Goodbye To All That (3 page)

“Just tell me what’s going on,” she said, deciding she could be demanding, too. “Tell me, or I won’t host this thing.”

“I really don’t want to talk about it on the phone.”

“Why? Do you think the NSA has my line bugged?”

“What’s the NSA? One of those spy things?” A pregnant pause. “All right, Jill. I’ll tell you. But please don’t tell Doug and Melissa. Let Dad and me tell them in person.”

Jill hadn’t realized this was a question requiring a response until her mother’s silence stretched several long seconds. “Okay,” Jill agreed. “I won’t tell.”

“Your father and I are getting a divorce.”

Jill almost gasped. Almost laughed. The very idea was so shocking it was hilarious.

She wasn’t naïve. She was aware of the statistics—half of all marriages and blah-blah-blah. She counted among her acquaintances a fair share of divorced people. Two of her closest friends from college were divorced. Connie and Bill McNabb from down the street got a divorce last year and sold their house at a loss. Everyone in the neighborhood had seemed more upset by the puny price they’d accepted for their four-bedroom contemporary than by the news that the McNabbs were splitting up. Their divorce might not have threatened the other married couples on the street, but it did threaten their property values.

Divorces didn’t happen in Jill’s family, though. The marriage of her grandparents on her mother’s side had survived World War II, most of which Grandpa Schwartz had spent in a cold, damp trench somewhere in Belgium while Grandma Schwartz collected tin cans and grew vegetables in a ten-by-twenty-foot plot behind their three-decker in Roxbury. Then Grandpa Schwartz had come home and their marriage had survived a move to Brookline, Grandma Schwartz’s frequent spasms of hysteria, and Grandpa Schwartz’s fondness for schnapps. It had survived financial ups and downs and passionate fights and their son Isaac eloping with a shiksa. Grandpa Schwartz was gone now, his butt no doubt planted firmly on a bar stool somewhere in heaven, and Grandma Schwartz was missing about half her mind, but the remaining half seemed to be coping well enough, supported by the competent staff at the assisted-living facility she’d moved to last year. The Schwartz grandparents had stayed together until Grandpa Schwartz shuffled off his mortal coil.

The same with Jill’s paternal grandparents. The Bendels had been a perfect match, both of them slight and pale and meek. Grandpa Bendel had been bald, Grandma Bendel had had breasts, but other than that they’d been more or less interchangeable.

So neither of Jill’s parents had come from broken homes. And until a minute ago, Jill hadn’t come from a broken home, either.

“How can you get a divorce?” she wailed. For some reason, her mother’s announcement seemed like a personal affront. What Jill had really wanted to shout was,
How dare you?
Which didn’t make sense. It was her mother’s divorce, not hers. Her mother’s and her father’s. “You’ve been married for forty years.”

“Forty-two, but who’s counting? We can talk more on Saturday. I know you’re busy. You’re working on one of those catalog jobs? I shouldn’t keep you.”

Don’t do this,
Jill thought, unsure of what
this
was.
Don’t guilt-trip me about my work. Don’t dump a bombshell on me and hang up.

Don’t get a divorce.

“What happened?” she asked. “Did Dad
 . . .
do something?” She couldn’t imagine her father doing anything divorce-worthy. Sixty-four years old and the man had never even gotten a speeding ticket. The idea of his having an affair, or visiting porn websites, or
 . . .
what
? Switching his voter registration to the Republican party? Jill’s mother would probably kick him out of the house for that.

“It’s not any one thing, Jill. It’s nothing I can explain when you haven’t got any time to talk.”

“Try.”

“You haven’t got time,” her mother reminded her. “We’ll talk later. Call and let me know when we should come on Saturday.”

Before Jill could argue with her, before she could insist she
did
have time even though she didn’t, before she could plead with her mother, and cry and stamp her feet and declare that if her parents did this stupid thing she’d hold her breath until she turned blue and passed out, her mother had hung up the phone.

Jill didn’t have much choice but to hang up, too.

She crossed back to her desk, weak and dizzy. What could have precipitated such a drastic move by her parents? What could her father have done to drive her mother away?

What if it was Jill’s mother who had done the doing? What if Ruth had fallen in love with someone else? A neighbor. Someone from her synagogue. A younger man. A younger woman. What if she’d suddenly discovered she was a lesbian?

What if she’d decided to join the Republican party?

Jill couldn’t imagine that. Lesbian, maybe. Republican, never.

Words swam before her on the computer monitor:
romantic
,
rainbow
,
midnight
. Forty-two years, she thought. It wasn’t being the child of a broken home that upset her; it was the idea that something she’d depended on, something that had lasted longer than her own life, something she’d had such tenacious faith in, could suddenly stop existing.

If she could misread her parents’ marriage so totally, how could she trust her judgment on any other issue? If Ruth and Richard Bendel could get a divorce after all these years, why shouldn’t Jill also assume that gravity didn’t exist, and chocolate-chip cookies lowered your cholesterol, and Abbie didn’t need a bat mitzvah, and the shantung silk scarves being peddled by Black Pearl actually felt more like sandpaper than a waterfall against one’s skin?

The back door swung open and Abbie swept in, her eyes bright, her hair windblown and her backpack dangling heavily from one shoulder. “I hate pre-algebra,” she announced with operatic grandeur. “Three worksheets are due tomorrow.
Three
. And Mr. Parshna
knows
it takes, like, a half hour to get through a worksheet. He said so, he said he expects us to spend, like, a half hour on a worksheet, and then he gives us
three
and says they’re due tomorrow. Like I don’t have anything better to do.”

Jill should say something. Something sympathetic about the work sheets, something supportive of Abbie’s math teacher, something about not dumping her backpack on the kitchen table if she was planning to eat a snack, because the during the trip home from school the backpack had probably been sitting on the floor of the bus, where it would have picked up enough germs to poison the population of a small nation.

But her lips refused to move. If she spoke, she might say something about her parents’ divorce. And she couldn’t tell Abbie about that. Abbie adored her grandparents. She would be devastated to think they no longer adored each other.

Of course they adored each other. Forty-two years of love didn’t just evaporate overnight. The whole thing was absurd.

On Saturday, the Bendel family would converge at Jill’s house and she would work this thing out. She was the fixer, the solver, the person who held her loved ones together. The Bendel everyone depended on.

She’d make this right.

“Are you okay, Mom?” Abbie asked.

“Sure,” Jill managed. She turned from her daughter, her beautiful daughter, whose blondish-brown hair looked a lot more like a silken waterfall spilling down her back than Black Pearl’s silk scarf ever would. “I’m just a little distracted, that’s all. I’ve got to write this copy before Noah gets home.” The middle-school bus dropped Abbie off a half-hour before the primary-school bus dropped Noah off. In thirty minutes, maybe Jill could spew out some text for the catalog.

“Once he gets home,” Abbie said, sounding far too wise for her years, “life as we know it comes to an end. Can I bring an apple to my room? I’ve got to get started on these stupid math sheets.”

Jill usually banned food from the kids’ bedrooms, especially food that could drip juice onto the carpet. But she needed to be alone right now as much as Abbie needed to do her math sheets. “Go ahead,” she said. “Just be careful.”

“Oh, darn. I was planning to be careless,” Abbie said sarcastically as she swung open the refrigerator door. “Yay, you bought Granny Smiths. I love Granny Smiths.” She waved a round green apple in her mother’s direction. “I don’t know why Daddy and Noah like those Cortlands so much. These are much better.” She took a bite, grinned and tore a square of paper towel from the roll next to the sink. “Any apple they name after a grandma has to be the best,” she said before scooping her backpack off the table and prancing out of the kitchen.

Abbie idolized her grandmother. What would she think if she knew her grandmother was planning to divorce her grandfather? What would she do? Abandon Granny Smith apples for Cortlands?

Jill wanted to cry. She wanted to be a Bad Mom and curse. She wanted to be a Bad Daughter and call her mother back and accuse her parents of being idiots.

Instead, she guzzled some Diet Coke and typed, “Our new shantung scarf will wrap around you like a fresh breeze.” The hell with alliteration. And waterfalls.

After a deep, cleansing sigh, he straightened and swung out of the car. The garage wrapped him in its cool, musty atmosphere. He pulled his white medical coat and briefcase from the back seat, then climbed the three steps to the inner door that led into the house.

Brooke stood by the cook-top in the kitchen’s center island, a glass of white wine in one hand and a stirring spoon in the other. How a woman could look so enticing while stirring marinara sauce was beyond him. He wasn’t in the mood for spaghetti, but the girls loved it. Brooke did, too, even though she ate at most a dozen strands because she was always watching her carb consumption. Spaghetti was easy to make, she said. Boil water, dump in the pasta, heat up a jar of sauce and
voila
.

Still, he wished the kitchen—a monumental room teeming with the latest gourmet equipment, from a Viking range and a Sub-Zero fridge to engineered stone countertops—didn’t reek of pureed tomatoes and garlic. He wanted to smell Brooke. He wanted to bury his nose in her glossy blond hair and inhale her perfume. He couldn’t recall the name of the scent she wore, but it was obscenely expensive.

And worth every penny, he thought as he studied her from the mudroom doorway.

She glanced up from the stove and smiled. “Hi, honey. I hope you don’t mind.” She gestured toward the saucepan with her long-handled cooking spoon, and then at the large pot sitting on an adjacent burner. “The girls had a play date after school, and by the time we got home
 . . .
”

“No problem,” he assured her, silently ordering himself not to be a prima donna about dinner. The girls had had a play date. Brooke couldn’t be expected to throw together a gourmet feast. Cooking wasn’t her forte, even when the girls didn’t have a play date.

He started toward her, thinking again about burying his nose in the soft, silky blond locks of her hair and gathering her to himself. But before he got close enough even to take her hand, she told him, “And you have to call your sister. As soon as you get home, she said.”

So much for kissing Brooke. So much for pulling her slim, dozen-strands-of-spaghetti body against him. So much for a calm, private minute with his wife before the girls—or, in this case, his sister—barged in. “Damn. What did Melissa do now?”

“Not Melissa. Jill,” Brooke corrected him, stirring the sauce as if she actually had to do that to make it cook properly. “She called earlier and said she needed you to go to her house on Saturday afternoon. I told her you’d be playing golf with your father then, and she said no you wouldn’t.”