be ignored.
For some people, worse than being seen as a bitch on Long Island is not being seen at all. This, I don’t have to tell you, makes it hard on the rest of us, who spend our lives worrying we’ll be mistaken for one of them.
Helene begins to mother me, pushing the hair out of my eyes, handing me a tissue. “Come, sprinkle some cold water on that pretty face,” she says, taking my father’s cast-off BlackBerry out of my hands and leaving it on the chair I’ve vacated. She leads me farther back in the shop and parts a velvet curtain for me. “Don’t tell a soul I have a bathroom in here,” she says dramatically. “They’ll be coming in here in droves to use it if the word gets out.”
She is not joking. Small shops save their bathrooms for people spending over five hundred dollars. You think I’m kidding? Ask if you can use their restroom and they’ll tell you to go next door to Carvel or down the block to Burger King. Now put several costly items on the counter and tell them you’ll be back for them after you find a restroom and they’ll act as though the carpenters just finished installing the fixtures in theirs. Please, be their guest.
The bathroom, no bigger than a broom closet, is outfitted for her big spenders, with a hand-painted porcelain pedestal sink that matches the wallpaper and the paper hand towels. There are no toothpaste smears on the basin, no strands of hair clinging to the neat little brush that sits on the glass shelf below the mirror. Beside the toilet there is no book turned over to hold the reader’s place, no ratty magazine with free samples of moisturizer ripped out. There are no chocolate-smeared towels piled on the floor, no pots of flavored lip gloss left open on the tank behind the toilet.
This is the kind of guest bath my mother expects to find in my house, despite three children living there and me working full time. It’s just one of the gazillion ways I disappoint her. Thank God she can’t see what I’m seeing in the mirror—a very ugly, bedraggled version of me staring blankly back. I have dark eyes anyway, only now, below them, my mascara and all that liner I carefully put on and then smudged to perfection has formed dry river beds that resemble a map of the Finger Lakes. Very attractive—perhaps in a few weeks, for Halloween. My nose, ordinarily an acceptable size and color for my face thanks to the nose job my mother insisted I have at sixteen, now rivals Ronald McDonald’s in size and hue. My very dark hair, which usually has a sort of just-got-out-of-bed come hitherness, looks like I washed it last for New Year’s Eve. And my white T-shirt looks like it needs to be laundered just to become a rag.
As I try to wash up without messing up Helene’s House Beautiful powder room, the cell phone in my purse begins to play The Looney Tunes theme, which signifies my mother is calling. (Hey, some call it sick. I call it survival.) While dear June doesn’t know her theme song, she does, of course, know I have caller ID, and rather than argue about whether I chose to take her call or not, I flip the phone open.
“On the television,” she says without any preamble. “I have to find out that my daughter escaped from the jaws of death by moments on the television? You discover a dead body and you think…what? That because we have problems of our own, real problems, you and the children aren’t still the most important thing in our lives? Roz Adelman called and I had to pretend I’d already heard it from you…. And your father! Your father is beside himself with worry.”
“There’s nothing to worry about,” I say, and I ask her how she knows about Elise and the fact that I was there.
“You’re on the news. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Your father is forgoing the back nine and we’re coming over as soon as he gets home so you shouldn’t be alone.”
I tell her that they don’t have to do that.
“What kind of parents would we be if we didn’t come?” she asks. “Besides, he’s losing anyway. You want me to bring you some Xanax?”
I’m thinking that the only way I’ll need Xanax is if she comes over, but I don’t tell her as much because she’s insisting that the kids and I shouldn’t be alone in the house.
She and my father will pack a bag.
And I will shoot myself.
My call-waiting clicks. I tell her to hold on, but she is on a roll about the food she will have my father stop to pick up along the way and she ignores me. Since she’ll keep talking without me, I hit the button and cautiously say, “Hello?”
Detective Scoones identifies himself and asks how I’m doing. He leaves the g off doing, and it comes out sort of intimate.
“I was thinking that possibly I could come over tonight to discuss a few details regarding the case,” he says.
I can’t think of a thing to say. For some inexplicable reason I’m seeing David Caruso’s naked butt.
“I’d hate to drag you down to the precinct to—”
“Am I a suspect?” I stop fussing with my hair, trying to fix the unfixable in the damn bathroom at Precious Things, where no one, least of all Drew Scoones, can see me.
“Nothing like that,” he says. Is that the same as no? “I’m just curious about Mr. Meyers and I thought that you, working with the two of them, and knowing Mrs. Meyers pretty well…”
I ask about Jack’s alibi and Detective Scoones says they are checking into it. Helene knocks on the bathroom door and asks if I am all right.
“So about seven, Ms. Bayer?” he says. It seems that only the time is in question. “I’ll come by your place.”
And then he clicks off and I hear my mother’s voice.
“I said, ‘Does Jesse like chocolate or regular rugelach?’”
“Oh, he likes them both,” I lie, planning to eat the ones with the raisins while Jesse, ten, and Alyssa, six, gobble the chocolate ones. (Dana, the stick, will no doubt makes noises about how she’ll be fat for her bat mitzvah while scarfing down the rainbow cookies my father always brings for her. At twelve, she is old enough to watch the other two, and I could tell my mother not to come, not to bother. But rugelach sounds like exactly what I need at the moment. And I do, after all, have a date with the police. So in the end, as always with my parents, I fold and tell her that sure, they can come over to look after the kids. And yes, I add, they can pick up some pastrami and knishes as long as they are stopping at Ben’s Deli.
I exit the bathroom to find Gina staring at me like I’m an ax murderer, clearly on the road to the electric chair.
She hands me my BlackBerry. “Your reminder went off,” she says apologetically.
Today is a day I’m not likely to forget.
As if none of this has happened, Helene returns to the subject of her brother, Howard, and reminds me that he is a food critic for Newsday. “You’d never starve,” she says with a wink as I gather up my belongings. I smile and wave, opening the door without comment. “The divorce was his wife’s fault,” she shouts after me. “His ex-wife!”
Yeah, yeah, my wave says. I bet that’s what Rio tells every woman he meets.
My phone rings again as I am getting into the car, and of course, it’s Bobbie. The neighborhood grapevine has already begun to produce fruit. Or is it whine? She apologizes to me fifty times for refusing to come to Elise’s with me this morning. When her sister, Diane called Bobbie from the precinct to tell her what happened, she couldn’t believe it. And then,
