Sweet Love (12 page)

Love. That’s so quaint of Arnie to use that term.

“I didn’t lie. And if we were in love, Arnie, then, logically, I would have helped Michael by
ignoring
rumors of FitzWilliams’s sexual harassment instead of undercutting him by exposing his candidate.”

“Unless Michael rejected you. In which case, your FitzWilliams exposé would have been pure retaliation.” Dumping the rest of the chips directly in his mouth, he adds, “That’s FitzWilliams’s spin on it, anyway. The old ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.’ ”

“More Shakespeare. He’s everywhere.”

Arnie flips up a finger. “Aha! Not Shakespeare. Everyone thinks that, but they’re wrong. It’s actually William Congreve.”

Who? “I don’t care. It’s meaningless. Long ago I had a schoolgirl crush on Michael, nothing more. And Michael has never shown any interest in me other than that of a big brother. We’re barely acquaintances, which is fine because, personally, the guy’s a bit of a flake. He honestly fell for it when a homeless guy spun the old scam about being an investment banker who sacrificed all material pleasures for the comfort of a good book. Michael’s like a child.”

“Boy. For an
acquaintance
you certainly can wax rhapsodic about the guy. Hate to see what you’re like if you were a full-fledged friend.”

Time to switch subjects. “Let’s get to the point. Am I definitely disqualified for the national election team?”

Linking his hands behind his head, Arnie leans back and considers this. “I don’t think so. After Kirk calms down, I’ll explain Slayton’s being a prick who’s still nursing a grudge against the station.” He picks up the baseball and rolls it around, studying Papelbon’s bogus scrawl. “You’ve got to see the situation from Kirk’s point of view, Julie. He has to be assured you’re not some black widow who goes around sleeping with campaign workers and biting their heads off. That could ruin a network’s reputation forever.”

“But I never slept with Michael.”

“You say that and I believe you. But just saying you don’t love him doesn’t make it so.”

Arnie and I sit in silence as he studies the ball and I study the poster of Johnny Damon onto which some joker from sports has drawn devil’s horns and a goatee. Did Johnny Damon think with his heart or his head when he traitored out to the Yankees?
He thought with his wallet.

“What do I do in the meantime?” I ask at last. “Between now and when you talk to Kirk.”

He replaces the ball on its stand and goes back to examining the ceiling on which a giant red sock has been painted. “Put your nose down. Keep your mouth shut. Read all you can and, most important, stay out of trouble.”

“Sounds dull.”

“Then why don’t you go home and make those desserts. That’s how they used to keep women busy in the old days, rolling piecrusts and stuff.”

“I bet you’d love it if we women got out of the workplace and back to the kitchen in our flowered aprons and pearls—like the 1950s.”

“Please, not the 50s. That was the worst decade in Red Sox history. Ted Williams and his Seven Dwarfs. A nightmare.”

“Is there any situation that you don’t turn into a baseball analogy?” I ask.

Arnie frowns and says, “Sex. It’s impossible to think about sex and baseball at the same time. It’s too damn distracting.”

The sad thing is, I bet baseball distracts him from sex—not the other way around.

Chapter Nine

—LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST ACT V, SCENE 2

I love my mother. No, I really do. It’s just that . . . she has the absolute worst timing.

Here I am trying to make sense of this recipe for peach cobbler D’Ours, so immersed in how to cut butter into flour that I don’t notice the front door open and Mom sneaking in until I feel a tap on my shoulder and jump back wicked fast. Boom! Off the counter go all my perfect New Jersey peaches, the prize first crop.

“My word, Julie. Chill out.” Mom bends down to fetch a peach, but I beat her to it. I can’t have my seventy-five-year-old mother picking up after me.

“What’s wrong with you? You’ve been so jumpy lately. At night I hear you stomping around in the kitchen when it’s way after two a.m. Are you not sleeping?”

“Got a lot on my mind, Mom.” I reach to retrieve the last peach stuck way under the table. It’s covered with dust and a plastic tie from a bread bag.

“It could be menopause. I hate to say it, but I was about your age when it started.”

Nice try, but she’s not roping me into that one. So far I’ve been able to stiff-arm Mom on the “menopause discussion” and I have no intention of losing ground. Reminds me of when I was a kid and she tried to trap me in her bedroom to have a mother-daughter chat about “a wonderful cycle a woman goes through each month that perfectly prepares her body for a baby.”

That is not the kind of shop talk a ten-year-old girl wants to hear. Trust me. Much better to get the lowdown from your friends who have absolutely no idea what’s going on. (Don’t even ask where Liza was sure the fallopian tubes were located.)

“I am not going through menopause,” I say, carving out a blossoming bruise on the last peach.

“Perimenopause, then.”

“Is perimenopause related to Perry Como? Because, if so, that could be a helluva act in Vegas.”

“Ha, ha.” Mom thrusts out a metal box in the shape of a barn, complete with worn yellow chickens and rusting cows raised on the sides. “Now that you’re taking dessert class and actually cooking for once, I thought you might appreciate this.”

It’s familiar, a relic from my childhood. Mom kept it in a cabinet above the oven next to her Crock-Pot and the wok she never used. “Is this a ...”

“Recipe box. My very own.” She rocks on her heels, proud. “There are fifty years of recipes in that box, I’ll have you know. Recipes you can’t find anymore if you tried.”

And there’s a reason for that.

Salmon aspic. Oxtail soup. Holiday cottage cheese log. Curried chicken salad with hard-boiled eggs. Lamb rice balls. Baked stuffed onions. Plus that favorite standby: Jell-O. Jell-O with pineapples. Jell-O with marshmallows. Celery Jell-O ring with tomato. And, for when company came, the always miraculous triple-layered Jell-O fruit parfait.

“Thank you, Mom. That’s so sweet.”

“They’re treasures. I clipped and pasted them over the years.
Woman’s Day
.
Family Circle
.
Reader’s Digest
.”

Depressed Housewife Monthly
.

“I will
use
this,” I gush. “Definitely.”

“Really?”

“Absolutely.”

“Great.” Mom glances sideways to the flour, sugar, and peaches sprawled across the counter. “Shouldn’t you be at work instead of cooking? I heard on the radio they found Amy Michak’s body. I was going to call you, but I know how you hate to be bothered when there’s a breaking news story.”

What my mother’s not saying is,
This is your big story, Julie. Why aren’t you on the scene?

“Arnie took me off the story. He assigned it to Valerie.” And I go back to mutilating the peach with an apple peeler and having a dickens of a time. The skin comes off in hard strips, if at all, or it mushes the valuable orange insides, leaving my fingers sticky and slippery.

“There’s an easier way to do that, you know.” She fetches a pot from under the sink and fills it with water. “Drop the peaches into boiling water, boil for one minute. Then remove with a slotted spoon and dunk in ice water. They slide right off.”

I can’t do anything right. I can’t even peel a peach.

Mom turns on the heat and says, “You having work problems, hon?”

“Nope.”

I’d like to confide in her, honestly I would, but I can’t. It’s not only that she’ll blab to any stranger who crosses her line of vision. (“Hey, you, gas station attendant. Let me tell you about my loser daughter who blew her chance at being on the national election team.”)

It’s also because she worries too much about my financial future. Yes, I’ve got a piddly IRA and, aside from this house, a thin savings account. T. Rowe Price isn’t going to feature me in a commercial, boating on a misty lake to my massive retirement waterfront home anytime soon. But I’ll get by. Somehow. I don’t need her prying into how much I’m socking away each month or if I’ve considered annuities.

But what I really dread are her platitudes when things don’t work out. That tomorrow is another day, that everything happens for a reason, and God has plans and is opening doors and closing windows . . . or is it closing doors and opening windows? I forget.

I can tell Mom is desperate for me to confide and discuss. That’s what she did with her sister, Charlotte, with her own mother, Nana, what she does with Lois and Teenie. Share, bitch, cry, soothe in a never-ending loop of tears and tea.

Well, I’m sorry. I just won’t give her the satisfaction. I’m a fortysomething woman and it’s time I stood on my own. I do not need a live-in therapist.

“I’m . . . a . . . failure!” I hear myself moan. And before I can get a grip, the peach slips out of my hands, bounces into the sink, and Mom has her arms around me. “I’m a complete and utter fuckup.”

“No, you’re not. No, you’re not,” she coos, leading me to the kitchen table. “Sit down and I’ll get you some water.” She gets me the water and then settles in across from me for a good gossip fest. “Now tell me what this is about and don’t spare me any details. I can take them.”

I don’t spill about the national election team since Kirk told me to keep it under my hat. But I do my fair share of wheedling and whining about how I’m mediocre at best. A straight-B student of life.

“That’s not so,” Mom says, getting up and dropping the peaches into the boiling water. “Look how much you’ve accomplished. You have a beautiful daughter who is a delight to be around. A house. A car. An exciting, glamorous job.”

“Hah! I spent half the day sitting in the musty basement of the secretary of state’s office going through campaign finance reports. How glamorous is that?”

“To some people it might seem very glamorous.”

She needs an ice bath for those peaches. Going to the freezer, I point out that while I may have a house, a daughter, and a job, I also have a divorce, no savings, and a stagnating career.

“More than I had at your age,” she says, poking at a peach with the spoon.

“At my age you had a husband, two kids, and a house that ran like a Mussolini train station. Sheets white and crisply folded. Living room dusted and decorated with heavy damask curtains and matching furniture. Dinner on the table at five-thirty every night without fail complete with two vegetables, a meat, and dessert.” I run water into the bowl of ice and help take out the peaches. “Em is lucky if I remember to stop by Whole Foods on my way home from work. Otherwise it’s Chinese take-out, straight out of the box eaten in front of the TV at nine.”

I throw in the last peach and turn off the stove. “Twenty years of perfecting my skills as a journalist and I’m no better than when I was twenty-three. In fact, I’m worse. Too biased, according to Arnie, and not biased enough, according to Michael.”

Mom squeezes off a skin. “Michael who?”

“Michael Slayton.” I try following her example but, naturally, my skin sticks. “We had coffee this morning. He told me I’ve changed, lost my joy or whatever, because I don’t follow my heart. Which, if you ask me, sounds like something off a Hallmark card or a Nicholas Sparks novel.”

Mom is stuck on one track, though. “Why were you having coffee with Michael Slayton?”

“Kirk Bledsoe called him. . . .” Oops! I almost told her.

She holds up a peach, stunned. “Kirk Bledsoe from
Noon Newshour with Kirk Bledsoe
?
That
Kirk Bledsoe?”

Now I’ve done it. She’ll never let this go. “Yeah, uh, he was in town to visit family over the weekend.”

“Why was he calling Michael? Was he calling about you?”

God, she’s good. How does she do it? “Uh . . .”

“What is it you’re not telling me, Julie? What’s really . . . ooh.” She teeters and swings, bumping the bowl of ice water and gripping the counter for support.

“Mom!” I cry, steadying her. “Are you all right?”

“Just woozy all of a sudden.” She puts her finger to her temple and closes her eyes, an image that seems disturbingly familiar. Just the other day this happened, no?

“You want me to call the doctor?” I say, leading her back to the chair.

“The doctor?” she scoffs. “No, Julie. I don’t need a
doctor.
” As if I’d offered to summon the friendly neighborhood voodoo witch. “This is called getting old. It’ll happen to you one day, too.”

It’s not called getting old. Getting old means your joints don’t always do what you tell them to and that your skin loses its elasticity. This is something else. But what?

The phone rings, startling both of us. Caller ID says unknown, which means it’s a telemarketer interrupting an important moment. Have those people no shame?

It’s not a telemarketer, though. It’s Ray, and for a second I have to place who he is.

“I’m sorry for bothering you at home,” he begins hesitantly. “But this is an emergency—kinda—and I was told you wouldn’t mind.”

Right. Ray is Ray Schmuler, Rhonda’s live-in boyfriend. A gentle, practically illiterate garbage hauler who’s tirelessly tacked up posters and accumulated reward money for anyone with information about his girlfriend’s kid.

“Are you kidding? You can call me whenever, Ray. I’m so, so sorry about the turn of events.”

Ray says, “Yeah?” Though he sounds skeptical. “I’m not going to keep you. I just wondered . . . You know, I don’t even know if you can, but . . .”

All of a sudden, Ray gets off and there’s much muffled noise in the background. Mom mouths, “What’s going on?” And I shrug.