Carpool Confidential

by Jessica Benson

  “I knew we could count on you both to be on board.” Sue beamed down the table at them.

  Why didn’t Sue’s husband leave her? I mean, if there was ever a woman who deserved to be left, trust me, it’s her, was my next—particularly mature—thought. After Wharton, Sue had gone to work for a media PR firm, becoming the youngest—and one of the rare female—vice presidents. When she married Tim Stephens, a major intellectual property lawyer at Fitzwilliam & Compton, it was practically like a Kennedy wedding (minus the drugs, lecherous uncles, and general air of tragedy).

  The following year, they bought a twenty-five-foot-wide Greek revival townhouse, original detail intact, on Columbia Heights in Brooklyn—the New York real estate equivalent of Buckingham Palace. Rick and I were stuffed into our one bedroom plus den on the upper Upper West Side—the New York real estate equivalent of a walk-in closet anywhere else.

  About a year later, I interviewed Sue for a City Woman article on women in PR. I was a week away from giving birth to Noah and had arranged to meet over lunch at the Four Seasons, which back then was still considered the place to lunch.

  “Oh, look at you! You and Rick are having a baby!” Sue had squealed, as I’d aimed myself at my chair and hoped for the best. That was the thing about that particular stage of pregnancy: even the most self-absorbed can’t miss the clues. My enormity was particularly surprising to me, since all I’d done for the past thirty-seven weeks was puke. “So, how do you feel?”

  “Good,” I’d said. “Great.” Which wasn’t true, but nothing is more deadly than pregnant women who catalog their hemorrhoids/ swollen ankles/constipation/cravings for Pepperidge Farm Milanos dipped in tartar sauce to other, non-pregnant people.

  Sue leaned closer, across the table. “So did you hear about Ashley Dunow?”

  Ashley had been the only woman to finish ahead of Sue at Wharton, so there were a few scores to settle. In fairness, had Ashley been hit by a bus, Sue would not have been alone in cheering. I shook my head.

  “Do you remember how she used to do those iron woman triathlons? And how when she broke her leg that time while they were climbing Mt. Cho Oyo she let the guide set it with no anesthetic?”

  It was hard not to.

  “When she got pregnant she assembled a birthing team, you know, a doula, a midwife team, a masseuse, an acupuncturist, a reiki specialist, three OBs, studied different philosophies of birthing—you know Ashley. She was planning a water birth with dolphins. Are you doing it at Lenox Hill? Because that’s the only place in the city that will allow it, apparently.”

  I shook my head. I was just hoping to make it through alive and, frankly, wasn’t all that optimistic.

  “Anyway, on her due date she did two cardio classes in a row, power walked to work”—Sue let her gaze drift over my abdomen—“(she only gained eight pounds) and then, bam, went into labor right there on the trading floor. It took three paramedics to subdue her, and fortunately the one whose eye she gouged out when they were putting her in the restraints decided not to press charges. They jammed the needle into her spine something like six times, but the epidural didn’t take. She was begging for morphine! Anyway, she was in labor for four days. The tear was so big they thought she might need a vagina transplant. Hasn’t been the same since.”

  I’d sipped my water in an attempt to quell the dizzy sweat.

  Sue shook her head. “If Ashley couldn’t handle it…well, you won’t catch me trying. But don’t worry,” she’d added brightly, “I’m sure things will go much better for you!”

  The next time I’d heard from Sue was a year later. Since she was announcing the (water, no dolphins mentioned) birth of Isabella Moriarty-Stephens, I figured she’d changed her mind. I’d sent a gift, and then there was no contact until I called to tell her we were moving to Brooklyn. By that point Sue and Tim had added two more Moriarty-Stephenses (trendy IVF-assisted twins, Dash and Maisie), and she was on her way to becoming the once and future PTA Queen of Brooklyn Heights.

  “So the question,” she said, “is: is this Harvard number steady from year to year, or does it reflect a growth trend?”

  Ken nodded. “And is this something Harvard deliberately seeks in applicants? Or”—he punctuated his sentence by slurping at his coffee, and my stomach lurched—“conversely, does the skill in applicants reflect a trend in preschools?”

  “Chicken or egg!” Betsy said. “Chicken or egg?”

  I wrote this down. Chicken or egg. Then I debated whether to go back and add either an exclamation point or a question mark. As the person ostensibly chairing the meeting, it was my job to take notes. This was the only thing I’d written down so far.

  My husband left me, I tried saying to myself for practice. But that sounded wrong, so I added the children: He left me and the children. It still didn’t sound for real, so I tacked on Barry Manilow: He’s dumping me and the children for Barry Manilow. But then my life sounded like the punch line to a bad joke, so I added: but it’s not a dump, it’s a postmodern concept deploying post-ironic discourse. Which made it sound like a bad joke I wasn’t smart enough to get, so I gave up.

  “But surely we can’t afford to wait and find out which it is.” Sue looked around. “Because if it’s chicken, well, it’s our children who will be left behind.”

  Nods of approval bobbed. I tried to make myself write this down but couldn’t seem to focus long enough. A sense of overwhelming panic was crawling over me, filling my chest and clogging my throat.

  “The kids don’t need this.” Randy Bradford, who said this, is my best friend. She is smart, cutting, insightful, and completely capable of debating the opposing viewpoint for days, or at least until she had to be in court debating the opposing viewpoint for a living. I wished she’d shut up.

  At home, it had seemed like a good idea to attend the meeting. Now, with Sue glaring at my less-than-assiduous note-taking, Randy glaring because I wasn’t backing her up, and my own panic threatening to choke me, it looked a lot less inspired.

  “Do you have data to back up your assertion?” Sue stroked her folder lovingly.

  “Just that since they start a second language in first grade, this is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard.” Randy gave me another back me up here look. I looked away.

  “If you have anything more evidentiary than ‘this is one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever heard,’ we’d be happy to hear it at the next meeting. When is the next meeting, Cassie?” Sue looked up from tapping away on her Palm.

  “Um. How about next week at the same time. The”—I glanced down at my diary—“twenty-first at nine-thirty?”

  “Cassie”—Sue squinted at me—“I think you’re looking at April! This is October, and next Wednesday is the seventeenth.”

  “Oh, right.” I tried to give a silly-me laugh as I flipped the pages, but it came out sounding not right. Randy gave me a strange look. I couldn’t tell what month I was looking at. October, April, May. It was all an indecipherable blur. My life, in the space of one night, had changed so cataclysmically, it was beyond my comprehension that these people cared about this, that I might have, yesterday.

  “I think when we reconvene, we should also be looking at data from Yale and Princeton.” Ken had droplets of coffee glittering in his mustache.

  “Definitely. Ivies, plural, as opposed to Harvard, singular,” Betsy agreed.

  “Or does that diffuse the focus of our discussion?” Ailsa was frowning.

  Queasiness lurched precariously in my throat. My husband is gone, I thought. Gone, gone, gone, gone, gone. How many times would I have to repeat it before it lost its meaning? Its gravity-defying, horrifying meaning? Gone, gone, gone, gone, gone. Damn, not yet. Gone, gone, gone, gone, gone. Betsy’s husband is not gone. Ailsa’s husband is not gone. Sue’s husband is not gone, alas. Randy’s husband is not gone. Mine is. Gone. How could this be happening to me?

  “You do all know that St. Stanley’s is changing their curriculum to give preschoolers on th
eir so-called”—Betsy made those little quote thingies in the air—“genius track” (she took her fingers down) “an option to choose between Latin and ancient Greek?”

  I’d wondered how long it would be before the discussion headed there. St. Stanley’s was a rival private school. Just a few physical blocks but several atmospheric miles away. It had a reputation for catering in its own eccentric way to the genius-ly inclined but behaviorally challenged offspring of the wealthy, the great, and the good (i.e., Goldman Sachs VPs and soap stars planning on making comebacks soon) mostly from across the river in Tribeca. Whether the education was any more or less was open to (frequent) debate. Their college admissions record was not.

  Consequently, the other private schools in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan were populated almost entirely by children who had mysteriously “been accepted” by St. Stanley’s but had (at age three) “made the decision” to turn them down because they recognized it was “not right for them.” Sadly, Noah had not had that opportunity. Possibly due to the fact that at the play-group portion of the interview, the child from whom he had grabbed the bin of plastic dinosaurs (screaming, “Those are mine. My, my, mine!” who had retaliated by screaming, “No, they me, mine!”) was the progeny of a drug-addicted model turned fashion designer and someone high up at CNN. After that black mark, we hadn’t even tried for Jared.

  I rubbed my fingers over my forehead. My face felt stiff, the claustrophobia of the windowless conference room pressing in as the nausea rolled over me in waves.

  “I have a headache,” I said to Ken (as the tallest person in the room). “Do you think you could do me a favor and turn on the air conditioner?” This involved climbing on a circa 1974 school chair—our $25,000 a year tuition didn’t stretch far—and randomly hitting buttons until one of them coaxed the ancient machine to life.

  As he stood, it occurred to me that the reason his coffee smelled so vile was that it was mixing noxiously with the Polo overload. He was still holding a bagel coated in gelatinous cream cheese. His butt quivered with effort beneath his Dockers, and the bagel tilted in his hand. The heat in the room must have made the cream cheese runny, because a big glob of it slid slowly off the bagel, where it hung, suspended for a moment, before falling, as if in slow motion, splat onto the table. I watched it, hypnotized.

  Revulsion overtook me. The room was swimming in front of my eyes, and the voices seemed to dim. I was pretty sure I was going to choke. I didn’t feel like I was going to throw up, anymore. It was worse, more like asphyxiation. I couldn’t swallow. Polo, coffee, cream cheese, too many voices, melded together. Rick’s gone.

  If I didn’t drink something I wasn’t going to be able to swallow, and I was definitely going to choke and probably pass out, right here, at the Subcommittee on Language in the Preschool meeting. Could you just lose the ability to swallow? If so, could you die that way? My brain was working at double time. What if I hyperventilated? What if I died? Then my two beautiful mono-lingual children would be orphans and there would be no one to watch out for their interests and Sue Moriarty would probably raise them. Or worse yet, my mother would. Or even more unthinkable, Rick’s mother.

  I could definitely not afford to choke.

  I reached out and grabbed the only drink within reach: Ken’s half-drunk coffee. Even the cup wafted Polo. It was either that or die, so I took a slug. Miraculously, it burst down my throat, and my ability to breathe kicked in again.

  Ken had wrestled the air conditioner into reluctant cooperation—it was now spewing fetid, lukewarm air and dust—and turned around just in time to witness me sucking down his cold coffee. His eyebrow lifted behind his smeary glasses.

  Everyone, including Randy, was staring at me. I smiled weakly.

  “That was mine.” Poor Ken sounded baffled, and rightly so. “I bought it.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll reimburse you. It just looked so…good.” I was desperately attempting to get a grip. Lose it here, I reminded myself, and you’ll end up explaining last night to greater Brooklyn Heights, which in turn means clueing in Park Slope, Fort Greene, Prospect Heights, DUMBO, Williamsburg, lower Manhattan, and a few areas of Red Hook. Because this is going to make one hell of a did-you-hear? at Starbucks. “What did you put in it, Ken?”

  “Milk.” He looked suspicious now. “And Splenda.” He pulled a vial from his pocket. “I buy it in bulk at Costco. You can bake with it, you know.”

  “Well now that the pressing issue of Cassie’s coffee is settled, perhaps we could return to the matter at hand?” Sue suggested.

  Randy was still looking at me like I was insane.

  “My Robert took to Latin like the proverbial duck to water when I introduced it at home when he was three,” Ken said.

  “But surely this should be curricular, not left to the discretion of the individual parent?” Sue said.

  Ailsa nodded. “For what we’re paying…” She didn’t need to finish, having trotted out the motto of the New York private school parent.

  “Although”—Betsy smiled brightly—“maybe St. Stanley’s does have the right idea about tracking which kids do it and which don’t. I mean, Poppy, well, she could handle it—she loves to learn!—but it’s not exactly a secret that not all of them can.”

  “Has anyone besides me noticed that the children in the pre-school here seem to spend an awful lot of their time”—Ailsa lowered her voice—“well, playing?”

  I looked down at my watch. I’d now been a single parent for twenty minutes and one near-death experience longer than the last time I’d checked. The bad news was that I wasn’t any more used to it.

  “St. Stanley’s,” Sue said. “Remember last year? They were going to adopt British spellings and turn the roof into an organic farming co-op where the kids would raise their own food? It never amounts to anything.”

  “Their ivy acceptance rate is twice ours.” Ailsa was obviously too new to know the rule: never admit any possibility of superiority on St. Stanley’s part.

  “That,” Sue said in the kind of tone you might employ if you were discussing drug trafficking or child labor, “is because they have connections.”

  Would my children even go to college? Or would they end up too broken and scarred, now that their happy, secure lives had been trashed?

  Betsy leaned toward Ailsa, her voice low. “The headmaster there”—Ken, always the gentleman, knowing what she was going to say, looked away so as not to embarrass her—“sleeps with admissions directors.”

  Ailsa laughed. She thought it was a joke. “But surely some of them are male?”

  “He doesn’t care.” Sue was whispering too.

  Now Randy laughed. “And if their acceptance rate is a reflection, he’s damned good with both.”

  “Well”—Ailsa had gathered herself—“that makes it all the more imperative we raise the educational bar, don’t you think?”

  “I’m so glad you said that!” Betsy beamed.

  There was no way this meeting was winding up soon. My head was buzzing, I was starting to get that choked feeling again. I couldn’t stay. “Sorry.” I jumped to my feet.

  “Cassie?” Sue looked puzzled. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yeah, um, fine. Fine. Great, actually.” I reached, blindly, to grab my stuff and, in the process, managed to catch poor Ken’s coffee cup with my elbow.

  6

  You Oughta be Home with Me

  “Cass.” I was heading down the street at record pace, and Randy was right behind me, still zipping her bag. “What’s up?”

  I did not want to be within hearing range of anyone from the school when we had this conversation. I mumbled, “Bad morning,” over my shoulder.

  “No kidding.” Her heels clicked behind me as she took my arm, so I had no choice but to slow down. She took one look at my face and said, “What? What is it?”

  I gulped. “Rick. He, ah…” What was the right way to describe it? “Left me.” It sounded so surprising when I said it out loud that the shock of he
aring it made me sit down, hard, on the steps of the Court Street office supply store.

  “Cassie?” Randy’s voice seemed like it was coming from very far away. When I looked at her through the tears, with her white blond hair and white Elie Tahari coat, she almost looked like she was shimmering. Her face was white, too, like you read about in novels. “Are you serious?”

  “Dead serious.”

  “Oh my God.” She sat down on the steps next to me, apparently unconcerned about the fate of her coat. We both sat there, not saying anything, until: “I’m just…how could I not have known you guys were having problems?” Randy was my running partner. When you run with someone, they learn everything there is to know about you because talking distracts you from the agony.

  “Because I didn’t either. Until last night when he came home and dumped me. No warning, nothing.” I closed my eyes. Closed, open, it didn’t matter. Either way, I could still see myself on my knees and Rick, as he said the words. “It was as much a surprise to me as it is to you.”

  Randy put her arms around me, and I started to cry again. She said, “Shit. I have to be at a deposition in an hour. Oh, Cass, I’m so sorry.”

  “I’m OK,” I said, even though we both knew I wasn’t.

  A blaring horn informed us that a truck driver wanted to back up onto the curb and unload office supplies. We ignored him. “What are you going to do now?”

  Planning even the next ten minutes seemed beyond me. “I don’t know.”

  “Have you called your mother?”

  The truck driver was yelling at us, out his window, to get out of the way.

  “Not yet.”

  Randy handed me a tissue. She knew my mother didn’t do mothering. I sniffled into the tissue. The truck driver revved his engine to back up. Randy pulled me down the steps and we stood, huddled, on the corner.

  “Do you want Josh to pick up the boys this afternoon?” She was one of the few women I knew fortunate enough to have a husband who worked from home.

  I hesitated, feeling like the routine of getting the boys home, listening to them bicker, feeding them, might be the only thing pulling me through the day. Without it there was nothing to keep me from falling to pieces. I decided to ignore the fact that this theory had backfired on me fairly spectacularly with the PTA meeting. “I think I need them with me.”