Social Lives (10 page)

 

 

 

“I'
M HOME
!” S
ARA YELLED
as she stumbled through the mudroom door, arms loaded with grocery bags. There was no answer, only the smell of dust and primer. Mentally exhausted and desperate to see her baby girl, she walked across the plastic sheeting to the kitchen island, where she heaved the bags, her purse, and car keys.

She'd been gone just four hours, though it had felt like an interminable odyssey in some bizarre faraway land. Alone in her journey, weaving through a maze of home-goods and decorating stores and the pompous ladies who worked in them simply to kill time, her mind was now altered. Four hours were now lost, and she would never get them back. A bit dramatic, but true. Everything and everyone she'd encountered had been nothing short of intolerable roadblocks to spending time with Annie, whom she hadn't seen since breakfast.

“Hello?” she yelled again, turning toward the kitchen door. This time, someone came.

“Oh—hey, there, Mrs. Livingston.” Standing in the doorway, Roy the Contractor smelled of cigarettes, which meant he'd just come from her yard, where he'd indulged in another break. From what, she couldn't tell. The house looked exactly the same as it had when she'd left to run her errands.

“Hi, Roy,” Sara managed, though Roy was the last person she wanted to see at the moment. He was the real reason her day had completely sucked. “How's it coming along?” The question was rhetorical. Comical, actually, though the humor was lost on her today.

“Just fine. We're waiting on the electrician. Kinda stuck for a while till he gets here.”

Sara didn't let the words sink in at first. Her mind was fixated on wrapping her arms around her daughter, if only to make sure she still existed. “Nanna? Annie?” she called out.

The silence annoyed her. She would have to go looking now, and Roy was in her path. She let his words enter her consciousness.

Then she let out an audible sigh. “And why is that?” she asked, her tone infused with sarcasm. The niceties had long since left their relationship.

“Well, it's like I told you yesterday. The wiring in the walls we took down was old—”

Sara waved her hand to silence him. “Yeah—I remember. The whole house needs to be rewired or we're all gonna burn up in an electrical fire. Never mind the house has survived for thirty years.”

Roy scowled. Then he shrugged, and Sara couldn't decide which was more infuriating as she began to shove groceries into the few cupboards that were still functional.
It's your family
, he was saying.
If they burn, it's on you, lady
. And yet she couldn't help feeling that it was part of a scheme, a gigantic con that had started with a reasonable bid on a small renovation and was now a do-or-die deconstruction of the entire dwelling with no end in sight.

“Isn't there anything you can do in the meantime? No flooring? No plumbing? No tile work?” She opened the fridge and stared at shelves caked with dust. It was everywhere. A plague of dust. She placed the milk inside and closed the door.

Roy shrugged again in that
sorry
way of his. “Not really.” Shrug.

It kept coming. An all-out assault on her senses. She scoured over this man standing before her, so calm, so matter-of-fact. They both knew he was putting a gun to her head. That's all this was. Good old-fashioned armed robbery. And yet, there wasn't a damned thing she could do about it.

Except cry—which is exactly what she did. It came from her gut and burst into the dusty kitchen air all the way up through the torn-apart walls to the second floor and back down again in one giant echo that only served to humiliate
her further. Not only was she getting screwed royally, but she'd now lost control of her very self in front of Roy as well. She would be, from here on out, the hysterical housewife, the one he'd planned on turning her into all along.

Roy seemed to be smiling. Somewhere behind his serious face, crossed arms, and filthy, cigarette-stinky T-shirt, he was definitely smiling.

Eyes fully pooled with tears, Sara held a hand over her mouth.
Who are you?
she thought. Never had she been so consumed by her external circumstances. Even in the roach-infested apartment at Columbia that Nick had saved her from. She used to thrive on hardship. But this was entirely different for her. She had no idea how to manage this life. It was a life she had never planned on having.

She placed her hands around her face and let the tears fall. “I just want to see my daughter.” Her voice was desperate, but she didn't care. “Can you please . . . just leave me alone so I can see my child?”

Roy was not fazed. Of course he wasn't. “Sure, Mrs. Livingston.”

“Just find Annie,” she whispered to herself. She turned toward the door and yelled again. “Hello?”

It was well past three. Nanna should have had Annie home from school two hours ago.

She moved closer to the stairs, the tears still falling uncontrollably. “Hello?” she called out, her voice riddled with frustration.

Roy walked past her silently, an unlit cigarette hanging from between his fingers. As he neared the door to the yard, he turned back to her. “They're not home.”

Sara drew another long breath, but it did nothing to ease the pounding in her head that was now a constant, unrelenting stress ball ready to explode. This was the third time in a month that Nanna had disregarded her instructions to bring Annie home after school. And she was having to hear this news from Roy, of all people.

She raced upstairs to her bedroom and closed the door, but in every corner, something was staring her down. The plaid valances, a small dust ball in a corner missed by the cleaners who had just been here yesterday, the sunlight placidly sifting through her picture window—all of it was pushing her right over the edge. She rushed to her closet and locked herself inside, as though somehow she could keep it at bay, these forces that were spinning out of control. Destroying her home. Eating her flowers. Stealing her time, and
erasing her from her daughter's life. She sat on the floor, knees to chest, and stared at her tear-stricken face in the mirror.

She forced herself to exhale as she considered the facts that were tangled in her head. A torn-apart house that they couldn't afford to walk away from. An irreverent nanny who was necessary
because
of the torn-apart house and the demands it placed on her time. The impossibility of breaking into a circle of friends because, again, she had no time to invest in understanding their world. She was Alice down the rabbit hole, a pawn who'd been sucked into the vortex of a giant suburban storm and was now being tossed and turned and twisted. Could she just scream?
Stop!
Send Roy packing. Fire Nanna. Stop caring about the women of Wilshire. Could she do all that and start again? She could hardly remember what it was like before Annie came, being twenty-three with nothing to do but explore the world.

That was it. She raced out of her room and called down the stairs. “Roy!”

Then she grabbed the phone and called Nanna's cell. It went straight to voice mail.
The nerve!
Never mind—she would deal with Nanna the moment the woman walked through the door. Feeling a burst of empowerment, she called out again from the open hallway window—louder this time.

“Roy!”

She heard the door open from outside. Almost giddy now, she formed the words in her head.
You're fired!
His steps were approaching the bottom of the stairs, and she moved toward them.

“Mrs. Livingston?” It was Roy. She could smell the stale smoke. She started her descent.

Then the phone rang.

“Hold on—don't go anywhere!” she called down to him. Then she ran back for the cordless, which she'd thrown on the bed.

“Hello?”

“Sara?”

“Yes?”

“It's Rosalyn Barlow.”

Sara froze. It had been only three days since the nursery school benefit, and she had been quite certain that Rosalyn Barlow would never give her the time of day again. They had figured out how young she was, revealed enough of their secrets to be embarrassed, if they were even capable of that, and otherwise excluded her from the conversation. Yet here she was—calling?

Sara tried to sound pleasantly surprised and not shocked, which she was. Completely.

“Oh, hi! How are you?” She wiped the wetness from her face with the back of her hand.

“Fine, thank you. Listen, I apologize for the short notice, but I have a proposition for you.”

With Roy waiting at the bottom of the stairs, Sara listened. And as she listened, her new plan, the one where she took back the reins of her runaway life, was deconstructed the way her house had been—one piece at a time. The reasoning she had used, the inputs and assumptions, were suddenly open to question, and she was left with nothing but a head full of whirring uncertainty. Rosalyn Barlow wanted her to join an intimate committee to solve the social problems of teenage girls, to prevent other girls from the plight of the hallway blow job. She wanted Sara to write an article about it for the local newspaper. (
Wouldn't that be a great way to restart your career?
) And if Sara accepted, she would somehow, miraculously, be cast into the circle of Rosalyn Barlow and her most trusted friends.

Why this mattered to her was as puzzling as the phone call, but somehow it did. Maybe for Nick, who so wanted to rebuild his life here. Maybe for her, to make Nick happy? If she were honest, no. She had never failed at anything before moving to Wilshire. She had never been on the bottom rung. Valedictorian of her high school class. Magna cum laude at Princeton. The master's degree from Columbia.

She hung up the phone and sat down on her bed. Maybe she'd been right. Impatient, but right. Rosalyn Barlow wanted her on this committee because of all she had been and maybe still was, and with the innocence of her own youth, she let herself believe that her two worlds might actually be able to meld together after all. She wiped her face again, removing the last traces of the tears. She felt the charges begin to settle inside her.

“Mrs. Livingston?” Roy was still waiting.

She thought about what to do. Surprisingly, it wasn't hard. Everything had changed. The house would get done. She could spend the entire evening with Annie. All was not lost. This was not the time for rash decisions.

She walked to the stairs and yelled down, “Nothing, Roy. Nothing.”

 

 

 

 

 

I
T WAS A BRILLIANT
plan. Now that she had made her first public appearance since the
incident,
Rosalyn Barlow was ready to tackle the larger problem, the social problem that was making its way across the country, and doing so indiscriminately. Wealthy or poor, the scourge of teenage promiscuity and this latest twist, this “friends with benefits” phenomenon, were infiltrating the lives of children everywhere. That her daughter had become a victim in its powerful path had opened her eyes, and she would not turn her back on the other girls who were potential prey. Like Al Gore and climate change, Rosalyn Barlow was about to become the poster woman for this important social cause. When she was finished playing spin doctor, this problem would be viewed through her eyes, and the town would believe it was virtually breeding inside the walls of the school. Whether or not that was actually true was of little concern.

And that was why, seated around her at Asi (Wilshire's answer to Nobu) and eyeing a platter of designer sushi were the people essential to the plan. First, of course, was Wilshire Academy headmistress, Marcia Preston. With wavy but neat chestnut hair and a serious, angular face, she was just what the situation called for: an intellectual. That she was here solely out of obligation
to the Barlow family, and the large donation they had recently made, was silently and mutually understood.

Eva Ridley was seated to the right of Ms. Preston, and Rosalyn was counting on her love of storytelling to broadcast everything that went on at these meetings through the underground sound system she had installed into the far corners of this town.
Rosalyn Barlow, hero. Caitlin Barlow, victim. Who would be next?
The scandal at the Wilshire Academy would fit nicely on her playlist.

Elbow to elbow with Rosalyn was Sara Livingston, who was not only perspiring under her wool suit jacket and silk blouse, but was actually soaked with sweat. Rosalyn still wasn't quite sure what she made of this young woman. Middle-class breeding and only twenty-seven years old with one three-year-old, Sara Livingston was a suburban virgin. But Princeton and Columbia—nothing to smirk at. Besides, it was there, on her face. The unmistakable desire to be one of them, to fit in, and Rosalyn was betting Sara would give this agenda the attention it deserved. The local paper would print her articles, providing instant credibility to the cause.