Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Lucy
What did I know about breakups? I married my first boyfriend.
Everything I knew about breakups I learned from my younger sister, Miranda. She’d been broken up with at least ten times in her twenty-nine years, yet she never saw it coming. It was always the same story. They were in bed (usually his, because Miranda had roommates), she asked where the relationship was going, and ten or twenty or two hundred minutes later, she was informed that the relationship was going nowhere because it was over. She then tearfully collected her toothbrush and facial cleanser, the box of Tampax under the sink, her nighties and her books (purposely leaving something behind, like her leather jacket or contact lenses), stuffed everything into a large brown paper bag she’d found wedged between the refrigerator and oven and ran crying out of his apartment building. She stopped at the corner, huddled under the awning of a twenty-four-hour deli, and called me from her cell phone while the paper bag ripped, the contents of her life with Jim, Mark, Peter, Ethan,
Andrew, Gabriel, et al, dropping to the sidewalk.
And so at midnight or two in the morning, my phone would ring, Miranda sobbing and sputtering on the other end.
Miranda: "Eeeee . . . woo . . . uhh mahhhh."
Me: "He threw up on you?"
Miranda sobs harder: "Eeee . . . bwoh up wi muhh!"
Ah. Translation:
He broke up with me.
If my husband happened to be out at midnight or two in the morning delivering a baby (he’s an obstetrician), rather than go pick up my sister and leave our twelve-year-old daughter, Amelia, alone in the apartment, I’d instruct Miranda to calm down, take deep breaths and hail a cab. Since she rarely had more than six bucks on her, I’d meet her taxi in front of my building and pay the driver. Then I’d take her torn brown paper bag, hand her a few tissues for her running mascara and red nose, sling an arm over her shoulder and lead her upstairs, where we’d order in Chinese food and watch her favorite movie,
Muriel’s Wedding, until she was ready to tell me what happened. What happened was always more or less the same thing, with minor variations: she was too this or too that; he met someone else; he was moving to Boston/Botswana/the Upper West Side and wasn’t into long-distance relationships; she caught him cheating; he didn’t want her to leave a toothbrush in his toothbrush holder; it wasn’t her, it was him; it was her, she asked where the relationship was going. Et cetera.
Miranda would scarf down her spring rolls and her shrimp dumplings and half of my sweet-and-sour chicken and break open the fortune cookies, looking for assurances of future love, and I’d hold her hand and reheat her tea and hand her another box of tissues. Then she’d burst into a fresh round of tears and croak out, "I . . . tau . . . eee . . . wuv-d . . . muh." Translation:
I thought he loved me.
The last time was six months ago and had taken even me by surprise. Miranda had been so in love, and the boyfriend, Gabriel, had shown up at every family function during their year-long relationship. I’d liked him, my daughter had liked him -- even my husband, who couldn’t stand any of Miranda’s boyfriends, had liked him.
After every breakup, she’d sob out the same question: "What’s . . . wong . . . wid . . . meeee, Luceeeee?"
What’s wrong with you is what’s wrong with me, little sister. Which was: we were bad at reading signs. I attributed this to growing up with an odd mother who would be, say, making a quiche lorraine from scratch, then suddenly take off her
apron, hang it up on its peg by the cookbooks, announce she was leaving and then not return for a few days. During our childhood, our mother left a total of forty-nine times. We never saw it coming, because there
were no signs. When her
internal bomb imploded, it was time for her to go, and she went quietly, no muss, no fuss. Sometimes she was gone for an hour, sometimes for days. Never longer than one week. Once, she rented a house at the Jersey shore in the middle of winter, and when I asked her what she did all alone for seven days in the freezing cold, she said she read four Janet Evanovich novels from the town library and knitted herself a scarf (half of one, anyway).
My father was a quiet, even-tempered man and let her have these "moments."
"Your mother is taking some me-time," he’d tell us when she’d get up from the couch in the middle of
Wheel of Fortune and return three days later.
"Your mother is
crazy," Miranda would whisper to me, rolling her eyes. And then she’d link her arm around mine, her attention seemingly focused on Vanna’s sparkly dress.
So when Larry -- the husband I chose
because he lacked a crazy gene -- went completely nuts during Thanksgiving
dinner this afternoon, I was as shocked as everyone else.
"Has he been acting strangely lately?" the various relatives sitting around the dining-room table asked me.
Nope. He hadn’t been. Or at least I didn’t think so. As I said, I was bad at reading signs and I knew nothing about breakups. So I didn’t know that my husband’s temper tantrum -- over a paper plate -- was a big neon sign that a breakup was coming.
We had two Thanksgiving traditions. The first was that dinner was always at our apartment. Actually that was less a
tradition and more a result of the fact that no one else ever offered to host. Aunt Dinah (my father’s sister) hadn’t cooked
a hot meal since Uncle Saul died. "Who wants to cook for one?" she’d say before driving off to Boston Market for her contribution of two pounds of mashed potatoes. My sister couldn’t cook and had the aforementioned roommate. My husband’s sister couldn’t fit more than three people into her tiny studio apartment. Larry’s parents, recently retired professors of comparative literature at Rutgers University, where they’d met and had a long tenured life together, were staunch vegetarians and brought their own food to all family functions. My parents took off for their gated community in Florida the second the forecast called for temperatures under sixty-five. And Larry’s elderly grandparents could barely lift a fork.
Which left me. I’d managed to make an entire traditional feast for eleven
and edit a manuscript for work (I was a senior editor at Bold Books) without a) getting turkey guts on a single manuscript page or b) burning anything because I
was so caught up in the unauthorized biography of Chrissy Cobb, the nineteen-year-old pop singer who had lifted her shirt on live television six months ago and got herself banned for life from the networks.
"Like I need those conservative assholes?" the gorgeous but grumpy singer countered in a
Rolling Stone magazine interview. "Like
Oprah or
Live with Regis and Kelly are TRL. Puh-leeze!"
All of which made her a worthy subject of a Bold Books "instant" book. Instant books are conceived, written, edited and sent through the stages of production at warp speed to capitalize on the timeliness of a media frenzy. The life and times of a nineteen-year-old didn’t amount to many chapters, so it was a short biography, something to be grateful for on this Thanksgiving Day when I was working and cooking inside a too-small, too-hot kitchen and being interrupted for more Diet Coke, more hummus, more ice cubes by the relatives. The edited manuscript was due to production on Monday, and since I was gunning for a promotion at Bold (the editor in chief, Futterman, had announced his intention to promote one of his three senior
editors to executive editor), I had to spend the entire weekend working on it. Whora Belle -- oops, I mean
Wanda
Belle -- senior editor of romance, had the whory edge (I had a suspicion that she and Futterman had once been
involved), and Boy Wonder (oops again, I mean Christopher Levy), senior editor of true crime and mysteries, had the male bonding edge, but
I had the seniority. Which meant absolutely nothing to a jerk like Futterman.
Although I’d given the assistant editor, who was my one staff member, two weeks to do a preliminary edit on the Cobb Bio -- a luxury in the world of instant books (overnight was more like it) -- she hadn’t done anything but take the manuscript and then give it back. Forget the glaring inconsistency in the second chapter, she didn’t even catch the typo in the first sentence:
When pop singer Chrissy Cobb lifted her tiny tank top on national television, baring her silicone-enhanced brests for all of America . . .
Ah, something else to be grateful for -- yesterday had been the assistant editor’s last day. Hence the untouched manuscript -- what was I going to do, fire her? Give her another mediocre performance review? Under a mangle of black tights and loose M&M’s in her desk drawer, I also found four unread book proposals on the eighteen-month-old baby boy who survived alone in the woods for three days after getting separated from his parents on a camping trip. ABC was airing a TV movie on the story in June, and Futterman wanted an instant book on shelves exactly one week before airtime, to capitalize on ABC’s promotion.
Working today -- all weekend, really -- would help land me that promotion. And it wasn’t as if I were taking time away from my husband and daughter, which led me to our second Thanksgiving Day family tradition: the Thanksgiving Day parade. Every year, Larry and Amelia took the crosstown bus from Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where we lived, to the Upper West Side to watch the parade, unless one of Larry’s patients went into labor, a hazard of marrying an obstetrician. Regardless, every year, Larry’s entire side of the family came over two hours early and were always annoyed that Larry and Amelia weren’t home.
Did I mind that I was stuck entertaining the relatives (mostly Larry’s) while Larry and Amelia escaped to the Thanksgiving Day parade in this year’s terrific weather (fifty-one degrees!)? No. Larry often disappeared with Amelia moments before company was due, especially if the company included our various relatives, even his own. Did I yell at him for it? Nope. I’d rather he spent some alone-time with our daughter than save me from his parents, who were prone to conducting long, dry debates about the "death of literature" while sipping white wine. Larry’s job called him away from home at odd hours, evenings, weekends, middle of the night. Daddy-and-me time was precious to Amelia.
Larry Masterson, M.D., OB, was a darling of the Upper East Side moms who flirtily referred to him as Dr. Master
ful.
I did and didn’t get it. Larry is a good-looking man, yes, but he’d slowly morphed from the hot med student I’d married at twenty-two to a soft-bellied, balding thirty-four-year-old in comfortable slacks and horn-rimmed glasses. Yet despite his fleshy cheeks and Pillsbury stomach and the Rockports, the mothers swooned.
Perhaps it was his bedside manner, which was spectacular outside of our bed. My marriage had been blah for months now. Not years. Just months. Just recently.
An affair? I wondered occasionally.
But when? How? Larry was either delivering a baby at three in the morning or spending weekend afternoons enlightening Amelia on the finer points of menstruation in dry, dull clinical terms that held her enrapt. Amelia, who had the attention span of a toddler but the worries and questions of an adolescent, loved listening to her father’s documentary-style monologues on Your Body. He was a doctor. He
knew. What he said was official.
Between Larry’s office hours and all the weekend calls from his service about water breaking and preterm labor, Amelia rarely saw her father, despite our living only three avenues and two blocks from his Park Avenue practice. So if he actually had the opportunity to take his daughter to the parade for a few hours while I got stuck with the Mastersons, fine with me.
Besides, I had Miranda to entertain me. My sister was funny as hell (Amelia idolized her "super-cool!" aunt, especially in
contrast with her super-uncool aunt, Larry’s sister). And if Miranda was with me, she wasn’t standing in front of her ex-boyfriend’s apartment building at one in the morning, staring up at his windows and wondering if he was in bed with someone else. I had no doubt he was; Miranda held out hope.
Rewind to fifteen minutes ago, when Larry and Amelia returned from the parade.
"We’re back!" my daughter called as she and Larry hung up their jackets in the hall closet.
"How dare you!" my husband’s mother snapped, hands on hips. "I came all the way into the city on the busiest travel day of the year, and my only grandchild is nowhere to be found for two hours!"
My mother-in-law, who lived ten miles away and dressed in fuchsia sequins as though she were headed for the opera and not the casual afternoon dinner we always had, was placated in seconds by the World’s Best Preteen with a few hugs and kisses.
The female relatives helped me set the table and lay out platters and bowls of the delicious basics -- garlic mashed potatoes and baked sweet potatoes, two kinds of stuffing, cranberry sauce, creamed corn and three kinds of South Beach Diet–approved side dishes for Larry, who’d started four days ago (why not wait till
after Thanksgiving?), plus two pies, pumpkin and apple. The male relatives, on the other hand, sat on their butts, talking about the Yankees.
Amelia put her hands on her hips and yelled, "Hey, why are only the
women doing the work? This isn’t the twentieth
century, you know!"
"Trust me, it’ll be the same when you get married," my mother-in-law said in her most world-weary tone as she heaped mashed potatoes into a serving bowl.
If you were looking for one word to describe Marian Masterson, Milton scholar,
cynical would do.
Larry scooped Amelia into a hug. "Amelia May Masterson, you are absolutely right. And I hope and pray that your grandmother is wrong. Your mom is senior editor of
New York Times bestsellers, and she works just as hard as I do, so
there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be helping with the setting up and serving too. Or why any of you lazy bums shouldn’t be helping," he called out with a raised eyebrow at the male relatives.
Ah, Larry, I may not see you much, but I always remember why I married you.
"Okay, everyone, come and get it!" I announced, setting down the scrumptious-looking twenty-five-pound turkey on the dining-room table in front of Larry’s seat, as he was "family carver."
Everyone sat, sipped their sodas and began passing around side dishes.
"WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?" aforementioned wonderful husband bellowed.
Conversation stopped. Heads turned. Eyes swung to Larry.
What was wrong? Had a morsel of stuffing or the bowl of mashed potatoes accidentally brushed up against the turkey
platter? Larry was taking his new diet very seriously, so I had basted the turkey with fat-free, sugar-free, carb-free, everything-free "oil" spray. Turkey sans skin and a few of the side dishes were about all he could eat. I put the turkey platter in front of his place setting and let it block all the delicious foods that he couldn’t eat.
Larry stood at the head of the table, staring at his empty plate. His very attractive holiday-themed heavyweight orange
paper plate, decorated with tiny turkeys along the rim. Why spend the wee hours scraping food off the good china when there were gorgeous paper plates that could just be tossed into the trash?
"
Duh, Daddy," Amelia said. "It’s a
plate."
"Larry, what’s wrong?" I interrupted, able to spot steam coming out of my husband’s ears at first smoke.
My husband, my completely normal (until that moment) husband, suddenly flung the plate into the air, then pushed the turkey platter off the table with all his might, which was considerable, given that he was six feet and well over two
hundred pounds. The turkey went flying, knocking the bowl of garlic mashed potatoes upside down (of course) onto Larry’s mother’s lap, and the cranberry sauce onto the salmon walls of the dining room, blending in quite well, actually.
"Paper plates!" he yelled. "And
plastic cups?" He grabbed a faux highball glass and waved it at me. "Are you KIDDING me? It’s a HOLIDAY, for God’s sake! How goddamned tacky is this!"
Whoa. Whoa. Whoa.
What the hell?
"Your husband has the maturity and self-control of a four-year-old," my aunt Dinah whispered to me, shaking her head. "In all my years of marriage, your uncle Saul never once pushed food off a table."
"That would explain why Uncle Saul was three hundred pounds," my sister whispered to Amelia with a wink.
"I had a three-hundred-pound uncle?" Amelia yelped, eyes and mouth open wide. "Omigod!"
Copyright © 2005 Melissa Senate
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