meeting-she spots her sister several cars back in the line. If she could see her sister’s face, it would not be much different than glancing in this mirror. Only smaller, a little sharper and foxier. And frowning, begrudging Heloise her better spot in line, as Meghan begrudges Heloise everything. They are not even six months apart, beyond Irish twins. If they had been boys, the doctor might have thrown in the second circumcision for free. Then again, they probably only do that when Irish twins have the same mother. Heloise and Meghan share a father, a not particularly nice one, who left Meghan’s mother for Heloise’s, then spent the rest of his life making both women miserable.
But while Heloise has their father’s long-legged frame, Meghan favors her little sparrow of a mother, growing smaller and tighter with the years, her bones feeding off her skin. She doesn’t have an ounce of fat left on her body, and there are unhealthy hollows beneath her eyes. Heloise wonders if her sister still gets her period. Knowing Meghan, she probably willed it to go away after having four children in five years. Her husband refused to get a vasectomy on the grounds that it wasn’t natural. Heloise tries to figure out the chicken-or-egg implications. Did Meghan become borderline anorexic to punish her husband, to make herself less desirable to him, or did she stay that way because she welcomed the side effects? There has always, always, been a tightness about Meghan, a kind of controlled fury. You can see it even in baby pictures, her long, skinny body propped up on a sofa, her face pinched with resentment. The youngest child by a bit in Hector Lewis’s first family, Meghan believes she was short-changed on everything in childhood: allowance money, new clothes, extra helpings, her father’s attention. She has been making up for lost time ever since she landed Brian a year out of college. She keeps score by stuff, and her primary anxiety about having Heloise close seems to be that Heloise is in the top-tier development in Turner’s Grove, while Meghan is in Phase II. Larger, but with fewer custom details. Meghan lives for custom details.
Come to notice-Meghan is driving a new SUV today, although her previous car couldn’t have been more than three years old. She has moved up to a Lexus, the hybrid. The last time she and Heloise spoke-if one can call their chance encounters conversations-she was torn between the Navigator, by far the largest of the SUVs on the market, and the Range Rover. “The Rover makes a better statement,” she told Heloise, “but Brian vetoed it.”
“Statement about what?” Heloise was genuinely confused, but Meghan rolled her eyes as if Heloise were trying to provoke her. Disapproving of Heloise makes Meghan feels so good that Heloise almost-almost-doesn’t resent it. If Meghan ever comes to resent her too much, it will be bad, very bad indeed.
The final bell rings and the school seems to inhale before expelling the children in one big breath. Scott used to be one of the first out the door, but he’s infinitely cooler now that he’s nine and it’s a minute or two before he saunters out with his two best friends, Luke and Addison. But he is still young enough to light up when he sees Heloise, to remember, at least for a moment, that no one loves him more than his mother. He doesn’t let himself run to the car, but he picks up the pace, walking faster and faster until he bursts into the backseat, bringing noise and light and that wonderfully grubby little-boy smell, all dirt and glue and school supplies.
“Good day?” Heloise asks.
“Pretty good. We talked about genes in science.”
“Blue jeans?” she asks, setting him up to correct her.
“The genes that make you what you are. Did you know that two brown-eyed people can have a blue-eyed child, but two blue-eyed people can’t have a brown-eyed one? Not without mu-mu-” She lets him struggle for it. “Mutation.”
“Really?”
“Yes. So my dad must have had brown eyes, right?”
“Right.” She waits a second, then prompts: “And?” She doesn’t want him to grow up incurious like so many men, programmed only for their own outgoing messages.
“Oh.” He stops and thinks about what he’s supposed to say. “How was your day?”
“Pretty good.” Wednesday is one of her busiest days. She had two lunch appointments back-to-back.
“ Washington, Baltimore, or Annapolis?”
“ Washington. I had lunch at Red Sage. Tamales.”
“Luc-ky.”
She worries for a moment that she has trained him too well, that he might have follow-up questions, and then she’ll really have to gild the burrito, pile on more details about the lunch she didn’t actually eat, because she seldom eats the expensive meals purchased by her clients. Luckily, Scott launches into a complicated story about that day’s science class, and she knows she is safe. For now. But it is only a matter of time before Scott thinks to ask one day, “What does a lobbyist do exactly, Mommy?” Only a matter of time before she will have to muster an explanation boring enough to discourage him from asking still more questions. Sometimes, Heloise wishes she had settled for pretending to be, say, an importer-exporter, but then she would have been forced to do even more research to make her lies plausible. She may not be a real lobbyist, but her work has always centered on politicians and the kind of businessmen who court them, and she has absorbed quite a bit-more than she wants to, actually-about various state and federal issues. She has to watch herself sometimes, when a neighbor says something ignorant about Iraq or the Middle East and she’s tempted to contradict. Easier to stay silent than explain how she happens to know more about foreign policy than some fat-ass neighbor, that she actually does have sources in the State Department. And the CIA, come to think of it.
Heloise would have been a great CIA agent. Heloise could have been anything she wanted to be, according to the only man who ever really loved her, which is to say, the only man who never raised a hand against her. “But I am,” she tried to convince him. “I am exactly who I want to be.” He could never accept that, which is why they’re not together. Well, it’s one reason they’re not together. The unfortunate truth is that Heloise didn’t love him back, although she wanted to, and even tried for a while. But a cop, especially an honest one like Brad, couldn’t begin to provide for Scott and her as well she does. Economic inequity. It’s a problem in relationships.
For someone keen to avoid exposure, Heloise has a strange fantasy: She likes to imagine being invited to Career Day at Scott’s school. She sees herself in an elegant black suit. (Which is, in fact, what she wears to work- tailored suits, silk blouses, and beautiful shoes.) She would sit on the teacher’s desk, crossing what everyone agrees are a pair of exceptionally well-kept forty-year-old legs, kundalini or no, and make eye contact with the one girl she knows she will find about two thirds back, in the row closest to the windows. A girl like her, hiding behind too-long bangs and a book, pretending she’s not interested in anything. A girl who daydreams during Career Day because she has yet to hear anything that sounds remotely plausible, much less interesting.
Heloise would clear her throat, once, twice, then say: “I work for myself, at a company licensed with the state of Maryland as the Women’s Full Employment Network. I make $200 to $1,000 an hour, depending on the services I provide. I wear beautiful clothes and set my own hours. I have been in the finest hotels in the Baltimore- Washington metropolitan area, even in New York, eaten sumptuous meals, gone to gorgeous parties and Kennedy Center galas. There is so much demand for my services that I can pick and choose as I desire, taking only the clients I find acceptable. I work perhaps fifteen hours a week and employ four to eight other women, providing them base salaries and health insurance in return for commissions on the jobs I book them.
“I am, of course, a whore and a madam. And I am here to tell you what no one wants you to know-it’s one of the best jobs a woman can have, if you can do it the way I do it.” Heloise has done it the other way, too, on the street with a pimp and scant money to show for all her work. Talk about economic inequity in relationships…
But Scott is suddenly in a panic in the backseat, and Heloise abandons her daydream. It’s music lesson day, and he has left his exercise book in his locker at school. Fearfully, anxiously-although Heloise is always gentle with his mistakes-he asks if they can go back.
“Of course,” she says, making a smooth U-turn in her car, a Volvo sedan that the other mothers pretend to envy. But their envy is a kind of condescension-Oh, if only I could get by with a car that small, but there are five of us in our household. You’re just the two. On Old Orchard Road, she passes her sister Meghan, her narrow face so tight that it has lost the heart-shaped curve it once had and become a triangle. Heloise knows that Meghan still has several more trips-dropping one child at swimming practice, another at soccer, then trying to entertain the youngest two at a Starbucks as there’s not enough time to go home before it’s time to pick up the one at swimming and the one at soccer. Funny-Meghan, so determined to flee her mother’s way of life, has ended up replicating it, albeit with a lot more money and a husband who will never abandon her. Of all Brian’s traits, his steadfastness is second only to his income potential. Still, Meghan is her mother all over again, endlessly exasperated, chauffeuring four children around, with no help, except part-time housecleaning, because that’s the one thing Brian is stingy about, hiring help. Brian, who hates his job, can’t stand the idea that all the money he
