The High Season(17)
“I could have killed him, actually,” Penny said. “It was such an Oprah moment, I swear he and Elena both had tears in their eyes. Go for the dream, he said.”
“He did not. He did not say go for the dream,” Ruthie said.
“Well, okay, not exactly. He said if you’re trapped in a life that’s not your life, it’s the worst thing in the world.”
There came a pause. Ruthie distinctly saw Elena step on Penny’s foot.
“I’m sure he didn’t mean that personally,” Elena said.
“Mmm,” Ruthie said.
“He said not to give a rat’s ass what anyone else thought,” Penny added.
“And he’s seen a rat’s ass, so I’d believe him,” said Ruthie.
9
RUTHIE AND JEM unpacked the car, shouldering the totes, cases, boxes, and suitcases into the playhouse, colliding in doorways, calling out from different rooms (“This room is a shriek of pink!” Jem shrieked, when she saw her room. “It’s an intestine!”), bouncing on beds, turning on faucets, and exulting in a well-stocked open kitchen. Outside they dipped their feet into the pool and examined the pool house.
“Stacks and stacks of towels,” Jem said. “And really good shampoo. My hair is going to smell like a meadow.”
“It’s a compound,” Ruthie said as they surveyed the view. “We have secured the compound, Captain. And we have a vista.” She swung her arms wide. “Ich bein ein Berlinger!”
“Mom, please. You are so beyond me-hearties right now.”
Ruthie knew she was pumping up enthusiasm when the truth was she just felt beleaguered by the day. She’d met a goddess and been ignored by her stepson. Trouble at work that had seemed manageable now loomed, serious. Mike had leaned against the door and suggested a dinner “to talk.” He’d told Penny and Elena that he was trapped in a life that wasn’t his life. She’d been called presentable and dependable.
Maybe Carole was right. Had the disappointments of middle age, the sorrow of a failed marriage, drained something out of her, what her father used to call her pep? Had she lost so much vitality that a young man could see right through her?
She’d once been blessed with cherubic cheeks and good skin. Her thirties had been almost indistinguishable from her radiant twenties. Although slightly drier. Not beautiful but pretty, she knew how to talk to men, how to flirt and keep them abuzz. Of course now she knew that her currency had been mostly youth, because now nobody was looking. She saved the sass and crackle for her girlfriends.
She’d shut all that off because men had shut it off. On the north side of forty, they weren’t leaning closer, weren’t watching her mouth or her ass. They didn’t give a shit if she tossed her hair or cocked an eyebrow. If she was witty they no longer wondered how she’d be in bed, they merely laughed. And it would be a surprised laugh, as though it was impossible for her, at this age, to give them even momentary pleasure.
Post-divorce you had to buy a good bra and inject things into your laugh lines, and she wasn’t in the mood. Who was she going to flirt with, Lloyd Handleman, the local realtor who kept suggesting they have a martini so she could “take the edge off”?
Now she was rounding the corner toward fifty. She thought of Adeline Clay, her face taut, her skin glowing, her waist like a twenty-year-old’s (no butter!), her body as supple as if she’d just stepped off the shiatsu table.
If Ruthie was going to carve a new person out of the old one, she needed more than drugstore moisturizer and outlet shopping.
She needed Carole’s size eight fat pants.
“Come on,” she said to Jem. “Let’s invade the big house. I’ll get the key.”
* * *
—
“THERE ARE EIGHT pairs of Wellington boots,” Jem said. “I counted. And two dishwashers.”
“I know.”
“There’s a climbing wall in the boy’s room.”
“Really?”
“Are you sure we’re allowed to be here?”
“Carole said it was fine.” Ruthie regarded herself in the full-length mirror. She looked drawn. Was the mirror too used to reflecting the better-looking?
“Plus this dressing room is the size of my bedroom.” Jem touched a drawer and it slid open silently, revealing triangularly folded silk panties in an array of colors, a line of matching bras in a column next to them.
“Whoa,” Jem said.
“Honey, please don’t ogle Carole’s underwear, I feel spooky enough as it is.”
“Rich people match,” Jem said. “I bet if they lose a sock, they just throw the other sucker out. They don’t even wait for a couple of laundry cycles to be sure.”
They stared down at the drawer for a moment. Was this the secret that rich people knew? The things most people bought in batches, hurriedly, shaking them out of Gap and Target bags—T-shirts, underwear, socks—were, for the rich, silky secret fabrics that lay against their skin like talismans, reminding them that they did not have to worry about the costs of the ordinary: dry cleaning, orthodontics, lunch. They had the worries of a pleasant life with equally pleasant choices—London for theater this winter, or Turks and Caicos?—so maybe their base level of dopamine was higher than everyone else’s.