Mrs. Saint and the Defectives: A Novel Page 6

  Markie dropped the phone and heard it clatter on the table as she spun toward the door. But she couldn’t take a single step in retreat, because at the end of her turn, she crashed into a woman who was heading for the empty chair at the table. Markie wouldn’t have thought she could possibly feel any more agitated, but this was the one woman in their social circle whom she truly disliked.

  She was the woman who headed up the Mothers’ Club, and as Markie had complained to Kyle many times, because of some weird competitive streak or superiority complex, this woman had slowly pitted their Saint Mark’s jobs against each other when they should have been working in concert. She was the only woman whose dinner invitations Markie was tempted to decline.

  She was also the woman whose breasts Markie had just seen up close on a cell phone.

  “Markie!” she said. “You’re joining us? Terrific! Like I said in my last e-mail, the Mothers’ Club could use more help with this year’s—”

  It was then that the woman looked past Markie toward the table of her waiting friends. Her fake enthusiasm faded immediately, and before Markie could think to run past her and out the door, she saw the other woman’s eyes narrow, then darken with something Markie couldn’t readily name.

  Of course Kyle was home when she screamed into the driveway moments later and tore through the front door. It turned out his “What’s on your agenda for the day?” every morning that week had been less about taking an interest in her life and more about determining when he could take a midday nap on the family-room couch without being caught jobless. She must have known that before. She must have sensed it in the tone of his question. Now, after her humiliation in the restaurant, she had—finally—lost her motivation to continue to overlook it.

  “Let me see the account balances,” she said, clicking the TV off and slamming his laptop cover closed over his poker game. “Right now. All of them.”

  It should have offended him that she asked about the money first, the women second. He should have felt the sting of that, and being Kyle, he should have manipulated that rejection into some kind of sorrowful accusation that Markie’s lack of jealousy showed how passionless their marriage had become, and that’s what had driven him to it.

  Or maybe she should have been the one to feel hurt when he didn’t start by begging her forgiveness and pledging his undying love, but instead went straight to justifications and defensiveness. But that was the thing about their relationship: forgiveness-begging and love-pledging had long become things of the past. Now it was only about finger-pointing and blame-deflection.

  They had been so close in the beginning. So crazy in love with each other—and despite what Clayton and Lydia had said, it had absolutely been true love and not “a grown daughter’s childish rebellion against her parents.” True love, true lust, of the flush-faced, pounding-heart, fluttery-stomach, “can’t take my hands off you, can’t stop thinking about you, can’t spend a day without you” type.

  Back then, Markie couldn’t believe her luck. Charming, popular Kyle Bryant, in a different league from her in terms of sex appeal (a different stratosphere, really) wanted plain old unremarkable her? So smitten was she, so flattered by his attention, that it was no effort to excuse a few red flags. So he was a little immature, somewhat flaky and irresponsible, not very good at owning his mistakes, and not particularly ambitious. As the youngest of five and the only boy, he had been coddled like a little prince. What chance had he been given to grow up?

  And look at the good traits a childhood with four sisters had given him: he was sensitive, understanding, more willing to share his feelings than any other guy she had ever known. And he was incredibly romantic, forever sweeping her up in long embraces or producing flowers or lighting candles even when they were only having boxed mac and cheese while she studied and he flipped through pages of a magazine. She decided those were the things that mattered most. Look at her parents: her father might have been upstanding and duty-bound since he was five, but where was the passion? If Markie had to choose between dependability and romance, she’d take the latter.

  But that was before the kid and the big mortgage. Before she realized that it’s oh-so-easy to devote your heart, mind, and body to another person when you’re both in college and there’s so little stress in your lives. Romance and passion and long talks into the night can carry the day when there are no bills to pay, no jobs to hold down, no middle-of-the-night feedings, no debates about attachment parenting and discipline techniques.

  After all those things, after all the pressure and stress the grown-up responsibilities brought with them, after all the tears from her about needing a real partner instead of a second child, the (broken) promises from Kyle about how, this time, he would finally begin to act like one, after all the fights when, ultimately, he threw up his hands and said she was expecting too much, things changed. “Crazy in love” was downgraded to “in this together,” which sank, eventually, to “We owe it to Jesse” and “What would people think if we split up?” For more years than she could count, staying together hadn’t been about the feeling they couldn’t live without each other, but only about their son and how it would look if the Golden Couple revealed their tarnish.

  Kyle’s explanation for the mess he had gotten them into was―no surprise to Markie―immature, illogical, and devoid of personal responsibility. As for the repeated job loss, “Look, Markie, you’re the one who wanted me in all these big-shot sales positions. I never said I had what it took to do that kind of thing. I’d have been happier working construction; you know how much I loved those summer building jobs when we were in college. But you wanted a successful businessman for a husband, so I faked it at every company for as long as I could. For you. I could’ve told you they were all going to figure it out after a while.”

  As for the money, “It’s always been so important to you to have all the things everyone else at Saint Mark’s has. You think I wanted to be the one to tell you we couldn’t afford all that stuff?” And as for the women, “You try living with someone who’s so much more responsible and successful and such a better parent. It erodes your self-esteem completely! If I hadn’t found some way to feel good about myself, I’d have ended up depressed, or worse. You think that would’ve been better for our son?”

  The mortgage company was unimpressed with Markie’s promises that if they would merely give the Bryants a slight extension, she could make things right. Because by then, unbeknownst to her, Kyle had already requested the maximum number of extensions allowed to enable him to divert their monthly mortgage payments to stave off the collection agencies breathing down his neck about the credit cards and home-equity loans that were even more delinquent than the house note. They were all done granting extensions on this account, a mortgage representative told Markie over the phone, in a tone that made it clear just how many times Kyle had called them and how annoying he must have been. But here’s what they would do: they’d give Markie and Kyle six months to either pay up or get the hell out before they initiated foreclosure proceedings.

  Markie couldn’t pay. Their “rainy day” fund was gone, along with Jesse’s school account. Enter Clayton and Lydia and their Loan of Many Attached Strings. In hindsight, Markie wondered if borrowing tuition money to keep Jesse at Saint Mark’s a few months longer might have been more an act of cruelty than compassion. Word had traveled through the student body that not only had his parents filed for divorce in the wake of a financial crisis, but Jesse’s father had worked his way into the bedrooms of most of the Mothers’ Club over the course of his son’s nine-year tenure at the school.

  There had been vague rumors before—ones Markie had studiously ignored—but in the spirit of upper-crust discretion, the gossip had been tastefully squelched before it had been allowed to gain legs. Apparently, once it got out that the Bryants were no longer financially capable of remaining in the Saint Mark’s circle, it was decided that they should also no longer be afforded diplomacy.

  If Markie had pa
id attention to her husband’s financial shenanigans, she could have put a stop to them before they got so out of control. If she had acknowledged the lipstick stains, the scent of someone else’s perfume, the alibis that didn’t add up, she could have called him on his infidelity, made him renew his vow of faithfulness. If she had stopped to think about it, to piece together that the money and the women were signs of a deeper problem, she could have dragged him with her into counseling, locked the door, and insisted that they not leave until they had worked out all of their issues, recommitted themselves to each other, their family, their son.

  Were it not for her willful blindness, she could have spared Jesse the humiliation of trading private school for public, five thousand square feet of living space for nine hundred, family dinners with both of his parents for traded weekends via court-ordered visitation. Relative anonymity among his Saint Mark’s classmates for the infamy of being “that kid whose parents self-destructed.”

  The night they told Jesse about the divorce, Kyle pulled the boy aside to say he was sorry about how things had turned out. He didn’t fess up to the maxed-out credit cards, the secret refinancing of the house, the unpaid mortgage statements, his pilfering of Jesse’s education account. He certainly didn’t mention the Mothers’ Club.

  What he said was that he had “tried to reason with your mother,” but that it hadn’t worked out. “What can I do, pal? I guess she just doesn’t want to be married anymore.”

  When Jesse relayed this to his mother later, he said it in a tone that suggested he wasn’t entirely sure his father had been completely honest with him. Markie studied her son carefully as she considered her answer. The boy knew his parents—he knew his father’s impulsiveness, his occasional immaturity, how it sometimes seemed like there were two children in the house, Markie the lone parent. He knew, deep down, that she would never have given up on her marriage, on their family, unless his father had committed some major matrimonial infraction.

  But it didn’t matter what the boy knew, deep down. What mattered was what Markie saw in his eyes, in the set of his mouth: Don’t tell me what he said isn’t true. Don’t tell me your side of it. Don’t tell me anything that will make me question my father, a man whose dependability has always been a fragile, fleeting thing in my life. Because I will not survive that.

  Markie patted his hair and kissed his cheek. And did not set him straight. Instead, she let him believe what his father had said, that the blame for the dissolution of their marriage, their family, Jesse’s entire world, lay at her feet.

  And that was why, in addition to avoiding their former neighborhood, her job at Saint Mark’s, the Mothers’ Club, and every other person, place, or thing that reminded her of their past life, she was also avoiding her own son. Or letting him avoid her, as the case may be.

  Chapter Eight

  The side door slammed shut as Markie raced downstairs to say goodbye. “Damn!” she said to the empty kitchen. She should have skipped the hair and teeth brushing. The day before, she had managed to fit those in and still make it to the kitchen as Jesse was making himself a sandwich for breakfast, though when he saw her, he dropped the knife, abandoned the open jars of peanut butter and jam, grunted “Bye,” and walked out of the house, a backpack in one hand and two plain pieces of bread in the other. He must have adjusted his schedule this morning, timing it so he could slip out before she got downstairs.

  A couple of weeks earlier, after their first Skype call with her parents from the bungalow, she had made the mistake of interpreting Jesse’s hug, and his offer to split a sandwich with her, as an invitation for her to take another shot at bridging the gap between them. “Listen,” she had said, placing her hand on his, “Mrs. Saint thinks maybe you were smoking outside yesterday when I was out buying lunch. Is that true? Are you smoking?”

  He yanked his arm out of her reach. “We haven’t even been here a whole weekend, and you’ve already got the neighbors spying on me? Nice trust, Mom.”

  “I didn’t ask her to—”

  But he was already halfway down the basement stairs. At the time, she had tried to work up some fury about his walking out on their conversation, but she couldn’t manage it. That was the shot she had decided to take to bring them closer? Accusing him of sneaking a smoke in the yard? She didn’t blame him for being angry with her for that. She was furious with herself about it. She wasn’t two-full-weeks-of-silent-treatment furious, but then, she wasn’t a teenager whose life had been recently upended.

  Now she watched from the living room window as he walked down the block, his pack slung over his right shoulder. Her head started to pound, and she headed for the coffeemaker. She pushed the button on the machine and reminded herself that it was Friday, at least. She had an annoying trip to make to her company’s downtown headquarters later, but after that, she would be able to relax. She was ahead on her work for the week, so she was planning to knock off the minute Jesse got home from school.

  She wanted to fix things. Maybe they would walk down to the sandwich place for dinner. Catch a movie, even. Her first Global Insurance paycheck had hit her bank account the day before—finally, they could live a little. There had to be some new video game he was after, or maybe some new style of hoodie or jeans that everyone wore at school. They could stop for those things after the movie. Yes, it was bribery. Right now, she wasn’t above it.

  Later, peering into her tiny closet, she averted her eyes from the main clothes rod on which her nicest suits and dresses hung—all too tight now, thanks to her post-divorce carb-fest. Hanging on a hook behind the door was the sole businesslike item she owned that still fit: a green dress she had purchased shortly after Jesse was born.

  She still remembered the day she bought it. By the time she had loaded Jesse into his car seat, gotten them to the mall, and made her way to the dress department—finally, not the maternity department!—she calculated she had four minutes to shop before he woke and hollered for milk. She grabbed three dresses from the rack and settled on the first one she could fit into—a trendy-looking green scoop-necked item that she loved in the dressing room. When she got it home and under regular light, she discovered the color leaned toward neon, and on closer inspection, the scooped neck seemed to scoop slightly to one side. No matter, though—it didn’t have an elastic tummy, so to her, it was high fashion. She had worn it constantly.

  Now she took the dress off its hook, slid it on, and regarded herself in the mirror, wrinkling her nose. She was amazed Kyle had let her out of the house in such an atrocious article of clothing all those years ago. She couldn’t believe she was about to let herself do it again today, and for the fourth time in as many weeks, no less, as she had now been to the Global Insurance office that many times, having started her job before they moved to the bungalow. Climbing into the decidedly not flashy, definitely not European, used car she had bought for $500 after she lost her fancy leased one, she told herself that on the upside, even if someone from her old life were to see her, they would never recognize her.

  Downtown, she fought traffic to reach the loading bay at the back of the Global Insurance building, where two shipping department guys would remove the boxes of completed files she was returning and replace them with a new set while she performed her requisite check-in on the fortieth floor. In the elevator, she held her breath and pressed the number. In, out, fast, she whispered to herself—the mantra she had developed after her first miserable trip to the building. There were only a handful of work-at-home employees at Global Insurance. The rest of the company’s vast army of claims processors worked here, in the downtown headquarters, between floors thirty and forty. Markie had only seen the fortieth—the floor occupied by Claims Review and Appeals Processing—but her manager, Gregory, assured her the others were identical, each an enormous square space with a perimeter of offices and an interior filled with cubicles, cubicles, and more cubicles.

  Markie had heard of “cube farms” before. The fortieth floor was more like a cube prairie.
Across its great expanse, claims reviewers (this was Markie’s job—and it was a quiet one) were interspersed with appeals processors (involving telephone calls). This meant that in one cube, a person might be trying to read silently, while directly beside him someone else squawked loudly into her headset, explaining at several decibels greater than necessary why it was that although Global Insurance was most definitely “On Your Side!” and “Here for You!” it could not, sadly, pay that particular claim.

  On her first trip to the office, standing on the perimeter of the cube prairie with Gregory and listening to the sound of shuffling paper and keyboards clicking and people coughing and sniffing and sighing and chairs moving and file drawers opening and closing, Markie had thought of the farmers in biblical stories watching as clouds of buzzing locusts swarmed toward them. This must be what it sounded like, she thought, the droning noise of impending doom. She had scratched her arms and checked the collar of her neon-green dress, shaking the fabric to set free the insects she was sure had crawled under the polyester and onto her skin.

  Now, stepping out of the elevator, she tried not to look at the cube prairie as she racewalked down the long hallway and into the office of the wordless, humorless woman who collected everyone’s completed log sheets each week and handed them new ones. Markie didn’t know the woman’s name—the nameplate outside her door said only LOG SHEETS. On Markie’s first visit to headquarters, Gregory had pointed out the office and explained the log sheet–swapping process, but he claimed not to have time to make introductions. Markie suspected he might be afraid of the woman. If she thought less of him for it at the time, she didn’t the following week when she stood on the threshold of the woman’s office and offered a cheerful “Good morning!” only to be met with a pinched-face glare as the Log Sheet Lady growled, “I don’t do small talk.”