The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted (22 page)

Are men her age trying to make sure they can still . . . ?

And if they are, would it be any fun to try once again to . . . ?

Focus!
she tells herself, in the same odd accent her yoga instructor has, and begins her dreary task of calculation—she likes to work on the weekend and take weekdays off. If this new longing has not gone away by five P.M., she’ll go out to Panera for an Asian sesame chicken salad for dinner.

There she will make a list of old boyfriends who might still be alive and were not horrible. She will Google them, and if she finds them, she will call and propose a lunch, and if they agree to meet her, she will even fly to get there.

Might be better to fly there, in fact. No. No, she won’t fly.

It has to be driving distance, she’s not going to use up her miles on what might prove to be a complete disaster. Imagine if the plane crashed after what wasn’t even any fun.

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d Her sons at her funeral, sorrowfully asking, “What was she doing in Kansas
City
?”

Focus!
Laura gets to work.

All the way to Panera, Laura has told herself not to get the bread as a side, get the apple. But when she gets there, she goes right ahead and gets the bread. One good thing if she starts to have sex again is that it will be no trouble to get the apple. That’s how it goes: good sex equals appetite sup-pression. Plus your complexion improves, who knows why.

Laura eats her salad and starts making a list of all the boyfriends she’s had, from college on. The redheaded guy who came from a really rich family who dumped her after two weeks, the business major who looked like Gregory Peck but was chronically depressed, the Italian guy who loved Apple Jacks cereal and was such a good dancer, the doctor who wanted her to convert to Judaism. And after that doctor, Brian’s and her marriage, which lasted for over twenty-five years, then abruptly ended.

The first few months after the divorce, she was ecstatic to be free again. Then, gradually, she became aware of what her freedom really meant; and there was nothing to be ecstatic about—mostly she felt as though she were walking a tightrope all the time. She came to the discouraging realization that many of the demons present in her marriage had moved into her condo right along with her.

She realizes now that her ex-husband
is
the old boyfriend she would most like to have lunch with. Would like, in fact, to be married to again. He has a girlfriend named Cassandra, she’s heard—five years after the divorce, he finally has a steady girlfriend, but a girlfriend is not a wife, even if she’s living with him. Laura has never seen Cassandra; Brian, deeply wounded by the split, wanted nothing to do
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with Laura after their day in court. They communicated over the phone or e-mail about their grown sons only when necessary, which turned out to be hardly ever.

Laura offered to be the one to move out of the house.

She thought that, since the divorce was her idea, the least she could do was let Brian stay in the house they’d built together. But she misses that house. She drives past it now and then, and last time she parked her car a few houses down and went to look at the garden in the backyard that she put in the first year they lived there. There it was, still growing. Everything still alive. It shamed her in a way so elemental her knees actually buckled. She fled the yard with her head held falsely high, a tight smile on her face, and vowed never to go there again. But now she leaves her salad unfinished and walks quickly to her car, keys in hand.

Even on a Saturday the neighborhood is quiet. No one on the street, as usual. It’s one of the things that bothered her about this neighborhood, actually, the way you hardly ever saw anyone out. She likes that aspect of condo life better, the way you can’t help but see people every day—in the elevator, in the laundry room, at the monthly meetings. If she and Brian got back together, they would move to a bigger condo together. They wouldn’t need this house anymore.

So now what,
she thinks. Here she is, she sped over here, and now she is just sitting in her car right in front of the house. She looks up to see if anyone is peering out the windows at her. No.

She takes a quick look at herself in the rearview, then marches up to the front door. She will say she is sorry to come over unannounced, but she needs a word with Brian.

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d She hopes it’s Brian who answers the door. And she hopes he will accommodate her request. She thinks he will. She’s sure of it, actually. Laura and Brian. The roots remain.

She rings the doorbell and waits. Rings it again and waits some more. Inside, she hears the grandfather clock striking, the clock she and Brian saved so long for, she loves that clock. She rings the bell one more time, waits one more minute. Then she walks down the sidewalk toward her car, full of a kind of misplaced embarrassment. As she moves past the curbside mailbox, she sees that the flag is up, and she looks to see what’s inside. It’s pathetic, it’s wrong, but she just wants to see. There are bills being paid, Brian’s familiar script for the return address. The only other thing is a postcard being sent to some kind of catering company; Cassandra is taking advantage of a free consultation. Laura looks around, up and down the block. No one. She puts the postcard in her purse. Then she closes the mailbox and drives away, careful not to exceed the speed limit. Once she got pulled over on her own street. “But I
live
here,” she told the cop. He looked at her oddly, then issued her a ticket. She cursed him as he drove away.

On the way home, she resolves to mail the postcard—she’ll drop it in the box outside her building. She’s horrified that she took it. What in the world is the matter with her. She wonders what she would have done if Brian had been home, or Cassandra, or both of them. She’d flown over there in some kind of trance, expecting that Brian would drop whatever he was doing and say yes to anything she suggested, including getting back together. What is the matter with her. She will mail the postcard, and then maybe she’ll try to find Jerry Menzel, who was her teacher for an acting class. She’d had a crush on him, but he never knew, because he had a girlfriend, and so she never ap-

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proached him. That’s how she used to be. What is the matter with her.

On Monday afternoon, Laura calls Cassandra. “Hello,” she says. “This is Regan Kennedy from—” She looks quickly at the postcard again. “Home Cook In, and I am calling about the postcard you sent for a consultation.”

“You got it already?” Cassandra asks.

Silence, and then Laura says quickly, “Yes, we did, and I’m happy to say we’ve had a very nice response to this offer, so you’ll need to pick a time quickly, now how does this afternoon work?”

“Today?”

“Well, we only have . . . this is a limited offer.”

“I can’t do it today. But I could do tomorrow morning, say, ten o’clock?”

“That’s fine,” Laura says. Something occurs to her, and she says, “Now, with whom will I be meeting?” Undoubtedly Brian will be at work, but better make sure. For what she has decided is that she wants to have lunch not with an ex but with that ex’s girlfriend.

“Oh, it’ll be just me,” Cassandra says. “This is a surprise for my fiancé.”

Once Laura put salt on a slug. This is what her stomach is doing now. But she manages, “Oh! What fun.”

“Yes,” Cassandra says. “I’m excited.”

Laura hangs up the phone and stares out her window.

Fiancée is not wife, she tells herself. She eats nonfat cot-tage cheese for breakfast. It would be nice if she could lose forty pounds by tomorrow.

She doesn’t bother with makeup today. She doesn’t want to look into her own eyes in the mirror. Nor does she answer the phone when Trudy calls, because if she does, 174

t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d she’ll tell Trudy what she’s doing, and Trudy will make her come to her senses, and she doesn’t want to come to her senses. She wants to meet Cassandra, who has a low and lovely voice. She could be on the radio, one of those late-night personalities. What she does do is nothing, Laura happens to know. Her younger son told her that Cassandra used to sell cars, but now she’s doing nothing. “That’s ridiculous,” Laura said, and her son said, “I know. She should work.” But what Laura found ridiculous was that Cassandra had sold cars. It made Laura mad, because it made her jealous, because she could never do that. She still doesn’t know what a spark plug is. She pictures it as a cartoon character with a high voice and a little hat.

On Tuesday morning, Laura parks on the curb a few houses down from Brian’s, gets out of her car, then back in it. She drives right up to the house, parks in the driveway, and walks briskly up to the front door. She puts her finger to the bell and takes in a deep breath. Rings it.

Almost right away, the door is opened by an unusually beautiful woman wearing a sleeveless black sweater and tan pants, gold hoop earrings. She is tall and slender, with shoulder-length black hair, green eyes, and a full mouth.

She is barefoot, her toes painted a champagne color, and even her feet are pretty. Laura’s hand flies up to her mouth, and, helplessly, she begins to laugh. When Cassandra looks askance at her, Laura says, “I’m sorry. Sorry!

I was just remembering a joke a friend told me about . . . Well, never mind.” She holds out her hand. “I’m Regan. Very nice to meet you.”

Cassandra continues to stare closely at her but smiles back. “Cassandra. Thanks so much for coming.” She ges-

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tures toward the back of the house. “Shall we go into the kitchen?”

“Surely,” Laura says.
Surely!
Like some old maid schoolteacher. All she needs is some ugly old satchel-type briefcase, the straps curled up from age. Bad enough the state of her purse. Her older son, who lives in L.A., has a girlfriend who showed her a purse she thought Laura should buy, and Laura told her don’t be ridiculous, who would spend that much for a purse? Well, the woman in front of her would. Laura would guess that she paid well over fifty dollars for her pedicure.

Laura sits at the kitchen table and puts her purse on the floor. A lot has changed here—the walls are a different color, the table is round rather than square, a lighter wood.

There are curtains at the kitchen window, and it’s all Laura can do not to say, “Hey! Brian and I hate curtains—how’d you talk him into that?” Instead, she folds her hands and says, “So. How can I help you?”

Cassandra laughs. “I hope that’s what you’re here to tell me. All I know is that your company sends people into homes to cook. So . . . What do you cook?”

“What do you want?” Laura asks. It feels a little mean, the way she’s said this, and she likes that. She likes being a little mean.

But Cassandra is not in the least offended. She says,

“Well, the first thing I should say is that I’m a terrible, terrible cook. Just never had any interest or talent. But I’d like my fiancé to have good, home-cooked dinners every night—his ex was a wonderful cook.”

“Was she?” Laura asks.

“Yes, apparently
everything
was homemade—bread, piecrusts, pasta.”

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t h e d a y i a t e w h a t e v e r i w a n t e d

“I suppose she had one of those pasta machines,” Laura says. She did not. She cut the noodles freestyle and laid them over the backs of the kitchen chairs to dry.

“I guess so.”

“Although she might have cut them by hand and let them air-dry,” Laura says. “Like when pasta is
really
homemade. I’ll bet she did that. I’d imagine she made her own pizza crust, too. And fancy birthday cakes?”

“Oh, I’m sure. I mean, Brian told me she made corn bread from scratch to use in the
dressing
she made at Thanksgiving.”

“Gotta love that,” Laura says sarcastically and rolls her eyes in what she hopes is a modern, working-woman way.

“Well, actually I kind of admire it,” Cassandra says.

“But I don’t want to do it. So I thought I’d hire you and have my cake and eat it, too. So to speak.”

Laura leans forward. “I have to tell you right off that this would be a very expensive proposition. Having everything homemade that way.”

“No problem,” Cassandra says.

The bitch.
“With the shopping, it would be a good five hundred or so a week,” Laura says, then wonders if that’s enough.

“That’s fine.”

Laura raises her eyebrows. “Your boyfriend must do very well, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“He does, but it’s not my fiancé—he’s my fiancé—who would be paying. I would.”

There’s a neat trick for an unemployed woman ,
Laura thinks. But never mind, better let this go; a real person would not be asking these kinds of questions.

“So let’s talk about some menu ideas,” Laura says, and Cassandra says, “Oh, good, let’s.” Laura looks sharply at
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her, but no, there’s nothing in her face that makes it seem as though her remark is anything but innocent and true.