The Penny Pinchers Club (2 page)

Ramone cracked his gum dubiously. Wasko tapped a pencil.

“Nothing wrong with trying to find a bargain,” he said. “But trespassing onto private property at the crack of dawn, ignoring warning signs threatening prosecution, sneaking past electric gates, ducking security cameras, and breaking into a locked repository just for an old rocker or whatever strikes me as fairly implausible, especially considering the sensitive material that might have been found on E. W. Drummond’s premises. National security information and whatnot. If you’re found guilty, you know, you could be looking at ten years in a federal pen.”

He was pulling my leg. No one got ten years for sifting through trash.

Wasko linked his thin, pale fingers. “Then again, I might be more inclined to believe your story if not for your accomplice.”

“Wade? The guy lives with his mother.”

“I have a hunch there’s a lot you don’t know about Wade Rothschild III, Mrs. Griffiths. And I have my doubts about the real purpose of this so-called Penny Pinchers group of yours. Too bad you’ll learn the truth after it’s too late, when you’re convicted of economic espionage for stealing corporate secrets.”

That was absurd. “I promise, I wasn’t in there trying to steal corporate secrets.” Nevertheless, a bead of sweat balled at the base of my neck as it dawned on me I really was in serious trouble. This wasn’t a parking ticket. This wasn’t forgetting to get permits for a yard sale. This was ten years in the federal pen.

“Then why
were
you there?” Agent Wasko had stopped trying to be my friend. “What would motivate a suburban housewife with a nice house, a husband, a kid, a dog, and a job to risk it all by looking for a free chair?”

They leaned forward. I debated whether to tell them the truth. Was it worth it? Could confessing my most intimate secret save me from having to spend my days at a federal prison camp, as Martha Stewart had, wearing ugly brown ponchos?

I took a deep breath and exhaled. “Because I’m saving up for a divorce.”

CHAPTER ONE

T
he reason I’m lousy with money is because I was born and raised in the great state of New Jersey. In Jersey, we drive, we shop, we charge, we throw away. We do not save.

True, ours was the first state in the country to mandate recycling, but after a while we figured screw it. Let those J.Crew preppies in Connecticut separate their Paul Newman salad bottles. We had more important stuff to do, like buy more junk.

As a native of South River, I was particularly afflicted because South River is Jersey concentrate, an enclave of tidy, single-family homes straight from the backdrop of Springsteen’s “My Hometown.” Lots of bleached sidewalks and chain-link fences surrounding patchy lawns littered with Doritos and McDonald’s bags. I grew up with a Knights of Columbus right downtown, a five-and-dime around the corner, and as many churches as bars coexisting under an umbrella of sulfurous yellow haze.

Depressing in some ways. But where God closes a door, he also opens a window. Or, to put it in Jerseyese, he closes the window and turns on the air-conditioning.

For us, that relief was our town’s easy access (if you consider sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic down Route 18 easy) to ten major shopping malls—entrées to a more glamorous world of Pier I and cheap tamales.

So vital were the malls to our sense of freedom that I celebrated the passing of my driver’s test by getting behind the wheel of Dad’s embarrassing orange-brown Dodge Dart with my girlfriends and zipping right past Mom’s reliable discount mall (Loehmann’s of the awkward communal dressing room) for the upscale paradise of Menlo Park.

It was a complete rush of independence. Aerosmith wailed “Sweet Emotion” on the radio, our feathered, blow-dried hair waved in the New Jersey breeze, and we were headed to Edison, New Jersey, on the off chance of running into Jeff Doncha. Black hair, blue eyes. To die for. Hottest guy in South River hands down.

We didn’t smoke. We didn’t drink. We didn’t do drugs. We didn’t even have sex. Well, not
technically
. We shopped and gossiped and harassed the Clinique lady for makeovers (after which we bought nothing) before stopping off at a chain Mexican restaurant for virgin daiquiris. That launched our pastime, and in almost thirty years not much has changed.

Yes, we’ve moved up from the Dart. Most of us drive Highlanders or Lexus SUVs, cars with bigger rear ends (like ourselves) to hold more stuff. Our hair is foiled, and Loehmann’s now stocks Diesel jeans. We no longer endure the torture of seeing our pores enlarged in a Clinique magnifying mirror. But we still crank the Aerosmith and every so often treat ourselves to strawberry daiquiris that, like us, are not so virgin.

As for Jeff Doncha, last I checked he was holding his own down at his dad’s salvage yard after a couple of stints in rehab and one strike short of permanent incarceration. Funny enough, the guy I ended up marrying had black hair and midnight blue eyes, too, though that was where all similarities between him and Jeff ended.

My husband and I met when I was fresh out of Rutgers, sharing an apartment near Princeton with my former college roommate Suzanne Veruki. Back then, the two of us were miserably employed at PharMax, a corporate pharmaceutical conglomerate in Bridgewater, though we’d known each other for years, having been visual design majors in college with plans to be snapped up by the hottest interior design boutiques from Manhattan to Palm Beach.

Ah, the naïveté of youth. Our mortarboards weren’t yet dusty when we realized we couldn’t get jobs assembling furniture at IKEA, much less redoing interiors for Jed Johnson in Manhattan. So, I got a position at PharMax schlepping a new birth control pill (OvuTerm—later found to trigger early menopause), while Suzanne hawked a new colorectal cancer test made popular by Ronald Reagan’s very own presidential colon.

It was tough going, pushing drugs. Being a pharmaceutical rep meant constantly being rejected by snooty doctors’ receptionists after hours of waiting patiently with a smile for “just a moment to tell you about our new product.” It takes a very special person to face that kind of humiliation every day—a stripper, maybe, or a Jehovah’s Witness. But without the Franklins being shoved in our panties or the promise of eternal salvation, Suzanne and I couldn’t see the point. We went down in PharMax history as achieving the worst sales ever, a dishonor in which we took weird pride.

About the only good thing happening in my life back then was Liam Novak. Liam was a wunderkind on PharMax’s corporate track, destined to be CEO with his Wharton degree and uncanny memory for the most mind-numbing pharmaceutical minutiae.

It helped that he was a rather sexy, Polish-Irish version of Dudley Do-Right, right down to his dimpled chin, fit physique, and blond hair that, unlike Dudley, he wore with a shock of long bangs, a style left over from his days at the all-boy Jesuit boarding school, George town Prep, where he’d starred as lacrosse captain and cross-country record holder.

Lucky for me, I met Liam’s ideal of a perfect potential wife, probably because I’d been raised Roman Catholic, which pleased his conservative Irish Catholic mother, and because with my own white-blond hair; fair, almost transparent, complexion; ridiculously high forehead; and pale, pale blue eyes, I resembled the living incarnation of every beatific Madonna hanging over every Polish grandmother’s bed west of Warsaw. Not that that was something to be proud of, mind you. Back then I’d have much preferred to be compared with the other gap-toothed Madonna in pearls and lace bustiers—as would have most of the guys I dated.

Except for Liam. He pursued me with the same gung-ho energy he used to win over PharMax’s shareholders and blitz his friends with ninety-five-mile-an-hour aces. Dinners at the upscale Princeton Inn, huge bouquets of flowers sent to my desk, shopping sprees on Fifth Avenue, and weekends at his family’s beachside compound in Avalon, New Jersey, were par for the course.

This worked out well because I loved his family and they loved me. Such a boisterous bunch of mindless consumers like myself, not a deep thinker in the group. With Liam and at least two of his seven brothers and sisters, I’d spend entire days at the beach playing Frisbee or zoned out on the sand, shopping for bric-a-brac along Ninty-sixth Street in Stone Harbor and hitting the beachfront clubs afterward. No matter how late we stayed out on Saturday nights, though, Bridget Novak (Liam’s haggard mother) managed to rouse us out of bed and get us to the ten A.M. mass at Maris Stella every morning, delicate lace veils perched primly on our occasionally hungover heads.

My own smitten mother used to call them “Kennedy South,” but she was wrong. Yes, like Joe Kennedy, Liam’s father, Karol, had come to America and “done good,” becoming the hands-down gypsum king of the tri-state area. But that was where all similarities between the Kennedys and the Novaks ended. Karol Novak had no more sense of noblesse oblige than Paris Hilton, and his politics were lever-pulling straight Republican like that of my father and so many other first-generation American Eastern Europeans.

Even with a patriarch like Karol calling the shots, though, it was easy being Liam’s girlfriend because he loved me to death and also because he was gorgeous with a terrific sense of style. From his choice of automobile (BMW 3 series, nothing less) to Gucci loafers to Ray-Ban Aviators, everything Liam owned was top notch. It might sound shallow, but that made being with him all the more thrilling.

Wherever we went, Liam would be mistaken for a minor actor (on
General Hospital
?) or even a fashion model. Perfect strangers—middle-aged housewives, mostly—would stop him in the grocery store and ask if he’d been that man on the Calvin Klein billboard, the one in the white cotton briefs that was so
obscene
. (And sexy!)

He’d win me over with his modest response, shrugging off the double takes and drinks sent to him from admirers across a crowded bar as nothing more than the benefits of fleeting youth. Liam was that rare commodity—a heterosexual American male who loved style for style’s sake, whether it pertained to his car, his clothes, or—my personal passion—interior decorating.

And he loved to go shopping. Happily. Half the time it would be his idea. My roommate Suzanne used to claim I’d hit the jackpot with Liam, though that might have been because she was miserably dating a chef who spent his off-hours watching football while sharpening his knives.

That said, Liam was not perfect. For one thing, he had a tendency to automatically issue decisions without my input, like making dinner reservations and advising me what to wear. At restaurants, he’d occasionally order for me or he’d take my car in for tune-ups without asking. Once, he called up my dentist to make an appointment to have my teeth cleaned.

I’m sure he thought he was being masculine and protective, or maybe he was emulating his father, who also tended toward the dictatorial, but I found it increasingly annoying to be told what I would do and when to floss.

Then there was the day when he stepped into my cubicle at PharMax and plunked down a purchase agreement for a classic Morrisville colonial on a shady oak-lined street with a brick fireplace, kitchen nook, and five bedrooms.

“The kids might have to double up,” he said.

Kids?
Just how many kids was he talking about, because if Liam was entertaining notions of me turning into another Bridget Novak, with her dropped uterus and bulging varicose veins, he had another think coming.

“Go with it,” my sister Viv advised when I mentioned this over lunch. “You just know Liam’s going to propose to you this spring, followed by an August wedding at Our Lady of Perpetual Pain in South River. It’s the script! Then all you’ll have to do is spit out babies like a royal princess while he climbs the corporate ladder. With nannies galore—what could be easier?”

I took a bite of my chicken salad and thought about the possibility of being Mrs. Liam Novak.

“In between stints in the maternity ward, you can spend your days working out and driving around in your wood-paneled station wagon from mall to mall, shopping to your heart’s content. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

I put myself inViv’s picture. Me with a highlighted bob and bright pink lips, one of those little woven purses in the crook of my arm. Entire summers at the Shore making peanut butter sandwiches on Wonder bread for when the kids got back from swimming. Bright green lawns. Blue country club swimming pools and the squeaky clean perfume of chlorine in my children’s hair. Perfectly appointed living rooms with fireplaces and deep shag. Whole school days devoted to choosing new drapes before the kids got home at three and I had to chaperone them to piano and catechism.

That wasn’t so bad.

Besides, I loved Liam—or so my twenty-three-year-old self assumed. He was kind to me and I was kind to him. Our religious and ethnic backgrounds were comfortably similar and yet different enough to spice up the mix. My only concerns were his mother—who no doubt would be at our house every single day organizing the sock drawers—and those controlling tendencies of his that seemed to be growing stronger the closer we got to marriage.

But, heck, I could nip that in the bud, right? We were still young and flexible. It wasn’t etched in stone that he had to turn into his father.

As Viv predicted, Liam did propose on Easter Sunday while we took a chilly walk on the beach in Avalon after church and brunch. We were holding hands and chatting about nothing in particular, dodging the frigid waves, when I felt something cold on my ring finger, looked down, and saw his grandmother’s diamond, repositioned in a spectacular Tiffany platinum setting.

“All I can promise you,” he said, gently kissing me on the forehead, “is that I’ll do my best to provide us a beautiful life, Kat. A home, children, and my undying love forever. You’ll never want for anything.”

It was an irresistible package and there’s no doubt in my mind, looking back, that had he popped the question three weeks before, I would have eagerly and gladly responded with a resounding “Yes!” Nor is there any doubt that we would have gone on to lead that beautiful life with the home, the children, and me never wanting for anything.