Sunsets and Silencers

CAN’T GET HIM OUT OF MY MIND

Emily and Martin are married less than a year when they decide to buy a house. The apartment building they live in near the ocean will soon be converted to condos, but Martin views condo ownership like being in business with strangers. Athletic as well as wary of realtors, each weekend he rollerblades through his neighborhood in search of an interesting property. Before long he finds a small, neglected, one-story bungalow two blocks off Abbott Kinney and a ten-minute walk to the beach. On first inspection, Emily is grim; this house does not fit her idea of home. But Martin enthusiastically explains his restoration plans, and Emily and Martin become the proud owners of their new, albeit homely, home. 

Emily likes living in her little house in Venice Beach. As frequently happens, the pair finds temporary happiness in home remodeling. Focusing on one room at a time, each receives a make-over, good taste compensating for what they cannot yet afford. Six months after they began, interior renovations are well along. The exterior, however, remains the same as the day Martin first skated upon it. All work has stopped. Except for when the lights are on in the evening, the house looks unlived in and, in a sense it is. For even though pretty Emily and successful Martin’s marriage is often emulated and envied, three years after they first met they still don’t know one another. This is because both harbor secrets, secrets of the most serious kind, secrets that lead to packs of lies.

The truth is that although Emily rejoices each time she takes a Kate Spade Gramercy Park-patterned cup out of her top-of-the-line dishwasher and places it back in its appointed spot in her new cabinet, a part of her is as forlorn as if she dropped it on her newly tiled kitchen floor. Her secret is a simple one; she married Martin by default. Emily is in love with David, a friend of hers at work. But before she could get up the courage to attempt to bring their relationship to another level, in one of life’s cruel ironies, David winked at Emily’s friend Jane on match.com and Jane winked back. Their  first date at Starbucks catapulted to full fledged romance the following night during three courses at Il Sole; six months later they were married.

Soon after their wedding, Emily met Martin on a much needed Hawaiian vacation. They got along reasonably well and Martin looked handsome in a suit. He also shares her passion for the clean lines of mid-century modern and makes a good living. She assumes marriage to him will shut the door on David, and that now they can enjoy dinner parties, movies and occasional weekends away as a foursome. Emily chooses to believe marriage will bring her closer to Martin and weed out all or at least most of the fantasies about David that surely no married woman should have. She is wrong. Too many nights sleep is impossible because Emily can’t get David out of her mind. Employing twisted logic, she takes this as a sign that she and David are meant to be together, that a cosmic mistake occurred to keep them apart. She carries on with buying gourmet cheeses and excellent wines. She keeps perfect closets and perfect drawers. And she continues preparing perfect breakfasts, lunches and dinners for Martin, until the day comes—and she knows it will--when she will never do anything for him again.

During a small dinner party at her house Emily watches for cracks in David and Jane’s marriage. Her good fortune comes sooner than anticipated. Both couples share a meal of  broiled halibut and mushroom risotto that Emily made from scratch. Afterwards, as the men sit on the front porch, Emily and Jane clean the kitchen while finishing off a bottle of pinot.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” Jane whispers, obviously distressed.

“What’s the matter?”

“It’s David. He’s not the person I thought I married.”

 “Is anyone ever really?”

“Probably not, but believe me, we’re in trouble. He comes home late every night, and he’s even stopped bothering to make excuses. I don’t know what to do.”

“It’ll pass. All marriages have their ups and downs as clichéd as that may sound.”

“We haven’t had sex in six months.”

It takes Emily all the control she can muster not to reveal how pleased she is. As Jane’s friend she feels slightly guilty but Jane is not her top priority and anyway, she loved David first. “I’m sure that happens far more often than people admit,” Emily says, not believing that at all.

“I’ll ride it out. Maybe you’re right.”

But a month later David leaves Jane. He doesn’t offer much in the way of an explanation, but does let her stay in their condo while they decide what steps to take next. Emily is ecstatic. With nothing but the thoughts in her head to go on, she believes David left Jane to be with her. In her mind there can be no other reason. Soon he will contact her and they will breeze through life together, leaving their spouses behind. Every time the phone rings she runs to answer it. A few times it is David, but he’s calling to speak to Martin. Emily is dumbfounded. Her fantasies have clouded her reality.

Emily is so thoroughly occupied thinking about David, she neglects to see that for all intrinsic purposes Martin has left her as well. He comes in late from work each night and creeps quietly into bed. Actually Emily is relieved. Her sexual fantasies have come to be all that she needs. Then one Saturday morning Emily gets what she wants; Martin tells her he’s leaving. 

“I’m so sorry, Emily,” he says. His face is pale, his voice low. He looks down at the glossy oak planks splashed with sunshine.

This is Emily’s final sign. She is free now to pursue David. She can’t wait for Martin to pack some of his things and leave the house. Standing in the kitchen impatiently drumming her fingers on the granite counter, at last she hears the front door slam. Her heart beats furiously as she dials David’s cell phone. She has no idea what she will say. She’s certain, however, he will know why she’s calling.

“Martin?” he says.

“No, David. It’s me. Emily.”

“Oh, hi.”

Emily hesitates.

“Bad connection?” he asks.

“No, no. I thought you’d want to know…Martin left me.”

“I know.”

“But it only just happened.”

“I’m sorry, Emily. No one ever plans these things.”

“It’s the way it’s supposed to be. We can be together now.”

“What did you say?”

“We can be together now. Isn’t that what you want?”

 “Haven’t you spoken to Jane? I told her everything last week.” But Emily has avoided Jane since her separation from David.

“What are you saying?”

“Me and Martin, Emily. This is about me and Martin.”

Emily’s fantasy careens to an end. The phone slips out of her hand and hits the floor chipping a pale yellow Mexican tile. Martin, she discovers, has a secret too.

HOME INVASION

A large cockroach races out of the plastic grocery sack Shelly is emptying, zips over her granite kitchen counter, and heads for parts unknown.. It happens so fast she doesn’t have time to smash it with the can of tomato soup she happens to be holding.

“Oh, lord,” she laments, picturing the bug setting up house in her home. Waving the can overhead she sprints into the dining room, but it’s nowhere to be seen. Assuming it’s female and in the late stages of pregnancy, she worries it will find a secluded spot to birth her brood. Soon they will be inundated with offspring that will swiftly grow to adulthood and reproduce on their own, leaving their obsessively-cleaned, vintage Victorian roach infested. She guesses this will take a couple of weeks, but makes a mental note to Google it to be sure.

Back in the kitchen, she sits hunched over on a step stool and worries. Shelly excels at worry. When she finishes worrying about one problem, she shifts focus to a different one, new or old, real or imagined. Often she worries about several things simultaneously. Such is the life of a worrier. And according to Dr. Feldman, her former therapist, once a worrier, always a worrier. Shelly won’t change midstream at the age of thirty-eight; she has a calamity mentality and that is that. Everyone who knows her knows this, and everyone accepts this, more or less. After thirteen years of marriage, her husband Jeffrey frequently turns a deaf ear to her latest assessment of a catastrophic conclusion for what Shelly worries about almost never happens. One would think this might stop her fretful imaginings, but Shelly believes if she stops worrying, whatever she would have normally worried about will come to pass. She has to keep worrying or face disaster.

So far her children, Josh who is ten and Ellen soon to turn twelve, do not appear to have inherited this disorder. Jeffrey does not take much in life seriously, and that might be what saved the kids thus far. Children do change, however, and a future of worry could be in store for either of them or both, of course.

They live in Sea Cliff, a picturesque, leafy little suburb on Long Island’s North Shore. Their family experiences victories, like Ellen taking second in her school’s annual spelling bee, and disappointments, like Josh having difficulty with math. But discounting Shelly’s ruinous musings, life is good. That is, until Shelly lets her guard down. Later she will say she should have known better, that had she worried about the situation’s potential outcome, disaster would have been diverted. But much like the road not taken, there is no way to know this for sure.

It happens the summer her friend Anne comes to Sea Cliff to house sit for the people across the street. Shelly’s neighbors, Sam and Doris, are indulgent housekeepers. Their home is in a line of houses that give credence to the town’s name, perched as they are atop a cliff facing Long Island Sound. The 1889 Georgian colonial is the star of the street after being under their tutelage for eight, paint-stripping years. Doris was so intent on getting down to the original finish of every door, molding and bit of wainscoting that she landed in the emergency room from a combination of poisonous fumes and exhaustion. Luckily she had finished her work.

Sam and Doris have no children, no cats, no dogs. Their home is their raison d’etre, their baby. So when they schedule an extended European vacation to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary, they insist on having someone live in to watch over it. Anne, Shelly’s friend since high school, is off for the summer as a teacher and going through a nasty separation from her husband Mark. The couple live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in an awe-inspiring, classic six they purchased before the run-up in prices. And although home values now head south, just about everyone who visits them is inflicted with real estate envy.  No one knows that after ten years of being the beneficiaries of good fortune, Anne and Mark are going at one another with Chinese take-out. With a settlement of their common property nowhere in sight, the now-divided co-op has become a battlefield fronting Riverside Drive. Skirmishes erupt daily in the shared kitchen where Magnolia cupcakes and General Tso’s chicken are deployed as munitions, leaving their distinctive greasy smears on walls, custom cabinetry and wounded psyches. Anne jumps at the chance to detox and house sit for eight weeks when Shelly tells her about it. For their part, Sam and Doris are cautiously optimistic about their new babysitter, but after meeting with Anne are able to relinquish temporary control with the assurance that Anne’s only child, a girl of nine, will be in the mountains of Pennsylvania at summer camp, away from their antique furniture and copious collections. Shelly’s children will also be away, and she looks forward to long talks, good wine, and leisurely sunsets over the Sound with her old friend. It is this very vision that leaves Shelly without her usual defenses; it seems she simply forgot to worry.

Shelly joins Anne in Sam and Doris’s backyard almost every day before Jeffrey gets home from work. They sit on white wicker chairs with plump, cabbage-rose-patterned cushions and watch the passing boats while sipping Pinot Grigio from Waterford stemware. On their first afternoon together, Anne takes out a joint from a silver case. Somewhere along the line she has acquired a hefty marijuana habit, lighting up every few hours day and night. Shelly doesn’t know if this is due to post-marital misery or came before it. She herself hasn’t smoked since college as it made her especially paranoid, but decides to give it another try. She puts the cigarette to her lips and inhales.

“Like…riding…a…bike,” Shelly says, coughing between words like a TB patient.

“Sitting here with you like this makes me think of the old days,” Anne says, oblivious that her friend is gasping for breathe. “Wish we knew then what we know now. I had no clue Mark was such a bastard.”

“Who really knows who they’re marrying? Getting married is like playing Russian roulette with a gun that’s almost fully loaded,” Shelly says, no longer choking.

“Yes, you could say I took a bullet.”      

“No one knows who’ll get shot or when. And just when someone thinks it can’t possibly happen to them…” Shelly opens her eyes wide and makes a slicing motion across her throat. “There’s no way of knowing.”

 “No way of knowing,” Anne echoes, lighting up again. Her usually fastidious façade shows signs of wear and a lot of brown-colored stains, but her face is still pretty even in the harsh glare of the late day sun. She was the one the boys wanted in high school.

“You’ll get through this, Anne. More than half of all marriages end in divorce. It’s odder to stay married.”

But Shelly is concerned. Anne looks so forlorn eating M & M’s and staring into space. Everyone thought Anne and Mark’s life was perfect, the one to strive for. And while Shelly and most of her women friends enjoy dishing about problems they have with their husbands, Anne never said a negative word about Mark. Even after she found out he was cheating on her she kept it to herself. By the time she finally told Shelly, she and Mark had lawyers. From then on they were under the spell of Robb, Hugh, Blind, esq. and Heller & Moore Heller, esq., their lives reduced to a growing pile of time sheets and billing statements.

In the balmy breeze which doesn’t yet betray the coming of fall, Shelly sips at her wine. A worry begins making its way through the haze of dual substances: What if Anne inadvertently burns down Sam and Doris’s house? “Geez,” Shelly says aloud, watching the fiery little tip of the cigarette as it leaves Anne’s mouth and sprays light gray ash onto her lap; Shelly resolves to make frequent checks on the household and skip the pot.

* * *

“So what do you and Anne talk about all day?” Jeffrey asks, as they eat a veggie pizza in their kitchen nook.

“You know, the usual.”

“Come on, give me some gossip. All I hear about are running toilets and stopped up sinks.” Actually, Jeffrey lives a charmed life having stepped into his family’s thriving plumbing business. No hard choices to make, no aspirations to toil toward, no anxiety, which could account for his being so easy going. “Did you find out who Mark’s cheating with? Someone we know?” Jeffrey asks.

“Anne never found out. Or she’s not saying.”

“Could be Bunny Roll. A lot of guys had the hots for her.”

Bunny, who acquired the unfortunate surname of Roll on marrying Bernie Roll, used to live in Sea Cliff. She and her husband, a poor sap of a guy who made a bundle in organic produce, came to the house parties where everyone drank too much and Bunny danced herself into a glistening, sexy sweat. She looked and acted like a typical dumb blonde but was brunette, and inspired a devoted following among the neighborhood husbands. One day Bernie struggled past denial and filed for divorce. The couple quickly sold their house and both of them left town. That was two years before.

“That’s crazy. Mark only met her a few times, and no one’s seen Bunny or Bernie in years.”

“No one who’s talking,” Jeffrey says.

*   *   *  

Going through a divorce either puts weight on a woman or strips it dramatically off. After three weeks at Sam and Doris’s it becomes apparent that Anne is packing on the pounds. While Shelly’s house inspections reveal no fire safety infractions, they are met with a vast amount of empty candy wrappers, particularly Hershey bars and M & M’s. Being a pothead has its chocolate downside, and explains the myriad brown stains on Anne’s T-shirts and shorts.

“Divorce is exhausting,” Anne says to Jeffrey, as Shelly walks across the emerald lawn to sit with them. The sun is high in the sky, the water below shimmers with movement, and an open bottle of Pinot beckons on the table.

“I thought you went jogging,” Shelly says to Jeffrey.

“It’s too hot,” Jeffrey says.

“I was getting the mail and saw him staggering down the street. I needed someone to talk to. Mark’s coming this weekend. Says he’s worked out a settlement.”

“Did you speak to your lawyer?”

“I have a call in.”

“Sounds too fast,” Shelly says.

“That’s Mark. Faster than a speeding bullet.” Anne fakes shooting herself in the head.

“Don’t freak yet. There’s plenty of time for that,” Jeffrey says, patting her thigh. His hand stays a second too long, but Shelly is watching a fat bumblebee hover over a nearby rose bush. If it comes any closer, she plans to make a run for it.

The day Mark comes in from the city, the two men sit in Jeffrey’s den thick as thieves. Shelly puts her ear to the wall to hear what they’re saying, but can’t decipher much. She thinks she hears the word “Bunny,” but can’t be certain. Both couples choose teams along gender lines.

Shelly finds Anne in the downstairs bathroom sitting on the edge of the tub. Fresh ash is in her lap and the exhaust fan rumbles. A pungent odor is not yet sucked from the room.

“I saw Bunny Roll today. At the pharmacy,” Anne says.

“Couldn’t be.”

“No, it was her. She looks the same. Trashy but irresistible.”

Shelly wonders if Jeffrey is right about Bunny and Mark. As if reading her mind, Anne says, “Mark never said it’s Bunny, but it’s too much of a coincidence that she’s here the same day he is.”

“Even if it is Bunny, I’m sure he doesn’t care about her. No one really did, well, except for Bernie.”

“So what’s she doing back in Sea Cliff?”

It takes the rest of the summer to get that question answered, on Labor Day to be exact. Anne’s respite at Sam and Doris’s is coming to a close, but her separation from Mark has a surprising ending. With only three days before Anne is to move back home and resume combat, they decide to give their marriage another try. Time apart has altered their thoughts about one another; mounting lawyer fees also exerted influence. Mark never tells Anne who he had an affair with, and Anne concludes it’s better not to know. They celebrate their reconciliation with plans for a kitchen remodeling, changing the staging area of their battles beyond recognition.

Sam and Doris come back from their European vacation with many memories and a renewed delight at being home. There’s a problem with ants in their master bedroom, however, this is remedied after several visits from an exterminator. Anne had gathered up her candy wrappers and put them out with the trash before her departure, and if Sam and Doris blame her for the infestation they never say.

Before Shelly can return to her regular course of worry, she is confronted with something truly cataclysmic. On the last day of the Labor Day weekend, Mark and Anne drive their matching BMWs loaded with Anne’s belongings back into the city. Shelly and Jeffrey wave good-bye as they take off, then walk across the street to their house. Shelly feels it then, the chill inside the warm sunny breeze. She shivers as she follows her husband inside. Abruptly he stands still in the center hallway, his back toward her. In an uncharacteristically solemn tone he says those four dreaded words: “We have to talk.”

Shelly’s worry default kicks into high gear. Have the roaches invaded their home after all? Is Jeffrey thinking about leaving the plumbing business and becoming a novelist? Will they face a lifetime of poverty? Does he have a disease? She’s off and running with juicy options. But it isn’t anything Shelly ever worried about, fitting in nicely with her theory about having to worry. Jeffrey, it turns out, is having an affair with Bunny Roll, who now lives in a rented farmhouse colonial on the outskirts of Sea Cliff.

He turns to face her. “I never planned this, never wanted it to happen. She came by the house. That weekend it wouldn’t stop raining. Remember? You were at the movies with Anne. Actually, Bunny came to see you. She said she wanted to tell you that she moved back to town.”

Had Shelly looked that day, she would have seen Bunny staring out the window of the luncheonette they parked in front of.  Rain was coming down in torrents, and she and Anne giggled like little kids as they got out of the car and ran across the street to the Cliff Cinema. Sitting alone at a booth for four, Bunny watched these women who seemed to have all that she had lost. As she stabbed at the remains of her chicken salad, it didn’t take her long to decide how to spend the rest of the inclement afternoon. She expertly applied cherry-colored lipstick in the reflection of a knife, smiled at the results, then motioned for the waitress to bring her the check.

“We didn’t mean to…it just happened…I’m so sorry, Shelly.” All this said in a rush as he studies the floor and rocks side to side with growing velocity. He bites down on his lip, then says the other four dreaded words: “I want a divorce.”

For Shelly who has been thinking roaches, career change, money problems, sickness, this comes as quite a shock, especially since no one thinks anyone could really be interested in Bunny. But life is like that. If one thing doesn’t get you, something else probably will.

PURSUING HAPPINESS

They fought every day of their thirty-two year marriage, but not for a minute had my father considered leaving my mother. Remnants of love, habit, her ageless beauty (she must have made a deal with the devil), and maintaining the status quo each played their part to keep my father in apartment 2B on Yellowstone Boulevard in Queens. Everything changed when my mother left him and moved in with their friend Sheldon. Sheldon bore an unfortunate resemblance to the Pillsbury Doughboy, but made piles of money in Laundromats. I knew my mother had been searching for a wealthy replacement for my father. The fact that Sheldon was married to her friend Charlotte was of no consequence to her.

 After a year of living alone, my father decided to leave New York. The apartment was downright depressing and his job in the garment center far too taxing for a man of sixty-two. Perhaps even more devastating was his belief that everyone, including complete strangers he passed on the street, knew all about how my mother had humiliated him. Fort Lauderdale seemed the perfect antidote.

In no time, he had a bevy of old beauties tempting him with homemade casseroles, club house movies, danish and coffee at the monthly dances, and invitations to early bird dinners for which he offered to split the tab. He enjoyed Florida so much, he bought the condo he’d been renting. My father had the life: pool and tennis days, a different woman each night. Decades late, he was catching up with the sexual revolution.

He took a part-time job at the King of Poultry. Amidst the matzo balls and stuffed cabbage, against a never-ending soundtrack of Elvis’s greatest hits, was a surplus of lonely female shoppers eager to get to know the store’s silver-haired, handsome new clerk. The better looking women found a little something extra in their shopping bags—a slice of noodle pudding, a piece of derma, a couple of turkey meatballs—and he got a date for that evening. He sold a record-breaking number of barbecued chickens his first year there, keeping his boss happy and his libido rejuvenated. Abe Klein, owner of the Poultry King as well as president of the local Elvis fan club, was even considering making him a partner.

But trouble was afoot. My mother had not fared well in Manhattan since Sheldon’s untimely death two weeks shy of their wedding day, and decided to test the Florida waters. She was determined to win my father back or, better yet, live in his condo while she searched for viable husband prospects. She flew down and called him on the phone from her room at the Holiday Inn.

“Hello, Sidney. Is that you?”

“Rose?”

“It’s me.”

“You sound like you’re right around the corner.”

“I am.”

“What do you mean? What are you doing here?” He looked anxiously over at Colleen Thompson, a petite blonde Presbyterian who sometimes got a yen for kosher food. She was placing the tuna casserole she prepared with Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup and topped with Chinese noodles on Sid’s small Formica dinette table.

“I’m thinking of moving down. I hear you love it.”

“It’s okay. Not for everyone though. Look, Rose, you caught me in the middle of something. Give me your number. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

My mother was disappointed, but still confident that he wasn’t over her. She gave him her phone number.

“Speak to you tomorrow, Sidney,” she said, hanging up the phone. Sitting on the faded, frayed bedspread, she surveyed the generic room. It was a world apart from the posh hotel suites she and Sheldon enjoyed before his sudden death, brought on by a life-long affinity for brisket with gravy, mashed potatoes and custard éclairs.

She stood up and walked into the bathroom. “No problem,” she said, smiling at her recently resurfaced face in the mirror. “He won’t be able to resist me.”

*   *   *

Never dreaming my father would be anything but alone, my mother awoke early the next morning, allowing herself ample time to dress and make-up. Pleased with the results, she went downstairs and got into a taxi for the short ride over to Horizon Condo Village. Driving past man-made lakes and buildings distinguished from one another only by their number, my mother was not impressed. For now, however, she could not be choosy or she’d risk using up her dwindling savings.

She walked the two outdoor flights up to number three hundred and ten in building twenty-five and rang the bell. It took a few minutes, but then she heard footsteps approaching the door.

  “Who’s there?” Sid asked, evidently annoyed.

  “It’s me, Sid. Rose.”

  He opened the door a crack. “What are you doing here? I just woke up.”

 “That’s when you used to like it the best. Remember, Sidney?”

 “Jesus, Rose.”

 She pushed the door open and walked in.

“Not bad,” she said, looking around. “Could use a woman’s touch though.”

Just then Colleen padded barefoot into the living room wearing Sidney’s old plaid bathrobe over a black lace nightgown.

 “Who the hell is this?” Rose asked him.

 “Who the hell are you?” Colleen replied.

 For once, my mother had nothing to say.

 “You should’ve called first, Rosie,” Sid said.

My mother walked the eight, hot, long blocks back to the hotel. She hadn’t counted on my father making a new life for himself. Now what was she going to do about hers?

*   *   *

The thought of my father with other women did not sit well with my mother. She lay awake at night in the cramped bedroom of her new, furnished rental at Lakeside Villas--which was neither a villa nor anywhere near a lake—and couldn’t stop picturing him having sex first with one woman, then with another. One night she woke up panicked and drenched in sweat. In her nightmare every room in Sid’s Horizon Village condo was filled with unmade beds.

While they were together, she had only disdain for my father; now she was obsessed with him. She began to stalk him. She lurked behind a clump of bushes when he was due home from work and watched as he escorted different women carrying Corningware casseroles and grocery bags up to his third floor lair. She put her ear against the wall of the laundry room, which was adjacent to his bedroom, but could only make out a word or two, especially when the machines were running. The moans, however, came through loud and clear, driving her into a frenzy. It took every bit of her self-control to refrain from breaking into his apartment and smashing the lovebirds with Sid’s new seven-piece Teflon pot set. (She watched as he walked the empty box to his trash chute one night, and his attempts at homemaking without her drove a stake through her heart.)

She stopped hanging out in the laundry, but continued to call him and hang up at odd hours during the night, why, she couldn’t really say. To hear his voice? Make him sick from interrupting his sleep? Stop possible lovemaking in progress? And she went to the King of Poultry, skulking around the parking lot, trying to discern which women he favored that day with an extra meatball.

She spent one entire night cutting my father out of every photograph in both of the albums she brought with her to Florida. She also figured out the code to his answering machine, (fifty-one, his lucky number at the race track), and called in to listen to his phone messages four, five, six times a day. She felt physically sick every time she heard a

female voice confirm a date, “call to say hello” or tell him about the pot roast she just made. My mother was in trouble.

Never a believer in psychiatric care--or afraid, perhaps, of what she’d find out--she finally relented and went to see a shrink.

“It’s really quite simple,” Dr. Brot told her. “You’re obsessing. You believe that Sidney is your property, always has been. No matter that you left him. Now that he appears to be managing without you, moving on as they say, you want to reassert your control. It happens all the time.”

This did not make my mother feel any better. Valium, however, did. The doctor also advised that she move far enough away from my father to require a plane ride.

Back at her apartment, she studied a map of the East Coast. She didn’t want to return to New York; it was too difficult to meet men there. Miami was appealing because of its abundance of rich, elderly men, but too close to my father. Deciding to rule out the entire state of Florida, she came upon Hilton Head, South Carolina. “Hilton Head,” she said aloud. “Hmm, I like the way that sounds.” My mother sang snatches of “One Day My Prince Will Come,” as she pulled out her suitcases and began packing.

Meanwhile back at the condo, my father and Colleen were making plans to marry as soon as their snowbird friends came south for the winter. He had grown tired of dating and was ready to settle down again. For a nominal fee, he procured Horizon’s main card room for their wedding reception. After a ceremony at a local justice of the peace, they’d gather with their guests for platters of miniature potato and kasha knishes and an assortment of Danish, all courtesy of The King of Poultry. Colleen suggested serving cold shrimp with cocktail dipping sauce, but my father blanched at the expense. They bought a dozen boxed wine coolers at Costco that they stored under their bed. After much deliberation, my father decided to throw in two bottles of vodka and a few quarts of orange juice. No one but he and Colleen drank the stuff; they would take whatever was left back to their apartment after the party. At the time I was twenty-four and living on my own in New York. My father called and invited me down for the celebration. Fearing that if my mother found out about the nuptials she’d attend the party and go berserk, he swore me to secrecy.

On a sunny Saturday afternoon soon after the start of the new year, I watched as my father married Colleen. The reception afterwards was a big hit with their neighbors and friends and, as previously decided with his partner, my father passed out twenty percent off coupons for purchases made at the King to all of his guests.

 A month later my mother found out about my father’s marriage from my cousin Joyce, who was always looking for trouble. But by then my mother was pursuing a wealthy octogenarian in the greener pastures of a Hilton Head condominium development.

Karen Karlitz work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Miranda Literary Journal, Long Story Short, Beverly Hills 90210, Brentwood News, and the anthology, Freckles to Wrinkles, among others. One of my stories was a Third Glass Woman Prize finalist, and another included in the 2007-2008 edition of The Best of the Foliate Oak. Additional stories will appear in Clever Magazine and The Stray Branch. Currently I am submitting my first novel for publication, and working on a short fiction collection.