wives who love each other’s company, old friends, new friends. Anybody. I should have eaten with my mother and her dumb boyfriend.
I have quite a few leftovers. Enough for thirty, approximately. I can barely fit them into the refrigerator. I never even whipped the cream. For what? I don’t want any of the pies I made. I see them lined up on the counter, imagine them looking at each other and shrugging. Then I go out for a walk.
Nothing is on television, Bruce Springsteen is absolutely right; fifty-seven channels, and nothing on. Is it fifty-seven? Maybe it’s sixty-seven. It could be six hundred and seven and still nothing would be on. I turn off the television and look at my watch. Eight-thirty. I could go to bed. By the time I got ready, it would be close to nine.
I don’t feel like reading. I just finished a novel last night, and after I was done, I stared for a while at the author photo on the back, wishing I could call the woman and say, “I really liked your book. It says here you live with your two daughters. Are you divorced?”
I could call Rita. But why run up the phone bill? I’ll see her soon. Besides, Rita’s probably busy, having a terrific time, eating dinner with forty creative, California types, all of them mellow, all of them wearing contemporary jewelry and natural fibers and drinking the Napa Valley wines they’re so damn proud of. I hate eating with California people when they aren’t in California. All they do is talk about their superior produce, as though they are responsible for it, as though I don’t know that the only contribution they make is to pull up into the too-clean parking lot of the grocery store in their nonrust California car! convertible and fill it with avocados. When they eat in restaurants outside their own state, all they do is say, “In California,” loudly, as though it’s a credit to their personhood that they live there and they need to make sure the waiter and everyone else knows that they do. And why? No seasons, a bunch of airheads running around being so irritatingly happy you wanted to wring their necks. Everybody is happy there. Call directory assistance and you get some ecstatic person, thrilled to death that they live in California, they have a job in California. Who cares? Who wants to live in California?
Maybe I do.
I sigh, lean back in my chair, close my eyes. How come Rita gets such a good life and I get such a crummy one? How come Rita never has to shovel snow and has a suede checkbook cover? How come Rita’s husband adores her, sits lazily in his chair watching her, laughing at all her jokes? Once, when I visited them and the three of us were walking down one of the long, hilly streets of San Francisco, Lawrence turned to Rita and kissed her full on the mouth. Then, turning to me, he said, “I love my wife!” And I said, “I know you do,” feeling too much present, feeling in the way, knowing that David would never do that to me and would in fact object to seeing anyone else do it. “There’s a time and a place,” he’d say.
How come Rita is a television producer—creative, well paid, well respected; while the apparent outlet for my talents is as proprietress of the Hotel Meatloaf, temporary lodging in a wrecked suburban home? It occurs to me to get out my high school year-book, to call everyone and say, “I was just wondering. How did things work out for you?” Maybe someone would be in prison, and I could feel better.
I pick up the Martha Stewart catalogue, call the 800 number, ask the woman who answers the phone if she can give me Martha’s telephone number. She says, no, sorry, she can’t do that.
“I would really like to talk to her,” I say. “I need to ask her some things. Of a personal nature.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“I went to high school with her,” I say. “We were pretty good friends. But we, you know, lost touch.”
“I don’t have her number,” the woman says. “I couldn’t give it to you even if I wanted to. Would you like to order something?”
“I wonder … would you mind taking my number, and asking her to call me?”
“Surely. What’s your number?”
I tell her, then say, “You didn’t even write it down, did you?”
“Yes, I did.”
Right. “Too bad