Magnolia Wednesdays (16 page)

In truth, Vivi had already decided to stay at the Pemberton High football game, where she expected to mine for gold. Or at least material for this week’s column.

“All right.” Melanie shouted good-bye to the kids and hurried out to the van.

“Come on, guys,” Vivien shouted upstairs to Shelby and Trip. “Let’s go!”

Vivien backed the Toyota down the driveway just a few minutes after Melanie, though with none of her finesse. “Maybe I should have let it warm up a little bit longer,” Vivien said.

Shelby rolled her eyes. “I don’t think it’s a mechanical problem.” Trip made no comment, but as Vivien drove through the neighborhood she could feel both of them judging her and finding her wanting. At the exit onto 120, she waited until there were no cars whizzing by in either direction rather than pulling out between medians; that move hadn’t gone so well the other morning.

“Oh, my God,” Shelby groaned. “We’ll be lucky to get there before the game is
over
!”

“Better safe than sorry,” Vivien said like some old fart.

Shelby laughed at her. Even Trip grinned.

“Hey,” Vivi said to Shelby. “If you behaved responsibly once in a while, you could be driving yourself to the game right now.”

Shelby stopped laughing.

“In fact, if you can’t do the right thing for yourself, maybe you could take your mother into account. It’d give her one less thing to worry about.” Vivien hardly recognized her voice with its lecturing tone.

“You’re kidding, right?” Shelby snapped. “Since when did you become the queen of considerate behavior?”

The girl had a point. But then Vivien had never spent two weeks watching her sister run herself ragged trying to take care of a home, a business, and two children before. She’d had no idea at all what Melanie dealt with on a daily basis. And if she had?

“I don’t even know what you’re doing here,” Shelby said. “None of us knows. Why don’t you just go back to New York and mind your own effing business?”

Vivien’s mouth tightened. No matter how Shelby dressed or liked to think of herself, she was only seventeen. Trying to ignore the insult itself, she focused on Shelby’s use of the F-word.

“Vulgarity is a mark of a limited vocabulary.” This had been Caroline’s response to anything even approximating a curse. Vivien hadn’t heard the reprimand in almost twenty years, and yet it tripped off of her tongue without conscious thought and in the same insulting upper-class drawl with which her mother had always delivered it.

The remark got Shelby’s attention all right, but not because she took the reprimand to heart. “Oh, my God. You didn’t really just say that did you?” She chortled. “What century did that come from? No, I know, I bet it came from Grandmother Caroline’s bible—
Gone with the Wind
!”

Vivien had thought the remark asinine when it had been used on her and she was appalled that it had come out of her mouth. Would all of those things she’d rejected as a child become part of her repertoire after she gave birth? Were they even now fighting their way out of her subconscious for use later? Was she, in fact, doomed to be her mother? Once during an argument Caroline had hissed, “I hope you end up with a child just like you!” What if that actually happened? Oh, God, what in the world was she doing?

Lost in her own frightening visions of parenthood, Vivien didn’t respond to Shelby’s taunt. In the wrong lane when it was time to turn, she reacted without thinking and cut off another driver, who laid on the horn. After that they inched along behind a long stream of cars heading toward the high school.

“Parking’s to the left. You can just drop us off at the corner and leave if you go straight.” Shelby pointed toward the drop-off spot. “You can pick us up at ten thirty. Or we’ll call if we want to come home early.”

“I’m not the help,” Vivien said, making the left instead. “And I’m planning to stay for the game.”

There was a shocked silence.

“Show me where to park,” she said.

Trip sat up straighter in the backseat, tuned in now. Shelby’s gaze narrowed. “Trip might be willing to be seen with you. I’m not.”

“Um, grown-ups and kids don’t, um, hang together at games.” Trip shifted uncomfortably behind her. “There’s like separate sections and everything.” It was a long speech for Trip; apparently even the strong, silent types wanted to evade embarrassment.

“That space is mine!” Vivien said as she zoomed into a vacant parking spot and received more horn from the SUV driver that had been eyeing it. But Vivien didn’t care. She was thinking how odd it was that she’d reached an age where her mere presence could be an embarrassment to her niece and nephew. “Well, you all go on ahead then so nobody suspects we arrived together,” Vivien said. “I’ll just get my cane out of the back and hobble in on my own.”

They were out of the car and distancing themselves so fast she was talking to herself, like any senior citizen might.

Vivi paid at the gate and then walked across the track to the Pemberton side. The stands were filling rapidly and even from a distance the separation of teen from adult was apparent; at the far end the marching band filled an entire section; the strains of the school’s fight song filled the air and wafted across the field where the Pemberton team warmed up. A steady stream of students paraded from one end of the stands to the other, busy seeing and being seen. An even greater number milled about in amoebalike groups that continually expanded and contracted.

She slowed in front of the concession stand, a cinder-block rectangle, which was knee-deep in teens waiting to buy food from parents working feverishly to serve them.

Vivi scanned the bleachers for a good observation point. Out of the corner of one eye she caught a glimpse of Melanie’s neighbor, Catherine Dennison, who waved eagerly and motioned her up.

“You look like you’ve gone native,” the blonde said, taking in Vivien’s sweats and sneakers. Vivi had noticed plenty of other parents dressed this way, but Catherine, who wore tight designer jeans and a cropped sweater, wasn’t one of them. “What brings you to the game?” She slid over to make room for Vivien on the hard metal bleacher.

“I brought Shelby and Trip and thought I might as well stay and watch,” Vivi said. “I feel obligated to embarrass my niece and nephew as much as humanly possible while I’m in town. Not that they’re going to get close enough to me to allow that to happen.”

Catherine smiled, showing perfectly capped teeth. “Usually the only time you see them is if they run out of money.”

“Is your daughter here?” Vivi couldn’t remember the girl’s name, only that she was a junior like Shelby.

“Of course.” Catherine pointed down to the field where a long-legged blonde stood at the very top of a six-person pyramid. “Claire cheers
very
competitively. She’s cocaptain of the squad and she’s been on the Homecoming Court every year since she started at Pemberton. She’s also a member of the National Honor Society and has a GPA of four-point-five.”

Claire Dennison did a summersault and a half off the pyramid and made a perfect landing with her arms up in a V. Her mother’s artificially endowed chest puffed out in pride.

“Wow,” Vivien said, beginning to understand Melanie’s reluctance to converse and compare. Still, she’d come looking for someone who would dish, and Catherine might be just self-absorbed enough not to notice that Vivi was more interested in the people who were watching the game than the people who were playing.

A trumpet sounded a cavalry charge and the game began. Below, the migration of students from one end of the bleachers to the other continued. She saw Trip in the middle of a group of guys, looking oddly alone. Vivien peered more closely, not sure why she’d thought that. Maybe it was how still he was in the midst of everyone else’s constant fidgeting and movement. Or the slightly removed look on his face.

Down by the fence Shelby strutted up to a tall broad-shouldered boy lounging carelessly against a fencepost. Like most of the girls, Shelby wore tight jeans slung low on her hips. Despite the mid-November chill, the layered T-shirts she wore were extremely thin and bared the flat of her stomach when she moved, and she moved a lot, not-so-subtle gyrations meant to get and hold the boy’s attention.

Catherine had apparently been watching, too. “That’s Ty Womack,” she said. “All the girls think he’s totally hot.” She watched the interplay between Shelby and the boy. “But he’s got a reputation for being wild. He was suspended from the football team for drinking and for ‘unbecoming behavior,’ though that could mean almost anything.”

The boy, who had the height and broad shoulders of a man, leaned down to whisper something in Shelby’s ear. Shelby said something back, and they both laughed.

“My Claire knows to stay away from boys like that. I’m surprised Melanie allows it.”

Shelby tossed her dark hair and laid a hand on the boy’s arm. Despite the noise and the constant stream of students ebbing and flowing around them, Shelby and the boy were completely focused on each other. A moment later he slipped an arm around her shoulders and they walked off around the back of the bleachers.

Vivien didn’t know whether Melanie was even aware of Ty Womack’s existence. Nor did she know what, if anything, she could do to protect Shelby from him. If she charged down there and broke up what might be an innocent kiss or conversation, Shelby would never speak to her again and any chance of establishing a relationship would be gone. But it felt wrong not to act.

“I hate to say it,” Catherine said. “But ever since J.J. died, Shelby’s seemed a bit . . . wild herself.”

Vivien’s hands knotted into fists. With some surprise, she realized she wanted to tell Catherine to mind her own business. But she’d come seeking information; she knew from experience that you couldn’t always control what kind you got.

“J.J. was a good man,” Catherine said, her eyes softening. “I know losing their father has been a huge thing for both Shelby and Trip. Claire was devastated when her father and I divorced, and he hasn’t disappeared from her life. She still sees him regularly.”

It made sense that J.J.’s death would affect Shelby and Trip’s behavior. How could it not? But Vivien had no idea what would help other than time.

“Did you know J.J. well?” Vivi asked.

Catherine looked out at the field, her gaze seeking out her daughter. “Oh, about as well as you know any neighbor. After Charles moved out, J.J. used to help me with things around the house when I needed it. I used to be in the neighborhood book club with Melanie.”

There was a roar as the Pemberton quarterback sent the ball flying down the field where it was caught handily. The receiver was taken down just a couple of yards from the end zone.

For the rest of the game, Vivi split her attention between her niece and nephew, the parade of students, and Catherine Dennison, who turned out to be a real font of information about Pemberton and the suburbs surrounding it. As long as she was able to get in the occasional boast about Claire, who was apparently not only a prodigy but one of Pemberton’s most popular students, Catherine seemed happy to answer any question Vivien raised.

To supplement Catherine’s insights, Vivien eavesdropped on the conversations around her. Mostly the parents complained about their children’s demanding schedules, which depended on constant chauffeuring and frequent check writing. They complained of feeling overwhelmed, overscheduled, and overextended. But underneath the complaints Vivi heard their pride in all the things their children had undertaken. In how attractive and well rounded they would appear when all those things could be put on those all-important college applications.

“What are you doing?” Catherine asked late in the fourth quarter when she caught Vivien leaning perilously close to one of the players’ mother who was complaining that the harsh economic climate had forced her and her husband to cut out their personal trainer. “If you lean over any farther, you’re going to be sitting in her lap.” She frowned slightly, though no corresponding lines appeared on her forehead. “You certainly do ask a ton of questions.”

Vivien shrugged and smiled. “Just curious,” she said as innocently as she could. “Occupational hazard, I guess.”

16

O
N SUNDAY NIGHT while Melanie, Clay, and the kids settled in front of the family room television, Vivien went upstairs where she sat on her bed and pulled out her laptop.

Tentatively she began to turn her observations from Friday night’s football game into a lead. There were a few false starts, but ultimately she typed,
Greetings from suburbia, where children are the suns around which parents revolve. In truth, children are their parents’ reason for being, not to mention their reason for being here.

Vivien thought about all that she’d seen and heard since she’d arrived: the hockey practices at six A.M. for children barely big enough to hold a hockey stick. Weekday volunteer shifts at school, afternoons, evenings, and weekends crammed full of extracurricular activities. Busy children were a badge of belonging. The overscheduling was something to complain about, only the complaints were a socially acceptable form of bragging.

They are driving before the sun comes up and long after it’s gone down,
she wrote.
They are fund-raisers, boosters, ticket takers, concessionaires, burger flippers, timekeepers, and pregame meal providers. They fill the stands of every sport known to man and a few I’d never heard of before arriving here. They man the welcome desks, phone switchboards, media centers, and copy machines at their children’s schools. They are involved in virtually everything their children do from the cerebral to the physical. On the weekends they are coaches and team moms, and there are teams for everything. Because clearly if an activity exists—it’s even better if your child competes in it. They are exhilarated by their children’s successes and depressed by their failures, though the word “failure” is rarely used.
Vivien made a note to address this concept in a future column.

Weekends are so jam-packed that fathers and working mothers are relieved to return to the office on Monday morning so that they can slacken the pace. They’re exhausted from supporting their children’s busy lives. It makes one wonder if this busy life is simply a substitute for “parenting.” After all, if everyone is so exhausted all the time, less genuine interaction is required.

Vivien continued with this line of thought for several paragraphs, then reread what she had written. It was, perhaps, a bit harsh; she cringed at the idea of including Melanie, who worked and parented single-handedly, in this blithe condemnation. And it was possible that city dwellers did the same revolution around their offspring. But she left it as it was. There was not a line she’d written that was untrue.

When I was a child,
she wrote in conclusion,
children fit into their parents’ lives. Today, especially in this suburb in which I’ve landed, it is clearly the opposite. Because here parents don’t have lives of their own. They are much too busy revolving around their sons. And, of course, their daughters.

As always she signed it
, Your stranger in an even stranger land, Scarlett Leigh.
And then sent it on its way to New York.

But when she turned out the light and hunkered down under the covers, the murmur of voices from downstairs turned her thoughts from the exhaustion of the locals to her disturbing reaction to Clay Alexander.

She had no idea if he’d been this involved in the Jacksons’ life before J.J.’s death; that was yet another detail of Melanie’s life that Vivien had failed to tune into. But his continual presence struck her as calculated, and the way he hovered between friend of the family and head of the household left her unsure of what he was trying to achieve. He seemed attached not only to the kids but to Melanie, and yet there was no indication that they were “dating.” She’d finally been able to set an appointment with Blaine Stewart for Tuesday. Presumably a look at the file would either confirm or eliminate her suspicions.

The whole thing reminded her of that movie with Richard Gere and Jodie Foster where an imposter comes back from the Civil War and even though the wife knows it’s not her husband, she acts like he is. Not that she didn’t think Mel and the kids knew the difference between J.J. and Clay. It was just that she had the weirdest feeling that Clay Alexander might be trying to eliminate those differences.

RUTH SPENT MUCH of that Wednesday afternoon at the Magnolia Ballroom working on a holiday mailing for Melanie. When that was done, she tidied the place up a bit, straightening the tables and chairs that bordered the dance floor, polishing the beautiful burled wood of the welcome desk at which she often sat, stacking the CDs and miscellaneous items that accumulated in the DJ area. Mostly she just wanted to keep her hands busy and her body in motion. Her brain was completely occupied with Ira. Or rather her marriage to Ira.

They’d barely spoken since last Friday night’s disastrous Shabbat dinner. Ruth had always believed in talking things out and, in fact, often erred on the side of too much talking. But now whenever she even looked at Ira the anger and disappointment rose up to clog her throat, holding her words and thoughts prisoner inside.

Seeing no reason to go home for dinner before class, Ruth ran over to the nearby McDonald’s for a burger, then came back to the studio to man the front desk. Smiling and greeting students as they arrived for that night’s classes, she could pretend that her world had not crumbled around her.

By eight P.M., they stood in their ragged line at the far end of the dance floor waiting for Naranya to finish setting up the speakers. The Shipley sisters laughed identical trilling laughs as the uninjured one helped the other into a nearby chair. Melanie took up a spot in the back to help two newcomers who’d come for a free first trial lesson. Lourdes and Sally stood together chatting.

Ruth stood between Angela, whose clothes seemed far too big, and Vivien, whose clothes were clearly too small. In fact, Ruth had noticed that Vivien’s breasts swelled precariously over the top of the camisole as if they’d grown a whole cup size in the last week. Her face looked fuller, too. The woman was definitely piling on the pounds, but what did she care how much Vivien Gray weighed? Or why? All she cared about was that she hadn’t bailed out on Melanie. Yet.

The music wafted out of the speakers, slow and plaintive, matching Ruth’s mood. Naranya passed out the hip scarves, then stepped in front of them to begin the opening stretches. Ruth followed, bending to the right and then the left, reaching down to touch each toe before coming back to center. Slowly they rose up onto the balls of their feet and stretched their arms up toward the ceiling. Ruth tried to clear her mind, but it was like trying to part a fog.

They circled their shoulders, then worked with their arms, forming S’s, making them slither like snakes, but Ruth could barely force herself through the motions. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, something she’d noticed Vivien and Angela were careful not to do, and saw a solid block of a woman with a puff of white hair at the top; she might as well have been the Q-tip she resembled for all Ira seemed to care.

Naranya drew them into a circle to practice a walking step that looked suspiciously like the Israeli folk dance the hora. Ruth’s hands, clasped in Angela and Vivi’s, felt slippery with sweat as she thought of the weddings and Bar Mitzvah parties when she’d danced these steps joined with Ira.

“Are you all right?” The redhead asked her, holding tight to her hand. “Can I get you something cold to drink?”

“No, I’m fine.” Ruth’s response was automatic, though this time she wasn’t sure it was true. Her shoulders drooped despite her efforts to hold them up and she was relieved when Naranya led them out of the circle and back into their lines.

“You all look very good today,” Naranya said. “I think you have been practicing?”

She heard the others laugh at that and someone shook her hips so that her scarf jangled loudly.

“Thank you, Sally. I heard that. We weel work more with our hips. When your half-moons look good, I will show you the eights.” Naranya strode over to the computer to restart the music, and there was an excited buzz.

Ruth just stood there, silent and numb, one thought filling her mind: she’d drawn a line in the sand, and now she was afraid that Ira would refuse to step over it.

Not knowing where to turn, she raised her eyes to the mirror and her gaze met Melanie’s.

“I need Ruth to help me with something,” Melanie said as she stepped up to Ruth’s side and slipped an arm around her shoulders. “Will you excuse us?”

Melanie led Ruth off the floor and into the empty office. Ruth was embarrassed by how much the physical contact meant to her; she was far more used to offering comfort than receiving it. But she felt as if she might weep with gratitude.

“It’ll be all right, Ruth,” Melanie said as she closed the office door behind them and helped Ruth into a chair. “I know it will. Sometimes it just takes men a little longer to figure things out.”

They sat for a while listening to the odd mixture of Naranya’s oriental music and the insistent beat of a rhumba. But Ruth couldn’t imagine why Ira was having such a hard time figuring this out. Surely even Ira at his most stubborn wouldn’t choose divorce over a couple of hours of dancing? Her mind said, of course not, but her heart wasn’t so sure.

IN HER ROOM at Melanie’s, Vivien picked up her cell phone on the third ring.

“Hello there, stranger.” Marty’s voice was its usual teasing self. “I thought we were going to talk regularly. I don’t think once a month qualifies.”

“Sorry. Just haven’t had much to report.” Vivien carried the phone over to the chaise lounge near the window and lowered herself into it.

“I think I may be going through Gray withdrawal,” Marty said. “I don’t even hear from your mother anymore. If I hadn’t reached you, I might have broken down and called Caroline.”

Vivien smiled, realizing as she did just how much she’d missed the irrepressible Marty. “Wouldn’t she have loved that?”

There was a pause. And then because she couldn’t help herself she asked, “So . . . how’s the Barbie doll doing?”

“Okay,” he said carefully.

“Are you shooting for her?”

“No, they assigned Drew Haynes to her. I’m working with Terry.”

Somehow this made Vivi feel better. Giving her Marty would have been like handing a family member over to the enemy.

“She was a bit of a ‘bitchy Barbie’ in the beginning. Tried bad-mouthing you at first,” Marty said, knowing Vivien well enough to know she’d want the details. “Took potshots at you whenever she could. But she’s a relatively brainy Barbie. She finally figured out that nobody wanted to hear it.”

Well, that was something. “Thanks.”

There was another protracted pause. Vivien didn’t want to hang up and break the connection, but this brush with her old life was even more painful than she’d imagined. For the past weeks she’d been able to shove it to a corner of her consciousness and had wrapped it up in a sort of hazy “then” that had allowed her to focus on the all-too-sharp “now.”

“Listen,” Marty said. “I know this isn’t really my business . . .”

Vivi smiled again. This was how Marty had always begun his swan dives into her personal life. “But I think you need to be in better touch with Stone. Assuming you, um, want to continue your, um, relationship with him.”

Vivien closed her eyes as another stab of pain pierced her. She wanted to be in touch, actually craved the sound of Stone’s voice when she felt overwhelmed, which was far more often than she wanted to admit. But she’d been afraid to talk to him too often, afraid that she’d break down one day and give away her secret.