by Chloe, a boutique firm in the heart of posh Princeton, where she tried to recast herself and her perky redone nose as a blond Presbyterian raised in New Jersey’s horse country amid polo matches and white-gloved luncheons, a distant relative, naturally, of New York City’s A-list Sykes.

  It was all a sham.

  In reality, Chloe had been born Tammy Ann Szabo, native of Manville, New Jersey, where asbestos used to roll in big white balls down Main Street like cancerous tumbleweed. Having grown up across the street from heiress Doris Duke’s 2,700-acre walled estate, Duke Farms, young Chloe was the girl with her face pressed to the proverbial candy store window. She grew into adulthood with a bottomless appetite for wealth, status, and luxury.

  What she got was Scotty Boy Sykes, her rich duffer of a husband some thirty years her senior. With his blue lips, liver spots, paunchy eyes, and tendency to spit while stuttering, Scotty Boy would have repulsed most women of Chloe’s age and beauty. But Chloe was that desperate and he’d had that last name, although years later she would learn Sykes was merely an Ellis Island shortcut from his family’s original—Siemankowski.

  I think this is why Chloe hired me. Once she learned I was Katarina Popalaski from Manville’s not-too-distant cousin South River, she knew she was onto something. Here, at last, was one of her people. Had our descendants not stepped onto the boat at Gdansk, both of us would have been wearing ankle socks and headscarves, gumming salted fish and cursing the apparatchik. Only, unlike Chloe, I hadn’t changed my name and tried to parlay my blond hair into WASP credentials. Therefore, she assumed I was clay to mold, a novice she could impress with her late-model Range Rover and designer bags.

  I was impressed—mostly by Chloe’s determination to get out of bed every day and put on a show, arming herself with Chanel, Ferragamo, Nancy Gonzalez satchels, Bulgari shades, and constant dieting. It took so much work to fight back those Szabo genes, so much studying and brushing up on who was in and who was out in the Bedminster-Far Hills set, that being in her presence was often enervating.

  Especially when she was second-guessing herself into a nervous breakdown.

  That was what she was doing the fateful day beaucoup bucks client Barb Gladstone (as in Peapack Gladstone, an irrelevant detail Chloe never failed to mention) announced she was displeased. The drapes Chloe had designed for Barb’s master bedroom were doing absolutely nothing about shutting out the morning sun, as she’d specifically requested. She demanded Chloe come up to Bedminster ASAP.

  In the incestuous world of high-end Jersey redecorating, this spelled disaster. Barb knew everyone who was anyone and she’d taken a chance on Chloe after she and her regular interior decorator had suffered a minor falling-out. It had been Chloe’s golden opportunity to wedge her Dior sandals in the door and she’d blown it big-time.

  “It’s not a huge deal, don’t you think? I mean, it’s not as if the drapes can’t be replaced or that I’m not willing to absorb every last penny of replacing them.” She furiously flossed her teeth while zigzagging the Range Rover through Bedminster’s winding roads, paying scant regard to nuisances like stop signs and speed limits. Or trees.

  I’d only been working for Chloe two weeks, so I wasn’t quite sure what to say. At the moment, I was more concerned with staying alive as I gripped the door handle and assessed the situation. It seemed to me that the cost of replacing the drapes that had averaged about $800 a panel was prohibitive. Plus, my sense was that Barb had given Chloe a simple task as a test case. If she couldn’t throw up a pair of curtains, then how could Chloe be expected to redo a whole kitchen?

  “I’m sure you’re fine,” I lied, patting her purse as a safe alternative to patting any part of her physical presence. “Barb’s probably one of those grand dames who complains about everything. Look how she fired her regular decorator.”

  Chloe slammed on the brakes. “If Barb fires me, then I should fold up the business right now. My name will be mud.”

  I decided if I was going to keep my job, I had better work on my tact.

  We arrived at the white stone house where Chloe, so beside herself, nearly plowed her Range Rover into the back of a truck filled with dirt and grass belonging to two landscapers hard at work resetting the Gladstone slate walkway. They leaned on their shovels and stared at Chloe, who inconsiderately left her car smack in the middle of the driveway so no one else could get around.

  I shrugged in apology and trotted after her, though I had no idea what I was expected to do or say.

  Inside the mansion, that role became no clearer. Barb, dressed in blue, glided down the stairs—pale from insomnia—and escorted Chloe to the bedchamber of horrors. It was understood that I was to stay put.

  Meanwhile, I conducted a self-guided tour, wandering from room to room, gradually forgetting about Chloe and the drapes while I let myself be dazzled by Barb Gladstone’s artwork, including an original Picasso and a collection of intricately painted antique Chinese vases that must have been pre-eighteenth century. I took mental notes of how Barb placed the fresh flowers and chintz furniture for when Liam and I moved into the Morrisville colonial. Someday, we’d have a home just like this, sans the Picasso, of course. I could hardly wait.

  It wasn’t until I strolled outside, humming a tune and taking in the earthy aroma of freshly mowed spring grass, that I realized I was in deep, deep trouble. The landscapers were gone. So was Chloe’s Range Rover.

  Uh-oh. There was a brief moment of panic as I rapidly assessed my options. Since this was before cell phones, in the 1980s, it was impossible to call Chloe while she was on the road. But, surely, she would be back soon. Perhaps she’d been made to move her car. Or Barb had sent her on an errand.

  Still, it would be a good idea to check with her office just in case. Unfortunately, despite possessing every luxury imaginable, Barb Gladstone seemed to have overlooked modern communication. There wasn’t a phone anywhere. Not even in the library, where I rushed in and was stopped short at the sight of one of the landscapers going through Barb’s personal belongings.

  His back was toward me, his faded red T-shirt smudged with dirt, a maroon line of sweat running between his pronounced shoulder blades. Longish black wavy hair curled from perspiration at his neck, and from where I stood at the door, his metallic, musky odor of heavy physical labor mixed with the library’s more distinguished aroma of fine leather and bound books. I couldn’t imagine that Barb would approve of a man in his state flipping through her collection with his filthy fingers.

  “Excuse me.”

  He plunked a finger between the pages and turned, at first seemingly annoyed by my interruption and then, seeing me in my short black shirt and white sweater with the plunging neckline, more forgiving.

  “Hello.” He raised a curious eyebrow. “Lost?”

  “Kind of.” I really was in no mood for idle chatter. This was serious. “Do you happen to know if the woman with the Range Rover—”

  “Left? About a half hour ago.”

  A half hour ago? So it was true! Chloe had ditched me. Not only that, but my car was parked back in Princeton at the university since there was no room in Chloe’s lot, a definite risk considering I wasn’t a university student and that I’d been warned once before. . . .

  “Shit!”

  The landscaper approached, his head cocked slightly in interest. I noticed that his eyes, while blue, were very dark, and there was a slight scar on his forehead. Other than that scar, he was strikingly handsome, almost like a Greek statue, with a pointed chin, graceful nose, and a strong, long neck with sinews so pronounced I was tempted to reach out and trace one of them with my finger.

  Not that I was interested, of course. I was almost engaged to Liam. But Liam was completely averse to anything smacking of physical lab
or. That’s what checks were for, he liked to say: to pay others to do what he didn’t have to. This man, with his grime and muscles, was an intriguing, albeit slightly disgusting, fascination—like raw oysters.

  He said, “I gather there’s a problem.”

  I quickly explained about being stranded and about my car being parked illegally back at the university. I wasn’t out and out asking for a ride, but as soon as I described my dilemma, I realized I’d dropped a very strong hint.

  “Is this a common practice of yours?” He casually leaned against a bookshelf as if we had all the time in the world. “Using Princeton University as your personal parking lot?”

  “I wouldn’t have to if I weren’t in hot water with the town,” I said, choosing to ignore his amused smile.

  “And that’s because . . . ?”

  “Because I owe them about three hundred dollars in unpaid parking tickets and if I so much as idle at a stoplight, they’ll slap a boot on my car.”

  “I see.” He ran a finger under his lower lip, taking me in, trying to decide if I was worth the effort. “I’ll tell you what. Give me ten minutes and I’ll drive you down.”

  It was a supremely generous offer, exactly what I needed, and I would have leaped at it immediately if it hadn’t been for the fact that he was a dirty stranger. For all I knew, he could have been a rapist or a serial killer or . . . both! But before I could ask a few more prudent questions, he was gone, taking Barb’s book with him.

  He returned as promised, having showered and changed into clean jeans and a heavy white cotton shirt that he was buttoning up with one hand, his other holding the book and a set of keys. With his black hair wet and slicked back, his odor of filth replaced with the refreshing scent of soap, he bore only a vague resemblance to the landscaper from before.

  “Come on.” He nodded to a side door. “My car’s out back.”

  “You can shower here? I mean, Barb lets you?” She seemed like such an ungenerous old woman.