The Scarlet Letter Society (2 page)

BOOK: The Scarlet Letter Society
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Thinking of the early morning visit of the adulteresses, Zarina smiled at the thought of someone like Tara overhearing a conversation about blow job spray.

“’Adultresses’ seems like an outrageously old-fashioned word to use,”
Zarina thought, as she cleaned the espresso maker,
“but what else is there to call them? The Women Who Cheat on Their Husbands? MILFs?”
Some would say ‘sluts’ or ‘whores’ in a more serious way than the club members, who used the terms jokingly. “
Maybe it’s best to just call them what they call themselves, in honor of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s famous novel
,” Zarina decided. They’re simply known as “The Scarlet Letter Society.”

“I don’t know what I’d do if Ron and Charles found out about each other,” whispered Eva after the gathering at the coffee shop. “Not to mention if my husband found out about my two lovers. Ugh.”

The worn oval sign reading
Wings Vintage Clothing
creaked on its iron hinges as the women entered Maggie’s downtown shop, its name chosen as a tribute to her favorite piece of literature, Erica Jong’s revolutionary 1973 book
Fear of Flying
. Maggie had even gone so far as to name her first daughter Erica (her other daughter’s name, Lilith, also reflected a healthy sense of feminism.)

“Well it’s plenty to worry about, hussy,” laughed Maggie. She tossed her unruly reddish-brown curls, always bordering on disheveled and frizzy, over her
shoulders. The two had been friends for years and shared the comfortable conversation style reserved for sisterhood and rare relationships between women.

Eva absentmindedly dusted the top of a vintage frame containing a piece of antique handmade needlework that served as another nod to the shop name:
“My child, I wish you two things. To give you roots, and to give you wings.”

“I need advice,” declared Eva. “Everything is just so complicated, and I honestly feel like my life is spinning way out of control. Have you ever felt that way?”

Maggie smiled, a glint in her green eyes. “Yeah, once upon a time, I guess I did.”

Eva replied, “Well, what did you do? I feel like my whole life is a circus, and I’m a terrible ringleader.”

Maggie turned to face Eva. “You just gotta learn how to keep all the balls in the air.”

“There are just so many balls!” said Eva. Both women laughed. “Now help me pick out something vintage and fabulous to wear to my meeting next week.”

Maggie picked out a few vintage 40s dresses and sent Eva into a dressing room. Eva modeled; everything always looked amazing on her. Maggie rang up the purchase, sending Eva on her way with a hug, some reassurance to take one day at a time, and an A-line navy dress that looked stunning on her petite frame.

As she put the dress into a bag, a certain smell triggered a long ago memory. After Eva left the shop, Maggie sat in a trance-like state, remembering.

Frost formed on the insides of the two-room efficiency apartment window. Maggie was locked inside alone on one of many nights when her mother, a waitress at a nearby bar, couldn’t afford a sitter. Maggie didn’t even remember her own mother’s name, only that she’d run home to check on her only child during fifteen-minute breaks, smelling of stale cigarettes and beer. Like a choppy scene from a horror movie, the images flickering and jerky and too quick, then too slow, then too quick, Maggie thought of nights where her mother tucked her into bed, leaving a flashlight on the nightstand in case she had to use the bathroom. The electric bill hadn’t been paid. The smell. That familiar smell, from the hourglass-shaped glass bottle with the gold bow.
Her mother would spray that Estee Lauder (a gift, somehow Maggie knew it had been a gift… but from who?) on her to hide the bar smells before she climbed into bed with Maggie; they’d slept in the same bed to stay warm
.

The jingle of the shop door’s bell jolted Maggie back into the moment, her face flushed and hands sweaty. Her heart was beating faster and her head was pounding as she reached for the pills in her purse.

“Daymares?”

It was Dave, Maggie’s first husband, who knew she called her daytime trances “daymares” since they reminded her of nightmares.

Maggie’s face softened when she saw Dave: bearded, tall, corduroy and flannel-clad. He walked over and hugged her.

Eva couldn’t get the lyrics to “Lyin Eyes” out of her head ever since Maggie had sent the invite to that month’s Scarlet Letter Society meeting. The line
“she’s so far gone, she feels just like a fool”
played in her head after she left Maggie’s shop and headed over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge toward her mother’s Matthew’s Island cottage on what James Michener called “the calmer waters of the Eastern Shore” of Maryland.

Her phone rang as she finished crossing the bridge, and
“Call from Ron”
appeared on her car dashboard screen. She answered it on the steering wheel of her Mars Red Mercedes SLK 350 Roadster.

“Eva Bradley,” she crooned in a fake professional tone as she answered the phone.

“Ms. Bradley, this is your intern Ron. I’m calling to let you know that your meeting next Thursday morning meeting needs to be rescheduled due to a conflict with the client.”

“Ron, you’re my only intern at the moment. You don’t have to introduce yourself. You can call and tell that particular client to gargle my balls, because this is the third time she’s canceled.”

A moment’s pause. “Er, Ms. Bradley, I’m not sure the phrase ‘gargle my balls’ is one that the madam Fortune 500 executive is used to hearing…”

Eva laughed. “I’ve been hanging around Maggie too much. Well, I’ll leave it to you to phrase that in a more diplomatic way, then, Ron. In the meantime, I demand to know why your body is not underneath mine right now.”

“Ms. Bradley, are you driving?”

“Yes, Ron, I am.”

“Well then, the answer is that I wouldn’t want to wreck a perfectly gorgeous piece of German machinery. I will, however, be happy to fill your empty appointment slot on Thursday morning since your client canceled.”

“In that case,” replied Eva, blushing slightly despite herself and snickering, “you can thank that bitch of a client for me.”

Eva hung up the phone, smiling at the way her body tingled just hearing her young lover’s voice. He made her happy. Her husband Joe, a department head physician at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, worked virtually 24-7. Her twin boys Calvin and Graham were fourteen, started high school this year, and were hormonal and smelly and awful. She loved her family like crazy, but escaping from them seemed to be all she ever wanted to do—which of course brought on guilt, because she was raised Catholic, and if anyone could send you on an all-expenses paid mom-guilt trip to the moon and back any day of the week, it was the Catholics.

She had somehow managed to position herself to be a forty-one-year-old woman who was cheating on both her forty-five-year-old husband and her fifty-three-year-old lover with her twenty-eight-year-old intern. Her sex drive aside, it was Eva’s workaholism that really drove her. Her career as a corporate attorney was both successful and demanding, and she often wondered if all the steam she put into the corporate machine during her long workweeks was exactly the steam she was blowing off with her various creative sexual outlets.

Suddenly the phone rang again.

Without looking at the dashboard, Eva purred, “How may I help you?” in a seductive voice.

“EEE-vah?” asked her husband, Joe. Her name was pronounced “ee-vah” though people often mispronounced it “Ay-va.” When Joe thundered the word, the first half sounded like it was being shouted in a capital letter:
EEE-vah
.

Eva was snapped back into her reality like a branch in a thunderstorm. She unknowingly shifted her driving position. Where she had been reclining back into her leather seats, sunroof open, hair blowing in the wind, she now sat upright, straightened and stiffened. “Hey Joe,” Eva replied, trying to sound casual. “What’s up?”

“What’s up is that your sons just got busted behind the school football field bleachers drinking beers.”

Eva winced at the way Joe referred to their sons when they were in trouble, as “your sons.” When they made state championship teams in lacrosse, he called them “my boys.”

Joe continued. “Apparently you didn’t answer your cell phone, so the Vice Principal Ken Tracey called me to let me know they were suspended for three days. And that was after I spent fifteen minutes convincing him that they shouldn’t be expelled. So fortunately, they will make it through at least their first year of high school.”

Eva cringed. Dreaded, ever-present mommy guilt immediately flared up. Somehow, it was her fault. She traveled too much and the boys were acting out in rebellion. Now they would do terribly in high school and then not get into good colleges. And all of that was because their mother was a wine-drinking, career-obsessed sex freak and their father worked all the time.

Eva cleared her head, and her throat, and responded, “What should we do about OUR sons?” She hated how she sounded. She couldn’t understand how she could ruin entire corporations in the courtroom without batting an eyelash, but when it came to dealing with her husband, she turned into a handkerchief-gripping 1950s housewife, complete with red and white checked apron.

Joe replied, “Destroy their lives as they know them?”

Eva sighed. “Have you spoken to them? What’s the rest of the story? Some older kid must’ve given them the beer. This is the first time they’ve done anything like this. We should sit down as a family and discuss it.”

Joe bellowed, “The rest of the story? There is no rest of the story. I sent them to their rooms for the weekend. I don’t want to see their faces.”

“So you didn’t talk to them?” inquired Eva, marveling at the fact that all her husband, a pediatric oncologist at one of the top medical institutions in the country, could muster up when the first sign of teen angst acting out appeared was a big time out chair.

“There is nothing to say,” said Joe. “You can come home and deal with them.”

Eva had already been debating doing a U-turn on Kent Island to head back to the Western Shore of Maryland. But this was
her weekend
. She hadn’t been to the island in a month, had promised her mother a visit, and she couldn’t travel there again for at least another month. Her mother honestly needed her.

“I’ll just spend one night with Mom,” said Eva, compromising. “Tomorrow when I get home, I will speak with the boys, and I’ll text them tonight.”

Joe laughed.

“Why would you think they would still have phones?” He hung up.

Eva winced and began the inevitable beating-herself-up routine. Although their father was emotionally vacant from their boys’ lives, preferring to lose himself in his work than to take his own sons to an Orioles game, Eva still blamed herself when there was a low grade on a test or a small altercation on the lacrosse field.

Eva pulled her car over to get an iced coffee; she’d need it to get through this drive. She opened the Facebook application on her iPhone. Her husband wouldn’t realize it, but she knew the boys were fully technologically functioning without the phones. The spoiled brats each had MacBooks and iPads in their rooms, and even Internet through the Wiis on their bedroom TVs.

She wanted to cyberstalk them a tiny bit, just a quick check of Facebook pages, to be sure they weren’t bragging about their exploits. She messaged both of them in the same message on Facebook.

Dear Graham and Calvin
,

Nice job, boys. Dad’s pissed and I can’t exactly say I’m a proud mom. Do not use your Facebook accounts. If I see any use on them, I’ll disable them. The last thing you need is to mess up your college chances by bragging about your little escapades. I will be home tomorrow and we can discuss this. In the meantime, be productive. Do homework! Clean your rooms! Do dishes! Don’t leave the house. Spend time thinking about how stupid of a decision you just made and how incredibly crappy your summer is going to be because of it
.

BOOK: The Scarlet Letter Society
13.03Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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