Wish Club (12 page)

People’s heads weren’t the only thing he got
inside of
when he did their portraits, Jill thought.

“Maybe you’d let me paint you sometime.” That smile again.
Damn he is beautiful.

“Maybe I would.”

Claudia
sat in one of the stuffed chairs in the faculty break room, wading her way through a stack of essays on
The Old Man and the Sea,
even though she hadn’t gone in there to grade them. She had wanted to call Gail, to find out if her wish was coming true the way everyone else’s appeared to be, but people kept wandering in and out, putting lunches in the fridge, getting a cup of coffee, grabbing a doughnut left over from the morning.

It was against school policy to use cellular phones inside the school, except in the common area at the main entrance—and she couldn’t talk openly there. Teachers were expected to abide by school policy, so Claudia bided her time in the break room, waiting for it to clear out, annoyed because it was usually so deserted at this hour.

Finally the room emptied and Claudia had Gail’s phone ringing before the door had shut.

“C’mon, c’mon, pick up,” she whispered. Claudia knew that at 1:45 p.m. Gail ought to be home alone with Emily. Finally, Gail answered.

“Hi, it’s me,” Claudia said. “Did Mara call you?”

“Yeah. Can you make it on Monday?”

“Yeah, I can but—Mara says everybody’s wishes are starting to come true but I…”

“Oh aargh.” Gail sounded completely exasperated, pissed off.

Crap. I shouldn’t have called.

“Emily!”

Oh,
Claudia thought.
She’s mad at Emily.

“She just pulled all the clothes off the hangers in her closet. Are you sure you want to have kids?”

“That’s why I—”

“This is going to take me an hour. Emily, honey, we don’t pull clothes off the hangers. It makes a mess.” Gail had this sweet-mommy voice she used when she talked to her kids—it almost always took Claudia by surprise.

“You are not going to believe this,” Gail’s voice had grown a little fainter and Claudia could envision the phone tucked under her chin as she, presumably, put little pink outfits back on little pink hangers, “but Ellen called and she was able to come back early. Emily, I said no. The clothes have to
stay
on the hangers. She was here yesterday and she said if her foot wasn’t bothering her too much today she could start up again one day a week. Emily, do
not
do that. No!”

Emily’s tantrum was starting to mount in the background and it grated on Claudia’s nerves.

Gail continued, seemingly oblivious to it. “So will you be there on Monday?”

“Well, I’m planning on it but—”

Claudia heard a
whummphf
from Gail’s end of the line.

Marion Chutterman, the school nurse, walked into the break room and started fixing herself some coffee.

“Oh man,” Gail whined. “She pulled the whole shelf down—John is going to…”

Emily started to cry. “You’re all right honey. You’re okay. Claudia, I gotta go.”

Claudia could hear Gail say, “Emily Anne—” in her sweet-mommy voice, before she hung up.

Claudia frowned as she turned off her phone, staring at it in the palm of her hand for a while. She probably should have known better than to try to call Gail in the middle of the day.

“Everything okay on the home front?” Marion asked her, always on the alert for some gossip. Her Minnesota accent stretched and rounded out her Os.

“Oh,” Claudia said, unintentionally imitating her. “Everything is fine. Actually, that wa—”

“Oh, I know what it’s like sometimes,” Marion interrupted. “Everyone gets so busy they just don’t take the time for one another, but when you’re in a relationship, time together is the most important thing. It’ll be even more important when you start your family.” Marion bobbed her head on the word
family,
a presumptuous, get-going kind of gesture. It couldn’t have been more rude if she’d tapped her finger on her watch.

Claudia wanted to jump over the table and wrap her hands around Marion’s neck. She gave Marion a fake smile instead, as if to thank her for her unsolicited advice.

“I need to get back in time for class.” Claudia shuffled her still ungraded
Old Man and the Sea
essays into a pile. April Sibley was going to have another hissy fit. Claudia stopped at the side table and filled her mug, eyeing the Dunkin’ Donut munchkins still sitting out. She grabbed one and popped it in her mouth.

“Oh, I envy you young ladies,” Marion started in again. “You can eat whatever you like and it never stays with you. I used to be like that myself, but once you hit thirty-five, well, then the free ride is over and the doughnuts just stick to your thighs like dried oatmeal to a bowl.”

Claudia gave her another weak smile, her cheeks full of chocolate munchkin—which she could no longer enjoy, thanks to an uninvited visual of Marion Chutterman’s oatmealy thighs.

She gave Marion a stilted good-bye wave with the free fingers she had on the handle of her coffee mug while she juggled with her papers and the handle to the door. Her parting gesture went unnoticed; Marion was already preoccupied with ripping open a packet of artificial sweetener. Claudia’s wiggling fingers jostled her full cup of coffee, splashing some on the
Old Man and the Sea
essays, the indoor-outdoor carpeting in the hallway, and the toe of her gray suede boot.

Chapter Twelve

Mara
lugged groceries up the salt-encrusted front steps to her framed northwest-side bungalow. “Saint Ben’s” is what they’d always called their neighborhood, but as more and more yuppies and dinks started moving in, she’d noticed a slow transition to the trendier “North Center” label. If only their tax increases had made such a slow transition.

She tried to lift her keys to the lock on the front door but the grocery bags were too heavy and she didn’t have the arm strength, so she ended up setting everything down on the salt, exactly what she’d been trying to avoid.

Once the groceries were in the kitchen, she walked back across the hardwood floor, which she would now have to mop again, to close the front door.

Tippy had his nose sticking out and around the partially opened screen door, which never closed completely without some brute force. He darted back in when he heard her footsteps getting close, his body low to the ground as he hurried away.

“No Hills Science Diet or radiators out there,” Mara said to his backside. “The life of an alley cat is not what it’s cracked up to be.”

Tippy ran into the kitchen and sat by the grocery bags on the floor, his tail wrapped around him where he sat. He flipped the tip of it onto the linoleum as if he were a woman tapping a manicured nail on a countertop. His green eyes stared at Mara.

“Oh, sure.” Mara started putting the groceries away. “Sure, it sounds all glamorous—the freedom, the grass between your toes, the tomcatting around. But, I tell you what, getting your dinner out of a garbage can every night like a common gray squirrel, well, that is a fate much too undignified for my precious Tippy.”

With everything that needed to be put in the refrigerator safely inside, she left the rest of the groceries where they were and scooped Tippy up on her way to the living room. He squirmed in her arms, then gave her a low meow, as if he were trying to protest yet another assault on his dignity. “Oh, hush now. You’ve got nothing to complain about.” Mara sat down in the armchair by the window.

She was hosting an impromptu meeting of Book Club tonight. It had only been two weeks since the last meeting, and it was all happening very last minute—but Mara didn’t mind. Everyone was having such good luck with their wishes that they all wanted to make more right away, and Mara was certainly in favor of that.

At Dr. Seeley’s office this morning, she’d been staring at the sailboat print that hung on the wall opposite her desk when she’d decided to take the afternoon off work, burn up half of a personal day. Sail away. When she’d asked Dr. Seeley, he’d of course acted displeased that an employee of his would have to attend to anything “personal,” but he’d agreed to it, “Fine, fine. If you feel you must.” And he’d seemed to be waiting for an explanation, which Mara gleefully hadn’t given.
Let him stew on this one.

Mara knew Seeley would hate it if she spent her time idly, which was why she thought right now, the right thing to do was to take a little personal time and relax. She sat in Henry’s La-Z-Boy by the window, petted her cat, and enjoyed the afternoon sun. Tippy circled her lap several times before curling up in it. The sun warmed her face and when she closed her eyes, she could pretend she was someplace tropical; something worth wishing for in Chicago in February, when it was cold and snowy and the sun was making its first appearance in nearly a week. But then, there were so many things to wish for.

Her wish for abundance seemed to be humming along. It had started with that hundred-dollar bill and, while she hadn’t found anything quite so dramatic since then, she kept finding coins lying on the ground, a quarter, a few pennies. Two days ago she’d found a twenty in the pocket of a laundered pair of jeans.
This counts,
she’d thought. Well, she was going to need all of it when Henry found out it was her turn to host Book Club. The wine and noshes always seemed to break their budget for the month. She could hear Henry now: “
Precious snacks for all the precious ladies.
”

Precious
was Henry’s word for any fabulously-well-put-together woman of means, with perfect hair and skin and clothes and, of course, manicured nails. Mara adapted the term as well, adding a criterion—any woman whose dark wool coat never, not ever, had a speck of lint on it. They had a mutual understanding of who fell into the category of
precious:
anyone who might fear lint or poverty.

While Mara might have, at first, prejudiciously dumped Lindsay and Jill into that category, she certainly couldn’t have done that to Claudia or Gail. And it was Claudia whom Mara had met first, at some boring Strawn faculty function. Claudia had invited her to join Book Club that same night, since they’d spent the whole evening off in a corner talking about books while Dan and Henry had mourned their Cubs. During the first few Book Club meetings she attended, Mara had felt a little out of place—surrounded by more preciousness than she was used to—but she had stuck it out. They picked such interesting books.

Now, Mara thought all the Book Club women were precious, but in the true sense of the word. She adored every one of them—well, except for maybe Jill, but even she was okay when she stopped being so self-absorbed, when she got over herself and actually showed some emotion, which seemed to be happening a little more often now, ever since the wishing had started.

Mara petted Tippy and sighed as she looked out at her living room. Jill had such a designed apartment; every detail had the touch of an interior decorator written all over it. Very under control. Mara’s house had been designed by life. And she wished she had a coffee table. Tippy, Henry, and the boys had done some redecorating of their own during one of the previous season’s Sunday-afternoon football games.

Mara had discovered their misdeed while driving home. She’d shortcutted down the alley and as she’d driven past her garage, she’d stopped and stared at what she’d been sure was her coffee table in the garbage can in front of it, two of its three remaining legs sticking out of it like a body with rigor mortis.

“Tippy has been jumping on that coffee table for twelve years,” she’d said to Henry when she’d gone inside. “I don’t see how he could manage to tip the glass top over
and
break a metal leg off.”

Henry had just shrugged, refusing to get defensive. The boys had nodded their heads in support. Mara had been fairly certain the demise of the table had had less to do with Tippy and more to do with the Bears’ defensive line and their loss to the Green Bay Packers on that same Sunday.

The old beat-up coffee table had been better than no coffee table and today, she wished she had something. She had a vision of the Book Club women balancing plates on their knees and setting wineglasses at their feet.
Maybe I could run out and get one now?
Mara pulled her arm out from under Tippy and checked her watch, disturbing him. He arched up in irritation for a moment before settling back down. No time. Oh well, she thought, sometimes you imagine you absolutely have to have something that you really don’t need. She could just make do with what she had. Her friends wouldn’t mind.

Mara rubbed Tippy’s ears and started to hum,
A sailboat in the moonlight and you, Wouldn’t that be heaven.

An old Billie Holiday song. Mara had a lovely voice; people often compared it to Billie Holiday’s. It was something she had once thought she might make a career out of, but that was a long time ago. Her dream had given way to Henry, and then her boys and then hygienist school to help pay the bills. In retrospect, her dream had always seemed a little far-fetched, anyway.

Mara started singing the song out loud, softly.

A heaven just for two, a soft breeze on a June night and you.

Tippy continued to purr in her lap.

But now. Now, maybe her dream wasn’t as far-fetched as all that. Mara allowed herself to think of it—just for a minute or two.

What a perfect setting for letting dreams come true.

The
Book Club women sat on the floor in Mara’s living room, having given up on the couches. Without the cofee table, it was easier this way. More like a picnic.

One white origami wish rested on its side in a Tupperware bowl, looking sadly like a bird with a broken wing. The bowl was with them on the floor, which was now covered with candles and herbs and magical ingredients and wineglasses, along with a few empty bottles. Everyone else’s wishes had been cast, with only Claudia’s to go.

I should let everybody off the hook,
Claudia thought,
just tell them to forget it so we can all go home.

She watched her friends as they relaxed between wishes. She was happy for them, truly. She
loved
them, but she couldn’t help feeling sorry for herself. She’d been so certain it was going to finally happen for her, that she would finally get pregnant. Even the timing had been right. According to her temperature, she’d ovulated the day after the last meeting, the day after she and Dan had had sex. The way everyone’s wishes had been going, Claudia thought her pregnancy was practically a given. Over the course of the past couple of weeks she kept putting her hand on her belly, hoping it, willing it. What an idiot. She’d gotten her period three days earlier. It had happened the previous Friday morning, right before she called Gail from school.

Everyone had been very consoling about her wish’s lack of success.
Your wish is different. It needs a little time. It’s only been two weeks.
Only Lindsay found a way to be irritating when she said,
You can’t rush Mother Nature.
You can’t rush Mother Nature?
Good grief.

Tonight, they’d done Jill’s wish first. She’d shown up late and then said she couldn’t stay for very long because she had plans with her new boyfriend later.

“Creative inspiration?” Gail asked when she pulled Jill’s wish out of the Tupperware. “You think you need more creativity? I think your work is amazing as it is.”

“Thanks, but…I’m ready to break out, you know? I want that flash, that brilliant creative insight to help me make a huge splash with my show. I guess I’m just getting tired of futzing along.”

It seemed to Claudia that during this round of wishes, no one held back—everyone was completely honest.

Lindsay finally admitted she wanted to be completely and totally accepted in Chicago society, and not just skirt around the edges, as she felt she’d been doing her whole life, being accepted in some minimal way because of her family name.

Finally,
Claudia thought,
she admits it!

Whenever the subject of society had come up in the past, Lindsay had shrugged it off, trying to make a point that she didn’t care much about it. Her independent clique in high school was supposed to be proof, but Claudia wasn’t buying it anymore. Not after what she saw every day at Strawn. All of Lindsay’s charity work and fads and fitness crazes—Claudia had always suspected that they were just Lindsay’s attempts to be friends, to fit in,
to belong.
In some way, it was as though Lindsay were trying to make up for high school, trying to recover from some unrequited longing to be accepted by the Molly Bonners of the world.

So, they’d helped Lindsay with her wish to find her place in society.

When Gail’s turn came, Claudia expected she would ask to go back to work, which she did in a way, but in a way that had surprised all of them. Gail wished to return to the theater.

Claudia had forgotten. She’d gone to see Gail in countless plays down at school, her favorite being
Bleacher Bums,
in which Gail played the part of the hottie, Melody. Gail was a great actor. She radiated on stage and off, whenever she was in a play. Claudia looked over at Gail now, her short blond hair all that remained of the artsy girl she’d known in college. Gail’s hair used to change color every few months and her clothes were always so cool, nothing Claudia could ever pull off. It was as if Gail had been made for the theater. It was weird, and sad, that she hadn’t remembered this aspect of her friend. It might be even more sad, Claudia thought, that Gail had almost forgotten about this aspect of herself.