Page 26 of The Husband Diet
I begrudgingly bunched the suit up at the hem and slowly –slowly– pulled it over my head. Shoulders clear – that was a first! Oh, God, was it coming to a halt around my waist? No, it was just the lining scrunching, thank goodness. I tugged on it as delicately but firmly as I could, as if this dress were made of paper and the very last one on Earth. After this it was the proverbial fig leaf. How Marcy hadn’t foreseen that this suit wouldn’t fit me had been a mystery to me for many years until one day, while scoffing at it, resenting its mere presence in my home, it dawned on me that she’d done it on purpose. To give me a goal in my life. As if wearing this dead ringer for a burlap sack was going to inspire me to lose weight.
At my hips there was a definite stalemate situation. It wasn’t going down any further! Panicking, I eyed my track suit and then my flowery summer dresses, and with a grunt, coaxed the suit (the wool stretched easily enough, but it was the damn lining that seemed made for a five-year-old) over my curves. All the while holding my breath.
And yes! Mission accomplished! Here we were, as one, this horrid piece of couture and me.AndI’d never been this elated before, not even in my wedding dress. I’d finally proved Marcy wrong.
Admiring the way it didn’t cling, squeeze or underline anything, I added a shiny burnt-copper beigey-green silk scarf that changed color under the light. I had to compensate somehow for the lack of make-up. There was no way I could wear mascara with these watery eyes today and not look like the actor Brandon Lee inThe Crow. Besides, I could hardly keep them open. All I wanted to do was crawl back into my nice warm, comfy bed and sleep until Christmas. Or even better, next summer, by which time the divorce would no longer be a novelty to the kids.
I made it to work in record time and, way ahead of my schedule, I plunked myself down into my amazingly comfortableStar Trekkieswivel armchair behind my desk, ready to take on the day. If you’re a working mom, you know how difficult it is to balance things. If you’re a single working mom, I know exactly how you feel, doing everything on your own without a man at your side. My assistant, Jackie, poked her head round my office door. The look on her face wasn’t good.
‘Uh, Erica? We have a teensy-weensy problem.’
I sighed. ‘Just give it to me straight.’
‘There’s a… um… flood on the third floor.’
‘A flood,’ I repeated calmly, as if she were talking about some remote, overpopulated and underfed village in some Third World country that I could sympathize with but do absolutely nothing about.
‘And it’s leaking onto the second.’
‘Did you see where it’s coming from?’ I sighed at the blank look on her face. ‘Never mind – I’ll do it.’
Jackie was amazingly good with people, but she was a disaster with disasters. Me, I was good with disasters – and people with whom I didn’t share a surname.
It was the boiler system. It had sprung a major leak, and there was nothing I could do but call the maintenance team and invite the guests on both affected floors to an improvised mid-afternoon buffet and drinks. In the meantime the in-house laundry service took care of transferring their sodden clothing to be dry-cleaned or washed and pressed, and we upgraded them all to a superior room. On top of that, I threw in a voucher for a two-night stay in any Farthington Hotel in North America, all compliments of the management. By the time I’d finished my reparatory spiel, I’d charmed the pants off them (their only dry pair) and the incident was forgotten. That was my job and I was amazing at it.
And motherhood? I did my damned best. The kids were always fed and read to and everything (well, not quite everything, but at least the most important things) that was natural for a woman to do for her family. I grimly pictured the list of women’s chores and compared them to men’s. Bit of a chasm there, not to say the entire Grand Canyon.
So, faced with the fact that I’d never be able to check mark all those chores, I did what I’d normally do at work. Prioritize. What was more important – cleaning my windows or helping my kids with their homework? To iron bed sheets, which no one ever sees anyway, or learn to play baseball with Warren – even if it meant knocking myself out and seeing stars in the process – and take Maddy to ballet classes? No contest.
And gosh, the look in their eyes whenever I dropped my vacuum cleaner and sat down to color? Much to Ira’s annoyance, of course, because he always thought I did it to show him up, to underline the difference between mommy and daddy. He never understood it wasn’t about him. He never understood it was simply about making the kids feel loved, about them coming first – before Sunday brunches, before our own hobbies.
I once had a passion for painting and had been told I was good at it, too. But I hadn’t painted a landscape in years, though my fingers yearned to. Every time I saw a beautiful view or closed my eyes, I could see a million things I wanted to paint, could feel a million colors exploding within me, dying to get out. But I settled for coloring and making paper dolls with Maddy.
Ira, on the other hand, sometimes, if at all, paid attention to them the first half-hour he was home, but then lost interest. He was totally unaware of anybody else’s needs and he’d slowly worsened over the years. A bit like my mom, in a way. These people lacked the sensitivity gene. They didn’t realize what was going on around them or if someone, friend or family, was suffering. They’d never really loved, in my opinion. Never sat up all night worried about someone (Nonna Silvia had told me I was never sick as a baby, so I guess that was my mom’s cue to take life easy).
As a child, every time I woke in the middle of the night with a nightmare, it was always,alwaysmy nonna who came to my bed with a glass of water, a chat and finally a good night hug. She was the only one who ever kissed me and said, ‘Sleep well, sweetheart.’
Sleep well, sweetheart. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had said that to me.
A few confused, phlegmy and foggy hours later during lunch, as I was writing a list of all the bad words I knew in Italian, likebastardoandstronzo, and linking them to Ira’s name in a sort of spider-gram, I got a personal call from Mr. Foxham, the kids’ new school principal.
Shit. He’d sent out a letter to the families with a new mission statement against the spreading phenomenon of bullying and what his main goals were, inviting us in to discuss whether or not our children felt safe, were happy, etcetera. I’d forgotten to RSVPthatparty.
And so, clutching the phone, I feared the worst, conjuring images of Warren hanging from the strip lights or the ceiling beams by his tie, courtesy of an older kid, or Madeleine’s dress being torn to pieces by a posse of vicious girls kicking her and her pretty pink raincoat and matching boots around in the mud.
‘Good morning, Mrs. Lowenstein,’ came the voice of doom, calling me by a name that was no longer mine. ‘I’m Mr. Foxham, Madeleine and Warren’s principal.’
This wasn’t going to be pleasant. Memories of my homeroom teacher, Miss Briton (who was actually Australian), talking down to me in her crisp accent, surfaced and in a single moment, I relived the worst years of my school life.
I felt my own diction tighten accordingly. ‘Yes, good morning, Mr. Foxham. Is there a problem?’
A pause. Oh, that deadly pause where I saw at least one of my kids lying lifeless…
‘No, no, they’re quite alright, Mrs. Lowenstein. Warren’s sitting a math test at the moment and Madeleine is doing art, her favorite subject.’
I exhaled in relief. The personal touch hadn’t escaped my notice. They were always nice to you before delivering the blow.
‘Warren didn’t cheat, did he? I told them a million times it’s better to get a C that’s yours than someone else’s A.’
