Olivia Goldsmith - Young Wives

She looked at the paper. There, spread out in two pages of tabloid pictures, was Michelle’s house, a close-up of Frank’s bloody, obviously beaten face, and—oh dear Lord—Michelle herself in her blue winter coat and handcuffs. Jada put her hand up to her mouth. SUSPECTED DRUG KINGPIN BUSTED, the headline read. She could hardly believe it.

“Isn’t that something?” Anne asked. There was something in the sound of her voice that gave Jada the feeling Anne was enjoying the excitement of this.

Jada grabbed the newspaper and crumpled it. “That headline is outrageous. Why don’t they just write ‘guilty’? This man has only been accused, not convicted,” she reminded Anne. “The press has already gone too far.” She looked up at Anne as she flung the newspaper into the garbage. “When Michelle comes back to work, I hope you will all remember that she hasn’t even been accused of anything. Now, don’t you have something better to do?”

After Anne left, Jada walked out onto the floor, spoke to a few of her staff as naturally as possible, and greeted an important customer. She returned to her office, trying to look casual, closed the door, and retrieved the newspaper from the trash. Smoothing it out as best she could, she gobbled up the dearth of information. Despite the bad underwriting, it didn’t seem as if any drugs had been discovered, thank God, and it did seem as if the police had been incredibly harsh both to Frank’s face and to the house. Jada knew that since the RICO Act had been passed, police had been gung-ho about busting for profit. She also knew that success bred resentment, and Frank, cocky as he was, probably had a lot of envious enemies in the county.

The intercom rang. “It’s Michelle,” Anne announced in a breathless voice, as if Al Capone were back from the dead and calling bankers. Jada picked up the phone, watching to make sure that Anne hung up.

“Have you heard?” Michelle’s voice asked.

Jada wondered if Anne, not visible now, was still listening on some other extension. “Honey, everybody’s heard,” Jada said. “Where are you?”

“I’m at home,” Michelle managed and then she gasped, making an awful sound that Jada didn’t like to hear and hoped that Anne wasn’t hearing. She lifted the phone base off her desk and pulled it as far as she could. Then, setting it on the floor next to the credenza, she stretched the handset as far as she could and just managed to get to the door and look out. Anne and several of the other women had their heads turned toward her but immediately telescoped around, avoiding her. None of them was on the phone.

“Oh God, Jada this is terrible. This place … it’s …” Michelle began to cry. “I have to go. I have to go pick up the kids. They were fostered out last night. Can you imagine?” She started to choke up; Jada could barely understand what she was saying. Something about Frank and making a list and the mirror and something else.

“Be cool, Michelle,” Jada said. “All the shit you’re looking at, all the broken stuff, isn’t important. The babies are important and they’re all right. You can come to my house tonight. We can clean up your place tomorrow.” The poor girl. Kneeling there in the wreckage, she probably did look like Cinderella but it wasn’t the time for Jada to make a “Cindy” joke.

“Oh, Jada.” Michelle made another horrible noise and then said something else about Frank.

“Is he home?” Jada said. She didn’t want to be too inquisitive. She’d known a lot of people who’d been in trouble and now wasn’t the time for twenty questions. “Is he there with you?” she asked.

“No,” Michelle answered, sobbing. “They wouldn’t let me talk to him, but a lawyer came and said he would be home tonight or tomorrow. Jada,” Michelle whispered, “it’s a nightmare. Frank didn’t do anything. How could the police do this to us?” She lost it then, and tears rose in Jada’s own eyes.

“Michelle? Michelle? You cry, but then wash your face and fix your hair and pull yourself together for Jenna and Frankie. You want me to come with you to pick them up? I know how Child Welfare can be.”

“I can do it,” Michelle whispered, pulling herself together. “I can do it,” she repeated, as if she were giving herself a pep talk, which Jada figured she was doing.

Jada used an old joke they’d run through together during the trials of raising suburban kids. “Are you calm?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“If you’re calm, I’m the Dalai Lama,” Jada said.

“If you’re the Dalai Lama, I’m Richard Gere,” Michelle answered weakly.

“If you’re Richard Gere, I’m outta here,” Jada finished. “I’ll leave work real soon, pick up some pizzas, and we’ll have a pizza party at my house. If you want to sleep over with the kids, that’s just fine.”

“Sleep?” Michelle asked. “Oh God, Jada. I’m never going to be able to sleep again.”

“Just as well,” Jada said. “It’s overrated. A big time-waster, generally. And you got a lot of cleaning to do. You okay?” she asked, just to be sure.

“Under the circumstances, yeah,” Michelle said. “Under the circumstances. And Jada?”

“Yes,” Jada said.

“Thank you. I won’t forget this.”

“I hope you do. I hope you forget the whole thing once it all gets straightened out. Meanwhile, tell me what’s really important. I forget if the kids eat sausage on their pizza or not.”

During which Angela sleeps through a riot and is subsequently read the riot act twice

“You’re going to have to do something , Angela,” Tony, her father, was saying from the doorway of the study. “It’s not healthy to just lie here. You don’t even look healthy.” He craned his neck forward. “You’re not taking an interest in anything. You didn’t even get up last night during that riot.”

“What riot?” Angie asked dully.

“You didn’t even hear the cop cars and the commotion down at the end of the street?” Angela just shook her head. She’d found the number of a pharmacy that delivered, and a combination of Nyquil and Tylenol PM had put her in something close to a coma. “Well, you saw the police tape around the house today, didn’t you?” her father was asking. “The bastids wrecked the joint.”

Angie shook her head again. She didn’t have a clue about what he was talking about, and she didn’t care.

“Angie, there was a huge drug bust round the corner, about ten houses down.” He looked at her appraisingly. “Hey, when’s the last time you went out?” he asked, suspicion in his deep voice.

“I’m going out later,” Angie told him, avoiding the question. It had been a few days. She was still in the Rangers sweatshirt, still on the sofa.

“Great! You gotta date?” He approached her and sat on the arm of the couch.

“Yeah. With my mother,” Angie said grimly. He better not get too close. She hadn’t washed, brushed her teeth, or been out of her father’s house since she arrived, and even she was willing to admit she was getting a little strange.

“Oh, she’s back?” her father asked. Angie couldn’t help but notice how he pretended to be totally casual, but she could sense his very real curiosity behind it. Desperation knew desperation. Angela was almost certain that her dad regretted the divorce. As far as she knew, her parents didn’t speak. Her father had simply disappeared from her mother’s conversation. But somehow Anthony Romazzano always knew Natalie Goldfarb’s whereabouts.

“You’re not going to get involved working for those schnorers ?” he asked. “I didn’t pay for law school so that you could help out a bunch of freeloaders.”

“You didn’t pay for my law school,” Angie reminded him. Her father was very odd about money; he’d been poor and then he’d been very rich. He tried never to let the women in his family know where he’d stood. But they’d ignored him, and he’d always been disturbed that neither Natalie nor Angie seemed influenced by his money. Though he’d suffered a few business reverses recently, he was still well off.

“Please, Angie. You could get a job with a Park Avenue firm in a minute. I could help you.”

“I’m not interested in Park Avenue. And you’re helping me right now,” Angie said. “You’ve been great.” She kissed him on the cheek.

Tony awkwardly shifted his weight, reached into his back pocket, and took out his wallet. He pulled a wad of bills from it and handed them to her, without getting too close. “Look, you’re a beautiful girl. Go out. Get your hair done. Get a manicure.”

She sat up, kissed him again, and let him hand her the money. She didn’t want it, but she knew it was his way of being kind. “Next you’ll be telling me to buy a hat.”

“You want a hat?” Tony asked, pulling open the wallet again. “I’ll buy you as many hats as you want.”

Angie couldn’t even smile at his cluelessness. “No, Dad. It was a figure of speech. Men used to think that when women were unhappy, they could just buy a hat to cheer themselves up.”

“When?”

“Back in the fifties, I think.”

“No, they didn’t. I was alive then. Your grandfather never told Nana to buy a hat. I never told your mother to buy a hat.”

“Just as well,” Angie said darkly. “It saved your life, no doubt.” She flopped back down on her back, already used to the warm but unpleasantly sticky leather waiting for her. Probably that dead cow hide was the only skin that would ever touch hers again, she thought morosely and stared overhead at the hideous figure eights in the ceiling.

Her mother was arriving home tonight and Angela knew she should be showering. Since she hadn’t brought any clothes with her, and since she’d rather die than get into that stupid dress she’d worn to the club, it wouldn’t hurt if she stopped off at the Cross County Mall and bought a pair of jeans and a couple of shirts. But the idea of doing either of those things tired her to the point of exhaustion. The thought of getting vertical, getting into the car, getting to Poughkeepsie, parking, and finding her mother’s apartment was daunting enough. Angie felt as if all energy had been drained from her. She had no “gets” left in her. But she had to go: her mother was her only hope. Natalie Goldfarb would tell her what to do. Her mother had to because otherwise, Angie figured, she was doomed.

Her friend Lisa was still telling her to just stay away, to try not to think about Reid, to remember how unforgivable his action had been. It was good advice, and Angie was almost embarrassed when she thought of how often she’d cried talking to Lisa.

She couldn’t cry with her dad. It would upset him too much. He would either cry, too, or threaten to kill Reid. Angie looked over at Anthony. His fingers were pulling uselessly at the corduroy of his trousers. He got up and moved to the end of the couch and motioned with his head for her to retract her feet. She did so, curling up into a semi-fetal position, her back now pressed against the stupid leather sofa. The hide was cool on her back, since it hadn’t been leaned on. Angie shivered. Yes, that was what she should get used to. She would spend her life untouched by real skin. She would spend her life pushing herself against coldness, hoping for a tiny bit of warmth.

Angie looked over at the flowers her son-of-a-bitch husband had sent. She hadn’t put them in water and the heads were already drooping, the edges of the petals already brown. The bouquet was a metaphor for her life—she would wither long before her time because of a tragic lack of caring. She hadn’t taken all those comparative lit courses for nothing. When her father put his hand on her ankle, she turned away from her dead flowers to look at him.