The Penny Pinchers Club

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  But it was so hard to tamp down those insecurities. What if what Vivian said turned out to be true? Was our relationship really in such shambles that Griff had to go rushing into the arms of someone like Bree? Or was it . . . me?

  Couldn’t be. My figure hadn’t gone completely to pot. Sure, my breasts weren’t full and bouncy with that perky great-to-meet-you attitude they’d sported in their twenties. Nursing and an aversion to exercise will do that. But my hair was still blond(ish). And after professional bleaching by Beth Williams herself, my teeth were whiter.

  I pulled back my lips and checked them like a horse up for auction. Yep. Still white.

  Anyway, this was stupid. Griff and I were beyond breast shape and whether his abs had gone from six-pack to half dozen. (They hadn’t, curse him.) We were a team. We were each other’s confidantes who held hands in line at the movies and loved nothing more than to curl up in bed on a Sunday night and watch a PBS mystery, our toes playing tootsie, Griff every once in a while mindlessly planting a kiss on the top of my head.

  Did he do that with . . . her?

  It was beginning to eat at me from within—the creeping feeling of betrayal and disloyalty, how it acted like dry rot, ruining a perfectly fine foundation from underneath. So this was why adultery was so insidious. It wasn’t just the act of Griff having sex with another woman, it was all the whispering machinations that made the adultery justifiable. His gripes to her about me. His girlfriend’s strokes of consolation, having heard only his side of the story.

  After all, no man starts off an affair by proclaiming his wife is his soul mate who is understanding and still outrageously sexy. An affair begins with dissatisfaction, with a complaint. So what was Griff ’s beef? What, exactly, had he told her about our private life? That I shopped too much? That I turned a deaf ear to his views on the Fed? Give me a break. There were worse crimes than growing bored with rants about Alan Greenspan.

  My eyes hurt and I realized crying was inevitable. It was going to happen and it was going to be bad. Just when I needed to be strong and optimistic, my glands were turning traitor.

  Halfway through a deep and wrenching sob, there was a knock on the bathroom door. I lifted my swollen red face to the mirror.

  “Kat?” Vivian cooed. “Are you okay?”

  “Just fine!” My shaking voice indicated quite the opposite. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  “Could you make it sooner? There’s some kind of incident going on in the driveway.”

  A whiff of Basic cigarettes floated through the window and I thought—Saturday. Quarter after ten. Driveway. Jasper.

  Uh-oh.

  Throwing open the bathroom door, I grabbed Griff ’s shirts for the dry cleaner, tossed my keys in my purse, and flew outside. As I feared, my cleaning woman, Libby, in green knit shorts and a blue tank top, her anchor tattoo visible on her upper left shoulder, was leaning against her pickup truck, a smoldering cigarette in one hand, a black can of Mace in the other.

  “I told you I was coming at ten,” she scolded. “Why you didn’t lock that beast in the basement is beyond me.”

  I eyed the “beast” Jasper, whose gray muzzle lay between his two arthritic paws. He arched an eyebrow in my direction, glanced at the Mace pointed at him, and sighed. Talk about misunderstood.

  “He’s something like ninety-two in dog years.” I slipped a finger under his collar and gently brought him to his feet.

  “I don’t care. He hates me. If you weren’t around, he’d bite off my ankle.”

  “No, he wouldn’t. He hardly has any teeth left.” But there was no point in explaining that to Libby, who’d been cleaning my house for fifteen years—about as long as we’d had Jasper. She hated all dogs, and all dogs hated her. If Vivian hadn’t fetched me, she would have doused the old boy in pepper spray and probably given him a heart attack.

  I put Jasper in the garage and closed the door. Sorry, I mouthed to him.

  “By the way,” she said, biting the cigarette as she fetched her mop and pail from the back of her truck,“I went shopping with my group this morning and picked up a few things on sale for your party.”

  By “group,” Libby meant the Penny Pinchers, a bunch of super savers like her who met in the basement of the Rocky River Public Library once a week to swap coupons and trade tips. You’d have thought the Penny Pinchers were A-list celebrities the way she was forever going on about their crazy antics, recounting their great finds at yard sales and their coups at the grocery store beating the system, ticking off the store managers and filling their shopping carts with loads of free stuff.

  She tried to get me to come to a couple of meetings, but so far I’d managed to duck her. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to learn how to save, it was just that I wasn’t sure I could. My few attempts at living by a budget in the past had been utter, costly failures.

  Take coupons, for example. I’d usually start off gung ho, buying a bunch of Sunday newspapers and cutting out each coupon, filing them by category in long white envelopes. Inevitably, though, I’d forget the envelopes when I went grocery shopping or I’d hold on to the coupons too long. They’d expire and fall to the bottom of my purse, where they’d become ripped or crumpled until I used them to hold spit-out gum or to pat my lipstick. Not to pun, but some of us were just not cut out for coupons.

  Libby handed me a dozen used Ball jelly jars and a bag of tiny votive candles.

  “Thank you,” I said, grateful, if slightly confused. Along with not clipping coupons, I wasn’t a canner, either.

  “Lights for the patio. Very pretty with the glass quilting.” She exhaled her cigarette triumphantly. “I got them at a yard sale this morning. Guess how much.”

  Libby loved to play the home version of The Price Is Right.

  “Five dollars.”

  “For free!” She pumped her fist. “It was the end of the sale and they couldn’t get rid of them, so they threw them in when I bought a towel rack for thirty-five cents. The candles were left over from Christmas last year. I picked them up at a post-holiday steal down at the drugstore for a buck a bag. Now you won’t have to go out and drop a Ulysses S. Grant on lanterns.”

  She opened the candles and plopped one into a jar, lighting it with her cigarette. Although it was still daylight, I could see the candle’s potential as the flame danced in the puckered glass.

  “Hey. That’s very pretty!”

  “Isn’t it?” She gazed at the jar with pride until her hand began to shake. “And . . . hot. Ohmigod.”

  Quickly, I snatched it from her hand and blew out the flame while Libby waved her red palm in the cooling air. “I thought they’d be insulated,” she said.

  “I don’t think that’s what quilting means.”

  I took the Ball jars and candles to the patio. Then I dumped Griff ’s shirts in the backseat of the Lexus, started the car, and headed toward Chloe’s office, though it was Saturday and the day of the anniversary party. When Chloe summons, one comes.

  Griff calls Rocky River “New Jersey’s Brigadoon” because it’s hidden between New Brunswick and Princeton, off Route 27, in the valley marked by a wooden bridge. It was love at first sight when Griff and I, house hunting, stumbled upon this community with its little shops, the hardware store and local ice-cream parlor, its white clapboard town hall and annual Fourth of July parades. Right off, I knew we’d found our home.

  After picking up a triple venti latte with a blueberry scone at Starbs, I drove down to Princeton and parked my Lexus in its usual space next to Chloe’s all-white Mercedes. Sitting in my car, I tried to reach Griff at his various numbers—home, office, cell—again. And again, I was sent directly to voice mail, just like when I attempted to reach him in San Francisco.

  An inner voice whispered, Your marriage is in trouble.

  Be quiet, you, I whispered back, tossing my phone into my purse and heading to work. Honestly, my inner voice had no idea when to shut up. So rude!

  Interiors by Chloe was on the first floor of the
Stevens Building, across the hall from Arthur B. Winchester Properties, where my friend Elaine was one of two real estate agents. When she wasn’t scrolling the Internet, she was lounging on Chloe’s soft couches and flipping through our copies of Town & Country, which is exactly what she was doing when I opened the door and found her bare feet on the antique coffee table, a bag of Oreos in her lap.

  “Shoot.” She sat back and closed her eyes, placing a hand on her rather ample chest. “You nearly gave me a heart attack. I thought you were Chloe.”

  I put the Starbucks on my desk and dropped my keys. “Do you know what she would have done if she’d caught you like this?”

  Elaine brushed the crumbs off the unflattering navy pantsuit Arthur B. Winchester insisted she wear and collected them on the magazine. “You know what? After what I’ve been through, I’m not sure I’d care.” Carrying the magazine over to a wastepaper basket, she dumped in the crumbs and said, “Got a call from the cops at two A.M. this morning. Taylor was rounded up in an underage drinking party.”

  “You’re kidding me.” I slumped at my desk and popped open the Starbucks. Elaine had three sons, two of whom were star athletes and students. It was as though Taylor, the youngest, was trying to make up for the older two by skipping school, drinking, and repeatedly getting in trouble with the authorities. “What are they going to do?”

  “I don’t know. Gerry had a long talk with the chief of police and maybe, just maybe, they’ll let him go with a warning. But you know how they like to make examples of kids, especially at the start of the school year.”

  “How about the coach?”

  “Oh, yeah. Tay’s kicked off the football team for the duration. Definitely.”

  Elaine and I sat in silence, she eating her Oreos and I sipping coffee, mulling over our separate worries.

  “This might seem like a strange question,” I ventured, “but has Gerry ever cheated on you?”

  She coughed on her cookie. “Why?” She coughed again. “Do you know something I don’t?” Recovered, she dove into the bag for another Oreo.

  “No. I was thinking of Griff.” I paused, debating only for a second whether what I was about to confide would be considered a violation of our marriage. “This morning while I was doing the wash from his trip to San Francisco, I came across two wrappers for condoms in the pockets of his khakis.”

  Elaine stopped mid-bite. “You’re noth therious,” she said, her mouth full.

  “And, also, a receipt for a $200 dinner he had the night of Laura’s accident, even though he told me he was in his hotel room, sleeping.”

  She thrust out the Oreos. “Take one.”

  “No thanks.”

  “I’m telling you, they help. They’re like magic.”

  “I’m sure you’re right, but I couldn’t eat right now if I wanted to.” I flipped through the calendar until I found last Thursday, the day Laura hit the state trooper. “I just can’t believe he lied to me.”

  “Oh, honey.” She rolled up the bag and tossed it onto the table, releasing a shower of crumbs that I prayed were gone by the time Chloe arrived. “It’s probably not as bad as it looks. I can’t think of a more perfect couple than you two. You put the rest of us to shame.”

  “Hmph.” The more I thought about us, the more worried I got. Viv had been right. Married couples did drift apart and maybe Bree was giving him something I’d stopped gladly handing out long ago. Would it have hurt for me to ask him about his Fed book once in a blue moon? Not that his cheating could be justified. . . .

  “I’m sure there’s a rational explanation. Did you ask him?” Elaine said.

  “Well, that would be the logical thing to do, wouldn’t it?”

  “Unless you were trying to trip him into an admission of sorts.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  She shrugged. “I dunno. If I found condom wrappers in Gerry’s pockets, I might consider laying a trap. But then, that’s me. Men, I’ve come to see, are the enemy, whether they’re husbands, bosses, or mouthy teenage sons.”

  That was just talk. Gerry and Elaine had a fabulous relationship. “I did try to call him, and he didn’t answer, even though I know for a fact he’s at the office . . . with her.”

  “Bree?”

  I nodded.

  “I personally think young women should be confined in convents until they have the permission of older women.” Elaine was about to criticize the forwardness of the younger generation when the door slammed and Chloe appeared in a pale beige swing coat to match her pale beige shoes and pale beige headband. With her frosted blond hair she gave the impression of a human iced latte.

  “Ladies?” She zoomed right in on those Oreos.

  Elaine swiped her feet off the table and slipped them into her navy pumps. “Hey, Chloe. What’s up?”

  “Your feet,” she said, “on my antique Queen Anne.”

  The only reason Chloe didn’t get along with Elaine was because Elaine was, for lack of a more flattering word, zaftig, and with generations of hefty Szabos in her past, Chloe feared fat people like they were contagious diseases.

  “I’ve got clients coming in twenty minutes.” She adjusted the black Coach bag swinging from the crook of her arm. “It’d be nice if this place didn’t look like a frat house.”

  She handed me her daily “to-do list” and marched across the room into her office, giving the door another slam.

  Elaine stifled a giggle. “Does she know what dumps frat houses are? A frat house! I bet she’s never even stepped inside one.”

  “If she had,” I said, turning on my computer,“she wouldn’t admit it.”

  “I swear, that’s your biggest problem right there.” Elaine pointed to the white door marked with a brass plaque that read CHLOE SYKES in ornately cursive lettering. “If you didn’t have to focus all your energy on keeping her mentally stable, you’d be happier and so would your marriage.”

  Aha. “So you think my marriage isn’t happy.”

  “Listen to me, girlfriend. I think you’re not happy. But being a typical woman, you put on a happy face and pretend to be.” She got up and picked the list out of my hand. “Look at this. Three follow-up calls, a write-up of her meeting Susan and Dick Weinstein, and—I can’t believe it—a re-measure of the Andersons’ kitchen. Tell me why this couldn’t wait until Monday.” She let the list flutter to my desk. “And you’ve got a party to throw tonight. That woman has no soul.”

  “No, but she does have my paycheck.” Picking up the phone, I started to dial the Andersons to ask if I could stop by in half an hour.

  Elaine yanked the telephone cord out of the wall. “Stop it.” Checking over her shoulder to make sure Chloe couldn’t hear, she whispered, “You need to call Madeleine Granville right now.”

  “Now?”

  Elaine recently sold a house to a New York television producer named Madeleine Granville and, since then, had been trying to talk me into doing the redecorating for her as a way of jump-starting my own design business. A pipe dream, really, although one I couldn’t quit obsessing over.

  “I happen to know she’s in town. This is the perfect opportunity.”

  “Chloe’s got clients coming any minute.”

  “So?” Elaine rolled her eyes. “When Chloe’s meeting with them, you can call Madeleine. The only reason she hasn’t called yet is that she’s so freaking busy, she doesn’t know what day it is.”

  I was tempted. I really was. Only one teensy-weensy problem. Chloe possessed an unforgiving vengeful streak as hard as the diamonds on her fingers. When combined with her insistence on devout loyalty, calling Madeleine Granville was akin to career suicide.

  If Chloe so much as suspected I went behind her back and sought a client on my own in an effort to take the first steps in establishing my own business, she would not only fire me, she would see to it that no one in the tri-state interior decorating network took me on, too. That I could not risk, not with Laura to send to school the following year in an economy where prof
essional interior decorating was the first luxury to be axed from the average homeowner’s budget.

  “Take a chance.” Elaine pulled out her BlackBerry, scrolled to Madeleine’s number, and wrote it down on Chloe’s to-do list. “Nothing good happens if you don’t take chances.”

  With a last thumbs-up, Elaine grabbed the Town & Country, picked a few Oreo crumbs off the white carpeting, and went across the hall to her office. I was left to stare at Madeleine’s number.

  The door to Chloe’s office flew open. “Is she gone?”

  “Yup.”

  Chloe checked her watch. “None too soon, either. Ray and Andrea Perotta are five minutes late. Can’t you do something about her? She’s bringing down the property values.”

  “She’s my friend. And she gets us clients.”

  “At the very least, she could make an effort. Oreos. All that saturated fat.” Chloe shivered. “Have some self-respect, for god’s sake.”

  Two minutes later, in walked the Perottas—a retired couple moving to New Jersey to be closer to their daughter and son-in-law—for the ritual of contract signing that Chloe demanded be done in her office. I never understood why she didn’t do this in people’s homes, like other interior decorators did, until I was searching through her desk one day and came across a mini digital recorder.

  Along with vengeful and demanding, I could add paranoid to Chloe’s many delightful characteristics.

  I led the Perottas to Chloe’s office and once I’d fetched the usual coffee and tea, went back to my desk, where Madeleine’s number stared up at me like a dare.

  Do it, I thought. Do it now or you never will.

  My fingers tapped out the numbers on my cell as I applauded myself for having the decency not to use Chloe’s phone. If anything, I was ethical.

  “Hello?”

  I didn’t expect her to answer right away. But then, in worrying about this fact instead of talking, I created a pause that was so long, Madeleine had to say hello again.

  Quickly, I introduced myself, throwing out Elaine’s name a billion times until Madeleine eagerly said,“Oh, yes. I’ve been meaning to call you. This house is wonderful, but it’s so . . . dark. I was just thinking how much I’d like to get it redone this winter and how I should probably get started now.”