“You never told me that,” Deborah said, looking at John, eyebrows down and clearly annoyed. Ted thought, What kind of family airs this crap in front of strangers? Ashton was moved by it, however.
“I thought there was something wrong with her,” John stated. “She squirmed when we tried to pick her up and wouldn’t make eye contact. She could talk to strangers by the time she was one, but not to us.” Deborah was flushed, trying not to get defensive, but failing.
“I must have known I couldn’t belong to you,” she said. Looking over at Natalie’s wiry curls, she smiled. “Beverly, Mom here, had my hair straightened when I was six. Not that I don’t appreciate it now, Bev. It made elementary school much easier, not having a Brillo pad for a hairdo.”
Natalie started laughing. “You were lucky! My mother wouldn’t allow it. They were hippies back then, and you didn’t mess with Mother Nature. Besides, your hair didn’t suffer; it looks great now!” Everyone but John complimented Deborah for her wild, beautiful hair.
“Anyway, it looks like you might have benefited from my genes,” Ted added with a deadpan delivery. They looked at Ted’s receding hairline and thinning top. There was silence, and then laughter erupted. Hopefully, Ted thought, John will shut his mouth. There goes the stereotype that people from Princeton are liberal intellectuals.
“Zach, what do you think about all this?” Ashton asked. Zach shook his head back and forth.
“No way man, I’ve got no opinion about any of it,” he answered. They laughed, but Deborah looked at him, concerned. The last thing she needed was a reluctant boyfriend. Without him, she’d have to move back home for the summer.
The meal ended without any more commentary from John.
Ted wanted nothing but for them all to respect each other. He was still uncertain whether he needed a relationship with Deborah and Natalie, but it appeared that Ashton did. He was in the habit of speaking to Natalie on the phone at least three times a day.
“So, is this couch comfortable for sleeping?” Deborah asked Ashton.
“Yes, but come with me. We have two bedrooms, my dear.” He took her by the hand to a light-filled space at the rear of the apartment. It contained a daybed and the bookshelves with the overflow books from the den. “You can stay in here when you visit. He imagined weekend sleepovers, holiday meals with his new stepdaughter, shopping trips for back-to-school clothes. Did college-aged students need that? He had a lot to learn. His reverie was disturbed when Ted came to get them; John and Beverly were leaving.
After the Phillipses left for New Jersey, the relief everyone felt was evident when they found a place to curl up alone. Natalie claimed one end of the couch in the den and immediately starting snoring. Zach, who acted like nothing bothered him, lay on the carpet and went right to sleep. Deborah found a leather-bound copy of Rebecca that had belonged to Ted’s grandmother in the spare bedroom and curled up on the other end of the couch to read in peace. Ted put the football game on in the living room. Only Ashton was still standing, puttering around his kitchen and refusing any help cleaning up. It was a comfortable, relaxing ending to a nerve-racking meal.
It wasn’t so nice for John and Beverly, though. When they got to their car, they found the rear passenger-side window of John’s Mercedes-Benz smashed and the radio and GPS gone.
“In broad daylight?” John asked, looking around. “What kind of brazen jackass breaks into a car in this neighborhood? It’s no better than Jersey City here.”
“Are you going to call the police?” Beverly asked.
“Why? What will they do about it? God damn it!” he yelled. “Don’t stand there gawking. Help me clean up this glass in front of the tires so we don’t get a flat,” he demanded. They spent the next five minutes trying to avoid getting cut while they swept the glass up with pieces of cardboard John got out of the trunk while passers-by looked on with apathy. “This is why we don’t live in the fucking city,” John said.
Beverly thought the reason was because he worked in Princeton, but she kept her mouth shut. When they created a path for the tires to drive through, they left for home. It was hot out, so the wind from the absent back window felt good. Beverly imagined that if she were alone, she’d stop somewhere to shop or go to a museum—anywhere but home. Or she’d get on Route 9 once they were back in New Jersey and head to the shore. Her sister had a great little beach house on the bayside in Ocean City. Beverly loved going there. When the kids were small, she went every weekend and when invited, stayed the night. John hated the Jersey shore, preferring to drive five hours south to Bethany Beach in Delaware. But Beverly didn’t like going there because it meant the protracted car ride with her husband, who acted like he hated her and days in a small condo facing other condos with no chance to lounge on the beach alone. Now that the kids were gone, she knew she had to do something. She couldn’t stay with John and feel like crap about herself.
She’d had an idea the year before, the year Greg started high school. He didn’t need her as much as before. The private high school he went to was practically in their backyard, so he didn’t even need her to drive him in the snowiest weather. Her mother left her a little cash, not a fortune, but enough to help out with college tuition for the children with something left over. She knew John expected her to fork all of it over to him to manage, but she was standing strong that it would not happen. It was money her mother had invested for Beverly instead of spending it on herself. Thinking about it made Beverly cry; her mother had been generous to a fault with her daughters, buying them gifts and helping them have a better, easier life then she did. No, John was not touching the money. Beverly wanted to start a business. She wasn’t sure yet what it would be. She thought of the things she loved and wondered how she might turn them into a profit making business. Beverly loved to bake and imagined a little bakery like the old-time bakeries that used to line the street in the Chambersburg neighborhood she grew up in near Trenton. She and her father would walk to their favorite place every summer morning and buy pastries and bread for the day. Her mother would scold them for the sweet stuff; it wasn’t healthy. But he bought it anyway. Although the rent in Princeton would be too high for her to have a business there, she thought about the old Italian neighborhood from her childhood. You couldn’t pick up a paper without reading how they were up and coming again, the classic old row houses available to young, savvy buyers for a song. She was going to look at the real-estate section of the paper when they got home and start investigating.
The horrendous traffic flowed out of the Jersey side of the Lincoln tunnel. Once they were on the turnpike, John could relax and start interrogating his wife.
“So did you know those two were homos?” he asked, looking over at her. She wanted to ignore him, to tell him he was an ignorant asshole, how the hell would she know? But she fought the urge, and although she felt like the air had been sucked out of the car, she smiled at him sweetly.
“No John, Deborah didn’t say anything to me about their sexual orientation. Young people take those things in stride now days.” The minute the words were out of her mouth, she regretted it.
“That’s a crock of shit,” he said, exploding. “We raised her in church. She knows it’s a sin not to be taken lightly. I should have insisted that she go to the church school and not that liberal Friend’s School piece of garbage. I blame you for that mistake. No wonder she’s accepted those reprobates and that frizzy-haired hippy as her parents.” Beverly looked over at her husband, not understanding how he could fail to see the hypocrisy in what he’d just said.
“What’s a crock of shit, John? That we raised her in the church? Or that she is a lovely young woman who doesn’t judge others because they don’t think exactly like she does?” Beverly didn’t like starting fights while John drove, but it was too late. Better to get the issues out in the open before they got home and exposed Greg to this squabble. They’d adopted Deborah doing the best they could for her, and now she was grown up and decent—maybe not exactly what John
wanted by living in sin with Zach and not coming home for the summer. But she’d looked for her birth parents with Beverly and John’s blessing and wanted them all to meet. Whether that was Deborah’s idea or someone else’s was not important. What mattered was that she included them in her plans. But Beverly wasn’t going to bring it up with John. In his current mood, he’d fail to see the positive in anything their daughter did.
He didn’t answer her.
Beverly loved John, and if they’d lived in a vacuum all their lives, they’d been fine with nothing to fight about. She thought the way a couple dealt with stress defined what kind of relationship they had. She also felt like they were always headed for divorce court.
Chapter 14
After Steve Marks so kindly drove Carolyn Fitzsimmons back to her home in Queens, she made it up to her room before her mother and father came out of their apartment. The feeling that she was a teen again and not a middle-aged woman approaching seniorhood made her nervous and angry. If her mother dared to say anything to her about going out after work last night, she wouldn’t hold back. She needed some privacy if she was going to get on with her life.
Saturdays were always a crap shoot for Carolyn. She was supposed to have her boys until Monday morning. However, they often didn’t want to see her. June would call, which really pissed Carolyn off; it was something Frank should do. She debated telling her lawyer to address it. So June would call first thing in the morning and say something like, “Scott has a soccer game this morning, and of course you’re welcome to come, but he wants to go to Six Flags afterward” or “Danny has friends here from a sleepover last night. It would be rude if he left.” If Carolyn refused, she’d be the mean old mom who thwarted the amusement-park plans or ruined their sleepover. Seening her children was getting to be such a problem she almost stopped. But she was afraid that if she allowed them to get away with it, soon there would be a petition from the court that stated that since she didn’t take advantage of her visitation, she was in danger of losing it. She thought about what the day would be like if she didn’t have to worry about the boys. She’d be free to run errands without arguing with them to come with her. If they showed up on her doorstep, she’d have to plan something for them to do; there was the competition to keep things as exciting at her house as it was at Frank’s. Often, they would get to the house, run up to their bedrooms without greeting her, and slam the doors if she tried to follow them.
Then the phone rang; it was Frank’s number.
“Hello, Carolyn,” June said.
Grrrrr, Carolyn thought.
“I know today’s your day, but Danny wants to go into the city for a kite-flying contest at the park later.” Carolyn thought about what it would be like to go into the city on a Saturday so her boys could fly kites. They could get lunch from a food cart, which they loved. She might even invite Steve to go along. She liked flying kites and hadn’t done so in a while.
“Well, tell Danny his mother is taking him to the park, June. Get the boys here by nine or I’m calling my attorney. Don’t tell me again they aren’t coming home on the weekends.”
She waited for a second or two, and then June said, “OK.” She didn’t argue or say the boys would be mad. Carolyn was pleased with herself. She quickly got a shower and dressed in casual, summer clothes appropriate for kite flying and impressing men. As she carefully applied her makeup, she realized she was smiling at her reflection.
Fifteen minutes later, she heard doors slamming. She approached the hallway just as her boys were running up the steps, preparing to move past her without a hello or a hug. She grabbed both of them as they attempted to get by.
“Oh no, you don’t,” she warned. “No more disrespect in your mother’s household, do you understand me?” Danny struggled a little, but Scott stopped, looking at his mother, surprised. “Come with me,” she said as she dragged them by the arms into her bedroom. She pushed both boys down on her bed. She was pleased they hadn’t tried to resist her yet.
“I know you like staying at Dad and June’s on the weekend. But it’s too bad. The court gave me your weekends, and I’m your mother. I’m not going to let you hurt my feelings anymore by not coming here. Every weekend, unless it’s prearranged, you are coming home. Is that clear?” Scott nodded his head, but it was taking Danny longer to accept the fact. He was looking at his mother, mulling over her “hurt feelings.” He was fourteen years old. He knew about hurting people, and he was sorry he’d hurt his mother. He stood up and hugged her.
“I’m sorry Mom. I like staying in bed on Saturday mornings, that’s all,” he said.
Carolyn thought the solution might be as simple as having them come home Friday night; she’d talk to Frank, not June. And if he resisted, she’d threaten a lawyer consultation that would come out of his pocket.
“Apology accepted. Let’s get ourselves fed and ready for some kite flying,” she prompted. They went down the stairs to the kitchen, and it felt like old times, sort of. Frank’s empty place at the table glared at her. Guilty, it said. You drove him away with your granny panties and your chubby knees. Wait until you see June’s midriff. She’d get the opportunity, later in the day, when the three of them would run into June and Frank as they walked to their car on Fifth Avenue. How was it that in a city of eight million people, they’d cross paths with the slender, youthful June and her older boyfriend?
And sure enough, they did. Frank looks awful, Carolyn thought. His skin was pasty, and he was almost skinny. Age was not kind to him. He seemed tired. June might be too much for the old boy. June was wearing a short top that showed her trim waist and taut skin. Carolyn was suddenly conscious of the peasant top she had on to help hide her thick waist. Oh, tough! I am what I am.
Frank had the decency to appear embarrassed. He introduced June to Carolyn, not sure what was correct—“Meet my wife, my ex-wife, my girlfriend, my lover”—so he simply used their names. They knew who they were. June was nice enough; she didn’t gloat or cling to Frank. And then, strangely or surprisingly, she asked Carolyn if she would have dinner with them. It was as natural to her as if she were asking her best friend to join them.
“Come over to the house,” she said. “I’m grilling on the deck. I’d love to have you.” Carolyn was sorry the request had been made in front of her boys because it would appear that a refusal would be deliberate and angry. But then she remembered that Steve had asked them to his place in Greenwich Village for pizza, and they were excited to go. The boys loved the hip, artsy-fartsiness of the neighborhood. Carolyn decided she could afford to be gracious to this woman who was, after all, kind and caring to her two boys.
“Thank you, June,” she replied. “It’s very generous of you to invite me. But we have plans for dinner tonight. A friend from work invited us for pizza in the Village.” The boys were fidgeting, trying to get the trunk open so they could put their kites away, and in doing so, had popped open the gas cap, turned the windshield wipers on, and done everything but open the trunk. Carolyn laughed out loud. “I’d better get moving here before there’s a wrestling match.” Neither boy moved to say goodbye to their father and his girlfriend. Although it did give Carolyn a twinge of satisfaction, she was determined to rise above pettiness. She knocked on the window and told them to say goodbye. “Hey, you two, show some respect.” Maybe Frank would get the hint and reciprocate. He was looking at her with—was it renewed admiration? She couldn’t read it but saw that June noticed, too, and began pushing Frank toward their car. He’d lingered just a little too long for her comfort. They said goodbye, and Carolyn got into the driver’s seat, Saturday traffic in Manhattan taking all her attention. Frank and June watched them pull away from the curb, and Carolyn thought she might have detected just a hint of regret on Frank’s face. Well, he can regret it while he is humping his girlfriend, she thought.
“Let’s go to Steve’s, OK?”
In chorus, the boys said, “OK!”
In a different village, across the East River in the Vi
llage of Babylon, Pam Smith was sitting at a café in town, having breakfast with her new attorney, Dan Chua. They were doing more laughing than eating.
Pam had had an iffy morning, talking to Dave about her plans. She decided that, although they didn’t usually spend Saturday morning with each other, she owed Dave an explanation about what she’d be doing in case someone they both knew saw her having a meal with a handsome, single guy.
“I wanted to tell you because it might seem odd if I didn’t,” she explained. Dave was jealous of her relationship with her gay friend, Jeff—what would he say about her young lawyer?
“Why a new lawyer?” he asked. Pam didn’t tell Dave much pertaining to Jack and was sure the news about a wrongful-death lawsuit was among the things she’d keep from him. It was just easier that way. She didn’t like being put in the position of defending her late husband.
“I have some work that my current guy doesn’t handle,” she lied. “Why not join us?” Her heart started pounding in her chest because what if he accepted? He never liked going for breakfast with her but might change his mind.
“Why would I go to a business meeting with you? No, go meet your ‘lawyer,’” he said with just the right tone of voice so that Pam would understand he was not happy.
Now she was sitting across from this great-looking man who was obviously very interested in her. She knew she had to make the AIDS speech happen that morning. They’d spent the previous afternoon working out together at the gym, and Pam hated to have to end it. She and Dave had spent each evening having dinner together for the past year, and she couldn’t be gone when he called her. She felt so guilty now because it was evident she’d been super-comfortable with him and fell into a pattern of needing to see him for the companionship, but little else. The small physical attraction she’d had for him had waned and finally disappeared. She thought it was her own faltering libido due to age and poor health. But now, sitting across from this handsome guy who exuded sexuality yet didn’t seem to be aware of it, she realized she may have been selling herself short.
Family Dynamics: Pam of Babylon Book #5 Page 8
