Fly Away Home (15 page)

PART TWO
 
 
Not Waving but Drowning

SYLVIE

“Shh!” On the stage of an overheated South Florida ballroom, a woman in a pink mesh and satin hat that looked like an ambitious Easter bonnet was hissing into a microphone. “Ladies. Ladies! SHH!” Flecks of spittle sprayed from her mouth and pattered onto the podium. Sylvie winced and hoped she’d be able to wipe it off discreetly before her speech began. She inhaled, but not too deeply. The room smelled of the floral centerpieces and a dozen competing perfumes and, faintly, of the eye-watering undertone of animal urine. That was what you got, Sylvie supposed, for holding your event in the Monkey Jungle.

Beside her, Selma squeezed her knee. “You doing okay?” Selma asked. Sylvie nodded, even though it wasn’t true. It was five days after Richard’s press conference, and she was a long way from home and a long way from okay.

After the press conference, Sylvie had gone back to Ceil’s. Clarissa had e-mailed Sylvie her schedule for the next six months, her speaking engagements and board meetings, the luncheons she’d promised to attend and silent auctions she’d pledged to organize. After several deep cleansing breaths and two glasses of wine, Sylvie and Ceil had worked their way through the list, calling various presidents and chairs and telling them that Sylvie was to take a leave of absence. Almost everyone had been understanding, from the chair of the library luncheon to the organizer of the ballet ball. The synagogue’s silent auction committee chair had balked—“we were really counting on you and the senator to be there,” she said plaintively—but Ceil had donated a weekend at her house on Shelter Island, plus a session with her daughter, Clemmie, who taught what
New York
magazine had judged the city’s best Pilates class, and the woman had grumpily agreed to take Sylvie’s name off the host committee.

Everyone had let her off the hook except for the head of the South Florida chapter of Women for Women, a charity devoted to raising money for the formerly homeless making the transition from shelters back into the workforce. Sylvie had sat on their national board for years, and would occasionally attend events at local chapters, to give speeches, to hand out awards, to remind wealthy ladies of their obligations to their less fortunate sisters and their children.

“You praw-mised!” the group’s president, one Wendy Silver, had said when Sylvie had called. Wendy lived in Boca, but had a Long Island whine so pronounced that it made Fran Drescher sound sedate and refined.

“Of course,” Sylvie had said, struggling to keep her temper. “But I’m sure you understand that my circumstances have changed.”

Wendy Silver was unmoved. “I’ve got five hundred women”—rendered as
foive hundrit wimmin
—“who paid a hundred and eighteen dollars apiece to see you.”

“I understand that—”

“And,” Wendy continued as if Sylvie hadn’t spoken, “our angels, who pay one thousand dollars a year to sponsor a child in need, and our silver angels and our Golden Halo circle.” She detailed the level of financial support each group gave, then added emphatically, “You can’t back out now!” Sylvie suspected that prior to the news of her husband’s infidelity, the women who’d paid to see her would have been perfectly happy with the substitute she’d volunteered to arrange. Now they probably were eager to see her—the disgraced wife, up close and in person. They were excited about the chance to look at her face and her figure and try to determine whether or not Richard had been justified in cheating. “You signed a CAWN-tract,” Wendy Silver shrilled triumphantly, “and we already paid you.”

This was true. She’d signed a contract; they’d already paid her, and Sylvie, as usual, had given her honorarium to a halfway house for pregnant teenagers here in New York. So here she was, in the suit she’d worn at the press conference, with her entirely-too-amused mother at her side. (“The bitches of Boca Raton,” Selma had called them after checking out Wendy Silver, a predictably emaciated woman who could have been any age from thirty-five to sixty, with stiff, dyed hair and a face full of fillers. Wendy had worn Prada pumps, major diamonds, and a Missoni dress that Sylvie recognized from Saks and knew cost enough to support a formerly homeless mother and two of her kids for a month.)

“I’d like to thank our sponsors, BMW of Boca, Jay Green Jewelers … ladies! Please! Shh!” Onstage, the hat lady was still hissing, and the women in the audience were continuing to ignore her. Sylvie had been to enough luncheons like these, as a speaker and as a guest, to know that the ladies weren’t there to listen to speeches, or even necessarily to support women making the journey from welfare to gainful employment. Their hundred-and-eighteen-dollar price of admission gave them the privilege to see and be seen, to sport four-figure outfits and four-inch heels, to show off their Botox and their spray tans, their diamonds and their gold, to pick at their lunches and ignore their dessert and gossip about who was getting a divorce, who was having an affair, who’d lost weight and who’d gained it, and feel good—even righteous—while they did it. The hat lady would have as good a chance of silencing the five hundred chattering ladies-who-lunch as she would herding cats.

Sylvie lifted her fork and poked at the slimy rectangle of salmon on her plate, which would have been unpalatable even if the room didn’t smell like monkey pee. The good news was, she wasn’t the headliner—they’d hired a stand-up comedian for that. Sylvie’s job was to introduce the group’s Mother of the Year. Five minutes, she told herself, and sipped her too-sweet iced tea. Five minutes on stage, then she’d slip out the back door, where her car and driver would be waiting to take her to the airport, where she’d fly back to New York.

She had the keys to the Connecticut house, but after leaving the press conference, she’d gone to Palm Beach, to her mother’s condo. Selma, normally in New York through Thanksgiving, had flown to join her, and Sylvie had spent the next three days shadowing her mother. She’d have a hard-boiled egg and a slice of toast for breakfast, go to an eighty-and-over water aerobics class, have tuna salad and a tomato for lunch, then nap—or, really, lie on the guest-room bed, stare up at the ceiling fan, and think of how angry she was and how betrayed. Dinner was at five o’clock, in one of the delis or Italian restaurants that Selma frequented—places where they knew her and greeted her not just by name but by title. “Good evening, Judge,” they’d say, setting her pasta on the table. Sylvie would pick at a salad or a slice of garlic bread while her mother kept up a steady monologue about everything from the state of the European Union to the state of Sylvie’s own. “Are you talking to him?” she’d ask, and Sylvie would shake her head. “Are the girls all right?” she’d continue, and Sylvie would nod. They’d be home by seven o’clock, eight at the latest. Selma would read—even in retirement, she kept up with the papers and the legal journals. Sylvie would try to read, but she’d find herself stuck on the same page of her novel.

“And now,” said the hat lady, “I’d like to call to the stage, to introduce our mother of the year, Sylvie Woodruff.” Sylvie got to her feet as the woman recited her resume: Barnard and Yale, lawyer, national board member, mother of two, “and wife—of course—of Senator Richard Woodruff.” Thankfully the woman left it at that, but Sylvie could hear the whispers getting louder as she mounted the stage, could feel five hundred pairs of eyes on her, measuring and judging and probably finding her wanting.

“Good afternoon,” she began, setting her notes on the podium. “I don’t need to tell any of you of the vital importance of the work your volunteers, and your dollars, are doing.” She gave them the statistics: how many women lived in poverty; how hard it was for them to improve their circumstances without help above and beyond what the government could provide; how it was the obligation of women—Jewish women in particular—to do the work the Talmud commanded, the work Tikkun Olam, repairing the broken world.
A broken world
, she thought, as the women applauded for themselves. That was what she had.

Swallowing hard, she turned back to her notes and introduced the mother of the year, a full-figured foster mother of three in a black dress who hugged her warmly and whispered, “Good luck to you,” in Sylvie’s ear.

Back at the table, her mother squeezed her hand. “Very nice, dear,” she said. Sylvie nodded numbly, still feeling all of those eyes on her. She kissed her mother goodbye and promised to call when she landed. Then she slid her bag out from underneath her seat where she’d tucked it and escaped to the bathroom. Pulling down her pantyhose in the stall, she heard the door open and shut, and recognized Wendy Silver’s unmistakable voice.

“I thawt she’d be thinner,” said Wendy before starting to pee. “She looked thinner on TV.”

Sylvie was surprised to find that her feelings weren’t hurt, the way they’d normally have been by this bitchy little critique. Maybe this was the benefit of what she’d lived through—have your husband admit to infidelity, be humiliated coast-to-coast, and you would no longer care about what your peers had to say about your body. She found herself biting back laughter. For someone so tiny, Wendy Silver urinated as noisily as a three-hundred-pound linebacker. It was the kind of thing she’d once have told Richard, when the event was over and she was home, barefoot, with a cup of tea, and he was on the couch beside her.

“And what about that suit?” demanded Wendy’s friend. “You think they don’t have irons in New York?”

Sylvie looked down at herself, thinking ruefully that she could have had her suit pressed and her nails done. Then again, Wendy could have been decent and let her off the hook.

“Well, I’m going to complain,” announced Wendy over the sound of the toilet’s flush. “There’s an evaluation form. I’m going to tell them that her clothes weren’t appropriate.”

Sylvie opened the door of her stall and saw Wendy, at the sink, catch sight of her in the mirror. Wendy’s already-mostly-frozen face got even more frozen as Sylvie gave her one of her well-practiced pleasant smiles. “Sorry you were disappointed,” she said.

Wendy’s mouth opened and closed like a fish tossed on a dock. “I … I’m …”

“Have a good day,” said Sylvie, and breezed past her. It was evil, she knew, but there was a certain satisfaction in the stunned, stupid look on her face. Let them complain, she thought. Let them tell her fellow national board members that her suit was wrinkled and her nails unpolished. Given the circumstances, she was sure they’d understand.

Outside, the humidity and the stink of monkeys hit her like a slap in the face. Her car was waiting for her. So was a young woman, standing on the sidewalk in jeans and a blazer, with her brown hair in a ponytail. She had a notebook in one hand and a camera in the other. Sylvie’s heart sank. The event was private, but it had been written up in the paper, which meant that people—and reporters—knew she’d be in town.

“Ms. Woodruff?” the young woman asked pleasantly. “I’m Mandy Miller from the
Miami Herald
.”

Sylvie shook her hand. “It’s nice to meet you, but I’m not doing interviews right now.”

“Just a few quick questions?”

She shook her head again, her hand on the car’s hot chrome door handle. She’d gotten the door open when the woman blurted out, “Why?”

Without meaning to, Sylvie turned.

“I just want to know,” said the woman. Her notebook was closed, and beads of sweat dotted her hairline and her upper lip. “I mean, as a woman. What were you doing up there onstage with him? You didn’t have to be there.”

Sylvie opened her mouth. She thought about explaining, or trying to—that if it wasn’t her up there, it would have been her daughters, that she loved her husband, loved him in spite of it all, in a way that a woman as young as the one in front of her would never be able to understand. The life they’d built together, the history they shared—that meant something. But she knew whatever answer she could give wouldn’t satisfy her inquisitor. To Mandy Miller from the
Miami Herald
, Sylvie was a symbol, a feminist heroine who’d failed her, and no explanation or amount of rationalizing would change that.

“I’m sorry I disappointed you,” she said. Then she got into the car and bowed her head and cried silently all the way to the airport, where she wiped her eyes and checked her bag and boarded a flight back home.

Two weeks later she woke up to the sound of pounding surf and the shrill crying of birds. In her dream, the girls had been young again, and they’d been at the beach. Diana, tall and lean and already with a teenager’s disdainful attitude, lay on a towel on the sand, while Sylvie bobbed in the shallows with Lizzie in her arms. In her dream, Lizzie was little, plump and tow-headed, dressed not in a swimsuit, like she should have been, but in the pale pink leotard she’d worn for ballet class, the one that, somehow, always left an inch or two of underwear drooping out underneath the leg bands. Sylvie turned toward the horizon and saw a wave swelling in the distance. Heart pounding, mouth dry, she held her daughter in her arms and started swimming for the shore, but the sand was sucked backward underneath her feet, and she couldn’t move. The wave crested, breaking over her head, yanking her down. She struggled toward the surface, managing to get her head, and Lizzie’s, above water.
Save her
, she thought.
I have to save her
. But her feet kept going out from under her, and the water kept crashing and pounding, and when she finally managed to thrust her head into the air again she saw, high on the bluff, not the Connecticut house, but her New York City apartment building, and it was on fire. Flames leapt out from every window, and, before the waves took her down, she saw the western-facing wall crumble down to the street.

She jerked upright in her bed, dry-mouthed and gasping. It took her a minute to remember the specifics of her life: that she was in Connecticut, that Richard had cheated on her, that she was alone.

Except she wasn’t.

“Hello, missus,” called a voice from downstairs. Quickly, Sylvie got out of bed, wincing at the ache in her back. She scrambled into her clothes and hurried her stiff legs down the stairs as fast as they’d go to meet Mel, the caretaker, who’d been calling since she’d arrived, trying to set up a time when he could stop by and see how she was getting on.