Keep Me Posted (17 page)

Later that night, thanks to the nap, I couldn’t sleep. My body tossed and turned but felt incapable of doing anything purposeful. Close to one a.m., I grabbed my iPhone from its spot under my pillow, just to double-check that the privacy reset had really worked. (Yes, I’ve read about the radiation shooting out of it and directly into my brain, but probable brain cancer is just another sacrifice of living in our fabulous apartment in our fabulous neighborhood with no room for suburban luxuries such as bedside tables. Our bed was nestled perfectly between two extra-tall dressers and beneath a to-the-ceiling Elfa shelving system, all cleverly concealed by curtains on the sides and a custom-made pull-down shade on the top. Standing back, the impression was that our bed was tucked back
into a cozy nook surrounded by silver-gray silk curtains. But sleeping in our bed was exactly like sleeping in a closet.)

In fact, the longer I lay there, feeling the weight of my stupid clothes all around me, the higher my anxiety level climbed. I needed air. With Mom asleep on the couch, climbing out onto the fire escape was not an option. So I pulled on jeans and grabbed a bra from the hook on the back of my door, hastily securing it under the gray tank top I was sleeping in, and then reached under my pillow again to find a hair tie. I thought to take my laptop in case I needed full word-processing capabilities, stuffed it in my bag with the magazine, and as quietly as I could, snuck out the front door.

I figured I could get online at the Ostrich Lounge because it was next to a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi, so I headed there, knowing my disheveled appearance wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. The Ostrich was the closest thing Hudson Street had to a dive bar, with a regular-people kind of clientele, a jukebox, and horrible bathrooms. A long and narrow space with booths on one side and the bar on the other, it had a gorgeous tin ceiling and ugly fake-wood-paneled walls.

The place was about half full, and I snagged the last barstool at the back and ordered a Stoli on the rocks with two lemon wedges. I checked the blog again, and it was indeed still private. I was the only one in the world who could see it now; still, the sight of it made me queasy and unsettled. I closed the laptop and got out my pen and paper. I thought I’d brainstorm a plan—a crisis-communications plan. Who do I tell, and when, and how? I jotted some nonsensical notes, and then started to wonder if I really needed to tell anyone. Hadn’t I fixed the problem this afternoon? Maybe it would just go away.

The Sundays song that I associate with the beginning of this
whole experiment started playing from the jukebox, and my eyes watered as I looked around the bar, half expecting Sid to be standing in the corner, smiling knowingly before she let me in on this elaborate joke she’d masterminded.

The bartender took it upon himself to serve me another drink, even though I hadn’t asked. Grateful, I nodded at him and downed about half of it in one stinging go.

Then, to give my hands and brain something to do, I started jotting down the words to the song. I had a quick flashback to being thirteen or fourteen and writing down all of the lyrics to “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine),” starting and stopping and rewinding my tape player over and over again and driving Sid crazy until she finally joined me. (
It does not go, “Donkey Kong foreign power!” Yes, it does!
) My eyes welled at the memory, but I forced the tears back and kept writing as fast as I could, clinging to a Sid-like notion that there was an explanation or a solution or—I don’t know—a silver lining of some sort that would reveal itself to me if I only looked. Tears were threatening to drop on my paper, so I looked up at the shiny tin ceiling in an effort to stave them off, losing myself for a moment in the tiles’ intricate pattern.

A familiar voice brought me back to earth.

“Drinking alone with your notebook again, Cassie?”

It was Jake. He smiled—extra warmly, I thought—and leaned in for a peck on the cheek.

I allowed it but didn’t peck back. The bartender handed him a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, his favorite, and shook his hand. While they exchanged pleasantries, I rapidly sipped my drink and told myself to pull it together.

He turned back to me and said, “So what is it with you and your notebook? You working again?”

“Ooh. Ooh. Not really. Sort of,” I said, though I have no idea why, and quickly shoved it back into my bag.

“You all right, Cass?” he asked, looking at me closer.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine. I’m good,” I said, glancing away for a second and hoping that my eyes were dry.

Jake motioned to the bartender, and then I had my own bottle of Sierra Nevada.

The buddy Jake had come with looked to be deep in conversation with a young woman near the front of the bar, which left Jake and me alone to chat. The topic I chose—how we’d gone years barely seeing each other and now every time I turn around, there he is . . . in a magazine, in my yoga class, on TV, at the corner bar—came off as more flirtatious than I’d meant it to. I was distracted and embarrassed, remembering how I’d ditched him at the restaurant and snippets of the drunken kiss. I wondered if he’d kissed me because he wanted to or because I was so obviously throwing myself at him, and if he’d (please, no!) seen the letters.

I noticed that there was a new song on the jukebox—“Under My Thumb” by the Rolling Stones—and I felt annoyed that he had made me miss what might have been a breakthrough moment during the Sundays song. I had a different sort of breakthrough then, despite the two vodkas and one beer in me, and thought about how this looked. I had just snuck out of my apartment, where my husband, children, and mother (for Christ’s sake!) slept, while I drank at the corner bar with my ex, whom I had spent the last three months fantasizing about
and
whom I had recently made out with. I would finish my beer and split.

The conversation had meandered toward more banal topics, and he started telling me a story about his seafood supplier who keeps bringing him his home-pickled herring, but pickled herring is the
one food in the whole world that Jake truly hates, and now he’s in this situation where his white lie about how delicious the herring was has turned into this awkward and ongoing deception, and—missing a third possible breakthrough moment—all I could think was,
I should not be here. This is not who I am. I am Margie and Joe’s granddaughter. I am Leo’s wife. I am a mother. I should not be here.
I cut Jake off midsentence. I feared if I didn’t seize this flash of prudence, there would be no turning back, because to be honest, I didn’t want to leave.

“I’m sorry, Jake. I’ve got to get home.” I touched him lightly on the arm, and a charge went through me. He reciprocated by cupping my elbow and drawing us an inch closer.

“Are you sure?” he said in a soft voice in my ear, leaving no question as to his intention.

A sexual advance from a new-old lover was exciting and seductive, and part of me—a big part of me, I’m afraid—didn’t want to turn away from the feeling of that moment, of feeling desired and forgetting about all of my other problems. But I reclaimed my mind of ten seconds ago, shook myself loose from Jake’s grasp, slid the two twenties out of my back pocket onto the bar, grabbed my bag, and headed for the door without another word. A group of people came in just as I reached the exit, and I found myself holding the door open for them, smiling and nodding and cursing my Midwestern manners while I resisted the impulse to glance over my shoulder.

Once outside, I felt the urge to run. Now, here’s an urge I can give in to without hurting anyone, I thought, and so I started running. A middle-aged couple walking toward me hand in hand watched with concern. The woman seemed to be searching my face for signs of distress while the man strained to look past me—
perhaps in case I was being chased.
Am I being chased? Did Jake come out after me?
I looked back, but the coast was clear.

“Everything’s okay!” I yelled to the couple. It felt good, so I ran faster—as fast as I could down Hudson Street without losing my flip-flops. To the bouncer standing in front of Employees Only, also regarding me with curiosity, I yelled it again. “Everything is okay!” To the women sitting outside the Henrietta Hudson, “It’s okay! Everything’s okay!” I rounded onto Morton Street, unlocked my door, and ran up the stairs two at a time.

When I got to my door, I took a few minutes to catch my breath, still muttering,
It’s okay. Everything is okay.
With tears running down my face, I took a few shaky deep breaths to prevent a full-scale sob-fest, unlocked my door as quietly as I could with trembling hands, and stepping over the two creaky floorboards, tiptoed past my sleeping mother and back into bed with Leo. Lying there, I let my thoughts drift toward the more superficial elements at play here, such as being thankful for Mayor Bloomberg’s smoking ban, without which I would never have been able to pull the whole thing off.

Mom’s flight the next day was at noon out of LaGuardia. She was always nervous about getting to the airport on time, and I had assured her that if she left by ten she’d be fine. Yet she was packed and dressed for the day when the rest of us woke up at seven. As we went about our morning routine, she kept suggesting we go to the playground early, or put the boys in the stroller and go for a walk so we could talk. But I wasn’t on my A game, and by the time we ate breakfast, saw Leo off to work, printed out her boarding pass, and
had the boys ready to go, we had to put her in a cab. The boys and I walked her out, and when we got downstairs, she grabbed my arm and locked eyes with me.

“Talk to your husband, Cassandra,” she said.

“Mo-om. What? Everything’s okay,” I said, sounding like a whiny teenager.

And then, with a sigh and a look that was either disappointment or plain weariness, she said, “I love you, honey,” and came in for a big hug. She couldn’t have known about the blog; she would have said something. She must have heard me come in last night and assumed the worst. I loaded her suitcase in the trunk of the cab while she said her goodbyes to the boys, and off she went, leaving me alone with my big, giant
problem.

D
espite my proclamations to the contrary, everything was not okay. I died a thousand deaths before noon, physically crumpling at each flash of a catty revelation or unkind characterization of Leo’s family that appeared in my letters.
How much did I say about Jenna? Was there anything about Mom that might hurt her to read?

Question upon question piled up in my brain. I couldn’t grasp the timeline of this whole thing. Was it over, or was it just beginning? It hadn’t become real yet, because Leo and Sid hadn’t seen it. Maybe they never would. But still, I had to do something about this, didn’t I? There was damage to be undone, wasn’t there?

I didn’t trust myself to find the answers. What I needed was a third-party assessment: someone to explain to me what I’d done, how bad it was, and what I needed to do to fix it. My first two choices—Leo and Sid—were obviously out of the question, so I called Monica and set a noon playdate. We would bring lunch.

The next two and a half hours were rough. While the boys ran
naked through the fountain at the Bleecker Street playground, I stole glances at the comments on the blog. Nothing new since last night, which meant my privacy lock worked. I could barely stand to read most of them. Lots of people were talking about me, and just as many were talking
to
me, which was strange. They were also talking to Sid about her letters. Some of the comments made me gasp out loud with bemusement or shock or even mirth.

“These girls seem nice but boring. I gave them a chance but going back to the
Real Housewives
.”

Some kind souls came to my defense. “You are missing the point,” wrote BarrioBabe. “This is about communication and sisters trying to navigate their lives while still staying close, not about manufactured drama.”

Um, no
. I wanted to correct them.
This is not “about” anything. This is nothing to you. Stop reading my letters! Stop having opinions about them!

When Monica answered her door, she had the phone to her ear. Waving us in while she nodded vigorously and said, “Yes, uh-huh, nine twenty, sounds great.”

I shushed the boys and tried to get them to enter like secret agents.

Pocketing her phone, she looked at me with eyes bulging. “You will never guess who that was.”

“I’m not even going to try.”

“Kathie Lee motherfucking Gifford,” but she only mouthed the “motherfucking” part, not that the boys would have noticed. They were barreling in to join Ana and Jonny in the playroom in the back of the house.

“What? Why?” I said as we walked back to the kitchen.

“So in the Hamptons my Twitter feed was bursting with this stupid ‘Dear mom on her phone’ post written by some old man,” said Monica. She handed me a glass of water and I leaned against the kitchen counter while she loaded the dishwasher. “You probably saw it.” (I had, but hadn’t clicked through to read it.) “He was admonishing every mother who ever used her phone in the park and saying they were basically missing their children’s childhoods and demonstrating that their phones are more important than their children.”

“Dick,” I said.

“Complete asshole,” said Monica. “Anyway, I wrote a response on my blog and it went viral.”

There I was, dying to share my big news, and she beat me to the punch! I almost said, “Okay, great, but guess what happened to me!” But I couldn’t. That would be shitty. First I had to work through forty-five minutes of her thing before we could get to my thing. I pride myself on being an actual conversationalist, not just a person who waits for her turn to say something, but I struggled that afternoon. Luckily, there weren’t a lot of opportunities for my input.

“And now Kathie Lee and Hoda want to have me on the fourth hour of
The
Today Show
,” she continued. “Kathie Lee called me herself. She was all, ‘You go, girl!’ She said she read the post, too, and was wondering why all these moms were letting some old guy shame them, and then someone e-mailed her my post and she was all, ‘Yes! Thank you!’ So I’m going on tomorrow. I have to be there at nine twenty. Do you want to come with me? What should I wear?”

We were on our way to her bedroom when we were diverted by the kids, who needed a peace deal brokered over a plastic dinosaur. After hearing their arguments, Monica set her kitchen timer for five minutes, at which point Joey would have to give the toy to Jonny.

We sat with the kids and she pulled Ana onto her lap. “I mean, it’s not like the guy doesn’t have a point. Most of us
should
put the phone away more often, but the moms I know are awesome, regardless of how much time they spend staring at their phone. So I listed
all of the things these moms he’s judging might be doing on their phones—like making doctors’ appointments for elderly parents; researching their child’s autism; editing a blog post that needs to go live in the middle of playtime . . . They should be applauded, not shamed. Their kids get to run around and play outside while they get stuff done. Right?” And then, as if really looking at me for the first time, she said, “Cass? Is everything okay?

“Yeah, yeah. Sorry, I was sort of spacing out for a second there. I actually have a crazy story of my own.”

“What’s going on? Tell me.” She lifted Ana off of her lap and shooed her away.

“All right. So, did I mention how I’ve been writing letters to my sister all year?”

“Yeah—you told me a while ago.”

“So, yeah, it’s been this great thing we’ve done all year, and I feel closer to her than I have since we were teenagers.” I was stalling.

“So what’s the problem?”

Ding!
The timer sounded. With minimal cajoling, Joey handed the dinosaur to Jonny. “Okay, five minutes for you and then we eat lunch!” announced Monica, setting the timer again. She and I got up and went into the kitchen to set out the bagels and salads.

“All right, Cass, let’s have it,” she said, and handed me a stack of plates.

I set the pile of plates on the table, and it all came tumbling out in one breath.

“Wait a second—what?” said Monica.

“Well, in a nutshell, I had a private blog of all the letters between Sid and me. But it turns out it wasn’t private, and it
became superpopular for a couple weeks. So we both went viral, I guess.”

“What’s the blog called?”

“
The Slow News Sisters
,” I said.

She gasped and pulled up a note on her iPhone. It said, “
Slow News Sisters
blog.”

“What the hell?” I said. “You’ve seen it?”

“No—I overheard two women talking about it at the market up in the Hamptons,” she said, “so I made a note to check it out.”

“Well, what were they saying?”

“Cass! I can’t believe this is you. One of them was telling the other one she had to read it. That it was these two normal sisters writing these honest and real letters. Someone was being cheated on. Oh shit, it’s not you, is it?”

“No. Wait, they said we were normal?”

“Does that surprise you?

“God, I don’t know. I guess we are normal.”

“So what did Sid say?”

“I haven’t told her. You’re the first person I’ve told.”

“But you’re going to tell her, right?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I made it private again, so it’s gone now, right? I mean, no one can see it anymore, right? That’s what I need you to explain to me.”

“Well, here’s the thing. It’s rare that you can one hundred percent erase something from the Internet. Remember that picture I took of that little girl taking a dump in a portable training potty in the middle of the playground at Chelsea Piers and it turned out to be Suri Cruise?”

“Yeah.” I had a feeling that this little allegory was not going to end well for me.

“Her lawyer asked me to take down the photo, so I did, but Perez Hilton and Page Six had already reblogged it with a screen capture. I could only control what’s on my site, so the legal team had to track down everyone who had reblogged the shot and linked to Perez or Page Six.”

I took a deep breath. “So I’m fucked?”

“Maybe not. Did you delete the whole thing, or is it still up?”

“Still up. But private again.”

She looked at me, narrowing her eyes and nodding in thought.

“I mean, you’re probably okay, but it’s hard to say for sure.”

Then the timer dinged again and the kids came stampeding into the kitchen.

“Do you want to see it?” I said, once all the kids were settled with bagels and peanut butter and carrots and cucumber sticks.

“I’m dying to! But only if you’re cool with it.”

“I think I want you to—I need you to tell me how bad it is.”

I handed her my phone, and she took her salad into the living room to eat and read on the couch while I dined with the kids. I plowed through my salad in a fit of nervous energy and then picked at the kids’ bagels during the impossibly long time it takes them to finish the smallest amount of food.

The kids finished lunch and charged into the back room while I stayed put, awaiting a signal from Monica. When I heard her ask them about Play-Doh, I cleaned up the lunch dishes while she, presumably, continued to read.

Once the kitchen was spotless, I couldn’t take it anymore and I went into the living room.

I looked at her expectantly.

“Cass. Wow.”

“So what do I do?”

She got up and followed me back into the kitchen. “Well, you’ve got to tell Leo. And your sister.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

“Oh, come on! You and your sister are solid. What about you and Leo? Do you think a drunken kiss is enough to topple your marriage? And, Jesus, I was not prepared to read that part—I wish you would have warned me.”

“Pretty major, right?”

“Well, unexpected, but what are we talking, a kiss? Or is there more?”

“No. No more,” I said, though in my memory it was hardly just a kiss.

“I think that’s something Leo can handle.”

“But other than that, there’s so much in those letters I would never want him to see—petty stuff about his family, stupid complaints about our marriage. Nothing I’d call a deal breaker on its own, but all added up, it would be hard to take. I mean, where do I even begin with him? Do I have him read everything?”

“I’d vote against doing that. What if you told him about the kiss, and the blog, and then asked him if he wanted to read it all?”

“I guess that could work,” I said, though I wasn’t convinced.

“It’ll be all right, Cass. You just need to come clean. Dreading their reaction is the worst part.”

The kids were still happily playing Play-Doh (a magical substance, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve often wondered if it contains a mild sedative, based on the uncharacteristically calm and content behavior my boys exhibit under its spell). We had moved from the kitchen to her bedroom during the course of our chat, and Monica was rifling through her closet for something to wear on
The Today Show
, while I lay on her bed, chewing apart my lip in thought.

I knew she was right about telling Leo and Sid. But now that I had stopped this runaway train, I had to gather my thoughts—or read an instruction manual—before I defused the bomb. Talking to Monica had helped a little, but it also made it clear that this was my mess to clean up, that no one was going to do it for me. I thought, if I could just get some time to think, I might be able to handle this situation with some delicacy and save my loved ones from pain and disgrace.

And then I remembered something. I scrambled for my phone and scrolled back through the letters until I found the one I was looking for: Sid said she was going to Bali for another yoga retreat on September first—today. (Or was it yesterday for her?) And Leo and I were scheduled to be at the Jersey Shore with his family tomorrow. When Leo wasn’t working, he rarely checked his e-mail. His team could handle almost anything that arose but knew to phone him if there was an emergency. So as long as no one in his family found out about the blog, I was safe. Contemplating the idea of someone in his family finding out triggered another wave of panic. I needed to walk. I asked Monica if she’d keep the kids while I did a quick Duane Reade run.

Filling my basket with bubbles and sunscreen and car snacks, I weighed the pros and cons of the weekend away. I framed it like this: With Leo and Sid effectively sequestered, I’d gained a few more days of ignorant bliss for them—torturous anticipation for me, yes, but as long as none of the Costas knew, I could maintain the status quo.

Not that I had a choice in the matter. September third is my mother-in-law’s birthday, and it goes without saying that all four of Mary Costa’s boys will be together—with her—on Labor Day
weekend. It is the one holiday she insists on, having given up on getting full attendance at Christmas or Easter years ago.

Besides, the boys loved seeing their cousins, Leo would get to spend time with all three of his brothers, and I would get to hang out with Emma.

I fetched the boys from Monica’s and we walked home. It was one of those special days where the mailbox contained two letters from Sid, only instead of feeling the childlike joy that I’d felt the other few times this had happened, I felt anxious and guilty. Still, here they were. Once upstairs, I distributed iPads and decided to open the one with the earlier postmark and save the other one for later.