The Best of Enemies (35 page)

As Hallee waves the bottle and points at us, I feel my first pang of panic.
“I can’t do a body shot!
The alcohol’s going to pool in my C-section scar.
They’ll realize we’re not Patsy and Edina from River North.”

“Oh, to return to the land of five seconds ago, before I knew about your C-section scar,” Jack says.
“Please fill me in again on how your vagina’s like an unfolded map.
Tremendous fan of that story, too.”

“Shut it.
Also, you are going to have to
steal
the laptop, but mostly, shut it,” I say.

“I would, but where do you propose I hide it?
My dress is literally the size of an eye patch.
And I can see the mole on my hip through this fabric.
If I try to conceal so much as a Tootsie Roll, they’re going to see it.”

“Fine.
Then you do body shots with Tomorrow’s Leaders while I save the day.
A-flipping-gain.”

I make my way to the bathroom through the crowd.
The roommates squeal as Jack takes her turn at bat over Hallee’s navel, her face as grim as though she were facing a firing squad.

Sorry I’m not sorry.

Ingrid’s room is a veritable trash heap, shoes and clothes strewn everywhere.
I fight the urge to make her bed.
I give the space a cursory glance to determine what she may or may not have taken with her.
There’s no makeup or shampoo in the bathroom, or evidence of birth control pills anywhere, so she must have packed these items.
I don’t see any sandals, tank tops, or sundresses in the closet, so I hold with Jack’s theory that she’s somewhere warm.

I take the laptop into Ingrid’s bathroom and I lift the back of my dress, sliding the computer into my Spanx the long way.
Because this dress is black and not completely body-skimming, the bulge isn’t too noticeable, but sitting down’s out of the question.

Theft complete, we have to scram before we’re caught.

“Hey, bae!”
Hallee calls as she positions an ashen-faced Jack on the table.
“Shots, shots, shots!”
As I approach Hallee, Blake smacks me on the butt.

“Ow!
Your ass is like titanium, Patsy,” Blake says, scrunching and unscrunching her fingers.
“Why is it so hard?
And flat?”

“Squats and lunges,” I titter nervously.

Hallee peers at my posterior.
“Hey.
HEY.
Are you . . .
Is that . . .
Bitch is Bogarting one of our laptops!”
Jack’s off the table in a flash and I’m already running when the chase ensues.
Jack and I push past revelers down the apartment’s long hallway.
I press the
DOWN
button but the elevator is stopped ten floors away.

“I can’t run any faster!”
Jack yelps, limping behind me at half speed.
“Not in these boots!
Save yourself and the laptop!”

“I’m not leaving you behind because I’ll never hear the end of it!
Use the pills to create a diversion,” I yell, yanking open the door to the emergency exit stairwell.

With one deft, Women’s-World-Series-of-Softball pitch, Jack hurls the Razzles/SweeTarts/Molly at the apartment doorway and the partygoers dive for the drugs like a pack of piranhas on an unfortunate cow, effectively blocking the roommates’ progress.

We make it down five flights of cement stairs and to the street just as a cab pulls up, the girls a couple of paces behind us.
They must have caught the elevator.
I have to dive into the car lengthwise because I can’t bend at the waist.
We’re both screaming at the cabbie to “drive, drive” before we even have the doors shut.

“Are you ladies filming
Amazing Race
?
I love
Amazing Race
!
Is my favorite!
Taxi make or break racers.
I always want to be cabdriver on show—you ride with Mahvish, you win game.”
The happy man in the turban beams back at us.

Before I can say anything, Jack tells him, “Yes, and you just helped us beat the other teams.
Thank you, Mahvish.
You’re the best.”

•   •   •

“You’re not sleeping in the garage.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s a
garage.
”

“But it smells like Christmas!”

When we arrived home, we were both too keyed up to sleep, so I opened a bottle of wine while we tried to guess Ingrid’s password.
We had no luck with the computer, so we hatched a plan to head to Atlanta in the morning so that John-John can use his skills to help us.
Jack says she has other contacts who could crack the password for us, but we decided John is the only one we can trust.

Feeling victorious, we opened a second bottle.
We’re currently sitting on the amazing rug Betsy gave me, as this seemed the most appropriate place to toast her.

“You’re not bunking with my lawn mower when the pullout couch has thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets on it,” I reply.
“So soft.
Like a cloud made of marshmallow fluff.”

“But I loooove your garage,” Jack says dreamily, lying back on the rug.
“I hate these boots, but I want to marry your garage.”
The moment we arrived home, Jack donned underwear and now the daisy cutout is filled with the striped pattern of her sensible high-hipped panties.

“And I love my chicken cutlets,” I say, hugging my chest.
“But we’re not getting married.
We’re in a committed domestic partnership.
We’re very progressive.”

“There’s a slight possibility I may be drunk,” Jack says.
“Very slight.
Yet still possible.”

“Me, too.”

Jack hums something to herself and I can feel my eyelids grow heavy.
I swear this has been the longest day of my life.
Did Ken just leave for Miami yesterday?
Were we at the funeral this very afternoon?
Reflecting on the past two days makes me even more exhausted than I already am, far too tired to even climb the stairs, let alone change out of this dress.

I tell Jack, “You go sleep on the couch.
I’m going to sleep right here on this rug.
For Betsy.”
Jack is already horizontal, so I lie down as well, feeling the not-unpleasant scratch of the wool beneath me.
As I lie here and look up, I wonder . . .
should I paint my ceiling a contrasting color?

“For Sars,” she echoes, more to herself than to me.

“Hey, Jack?”

“What?”

“Should I paint the ceiling in here?”

“With frescoes?
Like the Sistine Chapel?”

I was thinking “a lighter shade of iridescent dove gray” but her way sounds much better, ultimately more pin-able.
“Yes.”

“Absolutely.”

“Cool.”
My body feels very heavy against the rug.
“Hey, Jack?”

“What?”

“We’re kind of a good team.”

She takes so long to respond I believe she’s already asleep, until she replies, “We are.
And I don’t hate you right now.”

I reach over and pat her on the face.
“I don’t hate you, either.”

She pats me back, saying, “Whoa.”
Her arms drop back to her side.

“Right?”
I ask.

The house is quiet, save for the occasional clink of the ice maker and the soft whir of the air conditioner.

“Good night, Kitty Cat Carricoe.”

“Good night, Jack NotBouvier Jordan.”

Her breathing slows, as does mine.
I pull the edge of the rug over to use as a blanket, drifting off into the most well-earned sleep.

“Hey, Kitty?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you say we have lice?”

En route to Atlanta

Thursday

“I’m hobbled.”

I flex my foot, desperate to soothe the cavalcade of pain from toe to heel.
Why am I in such agony?
My extremities are accustomed to discomfort.
I’ve humped a fifty-pound rucksack over a twenty-five-mile tactical road march in the scorching desert sun.
I’ve run the BMW Berlin marathon, twice.
I’ve had bones shaved when
hallux rigidus
set in after mountaineering the Wrangell range.
But nothing could have prepared me for how my poor dogs barked in those hooker boots last night.

“You’re not hobbled.
Millions of women wear heels every day.
Trust me, you’ll rally.”

“You’re speaking to me again?”
I glance over at Kitty in the driver’s seat.
Much like me, she’s all pale skin and dark circles this morning.

She keeps her eyes fixed on the highway while maintaining a strict fifty-six miles per hour, a pair of huge plastic sunglasses balanced on the tip of her nose, even though it’s not bright out.
“Only long enough to tell you you’re not hobbled.”

A truck honks at us and then passes on the right, despite this stretch of road having a sixty-five-MPH speed limit.
“When you do start speaking to me, can you explain the breakfast cereal bit?”
I ask.
I massage my foot to no avail—it’s still throbbing.

“Breakfast cereal is Special K,” she replies, offering the trucker a friendly wave.
“Those are both slang terms for ketamine.”

“Ketamine—the NMDA receptor antagonist, which is a Schedule III controlled substance?”
I ask.

She pushes the big plastic glasses up on her head to hold back her hair.
“Yep, it’s a club drug, similar to ecstasy and Molly, which is supposed to be the purest form of MDMA.
Pure, my aunt Fanny!
The newest batches of Molly have been coming out of labs in China.
I say, if we can’t trust the Chinese not to poison our pets with tainted dog chow, there’s no way they’re selling a pure form not cut with anything.
That’s why these substances are such a clear and present danger.
I hate that we were on the wrong side of the War on Drugs last night, but I didn’t see any other way.”

How does Captain Carpool know about club drugs when I don’t?

“And you learned all of this . . .
how?”

She glances over at me.
“Because I have a fifteen-year-old to protect not only from the world but also from himself and his fifteen-year-old impulses.
I have to be perpetually one step ahead of him.
A lot of parents—the decent ones, not Brooke Birchbaum,
ahem
—keep track of what their kids are doing by reading their texts.
Kids caught on, so they started texting in code, especially when it came to illegal substances.”

“Like the Enigma machine famously used by the Nazis to generate cyphers via electro-mechanical rotors?”

“Sure.
Exactly like that.”

“Your glasses are off; I can see you rolling your eyes at me.”

“Excellent.
I wasn’t trying to hide the fact.
Anyway, I made it my job to stay abreast of the lingo because I am
not
about to be a forty-year-old grandmother or have my kid hooked on anything other than Phonics.
Before you even say it, no, I give zero craps about his Fourth Amendment rights when I’m trying to keep him safe.
He doesn’t have a right to privacy when he’s fifteen.
And P.S., still not speaking to you, so please stop speaking to me.
Unless you spot a Starbucks.
In which case, grunt.”

I was about to compliment her on her parenting skills, but now I shall keep my kudos to myself.
Still, I’m very impressed by her level of commitment to her children, even if this is the reason she’s currently freezing me out.

At least I
understand
her silent treatment this time around.

I gaze out the window as the miles rush by.
We’re on a desolate part of I-65, somewhere in northern Indiana, on our way down to Atlanta where John-John will help us hack into Ingrid’s computer.
We tried booking a flight, but the airlines are still in a state of chaos after the massive storms yesterday—my God, was that just yesterday?—and we’ll arrive quicker by driving.

We ride for another twenty minutes of silence.
We’d been listening to the nineties station on Sirius until a David Gray song came on.
In the spirit of making benign conversation, I mentioned how this song had been used at GITMO as part of the advanced interrogation program to solicit information from prisoners.
That’s when she snapped off the radio.

I say, “To confirm, you’re mad about the hair, right?”

It has to be the hair this morning, because we were chummy by the end of the night, drunk on victory, and to a lesser extent, chardonnay.
Overall, our interaction was, dare I say, pleasant.
Perhaps all we ever needed was a common cause.
She even turned on the charm first thing this morning when Bobby brought me a few changes of clothing, sending him back to Teddy’s with a Tupperware full of squash-laden scones.
So the hair has to be her sticking point.

Kitty glowers at me, her face pasty under two rage-based circles of pink on her cheeks.
“Ding, ding, ding.”

“I was trying to get us on the road as expediently as possible,” I say.

Silence.

“It’s an effective solution,” I say.
“The US Army wouldn’t have used it if it weren’t.”

Angry silence.

“I’d never suggest anything I wouldn’t do myself,” I say.

Punishing silence.

“Wouldn’t have been an issue if you’d accepted that Birchbaum person’s offer to send the Hair I Go Again technician,” I say.

“Don’t try to justify your actions, okay?
Do not pin this on me.
How do you not realize YOU CAN’T SHAVE AN EIGHT-YEAR-OLD’S HEAD?”
she shouts in reply.

“She was game,” I reason.
“She recognized we were trying to get on the road as soon as possible and she wanted to do her part.”

Kitty presses down harder on the gas pedal, grimacing the whole time.
We jump from fifty-six to seventy-six miles per hour in what feels like a millisecond.
(Perhaps the quote should be
‘Cadillac, there is no substitute.’
)

Kitty seethes.
“First, no one shaves heads anymore for lice.
Doesn’t happen.
That’s so flipping outdated.
As for ‘do her part’?
There’s no
do her part
.
She’s eight, okay?
Eight.
”

“I beg to differ.
I was doing my part when I was eight.
My mother always insisted we do our part to be quiet when she had one of her ‘headaches,’ do our part grocery shopping, do our part in cleaning the house, planting the flowers . . .
I don’t know if I ever told you—she and my father met in law school.
She left before third year to get married, so mostly we had to do our part in amusing ourselves when she went back to school to complete her degree and then worked to pass the bar.”

Kitty pulls an odd face and I don’t know how to interpret her expression.

“How did her putting pressure on you to ‘do your part’ work out?”
she asks.

I reflect on the unrelenting stress.
“Not well.
We’d try our frantic best to complete our tasks to her specifications, perpetually disappointing her, only to be ‘rewarded’ with her stony silence.
Then she’d grab the damn cat and retreat to her office for hours.
She’d never explode at us, only quietly implode.
I clearly remember two things—one, that she never yelled at us and, two, that I wished she would have.
Probably would have been easier.
Anger dissipates.
Indifference can go on indefinitely.”

“That had to be hard.”

“It was.”
To this day, I despise silence as a form of punishment.
I’d much prefer to deal with someone’s ire.

In a softer tone, Kitty explains, “Here’s the thing—at eight, the prefrontal cortex is barely developed.
Children are by nature irrational and impulsive.
So if you, a person she likes and trusts, tell Kassie she should allow you to shave her head as a delousing solution, she’s likely to submit.
Kassie’s less mature than many of the girls in her class, so she still wants to please everyone.
You and I had the hour to spare.
That was time enough for the lice shampoo to work and for me to strip and wash everything.
Buzzing off her hair wasn’t ever the best long-term solution, particularly since she didn’t even have nits.
Would we have saved the hour it took me to comb through her hair?
Yes.
But then she’d be the only bald girl starting third grade at Lakeside.
That’s why I slapped the clippers out of your mitts and called you a ‘flipping ninny.’”

Even though she’s speaking rationally to me, she’s still clearly upset.
At this point we’re traveling almost ninety-four miles per hour.

“I am very sorry, Kitty.
Truly.
I overstepped my bounds and I apologize.
Kassie’s a great kid and I regret that my actions could have potentially caused alienation.
I remember how singled out I felt in Saint Louis as the only girl in class without a two-parent family.
The teachers used to huddle, talking about me in hushed tones.
I hated being the object of pity.
I wouldn’t wish that level of discomfort on anyone, particularly a little girl as sweet as Kassie.”

She’s quiet but I can tell she’s processing my words.

I suggest, “This is where you say, ‘I forgive you, Jack.
Your heart was in the right place.’”

Kitty eases off the gas and we drop back down to the fifties.
“I’ve known you for twenty years and this is the most I’ve heard you speak about your mother.”

“Not my favorite topic,” I reply.
“My mother was . . .
a chasm of icy contempt.
Our whole family bore the mark of her dissatisfaction.
We walked on eggshells.
I always think about the line from
Anna Karenina
, ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’
Callous as it sounds, we were better off after she was gone.
I feel like my childhood began when we moved to Evanston.
I prefer not to remember a lot of what came before.”

Kitty lightly touches my shoulder with her right hand.
“I forgive you, Jack.
Your heart was in the right place.
I’m sorry I overreacted and the next time you make me mad—which, let’s be honest, is probably just around the corner—I’ll tell you why.”

I actually believe her apology.

We pass a few miles of cornfields before I speak.
“Your children—your Littles?—are very lucky to have a mom who’s so invested, so involved.
My brothers and I would have done anything to garner that kind of attention.
Kassie, Kord, and Konnor are going to grow up healthy and strong, mentally and physically.
Able to face problems, rather than run from them.”

“There are no guarantees in life,” Kitty says.
“The best I can do is start them off with a solid foundation; the rest is up to them.”

“If Ken’s half the father you are a mother, then you have nothing to worry about.”

She looks over at me.
“Are we veering dangerously toward a Hallmark moment?”
Kitty asks.