Better Off Without Him (3 page)

“You’re coming back tonight?” Was I surprised? Confused? Pleased?

“Well, yes. I think we should tell the girls together.”

“Together? You want us to tell our daughters together that you’re moving out to be with another woman?”

Brian looked uncomfortable for the first time. “Yes. Well, I think they need to hear the explanation from both of us.”

“But both of us aren’t leaving,” I pointed out. “You’re leaving. You’re leaving because you’re screwing a woman almost half your age. How can I possibly explain that when I don’t even understand it myself?”

See, I was calm. No screeching.

He cleared his throat. “Now, Mona, I can’t take the total responsibility for this.”

That may have been the wrong thing for him to say. “And how, exactly, am I at fault?”

“Well, let’s face it. Our marriage hasn’t been the same these past few months.”

I think at that moment I forgot all about being a big person. The entire unnoticed-blip-that-I-should-have-seen theory went out the window. “You’re right. Apparently, for these past few months, one of us has been unfaithful.”

“Well, yes, but before that, things were, ah, you know…” He looked at me hopefully. Like I was actually going to let him off the hook.

“Before that you and I spent a week in Aruba where we had monkey sex for six days in a row. Before that we talked about your coming with me to San Francisco this summer. We’ve been planning your sister’s surprise fiftieth birthday party, which, I believe, is still scheduled for three weeks from next Saturday.” I could feel the blood rising, and I fought the urge to scream. Had he actually thought I should admit mistakes? Was he crazy??? “Two months ago you bought me a diamond necklace for our twentieth wedding anniversary.” I took a few deep breaths. “So tell me. When, in the past few months, was I supposed to figure out that things were, ah…you know?”

Brain shook his head sadly. “I’m going to take these out to the car.” He picked up some suitcases and went out the front door. I sat down on our hall bench, gripping my knees with my sweaty palms. My eyes came to rest on our wonderfully quaint umbrella stand, an antique made to look like an elephant’s foot, and I thought briefly about running him through with my Monet umbrella from the New York Metropolitan Museum Store. I probably couldn’t kill him with an umbrella, unless he agreed to lie down while I repeatedly stabbed him in the eye with it. My eyes moved to the cute bulldog door-stop. Also antique. Cast iron. Weighed a frigging ton. Capable of inflicting severe, possibly fatal damage. It was so heavy, one good swing would probably do it. It was so heavy, however, I probably couldn’t lift it high enough to hit him anywhere but on the foot.

He came back in to get the rest of his suitcases. My suitcases, actually. Could I call the police and report missing luggage? Would they actually arrest him for it? Now, there was a plan. What foreign woman, probably fishing for a green card or something similar, would want to associate with a convicted tote-bag felon? Why should I go to jail for murder when I could just as easily send him to jail for petty theft?

“I’m going now,” Brian said. I had been so lost in the vision of my apparently soon-to-be-ex-husband in an orange jumpsuit that I didn’t hear him come back in. He was looking down at me, actually smiling. “I’ll be back around dinner. I’ll talk to the girls.”

“Where are you going?” I asked.

“To Dominique’s,” he said easily. “She has a condo in Hoboken, so I’ll be close to work. And the girls, of course. I’ll have my lawyer call your lawyer.”

“I don’t have a lawyer,” I whined.

“You’ll find somebody competent. Ask around. I’m not worried, Mona. I’m sure you’ll be fine.” Brian patted me on the head. Really. Can you believe it? Then he walked out the door.

I was so angry. Really outraged that he could so serenely walk out and leave behind a life and children and a dog and a cat. And I felt betrayed. I mean, there were vows taken. Love. Honor. Cherish. Till death. I wasn’t dead yet.

I was also highly insulted that a person such as myself, attractive, intelligent, successful, respected in the community, great mother and one hell of a cook, could be so easily be replaced by a woman who was merely blond, foreign, and who may or not have blown the president.

What I did not feel, and I only realized it long afterward, was broken-hearted.

The phone rang a few moments after Brian left. I have telephones in every room, and all the phones have caller ID, so I merely had to lean over from where I was sitting, hunched on the front hall bench, to see that Westfield High School was calling. That was not a good sign. But it was what I needed to pull me out of the pool of self-pity I was rapidly digging for myself.

“Mrs. Berman?” a man’s voice asked after I said hello. “This is Vice Principal Arnold.”

He didn’t need to tell me who he was. Sadly, I recognized his voice from several previous phone calls.

“Yes, Mr. Arnold. What did Jessica do this time?”

Now, some parents with multiple offspring may not automatically assume that one child is more worth a phone call from the assistant principal than any of the others, but other parents don’t have a Jessica. While her elementary and middle school careers might have been relatively undistinguished, she hit high school with an agenda. So far, in a few short months, she had incited her English class to walk out in protest of the banning of certain books in the library, managed to flip a calculator into the air, accidentally of course, but at her geometry teacher, narrowly missing him but apparently damaging the calculator beyond repair, and had been permanently forbidden to use the upstairs annex of the library. So there was a little history here for me to go on.

“Actually,” Mr. Arnold said, “it’s not Jessica.”

“Miranda? Did she get caught smoking again? Or was it about the missing trigonometry book? She swore to me-“

“Mrs. Berman,” Mr. Arnold said firmly, “it’s Lauren.”

My heart stopped. I think, although there’s been no scientific evidence produced so far to back me up, that the entire earth paused for just a moment on its axis.

“Lauren?” I whispered in disbelief.

“Yes.”

“Is she okay?” My heart was pounding.

“She’s fine, but there has been an incident and another student is involved. It’s complicated. I’ll explain when you get here.”

I slammed down the phone, hand shaking. Lauren? I ran and grabbed my purse, slammed the back door behind me, hopped into Johnson and sped out of the driveway.

Normally, I can walk to the high school. It’s several blocks away, but they are lovely, tree-lined blocks, with wide sidewalks and gracious homes, and I love the walk. Downtown Westfield, which is in the other direction, is another lovely walk. But today, I whizzed past Tudors and Victorians, blinded to everything but the gray pavement before me. Lauren?

I entered Mr. Arnold’s office still trembling. He rose from his desk and took my arm, leading me to the sofa and sitting down with me. We faced each other, knees almost touching, and he actually patted my hand.

“Mrs. Berman, first let me repeat that Lauren is fine. That is, she is unhurt.”

“You’re sure it’s Lauren?” I asked, reaching for any straw.

“Oh, yes. And she did confess.”

“Confess?” My eyes started to well with tears. “Oh, Mr. Arnold,” I whispered, “she was my best hope.”

“Yes,” he said, waving his hands helplessly in the air. “I know. She’s always been a model student. An example for others, really. Which is why her behavior is so upsetting. I feel I must ask – is there anything going on at home that may have caused her to, well, act out?”

I took a deep breath and lifted my chin, blinking away the tears. “Well, as a matter of fact, my husband is leaving me. Us.”

Mr. Arnold nodded his head. “Well, that might explain it. I’m sure that hit Lauren very hard.”

“Well, no, because she doesn’t know yet. He just told me himself, um - ” I glanced at my watch - “fifty-three minutes ago.”

Mr. Arnold drew back. “Are you saying that your husband just now, this morning, told you that he was leaving you?”

“Yep.”

Mr. Arnold looked amazed for a moment, then slipped back into his I-can-help-I’m -a-professional mode. “Well, you know Mrs. Berman, sometimes these separations can result in the strengthening of a marriage.”

I looked at him rather coldly. “I don’t think that will be true in our case.”

He lifted one eyebrow. “Don’t be too hasty, Mrs. Berman. Why, my wife and I recently had a bit of a problem, and the time apart did us a world of good.”

I tilted my head at him. “Did your bit of a problem involve you schtooping a thirty-year-old French whore?”

Mr. Arnold looked shocked. “No, of course not.”

“Then I don’t think we’re on the same page with this one, Mr. Arnold. Now, what about Lauren?”

“Yes. Well, she assaulted a fellow student, and as you know, we have a zero tolerance policy about that sort of thing. She faces an automatic three-day suspension, and we will insist she attend anger management classes.”

“Assault? Are you telling me that she hit somebody?”

“Yes. I’m afraid so.”

This was so not making sense. “Hit? She hit somebody with her hand?”

“Well, no. She hit them with her science project.”

I made the leap from surreal to impossible with no effort at all. “Her science project? She hit someone with a five-foot-tall model of DNA?”

Mr. Arnold nodded sadly. “I’m afraid so.”

I stared past Mr. Arnold to the wall behind his desk. Apparently, he graduated from the University of Virginia, Summa Cum Laude. I looked back at Mr. Arnold. “Why?”

“It really doesn’t matter why she did it, Mrs. Berman, the fact is – “

“It matters to me,” I interrupted.

“Well, I really don’t know why. Let’s bring her in, shall we?” He got up, spoke into his telephone, and a moment later Lauren walked into his office.

She looked miserable. Her shoulders were hunched, her eyes were red, and her perky braid had come undone. “Mommy, I’m so sorry,” she whimpered, and started to cry.

I stood up and swept her into my arms. My poor baby. My heart was breaking for her. Really. I wiped the hair from her eyes and looked into her unhappy little face. “What the hell were you thinkin’?” I yelled at her.

She took a lungful of air. “It’s just that she broke it,” she wailed.

I shot a look at Mr. Arnold. “Who broke what?”

“Bernadette,” Lauren explained at a gallop. “ See, Jessica was supposed to carry the project from Mrs. Chambers’s room, and when she brought it in, all the strands along the top, you know, the green ones, well, they were all broken off, so I started to yell at Jess, and Jess said she didn’t do anything, and Ahmed said he saw Bernadette reach up and break them as Jess walked by, so I went to Bernadette and asked her if she broke our project, and she said yeah, she did, that it was a stupid project anyway, and then she started to laugh. So I grabbed the project from Jess and hit her over the head with it. Hit Bernadette, not Jess. Jess just stood there with her mouth hanging open.” Lauren moved her shoulders in a pitiful kind of way. “I was just so mad.”

I was staring at Mr. Arnold, who had the good grace to look uncomfortable. “So, Bernadette ruined the science project that you and your sister spent six weeks working on?” I asked Lauren, but my eyes never left Mr. Arnold’s face.

I could feel Lauren nod. I narrowed my eyes. “Let’s hear Bernadette’s side of this, shall we, Mr. Arnold?”

Mr. Arnold left the room. I shook my head at Lauren. “You bopped her with five feet of plastic straw and miniature marshmallows?”

A smile played along her lips. “Yes. I’m really sorry, Mom, but she is such a bitch. Honest. She is.”

“Lauren, honey, I believe you. But you’re the one who keeps me from running off to join the circus. If you start acting like your sisters, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

“Daddy’s going to be pissed, isn’t he?”

I exhaled slowly. “Oh, dear. Well, I don’t know. I have a feeling you’ll be getting away with this one.”

Mr. Arnold returned with Bernadette and Bernadette’s mother, a shallow-faced woman I recognized at once. Sometime in the recent past, during a sixth grade PTA bake sale, she had given me a hard time because I only wanted six brownies and refused to pay for a whole dozen. Her name, as I recalled, was Bridget or Britta or Greta. I didn’t like her.

“My daughter,” she said at once, “could have been seriously injured. She called me on her cell phone as soon as it happened, she was so distraught.”

“Your daughter,” I spat back, “got hit with plastic straws held together by miniature marshmallows and craft glue. The only way she could have gotten hurt is if one of the straws went so far up her nose that it severed her brain stem. Who are you kidding? Injured?” I looked hard at Mr. Arnold. “So, what is going to be Bernadette’s punishment?”

Mr. Arnold looked puzzled. Bernadette and her mother looked immediately on guard.

“What do you mean?” Mr. Arnold asked.

“There’s a zero tolerance policy when it comes to assault. What’s the policy about the deliberate destruction of personal property?”

Bridget/Britta/Greta looked nervous. Mr. Arnold still didn’t get it.

“Those kids last year,” I went on, “the ones who slashed the tires in the parking lot? Didn’t they get an immediate suspension too?”

“Well, now, Mrs. Berman, this isn’t quite the same thing now, is it?” Mr. Arnold could see the trap, looming wide ahead of him, and he was trying to steer as clear as possible.

“Oh, Mr. Arnold, I think it’s exactly the same thing. You can’t place a monetary value on what Bernadette destroyed, because it involved weeks of work, and that’s so hard to calculate, not to mention the affect on both of my girls’ grades. It’s the same thing, isn’t it? Personal property is personal property, and Bernadette deliberately destroyed my daughter’s property. How long were those boys out? A week? And maybe Bernadette should also be required to seek counseling. After all, there may be some deep, underlying reason she sought out this particular science project, and if there are DNA model issues, we wouldn’t want her to repeat the same grave error later on in life, would we?”

Mr. Arnold rolled his eyes in defeat. Bridget/Britta/Greta clenched her jaw. Bernadette looked clueless. I dared not look at Lauren, because I could feel her shoulders shaking with laughter, and I was afraid if I looked at her, we would both become hysterical.

“I can’t suspend somebody for breaking a science project,” Mr. Arnold said.

“Sure you can,” I said, my voice steely.

“It’s possible,” Lauren suggested in a clear voice, “that Bernadette did it by accident.”

“And it’s also possible,” Bridget/Britta/Greta said from between clenched teeth, “that Lauren tripped and the project just fell on my Bernadette.”

Her Bernadette opened her mouth to protest, but got her foot stomped on. Mr. Arnold looked beaten. He took a deep breath and asked, “Does Bernadette wish to withdraw her complaint?”

Bridget/Britta/Greta nodded.

“Apparently, then, this has just been a little misunderstanding. Bernadette obviously overreacted, making a false accusation.” Mr. Arnold clapped his hands together. “Okay, everybody, sorry for the commotion. Why don’t we just get back to what we were doing, and forget all about this?”

Bernadette, still protesting under her breath, got dragged from the room. Lauren had turned to leave, but my hand shot out to stop her.

“What about the science project?” I asked.

Lauren looked back in surprise. Mr. Arnold just looked annoyed.

“Was Mr. Coopersmith able to evaluate the girls’ work before the project was, um, accidentally destroyed?” I pressed on.

Lauren’s face fell. “No. It was in Mrs. Chambers’s room. Mr. Coopersmith never saw it.”

I smiled sweetly at Mr. Arnold. “It would be a shame if my two daughters received a failing grade because their project was the victim of a little misunderstanding, don’t you think, Mr. Arnold?”

Mr. Arnold sighed. “What would you suggest, Mrs. Berman?”

“Since it was sitting in Mrs. Chambers’s room all morning, and Mrs. Chambers is also a science teacher, perhaps she can recommend a grade for the girls.”

Lauren grinned. Even Mr. Arnold looked happy. “Excellent suggestion, Mrs. Berman.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Isn’t it.” I gave Lauren a quick kiss. “Go back to class, honey.”

I watched her go with a warm feeling. Kicking ass for the sake of my kids is something I do quite naturally. I don’t send back bad food in a restaurant, and I’ve never returned an appliance if it breaks while under warranty. I even feel bad about telling the sales clerk at Chico’s that she forgot my Passport discount again. But with my daughters, I grow an instant backbone.

Mr. Arnold put his hand on my shoulder as I started to leave. “Mrs. Berman? “

I turned. He looked the soul of sympathy and understanding.

“Is there someone who can be with you today? After that kind of news, you probably shouldn’t be alone. A sister perhaps? Or a neighbor?”

‘Darling,’ he whispered into her hair, holding her gently, ‘what can I do? How can I help you?’ She leaned back to gaze into the dark tenderness of his eyes. ‘Just love me,’ she said, pulling down his head to meet his mouth with her own.

“Better than that,” I said. “My plumber.”

He looked confused, but smiled. “If you ever feel the need to talk,” he went on, “please think of me as a friend. I can understand that having your husband leave you for a younger woman can be a very humbling experience.”

“Mr. Arnold,” I said between clenched teeth, “looking into a lighted make-up mirror with a plus-seven magnification is a humbling experience. Having your husband leave you for a younger woman just plain sucks.”

And then I left.

When I got back home, everything looked exactly the same. The furniture gleamed softly. Fred was stretched out in his favorite patch of sunshine on the living room floor. Lana was curled up on the softest pillow of the window seat. I could sense a vague feeling of something missing, probably my luggage, but my home looked the same as it did when Brian was still living in it.

I sat down in the hall and called my best friend, Patricia Carmichael. Everyone needs a best friend like Patricia. She’s very rich. I mean, she’s a Carmichael, born and raised on the North Shore of Long Island, the same neighborhood Jay Gatsby lived in. That’s the kind of rich she is.