The Solomon Sisters Wise Up (6 page)

I called her that night and told her to keep her money—to pay for a critique of that Technicolor nightmare would add the clichéd insult to injury. We shared a good laugh over bad dates that you couldn’t do a danged thing about, and then I called Charlie.

That was fourteen months and five or ten or twenty marriage proposals ago. Charlie had proposed on our fifth date, and I’d been telling him I wasn’t ready ever since.

Why? Didn’t I love him? Wasn’t he what I wanted?

If he was, then why did I always come down with a cold whenever I thought I should just say yes already? Every time I decided I was nuts for not accepting his proposal, my body seemed to tell me I wasn’t. I came down with heartburn, the flu, hives, migraines.

I didn’t want to marry Charlie, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t know if it was just a not-yet kind of thing or a not-ever kind of thing.

It was driving me crazy. And driving him away.

He’d proposed again two weeks ago, with his mother’s heirloom two-carat marquise diamond ring in a diamond-studded platinum setting and a hansom-cab ride. When I’d told him I still wasn’t ready, he’d jumped out of the carriage, slammed shut the ring box and told me he was getting really tired of waiting. That if I loved him, I’d commit.

Was that how it worked?

I was supposed to be pro-commitment, he’d said, since I was the only person he knew whose parents had been married for twenty-five years.

Hello? My parents divorced
after
twenty-five years.

My father had been having an affair with a twenty-four-year-old student. A little over a year ago, he’d broken the news to my mother that he was leaving her for another woman. My mother had called me in a hysterical panic, and I’d called my father to find out what the hell was going on.

“She’s everything I’ve ever wanted,”
my father told me when I’d driven to his house that night to see him.
“Don’thate me, Zoe. This is what it’s all about. Love. Incredible love. This is all I can ever want for you, too.”

He hadn’t mentioned that night that the woman who was everything he’d ever wanted was my friend Giselle. My friend who I’d introduced to him without a second thought when we ran into him in a popular brunch spot in Santa Monica.

“Dad, this is my friend Giselle Archweller,”
I’d said.

“Giselle Archweller. What a lovely name,”
he’d said.

And apparently, he’d remembered it. There weren’t too many Giselle Archwellers in the L.A. area, and he’d looked her up and called her, and that, as they said, was that.

That was also the end of my parents’ marriage.

Giselle and I hadn’t been best friends or particularly close friends, but we probably would have been had fate not intervened in the form of my father. (Was that fate? I was still unsure a year later.) But we’d been budding friends and I’d liked her. She was the kind of friend I hadn’t had since high school. And since my three high school friends had scattered across the world—Lauren was in France with the chef she’d met in a two-month-long French cooking class in Paris; Deb was in Switzerland, doing something involving banking and skiing; and the other Debbie was in an African country, deeply involved with the Peace Corp—I was sorely in need of a gal pal.

Giselle and I had met at Neiman Marcus, right before I quit to become the Dating Diva full time. We were both well-paid floor model slash perfume sprayers with psychology degrees from UCLA and no idea what we really wanted to do. Co-worker quips led to coffee breaks and then lunch breaks and then shopping trips. Giselle had a one-year-old baby whom she adored (the happy result of an unhappy relationship with a wanna-be rock star who’d told her it couldn’t be his kid), and the three of us had just begun to spend time together on Saturday afternoons, at the beach or park, when Giselle suddenly stopped being so available a couple of months into our friendship.

At first I was sure I’d done something to offend her, but finally she told me she was seeing someone new and was crazy in love, but didn’t want to jinx it by talking about it.

My father and Giselle were very careful. I didn’t have a clue that they were involved. Until the day my mother called me, sobbing hysterically on the phone.

“We meant to tell you ourselves,”
my father had said later.
“We felt that I should tell your mother first, but we hadn’t realized that she’d tell you right away. We thought we could then come over to your place, sit down and explain what happened. That we fell in love. Didn’t mean to hurt anyone. That love is love.”

They’d been dating for two months. Two months. And that was love? Apparently it was love enough to destroy a twenty-five-year-long marriage.

And a daughter’s faith.

“Honey, we’re deeply in love…it just happened. So sorry you got hurt. I feel terrible that your mother is beside herself. Age is just a number…. Would I break up my family if this weren’t the real thing? A woman half my age with a one-year-old baby, for God’s sake?”

I hadn’t talked to my father for two months after that. And I’d refused all calls and visits from Giselle, who tried for months to explain that she simply couldn’t help falling in love with my father, a man twice her age, a man who was married to my mother.

My mother thought it was just another affair (I hadn’t known there
were
affairs, let alone that my mother knew about them) and ran to get Botox injections, booked an emergency appointment with her colorist and hired a personal trainer to come to the house four times a week. She went for counseling, group therapy, and even tried to hire me to analyze her as a human being. She bought push-up bras and black stockings with seams down the back, high heels and leather. She shopped in stores like Bebe and started wearing Seven jeans.

And my father complimented her on how great she looked, adding that she’d surely catch a young stud in no time.

My father had always been clueless.

And my mother had gone nuts.

First, it was
“I’ll never grant that son of a bitch a divorce!”

Then it was
“Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?”

And finally,
“That son of a bitch won’t live a peaceful moment while I’m alive!”

She meant it too. Which was why I’d booked myself on the first flight to New York City that wouldn’t cost me a thousand bucks, tomorrow night’s red-eye. My mother was somewhere on the loose in Manhattan.

“Zoe, honey, it’s Mommy,”
she’d said in her usual voice on my answering machine an hour ago, which I checked before every date to make sure the date was still on.
“Don’t worry about me, dear, but I’m on my way to New York to shove your father’s engagement announcement up his ass. Do you believe he had the goddamn nerve to send me one? ‘See, Judith, it was the real thing,’ he wrote on the inner envelope. Well, he and his child bride aren’t going to have a wedding, because I’m going to ruin their goddamned lives!”

And then she’d slammed the phone down and called me back a moment later.
“Zoe, sweetie, my anger wasn’t directed at you, you know that, right, doll? Bye now!”

My mother was crazy. My father was crazy. Giselle
had
to be crazy to want to be with my father, so good riddance.

Deep sigh.

My father and Giselle had been together for a year now. They’d gotten engaged on their anniversary, which was two months ago, bought a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue and insta-decorated it, and then, two weeks ago, they’d begun sending out the engagement announcements.

If my father had planned to tell me about his engagement himself, the announcement had beat him to it.

“Zoe, it’s time to forgive and forget,”
my father said over the two lunches we’d had in L.A. since my parents’ breakup, his ubiquitous sunglasses shielding his sincerity or lack thereof.
“Giselle is just beside herself that you won’t speak to her. Not only did she lose her friend, but she feels like she destroyed your relationship with me, as well.”

No, you
both
take that honor, Dad.

“Zoe, I tell her nothing could destroy our relationship, but she thinks that you keep your distance because you’re upset with us.”

Ding! And he’s won one million dollars!

When you were in a good mood, without a care in the world, there was no one better to be around than Bartholomew Solomon. The man was always up, always ready to take on the world. If you were down, he’d tell you to snap out of it, that the world was too full of novelty and surprises to waste one second being depressed.

A divorce? A broken family? No big whoop!

“You could use some therapy, young lady!”
my mother had once snapped at Ally on the telephone. I was ten or eleven, so Ally must have been eighteen or nineteen. Silence, and then;
“Well, I’m not surprised to hear that you are seeing a college psychologist, because you really need to deal with your issues, Allison. You’re an adult now. And it’s time to grow up and stop expecting your father to be your daddy.”

It was a pivotal moment when you realized that you didn’t agree with your mother about fundamental things, when you realized that your values were completely different. It was no surprise to me that my parents’ marriage worked and for so long. They were peas in a pod. They both swept everything under the rug. My father wore sunglasses indoors. And my mother got a lot of plastic surgery.

What the hell did Giselle see in my father? That was the one thing I couldn’t figure out. She wasn’t an airhead or an under-the-rug-sweeper or a wanna-be film star (my father was a movie producer).

And besides her looks and her brains and the fact that she was once a very nice person, what did my father see in a woman half his age?

“She’s the love of my life,”
my father said for the hundredth time.

“She’s younger than I am,”
I countered.

“Age is just a number, Zoe.”

He said that a lot.

Age is just a number, Zoe,
had also become my mother’s line when I asked her why she was having so much plastic surgery. She’d seen a television show about a woman who’d had over twenty-five surgeries to look like a human Barbie doll.
“Why shouldn’t I turn back the clock, be the beauty I used to be?”
my mother said.
“To look at me, who would think I was ever a contender for Miss Orange County?”

One year. My father and Giselle had been together for one year, and now they were getting married. I’d been with Charlie for a few months longer, and I was no closer to getting married than I was when I met him.

Now, as I watched Amber scooch closer to her date, I wondered if it was really worth all she was putting into it. Paying me two hundred and twenty-five bucks to tell her what? That she shouldn’t be herself? That she was doing something wrong? My mother had spent twenty-five years doing everything she possibly could to keep my father interested, and he’d dumped her for a woman half her age. I had a boyfriend I couldn’t commit to. What the hell did I know?

Amber and her date left the bar together, hand in hand.

4

Sarah

A
s Griffen and I collected our doggie bags (containing one chocolate cupcake each), put on our jackets in what felt like slow motion, and made our way to the door of Julien’s restaurant, Griffen was hit in the ankle by the smallest baby stroller I’d ever seen. I watched him peer inside at the sleeping infant, and I was quite sure he was about to throw up on the baby.

He managed a “sorry” to the mother, eyed the two wild-eyed children who refused to put on their coats and shot a glance at the father, who was struggling to get the little girl’s arm through her denim jacket when she was busy trying to stuff a bread stick down her brother’s pants. The father grabbed the bread stick, startling the girl, and she started bawling. The couple sitting to the left of them apparently had had enough, took final sips of their wine, threw a pile of bills on the table and left, dirty looks all around.

In the five minutes it took to get out of the restaurant, Griffen didn’t say a word. Not a sarcastic “And you want to have one of
those?
” Not an offensive “Are you one hundred percent sure it’s mine?” He just clutched his doggie bag in his white-knuckled fist, held open the door for me and out we went into the oddly warm October air.

As we passed the entrance to the Seventy-seventh Street 6 train, he didn’t run down the steps. He didn’t hail the taxi that was stopped at a red light. He didn’t flee west around the corner to make his escape home through Central Park.

He didn’t do or say anything. He just walked, staring down at the sidewalk.

A few blocks later, at Eighty-fourth Street, he stopped. “Are you absolutely sure?” he asked me, glancing at the traffic for a moment, then at me, then at the sidewalk, then back at me. “I mean, did you see your doctor?”

I nodded.

“We can wait a few hours for the blood test results to be one hundred percent conclusive,”
Dr. Scharf had said four days ago,
“but you’re definitely pregnant. Your uterus is enlarged. Congratulations!”

It was interesting that the only two people who’d offered me congratulations were the doctor I saw every two years for birth control (lawsuit!), and a stranger in a restaurant.

When I’d walked out of Dr. Scharf’s office, Lisa at my side, the words
Your uterus is enlarged
had echoed over and over in my mind. Lisa had taken my arm and led my dazed and confused self to Barnes & Noble, sat me down in a big green leather club chair near the magazines, disappeared for two minutes and returned with three books:
What To Expect When You’re Expecting, The Girlfriends’ Guide To Pregnancy
and
But I Don’t Know How To Be Pregnant!

And then we went to my favorite coffee bar, the very one where I’d met Griffen in the first place. She bought me a large decaf cappuccino and a Linzer torte (“Gotta watch the caffeine—in chocolate too,” she said), pointed at an overstuffed sofa and handed me
But I Don’t Know How To Be Pregnant!
while she started reading
What To Expect.
And so I drank and ate and read. We sat there for two hours, reading, flipping pages. Staring at truly frightening pictures of fetal development. I learned about the placenta. Sonograms. Arm buds. That I wouldn’t
have
to drink milk, after all, but that I would have to avoid aspirin and cough medicine and soft cheeses and any fish containing too much mercury. Caffeine, to be safe. Alcoholic beverages. Hot dogs, bacon, and anything with nitrites.