by Claire Cook
I put the golf cart into neutral and let myself into Tag’s house so I could open the garage from the inside. Once the cart was safely parked in its rightful spot, next to Tag’s Porsche and behind his motorcycle, I headed for the kitchen.
“Well, look who’s here.” Tag’s first ex-wife, Wendy, met me in the hallway and gave me a hug. She was blond and delicate with wrists so thin they made me think of seabird legs.
The other half of Afterwife, Tag’s second ex-wife, Blythe, poked her head out from behind the refrigerator door. She looked a lot like Wendy, except she was younger and had thicker wrists.
“There she is,” Blythe said. “The family dancer.”
“Uh-oh,” I said. “Word’s out.” I crossed over to Blythe and gave her a hug, while I peeked over her shoulder into the fridge at the same time.
“That’s an understatement,” Wendy said. “You’re all over the Internet.”
“Are you hungry?” Blythe asked, as if being all over the Internet was nothing so unusual, which was true, I supposed, if you’d been married to Tag. The only thing that made this situation the least bit remarkable was that it revolved not around Tag but around same-old-boring-no-life-of-her-own me.
“Starved,” I said. I simply had to play it cool, and before I knew it the whole Dancing With the Stars thing would just blow over the way these Internet things always did. The next time I was sitting in my brother’s kitchen with his two ex-wives, none of us would even remember it.
Wendy reached for a plate and some silverware. Blythe pulled a rectangular pan out of the fridge and started cutting me a big square of Afterwife’s famous spinach-and-portobello lasagna.
Since they seemed to have things under control, I climbed up on a stool at the kitchen island and drained the last drops of my coffee.
“It should still be warm,” Blythe said as she placed the lasagna in front of me. “But let me know if you’d like it heated.”
“Something else to drink?” Wendy asked.
“No thanks,” I said. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.” I put my napkin on my lap, since I wasn’t alone, and started to eat. My brother’s two ex-wives stood there and watched.
“Delish,” I said between bites.
They both smiled and kept watching. I didn’t get it: two skinny blond women cooking all day and not eating anything. Maybe there was a vicarious thrill in there somewhere, the way I might scroll through page after page of shoes on the Zappos website without ordering and somehow feel satisfied enough when I was finished to just slide on my same old flip-flops again.
“So,” Wendy said. “Just do it. Tag will get over it.”
“He always does,” Blythe said.
“Exactly,” Wendy said.
I looked up. “We’re not talking about eating his lasagna, right?”
They both laughed. They even laughed alike. I loved them like sisters, and liked them even more sometimes, but the nagging possibility that Tag might clone his wives still creeped me out from time to time.
“Oh,” I said. “You mean Dancing With the Stars. Yeah, well, I’m waiting to hear back from the producer. I still don’t know anything officially yet.”
Blythe sighed. “Oh, no. You don’t think they—”
“Went with someone else?” Wendy finished.
“Why?” I said, surprising myself by feeling a twinge of disappointment. “Did you hear something I didn’t?”
They looked at each other.
“No,” Blythe said.
“We thought you did,” Wendy said.
It was like hearing double. My headache was coming back. And my lasagna was almost gone.
“No,” I said. I thought for a moment. “And I guess I’m not waiting that hard to hear back. The truth is I can’t decide whether or not to go. No. Actually the truth is I can’t even make myself think about whether or not I want to go. And my head hurts.”
Wendy opened Tag’s kitchen drawer and pulled out a pad of paper and a pen. “We’ll make a list—”
“Of the pros and cons,” Blythe said.
Wendy drew a line down the center of a page. Blythe and I watched her write Pros on one side and Cons on the other.
They looked at me.
“Okay,” I said. “Pros. One: I have no life. Two: I have no life. Three: Tag is coming home to kill me. Cons. One: I have nothing to wear. Two: I haven’t danced since third grade. Three: If I do go through with it, Tag might kill me more.”
Wendy looked up from scribbling. “Those aren’t the things that matter.”
“It’s what’s in your heart that matters,” Blythe said.
I shook my head. “Do you two rehearse, or do you just naturally finish each other’s sentences?”
They looked at me. Neither of them said a thing.
“Sorry,” I said. “Okay, I think maybe I should do it. But I’m terrified. And it’s probably not going to happen anyway.”
Wendy looked at the paper in front of her as if it were a Magic 8 Ball. “All signs point to—”
“It’s looking like it will,” Blythe said, “so you need to deal with it.”
The lasagna was kicking in. “What I really need to deal with is a nap.”
“Who knows what doors it might open,” Wendy said. “Maybe it’s time to get excited—”
“About your life,” Blythe said.
I yawned. “I think I just want to lay low and hope that it all blows over by the time Tag gets home.”
“No,” Wendy said. “You’re telling yourself what you should want.”
“What you should be feeling,” Blythe said.
Wendy clasped her fingers together and stretched her seabird wrists up over her head. “When Tag and I split up, my whole family told me to pack up the kids and come back home. It’s crazy to stay, they said. Demeaning. Demoralizing. And I kept trying to convince myself that they were right, to persuade myself that’s what I wanted, but the truth is that Tag is a terrific ex-husband. And a wonderful father. He goes out of his way to get along with anyone I date. So I have a great life here, with or without him, but especially with.”
“Ditto,” Blythe said.
“So what it comes down to,” Wendy said, “is this: It’s not what you’re telling your heart—”
Blythe put one hand at the base of her throat, like a necklace. “But what your heart is telling you.”
I closed my eyes and listened. Then I turned and gazed out through the wall of windows, past the pool and across the vast fields beyond. I didn’t start to whine or try to fill the silence with a flip comment. I actually tried to hear what my heart was telling me.
Some of the leaves on the trees were just starting to change color. Birds and squirrels converged at the bird feeder, all focus and energy as they stocked up for the coming season. The setting sun was hitting the pool in such a way that half of it was in shadow and the other half sparkled with possibility.
I gazed into my brother’s ex-wives’ kind, open faces. Even the Afterwives had taken a bad situation and turned it into an opportunity. Maybe, just maybe, I could, too.
They smiled at me encouragingly.
“I think my heart is telling me to dance,” I said.
Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.
—MARIA ROBINSON
Karen, the Dancing With the Stars producer, was fast. By the time I’d finished my lasagna and pep talk and gotten back to the sheep shed, she’d e-mailed me my e-ticket, as well as the confirmation for my rental car and directions to my temporary apartment.
My heart changed its mind immediately. I clicked Reply and attempted to wiggle my way out with a quick e-mail: Sorry to last-minute you, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to participate after all. A sudden emergency has come up.
Karen e-mailed back within seconds: It’s called stage fright. You’ll be fine.
I seriously doubted it, but I did what I had to do: I threw my dirty clothes into the washing machine.
>
I sat on my bed and gazed at nothing. Then I found the little piece of paper Joanie had given me with Steve Moretti’s phone number on it. I stared at it until my clothes finished the spin cycle. So, his message probably said, how about breakfast? I’d like to pick your brain about the best way to present my business proposition to Tag.
Or maybe it went like this: Listen, I’m really sorry about that kiss. Let’s just have a nice breakfast and pretend it never happened, okay? Hey, by the way, what’s Tag’s cell number? I forgot to ask him for it and I really need to get in touch with him to follow up on something.
Maybe it was better not to know what Steve’s message said. But then again, the sooner I found out how bad it was, the sooner I could get over it.
I took everything out of the washer and put it into the dryer. Joanie had said she’d erased all the angry voice mails from Tag and my parents, but by now another stream of them had landed to take their place. I deleted them as quickly as I could but still caught my father’s “Now, honey,” and my mother’s “Deirdre Marie Griffin, what were you—” Tag’s bombardment was relentless as usual and all about how pissed off he was and how ungrateful I was and how I’d better be on top of damage control. I hit Delete, Delete, Delete.
Finally, I found Steve’s message.
Hey, this is Steve. The guy you just kissed and ran away from? Anyway, just in case you’re wondering how I got your number, your father slipped it to me on a folded piece of paper right after your brother told me he’d break my face if I went near you again. So, family dynamics aside, what about breakfast tomorrow? I have an early meeting, so I’m thinking we get up at the crack of dawn and sneak out and find a real authentic Texas Starbucks. How about six thirty in the lobby?
I sat on my bed and played it three more times. The last time I said all the words out loud right along with him, like a duet. At best, it was inconclusive. Maybe he was actually interested in me and not Tag, but maybe he was just smart enough to wait till we got to breakfast to tell me what he really wanted.
I did the math. At 6:30 that next morning Steve was referring to I was in another lobby in another state. I’d finished a sleepless night at the Sheraton near the Milwaukee airport and had just grabbed my own cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich and was getting ready to take the shuttle back over to the terminal.
What if I hadn’t turned off my cell phone two nights ago? It could have been like one of those scenes in a star-crossed-lovers movie. I’d be in a taxi headed from the conference center to the airport, tears rolling down my face. Then the taxi driver would drop me off at the Austin airport, and between sobs I’d hand him some bills and tell him to keep the change. I’d run through the airport trying to catch the last plane out, and when I took my shoes off at security, a sprig of lemon basil would flutter to the floor. I’d pick it up and stare at it, hold it to my nose and breathe in the dwindling scent, and burst into tears again. I’d board the plane and take my seat. I’d gaze sadly out the window. And then my cell phone would ring. It would be Steve. Whatever he said would make me laugh. I’d get off the plane just in the nick of time. Music would soar and closing titles would roll and we’d live happily ever after.
An electronic buzzer went off. I jumped as if it were the perfectly timed phone call. But it was only the dryer. Because my life was not a movie. I couldn’t ask for a retake, a rewrite.
The perfect chiastic quote flitted just out of my reach. Something about how you can’t go back and start a new beginning, but you can start today and make a new ending.
As I folded my clothes from the dryer straight into my suitcase, I could almost imagine that new ending. The Dancing With the Stars thing would be a fond memory, or at least a distant one. I’d be sitting in my L.A. apartment, which was lovely but not pretentious. I’d have just come back from a jog and finished showering, and as I slid into a silk robe and wrapped a plush towel around my hair, I’d pick up the phone. Because by then I’d know who I was and what I wanted my life to be, and exactly what I wanted to say to Steve Moretti.
But first, I had a long way to go. The DWTS shows lived and breathed by the fans online, that much I knew. And Tag was often referred to as a New Age phenomenon, but in many ways he was really a new media phenomenon. And, truth be told, I was responsible for creating him.
I’d once read that everyone in the movie industry had a number assigned to them based on their value. Nobody ever said the number out loud, but everybody in the know could tell at the drop of a name whether that person was a 45 or a 97 or a –3. Whether acting, directing, or costume designing offers came your way, whether your name made the invitation list for A-list premieres, and even whether or not you could get reservations at the right restaurants was based entirely upon this mysterious, fluctuating number.
In a way, the social media revolution was a great equalizer. Now we all had a number. Whether you wanted to buy into it or not, in this day and age our personal power was measured by our Web reach. There was no secret or mystery to this number; it was simple arithmetic. Just add your Facebook friends and fans to your Twitter followers to your blog followers to your website newsletter list. The number you got might trigger flashbacks to high school popularity indexes, but in many ways it was much kinder. In high school, it was almost impossible to increase your cool quotient. Today, you can build your Web reach with steady, hard work.
I knew, because that’s what I’d done for Tag. His number was well up in the hundreds of thousands and growing rapidly. And still, almost all the people connected to his online hubs felt a personal connection to him. Fans completely believed they were in Tag’s inner circle, that they were really his “friends.” And right now they were all checking and rechecking for a message from Tag thanking them for voting his sister onto Dancing With the Stars and giving them the inside scoop on what would happen next.
The funny thing was that in social media, waiting can be a good thing. The biggest mistake most people make is to tweet too much, to overpost on Facebook, to send out an e-newsletter weekly or even daily. It doesn’t take long till it all becomes noise and your new friends tune you out and ultimately break up with you.
I’d learned to alternate periods of silence with flurries of activity, varying the patterns to break the rhythm and keep everyone on their toes. In a way social networking is like any other relationship: We all want the ones we can’t quite predict, the ones we can’t control.
But all of that effort had always been for Tag. My own sphere of influence could be listed on the palm of one hand, without writing on any fingers. And most of those people weren’t even talking to me anymore.
I knew what I had to do. I wasn’t sure who in the family might be watching Tag’s Facebook page, so I didn’t dare pretend to be Tag and send an e-blast congratulating me yet, but I could at least make a quick, subversive start on my own virtual life.
First I set up my own Twitter account. Then I wrote a new tweet for Tag’s account.
Stay tuned to cheer my fav sister Dee on DWTS! All follow @DeeCanDance and spread word to universe. Peace in, peace out. Tag.
But instead of posting it publicly, I instructed my auto-reply app to send the message to Tag’s new followers in the form of a DM, or direct message.
Next I instructed my auto-follower app to have Tag follow anyone in the world who’d tweeted anything about Dancing With the Stars or DWTS. Almost without exception, they’d be thrilled out of their minds to be followed by Tag. So they’d follow him back and get his DM telling them to follow me.
Total genius, if I did say so myself. Maybe I should have felt more guilty, but there was barely a twinge. By the time I got myself settled on the left coast, I’d have thousands of my own Twitter followers. And because the message went out only to new followers, I had virtually no chance of getting caught. I mean, Tag was a narcissist, but even he couldn’t follow himself. And the good news was that even though my brother texted and talked on his iPhone all day long, he was basically computer illiterate.
Wendy dropped me off at the water shuttle terminal, while Blythe got both sets of kids off to school. They’d even packed me a breakfast sandwich to eat on the ferry ride across Boston Harbor to the airport. If worse came to worst and I was out of a job when I came back, maybe they’d let me do their marketing after all. We could always change the name of the company from Afterwife to Afterwife and No Life.
I couldn’t wait to get on the plane and up in the air. I knew Tag and my parents’ flight wasn’t due in for hours yet. I’d even double-checked their itinerary to make absolutely sure. But as I surged with the crowd through the maze of corridors at Logan Airport, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was about to run right into them.
I found my gate and took a seat in a faux leather chair. I moved my carry-on in front of my feet to camouflage them. I tapped the toes of one foot and then the other, trying to see if I remembered anything at all from my last dance class, decades ago. I moved on to a kick ball change and then I upped it to a shuffle. Sitting safely in a padded vinyl airport terminal chair, I could shuffle with my right foot, but my left was a bit sluggish. The good news was I could still shuffle. But could I Shuffle Off to Buffalo? That had been the trickiest beginning tap step of them all, the one that I’d practiced over and over on the linoleum kitchen floor so I’d be able to keep up with the big kids.
But the truth was, even if I could somehow manage to Shuffle Off to Buffalo, shuffling off to Hollywood was another thing entirely.
What made me think I could pull this off? Maybe it wouldn’t be so horrible after all if Tag and my parents found me before my flight took off. I mean, if you weighed family confrontation against international humiliation, the embarrassment quotient might be slightly lower on the family side. And with luck my family’s outburst wouldn’t last an entire season.
