The Transformation of Things

by Jillian Cantor

  Will had plenty of money. Our house, our cars, my decorating, none of it came cheap. But Will had made really good money at FF&G, and he also made a very nice salary as a judge. So the idea of Will taking a bribe made very little sense to me.

  I heard footsteps coming toward the kitchen, so I hastily tucked the paper in the silverware drawer, and hoped he wouldn’t find it. “You’re still here,” I said, stating the obvious. It was after eight, and he never left for work later than seven. I hadn’t heard him come in last night, and his side of the bed had been empty when I woke up, something that was not unusual, so I hadn’t thought twice about it until now.

  He nodded. “Danny told me not to go back.”

  “For how long?” I asked.

  He shrugged, a heavy shrug, as if the weight of the world literally held him down, kept him stooping far below his normal straight six-foot stature. “He’s talking to the prosecutor for me.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I don’t know. Trying to cut a deal.”

  “A deal?” Though I knew very little about anything in Will’s profession, I thought that cutting a deal was what guilty people did.

  “Danny knows what he’s doing.”

  I nodded. Will and I stared at each other for a minute, neither one of us sure what to say. “Do you want coffee?” I finally asked. “Or breakfast? I could make you something.”

  He shook his head. “No thanks. I’m not very hungry.” And then he retreated back into his study.

  I tried to remember the last time we’d eaten breakfast together, and I couldn’t. It was something we’d done every day when we lived in the city—coffee and oatmeal at the kitchen table. I used to love to watch the way Will’s blue eyes lit up first thing in the morning, as if every new day had the possibility to be something special for him, for us.

  But that was a long time ago. A different life. I sighed and then headed upstairs to get dressed, as if this was any other day in Deerfield, any other morning. I was playing tennis at nine-thirty, and I didn’t want to be late.

  The Deerfield Country Club sat at the end of a long, winding drive on top of a hill. It was surrounded on all sides by tall, leafy oaks and thick, lush evergreens. The building itself was large and white, with thick columns out front that looked oddly more like something out of ancient Greece than modern-day suburbia.

  The inside was lush and luxurious, appearing more like a five-star resort than a simple tennis and golf club: hallways with thick red carpeting and expensive artwork on the walls. But today, as I stepped inside, I noticed only one thing: the instant and almost deafening quiet.

  And then it hit me, that feeling I’d had in junior high school, just after my mother had died of breast cancer. Back then,everyone knew what had happened. Some of them had been to the funeral or even sent cards. But the first time I’d walked back into school that day, after she was dead, there was the unbearable quiet, this silent penetration of eyes, then whispers, about me, not to me. They all knew she was gone, knew I was suffering, but no one knew what to say or how to move, so for a few minutes, as I’d walked down the hall to my locker, the world had been eerily silent. I just kept looking down, watching my feet take one step after another. Counting them. One, two, three, four …

  I did it now, staring at my too-white tennis shoes collapsing against the deep red carpet that led to the locker room.

  And once inside I ran into the bathroom and shut the stall door. I felt dizzy, the blue tile floor swirling and dancing beneath my feet, and I tried to steady myself by sitting down on the toilet seat and taking a deep breath.

  Danny was going to know what to do. Everything was going to be fine. Will was a judge. Will was a good judge, or I assumed he must be. This was a mistake. He’d done nothing wrong.

  I took a deep breath, and I felt a little better, until I heard the unmistakable twitter of Bethany Maxwell’s laugh. Bethany was one of the women I played doubles with and also my friend. Her husband, Kevin, owned a company that made fireproof materials, which had taken off of late. So they were literally rolling in it, as she liked to casually slip into conversation as often as possible.

  She was talking to someone, but her voice was muffled, far away, fuzzy, and I couldn’t make out her words at first. Then, all of a sudden, her voice became clear, and I heard her say, “Did you see the paper?”

  “I did.” I was pretty sure that was Amber Tannenbaum,Bethany’s doubles partner, whose husband was some big-shot CFO in New York City.

  “I mean really,” Bethany said.

  “Jennifer’s nice enough, but who’s going to want to be her friend now?” Amber asked.

  Tears stung hot in my eyes, and the door of the stall started swimming in front of me. Who’s going to want to be her friend now?

  I thought about another woman whose name I couldn’t even remember now, who used to play doubles tennis with Bethany and Amber before they invited me. She just didn’t fit in with us anymore, Amber had told me, crinkling up her nose, when I’d asked what had happened.

  No. Bethany had shaken her head, while my partner, Lisa Rosenberg, had remained silent. And I’d thought it wise not to bring it up again.

  I wiped the tears out of my eyes quickly and shook my head. Then I flushed the toilet, hoping that would be enough for them to move. It was.

  When I walked back into the locker room, Bethany and Amber were standing there together with Lisa, who was not only my doubles partner, but also my next-door neighbor. Lisa was putting her hair in a ponytail, while Bethany and Amber were applying their makeup in the mirror. Yes, these two ladies never played tennis without their lipstick. It doesn’t hurt to look beautiful when you’re sweating, Amber would say, and make a face, as if the thought of sweating was really too much to bear.

  “Oh, sweetie.” Bethany ran and gave me a hug, and I had this strange detached feeling, as if I were watching this unfold like a scene in a movie, from somewhere far away, somewhere distant.

  “We heard.” Amber patted my shoulder.

  “He’s totally innocent,” I said, enunciating the word innocent more than necessary, and looking directly at Amber, who didn’t even flinch.

  “Of course he is,” Lisa said. “I didn’t believe it for a second.” I smiled at her, because I believed her. Lisa was always the most genuine of all my country club friends. She was the one who’d introduced me into the tennis club, and also the one who’d gotten me involved in the Deerfield Ladies Lunch Club.

  The mother of twin five-year-old boys, she’d been a prosecutor in what she called her former life. But just after the boys were born, she and her husband, a plastic surgeon, retreated to the suburbs, and Lisa, now five years away from putting hard-core criminals in jail, was a little overweight and a little ragged around the edges from the demands of the boys, which she called never-ending. Do not have kids, she implored me. Don’t do it. You’ll lose your ass and your waist and your sanity.

  Oh, it’s not all that bad, Bethany would say. Don’t scare her. Bethany had an almost two-year-old who was so perfectly behaved that her nickname was Angel. Bethany had not lost her ass or her waist—in fact she’d emerged through the pregnancy even thinner and perkier than before.

  I’ve got two words for you, Lisa had whispered to me on more than one occasion. Tummy Tuck! And sometimes Lisa even called her this behind her back.

  Tummy Tuck hugged me again. “If there’s anything we can do,” she said, “you just say the word.”

  “We can play tennis,” I said. They were all still staring at me. “Hey, I’m sure it’s all going to blow over in a few days anyway.”

  I grabbed my racket from the bench, and I headed in the direction of the court.

  Lisa and I won, two to one. Maybe because every time the ball came my way, I heard Amber’s voice saying, Who’s going to want to be friends with her now? So I kept slamming the ball into Amber’s court so hard that it was impossible for her to return it.

  When the game was over, the other ladies went to take showers, but I sn
uck out, before I could overhear anything else that I didn’t want to, anything else that would literally make me want to slam a tennis ball down someone’s throat.

  Three

  Once I got into the car, I popped in my Bluetooth and checked my voice mail. My most recent message was from Will wondering when I would be home. I nearly ran a red light when I heard it. Will never wondered where I was or when I was coming home. And then there was a message from my sister, Kelly, which said simply, “I just saw the paper. Call me.”

  I quickly called Will at home, but he didn’t answer. I wasn’t in the mood to talk to Kelly, so I put that off until later, and instead I called my herbalist, Ethel Greenberg. Though we didn’t have an appointment, I asked Ethel if I could stop by. She didn’t ask why, and it was clear she’d either seen the paper or just didn’t care. “I’m free all morning,” she told me.

  Ethel Greenberg’s office was actually a small, converted detached garage, the inside of which was filled with rickety metal shelves of herbs. Floor-to-ceiling bottles of herbs.

  The first time I’d gone to her office was just after we’d moved out of the city, just after the lump I’d found in my breast had turned out to be benign. Back when I’d worked at City Style, I’d done an article on Eastern medicine, and I’d interviewed her.

  On my first visit she’d spent five hours monitoring the electrical impulses from my body, checking, as she called them, my meridians. She was a small Jewish woman in her sixties, very grandmotherly, which immediately put me at ease, even after she looked me straight in the eye and said, “You’re right. There is bad energy. Underneath here.” She held her hand close to my chest, somewhere in between the territory of my heart, breasts, and lungs. “It is small now,” she’d said, “but a small crack is rarely just a crack. It’s the result of something bigger, something worse, lying just beneath the surface.”

  I’d nodded, and instead of feeling terrified, I’d felt relieved. Someone else could feel it, the sense of doom I’d felt hanging around in my body for years. And she also told me she could do something about it: a series of herbal remedies that she said would flush my body of toxins.

  No one—not my friends, my sister, or even Will—knew that I went to her, because I knew they would think it was insane, think that Ethel was some sort of Eastern medicine quack, but Western medicine had failed to do anything to save my mother. I was a bit undecided myself whether anything Ethel gave me actually helped, but I also didn’t think it could hurt.

  Now I was on Ethel’s maintenance plan, a visit every few months and herbs every night before bed.

  I parked my car in Ethel’s driveway and rang the bell by her office door. She opened it up right away. “Jennifer.” She ushered me through the door. “Come in.”

  She cleared a box filled with pill bottles off a chair and motioned for me to sit down. The office was always filled with clutter, something like the den of a mad scientist, and I sometimes wondered if I was Ethel’s only patient, though back when I’d interviewed her, it had seemed like there had been others.

  “How have you been feeling?” she asked.

  “Good. I’m just running low on herbs, and I was in the area,” which was not a total lie. I was actually completely out of herbs.

  She cocked her head to the side. “Everything is good? Are you sure?”

  “My husband,” I said. “You saw the paper.” Because it was clear from the tone of her voice that she had. Ethel was not a mind reader, only a smart old lady obsessed with the way natural herbs could improve the body’s function. This was what she told me the first time we met. “I’m not a psychic,” she’d said. “Not a miracle worker.” She’d paused. “But that doesn’t mean I’m not a healer.”

  “Yes.” She nodded. “I did see the paper. That must be quite a lot of stress for you, Jennifer.” Ethel had already told me to keep my stress level down, that stress in itself could prove toxic to the body, could suppress the immune system in ways that science had yet to fully imagine.

  “A little,” I said, feeling the dizziness I’d felt this morning at the club return, and I shook my head to try to clear it away. “But Will’s innocent. It’s all a big misunderstanding.”

  She stared at me for a few minutes and twirled a strand of gray hair around her finger. “Okay,” she said. “But in addition to the usual I’m going to give you something else, something for calming.”

  “Okay,” I agreed, willing to do whatever Ethel told me, not because I necessarily believed it would work, but because I believed that she believed it would. And who wouldn’t want to trust in a little old Jewish grandma who was trying to keep you whole?

  She went to her shelves, and though any normal person would be daunted by the sheer number of herbs, she always knew exactly where it all was, immediately. She handed me my four usual bottles, plus the new fifth one. “Let me know if there’s any problems,” she said. “And I’ll see you back in three months.” Then she bowed toward me as she always did and said, “Namaste.”

  “Namaste.” I nodded back. I always repeated it back to her, even though I had no idea what it meant.

  When I got back to my house, Will’s car was gone, and there was a note on the table that said he’d gone into the city to meet Danny for lunch. It was funny to see the note there, in his square block all-caps writing, as if he was neatly shouting at me, which maybe he was.

  Will and I didn’t leave each other notes. We didn’t talk about whom we ate lunch with, what we ate, or what we did in the space between breakfast and dinner at all. Or at least we hadn’t for the past few years. I’d never mentioned Ethel to Will, not because I thought he would disapprove, as I knew my sister, Kelly, would, but more because it just never came up. Will didn’t notice my pill bottles of herbs, or if he did, he didn’t ask.

  I took a yogurt out of the fridge for lunch and got my list of phone numbers for the other ladies on the board of the charity auction. The auction, which we always held the Saturday before Thanksgiving, was only six weeks away, and we had some planning and dividing up of tasks to do.

  The charity auctions had been my idea, sort of my break into the Deerfield social scene, if you will. Right after Will and I moved here, I met Lisa. Or I guess I should say she made a point of meeting me.

  As the movers carried in our boxes, and Will and I stood in the driveway directing them, she walked over and handed me a plate of lopsided muffins.

  “I made these for you,” she said. “Welcome to the neighborhood.” I guess she noticed my face as I looked at the uneven and oddly shaped muffins. “They’re blueberry,” she said. “My mother-in-law’s recipe.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “They look delicious.”

  “I’m not the greatest with presentation,” she said. And that was Lisa in a nutshell; she really was very nice, and she tried hard, but there was always something a little too gruff, a little too edgy about her to really be a housewife or a refined lady of Deerfield. That was also why I liked her immediately. That—and there was a little something about her that reminded me of Kat.

  I invited her to sit down in the driveway and share a muffin, and she invited me to join the Deerfield Ladies Lunch Club. They met once a week at different houses and, as the name implied, had lunch. “It’s sort of like a book club,” she said. “Only we eat, instead of read. And good stuff, too. Gourmet.”

  “I’m good with eating,” I told her.

  After a few meetings, when we were having lunch at Bethany’s house, the women started talking about Helen Kemper, who I’d met once, only briefly, before she started undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer, and who hadn’t been back to the lunch club since.

  “I wish there was something we could do,” Bethany said, shaking her head.

  “There’s nothing anyone can do,” Lisa said. “It’s a private thing.” She said it like she knew, and I wondered if, like me, she did.

  Then it occurred to me. We were a bunch of women, mostly smart, college-educated women, with time, probably
too much time, on our hands. And the truth was, I was bored. After we’d moved out of the city, I’d fallen into a steady social life and an obsession with decorating, which all seemed to keep me busy on the surface, but sometimes underneath, it felt as if I was just passing time, just waiting for something real to happen. “We could have a charity auction,” I said. Everyone stopped talking and looked at me, a little curious or a little annoyed, I wasn’t sure which at first. “Raise money for breast cancer research. Or something,” I added, just in case they all thought it was a terrible idea.

  “That’s actually very good,” Lisa said.

  Everyone else chimed in with nods and uh-hums. And that was how I made my place in the Deerfield social scene, as the organizer of the first annual and then the second annual and now coming up on the fourth annual auction. After Helen Kemper died last year, we renamed it in her honor, which, Lisa had said, making a lame attempt at a joke to lighten the mood, made us kind of like Susan G. Komen, except without the dreadful running.

  And that was that. I was a member. Of the lunch club, of the country club, of the Deerfield high society. The women were all nice to me, and before I knew it I was part of the tennis team, and I was also being invited to parties and lunches. Though Kelly instantly made fun of it when I told her about it, I was surprised, almost awed, by the easy way I’d been accepted into life in Deerfield.

  “Well, it doesn’t hurt that your husband is a judge,” Kelly said, just after Will got elected.

  “That’s not what it’s about,” I’d told her, annoyed at her inability to understand. Kelly had only a few close friends that she’d had and kept since high school. Her life was insular and revolved around her husband, Dave; her three kids; and her photography. “No one cares about Will,” I’d scoffed.