as if Gina has asked if Helene wants to sell the high-heel chair.
You should be warned that How Can You Not? is the national anthem of Long Island. It explains the Perrier-filled water glasses at the bar mitzvahs, the catered first birthday parties, the BMWs for seventeen-year-olds, and the four-carat diamonds given to wives who have found out their husbands are cheating. There are a lot of large diamonds on Long Island.
Don’t let me give you the wrong impression. How Can You Not? also applies to allowing your neighbors to run a one-hundred-foot extension cord from their refrigerator to the outlet in your house because a storm has knocked the power out on their side of the street. It means letting some kid move into your house for the last three months of his senior year because his parents have found the perfect house in another state and you can’t imagine the poor kid transferring with only months to go. It means inviting a couple you hate to your daughter’s bat mitzvah because they’re friends with a couple you love. The rules are complicated, but they’re a comfort, too. Like in Tevye’s shtetl, everyone knows what’s expected of them.
Okay, not everyone.
It is my firm belief that somewhere there is a Secret Handbook of Long Island Rules and that certain women are given copies. My mother has one. Actually, she may be its original author. Bobbie has one. These women have been sworn to secrecy and refuse to admit it exists, but there just isn’t any way they could know all the rules without it.
I’m still waiting for mine to arrive in the mail.
Men don’t seem to know the rules, or maybe they don’t care. They surely don’t have to live by them. Which brings us to Gina’s question.
“So where was Mr. Meyers when Elise was bludgeoned to death?”
It seems wrong to tell Gina about the sham of a marriage that Elise and her husband had. First off, who am I to judge how blind Elise was or wasn’t? I mean, Rio, my ex, pulled the wool down over my eyes so far that I didn’t know what I was doing, never mind what he was up to! Second, Elise was one of those Long Islanders who would have been appalled if I aired her dirty laundry in front of anyone beneath what she perceived as her social station. I don’t really know how she’d feel about my sharing it with those above or within her circle, but since I’m from the Plainview side of Syosset, and not from Woodbury, I don’t really swim in her social pool.
And while I don’t subscribe to it, I do understand the hierarchy because I was born in the Five Towns, that area on the South Shore of Long Island where the nouveau riche have riched their limit, and clawing your way to the top of the social ladder while appearing not to care (or even notice) is not simply an art form, but a requisite survival skill.
As luck would have it, I married out of it. Just ask my mother. It’s hard to know which she and my father view as more of a disgrace—my marrying out of the faith or out of the neighborhood.
Besides, Elise is dead. And everyone knows that you don’t speak ill of the dead.
At least not until after they’re buried.
“Jack Meyers claims to have an alibi,” I tell her, but still, my money is on him. When I admit that the police seemed to suspect me for a minute, Helene stops me and flips the Back in Ten Minutes sign on the door, then locks it. She and Gina lead me back to their offices in the rear of the store and Helene puts on a pot of fresh coffee.
Gina doesn’t really have an office, but a corner of the storeroom seems to belong to her. She works there at a computer surrounded by a bunch of Snoopy paraphernalia and some family photos. There’s the requisite picture of two little tow-headed girls on an outdated Christmas card with “Season’s Greetings from our house to yours!” Pinned to the same bulletin board, held in place by a fuzzy little yarn ball with goggly eyes, flat feet and a tag that says Have A Great Day! are two Charlie Brown and Lucy comics cut from the newspaper. A Snoopy tack holds a comic from the Internet about computers. Another holds a picture of a guy in a camouflage outfit somewhere in the desert.
“Is that your husband?” I ask, because it’s better than talking about finding Elise bleeding on her floor, or about Elise’s husband screwing some client while his wife bled to death. Or concussed to death, or whatever it was that killed her.
Anyway, Gina’s in love. I remember the feeling well.
Okay, vaguely. I remember thinking I was in love. For twelve years.
“Not yet,” she says, and she waves a darling little chip of a diamond under my nose. I think of Elise and her rock and what a terrible marriage she had and wonder if the size of the diamond is inversely proportional to the happiness of the marriage. Of course, it’s not, but for the moment, for Gina’s sake, I wish it were. “We’re getting married the day he gets back.”
The picture looks like he’s in some desert so I ask if he’s in the Army or the Marines. People from the Five Towns (that would be Lawrence, Hewlett, Woodmere, Cedarhurst and Inwood), where I was raised, don’t join the service. Neither do people where I live now, in Syosset, so one uniform tends to look the same as another to me. It’s the boys and girls from Wyandanch, from Roosevelt, from Freeport, who mow the lawns and clean the gutters of those who live in the Five Towns, who don’t have trust funds to pay for college or even a used car, who sign up and serve.
But Gina says that Danny is in construction and that he goes all around the world building things like dams and bridges. “He was in Iraq for a while, and Saudi Arabia and now he’s in Qatar.”
And Helene adds that Gina was late this morning because she had to go to the post office to get off a letter to Bob the Builder. Then she offers me Valium for my nerves, Percocet for the throbbing pain in my head and the number of her masseuse, who, she assures me, can make the world go away. I’d be happy if the phone would just stop ringing.
Helene answers it, placates the person on the other end, explains that the shipment was held up in customs (shrugging at me as she wonders if the customer will buy that excuse or if she’ll have to come up with another) and finally hangs up.
“Sorry,” she says, “but you of all people know how my customers are.”
I know all too well, and, if there was another way for me to give my children all the material things I want for them and that they need without sacrificing my self-respect (assuming that Rio even could or would pay child support if I allowed him to, which is a big assumption, a huge assumption), I’d be in some other line of work. Maybe I’d still be painting custom designs on furniture or, if money were irrelevant, giving art lessons to old ladies who wear funky hats and feed squirrels in little pocket parks in Forest Hills. Unfortunately, my father knew what he was talking about when he said that money doesn’t grow on trees, and I have three kids, a mortgage, a toilet that drips, a freezer that won’t freeze and a pledge to myself to finish repaying my parents for my final semester at Parsons (where I finally got a degree in interior design last spring after quitting to marry Rio thirteen years ago).
The point here being that Helene’s customers are my customers. Bobbie and I call them Type S women, as in spoiled, self-indulgent and self-consumed. All those commercials you see on TV where people lounge by private pools while wild jaguars race by? The ads in the New York Times for thousand-dollar designer purses? They aren’t talking to you and me. They are talking to the S’s, for whom Long Island is apparently a breeding ground. Here they thrive in our strategically located gated communities, which they only leave in their GPS-navigated Lexuses (with the individual DVD players in the backseat) to cut off normal Toyota-driving people like me as they head for the South Shore in pursuit of Princess In Training T-shirts for their off-spring. Off they go, weighing less than
