Carpool Confidential (6 page)

“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.

“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 hearing 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.”

Randy looked like she might cry too. “How are they doing?”

“They're fine.” I looked away so I wouldn't have to see her expression. “They don't know yet. I'm waiting for the right time. I need to take it in before I can tell them.”

She nodded. “Of course. It's just so shocking. Of everyone I know, it never occurred to me that you two wouldn't go the distance.”

I sniffled some more. “Me too.”

 

Maria, the cleaning lady, was banging the breakfast dishes around in the sink when I got home. She came every morning and followed me around the apartment talking about her husband, whose hobby was moose hunting. Maria had half a moose in her freezer at all times. The first week she worked for us, in an attempt to stop her from offering me moose pieces, I told her we were vegetarians. Vegetarianism, it turns out, is a really stupid lie to tell someone you're employing in large part to do the shopping and cooking. Because then, to cover up the lie, I had to go right on doing all the grocery shopping and cooking myself.

Why Maria was employed by us (me, now, I realized) was a bit of a mystery. Since she lived in mortal fear of Cadbury (a phobia of furry things that sleep most of the day, maybe?), she refused to walk her ever. As the children disliked Maria (
she's a total freak, Mom
), her usefulness as a babysitter was limited, and since she didn't actually clean other than making a few beds, her value as a cleaner was limited.

This morning, she was very busy in the kitchen watching
The View
. I crept down the hall to the study, where I closed the door, turned on the computer, and sat, shivering, at the desk while I debated what to do first. Call my mother or sister, cry some more, find a PI, call the accountant and figure out how much money I had: these were all on the reasonable option list. Instead, I pulled out my Filofax (that's how long it had been since I'd worked— my business contact phone numbers were still handwritten) and looked up Charlotte Worth's work number.

Charlotte was an old friend from graduate school. We'd worked together at
City Woman
, and she was now the features editor of
NYMetro
. If I hadn't known her back when she'd worn the same pair of Doc Martens every day and believed she had found lasting passion with a guy whose main means of support was power washing graffiti off subway platforms, I'd have been intimidated as hell by her glossy, adult perfection. So between that and the fact I had no idea why I was calling or what to say, I had mixed feelings when she picked up her own phone after two rings. “Charlotte?”

“Yes?” It could not have been clearer that she had Something Very Important going at the moment.

“Charlotte, it's, um, Cassie Martin.”

Silence. Oh, shit. She'd forgotten me! Even in my most humiliating imaginings it hadn't been
this
humiliating.

“Cassie-might-as-well-have-disappeared-from-the-face-of-the-earth-Martin?” she said after a long-enough wait to make me seriously sweat. “I don't believe it.”

Relief at not having to explain who I was flooded through me. “How are you?”

“Good. Great. What's doing in the outer boroughs? Do you have sushi yet?”

This was a joke. Possibly. Or maybe not. Charlotte prided herself on never crossing the bridge.

“Sure,” I said. “Blue Ribbon. Charlotte, Brooklyn's the new Tribeca. We have Miranda and Steve from
Sex in the City
, although I do understand they're fictional, Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, they're real. I think. Jennifer Connelly and Paul Bettany, Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams. They're all here.”

As it occurred to me that I had no idea where exactly I was going with this, the door opened and Maria frowned around it. “Why didn't you tell me you were home?” she demanded, hand on her chest. “You scared me to death.”

“Sorry,” I mouthed. “
And
we have Williamsburg hipsters,” I told Charlotte. Since I'd started this idiotic line of conversation, I felt compelled to continue digging myself deeper and deeper. I wanted Maria to go away, but she was still standing in the doorway glaring at me. I raised an eyebrow at her.

“That dog, I think she needs to go out.”

I covered the receiver. “Could you please take her, just this once?” I pleaded. “Please?”

Maria crossed her arms. “No. She's dangerous.”

Yeah, you could die of old age waiting for her to make her way out the door.

“There's probably still a hipster or two left wandering aimlessly around Williamsburg now that the investment bankers have taken over,” Charlotte said.

“Bring her in here,” I hissed.

“I'm not cleaning it if she has another accident,” Maria warned.

“Fine,” I hissed, hand still over the receiver. She opened the door wider, letting Cad amble in.

“They might as well just rename the whole place, you know those Welcome to Brooklyn signs you get when you cross the bridge? Change them to Welcome to the Borough of Domestic Bliss,” Charlotte drawled. “No entry without a stroller.”

Cadbury threw herself down on my feet and went to sleep. “I can't speak for anyone else,” I said, “but I don't think you want my take on domestic bliss at the moment. And frankly, the sushi's not exactly Nobu.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Blue Ribbon's pretty good, but—”

“Back up to your hit and run on the domestic bliss thing.”

“Rick left me.” The second time I'd said it out loud. It didn't feel significantly better than the first, but I was at least already sitting this time. Would the thousandth time still bring the same misery? I tried to breathe my way through the agony.

“I'm sorry.”

“Go ahead and tell me why you never liked him.”

She laughed. I'd forgotten how great a laugh she had. “What makes you think I didn't like him?”

“I have that sixth sense,” I said. Then, “Maura Ginsberg told me one time after thirteen Appletinis.” Maura was another Columbia J School classmate.

“Maura has a big mouth.”

“Maybe,” I agreed, “but I still want to know.”

“Why?”

“Because”—as I answered, I started to feel like I was almost poised on understanding—“he's such a standup guy, everyone loves him.” Or everyone other than my mother, but I already knew the hows and whys of that. “As far as I know, this is the only shitty thing he's ever done. I want someone to tell me something bad so I can see if it makes sense. I need help reconciling this.”

“I still remember the first time I met him. Remember, you brought him to that awful party Ben Strohmeyer threw after he had his letter to the editor accepted by the
Village Voice
?”

I laughed. “Actually, I think it was an op-ed.”

“Whatever.” She paused. “I wonder whatever happened to Ben. Anyway, Rick, I don't know. You want this straight up, Cassie? Really?”

I glanced out the window at the serene blue stretch of harbor under an achingly clear sky. Was my world about to unfurl even more? “Does it involve Rick hitting on you or anything?”

“No, nothing like that.” She was quiet.

“Then, yes.”

“OK. I always felt like he never wanted you to be more than an accessory to him and his life.”

I knew what she was getting at and felt the need to defend him—both of us—here. “Me staying home was a mutual decision, you know, not anything he dictated.”

“But why not keep a hand in? Writing's one of the few things you can do
and
stay home. Of all of us in our class, you probably had the most ability. Unfortunately it was coupled with the least belief in yourself.”

“How is that his fault?”

“It's not. It's just a shame you ended up with someone content to believe that too instead of pushing or encouraging or whatever it is you needed. You always wanted to be the straight reporter, which wasn't what you were cut out for. You're neurotic as hell, but it translates into something quirky and funny on the page—like some young, female Woody Allen—”

“Is that supposed to be flattering? Because, ugh.”

“Actually, yes, but I recognize it didn't come out right. I just meant your quirkiness translates into originality on the page. I sometimes still send writers your
City Woman
clips to show them that a dull subject doesn't have to mean no writer's voice.”

I rubbed my forehead. “I still don't see how Rick's at fault here.”

“Only in what he declined to see and neglected to do. He lived with you and loved you but didn't really see you. As far as I could see, he was dismissive of what he should have nurtured— the part of you that was interesting and different. He was interested in the other, the conventional, compliant, soothing part.”

I thought of my interesting, different, unconventional, un-compliant, distinctly unsoothing mother. Him and me both. “We made our decisions together,” I said.

“The thing about his kind of smugness,” she said, quickly enough that I knew it wasn't the first time she'd thought this through, “is that it's contagious. Or at least easy to get carried along on.”

“Like Yertle,” I said.

“Who?”

“Yertle the Turtle. It's a Dr. Seuss story about a power-mad turtle king that I've read…” a few hundred thousand times. “Never mind.” Like I said before, I got it about potential smugness where Rick was concerned, but I preferred to see the flip sides—constancy and certainty. “Look, we all have to rationalize the choices we make, working or staying home, or we wouldn't be able to live with them. And I'd make the same decision again.” I closed my eyes for a second. The sun off the harbor was almost too bright. I would. Wouldn't I?

“Hey, as long as it's a choice, great. I'm just saying you embraced granola mom martyrdom to the exclusion of all else in a way people do when they're trying to convince themselves something is right for them when they think maybe it's really not.”