Authors: Kamy Wicoff
Jennifer sat back on the couch. “So Dr. Sexton was Dr. Terry’s partner,” she said. “That doesn’t mean she couldn’t have invented Wishful Thinking herself.”
“You have to admit it
is
suspicious,” Vinita said, sitting forward and putting a hand on Jennifer’s leg. “What if Dr. Sexton is operating totally out of her league? What if Dr. Terry is the one who really understands all of this stuff, but somehow Dr. Sexton has managed to make it work without Dr. Terry’s knowing, and you are entrusting your life to somebody who is not only an inferior scientist but a thief?”
“Does she seem like that to you?” Jennifer asked.
Vinita sighed. “No. But I don’t like how in the dark you still are, and I still am, about all of this. You need to ask her about it, Jay. You need to find out what happened with her and Dr. Terry. You need to know the truth.”
The buzzer rang. “The pizza,” Vinita said, handing Jennifer the iPad and standing up. “Promise me you’ll ask her?”
Jennifer stared at the photograph of Dr. Terry and Dr. Sexton, the happy couple, on the screen. “I promise,” she said,
as Vinita headed for the door. “And, Vee, thank you. Thanks for looking out for me. Thanks for everything.”
“Love you,” Vinita answered.
“Love you too,” Jennifer replied. Vinita was right. It was high time she got to know Dr. Diane Sexton a whole lot better.
T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Jennifer received an unusual phone call. It was Norman, requesting that she drop the boys with him at 5:00 p.m. that day, rather than at 4:00.
“Okay,” Jennifer said. She couldn’t resist adding, “But I am going to put that in the Bad Dad column of the time log I am keeping for your lawyer.”
“Very funny, Jennifer,” Norman said. “You still owe my attorney a response to the letter she sent you, you know.”
“I know,” she said. “I know.”
Now that Norman was taking the boys on Wednesday afternoons and for his weekly Saturday overnights, too, Jennifer had hoped he would be appeased and drop his pursuit of fifty-fifty custody altogether. She knew Norman was intimidated by the new her, the practically stay-at-home mom who, in every aspect of parenting, so obviously had him beat. She’d hoped that if she left the ball in his court long enough, he might not ever bring it up to the basket. But a month before, Jennifer had received a letter from Norman’s new lawyer
asking her to begin negotiations to officially amend their agreement. At first, Jennifer had simply ignored it. Hanging up the phone now, she thought of the list of divorce lawyers she’d compiled and resolved to make an appointment the following week. It had to be done. The 5-2-2-5 schedule Norman had proposed (supposedly a common custody arrangement that made
5-2-2-5
part of divorce parlance) would have the boys with her Monday and Tuesday, with Norman Wednesday and Thursday, and at her place every other weekend, meaning that some weeks she would have five nights in a row without them. It was completely untenable. She still didn’t believe Norman would really take her to court to get it, but she’d be foolish to count on that.
She sighed. The change in plan meant an extra hour to kill on a dark, cold Saturday, and that she would have to wait an extra hour before her desperately needed Saturday-afternoon nap, which she always took after she dropped the boys off. It was too cold for the park—the beginning of those dark months when parents of young boys spend a lot of time in bowling alleys or at Chuck E. Cheese, trying to burn excess boy energy before it incinerated entire city blocks. Luckily, Julien had a birthday party to go to at a bounce-house place, and Jack was invited to bounce too. The party, however, didn’t start until one, and it was only nine in the morning.
“I want to pway—I mean p
l
ay—Mousetrap!” Jack announced after pancakes. “With
Mama
!” Mousetrap was Jack’s new favorite game, and Jennifer had spent so much time circling the cheese wheel with her little yellow mouse (the forlorn color neither boy ever wanted), she had begun to wish the mice really were in a trap and would get picked off by a predator one by one, never to traverse the wheel again. “Julien,” she said, as she sat down on a barstool with the newspaper, “will you play with him, please?”
“But we want
you
to play with us,” Julien said. “And I don’t want to play Mousetrap. I want to play Sorry.”
“How about an hour of quiet time first,” Jennifer suggested, “where everybody does their own thing, and then I will play with you guys?”
“Nooooo!” they both wailed. “No quiet time! We want to play with you now!”
Jennifer looked longingly at the paper. She had not always been successful at enforcing periods of “quiet time” on the weekends even before she’d begun using the app, but since she’d been around more, she had noted that the boys seemed less able, or perhaps simply less willing, to play on their own. “Did you know Grandma made me have quiet time every day after school?” she asked them. “And did you know that parents never used to play with their children? Like in
Little House
? Mary and Laura don’t ask Ma and Pa to play with them. Can you imagine?”
“We know, Mom,” said Julien. “But we don’t live on a prairie. We live in an apartment building. We can’t go around looking for animals and Indian beads. We can’t even go alone into the elevator.”
He had a point. But Jennifer did not want to play Sorry, or Mousetrap. She wanted to read the paper. “How about a movie?” she said, feeling like a lame, no-account mother the minute she said it. “Yes!” they cried. “With
Mama
,” Jack said.
“No,” Jennifer replied. “You are perfectly capable of watching a movie by yourselves. Especially if it’s going to be
Swiss Family Robinson
. Again.” Even as she said it, she felt pathetic. Observing them as they hungrily searched through the DVDs, fighting already about what to watch, she added, “Afterward, we’ll do an art project.”
They barely heard her, but she didn’t care.
* * *
A
FTER THE MOVIE
(during which Jennifer attempted to read the paper but instead fell asleep in Jack’s deliciously cozy, stuffed animal–filled bed), they did do a project, as planned. It was a simple project, one her mother had always done with her during the holidays to make gifts for her teachers. Naturally, Jennifer had never found the time to do it with her boys, and as she set the Styrofoam cones out on the table, with a big bowl of peppermints placed in the middle, and showed the boys how to pin the ends of peppermint wrappers in rows around the cones to make red and green and white peppermint trees, the way she and her mother used to do, she both missed and felt close to her mom in a way she hadn’t for a long time. The boys, perhaps picking up on her good feeling, decided they loved making the trees so much that they made an extra one, for none other than Norman.
Jennifer couldn’t wait for Norman to see it.
And so, after two hours of bouncing, pizza, and cake, and a spontaneous hour spent at a friend’s house afterward to kill the rest of the afternoon, Jennifer brought the boys, the peppermint Christmas tree (placed carefully upright in a crisp white paper bag), and Jack’s blankie to Norman’s front door, ready to deliver them all. Or at least to what she thought was Norman’s front door. She ought to know, as it used to be hers too. But now there was a wreath on it, and a cheery welcome mat with a snowman on it waving hello.
This was strange. So strange that she said aloud, “This is Daddy’s, right?” The boys were too busy knocking to answer, and then the door opened and, sure enough, there was Norman, his thick black hair full of product, as usual. But then the scent of mulled wine and fresh-baked cookies wafted out around him and into the hallway, which was stranger still.
“Boys!” he said, lifting them up in the air with extra
I’m a
great dad
enthusiasm, she thought, though there was nobody but her to perform for. “How are you guys?”
Jennifer tried to smile.
“Come in,” he said. “Sorry about the five o’clock thing. We’re just having some people over and we needed a little bit more time to get ready.”
We?
Jennifer thought. She looked around nervously, her heart beginning to pound. Peeking her head inside the apartment, she saw that it had been transformed. It wasn’t just that it smelled like yummy holiday things, or that there was a five-foot tree in the corner (when was the last time Norman had gotten anything other than a tiny bush in a foil-covered pot to appease the boys, and decorated it with anything more than a single string of tinsel?), or that there were little white lights in the window. It was that it was neat, and clean, and homey, even, and there were new throw pillows on the couch. Some of the boys’ recent artwork hung from clips on a wire strung on one of the walls. She had always meant to do that. There was no way Norman had.
With a sickening feeling, she realized she had not entered Norman’s apartment in weeks, maybe even a month or more. She’d been sending the boys up and down from the lobby, which they loved because it was the only time she let them ride in the elevator alone. She’d come up this time only to show off her stupid peppermint tree, which she was beginning to want to crush beneath her snow boot.
There was somebody in the kitchen.
“Dina?” Norman said, holding Jack in his arms and tickling him. “Jennifer’s here.”
“Oh, sorry!” Jennifer heard a woman’s voice cry. “I was just taking out the cookies!”
Jennifer felt like she was on an episode of
Punk’d
. Surely somewhere there was a hidden camera. Everything in her body
was screaming at her to flee. She prayed that the smile she had managed to plaster on her face when she walked through the door would not fail her. And out of the kitchen she came: Dina, who looked like a pixie, barely five feet tall, with short, dark brown hair that curled in perfect little wisps on her forehead, and dark purple lipstick, adding a hint of downtown cool to her otherwise too-cute cookie-baking costume, complete with an apron and floured forearms.
Dina Lou Who,
Jennifer thought,
who could be no more than two.
Or at least born in the 1980s.
“Jennifer,” she said warmly, and genuinely, Jennifer thought, which irritated her even more, “I’m so happy to meet you. I’ve heard so much about you, and I just love the boys.”
They shook hands. And then it happened. The boys ran happily into Dina’s arms too.
“Hi, monkey!” she said to Jack, kissing his head not once but
several
times, cooing and mooning over him without the slightest hint of reserve at Jennifer’s being there. “I’m making cookies; want to help?”
Jennifer attempted to stand still, but she was beginning to shake. “Norman?” she said. “Can we talk for a minute, please?” Norman nodded. She could have sworn she saw the tiniest little smirk on his face. “Nice to meet you,” she said to Dina.
“Nice to meet you too,” she said. “Come on, peanuts; help me with the frosting?”
Peanuts? Monkey?
How many idiotic nicknames did this woman have for Jennifer’s children? Dina led the boys, who followed her after a quick glance back at Jennifer, who nodded them on as encouragingly as she could, into the kitchen.
Norman and Jennifer went into the bedroom. The bedroom that used to be their bedroom. Three years ago, when Jennifer had realized that she could not live with Norman another day, that his combination of insecurity, self-righteousness,
and emotional obliviousness was killing her, she’d known that she would have to be the one to find somewhere new to live. He would have made such a botched job of creating a new home that would be suitable for the boys, and she had already created this one. (Though of course until recently, they’d hardly spent any time there.) It wasn’t much, anyway: small, like her place was. But still, it had been theirs together. And now there was another woman’s underwear on the floor.
The bed was unmade. Apparently Dina did not do beds, just cookies.
“Who is that?” Jennifer asked.
“Dina,” he said slowly, as though Jennifer had missed her name. “We’ve been seeing each other since school started. She teaches at St. John’s too. Math,” he added proudly.
“She’s not a student?”
“She’s twenty-nine, Jennifer. She’ll be thirty in May.” He said it as though she were about to reach retirement. Jennifer thought of all the fortysomething men, men Norman’s age, who, in her brief forays on online dating sites, had specified they wanted to meet women between the ages of eighteen (
eighteen!
) and thirty-five, and then of the fifty- and even sixty-year-old men who “winked” at her there, viewing a thirty-nine-year-old as just their size. How things had changed since she and Norman had begun their courtship, when she, the hot young coed, had had all the power, and he had been the one, penniless but full of ambition, in hot pursuit.
“Do you know what that was like for me?” she asked him. “Walking in your door, getting ambushed like that?”
“What about Dina?” he said. “Do you think that was easy for
her
? She didn’t expect to see you either, Jen. You never come up. You could have let me know.” So it was her fault?
“Is it serious?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“How serious? I mean, it better be serious, if you are letting the boys get so close to her. And I assume she doesn’t stay here when they’re here.”
Norman looked her right in the eye. “She does, actually,” he said. “We just tell them it’s a grown-up sleepover.”
“Seriously?” she said, her face turning bright red. “A
grownup sleepover
? You realize Julien is eight, right? You realize Jack is not a moron? And what about when they crawl into bed with you in the middle of the night? What is she … what does she …” Jennifer glanced at the underwear on the floor and grimaced. “How could you think it was okay for you to do this without telling me?”
“To do what?” he said. “To move on, Jennifer? To try to be happy?”
“Oh, come on,” she said. “That’s not what I’m saying, and you—”