I'm Not Julia Roberts (13 page)

At least Lu was close to Beatrix’s age. So many other first wives she knew had to deal with second wives like Heather the Waitress, emaciated little twits not even twenty-five, teetering around in too high heels and too tight jeans, acting as if life hadn’t officially begun until they strutted through the door. Please. Beatrix remembered her early twenties quite well, thank you, remembered the cluelessness, the shallowness, the head-up-the-assness. Wasn’t that when she’d chosen to marry Ward? Didn’t that prove that no one should be allowed to get married before the age of thirty?

There should be laws,
thought Beatrix,
there should be rules and requirements and guidelines. No second wives under twenty-five, no second wives who looked like movie stars.
Here, Beatrix had lucked out. Lu was no Julia Roberts.

Lu was again examining the doctor’s bill that she had tossed next to the sugar packets and mustard, her expression unreadable.
What?
Beatrix thought.
I’m not allowed to take my son to a specialist when it’s perfectly clear that there’s something wrong with his eye? I’m not allowed to emphasize that payment should be made immediately when Ward’s concept of “immediately” seems to be “if and when I feel like it so get off my case”?

She wondered what, if anything, she was allowed to do in Lu’s opinion. Thank Lu for making her youngest feel fat and unwelcome in his own father’s house? Thank her for trying to purchase her oldest son’s affections with expensive jeans and gym shoes? Thank her for going to her middle son’s afternoon sporting events—events that Beatrix could not possibly attend because she had a regular nine-to-five—and making Beatrix look like an uncaring, unsupportive hag?
Rules!
she thought.
Rules!

Beatrix felt the anger like a spike through the top of her head, the heat of it racing through her veins, and she took a gulp of water. She would kill for her kids—any mother would—but she didn’t like being so intimate with that knowledge.

The gargoyle busboy sidled by the table, smelling of smoke and Parmesan. He waved his hand at Lu’s plate. “Finished?” he mumbled.

Lu pushed the plate with the half-eaten piece of pie toward the edge of the table. “If I’m not, I probably should be.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Lu could see Beatrix fussing with her files again, her lips in a tight, sour pucker. She was sure Beatrix felt judged, and judged lacking, by Lu, and while that was true, it was also true that Lu didn’t want Beatrix’s job. In Ward, Lu had found that rarest of things: the nearly perfect husband. He loved her so well when he was around and yet went on business trips just long enough and often enough to convince her that she hadn’t lost herself completely, hadn’t turned into a bubble-headed, tittering wifey-wife the way some of her old friends had, or a seething bitch who complained constantly about how unappreciated she was, like some of her other friends. Yet this satisfaction didn’t trickle down to the kids, not in the triple-exclamation-point way all those women on secondwivesspeakeasy.com claimed it did (“I like to call my stepchildren my
bonus
children!!!”). It might have been normal to feel differently about the boys, but it didn’t feel right. It was like trying not to stare at a person with a prosthetic arm: You worked so hard not to focus on the arm that it was all you could think about. Prosthetic arms everywhere.

Lu sighed. Just once, she would like to have a triple-exclamation-point moment. “Other than his eye, Britt seems to be doing better.”

“Britt was just tossed off the tennis team for throwing a racket at the umpire.”

“Besides that,” Lu said.

“Besides that?”

“Yeah,” Lu said. “He’s a funny kid, don’t you think?”

Beatrix didn’t know how to respond to this comment. “Sometimes he could try being a little less funny.”

“But then he wouldn’t be Britt.” Lu hated herself for the chirpy tone of her voice, but she couldn’t help it. She was simply not normal around this woman.

“Yes,” said Beatrix, rolling her eyes. “I suppose not.” She paused. “What about Devin? How’s he doing?”

“Okay.” Lu realized that she should probably say more, as both of them knew that Devin had been avoiding his mother ever since he came to live with his father. This might have made Lu feel superior if Devin hadn’t calcified into some walking statue of teenage blankness and rage, and if that walking statue wasn’t perched in Lu’s living room every day, staring stonily at the TV. But then, there were cracks here and there. She’d seen them. And besides, Lu believed that Devin had moved in with his father not because Ward was a better parent, but because Devin wanted to torture him up close and personal.

This was not what she told Beatrix, however. “It’s hard to tell with Devin,” Lu said carefully. “You know he doesn’t say that much. I think he’s . . . better.”

The corners of Beatrix’s mouth twitched. “Is he still dating that girl?”

“Ashleigh?” said Lu. “Unfortunately.”

“Aren’t you friendly with her mother?”

“Just because I like Moira,” said Lu, tugging at her collar, “doesn’t mean I like her kid. Every time I see Ashleigh I want to tell her to tuck her boobs back into her shirt.”

“Maybe you should,” said Beatrix.

“That’d be nice.”

“No, really. She looks like that singer, what’s her name? The one who can’t sing but distracts everyone by falling out of her clothes.”

“You could be describing one of dozens of people. Hundreds, maybe. Entire junior highs full of kids. Grade school kids are wearing
Sesame Street
thongs.”

“Well, anyway, who knows where it will lead?”

Lu nodded. “I know.”

“I’m talking about Ashleigh. A girl with clothes like that. I bet she has a
collection
of thongs. . . .” Beatrix trailed off, raising her eyebrows.

“Lots of girls who don’t wear thongs,” Lu said, “do all sorts of stuff that their moms wouldn’t approve of. Besides, isn’t that something you should discuss with Devin? Boys are just as accountable for their behavior as girls are.”

“We wouldn’t have any trouble if they were properly supervised,” said Beatrix.

Lu’s blink came in stages. “Supervised.”

“I have to explain this to you?” Beatrix barked.

“What do you want? Cameras in his backpack? We can only supervise them so much.” Lu used her index and middle fingers to put quotation marks around the word
supervise.
“We can’t be with them every minute of every day. We can only present them with the facts. We have to hope and trust that they’ll be responsible.”

“
Hope
that they’ll be responsible? How about
demand
that they be responsible?”

“Hope, demand, expect. When it comes down to it, they’re going to do what they’re going to do.”

Beatrix’s face tightened into a mask. “That’s a perfectly insane way to think about this issue. But I’m not surprised to hear this from you.”

Lu grabbed for her fork, then remembered her place had been cleared. “Oh, God. Do they serve alcohol here?”

“I don’t appreciate the way that the subject of sex was introduced to my sons.”

“Maybe I’ll order myself a whole pie.”

“If you and Ward hadn’t spent so much time carrying on in front of my children, maybe they wouldn’t have so many problems. Maybe Devin wouldn’t have gotten so many ideas.” Beatrix’s finger came down like a jackhammer upon the pile of folders, as if she already had all the evidence she’d ever need.

Lu watched the jackhammering finger, remembered a night in which Britt had come upon Lu and Ward kissing.
It was just
kissing.
We should outlaw kissing?
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I never did. And speaking about carrying on, how about what you and Alan were doing?” Lu attempted to make more quotation marks, but her hands slashed at the air, like a person having a seizure. “Don’t you think that might have given the boys some, uh, ideas? And don’t you think they would have gotten ideas no matter what you or Ward or your husband or I did?”

Beatrix wiped the table with a napkin. “I guess some people,” she continued as if Lu hadn’t spoken, “don’t like to take responsibility for what they’ve done.”

“You got that right,” Lu said. This was her life now, a life of revisionist history, marked by petty skirmishes over bills, curfews, meals, clothes, visitation, TV, computer time, housework, holidays, even residences. How long could she tough it out? How long till she punched the next sanctimonious jerk-off who said: You
knew
he had kids; you
knew
what you were getting into.

Heather the Waitress hovered, her skinny little arms behind her back. “Do you guys want anything else? More coffee or anything?”

“No, thank you,” Beatrix told her. Lu merely shook her head in unconscious defeat.

“Okay, then. Here’s your check.” The waitress turned and almost crashed into the little boy, the one from the next table who had been so artfully mutilating his placemat. In his hands he held a stiff piece of toast on which was balanced a pepper shaker.

“Whoa!” said Heather.

“Dakota, get back here, you’re going to break that,” his mother said. She stood and zipped up her brown hoodie sweatshirt to her neck. “Leave those ladies alone.”

The little boy grinned as he set down the toast and shaker on Lu’s side of the table. “Meat!” he said.

“Maybe in another dimension. Here, it’s just pepper,” Lu told him, taking the shaker off the toast and placing it on the table. Beatrix scowled, though it wasn’t obvious whether she was displeased with Lu or the boy or both.

The boy’s mother crouched behind him. “Say good-bye to the nice ladies.”

“Meat,” snarled the boy.

At the next table, the boy’s father laid a twenty on top of his check. He smiled sheepishly, lips pink and womanly in his white face. “He calls everything meat now. We don’t know why. Last month it was ‘bug.’ Everything was ‘bug.’ You’d say ‘hi,’ he’d say ‘bug.’ Kids are crazy.”

“Crazy,” agreed Beatrix. “You said it.”

Lu sneezed abruptly, like a dog.

“Say good-bye, Dakota,” his mother insisted.

“Dakota!” said Dakota.

Dakota’s mother sighed, then swung the boy onto her hip. Her perfume wafted over Beatrix and Lu’s table, a mommy scent, cloying and heavy and sweet. “Sorry for interrupting your visit,” she said. “Are you two sisters?”

Heather the Hovering Waitress took a tiny step forward. “I was just thinking that. You have the same kind of, um,
way
about you. The same . . . what’s that word? I just learned it in psych class . . . oh! Gestalt.”

That did it. Beatrix scooped up the check before Lu could get it and before Heather the Waitress could expound further.

“Let me,” Lu said. “I had the pie.”

“No, no. This was my idea.” Beatrix opened her wallet and fished for a ten, which she gave to Heather the Waitress.

“I’ll get your change,” Heather said.

Beatrix gathered up her folders and her umbrella. “You keep the change.”

“Thanks!” Heather said. “Have a nice day.”

“You too,” said Lu, sliding from the booth. “And you,” she added, slipping past Dakota and his mother.

“Meat!” said Dakota.

“Bug!” Lu said.

The two women exited the restaurant and stood silently for a moment. Beatrix opened her automatic umbrella directly over her own head, not in the mood to share. Lu didn’t care. The gray drizzle was cool and bracing, like the spray from a breaking wave.

Beatrix and Lu did not look at each other; they didn’t have to. Each thought:
So we both have dark eyes, so what? I am
not
like her. And she is
nothing
like me. She will never understand how terrible it is, how much it really sucks, to have so much responsibility and so little control.

“What were they babbling about in there?” Beatrix said finally.

“I think Heather used the word
gestalt,
” said Lu.

“What does that mean?”

“Gestalt means—”

“
I
know what the word means, but what does it mean that
Heather
knows what it means?”

“The end of the world,” said Lu.

What it did mean: They wouldn’t be coming here again. Rage, hostility, jealousy, resentment—these things they could bear; people endured worse than that every day. They were not poor, not hungry, not plagued by plagues or flattened by natural disasters. They didn’t have the energy, maturity, frontal lobotomy, or whatever else you needed for this first-wife-second-wife-Chinese-royalty crap, and they didn’t know anyone who did. The old battles made so much more sense.

“Well,” said Beatrix. “I guess that’s it.”

“Yep,” said Lu. She watched Beatrix run to her car, the woman’s heavy footsteps spraying stars all around her. Lu shivered under the buzzing baked potato long after Beatrix had gone, the rain picking at her hair, her face, her sudden, bitter grin.
Here I am,
Lu thought.
Julia Roberts, smiling bravely into the future with my big, big teeth.

THE BUNKO BUNNY

I
have no luck.
Glynn remembered this snippet of movie dialogue, but not the actress who said it or the name of the movie. She did recall a histrionic mass of corkscrew curls, a chewy New York accent, a tragedy: The husband she loved had been hit by a bus before they could have a baby.
No baby. No husband. No luck.

Glynn figured it was better to have no luck than bad luck; even inertia was preferable to chaos. Glynn herself knew a lot about chaos because she had plenty of luck: a little good, some bad, all of it adding up to insanity. She had thermodynamic luck; the odds for explosion were high. Who cared that you shouldn’t apply the laws of thermodynamics to human relations? She had atoms, she had energy. There must be, she decided, a scientific explanation, an underlying, imperceptible flame beneath her feet.

An example: Glynn wanted to play super couples bunko, but George would have none of it. Here she was, ten minutes before everyone was supposed to show up, cross, sweaty, trying to convince him. Not that she could gather up all those husbands at the last minute, but still, there was the principle of the thing. One had to have principles. And anyway, he’d gone and devoured the box of spinach tarts that she thought she’d hidden underneath the frozen pizzas, and she’d been forced to run—literally—to get more.

“I’m not playing anything called ‘super’ or ‘bunko,’” he said, his face washed out in the glare of the TV.

“But they’re your friends,” she said.

“They’re your friends. They’re my friends’
wives.
”

That was the point, but Glynn didn’t say it. Glynn was the new wife. The young one. But she wasn’t so young. And George was her second husband. She was between jobs and, she hoped, between children. Anyway, she had to make a good showing, and she hadn’t gotten remarried to go it alone.

And speaking of showing. “Will you please turn that horrible stuff off? You know how I hate it.”

George tugged on his bottom lip. “Did you know that it only takes five pounds of pressure to rip a person’s cheek away from the gums?”

“Ugh, George. I don’t know why you feel the need to share these things with me.”

George tore his eyes away from his new favorite program:
Autopsy!
“I love you.”

She wiped the back of her hand across her brow. “We shouldn’t have moved,” she said, though the move was due to her own faulty logic, her luck. Their future seemed so ripe with possibility, why not move to a nice neighborhood in the suburbs, send Joey to a decent school for once, settle in, settle down? But that was before the budget cutbacks that cost Glynn her job, the strain to make the mortgage. Before she discovered that her new neighbor was a mortician and that her husband had never lost his little-boy obsession with all things torn and bloody. “We shouldn’t have bought a house near those people.”

“Who?”

Though she was irrationally fond of him—from his Muppet-oboe voice to his feline fits of ecstasy—she sometimes wondered if George was breathing through both nostrils. “You
know
who. The Addams Family.”

“He said that if he gets a call for a body tonight, I can go.”

“You’re not serious.”

“It’s a necessary profession.” George turned back to the screen. “You can’t just leave a lot of dead people lying around. It’s unsanitary.”

The first time she’d brought George home to her mother’s for dinner, his nerves had gotten the better of him and he’d ended up berating her mom and stepdad about their injudicious use of water. “You’re watering the lawn
and
using the dishwasher. And the pool! Do you know how many gallons it takes to fill a pool?”

Her mother’s verdict: “He’ll need some encouragement, that one.”

The bunko box waited on the dining room table. This was the box that jumped from hostess to hostess, a box that her ex-sister-in-law, Moira, had solemnly handed off to Glynn the week before. “This is it,” she’d said in a tone that meant, to Glynn,
Don’t fuck this up.

Inside the box: dice, three for each table; scorecards; tiny little pencils; a large brass bell; and the bunko bunny, floppy eared and absurd in its polka-dotted boxer shorts. Joey would have gone nuts over the bunny, would have grabbed it and tortured it and then refused to give it up on pain of . . . well, on pain of pain. She supposed it was lucky—in the good and not thermodynamic way—that he was at his shithead father’s for the night.

At his father’s,
she corrected herself.
Do not even
think
shithead.
Thinking led to speaking, and speaking led to parroting, and then there would be another infuriating letter from the shithead’s attorney,
from his father’s attorney,
about therapy and respect and the positive impact fathers have on the lives of their children. She’d said one little thing—one thing!—after the shithead had started dating that bitch.
Woman.
After Joey had come home from a visit and informed Glynn that his father, the positive influence, and the woman, the positive influence’s influence, thought it was okeydokey to sleep in the same bed on a kid weekend and leave boxes of rubbers inadequately concealed for children to find. And bring home. And show to their still-prone-to-outbursts mothers. “Mommy? What’s ‘pleasure’?”

Glynn placed three dice on each table along with a scorecard and some pencils. She ripped open bags of M&M’s and Reese’s Pieces and poured them into the matching candy bowls they’d gotten as wedding presents, one per table, and then into some larger bowls at the bar. Indulging her librarian’s lust, her secret craving for order, she arranged the liquor bottles alphabetically, lining them up in neat rows. Martinis. Check. Mimosas. Check. Manhattans. Check. Beer, wine, even a nasty bottle of candy-cane-flavored grain that some alcoholic neighbor had given her for Christmas. She could make any drink the wives could think to think of and a whole bunch they couldn’t.

Bring them on,
she thought. She was a wife, a wifey-wife, the wifey-est.
Look at these M&M’s, will you?

Of course, none of this was what she wanted to be doing on a shithead weekend. No, these weekends were their “young marrieds” weekends, where she and George could eat four-course breakfasts, see R-rated movies, or grope in the living room—things she hadn’t been able to do freely for more than seven years. It was a pleasant—and unsettling—side effect of the shithead’s visitation schedule. It hadn’t started out that way. Those first sonless days after the separation, she had lurked and moped, a thin haunt in her own house, unmoored and outraged. After a while, though it seemed impossible, she got used to the days without her son, got used to herself without him. Now, when he was home, she began to crave the days he wasn’t, that lazy sweep of hours in which she was relieved of monitoring the appetite, bladder, and emotional development of another human. And then he was gone again, and just folding his little underpants could make her weep. Split custody split her down the middle, until one day she was both mother and not-mother, two-faced like some goddess, but a crazy one, always turned the wrong way. And it made her despise her ex-husband that much more.

The doorbell rang. Glynn ran a finger across her teeth to ensure no lipstick had strayed there and watched George trundle upstairs, where he had promised to stay all evening. Then she opened the door.

“Is your doorbell broken or something?” said Moira, her hair blown straight enough to shear her blouse. “I’ve been standing here for ten minutes.”

“Really?” said Glynn. “I’ll have George look at it tomorrow.”

“Sure, sure,” Moira said, and threw her coat over the banister. “I need a drink. You wouldn’t believe the week I’ve had.” She marched into the living room, where Glynn had set up her bar, and sifted through the bottles. “Ryan is driving me crazy. I don’t think he’s spoken a civil word to me since he got back from that stupid fishing trip that Ben took him on. Now, he fishes. Since when does that rotten bastard fish? Do you have any Campari? I’m feeling Mediterranean today.”

Campari. “I have everything else,” Glynn said, surreptitiously pushing some bottles back in line.

Moira heaved one of her theatrical sighs. “What the hell. I’ll have a Scotch and soda. The effect’s the same.” The doorbell rang, and Moira looked up, frowning. “Your bell works fine.”

“I’ll get that,” Glynn said.

One by one, eleven women arrived, threw coats over the banister, and ran for the bar. As they plunged into the bowls of candy and poured themselves an assortment of drinks, Glynn collected the $10 ante from everyone. She knew them all by name, except for one, a woman so dull that her name refused to stick in the mind. This woman did not mix a drink or dive into the candies, she skulked around tugging on her crispy hair, doing something weird with her lips, sucking them in and out like gills. Glynn found it difficult not to stare. Joey would never have let her get away with a habit like that. As a mimic, he was merciless.

Moira sidled up to Glynn as she struggled to hang the coats on the lone coat tree in the foyer. “What’s Lu doing here?”

“She’s taking Rosemary’s place tonight,” Glynn said.

“Lu is.”

“Yes.” A coat, gray and shiny like sealskin, slithered to the floor. “What’s the matter?”

“Lu’s married to Ward.”

Apparently, Glynn was supposed to understand the significance of this. “So?”

“So? Roxie’s here. Roxie’s ex is married to Ward’s ex, Beatrix.”

“Oh,” Glynn said. She felt the prickle of sweat underneath her arms—the creep of chaos—as she tried to work out the relational tangle. “Is that a problem?”

Moira blinked at her. “What do you think?”

“Lu isn’t married to Roxie’s ex. She’s married to the ex of an ex. What do they care? They probably don’t even know each other, right?” she said, hoping that this once Moira might humor her. After Moira had divorced Tate, Glynn’s brother, Moira had declared them the only extended family to have ever survived a divorce intact.

“Of course they know each other,” Moira said. “The knee bone’s connected to the hip bone by the thigh bone, you know?”

Campari and now anatomy. Glynn reminded herself that Ben, Moira’s second husband, had walked out on her recently, and one had to be compassionate at times like these. “Sorry,” Glynn said. “What?”

Moira pinched the bridge of her nose, like a teacher with a particularly dense student. “When Little Miss Hot Pants finally moves in with your ex, Joey will find out all about her and tell you. You’ll hear about her parents, her hobbies, the fact that she calls your ex ‘Motor Hips’ when she thinks Joey’s not listening. And she’ll know all about you, too, down to your bra size. That’s what sucks about divorce. You can’t keep a damn thing secret from anyone anymore. You know what I mean.”

No more coats would fit on the rack. Glynn was left holding the slippery gray one, which she hugged as if it were a diary. “Well, I don’t know what I can do about it.”

“Nothing,” Moira said, shrugging. “Now,” she added. She threw back the dregs of her Scotch. Then she flexed a bicep and tested it with a finger.

Glynn wondered what kind of drink she should have, besides big.

Glynn had arranged three card tables in her family room, labeled “High,” “Middle,” and “Low.” Glynn drew the head table and found herself sitting across from Roxie, while Moira took the “Middle” table with some of the other girls. Lu, Glynn noticed with relief, sat with the losers at the “Low” table.

Roxie declared herself the scorekeeper and rang the bell for the first round to begin. Even though Glynn had played before, even though the game was supposed to be mind-numbingly simple, she had to work to remember the few rules. In each round, players take the three dice and try to roll the same number as the round, called the target number. So in round one, you try to roll ones. Round two, twos. You get one point for each target number you roll. Three of a kind of any number
except
the target gets five points. Bunko is called when you roll three of the target number. Rolling bunko gets twenty-one points, but you have to yell it out to get credit. The round ends when the “High” table reaches twenty-one points.

“Rats,” Roxie said after rolling, “not even one one.” She slid the three dice over to Glynn.

Apart from the cartoon characters Joey liked to watch, Glynn didn’t know anyone who could say “rats” and make it sound organic. Glynn rolled two ones, one one, and then bust. She watched Roxie scribble a “3” next to her name and tried to think of a topic that didn’t have anything to do with Lu or the fact that Lu was married to the ex of an ex and might be privy to Roxie’s personal information. Kids were safe. Except when they were on drugs. But Moira hadn’t said anything about Roxie’s daughter, Liv, being on drugs, just that she was a bitch. And that was all teenage girls, wasn’t it?

“How’s your daughter?” Glynn asked.

Roxie sighed, scratching her head with the end of her pencil. “Very skinny.”

“In a good way?”

“In every way. Her body. Her outlook. Her worldview. I like to imagine she’ll spend less time disappointed because of it.”

Glynn handed the dice to a large, pie-faced woman named Sharon, who yelled, “Come on, baby!” before rolling three ones. “Bunko! Hey! I said bunko! Where’s my bunny?”

Moira, who had been holding the bunko bunny, tossed it to Sharon, hitting her in her big head. “You’re not supposed to get a bunko so fast!” Moira said. “I haven’t even gotten a chance to roll yet.”

“Me neither,” said Rita, who was Sharon’s partner but wouldn’t get any credit for the bunko. Bunkos were an individual thing.

Sharon hugged the bunko bunny. “That’s tough luck, ladies, this bunny’s mine. And so’s the pot tonight. I can feel it. It’s my lucky night!”

“You always say that,” said Rita, whose luck with bunko, a game that required absolutely no skill whatsoever, was as poor as her luck with men. Rita’s bizarro husband, Mike, the Pyramid Scheme King, still fancied himself a jock, though his bandy legs had gone thick and his pectorals were as soft as breasts. At the last Super Bowl party, he’d tried to leap over one of the couches but caught his foot, fell, and knocked out his front teeth.