Priscilla was, and still is, beautiful.
Three pregnancies and a lifetime ago, I was also beautiful. Now I’ve got a seven-year-old, a preschooler and a baby. I’ve also got flab, stretch marks, varicose veins, dark circles under my eyes, sagging breasts that have nursed three children, with nipples that hit my belly button, and a childbirth-traumatized crotch that leaks pee if I laugh.
Which I don’t, lately.
That, I suppose, is a blessing. But it doesn’t feel like one.
Damn, it used to feel good to laugh until tears streamed from my eyes instead of my bladder.
Things that used to make me laugh that hard: being tickled by my dad. The scene in Planes, Trains and Automobiles where Steve Martin and John Candy are in the car that catches fire. Seinfeld—even the reruns I’ve seen a dozen times.
Oh, and my husband, Mike.
He really cracked me up back when we were dating. When we were first married, too, even after we moved up here to the suburbs.
He used to do this dead-on imitation of our crotchety old neighbor, Mrs. Rosenkrantz, that was hilarious—and, I suppose, cruel, if anybody but me had ever seen it. But nobody ever did. It was our special thing.
We’d be doing some mundane task—folding laundry or grocery shopping—and I’d say, “Do Mrs. Rosenkrantz for me, please,” and he would. He’d be Mrs. Rosenkrantz folding laundry or Mrs. Rosenkrantz grocery shopping, and I swear I’d be on the floor gasping for air.
Mrs. Rosenkrantz died right before I gave birth to our second son. I was in labor for the wake and in the hospital for the funeral, so we didn’t go. We came home with our tiny blue bundle to find a rented wooden stork on our lawn and a For Sale sign on hers.
Once or twice after that, I asked Mike to “Do Mrs. Rosenkrantz,” and he obliged, but it wasn’t the same.
A lot of things haven’t been the same since then. Some are better, some are worse—but nothing is the same. Lately, I find myself missing the way things used to be.
I don’t miss Mrs. Rosenkrantz, though—I just miss laughing at her. Or, rather, laughing at my husband’s impression of her.
A young family from the city bought her house. Where we live, in the leafy northern suburbs of New York, young families from the city always buy dead old people’s houses. This was a nice family, the Carsons. They have a daughter my older son’s age and a son my second son’s age and twins on the way any second now. The mom, Laura, is a lot of fun when she isn’t eight months pregnant with multiples in the blazing dead of July, and the dad, Kirk, coaches Little League with Mike.
On hot summer days we grill and drink beers on their deck or ours while the kids play in the sprinkler, and on cold winter days we shovel while the kids build snowmen. The Carsons pick up our mail and Journal News when we’re on vacation and we pick up their mail and Journal News when they’re on vacation, and we keep saying that one of these years we should vacation together.
It sounds good, doesn’t it?
Yeah. Suburban bliss.
Three kids, a raised ranch, an SUV and a 401K. We have everything but a dog, but the boys have been begging for one, and sooner or later I know I’m going to give in and we’ll have the dog, too.
They, like I, will have everything they always wanted.
I was born under a lucky star. That’s what my mother always said, shaking her head and laughing. Things came easily to me from day one. Friends…contest prizes…school elections…boyfriends.
If I wanted something, I got it.
This life is what I’ve always wanted. Isn’t it?
Well, isn’t it?
Back when I was young and single and dating my husband—along with the other Mike, the one I didn’t marry—I dreamed of the life I have now. I figured it would be mine for the taking, because most things were.
Be careful what you wish for—or so they say.
They being the same they my grandmother is always quoting; the they who say beauty is only skin deep, and when the cat’s away, the mice will play, and love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage.
Or was that Frank Sinatra?
Not that it matters. Grandma Alice quotes him, too.
The thing is, there’s truth in all clichés—that’s why they’re clichés.
So here I am, a living cliché, on the cusp of my fortieth birthday, reminding myself that I have everything I ever wanted—and trying desperately to remember why the hell I wanted it in the first place.
two
The past
“If I were you,” Valerie told me, lounging on her unmade bed and polishing her toenails that stifling July night, “I’d wear the red. Mike likes you in red, right?”
“He does, but…” I surveyed my image in the full-length mirror we had bought at Woolworth’s and tacked to the back of our closet door only a few days ago. God only knew how we had managed to live in that apartment for almost a year without a full-length mirror.
But Valerie claimed that when she couldn’t see the thirty pounds she had to lose, she didn’t worry about them.
The day after we bought the mirror—my idea—she went back on her diet. It was the same diet she had been on—and off—for the past year or two.
You would think something as drastic as eliminating all fat grams from one’s diet would work. At least, Valerie would think that. It seemed a little extreme to me. But then, I was blessed with a normal weight and a high metabolism. I couldn’t imagine giving up ice cream, chicken chimichangas with cheese, or Popeye’s fried chicken with mashed potatoes and Cajun gravy.
Whenever Valerie was on her low-fat diet, I had to sneak my indulgences so that she wouldn’t be tempted to stray from her oat-bran-strewn path. Of course, sooner or later, she always did, but at least I knew it wasn’t my fault.
“This is new. Don’t you like it?” I asked Valerie, gesturing at the black spandex minidress I was wearing.
I wiped a trickle of sweat from my forehead as she contemplated my appearance. Damn, it was hot, despite the open window and the rotating floor fan in front of it. This was my second summer in Manhattan. Last year, I was so thrilled to actually be living here that I guess I didn’t notice the heat in our fourth floor, un-air-conditioned one-bedroom walk-up.
I do remember noticing the street noise—the round-the-clock horn-honking, sirens, construction-site jackhammers, the throbbing bass from passing car radios and neighborhood bars. It took me a while to get used to the incessant din that accompanied daily life on the Upper West Side. After I did get used to it, whenever I went upstate to visit my family, the nights seemed preternaturally quiet.
Valerie shrugged, set aside the bottle of pale frosted pink polish and said, re: my outfit, “I don’t know, Beau. Don’t you think it’s kind of…”
“Short?”
“Yeah, that. And…”
“Dark?”
“That, too. But also kind of…”
I opened my mouth again, but this time Valerie finished her own sentence.
She finished it with “slutty,” and I grinned.
“I haven’t seen Mike since April, Val. After three months apart, maybe I want to look slutty.”
“No, you want to look sexy. The red one is sexy. This one is slutty. There’s a big difference. Hey, I