Never Have I Ever(2)
She was looking down the stairs and didn’t answer. “What’s up with . . . what’s her name? My neighbor?”
Charlotte was hand-wringing at the foot, giving me emergency eyebrows.
“Charlotte,” I reminded her. “I don’t know. Let me find someone to introduce you around.”
“No need,” Roux said. She sailed past me, directly into the crowd, off to introduce herself.
As soon as she was out of earshot, Char said, “Cher Hair came? Now there’s twenty-one people here, not counting us, and no one seems to realize we do not have enough chairs. I should not move chairs!” She kept tucking her hair back. She looked like a nervous brown mousey, cleaning its ears.
“Her name is Roux, and of course you can’t move chairs, preggo. Relax! I’ll get them,” I told her.
She still looked worried, because she was Charlotte. Plus, this was her book club. She’d started it when Ruby began crawling and she realized she hadn’t read a book since giving birth.
“It’s like the baby ate my brain!” she’d said. “Forget reading. I can’t remember the last time I washed my hair.”
It looked like it had been a good while, but I’d kept that to myself. Instead I’d babysat while Char designed some flyers, and then we’d tucked them into every neighborhood mailbox. She’d called it the Brain-Dead Mommies Book Club, which I thought was bad, but at least I’d talked her out of Zombie-Mombies. It turned out her AA in marketing was wiser than I was. The flyer, the name, attracted the crowd she wanted. Almost everyone here was around her age, all with babies and preschoolers and littlies still in elementary. I was the oldest mommy in the room, in most cases by a good decade.
Before Oliver was born, I’d been on the fringes of this group, knowing them mostly via gossip I got from Charlotte on our daily power walk. Back then I’d played bunco with the middle-aged mothers who had retired from caring about diapers and breast-feeding. That set rolled dice, drank hard liquor, and talked serious about puberty and pot, birth control and college applications. As the stepmom of an adolescent, I’d needed them. These days I fit in better here, and my rare Florida basement space and my chair-moving muscles were forever at Char’s service.
“Get three chairs. Get four. Get at least three,” Char told me, and started counting the women again.
I handed her the stack of printed-out discussion questions and went back up. Every time I came down with another dining-room chair, I checked on our drop-in. Roux seemed fine, easy in her skin, moving group to group. Everyone I saw her speaking with seemed to smile a little wider, laugh a little louder. They were trying to impress her, and I couldn’t blame them. Roux looked so interesting, like a woman with a passport full of stamps, who would know how to make paté from scratch, who’d probably had sex in a moving vehicle. Maybe on the way here.
I came down with the last chair just in time to see Roux holding out a hand to shake with Tate Bonasco. I paused to watch. I couldn’t help it. Tate had never recovered from being pretty in high school, and she brought an eau-de-tenth-grade-lunchroom to neighborhood politics. She called me “the pit bull” behind my back, partly because I had short, sandy hair and an athletic build, but also because I’d thwarted her book-club coup. When we outgrew Char’s little house, she’d cited her big den as an excuse to jack the whole thing.
“It’ll give Charlotte a break from planning it, too,” she’d cooed, acting as if she were doing Char a favor.
I called her on it, saying out loud, in front of everyone, that Tate only wanted it because Char had worked so hard to make it shiny and popular, plus, with Tate at the helm we’d be reading Kardashian biographies every month.
It was bitchy, but losing the club would have broken Char’s heart. And it worked. In the end we moved to my large basement rec room with Char still in charge. Given the history, I couldn’t help but enjoy watching standard-American-pretty Tate meet exotic Roux. Tate straightened, one hand going to smooth her hair, then excused herself to the restroom. Two minutes later she emerged with fresh lip gloss and her T-shirt knotted to show a strip of flat, tanned midriff.
Charlotte began banging out chimes on Lisa Fenton’s wineglass, then motioning with the spoon for everyone to find seats. Unfortunately, Roux happened to be standing in front of the leather wing chair. Roux didn’t even look. She sank backward, and the wing chair received her. It was the tallest chair, the natural focal point of the circle, traditionally Charlotte’s. Char jerked like she’d received a small electric shock when she looked up from herding ladies and saw Roux already settled there. I took a seat in one of the dining-room chairs that I’d pushed up against the fireplace and motioned Char to join me.
“Honestly,” Char whispered as she sat next to me. “I mean, she didn’t know, but you’d think someone would have mentioned.”
Instead there’d been a minor traffic jam as five different women tried to claim the seats on either side of Roux.
“Next time I’ll set the printouts in your chair to hold it,” I said, and Charlotte brightened. She liked having a plan.
I was thinking that I wouldn’t have to. Braless, rental-house Roux and her bird tats would not be back. She didn’t strike me as a joiner, much less a woman who wanted to talk potty training and the lighter side of classic literature. She’d end up at bunco, or maybe nowhere, if her business got done fast enough.