Slightly Single

by Wendy Markham

  Getting organized.

  Which is why, the moment I get back to my office, I enter his name and number in alphabetical order in my Palm Pilot before I throw the card away.

  After all, you just never know when you might need a copywriter.

  Twelve

  Three weeks and seven pounds—give or take on both—later, I find myself stepping off a bus in Buffalo just before midnight. This is no state-of-the-art Hampton Jitney with reclining seats and fresh herbs wafting in the air.

  In fact, you don’t want to know what’s been wafting in the air on this bus, which is filled with men, most of whom look, smell and act like they just got out of prison. You would be surprised how many ex-cons take the bus to Buffalo to kick off Fourth of July weekend. It appears to be a tradition that’s somehow escaped me until now.

  Three different men, all of them missing at least one tooth, offer to carry my bag as I walk toward the terminal. I thank them all politely—thanks, but no thanks. Two of them scuttle off into the night, but a third calls me a bitch and follows me all the way into the terminal.

  My brother Joey and his wife Sara are waiting there for me, just as they promised.

  After we’ve hugged and kissed and talked about whether my trip was as awful as they imagine—it was—we head to the car.

  “Why do you keep looking over your shoulder, Trace?” Joey asks.

  “No reason.” Actually, I’m making sure the hostile would-be-bag-carrier isn’t still shadowing us. Hope I don’t run into him on the return trip Monday.

  “Have you lost weight, Tracey?” Sara asks, behind me holding the door open as I climb into the back seat of their two-door Blazer.

  “You can actually tell from that angle?”

  “Definitely!”

  She’s so sweet, Sara. It’s almost enough to make me stop resenting her for being able to eat absolutely anything she wants and still be built like a lollypop with hair. My mother and Mary Beth are always saying she’s too skinny. But they’re the ones who told me I looked beautiful in that red dress with the gathered skirt and shoulder pads for the junior prom, so what do they know?

  “Have you been dieting, or exercising, or both?” Sara asks.

  “Both, actually.” I tell her how I’ve been walking all over Manhattan every chance I get, and how I’ve been doing the Jane Fonda workout tape Brenda loaned me. At first I felt like a clod and I wanted to give up, but Brenda urged me to stick with it. It took me a few times to figure out the moves, but now I actually kind of enjoy it.

  As we drive the forty-some miles back to Brookside, Sara and I do most of the talking. Like I said, Joey is the silent type, especially now that he has a wife around who can converse on his behalf. Sara tells me about their new house and their Memorial Day camping trip and how they’re trying to get pregnant.

  She also tells me that she’s worried about Mary Beth.

  “Why?” I’ve talked to my sister a few times over the past week or two, and she always sounds fine.

  “Did she tell you she had dinner with Vinnie?”

  “No!” I can’t believe it.

  “She didn’t tell us, either, did she, Joey?”

  “Nope.”

  “We found out through Joey’s friend Frank’s brother Al. He saw the two of them at Applebee’s with the kids.”

  “With the kids?” I echo. “Then maybe it wasn’t—”

  “It was,” Sara assures me. “Al said Mary Beth had this hopeful look on her face. And his wife, Amy, said that Vinnie kept flirting with the waitress.”

  “In front of his kids?” But I wouldn’t put it past him, the slime.

  “That’s what I mean. He hasn’t changed a bit, has he, Joey?”

  “Nope.”

  I glance at my brother, whose gaze is fixed straight ahead on the sporadic Thruway traffic, and I wonder whether he even knows what we’re talking about.

  “Somebody should talk to Mary Beth,” Sara tells me. “I keep telling your brother to do it….”

  Joey snorts at that. Obviously, he’s been following the conversation.

  “She’s your sister, Joe,” Sara points out. “I can’t do it—I’m just an in-law. Maybe while you’re home, Tracey, you can find out what she’s doing with Vinnie. I just hate to see her make a mistake and go back to him.”

  “He’d never take her back even if she wanted him,” I say.

  “You never know, Tracey. He had it pretty good when he was living with her. Home-cooked meals, a house, someone to watch the kids—now when he takes them for visitation he tries to dump them off on his mother.”

  “Really? How do you know that?”

  “Vince Junior told me.”

  “Vince Junior told you that his dad tries to dump him and Nino off on their grandmother?”

  “In so many words,” Sara says, and Joey snorts again.

  “Cut that out, Joey,” she tells him, then turns back to me. “Your brother thinks I’m making this stuff up, but I’m not. And anyway, he heard what Al and Amy said about Mary Beth and Vinnie in Applebee’s. Amy said Mary Beth was all glowing, like they were out on a date or something.”

  I can just picture my sister’s face wearing her Vinnie look. She’s always been starry-eyed around him. Even after they were married a few years. Even after she knew for sure he was cheating on her.

  With that thought, an image of Will slams into my mind.

  It’s not the same thing, me and Will.

  It’s not.

  I know I almost convinced myself that he was cheating on me a few weeks ago. But I’ve done a few more jobs for Milos since then, and I’ve decided it might have been my imagination. Everyone’s been nice to me, even Zoe. Nobody seems to be acting suspiciously or trying to hide anything, the way they would if Will had been fooling around with someone at Eat Drink Or Be Married.

  Will has called me every week since he’s been gone, and we even made tentative plans for me to go up and visit him later in July. He said there’s a rumor that he might get the lead in Sunday in the Park with George, and that I should come for that if it happens.

  Every time we talk, there’s a big commotion in the background. But I’m getting used to it now. It’s kind of like talking to someone who’s living in a dorm. There are always people around, and somebody always needs to use the phone. No opportunity for intimate conversation. We pretty much just tell each other what we’ve been doing.

  Will has been immersed in musical theater from morning till night. He’s had minor roles in two more shows—one of Herod’s henchmen in Jesus Christ, Superstar, and Laza Wolf, the wealthy guy who loses Tzeitel to the lowly tailor she loves, in Fiddler on the Roof. I was surprised, since he seems more like romantic hero material than character parts. But maybe that’s just my perception.

  “How are Mom and Dad?” I ask Sara and Joey, needing to think about something other than Will or my sister’s troubled relationship with her ex.

  “They’re fine,” is Joey’s typically vague reply.

  “Your mother had to get a stronger prescription for her glasses, and your father thought he was going to be laid off at the plant last week but nothing’s happened yet,” Sara tells me. “Oh, and they ordered a new couch for the living room.”

  “It’s about time!” I picture the low-backed brown-and-tan plaid couch that’s been there so long I can remember throwing up on it one day when my kindergarten teacher sent me home early from school.

  “Yeah, your father didn’t want to get it because of the layoff that might be happening, but little Danny drew all over it in colored markers—not the washable kind—and they really have no choice.”

  Little Danny is my other nephew—my brother Danny and sister-in-law Michaela’s little boy. He’s only eighteen months old, and I can’t wait to see how he’s grown since Easter.

  “Your parents are going to be so happy when they see you tomorrow at the party,” Sara tells me. “I’m glad you decided to surprise them.”

  “Yeah, it’ll be fun.�
�� I’m thinking that it’s too bad my friend Andrea isn’t going to be around this weekend. She’s at her cousin’s wedding in Rochester. When I called her the other night to try and make plans to see her while I’m here, we talked about how she should come to New York to visit me. But I can tell it’s not going to happen. People from Brookside have the same attitude toward New York City as people from the city have toward the nether regions of the state. East is east, west is west, home is best.

  We’re in Brookside now, pulling off the exit and paying the toll. Everything looks exactly the same, I notice, as we pass the strip with its fast food joints and the infamous Applebee’s. We’ve left the skimpy business district behind before you can say K-mart, and now we’re heading toward my sister’s house. I’ll be spending the night there so that my parents will be surprised tomorrow when I show up at their party.

  “I wish you could stay with me and Joey,” Sara says. She and my brother are living above her parents’ garage, where they’ve been ever since they got married three years ago.

  She promises, “When we move into our new place, you can stay in the guest room any time you want, Tracey.”

  “That would be great,” I say, trying to imagine what it would feel like to be happily married with a house with a real live guest room. I wonder if I’ll ever know. “When do you move in?”

  “We close in August, but it needs a lot of work.”

  “Should be livable by Christmas,” Joey says.

  “Oh, Joey, come on.” She swats his arm.

  “What? I’m serious, Sara.”

  “We’re not waiting till Christmas to be in our own place.”

  I half listen as they argue about it.

  I’m staring out the window as we drive through the quiet, streetlight-illuminated streets of my hometown. We pass the gray stone library and the redbrick elementary school and the rough patch of sidewalk where I once fell off my bike and needed stitches in my knee. I wonder if they’ve fixed the concrete there. Last time I walked down that block, when I was home last Thanksgiving, it was still pothole ridden. They get so much snow up here in winter that the sidewalk plows wreak havoc from late October till March.

  Brookside isn’t the kind of town where municipal workers give a lot of care to repairs. It’s a blue-collar town that’s seen one too many of its factories shut down. My father and Danny are both employed by one of the few remaining plants, and there are always rumors that it’s going to be swallowed up by some big corporation that will decide to move operations to Mexico or Asia. My mother’s claim to fame is that in a layoff situation, she can feed a family of eight for weeks with the staples in her cupboard and, if the layoff is timed right, the contents of the backyard vegetable garden.

  I think about some of the parties Milos has catered over the past few weeks—parties in the most elegant homes I’ve ever seen, with food that costs more than it does for my mother to do a year’s worth of grocery shopping at Tops Market in Brookside.

  Until recently, I’d never tasted Dom Perignon and Beluga caviar. Now that I’ve had a sip and a nibble, I can’t say that I get what all the fuss is about.

  Especially now, being back here in Brookside, where everyone in my family is still living off pasta and white bread and generic-brand soda. I imagine what my parents could do with the money Milos’s clients spend on flowers alone for a single event.

  But the funny thing is, some of the stuff my mother used to make in a pinch is now considered haute cuisine—Italian gourmet. Sauteed dandelion greens, broccoli rabe with garlic, even pasta fagiolo. Peasant food, she used to call it.

  We pull up in front of the small cape where my sister lives. There are lights on, and Vinnie’s green SUV is in the driveway.

  “He’s here!” I say in disbelief.

  “No, she’s using his car while hers is getting a new muffler,” Sara tells me. “It was supposed to be ready today, but there was some problem, so she’s getting it back in the morning.”

  “That’s a relief.” I’m not in the mood to see my two-timing ex-brother-in-law. “I’m surprised he’s letting her drive the Explorer.”

  “It’s just so that he doesn’t have to cart the kids around while her car is in the shop,” Sara says. “Vince Junior has T-ball practice, and they both have swimming lessons, and your sister’s always carpooling them someplace. And don’t worry about Vinnie—he’s got his mother’s car while Mary Beth’s using his.”

  My sister’s face appears in the picture window, and then she’s opening the front door.

  I climb out of the car, give Sara a quick hug and try to take my bag from Joey, who insists on carrying it to the house for me.

  “I tried calling you at work this afternoon,” Mary Beth says, escorting me into the familiar, toy-cluttered living room. “But I got your voice mail.”

  “The company closed at noon because of the holiday weekend,” I tell her.

  “That’s nice.”

  “Yeah.” Especially since I didn’t have to waste a sick day or ask Jake for a half day off. “Why did you call me?”

  “I couldn’t remember if I told you the party tomorrow is going to be dressy. But it’s okay if you didn’t bring anything—you can borrow something of mine.” She gapes at me. “Or maybe you can’t. Look at you, Tracey! You’ve lost a ton of weight!”

  “I have not!” I protest, loving it. “Not a ton.”

  Not yet, at least.

  “How much?”

  “About thirteen pounds total, last time I checked.”

  “Don’t overdo it,” she warns, sounding just like my mother.

  I look at my sister, standing there in her sweatpants and sweatshirt that do little to conceal her belly and hips and thighs, and I feel sorry for her.

  “Trust me, I’m not overdoing it,” I assure Mary Beth. “I have at least twenty more pounds to lose.”

  “Twenty! You do not!”

  “Mary Beth—”

  “Five more pounds, maybe,” she says. “You want something to drink? I’ve got pop.”

  Pop. I’m definitely not in New York anymore.

  “Do you have any diet stuff?” I ask her.

  “Sure. You want anything to eat?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Did you eat on the bus?”

  “Yep,” I lie, because I don’t feel like having her force-feed me. She and my mother freak out if they think somebody’s missed a meal.

  I watch her leave the room, and I feel guilty for wondering if my butt has ever been as big as hers is. I love my sister. She’s my favorite person in the world.

  But we’re so different.

  At least, that’s what I’ve always told myself.

  I look around the living room, with its Fisher Price meets Sears decor. I smile when I see the boys’ latest school pictures framed on a shelf in the entertainment center. I stop smiling when I notice that my sister and Vinnie’s wedding portrait is exactly where it’s always been.

  “Why haven’t you taken that down, Mary Beth?” I ask, pointing at it when she reappears with two Diet Cokes and a bowl of potato chips.

  “What? The wedding picture? What would the boys think if I took it down? That’s me and their dad.”

  “The boys already know you’re getting divorced.” This is a given. I was with her last fall when she told them. Vince Junior seemed to get it, but he wasn’t fazed. Nino was oblivious to the news.

  “They know we’re getting divorced, but I don’t want them to think I hate their dad,” Mary Beth says, sitting on the couch and crunching a chip.

  “That’s crazy. For one thing, you do hate him…don’t you?” I demand when I catch the fleeting expression on her face.

  “He cheated on me when I was pregnant. I found out he was with another woman while I was in labor, Tracey. How do you think I feel about him?” she replies.

  “Well, then, get rid of this picture,” I insist, crossing the room and taking it off the shelf.

  “Now?”

  “Here.”
I hand her the frame. “Throw it away.”

  “But you gave us the frame for a wedding present.”

  She’s right. It’s sterling silver, and it’s engraved with their wedding date. I bought it at Things Remembered, and it seemed extravagant back then. When my mother saw it, she said I should have gotten the brass because silver would tarnish.

  I realize it hasn’t.

  And I realize Mary Beth must polish it regularly.

  This makes me ill.

  “Throw it away,” I say again.

  “That seems so—”

  “I’ll do it for you.” I march into her kitchen and stomp on the pedal of the plastic garbage can. As the lid swings open, I drop in the frame. It lands with a splat on top of somebody’s leftover Spaghetti-Os mixed with coffee grounds.

  “There. Don’t you feel better?” I ask my sister as I return to the living room.

  “I guess.”

  But she doesn’t. I can tell it’s killing her.

  She wants the picture back where it belongs.

  She wants Vinnie back where he belongs.

  “Are these Wow chips?” I ask, grabbing one and biting into it.

  “Nope. Full fat.”

  “Oh.” I eat just that one chip, and then I sit on the chair opposite the couch, taking a sip of my Diet Coke. “So how are the boys?”

  “Oh, you’ll see them first thing in the morning. And I mean first thing.” She smiles. “They’re so excited you’re going to be staying here, Trace. They wanted to know if you can spend the whole weekend with us, but I told them you’ll probably sleep at Nana and Poppi’s tomorrow night.”

  “Yeah, I probably should,” I say. My parents would be hurt if I didn’t.

  But I know my mother’s going to be driving me crazy within twenty-four hours. She’ll keep trying to make me feel guilty for moving away. She’ll act like it’s only a temporary thing, the way she always does.

  “I heard Mom and Dad are getting a new couch,” I tell Mary Beth.

  “Yeah. It’s god-awful.”

  “I know. I remember barfing all over it, and I’m not the only one who did over the years.”