The Penny Pinchers Club

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  Griff was going to have a fit.

  As Madeleine went into a lengthy description of lefts and rights and turning at the second light—or was it the third?—I crumpled the letter into a ball, my mind racing for a possible way to fix this. It was Sunday, the bank was closed, what could I do?

  A car door slammed and I peeked out the window to see our godson Jack’s beaten-up Toyota in the driveway. True sport and loving kid that he was, he’d driven up from Stone Harbor for our anniversary. Or perhaps . . . to use our washing machine.

  Done with Madeleine, I hung up and rushed outside to tell Griff, not only about Jack, but about my first bona fide client. Forget the overdraft, Madeleine’s call was so much more important and reminded me of one of the great perks of marriage—having someone with whom to share not only the bad news, but also the good.

  My excitement quickly vanished when I found Griff bent over his iPhone again, his thumbs working back and forth, a huge smile on his face.

  “Did Christiansen say yes?”

  He lifted his head abruptly and, I swear, tried to hide what he’d been typing. “Pardon?”

  “Christiansen. Did he say yes?”

  He frowned, lost in a shadow of confusion. “Er, no. Did I just hear a car pull up? Is that Jack? He said he might come up.”

  What was making him so happy if it wasn’t Christiansen? I debated whether to push the iPhone issue further but, hearing Jack call, “Hello!” I decided to drop it. “Yep. Jack’s here.”

  “Great. Let me finish this memo and then I’ll be out to see him.” And he went back to that damned phone.

  Deflated, I left the patio to meet Jack in the driveway. He must have grown a foot since I saw him three weeks before, so tall and blond and . . . red. The boy had skin like a lobster.

  “Didn’t you ever hear of sunblock?” I reached up to kiss him on the cheek.

  “Yes, Aunt Kat. I know all about sunblock. It’s not my fault; blame global warming.” He hugged me tightly before handing me a present—a pillowcase packed with laundry. It reeked of old, mildewed sneakers, like he hadn’t done a wash since he’d left. Which he hadn’t.

  Laura shuffled out in a pair of light flannel pj bottoms and a tank top and, without saying so much as hi, began to tease her cousin about his surfer hair and bronzed skin. Again, I found myself glancing off, unable to think of her alone with Todd in that way. Well, I would just have to learn to deal with it. She couldn’t stay my little girl forever.

  We whittled away the rest of the day in pleasant family togetherness. Jack did his laundry and helped his uncle fix the backyard fence. The four of us played a couple of halfhearted games of badminton before a few of Laura’s friends—alerted that a strapping, blond lifeguard was on the premises—stopped by to clean us out of chips, crackers, cheese, and hors d’oeuvres left over from the party.

  Griff, ever the professor, gravitated to the kids, plying them with questions and abstract bits of random economics theory having to do with the purchasing power of their meager after-school earnings.

  Any other middle-aged man explaining the “income effect of a price increase on demand” would have driven off the most polite teenagers. But Laura’s friends didn’t mind. In fact, they seemed to get a kick out Griff ’s mini lecture, needling him about being mind- numbingly boring, pretending to commit hara-kiri or keel over dead as, playing to their jokes, he proceeded to use a tortilla chip to draw a price curve in the bowl of salsa.

  It reminded me of our first unofficial date at the Alchemist & Barrister when he was hanging out with the Princeton students and I realized my whole life had been leading up to our meeting. It wasn’t merely that he was still handsome, that, with his longish, dark hair and jeans he stood apart from these girls’ staid fathers. It was—as always—his energy, his enthusiasm, his interest in others.

  I must remember to think of him like this, I thought, confused by my shifting feelings of suspicion, anger, doubt, and intense love. If I only knew for certain he wasn’t cheating on me—or if he was—it would be far easier on my psyche than hovering in this limbo. At least I could take the appropriate action and move forward.

  But, as the saying goes, be careful what you ask for.

  It happened completely by accident. I was not snooping (no matter what Viv claims). I was simply going downstairs to get the last bottle of champagne to accompany our anniversary dinner of steaks and the last of the summer’s corn to put on the grill.

  If Griff, or Laura or Jack, had fetched the champagne, if I hadn’t accidentally bumped his desk and jolted the computer out of sleep thereby revealing the outbox for Griff ’s online iPhone email account, there was a good chance Griff and I would never have stepped on the road to divorce.

  But I did bump the computer and I did see the emails he’d sent that morning when I’d been on the phone with Madeleine, and once I read them, I knew Toni Feinzig was right: His passion for me in the laundry room had only been a pathetic ploy to buy time.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “you did the right thing,” Toni said, pushing a box of aloe vera Kleenex in my direction, “by coming to me first.”

  She sounded more like Tony Soprano than Toni Feinzig, I thought, blowing my nose and rethinking my decision to see a lawyer so soon. I didn’t want to ruin Griff or leave him destitute, far from it. I didn’t even want a divorce.

  “I want him to, to . . . to love me.”

  “Absolutely. Of course.” Toni’s voice was scripted sympathetic. As a veteran divorce attorney who specifically sought women clients in her yellow page ads, she’d been in this position many a time before.

  “I can’t believe I . . .” Oh, god. Here came the tears again. “. . . love a man who’s lying to me, who’s planning to leave me for his assistant. . . .” My chest tightened, the crushing words of Griff ’s email hitting as hard as they did the first time I’d read them. “. . . as soon as Laura graduates from high school.”

  Another tsunami of self-pity crashed and I broke down in waves of sobs. Viv brought her arm around my shoulders and squeezed tightly. “It’s okay,” she murmured. “Try to forget about the SOB and concentrate on what you need to do.”

  Thank god for Viv, that she was always there for me when the chips were down. It was true that on the night of the party I’d been so annoyed by her nosiness I’d literally pushed her out the door.

  And yet, within twenty-four hours, there I was in the master bath on the phone to her, breaking down about the emails as she clucked in sympathy just like she used to when I was thirteen and couldn’t stand the utter heartbreak of learning that Justin Danyhew had been passing me love notes in class only to get to my best friend Francine Bracchia, the prettiest girl at South River Junior High.

  Sisters were gifts from heaven, even if they borrowed your jewelry without asking and snitched to your parents behind your back.

  “Take a deep breath and drink some water,” she’d urged during my master-bath breakdown as I robotically followed her order, putting my mouth to the bathroom faucet like Laura used to when she was little. “Now start from the beginning. You found the emails on Griff ’s computer. Then what?”

  With difficulty, as if it had been years, not hours, after discovering them, I tried to re-create the chain of events:

  When I’d read enough, I shut down the computer to preserve what was left of my self-esteem, sat back, and tried to breathe. I almost couldn’t. Two thoughts: A) My marriage was over, and B) What the heck was I doing in this dark basement?

  Oh, right. Champagne. To celebrate.

  Because I am a woman and a mother, I made the definitive choice to say nothing about what I’d read so as not to ruin what otherwise might have been a perfect day for Laura and Jack. Instead, I brought up the champagne and toasted our family, chatted with the children as we did the dishes, and even, later that night, succumbed to sex with my husband. (I know! Awful!) Numb, stunned, I kissed him good night and somehow managed to look, talk, and act like a functioning human the next
morning despite the black hollow rotting me from within.

  It wasn’t until the house was empty that I let myself unravel in a deep, hot bath, crying forcefully as I reread Griff’s emails I’d printed out that morning.

  TO: b.robeson@emerly.edu (Bree!)

  FROM: d.griffiths@emerly.edu

  RE: last night

  you’re right. . . . it’d be a burden off our backs if we could tell Kat now, especially, as you point out, the fight she and I had last night indicates there’s good reason to think that if she doesn’t know already . . . then she suspects.

  . . . still, I want to stick with my plan to break it to her after Laura graduates. like I said, that’ll give Kat a summer to adjust. Change is hard enough . . . but, in this case, she’ll not only have to cope with change but also the fact that I’ve been—let’s face it—lying to her for months. She’s been my wife for 20 yrs, bree. She’s going to be devastated.

  And then, another email to Bree, at the bottom of which was . . .

  —I guess it goes back to what you said—my age. I’m a few years away from fifty and it’s either now or never. And if you and I don’t do this now, I’m sure I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.

  I just hope I can keep it together until June. I dunno. Kat’s smart and I dread to think what she’ll do when she finds out. But if we tell her now, I can guarantee the first thing she’ll do is drain the account and leave us high and dry and that, my dear, would be the end of our future. ☺

  Bottom line? We have to be more careful in what we say, etc. . . .

  Until Monday . . .

  G

  “Interestingly enough,” I told Viv, “his inbox had been cleaned out sometime either in the night or the morning after I got the champagne. I can only imagine Bree’s emails to him.”

  Viv was silent for a while. “Well, I guess we have our confirmation.”

  I sniffled back a few tears as I shivered in the cooling water. “I guess so.”

  “Kind of supports what I said earlier, about couples not being designed to stay together for fifty years. I gotta say, Kat, from that line you read about him turning fifty, this is a guy going through a classic middle-age crisis.”

  I checked the mirror and was horrified by my reflection, puffy, red-rimmed eyes. “Why couldn’t he have just bought a Miata?”

  “Indeed.” In the background, the school bell rang, indicating her free period was up and she needed to get ready for her next class. “There’s only one thing to do. We gotta go see Toni.”

  “But I don’t want a divorce. What I want is for my husband to love me.”

  “And, as your older sister, I want you to be protected. You can’t just sit around until Laura’s graduation and hope he changes his mind only to have him hand you a set of divorce papers.”

  “I can’t?” Seemed like a fairly reasonable course of action to me, provided I had enough chocolate . . . and didn’t have to get out of bed. Could humans hibernate?

  “Think of Beth Williams. Do you want to end up like her, stocking shelves at Wegmans? At least you have the advantage of a heads-up, so let’s use it. I’m calling.”

  Which she did. Which was how I ended up in Toni’s office.

  “Earth to Kat.” Toni’s piercing voice snapped me to attention. “I know you’re grieving, but now is not the moment to drift into the sea of pity. I need you here, present, thinking not like a wronged woman, but like a wronged man.”

  Viv, her arm firmly around my shoulders, said, “Don’t you have that backward?”

  “Absolutely not. In other words, I want you to grow a pair. Look, when it comes to divorce, most of my jilted clients . . .”

  I bristled and, sensing this,Viv cleared her throat in warning. “She’s a bit more than a wallflower stood up at the prom, Toni. Though, I should add, right now she’s about as fragile.”

  “The point I’m trying to make,” Toni said, softening her tone, “is that, when faced with marital dissolution, women tend to think with their hearts whereas men think with their bank accounts. Which is why nine times out of ten, women get screwed financially in divorces.”

  The “D” word again. I wished everyone would stop using it.

  “How do you think with a bank account?” Viv used her practical teacher’s voice. “Bank accounts don’t have brains.”

  “Neither do other parts of male anatomy and yet I’ve found they drive most thoughts of the male population.”

  Harsh.

  “What I’m trying to press upon you, Kat, is that if you confront your husband now with virtually no assets to your name besides the ones you two hold mutually, you will only be hurting yourself in the long run since there is a very strong possibility that he’ll call your bluff and declare immediately that he’s leaving you, at which point you will be on your own. Think of his email—this is a man with one foot already out the door. Do you understand?”

  I told her I did, but she went on, anyway, to relate the story of another local woman—not, for once, the infamously abandoned and unwise Beth Williams—who, upon finding her husband had been conducting an affair with a colleague at work, packed up and took the children to her mother’s house.

  “This is categorically the worst move a woman can make. In so doing, she robbed herself of her own home, the one she’d maintained, simply because she left the domicile first. At least you didn’t do that.”

  Though it had crossed my mind, as had several other dramatic scenarios:

  Fantasy #1—After finding those emails, my first impulse was to run to my bedroom, gather my stuff, throw it in the back of the car, and head west. I wanted to never see Griff again. At which point, he’d find himself missing me so much he’d pledge to never rest until he held me in his arms, promising his undying love forever.

  Fantasy #2—Not nearly as romantic, but still inspiring in a Thelma and Louise kind of way, was to print Griff’s emails and lay them out on the marital bed, followed by packing up, stepping on the gas, and heading west, yadda, yadda, yadda. When he came home and realized what horror he’d wrought, he’d read my succinct note—something about how I was sorry to have burdened him for twenty years—after which he’d get down on his knees and curse himself for not appreciating me when he had the chance.

  Toni was right. Both scenarios ended with Griff apologizing and begging my forgiveness. I couldn’t think of the alternate ending—him leaving. It simply did not compute.

  Toni regarded me with her fishy eyes. “I’m assuming the situation is not abusive.”

  “Of course not!” The idea of Griff hitting me or even raising his voice was preposterous. “My husband has never been anything but considerate.”

  “She’s right,” Viv added. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  Toni bit her lip, as though Griff’s placidity were regrettable. “Then here’s my suggestion, and bear with me. It might be rather hard to take initially.”

  Kick him out. Change the locks. Serve him with papers. Demand a divorce and circle for-rent ads in the classifieds. Take Laura aside and tell her the truth. Get yourself into daily psychotherapy with antidepressants. Change back to your maiden name. Burn the socks he scatters around the bedroom floor. Pour yourself a shot of tequila. I held my breath, anxiously awaiting which dramatic step she’d have me take.

  “Shut up and stay with him, so if—and when—he asks for a divorce, you’ll be prepared financially.”

  What? Anticipation popped like a balloon. “How am I supposed to do that?”

  Viv said, “You have to admit, Toni, that would be kind of hard, to live with a man, have sex with him, just to save money.”

  “Nonsense. Women stay with their husbands for financial reasons all the time, have for ages. In Kat’s situation, it’s the only sensible strategy.”

  Screw strategy. This was my heart, my soul, my very sanity at stake here.

  “I’m not asking you to stay with your husband forever like they used to in your mother’s generation.”

  Viv and I fla
shed each other questioning looks. How did she know?

  “I’m saying use this window until June to photocopy all your records, clear up your credit rating, get a better job, and open your own bank account with enough money to keep you afloat after he leaves. Prior planning prevents piss-poor performance, and all that.”

  “I can’t.” I wiggled out of Viv’s grasp. “No way. I’ve barely been able to endure the past few days without going out of my mind. A minute more of living with him and not admitting what I’ve discovered would be torture.”

  “Ah, ah, ah.” Toni wagged her finger. “You’re thinking with your heart instead of your bank account, Kat. What did I say about that?”

  Viv, more focused than I, said, “Speaking of thinking like a man, let me ask how much you think this divorce will cost my sister.”

  It was the question my very female brain wanted to pose since I’d first stepped into Toni’s plush office with its pewter-colored walls and thick oriental rugs, built-in bookshelves, cushy leather furniture, and expensively framed, expensively obtained diplomas. But somewhere between crying about the end of my marriage and reeling from the shock of Toni’s advice to stay with Griff, I’d forgotten about money.

  Then again, I always forgot about money. Hence, my problems.

  “My usual retainer is $15,000.”

  Holy crap! In home designer currency, that could buy a French Godin stove and hood.

  Viv and I were speechless. Fifteen grand was my annual starting salary when I’d first started working for Chloe. Fifteen grand had bought Viv her used Passat.

  “Fifteen thousand is reasonable for this area,” Toni said. “Go to New York and it can be $10,000 more. Keep in mind that’s just my retainer, too. The actual divorce could end up costing much more, depending on complications, not to mention the additional expenses of moving, renting, insurance, your own food, health care, et cetera.”