Young Wives Read online

  “When?”

  “Back in the fifties, I think.”

  “No, they didn’t. I was alive then. Your grandfather never told Nana to buy a hat. I never told your mother to buy a hat.”

  “Just as well,” Angie said darkly. “It saved your life, no doubt.” She flopped back down on her back, already used to the warm but unpleasantly sticky leather waiting for her. Probably that dead cow hide was the only skin that would ever touch hers again, she thought morosely and stared overhead at the hideous figure eights in the ceiling.

  Her mother was arriving home tonight and Angela knew she should be showering. Since she hadn’t brought any clothes with her, and since she’d rather die than get into that stupid dress she’d worn to the club, it wouldn’t hurt if she stopped off at the Cross County Mall and bought a pair of jeans and a couple of shirts. But the idea of doing either of those things tired her to the point of exhaustion. The thought of getting vertical, getting into the car, getting to Poughkeepsie, parking, and finding her mother’s apartment was daunting enough. Angie felt as if all energy had been drained from her. She had no “gets” left in her. But she had to go: her mother was her only hope. Natalie Goldfarb would tell her what to do. Her mother had to because otherwise, Angie figured, she was doomed.

  Her friend Lisa was still telling her to just stay away, to try not to think about Reid, to remember how unforgivable his action had been. It was good advice, and Angie was almost embarrassed when she thought of how often she’d cried talking to Lisa.

  She couldn’t cry with her dad. It would upset him too much. He would either cry, too, or threaten to kill Reid. Angie looked over at Anthony. His fingers were pulling uselessly at the corduroy of his trousers. He got up and moved to the end of the couch and motioned with his head for her to retract her feet. She did so, curling up into a semi-fetal position, her back now pressed against the stupid leather sofa. The hide was cool on her back, since it hadn’t been leaned on. Angie shivered. Yes, that was what she should get used to. She would spend her life untouched by real skin. She would spend her life pushing herself against coldness, hoping for a tiny bit of warmth.

  Angie looked over at the flowers her son-of-a-bitch husband had sent. She hadn’t put them in water and the heads were already drooping, the edges of the petals already brown. The bouquet was a metaphor for her life—she would wither long before her time because of a tragic lack of caring. She hadn’t taken all those comparative lit courses for nothing. When her father put his hand on her ankle, she turned away from her dead flowers to look at him.

  He’d done this to her mother, she thought as he began to speak. “Angie, listen to me. You can’t just lie here. Reid was a spoiled bastid. He always was. You can get over this. What he did was wrong, but the fact that he told you was unforgivable. You—”

  “What do you mean?” Angie asked, but she knew about her father’s double standard. It was an Italian thing. “You mean it would have been okay if he was screwing some other woman as long as I didn’t know about it?” She pulled her knees the rest of the way into her chest, away from her dad, and shook her head. “Thank God he was guilty—or idiotic—enough to tell me. Otherwise I might still be there, a marble-head in Marblehead, living a lie.”

  At that moment, Angie hated her father and all men. Clueless, rotten, selfish, insensitive bastards. But Reid was the worst. As she lay on her back all these days—what, five? a week?—Angie had played scene after scene from her courtship, wedding, and marriage in her mind. The week she and Reid went to Vail and never got onto the slopes. The fight they had once in a Boston supermarket over mayonnaise. The way he had looked at her the first time she wore that taffeta dress. All gone. All useless, stupid memories of a stupid girl.

  But a part of Angie couldn’t believe that the good times were over forever. If Reid had died, she thought, she would be able to cope because she would have known that he wanted the good times to continue as much as she did. Knowing that their lives could continue, were continuing, but with Reid having the good times with someone else, just tore her apart. The idea that she alone had experienced some of their most touching moments together, while he was merely waiting to go meet the Soprano, was unbearable to her. Her stupidity, her lack of insight, her bad choices … all of it was unbearable. Angie knew that many, maybe even most, people had to compromise and adjust their view of marriage once they were actually married. But she hadn’t had a marriage, though she’d thought she had. He’d been cheating on her, not married to her, except perhaps for the month or so after their wedding. She had had a one-sided fantasy.

  Her father, at the foot of the sofa, began moving one of his meaty hands up and down the sole of her foot. Hot tears rushed to her eyes. Being touched was excruciating. She wanted to kick him away and then crawl into a ball of shame and fear and rage, but instead she smiled and accepted the massage. He meant to be comforting. He loved her. But Angie stared at him and could only think that he, too, had betrayed a woman—her own mother. Well, at least Anthony hadn’t snuck around behind Natalie’s back. He had just gotten tired of Natalie, dumped her for another woman, and at the same time tried to hold on to every nickel he had ever made. He was her father, but he was also a man. She pulled her feet away from him.

  The only one now who could help her was her mother. Suddenly all Angie wanted was to be away from Anthony, to be next to Natalie and listen to Natalie tell her how she could fix her life. Her revulsion was the only thing that gave her enough energy to pull herself up from the sofa. “I’m going to go and see Mom,” Angie told him.

  “Angie, enough with the poor personal hygiene and the self-pity,” Natalie Goldfarb said to her daughter as she leaned across the table. “You lie down with dogs, you get up with low self-esteem.” Natalie reached out and stroked her daughter’s hair, but then pulled her hand away. “Wow,” she said wiping her hand with the napkin. “I need some of that in my Buick’s crankcase.” She opened her purse and took out a lip balm, handing it silently to Angie, who had been furiously chewing on her lower lip all week.

  As Angie applied the lip balm, her mother watched, then heaved a sigh. “I love you, honey, but a part of you always knew what a spoiled little bastard Reid was. Maybe you’re shocked, but you can’t tell me you’re really surprised.”

  Mother and daughter were sitting at the tiny table in the minuscule kitchenette of the small studio that Natalie sublet. It didn’t seem like a home—it was more of a big storage room, with cartons, books, and papers everywhere. Two chairs sat one on top of the other, rolled-up rugs leaned against the wall, and no paintings or pictures or photographs were displayed anywhere. Angie thought of the cozy home Natalie had made for her family, as well as the domestic way Natalie used to live with her law partner, Laura. She looked around with fear and distaste at this. Had her mother given up? Could she only make a home for other people? This was not a comfortable place to live and certainly not one that would give her shelter.

  “You should work in a shelter,” Natalie said. “You should see how bad some of our sisters have it. I was just in India, and let me tell you, when a husband is tired of a wife over there, he and his mother douse her with kerosene and set her on fire. They have a name for it. ‘Stove accidents.’”

  Angie shuddered. “Very nice. So am I supposed to be grateful that Reid didn’t use me as a luau torch?” she asked. Natalie got up, took the untouched sprout and sunflower seed salad away from Angie, and bustled over to the sink.

  “Do you want something else?” she asked Angie. “I think I have sardines, but I’m not sure about crackers.”

  Angie shook her head. She hadn’t eaten anything real in days, but if she did it wouldn’t be something as disgusting as that. All at once she felt very sorry for herself. Didn’t her mother even remember that she hated sardines? She’d always hated them, since she was little. Her mother and father had been such an odd mix: her mother was so domestic but not a physical person, while her father craved being taken care of. They’d battled ove
r who should take care of whom for almost twenty years. Meanwhile, who’d taken care of her?

  Suddenly Angie felt as if she were very, very young. Five years old, or maybe four. And lost, like the time she’d been lost at the zoo and had wandered into the park only to realize she couldn’t find her way home. At the time, she’d decided she’d just sit down on a rock and wait until she grew up, because she knew she couldn’t make a home for herself until she was older. When her mother had found her, she hadn’t cried. She’d just felt very, very lucky.

  Her luck, though, had changed. If she had sat on the rock all those years until she was grown up, the way she was today, she still wouldn’t be able to make a home for herself. She thought of all the care and attention she’d poured into the apartment in Marblehead. Picking out the sheer curtains, buying the sofa, and carefully stacking their wedding china—it had all been exciting but exhausting. She couldn’t do it again.

  She looked around her. Was this what she was doomed to, then? A room like a warehouse with nothing but a few cans in the larder? Her mother had once run a household and served warm nourishing dinners and put starched linen pillow cases on all the beds. Angie remembered the comfort of that. What had happened? Was her mother falling apart, Angie wondered? She seemed cheerful, though distracted, and now concerned for Angie. Was this the way every woman lived when they weren’t living for somebody else? Or was her mother in more pain than she was showing? The break-up with Laura could not have been easy for her.

  Whatever it was, however her mother felt, it was clear to Angie that there was no place for her here. Angie might as well go out and find a rock to sit on.

  With that knowledge, all of her loss seemed to tumble in on her. She began to cry and then not to cry, but to sob. Her shoulders began to heave in spasmodic jerks and the noise she was making was almost obscene.

  Natalie’s arms were around her in a moment. “Oh, baby. Oh, sweetheart,” Natalie said, stroking Angie’s greasy hair lovingly. “Oh, my little baby. You loved him that much? You loved that idiot so much? Mourn as long as you have to. But I think it couldn’t hurt you to start doing something for yourself. You definitely need your hair touched up. You want me to ask my guy to do it?”

  “Mom, my problems won’t be solved by highlights.”

  “No, but it’s a start.” Natalie took a deep breath. “You never really liked that job up in Needham. You just took it to be close to Reid.”

  Angie couldn’t remember now why she had taken the job, but she knew she was lucky to get it. It hadn’t been easy to get the month’s leave of absence, either. But Angie wasn’t ready to go back or to quit. She put her head down and hunched her shoulders, knowing what was coming.

  “Why don’t you give up those rich people’s wills and trust funds?” her mother asked her. “Why don’t you join our practice?”

  Angie looked up from the Formica tabletop and stared at her mother. Natalie ran a women’s legal services clinic where the clientele was primarily women so down and out, so pathetic, that they didn’t have a few thousand to ante up to an attorney.

  “I can’t work there,” Angie said, frightened of both the idea and her snobby repulsion. Her mother’s practice served mostly poor or embattled women coping with everything from a disastrous divorce to immigration problems to harassment. Angie wasn’t ready to spend her time helping other depressed women. She was too depressed herself. “I’m not registered with the bar here.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t drink I can swear you in until you get the bar,” Natalie said, and with a flourish brought a bottle of burgundy over to the table. She poured herself a glass—a jelly glass with blue dinosaurs on it—and then one for Angie. “Listen to me,” Natalie said, leaning forward and holding her glass of wine. “What the hell is the point of going back to the scene of the crime? What’s the point in going back to a selfish life where you’re thinking of nothing but your own pleasure—or your own pain? Believe me, one is worse than the other. Join us. We’ll get you through the bar in no time and we have a hundred women with problems so pressing, they’ll make your adventure with Reid look like a day at the circus. Did I tell you about the eighty-two-year-old woman evicted from—”

  “Mom, I don’t want to hear about her pain,” Angie interrupted, and took a swig of her wine. “I have my own.” This wasn’t what she had craved, what she had expected and needed. She wanted her mother to fix her old life for her, not offer her a new one … a boring, awful new one with a house like a garage and a job worse than social work.

  “You think I don’t understand?” Natalie asked, raising her brows. “Of course I understand. All you can do is think of him. How maybe it didn’t happen, how you are looking for excuses, or, if there is no excuse, how maybe it was your fault and then you can forgive him anyway. How just because it happened once before, doesn’t mean it’ll happen again. Yup, I know what you’re thinking. But those are all the desperate configurations of a rat trapped in a maze, looking for the little bar to press to get the cocaine that the scientist administers at the end of every test. You’re obsessed with your future former husband because you’re still hoping somehow you can get that hit of affection. That hit of sex.”

  Angie turned her head away. Her mother might be accurate, but accuracy didn’t feel like what she needed right now. Natalie leaned across the table, trying to get closer, but Angie kept her face averted. Natalie’s voice softened. “You feel like without it you can’t go on, that you’re trapped. But I’m here to tell you that being ‘in love’ is only an addiction. It keeps delusions going. It separates you from your real life, from real love, which you can feel for a friend, God, an animal, even a man. ‘In love’ sets you up to worship Prince Reid, some false idol you’ve erected within your temple. You were only with him for a year, Angie. You’re young—only twenty-eight. Oh, there can be a man, later, if you want one. A good man, one who could be there for you.” Natalie’s voice toughened up then. “One who doesn’t look like Brad Pitt in any way.”

  Angie stood up and reached for her purse. Somehow she felt more depressed but less hysterical then she’d been. Her mother hugged her. “You look beat,” Natalie said, patting her on the shoulder. She hugged her again and Angie, too weak to hug back, let herself melt against her mother. That was what she wanted: to melt, to disappear, to lose herself forever.

  “Do you want to sleep over?” Natalie asked. “I can unfold a cot I use when we get full at the crisis center.”

  Angie restrained herself from shivering. The idea of sleeping on a bed of misery here in this warehouse made her father’s sofa and the plaster infinity signs overhead seem almost heavenly. “No,” Angie said. “I’m just fine.”

  “Yeah,” her mother said. “You’re fine and I’m skinny.”

  Angie managed to give her mother a watery smile before she shrugged into her coat and left.

  11

  In which dinner and an ultimatum are both served

  Jada and Michelle had planned to rendezvous at Post Road Pizza, but Michelle had called back to say she had to go down and pick up Frank. Jada pulled the car into the driveway, got out, and opened the rear door for Jenna. Jenna got out, moving slowly, as if overnight her eleven-year-old body had been transformed into an old woman’s. But at least she was moving. Frankie seemed to have become paralyzed, turned into a block of stone, or maybe ice, by the trauma of the last twenty-four hours. When Jada lifted him from the backseat, she was surprised by his heaviness. The kid couldn’t weigh more than forty pounds, but as dead weight he felt like the huge bags of Sacrete that Clinton used to throw so easily across his shoulder in the old days. Jada hugged the little boy to her, freed up a hand, and put it on Jenna’s shoulder as she led them into the house.

  When Clinton looked up from the kitchen table, Jada knew immediately that there would be trouble. She decided to ignore him for as long as she could. Normalization was the goal here, and since she normally ignored Clinton anyway, that was the route to take.

 
“Hey, Kevon! Hey, Shavonne! Guess who’s here?” she called out. Shavonne wasn’t crazy about Jenna lately—sometimes they got along and sometimes they fought—but Kevon adored Frankie. Kevon ran into the kitchen, but skidded to a stop when she put Frankie down on the linoleum. Kevon stood almost as still as his friend, then his eyes flicked from Frankie’s face to his mom’s.

  “What’s wrong with him?” he asked her in a hoarse kid’s whisper, as if he could already tell that Frankie wasn’t talking and maybe couldn’t hear.

  Jada felt Clinton’s disapproval from all the way across the room. He was such a hypocrite! He’d hung with some neighborhood brothers who’d gotten in plenty of trouble, and once or twice had even brought the kids along until she’d put her foot down.

  “He had a bad sleepover,” she said. “Remember when you had that sleepover at Billy’s?” Kevon nodded. It wasn’t easy for her son to be the only African-American in his grade. “Well, it was scarier than that. But he’s okay now. He’s with us.” She tightened her arm around Frankie, really talking to him. Kevon, bless his heart, reached his hand out to Frankie, who still stood immobile.

  “Come on, Frankie,” Kevon said. “We hate Billy.” Jada realized that Kevon thought Frankie had spent the night with Kevon’s little enemy. But she wasn’t going to bother to correct the picture because, thank the Lord, Frankie allowed Kevon to pull him out of the room. She turned to Jenna, who was chewing the end of her hair.

  “Is my mother coming back now?” Jenna asked.

  “She’s having dinner with your dad. He wanted pizza. We’ll be eating in a little while,” Jada said. Then she raised her voice and called her daughter again. Shavonne came into the kitchen clutching the baby.

  “Oh, hi,” she said, overly casual. She looked at Jenna. “I can’t really play with you now,” she told her self-importantly, “I’m baby-sitting my little sister.”