Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway? Read online

  “Okay. I’ll play,” he says. “Let’s say I say, ‘Mike would have to be nutzo to leave Bobbie.’ What’s your first thought, Teddi?” He watches me struggle to answer without outright lying. “You’re off thinking that I’ve got a thing for her, right?”

  My answer is a shrug. What man wouldn’t have a thing for Bobbie, with that flat stomach and those perky little breasts, which have no stretch marks even though the woman had twins? How do some women get away with that? This morning I would have felt the usual stab of jealousy, but tonight is a whole new ball game.

  “But, if I take Mike’s side and say your friend is a selfish, spoiled little you-know-what who’d gnaw the hand that fed her if she was hungry enough, you’ll decide that next I’m leaving you, right?”

  Well, the thought has crossed my mind…only a million times in the last ten minutes. The truth is that the first time I saw Rio, I lost my ability to speak, to breathe. My first thought was that he had a John Travolta sexy smile, but let me tell you, God was only practicing on J. T. When he got it right, he created Rio. Of course, that was twelve years ago, and John Travolta surprised us all by proving to be a fine wine…. Don’t get me wrong, Rio hasn’t exactly gone to pot, but where John Travolta has somehow managed to evolve from Vinnie Barbarino to expensive champagne, Rio has only made it as far as Corona with lime.

  I don’t know what made me say that. I don’t even like beer—with lime or without. And Rio is still handsomer than John Travolta—then or now.

  “So what’s your plan in that sexy little negligee, Ted? You figuring we can screw each other’s brains out so you can be sure I’m really here, and really staying? That about sum it up?” He looks smugly at me while I squirm.

  I tell him that I probably would not have put it exactly that way. What I want to say is that he is a hundred percent wrong when we both know damn well that he is a hundred percent right. Always two steps ahead of me. That’s Rio. He sees through me like a plate-glass window, knows my thoughts before I even have them.

  “You can wrap it in any fancy words you want,” he tells me as he unbuttons his shirt and pulls it off, throwing it toward the bench at the foot of the bed and stretching out next to me. “You wanna make me glad to be here, don’t let me stop you.”

  Well, I was asking for it, wasn’t I, all dolled up in a black negligee? I run my hand down his bare chest, his curls reaching out to capture my fingers, but all I can think about is Bobbie and Mike and how a wife can just not know. “Look, could you just tell me that our marriage is nothing like theirs?” I ask. He leans toward me, nibbling at my neck while he works the strap of my nightgown down my arm. “I mean—”

  “No, it’s nothing like theirs,” he agrees, freeing one breast from behind the black lace trap I’ve set.

  “And we’re happy, right? I mean you are, aren’t you?” I ask, wanting to hear him say it, hear him promise.

  “I’m getting happy,” he mumbles against my midriff as he tries to pull my gown down over my hips. I raise myself, trying to make it easier, but he’s already moving on, leaving the nightgown puddled at my waist while his hands play over me as if I’m an instrument he knows well, on which he is merely practicing his scales. “Happier…”

  After a few minutes he stops. “What?” I ask, shifting and grinding my bottom into the bed. “Why are you stopping?”

  Raising himself up on one elbow, he lazily runs his finger up and down my arm. Finally he speaks. “So your father and I talked. And he thinks buying the building next door for the outlet center is a good idea.”

  “I thought he was against it,” I say, telling myself it’s only the cool May night that chills me, and not fear, not foreboding. “And besides, we’re doing fine the way we are, aren’t we? Don’t we have this wonderful house, these great kids and—”

  “—a father-in-law who looks at his watch every time I take a crap. I need to get out of there, Teddi. Can’t you understand that? Even felons get time off for good behavior. When do I get my time off?”

  I understand what he’s saying, but at this point it’s simply a matter of patience. “My father is seventy years old, Rio. Boca is calling his name louder and louder every day. A year, two, maybe, and Bayer Furniture will be yours. You’ll be able to—”

  “Right,” he says without enthusiasm. “Next year. And what if in the meantime that brother of yours comes home?”

  “And what if the earth stops turning? Now you sound like my mother, Rio. David isn’t coming home.”

  Rio runs his fingers through his hair the way he always does when he’s frustrated.

  “It’s a great business opportunity, but your father hasn’t got any vision. It’s like he’s got cataracts of the brain or something.”

  “If it’s such a good investment, maybe you and my father should explain to the bank—”

  “What? You think they’ll just hand us over half a mil with no collateral? You live in this dream world, Teddi, but just because you got born with one of those silver spoons, it doesn’t mean it’s so easy for the rest of us, you know. You want to start a business with Bobbie and poof, a couple weeks later you two are painting furniture and selling it in Cold Spring Harbor. The rest of us, us normal people, aren’t so lucky.”

  Luck, my father always says, is the residue of hard work. So is my business with Bobbie, but Rio doesn’t want to hear that. So instead I suggest that we consider taking all the money we are planning to spend on the kids bar and bat mitzvahs and roll it into Rio’s shot at being his own boss.

  You’re thinking that’s a pretty gutsy, generous thing for me to do, and I’d love to leave you with that impression, but I know my husband. His favorite game is I can’t because…

  “Oh, that’d be great,” he says as if he’s reading from my script. “I can just see working with your father every day if I didn’t get his kids mitzvahed.” It’s not a word, but since it isn’t happening, anyway, I let it go.

  “He’d get over it,” I say. My mother is another story, but again, it isn’t happening and I know it and he knows it.

  “He’d take it out on me every day for the rest of my life. And he’d cut us out of his will. And the kids.”

  “I’m not saying it would be easy.”

  “If he’d only retire,” he says.

  I murmur my agreement.

  “Or, we could put up the house.”

  I didn’t see that coming. I thought this was a simple whining session and my job was to sympathize and stroke him through it. He takes advantage of my momentary speechlessness to tell me that the building is going for a song. “By the time we have to pay for college we’ll be raking it in faster than we can count it. If we—”

  College, I remind him, is right around the corner.

  “You’re right,” he says, flipping onto his back and putting his hands behind his head. “Forget it.”

  And we lie there for a few minutes in the semidarkness, the security lights out back giving the room an unnatural glow. I make a few tentative movements, test the waters by skimming his chest with my hand, but he doesn’t respond.

  My mind wanders to Bobbie, lying alone in a king-size bed, so I start raining kisses on Rio’s chest, working my way down lower and lower. Above me somewhere, he sighs. Is that a contented, this is the life kind of sigh I hear, or is it asking is this going to take all night?

  After a while, during which it seems nothing I do even remotely excites him, Rio comes to life. He flips me onto my back and teases my nipple with his teeth. He runs his hands down my belly and his fingers wind their way inside me until I am slick and ready and arching against his hand.

  I am so close to there, to home, to safety. I push myself against his hand, offering myself up to him, straining, lifting myself from the mattress, cooing, my fists gripping the coverlet on the bed, my neck arching, my breathing loud enough to embarrass me, on the threshold of not caring who hears me.

  Only he doesn’t enter me. Instead he props himself up on an elbow, and when he shoul
d be telling me how beautiful I am, how rich and full I make his life, he folds his pillow in half and leans against it.

  “What?” I ask, reaching out for him, wondering where the bliss has gone. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he says, and his body seems to relax. I fight to control my breathing, to come down from the cloud I was lost in, and as soon as my heart begins to beat regularly he seeks me out once more, only to hesitate yet again as soon as my breathing betrays me.

  And now I’m wise to his game and I have had enough of it. I sit up, jumping away from his touch and hugging a pillow to my chest, and ask him point-blank, “Are you trying to drive me crazy? Is that it?”

  He runs one finger up my spine until it reaches my hair. He sits up behind me, trying to win me over by kissing my shoulders, my neck, reaching over and using his tongue to play with my ear. But I refuse to be so easily won. “Am I driving you crazy?” he asks, knowing that despite my protests I am putty in his hands, always was, probably always will be.

  I nod, stretching my neck back in search of his mouth. He lifts my hair, licks the back of my neck and blows softly on my skin.

  “Am I?” he demands, his voice low, his manhood pressing against my hip.

  “Yes,” I admit, slipping down flat on the bed, trying to pull him into position above me. “Stark raving mad.”

  He says I haven’t seen anything yet, and slips down my body until his face is buried between my legs and his tongue is doing things I swear no man has ever done to any woman before. And he keeps at it even after I think I can’t bear it anymore, after I’ve come and come again and am calling out so loudly that he has to put his hands over my mouth so that I don’t wake the kids.

  When it’s over, and we’re lying satiated and sticky and our breaths have evened out, he begins to punch the pillows as if there is no place in the bed that he can get comfortable.

  “You okay?” I ask him, realizing that I am the only one who has been satisfied, that, as they say, it’s all been about me. “Do you want—” I don’t know what I’m offering, I am barely awake, barely able to move my mouth, never mind my limbs.

  “I’m good,” he says. Only he isn’t, and I’m not so stupid that I think his misery has anything to do with sex.

  “Maybe I could talk to my father,” I offer as he massacres our best down pillows.

  “I told you to forget it, Teddi.” His voice is dreamy, disconnected.

  “But—”

  “Forget about it,” he says, and I can tell his lips are tight and it isn’t easy for him to push the words out. He settles himself behind me, spooning. “Oh, yeah. Did you wash my camos for tomorrow?” he asks, referring to the army camouflage fatigues he wears for paintball. “I gotta leave first thing in the morning.”

  “Angelina did the wash yesterday,” I say, not sure if I actually saw the stupid green clothes that signal a weekend away. “They must be in the basket in the laundry room.”

  “Thank God for Angelina,” he says, sleep dulling his voice. It’s a sentiment I’ve uttered a thousand times since I was a little girl and she came to live with us and take care of my mother’s house and family. Now, once a week, she does the same for me. It lets me, once a week, leave the house without Alyssa’s three favorite Lil Bratz, a backpack full of Beanie Babies and, of course, Alyssa. It lets me shop for bras without Jesse tagging along and trying all the 38DD bras on his head as if they were yarmulkes. And it lets me listen to the oldies station in the car instead of Dana’s Limp Bizkit CD.

  And sometimes at the end of the day we sit together at my kitchen table, the way we did at my mother’s, and I tell her about my fears and hopes and dreams and she tells me about her wishes for me and by the time she leaves we have conquered the worst of my demons.

  Rio’s arm snakes around my middle. “You got the gift for my mother, right?”

  “Mmm,” I say, waiting for his breathing to even out. When I am sure he is asleep I let out the sigh I am holding.

  It comes out ragged, and when I touch my chest, I can feel my heart beating frantically. It was the incredible sex, I tell myself. Not my forgetting one silly gift. Everyone forgets things, I tell myself. I am a busy woman with three children to take care of. There are bound to be a few things that slip through the cracks. The fact that I’ve forgotten Theresa’s present is probably that covert hostility my mother is always accusing me of. Indirect sabotage.

  So what if I also forgot the graph paper Jesse asked me for again and the Beanie Baby I promised Alyssa? So what if I don’t remember picking up Rio’s suit? It’s in the closest, isn’t it? Isn’t that what counts?

  So what if I forget a thing or two? I never claimed to have great organizational skills.

  So forget the idea that I am becoming my mother because a thing or two slipped my mind.

  Just forget it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Rio left early this morning in a huff, angry that I forgot to buy his mother’s birthday gift. Hard as it is to believe, his plan—despite the fact that it was five o’clock in the morning—was to stop at her place on his way to his paintball extravaganza upstate. What kind of mother wants to see her grown son at that hour? The same kind, I suppose, who irons underwear. Enough said?

  So anyway, when the phone rings at eight-thirty, I expect it to be Rio, calling to apologize for being a total jerk.

  Instead, a hoarse voice tells me, “We need to get footcials.”

  “Excuse me?” I have no idea what my mother is talking about.

  “I saw it on the Today Show,” she tells me. “It gets your feet ready for Manolo Blahniks.”

  I remind my mother that she has given up wearing any shoes with heels higher than two-and-a-half inches, and that, as far as I know, Manolo doesn’t make heels shorter than four.

  My mother says that I am missing the point. The truth is, I often do. Unlike my mother, unlike Bobbie and most of my neighbors, I can’t seem to get my hands on a copy of The Secret Handbook of Long Island Rules. All of them deny such a thing exists, but I know better. How else can they all know which is the “right” kind of car to drive this year and where, which piece of jewelry is the “right” one to wear this month and when, and which is the “right” store to buy whatevers this week and why? And it’s not only the purchases. They all know the required moves to keep advancing on the food chain, or at least not lose ground.

  Several of my neighbors have taught me, for example, that it is perfectly acceptable to miss hospital visiting hours after your husband’s bypass surgery if going means missing your standing nail appointment. Of course, this doesn’t apply when visiting your new grandchild, but no one, with the possible exception of my mother, would do something that awful.

  My mother has no need for The Handbook, as she was born knowing The Rules. And she has told me in no uncertain terms that she hopes that this genetic trait has simply skipped a generation and been passed on to my children. To her, ignorance of the rules is as serious as diabetes or some other fatal ailment. And it’s no excuse.

  Bobbie doesn’t just know The Rules, she probably codified them.

  “So what’s a footcial, anyway?” I ask my mother because Bobbie hasn’t filled me in on this one and I’m afraid that I have missed out on yet another important initiation ritual of Suburban Society.

  She describes one in detail, including scrubs and masks, as basically a facial for one’s feet. I can’t figure out why I suddenly need to know all this until she tells me that, according to Katie Couric, the best ones are in the City. (For those of you who live in other parts of the country, Long Islanders believe there is only one city—and it is not called Manhattan, or even New York—but simply, “the City.”) My mother doesn’t drive into the City, and thinks that the Long Island Railroad is for businessmen, for women who frequent bargain matinees, and for derelicts, none of which she aspires to be. She wants me to drive her, hence the we in “we need footcials.”

  “I have Dr. Cohen on Thursday at eleven,” my mother tell
s me, as if she hasn’t had a standing appointment with her psychiatrist for the past thirty or so years. Even I, in the advanced stages of forgetfulness that Rio claims I have entered, can remember that. The man had the nerve to leave me a list with things on it like brush your teeth, which he claims I’ve been forgetting lately, along with several other things.

  When I agree to take her at some vague date between next week and hell freezing over, she tells me not to forget, like I always do. I’d argue with her, but then she’d bring up the one time I forgot to send her a Mother’s Day card when I was busy giving birth to Alyssa two days before. Then I’d remind her that I did call, and she’d assure me that a call and a card are not the same thing. (I know, I know—it’s in The Rules.)

  “You forget all the time,” she tells me as she takes a drag off her Newport Light and blows smoke in my face through the telephone lines. “You’re, what’s that word? With an A? You’re absentminded.”

  I get off the phone, telling my mother that it’s apparently time for me to go to my laboratory and invent flubber, but the reference sails over her head. From there, the day goes downhill. I botch up two nightstands I’m supposed to be painting with Spider-Man, not Superman. Jesse breaks his glasses. Dana forgets her wallet on a shopping expedition. Alyssa paints her own nightstands—with toothpaste. Mike doesn’t come home to Bobbie and the girls.

  And now it’s Sunday, and things aren’t looking a whole lot better. Bobbie has backed out of our plans to go out to the Hamptons for graduation dresses for the girls in favor of staying home to cut Mike’s picture out of every photo in the family album while watching Olivia de Havilland get her revenge on Montgomery Clift for deserting her in The Heiress again. The movie may be PG, but Bobbie’s performance is definitely NFC, as in Not for Children. Her daughter Kristin has bailed already, and Kimmie has opted to come with us.