Girl Friday

by Unknown

  Kit should be here with the kids, she thinks, seeing the hayride pass every few minutes, piles of children and their grown-ups sitting on hay bales, bumping along the dirt track as they drive slowly past the cows and horses grazing in the field.

  There is a stand for food – apple cider, popcorn, caramel apples – and rosy-cheeked children are running up to the barnyard animals and shrieking with laughter as the cows moo.

  Although Kit knows she will come back next weekend with the children, she feels a sharp pang of missing them, of knowing that this would be so much nicer with them here.

  ‘Mom!’ Kit looks up sharply – she is programmed to look up whenever she hears someone shout ‘Mom!’ and has been known to shout back ‘Yes?’ no matter whose child it is that is asking.

  But this time she sees Buckley – her delicious Buckley! – running through the pumpkins, his eyes wide with delight, and she runs towards him and scoops him up, burying her face in his hair.

  ‘Buck! What are you doing here?’

  ‘We’re here with Dad!’ Buckley says, flinging his arms around her neck and hugging her tightly, showing her, quite unconsciously, how much he misses her. Most times when he comes back from his father’s he is cool and offhand with her, refuses to kiss or be kissed, wants to be anything other than Mama’s little boy.

  But now, when he sees her so unexpectedly, he can’t hide his joy, allows her to cover him with kisses, squeeze him tightly, shower him with love and affection.

  ‘Dad! Tory! Mom’s here!’ Buckley shouts over, and both Adam’s and Tory’s faces light up, a fact which surprises Kit, and slightly confuses her.

  ‘Mom!’ Tory comes over and hugs her, which is yet another unexpected surprise, and Adam grins, then both kids run off to see a friend of Tory’s on the other side of the field.

  ‘Hey, Kit. Hi, Edie.’ He reaches over and gives Edie a kiss.

  Kit is astonished to see Edie practically simper. Why didn’t she react that way with Steve?

  ‘Did you borrow children for the day?’ He looks amused; and it’s true, they do seem to be the only adults there without small children.

  ‘Edie is my child for the day.’ Kit smiles.

  ‘I’m afraid she’s right. I decorate my house every year, and it’s time for pumpkins. I need big ones for the porch, and a bunch of those little tiny ones to go above the front door. I’m thinking that I might also do a scarecrow this year. I thought Tory and Buckley could help. It would be a fun project.’

  ‘Sounds great,’ Kit says.

  ‘Well, Tory’s only going to be interested if the Scarecrow’s clothes come from Kool Klothes and it has earrings that come from Claire’s.’

  ‘God, Claire’s.’ Kit shakes her head. ‘What is this obsession with Claire’s?’

  Adam laughs. ‘Every weekend she’s with me, all she wants to do is have me take her up to Claire’s. I won’t go any more. Too much sparkly make-up in there. It gives me panic attacks. Last time I dropped her off on Main Street and left her there for an hour and a half. I thought she would have gone to all the stores, but she and Livvy spent the entire time in Claire’s.’

  Kit laughs.

  ‘And have you heard the latest?’ Kit shakes her head so Adam carries on: ‘She’s decided she wants her navel pierced.’

  Kit gasps in horror. ‘Not in this lifetime.’

  ‘Her what?’ Edie strains to hear. ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘Her navel –’ he gestures to his own, nodding – ‘pierced. Horrendous. I told her she’s welcome to pierce whatever she wants when she’s not living under my roof.’

  ‘Jesus.’ Kit whistles under her breath. ‘Where did my little girl go? What did she say?’

  ‘She said she lived mostly under your roof.’

  ‘Typically smart-mouthed.’

  ‘So then I said if she did that she’d lose her iPod, her phone and her right to go to any dances for six months. And I said that you agreed with me – hope that’s okay? If I hadn’t said that she would have just presumed she could continue doing everything from your place.’

  ‘No, that’s fine. Absolutely right, in fact. I’m glad you said it. Thanks.’

  Kit is grateful. The children have always listened more to Adam. When they were married, the worst punishment she could think of was to say, ‘Wait until your father gets home.’

  The children did seem to be far better behaved when they were married. Everything she has read has said that the transitions are the hardest, and it’s true: when she gets Buckley and Tory back, they both take a while to recover their equilibrium.

  Buckley is wild, doesn’t listen to her at all, has a tendency to be sassy with her, and Tory is sullen and resentful, claiming her place as the Daddy’s girl she has always been.

  Discipline doesn’t seem to stick when it comes out of Kit’s mouth and Adam is not there to back her up, and although they get on well enough for her to be able to invoke him if necessary, she doesn’t want to, doesn’t want to not be able to deal with her own children herself, in her own way.

  The latest behaviour that Tory is exhibiting is what Kit is calling the ‘Whatevers’. Kit will be talking to Tory, and in mid-conversation Tory will walk out of the room, muttering, ‘Whatever. Whatever. Whatever,’ as she disappears.

  ‘Don’t you “whatever” me!’ Kit has snapped, not knowing how to stop it, no longer knowing how to talk to her daughter. So, at moments like this, when Tory seems to be back to the sweet girl she always has been, Kit prays they will last for ever.

  ‘Do you guys want to join us?’ Adam gestures over to the kids, busy chatting with some other children they know. ‘Seems silly for us all to be here and not doing it together.’

  Kit looks at Edie who beams at Adam in delight. ‘Sure!’ she says.

  The hayride bumps along with Buckley and Tory sitting in between Adam and Kit. Buckley is holding hands with both of them, across Tory’s lap, and Tory has her hand resting on her mother’s and Buckley’s. Every minute or so, one or other of the children looks first at Kit, then at Adam, the smile on their little faces so wide Kit is concerned she may burst into tears.

  At one point she looks over at Buckley, then raises her eyes to find Adam looking at her, and she knows he is thinking the same thing; when she looks away there is a lump in her throat.

  She doesn’t know, during moments like this, why it went so terribly wrong, but she knows that she can’t go backwards. Too much time has passed, and she can’t go back to being the corporate wife that Adam so badly wanted and needed her to be.

  She can’t go back to that life, that lonely life of being a Wall Street widow, with a husband who is barely there during the week, who whisks the children to all the weekend activities because of the guilt, leaving his wife at home to recover from a week of solitary child-rearing.

  Adam was always like this when he was there. Fun. Involved. Engaged. But he was so rarely there; and then, when he started travelling for work, there were weekends when he was gone too, because he couldn’t get a flight back until Saturday afternoon or late Saturday night.

  They were a great family unit, but they were rarely a family unit. And nothing has changed, nothing would be different. Think of how many times Adam changes the schedule, moves things around because of work commitments, knows that it is always fine to change things around because Kit’s life doesn’t matter, Kit’s primary purpose is still to be there for the children.

  And in all the time that has passed, Kit has found that she doesn’t look at Adam in the same way. There is a comfort in the familiarity that exists between them, but she doesn’t look at him and find him physically attractive any more, not in the way she looks at Steve and wants to rip open his shirt and run her hands over his chest.

  If anything, looking at Adam now, she wonders how she managed to sleep with him for so long. Not because she is repulsed, far from it, but because the intimacy that grows between married people is sliced away as soon as they divorce, and once the intima
cy has gone, however well you may get on, however friendly you may become, it is hard to believe it was ever there.

  ‘Mom? Dad? Can we go to the diner for lunch?’ Tory asks suddenly, as the hayride bounces to a halt. They look at one another and both smile. This was their routine when they were married. Saturday lunches at the diner. Greek salad for Kit, pancakes, scrambled eggs and crispy bacon for Adam, waffles for Buckley and egg salad sandwich for Tory.

  ‘It’s fine with me,’ Adam says. ‘I don’t know about Mom and Edie. You want to come with us?’

  ‘Yes?’ Kit isn’t sure.

  ‘The kids would love it.’ Adam smiles, and it’s genuine.

  ‘So would we. Edie?’

  Edie nods at her, a mischievous glint in her eye. ‘We’d love to.’

  12

  Kit has never believed in time machines before today but she spends most of this sunny Saturday feeling as if she has stepped back to her life as it was three years ago.

  The pumpkin patch with the family – the only addition being Edie, whom she didn’t know when she was married to Adam and living in the big house on the other side of town – then lunch at the diner.

  And at the diner they run into Charlie, Keith and the kids who have just sat down, so they get up and wait for the big table in the middle, and the two couples and their kids chat and laugh, as they have done so many times in the past.

  Charlie keeps making googly eyes at Kit across the table, gesturing towards the toilets, and eventually Kit gets up and excuses herself, closely followed by Charlie.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Charlie grins as soon as the door to the Ladies is safely closed.

  ‘What do you mean? We just ran into Adam and the kids at the pumpkin patch and he asked us to join him for lunch. It’s entirely innocent.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Not “right”. God, Charlie. It is possible for divorced people to remain friends, you know.’

  ‘I know. It’s just that… how come you never were before?’

  ‘What do you mean? We’ve always been friendly.’

  ‘You mean, always been friendly since you completely hated each other when you were going through the divorce?’

  ‘Well, yes. Obviously, I mean since then.’

  ‘Okay, it’s true – once you got past the anger you have been friends.’ Charlie frowns. ‘But something’s changed.’

  She’s right. Something has. There is a new-found ease between them, an acceptance, both of their divorce and of their right to lead separate lives, and also of the fact that they are both the parents of two children they love, and are standing by their decision to co-parent.

  And because of that, there isn’t a negative charge any more. No anger. No hurt. No pain. Just the ability to finally be friends.

  ‘Nothing’s changed.’ Kit smiles. ‘We’re just in a good place. I think we’ve both truly moved on.’

  ‘Really?’ Charlie’s eyes grow wide. ‘I’d say the exact opposite. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that seeing you two together, today, seems… I don’t know… right, I guess. Maybe I shouldn’t say that, but it’s true.’

  ‘Oh Charlie. Of course you can say that, and I totally understand why you feel that. You and Keith were our best friends, and it’s bound to feel great when the four of us get together. And time has a tendency to wipe out all the bad so you just remember the good. Honestly, sometimes I have a hard time remembering what was bad. But, Charlie, remember how lonely I was? Remember how we grew apart? How we ended up barely speaking to one another?’

  ‘I do,’ Charlie nods as she answers. ‘I just wonder if you maybe didn’t try hard enough to make it work. If maybe Adam had been willing to make changes, get another job, find something closer to home, maybe it could have worked, because seeing how well you two get on now just makes me sad.’

  ‘It makes me sad too, but the thing is that Adam wasn’t willing. He loves his job too much, is too defined by being a successful finance guy to ever give it up. I never cared about that stuff, and that was the biggest problem. That Adam cared too much.’

  ‘Well, given the way the world is going, he may not have a choice. I thought Keith’s career was going fantastically, and then – poof! The world changed. After Lehman and AIG went down, Keith was really worried, and now they’ve just fired seventy-five per cent of the department.’

  ‘That’s terrible! Is Keith’s job okay? Why didn’t you say something before?’

  ‘It is terrible, but we’re hoping that Keith is going to be okay. The worst thing is losing the stock. I know everyone says that you just have to leave alone whatever stock is left and that, although it may take years, it will come back again, but we’re literally watching our savings dwindle away to nothing.’

  Kit doesn’t know what to say. She thinks of Charlie’s large, beautiful house, her large, beautiful life. Everything you are supposed to have, living on Connecticut’s Gold Coast, Charlie has.

  It is everything Kit used to have too, but Kit has learned to live without all the accoutrements, and is happier without.

  She wonders if Charlie could do the same thing. Live in a small cottage, drive a third-hand Volvo wagon – nothing smart or sexy about it. Shop cautiously and sparingly in the sales, learn the price of milk, of eggs, and learn which grocery stores are cheaper, cutting out the coupons in the free magazines, remembering to bring them with her every time she needs groceries.

  Charlie drives the obligatory black Range Rover, and Keith a BMW, 5 series. She shops at Rakers, the designer store in town, without thinking about it.

  Kit knows that Charlie doesn’t really care about all this, not deep down, but the problem with living in Highfield is that there are plenty of women who do care, and while Kit suspects Charlie would be perfectly happy living as Kit does, she would be judged by others if she had to give up these things, would be found wanting.

  Already, since the collapse of Wall Street, everyone at the yoga centre is talking about it.

  ‘Do you know anyone?’ everyone is asking, meaning anyone who has lost their job, anyone who has lost their house, lost their life.

  ‘There are foreclosures happening all over town,’ Edie said yesterday. Now semi-retired, she is still keeping a close eye on what is going on. ‘We’re all being asked to go to conferences on short sales and foreclosures. Nothing whatsoever is moving, and everybody is waiting to see what’s going to happen.’

  Like vultures, the people in Highfield are waiting for someone in their circle to have their life circumstances changed, someone to feel sorry for, at the same time as having immense gratitude that they themselves are safe.

  Nothing like a hint of Schadenfreude to make an insecure wealthy housewife feel better about herself.

  ‘Come on.’ Charlie smoothes her hair back in the mirror. ‘They’ll be wondering where we’ve got to.’

  ‘Charlie –’ Kit lays a hand on her arm to stop her just as they’re about to walk over to the table – ‘I want you to know that, whatever happens, I’m here to support you.’

  ‘Thanks, Kit. I know. The only thing I’d ask is that you don’t say anything to anyone. As it is we’re having dinner with Tracy tonight because she’s got some business opportunity she wants to talk to us about.’

  ‘Business opportunity? She didn’t say anything to me.’

  ‘That’s because she’s looking for investors and she wants us to invest.’

  ‘Oh well, I guess that’s why she didn’t come to me.’ Kit laughs awkwardly.

  ‘Yeah. I wouldn’t take offence. Alice and Harry, from the Greenhouse, are coming too.’

  ‘As investors?’

  ‘Yeah. Apparently, Alice’s ex is some super-big big shot on Wall Street and she got a big settlement in the divorce.’

  ‘Really? Wow. That surprises me. I guess just because they seem so down-to-earth.’

  Charlie nudges her. ‘And I’m not?’

  ‘Yes, you are. Very down to earth in your black Range Rover with your – how
many carats are those diamond studs in your ears?’ Kit laughs.

  ‘As I’ve told you many times before, the Range Rover is practical for the flower deliveries, and I only wear the diamond studs because they’re pretty. Three.’

  ‘Three what?’

  ‘Three carats each. Bigger than Melanie Colgan’s. That’s all I care about.’

  They grin at each other, for Melanie Colgan is the girl who strives to be chair of all the charity galas, strives to be bigger and better, to have more than everyone else. Both Kit and Charlie try to stay as far away from her as possible.

  When Melanie Colgan is in the front row of the yoga class, Kit and Charlie are in the back. When she is holding court on one side of the smoothie bar, Kit and Charlie are on the other.

  As Charlie says, ‘She’s not a bad girl, she’s just trying so goddamned hard.’

  They go back to the table and pull out their chairs.

  ‘Why is it,’ Adam wonders, ‘that when women go to the bathroom together they take four times as long as men?’

  ‘Because we have to powder our noses to look pretty for our men,’ Charlie says in a Southern accent. ‘Don’t flatter yourself thinking it’s because we like to gossip about you, or anything like that.’

  ‘Just checking.’ Adam winks at Kit, and they signal for the bill.

  *

  ‘Has Charlie said anything to you about money?’ Adam asks, as they reach their cars.

  ‘Not much. Why?’

  ‘It’s just that Keith said things aren’t looking good, and he’s worried.’

  ‘Charlie said they were hoping things would be okay. He still has his job, right?’

  ‘Right, but they’re doing another round of lay-offs in the next couple of weeks and Keith is pretty sure he’s going to be among them.’

  ‘She just said their stock was doing badly.’

  Adam shakes his head. ‘Tell me about it. He seems to think that Charlie doesn’t understand how serious it is. Apparently, she bought herself a necklace at Rakers the other day, and that was just after Keith told her they had to rein it in.’