Been There, Done That Page 11

  Today’s class, we were to talk about the press’s treatment of the British royal family. As a decade-long subscriber to People magazine, I felt I had much to offer the discussion. I feared that the instructor, a stodgy, humorless man, would probably dwell far too long on Diana’s death, neglecting not only Squidgygate but also Fergie’s toe-sucking episode and Charles’s professed wish to be reincarnated as Camilla’s tampon.

  On my way into the city, I stopped at Marcy’s house for coffee. I called her from my room right before I’d left and told her I was “out in the field” doing some research. “I wasn’t sure you’d be home,” I said.

  “I’m always home,” she moaned. Tim had forbidden me from telling anyone—“even Marcy, especially Marcy”—about my undercover life, and I didn’t want to lie to her. But she’d left a message on my answering machine (“Just me. Nothing important. Guess you’re out doing something fun. Call me if you—Jacob! Stop that! Jacob! No!—Gotta go, Kathy. JACOB!”) which was such a rare event these days that I couldn’t just ignore her. Besides, pregnancy made Marcy so self-involved that I figured I was safe. If she questioned my casual attire, I’d tell her that I was just going to the library to do a little research, which wasn’t technically a lie since I had two papers due this week.

  “There are five Jacobs in Jacob’s preschool,” Marcy announced as she opened the door of her colonial house. She was wearing a green and white striped maternity shirt over black stretch pants. “Five!”

  The Rubinsteins live on a tree-lined street in Newton, in the kind of house I’d like to live in when I grow up. I entered the house and stepped over a plastic airplane. When Jacob entered toddlerhood, trips to Marcy’s house inevitably meant twisting an ankle over some primary-colored plastic thing. Once, in bare feet, I landed squarely on a flimsy red fire truck with spectacularly sharp edges. The force broke a ladder off the truck. The pain shot all the way up my calf. Still, I held my tears. Jacob was less stoic. “It was his favorite truck,” Marcy informed me without apology while her son wailed in her arms. It took me about three months to forgive her insensitivity. Now I look before I step. Also, I keep my shoes on, no matter how hard they pinch.

  “How many kids in the preschool?” I asked, heading for the kitchen.

  “Sixty. The list came today.” She retrieved mugs from her cherry cabinet with Mission-style hardware. I had more than a little input when Marcy and Dan redesigned their kitchen last year. Marcy pulled out my favorite mug, a gift from her sister-in-law, Pamela. It said, “You’re my sister-in-law by marriage but my friend by choice.” As Marcy despised Pamela almost as much as Pamela despised her, we could only assume the mug had been marked way, way down. Marcy had tried to bury the mug far back in her cabinet, but I always insisted she pull it out for me.

  “Five kids out of sixty isn’t so bad,” I said as we headed to the playroom.

  She glared at me. “Half of the sixty are girls.”

  “I was hoping you wouldn’t pick up on that.” On our way to the playroom, she popped into a bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet and retrieved baby oil and a Q-tip. “Not to be rude, but . . .” she said.

  “I ran out of eye makeup remover,” I replied, accepting the offering.

  We settled ourselves on the pouffy leather sectional with the built-in recliners (which Marcy and Dan had purchased without consulting me). I winced as a LEGO cut into my butt, then silently swept it to the ground. Jacob sat cross-legged on the floor, his glazed eyes staring at the primary-color clad young men who bounded around on the big screen TV (also purchased without my input), flapping their arms and singing “Cock-a-doodle! Cock-a-doodly-do!”

  “Say hi to Kathy, Jacob.” Marcy said.

  “Hi to Kathy, Jacob.” Jacob twisted his neck and gave me a sly grin. I winked at him. We had long since made our peace about the fire truck. “You look like a raccoon,” he added.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. I put my mug on a marble coaster and squirted some baby oil on the Q-tip. A drop of oil hit my blue jeans. Damn. There were only three washers in the dorm’s dank basement. I’d avoided them until now, but this had been my last pair of clean jeans. Time to start saving quarters.

  “And Joshuas?” Marcy said, continuing her rant. “Three. I told Dan it was too trendy.”

  I looked around. “Where is Joshua, anyway? Usually, I’ve tripped over him by now.” Joshua was sixteen months old. He got stepped on a lot, usually by his older brother, who always insisted it was an accident.

  “Napping. Thank God he sleeps.”

  Jacob looked up at his mother. “I think Joshy’s crying.” Marcy shook her head reflexively. “That isn’t crying, honey. Those are just the noises he makes in his sleep.” Now that Jacob mentioned it, I, too, detected a faint wailing.

  Marcy sipped her coffee. I knew better than to ask about restrictions on caffeine in pregnancy. The woman hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in four years. “There are two other mothers coming to my shower that have Jacobs,” she said.

  “I thought your shower was supposed to be a surprise.”

  “Alex’s mom let it slip. The Alex from the Mommy-and-Me group. The other Alex’s mom—the girl Alex—was really ticked. She’s the one throwing it.”

  “I know. I got an invitation.”

  “You’re coming, aren’t you?”

  I had spent the two weeks since receiving the invitation trying to come up with a decent excuse. Every time I mixed with Marcy’s mommy friends, the conversation inevitably turned to breast-feeding and episiotomies. I felt simultaneously bored, left out, envious and repulsed. “To the shower? Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  Marcy picked up a stapled packet of blue pages and shook her head. “Out of thirty boys, there are five Jacobs. One-sixth of the boys are named Jacob!”

  “You were always really good at math.”

  “Thank you.”

  We sipped.

  During Marcy’s first pregnancy, we used to meet for lunch downtown. She was a banker then, with French-manicured nails and a navy blue maternity suit that cost two hundred dollars. Over flavored iced teas, we mulled over countless boy names, trying to find the perfect one: masculine, yet sensitive; intelligent, yet fun; recognizable but not overused. She’d come up with Jacob. “I’ve never even known a Jacob,” she’d said, and I’d concurred.

  “I should have called him Isaac,” she now muttered. “There isn’t a single Isaac in the preschool.”

  “Jacob is much cuter,” I assured her.

  She squinted at the class list and flipped a few pages. “I can’t believe some of these names,” she said, some measure of self-confidence returning to her voice. “I mean, Nixon? Who would name their kid Nixon?”

  “Someone born after the Ford administration?” I ventured.

  Before I left, Marcy asked, “How’s your job?” I knew she was just being polite.

  “Okay,” I shrugged. And that was the end of that. I never even had to lie.

  eighteen

  It was good to be the real me again, if only for the day. I stopped at my apartment before heading into the office. I swapped the scrunchy in my hair for a tortoiseshell barrette. My jeans I traded for a cotton dress. There was a new message on my answering machine (I’d been calling in for messages every few days). My parents were calling to say good-bye before heading off on their trip down the Rhine.

  I hummed as I set off on my half hour walk to the office, that damned cock-a-doodle song thoroughly lodged in my brain.

  The office elevator was broken again. I wasn’t thrilled about walking the four flights of stairs, but at least I hadn’t been in the damn thing when it had halted. Much of Salad’s staff boasted well-muscled calves. When the elevator wasn’t broken, those burned by experience or merely cautious chose the stairs. I took my chances. After all, the longest anyone ever got stuck was three hours, and they had Cheetos and beer being passed down the whole time. That didn’t sound so bad, although Kristen called it the most traumatic experience of your li
fe. “You try drinking four beers then not knowing when you’ll get to the john!”

  Jennifer wasn’t at her desk, which sat just outside my cubicle. Instead, she was at mine, her empty Starbucks cup indicating that she’d been there since morning (in the afternoon, she drank Diet Coke).

  Tim, wearing a soft denim shirt with khakis (a combo I had always liked), sat on my desk, leaning against the canvas partition. Jennifer looked awfully comfy in my gray swivel chair, which wasn’t, quite frankly, all that comfy but was a step up from hers. My “to file” basket, which had always been overflowing, waiting for Jennifer’s attention, was finally empty.

  “You filed,” I said. I suppose I should have said hello first.

  “My mind turns to total mush when I work in a cluttered space.”

  I gave Tim a look, as if to say, “Can you believe this chick?”

  “How’s the world’s oldest coed?” he asked.

  “There’s a sixty-two-year-old in my women’s studies class,” I shot back. “And she’s got more to say than all those teenagers combined.”

  “Touché,” he said.

  I dropped my Coach bag on the desk. “Jennifer, would you mind sitting somewhere else?”

  A scowl flickered across her face. She stood up and smoothed her fuchsia mini skirt. Never one to forfeit the last word, she said, “It’s just been nice to have a computer that, like, works.” At this, I was supposed to scurry down to the nearest computer superstore, flash my Visa, and equip the little pumpkin with a Pentium processor and CD-ROM drive.

  “I didn’t mean to sound so territorial,” I muttered. “But I feel like I’ve been away for a year, and there’s stuff I need to get done.” In my women’s studies class, we’d touched on women’s reflexive tendency to apologize. One red-faced freshman, convinced that she’d been liberated by grrrrrl power, found the premise infuriating. “I’m sorry, but I just don’t agree!” Jennifer, of course, was a glaring exception to this gender rule. For a delightfully nasty moment it occurred to me that Jennifer might be a man in drag. But the idea was ludicrous. Given the amount of skin and curves her wardrobe revealed, her body could only be the real thing.

  Jennifer flipped her hair (it was looking oddly maroon today) over her shoulder. “No big deal,” she said to me. “And Tim, thanks for letting me bounce those ideas off you.” She strode regally away in the direction of the vending machine.

  “What ideas?” I asked Tim, trying not to sound panicked. I envisioned brilliant article proposals on education reform, mainstreaming, school vouchers and all those other touchy topics I’d been too cowardly to address. I settled into my chair and noticed a black canvas bag on the ground.

  “Nothing,” he said. “She was just talking to me about her novel.”

  “Ah,” I said, relieved. I recognized that the sense of superiority washing over me was ignoble, but I enjoyed it just the same. “The famous novel-in-waiting. Since when do you know anything about fiction?” Unlike some journalists, Tim was no frustrated novelist. He didn’t see the point of making things up when there was so much real stuff to write about.

  He grinned. “Hey, I studied Catcher in the Rye in the ninth grade.”

  “So you’re pretty much an expert.”

  “Pretty much.”

  Tim reached into the black bag and retrieved a dark gray laptop. I stared at it. I looked up at him beseechingly. “Is it? Could it be?”

  He handed it over. “Don’t get too attached. It’s a loaner from my office.”

  We met with Richard and briefed him on my progress. “Is that all you’ve found out?” he asked when I told him about the Wallflowers, my voice breathy with excitement.

  “Kathy’s going to infiltrate the group,” Tim said. “Try-outs are coming up, and she’s a shoo-in. After that, everything should fall into place pretty quickly.”

  I handed over the articles I’d held in reserve (“Tapas Take Center Stage” and “You’ve Been Framed: A Do-It Yourself Guide”). Neither was going to win any awards, but they’d fill the necessary inches.

  Tim and I spent the afternoon huddled at my desk, with me at the laptop’s keyboard. Tim sat so close, I could feel his breath against my cheek. We outlined everything we knew: the initial tip from Tim’s intern; Mercer’s cost and admissions standards; the college’s social structure; the suspected ringleader; the odd role of the singing group. We formulated our plan of attack. I would infiltrate the singing group; Tim, posing as my older brother (hey, I’d already told Jeremy I had one) would visit once or twice and maybe even get “drunk” and look for action.

  At six o’clock, we shut down the computer. We walked to a dimly lit Chinese restaurant around the corner that specialized in red vinyl booths and scorpion bowls. We reminisced about the first time we had drunk from a scorpion bowl—graduation week, our senior year—and how we’d spent the rest of the night taking turns puking into the toilet of the off-campus apartment I shared with Marcy (and Tim, most nights). The memory seemed sweet now. We ordered a small bowl from our non-English speaking waiter.

  The vast bowl—the small wasn’t so small—sat on the table between us, fruit floating inside. With long straws, we sipped the deadly concoction, which tasted remarkably like that ancient Shanghai drink, Kool-Aid. I’d expected the taste to make me nauseous, as Scorpion Bowls always did after that fateful night, but it didn’t. That seemed significant. It didn’t even occur to me that this restaurant might just use a different flavor of Kool-Aid.

  I recalled my recent hangover. “Less than a week ago, I swore I’d never drink again, and now look at me.”

  Tim took the straw out of his mouth and twirled it between his fingers. “This is for professional purposes only. We’ve got to loosen you up for your rehearsal.” After dinner, Tim was going to help me practice my audition song. My nerves were more fraught from the thought of performing for Tim than they were for the actual auditions.

  “In that case, we might need another bowl after this one.” I sucked on my straw. I was starting to glow.

  Tim fished a maraschino out of the bowl. He stuck the cherry between his teeth and pulled it off the stem. “It’s hard to rehearse when you’re getting your stomach pumped.”

  “But think of all of those nice medical personnel who would be on hand to give me feedback. Doctors tend to be very musically inclined.”

  We ate egg rolls and dumplings and moo shu pork. We drank the entire scorpion bowl and sucked on alcohol-soaked orange slices. We were the only people in the place, which relied on the business lunch crowd. Our fortune cookies came with the bill. We broke them in half. As I tried to read my fortune—not easy, considering the bad lighting and my drunken vision, which made me see triple—I put half the cookie in my mouth. It was too chewy and vaguely lemony. I held my fortune near the stubby candle, encased in a knobby red glass globe. “Love comes to those who wait,” it said, unbelievably.

  I handed it to Tim. He peered at the slip of paper and smiled. “Mine’s better.” He handed me his slip: “A man who wears a clean shirt is respected by his neighbors.”

  We stumbled two blocks before hailing a cab to take us back to my apartment. The driver, who, his cab permit told us, was named Fazel, listened to my address and nodded without a word. The cab stank of stale cigarette smoke. NPR hummed in the background. I nuzzled Tim’s shoulder. His denim shirt smelled like Chinese food. He put his arm around me, and I leaned against his chest, bouncing as the cab jostled through potholes.

  It took me awhile to open the front door to my building. That was probably because I was trying to open it with my mailbox key. Once inside, I clutched Tim’s arm as we climbed the two flights to my apartment. The stairs seemed to alternately lurch up and fall away. I stumbled but maintained my balance by clutching the thick wooden bannister. Tim was marginally more steady.

  Once inside, Tim slipped off his shoes and set them by the door. For once, the apartment was immaculate; I’d known Tim was coming back to hear me sing, after all. After all those years o
f living together, it seemed unlikely that he’d believe I’d changed my evil ways and become tidy, but you never know. It didn’t much matter. He wasn’t looking around for dust and year-old magazines. He was too busy pulling me toward him and kissing me.

  My lips—indeed, my entire face—felt numb from the alcohol, but I recognized his taste, his touch. How had I forgotten how he’d rub the small of my back when we embraced? And even in that blurry state, I was conscious enough to decide that I wanted a small wedding in a country inn and not the blow-out affair that I’d envisioned in my twenties.

  Tim nibbled my earlobe in a gerbil-like way that I’d once found vaguely annoying but now seemed so sensual. “Can I have some water?”

  “Sure.” I stepped back, alarmed, and checked his face for signs of regret or repulsion. I saw neither, merely thirst.

  I poured two glasses from a filtration pitcher. To keep my balance, I focused on a sticker on the pitcher’s side. The filter was due to be changed last February. I dumped out the water and refilled from the tap, clutching the cold faucet. I knew I should put ice in the glasses, but I worried that the extra minute would give Tim just enough time to realize that the woman he had just been kissing was not some exciting stranger but just me.

  When I returned to the living room, he was sitting on the couch, a small smile on his lips. I handed him the glass. He took a long drink and put the glass on the coffee table, carefully positioning it in the middle of a coaster. I sat next to him, somewhat nervously, and placed my glass on the floor. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked at me. “I’ve missed you.”

  “I’ve missed you too.” For a moment, the room stopped spinning. He brushed my hair behind my ears with his fingers, put his hand on the back of my head, and kissed me gently. Then he leaned against me, and we sank back into the couch. He kissed my cheeks and eyelids. He parted my lips with his tongue. It was just like I’d always dreamed it would be.