Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway? Page 3

  The rain is coming down in sheets. I am in the car with a bunch of kids who have raised bickering to an art form and seat selection to a matter of life or death. They are acting as if it’s weird to insist they all buckle up, like this is some new form of torture I’ve dreamed up, and not a state law. After I assure them we are not leaving the driveway until everyone is buckled, I turn on the radio in a vain attempt to tune them out.

  Seven youngsters traveling in a van with their parents were hurt, some of them seriously, when their father, the driver of the van, was fatally wounded by a gunshot in what police are calling a bizarre case of mistaken identity on Sunrise Highway early this morning….

  “Great,” Jesse says sarcastically, not even closing his book as he flips off the radio. “I don’t know why you listen to the news.” He looks at me accusingly, though I’m not sure what I’m being accused of. Maybe it’s that I can hear such horrors and still pull out of the driveway, heading off for posh shopping in the Hamptons. Shouldn’t I have to pull over to the side of the road to puke my guts out over such a story? And if not, shouldn’t I have to pull over and puke my guts out that I can hear such awful things, hour after hour, and still go off to get my daughter a dress, my baby a Beanie Baby and my son a new game for his Xbox? Oh, and pick up a nail-patch kit because the acrylic nail on my pinkie is coming loose, and maybe something to cheer Bobbie up, and there’s something else…

  Do I tell Jesse this? No. I say, “Because a person needs to know what’s going on in the world.” Better to sound like an old fart than to tell him I need to know what unimaginably awful thing I’ve managed to avoid so that I can count my blessings while I add new worries to my list.

  “Like you can do anything about it?”

  I ignore him while silently trying to devise ways to protect the children from death if I were to be shot in the head while driving on Sunrise Highway. Maybe there is another way to get out to the Hamptons without taking Sunrise Highway….

  I wonder if it’s normal to worry so much, and realize that I’ve got a new worry to add to the list—how much I worry.

  While I head down the LIE, the kids do what kids do. Dana calls Jesse a dork, Princess Cupcake whines about the Limp Bizket CD, Jesse moves his seat back and forth—all the usual stuff that so endear children to their parents while traveling in an enclosed space at a speed at which the slightest moment of inattention could kill them all.

  It is one of those how-did-I-get-here moments, the kind I share with any mother whose three children individually are the sweetest kids on earth, but who collectively comprise a band of escapees from Children of the Corn.

  “Are you all buckled up?” I ask as the rain drums on the moon roof and cars heading the other way send up sprays that hit the windshield and make the wipers whoosh. “Alyssa’s still buckled?” The least I can do, in the event of a bullet to the brain, is to make sure that the kids’ll be safe in their seats.

  “That’s three times you’ve asked,” Dana tells me. “Everybody’s buckled. Daddy is so right about you! You’re gonna drive yourself and us crazy with all your worrying.”

  “Dana! I’ll watch Alyssa,” Kimmie says, a little too quickly. “Don’t you worry about anything, Teddi.”

  Right. Don’t worry, I think as I look back and catch the glance between Dana and Kimmie, the one that says, You see how it is? Didn’t I tell you?

  Kimmie’s look, Yes, I see how it is. Poor you! says that suddenly I’ve become a major topic of discussion. Great.

  Are my frayed edges showing? Have they noticed something I’ve missed? Am I teetering closer to the edge of late? Or is it just that there are few things as dramatic as being eleven? My memories are certainly vivid enough and I have nothing but sympathy for Dana. Eleven is the age where weird is the worst thing you can be, when you realize that your parents are even weirder than your friends’ parents, and when you alternate between denying it to yourself and proving it to everyone else. Of course, when I was a kid, my mother won hands down.

  “Really, Mom, don’t worry,” Dana chimes in. It is a rare appearance by the old Dana, the sweet one who existed before she became possessed by the hormone demon that pimpled her face and put tears in her voice on a daily basis.

  “That’s my job,” I tell her. “It’s why they made me the Mom.”

  Sometimes I have this vision of myself as “Lucy in the Chocolate Factory.” Only instead of chocolates, worries keep coming out of the machine, faster and faster, and no matter where I stuff them, bury them, swallow them, there are always more worries. And like with Lucy, anyone watching just laughs at me.

  “Maybe you should get over now, Mom,” Dana says. “We’re supposed to get off at exit 70.”

  No learner’s permit in sight, and already Dana is an accomplished backseat driver. “Yes, honey, I’m putting on my signal, checking my rearview mir—”

  “Look out!” Jesse yells.

  But of course it is too late. The car is traveling too fast. Did it even occur to me to worry about hitting a deer? There you have it—proof positive that if you don’t worry about something, it’s bound to happen.

  Suffice it to say, the poor little wayward deer can’t avoid the optional-at-extra-cost grill guards on my Eddie Bauer edition Ford Expedition.

  “You’re sure you’re all right?” Rio asks for the third time. Standing in our den, still dressed in his camos with his blackened face, he looks like someone who’s emerged from a coal mine. Except that along with the sooty face he has touches of blue paint on his left shoulder and right thigh, and dirt everywhere else. “Nobody’s neck hurts or anything?”

  “We’re fine,” I say again, now worried about whether or not the kids will be fine tomorrow. Doesn’t whiplash take a day or two to show up?

  “Some other car didn’t make you swerve into the deer or anything?” he asks.

  “There’s no one to sue,” I assure him.

  “I wasn’t thinking of that,” he lies.

  Of course he was. No one tries harder to beat the system than my husband, and even I thought, for a nanosecond, that it would be nice if there were someone else to share the blame.

  “So then tell me one more time.” He takes a deep breath and I think we’re lucky that he can’t breathe and curse at the same time because if he wasn’t doing the former, he’d be doing the latter, for sure. “Slowly. From the beginning.”

  I start again, though I’ve gone over it all on the phone in detail. “We were going to Southampton.”

  “After that,” he says so tightly that I wince involuntarily. Of all the weekends to hit a deer, it had to be this one—the one he waits for all year? His one great escape from Bayer of the Bronx?

  “It was my fault,” Dana says, and her dark eyes are a little too bright. “I mean, we could have just gone to the mall.”

  “I should have been watching the road,” Jesse says, kicking the deep green glove-leather couch as he swings his leg nervously. “But Voldemort and Harry were having this big magic fight with the wands that have the phoenix feathers at their hearts and…”

  “Don’t kick the couch,” Rio says. It cost sixteen hundred dollars and he’s so ridiculously proud of this impractical, sticky-in-the-summer, cold-in-the-winter, dead-animal sofa that the kids aren’t supposed to snack on. He actually left the “genuine leather” tags hanging on it for three weeks after it arrived.

  “It was no one’s fault but my own,” I say. “I mean—”

  “It was the freakin’ deer’s fault,” Rio interrupts. “He had no business being on the Parkway—”

  “It was the Expressway,” I correct him, because I can’t leave well enough alone.

  You see, both the Parkway and the Expressway run the length of Long Island, and when it comes to hitting a deer I really can’t blame Rio for missing the distinction. Not when I’ve done, according to him (now read this in a deep, husky voice, because that’s the way he said it) “a good fourteen hundred dollars’ worth of damage to the car on top of draggi
ng me home from Neversink.”

  “Oh, excuse me,” he says, all but bowing to me. “I stand corrected. Now that I know it was the Expressway it makes all the difference….”

  “I just thought you’d want to know where you nearly lost your family,” I tell him, adding, “while you were off hurling paint.”

  “You don’t hurl paint—you shoot off rounds,” he corrects me right back. Well, “shooting off” is something he has a fair amount of practice doing. And it makes a difference what you call the stupidest sport next to Olympic skeleton races?

  “It gets worse,” I warn him. Believe me, he is not going to like this part. Not that I had a choice. Even now that I’m calmer, sure the children are fine and that the deer will be, I can’t see that there was anything else I could have done.

  “I don’t see how.”

  He needs a better imagination. I can think of half-a-dozen ways right off the top of my head.

  “I leave eight guys in Neversink who are, let me tell you, never gonna let this go, and you’ve got a smashed-up truck. I can see you and the kids are fine—thank God—which is more than I can say for the deer. But I guess you could say he learned his lesson, even though it only cost him his life. Me it’s costing—”

  “Oh, he’s not dead, Daddy,” Alyssa pipes up, preempting me before I can come up with some way to break it to him gently, gradually, set up the scene so he understands that I had no choice—not really. “He’s going to be fine after they osperate.”

  “Operate,” Dana corrects her, sliding an inch or two closer to my left side while Jesse closes ranks on my right.

  “First off,” I say, sinking to a new low (and setting a terrible example for my daughters) by trying to look cute. “I really am sorry I ruined your weekend. I’m sorry you had to leave your buddies high and dry and I’m sorry that the car has to be repaired and the vet is going to cost a fortune.”

  I slip out from between the kids and stand, hands on hips. Screw looking cute. If he doesn’t get it, is that my fault?

  “But I just nearly killed a deer with the kids in the car. I’m feeling lucky that we’re all physically and—thanks to that vet—emotionally fine, though I am a little shaky, so if you don’t mind…” I take a step toward the kitchen, though I have no idea what I want to do when I get there, and really, what can I possibly say that will make up for interrupting his paint-hurling extravaganza?

  “Did you say vet?” Rio, refusing to take his eyes off my face, is feeling with his foot for the ottoman. When he finds it, he lowers himself down heavily. “There was a vet there?”

  I sit back down between the kids, prepared to defend myself. “Well, Alyssa was crying and saying that I killed Bambi,” I say at the same time that Dana starts explaining about how the vet wants to put some kind of plates in the deer’s hip and Jesse announces that we called him on the cell phone. I squeeze my son’s thigh, trying to warn him to shush, but he goes on adding fuel to the fire. “First there was the police, and they said Mom must be crazy to wanna call a vet, but…”

  Rio cuts Jesse off. “You’re telling me you called a freakin’ veterinarian for a damn wild deer?” His voice is rising ominously, but then all his anger seems to suddenly vanish, replaced by a wary smile. “Oh, I get it. This is a joke, right? One of your damn Jewish jokes, like you think the repairs on the car are bad? Wait’ll you hear about the repairs on the deer! Right?”

  “You know, you sounded, for a second, a lot like the policeman,” I say, trying to keep the atmosphere light. “He thought I was joking, too. But really, what was I supposed to do, Rio? That little deer was clearly suffering.”

  Rio shakes his head. “This isn’t a joke or something?” he asks, his eyebrows raising in question.

  “The dumb cop was gonna shoot it,” Jesse says.

  “Don’t call a cop dumb,” Rio tells our son. Now you need to know here that Rio has worse adjectives than dumb for cops on Long Island (and he knows his share of them from back before we were married and his crowd included men with nicknames like Snake and the Nose). “So you’re telling me that you called a veterinarian to come and take care of a deer that did two thousand dollars’ worth of damage to my car?”

  The whole thing is now spiraling out of control. “My car,” I correct him, because I like to live dangerously, I suppose. After all, he’s got my adorable little Corvette and what do I drive? The “family” car so that I can tote around all these children he isn’t taking into account. “What did you want me to do? Back up over it and put it out of its misery?”

  Alyssa starts to cry. Good girl, I think. I give him a look that says, see?

  He cuts to the chase. “How much?”

  “He estimates eleven hundred.” I say it as quietly as I can so that it doesn’t sound like quite so much. Is it my fault that this fall Rio will be out there trying to kill the poor little fawn—along with all its relatives?

  “Three thousand for the car repairs, fifteen hundred for the deer…You get her a dress?” he asks as calmly as he is capable of at the moment, pointing with his chin at Dana.

  Dana opens her mouth, but I answer quickly, not wanting Rio to be annoyed with my little girl. “Bobbie wound up taking them to Walt Whitman Mall. She found a dress at Bloomingdale’s.”

  He waits, one eyebrow raised, for me to supply the amount. The price is outrageous, but Dana looks gorgeous in the dress, and it’s hard to blame Bobbie for wanting to stick it to every husband she knows. “Around two hundred,” I say, trying to sound offhand.

  He nods, slowly. “And I take it she can’t wear this to the bat mitzvah, right? This is for a fifth-grade graduation dance,” he says, making it abundantly clear that he is only pretending to find this in any way rational. What is he thinking, anyway? That I’ll be able to get away with a store-bought dress for Dana or for me for the bat mitzvah? Is he kidding? The other mothers are already recommending dressmakers and comparing the cost of dyed-to-match suede heels while they wait in the hallway at shul to pick up their kids from Hebrew school. I may not have actually read it in The Handbook, but even I know that the possibility of someone else showing up at her bat mitzvah in the same dress she’s wearing would land Dana on a shrink’s couch for life, and buy me a permanent place in my mother’s doghouse.

  Rio claps his hands once and leaves them clasped. “Okay. That’s forty-seven-hundred dollars for your weekend. Twenty-eight dollars for mine.”

  “Hey, maybe we should have gone to Disney World instead,” Jesse pipes up. When did the kid develop a death wish? Clearly he wouldn’t last until the first commercial on Survivor—Children’s Edition.

  “It’s one of those Kodak moments,” Rio says, shaking his head. He holds up his hands, framing the scene. “The Day Mom Hit the Deer.”

  “I’ll help pay for the deer,” Dana says between sniffs.

  “Aren’t you the one who spent more today for your little dress than I used to earn in a month?” Rio asks her. I guess he’s not counting the hot car parts.

  “Me, too,” Jesse offers, trying to come to my rescue. “You can take a quarter out of my allowance every week.”

  “Until you’re eighty?” Rio asks him, but I can see that his anger is waning.

  “Could the deer come live here when it’s all better?” Alyssa asks.

  Rio looks as if he’s actually considering it, but finally says that he has no use for canned hunts.

  I try not to roll my eyes the way I do when his hunting license shows up in the mail each fall. “Deer need to be free. And you children need to go to bed,” I add, pushing Alyssa off my lap and giving her a pat on the rump.

  “Do you have to go to work tomorrow, Daddy?” Princess Cupcake asks, patting Rio’s leg as if he’s some big dog.

  “Your grandpa, Mr. Generosity, gave me the day off,” he says, sending daggers at me with his eyes, as if I planned this whole thing in order to ruin his big Warpigs Weekend. Tempting as that might have been, I never would have used an innocent deer to do it. “And I only
had to promise him my right arm. I guess you and me can go watch Jesse play some ball, okay?” He sends me a happy now? look through narrowed eyes.

  Just ecstatic, I shoot back with a plastic smile.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re all okay,” he says, and the anger is gone from his voice now, and a huskiness tingeing it instead as he pets Alyssa’s head. He stares hard at me and I can feel the caress in his gaze. The temperature in the room rises twenty degrees when he flashes that crooked you’ve-still-got-it-and-I-still-want-it smile at me.

  “I really am sorry,” I say softly as he lets his gaze drift down my body until I begin to squirm, what with the kids right there and all.

  “No,” Rio says softly. “You rescue a damn deer, and I think the whole world would agree with me, you’re not sorry, you’re crazy.” But he is smiling at me as if he kind of likes crazy. Like he’s given it some thought and decided crazy isn’t such a bad thing for me to be.

  CHAPTER 3

  It’s Memorial Day, the biggest furniture-sale day of the year. Rio is back in Neversink, and my father should be at Bayer Furniture and not my front door. But here he is, his sad face peering back at me through the sidelights. He is barely balancing several bags from the new Fairway Market in Plainview, and there is a crate of Haifa oranges by his foot.

  I take two of the bags from him and jerk my head toward the kitchen, indicating he should follow me. “So Mom’s back at South Winds, then?” I ask. Well, it is more like a statement. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what my father is doing at my door, laden with food, on one of the biggest sale days of the year. Ever since the first time my mother was taken to the psychiatric hospital, my father has been buying groceries to mark her admittance. When I was little, my father did it because someone had to and Angelina didn’t drive. Or maybe Angelina didn’t buy him what he liked. I don’t really remember. I just know that the ritual didn’t stop with my marriage to Rio. It doesn’t matter that I don’t live at home anymore, that I’ve outgrown the cookies. If my mother goes into South Winds, my father shows up with cookies. It may not compare to gathering around the spinet to sing Christmas carols on Christmas Eve, but for my family, it’s a tradition.