Keep Your Mouth Shut and Wear Beige (15 page)

There are women who take care of their homes because they love the results—the peaceful, orderly rooms, the fragrance of home cooking. Not me. I like the process. I like the moving, the stretching, the lifting involved in housework. I don’t care too much about what my house looks like; my kitchen is always clean and my beds are always made because I don’t like to sit still.

But Rose got satisfaction from neither the process nor the result.

I’m not the most spiritual person on the face of the earth, but like most people who work in hospitals, I believe in institutions— schools, Boy Scouts, swim teams, the March of Dimes, organized
religion. When I was pregnant with Jeremy, Mike and I joined a church and started hauling ourselves there every Sunday. I frequently volunteered to teach one of the youth Sunday school classes. As a result of that, I knew my Bible stories, one of which was the Mary and Martha story.

Mary and Martha were a pair of sisters. Jesus and his followers came to their house. Martha set to work, preparing the food and doing whatever else was the New Testament equivalent of planting the mums and changing the sheets. Mary listened to Jesus preach. Martha appealed to Jesus, saying that she needed Mary’s help. Jesus came down on Mary’s side, saying that Martha was fretting too much.

I don’t know what Martha was expecting in appealing to Jesus for support. Men always pretend that housework isn’t important. But other than that, I had complete sympathy for her. If you divide the world into Marys and Marthas, I’m an off-the-charts Martha. I’m a doer, not a thinker. Given a choice between sitting at someone’s feet listening to theology and being in the kitchen peeling carrots, I’d probably skip the chance to hear the Only Begotten Son and put myself on vegetable duty instead.

But Rose was a Mary, an intellectual, a scholar. Finney’s birth had made her a Martha . . . and any decent woman would have done that for her child—but somehow the Martha-ness had taken over every aspect of her life, and here she was making beds while Jill Allyn wouldn’t come out of Mary-dom long enough to move her car.

We finished the bed. I checked the bathroom for towels and toilet paper. It had both, but the lightbulb was out.

“The new ones are in the pantry,” Rose said, “but let’s do your dad’s room first. It may need lightbulbs too.”

There were three more bedrooms on this level, all of them facing the back of the house. Jill Allyn’s corner room was over
the kitchen; the master suite, which took up nearly half the floor space, was at the opposite end. Both of those doors were closed. Between them was the room for my father. Although less than a third of the size of the room over the garage, it had its own small balcony, a big, comfortable reading chair, and a view of the ocean. From these rooms you could see past the reeds and marsh and over a small bay to the ocean and its endless waves. I could see why other people would want a view like that, but I’m a midwesterner. I’d rather look at a plowed field or an orchard of blossoming fruit trees.

There were lightbulbs, towels, and toilet paper in Dad’s room, but no soap or wash cloths.

“Every room probably needs something,” Rose said sighing.

The third floor could be reached only by the back stairs— another result, Rose said, of the original owners firing everyone who had any design sense.

This level was laid out like a college dorm, a long center hallway with four low-ceiling bedrooms on either side. Some had private baths; the others shared one with the adjacent room. This is how the house managed to have twelve bedrooms; eight of them were a little like a Holiday Inn Express.

“The family who built the place had two nannies,” Rose told me, “and all their friends traveled with at least one. One way to throw your weight around is to insist that your nanny not only have her own room, but a private bath as well.”

Those folks weren’t going to be able to visit me. “Do people get pissed off when you put them up here instead of on the second floor?”

“You have no idea,” Rose answered. “If I had any sense, I’d just have people draw straws when they walked in. Now let’s make up Finney’s bed and then leave the sheets out for everyone else to do their own.”

We counted out sheets and checked the bathrooms for towels and toilet paper. Rose searched for missing pillowcases while I went to the pantry to get lightbulbs. Jill Allyn was apparently in the kitchen because as soon as I started making noise, she came to the pantry door.

“Lightbulbs,” I said, lifting a package to explain what I was doing.

“No one likes her anymore.”

I stopped. “I beg your pardon?”

“Rose. No one likes her anymore.”

It takes a lot before I am speechless, but I was now. How could she possibly think that this was an appropriate thing to say?

“She used to be interesting. She was the first person I ever let read any of my manuscripts. But once Finney was born, she changed. She became a different person. For years that’s all she could think about—Finney this, Finney that. It’s really boring. I’m the only one who still sticks by her.”

If this was “sticking by her,” Rose probably would have been better off being abandoned. “Don’t you have children?” I asked.

“Yes, Jean-Paul. But I didn’t stop working when he was born.”

And Rose hadn’t stopped working when Cami and Annie had been born. I had met dozens and dozens of women with special-needs children, and the only ones I judged negatively were the ones who hadn’t changed, the ones who went on as if their lives were still the same.

“And now she’s gotten so grand-dame-ish just because she has a big house in the Hamptons.” Jill Allyn turned to go, then paused. “Oh, by the way, Jean-Paul is getting in late this evening. You’re going back upstairs, aren’t you? Will you be sure Rose knows that that’s when he’s coming?”

I doubted that Rose knew Jean-Paul was coming at all. His
name had never come up when we had been sorting out sheets. Was this a hotel where people could invite their own families if they felt like it? It was a good thing that Mike hadn’t known about that, or we would have been struggling to figure out where to house his chain-smoking mother.

“So will you tell her?” Jill Allyn repeated.

Jill Allyn had obviously labeled me as an easy mark. She had gotten me to clean up her dirty dishes, move her car, and give up the good room. But advanced-practice nurses are not easy marks. On the whole, we are pretty tough cookies. “No,” I said. “You need to tell her that yourself.”

“She must know,” Jill Allyn said as if excusing herself from that duty. “I mean, she has to have figured it out. I’m here, where else would he be?”

The Wednesday-afternoon transportation schedule was so complex and ever-changing that keeping track of it should have, Rose said, qualified as a thesis for an advanced degree in event planning. But by dinner that evening twelve of us were gathered around the table—the five Zander-Browns, the four of us Van Aikens, Claudia, Dad, and Jill Allyn. Jill Allyn’s son didn’t make it. He had missed his plane and, instead of rebooking himself, had gone back home.

“I bet he didn’t even go to the airport in the first place,” I overheard Annie say to Cami. “He hates his mom.”

“You shouldn’t say things like that,” Cami reproved.

“But it’s true.”

Despite my covered wagon full of food, I had not brought a hostess gift. Claudia had. From a large flat box Rose lifted a table runner that was shimmering with amber, rust, and bottle green. There were twelve matching placemats and napkins. Claudia had made them. “Cami told me that you use white dishes here,” she said.

“We do. These will look beautiful.” Rose examined the items with a flattering interest. “It’s nice to have something out here that isn’t so desperately bland.”

Claudia explained that although she had quilted the table runner and twelve placemats with gold metallic thread and although the amber layer was silk organza, everything was still machine washable. The pattern for the quilting lines was derived from a—

This was as extreme as my making my own ketchup. Was Rose a prize that Claudia and I were competing for? Did the winner get an invitation to stay in one of the four good bedrooms?

If so, I had a head start. I was already in one of those rooms— the worst of the four, it’s true, but Claudia wasn’t even in the house.

Yet.

For our Wednesday-night meal, a nearby Italian restaurant, carefully schooled in Finney’s allergies, delivered a massive amount of food. Determined to compensate for being deprived of my pie opportunities, I had brought a pumpkin roll for dessert—it was a light spongy cakelike thing that I had baked in a jelly-roll pan and then filled with sweetened cream cheese.

Claudia might be able to quilt with metallic thread, but I could bake without corn products . . . and more people appreciated baking than metallic-thread quilting. I cut the pumpkin roll into twelve slices, and Cami passed around the plates.

“There’s something terribly wrong with this,” Guy said after his first bite.

I looked at him in surprise.

“You only made one. What
were
you thinking?”

Indeed, Finney had already finished his slice and was eyeing his mother’s. “No,” she said to him. “I love you with all my heart, but this is mine.”

“Don’t look at me,” Guy added. “I’d take a bullet for you, my boy, but I’m not giving you my dessert.”

I was about to slide my plate across the table to Finney, but my father had beaten me to it.

We had used paper plates so the cleanup went quickly. Claudia was loading the glasses and utensils into the dishwasher, and— no surprise—she was one of those people who washes the dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. We had a babysitter like that once. The girl would load the dishes after serving the kids macaroni and cheese, and in the morning I would start unloading the machine thinking that the dishes were clean, and only after I was halfway through would I realize that the machine hadn’t been run, and I’d have to try to fish stuff back out of the cabinets.

See, I have servant problems too.

The adults were now standing around trying to decide whether to make another pot of coffee; the kids were talking about what DVDs they had brought. There was a home theater in the basement, and they were all going down to watch a movie.

I didn’t like that idea. I wanted us all to do something together.

I had no idea what the Zander-Browns’ definition of quality family time was—for all I knew, they memorized Shakespeare’s sonnets together. For me, if I couldn’t convince people that cleaning the garage would be a happy, meaningful activity, I wanted to play games, preferably active, noisy, chaotic games.

And this garage was already way too clean. I thought for a moment. There had been a big Costco pack of flashlights in the pantry,
and the weather wasn’t at all that cold—at least it wouldn’t be once we started moving. “Okay,” I said, “who’s up for flashlight tag?”

“Flashlight tag?” Jeremy sat up. “We haven’t played that in ages. We used to love it, didn’t we? Come on, Cami,” he said, “you, me, and Finney are going to kick some major butt.”

“Have you forgotten what Mom’s like when she plays?” Zack said loyally. “She’s ruthless.”

“And I taught her everything she knows,” my dad said.

“So who’s in?” I said. “And no one is allowed to say that it’s too cold.”

Hands went up. At first Annie didn’t raise her hand, but after Cami’s “oh, come on, it will be fun,” she said she would play.

Jill Allyn had stood up, but not because she wanted to participate. “I’m going back to work.”

That was fine with me. She didn’t seem much of a team player.

“And I’m afraid that I don’t have the right shoes,” Claudia apologized, gesturing down toward her feet.

I hadn’t noticed her shoes before. If Rose wore shoes that I wasn’t willing to pay for, then Claudia wore ones that I wasn’t willing to walk in. Hers were narrow and pointy with stiletto heels and a little bow.

“Maybe we can find you a pair,” Guy said to her. “Annie?”

“I wear a six, Cami a seven, and Mom an eight.” Annie was apparently the one who knew everyone’s sizes. “And I think Jill Allyn wears an eight and a half or a nine. We’re bound to have something to fit you.”

“No, I’m fine here, but thank you,” Claudia said politely.

Mike had been standing up. He would have the right shoes. Never wanting to miss a chance to play a sport, he always had golf clubs, tennis and squash rackets, a small gym bag, and various athletic shoes in the trunk of his car.

But he sat back down. He felt obligated to stay inside with Claudia.

This was the first time I’d been conscious of them as a couple. They hadn’t sat next to each other at dinner. I hadn’t seen them touch each other or exchange a private conversation.