“No. But I’m separated from my husband.”
“Well, cool,” Hilda said happily. “Maybe you’ll meet someone at the club.”
Ruth was rendered momentarily speechless. She didn’t want to meet someone. She was enjoying her life alone. If she wanted to be with a man, she’d be with Richard. He was good-looking and she already knew all his faults.
But if she refused to go to the club, would that mean she was too old? Would it mean she was afraid of doing something different?
“Tell you what,” she said. “I can be the designated driver.”
“Oh, that’s no fun,” Hilda argued. “Besides, Wade is always the designated driver. He doesn’t drink at clubs. He says drinking makes him dance funny.”
Ruth would bet he and Hilda would consider her a funny dancer, drunk or sober. But she wasn’t too old. She’d been brave enough to leave Richard, move into her own apartment, buy her own furniture, get a job and figure out how to set the alarm clock so she could open the store. Surely she could be brave enough to go to a club.
“Okay,” she said. “Count me in.”
Chapter Sixteen
Jill huddled inside her coat and watched the soccer players as they charged up and down the field in front of her. They managed to stay warm—some were even sweating—by running non-stop across the crisp grass, but the devoted parents—mothers, mostly—standing motionless on the sidelines were bundled in parkas and scarves and clutched insulated travel mugs filled with coffee or cocoa in the hope that hot beverages might stave off frostbite.
The hell with hot beverages. Jill hankered for a Diet Coke. Four o’clock on a late October afternoon was a lousy time to be watching a soccer game, not only because of the cold and the waning light but because her energy was at low ebb and her body cried out for caffeine. Noah’s games were usually played on Saturdays, but this was a make-up game, originally scheduled for September but postponed due to a nor’easter that had blown through New England that weekend. Why the game couldn’t have just been forgotten, Jill didn’t know.
She picked Noah out in the crowd of oatmeal-colored jerseys, his dark hair flying and his skinny pre-puberty legs pumping hard as he raced up the field. The opposing team wore radish-hued jerseys. For some reason, they seemed to outnumber Noah’s team. Jill knew they didn’t really. It just looked that way. In fact, it looked as if Noah himself was surrounded by nothing but radishes.
And if she was thinking of soccer uniform colors as oatmeal and radish, she was spending too much time writing catalogue copy. Why couldn’t the kids’ jerseys be beige and red? Why did she have to think of their colors in terms of food?
She stood stoically, feeling the tip of her nose tingle in the biting autumn wind, and tried to keep track of the oatmeal jerseys, number eleven in particular since that was Noah’s. She noticed that the elastic in his knee-length uniform socks was stretched out, causing the socks to sag around his shin guards. The soccer season was nearing its end, so she wasn’t going to buy him new socks at this point. If the old pair died, they died. Only three more weeks and she’d be done with soccer until next spring.
Only four more weeks and she’d be dealing with Thanksgiving.
How was the family going to manage that holiday? Jill’s parents always hosted the big turkey feast. But now . . . Her mother couldn’t possibly prepare turkey, yams, turnips, cranberry mold, string beans almandine and celery stuffed with cream cheese and chives in that puny little apartment kitchen. For that matter, she couldn’t possibly fit the entire family into the apartment, unless they set up a table for the children in the bedroom. At her parents’ house, the expanded dining room table was long enough to accommodate everyone, all three generations.
But Ruth and Richard Bendel were separated. How could they co-host a family Thanksgiving at the house Jill’s mother had abandoned? Where could a broken family give thanks, and what were they giving thanks for?
Jill realized with a twinge of something—regret, grief, supreme annoyance—that she would get stuck hosting the family’s Thanksgiving dinner. Melissa couldn’t do it; the whole family wasn’t about to trek down to New York City when it was so much easier for her to travel to Massachusetts. Brooke wouldn’t do it because, as best Jill could tell, Brooke didn’t cook. She and Doug always contributed the wine to the annual Thanksgiving feast. Jill traditionally baked the pies and brownies, and Melissa got a pass because she had the burden of traveling two hundred miles.
A cheer erupted among the mothers standing on her side of the field, dragging her attention back to the game. She leaned forward to see a group of boys in oatmeal jerseys jumping up and down near the goal. Apparently someone on Noah’s team had scored. She hoped it wasn’t Noah, because if it was, Gordon would demand a second-by-second description of how the play was set up, who had passed the ball to Noah, which part of his foot—or God forbid his forehead—he’d used to power the ball into the net and exactly how he’d felt when the ball had blown past the goalie. It was up to Noah to report on how he felt, but Gordon would be expecting Jill to supply the other details. “Noah couldn’t see what was going on behind him,” Gordon would point out. “You had a view of the entire field. Where was the rest of his team? Where was the other team’s defense? How did he get around them?”
She could make something up. She was creative. Noah could amend her narration if necessary. Of course, that was based on the assumption that Noah had kicked the goal, which, if she was lucky, he hadn’t.
Did thinking that make her a Bad Mom?
The teams gravitated back to midfield. The woman standing next to Jill, one of those loud, energetic jock types who actually loved standing in the cold and watching kids kick a ball around, grinned and said, “These boys are fabulous, aren’t they?”
“Yes,” Jill agreed, despite her belief that winning a soccer game played by ten-year-olds fell a bit short of fabulous.
“The Revolution ought to send their scouts this way. I’m telling you, these boys. The talent. The heart.”
Jill nodded vaguely. As far as she was concerned, fabulous was when Noah aced a math test. Heart was when he gave her a hand-made Mother’s Day card. Soccer was just a game.
A muffled trill emerged from her purse. Her cell phone. The woman beside her eyed her purse, then scowled. Clearly she disapproved of anyone who’d leave her phone turned on during something as fabulous as a town-league soccer game.
Jill didn’t care what the woman thought. She’d left Abbie home alone, and if Abbie had set the house on fire or cut herself and was hemorrhaging into the kitchen sink or was bored, she had to be able to reach her mother. Jill might be a Bad Mom when it came to paying attention to Noah’s game, but she wasn’t bad enough to turn her phone off when her twelve-year-old daughter was home all by herself.
She dug frantically through the clutter in her bag to find the phone, even though she doubted Abbie had set the house on fire or cut herself. Abbie was calm, sane and generally responsible. Jill had called her at the end of the game’s first quarter and Abbie had rhapsodized about how much she loved having the entire house to herself. “It’s so peaceful,” she’d said. “There’s so much space. When I grow up I want to live all by myself, just like Grandma.”
Jill had refrained from suggesting that Abbie might seek a better role model than her crazy grandmother, who at that very moment was undoubtedly wearing her ugly red First-Rate pinafore and ringing up a box of tampons for a PMS-ing customer.
Her fingers closed around the phone and she pulled it from her bag. The ringing sounded much louder out in the air, and several mothers glared at her. Bad Mom, she muttered to herself, forcing an apologetic smile before she moved away from the sideline. Noah had better not score a goal while she was on the phone.
“Hello?”
“Jill? It’s your mother. Have you got a minute?”
Jill sighed. “Actually, I don’t. I’m watching Noah play soccer.”
“I know. I called your house and Abbie told me wher
e you were. She said you had your cell phone and you wouldn’t mind my calling you. I’ll be quick. I’ve only got a ten-minute break, anyway. I have to ask you to do a big favor for me.”
Jill sighed again. “What?”
“I need some clothes from the house. When I moved out, I took only the clothes I thought I’d be wearing for work, because I just don’t have the closet space here. I’m not complaining, the apartment’s fine, but the closet space is on the less than ample side. So I tried to be practical and take only what I would use.”
Jill’s mother seemed determined to expend her entire ten-minute break on this phone call. Jill glanced toward the game, wondering if she was missing anything significant.
“So, wouldn’t you know? I need something I didn’t bring with me,” her mother continued. “I was thinking that turquoise V-neck sweater, the cashmere, you know which one I mean? And the off-white shell, it’s a silk knit, not machine-washable but I love it, so if I have to, I’ll hand-wash it in the sink. Can you pick those things up for me?”
“Why can’t you get them yourself?” Jill asked, hoping she didn’t sound too impatient.
“How can I? I work.”
“I work, too,” Jill pointed out.
“You’re not working now.”
“Because someone had to attend Noah’s game, and Gordon’s . . .” Working, she thought peevishly. He couldn’t possibly have left the school building as soon as he was done teaching his last class so he could attend this game, but Jill could put aside the copy she was composing for the open-toed canvas espadrilles, available in a delectable fruit-salad of colors—blueberry, lemon, lime, plum and mango—that would be featured in Prairie Wind’s catalog next summer, and stand outside at the Howland Street Parks-and-Rec complex, freezing her ass off, while Noah’s team played its rescheduled game.
Her mother didn’t wait for her to finish the sentence. “And I can’t go over after work, because your father’ll be home then, and I just think it would be easier if he didn’t have to watch me enter the house and pack some more clothing and take it with me. Oh, and I need shoes, too. Those low-heel black pumps. The high-heeled ones hurt my arches. Can you get me those things?”
Jill’s mother thought it would be easier. For her, yes. Not easier for Jill. “Why do you need this stuff?”
“I’m going to a club this weekend. In Boston.”
“You joined a club? What kind of club?” Now that her mother was working, she could no longer enjoy bridge afternoons with her friends. Maybe she’d found a bridge group that met weekends, although why she had to go all the way into Boston to find a foursome, and why she needed her cashmere sweater—
“A club, where they play music and people drink.”
Jill’s mouth clamped shut as she tried to digest this. Her mother was going to a club? “Do you have a date?” she asked, forcing the words around a strangulating knot in her throat.
“Don’t be silly. If I wanted a date, I’d be living with your father. I’m going with friends, that’s all.”
“What friends?”
“Wade Smith from work. You met him that day you came to First-Rate, remember? With the thing in his eyebrow?”
Jill recalled a skinny white kid with dreadlocks. “You’re going to a club with him?”
“And his girlfriend. His ex-girlfriend. Not exactly ex. It’s complicated. Wade wanted to invite Bernie to join us, but I said absolutely not. He’s married, and he’s always flirting, and it’s bad enough he flirts at work, but what if he flirts while he’s at a club? Unless he flirts with his wife, but I got the impression Wade wanted to invite him without his wife. Forget about it. I’ve got my hands full with Wade and Hilda.”
“Who’s Hilda?” Jill didn’t bother to ask who Bernie was. From her mother’s tone, she assumed she was supposed to know that already.
“Wade’s girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend. Almost. I don’t want to take up your time, Jill, I know you’re busy watching the soccer game, so if you could just pick up those few things for me. You can bring them here, to First-Rate. I’ve got a locker I can store them in. I showed you the staff room, didn’t I?”
Jill didn’t care about her mother’s locker in the staff room. She cared that here she was, worrying about how the family was going to survive Thanksgiving, and her mother was gallivanting off to a club with a guy Jill wouldn’t leave alone in the same room as her daughter, and someone named Hilda.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” she asked.
Her mother laughed. “It’s like I’m their chaperone. And just because I specialized in Corelli doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy some rock-and-roll every now and then. I was a Beatles fan. I didn’t jump up and down and scream when they played, but I loved their music.”
“Rock today is a little different from the Beatles.”
“You think I don’t know? I’ve got grandchildren. I’ve got a TV. So can you get those items for me before Saturday? I’d really appreciate it. You don’t want your mother going to a club in Boston wearing her First-Rate apron, do you?”
Jill didn’t want her mother going anywhere in her First-Rate apron. “All right,” she said.
“You still have your key to our house, right? I don’t think Dad changed the locks.”
Not if he wanted Jill’s mother to come home. But maybe he didn’t. Maybe he enjoyed life as a single as much as she did. Maybe he’d already done a pub crawl or two. He had access to his full wardrobe, after all.
“I’ll get to it before Saturday,” she promised her mother, even though she knew damned well she’d get to it tomorrow. She’d set aside the Prairie Wind espadrilles again and run her mother’s errand for her. She was, after all, the person who took care of everything.
THE KEY HER MOTHER had given Jill when she was a ten-year-old still unlocked all the outer doors to her parents’ house. She was accustomed to coming and going through the back door. The front door was used mostly by company, parcel delivery people and the occasional Jehovah’s Witness passing through the neighborhood. So once she’d parked in the driveway, she circled around to the back of the house, passing the flower bed her mother always planted with chrysanthemums. None there this year; Jill’s mother had obviously been planning her escape in early September, when she would otherwise have put in the mums.
Jill entered her parents’ kitchen.
She wasn’t sure what she expected. With her mother gone nearly a month, would the place be a wreck? Unwashed dishes piled up on the kitchen counters? A three-inch carpet of dust covering the floor? The master bathroom sink clogged with beard hairs her father had neglected to rinse down the drain?
What she found was the house she remembered. The atmosphere felt a little stagnant. Since her father was at work all day, no one was around during the sunlight hours to throw open a window and let in some fresh air, but she didn’t smell rotting food or the stale, musty fragrance of dirty socks that always emanated from Noah’s bedroom. Sections of that morning’s Boston Globe lay scattered across the kitchen table, but the only unwashed dish was a coffee mug in the sink. Was her father eating breakfast? If so, where was the plate, the bowl?
Maybe she should have run this errand in the evening, when he would be home and she could check up on him. But the thought of explaining her mission to him made her queasy. How would he take the news that his wife hadn’t just abandoned him but had also apparently abandoned her senses? Going club-hopping with pierced twenty-somethings in Boston? The news might give him a heart attack, and unlike him, Jill wasn’t a cardiologist. She’d taken a CPR course when she was pregnant with Abbie, determined to be prepared for every emergency her precious firstborn might encounter, but that was twelve and a half years ago. If her father keeled over, she wouldn’t know how to revive him.
She peeked through the doorway into the dining room, the table lightly filmed with dust and truncated without the leaves inserted in it. Not ready for Thanksgiving, she thought dolefully. All right, so she’d host the damn dinner. Would both he
r parents come? Would they insist on sitting at opposite ends of the table, and would they growl and snap at each other?
With a shudder, she turned and headed down the hall to the stairs. If she hosted Thanksgiving and her mother showed up wearing her turquoise cashmere sweater and low-heeled pumps, would her father wonder when she’d gotten hold of those garments? Or wasn’t he even aware of which clothes she’d taken with her when she’d moved out? If Jill ever left Gordon, he wouldn’t notice which clothes she’d packed and which she’d left behind. As it was, he hardly noticed her clothing while she lived with him. Every now and then she would catch him staring hard at her and frowning. “Where did that shirt come from?” he’d ask, and she’d answer that she’d owned the shirt for years, and she wore it frequently, and he’d give her a bewildered shrug and, if he was thinking fast enough, mention that she looked nice.
He just didn’t pay attention to things like her wardrobe. Her father didn’t pay attention, either. She was willing to bet most men didn’t.
Melissa’s boyfriend, the hairdresser, probably did.
She felt like a trespasser moving through the empty house. The soles of her sneakers muted her footsteps as she prowled up the stairs. It was silly, really. She wasn’t breaking any laws. She didn’t have to tiptoe around. Besides, no one was home to hear her.
She tiptoed anyway, because logical or not, she felt like a trespasser, grabbing her mother’s clothing behind her father’s back.
At the top of the stairs, she paused. What was it about returning to your childhood home that caused you to regress? Standing at the top of the stairs, gazing down the narrow second-floor hallway, she could have been seventeen again, wishing she had the nerve to tell her parents she was going out and it was none of their business whom she was going with or where they’d be. In her case, she would only have been going out with her girlfriends—Lucy Shapiro or Marianne Delmonica or a group of fellow staff members from the school newspaper—and where they’d be would likely have been the roller rink or the movie theater at Shopper’s World, or maybe swimming at Walden Pond, which besides being a historical landmark also had a cute little beach. They would not have been going somewhere to get drunk or stoned. They would not have been searching for guys to pick up. Sure, they might check out guys, but they wouldn’t have wound up at the house of someone whose parents weren’t home, where everyone could pair off and vanish into various bedrooms. Jill had always been a Good Daughter.
Goodbye To All That Page 20
