The Never Never Sisters (10 page)

EVERY WORKDAY MORNING
at roughly eight fifteen, Dave shoved his keys in his leather messenger bag, slung
that bag over his shoulder and set out for the twenty-block walk to work. I’d accompanied
him a few times, so I knew that throughout the walk he was largely distracted by thoughts
of the day’s deadlines and calls. His ultimate destination was the General Motors
Building on Fifty-ninth Street, a skyscraper set off from Fifth Avenue by a plaza
that sat squarely in the middle of a major Manhattan artery: diagonal from Central
Park and directly across the street from the New York Plaza Hotel.

That morning, as always, he strode across the plaza, ignoring the fountains, the small
crowd gathered around the morning news program being filmed there and the tourists
waiting for the toy store to open. He walked quicker than some of the joggers streaming
into the park, passing through the security turnstiles and not pausing until he turned
right into one of the elevator banks designated for Duane Covington, LLP.

He had worked at the firm for twelve years and inevitably bumped into someone he genuinely
liked. That morning he saw Stan Blakesey and, as always, Dave brightened, and they
gossiped about fallen comrades until Stan got off on seventeen.

When the elevator doors opened on twenty, Dave walked down the sunlit hall to his
office—a four-hundred-square-foot perfect rectangle in the northwest corner of the
building with park views. Dave was proud of his office, especially after Herb had
confided that his assignment had been a matter of some delicacy. It needed to be large
enough to acknowledge Dave’s substantial rainmaking contributions to the corporate
practice, but not so large as to piss off his more senior colleagues. All in due time,
Herb had said.

As soon as Dave plopped down in the chair to log onto his computer, Herb himself knocked
on his door. Getting visited by Herb was strange enough—usually Herb did the summoning—but
the tentative politeness of his knock made Dave half rise out of his seat. When Herb
shut the door behind him, Dave knew something big was happening.

Herb asked Dave how his summer had been going. The two often spoke several times a
week, so Herb knew damn well how Dave’s summer had been going. “Fine,” said Dave,
trying to be casual.

“Good,” Herb said. “Do you mind coming up to my office?”

The two of them clipped up the internal stairwell, Herb setting a fast pace and Dave
keeping step and wondering if all this secrecy meant a spot had finally opened up
on the compensation committee. It was one of the most prestigious at the firm, and
Dave had been gunning for Richard Abbott’s spot, since Abbott was rumored to be decamping
to another firm.

Hedda Brynn, the human resources representative, was already sitting in Herb’s office
when they got there, her legs crossed tightly and a folder on her lap. Dave greeted
her and asked, with concern, if this was about her son. The kid was a tennis player,
nationally ranked in some teen tournament. Dave had spent some time talking to him
at the last family retreat and felt a connection. Perhaps he was in trouble and had
asked for Dave, even if, as Dave pondered this, he doubted whether a seventeen-year-old
would really need a good corporate lawyer.

No one said anything and Dave was about to ask more questions, but Herb, now safe
behind his desk, leaned forward, hanging his head sadly. “Dave, buddy,” he said, “you’re
the subject of an ongoing investigation, and you need to stay out of the office until
it’s cleared up.”

A joke, Dave thought. He looked at both of them, half smiling, but when their faces
stayed serious, he got that it wasn’t a joke. His brain frantically sorted through
his cases and his associates. “Is it the Pinkus Farms matter?” he said. “The work
Noah’s doing on Arkat? Is it—”

“Dave.” Herb patted the desk gently. “That’s all we can say. But I know in my heart”—Herb
palmed his chest—“that you’re as squeaky clean as they come. So let us go through
formalities here, and you’ll be back as soon as we can clear up everything.”

They agreed that Dave should maintain productivity on his matters. Ideally, Herb explained,
he’d work at home. Ideally, they could keep his inconvenience to a minimum. The firm
would supply whatever equipment he needed. Then Herb accompanied him—first, back to
his office, where Dave packed up a Bankers Box, and second, down to the lobby, where
a town car was sitting on Fifth Avenue, waiting to take him home. Dave wondered whether
he had passed the car, sitting empty, waiting for him, twenty minutes before, on his
way into the office. As soon as he buckled his seat belt, he started to cry.

When he finished talking, Dave sat silent for a few minutes on the couch. Then, rather
abruptly, he got up.

“Are you going back to work?”

I was surprised at how relieved I was when he shook his head and held out his hand.
I followed him to bed and we tucked into our sides at the same time; then he reached
out his hand for mine across the middle of the bed. Within seconds, I felt his hand
go slack and heard his breathing slow with the unbothered sleep of the innocent.

Dave’s report had been convincing and detailed, but my eyelids sprang open every time
I tried to close them. I felt like he was lying.

But why wouldn’t he tell me truth about this?

It was hard to breathe in that position, so I released my hand from the weight of
Dave’s and sat up. I snuck to my closet. One of the blue notebooks had a pen—a twenty-year-old
Bic, its blue top streaked white with tooth marks—stuck in the spiral. I selected
that one and flipped past my mother’s scribble, stopping at the longest entry I could
find.

Frankie was grumbling right up to when he dropped us off at the car dealer. I slammed
the door on him rather than say for the fifteenth time that morning that Sloane earned
it, so let’s just be happy about that fact. Let’s not waste our time bitching about
a thing
. It’s only a thing. We can provide it; it makes her happy: everyone wins.

He kept at it, though. Since when does seven months of playing by the rules get someone
a car? A
car
? You think I ever got a brand-new car when I was a teenager? Seven months of sobriety
means she gets a later curfew, a new sweater. (I think his real problem was with the
color: mint green. Cars, Frankie thinks, are silver or black. Maybe—if it’s a Ferrari
or a little sports number—cherry red.) “What did Pressman say about the car?” he asked.
“He can’t think this is a good idea.”

Slam dunk for me. “Ask him yourself,” I said. “Come to a fucking session and ask him
yourself.”

Frankie shut right up—he has made clear his position on journaling. We get it, Frankie.
We all get it. Men don’t show their feelings.

I haven’t actually told Pressman about the car. I’m not scared of his disapproval,
but I think he’s getting fixated on what he calls my “Guilty Feelings.” He’s very
disapproving of these Guilty Feelings. “Vanessa,” he said last week, “I don’t want
your Guilty Feelings to run the show.”

I was touched (it’s the closest the guy has gotten to expressing a direct opinion);
too touched to tell him that as a mom, I have nothing but my Guilty Feelings. They
are my touchstone. If you don’t feel guilty, especially when you know it’s your goddamn
fault, that all your kids’ problems can be traced to your bloodline, you’re not doing
your job.

I don’t think Pressman has kids. I don’t see any evidence of them in the driveway—no
basketball hoop, no swing set. The only hint of his life outside the room with the
couch is the bad cooking smells through the vent. I was talking with G. in the waiting
room about the car thing, and we both started to sniff at the air—there was a starchy,
overcooked, heavy odor overpowering the room like those waves of smell in a cartoon.

“Potatoes?” G. said.

“Sauerkraut,” I said.

“Boiled beef? No.” G. sniffed. “Broccoli, first steamed, then boiled for twenty minutes,
then microwaved.”

“What’s his deal?” I asked.

G. pointed toward Pressman’s closed door. “Based on the smells, I think he lives alone
with his housekeeper-cook, a refugee from the Marriott prison institutional cooking
services who dresses in one of those black-and-white maids’ uniforms and walks around
with an ostrich feather duster.”

We laughed way out of proportion to how funny it was, but sometimes a joke just hits
right. I needed at that moment for Pressman to be reduced to a goofy caricature. I
don’t know why, I just did.

We had one minute left. One minute before the start of the hour, when Pressman would
open the door for G.’s session. I didn’t want him to see me still there, so I started
to leave.

“About the car,” G. said, “I think you should go with your gut. You’re her mom, and
if you know she’s in a good place, that should be conclusive.”

I
do
know she’s in a good place, a much different place from where she was last year.
For one, the company she keeps. G. told me that a parent who was halfway paying attention
would have been able to take the temperature from G.’s group of surrounding friends
at any given moment, to tell whether G. was using or not.

Jeremy is a relief. Not just because I know the dad’s a pediatrician, but just look
at him. The button-downs and baseball caps. He shakes my hand, calls me Mrs. Reinhardt.
He looks me in the eye. He’s on the swim team. He talks about movies and early-morning
practices and algebra tests. No room for monkey business with all those late-afternoon
practices. What’s that phrase I heard Sloane say? “His body is a temple.”

Last year, one of the things I kept coming back to was how much easier it would be
if Sloane were a boy. Not that boys can’t get abused that way, but something about
my skinny little daughter out on the streets at midnight met me at the place of my
greatest fears. I felt as if all the caution I’d used in my own life—calling cabs
when I couldn’t afford them, wearing flats so I could walk fast late at night when
leaving work—had been prematurely spent.

It’s not like I wanted to give her a car last year, to be used by those greasy hoods
she hung out with. Who knows what would’ve happened in it? Now it’s a different story
entirely. And even if I do have Guilty Feelings, that’s not why she’s getting one;
she gets the car because it’s Sloane’s birthright as a regular suburban daughter who
turned sixteen and whose parents can, with a little extra budgeting, afford it.

I WAS STILL
sleeping, my face pressed against the notebook spiral, when my phone rang. “Mom?”

“Hon, talk me through something.” She was using her rushed party-planner voice, so
I assumed she was calling to brag about something like the thread count of the napkins
for my dad’s party later that night.

I checked my watch. Theoretically, clients were due in my office in three hours. But
because it was the Jacobys, I wasn’t holding my breath. “Sure.”

“Do you think Sloane will be okay tonight, with all the people?”

I exhaled.
This!
This, I realized, was one of the reasons why I hadn’t stopped reading the journals,
as maddening as they were. They rambled. They were out of order. They required constant
flipping through pages and indecipherable initials. But still. They were a missing
piece to everything else that we couldn’t discuss: my grandfather, Sloane’s adolescence,
why she—steel-nerved, tough, frank, bossy Vanessa—dissolved around Sloane. “I do.
I think she’ll be fine.”

“Did you ask her to bring Giovanni? Because I don’t want to bring it up without her
telling me about him and—”

“Mom. I haven’t talked to her either.”

“It’s a lot of people for her alone. She’s meeting Dave. She’s seeing the Rabinowitzes
again. I could tell Cherie not to come.”

“Isn’t it more celebratory for Dad if they’re there?”

“Come on. He doesn’t care. And what if she needs to smoke?”

“You did not just say that. You’re going to cancel Dad’s party so your daughter has
enough time to smoke?”

“I guess not.”

“It’s not that many people. It’s”—I calculated the guest list in my head: Mom, Dad,
me, Dave, Cherie and Darren Rabinowitz, and, of course, Binnie and her husband, Michael,
who happened to be Dave’s law school friend and was incapable of discussing anything
that wasn’t about work or baseball statistics, and Sloane—“eight people. She can handle
it.”

“Would you look after her?”

“Of course. Every forty-five minutes, I’ll take her for a smoke break.”

Dave wandered past me into the bathroom and did a double take when I said that. “Sloane,”
I mouthed, and he nodded, pointing to the shower to indicate his destination.

“Thank you, my dear,” my mom was saying. “That relaxes me plenty.”

“You’re joking, right?
I
was joking.”

“Bye, sweetie. Oh, and I did something funny.”

“What?”

“It’s a surprise. You’ll see tonight.”

I stood there after she hung up until I heard Dave turn the water on, and then I darted
for an empty trash bag. Since his suspension, things had gotten a little gross in
the orbit of his personal space—no time, he claimed, no time—and I’d been sneaking
into his office whenever he showered, just to pick up the empty bottles and wrappers,
to clear the crusty cereal bowls and spoons. It made the smell in there a little fresher,
even if I always felt like I was doing community service—shuffling around the room,
white bag in one hand.

I patted the papers on his desk, listening for the telltale crinkle of a Pop-Tarts
wrapper buried by books and documents. There, faceup on his desk, was his work phone,
the automatic lock function disabled because of a book corner pressing down on its
keyboard.
Hey,
the message he’d been typing read.
Good point about the collateral. But I happppppppppppppppppppppp
. I released the
P
key and picked it up, and there the thing was, in my hands, unlocked and innocent.
No need for a password.

The water flow turned quiet. Dave, three rooms away, was done with his shower, reaching
for his towel, pressing it against first his face and then his shoulders. I toggled
to the call log and back to the e-mail screen. There was no time to really read anything,
but it was immediately apparent: Dave had been in touch with more people than Brian
the Moronic. And wasn’t that the whole point of having a liaison? To not contact these
others: Maya, Nell, Matt, Jack? The door creaked and I dropped the thing back on the
desk, walking clear out of the apartment and down the hall barefoot to the trash room.
Technically, it was a waste of both a garbage bag and a trip—there was only one Eskimo
bar wrapper and a paper—but I went anyway, slamming the door hard when I left.

Why wouldn’t he tell me the truth?

Scott Jacoby’s eyes were bleary and red, possibly from crying or possibly from smoking
pot. (I’ve learned the hard way that disengaged and sad can read very much the same
in my office.) Now that he wasn’t in his work clothes, he kind of looked like a pot
smoker—shaggy blond curls pushed back with small oval sunglasses on the top of his
head. Plaid shirt. Droopy khaki shorts with paint splotches. We hadn’t gotten beyond
pleasant greetings before Scott started twisting and turning in his chair as though
what he
really
wanted
—to the point of obsessive distraction—was to crack his lower back.

Helene, on the other hand, was dressed for a tuna-salad luncheon at the Junior League:
green pastel collared shirt and pencil skirt. Kitten-heeled shoes. I got a little
knot in my stomach at that. It sounds superficial, but sometimes people who dress
like they want different things in life actually do.

“Okay to start?” I asked.

“What you said, last time, about what do I want?” Scott’s voice was soft, and I nodded
to encourage him. Sometimes, by the end of my sessions, I felt like a bobblehead doll.
“That’s irrelevant.”

“How so?” I said.

“It’s about compromise and sublimation.” The red eyes were from crying, then.

I nodded gently. “Like, what?”

He shrugged. “I’m basically being asked to ignore and forget.”

“Can you give me more details?” He shrugged again. “I ask
what you want
because I believe that, as a foundation, you both have to want the marriage to work,
even if you don’t see how it can. Do you?”

“Yes.”

“And then,” I continued, “once you remind yourself that you want it to work, if you
learn how to
reflect
—truly understand where each other is coming from—it won’t feel like compromise.”

I admitted to them, because I’d seen skeptical expressions such as theirs before,
that I knew
reflection
sounded cheesy, but it was effective. If you can concentrate on listening to another
person—without your own viewpoint getting in the way, without judging or discarding
or thinking of a response—for the simple purpose of taking in someone else’s reality,
you start to understand her.

“How do we do it?” said Scott.

“You’d listen to Helene, try to repeat the essence of what she said in your own words
and repeat it back to her. Then vice versa.”

“I’m ready,” Helene said in that get-down-to-business voice. “Let’s start.”

Scott started pulling at an imaginary string on his pants leg.

“Scott?”

He stopped fidgeting. “Yeah. Reflection. I get it.”

“He’s fine,” Helene said. “Right, baby?”

“I’m fine.” Scott cleared his throat. “But don’t you want our backstory first? So
you can decide who’s right?”

“That’s not what I do, Scott.”

“I know.” He removed his sunglasses from the top of his head, shook out his curls
and put the glasses back on.

“If there’s something you think I should know, tell me,” I said.

“Tell her.” Helene sounded tired. “Just get it out.”

“Not to just get it out,” Scott said. “Because it matters. Paige, you’re not saying
the past doesn’t matter, right?”

“It’s a tricky balance—to not hide the past but also not get stuck in its axel, so
you keep rotating around the same cycle. I can listen, sure, but know I’ll be trying
to keep you both on track to move forward.”

They both looked satisfied with that and then, in polite, worried fragments, they
told me what they hoped to get over but weren’t sure they could.

They’d been married for ten months when Helene said she wanted out. “A full-on breakdown
freak-out,” she’d called it. It had nothing to do with Scott, she swore, and everything
to do with her father having left her mother when Helene was nine years old. Married
at twenty-eight, Helene saw it unfold like a movie reel: she had put all her eggs
in one basket, that basket would break and she would relive her mother’s mistakes.

She left Scott suddenly and moved to Seattle to be with Paul, a high school boyfriend
she’d reconnected with on Facebook. She and Paul were together for one month. That’s
how long it took for Helene to realize that she’d made the biggest mistake of her
life and move back to Manhattan to immediately start trying to win back Scott.

It had taken time and setbacks and many conversations, but Scott had eventually forgiven
Helene, or so he thought. Two months before that day in my office, they’d moved back
in together. One week after that, he got out of bed to get a glass of water and saw
Helene on the computer in the living room, catching up on Facebook. She had long before
unfriended Paul, but the next morning, Scott broke out in hives.

“No more Facebook,” Scott said, and Helene agreed. “No Facebook.”

But then a few weeks later, she came home at ten p.m. after going out for work drinks,
and Scott flipped out. It kept happening: Scott falling to pieces, Helene bending
to meet him, until they called me.

Instead of looking vindicated after sharing the story, Scott looked sick. “I don’t
know that I can ever get over it.”

“We’ll figure it out.” Helene said this with confidence. “I’ll do whatever you need.”

Scott stood up, flipped his sunglasses over his eyes. “Unless you just can’t.” After
he left, the door shut softly behind him—a sigh, not a slam.

Helene stood up slowly, two spots of red streaking her cheekbones. “E-mail me some
times for next Friday, okay?” she said without looking at me. She didn’t wait for
a response before leaving. I wondered if she was going to look for Scott and try to
persuade him to keep at this work of saving their marriage, or just let him be.