Switcheroo (9 page)

“What, the finger in person?!” Mildred asked.

“Yes! I’m not wasting this rage. Can I borrow your car?”

“Listen. The two of you have history. That’s worth something. You have a past and maybe a future. You point the finger at him he gets mad, then deaf.”

Sylvie picked up the suitcase. “Your thinking is so out-of-date.”

“Out of date my buttocks,” Mildred croaked. “You think, Sylvie. Think hard. Do you know what you want? A future like Rosalie the Bitter?” Sylvie just shook her head, grabbed her purse, and left the room. “Where are you going?” Mildred cried, then followed her daughter.

“I’ve called a taxi. I’m going over to the lot, confronting Bob, and then I’m leaving him.” Sylvie was down at the bottom of the staircase. “And I’m taking back my old car to do it.”

“Oh, no,” Mildred moaned. There was a honk from outside and Sylvie opened the door, waving to the driver. She picked up her suitcase. “Please…” Mildred began, but her daughter had already walked out the door and down the walk to the waiting cab.

Sylvie hadn’t taken cabs often. Shaker Heights was the kind of town you drove in, and even when they went to the airport, she and Bob preferred to drive and leave their own car in long-term parking. The taxi that was now waiting outside was all blue—the beaten-up exterior, the vinyl interior seats, the dirty floor mats, and even the ineffective pine-shaped deodorizer hanging from the windshield. Well, blue matched her mood, Sylvie thought as she got in. Since the driver didn’t even offer to help with her bag, she threw it in the backseat herself. Might as well get used to doing everything for myself, she thought.

“Where to?” he asked.

“Longworth Avenue. Crandall’s car lot.”

“No problem,” the driver said. She could only see the back of his neck and a strange hat he had pulled down. It was blue too, and shaped like a mushroom with seams. The cab took off and Sylvie leaned forward.

“Let me ask you a question,” she said. She tried to catch his eye in the rearview mirror. “Did you ever cheat on your wife?”

“Not that I can recall,” the driver said. Sylvie raised her brows.

“I think if you cheated you’d be able to recall it,” she spat.

“Maybe not if I was very, very drunk,” the driver said. “Not that I drink. Anymore. ’Course, I’m not married anymore either.”

Sylvie directed the driver past the main entrance of the BMW lot and onto the side street off Longworth. Sylvie asked the driver, after lambasting him for most of the ride, to try and not be obvious. She got out of the car and, perhaps out of shame, he handed Sylvie her bag, obviously relieved to be rid of her. She fumbled with her purse. She wasn’t exactly sure how to tip. The ride had been awful, but so had her behavior and, after all, he had gotten her there and taken her abuse as well. She handed him the fare and fished out another two dollars. “This is for calling you a scumbag,” she told him. “I’m sorry.” She reached into her bag and took out another two dollars. “And this is for referring to you as a ‘hopeless asshole.’ I’m sure you’re not hopeless.” She paused for a moment, remembered something, then handed him a five. “And this is because you said I’m still pretty.”

The driver smiled. He was missing a bicuspid and the teeth he had didn’t seem worth keeping. “Hey, thanks, lady.” As he started to pull away, leaving Sylvie in the middle of the empty street, her mother’s car pulled up, Mildred at the wheel.

“Don’t argue. Put your suitcase in the backseat and get in,” Mildred commanded. Sylvie had last heard that tone of voice when she was in the seventh grade and, to her own surprise, she responded automatically and did exactly as her mother told her. Once in, Mildred rolled up the window and turned to her daughter. “Okay. You want to confront Bob?” Sylvie nodded her head and held up the envelope full of proof. “Foolish girl. If you have to confront someone, I say you confront the
girlfriend
. Throw
her
out of town.”

“Mom, this is not about two women fighting over a man. This is about Bob lying and making a fool of me.”

Mildred sighed, shook her head, and then laboriously managed a three-point turn. As she braked for the stop sign at Longworth, they simultaneously spotted Beautiful Baby zipping by.

“Oh my god!” Sylvie cried. “I’ll bet he’s going there. To her.”

Mildred pulled out and began to follow him. “We can’t get right behind him,” she said. “Do you know where she lives?”

“Across the bridge. Cleveland. 1411 Green Bay Road. That’s where the negligee went.”

Mildred snorted. “I bet there’s no green and I bet there’s no bay,” she said. “I think that’s the section beyond the airport. Condos,” she sniffed, as if it were a dirty word. They drove in silence for a while. Grimly, she clutched the wheel and stared ahead at Bob’s distant taillights. Mildred kept a car between her own and Beautiful Baby. As they left their Shaker Heights neighborhood, the houses got smaller and the traffic more congested. But Mildred never lost sight of Beautiful Baby.

“Hey, you’re good at this,” Sylvie marveled.

“There’s a lot of things I have experience with.” Way ahead Sylvie saw Beautiful Baby pull off the road.

“Look!” Sylvie cried. “Bob’s stopped. Does he have car trouble? Or is he having second thoughts?” They slowed down. “It’s a roadside stand. What does he want?”

“Isn’t it too late in the evening to buy vegetables?” Mildred asked. “Who needs emergency eggplant?” she demanded, and after Bob pulled out she drove up and pulled her car over.

Sylvie opened the window. “What did that guy just buy?” she demanded of the man at the stand.

“A couple a dozen roses. You interested?”

Sylvie screamed, closed the window, and Mildred burned rubber. The car sped off, Mildred pushing to catch up with her son-in-law.

“An adultery flower stand. Of course it’s open late,” she muttered.

“Flowers! I don’t get flowers!” Sylvie said.

“Déjà vu,” Mildred said, half to herself.

“Bob never cheated before.”

Mildred was silent, knuckles white, peering out over the steering wheel. “I wasn’t talking about Bob,” she said at last. Sylvie looked at her. What? Something about the set of her mother’s mouth, the jutting of her shoulders, gave Sylvie the clue.

“Daddy? Daddy cheated on you?” Sylvie couldn’t believe it. “Not Daddy.”

“No. Just one of his body parts.” Mildred paused, embarrassed, then tried to explain. “You remember what happened when your brother hit puberty?” Sylvie shrugged. “Well, maybe Phil isn’t a good example. He’s never
left
puberty. But with most boys…they…their heads and their penises…peni…separate. It’s natural. Still—with the exception of your brother—it’s only for a time. They unite when the guy falls in love. He wants to use his thing to start a family. That’s how it was with your father and me.”

“Please, Mom. There are limits. Don’t talk to me about Daddy’s…thing.”

“You don’t understand. It was
our
thing. Freud was right: women
do
want a penis, but they want it attached to their man. When you kids were growing up, your father and I shared his…thing.” Sylvie made an “Eeee-euu!” face. She
definitely
did not want to hear about her parents’ sex life. But as she looked over at her mother she saw that Mildred was smiling to herself. “Anyway, just about the time that Daddy was Bob’s age, his penis and his mind separated again. And out of nowhere, it turned on me and took your father out with the bookkeeper.”

“Oh, Mom. I’m so sorry.” Sylvie stared ahead into the gathering darkness at Bob’s taillights. Her daddy had cheated on her mom. She’d never even known it, never suspected. It put her father in a whole new light. He was now a member of The Opposition, just another man. Sylvie was flooded with a sadness so sharp that she had to push her nails into the flesh of her palms to distract herself and make it more bearable. And then she took her eyes off the road and Bob’s car to glance at her mother’s profile again. She’d thought she’d known everything—or almost everything—about Mildred. How many other secrets had Mildred not revealed? How much pain had she gone through? And she had never let on, never leaked it to her children. “It must have been terrible for you,” Sylvie whispered.

Mildred nodded. “It was a god-awful year, but I had only two choices: to wait it out or to leave. Remember, we didn’t have much money then. And I had three children. What could I do? Wait tables? I retained my dignity by staying.”

Sylvie bit her lip. Maybe, she thought, she shouldn’t be so quick to judge her mother or discard Mildred’s opinions. Shy for a moment, Sylvie peeked over at Mildred again. Her mother was a strong woman. She had been through a lot and she had managed to keep a family, a husband, and a home while she created her little business in the community. Who was Sylvie to judge that? She focused on the road ahead and saw Bob’s blinking directional. Sylvie yelled and pointed. “He’s turning—he’s turning!”

“I saw,” Mildred said grimly.

Sylvie couldn’t help but wonder, if years before, Mildred had followed Jim just this way. But Sylvie didn’t want to inquire and didn’t want to know. She did, however, need to know her mother’s strategy. “So what did
you
do?” she asked as they took the corner. “You just waited it out?”

“Heavens, no!” her mother said and took her eyes off the road for the first time, giving Sylvie a quick but piercing glance.

“Mom, putting up with this kind of behavior for me is not possible,” Sylvie protested. “It’s old-fashioned.”

“Are you calling
me
old-fashioned? Even before they invented the word, I knew how to be proactive,” she paused. “Look, I made a cash deal with the book-keeper. Why do you think I couldn’t afford to get my legs waxed for two whole years? A cash deal. How nineties is that?”

“I’m not buying anyone off, Mom.”

“Hey, how much do you love him?”

“Who? Bob? Not at all, now.”

“Oh, really? Think again. Imagine you’re at my funeral…”

Sylvie shuddered. “Don’t be morbid. I don’t even want to
think
about that.” She was actually shocked by her mother’s remark. What would she do without her mother?

“Okay.” Mildred agreed. “You’re at your
father’s
funeral. Whose shoulder are you crying on?”

Sylvie stopped to think. “Bob’s,” she admitted.

“I rest my case.”

Both cars drove onto a street filled with condo apartments. It was one of the developments built fifteen years ago—quickly constructed, cheaply made “town houses” with paper-thin walls and fake Palladian windows with snap-on muntins. The whole tacky thing had been painted an ocher color in some misguided attempt to make the place Italianesque but the paint was faded and chipping and the faux Tuscany look didn’t work in Cleveland. Sylvie imagined stewardesses, dental hygienists, and hairdressers living alone in each of the warren of apartments. Yes. And divorced piano teachers, she added. Like me. Then Bob pulled over into a reserved parking spot.

“He has his own parking place?” Mildred asked, outraged.

“Big deal, his own spot,” Sylvie said dismissively. “The point is, it’s outside. He parks Beautiful Baby
outside
for her! He wouldn’t do that for me.” Then Sylvie saw what Bob had parked next to: a car exactly like her own (recently drowned) BMW. Another silver Z2 convertible! Sylvie shrieked as quietly as possible. “She has my car! He bought her the exact same model. No wonder I sank it.”

Mildred, with a look of determination, drove past both vehicles and parked down the block. “Now don’t—” she began but Sylvie didn’t hear the rest because she’d already gotten out to spy on Bob, making sure, though, that she couldn’t be seen.

Bob approached a walkway and turned up it. Sylvie got as close as she safely could, trying not to cry or trip in the dark. Bob turned around and she hid behind a tree. He turned up the branch of the walkway that led to 1411. She saw him ring the doorbell of a ground-floor apartment. A woman answered the door and, although Sylvie couldn’t get a good look in the light spilling out from the door, she saw that they embraced and that Bob was let in. Sylvie gestured to Mildred, still in the car, who then pulled it up beside her. Sylvie got back in. Mildred drove next to Bob’s parking spot.

Sylvie got out of the car, followed by Mildred. She looked at the silver BMW convertible, exactly like her own. She peered in the window on one side, Mildred’s head right beside hers, their noses pressed up against the glass.

“I’ve
got
to smash it,” Sylvie said.

“Control yourself. Divorce for a woman is not a pretty picture,” Mildred repeated to her daughter.

“Times have changed.”

“Not enough. Look at Rosalie. She’s dating a man with nine toes. She dreads summer coming and having to go to the beach with him.”

“I’m not Rosalie,” Sylvie said defiantly. “I hate Bob. He should never have done this. And I’m going to make him sorry he has.”

What do you wear to confront your husband’s mistress? Sylvie wondered. And did you even call them—those women—“mistresses” anymore? Was she his girlfriend? His lover? The other words that came to Sylvie’s mind were ones she wouldn’t call anyone, not to their faces. Though, she thought, once she looked at M. Molensky’s she might.

Sylvie was in her convertible, now as good as new again—except for the mildew smell. She was full of determination. Sylvie was bothered by the odor but her mission in progress was even more troublesome. She’d had two days to think this all through, to stew and settle and then stew some more. She must be goulash by now, she figured. She pulled her car up to a spot just beyond 1411 Green Bay Road, got out, and smoothed the black slacks and blue sweater set she was wearing. Then, tucking her purse under her arm, she marched up the walk to the condo entrance. At the doorway she lifted her arm, ready to pound on the door. But, all at once, her bravado left her and she pulled her hand back. What was she doing? This wasn’t between her and M. Molensky, whoever
she
was. This was between her and Bob. Despite her mother’s advice and her own hatred of violence, she should go back to the lot, find her husband, and tear his goddamned pink toenails off. She felt another surge of anger, turned around, and began to walk back to her car. Then she saw something that made her stop in mid-step and catch her breath. It was the convertible, the one just like her own birthday gift.