Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway? Read online

  My cheeks burn as I imagine the women sitting with my mother overhearing our conversation. “Is there anything you need?” I ask. “Anything I can bring you?”

  I expect a sarcastic answer, like a faithful husband, a divorce or a gun, so I am surprised when she says, “I need a manicure.” I don’t have a chance to respond before she adds that just because she’s in a nut house doesn’t mean she doesn’t care how she looks. “You are how you feel, Teddi. I don’t know why you can’t grasp the concept. You dress well, you feel well. You wear raggedy old clothes with paint drips on them, you feel raggedy and old. Look at your husband. He dresses like a fancy dandy, and he thinks he is one. Who’s to say he’s not? Illusions, Teddi. They’re all we’ve got.”

  Somehow I feel there is a Rule in there, but my mother’s logic shakes me. I promise to take her for one of those foot facials when she is well.

  “Are you happy, Teddi?” she asks me, and the question seems to come out of nowhere, until I realize she’s testing me to see if the lesson has taken.

  “Yes, Mom, I’m happy,” I tell her. After all, if I say I am, who’s to say I’m not?

  CHAPTER 9

  On my dreaded thirty-seventh birthday I am alone in my queen-size bed. I can hear my family in the kitchen, Jesse still pumped from his trip to Yankee Stadium with his grandfather, the girls shouting about who will cut a flower for Mommy’s surprise birthday breakfast tray. Please let them just make an English muffin and coffee, I vainly pray, remembering how hard it was to get the dried egg off the stove last year, and how the year before I had to throw out the bacon griddle. It was so far gone that even Angelina couldn’t clean it.

  “Okay, let’s turn the volume down,” I hear Rio saying as they head up the stairway like a herd of elephants. Quickly I scoot under the covers and close my eyes, pretending to be asleep so that they can wake me up with shouts of “Happy Birthday!”

  “Shh!” Jesse shouts at one or the other of his sisters. “You’ll wake her up!”

  Of course, he says this so loudly I would need to be in a coma for his shushing not to wake me up. Still, when they open the bedroom door, I am playing my part.

  “Happy birthday!” they all yell, and I open my eyes and give them my best surprised look, like I have no idea the day, the breakfast, the rose and all were coming. Rio probably thinks I don’t.

  “Oh! Aren’t you the sweetest family any woman could ask for?” I say, stretching and sitting up in the bed, patting the comforter around me to invite them all to sit down. “Look at this!” I purr as Rio puts the tray across my lap. He’s got that I’m so proud of myself look I always find so irresistible because he combines it with this raising of his eyebrows that adds I hope, I hope to the mix.

  Alyssa scrambles up onto the bed. Thankfully Rio knows Alyssa well enough to fill the juice glass only halfway, and put the saucer on top of the coffee cup.

  “Happy birthday, Mommy!” our littlest one says, shoving at me the computer-generated card with the Internet-perfect characters and the Comic Sans MS font that Dana has obviously helped her make. Whatever happened to doilies and crayons and each child’s card being recognizable? She takes my face in her two chubby little hands and, inches from my nose, says, “We didn’t get you a pool for your birthday!”

  I grin weakly. Alyssa comes up with the wildest things.

  “Of course you didn’t,” I start to say, until it dawns on me that Dana and Jesse are actually yelling at Alyssa for letting the cat out of the bag. “We said not to tell her!” they shout, while my eyes connect with Rio’s for a flash of truth before he looks away.

  Impossible. It can’t be, I think, unable to breathe, unable to swallow. I wave my hands, trying to tell Rio that I am choking, dying—help me, or get the kids out of the room so they don’t witness it.

  “It’s got all the bells and whistles, Ted,” he says, not even realizing that I am going to die, then and there, in my bed with my birthday breakfast on my lap and my children crowded around me. “One of those electric-eye things that can tell if a fly is breathing near it, a special cover that’ll hold an elephant or something, six-foot-high fencing around the whole magilla—”

  “Are you out of your mind?” I sputter when I can find my voice. I am blinking wildly, pinching my leg hard to see if maybe I’m dreaming and that this is a nightmare from which I can wake up.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know,” he says, putting his hands up as if I am some customer who doesn’t want to go for Scotchgard on the matching ottoman. “I shoulda talked it over with you first, but it’ll help my brother-in-law Joey out. Maybe keep his job with the pool guys he works for. And it’s not that expensive. Besides, I knew you wouldn’t want to treat yourself—”

  “Treat myself? Rio! My brother…?”

  “David?” He looks puzzled, and then the dim bulb over his head comes to life and he smacks his forehead. “Oh, Jesus H. Christ! Markie! I can’t believe I didn’t think of that!”

  “You can’t believe it?”

  He looks at the kids. He looks at me. He sits down on the bed and stares at the carpeting. I opt for the ceiling.

  “Okay, here’s what we do,” he says. “I’ll get some kind of swimming teacher for Alyssa. You know, teach her, and maybe give Jesse and Dana some pointers, too. That way you can stop worrying about anything bad happening to the kids. We shoulda had someone teach her to swim years ago.”

  He asks Alyssa if she wants to learn to swim. I ask him if he’d like to have bamboo shoots stuck under his fingernails, but he just pats my legs.

  “For God’s sake, Rio. The kids aren’t even home in the summer. They go to camp.”

  Rio tells me that Dana is nearly too old for camp already, and that Jesse hates it.

  “I don’t—” Jesse starts, but Rio shoots him a look that shuts him up. I wonder how many times they’ve rehearsed the whole thing. We tell Mommy about the pool like it’s a wonderful thing, and then Alyssa, honey, you start to cry, and Jesse, you say how you hate camp.

  Rio is still rolling.

  I, on the other hand, am drowning. I imagine the Supremes dancing into the bedroom, looking resplendent in turquoise sequined bathing suits with matching Carmen Mirandaesque turbans. They are belting out, for all they are worth, Baby, where did our love go, and all your promises…

  Rio, of course, doesn’t see them. “And there’s plenty of time before and after camp, and it’ll increase the value of the house by tons more than it costs to put it in….”

  I am shaking my head before my eyes are open again. “I don’t want a pool,” I say, swallowing around the word as if even uttering it can hurt the kids. “We can’t afford a pool.”

  “Hey, everybody knows a pool is to a backyard what a Lexus is to the driveway. It’s pure status, honey. Raises our backyard a notch above all the other yards, and ergo all the houses in the neighborhood, making it an investment that can’t go down with the market. See? It’s like a Mercedes, only instead of losing half its value when you drive it out of the showroom, it increases what the house is worth, and what the owners are worth, too.”

  These are things that matter tremendously to Rio and about which I couldn’t care less. Besides, the danger of a pool so completely outweighs any possible status bump Rio might imagine. “I don’t want a pool,” I repeat. “And we aren’t getting one. We can’t afford one and I can’t live with one.” And that, I think, is that. Why couldn’t he get me some nice piece of jewelry like other husbands do? If he is so concerned with status, he could have gone for jewels. Everyone knows a diamond ring appreciates…and so would I.

  “Look, Ted, I can cancel the whole deal, but it’d be a mistake. A chance like this doesn’t come along every day. The whole thing isn’t gonna cost us one penny over cost cause Joey’s company is doing it. Who knows if that schmuck he works for will even be in business next year?”

  “Who cares?” I ask him back. How can he think that this is about money? Let’s risk the kids’ lives and your sanity this year, honey. It�
��s cheaper.

  “Please, Mom?” Jesse begs. I steel myself. If he asked me to let him go bungee jumping with that same pitiful look, would I have any trouble saying no?

  “Dad says I can have pool parties,” Dana says, “like Melinda Moskowitz.”

  “You know the damn thing will actually save us a fortune in the long run,” Rio says.

  Of course, I know better than this. It’s another Rule. The only way to have home parties is to have someone come in to entertain the children, or to inaugurate some new major purchase. There will be one pool party. The first one. After that, no one will be interested, the parties will return to restaurants, and there will be a very expensive hole in my backyard that I will beg to pave over on a daily basis. Were I to agree in the first place, which I won’t.

  “Melinda is the most popular girl in the fifth grade,” Dana reminds me. I doubt this for two reasons. (1) I’ve never heard her name mentioned before, and (2) her name doesn’t start with a J or an A.

  “You can’t buy friends,” I tell them. It’s weak, I know, but it is four against one, and I can’t find anything truly awful to say about their wanting a pool. I can’t blame them for wishing they had one, even if I am not ever going to give in.

  “Yeah, yeah. And you can’t buy happiness,” Rio agrees. Then with a nudge and a wink at Jesse, he tacks on, “but you can sure make one helluva down payment!”

  I don’t find that as funny as the kids do.

  “Look,” he says. “You want me to, I’ll cancel the whole deal first thing in the morning. Only the way I see it, that means you’re gonna live the rest of your life being superstitious, and we’re gonna spend this whole year watching you wait for something terrible to happen, instead of saying, ‘This is my life, not my mother’s, you don’t inherit accidents,’ and moving on. Come on, Teddi, isn’t that what the doctor told you?”

  Maybe she did say that a person couldn’t inherit accidents. But she didn’t say, ” so go home and have a pool installed.”

  “The kids want a pool, I want a pool—”

  “And so it’s my birthday present?” I ask. “What are you going to give me for Hanukkah? A ski trip for the four of you?”

  “We ordered you a float,” Jesse pipes up. “It’s got armrests that hold your drink and everything. And we ordered water wings for Alyssa and—”

  I tell them maybe when the princess is older, but Rio counters that Lys is nearly five.

  “By next summer, when we can really use it, she’ll be almost six. But hey, if your mother doesn’t want a pool…” Rio tells the kids, playing on the fact that there is nothing stronger in this world than Jewish guilt “…I gotta cancel it. Of course, then you guys’ll be stuck with the town pool again this year. And you’ll have to deal with the crap that goes on there.”

  Jesse and Dana look appropriately miserable. Lys starts to sniff.

  I am not giving in. Not this time, and not on this issue. I haven’t caved on Jesse crossing Jericho Turnpike at South Oyster Bay Road, even for Carvel, and I’m not caving for this. It isn’t happening. They can read my lips. On this, I will not budge. How he could even put me in this position, I don’t know. Is it fair to make me be the party pooper and admit to the kids that I am afraid, when he knows how important it is for me to be a good example?

  What kind of example am I setting? What kind of message will the children come out of this with? If something is hard, just throw up your hands?

  “But Daddy said…” Lys whines at me. Usually Rio doesn’t tolerate her whining, but this time he is letting it go. Heck, he’s probably given her a quarter to do it.

  “And I was thinking maybe I could talk your father into letting me take off a few Saturdays this summer, what with business being slow then, and we could spend weekends around the pool…us and Bobbie and the girls…Maybe even next Memorial Day weekend…”

  Man, he is slick. It’s like my father is always saying. Rio Gallo can sell anything. He could probably sell Wonder bread to Hasidim during Pesach.

  I feel my shoulders sag ever so slightly.

  “And Jesse could use the exercise,” Rio adds.

  I suppose this is true enough.

  “And I wanna learn to do the doggie paddle,” Alyssa pipes up. I raise an eyebrow at Rio. Over the top now, no?

  “And the hole in my backyard?” I ask, demanding to know how I am supposed to deal with that. “A huge hole anyone can fall into for weeks? Not to mention my flowers…”

  “I’ll move all the bushes myself,” Rio says while the kids whoop and holler. “I swear it. And the hole’ll only be there for about three weeks. Being as how I know how you’d worry about Alyssa and the hole and all, I called up Westwood Lake, and they’ve got kids going as young as Lys, so if you wanna, we could send her along with Jesse and Dana and—”

  “Send Alyssa to sleep-away camp?” If the pool is a shock, it is quickly paling in comparison to the idea of sending my baby off for seven weeks. Some lines cannot be crossed. “Absolutely not.”

  “So then it’s settled,” he says, as if I said okay, which technically, I haven’t. I can still change my mind. They’ll be disappointed, but if I can’t cut it, the pool is not going to happen. I can try living with the idea for a while. And, if I’m not really on my mother’s bus, I’ll be able to kiss all my fears goodbye.

  It is a huge, enormous, mammoth if.

  “Happy birthday, honey!” Rio says, reaching beneath the bed and pulling out a box with a bow on the top.

  Glaring at him, I move the untouched tray out of the way and lift the lid off the box.

  Great. Exactly what every thirty-seven-year-old woman who’s borne three kids wants.

  A bikini.

  CHAPTER 10

  Bobbie, her sister Diane, and I have been getting together for a Girls’ Night In since Dana and the twins were babies. We’ve continued the gatherings through my other two pregnancies (watching Baby Boom, Three Men and a Baby), through the remodeling of Bobbie’s house (The Money Pit, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House), through Diane’s months at the police academy (you guessed it, Police Academy 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), and the fact that Mike has jumped ship isn’t going to stop us now.

  Bobbie keeps saying that while she may have gotten the husband from hell, she’s got friends from heaven. Frankly I feel about as useful to Bobbie as a Hummer on Willis Avenue, but I try to be there for her, at least in body, ready to watch whatever stupid movie she and her sister want. And to pretend that life is normal for her sake.

  Not that I couldn’t use a large dose of normalcy myself these days. As Bobbie keeps saying, if I stand any closer to the edge, a boo from Rio will be enough to send me tumbling into the snake pit. She is not at all pleased about my allowing Rio to put a pool into my backyard. Like I’m happy about it?

  No happier than I am about rehashing the birthday fiasco at my mother-in-law’s, the details of which Bobbie has related to Diane.

  “I don’t know why you always agree to spend your birthday at your mother-in-law’s, anyway,” Bobbie says, placing the blame on me, as she seems to do about everything lately. She takes another swig of her merlot and offers me some, and I tell myself it is the wine, and not my friend, attacking me.

  “What?” I ask playfully, trying to make a joke of the whole thing. “You wouldn’t choose to spend your birthday with a woman who thinks you’ve ruined her son’s life? Who purposely forgets every year that you are lactose-intolerant and puts cheese on everything in the hopes of either starving you or confining you to the bathroom throughout the meal because every time she looks at you she sees one of the daughters from Fiddler on the Roof?”

  They both look at me as if I’m babbling, which, though I’ve done a bit of it lately, I’m not at the moment. I pick up Igor, Bobbie’s cat, and settle him on my lap while I continue.

  “Okay, you remember that part in Annie Hall when Diane Keaton’s grannie looks at Woody Allen—pre-Soon-Yi, when we could still like him—and she sees him like Hasidim with
one of those tall hats and long sideburns? Well, that’s how Mama Theresa looks at me.”

  I release Igor, who clearly doesn’t want to be held, and reach for a diet Coke, pour some into a glass and clink it against Bobbie’s raised one. “Here’s to a better meal than my birthday scungilli. I don’t know when I’m ever going to learn. You’d think I’d remember from year to year, but lately I can’t remember from minute to minute.”

  Mistake.

  Bobbie exchanges a look with her sister. Clearly they have been talking about me. They see what I think I’ve been hiding. I feel naked. I want to run home, only that isn’t where I want to be. Panic swells like a tidal wave, and I want, no, I need, to run somewhere. Is Marshall’s still open? CVS is twenty-four/seven. So’s Home Depot, where I could pick up some new batteries for the Palm Pilot Rio came home with last night.

  “You have that estrogen patch on from the doctor?” Bobbie asks, and I imagine myself in my new bikini, complete with a tire patch across my belly, courtesy of the new ob/gyn Old Doc Benjamin has sent me to.

  I nod, saying how great it is to now be thirty-seven, patched for possible perimenopause, and on the brink of insanity.

  “Did I tell you that the Palm Pilot Rio got me has some kind of beam thing and I can exchange information with other Palms? I studied it for an hour last night. Do you suppose that makes me a palm reader?”

  “She’s testing herself, you know,” Bobbie explains to Diane. “Does it all the time. She’s the only woman I know who has to challenge herself at every turn. Can she put up the wallpaper in the bathroom herself? Can she figure out how to uninstall the women-with-boobs game that Jesse put on the hard drive? Can she cut her own hair, even the back?” She mouths the word no at Diane and continues taking me apart. “But does that stop her? No one crams more into a day, expects more of herself and makes fewer excuses than our Teddi. It goddamn drives me up the wall!”

  Diane tries to shut Bobbie up, but with almost a whole bottle of her favorite Lindemans merlot, there is no stopping her. She doesn’t even notice that I am rather frantically hunting for the Sam and Libby ballet flats I got at DSW, because I am so out of there that my head is already back in my own house, under my pillow, blocking her out. No, she rants on.