The Cradle Robbers (4 page)

The guests were each responsible for a bottle of wine to complement the hostess’s largesse, which explained our little shopping excursion. I picked up a bottle from the sale bin. “I’m bringing this. Long Vineyards Johannesburg Riesling. Eighteen dollars. Perfect. Generous, even. Maybe I can find something for under ten.”

“Just buy the wine, Juliet,” Stacey said, tottering off in the direction of the cash register. I gazed longingly at her shoes. I think one of the things I miss most about working full-time as an attorney is the freedom to spend ridiculous sums of money on
shoes. It’s hard to rationalize the expenditure when your days are spent on the playground or in a garage in Westminster. I fantasized for a moment about doing a worker’s compensation stakeout in a pair of Marc Jacobs slingbacks. I inevitably end up peeing in the bushes at least once or twice during a long day trapped in my car outside a malingering employee’s house, and I somehow doubt the designer took squatting and spraying into account when creating his satin prints. He definitely didn’t construct them for climbing up to the top of a play structure to retrieve a stranded toddler. And they aren’t finger paint–repellent. I’ve actually proved that. Or rather, Isaac has.

Book club was in full swing by the time we arrived. Mine was by far the cheapest wine offering and, to Stacey’s dismay, hers was not the most expensive. Someone had left the $140 price tag on a bottle of Perrier-Jouët. I was quite relieved that I’d scraped off all evidence of my parsimony. Still, I don’t think my mother has
ever
spent even eighteen bucks on a bottle of wine. In my family, if it’s over $7.99 and has a cork, we keep it for a special occasion.

Our hostess for the evening was someone I’d introduced
to the book club. I’d met Frances at this little swim school I’d been taking the kids to for the past few years, way over in West L.A. The lessons are fifteen minutes long, which wouldn’t give you enough time to get to know someone unless you were a woman with small children used to cramming an intimate conversation into the time it takes to change a diaper. While her little boy and my two kids were paddling around in their flippers and wings and bobbing after rubber dinosaurs to the cheers of their pathologically good-natured college student instructors, Frances and I sat side by side in the shade and exchanged life histories. By the time Ruby was jumping off the diving board, I knew everything about Frances, from the complications of her mother’s third divorce to the frustrations her husband felt at having been passed over for partner at his law firm. Best of all, I’d gotten lots of free medical advice. There’s nothing that pleases a hypochondriac so well as an obliging new physician friend. Frances hadn’t practiced since her daughter was born, but she was a gynecological surgeon by training and we’d already discussed everything from prolapsed uteruses to incontinence to fibroid tumors. Not that I suffered
from any of those ailments, but you can never be too prepared.

Tonight, however, Frances was showing off her skills as a sushi chef. She’d prepared a lavish spread of raw and cooked fish and Japanese salads and rice, and was handing out bamboo mats and sheets of seaweed. The other women all valiantly attempted a variety of maki rolls, but I kept to the hand rolls and was soon contently balancing a heaping plate on my lap.

Playing with our food loosened us up even more than usual, and by the time the heated sake and various wines were passed around, the gossip had already started. Inevitably, as is always the case when a group of married women in their thirties gathers, conversation began with our children and moved quickly to our husbands. There was one woman in the group whose spouse was female, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter; she complained right along with the rest of us. Rachel bitched about how her husband would walk in the door every evening after being at work all day and announce that he needed time to “decompress” in front of the television before being forced to deal with her or the kids. “Honestly,” she said, “sometimes I just feel
like pitching the baby at his head and taking off. When do
I
get to decompress?” Nods all around at that one.

Colleen was on a tear about her husband’s new passion—his rock and roll band. “They practice every weekend. Every single weekend. He’s a thirty-seven-year-old orthodontist, and suddenly he thinks he’s Eric Clapton. And when I dare to suggest that maybe he should consider missing practice so that he could go to Nicky’s hockey game, then I’m the old lady who’s bringing him down. He gives me this adolescent grief, like I’m his mother!”

“I wish Zach would miss Dylan’s games,” Beth said. “He gets absolutely insane about soccer. You guys had to sign that positive cheering pledge, didn’t you?” We had all signed the league’s pledge to cheer on our children using only affirming and encouraging words. “Well, I
laminated
ours and put it on the fridge. It hasn’t done any good. Zach still stands there on the sidelines screaming like a maniac. And poor Dylan just keeps running back and forth pretending he can’t hear anything his father is saying to him.”

I opened my mouth to tell the women about my own aging adolescent, with his thousands of dollars’
worth of superhero toys and his comic books. The truth is, however, that I find that part of Peter’s personality endearing. I knew from our very first date that he was an overgrown child—he’d shown up with a Fantastic Four button clipped to his lapel. But he’d also had a bouquet of irises in his hand. Peter is almost always willing to share his toys with my other children. And, frankly, he is a whole lot better at playing with Ruby and Isaac than I am. No, the difficulties we were experiencing had nothing to do with his immaturity.

“I just have to ask this question,” Katherine, our resident lesbian, said suddenly. “How often do you guys, you know . . . do it?”

The women all laughed, and a few groaned. We’d all had this conversation before. Whenever women gather to talk, the topic inevitably bubbles to the surface. The deep, dark, not-so-secret secret of contemporary American marriage is that nobody is having any sex.

“We’ve had sex three times,” Kristina said.

“This
week
?” I asked, stunned. I didn’t know anybody who was having sex three times a week. Those were pre-kid numbers.

“No. Three times. That I can remember. Donovan,
Bianca, and Trenton. Three kids, three times. That’s it.” She didn’t look like she was kidding.

“Has anybody actually tried making a date for sex like all the magazines suggest?” Lucy asked. Lucy is another mom I met on the circuit. Our daughters are in the same class, and she has a son a year younger than Isaac. Lucy is one of those beautiful Los Angeles women who manage within weeks of giving birth to be back in their hip-hugger jeans and midriff-baring tops. I hate her.

“Yeah, right,” Frances said. “Date night. Give me a break. That’s invariably the night the cat decides to vomit in our bed or one of the kids has a four-hour temper tantrum. Or the baby-sitter’s husband gets arrested and she needs to go to Riverside to bail him out. Date night never happens. And anyway, the problem isn’t
making time
for sex. The problem is
wanting
sex.”

Katherine said, “I don’t have a sex drive. But neither does Amy, so we don’t really have a problem. That’s one of the many nice things about being a lesbian. Bed death is a mutually agreed-upon phenomenon.”

Rachel said, “Well, that’s certainly not true in my house. Ben never stops complaining about it. Never.
It’s become a running gag with him. If I hear one more joke about hookers, I’m going to kill him.”

“Do you know,” Kristina said, “the other night we were out with two couples for dinner and one of the men actually made some crack about how the guys ought to all get together and split the cost of a prostitute. They talked about it for ages. Where they’d get her, who would go first. I finally had to tell them to shut up. They were pretending to be kidding around, but I’m not the only one who sensed more than a dash of seriousness in the conversation.”

“The danger is always there,” Stacey said, her eyes fixed to the maki roll she held delicately between vermilion-polished nails. Stacey and her husband were back together again, but they have been separated more than once. Andy strays, usually with a younger and less accomplished version of his wife. It’s not hard to figure out that he finds Stacey intimidating, that her beauty and success emasculate him to some degree. Men like Andy are made uncomfortable, even frightened, by a woman’s intelligence. I read a study once that showed that for men there is a 35 percent increase in the likelihood of marriage for each 16-point rise in their IQ. For
women, there is a 40 percent drop for each 16-point increase. Obviously Andy isn’t alone in desiring a bimbo.

Stacey’s warning cast a momentary pall over the group. Jeannie, who is a few years younger than the rest of us, spoke up. “Our sex life is still pretty terrific,” she said.

“You don’t have children,” Kristina reminded her.

A pretty rose stain spread across the young woman’s cheeks. “We will soon,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

“Well then kiss your libido good-bye.”

That’s what we were giving her in lieu of congratulations? “Oh, Kristina,” I said. “It’s not necessarily true. I was voracious when I was pregnant. After I got over all the throwing up. And before the reflux and the hemorrhoids really kicked in. I wanted it all the time!”

Katherine said, “When was that, exactly? When you had no nausea, reflux, hemorrhoids . . .”

Lucy added, “Or varicose veins, restless leg syndrome, swollen ankles, migraine headaches . . .”

“Or yeast infections, unusual body odor, cramping, vaginal dryness . . .” Beth laughed.

“Don’t forget the full-body itching!” Colleen
said. She was days away from giving birth. “I’ve been itching for months, even with enough prednisone to turn this baby into an East German weight lifter.”

“Stop it!” I said. “The poor woman is, what, three months pregnant?”

“Eight weeks,” Jeannie whispered.

“Eight weeks!” I said. “Don’t terrify her. She’s all aglow. Maybe she won’t suffer from any of our symptoms. And anyway, we were talking about sex.
Sex
. Not full-body itching or yeast infections.”

“Oh, she’s never going to have sex again,” Colleen said. “She might as well get used to
that
now.”

“Doesn’t anyone want to talk about the book?” Barbie whined. “I prepared a whole series of questions for the group based on my analysis of the characters. As you know, my husband is adapting the book for the screen and has already been signed to direct it himself. Let’s start with the end.”

“Wait!” I said. “I haven’t finished it. Don’t give anything away.”

But she didn’t hear me. “Wasn’t Rabbit’s death, like, the most poetic thing you’ve ever read?”

L
AST
month, after I rear-ended someone on the 10, Peter made me promise not to use my cell phone while driving. The nice young man I bashed in to was also talking on his cell phone, so he couldn’t condemn me as easily as my husband did, but it’s true, I’m a bad enough driver without the additional distraction. Still, much of an investigator’s work is done on the phone, even in the computer age, and I spend an awful lot of time in my car. Luckily, there was a long wait on the pickup line in front of Ruby’s school. I handed Isaac a juice box and half a peanut butter sandwich, popped Sadie onto a breast to catch a little mid-flight refueling before we set
off for tae kwon do, and called the office. I had asked Chiki to put the word out to his family that if Fidelia called, they should find out if she knew of any women who were now out of custody who had had experiences with the Lambs of the Lord. I wanted to do everything possible to avoid a plane ride up to Pleasanton to the foster care agency’s office, and since they weren’t answering my calls, I thought an old client might be the best way to find out about them.

“I’ve got a name for you,” Chiki said. “Fidelia doesn’t know for sure, but one of the other women behind her in line for the phone said she heard about this lady whose baby was taken by the Lambs of the Lord. The lady got out and is living in Canoga Park, in the Penfield Avenue projects.”

“What’s her name?”

“They called her Sister Pauline. No one could remember her last name, but her mother’s the head of the tenants’ commission out at Penfield Avenue. They knew that for sure. They said Sister Pauline used to brag about her mama all the time.”

“Okay, I’ll find her. Canoga Park. It figures.” In the middle of the night on Christmas Eve, it would take me half an hour to get all the way out to
Canoga Park. After school on a weekday? There was no way I could make it there and back during the kids’ tae kwon do class, even if I signed them up for an extra half hour of sparring.

“Chiki,” I said. “Do me a favor: Fax requests for legal interviews with Fidelia and Sandra Lorgeree up to Dartmore for me, just in case I have to go.”

Ruby bounced into the car, tossed her backpack in the front passenger seat, and whacked her brother on the side of the head. He screamed, the baby woke up from her nursing stupor, and it took me a good ten minutes to get everybody calmed down and buckled into their car seats and boosters. I’m sure Ruby announced her presence in the car so violently because she was trying to make known her opposition to her booster seat. While I had many failings as a mother, God knows, I was not willing to add to them crippling my child in an automobile accident. I had already sworn she was going to sit in a booster seat until she was tall enough and heavy enough to be safe without one, or until she got a driver’s license, whichever came first.

I realize that forcing Ruby and Isaac to change into their tae kwon do uniforms while we were in transit somewhat diminished the security of the
ride, but they kept their seat belts on, and we were running late.

I dropped Isaac in Mighty Mites and took Ruby up the stairs to the yellow and green belt class. She had just moved up to green, after struggling for quite some time with a mere green stripe on her yellow belt, and she was full of herself, swaggering onto the mat and giving the American and Korean flags a crisp bow. I scanned the assembled crowd, seeking out a mother I knew well enough to ask for a favor, but one whom I hadn’t imposed upon yet. There was one: a dark-haired woman with a shelf of a bosom and a roll of stretch-marked belly peeking out from between her tight T-shirt and her army-green, paint-spattered capri pants. She wore dark eye shadow and mascara and a slash of purple lipstick. Her hands were smudged with what looked like charcoal. She looked like an artist, or a Hollywood rendition of one. I recognized her from Isaac’s preschool—her son was a year ahead of mine.