Something New (9781101612262) Read online

  So here I sit, surrounded by piles of old scooters (two Iron Man, one Batman, two generic Razors, and a pretty pink princess Razor with the faces of all the Disney princesses along the bottom, which Jessie refuses to ride because she doesn’t want to step all over Cinderella and Jasmine), roller skates, skateboards, helmets, and other assorted paraphernalia disgorged by the huge toy bin next to the garage door. Add that to the rusted tools from the interior shed to my right and the corroded camping equipment and long-forgotten sporting goods hauled out of the steamer trunk to my left. What I would like to do is dump everything into the recycling barrel, but my upper-middle-class guilt keeps me from doing so, and I mull over the fact that I am probably more guilt ridden about the prospect of throwing away not-so-gently-used toys than I am over making out with Ben Campbell in my kitchen.

  Do not go there, Ellen, I warn myself, as it is only ten a.m. and I am already mentally exhausted. The point of garage purging, aside from my desire to create enough room to park the Flex next to Jonah’s Lexus, is to clear my mind. Breathe in, breathe out. Goodwill for this Razor, recycling bin for this helmet. Breathe in, breathe out.

  I hear the engine of an approaching car and I clutch Jessie’s old Elmo kneepads to my chest as though they will protect me from whatever temptation might be headed my way. (Hahahahahahaha, today, boys and girls, we’re going to talk about adultery. Can you say that? A-dul-tery. Hahahaha. Oh, it’s Mr. Noodle!) When Jill’s champagne-colored Chrysler Town and Country pulls into my driveway, I sigh with relief. I had forgotten her promise to bring the boys by to see if there was anything they might like to salvage from my garage. She pops out from behind the wheel, cardboard carry carton with two paper cups in hand, just as the back door mechanically slides open with nary a sound. The three Ds jump out of the minivan and follow their mom up to the garage, eyes wide with the promise of discovering buried treasure.

  “Hi-yo, Elle-belle,” says Decatur.

  “Hi-yo yourself,” I return as I push myself off the garage floor to the musical accompaniment of popping joints.

  Denver and Detroit each toss a “Hi” in my general direction as all three immediately begin to pilfer through the junk. Jill is wearing cream slacks and a mint green pullover sweater, and she looks around with alarm at the piles of dirt and dust-encrusted crap. I should have advised her to wear a hazmat suit. She gingerly steps over to me and hands me a coffee. I try not to think of Ben as I peer at the Starbucks logo emblazoned on the side.

  “Thanks,” I say, brushing off my tattered jeans and taking the cup from her.

  “So, how’s it going?” she asks, still surveying the wreckage of my garage.

  “Life is an accumulation of crap,” I say.

  “Check it out!” exclaims Decatur as he unearths a blue-and-rust (yes, actual rust) pogo stick from one of the piles. His younger brothers ooh and ahh and the three of them trot to the driveway to test it out. I pray their tetanus shots are current.

  “You need your own Dumpster,” Jill offers, and I frown at her. “What are you going to do with this stuff?”

  I take a sip of coffee and set the cup down on the tool bench. “Some of it’s going to Goodwill, some I’m just going to dump, and the rest—”

  “Oh my God! What the h-e-l-l is that??”

  She is staring at me with something like horror on her face. Or, I should say, she is staring at my neck with horror. Reflexively, my hand shoots up to my throat.

  “What?” My first thought is bug. Yikes! “What is it? What?” I start swatting at myself like I’m demon-possessed as phantom insects creepy-crawl over my skin.

  “It’s not a bug!” Jill states as she leans in to get a closer look. “It’s a d-a-m-n hickey, that’s what it is.” Her words come out in a strangled whisper so the boys won’t hear. My hand freezes midswat and I feel my mouth form an O of surprise. And apparently, my left temporal lobe is on a union break because I suddenly can’t remember how to speak.

  Jill straightens up and arches a brow at me. “And just what have you been up to, sugar?” she asks, sounding exactly like Scarlett O’Hara. “If you tell me that’s from the curling iron, I will club you to death with that Justice League baseball bat over there.”

  I clear my throat violently, hoping to startle my vocal chords to life. “I, uh, I…”

  She bites her lip, trying to stifle a grin. “Ben, right?”

  I nod.

  “Oh my Lord.” She shakes her head, then narrows her eyes at me. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It happened last night!” My voice has returned, but I keep the volume turned way down. “What was I supposed to do? Interrupt your freaking sex-fest to tell you I made out with Ben Campbell in my kitchen? I thought it could wait till this morning.”

  Actually, I hadn’t thought about Jill at all. I was too consumed by my own guilt/euphoria to consider calling my cousin.

  “Okay, fine,” she relinquishes. “So…you made out? Is that all? Just, what, kissing, and neck sucking?”

  “That about covers it,” I say. “Isn’t that enough?”

  “It’s not enough to get you into h-e-l-l.” Her grin slowly slides from her face and she regards me seriously. “But it is enough to get you booted out of a marriage.”

  “Oh, Jill!” I rub my eyes, which is a mistake since my fingernails are full of grime. “Don’t say that.”

  “If you found out that Jonah made out with that chick from his sales territory, you know, the one with the death’s-head moth tattoo between her shoulder blades, you’d go completely ballistic. You would kick his sorry a-s-s out of the house faster than you can say Silence of the Lambs.”

  Her words are like a glass of ice water dumped over my head. She is absolutely right. Before this moment, I hadn’t considered how I would feel if the situation were reversed. I may not harbor any fondness for my husband at this juncture of our marriage. I may even be subconsciously hoping that some kind of natural disaster sweeps him away or a freak accident befalls him. But the idea of him making out with another woman behind my back makes me seriously queasy.

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Obviously.”

  “Look,” I whine. “It’s not going to happen again.” Jill’s gaze remains steady, as though she is sizing up my words. “Really,” I add for emphasis. “It was a mistake. And anyway, we stopped before it got out of hand.” I don’t mention the phone call, or the fact that if Ben’s wife (because who else could it have been?) hadn’t interrupted us, it would definitely have gotten out of hand. But even as I am assuring her of my contrition, I can feel my skin grow hot at the memory of Ben’s touch.

  Whoops of laughter from the sidewalk catch our attention and we both turn to see Detroit bouncing on the pogo stick like Tigger on methamphetamines while his brothers applaud him. Jill and I laugh along with the boys, and then she returns her attention to me as her smile fades.

  “I’m your cousin, Ellen, and your best friend, and I love you.” I groan inwardly and prepare myself for one of Jill’s sermons, which in my experience, could land her a gig as an evangelist on Sunday morning TV. The only thing that keeps me from sticking a wide swath of duct tape across her mouth is the knowledge that she really does have my best interests in mind. So I obediently listen to her.

  “I know things with Jonah aren’t so hot right now. And I know you’ve been focusing on you. And you really are looking great, and I can tell you’re feeling great. And you’ve started writing again, and that is amazing. Your blog seriously kicks a-s-s. But at this point in your life, you have to be practical. You are not twenty-three, when life was fun and exciting. You’re almost forty-three, and life, well, it’s just life.”

  She stops to take a breath and I catch the subtle slump of her shoulders, notice the slight shimmer of her green eyes as though tears are threatening.

  “We make choices, and we have to stick with them. We have responsibilities and commitments, and we have to live up to them, even when they practically crush us.”


  It dawns on me that her words are meant as much for herself as they are for me. I reach out and place a hand on her arm.

  “We are where we are,” she says finally. “And we just have to deal with it.”

  “Jill.”

  She looks at me, and I see the regret etched into the faint lines around her eyes and mouth.

  “But the other night, you told Greg you’d divorce him if he didn’t start treating you right.”

  She flashes a sad smile. “It was a gamble,” she admits, then sighs. “I’ll never divorce him, Ellen. What would I do?” She laughs without humor. “At my age? A single mother? Please. It’s not an option I want to consider. Do you?” I remain silent, and she shrugs dispassionately. “All we can do is just make the best of it.”

  Make the best of it? Make the best of it? This sentence rattles through my skull like a bowling ball, knocking out all other thoughts.

  “Anyway,” Jill says, casting off her gloom as though she is a molting snake. “This thing with Ben…Oh my. How am I ever going to look him in the eye again?” She giggles, and the sound is so at odds with her mood just seconds ago that it makes me cringe. “It’s not like he was ever going to sweep you off your feet and take you away from all this, right?” She makes a point of looking around the garage.

  I swallow. “No, of course not.”

  “It was a nice distraction, that’s all. A little ego boost. And that’s perfect! Just what you needed! Now you can get back to your life.”

  I nod acquiescently.

  “Great!” she says brightly. “So, how can I help you with this other mess?”

  For a woman who takes pride in the fact that she is one of the few people on planet earth, not including those in third world countries, who is not a slave to her cell phone, I am ashamed to admit that I have been carrying mine around with me all day, tucked into the back pocket of my jeans. It’s not as though I believe Ben will call, or that I want him to call. I may not even answer the phone if he does call. But if he does, I want the option of answering. All day long, while immersed in Operation Clean Garage, I have subconsciously been anticipating that slight vibration against my butt cheek that precedes the ring.

  Of course, my cell phone finally does vibrate just as I am pulling down my pants to pee. The ring tone assaults me and I jerk to my feet, yanking my jeans up so violently that the phone pops out of my back pocket and lands right smack-dab in the toilet bowl with a kerplunk! Three thoughts piggyback through my brain almost simultaneously. The first is that Jonah is going to be pissed. The second is that the PTA ladies will be immensely proud of me for bringing my cell phone into the bathroom. And the third is that it’s a good thing it fell in before I peed because what woman wants to touch her own urine, unless she’s just been stung on the hand by a jellyfish?

  I quickly reach into the toilet and withdraw the phone, then cover it with a towel in a vain attempt to save it. When I stare down at it, the light on the screen is fading, like the man-machine’s glowing red eyes at the end of Terminator. Going, going, gone. Dead in my hand. And I didn’t even have a chance to see who called. Fuck.

  It was probably Jonah or the kids, I tell myself. They’ll try the house phone next. But as I wander out of the bathroom, unevacuated—as I have suddenly lost the urge to pee—the landline remains silent.

  I know there is a way to retrieve messages from my cell from any phone, but I resist the urge. First, it would require me to find the instruction manual, which is probably buried somewhere under the debris in Jonah’s office, and second, I am reading the whole cell-phone-as-Jacques-Cousteau debacle as a sign from God. If it was Ben who called, I should ignore it. But after pacing my house for a half an hour, which included a brief tour of my garage to admire the fruits of my labor (I give Jill no credit, because although she did stay, hers was more of a supervisory position which included saying things like “Dump” or “Recycle” or “What the h-e-l-l does that do?” while keeping her cream trousers dust-free), I am literally going out of my gourd. I just want to know who called, I tell myself. That’s all. Knowing who called requires no reciprocal action, but at least I won’t be driving myself crazy with curiosity.

  I head for Jonah’s office and begin rifling through the piles of papers and magazines on his desk. With my husband’s deep-seated adoration for his cell phone, I would have thought he’d erected a shrine to the BlackBerry gods, but the his-and-hers tomes of technological elucidation are nowhere to be found. I pull out the top drawer, find only the requisite ps: pens, pencils, paper clips, and Post-its. I move down to the side drawers, come up empty on the first and second, then hit pay dirt on the third. I reach down and close my fingers around the manual, which has more pages than an Encyclopedia Britannica, because, let’s face it, it’s important to print the instructions in Swahili. Then my eye is caught by a small envelope the pale pink of early-morning clouds, tucked into the bottom crevice of the drawer.

  I grasp the envelope and tug it free, then slowly turn it over in my hands. There is nothing written on the outside, and for a brief moment, I consider shoving it back into the drawer unopened. But who am I kidding, right? As I lift the flap and withdraw the note card from within, I realize that my heart is doing a tap dance against my chest plate. I have been with Jonah for fourteen years and have never given him a card even remotely like this.

  I unfold the card and read the inscription and practically fall onto my ass on the office floor. I read it a second time. Short, sweet, to the point:

  J–

  Thanks for everything. You really saved me. Let me know how I can repay you.

  T.

  Okay. Okay. Okay. That one word flip-flops over and over again in my mind as the tap dance turns into the Riverdance, twenty-four wooden clogs stomping around my chest in unison. I read the note again, trying to discern the deeper meaning. It is fairly innocent, I conclude, even though I am now sweating like Seabiscuit charging for the finish line. It doesn’t say anything like Thanks for the hot night of wax, handcuffs, anal stimulation, and vaginal penetration. Love and flowery kisses. But the J and the T somehow make it more intimate. We are not only on a first-name basis, we are on an initial basis. Hi, J. How are you? Great, T. You look terrific in that cashmere sweater that shows off your double Ds.

  Okay, again. I take a deep breath. Maybe I am overreacting. Perhaps I am reading into the whole pink stationery/initial-using circumstances. But a needling question remains: Why didn’t Jonah say anything about it? If the whole thing is innocent, and Jonah, brave shining knight that he wishes he were, helped someone through a crisis, like someone’s dog getting hit by a car or the rupturing of an appendix, or the disposal of a dismembered corpse—a situation that warranted a thank-you card—my husband never mentioned it to me. You would think that if it were innocent, he would have said something, at least in passing, brushing it off in that humble Jonah way, “Oh, it was nothing, I was just glad to help out.” But not a word.

  And, come to think of it, just who the fuck is T? I scan my mental rolodex for all of Jonah’s work colleagues but the only Ts are men: Tom, Tony, Tariq. So unless Jonah is actually gay and Tony, a New Jersey transplant who is always saying “fogeddabowdit,” or Tariq, who is an ex-linebacker for the Redskins, or Tom, a twenty-two-year-old rookie with a new wife and baby, has taken to using flowing cursive on pale pink note cards, T is not one of his co-workers. Unless…

  Death’s-Head Moth Girl’s name is Patricia. Oh my God! Tricia. It could be her. Since she was hired last year, Jonah has talked about her frequently. Nothing blatant, not I’d like her to mount me during our ride-along. Just that kind of offhand chatter that speaks volumes. Oh, Patricia did this crazy thing today at our meeting with Office Max. Or You should have seen Patricia’s face when the Geico guy stapled his tie to our contract. Little things. Inconsequential. Meaningless. Right up until you find a pink note card tucked into the side of your husband’s desk drawer.

  I sit for another few minutes, afraid that if I
stand too quickly I’ll fall back down again. Then I heave myself up with a grunt, still clutching the card in my clammy hand. I watch myself tuck the pink envelope back in the drawer, slide the drawer shut, and lean against the side of the desk. What now? What now what now? I feel dizzy and nauseated and yet a bubble of crazed lunacy in the form of the giggles is churning inside me. The irony of this find is not lost on me. Here I’ve been, flirting with disaster, paddleboarding and helicoptering and sucking face with a man in my kitchen, and it just might be that Jonah has beaten me to the extramarital shag.

  Well, this is certainly Something New.

  I give in to the giggles, and within seconds, they turn to full-blown, belly-cramping gales of laughter, and just when I think I am going to puke on Jonah’s carpet, the laughter turns to tears and I am sobbing and retching and gasping for air.

  Either I am in the middle of some kind of breakdown or I am a drama queen of the first order. I can’t decide which bothers me more, and that conundrum alone helps me pull myself together. If I am wondering about the nature of this crying jag, I mustn’t be completely out of my head. Then I start to question just what it is I am crying about. Is it because my husband is possibly having an affair? Is it because I might have an affair? Is it because, despite my recent skepticism regarding the institution of marriage, the eight-year-old girl who lives inside me, who lives inside every woman through the age of a hundred, desperately wants to believe in happily ever after? We want to believe, I want to believe, that the choices we’ve made were the right ones. And how can we ever really know?

  I glance at the floor and spy the cell phone instruction manual, lying open, as fate would have it, on the call retrieval page. If that’s not a sign from God, I don’t know what is. I reach for the booklet and grasp it like a lifeline, then bolt out of the office and head for the kitchen.

  Hi. It’s me. Ben. If you get this message, give me a call back. If you want to.

  Oh, yes. I want to.