Lauren Takes Leave
Read Lauren Takes Leave Online
Authors: Julie Gerstenblatt
Lauren Takes Leave
~ A NOVEL ~
Julie Gerstenblatt
Copyright © 2012 by Julie
Gerstenblatt.
All
rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the author.
Lauren Takes Leave
is a work of
fiction. Names, characters, e-mail addresses, places, and incidents are
the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.
Cover
concept and design by Brett Gerstenblatt and Gary Tooth
Illustrations
by Liz Starin
FIRST EDITION
www.juliegerstenblatt.com
Table of Contents
Questions and Topics for Discussion
if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility.”
—ALGERNON MONCRIEFF, from Oscar Wilde’s
The
Importance of Being Earnest
, Act 1
“Hey, Cameron, you realize if we’d played by the rules,
right now we’d be in gym?”
—FERRIS BUELLER, from John Hughes’
Ferris Bueller’s
Day Off
A Confession or Three
Now, this is going to sound crazy, ladies and gentlemen
of the jury, but it’s true. All of it. Except for the parts that I made up, of
course. Those are false.
My first confession is this: I
wanted
to get placed
on a jury. Yes, bizarre as it sounds, I longed for it.
Only, I didn’t know how badly I wanted it until it was
almost too late.
Fact: I received a blue jury questionnaire in the mail in
January of this year.
Fact: I filled out the form and sent it back to the return
address, promptly forgetting all about it.
Fact: As luck, fate, or divine intervention would have it,
in April I was called for jury duty at the county courthouse in Alden, New
York.
This one act led to several random incidents, including a
bit of travel, some outpatient cosmetic procedures, and, of particular note, a brief
adventure with a cross-dressed burlesque dancer named Dixie. It also led to my
so-called incarceration.
I am standing before you now to beg your forgiveness. It
is my desire to explain, with almost complete candor, as much about the past
week as I can recall. Those bits from when I was inebriated notwithstanding, I
will do my best to piece it all together for you.
Why you? Because, dear reader, by picking up my story and
cradling its contents in your hands, you have become my jury.
Unwittingly, perhaps, but isn’t that how all jurors come
to be? One minute you’re in your office cubicle, playing Scrabble against the
brain in the iPad, or running on a treadmill somewhere, trying to will your
thighs into submission, and the next, you’re responding to a summons from the
local courts and deciding the fate of a schoolteacher who may or may not be
guilty of the types of wrongdoings that we’re all guilty of, to a degree.
And so, please read without bias. The decision lies in
your hands.
Fact: I am mostly innocent.
Monday
“Ben, you need to change. Those pants are way too short,”
my husband, Doug, says, passing Ben on the stairs.
My nine-year-old son checks himself out by looking down at
his feet as he reaches the bottom step. “They’re fine,” he concludes. “I’m not
changing.”
Doug appeals to me, calling down from the second-floor
landing. “Lauren!”
“O
kay
,” I say, wondering for the thousandth time
why it is automatically my job to clothe, feed, and bathe the offspring we
produced together.
“And did you get to pick up my shirts from the dry cleaner’s
yet?”
“Yes!” I shout. But then I remember a small detail. “They’re
still in the trunk of the car.”
Silence.
“Dad, I
like
my pants like this,” Ben calls up the
stairs, daring Doug into a full-on, 7:30 a.m. brawl.
There is a heartbeat’s length pause as the house holds its
breath, waiting for the next move.
I, for one, know what will happen next, because this
conflict occurs between them in some variation every weekday morning. Doug puts
on his glasses after showering and his critical eye wakes up, begins to focus.
It’s the hair not brushed, the dishes unwashed, the frogs
unfed. The bed unmade, the shoes untied, the homework incomplete.
I nod and smile, brush the hair, clean the dishes, feed
the frogs, make the beds, tie the shoes, finish the homework. (Which is hard,
by the way. Since when does third-grade math include algebra?)
The conversation between them goes on over my head, and
snakes between my chores. It always boils down to “You didn’t do this or that”
from Doug and “Why do you care? You’re never home” from Ben.
Both have a point. I referee. I acknowledge to Doug that
Ben is a bit spoiled and we’re working on it, and then, when Doug is out of
earshot, whisper to Ben that Dad’s stressed out because his start-up company
isn’t doing that well in this economy and we have to be understanding. I try to
make peace by cheerleading for both sides.
It’s almost enough to make a person want to run out of the
kitchen to go teach middle school.
Almost.
“Lauren? Did you call the electrician yet? And Ben needs
to apologize.”
“No,” I call up the stairs.
“No, what? Electrician or apology?”
“Yes,” I shout back, emptying last night’s clean items
from the dishwasher.
That should be sufficiently inconclusive. There’s no word
from Doug upstairs. Ben just shrugs and saunters into the kitchen for
breakfast.
Like in a finely choreographed ballet, the next dancer
comes onstage just as the other one exits. My kindergartener, Becca, yells from
her room at the top of the stairs. “Everyone be quiet! I need my sleep so the
monsters don’t come into my head!”
“What does that even mean?” Ben asks.
“Not sure,” I say, following him.
Ben sits at the kitchen counter and waits, like this is a
restaurant and I’m serving up his favorite.
“We’ve discussed breakfast, Ben. You are old enough to get
it for yourself,” I say, as I set up his breakfast for him—bowl, spoon, milk,
Cinnamon Toast Crunch—the irony of which is not lost on me, and move on to the
making of lunches and snacks—mine, Ben’s, and Becca’s.
Becca stumbles into the kitchen moments later, her hair a
testament to her fitful sleep; it looks like she was caught in a wind tunnel. Oblivious
to her appearance, she slides onto a stool at the island. “Kix, Mommy. Now.”
“Now, what…?” I lead.
“Now,
please
,” she says, rolling her eyes. There’s
a dormant teenager living inside my five-year-old, like an ancient volcano that
could explode at any moment. These days she just rumbles. But in a few years,
I’m going to have to move out of the house in order to protect myself from the
hot lava that will be Becca.
I scan the shelf of cereal boxes to find that, although we
own approximately forty-two kinds of General Mills and Kellogg’s varieties, we
are fresh out of Kix.
“How about limited-edition Froot Loops Sprinkles?” I say.
“Kix.”
“Berry Berry Kix?”
“Regular!” she says, clearly not amused.
I know how this is going to end, and it’s not pretty.
“Bec, I’m all out of Kix.” I make a pouty face, to let her
see how devastating this moment is to me. Maybe if I feign distress, she won’t
have to.
Her mouth opens wide, but no sound emerges. Her face
wrinkles and contorts. Ben takes his bowl and moves to the other side of the
room with it, so as not to be caught in the path of whatever tornado is about
to be unleashed.
A piercing wail breaks the silence and reverberates around
the room. Fat tears sprout fully formed, running down her pink cheeks and
drenching her pajamas in seconds. She is a tsunami, a typhoon, a series of
natural disasters from around the globe bottled and unleashed in my kitchen.
“
Mommy!
”
she hollers. “Ooooouuugghh!”
Little people, little problems. I try not to laugh at her
need for drama, then I console her, as I do every other morning when I can’t
give her exactly what she wants. If I have plain bagels, she wants sesame. If I
have apples, she wants pears. If I’ve made pancakes, she wants waffles.
Today, I offer up all the other cereals like they are
contestants in a beauty pageant. “Look, Bec, Lucky Charms has swirly
horseshoes! The unopened Frosted Flakes holds a prize inside!
Don’t you want
to know what it is?
”
I’m all slick gloss on the outside, and I know that I’m
supposed to be the one in charge here, but my heart is beating a million miles
a nanosecond. Just to be clear: I am a tad bit petrified of my five-year-old.
Becca considers my overwhelmingly enthusiastic response. Her
puffy eyes meet mine and, for a moment, I think the storm is blowing over. There
may be a spark of reason there, behind the psychotic glaze.
Instead, she reaches over and grabs the opened box of
Lucky Charms, sniffing its contents like a fine connoisseur. Then she takes a
handful of the sugarcoated puffs, slides off her seat, and considers me. She
opens her fist and pops the entire contents into her mouth, chewing
thoughtfully. A stray purple star ends up on the floor, where Becca steps on
it, perhaps accidentally, on her way back to the sunroom’s television.
That poor Lucky Charm is like a fine dust now, and Becca
is trailing it with her sock across the white kitchen tile.
“Miss Rebecca Eliza Worthing!” I say. As if what? The use
of her full, formal name will whip her into shape? “Shake that off your foot!” She
does. “Now, please come help me clean that up or I’ll…” But she’s gone before I
can come up with a suitable threat, perhaps to work through the rest of her
displeasure with an unsuspecting Barbie.
“Good job, Mom,” Ben says, deeming it safe to approach the
kitchen island once more.
He places his empty cereal bowl in front of me and mocks
my parenting with a thumbs-up signal and a sardonic grin.
“What? You can’t put the bowl in the sink, twelve inches
that way?” I snap at him. “Or, God forbid,
inside
the actual
dishwasher?”
“Whatever,” he says, heading to the den to watch cartoons.
“You and dad are both in bad moods this morning.”
Amidst deep, cleansing breaths, I write sweet little notes
on paper napkins and slip them into my children’s lunch bags, hoping that by
doing so, I will actually feel the scribbled sentiment.
After I finish putting Ben’s and Becca’s lunches and
snacks, in their color-coordinated containers, into their rightful pockets of
the correct backpacks, I place my lunch in my school bag along with a folder of
graded essays and three folders of not-graded essays. I move it all to the
door, ready for launch in eight minutes’ time.
Becca sheepishly re-enters the kitchen, fully dressed for
school. She leans against the doorframe and looks up through long lashes. “Can
I have some more of that cereal? It was good. I’m sorry. Please?”
“Sure, honey,” I say, biting my tongue.
She’s only
five, Lauren
, I think.
She doesn’t know any better.
I pour some
cereal into a plastic cup and hand it to her for breakfast on the go.
“Laney, could you find Ben and make sure he brushes his
teeth, please?” I call. “Laney?” There’s no response. I try a few more times. “Laney?”
My mantra eventually brings Ben in from the den.
“Where’s Laney?” I ask the kids, looking around. The
already cluttered kitchen is now covered with breakfast detritus. Laundry is
piled by the basement door, ready for washing. “Where’s dad?”