Goodbye To All That

by Judith Arnold

  To go to France alone . . . what a scary thought. What an exhilarating idea. What if she never did it? What if she dropped everything and did it tomorrow?

  She couldn’t, of course. Abbie’s bat mitzvah was just months away, and now that the Old Rockford Inn was ripping her off for an extra three bucks a guest, she couldn’t afford a jaunt to Europe. And once Abbie’s bat mitzvah was over, she and Gordon would have to start saving for Noah’s bar mitzvah.

  What had her mother said? At different times in your life you need different things.

  She didn’t need France. She certainly didn’t need an ugly little apartment overlooking a major roadway and a strip mall.

  Time alone, though? Did she need that?

  Don’t even think about it.

  NOAH WAS ALREADY IN BED when Jill and Abbie arrived home around ten. “It’s a school night,” Jill reminded Abbie as they entered the house. “I didn’t mean to keep you out this late.”

  “Wow, like it’s so late,” Abbie argued with the requisite eye-rolling and lip-curling.

  Jill didn’t take Abbie’s sarcasm personally. Of course Abbie would be more affectionate with her grandmother and more snide with her mother. A Good Mom accepted the mood swings of an adolescent daughter without fussing, and she understood that it was her job to be the prime target for whatever snarkiness her daughter chose to spew. She’d spewed her own share of snarkiness at her mother when she’d been Abbie’s age.

  Gordon greeted them as they entered the kitchen through the garage door. “Daddy!” Abbie hollered loud enough to wake Noah up, except for the fact that nothing short of a seven-on-the-Richter-Scale earthquake could wake him up once he was asleep. The alarm on his clock was pitched about as shrilly as a police siren—and even then, he sometimes slept through it.

  Abbie wrapped her father in a big embrace, and Jill, still in Good Mom mode, refused to resent the fact that Abbie hugged her father and her grandmother a lot more exuberantly than she hugged her mother, on those rare occasions when she deigned to hug her mother at all.

  “So, how’s Grandma’s new apartment?” Gordon asked. His hair was tousled, his eyes glazed as if he’d been watching too much TV. The kitchen smelled of olive oil and oregano, and a square, grease-stained pizza box sat on the counter beside the sink. Evidently, discarding the box hadn’t been on his or Noah’s to-do list. Nor, for that matter, had wrapping the two leftover slices that remained inside the box, the cheese congealed and the circles of pepperoni starting to shrivel.

  Abbie babbled about the apartment, answering all Gordon’s questions—as if he actually cared what color the bathroom was or whether Grandma had hung any paintings on the walls. He just wanted to keep Abbie talking, to enjoy a few minutes of happy chatter with his princess before she headed upstairs and vanished into her bedroom to text Caitlin.

  Jill lifted Abbie’s jacket from the chair where she’d tossed it and hung it and her own jacket up in the coat closet. Then she returned to the kitchen. Still immersed in conversation, Gordon had steered Abbie out of the kitchen and up the stairs. Their voices drifted down the hall to Jill, growing fainter.

  She wrapped the leftover pizza and stashed it in the refrigerator, then pulled a can of Diet Coke from the door shelf and snapped it open. A cola-scented wisp of mist rose from the opening and she took a few sweet swigs. By the time she lowered the can, Gordon and Abbie were out of earshot.

  She gazed around her. She’d never considered her kitchen huge, but compared to her mother’s kitchen it was monstrous. All those work surfaces, those cabinets, the full-size appliances, the table and chairs. The windows, now dark but usually filling the room with natural light. The counter-top desk with her computer humming and the screensaver spitting stars at her like the opening moments of the original Star Trek TV show, when William Shatner ponderously intoned, “Space, the Final Frontier.” Gordon had Trekkie tendencies. Jill had watched a lot of those old episodes with him over the years.

  She watched his shows. She put away his leftover pizza and flattened the empty box for the paper recycling bin. She sponged off the counters, which were speckled with crust crumbs, and moved his and Noah’s dirty dishes from the sink to the dishwasher.

  She swore to herself that she wasn’t turning into her mother. It was just that she hadn’t been home when the guys had been feasting on their pizza, and now it was late—too late to nag Gordon about leaving the kitchen a mess, too late to get angry and resentful about having to clean up that mess.

  She absolutely wasn’t her mother. Look at the computer. She hit a key to kill the screensaver, and the bra and panty text she’d composed earlier that day for Velvet Moon shivered to life on the screen.

  See? She had a job. A real job, more creative than running a cash register at First-Rate. Her mother was probably earning minimum wage, whereas Jill . . . well, she didn’t want to calculate her earnings per hour, and her compensation didn’t include benefits, but still. She got to write things. She got to come up with new, edible names for colors, and she could drink Diet Coke while she worked, which she really did have to cut back on, but . . .

  France. Imagine being alone in France rather than alone in her kitchen.

  The sting of her drink’s carbonation caused her eyes to water and she closed them, which liberated her imagination to conjure a stereotypical Parisian scene. A café beside the Seine. A glass of wine and a plate of cheese and fruit and crusty bread. Cute, skinny men in berets. Gorgeous, skinny women in haute couture. Edith Piaf’s nasal voice wafting into the air, accompanied by tinkly accordion music. The vision was pathetically clichéd and corny, but Jill reveled in it. No eye-rolling, lip-curling daughter; no rowdy, rambunctious son. No husband. No pizza crust crumbs and dirty dishes.

  Just France.

  Gordon’s hands alighted on her shoulders and she flinched and blinked herself back to the kitchen. “Seems like someone had fun tonight,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Jill took another gulp of soda—nothing like an icy can of Diet Coke to jolt a person back to reality. “She whined the whole drive over there, then freaked out about how wonderful my mother’s place was.”

  “Was it wonderful?”

  “No. It’s tiny and ugly.”

  “But your mother’s happy there.”

  “At the moment.”

  She shook free of Gordon’s hands and turned to face him. She didn’t really want to go to France without him. He was still tall and handsome and had that crooked smile she’d fallen in love with the first time she’d seen him, when she’d been an undergraduate and he’d been in his first year of Brandeis’s MAT program. She’d just settled at an empty table in the student center with a sandwich and a Diet Coke—her addiction dated back many years—and Sarah Levine’s battered copy of The Awakening, which Sarah had already marked up with highlighter and marginal comments, sparing Jill the need to do so since she had the same prof for post-Civil War American Lit that Sarah had had the previous year. And then Gordon had dropped onto the empty chair across from her, set his sandwich and coffee down on the table and said, “You are far and away the most beautiful girl in this building, so I hope you don’t mind my sitting here.”

  She’d been dumbfounded. She’d never considered herself particularly beautiful, and she’d never heard such a blunt come-on line before. At the time, she’d been sort of going with Marty Fischbein, but he’d been getting on her nerves, acting like an asshole when he drank too much beer—something he did on a regular basis. And this man, this totally unsuave stranger, had had the cutest smile. So she’d told him she didn’t mind his sitting across the table from her.

  She wrapped her arms around him, almost dumping soda down his back, and kissed his cheek. This was the man she’d married, the man she’d chosen to build a life with. She never, ever wanted to picture herself living by herself in a tiny, ugly apartment like her mother. She wanted to love Gordon always, even if loving him meant cleaning up his damn pizza. Even if it meant tolerating his channel-surfing and washi
ng his beard hairs down the sink. She never wanted to reach a point where going to France alone seemed more romantic than going to France with him, even if he called French people frogs.

  But they’d been together only sixteen years, married only fourteen. Who knew how she’d feel twenty-eight years from now? Who knew how many leftover pizza slices it took to wind up where her mother was?

  And to be in France, alone in that café, with the wine and the music and the Seine flowing past . . .

  Shit. She did want that. France. All by herself.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Brooke’s bay was empty when Doug pulled into the garage. Six-fifteen. Where could she be? Were the girls home? With a baby-sitter? Which one? Ashleigh had gotten really bitchy now that she was a senior in high school—she clearly believed she was too mature and sophisticated for baby-sitting, but she loved the money so she condescended to work for Doug and Brooke when she was in the mood—but the new one, Megan, was kind of young to be left alone with the girls when they were awake. At night, once they were both in bed, they were easier to take care of. God, how Doug loved his daughters when they were asleep.

  At six-fifteen in the evening, they weren’t asleep.

  He climbed out of the car, rolled his shoulders to loosen them—performing delicate incisions on corneas could tie knots in a person’s muscles—and entered the house. Brooke had probably left a note somewhere, explaining their absence. Maybe she’d also left a nice, well-balanced meal on the kitchen’s center island for him, something that would require five minutes in the microwave to be fully cooked. His empty stomach rumbled in anticipation. He wouldn’t mind eating dinner by himself, as long as the food was good.

  Brooke’s culinary skills hadn’t progressed all that much in the years they’d been married, though. “Good” was still a bit beyond her capabilities. And she’d left neither a meal nor a note.

  What if she was gone? Really gone, packed-up-the-kids-and-disappeared gone?

  Christ. Why would he even think such a thing? Just because his parents, two halves of the most solid, sturdy, unshakable marriage in the world, had split, didn’t mean Brooke would leave him. Just because the inconceivable had happened didn’t mean it would happen again.

  He would not race upstairs to check Brooke’s closet, her drawers, the guest-bedroom closet where they stored their luggage. He would not panic. He would not assume—

  “Doug? Hi, we’re home!” her voice sang out in the mudroom, accompanied by the clamor of multiple small feet that sounded nothing like pitter-patter. Maybe he and Brooke ought to enroll the twins in ballet classes so they’d learn how to walk without clomping.

  At that moment, of course, Madison and Mackenzie’s clomping was the sweetest sound he could imagine, short of Brooke’s lilting voice as she followed the girls into the kitchen.

  The girls were babbling, as usual. “Hi, Daddy!”

  “We were at Stephanie’s house!”

  “Stephanie’s mother gave us oatmeal cookies.”

  “I picked out all the raisins!”

  “I ate her raisins!”

  He nodded and automatically reached down to pat the girls’ shoulders as they wrapped themselves around his legs, but his gaze was glued to Brooke. She looked . . . different.

  Gorgeous, as always. Maybe even more gorgeous than always. Her hair was changed, though. A little darker, with lighter streaks and fluffy locks and playful strands dancing across her forehead.

  Jesus. What had she done? Sure, she looked spectacular, but she looked so fucking different.

  “Sorry we’re late,” she said, as if she hadn’t transformed from the beautiful woman he loved into this other creature with altered hair. Her arms hugged a wilting paper bag. “We stopped at Colonel Ping’s and picked up some take-out on the way home.”

  “Lotus Garden is better,” he said, then shook his head. What was the matter with him? His wife had undergone this profound mutation, and he was quibbling over which Chinese restaurant he preferred.

  “Colonel Ping’s was on our way,” she said breezily as she set the bag on the island.

  “We got egg foo yong,” Mackenzie announced.

  Shit. He hated egg foo yong. Well, not hated, but honestly, all it was a glorified omelet with salty brown sauce and no cheese. For breakfast, maybe, but egg foo yong was not his idea of dinner.

  “Don’t worry,” Brooke said, giving him a tolerant smile and a light kiss on the cheek. “We got chicken with cashews, too.”

  “And fried rice!” Madison crowed.

  He nodded absently, too distracted by Brooke’s scent to pay attention to the evening’s menu. When she’d leaned in and kissed him, he’d smelled something as unfamiliar as her appearance. Whoever had done this thing to her—added infinite shadings to her hair and cut it all those different lengths—had sprayed something onto it as well, or conditioned it, or . . . something. Something that included spices a person didn’t find in egg foo yong.

  He felt disoriented. The knowledge that he was overreacting wildly to his wife’s new hairdo made him feel even more disoriented. For God’s sake, it was just a few snips here and there, and some coloring. Back in the old days—for instance, that morning—when she was blonder, he knew that a skilled hairdresser at a salon had contributed to the blondness. He wasn’t opposed to cosmetic enhancement. Hell, he earned a fortune surgically enhancing patients’ eyes so they could jettison their eyeglasses.

  But Brooke hadn’t told him she’d be doing this. She hadn’t even hinted that she intended to transform her appearance. Maybe it had been a spur-of-the-moment decision; maybe she’d gone to the salon planning on the usual, and she’d impulsively changed her mind.

  Her next statement informed him that it hadn’t been impulsive or spur-of-the-moment. “I had your sister’s friend do my hair. What do you think?”

  “Jill has a friend who does hair?” Then why did Jill’s hair always look so uninspired?

  “No, silly.” Brooke began to unload lidded plastic containers from the Colonel Ping bag. “Melissa’s friend Luc.”

  That guy Melissa had driven up to Massachusetts with, the day Doug’s parents had announced their separation. That guy Melissa shouldn’t have brought with her, that guy Melissa shouldn’t be dating, that guy who screamed inappropriate in so many varied ways.

  He’d done this thing to Brooke’s hair, this thing that made her look stunning, but not like his beloved Brooke.

  “You went all the way to New York to get your hair done? Why?”

  “Doesn’t she look pretty?” Madison asked.

  “I think she’s beautiful,” Mackenzie added.

  “Of course she’s beautiful. She’s your mom.” At Brooke’s perplexed glance, he clarified. “You’d be beautiful even if you weren’t their mom. I’m just saying, you’re the same beautiful person now that you were this morning.” Aren’t you?

  Steam rose from the containers of food, an oily fragrance laced with soy and ginger. His hunger had vanished, however. He considered pouring himself a glass of scotch, but if he did that he’d have to drink it. Right here, in his house, with his yammering daughters and his transformed wife, in a world where the earth kept shifting beneath his feet and people defied expectations and nothing was the way he expected it to be.

  “Listen, honey . . . I’ve got to go,” he said.

  Brooke glanced at him again, looking even more puzzled.

  “I got a call earlier today from my father,” he lied. “He asked me to stop by after work.”

  She accepted his explanation with a nod. “I’ll go ahead and feed the girls, then. Will you be long?”

  “I’m not sure. You eat with the girls,” he urged her. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.” Still in the dress shirt and tie he’d worn to the clinic, he started toward the mudroom.

  “So, you like my hair?” she asked, prying off the lid of the egg foo yong and then sending him a beaming smile as the girls clamored for food.

  “You look fantastic,”
he said, managing to return her smile before he ducked into the mudroom and out to the garage.

  He didn’t take another breath until he was safely ensconced behind the wheel of his Mercedes. He wasn’t sure what was wrong with him: accelerated pulse, icy hands—Reynaud’s, maybe? He was so far removed from his med school classes. Spend enough time doing Lasik surgery and your basic diagnostic skills began to erode.

  He backed out of the garage, tore down the driveway and steered away from their subdivision, speeding along winding, tree-shaded roads bearing cloyingly picturesque two-word names that had little to do with the actual topography: Rippling Brook, Silver Hill, Blossom Boulder. By the time he hung a left off Rolling Meadow Lane, past a ghastly Tudor house designed for someone entertaining serious British-nobility delusions, and onto Route 30, his respiration was almost normal.

  He pulled into the parking lot of a Dunkin Donuts, braked to a halt and took a deep, cleansing breath. And tried to figure out what was so disturbing about Brooke’s new hair style.

  The newness of it, for one thing. The fact that she hadn’t told Doug she was planning this. Most of all, the fact that she’d traveled all the way to New York City—three and a half hours each way—just to have Melissa’s boyfriend do the job.

  He tugged his tie loose, unbuttoned his collar and pulled his cell phone from his pocket. He ought to call Melissa and find out what she knew about this.

  No, he couldn’t call her. He couldn’t admit he had so little awareness of his own wife’s plans that her jaunt to the boyfriend’s salon had taken him completely by surprise.

  He fingered the buttons on the phone. Jill, maybe. She was sensible. She was grounded. She was the rock in the family, the one they all turned to in a crisis. But Doug wasn’t prepared to admit to her that he could be thrown into a crisis by his wife’s new hairdo.

  Besides, Jill was a woman.

  He’d never before longed for a brother—he’d liked being the only male child in the family; it was a position of privilege—but right now he could use one. He had buddies, but this was too personal to confide to them about. How could a man say, “My wife cut and colored her hair and I feel as if I’m losing her” to a buddy?