The Cradle Robbers

by Ayelet Waldman

  I was about to open my mouth when I looked at Chiki standing in the doorway, the Swiffer in his hands. Like most ex-prisoners, he liked to keep his surroundings not just neat and tidy, but almost compulsively clean. Perhaps he was like this before his experiences in prison, I don’t know. It was an uphill battle in this garage, what with the rats and all, but the first thing Chiki did when he started to work for us was transform a storage unit in a corner of the garage into a utility closet, complete with spray bottles of every form of cleaner available at the market. He was partial to aromatherapy. His favorite implement was definitely the Swiffer, and he swished that thing around three or four times a day, catching up every bit of dust before it had a chance to settle on the floor. Chiki was a very young man when he went to prison, just out of his teens, slightly built and delicate. I never asked him what happened to him on the inside. I did not need to.

  Now, as I watched him indulge his grim OCD, I thought of the young mother in prison, and the promise Chiki had made to his cousin and to her. I looked down at my own baby, safe in her nest of blankets in the car seat, her lips pursed in her sleep.

  “I’ll make some calls,” I said.

  “Thank you, Juliet. Fidelia will really appreciate it, and so will Sandra. I really appreciate it. You know, it’s so hard for those ladies inside.”

  “Yeah, I know, Chiki. It’s hard.”

  Three

  THAT night was book club, and even though I was nowhere near done with the book, I decided to go. I was feeling guilty about not having managed to reach anyone at the Lambs of the Lord, despite leaving a dozen progressively more irritated voicemail messages. I needed the company of some girlfriends, and if previous experience was anything to go by, I wasn’t going to be the only book club member derelict in my belletristic duties. In fact, there were a few who had never once, in the six months we’d been meeting, managed to get through a novel, even when we’d chosen The Da Vinci Code expressly to guarantee them a simplified and propulsive literary experience. This month’s novel was Rabbit at Rest, by John Updike, selected by the wife of a client of my best friend Stacey, solely for the purposes, I’m convinced, of announcing to the group that her husband’s screen adaptation had just been greenlit. Which she had done eight times so far, by my count. And we hadn’t yet met to discuss the book.

  Stacey and I were at Greenblatt’s, a delicatessen on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, not too far from my house. In addition to decent pastrami, Greenblatt’s has what Stacey insists is the best selection of fine wine in the city. If I were on my own I would have stopped at the Safeway and picked up something in “red” or “white,” but my oldest friend has a far more epicurean palate. Stacey has always been a classier girl than I; even at college she had already developed a style that, together with her shimmering good looks, intimidated every single person on campus, male or female. We became friends despite the fact that Stacey had riding boots especially constructed for her feet and I was a Jersey girl who thought the sale rack at Abraham & Strauss was the height of luxury. It helped back then to cement our friendship that I was as smart as she was. We competed on an even keel for a while, until I dropped onto the mommy track and she stayed on the bullet train to superstardom, becoming one of the most successful agents at International Creative Artists. What keeps Stacey and me together is loyalty and love. For all our differences, I know I can trust her with anything, even the grimmest and most repulsive secret of my life. She would stand by me through it all. And I feel the same way about her. Still, I can’t help but be jealous of the fact that we seem to be on opposite trajectories. Like a normal person, I get fatter and more wrinkled as we creep inexorably up the ladder of our thirties. Stacey gets thinner and ever more dewy and luminous. Pretty soon people are going to start thinking I’m her mother. And then, inevitably, her grandmother.

  “This is what I’m bringing,” she said, holding up a bottle of Château Guiraud Sauternes 1990.

  “Oh come on, Stacey. That’s a fifty-dollar bottle of wine.”

  “No, it’s a seventy-dollar bottle of wine that I’m getting for fifty bucks. If you tell the ladies that it was on sale, I’ll kill you.”

  Catering our book club has become something of a competitive sport. I lay the blame squarely on Stacey. The first night she was hosting, she had to work late to close a deal, and instead of whipping up a pot of pasta or picking up some cheese and crackers at the supermarket, she instructed her assistant to arrange dinner for twelve. It was the young woman’s first and last week on the job, and I can still taste the poached lobster in ginger sauce. And that was just the first course. Since then, each hosting member has felt the need to ratchet up the level of hysteria, and the books we read are fast becoming beside the point. Pretty soon we’ll be dipping truffle fingers into foie gras. We’ve already done the blinis and caviar.

  The guests were each responsible for a bottle of wine to complement the hostess’s largesse, which explained our little shopping excursion. I picked up a bottle from the sale bin. “I’m bringing this. Long Vineyards Johannesburg Riesling. Eighteen dollars. Perfect. Generous, even. Maybe I can find something for under ten.”

  “Just buy the wine, Juliet,” Stacey said, tottering off in the direction of the cash register. I gazed longingly at her shoes. I think one of the things I miss most about working full-time as an attorney is the freedom to spend ridiculous sums of money on shoes. It’s hard to rationalize the expenditure when your days are spent on the playground or in a garage in Westminster. I fantasized for a moment about doing a worker’s compensation stakeout in a pair of Marc Jacobs slingbacks. I inevitably end up peeing in the bushes at least once or twice during a long day trapped in my car outside a malingering employee’s house, and I somehow doubt the designer took squatting and spraying into account when creating his satin prints. He definitely didn’t construct them for climbing up to the top of a play structure to retrieve a stranded toddler. And they aren’t finger paint–repellent. I’ve actually proved that. Or rather, Isaac has.

  Book club was in full swing by the time we arrived. Mine was by far the cheapest wine offering and, to Stacey’s dismay, hers was not the most expensive. Someone had left the $140 price tag on a bottle of Perrier-Jouët. I was quite relieved that I’d scraped off all evidence of my parsimony. Still, I don’t think my mother has ever spent even eighteen bucks on a bottle of wine. In my family, if it’s over $7.99 and has a cork, we keep it for a special occasion.

  Our hostess for the evening was someone I’d introduced to the book club. I’d met Frances at this little swim school I’d been taking the kids to for the past few years, way over in West L.A. The lessons are fifteen minutes long, which wouldn’t give you enough time to get to know someone unless you were a woman with small children used to cramming an intimate conversation into the time it takes to change a diaper. While her little boy and my two kids were paddling around in their flippers and wings and bobbing after rubber dinosaurs to the cheers of their pathologically good-natured college student instructors, Frances and I sat side by side in the shade and exchanged life histories. By the time Ruby was jumping off the diving board, I knew everything about Frances, from the complications of her mother’s third divorce to the frustrations her husband felt at having been passed over for partner at his law firm. Best of all, I’d gotten lots of free medical advice. There’s nothing that pleases a hypochondriac so well as an obliging new physician friend. Frances hadn’t practiced since her daughter was born, but she was a gynecological surgeon by training and we’d already discussed everything from prolapsed uteruses to incontinence to fibroid tumors. Not that I suffered from any of those ailments, but you can never be too prepared.

  Tonight, however, Frances was showing off her skills as a sushi chef. She’d prepared a lavish spread of raw and cooked fish and Japanese salads and rice, and was handing out bamboo mats and sheets of seaweed. The other women all valiantly attempted a variety of maki rolls, but I kept to the hand rolls and was soon contently balancing
a heaping plate on my lap.

  Playing with our food loosened us up even more than usual, and by the time the heated sake and various wines were passed around, the gossip had already started. Inevitably, as is always the case when a group of married women in their thirties gathers, conversation began with our children and moved quickly to our husbands. There was one woman in the group whose spouse was female, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter; she complained right along with the rest of us. Rachel bitched about how her husband would walk in the door every evening after being at work all day and announce that he needed time to “decompress” in front of the television before being forced to deal with her or the kids. “Honestly,” she said, “sometimes I just feel like pitching the baby at his head and taking off. When do I get to decompress?” Nods all around at that one.

  Colleen was on a tear about her husband’s new passion—his rock and roll band. “They practice every weekend. Every single weekend. He’s a thirty-seven-year-old orthodontist, and suddenly he thinks he’s Eric Clapton. And when I dare to suggest that maybe he should consider missing practice so that he could go to Nicky’s hockey game, then I’m the old lady who’s bringing him down. He gives me this adolescent grief, like I’m his mother!”

  “I wish Zach would miss Dylan’s games,” Beth said. “He gets absolutely insane about soccer. You guys had to sign that positive cheering pledge, didn’t you?” We had all signed the league’s pledge to cheer on our children using only affirming and encouraging words. “Well, I laminated ours and put it on the fridge. It hasn’t done any good. Zach still stands there on the sidelines screaming like a maniac. And poor Dylan just keeps running back and forth pretending he can’t hear anything his father is saying to him.”

  I opened my mouth to tell the women about my own aging adolescent, with his thousands of dollars’ worth of superhero toys and his comic books. The truth is, however, that I find that part of Peter’s personality endearing. I knew from our very first date that he was an overgrown child—he’d shown up with a Fantastic Four button clipped to his lapel. But he’d also had a bouquet of irises in his hand. Peter is almost always willing to share his toys with my other children. And, frankly, he is a whole lot better at playing with Ruby and Isaac than I am. No, the difficulties we were experiencing had nothing to do with his immaturity.

  “I just have to ask this question,” Katherine, our resident lesbian, said suddenly. “How often do you guys, you know . . . do it?”

  The women all laughed, and a few groaned. We’d all had this conversation before. Whenever women gather to talk, the topic inevitably bubbles to the surface. The deep, dark, not-so-secret secret of contemporary American marriage is that nobody is having any sex.

  “We’ve had sex three times,” Kristina said.

  “This week?” I asked, stunned. I didn’t know anybody who was having sex three times a week. Those were pre-kid numbers.

  “No. Three times. That I can remember. Donovan, Bianca, and Trenton. Three kids, three times. That’s it.” She didn’t look like she was kidding.

  “Has anybody actually tried making a date for sex like all the magazines suggest?” Lucy asked. Lucy is another mom I met on the circuit. Our daughters are in the same class, and she has a son a year younger than Isaac. Lucy is one of those beautiful Los Angeles women who manage within weeks of giving birth to be back in their hip-hugger jeans and midriff-baring tops. I hate her.

  “Yeah, right,” Frances said. “Date night. Give me a break. That’s invariably the night the cat decides to vomit in our bed or one of the kids has a four-hour temper tantrum. Or the baby-sitter’s husband gets arrested and she needs to go to Riverside to bail him out. Date night never happens. And anyway, the problem isn’t making time for sex. The problem is wanting sex.”

  Katherine said, “I don’t have a sex drive. But neither does Amy, so we don’t really have a problem. That’s one of the many nice things about being a lesbian. Bed death is a mutually agreed-upon phenomenon.”

  Rachel said, “Well, that’s certainly not true in my house. Ben never stops complaining about it. Never. It’s become a running gag with him. If I hear one more joke about hookers, I’m going to kill him.”

  “Do you know,” Kristina said, “the other night we were out with two couples for dinner and one of the men actually made some crack about how the guys ought to all get together and split the cost of a prostitute. They talked about it for ages. Where they’d get her, who would go first. I finally had to tell them to shut up. They were pretending to be kidding around, but I’m not the only one who sensed more than a dash of seriousness in the conversation.”

  “The danger is always there,” Stacey said, her eyes fixed to the maki roll she held delicately between vermilion-polished nails. Stacey and her husband were back together again, but they have been separated more than once. Andy strays, usually with a younger and less accomplished version of his wife. It’s not hard to figure out that he finds Stacey intimidating, that her beauty and success emasculate him to some degree. Men like Andy are made uncomfortable, even frightened, by a woman’s intelligence. I read a study once that showed that for men there is a 35 percent increase in the likelihood of marriage for each 16-point rise in their IQ. For women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point increase. Obviously Andy isn’t alone in desiring a bimbo.

  Stacey’s warning cast a momentary pall over the group. Jeannie, who is a few years younger than the rest of us, spoke up. “Our sex life is still pretty terrific,” she said.

  “You don’t have children,” Kristina reminded her.

  A pretty rose stain spread across the young woman’s cheeks. “We will soon,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

  “Well then kiss your libido good-bye.”

  That’s what we were giving her in lieu of congratulations? “Oh, Kristina,” I said. “It’s not necessarily true. I was voracious when I was pregnant. After I got over all the throwing up. And before the reflux and the hemorrhoids really kicked in. I wanted it all the time!”

  Katherine said, “When was that, exactly? When you had no nausea, reflux, hemorrhoids . . .”

  Lucy added, “Or varicose veins, restless leg syndrome, swollen ankles, migraine headaches . . .”

  “Or yeast infections, unusual body odor, cramping, vaginal dryness . . .” Beth laughed.

  “Don’t forget the full-body itching!” Colleen said. She was days away from giving birth. “I’ve been itching for months, even with enough prednisone to turn this baby into an East German weight lifter.”

  “Stop it!” I said. “The poor woman is, what, three months pregnant?”

  “Eight weeks,” Jeannie whispered.

  “Eight weeks!” I said. “Don’t terrify her. She’s all aglow. Maybe she won’t suffer from any of our symptoms. And anyway, we were talking about sex. Sex. Not full-body itching or yeast infections.”

  “Oh, she’s never going to have sex again,” Colleen said. “She might as well get used to that now.”

  “Doesn’t anyone want to talk about the book?” Barbie whined. “I prepared a whole series of questions for the group based on my analysis of the characters. As you know, my husband is adapting the book for the screen and has already been signed to direct it himself. Let’s start with the end.”

  “Wait!” I said. “I haven’t finished it. Don’t give anything away.”

  But she didn’t hear me. “Wasn’t Rabbit’s death, like, the most poetic thing you’ve ever read?”

  Four

  LAST month, after I rear-ended someone on the 10, Peter made me promise not to use my cell phone while driving. The nice young man I bashed in to was also talking on his cell phone, so he couldn’t condemn me as easily as my husband did, but it’s true, I’m a bad enough driver without the additional distraction. Still, much of an investigator’s work is done on the phone, even in the computer age, and I spend an awful lot of time in my car. Luckily, there was a long wait on the pickup line in front of Ruby’s school. I handed Isaac a juic
e box and half a peanut butter sandwich, popped Sadie onto a breast to catch a little mid-flight refueling before we set off for tae kwon do, and called the office. I had asked Chiki to put the word out to his family that if Fidelia called, they should find out if she knew of any women who were now out of custody who had had experiences with the Lambs of the Lord. I wanted to do everything possible to avoid a plane ride up to Pleasanton to the foster care agency’s office, and since they weren’t answering my calls, I thought an old client might be the best way to find out about them.

  “I’ve got a name for you,” Chiki said. “Fidelia doesn’t know for sure, but one of the other women behind her in line for the phone said she heard about this lady whose baby was taken by the Lambs of the Lord. The lady got out and is living in Canoga Park, in the Penfield Avenue projects.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “They called her Sister Pauline. No one could remember her last name, but her mother’s the head of the tenants’ commission out at Penfield Avenue. They knew that for sure. They said Sister Pauline used to brag about her mama all the time.”

  “Okay, I’ll find her. Canoga Park. It figures.” In the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, it would take me half an hour to get all the way out to Canoga Park. After school on a weekday? There was no way I could make it there and back during the kids’ tae kwon do class, even if I signed them up for an extra half hour of sparring.

  “Chiki,” I said. “Do me a favor: Fax requests for legal interviews with Fidelia and Sandra Lorgeree up to Dartmore for me, just in case I have to go.”