Keep Me Posted (7 page)

Monica let out a deep and gurgling laugh as she tore into a lamb chop. She had tucked a spare T-shirt of Jonny’s into her shirt to act as a bib. Our feast was attracting the attention of the other
parents and nannies. One mom actually stood and watched us like a spectator as we feasted on the piles of beef like a couple of Vikings home from battle. Monica held out a lamb chop and beckoned her over with it. “Do you want one? There’s plenty!” When the woman looked away, embarrassed, Monica chirped, “It’s okay! It’s organic, grass-fed, local, all that!”

I nudged her and hissed, “Shut up!”

She just cackled, drunk on meat. “You’re right. More for us.” Then she yelled over to the other mom, “Never mind!”

I normally felt embarrassed or annoyed when Monica was needlessly confrontational, but I was as gaga as she was. When we made eye contact, our faces and hands covered in whatever heavenly sauce the short ribs were in, we dissolved into a giggling fit. Though it only deepened our hysterics, we kept looking at each other through sobs of laughter, gasping for air and trying not to choke. I’d finally worked myself down to a groaning giggle and grabbed a pack of baby wipes from the bottom of my stroller, but the crime-scene handprint I made on the package only set us off again. My stomach and face hurt for an hour afterward.

I got home that day and had a letter from Sid. My heart did a little dance the way it does every time I see her writing on the envelope. I’ve got a thing with handwriting. Leo’s was nearly a deal breaker. If he weren’t such an exquisite eater, it would have been. This will sound incredibly shallow, but the way someone writes and the way they eat are as important to me as how they vote and how they kiss.

We had been together six months. On Valentine’s Day, he surprised me with a weekend at the Royalton on Forty-fourth Street. It
was all very romantic, with nothing but eating, drinking, and hotel sex for two days. I woke up late on Sunday morning and found a note on the pillow.
Wake up! I miss you! Went to get bagels. —Leo.
I recoiled in disgust.
Who was this from? Surely not the man I love! He’s not a lefty! Why is everything leaning backward? Did he recently have hand surgery? I thought I knew him. How is it possible that this is the first time I’m seeing his handwriting?

Then he came back with the bagels and we sat on the bed eating them. It was those bagels that saved him. He was a great eater. You know how Brad Pitt eats in every movie, and there’s something so sensual and enchanting about it? Well, that’s how Leo eats. With his mouth closed and eyes twinkling, he chews fast and with purpose, but miraculously silently. He’ll raise his eyebrows and give little grunts of approval or interest while he’s chewing, but he waits until he’s finished to speak. It’s the perfect combination of gentlemanly and rugged. I focused on the bagels and coffee and my lover’s eating and tried to put the shock of five minutes ago out of my head.

“I got something else while I was out,” he said.

“The paper?” I asked.

“Already here.” He motioned to the fat Sunday
Times
on the floor in the corner.

“What else is there?” I said. As far as I was concerned, everything I needed for a perfect Sunday morning was in that room. If only that wretched note would disappear.

He reached down and produced a small red box from the pocket of his jacket on the floor next to the bed. I stopped chewing. He was looking down, seeming to focus on getting the box opened just right. Both of us were staring at the box when it finally opened to reveal a sparkly circle-cut diamond ring. We looked up at each other at the same time, and he said, “Will you marry me, Cassie?”

I forced myself to finish chewing the huge bite of salt bagel and cream cheese before I said anything, but tears were already coming to my eyes and I was nodding my head affirmatively.

We cried and giggled and hugged and kissed for about fifteen minutes, and
then I suddenly had the urge to call everyone I knew and go buy a pile of
Brides
magazines. I phoned my parents first. They already knew. Leo had called and asked for their blessing. When I heard about other people doing that, I thought it was a bit stupid and sexist, but at that moment it made me feel like I had landed the sweetest, most thoughtful guy in the whole world. Sid was there, and we shrieked on the phone together. She made me put Leo on, and I could hear her cooing at him and telling him how happy she was. My family had always approved of Leo. I think at first they were merely relieved at how normal and stable he seemed after my two previous serious boyfriends, Spencer, the trust-fund brat for whom I’d moved to California right after college, and of course, Jake, the on-again, off-again heartthrob who seemed to be constantly reevaluating my worthiness as a girlfriend. Leo’s big Italian Catholic family of brothers gave him immediate credibility, and his even-tempered and affable nature signaled a low-drama future.

A more sentimental person might have saved that note for a scrapbook or to stick in the side of a picture frame. But when we checked out of the hotel at two in the afternoon, I chucked it in the trash and tried to forget about this gross shortcoming of my future
husband.

M
y big box of pretentious and embarrassing “Cassandra Marie” stationery that Mom gave me when I graduated college had finally run out. So had the thank-you cards left over from my baby shower. To reward myself for my thrift, I went on a spree at Greenwich Letterpress on Christopher Street. I had stopped in with the boys last week and gotten just past the welcome mat when I knew I was going to need to come back without them. I came straight from school drop-off, knowing I might spend the bulk of my three hours of freedom at that store.

Walking among the thick card stock, the thin rice paper, the carefully edited selection of pens, I was transported back to my childhood, when I would often visit a neighborhood shop called the Depot, which sold greeting cards and candles and had an entire wonderful wall of Mrs. Grossman’s stickers. I spent every cent of my allowance on that wall for the whole of my eleventh year. We stopped every week on the way home from ballet. Occasionally, Mom would wander off in search of a greeting card or even pop
over to the pharmacy next door, and I remember being scandalously thrilled by the row of “adult” cards, only their tops visible behind the plain white card placed in front of them to hide what debauchery lay beneath. This being the eighties, it meant we saw only teased blond bangs on the women or feathered dark brown hair on the men.

Once, Sid climbed up on a stool and quickly grabbed two cards. She foisted one on me, and I beheld a close-up of a red-lace-clad bosom, a single lit candle peeking out from the heaving cleavage. I stifled a giggle and traded cards with Sid. The next one was an oily naked muscleman holding a strategically placed white box with a red bow on it. When Mom and the clerk had returned from the back of the store, Sid grabbed both cards and shoved them in with the birthday cards.

That night, Sid and I lay in our beds wondering out loud if our boobs would ever be big enough to hold a candle. “Do you think Mom’s can do that?” I asked.

“No way.”

“I heard that you know you need a bra when a pencil stays between your boobs without falling to the floor,” I said.

“I don’t think so. Tricia Peterson wears a bra and hers are nowhere near big enough to hold on to a pencil or a candle—or even a roll of paper towels,” she said.

“Oh. Well, maybe you need a bra if you can smush them together and hold something.”

“Maybe.”

The memory made me wistful. There was no such adult shelf at Kate’s Paperie—or even any Mrs. Grossman’s stickers—but it smelled exactly like the Depot, and I wished I could find that cleavage card and send it to Sid to see if she remembered. Instead, I
settled for a “Brandon and Dylan” card, which I knew would deliver a similar brand of nostalgic giggles.

After spending way too much time trying to calculate how different pens would perform on various papers and seriously considering a quill and ink pot, I finally settled on a set of thick notecards embossed with a lone and lovely zebra that came with ornately lined envelopes, a handful of funny postcards for short notes, and a stack of thick and mottled cream-colored sheets for longer letters, along with a mix of gray, pale purple, and orange envelopes.

I started my next letter on one of the zebra notecards, and about midway through I regretted it. Something this lowbrow didn’t belong on special paper. So I tossed it and started over on my trusty notebook of Japanese graph paper.

New York

May 1

Hey, Sis,

Guess who is becoming quite the celebrity chef. Jake! I ran into him a few weeks ago doing a photo shoot in front of his new restaurant (which is about six blocks from me), and he seems really good. I haven’t seen him in years—since the last time we broke up, I guess. Now I see him everywhere—in the
Times
, on the Food Network, or just walking down the street. His Brussels sprouts are the talk of the town.

I have to admit that I felt a few pangs of jealousy for the exciting turn his life has taken. Mine must seem so monotonous and boring to him. And part of me feels ripped off for those unglamorous years I spent with him when he was the sous chef at Public. I’m comforting myself with the idea that
maybe now he has a raging ego, but when I saw him, he seemed to be as normal as ever, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find myself fantasizing about what my life might be like now if we’d stayed together. I know it’s beyond blasphemous for a mother of two incredible little boys to say such a thing. I mean, obviously I wouldn’t give them up for the world. They
are
my world. But some days, just for fun, I wonder about other worlds.

Be honest: Do you ever think about what your life might have been like if you hadn’t gotten pregnant that summer? I know I do for you. I hope that doesn’t make you feel bad, because it’s only because of the timing of it all. It doesn’t mean that we’d trade in River (or Quinn or Joey) for a second, but you must have thought about it, too. Or—what about ending up with Kenny?! Would you guys be following Phish around in a camper van, River selling grilled cheese alongside Kenny’s kind buds?

Love you, and I never think about what life would be like without you!

—Cassie

PS—Remember the Depot?

Singapore

May 15

Oh, Cass, my darling—

The grass is always greener, isn’t it? Re. Jake, I’m happy that his Brussels sprouts are finally getting the attention they deserve. But for all the sprouts in the world, I don’t for a second think you should have stayed with him. He is a good guy, but not a great guy. And he was kind of always messing with your head, wasn’t he? Or were you the bad guy? I can’t remember. Either way, Leo is a good egg, and I had a good feeling about him from the first time I met him. And you know, there’s an excellent chance Jake was looking at you and thinking that your life looks fantastic and full and perfect.

All is well here. Adrian’s job gave him a car, which smells to me like a bribe to get us to stay longer. He uses it when he’s in town, but it mostly just sits there because I stick to taxis. The drivers are a hoot! No one tips for anything here, but I usually round up, which sends some of them over the moon. My driver today was struggling to put into words how grateful he was for my seventy-cent tip, and finally came up with, “You are a nice, sporting lady!” How do you like that? I was wearing yoga clothes, so maybe that explains his comment. Either way, it made me smile for hours.

I’m still enjoying my role as den mother to all of these helpers. I started a Monday-night personal finance workshop to help them budget their money and start savings accounts. The stress these women are under to send money back to their families is unreal. Most of them make $500 or $600 a month, and with a few exceptions, every cent goes back to their families. Still, it never seems to be enough, and there are a lot of tear-filled phone calls telling sons, no, you can’t go on the class trip, or brothers, no, you can’t buy any extra seeds
for this season’s planting, or mothers, no, you can’t get the hip-replacement surgery. It’s all pretty gut-wrenching.

I even started a backroom savings and loan here, where I keep envelopes for them to put away $5 here and $10 there, so they can save up the $400 minimum to start a real bank account. I’ve started paying them interest—$5 for every month they go without withdrawing any money. It sounds silly, but I’m finding it so fulfilling.

I’m also coaching them on how to ask for a raise. A few of them are making way under the going rate. Unfortunately, it’s created a bit of a fissure between some of the other “ma’ams” and me, which is a shame because most of them are really nice people—they’re just a bit, oh, I don’t know, unsure how to “have help” in a way that’s anything other than this master-servant thing.

I realize now that I’m as big a cliché as the rest of the expat wives here. So many of them—of us!—gave up a career to move here. And those who didn’t were busy with their kids and housework, but now we have all this time on our hands, so we develop projects. When I meet someone new, I can usually suss out her project within minutes. Either it’s fitness (honestly, the bodies on these moms! Most of them have the ass of a twenty-year-old), or it’s obsessing over their kids’ schooling and extracurriculars, or they’ve started a small fashion business, or they volunteer or blog or whatever—certainly no one will admit to not having a project. That would just be lazy. Oh, the tyranny of having help!

Mwah!

—Sid

In fact, I was in the midst of a little project of my own: a rich and ongoing fantasy in which I was Jake’s wife instead of Leo’s. I imagined serving ten-dollar tacos on his trendy new food truck, tending his rooftop garden, hanging around at TV show tapings, having romantic candlelit dinners, feeding each other chocolate cake before steamy lovemaking sessions . . . that kind of thing. I had just enough self-awareness to laugh at myself over the whole thing. But I stopped short of an actual reality check, which would be that I’d still be working long hours while Jake worked the opposite hours at his restaurant. I’d still be watching friends and colleagues have babies and vacillating between convincing myself that I didn’t want kids and panicking that my window on becoming a mother was closing. Because the truth was that I’d longed for an unoriginal life, as Jake called the well-tread path of parenthood. I’d wanted to get fat and have cravings for pickles and ice cream in the middle of the night, to scream at my long-suffering husband during labor, to smilingly complain about sleepless nights, to wear my baby in one of those slings that looked like a big Ace bandage, to be out on the streets of New York in the early-morning hours when only dog owners and parents were awake. That’s what I always wanted, and here I was punishing the great guy to come along and give all of that to me by longing for the good but not great guy who wouldn’t. Leo, who wanted what I wanted, who’d spent his life savings on the IVF treatments that made me pregnant with twins—“a two-for,” we’d called it—was getting the short end of the stick. At least in my fantasies. I was conscious of my bad behavior but somehow also removed from it because I wasn’t acting on it. But, in fact—of course—I was. You can’t think about something that much and not have it show up in your actions.

An unfortunate side effect was that when I wasn’t feeling
annoyed with Leo for some small transgression involving cheese or whose turn it was to wake up first, I started to pity him for having an ungrateful wife like me who doesn’t appreciate him. And pity is not an emotion conducive to romance. The guiltier I felt, the less into Leo I was. And the more into Jake I became.

My restless legs syndrome—a maddening affliction I’d not been able to shake since the end of my pregnancy—had reached an all-time high right around this time. And many of these fantastical escapes from reality took place as I paced the living room floor in the middle of the night, shaking out my legs and scrolling through Facebook on my phone, increasingly cruising Jake’s new “public figure” page.

Soon I was following his food truck on Twitter and picking up tacos from it every week when it was parked on West Fourth Street. I’d walk the boys past the sex shops and tattoo parlors, brushing off their questions about the crotchless leather bodysuits or the Day-Glo water bongs and trying to distract them with questions about what kind of tacos they wanted. Once, I surreptitiously took a picture of Quinn in front of one of the seedier adult shops and tagged it #citykid. It didn’t get as many likes or comments as I thought it would, and we walked the long way from then on, avoiding the tawdriest section of the street. Jake was never there at the truck, but we kept going anyway because the boys loved those tacos, and so did Leo. I didn’t tell him who was behind them.