The Secret Life of Sarah Hollenbeck

by Bethany Turner

  For the record, I was very proud of my epiphany. I felt very mature and profound for figuring that out—but that’s not to say that I was proud of the way I was feeling, of course. Nevertheless, I expected at least some marveling at my diagnostic skills, but Piper didn’t marvel.

  “‘Upon the dissolution’? Is that really how you talk?”

  I stared at her for a moment, willing myself to be offended, but in the end all I could do was laugh. “I don’t know!”

  And she laughed with me, though neither of us really understood the joke.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  “I mean, I don’t really know how I really talk. I haven’t been just me for a very long time.”

  Understanding and kindness shone in her eyes. “Stay here,” she commanded kindly, and then she walked into the room where the circle of ladies had become more of a parallelogram as they all wiggled and stretched to get a view of whatever was going on in the hallway.

  Within seconds, Piper was back with her backpack and my Louis Vuitton purse, Kate Spade messenger bag, and Williams Sonoma brownie pan.

  “Let’s go get some coffee,” she said as she handed everything to me.

  “Okay,” I said, not fully understanding why we were going to get coffee but not opposed to the idea. “I just have to run back in quickly. I left my pen with . . .” Oh, here we were again. I had to refer to someone in the group, and I had no idea what her name was. I sighed, embarrassed once more.

  “Eh, don’t worry about it. I have plenty of pens. I’ll loan you one.”

  I didn’t move from the spot.

  She sighed. “Is your pen a designer too?”

  I blushed. “Montblanc.”

  “Okay, I’ll go get it. Who has it? Marilyn?” she asked. I scrunched up my nose, trying to act like I was just having a mental lapse. “Shawna? Rachel? Cynthia? Shaniqua?”

  I did an involuntary double take and then tried to hide it. Of all those laced-up white ladies, which of them could possibly be named Shaniqua?

  “Umm . . .”

  Piper started laughing. “Come on, Sarah. We know that you don’t know our names. Just describe her.”

  Oh, how the embarrassment grew. And yet, it was funny. Piper made it funny.

  I mumbled, and when she couldn’t understand me, I said a little more loudly, “Mullet Marie.”

  “Got it. Be right back.”

  I watched out of the corner of my eye as she went right up to Mullet Marie and got my $400 pen.

  “Thank you,” I whispered when she handed it to me, a smirk on her face.

  “You’re welcome. Let’s go.”

  Over coffee and scones, I told her my sob story. I was surprised and saddened to discover that my entire adult life could be relayed in about ten minutes. I met Patrick at the end of our junior year of high school and never looked back. We went to DePaul University together because that’s where he was going, and I couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from him. DePaul, of course, is a Catholic university. I wasn’t Catholic, but Patrick was, and that was all that mattered. We graduated and decided to stay in Chicago so that he could work for his dad—a dreadful bore of a man who wouldn’t allow me to call him anything other than Mr. McDermott. Patrick worked during the day and went to classes at night in order to earn his MBA. We didn’t see much of each other in those early days, but that was okay, because it was all temporary, I thought. It was what was necessary in order to achieve the American dream. On our fifth wedding anniversary, Mr. McDermott died of a massive heart attack, and Patrick was suddenly the man in charge.

  I was so proud of him. I really was. But that doesn’t mean that life was everything I wanted it to be. For every perk of our life, there seemed to be twice as many drawbacks. Yes, we had money, but I was usually left to spend it alone. Yes, we had use of a private jet, but the only vacation we ever took together was our honeymoon. Yes, we had a huge house in Near North Side, but the empty rooms were filled only by echoing silence during the day and the cold business talk of colleagues and clients at night.

  And then there was Bree.

  She wasn’t his first mistress, but it was the only time he ever dared to bring one of them into our home. That was the night I realized what we’d become, and on some level what I had become, though of course I was still trying to figure that one out.

  I stopped there and sat back in my chair, exhausted.

  “This is the story you should write, Sarah,” Piper said, speaking for the first time in several minutes. “You’re on this journey, trying to figure out who you are now. This is stuff you know, and stuff you feel. Patrick, his dad, Bree . . . all of it. That’s what you should write about.”

  I hadn’t had a conversation this intimate with anyone in a very long time. I thought for a moment, trying to remember the last time. It certainly wasn’t with Patrick, or my mother. Ah, that’s right. Father Horatio.

  Father Horatio is my favorite priest. I never really got into the whole church thing, but I still had to act like a good little Catholic wife for appearances’ sake, so I would go to confession. But only to Father Horatio. My first confession to Father Horatio, two weeks after Patrick and I got married, was that I didn’t believe in God.

  It wasn’t true, of course. I didn’t have a lot of faith, and my actual spiritual life was pretty nonexistent, but I’d always believed in God. But I figured that telling a priest I didn’t believe in God was a pretty good litmus test for how he’d handle all of my other sacrilegious baggage.

  “Excuse me?” Father Horatio asked through the lattice, and I smiled before continuing solemnly.

  “Yes, that’s right, Father. I don’t believe in God.”

  “No, dear, I wasn’t talking to you,” he said in reply.

  What? Was someone in there with him? I was new to Catholicism, but I was still pretty confident that was somehow against the rules.

  “Who are you talking to?”

  “Actually, I was talking to God. He was wondering why I was sitting here in an empty booth. Turns out he doesn’t believe in you either.”

  I laughed so hard, and so did Father Horatio, and from that moment on I was completely honest with him. With Father Horatio, I could be myself. He was the only one.

  Well, until now. I knew nothing about the woman sitting across the café table from me, but I was more comfortable with her than I was with people I had known my entire life.

  “Can I ask you something?” I was about to look like a self-centered jerk once more, but I knew it was unavoidable.

  Piper nodded that I could as she took a sip of her coffee.

  “What made you feel so free to say what you said about my poems?”

  She grimaced. “Come on now, Sarah. Aren’t you being a bit generous by calling them that?”

  I laughed. “Yes, yes, I know. ‘Kerosene Boom’ was pretty bad.”

  “Well, hang on a minute. I actually thought that was one of the better ones.”

  “Oh, that’s a sad statement!”

  She quoted a few choice lines from “Air Freshener Catharsis” to demonstrate her point, and tears began running down my cheeks, I was laughing so hard.

  “I think that ‘Ernest Hemingway Was Never So Young as a Chimpanzee in School, Part 2’ is actually rather profound,” I deadpanned. “One might even say enigmatic and enthralling.”

  She shook her head as she began laughing every bit as freely as I was. “And what was the one about the spleen?”

  “That one was called ‘Spleen,’ I believe.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Trust me, I know they’re bad. And I’m not for a moment suggesting you shouldn’t have said anything. I mean, you were the only person with the guts to tell me the truth, and I appreciate that. You didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know, really, on some level. It’s just . . .”

  “I don’t know.” Piper sighed. “I’d just been watching you for weeks, and it was plain as day that you were going thr
ough something. I thought you deserved the truth. Don’t we all deserve the truth?”

  And then it poured out of me. “Okay, here’s the truth: I never even noticed you before that day. Not once. When you spoke up, it was like you had just wandered into the room. So that was pretty shocking.”

  “It would be, wouldn’t it?” She frowned. “You’d never noticed me at all?”

  I shook my head.

  “I wasn’t even a Mullet Marie?”

  “Nope. Everyone in that room has a nickname, but not you. I never noticed you. I don’t even know how that’s possible, actually.” I pushed away the momentary consideration that she was a ghost or an angel, though that made as much sense as anything else I could come up with. But somehow, Piper knew exactly how to explain it.

  “From the first day you joined the book club, it was so unbelievably obvious that you were searching for something.”

  I didn’t ask her what she thought I was searching for. I think that even then I knew I wasn’t ready for the answer.

  “You seemed like you needed a friend,” she continued. “I watched you, and I noticed that you never made eye contact with anyone. You went out of your way to avoid it, whether you realized it or not. I didn’t know why—I still don’t—but I knew I was right. So, never being one to back down from a challenge, my quest each week was to get you to make eye contact with me. So I watched you all the time.”

  I couldn’t believe it. “Did you? I didn’t notice.”

  “Of course you didn’t notice.” Piper laughed. “I was the only person in that circle who was willing to meet you head-on. I think everyone else is almost as bad as you are. Everyone is running or hiding from something. It took three months to get Alisa to make eye contact with me.” She started laughing again as she stood to throw her napkin away.

  “Who’s Alisa?” I asked, no longer embarrassed by my lack of knowledge.

  “Hmm. Let me think. How would you know her? Surprised Sally, perhaps?” That didn’t trigger anything other than a smile. “You know,” she continued, “she always looks surprised. Or startled, maybe. Her eyebrows are always . . .” She used her fingers to push her own eyebrows as high as they could go, and I started laughing loudly as realization hit.

  “Botox! That’s Botox!”

  Piper covered her mouth to try to keep the laughter from being too loud, but she failed shamefully, which just made me laugh even more.

  I couldn’t think of the last real friend I’d had. I suppose Patrick was the last. That’s sad, isn’t it? But there was a time when he was my friend. My best friend. And then we got married.

  Piper and I talked for hours, and it felt like, well, hours. It didn’t drag on because it was an excruciating experience I couldn’t wait to walk away from. Not at all. And it also wasn’t a giddy, slumber party–esque gabfest where the time flew by as we talked about boys and hairstyles and ate cookie dough. We laughed and bonded and just genuinely enjoyed our time together.

  It was very real, and very impactful. And the time that we spent together was perhaps my first dance with reality, at least since reaching adulthood. I wasn’t carrying on a conversation with the sole purpose of impressing a client for Patrick. I wasn’t laughing at jokes and flashing my pearly whites, hoping that I didn’t zone out during all of the boring stock market talk.

  For the first time in a very long time, I was just me. Piper helped me remember what it was like before I ever became Sarah McDermott. I was once again Sarah Hollenbeck from the south side of Chicago—a girl who may not have grown up in an affluent neighborhood, a fancy house, or even a happy home, but she was genuine.

  From that point on, I was committed to the belief that there was no one else I needed to be, ever again.

  That was a good thought, in theory.

  3.

  Raine, with an E

  I took Piper’s advice and started writing what I knew. But what did I know, really? I knew who to call if you ran into a landscaping emergency at 10:00 in the evening. I knew which items from Burberry’s previous collections were timeless and which to pass off to consignment. But none of that seemed like enough to fuel a novel, so I realized I would have to dig deeper.

  I dug deeper for about the same length of time as the Frasier rerun I was watching, and then I decided, instead, to write what I knew nothing about. Not in the Yellow Pages poetry way, which had failed so horribly for me. No, it was time for something more. It was time to have fun. It was time to dream and pretend and conjure up a working hypothesis of what I thought it might be like to be half of a loving, functional couple.

  Something I knew nothing about.

  Loving, functional couples always fall in love at first sight, right? At least that’s how it usually happens in the films and books I had filled my head with. And they can’t keep their hands off of each other, even when the moment is less than appropriate. And tempers and passions continually flare, usually stemming from or leading to misunderstandings that could have been cleared up with simple questions like, “Is that your ex or his twin brother whom you’ve never mentioned?” or comments like, “The lady I’m going to the party with tonight is my dying aunt and not a rich benefactress you assume I’m sleeping with.”

  I wrote Stollen Desire over the course of about six weeks, while sustaining an unhealthy—and rather disgusting, in retrospect—diet of hot wings, quinoa, and Merlot. It was the story of Alex Stollen, a rich, successful, celebrity chef, and Annie Simnel, his young sous-chef. It was unrealistic and schmaltzy, and both of my lead characters’ last names were types of baked goods. But she made him want to be a better man, and he made her feel whole again. And they got to throw a lot of flour around during their love scenes.

  I’m not exactly sure why I decided Alex and Annie’s sex life needed to be written about in such graphic detail. Then again, I suppose it’s not that difficult to connect the dots, considering I spent every day blaming my ex-husband’s infidelity on my own apparent sexual inadequacy. I had no real reason to suspect that Patrick had been dissatisfied with the physical aspect of our relationship, apart from the fact that there had been no physical aspect at all for a very long time. “Experts” would most likely hit on something more profound and insist that our separate bedrooms and his infidelities were symptoms of a deeper wound, but it was much less painful to confront the idea that he turned to Bree and the rest of them because of who I was in the bedroom, rather than who I was as a person.

  So maybe I wrote certain scenes certain ways in order to confront what I was dealing with inside my head, or maybe that’s what I was trying to avoid. Or maybe I was just tired of watching Frasier reruns. Regardless of why the book was written, who it was written for was never in doubt.

  Me. Only me.

  And no one would have read it if I hadn’t been distracted, and thoroughly amused, by the disbelief, shock, and horror every other woman in the circle was exhibiting as Piper explained why she just didn’t think Mr. Darcy was “marriage material.”

  “How can you say that?” asked Mullet Marie, whose real name was Mullet Cynthia. I mean, just Cynthia, of course. But who are we kidding? The mullet just cried out for an identity all its own. “The entire book is literally about how Mr. Darcy is marriage material. He’s the very embodiment of the phrase, Piper.”

  Piper scrunched up her nose, and when I caught the mischievous wink she directed toward me, I knew she was in her element. I didn’t want to miss a moment of it. So when Moira, previously known as Barbra Streisand Nose, asked if she could borrow a piece of paper, I didn’t bother to take my eyes off of the evening’s Austen debate.

  Clearly not paying attention to my own actions, I inconveniently picked up my Kate Spade messenger bag by its leather base rather than the leather strap. Everything came tumbling out of the bag. It was kind of like it all happened in slow motion—I focused on the bag in horror, taking just a moment to verify that I had indeed lifted it by the wrong end and that there wasn’t somehow a hole or tear, before setting it
back on the floor beside me. All at once, Moira picked up my notebook and tore out a sheet of blank paper before slipping the notebook back into the bag while Cynthia retrieved my Austen anthology and handed it to me with great care—as if the very lives of Mr. Darcy, Colonel Brandon, and Captain Wentworth were entrusted to her.

  It wasn’t until I saw Shawna, with the aid of her Coke bottle glasses, trying to make sense of the coffee-stained 8½-by-11 sheet in her hand, that I began to fully understand the magnitude of the moment.

  “Hey, Sarah, what’s this?”

  A few pages of my very private story were scattered all across the floor, but the question came from Boob Job Bonnie, who I instantly renamed Bad News Bonnie (her name is actually Alma). In her hands was a stack of papers about an inch thick, covered in coffee stains throughout. I reached out to grab it from her hand as she flipped through the pages, but she wasn’t holding the manuscript as tightly as I’d thought. The papers flew from her hands and mine and rained down on the group. Instantly, everyone—graciously and annoyingly—started helping to pick up the pieces of paper, and as they did, they spotted certain words.

  Words that couldn’t help but grab a reader’s eye.

  The room went quiet as all of the ladies read what they held in their hands. I was powerless to stop it, and then I didn’t want to. There were near-silent teeters and sighs and a few rosy cheeks as they picked up additional pages to read them.

  “What is this?” said Pirate Patch Patty (who actually is named Patty, as it turns out). And then the room erupted into unabashed giggling.

  My name wasn’t on the manuscript—after all, I wasn’t seeking publication or even proofreading from anyone. The only person I had intended to share my work with was Piper, who by then was without a doubt my best friend. Although, let’s face it: she had become my best friend the moment she became my friend. The best among one. But don’t let that undermine the depth of our friendship.

  “Oh, it’s just something a friend of mine is working on,” I lied.