Carpool Confidential

by Jessica Benson

  “I’m not supposed to have dairy or anything acidic.” Every s sound was a th.

  Great. Special needs already. “Hey, everyone,” I said cheerfully. The whole kitchen was filled with the puncturing air of we’re all just hanging here, not worrying about whether it’s Rick at the door. “Look who’s here! It’s my niece, Harmonye.”

  She kind of waved. There was a collective exhalation, and then a little babbled rush of nice to meet yous and I’ve heard so much about yous, some true some not.

  “How lovely to see you again!” Letitia, looking like she might tip over at any moment, brandished her glass in greeting.

  I grabbed Randy’s elbow. “I think one of us is going to have to cut her off.”

  “I vote you,” she hissed back.

  “You’re always saying you’re so tough. Prove it.”

  “You’re the daughter-in-law.”

  “Ex.”

  “Show me papers.”

  “Children?” Jen said.

  “I’m not drunk.” Letitia turned to Harmonye. “Do I look drunk to you?”

  Harmonye neatly sidestepped Letitia’s question. “I’m not going by that name anymore. I’m thinking Mary Alice.” Because of the swelling it came out Mary Alith.

  “I think it’s a mistake, young lady”—Letitia was actually slurring—“to choose a name you can’t pronounce.”

  “The lisp is temporary,” Harmonye assured her.

  I smiled at her. “If your dad hadn’t been on assignment, he might have talked your mom out of Harmonye. You could have ended up her second choice: Peace-A.”

  “He wanted Beatrice, which is probably worse—my mother always says, if you can’t be bothered to show up, you don’t get a say. Of course, knowing my mother, she was probably only there because she like had no choice.”

  Unfortunately this was probably true. My sister, whom I love despite her eccentricities, and her husband, about whom I’m more equivocal, are not bad people. Just bad parents. I handed Harmonye a Horizon pudding.

  She frowned. “It’s dairy.”

  “Live on the edge,” I suggested.

  “Thanks.” She smiled, and I could see a trace of the chubby toddler who used to climb into my lap, which made me think with sadness of the baby I was not having. She sat down at the island and began spooning it up.

  I turned away and pulled a box of Oreos out of the cupboard.

  “Oreos!” Letitia cried happily. “I haven’t had one of those in years!”

  Randy took one. “They’re not the same since they took the lard out.”

  Harmonye gazed at them longingly.

  “That’s what you get for piercing your tongue.” I handed her another pudding. “Maybe I’ll make you some gruel instead.”

  She burst into tears for real, making her the third person tonight. I was starting to get a serious complex. I put my arms around her. “I don’t really have any gruel.”

  “Maybe it’s time for us to get going.” Randy gave Letitia an and you too look.

  Letitia, who was drunkenly splitting Oreos, either missed or ignored the hint. “They’re best if you lick out the filling first. Do you have any milk, Cassie?”

  Jen handed Harmonye a box. “Randy’s right. I hadn’t realized how late it—”

  “No, it’s okay”—Harmonye said—“don’t go. If you stay, it’s like”—sniffle—“having like a tribe of elders or something.”

  “Gee,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “If you’re an elder,” Letitia said as she sat down with a thump, still holding the Oreo box but looking at me, “what does that make me?”

  Randy yawned. “I don’t know, but this elder has to be at work in the morning.”

  “Oh, don’t go.” Jen smiled. “It won’t be a true powwow without you.”

  Harmonye gave a teary giggle. “Sorry.”

  In the end, Randy called Josh to say she was staying a little longer. They had one of those marital conversations of hushed voices and few words. Listening to them, I felt the cold draft of my aloneness. It was awful, this feeling of wanting my life back, which meant wanting my marriage, but not knowing if love or hate was my predominant feeling toward my husband.

  “I know your mom’s in the Himalayas, but where’s your dad?” I asked Harmonye.

  “Wherever.” She sniffled again. “Iraq, Pakistan. Somewhere in Europe.”

  “Iraq and Pakistan aren’t in Europe,” I said. “What are you learning at boarding school?”

  “How to tell an Andover boy from an Exeter one,” she said, deadpan.

  Randy hung up the phone. “Is that some kind of secret circumcision issue?”

  Harmonye looked down at her pudding and started crying again. “I wouldn’t know.”

  So this was a boy thing. I should have guessed.

  “Are you saying”—Letitia had Oreo in her teeth—“these boys don’t like you?”

  We all looked at Harmonye. Even with the swollen tongue, she was a beautiful girl. With breasts. And I don’t recall it taking a whole lot more than that at her age. Come to think of it, it probably didn’t take much more than that at any age.

  “Griffin doesn’t anymore,” Harmonye said. Then she started sobbing again. “And he wasn’t circumcised at all.” I looked at my niece snuffling into tissues. Was Katya’s little baby girl really old enough to be having sex? She was sixteen. God, now I really did feel like a tribal elder.

  “Stupid, fucking uncircumcised jerk.”

  I was out of my parenting depth and I knew it. My specialties were people who lost anything not physically attached, only ate two foods (neither with any taste or nutritional content), PSP hoggers, musical instrument practice shirkers, and those who needed half-hourly reminding not to throw balls in the house or step on other people’s heads. Teenaged girls were not my area of expertise.

  I knew whatever I said or did, it would be the wrong thing. And Rick had been an only child, Jen’s daughter was seven and Randy’s was eight, so there was no use looking around me for help. Why wasn’t her mother here? Unfortunately, I was intimately acquainted with the fact that this wasn’t the first time Katya hadn’t been there for her daughter and likely wouldn’t be the last.

  My head throbbed and my eyes were so burning with exhaustion I could barely focus on the people in my kitchen. Randy was quietly making tea. I looked at Harmonye. Was it even legal for me to keep her here if she’d run away from school?

  “Harmonye,” I said, “does the school know you’re gone?”

  She shook her head. “Well, probably they do by now.”

  “Did you tell anyone you were going?”

  She shook her head again.

  “We’d better let them know before there’s a panic and they terrify your mom.”

  Jen crept out to check on the boys for me.

  “Oh, Cassie.” She shook her head. “You so don’t get my mom. I mean, good luck to them getting hold of her. I like tried and tried. And even if they do, she’s not going to give a fu—um, damn.”

  “I do get your mom, sweetie.” Randy handed me a mug of tea, and I wrapped my free hand around the warmth. “And I know she’s not perfect, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you, and it also doesn’t mean she should have the life scared out of her the first second she gets back to phone reception.” Although privately, I sort of thought maybe she should. “So let’s call and leave her a message that you’re here and you’re OK and then let’s call the school.”

  “I’m not going back.” She was getting hysterical.

  Letitia burped. “Oh, dear,” She covered her mouth. “Now I remember why I haven’t had an Oreo in years.”

  She did look kind of green.

  “They’re best taken in moderation.” Jen came back in. “Sound asleep.”

  “They may not mix well with margaritas.” Randy took the empty Oreo box.

  I rubbed Harmonye’s back. She sobbed on the waxed finish of my antique pine table. I started to laugh in that I-know-I’m-laughing
-at-a-funeral-but-I-can’t-stop kind of way. “You do realize,” I said to Jen, “that you’re the only person in this apartment other than me who hasn’t cried tonight.”

  She burst into tears.

  Fuck. I never should have mentioned it. Now I was the only one who hadn’t, which made a change. I’d cried so much over the past few months I had no real recollection of starting and ending points.

  This time Letitia got up to make tea. I worried as she turned on the Viking that the flame might ignite the margarita fumes. “You know what would be fun?” She was once again the flawless hostess. “Let’s take turns placing our problems in front of the tribunal of elders. Harmonye first, then Randy, then Jen, then Cassie.”

  No one said anything, but apparently as far as she was concerned, lack of protest constituted a communal yes, even if some of us looked sort of taken aback. She smiled brightly. “Excellent. And me, well don’t worry, Cassie, I’ll wait for another day.”

  18

  One of these Days

  At this point anything that meant getting to the bottom of things with Harmonye and not getting to the bottom of things with Letitia sounded pretty good to me. I looked at Harmonye.

  “Can you call me Mary Alice?”

  We all nodded.

  “Griffin—” She started sobbing again. “I hate him. He’s gross and totally random and has no chin. His family hasn’t since William the Conquerer, it’s like a point of pride, and now”—her tears picked up steam—“my baby might have no chin.”

  Oh, God. Queasy, stomach-churning shock for, what, like the fifteenth time today? I’d had no idea earlier how out of my depth I was. “Har—Mary Alice—” I stopped then, because even though I had a million questions, I had no idea which were helpful to ask and which were not.

  “You’re pregnant.” Randy said it rather than asked it, but it seemed like as good a place as any to start.

  “The condom broke.” Harmony hiccupped. “And when I told him about being pr-pregnant, he just said that I knew what to do and I should do it. And he’s already seeing Tabitha Foster. And I don’t want to tell anyone at school because they make you go to the counseling center and talk about stuff with old people with lard asses and thick cardigans”—she looked at us—“like way older than you guys, like the shrink my mom used to drag me to, and they try to ask you how you feel about things and like try to make it seem like they understand even though you all know they don’t.”

  “Cardigans?” Letitia could not have been more horrified.

  “Thick ones,” Harmonye assured her. “With those little ball-y things from being old and gross—”

  “Acrylic!” I hoped Letitia wasn’t going to get the vapors.

  I tried, “But, M.A., sweetie, that doesn’t mean they can’t be good at—”

  “Are you saying you would talk about your innermost problems to someone in a thick cardigan with pilling, Cassie?” Letitia demanded.

  “I would if—”

  “Never.” She sat down next to Harmonye and offered her hand. Harmonye took it, and the two of them sat there glaring at me. Like I had done something wrong.

  “So.” Randy looked at me. “You think you’re pregnant but you’re not—”

  “What?” Harmonye looked at me too.

  “False alarm.”

  “—Harmonye—”

  “Mary Alice,” Harmonye interjected.

  “—should not be pregnant but is, and—” Randy started crying again. Jen, still holding her own soggy tissue, patted her back. “—I want to be and should be but I’m not. Nonspecific secondary infertility. That means I’ve been pregnant before but it’s not happening now and they have no fucking idea why not.”

  She did? She should? She wasn’t? I’d had no idea—none at all, not even an inkling—that Randy wanted another child. I couldn’t decide whether or not this was because she’d done an amazing job of hiding it or because I was either the most self-centered person in the universe or going through an incredibly self-centered time, or worse, both. I looked at Jen. “Did you know this?”

  She shook her head. “No idea at all.”

  Jen was demonstrably not the most self-centered person in the universe, so this made me feel a little better.

  “I’m married and old enough to know what I want, and my husband has one hell of a chin,” Randy said.

  “True.” I did a quick mental flip back to Randy, mooning over that stroller in Starbucks. How uncharacteristically upset she’d been by my thinking I was pregnant. It made sense now. “But Ran, how long has this been going on? Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “About two years.” She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “It’s just been so”—she paused—“boring. It’s boring and it’s depressing.”

  “Unlike my recent life,” I glared at her. “God, Ran, I’d never have dumped all this on you if I’d known you were having your own rotten time.”

  “At least yours hasn’t been boring.” She sniffled angrily.

  I was working on the ground-shifting revelation that Randy, too, had weak spots. “But I would have liked to have been there for you, too.”

  “Me too,” Jen said.

  There was a noise behind me. Letitia had let go of Harmonye’s hand, gotten up, and opened the dishwasher. She wasn’t loading it, exactly. More staring into the empty drum like she’d never seen anything quite like it, but she appeared to be thinking about loading it. “I’m sorry,” she said to Randy. “Infertility is heartbreaking.” She looked far away, and I wondered what she was seeing. It was almost like she was human.

  “I might quit my job,” Randy said. “They say stress is contributing, and that’s the only real way to reduce it. But IVF is expensive, and not only do I make more than Josh, my health insurance is way better, so quitting would just bring on a whole new kind of stress. I just don’t know what to do.” Her eyes were brimming again.

  At this Jen welled up again.

  “I’m finished.” Randy pulled herself together. “I’ve even bored myself. So, Jen, what’s up?”

  “It’s way more boring than yours.” Jen gave a soggy laugh. “Nora wants to move to the burbs—better for the kids, more space, you know, the usual. We’ve looked at Scarsdale, Short Hills, Greenwich, I’ve hated them all. Nora’s absolutely set on it, and it seems like all we do is fight. I’m starting to feel like as long as I take care of other people and worry about what they want, then everything’s fine, but heaven forbid I have my own opinions, then everything falls apart.”

  I felt dizzy. “What about all that stuff in Starbucks about you knowing who you are?” It was like Jen and Randy were suddenly different people. Maybe I’d never really known them at all, only what I’d wanted them to be.

  “It was then that I realized I was saying all that stuff while simultaneously debating the merits of ten-thousand-square-foot mcmansions I hated—”

  Randy looked stunned. “Ten thousand square feet?” You’ll have to excuse her—we are New Yorkers, after all, a species known for being able to house a family of five in a space the size of a suburban walk-in closet. Randy and Josh owned a brown-stone with potential—i.e., fifteen feet wide, dropped acoustic tile ceilings hiding the Victorian decorative plaster, and the previous owner’s indoor-outdoor carpeting “protecting” the original floorboards (maybe). Josh figured they’d have the money to fix it up right about the time they were too old to climb the stairs. “How many is your apartment?”

  “Um, maybe four,” Jen said. “It seems more spacious than it is because it’s a loft.”

  Randy turned to me. “What about yours?”

  “About the same as Jen’s but not nearly as cool.” I nodded at Letitia. “Yours?”

  “Oh, dear, I really don’t know exactly.” Silence. Everyone knew Letitia knew. “Seven thousand, four hundred and eighty.”

  Randy shook her head. “I’d go to Greenwich in like ten seconds if Josh would consider it. Is it ten thousand nice square feet?”

  “Excuse me”—Jen was
sort of laughing—“that’s not even on the same page as my point, which is that all the stuff I said in Starbucks, I don’t even know how much of it is true anymore. Maybe none. I’m definitely not who I used to be.”

  “I don’t get it.” Randy frowned. “Why can’t you go back to work? You’re a doctor. It’s not like you’re not qualified to do anything.”

  “I’ve spent so many years bolstering Nora’s career…I just don’t know.” Jen wiped her eyes. “And we agreed I should be home for the kids.”

  “So the agreement’s changed.” Randy looked at Jen. “I mean, that’s life, right?”

  Jen shook her head. “You make it sound so simple, but it’s not. I still believe one of us should be home, and the reality is that she just makes so much more money than I ever did.”

  “Just like a real husband.” I drained the dregs of my warm margarita. “Does she complain about the dry cleaning all the time?”

  “And that we never have the right kind of raisin bran or shampoo.”

  I knew all about this. “Has she started complaining about bottled water?”

  “She used to drink anything—Polar brand, Schweppes, but now—”

  “It doesn’t have to come from Finland, does it?” I was having dark memories.

  “So you’re like really a doctor?” Harmonye looked at Jen like she couldn’t believe it.

  Jen smiled. “Yeah. I like really am.”

  “And you quit after all that work just because someone told you to?”

  “It wasn’t that simple. I was thirty-six. I was in love with Nora and my new baby. At the time it seemed like not much to give up.”

  I nodded. Definitely knew that feeling too.

  Harmonye hiccupped a sob. “Oh, God. I’m so not ready to be a mom. Even you’re confused, and you’re like a million years older than me.”

  “Thanks,” Jen said dryly.

  I though of Katya and then of Rick and it hit me how misplaced Harmonye’s faith in the power of a couple of decades was. “How far along are you, M.A.?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe like,” she looked down again, “a month or two.”

  “Do you want—what do you want to do?”