Switcheroo (7 page)

Sylvie focused on the girl, leaving the growing pageant at the window and putting her hand on the girl’s shoulder, trying to gently explain. “Play it as if you were falling in love for the first time,” Sylvie suggested and sat down at the piano. She played the Schubert dreamily, and the yearning and romance of the piece came through. Sylvie herself fell under the sonata’s spell. “
Feel
it, Jennifer.”

“I don’t know what that love stuff feels like.” Jennifer sat, as solid as a packed laundry sack.

“You will,” Sylvie told her reassuringly. Looking at Jennifer’s doubting face, she continued: “Love heightens the senses and makes you do things that are
so
surprising,” she lowered her voice, “and feel so-o-o good. You’ll be amazed. But you have to go slow then too.” Then, as if she were waking up from a dream, Sylvie realized how inappropriate she was being. To cover her slip she smiled brightly, a teacher-to-pupil face. “Don’t worry, Jennifer, you’ll feel it after your first kiss.” Sylvie got up from the piano and went to look out the window again at the activity around the pool. “Try it again,” she encouraged.

“I’ve already been kissed, like, three times,” Jennifer told her, still defensive. Then she began playing the piece again, almost as maniacally as before.

Sylvie turned back to her. “Maybe you just need a better kisser,” she suggested. Jennifer giggled, perked up, and actually slowed down. Good. Poor kid. Sylvie wanted her students to enjoy their lessons, and Jennifer had talent. She just needed the capacity to enjoy it. The girl finished the piece and Sylvie made it a point to praise her. Meanwhile, when she glanced back, her backyard had become even more of a circus.

“Come over here and take a look,” Sylvie told the girl. Jennifer and Sylvie both peered out the window. The crane, tearing the hell out of the lawn, was pool-side. Men with hard hats were gesturing, one of them obscenely. “How did your car get in there?” Jennifer asked, sounding awed.

“I don’t know. Maybe it wanted one more swim before winter.”

Jennifer giggled, until her mother, Mrs. Miller, appeared on the walk outside the French doors and stepped in to join them. She was the kind of suburban matron who not only had to have her children do everything, but always had to know everything herself. “Sorry I’m a little late,” she apologized, but it didn’t sound like she was sorry. “There’s a lot of confusion in your driveway. How did the lesson go?” she asked brightly.

Jennifer tore her eyes off the crane and looked up at her mother. “She told me I had to get kissed better. Like, maybe with tongues.”

Mrs. Miller opened her eyes wide and turned to Sylvie. Great, Sylvie thought. She shook her head. “No, Jennifer, I did not say that. I didn’t give specifics,” Sylvie reassured Mrs. Miller. “We were talking about tempo, actually.” She raised her brows and lowered her voice. “I’d also suggest you monitor her television.” Jennifer’s mother, pacified, took her daughter by the arm and left.

Sylvie walked out into her yard. People were all over. Phil was yelling at a guy with a video camera. She felt as if it were some kind of foreign film and she was in it. “What
is
all this?” she asked her brother.

“We’re shooting today’s commercial here.”

“Here? In my
yard?
”

“Yeah. I rerouted the crew. We’d been scheduled to shoot one on the lot, but this is better. Now we’re just waiting for Bob to get ready.” Phil laughed and looked over toward the garage, where Sylvie was surprised to see her husband having his hair combed by a woman. “He’s becoming the Harrison Ford of car ads,” Phil smirked. He looked back at her. “It’s a hell of a thing to do to a Z2,” he told her. “But Pop thinks it’s a stroke of luck that you couldn’t control yourself. Women drivers.” Phil shook his head again.

Then Bob approached. Sylvie just looked up at him and his professionally combed hair. He smiled back sheepishly. “Hey, Bob, you—” Phil began but, klutzy as always, he tripped over a cable, then looked around to see who he could blame it on. Of course, Sylvie saw, he noticed the only woman on the crew, a pretty woman with freckles and auburn hair. “Hey! Red! Is this the way you hope to get a good-looking guy?” he shouted. “Try taking out a personal ad.” Sylvie cringed. Phil peered at Bob. “Makeup! We need makeup.” The woman Phil had just dissed picked up her makeup box and moved toward them.

“Well, I’m sure she’ll do a great job now,” Bob said to Phil, smiling again at Sylvie. She said nothing, just moved away as Bob was prepped and fussed over.

“Okay, okay, listen up. A star is born,” Phil yelled to the crew.

My brother is an ass, Sylvie thought. She watched as Phil hunkered down to talk to Bob. “You know what we need here. The usual bullshit. Sincerity until it hurts.” Phil paused in his directorial overdrive. He’d obviously seen what Sylvie just had—Rosalie’s face popping up over the fence. “Get that head down out of the shot or we’re going back to court!” he shouted.

Rosalie disappeared. Poor Rosalie. She’d always been loud and insensitive, but no woman deserved Phil. Sylvie looked back at Bob, who’d been powdered down and was now being led to his mark. Phil handed him the script. Bob was used to doing all this, but he looked nervous. Sylvie watched him. Somehow, he looked different. It wasn’t just the makeup. She approached him.

“Sylvie, I know that you—” Bob began.

From behind, Phil interrupted. “Got your lines down?” he asked.

Bob gestured toward the script. “I don’t think it’s—”

Phil, the half-pint Quentin Tarantino, was in his glory. When they were shooting a commercial, he got himself confused with an
auteur
. “Come on. No temperament,” he said to Bob. “And people: let’s get this the first time or die,” he called out. Sylvie saw one of the crew members roll his eyes. She blushed for her brother. Meanwhile, Bob turned to the camera.

Was this, then, all the attention she got after doing something as crazed, as outrageous, as dunking her car like a doughnut? Had Bob, before he’d even spoken to her, before he’d had a chance to…before
she’d
had a chance to—well, to talk—digested this bold act of hers? Had he processed it in his own way, turned it to his advantage and already moved on, leaving her frozen here, unable to move?

Somehow Bob had managed, literally overnight, to turn her discomfort, her confusion and pain, into an advantage, or at least an ad. No wonder he’d been president of the Rotary and head of the Chamber of Commerce!

Sylvie stood, frozen, while Phil the director signaled for Bob to start. But then Sylvie broke out of her trance and began walking toward her husband. Rosalie, along with another neighbor and a few kids, had come from her side of the fence and joined the crowd around the shot.

“Rolling,” the cameraman called out. “Speed.”

Bob began to speak his lines. “Why would I put a BMW in a pool? To prove to you—”

“Bob?”

“Great, Sylvie! You blew a take!” Phil cried. “You know we’re working here.”

“Bob?” Sylvie repeated, ignoring her brother. “You didn’t put the car in the pool.”

“No. I know that, Sylvie. I’m just reading the script.”

Phil got between the two of them and shook his head. “Even my own sister acts like a woman.” Phil signaled to the crew to begin again. “Sylvie, move out of the frame. Okay, people, let’s take it from the top. Rosalie, move back. No one wants that face in their living rooms.”

Rosalie flipped Phil the bird and stalked away.

Sylvie, who felt like doing the same thing to her brother, ignored him instead and looked only at her husband. “Bob, do you think I did this to improve car sales?”

“No.”

“Oh, come
on!
” Phil smacked his own thigh. If he’d been von Sternberg he’d have used a riding crop. “Are we playing twenty questions, Sylvie?” Sylvie just stood there.

Despite his brother-in-law’s impatience, Bob did, to his credit, keep his eyes locked with hers. “I thought you must have been upset about something,” he admitted.

“Have you thought about what, Bob?”

Phil smacked his own forehead, but not as hard as Sylvie wanted to. He pointed to his watch. “This is not the time for a tender marital moment.”

Sylvie kept the laser look on her husband. “What, Bob?” Sylvie repeated, ignoring not only Phil but all the now silent staff and neighbors crowding her yard.

Phil, a desperate look on his face, glanced at the watching crew. Then he grabbed his sister’s hand. “Hey, how about you be in the commercial with Bob?” he asked in the false, cheery voice of a desperate clown at a children’s birthday party gone wrong. He regrouped and then continued in a tone that sounded apologetic. “Women buy cars.”

“No…really. I don’t want to—” Sylvie tried to pull free.

But Bob grabbed her other hand. “Come on! Wasn’t it you who wanted us to be spontaneous? Just kick off your shoes so they don’t get wet,” he told her. “We’re only shooting from the knees up.” He pulled her into the shot, hugged her, and then grabbed the nape of her neck. Bob tried to point her at the camera.

Sylvie was about to pull away when she looked down and saw that Bob’s own pant legs were rolled up, his socks and shoes off. She stared down at his bare feet. She couldn’t believe it. She stiffened and once again she found it hard to catch her breath. Bob’s hand on her shoulder became suddenly unbearable. “Sorry. No. I can’t,” she said, horrified, and pulled away.

“You
can’t
? Come on, Sylvie. Since when do you have stage fright?” Phil asked. He grabbed her hand.

“No. It’s not that. I forgot. I have to go.” Sylvie pulled away again.

“Where?” Bob wanted to know. As if he had any right.

“I just have to go. I need to…” Sylvie felt tears welling up in her eyes. She couldn’t think, couldn’t he, couldn’t stay. She couldn’t bear for Bob to touch her, for them all to be looking at her. She felt exposed, humiliated. “I have to…go get a pedicure or something,” she said and bolted.

Jim, Sylvie’s father, was sitting in his wing chair, his feet on an ottoman, watching television. Mildred was deadheading her African violets. She noted that the pot on this one was cracked. She made a mental note to glaze another one at the pottery shop she owned. She looked over at her husband, seeing what the world saw. Jim was still good-looking, but he’d mellowed into a slightly overweight, grandfatherly type, the kind of man who could sell oatmeal on television. In fact, at the moment he had the television on, the remote in his hand. He was watching a PBS documentary on Dunkirk, or maybe it was Anzio—one that he’d probably seen a hundred times.

“Mildred. Look at this.”

“Please. Change the channel. You’re making me nervous,” she told him. “I hate it when you say, ‘Honey…the Nazis are on.’ As if I care.”

“I thought you wanted to see them lose again.”

“Jim, I’m not interested. Women don’t want to watch World War II unless Gary Cooper is an officer in it. Why don’t you give
me
the remote? There’s an Angela Lansbury rerun on.”

He waved her away, then realized she was teasing. “You know, we’ve been fighting about television since it was invented,” Jim commented.

Mildred laughed. Jim put his arm out but before he could hug her, gunfire broke out. He looked back at the screen and only patted Mildred’s back. Mildred had hoped for more and, anyway, she didn’t like to be patted. Never had. It felt…condescending. There, there, old girl. She turned to go back to her deadheading. Just then the doorbell chimed. Jim, of course, didn’t move, so Mildred went to the door and opened it. Sylvie was standing there, disheveled, out of breath and clearly upset.

“My God! Sylvie! What’s happened? Another car incident?”

Sylvie shook her head and tried to talk, but no words came out of her mouth. Looking in both directions, Mildred drew her into the foyer. No use sharing the latest bizarre family behavior with the entire neighborhood, not to mention Rosalie the Mouth. “Take a deep breath. There. Now another,” Mildred directed. “Okay. Talk.”

“Bob’s having an affair,” Sylvie finally managed to gasp.

The two women stared at one another for a silent moment. Mildred then shook her head. “Not Bob. I admit my son is crazy, but not my son-in-law. We took him into the business
and
the cul-de-sac…” She paused. “How do you know?”

“He’s never home. He forgave me about my car too easily. Did you see the crane he’s got in the backyard? He and Phil are using it to shoot a commercial. Daddy told them to.”

“I’m not surprised,” Mildred murmured.

“Mom, don’t you see? Next he’ll even let me drive Beautiful Baby. Something is
definitely
wrong. And…people are saying they saw us out together. But it’s always some place
I
haven’t been to.”

Mildred, her heart beginning to flutter in her chest, forced herself to take on the practical aspect that Angela Lansbury used in
Murder, She Wrote
. “That’s nothing. Circumstantial,” she said dismissively. “You still haven’t given me anything definitive.”

Sylvie burst into tears. “He’s gotten a pedicure.”

“A pedicure! My god!” Mildred took her daughter into her arms. Sylvie wasn’t just paranoid. “Was it a professional pedicure?” Mildred asked, giving her son-in-law the benefit of the doubt.

Sylvie nodded and wiped her nose on her sleeve. “He’s been stabbing me with those pointy, deadly, fungoid toenails for twenty-one years. And now, just when he’s ignoring me, they’re short and shell pink.”

“He had a
professional
pedicure?” Mildred repeated, outraged. “He was dying to get caught,” she muttered.

Sylvie began crying on Mildred’s shoulder. “I know he’s sleeping with a younger woman.”

Mildred rocked Sylvie in her arms, but managed to shrug. “Of course it’s a younger woman! Do you think men cheat on their wives because they miss their grandmothers?” Mildred glanced toward her husband. Jim was still in the living room and the GIs were still eating lead on the beach. He was entranced. If a sociopath with a can of acid and a butcher knife had been at the door, Mildred would be blinded and gutted at this very moment while Jim waited for a commercial break to channel surf. Men! What were they good for? “It’s your daughter,” Mildred called out to him.