Outtakes from a Marriage (3 page)

I placed the phone back on the charger. I heard a toilet flush from the other end of the apartment, which meant that Sammy was up. Sure enough, he wandered into the kitchen a moment later.

“Hi, baby,” I said.

“Hi, Mommy.”

Sammy was smiling up at me with his sleepy, flirty, flushed morning face, which on an ordinary day might have caused me to scoop him up in my arms and cover his face and tummy with kisses. Instead, I was trying to calculate the exact time that it would take for Joe to go from the makeup trailer to the set. He would have to turn the phone off while he was on set, which is when I would be able to check his messages.

“Mommy, I want pancakes!”

He might have already turned off his phone as soon as he hung up with me. Then again…

“Mommy,
pancakes
?”

“Sure, sweetie, Catalina will be here any minute now and she’ll make you pancakes.” Breakfast was really the only meal I was responsible for anymore, and I was increasingly passing that responsibility on to Catalina.

“Will Catalina take me to school?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, smiling enthusiastically. “You know how much Catalina loves to take you to school!”

“I don’t want Catalina to take me to school! I want
you
to take me to school!”

“I know, but…” I had, of late, also passed on the responsibility of school drop-off to Catalina. I felt guilty. Plus, I realized I needed to get out of the house. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll take you.”

I pulled a carton of orange juice out of the fridge and looked at the clock. It was 7:46. Joe would have to be on the set by now.

“Here’s a nice glass of juice. I don’t know where Catalina is. Hey, how about a little
SpongeBob
?”

“Yeah!” said Sammy, thrilled that the no-TV-in-the-morning rule had somehow been circumvented. The two of us raced into the family room and I inserted Sammy’s favorite DVD into the machine. After handing him the juice, I spun on my heel and flew back to the kitchen. I was like a woman possessed—it took me two attempts to hit the numbers right before it started ringing.
Please don’t answer, please don’t answer,
I prayed, and my heart soared at the sound of the Nextel recording informing me that the subscriber I was trying to reach was not available. I hastily punched in the access code and just then Catalina walked into the kitchen, all pink-cheeked and out of breath.

“Sorry I’m so late, I—”

I turned so that Catalina could see that I was on the phone, and she mouthed, “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” and scurried into the other room, looking for Sammy.

“You have no new or saved messages.”

Okay, now I felt that I was getting someplace. Now I had some answers. Joe had heard and erased the message. I had saved the message each time I played it, so now I knew that Joe had heard the message and erased it.

He hadn’t saved the message
.

Which meant…what?

It meant nothing, I realized. Why would he save a message like that? If she were a stalker, he would be annoyed, and if she were a girlfriend, he would feel guilty (one would hope). But here comes the weird part: I felt oddly disappointed that the message had disappeared. She was gone and I was left with only the memory of her crude communiqué, and I wanted more. I wanted more access to the mysteriousness of it all, more clues. I pushed the hang-up button and instantly the phone rang, which caused me to startle and drop the handset onto the floor, where it came apart, sending the batteries rolling across the marble tiles.

“Julia?” Catalina called from the back hall.

“Yeah, it’s okay, Catalina, I just dropped the phone.”

The batteries had sought refuge under the refrigerator, so I rattled around in my cluttered cabinets for some fresh ones, which I eventually found and jammed, shakily, into the handset. As soon as the second one was laid to rest, the phone rang again and this time I answered it.

“Hey, what’s going on?” It was Joe.

“Nothing,” I said, trying to sound bored.

“Well, my phone rang, and when I saw it was you, I tried to answer but I got a weird busy signal….”

“Really?”

“Yeah, and when I tried to call back, it rang once and then I was cut off.”

“I know. I dropped the phone when I tried to answer it.”

“Well, what is it?”

“I just wanted to know if you felt like chicken tonight.”

“I guess so. You know I might be working late, right?”

“No…I thought since you had the early call this morning…”

“Yeah, but we’re shooting a stunt sequence that’s kind of time consuming, and my stunt double isn’t working out so great, so we have to bring another guy in….”

“Okay, just let me know when you have a better idea what time you’ll be home,” I said briskly, but when we hung up I thought,
Working late, my ass.

Working late, my big, fat ass.

[
three
]

T
he Multicultural Montessori School is located in a brownstone exactly two blocks from our apartment. If you were to read their glossy admissions brochure, you might decide that the Multicultural Montessori School—or “Multi,” as many devoted parents refer to it—is the right place for your preschooler because it offers “an enriching, noncompetitive whole learning environment for the whole child.” Or you might be interested in the fact that Multi’s literacy program allows a child to explore “a whole language approach to literacy development.” Or you might, like Joe and me, decide that it’s the perfect preschool for your child, solely based on its whole convenient location, a mere two blocks from home.

The summer before Sammy turned three, I was in the playground with Karen Metzger and her friend Abby, when Abby asked where Sammy was going to go to preschool in the fall. “I don’t know,” I said. “I like the looks of that little Montessori school on Eighty-fourth Street. I think I might want to send him there.”

Karen and Abby just stared at me.

“What?” I asked.

“Are you talking about the Multicultural Montessori School?” said Karen.

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“Have you applied?” Abby asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “I guess I should.”

Abby and Karen stared at each other for a moment and then they both burst out laughing.

“Julia,” Karen said, “everybody applied to preschools last fall. Multi is one of the hardest schools to get into in Manhattan. You actually have to call on the morning after Labor Day—I’m talking about last year—in order to get them to send you an application. It takes all day to get through. How could you not know this?”

“I guess I didn’t know it was that…organized. It’s just a nursery school, for Christ’s sake.”

Now Karen’s amused look had turned into one of deep concern.

“Julia, Multi is a feeder school. Everybody wants their kid to get into that school so that they can get him into the best kindergarten possible. Didn’t you go through this with Ruby?”

“No,” I said, and I explained that when Ruby was of preschool age we were on location, first in London, next in Nevada, and then we rented a house in Los Angeles while Joe worked on the first season of a sitcom that was never picked up for a second season. Ruby and I went to various Mommy and Me classes, but I never enrolled her in an actual school until we were back in Manhattan, and by that time she was old enough for kindergarten.

“Nobody made a big deal about Ruby not having attended preschool when we applied to Walton,” I told Abby and Karen, “and she got in, no problem.” I couldn’t help feeling slightly defensive about the whole thing. Karen had always presented herself as the expert on all things related to parenting, which really irked me because she was the mother of five-year-old twins. I was the one with fourteen years’ experience. So why did I feel like a perpetual novice?

The first time I pushed Ruby in her stroller, not long after she was born, I remember feeling like a giant child playing house. Playing “mommy.” I felt that everybody I passed could see by my awkwardness—my crouched posture, my death-grip on the handles and frantic deer-in-the-headlights stare—that I was a student driver. With achingly stiff arms, I inched the strange vehicle along the sidewalks of Broadway while the other NASCAR-level moms whipped past me pushing a double stroller with one hand and balancing an iced latte and a cell phone in the other. Somehow Karen skipped the whole intro-level, beginner-parenting stage. By the time she pushed out her twins at age forty-two, she knew everything she and everybody else needed to know about parenting and was happy to gently bring me up to speed.

“Jules, Ruby was reading chapter books when you applied to kindergarten for her. Sammy, obviously, isn’t quite as…advanced.” I followed Karen’s gaze to where Sammy teetered precariously near the top of the climbing apparatus. He waved his hands mockingly at a child on the ground below him and shouted, repeatedly, “Nana-nana-poo-poo!”

I watched him. There really wasn’t much I could say.

“Okay, okay,” Karen said, “I think we can make this work in your favor. You have to put some sort of show-business spin on it. Make an appointment to meet with Elaine Mayhew—she’s the head of the school—and kind of act as if you’ve been doing the same thing with Sammy. You know, running all over the world while your husband makes movies and TV shows. Honestly, most of the parents in these schools are lawyers and investment bankers and the schools love to have their little celebrities. It creates diversity! These schools are always bragging about how diverse they are.”

This, I came to learn, was an understatement.

I followed Karen’s advice and insisted that Joe attend the admissions interview with Sammy and me, and when we arrived for our appointment, the three of us followed a very pretty young teacher named Amber into a small, cluttered classroom.

Sammy, we learned that day, doesn’t interview terribly well. His responses to all of Amber’s carefully phrased questions, such as “Do you want to draw for me, Sammy? Let’s draw together!” were lines from movies he had watched repeatedly with Ruby and her friends. Lines like “Oh, be-have” and “Do I make you randy?” delivered in what we had, until that moment, considered a brilliant attempt at a Cockney accent. He also did his rapper impersonation, grabbing his crotch and saying, “Yo, yo, yo,” in a deep, throaty little voice. Then, apparently desperate—all the material that had worked so well at home was falling flat here—he resorted to his old standby: poop jokes.

“Do you see the truck in the picture, Sammy? What color is the truck?”

“Poop colored.”

“Hmm…Well, it’s actually orange, which isn’t quite the color of—”

“Poop!”

“Sammy…” Joe scolded.

“That’s okay,” said the teacher. “This kind of talk is age-appropriate. I bet this is left over from our potty-training days.”

“Well, actually, he’s not—” Joe began, and I interrupted, “We’re still…working out a few kinks.”

Sammy had never actually used the potty at that point in time.

“Don’t worry,” said Amber. “School doesn’t start for another six weeks. Of course, you know that he must be using the toilet by the time school starts.”

“Of course,” I said.

At this point, having been quite cheerful all morning, Sammy was getting tired. He started to whine.

“I wanna go home. Want Catalina.”

“That’s fine, Sammy, we’re all finished,” said Amber. “I know that Elaine wanted to have a quick word with you before you left. Let me see if I can find her.”

“WANT CATALINA!”

Amber forced a smile in Sammy’s direction, then scurried out the door in search of Elaine Mayhew.

“You know what?” Joe said. “I’m gonna take him home. You stay here and meet whoever it is you’re supposed to meet.”

“Elaine Mayhew,” I hissed. “The head of school! You can’t leave now. She wants to meet you. This is important!” I was becoming completely unwound. For some reason I hadn’t anticipated anything but wonderful behavior on Sammy’s part, and now that he had totally flubbed his interview, I was beginning to panic. What if we never did get him into a preschool? How would we explain to grammar-school admissions directors the fact that even though we lived in New York, Sammy hadn’t attended preschool? And if he didn’t go to preschool, his social skills, with a little help from Ruby and her friends, were likely to deteriorate even further, and then what?

“You meet with her. He’s too tired to make a good impression now, anyway,” said Joe, and I could see he was right. Sammy was butting his head against Joe’s thigh. I kissed them both good-bye and sat myself down in a tiny chair to await Elaine Mayhew.

And I waited.

It was a good thirty minutes before Elaine finally marched into the room. She was a tall, lean, masculine woman whose manic energy caused me to sink down into the Lilliputian chair until my knees nearly covered my ears.

“I’ve been behind schedule all day,” she said with such an accusatory tone that I almost apologized to her. Later I would come to understand that Elaine doesn’t waste her valuable time with frivolous greeting words such as “Hello, how are you?” and “Nice to see you.”

“I’m the head of ISAAGNY, as you probably know, and
New York
magazine is doing a feature on independent schools, so I had to talk to the writer.”

“ISAAGNY?”

“Independent School Admission Association of Greater New York. I’m the chairman. Well, I’m sorry your son and husband couldn’t wait, but it’s probably just as well. A lot of parents, especially the dads, get nervous meeting me for the first time. They believe all the playground banter about me.”

Playground banter is not something Joe would be privy to, but I just smiled up at Elaine.

“I think the other Multi parents will tell you that I’m totally approachable. Yes, I’m busy promoting my book, and the school, of course, but I take an interest in all of the families.”

Now I felt as if I was missing something. Apparently Elaine Mayhew was a very big deal. I looked around the classroom in despair. When we had first walked in, the space had seemed small and cluttered. I knew from reading the school’s brochure that twenty-two children were assigned to each classroom and I had wondered how they all fit into such squalid, confined quarters. But now that I sat here, at a child’s level, enjoying a private audience with Elaine Mayhew herself, I saw that the space was rich in stimulating and mind-broadening…stuff. I didn’t really know what all the stuff was—there seemed to be an overabundance of blocks—but I knew that the industrious young geniuses who were allowed entry to this exclusive enclave of the best and the brightest would know exactly what to do with them. I was suddenly stricken with the heart-racing conviction that I would get Sammy into this school…or die.

“I’ve heard so much about your great auction!” I blurted out. I
was
privy to playground banter myself and knew that Elaine Mayhew took great pride in the fact that her school’s auction outgrossed those of the other Upper West Side schools by tens of thousands of dollars.

“Yes, our auction is always a big success.”

Elaine picked up a long red wooden rod from the table in front of me and began tapping her palm with it thoughtfully.

“My husband…Joe. He’s…Joseph Ferraro. I don’t know if you’ve heard of him. He’s an…actor.”

“Yes, Amber was telling me. I never watch television myself,” Elaine said, placing the rod next to a group of other red rods that were scattered about on a broad, squat table next to her. They were all different lengths and she fussed with them for a moment, placing them side by side, making them line up in descending lengths. The tilt of her head and the precision of her movements led me to understand that this sequencing had some kind of significance that was beyond the intellectual grasp of the average person, so I gazed at the rods with her, nodding and smiling in what I hoped was a thoughtful and comprehending manner.

“Oh, I know, neither do I. We don’t like the kids to watch it…too much, either. Anyway, Joe is on this show. On NBC. And I know that he donated a set visit to the Robin Hood Foundation recently. I’m sure he’d give something like that to the school.”

“Oh?” Elaine said, putting the last rod in its place. She had simply lined them up, side by side, longest to shortest, but she glanced at me and then back at her completed task as if to say,
There it all is,
and a bright future instantly unfolded for Sammy in my mind. I saw my son standing next to this very table, his underpants dry but his vocabulary just dripping with complex and expressive wordage. I saw him placing the rods next to one another as Elaine had done, and as each rod took its proper place, his mind and his soul expanded. This grouping of objects and their proper sequencing would unravel the mysteries of mathematics and logic and reasoning. He would learn to add and then to multiply. He would become organized and responsible and he would, like Elaine, take pride in his tasks, no matter how small.

“One of the producers of
Sex and the City
had a child here a few years ago,” Elaine said. “They used to donate a walk-on part. That’s always an exciting item.”

“Oh, I can see that it would be.” Then, without thinking, I gushed, “What about a speaking part? That might be a fun item! A speaking part on
The Squad
!”

Three weeks later Sammy received his acceptance letter to the Multicultural Montessori School. And one week after I sent in our deposit, I received an auction item donation form. When I sent it back with a lengthy explanation about why the producers of
The Squad
no longer gave out speaking parts (union rules, previous problems with other charities) and offered a set visit instead, I received a gracious thank-you note from one of the auction organizers. But I knew Elaine was miffed, because there were very few bids on it that year at the auction. A parent whose husband’s status as a billionaire had earned them the privilege of being seated at Elaine’s table told me that Elaine had sniped, “This is New York, not Peoria! Who would pay money to walk around a television set all day?”

School starts at eight-thirty at Multi, and Sammy and I, true to form, left our building at eight-forty that Thursday morning after the dinner with the Metzgers. Sammy’s teacher was “concerned” about tardiness. She told me that she had noticed a certain “fragility” when some children arrived at the classroom setting later than the others. It took them longer to begin to focus on their “work.” To me, the kids looked no more or less fragile at eight-thirty than they did at nine o’clock. “They’re four-year-olds,” my one Multi friend, Jennifer Weiss, always scoffed. “Give me a break.”

When we turned onto the school block, Sammy wriggled his hand from my grasp and ran for the building’s front door.

“Wait, Sammy,” I called, breaking into a little jog. Ruby had always hated leaving me to go to school when she was young. Separation anxiety, her teacher had called it. “Totally normal,” she had said as I peeled my weeping daughter from my knees every morning. Sammy was different. He liked to separate.