Momzillas (2 page)

Two

Bee Elliott was pretty much the most drop-dead-gorgissima person I had ever seen up close—like that untouchable girl in high school two grades above you who all your friends stared at in the main hallway. With blond shoulder-length hair (that probably fell into place as she stretched and yawned at sunrise, barf) and a modelesque frame, she maintained her skeletore bod (or “lovely figure” as ol' school people would say, i.e., a stick with boobs) after giving birth to her son, Weston Burke Elliott. She was basically SuperMom, but not in that horrifying suburban soccer mom kind of way. She didn't wear pleat-front “Mom Jeans” like in the
Saturday Night Live
faux commercial featuring asexual, minivan-driving, baked-goods-wielding, newscaster-haircut women.

She was a stunning New York fashion plate. Her photograph appeared in magazines for her philanthropic efforts, which she managed to juggle between being class mom at her son's nursery school, running around the reservoir twice every morning, going to ladies' luncheons to benefit causes close to her heart, and showing up looking astonishingly beautiful when she accompanied her husband, Parker, to a dinner party or charity gala.

But don't get me wrong, she was no Stepford Wife. Some brain-free bimbo without wiles wouldn't make me nervous. Bee had gone to Princeton, which she let you know quickly enough to think “overcompensation,” and had worked at Lazard Frères up through the delivery of her son before taking the maternity leave that never ended. She nursed for a year, lost the baby weight in six weeks, and was in a bikini the weekend of my California wedding.

At the reception, while it was truly the greatest day of my thirty years next to the birth of little Violet, the one nanosecond of real stress (aside from my mother-in-law remarking that my dress was “so simple”) was when I said hello to Bee. Everyone—I mean everyone, not to brag—gushed about how stunning the wedding was, how soulful, how perfect, but Bee said only a terse “congratulations.” I know my reaction was my own issue and that I was probably reading too much into it or even searching for her approval in some odd way, but it was obvious that next to her blowout, high-society wedding, mine was a sandy, ramshackle beachfest with a barefoot bride and a clichéd sunset.

Bee's epic, peony-dripping, Colin Cowie–planned wedding to Parker Elliott was in New York, where they had both grown up. She'd gone to Chapin, he to Collegiate—both single-sex, old-line academies. They met in third grade at Knickerbocker ballroom dance class. Yes,
ballroom
dance, complete with white gloves. At age eight. I think at the time I was involved in the slightly less chic endeavor of frying bugs under a magnifying glass on our lawn. But Bee's life path seemed glamorous from her first steps, probably taken in satin ballet slippers. Her parents, who were old friends of Josh's mom, had an apartment in Paris, a ski house in Aspen, and an oceanfront estate in Southampton. So it should have been no surprise that her wedding was, next to Lady Di's, which I watched on TV as a kid, the most spectacular extravaganza I'd ever witnessed.

The four-hundred-guest University Club nuptials were captured on the glossy pages of
Town & Country
: her fourteen bridesmaids shimmering in crimson Vera Wang, four blond flower girls floating in white tulle skirts with white hydrangea wreaths on their towheads, and two ring bearers in tiny Ralph Lauren suits with little suspenders and bow ties. Joshie was up at the altar as best man, so I was alone in the pews for the ceremony, immediately feeling like a weird “plus one” on the guest list. It's strange when your guy is in a wedding and you're not; it's that “I'm with him” feeling, like you're not in the bride's inner circle and you don't fully belong. I sat next to Josh's mom, who raved about the “exquisite” and “sumptuous” Oscar de la Renta couture wedding gown, the towering bursts of peonies, and the fourteen-foot Sylvia Weinstock tiered cake. Forget the bride's inner circle—I kind of felt like I didn't even belong in the four hundred.

A year and a half later, when Josh and I got married, I met Bee for the second time, and she was just as radiant as she'd been on her wedding day, but this time with the added feather in her cap of being that hot
and
a mom, too. She was thinner than I was with my bridearexia and I hadn't even borne fruit. The thing was, Parker was the greatest guy ever, a true brother to Josh and always a kindhearted, lovely, fun person to be around. He came to San Francisco every couple months on business and our hilarious laugh-packed dinners together gave me those cackle cramps in my stomach. He was such a gem, always warm and sweet, and a loving dad who promptly whipped out folios of West's pictures while gushing about how much he missed him. So while I felt incredibly close to her husband, Bee was always a little bit of a mystery to me. It was also awky because I'm really a girls' girl and not one to bond with the boys; I have never been dicks over chicks. But I always felt it was so much more seamless with Parker. With Bee, convo seemed forced.

When my daughter was born, an extravagant sterling silver Tiffany baby cup arrived, hand-engraved
VIOLET GRACE
with a card that said “Welcome to the World—the Elliotts.” I was suddenly so embarrassed by the dumb Baby Gap onesies I had sent Bee for Weston the year before. She must have thought that so…unspecial. It wasn't that I had, like, class-anxiety or anything, it wasn't about her having tons of money, it was more about
polish
. Bee was always so perfect, so put-together, I felt like a frigging slob-ass. I had met all of her Chapin friends, who just seemed so stylish and did everything right, by the book. Bee's hand-letterpressed stationery made my thermo-graphed cheapola stuff look like I'd made it at Kinko's.

Take, for example, Bee's Christmas card. It was printed on stock so thick you could slash your wrist with it. Mine was flimsy and done with ink-pad stamps, total junior varsity Martha Stewart–style. The photograph of West was a full-on black-and-white professional portrait captured on the gleaming beaches of the Southampton Bathing Corp. Ours? A random snapshot I took of Violet playing with the seagulls by Fisherman's Wharf—hello cheesy tourist trap. I know I am overanalyzing and sounding all crazy, but it was little symbols like this, a tiny taste posted from her world into mine with a perfectly affixed seasonal stamp, that made me anxious to face my new life. Very anxious.

Three

Yet there was one other embodiment-of-chic humanoid that infused my move with spine-tingling stress. No sooner did I hook up our digital answering machine (which almost required an MIT diploma it took so effing long) than we got The Call. I'd gone to change Violet's diaper; it was a serious Code Brown situation, meaning I couldn't answer the ringing phone, and came back to the living room with my freshly Pampered tot to see a red “1” on the machine. I pressed play and instantly shivered as the poisonous timbre reverberated through the pad. It was Mrs. Lila Allen Dillingham, aka Josh's mom.

I know, I know: most peeps loathe their MiLs; it's the rule and not the exception. MiLs bug DiLs. They get up in their
bidniss
. They claim to know what's best for the kids. The list goes on. But this woman was not just a thorn in my side, she was a full
My name is Inigo Montoya
–hand-carved spear bisecting my bod. A true
Mayflower
type, she had married Josh's warm, sweet dad for love at twenty-one. But for a Greenwich-born
Social Register
member, love don't pay the country club bills. Josh's father, whose twinkling eyes and happy smile lit picture frames in our house, died when Josh was eight, leaving very little money—like my parents, he was a passionate teacher. Lila's parents, due to their lineage (but dwindling bank account, thanks to three generations of racquetball-playing Roman-numeraled peeps who felt “above” working), had vehemently opposed the marriage because he was Jewish. And though she must have loved him (by all reports, he was the funniest, most adoring man ever), her increasing anger about what her friends had and the pressures of keeping up with her childhood Greenwich friends mounted as her parents' dollars-in-eyes values seeped in. Josh said she got so crazy through the years, she used to obsessively drive him by Lauder Way after his father passed away, looking at the fancy houses in Greenwich before they moved back to the city, as she said to her young son—mere months after his father's death—“to find my next husband.” She was this hardhearted patrician blonde, the only one who didn't sound psyched when we announced our marriage plans.

I cried to him after we told her because I could just tell by her Tom Cruisey clenched jaw that she was devastated that her only child, her prince, was wasting himself on a middle-class girl like me when I knew she had cadres of society swans fluttering around her that she'd prefer he wed. She had never been anything but ice cold to me (I called her “The Cube” to the Mooshu Mafia, my group of friends in SF who we had Chinese dinner with every Sunday) and always scanned me from head to toe, no doubt giving me the internal outfit-disapproval once-over. I'm sure even Christy Turlington wouldn't pass her MRI-like inspection, since no mortal maiden could ever be good enough for her “aaaaangel.” And not to be cocky, but with every guy I've ever dated, the moms have loved me. I am always super polite, attentive, respectful, and leaping up as if my four-inch heeled boots were Air Jordans to clear the table or help in the kitchen. I am a girls' girl. I'm open, I watch Lifetime, I smile, I connect. And I fully understand that mother/son he's-my-baby thing. But this, unfortch, was way different, another beast altogether. Josh's mom had this strange worship of him that I found a little weirdo, like he was her chance to keep her lineage “on track” at a social level she had flouted by her first marriage; if Josh married someone to the manor born, she could right the wrongs of her past by sealing her grandchildren into the club of the elite. And she obviously didn't want him to make the same mistake she'd made.

And she didn't make the same mistake again herself: her second marriage, well, that was for cold hard ca$hola. Watson Dillingham was a British hundred millionaire slash former champion polo player who bought her a weekend estate on Conyers Farm in Greenwich and a penthouse on Fifth perched over the swaying trees of Central Park, which looked like their own personal backyard. He was nearing eighty—twenty years her senior—and while she lived it up with her credit cards galore, Watson, “Watts,” had two daughters back in England who would surely get the bulk o' his dough when he went on to that great polo match in the sky. Maybe that was why she had been so desperate for Josh to marry someone wealthy. Maybe she just thought I was beneath him. Maybe she would plague me until I myself went nutso.

But thank God for my husband. Josh was the greatest. So many choruses of women have mother-in-law issues—obviously, even with my extremely tough-to-take MiL, I am not alone. And the only thing that can make it tolerable is how the husband deals with it. The worst is a Jocasta/Oedipus sitch I've heard lore about, where the guy lovingly defends his mom's behavior or even is “torn.” Josh wasn't. He always told me he was well aware of his mom's craziness—he'd grown up with it: the constant quest to be on the right boards, the talking about other families' fortunes, the nonstop gossip about the so-and-sos' split or whose child got rejected from Groton or what family company stock was plummeting. “Just don't let her get to you, she's insane,” he'd say, calming me down. “Hannah, you're the woman in my life.” And it was true. At least while we were in our California perch, thousands of miles away from The Cube. Until I heard her throaty voice on the tin speaker and I froze all over again.

“Joshie! Welcome back, angel darling,” she echoed through the machine's crap speaker. “I hope you're coming to Greenwich this weekend for my big birthday dinner. Watts and I are here having a great time. I'm going to pop into town tomorrow or the next day for some appointments. Call us in the morning, my angel.”

No “Hi, Hannah” or even a mention of her only grandchild, Violet.

But I knew we had to face the music and go that weekend. It was her sixtieth birthday, after all. I could not have been dreading the sojourn more—every time we visited their country house during our dating days I felt so out of place in the Lilly Pulitzer explosion. If Greenwich was Hades, Josh's mom was the devil presiding over the lava-bubbling pit o' fire. And it would only get worse in a few weeks when her majesty was back in residence full-time just a few blocks from us. But I would have to take deep breaths and exhale my frustration and be strong. I thought I could do it. Sure! I could do it. Except that whenever we were with her, minutes passed like hours and I felt like I was in lockdown in Attica.

MEANWHILE, A FEW BLOCKS NORTH…

Instant Message from: BeeElliott

BeeElliott: Bonjour—you there?

Maggs10021: Oui, cherie. How art thou?

BeeElliott: TERRIBLE.

Maggs10021: Y?????

BeeElliott: Went to my dermo today and got totally bitched out for my tan from Lyford.

Maggs10021: Dr. Phillip? What'd he say?

BeeElliott: That walking into his office with my skin is like someone walking into an AA mtg. w/ a bottle of Grey Goose.

Maggs10021: Hilar.

BeeElliott: So…Maggs, HUGE fave.

Maggs10021: Sure, s'up?

BeeElliott: This chick whose hub is friends w/ Park just moved here and I have to intro her around, ugh. Will u come?

Maggs10021: K, so? What's her deal?

BeeElliott: Blah. Lived in SF, grew up in Seattle, I think; nice-ish, but NOK. Dresses like Urban Outfitters threw up on her. Not a MILF like us         

Maggs10021: HA. Gotcha. I'll totally come, no prob.

BeeElliott: I know her hub and MiL since fetushood—u met her, Lila Allen Dillingham? She's chair of the WOG benefit committee.

Maggs10021: Wipe Out Glaucoma? Oh yes! Just saw her pic in T&C. Watson Dillingham's wife?

BeeElliott: Right—saw her at Swifty's and she practically begged me to intro her DiL to the gang; she's clearly stressed b/c the chick is v. left coast and NOK…dreading but please help!

Maggs10021: Of course ma cherie.

BeeElliott: Love u, thx! Let's get the boys together this week—I'll have my nanny call your nanny.