Eliza Starts a Rumor(15)
“Hello!” she sang. “Are you my eleven o’clock?”
Alison held in a laugh and sang back, “I am not!”
“Too bad for you! This house is a beauty!”
Alison moved her diaper bag out of the woman’s way with her foot.
“No worries,” Marilyn had said. “Take your time.”
The woman popped open the front door of the house, and Alison peered in. She wasn’t kidding. It was beautiful. She stood in the doorway, while coaxing Zachary to burp, and took it all in.
The house smelled like a mixture of pine and lavender. She stepped inside to get a better whiff. The entrance foyer led into an oval-shaped parlor with crown molding and parquet floors. The agent caught her peeking.
“Don’t be scared, honey. Come on in,” she said. “My appointment will be here any minute, but the illusion of competition never hurts. Want to see the upstairs?”
Alison was happy to oblige.
The second floor was even prettier than the first. A cozy living room with a wood-burning stove opened into a large dining room. Out the paned picture window off the kitchen sat a big old oak with the platform of a tree house wedged between its limbs. She pictured sitting up there with five-year-old Zachary reading books and eating homemade oatmeal cookies. She’d never baked cookies in her life, but she was sure that if they lived here, she would.
It was then that Alison knew she wasn’t ready to hand Zachary over to the nice nanny she had hired. Images of a black-robed Sandra Day O’Connor spoon-feeding pureed sweet potato to her toddler flashed before her eyes. She had read once that O’Connor took off five years to raise her children before returning to the law. And she became the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court. Alison had given everything to her law firm; certainly, they would understand if she wanted to take a one-year leave of absence.
“I’ll take it,” she’d said to the agent, rifling around her diaper bag for her checkbook so that the woman knew she meant business.
“You don’t even know the details.”
She knew enough about real estate to know that subletting her two-bedroom apartment on lower Fifth Avenue would cover the cost of this house and then some—then plenty, actually. It was the perfect plan for her, taking off more time without running through her savings.
As she sat in the office now, she hoped that she hadn’t made a huge mistake.
CHAPTER 10
Eliza
The day was long, so long that it felt like the equivalent of two or three combined in Eliza’s ordinarily mundane life. At its start she surveyed the spread on her dining room table and filled with pride, pride laced with rebellion. Since food had never been a staple in her house growing up, Eliza always got a little extra satisfaction from filling that same dining room table with a cornucopia of calories. Her mother had maintained her figure by washing down Dexatrim with cans of Tab, while Eliza had sustained herself on boxes of Pop-Tarts and bags of Cheez Doodles she’d kept hidden under her bed next to the Entenmann’s donuts. Her mother would regurgitate dieting idioms one after the other like a walking, talking Jenny Craig Pez dispenser:
“Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels!”
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst, for they are sticking to their diets.”
“Brain cells come and go, but fat cells live forever.”
And the crowd favorite:
“A moment on your lips, a lifetime on your hips.”
Of course, the disparity between her and her mother’s relationship with food felt much bigger to Eliza than her mother’s pithy slogans had suggested. It’s hard to know if Eliza equated her mother not feeding her with her mother not loving her, or the other way around. Either way, one needn’t be a shrink to see why Eliza spent her adult life feeding everyone else.
Eliza had been planning today’s menu for weeks, scouring online cooking sites and saving new recipes on her computer in a folder marked “Delicious” to mix in with her family’s favorites. In the end, the winners were cinnamon roll French toast, morning glory muffins, crustless spinach quiche, scrambled eggs with lox and onions, and her grandmother’s noodle kugel. She made everything herself, except for the fruit salad and bagels, and it all turned out so well you might have thought it came from a caterer. Even in her current mental state, she managed to keep up her Martha Stewart ways.
Eliza had arranged for household items and the dry cleaning to be delivered and joined a farm collective and healthy cooking meal club under the pretext of losing weight. Her strict diet gave her a solid excuse regarding eating out, and Luke seemed thrilled to walk in nightly to the delicious smell of a home-cooked meal. He worked hard all week, golfed most fall weekends, and was usually too spent by the day’s end to care about going out. Not that their recent routine resembled the second act either of them had imagined.
This fall should have been filled with weekend excursions to the city for Broadway plays and concerts at the Garden, meeting Luke in town for a bite after work, and Eliza finally taking up golf, after threatening to do so for just about ever. Even today’s party originated as an excuse—when Luke suggested they do something special and take the kids to see Hamilton, she had produced a quick reason not to.
“We can’t. They have their hearts set on one of our all-day brunches!”