The Solomon Sisters Wise Up

by Melissa Senate

  “If you knew the basics, Sarah,” I told her, “you wouldn’t have been about to lug that suitcase. You’re not supposed to lift anything heavier than a hardcover book. You can have caffeine once a week. No alcohol, ever. Have you been taking your prenatal vitamins?”

  “Ally—”

  “Humor me, Sarah.”

  “I always do, Ally.”

  There was a soft knock at the door. “It’s me again,” came Zoe’s voice.

  “You don’t have to knock, Zoe,” Sarah called out. “This is your room too.”

  Zoe came in and shut the door. She sat down on her bed. “Dad and Giselle are in the living room, staring at photographs of tuxedo shirts. I couldn’t take it. Sorry.”

  Sarah laughed. “At least cummerbund weekend is over.”

  “Cummerbund weekend?” Zoe repeated. “Try cummerbund week. It’s all we’ve talked about since last weekend. And Ally arrived a day before me. She had to suffer it out all alone.”

  “That’s right,” I said, tossing Sarah another sourball. “So I deserve a little peace.”

  “Peace? You wanna piece of me,” Sarah said in her best Brooklyn Robert DeNiro accent, putting up her dukes, and the three of us laughed. “You wanna piece a me?”

  Zoe sat on the edge of her bed, facing Sarah and me. She sobered up. “You want to know why I’m staying here?” We stared at her, dying of curiosity. “Because my mother’s on the warpath about Dad getting engaged. He sent her an announcement with an idiotic personalized note, and she went ballistic and flew out here vowing to ruin his life.”

  “I don’t blame her,” I said. “He’s marrying a woman younger than her own daughter. It’s vile.”

  Sarah and Zoe stared at me as though they couldn’t believe I actually said it aloud.

  “I’m really worried about my mom,” Zoe continued. “She came here over a week ago, and I have no idea where she is. She’s left me a couple of messages on my home phone to say she’s fine and not to worry.”

  “So maybe she is fine and maybe you shouldn’t worry,” Sarah said. “She was probably just being funny when she said she’s going to ruin Dad’s life.”

  “Funny?” I repeated. “That I doubt. I remember Zoe’s mother.”

  Sarah shot me a look. If I’d offended Zoe, it didn’t show in her expression.

  “Well, why are you so worried about her?” Sarah asked. “Do you really think she’s going to do something crazy?”

  “I don’t know,” Zoe replied on a sigh. “She’s gone nuts as it is with plastic surgery to try to look younger to win him back. She dresses like a trendy teenager. She’s a size four. She got her boobs done—bigger and lifted. She grew her hair even longer and made it even blonder. And when all the extremes didn’t work—I just don’t know what she’s capable of doing.”

  “What is she capable of doing?” Sarah asked. “We’re not talking Lorena Bobbitt, are we?”

  “I don’t think so,” Zoe said. “But honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know what she thinks she can do. She wants Dad back so badly she’ll do anything. That’s what I’m scared of.”

  I shook my head. “You know what, Zoe? I don’t really think it’s your father she wants back.”

  “What do you mean?” Zoe asked me.

  “I don’t claim to know your mother that well,” I said, “but I’d bet anything it’s her dignity she wants back. Not your father.”

  “Her dignity?” Zoe repeated.

  I nodded. “Getting plastic surgery, dressing like Britney Spears—she’s trying to look like she’s twenty-five because she associates youth with dignity. She was treated like a queen when she was young and beautiful, and now she feels she’s being treated like shit. So she associates youth with dignity, instead of associating it with herself, with self-esteem.”

  “Very impressive, Ally,” Sarah said. “Does that sound right to you, Zoe? You know your mom best.”

  Zoe nodded. “It sounds exactly right. But I don’t get why my mom flew out here, then. If she’s after her dignity, why not just go meet a new man who’ll appreciate how well preserved she is? Why come after Dad? Why work so hard to get him back?”

  Because she’s a beast like Dad, that’s why. They were made for each other.

  I understood Judith Gold Solomon and Bartholomew Solomon as a couple. What I’d never understood was my mother and Bartholomew Solomon. I got why he wanted her—she was beautiful and the kindest person there ever was. But I’d never understood why she’d fallen for him, why she’d married such a superficial person.

  “Why would you marry someone who’d just up and leave you one day for someone else?” six-year-old me had screamed at her when she told me my father was leaving, that he fell in love with someone else. She’d picked me up in her arms and sat with me on the rocking chair by the window in our midtown apartment, and I’d screamed and cried and shaken my fists at her as though it were her fault. She’d held me against her, tight, trying to hold my beating fists, and soothed me with shushes and strokes of my hair and told me that my father was a good man, but that sometimes people changed, and if they did, you had to let go, had to let them be who they were. “You didn’t even fight for him?” I’d asked, crying and kicking again.

  “Oh, Ally,” she’d said over and over. “Everything will be okay, you’ll see, baby girl.”

  And everything had been okay, basically, because my mother, with an angry six-year-old and a newborn, was a strong person. We’d moved to a smaller and dinkier apartment on the Lower East Side, near my mother’s grandmother, and once a year Sarah and I flew out to California to stay with my dad, Judith and Zoe for two weeks.

  Why would you marry someone who’d up and leave you one day for someone else…? Oh God, Mom, I thought now. I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry.

  “Zoe, your mom didn’t work so hard to get him back,” I said, “she worked so hard to get herself back. You said your mother was here in New York to ruin Dad’s life, not to get him back. When you want someone back, you don’t go about it from a ‘destroy their happiness’ angle. Unless you’re insane.”

  “Your mom’s not insane, is she?” Sarah asked Zoe with a smile.

  Zoe laughed. “She’s just normal crazy.”

  “Like all of us,” Sarah said.

  “Trust me, she doesn’t want Dad,” I said. “She’s after something else.”

  Zoe lay down on her bed, on her stomach, and folded her hands under her chin. “I guess you’re right, Ally. I didn’t really look at it that way.”

  “You know,” I added, “I never got the feeling that Dad and your mother really even liked each other. I mean, really liked each other, the way you really like a friend.”

  “They were married for twenty-five years, Ally,” Zoe pointed out.

  “Yeah, because they probably didn’t really care,” I said. “So they never actually fought and got along fine.”

  “They cared about each other,” Zoe snapped. “I was there.”

  “Yeah, you were,” I snapped back.

  Sarah looked between us nervously. “So what are you saying, Ally? That a marriage based on something other than love will work just fine, but that a marriage based on love is doomed?”

  “You’re generalizing,” I told her. “I was applying that strictly to Dad and Zoe’s mother.”

  “You really hate her guts,” Zoe said. “Don’t you?”

  “I’d have to care to hate her, Zoe,” I pointed out. “And I don’t. I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

  Zoe’s mother had been vicious and vile to me and Sarah from the get-go, preferring to think that her husband didn’t have two other daughters back in New York. Once, during our annual two-week summer visit, when I was nine and Sarah just three, I’d come inside from the pool to use the bathroom, careful not to drip all over the rug (she’d had a major cow over that one year), and as Sarah splashed happily in the pool, the ever-present nanny watching with one eye while the other was on newborn Zoe, I’d overheard the witch trying to convinc
e my father that a two-week visit was too long, that one week was surely plenty, since he flew to New York to see us twice a year for a day or two. The next summer, when we were invited back for two weeks as usual, I stopped hating my father, and my chronic headaches at age ten went away. I didn’t like him, but at least I didn’t hate him. In his own way and very indirectly, he’d chosen us over his new wife. That had meant something to me.

  “Whatever,” Zoe said. And then she stood up, took off her clothes (except for her underwear), put on a T-shirt and low-rise yoga pants, slipped into bed and faced the wall. “Good night,” she added after a moment.

  “Good night, Zoe,” Sarah said, shooting me a look.

  I shrugged and turned back to my laptop but my hands were trembling and I couldn’t use the keyboard.

  I had no idea how the three of us were supposed to share a room without strangling each other. Sarah and I kicked and screamed, but we were able to have a relationship. I’d never been able to get along with Zoe. She was perfectly nice, but her very being bothered me. Her very being had bothered me from the moment she was born when I was nine.

  Amazing. When Zoe was born, Giselle, our stepmother-to-be, hadn’t even been a twinkle.

  According to FindAMate’s matching system, 226 men met my criteria. While Zoe tossed and turned, and Sarah snored (she’d fallen asleep with her cheek mashed into page 178 of But I Don’t Know How To Be Pregnant!), I chose men to potentially meet. Talk about distracting. FindAMate. com was almost too much fun. In a matter of minutes, I’d forgotten all about angry little girls and terrible summers and marriages gone wrong and sisters who most likely wanted to wring my neck. I’d spent a half hour familiarizing myself with the site, then began clicking on everything I wanted in a man, from hair color to salary range to how often he visited a house of worship, and seconds later, 226 thumbnail photos and lengthy profiles appeared before my eyes. You didn’t like the looks of someone, you simply scrolled past him. You liked someone’s face, you clicked on his picture and it became bigger. And then you read his profile, his questionnaire, his likes and dislikes and his personal essay—what he was looking for in a woman, in a relationship.

  I whittled down the two-hundred-plus men to fifty, based on who I was attracted to, physically and mentally—at least as mentally as their personal statements and little essays allowed me to get a glimpse of who they were. And then I scrolled through those. At least twenty-five men interested me, some ruggedly blond, others the always delicious tall, dark and handsome, and some David Caruso red. There were lawyers, doctors, journalists, investment bankers and real estate developers.

  The only problem was that most of the men I was interested in were interested in women aged twenty-one to thirty-four. Out of the twenty-five whose profiles and pictures reeled me in, twenty-two of those men wanted women younger than me, despite the fact that they were my age or older.

  Twenty-one years old? What would a thirty-seven-year-old man want with a twenty-one-year-old kid? Honestly. I didn’t get it. Yeah, yeah, they were young and inexperienced and lithe and beautiful. Whoo-hoo. You could have great sex with a lithe and beautiful and experienced thirty-five-year-old, a woman your own age, a woman who got your references, who grew up when you grew up, who knew what you were talking about, why you found something funny or nostaglic. Why date a woman you had nothing in common with? Why date a woman who was playing spin the bottle when you were climbing the corporate ladder? What would you really talk about? Perhaps I should nip down the hall and ask my father.

  So now what? Did I forget about those men I was interested in and look for ones whose age range I met? They were jerks anyway, weren’t they?

  Or were they? I myself had scrolled past every man with a receding hairline, anyone who clicked on husky to describe his body type, anyone without an advanced degree and anyone who misspelled a single word or used numbers to represent words, like Looking 4 U. Taste in the opposite sex, types, was very individual. If Sarah were picking her FindAMate preferences, she’d ignore the Andrew Sharp types, the financial geniuses who made fortunes on Wall Street and owned sailboats and houses in the Hamptons, and she’d go straight for the writers and painters who were really waiters—the more silly facial hair, the better.

  So what to do? My taste was the twenty-five men I’d carefully selected. Their taste was a woman younger than myself.

  I decided to come back to that dilemma and create my own profile so that whoever I did e-mail could check me out, decide if he liked the look and sound of me.

  Click here to create your profile and you could have a hot date tonight! I clicked. Name (no last names please. ): Ally. Age: 34—I deleted the thirty-four and typed in thirty-five, since I would be thirty-five next month, on Thanksgiving Day.

  Thirty-four looked better than thirty-five.

  Twenty-nine sounded better than thirty-four.

  I tapped the 2 key with my nail. What to put, what to put?

  I deleted the thirty-five and typed thirty-four. Then I deleted the thirty-four and typed twenty-nine.

  I stared at the number. It looked ridiculous. I’d been twenty-nine a long time ago, and it had been a fine year. My baby sister was twenty-nine, for heaven’s sake.

  Yet all the men you selected want a woman under thirty-four, Ally. Perhaps once they see you, see that you could pass for twenty-nine (barely, perhaps), they won’t mind when they find out you’re really six years older than that.

  After all, surely there were little white lies involved in the online dating biz.

  I deleted the twenty-nine and typed thirty-four, which was technically true for an entire month. I was still in the youth demographic, dammit!

  I stared at the blinking cursor and deleted the thirty-four.

  Age: 29.

  I moved on before I could change it back. At the foot of my bed, Mary Jane cocked her head at me. Tsk-tsk, she seemed to be saying. I patted her head with my foot, and she closed her eyes and dropped her little head on her paws.

  Marital Status… Now that was another toughie. There was a box to click on for Separated, but whose business was that? Then again, I couldn’t click on Married, since that would suggest that I was married and looking for an affair. I couldn’t click on Divorced, since I wasn’t. Then again, I wasn’t twenty-nine, either. Oh Lord.

  But I wasn’t divorced. And I wasn’t ready to apply that word to myself.

  I clicked on Single. I considered myself single, and that was what mattered.

  For Job and Salary Range, I was tempted to click on Clerical and $25-$50,000, since some men were intimidated by high-powered women. But did I want to meet one of those men? No. I clicked on Professional and Over 200K.

  Use the space below to describe the kind of man you’re looking for in forty words or less:

  My fingers typed before my brain even had a chance: I’m looking for a man to make me feel like a woman.

  Huh? Was that what I was looking for? What was I looking for? I didn’t even know. I wasn’t looking for a relationship. I wasn’t looking for a friend. I wasn’t looking for sex.

  So what the hell was I doing?

  I set the laptop on my bed and lay back and stared up at the ceiling. What was I doing?

  You’re looking to distract yourself, Ally, I told myself, running my toes along Mary Jane’s silky fur. You’re looking for someone to make you feel special again. You’re looking to sit at a table for two with an attractive man who’s flirting with you, interested in you. And if you should be inclined to have sex, then so be it. Your marriage is over.

  I sat back up and pulled the computer back onto my lap.

  Upload a recent photo of yourself. I scrolled through the photos I had online and chose my very favorite, which was taken five years ago. I’d been sunbathing in Central Park with Mary Jane when Sarah happened to settle down on the Great Lawn with a blanket and a girlfriend. She’d recognized Mary Jane and sneaked over with a camera, catching me unaware. She told me she’d never seen me look so relaxed
, so at peace, as I did lying there on my side, reading a book.

  The book, which you couldn’t see in the photo, was Get Pregnant Now. The night before, Andrew had said yes to having a baby. You can finally stop asking me if I’m ready, Ally-cakes, he’d said, because the answer is yes. Baby, let’s have a baby!

  And so I’d thrown out my birth control pills and bought a basal thermometer. I’d bought the bikini I was wearing in the photo. Andrew couldn’t get enough of me then. We had sex morning and night. No protection. I’d thought we were making a baby. But month after month, I got my period.

  A man had made a fool out of me for the past five years. It would never, ever happen again. From now on, I would be in control.

  Five minutes later, all clicked and uploaded and my twenty-five-dollar monthly fee taken care of, I was a member of FindAMate.com.

  9

  Zoa

  My cell phone rang, and I snatched it off my bedside table. “Mom?”

  “No, it’s Daniel. But I saw your mom a few minutes ago.”

  Daniel? Ah, Danny Marx. “You did? Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure,” he said. “It was only for a few seconds, and when I ran over, she was gone. Bloomingdale’s is pretty crowded for a Wednesday morning. I looked for her for a while, but I couldn’t find her.”

  My mom was alive and well and in Bloomingdale’s. I let out a deep breath and lay down on my bed, but then a wet-haired Sarah wearing a robe and slippers came into the bedroom. I figured she wanted some privacy to dress for work, so I took the phone into the living room.

  “Bloomingdale’s,” I repeated, dropping down on the loveseat by the window. I should have figured I’d find her in an upscale department store.

  “She was in the cosmetics department,” he said. “Bobbi Brown, to be exact.”

  “What were you doing in the cosmetics department?” I asked.

  “Well, now that you’re in town, I thought I should spruce up a little.”

  Was he serious?

  “Kidding, Zoe.”

  “Sorry,” I said, parting the filmy drape and peering out the window. “My sense of humor is definitely off.”