Live a Little (40 page)
Boss of Shiny Pony is sliding his hand across his throat. Cameramen flick off their lenses. Technicians cut at last to the planned commercial break. As I sag into my chair, nausea painting my stomach, two words emerge from my parched lips over and over, like a mantra, belying the indictment.
“Not everything’s a lie,” I say. “Not everything.”
When Raquel’s Wax Wings Are Revealed to Be . . . Wax
My finger hovers over speed dial: pizza or Chinese?
A black crow, universal harbinger of death, bisects the sky over my head. It feels good to have confirmation. Pizza, then.
After I order the team-size pie with artery-clogging sausage and extra cheese, plus a single Diet Coke—old habits die hard—I let the phone fall onto the blanket and resume staring into the milky bowl of sky overhead.
Ultimate irony: From the minute my family discovered I was not dying, I have deeply, unreservedly wanted to.
It is not the humiliation, per se—although that itself is as jagged and unceasing as a butcher’s blade carving through raw sirloin—but, rather, the vile knowledge that no matter what my prior rationalizations were, the experiment in civic activism and self-improvement was not worth the pain I have caused them.
How could I have ever thought that it was?
That I am a monster of some sort is indisputable; whether monsters are capable of repairing the damage they’ve caused, let alone clambering past it, is as yet undetermined.
I dip my toe over the edge of the pool for sensual respite before I remember that it is drained. The pale blue-white canyon is vacant and dry, save a rainbow heap of leaves in the shallows and a clot of mud over the drain. Like my conscience, the pool awaits cleansing from unidentified sources. On the advice of our Realtor, we will leave it unfilled until the house is sold, primed for future occupancy.
I feel like a criminal awaiting the firing squad.
Unlike those assembled to eke justice on my criminal brethren, my firing squad delivers the bullets individually and protractedly. The reckoning started four days ago when Rochelle Schitzfelder outed me on
Living with Lauren!
Things show no sign of slowing down.
Remembering is hard, so I try not to think of it. I am not particularly successful. Yesterday I drove over the Dumbarton Bridge to Fremont, an hour away in noxious traffic, to shop for food in a dilapidated Safeway where no one would recognize me. Halfway through, I began to picture the house, empty save me and the two bassets—who, I suspect, would desert me in a heartbeat if they found an alternate food source—and, panicked, abandoned my basket in the middle of the snack aisle. Its contents—two one-liter bottles of Diet Coke, a rainbow of chips (some of which contained the stuff that causes anal leakage), Ho Hos, beef jerky, cold-sore cream, and panty liners—sketched a sad existence. A solitary sad existence.
Alone yet accountable—that pretty much sums it up.
Laurie fired the first shots.
“Are you all right?” Her first words to me, delivered in her off-the-set dressing room after last week’s show, were so much kinder than I deserved, they immediately unleashed a wellspring of self-recriminating tears. My downfall had redressed the cosmic imbalance between us. Things were now back to normal, with Laurie operating on high ground while I squirmed in the mud, a swine seeking the throwaway morsels of her mistress.
“Do you have any Kleenex?” I asked.
Laurie handed me a box. Apparently, enough guests required tissue that her show’s logo was stamped on the container:
LwL-
approved snot rags. For the discriminating nose-blower. Except for the moral repugnance of my actions, I was not alone in my regrets.
I blew my nose hard. Traces of my lipstick stained the tissue red. A year ago, if somebody had suggested I’d wear red lipstick on an occasion other than Halloween, I’d have laughed.
“Is it true, Rachel?” Laurie looked so beautiful and righteous. She could have boiled in here full of now-you’ve-doneits and you-make-me-want-to-pukes. Instead, she gave me Kleenex and the benefit of the doubt. For the first time ever, I believed unreservedly that she deserved Ren more than I. She really did.
“ Uh-huh.” More sobs. “I think I’m hyperventilating.”
Laurie cocked her head. “No, if you were, you wouldn’t be able to talk.”
“Do . . . Don’t you have to go back out there?” How horrible. Maybe I should give her my adoption story, the one I handed out to people like Cleo and Jonesie, so she could distance herself from my ethical decrepitude. For all I knew, she really was born to Scandinavian royalty.
“It’s okay. We’re re-airing the show about mite-free bedding. Everyone’s gone. We gave the studio audience another set of tickets and gift certificates to Jamba Juice.”
I pinched my thigh under the beautiful slacks that I’d never wear again. “Do the kids know yet?”
“I don’t know. Phil called the studio when you didn’t answer your cell. I think he may have told them.” Laurie thoughtfully plucked another box of tissues from a cabinet and set it in front of me. “Rach, I think you should call Ma,” she said.
We both knew Ma watched
Living with Lauren!
religiously. If I closed my eyes, I could almost see her sitting on the chartreuse sofa, spine straight, one bird leg dangling off the edge, the other tucked under her butt, curly gray head cocked to one side, her small fist curled around a mug of tea.
I didn’t answer. I
couldn’t
answer. How do you tell your mother you pretended you had cancer because of a telethon? Because you thought your life sucked? Because you wanted to be an exciting person, someone whom others admire, even envy? Someone who has orgasms and sculptures that are reviewed by the
Chronicle
(the sculptures, not the orgasms). Someone who is more to her children and husband than a place to fling coats when they come off the ski lift for lunch. Someone for whom life
thrills.
I took a deep breath. It had nowhere to go; my diaphragm had been pink-slipped. “Okay. I’ll call Ma.” I grabbed the phone and pressed the familiar numbers on autopilot. I was 100 percent sure Ma would be sitting by the phone in a confused version of death-watch mode, not even offering a pretense of continuing to thrive by browsing a magazine or going for her daily power walk. I was fairly sure Eliot would be standing by, whispering affirmations of my shittiness in Ma’s ear. The image caused sweat to pop out on my forehead.
Laurie placed her hand on mine. Our similarly widow’speaked foreheads tilted toward each other, met; they were the only physical attribute we shared, courtesy of Dad.
“Will you stay with me?” I said.
“Okay.”
Suddenly, the sun winks out.
“Raquel?”
I press pause on the nightmare memory of telling Ma and open my eyes to the (glaring) here and now. A big head looms above me, surrounded by frizzy curls. I want to be dramatic and scream, but since I know it’s Sue—I heard the baby, Arlie, shrieking from the front yard during my ruminations—and she knows I know, I fold myself into a sitting position. It is harder than a month ago; I have gained back ten of the twelve pounds. Okay, I have gained back thirteen, but who’s counting?
“Hey, you.” I get up and hug Sue in what even I can see is an anemic manner not befitting a twenty-five-year friendship. Two-month-old Arlie is strapped across Sue’s chest in a fleece sling. She has cradle cap but is still adorable, with a head of strawberry fluff, triangular elfin ears and a wail that says she will give her parents grief when she’s fourteen.
“I’m glad to see you’re not wallowing in self-pity or anything.” Sue glances sharply at the pile of empty processed-food wrappers next to me before pulling out a lawn chair and flopping down in it. “I have come on a mission of mercy,” she says. Arlie starts crying again, more lion cub than kitten. Sue whips out a swollen, blue-veined breast and pops the baby on. Her eyes narrow at me. “What’s your plan, to just sit here until the house is sold and they come to cart you away?” she says after a minute.
“No, actually, I was thinking I’d leave before the cart part. I was going to ask my only friend if I could rent a room. My supportive, not-into-eviscerating-people-when-they’re-down best friend.”
“I see.” Pause. “Where are the children?” Sue is very stern. It occurs to me that she thinks I might be crazy, that she suspects I have done something even worse than The Great Lie. She has been this way ever since the Baron von Mün
chhausen fight.
“They chose to go with their father.”
There is no way around it: This hurts. When I had it out with them, Taylor stared at me in shock, revulsion and relief warring on her pretty face as she processed my rationalizations. Her response, when it came, was to stalk to her room and calmly begin packing her overnight bag. Having expected a higher-volume dramatic gesture—flinging herself into Phil’s arms and sobbing; coming at me with nails extended—I’d been more than alarmed by my daughter’s show of poise. What had made her grow up so quickly? Was it the not-cancer? The not-much-of-an-affair? The not-yet-divorce? Or some combination of the three?
Micah remained true to form, yelling a bit and stomping around, then telling me “You’re pathetic and I feel sorry for you” before adding his duffel to the collection of bags at the front door. I felt almost sorry for Phil; his resourcefulness doesn’t stretch to providing dinner, especially not with the single frying pan he now uses to heat everything from refried beans to Campbell’s Chunky soup.
“And you’re just going to roll over for this?” Sue asks.
I shrug. “They’re teenagers. I can’t force them to stay here. Phil rented a two-bedroom apartment in Redwood City. After we sell the house and the divorce goes through, we’ll see what we can afford separately. Micah’s been accepted at Michigan. He’ll go to Ann Arbor on a partial soccer scholarship. Taylor will stay with Phil through the summer, then decide who she wants to live with for her junior year.” Just saying it pains me, but what am I supposed to do? Tay made it clear that the prospect of living with Crazy Cancerless Mom would add significantly to her usual load of teenage angst. I could hardly put her through more trauma simply to salve my own maternal ego, could I?
Sue switches gears. “I ran into Saskia at the corner store. She acted kind of weird.”
Weird only if you feel uncomfortable chatting up the best friend of the artist you recently kicked out of your gallery for creating art under false pretenses.
“Maybe she was having a hot flash,” I tell Sue. “Or maybe she’s just a bitch.”
Sue stands up so quickly that Arlie pops off and lets us know it. “What’s up your ass?”
I shift and release my sweatpant wedgie in a way that is self-evident.
Sue continues, “Stop being such a snot for once. All I did was drive all the way down here to see if you’re okay, and what do I get? A load of smart-ass commentary and evasion. I have some news for you, Quel—they have a right to be angry.”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because you don’t act like it. You act like everyone’s being too hard on you or something. Like this is somebody else’s fault. Like you didn’t—”
“I know! I get it already: I’m a big liar. I’m a terrible mother. I’m a terrible wife. I’m a bad friend. I know! So will you just shut up? Will you please, please just shut up?” My heart is pounding so loudly it blots out the shape of my friend’s hurt.
Sue steps back, distress etched into her snub Celt features. “You. . . I can’t talk to you,” she says. Tears shine all down her face.
“Sue, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“The fuck you didn’t. I’m out of here. Man, you are a piece of work.” Sue grabs her diaper bag, her poncho, and her assorted babyware, muttering to herself before turning back around with a finger extended toward my chest. “You’re such a martyr. You know that? You’re so caught up in the idea of your own victimhood that it never occurs to you that
you
could be the one victimizing someone else.” With each tear that glosses Sue’s pink cheeks, my heart contracts. It’s Münchhausenville all over again. Except that this time my record is tarnished by a second strike. In the high-stakes game of friends for life, I’m on my way to prison with no possibility of parole.
“Quel, I’m saying this to you because I am your friend, and I always will be your friend: You wouldn’t know a powerless moment if it punched you in the schnozz.”
Somewhere Between Great Sex and an Ass Massage
It is Friday night. I am invited to Ma and Eliot’s for dinner. My first instinct, honed by many years of reluctance, is to weasel out of it with an excuse. However, as I sponge-bathe my armpits and private parts in front of the bathroom mirror, rub on half a bottle of anti-wrinkle cream in the hopes that more is better, and comb out my tangles so I won’t be mistaken for a homeless Rastafarian, it occurs to me that I owe them my presence more than I owe myself another night of bad TV.
Out of all the people whom I wronged, Ma and Eliot are the last ones I would have guessed would extend me a quick and relatively painless pardon. Yet they did. Out of all the people whose feelings I trod on, Ma and Eliot are the last ones I would have guessed would brush themselves off and draw me to their hearth for comfort. Yet they have.